The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #959 - Mick West

00:00:10.000 And we're live, ladies and gentlemen.

00:00:11.000 We're live sporting the latest Round Earth Shill.

00:00:13.000 We're just coming out with it.

00:00:14.000 Round Earth Shill t-shirts.

00:00:16.000 Both Jamie and I get $3 per month from the federal government to tell you that the world is round.

00:00:23.000 And Mick West is a big part of it all.

00:00:25.000 He is one of the main shills that tells everybody.

00:00:29.000 Not only that, he has a whole website dedicated to arguing against people that think the world is flat.

00:00:35.000 Yeah, the difference is I don't get paid for anything.

00:00:37.000 Come on, stop lying.

00:00:38.000 I know you're getting $3.50 per month.

00:00:39.000 I wish I did.

00:00:41.000 I had to pay for my web hosting and it's coming out of my pocket and nobody pays me anything.

00:00:45.000 See, Mick West is serious.

00:00:46.000 He's not joking around with us.

00:00:50.000 This has got to be one of the most bizarre trends ever.

00:00:55.000 And Jamie, I think you said at first that you thought it was originally a troll. 0.99

00:01:00.000 You thought that they were fucking around like... 0.99

00:01:02.000 I still think some people are. 1.00

00:01:04.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:01:06.000 But I feel like it started out with like 4chan or something like that, or maybe Reddit.

00:01:11.000 These crazy kids, these wacky kids, they decided to start trolling, saying that the Earth is round or the Earth is flat.

00:01:18.000 I think that's some of it, but a lot of it is just people who... 0.71

00:01:23.000 They actually believe it.

00:01:24.000 Yes.

00:01:25.000 Oh, there's a lot that actually believe it.

00:01:26.000 There 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.

00:01:33.000 Yes.

00:01:34.000 And 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. 0.86

00:01:41.000 There 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.

00:01:49.000 Yeah, I think that type of person has kind of adopted it. 0.66

00:01:53.000 Yes. 0.83

00:01:55.000 You were talking about shitposting the other day.

00:01:58.000 Yes, yes. 0.83

00:01:58.000 And 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? 0.83

00:02:14.000 And, you know, it's... 0.98

00:02:15.000 The shit poster enjoys that type of thing. 1.00

00:02:17.000 I 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. 0.99

00:02:28.000 We need to start accepting the fact that it's a fact.

00:02:30.000 He was hilarious.

00:02:32.000 Let me find this, because I saved it.

00:02:35.000 I think his name was like Vegan Warrior or something like that, which is always a good...

00:02:39.000 Yes, Vegan Warrior.

00:02:43.000 He's a realist.

00:02:45.000 It says he's not only a flat earther, he's a realist.

00:02:49.000 Yeah, I think I've come across him.

00:02:51.000 I think there's actually a relatively small number of people who are really active in promoting the flat earth stuff on YouTube.

00:02:57.000 What'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.

00:03:08.000 And they keep saying, erroneously, that you're not allowed to fly over Antarctica. 0.92

00:03:14.000 Like, yes you are.

00:03:15.000 They keep saying that there's no photographs of Earth from space, that they're all composites.

00:03:21.000 No, that's not true.

00:03:22.000 Why do they keep saying that?

00:03:24.000 They keep saying that. 0.99

00:03:25.000 There'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. 0.99

00:03:36.000 Yeah, that's the Japanese Himawari-8 satellite. 0.99

00:03:39.000 But there's also a US satellite that was just launched last year, the GOES-16 satellite, which is basically the same resolution. 0.97

00:03:47.000 Pull this sucker right up to your face. 1.00

00:03:48.000 Sorry. 1.00

00:03:48.000 And the Russians have a satellite. 1.00

00:03:51.000 Everyone's got their own satellite, because this is basically a weather satellite.

00:03:53.000 So they put them over the equator so they can see their own country. 0.98

00:03:59.000 So Russia has one. 0.79

00:04:00.000 You can mostly see India.

00:04:01.000 China has one.

00:04:02.000 It's not as good as the other ones.

00:04:03.000 But the Russian one is the same resolution, 121 megapixels.

00:04:08.000 That's the size of the image they do.

00:04:09.000 It's like 11,000 pixels by 11,000 pixels view of the Earth.

00:04:15.000 And you can zoom in and you can see cities.

00:04:17.000 You can see contrails.

00:04:18.000 And you can actually use these images from the satellites to actually match up with the views of clouds and controls from the ground.

00:04:26.000 So you can actually check to see if these images are actually correct, at least for where you are.

00:04:31.000 Right.

00:04:31.000 Then you could, like, find a friend somewhere else and ask them, you know, do you have this type of cloud overhead?

00:04:36.000 So you can actually verify whether these images are actually real or not.

00:04:41.000 Well, I brought it up to my friend Eddie, and he said it's all fake.

00:04:44.000 He said all the photos are fake.

00:04:46.000 They look fake.

00:04:47.000 I'm like, but how would you know what a real photo of Earth from 22,000 miles looked like?

00:04:51.000 Wouldn't it look exactly like Earth?

00:04:54.000 I think when you get to that stage of deep belief, you kind of have to believe that they're fake.

00:05:00.000 There's no way.

00:05:01.000 And it's a real challenge.

00:05:02.000 Like, how do you actually break through that for somebody?

00:05:05.000 How can you actually...

00:05:07.000 And convince them that something isn't fake if they just automatically assume it's fake.

00:05:11.000 And I think, has the person actually looked in detail at these images?

00:05:16.000 Most people know.

00:05:17.000 And 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.

00:05:26.000 And it all matches up exactly with what the weather is around the world.

00:05:30.000 And it matches up with all the other size images, one from the Russians, one from the Chinese, one from the Japanese.

00:05:35.000 They all match up.

00:05:36.000 And I really don't think that the people who say, ah, it's fake, have really actually looked at what that's about there.

00:05:42.000 Well, you're absolutely right.

00:05:43.000 They definitely haven't, nor do they have any desire to.

00:05:46.000 It's a belief issue, and it's almost like a religious issue.

00:05:49.000 It's really fascinating.

00:05:51.000 It's completely infected the world of professional pool players.

00:05:55.000 Really?

00:05:55.000 Professional pool players?

00:05:56.000 Yeah, professional pool players.

00:05:58.000 There's a guy named C.J. Wiley.

00:06:00.000 He's a top pool player who's 100% convinced the Earth is flat.

00:06:03.000 Wow.

00:06:03.000 There's another guy named Max Everly.

00:06:05.000 He's a buddy of mine.

00:06:06.000 Out of his mind.

00:06:07.000 Thinks the world is flat.

00:06:08.000 I wonder if that's related to their, like, obsession with the table being flat.

00:06:12.000 No, I don't think so.

00:06:14.000 Yeah, they have to make sure the table's level.

00:06:15.000 But then they've got these little round balls on the table as well.

00:06:17.000 That's confusing, right?

00:06:18.000 Yeah, you've got a little solar system going on with your pool balls. 0.59

00:06:22.000 What's confusing is they're smart guys.

00:06:24.000 Like, if you talk to them, you'd be like, this is a reasonable, intelligent guy.

00:06:26.000 Are they really believing that he's flat?

00:06:28.000 100%.

00:06:29.000 Yeah, they're not shitposting.

00:06:30.000 That's unusual.

00:06:32.000 People, 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.

00:06:40.000 It 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.

00:06:51.000 They prefer the ones that confirm it. 0.92

00:06:53.000 Of 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. 0.96

00:07:04.000 Not one. 0.97

00:07:05.000 Not one photo.

00:07:07.000 Not only that, Every planet you see is round.

00:07:10.000 You could follow them.

00:07:12.000 You could look at them if you have a reasonable telescope.

00:07:16.000 You could see the difference as they change and spin.

00:07:19.000 I mean, you can tell that they're round.

00:07:22.000 A lot of flat earthers have the same camera that I've got, which is a Nikon P900. Flat earthers have an excellent camera?

00:07:29.000 They have...

00:07:30.000 I brought one with me.

00:07:31.000 They have, like, Nikon has a deal with the Flat Earth Society?

00:07:34.000 It's this camera.

00:07:35.000 It's just like, it's not like a SLR or anything.

00:07:37.000 It's just like a $600 camera.

00:07:39.000 But it's got this really, really long zoom lens on it.

00:07:42.000 Like, it's like a 2,000 millimeter zoom lens.

00:07:46.000 So you can see, you can zoom in on the moon, you can zoom in on the stars and planets.

00:07:50.000 Right.

00:07:50.000 And you can use this camera, I've used it a few times, to actually take pictures of Jupiter and of Venus and Mars.

00:07:57.000 And you can actually just make out the roundness of the planet and the actual shadow of the sun.

00:08:03.000 You'll see Venus as being like the moon, being like an arc.

00:08:07.000 And you'll see Jupiter and you see the bands of Jupiter.

00:08:10.000 And you can do that with this camera.

00:08:11.000 And 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.

00:08:20.000 But 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.

00:08:30.000 One great thing is the moons of Jupiter.

00:08:33.000 If you look at Jupiter really closely, even with some binoculars, you can see it's got these four little moons that are orbiting it.

00:08:41.000 It looks like there's four little lights in a line with Jupiter, and they actually move around in a regular pattern.

00:08:47.000 And 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.

00:08:56.000 And you can actually see that with this camera, I've taken photos of it, posted them on the website, or even with binoculars.

00:09:02.000 And 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.

00:09:17.000 They move exactly as if they are a little simulation of a planetary system.

00:09:23.000 So 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.

00:09:32.000 Hmm, probably a hologram.

00:09:34.000 What?

00:09:35.000 When did you first become aware of this?

00:09:37.000 You'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.

00:09:54.000 The heat of the engine produces these contrails, and people were absolutely convinced that they're spraying, the government is spraying something in the sky.

00:10:02.000 And you caught it.

00:10:04.000 You had a really good explanation for it.

00:10:07.000 You said they're basically like the training wheels for conspiracy theories.

00:10:10.000 Yeah.

00:10:11.000 Yeah, it's something you can see, I think, is kind of more enticing.

00:10:16.000 Yes.

00:10:16.000 And I think the same thing applies to the Flat Earth.

00:10:19.000 Now, when I got into the Flat Earth thing, I became aware of it a few years ago.

00:10:24.000 What does that sound?

00:10:26.000 Yeah, so the government is trying to...

00:10:28.000 Oh, is that your camera?

00:10:29.000 Yeah.

00:10:30.000 Yeah.

00:10:32.000 Freak me out, man.

00:10:33.000 That was the government, man.

00:10:35.000 Spying on you.

00:10:36.000 Yeah, so, like, when I first heard about the Flat Earth Theory, obviously I've heard it before.

00:10:40.000 Actually, my father, going back, when I was young, he told me that he was a member of the Flat Earth Society.

00:10:46.000 Your father told you that?

00:10:47.000 Yeah.

00:10:48.000 Was he joking around?

00:10:49.000 Uh...

00:10:49.000 Kind of, but he was doing it in a kind of satirical way, ironically.

00:10:55.000 He was doing it because he was saying, people are too sure of themselves, and so I'm going to join the Flat Earth Society.

00:11:01.000 He didn't believe the Earth was round.

00:11:03.000 So it's been around for quite a while, the Flat Earth Society.

00:11:06.000 The 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.

00:11:17.000 It was figured out by the ancient Greeks like 3,000 years ago that it wasn't.

00:11:21.000 That it wasn't round?

00:11:23.000 That it wasn't flat, sorry. 0.97

00:11:24.000 Oh, you fucked it up. 0.99

00:11:25.000 You gave up the goose. 0.99

00:11:26.000 You said thousands of years ago that people thought the earth was round and they realized it wasn't.

00:11:31.000 Yeah.

00:11:32.000 You just, right now, you gave them fuel.

00:11:34.000 That's a quote that's going to go on YouTube. 0.99

00:11:36.000 Fucked up. 1.00

00:11:37.000 Fucked up. 1.00

00:11:37.000 I am a shill quote from the last one. 1.00

00:11:40.000 Strike that one.

00:11:42.000 A slight misquote.

00:11:44.000 Yeah.

00:11:44.000 So, what happened was science basically figured out the shape of the universe.

00:11:51.000 And 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.

00:12:03.000 There's all this science going on.

00:12:05.000 But 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.

00:12:21.000 Pretty much every single thing that is in Eric DeBay's current book, you will find in Samuel Robotham's book from 1860. And in fact, if you read DeBay's book, which I don't recommend, You will see that about 80% of the text of Eric Dubé's book is actually quotes from these books from the 1800s.

00:12:41.000 It's not actually this new stuff that he's discovered.

00:12:44.000 It's all stuff like, you know, if somebody walks away from you, you will see their feet disappear first.

00:12:50.000 And then he has a two-page quote of Samuel Robotham saying the exact same thing from the 1860s.

00:12:56.000 So 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.

00:13:08.000 They think satellites are fake as well.

00:13:09.000 Yeah.

00:13:10.000 But Dubé, he's hilarious.

00:13:11.000 He thinks that dinosaurs are fake, nuclear bombs are fake.

00:13:15.000 I 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.

00:13:27.000 There'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.

00:13:37.000 He's basically recycling theories in a way that is popular.

00:13:52.000 That's the problem.

00:13:55.000 Right.

00:14:04.000 There's a variety of experiments.

00:14:06.000 The Michelson-Morley experiment that Eddie mentioned is one of them that keeps cropping up and then there's the...

00:14:12.000 Which has never been reproduced.

00:14:14.000 That's the experiment that supposedly...

00:14:17.000 It actually has been reproduced because it's...

00:14:19.000 Well, the wrong way, not the way that they want it to.

00:14:21.000 The Michelson-Morley experiment was an experiment to detect the luminiferous ether, which is the supposed medium through which light travels.

00:14:34.000 Now, back in the 1800s, we didn't know that light was made up out of photons because light was waves.

00:14:39.000 So we thought that there was this stuff that permeated all of space called the luminiferous ether.

00:14:47.000 It's a little hard to pronounce.

00:14:49.000 And that this is what light travelled through as waves going through and like...

00:14:54.000 They didn't know exactly how it worked, but they figured there must be this stuff that permeates all of space.

00:14:59.000 And 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.

00:15:12.000 By doing this experiment.

00:15:13.000 So 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.

00:15:19.000 And 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.

00:15:29.000 So that was the whole experiment, was just this thing.

00:15:31.000 They 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.

00:15:39.000 But what happened was nothing was detected.

