Transcript: Episode 0038

“Conspiracy Theories and Truth”

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
WEBVTT

00:00:00 – 00:00:14:	Music

00:00:14 – 00:00:41:	Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast, I am Corey J. Mahler.

00:00:41 – 00:00:44:	And I'm still woe.

00:00:44 – 00:00:52:	On today's Stone Choir we are going to be discussing how you can safely ingest new novel

00:00:52 – 00:00:57:	information that flies in the face of what you knew yesterday.

00:00:57 – 00:01:02:	Another way of putting it more simply is what do you do with these conspiracy theories?

00:01:02 – 00:01:07:	Last week we talked about one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the 20th century.

00:01:07 – 00:01:11:	If you don't believe what we said then that was a completely insane episode out of left

00:01:11 – 00:01:15:	wing and also has to be very evil because of the nature of it.

00:01:15 – 00:01:22:	If it's not a conspiracy theory, if it's actually true, then it reshapes how you view things.

00:01:22 – 00:01:27:	And one of the reasons we wanted to do this episode today is that we've done a number

00:01:27 – 00:01:30:	of episodes, maybe not quite that earth shattering in the past.

00:01:30 – 00:01:34:	You know when we talked about Michael Martin Luther King Jr. being a heretic, he was never

00:01:34 – 00:01:39:	a Christian a day in his life and by the way the civil rights movement was invented by

00:01:39 – 00:01:41:	the Soviets to undermine America.

00:01:41 – 00:01:42:	Those are facts.

00:01:42 – 00:01:45:	It's both a conspiracy theory and a fact.

00:01:45 – 00:01:51:	You have to deal with how do you work through that, especially when everything that everyone

00:01:51 – 00:01:52:	knows says the opposite of it.

00:01:52 – 00:02:00:	So we wanted to discuss today what is important for us as individuals as we are taking in

00:02:00 – 00:02:08:	new information because every day in the world there's a new fad diet, there's some new scientific

00:02:08 – 00:02:14:	discovery that upends everything we knew, there's some political or historical revelation

00:02:14 – 00:02:20:	and they all have the effect of unmooring us from reality where we basically feel like

00:02:20 – 00:02:23:	I can't trust anything.

00:02:23 – 00:02:28:	And ironically, that's sort of one of the things that's undergirding a lot of the episodes

00:02:28 – 00:02:29:	of Stone Choir.

00:02:29 – 00:02:33:	We're going back and looking at things and saying, well, they were saying this for the

00:02:33 – 00:02:38:	last 100 years or 200 years, but if you look before that they were saying the opposite.

00:02:38 – 00:02:40:	So one of them is a lie.

00:02:40 – 00:02:46:	So although we do a lot of episodes that are kind of destabilizing in terms of what I thought

00:02:46 – 00:02:49:	I knew turned out not to be true.

00:02:49 – 00:02:55:	We don't want people to feel completely unmoored from reality.

00:02:55 – 00:03:00:	We try to interleave the really serious stuff with episodes that don't hammer you as hard

00:03:00 – 00:03:07:	because frankly, the very fact that the new cycle is dominated by this sort of disruption

00:03:07 – 00:03:11:	psychologically is itself psychological warfare.

00:03:11 – 00:03:15:	It's effectively a low-grade form of torture, which we'll be getting to towards the end

00:03:15 – 00:03:16:	of this episode.

00:03:16 – 00:03:18:	This episode is not going to be real long.

00:03:18 – 00:03:22:	We had originally planned on doing Bonn Offer this week, but as Corey and I were getting

00:03:22 – 00:03:25:	into the research for that, we realized that it's going to take more research because

00:03:25 – 00:03:30:	there's both so much wrong with the things that he said and there's a degree of subtlety

00:03:30 – 00:03:35:	to the way he hit a lot of it that we want to make sure we get that one right.

00:03:36 – 00:03:41:	Simultaneously, we are both tuning into the Missouri Synod's Triennial Convention that

00:03:41 – 00:03:44:	began on Sunday, so we're a little bit disrupted.

00:03:44 – 00:03:47:	This episode is not going to be a real long one.

00:03:47 – 00:03:49:	We're not going to do another three-hour marathon.

00:03:49 – 00:03:53:	We just want to talk about what do you do when someone comes along and says something

00:03:53 – 00:03:56:	like last week's episode because some people break.

00:03:56 – 00:04:03:	Some people ingest this new information and they kind of shatter some.

00:04:03 – 00:04:04:	It's called redpilling.

00:04:04 – 00:04:07:	In a lot of cases, you know what that means.

00:04:07 – 00:04:11:	Some people turn that into their identity, and suddenly whatever is redpilled is the

00:04:11 – 00:04:16:	new thing and the only thing, and they will then only believe things that are both consonant

00:04:16 – 00:04:20:	with this new redpilled information, and they don't want to know anything else.

00:04:20 – 00:04:23:	That's also insane.

00:04:23 – 00:04:30:	As Christians and as honest men, our fundamental pursuit should be what is true, what is truth,

00:04:30 – 00:04:35:	The challenge of all these things that are told as lies publicly and things that are

00:04:35 – 00:04:41:	confusing where they mix lies with truth is that if you are able to filter through that

00:04:41 – 00:04:45:	and realize some people are lying, some people are mistaken, and some people are telling

00:04:45 – 00:04:50:	the truth, and there's an inner mixture of those, and there are reasons for each of those.

00:04:50 – 00:04:55:	If you're not doing a really good job as an individual of just filtering your own inputs,

00:04:55 – 00:04:58:	you're going to absorb information that's false.

00:04:58 – 00:05:03:	You're going to believe things that are untrue, or you're going to have some mixture of truth

00:05:03 – 00:05:05:	and untruth that may drive you crazy.

00:05:05 – 00:05:10:	As we said, there are guys who believe the things that we said last week, which are true,

00:05:10 – 00:05:14:	but then that becomes all that they can think about, and that's part of the reason we saved

00:05:14 – 00:05:15:	it.

00:05:15 – 00:05:18:	We're well over a year into doing Stone Coir episodes.

00:05:18 – 00:05:22:	We always knew that we wanted to tackle the Holocaust, but we didn't jump into it right

00:05:22 – 00:05:26:	away because, first of all, everyone would think that this was the Holocaust podcast,

00:05:26 – 00:05:27:	which is not.

00:05:27 – 00:05:33:	This is fundamentally a podcast about religion and Christianity and truth, but as Christians,

00:05:33 – 00:05:34:	that's every day.

00:05:34 – 00:05:35:	That's 24 hours a day.

