Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: I was taking a road trip not long ago, listening
Speaker 2: to the Joe Rogan experience, as I like to do sometimes.
Speaker 2: It was an old episode he'd done with Robert F.
Speaker 2: Kennedy Junior, before he became US Secretary for Health and
Speaker 2: Human Services, the man responsible for running a massive medical
Speaker 2: science administration. By the way, I was once on Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2: It was a while back, and from my experience that day,
Speaker 2: I came up with a theory, which is that all
Speaker 2: the good stuff happens in any Rogan interview as you
Speaker 2: approach our three, when the guest has finally adapted to
Speaker 2: Rogan's particular seductive rhythms, and when all thoughts of the
Speaker 2: outside world have evaporated. If you listen to Rogan, in
Speaker 2: other words, you have to commit. And so on that
Speaker 2: car ride I did, and at the one hour and
Speaker 2: fifty two minutes mark, right on schedule, came in exchange
Speaker 2: which I found so fascinating, so peculiar, so downright weird,
Speaker 2: that I pulled my car over to the side of
Speaker 2: the road and said to myself, oh man, RFK was
Speaker 2: talking about measles, and he essentially tells Rogan the kids
Speaker 2: who die for measles don't die because of measles. They
Speaker 2: die because they're malnourished.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's hard for a disease to kill
Speaker 3: a healthy person. It's hard for an infectious disease to
Speaker 3: kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system.
Speaker 2: And then Rogan says evidence, well, not.
Speaker 4: The Spanish flu though, right, which.
Speaker 1: Is a good question.
Speaker 2: The nineteen eighteen Spanish flu was one of the most
Speaker 2: devastating pandemics in history. It killed as many as one
Speaker 2: hundred million people, and an overwhelming number of its victims
Speaker 2: were healthy and relatively young adults, in sharp contrast to
Speaker 2: the normal influenza mortality pattern on preying on the old
Speaker 2: in the infirm Rogan is asking, if it's so hard
Speaker 2: for a disease to kill a healthy person, then how
Speaker 2: do you explain the most devastating viral epidemic of all time?
Speaker 3: And Kennedy says, well, the Spanish flu was not a virus. Oh,
Speaker 3: and even Fauci now acknowledges that, and they you know,
Speaker 3: there's there's good evidence that the Spanish flu. There's there is,
Speaker 3: you know, not not a definitive, but very very strong
Speaker 3: evidence the Spanish flu was vaccine induced flu the deaths
Speaker 3: were vaccine induced.
Speaker 2: Three bombshells all in a row. One the influenza epidemic
Speaker 2: of nineteen eighteen was not caused by influenza. Two Anthony
Speaker 2: Fauci longtime had the National Institute of Infectious Disease at
Speaker 2: NAH and established. Of all defenders of the medical science
Speaker 2: orthodoxy agrees with me on this and three the real
Speaker 2: cause of the nineteen eighteen pandemic was a population wide
Speaker 2: reaction to a vaccine. I mean, my name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 2: and misunderstood. I already knew this about RFK JR. He
Speaker 2: says crazy things all the time. That's what our last
Speaker 2: episode was all about. It's his m o. He's a
Speaker 2: disciple of the obscure French nineteenth century biologist Antoine Beauchamp,
Speaker 2: whose claim to fame is that he completely misunderstood the
Speaker 2: foundational idea in modern medical science. I didn't pull over
Speaker 2: because of RFK JR. I pulled over because of Joe Rocn.
Speaker 2: This episode is devoted to the lost art of the interviewer,
Speaker 2: because some of us apparently have forgotten how to ask questions.
Speaker 2: When I went on Joe Rogan, it was before he
Speaker 2: had moved to Austin. He still lived in southern California
Speaker 2: and operated out of what seemed like an old airplane
Speaker 2: hangar somewhere deep in the Los Angeles suburbs. I can't
Speaker 2: tell you where exactly because I had to sign an NDA,
Speaker 2: but it was a vast open structure full of weights,
Speaker 2: monster trucks, dogs, and exceedingly fit young men clutching energy drinks.
