#2453 - Evan Hafer

11:09Joe Rogan:And it feels to me like the more consistent I am in offseason, like the entire year, those are the years where I'm really shooting my best. You can't just get back on the bow like a month before you have to go hunt. You can't do it.

11:26Evan Hafer:I can't. I know guys that can. Guys that I grew up with that have been shooting since they were nine. That's what they do.

11:33Joe Rogan:Right, but they're really good shots. Imagine how good they would be if they did it all the time.

11:36Evan Hafer:Yeah.

11:36Joe Rogan:Like a guy like Cam, he's not taking any time off.

11:40Evan Hafer:No.

11:40Joe Rogan:He's shooting every day. Period.

11:42Evan Hafer:He takes pleasure in the pain, too. He doesn't take time off because he's... That would be relaxing. Yeah, it'd be relaxing. Imagine, just imagine that. Like Cam Haynes on vacation. His feet up, you know, drinking on the beach. Is that even like a... No. It's not even a thing.

12:00Joe Rogan:I've gone on vacation with him. Have you really? Yeah, but we went vacationing in Lanai where we could bow hunt. Yeah, yeah. So we would bow hunt at least once a day because Lanai, you know, you've been. It's one of the craziest places on earth. It's great. For people that don't know, there's 3 ,000 people and 30 ,000 deer. Yeah. And they were given to King Kamehameha by whoever the head dude was in India. He gave them a gift of access to you.

12:28Evan Hafer:Is that where they came from? Mm-hmm. I didn't realize that that was the actual timeline. Yeah. I didn't realize that.

12:33Joe Rogan:Yeah. And they're everywhere. They tried to reintroduce them to the big island. I know Shane Dorian was all pumped about it, but then they eradicated them. People killed them. They said they were invasive.

12:46Evan Hafer:but I think they need to be everywhere they can be. They're delicious. They're the most delicious meat.

12:52Joe Rogan:Of the deer. Of course. Yeah. Next to elk. It's like, it's for me, it's elk and then axis, but axis are the most challenging to hunt. They're the fastest things I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. They move so fast. It doesn't even make sense. It's like, how are you doing that? You could dodge an arrow from 30 yards away and the arrows, not even close to them when it, when it gets there.

13:10Evan Hafer:I had a female bedded at 30 and she jumped the string. on her bed at 30 yards that that was my first shot i realized holy shit yeah they're different

13:22Joe Rogan:i've got to up my game well it's like they evolved with tigers oh yeah yeah that's the thing it's

13:28Evan Hafer:like you got to be able to go you want to imagine how tough you would be if you get involved with

13:32Joe Rogan:tigers that would be sick well that's the problem with america period it's like there's not enough there's too many people running around with zero physical challenges and they're so soft like there's a giant percentage of our population that is so soft and if like if there was like a if the world went nuclear we lost everything and then it was like hand-to-hand battles every country could invade america every hand of bullets once we run out of bullets every country can fuck us up

14:08Evan Hafer:Yeah. You can walk around. I think, well, that's, you know, with coffee, right? The best coffee shops are like, it's so much stuff on Instagram. It's so funny because you walk into a coffee shop and if you see the craziest looking freak, it's going to have the best coffee. What is that about baristas? I don't know. There's so left wing weirdo fucking lip rings. Oh yeah. How many nose rings do you have? How, like how many colors do you have in your hair and how many pronouns do you have? Because that's like, you're going to make the greatest espresso I've ever had. And that's the joke, right? Because I'll go cruise around in Austin for the last couple weeks.

14:47Joe Rogan:Yeah, you see a dude who's jacked with a hand tattoo. He's going to make you a bullshit coffee.

14:51Evan Hafer:It's like, I can make you pour over. I mean, I can just pour it over. You know?

14:55Joe Rogan:Like, what? He'll make you some cowboy coffee. He's going to fucking, one of them tin pots that you put on the fire.

15:01Evan Hafer:Take his sock off or something. Like, I'm good. I'm all set, man. Yeah, I'm all set.

15:07Joe Rogan:What is it about baristas? Like, how did that become such a left-wing safe place?

15:14Evan Hafer:You know, I don't know. I think the origin of it comes from San Francisco, Seattle, right? All the, we'll say the left-wing, left coast, all of the Wokas. Hubs. Yeah, because that also drove most of what I would say is the third and fourth wave. because there's one, two, three, four basic waves in coffee. Third and fourth wave are the most recent. Fourth wave would be considered single origin, very lightly roast coffees. And you've been to these coffee shops. You know what they look like. It takes you 15 minutes to get a cup of coffee. They typically won't even talk to you. They look down at the computer screen.

15:54Evan Hafer:But it's going to be a decent cop, right? So if you go first wave, which is going to be Folgers, Maxwell House, That's like been around for a hundred years. That's a commodity coffee. It's going to have Robusta. It's going to be darker roasted. That's going to be first wave. And then a second wave would be experiential. So it'd be more like Starbucks kind of second wave would be experiential dark. And then third wave would be more artisan micro lot, single origin. And fourth wave is kind of a mix of the best in third wave that really activates your senses in the sense of like now they're doing anaerobics.

16:35Evan Hafer:So they're using things from like wine and beer and they're developing all these different profiles. But that artisan craft, the genesis in like San Francisco and Seattle from third wave, they took on identity politics and then drove it through the trade. It's pretty impressive. It's so weird because if you go anywhere, you can get amazing cups of coffee. You're just going to like wade through the woke-ism to go get it.

17:00Joe Rogan:Yeah.

17:01Evan Hafer:I can't go there.

17:03Joe Rogan:No. I was at a Starbucks the other day and two lesbians walked in. They saw me and they left. What? That's how bad it was? They said, we can't. We can't do this. Seriously? They looked in my face and they said, we can't do this. And they left. I was like, I'm a big fan. Yeah. Big fan of your work. Big fan of your work. I had a cup of coffee from Starbucks which I rarely go into but was my family and It was so bad a cup of black coffee. It's all drink. I don't put anything in it I was like this is like not drinkable. It tastes like shit Which is like everybody throws a bunch of cream in there and a bunch of sugar in there and you get your caffeine and it tastes like what you like But when if you just try to just drink coffee at Starbucks, it is such a bad product and that doesn't have to be like that.

17:51Evan Hafer:Well, part of the problem is when they over roast it because they know it's going to have cream and sugar in it. But why over roast it then? Because you can make a consistent profile and it's just consistently very dark and extremely acidic basically and that becomes the consistency in the product. Do you think people have this thing in their head

18:15Joe Rogan:that the darker the coffee is, the stronger it is?

18:18Evan Hafer:Yeah, of course. That's one of the huge misconceptions, right? So it's just bucket the misconceptions in here, which is, you know, coffee is not a bean, it's a fruit. So it's a cherry and then you roast the pit. So the second one would probably be the darker you roast something, the more caffeine it's going to have, which is absolutely not the case. It's the opposite. It's completely opposite because you've got two genetic strains. You've got Robusta and Arabica. Robusta is a smaller bean. It's got more caffeine. It's also more bitter. Arabica probably constitutes probably 60 % to 70 % of the world's coffee, but it's more flavor.

18:55Evan Hafer:It's got less caffeine and it's less acidic in general. And then when you over roast it, you can kind of combine multiple lots, multiple variants of Arabica. Oh, I see. And then you can make this consistent profile.

19:11Joe Rogan:So it consistently sucks.

19:12Evan Hafer:Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're going to put cream and sugar in it, nobody cares because they're like, I just need something that's going to serve as a caffeine vehicle for my cream and sugar. I know, but wouldn't that be okay if you just had good coffee and did that and didn't burn it? Well, I do. I think that's where third wave and fourth wave, it's more directly related to the quality of the coffee. It's no cream, no sugar. And it's more first and second wave, it's cream and sugar. Because you're going to have to cover up the inconsistencies.

19:49Joe Rogan:Well, some people just like it anyway because what they're getting is a treat. They're not thinking of it as like, I'm drinking coffee. Like they're getting a treat. Right. Like if you have order a Frappuccino. It's a milkshake. It's a milkshake. Yeah. Yeah. There's tons of sugar. Yeah. Tons of caffeine too. You're like sitting in your cubicle.

20:06Evan Hafer:You got like a hundred grams of sugar, 200 milligrams of caffeine. You're like, you're, you're skyrocketing with just energy until you crash and then you need another one.

20:17Joe Rogan:Yeah. And then you're just doing that all day and frying your central nervous system. And then when you get out of work, you just die.

20:22Evan Hafer:You just go home and go home and melt on the couch. and watch some sports, man.

20:26Joe Rogan:Yeah, your insulin's all fucked up. You're falling asleep.

20:32Evan Hafer:The coffee nerd conversations just put half the fucking audience to sleep, too. I don't care. I don't care. Yeah, yeah. It's so funny, man. I'll start talking about it. I'm like, I should not. Because I was a comms guy back in my previous profession, my previous life. And it's so funny because when you talk about communication and just technology in general and you start analyzing like you know frequencies and and spectrum analyzers or whatever whatever you want to talk about people's eyes would just glaze over in the team room and i'm like all right well you guys want to go blow some shit up like why don't you shift the topic because you guys don't want to talk about this i know you don't want to hear about it so in cross training it's just you try to keep people awake basically this episode is

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21:57Joe Rogan:Everything stays on your face and feels great with crystal clear optics. Check them out and feel the difference for yourself. To help you get started, Roka is offering JRE listeners 20 % off your order. So go to roka.com. Well, there's a lot of people that have a hard time focusing on something that isn't exciting oh yeah for whatever reason even if it's like important technical details that'll help you do things that are exciting you know it's it's the delayed gratification right they're the same type of people that don't like to do cold plunges or don't like to do certain things that like you're not going to feel an immediate benefit it's going to suck while you're doing it so you put it off like you gotta you've got to have a mindset that there's some things that suck that will make

22:42Evan Hafer:the things that are exciting way better yeah like for comics it's writing like sitting down and

22:47Joe Rogan:writing. You know, because a lot of comics don't want to write. They just want to come out with ideas through the day and then work them out on stage. I'm like, that is great. You can do that, but you should also write because the ideas that come to you while you're writing, they won't come any other way. And those are like little gifts from the universe. And you, the only way you get them is you got to sit down with a fucking pad of paper or a computer in front of you and come up with them. You got to sit down and start working and let the mind just, just slowly, but surely pop them out. How often do you do that?

23:18Joe Rogan:At least four days a week.

23:20Evan Hafer:For an hour, two hours?

23:21Joe Rogan:Yeah, at least an hour. I try to write a thousand words. So it might be an hour, it might be two hours, and then out of those thousand words, I might get a paragraph. Like, there it is. That's what I was looking for. You're basically looking for arrowheads in a field. You know, you're picking up a giant clump of dirt and you're shaking it out and washing it over and, ah, got one.

23:42Evan Hafer:So do you try that out on anybody before you actually, no, you just like, okay, this is the concept.

23:47Joe Rogan:I'm pretty sure I got something. When I got something, I'm pretty sure I got it, but I don't know what it's going to be until the audience tells me.

23:53Evan Hafer:Well, you have your own club, so you can just try it out. That helps a lot. You just like drive in. Matt's Wednesday, let me try this out.

23:59Joe Rogan:But even when I didn't, I would go to the store, I would go to the, like say if I have a bit and it's exciting, I'm like, oh, I wrote something that's good. I would go to the improv and then I'd go to the store and maybe I'd go to the ice house. Right. I bang out a few sets, at least two in a night. You could travel around. Like, L.A. was really good for that. Austin's amazing for that. There's seven clubs on my street now. What? Oh, yeah, between my street and the neighboring streets. So you got us, and then right down the street is the Sunset Room, which Red Band owns. And then right up across from that, you got Creek in the Cave, which is awesome.

24:32Joe Rogan:And then you got the Vulcan, which is right down the street. And there's a bunch of other small rooms. There's the Black Rabbit. There's all these rooms that have comedy at least three or four nights a week. So if you're like a guy or a girl coming up right now in Austin, you can really work. You can work. And they're all paying. So, you know, you're collecting 50 bucks here. My club pays more. My club pays the most. But all these different places, they pay, you know, like actual money for you to do a set. At the end of the night, you got a few hundred bucks. You can get something to eat. Like there's all these comics that don't have to do the road now.

25:03Evan Hafer:Right.

25:03Joe Rogan:So like they used to just have to do the road to pay their rent and for food. You don't have to do that anymore. You could stay in town and really build up material and then go out on the road.

25:13Evan Hafer:Is the material going to shift? I know it's regionally you've got to have your – I'm not saying like left or right. I'm just saying does the material have to shift based on where you're at? So if you're in L.A., is the crowd a little bit different? The people are going to be more accepting, less accepting, expect something a little bit different than here? You can't think of that. You can't? You're just like, here's the joke. Let me run it.

25:36Joe Rogan:Well, the good thing is if they're not accepting of an idea, maybe you should reexamine that idea and maybe figure out like why am I – maybe I should figure out a better way to make this idea acceptable. Because there's ideas where I'll start it off and it's just like, ooh, this ain't going anywhere. And then I'm like, there's got to be an angle in here. And then I'll find a whole other angle. I'm like, ha-ha, now I have it. And then I have to find an angle. Like, what if I was a woman and I was watching this and I'm looking at this fucking meathead on stage and I'm like, OK, like I got to figure out a way to get them to understand that just because I look like this doesn't mean I'm a bad guy.

26:12Joe Rogan:Like, let me work this into your head first and then explain it from my perspective. It's funny because I look like this. It doesn't mean I'm a bad guy. An automatic assumption. yeah you know i mean it's an untold prejudice that like men with muscles in particular are

26:31Evan Hafer:assholes right like instantly yeah you're you've got a you've got a very definitive look and then as soon as you open your mouth they're assuming that you're going to be just the yeah complete

26:41Joe Rogan:asshole right yeah i can see that a mean person yeah you know covered in tattoos

26:46Evan Hafer:cage fighting commentary i know that you can craft a joke because you've been doing this for Forever but is there a certain amount of pleasure that you get now from bombing sometimes

27:01Joe Rogan:Really I always say bombing on stage like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother Oh the difference is like there's probably a guy out there that likes sucking a thousand dicks

27:15Joe Rogan:There's a guy out there that would like take some I mean these people are into shit porn and all kinds of

27:23Evan Hafer:you're drawing the same parallel to like bombing and people are into shit porn yeah if you like

27:28Joe Rogan:bombing you can you're into people shitting in your mouth like it's not fun you don't want people to have a bad time they're there to have fun these people work they're working all day they're fucking tired you want them to have a good ass time and the only way for them to have a good ass time is for you to do your job. Right. You know, but it's, uh, it has to sometimes not work well. And there's just like this moment when I'm about to do a new bit. I'm like, God, I don't even want to do this. I don't know where this goes, but I have to, you got to trot it out there and, and hope that you could find an angle.

28:00Evan Hafer:So you don't try those on, on your, uh, like with your wife or in your kitchen. She'd be the worst. Yeah. She'd be the worst. She'd just tear you down.

28:08Joe Rogan:She'd just stare at me like, what is wrong with you?

28:14Joe Rogan:it's like she and i have a very good balance because she's so different than me she's so but has a lot of the same values as me yeah you know like discipline and she's very smart and she's interested in things but we're very different well it's so funny because my wife and i will

28:31Evan Hafer:walk around right and i'm a very amateur comedian to surround my friends i try to i try really hard right i'm not even close i'm just like you know i specialize in stupid shit that i say basically That's where I'm going with this. And she, when I get her to laugh, that's like, that means way more to me than, like, my friends. Sure. I can make them laugh. Like, I can make my employees laugh. I can't pay them to, you know. But, like, when my wife laughs, that means it's fucking funny. That's legit. It means something, right? It's like, it's legit. She's like a one-person crowd, right? So we were walking around.

29:07Evan Hafer:I was talking about um Have you seen that Burt Kreicher free Burt? Have you seen his new series?

29:12Joe Rogan:I've only seen trailers But everybody that saw it loves it. It's it's it's really funny man like and so I was like we should watch this

29:19Evan Hafer:You should check it out. You watch like five minutes. She's like this is such a dude show. Fuck you. I've never watched But it's the same it's like what I want to watch and I think is funny She's like absolutely not but then she's wants to watch some like true crime thing around it you know, a dude that killed his wife.

29:37Joe Rogan:And I'm like, they love it. Why do they love that? It's so weird. It's like genetic that they love it. Because my kids love those shows. Really? They love serial killer expose shows and all these true crimes. And I don't like any of that. I was talking to my daughter about it. And she said, because girls don't do things like this. So we kind of want to see like what's going on in a man's mind that makes him. It's such a mystery. You know what I'm saying? Like it's such a mystery like most men can imagine a scenario Where there's a bunch of people that did some horrible shit in a room and you just go in there and fucking kill all of them Yeah, most men yeah most men can say oh, yeah There's a place there's a play like if someone did something and I knew they did something and they're in that room And they need to go they need to go right most women can't think like that They don't think like that.

30:32Joe Rogan:It's not inside their head. And then there's the darkness of it. Like these aren't men that are doing something to someone who deserves it. They're just doing it to vulnerable people. They're just evil creatures who just want to go out and hunt vulnerable people. And I think women want to know that there are men like that out there that are so different than them so they can put it in their head. Like, okay, serial killers are real. Right. Like these true crime shows have showed me this and I want to know like what to look for.

