All right everybody, welcome back to the Conspiracy Podcast. It’s us again. What’s up guys? Sean, Eric, Jorge, the three compadres. Welcome again. I think this is, uh, what are we at, episode 26, give or take 27, 28. Getting started, nice little run, but we just get almost in our 30s. We have a collection now. So today’s episode is on Flat Earth, highly contested subject.

Before we start on Flat Earth, let me just put a disclaimer here. A lot of people bash flat earthers, you know what I mean? No opinions. What I wanted to say though is, just imagine you’re a flat earther and they crap on you and they crap on you and they crap on you. That’s the life of a conspiracy theorist, man. It’s the life of a flat earther. Homie signed on for that. What’s funny is that we have a conspiracy podcast, but this is like the extreme one. You look at the difference between far left and far right, and this is the farthest you can possibly go. This is the extreme.

So I wanted to ask you guys ahead of time, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, because I’ve heard that there are in-the-closet flat earthers. They’re too afraid to tell their friends. People believe in it and then they say it and then they get disowned. It’s like Trump supporters, like MAGA, I hate you, get out of my life. I didn’t know if you wanted to just say hey, Eric’s safe space, there’s a safe spot. If anybody’s a closet flat earther it’s Eric. We’re actually not even here, we’re in a simulation.

All right, so here we go. We’ll see how long this is, it might be two parts. We’ll kind of just take it how it goes, roll with the punches. The idea here is to understand, in my opinion, why is this a thing? Like why is it a thing? Until I looked into it more, I was just really confused on what’s the full scale of what they believe in. Like I get it, the Earth’s flat, but there’s got to be more than that. What’s the argument, what about outside of Earth and that kind of stuff. All planets are flat, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s like the universe is like my pantry, there’s just like plates. It doesn’t make any sense at all and I’m trying to be open-minded, well let’s just see what happens, maybe we change your mind.

What’s crazy is I saw all these interviews of people who were like, you know, I thought this was such a joke, and then I watched these videos and I read this book and you know what I believe now. And I did the same thing and I was like, what are you talking about, I believe less now. No offense. We’re going to just go through and then we want you guys to decide. We might actually put a poll up afterwards. Two polls: were you a flat earther before, yes or no, and then are you a flat earther now, yes or no.

So I thought it was a good idea to kind of do a little history lesson about the concept of Flat Earth. Well, in classic Conspiracy Podcast fashion, exactly. It’s like our thing, we’re like history teachers that drink Miller Lites. We have three high school diplomas, three, count them. All right, so here we go, put your Flat Earth hat on.

So in 1492, Christopher Columbus was shocked when his ship made landfall in a land that the Europeans never explored. Along the way Christopher proved the Earth is not flat. This is not correct. I wanted to start with that, that was what we were kind of taught in school and that is not correct. It’s not true that he was trying to talk the crown into thinking that it was round. He also stumbled on America by accident. He was trying to go to Asia, took a wrong left turn. But there’s this conception that in that time period everybody thought the Earth was flat, and it’s not true.

Historian Jeffrey Russell said no educated person in the history of Western civilization from the 3rd century BC onward believed that the Earth was flat. So this has just been known for a long period of time. And that was thanks to scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, etc., who around 600 BC made observations that the Earth was round. The Greek scholars determined that it was a sphere. The earliest documented mention of the concept dates around the 5th century BC, and that was Greek philosophers. Additionally, Magellan went around the planet, he circumnavigated the entire planet. That was in like 1520, on a wooden ship.

So Columbus ran into resistance when he was trying to get funding for his whole trip. I would have loved to have been in that Shark Tank episode. He mistakenly believed the circumference of Earth was very small and that by traveling west toward what he thought was China he would open up new routes. After years of negotiation and argument over the length of the proposed journey, he finally convinced Ferdinand II of Spain to finance the expedition. The diameter is 12,756 kilometers, and the circumference is roughly 24,000 miles, the distance all the way around the equator.

So what’s interesting and where it kind of perverted the story was a writer, go figure, his name is Washington Irving. In 1828, this guy published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Irving, a storyteller, was already famous for Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and then he tackled the life of Columbus. While he was visiting Madrid he was tempted by a gigantic archive of documents about Columbus and decided to write an explorer’s biography. While the archive may have been extensive, Irving couldn’t help himself but add a fictional twist.

