May 10, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:01:37
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And we're live, ladies and gentlemen. | |
| We're live sporting the latest Round Earth Shill. | ||
| We're just coming out with it. | ||
| Round Earth Shill t-shirts. | ||
| Both Jamie and I get $3 per month from the federal government to tell you that the world is round. | ||
| And Mick West is a big part of it all. | ||
| He is one of the main shills that tells everybody. | ||
| Not only that, he has a whole website dedicated to arguing against people that think the world is flat. | ||
| Yeah, the difference is I don't get paid for anything. | ||
| Come on, stop lying. | ||
| I know you're getting $3.50 per month. | ||
| I wish I did. | ||
| I had to pay for my web hosting and it's coming out of my pocket and nobody pays me anything. | ||
| See, Mick West is serious. | ||
| He's not joking around with us. | ||
| This has got to be one of the most bizarre trends ever. | ||
| And Jamie, I think you said at first that you thought it was originally a troll. | ||
| You thought that they were fucking around like... | ||
| I still think some people are. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But I feel like it started out with like 4chan or something like that, or maybe Reddit. | ||
| These crazy kids, these wacky kids, they decided to start trolling, saying that the Earth is round or the Earth is flat. | ||
| I think that's some of it, but a lot of it is just people who... | ||
| They actually believe it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, there's a lot that actually believe it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I think that type of person has kind of adopted it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You were talking about shitposting the other day. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And, you know, it's... | ||
| The shit poster enjoys that type of thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We need to start accepting the fact that it's a fact. | ||
| He was hilarious. | ||
| Let me find this, because I saved it. | ||
| I think his name was like Vegan Warrior or something like that, which is always a good... | ||
| Yes, Vegan Warrior. | ||
| He's a realist. | ||
| It says he's not only a flat earther, he's a realist. | ||
| Yeah, I think I've come across him. | ||
| I think there's actually a relatively small number of people who are really active in promoting the flat earth stuff on YouTube. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they keep saying, erroneously, that you're not allowed to fly over Antarctica. | ||
| Like, yes you are. | ||
| They keep saying that there's no photographs of Earth from space, that they're all composites. | ||
| No, that's not true. | ||
| Why do they keep saying that? | ||
| They keep saying that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, that's the Japanese Himawari-8 satellite. | ||
| But there's also a US satellite that was just launched last year, the GOES-16 satellite, which is basically the same resolution. | ||
| Pull this sucker right up to your face. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| And the Russians have a satellite. | ||
| Everyone's got their own satellite, because this is basically a weather satellite. | ||
| So they put them over the equator so they can see their own country. | ||
| So Russia has one. | ||
| You can mostly see India. | ||
| China has one. | ||
| It's not as good as the other ones. | ||
| But the Russian one is the same resolution, 121 megapixels. | ||
| That's the size of the image they do. | ||
| It's like 11,000 pixels by 11,000 pixels view of the Earth. | ||
| And you can zoom in and you can see cities. | ||
| You can see contrails. | ||
| And you can actually use these images from the satellites to actually match up with the views of clouds and controls from the ground. | ||
| So you can actually check to see if these images are actually correct, at least for where you are. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then you could, like, find a friend somewhere else and ask them, you know, do you have this type of cloud overhead? | ||
| So you can actually verify whether these images are actually real or not. | ||
| Well, I brought it up to my friend Eddie, and he said it's all fake. | ||
| He said all the photos are fake. | ||
| They look fake. | ||
| I'm like, but how would you know what a real photo of Earth from 22,000 miles looked like? | ||
| Wouldn't it look exactly like Earth? | ||
| I think when you get to that stage of deep belief, you kind of have to believe that they're fake. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| And it's a real challenge. | ||
| Like, how do you actually break through that for somebody? | ||
| How can you actually... | ||
| And convince them that something isn't fake if they just automatically assume it's fake. | ||
| And I think, has the person actually looked in detail at these images? | ||
| Most people know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it all matches up exactly with what the weather is around the world. | ||
| And it matches up with all the other size images, one from the Russians, one from the Chinese, one from the Japanese. | ||
| They all match up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, you're absolutely right. | ||
| They definitely haven't, nor do they have any desire to. | ||
| It's a belief issue, and it's almost like a religious issue. | ||
| It's really fascinating. | ||
| It's completely infected the world of professional pool players. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Professional pool players? | ||
| Yeah, professional pool players. | ||
| There's a guy named C.J. Wiley. | ||
| He's a top pool player who's 100% convinced the Earth is flat. | ||
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Wow. | |
| There's another guy named Max Everly. | ||
| He's a buddy of mine. | ||
| Out of his mind. | ||
| Thinks the world is flat. | ||
| I wonder if that's related to their, like, obsession with the table being flat. | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| Yeah, they have to make sure the table's level. | ||
| But then they've got these little round balls on the table as well. | ||
| That's confusing, right? | ||
| Yeah, you've got a little solar system going on with your pool balls. | ||
| What's confusing is they're smart guys. | ||
| Like, if you talk to them, you'd be like, this is a reasonable, intelligent guy. | ||
| Are they really believing that he's flat? | ||
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100%. | |
| Yeah, they're not shitposting. | ||
| That's unusual. | ||
| That's unusual. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They prefer the ones that confirm it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not one. | ||
| Not one photo. | ||
| Not only that, Every planet you see is round. | ||
| You could follow them. | ||
| You could look at them if you have a reasonable telescope. | ||
| You could see the difference as they change and spin. | ||
| I mean, you can tell that they're round. | ||
| A lot of flat earthers have the same camera that I've got, which is a Nikon P900. Flat earthers have an excellent camera? | ||
| They have... | ||
| I brought one with me. | ||
| They have, like, Nikon has a deal with the Flat Earth Society? | ||
| It's this camera. | ||
| It's just like, it's not like a SLR or anything. | ||
| It's just like a $600 camera. | ||
| But it's got this really, really long zoom lens on it. | ||
| Like, it's like a 2,000 millimeter zoom lens. | ||
| So you can see, you can zoom in on the moon, you can zoom in on the stars and planets. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you can use this camera, I've used it a few times, to actually take pictures of Jupiter and of Venus and Mars. | ||
| And you can actually just make out the roundness of the planet and the actual shadow of the sun. | ||
| You'll see Venus as being like the moon, being like an arc. | ||
| And you'll see Jupiter and you see the bands of Jupiter. | ||
| And you can do that with this camera. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| One great thing is the moons of Jupiter. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It looks like there's four little lights in a line with Jupiter, and they actually move around in a regular pattern. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you can actually see that with this camera, I've taken photos of it, posted them on the website, or even with binoculars. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They move exactly as if they are a little simulation of a planetary system. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Hmm, probably a hologram. | ||
| What? | ||
| When did you first become aware of this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you caught it. | ||
| You had a really good explanation for it. | ||
| You said they're basically like the training wheels for conspiracy theories. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's something you can see, I think, is kind of more enticing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think the same thing applies to the Flat Earth. | ||
| Now, when I got into the Flat Earth thing, I became aware of it a few years ago. | ||
| What does that sound? | ||
| Yeah, so the government is trying to... | ||
| Oh, is that your camera? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Freak me out, man. | ||
| That was the government, man. | ||
| Spying on you. | ||
| Yeah, so, like, when I first heard about the Flat Earth Theory, obviously I've heard it before. | ||
| Actually, my father, going back, when I was young, he told me that he was a member of the Flat Earth Society. | ||
| Your father told you that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was he joking around? | ||
| Uh... | ||
| Kind of, but he was doing it in a kind of satirical way, ironically. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He didn't believe the Earth was round. | ||
| So it's been around for quite a while, the Flat Earth Society. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was figured out by the ancient Greeks like 3,000 years ago that it wasn't. | ||
| That it wasn't round? | ||
| That it wasn't flat, sorry. | ||
| Oh, you fucked it up. | ||
| You gave up the goose. | ||
| You said thousands of years ago that people thought the earth was round and they realized it wasn't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just, right now, you gave them fuel. | ||
| That's a quote that's going to go on YouTube. | ||
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Fucked up. | |
| Fucked up. | ||
| I am a shill quote from the last one. | ||
| Strike that one. | ||
| A slight misquote. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, what happened was science basically figured out the shape of the universe. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's all this science going on. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's not actually this new stuff that he's discovered. | ||
| It's all stuff like, you know, if somebody walks away from you, you will see their feet disappear first. | ||
| And then he has a two-page quote of Samuel Robotham saying the exact same thing from the 1860s. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They think satellites are fake as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Dubé, he's hilarious. | ||
| He thinks that dinosaurs are fake, nuclear bombs are fake. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, he's basically recycling theories in a way that is popular to the reader and figuring out how to get them across to people. | ||
| So he does these YouTube videos that are very engaging and they sound good. | ||
| They sound, if you don't know what's what, they sound like they make sense. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| are quite technical. | ||
| At least they use a lot of technical terms. | ||
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Right. | |
| But they delve into things like there's a variety The Michelson-Morley experiment that Eddie mentioned is one of them that keeps cropping up and then there's the... | ||
| Which has never been reproduced. | ||
| That's the experiment that supposedly... | ||
| It actually has been reproduced because it's... | ||
| Well, the wrong way, not the way that they want it to. | ||
| The Michelson-Morley experiment was an experiment to detect the luminiferous ether, which is the supposed medium through which light travels. | ||
| Now, back in the 1800s, we didn't know that light was made up out of photons because light was waves. | ||
| So we thought that there was this stuff that permeated all of space called the luminiferous ether. | ||
| It's a little hard to pronounce. | ||
| And that this is what light travelled through as waves going through and like... | ||
| They didn't know exactly how it worked, but they figured there must be this stuff that permeates all of space. | ||
| 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. | ||
| By doing this experiment. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that was the whole experiment, was just this thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But what happened was nothing was detected. | ||
| Which was kind of the start of people realizing, oh, there is no luminiferous ether permeating the universe. | ||
