Episode 178: Flat Earth Ain't Going Away feat Kelly Weill
The earth is flat. We debunk Kelly Weill's new book 'Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything'.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 178 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Flat Earth Ain't Going Away episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Fields and Travis View.
A long, long time ago, on Episode 17 of this podcast, we covered the Flat Earth Conspiracy Theory and spoke with Kelly Weil, a reporter at the Daily Beast, about her experiences attending one of the movement's conferences.
That was November 2018, and lots has changed since then.
COVID-19 swept the world, acting as a wake-up call for flat-earthers who promptly fled the movement in favor of rationalism and science.
Many posted public apologies and started following Travis underscore View on Twitter.
Today, the belief that the Earth is flat feels like a strange and distant memory of the before times, when we were still gawking at the shadows on the wall.
Having exited the cave, we now stand arm-in-arm with our vaccinated ex-Flat Earther brethren, gazing at what we all agree is a slightly curved horizon.
Travis View woke up.
The lingering smile on his face turned to horror.
It had all been a dream.
Flat Earthers were still out there thriving, and Kelly Weil had even written a book about them.
Oh fuck, what time was it?
He was supposed to be interviewing her in a few minutes!
Travis scrambled to his desk, tussled his golden hair just so, and prepared to find out about the Flat Earth Movement, where it had started, and where it was going next.
Hopefully Julian had written an intro for this shit.
Probably not.
How dare Jake be preparing for his wedding, leaving Travis alone with the least good host.
Oh, how he hated Julian, Travis thought, as he picked his nose and distractedly ate what he found.
Yum, yum, yum, he said to himself.
All right, listen, listen.
I just got back from giving a lecture at the Carnegie Mellon Ideas Conference.
I come back to be treated like this.
Okay, sorry.
Especially here with our much requested repeat guest.
Yes, we are joined now by Kelly Weil.
She's a reporter for the Daily Beast and author of the book Off the edge, flat earthers, conspiracy culture, and why people will believe anything.
Kelly, thanks again for coming to talk with us despite Julie, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me, and thanks for taking the time from picking your nose.
Well, yeah, well.
There is no safe space here, Travis.
I guess not.
Now, yeah, I mean, I read your book, which was really, really fascinating.
Obviously, I understand the interest in conspiracism generally, but I have to say I've kind of shied away from diving too deeply into Flat Earth because it was a little out there even for me.
So, how did you stumble upon this conspiracy theory and the community that believes in it, and what inspired you to dive really deeply into it?
Yeah, I mean, I've always been interested in fringe internet ideologies.
I was a 4chan lurker in high school, which probably did wonders to my psyche.
And as I went through journalism school in the early stages of my career, that niche interest really turned into something that newsrooms Actually needed.
So I've always been watching weird people online.
And as I started focusing more on the far right and far right media ecosystems in the early Trump presidency, I started noticing people on outright extremist forums posting about flat earth.
And I'm like, that is just like a step too weird.
Surely you don't actually believe Earth is flat.
Like, you must just be memeing on me.
And so I spent a lot of time looking into it, and it turned out they were dead serious, and they've only got more serious since then.
Yeah.
You know, there was also, you know, a bit of a schism in the, you know, the QAnon community, which we covered all the way back in 2018 over the flat Earth issue, because there are some people—it was supposed to be—QAnon was supposed to be this big tent movement, but even flat Earth for that community was like, oh, come on, guys.
You're making us look dumb.
Too far.
Too far.
Totally.
Um, and I mean, what I love about Flat Earth is it's almost this, um, it's like a case study on what people will believe because it is, I think, one of the weirdest things that you could pose to a person.
It's so objectively incorrect that if you accept that, you can accept just about anything.
And although there's that schism that you're talking about, which was so funny to see Q himself disavow Flat Earth, I've seen QAnoners make very deliberate outreach to Flat Earthers.
And in 2019, I was at a Flat Earth conference and there were these two women walking around handing out QAnon jewelry.
And they're like, oh, you know, we're not really here for Flat Earth.
We just think these people might be fellow travelers.
So it's, um, it's a real push-pull force.
And QAnon, like, has its eye on Flat Earth, whether Flat Earth wants it or not.
Yeah, it's funny.
It's like, I don't like what you believe.
But since you believe something that ludicrous, you'll probably be open to what I have on offer.
Absolutely.
And they were really frank with me.
They're like, yeah, we took this to a gun show, a Trump rally, and this Flat Earth Conference is the best reception we've had so far.
They are a really good audience.
I have to give it to them.
You know, it's like the it's like people who laugh generously.
You know, you have to appreciate this type of person because put in the right context, they're just positive.
They're just pure positivity.
And, you know, instead, here we are.
Yeah, it's the only time I've been offered free jewelry in God knows how long, so... Was it Shungite?
It was, uh, it was like those Livestrong bracelets, but with Pandora jewels hanging off them with a little Q. Okay.
Yeah, in the book you go over this really fascinating history of the Flat Earth Movement, the modern Flat Earth Movement, and it is, you know, richer and more and crazier than I thought it was.
And one could argue that we have sort of pre-Marx socialists to blame for Flat Earthers.
Yeah, you talk about sort of this early 19th century socialist commune in England called Manea Fenn.
And it was very short-lived, only lasted less than two years, apparently, and it might have been forgotten to everyone except for, you know, a handful of historians.
But one participant in this commune was a man named Samuel Burley Raubautham, who would go on to become a pioneer of flat-earth theory.
So could you talk about, like, his beliefs and, I guess, the general conditions that gave rise to, I guess, the sort of the first sort of real modern flat-earther?
Sure.
So the general conditions are interesting to me as someone who loves, you know, just forgotten lefty blood feuds.
This was early 1800s Britain.
