#0003 Evan Hafer

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience, number 2230, with guest Evan Hafer, Special Forces veteran, founder, and CEO of the Black Rifle Coffee Company.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is where two skeptics with no previous Rogan experience listen to Joe Rogan shows with an open mind and try to set the record straight.

I'm Cecil, and I'm joined by Michael Marshall.

Marsh, why are we doing this?

Well, Cecil, Joe Rogan, he genuinely might be the most listened to person on the planet right now.

He's got a reach that is arguably far greater than any traditional broadcaster out there.

And his conversations and his viewpoints influence millions of people.

So we should probably pay attention to him, I think.

Yeah, probably a good bet.

Okay.

So today we're going to be covering Joe's November 2024 interview with Evan Hafer.

So how did Joe introduce Evan in the show notes, Marsh?

Okay, well, according to Joe, Evan Hafer is a special forces veteran and the founder and CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company and one of the hosts of the Black Rifle Coffee Podcast.

Okay.

And is there

something in his past that perhaps could shed some light on his opinions that he has on this very particular show?

Yeah, absolutely.

Because yeah, just in case you don't usually get your podcasts from branded beverage producers, the Black Rifle Coffee Podcast, it claims to provide, quote, a unique insight into American exceptionalism in what it says is the most pro-American podcast to exist since 1776.

1776 citation needed thank you well that is that is the strapline of the show and i guess george washington's missives from the front line of the revolution were spotify exclusives at the time but yeah other than those this coffee podcast is the most american thing possible

other than perhaps the black rifle coffee company's plan in 2017 to hire and employ 10 000 veterans which you know is fine people need jobs that's a great thing to be doing but it's worth pointing out that that plan was only launched after starbucks announced their plan to hire 10,000 refugees.

I don't know that I like where this is going.

Continue.

Yeah, so Haifer's company responded to that with a meme of ISIS fighters photoshopped with Starbucks cups and the text, Starbucks vows to hire 10,000 refugees, Black Rifle Coffee Company vows to hire 10,000 veterans.

Now, Haifa claimed he was just criticizing a publicity stunt by Starbucks, and that might be a fair criticism.

You know, Starbucks was obviously doing this at least in part for the publicity.

They're a capitalist company.

That's what they're about.

Except Starbucks also has a program to hire 10,000 veterans, of which they'd already hired 8,000 by 2017.

And also, when it comes to criticizing publicity stunts, you can't leave out the fact that Black Rifle coffee company never had any intention, as best we can see, of following through on that promise to hire 10,000 veterans.

Because at the time, their company consisted of 52 people.

It was very unlikely they were adding 10,000 people to that workforce.

But these days, that number is higher.

It's 550.

And half of them are veterans.

So, you know, kudos there.

But that 10,000 figure was never likely to be happening, as best I can tell.

It feels like that one is still pretty far off into the future if you've only increased your population at work by 500 people.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, that definitely sounds like something we should be aware of.

So, as ever with the Joe Rogan experience, this show was a meandering chat through a grab bag of topics.

So, Cecil, come on, what did Evan and Joel cover on this show?

There's so much to tell you here, Marsh.

So, the show starts out talking about Evan's time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And this portion of the show talks a lot about sex with underage boys.

They then broach the topic that sort of will be recurring throughout this entire episode about how psychedelics can help people with PTSD.

And then they spend some time talking about how people that work in academia don't really understand how the real world works, especially in combat zones.

Then they briefly...

talk about Trump and his cabinet picks.

They bring up conspiracies like the idea that Joe Biden had had a body double.

We'll go into that a little bit here on the show.

And then they spend some time talking about COVID and how the media colluded to lie to everyone about it.

They talk about eating meat versus eating plants, how well the special forces would fare against the Mexican cartels, Trump's victory, Area 51, JFK assassination, how Elon Musk's going to save the world.

And then they spend much of the rest of the show, and we're talking, I would say, a full quarter of this show at the very end, a sort of in-depth discussion about how arrow, how arrowheads work, and it just uses a ton of archery jargon that it really feels like it flies over a lot of people's heads unless they're out bow hunting.

Yes, so so much of it is archery chat.

It did make me sort of think, who is that archery chat for?

I'm not 100% sure that many listeners are going to get a great deal out of Joe talking about how expensive his bow is and nerding it up on their archery heads.

But you know, if they like that kind of thing, that's totally fine.

So obviously there's a lot of things to cover there, and we could go into pretty much anything about that other than the archery stuff.

but in particular this week let's focus on the conspiracy claims so we're going to do that in our main event

all right so for the main event this time we're going to be talking about how easily Joe dips into conspiracy.

And this is a recurring theme.

Clearly, we haven't a ton of Joe Rogan podcasts under our belt yet, but we recognize that so far, Joe has dipped into conspiracy whenever that pool appears.

He has gone out of his way to dive in and drag his guest in, sometimes unwillingly, this time a little more willingly.

So we're going to talk about the different times that Joe brings up conspiracy in this particular podcast.

So we're going to start with what we sort of teased at the beginning of the show.

There is a Joe Biden body double that they are convinced exists.

So I'm just going to play the clip here.

Did you ever see the fake Biden?

Yeah, yeah.

The tall guy?

That guy was so much taller.

The guy was like 6'4 ⁇ .

He was a giant Biden.

It made no sense.

They're going to smoke that one bias.

Like, it's like, dude, this guy's like, you know, 6'7 could be playing in the NBA.

He was so much taller.

They showed Jill and him together.

Jill's like, like, what happened?

That's a different human being.

Totally.

This is a 24-second clip, Marsh, and he grows three inches in this clip.

He is 6'4, and then he's 6'7.

We could all aspire to that.

Growing three inches in 24 seconds, Cecil.

Hell, I'd take it.

I'd absolutely take it.

I, you know, look, there's a, there's an article we'll link in the show notes clearly that shows that it basically shows that Joe Biden walking out after he had COVID, and he's standing much closer to the camera than Jill.

So he looks much taller than her, just like the Gandalf did in the Lord of the Rings.

Like it's called forced perspective.

Sometimes people look a lot taller when they're they're standing near other people because your brain can't do the depth perception very well, and so it thinks that something's taller when it really isn't.

It's really simple, yeah, it is.

And the thing that gets me about this is you could say that they're just bringing this up as a joke.

Obviously, this was a meme that was knocking around online.

A lot of people brought it up as a joke, and maybe they were just joking about it.

But the way they come into it so much so often, it sort of feels like they've mainstreamed this and think it's beyond just a joke into being real.

