In this episode, we discuss the rise of the Flat Earth Theory, the conspiracy theory that the Earth is round, and the conspiracy theories that go along with it. We also talk about some of the science behind the theory, and what we can do about it. Also, we talk about the new round Earth Shill t-shirt, and why we think it's a good idea to have a round Earth Day! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used by permission. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. We do not own the rights to either of these songs, credit goes to original artists. If you enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your music. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to our other projects! We are working on transcribing episodes of the podcast and putting them on a website. Please be kind enough to send us your thoughts and suggestions for future episodes. Thank you so much love and support. Timestamps: 0:00 - Flat Earth Day 1:00:30 - What is a round earth day? 5:00- Flat Earth? 6:30- Is the Earth round? 7:15 - What does the Earth really have a diameter? 8:20 - What are we supposed to be? 9:00? 11:30? 12:40 - Is there any such thing as a planet? 13: What is it? 15: Is there such a thing? 16:15? 17:00 18: Does the Earth a circle? 19:40? 21:20? 22:00 Is there a planet out there? 23:00 Can we see the Earth in a cube? 26:00 Do we have a point of view? 27:30 Is it a planet in the middle place? 25:00 Are we a planet on the equator? 24:00 What do we need to be a circle or something like that? 29:00 We don t we have it in a square plane? 35: Is it really? ? 36:00 Or do we have an equator or a planet with a point in the center of the sky? 31:00 Does it matter?
00:01:25.000Oh, there's a lot that actually believe it.
00:01:26.000There are people who actually believe it, and then there's people who see that there's people out there who believe it, and then they start, like, kind of egging these people on.
00:01:34.000And then it becomes really, really hard to tell where the dividing line is, who's actually trolling, and who's actually a genuine true believer.
00:01:41.000There are absolutely a lot of true believers, but there's also a lot of people with, like, little green frogs in their avatar that think it's fucking hilarious.
00:01:49.000Yeah, I think that type of person has kind of adopted it.
00:01:58.000And that's just something that you could do is if you want to just annoy people by shitposting, you'll just post a bunch of flat earth memes because they're so infuriating to the average person that they're just going to be, what the heck is this that this person is posting?
00:02:15.000The shit poster enjoys that type of thing.
00:02:17.000I was watching a video with this guy, was ranting on and on that it's not a theory, that we need to stop accepting that the Flat Earth is a theory, but that it's a fact.
00:02:28.000We need to start accepting the fact that it's a fact.
00:02:51.000I think there's actually a relatively small number of people who are really active in promoting the flat earth stuff on YouTube.
00:02:57.000What's adorable is that they keep claiming that all the photos of Earth are fake, but they don't have a single photo of this fucking ice wall that's supposed to be around Antarctica.
00:03:08.000And they keep saying, erroneously, that you're not allowed to fly over Antarctica.
00:03:25.000There's a fucking satellite, there's a bunch of satellites, but there's one from Japan that takes high-resolution photos of the Earth every 10 minutes, the full Earth from 22,000 miles away.
00:03:36.000Yeah, that's the Japanese Himawari-8 satellite.
00:03:39.000But there's also a US satellite that was just launched last year, the GOES-16 satellite, which is basically the same resolution.
00:03:47.000Pull this sucker right up to your face.
00:05:17.000And have they looked at the fact that, you know, you get one every 10 minutes or one every 15 minutes, and do, you know, every single image is this 121 megapixel image.
00:05:26.000And it all matches up exactly with what the weather is around the world.
00:05:30.000And it matches up with all the other size images, one from the Russians, one from the Chinese, one from the Japanese.
00:06:32.000People, they go down a YouTube rabbit hole, and that's part of the problem is once you believe something, it's very difficult to unbelieve it.
00:06:40.000It is, and there's so much out there that if you tell people to do some research, what they end up doing is just looking at more YouTube videos that confirm what they believe.
00:06:53.000Of course, but it's just amazing to me that people would decide that all of these photos were fake so that they don't believe the world is around, but yet they don't have a single photo of this fucking flat earth.
00:08:11.000And this is a camera that a lot of them have because they're obsessed with zooming in on things that are on the horizon, like ships going beyond the horizon.
00:08:20.000But if they just take the same camera that they have and point it upwards, they would actually see things in the solar system, basically, that really can't be explained any other way.
00:08:30.000One great thing is the moons of Jupiter.
00:08:33.000If you look at Jupiter really closely, even with some binoculars, you can see it's got these four little moons that are orbiting it.
00:08:41.000It looks like there's four little lights in a line with Jupiter, and they actually move around in a regular pattern.
00:08:47.000And they move around, they've got orbits of like, some of them are I think like 80 hours or something, so they move around really fast, like every day it's a completely different pattern, these little dots around Jupiter.
00:08:56.000And you can actually see that with this camera, I've taken photos of it, posted them on the website, or even with binoculars.
00:09:02.000And if you actually watch it from day to day, you will see the moons of Jupiter move in exactly the same way that science predicts that they should move, using Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Newton's law of gravitation.
00:09:17.000They move exactly as if they are a little simulation of a planetary system.
00:09:23.000So either there's some kind of weird hologram up in that little corner of the sky which moves around, or there is actually a planet there with little moons orbiting it.
00:09:35.000When did you first become aware of this?
00:09:37.000You've run Metabunk for a long time, and for those who don't know, Mick and I met on the sci-fi show that I did, Joe Rogan Questions Everything, where we discussed chemtrails or contrails and what causes a jet engine to make what looks like artificial clouds by passing through condensation.
00:09:54.000The heat of the engine produces these contrails, and people were absolutely convinced that they're spraying, the government is spraying something in the sky.
00:10:49.000Kind of, but he was doing it in a kind of satirical way, ironically.
00:10:55.000He was doing it because he was saying, people are too sure of themselves, and so I'm going to join the Flat Earth Society.
00:11:01.000He didn't believe the Earth was round.
00:11:03.000So it's been around for quite a while, the Flat Earth Society.
00:11:06.000The Flat Earth Theory has been around, obviously, thousands of years ago people thought the Earth was round, and then slightly fewer thousand years ago people figured out that it wasn't.
00:11:17.000It was figured out by the ancient Greeks like 3,000 years ago that it wasn't.
00:11:44.000So, what happened was science basically figured out the shape of the universe.
00:11:51.000And in the 1800s, there was a gentleman scientist doing all kinds of cool things with stars, like measuring the orbits and checking out how far away things were and discovering that there were galaxies and things like that.
00:12:05.000But then there was this guy comes along called Samuel Robotham, who published under the name of Parallax in about 1860, and he started publishing what is basically the same as Eric DeBay's book that has been published now.
00:12:41.000It's not actually this new stuff that he's discovered.
00:12:44.000It's all stuff like, you know, if somebody walks away from you, you will see their feet disappear first.
00:12:50.000And then he has a two-page quote of Samuel Robotham saying the exact same thing from the 1860s.
00:12:56.000So it's basically recycling this theory that started in the 1860s and then just adding a few little sprinkles to it, like saying that astronauts must be fake and the space station is fake.
00:13:08.000They think satellites are fake as well.
00:13:11.000He thinks that dinosaurs are fake, nuclear bombs are fake.
00:13:15.000I mean, the idea that one person would be this mastermind that discovers all these monumental frauds, I don't think he's claiming to have discovered these things.
00:13:27.000There's lots of people who think that nukes are fake and dinosaurs being fake is an obvious thing for creationists and people of that ilk.
00:13:37.000He's basically recycling theories in a way that is popular.
00:14:14.000That's the experiment that supposedly...
00:14:17.000It actually has been reproduced because it's...
00:14:19.000Well, the wrong way, not the way that they want it to.
00:14:21.000The Michelson-Morley experiment was an experiment to detect the luminiferous ether, which is the supposed medium through which light travels.
00:14:34.000Now, back in the 1800s, we didn't know that light was made up out of photons because light was waves.
00:14:39.000So we thought that there was this stuff that permeated all of space called the luminiferous ether.
00:14:49.000And that this is what light travelled through as waves going through and like...
00:14:54.000They didn't know exactly how it worked, but they figured there must be this stuff that permeates all of space.
00:14:59.000And then they figured that since the Earth was moving, and these scientists actually knew at the time that the Earth was moving, so they were using this as a basis for their experiment, they thought that if the Earth is moving, then they will be able to detect the ether.
00:15:13.000So what they did, they set up this experiment where they shot light one direction and they shot it in the other direction, and then when it came back together, it combined.