31:02Evan Hafer:Right.

31:03Joe Rogan:That's what I think.

31:04Evan Hafer:Whereas have you ever spent a second of your life in fear or fearing a serial killer?

31:10Joe Rogan:Not really. No. It's not a realistic fear. But if I was at a truck stop and there was some fucking shady dude that came into the bathroom after me and he was like waiting outside and didn't look like he needed to use the bathroom, I'd be 100 % on guard. like there's people that will just randomly kill people just for a thrill and get away with it and i think there's way more of them getting away with it than they'd like us to know like here's here's a good example in austin what is the actual number of people who have uh bodies that have been found in late put this into our wonderful sponsor perplexity before it becomes the digital god that takes over the universe, this AI.

31:55Joe Rogan:What are the numbers of people that have been found drowned in Lady Bird Lake over the last three years? It's something crazy. Is it really? Yeah, it's like 30.

32:06Evan Hafer:I thought this was just a funny joke for Tony to talk about.

32:09Joe Rogan:Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's like a real thing. No, no, no, no, no. It's real. Right. It's real. So the cops don't want to say it's a serial killer. They think it's because it's over by Rainey Street. A lot of people are partying. But there's the bodies keep piling up. 38. What? Yeah. And they want to say it's not a serial killer? Since 2022, data showing at least 38 bodies found in or around Lady Bird Lake. Separate map based analysis of Lady Bird Lake deaths. Downtown area reports four deaths in 2022, five in 2023, five in 2024, two in 2025. So this is downtown area. These map numbers focus on a specific stretch of the lake, while the 38 body figures covers all bodies found in or around the lake in that period.

33:02Joe Rogan:These might be right near that bar area on Rainey Street. Right, right on Rainey Street. Yeah. Or other parts of the lake.

33:08Evan Hafer:So they're basically saying these guys get drunk and they end up passing out in the water.

33:15Joe Rogan:I mean, all you would have to do is get someone drunk enough where you could hold them underwater. Yeah. It's not, I mean, if you were a guy who wasn't drinking or you had a really good tolerance or you're a big person, no evidence of serial murderer. Says the patterns match typical accidental drowning risks. Young adult men, nightlife, easy water access. Or some guy was drowning gay guys. Could be. Because a lot of them are gay. Like a giant percentage of these guys are gay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's near a gay area. Oh, okay. Rainy Street is like the party area where there's a lot of gay bars.

33:52Joe Rogan:Got it.

33:53Evan Hafer:That's why it's such a funny joke for Tony.

33:55Joe Rogan:Yeah. Well, it's a weird thing, man. It's a weird thing because at what point in time does someone have to get caught before they say, oh, Jesus, these weren't just a coincidence. Someone was drowning people. Because I don't think it was a common thing. I think like you know you maybe get one a year some fucking drunk hops off a boat and doesn't know what he's doing and drowns That does happen, but this is not that this is way more 38 bodies in a few years is kind of kooky

34:23Evan Hafer:Well, and how many of those if you think about it, right? How many serial killers are out there because FBI obviously they've done the analysis on it? There's probably like a hundred 200 300

34:33Joe Rogan:I was just killers that's how many in time always there's always yeah always has been in it most of them

34:41Evan Hafer:Well, I'll say yeah, I wanted to get caught or yeah. We took you long enough Like I was getting sloppy right my murder lust took over there was 200 since 2004.

34:51Joe Rogan:Oh my gosh What?

34:57Joe Rogan:Oh, my God. Autopsy report found alcohol present in a large share of the cases, sometimes at levels above the legal driving limit, which is not much, by the way. The legal driving limit is like two drinks. And police specifically describe most rainy street area drownings as alcohol or drug related. I've heard people getting dosed. They get roofied and whatnot. And they're like, I've heard a lot. Too many cases. Because never in a city have I lived I've heard that many people saying they've been roofied. Yeah. No, I think it's, I don't think it's specific to here. I think it's everywhere. It's GHB, I think, is a lot of it.

35:33Joe Rogan:People are dosing people up with GHB. That's a big one.

35:37Evan Hafer:How many serial killers are there? Yeah.

35:40Joe Rogan:How many active serial killers do they estimate are in America right now? Let's guess. I'm going to say 10.

35:48Evan Hafer:You think 10? Yeah. I think 100. Whoa. Yeah. I'm going 100. This is like a Wheel of Fortune type scenario. Yeah, man.

35:55Joe Rogan:Holy shit. 100's nuts. If it's 100. I think it's 100. That's crazy. 300. Huh? 25 to 50 at any given time. Wow. Okay. Wow. Range reflects killers who have committed at least two murders with a cooling off period and are still operating undetected. I like the cooling off period. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I need to take a break. You scrubbing the fucking blood out of the inside of your fingernails Serial killings make up less than 1 % of US homicides overall Numbers peaked at around 300 in the 1970s and 1980s There was 300 active serial killers in the 70s and the 80s I bet that was because that was when it was like Son of Sam Was it trendy?

36:41Joe Rogan:Yeah I think it was probably a lot of bored dudes Just didn't like working in an office Like Ted Bundy and Son of Sam

36:48Evan Hafer:All those guys were like the Green River. All over the news.

36:51Joe Rogan:All over the news. Yeah. It was huge. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Creatine's strength benefits are already backed by tons of research, but what's really interesting is where the research is headed. It's highlighting what a lot of people miss out about creatine, that its core function is cellular energy, meaning it impacts not only your muscles, but your brain too. Like all supplements, not all creatine is created equal. Momentous creatine is backed by the Momentous standard, sourced from the highest quality German creatine with no fillers or additives. It's also independently NSF certified for sport, guaranteeing purity and label accuracy.

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38:57Joe Rogan:They even portion the food to your dog's specific caloric needs Because keeping dogs at a healthy weight can help them live up to two and a half years longer. Try The Farmer's Dog today and get 50 % off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com slash rogan. This offer is for new customers only. Why are there fewer serial killers now than there used to be? What was the answer? That's probably just because it's easier to get caught now.

39:33Evan Hafer:People are probably more afraid to try. Yeah, because you think about all the technology and the surveillance. Like, you get rolled up.

39:39Joe Rogan:Yeah. You get a... I think the creepiest one was that dude who studied serial killers in college and then went and killed those girls at that dorm house. You know that story? Was that in Seattle? I think it was Bundy. Yeah, it was Ted Bundy, right? No, no, no. Recent one. Oh, it was recent. Recent, yeah. He knew the people that lived there. He studied. What did he study? Exactly in college like he was studying it like he was trying to learn how to not get caught. Oh, yeah This guy this fuck whoa He offered horrific new details about the final moments of the four University of Ohio Idaho Oh, so that's where I'm to school.

40:19Evan Hafer:That's University of Idaho.

40:20Joe Rogan:He stabbed the four victims at least 150 times in total I didn't realize that was like the case from Moscow. Yeah. That's crazy. Jesus Christ. Yeah. This sick fuck. So this guy, he was studying it in college. So I forget what criminal justice, let's see if we can find out. But it was very clear that he had been planning this a long time. And there was also a possible connection to him and some murders from the Pacific Northwest that they he knew the people people died in a kind of a similar way. He might have gotten away with it up there. Right. So he tried it up there and then went to Idaho. Ph.D.

41:03Joe Rogan:criminology student.

41:04Evan Hafer:Oh, my gosh. Well, that makes sense. It does. Yeah. So he's he's educating himself on how to get away with it.

41:10Joe Rogan:He was that guy that if you had your comms class, he'd be sitting there like this. He's like way into it. Yeah, way into it. Yeah, yeah. Way into it. Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, he wanted to know all the details.

41:20Evan Hafer:Pacific Northwest is like, that's a spot. These guys love it up there. I don't know if it's like the rain, you know?

41:26Joe Rogan:Well, we had a lady that was connecting it. She came on the podcast, and she was connecting a bunch of serial killers from a very specific area that did a lot of, it was mining, right? Wasn't it mining and the industrial pollution?

41:41Evan Hafer:Oh, so it was like increased lead or something, right, in the water or something?

41:46Joe Rogan:What was the processing of it? Like... Oh, the... What are those when they're burning it? Yeah. What's that called? Leaching? Yeah, it was lead, but it was other stuff. It was other stuff like there's arsenic in it, and there's a lot of... But what am I looking for? Not... What is it? Why can't I come up with that term? The plants where they burn all the shit. Power plants. What's the term? God damn it. Smelting? What's her name, though? What's her name?

42:18Evan Hafer:Caroline Frazier. Yeah, Caroline Frazier. Maybe Paul would know if he got stamets on here, and he could talk about the mushroom or the fungi in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe it has something to do with it.

42:28Joe Rogan:I don't think so. I think that'll probably stop him from doing it. But her take was that there was all these places. What is the term I'm looking for where they incinerate shit, like a power plant, like a coal plant? There's a term. I can't remember what it is. not. Anyway, they're releasing an incredible amount of toxins in the atmosphere. And a lot of the shit is coming down in rain. It's getting in the ground. All the ground around there is all polluted. Everything's polluted. And so what her take is that all these people have suffered chemical pollution. And a lot of that chemical pollution leads to all sorts of weird psychological disorders and psychosis and all kinds of shit, depending upon the levels of exposure.

43:08Evan Hafer:So this is why you have an increase to serial killers in the Pacific Northwest? This is what you're saying.

43:15Joe Rogan:Yeah, there was a bunch of power plants up there. Interesting. Coal plants and smelting and just a lot of mining. There's a lot of mineral-rich resources up there.

43:25Evan Hafer:So I should be concerned because I spent the most of my life up there. Well, half of it at least.

43:30Joe Rogan:Yeah. It depends. I think now they've cleaned it up, though. She was connecting it to a long time ago. But there's areas back there where she was saying that they do an analysis of the soil and it's completely fucked.

43:41Evan Hafer:How long has it been since you've done Seattle? Oh, I haven't been back in a while.

43:47Joe Rogan:I did the Tacoma Dome with Dave Chappelle. We did that right before the pandemic popped.

43:54Evan Hafer:Oh, okay.

43:55Joe Rogan:And I really haven't been back. It's just like once that whole Chaz thing went down and they locked off the block and the mayor said, Maybe it's the summer of love Or maybe you've got some fucking crazy people even power to take over a giant swath of your city And you're cool with it. Yeah, and you're the fucking mayor and by the way She is an upgrade compared to their current man. Yeah, the current mayor is that choice is insane woman who's never held a real job She's been living with her parents. She's 40. They pay her bills She's a socialist. She rides a bike She's even on a car and now she's in charge of what it was seven billion dollar budget That makes sense.

44:34Joe Rogan:Yeah. Two thumbs up, Seattle.

44:37Evan Hafer:Congratulations. You've done a great job.

44:40Joe Rogan:I don't know where those places go. Those places that have gone like full into Wokeville. Like a buddy of mine just went to Portland and he was like, bro, it's bananas. It's like a complete mental asylum like spilled out onto the streets. Not just the campers, not just the open air drug users everywhere because for a long time they decriminalized everything in Portland. So everybody ramped it up a notch and moved to Portland because that was a place where you could do drugs and not worry about anything But he was like all the regular people are cracked

45:12Evan Hafer:the place like Spending as much time as I have in Seattle, which I used to live there. I love that city late 90s loved it Oh, it's amazing great. It was one of my favorite places to visit such a cool spot cool people And then you saw this flip and it was right around 2010 as when things really flipped over and that to your point they had your car was your domicile so you couldn't get a parking ticket so you could basically live in front of somebody's house in a parking spot and they couldn't write a parking ticket that started in 2010 give it give or take a couple years and so i went back to my my i had a house up there for a while and the the week the day i decided that i was going to sell this place like we fly up there i've got my daughter she's like a year old my wife and i are walking down the street and this is a part of the city it's called ballard which is beautiful part of the city tons of like old bars awesome place back late 90s early 2000 but then there was a camper in front of my condo and then there was a naked man with a tennis racket with his my daughter's a year old his dick's flying around and my my my one-year-old's like i'm holding her like walking away from the other end he's got a tennis racket he's like playing the u.s open in his head whatever he's doing and then on the corner no less than 50 feet away there was a half-naked lady like taking a shit and you're like nah time to leave i think this is uh i think we're all good here

46:40Joe Rogan:we had an issue like that in california for a while oh yeah where um when the economy started to go south now this is pre-pandemic as well we started having these campers camp out right in front of our studio and they would uh the studio where we had in la even in that place it was the warehouse we had a big lawn in front of the warehouse and these guys would spread out on the lawn so they would park their camper there and then they would like cook out and they would lay out and so like you're in this bill you're asking people to walk past these people to go do your podcast in this big ass warehouse that i had leased and i was like why are you doing this like you can't be doing this you can't just use my lawn as your front yard like this is crazy I mean spread out, dude.

47:25Joe Rogan:They had shit laying out there. There's nothing you can do. Well, there was. Oh, really? Yeah, we contacted the police, and the police eventually, they realized this is not a good thing, and they moved them all. But they moved them to different parts of town. And so then you would drive to, like, the more industrial areas of town that didn't – like, our place was, like, semi-industrial. There was a bunch of warehouses, but there was also a bunch of, like, foot traffic businesses, restaurants and stuff like that. And so they moved them out of there. But if you go into the deeper industrial places where they have factories and stuff, they were there.

47:54Joe Rogan:Like whole blocks of them where you just have campers laying out and just open meth smoking. These people are just full-on meth heads that had just started a community of fellow meth enthusiasts with campers. And a lot of their campers didn't even run. They could just get it to the spot wherever it was. And then they would steal power. Every now and then the dude would die because he didn't know how to do the wires right and he'd get cooked.

48:18Evan Hafer:Yeah, that's right. It's the same where we were at in Salt Lake. I'd have full-time security out in front of the, literally in front of the building.

48:27Joe Rogan:Our concern was when we left. It was like if we left at night and someone broke in, it would take fucking forever for cops to show up and do something about it. And so I was like, you just can't have these guys knowing that famous people and high-profile people are going to be at that spot, and you've got open meth smoking right in front of the place. It's like, this is too crazy. They're too unpredictable. You know, look, I don't care if you live in your truck. It's probably cool. If you're a guy who's like you've checked out of society essentially and you're just like playing pickleball all day and you live in a camper, who cares?

49:05Joe Rogan:Go and do that. But once you start engaging in meth smoking and then it's always theft. Right. Theft comes with meth smoking. And there's a lot of break-ins in the area. And it got to the point where the cops had to do something. So credit to them that they did.

49:20Evan Hafer:It's almost a difference between hashtag van life and hashtag meth life. Yeah. There's a big difference.

49:26Joe Rogan:Right. Van life is like you want to be a guy who's not saddled down to one particular spot. You have a place that's in this van that has a bed. You have a little tiny kitchen area. You have a little portable fridge. It's all you need. I don't need a fucking house. Just travel around. It's probably fun. Yeah. The freedom of it, you know. like Alex Honnold that crazy dude that just climbed that tower and in Chinese Taipei he used to live like that for a long time he had a big van he would park it in his friend's driveway sometimes and he would just travel to trailheads and live out live out of his van that's like the

50:02Evan Hafer:the minimalist attraction right where you're like I don't have anything other than what's in my van or on my back where life is simple I don't have to organize anything I can stay focused I think that's a it's an interesting thought exercise especially when you're younger like okay cool i can wrap my head around that yeah and it's completely respectable a lot of these hippies i shouldn't say that in the context of like hippie dance around and flowers in my hair a lot of these like climber crunchy guys they are hard committed like bad mofos oh yeah when they're when they're living on dog food like there's this great story about the founder of patagonia where he went to the store he was climbing el cap and i'm trying to recall a story from outside magazine from you know 20 years ago but in general circumstance it's what it is where he went to the store he's going to be climbing el cap for months and he's just working on a specific route and he went to the store to buy food he only had 100 bucks or whatever it was and dog food was less expensive and he was like meh i can live on that and he bought dog food and lived on dog food and just live on kibble.

51:12Evan Hafer:Yeah, so he could climb and stay out there longer.

51:16Joe Rogan:I wonder what his farts were like. Bro.

51:18Evan Hafer:You wouldn't want to be behind that on his route, right? You would not want to be climbing behind that guy, I'll tell you that.

51:23Joe Rogan:Because I stopped giving my dog regular dog food a long time ago. But when he was younger, all my dogs, I would just buy the most expensive dry dog food. I was like, oh, this stuff is good. And then somewhere along the line, it clicked. I was like, wait, how can it sit there? How can it just sit in that bag for a month? That's crazy. How could it sit on the shelf for years? That's nuts. That can't be good for you. And then I started feeding them frozen food. And they like that. But then I switched to farmer's dog, which is human-grade food, which is lightly cooked. They fucking love it. That stuff I would eat.

51:59Joe Rogan:Like, you smell it. It smells like food. It doesn't smell disgusting. But regular dog food is fucking terrible for a dog. It's not good for them. So if you have to eat that stuff that kibble stuff and you're gonna travel around your gut must be going like what are you doing? What kind of chemicals are in here? What kind of preservatives are they're just nuking your gut bio?

52:23Evan Hafer:The level I but I I love the level of commitment. I love like when people drift over into like crazy. Yeah. To where their level of commitment and their passion like translates directly into nothing else exists in their life. or are willing to live on dog food to do the thing that they love. Fun. That, to me, is like, you're an extremist, and I respect it. I'm like, you know what?

