The Joe Rogan Intervention

Speaker 1 Pushkin

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Speaker 55 I was taking a road trip not long ago, listening to the Joe Rogan experience, as I like to do sometimes.

Speaker 41 It was an old episode he'd done with Robert F.

Speaker 55 Kennedy Jr.

Speaker 45 before he became U.S.

Speaker 46 Secretary for Health and Human Services, the man responsible for running a massive medical science administration.

Speaker 22 By the way, I was once on Joe Rogan.

Speaker 60 It was a while back.

Speaker 61 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 hour three, when the guest has finally adapted to Rogan's particular seductive rhythms, and when all thoughts of the outside world have evaporated.

Speaker 48 If you listen to Rogan, in other words, you have to commit.

Speaker 27 And so, on that car ride, I did.

Speaker 37 And at the one hour and 52 minutes mark, right on schedule, came an 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.

Speaker 54 RFK was talking about measles, and he essentially tells Rogan, the kids who die from measles don't die because of measles, they die because they're malnourished.

Speaker 69 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.

Speaker 51 And then

Speaker 71 Rogan says,

Speaker 72 Well, not the Spanish flu, though, right?

Speaker 34 Which is a good question.

Speaker 54 The 1918 Spanish flu was one of the most devastating pandemics in history.

Speaker 68 It killed as many as 100 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 and the infirm.

Speaker 26 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?

Speaker 47 And Kennedy says.

Speaker 69 Well, the Spanish flu was not a virus.

Speaker 70 And even

Speaker 69 Fauci now acknowledges that. And

Speaker 69 there's good evidence that the Spanish flu, there's

Speaker 70 not a definitive, but very, very strong evidence.

Speaker 69 The Spanish flu was vaccine-induced flu.

Speaker 69 The deaths were vaccine-induced.

Speaker 41 Three bombshells, all in a row.

Speaker 68 One, the influenza epidemic of 1918 was not caused by influenza.

Speaker 47 Two, Anthony Fauci, longtime head of the National Institute of Infectious Disease at NIH and the stoutest of all defenders of the medical science orthodoxy, agrees with me on this.

Speaker 43 And three,

Speaker 58 the real cause of the 1918 pandemic was a population-wide reaction.

Speaker 46 to a vaccine.

Speaker 68 I mean.

Speaker 22 my name is Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 65 You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 60 I already knew this about RFK Jr.

Speaker 43 He says crazy things all the time.

Speaker 45 That's what our last episode was all about.

Speaker 67 It's his M.O.

Speaker 43 He's a disciple of the obscure French 19th century biologist Antoine Buchamp, whose claim to fame is that he completely misunderstood the foundational idea in modern medical science.

Speaker 48 I didn't pull over because of RFK Jr.

Speaker 48 I pulled over because of Joe Rogan.

Speaker 65 This episode is devoted to the lost art of the interview because some of us, apparently, have forgotten how to ask questions.

Speaker 54 When I went on Joe Rogan, it was before he had moved to Austin.

Speaker 13 He still lived in Southern California California and operated out of what seemed like an old airplane hangar somewhere deep in the Los Angeles suburbs.

Speaker 8 I can't tell you where exactly because I had to sign an NDA.

Speaker 26 But it was a vast open structure full of weights, monster trucks, dogs, and exceedingly fit young men clutching energy drinks.

Speaker 74 The studio was in the middle of the room, inside what looked like a repurposed boxing ring.

Speaker 22 It was so much fun that if Rogan's people wanted me 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.

Speaker 54 I tell you all this just so you can imagine the scene.

Speaker 43 RFK Jr.

Speaker 68 is a weightlifter himself, barrel chest, biceps like big chunks of hormone-free non-GMO ham.

Speaker 41 They're in the boxing ring, mono-amano. There's a tantalizing scent of testosterone in the air.

Speaker 52 And Kennedy just talks about all the things he likes to talk about.

Speaker 34 Autism, vaccines, refrigerated trucks, the Hudson River.

Speaker 46 Then he gets to the 1918 flu.

Speaker 51 Full disclosure, the 1918 flu is one of my very favorite subjects.

Speaker 55 Many, many years ago, I heard that a scientist had discovered that they were victims of the 1918 flu buried deep in a cemetery in a small town in Norway, high above the Arctic Circle.

