Does a Flat Earther react to world events differently to other people? When you think the world is flat, then you think that the mainstream view of the world is very wrong. Does this carry over to other topics?
I interview a Flat Earther who thinks she has good arguments for the Earth not being a spinning ball in space. She has some questions about Coronavirus but feels a little unable to get them answered, for a variety of reasons.
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Jeremy Rys has gone by “Alien Scientist” for over ten years. His primary interest is in independently researching exotic technology like anti-gravity and warp drives. Some people speculate that such technology exists and comes from visiting aliens. While Jeremy does not discount this theory, he thinks it’s more likely that if aliens were visiting us, they would not be leaving evidence.
In this second part of my chat with UFO experiencer Michael, we talk about his interest in the QAnon theory. He firmly believes we are on the verge of a storm of arrests of people currently running the “deep state”. I try to narrow down what this means and arrive at some testable predictions we can check next year.
Mike is a member of the 9/11 Truth community. He thinks there might have been explosives used on 9/11 to cause the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. He does NOT think that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon, and considers that, like some other common 9/11 beliefs, to be “B.S.”
Stian is someone who has been quite deeply involved in the 9/11 Truth community and the UFO community. He also just read my book: Escaping the Rabbit Hole, and has a few questions for me about my approach to debunking. We also cover the slippery slope of internet censorship, the sometimes useful role of conspiracy promoters, how to find common ground, and what I think about the Tic-Tac UFO.
Tom has dabbled in a few conspiracy theories over the years, and still thinks there are some significant questions that have never been answered about why the World Trade Center buildings fell down the way they did on 9/11. We talk about how he came to believe what he does, how it has changed over the years, and what evidence it make take for him to feel the question is resolved.
Geoff says that six years ago he was “as normal as everyone else,” but when he was caught up in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bomber (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) he took an interest in the events and eventually came to believe it was all staged. This led him to research other topics and now he feels nearly everything we see is staged, and that the world is run by an organization of Freemasons, Jesuits, and the Vatican. He also thinks that the earth is not a globe and that it’s possibly flat.
Jason Bermas is a producer, writer, and YouTuber, best known for conspiracy documentaries such as Loose Change, Fabled Enemies, Shade, and Invisible Empire. Loose Change was a seminal documentary for the 9/11 “Truth” movement, and I’ve often heard people cite it as a big part of why they got interested in the various 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Ian goes by the name TheoryQED on Metabunk and his YouTube Channel, where he posts about UFOs. Unlike me, and definitely unlike my last guest (Seth Shostak), Ian thinks there’s something highly significant to the UFO phenomenon, maybe even alien visitors. Like most Americans, he also suspects the government is not telling us everything it knows.
JM Talboo runs the web site http://911debunkers.blogspot.com subtitled “Debunking the Debunkers of the 9/11 Truth Movement”. His focus is on debunking people like me, i.e. people who debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories. But he also debunks 9/11 Truthers when he sees them make mistakes, and recently added another subtitle to his blog: “Refuting the Hollow Arguments of the So-called 9/11 Debunkers & Truthers”
Adam Taylor was very active in the 9/11 truth movement for ten years from 2007 to 2017. He’s still very much in favor of a new investigation and thinks there are many unanswered questions about the events of 9/11. But he no longer spends time advocating, and instead is focusing on living a normal life. We talk about how he got into 9/11 “truth” activism, why he eventually retired from the movement, the role of debunkers, and his thoughts on the “truth” movement as a whole
Paul is a former promoter of the Planet X conspiracy theory, which is also known as the 
Jim Lee used to be a fairly hardcore conspiracy theorist, deep into things like Chemtrails and doomsday comets. Now he’s less deep down the rabbit hole, but has managed to create one of his own. He’s convinced there’s something going on involving chemicals in the air or modifying contrails. Not exactly chemtrails, but still something nefarious. He spends a lot of time researching what it might be. He’s also concerned about the effects of potential future geoengineering, pollution, and nuclear leaks, and his large website Climate Viewer, is where he educates people on those issues, and other things he finds important.
I met Sasha at the Flat Earth conference a couple of weeks ago. During the debate, she asked an interesting question about the moment that made us commit to the Earth being flat (or, in my case, a globe). Afterwards, she approached me and asked a few more questions, and we ended up talking for quite a while. I found her fascinating, as she was a very nice, normal-seeming, intelligent person. She’s certainly not stupid, and does not seem to be crazy, and yet she thinks there’s a good chance that the Earth actually is Flat. I tried explaining a few things to her, particularly the fact that distant mountains seem to be hidden behind the horizon just like the Globe model predicts. She didn’t think this was good evidence though, as there seemed to her to exist other possible explanations, like “perspective” hiding the bottom of the mountain. So was frustrated and intrigued. I invited here on my Podcast, and we have a fascinating conversation, where I again fail to get my explanation across, and she quite eloquently speaks about the need for both questioning of assumptions, and communication between diverse groups.
