Revisionist History - The Joe Rogan Intervention

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

The world's most famous interviewer has a problem with interviewing. Revisionist History is here to help. Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.  Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkinSubscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Jr. before he became U.S. 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 hour 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 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. 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. 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, Well, not the Spanish flu, though, right? Which is a good question. The 1918 Spanish flu was one of the most devastating pandemics in history. 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.

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 and even Fauci now acknowledges that and they you know there's there's good evidence that the Spanish flu there's there, you know, 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 1918 was not caused by influenza. Two, Anthony Fauci, long time head of the National Institute of Infectious Disease at NIH, and a stoutest of all defenders of the medical science orthodoxy, agrees with me

on this. And three, the real cause of the 1918 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 R.F.K. 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 19th century biologist Antoine Béchamp,

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 Rogan. This episode is devoted to the lost art of the interview 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 the scene. R.F.K. Jr. is a weightlifter himself. Barreled chest. Biceps like big chunks of hormone-free non-GMO ham. They're in the boxing ring, mano a mano.

There's a tantalizing scent of testosterone in the air. And Kennedy just talks about all the things he likes to talk about. Autism, vaccines, refrigerated trucks, the Hudson River. Then he gets to the 1918 flu. Full disclosure, the 1918 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 1918 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 1918 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 Tromso, then across the Norwegian Sea from Tromso to Langeben, 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 1918 flu virus talk. What are you saying that the Spanish flu was?

So Rogan asks his question about the 1918 flu. So far so good This is what an interviewer is supposed to do. What is the the documentation? the you know, I You said that Fauci has Wrote an article in 2008 and I that I'm pretty sure it's 2008, in which he acknowledged that it was not the flu that was killing those people. It was a bacteriological infection.

And a bacteriological infection, these days, you could 100% cure all of it with an antibiotic. 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 and pneumonia as cause of death and pandemic influenza implications. Yeah, that's challenging. Yeah, of 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. 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. A proposition has been advanced. Google has been summoned. The proposition has been verified. Oh my God, Mr. Virus himself, Tony Fauci, is peddling us 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 ever wasn't caused by a virus at all. It was caused by a runaway bacterial infection. Did you hear that sigh from Joe? There's always a moment on Joe Rogan where someone in the position of power really really bums 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 a 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. 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 a viral infection, 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 pneumonia 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 1918 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 1918.

He was doing the opposite. He was explaining how the virus did its damage. It's safe to say, isn't it? Kennedy does not understand the difference between a 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, R.F.K. Jr. 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 ends. 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 10 interviews each 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 what's much harder than conversation. But you know what'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 Meghan 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 curated 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 those thoughts? Why do you think that is? Do you think it's because of his race? That's sigh. 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, he's not gonna be given a title. And also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he's born.

What? And who is having that conversation with you? So, um... There is a conversa- hold up, hold up, stop right now. There's several, there's several conversations about it. There's a conversation with you? 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. Meghan 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 conversations.

Because they were 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. Markle has thus far presented an artfully constructed narrative of trivial grievances designed to turn her into Rapunzel

locked in a 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 Meghan wasn't able to get the Queen's people to schedule a Zoom to provide more details, so 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. There's so many examples of people saying my heart goes out to you. You did it with a little enthusiasm that probably wouldn't be recommended 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, seetile hand motions. And now I can never point at things diagonally. I can only point at things there and there, and then I see you have to divide that because that's where the spaceship is over there. That's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous. It's absurd. It's so crazy. It's deliberate 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?

She'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 Joe 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'd 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 you know, it was a great crowd, you know, so. Yeah, you got a little pumped up. Yeah, it got pumped up, exactly.

Yeah, 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 Loughenough and you realize, oh, this is a pattern. Here's Rogan doing an episode with Matt Walsh,

big figure in 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 progressives see racism around every corner. And at a key point in the conversation, Walsh says this. There was no one who lived on earth 100 years ago who we would not consider racist anywhere of any race.

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 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 you could talk about and think about. Why is that? You go back 500 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 500 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 were 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 Mount 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. Pete Slauson 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 that race is surreal.

