Pushkin.
I was taking a road trip not long ago, listening to the Joe Rogan experience, as I like to do sometimes. It was an old episode he'd done with Robert F. Kennedy Junior, before he became US Secretary for Health and Human Services, the man responsible for running a massive medical science administration. By the way, I was once on Joe Rogan.
It was a while back, and from my experience that day, I came up with a theory, which is that all the good stuff happens in any Rogan interview as you approach our three, when the guest has finally adapted to Rogan's particular seductive rhythms, and when all thoughts of the outside world have evaporated. If you listen to Rogan, in
other words, you have to commit. And so on that car ride I did, and at the one hour and fifty two minutes mark, right on schedule, came in exchange which I found so fascinating, so peculiar, so downright weird, that I pulled my car over to the side of the road and said to myself, oh man, RFK was talking about measles, and he essentially tells Rogan the kids who die for measles don't die because of measles. They die because they're malnourished.
And you know, it's hard for a disease to kill a healthy person. It's hard for an infectious disease to kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system.
And then Rogan says evidence, well, not.
The Spanish flu though, right, which.
Is a good question.
The nineteen eighteen Spanish flu was one of the most devastating pandemics in history. It killed as many as one hundred million people, and an overwhelming number of its victims were healthy and relatively young adults, in sharp contrast to the normal influenza mortality pattern on preying on the old in the infirm Rogan is asking, if it's so hard for a disease to kill a healthy person, then how do you explain the most devastating viral epidemic of all time?
And Kennedy says, well, the Spanish flu was not a virus. Oh, and even Fauci now acknowledges that, and they you know, there's there's good evidence that the Spanish flu. There's there is, you know, not not a definitive, but very very strong evidence the Spanish flu was vaccine induced flu the deaths were vaccine induced.
Three bombshells all in a row. One the influenza epidemic of nineteen eighteen was not caused by influenza. Two Anthony Fauci longtime had the National Institute of Infectious Disease at NAH and established. Of all defenders of the medical science orthodoxy agrees with me on this and three the real cause of the nineteen eighteen pandemic was a population wide reaction to a vaccine. I mean, my name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and misunderstood. I already knew this about RFK JR. He says crazy things all the time. That's what our last episode was all about. It's his m o. He's a disciple of the obscure French nineteenth century biologist Antoine Beauchamp, whose claim to fame is that he completely misunderstood the foundational idea in modern medical science. I didn't pull over because of RFK JR. I pulled over because of Joe Rocn.
This episode is devoted to the lost art of the interviewer, because some of us apparently have forgotten how to ask questions. When I went on Joe Rogan, it was before he had moved to Austin. He still lived in southern California and operated out of what seemed like an old airplane
hangar somewhere deep in the Los Angeles suburbs. I can't tell you where exactly because I had to sign an NDA, but it was a vast open structure full of weights, monster trucks, dogs, and exceedingly fit young men clutching energy drinks. The studio was in the middle of the room, inside what looked like a repurposed boxing ring. It was so much fun that if Rogan's people want to be back, I would jump on a plane this evening, packing only a muscle shirt and a case of Red Bull to
bring as a housewarming gift. I tell you all this just so you can imagine a scene. RFK Junior is a weightlifter himself, barrel chest, biceps like big chunks of hormone free non GMO ham boxing ring mano Amano. There's a tantalizing scent of testosterone in the air, and Kennedy just talks about all the things he likes to talk about, bautism, vaccines, refrigerated trucks the Hudson River. Then he gets to the nineteen eighteen flu full disclosure. The nineteen eighteen flu is
one of my very favorite subjects. Many many years ago, I heard that a scientist had discovered that they were victims of the nineteen eighteen flu buried deep in a cemetery in a small town in Norway, high above the Arctic circle. So there was a chance that they had been frozen ever since, meaning they could be dug up and intact samples of the nineteen eighteen virus could be extracted.
