Joe Rogan Says the No New Wars Promise F*cked a Lot of People
Joe Rogan told Sean Sharaf that the “no new wars” promise is the line that f*cked a lot of people. The exchange came on JRE MMA Show #186, released October 1, 2026, while the UFC heavyweight was in the studio days after his 12-second knockout of Gable Steveson.
Rogan did not present the comment as a polling result. He treated the promise as the political break point. “Well, the no, no new wars thing is the one that f*cked a lot of people,” he said.
He then moved to the war he said people had not expected to last. “That, no one thought that we were going to go into this prolonged war with Iran, that who, who knows how long that’s going to take, and what, what that’s for,” Rogan said. “What’s, what’s the reason why we’re there in the first place?”
Rogan laid out two arguments he said are already in circulation, and he did not settle them.
“And there’s some people that say that Iran was ramping up their missile production, we had to stop them,” he said. “But then there’s a lot of other people that know a lot about nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons and say, not, not only is it, like, insanely difficult to develop a nuclear weapon, but they weren’t even close to doing it.”
Those are competing claims he attributed to other people, not findings he documented on the show. He did not name the experts, cite a report, or give a timeline for how long he thinks the war will run. The point he kept returning to was that he does not accept the mission as it has been explained.
“I, I don’t like, I don’t like any of that sh*t,” Rogan said. “I don’t like any people being sent over to a foreign country for a war that most people don’t want. I don’t like any of that.”
Sharaf’s reply in the clip was short and direct. “Soldiers, soldiers are dying,” he said. Rogan answered, “Yeah.”
The heavyweight did not expand on casualty figures, and Rogan did not either. The available portion of the interview does not include a count, a unit, or a date. Sharaf’s line sits next to Rogan’s objection rather than turning the segment into a briefing.
“I, I have never been impressed with any single one individual politician who comes along and changes everything,” he said. “They all say they’re going to do something, and they never wind up doing exactly what they’re doing.”
That second quote is broader than the Iran comment. He did not say every campaign promise fails, and he did not name another politician in this stretch of the interview. He used the “no new wars” line as the example that, in his view, broke faith with people who had taken it seriously.
The clip does not include a response from the White House, and Rogan did not claim to have spoken with anyone involved in the decision. He also did not say the war had changed his view of combat sports, the UFC, or Sharaf’s own situation. The political stretch sits inside a heavyweight interview that otherwise covered Sharaf’s upset, his money problems, and whether he should keep fighting.
Sharaf entered that conversation as the fighter who had just stopped Steveson at UFC 331 and was already talking about walking away. Rogan used part of the same episode to say he does not like sending people to a war he thinks most people do not want. Neither man closed the subject, and nothing in the released clip shows a reply from the people Rogan was talking about.
