What Joe Rogan and Ken Burns Can Teach Us About History Class

What Joe Rogan and Ken Burns Can Teach Us About History Class

Last month, I found myself unexpectedly drawn into a nearly three‑hour conversation between documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and podcaster Joe Rogan. In a world dominated by short-form TikToks and Instagram Reels, Rogan’s sprawling podcasts feel anachronistic. Yet his tens of millions of subscribers can’t be wrong; there’s still an audience for the long form. Similarly large crowds tune in to Burns’s 10- to 20-hour documentaries about jazz, baseb…