This fact made me so deliriously happy that I convinced my editors at the New Yorker to fly me to Norway, New York to Oslo, Oslo to Trompso, then across the Norwegian Sea from trumps So delng you're bin, just so I could walk across the tundra and see the cemetery, which I did, although I didn't linger because the guy at my hotel told me to watch out for polar bears. My point is I'm down for any nineteen eighteen flu virus talk.
What are you saying that the Spanish flu was so?
Rogan asks his question about the nineteen eighteen flu. So far, so good. This is what an interviewer is supposed to do.
What is the documentation the you know I you said that Fauci HASGIVAUGI.
Wrote an article in two thousand and eight and that I'm pretty sure it's two thousand and eight in which he acknowledged that it was not the flu that was killing those people, it was a back geological infection and a back geological infection. These days, you could one hundred percent you're all of it with an.
The article in question is immediately googled.
This is important to cover, right, So let's see if we can find this predominant role of bacteria pneumonia has caused death in pandemic influenza implication Yeah, of a pandemic influenza preparedness. So what this is saying is that bacterial pneumonia was the cause of death.
What's three? What he says?
The results conclusions The majority of deaths from the nineteen eighteen nineteen nineteen influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory tract bacteria.
A proposition has been advanced. Google has been summoned, the proposition has been verified. Oh my god, mister virus himself, Tony Fauci is peddling this a line of bs. Fauci goes on and on about viruses, but then you actually read one of his papers and he admits the biggest viral pandemic wasn't caused by a virus at all. It was caused by a runaway bacterial infection. Did you hear that sigh from Joe becauseau was a moment on Joe Rogan where someone in a position of power really really
bumps Joe out. But wait, did Fauci actually say that? When I heard Rogan read that conclusion, the word that jumped out for me was secondary. One of the things that a respiratory virus, like the flu or covid for that matter, does is attack the cells that line the walls of your lungs. The cells die, they can become leaky, your lungs fill with fluid. In severe cases, you come down with viral pneumonia, and in that state you often get hit by a second round of pneumonia, this one
caused by a bacteria. That's the secondary infection which follows as result of the primary infection.
An analogy that I've used when I've been trying to talk about this phenomenon is trauma.
This is Benjamin Singer, a pulmonary specialist at Northwestern University.
So, a motor vehicle trauma that occurs as a primary event, right, it happens many, many times a day. And in severe trauma, you have hemorrhage, you have blood loss that can become life threatening. Patients will go to the operating room to try to prevent the hemorrhage from causing death. But in some cases patients, unfortunately, if the trauma is severe enough, do die from hemorrhage. But you wouldn't say that there is a problem with hemorrhage just befalling people. Right. It
ultimately was the car crash. It was the trauma that was the initial cause.
Singer published a study not long ago showing that in many COVID victims, it was that second bacterial infection that killed them. In the absence of viral infection. Would what would your odds of having a bacterial pneumonia be?
Would they be?
I mean, are you getting the bacterial pneumonia in large part because your body is so weakened by the viral attack.
Yeah, that's a key point. These are not bacterial pneumonias that would have occurred on their own.
They aren't.
They are occurring only because of the heightened susceptibility of the host having had the viral numoonia.
To begin with.
The Fauci study that Rogan googles and reads during the Kennedy interview involved looking at tissue samples from the lungs of people who had died during the Spanish flu, and what Fauci found was exactly what Singer found with COVID, that the virus so weakened the lungs of people in nineteen eighteen that they were vulnerable to a second fatal round of bacterial pneumonia. Kennedy somehow read that paper and completely missed its point. Fauci wasn't denying the role of
the virus in nineteen eighteen. He was doing the opposite. He was explaining how the viaris did its damage. It's safe to say, isn't it. Kennedy does not understand the difference between of primary and a secondary infection.
I think that's right.