00:15:43.000 Which was kind of the start of people realizing, oh, there is no luminiferous ether permeating the universe.

00:15:48.000 Right, but they used that to say that it's because the Earth isn't moving.

00:15:51.000 That was what the flat Earth people tried to use.

00:15:54.000 Yeah, they did.

00:15:55.000 They did, but Michelson and Morley knew the Earth was moving.

00:15:58.000 Right.

00:15:59.000 They wanted to figure out whether the ether was moving with the Earth or whether the Earth was moving through the ether.

00:16:07.000 Right.

00:16:08.000 So they were trying to detect the ether.

00:16:09.000 So 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.

00:16:21.000 There's still people like that, by the way.

00:16:23.000 Oh, yeah.

00:16:23.000 There's a recent resurgence.

00:16:27.000 I think it was Gavin McGinnis sent me something where some guy thinks that the Earth is the center of the universe.

00:16:32.000 Essentially, he was saying that it sort of confirms everything in Genesis.

00:16:36.000 I was like, what?

00:16:38.000 Yeah, 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.

00:16:49.000 But yeah, there's these experiments like the Michelson-Morley experiment, but people bring them up.

00:16:55.000 And they say that what they detected was no motion.

00:16:58.000 Right.

00:16:59.000 But what it actually detected was no luminiferous ether.

00:17:02.000 Right.

00:17:03.000 And because they detected no luminiferous ether, it eventually led to theories about what light actually is, which is wave-particle duality.

00:17:13.000 You know, light is photons, which act both as a wave and as a particle, and eventually to the theory of relativity.

00:17:20.000 Well, you started Metabunk when?

00:17:23.000 When did you?

00:17:24.000 I think it was about five years ago.

00:17:26.000 But I've been doing the chemtrail stuff with Contrail Science for like over ten years now.

00:17:31.000 I was just looking at one of my old posts on satellite images.

00:17:35.000 I was quite surprised at how long I've been doing it.

00:17:39.000 And, yeah, and Metabunk been going about five years, and the Flat Earth stuff came up maybe two years ago.

00:17:46.000 I 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?

00:17:56.000 And basically said, like, all these people are basically either trolling or they're crazy.

00:18:01.000 So there's no point addressing either of them.

00:18:03.000 And I think most of them are just trolling because no one could seriously believe this.

00:18:07.000 You'd have to be like...

00:18:08.000 I don't think you're right.

00:18:09.000 I know.

00:18:09.000 I've come to realize that I'm not.

00:18:11.000 I was wrong.

00:18:12.000 And that post now, you know, it's gone down the line.

00:18:16.000 But it's, you know, I've almost done like a 180 from that.

00:18:20.000 It's stunning.

00:18:21.000 It really is stunning.

00:18:22.000 And 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. 0.99

00:18:33.000 Like, 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. 0.99

00:18:40.000 I'm a sellout. 0.94

00:18:43.000 You don't think that if I really thought the Earth was flat, like if someone thought the Earth was flat, what a revelation that would be.

00:18:49.000 What an amazing discovery.

00:18:50.000 Every scientist would be clamoring to expose this.

00:18:53.000 Every single scientist.

00:18:55.000 The 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.

00:19:04.000 And then the big question is, why would the government say the world is flat?

00:19:07.000 I mean, why would they, in any way, why would they rather hide the fact the world is flat?

00:19:12.000 Like, what motivation would anybody have to show that the world was round?

00:19:15.000 It would be pretty fascinating if we lived on this flat disk and everybody else throughout the universe was on a planet.

00:19:22.000 We'd be like, whoa, what's going on?

00:19:25.000 There'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.

00:19:36.000 It keeps going back to Genesis and that we are the children of God and that creation is true and that evolution is a lie.

00:19:45.000 And it gets to some weird anti-Jew stuff with a lot of these guys.

00:19:49.000 Yeah.

00:19:50.000 A lot of conspiracy theories basically boil down to some kind of suspicion of other people and quite often suspicion of Jewish people.

00:19:59.000 Why Jewish people?

00:19:59.000 It's always the Jews, man.

00:20:01.000 People can't catch a break. 0.92

00:20:02.000 I don't know exactly why.

00:20:03.000 I 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. 0.54

00:20:11.000 So they've just been viewed as being an other.

00:20:14.000 And they're often, you know, the Jewish, the broader Jewish population is often like a minority within cities.

00:20:21.000 And so it's kind of an easy person to pick on when things go wrong.

00:20:25.000 But I don't know, I'm sure there's loads of books written on why Jews are the subject of conspiracy theories.

00:20:30.000 But doesn't Dubé have a recent video about Jews and about Hitler?

00:20:35.000 It's gonna they all they all go down that road yeah, um what is What can be done, if anything, other than your website?

00:20:45.000 What can be done, if anything?

00:20:47.000 My concern is these young kids that are on the fence.

00:20:51.000 My thoughts are, look, I'm not going to reach out.

00:20:54.000 There'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.

00:21:06.000 Those guys don't mean anything to me.

00:21:08.000 You can't do anything about them.

00:21:09.000 But 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. 0.99

00:21:20.000 That's you, motherfucker, whoever's listening to this. 0.99

00:21:22.000 That's you. 1.00

00:21:23.000 And you start...

00:21:24.000 I've been tricked before, and I wrote this big...

00:21:29.000 Instagram post recently about rods, about those Roswell rods.

00:21:34.000 I read it.

00:21:35.000 God, they got me.

00:21:36.000 I was convinced.

00:21:37.000 I was convinced.

00:21:38.000 But it was just, I never looked into it.

00:21:40.000 I just watched a documentary, and this guy had the footage.

00:21:43.000 I was like, wow, these things are flying around.

00:21:44.000 We can't see them.

00:21:45.000 That's crazy.

00:21:47.000 And then a show called, if you never saw the Instagram post that I made, there was a guy that made this video, a documentary.

00:21:55.000 I think he made more than one.

00:21:57.000 And 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.

00:22:09.000 Like, they were moving so fast, we couldn't see them.

00:22:11.000 And so, I was convinced, man.

00:22:13.000 I was really convinced.

00:22:14.000 And then, there was a show called Monster Quest, and what they did is they set up two cameras.

00:22:18.000 One camera, which was a very fast, high-speed camera, and the other one, which is a standard video camera.

00:22:24.000 And the standard video camera caught all these rods flying around.

00:22:28.000 And then the exact same images right next to each other with this high-definition, high-speed camera showed actual bugs.

00:22:35.000 So 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.

00:22:45.000 And so it created this elongating effect and made it look like there were these jellyfish.

00:22:49.000 Yeah.

00:22:50.000 Well, 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,

00:23:06.000 it's filled with people angry at me.

00:23:08.000 Because they think it's fake.

00:23:09.000 They think it's fake, and they think I'm a shill because I put that up.

00:23:12.000 If you can't get people to look at things, that's a challenge in itself.

00:23:15.000 How do you get people to look at things?

00:23:16.000 I think if you start slowly.

00:23:19.000 I 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?

00:23:33.000 And, 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.

00:23:43.000 Oh, I'm sure, because I think it got, like, 50,000 likes or something like that.

00:23:47.000 So I'm sure, even besides people that didn't like it, many people, they were like, oh, really?

00:23:52.000 Because 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.

00:24:00.000 Like, that's...

00:24:00.000 It's just not true.

00:24:02.000 And this rods video that you saw with the two cameras, if that hadn't existed, you might have taken a bit longer.

00:24:07.000 Yes.

00:24:08.000 I mean, you might still believe it now.

00:24:09.000 You might be telling your friends about it.

00:24:10.000 Have you seen these crazy rods that are everywhere?

00:24:13.000 The 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.

00:24:23.000 And 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.

00:24:30.000 Come on, you're still buying it?

00:24:32.000 He's still selling it.

00:24:33.000 They call them Roswell Rods, which is hilarious.

00:24:36.000 They're implying that somehow or another they're alien.

00:24:38.000 Yeah, probably some guy was at Roswell taking pictures trying to get UFOs and some bugs flew by.

00:24:43.000 It wasn't even Roswell.

00:24:44.000 That's what's funny.

00:24:45.000 They call them Roswell Rods.

00:24:46.000 The best footage is from Mexico.

00:24:47.000 The best footage was from a bunch of cave jumpers.

00:24:50.000 You know, they have that one really enormous cave, but it's a hole, essentially.

00:24:54.000 A gigantic pit, and people skydive into it.

00:24:57.000 You ever seen that?

00:24:58.000 Yeah, I've seen things like that.

00:24:59.000 It's pretty wild.

00:25:01.000 It's pretty wild.

00:25:01.000 But they filmed, they set up a camera to watch them jump off the edge and parachute down, and you see the rods flying by.

00:25:08.000 That was like the best footage was from Mexico, from this one place.

00:25:12.000 So it had nothing to do with Roswell. 0.96

00:25:13.000 They just called them Roswell rods because they're dorks.

00:25:15.000 They probably had...

00:25:17.000 They 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.

00:25:33.000 Exactly.

00:25:34.000 Exactly.

00:25:35.000 And 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.

00:25:43.000 It's that kind of thinking.

00:25:45.000 It's once someone commits to an idea, it's very difficult to shake them off of it.

00:25:49.000 And they just look for confirmation bias.

00:25:50.000 They just look for someone else to agree with them.

00:25:52.000 They find communities.

00:25:54.000 They find these flat earth communities, which is hilarious. 0.90

00:25:56.000 The flat, one of the best One of the best fucking unintentional, hilarious things I read online.

00:26:01.000 This dude wrote, the Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe.

00:26:04.000 Yeah.

00:26:06.000 Whoops.

00:26:07.000 Did he even realize what he was saying?

00:26:08.000 Of course not.

00:26:09.000 Or is that just him trolling?

00:26:11.000 I hope it's him trolling.

00:26:14.000 The community thing, I think, is a key thing.

00:26:17.000 Yes.

00:26:18.000 I recently did a debunk of a UFO that the Chilean Navy supposedly saw.

00:26:24.000 What was that?

00:26:25.000 I'm not aware of that one.

00:26:25.000 It was like this...

00:26:28.000 There 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.

00:26:46.000 And 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.

00:27:04.000 And 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.

00:27:19.000 And so this got a bit of play online and it was on like Covington Post and things like that.

00:27:24.000 And some UFO enthusiasts started talking to me and I joined their groups.

00:27:32.000 And I joined a few other groups.

00:27:33.000 And then I found myself in this kind of weird corner of the internet where everybody believes in UFOs unquestioningly.

00:27:42.000 And they're always putting up these photographs of things.

00:27:45.000 And people are like, oh, great capture, dude.

00:27:47.000 And it's just something like a streetlight or something.

00:27:50.000 Tss!

00:27:50.000 But 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,

00:28:06.000 they're just very supportive of them.

00:28:08.000 Yeah.

00:28:09.000 One that happened a couple of days ago, some woman put up a picture of a strange light that she said was in the sky.

00:28:16.000 And 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.

00:28:24.000 And you could see it was like there was trees behind it and it was a security light and it was this reflection.

00:28:28.000 So I posted that and then I started getting called like a shill.

00:28:35.000 For pointing this out.

00:28:36.000 There's a couple of people who said, oh yeah, it's just this lie.

00:28:38.000 But other people were like, why don't you believe me?

00:28:40.000 Why are you invalidating my claims?

00:28:44.000 And so they want to have these kind of little walled gardens where everybody believes the same thing.

00:28:48.000 That's a good way to put it.

00:28:50.000 The walled gardens.

00:28:51.000 It 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.

00:28:56.000 I 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.

00:29:11.000 Illogical people with very little evidence, believing things in almost a religious way.

00:29:16.000 And 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. 0.95

00:29:26.000 I feel like contrails and chemtrails were the most nutty people.

00:29:30.000 UFO people seem to be the most reasonable because it's the most reasonable theory.

00:29:35.000 Out of all of them, the idea that we have spaceships, why doesn't someone else have spaceships?

00:29:39.000 There's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, hundreds of billions of planets in each galaxy.

00:29:45.000 The odds of there being some sort of a life form out there is pretty high.

00:29:49.000 But there's nothing.

00:29:50.000 That's the craziest thing.

00:29:52.000 The 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.

00:30:01.000 There is nothing. 0.92

00:30:03.000 There's not a goddamn thing that you can put on a scale. 0.98

00:30:05.000 There's not a thing that you can weigh. 0.98

00:30:06.000 There's not a thing that you can measure.

00:30:08.000 There's not a thing that you can look at a photo and go, wow, that's compelling.

00:30:11.000 There's not one.

00:30:12.000 It's just an idea.

00:30:13.000 And 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.

00:30:22.000 Right.

00:30:22.000 Yeah, 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.

00:30:35.000 It's always that.

00:30:36.000 From the 60s.

00:30:36.000 Well, 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.

00:30:46.000 Now, they've proven that this stuff is...

00:30:49.000 Produced 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

00:31:19.000 neurochemical that entered into their bloodstream, whatever it is, it caused it. 0.99

00:31:24.000 All these fucking UFO abductions, all of them, almost exactly happen at night. 0.97

00:31:30.000 And they happen while these people are sleeping. 0.99

00:31:32.000 Wouldn't you just assume that you were dreaming?

00:31:34.000 Why wouldn't you assume you were dreaming?

00:31:36.000 Yeah, I used to have these kind of night terror hallucination things which were kind of like that.

00:31:42.000 Yeah.

00:31:43.000 And it was always the same type of thing.

00:31:44.000 It was like a giant spider coming down from the ceiling towards me.

00:31:49.000 And you couldn't move?

00:31:49.000 I was like, you know, frozen for a second and then I would jump out of bed and turn on the light and look for the spider.

00:31:56.000 And it's happened all the time.

00:31:57.000 And, you know, I knew because there was no spider that it wasn't real.

00:32:00.000 But I could see if someone was having a different type of hallucination that seemed a bit more real and then, you know, maybe it's...

00:32:06.000 It came in between sleep cycles for them, then tell it.

00:32:10.000 Because it seemed completely real.

00:32:13.000 I used to have them all the time, and it was always horrible.

00:32:17.000 It was this giant, really realistic spider.

00:32:19.000 And it wasn't like I was dreaming.

00:32:22.000 Somewhere else, I was in the room and I could see it like I was seeing something crawling across the table right here.

00:32:27.000 It was this hallucination.

00:32:29.000 I don't really get them anymore.

00:32:30.000 I don't know what it was.

00:32:31.000 My brain's fixed itself or whatever.