Speaker 2: The studio was in the middle of the room, inside
Speaker 2: what looked like a repurposed boxing ring. It was so
Speaker 2: much fun that if Rogan's people want to be back,
Speaker 2: I would jump on a plane this evening, packing only
Speaker 2: a muscle shirt and a case of Red Bull to
Speaker 2: bring as a housewarming gift. I tell you all this
Speaker 2: just so you can imagine a scene. RFK Junior is
Speaker 2: a weightlifter himself, barrel chest, biceps like big chunks of
Speaker 2: hormone free non GMO ham boxing ring mano Amano. There's
Speaker 2: a tantalizing scent of testosterone in the air, and Kennedy
Speaker 2: just talks about all the things he likes to talk about, bautism, vaccines,
Speaker 2: refrigerated trucks the Hudson River. Then he gets to the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighteen flu full disclosure. The nineteen eighteen flu is
Speaker 2: one of my very favorite subjects. Many many years ago,
Speaker 2: I heard that a scientist had discovered that they were
Speaker 2: victims of the nineteen eighteen flu buried deep in a
Speaker 2: cemetery in a small town in Norway, high above the
Speaker 2: Arctic circle. So there was a chance that they had
Speaker 2: been frozen ever since, meaning they could be dug up
Speaker 2: and intact samples of the nineteen eighteen virus could be extracted.
Speaker 2: This fact made me so deliriously happy that I convinced
Speaker 2: my editors at the New Yorker to fly me to Norway,
Speaker 2: New York to Oslo, Oslo to Trompso, then across the
Speaker 2: Norwegian Sea from trumps So delng you're bin, just so
Speaker 2: I could walk across the tundra and see the cemetery,
Speaker 2: which I did, although I didn't linger because the guy
Speaker 2: at my hotel told me to watch out for polar bears.
Speaker 2: My point is I'm down for any nineteen eighteen flu
Speaker 2: virus talk.
Speaker 4: What are you saying that the Spanish flu was so?
Speaker 2: Rogan asks his question about the nineteen eighteen flu. So far,
Speaker 2: so good. This is what an interviewer is supposed to do.
Speaker 5: What is the documentation the you know I you said
Speaker 5: that Fauci HASGIVAUGI.
Speaker 3: Wrote an article in two thousand and eight and that
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure it's two thousand and eight in which
Speaker 3: he acknowledged that it was not the flu that was
Speaker 3: killing those people, it was a back geological infection and
Speaker 3: a back geological infection. These days, you could one hundred
Speaker 3: percent you're all of it with an.
Speaker 2: The article in question is immediately googled.
Speaker 5: This is important to cover, right, So let's see if
Speaker 5: we can find this predominant role of bacteria pneumonia has
Speaker 5: caused death in pandemic influenza implication Yeah, of a pandemic
Speaker 5: influenza preparedness. So what this is saying is that bacterial
Speaker 5: pneumonia was the cause of death.
Speaker 4: What's three? What he says?
Speaker 5: The results conclusions The majority of deaths from the nineteen
Speaker 5: eighteen nineteen nineteen influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary
Speaker 5: bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory tract bacteria.
Speaker 2: A proposition has been advanced. Google has been summoned, the
Speaker 2: proposition has been verified. Oh my god, mister virus himself,
Speaker 2: Tony Fauci is peddling this a line of bs. Fauci
Speaker 2: goes on and on about viruses, but then you actually
Speaker 2: read one of his papers and he admits the biggest
Speaker 2: viral pandemic wasn't caused by a virus at all. It
Speaker 2: was caused by a runaway bacterial infection. Did you hear
Speaker 2: that sigh from Joe becauseau was a moment on Joe
Speaker 2: Rogan where someone in a position of power really really
Speaker 2: bumps Joe out. But wait, did Fauci actually say that?
Speaker 2: When I heard Rogan read that conclusion, the word that
Speaker 2: jumped out for me was secondary. One of the things
Speaker 2: that a respiratory virus, like the flu or covid for
Speaker 2: that matter, does is attack the cells that line the
Speaker 2: walls of your lungs. The cells die, they can become leaky,
Speaker 2: your lungs fill with fluid. In severe cases, you come
Speaker 2: down with viral pneumonia, and in that state you often
Speaker 2: get hit by a second round of pneumonia, this one
Speaker 2: caused by a bacteria. That's the secondary infection which follows
Speaker 2: as result of the primary infection.
Speaker 6: An analogy that I've used when I've been trying to
Speaker 6: talk about this phenomenon is trauma.
Speaker 2: This is Benjamin Singer, a pulmonary specialist at Northwestern University.
