Darryl Cooper

High-Level Overview

Joe Rogan hosts Darryl Cooper, creator of the long-form history podcast Martyr Made, shortly after Cooper's interview with Tucker Carlson set off a wave of accusations that he is an antisemite and a Nazi apologist. Rogan opens by defending Cooper, saying anyone who has listened to his work, especially his series on Israel and Palestine, would know better. Cooper then lays out his method: before recording anything, he tries to understand how people's actions made sense to them in their own time, and he argues that this kind of understanding, even of monsters, is good for individuals and for society.

From there the conversation becomes a sweeping, reflective tour of history: Hitler's formation in Vienna and the trenches of World War I, the lessons Europe drew about violence, American immigration and identity, Ireland, the brutal early labor movement, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, the collapse of the 1960s protest movements into cults and violence, the limits of historical sources, factory farming and the forces behind slavery. The tone is serious and thoughtful, with occasional humor, and it moves between current controversy, historical storytelling and questions about how to think honestly about the past.

The Discussion Explores:

• The backlash to Cooper's Tucker Carlson interview and Rogan's defense of his work
• Cooper's method of understanding historical actors on human terms, and why it is mistaken for sympathy
• How World War I trauma and postwar chaos shaped Hitler and taught Europe that violence works
• America's constantly renegotiated identity versus European nationhood, and immigration today
• The early American labor movement, which Cooper calls America's best story
• Jonestown, the 1960s protest movements and how virtues get hijacked by cults
• The narrowness of historical sources, humility, and how history is made by people in crisis
• Industrialization, factory farming and the game theory of the Atlantic slave trade

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

The Backlash and the Case for Charity

After some UFC talk about Magomed Ankalaev's win over Alex Pereira and Armen Tsarukyan's fight with Charles Oliveira, Rogan says he received pushback for booking Cooper but ignored it because he knows Cooper's work. He calls Martyr Made one of the very best long-form history podcasts and says anyone who listens to the first hour of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, Cooper's series on Israel and Palestine, will see that its author is not antisemitic. Rogan criticizes a culture that reduces people to the worst interpretation of a single tweet, and argues that "The problem with calling everything racist and everything anti-Semitic when it's clearly not is that you diminish what that word means."

Cooper admits he could have been clearer on Tucker's show, where he was partly needling Jocko Willink, whose wife is English, about Winston Churchill. He is critical of what he sees as Churchill's role in turning the German invasion of Poland into a world war. He also describes feeling relief when a drone strike video showed a munition failing to explode, saying he increasingly does not care whose truck it was and simply wants people to be okay. He recalls how Americans reacted to Abu Ghraib in 2004 by asking what the war was doing to their own people, and worries the war on terror has hardened hearts since then.

Understanding Is Not Endorsing

Cooper's rule is that he does not record until he can put himself in the shoes of the people he is covering. He argues that taking the wrong lessons from events has real consequences: the government read Jonestown as a case of waiting too long, and that informed the aggressive approach at Waco. Even someone like Uday Hussein, he notes, was once a three-year-old who did not choose to be born into a world where his father reportedly brought him to watch torture sessions. "Understanding brings you right up to the brink of empathy," he says, and people who see that mistake it for justification.

Rogan says this approach is accepted for Jonestown but triggers red flags around World War II, where nuance disappears. Cooper adds that making people radioactive for asking questions backfires: a young person who sees children pulled from rubble in Gaza, asks a sincere question, and gets shouted down tends to wonder why, rather than stop asking. Rogan also discusses astroturfing, AI-driven bot campaigns and tax-funded NGOs shaping online opinion on every side of the Israel-Palestine debate.

Hitler, the Trenches and the Lesson of Violence

Cooper says many critics effectively believe 40 million deaths were a price worth paying rather than any chance of de-escalation, a view he calls insane. When Rogan asks whether that holds before or after the Holocaust began, Cooper clarifies his Tucker points concerned the period a year before the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, where most of Europe's Jews lived. He then traces Hitler's antisemitism using Mein Kampf, read with a grain of salt: a middle-class boy from a small town with little awareness of Jews who became destitute in Vienna, was shocked by the German underclass, and came to blame Jews for their degradation. Cooper suggests this antisemitism is what allowed Hitler to keep loving the German people, and that before World War I it was largely abstract, according to people who knew him.

Cooper then describes the trauma of World War I, drawing on Dan Carlin's series on the war: men who spent their formative years in trenches with dead friends rotting beside them, followed by the collapse of every government east of Germany and years of militias fighting in the streets of Berlin and Munich. Europeans took the lesson that violence accomplishes goals and that the world will eventually accept the result, as when Roosevelt normalized relations with Stalin in 1933 despite the Ukrainian famine, or when the world moved past the Armenian genocide. He also notes that Kristallnacht in 1938 provoked outrage in German cities, with Hitler telling Goebbels to stop because it was bad propaganda, a reminder that Germans did not become demons for twelve years.

America's Renegotiated Identity and Immigration

Cooper argues that Israel and the Bolshevik state were both shaped by the violence of their founding, but that the Zionist project began idealistically, and that the real lesson of the Jewish experience in the 20th century is that "everybody needs a country," since minorities are easily scapegoated. America, he says, is different: it has renegotiated its identity every generation, from Irish and German arrivals in the early 1800s, to Italians and Eastern European Jews, to the Great Migration of six or seven million Black Americans from the South, to the reopening of immigration in 1965. He reads the 1798 naturalization law's offer of citizenship to free white persons as radically open for its time, since English and Irish settlers did not see themselves as the same people.

