Joe Rogan Experience #2454 - Robert Malone, MD

Joe Rogan Experience number 2454 with Dr. Robert Malone. This is a two and a half hour conversation between Joe and the man who helped pioneer mRNA vaccine technology, returning to the show nearly five years after their infamous first sit-down that broke the internet, triggered a Spotify meltdown, and turned Malone into one of the most polarizing figures in medicine. This time around, Malone comes back not as a fugitive from the establishment but as a special government employee advising the CDC and the State Department, and the conversation ranges from the deeply personal to the geopolitically terrifying.

Section 1. The Return and the Victory Lap

Joe opens by noting it has been close to five years since Malone was last on the show, and he frames this episode as something of a victory dance. As Joe puts it, all of Malone's warnings and all the things he was saying about the problems with the mRNA vaccines turned out to be true. Malone admits he did not expect to ever be invited back, figuring Spotify would simply say no. Joe clarifies that Spotify was actually great throughout the whole controversy, and that the real grief came from artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell who threatened to pull their music.

Malone has about fifteen patents total, nine specifically on mRNA technology, and Joe reminds the audience this is someone with deep credibility in the exact field being debated. Malone took the vaccine himself and had horrible adverse events. His own cardiologist asked him why he was so stupid to take it, and he has had to answer that question a thousand times since.

When Joe asks what his perspective on the vaccine was before he took it, Malone says he was genuinely amazed that the problems he had encountered in his early research had supposedly been solved. In his hands as a graduate student in the late 1980s, mRNA technology was incredibly inflammatory, could not be localized to the injection site, did not produce long-lasting expression, and was hard to manufacture. He describes it as almost witchcraft, working with a couple thousand dollars worth of reagents in a tiny tube with no guarantee the reaction would even work. The technology worked well in cell culture but not in animals, causing aggressive white cell infiltrates in both mice and monkeys. He ultimately abandoned it as a viable delivery strategy.

Section 2. The Lipid Nanoparticle Breakthrough and Peter Cullis

Malone explains that the key breakthrough came from a group at the University of British Columbia led by Peter Cullis, who Malone believes should have received the Nobel Prize for these products instead of Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman. Cullis and his team developed the lipid nanoparticle formulations that made both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines possible, licensing the technology non-exclusively to both companies.

Before taking the vaccine, Malone called Cullis directly to ask whether the old problems had been solved. Cullis assured him that the new formulations incorporating polyethylene glycol, which Malone describes to Joe as essentially antifreeze, created particles that would stay localized at the injection site and travel to draining lymph nodes without the dangerous systemic distribution Malone had seen in his earlier work. Malone believed him because Cullis was an extremely experienced and knowledgeable liposome formulation expert, decades his senior. But Malone also needed to travel internationally, and at the time you could not get on an airplane without being vaccinated, let alone travel to Canada where you could not even board a train.

There was also a narrative circulating that if you had long COVID, taking the vaccine would kick your immune system into gear and help clear those symptoms. Malone had caught COVID in late February 2020 at a conference in Boston, staying in a converted firehouse right across from the biotech company associated with the initial Boston outbreak. He came home sick as a dog, lost his stamina, could not walk up hills, could not do his farm chores. He had been experiencing these long COVID symptoms for many months and the vaccine was presented as a potential cure. He notes that recent data now shows the opposite is true, that the vaccines may have worsened long COVID rather than helping.

Section 3. Drug Repurposing, Ivermectin, and the FDA Resistance

Malone reveals that before any vaccines were available, he was deeply involved in drug repurposing efforts. After getting a call from a former CIA contact named Michael Callahan warning about the Wuhan virus, Malone assembled a team using computational drug discovery, running massive virtual libraries through Amazon AWS to identify potential repurposed drugs. He came up with a list of candidates and, lying sick in bed, decided to experiment on himself despite the medical taboo against self-experimentation. As he tells Joe, he thought he was probably going to die anyway, so what did he have to lose.