Speaker 6: So, a motor vehicle trauma that occurs as a primary event, right,
Speaker 6: it happens many, many times a day. And in severe trauma,
Speaker 6: you have hemorrhage, you have blood loss that can become
Speaker 6: life threatening. Patients will go to the operating room to
Speaker 6: try to prevent the hemorrhage from causing death. But in
Speaker 6: some cases patients, unfortunately, if the trauma is severe enough,
Speaker 6: do die from hemorrhage. But you wouldn't say that there
Speaker 6: is a problem with hemorrhage just befalling people. Right. It
Speaker 6: ultimately was the car crash. It was the trauma that
Speaker 6: was the initial cause.
Speaker 2: Singer published a study not long ago showing that in
Speaker 2: many COVID victims, it was that second bacterial infection that
Speaker 2: killed them. In the absence of viral infection. Would what
Speaker 2: would your odds of having a bacterial pneumonia be?
Speaker 1: Would they be?
Speaker 2: I mean, are you getting the bacterial pneumonia in large
Speaker 2: part because your body is so weakened by the viral attack.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's a key point. These are not bacterial pneumonias
Speaker 6: that would have occurred on their own.
Speaker 7: They aren't.
Speaker 6: They are occurring only because of the heightened susceptibility of
Speaker 6: the host having had the viral numoonia.
Speaker 1: To begin with.
Speaker 2: The Fauci study that Rogan googles and reads during the
Speaker 2: Kennedy interview involved looking at tissue samples from the lungs
Speaker 2: of people who had died during the Spanish flu, and
Speaker 2: what Fauci found was exactly what Singer found with COVID,
Speaker 2: that the virus so weakened the lungs of people in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighteen that they were vulnerable to a second fatal
Speaker 2: round of bacterial pneumonia. Kennedy somehow read that paper and
Speaker 2: completely missed its point. Fauci wasn't denying the role of
Speaker 2: the virus in nineteen eighteen. He was doing the opposite.
Speaker 2: He was explaining how the viaris did its damage. It's
Speaker 2: safe to say, isn't it. Kennedy does not understand the
Speaker 2: difference between of primary and a secondary infection.
Speaker 6: I think that's right.
Speaker 2: Rogan is a very smart guy. He's one of the
Speaker 2: biggest podcasters in the world. Rogan does mixed martial arts
Speaker 2: for fun. He's not afraid of anyone yet. RFK Junior
Speaker 2: goes on his show and says something so dumb that
Speaker 2: you couldn't get away with it in a high school
Speaker 2: biology class. And what did Rogan do? He just sighed
Speaker 2: and moved on. Joe, dude, what's wrong with you? The
Speaker 2: most natural form of human interaction is the conversation. Two
Speaker 2: people talking, unscripted, improvised. It ends when it is the
Speaker 2: roles of listener and talker are fluid. The endpoint can
Speaker 2: be any number of a million different things, consolation, admonishment, encouragement, seduction, joy.
Speaker 2: An interview is very different. It's two people talking with
Speaker 2: a purpose. One person asks questions of another with the
Speaker 2: intention of revealing something of consequence. Conversation is easy and natural.
Speaker 2: Interviewing is an acquired art. There are weeks where I
Speaker 2: might do ten interviews each an hour or more, with
Speaker 2: even more time devoted to preparation. I've been doing that
Speaker 2: my whole career, and only in the last five years
Speaker 2: or so do I think I've gotten any good at it.
Speaker 2: Interviewing is much much harder than conversation, but you know,
Speaker 2: it's even harder performance, the interview conducted for the benefit
Speaker 2: of someone else, an audience. This is what Oprah does
Speaker 2: better than anyone else. I recently rewatched Oprah's famous interview
Speaker 2: with Megan Markle, and oh man, that's a masterclass. You
Speaker 2: have an actress, that is, someone trained in the art
Speaker 2: of deceptive self presentation, who wants to air a carefully
Speaker 2: scripted grievance about her position as a royal princess, and
Speaker 2: the whole world intends to watch. The degree of difficulty
Speaker 2: on this one is through the roof. How do you
Speaker 2: get someone to leave behind their carefully created self. Oprah
Speaker 2: nails it.
Speaker 8: You certainly must have had some conversations with Harry about
Speaker 8: it and have your own suspicions as to why they
Speaker 8: didn't want to make Archie a prince.