00:32:33.000 Well, it's probably a lot has to do with being young and confused and hormones and nerves.

00:32:39.000 And then also like...

00:32:40.000 Your brain starts filling in the blanks.

00:32:42.000 If you don't have a very good understanding of the universe, your imagination runs wild.

00:32:48.000 It was very confusing to me doing that television show.

00:32:51.000 And it really changed me a lot.

00:32:52.000 It changed me to the point that people started accusing me of being co-opted by the government.

00:33:00.000 That the government threatened my family and told me to stop talking about conspiracies.

00:33:05.000 And then the idea that I wouldn't say that if that was the case. 0.92

00:33:08.000 Like, you don't think I would fucking tell everybody if someone threatened my family because I was talking about UFOs? 0.81

00:33:14.000 I'd be telling everybody. 0.98

00:33:15.000 I'd be like, hey man.

00:33:16.000 I would tell all my friends. 0.98

00:33:17.000 I'd be like, dude, they fucking threatened me because I was talking about UFOs. 1.00

00:33:20.000 This shit is real. 1.00

00:33:21.000 Hangar 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. 1.00

00:33:32.000 Yeah. 0.89

00:33:32.000 And it's just ridiculous. 0.89

00:33:33.000 You can't have tens of millions of people in on a conspiracy.

00:33:39.000 Well, the Flat Earth one is the best one for that.

00:33:41.000 Yeah.

00:33:42.000 Because what about all those people?

00:33:43.000 All of science.

00:33:44.000 Every single scientist.

00:33:45.000 Yeah.

00:33:46.000 And everyone who is involved in shipping routes and overseas flights and the fact that you can fly west and land east.

00:33:54.000 I mean, you can.

00:33:56.000 You 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.

00:34:19.000 Ground truth is a concept in satellite observations, which I kind of touched on before.

00:34:24.000 You take a satellite observation and you see, does it match what you see on the ground?

00:34:29.000 Or 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?

00:34:35.000 And 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.

00:34:47.000 I want to talk very briefly about a program called Stellarium, which you might have seen.

00:34:52.000 It's just basically a solar system simulator.

00:34:54.000 It shows what's in the night sky.

00:34:55.000 You've probably seen these little things on your phone where you hold it up and it shows you what the stars are.

00:35:01.000 Yeah.

00:35:01.000 It's like that for the PC, and you can use the one on your phone as well.

00:35:07.000 So what I would encourage people to do is figure out, like, is this program actually correct?

00:35:12.000 Is it actually showing me what we see in the night sky?

00:35:16.000 And you can do it really easily.

00:35:17.000 You 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?

00:35:26.000 So this is basically you checking the ground truth of this program, which seems like a very straightforward thing.

00:35:31.000 But then what you can do from that is you can then use the program to look at the sky from other positions.

00:35:37.000 And 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.

00:35:52.000 Or the little program you have in your phone that shows you the stars in the sky.

00:35:56.000 So you've got this computer showing you what it expects to see from any position anywhere in the world.

00:36:02.000 And you, by doing ground truth observations, have figured out what it actually is here.

00:36:08.000 So that's the type of thing you see in Stellarium, obviously in a much less light-polluted environment than you have here.

00:36:15.000 Do 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,

00:36:31.000 hidden discoveries, or things that are somehow or another being kept from everybody.

00:36:39.000 What's fascinating to me is They're looking into this nonsense.

00:36:44.000 They're looking into this thing that's not real.

00:36:47.000 When the real space, like the actual, like what is observable about space is so mind blowing.

00:36:56.000 Yeah.

00:36:57.000 And 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.

00:37:11.000 When you see, like, they don't believe satellites are real. 0.91

00:37:13.000 When you see how many satellites we actually have, that's what's really fucked. 0.92

00:37:18.000 It's not that there's no satellites. 0.94

00:37:21.000 There's way too many.

00:37:21.000 They're going to start bashing into each other and then we'll have no more satellites.

00:37:24.000 There's thousands of them up there and they have to time space flights.

00:37:28.000 They 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.

00:37:38.000 I mean, it's still floating up there.

00:37:40.000 You've seen the movie Gravity?

00:37:41.000 Yes.

00:37:41.000 Yeah, 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.

00:37:49.000 Did you see that Japanese expedition that they tried to do?

00:37:52.000 They tried to capture space junk.

00:37:55.000 Didn't work.

00:37:55.000 Yeah, I don't know how well it worked.

00:37:57.000 They had a big tether that they were dragging behind it.

00:37:59.000 Yeah, they were trying to, like, catch a bunch of space junk with a net, right?

00:38:03.000 Yeah.

00:38:03.000 Somehow or another.

00:38:04.000 Yeah, it's amazing.

00:38:04.000 This stuff is way more interesting than...

00:38:06.000 Yes.

00:38:06.000 Yeah.

00:38:07.000 That's the real stuff.

00:38:08.000 That's really crazy.

00:38:08.000 The flat Earth idea is so...

00:38:10.000 It's like this tiny little thing where the Earth is flat and we're stuck in this weird prison where people are keeping us here.

00:38:15.000 Yeah.

00:38:16.000 Yeah, 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.

00:38:26.000 Like, it doesn't make any sense.

00:38:28.000 Yeah, 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,

00:38:46.000 even though they know it's not true, but they still believe it, and it's a way of mind control.

00:38:50.000 So the same thing would have happened with the flat earth, but on a far grander scale.

00:38:54.000 You'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.

00:39:02.000 So 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, 0.56

00:39:18.000 or Mormons do, or anybody that creates some sort of an ideology that's provably false.

00:39:22.000 I mean, look, there's not a whole lot of difference between Scientology and Flat Earth theory.

00:39:28.000 I mean, there really isn't. 0.97

00:39:29.000 I 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.

00:39:37.000 And 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.

00:39:48.000 I mean, I had this guy on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, Ron Miscavige, David Miscavige's dad. 0.99

00:39:54.000 I was like, what in the fuck? 1.00

00:39:55.000 This guy's wasted his life. 1.00

00:39:57.000 Guy lived in the Scientology world for 50 years.

00:40:00.000 I mean, it's crazy.

00:40:01.000 It's crazy.

00:40:02.000 It is, it is.

00:40:03.000 There's not much difference between that and flat earth theory.

00:40:05.000 There really isn't.

00:40:05.000 You know how Scientology works.

00:40:07.000 It's like gradually sucks you in a bit at a time.

00:40:11.000 It just sounds all very reasonable at the start.

00:40:13.000 Very self-helpy in the beginning.

00:40:14.000 It gets more and more cult-like the further you get into it.

00:40:17.000 Well, 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.

00:40:26.000 People start seeing those benefits.

00:40:27.000 They start feeling positive, and then they get into the thetans and the frozen souls chucked into the volcano, and they're like, what?

00:40:34.000 Well, 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.

00:40:45.000 And I think this is something that people really like about it, is that you don't believe scientists just because scientists say something.

00:40:55.000 It's this thing they call the zetetic method.

00:40:59.000 Which basically is a Greek word meaning questioning.

00:41:02.000 So you've got to question everything.

00:41:04.000 You can't believe that gravity exists or that planets go around the sun just because scientists do it.

00:41:09.000 You actually have to observe it for yourself.

00:41:11.000 And if you can't observe it for yourself, then it isn't real.

00:41:14.000 Which leads people to think the Earth is flat because it kind of appears flat from various positions.

00:41:20.000 Right.

00:41:20.000 And they haven't been into space or they haven't done the various experiments that show that it's not flat.

00:41:25.000 So I think...

00:41:27.000 You'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,

00:41:43.000 but then they get sucked into people like DeBay, who feed them all this nonsense.

00:41:49.000 He's very articulate, very smooth with the way he talks, and he makes his well-edited videos, and they're very compelling.

00:41:55.000 And 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.

00:42:09.000 Yeah, 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,

00:42:28.000 sort 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.

00:42:39.000 And they did it because they thought that they were, you know, following science.

00:42:42.000 And so questioning science and questioning scientists, you know, occasionally you're right.

00:42:48.000 Occasionally you'll find something like this conspiracy by the sugar industry.

00:42:53.000 You know, there's the old saying like, trust yet verify.

00:42:56.000 Yes.

00:42:56.000 You know, Reagan popularized that with the salt talks.

00:42:59.000 Yeah, that's a very good statement.

00:43:01.000 Trust yet verify.

00:43:02.000 Trust yet verify.

00:43:02.000 Yeah.

00:43:03.000 If you want to trust Eric DeBay, that's fine, but check the things that he says.

00:43:08.000 I checked one of his things on the way here on the plane.

00:43:12.000 He has a thing that a lot of them say, which is that the horizon always rises to eye level.

00:43:17.000 So on the plane on the way here, I checked to see if this was actually correct.

00:43:21.000 Now, 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.

00:43:27.000 It's at eye level.

00:43:29.000 But 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.

00:43:36.000 It actually drops around two or three degrees.

00:43:38.000 But it's very hard to see when you're just looking out of the window of the plane.

00:43:41.000 So it's very easy to get taken into believing that it stays at eye level.

00:43:46.000 So what I did is I took this little carpenter's level You brought a carpenter's level?

00:43:51.000 A carpenter's level.

00:43:52.000 A very small one.

00:43:53.000 It's like eight inches long or so.

00:43:55.000 And I've taped a small tube to the top, which is like a bit of a pen.

00:43:58.000 And then I set it level and wedged it so it was level.

00:44:02.000 And then I looked through the tube on the top of this level and saw where the horizon was.

00:44:06.000 And the horizon was just below the end of the level.

00:44:10.000 So the horizon had actually dropped away.

00:44:14.000 Which 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.

00:44:20.000 And it's demonstrably incorrect with this $2 level, which I actually got free from somewhere.

00:44:24.000 And anyone can do this.

00:44:26.000 You don't even need to be in a plane.

00:44:29.000 In fact, it works better if you're just on a cliff or something, like a thousand feet up.

00:44:33.000 Well, 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.

00:44:43.000 But I do not think that people understand perspective and they do not understand how huge the earth is.

00:44:50.000 When 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,

00:45:06.000 and 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.

00:45:16.000 You're dealing with something that's so big, it feels like it's flat.

00:45:22.000 It feels like it's flat because it's enormous and you're tiny.

00:45:26.000 Yeah, 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.

00:45:35.000 Yeah.

00:45:36.000 There'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.

00:45:49.000 It 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.

00:45:57.000 So it's actually slightly curved, but when you look at it, it looks perfectly straight.

00:46:03.000 You 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.

00:46:11.000 But 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.

00:46:22.000 Over this 80 miles, it moves maybe like 10 feet or something.

00:46:25.000 And people just don't realise just how small the curve of the Earth actually is.

00:46:33.000 It looks flat.

00:46:34.000 And 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.

00:46:46.000 You don't want to believe that you got taken.

00:46:48.000 You don't want to believe you've been had.

00:46:50.000 You don't want to believe you've been fooled.

00:46:51.000 So 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.

00:47:01.000 Yeah, 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.

00:47:13.000 Like, the level experiment that I did, someone did something similar with that.

00:47:17.000 They 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.

00:47:27.000 But they did this experiment, and they did it at sea level.

00:47:30.000 Which meant it's always going to be exactly the same as the horizon.

00:47:33.000 You've actually got to go up a thousand feet before you can see anything.

00:47:35.000 But 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.

00:47:48.000 There's a ridiculous amount of people doing flat earth experiments on YouTube and just getting it completely wrong.

00:47:57.000 I think the most common one is people taking photographs of something that they think shouldn't be visible from a certain position.

00:48:05.000 They'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.

00:48:18.000 And then there's all these mistakes that they make.

00:48:20.000 Some of them do the math wrong.

00:48:22.000 Some of them don't account for the fact that you've got to factor in how high the viewer is.

00:48:29.000 Some of them will get entirely the wrong island.

00:48:32.000 Like, 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.

00:48:37.000 Well, how come you can look out in the—I mean, here's a simple one.

00:48:40.000 How come you look out across the ocean and you don't see anything on the other side?

00:48:43.000 Yeah.

00:48:44.000 Like, what's over there?

00:48:45.000 Well— So far away that you can't see it?

00:48:47.000 They've gotten out there.

00:48:47.000 They've gotten out there because the—you wouldn't be able to see anything away because the atmosphere is so thick.

00:48:52.000 You wouldn't be able to see through it.

00:48:53.000 Oh.

00:48:53.000 If things get further away, they get fainter and fainter.

00:48:55.000 Islands that are— Do they believe in the atmosphere?

00:48:57.000 They do, and they use it a lot to make up reasons for certain things, like things going below the horizon.

00:49:04.000 That's where it gets weird, right, is that people use some science to try to debunk science.

00:49:10.000 Or things that they claim are science, like the law of perspective.

00:49:13.000 The law of perspective doesn't exist.

00:49:15.000 There's no law of perspective.

00:49:17.000 I 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.

00:49:24.000 So if it gets twice as far away, it's half the size.

00:49:27.000 If it gets four times as far away, it's a quarter of the size.

00:49:30.000 And that's it.

00:49:32.000 And that's all that perspective is.

00:49:34.000 Now, people talk about vanishing points.

00:49:36.000 Well, that came up during the podcast with Eddie Bravo.

00:49:38.000 Yeah.

00:49:39.000 And 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.

00:49:51.000 He was just explaining how you define perspective when you're illustrating things.

00:49:56.000 That's the law of perspective on a piece of paper.

00:49:59.000 Or on a photograph.

00:50:00.000 It's nothing at all to do with the real world.

00:50:02.000 It's about what you can see visually, what the image is projected onto your eyes, or what comes through a camera when you take a picture.

00:50:09.000 You know, what's the actual perspective of things?

00:50:11.000 You know, things just get smaller.

00:50:12.000 But it sounds good when you say the law of perspective.

00:50:16.000 It does.

00:50:17.000 It sounds good, like you're invoking a law, a scientific law.

00:50:19.000 But then they will discover a real law like the law of universal gravitation.

00:50:24.000 Yeah.

00:50:25.000 I just, again, here's the thing.

00:50:27.000 I don't have anything against Eric Dupay or any of these people.

00:50:30.000 I really don't. 1.00

00:50:31.000 My real concern is with young people out there that are listening to this that get sucked into this stupid shit. 1.00

00:50:37.000 And there's so much that you could learn. 1.00

00:50:41.000 There's so much that's fascinating about the universe.

00:50:44.000 There's so much fascinating about the natural world.

00:50:46.000 There's so much to learn.