00:15:19.000And if they were moving through the ether, or if the ether was moving through them, then the light that went one way would interfere with the light that went the other way.
00:15:29.000So that was the whole experiment, was just this thing.
00:15:31.000They shot these two light beams in two directions, and they figured, like, you know, if we turn the table this way, it will change because we're now going through the ether in a different direction.
00:15:39.000But what happened was nothing was detected.
00:15:43.000Which was kind of the start of people realizing, oh, there is no luminiferous ether permeating the universe.
00:15:48.000Right, but they used that to say that it's because the Earth isn't moving.
00:15:51.000That was what the flat Earth people tried to use.
00:16:08.000So they were trying to detect the ether.
00:16:09.000So people who thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, not really so much flat-earthers, people who were geocentrists, people who thought that the Sun went around the Earth and all the stars went around the Earth.
00:16:21.000There's still people like that, by the way.
00:16:38.000Yeah, well, I mean, if you need to shoehorn the whole universe into, you know, the descriptions in Genesis, then you're probably going to have to take a few shortcuts.
00:16:49.000But yeah, there's these experiments like the Michelson-Morley experiment, but people bring them up.
00:16:55.000And they say that what they detected was no motion.
00:17:03.000And because they detected no luminiferous ether, it eventually led to theories about what light actually is, which is wave-particle duality.
00:17:13.000You know, light is photons, which act both as a wave and as a particle, and eventually to the theory of relativity.
00:17:26.000But I've been doing the chemtrail stuff with Contrail Science for like over ten years now.
00:17:31.000I was just looking at one of my old posts on satellite images.
00:17:35.000I was quite surprised at how long I've been doing it.
00:17:39.000And, yeah, and Metabunk been going about five years, and the Flat Earth stuff came up maybe two years ago.
00:17:46.000I started to see things about Flat Earth, and a bit over a year ago, I wrote a post on, you know, what should we do about debunking the Flat Earth?
00:17:56.000And basically said, like, all these people are basically either trolling or they're crazy.
00:18:01.000So there's no point addressing either of them.
00:18:03.000And I think most of them are just trolling because no one could seriously believe this.
00:18:22.000And it's stunning how many people, like, this is why Jamie made these, youngjamie.com, you can go and get these flat earth shill shirts, that somehow or another we're being paid to say that the earth is round.
00:18:33.000Like, the idea that anybody would actually believe, I've had so many people tweet at me, I know where your checks are coming from, bro, you're a fucking sellout.
00:18:55.000The idea that all these scientists who make their name off discoveries, by the way, especially a monumental and provable discovery like the world being flat, like somehow or another they would hide that.
00:19:04.000And then the big question is, why would the government say the world is flat?
00:19:07.000I mean, why would they, in any way, why would they rather hide the fact the world is flat?
00:19:12.000Like, what motivation would anybody have to show that the world was round?
00:19:15.000It would be pretty fascinating if we lived on this flat disk and everybody else throughout the universe was on a planet.
00:19:25.000There's a weird thing that's going on with some of these flat earth people where they're linking this to a sign that we are in some way special, that we are the chosen ones.
00:19:36.000It keeps going back to Genesis and that we are the children of God and that creation is true and that evolution is a lie.
00:19:45.000And it gets to some weird anti-Jew stuff with a lot of these guys.
00:20:03.000I think perhaps because of the The whole, the Jews killed Jesus, so Christians don't like the Jews, or some Christians don't like the Jews.
00:20:11.000So they've just been viewed as being an other.
00:20:14.000And they're often, you know, the Jewish, the broader Jewish population is often like a minority within cities.
00:20:21.000And so it's kind of an easy person to pick on when things go wrong.
00:20:25.000But I don't know, I'm sure there's loads of books written on why Jews are the subject of conspiracy theories.
00:20:47.000My concern is these young kids that are on the fence.
00:20:51.000My thoughts are, look, I'm not going to reach out.
00:20:54.000There's some 45-year-old crazy person who's making YouTube videos three times a day about the world being flat and ranting and raving and challenging everyone to debates that he's never going to engage in.
00:21:09.000But there's some 16-year-old kids out there that maybe are in high school and maybe don't have a real formal education in science or astrophysics, and they're getting confused, and they maybe smoke a little too much pot.
00:21:20.000That's you, motherfucker, whoever's listening to this.
00:21:57.000And it showed that there was these things that looked like tubes that had jellyfish-like wings that were flying through the air Supposedly, it speeds undetectable to the human eye.
00:22:09.000Like, they were moving so fast, we couldn't see them.
00:22:14.000And then, there was a show called Monster Quest, and what they did is they set up two cameras.
00:22:18.000One camera, which was a very fast, high-speed camera, and the other one, which is a standard video camera.
00:22:24.000And the standard video camera caught all these rods flying around.
00:22:28.000And then the exact same images right next to each other with this high-definition, high-speed camera showed actual bugs.
00:22:35.000So what those rods were was just a video artifact of these bugs that were moving so close to the screen and so fast that the camera couldn't register correctly.
00:22:45.000And so it created this elongating effect and made it look like there were these jellyfish.
00:22:50.000Well, I think that type of thing, that type of video, is the type of thing that needs to be done to counteract this type of But I don't think it would work, though, because if people aren't looking at the Himawari 8, if they see those images, I put those images up, and dude, if you look at my Instagram post,
00:23:19.000I engage with a lot of conspiracy theorists online, and I know when I'm doing it, I'm not actually going to reach the vast majority of the people I'm talking directly to, but I know there's lots of other people reading What I'm saying, who will?
00:23:33.000And, you know, just because people are complaining about your posts of the Himawari-8 images doesn't mean that there aren't people who actually went and looked it up.
00:23:43.000Oh, I'm sure, because I think it got, like, 50,000 likes or something like that.
00:23:47.000So I'm sure, even besides people that didn't like it, many people, they were like, oh, really?
00:23:52.000Because that was one of the big things that the flat Earth people kept saying, that there's no photos of the Earth that aren't a composite from space.
00:24:08.000I mean, you might still believe it now.
00:24:09.000You might be telling your friends about it.
00:24:10.000Have you seen these crazy rods that are everywhere?
00:24:13.000The guy who made that video showed up at a Q&A that I did once for the UFC. I do these Q&As where people yell out questions like, what do you think about this guy fighting that guy, that kind of thing.
00:24:23.000And he waited in line to get to the front of the line to tell me that I was wrong and that the rods are real.
00:25:17.000They were probably looking down at the darkness of the pit below, and then they had a shaft of sunlight in front of that, so the bugs were flying through the sunlight with a dark background, which is something you don't normally see, so it would have been an unusually good environment for rods to show up in.
00:25:35.000And that guy, I mean, waiting in line to get to the front of the line to ask me a question and tell me that, you know, he has the evidence and I need to see it.
00:26:28.000There was a Chilean Navy helicopter that had this infrared camera and they saw this two black dots off in the distance that looked like a weird thing, like a figure eight type thing flying away and then it started spraying out this stuff and they couldn't figure out what it was and they chased after it but it was too fast and it got away from them.
00:26:46.000And the Chilean government has an official UFO investigation team, and they set them on it, and they spent two years figuring out what it was, and they couldn't figure out what it was, and so they said it's a confirmed, unidentified object.
00:27:04.000And then they published their findings, and then I... And some other people on Metabunk looked at it and we figured out it was actually just a plane flying away from the helicopter leaving some contrails behind and we actually figured out exactly which plane it was.
00:27:19.000And so this got a bit of play online and it was on like Covington Post and things like that.
00:27:24.000And some UFO enthusiasts started talking to me and I joined their groups.
00:27:50.000But they think they have this confirmation bias, this group confirmation bias, where they can't disagree with someone and they know they're in a safe space so they can put out whatever theory that they like and they know that people will be like,
00:28:09.000One that happened a couple of days ago, some woman put up a picture of a strange light that she said was in the sky.
00:28:16.000And so I downloaded the picture and I boosted the brightness and I saw it was actually a reflection of something in a security light on a porch.
00:28:24.000And you could see it was like there was trees behind it and it was a security light and it was this reflection.
00:28:28.000So I posted that and then I started getting called like a shill.
00:28:51.000It really is a good way to put it, because that is what those communities seemed like, and that's one of the things that I found when I did that television show.
00:28:56.000I still harbored a few conspiracy theories before I did that show, but doing that show for several months and constantly interviewing people who believed in outlandish things, I found the same thing over and over and over again.
00:29:11.000Illogical people with very little evidence, believing things in almost a religious way.