People were still getting over the effects of the first industrial revolution there.
There was rising income inequality.
There was a lot of industrialization.
A lot of Uncertainty about how people would continue as workers, but not just that how they would continue as people and what their lives meant in a changing world.
In that era of flux, I think people are very receptive to alternate theories and Alternate ideas of meaning.
And so a lot of different theories popped up, not just conspiracy theories, but economic theories.
There was a pre-Marxist socialist movement called the Owenites, and they believed in living communally and farming communally.
It was a Interesting idea, except that they ran it really badly.
One of the leaders of one of these attempted communes was a guy named Samuel Rawbotham.
He effectively ran this commune into the ground.
It was terrible.
Everyone was drunk all the time.
They had a hermit who lived in a cave and they couldn't really find good work for him.
It ended badly.
But his next couple career pivots were, I think, really recognizable to people who study the modern ecosystem of weird grifts.
He went from preaching kind of a fringe political ideology to selling Miracle Cures.
He was trying to sell like trumped up Dr. Pepper basically and saying that this would cure all your ills and then from there he went on to pushing what we now recognize as Flat Earth Theory.
He started writing these pamphlets saying that Look around you.
Do you see the curvature of the Earth?
Well, maybe there's something to that.
Maybe people are lying to you about the Earth's shape.
And that became a very lucrative job for him.
He went from this nobody who had led a failed commune to a pretty esteemed lecturer, at least in what we would now recognize as the fringes.
So That's where this theory that now has so many adherents emerged from.
It's really one guy's work.
Yeah, it is crazy.
And I feel like he, I mean, he pioneered, like, a lot of the things that we see in, like, even, like, the 21st century Flat Earth Serve community.
One of them is the miracle cure thing.
Now, it isn't obvious that belief in, you know, the shape of the Earth would be connected to belief in, you know, the miracle cures, in his case, belief that basically soda pop would make you immortal.
So, what is the connection there?
The belief that, you know, that we live in a dome and the belief that there's some sort of secret magic cure to all disease?
I think miracle cures and conspiracy theories operate under a lot of the same logic.
I mean, people don't buy into conspiracy theories because they say, what's the weirdest thing that I could talk about at the Thanksgiving table?
They buy into it because it's offering them an alternate explanation of facts that seem uncomfortable to them.
And that works Very efficiently in the medical field.
People don't want to die, they don't want to be sick, and they also don't want to pay a million dollars to go see their doctor or take some medicine that might work but tastes yucky.
So they very often pivot to, um, cures that are too good to be true.
To a doctor who says that you, uh, you can cure your asthma just by guzzling Mountain Dew, which is effectively what Rob Botham was preaching at the time.
It's a very similar play on our willingness to believe comforting information, even when it defies scientific fact.
Something else that Ralph Baltham pioneered was using scientific experiments, or at least trying scientific experiments, in an attempt to support his nonsense theories.
And he had a few of them.
So what exactly did he do to try to establish scientifically that the Earth had no curve and it was totally flat?
I love this because like Rob Otham was sort of a proto-YouTuber.
You can absolutely see the kind of guy that he was if he were, you know, dropped off 150 years later.
On his commune was next to a canal that was about six miles long and really, really straight and flat.
There were no bends in it and people called it the Bedford Level because it looked just like a straight line.
He would take a telescope and go wading in there and look forward and say, oh, I can see people or I can see boats well past where the Earth's curvature should obscure them.
He would lay down on the ice during winter and say he could see ice skaters at the end of the canal and he shouldn't be able to do that.
We can pretty much attribute this to him lying or him being mistaken because everybody can observe the Earth's curvature over a couple miles.
It only takes a couple miles for the Earth to curve about like eight feet down, at which point you wouldn't be able to see an ice skater.
But that didn't deter Rob Botham and he published these findings in an ever-growing collection of Flat Earth writing that got pretty popular and got a lot of readers.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to answer the question, why am I going uphill in direction of the horizon?
Does that mean maybe the Earth is actually, has a kind of depression at the center?
You know, like, is it a donut?
And then later, I'm going down, but only for a bit.
Then I'm going back up.
And I'm still trying to kind of compute all this stuff, you know?
My background is in liberal arts.
For what it's worth, I've heard similar arguments from people who say that they are survey landscapers.
Like I've been to flat earth conferences and I remember this guy is like, uh, yeah, I used to contract with NASA and frankly, I think they're lying about the shape of the earth so that we believe in aliens so that when Jesus comes down, we'll mistake him as an alien and we'll shoot him.
So, you know, you're not alone in that argument.
I like that.
So it's like the idea is that the instruments are created as a kind of elaborate fence for thought.
It's like we've created instruments we know will keep returning the same globe lie.
Maybe we can get it to run Doom someday.
It's like we could repurpose it.
Yeah, I mean, why not?
Listen, when you cast out the shape of the Earth, you're really making a lot of creative space for yourself.
You can really do anything.
I think that's some of the fun of it.
Yeah.
Yo, one of my favorite characters from the early, I guess, pioneering flat earthers that you talk about is Lady Blount, and she wrote an amazing book.
What?
I'm smoking on that Lady Blount.
No, no, no.
Okay, you'll love this because it's actually pronounced Lady Blunt.
No, I—really?
Because I deliberately didn't pronounce it that way, because there's no way it's Lady Blunt.
And it's a very polite American sensibility, but no, it's literally Lady Blunt.
All right, so Lady Blunt, pioneering flat earther, wrote an amazing book about how basically she, Poorly, you know, uh, disguised herself would become, you know, a, uh, important flat earther.
And they also, she also wrote some of the first, uh, songs in support of flat earth in this book.
So you could talk a little about her cause she is great.
Lady Blunt fucking rocks.