00:50:48.000 And to waste any time.

00:50:49.000 The 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.

00:50:58.000 And again, it's not like in any way, shape, or form, it's not something to be embarrassed about or sad about.

00:51:04.000 It's just a normal, natural human inclination to try to find things that are hidden truths or, you know, that are Covered up mysteries.

00:51:14.000 It's natural for whatever reason.

00:51:16.000 I think it's very much a part of growing up and I think it's just it's different for different people.

00:51:21.000 Yeah.

00:51:21.000 I had a whole bunch of crazy ideas when I was growing up.

00:51:23.000 What'd you have?

00:51:24.000 I 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.

00:51:38.000 So I sent it to their brothers.

00:51:40.000 So I sent a letter to Raul Castro, who is now the president of Cuba.

00:51:45.000 Wow!

00:51:46.000 But back then I thought, I can set up this organization of the relatives of world leaders and bring about world peace.

00:51:53.000 Now, I was like 13 at the time.

00:51:55.000 It's funny that you decided to get a hold of their brothers.

00:51:57.000 That's kind of hilarious.

00:51:59.000 Yeah, well I figured like...

00:52:00.000 Sneaky back door move.

00:52:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:52:02.000 And I found his address in Who's Who in the library.

00:52:05.000 Oh.

00:52:06.000 I don't know.

00:52:07.000 Back in the day.

00:52:08.000 Back in the day when you look things up in the library.

00:52:10.000 Hmm.

00:52:11.000 Yeah, I mean, that's not even that unreasonable.

00:52:13.000 That's like you thinking, well, world peace seems to make sense to me.

00:52:17.000 This 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.

00:52:25.000 I had delusions of solving great mathematical problems when I was young.

00:52:31.000 Problems like, how do you trisect an angle by this geometrical method?

00:52:37.000 Which was proved to be impossible to do.

00:52:39.000 And 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.

00:52:47.000 It seems like it's possible to me.

00:52:48.000 And if you did discover it, what a gigantic, huge feather in your cap that would have been.

00:52:53.000 That was the motivation, really.

00:52:54.000 It wasn't just like pure altruism. 1.00

00:52:57.000 I believed in a bunch of stupid shit. 1.00

00:52:59.000 And the big one for me that I've clung to longest is Bigfoot. 1.00

00:53:05.000 That one, man.

00:53:06.000 Oh, it's so hard for me to let that one go.

00:53:12.000 Well, first of all, because it used to be an animal.

00:53:14.000 It used to be Gigandopithecus.

00:53:16.000 But man, when my friend Les Stroud actually started doing that show, that Bigfoot show.

00:53:21.000 Have you ever seen that show?

00:53:22.000 I don't think so. 1.00

00:53:23.000 He did that show with some fucking guy who's just a total hoaxer. 0.99

00:53:28.000 And 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. 1.00

00:53:36.000 It is so stupid looking. 0.99

00:53:38.000 See if you can find it, Jamie. 1.00

00:53:39.000 And this guy, this is how wacky this guy is. 1.00

00:53:43.000 The Bigfoot community thinks he's full of shit. 1.00

00:53:46.000 That's when you know you fucked up. 1.00

00:53:47.000 When the Bigfoot community is calling shenanigans. 0.99

00:53:50.000 They're like, this guy, I'm not buying this.

00:53:52.000 It's funny, you get these schisms in these communities and they fracture off into sub-communities.

00:53:57.000 Yeah.

00:53:57.000 You know, the Scientologists, there are people who have fractured it off from the Scientologists.

00:54:01.000 Watch this.

00:54:02.000 This is awesome.

00:54:03.000 See, this guy's in the woods and he sees it.

00:54:05.000 He sees it.

00:54:06.000 It's through the trees.

00:54:06.000 What is it?

00:54:07.000 Where is it?

00:54:08.000 And he can't.

00:54:08.000 He's not even moving.

00:54:09.000 Meanwhile, Bigfoot has just been running from people from day one, right?

00:54:12.000 But there's one animal that's just standing there.

00:54:15.000 And he's like, God, I think I see it.

00:54:16.000 I think I see it.

00:54:17.000 So then towards the end of the video, he gets really close.

00:54:19.000 Like, look at that. 0.99

00:54:20.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:54:21.000 He's got like an afro from the 1970s. 0.99

00:54:24.000 Like, look how clean its hair looks. 0.99

00:54:26.000 I mean, it looks so dumb. 0.98

00:54:28.000 It's not moving. 0.98

00:54:29.000 No, he gets close up on it.

00:54:31.000 Look at that.

00:54:32.000 Doesn't it wink or something?

00:54:34.000 Yeah, here it is.

00:54:35.000 Look how bad this is.

00:54:37.000 Look how bad this is.

00:54:39.000 Here's how you know it's fake.

00:54:41.000 Whenever something looks like a dude in a monkey suit, it's a dude in a monkey suit.

00:54:45.000 That's all you need to know.

00:54:46.000 Because your brain knows.

00:54:48.000 Your brain's like, hey, wait a minute.

00:54:50.000 If you look at a gorilla, a gorilla doesn't look like a person in a gorilla suit.

00:54:54.000 If you look at a giraffe, it does not look like a person in a giraffe suit. 0.99

00:54:57.000 If you look at Bigfoot and it looks like a dude in a monkey suit, it's a fucking dude in a monkey suit. 1.00

00:55:01.000 Like, your brain starts filling in the blanks. 0.99

00:55:03.000 And also, whether you recognize it or not, your brain recognizes geometry, facial geometry, recognizes a Fibonacci sequence.

00:55:11.000 Hardwired.

00:55:12.000 Yeah, and you see, that's why people freak out when you see someone with fake lips or a fake nose.

00:55:16.000 Upside down eyes and things like that. 0.74

00:55:18.000 When 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. 0.86

00:55:27.000 And 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. 0.98

00:55:35.000 And when that geometry is off, it's confusing to us.

00:55:38.000 Like, why are their cheeks so big?

00:55:40.000 Why is that nose so small?

00:55:41.000 Why are the lips so big? 0.99

00:55:42.000 Like, what the fuck is going on? 0.98

00:55:43.000 Like, your body starts You react to it. 0.99

00:55:46.000 Yeah, there's an illusion where they put two sets of eyes on people.

00:55:49.000 Yes.

00:55:49.000 And you look at that and your brain just is constantly resetting and you think, oh, my eyes are crossed or whatever.

00:55:54.000 No, they're not.

00:55:55.000 Yeah.

00:55:55.000 Your brain's just so hardwired to recognize faces.

00:55:58.000 Yes.

00:55:59.000 That it just automatically...

00:56:00.000 Recognized 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.

00:56:09.000 And that's the golden ratio.

00:56:11.000 I mean, if you look at a person's face, you can actually do the math.

00:56:15.000 Where their chin is, where their eyes are, it all lines up.

00:56:18.000 And your brain recognizes when that's not the case.

00:56:21.000 So if you see that and you see like, oh, it's a person. 0.99

00:56:23.000 What the fuck's going on? 0.99

00:56:24.000 Because it is a person. 1.00

00:56:25.000 That's a person.

00:56:26.000 That's a dude in a monkey suit.

00:56:27.000 It's not even a good one.

00:56:29.000 And there's so many people that trot out that Patterson footage, which is so bad.

00:56:33.000 They believe so hard.

00:56:36.000 They believe so hard. 1.00

00:56:37.000 It was the hardest one for me to realize that those people were all full of shit. 1.00

00:56:41.000 Because when I was a kid, man, God, I don't want a Bigfoot to be real. 1.00

00:56:44.000 That was a tough one.

00:56:46.000 Tough one.

00:56:48.000 And plus it was a real animal at one point in time.

00:56:50.000 There was really a thing called Gigantopithecus, which was an eight to ten foot tall ape.

00:56:56.000 Rakatang. 0.82

00:56:56.000 Yeah. 0.82

00:56:57.000 That may have been bipedal, at least occasionally.

00:57:00.000 Yeah.

00:57:01.000 Yeah.

00:57:03.000 Yeah, you want things to be true, like UFOs.

00:57:05.000 I was kind of into UFOs and all kinds of weird stuff when I was younger.

00:57:09.000 And I think partly me figuring out that a lot of it was just bullshit was part of my motivation for getting into debunking stuff later.

00:57:17.000 But to a certain degree, I think there's no harm in people believing in things. 0.87

00:57:22.000 Like, you know, little kids believe in Santa Claus, etc., that type of things.

00:57:26.000 Right.

00:57:26.000 The Christmas, the Easter Bunny.

00:57:28.000 It's just that for some people it kind of goes a bit wrong, goes a bit too far.

00:57:31.000 They 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.

00:57:48.000 And 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.

00:57:58.000 The Illuminati.

00:57:59.000 Yeah.

00:58:00.000 So I think it's partly this kind of a natural, childish wanting to believe in things, which we all have.

00:58:07.000 Yeah.

00:58:07.000 We all believed strange things when we were young.

00:58:09.000 And I think that aliens in a lot of ways are like a cosmic daddy.

00:58:13.000 The idea that there's someone who's really on the ball.

00:58:16.000 That's watching us and you've got to make sure we don't fuck everything up.

00:58:19.000 That's why those contact movies are so popular.

00:58:21.000 Just the idea of like, oh, aliens coming to help us or whatever is so enticing.

00:58:26.000 It'd be so amazing.

00:58:27.000 Yeah, meanwhile, I think the movie Alien is probably more likely what's going to happen. 0.99

00:58:32.000 Just come down here and fuck us up. 0.98

00:58:35.000 The 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. 0.99

00:58:43.000 And they become, you know, air quotes, experts.

00:58:48.000 And that becomes a problem, because then they have a vested interest in making sure that other people believe.

00:58:53.000 They start writing books.

00:58:54.000 They start doing lectures.

00:58:55.000 They start showing pictures.

00:58:56.000 And also, here's what's interesting.

00:58:59.000 As the number of phones that have cameras have radically increased, the number of usable UFO pictures has radically decreased.

00:59:08.000 Which doesn't really make sense.

00:59:10.000 Cameras like this one, it's got 83x zoom on it.

00:59:12.000 You can take pictures of, if there was a UFO, you could take a real closer picture of it.

00:59:17.000 I 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.

00:59:25.000 Do you see the windows?

00:59:27.000 Yeah, depending on the angle.

00:59:29.000 That'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.

00:59:40.000 Right.

00:59:41.000 If 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.

00:59:47.000 Right, right.

00:59:48.000 Speaking of the camera, there's something coming up in August, which is the eclipse.

00:59:53.000 There's going to be a total eclipse of the Sun over North America, I think, August 21st this year.

00:59:59.000 And 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.

01:00:09.000 Don't they have an excuse for that, though?

01:00:11.000 Yeah, but how are they going to justify it if they actually look at it?

01:00:15.000 I think the challenge is getting people to look at things.

01:00:18.000 The excuse, well not the excuse, the reason we're giving them is that there's an eclipse.

01:00:23.000 And everybody wants to look at the eclipse because it's an amazing thing.

01:00:25.000 The moon goes in front of the sun and blocks it out.

01:00:27.000 Yeah, but I think that you're giving them too much credit.

01:00:29.000 I 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.

01:00:39.000 I mean, it just doesn't seem to me that it's enough.

01:00:41.000 This is like a solar eclipse, though.

01:00:43.000 I understand.

01:00:44.000 They can tell that the moon is going in front of the sun.

01:00:47.000 Well, I know what you're saying is logical.

01:00:49.000 But no, even the flat Earthers believe that the Moon goes in front of the Sun for a solar eclipse.

01:00:54.000 Oh, they do?

01:00:54.000 Yeah, because they can track the position of the Moon through the sky, and they know that it gets closer to the Sun every time.

01:01:00.000 Don't they believe that the Earth sits flat and that everything spins around the Earth?

01:01:04.000 They do.

01:01:04.000 Well, yeah, the Earth is flat and the Sun and the Moon are orbiting above.

01:01:12.000 But 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.

01:01:22.000 So 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.

01:01:31.000 So you should encourage people who are flat earth believers to look at this amazing thing that's happening. 0.99

01:01:37.000 They still don't give a fuck. 0.94

01:01:38.000 Is there uniformity in the Flat Earth community? 0.99

01:01:42.000 Have they all agreed?

01:01:43.000 Or is there dissension?

01:01:45.000 Some people say it's because of the ice wall. 0.99

01:01:48.000 No, there's no fucking ice wall. 0.99

01:01:49.000 It's just a drop-off and everybody dies. 0.99

01:01:52.000 There is this mainstream thing, the debate model of things.

01:01:56.000 It's kind of like in the chemtrail community.

01:01:58.000 You've got this one guy, Dane Wigington, Who's this really popular guy.

01:02:03.000 And then you've got like a bunch of other people.

01:02:05.000 Which one is he?

01:02:05.000 Is he the guy that made the videos?

01:02:07.000 No, that was Michael J. Murphy was the guy who made the videos.

01:02:10.000 That guy was... 0.94

01:02:11.000 He was a little loony.

01:02:14.000 And Wickington is the guy who lives in a big house on 200 acres up in the mountains somewhere.

01:02:21.000 And he got obsessed with solar panels being blocked by contrails and so became a chemtrail believer.

01:02:26.000 But he's like the equivalent of DeBay, really, because he's the guy who's really promoting it. 0.95

01:02:30.000 But 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. 0.93

01:02:41.000 Oh, those folks. 0.77

01:02:42.000 There's this division between people who believe in global warming and who don't.

01:02:46.000 So 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.

01:03:01.000 You've got the same type of range of things in the flat Earth, believers, as well.

01:03:05.000 Some people think that the Earth is kind of concave.

01:03:08.000 It's not actually flat at all.

01:03:10.000 What about the hollow Earth people? 1.00

01:03:12.000 Some people think the Earth is hollow.

01:03:13.000 That's not really a flat Earth thing.

01:03:16.000 That's like a round Earth with a hole in the top.

01:03:18.000 And a whole new world in there.

01:03:19.000 People live on the inside of the Earth, which makes even less sense than the flat Earth from a physical point of view.

01:03:28.000 Well, they think there's monsters in there.

01:03:30.000 Yeah.

01:03:31.000 Or there's aliens, the Rothschilds.

01:03:33.000 They think they're lizard people.

01:03:34.000 They live under the earth.

01:03:35.000 Yeah.

01:03:36.000 They shoot lasers.

01:03:37.000 They make tunnels.

01:03:38.000 You've heard that?