They really seem to think this was a different guy.

And what I love about that is you've got to ask your question, ask yourself the question: question, what do they think that means?

Like if they do think that they replaced Joe Biden, like it has to be that they replaced Joe Biden for that one event.

Maybe he wasn't well enough after COVID.

Is that what they're thinking?

But if that's true, they got someone to look exactly like Joe Biden, except he was seven inches taller and they didn't spot that that was going to be an issue.

Like to what end would that possibly be?

It just makes no sense.

I can't understand.

First, I

their tone does not feel like they are just making fun of this.

Like, like, I understand there might be a meme out there, but man, I am missing the nuance of their tone if that's the case.

If someone sends me a message and be like, oh, clearly they're joking about it.

I really need to like really

change how I understand how people interact with things they think are funny.

Cause it sounds like while they are laughing at it, it definitely sounds like they buy it.

Yeah, especially when we see so many other conspiracy theories, as we'll come to, if that was the only thing that was raised, all right, maybe we're being a little bit, you know, picky by picking that one out.

But it's not the only conspiracy theory they come to throughout the course of this four and a half hour conversation.

What's so insane to me is Joe Biden was out for a while.

If you didn't want him to be out at all, you would have just gotten this guy earlier, if that's the case.

But Joe Biden was sick for several days.

He was by, what's one more day?

What's one event?

What's one single thing?

It doesn't make any sense.

The motivation to try to, like they suggest, smoke one past the audience isn't even there.

There's no real motivation.

Especially for what was not that big and serious an event.

It's not like this was some sort of meeting with a world leader.

This was just a campaign event.

It just seems like such a weird thing.

And then they've now got, if this was true, if this was, and I often think this when I talk to conspiracy theorists, if this was true, what else has to be true?

And what would have to be true is they have a guy who doubled for Biden, who they now have to silence for the rest of his life.

Otherwise, they undermine everything.

Like, where did that guy go if this was possibly true?

There's no way in the world this could possibly be true.

They should be asking more questions about this.

Okay, so next piece here is about the media.

It's conspiracy of the media.

They all say this.

There's all these montages of clips of news organizations saying the same narrative outright, over and over, verbatim, word by word.

They're getting fed this by someone, some entity,

somehow or another, they're collaborating.

And they're all choosing this very specific narrative and they're running with it and they're trying to destroy people with it.

And I saw them do it with me.

So yeah, he is, Joe is right.

Joe is right.

There was a group of a media group, a large media group.

There's another link in the show notes of them saying the words verbatim.

They were saying a very specific message to the audience verbatim.

But this isn't a conspiracy, so to speak.

It's literally capitalism.

It's what happens when media and journalism meet is that one media entity will gobble up a bunch of others and then they suddenly have all the same message.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It's not that the media is being controlled by a sinister cabal feeding them a narrative per se.

It's just that a right-wing media group bought up a lot of local news channels and to cut costs, they just sent them all the same message to read out.

And what I think is really interesting about this bit is it is a genuine issue that there isn't as much variety in the media voices out there.

The lack of variety is going to be a real issue for getting towards truth.

But Joe's level of curiosity here is really something worth paying attention to because he says, oh, they're being fed this by someone, some entity, somehow or another.

The answer is just they were bought out by a big news corp and then they've just been giving it by the people who own that news corp.

Like to have the interest in this being a bad thing is definitely a good instinct, but follow that instinct up with some genuinely interesting questions, with some genuine curiosity, and you might get to somewhere.

But instead, what we just get is this kind of very superficial, oh, there's something shady going on behind the scenes.

Yeah, the answers are out there and sometimes the answers are pretty banal.

You know, sometimes the answers are just boring.

And, you know, you don't want a boring answer.

You want something like, oh, someone is really behind the scenes as a puppet master.

They're doing all kinds of.

No, sometimes it's really just, hey, guess what?

Capitalism follows the path of least resistance and it's really boring.

Yeah.

And when it comes to things like whenever you accept, whenever you reject the boring true answer to something, it just undermines you for the next thing that you ask a question about.

It just shows that you aren't a serious, unfortunately, not a serious critical thinker.

So we have to accept the boring, mundane answer when it's right because it actually gives us more power when we're asking more interesting questions about things that don't have a boring and mundane answer.

All right.

So this next piece is about COVID and pharmaceutical companies.

Yeah.

I saw them do it with me during the COVID thing, and it was all motivated by the pharmaceutical drug companies and the prophets.

And they were terrified that someone's going to come along and somehow another put a notch in this little thing that they've created, which is a devious little thing that they've done, where they eliminated all sorts of other remedies.

They cut out all these generic drugs that possibly could have been used to help people.

They denied people the use of monoclonal antibodies.

They pushed the fucking shit out of this one thing so they could make money off of it.

And they did it in collusion with the media.

No one acted like a journalist.

No one looked at the excess deaths.

No one looked at the instances of myocarditis in young people.

No one looked at any of that.

There was no journalism.

It just showed.

Everyone that the whole system is bought and paid for.

It's all corrupt.

Yeah, so on this one, so Joe's saying like when it came to COVID, they eliminated all these other remedies.

They didn't eliminate all these other remedies at all They tested which ones worked and then they discouraged people from putting the things that they knew didn't work to begin with It was reasonable to try and take a load of different stuff and see whether that worked because we didn't have anything that worked But once you start to have some evidence that some stuff is actually effective It's then counterproductive to allow people to direct like everyone away from the effective stuff into all these other things

So, for example, we didn't know until midway through the first kind of wave of it that it was actually really beneficial when patients were in hospital on ventilators to lie them on their front rather than their back.

They actually survived way better if they were lid on their front.

And so that was one of the things we tested and it turned out to be really effective.

Later, we found out that Paxlavid worked and would actually help some of the symptoms.

He mentions monoclonal antibodies.

Well, the reason they stopped people using those is because those weren't effective once the

Omicron variant came along.

It was essentially immune to that.

It was resistant to those.

And so they no longer were effective.

So you have to move with the times.

You You can't just stick to your own ideology on it.

And one thing that he seems to very conveniently leave out here, Marsh, is that some of these things that people were trying out in the wild were dangerous.

They were not.

very safe.

I mean, ivermectin, there were people who were with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were having to go to the hospital because they took something.

This is a prescription drug that they're taking without a doctor to supervise them.

And they are getting sick from it and having to go to the hospital.

You can't just expect, as a layperson, to understand exactly how this medication is going to work against your, uh, in your body.

And so, these people were just self-medicating, and that can be really dangerous.