Speaker 2: This is halfway in. Markle has revealed that the royal
Speaker 2: family is declining to give her firstborn son Archie, a title,
Speaker 2: and when she hears this, Oprah's eyes light up. I've
Speaker 2: been interviewed by Oprah before, and let me tell you,
Speaker 2: when she sees a moment coming, she climbs inside your
Speaker 2: head and starts to direct traffic.
Speaker 8: What are what are those thoughts. Why do you think
Speaker 8: that is? Do you think it's because of his race?
Speaker 1: That's sign And.
Speaker 8: I know that's a loaded question, but.
Speaker 9: But I can give you an honest answer.
Speaker 10: In those months when I was pregnant, all around this
Speaker 10: same time. So we have in tandem the conversation of
Speaker 10: he won't be given security, it's not going to be
Speaker 10: given a title, and also concerns and conversations about how
Speaker 10: dark his skin might be when he's born.
Speaker 4: What and.
Speaker 1: Who?
Speaker 8: Who is having that conversation.
Speaker 1: With you?
Speaker 8: So there is a conversation, can hold it?
Speaker 9: Hold up the several conversations.
Speaker 8: There's a conversation with you who with Harry about how
Speaker 8: dark your baby is going.
Speaker 9: To be potentially and what that would mean or look like.
Speaker 8: Ooh, And you're not going to tell me who had
Speaker 8: the conversation.
Speaker 9: I think that would be very damaging to them.
Speaker 2: Okay, Megan gets evasive. She says Harry was the one
Speaker 2: in those conversations, not her.
Speaker 10: It was really hard to be able to see those
Speaker 10: as compartmentalized.
Speaker 8: We're concerned that if you were too brown that that
Speaker 8: would be a problem. Are you saying that.
Speaker 9: I wasn't able to follow up with why.
Speaker 2: It's that last comment, of course, that is the most telling.
Speaker 2: I wasn't able to follow up with why Michael has
Speaker 2: thus far presented an artfully constructed narrative of trivial grievances
Speaker 2: designed to turn her into a punzel locked in the
Speaker 2: lonely tower. But at that moment, Oprah gets her to
Speaker 2: give us a glimpse of something real. Somebody high up
Speaker 2: was worried that her child would be too brown, and
Speaker 2: Meghan wasn't able to follow up with why even the
Speaker 2: choice of words follow up like there was a brief
Speaker 2: call with the Queen about Archie's potential blackness, but Megan
Speaker 2: wasn't able to get the queen's people to schedule assumed
Speaker 2: to provide more details, so she let the whole thing slide.
Speaker 2: Oprah is so good, and she's good because she knows
Speaker 2: how to keep pulling on a thread to get past
Speaker 2: what seems like an obvious revelation to a second, deeper one. Okay,
Speaker 2: now let's listen to Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk. This
Speaker 2: was just after Musk had given what looked an awful
Speaker 2: lot like a stiff armed Nazi salute at a Trump.
Speaker 5: Rally and now the same idiots are calling you a Nazi.
Speaker 5: It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's so many examples of people saying, my
Speaker 5: heart goes out to you get a little enthusiasm that
Speaker 5: probably wouldn't be with hindsight.
Speaker 11: Yes, but I was obviously meant in the most positive
Speaker 11: spirit possible.
Speaker 4: Yes, obviously obviously.
Speaker 5: But it's so strange where people want to think that
Speaker 5: you are openly public publicly doing secret Nazi se Kyle
Speaker 5: hand motions.
Speaker 11: And now I can never pointed things diagonally. I can
Speaker 11: only pointed things there and there, and then actually you
Speaker 11: have to divide that, yeah, because that's where the spaceship
Speaker 11: is over there.
Speaker 4: It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous, it's absurd. It's so it's delivery propaganda.
Speaker 2: Imagine for a moment what Oprah would do. In that moment,
Speaker 2: Oprah would ask, if you didn't want to be called
Speaker 2: a Nazi, then why did you give a Nazi salute
Speaker 2: in front of thousands of people. You'd ask that question
Speaker 2: because that's what everyone was wondering when they saw the
Speaker 2: offending image. Oprah would have put Musk on the couch,
Speaker 2: elon We all know you're a genius, but we also
Speaker 2: know you're super sensitive. You spend all day on Twitter
Speaker 2: responding to your critics, So why would you do something
Speaker 2: so perfectly designed to be misunderstood? Can't you just hear
Speaker 2: Oprah saying that, but not your Rogan? With Musk sitting
Speaker 2: across the table from him, Rogan chooses to have the
Speaker 2: kind of conversation that you would have with a close
Speaker 2: friend late at night to console them after they have
Speaker 2: done something really stupid. You know, what they did was stupid.
