All Episodes

April 24, 2025 37 mins

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
Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
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 Junior, before he became US 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.

(00:40):
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 our 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

(01:01):
other words, you have to commit. And so on that
car ride I did, and at the one hour and
fifty two minutes mark, right on schedule, came in 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

(01:27):
talking about measles, and he essentially tells Rogan the kids
who die for measles don't die because of measles. They
die because they're malnourished.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
And then Rogan says evidence, well, not.

Speaker 4 (01:48):
The Spanish flu though, right, which.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Is a good question.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
The nineteen eighteen Spanish flu was one of the most
devastating pandemics in history. It killed as many as one
hundred 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
in the infirm Rogan is asking, if it's so hard

(02:13):
for a disease to kill a healthy person, then how
do you explain the most devastating viral epidemic of all time?

Speaker 3 (02:20):
And Kennedy says, well, the Spanish flu was not a virus. Oh,
and even Fauci now acknowledges that, and they you know,
there's there's good evidence that the Spanish flu. There's there is,
you know, not not a definitive, but very very strong
evidence the Spanish flu was vaccine induced flu the deaths

(02:42):
were vaccine induced.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Three bombshells all in a row. One the influenza epidemic
of nineteen eighteen was not caused by influenza. Two Anthony
Fauci longtime had the National Institute of Infectious Disease at
NAH and established. Of all defenders of the medical science
orthodoxy agrees with me on this and three the real

(03:07):
cause of the nineteen eighteen 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

(03:29):
says crazy things all the time. That's what our last
episode was all about. It's his m o. He's a
disciple of the obscure French nineteenth century biologist Antoine Beauchamp,
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 Rocn.

(03:55):
This episode is devoted to the lost art of the interviewer,
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

(04:17):
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.

(04:38):
The studio was in the middle of the room, inside
what looked like a repurposed boxing ring. It was so
much fun that if Rogan's people want to be back,
I would jump on a plane this evening, packing only
a muscle shirt and a case of Red Bull to
bring as a housewarming gift. I tell you all this
just so you can imagine a scene. RFK Junior is

(05:00):
a weightlifter himself, barrel chest, biceps like big chunks of
hormone free non GMO ham boxing ring mano Amano. There's
a tantalizing scent of testosterone in the air, and Kennedy
just talks about all the things he likes to talk about, bautism, vaccines,

(05:22):
refrigerated trucks the Hudson River. Then he gets to the
nineteen eighteen flu full disclosure. The nineteen eighteen 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 nineteen eighteen flu buried deep in a
cemetery in a small town in Norway, high above the

(05:46):
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 nineteen eighteen 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 Trompso, then across the

(06:07):
Norwegian Sea from trumps So delng you're bin, 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 nineteen eighteen flu
virus talk.

Speaker 4 (06:26):
What are you saying that the Spanish flu was so?

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Rogan asks his question about the nineteen eighteen flu. So far,
so good. This is what an interviewer is supposed to do.

Speaker 5 (06:37):
What is the documentation the you know I you said
that Fauci HASGIVAUGI.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Wrote an article in two thousand and eight and that
I'm pretty sure it's two thousand and eight in which
he acknowledged that it was not the flu that was
killing those people, it was a back geological infection and
a back geological infection. These days, you could one hundred

(07:06):
percent you're all of it with an.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
The article in question is immediately googled.

Speaker 5 (07:13):
This is important to cover, right, So let's see if
we can find this predominant role of bacteria pneumonia has
caused death in pandemic influenza implication Yeah, of a pandemic
influenza preparedness. So what this is saying is that bacterial
pneumonia was the cause of death.

Speaker 4 (07:30):
What's three? What he says?

Speaker 5 (07:31):
The results conclusions The majority of deaths from the nineteen
eighteen nineteen nineteen influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary
bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory tract bacteria.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
A proposition has been advanced. Google has been summoned, the
proposition has been verified. Oh my god, mister virus himself,
Tony Fauci is peddling this 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

(08:07):
viral pandemic wasn't caused by a virus at all. It
was caused by a runaway bacterial infection. Did you hear
that sigh from Joe becauseau was a moment on Joe
Rogan where someone in a position of power really really
bumps Joe out. But wait, did Fauci actually say that?

(08:32):
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

(08:54):
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 result of the primary infection.

Speaker 6 (09:11):
An analogy that I've used when I've been trying to
talk about this phenomenon is trauma.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
This is Benjamin Singer, a pulmonary specialist at Northwestern University.

Speaker 6 (09:24):
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,

(09:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
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 viral infection. Would what
would your odds of having a bacterial pneumonia be?

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Would they be?

