Rosenberg: In other words, you might think that Joe Rogan is imparting mistaken information about the virus, but you might learn from him about how to convince an audience to believe certain things and how to get an audience to listen, because clearly he has mastered that.

Shapin: I think so.

There’s also an interesting relationship between Joe Rogan and Donald Trump on the one hand and—if you want a historical example—Galileo. One of the things that we’re taught in school is the idea of speaking truth to power. And that’s what we’re told Galileo does. He’s a lone voice. We like the idea of the lone genius. Okay, I think that idea is wrong. I think it’s misguided. But the idea of the lone genius of iconoclasm, of skepticism, is so powerfully attached in the public mind to science. And so in the public mind, the voice that speaks up and asks, “What about hydroxychloroquine?” or says, “This is all a Chinese plot,” attaches to this idea of the lone voice standing against the orthodoxy, while scientific orthodoxy and consensus get cast as conspiracy. In other words, we’re in the world of the Zionist plot.