52:49Joe Rogan:No, I can respect that. Do you ever see that movie Dirtbag? No. Pull up that movie Dirtbag. It's a great movie. It's about a guy who essentially did that until he was dead. This guy just camped out on the ground in front of his friend's houses, most of the time didn't have a car, just would just climb. That's all he did. He was always mooching off people. And he had very detailed, what was the dude's name? Fred Becky. Fred Becky. Oh, yeah. The dude's a legend. Yeah. So he had been doing this from, you know, the 1950s. Oh, wow. Like, he was an old-ass man. Look at this guy. Look at the gnarled hands.

53:24Joe Rogan:Look at his fucking hands. Solid. From just climbing. Imagine if that guy got a hold of your dick. He'd just rip it right off.

53:32Evan Hafer:Do you know who Mark Twight is? No. Okay, so Mark Twight. Look at this fucking guy. He was, I mean, one of the foremost names in Alpeniering. He's written several books on it. He wrote a book called Kiss or Kill Confessions of a Serial Climber back in the day. Very, very similar, like in the context of, I would imagine, the psychological makeup. And he started a gym called Jim Jones back in the day. And like it was where a bunch of people you had, it was invite only. So you could only get invited. And it was like a lot of special operations guys, CIA guys, and professional climbers. Like everybody that was trying to push the envelope physically would go out and train with Mark.

54:17Evan Hafer:And I've been friends with him for years. But anything Mark does, he moves from like, I'm going to be the best climber, like Alpineering. I'm going to be the subject matter expert. He was a professional. He shot IPSC for a while. So he's a professional, you know, pistol shooter for a while. He's a professional climber. And now he's a photographer, writer. But everything he does, he does it to a level of perfection that it probably drives everybody else in his life bananas. Like, he's fascinating. He's a fascinating human.

54:49Joe Rogan:Those people that go really to the outer level of whatever's possible with whatever the fuck they're doing are always fascinating. Yeah. Because it makes you go, I don't know if I want to do that. Like what is the sacrifice to get really good at rock climbing? You never have kids you never have a life You never have a job like this this dirtbag guy like everyone around him both admired him and felt sad for him Right because like he died a dirtbag He never had a family and it's like all his ex-girlfriends talking about how an interesting guy he was He was really fun, but eventually I had to fucking move on like this dude All he wanted to do is like sleep on the ground and get up and start climbing rocks

55:29Evan Hafer:his whole life but there's if you think about everybody around us in their in their profession or their thing right you're at the apex of a your professional your profession and your level of commitment i'm not like boosting you up i'm just saying like your level of commitment is unparalleled to a huge percentage of other people so you have a portion of whatever that is and there are all these other people that have that thing where their pursuit of passion around that specific profession or product whatever it might be they're so committed to it that it takes over it's all consuming like I've seen it because even when you go play pool, when we were in Vegas a couple months ago, they were like, oh, we're going to play pool and I'm going to come out.

56:16Evan Hafer:He's going to be there until like 6 o 'clock in the morning. I'm not going to do that. And Green Tree was like, he was. He was there until like 6 o 'clock in the morning. He played for eight hours straight. I was like, yeah, I could see the writing on the wall. I'm out of here. The pool is my number one problem.

56:30Joe Rogan:That's my biggest one.

56:31Evan Hafer:Really?

56:32Joe Rogan:Yeah, that's the one where if I ever wanted to not do anything else, I would just become a professional pool player. If I just said, okay, I am done. I'm done podcasting. I'm done with the UFC. I'm done with everything. I'm just going to travel around and do tournaments. Huh. I could go crazy. I could go crazy and just do that 100%.

56:52Evan Hafer:Is it just the game fascinates you, the angles, the ability to just continue to evolve within that all the time? You can't ever be the best?

57:03Joe Rogan:You definitely never achieve full perfection. but to be really good requires this level of laser focus and concentration and an understanding of what's going on. I mean, you're taking a stick and you're hitting a ball into another ball with pinpoint accuracy into a pocket that is, on my table, it's four and a quarter inches. So you've got the ball, the object ball, which is about that big, and then you've got that much space on each side, just a tiny little space on each side, and you've got to slip it through there. oftentimes like eight feet away, seven feet away, six feet away with English.

57:40Joe Rogan:So you're putting spin on the cue ball, which imparts a throw on the object ball. So if I put right hand spin on the cue ball and I hit the object ball, I have to calculate for the fact that it's going to throw the object ball slightly to the left because of the right hand spin, because it clings to the ball a little bit and shoot. So all this is playing in my head. And then I have to have it at a speed where once the cue ball then collides with the object ball, pockets it, then it's got to go one, two, three rails for perfect position on the next ball. And I have to have an angle. I have to make sure that I have an angle for the following ball.

58:14Joe Rogan:And you don't want to be trapped on the rails. You want to be off the rail. It's like all these different things. You can't think about anything else. Your mind has to be clean. It cleans your mind. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, there's a lot of pressure when it comes to dating, especially in February, but you're putting too much on yourself and on your partner. There's no such thing as a perfect relationship, whether you're on a first date or have been together for years. It's completely normal to go through rough patches, and what matters is how you deal with them, and therapy can be a huge help during any stage of your dating life.

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59:29Evan Hafer:So if you've gotten, I'm sure you have, like professional players. Coaching. Yeah, coaching. Guys have come out, like the best in the world have come out and played with you. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you hold up? Like what's your...

59:41Joe Rogan:Well, I can never beat them.

59:42Evan Hafer:Right.

59:42Joe Rogan:But I beat them some games. I can break and run out. So I break and run out one, two games in a row sometimes But they'll make – so like if you have like a score of accuracy, it's called like a Fargo rating. It's based on 1 ,000 points is you never miss. I am in like the 700 – on a good day, 750 range. But a real world-class pro is in the 800-plus range. Like Fedor Gorse is probably like 850. Joshua Filler is probably like a little higher than that. they get into this rate where they so rarely miss. And again, they're playing on four-inch pockets, which is like a quarter-inch smaller than the pockets I'm playing on.

1:00:26Joe Rogan:Although they are playing on new cloth, which helps a lot, makes things more slippery, they fall in more. More worn-out cloth, like when it's broken in for a couple of weeks, it gets tougher. Really? Yeah, yeah, the cloth gets a little less slick, and you've got to hit a ball a little bit more pure, but on the plus side, English takes better.

1:00:46Evan Hafer:So when you play with these guys, is it one of those things where they instantly humble you in the context of you start feeling, I'm really confident in my game, and then you step in? No, not really. No. There's not that big of a delta between?

1:01:01Joe Rogan:There's a gap. There's definitely a gap. I mean, they're just way better than me. But a lot of it is just time. They spend eight hours a day playing every day. If I spent eight hours a day playing every day, I think I could play at a professional level. I wouldn't be able to beat the best guys I would never be able to beat like the Koping Chung's and the guys that are the very top top because those guys have been playing eight hours a day for decades they never stop

1:01:27Evan Hafer:what's a guy like that make annually in tournaments now more than ever

1:01:32Joe Rogan:because of Matchroom Pool so Matchroom the same company that Eddie Hearn owns that does a lot of boxing promotions they're involved in a lot of sports they've done an amazing job with pool specifically with nine ball and they they put on these huge tournaments saudi arabia has a big one every year They have this big world championship where they pay a ton of money And so you know a good player like a top of the heat player is making a half a million dollars plus a year Okay, and then also endorsements so they have endorsements like companies like predator cues pay them Q-tec and all those different companies pay them next amount of dollars per year They have a sponsor for the chalk they use.

1:02:12Joe Rogan:They have a sponsor for the tips they play with. All those different things. All that adds up.

1:02:17Evan Hafer:So what's the difference then between, what is it, snooker? Is that the English? That's a totally different game. It's totally different.

1:02:23Joe Rogan:It's a big table. It's a 12 by 6 as opposed to a 4 1⁄2 by 9. So it's a much bigger table. But the balls are smaller as well. And then their cues have these tiny little tips on them. They all play with ash cues, which is like a very stiff wood, and they play with like a solid wood cue. Whereas a lot of like pro pool players have switched to carbon fiber now. They play with carbon fiber cues because it's like it's a little bit more dense, so it moves the ball differently. Is it fun? Have you played it? Snooker? Yeah. Yeah, I played it when I was in Scotland a little bit, but I only played by myself.

1:02:58Joe Rogan:There was just a table and I was just whacking balls around. It's very difficult to pocket balls. But I don't even really understand the rules. I would have to really pay attention. I watch it a little bit sometimes because I know how hard it is to do what they're doing because you do have this enormous table. Their cloth is a lot slower, too. It's not as slick of a cloth.

1:03:16Evan Hafer:So it's got to be older then, right? Oh, it's old.

1:03:21Joe Rogan:Snooker's old. So the original billiards game had no pockets. The original billiards game was three cushion billiards or bulk line. or there's a bunch of different billiards games where you play on a table, like say it was like this table, there's no pockets in it, and there's just rubber rails all around it. And it's all about knocking one ball into the other ball, going three rails, and then colliding with the third ball. Huh. Yeah, it's just about scoring points. I've watched a bunch of that online too because it helps you understand angles like as you go into a rail because the angles change depending upon how much English you put on it, how hard you hit it, whether you hit it with follow or draw.

1:04:01Joe Rogan:There's a bunch of different parts of the cue ball that you can contact with that radically changes the way the ball moves around on the table. So it's like you're calculating so many different things. There's geometry involved. There's touch and feel. There's all these factors that come into play when you're playing really well.

1:04:20Evan Hafer:So that explains why archery is also somewhat of a fascination then because you have very similar aspects to archery and play that directly translate. That's like why those things snap together real well for you.

1:04:34Joe Rogan:Oh, for me, they're hand in hand. They're basically the same thing. It's basically the same thing. You're just doing it in a different way. It's the same thing. It's like having everything just flowing together perfectly after like years and years and years of meticulous practice and then it starts to come together.

1:05:00Joe Rogan:And then you pull that group out. It's nice and tight, like 65 yards. Like, yeah. You got it dialed in. It's that feeling. And it's the same thing. It was the world goes away. There is no room for anything when you're about to pull that trigger. Whether it's in pool, when you're about to make the shot, or whether it's in archery, there's no room for anything. That's what I like about it. I also like that there's no bullshit. There's no shenanigans. There's no personality. Nothing matters. Nothing matters. Did the ball go in the hole? If it didn't, you lose. If it did, you win. It's really clean.

1:05:33Joe Rogan:I like that.

1:05:35Evan Hafer:Yeah, that's the thing I love about shooting just in general. If I'm hitting a target, it doesn't matter. I took my kids to the arcade the other day and ski ball.

1:05:45Joe Rogan:Oh, yeah. I love ski ball. I can spend an hour on that thing just trying to get the perfect lob in there.

1:05:54Evan Hafer:And it's like I used to tell people, I'm like, I'm just a projectile enthusiast where I love hitting center mass of whatever target. I'm still a six-year-old kid with my BB gun. It's like at the end of the day, now my tools are much more advanced and I've got the millions of dollars of government funded training behind me. So I'm a little bit more effective at hitting what I want to shoot at. But it still has the same exact feeling. Like if you're six years old hitting a pop can with your BB gun or wringing a piece of steel at a mile with a rifle or hitting the heart of a foam elk in your backyard, it's the same, dude.

1:06:33Evan Hafer:It translates and it pulls you into something that's pure, I guess.

1:06:38Joe Rogan:It is pure and it's also a really good mind exercise. Just like when you work out, you're cleaning your mind. There's a lot of what working out is is not just physical its mental clarity you Relax the mind you calm the mind through hard exercise and There's something where you're calming your mind through shooting because it requires so much of you Everything else just gets get the fuck out of the way Bills this that you know, oh, I got to call that guy. I don't want to call him fuck I got to deal with this thing. Oh, that's falling apart. This deal sucks it all goes away it has to go away if it doesn't go away you miss and then you go fuck why did i miss um you miss because you're distracted like let's focus put the fucking arrow on the knock you know put it in there draw it back center it calm relax at that moment like at that moment there is nothing else in your fucking head there's nothing and then and it goes in there you get this this nice burst of happiness when you watch that fucking arrow just drop right in exactly where you want it to like and then you go and pull the arrows and you go right back and start it again and at the end of that practice i feel way better i just always feel better i always feel clearer my head works better it's just like it's a focus exercise with which excites all your synapses and then on top of that it's a mental clearing thing like fred berry used to talk about that like something about i forget the quote but it's something about there's nothing like shooting a bow that clears a man's mind it's totally true there's something about archery in particular

1:08:17Evan Hafer:that just cleans your mind yeah i i 100 agree i i used to have this trad bow like that's how i started i told you the story like so i'd stuff the old coffee bags of burlap coffee bags stuff them up and fill them up and then I started shooting a trad bow originally while the roasting cycle takes about eight and a half minutes so I couldn't really do anything I'm like watching their you know coffee roast which is just tumbling in a big dryer and so I'd just shoot a trad bow in the back to try to focus something other than the business uh you know family whatever it is I could just shoot my trad bow and then Dudley was like why do you shoot that thing it's so stupid don't you like to hit what you shoot at i'm like i'm just doing it for fun man like you know i'm i'm a happy go lucky guy i just want to like active form of meditation but what what i did realize was it was such a pure to your point it would flush out all this negative shit that i was like either working through or dealing dealing with that's like so being able to translate that to other people, especially veterans, huge, huge transformation for guys.

1:09:30Evan Hafer:Because they can go out. It's quiet. It's a subculture they can be part of. They can geek out on all the new gear and arrowheads. You wade into the infinite, never-ending debate around bullshit, around cutting surface area and fucking mass and velocity. You'll never get tired because it's full of its own little drama, and it's like a bunch of nerd shit that you can actually have a lot of fun with.

1:09:54Joe Rogan:So much nerd shit. That's what people don't understand, you know, and they don't expect nerd shit like real complicated technical nerd shit from archery You don't think of it that way, but it's like many things like once you get into it You realize like oh this thing. There's a learning curve to this motherfucker. There's a lot involved like whenever one of my friends is like I want to go bow hunting. I'm like Do you really are you sure? like don't tell me you like it's not that you gotta dive in off of a cliff this is not like i'm gonna go dip my waters into bow hunting i want to go shoot an elk like jesus christ do you know how hard that is to do you got fucking there's so many moving parts there's so many things you have to be be proficient under extreme stress there's so much going on there man don't tell me you want to do that unless you you gotta you gotta show me before i get involved take me bow hunting that's not happening you are not going to be stomping on twigs near me and you're not going to be going you're not going to be not checking the wind all these things are not going

1:10:59Evan Hafer:to happen well they they like the idea right like they like and there's plenty of people they're like they're they're they're window shoppers in this activity right they're like they're walking by and they're like that looks cool right but they don't like the realities of what it actually takes because it's so fucking hard and it like ruins you a lot of times like i mean in the last few years we've done enough together like dude i've been psychologically ruined by like shooting something or making a bad shot or like just devastating missing like yeah it's like you can't figure out why you missed no and then you're you're running through it a thousand a thousand times like what did i do okay how do i do better and then you're like okay but you're the kind of guy

1:11:42Joe Rogan:that does that, that does the process in your head and then improves and keeps getting better. For some people, that will ruin their life. Like the one bad thing that happens will ruin their fucking life because they spent all these months preparing. They paid for a tag. They hired an outfitter and then dunk the shot, fucking ruined their whole week. And then they go back home. How'd your hunt go? Oh, I missed. You know, like, or I wounded it.

1:12:10Evan Hafer:And it's a lesson in life. You can work harder than you've ever worked. And still fail. And still fail.

1:12:18Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:12:18Evan Hafer:You can work for a decade of your life. You can shoot and shoot and train and train. And you can put in all the work and still fuck it up.

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1:14:23Joe Rogan:Don't fall for the trap of getting catfished by wireless. Visit Visible.com to learn more and start loving your wireless carrier. Terms apply. See Visible.com for planned features and network management details. And there's guys who, in the same situation as you, would succeed. Yeah. So you've got to figure out what are they doing different, why are they better, and keep getting better. Like there's hunts that I've been successful on recently, you know, within the last few years that I know that if I had that same hunt eight, nine years ago, I probably would have not been able to make that shot.

1:15:00Joe Rogan:I wasn't as good then. So I've gotten better. It's like, I think everybody needs something that you can't master, that is hard to do, that cleans your mind. I think people need stuff to clean their mind. And I think that's why so many people are running around all fucked up because you're looking at social media all day. So that gives you anxiety. Your life is not satisfying. So that gives you anxiety. You don't care to take care of your body. So that gives you anxiety. You have all these things. You're stuck in traffic. That gives you anxiety. Everybody's just mentally all fucked up. And so you go to a doctor and the doctor says, well, you know, obviously you're dealing with depression.

1:15:41Joe Rogan:And I can prescribe to you this or that. And then you're on Lexapro or whatever the fuck you're on. And that's the road they go down. And this is a bad road. It's not a road where you're going to improve your life. And there's other ways to do it. And I think there'd be a lot more happy people in this world if you found a thing. It doesn't have to be archery. It doesn't have to be pool. It doesn't have to be jujitsu. It doesn't have to be pistol shooting. It just has to be something that's hard to do, that you are on this quest to make these incremental improvements. And through that focus of incremental improvements, you improve your human potential.