Speaker 22 So there was a chance that they had been frozen ever since, meaning they could be dug up and intact samples of the 1918 virus could be extracted.

Speaker 58 This fact made me so deliriously happy that I convinced my editors at the New Yorker to fly me to Norway.

Speaker 8 New York to Oslo, Oslo to Tromso, then across the Norwegian Sea from Tromso to Longyurben, just so I could walk across the tundra and see the cemetery.

Speaker 58 Which I did.

Speaker 48 Although I didn't linger linger because the guy at my hotel told me to watch out for polar bears.

Speaker 78 My point is, I'm down for any 1918 flu virus talk.

Speaker 72 What are you saying that the Spanish flu was?

Speaker 78 So, Rogan asks his question about the 1918 flu.

Speaker 45 So far, so good.

Speaker 57 This is what an interviewer is supposed to do.

Speaker 72 What is the documentation?

Speaker 70 You know,

Speaker 72 I you said that Fauci has publicly admitted that it's not.

Speaker 69 Fauci wrote an article in 2008, and

Speaker 70 that

Speaker 69 I'm pretty sure it's 2008,

Speaker 69 in which he acknowledged that it was not the flu that was killing those people. It was a bacteriological infection.

Speaker 69 And a bacteriological infection, these days, you could 100% cure all of it with an antibiotic.

Speaker 47 The article in question is immediately Googled.

Speaker 72 This is important to cover, right? So let's see if we can find this. Predominant role of bacterial pneumonia as cause of death in pandemic influenza, implications

Speaker 72 of

Speaker 72 pandemic influenza preparedness. So what this is saying is that bacterial pneumonia was the cause of death.
Let's read what he says, the results.

Speaker 72 Conclusions. The majority of deaths from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory tract bacteria.

Speaker 41 A A proposition has been advanced.

Speaker 46 Google has been summoned.

Speaker 41 The proposition has been verified.

Speaker 51 Oh my God, Mr.

Speaker 63 Virus himself, Tony Fauci, is peddling us a line of BS.

Speaker 84 Fauci goes on and on about viruses, but then you actually read one of his papers and he admits the biggest viral pandemic ever wasn't caused by a virus at all.

Speaker 51 It was caused by a runaway bacterial infection.

Speaker 46 Did you hear that sigh from Joe?

Speaker 57 There's always a moment on Joe Rogan where someone in a position of power really, really bumps Joe out.

Speaker 34 But wait, did Fauci actually say that?

Speaker 82 When I heard Rogan read that conclusion, the word that jumped out for me was secondary.

Speaker 48 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.

Speaker 74 The cells die.

Speaker 41 They can become leaky.

Speaker 47 Your lungs fill with fluid.

Speaker 54 In severe cases, you come down with viral pneumonia.

Speaker 47 And in that state, you often get hit by a second round of pneumonia.

Speaker 65 This one caused by a bacteria.

Speaker 45 That's the secondary infection, which follows as a result of the primary infection.

Speaker 85 An analogy that I've used when I've been trying to talk about this phenomenon is trauma.

Speaker 22 This is Benjamin Singer, a pulmonary specialist at Northwestern University.

Speaker 85 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.

Speaker 85 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.

Speaker 85 But you wouldn't say that there is a problem with hemorrhage just befalling people, right?

Speaker 85 It ultimately was the car crash. It was the trauma that was

Speaker 85 the initial cause.

Speaker 54 Singer published a study not long ago showing that in many COVID victims, it was that second bacterial infection that killed them.

Speaker 45 In the absence of a viral infection,

Speaker 23 what would your odds of having a bacterial pneumonia be?

Speaker 29 Would they be, I mean, mean, are you getting the bacterial pneumonia in large part because your body is so weakened by the viral attack?

Speaker 85 Yeah, that's a key point. These are not bacterial pneumonias that would have occurred on their own.
They aren't.

Speaker 85 They are occurring only because of the heightened susceptibility of the host having had the viral pneumonia to begin with.

Speaker 54 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.

Speaker 55 And what Fauci found was exactly what Singer found with COVID, that the virus so weakened the lungs of people in 1918 that they were vulnerable to a second fatal round of bacterial pneumonia.

Speaker 54 Kennedy somehow read that paper and completely missed its point.