Rogan is a very smart guy. He's one of the biggest podcasters in the world. Rogan does mixed martial arts for fun. He's not afraid of anyone yet. RFK Junior goes on his show and says something so dumb that you couldn't get away with it in a high school biology class. And what did Rogan do? He just sighed and moved on. Joe, dude, what's wrong with you? The most natural form of human interaction is the conversation. Two people talking, unscripted, improvised. It ends when it is the
roles of listener and talker are fluid. The endpoint can be any number of a million different things, consolation, admonishment, encouragement, seduction, joy. An interview is very different. It's two people talking with a purpose. One person asks questions of another with the intention of revealing something of consequence. Conversation is easy and natural. Interviewing is an acquired art. There are weeks where I might do ten interviews each an hour or more, with
even more time devoted to preparation. I've been doing that my whole career, and only in the last five years or so do I think I've gotten any good at it. Interviewing is much much harder than conversation, but you know, it's even harder performance, the interview conducted for the benefit of someone else, an audience. This is what Oprah does better than anyone else. I recently rewatched Oprah's famous interview
with Megan Markle, and oh man, that's a masterclass. You have an actress, that is, someone trained in the art of deceptive self presentation, who wants to air a carefully scripted grievance about her position as a royal princess, and the whole world intends to watch. The degree of difficulty on this one is through the roof. How do you get someone to leave behind their carefully created self. Oprah nails it.
You certainly must have had some conversations with Harry about it and have your own suspicions as to why they didn't want to make Archie a prince.
This is halfway in. Markle has revealed that the royal family is declining to give her firstborn son Archie, a title, and when she hears this, Oprah's eyes light up. I've been interviewed by Oprah before, and let me tell you, when she sees a moment coming, she climbs inside your head and starts to direct traffic.
What are what are those thoughts. Why do you think that is? Do you think it's because of his race?
That's sign And.
I know that's a loaded question, but.
But I can give you an honest answer.
In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time. So we have in tandem the conversation of he won't be given security, it's not going to be given a title, and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he's born.
What and.
Who?
Who is having that conversation.
With you?
So there is a conversation, can hold it?
Hold up the several conversations.
There's a conversation with you who with Harry about how dark your baby is going.
To be potentially and what that would mean or look like.
Ooh, And you're not going to tell me who had the conversation.
I think that would be very damaging to them.
Okay, Megan gets evasive. She says Harry was the one in those conversations, not her.
It was really hard to be able to see those as compartmentalized.
We're concerned that if you were too brown that that would be a problem. Are you saying that.
I wasn't able to follow up with why.
It's that last comment, of course, that is the most telling. I wasn't able to follow up with why Michael has thus far presented an artfully constructed narrative of trivial grievances designed to turn her into a punzel locked in the lonely tower. But at that moment, Oprah gets her to
give us a glimpse of something real. Somebody high up was worried that her child would be too brown, and Meghan wasn't able to follow up with why even the choice of words follow up like there was a brief call with the Queen about Archie's potential blackness, but Megan wasn't able to get the queen's people to schedule assumed to provide more details, so she let the whole thing slide. Oprah is so good, and she's good because she knows how to keep pulling on a thread to get past
what seems like an obvious revelation to a second, deeper one. Okay, now let's listen to Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk. This was just after Musk had given what looked an awful lot like a stiff armed Nazi salute at a Trump.
Rally and now the same idiots are calling you a Nazi. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my life. I mean, there's so many examples of people saying, my heart goes out to you get a little enthusiasm that probably wouldn't be with hindsight.
Yes, but I was obviously meant in the most positive spirit possible.
Yes, obviously obviously.
But it's so strange where people want to think that you are openly public publicly doing secret Nazi se Kyle hand motions.
And now I can never pointed things diagonally. I can only pointed things there and there, and then actually you have to divide that, yeah, because that's where the spaceship is over there.
It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous, it's absurd. It's so it's delivery propaganda.