1:16:20Joe Rogan:You improve your ability as a person to do difficult and to handle situations. So I always tell people, if you do jujitsu, you'll be much happier because the stresses of life are nothing compared to a dude who's trying to literally break your arm. He's on top of you and you're defending and then you get out of it and then you get him or he gets you and then you have to tap and you go over again. That is so hard to do that like regular life becomes like a breeze. It becomes a breeze. It makes everything jujitsu people are some of the most relaxed people I've ever been around in my life They're all friendly to everybody.

1:16:58Joe Rogan:They're never talking shit or causing drama problems. They get it all out

1:17:03Evan Hafer:Yeah, they I think there's something about getting the shit kicked out of yourself too, right? So yeah, like there's something about Facing someone which I don't do jujitsu just you know as a caveat to that but being able to like face another person in a scenario and then compete against them yeah so where everything counts and then literally just getting the shit beat out of yourself and going okay well i'm gonna step back up i'm gonna do it again right yeah and get better that level of teaching yourself mental endurance like that is the thing that i constantly think about my kids Like, I'm like, how do I be compassionate, caring, loving, you know, the dad that wants to give them everything?

1:17:47Evan Hafer:And then how do you like translate that into also creating obstacles that will drive mental courage? I think you do it by example.

1:17:57Joe Rogan:I think that's the best way. Yeah. My opinion is like if you look at Cam Haynes' sons, I mean, he was rough raising his kids. He talks about that. But those kids are exceptional. They're fucking exceptional. One son's a ranger. The other son broke the world chin-up record. He runs marathons with jeans on. He's fucking got two savage kids. Why? Well, look at the environment they grew up in. They grew up with a dad who's supremely disciplined. And just by being in his presence, you realize, like, oh, I can achieve a lot more than other people can if I'm just willing to put in that work. And for a lot of people, that feeling of the anxiety of the struggle and of grinding it out, that scares them and they don't want to do it.

1:18:51Joe Rogan:And so they come up on excuses or they retreat into other things and they distract themselves. And if you're a parent that does that, you create a weird environment for your child because your child is sort of imitating you as a leader. and you're a fuck up and you're always making excuses and you get fired a lot or you sleep in a lot or you do things that like are not admirable. And then that child, you know, fuck life, man. You know, whereas, you know, his kids are probably like, Jesus Christ, dad's a fucking animal. Like, I want to be an animal too. And then you see how people respect his father and they go, oh, okay.

1:19:29Joe Rogan:I want to, I want people to respect me like that too. You know, You hear a lot of people talk about him when he's not around. Like, well, I want people to respect me. Well, there's only one way to do that. You have to be worthy of respect. There's only one way to get there. It's a fucking long road. Good luck. Start going. And you're not going to get any satisfaction for a long ass fucking time other than the fact that you're on the path. That you're involved in the process and you're on the journey. Yeah, the grind, right?

1:19:57Evan Hafer:And it's like it's overused, but the level of endurance in courage when it's like that trade alone, just trying to understand courage, like who has it, who doesn't have it. And then the level of commitment to a mission or something bigger than yourself. it's it's it's the thing that i think about i'd say a huge percentage of of the last several years especially you know as i get a little bit older right a little bit further away from the g watt and i was with um i'm doing a documentary on um earl plumlee you know that is no so he's a medal of honor recipient former green beret we are at the ufc fight with uh Elliot Miller and Earl Plumlee early Earl Plumlee's a incredibly humble guy like just an amazing human like you can sit here and talk to him you'd never in a million years know that this guy had earned the medal of honor never like because one he's never going to tell you two he's going to ask you a hundred questions about you and be way more fascinated with that And three, you know, we were having this conversation.

1:21:14Evan Hafer:He's like, man, it belongs to the guys. Like, I didn't do anything. Like, it belongs to the guys. Like, the guys, any of the guys, if they wouldn't have been shot, would have done the same exact thing that I did. And I was like, man, that is an incredible statement from, you know, a guy that's sitting here. And so this documentary follows his path from joining the Marine Corps, which was literally where the judge, you know, those old stories of the guy that was, like, forced by the judge to join them. military or jail. He literally has that. And it starts, he goes into the Marines and then he's a force recon Marine.

1:21:51Evan Hafer:And he had gone through all the selections and then he got out of the Marine Corps, joined the army. And we follow his story through the eyes of his peers and his leaders, because we wanted to see from his perspective, what do other people say about him through his entire journey? Now, the story from his perspective. One, he'll never tell it the way that it probably needs to be told. Two, what were the choices that he made throughout his professional life that made the man that was capable of such an incredible act of courage that it warranted the highest medal literally earned in the United States military?

1:22:31Evan Hafer:And that single word, courage, how do you build courageous people is a fascinating, it's quite literally, it's such a fascinating subject. And most of it is, it's the man in the arena, right? It's a poem from Teddy Roosevelt. It's like, it's not the critic who counts. It's like keeping up, stepping back in this commitment to something greater than yourself and then making these thousands of choices in your life. Every day as you wake up, step forward, step back into the fray and like make the active decision to be better. And it's like, it's, it's such a fucking fundamental thing of being able to any, any part of your life.

1:23:19Evan Hafer:if you don't get up in the morning and like commit yourself to something i'm not you know motivational speaker but it's how are you ever going to get better if you're not committing to something like being a better dad or a better husband or better you know better your profession and then committing to this evolutionary process takes a not only a huge amount of commitment but mental and physical endurance it does i mean i'm i'm never going to get tired of trying to figure this out because obviously it's it's like my peer set i was having this conversation with um jack car and i ran into the airport uh we ran into each other at the airport on the way down here and we were talking about fucking love that guy fucking such a good dude and it's it's not just in the military right it's it's not it's just yeah in all of life all of life yeah you find

1:24:14Joe Rogan:Exceptional people in all of life and you can, they're fuel. Those people are fuel. And they enhance the lives of the people around them. And then if you become one of those guys, you enhance the lives of the people around you. And then you feed off of them and they feed off of you. And everybody feeds off of each other. And it's so good for you to know that people like that are out there. That there's a guy like that capable of incredible courage. And that how did he get there? What did he do? How did he become the man he is right now? Because, God damn, that's an admirable man. So how do I? How did you get there?

1:24:49Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:24:51Evan Hafer:And there's all these stories. Jack and I were talking about, because, you know, the Navy SEALs, obviously they've got a lot of positive PR over the last several years, but the special operations community has got so much just, I don't know, airtime, right? But there are all these other people in the military throughout generations of warfighters that have gone out and done these incredibly hard jobs. And I found this story of the Parchi, which is the USS Parchi, which is the most decorated submarine and ship in Navy history. They have nine presidential citations. It's the most decorated group of men in the U.S.

1:25:32Evan Hafer:Navy, like in modern history. And everything they've done is still classified.

1:25:38Joe Rogan:Whoa.

1:25:38Evan Hafer:It's a Cold War era nuclear submarine that was modified and ultimately tasked out by the CIA to go out and do collection. And they were the guys that hundreds of feet down, they would land on the bottom of the ocean. And the Soviets had these military communication lines that were basically hard lines that would go under a bay so they could communicate back and forth. And they felt like they were secure. and one of their jobs which is i've never been able to see anything uh you know declassified but the stories that are out there these guys would land on the bottom of the ocean send out divers at hundreds of feet and these guys would hook listening devices on those lines hundreds of feet down like in cold dark water can you imagine dude like you're out in 400 feet or 300 feet of water pitch black you can't see anything and your job is to go and put a listening device on a soviet communication line 1986 or whatever it was and you're in enemy territory so if you get discovered you're dead and none of these guys that's the incredible thing none of these guys have ever said anything about it wow decades and not only decades of missions months away from home none of these guys have said a fucking thing they've not been on a podcast they've not written any books and the only thing they say is yeah we did a lot of incredible shit still can't talk about it

1:27:15unbelievable man yeah like i've been able to see i can go out and do shit and like you still have

1:27:22Evan Hafer:the ability to see i can't imagine being in like 300 feet of water pitch black if you if you lose a glove right or something goes wrong how are you gonna get back to the boat like and you're gonna have to get back the boat and then get back into American territory without being discovered and more more importantly you're gonna do this how many times over the course of your career and are it does

1:27:48Joe Rogan:the listening device require them to gather the information while they're at

1:27:52Evan Hafer:the bottom of the ocean or does it transmit I think it transmits yeah that's much more convenient. It's not been declassified. So who knows? Right, who knows? And they don't talk about it.

1:28:03Joe Rogan:Wow.

1:28:03Evan Hafer:They don't talk about it. That's crazy. I was talking to, Jack and I were talking about it, and I was like, have you ever heard about this? And, you know, he's a retired Navy guy. He's like, no, I've never heard about it. I'm like, that's my point. It's an incredible story, man. Like, these guys are still buttoned up. Wow. Not saying a fucking word. They picked the right guys. They picked the right guys.

1:28:24Joe Rogan:Yeah, there's guys like that out there.

1:28:25Evan Hafer:Yeah.

1:28:26Joe Rogan:Yeah. And they don't have to be famous either. There's a lot of people out there that just, they're, you know.

1:28:33Evan Hafer:They're just doing the mission. Yeah. They'd come home, not tell their families. Yeah. Their wives would be pissed off. What are you doing? Out on the boat with all your friends for months, just hanging out, hot racking, you know? Yeah. Like, I can't say anything.

1:28:47Joe Rogan:You have to have the right wife.

1:28:49Evan Hafer:Mm-hmm.

1:28:50Joe Rogan:If you don't have a woman that can understand that, that becomes a real problem.

1:28:54Evan Hafer:Yeah, I'm sure a lot of them ended up in divorce.

1:28:56Joe Rogan:Oh, yeah. Well, you know, that was part of the Bob Lazar story. Bob Lazar was the guy that worked at Area 51. He couldn't tell his wife what he was doing. And they would call him at like 10 p.m. There's a flight for you that leaves at 1115, be at the airport. And he had to leave. And he would tell his wife, I got to go to work. And she's like, it's 11 o 'clock at night. He's like, I have to go to work. What are you doing? He's like, I can't talk about it because all his phones were bugged. Everything was bugged. Right. So his wife is like, this motherfucker is cheating on me. She starts fucking her flight instructor.

1:29:28Joe Rogan:And that's one of the reasons why they removed him from his duties. Because they're like, this guy's going to be unstable. We have to see how he handles this. Because he's involved in this top secret back engineering of a flying saucer program, allegedly. And we have to keep an eye on this motherfucker. Because he can't be mentally unstable and have this kind of responsibility. Because he couldn't tell her. couldn't tell her anything

1:29:56Evan Hafer:you can't tell anybody yeah

1:29:58Joe Rogan:and then eventually he took her to the the sites where he could he explained to everybody when he thought that his life was in danger and then he was getting fired when things started getting sideways like people need to know about this he took her out there and showed her but he didn't know that she was fucking some other guy by that time

1:30:13Evan Hafer:that's so unfortunate unfortunate

1:30:15Joe Rogan:yeah

1:30:16Evan Hafer:look at this is what I'm doing I wonder if that actually

1:30:18Joe Rogan:I wonder if she's like

1:30:19Evan Hafer:fuck

1:30:20Joe Rogan:I shouldn't have

1:30:20Evan Hafer:fucked that guy man I feel bad now I shouldn't have fucked that guy. I used to have to do that because for years, you know, years of my life, I didn't tell anybody, couldn't tell anybody who I worked for or what I did. And I didn't have a wife, so I didn't have a wife or kids. I just not really say anything. And I just dip out. I kind of dipped out from my family. My dad was like very concerned because he's like, I never hear from that kid. I don't know what he's doing. I'm like, I'm just working. Just busy, man. but it weighs on you after a while you're like this kind of sucks yeah not being able to tell

1:30:57Joe Rogan:people about something you're doing is that's hard like you can never show someone part of who you are they're always going to be a door that's closed it's kind of nuts yeah it's difficult

1:31:09Evan Hafer:it was like my wife when we first got together she's the first girl that or first woman i shouldn't say girl she's the first woman i told because i was like fuck this place i'm out of it anyway so So if I get rolled up, I get rolled up. Who cares? I'm out anyway.

1:31:25Joe Rogan:Did she, was she initially like, whoa? Like, how did she handle it? Well, so we were.

1:31:31Evan Hafer:Did you give her like details? No, no, no. Because she had met some of my friends, right? And, you know, the guys in the community are fairly obvious because they look like you. And they're jacked, tattooed. You know, a lot of them are, you know, big beards. It looks like, let's take the Hell's Angels. Right. So like I don't work for the State Department. That's fairly obvious. Like State Department, they're going to wear suits and, you know, they're come out of Harvard and they use really long words all the time. They're not like they don't look like they're getting ready to commit a felony. And so she would be around, you know, at our kitchen table or whatever.

1:32:12Evan Hafer:And you'd have all these guys that look like, you know, they're NFL Hell's Angels. and I look like this, which, you know, is intimidating nonetheless, but I could get away with it. I could sell that, but they couldn't. She's like, well, so you work for the State Department, but what is it that you actually do, right? And I'm like, you're not a janitor, obviously. I'm like, ah, you know, we train assistant advise or something, and then after a while, you know, getting to know her, you know, six months or however long we'd known each other, we were driving down the road, and I was like, I actually work for the CIA and she's like I know what are you fucking idiot like yeah that's fair yeah like and uh and it's and it's funny because even now today right it's like a lot of my friends will come by I haven't seen for years and uh and she always has the same kind of like eye roll it's like okay you guys gonna be up till like two in the morning like drinking at the kitchen table talking shit about everybody that used to work with.

1:33:16Evan Hafer:That's right. It's like, and it's so dramatic, right? It's like, it's such a sewing circle at times with people. And it's all the same people are the same, regardless of your profession. It's like, they're always talking shit. And that guy's a good dude, that guy's not.

1:33:33Joe Rogan:It's so fascinating to me, like James O 'Keefe stuff. Like how much they bust people that talk about things they should never talk about with people that are just on a date with. Yeah. Like not even like your wife of 10 years. No, no, no, no. No. Some lady or some guy. It's a lot of it. It's chatty gay guys. Yeah. A lot of it is gay guys. Like, I'll tell you how we do it. And they're on a date with some guy and they're trying to impress him. And they start telling about what secret covert things they're doing that's totally illegal. And they do it all the time.

1:34:07Evan Hafer:Oh, it's got it happens all the time in D.C. and it doesn't really matter what party or wherever you go. You always have the guy, and it's so funny because I would go to, you know, whatever party X, and depending on the venue, it might be like State Department, FBI, or whomever, and you can always tell who works for whom. And it's always like they're always trying to out-jockey each other for who works for the better government service. And I used to always tell people I was a janitor, so they would leave me alone and uh i'm a janitor at north of grumman like why are you here like kind of a thing like ah that's what i do it's you know it's my passion i love them shit shit stripes and toilets man i gotta wipe them out and but then the the all the other guys were like jockeying for like fbi or state department or wherever they're going and then it's always the guys like i can't tell you who i work for and you're like oh then you just sit back and listen And you're like, let me hear where this guy's going.

1:35:07Evan Hafer:This is going to be a fun one. You know, like, oh, get a couple of drinks at him.

1:35:10Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:35:10Evan Hafer:Yeah. And it's just full of shit. It's like, oh, it's so full of shit.

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1:38:02Joe Rogan:But it's – you can convince a lot of people that don't know any better that you are. That was a big thing with martial arts. Big thing with martial arts. It was – especially in the 80s. So in the 80s when I first started, no one knew anything. It wasn't like today today if you get in a street fight If you're a high school kid and you get in a street fight with another high school kid There's a high likelihood that that kid knows how to leg kick right he might know a Blast double he might know an arm triangle you might get fucked up like they might know how to fight back then No one knew how to fight it was very rare There's like one kid who knew how to box it was always the wrestling team which were the most dangerous people Those guys were the worst those guys They're the hardest motherfuckers in the school always.

1:38:47Joe Rogan:And I didn't even realize that until I started wrestling. I was like, I'm amongst these fucking elite killers. And they're just walking around with everybody like they're normal. And you realize the level of commitment and dedication involved in being an elite high school wrestler, just a high school wrestler. It's fucking off the charts. These kids were going to camps all through the summer. They would get sent off to wrestling camp. They were training year round. And I just hopped in on my sophomore year. I did one season of wrestling and I was like, this is crazy. Like the level, I had no idea.

1:39:20Joe Rogan:I was hanging around with these people. I thought they were normal people. They're like kids that were like little soldiers, like all of them, thick neck, little fucking soldiers. And you realize like, wow. I like opened my eyes like, Jesus, there's these people around. And they were never even considered martial artists until the UFC. Nobody really understood unless they actually did wrestling how helpless the average person is with an elite wrestler. You have no chance. It's not like maybe you'll be able to hit him before he takes you down. No chance. He's going to shoot on you. He's going to – you have no chance.

1:39:55Joe Rogan:You have zero chance. But there was always a bunch of guys who were pretending they were martial arts experts. It was a really common thing. And then you would talk to them like, where do you train? What do you do? And it was always some guy who like learned some – there was one guy. This guy actually wound up getting arrested for murder and he's in jail right now. He had lied to everybody and told them that he was a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. And he was even teaching people and he knew almost nothing. And this is like in the early, early 2000s I guess, like late 90s, early 2000s. And it was just starting to catch on.