You need to talk to a doctor when you do these sorts of things.

And people were not doing that.

And you were seeing a lot more people being sick, not from COVID, but from the treatments that they were taking to try to prevent COVID.

Yeah.

And in those particular cases, I think hydroxychloroquine, like people do genuinely take that for ailments that they have.

And it was causing shortages that loads of people were pushing towards this for COVID, where it wasn't effective.

And the people who needed it for their genuine treatments that we know it works for weren't able to get it.

And when he says about like, no one was looking at the excess deaths, no one was looking for instances of myocarditis.

This just isn't true.

Actually, lots of people were looking at that.

It's just they came to conclusions that Joe disliked.

And so therefore, those conclusions weren't arrived at properly.

So whenever you come to a conclusion that isn't what I've come up to, come to, it must because you've done something something wrong.

You can't have just found the evidence and come to a different conclusion.

Yeah.

And

this entire clip is dripping in conspiracy language, right?

It's dripping in that sort of, this is something they don't want you to do.

This is them just trying to gobble up profits.

Look at what they're trying to, they're trying to stop you from doing these things that work and trying to sell you something that works.

When in actuality, you saw a lot of science going on in real time during COVID.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And the thing to bear in mind, too is that not everywhere has the American healthcare system where things have the kind of expenses attached.

That's true.

I've seen a lot of people saying, well, the doctors just want to give you the vaccine because they get paid per vaccine.

Not in the UK, they don't.

What about the countries with socialized medicine where the doctors get paid regardless?

They get paid the same amount regardless of what they're prescribing.

The fact that they're all on the same page says the medicine probably actually works.

This next piece here is talking about social media and trying to keep sort of this right-wing narrative off of the air.

And Dennis Quaid is like one of the rare few like male movie stars who just fucking completely gave up.

He's like, I support Trump.

I support,

I'm a Christian.

You know, I sing gospel music.

Like, fuck you.

I quit.

And he did this Reagan movie.

It was a Reagan movie.

Okay.

It's about a 1980s president.

They wouldn't let him advertise on certain social media networks because they said it was during the time of the election and it could affect the election.

What was it?

Was it Facebook?

Like, what's kept him from ad?

Was it YouTube or Facebook?

Some one of the social media outlets kept him from advertising this movie, which is a great movie about Reagan, where he plays Reagan.

He does a fucking amazing job.

It has nothing to do with today.

It's about a guy who's dead.

He's dead.

He's not dead.

He's been dead forever.

He was dead his last year in office.

He was at fucking full-on Alzheimer's.

Yeah, I agree there.

So in this clip, we're hearing these two gentlemen talk about how there's sort of this conspiracy of Facebook to try to hide something that is not election related because they don't like it.

Their conclusion is they don't like the thing that they want to post.

So they're going to hide it from other people.

They're not going to let them watch it.

And then they're going to blame election.

algorithms on it.

But one thing that is mentioned, and I didn't clip it out because it's another piece later on, is Jamie, his assistant, jumps in later and says, Hey, by the way, there was a mistake.

And he reads an article to them, which again, I'll post in the show notes.

But the article says that four hours after the story was published, a Facebook spoke person told Newsweek, while there are no restrictions on this page that would prevent the admins from posting, we did identify a handful of ads from this account that were incorrectly rejected.

And then they changed that, essentially put it in accordance because their algorithm picked it out and said, hey, guess what?

That's, that's political.

We can't use this, especially during this time, during election when we caught so much heat from it last time.

Yeah, yeah.

And the thing is, if their point here was that social media isn't doing a good job of deciding what is and isn't worth banning over any particular thing,

I think they'd be right on that.

It's a great point.

Yeah, but it's not that tech companies are inherently anti-conservative.

It's that they're cutting corners and they're automating any of the kind of the flagging of what's an issue and they misfire constantly.

And if you want to see examples of that, try criticizing criticizing anti-vaxes on youtube and see how fastly your account gets how fast your account gets taken down for being promoting of uh of anti-vax narratives you can't say vaccine without immediately being banned on uh or being flagged at least on twitter yeah no that's that's so true and another thing you know if you want to look at YouTube,

so often on YouTube, I do another show and that other show, I will talk about a conspiracy theory and they will take my show down for talking about that conspiracy theory, even though I'm debunking that conspiracy theory.

That happens all day.

They accuse us of being conspiracy constantly, and we get videos demonetized or taken down on a regular basis because that same thing with vaccine stuff.

And that's just because it's a robot.

And you know what doesn't fix it?

Sometimes even talking to people doesn't fix it because they don't bother to listen.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

This is more YouTube stuff.

This is actually talking about YouTube and demonetization, something I was just mentioning.

The entire firearms community, and it's weird because we,

when I say we, we talk about it all the time, like whether it's you know the biggest YouTube channels on

for the firearms space they're constantly battling trying to keep their channels up this is a constitutionally protected right right and because

there's a difference in political opinion they can

they can tip the scale right which is completely insane to me and there and there's a lot of traffic I mean you think about some of these really big channels that are out there these guys drive millions and millions of views.

People obviously want to watch, and they can't increase their reach, or they get demonetized, and they're constantly screwed with over and over and over again.

And that's the way that we've, I think a lot of us have felt we've been living under the thumb of,

you know,

our social media oligarchs that are deciding whether or not our information is agreeable to their political opinion.

It's interesting to hear them talk about this in contrast to the other show that we did on Mark Andreessen when they were talking about how oligarchs were going to fix the entire thing.

And now here's this moment where the oligarchs are really actually not going to fix anything.

But I want to point out something that I think he's getting, Evan is getting very, very wrong here.

What he's saying is that there's a constitutional right in the United States to have a firearm.

And he's right.

There is a constitutional right in the United States to have a firearm.

But there's not a right to show those people your firearm or show people firing your firearm on YouTube because YouTube's privately owned and there's not a constitutional right for YouTube to put your video out there with no with no sort of barriers and let other people view it because they might be held liable if you know I happen to be a school shooter and I and I'm you know, they look in my past browser history and they find I've been liking or subscribed to a bunch of gun channels.

And then YouTube suddenly becomes under the microscope as pushing a gun narrative to somebody who might have been vulnerable to that sort of thing.

So they don't want to see that happen.

So the business itself says, hey, let's make sure that certain content gets sort of has to go through certain baffles in order to slow it down or not be actual monetized or not be put out there.

And they, again, this could be an algorithm problem.

It could also just be it's a content problem because these are controversial topics.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, YouTube's only motivation is to get you to watch YouTube so they can sell you ads and make money from you watching YouTube.

