Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1693 - Evan Hafer
Uploaded: 2021-08-06T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1693 - Evan Hafer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1693 - Evan Hafer' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-06. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1693 - Evan Hafer

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Evan.
Hey, Joe.
Good to see you, buddy.
Is that coffee?
It is coffee, but I just grabbed it because it was here.
There we go.
Cheers.
Cheers to booze.
Booze to booze.
Booze to coffee seems odd.
Oh, that's good.
God, it's great to see you, man.
Good to see you.
Still Austin.
Shout out to Still Austin.
God, that is good.
It is.
Good stuff.
Made here, I think.
I don't know.
Maybe just the name.
I really have no idea.
So I feel like you're like wine and a dine to me.
I got cigars and whiskey.
This is going to be a great episode.
I can't wait to see what happens after.
Well, when people were attacking you, I got butt hurt.
I was like, come on, Evan.
Get the fuck out of here.
I was like, I got to have you in.
It was so weird to see cancel culture come from the right.
I was like, I didn't know it worked that way.
I didn't know you fucking idiots would do the same shit.
Like, what is going on?
It didn't even make sense.
It made no sense.
It was the weirdest dog pile I've ever watched.
You know, I've tried to figure it out, and I haven't really spent a ton of time
on it, because honestly, I got better shit to do in my life than figure out
what anonymous accounts and Twitter are saying what about me.
But I think there's just such a mistrust with mainstream media, and that's bred
this hyper-divisive gaslighting on both sides.
And I think conservatives, at times, are also looking for the conspiracy inside
the party, so they kind of spin themselves up a little bit.
But it was such a strange scenario for me to be in, because I think I've been
so open for seven years as, like, who we are, what we do.
I haven't really held anything back, so I think it's a combination of things
going on.
Like, people are super pissed off.
Like, the pandemic has been a complete shit show.
You've got to mistrust in the government.
You've got to mistrust in mainstream media, and you're looking for the boogeyman.
And, I mean, it's crazy to see misinformation being put out about yourself.
Did it start with the New York Times article?
Yeah.
So, what was the, the New York Times article was, like, Black Rifle Coffee is
the Starbucks of the right?
Is that how they described it?
Can they be?
Oh, can they be the Starbucks of the right?
And what was the negative part of that?
Did you read the article?
I did, only because I was really interested to see how they were going to
represent the company.
And we didn't, so to rewind, we knew this story was going down months before.
So, I was down in Florida, I was bass fishing with Johnny Morris, who owns Bass
Pro Shops.
And Cabela's.
Must be nice.
Yeah.
He's a great guy.
He's, he's awesome.
I'm sure.
If he owns those spots.
Yeah.
He knows exactly where the great bass are, believe it or not.
So, we were bass fishing, and it was me, my business partner, Matt.
And we get a call.
Hey, the Times is doing an article on you guys.
Do you guys want to sit for the interview?
And we're like, fuck you, no, right?
But then we started thinking about it.
And I kind of debated it internally for a while.
And I looked at other articles they had done on guys like Dave Portnoy.
I think you had had one, or at least in the past.
And, you know, Don Jr., who is also a friend of mine.
I'm like, hey, man, I think if they're going to do this story, I'll at least
give them the
opportunity to be objective and then really take a look at the company from the
inside.
I had no illusions as to what type of position they might take or how they
might misrepresent the company.
It was, at least I'll give them the opportunity.
So, it's kind of a fool me once type scenario where it's like, hey, man, fool
me once, sure, not going to get the second time.
So, we debated it.
I was like, I'll come or come on out and I'll take you to a veteran adaptive
athlete shoot that we do.
And you can talk to 30-plus wounded veterans and Black Rifle Coffee employees.
And maybe you'll get a true feeling as to what this company does and what it
means.
That never pulled through the article, which I thought was a little bit
disappointing.
That wasn't in the article at all?
There was a quick blurb about it.
And it was representing kind of veterans as, you know, they were talking about
the shirt that he was wearing.
And, you know, we were talking about somebody that lost their legs in combat,
who gives a shit about what shirt they're wearing.
So, but what I, the justification was, I feel like I have an ethical
responsibility to represent the veteran community and really use what I call
earned media to shed light on what I think are the most important issues of the
post-9-11 veteran community.
So, I'm fine with advertising my brand and marketing my brand outside of that.
But if we have an opportunity with somebody like the Times to talk about what's
happening in our peer group, like what's happening along the lines of the
psychological and physical issues with all the veterans that we hire.
Uh, I have 220 plus veterans at work inside the company.
Um, I felt it would be, uh, the ethically correct thing for me to do for the
company and for the people there to tell their side of the story.
Uh, I didn't have any illusions as to whether or not they were going to paint
the company in a certain light, but I did feel it was really important to do
that.
Um, I don't think that that pulled through.
There's a lot of things that didn't pull through in the article that I would
have loved to have had in the article, but they didn't.
I'm not riding it.
Right.
Uh, that's the way the journalist views the world.
So I was, I was surprised to see all the kickback from, I think conservatives,
because now all of a sudden conservatives are reading and believing the New
York Times.
