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.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
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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
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 there's good evidence that the Spanish flu, there's not a definitive but very, very strong evidence. The Spanish flu was vaccine-induced flu. The deaths were vaccine-induced.
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Chapter 2: How does Joe Rogan's interviewing style differ?
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 Longyearbyen, 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 documentation? Well, you know... You said that Fauci has publicly admitted that it's not a flu.
Fauci wrote an article in 2008, and I'm pretty sure it was 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 bacterial pneumonia as cause of death in pandemic influenza implications. 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.
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Chapter 3: What controversial claims did RFK Jr. make?
Yeah. Obviously. Obviously.
But it's so strange where people want to think that you are openly, publicly doing secret Nazi, secret hand motions.
And now I can never point at things diagonally. I can only point at things there and there. Yeah. And then you have to divide that because that's where the spaceship is over there. It'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 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 it was a great crowd. Yeah, you got a little pumped up.
Yeah, I 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 long enough 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?
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Chapter 4: How did the Spanish flu relate to modern pandemics?
Probably nothing. The detailed reports on what was actually found are buried. This is like the Kennedy files. 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, 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 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 a pessimistic lens?
Oh, I'm an optimist. I come from, glabels are optimists.
My mom, I was talking to my mom. My mom is 93. And she just turned 93. And I was talking to her. And it was her birthday. And she just, she's a twin. She was 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.
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