00:29:16.000And I found it with Bigfoot, and I found it with UFOs, and I found it with chemtrails, and I found it with, it was just one after the other, in varying stages of ridiculousness.
00:29:26.000I feel like contrails and chemtrails were the most nutty people.
00:29:30.000UFO people seem to be the most reasonable because it's the most reasonable theory.
00:29:35.000Out of all of them, the idea that we have spaceships, why doesn't someone else have spaceships?
00:29:39.000There's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, hundreds of billions of planets in each galaxy.
00:29:45.000The odds of there being some sort of a life form out there is pretty high.
00:29:52.000The more I talked to these people, the more I went over all their evidence, air quotes evidence, the more I asked them why they believe things.
00:30:13.000And that idea is that there's something in the sky that flies around that we either might catch, if you're there, the right place at the right time or not, and that they're from another planet.
00:30:22.000Yeah, if you look at what they put forward as the best evidence, it's often like cases from the 60s where there's an eyewitness who said something, like there was some guy on a road who says he blacked out and his car got messed up.
00:30:36.000Well, that's the other thing that I know too much about psychedelic drugs, and I know about endogenous psychedelic drugs, the brain producing this chemical called dimethyltryptamine that happens when you're sleeping.
00:30:46.000Now, they've proven that this stuff is...
00:30:49.000Produced in the liver and in the lungs and they believe it's now they've got evidence that it's produced in the pineal gland It's a very potent psychedelic drug that your brain produces and your brain produces it during REM sleep So these people they all take naps and during these naps they have these crazy fucking dreams and it's entirely possible that during these dreams What happened is they got some endogenous DMT dump whether they were under stress or whether they just had just a Erratic dump of this human
00:31:19.000neurochemical that entered into their bloodstream, whatever it is, it caused it.
00:31:24.000All these fucking UFO abductions, all of them, almost exactly happen at night.
00:31:30.000And they happen while these people are sleeping.
00:31:32.000Wouldn't you just assume that you were dreaming?
00:31:34.000Why wouldn't you assume you were dreaming?
00:31:36.000Yeah, I used to have these kind of night terror hallucination things which were kind of like that.
00:33:21.000Hangar 18. Area 51. I think there was a paper a while ago published on how many people it would take to cover up certain conspiracy theories and the probability of none of those people ever talking.
00:33:56.000You can just land in one spot, take off again, land in another spot, and you can eventually get to the same spot that you're at with a bunch of different flights that you can track them on a GPS. That's fake too, GPS. Well, one thing I want to try to introduce to people who believe in the flat Earth is this concept of ground truth.
00:34:19.000Ground truth is a concept in satellite observations, which I kind of touched on before.
00:34:24.000You take a satellite observation and you see, does it match what you see on the ground?
00:34:29.000Or if you've got something like a weather prediction model, like you're predicting the weather, you see, does that match what you see on the ground?
00:34:35.000And this is something that you can do if you're actually really interested in looking into the flat-earth theory, is figure out what the actual ground truth is for something.
00:34:47.000I want to talk very briefly about a program called Stellarium, which you might have seen.
00:34:52.000It's just basically a solar system simulator.
00:35:17.000You know, basically you just look at what's on the screen and then you go outside and you look to see, is this what I'm seeing on the screen here?
00:35:26.000So this is basically you checking the ground truth of this program, which seems like a very straightforward thing.
00:35:31.000But then what you can do from that is you can then use the program to look at the sky from other positions.
00:35:37.000And because you verify that it's correct for where you are, and you can ask someone else to verify it's correct for where they are, and you can check other photographs that have been taken to see if they match up as well, you'll eventually build up the knowledge that this program is correct, this Stellarium program.
00:35:52.000Or the little program you have in your phone that shows you the stars in the sky.
00:35:56.000So you've got this computer showing you what it expects to see from any position anywhere in the world.
00:36:02.000And you, by doing ground truth observations, have figured out what it actually is here.
00:36:08.000So that's the type of thing you see in Stellarium, obviously in a much less light-polluted environment than you have here.
00:36:15.000Do you think that a lot of what's going on with these people that are theorizing, keep that up, that's pretty cool to look at, with a lot of what's going on with these people theorizing about Flat Earth, there seems to be some desire that people have to expose hidden truths,
00:36:31.000hidden discoveries, or things that are somehow or another being kept from everybody.
00:36:39.000What's fascinating to me is They're looking into this nonsense.
00:36:44.000They're looking into this thing that's not real.
00:36:47.000When the real space, like the actual, like what is observable about space is so mind blowing.
00:36:57.000And somehow or another, that is what you absolutely can see every day, what you absolutely can observe, what you absolutely can read about and learn about, and what scientists are discovering on a daily basis is so mind-blowing.
00:37:11.000When you see, like, they don't believe satellites are real.
00:37:13.000When you see how many satellites we actually have, that's what's really fucked.
00:37:21.000They're going to start bashing into each other and then we'll have no more satellites.
00:37:24.000There's thousands of them up there and they have to time space flights.
00:37:28.000They have to time space flights based on whether or not they're going to hit these satellites or space junk or some of the stuff that's been ejected from various rocket trips.
00:37:41.000Yeah, there's a bit in that where the satellites start bumping into each other, and it's this big chain reaction, and eventually all the satellites get knocked out.
00:37:49.000Did you see that Japanese expedition that they tried to do?
00:38:16.000Yeah, that's the thing too, that somehow or another by being on a flat planet, it gives you a different perspective and they don't want you to have that perspective, so they tell you that the world is round.
00:38:28.000Yeah, one thing I've heard is that they think that if they can convince you that the world is flat when it isn't, then it's kind of like in 1984 where they get people to believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5. And they actually indoctrinate people to genuinely believe that,
00:38:46.000even though they know it's not true, but they still believe it, and it's a way of mind control.
00:38:50.000So the same thing would have happened with the flat earth, but on a far grander scale.
00:38:54.000You're not just convincing someone that 2 plus 2 equals 5, and war equals peace, etc., etc., You're convincing them that the Earth is flat when it's actually round.
00:39:02.000So by twisting their minds around something that's demonstrably false and making them think that it's correct, then you're gaining power over their minds in the same way that they did in 1984. Right, well, in the same way that Scientologists do,
00:39:18.000or Mormons do, or anybody that creates some sort of an ideology that's provably false.
00:39:22.000I mean, look, there's not a whole lot of difference between Scientology and Flat Earth theory.
00:39:29.000I mean, if you really read L. Ron Hubbard's work, if you read what his actual theories were about the origins of mankind, it's pretty fucking loony.
00:39:37.000And yet, there's thousands and thousands of members of Scientology to the point where They're making documentaries about it and writing books about it, and these people are coming out and they've escaped the church and these harrowing stories.
00:39:48.000I mean, I had this guy on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, Ron Miscavige, David Miscavige's dad.
00:40:14.000It gets more and more cult-like the further you get into it.
00:40:17.000Well, also the first original principles of it, like when we start thinking positive and doing positive things, there's a lot of benefits to that.
00:40:27.000They start feeling positive, and then they get into the thetans and the frozen souls chucked into the volcano, and they're like, what?
00:40:34.000Well, I think you could argue that there's some good in the flat earth, not the flat earth theory as such, but the flat earth way of thinking, like questioning things.
00:40:45.000And I think this is something that people really like about it, is that you don't believe scientists just because scientists say something.
00:40:55.000It's this thing they call the zetetic method.
00:40:59.000Which basically is a Greek word meaning questioning.
00:41:27.000You've got young people who are exposed to the idea of Zeteticism, and they think, oh, that's great, you know, I'm rebelling against authority, like young people do, and they think, like, I will not believe, I will not believe the scientists, I will do my own research,
00:41:43.000but then they get sucked into people like DeBay, who feed them all this nonsense.
00:41:49.000He's very articulate, very smooth with the way he talks, and he makes his well-edited videos, and they're very compelling.
00:41:55.000And because he's not an authority, he's not part of the government, he's part of the alt culture, they tend to give his arguments way more weight than mainstream science.
00:42:09.000Yeah, and then they'll find out something like that New York Times article that was out a couple months back where it showed that scientists from the 1950s were paid off by sugar companies to switch the blame to saturated fat, and they started attributing all these health problems that were really about sugar and about eating processed sugar,
00:42:28.000sort of attribute them to the saturated fat, and it changed a lot of people's diets and really fucked a lot of people up in terms of like People start eating margarine and all these things that are filled with trans fats and very unhealthy for you.
