If you listened to the March 5 episode of the top-rated podcast on Spotify in the US, you would hear, in the first thirty minutes, that:
- Richard Nixon was framed,
- Time travel is possible,
- Charles Manson was a CIA asset,
- The 1960s anti-war movement was a CIA op, and
- Sirhan Sirhan (the convicted assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy) had been subjected to mind control.
Then just a few more minutes after that, you would hear the guest, Ian Carroll, tell the host, Joe Rogan, “I sound crazy to someone that doesn’t do their own research.”
You don’t say.
If you were brave or gullible enough to keep listening after Carroll’s assertion that he “sounds crazy” only to “someone that doesn’t do their own research,” (or if you were forced to keep listening as it was your job), you would hear him wonder if the Egyptian pyramids were built by telepathic aliens and hear him, along with Rogan, claim that we don’t really know what happened at 7 World Trade Center.
The destruction of 7 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was litigated in multiple cases, with multiple parties fighting over hundreds of millions of dollars. One litigation lasted over ten years, and an army of lawyers was involved. I briefly worked on one of the cases myself. And I can promise you, we know what happened at 7 World Trade Center.
I suppose I can’t prove that the pyramids weren’t built by telepathic aliens. But should anyone really have to?
This is the sort of exasperation that prompted Douglas Murray, on the April 10 episode of Rogan’s show, to exclaim in frustration, “you don’t need to consume endless versions of a revisionist history!”
It takes about five minutes to look up and then spout off a conspiracy theory, but exponentially longer to debunk one. The sheer number of bizarre claims made on this program, thrown out rapidly one after another for over two and a half hours, could send an actual, serious researcher on a months’ long, or longer, full-time quest to conclusively debunk each one.
No normal person has that kind of time – and that’s part of the conceit here. Carroll, a former Uber Eats driver turned “independent researcher,” wants his audience to feel that if they believe such claims, they are the ones who are in-the-know, in possession of a secret knowledge that powerful people are trying to keep hidden.
And unfortunately someone who believes, or is even willing to entertain, Carroll’s ridiculous claims might also believe him when he claims that Jeffrey Epstein was working for the Mossad to gather intelligence on American officials, or that a group of Jewish philanthropists investing in Jewish causes was conducting espionage (“it is unclear if we have proof that they were conducting espionage,” Carroll says. Do your own research!). Or that “Israel has so much control over our government right now. And I’m not saying that all Jews are in on something. Clearly, internet. Thank you.”
Or, such a person might have believed comic Dave Smith when he claimed on a solo appearance on Rogan’s show, prior to his “debate” with Douglas Murray, that the US is bombing Yemen “on behalf of Israel,” or when he said of Palestinians in the West Bank, “under Israeli control they have zero rights, zero rights whatsoever,” or when he said that Israel has “gotten us into like seven wars.” (April 3, 2025.) Or believed Darryl Cooper’s Holocaust revisionism. (March 13, 2025.) But these are just the same old tired conspiracy theories – at root, most antisemitism is conspiracy theory – now recycled into a new media environment that has no guardrails.
It’s good to know, of course, that Carroll doesn’t believe in David Icke’s theories about reptiles (calling them a “grift”), or that the earth is flat (purposeful misinformation meant to “obfuscate the narrative,” he says), but is that really our new baseline? One would hope not.
Rogan ended the episode, after play-acting for the supposed censors, “I can’t believe what you said…. I am so upset that I even platformed you, you’re outrageous!” by more seriously telling Carroll that he was “very, very reasonable” and performing a “valuable service.”
Nor was Ian Carroll the first obvious kook that Rogan had on his show – he has previously hosted Terrence Howard, Roger Waters, and Abby Martin.
And just this week, Rogan was once again suggesting that aliens may have built the pyramids in Egypt. (May 14, 2025.) Notably, Rogan pushed back much harder on the former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, who opposes such bonkers theories, that he ever pushed back on Carroll. But it took Carroll just a couple of minutes to promote the claim that the pyramids could have been built by telepathic aliens, and it took an actual archeologist with decades of experience two hours to rebut it.
No one knows better than CAMERA that the credentialed experts don’t always get things right. But that’s not an excuse to promote baseless conspiracy theories pedaled by someone with no credibility whatsoever.
Rogan is entertaining, and many people enjoy the super-long format that has at other times allowed him to get much more in-depth into issues than television news, even magazine formats like 20/20 or 60 Minutes, can allow. But if a listener can learn one thing from Carroll, Cooper, and Smith’s interviews on this podcast, it’s that Joe Rogan, who boasts, “I was arguing with people about the moon landing on the radio before [expletive] there was any podcasts,” doesn’t vet his guests for any type of intellectual rigor whatsoever, and often lacks the knowledge to push back on some of his guests’ crazier claims. And, he’s happy to use his show to promote wild conspiracy theories – including, but certainly not limited to, those about Jews and Israel.