01:03:38.000 Yeah.

01:03:39.000 I've heard of that, yeah.

01:03:39.000 Sounds real.

01:03:41.000 Yeah.

01:03:41.000 I'm looking into it.

01:03:42.000 Any conspiracy theory is going to have a range of plausibility.

01:03:46.000 Yeah.

01:03:47.000 From reasonably plausible to completely implausible.

01:03:49.000 You think of some of the 9-11 conspiracy theories.

01:03:52.000 At one end, you've got the World Trade Center was destroyed by nuclear bombs that were in the basement.

01:04:00.000 Nuclear bombs?

01:04:01.000 Nuclear bombs.

01:04:02.000 People think that?

01:04:03.000 Yeah.

01:04:03.000 I haven't heard that one.

01:04:04.000 It's a fringe one, but it's got a few people who believe it.

01:04:08.000 Then 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.

01:04:20.000 And then you get more and more plausible.

01:04:23.000 There was pre-planted explosives.

01:04:25.000 Or 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.

01:04:34.000 And then they knew it was going to happen, but they did nothing about it.

01:04:38.000 And then they had some warnings about it, and they didn't do anything about it.

01:04:41.000 So you've got this whole range of plausibilities for the conspiracists.

01:04:47.000 With the Flat Earth, it's pretty much all of this end.

01:04:50.000 Because the flat earth theory is either the earth is flat or it's round.

01:04:55.000 So with the flat earth you've only got very extreme and then more extreme theories.

01:05:03.000 The most extreme thing which all conspiracy theories end up with is the everything is an illusion.

01:05:09.000 We are living in the matrix conspiracy theory.

01:05:14.000 Well, that theory is very compelling.

01:05:16.000 That 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.

01:05:27.000 As 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?

01:05:36.000 It'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.

01:06:07.000 Like the Berenstain Bears.

01:06:08.000 Yeah, Berenstain Bears are actually called the Bearstein Bears in an alternate timeline.

01:06:13.000 Or there was this movie called Shazam done by, I can't remember the guy's name now.

01:06:20.000 People say Sinbad was in the movie Shazam, but Shaq was in Kazam.

01:06:25.000 Yeah.

01:06:27.000 They completely believe that this actually happened and that the world has been changed.

01:06:32.000 Oh, it is.

01:06:33.000 It is, but they believe it.

01:06:34.000 So that's something that's at the end of all these conspiracy theories.

01:06:37.000 That'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...

01:06:44.000 Elon Musk.

01:06:45.000 Yes.

01:06:45.000 He believes it.

01:06:46.000 Yeah.

01:06:47.000 Yeah, I'm not really convinced myself because it's kind of a simplistic argument saying that technology will always advance and get better.

01:06:55.000 There are fundamental limits on information theory, like how much information that we can process.

01:07:01.000 Have you ever messed around with HTC Vive or any of the more recent state-of-the-art?

01:07:07.000 Yeah.

01:07:08.000 They're mind-blowing.

01:07:09.000 Yeah.

01:07:09.000 Mind-blowing.

01:07:10.000 And this is one of the reasons why I subscribe to it.

01:07:12.000 I mean, not today, but, I mean, I think one day in the future, whether it's 100 years or whatever it is of technology.

01:07:17.000 I mean, you just got to think, 150 years ago they were using teletypes.

01:07:20.000 That was the only way to get a message across, you know?

01:07:25.000 And then what can we do today?

01:07:26.000 We can take a film and send it to someone in Australia.

01:07:28.000 They get it in real time.

01:07:30.000 I think it's very reasonable to assume that if you put on the HTC Vive, They have this one underwater experience.

01:07:36.000 It's amazing.

01:07:37.000 Jamie, see if you can find it, because I know it's in video form, but...

01:07:40.000 I think it's reasonable that there's going to be extremely realistic things that make you think that you are there.

01:07:45.000 Yes.

01:07:45.000 But 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.

01:07:54.000 Wow!

01:07:55.000 Is this simulation just you?

01:07:57.000 Is it just your head that's doing a simulation?

01:07:58.000 See this right here?

01:07:59.000 This is you put this thing on.

01:08:00.000 I mean, again, we're in 2017 and this is all in its fairly adolescent stage.

01:08:08.000 And man, when you're in this thing and you're looking around, it's not necessarily high definition.

01:08:13.000 It's very clear.

01:08:17.000 And you know that it's not real.

01:08:19.000 But God, it gives you this feeling that it's real.

01:08:21.000 Then a whale pulls up and all these fish swim by.

01:08:24.000 It's amazing.

01:08:25.000 And more than anything, it gives you a window into the future.

01:08:29.000 It 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. 0.51

01:08:37.000 Remember Pong, the game that you'd play?

01:08:39.000 It was like, I can't believe I'm controlling something on the television.

01:08:42.000 Doot doot, doot doot. 0.52

01:08:44.000 And 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.

01:08:52.000 And I think that the improvements in this sort of artificial reality, this virtual reality that you're seeing in this current...

01:09:02.000 HTC Vive, 100 years from now, I would only imagine that we could get to a point where it's indiscernible, that somebody connects you.

01:09:10.000 Really?

01:09:10.000 Why?

01:09:11.000 Look at that whale there.

01:09:12.000 That whale is a living thing.

01:09:14.000 It's made up of cells.

01:09:15.000 You 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.

01:09:22.000 Okay, maybe we're having a different argument here.

01:09:24.000 I'm thinking that it's going to feel real.

01:09:28.000 You're saying scientists won't be able to prove.

01:09:30.000 I believe you will be able to.

01:09:33.000 I don't believe that they can make something that you could not detect.

01:09:37.000 Not detect with science.

01:09:39.000 Unless they cripple your intelligence, so they steer you away from it.

01:09:44.000 They'll be able to make something that's indiscernible while you're experiencing it, but a scientist could come along and check it.

01:09:51.000 It's a bit of a philosophical question, though, because what we have now is our observable universe with the laws of physics.

01:09:56.000 I don't think within this universe you could make something that simulates the universe that's the same.

01:10:03.000 Right.

01:10:03.000 Because 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.

01:10:11.000 I don't think you could simulate the entire Earth in our physical universe.

01:10:16.000 Not now, but you don't think you could do it a thousand years from now?

01:10:19.000 No, I don't think so.

01:10:20.000 I think there are fundamental limits as to how much information will be required.

01:10:25.000 You could get something that's a...

01:10:28.000 An imitation of that, but it would be detectably different.

01:10:32.000 It's like each simulation is going to be lower fidelity than the universe that created it.

01:10:39.000 Right.

01:10:40.000 So you can only create something that's less complex than the universe you're currently in.

01:10:44.000 Is that true though?

01:10:45.000 I 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?

01:10:54.000 How far it would advance.

01:10:56.000 You go back 5,000 years ago, people were modern humans.

01:10:59.000 You know, I mean, the people that built the pyramids were modern humans, right?

01:11:03.000 They looked like us, maybe a little smaller.

01:11:04.000 They didn't get as much to eat.

01:11:05.000 They looked just like us.

01:11:07.000 If 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?

01:11:24.000 I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility.

01:11:26.000 But could you then create within that universe the same quantum computers that are simulating itself?

01:11:31.000 Yes.

01:11:31.000 I think you could.

01:11:32.000 I think that's kind of a paradox, really.

01:11:35.000 It has to be as powerful as the thing that is simulating it.

01:11:38.000 I don't think so.

01:11:39.000 I think artificial intelligence is going to lead us to...

01:11:41.000 Well, 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.

01:11:55.000 It's going to realize, like, if you give it autonomy...

01:11:57.000 Yeah, we don't know what's going to happen.

01:11:59.000 Right.

01:11:59.000 Quantum computers, we don't know how well they're going to work.

01:12:01.000 They could be, like...

01:12:02.000 Could be a dud. 0.99

01:12:04.000 Or it could be fucking amazing. 0.99

01:12:05.000 It could be fucking amazing. 0.97

01:12:06.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:12:07.000 Who knows?

01:12:08.000 It's something to think about.

01:12:09.000 But when scientists start thinking that we are currently living in some sort of a computer simulation, I don't discard it.

01:12:17.000 I give it a pause. 0.93

01:12:18.000 I mean, I don't subscribe or not subscribe to something as ridiculous as that.

01:12:23.000 Because 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.

01:12:33.000 We're not going to be able to do anything about it if we do figure it out.

01:12:36.000 Right, right, right.

01:12:37.000 A thought experiment.

01:12:39.000 Scientists are looking at the laws of physics.

01:12:41.000 If 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.

01:12:53.000 But that's just basically us resolving the laws of physics more.

01:12:57.000 If we get down that deep, we can't do anything about it.

01:13:01.000 Well, not only that, does that actually mean that we're living in some sort of an artificial realm?

01:13:05.000 Or does it mean that that's what the universe is made of?

01:13:07.000 It's not artificial.

01:13:09.000 But that the universe, much like what we're creating, that the universe is almost fractal.

01:13:14.000 And much like what we're creating when we're creating these artificial environments, that the universe itself is made out of ones and zeros.

01:13:20.000 And that this whole thing is really mathematical.

01:13:22.000 Yeah, 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.

01:13:32.000 Yeah, 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?

01:13:43.000 Yeah, so yeah, it's it's a philosophical question.

01:13:47.000 It's a little bit of mental masturbating Yeah. 0.86

01:13:50.000 It seems to me that that's a thing that people do.

01:13:53.000 And 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.

01:14:03.000 And 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.

01:14:15.000 We love to chase and become, like, engrossed in these things.

01:14:18.000 And I wonder why we're doing it.

01:14:20.000 I wonder if we're distracting ourselves.

01:14:21.000 You 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.

01:14:34.000 Yeah.

01:14:35.000 You 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.

01:14:45.000 It doesn't seem to be the case.

01:14:47.000 Well, you've got these pool players who believe.

01:14:49.000 They're not doing so good.

01:14:50.000 It's hard out there for a pool player right now.

01:14:52.000 The guys are the top of the game, isn't they? 0.99

01:14:54.000 I think those guys just watch too many fucking YouTube videos and they don't have any science. 0.94

01:14:59.000 Most of the pool players, one of the things about... 0.99

01:15:01.000 What's that common expression about pool players?

01:15:03.000 If someone plays pool really well, it's the glorious results of a misspent youth.

01:15:07.000 Because it takes a long time to learn how to play pool really well.

01:15:10.000 And you're not going to be doing that while you're, you know, got your nose buried in physics books.

01:15:15.000 I think, like, people like things like the flight of...

01:15:17.000 They get things out of them.

01:15:19.000 They're getting something out of it.

01:15:20.000 It's giving them purpose in their life.

01:15:22.000 It's like...

01:15:22.000 It's kind of like a hobby in a way.

01:15:24.000 You're just doing something because you enjoy doing it, like playing chess.

01:15:27.000 Except along with that hobby of doing stuff, they actually have a belief that it's required for them to actually do their hobby.

01:15:34.000 They don't obviously think of it like that, but that's essentially what it is.

01:15:38.000 They have this activity they like doing, like gardening or whatever, but it requires them to believe that the earth is flat.

01:15:45.000 They 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.

01:15:56.000 I do the same thing except I'm actually doing it for science.

01:16:02.000 I do these fun little experiments.

01:16:03.000 On 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.

01:16:14.000 You should have told her, I'm proving that the Earth isn't flat, ma'am.

01:16:17.000 She probably thought that I was thinking that the Earth was flat.

01:16:19.000 I've seen other people on YouTube that are bringing levels onto the plane, and they're like, hey, look, the level isn't moving!

01:16:25.000 Well, 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...

01:16:41.000 All of the possibilities and all the science behind all the arguments and it's just...

01:16:46.000 Yeah.

01:16:47.000 I think what happens is either they get this superficial understanding of the conspiracy theory or the actual real life suffers.

01:16:57.000 And a lot of people get sucked into conspiracy theories like chemtrails.

01:17:01.000 Or 9-11 truth.

01:17:03.000 And they become socially isolated.

01:17:06.000 And they become, they get divorced and they lose custody of their children.

01:17:10.000 It happens all the time.

01:17:11.000 Yeah.

01:17:11.000 And this isn't like, you know, it's not like the government punishing them or anything like that.

01:17:15.000 It's just because they become obsessed with something that is outside of societal norms.

01:17:20.000 And they feel like this overwhelming, compelling need to tell other people about it.

01:17:25.000 Yeah.

01:17:25.000 And they talk about, oh, people roll their eyes when I bring up the subject of chemtrails or the flat earth.

01:17:32.000 Of course they do.

01:17:33.000 But from their point of view, they're trying to wake up other people.

01:17:37.000 They're doing the Lord's work by giving the truth to people.

01:17:42.000 But then there's some theories that are really compelling.

01:17:44.000 Like when you look into Operation Northwoods and you find out that the government really was planning false flag attacks.

01:17:51.000 It didn't work.

01:17:52.000 That's exaggerated, I think.

01:17:53.000 No, it's not.

01:17:54.000 How's the exaggeration?

01:17:55.000 Well, it was a discussion document.

01:17:58.000 It was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

01:18:00.000 Yeah, it was rejected by Kennedy.

01:18:04.000 Yeah, but it was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

01:18:06.000 It didn't go very far.

01:18:06.000 It was just one document.

01:18:08.000 Right.

01:18:08.000 They signed it.

01:18:09.000 They got it.

01:18:11.000 They didn't sign it that they wanted to do it.

01:18:13.000 But it was an idea.

01:18:14.000 The 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.

01:18:21.000 These were all proposed things.

01:18:22.000 They were proposed things, yeah.

01:18:23.000 But it was just like, you know, spitballing.

01:18:26.000 I 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.

01:18:40.000 So 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.

01:18:48.000 They are real.

01:18:49.000 And if you dismiss everything, you'll be thought of as a shill. 0.70

01:18:53.000 As much as people who look for conspiracies and everything, there are also people who try to dismiss everything.

01:18:59.000 And you have to be very careful, because there are a lot of things that people do conspire to do.

01:19:05.000 One of the things that I've brought up before, and people hate when I talk about this, but I'm going to do it again.

01:19:09.000 People say, I don't believe in conspiracies.

01:19:12.000 And I say, you don't believe in any conspiracies?

01:19:14.000 No.

01:19:15.000 Okay, do you believe 9-11 happened?

01:19:18.000 Do you believe that people flew jet planes into buildings?

01:19:22.000 Well, then you believe in conspiracies, because someone conspired to do that, and they did it.