00:05:35 – 00:05:40:	It's not just on Sunday, and so there's other things that we all deal with in our lives

00:05:40 – 00:05:48:	that also need to be constant with our Christian faith and rejecting lies and embracing truth

00:05:48 – 00:05:56:	and balancing our focus in our daily lives is a key part of that because you can spend

00:05:56 – 00:05:59:	your time listening to podcasts and thinking about stuff and studying, but you also have

00:05:59 – 00:06:00:	duties.

00:06:00 – 00:06:03:	God gives you other things to do.

00:06:03 – 00:06:07:	Maybe your bless that your duty, your vocation in life is to focus on that stuff.

00:06:07 – 00:06:09:	For most people, that's not the case.

00:06:09 – 00:06:14:	You have a job, maybe it's tedious, maybe it's really important, maybe it's both, but

00:06:14 – 00:06:18:	you have to provide for your family and you have to do other things.

00:06:18 – 00:06:25:	You can't get bogged down in tedious details that don't seem immediately relevant.

00:06:25 – 00:06:29:	We have the luxury on a podcast of being able to tackle some of those subjects.

00:06:29 – 00:06:34:	One of the early episodes we did was on the neglected matters in Scripture.

00:06:34 – 00:06:38:	We'll do kind of an ongoing series of those things where we specifically made the point

00:06:38 – 00:06:39:	in that episode.

00:06:39 – 00:06:42:	We're not saying this is the meat of the Christian life.

00:06:42 – 00:06:46:	We are saying these are a few doctrines that are in Scripture and nobody really talks about

00:06:46 – 00:06:52:	them, or when they do talk about them, it's just kind of way off in the distance.

00:06:52 – 00:06:57:	All Scripture is breathed out by God and is useful for rebuke and reproof and correction

00:06:57 – 00:06:58:	of error.

00:06:58 – 00:07:05:	When we start throwing things away or deleting things or minimizing them, we get into trouble.

00:07:05 – 00:07:08:	When we talk about Scripture explicitly, we want to go back and look at some of the things

00:07:08 – 00:07:13:	that modern Christians don't really take seriously.

00:07:13 – 00:07:16:	As we're looking elsewhere in life, we have these things like today we're going to be

00:07:16 – 00:07:22:	discussing in some detail, just to give you a preview, the moon landing, the space race

00:07:22 – 00:07:23:	in general.

00:07:23 – 00:07:25:	We're going to be talking a bit about Flat Earth.

00:07:25 – 00:07:29:	We'll be talking briefly maybe about nukes, whether or not they're true.

00:07:29 – 00:07:32:	Basically kind of going down the list of the things that Owen Benjamin has been inserting

00:07:32 – 00:07:41:	into the zeitgeist, because those are pernicious lies that are really driving people insane.

00:07:41 – 00:07:45:	They get lumped in with things like last week's episode, and that's one of the reasons we

00:07:45 – 00:07:52:	want to tackle this next was that it's important as we are listening to things, not to too

00:07:52 – 00:07:56:	quickly jump on to things that are brand new, but to weigh them, to evaluate them based

00:07:56 – 00:08:00:	on reason and on what we can understand.

00:08:00 – 00:08:04:	As we go through some of the details of some of these things that are lies that are being

00:08:04 – 00:08:08:	produced today, we're going to contrast them with some of the other things that are true

00:08:08 – 00:08:13:	that we've talked about in the past to illustrate how superficially it may seem like the moon

00:08:13 – 00:08:19:	landing and what happened in the 40s in Germany are on the same level, but when you look at

00:08:19 – 00:08:25:	the details of the facts, they go in a completely opposite direction in terms of veracity and

00:08:25 – 00:08:27:	verifiability.

00:08:27 – 00:08:31:	As we work through this, this isn't going to be a debunking episode, it's just going

00:08:31 – 00:08:37:	to give some examples of how as we talk about these subjects, or as you hear about them,

00:08:37 – 00:08:39:	it's okay just to set it aside and not pay attention.

00:08:39 – 00:08:42:	If you don't want to hear it, that's completely fine.

00:08:42 – 00:08:46:	Everybody starts raving about whether it's the Holocaust or the moon landing or whatever,

00:08:46 – 00:08:48:	it's fine to tune out.

00:08:48 – 00:08:53:	What's not okay is to say, those people are all crazy, I don't believe any of it.

00:08:53 – 00:08:58:	Because if you want to engage in the veracity of the subject, you have to actually engage

00:08:58 – 00:08:59:	in the facts.

00:08:59 – 00:09:02:	You can't just say, they're nuts, I don't believe them.

00:09:02 – 00:09:07:	Because one of the things that all these things collectively do is convince us that anyone

00:09:07 – 00:09:09:	who talks about any of these things are crazy.

00:09:09 – 00:09:12:	That's why a lot of these things end up in the same bucket.

00:09:12 – 00:09:16:	You have people believing completely in the same things, like the gimmick from a few years

00:09:16 – 00:09:17:	ago, the birds aren't real.

00:09:17 – 00:09:24:	There's some guys, it was an open prank that some people then sort of turned into either

00:09:24 – 00:09:28:	just a personality or they wanted to believe it because, hey, it's one more revisionist

00:09:28 – 00:09:30:	part of history.

00:09:30 – 00:09:36:	We want to try to equip you today to just filter out with a few simple heuristics, am

00:09:36 – 00:09:40:	I being deceived here, or am I learning something new, and what do I do with it once I learn it?

00:09:42 – 00:09:49:	One of the conspiracy theories that really crops up constantly in the US context and

00:09:49 – 00:09:56:	abroad as well, there are actually some countries where an even higher percentage of the population

00:09:56 – 00:09:59:	would say they don't believe in this.

00:09:59 – 00:10:04:	That is, whether or not the moon landings actually took place.

00:10:04 – 00:10:08:	There are a lot of reasons that are given, none of them are good, but there are a lot

00:10:08 – 00:10:14:	of reasons that are given by people why they do not believe that the moon landings took place.

00:10:16 – 00:10:22:	Now part of this, of course, is because of all the other things that we are subjected

00:10:22 – 00:10:26:	to in our daily lives, we're bombarded with lies.

00:10:26 – 00:10:32:	We have lies about the COVID vaccines, vaccines and quotation marks here.

00:10:32 – 00:10:35:	We have lies about what happened with the pandemic.

00:10:35 – 00:10:40:	We have lies about so very many things.

00:10:40 – 00:10:45:	So people will go back and say, well, when did they start lying to me?

00:10:45 – 00:10:50:	And so if they started lying to me about the world wars, well, why would I believe them

00:10:50 – 00:10:53:	about the moon landing?

00:10:53 – 00:11:00:	But as Woe said in the introduction, the moon landing is a very different thing.

00:11:00 – 00:11:06:	Not only because it is just a very different thing from a war or something like that.