| Right, but they used that to say that it's because the Earth isn't moving. | ||
| That was what the flat Earth people tried to use. | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| They did, but Michelson and Morley knew the Earth was moving. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They wanted to figure out whether the ether was moving with the Earth or whether the Earth was moving through the ether. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they were trying to detect the ether. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's still people like that, by the way. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's a recent resurgence. | ||
| I think it was Gavin McGinnis sent me something where some guy thinks that the Earth is the center of the universe. | ||
| Essentially, he was saying that it sort of confirms everything in Genesis. | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| 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. | ||
| But yeah, there's these experiments like the Michelson-Morley experiment, but people bring them up. | ||
| And they say that what they detected was no motion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what it actually detected was no luminiferous ether. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| And because they detected no luminiferous ether, it eventually led to theories about what light actually is, which is wave-particle duality. | ||
| You know, light is photons, which act both as a wave and as a particle, and eventually to the theory of relativity. | ||
| Well, you started Metabunk when? | ||
| When did you? | ||
| I think it was about five years ago. | ||
| But I've been doing the chemtrail stuff with Contrail Science for like over ten years now. | ||
| I was just looking at one of my old posts on satellite images. | ||
| I was quite surprised at how long I've been doing it. | ||
| And, yeah, and Metabunk been going about five years, and the Flat Earth stuff came up maybe two years ago. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And basically said, like, all these people are basically either trolling or they're crazy. | ||
| So there's no point addressing either of them. | ||
| And I think most of them are just trolling because no one could seriously believe this. | ||
| You'd have to be like... | ||
| I don't think you're right. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I've come to realize that I'm not. | ||
| I was wrong. | ||
| And that post now, you know, it's gone down the line. | ||
| But it's, you know, I've almost done like a 180 from that. | ||
| It's stunning. | ||
| It really is stunning. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm a sellout. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What an amazing discovery. | ||
| Every scientist would be clamoring to expose this. | ||
| Every single scientist. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then the big question is, why would the government say the world is flat? | ||
| I mean, why would they, in any way, why would they rather hide the fact the world is flat? | ||
| Like, what motivation would anybody have to show that the world was round? | ||
| It would be pretty fascinating if we lived on this flat disk and everybody else throughout the universe was on a planet. | ||
| We'd be like, whoa, what's going on? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it gets to some weird anti-Jew stuff with a lot of these guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of conspiracy theories basically boil down to some kind of suspicion of other people and quite often suspicion of Jewish people. | ||
| Why Jewish people? | ||
| It's always the Jews, man. | ||
| People can't catch a break. | ||
| I don't know exactly why. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So they've just been viewed as being an other. | ||
| And they're often, you know, the Jewish, the broader Jewish population is often like a minority within cities. | ||
| And so it's kind of an easy person to pick on when things go wrong. | ||
| But I don't know, I'm sure there's loads of books written on why Jews are the subject of conspiracy theories. | ||
| But doesn't Dubé have a recent video about Jews and about Hitler? | ||
| 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? | ||
| What can be done, if anything? | ||
| My concern is these young kids that are on the fence. | ||
| My thoughts are, look, I'm not going to reach out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Those guys don't mean anything to me. | ||
| You can't do anything about them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's you, motherfucker, whoever's listening to this. | ||
| That's you. | ||
| And you start... | ||
| I've been tricked before, and I wrote this big... | ||
| Instagram post recently about rods, about those Roswell rods. | ||
| I read it. | ||
| God, they got me. | ||
| I was convinced. | ||
| I was convinced. | ||
| But it was just, I never looked into it. | ||
| I just watched a documentary, and this guy had the footage. | ||
| I was like, wow, these things are flying around. | ||
| We can't see them. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I think he made more than one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, they were moving so fast, we couldn't see them. | ||
| And so, I was convinced, man. | ||
| I was really convinced. | ||
| And then, there was a show called Monster Quest, and what they did is they set up two cameras. | ||
| One camera, which was a very fast, high-speed camera, and the other one, which is a standard video camera. | ||
| And the standard video camera caught all these rods flying around. | ||
| And then the exact same images right next to each other with this high-definition, high-speed camera showed actual bugs. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so it created this elongating effect and made it look like there were these jellyfish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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, it's filled with people angry at me. | ||
| Because they think it's fake. | ||
| They think it's fake, and they think I'm a shill because I put that up. | ||
| If you can't get people to look at things, that's a challenge in itself. | ||
| How do you get people to look at things? | ||
| I think if you start slowly. | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure, because I think it got, like, 50,000 likes or something like that. | ||
| So I'm sure, even besides people that didn't like it, many people, they were like, oh, really? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, that's... | ||
| It's just not true. | ||
| And this rods video that you saw with the two cameras, if that hadn't existed, you might have taken a bit longer. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, you might still believe it now. | ||
| You might be telling your friends about it. | ||
| Have you seen these crazy rods that are everywhere? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Come on, you're still buying it? | ||
| He's still selling it. | ||
| They call them Roswell Rods, which is hilarious. | ||
| They're implying that somehow or another they're alien. | ||
| Yeah, probably some guy was at Roswell taking pictures trying to get UFOs and some bugs flew by. | ||
| It wasn't even Roswell. | ||
| That's what's funny. | ||
| They call them Roswell Rods. | ||
| The best footage is from Mexico. | ||
| The best footage was from a bunch of cave jumpers. | ||
| You know, they have that one really enormous cave, but it's a hole, essentially. | ||
| A gigantic pit, and people skydive into it. | ||
| You ever seen that? | ||
| Yeah, I've seen things like that. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That was like the best footage was from Mexico, from this one place. | ||
| So it had nothing to do with Roswell. | ||
| They just called them Roswell rods because they're dorks. | ||
| They probably had... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's that kind of thinking. | ||
| It's once someone commits to an idea, it's very difficult to shake them off of it. | ||
| And they just look for confirmation bias. | ||
| They just look for someone else to agree with them. | ||
| They find communities. | ||
| They find these flat earth communities, which is hilarious. | ||
| The flat, one of the best One of the best fucking unintentional, hilarious things I read online. | ||
| This dude wrote, the Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whoops. | ||
| Did he even realize what he was saying? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Or is that just him trolling? | ||
| I hope it's him trolling. | ||
| The community thing, I think, is a key thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I recently did a debunk of a UFO that the Chilean Navy supposedly saw. | ||
| What was that? | ||
| I'm not aware of that one. | ||
| It was like this... | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so this got a bit of play online and it was on like Covington Post and things like that. | ||
| And some UFO enthusiasts started talking to me and I joined their groups. | ||
| And I joined a few other groups. | ||
| And then I found myself in this kind of weird corner of the internet where everybody believes in UFOs unquestioningly. | ||
| And they're always putting up these photographs of things. | ||
| And people are like, oh, great capture, dude. | ||
| And it's just something like a streetlight or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tss! | |
| 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, they're just very supportive of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you could see it was like there was trees behind it and it was a security light and it was this reflection. | ||
| So I posted that and then I started getting called like a shill. | ||
| For pointing this out. | ||
| There's a couple of people who said, oh yeah, it's just this lie. | ||
| But other people were like, why don't you believe me? | ||
| Why are you invalidating my claims? | ||
| And so they want to have these kind of little walled gardens where everybody believes the same thing. | ||
| That's a good way to put it. | ||
| The walled gardens. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Illogical people with very little evidence, believing things in almost a religious way. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I feel like contrails and chemtrails were the most nutty people. | ||
| UFO people seem to be the most reasonable because it's the most reasonable theory. | ||
| Out of all of them, the idea that we have spaceships, why doesn't someone else have spaceships? | ||
| There's hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, hundreds of billions of planets in each galaxy. | ||
| The odds of there being some sort of a life form out there is pretty high. | ||
| But there's nothing. | ||
| That's the craziest thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There is nothing. | ||
| There's not a goddamn thing that you can put on a scale. | ||
| There's not a thing that you can weigh. | ||
| There's not a thing that you can measure. | ||
| There's not a thing that you can look at a photo and go, wow, that's compelling. | ||
| There's not one. | ||
| It's just an idea. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's always that. | ||
| From the 60s. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, they've proven that this stuff is... | ||
| 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 | ||
| neurochemical that entered into their bloodstream, whatever it is, it caused it. | ||
| All these fucking UFO abductions, all of them, almost exactly happen at night. | ||
| And they happen while these people are sleeping. | ||
| Wouldn't you just assume that you were dreaming? | ||
| Why wouldn't you assume you were dreaming? | ||
| Yeah, I used to have these kind of night terror hallucination things which were kind of like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was always the same type of thing. | ||
| It was like a giant spider coming down from the ceiling towards me. | ||
| And you couldn't move? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's happened all the time. | ||
| And, you know, I knew because there was no spider that it wasn't real. | ||
| 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... | ||
| It came in between sleep cycles for them, then tell it. | ||
| Because it seemed completely real. | ||
| I used to have them all the time, and it was always horrible. | ||
| It was this giant, really realistic spider. | ||
| And it wasn't like I was dreaming. | ||
| Somewhere else, I was in the room and I could see it like I was seeing something crawling across the table right here. | ||
| It was this hallucination. | ||
| I don't really get them anymore. | ||
| I don't know what it was. | ||
| My brain's fixed itself or whatever. | ||
| Well, it's probably a lot has to do with being young and confused and hormones and nerves. | ||
| And then also like... | ||
| Your brain starts filling in the blanks. | ||
| If you don't have a very good understanding of the universe, your imagination runs wild. | ||
| It was very confusing to me doing that television show. | ||
| And it really changed me a lot. | ||
| It changed me to the point that people started accusing me of being co-opted by the government. | ||
| That the government threatened my family and told me to stop talking about conspiracies. | ||