One of the compounds was famotidine, a common stomach acid medication, which gave him an immediate response. He also tried quercetin with less effect. Working with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, he managed to secure several hundred million dollars for adaptive clinical trials of a drug combination including famotidine, celecoxib, and what he calls the forbidden horse medicine, ivermectin. But the FDA repeatedly rejected the application, demanding cell culture tests to demonstrate antiviral activity before allowing the trials to proceed. The Department of Defense eventually caved, dropped the ivermectin component, and proceeded with just famotidine and celecoxib.

Joe is characteristically baffled by this. The two threads Malone can pull on to explain the resistance are that ivermectin is off-patent, meaning no one profits from it, and that its effectiveness would have threatened the emergency use authorization pathway for the vaccines. Under the rules, if an effective countermeasure existed, the fast-tracking of vaccines under the PREP Act would no longer be valid. Joe connects the dots plainly: it was all about emergency use authorization, and the pharmaceutical companies made hundreds of billions of dollars. Malone agrees, noting the greatest upward transfer of wealth in modern history occurred during COVID, and it was not just the vaccines but the entire enterprise of lockdowns, destruction of small businesses, stimulus package fraud, and the hollowing out of the middle class on hyperspeed.

Section 4. Mass Formation, Psychological Warfare, and the Coca-Cola Connection

The conversation circles back to the aftermath of their first episode, when Malone introduced the concept of mass formation psychosis. He explains that the term originated with Mattias Desmet, a professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium who had been teaching about the psychology of totalitarianism for years before having an epiphany that he was living through exactly what he had been teaching. The core idea is that when people become socially isolated and disassociated from community, they become extremely vulnerable to manipulation by a strong leader who offers a solution to their psychological pain. People attach vertically to that leader rather than building horizontal social connections, and this enables totalitarianism.

Malone then drops what he calls the documented backstory of the Spotify blowback, sourced from a congressional report. The chain of events went like this: their discussion triggered Coca-Cola Corporation to complain to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which was created by the World Economic Forum. GARM had a connection to Google AdSense and controlled the advertising ecosystem. Coca-Cola told GARM to put pressure on Spotify, threatening to pull advertising. The question Malone raises is why Coca-Cola would care about what Joe Rogan said to Robert Malone on New Year's Eve. The answer, he says, is that Coca-Cola is tight with the CDC, having funded buildings there and contributing to the CDC Foundation. Coca-Cola wanted the CDC to influence the WHO not to implement restrictions on sugar use, which would hurt their market share. So the CDC apparently acted through its ally Coca-Cola to initiate the pressure campaign against the podcast.

Joe recalls making what Malone describes as close to a hostage video, sitting on his porch explaining what he was going to do differently. Malone says he was literally sitting around Gavin de Becker's campfire in Maui when someone showed him the clip. The compromise was a little banner at the bottom of the episode directing viewers to the CDC for the truth about COVID, which Malone says was pushed out by the nudge units at the CDC, a direct product of behavioral science technology normalized by an Obama-era presidential directive that still has not been rescinded.

Section 5. Nudge Technology, Fifth Generation Warfare, and Information Control

This section goes deep into what Malone calls the weaponization of modern psychology. He traces it back to a 2015 executive order from President Obama requiring federal agencies to incorporate behavioral insights into their evaluation efforts, which Malone characterizes as a nice way of saying the use of propaganda on the American people. He describes how the UK is even further along, with the 77th Brigade of the British Army operating as an open psychological warfare unit, and a civilian branch that paid people to counter unapproved narratives on social media. Now, he says, they have cut out the middleman and simply censor you and send you to jail.

Malone recounts being on a Great Britain News broadcast where his government-aligned counterpart openly stated that in the UK, once a government wins an election, it has the right to deploy these psychological tools on its own population. This moment crystallized everything for Malone, connecting Desmet's mass formation theory, the attacks he experienced after the Rogan episode, and the broader infrastructure of information control into a coherent picture of fifth generation warfare.

He describes how his wife uses the Hindustan Times to find stories American corporate media will not report, and how even AI systems like Grok have algorithmically built firewalls on certain subjects. He credits Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter as one of the most impactful decisions any American citizen has ever made, saying without it we would be really screwed. Joe points to the Twitter Files as proof of how deeply the government was censoring accurate information.

