The Joe Rogan Intervention

Summary

Revisionist History: The Joe Rogan Intervention – A Detailed Summary

Introduction

In the April 24, 2025 episode of Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell delves into the intricacies of modern interviewing techniques by dissecting a particularly contentious episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Titled "The Joe Rogan Intervention," this episode features former Attorney General and environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. engaging in a discussion with Joe Rogan. Gladwell uses this episode as a case study to explore the "lost art of the interview," emphasizing the critical role of effective questioning in uncovering the truth and combating misinformation.

The RFK Jr. Interview: Missteps and Misconceptions

The core of the episode revolves around Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s controversial claims during his interview with Joe Rogan about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. At the 1:52 mark, RFK Jr. asserts:

“The Spanish flu was not a virus... there's very, very strong evidence the Spanish flu... was vaccine-induced flu. The deaths were vaccine-induced.”
[01:52]

This bold claim challenges the established scientific consensus that the 1918 pandemic was caused by the H1N1 influenza virus. RFK Jr. further bolsters his argument by referencing a 2008 article he claims was authored by Anthony Fauci, suggesting the pandemic's true cause was a population-wide reaction to a vaccine rather than the virus itself.

However, Malcolm Gladwell quickly identifies a critical flaw in RFK Jr.'s interpretation of Fauci's work:

“Fauci wasn't denying the role of the virus in 1918. He was explaining how the virus did its damage.”
[12:03]

Gladwell clarifies that Fauci's research indicates that while the influenza virus initiated the pandemic, secondary bacterial pneumonia was the primary cause of death, a common complication in viral infections that compromise the immune system.

Malcolm’s Critique: Unpacking the Misunderstanding

Gladwell critiques both RFK Jr.'s misinterpretation of Fauci's findings and Rogan's handling of the conversation. At [12:43], he states:

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

This misunderstanding underscores a significant lapse in RFK Jr.'s ability to accurately convey complex medical information. Moreover, Rogan's response—or lack thereof—to RFK Jr.'s claims exemplifies what Gladwell perceives as a failure in journalistic rigor:

“Rogan chooses to have the kind of conversation that you would have with a close friend... To help us sustain the pretense that what we did wasn't stupid at all.”
[21:05]

By not challenging RFK Jr.'s assertions, Rogan allows the propagation of unfounded theories, contributing to public misinformation.

The Lost Art of Interviewing: A Comparative Analysis

Gladwell contrasts Rogan's conversational style with the more probing techniques employed by legendary interviewers like Oprah Winfrey. He argues that effective interviewing is an art that involves:

1. Preparation: Understanding the subject matter deeply to ask informed questions.
2. Probing: Delving deeper into statements to uncover underlying truths or inconsistencies.
3. Challenging: Confronting misinformation directly to clarify and correct the narrative.

At [16:36], Gladwell reflects on Oprah's mastery by referencing her interview with Meghan Markle:

“Oprah's eyes light up... she climbs inside your head and starts to direct traffic.”
[16:36]

This ability to navigate sensitive topics and elicit genuine responses stands in stark contrast to Rogan's more laissez-faire approach, where difficult topics may receive insufficient scrutiny.

Case Studies: Elon Musk and Matt Walsh

Gladwell further illustrates his points by analyzing other interviews conducted by Rogan. For instance, his conversation with Elon Musk following an event where Musk was perceived to give a Nazi salute resulted in ambiguous and unsatisfactory explanations:

“Elon, we all know you're a genius... But why would you do something so perfectly designed to be misunderstood?”
[19:23]

Similarly, in an interview with Matt Walsh discussing racism and historical perspectives, Rogan fails to challenge Walsh's sweeping generalizations:

“Slavery is fundamentally wrong... Why is that?”
[22:03]

In both instances, Gladwell emphasizes that Rogan's style allows guests to present unfettered narratives without sufficient critical examination, thereby missing opportunities to correct misconceptions and inform the audience accurately.