I have some harsh words for some Flat Earthers in here.
Nary a harsh word for Lady Blunt.
If we're going to keep mapping old Flat Earthers onto new archetypes, she is the rich lady with too much time on her hands.
She married a wealthy guy a lot older than her, had some issues with him, and set out to find herself and landed in the Flat Earth community.
She believed herself a real musical talent.
She would make all these songs increasingly about Flat Earth, and then she wrote this incredible Flat Earth novel.
Like, there's nothing contemporary like this as far as I know, and it's about It's so shady.
So she had all these marriage troubles and it's about like this beautiful thinly disguised version of herself who runs out on her terrible mean husband who has all the same characteristics of her real husband.
And she gets shot and then she recovers and she becomes this flat earth lecturer and all the chapters are just her lecturing about flat earth and people in the audience being like, by God, you're right!
Why?
That lady's right!
That lady is correct!
And she had, like, she would include sheet music for the songs that she wrote, like, in this book.
So your reading is like, oh, fuck, do I have to get a piano?
And okay, I'm gonna figure out what she's saying.
It's, um, it's good.
It's like, um, it's a multimedia work.
It's before it's time.
She had many Lady Blunt ideas.
She had this idea for a flying machine that was like valves that opened and closed and you would, like, flap it around and it would fly.
She's a, yeah, she's, she's a pioneer.
Love her.
If we still had the Medicis around, like, she would have been Leonardo da Vinci.
Yeah!
But unfortunately, we failed.
We failed.
The education system has failed, and we no longer have the excess money of aristocratic times to properly fund someone like Lady Blunt.
Yeah.
Return.
Return spelled with a B, obviously.
Totally.
You also talk about, you know, the development of sort of Flat Earth through the 20th century.
And it seems to have, like, you know, been kind of, like, fallen in and out of favor among kooks, especially through, like, the Flat Earth Society, you know, prior to the internet.
So I guess, you know, I suppose can you talk a little bit about, like, you know, some of the, I guess, the dark days of the Flat Earth movement before its modern renaissance?
Yeah.
The flat earth movement definitely fell out of favor.
I think part of what uh killed it at times was the fact that we could go to outer space and we could take pictures of around earth and for a couple decades flat earthers didn't really have a solid rebuttal to that.
You know there were a few people saying these are fake pictures or paintings or whatever um but there were always people keeping the flat earth forever alive.
One of my favorites um Couples who was there in the lean times for Flat Earth were a couple named Charles and Marjorie Johnson.
They took over the Flat Earth Society from a UK institution, brought it to the US, and they lived in the desert and wrote a little Flat Earth zine that they sent out into the late 90s.
I think Charles finally died in 2001.
And They were the stewards of this thing.
They had all the old records.
They had the physical mailing lists.
And that's the kind of like cool archival stuff that nearly disappears.
And I think not many people are interested in preserving it.
But from the ashes, a new Flat Earth society has digitized a lot of it.
And for absolute freaks like me, it's a really fun thing to go look through and see where this movement has been.
Yeah, and of course it had a revival, the Flat Earth Movement, thanks to the internet.
One of the many things we can thank the internet for.
And in particular, it seems like a big driving force was YouTube, which sort of like, I guess, coalesced and like helped a lot of people find, I think you also mentioned that like a lot of people that you spoke to who are contemporary flat earthers became flat earthers because of YouTube.
So how did, you know, I guess, YouTube specifically, the internet generally sort of make modern Flat Earthism?
Yeah, I mean, so much of this is very specifically YouTube's fault.
And I mean, speaking technically, YouTube has this recommendation algorithm, and we all know it.
You know, you're watching like basketball videos and suddenly you're watching Space Jam and suddenly
you're watching like, you know, cartoons from the 80s. What YouTube does is it says, "Okay,
what are they watching and what might they want to keep watching?" It turns out that people want
to watch conspiracy videos. And I think we can all kind of relate to that on a certain level
because they're really interesting.
Even if you don't agree at all with the uh the tagline of a video.
If it's like yeah earth is flat and it's two in the morning and you're like yeah that's batshit I'm gonna click on that you know straight into my veins.
We all do that.
So YouTube's algorithm started picking up that that's what people are going to click on and flat earth videos, which prior to 2014 were really rare, started getting pushed way up in recommendations.
You could be watching a more tame conspiracy video like on Fluoride or whatever and start getting flat earth recommendations or as is in the case of some flat earthers I've spoken to you can be watching just like videos about astronomy and get recommendations for flat earth.
So there became these two factors where um people started learning about flat earth and started getting very genuinely into it and making their own videos and people started getting very cynically into flat earth and realizing that if I make a flat earth video even kind of in jest Uh, it's going to get me those sweet, sweet, uh, clicks.
One thing that I remember from your original reporting around this was that Jake Paul had shown up and was doing exactly that kind of almost like jokingly presenting himself as someone who's considering flat earth.
So is, you know, I mean, so that just hasn't changed.
And that essentially is like the model for it, right?
Clout chasers.
Yeah, it was Logan Paul, please.
There's some nuance in the Paul brother.
Apologies, sorry.
I couldn't tell you which one is which, but it was... Is it the one who got punched in the face repeatedly or the one who got the Pokemon card faked and ripped off?
It was the one who filmed a dead person in a forest.
Oh, good, good, good.
This was this was his rebound video.
But no, you're totally right to flag that because that's exactly what he was doing.
So I ran into Logan Paul at this Flat Earth conference where he was filming.
He was making what he called a mockumentary, right, where he would pretend to be a Flat Earther.
But several things got my goat about this.
And one was that he was really playing with Flat Earthers hearts.
Like he got on stage and was like, I'm Logan Paul.
I'm starting to come out of the Flat Earth closet.
