The Joe Rogan Intervention

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/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask Chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at ChatGPT.com.

• 0:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over

• 1:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners, subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 2:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  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."

• 3:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  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."

• 3:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  And then Rogan says...

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Well, not the Spanish Flu though, right?

• 3:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 motality 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...

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Well, the Spanish Flu was not a virus. And even Fauci now acknowledges that. And, 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.

• 4:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 a statist 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.

• 5:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

• 5:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 MO. He's a disciple of the obscure French 19th century biologist Antoine Bichon, 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.

• 5:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 6:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  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. 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.

• 7:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 Longurben,

• 7:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  What are you saying that the Spanish flu was?

• 8:17Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 8:25Speaker 03

  What is the documentation?

• 8:28Speaker 02

  You know, I...

• 8:30Speaker 03

  You said that Fauci has publicly admitted that it's not a flu.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Fauci wrote an article in 2008. And that, I'm pretty sure it's 2008.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  The article in question is immediately Googled.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  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?

• 10:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  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. 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.

• 10:59Speaker 04

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

• 11:07Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 11:11Speaker 04

  So a motor vehicle trauma that occurs as a primary event, right? It 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 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 the initial cause.

• 11:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 of viral infection, would 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?

• 12:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, that 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.

• 12:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  I think that's right.

• 13:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 Junior 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?

• 13:45Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 14:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do,

• 15:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1st, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC.

• 15:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com. This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. I have a question. When you wake up at 3:00 in the morning and start stewing over something that happened in your life or some problem you're mulling over, what is that thing? What's that annoying, troublesome stone in your shoe that you just can't get rid of? Well, the truth is that you really can get rid of those experiences that haunt us, but you need help. And that's where BetterHelp comes in. BetterHelp therapists are licensed, experienced professionals, such as psychologists, marriage and family therapists, social workers and counselors. They have at least three years and 1,000 hours of hands-on experience and have the required education, training, exams, and practice.

• 16:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  BetterHelp is now in network with more than 125 health plans, with many copays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance or live outside the US, you can still get 20% off your first month. Sign up and get 20% off at betterhelp.com/gladwell. That's better H E L P dot com slash gladwell.

• 17:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 end point 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.

• 17:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 re-watched 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.

• 18:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  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.

• 18:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  What are those thoughts?

• 19:13Speaker 05

  Why do you think that is? Do you think it's because of his race?

• 19:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  That sigh.

• 19:20Speaker 05

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

• 19:24Speaker 06

  But I can give you an honest answer.

• 19:27Speaker 06

  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 going to be given a title.

• 19:42Speaker 06

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

• 19:51Speaker 05

  What?

• 19:53Speaker 06

  And...

• 19:54Speaker 05

  Who is having that conversation? With you?

• 20:00Speaker 06

  So, um...

• 20:03Speaker 05

  There is a conversation. Hold up, hold up.

• 20:05Speaker 06

  There are several conversations.

• 20:07Speaker 05

  There's a conversation with you?

• 20:11Speaker 06

  With Harry.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  About? How dark your baby is going to be?

• 20:17Speaker 06

  Potentially, and what that would mean or look like.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 20:21Speaker 05

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

• 20:24Speaker 06

  I think that would be very damaging to them.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 20:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Meghan gets evasive. She says Harry was the one in those conversations, not her.

• 20:33Speaker 06

  It was really hard to be able to see those as compartmentalized conversations.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  Because they were concerned that if he were too brown, that that would be a problem. Are you saying that?

• 20:45Speaker 06

  I wasn't able to follow up with why.

• 20:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's that last comment, of course, that is the most telling. "I wasn't able to follow up with why." Merkel 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 let the whole thing slide. Oprah is so good.

• 21:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 21:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 21:57Speaker 03

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

• 22:02Speaker 07

  Um, I mean--

• 22:04Speaker 03

  There's so many examples of people saying, "My heart goes out to you."

• 22:07Speaker 07

  Sure, sure.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  You get it with a little enthusiasm that probably wouldn't be recommended with hindsight.

• 22:11Speaker 07

  Yes, but it was obviously meant in the most positive spirit possible.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Yes, obviously.

• 22:17Speaker 07

  Obviously.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  But it's so strange where people want to think that you are openly, publicly, publicly doing secret Nazi, seagull hand motions.

• 22:27Speaker 07

  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--

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 07

  Because that's where the spaceship is, over there. And it's ridiculous.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  It's ridiculous.

• 22:39Speaker 07

  It's absurd.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  It's so crazy.

• 22:41Speaker 07

  It's deliberate propaganda.

• 22:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  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

• 23:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 23:39Speaker 07

  It was obviously not meant in a negative way, 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--

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got a little pumped up.

• 24:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, I got pumped up, exactly.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's all it is, obviously.