Speaker 2: They know what they did was stupid. But what are
Speaker 2: friends for to help us sustain the pretense that what
Speaker 2: we did wasn't stupid at all?
Speaker 11: It was obviously not meant in a negative way. That
Speaker 11: it was that I literally said, my heart goes out
Speaker 11: to you, and it was very positive. The entire speech
Speaker 11: was very positive. I was being very enthusiastic about the
Speaker 11: future in space, and that, you know, was great.
Speaker 1: Crowd.
Speaker 11: You know, so you got a little popped up, Yeah,
Speaker 11: it go popped up exactly.
Speaker 4: Ye, that's all it is. Obviously Obviously, obviously.
Speaker 2: Who among us has not inadvertently given a Nazi salute
Speaker 2: in front of the whole world after getting just a
Speaker 2: little pumped up, listen to Rogan long enough and you realize, oh,
Speaker 2: this is a pattern. Here's Rogan doing an episode with
Speaker 2: Matt Walsh, big figuring conservative media blogger podcaster. He was
Speaker 2: on Rogan to talk about a documentary he just made
Speaker 2: called Am I a Racist? Where he made fun of
Speaker 2: the way that progressive see racism around every corner, and
Speaker 2: at a key point in the conversation, Walsh says.
Speaker 12: This, there was no one who lived on Earth one
Speaker 12: hundred years ago who we would not consider racist anywhere
Speaker 12: of any race. If you go back two hundred years
Speaker 12: or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or
Speaker 12: was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back
Speaker 12: five hundred years, and there was nobody on the planet
Speaker 12: who considered slavery to be wrong fundamentally. They might have
Speaker 12: had issues with how slaves are treated in some context,
Speaker 12: but it took like thousands of years for it to
Speaker 12: ever even occur to a single human on Earth that
Speaker 12: slavery is actually fundamentally wrong, which is a crazy thing,
Speaker 12: and that's actually an interesting thing we could you could
Speaker 12: talk about and think about, like why is that.
Speaker 2: You go back five hundred years and there was nobody
Speaker 2: on the planet who considered slavery to be wrong. Now,
Speaker 2: once again, let us imagine Oprah in this moment. Oprah
Speaker 2: would have sat up straight. Oprah would have stopped him
Speaker 2: right there, Matt. There were lots of people five hundred
Speaker 2: years ago who considered slavery to be wrong, millions of
Speaker 2: them slaves, exactly right. You think Moses led the Israelites
Speaker 2: out of slavery in Egypt just because he thought the
Speaker 2: schools were better in the Promised Land. You think the
Speaker 2: millions of people who were brutally rounded up in West Africa,
Speaker 2: torn from their families and communities, marched onto slavery ships
Speaker 2: and shipped overseas in brutal conditions, were ambivalent about the
Speaker 2: social institution they are being forced to join. And why
Speaker 2: would Oprah have stopped Matt Walsh at that moment? Not
Speaker 2: just because she would have felt compelled to correct this
Speaker 2: spectacular bit of foolishness, but because her job, as she
Speaker 2: sees it, is to reveal something of importance about her
Speaker 2: subjects to her audience. And here was a golden opportunity.
Speaker 2: Do you want to know who Matt Walsh is? He
Speaker 2: is someone who constructed a history of slavery and forgot
Speaker 2: all about the slaves. But Joe Rogan, when presented with
Speaker 2: that same opportunity, just wants to sit and chat.
Speaker 5: Well, I've had friends that have a different perspective on
Speaker 5: the Obama situation. And my friend Willie was talking to
Speaker 5: me about this, and he was saying that what happened
Speaker 5: was when you look one thing that we can be
Speaker 5: sure of, is it racist, surreal? And when Obama became president,
Speaker 5: those people became more embolden Obama.
Speaker 2: What does Obama have to.
Speaker 1: Do with this?
