#846 - Michael Shermer

Joe Rogan (0:00)

Three, two, one, boom, Michael Shermer is here, ladies and gentlemen, again. And we have been talking about silly people for the past 15 minutes.

We had to get warmed up.

Michael Shermer (0:11)

The list is endless.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

We had to get warmed up with body doubles.

Michael Shermer (0:15)

Flat earthers.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

Yeah, flat earthers, forests aren't real. Is that what they're saying, Jamie, the flat earthers? We're going to talk about the flat earthers for one reason.

The reason why I wanted to bring this up is because I think there's a lot of folks out there that are super gullible, and I think they're being trolled. I think they're being trolled by people who put together these, it's one of two options, either they're being trolled by people who put together these elaborate arguments for something that they don't believe because they're just trying to make money off of YouTube views, which is entirely possible. And this needs to be thought of, it really needs to be considered, because YouTube videos can be extremely lucrative. If you can get a YouTube video with millions of hits, and a lot of these videos on all sorts of different conspiracies and all sorts of different crazy things can generate that kind of volume, you're making real money.

Michael Shermer (1:06)

Pennies on the dollar, but if it's millions, you can, yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:08)

It starts becoming real money and starts, and if you do a bunch of them and you do them on a regular basis, it becomes a gig, it becomes like what they do. They create these silly videos, but people who just don't have the time or the inclination to actually read scientific papers and articles and journals and all these different things that explain how we've known for a long time that the earth is round.

Michael Shermer (1:33)

Right. Yeah, it's a myth that Columbus proved that the earth is not flat, that it's round.

The ancients knew, the Greeks knew, Columbus knew, everyone knew then that it was round.

Joe Rogan (1:46)

The Sumerians knew.

Michael Shermer (1:48)

Absolutely.

Joe Rogan (1:49)

They're depictions on clay. They drew it in clay. They drew all the planets as circles.

They knew.

Michael Shermer (1:55)

Right. I mean, there's some obvious simple ones anybody could do. If you see an eclipse, like a lunar eclipse, you can see the earth shadow on the moon. It's round.

If you're high enough and the ships are sailing out, you can see the mast is the last thing you would see as the whole drops over the horizon first slowly. There's things like that that we know the earth is round. You travel around, you come back to where you started.

Now their explanation, the Flat Earthers, is that, yeah, it's round like a pizza, but a round flat pizza and all the continents are on the one flat face side up. And that the satellites are up there going around. It's like, yeah, but the satellite photos don't show all the continents in one picture because some of them are on the other side of the globe. So that refutes that.

Joe Rogan (2:42)

Well, not only that, but they think that satellites are actually in planes.

They're in planes in low Earth orbit that are just circling around. There's no actual satellites. They don't even believe in satellites.

Michael Shermer (2:54)

Yeah, so back to your original comment, some of these recent ones are so crazy that you can't help but think, okay, they don't believe that they're just yanking our chain for maybe financial reasons. But that does get to the question I always get, which is do these people really believe it, the cult leaders, the people that make extraordinary claims? Are they just making this stuff up? People make shit up all the time. It's called fiction fantasy.

Or do they really believe it? Are they true believers? And it's hard to tell, it's hard to get inside people's heads.

The old flat earthers in the 19th century, I think they really did believe it. There wasn't much money to be made on those kinds of things. I mentioned Alfred Russell Wallace, who was the co-discoverer of Natural Selection with Darwin. I wrote my dissertation on him and wrote a biography of him, and he was quite the colorful character who was so open-minded to new ideas that he was also gullible. So open-minded enough to see this radical new theory of the evolution of life by natural selection. That's good. Pioneered other fields like biogeography and so on. But he also was really into spiritualism and phrenology, seances, channeling, all that stuff. And then he encountered an ad in one of the Natural History magazines for this 500 pound bet if anybody could prove the earth is round. So he devised a test and he went down to the Bedford Canal, which is a long straight, like 10 kilometers long. You can see the whole distance. And if you put these little sticks in the ground with markers on them, then you get a little telescope like a surveyor's scope. And you line it up, you can see that it bends.