He claimed in that biography that when the explorer told the Spanish geographers the Earth was not actually flat, they refused to believe him, even questioning his faith and endangering his life. So the writer is saying that Columbus, being the hero that Columbus was, went and said hey the Earth is round, and the geographers said no it’s not, you pagan, you don’t believe in God. At this time the Spanish pretty much ruled the world, and the entire Spanish Armada, all of their exploits was literally just to fund the church. They would bring back all this gold, that’s why if you go to Spain all the churches are just out of control, everything’s gold, because the church was the law.

Unfortunately, Irving tricked his readers and they believed him, and his book became a bestseller. So he kind of created old school fake news, propaganda. He created a bad guy in the story and the bad guy was the Spanish crown and the geographers and the scientists at the time. And that’s interesting because Christopher Columbus is really glorified, and if you look at real history he was a piece of garbage. We’re in our late 30s and when we were growing up we learned that Columbus was a great guy and discovered America, it was like a great thing. But then when we actually looked, he was beating up his crew and ruthlessly murdered the indigenous people, he enslaved them, he was super savage.

So this is kind of just telling the story of how a writer who wrote a book glorified his life. He’s trying to get clicks, it was like clickbait in the 1500s. He’s like, the story is not that exciting so let’s pump it up. Just to make sure why we’re talking about this is because his story said that nobody believed him that the Earth was round, in the biography, but that’s not true, everybody believed it was round. That was the lie, and that stuck. More and more writers wrote more and more books saying the same thing, and like the telephone game, over two centuries it just gets perverted.

So though Columbus never proved Earth was round, he did manage to upset the long-held belief that there was another way across the ocean. Of course he didn’t discover America, the indigenous people were there for thousands of years, the Vikings were there 300 years earlier. But the point of this is he did not think the Earth was flat, the government did not think the Earth was flat. Okay, so you guys ready now for the birth of the Flat Earth theory?

All right, so there’s a man named Samuel Rowbotham, the father of flat Earth. He was an English inventor, so he lived in England, and he was a writer and he was a utopian socialist. How would you define a utopian socialist? They believe that a perfect society is, like with socialism everyone’s equal and it could then be perfect, communes kind of like, everyone is like the perfect cog to make the machine work. You realize you can’t just delete ambition, you can’t delete inherent like some people are inherently smarter or better or more suited to do certain things at a much higher level than other humans. It’s just the way it is.

And he wrote something called Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe. Now he wrote it under a pseudonym of course, because they can’t find me. And his pseudonym was Parallax. That’s so bad, it sounds like congestion medicine, your nose getting a little sloppy, a little Parallax. It is kind of dope when you say it in a deep voice. I’m pretty sure it’s like the new Disney villain. So he wrote congestion medicine or Disney villain, both simultaneous. He evolved from congestion medicine into being a villain.

So in 1849 he published a pamphlet, a manifesto, and then later like 10, 15 years later he turned it into an actual book. His method, which he called zetetic astronomy, models the Earth as a flat disc centered at the North Pole and bounded along the perimeter by a wall of ice. So it’s flat, in the center is the North Pole, and then there’s this like the night watch, Game of Thrones, a big ice wall. With the Sun, the moon, planets and stars moving only several thousand miles above the surface. So not millions of miles away, but simply several thousand miles up. So this giant nuclear reaction, the sun, that’s 4,000 times bigger than the Earth, is just a couple hundred miles up, and it doesn’t melt the ice. 100% believable.

So Rowbotham started out as an organizer of what’s called an Owenite community. An Owenite community is kind of like a commune, it was based on this guy Owen, and it was a socialist commune where everybody would share everything. It’s kind of like in The Last of Us, communes only work when there’s a zombie apocalypse, that’s the only time it actually ever works, without the zombies.

So his initial theory was that if the Earth was round, then an object the further it is away from your viewing would be lower based on the curvature of the Earth. But it’s too big for that to happen. So say you’re right here, your line of sight ends here, and if it is in fact a sphere then everything else is lower, out of sight, it would essentially go down. That was his initial theory. Well, the theory is not necessarily wrong, but the Earth’s too big for that to make sense. Maybe on the moon that works.

And he did an experiment. The experiment was he got into a canal, this really long six mile ditch, canal, and it had water in it. He put a telescope on like a tripod, a pole, sticking out of the water. Then he put a boat on the canal, and in the boat he put a post, and the post was a meter high, three feet. And he put a flag on the post. So his theory was if he had the boat go six miles down the canal, if the Earth was curved it would get small, it would disappear, he would cease to see it.