Speaker 2: And who's Willie Willie Nelson? But of course we never
Speaker 2: find out. It's none of our business. All of which
Speaker 2: is to say, the warning signs were there from the
Speaker 2: very beginning of the RFK Junior interview.
Speaker 4: And so then we run into each other and Aspen.
Speaker 3: Just Randa is the weirdness moment because we were both
Speaker 3: staring at each other.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then we almost did it like a full three.
Speaker 5: Six Yeah, yeah, yeah, I noticed you walking.
Speaker 4: I'm like, that's it is, So I said, hey, what's up.
Speaker 2: It was just going to be the two of them
Speaker 2: in the room. The rest of us weren't invited, Do
Speaker 2: I like evesdropping on Joe Rogan's conversations. I do, That's
Speaker 2: why I listen to his show. But there are times
Speaker 2: when the conversational mode doesn't work, and when you have
Speaker 2: RFK Junior on, that's definitely one of those times. So
Speaker 2: let's start from the beginning and redo the RFK Junior conversation,
Speaker 2: only this time with an eye to all the things
Speaker 2: that a conversation between friends does not cover. Okay, Kennedy
Speaker 2: now elaborates on his theory of the nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic,
Speaker 2: what caused all those bacterial infections that he believes with
Speaker 2: the real source of all those millions of deaths.
Speaker 3: You know, I read an article reasonably, and you can
Speaker 3: look up these articles pretty easily. But the article that
Speaker 3: I read made a very strong case that the illness
Speaker 3: came from testing a new vaccine in Kansas at a
Speaker 3: military base in Kansas.
Speaker 2: What should the interviewer do in this moment, or at
Speaker 2: least before letting this kind of thing go out into
Speaker 2: the world. Well, since this is a pretty dramatic claim,
Speaker 2: they should figure out what Kennedy is referring to. What
Speaker 2: are these articles that led him to such a radical
Speaker 2: reinterpretation of one of the most famous viral epidemics in history.
Speaker 2: It turns out finding them is not that hard. It
Speaker 2: took me five minutes on Google and two phone calls.
Speaker 2: The first article I found is by Kevin Barry, an
Speaker 2: attorney based out of Siast on Long Island who wrote
Speaker 2: a two part series for vaccine impact dot Com in
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen called did a military experimental vaccine in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighteen kill fifty to one hundred million people? Blamed a
Speaker 2: Spanish flu? I was listening to rfk's appearance on Joe
Speaker 2: Rogan and they have that moment when they start talking
Speaker 2: about the nineteen eighteen flu, which is super fascinating, and
Speaker 2: RFK says, well, in fact, i've quote so he says,
Speaker 2: you know, well, you know well, the Spanish flue was
Speaker 2: not a virus. It was he says, even Foucing now
Speaker 2: acknowledges that. But then he says, and you know, I
Speaker 2: read an article recently, and you can look at these
Speaker 2: articles pretty easily. The article that I read made a
Speaker 2: very strong case. He onlyess came from testing a new
Speaker 2: vaccine in Kansas at a military base in Kansas. Is
Speaker 2: that your article?
Speaker 7: He's referring to I'm not sure it probably as far
Speaker 7: as I know that I wrote this in twenty eighteen
Speaker 7: and I circulated it to my friends, and Bobby would
Speaker 7: have been on the list.
Speaker 2: Barry's article focuses on a trial for an experimental meningitis
Speaker 2: vaccine run by doctor Frederick Gates, a first lieutenant in
Speaker 2: the Army's Medical Corps during the First World War serving
Speaker 2: at Fort Riley, Kansas.
Speaker 7: That antiminingitas study that they published came out and that
Speaker 7: started me down the path of digging into it.
Speaker 2: Barry is convinced that the meningitis vaccine caused the Spanish
Speaker 2: flu and that every scientist who has ever studied the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighteen pandemic has just missed this. I asked him
Speaker 2: what role, if any, he thought the influenza virus played
Speaker 2: in the nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic.
Speaker 7: Not a role that was a killer. But I think
Speaker 7: that the killer was the bacterial meningitis. You know that
Speaker 7: there's something level of the conventional that literature calls it
Speaker 7: a secondary infection.
Speaker 2: Oh right, remember the Fauci paper that Rogan googled and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: Barry read it too.