Speaker 2 (10:17):
I mean, are you getting the bacterial pneumonia in large
part because your body is so weakened by the viral attack.

Speaker 6 (10:22):
Yeah, that's a key point. These are not bacterial pneumonias
that would have occurred on their own.

Speaker 7 (10:28):
They aren't.

Speaker 6 (10:29):
They are occurring only because of the heightened susceptibility of
the host having had the viral numoonia.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
To begin with.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
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
nineteen eighteen that they were vulnerable to a second fatal
round of bacterial pneumonia. Kennedy somehow read that paper and

(11:00):
completely missed its point. Fauci wasn't denying the role of
the virus in nineteen eighteen. He was doing the opposite.
He was explaining how the viaris did its damage. It's
safe to say, isn't it. Kennedy does not understand the
difference between of primary and a secondary infection.

Speaker 6 (11:16):
I think that's right.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
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

(11:40):
and moved on. Joe, dude, what's wrong with you? The
most natural form of human interaction is the conversation. Two

(12:04):
people talking, unscripted, improvised. It ends when it is 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

(12:27):
intention of revealing something of consequence. Conversation is easy and natural.
Interviewing is an acquired art. There are weeks where I
might do ten 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.

(12:49):
Interviewing is much much harder than conversation, but you know,
it'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 Megan Markle, and oh man, that's a masterclass. You

(13:13):
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 created self. Oprah

(13:34):
nails it.

Speaker 8 (13:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
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.

Speaker 8 (14:08):
What are what are those thoughts. Why do you think
that is? Do you think it's because of his race?

Speaker 1 (14:17):
That's sign And.

Speaker 8 (14:19):
I know that's a loaded question, but.

Speaker 9 (14:22):
But I can give you an honest answer.

Speaker 10 (14:26):
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, it's not going to be
given a title, and also concerns and conversations about how
dark his skin might be when he's born.

Speaker 4 (14:50):
What and.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Who?

Speaker 8 (14:54):
Who is having that conversation.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
With you?

Speaker 8 (14:59):
So there is a conversation, can hold it?

Speaker 9 (15:03):
Hold up the several conversations.

Speaker 8 (15:06):
There's a conversation with you who with Harry about how
dark your baby is going.

Speaker 9 (15:14):
To be potentially and what that would mean or look like.

Speaker 8 (15:17):
Ooh, And you're not going to tell me who had
the conversation.

Speaker 9 (15:23):
I think that would be very damaging to them.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Okay, Megan gets evasive. She says Harry was the one
in those conversations, not her.

Speaker 10 (15:32):
It was really hard to be able to see those
as compartmentalized.

Speaker 8 (15:35):
We're concerned that if you were too brown that that
would be a problem. Are you saying that.

Speaker 9 (15:44):
I wasn't able to follow up with why.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
It's that last comment, of course, that is the most telling.
I wasn't able to follow up with why Michael has
thus far presented an artfully constructed narrative of trivial grievances
designed to turn her into a punzel locked in the
lonely tower. But at that moment, Oprah gets her to
give us a glimpse of something real. Somebody high up

(16:11):
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 Megan
wasn't able to get the queen's people to schedule assumed
to provide more details, so she let the whole thing slide.
Oprah is so good, and she's good because she knows

(16:34):
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.

Speaker 5 (16:55):
Rally 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 get a little enthusiasm that
probably wouldn't be with hindsight.

Speaker 11 (17:10):
Yes, but I was obviously meant in the most positive
spirit possible.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
Yes, obviously obviously.

Speaker 5 (17:16):
But it's so strange where people want to think that
you are openly public publicly doing secret Nazi se Kyle
hand motions.

Speaker 11 (17:26):
And now I can never pointed things diagonally. I can
only pointed things there and there, and then actually you
have to divide that, yeah, because that's where the spaceship
is over there.

Speaker 4 (17:36):
It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous, it's absurd. It's so it's delivery propaganda.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
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. You'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

(18:03):
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 your 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

(18:25):
done something really stupid. You know, what they did was stupid.
They know what they did was stupid. But what are
friends for to help us sustain the pretense that what
we did wasn't stupid at all?

Speaker 11 (18:38):
It was obviously not meant in a negative way. That
it was that I literally said, my heart goes out
to you, and it was very positive. The entire speech
was very positive. I was being very enthusiastic about the
future in space, and that, you know, was great.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
Crowd.

Speaker 11 (18:57):
You know, so you got a little popped up, Yeah,
it go popped up exactly.