And these people were like, fuck Yes.
This is what I've been waiting for.
This is going to catapult the movement into reality.
Like, this was their getting invited on Oprah moment.
And of course, he releases the mockumentary documentary and his character in it.
At the end comes out, he's like, guys, I'm just kidding.
I'm not a flat earther.
It's like, well, damage done, dude.
Logan, now do the Jewish question, Logan.
Christ, man!
Let's just run down the list.
You know what?
You get that engagement wherever it's coming from.
Jesus Christ.
But yeah, sorry, I interrupted you.
You were talking about the evolution there.
No, that's pretty much the logical end point, so I'm glad we reached it.
Yeah, it was interesting because it seems like the people at this Flat Earth conference, they were welcoming of Logan's presence and they thought like, oh, here's someone with a big sort of platform coming to us and now we're being taken more seriously.
And really, Logan Paul was just taking them all for a ride.
Yeah.
Yeah, I thought that was pretty shitty.
I mean, listen, I know he's not a journalist.
Like, I know we come at these things differently.
And, like, when I go to a flat-earth conference, I'm really upfront with people.
I'm like, I'm a journalist.
I don't agree with you.
Let's talk anyway.
And people still do that.
You don't need to fucking lie to people.
Like, they'll talk to you anyway.
Well, it's because there would be no headline about, like, you know, Kelly Weil is now a flat earther.
But there would be with Paul, and that's the big difference there, is that he instantly leveraged his visibility, his clout, to kind of make this something that would raise their spirits.
Whereas if Travis Yu showed up and said the same thing, they'd be like, cool man, who are you?
Yeah, no, it was, um, I will say not all Flat Earthers were like, instantly fooled by this, like one of their major speakers pulled out from the conference.
And then they like lied about it on stage.
They're like, Oh, he had a he had a health issue.
And he's like, No, I didn't.
I just didn't want to share a room with this fuckhead.
Um, in more polite terms, most of them are married.
Nice people.
But yeah, I mean, it's just cynical.
And I mean, it's smart cynicism because he's right.
The video got tons of views.
It's really interesting, I guess, you know, given the history, the very strange history of the Flat Earth Movement, is that how much of it is driven by biblical literalism, even though, like I said, the sort of the earliest promoters were like, you know, pre-Marx socialists and like there are other, you know, bored rich people and, you know, people who are doing this.
I mean, guess what exactly is the through line there?
People who promote strange sort of biblical literalism and also these other kooky beliefs.
Yeah, what's funny about that is there's no direct reason Flat Earth Theory needs to be religious at all.
Like, for listeners who are unfamiliar, the main claim is, you know, we live on this little pancake Earth, there's an ice wall around it, and sometimes there's a dome over top.
You don't really need to be religious for that, but a lot of um mostly very evangelical types and biblical literalists have worked it into this theory of um it's sort of like young earth creationism where the universe is actually really tiny and the view of a lot of modern flat earthers, this flat earth is all we have.
Everything is Either under the dome or not existent at all.
And so I think that works with a certain Christian cosmology.
And it does, I think, for some biblical literalists, provide a sort of a sense of safety.
I've had some people tell me that prior to Flat Earth belief, they felt literally alone in the universe, that there was this vast Extra Earth expanse and they couldn't really see themselves in it.
They couldn't see God in it.
And then when they learned that all we have is this little snow globe and God made it and it's actually very finite and you're special within its context, well, that meant something to them.
So I think that's kind of where the Bible tie-in comes for a lot of people.
Even though it doesn't need to be there, it's pretty explicit in a lot of Flat Earth writing.
You know, in your book, you also talk about how, you know, there's this commonality amongst all sort of committed conspiracy theorists, which is the sense of alienation.
We talk a lot on this show about how Cuban followers, they, you know, as a consequence of their devoted belief, they, you know, they separate from their family, their friends, you know, sometimes it costs their career and stuff.
So, like, how, I mean, how have you seen this, this play out in the Flat Earth community?
Alienation is this just unifying effect.
It's almost universal among Flat Earthers, at least Flat Earthers who have declared their beliefs outright.
It's really hard to be a Flat Earther and coexist with a lot of the world.
I mean, you're suggesting a completely alternative model of existence.
So a lot of Flat Earthers get laughed at.
Their friends make fun of them.
Their family's like, hmm, I'm gonna Take a couple steps back here.
And rather than examine their beliefs and examine the conflicts that are coming from that, people often double down.
They say, I'm being persecuted for my beliefs, or my family will eventually wake up and they'll realize that I was speaking the truth.
And in the interim, they go looking for people who will support them.
And that's always the Flat Earth community.
So people lose the grounding effect of a more stable community, a more reality-based community, and they fall further into this very small circle that says, yeah, you're right.
It's us against the world.
And you should definitely pay $250 to come to my conference next month.
Yeah, and I mean, like QAnon, it's also a very much, I guess, a content-driven community where you can sort of like, you know, like I said, upload things to YouTube and there are these, you know, these internal squabbles and friends and sort of sex that become your new social life, your new sort of understanding of how the world works.
Totally, totally.
Yeah, it's, um, I mean, the conspiracy ecosystem online, like, it really does incentivize everyone to become a creator.
People will get into Flat Earth and two weeks later, they have a channel promoting it.
Yeah, there's, I mean, there's necessarily feuds.
I mean, I want to say that, like, there's feuds because some of these folks are kind of out there, but, I mean, everybody knows each other.
I mean, necessarily, people are fucking.
People are having love triangles and jealousy and, um, also a terrible knockoff effect of this is when you have those strong feelings and, um, you know, those competing relationships and you also have a strong conspiratorial trend, the gossip is really, really mean.
Like, it's not just like, oh, she's two-faced.