| And then the idea that I wouldn't say that if that was the case. | ||
| Like, you don't think I would fucking tell everybody if someone threatened my family because I was talking about UFOs? | ||
| I'd be telling everybody. | ||
| I'd be like, hey man. | ||
| I would tell all my friends. | ||
| I'd be like, dude, they fucking threatened me because I was talking about UFOs. | ||
| This shit is real. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just ridiculous. | ||
| You can't have tens of millions of people in on a conspiracy. | ||
| Well, the Flat Earth one is the best one for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because what about all those people? | ||
| All of science. | ||
| Every single scientist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And everyone who is involved in shipping routes and overseas flights and the fact that you can fly west and land east. | ||
| I mean, you can. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Ground truth is a concept in satellite observations, which I kind of touched on before. | ||
| You take a satellite observation and you see, does it match what you see on the ground? | ||
| 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? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I want to talk very briefly about a program called Stellarium, which you might have seen. | ||
| It's just basically a solar system simulator. | ||
| It shows what's in the night sky. | ||
| You've probably seen these little things on your phone where you hold it up and it shows you what the stars are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like that for the PC, and you can use the one on your phone as well. | ||
| So what I would encourage people to do is figure out, like, is this program actually correct? | ||
| Is it actually showing me what we see in the night sky? | ||
| And you can do it really easily. | ||
| 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? | ||
| So this is basically you checking the ground truth of this program, which seems like a very straightforward thing. | ||
| But then what you can do from that is you can then use the program to look at the sky from other positions. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or the little program you have in your phone that shows you the stars in the sky. | ||
| So you've got this computer showing you what it expects to see from any position anywhere in the world. | ||
| And you, by doing ground truth observations, have figured out what it actually is here. | ||
| So that's the type of thing you see in Stellarium, obviously in a much less light-polluted environment than you have here. | ||
| 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, hidden discoveries, or things that are somehow or another being kept from everybody. | ||
| What's fascinating to me is They're looking into this nonsense. | ||
| They're looking into this thing that's not real. | ||
| When the real space, like the actual, like what is observable about space is so mind blowing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When you see, like, they don't believe satellites are real. | ||
| When you see how many satellites we actually have, that's what's really fucked. | ||
| It's not that there's no satellites. | ||
| There's way too many. | ||
| They're going to start bashing into each other and then we'll have no more satellites. | ||
| There's thousands of them up there and they have to time space flights. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, it's still floating up there. | ||
| You've seen the movie Gravity? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did you see that Japanese expedition that they tried to do? | ||
| They tried to capture space junk. | ||
| Didn't work. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how well it worked. | ||
| They had a big tether that they were dragging behind it. | ||
| Yeah, they were trying to, like, catch a bunch of space junk with a net, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Somehow or another. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| This stuff is way more interesting than... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the real stuff. | ||
| That's really crazy. | ||
| The flat Earth idea is so... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| 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, even though they know it's not true, but they still believe it, and it's a way of mind control. | ||
| So the same thing would have happened with the flat earth, but on a far grander scale. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, or Mormons do, or anybody that creates some sort of an ideology that's provably false. | ||
| I mean, look, there's not a whole lot of difference between Scientology and Flat Earth theory. | ||
| I mean, there really isn't. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, I had this guy on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, Ron Miscavige, David Miscavige's dad. | ||
| I was like, what in the fuck? | ||
| This guy's wasted his life. | ||
| Guy lived in the Scientology world for 50 years. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It is, it is. | ||
| There's not much difference between that and flat earth theory. | ||
| There really isn't. | ||
| You know how Scientology works. | ||
| It's like gradually sucks you in a bit at a time. | ||
| It just sounds all very reasonable at the start. | ||
| Very self-helpy in the beginning. | ||
| It gets more and more cult-like the further you get into it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| People start seeing those benefits. | ||
| They start feeling positive, and then they get into the thetans and the frozen souls chucked into the volcano, and they're like, what? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I think this is something that people really like about it, is that you don't believe scientists just because scientists say something. | ||
| It's this thing they call the zetetic method. | ||
| Which basically is a Greek word meaning questioning. | ||
| So you've got to question everything. | ||
| You can't believe that gravity exists or that planets go around the sun just because scientists do it. | ||
| You actually have to observe it for yourself. | ||
| And if you can't observe it for yourself, then it isn't real. | ||
| Which leads people to think the Earth is flat because it kind of appears flat from various positions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they haven't been into space or they haven't done the various experiments that show that it's not flat. | ||
| So I think... | ||
| 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, but then they get sucked into people like DeBay, who feed them all this nonsense. | ||
| He's very articulate, very smooth with the way he talks, and he makes his well-edited videos, and they're very compelling. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| And they did it because they thought that they were, you know, following science. | ||
| And so questioning science and questioning scientists, you know, occasionally you're right. | ||
| Occasionally you'll find something like this conspiracy by the sugar industry. | ||
| You know, there's the old saying like, trust yet verify. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, Reagan popularized that with the salt talks. | ||
| Yeah, that's a very good statement. | ||
| Trust yet verify. | ||
| Trust yet verify. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you want to trust Eric DeBay, that's fine, but check the things that he says. | ||
| I checked one of his things on the way here on the plane. | ||
| He has a thing that a lot of them say, which is that the horizon always rises to eye level. | ||
| So on the plane on the way here, I checked to see if this was actually correct. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's at eye level. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It actually drops around two or three degrees. | ||
| But it's very hard to see when you're just looking out of the window of the plane. | ||
| So it's very easy to get taken into believing that it stays at eye level. | ||
| So what I did is I took this little carpenter's level You brought a carpenter's level? | ||
| A carpenter's level. | ||
| A very small one. | ||
| It's like eight inches long or so. | ||
| And I've taped a small tube to the top, which is like a bit of a pen. | ||
| And then I set it level and wedged it so it was level. | ||
| And then I looked through the tube on the top of this level and saw where the horizon was. | ||
| And the horizon was just below the end of the level. | ||
| So the horizon had actually dropped away. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's demonstrably incorrect with this $2 level, which I actually got free from somewhere. | ||
| And anyone can do this. | ||
| You don't even need to be in a plane. | ||
| In fact, it works better if you're just on a cliff or something, like a thousand feet up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But I do not think that people understand perspective and they do not understand how huge the earth is. | ||
| 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, 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. | ||
| You're dealing with something that's so big, it feels like it's flat. | ||
| It feels like it's flat because it's enormous and you're tiny. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So it's actually slightly curved, but when you look at it, it looks perfectly straight. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Over this 80 miles, it moves maybe like 10 feet or something. | ||
| And people just don't realise just how small the curve of the Earth actually is. | ||
| It looks flat. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You don't want to believe that you got taken. | ||
| You don't want to believe you've been had. | ||
| You don't want to believe you've been fooled. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, the level experiment that I did, someone did something similar with that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But they did this experiment, and they did it at sea level. | ||
| Which meant it's always going to be exactly the same as the horizon. | ||
| You've actually got to go up a thousand feet before you can see anything. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's a ridiculous amount of people doing flat earth experiments on YouTube and just getting it completely wrong. | ||
| I think the most common one is people taking photographs of something that they think shouldn't be visible from a certain position. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then there's all these mistakes that they make. | ||
| Some of them do the math wrong. | ||
| Some of them don't account for the fact that you've got to factor in how high the viewer is. | ||
| Some of them will get entirely the wrong island. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, how come you can look out in the—I mean, here's a simple one. | ||
| How come you look out across the ocean and you don't see anything on the other side? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, what's over there? | ||
| Well— So far away that you can't see it? | ||
| They've gotten out there. | ||
| They've gotten out there because the—you wouldn't be able to see anything away because the atmosphere is so thick. | ||
| You wouldn't be able to see through it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh. | |
| If things get further away, they get fainter and fainter. | ||
| Islands that are— Do they believe in the atmosphere? | ||
| They do, and they use it a lot to make up reasons for certain things, like things going below the horizon. | ||
| That's where it gets weird, right, is that people use some science to try to debunk science. | ||
| Or things that they claim are science, like the law of perspective. | ||
| The law of perspective doesn't exist. | ||
| There's no law of perspective. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So if it gets twice as far away, it's half the size. | ||
| If it gets four times as far away, it's a quarter of the size. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And that's all that perspective is. | ||
| Now, people talk about vanishing points. | ||
| Well, that came up during the podcast with Eddie Bravo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He was just explaining how you define perspective when you're illustrating things. | ||
| That's the law of perspective on a piece of paper. | ||
| Or on a photograph. | ||
| It's nothing at all to do with the real world. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, what's the actual perspective of things? | ||
| You know, things just get smaller. | ||
| But it sounds good when you say the law of perspective. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It sounds good, like you're invoking a law, a scientific law. | ||
| But then they will discover a real law like the law of universal gravitation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just, again, here's the thing. | ||
| I don't have anything against Eric Dupay or any of these people. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| My real concern is with young people out there that are listening to this that get sucked into this stupid shit. | ||
| And there's so much that you could learn. | ||
| There's so much that's fascinating about the universe. | ||