So his experiment begins. He gets in the water, he pushes the boat down six miles, and sure enough he could still see the flag through the telescope. So that is when he became, I am a flat earther. He literally started this. He went back to the commune, you’re never going to believe this. So then he declared the Earth is flat. In his book he has a few other ones but they’re so small, like he threw a rock and it didn’t disappear in the horizon. That was his foundation, this is what I’m basing everything on. Six miles, he can still see it.

So now here’s the question that we’re going to pose right here: why could he still see it? If there’s a curvature, why can you still see it? The Earth is so wide that six miles in comparison, what did we say it was, 24,000 miles circumference fully around, that’s nothing. Well, he did the measurements, so six miles should have been enough to drop it, the meter, remember how the post is a meter high. Well, there’s a lot that depends, because one of the big things is elevation. You don’t know how high he was in the canal. I understand what you’re saying, but now just take for example, under the idea that his six miles is right, based on Sean’s theory, his elevation was higher than he had.

The only way to see that far, this exact thing could actually prove that the Earth was round, because if the Earth was flat I could use my father-in-law’s telescope that he looks into space with and I could see the end of the planet with it. I could just look at the end of the Earth, drop. There’s two factors: he’s just saying it was six miles, there’s no proof that this canal was six miles long or what his elevation was. I understand his experiment, totally valid experiment, if it was actually six miles then that would have proved his point. But what about light, what about fog, can light refract and then we would be able to see it? The light refraction would only make the visibility less, it wouldn’t extend it.

So this is the Old Bedford River, which is in the UK, and it’s 9.7 kilometers, it’s pretty straight, and it looks pretty flat, it says 6.27 miles. So I’m assuming that he just pushed it all the way to the end and he’s like, this is now at the end, I can see the flag now. He’s like, please get there, please get to the end, whatever you do just keep going straight. But there’s got to be other stuff, you see a mirage, that’s a good point, and it messes with your visual, it makes you believe you see something and something’s not there, and it floats up and down. Or maybe his telescope is just janky as hell. There’s a spec, he’s like there it is, I see a scintilla.

But essentially he turned into this. You ever talk to somebody who was just constantly arguing and then they evade a question, because he doesn’t have the answers. So he started lecturing, and he would charge six pence for the lecture per witnesses or people who attended. He would counter every argument with ingenuity, wit and skill. So he was one of those that’s good at arguing, annoying, he’s like a vacuum salesman, I’ve heard that one before, shut up, next question.

So again he was pressed in 1864 to do another experiment, but in front of other people. He’s like, prove it, I’m busy. So it was a place called Plymouth, England. It was like a lighthouse on the water, called Plymouth Hoe. He went to a beach where a telescope had been set up, and his opponents to this claim, there was a lantern at a lighthouse and it was 14 miles out to the sea, like a little island or a little rock. So he did the same kind of thing, it’s 14 miles so it’s even further. And in front of everybody he said I can see part of the lantern. Did anyone else look in the thing? Only him. He’s like I can see it. So basically the people that were watching agreed and said you know what, this invalidated basic concepts of astronomy. I just love this guy, he’s like I can see it, and they’re like he’s not lying, and he breaks the telescope, I saw it.

So I got to give this guy mad props. This guy would be like VP of sales somewhere right now, just dominating. So I did put together a little paragraph about him. So he married twice, he had two children, one of which died in infancy. When he was 46 he married a 15-year-old girl, that’s normal back then, but it’s already a little sketch, he was 40 years older than her. He had 15 children, unfortunately four survived till adulthood. He was named in multiple wrongful death suits. He had a case against him which was called a death by misadventure, he was playing with one of his kids and he accidentally gave him poison and killed one of his kids.

He lived under an alias named Dr. Samuel Birley, and he got in trouble for giving people cures that were fake, like snake oil, the literal definition. So that just shows this guy sucks. He also sold some stuff that he claimed prolonged life, and he patented a few things, he had a life-preserving cylindrical railway carriage. But he never got a degree, he never really was a doctor. It seems like this is one of those guys, it reminds me of Lee Harvey Oswald, he’s trying to be important, he just can’t dedicate himself to something. He wants to be special, and so I feel like this was his way, he was like I finally found something. He’s like, oh, I did an experiment, it worked, people are going to believe me now.