It's like, no, she literally has two faces.
She's a reptile.
I can prove it.
So it's, yeah, it's catty.
I don't personally have the spine for that level of vitriol, but it's, yeah, it is gossip heaven.
Terrible.
It's like, oh, you hear, oh, yeah, she's a shapeshifter.
Don't trust her.
Now, in the book, you also devote a chapter to the life and death of prominent flat earther Mad Mike Hughes, who you were in communication with and had reported on before.
So he was an amateur rocket maker who attempted to launch himself into space to see this flat earth for himself, but this ended in tragedy in 2020.
So, I mean, could you talk a little bit about his dedication to the flat earth cause?
Totally.
Mike Hughes was someone I personally quite liked.
He was, as you say, an amateur stuntman.
He would do all kinds of crazy jumps in like steam propelled cars, then steam propelled rockets.
And his ultimate goal was to launch a steam propelled rocket, then at like the apex of its flight, deploy weather balloons that would take him all the way up into the upper layers of the atmosphere where he could take a picture of the earth It's curvature or lack thereof.
He in February 2020 was participating in a Discovery Channel show that was just encouraging people to launch themselves very high.
I have very unkind things to say about the premise of that show.
This was not the launch that was going to take him to space.
This was just trying to go very high, but according to a lot of his friends that I've Spoken to and who were present that day, they were saying that Mike was getting pretty impatient with this process.
He wanted to get this jump over with so that he could get his real project off the ground.
And potentially in that haste, he was a little more ambitious than he should have been with his launch.
He filled the rocket with more steam than he should have.
There were Concerns that he may not have addressed about the state of his launch equipment, about potentially his parachutes.
And when he launched that day, he hit a snag immediately on the launch pad.
Rocket went sideways and up and he probably would have blacked out before he started falling.
But rather than hit the parachutes like he was supposed to, the craft went right down, smashed into the desert, and he died on impact.
So this was someone who was trying to do the experiments, who was really trying to see whether Earth was round.
There has subsequently been some debate over whether he was a real flat earther.
His agent said it was an act.
His friends who were not Flat Earthers told me that he was completely committed.
That they had tried these arguments on him and he would not give up Flat Earth belief.
I know that he was very earnestly into other conspiracy theories like some sovereign citizen legal theory.
And maybe the best explanation I got from one friend was that he was kind of Flat Earth curious when he started fundraising for rockets.
And then in his process of Cozying up to Flat Earth became an earnest believer.
So there's some debate, but this is a guy who penned his name to Flat Earth and who was really, really trying to do this Flat Earth experiment and the process killed him.
Yeah, it is interesting because it is sort of a, I guess, an extension of sort of the spirit of the original sort of Flat Earth ideology, which is this kind of like super radical empiricism, which you only believe what you personally see for yourself.
And this includes the shape of the Earth.
Yeah, Rob Otham, the Flat Earth founder, called it Zeteticism.
It's knowledge proceeding from inquiry, right?
And it's not a viable scientific method.
It sounds nice, you know, only believing what you can personally prove, but the world doesn't work that way.
I need to trust that, you know, We need to have some level of trust in order to just function as, you know, rational animals.
grab a power line because I can't personally prove that it's not
delivering electricity. Like we need to have some level of trust in order to
just function as, you know, rational animals. And so this whole notion that
you can't say that earth is round because you can't personally prove it,
You can't say the earth is round because you haven't been up in outer space to witness it yourself.
I mean that's literally often, it's a fatal impulse.
You talked about, like, you know, the question about, like, you know, who exactly is sincere about, you know, their Flat Earth belief.
And this is, of course, complicated by the fact that, you know, there's a fairly healthy grifter economy in Flat Earth, as there is in QAnon, lots of conspiracism.
So, like, what exactly is their financial incentives there to promote, like, Flat Earth theory?
And do you think there are any, like, major sort of Flat Earth promoters who are really super cynical and just in it for the money?
Um, I have good reason to believe that the guy who revamped the modern flat-earth society is kind of in it for a joke.
He's not active anymore, like you can't find the guy.
I think less for profit and more for the lols and for kind of an archivalist sense of finding these old documents.
I haven't spoken to him, but I am suspicious of his actual convictions, but that's not so much a money-making device.
There are a lot of people who promote Flat Earth and will pose it as a question.
Who will make a YouTube video about it because they know it's going to get clicks.
They won't make a definitive judgment about whether Earth is round or not.
And I think that's almost as harmful as making an explicit Flat Earth video.
And More than that, there are people who have grifted onto Flat Earth from other conspiracy communities because they know that they can sell the t-shirts, that they can go to a conference and have the the merch stand, that they can have a successful Patreon.
There are also outright scammers attached to the Flat Earth movement who are scamming genuine Flat Earthers.
There have been multiple websites that promise to take people to the...
Antarctica and the much mythological South Pole, which they say, well, is an energy wall.
Maybe it can cure all diseases.
And Flat Earthers actually give these people money because they actually believe in the people cut and run with the money.
They only get a vacation out of the deal.
They just take the money.
It's terrible.
Yeah, I mean totally.
I think you should at least get to see a penguin.
Maybe not the ice wall, but you get like a little prize out of it.
No, but so there's a grift operating on a lot of levels.
Flat earthers bilking each other for money and trying to get like a super likes or whatever it's called on YouTube, you know, contributions.
And then people who are just looking at flat earthers as marks and who are, yeah, who are taking money from You know, in recent years, unfortunately, it hasn't just been sort of conspiracy theorists on YouTube who've been promoting these beliefs.
We've been seeing a handful of, like, celebrities and musicians and, you know, major public figures all of a sudden come out in support of Flat Earth.
I think the most famous recent example is NBA star Kyrie Irving.
So, like, what's happening here?