| There's so much fascinating about the natural world. | ||
| There's so much to learn. | ||
| And to waste any time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And again, it's not like in any way, shape, or form, it's not something to be embarrassed about or sad about. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's natural for whatever reason. | ||
| I think it's very much a part of growing up and I think it's just it's different for different people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had a whole bunch of crazy ideas when I was growing up. | ||
| What'd you have? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I sent it to their brothers. | ||
| So I sent a letter to Raul Castro, who is now the president of Cuba. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| But back then I thought, I can set up this organization of the relatives of world leaders and bring about world peace. | ||
| Now, I was like 13 at the time. | ||
| It's funny that you decided to get a hold of their brothers. | ||
| That's kind of hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, well I figured like... | ||
| Sneaky back door move. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I found his address in Who's Who in the library. | ||
|
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Oh. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Back in the day. | ||
| Back in the day when you look things up in the library. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's not even that unreasonable. | ||
| That's like you thinking, well, world peace seems to make sense to me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I had delusions of solving great mathematical problems when I was young. | ||
| Problems like, how do you trisect an angle by this geometrical method? | ||
| Which was proved to be impossible to do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It seems like it's possible to me. | ||
| And if you did discover it, what a gigantic, huge feather in your cap that would have been. | ||
| That was the motivation, really. | ||
| It wasn't just like pure altruism. | ||
| I believed in a bunch of stupid shit. | ||
| And the big one for me that I've clung to longest is Bigfoot. | ||
| That one, man. | ||
| Oh, it's so hard for me to let that one go. | ||
| Well, first of all, because it used to be an animal. | ||
| It used to be Gigandopithecus. | ||
| But man, when my friend Les Stroud actually started doing that show, that Bigfoot show. | ||
| Have you ever seen that show? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| He did that show with some fucking guy who's just a total hoaxer. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It is so stupid looking. | ||
| See if you can find it, Jamie. | ||
| And this guy, this is how wacky this guy is. | ||
| The Bigfoot community thinks he's full of shit. | ||
| That's when you know you fucked up. | ||
| When the Bigfoot community is calling shenanigans. | ||
| They're like, this guy, I'm not buying this. | ||
| It's funny, you get these schisms in these communities and they fracture off into sub-communities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the Scientologists, there are people who have fractured it off from the Scientologists. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| This is awesome. | ||
| See, this guy's in the woods and he sees it. | ||
|
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He sees it. | |
| It's through the trees. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| And he can't. | ||
| He's not even moving. | ||
| Meanwhile, Bigfoot has just been running from people from day one, right? | ||
| But there's one animal that's just standing there. | ||
| And he's like, God, I think I see it. | ||
| I think I see it. | ||
| So then towards the end of the video, he gets really close. | ||
|
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Like, look at that. | |
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| He's got like an afro from the 1970s. | ||
| Like, look how clean its hair looks. | ||
| I mean, it looks so dumb. | ||
| It's not moving. | ||
| No, he gets close up on it. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Doesn't it wink or something? | ||
| Yeah, here it is. | ||
| Look how bad this is. | ||
| Look how bad this is. | ||
| Here's how you know it's fake. | ||
| Whenever something looks like a dude in a monkey suit, it's a dude in a monkey suit. | ||
| That's all you need to know. | ||
| Because your brain knows. | ||
| Your brain's like, hey, wait a minute. | ||
| If you look at a gorilla, a gorilla doesn't look like a person in a gorilla suit. | ||
| If you look at a giraffe, it does not look like a person in a giraffe suit. | ||
| If you look at Bigfoot and it looks like a dude in a monkey suit, it's a fucking dude in a monkey suit. | ||
| Like, your brain starts filling in the blanks. | ||
| And also, whether you recognize it or not, your brain recognizes geometry, facial geometry, recognizes a Fibonacci sequence. | ||
| Hardwired. | ||
| Yeah, and you see, that's why people freak out when you see someone with fake lips or a fake nose. | ||
| Upside down eyes and things like that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And when that geometry is off, it's confusing to us. | ||
| Like, why are their cheeks so big? | ||
| Why is that nose so small? | ||
| Why are the lips so big? | ||
| Like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| Like, your body starts You react to it. | ||
| Yeah, there's an illusion where they put two sets of eyes on people. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you look at that and your brain just is constantly resetting and you think, oh, my eyes are crossed or whatever. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Your brain's just so hardwired to recognize faces. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That it just automatically... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's the golden ratio. | ||
| I mean, if you look at a person's face, you can actually do the math. | ||
| Where their chin is, where their eyes are, it all lines up. | ||
| And your brain recognizes when that's not the case. | ||
| So if you see that and you see like, oh, it's a person. | ||
| What the fuck's going on? | ||
| Because it is a person. | ||
| That's a person. | ||
| That's a dude in a monkey suit. | ||
| It's not even a good one. | ||
| And there's so many people that trot out that Patterson footage, which is so bad. | ||
| They believe so hard. | ||
| They believe so hard. | ||
| It was the hardest one for me to realize that those people were all full of shit. | ||
| Because when I was a kid, man, God, I don't want a Bigfoot to be real. | ||
| That was a tough one. | ||
|
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Tough one. | |
| And plus it was a real animal at one point in time. | ||
| There was really a thing called Gigantopithecus, which was an eight to ten foot tall ape. | ||
| Rakatang. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That may have been bipedal, at least occasionally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you want things to be true, like UFOs. | ||
| I was kind of into UFOs and all kinds of weird stuff when I was younger. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But to a certain degree, I think there's no harm in people believing in things. | ||
| Like, you know, little kids believe in Santa Claus, etc., that type of things. | ||
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Right. | |
| The Christmas, the Easter Bunny. | ||
| It's just that for some people it kind of goes a bit wrong, goes a bit too far. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The Illuminati. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think it's partly this kind of a natural, childish wanting to believe in things, which we all have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We all believed strange things when we were young. | ||
| And I think that aliens in a lot of ways are like a cosmic daddy. | ||
| The idea that there's someone who's really on the ball. | ||
| That's watching us and you've got to make sure we don't fuck everything up. | ||
| That's why those contact movies are so popular. | ||
| Just the idea of like, oh, aliens coming to help us or whatever is so enticing. | ||
| It'd be so amazing. | ||
| Yeah, meanwhile, I think the movie Alien is probably more likely what's going to happen. | ||
| Just come down here and fuck us up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they become, you know, air quotes, experts. | ||
| And that becomes a problem, because then they have a vested interest in making sure that other people believe. | ||
| They start writing books. | ||
| They start doing lectures. | ||
| They start showing pictures. | ||
| And also, here's what's interesting. | ||
| As the number of phones that have cameras have radically increased, the number of usable UFO pictures has radically decreased. | ||
| Which doesn't really make sense. | ||
| Cameras like this one, it's got 83x zoom on it. | ||
| You can take pictures of, if there was a UFO, you could take a real closer picture of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you see the windows? | ||
| Yeah, depending on the angle. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Speaking of the camera, there's something coming up in August, which is the eclipse. | ||
| There's going to be a total eclipse of the Sun over North America, I think, August 21st this year. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Don't they have an excuse for that, though? | ||
| Yeah, but how are they going to justify it if they actually look at it? | ||
| I think the challenge is getting people to look at things. | ||
| The excuse, well not the excuse, the reason we're giving them is that there's an eclipse. | ||
| And everybody wants to look at the eclipse because it's an amazing thing. | ||
| The moon goes in front of the sun and blocks it out. | ||
| Yeah, but I think that you're giving them too much credit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, it just doesn't seem to me that it's enough. | ||
| This is like a solar eclipse, though. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| They can tell that the moon is going in front of the sun. | ||
| Well, I know what you're saying is logical. | ||
| But no, even the flat Earthers believe that the Moon goes in front of the Sun for a solar eclipse. | ||
| Oh, they do? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Don't they believe that the Earth sits flat and that everything spins around the Earth? | ||
| They do. | ||
| Well, yeah, the Earth is flat and the Sun and the Moon are orbiting above. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you should encourage people who are flat earth believers to look at this amazing thing that's happening. | ||
| They still don't give a fuck. | ||
| Is there uniformity in the Flat Earth community? | ||
| Have they all agreed? | ||
| Or is there dissension? | ||
| Some people say it's because of the ice wall. | ||
| No, there's no fucking ice wall. | ||
| It's just a drop-off and everybody dies. | ||
| There is this mainstream thing, the debate model of things. | ||
| It's kind of like in the chemtrail community. | ||
| You've got this one guy, Dane Wigington, Who's this really popular guy. | ||
| And then you've got like a bunch of other people. | ||
| Which one is he? | ||
| Is he the guy that made the videos? | ||
| No, that was Michael J. Murphy was the guy who made the videos. | ||
| That guy was... | ||
| He was a little loony. | ||
| And Wickington is the guy who lives in a big house on 200 acres up in the mountains somewhere. | ||
| And he got obsessed with solar panels being blocked by contrails and so became a chemtrail believer. | ||
| But he's like the equivalent of DeBay, really, because he's the guy who's really promoting it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, those folks. | ||
| There's this division between people who believe in global warming and who don't. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You've got the same type of range of things in the flat Earth, believers, as well. | ||
| Some people think that the Earth is kind of concave. | ||
| It's not actually flat at all. | ||
| What about the hollow Earth people? | ||
| Some people think the Earth is hollow. | ||
| That's not really a flat Earth thing. | ||
| That's like a round Earth with a hole in the top. | ||
| And a whole new world in there. | ||
| People live on the inside of the Earth, which makes even less sense than the flat Earth from a physical point of view. | ||
| Well, they think there's monsters in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or there's aliens, the Rothschilds. | ||
| They think they're lizard people. | ||
| They live under the earth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They shoot lasers. | ||
| They make tunnels. | ||
| You've heard that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've heard of that, yeah. | ||
| Sounds real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm looking into it. | ||
| Any conspiracy theory is going to have a range of plausibility. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From reasonably plausible to completely implausible. | ||
| You think of some of the 9-11 conspiracy theories. | ||
| At one end, you've got the World Trade Center was destroyed by nuclear bombs that were in the basement. | ||