They're a business.

That's what they exist for.

They're not there to altruistically have a platform where you can say anything you want.

So yeah, absolutely.

You have a right in America to own a gun.

You also have a right from free speech to be involved in pornography if you want.

Not on YouTube, because YouTube has decided they don't want to show pornography on there.

So anything that was even remotely resembling pornography could be kicked off because YouTube have decided that doesn't work for their advertising model to be advertising these kind of things that might put off more people than they're looking to get on or put off businesses that they're looking to actually get on.

That's all this is.

It's a company taking a financial decision, and so they'll always try and do that to what they think is for the best of the company.

And sometimes that will be not allowing you to do stuff that you would be allowed to do elsewhere.

All right, Marsh, this next piece is about how powerful elites control elections.

So, politics is one of those things where I'm like, I follow it, I love it, it's interesting.

Just trying to understand the strategy behind it.

I've changed my opinion of it a little bit since the election.

I don't think

the control, the grip of the control of the country is as strong as I thought it was.

I thought this concept...

So everyone has a concept of they.

They don't want you to know things.

They're controlling things.

I have a feeling that in times of crisis, like what we find ourselves currently in, it's like when the lights come on and roaches scatter.

That's what I have a feeling.

I have a feeling there's no way that they can trust each other and that they all know that a certain percentage of people are going down for corruption.

There's a certain percentage of people that did some dirty shit.

There's some connections with organizations and corporations and some emails.

Save your emails.

It's one of the things that Rock

said.

So here, when they talk, we had to talk about this because they're talking about the they.

They always come up in conspiracy theories.

It's a way of saying that there's this kind of shadowy control over there.

But what's interesting is Joe is saying that he thought the election would go one way because they had control.

And when it went a different way, it didn't tell him that the they didn't have control or that the they weren't this, it didn't really exist or didn't have as much sway as he thought.

Instead, what it told him was, oh, they must be turning on each other.

That's the only way that this could work.

So he's given himself an additional narrative here rather than look at this

first of all, this initial kind of assumption as to the they who are in charge and reflect on whether that's even realistic, that there is this kind of behind this, you know, know, this deep state almost, uh, almost kind of thing.

And what this means is, win or lose, the, they still exist in Joe's world.

He can still have it both ways.

It doesn't matter what happens.

It's all just evidence that the they are out there and the they are evil.

And listen to that clip very closely.

And you, what you hear is a lot about Joe's feelings, right?

So Joe keeps saying, I feel this, I feel that.

And what we really,

you can't trust, don't trust Joe's feelings.

And I think we as media consumers sometimes hear somebody talk like this and we think they might know something we don't.

Don't believe that.

Joe does not know anything you don't know.

He's just talking about a hunch he has, which is probably wrong.

Okay.

And very specifically, they always seem to mention this sort of.

What I like to call Schrödinger's deep state, right?

At one time, the deep state is this most powerful cabal that can control literally everything.

They have their their hands in every single pie.

They have puppet strings on every single person, yet they are absolutely weak whenever they're exposed, right?

They're absolutely weak.

They're actually, in fact, incompetent most of the time is what they'll say.

So they're at this at the same time, they're very powerful.

They're also very incompetent.

All right.

We finally get to the really sort of deep conspiracies here, Marsh.

This is Area 51.

I'm sure.

Look, if Area 51 exists, and now we know it does for sure, it was a real base.

They said it wasn't a base forever.

And then during the Obama administration, they had to expand the boundaries because surveillance equipment and binoculars and telescopes are getting better and more sophisticated.

And they were filming things that were flying around they shouldn't have been filming.

So they expanded the boundaries.

They had to say that Area 51 existed.

Right, right.

So what was that?

Where'd you get the money?

What'd you do?

What are you doing down there?

Why do people say you have UFOs?

What the fuck are you doing?

Why do you have a base in the middle of nowhere that's built into the side of a mountain like why are you guys acting like this is an avengers movie what are you doing out here once again it goes back to just transparency yeah or you can't tell me because you think i'm a baby like the same reason why you think i can't have mushroom there's a lot to unpack here marsh uh one i'm there is clearly a joke going through here.

It's a sort of a stand-up routine he's starting to do.

He's starting to do his tight five on fortresses or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so you can hear it sort of happening as he's talking about it.

But there's also a ring of truth here because his guest clearly is not in on the joke and says, you know, it's about transparency.

But one thing I think we can all agree is maybe there's some things our government's military is doing that we just probably shouldn't know about.

Because if we know it, then our enemies know it.

Or the people who are trying to make sure we're keeping in check through this sort of balance of power of weaponry, maybe they shouldn't know it exists.

There is something to be said about secret military stuff saying, staying secret.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And if you think of like the Manhattan Project, you know, for the atomic bomb, that was essentially a similar kind of thing to, you know, it's a military secret that's being developed.

Nobody knows that it's happening.

The reason that that was happening was, as you say, so that the enemy had no idea.

So they had to withhold it from American people in order to withhold it from the enemy.

We can have the conversation about whether the government should be keeping so many secrets from you.

But what I think is really interesting, and I think it's a very valid question to be asking, a very valid conversation to be having.

But when it comes to transparency, I think they're not telling you is also quite strategic, because if they were to come out and say, there are definitely no UFOs here, and that sighting there wasn't a UFO, it was our secret test plane that we're doing, the stealth bomber that we've designed,

that would undermine the whole point of having a secret program in the first place.

But by allowing people to go out and conflate any sightings of stealth bombers with, oh, that's a UFO, also undermines any sightings that might come out that might have some credibility to them you know when people say oh i saw all these these lights in the sky and i got beamed up by a little green man and i lost a week by throwing all those things together you actually obscure the fact that there were lights in the sky because you've got a new kind of drone that's uh pretty pretty good and you don't want uh china or russia or whoever to know about it so you allow people to rumor monger about the more extreme beliefs you allow that to get polluted in there and it hides what's what's really happening in terms of new technology okay so now there's two clips here about the JFK assassination.

So I'm just going to play the first one.

You just pissed off the entire CIA paramilitary organization.

I don't know if I'm the president.

I don't know how I don't end up with a moonroof, to be honest with you.

Like, I just pissed off the guys that are actually in charge of assassination,

paramilitary, all of the dirty deeds around the planet.

I fire Alan Dulles for this catastrophe of the Bay of Pigs.

I've got a thousand plus guys that are in prison in Cuba.

I've got the entire former OSS, hardcore, anti-communist, anti-Castro organization of the CIA pissed off.