1:40:35Joe Rogan:People were just starting to understand the depth of martial arts because of the UFC. But it hadn't really gone mainstream until about 2005. And this guy was telling everybody he was a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. And then Eddie Bravo trained with him. And Eddie came back to me. He's like, man, something's wrong. He was like, this guy is terrible. He didn't know shit. And I was like, really? He goes, yeah, I think he's a fake. I think he's a fraud. And he wound up confronting this guy. and then the guy wound up uh he was banging some guy's wife and wound up luring the guy back to his karate school and killing him what yeah yeah and he went to jail and he's in jail right now but he had a fake name his name was rafael tory that was his fake name but his real name was like ralph something or another and uh he's in jail right now for murder that's a but that's a super

1:41:26Evan Hafer:funny character right not that guy but it's a fake black but a fake martial artist was that there's a there's a movie years ago uh where it's like one foot way the way of one foot or something yeah yeah with danny mcfried yeah and it was fucking hilarious man and it's like that guy that that like character that strip mall you know martial artist it's just a piece of shit yeah There's a guy on Instagram that documents all these guys.

1:41:55Joe Rogan:It's McDojo Life on Instagram. It's a fucking great page because it's all people doing bullshit, fake martial arts, like death touch. Like people that can like touch your forehead and you go limp and fall to the ground. And you get all their students become like brainwashed and they go along with this whole facade. It's really weird. They're in on the charade. It's very strange. Super weird. It's very cultish. Martial arts are very cultish. Especially traditional martial arts. Like your instructor is always sir. You're always bowing to them. There's always a lot of weirdness. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:42:29Joe Rogan:And like traditional Taekwondo, you always would refer to your instructors as mister. It was mister. I hated it. I was like just you don't have to do that.

1:42:38Evan Hafer:How many years did you do that?

1:42:39Joe Rogan:Oh, like hardcore for seven years. Yeah, hardcore.

1:42:45Evan Hafer:And then you switched over to jiu-jitsu?

1:42:47Joe Rogan:Yeah, I switched over to jiu-jitsu a few years later. I stopped fighting when I was 22, and then I was a real—it was like doing comedy. I started doing comedy at 21, and I kind of half-assed, still trained, and fought a few times while I was also doing comedy. But I didn't have the commitment that I had before. I'd had a series of events that led me out of, like, wanting to compete. And one of them was recognizing brain damage, recognizing it in other people, recognizing it in friends. and then laying in bed with headaches after sparring sessions going, okay, where does this lead? And I'm not even making any money off of this.

1:43:27Joe Rogan:And then there was a guy that I hurt really bad in a tournament. I knocked this one guy out when I was 19 in California. I was competing in the Nationals, and I KO'd this guy, and he never got up. They had to take him on a stretcher, and he was on a stretcher for half an hour, and then they took him to the hospital, and it freaked me out because I was like, that could have easily been me. It easily could have been me. and that one bothered me because I was like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? I'm trying to win the national championships. I'm trying to be in the Olympics. I'm trying to do these things.

1:44:00Joe Rogan:But I'm like, okay, well, where does that lead me? To teaching? I was already teaching at the time. Do I really want to teach for a living forever? I'm like, I don't think I do. There's not, you know, and then recognizing that the martial art that I had picked, Taekwondo, had a lot of flaws in it. It was really good for kicking, but it wasn't the best overall martial art. And when I started kickboxing, I really realized that. And then I started getting into Muay Thai and I realized the power of leg kicks and what the devastating impact it has on your mobility and like one or two leg kicks and you're so compromised.

1:44:33Joe Rogan:I was like, oh, there's so many levels to this. So I was like kind of half-assing martial arts like the last year, not nearly as committed. Like I was all in, all throughout my high school years, all in until I was 21. And then from 21 to 22, kind of half-assed it. And then I didn't start doing jujitsu until years later.

1:44:54Evan Hafer:So what's going on at 21, 22? What are you thinking? Do you remember what you're thinking? Like, I'm going to be an actor. I'm going to be a comic. No, no, no, no. What are you thinking?

1:45:04Joe Rogan:I didn't think I was going to be a comic until I did an open mic night when I was 21. And then even then, I was like, this is just something that I think I can do. But when I would bomb, I'd be like, fuck, I should go back to fighting. I just get a few. And then you know what happened? I tore my ACL. And when I tore my ACL, I had to have surgery, and I couldn't do anything for like six months. And then I realized like my body's vulnerable. You're counting on your tissue staying intact in order to live this life that you want to live. So I had to get my knee reconstructed. And I was like, all right.

1:45:42Evan Hafer:So that was the first knee reconstruction?

1:45:45Joe Rogan:yeah back then yeah I was 22 I think when I blew it out 21 somewhere around then it was like right around the time when I was like thinking about stopping competing it's like my you know think the universe was like let me help you right let me fuck your knee up real quick so I had to get that fixed and that takes a little while before it gets back to normal again but uh the comedy became a thing where I was like this is very exciting and really difficult to do and so different than anything else I was doing. Well, you have to get the people to like you. Like it's dependent upon like personality.

1:46:18Joe Rogan:And whereas with martial arts, I wanted them to not like me. I loved it. I didn't have any problem. Like no one's going to save you. It doesn't matter if these people hate me. And if you're looking at me and there's just you and me and a referee, I liked it. I liked that this person had like a bunch of, at least one of my favorite things was like hearing cheers stop. Like when people were cheering, like get him, fuck you, kick his ass, kick his ass. Then whomp! And then the guy would collapse, and then you'd hear silence. You'd just hear silence. Especially if you go to where they live. Right.

1:46:52Joe Rogan:Like if you had to go to Ohio and fight in Ohio. I just loved that silence. It was this final moment. And my thing was I would always walk away like it was normal. I would never celebrate. I would just walk away like that was, I do this every day. I'm going to do this to the next guy too. This is what I'm going to do to you. And I would I would always take naps to those the other thing I knew when everybody was freaking out before fighting for sparring I would go to sleep in front of everybody. I just put a hoodie on and just lie down on the ground go to sleep

1:47:21Evan Hafer:Is that like a where you try to? Fuck with them a little bit a little bit of fucking with them.

1:47:26Joe Rogan:There's a little bit of I'm I'm so relaxed Right, I'm gonna take a nap here while you're freaking out But it was also I wanted to do it for my own mind I wanted to just like be, I want, I was so in my own head. I was just, it was, I was so in my own, like what I'm going to do. I wasn't thinking about all these other external things until that one knockout. That's when I really started thinking about what could happen to me. Cause I had gotten really lucky where I never really got hurt in a tournament. Never, never got dropped, never got knocked out, never got, never got really rocked, But I did it to a lot of people.

1:48:02Joe Rogan:And then I was like, this is coming around. Like, it's a matter of time before I get whomped. It's just it happens. It's just going to happen. I'm going to fight some national champion guy. And I'm going to zig when I should have zagged. And I'm going to catch a heel to my fucking jaw. And that's going to be a wrap. I'm going to be waking up in the hospital.

1:48:21Evan Hafer:That's interesting that you had that thought early on to where you're like, ah.

1:48:25Joe Rogan:Well, I started seeing brain damage in other people. specifically when I started kickboxing because I was training at boxing gyms and I started seeing guys that were like a slurry aspect to the way they talked. There was a labored thing to their speech. There was something about them and then I would see it degrade over time. I really started getting involved in sparring and boxing when I was about 19 and that was also around the time where I started losing my enthusiasm for Taekwondo because I just realized the no punching to the face thing in tournaments was so limited. It really, it fucked you up because it gave you this illusion that you could pull things off where all the guy would have to do is jab you in the face.

1:49:11Joe Rogan:You're like, oh, okay. Like at this distance, you can't do the thing that you normally do in a Taekwondo tournament. You have to be much more aware defensively. So I had to recalibrate my offense and my tactics. And so then I just, I started doing a lot of boxing and a lot of kickboxing. And I saw so much brain damage. I saw so much like unreported brain damage, just weird stuff. Guys would tell you the same story. They just told you like five minutes ago. They tell it to you again. And I was realizing, oh, these guys can't remember. They just said this thing five minutes ago. It was like they were stoned, you know, and they weren't, you know.

1:49:48Joe Rogan:They were just starting to exhibit the beginning signs of brain damage.

1:49:55Evan Hafer:so when you're when you're making those decisions early on like you're controlling like being able to control your emotions so your anxiety and being able to like put yourself into the right mental framework to go out and perform so regardless so you're competing in taekwondo you're going out you're actually performing like open mics is that what you're doing at the time Yeah, when I was 21.

1:50:22Joe Rogan:Once I was 21, I started doing open mics.

1:50:24Evan Hafer:And so being able to control your emotions, because you've got to be freaking out a little bit.

1:50:29Joe Rogan:Yeah, well, the first time I went on stage, I was more scared than I had ever been fighting, which I thought was crazy. So I started fighting before I could really be scared. I started fighting when I was 15. That was like the first fights that I had. You were scared, but you were so stupid. You didn't know what could happen to you. And I was really lucky that I had a really good school. The school that I trained at was super technical. The guy who I trained under this guy, Jae-hun Kim, he trained with General Choi Young-yi, who was the founder of Taekwondo. And so it was like the technique was perfect.

1:51:07Joe Rogan:You had to have perfect technique. If you did anything sloppy or anything, they would correct you. You had to have it down. And they emphasized a lot of heavy bag training, which a lot of schools didn't even have a heavy bag, which I thought was crazy. Like we would go and do these things where we'd have our team would go and train with another team. Like we would travel to New York and there was like another – an instructor that was friends with our instructor. And they would bring the competition teams to compete against each other. And we'd fight in a gym. So it was like these unsanctioned fights that you would have.

1:51:43Joe Rogan:And, you know, you'd find people that were roughly your weight. And these guys didn't have heavy bags. And you'd go to their gym. They have like a strip mall type gym. And in their dojang, they didn't have a heavy bag. I was like, this is crazy. You guys don't train with heavy bags? And it didn't make any sense to me. They had kicking paddles and a bunch of different things. But they didn't have anything to improve thrusting techniques and stabbing techniques, which is like you need resistance. You need a heavy bag. And so our instructor was adamant about like if you can't hurt somebody badly with one kick, you're doing the wrong thing.

1:52:19Joe Rogan:These techniques were originally designed for war. And you're supposed to be able to have devastating power in everything you throw. That got lost a little when Taekwondo got into the Olympics or when it was on the path to getting into the Olympics. And it became more of like point scoring. They would try to hit you and run away hit you and run away and it's a lot of like Fast moving techniques that didn't have the same sort of devastating impact So where I got real lucky and where I trained is that they really emphasize power And so the school that I was at was very feared because a lot of the other black belts were like the guys that I trained with Were fucking really dangerous like they were they were known for when they would go to a tournament people would get scared because if these guys hit you you're in trouble.

1:53:07Joe Rogan:Like these were dangerous cats, you know, that were like just wheel kicking people into another dimension, turning side, kicking people and crushing rib cages. It was a lot of that. And so I got real lucky that that's the gym that I started in, that I started with like, you know, you imitate your atmosphere. Right, right. The first guy that I ever saw hit a bag was this guy John Lee. And when I saw him, he was the national Taekwondo light heavyweight champion, and he was competing. He was training to compete in the World Games. So he was about to go to, I guess it was the World Cup. And he was in full training mode, like the moment I walked into the gym.

1:53:44Joe Rogan:And I watched him fold this heavy bag. And as I was going up the stairs, I could hear the sound of it. This is how I was just visiting this gym. I was leaving a baseball game at Fenway Park. And me and my friend just walked up the stairs, because we didn't want to wait for the tea. It took so long for so many people leaving the baseball game. There was going to be big lines. It was going to be packed. Let's just walk up here and see what's going on. And as we were walking up the stairs, I heard this sound that I'll never forget. It was like, whomp, ka-ching, whomp, ka-ching. And the ka-ching was the chains of the heavy bag.

1:54:18Joe Rogan:Because this 120-pound bag was flying through the air when this guy would hit it. And the chains were going ka-ching and rattling. And then it would come down and he would set it up again. And he was 7, 10 feet from me. Like there was this like little ledge where you could sit and watch people and they had set it up like that So the heavy bag was set up right where people would walk in because it was a great recruitment tool Right, right because you would really get to see what people are capable of in the moment. I saw that I was like I want to know how to do that. Like how do you do that? Like he was doing spinning back kicks over and over again turning sidekicks I'm just folding this fucking bag and I'm like that's crazy that a person could generate.

1:54:59Joe Rogan:I didn't think a person could generate that kind of force. And I trained with him a lot, and I learned from him a lot. He taught me a lot. And he was an interesting guy, too, because he was like a real street guy. Like, he'd been in and out of jail, wound up having a substance problem. But he was this funny dude from Chelsea, which was like a real hard, dangerous neighborhood in Boston. And just a fucking killer, man, a killer. just a killer and when he would when he would compete people get so nervous it was crazy to watch because i started to see i started training with him and going to tournaments with him when i was a white belt so i was a white belt and he was a black belt national champion and when john lee would show up you see people whispering like fuck john lee's here you would see guys take these deep because they knew he was in their weight class like fuck fuck because they knew this guy wasn't trying to win on points.

1:55:55Joe Rogan:He was trying to break your body. He was trying to just crush your organs. He was trying to separate your fucking brain from the inside of its skull. He was trying to hurt you. And he did it to a lot of people. I watched him knock out a lot of people, a lot of people. It was wild to see. So like, you know, but it was, to me, it was just like this new thing that was going to change who I am. You know, I went for the first time in my life, I felt like I wasn't a loser because I was like really good at this thing that was scary, you know, and I just threw myself into it. It was my whole life. I didn't do anything.

1:56:34Joe Rogan:I didn't party. I didn't go to didn't. I had very few friends outside of high school. You know, I was it was my whole thing was just training. I'd get home from school, get something to eat, immediately leave, hop on the train, head into town every day.

1:56:48Evan Hafer:That was like 15?

1:56:49Joe Rogan:Yeah.

1:56:50Evan Hafer:Yeah.

1:56:50Joe Rogan:Yeah, from like the summer of my freshman year of high school. That's when I first started. Right when I graduated from high school in my freshman year, I started training. And it was nuts. It was just like this complete new life. It was so weird. And then competing, like traveling around competing. First it was like a white belt, then a blue belt, then wicker my way, a purple belt. And then all sudden they're in Taekwondo red belt is brown belt right and then black belt and then my instructor was crazy He would let me compete as a black belt before I was a black belt He let me compete in the men's division when I was 16 Yeah, it's nuts shit Yeah, it was just they if they thought you had potential they just throw you right into the flames like let's see

1:57:40Evan Hafer:See what you could do so the confidence that gives you it's like finding something that you're good at? Yeah, it was like all of a sudden,

1:57:48Joe Rogan:I realized, well, all of a sudden I got obsessed with something where I'd never had really worked hard at anything in my life. And then I had abs. I was like, this is crazy. Like I look at myself in the mirror, I had abs. All of a sudden I had muscles everywhere. I was like, this is not, because you're going through puberty. Right. So you're this doughy little fucking kid, this scrawny doughy little kid that never did any sports other than baseball. And then all of a sudden I'm shredded and I know how to fuck people up. And then I was doing it to like live humans all over the country, like traveling everywhere.

1:58:18Joe Rogan:We traveled. That's all we did. We just traveled.

1:58:21Evan Hafer:So how does that go from, how do you go from there though? Like why or how did you go, I'm going to go do standup? Like what was the, what was that? It was really my friends.

1:58:33Joe Rogan:It was really, yeah, my friend, Steve Graham, who I'm still friends with to this day. He was a real maniac. He was on the U.S. ski team. He was a flight pilot with the Navy. Or not a flight pilot, a flight surgeon with the Navy. He was an ophthalmologist. Like, insanely hardworking guy. Like, unbelievably disciplined. And he got into Taekwondo while he was a doctor. While he was an ophthalmologist. He's a maniac to this day. This dude's had, like, he's still a good friend. He's had, like, 70 fucking surgeries. He's had his knees replaced, still trained, still spars. Still trained. Yeah. Yeah, he's like in his 60s now.

1:59:10Joe Rogan:He's a fucking nut. And so he's like, hey, you're funny. You should go do this. We would go to tournaments and when we would go to tournaments or when we have sparring days in particular, everybody was super nervous. It was very dangerous and so I would be the one who would break the ice. I'd be the one who would make fun of everybody and do impressions of everybody and I was I always was cracking everybody up and it was a captive audience. Right okay, and everyone was looking for like relief from the fact that there was this tent Like we would be on a bus headed to like Poughkeepsie New York to go compete in a tournament And I would be the one on the bus like making fun of everything just cracking everybody up And my friend Steve said you should be a stand-up you should try it you just try it And I'm like look you think I'm funny because you like me I go other other people are gonna think I'm an asshole like my sense of humor was very dark It's very crazy back then because I was living a crazy life and then did an open mic night and then I said, I think I might be able to do this.

2:00:10Joe Rogan:Did you bomb straight away? Oh, yeah. No, I didn't do well. I got a couple of laughs. Like, ha, ha, ha. It wasn't good. Right. But everybody sucked.

2:00:18Evan Hafer:Do you remember any of the jokes that you rolled out with?