Malone shares that the Trusted News Initiative, launched by the BBC to counter Russian disinformation and repurposed for vaccine disinformation, had identified Joe Rogan as the major threat to their business model. Joe fires back that during the Spotify controversy, they gained two million subscribers in a single month.

Section 6. The Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine Suppression Campaign

Malone provides a detailed account of how alternative treatments were systematically crushed. With hydroxychloroquine, the story traces back to Ralph Baric, who had published years earlier that the drug was effective against coronaviruses. Zev Zelenko, a doctor in New York who has since passed away, found Baric's work, gained clinical experience with hydroxychloroquine, and wrote to the president. Peter Navarro was tasked with sourcing the drug domestically. Then the Lancet published a paper with completely fabricated data trashing the drug, claiming it was toxic and ineffective. The paper was eventually retracted when it was revealed the data was nonexistent, but by then the damage was done, the drug was completely crushed.

With ivermectin, the Cochrane Institute in the UK had produced a meta-analysis showing the drug was quite effective, but then something happened, influence was exerted, and the analysis was restructured with certain positive studies thrown out. One of the investigators, Tess Lawrie, was so furious that she created the World Council for Health. Malone also describes how Merck, which held the original ivermectin patent, was involved through the Foundation for NIH in running clinical trials that manipulated dosing to produce results suggesting ivermectin was ineffective. That foundation is now headed by Julie Gerberding, the former head of Merck vaccines, whom Bobby Kennedy cannot remove due to the rules governing the position.

Joe reflects on his own experience, recalling how he listed multiple treatments when he got COVID including IV vitamins, monoclonal antibodies, prednisone, and Z-Pack, but the only thing anyone attacked him for was ivermectin. As Joe puts it, there was no demonization of monoclonal antibodies, just ivermectin. He and Malone both land on the same conclusion: money is the root of all evil. Malone reframes it as money and power, noting that for the likes of Larry Fink and Bill Gates, the money itself is just chips, a score in a video game. Joe adds that these people are also captured by their past actions, constantly trying to obfuscate things they have done, like Gates giving children polio with the polio vaccine in Africa and India.

Section 7. Bird Flu, Chicken Culling, and Thinking Different

Joe asks about the mass chicken culling during the bird flu scares, and Malone explains why he told Bobby Kennedy it did not make sense. The core issue is that avian influenza has a natural reservoir in migratory waterfowl, ducks and geese that travel continent to continent carrying the virus and depositing it in water where it survives for extended periods. You cannot eliminate bird flu by killing chickens when wild birds are constantly reintroducing it. It has never worked and it will never work.

Malone argues the rational approach is to breed resistant chickens, noting there is a huge repository of different chicken cultivars, some of which are relatively resistant to bird flu. In a logical world, Tyson and other major producers would be investing in flu-resistant breeds rather than repeatedly engaging in mass culling. He also mentions that the Amish are already using hypochlorous acid in water supplies to control viruses and E. coli in their operations.

The broader point Malone makes is about institutional inertia. There is a saying that the only time the FDA ever changes is when somebody in a key position retires or dies. Kennedy and Trump have the courage to question these long-held beliefs, and that has been treated as heresy by the establishment.

Section 8. African Swine Fever and the New Lab Leak

Malone breaks what he calls truly breaking news about a situation in Spain that American media is not covering. A Spanish research laboratory has been collaborating with the USDA to develop a vaccine for African swine fever virus, and in doing so they have been conducting gain-of-function research, building recombinant viruses, exactly the same logic that was used in Wuhan. The facility is located in an area dense with wild hogs, which Malone calls a fundamental violation of common sense. You do not put a facility working with dangerous pathogens next to the animals that could be infected.

Last November, dead hogs started appearing around the facility. Police have seized records and digital information. China has already dropped the curtain and refused to accept Spanish pork. The entire Spanish pork industry is now compromised. Malone argues that Trump should raise trade barriers immediately to protect the American pork industry, noting that the band of high-density wild hog populations spreads from Catalonia through the mountains into Italy. Joe asks how they resolve it, and Malone admits he does not know. They are using drones to try to find infected animals, but as Joe points out from his knowledge of wild hog hunting in Texas, the hogs are winning.