If you don't think they're not going to tee a guy up like some pro

commie Oswald guy in a you know in a

multi-story building in Dallas if you don't think you're going to end up with a hole in your head, you're crazy, to be honest with you.

That's the way I'm looking at this.

So they end up getting these guys out, but man, he pissed off a lot of super capable guy, means opportunity intent.

Means opportunity intent, which is now you left me and my buddies on a beach in Cuba.

Bro, you are not going to get out of here unscathed.

I'm just...

Yeah.

What we have here is Evans' theory that after the Bay of Pigs, you had a thousand-plus CIA black ops guys who Kennedy left stranded on a beach in Cuba because he withdrew air support.

And those people went to prison.

And therefore, you know, his theory is that they were so aggrieved with him, they've come and they've caused this assassination.

Now, this isn't a theory.

This is just rumor-mongering, completely rumor-mongering, based on the idea that soldiers would

commit treason and an act of personal revenge

or revenge for their friends, which I think for a former soldier is a pretty damning thing to allege.

I'd be really surprised.

If I was one of the vets who was going to be hired by Evan, I'd be pretty upset at the idea that my honor as a soldier could be so called into question as to say I would turn treason if I felt that my commander-in-chief gave me an order I didn't agree with or like even hung me out to dry.

I think the idea that you can be committing treason for that is a pretty bad bad allegation.

But he also says they've got means, opportunity, intent.

But he doesn't give you that.

He hints at means in the sense that these are super capable guys.

He hints at intent that they'd be willing to commit treason in order to get revenge on Kennedy.

He's completely ignored opportunity, which is they would have to be there in Dallas, have planned the entire thing.

So he hasn't given you opportunity other than Kennedy was in Dallas.

Kennedy existed somewhere where somebody was.

But like, if we're looking at means opportunity intent, then why are we ignoring Lee Harvey Oswald?

Because we know he had the means.

Not only was he a former soldier, he'd actually tried to assassinate a general previously.

Like seven months before he shot Kennedy, he tried to assassinate

Edwin A.

Walker, who was a major general.

So clearly he was quite willing to take a pot shot at his superiors with a rifle.

He had the opportunity.

He lived in Dallas.

Kennedy was going through Dallas where Oswald lived.

And he had the intent because

he was willing to take shots at

a turn on the chain of command.

So like the means, opportunity, and intent leads us to to Lee Harvey Oswald, as does all of the evidence as well.

Um, and after this clip, as well, Joe then starts, and Joe and Evan both start sort of um including other things that were motivations for taking out Kennedy.

You know, they talk about how, well, people wanted uh Kennedy gone because he was too soft on Russia, or that he was going to get rid of the CIA, or that he was sleeping around.

Um, Joe brings up a 1961 speech where Kennedy was talking about secret societies as a, as in a way of saying, Oh, well, maybe it was the secret societies people who did it.

But like, then who was it?

You said it was these guys in Cuba.

Were the CIA, you know, black ops guys who were left on the beach in Cuba upset that Kennedy was being unfaithful to Jackie?

Or is that what Red Herring to bring up?

Were they part of the Freemasons, or is that another Red Herring to bring up?

This feels like a very complicated game of clue to me.

That's what it feels like for sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so when Joe brings up the secret societies thing, Kennedy did give a speech where he talked about secret societies.

It wasn't long after the Bay of Pigs.

And he was talking about the Communist Party of America because he wanted them not to gather any more power because this was the height of the Cold War and shit was going down essentially.

And so then at the end of it as well, Joe points out, you know, he says, quote, also, Kennedy was not universally loved.

We think of him as being universally loved because he's dead.

But when he was alive, there's a lot of people who are not fans of his in the red states, probably particularly in Dallas and he was driving through Dallas.

It's like, yeah, and Oswald lived in Dallas.

So you've just said there were people in the town where Oswald lived who weren't happy with Kennedy, weren't big fans, and might want him dead.

I think we've brought ourselves back to it was Oswald all along, but we've gone through this like circuitous route of like bringing all these different things.

That there's just no evidence.

There's not even a reason to be suspicious, other than you can say these things out loud.

They can't stop you saying them.

There is one more clip about the JFK assassination because they spend a bunch of time on this in the episode.

So we want to play one more clip for you.

Yeah, it's LBJ.

that's from

what's what's amazing about it really is how sloppy the whole from sloppy as shit the whole thing from autopsy to the fucking magic bullet lane on the gurney to having to come up with the magic bullet theory because of the ricochet and the underpass like the whole thing is so clunky It's like such a shitty explanation.

You couldn't kill one extra guy and say there was another guy over here.

We killed him too.

Yeah.

You guys are, this is such a shit job you guys do.

You don't have one other idiot that you can get out there?

One other idiot, give him a bad rifle and just fucking shoot him.

But they don't have any...

They don't have the context of what we have, which is social media.

Right.

I want to just say this is a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier of like

Schrödinger's conspiracy here, because at the same time, they are both bumbling, but then also ultra-powerful.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, Evan has said these are the CIA black ops people they tried to drop into Cuba, the ones who can just like start revolutions.

They're ultra capable, but now they're really sloppy, apparently.

Like they were going to overthrow the entire Cuban communist government, and now they can't kill a guy in Dallas and make it look like it was someone else.

Do you think maybe there's an undertone here?

If I'm going to try to give him any benefit of the doubt,

do you think that maybe the undertone here is he's saying they meant it to look sloppy so that it could it could send a message to maybe some other people in that organization.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, if we were going to give him anything on this, is that maybe something he was sort of intending to say?

I could see someone making that argument.

I didn't get the sense that he was saying because the way he's talking about how they had to invent, he says they had to invent this magic, but they had to come up with the magic bullet theory because of the ricochet.

So, it certainly seemed like he was saying that their plan, they had to kind of like keep changing it on the fly because

and so i mean on this magic bullet thing in particular this comes up so often this is such an old old point this was like around from you know kennedy was shot in 63 this was around in the 60s this magic bullet kind of query about the the the assassination because

one bullet hit kennedy in the back exited through his throat and then uh it entered uh i think the uh the chest or the back of uh texas governor john connolly came out of his chest through his right wrist and then embedded in his left thigh and that was one bullet that did that.

They referred to that as the magic bullet.

And then when they were taking Connolly away on the medical gurney that Joe's talking about, they found that bullet there.

Oh, isn't it a massive coincidence that that bullet was right there?

And it's like, well, it's not that much, that big a coincidence.