So he created something called the Flat Earth map, in his book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe in 1864. His lectures continued and concerned citizens addressed letters to the Astronomer Royal seeking rebuttal for his claims. A certain offshoot church started promoting it in the US when they had a radio station in 1923. By this time he had died, and then in the US somebody by the name of William Carpenter kept forwarding his ideas, he was like the apostle, continuing it. I thought it was funny, you were talking about the Flat Earth maps, I was looking that up, they sell that on Amazon. Flat Earth map, 1795, what an awkward number, it’s on sale right now, got it on Prime delivered tomorrow by 10 a.m.

I just love that Audible has this and it’s like Zetetic Astronomy is the magnum opus of Samuel Rowbotham, a self-taught polymath, debater, faith healer, an early advocate of utopian socialism. So after he died, somebody by the name of Lady Elizabeth Blount continued the Universal Zetetic Society which he had founded, and the society published a magazine entitled The Earth Not a Globe Review, and remained very active until the early part of the 20th century. After World War I the movement kind of declined, and then in 1956 it was revived and thus entitled The Flat Earth Society. So from 56 to like early 2000s it really was kind of dead, it wasn’t really a thriving concept.

What’s strange though is, remember we were talking about the way the Flat Earth is structured and there’s an ice thing, why is there ice? If there was ice around our entire flat perimeter, wouldn’t we have reached the ice? At some point people have reached the ice. People have never reached the ice wall barrier around the edge of the Earth. The ice of Antarctica, but not the ice wall around the edge. That’s what they’re calling the ice wall, like oh my God, I reached a spot where there’s cold, and this is the wall and I can’t get past it. It’s also like, global warming, hello, what happens when the ice melts, does the Earth just fall off the side?

What doesn’t make sense is what’s the science behind why that ice doesn’t melt, because if the sun is right there, space is right next to it. Isn’t the flat Earth theory that the sun is right 200 miles above us? No, it’s a thousand miles up instead of a million. The sun is 93 million miles away, 93 million, not 200 above us. So in 2015 there was somebody by the name of Mark Sargent, and in the Flat Earth world he’s probably the most well-known, he’s the guy of the time. Mark Sargent is the guy that you will see at all the conferences, he’s being interviewed by the LA Times, he’s the figurehead, a bit of a spokesperson for the Flat Earth community.

So in 2015 he released a series of videos on YouTube called Flat Earth Clues, and it questioned the shape of Earth, and this is what went viral, millions of views, millions of followers. He became really more infamous. I think this is when he got a Wikipedia page, he became social media famous, he became the guy. I watched a couple documentaries with him, I watched a couple of his videos, his live streams, and I’m going to start this off by saying he’s a really nice guy. He seems well intended, he doesn’t seem like he’s trying to trick anybody, he’s not really trying to sell anybody. He’s not Rowbotham, the guy we were talking about who started it, that guy seemed like a used car salesman, snake oil salesman. He just seems like a nice guy, people are allowed to believe what they want to believe.

So those videos took off, and now it’s kind of his life to convince others that the Earth is a flat disc with a giant wall of ice around it. And the idea that he has is that it’s an indestructible dome, attached to the rim making a closed system. So there’s like a giant bowl, like a snow globe. A good example is like a terrarium, the enclosed life habitat, you get a lizard in it and you make plants and a little habitat in itself, and you have a little light that’s a heat lamp, which is the sun. His analogy is 200 miles above. So he claims that the stars and the planets are not physical places but they’re lights that are attached to the top of the dome, literally the heat lamps.

So then he goes on further, his thing is that the governments of the planet are lying about it, NASA faked the Apollo program, we didn’t go to the moon. The moon is where the masters are, we already did a whole episode on this, you need to go and listen to that one. So his theory is that we’re literally like pets, we’re in a dome, but who does he think is controlling us? The planet government according to him. What the heck is the planet government, the IMF? Also you see how all of our governments hate each other, there’s clearly not a planet government going on. So obviously he gets made fun of a lot in major articles, and what happens is they put on these big Flat Earth conferences and thousands of people go, it’s called the Flat Earth conventions. And there’s news media teams and they do these interviews with him and they’re kind of making fun of him, but he’s gracious about it.