| Nuclear bombs? | ||
| Nuclear bombs. | ||
| People think that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I haven't heard that one. | ||
| It's a fringe one, but it's got a few people who believe it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then you get more and more plausible. | ||
| There was pre-planted explosives. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then they knew it was going to happen, but they did nothing about it. | ||
| And then they had some warnings about it, and they didn't do anything about it. | ||
| So you've got this whole range of plausibilities for the conspiracists. | ||
| With the Flat Earth, it's pretty much all of this end. | ||
| Because the flat earth theory is either the earth is flat or it's round. | ||
| So with the flat earth you've only got very extreme and then more extreme theories. | ||
| The most extreme thing which all conspiracy theories end up with is the everything is an illusion. | ||
| We are living in the matrix conspiracy theory. | ||
| Well, that theory is very compelling. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| it's entirely possible that 100 years from now or whatever it is, there'll be some way that they can interface somehow with your brain and create some sort of an artificial experience. | ||
| That's not outside the realm of possibility at all. | ||
| But the conspiracy theory is that they're doing it now, and it's detectable that these things that we are seeing are kind of artifacts of living in the Matrix. | ||
| You might have heard of the Mandela effect. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's people who believe that there's kind of glitches in the Matrix. | ||
| Like the Berenstain Bears. | ||
| Yeah, Berenstain Bears are actually called the Bearstein Bears in an alternate timeline. | ||
| Or there was this movie called Shazam done by, I can't remember the guy's name now. | ||
| People say Sinbad was in the movie Shazam, but Shaq was in Kazam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They completely believe that this actually happened and that the world has been changed. | ||
| Oh, it is. | ||
| It is, but they believe it. | ||
| So that's something that's at the end of all these conspiracy theories. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Elon Musk. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He believes it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not really convinced myself because it's kind of a simplistic argument saying that technology will always advance and get better. | ||
| There are fundamental limits on information theory, like how much information that we can process. | ||
| Have you ever messed around with HTC Vive or any of the more recent state-of-the-art? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're mind-blowing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mind-blowing. | ||
| And this is one of the reasons why I subscribe to it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, you just got to think, 150 years ago they were using teletypes. | ||
| That was the only way to get a message across, you know? | ||
| And then what can we do today? | ||
| We can take a film and send it to someone in Australia. | ||
| They get it in real time. | ||
| I think it's very reasonable to assume that if you put on the HTC Vive, They have this one underwater experience. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Jamie, see if you can find it, because I know it's in video form, but... | ||
| I think it's reasonable that there's going to be extremely realistic things that make you think that you are there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Is this simulation just you? | ||
| Is it just your head that's doing a simulation? | ||
| See this right here? | ||
| This is you put this thing on. | ||
| I mean, again, we're in 2017 and this is all in its fairly adolescent stage. | ||
| And man, when you're in this thing and you're looking around, it's not necessarily high definition. | ||
| It's very clear. | ||
| And you know that it's not real. | ||
| But God, it gives you this feeling that it's real. | ||
| Then a whale pulls up and all these fish swim by. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And more than anything, it gives you a window into the future. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Remember Pong, the game that you'd play? | ||
| It was like, I can't believe I'm controlling something on the television. | ||
|
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Doot doot, doot doot. | |
| 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. | ||
| And I think that the improvements in this sort of artificial reality, this virtual reality that you're seeing in this current... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Look at that whale there. | ||
| That whale is a living thing. | ||
| It's made up of cells. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, maybe we're having a different argument here. | ||
| I'm thinking that it's going to feel real. | ||
| You're saying scientists won't be able to prove. | ||
| I believe you will be able to. | ||
| I don't believe that they can make something that you could not detect. | ||
| Not detect with science. | ||
| Unless they cripple your intelligence, so they steer you away from it. | ||
| They'll be able to make something that's indiscernible while you're experiencing it, but a scientist could come along and check it. | ||
| It's a bit of a philosophical question, though, because what we have now is our observable universe with the laws of physics. | ||
| I don't think within this universe you could make something that simulates the universe that's the same. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't think you could simulate the entire Earth in our physical universe. | ||
| Not now, but you don't think you could do it a thousand years from now? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I think there are fundamental limits as to how much information will be required. | ||
| You could get something that's a... | ||
| An imitation of that, but it would be detectably different. | ||
| It's like each simulation is going to be lower fidelity than the universe that created it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you can only create something that's less complex than the universe you're currently in. | ||
| Is that true though? | ||
| 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? | ||
| How far it would advance. | ||
| You go back 5,000 years ago, people were modern humans. | ||
| You know, I mean, the people that built the pyramids were modern humans, right? | ||
| They looked like us, maybe a little smaller. | ||
| They didn't get as much to eat. | ||
| They looked just like us. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility. | ||
| But could you then create within that universe the same quantum computers that are simulating itself? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think you could. | ||
| I think that's kind of a paradox, really. | ||
| It has to be as powerful as the thing that is simulating it. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think artificial intelligence is going to lead us to... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's going to realize, like, if you give it autonomy... | ||
| Yeah, we don't know what's going to happen. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Quantum computers, we don't know how well they're going to work. | ||
| They could be, like... | ||
| Could be a dud. | ||
| Or it could be fucking amazing. | ||
| It could be fucking amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| It's something to think about. | ||
| But when scientists start thinking that we are currently living in some sort of a computer simulation, I don't discard it. | ||
| I give it a pause. | ||
| I mean, I don't subscribe or not subscribe to something as ridiculous as that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We're not going to be able to do anything about it if we do figure it out. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| A thought experiment. | ||
| Scientists are looking at the laws of physics. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But that's just basically us resolving the laws of physics more. | ||
| If we get down that deep, we can't do anything about it. | ||
| Well, not only that, does that actually mean that we're living in some sort of an artificial realm? | ||
| Or does it mean that that's what the universe is made of? | ||
| It's not artificial. | ||
| But that the universe, much like what we're creating, that the universe is almost fractal. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that this whole thing is really mathematical. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, so yeah, it's it's a philosophical question. | ||
| It's a little bit of mental masturbating Yeah. | ||
| It seems to me that that's a thing that people do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We love to chase and become, like, engrossed in these things. | ||
| And I wonder why we're doing it. | ||
| I wonder if we're distracting ourselves. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It doesn't seem to be the case. | ||
| Well, you've got these pool players who believe. | ||
| They're not doing so good. | ||
| It's hard out there for a pool player right now. | ||
| The guys are the top of the game, isn't they? | ||
| I think those guys just watch too many fucking YouTube videos and they don't have any science. | ||
| Most of the pool players, one of the things about... | ||
| What's that common expression about pool players? | ||
| If someone plays pool really well, it's the glorious results of a misspent youth. | ||
| Because it takes a long time to learn how to play pool really well. | ||
| And you're not going to be doing that while you're, you know, got your nose buried in physics books. | ||
| I think, like, people like things like the flight of... | ||
| They get things out of them. | ||
| They're getting something out of it. | ||
| It's giving them purpose in their life. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's kind of like a hobby in a way. | ||
| You're just doing something because you enjoy doing it, like playing chess. | ||
| Except along with that hobby of doing stuff, they actually have a belief that it's required for them to actually do their hobby. | ||
| They don't obviously think of it like that, but that's essentially what it is. | ||
| They have this activity they like doing, like gardening or whatever, but it requires them to believe that the earth is flat. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I do the same thing except I'm actually doing it for science. | ||
| I do these fun little experiments. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You should have told her, I'm proving that the Earth isn't flat, ma'am. | ||
| She probably thought that I was thinking that the Earth was flat. | ||
| 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! | ||
| 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... | ||
| All of the possibilities and all the science behind all the arguments and it's just... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think what happens is either they get this superficial understanding of the conspiracy theory or the actual real life suffers. | ||
| And a lot of people get sucked into conspiracy theories like chemtrails. | ||
| Or 9-11 truth. | ||
| And they become socially isolated. | ||
| And they become, they get divorced and they lose custody of their children. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this isn't like, you know, it's not like the government punishing them or anything like that. | ||
| It's just because they become obsessed with something that is outside of societal norms. | ||
| And they feel like this overwhelming, compelling need to tell other people about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they talk about, oh, people roll their eyes when I bring up the subject of chemtrails or the flat earth. | ||
| Of course they do. | ||
| But from their point of view, they're trying to wake up other people. | ||
| They're doing the Lord's work by giving the truth to people. | ||
| But then there's some theories that are really compelling. | ||
| Like when you look into Operation Northwoods and you find out that the government really was planning false flag attacks. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| That's exaggerated, I think. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| How's the exaggeration? | ||
| Well, it was a discussion document. | ||
| It was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. | ||
| Yeah, it was rejected by Kennedy. | ||
| Yeah, but it was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. | ||
| It didn't go very far. | ||
| It was just one document. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They signed it. | ||
| They got it. | ||
| They didn't sign it that they wanted to do it. | ||
| But it was an idea. | ||
| 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. | ||
| These were all proposed things. | ||
| They were proposed things, yeah. | ||
| But it was just like, you know, spitballing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They are real. | ||
| And if you dismiss everything, you'll be thought of as a shill. | ||
| As much as people who look for conspiracies and everything, there are also people who try to dismiss everything. | ||