00:11:06 – 00:11:11:	Yes, it takes place in the Cold War context, but it's not itself a war.

00:11:11 – 00:11:16:	It is demonstrable that man landed on the moon.

00:11:16 – 00:11:22:	Unlike some of the historical claims where as soon as you subject them to any sort of

00:11:22 – 00:11:29:	serious analysis or critique, any sort of criticism, they fall apart.

00:11:29 – 00:11:32:	If you look at the claims around World War II and you actually subject them to scientific

00:11:32 – 00:11:36:	analysis, they immediately collapse.

00:11:36 – 00:11:39:	The opposite is actually true with the moon landing.

00:11:39 – 00:11:46:	If you subject the moon landing and we have a wealth of information, we'll get into, there

00:11:46 – 00:11:50:	are those who say they destroyed records, they didn't destroy the records, they recycled

00:11:50 – 00:11:54:	the tapes and for those who don't understand technology that may not make sense, we'll

00:11:54 – 00:12:00:	get into that though and explain why that is what you do.

00:12:00 – 00:12:04:	But if you actually subject the moon landing claims using the evidence on hand and there

00:12:04 – 00:12:11:	is still evidence today that you can use, it's very obvious it did take place.

00:12:11 – 00:12:13:	We did land on the moon.

00:12:13 – 00:12:16:	And one of the best examples, we won't bury the lead, we'll just start with one of the

00:12:16 – 00:12:22:	best ones, we left retro reflectors on the moon.

00:12:22 – 00:12:28:	Now in case you don't know what a retro reflector is, a retro reflector is essentially a very

00:12:28 – 00:12:30:	specialized mirror.

00:12:30 – 00:12:36:	If you go into your bathroom and shine a flashlight in the mirror, you know that it will reflect

00:12:36 – 00:12:41:	basically at an angle opposite the angle at which you shine the light into the mirror,

00:12:41 – 00:12:47:	which is to say it will bounce off at a different angle unless you are directly in line with

00:12:47 – 00:12:51:	the mirror, in which case you'll blind yourself, so maybe don't do that.

00:12:51 – 00:12:56:	But the reason for that, there's some physics we don't really need to get into, but a regular

00:12:56 – 00:13:00:	mirror is basically just the one pane.

00:13:00 – 00:13:07:	It reflects at an angle relative to the angle at which the light is hitting the surface.

00:13:07 – 00:13:13:	A retro reflector is designed not to do that for a very specific reason.

00:13:13 – 00:13:22:	A retro reflector is designed so that over a wide angle, it will reflect light received

00:13:22 – 00:13:24:	back at the center.

00:13:24 – 00:13:28:	Now this is useful for many reasons.

00:13:28 – 00:13:32:	You actually probably own a retro reflector somewhere in your house.

00:13:32 – 00:13:36:	If you own a bicycle, you probably have a retro reflector.

00:13:36 – 00:13:42:	Those are used as the reflectors on bikes and the reason for that is very obvious.

00:13:42 – 00:13:47:	If you have someone who is driving up behind you, you want the light from the headlights

00:13:47 – 00:13:52:	on that vehicle to reflect back at that vehicle so you're visible.

00:13:52 – 00:13:58:	If you put a standard mirror, they would just reflect off at some wild angle unless the light

00:13:58 – 00:14:02:	source happened to be directly in line with the mirror.

00:14:02 – 00:14:05:	Well we left retro reflectors on the moon.

00:14:05 – 00:14:11:	The reason we did that wasn't to prove we went to the moon because those who were actually

00:14:12 – 00:14:17:	designing that mission and the hardware and placing them weren't thinking about crazy

00:14:17 – 00:14:21:	people coming along later and saying this never took place.

00:14:21 – 00:14:27:	Rather they wanted to be able to bounce a laser off of it and receive it back, obviously.

00:14:27 – 00:14:32:	Same device that sent the laser out so that you can tell how far the moon is from the

00:14:32 – 00:14:33:	earth.

00:14:33 – 00:14:39:	Because now we can get extremely accurate readings of the distance from the earth to

00:14:39 – 00:14:40:	the moon.

00:14:41 – 00:14:44:	However, this is a retro reflector.

00:14:44 – 00:14:50:	It's just sitting on the lunar surface with maybe a thousand dollars worth of hardware

00:14:50 – 00:14:55:	you could go in your backyard and prove that man went to the moon.

00:14:55 – 00:15:01:	Not only that, you can prove, if you know a little bit of math, exactly how far it is

00:15:01 – 00:15:05:	from where you are standing on the earth to where that retro reflector is sitting on the

00:15:05 – 00:15:07:	moon.

00:15:07 – 00:15:12:	It's absolute concrete proof that man went to the moon.

00:15:12 – 00:15:15:	God didn't place a retro reflector on the moon and wait for us to discover it.

00:15:15 – 00:15:20:	We built that on earth and took it to the moon and placed it there.

00:15:20 – 00:15:27:	One of the things when people attack the idea that we went to the moon, which is almost

00:15:27 – 00:15:33:	a separate question from the fact, and that's one of the goals is to say they don't simply

00:15:33 – 00:15:35:	want to deny that we did.

00:15:35 – 00:15:39:	They want to deny that it's even conceivably possible the humans could, which is immediately

00:15:39 – 00:15:42:	where the conversation goes.

00:15:42 – 00:15:44:	It's not simply we didn't do it.

00:15:44 – 00:15:48:	It's impossible for us to have done that, which is another part of this conversation,

00:15:48 – 00:15:52:	but it's important to acknowledge that there are two things going on simultaneously, and

00:15:52 – 00:15:55:	that's frequently the case with these things.

00:15:55 – 00:16:02:	The way that people attack these subjects is the opposite of the way that we attack

00:16:02 – 00:16:08:	the subject last week, so we're going to give a couple examples by contrast.

00:16:08 – 00:16:13:	As I mentioned, Owen Benjamin is one of the chief, I'll say architects, but he's one

00:16:13 – 00:16:17:	of the chief ring leaders of the current idea that it didn't happen.

00:16:17 – 00:16:19:	He's certainly not the first.

00:16:19 – 00:16:20:	He's a very smart guy.

00:16:20 – 00:16:21:	He's very intelligent.

00:16:21 – 00:16:23:	He probably has a genius level IQ.

00:16:23 – 00:16:27:	He's also a comedian.

00:16:27 – 00:16:33:	He spent his life getting punch lines, and when you deliver a punch line and you get

00:16:33 – 00:16:39:	people to laugh, there's a short circuiting effect that occurs where you present your

00:16:39 – 00:16:44:	joke, you present the body of what it is you're doing, and then you land the punch, and the

00:16:44 – 00:16:51:	immediate response is for people to reel and laugh, and then they go off and it goes on.