Like, so what was the, what was the Times take on the company?
Um, well, I think the first piece that I really wouldn't agree with is the tonality.
And I know that's a general term, but their perspective on it was that I'm just
a lucky guy.
I got lucky and I met, you know, Matt Best and Matt Best was lucky in the fact
that he was making, uh, viewed or watched viral videos.
And he and I just kind of linked up and we got lucky and then it felt really
exploitive in the first part.
Um, man, I'll tell you this, it's not been lucky.
Uh, you know, I think luck is what you capitalize on after you put in a fuck
ton of hard work.
Well, I've known you guys for years and I knew you guys when the company wasn't
nearly as big.
So I've seen the progress and I've seen the work.
I've seen your factory.
Yeah.
I've gone to the, the, the place in Salt Lake where you showed me the, the
fucking, the coffee roaster that you guys fabricated together and told me the
story about it.
And it's not luck.
No.
Like anybody who says it's luck doesn't know you or is willfully misrepresenting
the truth in order to paint a narrative that they already had established
before they started the article.
Bingo.
They already had a narrative.
Uh, they already had a narrative based on their readership that in the way that
they view the world, that this is the way they wanted to view the company.
Yeah.
And, you know, what it doesn't tell you is, uh, and I've, I've kind of put this
into light for a lot of people.
You know, you know, my past, like I was a green beret.
I worked for the CIA for a number of years.
Uh, I've seven and a half years deployed into combat zones between Iraq and
Afghanistan.
And starting this business and running this business for seven years is the
single hardest thing I've ever done.
Uh, the first two years of the business, I had a thermo rest below my desk
where I was only sleeping four, four and a half hours a night to the point
where, uh, my doctor was like, dude, you're going to kill yourself.
If you don't start sleeping, you're going to die.
And you always hear this in our subculture, which is, you know, we'll sleep
when you're dead, you know, toughen up, you know, there's, there's this drum
beat through the community at all times, which is you just got to suck it up.
And, uh, I live and breathe that and just suck it up, you know, do what it
takes to complete the mission, maintain maniacal focus on your goals, your
objectives.
Uh, the first few years of this business were so challenging because I was
carrying a rifle in Afghanistan for a living.
That's how, you know, I put a roof over my head.
This is what I was doing for not only the best interest of, you know, my
professional endeavors, but also the strategic interest of the United States.
So the first few years of this were brutal.
And when you distill it down to luck, it's, it's disingenuous and it takes away
all the hard work and the, the sacrifice that you, that I had to make.
Did you explain this to the times?
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
We, you know, I talked a lot about like I had sold everything I owned.
So, uh, probably year two, two and a half.
Uh, I hadn't taken any money out of the company because I am a capitalist at
the end of the day, but capital means you're reinvesting the money that you
make into the company to grow it.
Uh, and I think that's a clear differentiation, which is individual wealth and
capital are two totally different things, but we can unpack that later.
Um, but I sold everything.
So I had a couple of different homes, uh, every gun that I had, every,
everything that was not bolted down was out the door and sold.
I was running the company specifically on my personal credit cards, just trying
to get this thing off the ground to the point where my wife didn't know why we
were missing rent payments.
You know, I'm coming home looking at my, you know, my kids thinking there's not
only no money in the bank, but we have $36,000 of credit card debt and there's
nothing left to sell.
And I think that's the mentality that one, you have to have in order to succeed,
which is if you believe in yourself, you have to invest in yourself and you got
to take risks and you got to push.
I knew that we were going to succeed.
I knew it was going to take time and I knew it was going to be challenging, but
until you're there, it's a lot different when you're risking the lives.
When I say the life and comfort of your family, than it is your life limb and
your eyesight of the individual, the amount of stress and anxiety that that
takes over years of compounding interest of investing in yourself.
That's where the article missed it.
Uh, and not only to be that economically challenged for those many years, I've
always been able to give back to veteran nonprofits every year.
So I didn't take any money out of the company for, for two years, but I was
able to give back over, I think over the first couple of years, like 37, $38,000
back to veteran nonprofits, because I'm, that's my commitment.
And when I tell people that it's, I'm a capitalist that concentrates, uh, what
I like to do with philanthropy back to my peer group.
I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand it and they don't get it
and there's no way for people to get a small snapshot in time and to really
kind of comprehend what we're doing on a daily basis and why we're doing it.
So when the article comes out and you read their take on it, did you anticipate
that there was going to be blowback?
No.
You just thought like, okay, it's just another hit piece.
Was it all negative?
No.
Is there anything positive in it?
No, I, I didn't even see it initially as a, as a hit piece.
I didn't see it.
I just saw it as a list of factual, semi-factual and non-factual information.
So they're trying to portray you in a certain light.
Which wasn't all that negative.
It really wasn't.
It was, it, and it was as objective as he could be.
I truly think that it was, uh, as objective as that guy can be because that's
the way you've used the world.
It's not just that.
It's also editors.
Correct.
Yeah.
There's editors.
I have a good friend of mine who used to be a writer over there and she was
explai