1985. Under hot lights, the titanic televangelist glares at New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange. Lange speechifies on that matter of global importance, the nuclear weapon. The hall is a cornucopia of sensations - the rippling murmurs of the crowd, checkerboard tuxes and ties, and above all, the smell of uranium on his opponent’s breath as he leans in. Ripples crest in a roar as we witness the apex of wit. And really, hasn’t the whole night been one long Everest of human discourse?
Some say that today is a wasteland of the mind, algorithmic meltdown. To them I say: worry no more. Our century has been blessed with a meeting of minds to surpass all that hath come before. Your every question is answered. To call this the “thinking man’s pod” would undercut the universal appeal of what, frankly, should be burned onto a disc and sent out on Voyager.
I am talking, of course, about Joe Rogan Experience #2219 - Donald Trump.
45 seconds
Rogan establishes from the outset that this isn’t your parents’ interview. To Rogan’s mind, the media machine loved Trump until the day he ran for President. They’ve had it in for him ever since. Rogan is here to restore balance to the Force, to give Trump a break. Imagine if, instead of hectoring Lange, his opponent had said “I love you, Mister Lange”? How good would that debate have been? Think about that.
4 minutes and 42 seconds
Joe asks his first question: how did Trump, elected as the outsider in 2016, navigate his new political world?
Trump responds that his ear was shot. Then he shares his experience of driving down Pennsylvania Avenue ("a little bit dangerous. Right? I mean, when you watch, like, Kennedy and some others."), then the Lincoln Bedroom, then his son’s height (6’9”), then Lincoln’s depression, then how General Robert E. Lee whipped Lincoln, much like a UFC fighter - “you would know the names”, Trump tells Rogan (Joe doesn’t know who Trump is talking about), then Trump’s own Lees who beat ISIS with him, then how Trump beat seventeen opponents in the 2016 primaries,
12 minutes and 32 seconds
Rogan interjects to say that "Everyone's aware of all this stuff". He repeats the first question. Trump shares how the White House faded for him from a place of awe to just a building to live in.
13 minutes and 15 seconds
The former President of the United States says the words “governing the country”. This is the first answer we begin to receive to the first question asked. This is a fifty feet tall neon-lettered omen for the rest of the episode.
13 minutes and 16 seconds
Trump completes his sentence: “governing the country and survival”. He diverts into how he has suffered more persecution than anybody else.
15 minutes and 2 seconds
“I was a New York builder”, he confides, and in this moment we glimpse a different Trump, a Trump who never won power, a Trump who stuck to what he knows and loves best: contracting builders to build his buildings, then stiffing them.
21 minutes and 46 seconds
“You pick them young. This way, they're there for 50 years,” Trump says of his Supreme Court justices who ended abortion rights. It is an interesting strategy to hop on America’s most listened-to podcast and say this two weeks out from an election.
24 minutes and 58 seconds
“One of the beautiful things about you is that you free ball.”
Trump’s turn of phrase is that he likes to weave together different threads, "and you have to be very smart to do weaves".
36 minutes and 20 seconds
Trump empathises with the challenges cops face (they might find a gun pointed at them).
41 minutes and 7 seconds
Rogan asks his second question. Trump explains how great life was in the 1890s, under President McKinley, who was assassinated, and I’m starting to sense a theme here.
47 minutes and 1 second
Rogan offers his first critical thought: Trump’s tax cuts grew the US deficit. Let’s be charitable, and remove COVID from the equation entirely. Between 2016 and 2019, the deficit increased by $400,000,000,000,000. This is a larger number than the entire New Zealand economy. Rogan is terrified by the thought of confrontation, and casts about for the discursive exits -
Trump blames COVID.
59 minutes and 34 seconds
We end the first hour on several synonyms for human excrement, punctuated by an unsolicited admission that you can get an app which tells you where to find some. Great for gardeners. Presumably not the target audience.
1 hour, 11 minutes and 35 seconds
“I want to be a whale psychiatrist. [A windmill] drives the whales freaking crazy…”
In another life, I would have really liked just doing hydrotherapy and tariffs with you.
1 hour, 13 minutes and 34 seconds
Trump plays the greatest hits of his all-time best speech. (He peaked early.) Those ninety seconds distil these three hours into their purest form, the same way moonshine feels like getting kicked by a horse.
1 hour, 17 minutes and 38 seconds
Trump says he’s a “very common sense person”. Every Newstalk ZB listener across the country puts down what they were doing and starts writing out mail-in ballots.
1 hour, 20 minutes
Unprompted, Trump volunteers that he thinks that J.D. Vance was a great vice-presidential pick. He is not mentioned again.