01:19:27.000 They pulled it off.

01:19:28.000 A bunch of people got together, decided they were going to attack.

01:19:31.000 They flew a plane into the Pentagon.

01:19:34.000 They flew two planes into the World Trade Center towers.

01:19:37.000 I mean, that really happened.

01:19:38.000 So, that's a conspiracy.

01:19:40.000 And they pulled it off.

01:19:41.000 So 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.

01:19:52.000 No, I get what you're saying.

01:19:54.000 I personally just feel the Northwoods thing is a bit overblown.

01:19:57.000 I don't think it is at all.

01:19:58.000 As to what it was.

01:19:59.000 I think it speaks volumes about what the mindset of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were.

01:20:02.000 It's one example.

01:20:04.000 It's a good one, though.

01:20:05.000 Yeah, but they didn't come up with any others.

01:20:08.000 What about what got us into Vietnam?

01:20:10.000 Go for Tonkin.

01:20:11.000 Yeah, that was a false flag.

01:20:13.000 Well, that's debatable too, because that was just basically they thought that they were being attacked.

01:20:18.000 Is that debatable?

01:20:19.000 Yeah.

01:20:19.000 I think that's pretty much been agreed upon that that was a false flag.

01:20:23.000 It was a series of events.

01:20:24.000 That didn't happen.

01:20:26.000 Over two nights, there was reports of the boats being fired upon.

01:20:33.000 And it turns out there probably wasn't anything there.

01:20:36.000 Right.

01:20:37.000 So what's debatable is, did they think there was something there?

01:20:41.000 Or did they want there to be something there?

01:20:43.000 Or did they completely invent it out of thin air?

01:20:45.000 Right.

01:20:46.000 Now, 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.

01:21:03.000 Now, is that a conspiracy?

01:21:06.000 It's hard to say.

01:21:07.000 What knowledge did Bush have of the 9-11 attacks beforehand?

01:21:11.000 We know he took advantage of it.

01:21:12.000 And we know that the American administration back then took advantage of the Gulf of Tonkin reports.

01:21:20.000 We 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.

01:21:30.000 But we do know that they were taken advantage of.

01:21:34.000 Yeah. 0.82

01:21:35.000 Well, my whole point is that you have to be careful when you're a person who debunks things that are legitimately ridiculous.

01:21:42.000 You have to take into consideration the possibility that people do conspire to do things.

01:21:47.000 Oh, yes.

01:21:48.000 Totally they do.

01:21:49.000 And obviously that's happened within pretty high levels of government.

01:21:52.000 With Enron.

01:21:53.000 I mean, there's been a ton of conspiracies that turned out to be true.

01:21:57.000 Yeah, and there's, what, the arms for Iran, the Iran-Contra scandal?

01:22:02.000 Sure, yeah.

01:22:02.000 That probably went all the way to the top.

01:22:04.000 Oh, yeah.

01:22:04.000 Reagan probably knew all about that.

01:22:06.000 That was where it was hilarious when it was when Reagan was showing the first signs of Alzheimer's when he didn't remember.

01:22:13.000 He didn't remember anything and people were like, oh, he's lying.

01:22:15.000 And then it turns out, no, his memory is really eroding.

01:22:19.000 I mean, he was an older man.

01:22:21.000 He was in his late 70s at the time, wasn't he?

01:22:23.000 Yeah, he was Trump's age, I think.

01:22:27.000 Jesus Christ. 0.91

01:22:28.000 There 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. 0.97

01:22:38.000 And that's why he has so much energy, because he doesn't exercise. 0.96

01:22:40.000 I heard he has a strange diet.

01:22:43.000 He has his steaks well done, and he likes to eat lunch meat straight out of the fridge.

01:22:47.000 But it's neither here nor there.

01:22:49.000 I'm sure he's a very nice guy.

01:22:51.000 Are you?

01:22:53.000 Never met the guy.

01:22:55.000 Yeah, he doesn't look healthy, but he's got a lot of energy, man.

01:22:58.000 Kind of amazing how much energy he has.

01:23:00.000 Alex Jones.

01:23:02.000 Yeah.

01:23:02.000 Well, he kind of looks reasonably healthy, I guess.

01:23:05.000 He's not healthy.

01:23:06.000 No?

01:23:06.000 No, Alex doesn't look that healthy.

01:23:08.000 He's overweight, right?

01:23:09.000 And he's younger than me.

01:23:11.000 Like, I always used to freak out that he's younger than me.

01:23:13.000 I was like, how are you younger than me?

01:23:15.000 Like, he just goes hard.

01:23:16.000 Alex goes hard all the time.

01:23:18.000 You know, and now...

01:23:19.000 Takes a toll. 0.96

01:23:20.000 Well, 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. 0.84

01:23:30.000 The mind, you know, can only take so much pressure. 0.92

01:23:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:36.000 Should we talk about some more Flat Earth stuff?

01:23:38.000 Sure.

01:23:38.000 What else you got there?

01:23:39.000 You got notes.

01:23:40.000 I do.

01:23:41.000 I wrote down everything I could think of on the Flat Earth, which is a shitload of stuff.

01:23:45.000 The International Space Station.

01:23:47.000 Oh, that's a good one.

01:23:49.000 Yeah.

01:23:49.000 They think that that footage is fake.

01:23:50.000 They think it's all fake.

01:23:51.000 Yeah, it's hilarious.

01:23:53.000 But 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.

01:24:00.000 Because there's footage of Skylab with people running around in circles in zero gravity.

01:24:05.000 There's long sequences of people doing stuff in zero gravity.

01:24:09.000 And it's in a space that's actually too big to fit in any plane that's ever been built.

01:24:14.000 So it couldn't be filmed in a thing where they do the parabola, the vomit comet, yeah.

01:24:19.000 It has to be something that was actually zero gravity.

01:24:21.000 Yeah, 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.

01:24:41.000 And you could float around in it.

01:24:42.000 So this.

01:24:43.000 They're in zero gravity here.

01:24:44.000 Yeah.

01:24:45.000 Running around in circles.

01:24:46.000 They do all kinds of stuff.

01:24:47.000 You get three of them running.

01:24:49.000 And the space that they're in there is so big that it wouldn't fit in.

01:24:53.000 It probably wouldn't even fit in the beluga thing that they use for transporting planes.

01:24:58.000 Well, 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.

01:25:05.000 Yeah, I mean, it's obvious that this is in space.

01:25:07.000 Yeah, and this is from the 70s.

01:25:09.000 Yeah.

01:25:11.000 Pretty amazing.

01:25:12.000 The space station, the International Space Station, it flies over at regular intervals.

01:25:16.000 And this is one of the ground truth things that I was talking about earlier.

01:25:19.000 You can see it.

01:25:20.000 You can look up when it's going to fly over.

01:25:22.000 You can get them to send you alerts.

01:25:23.000 There's a site called Spot the Station.

01:25:25.000 It's a NASA site.

01:25:27.000 But you don't have to trust it.

01:25:28.000 But you can still sign up and it will tell you when the space station is going to fly over.

01:25:33.000 To the second.

01:25:34.000 It'll tell you to the second when it's going to appear and how high it will be and how long it will be visible for.

01:25:39.000 And you can get to send you an email and then get your camera out and take photographs of it when it happens.

01:25:44.000 So you know that this website is correct.

01:25:46.000 You've proven it on the ground.

01:25:48.000 And you can also do it from different positions and get two people doing it.

01:25:51.000 And you can figure out how high the space station is by triangulating it.

01:25:56.000 What's this angle?

01:25:56.000 What's that angle?

01:25:57.000 How far apart they are?

01:25:58.000 And you can figure out that the space station is actually 250 miles high.

01:26:02.000 It is actually orbiting the Earth at 250 miles.

01:26:05.000 And 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.

01:26:18.000 So you can see there actually is something that is moving along the same path that NASA says is moving along.

01:26:25.000 And 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.

01:26:37.000 So we know that something that the exact same size and shape and speed of the space station is exactly where NASA says it is.

01:26:46.000 And there's really no way you could fake that on a flat Earth.

01:26:50.000 Because 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.

01:27:05.000 It's just, you know, it's literally impossible.

01:27:07.000 Whereas if you look at it from the globe model point of view, it's just the space station orbiting the globe.

01:27:12.000 Well, obviously it's orbiting the globe.

01:27:14.000 But does this bother you sometimes that you're even debunking this stuff?

01:27:17.000 It does.

01:27:18.000 It does. 0.97

01:27:18.000 I sometimes catch myself and go, What the fuck am I doing? 0.97

01:27:21.000 It's obvious. 0.99

01:27:22.000 One 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.

01:27:39.000 Now, 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.

01:27:49.000 But in the real world, what do they actually see?

01:27:52.000 They all see the exact same constellation, the Southern Cross, right in front of them.

01:27:57.000 So 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.

01:28:04.000 Right, I see what you're saying.

01:28:05.000 It's literally impossible to do that on the flat Earth.

01:28:09.000 Right, and you can actually see this and take photographs of the constellations and compare them.

01:28:13.000 Yeah, and that's something I was talking about with the ground truth thing, with Stellarium.

01:28:17.000 You could go virtually yourself to these places and see what the sky looks from that position.

01:28:24.000 So either Stellarium is lying or the Southern Cross does actually appear from these three different positions.

01:28:31.000 Well, that's another thing that these flat Earth people keep bringing up is Polaris.

01:28:35.000 The 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. 0.76

01:28:44.000 What's so stupid about that is that people in Australia have a completely different constellation.

01:28:48.000 That's right, and the stars rotate the other direction around it. 0.98

01:28:51.000 The stars are all coming towards us from the east.

01:28:54.000 So if you look north, they're going that way.

01:28:56.000 If you look south, they're going that way.

01:28:58.000 So they're rotating around the north star, which actually isn't anything special.

01:29:03.000 It's just the star that happens to be closest to the point, the north point.

01:29:06.000 And it changes all the time.

01:29:07.000 If you zoom in, you can actually see there are stars that are even closer.

01:29:11.000 And if you take a time lapse of the North Star, it actually makes a little circle.

01:29:15.000 Well, and also that North Star is not the same North Star as in the past.

01:29:19.000 Yeah, because the axis of the Earth, there's this thing called precession where the...

01:29:23.000 Every 26,000 years, it wobbles.

01:29:25.000 Wobbles away.

01:29:26.000 Yeah.

01:29:26.000 Yeah, the south, everyone's looking at the same thing in the south, and the stars are rotating in that direction.

01:29:33.000 But, yeah, Polaris, Polaris is a good one for a number of reasons.

01:29:36.000 One, it's not really fixed.

01:29:38.000 It's one degree off from the center of the celestial sphere.

01:29:43.000 But 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.

01:29:53.000 But 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.

01:30:03.000 And you're just not going to get a 26,000 years time-lapse photo of the Earth.

01:30:07.000 You could simulate it.

01:30:08.000 Yeah, you could simulate it.

01:30:10.000 In Stellarium, and no one's going to believe that.

01:30:12.000 What'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.

01:30:22.000 It would be quite impressive.

01:30:23.000 A lot of old cultures did actually take records at the stars, because stars were used for navigation.

01:30:30.000 The 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.

01:30:47.000 It's called celestial navigation.

01:30:49.000 What other ridiculous things Can we point out, before we wrap this up, my head's starting to hurt.

01:30:55.000 I had food poisoning yesterday, folks.

01:30:57.000 I don't know what happened.

01:30:58.000 I ate something bad at a greasy diner.

01:31:00.000 Well, Polaris is a good thing because you can actually look at the angle of Polaris.

01:31:06.000 Was that a banging?

01:31:07.000 Did you hear banging?

01:31:10.000 I heard banging.

01:31:13.000 Yeah.

01:31:15.000 I'll go check.

01:31:18.000 Oh, it's next door.

01:31:19.000 He's just putting something on the wall, it sounds like.

01:31:22.000 Yeah, they shut down the stream twice on us already.

01:31:24.000 Oh, really?

01:31:25.000 Yeah.

01:31:25.000 It's Flat Earth.

01:31:26.000 I'm recording the whole thing. 1.00

01:31:27.000 God damn it. 0.99

01:31:31.000 What other things are ridiculous? 0.99

01:31:34.000 Some of the Flat Earthers wonder why the Earth's atmosphere isn't sucked off into space. 1.00

01:31:38.000 Ah, well, how about the one where...

01:31:39.000 That's a good one.

01:31:41.000 It's a good one because I've wondered that myself.

01:31:44.000 I know now why that is.

01:31:47.000 I know why it doesn't get sucked into space.

01:31:48.000 Why doesn't it get sucked into space?

01:31:50.000 Because you think that a vacuum sucks things.

01:31:52.000 Right.

01:31:53.000 It's going to suck everything away.

01:31:56.000 So if there's this atmosphere on the Earth, the vacuum of space will suck it away.

01:31:59.000 But the thing is, vacuum doesn't actually suck.

01:32:02.000 Vacuum is nothing.

01:32:03.000 It has no energy.

01:32:04.000 It doesn't do anything.

01:32:05.000 There's no power.

01:32:06.000 The reason that things flow into vacuum is air pressure.

01:32:09.000 And air pressure is a function of gravity.

01:32:12.000 So gravity is pulling everything down towards the Earth.

01:32:16.000 So there's nothing that can push it out, if you see what I'm saying.

01:32:23.000 If 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.

01:32:36.000 Well, they don't believe in gravity, though.

01:32:37.000 Yeah, they don't believe in gravity.

01:32:38.000 It's electromagnetic.

01:32:40.000 This is my favorite new one.

01:32:42.000 Did you see the one where they show that if the Earth was a globe, that all the water would be on the bottom?

01:32:47.000 Yeah, I think that one's a joke.

01:32:49.000 You think it's a joke.

01:32:51.000 How could you be so sure?

01:32:52.000 I thought about the other ones as well.

01:32:53.000 No, no, no.

01:32:54.000 Bring it up, Jamie.

01:32:55.000 This one's wonderful.

01:32:56.000 I think they're being serious.

01:32:58.000 Yeah.

01:32:58.000 The gravity thing, though, it's kind of like almost irrelevant because we know that things fall down.

01:33:06.000 Right.

01:33:06.000 But it's electromagnetic something or other.

01:33:08.000 Well, it's a magical force that's making things fall down.

01:33:12.000 It doesn't really matter.

01:33:13.000 Gravity, we could say we don't really understand what gravity is.

01:33:15.000 How do you explain lava?