00:42:39.000And they did it because they thought that they were, you know, following science.
00:42:42.000And so questioning science and questioning scientists, you know, occasionally you're right.
00:42:48.000Occasionally you'll find something like this conspiracy by the sugar industry.
00:42:53.000You know, there's the old saying like, trust yet verify.
00:43:03.000If you want to trust Eric DeBay, that's fine, but check the things that he says.
00:43:08.000I checked one of his things on the way here on the plane.
00:43:12.000He has a thing that a lot of them say, which is that the horizon always rises to eye level.
00:43:17.000So on the plane on the way here, I checked to see if this was actually correct.
00:43:21.000Now, most people, when they check to see if the horizon rises to eye level, they just look out the window and they say, oh yeah, there's the horizon over there.
00:43:29.000But on around Earth, the horizon is actually going down a little bit when you look out the window of a plane because you're 30,000 feet up in the air.
00:43:36.000It actually drops around two or three degrees.
00:43:38.000But it's very hard to see when you're just looking out of the window of the plane.
00:43:41.000So it's very easy to get taken into believing that it stays at eye level.
00:43:46.000So what I did is I took this little carpenter's level You brought a carpenter's level?
00:43:55.000And I've taped a small tube to the top, which is like a bit of a pen.
00:43:58.000And then I set it level and wedged it so it was level.
00:44:02.000And then I looked through the tube on the top of this level and saw where the horizon was.
00:44:06.000And the horizon was just below the end of the level.
00:44:10.000So the horizon had actually dropped away.
00:44:14.000Which meant that DeBay's claim about the horizon rising to eye level, which is something you'd expect on a flat Earth, was actually incorrect.
00:44:20.000And it's demonstrably incorrect with this $2 level, which I actually got free from somewhere.
00:44:29.000In fact, it works better if you're just on a cliff or something, like a thousand feet up.
00:44:33.000Well, that's another claim that people keep saying that are devotees of this flat earth idea that if you get on a plane and you look up and you look out the window, it looks flat.
00:44:43.000But I do not think that people understand perspective and they do not understand how huge the earth is.
00:44:50.000When you see, there's images, someone did an image that showed how far you are up when you're 30,000 feet in the air, and then how huge the Earth actually is, and you get this little image of a plane at 30,000 feet,
00:45:06.000and then the dot of the plane is represented, and the amount of distance between the Earth is in perspective, and then you see how enormous the planet is.
00:45:16.000You're dealing with something that's so big, it feels like it's flat.
00:45:22.000It feels like it's flat because it's enormous and you're tiny.
00:45:26.000Yeah, that's a huge issue with people, is that they don't really understand the scale of the planet, and they don't understand how little it actually curves.
00:45:36.000There's a road, if you look up the longest roads in America, longest straight road in America, there's this road, it's in Oklahoma or somewhere, and it's about 80 miles long, and it's just perfectly straight.
00:45:49.000It actually isn't perfectly straight, because when they laid it out, they laid it out along a line of latitude, So it's one of the lines that goes around the Earth.
00:45:57.000So it's actually slightly curved, but when you look at it, it looks perfectly straight.
00:46:03.000You have to actually take the whole image and then draw a line from one end to the other in Google Earth, and you see that it deviates by just this tiny little amount.
00:46:11.000But if you were to drive along this road, You're actually driving around, you're actually turning right slightly the whole time, but it looks perfectly straight, because it's hardly moving at all.
00:46:22.000Over this 80 miles, it moves maybe like 10 feet or something.
00:46:25.000And people just don't realise just how small the curve of the Earth actually is.
00:46:34.000And again, I think a real big problem with this theory and with a lot of these theories, a lot of these really outlandish conspiracy theories, is once they hook you, it's very difficult to unhook yourself.
00:46:46.000You don't want to believe that you got taken.
00:46:48.000You don't want to believe you've been had.
00:46:50.000You don't want to believe you've been fooled.
00:46:51.000So you keep going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, and you keep finding more and more confirmation bias, more people inside that walled garden, as you put it.
00:47:01.000Yeah, and some people actually go out and do scientific experiments, and they try reasonably hard, some of them, but then they make some kind of mistake, and then they say this is actual proof that the Earth is flat.
00:47:13.000Like, the level experiment that I did, someone did something similar with that.
00:47:17.000They said they used, like, a water level where you have two tubes connected, and you use the level of the water, because the water level's the same on both of them, and then they hold this up and see if it was below the horizon.
00:47:27.000But they did this experiment, and they did it at sea level.
00:47:30.000Which meant it's always going to be exactly the same as the horizon.
00:47:33.000You've actually got to go up a thousand feet before you can see anything.
00:47:35.000But they still, you know, even though they thought that they were doing some science, but they make this one key mistake and then they won't listen to anybody trying to tell them what the mistake actually was.
00:47:48.000There's a ridiculous amount of people doing flat earth experiments on YouTube and just getting it completely wrong.
00:47:57.000I think the most common one is people taking photographs of something that they think shouldn't be visible from a certain position.
00:48:05.000They'll say, here's Catalina Island, and it's 60 miles away, and according to the curvature of the Earth, that means it should be below 5 miles of curve, and so it shouldn't be visible.
00:48:18.000And then there's all these mistakes that they make.
00:48:22.000Some of them don't account for the fact that you've got to factor in how high the viewer is.
00:48:29.000Some of them will get entirely the wrong island.
00:48:32.000Like, they'll say, like, oh, this is this island which is, like, 100 miles away, and they're actually looking at something that's 40 miles away.
00:48:37.000Well, how come you can look out in the—I mean, here's a simple one.
00:48:40.000How come you look out across the ocean and you don't see anything on the other side?
00:49:17.000I mean, if you were to make a law of perspective, you could say that the size of something decreases in virtually proportional to its distance.
00:49:24.000So if it gets twice as far away, it's half the size.
00:49:27.000If it gets four times as far away, it's a quarter of the size.
00:49:39.000And Jamie brought it up, and then Eddie started posting pictures on his Instagram of a guy from the early 1900s who was an artist who wrote something about the law of perspective in drawing, just drawing.
00:49:51.000He was just explaining how you define perspective when you're illustrating things.
00:49:56.000That's the law of perspective on a piece of paper.
00:50:49.000The only thing that's good about it is you'll recognize the pitfalls that the human mind can slip into, that I've slipped into, that many people I know have slipped into.
00:50:58.000And again, it's not like in any way, shape, or form, it's not something to be embarrassed about or sad about.
00:51:04.000It's just a normal, natural human inclination to try to find things that are hidden truths or, you know, that are Covered up mysteries.
00:51:24.000I thought I could bring about world peace by getting a whole bunch of world leaders together and I actually sent letters to a bunch of world leaders and I figured like I shouldn't send it directly to the world leaders because they'd be It'll be a bit, you know, they wouldn't read my letters.
00:52:11.000Yeah, I mean, that's not even that unreasonable.
00:52:13.000That's like you thinking, well, world peace seems to make sense to me.
00:52:17.000This idealistic child, and you want to try to do something, and you think you can make a difference, and so you're kind of rebelling against things.
00:52:25.000I had delusions of solving great mathematical problems when I was young.
00:52:31.000Problems like, how do you trisect an angle by this geometrical method?
00:52:37.000Which was proved to be impossible to do.
00:52:39.000And yet, I still spent months and months trying to do it when I was a kid because I thought, they can't tell me what's impossible and what's not possible.
00:53:23.000He did that show with some fucking guy who's just a total hoaxer.
00:53:28.000And the guy put on a Bigfoot mask and they got this high-resolution photo and video of this Bigfoot mask that they're claiming is Bigfoot just staring at them through the woods.
00:55:12.000Yeah, and you see, that's why people freak out when you see someone with fake lips or a fake nose.
00:55:16.000Upside down eyes and things like that.
00:55:18.000When people do weird shit to their face, like when someone gets plastic surgery in their face and they like radically alter their face, it's jarring to us.
00:55:27.000And one of the reasons why it's jarring is because the brain recognizes geometry and human facial recognition or your facial patterns and the structure of the face.
00:55:35.000And when that geometry is off, it's confusing to us.
00:56:00.000Recognized faces and your face and my face are different, but there's a science to the structure of your face that's applied to the science of my face.
00:57:28.000It's just that for some people it kind of goes a bit wrong, goes a bit too far.
00:57:31.000They don't let their childish beliefs drop away as they get older or they stay longer or when they come of age they go on to the next level of disbelief, of imaginary things that they want to be true.