Speaker 7: But like if you have the sniffles and a bullet
Speaker 7: cust of your head. Did the sniffles kill you? What
Speaker 7: did the thing that rapped apart your locks?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: This is source number one, Source number two as far
Speaker 2: as I can tell. It's a chiropractor from Melbourne, Florida
Speaker 2: named sal Martin Gano, who wrote in his book that
Speaker 2: this same rogue meningetis vaccine somehow got sent around the
Speaker 2: world in nineteen eighteen, and then the whole thing was
Speaker 2: covered up by the pharmaceutical industry.
Speaker 13: You know, they twisted and turned it around, but the
Speaker 13: bottom line was they killed They just killed half the population.
Speaker 13: I did deep dives with this stuff to try to,
Speaker 13: you know, put it in perspective, but there's no way
Speaker 13: to put this in perspective. It was just downright ugly.
Speaker 2: So the conventional line about nineteen eighteen is that it
Speaker 2: was an H one N one virus, and we have
Speaker 2: we I'm curious of what so, and we we've isolated
Speaker 2: this virus from people who died in the pandemic. What
Speaker 2: role do you think that virus was playing in what
Speaker 2: happened in nineteen eighteen?
Speaker 1: Probably nothing.
Speaker 13: The detailed reports on what was actually found are buried
Speaker 13: This is like the Kennedy Files. You know, you try
Speaker 13: to find good luck on that you're not going to
Speaker 13: find it.
Speaker 2: If a friend tells you in private conversation that they
Speaker 2: have a nutty idea about the nineteen eighteen Spanish flu,
Speaker 2: maybe it's okay just to not unsmile, because a friend
Speaker 2: is a friend, and we all have to tolerate the
Speaker 2: eccentricities of those closest to us. But when you have
Speaker 2: an audience in the tens of millions, and your friend
Speaker 2: is someone of real power and influence, then maybe it's
Speaker 2: not a bad idea to stop them and say, hold on,
Speaker 2: where are you getting this whole Kansas theory from? Because
Speaker 2: the way that Urka Junior answers that question will tell
Speaker 2: us a lot about the way his mind works, and
Speaker 2: we're all very interested in the way his mind works.
Speaker 2: And then when he tells you, you might just want
Speaker 2: to say something like, just so we're clear, Bobby, we
Speaker 2: have a century of biomedical science on one side of
Speaker 2: this question, and we have Kevin from Long Island and
Speaker 2: South from South Florida.
Speaker 1: On the other.
Speaker 2: And you're going with Kevin and si out. But Joe
Speaker 2: Rogan doesn't come close. He just rolls over in the
Speaker 2: middle of the road like a giant, tattooed, tightly muscled powsome. Joe,
Speaker 2: you're breaking my heart. When I was on my book
Speaker 2: tour for Revenge of the Tipping Point, I did an
Speaker 2: event at a theater in downtown San Diego. My interviewer
Speaker 2: was a guy named Michael Gervais. He's a psychologist who
Speaker 2: works a lot with elite athletes. He writes books. Nice guy.
Speaker 2: The interview began much like the dozens of other interviews
Speaker 2: I did on my book tour. So, when you think
Speaker 2: about it, and I'm going to come back to the
Speaker 2: original question, but when you think about the future, do
Speaker 2: you see it through an optimistic, a cynical or a
Speaker 2: pessimistic lens? Oh, I'm an optimist. I come from Glavels
Speaker 2: are optimists. My mom I was talking to my mom.
Speaker 2: My mom is ninety three and she just turned night
Speaker 2: three and I was talking to her and it was
Speaker 2: her birthday, and she just she's twin. She was talking
Speaker 2: to her and so she just called her twin sister,
Speaker 2: who lives in Jamaica, and she said to me, she
Speaker 2: was a little emotional, which is rare for Glad was
Speaker 2: also not terribly emotional.
Speaker 13: Huh.
Speaker 2: And she said to me, you know, I look back
Speaker 2: on my life and I cannot believe how improbable it was.