Speaker 4 (19:02):
Ye, that's all it is. Obviously Obviously, obviously.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
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 figuring conservative media blogger podcaster. He was
on Rogan to talk about a documentary he just made

(19:26):
called Am I a Racist? Where he made fun of
the way that progressive see racism around every corner, and
at a key point in the conversation, Walsh says.

Speaker 12 (19:35):
This, there was no one who lived on Earth one
hundred years ago who we would not consider racist anywhere
of any race. If you go back two hundred years
or earlier than that, almost everybody either owned slaves or
was okay with slavery as an institution. You go back
five hundred years, and there was nobody on the planet

(19:57):
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 we could you could
talk about and think about, like why is that.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
You go back five hundred 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 five hundred
years ago who considered slavery to be wrong, millions of

(20:41):
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

(21:02):
and shipped overseas in brutal conditions, were ambivalent about the
social institution they are 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

(21:24):
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.

Speaker 5 (21:47):
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 it racist, surreal? And when Obama became president,
those people became more embolden Obama.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
What does Obama have to.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Do with this?

Speaker 2 (22:11):
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 Junior interview.

Speaker 4 (22:25):
And so then we run into each other and Aspen.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Just Randa is the weirdness moment because we were both
staring at each other.

Speaker 4 (22:34):
Yeah, and then we almost did it like a full three.

Speaker 5 (22:37):
Six Yeah, yeah, yeah, I noticed you walking.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
I'm like, that's it is, So I said, hey, what's up.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
It was just going to be the two of them
in the room. The rest of us weren't invited, Do
I like evesdropping on Joe Rogan's conversations. I do, That's

(23:10):
why I listen to his show. But there are times
when the conversational mode doesn't work, and when you have
RFK Junior on, that's definitely one of those times. So
let's start from the beginning and redo the RFK Junior conversation,
only this time with an eye to all the things
that a conversation between friends does not cover. Okay, Kennedy

(23:31):
now elaborates on his theory of the nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic,
what caused all those bacterial infections that he believes with
the real source of all those millions of deaths.

Speaker 3 (23:43):
You know, I read an article reasonably, 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.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
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.

(24:24):
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 Siast on Long Island who wrote
a two part series for vaccine impact dot Com in
twenty eighteen called did a military experimental vaccine in nineteen

(24:45):
eighteen kill fifty to one hundred million people? Blamed a
Spanish flu? I was listening to rfk's appearance on Joe
Rogan and they have that moment when they start talking
about the nineteen eighteen flu, which is super fascinating, and

(25:07):
RFK says, well, in fact, i've quote so he says,
you know, well, you know well, the Spanish flue was
not a virus. It was he says, even Foucing 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

(25:27):
very strong case. He onlyess came from testing a new
vaccine in Kansas at a military base in Kansas. Is
that your article?

Speaker 7 (25:34):
He's referring to I'm not sure it probably as far
as I know that I wrote this in twenty eighteen
and I circulated it to my friends, and Bobby would
have been on the list.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Barry's article focuses on a trial for an experimental meningitis
vaccine run by doctor Frederick Gates, a first lieutenant in
the Army's Medical Corps during the First World War serving
at Fort Riley, Kansas.

Speaker 7 (26:04):
That antiminingitas study that they published came out and that
started me down the path of digging into it.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Barry is convinced that the meningitis vaccine caused the Spanish
flu and that every scientist who has ever studied the
nineteen eighteen pandemic has just missed this. I asked him
what role, if any, he thought the influenza virus played
in the nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic.

Speaker 7 (26:34):
Not a role that was a killer. But I think
that the killer was the bacterial meningitis. You know that
there's something level of the conventional that literature calls it
a secondary infection.

Speaker 2 (26:46):
Oh right, remember the Fauci paper that Rogan googled and misunderstood.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Barry read it too.

Speaker 7 (26:52):
But like if you have the sniffles and a bullet
cust of your head. Did the sniffles kill you? What
did the thing that rapped apart your locks?

Speaker 4 (26:58):
Right?

Speaker 2 (26:59):
This is source number one, Source number two as far
as I can tell. It's a chiropractor from Melbourne, Florida
named sal Martin Gano, who wrote in his book that
this same rogue meningetis vaccine somehow got sent around the
world in nineteen eighteen, and then the whole thing was
covered up by the pharmaceutical industry.

Speaker 13 (27:18):
You know, they twisted and turned it around, but the
bottom line was they killed They just killed half the population.
I did deep dives with this stuff to try to,
you know, put it in perspective, but there's no way
to put this in perspective. It was just downright ugly.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
So the conventional line about nineteen eighteen is that it
was an H one N one 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 nineteen eighteen?

Speaker 1 (27:52):
Probably nothing.