Speaker 68 Fauci wasn't denying the role of the virus in 1918.

Speaker 54 He was doing the opposite.

Speaker 67 He was explaining how the virus did its damage.

Speaker 45 It's safe to say, isn't it?

Speaker 42 Kennedy does not understand the difference between a primary and a secondary infection.

Speaker 66 I think that's right.

Speaker 34 Rogan is a very smart guy.

Speaker 54 He's one of the biggest podcasters in the world.

Speaker 62 Rogan does mixed martial arts for fun.

Speaker 27 He's not afraid of anyone.

Speaker 43 Yet, RFK Jr.

Speaker 36 goes on his show and says something so dumb that you couldn't get away with it in a high school biology class.

Speaker 1 And what did Rogan do?

Speaker 54 He just sighed and moved on.

Speaker 87 Joe, dude, what's wrong with you?

Speaker 3 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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Speaker 55 The most natural form of human interaction is the conversation.

Speaker 63 Two people talking, unscripted, improvised.

Speaker 51 It ends when it ends. The roles of listener and talker are fluid.

Speaker 59 The end point can be any number of a million different things.

Speaker 58 Consolation, admonishment, encouragement, seduction, joy.

Speaker 54 An interview is very different.

Speaker 63 It's two people talking with a purpose.

Speaker 35 One person asks questions of another with the intention of revealing something of consequence.

Speaker 51 Conversation is easy and natural. Interviewing...

Speaker 50 is an acquired art.

Speaker 68 There are weeks where I might do 10 interviews, each an hour or more, with even more time devoted to preparation.

Speaker 43 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.

Speaker 8 Interviewing is much, much harder than conversation.

Speaker 54 But you know what's even harder?

Speaker 71 Performance.

Speaker 5 The interview conducted for the benefit of someone else, an audience. This is what Oprah does better than anyone else.

Speaker 5 I recently rewatched Oprah's famous interview with Megan Megan Markle, and oh man, that's a masterclass.

Speaker 56 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.

Speaker 41 And the whole world intends to watch.

Speaker 54 The degree of difficulty on this one is through the roof.

Speaker 43 How do you get someone to leave behind their carefully created self?

Speaker 60 Oprah nails it.

Speaker 89 You certainly must have had some conversations with Harry about it and have your own suspicions as to why

Speaker 89 they didn't want to make Archie a prince.

Speaker 47 This is halfway in.

Speaker 55 Markle has revealed that the royal family is declining to give her firstborn son, Archie, a title.

Speaker 47 And when she hears this, Oprah's eyes light up.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 89 What are those thoughts?

Speaker 89 Why do you think that is?

Speaker 89 Do you think it's because of his race?

Speaker 71 That sigh.

Speaker 89 And I know that's a loaded question, but.

Speaker 89 But I can give you an honest answer.

Speaker 89 In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time,

Speaker 89 So we have in tandem the conversation of he won't be given security, he's not going to be given a title,

Speaker 89 and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he's born

Speaker 90 what

Speaker 81 and

Speaker 89 who who is having that conversation

Speaker 89 with you

Speaker 89 so

Speaker 89 um

Speaker 89 There is a conversation. Hold up, hold up.
There are several points. There are several conversations.
There's a conversation with you.

Speaker 89 With Harry

Speaker 89 about

Speaker 89 how dark your baby is going to be?

Speaker 89 Potentially, and what that would mean or look like.

Speaker 89 And you're not going to tell me who had the conversation?

Speaker 89 I think that would be very damaging to them.

Speaker 81 Okay.

Speaker 33 Megan gets evasive.

Speaker 63 She says Harry was the one in those conversations, not her.

Speaker 89 It was really hard to be able to see those as compartmentalizations. They were concerned.
I was concerned that if you were too

Speaker 89 brown,

Speaker 89 that that would be a problem. Are you saying that?

Speaker 89 I wasn't able to follow up with why.

Speaker 22 It's that last comment, of course, that is the most telling.

Speaker 43 I wasn't able to follow up with why.

Speaker 56 Markle has thus far presented an artfully constructed narrative of trivial grievances designed to turn her into Rapunzel locked in the lonely tower.

Speaker 8 But at that moment, Oprah gets her to give us a glimpse of something real.

