Joe Rogan has the largest podcast audience in America. Sometimes, he casts his pod for two hours or even four. The longest Rogan podcast so far, a 5-hour, 19-minute banter marathon with actor and comedian Duncan Trussell, is longer than the 1962 movie The Longest Day, which reconstructed the D-Day landings in a mere three hours. If The Longest Day were remade now, it would be much longer. Perhaps we would watch it in real time just like we listen to people think in real time on podcasts.
We are told that we want “immersive” entertainment, but even whales cannot stay underwater for more than an hour. What we really want is distraction. Rogan’s ramblings are the heir to talk radio. Unless you’re listening to a lunatic, you tune in and out of the radio as you do other things. You even turn it on and off as you go from room to room or car to office. These analog habits make you an unproductive member of the digital “attention economy,” in which your engagement depends upon your interest.
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When your interest is overstimulated in the manner of an elderly Ottoman sultan or former President Bill Clinton, ever more transgressive excitements must be contrived to attain the same response. The result is a Diddy party of the mind. A Barnum & Bailey’s world that’s just as phony as it can be. This, in part, explains why Rogan recently hosted Jake Shields, a mixed martial arts fighter who, having taken repeated blows to the cranium, became an anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist; Ian Carroll, whose brain was already so enfeebled that he became an anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist without repeated blows to the cranium; and Candace Owens, who became an anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist because she fell out with Ben Shapiro.
It is transgressive to host Carroll despite him saying, as he did in July 2024, that the United States is “controlled by an international crime organization that grew out of the Jewish mob” and has “complete control over Washington.” This is obviously delusional. If the Jews ran America and had half the acumen that their enemies attribute to them, the federal deficit wouldn’t be out of control, and pop hits would have tunes you could whistle. It’s transgressive but not exciting — unless you are Spotify and host Rogan’s show and make money from your engagement while he just asks questions.
The “just asking questions” format was invented in the early 400s B.C. by Socrates for his Live from the Agora podcast. It assumes that a well-crafted question can lead guests to realize the limits and errors of their assumptions. This only works if the host and the guests are not cranks or halfwits and if both parties actually want to establish the truth. Rogan is not a halfwit. He only flatters his audience by pretending to be one. Just asking questions for five hours must take considerable intelligence and discipline.
However, Tucker Carlson has developed from contrarian to crank since leaving Fox News. Since going sockless in his loafers, Carlson promoted the “Holocaust revisionist” Darryl Cooper, who is convinced that Churchill, not Hitler, was the bad guy in World War II and that all those Jews “ended up dead” by accident, as “the most important popular historian working in America today.” Carlson also entertained Owens in the florid bloom of her conviction that Brigitte Macron, the wife of that funny little man who’s the president of France, is actually his father: A man who had a sex change (presumably before he gave birth to his three children with his first husband) and then incestuously married his son.
Tucker admitted to having some doubts at first, but Owens convinced him after — wait for it — wagering her “professional credibility” on it. “And then it turns out she’s right!” Tucker said. “My mind is blown!” That would explain the method of the Carlson madness. He believes that American foreign policy has been subverted by the you-know-whos.
“Neocon projects in the Middle East invariably destroy ancient Christian communities, from Iraq to Gaza and in many places in between,” Carlson posted on March 7. “Can this be an accident? You wonder.”
You do. You wonder why there aren’t many Christians in Saudi Arabia or Iran. You wonder why their numbers are declining in Turkey and Egypt. You wonder how the Christian exodus from Gaza and Bethlehem, which happened under the rule of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, could possibly be a “neocon project.” You wonder if this chasing of clicks and 3-D chess with imaginary enemies will generate violence against “neocons” in the real world. You wonder if a democracy can function at all if people actually believe this stuff. You wonder how Carlson sleeps at night.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.