It would actually, it'd be a real issue if you were faking this to put the bullet there in order to have it found as a piece of evidence, because that's a really bad way of staging this thing, you know, to find the bullet there asks more questions than it answers.

And so what was really going on here, people say, well, it has to be in this magic bullet because it zigzagged its way through, you know, through Kennedy, out of his neck, and then zigzagged through Connolly.

Because what they imagine is a normal car where you've got Connolly sat in front, you've got Kennedy sat behind him, they're both at the same level.

And so, how could something go in through Kennedy's back and then out through his throat and then make its way through this guy's right wrist and then left thigh?

That seems very odd.

But it's just not really looking at what the situation really was because Kennedy wasn't a normal guy driving through Dallas.

This was a parade.

He was there to be seen by the people of Dallas.

So his car was like modified to make him more visible, which means you put him up a little bit.

You don't want his just his head porking out of a window.

You put you seat him higher.

So he was already seated higher in the back seat.

He was leaning over to the side because he wanted to be seen by as many people as possible.

So he's way off to the right.

And Connolly is twisted in the seat.

If you look on, even just on Wikipedia, you've got all the documents which show the actual path of the bullet and how it makes sense when you look at how these men actually were.

Oh, but you're actually sitting, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

the way that they actually were in the car.

Yeah, it's very, very, very easy to see.

Yeah.

So if you don't bother looking at any of the details, this seems like a really unusual thing.

It seems like an anomaly.

But if you actually see what the reality of the situation was, it makes sense completely.

So, so Joe is right that the conspiracy theory is clunky because it isn't true.

It doesn't match up to any of the details of the actual assassination.

When you look at the actual situation, all of this anomaly hunting goes away because everything can be explained by the the physics of what the actual situation was.

But he clearly hasn't done that research, and from the looks of things, neither has Evan.

All right, well, we've really beaten this conspiracy horse as much as we possibly can.

I'm sure no more conspiracies or things will pop up in this podcast in the second part of the show when we talk about our skeptical toolbox.

Wow.

So that's the tool bag, and something just fell out of the tool bag.

So, Marsh, we're going to be talking for this particular portion of the show, for this particular segment on this episode, about cherry-picking.

Can you tell us what cherry-picking is?

Yeah, so cherry-picking is where you cite evidence to prove the point that you're making, but you're extremely selective about what evidence you decide to bring up.

So, for example, I can make it look like I never ever miss a basketball free throw as long as I'm the one who gets to choose which video clips to show you.

And you don't get to see all of the clips where I inevitably miss because I'm shit at basketball.

When you ignore all of the evidence that disagrees with you and just focus on the bits that agree with you, that's cherry-picking.

All right.

So, we're going to start our little venture down Joe's cherry-picking lane by starting to, at the very beginning of the episode, which is the very first thing they talk about,

about sort of

how relationships between adults and children are happening in Afghanistan.

But National Geographic, I believe, did an article on it several years ago.

Yeah.

Bachabazi.

I could be getting the pronunciation a little bit off,

but it turns for you

emotionally and psychologically because you're like,

okay.

Now I've got some hate.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Makes your job job a little bit easier.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Makes your job a little bit easier.

Yeah.

It also makes it harder

for you not to

want to change the entire government system where you want to completely rewrite the entire DNA of the cultural infrastructure.

Right.

Because it's sad and it's

it's evil.

So he's talking about a practice that he says is widespread in Afghanistan.

It's a practice of

young boys with older men.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the thing is, this is something that does happen in Afghanistan.

It seems to be

relatively common.

But he makes it out like this is an accepted part of Afghan culture, that this is just something that is accepted by everyone.

And that's the bit that isn't true.

He makes it out like this is just happening everywhere.

But actually, a lot of people in Afghanistan call this out because this is not normal to them either.

This is something they would consider to be wrong.

So to point this out as evidence for why you need to restructure the entire culture and DNA of Afghanistan is missing the fact that there are plenty of people in Afghanistan who are against this.

This isn't part of Afghan culture at all.

You're just using this in order to spread hatred or feel hatred towards something and therefore be motivated against it.

There's also a part of this where there's sort of...

There's a lot of this talk and it sort of weaves its way through a narrative of a conversation about Evan's time in war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And one of the things that he mentions is that he had a translator at a certain point and he mentions he was a Mormon kid, right?

And he says he was a young kid who was his blue-eyed Mormon who was there to be his translator.

And he said that these Afghan men kept on saying, hey, we want to take your young

translator camping.

And they and he wasn't sure if they were joking or not.

He kept saying, why would you want to take him camping?

And then it side of dawned on him, oh, they don't want to take him camping.

They want to take him out into the woods and rail him or whatever he was sort of talking about.

But one, it strikes me that casual homophobia exists in male culture all over the world.

And so having a

casually joking, homophobia, homophobic

conversation doesn't strike me as odd, especially in a place where there is a more fundamentalist religion.

It seems like that might be something that people would pull for humor.

That sort of shock humor is pretty easy to pull from from that particular area of the world, and especially a culture steeped in religion.

So it makes sense that something like that would happen.

Also,

this isn't a child.

This is an adult male.

This is, he may look young, but he's an adult male.

He's somebody who is actually being sent over there by the United States to be his translator.

So it's not like they're just pulling a young child out.

This is an actual adult.

So we're blurring the lines here.

He's doing a job of sort of blurring the lines and saying, well, they're doing it with young boys and that makes me hate them.

And you're like, yeah, but then they're also clearly suggesting that they might do it with an adult.

And that also upsets you.

Yeah, exactly.

And the other thing is this might, this might not have been a joke.

They may genuinely have wanted to have sex with this young man.

They may have been gay.

The fact that they've got to like lie about it is because they're in such a strict religious culture.

as is parts of America right now, where you can't be particularly comfortable being out.

I think at one point, Evan even says, and I was coming at this like a regular American guy, and I just didn't even know that that that's what they were talking about.

And I thought to myself, well, Evan, there's gay people in America as well, Nit.

It's not a purely over there kind of thing.

Like maybe it's around you over America too.

Next clip here.

This is sort of talking about, he's cherry-picking here, talking about how politicians sometimes don't serve in the military.

And when you have decision makers that have never been to war and their kids will never go to war?

And Cheney's kids never went to war.

W's kids never went to war.

And none of these guys, by the way, they're all Vietnam-era guys.

None of them went to fucking Vietnam.

So it's not.

Nor did Trump.

Trump didn't either, right?

You got a bunch of deferments.