00:57:48.000And a lot of that boils down to what we were talking about earlier, the distrust in authority, like people, you know, and distrust of others and the belief that there's some secret cabal of people doing things to them.
00:58:35.000The weird thing about the UFO community and the Bigfoot community and all these different communities is that along the line they become people that make a living at it.
00:58:43.000And they become, you know, air quotes, experts.
00:58:48.000And that becomes a problem, because then they have a vested interest in making sure that other people believe.
00:59:10.000Cameras like this one, it's got 83x zoom on it.
00:59:12.000You can take pictures of, if there was a UFO, you could take a real closer picture of it.
00:59:17.000I take pictures of planes all the time that are flying 5 miles away or 10 miles away or sometimes even over 100 miles away and you can make out the plane.
00:59:29.000That's a claim that the Kentrails put out sometimes that the planes don't have windows, which is generally because they're using these crappy little cameras and you just can't see the windows because they're less than one pixel wide.
00:59:41.000If you've got a good camera and you zoom in far enough, the windows appear, kind of like things appearing over the horizon when you zoom in.
00:59:48.000Speaking of the camera, there's something coming up in August, which is the eclipse.
00:59:53.000There's going to be a total eclipse of the Sun over North America, I think, August 21st this year.
00:59:59.000And I think that would be a great opportunity for people to encourage anybody who believes in the flat Earth to actually start looking at what's going on.
01:00:09.000Don't they have an excuse for that, though?
01:00:11.000Yeah, but how are they going to justify it if they actually look at it?
01:00:15.000I think the challenge is getting people to look at things.
01:00:18.000The excuse, well not the excuse, the reason we're giving them is that there's an eclipse.
01:00:23.000And everybody wants to look at the eclipse because it's an amazing thing.
01:00:25.000The moon goes in front of the sun and blocks it out.
01:00:27.000Yeah, but I think that you're giving them too much credit.
01:00:29.000I think all someone has to do is make a YouTube video with some wonky explanation for why an eclipse works and that it works because the Earth is a disk and the sun gets below the disk and it blocks it out from below.
01:00:39.000I mean, it just doesn't seem to me that it's enough.
01:01:04.000Well, yeah, the Earth is flat and the Sun and the Moon are orbiting above.
01:01:12.000But sometimes the moon is going to be below the sun and it blocks out the light of the sun and that's how an eclipse happens on the flat earth and on the round earth.
01:01:22.000So it would be an amazing thing to see, even if you're a flat earth believer, this very rare coincidence when the moon is in front of the sun.
01:01:31.000So you should encourage people who are flat earth believers to look at this amazing thing that's happening.
01:02:14.000And Wickington is the guy who lives in a big house on 200 acres up in the mountains somewhere.
01:02:21.000And he got obsessed with solar panels being blocked by contrails and so became a chemtrail believer.
01:02:26.000But he's like the equivalent of DeBay, really, because he's the guy who's really promoting it.
01:02:30.000But then there's other people in the chemtrail community who are doing their own thing and they say, this Wiginton guy is full of crap because he believes in global warming and we don't.
01:02:42.000There's this division between people who believe in global warming and who don't.
01:02:46.000So there's some people who think that chemtrails are trying to stop global warming, and other people think that chemtrails are causing global warming, and then there's other people who think that chemtrails are something completely different, spreading nanorobots to control people's minds and things like that.
01:03:01.000You've got the same type of range of things in the flat Earth, believers, as well.
01:03:05.000Some people think that the Earth is kind of concave.
01:04:04.000It's a fringe one, but it's got a few people who believe it.
01:04:08.000Then there's people who think a bit more plausible they were destroyed by energy weapons from space, like there was these beams of energy, like high-powered microwaves or something that blew the buildings up.
01:04:20.000And then you get more and more plausible.
01:04:25.000Or some guys ran in there on the day with some explosives to blow up Building 7. And then you've got just, they let Building 7 burn when they didn't have to.
01:04:34.000And then they knew it was going to happen, but they did nothing about it.
01:04:38.000And then they had some warnings about it, and they didn't do anything about it.
01:04:41.000So you've got this whole range of plausibilities for the conspiracists.
01:04:47.000With the Flat Earth, it's pretty much all of this end.
01:04:50.000Because the flat earth theory is either the earth is flat or it's round.
01:04:55.000So with the flat earth you've only got very extreme and then more extreme theories.
01:05:03.000The most extreme thing which all conspiracy theories end up with is the everything is an illusion.
01:05:09.000We are living in the matrix conspiracy theory.
01:05:16.000That theory is very bizarre because one day, if technology continues the way it has been, there will come a time where they're able to create an artificial reality that's indiscernible from this reality.
01:05:27.000As long as we don't blow ourselves up and technology continues to advance, innovation continues to advance, the rate it is now, which is exponential, right?
01:05:36.000It's entirely possible that 100 years from now, or whatever it is, there'll be some way that they can interface with your We're good to go.
01:06:34.000So that's something that's at the end of all these conspiracy theories.
01:06:37.000That's not a very reasonable one, but there's some really reasonable scientists that believe that there's going to come a time where there's...
01:06:47.000Yeah, I'm not really convinced myself because it's kind of a simplistic argument saying that technology will always advance and get better.
01:06:55.000There are fundamental limits on information theory, like how much information that we can process.
01:07:01.000Have you ever messed around with HTC Vive or any of the more recent state-of-the-art?
01:07:45.000But I don't think it's realistic that you would be able to not detect that, and that scientists wouldn't be able to detect that we are all living in a simulation.
01:08:25.000And more than anything, it gives you a window into the future.
01:08:29.000It gives you a window when you sit next to this whale and it makes noises and the noises are all 3D. It gives you a window when you start thinking about Pong.
01:08:37.000Remember Pong, the game that you'd play?
01:08:39.000It was like, I can't believe I'm controlling something on the television.
01:08:44.000And then you compare that to like Halo and the games that you can play right now on an Xbox, you're like, my God, like the improvements are radical.
01:08:52.000And I think that the improvements in this sort of artificial reality, this virtual reality that you're seeing in this current...
01:09:02.000HTC Vive, 100 years from now, I would only imagine that we could get to a point where it's indiscernible, that somebody connects you.
01:09:15.000You could take one cell from that whale, and you could put it under a microscope, and you could dissect it, and you could look at the cell and everything that's in it.
01:09:22.000Okay, maybe we're having a different argument here.
01:09:24.000I'm thinking that it's going to feel real.
01:09:28.000You're saying scientists won't be able to prove.
01:10:03.000Because there's just too much information in the universe to be simulated by something that is within the universe, or even something as small as the Earth.
01:10:11.000I don't think you could simulate the entire Earth in our physical universe.
01:10:16.000Not now, but you don't think you could do it a thousand years from now?
01:10:45.000I mean, as time moves on, 5,000 years from now, whatever it is, I mean, how could anyone possibly discern or how could you even guess and estimate?
01:11:07.000If you went 5,000 years from the future, it's not unreasonable if we don't blow ourselves up, that we would have some sort of quantum computing, some astronomically powerful devices that could render and To create an artificial reality that felt to you entirely real?
01:11:24.000I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility.
01:11:26.000But could you then create within that universe the same quantum computers that are simulating itself?
01:11:39.000I think artificial intelligence is going to lead us to...
01:11:41.000Well, if you can create something that's artificially intelligent, right, which we feel like is going to happen way quicker than 5,000 years from now, if you create something that's artificially intelligent, it's going to improve upon its design almost instantaneously.
01:11:55.000It's going to realize, like, if you give it autonomy...
01:11:57.000Yeah, we don't know what's going to happen.
01:12:18.000I mean, I don't subscribe or not subscribe to something as ridiculous as that.
01:12:23.000Because it seems to me, within the realm of future possibility, It's a thought experiment, because if we are in a simulation, we're not going to figure it out.
01:12:33.000We're not going to be able to do anything about it if we do figure it out.
01:12:39.000Scientists are looking at the laws of physics.
01:12:41.000If they keep drilling down far and far enough, maybe eventually they'll discover there's some kind of artificial substrate of the universe, which is all ones and zeros, and that we are actually living in some kind of simulation.
01:12:53.000But that's just basically us resolving the laws of physics more.
01:12:57.000If we get down that deep, we can't do anything about it.
01:13:01.000Well, not only that, does that actually mean that we're living in some sort of an artificial realm?
01:13:05.000Or does it mean that that's what the universe is made of?
01:13:09.000But that the universe, much like what we're creating, that the universe is almost fractal.