| And you have to be very careful, because there are a lot of things that people do conspire to do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| People say, I don't believe in conspiracies. | ||
| And I say, you don't believe in any conspiracies? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, do you believe 9-11 happened? | ||
| Do you believe that people flew jet planes into buildings? | ||
| Well, then you believe in conspiracies, because someone conspired to do that, and they did it. | ||
| They pulled it off. | ||
| A bunch of people got together, decided they were going to attack. | ||
| They flew a plane into the Pentagon. | ||
| They flew two planes into the World Trade Center towers. | ||
| I mean, that really happened. | ||
| So, that's a conspiracy. | ||
| And they pulled it off. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, I get what you're saying. | ||
| I personally just feel the Northwoods thing is a bit overblown. | ||
| I don't think it is at all. | ||
| As to what it was. | ||
| I think it speaks volumes about what the mindset of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were. | ||
| It's one example. | ||
| It's a good one, though. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, but they didn't come up with any others. | |
| What about what got us into Vietnam? | ||
| Go for Tonkin. | ||
| Yeah, that was a false flag. | ||
| Well, that's debatable too, because that was just basically they thought that they were being attacked. | ||
| Is that debatable? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's pretty much been agreed upon that that was a false flag. | ||
| It was a series of events. | ||
| That didn't happen. | ||
| Over two nights, there was reports of the boats being fired upon. | ||
| And it turns out there probably wasn't anything there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what's debatable is, did they think there was something there? | ||
| Or did they want there to be something there? | ||
| Or did they completely invent it out of thin air? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, is that a conspiracy? | ||
| It's hard to say. | ||
| What knowledge did Bush have of the 9-11 attacks beforehand? | ||
| We know he took advantage of it. | ||
| And we know that the American administration back then took advantage of the Gulf of Tonkin reports. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But we do know that they were taken advantage of. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, my whole point is that you have to be careful when you're a person who debunks things that are legitimately ridiculous. | ||
| You have to take into consideration the possibility that people do conspire to do things. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| Totally they do. | ||
| And obviously that's happened within pretty high levels of government. | ||
| With Enron. | ||
| I mean, there's been a ton of conspiracies that turned out to be true. | ||
| Yeah, and there's, what, the arms for Iran, the Iran-Contra scandal? | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| That probably went all the way to the top. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Reagan probably knew all about that. | ||
| That was where it was hilarious when it was when Reagan was showing the first signs of Alzheimer's when he didn't remember. | ||
| He didn't remember anything and people were like, oh, he's lying. | ||
| And then it turns out, no, his memory is really eroding. | ||
| I mean, he was an older man. | ||
| He was in his late 70s at the time, wasn't he? | ||
| Yeah, he was Trump's age, I think. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's why he has so much energy, because he doesn't exercise. | ||
| I heard he has a strange diet. | ||
| He has his steaks well done, and he likes to eat lunch meat straight out of the fridge. | ||
| But it's neither here nor there. | ||
| I'm sure he's a very nice guy. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Never met the guy. | ||
| Yeah, he doesn't look healthy, but he's got a lot of energy, man. | ||
| Kind of amazing how much energy he has. | ||
| Alex Jones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he kind of looks reasonably healthy, I guess. | ||
| He's not healthy. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, Alex doesn't look that healthy. | ||
| He's overweight, right? | ||
| And he's younger than me. | ||
| Like, I always used to freak out that he's younger than me. | ||
| I was like, how are you younger than me? | ||
| Like, he just goes hard. | ||
| Alex goes hard all the time. | ||
| You know, and now... | ||
| Takes a toll. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The mind, you know, can only take so much pressure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Should we talk about some more Flat Earth stuff? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What else you got there? | ||
| You got notes. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I wrote down everything I could think of on the Flat Earth, which is a shitload of stuff. | ||
| The International Space Station. | ||
| Oh, that's a good one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They think that that footage is fake. | ||
| They think it's all fake. | ||
| Yeah, it's hilarious. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because there's footage of Skylab with people running around in circles in zero gravity. | ||
| There's long sequences of people doing stuff in zero gravity. | ||
| And it's in a space that's actually too big to fit in any plane that's ever been built. | ||
| So it couldn't be filmed in a thing where they do the parabola, the vomit comet, yeah. | ||
| It has to be something that was actually zero gravity. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you could float around in it. | ||
| So this. | ||
| They're in zero gravity here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Running around in circles. | ||
| They do all kinds of stuff. | ||
| You get three of them running. | ||
| And the space that they're in there is so big that it wouldn't fit in. | ||
| It probably wouldn't even fit in the beluga thing that they use for transporting planes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's obvious that this is in space. | ||
| Yeah, and this is from the 70s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pretty amazing. | ||
| The space station, the International Space Station, it flies over at regular intervals. | ||
| And this is one of the ground truth things that I was talking about earlier. | ||
| You can see it. | ||
| You can look up when it's going to fly over. | ||
| You can get them to send you alerts. | ||
| There's a site called Spot the Station. | ||
| It's a NASA site. | ||
| But you don't have to trust it. | ||
| But you can still sign up and it will tell you when the space station is going to fly over. | ||
| To the second. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you can get to send you an email and then get your camera out and take photographs of it when it happens. | ||
| So you know that this website is correct. | ||
| You've proven it on the ground. | ||
| And you can also do it from different positions and get two people doing it. | ||
| And you can figure out how high the space station is by triangulating it. | ||
| What's this angle? | ||
| What's that angle? | ||
| How far apart they are? | ||
| And you can figure out that the space station is actually 250 miles high. | ||
| It is actually orbiting the Earth at 250 miles. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you can see there actually is something that is moving along the same path that NASA says is moving along. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And there's really no way you could fake that on a flat Earth. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's just, you know, it's literally impossible. | ||
| Whereas if you look at it from the globe model point of view, it's just the space station orbiting the globe. | ||
| Well, obviously it's orbiting the globe. | ||
| But does this bother you sometimes that you're even debunking this stuff? | ||
| It does. | ||
| It does. | ||
| I sometimes catch myself and go, What the fuck am I doing? | ||
| It's obvious. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But in the real world, what do they actually see? | ||
| They all see the exact same constellation, the Southern Cross, right in front of them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, I see what you're saying. | ||
| It's literally impossible to do that on the flat Earth. | ||
| Right, and you can actually see this and take photographs of the constellations and compare them. | ||
| Yeah, and that's something I was talking about with the ground truth thing, with Stellarium. | ||
| You could go virtually yourself to these places and see what the sky looks from that position. | ||
| So either Stellarium is lying or the Southern Cross does actually appear from these three different positions. | ||
| Well, that's another thing that these flat Earth people keep bringing up is Polaris. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What's so stupid about that is that people in Australia have a completely different constellation. | ||
| That's right, and the stars rotate the other direction around it. | ||
| The stars are all coming towards us from the east. | ||
| So if you look north, they're going that way. | ||
| If you look south, they're going that way. | ||
| So they're rotating around the north star, which actually isn't anything special. | ||
| It's just the star that happens to be closest to the point, the north point. | ||
| And it changes all the time. | ||
| If you zoom in, you can actually see there are stars that are even closer. | ||
| And if you take a time lapse of the North Star, it actually makes a little circle. | ||
| Well, and also that North Star is not the same North Star as in the past. | ||
| Yeah, because the axis of the Earth, there's this thing called precession where the... | ||
| Every 26,000 years, it wobbles. | ||
| Wobbles away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the south, everyone's looking at the same thing in the south, and the stars are rotating in that direction. | ||
| But, yeah, Polaris, Polaris is a good one for a number of reasons. | ||
| One, it's not really fixed. | ||
| It's one degree off from the center of the celestial sphere. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you're just not going to get a 26,000 years time-lapse photo of the Earth. | ||
| You could simulate it. | ||
| Yeah, you could simulate it. | ||
| In Stellarium, and no one's going to believe that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It would be quite impressive. | ||
| A lot of old cultures did actually take records at the stars, because stars were used for navigation. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's called celestial navigation. | ||
| What other ridiculous things Can we point out, before we wrap this up, my head's starting to hurt. | ||
| I had food poisoning yesterday, folks. | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| I ate something bad at a greasy diner. | ||
| Well, Polaris is a good thing because you can actually look at the angle of Polaris. | ||
| Was that a banging? | ||
| Did you hear banging? | ||
| I heard banging. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll go check. | ||
| Oh, it's next door. | ||
| He's just putting something on the wall, it sounds like. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, they shut down the stream twice on us already. | |
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's Flat Earth. | ||
| I'm recording the whole thing. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| What other things are ridiculous? | ||
| Some of the Flat Earthers wonder why the Earth's atmosphere isn't sucked off into space. | ||
| Ah, well, how about the one where... | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| It's a good one because I've wondered that myself. | ||
| I know now why that is. | ||
| I know why it doesn't get sucked into space. | ||
| Why doesn't it get sucked into space? | ||
| Because you think that a vacuum sucks things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's going to suck everything away. | ||
| So if there's this atmosphere on the Earth, the vacuum of space will suck it away. | ||
| But the thing is, vacuum doesn't actually suck. | ||
| Vacuum is nothing. | ||
| It has no energy. | ||
| It doesn't do anything. | ||
| There's no power. | ||
| The reason that things flow into vacuum is air pressure. | ||
| And air pressure is a function of gravity. | ||
| So gravity is pulling everything down towards the Earth. | ||
| So there's nothing that can push it out, if you see what I'm saying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, they don't believe in gravity, though. | ||
| Yeah, they don't believe in gravity. | ||
| It's electromagnetic. | ||
| This is my favorite new one. | ||
| Did you see the one where they show that if the Earth was a globe, that all the water would be on the bottom? | ||
| Yeah, I think that one's a joke. | ||
| You think it's a joke. | ||
| How could you be so sure? | ||
| I thought about the other ones as well. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Bring it up, Jamie. | ||
| This one's wonderful. | ||