The Importance of Critical Interviewing

Through these analyses, Gladwell underscores the pressing need for interviewers to adopt more rigorous and investigative techniques. The stakes are high—misinformation can shape public perception, influence behaviors, and even affect policy decisions. Effective interviewing is not merely about facilitating conversation but about ensuring that dialogues contribute constructively to societal understanding.

Conclusion

Revisionist History's exploration of "The Joe Rogan Intervention" serves as a compelling examination of contemporary interviewing practices. Malcolm Gladwell advocates for a return to more disciplined and inquisitive interviewing methods, highlighting the responsibilities of both the interviewer and the audience in discerning truth from misinformation. By contrasting Rogan's conversational approach with Oprah's incisive techniques, Gladwell calls for a reassessment of how media personalities engage with complex and potentially misleading topics. This episode not only critiques existing interview paradigms but also champions the necessity for intellectual rigor in public discourse.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “The Spanish flu was not a virus... the deaths were vaccine-induced.”
  [01:52]

• Malcolm Gladwell: “Fauci wasn't denying the role of the virus in 1918. He was explaining how the virus did its damage.”
  [12:03]

• Malcolm Gladwell: “Rogan chooses to have the kind of conversation that you would have with a close friend...”
  [21:05]

• Malcolm Gladwell: “Oprah's eyes light up... she climbs inside your head and starts to direct traffic.”
  [16:36]

• Malcolm Gladwell: “Joe, you're breaking my heart...”
  [24:53]

Final Thoughts

This episode of Revisionist History not only sheds light on the limitations of certain modern interview styles but also serves as a call to action for media practitioners to embrace more responsible and thorough interviewing techniques. By doing so, the integrity of public discourse can be upheld, fostering a more informed and critically engaged society.

Transcript

[Joe Rogan]

Foreign.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Member FDIC Copyright 2025 JP Morgan Chase.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 1 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.

[Joe Rogan]

Spanish flu though, right?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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's, 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 1918 was not caused by influenza. 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. And three, the real cause of, 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 RFK Jr. He says crazy things all the time. That's what our last episode was all about. It's his movie. He's a disciple of the obscure French 19th century biologist Antoine Bishop, 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 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. I tell you all this just so you can imagine the scene. RFK Jr. Is a weightlifter himself. Barrel 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

What are you saying that the Spanish flu was.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

So Rogan asks his question about the 1918 flu. So far, so good. This is what an interviewer is supposed to do.

[Joe Rogan]

What is the documentation? You said that Fauci has publicly admitted.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That it's not a flu.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Fauci wrote an article in 2008 and 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.

[Joe Rogan]

This is important to cover, Right? So let's see if we can find this. Predominant role of bacterial pneumonia as cause of death and 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. The majority of Deaths from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory tract bacteria.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 to B.S. 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 a 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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

[Joe Rogan]

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.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that's a key point. These are not bacterial pneumonias that would have occurred on their own. They aren't. They are. They are occurring only because of the heightened susceptibility of the host having had the viral pneumonia to begin with.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

The Fauci study that Rogin googles and reads during the Kennedy interview is 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.

[Joe Rogan]

I think that's right.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 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?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

What are those thoughts?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Why do you think that is?

[Joe Rogan]

Do you think it's because of his race?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

That sigh. And I know that's a loaded question, but. But I can give you an honest answer in those months when I was.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Pregnant, all around this same time. So we have in tandem, the conversation of he won't be given security.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

He's not gonna be given a title.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

What.

[Joe Rogan]

And who.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Who is having that conversation with you?

[Joe Rogan]

So there is a conversa. Hold up, hold up.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's several. There are several conversations.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

There's a conversation with you, with Harry.

[Joe Rogan]

About how dark your baby is going.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

To be potentially, and what that would mean or look like.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

To see those as Compartmentalized conversations.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

So there was a concern that if he were to 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 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 Megan 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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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. You get it with a little enthusiasm. That probably wouldn't be recommended with hindsight. Yes, but it 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, publicly doing secret Nazi sea Kyle hand motions. And now I can never point at things diagonally. I can only point at things there and there. And then I say, you have to divide that. Yeah. 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.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 asked 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 with 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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 it was a great crowd. Yeah, you got a little pumped up. Yeah, it got pumped up.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Exactly.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. That's all it is, obviously. Obviously. Obviously.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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? 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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. 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. 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. Like, why is that?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 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.