01:13:14.000And much like what we're creating when we're creating these artificial environments, that the universe itself is made out of ones and zeros.
01:13:20.000And that this whole thing is really mathematical.
01:13:22.000Yeah, and that just because we haven't been able to detect it up until now doesn't mean it hasn't been running on some sort of Some sort of a uber complicated mathematical principle.
01:13:32.000Yeah, I think it's kind of a moot point in a way because like what's important is what are the laws of physics and you know, can we is Can we detect what's actually running the laws of physics?
01:13:43.000Yeah, so yeah, it's it's a philosophical question.
01:13:47.000It's a little bit of mental masturbating Yeah.
01:13:50.000It seems to me that that's a thing that people do.
01:13:53.000And I think we could bring it back to this flat earth thing, is that people love to go down these honey holes of information and of debate and ideas.
01:14:03.000And whether it's Bigfoot or UFOs, we love to chase ourselves, chase our own tail, when it comes to these bizarre subjects that That may or may not be real and most likely aren't real.
01:14:15.000We love to chase and become, like, engrossed in these things.
01:14:20.000I wonder if we're distracting ourselves.
01:14:21.000You know, I mean, it doesn't seem to be people that are fully happy with their life that really get into this kind of stuff, that really go all in and balls deep.
01:14:35.000You don't get a guy who has a promising career, he's at the top of his field, a happy family, great friends, great hobbies, loves his life, and then it just becomes a UFO nut.
01:15:24.000You're just doing something because you enjoy doing it, like playing chess.
01:15:27.000Except along with that hobby of doing stuff, they actually have a belief that it's required for them to actually do their hobby.
01:15:34.000They don't obviously think of it like that, but that's essentially what it is.
01:15:38.000They have this activity they like doing, like gardening or whatever, but it requires them to believe that the earth is flat.
01:15:45.000They spend all their time making YouTube videos about how the Earth is flat or doing their experiments about how the Earth is flat and they're getting something out of it because it's their little hobby.
01:15:56.000I do the same thing except I'm actually doing it for science.
01:16:03.000On the plane today, I was on the plane wedged up against the window looking through this, holding my camera up against it and the woman next to me thought I was this crazy guy.
01:16:14.000You should have told her, I'm proving that the Earth isn't flat, ma'am.
01:16:17.000She probably thought that I was thinking that the Earth was flat.
01:16:19.000I've seen other people on YouTube that are bringing levels onto the plane, and they're like, hey, look, the level isn't moving!
01:16:25.000Well, if you work all day, and you have an eight-hour day, plus commute, plus family, plus whatever bills and issues that you have to deal with, and then you get into one of these YouTube videos, you simply don't have the time to really explore...
01:16:41.000All of the possibilities and all the science behind all the arguments and it's just...
01:18:14.000The idea that you were going to attack American civilians, that you were going to arm Cuban friendlies and attack Guantanamo Bay, that you were going to blow up a drone airliner.
01:18:23.000But it was just like, you know, spitballing.
01:18:26.000I understand what you're saying, but spitballing that you're going to deceive the American people and kill American civilians and that this is a normal part of the way Nero burnt Rome, Hitler burned the Reichstag, that false flag attacks are real and that they have happened throughout history.
01:18:40.000So when you do have an open mind and you are compelled to try to seek the truth, You've got to be aware that these things have happened in history.
01:19:41.000So when you debunk all these things that are absolutely false, like flat earth and chemtrails and UFOs and all that jazz, you've got to be careful to not try to debunk everything.
01:20:46.000Now, they probably used it as a pretext to start the Vietnam War, but they just took advantage of it in the same way that Bush took advantage of the 9-11 attacks to push his agenda.
01:21:12.000And we know that the American administration back then took advantage of the Gulf of Tonkin reports.
01:21:20.000We don't know for sure whether the Gulf of Tonkin reports were fabricated or how much they were fabricated or what actually happened on that night.
01:21:30.000But we do know that they were taken advantage of.
01:22:28.000There was a fucking hilarious article about Trump today that he doesn't believe in exercise because he believes that the body has a finite amount of energy in it, and then when you exercise, you use up that energy.
01:22:38.000And that's why he has so much energy, because he doesn't exercise.
01:23:20.000Well, it's also, I mean, constantly worrying that the government's after you and that there's, you know, every fucking turn that you take has a conspiracy behind it.
01:23:30.000The mind, you know, can only take so much pressure.
01:23:53.000But what you can do is you can go back to the Skylab footage and ask someone who lives in Flat Earth how they faked the Skylab footage.
01:24:00.000Because there's footage of Skylab with people running around in circles in zero gravity.
01:24:05.000There's long sequences of people doing stuff in zero gravity.
01:24:09.000And it's in a space that's actually too big to fit in any plane that's ever been built.
01:24:14.000So it couldn't be filmed in a thing where they do the parabola, the vomit comet, yeah.
01:24:19.000It has to be something that was actually zero gravity.
01:24:21.000Yeah, for people who don't know what that is, when you see scenes in movies where someone was moving in zero gravity, they would film that in a plane that would literally be, they would get the plane up to like 40,000 feet or whatever, and then they would just literally shoot down so that you're kind of going faster down than gravity.
01:24:49.000And the space that they're in there is so big that it wouldn't fit in.
01:24:53.000It probably wouldn't even fit in the beluga thing that they use for transporting planes.
01:24:58.000Well, that brings us back to Area 51, because there's some giant airplanes that they make out of Area 51 that they use to simulate zero gravity.
01:25:05.000Yeah, I mean, it's obvious that this is in space.
01:25:58.000And you can figure out that the space station is actually 250 miles high.
01:26:02.000It is actually orbiting the Earth at 250 miles.
01:26:05.000And you can also take photographs of the space station with this camera, and you can zoom in close enough on the space station to actually see the shape of the space station and the solar panels and the main modules and everything.
01:26:18.000So you can see there actually is something that is moving along the same path that NASA says is moving along.
01:26:25.000And at the same speed, as they suggest, and it's at the right height, and it's the right size, because you can do the calculations on the camera and figure out, you know, what the size of the space station is.
01:26:37.000So we know that something that the exact same size and shape and speed of the space station is exactly where NASA says it is.
01:26:46.000And there's really no way you could fake that on a flat Earth.
01:26:50.000Because you'd have to have this bizarre, you know, 1,000-foot-wide floating thing moving along at like 14,000 miles an hour doing this kind of whizzy pattern all around, this spirograph pattern around the flat Earth.
01:27:05.000It's just, you know, it's literally impossible.
01:27:07.000Whereas if you look at it from the globe model point of view, it's just the space station orbiting the globe.
01:27:12.000Well, obviously it's orbiting the globe.
01:27:14.000But does this bother you sometimes that you're even debunking this stuff?
01:27:22.000One of the most stupidly obvious proofs that we're not on the Flat Earth is that if you get three people, you stand one of them at the bottom of South Africa, one of them at the bottom of South America, one of them in Australia, and have them all look south from that position.
01:27:39.000Now, on the Flat Earth, you've got one person here, one person here, one person here, and if they all look south, like away from the North Pole, they're all looking in completely different directions.
01:27:49.000But in the real world, what do they actually see?
01:27:52.000They all see the exact same constellation, the Southern Cross, right in front of them.
01:27:57.000So they're all looking in different directions on the flat Earth, but on the round Earth, they're all just looking towards the Southern Cross.
01:28:05.000It's literally impossible to do that on the flat Earth.
01:28:09.000Right, and you can actually see this and take photographs of the constellations and compare them.
01:28:13.000Yeah, and that's something I was talking about with the ground truth thing, with Stellarium.
01:28:17.000You could go virtually yourself to these places and see what the sky looks from that position.
01:28:24.000So either Stellarium is lying or the Southern Cross does actually appear from these three different positions.
01:28:31.000Well, that's another thing that these flat Earth people keep bringing up is Polaris.
01:28:35.000The idea that this one star stays put and that all these other stars rotate around it and that this is somehow or another proof that the Earth is not spinning or that we're on a flat Earth.
01:28:44.000What's so stupid about that is that people in Australia have a completely different constellation.
01:28:48.000That's right, and the stars rotate the other direction around it.
01:28:51.000The stars are all coming towards us from the east.
01:28:54.000So if you look north, they're going that way.
01:28:56.000If you look south, they're going that way.
01:28:58.000So they're rotating around the north star, which actually isn't anything special.
01:29:03.000It's just the star that happens to be closest to the point, the north point.
01:29:38.000It's one degree off from the center of the celestial sphere.