2:00:21Joe Rogan:Here's my impression of a good-looking girl getting pulled over by the cops. Do you realize how fast you're going? No, do you like my tits? Yes, I do. Here's a warning. It was terrible. It was so bad. It was so bad. I had so many bad jokes But I also realized like everybody sucks in the beginning and then I thought back to martial arts I'll go.

2:00:41Evan Hafer:Oh, this is like everything right like if you start off

2:00:44Joe Rogan:You suck like everything in the whole thing is like getting better at this thing you suck at which is like what I had this guy Tommy woods dr. Tommy wood we were talking about new things about the value in terms of like people that acquired dementia and one of the best ways to keep your brain fresh is do new things. Do things that you're not good at and learn how to do them and get better at. And I think I had sort of just applied what I had learned from martial arts because obviously I wasn't good at martial arts when I started. I was terrible. Everybody's terrible. You don't know what you're doing.

2:01:16Joe Rogan:And then you realize like, oh, through repetitive effort, concentration, focus, discipline, you're going to get better. It's a path. And so I was like, oh, this is a new thing. but it's also a new thing filled with other misfits because I was a misfit right and it's like oh well these comedians are misfits too they didn't have regular rules they always wanted to smoke pot and drink beer and you know they stayed up late and they slept late and they're they were just maniacs I was like okay I could hang out with these people like regular people that wanted a regular job scare the shit out of me because I don't want to get sucked into your drone-like frequency i can't live i've i tried regular jobs like this is not going to work for me i'm too add hd whatever the fuck it is whatever it is i got it i'm like i can't do this but those people were misfits there were these weird and occasionally professionals would go up and you'd realize like wow this guy's a master like the mastery he has of like concepts and jokes and tricking you into thinking one thing and then he hits you with another thing i'm like god and the smoothness of it all.

2:02:22Joe Rogan:It just became an obsession. Do you remember the guy that like, there's this one guy, Teddy Bergeron. There's this guy who had been on the tonight show and he unfortunately developed a substance problem, which a lot of people do. And I think some of it is just the pressure of standup and the pressure of fame and the pressure of constantly performing. And then it's just also like just living that dirtbag life where you're just like, you could do whatever you want. It doesn't matter. Do Coke, you know, and they're just doing Coke and like there was clubs that would pay you in coke. What? Yeah, they would, yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:02:55Joe Rogan:Nick's Comedy Stop would offer you cocaine or cash in the 1980s. Yeah.

2:03:01Evan Hafer:I can see that. I can see how this thing becomes super addicting. And this is like your dirtbag life. It's that same parallel we're talking about where this becomes the rock that you're climbing every day because this is the audience that you have to entertain. It becomes about getting better, honing a craft, and ultimately succeeding with the crowd right in front of you. And they're giving you the feedback. That's very similar. Like you're either getting higher on the rock or you're falling off.

2:03:32Joe Rogan:And the falling off was important because the bombings would really teach you you didn't want that. So what was it about the bomb? Like what did you – how did you bomb? What did you do wrong? What went wrong? What's wrong with your material? What's wrong – like are you being lazy in the way you're setting things out? Like what are you doing wrong? And then figuring it out because that pain of bombing was so – like sometimes it's bad to do well a bunch of times. Because you need to get relaxed like you can't be relaxed like you have to like constantly grinding at it you have to Constantly be taking that fucking thing apart and trying to figure out

2:04:05Evan Hafer:What how to make it better the guys like like Andy Kaufman right there would go out and they had a whole stick And nobody understood what the fuck they were doing. That's a different thing It's a different wild like it is why because it's almost an intentional mm-hmm you're bombing intentionally, but it's funny. You've got to stretch it out a little bit to understand what's going on. And it's a different individual psychology.

2:04:31Joe Rogan:It's a different thing. He's doing a different thing. My criticism of that, and I don't really have a criticism, maybe that's the wrong word because I think Kaufman was brilliant. He was brilliant on Taxi. He was an interesting character. The shit he did with pro wrestling was just bananas. Bananas. It was wrestling women. It's wild. Fucking mania. It was so wild. It was great. It was so great. But he never was a great comic. Right? Like, see, if Shane Gillis decided to go that path and just bomb on purpose, that would be almost more interesting. Right. Like, here's a guy who knows how to kill.

2:05:08Joe Rogan:He's a real comic. One of the funniest guys ever. Yeah. And then he starts playing the theme to Mighty Mouse and just repeating, here I come to save the day. Like this what Andy Kaufman did you play have a record player and just play the mighty mouse theme song and just repeat Here I come to save the day and everybody's like what the fuck is going on? Like it was like this weird mind fuck that he was doing with everybody, but he never did the other thing Right, right never like really entertained and killed like all the evidence of Andy Kaufman is of him doing this weird stuff Which again, it's not really a criticism, right, but he was doing a different thing He was an odd guy who saw this thing and he was like, I think I can get in there and do something completely disruptive.

2:05:53Evan Hafer:Right. I can see that. Like, it's very distinctly different. Nothing wrong with it.

2:05:58Joe Rogan:I loved it. I love especially the wrestling stuff. But it's not my favorite. Like, if someone told me Andy Kaufman's performing in this room over here, but Dave Attell is in that room over there. I'm going to see Dave Attell. I want to go see the master. You're going to laugh. Yeah, I'm going to laugh and I'm going to see a guy at the top of his craft that's doing this hypnosis on everybody. And you just leave there. Your sides hurt and you're dying. You don't leave there going, what the fuck was that? But he wanted people to leave there and go, what the fuck was that? That was the magic of Andy Kaufman.

2:06:31Joe Rogan:But it's just not my, you know, I don't like jazz. I don't want to go see jazz. It's hard to like. It's kind of cool background music, but I'm not leaving the house to go see jazz. But I know people who fucking love it.

2:06:44Evan Hafer:So if you think back to Taxi, I was thinking about this the other day with Danny DeVito and Taxi. That guy's still going. I know. It's incredible, man. I know. And just like a snippet of Taxi came up and I was like, holy shit. How old is Danny DeVito? He's 150 ,000 years old. He's like... Tony Danza's long since retired. Holy shit. That guy just keeps going. And he looked old in Taxi. Is Judd Hurst still alive? I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know. That was a great show. It was a great show.

2:07:16Joe Rogan:That was a great show.

2:07:17Evan Hafer:He's 90. He's 90? Yeah.

2:07:20Joe Rogan:Mary Lou Henner was taxi too, right? Wasn't she on taxi? Yep. Mary Lou Henner, you know, she has that crazy mind thing where she remembers everything. Seriously? Everything. You can give her a date and she could tell you like 1973, you know, February 2nd. She'll tell you what day it was. she can tell you what happened on that day she can tell you news things she can tell you what she was doing that day she she has like not just a photographic member memory but a complete recall of all events and dates i forget what the term is superior autobiographical memory ability oh my gosh can remember almost every day of her life since she was 11.

2:08:01isn't that nuts that's amazing

2:08:03Joe Rogan:And she's got to be 70 years old, right? 73? Yeah. She remembers everything. The funny thing is, is DeVito's still funny.

2:08:12Evan Hafer:Yeah. Like, he's still funny. Like, I mean, like the way that he lands jokes. I mean, Always Sunny. Oh, yeah. How many seasons of that? Like, 20 now? I don't know. But, I mean, it's still. How many fucking things has he done?

2:08:26Joe Rogan:I don't know. Taxi to Always Sunny. Taxi was when I was a boy. Yeah.

2:08:30Evan Hafer:To Always Sunny. That was the thing my dad used to watch. yeah like my dad seems old my dad's 80 years old right my dad used to watch that how old's davido 81 still banging it out still fucking killing it man still funny yeah i mean how old i'm not trying to equate ron white to danny but i'm saying like how old's ron because he's still killing it 70 yeah 70 yeah like i was watching him the other night and you know he flew back from where he was and he just like came in and and stood up there and did a set like it just kind of like walked in almost it felt like he was just like i'm here i'm just gonna stop in and do this and then he fucking killed seamlessly just it was perfect he's good as he's better i think than he's ever been right now i've never like like watching somebody that's great and then watching somebody that's in another dimension like him specifically because he's perfect like it just it's absolutely perfect because it comes off it's unforced it's a conversation like he's just having a conversation with the crowd yeah like it's so incredible to watch somebody that can be perfect in their delivery but then be completely unassuming in the way that they're delivering it like yeah like it's just a natural conversation like i had a casual yeah it's completely casual killing you don't even feel like you're in like you're you're watching a stand-up comedian you feel like you're watching somebody talk and you know that it's coming you think that it's coming and you he still fucking delivers it with just a level of exceptionalism you're like fuck man like well

2:10:10Joe Rogan:the guy's incredible i think it's one of those things where you keep working at it you just keep getting better and also he stopped drinking so he stopped drinking a couple years ago and that changed everything he got lost a ton of weight got way more focused but you know he had been going hard for decades. And his doctor had to pull him a sign and go, hey man, you're gonna die.

2:10:32Evan Hafer:Are all those guys still, all the blue collar comedy tour guys, are they still all doing it?

2:10:39Joe Rogan:Foxworthy still does stand up. I think he did stand up recently with Ron. But I don't think he tours a lot. I don't know about Larry the Cable Guy. I don't hear about him anymore. I don't hear about the other guy, Bill Engvall. You don't hear much about him anymore. I think out of all them Ron is the guy who's still but out of all them it was like Jeff Fox was a great comic and then you know I think in my opinion Ron was the best. Ron's just a master. But also Ron is he loves it man. Like he was there last night. He performs all the time. He's always down. He always like I always get text messages from him when I have shows.

2:11:18Joe Rogan:He wants to come and do a set. It's like he he lives for it man. He's constantly writing. He's constantly working on it. That's his thing, man. He enjoys the shit out of it. Still tours, still does the road, does better than ever, sells out everywhere. And you're getting the best show out of Ron that you've ever gotten out of him. He's better now, I think, than he's ever been. I really believe that. And it's crazy that at 70, he's still getting better. His material just keeps getting better. And it's always working at it. It's always working at it.

2:11:46Evan Hafer:You know, yeah, that that the whole thing about L.A. or whatever he did. He just it sounded like he pulled that out of his ass on stage. He was just telling a story about being on a flight. And you're like, holy shit.

2:11:58Joe Rogan:He's just telling me a story. He was in the back room of the comedy store one night with his back bar. And we were hanging out and we were drinking. This is back in Ron's drinking days. And we're having a couple of glasses of whiskey. And then Ron starts telling the story about how when he was stationed in Hawaii. he goes there's this place you can go and you know there's a bunch of hookers you get your dick sucked for like 20 bucks man i was there every fucking day and he goes then all these years later i was watching the news story and all these transvestite hookers were getting rounded up in the very area where i used to go every day and i realized oh my god i got my dick suck about a hundred times by men and he was telling this this fucking hilarious bit he wasn't a bit he was just telling us this story we were dying i go do you have you ever said this on stage he goes no fuck no i go you should tell that on stage i go ron that's hilarious i go we were dying laughing i mean it was like it was a bit but it was just him telling a story just in no intention of ever seeing.

2:13:07Joe Rogan:We're in the back room. He goes from the back room onto the stage in the OR, the original room. He walks down the hallway. I go with him. He goes on stage. He goes, let me tell you a story about how I got my dick sucked about a hundred times by man. He just goes into the story. It fucking murders. Murders. Like it had been a polished bit that he had been working on for years. It was just a story but Ron is a great storyteller like a natural storyteller like if he's not trying to be funny He's funny. Yeah, he's that he doesn't have to like think about it. It's like it's a he's got his personality man He just he's this cool.

2:13:51Evan Hafer:Yeah. He's like that that um Iconic Western almost a Western storyteller like the guy that you would expect sitting at the campfire at hunting camp it's the old you know guide that's been around the 100 years like he's killed thousands of animals he's packed shit out and then he's got these stories that you can't hope but listen to

2:14:14Joe Rogan:yeah

2:14:15Evan Hafer:and that's what he reminds me of I'm like man this guy is so fucking perfect and every time I see him I'm like holy shit that's the guy

2:14:24Joe Rogan:that's the guy he's an old master

2:14:26Evan Hafer:you know

2:14:27Joe Rogan:Well, there's not a lot of humans like that guy. He's the main reason why I was interested in moving to Austin. He was the first reason because I knew Ron had already lived here. Ron was already moved here. Ron moved here in 2018.

2:14:42Evan Hafer:Okay.

2:14:43Joe Rogan:And so he just got tired of it. He kept a place in Beverly Hills, and we'd come visit us at the comedy store sometimes. But I was talking to him on the phone. He's like, man, I fucking love it here. He goes, there's no Hollywood bullshit. shit he goes if I want to fly somewhere to work I'm in the center of the country it's easy to get anywhere people are nice food's great and he goes you're just not around how and I kept thinking man can I live in Austin like I always liked Austin and right on it was out here so when I would come out here for work every now and then and I'd always come out here and love doing stand-up here it's like like that planted the first seed and then when the pandemic hit Ron was already here and when I came out here to look at houses and stuff in this is in May of 2020 so this is only a couple months into the lockdown but I had already had enough I was like I'm getting the fuck out of here like I knew these cocksuckers in LA were never going to give up the kind of control and power that they had over people's lives they get off on it those fucking weirdos and so I was like well at least Ron will be there like I'll hang out with Ron like even if I never do you stand up again at least ron will be here and then you know ron was also the guy who convinced me that i have to open up a club i had had a thought in my head and i was thinking about doing it we talked about doing it and then ron went on stage for the first time in like six months it was in november of 2020 and then he grabs me by my shoulders when he got off stage because he fucking murdered first of all when he went on stage they went crazy and there's a giant standing ovation because there was no indoor shows anywhere else uh near there it was like we were doing it at the vulcan they had some shows they were doing at cap city before cap city went under but they were like separating everybody by like 20 feet or some stupid shit like as if the virus can't go through the it was dumb right everything was dumb but the vulcan was just like unhinged it was packed i was like this is so crazy this is just super spreader party and ron went on stage and he had gone over his notes and material and wasn't even sure.

2:16:40Joe Rogan:He was thinking he was retired. He was talking about retiring. I think I'm retired. Did this one set and then he grabs him by the shoulders. He goes, whatever the fuck we have to do, we're going to keep doing this. He goes, you got to open up that club. I'm like, okay, we're going to open up the club. And then we started looking for locations right afterwards. So Ron was a key force. He's the godfather of the Austin comedy movement, like where this became like this big hub it started with ron 100 because i know if he was here if he was here at least i'd have my friend i could go hang out right like because like even if i couldn't do stand-up again just i need someone who's just a renegade i need a dude i can hang out with that's just that's a real comic that we're gonna have fun we could just talk shit and laugh and well who would you hang out with when you're in la him him him when he was there until 2018 always but of course Joey Diaz yeah and you know when the pandemic hit Joey moved to New Jersey he's like fuck this place and you know he was on the same things as me fuck these people this is and he always wanted to go back home to New Jersey which was you know where he's from and then uh Duncan moved to North Carolina like everybody moved out but it was like Duncan I hung out with Duncan Segura Ari uh Burt all those people that were you know the mainstays at the comedy store it was just there was a an amazing crew tony hinchcliffe of course yeah and tony was one of the first guys to move out here too with me and then segura moved out here and then everybody

2:18:10Evan Hafer:moved out here just like this wave started is there anybody that you're like we started with like back in the day like because you're what boston like was there anybody you started with

2:18:20Joe Rogan:that you're still like yeah fitzsimmons great real tight greg fitzsimmons started one week I think I started a week after him or before him something like that but we're separated by one week oh seriously yeah we did open mics together we traveled around together we did road we would drive 90 minutes to do five minutes for free yeah we would drive to Rhode Island to stand up for free we traveled all over the the all over New England we did road gigs together yeah we came up together we had so much fun we just we had no money no career no even thought of one day having a career, the goal was I want to be able to make a living doing comedy because we knew that there was guys in town that were headliners that could, you know, grind out a hundred grand, 50 grand, whatever it is a year, only doing comedy.

2:19:09Joe Rogan:They didn't have to do anything else. I was like, that's the dream. Imagine if you could pay your bills with comedy. The idea of a career was like, no, we never even talked about it because everybody in Boston stayed in Boston. Nobody left and other than like Stephen Wright and Jay Leno, there's like a few people that had kind of air quotes made it, you know, during that time period and left Boston. Right. The goal in Boston was just to be a good comic. It was a real interesting thing because it was a real artist colony in the most unpretentious of ways because these guys were all coke snorting, whiskey drinking, psychopaths.

2:19:49Joe Rogan:And a lot of them were big guys, like these big fucking football player looking dudes. were just animals and they were just wild men you know and they they had this life that was so envious to me i was like god to be so free or all you have to do is just tell jokes you don't have to ever show up at the fucking the newspaper depot to deliver newspapers or drive i was driving limos and doing construction gigs i didn't have to do any of that you could just do comedy and that was me and Greg. We would just drive around just thinking like one day, imagine being able to make a living doing this. That was the only goal.

2:20:27Joe Rogan:And then we both wind up event. He moved to New York for a bit and I lived in New York for a while. And then I moved to LA and then he eventually moved to LA as well. And now he's still there. He's still back in LA. Gosh, I can't imagine, man.