00:16:51 – 00:16:52:	The joke is over.

00:16:52 – 00:16:53:	The whole story is over.

00:16:53 – 00:16:59:	The laughter is the acknowledgement that it's done, and there's no rational processing

00:16:59 – 00:17:04:	of what came before it, and that's a crucial part of the arguments that are used by these

00:17:04 – 00:17:07:	people saying that it didn't happen.

00:17:07 – 00:17:15:	One of the chief examples that they will give is to say, when Apollo 11 was on the moon,

00:17:15 – 00:17:20:	they had a phone call with Richard Nixon, and the comedians will say, I can't even make

00:17:20 – 00:17:24:	a phone call work well from my car on the highway.

00:17:24 – 00:17:31:	If in 2023, you can't get a cell phone with all this modern technology to connect a call,

00:17:31 – 00:17:37:	how could Richard Nixon in 1969 with a tin can have a phone call with astronauts a quarter

00:17:37 – 00:17:41:	million miles away?

00:17:41 – 00:17:42:	That's a punch line.

00:17:42 – 00:17:43:	That's a cheap shot.

00:17:43 – 00:17:48:	It's the easiest, stupidest question to ask, and if someone has no knowledge of anything

00:17:48 – 00:17:49:	like, oh, yeah, well, that makes sense.

00:17:49 – 00:17:51:	I use a cell phone every day, and I hate it.

00:17:51 – 00:17:52:	It's terrible.

00:17:52 – 00:17:54:	It doesn't work.

00:17:54 – 00:17:56:	It's comedian level rationality.

00:17:56 – 00:17:59:	I don't know what to call it.

00:17:59 – 00:18:02:	It's garbage.

00:18:02 – 00:18:05:	You can go and listen to the so-called phone call that they had.

00:18:05 – 00:18:07:	It was clearly scripted.

00:18:07 – 00:18:15:	It was timed, and it was an even more laggy version of what Corey and I do when we're

00:18:15 – 00:18:16:	doing this podcast.

00:18:16 – 00:18:17:	This isn't really a conversation.

00:18:17 – 00:18:18:	We're not in the same place.

00:18:18 – 00:18:22:	We take turns talking because there's enough lag that we don't want to interrupt each other.

00:18:22 – 00:18:28:	In the cases where we do try to interact live, usually there's some stumbling over each other.

00:18:28 – 00:18:29:	They were careful to avoid that.

00:18:29 – 00:18:35:	If you actually go listen, we'll put in the show notes the actual conversation that the

00:18:35 – 00:18:40:	astronauts and President Nixon had in 1969.

00:18:40 – 00:18:45:	Just listen to how it goes because the comedian will tell you, oh, they had a phone call.

00:18:45 – 00:18:54:	If you listen to it, A, these were incredibly powerful, incredibly sophisticated radios with

00:18:54 – 00:19:00:	directional antennae carefully tuned in a program that today is worth, I think, like

00:19:00 – 00:19:03:	$175 billion.

00:19:03 – 00:19:04:	This is not your cell phone.

00:19:04 – 00:19:10:	We're talking about the very best communications technology that was possible in 1969 with

00:19:10 – 00:19:13:	no wattage limit, which is a big deal.

00:19:13 – 00:19:15:	Your cell phone would always have connectivity.

00:19:15 – 00:19:18:	If it had 100 watts of output, it doesn't.

00:19:18 – 00:19:20:	That's one of the key differences.

00:19:20 – 00:19:24:	All you have to know is that when you listen to Nixon and the astronauts talking, they're

00:19:24 – 00:19:26:	not talking.

00:19:26 – 00:19:31:	Nixon gives us a speech that's a minute long, and then the astronauts give a canned response

00:19:31 – 00:19:33:	that's 20 seconds long or something.

00:19:33 – 00:19:35:	It wasn't a conversation.

00:19:35 – 00:19:39:	They each gave brief statements, and they took turns doing it.

00:19:39 – 00:19:42:	That's not a phone call.

00:19:42 – 00:19:44:	Even by itself, just that one thing, haha, it's a phone call.

00:19:44 – 00:19:46:	That doesn't work on the moon.

00:19:46 – 00:19:48:	It doesn't work on my neighborhood.

00:19:48 – 00:19:54:	That's the level of argumentation that you get from people who are denying what is easily

00:19:54 – 00:19:58:	the most well-documented event in all of human history.

00:19:58 – 00:20:01:	I don't say that with any exaggeration.

00:20:01 – 00:20:06:	The amount of documentation that went into the entire process of the Apollo program,

00:20:06 – 00:20:11:	including the launches and the return of those vehicles, it's indescribable how much

00:20:11 – 00:20:17:	data they had, radios, telemetry, just unfathomable amounts.

00:20:17 – 00:20:22:	Unfortunately, we just passed the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, and then this was back

00:20:22 – 00:20:28:	in the news a couple of weeks ago because we just passed January 20th of this year,

00:20:28 – 00:20:35:	which was, of course, the day that we landed on the moon in 1969.

00:20:35 – 00:20:40:	There was a website that was set up for 2019 for the 50th anniversary.

00:20:40 – 00:20:41:	Unfortunately, it's defunct now.

00:20:41 – 00:20:44:	I'm heartbroken because it's really cool.

00:20:44 – 00:20:50:	It was a website that basically was replaying the entire Apollo 11 mission from several

00:20:50 – 00:20:53:	hours before launch until its return.

00:20:53 – 00:20:58:	You could go to this website and you could jump between audio and video sources from

00:20:58 – 00:21:02:	every camera that they had available, every microphone they had available.

00:21:02 – 00:21:04:	You could see the telemetry in real time.

00:21:04 – 00:21:06:	You could scrub back and forth in time.

00:21:06 – 00:21:12:	You could just see the raft of data that was sent back to Earth and it was kept on Earth

00:21:12 – 00:21:18:	as part of this enormous project, just inconceivably huge project.

00:21:18 – 00:21:23:	That's a fraction of the data we have, as Cori alluded to.

00:21:23 – 00:21:24:	Some of the data was lost.

00:21:24 – 00:21:26:	Yeah, it's a government program.

00:21:26 – 00:21:28:	You ever hear government records getting misplaced?

00:21:28 – 00:21:30:	That's not a conspiracy.

00:21:30 – 00:21:34:	That's the realest part of the whole story, to say they're covering something up because

00:21:34 – 00:21:36:	they lost records.

00:21:36 – 00:21:38:	There's nothing I find more believable than that.

00:21:38 – 00:21:40:	Even at that, there's all this data.

00:21:40 – 00:21:44:	Again, it's available elsewhere, but it was just really nice that that website existed.

00:21:44 – 00:21:47:	You can go see the bones of it still.

00:21:47 – 00:21:52:	Even now, the telemetry data is widely available.

00:21:52 – 00:21:57:	As we talked about last week, if someone wanted to fake an event, as the event we talked about

00:21:57 – 00:22:02:	last week, if the Germans had wanted to cover up what they did and they falsified records

00:22:03 – 00:22:09:	by going in and modifying or deleting things, it would never withstand any sort of forensic

00:22:09 – 00:22:11:	scrutiny.

00:22:11 – 00:22:15:	That's absolutely the case with the Apollo missions.

00:22:15 – 00:22:17:	They were going out into space.

00:22:17 – 00:22:21:	One of the key parts of that is that everyone can see space.

00:22:21 – 00:22:24:	The moon is not over the United States of America.

00:22:24 – 00:22:26:	Everyone on the planet gets a shot at the moon.

00:22:26 – 00:22:31:	Everyone on the planet with a radio receiver or today a laser transmitter can do the same

00:22:31 – 00:22:32:	things that we could do.

00:22:32 – 00:22:38:	In 1969, when the astronauts were there, anyone with a radio receiver that was correctly

00:22:38 – 00:22:41:	set up and strong enough would be able to pick them up.

00:22:41 – 00:22:44:	That wasn't common in 1969, but you know who did have it?

00:22:44 – 00:22:45:	The Soviet Union.

00:22:45 – 00:22:50:	The Soviets were paying a great deal of attention to what we were doing in space.

00:22:50 – 00:22:54:	As Corey said, it was part of the Cold War.

00:22:54 – 00:22:59:	This was a military endeavor as far as the Soviets were concerned.

00:22:59 – 00:23:05:	One of the chief arguments from silence in all this is that if we had pretended to go

00:23:05 – 00:23:12:	to the moon and we hadn't, and we had been transmitting fake radio data from either moon

00:23:12 – 00:23:16:	orbit or from low Earth orbit, the Soviets would have known and they would have told

00:23:16 – 00:23:21:	the world because everything that the Soviets did at the time when they were a communist

00:23:21 – 00:23:27:	empire was to try to demonstrate to the world that communism was supreme over all reforms

00:23:27 – 00:23:28:	of life.

00:23:28 – 00:23:34:	Atheism, atheist communism was the way humanity was going to be ruled in the future.

00:23:34 – 00:23:35:	They were the first into space.

00:23:35 – 00:23:38:	They were the first to orbit.

00:23:38 – 00:23:39:	They did things before we did.

00:23:39 – 00:23:41:	The rocketry program was more advanced.

00:23:41 – 00:23:46:	We were playing catch-up when we did the Apollo and Gemini missions.

00:23:46 – 00:23:49:	They would have absolutely mocked us very publicly.

00:23:49 – 00:23:53:	If there was a shred of evidence that they could have collected from space that we didn't

00:23:53 – 00:23:56:	do this, it would have been everywhere in 1969.

00:23:56 – 00:24:01:	You had to wait for some idiot comedian 50 years later to say, oh, by the way, they didn't

00:24:01 – 00:24:02:	do it.

00:24:02 – 00:24:05:	The Russians would have told that before most of us were born.

00:24:05 – 00:24:11:	On a technical note about the supposed loss of data and one could argue that it is a loss

00:24:11 – 00:24:20:	of data, many of the reels would simply have been reused and that sounds crazy to the modern

00:24:20 – 00:24:26:	home user, let's say, of technology because you think, well, I just store everything on

00:24:26 – 00:24:31:	my hard drive and it seems to have infinite space, perhaps not your phone.

00:24:31 – 00:24:35:	You've run into a lack of space on your phone and that's a good example.

00:24:35 – 00:24:40:	If your phone fills up, you clear it and reuse the space.

00:24:40 – 00:24:46:	The same thing happens with certain systems that have high volumes of data passing through

00:24:46 – 00:24:47:	them.

00:24:47 – 00:24:51:	The best modern example would be a surveillance system.

00:24:51 – 00:24:56:	When you set up a surveillance system, yes, the cameras can be somewhat expensive, but

00:24:56 – 00:25:01:	the real expense winds up going into the back end where you actually store that data.

00:25:01 – 00:25:05:	I won't get into the specific numbers that much because no one really cares about the

00:25:05 – 00:25:07:	math.

00:25:07 – 00:25:13:	But the core point is that you are going to have a limited amount of space to store the

00:25:13 – 00:25:19:	data that you are collecting and you aim for X days of retention.

00:25:19 – 00:25:25:	So if you have an incident that occurs, you want to have back 90 days, say, and so you

00:25:25 – 00:25:29:	calculate your storage needs and you have enough storage for 90 days.

00:25:29 – 00:25:39:	Well, what happens is the video from 91 days ago drops off and gets reused for your current

00:25:39 – 00:25:40:	day.

00:25:40 – 00:25:41:	And that keeps happening.

00:25:42 – 00:25:44:	Cycling through that storage space.

00:25:44 – 00:25:48:	They did the same thing back when they had reels or whatever else they happened to be

00:25:48 – 00:25:54:	using, magnetic tapes, because they didn't have an infinite number of them.

00:25:54 – 00:25:58:	And back then it was very expensive to make more of them and they were large and you had

00:25:58 – 00:26:02:	to store them somewhere and they're somewhat delicate.

00:26:02 – 00:26:08:	So the fact that they were reused and that some of the data were lost is not at all surprising.

00:26:08 – 00:26:14:	That is exactly what you expect to happen with that kind of system.

00:26:14 – 00:26:22:	And the joke about, you know, my phone drops all the time and blah, blah, blah, okay, fine.

00:26:22 – 00:26:27:	If you wanted to build a system that was completely rock solid, you could do it.

00:26:27 – 00:26:30:	And it wouldn't even be that expensive today.

00:26:30 – 00:26:35:	Earlier I was looking at some hardware for something completely unrelated, but you can

00:26:35 – 00:26:46:	set up a 10 to 20 kilometer link for about $2,000 that will be completely stable.

00:26:46 – 00:26:51:	You could have a constant stream of data over this with no interruptions and it has enough

00:26:51 – 00:26:58:	throughput to do a little math.

00:26:58 – 00:27:01:	There's enough throughput in that to fill your hard drive.

00:27:01 – 00:27:06:	If you have an average size hard drive in about two hours, that's a lot of data, which

00:27:06 – 00:27:11:	is to say that if you wanted to build a system that was completely stable, you could do it.

00:27:11 – 00:27:18:	The phone system, your cell phone is not completely stable and reliable because of cost.

00:27:18 – 00:27:24:	It's the same thing as when you're storing X days worth of video of surveillance.

00:27:24 – 00:27:29:	You could store it indefinitely, but the cost keeps going up because you're going to have

00:27:29 – 00:27:33:	to buy new storage every time you fill your old storage.

00:27:33 – 00:27:39:	Well the phone system, the cellular system could be entirely reliable if that's what

00:27:39 – 00:27:41:	we wanted, if that's what we needed.

00:27:41 – 00:27:48:	We have systems like that for emergency services and things that are more sensitive to drops

00:27:48 – 00:27:53:	in quality or just entirely drops in service.

00:27:53 – 00:27:56:	We don't do it because of cost.

00:27:56 – 00:28:03:	The cost of building out that sort of system is extremely prohibitive unless you live in

00:28:03 – 00:28:05:	an area that is extremely dense.

00:28:05 – 00:28:13:	For instance, when I lived in Southern California, I had nearly perfect cell service basically

00:28:13 – 00:28:17:	everywhere I spent my time, unless I was hiking in the middle of nowhere, obviously in the

00:28:17 – 00:28:23:	depths of Sequoia National Forest, okay fine, I don't have service there, but everywhere

00:28:23 – 00:28:27:	in LA and in the surrounding areas, perfect service.

00:28:27 – 00:28:32:	Because of density, it makes sense to build out the network where you have literal millions

00:28:32 – 00:28:35:	of users.

00:28:35 – 00:28:39:	Now I live somewhere that is significantly more rural.

00:28:39 – 00:28:45:	My service here happens to be pretty good, but there are many places around where I live

00:28:45 – 00:28:48:	now where I don't have very good service.

00:28:48 – 00:28:51:	Because of the cost it would not make sense to build it out.

00:28:51 – 00:28:58:	And so it makes perfect sense that you would have good connection for something like the

00:28:58 – 00:29:04:	Apollo mission, which is critical, and yes, your cell phone doesn't perform to the same

00:29:04 – 00:29:05:	standard.

00:29:05 – 00:29:07:	It's insane to compare the two.

00:29:07 – 00:29:10:	And as Will mentioned, the point is the joke.

00:29:10 – 00:29:12:	It's a joke being told by a comedian.

00:29:12 – 00:29:17:	Aha, it's funny that my cell phone dropped service, no really, it's actually a wonder

00:29:17 – 00:29:23:	device that I have in my pocket that can do this virtually unlimited list of things that

00:29:23 – 00:29:27:	were inconceivable 40 years ago.

00:29:27 – 00:29:31:	Certainly inconceivable 100 years ago, 200 years ago.

00:29:31 – 00:29:36:	But yes, haha, it doesn't work all the time, okay fine, we understand the joke.

00:29:36 – 00:29:43:	Don't let the joke become warrant to believe something that is insane.

00:29:43 – 00:29:46:	Because then you've just made yourself the joke.

00:29:46 – 00:29:53:	Why would you take a joke from a comedian and turn that into one of your actual beliefs

00:29:53 – 00:29:56:	about the real world?

00:29:56 – 00:30:01:	That is an insane thing to do.

00:30:01 – 00:30:05:	Another common example that comes from the folks who say that we couldn't have gone to

00:30:05 – 00:30:08:	the moon is the Van Allen belts.

00:30:08 – 00:30:09:	You may have heard the term before.

00:30:09 – 00:30:14:	They're these belts of ionizing radiation around the earth.

00:30:14 – 00:30:21:	It's radiation that's held by the magnetism of the earth itself that does exist in places

00:30:21 – 00:30:24:	in lethal levels.

00:30:24 – 00:30:30:	And so the theory from guys on Twitter and YouTube who are not nearly smart enough to

00:30:30 – 00:30:35:	actually do any of this math is that the earth is surrounded by this murder cloud and no

00:30:35 – 00:30:43:	one can possibly transit that cloud or they all die instantly because it's radioactive.

00:30:43 – 00:30:45:	So it was worried about this.

00:30:45 – 00:30:46:	They were worried about the Van Allen belts.

00:30:46 – 00:30:47:	They knew about them.

00:30:47 – 00:30:49:	They knew of their existence.

00:30:49 – 00:30:54:	They had correctly modeled them in the 60s so that they knew that they were uneven.

00:30:54 – 00:30:59:	They're these multiple layers and pockets of radiation that are unevenly distributed

00:30:59 – 00:31:08:	because the galaxy and the solar system are basically is an illusion to the flat earth

00:31:08 – 00:31:09:	thing later.

00:31:09 – 00:31:10:	They're kind of a pancake.

00:31:10 – 00:31:13:	They're basically oriented in a flat fashion.

00:31:13 – 00:31:21:	So the earth's radiation belts, the Van Allen belts are oriented basically towards the sun.

00:31:21 – 00:31:23:	They're oriented with the poles of the earth.

00:31:23 – 00:31:27:	So it's not quite aligned, but more or less it's off to one side and the other.

00:31:27 – 00:31:33:	So you have up and down and you have left and right and north, south, east, west.

00:31:33 – 00:31:36:	That's important because the Van Allen belts are not perfect spheres.

00:31:36 – 00:31:40:	We're not talking about electron shells around a neutron.

00:31:40 – 00:31:43:	We're talking about a torus.

00:31:44 – 00:31:51:	It's a round donut basically around the earth of, yes, lethal levels of radiation.

00:31:51 – 00:31:52:	So NASA mapped it.

00:31:52 – 00:31:55:	They made sure that they understood all the risks.

00:31:55 – 00:31:59:	One of the other things that you'll hear from the Benjamins of the world is they would have

00:31:59 – 00:32:02:	had to have so much lead shielding they couldn't have possibly taken off.

00:32:02 – 00:32:06:	We'll link a video in the show notes that goes in briefly in just a bit of details.

00:32:06 – 00:32:09:	And it talks about some of the specifics that you can go Google if you actually care about

00:32:09 – 00:32:10:	the science.

00:32:10 – 00:32:16:	If, for the sake of argument, these idiotic internet comedians were right and you would

00:32:16 – 00:32:21:	have needed very thick lead shielding to protect the astronauts from the radiation.

00:32:21 – 00:32:25:	The scientific fact is that if they had had heavy lead shielding, it would have actually

00:32:25 – 00:32:30:	increased the amount of radiation they would have been exposed to.

00:32:30 – 00:32:34:	Because although the lead shielding would have kept the ionizing radiation on the outside

00:32:34 – 00:32:38:	of the lead shielding, the lead shielding itself would have been emitting X-rays inside

00:32:38 – 00:32:39:	the spaceship.

00:32:39 – 00:32:45:	So the light, aluminum skin, and the Mylar sheathing and the other things in this tin

00:32:45 – 00:32:48:	can of a spaceship, that's not a joke.

00:32:48 – 00:32:49:	That was real.

00:32:49 – 00:32:53:	It was incredibly light, not only because it had to be, but because it could be.

00:32:53 – 00:32:55:	And the materials that they used, they did the math.

00:32:55 – 00:32:56:	They were careful.

00:32:56 – 00:32:58:	They didn't just yolo into space.

00:32:58 – 00:32:59:	They were careful.

00:32:59 – 00:33:00:	They didn't want to kill people.

00:33:00 – 00:33:05:	They'd already killed three guys in the oxygen fire in Gemini.

00:33:05 – 00:33:09:	They wanted to make sure they didn't have that happen again by anything.

00:33:10 – 00:33:11:	It was a PR thing.

00:33:11 – 00:33:14:	It was a human thing.

00:33:14 – 00:33:18:	The mission was to send men to the moon and bring them back alive.

00:33:18 – 00:33:21:	Everything that went into that mission was important to them, and that included not having

00:33:21 – 00:33:23:	radiation poisoning.

00:33:23 – 00:33:25:	So what do they do for the Van Allen belts?

00:33:25 – 00:33:30:	They made sure that the spaceships had the appropriate materials to minimize as much

00:33:30 – 00:33:33:	of the radiation that they were going to be exposed to as possible.

00:33:33 – 00:33:35:	And then they went around the belts.

00:33:35 – 00:33:40:	And they cut through the edges of the Van Allen belts where it was not lethal.

00:33:40 – 00:33:45:	And they did it quickly enough that they were only exposed for a total of about six hours

00:33:45 – 00:33:47:	inside any portion of the belts.

00:33:47 – 00:33:51:	And all three of the astronauts were wearing dosimeters, so they knew how much radiation

00:33:51 – 00:33:53:	they were exposed to.

00:33:53 – 00:34:00:	Their entire trip through the Van Allen belts in the deepness of outer space with no magnetic

00:34:00 – 00:34:02:	shield from the Earth protecting them.

00:34:02 – 00:34:10:	They received less radioactivity exposure than a nuclear worker would today in a nuclear

00:34:10 – 00:34:11:	plant.

00:34:11 – 00:34:17:	It was a completely safe, innocuous, not even interesting level of radiation.

00:34:17 – 00:34:20:	It wasn't like they couldn't do that.

00:34:20 – 00:34:24:	If they went up every day, yes, they would start to get into levels that would be dangerous.

00:34:24 – 00:34:29:	But for the trips that they took, they went through it for about two and a half hours

00:34:29 – 00:34:33:	one way and about three and a half hours the other way.

00:34:33 – 00:34:35:	And in between, they had several days of rest.

00:34:35 – 00:34:38:	And so their bodies were able to repair some of the damage that may have been caused by

00:34:38 – 00:34:39:	the radiation.

00:34:39 – 00:34:44:	Because another problem with that sort of radiation is it's the continuous exposure

00:34:44 – 00:34:47:	that causes your body to break down.

00:34:47 – 00:34:49:	Our bodies are constantly being injured and damaged.

00:34:49 – 00:34:51:	We have cells that are dying all the time.

00:34:51 – 00:34:55:	Our bodies are always cleaning up some mass, some injury internally, and we never know

00:34:55 – 00:34:56:	about it.

00:34:56 – 00:34:58:	So they took all those things into account.

00:34:58 – 00:35:04:	So just as these two very brief examples, you have radioactivity and you have ha-ha

00:35:04 – 00:35:06:	phone calls.

00:35:06 – 00:35:10:	When you examine those gotcha claims, they disintegrate.

00:35:10 – 00:35:13:	There's a very plausible explanation.

00:35:13 – 00:35:18:	And on the flip side, when you look at all the proof that it actually happened, it's

00:35:18 – 00:35:19:	overwhelming.

00:35:19 – 00:35:25:	So the gotchas fall on their face and everything that the guys want to ignore is staring you

00:35:25 – 00:35:27:	right in the eyes.

00:35:27 – 00:35:31:	Last week's episode, by contrast, the opposite is true.

00:35:31 – 00:35:37:	See if all the bodies are missing and there have been all these millions killed, that's

00:35:37 – 00:35:38:	a big deal.

00:35:38 – 00:35:39:	That's not a phone call.

00:35:39 – 00:35:44:	And that's part of the reason we wanted to contrast these is that if you just bucket

00:35:44 – 00:35:49:	these together as, these are crazy conspiracy theories that guys on the internet make up

00:35:49 – 00:35:53:	and I don't know what to believe, it's all crazy, I don't want anything to do with it.

00:35:53 – 00:35:56:	If you just want to check out completely, that's fine.

00:35:56 – 00:36:02:	If you want to engage in the veracity of these things, take a look at the claims.

00:36:02 – 00:36:05:	If six million bodies vanish, that's a big deal.

00:36:05 – 00:36:09:	If something that someone calls a phone call, it was called a phone call at the time, but

00:36:09 – 00:36:10:	it wasn't.

00:36:10 – 00:36:13:	It was a scripted radio transmission.

00:36:13 – 00:36:17:	One guy pressed the button and talked for a minute or two and then the other guy responded

00:36:17 – 00:36:19:	when his time was up.

00:36:19 – 00:36:23:	All of the possible gotchas fall apart.

00:36:23 – 00:36:24:	I used to work in tech.

00:36:24 – 00:36:25:	I used to work at Apple.

00:36:25 – 00:36:26:	I've done demos before.

00:36:26 – 00:36:33:	Sometimes parts of demos are faked, not in the sense that the thing couldn't be done,

00:36:33 – 00:36:36:	but at the exact moment that you were asked to present it.

00:36:36 – 00:36:41:	Maybe it wasn't in a state that you could make it work as well as it was going to work

00:36:41 – 00:36:42:	in the end.

00:36:42 – 00:36:46:	Now, I'm not saying that the moon landing was a demo, but some of the other minor gotchas

00:36:46 – 00:36:50:	are that there's videos that were taken inside the capsules at different distances from the

00:36:50 – 00:36:51:	earth.

00:36:52 – 00:36:55:	You can do the math on the size of the earth and say, well, they were this far away when

00:36:55 – 00:36:57:	they were saying they were this far away.

00:36:57 – 00:37:02:	It's important to keep in mind that the astronauts, every minute of that three-day journey was

00:37:02 – 00:37:06:	scripted because this was not a canoe trip down a river.

00:37:06 – 00:37:13:	They had to do certain things at precise intervals at certain moments or they would all die.

00:37:13 – 00:37:14:	It's rocket science.

00:37:14 – 00:37:19:	We're talking about being in space where one accident, one mistake can potentially kill

00:37:19 – 00:37:20:	you.