So I did watch his video of what took off, which was the Flat Earth Clues. He states three things that cannot be faked. Number one: after 50 years and thousands of hours of footage by NASA in space travel, there is no exterior shot where the astronaut completes the simple act of panning the camera 180 degrees, let alone a 360 degree sweep. This has never happened on any moon mission or exterior space station. Stats will tell you this will have happened by accident years ago, but it hasn’t and it won’t. This is because of the rule they cannot break, which is never show the fourth wall, because there is no fourth wall.

So he’s saying that they never rotate the camera enough, they never take a selfie in space, panning all the way around the helmet. My rebuttal to that is that because no one cares. You think NASA is worried about what the astronauts look like? They’re taking pictures of space. No one gives a crap about that, it’s not enough data for Mark. Mark might have a point, but my viewpoint is, why would they do that, just to make him happy? They wouldn’t do that because they just don’t care, no one else is asking this question. And this guy doesn’t even believe that we went to the moon, so even if there was footage, then he would be like oh that’s fake, that was doctored.

And that leads into number two, which he says when you search for pictures of Earth, 95% are composite shots, the majority are simulated images, nearly none of the images are authentic pictures of the entire globe. Well, how does he know that, where did he get this data from? So the idea is, remember when we did the moon episode we were looking at a lot of the photos, you can’t see the globe fully because you’re only seeing what your eye can see. That’s how it works. He’s like there’s no three-dimensional picture of the Earth. Well, yeah, it’s a planet, it’s humongous, it’s a sphere, it’s a picture, you can’t see the other side. The whole point is that he says they’re all photoshopped. But what does he think, they took this picture and you can’t see all the continents, there’s only half the continents on it, where are the other continents? Africa’s not in the picture. A current camera can’t take three-dimensional pictures. A photo is two dimensional, there’s no such thing as a 3D photo.

All right, point three. Point three is commercial air travel routes to the southern hemisphere are wrong. The routes to the southern hemisphere are not direct, there are no non-stop flights. When the world is flat it is the greatest distance between two points, so it’s a distraction of layovers. So he’s saying they’re forcing layovers to make you believe that you’re traveling further than you are. Correct, that’s exactly what he’s saying. Have you traveled outside of the continent, Jorge? He was born in a different country. So the idea here is that if you were to fly to Buenos Aires you have to do a layover, of course, because it’s far. I just went to North Carolina and had to do a layover in Georgia.

But the idea is that there are non-stop flights to Paris but there are no non-stop flights to Santiago, Chile. That argument is ridiculous, it’s absurd, it just makes no sense. What it actually boils down to is economics, it’s just too far, they don’t have enough gas. His argument would be, why is there a non-stop flight to Paris? The reason there are non-stop flights is, how many people are flying to Santiago, Chile compared to Paris? There’s enough people paying money to go non-stop, whereas others are like okay cool, we’ll drop off these people, refuel, and then we make double the money. That’s the only way it’s economically feasible. Oh, I want a non-stop flight to New Zealand, well sorry, it’s not going to happen, maybe with a private jet. That would be the other part, why don’t we just rent a jet and fly down to Buenos Aires, just to test it, we need to do that.

So we’re going to go into more of present day stuff in the next episode. This was kind of like the history and where it came from. It’s been around for a while, people don’t know about that because we just recently been hearing about this the last few years or so. There are some die hard, huge believers. I found all these Instagram pages and they’re like 150,000 followers, it’s out of control. There’s a subreddit, it’s madness, way more people than I would have ever imagined. I was expecting like 32 people up in the Flat Earth page.

One of those is Kyrie Irving. We have all the celebrities who are flat earthers, we have quite a few, a bunch of people, there’s a lot, and all their quotes. People that you actually like. And then early 2010ish there was a resurgence of this, and if you go on YouTube there’s a bunch. It probably stemmed from the general distrust of the government. That’s a great point, it’s very much 1984, they’re lying to us, Big Brother. My thing is, what do they have to gain from that, it’s round.

But next episode we’re going to go into the conspiracy theories about it, some more stuff, some weird stories. There’s a lot of interesting things that you’ll kind of be enlightened about in terms of what they actually believe. It’s actually more than just the Earth, there’s like other things, and it goes into real interesting stuff, not just the theory of the math behind it. They believe some other stuff. So look out, after episode two we’ll post the surveys, the polls. We want to do a poll, if you guys are a flat earther believer now, if you change your mind after episode two. Two polls, before listening what were your beliefs, after listening. We also have about five things that are the main points of what they believe in. So you will find out why do you believe in that. It’s more complex than that. All right, well, love you a long time.