[Joe Rogan]

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

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

And so then we run into each other in Aspen. Just random.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

That was the weirdest moment because we were both staring at each other.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

And then we almost did it, like a full 360.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I noticed you walking. I'm like, that's. Yeah, it is. So I said, hey, what's up?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

It was just gonna be the two of them in the room. The rest of us weren't invited.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You know, when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace. Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner or just need a little extra one on one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance, no problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80. When you go to talkspace.com match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com save $80 with code [e-mail].

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 RFK Jr. On, that's definitely one of those times. 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. 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 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 as Spanish Flu? I was listening to RFK's appearance on Joe Rogan and they have that moment when they start talking about the 1918 flu, which is super fascinating. And RFK says, well, in fact, I've got the quote. So he says, you know, well, you know, well, the Spanish flu is not a virus. It was. He says even Fauci now acknowledges that. But then he says, and you know, I read an article recently and 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?

[Joe Rogan]

I'm not sure. It probably, as far as I know that I wrote this in 2018 and I circulated it to my friends and Bobby would have been on the list.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

That anti meningitis study that they published came out, and that started me down the path of digging into it.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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.

[Joe Rogan]

Not a role. That was a killer. But I think that the killer was the bacterial meningitis. A lot of the conventional literature calls it a secondary infection.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Oh, right. Remember the Fauci paper that Rogan googled and misunderstood? Barry read it, too.

[Joe Rogan]

But, like, if you have the sniffles and a bullet goes through your head, did the sniffles kill you, or did the thing that ripped apart your lungs?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

Right. This is source number one, source number two. As far as I can tell, it's a chiropractor from Melbourne, Florida, named Sal Martignano, who wrote in his blog that this same rogue meningitis vaccine somehow got sent around the world in 1918. And then the whole thing was covered up by the pharmaceutical industry.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, they twisted it and turned it around, but the bottom line was they killed.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

They did. They just killed half the population.

[Joe Rogan]

I did deep dives with this stuff to try to, you know, put it.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

In perspective, but there's no way to.

[Joe Rogan]

Put this in perspective. It was just downright ugly.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

So the conventional line about 1918 is that it was an H1N1 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 1918? Probably nothing. The detailed reports on what was actually found are buried.

[Joe Rogan]

This is like the Kennedy files. You try to find them. Good luck on that.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 at 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.

[Joe Rogan]

The original question, but when you think about the future, do you see it through an optimistic, a cynical or a pessimistic lens?

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

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 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 GL'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 house, a quarter the size of this stage with no electricity or running water in the middle of Jamaica. And she ended up, you know, living this wonderful life. And. 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 you have parents who think of their lives as a. My parents have 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 to. Not to participate in that spirit. Well, I'm getting a little emotional. 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 10 seconds before that the glabels are not emotional people? I want to move on, but Gervais 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 20 years ago today. I know him better today than I did back then. And I think about that nearly every day. And I. 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. And it's a gift, in other words. Yeah. And I think that's. I can't. I think. 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. 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 was an Englishman with a big bushy 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. He only ever cried when he was reading Dickens to his children. He. 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 did, just did whatever he wanted to do, which was I thought as a kid was the most magnificent thing I had ever seen. Well, you, you know that you, everyone in this room right now, Cu. 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 revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence and Ben Nadaf Halfrey. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, Jake Gorski and Ben Nedaff Haffrey. Mixing and mastering on this episode by Jake Gorski. Production support from Luke Lamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and El Jefe. Greta Cohn I'm Malcolm Glabo. Where have you gone, Joe Rogan? Experience Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Woohoo. What's that you say, Mr. Kennedy? Jolt. And Joe has left and gone away. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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