Imagine for a moment what Oprah would do. In that moment, Oprah would ask, if you didn't want to be called a Nazi, then why did you give a Nazi salute in front of thousands of people. You'd ask that question because that's what everyone was wondering when they saw the offending image. Oprah would have put Musk on the couch, elon We all know you're a genius, but we also know you're super sensitive. You spend all day on Twitter responding to your critics, So why would you do something
so perfectly designed to be misunderstood? Can't you just hear Oprah saying that, but not your Rogan? With Musk sitting across the table from him, Rogan chooses to have the kind of conversation that you would have with a close friend late at night to console them after they have done something really stupid. You know, what they did was stupid. They know what they did was stupid. But what are friends for to help us sustain the pretense that what we did wasn't stupid at all?
It was obviously not meant in a negative way. That it was that I literally said, my heart goes out to you, and it was very positive. The entire speech was very positive. I was being very enthusiastic about the future in space, and that, you know, was great.
Crowd.
You know, so you got a little popped up, Yeah, it go popped up exactly.
Ye, that's all it is. Obviously Obviously, obviously.
Who among us has not inadvertently given a Nazi salute in front of the whole world after getting just a little pumped up, listen to Rogan long enough and you realize, oh, this is a pattern. Here's Rogan doing an episode with Matt Walsh, big figuring conservative media blogger podcaster. He was on Rogan to talk about a documentary he just made called Am I a Racist? Where he made fun of the way that progressive see racism around every corner, and at a key point in the conversation, Walsh says.
This, there was no one who lived on Earth one hundred years ago who we would not consider racist anywhere of any race. If you go back two hundred years or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back five hundred years, and there was nobody on the planet
who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally. They might have had issues with how slaves are treated in some context, but it took like thousands of years for it to ever even occur to a single human on Earth that slavery is actually fundamentally wrong, which is a crazy thing, and that's actually an interesting thing we could you could talk about and think about, like why is that.
You go back five hundred years and there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong. Now, once again, let us imagine Oprah in this moment. Oprah would have sat up straight. Oprah would have stopped him right there, Matt. There were lots of people five hundred years ago who considered slavery to be wrong, millions of them slaves, exactly right. You think Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt just because he thought the
schools were better in the Promised Land. You think the millions of people who were brutally rounded up in West Africa, torn from their families and communities, marched onto slavery ships and shipped overseas in brutal conditions, were ambivalent about the social institution they are being forced to join. And why
would Oprah have stopped Matt Walsh at that moment? Not just because she would have felt compelled to correct this spectacular bit of foolishness, but because her job, as she sees it, is to reveal something of importance about her subjects to her audience. And here was a golden opportunity. Do you want to know who Matt Walsh is? He is someone who constructed a history of slavery and forgot all about the slaves. But Joe Rogan, when presented with that same opportunity, just wants to sit and chat.
Well, I've had friends that have a different perspective on the Obama situation. And my friend Willie was talking to me about this, and he was saying that what happened was when you look one thing that we can be sure of, is it racist, surreal? And when Obama became president, those people became more embolden Obama.
What does Obama have to.
Do with this?
And who's Willie Willie Nelson? But of course we never find out. It's none of our business. All of which is to say, the warning signs were there from the very beginning of the RFK Junior interview.
And so then we run into each other and Aspen.
Just Randa is the weirdness moment because we were both staring at each other.
Yeah, and then we almost did it like a full three.
Six Yeah, yeah, yeah, I noticed you walking.
I'm like, that's it is, So I said, hey, what's up.
It was just going to be the two of them in the room. The rest of us weren't invited, Do I like evesdropping on Joe Rogan's conversations. I do, That's why I listen to his show. But there are times when the conversational mode doesn't work, and when you have RFK Junior on, that's definitely one of those times. So let's start from the beginning and redo the RFK Junior conversation, only this time with an eye to all the things
that a conversation between friends does not cover. Okay, Kennedy now elaborates on his theory of the nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic, what caused all those bacterial infections that he believes with the real source of all those millions of deaths.
You know, I read an article reasonably, and you can look up these articles pretty easily. But the article that I read made a very strong case that the illness came from testing a new vaccine in Kansas at a military base in Kansas.