This leads to a wonderfully absurd tangent where Malone mentions the emu wars in Australia, and Joe's friend Monty Franklin has a joke about how Australia fought a war with the emus and lost. Malone says his wife describes their farm emus as not having two brain cells to rub together, and Joe shares that a falconer once told him emus are the dumbest birds, followed by owls. Malone is surprised, noting that the owl has been the symbol of learning since Athens.

Section 9. Malone's Government Role and the ACIP

Joe asks what Malone actually does in his government capacity. Malone explains he is a special government employee without pay, the same designation Elon Musk had, only without all the money, as he jokes. He serves as vice chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the CDC, which advises the CDC director on vaccine policy. He also chairs the influenza working group and occasionally gets calls from Secretary Kennedy asking for advice on specific issues.

He describes chairing the hepatitis B meeting as the worst meeting he has ever had to adjudicate in his entire life, a complete slugfest. He mentions that the American Academy of Pediatrics has filed a lawsuit seeking to shut down the ACIP and force everything back to the way it was when it was controlled by the professional societies. Malone warns that articles of impeachment have already been drawn up against Kennedy and they are talking about impeaching Trump, predicting another two years of stagnation and what he diplomatically avoids calling civil war.

On the State Department side, Malone has begun supporting the group under Secretary Rubio responsible for the bioweapons convention. He shares a funny anecdote about being asked to go to Geneva to keynote a talk on using AI for monitoring bioweapons threats, and when they told him the date was February 12th, he had to explain he was scheduled for Rogan that day. The State Department's response was immediate: absolutely, Rogan is way more important than speaking at the UN about bioweapons.

Section 10. Vaccines, the Pediatric Schedule, and the Business Model

This is where the conversation gets into what Malone calls the perfect business model. He walks through the economics of getting a vaccine onto the pediatric schedule. Once a manufacturer gets a product through the ACIP and onto the Vaccines for Children program, they have guaranteed purchasing, distribution, and marketing all paid for by the taxpayer, full indemnification from legal liability thanks to the Reagan-era legislation, and the CDC doing all the propaganda with the safe and effective messaging. School districts then mandate it, and the product becomes a cash cow in perpetuity. No legal liability, guaranteed profit, government-funded marketing. As Malone says, what's not to like as a business model?

Joe brings up Suzanne Humphries and her book Dissolving Illusions, which examines the history of vaccines and what actually caused the decline in infectious diseases. Malone, to his credit as a vaccinologist, acknowledges that the first time he really encountered this logic was when Candace Owens pointed out that infectious disease mortality was declining before the vaccines were introduced. He connects this to the concurrent removal of lead from the population and improvements in water sanitation, both of which contributed to better health outcomes but whose benefits were ascribed to vaccination by the people busy marketing vaccines.

They have a particularly striking exchange about polio. Malone asks Joe what percentage of polio cases are asymptomatic, and most people would guess close to zero. The answer is 95 to 99 percent. Joe adds that Humphries' work revealed DDT was being sprayed ubiquitously across the country at the same time, and DDT exposure produces the same symptoms as paralytic polio. The first infections were occurring in rural areas where DDT spraying was heaviest.

Section 11. Genetic Breakthroughs, Myocarditis, and the Bright Side

Malone pivots to some genuinely hopeful developments. A research group that had its funding cut during the Biden administration has managed to identify seven genes that represent high-risk factors for myocarditis after vaccination. Myocarditis has been associated with vaccines for quite a while, notably the smallpox vaccine, but with modern whole genome sequencing now costing just 300 dollars, we are approaching a future where genetic tests could identify individuals at higher risk for adverse vaccine reactions.

He believes this intersection of genomic analysis and epidemiology will open up entirely new understandings of human disease, though he acknowledges the public policy part is wicked hard. The point he is making is that the narratives promoted by manufacturers and academic surrogates for decades are going to be broken by actual science, if the current administration is allowed to do the work. Long-term follow-up studies will take a decade, which is the unfortunate truth, but the direction of travel is toward transparency and genuine understanding.