01:29:43.000But if you look at a time-lapse photograph of the Earth, if they point a camera up, like say from North America, what you get is the illusion that all these stars are spinning around, that one star is fixed.
01:29:53.000But it's because you're looking at a time-lapse of only a few hours where it's dark out at night, whereas this procession, the equinoxes, is a very slow process that takes 26,000 years.
01:30:03.000And you're just not going to get a 26,000 years time-lapse photo of the Earth.
01:30:10.000In Stellarium, and no one's going to believe that.
01:30:12.000What's interesting is that some cultures, it's been pretty much observed that some cultures were aware of the procession of the equinoxes thousands of years ago somehow, that they kind of knew.
01:30:23.000A lot of old cultures did actually take records at the stars, because stars were used for navigation.
01:30:30.000The pole star, obviously, is something that gives you this fixed north degree, but the other stars as well, like if you know how long it takes to go from one place to another, I don't really understand the exact maths, but you can use it for navigation.
01:32:06.000The reason that things flow into vacuum is air pressure.
01:32:09.000And air pressure is a function of gravity.
01:32:12.000So gravity is pulling everything down towards the Earth.
01:32:16.000So there's nothing that can push it out, if you see what I'm saying.
01:32:23.000If you imagine if the universe was suddenly filled with loads and loads of gas, like oxygen, say, and then you stick a big planet in there, All the gas would kind of, like, gravity would bring it down towards this planet.
01:32:36.000Well, they don't believe in gravity, though.
01:34:15.000Why would that be any weirder than what it is now?
01:34:17.000Yeah, the reason they don't like gravity is that if you actually apply the laws of gravity to a flat earth, the flat earth would actually scrunch up into a ball.
01:34:26.000Because of all that rock, there's no way it can lay flat like that.
01:34:29.000It would either be like gravity would be intensely large because you've got an infinite amount of rock underneath you, or it's like something on the back of a turtle or something, and it would just scrunch up into a ball.
01:35:19.000But it's not flying off because of the surface of the ball going a thousand miles an hour.
01:35:24.000It's flying off because it's rotating like 50 times a second or whatever, 10 times a second.
01:35:30.000It's the angular velocity which creates the outward force.
01:35:34.000Linear velocity has nothing to do with it.
01:35:36.000It's only when you're actually turning.
01:35:37.000You know, when you're driving in a car, like if you're driving really, really fast, you don't really feel any forces act on you, but when you go around a corner, you get slammed over to one side.
01:35:45.000So it's the rate of your angular velocity.
01:35:49.000Now the Earth rotates once every 24 hours, so it's going really, really, really slow.
01:35:57.000And if you imagine that tennis ball, and if you take it and stick it in a little turntable that rotates once every 24 hours, the water is not going to fly off.
01:36:05.000And it's the exact same force acting on the Earth, because the Earth rotates once every 24 hours.
01:36:09.000The fact that it's like you're going 1,000 miles an hour is completely irrelevant, because it's essentially going in straight lines around the edge.
01:36:16.000Jamie, go to that photo on the upper left-hand side.
01:38:10.000That's kind of based on like half, well, a quarter truth.
01:38:14.000Like you have to have, you can't fly a two engine jet over Antarctica because if one engine fails, you wouldn't be able to get to an airport.
01:38:22.000So they only allow four engine jets, like 747s, A380s to fly.
01:38:28.000So all those flights that you see that go over at the Antarctic ice, they're all 747s.
01:38:33.000Yeah, because if it fucks up, you're doomed.
01:38:38.000There's a set of regulations called ETOPS, which is all about how far you can go away from an airport and what configuration of plane that you have to do.
01:38:46.000See, now, I wonder how many people are listening to this and it's turning their mind.
01:39:48.000Yeah, I'm a retired video game programmer.
01:39:50.000I helped make the Tony Hawk series of video games, made enough money to retire on, and now I just potter around the house, do gardening, and do debunking stuff, do fun experiments in the backyard.
01:40:02.000But you're living the goddamn American dream.
01:40:26.000Morgellons disease is a fascinating one.
01:40:28.000It's one of the ones that we investigated on that show.
01:40:32.000And do you know that one of the guys we interviewed was a doctor, and what he thinks is that everyone who has Morgellons also has Lyme disease, and Lyme disease has a neurotoxicity effect.
01:40:45.000And he was talking himself about his own hallucinations, that he sees things like crawling across his eyes that he knows aren't there.
01:40:53.000And he was also saying that Lyme disease, when you get it from ticks, that you're not just getting this one disease, but you're getting a host of pathogens.
01:41:02.000And sometimes these pathogens will interact with each other in very different ways.
01:41:06.000And that, you know, some are more extreme, some are less extreme.
01:41:10.000But he's like, you might be dealing with hundreds of different pathogens that are unnecessary.
01:41:16.000And he thinks that what's going on with a lot of these people that have more gellons is Lyme disease and whatever these other diseases are that's causing them to hallucinate and think that fibers are growing out of their skin.
01:41:26.000When really what it is is they're scratching themselves and then they get like carpet fibers or clothing fibers on their skin and then they think it's coming out of there.
01:41:35.000He was very reasonable and he made a ton of sense.
01:41:37.000Because we went to this Morgellons convention, and we talked to all these people that had it, and they fucking all have Lyme disease.
01:41:44.000Well, they all get tested positive for it.
01:41:46.000There's a bit of controversy about that, because the tests that you can do, you can basically keep doing it, and it's kind of a very inexact test.
01:42:08.000Well, it's one of those things that the medical community has a mainstream opinion about whether there's these long-term effects from Lyme disease, and then there's people who think that there is these long-term effects.
01:42:20.000There is something to speak, but let me clarify from people that I know that have gotten it.
01:42:24.000One of the things about the medical community is the ignorance of Lyme disease and that you go to a lot of different doctors and they poo-poo it.
01:42:31.000They say, oh, there's nothing you don't have to worry about.
01:42:33.000My friend's son got it and he developed Bell's palsy where his face went numb and that was when they took it seriously and they finally gave him this intense round of intravenous antibiotics, but my friend was on antibiotics for months.
01:43:12.000Not that, but just trying to figure out what's really going on and raising possibilities that it might not be, like these bugs living under their skin.
01:43:33.000It's another one where people are initially invested in that idea, and then once they become initially invested, it's so hard to shake them off.
01:43:55.000They're spending all this money spraying things in the sky that just happen to look like clouds, but yet we know that you can make clouds with a jet engine, a certain amount of condensation in the atmosphere, the heat of the jet engine, causes clouds.
01:44:06.000Like, we know that, but they don't think that's what it is.
01:44:13.000Well, the lack of flatness of the earth is established science that's been going on for a real long time.
01:44:21.000And people just pick and choose which science they want to use.
01:44:25.000What keeps you going with all this stuff, with running Metabunk?
01:44:28.000Well, I enjoy doing these little experiments.
01:44:31.000I do a lot of stuff like going into my backyard and testing things out.
01:44:36.000A lot of the stuff, there's pictures of UFOs and things like that, and you can duplicate them because some of them are like reflections or things in the camera, and you can go out and say, well, this did this, or people are saying that a certain photograph is an indication that it's false or these shadows go this way.
01:44:51.000The moon landing has lots of fake shadow claims made about it.
01:44:54.000What do you think happened at Roswell?
01:44:57.000Roswell, New Mexico, that's the big one.
01:45:01.000Yeah, I think it's what they said it was.
01:45:03.000It was those balloons that they were using to detect Russian nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, and it was a secret program, so they weren't allowed to tell anybody about it.
01:45:14.000So they came in, they picked up the remains of the balloon, and then the story just took off.
01:45:30.000It's like you said earlier, people make money out of something, and then they get stuck into that.
01:45:34.000Because they're making money out of it, they're motivated to promote whatever it is, if it's Bigfoot or if it's aliens.
01:45:42.000Have you ever seen anything in all of your years of trying to debunk these things that made you question whether or not this was a legitimate phenomenon?
01:45:54.000The thing is, with UFOs, there's always things that you can't explain.
01:45:57.000There are things that are unidentified, but there's usually plausible explanations for them.
01:46:03.000Whenever I'm given something, like a mysterious thing, I like to list all the explanations that I can think of.
01:46:10.000Maybe none of them are perfect fits that you can guarantee this is what the explanation is.
01:46:15.000But it being a ghost or an alien spacecraft, as an explanation, is usually pretty close to the bottom.
01:46:20.000You start out saying, oh, it's a balloon, or it's a bird, or it's a drone, or it's CGI, or it's something somebody faked afterwards, or it's an alien spacecraft.