01:33:16.000 Because lava is a part of gravity, too, right?

01:33:19.000 Lava?

01:33:19.000 Well, it's the idea that all these rocks are pushing down and there's extreme friction and heat.

01:33:24.000 Buoyancy and density.

01:33:26.000 Buoyancy and density are functions of gravity.

01:33:29.000 Like if you stick something in the water, all the water is flowing to the bottom.

01:33:33.000 We're looking at this image, folks.

01:33:35.000 It says, gravity is not strong enough to stop a small stream from flowing to its lowest point.

01:33:40.000 Then what is stopping the oceans north of the equator from emptying into the oceans south of the equator?

01:33:46.000 This is what the Earth would look like.

01:33:49.000 If we lived on a globe, gravity is pseudoscience.

01:33:52.000 Dot, dot, dot.

01:33:54.000 A theory that can't be proven. 1.00

01:33:56.000 They forgot the apostrophe in can't, you fucking dunce. 1.00

01:33:59.000 Can't be proven. 1.00

01:34:00.000 Look at that image, though.

01:34:02.000 It's hilarious.

01:34:03.000 Why is there water on the top at all? 1.00

01:34:05.000 How about that, you stupid fuck? 1.00

01:34:06.000 It's raining. 1.00

01:34:08.000 Is that what it is?

01:34:08.000 It rains on top only?

01:34:09.000 It evaporates from the bottom and comes around the top.

01:34:11.000 That would be kind of cool if half the planet was dirt and half the planet was water.

01:34:14.000 Kind of weird.

01:34:15.000 Why would that be any weirder than what it is now?

01:34:17.000 Yeah, 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.

01:34:24.000 Oh, yeah, right, of course.

01:34:26.000 Because of all that rock, there's no way it can lay flat like that.

01:34:29.000 It 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.

01:34:40.000 What do they think lava is?

01:34:42.000 Molten rock?

01:34:43.000 I mean, they just think it's buoyant because it heats up and becomes less dense than the other rock.

01:34:47.000 But why is it down there in the bottom?

01:34:49.000 Why is it core of the earth?

01:34:50.000 The fires of hell are heating it up.

01:34:52.000 Oh, the fires of hell.

01:34:54.000 Look at this.

01:34:55.000 What is this?

01:34:56.000 Tennis ball?

01:34:56.000 Yeah, why doesn't water fly off the earth?

01:34:58.000 It spins like this.

01:34:59.000 Because the force is spinning.

01:35:02.000 This is a fundamental misunderstanding that people have.

01:35:06.000 They misinterpret angular velocity and linear velocity.

01:35:10.000 We know the Earth is spinning around a thousand miles an hour.

01:35:12.000 Right.

01:35:13.000 So they think like if this ball was spinning around at a thousand miles an hour, then the water would fly off.

01:35:19.000 Right.

01:35:19.000 But it's not flying off because of the surface of the ball going a thousand miles an hour.

01:35:24.000 It's flying off because it's rotating like 50 times a second or whatever, 10 times a second.

01:35:30.000 It's the angular velocity which creates the outward force.

01:35:34.000 Linear velocity has nothing to do with it.

01:35:36.000 It's only when you're actually turning.

01:35:37.000 You 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.

01:35:45.000 So it's the rate of your angular velocity.

01:35:49.000 Now the Earth rotates once every 24 hours, so it's going really, really, really slow.

01:35:55.000 Put that back up, please.

01:35:57.000 And 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.

01:36:04.000 Right.

01:36:05.000 And it's the exact same force acting on the Earth, because the Earth rotates once every 24 hours.

01:36:09.000 The 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.

01:36:16.000 Jamie, go to that photo on the upper left-hand side.

01:36:19.000 Scroll up.

01:36:23.000 Satan's globe earth lies. 0.97

01:36:25.000 This bottom picture here is a great example of how ridiculous things are. 0.97

01:36:29.000 Hold on. 0.98

01:36:30.000 Satan's globe earth lied.

01:36:32.000 The big bang and evolution explained life.

01:36:34.000 You were an accident.

01:36:35.000 We evolved from primordial soup.

01:36:37.000 We are specks in the universe.

01:36:40.000 Some people are more valuable than others.

01:36:42.000 Foundation for the new world order. 1.00

01:36:44.000 You are worthless. 0.95

01:36:46.000 Next image. 0.99

01:36:47.000 God's flat earth.

01:36:49.000 Creation is the only explanation.

01:36:51.000 We are incredibly valuable.

01:36:52.000 The Bible is 100% true.

01:36:55.000 We live on an unmoving, firm foundation.

01:36:58.000 You were created by God, in all caps, God loves you.

01:37:02.000 Oh, well, that seems better.

01:37:04.000 That seems better.

01:37:05.000 That's probably a true believer, though.

01:37:07.000 Oh yeah, you think? 0.93

01:37:08.000 That image there is a good example of things that are completely ridiculous on the flat earth.

01:37:13.000 You see they have the sun on one side and it's illuminating half the earth and the way it's curved like that.

01:37:19.000 They think the sun's way closer too, right?

01:37:21.000 Yeah, they think the sun acts like a spotlight.

01:37:24.000 But if you look at that, it's not acting like a spotlight.

01:37:26.000 It's illuminating all of the ice wall.

01:37:30.000 Where's the ice wall?

01:37:31.000 It's the white stuff around the side.

01:37:32.000 Oh, that's the ice wall?

01:37:33.000 Yeah.

01:37:33.000 Oh, cool.

01:37:34.000 Yeah, which is actually, you know, it's just Antarctica stretched into this projection. 0.96

01:37:38.000 Why doesn't one of those dickheads get in a boat and take a photo of that wall? 1.00

01:37:41.000 Well, that's another thing. 0.98

01:37:42.000 Like, they think they've got guards all the way around it.

01:37:44.000 Oh, there are guards.

01:37:45.000 Yeah, but that's, what is that?

01:37:46.000 That's like 36,000 miles.

01:37:50.000 Of guards?

01:37:51.000 Of guards.

01:37:53.000 In the ocean and on a freezing ice wall.

01:37:56.000 It's like, you know, the wall from, what is it, Game of Thrones.

01:37:59.000 It's at 36,000 miles of it.

01:38:02.000 Well, they make up facts and then they use those facts to kind of state their point.

01:38:06.000 Like, you can't, it's illegal to fly over Antarctica.

01:38:09.000 Yeah.

01:38:10.000 That's kind of based on like half, well, a quarter truth.

01:38:14.000 Like 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.

01:38:22.000 So they only allow four engine jets, like 747s, A380s to fly.

01:38:28.000 So all those flights that you see that go over at the Antarctic ice, they're all 747s.

01:38:33.000 Yeah, because if it fucks up, you're doomed.

01:38:35.000 Yeah.

01:38:36.000 Yeah, it's a long way with nothing.

01:38:38.000 There'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.

01:38:46.000 See, now, I wonder how many people are listening to this and it's turning their mind.

01:38:50.000 Do you think it's possible?

01:38:51.000 Do you think there's got to be a spectrum of people that believe?

01:38:54.000 There is.

01:38:54.000 There's a spectrum, and some people will be turned.

01:38:57.000 This will cause a lot of ruffled feathers.

01:38:59.000 Are you ready for the shill tweets?

01:39:02.000 Are you ready?

01:39:03.000 Will you wear a round earth shill shirt if we get you one?

01:39:05.000 At youngjammy.com?

01:39:07.000 I don't know.

01:39:07.000 I actually don't like...

01:39:08.000 It's very comfortable.

01:39:09.000 I know it's all in good humor.

01:39:11.000 It's very soft.

01:39:11.000 You don't like joking around about it?

01:39:13.000 People take it seriously. 1.00

01:39:14.000 Oh yeah, but those people are assholes. 1.00

01:39:16.000 I had a t-shirt that said, I make stuff up, that my wife got me because I'm always making stupid jokes. 1.00

01:39:20.000 Right. 0.98

01:39:21.000 And someone saw a photograph of me online wearing this t-shirt that said, I make stuff up.

01:39:25.000 And it said, there's Mick West, I'm missing.

01:39:27.000 And they were completely serious. 1.00

01:39:29.000 Yeah, but they're stupid. 1.00

01:39:32.000 That's part of the problem, isn't it? 1.00

01:39:33.000 It makes it harder to reach people if they're pointing.

01:39:37.000 It's a distraction or something like that.

01:39:40.000 Yeah, I guess I hear what you're saying.

01:39:41.000 I'm pretty easy to dismiss.

01:39:44.000 They always say that you work for the government.

01:39:45.000 That's the big one.

01:39:46.000 You're a government employee.

01:39:48.000 You made video games, right?

01:39:48.000 Yeah, I'm a retired video game programmer.

01:39:50.000 I 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. 0.98

01:40:02.000 But you're living the goddamn American dream. 0.97

01:40:03.000 That's what you're doing. 0.99

01:40:04.000 You made enough money to not have to slave away. 0.98

01:40:07.000 And these assholes want to think that you're some government shill, like the governments involved in the Tony Hawk video games. 0.98

01:40:12.000 They recruited you. 0.99

01:40:14.000 They said, listen, I know you're doing a good job making these video games.

01:40:16.000 We've got a better place for you.

01:40:18.000 What you need to do is cover up the flat earth and chemtrails and UFOs.

01:40:23.000 And what else?

01:40:23.000 What else you cover up?

01:40:26.000 Morgellons? 0.99

01:40:26.000 Morgellons disease is a fascinating one. 0.99

01:40:28.000 It's one of the ones that we investigated on that show.

01:40:32.000 And 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.

01:40:45.000 And he was talking himself about his own hallucinations, that he sees things like crawling across his eyes that he knows aren't there.

01:40:51.000 Hell yeah.

01:40:52.000 He was a very rational guy.

01:40:53.000 And 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.

01:41:02.000 And sometimes these pathogens will interact with each other in very different ways.

01:41:06.000 And that, you know, some are more extreme, some are less extreme.

01:41:10.000 But he's like, you might be dealing with hundreds of different pathogens that are unnecessary.

01:41:13.000 Undiscovered or undefined.

01:41:16.000 And 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.

01:41:26.000 When 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.

01:41:35.000 He was very reasonable and he made a ton of sense. 0.98

01:41:37.000 Because we went to this Morgellons convention, and we talked to all these people that had it, and they fucking all have Lyme disease. 0.99

01:41:43.000 They all have it. 0.99

01:41:44.000 Well, they all get tested positive for it.

01:41:46.000 There'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.

01:41:52.000 For Lyme disease?

01:41:53.000 Yeah, it gives a lot of false positives.

01:41:55.000 There's a bunch of different tests.

01:41:56.000 But there's so many people with Lyme disease, which is why it's interesting because Lyme disease is...

01:42:00.000 I know a lot of people that have gotten it from ticks, and it's devastating.

01:42:04.000 It's a real thing.

01:42:05.000 It's devastating.

01:42:06.000 There's a lot of controversy.

01:42:08.000 Well, 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.

01:42:18.000 So there's some dispute.

01:42:20.000 There is something to speak, but let me clarify from people that I know that have gotten it.

01:42:24.000 One 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.

01:42:31.000 They say, oh, there's nothing you don't have to worry about.

01:42:33.000 My 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.

01:42:46.000 I mean, he was devastated.

01:42:47.000 And we had a guy in here that had it for three years, and he had it for a full year where he was undiagnosed.

01:42:53.000 Steven Kotler had a full year where he was undiagnosed, and his body just was ravaged by this stuff.

01:42:58.000 I used to write a lot about Morgellons, which is, you know, related to Lyme disease.

01:43:02.000 And one of the reasons I stopped doing it was that it's such a personal thing for the people involved.

01:43:07.000 Yeah.

01:43:08.000 And I just really wasn't comfortable, like...

01:43:11.000 Calling them liars.

01:43:12.000 Not 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.

01:43:21.000 Yeah.

01:43:21.000 Because they just get very upset, and you really weren't reaching a lot of them.

01:43:25.000 So eventually I stopped that, and I moved on to chemtrails, which I thought would be more reasonable people involved.

01:43:32.000 But...

01:43:33.000 It'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.

01:43:41.000 It's so hard.

01:43:42.000 They just are absolutely convinced that the government is spraying things.

01:43:45.000 I had a conversation with a friend of mine.

01:43:47.000 I was like, that has got to be the most ineffective use of money ever. 0.98

01:43:51.000 They're spraying things, and what the fuck has changed? 0.98

01:43:53.000 Nothing. 0.96

01:43:54.000 Nothing's changed.

01:43:55.000 They'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.

01:44:06.000 Like, we know that, but they don't think that's what it is.

01:44:09.000 Yeah.

01:44:11.000 It's established science.

01:44:13.000 Well, the lack of flatness of the earth is established science that's been going on for a real long time.

01:44:21.000 And people just pick and choose which science they want to use.

01:44:25.000 What keeps you going with all this stuff, with running Metabunk?

01:44:28.000 Well, I enjoy doing these little experiments.

01:44:31.000 I do a lot of stuff like going into my backyard and testing things out.

01:44:36.000 A 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.

01:44:51.000 The moon landing has lots of fake shadow claims made about it.

01:44:54.000 What do you think happened at Roswell?

01:44:57.000 Roswell, New Mexico, that's the big one.

01:44:58.000 July 1947, I think a UFO crashed.

01:45:01.000 Yeah, I think it's what they said it was.

01:45:03.000 It 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.

01:45:14.000 So they came in, they picked up the remains of the balloon, and then the story just took off.

01:45:20.000 That's a funny one, though, boy.

01:45:21.000 That's made a whole town famous for UFOs.

01:45:25.000 If you go there now, they have alien-themed gift shops.

01:45:29.000 They're milking it.

01:45:30.000 It's like you said earlier, people make money out of something, and then they get stuck into that.

01:45:34.000 Because they're making money out of it, they're motivated to promote whatever it is, if it's Bigfoot or if it's aliens.

01:45:42.000 Have 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?

01:45:50.000 What?

01:45:50.000 The chemtrail thing?

01:45:51.000 Anything.

01:45:52.000 Anything.

01:45:52.000 UFO, chemtrail.

01:45:54.000 The thing is, with UFOs, there's always things that you can't explain.

01:45:57.000 There are things that are unidentified, but there's usually plausible explanations for them.

01:46:03.000 Whenever I'm given something, like a mysterious thing, I like to list all the explanations that I can think of.

01:46:10.000 Maybe none of them are perfect fits that you can guarantee this is what the explanation is.