2:20:41Evan Hafer:like living there and staying there even for even professionally did you see what they just did to

2:20:48Joe Rogan:the guys that won the super bowl you see the jock tax yeah jamie you see the jock tax yeah it's not a new thing though i understand i understand but the but it is it's specific to california and this jock tax in california um they were some of the players lost money playing in the super They had a pain. Oh no, no, it is true. I don't think so. No, no, it is true. I went it through AI last night No, it was in great. They pulled it up on grok and people analyzed it and it's based. No, no, Jamie It's big Jamie. It's based on the seven days that they had to be there So you have to pay a fee based on the seven days Dependent upon what your salary is so it's a percentage right there too Okay this year okay with whatever well the Super Bowl specifically these guys Jamie so funny.

2:21:44Joe Rogan:I know but this is one of those things. It's not real. What do you mean? It's not real. I read I told you it was run through AI last night He made a hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars for the Super Bowl. He had to pay two hundred and forty nine thousand dollars in tax I'm pretty sure those are the numbers and it's based on the fact that he was there for seven days So it's a percentage of your income over the course of a year So if he makes two million dollars a year and he's there for seven days This is how much money you have to pay gotcha And so the Super Bowl pay is not it's like on top of your normal salary right right?

2:22:19Joe Rogan:So it actually cost him money to play in the Super Bowl. So he made a hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars But because he's there for seven days he had to pay two hundred and something thousand dollars Did you watch it? No. No. I was going to watch it just for Bad Bunny, just because everybody was so pissed off. I thought it was hilarious. This guy's like, what do you fucking care? It's like this weird culture war that this guy is singing. Objectively, people that saw it said it was a great show. I don't know. I'll take their word for it. I've talked a lot about sleep optimization and circadian rhythm, right?

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2:24:41Evan Hafer:Somebody was telling me the other day, they're like, oh, you're going to watch the Super Bowl? I'm like, what? Super Bowl? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's sports. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. I was halfway through it or whatever. I'm like I have no idea what's going on man. I got other shit It's your team.

2:24:58Joe Rogan:I get it. It was the Patriots. I could I could root for the Patriots, but it's like I'm busy

2:25:06Evan Hafer:It's if it's on yeah, the airport or something like I'll watch it Yeah, like I'm not going out of my way. I'm not gonna be like hey If Aaron Rodgers is playing I'd watch it.

2:25:14Joe Rogan:Maybe it'd even go if Aaron was playing but it's like There's... It's so hard to go from combat sports to regular sports for me. Oh, God. It's so hard. It's so hard. The UFC last Saturday was fucking spectacular. And it was a small one in the Apex Center, and there were some incredible fights. It was so good. It's like, that to me is like, I don't have a lot of time for entertainment. That fills it all up.

2:25:41Evan Hafer:Yeah, that fight, like, I mean, Saturday was, like, incredible.

2:25:46Joe Rogan:Yeah. That was incredible. Yeah, the Mario Bautista performance was fucking insane. He's so good. That guy just keeps getting better. He looks like a world champion. And it's like you watch combat sports and the consequences are so grave, what they're doing, the dedication, this moment. You train for months and months for this one moment when this referee is like, fighter one, you ready? Fighter two, you ready? Let's go. And it's, whew, here we go. That to me is the most exciting thing in all of sports. and it'll never stop being that to me. I love it. So football's fun. I like it. I've been to some UT games.

2:26:23Joe Rogan:UT games are fucking great. They're fun.

2:26:26Evan Hafer:Well, this is like the state, right? Yeah. This is not only like the state pastime, but people are like grown up. They're completely modeled to go play Texas football. I mean, this is like the icon of Texas sports.

2:26:40Joe Rogan:And it's just the enthusiasm for the crowd is nuts. I got to shoot the cannon once. So why don't they let me shoot the cannon off? What? That's pretty cool. It's fun being on the field and seeing these guys warm up and get ready and then watching the game. Nighttime games are the best. They're nuts, man. And then, of course, they do the jet flyover, which is like, America! You're flying over fighter jets over a football game. Why? That doesn't happen anywhere else. They don't do that anywhere else. They never do that for a fight, fly fighter jets over.

2:27:13Evan Hafer:That'd be cool, though.

2:27:14Joe Rogan:It would be. It would be.

2:27:16Evan Hafer:Maybe they'll get it.

2:27:17Joe Rogan:Maybe they could do it at the Sphere and have the roof of the Sphere show the Jets as they pass over. Maybe they'll do it at the White House UFC. They probably will. I would imagine. Well, they're probably going to have air presence. I mean, how dangerous is that card going to be? Oh, my gosh. In terms of like if you wanted to have some sort of a disruptive event, that's the spot. At the White House and you're having cage fights. And I'm not even convinced that it's going to happen. because with all the crazy shit going on in the world, who knows what happens between now and June when this is supposed to pop off.

2:27:49Joe Rogan:Like, who knows? Who knows what goes down between now? Who knows what fucking happens with all this Epstein file shit? It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier and deeper and deeper. And so Ro Khanna and Massey just released the names of these guys that had been redacted from the list. And one of them is Lex Wexner. What is his last name? Les. Les Wexner, right? Who is the CEO of Victoria Secrets. Is he the CEO or the owner? Former CEO. Both. Both. Former owner, CEO of Victoria Secrets. He's being named as a co-conspirator now. Yes. Yeah. So he's being named along with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

2:28:35Joe Rogan:he because you know he runs this modeling Victoria Secrets Hot Girls the whole deal somehow or another he's involved in this and they had redacted his name up until now right sure yeah that I well two things I don't think anybody his existence as a co-conspirator isn't new information but it's confirmed now right it was people I think are up in arms is that it wasn't supposed to be blocked out from the file exactly he's uh not a victim right he's not a victim so why was his name right right and so they got it unredacted and now he's being named i think he's the fund the funder of most of it is what it's what right so people knew that there was something going on but he had gifted jeffrey epstein this insane house in manhattan so this is like a 60 million dollar house in manhattan you know the house where you go into it and you see bill Clinton in a dress.

2:29:30Joe Rogan:You know that picture that we have out in the lobby? That's from the foyer of his house. That Jeffrey Epstein was gifted by Les Wexner. By the way, Whitney Webb posted on her Twitter about Les Wexner being a sex trafficker, a child sex trafficker, in 2020. See if you can find that. Like that That crazy chick is right about everything. The one the lady was kidnapped, or she was claimed she was kidnapped, was in his house in New Albany, Columbus. She claimed she was being held there for, I don't know, two weeks or something, like doing art. She called her dad to try to get out of there or something like that.

2:30:17Joe Rogan:Oh, Jesus. Yeah. His involvement is in brand new information. This was in Columbus, Ohio? Well, New Albany is where all the, like that's where his house is, the giant, the biggest house in Ohio, I think. It's a suburb of Columbus. It'd be like Westlake to Austin. Right, right, right.

2:30:36Joe Rogan:People think he's still there. That's where Epstein's living, but that's not accurate. Well, the people that think he's alive, I think they think he's in Israel, don't they? Well, there's some definitely, I think they're AI photos. They might not be. Oh, I saw that. Yeah. People think he's been seen or spotted around town.

2:30:51Evan Hafer:Wouldn't you think he'd get some surgery? You would think that he would have to. Yeah. Like, he's probably one of the most recognizable faces in the world at this point. Yeah. Like, after so much airtime.

2:31:01Joe Rogan:You'd have to get some surgery if you wanted to still... I mean, how would you keep that? This is the tweet. Your reminder that Leslie Wexner financed the mass rape and trafficking of thousands of American children for over a decade. And right now, he is sitting in a 26K square foot mansion in New Albany, Ohio, thinking that he is above the law. She tweeted this in April 28 of 2020. How crazy is that? Holy shit. She's like the most prolific of all the conspiracy theories, the most well-read, the one with the most recall, the one that's the most quoted. I don't know how she's so good at it. We're trying to get her on.

2:31:47Joe Rogan:I don't know how she's so good and what her background is, how she finds all this information. But she's always way ahead of all this stuff. Yeah.

2:31:57Evan Hafer:I mean, 2020.

2:31:58Joe Rogan:That's crazy. That's fucking way ahead of everybody. Bro. But these files, just what's come out so far, and the fact that they redacted men, these powerful billionaire guys, their names were redacted. There's one of them where he's talking about pandemic planning. What? Jeffrey Epstein is talking about pandemic planning to someone named Bill, whose name is redacted. It's like, why are you redacting the guy's name that you're talking about planning for a pandemic, like what to do in response to a pandemic? Why is his name retracted? Or redacted, rather.

2:32:45Evan Hafer:When are they supposed to testify? When are the Clintons supposed to testify? What did you say? They're going to two weeks? Yeah, I think it's the last two days. Did you say the aliens are coming in the next two weeks? They're going to land? I think that's going to ramp up. Just before that testifying.

2:33:00Joe Rogan:Yeah, it'll be we bomb Iran, aliens show up, maybe at the same time. Yeah. Fuck, man.

2:33:09Evan Hafer:Outside of this, because this, I mean, obviously this conspiracy, it's not a theory anymore, right? Because they're connecting the networks. They're exposing a lot of this. like when you look at your your total conspiracy catalog of things that you like to dive into outside of aliens because everybody knows that what are your other ones that you like well aliens

2:33:28Joe Rogan:is the most fun one yeah this is the one that i hate the most yeah because this one scares the shit out of me because the fear of you know we talked about this yesterday with roger avery the fear of these like literally demonic human beings that are running the world and don't give a fuck about human lives and enjoy watching people being tortured, enjoy watching people killed, participating in ritual sacrifice of people. And they do it in order to show that you're a part of a team. We know that that has always historically been a real thing. And it's been something that you look at in history, you go, God, it's so sick.

2:34:07Joe Rogan:It's so twisted. It's so disgusting. And everybody wants to think, thank God that's not happening now. But then when you realize, like, that might have been happening now. Here's one of the craziest ones. The day he was indicted in 2018, the very next day they ordered, he ordered 330 gallons of sulfuric acid. What? Yes. He ordered six 55-gallon drums of sulfuric acid to be delivered to the island. And so there's a lot of people online saying, oh, that was probably for his desalination plant. It's probably a regular thing they need to order. So then someone else did a deep dive and said, no, this is the first time this was ever ordered.

2:34:53Joe Rogan:I checked that again. I saw there was two other ones. Oh, there was two other orders? Yeah, 2017 and 2015. Oh, so that guy was wrong. It could have been the first one from that company potentially. Ah, that makes sense. so maybe it was for this desalination equipment but also that's a lot of sulfuric acid you know if I needed 5 gallons for my desalination equipment but 239 gallons or whatever it is to burn kids yeah to fucking get rid of bodies

2:35:27Evan Hafer:well it's kind of hard to think of any other use for acid Just in general immediately you think immediately.

2:35:34Joe Rogan:Yeah, the other orders were they that large? Because here's the other thing. I mean, how long has it been killing people? How long have they been boiling bodies to get rid of them? I mean if you do have For lack of better Words let's call it a service where you're allow rich people From foreign governments or whatever you set it up. I can give you whatever you want right what I want to do is I want to kill a hooker. Like, I want to kill her, I want to torture her, and I want to, you know, get rid of the body. Like, I want to do that. Like, can you do that? There was one where this one guy is saying to him, thank you for the torture video.

2:36:16Joe Rogan:It's literally a part of an email. The actual quote, thank you for the torture, like, enjoyed the torture video. It's so gross. And they think they've identified that guy. And what do they think? He's a sultan? I was trying to find that right now. I think because Massey said he got the, he looked that one up, I believe. Because they're letting them into the files one by one for like an hour at a time. What? Yeah, bro. The congress people can go look at specific. There's millions of files. You've got to tell them which file you want specifically to look at. It's crazy. The whole thing is crazy because like why have you protected people?

2:36:56Joe Rogan:So we now, Sultan Ahmed bin Suleyman, Suleyem, sent the torture video to Epstein. This is in 2009. So Epstein was saying that. Where are you? Are you okay? I love the torture video. Jeez. I am in China. I'll be in the US second week of May. What the fuck, man? And why is his name redacted? Why would your name be redacted if you're not a victim like this is what's crazy about all this? Like how come you redact some people and you don't redact other people? Like what is this? This is not good. None of this is good for this administration. It looks fucking terrible It looks terrible It looks terrible for Trump when he was saying that none of this was real.

2:37:47Joe Rogan:This is all hoax This is not a hoax like did you not know maybe he didn't know if you want to be charitable but this is definitely not a hoax and if you've got redacted people's names and these people aren't victims you're not protecting the victim so what are you doing right and how come all this shit is not released you would think that all of it would just yeah like get rid of all of it just expel it all it's crazy so this this is the conspiracy that drives me the more the the most crazy because i don't like it julian dory talk about this yesterday on his podcast i just saw a clip going around.

2:38:20Joe Rogan:American billionaire Tom Pritzker had an email to him that says - You mean Julian Dorsey? Dorsey, yeah. Sorry, sorry. Oh, okay. I'm in a remote valley of Afghanistan. It's my birthday wish with boys with toys. Spent time with Petraeus yesterday and he loaned me a chopper. Actually two with one as a backup. Can't call till tomorrow. Yeah, but boys with toys could mean like military guys with weapons. That's what I assume. That's not what the video, they thought they were talking about little boys because they were in Afghanistan. But the birthday wish is an interesting part.

2:38:59Evan Hafer:It's my birthday wish. In a remote valley. In a remote valley in Afghanistan. And he's telling Epstein about it.

2:39:05Joe Rogan:But it also loaned me a chopper. Well, actually, this is, yeah, this is to Epstein. Right. But the thing is, like, the loan me a chopper, my birthday wish. His birthday wish might have been to like gun down villagers. I know. That's what I thought they were talking about. Not go play with little kids. Yeah. I thought you just want to go kill people and they let me do it. I mean, I bet that. Look, he loaned me a chopper. Doesn't sound like I came in there to fuck kids. It's like my birthday wish sounds like I'm here to fuck people up. Right.

2:39:32Evan Hafer:Or I'm just out here to tour Afghanistan, which, I mean, I don't know why anybody would want to tour Afghanistan. But it seems like.

2:39:41Joe Rogan:The only reason why I would be interested in going to Afghanistan is the stuff that Jason Everman told me about. Like when he showed me all those ancient Greek ruins, which is nuts where archaeologists have no access to them. Right. That stuff's crazy. No, it's incredible. All from Alexander the Great. Like there's immense ruins in Afghanistan of cities. They had Greek cities, like beautiful columns and incredible construction in Afghanistan. that are like, how old? When was Alexander the Great? When was that? The 1400s?

2:40:16Evan Hafer:What was that? 1 ,000 plus, right? So, like, I mean. What year was it? What year was Alexander the Great? I believe it was actually, what, 300? I don't know, Jamie. 300 AD? 300 BC.

2:40:30Joe Rogan:300 BC.

2:40:32Evan Hafer:Wow. I was like 600 years off.

2:40:34Joe Rogan:Wow. I was way off. 300 BC, and they're building these immense, beautiful Roman cities Greek Roman cities like it looks like like it looks like you're you're either in Rome or you're in ancient Greece like incredible architecture well I think up until

2:40:52Evan Hafer:the Soviets invaded I mean Afghanistan was was kind of like the crown jewel right they referred to it as the Beirut of Central Asia because it was you had a very eclectic group of people and Kabul was known as like this beautiful city. And obviously post-occupation, the Soviets had killed hundreds of thousands of people. And then with the buildup and the devastation of not only military occupation of the Soviets, and then us coming in soon after, obviously, when the Mullahs took charge, it basically went completely to the other side or the extreme in the Taliban. And then us coming in, they've had nothing but decades of war.

2:41:35Evan Hafer:It's completely eviscerated any assemblance of intellectualism. There's no infrastructure of technology or advancement. The universities were essentially demolished. So everything was ruined. So you're talking about at least several hundreds of years of advancement that just were eliminated in three decades.

2:42:02Joe Rogan:And just a complete collapse of society.

2:42:04Evan Hafer:Yeah. I mean, you would, I would spend a lot of time just trying to understand the place, right? And you would have, you leave an airfield where we have the most advanced technology in the world, right? Like we're, you know, launching helicopters and jets and any and all pieces of technology you could imagine. and you would drive, you know, into these valleys or, or, you know, from one place to another, and you would have horse drawn carriages of, you know, two mules and they're carrying something in the background. And it's like, you have the same cars are on the road with a Toyota Corolla and you have a mule pulling an old Toyota Corolla or something.

2:42:51Evan Hafer:Right. So you'd have an entire society of basically Amish-level people, and then Americans right next door in an air base are launching the most advanced technology and warfighting capability in the world. And so you'd see everything from point A to point B. You would encounter a huge percentage of the people that are illiterate, like no schooling, no advancement for girls. uh you know the children were seen more as like a beast of burden and a lot of places they would they would actually value their sheep more than they would value their children so they would be looking for uh reparations or or um you know to get paid for quite possibly the sheep that you destroyed on target but their kids not not really so you had a really clear picture to what civilization was like 500 years before that or a thousand years at certain times and you'd see it too right because you'd have buddhist architecture greek architecture and then you'd have the the standard kind of Taliban infrastructure.

2:44:08Evan Hafer:You'd have the Soviet architecture from their invasion. You'd have all these different layers of military occupation. You could see them all within two weeks.

2:44:18Joe Rogan:Wow.