• 24:04Speaker 07

  Obviously.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Obviously.

• 24:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 24:37Speaker 08

  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 contexts, but it took like thousands of years for it to ever even occur to a single human on Earth that slavery is actually fundamentally wrong. Which is a crazy thing, and that's actually an interesting thing you could talk about and think about, like, why is that?

• 25:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  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

• 26:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 26:42Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 26:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 27:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  All of which is to say, the warning signs were there from the very beginning of the RFK Junior interview.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  And so then we run into each other in Aspen.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Just randomly.

• 27:32Speaker 02

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

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  And then we almost did it like a full 360.

• 27:38Speaker 03

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

• 27:49Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 28:05Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 28:42Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 29:24Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 30:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype, from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio, is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 31:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  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?

• 31:27Speaker 02

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

• 31:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 Berry, an attorney based out of Saoset on Long Island, who wrote a two-part series for VaccineImpact.com in 2018 called "Did a Military Experimental

• 32:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 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, and you can look at these articles pretty easily. The article that I read made a very strong case, the illness came from testing a new

• 33:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  vaccine in Kansas, at a military base in Kansas." Is that your article he's referring to?

• 33:21Speaker 09

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

• 33:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 33:49Speaker 09

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

• 33:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 34:19Speaker 09

  Not, not the, not a role that was a killer. I think that the killer was, was the bacterial meningitis. You know, a lot of the conventional literature calls it a secondary infection.

• 34:31Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 34:37Speaker 09

  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, right?

• 34:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 35:03Speaker 09

  You know, they twisted it and turned it around. But the bottom line was they killed. They did. 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.

• 35:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  So the conventional line about 1918 is that it was an H1N1 virus. And we have, we, I'm curious what, so, and we, 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?

• 35:37Speaker 09

  Probably nothing. The detailed reports on what was actually found.

• 35:45Speaker 10

  Are buried. This is like the Kennedy files, you know, you try to find them. Good luck on that. You're not gonna find it.

• 35:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 Junior 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,

• 36:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 37:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 37:40Speaker 11

  So when you think about, and I'm gonna 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?

• 37:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, I'm an optimist. I come from, globalists are optimists.

• 37:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  My mom, I was talking to my mom. My mom is ninety-three. And she just turned ninety-three. And I was talking to her. And it was her birthday. And she just, she's a twin. Just 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, Glavos also not terribly emotional.

• 38:14Speaker 11

  Uh huh.

• 38:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  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 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 nineteen thirties, twins rarely survived. So that, even that I survived was a miracle.

• 38:52Speaker 11

  Then came this.

• 38:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  And you have parents who think of their lives as, 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, to, not to participate in that spirit. Well, I'm getting a little emotional talking.

• 39:20Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 39:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'm in danger. When I talk about my father, I start crying, so.

• 39:26Speaker 11

  Yeah, what is that about?

• 39:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  I don't know, he was.

• 39:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'm sorry.

• 39:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  At the bit.

• 39:48Speaker 12

  I'd encourage you to open it wide open.

• 39:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  There I was, onstage 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 bare my soul. Didn't I just say 10 seconds before that the Glabos are not emotional people? I want to move on, but Gervais won't let me. So off we go in an entirely new direction.

• 40:20Speaker 12

  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.

• 41:02Speaker 12

  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.

• 41:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 12

  And I think that's, I can't, I think I continue to grieve because I can't. I can't let it go.

• 41:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 42:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  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.

• 42:18Speaker 11

  So what did your dad teach you?

• 42:22Malcolm Gladwell?

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

• 42:27Speaker 12

  He was a... 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.

• 43:09Speaker 12

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

• 43:22Speaker 11

  You know that everyone in this room right now goes, "Oh, that's where he got it from."

• 43:29Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 11

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

• 43:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  There you go. That's how it's done.

• 43:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence, and Ben D'Avhafrey. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, Jake Gorski, and Ben D'Avhafrey. 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 Gladwell.

• 44:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  Where have you gone, Joe Rogan Experience? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Woo-hoo. What's that you say, Mr. Kennedy? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey.

• 45:06Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 46:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  For I don't know how long, maybe 12, 13 years, I've worn a Whoop band on my wrist. I started doing it because I met the founder of Whoop at a conference. He heard that I was a runner and he said, "Oh, you'll love this. It's perfect for athletes." And he was right. I've worn one ever since. Every time I work out, I see how hard I worked, how long I need to recover. I wake up in the morning and I get a complete picture of how my sleep went, which helps me understand the kinds of things that lead to a bad night and the kinds of things that lead to a good night. It's sleek, long-lasting battery, and now with AI looking at all my numbers and coaching me. Whoop is a winner. New members can try Whoop with a 30-day free trial before committing to a membership.

• 47:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop.