Why Flat Earthers Won’t Let Go Of Their Belief

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00:00:05 --> 00:00:22 Speaker B: You're listening to casual talk radio where common sense is still the norm whether you're a new or long time listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit us@casualtalkradio.net and now here's your host Ler.

00:00:22 --> 00:30:47 I am going to discuss the topic that and it's after the fact things have died down a little bit. That's why I'm talking about it now because I didn't want to get in the middle and be like a cloud chaser. But I, I figured might as well. I have an opinion that I'll share and it's out there. My audio is out there. Anybody? Look, I want the smoke a while back, a little while back. I think it was about a month ago or so. And you may not know these names. It's okay if you don't. I'll do my best to provide a two sentence on each. But Godfrey, who's a comedian, very, very funny comedian, he's done Bill Cosby impersonations, Steve Harvey impersonations, Richard Pryor impersonations, Eddie Murphy, he's a excellent comedian. And he would describe himself as nowhere in the class of like the top echelon, like a Cat Williams. But he, he's rising, he's, he's getting more popular. He launches his own show after he had been featured on DJ Vlad. Vlad has a, basically a podcast. He has a, people think he's an FBI agent or something or CIA. I can't say he is or isn't. Point is that he, he does seem to question his guests in the vein of like an interrogation. Like if you watch his, he did a session with Smokey Robinson and Smokey didn't look comfortable that whole damn time. So I can't say for sure. I am saying that he does come across that way and he's one of the ones he did an interview with. Forget the guy's name, but he was one of the ones that was arrested for killing Tupac. Anyhow. Godfrey and Lord Jamar, Lord Jamar is formerly a rapper. Brand Nubian, old school. Okay. They were on Vlad sometimes together, sometimes separate. Some of the best episodes Vlad ever had because both, I think are reasonably funny people. They come across very well. Now Jamar is, I would argue, I don't want to say he's militant. That's not really the word. He's not quite there. You know, he's not like a Malcolm X kind of person. But he is very adamant in his messaging. He believes what he believes and it's very difficult to change his Mind, that's just how he operates mentally. So when I listen to him, he strikes me as like a much younger version of Dick Gregory, may he rest in peace. Like he's, he's just, this is what it is, and you're going to listen what I'm saying and I'm not going to absorb anything else. So on Godfrey's show, Jamar says this is how the story went, that he's going to just hang out and Godfrey is going to have somebody who is on the science side because Jamar is a self professed flat Earther. I'll get to that in a second. But initially they were planning his. Godfrey's co host guys named Drake, ironically, and they're going to try to get Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is probably the foremost expert on all things having to do with why the flat Earth theory is bull. Right? So this was a big thing of trying to get Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the show to debate Jamar because Jamar had said, yeah, I want that, I want to debate him. I'll absolutely debate him. Because Jamar is so fervent in his belief about the flat Earth theory that he felt confident he could do it. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a very busy guy. He does all sorts of presentations. He goes to different campuses, he's all over the place. He wasn't going to be available for a few months. Godfrey's like, yeah, that's fine. The Drake. The other co host says, well, let's get the next best thing. Whether this guy was the next best thing or not is debatable. But this person's name is Professor Dave. I believe it is. And I don't consider. I understand why you might think that, but I think it's two different ways. So every. As a podcaster, you have to understand, and I only had this happen one time out of many people that I ever talked to when I was doing guests, which I like to get back into. But it's a harder thing than I thought it was, especially because my platform changed its schedule. But the. When you have a guest, the first thing you have to do is prep the guests. Now, prepping doesn't mean you give them all the questions. Some guests will require you to give them all the questions in advance and they can pre script, especially if they go on like talk shows. I don't like to do that. I want the questions to flow naturally, however you prep them in terms of what you expect out of it. Right. At least that much. What, what do you Want the conversation to really be and topically keep things on track. And you as a host, you have to kind of be a moderator if you have multiple guests. I would say Roland Martin is a good example of failure of this, you know, concept when you have two completely different, opposite, polar, opposite sides of the spectrum. He had a show, and I'm deviant a little bit, but it's contextually important. He had a show where he was talking to Dr. Umar Johnson and one of his panel, actually two of his panel were arguing with Umar Johnson because Umar Johnson kept talking about what has the government done for, you know, black community and systematically for the black community and everything else. And panelists like, well, you know, Civil Rights act and affirmative action and equal opportunity. The panel wasn't understanding what Umar was saying. What Umar was saying. None of the things that they rattled off were systematically designed to benefit black people. They were designed to benefit disadvantaged people, to include black people. But it was diluted because at one point it was catered towards black Americans. But then later they started adding all these different disadvantaged groups to where the benefit to black Americans was diluted over time. That was the point that Umar was making. But because Umar was so fervent in his belief, he wasn't communicating what the real problem was in his mind. This is common sense. What you're saying doesn't make any sense. The panel, in their mind, it's, yeah, we got all these laws. But they weren't understanding what he was saying. You then have a disconnect and at one point they're talking about coon. And that's when Roland Martin finally says, I don't like the word coon. But he never really control the conversation. And it got out of hand because neither side was listening to the other. Fast forward. And we get to this show now with Godfrey and Lord Jamar as a guest, and then this Professor Dave as a guest. He had already started off on the wrong track because Professor Dave, and this is what I was told, I had never heard of this person, but what I was told from multiple people is he's just a naturally arrogant, combative, just a generally smarmy person when he's debating this flat earth theory because he finds it so stupid, so illogical, so comical, so childish that he doesn't feel that he should respect these people. And so that's the way he communicates. And that should have been expected when they invited him and Godfrey. And this is why I'm pointing the finger as a host. Godfrey should have level set. We're not if we're gonna do that, okay, it's low playing field. When he come back at you, I don't want to hear nothing or no, we got to tone all this rhetoric down because we're here to talk about a real legit topic. And apparent from conversations on all three sides from Professor Dave, because he posted footage on his show. Jamar was talking about it on a live stream, and then Godfrey was talking about the aftermath on his. I got the sense that Godfrey didn't prep these two. They didn't prep them at all. They didn't, before going on the air, say, look, this has to be civil. This has to be whatever, that there was no prep of what was going to happen because the initial intent was to have Neil DeGrasse Tyson. And perhaps Jamar was caught off guard because it's a white man. Now, you might think that shouldn't matter. You have to understand. And Drake called out, the optics are why I felt like, okay, this might not be a good idea in, you know, in retrospect, because it's a white man who's already condescending in of himself and he's arguing with a black man belittling him, and this could actually turn out bad. So the fallout from this video, it's terrible. The flat Earth theory. This is what I want to talk about. And I'm not going to dig too deep into the whole back and forth, because the bottom line is that neither side respected the other. Neither side was listening. Everything went off the rails because neither guest was prepped and given very clear instructions and directions about what was going to happen. I think it was even live. So given all of the. And it might not have been live, but I got a sense it was live. Point is, I didn't see that either side accomplished anything. I said, though elsewhere, this Professor Dave should never be featured on any sort of platform, audio, video, or both. Because when you have this argument and you're coming at it already because he straight up said, I want to respond to the stupid everything was that right? When you start out conversations that way, you don't have any credibility. And then you do it as a white male talking down to a black male and a black male talking down to a white male, you got to understand what that's going to be perceived as by the larger communities on both sides. So I'm saying, shame on both of them. But Professor Dave in particular should never be featured again unless whoever's in charge of the show sits him down and says, none of that's happening on my show it will not happen. You will conduct yourself with, to quote a popular boxer, parliamentary procedure throughout this. Since that didn't happen, I can't blame him, Dave, but I am going to say he should never be featured on anything again. He has no credibility because of what he's doing. Now, what he was saying was correct in a lot of ways, but he still wasn't listening to what Jamar was saying. Jamar came off sounding like a nutcase, frankly. But Jamar wasn't wrong in some of the questions he was asking, which, if you listen, and this is the failure of social media, if you listen to what Jamar was trying to get across, what all of the Flat Earth deniers have been trying to get across, it's clear that the science community, they don't get it and they don't get why it's a losing battle. So in order to help explain that, that's my episode today, I want to explain what's the battle? What's the war? What's the fight? What's the problem here? Because it's been stated as well, they're just nutcases that think the world's flat. They do believe the world is not round. They do believe that there is this dome across or whatever. They do believe that nobody's gone to space. There are these fundamental beliefs they have. This is all true. But that's not the battle. The battle is really an existential one. Let me talk about the whole Flat Earth business and denying what we've been told, because that's where that's the crux of it, the Flat Earth population. If you listen to each and every one of them, I'm talking all of them to a T. And you really get behind some of the nutcase theories, like Terrence Howard. I was shocked to hear him talking on Joe Rogan. Every single one of them, the underlying message behind what they're saying. And Jamar tried to say it, but he was so busy, so fervent, trying to get his message out in his way and prove himself right, he came across like a nutcase. He came across like he was completely insane and needed to be put in a straightjacket. The bottom line of what Lord Jamar was trying to say, if he had any common damn sense, is anybody that questions the Flat Earth theory, you're doing it based on something you were told as kids. Professor Dave himself even said, this is elementary school. This is middle school stuff. Jamar's point, his bottom line point is everything that you're saying is based on something you were told and taught in school. He's not wrong. Everything that the science community responds is based on what we're taught. The science community is not wrong in what we were taught. Everything that I heard Professor Dave rattle off about force and about gravity, everything he was talking about, about density, about why things, the things we were taught about why, the why of things, everything mirrors what we were all taught. The flat Earthers know it. They were taught it. They absorbed it when they were younger, I guarantee you. Later they started questioning it. They questioned it because certain things didn't make sense to them. The science community would say, well, that's a you problem. Because it obviously makes sense. It's. It's math, it's science. No, that's where. That's the contention point. You have two sides. They're not on the same page. Because you got the science community who is belittling the flat earth community. The flat Earth community is basically dismissive of the science community. They're never going to be on the same page, no matter what. Because there's things that the flat Earth community is saying which are logical questions to ask. But because a lot of these, this is the real why it can't be solved a lot. Let's Jamar, he talked about how is it that a fish can freely swim in water. Professor Dave says something to the effect of, yeah, that's force that it's exerting against gravity, but at some point it's going to stop. Okay, but a fish can continue swimming for as long as it feels like swimming. If it does stop swimming, fish can actually levitate within water. That doesn't negate the fact that gravity's in play. The thing that Dave is missing in the question being asked that would have helped Dave's explanation of why it's a problem. Every assumption, every question that the flat Earth communities bringing out to try to make it make sense is faulty on its face. Because you're asking questions like Jamar even said, in addition to the fish argument, well, bubbles go up and, you know, the ball can be saturated and I want to see something stick on a thing. I want to see. And how can somebody be upside down? And all of his questions, it's faulty on its face. And this is the problem with science. You can't do any sort of testing of hypotheses around these things because we're standing on the very Earth that exhibits these traits. So you can't emulate. It's. You can't emulate Earth on Earth. That's what Dave was trying to say, but because he came across like a jackass, he didn't help. Jamar understand. You cannot test Earth on Earth because Earth is the source of the one factor that throws a wrench in all of your testing, which is gravity. We're already subject to it. Since we're subject to it and we cannot override it, you cannot do an effective test against it. This is. That makes more sense to me, thinking it through. We're subject to the same type of thing. How else would that. What's the greatest analogy of that? The greatest analogy is how do I know that fire burns? I would have to touch it. I would have to interact with it. If it's hot enough, I can be in close proximity to it and I might get singed or burned that way. There has to be an interaction with it while I'm being. While I'm touching fire. Right. I can't be cold. It doesn't make any sense. My skin touching fire. I cannot be cold. It doesn't make any sense because I'm within the fire right now. So if somebody were trying to ask the question, how is it that cold weather can help calm down a fire? You can try to test that, but you're going to still not be able to. How can you test that? It's truly dropping temperature. You could put a thermometer or something in there. There's things you could do in a controlled situation. You could. The same doesn't apply with gravity. We cannot test gravity while subject to gravity because we can't turn it off. Right. If you go into space, then where it's a vacuum. And this is another point of contention with flat Earthers as I wrap up the word vacuum. Now this is a fallacy of our long since predecessors. When people hear the word vacuum because of what you're taught, they think suction because of your vacuum cleaner. Vacuum, as it pertains to space refers to nothing, the absence of matter. I like the term void, not vacuum for clarity, because that's really what it is. It's a void. It's not a vacuum in the sense that it's doing any sort of suction. There's no force being applied against Earth that's sucking it. However, we do know that there's force being exerted from the sun to the Earth because the Earth rotates around the sun. We know that there's force exerted from the Earth to the Moon because the Moon rotates around the Earth. We know these things and we can verify that this must be the case because we can See the moon going up, the sun going down. We can see these things happening. If it were flat, how could it be that the sun and the moon are in this constant up and down cycle? That would happen. It doesn't make any sense. Unless if you took the flat earth and had it flip like a coin. But that wouldn't make any sense. It would contradict the whole question about people being upside down. That that's the point that Dave was trying to get at is you can't explain what does down mean, what does weight mean, what does heavy mean. You can't even explain these concepts except the presence of gravity. The presence of gravity itself negates the question about being upside down. Gravity is simply to the center of mass. The center of mass will be different based on who you are. So is it true that there is somebody, if I theoretically could bore straight from from where I stand down to the opposite side, that there is somebody who is essentially upside down? Sure, but it's upside down only to me. It's not upside down to them. I'm upside down to them. It's perceptive. The size of the Earth makes it to where you cannot wrap your head around it though. That's the problem. The size of the earth makes it to where you can't visually wrap your head around it. We can't control gravity. Thus you cannot test and create Earth on Earth because you can't emulate or control gravity's impact. And a magnet is not a perfect test either because a magnet is a one sided type of force. So my point in this is the flat Earthers are asking valid questions that I do think it's worth for them, it's worth asking the question because that really was the spirit of science is to ask and then test. Some of what they're asking cannot be tested. Some of what they're asking can be tested. The idea around water, they said they have this analogy about water has to have a container, water has to be contained. That's actually not true. Water follows water. Water flows together, essentially. So if you have water, you spray it on a window, it's going to cascade down together. The only time that's not true is if you chemically disrupt where the water goes and force it to be. That's why certain chemicals will cause beading on your windshield to help you be able to see. When it's on heavy rains, if you didn't do that type of a treatment on your window, it would look like a sheet of basically distorted glass and you wouldn't be able to see, because it all travels together. That's how water works. Water is going to seek basically the lowest point of a thing. This is true. Water doesn't necessarily have to see a container. That's not really true. You know that because of lawn drainage, as an example, if your lawn is just soil, it's just going to drip straight down as separate and at some point hit beneath the earth layer and just drip straight down separately. It may coalesce at the bottom, depending on the shape of whatever that is. But if the shape of whatever that is is flat, that's not a container per se, other than the fact that it's under the, you know, the soil surface. So the idea of a container is already debunked. The point on that is we can. We can ask those questions, and we should ask those questions. I think it's fair to ask a lot of those questions. But when science just keeps ridiculing what they're saying, like the idea that we've never been into space, SpaceX literally has a video showing them taking off and going into space and breaking the layer. So the idea of the dome over top. SpaceX has already put videos debunked. Then they'll say the videos are fake. William Shatner went into space. Recalling him a liar. Like they. There has to be a point where you say, we've seen enough to reasonably believe that certain of these things have to be factually true. The idea that we can go into space, the idea that there's not a dome. And for those questioning the dome, it comes from the idea about pressure in the air and what's causing pressure, because pressure would assume some sort of container to cause that pressure. Basically, it can't expand any further. The dome in this case would be a virtual one, the ozone layer, etc. But they don't accept that. They don't accept that something that they cannot see or feel can cause this. But we know that it can, because we know that there is no physical dome around the Earth because we disproven these. All I'm saying is that the science side has to do a better job of getting back to the fundamentals, which was to encourage curiosity, even if it contradicts the science. Lest I remind people, there was a time we believed that asbestos was the safest, most fireproof material we could ever use to build houses. And we were dumb enough to put it in a bunch of houses, only to find out later it caused mesothelioma in a bunch of people we were dumb enough to believe that putting the fuel tank at a certain part of the car was actually brilliant and thus spawned the Ford Pinto. And then it took a bunch of people blowing up their cars to realize it probably wasn't such a good idea. We thought leaded gasoline was better for the environment and for our cars and more efficient. And it is true that leaded gasoline was more efficient, but it certainly wasn't better for the environment. Turns out we were expediting such damage and that led us to finally getting to unleaded gasoline. Science has always challenged itself. Even if it was something that was taught, even if it was something that we were told and educated in school. We can accept that what we were educated was true as of what we knew. But with newer technologies, we should always encourage looking at it again and really challenging it and making sure we have enough proof and evidence. The only way that the flat earthers can ever convince themselves of a thing is to push themselves into space. It got so bad with some of these conspiracy theories, they said, well, if that's true, then why is it we can go into space and that's freely available, but it's egregiously expensive. It takes a billionaire to be able to afford to do it. That's why they freely let anybody do it, because they know nobody can afford to. Well, why don't they make it cheap and accessible so that anybody can do it themselves and validate for themselves? They're still not going to be satisfied. They won't, because they'll say, well, we went up in there, but yeah, the dome's just larger than whatever it is. No matter what, you're not going to win. My message to the science community. We should never discourage people that truly are curious about something. My message to the flat earth community. There's nothing wrong with wanting to challenge what you were taught. Both sides need to be more reasonable with your arguments, yea or nay. And both sides have to accept that there are certain compelling questions wrought on both sides. The science community has very valid strong points about things we know to be true about gravity, things we know to be true about force, things we know to be true about energy, things we know to be true about atmosphere. We can say these. We hold these truths to be self evident. It is what it is. We have to accept them. They're not going to change. The formula for oxygen, for example, is not going to change. Right? So we have to accept certain things as this is what it is. Fine, so then the flat earth community has to accept those fundamental things that cannot be challenged. That Cannot be changed. The flat Earth community brings up valid questions that I think should be answered at some level somehow by someone, not the governments, to allay some of those concerns. What's an easy, low hanging fruit? An easy, low hanging fruit to me is to truly answer the question about the spinning of the Earth, because that's something that you cannot, we can't test, but we can prove it. We can prove it by outer space. We don't, in my opinion, do enough videography from outer space about things that are happening in outer space in a way that allows somebody to understand the natural motion of something not being suspect, not being questionable. Right. So let's test that. Let's test that theory and see how that would work. Well, how can we test that effectively? There's two ways, in my opinion. If you can from one of the stations, because there's a lot of them now, from one of the stations, just do a live stream from the live Earth, then there may already be one. But it's not far enough back to be able to see the true nature of the spin. The other part is weather, because weather is going to affect your ability to see what's on the surface. To understand when you see North America spin, right? And how long did that take? Can you measure time directly by that rotation? Can you say this was a perfect 24 hours and I can prove it was 24 hours before I saw North America again. Doing all these things would help allay some of the concerns the science community has to accept. You're never going to fully convince all of them, no matter what you do. But you shouldn't belittle them. Let them accept or believe whatever they want to believe. It doesn't matter. It doesn't affect you. Let them believe what they want to believe. The flat Earth community has to understand that the things we were taught in school have basis and fundamentals, some of which were already tested and verified. And you have to accept it even if you weren't there for the testing. The hypothesis was already put out and we already verified what it is. Questions about the distance from the Earth to the sun, a lot of that is estimated because we can attest how long it takes light, right, to reach. But unless if you're like, think about it, 93 million light years, no human can travel it. So we can't prove it, but that doesn't mean it's false. So I think both sides, they're at a point where they're not going to agree. They're always going to disagree. You're always Going to have a subset of people that believes what they believe. Let them test it. Let them put it to the test. The science community has to be open to whatever the results are, truly open to those results, because it doesn't matter either way. Let's say that there is truly this mythical, you know, flat Earth scenario that's happening. Pictures of waterfalls, water spilling over straight into space. Let's say that is the case. Okay, if it's the case, then how does that affect us? How does it affect climate change? How does that affect all these different things? Because think about it. If what they're saying is true, climate change is a myth. It would have to be. Because part of what we see in the impacts, the differing impacts of climate change in different parts of the world are largely regional. You can point to different parts of the globe where the ozone layer is more damaged than others. Right. If that's true, how can that be? That it's a flat surface where there's only certain areas affected? But a round shape makes much more sense. You would expect to see that in a round shape. You would not expect to see in a flat. Now, you can challenge climate change. You can challenge and say, is this really a thing? And if it is, prove it. Prove that that's what's happening. And how can that happen in a flat? And then now you get into a whole set of hypotheses. I'm not taking a stance. Yay or nay. Everything the science side said is what we were all taught. It's common sense in terms of what we were taught. Things, certain things that the flat Earth side is describing are valid questions that I think need answers that we won't ever have. That's just what it is. I'm just one that accepts some things we cannot answer, some things we cannot describe. We cannot put any sort of context around it other than kind of tying the dots and saying two plus two is four. We have no way to directly witness these things. The Big Bang theory is another great example. People think it was an actual explosion because of the word bang. Well, that's a fault of our English system, not necessarily science. Some things we simply cannot prove or disprove. I saw a book when I was a kid, I read a book that said, you know, we're fine as far as the sun. Hundreds of millions of years, we're fine. That may not end up true. It could be that something happens where the sun gets damaged in some way and goes supernova sooner than that. It could happen. But based on what we do at the time. This is our estimation, assuming xyz, that's where we are here. So I'm not a flat Earther and I'm not hard science. I don't, I don't take a stance. I don't think it's worth the battle, frankly, because none of us are going to live long enough for it to matter. I think some people are just looking for something to keep themselves occupied and it gives them an opportunity to be part of a community, whichever community, and that's a good thing, you know, if you have something where it allows you to belong to a group of your like minded parents. It's like the old days of the Masons, the Freemasons, no problem. I have no issues with that at all. I just. The whole antagonist, you know, approach where people are just at each other's throats doesn't make any sense to me over something where it's philosophical. You know, you, you don't accept what you're told and you probably shouldn't. If you're not going to accept what you were told, that's fine. Make your own hypothesis and test it and put it. See what you can find out and maybe you can change the game. Until then, we have to accept what we were taught because it's what we were taught. That's all I'm saying.