| I think they're being serious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The gravity thing, though, it's kind of like almost irrelevant because we know that things fall down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's electromagnetic something or other. | ||
| Well, it's a magical force that's making things fall down. | ||
| It doesn't really matter. | ||
| Gravity, we could say we don't really understand what gravity is. | ||
| How do you explain lava? | ||
| Because lava is a part of gravity, too, right? | ||
| Lava? | ||
| Well, it's the idea that all these rocks are pushing down and there's extreme friction and heat. | ||
| Buoyancy and density. | ||
| Buoyancy and density are functions of gravity. | ||
| Like if you stick something in the water, all the water is flowing to the bottom. | ||
| We're looking at this image, folks. | ||
| It says, gravity is not strong enough to stop a small stream from flowing to its lowest point. | ||
| Then what is stopping the oceans north of the equator from emptying into the oceans south of the equator? | ||
| This is what the Earth would look like. | ||
| If we lived on a globe, gravity is pseudoscience. | ||
| Dot, dot, dot. | ||
| A theory that can't be proven. | ||
| They forgot the apostrophe in can't, you fucking dunce. | ||
| Can't be proven. | ||
| Look at that image, though. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| Why is there water on the top at all? | ||
| How about that, you stupid fuck? | ||
| It's raining. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| It rains on top only? | ||
| It evaporates from the bottom and comes around the top. | ||
| That would be kind of cool if half the planet was dirt and half the planet was water. | ||
| Kind of weird. | ||
| Why would that be any weirder than what it is now? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, yeah, right, of course. | ||
| Because of all that rock, there's no way it can lay flat like that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What do they think lava is? | ||
| Molten rock? | ||
| I mean, they just think it's buoyant because it heats up and becomes less dense than the other rock. | ||
| But why is it down there in the bottom? | ||
| Why is it core of the earth? | ||
| The fires of hell are heating it up. | ||
| Oh, the fires of hell. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Tennis ball? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, why doesn't water fly off the earth? | |
| It spins like this. | ||
| Because the force is spinning. | ||
| This is a fundamental misunderstanding that people have. | ||
| They misinterpret angular velocity and linear velocity. | ||
| We know the Earth is spinning around a thousand miles an hour. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they think like if this ball was spinning around at a thousand miles an hour, then the water would fly off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's not flying off because of the surface of the ball going a thousand miles an hour. | ||
| It's flying off because it's rotating like 50 times a second or whatever, 10 times a second. | ||
| It's the angular velocity which creates the outward force. | ||
| Linear velocity has nothing to do with it. | ||
| It's only when you're actually turning. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So it's the rate of your angular velocity. | ||
| Now the Earth rotates once every 24 hours, so it's going really, really, really slow. | ||
| Put that back up, please. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's the exact same force acting on the Earth, because the Earth rotates once every 24 hours. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jamie, go to that photo on the upper left-hand side. | ||
| Scroll up. | ||
| Satan's globe earth lies. | ||
| This bottom picture here is a great example of how ridiculous things are. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Satan's globe earth lied. | ||
| The big bang and evolution explained life. | ||
| You were an accident. | ||
| We evolved from primordial soup. | ||
| We are specks in the universe. | ||
| Some people are more valuable than others. | ||
| Foundation for the new world order. | ||
| You are worthless. | ||
| Next image. | ||
| God's flat earth. | ||
| Creation is the only explanation. | ||
| We are incredibly valuable. | ||
| The Bible is 100% true. | ||
| We live on an unmoving, firm foundation. | ||
| You were created by God, in all caps, God loves you. | ||
| Oh, well, that seems better. | ||
| That seems better. | ||
| That's probably a true believer, though. | ||
| Oh yeah, you think? | ||
| That image there is a good example of things that are completely ridiculous on the flat earth. | ||
| You see they have the sun on one side and it's illuminating half the earth and the way it's curved like that. | ||
| They think the sun's way closer too, right? | ||
| Yeah, they think the sun acts like a spotlight. | ||
| But if you look at that, it's not acting like a spotlight. | ||
| It's illuminating all of the ice wall. | ||
| Where's the ice wall? | ||
| It's the white stuff around the side. | ||
| Oh, that's the ice wall? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| Yeah, which is actually, you know, it's just Antarctica stretched into this projection. | ||
| Why doesn't one of those dickheads get in a boat and take a photo of that wall? | ||
| Well, that's another thing. | ||
| Like, they think they've got guards all the way around it. | ||
| Oh, there are guards. | ||
| Yeah, but that's, what is that? | ||
| That's like 36,000 miles. | ||
| Of guards? | ||
| Of guards. | ||
| In the ocean and on a freezing ice wall. | ||
| It's like, you know, the wall from, what is it, Game of Thrones. | ||
| It's at 36,000 miles of it. | ||
| Well, they make up facts and then they use those facts to kind of state their point. | ||
| Like, you can't, it's illegal to fly over Antarctica. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's kind of based on like half, well, a quarter truth. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So they only allow four engine jets, like 747s, A380s to fly. | ||
| So all those flights that you see that go over at the Antarctic ice, they're all 747s. | ||
| Yeah, because if it fucks up, you're doomed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a long way with nothing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| See, now, I wonder how many people are listening to this and it's turning their mind. | ||
| Do you think it's possible? | ||
| Do you think there's got to be a spectrum of people that believe? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There is. | |
| There's a spectrum, and some people will be turned. | ||
| This will cause a lot of ruffled feathers. | ||
| Are you ready for the shill tweets? | ||
| Are you ready? | ||
| Will you wear a round earth shill shirt if we get you one? | ||
| At youngjammy.com? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I actually don't like... | ||
| It's very comfortable. | ||
| I know it's all in good humor. | ||
| It's very soft. | ||
| You don't like joking around about it? | ||
| People take it seriously. | ||
| Oh yeah, but those people are assholes. | ||
| I had a t-shirt that said, I make stuff up, that my wife got me because I'm always making stupid jokes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And someone saw a photograph of me online wearing this t-shirt that said, I make stuff up. | ||
| And it said, there's Mick West, I'm missing. | ||
| And they were completely serious. | ||
| Yeah, but they're stupid. | ||
| That's part of the problem, isn't it? | ||
| It makes it harder to reach people if they're pointing. | ||
| It's a distraction or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, I guess I hear what you're saying. | ||
| I'm pretty easy to dismiss. | ||
| They always say that you work for the government. | ||
| That's the big one. | ||
| You're a government employee. | ||
| You made video games, right? | ||
| Yeah, I'm a retired video game programmer. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But you're living the goddamn American dream. | ||
| That's what you're doing. | ||
| You made enough money to not have to slave away. | ||
| And these assholes want to think that you're some government shill, like the governments involved in the Tony Hawk video games. | ||
| They recruited you. | ||
| They said, listen, I know you're doing a good job making these video games. | ||
| We've got a better place for you. | ||
| What you need to do is cover up the flat earth and chemtrails and UFOs. | ||
| And what else? | ||
| What else you cover up? | ||
|
unidentified
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Morgellons? | |
| Morgellons disease is a fascinating one. | ||
| It's one of the ones that we investigated on that show. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he was talking himself about his own hallucinations, that he sees things like crawling across his eyes that he knows aren't there. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| He was a very rational guy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And sometimes these pathogens will interact with each other in very different ways. | ||
| And that, you know, some are more extreme, some are less extreme. | ||
| But he's like, you might be dealing with hundreds of different pathogens that are unnecessary. | ||
| Undiscovered or undefined. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He was very reasonable and he made a ton of sense. | ||
| Because we went to this Morgellons convention, and we talked to all these people that had it, and they fucking all have Lyme disease. | ||
| They all have it. | ||
| Well, they all get tested positive for it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For Lyme disease? | ||
| Yeah, it gives a lot of false positives. | ||
| There's a bunch of different tests. | ||
| But there's so many people with Lyme disease, which is why it's interesting because Lyme disease is... | ||
| I know a lot of people that have gotten it from ticks, and it's devastating. | ||
| It's a real thing. | ||
| It's devastating. | ||
| There's a lot of controversy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So there's some dispute. | ||
| There is something to speak, but let me clarify from people that I know that have gotten it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They say, oh, there's nothing you don't have to worry about. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, he was devastated. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Steven Kotler had a full year where he was undiagnosed, and his body just was ravaged by this stuff. | ||
| I used to write a lot about Morgellons, which is, you know, related to Lyme disease. | ||
| And one of the reasons I stopped doing it was that it's such a personal thing for the people involved. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I just really wasn't comfortable, like... | ||
| Calling them liars. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they just get very upset, and you really weren't reaching a lot of them. | ||
| So eventually I stopped that, and I moved on to chemtrails, which I thought would be more reasonable people involved. | ||
| But... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| They just are absolutely convinced that the government is spraying things. | ||
| I had a conversation with a friend of mine. | ||
| I was like, that has got to be the most ineffective use of money ever. | ||
| They're spraying things, and what the fuck has changed? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Nothing's changed. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, we know that, but they don't think that's what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's established science. | ||
| Well, the lack of flatness of the earth is established science that's been going on for a real long time. | ||
| And people just pick and choose which science they want to use. | ||
| What keeps you going with all this stuff, with running Metabunk? | ||
| Well, I enjoy doing these little experiments. | ||
| I do a lot of stuff like going into my backyard and testing things out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The moon landing has lots of fake shadow claims made about it. | ||
| What do you think happened at Roswell? | ||
| Roswell, New Mexico, that's the big one. | ||
| July 1947, I think a UFO crashed. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's what they said it was. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So they came in, they picked up the remains of the balloon, and then the story just took off. | ||
| That's a funny one, though, boy. | ||
| That's made a whole town famous for UFOs. | ||
| If you go there now, they have alien-themed gift shops. | ||
| They're milking it. | ||
| It's like you said earlier, people make money out of something, and then they get stuck into that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| What? | ||
| The chemtrail thing? | ||
|
unidentified
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Anything. | |
| Anything. | ||
| UFO, chemtrail. | ||
| The thing is, with UFOs, there's always things that you can't explain. | ||
| There are things that are unidentified, but there's usually plausible explanations for them. | ||
| Whenever I'm given something, like a mysterious thing, I like to list all the explanations that I can think of. | ||