And like also I guess like why is this happening and also I guess where the sort of the downstream effects of people with such a sort of like a big platform lending legitimacy to this absolute insanity.
Totally.
Yeah, I mean, I think Akairi is as susceptible as anybody else when he's clicking around late at night.
I think he even said he got to Flat Earth via Instagram.
He was just getting served up memes and he's like, oh yeah, I can't actually refute that, which is how a lot of Flat Earthers come to the theory.
Um, it's always a little difficult to tell how genuine a celebrity is when they're promoting flat-earth belief.
I think Kyrie was genuine because he's genuinely apologized and then moved on to new interesting beliefs like his opposition to vaccines.
I think that's it?
Trax was someone who would genuinely get into flat earth.
There are other people like Tila Tequila who has billed herself as a flat earther, but she is also, um, she'll do a lot for attention.
Like I think she dressed her baby up as Hitler, uh, something like that.
So it's hard to tell how serious these people are.
What I will say though is that every time this happens the flat earth community is overjoyed because they're used to being treated as cranks.
They're used to being this weird fringe group that doesn't have anybody real in its circles.
They don't have any uh big outside celebrities.
So when you get These big names lending some kind of credibility to the movement, it's huge for them.
And it does bring more people into Flat Earth, if only because, like I've said, Flat Earth is interesting.
You hear about it and you say, what is that?
I'm gonna look it up.
And that happens every time there's a Flat Earth celebrity.
Yeah, you know, I mean, Kyrie, he fortunately backed down from that, but he can, like I mentioned, he went on to promote other arguably more dangerous beliefs.
But, you know, do you think there's any value to, I guess, engaging in flat earthers in, like, debate, trying to present sort of evidence?
You know, this is always the big question because, you know, the saying always goes, you know, you can't rationalize someone out of a belief that they didn't come to for the sake of reason in the first place.
Do people actually come out of this due to rational arguments?
Has that happened?
It has happened.
I don't tend to argue with flat earthers for two reasons.
While writing this book, I kind of felt like I was doing sort of an anthropological work where I didn't really want to disturb anyone.
And also, I often feel like it's useless.
I don't have the personal relationships and I think the trust That is often necessary when pulling somebody out of a fringe belief.
I think when people see me as a journalist they imply kind of an adversarial relationship and I get that.
But that's not to say that people can't come out of fringe beliefs even just by being shown evidence.
I for this book spoke to multiple ex-flat earthers and while their experiences aren't representative of everyone else, a lot of them opened their eyes after trying to do the experiments.
This one guy, he bought another flat earther's telescope and was trying to see the lack of the horizon and he just couldn't get it to work.
He's like, why can't I see as far as I'd like to?
I should be able to see well beyond the horizon here.
And he brought those findings to globe earthers in his life and they said, yeah, you can't see that far because the globe is obstructing your view.
Welcome to the round earth.
And that was enough for him.
Um, to have seen the evidence with his own eyes and to have received a pretty compassionate explanation from people that he trusted in his life.
I also think that element of welcoming someone back is important.
Not to make fun of someone for having gone on this tangent, but to make space for them to come back to the real world.
Because a lot of people are just worried about being made fun of on their return.
Yeah, I mean, this is I mean, this is something we see a lot with QAnon is like, all of a sudden, you know, you people think that they have esoteric knowledge, and they, you know, they see the world more clearly than the rest of us blue pelt normies.
And they have a new social circle.
And all of a sudden, there's, you know, they're, they're old, Maybe people in their old life are making fun of them.
There's just not a lot of off-ramps to QAnon.
And I think that this must be the same way with Flat Earth.
It's not enough for them to perhaps see the evidence with their own eyes.
There needs to be some kind of off-ramp that allows them to re-enter, I guess, the world the rest of us live in.
Absolutely.
And it's tough, right?
Because like you said, it's a very social movement.
People aren't purely getting into this on the facts of the matter.
They're getting into it for the friends and they probably have associated conspiracy theories that they believe in.
And honestly, a lot of flat earthers are pretty fringe.
A lot of flat earthers have beliefs that I don't really like and don't really want to engage with.
That's not to say all of them, but there are some who are, you know, just have some pretty bigoted beliefs.
And So it's tough because I don't want to necessarily hang out with some people of those beliefs.
I don't necessarily want to welcome them into my sphere, so to speak.
But I do think there needs to be some room for return and for normalizing people and hopefully saying that if you can step off the flat earth, maybe you can step off the whatever weird things you're putting online about the Jews, because I don't like that either.
Yes.
Always, always, always, whenever you study these conspiracist movements, always involves the Jews controlling something.
Always does.
You know, it talks about, like, I guess, the other element, I guess, that sort of, like, makes, I guess, Flat Earth stronger, I suppose, as a movement, I guess, as sort of a social sort of environment, is culture and, like, music.
I remember back when we started studying QAnon, when we started seeing, like, you know, people started making songs in support of the Great Awakening and stuff, and I thought, oh my gosh, because that worried me, because, like, this is, like, glue.
This is, like, cultural glue that will help people stay in this movement.
And it's the same way with, um, Flat Earth.
And I'm thinking specifically of a musician who goes by the name Flat Earth Man.
He's a British man, but he sings with this, you know, this really exaggerated kind of Southern twang.
So what is his deal?
Why?
I mean, because he's a fairly talented musician, but he's devoted, you know, at least the majority of his sort of musical output related to Flat Earth songs.
Yeah, totally.
And this is one of those venues where it's like, how much of this is grift, right?
Because he is the star.
He's the Justin Bieber of the flat earth world.
And I think even if you're not making a ton of money, just that level of fame and that level of adoration is probably pretty powerful.