Section 12. Biotechnology, Artificial Wombs, and the Transhumanist Frontier

The conversation takes a genuinely unsettling turn when Malone brings up artificial wombs. He says they already have a lamb grown de novo in an artificial womb, and that Silicon Valley is actively pursuing this technology as a reproductive freedom issue. Joe is viscerally disturbed. As he puts it, that is a serial killer, referring to the kind of human you might produce with no maternal interaction for nine months.

Malone connects this to the broader transhumanist agenda, noting that whole genome sequencing at 300 dollars combined with CRISPR gene editing and artificial womb technology puts us at the threshold of custom-built humans. He recommends the movie Gattaca as essentially a documentary of our near future. Joe brings up Ted Kaczynski, noting the Unabomber was kept in a nursery with no human contact as an infant and was permanently off from that point, illustrating the critical importance of maternal bonding.

Malone also touches on organ harvesting in China, citing a book documenting how live prisoners are genetically tested and harvested on demand for transplant organs, and argues that artificial womb technology opens the door to growing clones as donor tissue insurance policies. Joe keeps coming back to the word demonic, saying whether or not demons literally exist, these actions are exactly how they would behave.

Section 13. UAPs, High-Energy Physics, and the Future

In the final stretch, the conversation drifts into UAP territory. Malone says he has become increasingly convinced that there exists a physics beyond Einsteinian physics involving extremely high energy systems in very small packages. He has hosted people at his farm who work in this space, and he finds the transmedium device reports from military personnel, objects that fly and then go underwater at the same speed with no ripples, to be credible and consistent with this hypothesis.

He connects this to emerging micro-fusion reactor technology being developed to power data centers, arguing that if it matures and becomes available in small decentralized packages, it would transform the entire landscape of economic activity and humanity's future.

Joe and Malone close on cautious optimism. As Malone says, it does not have to be dark and demonic, if we do not let the bastards have their way. Joe notes that most of what Malone warned about five years ago is now widely accepted. Malone deflects the credit to the community of physicians and scientists whose voices he carried through that first appearance, calling it a moment in time where they did good, even though by God they came at us.

Key Takeaways

One. The mRNA vaccine technology had known problems with inflammation and systemic distribution going back to Malone's original research in the 1980s. The assurances that these problems had been solved came from colleagues whose claims were not independently verified before mass deployment.

Two. The suppression of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine was likely driven by the need to maintain emergency use authorization for the vaccines, which would have been invalidated if effective alternative treatments existed. The Lancet hydroxychloroquine paper was based on fabricated data and was retracted, but only after the drug had been effectively killed.

Three. The Spotify backlash was not organic. Congressional records show a chain from the CDC through Coca-Cola to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media to Spotify's advertising ecosystem, representing a coordinated information control operation.

Four. Obama-era presidential directives establishing nudge technology and behavioral science units in federal agencies remain in place and continue to enable what Malone characterizes as psychological warfare against American citizens.

Five. A new lab leak situation is unfolding in Spain where gain-of-function research on African swine fever virus has apparently resulted in infected wild hogs around the facility, threatening the European pork industry and potentially the American one.

Six. The vaccine business model as it exists creates perverse incentives: guaranteed purchasing, full indemnification, government-funded marketing, and no legal liability once a product reaches the pediatric schedule.

Seven. Emerging genetic research has identified seven genes associated with myocarditis risk after vaccination, pointing toward a future where genetic testing could identify vulnerable individuals before they receive vaccines.

Eight. Artificial womb technology combined with CRISPR and cheap genome sequencing is bringing us to the threshold of custom-engineered humans, raising profound questions about consciousness, maternal bonding, and what it means to be human.

Nine. Malone now serves as vice chair of the CDC's ACIP and supports State Department work on bioweapons convention compliance, a remarkable arc from dangerous misinformation spreader to government adviser on the very issues he was censored for discussing.

Ten. Despite the darkness, both express cautious optimism that information control structures are becoming visible and challengeable in ways that were impossible just a few years ago.