But I think the difference is that when somebody is saying,

stop the endless wars,

I am more than happy to go chips in on that narrative than I am to go, oh, we need to invest and put more time, money, energy into creating creating more chaos and destruction in the American service members' lives or the lives of other people.

Yeah, so what's cherry-picking here?

So, I think what's cherry-picking here is that he's absolutely right.

Cheney, Rumsfeld, George W.

Bush, they never served in Vietnam.

Those are the cherries he's picking.

But, like, John McCain supported the invasion of Iraq.

He was one of those decision makers.

He did serve in Vietnam.

You're just ignoring that piece of evidence because it's disconfirmatory to the point that you're making.

I mean, I'm against decision makers who don't have a great deal of skin in the game, you know, making these kind of decisions to rush into war.

That's a perfectly valid point.

But to point out that it's all just people who never ever served and didn't serve and got out of Vietnam, you're missing the people who did actually serve.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, again, we're getting into this.

I'm going to bring in, drag in something else that like isn't cherry-picking, but it's a little bit of hypocrisy that I think is necessary to point out here is that some politicians serve,

their service is sometimes greatly diminished.

And we saw that happen with John Kerry and the Swift Boat campaign that came out when he was running against George W.

Bush.

Now, this is two decades ago almost at this point.

So people may not remember it, but John Kerry was part.

He got a purple heart in the war.

He was injured.

He was in the front lines.

He was seeing combat, combat enough to be injured.

People here created a campaign that said he had a plush job because he was a rich kid.

And so there's this idea that, you know, even when they serve, it's not enough.

We're moving the goalposts.

And so, you know, even if even if some of these people did serve, I wonder if he would say, well, they serve, but it wasn't enough for me.

And he does walk it back when it comes to Trump, right?

Because Trump didn't serve, but it's enough for him that he just wants to not have these

endless wars.

So for him, it's not really about serving.

It's about doing the thing he wants to do.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, next piece of cherry picking.

This is about

previous president, President Obama.

But boy, Obama during this Kamala Harris administration, it changed my opinion of that guy.

Really?

Did you have a high opinion of him?

Yeah, I did.

Yeah, I did, just as an intelligent person, a statesman.

I felt like he's probably

caught up in the system.

It's very difficult to make real meaningful change.

You know, you think you're going to do something, and then you get into office, and you're like, oh, God, what a fucking quagmire this place is.

But watching him just straight up lie about Trump, the thing that got me was that very fine people thing, the white supremacist thing.

They just kept trying to say that he was a racist, which is this thing that I think worked in like 2017.

You know, I think it worked back then.

I don't think it works anymore.

I don't think people believe it anymore.

I think that we've gotten numb to all this stuff.

What, you know, this comes up a lot, this back and forth about...

uh the very fine people on both sides mark marsh what is this about so yeah i think the evidence he's brought up here that Obama is lying about the Very Fine People thing was that there was a meme during the election that was claiming that Trump never actually said that.

It's a lie that he ever said very fine people on both sides.

And that's the evidence that Joe is taking on board.

This meme, this thing he saw on social media that he's telling is true to 1.7 million people who've seen this episode.

But other evidence is available that he's overlooking.

For example, you go to the quotes from the official transcript of the conversation when Trump was asked about this.

And when this was first brought up about Charlottesville, Trump said, I've condemned neo-Nazis, I've condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis.

Believe me, you had many people in that group other than the neo-Nazis and white nationalists.

The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.

You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.

So that is a direct quote.

It is true that he said that.

The meme is saying it's a lie.

He never said that.

He never said that all of

the people in Charlottesvilles, all the Nazis in Charlottesville were very fine people.

No one is saying, Obama is not saying that Trump said the Nazis were very fine people.

What we're saying is when it was brought up that this horrible thing happened in Charlottesville, Trump said there were very fine people on both sides.

And that is true.

And Joe is just overlooking the evidence he doesn't like there.

And I want to point out, too, to people who might want to nitpick this and say, well, he clearly outlines and says he wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis.

But if you watch this, watch any video, go, I have found some images.

There are people standing there in full Ku Klux Klan outfits.

There are people standing there with full-on Nazi flags.

They're standing in front of this statue.

There's groups there that you would never want to associate ever.

If you show up to a protest and you're standing on one side is a Ku Klux Klan member and on the other side is a Nazi flag, you should probably leave that protest.

You are no longer...

By association, a very fine person.

You're literally standing.

You're sandwiched in between two hate groups.

You can't now look at me and say, well, I'm not part of one of those hate groups.

I wasn't part.

I don't believe in what those hate groups believe.

I'm sorry.

They've co-opted your entire protest.

I've been to protests that I've left before when I didn't see.

And I've also thrown people out when I've been a protest that have come to my side and brought a flag I didn't like.

So you just need to be more conscious of who you're standing next to.

That's really important because someone will distort your message.

Don't let them.

Yeah, absolutely.

And bear in mind that what when Trump was talking like that, what he was responding to was one of those neo-Nazis killing someone at the protest.

So even for you to say in that moment, well, it's very unfair that people are being lumped in with that.

I think it's really important to reflect on that.

What a great point.

The other thing he says about, you know, they keep trying to say that Trump's a racist and that's just kind of, that's not true.

Again, this, this might, I think he's cherry-picking the times when Trump wasn't being racist or didn't said something that wasn't racist.

But what he's doing is ignoring all of the evidence of Trump having done and said racist things.

And this isn't a matter of judgment.

This is a matter of fact.

Trump was sued for banning people, banning black tenants from his buildings when he owned buildings in New York to the point where he was advising the people who were assessing someone for a tenanthood to make a mark on the paper of anyone black.

So it was pretty clear that they wouldn't be included.

He called for the execution of the Central Park Five.

And even when they were exonerated and proven to be innocent, he hasn't said, I was wrong about that.

He still is consistent with that.

He's being sued for that right now.

Yeah, exactly.

By the Central Park Fire.

They are suing him again for defamation.

Yeah, understandable.

He's claimed that he witnessed Muslims celebrating on 9-11 in New York, which didn't happen.

In October, he said he'd been in a helicopter with Willie Brown when he'd actually been in a helicopter with former California state senator Nate Holden, a different black person.

And he just wasn't able to remember which black person it was.

These are evidences that Trump's views on race are not as

progressive or not as open as his supporters like to pretend he has.

This next piece is talking about campaign finance, which is something I'm passionate about, but I don't think they're talking about the same way I would.

And if anything, they showed you about that,

the Harris budget, which is spent a billion dollars, 580 million of it or something like that was for staff.

Yeah.

580 million.