Speaker 54 Somebody high up was worried that her child would be too brown, and Megan wasn't able to follow up with why.

Speaker 13 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 a Zoom to provide more details, so she let the whole thing slide.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 54 Okay, now let's listen to Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk.

Speaker 52 This was just after Musk had given what looked an awful lot like a stiff-armed Nazi salute at a Trump rally.

Speaker 72 And now the same idiots are calling you a Nazi. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 80 I mean, there's so many examples of people saying my heart goes out to you.

Speaker 72 Get it with a little enthusiasm that probably wouldn't be recommended with hindsight. Yes.

Speaker 91 But it was obviously meant in the most positive spirit possible.

Speaker 80 Yes. Yeah.
Obviously. Obviously.

Speaker 72 But it's so strange where people want to think that you are openly,

Speaker 72 publicly doing secret, Nazi, seekile hand motions.

Speaker 91 And now I can never point at things diagonally. I can only point at things there and there.

Speaker 91 And then I say you have to divide that because that's where the spaceship is over there.

Speaker 17 It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 72 It's absurd. It's so crazy.

Speaker 17 it's deliberate propaganda.

Speaker 87 Imagine for a moment what Oprah would do in that moment.

Speaker 67 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?

Speaker 54 She'd ask that question because that's what everyone was wondering when they saw the offending image.

Speaker 16 Oprah would have put Musk on the couch.

Speaker 54 Elon, we all know you're a genius.

Speaker 33 But we also know you're super sensitive.

Speaker 54 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?

Speaker 60 But not Joe Rogan.

Speaker 54 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.

Speaker 54 You know what they did was stupid. They know what they did was stupid.

Speaker 60 But what are friends for?

Speaker 9 To help us sustain the pretense that what we did wasn't stupid at all.

Speaker 91 It was obviously not meant

Speaker 91 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

Speaker 91 very positive. I was being very enthusiastic about the future in space.

Speaker 91 And,

Speaker 70 you know,

Speaker 91 it was a great crowd, you know.

Speaker 80 So.

Speaker 70 Yeah, you got a little pumped up.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it got pumped up. Exactly.
Yeah, that's all it is. Obviously.

Speaker 72 Obviously. Obviously.

Speaker 48 Who among us has not inadvertently given a Nazi salute in front of the whole world after getting just a little pumped up?

Speaker 47 Listen to Rogan long enough and you realize, oh, this is a pattern.

Speaker 58 Here's Rogan doing an episode with Matt Walsh, big figure in conservative media, blogger, podcaster.

Speaker 54 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 progressives see racism around every corner.

Speaker 54 And at a key point in the conversation, Walsh says this.

Speaker 93 There was no one who lived on Earth 100 years ago who we would not consider racist anywhere of any race.

Speaker 93 If you go back 200 years or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back 500 years,

Speaker 93 and there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally.

Speaker 93 They might have had issues with how slaves are treated in some contexts, 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.

Speaker 7 Which is a crazy thing.

Speaker 93 And that's actually an interesting thing you could talk about and think about. Like, why is that?

Speaker 55 You go back 500 years, and there was nobody on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong.

Speaker 57 Now, once again, let us imagine Oprah in this moment.

Speaker 54 Oprah would have sat up straight.

Speaker 34 Oprah would have stopped him right there. Matt, there were lots of people 500 years ago who considered slavery to be wrong.

Speaker 47 Millions of them.

Speaker 37 Slaves.

Speaker 79 Exactly, right?

Speaker 3 You think Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt just because he thought the schools were better in the promised land?

Speaker 54 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 were being forced to join?

Speaker 74 And why would Oprah have stopped Matt Walsh at that moment?

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 58 And here was a golden opportunity.

Speaker 62 Do you want to know who Matt Walsh is?

Speaker 74 He is someone who constructed a history of slavery and forgot all about the slaves.

Speaker 54 But Joe Rogan, when presented with that same opportunity, just wants to sit and chat.

Speaker 70 Well,

Speaker 72 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

Speaker 72 you look,

Speaker 72 one thing that we can be sure of is that racists are real. And when Obama became president, those people became more emboldened.

Speaker 66 Obama?

Speaker 45 What does Obama have to do with this?

Speaker 50 And who's Willie?

Speaker 77 Willie Nelson?

Speaker 68 But of course, we never find out.

