Joe Rogan Experience #2289 - Darryl Cooper

Joe and Darryl open on UFC before pivoting to the firestorm over Darryl's Tucker Carlson interview, where critics labeled him a Nazi apologist. Darryl explains his method: refusing to write about anyone until he can understand their actions on human terms, which brings him to the edge of empathizing with people society calls evil. The bulk of the conversation is a sweeping history seminar covering Hitler's radicalization in Vienna, WWI trauma, the American labor movement, immigration and national identity, the rise of cults like Jonestown, the 1960s protest movements, and how industrialization and slavery emerged from game-theory-like pressures. Throughout, they argue that reductive, outrage-driven culture destroys the nuance needed to actually learn from history.

• Darryl admits his Tucker interview could have been clearer and that he likes to provoke his English friend with critical Churchill takes.
  00:08:51
• Darryl argues Churchill helped turn the German invasion of Poland into WWII, and questions whether the war's 40 million deaths were a cost worth paying.
  00:09:23
• Claims his Tucker points were all about events a full year before the June 1941 invasion of the USSR, where most Jews lived, suggesting Hitler had no access to them before that.
  00:30:14
• Notes Hitler had to phone Goebbels to stop Kristallnacht because Germans were outraged and it was bad propaganda, not out of love for Jews.
  00:43:42
• Darryl tells a long, graphic self-deprecating story about pounding a Starbucks coffee, breaking into a friend's balcony, and a stairwell accident to illustrate that history is made by people improvising in crisis.
  01:14:24
• Argues Jim Jones would be remembered as a civil rights hero had he died in 1962, before the cult turned deadly.
  01:51:47
• Joe predicts future generations will view factory farming the way we view slaveholding.
  02:23:55
• Darryl frames the transatlantic slave trade as a game-theory problem where any ruler who abstained would simply be conquered and enslaved anyway.
  02:36:22

• Darryl's Jonestown series runs seven episodes and about 35 hours.
  00:11:58
• On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men.
  00:37:34
• In the American Primeval era, the Mormons were a genuinely dangerous, ultra-cohesive armed force.
  00:49:26
• Ireland is reportedly on track to be minority Irish by around 2070.
  00:59:52
• In the 1850s-60s, immigrant Irish dock workers on the East Coast had a life expectancy of about 14 years from stepping off the boat.
  01:07:06
• Colorado's National Guard once opened fire on a strikers' camp, killing around 22 women and children.
  01:10:14
• An active-duty IDF soldier emailed Darryl saying his podcast changed how he treats Palestinians daily.
  01:43:01
• Oxytocin increases trust and empathy toward your in-group while increasing distrust toward outsiders.
  01:50:13
• Jim Jones spent his last ~10 years on daily amphetamines to wake and barbiturates to sleep, fueling paranoia.
  02:02:37
• Some English churches reportedly still had the skins of Danish raiders nailed to their doors a hundred years into America's settlement.
  02:21:19