But, for those who have not encountered this guy before, he makes really catchy songs about how satellites are fake, and how NASA is lying to you for the, you know, satanic conspiracy.
And yeah, he performed at a Flat Earth Conference, and it was like, he was like THE man.
Like, I can't stress that enough.
He was the big celeb there.
What I do love that you already brought up is that he has this gruff cowboy character that he performs.
He's got the hat and he's kind of grimacing.
He's got the southern twang.
And I saw him at the bar at this conference.
I'm like, oh yeah, I'm gonna go just say hi.
I feel like I should.
And he's the poshest British man I've ever met.
This plummy accent.
I'm like, so, so NASA is fake, but this is just a character.
Okay, I got it.
Um, but yeah, he's still, he's still making conspiracy videos.
He's kind of rolled into like COVID conspiracy stuff.
You know, it's a rich time for conspiracy music.
So you've got to evolve and seize the opportunity.
Yeah, he also makes really great music videos, which involve a lot of use of green screen, himself being in a rocket and stuff, pictures of like, you know, the satellites, which he thinks are not real are actually carried by weather balloons.
But yeah, he's I mean, it's always frustrates me whenever I see someone who actually perhaps has a little bit of creative talent, cater specifically to the the niche of kooks.
Totally, yeah.
Now that we're talking about him, I've got the Satellite Hoax song stuck in my head, so he's not without talent.
But listen, it's really hard to break in in the industry, right?
And so if you can have a little niche gig going on, that can be enough to sustain a person, especially if you're just riding off of like monetized YouTube videos and the occasional Apple Music download.
So, like, in a normal sort of, like, I guess, scientific inquiry, there's, like, progress and, like, there are theories, you know, sort of displacing other theories.
Is that kind of thing, like, happening at Flat Earth?
Is there, like, cutting-edge Flat Earth research going on?
Um, there are... Listen.
You ask this question and people will list out all these experiments they're doing.
Like I'm doing cold moonlight refraction and it turns out they're just like standing out in their backyard with a mirror and being like oh that looks right.
Um yeah people are still doing experiments.
Um Mike Hughes's friend uh when he was telling me after Mike's death that like Mike was a flat earther.
He was like Mike was doing experiments you don't even know about.
That he wasn't even publicizing.
He's like he drove cross-country with like um Like level measuring equipment to show that they were level the whole time and therefore Earth couldn't be curved.
Someone's done a similar version of that.
Holding a level on a plane and as it flew across the country being like, well the level isn't rotating and therefore we must be flat rather than, you know, changes in Earth's curvature are so small they're imperceptible.
So people are always doing new experiments and summarily There's a lot of consternation about gravity, which they don't think is real.
There are also sometimes competing Flat Earth theories, even within a very small pseudoscientific
community, the Flat Earth Society.
So I should preface this.
There's a lot of consternation about gravity, which they don't think is real.
And I don't know why they don't think gravity is real either, because it doesn't necessarily
conflict with their theory, but they've just tossed it out.
So there's now a lot of consternation about, well, why aren't we floating up?
The Flat Earth Society says we are accelerating upwards, so the momentum keeps us stuck down.
And a lot of the Flat Earth Movement, which regards the Flat Earth Society as a bit of a joke, says don't listen to those quacks.
What's going on is buoyancy.
We are denser than the air and therefore we do not hover away.
And it's, you know, you do have to respect the time that went into crafting that argument.
You can kind of see someone doing it.
So people are actively theorizing and whether that means shooting themselves up in a rocket or shining a laser pointer in their friend's eye accidentally to measure the curvature, that's what they're up to.
You know, in QAnon, you know, the big prize, what they're always waiting for, is like the Great Awakening, which they always imagine as an event in which everyone realizes they were right the whole time, and they'll come to them, they'll say, I'm sorry, and then they'll get this, I told you so moment.
I mean, do Flat Earthers, are they waiting for something similar where everyone says, I'm sorry for calling you a kook for all those years?
Yes, yes.
This is like, this features prominently.
It doesn't have a name like The Great Awakening, but it is absolutely part of the animating emotion here.
One former Flat Earther I spoke to said that he was so convinced that this moment was going to happen and it was going to be imminent and he said, I was going to be big.
I was going to be one of the only truth tellers beforehand and Imagine if you were one of the only people who knew the Earth was flat before everyone else.
But I've had other people put it in more apocalyptic terms.
People saying that when the Earth's shape is revealed, everyone's going to go insane.
We're going to have societal collapse.
There's going to be meltdowns.
We are hoarding, you know, dry goods in our basement.
We're ready for it, but not everyone's going to be ready.
So there's kind of their version of a Great Reset argument to be made here where The Earth's shape is the greatest revelation and that when that comes true, not only will they be leaders in their community and be celebrated, but they're going to be kind of leaders in the apocalypse.
They're going to be ready and all you dumb globies are going to be asking for handouts.
Yeah, dumb globeys.
You know, I saw a lot of Flat Earth memes, and a lot of them, I guess, I guess they reflect the kind of, I guess, antagonism they sometimes receive, where it's like, dumb globeheads and stuff.
I mean, my theory is that it's basically a mirror of the kind of resentment that they are the target of.
Totally.
It's um, there's this woundedness I think runs through a lot of Flat Earth.
I've been to conferences where they opened it up, the emcee opened up the day by being like, what are some insults that you've got?
And it was like the two minutes of hate but like performed by the the victims who are like been like, Someone called me a globehead, you know.
Um, and like, yo, even if you're extremely wrong, that hurts.
There were other slurs that I'm not gonna repeat.
Um, but yeah, there's um, a lot of flat earthers feel victimized because the antagonism they face is genuinely real.
I even feel like a little of this by proxy, having written about them so long, because I know some Flat Earthers who are genuinely smart, who are genuinely kind, and I'll post something about Flat Earth and people will be like, what?