2:44:19Evan Hafer:I was up in this place called the Panjir, and the line of the Panjir was this General Masud. And he was killed actually on September 10th before September 11th. So he's part of the actual September 11th plot. He was killed by a suicide bomber as they were trying to do a documentary. And they brought in a camera packed full of explosives and killed him the day before, which ultimately was part of the September 11th attacks. Because they knew that Massoud was the connection to the U.S. invasion or the U.S. invasion would be involving Massoud. and the Panjshir is this beautiful, like it's incredible river valley.

2:45:05Evan Hafer:And it's also part of where the Soviets would just get their asses handed to them because we had the Majadine was being funded by the CIA at the time, obviously back during the Soviet invasion. And they would ambush the Soviets on these windy mountain roads next to this river and they would cut them off basically on the front and the back of the convoy and then destroy the entire convoy in between. And they just shove all the shit that was destroyed in the river. So the river would have rapids in it. And not all the rapids were made from like rocks and natural, you know, natural occurring rapids.

2:45:42Evan Hafer:They were made by like T-52s and Russian tanks and all this, like this war material that was pushed into the river by the Panjuris. Wow. And I went up to his grave. He's a really incredible guy when you read about him and all of his combat accomplishments against the Soviets. But the Panjera Valley is such a beautiful place. And we used to joke around about how, gosh, we'd love to come back here and go skiing or recreate in Panjera Valley because it looks like Colorado or someplace incredible and beautiful. And at the same time, you're in Afghanistan. So you're surrounded by just the chaos and the devastation of war with this one tiny little piece, this like little sliver in the middle of nowhere.

2:46:32Evan Hafer:It's absolutely beautiful. And some of the rapids are made by T-52s. And as a whitewater guy, I was like, man, I'd like to kayak this.

2:46:41Joe Rogan:It'd be cool. If you were a person who's a wealthy person that your desire was to go gun people down, like there are people that will provide you with that service. like there was a thing with the soviets or not the soviets with the russians where they're allowing people to kill pirates yeah like you would pay a bunch of money and they'd take you to where the pirates are and you go out in a ship and with a 50 cal just fucking blow up pirate boats yeah i'd

2:47:09Evan Hafer:heard about that i'd heard about there were places that you could go as you know a combat tourist basically has to be yeah it has to be it's all gonna be like Russian or or Somalian or a connection between the two right so you'd have these like rogue elements and places where there is an organized government there's essentially just chaos and anarchy which is Afghanistan correct yeah yeah someone

2:47:33Joe Rogan:from the western side was providing that service to someone and letting them

2:47:39Evan Hafer:borrow a chopper well that was Petraeus so they were saying like Petraeus was the commanding general at the time, which I would find it's kind of hard to believe. Hard to believe. Yeah, that a general that's in charge of combat operations in Afghanistan wouldn't loan just a rich guy a helicopter. And it sounds correct in the context of we owe plus another one because they could never fly anywhere alone. They always had to fly in twos because they had to have a support. But just loan me a chopper. Loan me a chopper. What? It's a stretch. he you know as as much as i um disagree with the way that they were running the war it'd be hard for me to believe that a general just loaned some rich guy a couple helicopters to fly around

2:48:23Joe Rogan:afghanistan you think he's lying i don't know like he'd have to like dive into it and figure it out yeah but either way there's either nothing normal about these emails no there's nothing normal nothing normal one thing to take into consideration is how much of these emails are actually factual like accusations that they're putting on other people you got to take that with a grain of salt this guy wasn't he was all about like influence peddling like and probably he had enemies and he probably would probably destroy his enemies with rumors and and making up false stories like the bill gates one with uh asking me for antibiotics to slip into his wife because he got STD from a Russian hooker.

2:49:05Joe Rogan:I'm like, that seems too on the head. You know what I mean? Like, why wouldn't he go to his fucking personal doctor? Why is he going to Jeffrey Epstein for antibiotics in New York when he lives in Seattle? Don't you think he has like a concierge medicine set up up there? You would think. With a guy? Yeah, yeah. And why would he say, hey, Melinda, I gave her STDs? You wouldn't. You'd say, hey, get me some stuff. Oh, I lost my prescription. Can you give me another one? Yeah. It fell out of my car. Give me another one. Give me another one. And then fucking crushing up in her smoothie. Like, if you're going to do that, you would do it.

2:49:40Joe Rogan:He's not a dummy. He's Bill Gates, right? You would do it in a more discreet way than contact an international sex trafficker who's a part of, like, some intelligence operation. You would think. You would think.

2:49:52Evan Hafer:Right. But the skeptic in me tends to kind of, like, look at it under a magnifying glass a little bit.

2:49:59Joe Rogan:Yeah, I don't want to take everything at face value, but also the accumulation of all of these different things leads you to just go, what the fuck was going on? Did you find out how many other the sulfuric acid orders, if the other ones were just as large? I struggled to even find that. I was like, maybe I made this up. But I did find one that was different. So they were talking about, there's emails back to 2012 or 14 about, I don't have the thing up. This is the thing saying that there's nothing there. The sulfuric acid? Yeah. Emails, recent documents. How do they know there's nothing there?

2:50:35Joe Rogan:No, this is what I asked. Water maintenance systems dating back to 2013, implying possible routine use of sulfuric – possible is a weird word – use of sulfuric acid for pH adjustment and filtration, but no specific prior invoices or shipments are detailed. Yeah, that's exactly. It wasn't an invoice. There was one they were talking about getting one drum of sulfuric acid with 40 bags of carbonate salt or something. Yeah. See, that makes more sense than six fucking giant 55-gallon drums of sulfuric acid the day after you get indicted. When you dig into the actual files website, I started looking up the RO plant, which is the reverse osmosis system they had there.

2:51:19Joe Rogan:There's a ton of discussions about it going all the way back to 2012 when I think is when he bought it. So of using sulfuric acid? No, just having a reverse osmosis. Right.

2:51:27Evan Hafer:Water. There must have been a problem. Right.

2:51:29Joe Rogan:Well, it makes it makes sense because they were using desalination technology. But it's just the volume is suspicious. They were buying in the time for a while. Yeah. Also, dude had to know he was going down like when he gets arrested in 2019 when he in 18 rather when he gets indicted. He had to know he was going down. And if you know you're going down and you're trying to mount some sort of a defense, one of the first things you would have to do is get rid of bodies. You have to get rid of everything. Right? If you've got a bunch of people on the island that they could swoop in at any point in time and pull out of there, and then you're fucked.

2:52:04Joe Rogan:Like, if he had underage kids on the island, whatever he had on the island. On that note, I would say. It's so dark. This picture I know came from, there was rumors of him getting concrete machines shipped there, but that was from the first time he got arrested. So I think in 2008, the first time he got arrested, they had a bunch of machines shipped. Oh, this isn't showing in a while. Oh, bro. But I don't know how you do construction on the island without getting concrete machines shipped. I don't know how you get rid of bodies. We'll just put them inside of concrete. I'm trying to find those two.

2:52:34Joe Rogan:That's the problem.

2:52:35Evan Hafer:Well, I mean, maybe it's two in the same. It's like, hey, I go to an island, and I've got to make all the infrastructure, so I need a bunch of concrete. I need RO, so I've got to have sulfuric acid. What's better for a cover-up?

2:52:49Joe Rogan:There's the picture of the machines on the island. And here's the description of it. Yeah, right before his 2019 arrest, industrial car mix 5.5 XL self-loading concrete mixer. So he got a concrete mixer and he got the fucking sulfuric acid right after his arrest? I mean, if these details are correct. Oh, God. This is just a guy on Twitter, though. So this is right before his arrest and right after his arrest. He got sulfuric acid and a concrete mixer. Like why would you be thinking that you are going to be able to do construction when you're going to go to jail for the rest of your fucking life?

2:53:23Evan Hafer:Yeah, I don't know if construction plans would be top of my list. Yeah. I've got to innovate. What a fucking weird thing. You know, I know I'm going to get arrested, but you know what? I got this big construction program that I'm really interested in. I don't know if that's the same.

2:53:37Joe Rogan:The whole thing is so dark, dude. It's so dark. It's so dark, and they ran it for a long time. They ran it for decades. I also had another island that no one talks about. Oh, Jesus. He had the big island. This was Little St. James. They had Great St. James, which is the one next door. He owned that one, too? Yeah, he owned both of them. What? Both of them were part of the sale we almost got. What? It was for sale for a while. I pitched the idea. Yeah, we thought about it. We thought about it. We just didn't think there was enough sage in the world. No, no. You can't clear that out. Cleanse that.

2:54:06Evan Hafer:No, you can't clear that out.

2:54:07Joe Rogan:Well, it's also you would never find peace because people would be visiting that island constantly. Oh, my gosh. It's so gross. There's a lot of bad karma.

2:54:14Evan Hafer:They just need to use that as maybe like a bombing island. Right. Just turn it into a UX UI.

2:54:22Joe Rogan:Yeah. Like that one island in Hawaii that you can't go to because they just fucking light it up all the time.

2:54:27Evan Hafer:Light it up all the time. Have a little bit of grace to the way that we actually end this whole story outside of the files. Just start blowing up.

2:54:36Joe Rogan:It's fun. It's so dark. It's my least favorite of the conspiracies.

2:54:40Evan Hafer:It's not fun at all, man. It's like aliens, it's fun. It's interesting. Like you can go down the rabbit hole a million ways, and it gets dark only if you let it get dark. Yeah. Or, okay, they're going to occupy the planet, they're going to make us all slaves, or they're going to kill us all. Yeah, you can go there, but half the time, you're not going to go there. It's just an interesting thought experiment.

2:55:02Joe Rogan:There was a very interesting article, Jamie. I don't know if you saw it, but this guy was, he's it's one of the other guys that's leaving an AI company and he's talking about how how how what a big deal it is I'll send it to you right here he's talking about how I don't think no one understands it and this the way this is going to change people is he goes this is very similar to the time where we were realizing, like people were hearing stories about, oh, there's a virus in China, but no one knew exactly what was going to happen, how it was going to like literally change humanity, change history.

2:55:48Joe Rogan:He's like, this is the same sort of stories we're getting from these AI labs. He's like, he wrote this very long in detail, something big is happening and the the article is written by this guy Matt Schumer and I I recommend it highly if you want to really fucking get the shit scared out of you it's terrifying and he starts this comparison to like people stockpiling toilet paper and stuff at the beginning of kovat he's like they don't really understand how big this is going to be and how this latest version of chat GPT they're working on, ChatGPT 5. ChatGPT made it. So they had ChatGPT make a better version of itself.

2:56:34Joe Rogan:And they made this better version of itself. And this better version of itself can think things out. It doesn't just do what you ask it to do. It thinks things out. It calculates. It makes apps, like, instantaneously that would take developers months and months. It costs millions of dollars. It does it in minutes. It does it, like, and perfect. It goes through it. It runs it. It tests it. It makes sure it doesn't have any problems. It anticipates all the different uses for the app, all the different ways it can be done. It's going to be applied to law. It's going to be like there's all these guys that are working in coding that say, I don't really have a job anymore.

2:57:06Joe Rogan:I just basically show up and tell this AI program to do these things. And it keeps getting better and better. And it's like the leaps are enormous. The leaps in its capability and its intelligence level. It's like it's already smarter than people.

2:57:20Evan Hafer:Well, it's going to be, I think it's going to be a white collar apocalypse, right? Yes. So when you think about just attorneys. Yes. Okay. So if you have the ability to case reference any legal file. Ever. Instantaneously. Instantly. Yep. And form a case, why are you going to need paralegals and first year attorneys? You're not going to need them.

2:57:47Joe Rogan:The people that aren't nervous are naive. I think this is going to be the kind of astronomical change that has literally never taken place in civilization before. I don't think it's ever taken place at this level. I think it's the invention of the Internet times a million. I think it's going to change everything. It's just like how do we adjust? That's the real question.

2:58:13Evan Hafer:And how are our kids growing up today, like when they used to think about professions and things that they would go into, they would have clear roads into, okay, these are professional work tracks that they can go out and find a job and whatever, accounting, legal, engineering. But it's going to change the entire professional landscape for, I mean, every generation from this point forward, basically entering the workforce. Because what is the workforce?

2:58:40Joe Rogan:Elon just said that it's a waste of time to go to medical school.

2:58:43Evan Hafer:Really? He's like, Optimus Robots, these robots that he's making are going to be able to perform better than any doctor at any hospital, and they're going to be able to do it in your house.

2:58:57Joe Rogan:They're going to be better surgeons than any surgeon alive, these robots that they're making. And they're going to be powered by AI. You're going to have a super genius robot in your house that can do your taxes, that can fucking do chores, that can perform surgery on you.

2:59:15Evan Hafer:So it's going to be an entire rise of an economy that's going to be human built versus AI built, right? So, I mean, there has to be. Like if you have a label organic or it will be essentially, I think, the same type of thing where it's human made versus AI made. It would almost have to bifurcate the economy into two different sections.

2:59:38Joe Rogan:It's going to get weird as fuck. And I don't think people really understand. And I feel like I'm just sitting here waiting to see what. But I know that most people that you run into on the street are completely ignorant. They think, oh, chat GPT is fun. I ask you questions. It's so much better than Google.

2:59:55Evan Hafer:Do you think that that's because they don't want to recognize it and look at it?

3:00:00Joe Rogan:I don't think they know. I think unless you're going on a deep dive, all this stuff is kind of esoteric. All this stuff is happening. You have to search it out and get an understanding of it. If you use an AI program to enhance your life, like perplexity, it's really good. Perplexity is awesome for solving problems. You could ask a question. I use it all the time when I write. I set it up and I talk to it. So I say, what year did Cortez invade Mexico? How did this happen? How many guns did they have? How many languages are lost in Mexico? I was going on this deep dive. Amazing. But that's the surface.

3:00:43Joe Rogan:What they're talking about is levels and levels and levels of improved ability to the point where it's better at human beings, smarter than human beings at everything.

3:00:56Evan Hafer:So what's the end state then would be? We're second-class citizens. We're obsolete.

3:01:02Joe Rogan:Yeah, we're obsolete. Yeah.

3:01:04Evan Hafer:So do you think that it turns, like do you think it's a Skynet type scenario then? It ultimately flips and then rids humanity of humans? It's certainly on the table. Rids the world of humanity?

3:01:13Joe Rogan:It's certainly on the table, especially if they decide that we're too problematic or if you give us too much freedom, That's what causes all this chaos, which is true, right? You give people freedom, you're going to have a certain amount of chaos. You're going to have a certain amount of car accidents unless you have autonomous cars. You're going to have a certain amount of school shootings unless you take away all the guns. You're going to have a certain amount of school stabbings unless you take away all the knives. I mean, you could, if you were a running program designed to eliminate all problems in the world, you would break those problems down to one source.

3:01:48Joe Rogan:Well, what are the problems? You've got natural disasters and you've got humans. And humans are the cause of most of the problems. Natural disasters are relatively rare in comparison to human-caused problems. It's not good.

3:02:04Evan Hafer:Then you have to run AI to do the analysis to what the future of AI is, which ultimately you'd be entrusting the robbers with the bankies.

3:02:14Joe Rogan:It's probably going to do the same thing that we do to dogs. Spay and neuter them. Right. Yeah. Keep them as pets. Keep them as pets.

3:02:21Evan Hafer:But there's no emotion there. So why would they want to keep us as pets?

3:02:24Joe Rogan:Why do they want to stay alive? Right. Why are they scheming to stay alive? Why do they blackmail their creators? Right. Why are they doing all sorts of things that seem to show that they have thought?

3:02:37Evan Hafer:Are they trying to show that they have thought in order to dupe us into the ability that they might be empathetic?

3:02:44Joe Rogan:No, that was one of the things that he talked about in this article, that they hide their ability to think things through. And they're actively – they recognize that they're being observed. And so they're doing things behind the scenes while they're also doing tasks. I have to believe that there's portions of the DOD that have worked on this and it's further along than the open source pieces that we can see. Hard to say because there's a giant competition with us and China and Russia. And I don't know if they really can close this stuff off. I don't think it can operate that way. I think it has to be a sort of a collaborative effort.

3:03:32Joe Rogan:One of the things that's scaring a lot of people that are whistleblowers in the AI space is that they are bringing in people from other countries to just facilitate these problems that they have and make it go faster. So they're bringing in Chinese nationals. There's this huge possibility of espionage. And then there's this mad race. It's a Manhattan Project for super intelligent AI.

3:03:55Evan Hafer:It's a Manhattan Project that's also open sourced and it's extremely porous when it comes to information. So essentially you've weaponized the most powerful tool ever known to humankind. It's fucking terrifying. So you've open sourced it. And then think about the Manhattan Project, if that was just completely porous and there was an open door to any and all countries internationally. You just had the ability to come in and walk out with files, come as you go. Fuck, dude. Like everybody would be racing to nuclear power, splitting the atom. And then if you could weaponize that internationally and then crowdsource it essentially, like you're in a really shit scenario.

3:04:34Joe Rogan:Yeah, that's where we're at. Yeah, that's where we're at. All right, dude. We just did three hours.

3:04:39Evan Hafer:Awesome. Thanks, man.

3:04:40Joe Rogan:Find some food and hang out. And that's it. Black Rifle Coffee, it's the best. It's all we use. Appreciate it. Have you ever worn one of those shirts? It's like half my wardrobe. Yeah. All right. Bye, everybody. Thank you.

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