And there's all this money that went to all these outreach groups and all these different and celebrities.

I'm telling you, I see the tweets that say that, but Fox News' website says the campaign spent $56 million on payroll and payroll taxes.

So what's that other money?

But wasn't there all the money that they had spent on

activism?

Yes, yes, yes.

Didn't they count that in staff?

But this is, no, I don't know.

This all comes from like Twitter.

I don't know where.

Well, if it comes from Twitter, Jamie, it's real.

He is clearly joking there at the end.

He's trying to make a joke there at the end.

And I did cut two pieces together because in between this conversation that they're having about this campaign, they have to go.

They cut so that they could both go to the bathroom.

And so they go back and then they come back.

And then Jamie has, while they were in the bathroom, found that the quotes that he had said, the money that he had said was just incorrect.

It just wasn't even right.

But how is this cherry picking?

So he's the evidence that Joe is citing here was a tweet from a guy called Justin Blinson, who'd who'd made exactly these claims about how much money Harris had and how much of it was spent on staff.

That's the single piece of evidence that Joe's remembering.

There is plenty of other evidence that says otherwise.

So he's ignoring all of that other evidence, or not, maybe that evidence never came across his Twitter feed, so he wasn't interested in it.

It didn't agree with him, so he didn't go looking for it.

To the credit of the show, Jamie, the producer, points out that this is wrong and says it's 56 million spent on staff.

I saw elsewhere there was 22 million, but certainly it is

an order of magnitude smaller than this 580 million.

So they do correct this, and that's to their credit, but it just shows that Joe's initial instinct is to follow the piece of evidence that he agrees with and not do any further investigation.

But the idea that half a billion pounds, 600 million dollars was spent on staff is clearly not credible on the face of it.

It shouldn't be something that Joe latches onto.

But because he wants it to be true, he doesn't look elsewhere.

He ignores all the other evidence.

Yeah, he wants it to be corrupt.

And if it's corrupt, then he's right.

And so he wants to do as much as he can to try to convince you of that narrative too.

And he wants to convince himself of that narrative.

Campaign finance is something we should definitely be paying attention to.

But what he's focusing on is how it's mismanaged or how it's corrupt.

I would agree that I think it's kind of corrupt, but I think he's missing how it's corrupt.

I think it's corrupt in the sense that we're allowing giant corporations and very, very rich people to funnel a lot of money into our politicians, and then they get a chance to really have them,

you know, have their ear after they get elected.

Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk gave Trump something like $243 million declared.

That's not about anything that went anywhere else in service to Trump in terms of sending people out there to door knock or those types of things.

That's just the money that Elon Musk has declared giving to Trump.

I'm against anybody having that amount of say in the electoral process or having that amount of sway over elected officials.

I think that's corrosive to democracy, regardless of where that money is going.

And I think Joe should be on the same page, except he likes Elon Musk and he likes Trump.

So he's not going to criticize those.

And I think that's a big problem.

Yeah.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

All right.

Well, Marsh, we listened to, this is four and a half hours.

This is an intense, long conversation.

Is there something in this conversation that you thought, you know, I agree with or something that struck you as something good out of this conversation?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think Joe is exactly right when it comes to his views on drug policy that it expresses in this conversation.

I agree.

He talks about how drugs should not be illegal.

How if I think he says specifically, if you take drugs and then you do crimes, the issue is the crimes, not the drugs.

And I completely agree.

If you do drugs and then you drink, drive, the issue isn't the drink, it's the driving while drunk.

If you steal something something while on drugs, the issue is the theft and not the drugs.

I think he's totally right about that.

He even says if there were more drugs illegal, if more drugs were legal, there may even be a decrease in violence.

I suspect the evidence would agree with him there.

At the moment, most of the drugs that people abuse legally are alcohol, and that definitely has a tremendous effect on things like violence, on street fights, on injuries through accidents and things like that.

Those are likely to be decreased if people had had a different range of drugs to choose from.

So I think Joe's take on drug policy here and the legality of drugs is actually pretty good.

I like it a lot.

And I also think we have seen examples of places around the globe, different countries, legalizing drugs.

And those drugs then suddenly become very unglamorous.

They're distributed by the government in sort of a really sort of sterile environment and people stop doing it.

The heroin

in Portugal is something that comes to mind.

It's like this idea that you unglamorize it.

You make it so it's not something that

you do as sort of subversive.

It's done by the government.

And suddenly people are like, that's an old person drug.

I don't want to do that.

I'm not going to do that.

And so they doubt.

And then they stop.

And that sort of creators.

And it also too normalizes the treatments that we have, right?

No one really thinks very much about alcoholic treatments because it's a common drug that people use.

But when it starts talking about other treatments, we don't do those as often and we don't talk about them as much because, and we, and they are sort of demonized because the drug itself is demonized.

If you take that away from there, then suddenly people who are heroin addicts are just the same thing as somebody who's going to Alcoholics Anonymous.

We need to embrace those people and help them get past their particular addiction.

And don't send me a message.

I know Alcoholics Anonymous is religious.

I understand.

I know it's not a great organization.

I'm just using it as an example.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of the treatment right now for heroin addiction is prison.

And prison is not a

treatment.

And it's also not a good way to get off drugs because there is a great deal of drugs in prison when there's little else to do there what struck me about this episode marsh was how much compassion evan has for people with ptsd the people he served with the people he doesn't know who have this particular damaging psychological problem that is impeding their lives changing their lives hurting their loved ones I the amount of compassion that man has for those people is is great and it cannot be be diminished.

When you listen to this, you'll hear it in his voice.

He almost breaks down a couple of times.

You can almost hear the tears.

He's holding back tears because he had to deal with PTSD.

He's known people who's had to deal with PTSD.

He's had, I think that that...

That rings true throughout this entire episode.

And even though I'm not sure I agree with how they want to treat PTSD, I don't know that it's the best way.

The treatments they're suggesting seem unproven.

I would love to see more scientific studies on them before they start distributing them.

But I will say the compassion is there and you can hear it and feel it.

And the military industry complex in our country spits veterans out and does not care about them.

And these guys genuinely care about veterans.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's no doubt at all that this guy wants to support veterans, that that is a genuine motivation for him.

And there's all credit to him for that.

Yeah, completely.

All right.

So that's the main portion of the show this week.

You can check us out on Patreon for our behind the curtain segment on where we take the gloves off.

You can join us next week for another piece of the No Rogan experience.

If you love the show, please rate and share it.

If you want to get in touch with us, become a patron, or check out the show notes, go to knowrogan.com.

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