Speaker 58 It's none of our business.

Speaker 27 All of which is to say, the warning signs were there from the very beginning of the RFK Jr.

Speaker 78 interview.

Speaker 72 And so, then we run into each other in Aspen.

Speaker 70 Just random. That was the weirdest moment because we were both staring at each other.

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 70 And then we almost did it like a full 360. Yeah.

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 72 Yeah, I noticed you walking. I'm like, that's.

Speaker 80 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 70 So I said, hey, what's up?

Speaker 54 It was just going to be the two of them in the room.

Speaker 60 The rest of us weren't invited.

Speaker 3 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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Speaker 9 They're now the best network, according to the experts at an OOCLA speed test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

Speaker 53 With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

Speaker 11 With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 64 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 88 And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

Speaker 17 That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 14 Learn more at supermobile.com.

Speaker 4 Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

Speaker 5 where you can see the sky.

Speaker 16 Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Speaker 29 With online programs that fit around deployments, training, and unpredictable schedules, AMU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you.

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Speaker 39 That's amu.apus.edu slash military.

Speaker 45 Picture this.

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Speaker 1 love.

Speaker 8 Do I like eavesdropping on Joe Rogan's conversations?

Speaker 60 I do.

Speaker 45 That's why I listen to his show.

Speaker 54 But there are times when the conversational mode doesn't work.

Speaker 22 And when you have RFK Jr.

Speaker 8 on, that's definitely one of those times.

Speaker 54 So let's start from the beginning and redo the RFK Jr. conversation, only this time with an eye to all the things that a conversation between friends does not cover.

Speaker 78 Okay, Kennedy now elaborates on his theory of the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Speaker 45 What caused all those bacterial infections that he believes were the real source of all those millions of deaths?

Speaker 69 You know, I read an article recently, and you can look up these articles pretty easily.

Speaker 70 But

Speaker 69 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.

Speaker 54 What should the interviewer do in this moment?

Speaker 22 Or at least before letting this kind of thing go out into the world?

Speaker 8 Well, since this is a pretty dramatic claim, they should figure out what Kennedy is referring to.

Speaker 54 What are these articles that led him to such a radical reinterpretation of one of the most famous viral epidemics in history?

Speaker 58 It turns out, finding them is not that hard.

Speaker 32 It took me five minutes on Google and two phone calls.

Speaker 78 The first article I found is by Kevin Berry, an attorney based out of Syosset on Long Island, who wrote a two-part series for VaccineImpact.com in 2018 called, Did a Military Experimental Vaccine in 1918 Kill 50 to 100 Million People Blamed a Spanish Flu?

Speaker 25 I was listening to RFK's appearance on Joe Rogan, and they have that moment when they start talking about the 1918

Speaker 25 flu, which is super fascinating.

Speaker 42 And

Speaker 77 RFK says, well, in fact, I've got the quote.

Speaker 10 So he says, you know, well, you know, well, the Spanish flu was not a virus.

Speaker 15 It was, he says, even Fauci now acknowledges that.

Speaker 20 But then he says,

Speaker 10 and you know, I read an article recently, and you can look at these articles pretty easily.

Speaker 42 The article that I read made a very strong case, the illness came from testing a new vaccine in Kansas at a military base in Kansas.

Speaker 83 Is that your article he's referring to?

Speaker 1 I'm not sure.

Speaker 95 It probably, as far as I know, that

Speaker 95 I wrote this in 2018

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 92 I circulated it to my friends and Bobby would have been on the list.

Speaker 43 Barry's article focuses on a trial for an experimental meningitis vaccine run by Dr.

Speaker 47 Frederick Gates, a first lieutenant in the Army's Medical Corps during the First World War, serving at Fort Riley, Kansas.

Speaker 92 That antimeningitis

Speaker 96 study that they published came out and

Speaker 96 that started me down the path of digging into it.

Speaker 63 Barry is convinced that the meningitis vaccine caused the Spanish flu, and that every scientist who has ever studied the 1918 pandemic has just missed this.

Speaker 58 I asked him what role, if any, he thought the influenza virus played in the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Speaker 73 Not a role that was a killer.

Speaker 96 I think the killer was the bacterial meningitis.

Speaker 95 a lot of the conventional literature calls it a secondary infection.

Speaker 66 Oh, right.

Speaker 74 Remember the Fauci paper that Rogan Googled and misunderstood?

Speaker 73 Barry read it, too.

Speaker 95 But like, if you have the sniffles and a bullet goes through your head, did the sniffles kill you?

Speaker 96 Or did the thing that ripped apart your lungs, right?

Speaker 51 This is source number one.

Speaker 45 Source number two, as far as I can tell, it's a chiropractor from Melbourne, Florida named Sal Martingano, who wrote in his blog that this same rogue meningitis vaccine vaccine somehow got sent around the world in 1918, and then the whole thing was covered up by the pharmaceutical industry.

Speaker 86 You know, they twisted it and turned it around, but the bottom line was they killed, they did, they just killed half the population.

Speaker 86 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.

Speaker 20 So the conventional line about 1918 is that it was an H1N1 virus.

Speaker 71 And we have

Speaker 71 we

Speaker 10 I'm curious about what, so and we, we, we've isolated this virus from people who died in the pandemic.

Speaker 15 What role do you think that virus was playing in what happened in 1918?

Speaker 1 Probably nothing.

Speaker 1 Um, the detailed reports on what was actually found

Speaker 1 are buried. This is like the Kennedy files, you know, you try to find them.
Good luck on that.

Speaker 86 You're not going to find it.

Speaker 55 If If a friend tells you in private conversation that they have a nutty idea about the 1918 Spanish flu, maybe it's okay just to nod and smile.

Speaker 47 Because a friend is a friend, and we all have to tolerate the eccentricities of those closest to us.

Speaker 43 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,

Speaker 54 Hold on, where are you getting this whole Kansas theory from?

Speaker 43 Because the way that RFK Jr.

Speaker 55 answers that question will tell us a lot about the way his mind works.

Speaker 35 And we're all very interested in the way his mind works.

Speaker 54 And then, when he tells you, you might just want to say something like, just so we're clear, Bobby,

Speaker 62 we have a century of biomedical science on one side of this question. And we have Kevin from Long Island and Sal from South Florida on the other.

Speaker 58 And you're going with Kevin and Sal?

Speaker 46 But Joe Rogan doesn't come close.

Speaker 15 He just rolls over in the middle of the road like a giant, tattooed, tightly muscled possum.

Speaker 1 Joe,

Speaker 68 you're breaking my heart.

Speaker 54 When I was on my book tour for Revenge of the Tipping Point, I did an event at a theater in downtown San Diego.

Speaker 82 My interviewer was a guy named Michael Gervais.

Speaker 74 He's a psychologist who works a lot with elite athletes.

Speaker 45 He writes books.

Speaker 12 Nice guy.

Speaker 55 The interview began much like the dozens of other interviews I did on my book tour.

Speaker 97 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?

Speaker 90 Oh, I'm an optimist.

Speaker 27 I come from

Speaker 30 Glabbles are optimists.

Speaker 90 My mom, I was talking to my mom.

Speaker 94 My mom is 93

Speaker 7 and she just turned 93.

Speaker 98 I was talking to her, and it was her birthday, and she just, she's twin, she was talking to her.

Speaker 76 So she just called her twin sister, who lives in Jamaica, and she said to me,

Speaker 75 she was a little emotional, which is rare for Gladwell's also not terribly emotional.

Speaker 88 And she said to me, you know,

Speaker 90 I look back on my life and I cannot believe how improbable it was.

Speaker 62 She was born in like a

Speaker 10 house that was probably a third the size of this, a quarter the size of this stage, with no electricity or running water in the middle of Jamaica.

Speaker 88 And she ended up,

Speaker 42 you know, living this wonderful life.

Speaker 94 And she's like, when I was born in, she said to me, when I was born in Jamaica in the early 1930s, twins rarely survived.

Speaker 43 So that, even that I survived was a miracle.

Speaker 51 Then came this.

Speaker 43 And you have parents who think of their lives as a gift.

Speaker 76 My parents have also,

Speaker 99 my dad is now dead, but deeply religious, in I think the best possible way, and think of their lives as a gift from God.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 56 when you grow up with that, it is very, very hard

Speaker 99 not to participate in that spirit.

Speaker 75 Well, I'm getting a little emotional, Todd.

Speaker 94 Yeah. I'm in danger.