What should the interviewer do in this moment, or at least before letting this kind of thing go out into the world. Well, since this is a pretty dramatic claim, they should figure out what Kennedy is referring to. What are these articles that led him to such a radical reinterpretation of one of the most famous viral epidemics in history. It turns out finding them is not that hard. It took me five minutes on Google and two phone calls.
The first article I found is by Kevin Barry, an attorney based out of Siast on Long Island who wrote a two part series for vaccine impact dot Com in twenty eighteen called did a military experimental vaccine in nineteen eighteen kill fifty to one hundred million people? Blamed a
Spanish flu? I was listening to rfk's appearance on Joe Rogan and they have that moment when they start talking about the nineteen eighteen flu, which is super fascinating, and RFK says, well, in fact, i've quote so he says, you know, well, you know well, the Spanish flue was not a virus. It was he says, even Foucing now acknowledges that. But then he says, and you know, I read an article recently, and you can look at these articles pretty easily. The article that I read made a
very strong case. He onlyess came from testing a new vaccine in Kansas at a military base in Kansas. Is that your article?
He's referring to I'm not sure it probably as far as I know that I wrote this in twenty eighteen and I circulated it to my friends, and Bobby would have been on the list.
Barry's article focuses on a trial for an experimental meningitis vaccine run by doctor Frederick Gates, a first lieutenant in the Army's Medical Corps during the First World War serving at Fort Riley, Kansas.
That antiminingitas study that they published came out and that started me down the path of digging into it.
Barry is convinced that the meningitis vaccine caused the Spanish flu and that every scientist who has ever studied the nineteen eighteen pandemic has just missed this. I asked him what role, if any, he thought the influenza virus played in the nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic.
Not a role that was a killer. But I think that the killer was the bacterial meningitis. You know that there's something level of the conventional that literature calls it a secondary infection.
Oh right, remember the Fauci paper that Rogan googled and misunderstood.
Barry read it too.
But like if you have the sniffles and a bullet cust of your head. Did the sniffles kill you? What did the thing that rapped apart your locks?
Right?
This is source number one, Source number two as far as I can tell. It's a chiropractor from Melbourne, Florida named sal Martin Gano, who wrote in his book that this same rogue meningetis vaccine somehow got sent around the world in nineteen eighteen, and then the whole thing was covered up by the pharmaceutical industry.
You know, they twisted and turned it around, but the bottom line was they killed They just killed half the population. I did deep dives with this stuff to try to, you know, put it in perspective, but there's no way to put this in perspective. It was just downright ugly.
So the conventional line about nineteen eighteen is that it was an H one N one virus, and we have we I'm curious of what so, and we we've isolated this virus from people who died in the pandemic. What role do you think that virus was playing in what happened in nineteen eighteen?
Probably nothing.
The detailed reports on what was actually found are buried This is like the Kennedy Files. You know, you try to find good luck on that you're not going to find it.
If a friend tells you in private conversation that they have a nutty idea about the nineteen eighteen Spanish flu, maybe it's okay just to not unsmile, because a friend is a friend, and we all have to tolerate the eccentricities of those closest to us. But when you have an audience in the tens of millions, and your friend is someone of real power and influence, then maybe it's not a bad idea to stop them and say, hold on,
where are you getting this whole Kansas theory from? Because the way that Urka Junior answers that question will tell us a lot about the way his mind works, and we're all very interested in the way his mind works. And then when he tells you, you might just want to say something like, just so we're clear, Bobby, we have a century of biomedical science on one side of this question, and we have Kevin from Long Island and South from South Florida.
On the other.
And you're going with Kevin and si out. But Joe Rogan doesn't come close. He just rolls over in the middle of the road like a giant, tattooed, tightly muscled powsome. Joe, you're breaking my heart. When I was on my book tour for Revenge of the Tipping Point, I did an event at a theater in downtown San Diego. My interviewer was a guy named Michael Gervais. He's a psychologist who works a lot with elite athletes. He writes books. Nice guy.