01:46:15.000 But it being a ghost or an alien spacecraft, as an explanation, is usually pretty close to the bottom.

01:46:20.000 You 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.

01:46:32.000 Or in between that, oh, it's something else that we don't know what it is.

01:46:36.000 Is there any evidence, like, in terms of UFOs that's interesting?

01:46:41.000 I haven't, you know, to be honest, I haven't really looked into the whole sphere of UFOology.

01:46:47.000 I 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.

01:46:59.000 Right.

01:47:00.000 These are like the top 10 best cases and this was like number two or something.

01:47:04.000 What about Bob Lazar?

01:47:05.000 You ever looking at that guy?

01:47:06.000 I don't know.

01:47:07.000 Bob Lazar is a guy who supposedly worked at Area 51 and became a whistleblower.

01:47:14.000 No, I haven't.

01:47:16.000 But, you know, a lot of...

01:47:17.000 It's something you see in the 9-11 community is...

01:47:23.000 And in the chemtrail community is people kind of becoming celebrities.

01:47:28.000 Yeah.

01:47:29.000 And 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.

01:47:39.000 And there's been lots of examples in the past...

01:47:42.000 Of people who made claims like this and then eventually owned up to it.

01:47:47.000 The 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.

01:47:59.000 And they convinced a large number of people, including Arthur Conan Doyle.

01:48:04.000 Really?

01:48:05.000 The guy who wrote Tarzan?

01:48:06.000 Yeah.

01:48:06.000 He believed in the fairies?

01:48:08.000 No, the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes.

01:48:11.000 Did Arthur Conan Doyle write Tarzan?

01:48:14.000 No, that was William Burroughs?

01:48:17.000 No, no.

01:48:17.000 No.

01:48:18.000 Anyway.

01:48:20.000 Look at that.

01:48:23.000 It's obviously fake.

01:48:24.000 They cut him out of a magazine or something.

01:48:28.000 And then they owned up, like, basically on their deathbed, like, 70 years later.

01:48:34.000 But they were milking it.

01:48:37.000 Because once they get into it, it's embarrassing to admit that you made something up.

01:48:40.000 Plus, you're getting all this attention.

01:48:42.000 Right.

01:48:42.000 And in some cases, you're getting money.

01:48:44.000 I don't know if they get any money.

01:48:46.000 I 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. 0.99

01:48:52.000 When I was growing up, that was put out as being a genuine fairy sighting.

01:48:56.000 Really?

01:48:57.000 Yeah.

01:48:58.000 Did you believe it?

01:48:59.000 Oh, no.

01:49:00.000 Well, I probably did when I was like, you know, 13 or 6. But yeah, people get sucked in and they become celebrities.

01:49:10.000 And then they, like...

01:49:12.000 There it is.

01:49:14.000 TNA reveals the first time letter which ended the Cottingly hoax.

01:49:22.000 Yeah, I went to school just behind the house.

01:49:25.000 So for 70 years this lady kept the lie? 0.99

01:49:27.000 Yeah, there was two of them I think. 1.00

01:49:30.000 What a bitch. 1.00

01:49:31.000 And 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. 0.99

01:49:43.000 There'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.

01:49:57.000 And yet this was heralded as one of the most important cases of ufology.

01:50:01.000 You know the guy I'm talking about?

01:50:03.000 I forget the guy's name.

01:50:04.000 There was a thing called the Montauk Chronicles.

01:50:10.000 It was like an island where they have an underground thing where they were rumored to be experimenting on children.

01:50:19.000 Plum Island.

01:50:20.000 No, it wasn't Plum Island.

01:50:21.000 But anyway, there was something like this guy basically said he had all these remembered memories of working on the secret government base.

01:50:30.000 And he became pretty famous and wrote loads of books.

01:50:33.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:50:34.000 I think he might have just been a bit crazy.

01:50:36.000 Well, there's a lot of that out there, for sure.

01:50:38.000 Is there anything else in your pile of notes over there that you wanted to alert people to?

01:50:42.000 I think the thing I would really encourage people to do is look closely at things.

01:50:47.000 It's really hard to do, but if people are on the fence, they need to look very, very closely at the claims that people are making, like the claims that Eric Dubé is making.

01:50:58.000 If Eric Dubé says something like, you know, the horizon always rises to eye level, this is something you can actually check.

01:51:04.000 Now, it's not easy.

01:51:05.000 You've got to be reasonably careful with this $2 level, but you can actually check to see whether that is correct.

01:51:11.000 You 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,

01:51:27.000 and if you zoom in, they will reappear.

01:51:29.000 It doesn't actually happen.

01:51:30.000 When you zoom in on something, all it does is it makes the picture bigger, makes the image bigger.

01:51:34.000 And you can check this for yourself.

01:51:36.000 You 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.

01:51:46.000 And 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.

01:51:56.000 And you can do it with Catalina.

01:51:57.000 You can turn around and look at Catalina, and you can zoom in on that.

01:52:00.000 And you can see that two-thirds of Catalina Island is missing.

01:52:04.000 I 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.

01:52:17.000 But I think what's really going on is a thought process.

01:52:20.000 There'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.

01:52:33.000 They want to be in the know.

01:52:35.000 And it's very intoxicating.

01:52:37.000 And that's what really this stuff's all about, more than anything.

01:52:40.000 It's about the way the mind works.

01:52:42.000 It's about the way your mind can be tricked.

01:52:45.000 And 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.

01:52:55.000 You don't have to go through the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times editorial board where they have to review your paper.

01:53:00.000 And go, hey, you wrote a bunch of stuff that's not true.

01:53:03.000 No, that doesn't have to happen anymore.

01:53:05.000 Now you can just make a video.

01:53:07.000 And it can be really well done with good music and good images.

01:53:12.000 And 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.

01:53:22.000 That's why whenever someone sends me something, I always say, just Google that, whatever you sent me, and then debunked.

01:53:28.000 Just do that first.

01:53:30.000 Yeah.

01:53:30.000 And then look at both sides.

01:53:31.000 You know, but people don't want that debunk.

01:53:33.000 That debunk's not sexy.

01:53:35.000 Yeah.

01:53:36.000 The conspiracy's sexy.

01:53:37.000 I know people are turned off by the debunking thing.

01:53:40.000 Yeah, they hate it.

01:53:40.000 Yeah, 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.

01:53:49.000 That's boring.

01:53:50.000 YouTube videos are fun.

01:53:52.000 You know, you watch a YouTube video about dinosaurs being fake, that's fun.

01:53:55.000 You know, like, what?

01:53:56.000 They're fake?

01:53:56.000 I can't believe it.

01:53:57.000 They fucking got me. 0.99

01:53:58.000 It's just like watching a YouTube video about Roswell rods or any of these other silly things. 1.00

01:54:03.000 I'm kind of excited about the eclipse.

01:54:04.000 I think that's an opportunity to get people excited about the sun.

01:54:07.000 You're thinking like a scientist, though.

01:54:08.000 You're not thinking like a loon. 0.54

01:54:10.000 I know.

01:54:11.000 I get excited about the eclipse, but not everyone does.

01:54:14.000 Well, it's exciting.

01:54:14.000 It is exciting.

01:54:15.000 It's pretty rare.

01:54:16.000 A solar eclipse.

01:54:16.000 The moon's going to come in front of the sun.

01:54:18.000 Yeah.

01:54:19.000 When does that happen?

01:54:20.000 Check it.

01:54:20.000 August 21st.

01:54:22.000 It's going to be totality in Oregon, but you'll be able to see it from all of...

01:54:26.000 Oh, a lot of people are going to go to Oregon just to see it?

01:54:29.000 Yeah, I'm going to Oregon.

01:54:29.000 Are you?

01:54:30.000 Wow, look at you. 1.00

01:54:31.000 You don't fuck around. 1.00

01:54:32.000 I have relatives. 1.00

01:54:33.000 Oh, an excuse?

01:54:34.000 Yeah.

01:54:35.000 They're going to try to schedule some sort of a dinner at the very time.

01:54:39.000 We're going to be out of the campsite looking at the eclipse.

01:54:42.000 Anything else?

01:54:49.000 It's kind of complicated, but let me just run it by you real quick.

01:54:53.000 Maps.

01:54:54.000 Maps.

01:54:54.000 Have you heard of the Mercator projection?

01:54:57.000 No.

01:54:57.000 The standard map that you see in schoolrooms has this really stretched out Iceland, Greenland.

01:55:03.000 It looks kind of distorted.

01:55:05.000 It's not like the real world.

01:55:06.000 The 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.

01:55:17.000 Now, this is a type of navigation called rum line navigation that's been used for like, yeah, hundreds of years.

01:55:25.000 And 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,

01:55:41.000 it would get you to that destination using rum navigation.

01:55:45.000 Which 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.

01:56:00.000 So you're saying that the image of the continents is in some way stretched out and distorted?

01:56:04.000 Yeah, if you take a globe...

01:56:05.000 Why do they do that?

01:56:05.000 Well, if you take a globe, you can't just put it onto a flat surface.

01:56:10.000 Right.

01:56:10.000 Because you're going to have to distort it somehow.

01:56:13.000 So there's various different ways people use of putting it on the surface.

01:56:17.000 You could just take your latitude and longitude and just map it into a rectangle, and that works out fairly well.

01:56:22.000 That's a nice thing.

01:56:23.000 That's called an equirectangular map.

01:56:25.000 But the most common map that was used before, let's say 30 years ago, was this Mercator projection.

01:56:32.000 Which 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,

01:56:47.000 that's the heading I've got to go in, and so you head off in that heading.

01:56:50.000 Now, that doesn't take you in a straight line.

01:56:52.000 It 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.

01:57:04.000 I really don't understand what you're saying.

01:57:07.000 But all it is is that there's this method of navigation that people use that relies upon the Earth being a globe.

01:57:13.000 And it's this really, really simple map that is in thousands of homes, millions of homes and schools that everybody uses.

01:57:19.000 And you can see that on the map, the lines get smaller towards the top and they get smaller towards the bottom.

01:57:25.000 And if people are doing a voyage around the world, they're going to use this map.

01:57:29.000 And it only works.

01:57:30.000 It only works on the globe world.

01:57:32.000 That's another issue, too.

01:57:33.000 People have circumnavigated the globe.

01:57:35.000 Yeah, well, they think they just sail around the outside, which, of course, would take a lot longer.

01:57:40.000 That's another thing, like Australia.

01:57:42.000 Have you seen Australia on the Flat Earth map?

01:57:44.000 No.

01:57:44.000 It's like, I don't know, you see it on that image that was up earlier.

01:57:48.000 It's like this kind of squish thing. 1.00

01:57:50.000 You know what Australia looks like?

01:57:51.000 It's more or less like this.

01:57:52.000 On the Flat Earth, it's kind of like this.

01:57:54.000 It's all stretched out.

01:57:55.000 It's like twice as long and half as wide.

01:57:57.000 Have you seen the conspiracy theory that Australia is Scooby-Doo?

01:58:01.000 No.

01:58:02.000 Scooby Doo's head.

01:58:03.000 Yes.

01:58:04.000 Yeah.

01:58:04.000 I can see that.

01:58:05.000 It's just a joke. 0.95

01:58:06.000 Italy is a boot.

01:58:07.000 Yeah, it's one of those joke memes.

01:58:09.000 Yeah, so the distances between places in Australia don't work.

01:58:13.000 Is that the Flat Earth map?

01:58:15.000 Yeah, that's the Flat Earth map, and that's Australia.

01:58:17.000 And Australia looks nothing like that.

01:58:18.000 And if you lived in Australia, you would know it looks nothing at all like that.

01:58:22.000 It's just hilarious that there's so many versions of this.

01:58:24.000 It'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.

01:58:32.000 And the idea that...

01:58:33.000 How do they know it's an ice wall?

01:58:35.000 Like, where's the pictures?

01:58:37.000 There's pictures of ice shelves.

01:58:40.000 From Antarctica.

01:58:41.000 So they think that's the whole wall?

01:58:42.000 They think that's the wall, yeah.

01:58:44.000 So you'll see memes like, yeah, Globertha's be like, what ice wall? 0.99

01:58:50.000 Suck on this. 1.00

01:58:50.000 And they'll show you the picture of an ice shelf, which is like 200 feet. 1.00

01:58:55.000 I wish you could fly over.

01:58:56.000 Well, that's the mentality, right? 0.96

01:58:57.000 It'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. 0.95

01:59:05.000 It ties into misconceptions that are natural. 0.93

01:59:08.000 A funny thing, when I worked in the video game industry, there was platform games.

01:59:14.000 You jump from little platforms, and sometimes you have platforms that move around, and you jump from Mario-type things.

01:59:19.000 In 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.

01:59:29.000 Sometimes you jump up and you move with the platform and you land on it.

01:59:32.000 Depends on what the programmer did.

01:59:34.000 Now, 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.

01:59:43.000 So you should be able to, like, you should be able to, you know, this is the way we should program the physics.

01:59:49.000 And then my friend Matt said, no, that's wrong.

01:59:52.000 And he couldn't convince this other guy.

01:59:54.000 So eventually what happened?

01:59:55.000 He said, right, what we're going to do is we're going to go out onto the road with my pickup, my pickup truck.

02:00:01.000 I'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.

02:00:11.000 So 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.

02:00:18.000 Because he's moving the same speed as the truck, so he jumps up and then he lands back in the truck.

02:00:23.000 And this is illustrating that this video game programmer had the exact same misconception that the flat earthers do.

02:00:30.000 Because 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?

02:00:38.000 Right.

02:00:38.000 It'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.

02:00:48.000 So, my point is that anyone can make misconceptions about physics like that.

02:00:54.000 Yeah.

02:00:55.000 And it's easy to get sucked into that.

02:00:57.000 And it's actually quite hard to break them.

02:00:59.000 Even, 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.

02:01:07.000 Yeah.

02:01:08.000 And quite possibly die, but still let him do the experiment.

02:01:10.000 Well, let's end it on that because this is literally hurting my brain.

02:01:14.000 All right.

02:01:14.000 But what you're doing is very important, and I really want to thank you.

02:01:17.000 Thank you.

02:01:17.000 Your website is very important.

02:01:19.000 It'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.

02:01:24.000 But 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.

02:01:33.000 So, thank you.

02:01:34.000 Thank you.

02:01:34.000 Thanks for being on, too.

02:01:36.000 All right, folks.

02:01:37.000 That's it for the week.

02:01:37.000 See ya!

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 10, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #959 - Mick West

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Transcript