Cooper contrasts this with European nations like Poland or Ireland, arguing that real diversity means Ireland remaining Irish and China Chinese, not every place looking the same. He notes Ireland, which colonized no one, is projected to become minority Irish by around 2070, and argues that some lessons drawn from World War II have made such countries feel they lack the moral right to preserve themselves. Rogan says he loves America's melting pot and descends from immigrants himself, but believes current immigration is partly coordinated to shift voting and to supply cheap labor, which he calls anti-American; everyone working here should be paid like an American. Cooper notes that exploiting immigrant labor is an old American story, citing Irish dock workers in the 1850s who lived about 14 years after arriving.

The Labor Movement as America's Best Story

Cooper says the early American labor movement is, in his words, "America's best story in my opinion." He describes the Battle of Blair Mountain, where 10,000 to 11,000 armed West Virginia coal miners marched against mine-company forces until the US Army arrived, and a Colorado massacre in which the National Guard fired machine guns into a striking miners' camp, killing about 22 women and children. Back then, he explains, owners saw strikes as sabotage and hired Pinkertons and ex-convicts to spy on, kidnap and beat organizers, so unions hired gangsters for protection, which is how labor racketeering began.

Rogan agrees and argues for a middle ground: he does not support socialism as a system but thinks some socialized functions, like fire departments and good public schools, are essential, supports a much larger medical safety net so no one goes broke from a broken leg, and still wants surgeons richly rewarded to keep excellence. Cooper adds that many American public institutions, like public schools, began as responses to waves of immigration, and that throughout much of its history America was built for strivers rather than for ordinary workers, who were largely forgotten until they pushed back.

Jonestown and How Virtues Get Hijacked

Asked how people get sucked into cults, Cooper says it is usually "because their virtues get hijacked." He points to research on oxytocin, which increases trust and empathy toward the in-group but distrust toward outsiders. Having listened to roughly a thousand hours of recordings recovered from Jonestown, he says he genuinely sympathizes with its members. Jim Jones founded a fully integrated church in Indianapolis around 1953, pressured businesses to desegregate and adopted a Black child, facing threats from the KKK, and "if Jim Jones would have gotten hit by a bus in 1962 he would 100% be remembered today as like an early hero the civil rights movement."

Cooper illustrates why the Peoples Temple attracted so many Black members, about 75% of those who died, through the imagined life of an elderly woman who left Jim Crow Alabama, was widowed and isolated in a decaying Oakland neighborhood, and found in the Temple a real family. He frames Jonestown as a microcosm of the 1960s: idealism, resistance, then radicalization, especially after 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and Eugene McCarthy's supporters saw the nomination go to Hubert Humphrey. That energy scattered into the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army. He adds that Jones spent his last decade on amphetamines, and that police reports of methamphetamine-fueled family hostage situations, about half ending in murder-suicide, mirror what happened in Jonestown. He sees a similar prophet-like quality in Hitler's effect on followers such as Goebbels.

The Limits of Sources and the Humility of History

Cooper stresses that historical sources come from a tiny literate, adult, male, upper-class slice of society, much as foreign correspondents today mostly talk to educated urban people and can misread countries like Egypt or Russia. He cites Euripides' The Trojan Women as an early example of retelling history from the losers' perspective. He only reads English, so his early Israel-Palestine research leaned on Zionist perspectives, and he says objectivity is not really achievable; "the goals should be understanding" with humility. He recalls how his first outline for that series, written after about six books, was embarrassingly wrong once he had read 20 or 30.

Cooper insists, as Dan Carlin does, that he is a storyteller rather than a historian, and shares favorite emails: an Israeli soldier who changed how he treats Palestinians, a young Palestinian woman who realized a Jewish girl in Tel Aviv might be just like her, and many former back-of-the-class students who became avid readers. Rogan argues podcasts show people are still curious despite the claim of a ten-second attention span. Cooper also tells a very funny story about a caffeine-fueled bathroom emergency to illustrate how crises produce decisions that look absurd in hindsight.

Industrialization, Factory Farming and Slavery

Rogan predicts future generations will view factory farming the way we view slaveholders, criticizes ag-gag laws, and praises Will Harris of White Oak Pastures for converting to regenerative agriculture, though he doubts it can yet scale. Cooper compares industrial agriculture to Rome after its conquests, when slave-worked estates pushed small farmers into the city and created the mob that helped end the Republic, and notes that Stalin forced the same consolidation through violence. He also discusses the great man versus trends-and-forces debate and argues the Atlantic slave trade became a kind of game theory trap: any ruler who refused to participate would be overpowered by one who did, and it only ended when the British Empire became dominant enough to enforce abolition at sea.

Conclusion

Darryl Cooper uses this conversation to explain what he actually does: tell history's hardest stories by trying to understand the people in them as human beings acting within their own time. Whether discussing Hitler's formation, Jonestown's members, desperate coal miners or Ireland's future, he argues that understanding is not endorsement, that virtues are often what lead people astray, and that humility about the limits of our sources should temper every judgment. Rogan, defending Cooper against the backlash, adds his own case for nuance, a stronger safety net and skepticism of manipulated online outrage, making this an episode for anyone interested in how to think about the past honestly.

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