#1999 - Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (0:08)

All day.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

I like them because they keep people from locking in. One of the things I wanted to make sure I did in this conversation is not interrupt you. Because it's very frustrating for me when I'm hearing people talk in these, which should be long form conversations about very important and nuanced things. And I think one of the things that happens is people are very concerned with letting you say things that is going to get them in trouble or get their channel in trouble. Like there's people that are doing a lot of self-censoring. And I think they're doing that also when they're having these conversations with you because they want to establish right away that they have problems with you. They have problems with some of the positions that a lot of people have problems with. I was one of those people. So when I had heard of you in the past, before I had read your book and before I had met you, I had no information on you. But there was this narrative. And this narrative was you were anti-vax and you believed in pseudoscience and you were kind of loony.

I didn't look into it at all. I just took it at face value because that's what everybody had said. And in my mind, vaccines have been one of the most important medical advancements in human history, saved countless lives, protected children. And I thought very strongly that they were important. I didn't have any information on that either. This was also just a narrative that I've adopted from cursory reading of news articles and not really getting into the subject at all.

Then the pandemic happens. And I had quite a few very reasonable liberal people, rational people, people that I trusted their mind, recommend The Real Anthony Fauci, your book. And I'm like, Robert Kennedy wrote a book about Anthony Fauci? Like, what is this gonna be about? This is my initial reaction. You've got this, what I perceive to be a kind of fringy thinking, almost conspiracy theorist type person that's not based in fact what their argument was. And he had written a book on Anthony Fauci. And this was right around the time where I was, I was very concerned with the way things were going, that people were just blindly trusting that there was only one way out of this. That was kind of bothering me, particularly when I had known that so many people had gotten the virus had been fine. So I'm like, well, what's the reality of this? So then I read the book.

And I've talked about it multiple times on the podcast, but if what you were saying in that book was not true, I do not understand how you are not being sued. You would instantly, immediately be sued. The book was very successful. It sold a lot of copies, but it was mysteriously absent from certain best seller lists. People were not promoting that book at all, but through word of mouth and through the time that we live in, through this time where there was so much uncertainty and people were very confused and also suspicious. They were suspicious that they were being told a narrative, and they were starting to remember that, hey, this has happened in the past. These kind of narratives about medications, they have happened in the past. They just never happened where this is like the whole country is being convinced that this is the way to do it.

So I read your book. And by the end of the book, it was so disturbing that sometimes I had to put it away and just read fiction for a few days. I was like, I don't want this in my head right now. Because I listen on audio, and a lot of times I'm listening in the sauna. So I'm listening while I'm already getting tortured. So it's 185 degrees, and I'm listening to this book that if it's telling the truth, just about the AIDS crisis, just about the AIDS crisis, just about the use of AZT, just about all of it, all of it.

So I had seen numerous interviews with you, and you seemed very reasonable and very rational.

Then I was like, is this possible that this is the guy that's telling the truth? Is this possible that everyone that I know that had these strong opinions of you, that most of them at least, were like me? They had formed these opinions through a glance at a headline, someone talking about you on a television show.

And so then we run into each other in Aspen.

Just randomly.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (5:03)