01:46:32.000Or in between that, oh, it's something else that we don't know what it is.
01:46:36.000Is there any evidence, like, in terms of UFOs that's interesting?
01:46:41.000I haven't, you know, to be honest, I haven't really looked into the whole sphere of UFOology.
01:46:47.000I know a lot of people have, but just looking at the quality of the best cases they put forward, like I mentioned earlier, like, you know, some guy in 1964, like, got his car beat up on a road.
01:47:29.000And then they kind of start going on roadshows and, you know, they go to conventions and they speak and then they write books and then they start doing things and they get sucked into their beliefs.
01:47:39.000And there's been lots of examples in the past...
01:47:42.000Of people who made claims like this and then eventually owned up to it.
01:47:47.000The classic one, really classic one, is the Cottingley Fairies, where these girls in Cottingley, England, which I went to school in, but it's still a world-famous thing, faked these photographs of fairies.
01:47:59.000And they convinced a large number of people, including Arthur Conan Doyle.
01:48:46.000I wonder how many people were so duped by that that it changed their life and they started looking for fairies and wasting their time out there in the forest.
01:48:52.000When I was growing up, that was put out as being a genuine fairy sighting.
01:49:31.000And there's people like that in the UFO community who've made up stories of abductions and things, and then later their stories either become so ridiculous and contradictory you know that they were lying.
01:49:43.000There's a wonderful one from this guy from the 1950s where it's great old black and white footage when they talk to him about his UFO experiences and all the different aliens that he communicates with, and he just seems so obviously crazy.
01:49:57.000And yet this was heralded as one of the most important cases of ufology.
01:50:21.000But anyway, there was something like this guy basically said he had all these remembered memories of working on the secret government base.
01:50:30.000And he became pretty famous and wrote loads of books.
01:51:05.000You've got to be reasonably careful with this $2 level, but you can actually check to see whether that is correct.
01:51:11.000You can check for yourself if something reappears over the horizon when you zoom in, which is something that he claims, something that's a ridiculous claim that's been made for over 100 years, that when things move away from you, they disappear from the bottom up,
01:51:27.000and if you zoom in, they will reappear.
01:51:36.000You can go down to Santa Monica Pier, you can focus on the North Shore, like Malibu, and you can zoom in, and you can see that the picture does not change at all throughout the entire zoom.
01:51:46.000And when you're fully zoomed in, so you can see the cars whizzing along PCH, you will see that the bottom part of the road and the buildings is obscured.
01:51:57.000You can turn around and look at Catalina, and you can zoom in on that.
01:52:00.000And you can see that two-thirds of Catalina Island is missing.
01:52:04.000I think a lot of what you're saying is very important because what we're talking about is just being able to look at things objectively and use facts to determine that this one theory in particular, flatter theory, is not true.
01:52:17.000But I think what's really going on is a thought process.
01:52:20.000There's a way the human mind gravitates towards these puzzles and these problems and these These undiscovered truths, these mysteries that people just want to be the person that knows.
01:52:42.000It's about the way your mind can be tricked.
01:52:45.000And it's an information issue that we're dealing with today with things like YouTube where no one can stop you from making, like you don't have to go through the people that work at NBC or Fox or whatever.
01:52:55.000You don't have to go through the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times editorial board where they have to review your paper.
01:53:00.000And go, hey, you wrote a bunch of stuff that's not true.
01:53:03.000No, that doesn't have to happen anymore.
01:53:07.000And it can be really well done with good music and good images.
01:53:12.000And the way it's done can really influence a lot of people who don't have a background in science or are not curious about looking into the debunking version of it.
01:53:22.000That's why whenever someone sends me something, I always say, just Google that, whatever you sent me, and then debunked.
01:53:40.000Yeah, and that's why I do tell people to go do their own research, but really actually do some real research, as in do some actual observations and experiments.
01:55:06.000The reason that we use these maps, this particular type of map, is that if you draw a line between two points on the map, And then you sail along that heading, you will end up at that point.
01:55:17.000Now, this is a type of navigation called rum line navigation that's been used for like, yeah, hundreds of years.
01:55:25.000And the thing is that the map, the Mercator map, gets stretched out at the top, but it also gets stretched out at the bottom, because the navigators from hundreds of years ago knew that the world was round, And they knew if they drew a line between two points in the southern hemisphere using the same map,
01:55:41.000it would get you to that destination using rum navigation.
01:55:45.000Which is basically just one more piece of evidence that the globe map matches reality, because people have used rum navigation For hundreds of years, if not thousands of years.
01:56:00.000So you're saying that the image of the continents is in some way stretched out and distorted?
01:56:25.000But the most common map that was used before, let's say 30 years ago, was this Mercator projection.
01:56:32.000Which is the map that people use for navigating ship routes, so you can get from point A to B. If you wanted to go from England to North America, across the ocean, you would just draw a line between the two points, and then you'd say, oh,
01:56:47.000that's the heading I've got to go in, and so you head off in that heading.
01:56:50.000Now, that doesn't take you in a straight line.
01:56:52.000It actually takes you in a kind of a curved line because if you're going on a constant compass heading on a globe you actually kind of curve in towards the poles or away from the poles depending which way you're going.
01:57:04.000I really don't understand what you're saying.
01:57:07.000But all it is is that there's this method of navigation that people use that relies upon the Earth being a globe.
01:57:13.000And it's this really, really simple map that is in thousands of homes, millions of homes and schools that everybody uses.
01:57:19.000And you can see that on the map, the lines get smaller towards the top and they get smaller towards the bottom.
01:57:25.000And if people are doing a voyage around the world, they're going to use this map.
01:58:15.000Yeah, that's the Flat Earth map, and that's Australia.
01:58:17.000And Australia looks nothing like that.
01:58:18.000And if you lived in Australia, you would know it looks nothing at all like that.
01:58:22.000It's just hilarious that there's so many versions of this.
01:58:24.000It's hilarious that there's so many people who have taken the time in front of a computer to create this flat earth map and put this ice wall.
01:58:57.000It's a bunch of little kids, or a bunch of dumb people, or a bunch of people that have very little education, or a bunch of people that are also speaking, they're preaching to the choir.
01:59:05.000It ties into misconceptions that are natural.
01:59:08.000A funny thing, when I worked in the video game industry, there was platform games.
01:59:14.000You jump from little platforms, and sometimes you have platforms that move around, and you jump from Mario-type things.
01:59:19.000In some video games, when you jump up on a moving platform and then fall down, you will fall down because the platform moves out from underneath you.
01:59:29.000Sometimes you jump up and you move with the platform and you land on it.
01:59:34.000Now, a friend of mine was doing a video game and one of the programmers said, like, oh, if you jump up and then jump down, the platform should have moved out from underneath you.
01:59:43.000So you should be able to, like, you should be able to, you know, this is the way we should program the physics.
01:59:49.000And then my friend Matt said, no, that's wrong.
01:59:52.000And he couldn't convince this other guy.
01:59:55.000He said, right, what we're going to do is we're going to go out onto the road with my pickup, my pickup truck.
02:00:01.000I'm going to get in the back and you're going to drive along at 30 miles an hour and I'm going to jump straight up in the air and we're going to see whether I land in the truck or I land on the road.
02:00:11.000So they did this experiment, and the other guy who was driving the truck was totally expecting him to jump up and then fall out of the back of the truck because the truck wouldn't have moved on.
02:00:18.000Because he's moving the same speed as the truck, so he jumps up and then he lands back in the truck.
02:00:23.000And this is illustrating that this video game programmer had the exact same misconception that the flat earthers do.
02:00:30.000Because they say, well, if the earth is moving so fast, why can't you just go up in a helicopter, hover a bit, wait for the earth to move underneath you, and then go back down again?
02:00:38.000It's just, you know, it's completely backwards physics because you're already moving, so you'd have to slow down to zero, which is the same as speeding up, relatively speaking.
02:00:48.000So, my point is that anyone can make misconceptions about physics like that.
02:00:55.000And it's easy to get sucked into that.
02:00:57.000And it's actually quite hard to break them.
02:00:59.000Even, like, this reasonable guy who was, like, you know, a video game programmer who presumably knew something about physics, he was convinced that Matt was going to fall out of the back of the truck.
02:01:19.000It's very important for people who are curious and concerned and that don't understand the physics and the logic and the science behind it all.
02:01:24.000But I've sent your site to many, many people that believed or don't believe and were trying to figure out a way to explain it.