1 hour, 21 minutes and 23 seconds
A hotly anticipated boxing match scheduled for right after the election prompts Trump to say something actually pretty funny: “So I'll either go as president, or I'll be depressed and I won't bother going.”
1 hour, 24 minutes and 35 seconds
Trump complains that Harris took a "crazy softball interview" where "She couldn't answer a question. And every question is not answered."
1 hour, 39 minutes and 50 seconds
Trump shares how his visit to the world's most oppressive country opened his eyes: Trump condos are a match made in heaven for North Korea's beautiful beaches. My jaw drops.
1 hour, 44 minutes and 25 seconds
Trump weaves from condemning legal Haitian immigrants ("They speak, they speak no language") to praising UFC CEO Dana White.
1 hour, 57 minutes and 49 seconds
They finish praising Dana White.
1 hour, 58 minutes and 15 seconds
Wow, this is new! Trump breaks out a chart to explain how Americans have gotten less healthy since he left office.
2 hours
We enter the second hour with Trump sharing that "That chart is a terrible chart...It's such a bad chart.”
2 hours, 1 minute and 20 seconds
Trump has the nerve to express shock that polio has reemerged in Gaza. Rogan has the gall to ask if vaccination is to blame. I stare in disbelief.
2 hours, 2 minutes and 17 seconds
Joe Rogan mentions NEW ZEALAND!! as one of two countries that permit pharmaceutical advertisements on TV. Pseudoephedrine enjoyers stand up, we got it locked down.
2 hours, 8 minutes and 40 seconds
Trump explains “the weave” again, ninety minutes after the first time. By this point, I'm starting to see why the powers that be still reckon that Trump is easily manipulated. This point of view, of course, omits the fact that many of history's most dangerous people also happened to be morons. In fact, moronity played a key part in why they were so good at designing and executing bad ideas. Mussolini wasn’t winning any prizes, ya know?
2 hours, 17 minutes and 6 seconds
Rogan offers Trump a golden opportunity. The media have been silencing Trump about how the election was stolen; Rogan promises him all the time in the world to explain. Trump replies "Well, what I'd rather do is we'll do it another time. And I would bring in papers that you would not believe. So many different papers." Trump flails to find his footing for a few minutes. Rogan comes to his rescue with an impassioned monologue about the many falsehoods pushed by the conventional media machine. That is a category that the biggest podcast in America interviewing the President of the United States mercifully does not, and will never, belong to.
2 hours, 21 minutes and 16 seconds
“Can you imagine Kamala doing this show?”
“I could imagine Kamala doing this show.”
Amusingly, after all the harsh words they’ve had for her (a stupid, low IQ liar and there’s something wrong with her), Rogan doesn’t seem to get why his plans to catch up with Harris didn’t come through. He’d try to talk to her like a human being! What’s the matter?
This is the strangest part of the Joe Rogan Experience. For all of Rogan’s strong views and invective, he really does see himself as a guy who sits down to chat with his guests, not an interviewer. Ironically, that process would probably be a lot more interesting with somebody like Harris than with Trump, who has already blended the personal with the political to the nth degree. A little birdie once told me that "Everyone's aware of all this stuff".
Trump keeps interjecting that Rogan interviewing her would knock her out flat.
2 hours, 29 minutes and 23 seconds
“You know, I built 570 miles of wall.”
We are 71% done with the episode, and 29% of the way to go. Fun fact: the border wall is the exact opposite!
2 hours, 31 minutes and 24 seconds
Rogan mentions "an author named Hemingway who is a great writer" and my ears prick up for a second, but he's just talking about a conspiracy theorist.
2 hours, 42 minutes and 40 seconds
Rogan asks Trump why he broke his promise to declassify the files on the JFK assassination. Trump replies that good, well-meaning people asked him not to, because he would expose the identities of people who are still living and undermine national security. He pledges that this time, he'll do it immediately. Rogan, presented with these two alternative facts, chooses to reconcile them by expressing his interest in people coming from space.
2 hours, 49 minutes and 31 seconds
They finish talking about aliens in our Solar System (consensus: there’s no reason why not, right?).
2 hours, 51 minutes and 27 seconds
I check the clock, thinking I have over half an hour to go. To my delight, less than ten minutes remain. We are so back.
2 hours, 52 minutes and 11 seconds
Trump says he won't reveal his peace plan (à la Nixon) "for the purpose of looking smart to five people”, on a podcast which averages eight digit listener numbers. I guess the MUN kids are on TikTok.
2 hours, 57 minutes and 50 seconds
Trump asks how long they've been talking. Rogan accepts that they won’t get to everything they meant to tonight. Trump excuses himself mid-sentence: he has to go make a speech. More things to say, you know how the business gets. It's the weave.
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