Morons!
I'm like, you know what, this person has a higher degree than you, and I mean, that doesn't empirically prove anything, but like, let's be nice.
So yeah, I mean, people are very defensive of this theory, and I think it makes them pull away from others because they are, at this point, reflexively afraid of being made fun of.
And yeah, I mean, it's an easy joke.
It's a layup.
Yeah, I think this is something that's difficult to sort of, you know, explain to someone who's not really deep in it, where I think it's too dismissive and simple to call people who believe these ludicrous false things like stupid.
You know, I think they're incredibly wrong.
They're off base.
They're, you know, they are, you know, victim to really powerful confirmation biases that they aren't aware of that leads them No, it's just like Kyrie Irving.
opposite of factual reality. But calling them like dumb, it's just not what I see.
I see them like be able to process and argue and sort of contend with a great deal of information.
I guess the cognitive kind of flaw that they're suffering from isn't a lack of intelligence.
Right.
No, it's just like Kyrie Irving. Like if you're really good at basketball,
like maybe you're not so good at like what shape the earth is.
Yeah, totally.
And with like a Kyrie or someone, like, I'm sure he has a lot of people just telling him he's right.
And with Flat Earthers, once they get in this community, they have an echo chamber of people telling them that, yeah, you are right about the Earth's shape.
So I think everybody is susceptible to this in a certain way.
You want information that's comforting to you.
You want information that satisfies unsolved questions in your head.
And once you find one that reaffirms your priors, you stick with the community that's supporting you there.
Fortunately, in Kyrie's case, I think most athletes are not flat earthers and he got pulled away from that pretty quickly.
But in the case of people who might be alienated from friends and family already, Or who might find a new community through Flat Earth.
Yeah, it's so hard to break out.
It's not an intelligence thing.
It's an understandable psychological process.
And it's a very social dynamic.
How has COVID been for Flat Earthers?
I mean, I know they like to get together for experiments and stuff.
It feels like a movement that enjoys kind of being around others.
So, you know, how has that kind of affected the trajectory of their community?
Or is it growing through that?
COVID has been pretty rough for Flat Earth in terms of actual casualties and at least in terms of meetups.
This is hard to prove because as with a lot of QAnon folks, Flat Earthers will not disclose that they have COVID when they ultimately die of it.
A very prominent flat earther, Rob Skiba, I've met with him multiple times, and this summer I started noticing posts by a friend saying, hey, we got back from, I think the conference was Take on the World.
It's kind of a biblical, flat-earth, tinged conference.
And Rob's not feeling so hot.
He might have COVID.
And, I mean, he struggled through it for a very long time and unfortunately passed away at the end of the year.
And so a lot of his comrades are now saying, well, he didn't die of COVID, he died of the treatment to cure him of COVID.
There's another Canadian fellow who violated Canadian curfew law to go to a Flat Earth conference in the U.S.
and come back without quarantining.
I think it was later on, not from that same conference, but started complaining in his streams of shortness of breath, chest pains, etc.
And we don't have a diagnosis for him, but died shortly thereafter.
So there have been deaths, straight up misinformation deaths.
And these are the same pattern as other folks who oppose vaccination.
A lot of there have been QAnon podcast hosts who've died of COVID and not vaccinated.
So in terms of actual casualties, it's been really rough.
But there's also something to be said for how COVID has really, I think, accelerated the spread and the universalizing of a lot of conspiracy theories.
In what journalist Anna Merlin calls the conspiracy singularity, where people are Bleeding across conspiracy lines.
There's a lot more crossover, I think, than at least when I started researching Flat Earth in like 2017.
And so in that respect, I think Flat Earth influencers have been able to reach more people.
I've seen Flat Earthers who previously specialized in Uh videos shouting in public about the earth's shape and who are now shouting in public about free yourselves from the tyranny of masks and communist vaccinations.
So it's um it's been a tragedy like it has been for everyone else but in some limited instances it's also been an opportunity.
And what do you make of the future of flat earth?
I mean, you know, on one side, it looks like a bunch of billionaires are going to do space tourism.
So it might be, you might not have to build your own rocket anymore.
I guess you could just save up a bunch of money or do a really big GoFundMe for one guy.
Or, I mean, how do you think the development of technology and, uh, you know, I don't know, like the, the almost like permanent COVID state and the privatization of space and all these things.
I mean, how, how is the community processing?
I don't think the community is actively receiving any new information about space travel.
They've written it off just like they've written off information about basic airline travel.
So I don't think that's going to snap anyone out of it.
What I will say is that I've noticed some lack of distinction and cohesion in the Flat Earth community just because it's been so It's just merged so much with so many other conspiracy beliefs.
You know, people say, is QAnon going away?
I don't see the hashtags as much anymore.
No, it's not going away.
It's spreading, but it's metastasizing.
It's finding new forms and it's finding new outlets and it's being a little less explicit about what it is.
And I think that's happening with Flat Earth and a lot of the people who believe in that now are Q-adjacent.
And the last note I'll make about tech is that the algorithms that artificially promoted Flat Earth on YouTube, they've now changed them.
It delists a lot of Flat Earth videos.
So it's harder to find them organically now.
That's definitely been a hit for Flat Earth content creators, but at a certain point, you know, the damage is done.
These folks have conferences with 600 people and it's an established movement now.
Again, the book is Off the Edge, Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything.
I recommend you pick it up.
It's worth it just for the history lesson in the history of the Flat Earth movement alone.
There's a lot of crazy stuff we weren't able to get to involving weird cults that were based upon Flat Earth in the early days.
But yeah, thank you so much again for chatting with us, Kelly.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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Listener, until next week, may the flat earth bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
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