Speaker 2: She was born in like a house that was probably
Speaker 2: a third the size of this a quarter of the
Speaker 2: size of this stage, with no electricity, running water, in
Speaker 2: the middle of Jamaica, and she ended up, you know,
Speaker 2: living this wonderful life. And she's like when I was
Speaker 2: born in she said to me, when I was born
Speaker 2: in Jamaica, and then early inteen thirties, twins rarely survived,
Speaker 2: so that even that I survived was a miracle. Then
Speaker 2: came this, you parents who think of their lives as
Speaker 2: my parents have. Also my dad is not dad but
Speaker 2: deeply religious in I think the best possible way, and
Speaker 2: think of their lives as a gift from God. And
Speaker 2: when you grow up with that, it is very, very
Speaker 2: hard not to participate in that spirit. Well, I'm getting
Speaker 2: a little emotional to you. I'm in danger. When I
Speaker 2: talk about my father, I start crying.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, what is that about. I don't know he was.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: I'd encourage you to open it wide open. There I
Speaker 2: was on stage in front of hundreds of people, perfectly happy.
Speaker 2: Then my dad came up, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: I became overwhelmed, and I was embarrassed. It wasn't what
Speaker 2: I intended. I wasn't there to bear my soul, didn't
Speaker 2: I just say ten seconds before, the Globels are not
Speaker 2: emotional people. I want to move on, but Jervase won't
Speaker 2: let me. So off we go in an entirely new direction.
Speaker 2: I mean, I do cry every time he's been He's
Speaker 2: been gone five years. And a friend of mine said,
Speaker 2: two friends of mine said two very beautiful things that
Speaker 2: I've always remembered. One was a friend of mine who
Speaker 2: was writing something about his father, and he said, my
Speaker 2: father died twenty years ago. Today, I know him better
Speaker 2: today than I did back then. And I think about
Speaker 2: that nearly every day, and because I think I know
Speaker 2: him better now. And another thing a friend of mine said,
Speaker 2: in trying to console me, was that grief is the
Speaker 2: way we keep someone alive. Yeah, and it's a gift
Speaker 2: in other words. Yeah, And I think that I can't.
Speaker 2: I think I continue to grieve because I can.
Speaker 7: I can't let it go.
Speaker 2: Subjects come to interviews with prerehearsed narratives, stories that have
Speaker 2: been told so many times that the ruts on the
Speaker 2: road have become deep and narrow. In a conversation, our
Speaker 2: partner gives us the freedom to follow the familiar path.
Speaker 2: They encourage and support with nods and smiles. But the
Speaker 2: performance is but the audience, the third party demands and deserves,
Speaker 2: is something more a departure. I have a friend who's
Speaker 2: a screenwriter who always says, the job of the storyteller
Speaker 2: is to defy the audience's expectations. That's absolutely right to
Speaker 2: take the audience somewhere they didn't know they were going.
Speaker 2: And that's what Gervais was doing when he interrupted me.
Speaker 4: So what did your dad teach you?
Speaker 2: I don't think he had that question in mind when
Speaker 2: he prepared for the interview.
Speaker 11: He was.
Speaker 4: So he's an Englishman.
Speaker 1: That's a big, pushy beard.
Speaker 13: And he was.
Speaker 2: Such a stereotypical englishman.
Speaker 4: He was.
Speaker 2: He liked going for long walks in the rain with dogs.
Speaker 2: He was a gardener. That's what he loved to do
Speaker 2: above all else. He uh, he only ever cried when
Speaker 2: he was reading Dickens to his children. He uh. He
Speaker 2: was a mathematician, and a very good one. I think,
Speaker 2: although I have no idea because I could never follow
Speaker 2: what he was doing.
Speaker 1: He was a.
Speaker 2: He was completely indifferent to what the world thought it did,
Speaker 2: just did whatever he wanted to do, which was I thought,
Speaker 2: as a kid, was the most magnificent thing I had
Speaker 2: ever seen. You know that, You see everyone in this
Speaker 2: room right now because oh that's where he got it from.
Speaker 1: Yeah he was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that's that's the big gift that he passed you.
Speaker 1: There you go. That's how it's done.
Speaker 2: Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence,
Speaker 2: and bendedaf Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji. Fact checking
Speaker 2: by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Gara, Jake Korsky
Speaker 2: and bendedaf Haffrey. Mixing and mastering on this episode by
Speaker 2: Jake Gorsky. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our executive producer
Speaker 2: is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and el
Speaker 2: Hefe Gretacone.
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glappo. Where have you gone?
Speaker 2: Joe Rogan Experience? Our nation turns its lonely.
Speaker 1: Eyes to you.
Speaker 2: Woohoo, what's that you say, mister Kennedy? John Joe has
Speaker 2: left and gone away? Hey, Hey, hey hey, hey,