| Maybe none of them are perfect fits that you can guarantee this is what the explanation is. | ||
| But it being a ghost or an alien spacecraft, as an explanation, is usually pretty close to the bottom. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or in between that, oh, it's something else that we don't know what it is. | ||
| Is there any evidence, like, in terms of UFOs that's interesting? | ||
| I haven't, you know, to be honest, I haven't really looked into the whole sphere of UFOology. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| These are like the top 10 best cases and this was like number two or something. | ||
| What about Bob Lazar? | ||
| You ever looking at that guy? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Bob Lazar is a guy who supposedly worked at Area 51 and became a whistleblower. | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| But, you know, a lot of... | ||
| It's something you see in the 9-11 community is... | ||
| And in the chemtrail community is people kind of becoming celebrities. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And there's been lots of examples in the past... | ||
| Of people who made claims like this and then eventually owned up to it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they convinced a large number of people, including Arthur Conan Doyle. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The guy who wrote Tarzan? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He believed in the fairies? | ||
| No, the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes. | ||
| Did Arthur Conan Doyle write Tarzan? | ||
| No, that was William Burroughs? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
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Look at that. | |
| It's obviously fake. | ||
| They cut him out of a magazine or something. | ||
| And then they owned up, like, basically on their deathbed, like, 70 years later. | ||
| But they were milking it. | ||
| Because once they get into it, it's embarrassing to admit that you made something up. | ||
| Plus, you're getting all this attention. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And in some cases, you're getting money. | ||
| I don't know if they get any money. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When I was growing up, that was put out as being a genuine fairy sighting. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you believe it? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Well, I probably did when I was like, you know, 13 or 6. But yeah, people get sucked in and they become celebrities. | ||
| And then they, like... | ||
| There it is. | ||
| TNA reveals the first time letter which ended the Cottingly hoax. | ||
| Yeah, I went to school just behind the house. | ||
| So for 70 years this lady kept the lie? | ||
| Yeah, there was two of them I think. | ||
| What a bitch. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And yet this was heralded as one of the most important cases of ufology. | ||
| You know the guy I'm talking about? | ||
| I forget the guy's name. | ||
| There was a thing called the Montauk Chronicles. | ||
| It was like an island where they have an underground thing where they were rumored to be experimenting on children. | ||
| Plum Island. | ||
| No, it wasn't Plum Island. | ||
| But anyway, there was something like this guy basically said he had all these remembered memories of working on the secret government base. | ||
| And he became pretty famous and wrote loads of books. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I think he might have just been a bit crazy. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of that out there, for sure. | ||
| Is there anything else in your pile of notes over there that you wanted to alert people to? | ||
| I think the thing I would really encourage people to do is look closely at things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If Eric Dubé says something like, you know, the horizon always rises to eye level, this is something you can actually check. | ||
| Now, it's not easy. | ||
| You've got to be reasonably careful with this $2 level, but you can actually check to see whether that is correct. | ||
| 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, and if you zoom in, they will reappear. | ||
| It doesn't actually happen. | ||
| When you zoom in on something, all it does is it makes the picture bigger, makes the image bigger. | ||
| And you can check this for yourself. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you can do it with Catalina. | ||
| You can turn around and look at Catalina, and you can zoom in on that. | ||
| And you can see that two-thirds of Catalina Island is missing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But I think what's really going on is a thought process. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They want to be in the know. | ||
| And it's very intoxicating. | ||
| And that's what really this stuff's all about, more than anything. | ||
| It's about the way the mind works. | ||
| It's about the way your mind can be tricked. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And go, hey, you wrote a bunch of stuff that's not true. | ||
| No, that doesn't have to happen anymore. | ||
| Now you can just make a video. | ||
| And it can be really well done with good music and good images. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's why whenever someone sends me something, I always say, just Google that, whatever you sent me, and then debunked. | ||
| Just do that first. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then look at both sides. | ||
| You know, but people don't want that debunk. | ||
| That debunk's not sexy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The conspiracy's sexy. | ||
| I know people are turned off by the debunking thing. | ||
| Yeah, they hate it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's boring. | ||
| YouTube videos are fun. | ||
| You know, you watch a YouTube video about dinosaurs being fake, that's fun. | ||
| You know, like, what? | ||
| They're fake? | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| They fucking got me. | ||
| It's just like watching a YouTube video about Roswell rods or any of these other silly things. | ||
| I'm kind of excited about the eclipse. | ||
| I think that's an opportunity to get people excited about the sun. | ||
| You're thinking like a scientist, though. | ||
| You're not thinking like a loon. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I get excited about the eclipse, but not everyone does. | ||
| Well, it's exciting. | ||
| It is exciting. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's pretty rare. | |
| A solar eclipse. | ||
| The moon's going to come in front of the sun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When does that happen? | ||
| Check it. | ||
| August 21st. | ||
| It's going to be totality in Oregon, but you'll be able to see it from all of... | ||
| Oh, a lot of people are going to go to Oregon just to see it? | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to Oregon. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Wow, look at you. | ||
| You don't fuck around. | ||
| I have relatives. | ||
| Oh, an excuse? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're going to try to schedule some sort of a dinner at the very time. | ||
| We're going to be out of the campsite looking at the eclipse. | ||
| Anything else? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pfft. | |
| I know, it's all the same. | ||
| Oh, uh... | ||
| I know, it's kind of complicated, but let me just run it by you real quick. | ||
| Maps. | ||
| Have you heard of the Mercator projection? | ||
| No. | ||
| The standard map that you see in schoolrooms has this really stretched out Iceland, Greenland. | ||
| It looks kind of distorted. | ||
| It's not like the real world. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, this is a type of navigation called rum line navigation that's been used for like, yeah, hundreds of years. | ||
| 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, it would get you to that destination using rum navigation. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you're saying that the image of the continents is in some way stretched out and distorted? | ||
| Yeah, if you take a globe... | ||
| Why do they do that? | ||
| Well, if you take a globe, you can't just put it onto a flat surface. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you're going to have to distort it somehow. | ||
| So there's various different ways people use of putting it on the surface. | ||
| You could just take your latitude and longitude and just map it into a rectangle, and that works out fairly well. | ||
| That's a nice thing. | ||
| That's called an equirectangular map. | ||
| But the most common map that was used before, let's say 30 years ago, was this Mercator projection. | ||
| 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, that's the heading I've got to go in, and so you head off in that heading. | ||
| Now, that doesn't take you in a straight line. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I really don't understand what you're saying. | ||
| But all it is is that there's this method of navigation that people use that relies upon the Earth being a globe. | ||
| And it's this really, really simple map that is in thousands of homes, millions of homes and schools that everybody uses. | ||
| And you can see that on the map, the lines get smaller towards the top and they get smaller towards the bottom. | ||
| And if people are doing a voyage around the world, they're going to use this map. | ||
| And it only works. | ||
| It only works on the globe world. | ||
| That's another issue, too. | ||
| People have circumnavigated the globe. | ||
| Yeah, well, they think they just sail around the outside, which, of course, would take a lot longer. | ||
| That's another thing, like Australia. | ||
| Have you seen Australia on the Flat Earth map? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It's like, I don't know, you see it on that image that was up earlier. | ||
| It's like this kind of squish thing. | ||
| You know what Australia looks like? | ||
| It's more or less like this. | ||
| On the Flat Earth, it's kind of like this. | ||
| It's all stretched out. | ||
| It's like twice as long and half as wide. | ||
| Have you seen the conspiracy theory that Australia is Scooby-Doo? | ||
| No. | ||
| Scooby Doo's head. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| It's just a joke. | ||
| Italy is a boot. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of those joke memes. | ||
| Yeah, so the distances between places in Australia don't work. | ||
| Is that the Flat Earth map? | ||
| Yeah, that's the Flat Earth map, and that's Australia. | ||
| And Australia looks nothing like that. | ||
| And if you lived in Australia, you would know it looks nothing at all like that. | ||
| It's just hilarious that there's so many versions of this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And the idea that... | ||
| How do they know it's an ice wall? | ||
| Like, where's the pictures? | ||
|
unidentified
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There's pictures of ice shelves. | |
| From Antarctica. | ||
| So they think that's the whole wall? | ||
| They think that's the wall, yeah. | ||
| So you'll see memes like, yeah, Globertha's be like, what ice wall? | ||
| Suck on this. | ||
| And they'll show you the picture of an ice shelf, which is like 200 feet. | ||
| I wish you could fly over. | ||
| Well, that's the mentality, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It ties into misconceptions that are natural. | ||
| A funny thing, when I worked in the video game industry, there was platform games. | ||
| You jump from little platforms, and sometimes you have platforms that move around, and you jump from Mario-type things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sometimes you jump up and you move with the platform and you land on it. | ||
| Depends on what the programmer did. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you should be able to, like, you should be able to, you know, this is the way we should program the physics. | ||
| And then my friend Matt said, no, that's wrong. | ||
| And he couldn't convince this other guy. | ||
| So eventually what happened? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because he's moving the same speed as the truck, so he jumps up and then he lands back in the truck. | ||
| And this is illustrating that this video game programmer had the exact same misconception that the flat earthers do. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, my point is that anyone can make misconceptions about physics like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's easy to get sucked into that. | ||
| And it's actually quite hard to break them. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And quite possibly die, but still let him do the experiment. | ||
| Well, let's end it on that because this is literally hurting my brain. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But what you're doing is very important, and I really want to thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Your website is very important. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for being on, too. | ||
| All right, folks. | ||
| That's it for the week. |
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