The interview began much like the dozens of other interviews I did on my book tour. So, when you think about it, and I'm going to come back to the original question, but when you think about the future, do you see it through an optimistic, a cynical or a pessimistic lens? Oh, I'm an optimist. I come from Glavels are optimists. My mom I was talking to my mom. My mom is ninety three and she just turned night three and I was talking to her and it was
her birthday, and she just she's twin. She was talking to her and so she just called her twin sister, who lives in Jamaica, and she said to me, she was a little emotional, which is rare for Glad was also not terribly emotional.
Huh.
And she said to me, you know, I look back on my life and I cannot believe how improbable it was. She was born in like a house that was probably a third the size of this a quarter of the size of this stage, with no electricity, running water, in the middle of Jamaica, and she ended up, you know, living this wonderful life. And she's like when I was born in she said to me, when I was born in Jamaica, and then early inteen thirties, twins rarely survived,
so that even that I survived was a miracle. Then came this, you parents who think of their lives as my parents have. Also my dad is not dad but deeply religious in I think the best possible way, and think of their lives as a gift from God. And when you grow up with that, it is very, very hard not to participate in that spirit. Well, I'm getting a little emotional to you. I'm in danger. When I talk about my father, I start crying.
So, yeah, what is that about. I don't know he was.
I'm sorry.
I'd encourage you to open it wide open. There I was on stage in front of hundreds of people, perfectly happy. Then my dad came up, and all of a sudden, I became overwhelmed, and I was embarrassed. It wasn't what I intended. I wasn't there to bear my soul, didn't I just say ten seconds before, the Globels are not emotional people. I want to move on, but Jervase won't let me. So off we go in an entirely new direction. I mean, I do cry every time he's been He's
been gone five years. And a friend of mine said, two friends of mine said two very beautiful things that I've always remembered. One was a friend of mine who was writing something about his father, and he said, my father died twenty years ago. Today, I know him better today than I did back then. And I think about that nearly every day, and because I think I know him better now. And another thing a friend of mine said, in trying to console me, was that grief is the
way we keep someone alive. Yeah, and it's a gift in other words. Yeah, And I think that I can't. I think I continue to grieve because I can.
I can't let it go.
Subjects come to interviews with prerehearsed narratives, stories that have been told so many times that the ruts on the road have become deep and narrow. In a conversation, our partner gives us the freedom to follow the familiar path. They encourage and support with nods and smiles. But the performance is but the audience, the third party demands and deserves, is something more a departure. I have a friend who's a screenwriter who always says, the job of the storyteller
is to defy the audience's expectations. That's absolutely right to take the audience somewhere they didn't know they were going. And that's what Gervais was doing when he interrupted me.
So what did your dad teach you?
I don't think he had that question in mind when he prepared for the interview.
He was.
So he's an Englishman.
That's a big, pushy beard.
And he was.
Such a stereotypical englishman.
He was.
He liked going for long walks in the rain with dogs. He was a gardener. That's what he loved to do above all else. He uh, he only ever cried when he was reading Dickens to his children. He uh. He was a mathematician, and a very good one. I think, although I have no idea because I could never follow what he was doing.
He was a.
He was completely indifferent to what the world thought it did, just did whatever he wanted to do, which was I thought, as a kid, was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. You know that, You see everyone in this room right now because oh that's where he got it from.
Yeah he was.
Yeah, So that's that's the big gift that he passed you.
There you go. That's how it's done.
Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence, and bendedaf Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Gara, Jake Korsky and bendedaf Haffrey. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Jake Gorsky. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and el Hefe Gretacone.
I'm Malcolm Glappo. Where have you gone?
Joe Rogan Experience? Our nation turns its lonely.
Eyes to you.
Woohoo, what's that you say, mister Kennedy? John Joe has left and gone away? Hey, Hey, hey hey, hey,