Speaker 13 (27:55):
The detailed reports on what was actually found are buried
This is like the Kennedy Files. You know, you try
to find good luck on that you're not going to
find it.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
If a friend tells you in private conversation that they
have a nutty idea about the nineteen eighteen Spanish flu,
maybe it's okay just to not unsmile, 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

(28:34):
not a bad idea to stop them and say, hold on,
where are you getting this whole Kansas theory from? Because
the way that Urka 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

(28:54):
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
South from South Florida.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
On the other.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
And you're going with Kevin and si out. But Joe
Rogan doesn't come close. He just rolls over in the
middle of the road like a giant, tattooed, tightly muscled powsome. Joe,
you're breaking my heart. When I was on my book

(29:36):
tour for Revenge of the Tipping Point, I did an
event at a theater in downtown San Diego. My interviewer
was a guy named Michael Gervais. He's a psychologist who
works a lot with elite athletes. He writes books. Nice guy.
The interview began much like the dozens of other interviews
I did on my book tour. So, when you think
about it, and I'm going to come back to the

(29:57):
original question, but when you think about the future, do
you see it through an optimistic, a cynical or a
pessimistic lens? Oh, I'm an optimist. I come from Glavels
are optimists. My mom I was talking to my mom.
My mom is ninety three and she just turned night
three and I was talking to her and it was
her birthday, and she just she's twin. She was talking

(30:19):
to her and 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 Glad was
also not terribly emotional.

Speaker 13 (30:29):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
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 of the
size of this stage, with no electricity, running water, in
the middle of Jamaica, and she ended up, you know,

(30:53):
living this wonderful life. And she's like when I was
born in she said to me, when I was born
in Jamaica, and then early inteen thirties, twins rarely survived,
so that even that I survived was a miracle. Then
came this, you parents who think of their lives as

(31:13):
my parents have. Also my dad is not dad 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 not to participate in that spirit. Well, I'm getting

(31:34):
a little emotional to you. I'm in danger. When I
talk about my father, I start crying.

Speaker 4 (31:39):
So, yeah, what is that about. I don't know he was.

Speaker 1 (31:57):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
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 ten seconds before, the Globels are not

(32:24):
emotional people. I want to move on, but Jervase 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,

(32:49):
two friends of mine said two very beautiful things that
I've always remembered. One was a friend of mine who
was writing something about his father, and he said, my
father died twenty years ago. Today, I know him better
today than I did back then. And I think about

(33:10):
that nearly every day, and 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. Yeah, and it's a gift

(33:32):
in other words. Yeah, And I think that I can't.
I think I continue to grieve because I can.

Speaker 7 (33:44):
I can't let it go.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Subjects come to interviews with prerehearsed 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 the

(34:07):
performance is but the audience, the third party demands and deserves,
is something more a departure. I have a friend who's
a screenwriter who always says, the job of the storyteller
is to defy the audience's expectations. That's absolutely right to
take the audience somewhere they didn't know they were going.

(34:29):
And that's what Gervais was doing when he interrupted me.

Speaker 4 (34:33):
So what did your dad teach you?

Speaker 2 (34:37):
I don't think he had that question in mind when
he prepared for the interview.

Speaker 11 (34:42):
He was.

Speaker 4 (34:45):
So he's an Englishman.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
That's a big, pushy beard.

Speaker 13 (34:49):
And he was.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Such a stereotypical englishman.

Speaker 4 (34:54):
He was.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
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 uh, he only ever cried when
he was reading Dickens to his children. He uh. He

(35:17):
was a mathematician, and a very good one. I think,
although I have no idea because I could never follow
what he was doing.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
He was a.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
He was completely indifferent to what the world thought it did,
just did whatever he wanted to do, which was I thought,
as a kid, was the most magnificent thing I had
ever seen. You know that, You see everyone in this
room right now because oh that's where he got it from.

Speaker 1 (35:44):
Yeah he was.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, So that's that's the big gift that he passed you.

Speaker 1 (35:51):
There you go. That's how it's done.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Nina Bird Lawrence,
and bendedaf Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji. Fact checking
by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Gara, Jake Korsky
and bendedaf Haffrey. Mixing and mastering on this episode by
Jake Gorsky. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our executive producer

(36:30):
is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix and el
Hefe Gretacone.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
I'm Malcolm Glappo. Where have you gone?

Speaker 2 (36:55):
Joe Rogan Experience? Our nation turns its lonely.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
Eyes to you.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
Woohoo, what's that you say, mister Kennedy? John Joe has
left and gone away? Hey, Hey, hey hey, hey,
Advertise With Us

Host

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell

Popular Podcasts

The Joe Rogan Experience

The Joe Rogan Experience

The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.