And when Obama became president, those people became more emboldened. 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 Jr. interview. And so then we run into each other in Aspen. Just randomly. That was the weirdest moment because we were both staring at each other. Yeah. And then we almost did it like a full 360. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I noticed you walking. I'm like, that's, yeah, 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 eavesdropping 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 R.F.K. Jr. on, that's definitely one of those times. So let's start from the beginning and redo the R.F.K. Jr. 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 1918 influenza epidemic. What caused all those bacterial infections that he believes were the real source of all those millions of deaths?

You know, I read an article recently, and you can look up these articles pretty easily. 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 Siosset 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 as Spanish flu. I was listening to RFK's appearance on Joe Rogan and they have that moment when they started talking about the 1918 flu, which is super fascinating. And RFK says, well, in fact, I've got the quote. So he says, well, the Spanish flu was not a virus. It was, he says, even Fauci now acknowledges that.

But then he says, and you know I read an article recently, you can look these articles pretty easily. 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. Is that your article he's referring to? I'm not sure. Probably, as far as I know, I wrote this in 2018, 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 Dr. Frederick Gates, a First Lieutenant in the Army's Medical Corps during the First World War, serving at Fort Riley, Kansas. That anti-meningitis 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 1918 pandemic has just missed this. I asked him what role, if any, he thought the influenza virus played in the 1918 influenza

epidemic. Not a role that was a killer. virus played in the 1918 influenza epidemic? Not a role that was a killer. I think that the killer was the bacterial meningitis. You know, a lot of the conventional 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 goes through your head, did the sniffles kill you? What did the thing that ripped apart your lungs, right? This is source number one. 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 the same rogue meningitis vaccine somehow got sent around the world in 1918, and then the whole thing was covered up by the pharmaceutical industry. You know, they twisted it 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 1918 is that it was an H1N1 virus.

Not true. And 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 1918? was playing in what happened in 1918? Probably nothing. The detailed reports on what was actually found are buried. This is like the Kennedy files, you know, you try to find them, 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 1918 Spanish flu, maybe it's okay just to nod and smile. 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 RFK Jr. 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,

very interested in the way his mind works. And then when he tells you, you might just wanna 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 Sal from South Florida on the other, and you're going with Kevin and Sal?

But Joe Rogan doesn't come close. He just rolls over in the middle of the road like a giant, tattooed, tightly muscled possum. 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, 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 pessimistic lens? Oh, I'm an optimist. I come from, globals are optimists. My mom, I was talking to my mom, my mom is 93 and she just turned 93. I was talking to her and it was her is 93, and she just turned 93, and I was talking to her,

and it was her birthday, and she's twin, she's talking to her, 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, gladwell's also not terribly emotional, 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 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 in the early 1930s, twins rarely survived. So that, even that I survived was a miracle. Then came this. And her parents who think of their lives as a, my parents are also, 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. And when you grow up with that, it is very, very hard to not, not to participate in that spirit. Well, I'm getting a little emotional talking about it. I'm in danger. When I talk about my father, I start crying.

So. Yeah, what is that about? Uh. I don't know, he was... I'm sorry. At the bit. 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 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 10 seconds before that the gladwells are not emotional people? I want to move on, but Gervais won't let me. So off we go in an entirely new direction.

me. So off we go in an entirely new direction. I mean, I do cry every time. 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, because I think I know I'm 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. And it's a gift, in other words. And it's a gift, in other words. Yeah. And I think that's, I can't, I think I continue to grieve because I can. I can't let it go. 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.

In a conversation, our partner gives us the freedom to follow the familiar path. They encourage and support with nods and smiles. But a performance is different. What 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, uh... So he was an Englishman with a big bushy beard. And he was such a stereotypical Englishman.

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

He just did whatever he wanted to do, which 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. Yeah, so that's the big gift that he passed you. There you go. That's how it's done. Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Byrd Lawrence, and Ben Nadav Haferi. Our editor is Karen Shikurji. Fact-checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, Jake Gorski, and Ben Nadav Haferi.

Mixing and mastering on this episode by Jake Gorski. Production support from Luc Lamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Jefe Greta Kohn. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Where have you gone, Joe Rogan Experience? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What's that you say, Mr. Kennedy? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away.

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