Speaker 64 When I talk about my father, I start crying.

Speaker 76 So.

Speaker 83 Yeah.

Speaker 10 What is that about?

Speaker 36 I don't know, he was.

Speaker 71 I'm sorry.

Speaker 80 I'd encourage you to open it wide open.

Speaker 8 There I was, on stage in front of hundreds of people, perfectly happy.

Speaker 55 Then my dad came up, and all of a sudden I became overwhelmed.

Speaker 8 And I was embarrassed.

Speaker 55 It wasn't what I intended.

Speaker 52 I wasn't there to bear my soul.

Speaker 55 Didn't I just say ten seconds before that the Gladwells are not emotional people?

Speaker 22 I want to move on, but Gervais won't let me.

Speaker 58 So off we go in an entirely new direction.

Speaker 10 I mean, I do cry every time.

Speaker 57 He's been

Speaker 57 gone five years.

Speaker 81 And

Speaker 27 a friend of mine said,

Speaker 98 two friends of mine said two very beautiful things that I've always remembered.

Speaker 65 One was

Speaker 76 a friend of mine who was writing something about his father, and he said,

Speaker 100 my father died 20 years ago today.

Speaker 100 I know him better today.

Speaker 70 than I did back then.

Speaker 83 And I think about that

Speaker 96 nearly every day,

Speaker 100 because I think I know him better now.

Speaker 100 And another thing a friend of mine said in trying to console me

Speaker 37 was that grief is the way

Speaker 34 we keep someone alive.

Speaker 98 And it's a gift, in other words.

Speaker 100 And I think that's, I can't,

Speaker 57 I think I continue to grieve because I can.

Speaker 90 I can't let it go.

Speaker 54 Subjects come to interviews with pre-rehearsed narratives, stories that have been told so many times that the ruts on the road have become deep and narrow.

Speaker 3 In a conversation, our partner gives us the freedom to follow the familiar path.

Speaker 22 They encourage and support with nods and smiles.

Speaker 54 But a performance is different. What the audience, the third party, demands and deserves is something more.

Speaker 45 A departure.

Speaker 74 I have a friend who's a screenwriter who always says the job of the storyteller is to defy the audience's expectations.

Speaker 60 That's absolutely right.

Speaker 54 To take the audience somewhere they didn't know they were going.

Speaker 58 And that's what Gervais was doing when he interrupted me.

Speaker 97 So what did your dad teach you?

Speaker 58 I don't think he had that question in mind when he prepared for the interview.

Speaker 90 He was

Speaker 71 an Englishman

Speaker 34 with a big bushy beard.

Speaker 5 And he was

Speaker 7 such a stereotypical Englishman.

Speaker 98 He was...

Speaker 98 He liked going for long walks in the rain with dogs.

Speaker 75 He was

Speaker 42 a gardener.

Speaker 10 That's what he loved to do above all else.

Speaker 59 He only ever cried when he was reading Dickens to his children

Speaker 81 he

Speaker 100 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

Speaker 7 he was a

Speaker 76 He was completely indifferent to what the world thought He did just did whatever he wanted to do, which was I thought as a kid was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen.

Speaker 97 You know that everyone in this room right now goes, oh, that's where he got it from.

Speaker 97 Yeah, he was. Yeah, so that's that's the big gift that he passed you.

Speaker 87 There you go.

Speaker 57 That's how it's done.

Speaker 3 Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence, and Ben Dadaf Haffrey.

Speaker 33 Our editor is Karen Shikurchi.

Speaker 74 Fact-checking by Kate Furbee.

Speaker 52 Original scoring by Luis Guerra, Jake Korski, and Ben Dadaf Haffrey.

Speaker 7 Mixing and mastering on this episode by Jake Korski.

Speaker 32 Production support from Luke Lamond.

Speaker 8 Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Speaker 51 Special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Hefe, Greta Cohn.

Speaker 87 I'm Malcolm Glapeau.

Speaker 47 Where have you gone, Joe Rogan?

Speaker 45 Experience

Speaker 45 Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Speaker 90 Woo-hoo-hoo.

Speaker 57 What's that you say, Mr. Kennedy?

Speaker 47 Jolton Joe has left and gone away.

Speaker 90 Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

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Speaker 39 That's amu.apus.edu slash military.

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