00:37:21 – 00:37:25:	Miraculously, we were able to recover from on Apollo 13 when a whole bunch of things

00:37:25 – 00:37:26:	went wrong.

00:37:26 – 00:37:30:	They did recover because they were brilliant men and they were hard workers and they had

00:37:30 – 00:37:32:	enough of a safety margin to make it back.

00:37:32 – 00:37:34:	Frankly, God saved their lives too.

00:37:34 – 00:37:39:	You can't, humans can't take all the credit for that.

00:37:39 – 00:37:45:	The difference between the so-called conspiracy theory where the couple gotchas blow a hole

00:37:45 – 00:37:51:	in everything and something like the moon landing where the gotchas are themselves in

00:37:51 – 00:37:54:	A.N., it's not even apples and oranges.

00:37:54 – 00:37:57:	It's apples and elephants.

00:37:57 – 00:38:03:	On the topic of radiation, I think a lot of people get the wrong conception of radiation

00:38:03 – 00:38:06:	and radiation risks.

00:38:06 – 00:38:14:	If you are an international traveler, you have increased exposure to radiation because

00:38:14 – 00:38:20:	when you fly, you are outside some of the protection of the Earth's atmosphere because

00:38:20 – 00:38:25:	you are above much of it when you are flying at altitude, particularly if you are taking

00:38:25 – 00:38:30:	international trips where you are at altitude for many hours.

00:38:30 – 00:38:38:	And so you have an increased risk of cancer over the long term because of that travel.

00:38:38 – 00:38:42:	The same thing is very true for astronauts.

00:38:42 – 00:38:48:	Astronauts, in some cases, face an increased risk of cancer.

00:38:48 – 00:38:54:	Now, we may get into nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

00:38:54 – 00:39:00:	It's not always true that being in the vicinity of nuclear energy is going to result in an

00:39:00 – 00:39:02:	increased risk of cancer.

00:39:02 – 00:39:08:	For instance, our submariners actually have a decreased risk of cancer.

00:39:08 – 00:39:15:	Because our nuclear submarines are designed in such a way, there's no radiation risk for

00:39:15 – 00:39:16:	the crew.

00:39:16 – 00:39:18:	They don't have any exposure.

00:39:18 – 00:39:23:	They actually have less because they are protected by the volume of water and the metal

00:39:23 – 00:39:24:	tube.

00:39:24 – 00:39:28:	They're actually getting less radiation than you would just being on the surface on an

00:39:28 – 00:39:29:	average day.

00:39:29 – 00:39:34:	I'm getting more right now from the open window, well, the unshuttered window next to me.

00:39:34 – 00:39:35:	Obviously not open.

00:39:35 – 00:39:37:	It's very warm outside.

00:39:37 – 00:39:42:	But radiation risk is a matter of longitudinal risk.

00:39:42 – 00:39:50:	It is exposure over a very long period of time unless you have an acute exposure, Chernobyl,

00:39:50 – 00:39:51:	for instance.

00:39:51 – 00:39:57:	But one of the reasons that people get this wrong is they don't understand longitudinal

00:39:57 – 00:39:58:	risk.

00:39:58 – 00:39:59:	It's not just acute risk.

00:39:59 – 00:40:01:	It's not like being poisoned.

00:40:01 – 00:40:05:	Yes, it is poisoning over a long period.

00:40:05 – 00:40:09:	So yes, you could compare it to a mild toxin, but it's not like cyanide poisoning where

00:40:09 – 00:40:11:	you take it and you die.

00:40:11 – 00:40:18:	This is one of the reasons when Japan had their nuclear incident in the wake of the tsunami,

00:40:18 – 00:40:21:	many elderly volunteered to help clean up.

00:40:21 – 00:40:27:	If you are already elderly, you don't run the risk of that longitudinal increase in

00:40:27 – 00:40:33:	cancer, the risk of cancer, well, really cancer because we all eventually get cancer if you

00:40:33 – 00:40:35:	live long enough.

00:40:35 – 00:40:41:	But you don't run that risk if you're already elderly because it is the dose over your life

00:40:41 – 00:40:46:	that increases the likelihood of getting that cancer.

00:40:46 – 00:40:54:	And we mistakenly believe that somehow we can just remove all of these risks.

00:40:54 – 00:40:58:	There were very real risks, including radiation risks for these astronauts.

00:40:58 – 00:41:03:	Yes, they did as much as they possibly could to reduce those risks, but they couldn't eliminate

00:41:03 – 00:41:04:	them.

00:41:04 – 00:41:11:	In the end analysis, we were blasting human beings into a vacuum in a metal tube.

00:41:11 – 00:41:16:	We'd already sort of done so and learned many things obviously from submarines because that's

00:41:16 – 00:41:19:	the best comparison for this.

00:41:19 – 00:41:24:	Submarine versus spacecraft because both are dealing with a very inhospitable external

00:41:24 – 00:41:28:	environment that if you do anything wrong, you're going to die.

00:41:28 – 00:41:32:	If you get a hole in your craft, you're probably going to die.

00:41:32 – 00:41:37:	But for instance, to compare these radiation risks, to understand them perhaps a little

00:41:37 – 00:41:43:	better, there's actually a monument, I guess this tangentially ties into last week's episode

00:41:43 – 00:41:50:	since it was built in 1936 and in Germany, but there's a monument on the campus of St.

00:41:50 – 00:41:58:	George's Hospital in Hamburg that has a list of, I think it's up to maybe 400 names now,

00:41:58 – 00:42:05:	of those who died learning about basically x-rays.

00:42:05 – 00:42:09:	These technologies, when we are experimenting with them, when we are first learning to use

00:42:09 – 00:42:14:	them, have very real risks that come with them and the astronauts knew those risks and

00:42:14 – 00:42:16:	undertook them.

00:42:16 – 00:42:20:	So when people say that, oh, you couldn't do it because of x, y, and z, no, that's a risk

00:42:20 – 00:42:22:	that you run.

00:42:22 – 00:42:27:	You account for the risk, you minimize the risk, but you can't eliminate it.

00:42:27 – 00:42:32:	And so it's not an argument against the moon landing that there was some sort of risk involved

00:42:32 – 00:42:36:	in radiation exposure.

00:42:36 – 00:42:42:	That's going to be the case with human spaceflight unless we figure out some way to totally

00:42:42 – 00:42:46:	mitigate radiation, which we have not done yet.

00:42:46 – 00:42:54:	That's actually one of the biggest hurdles in getting men to Mars because that is significantly

00:42:54 – 00:42:59:	more radiation exposure than just a trip to the moon.

00:42:59 – 00:43:00:	The moon's not that far away.

00:43:00 – 00:43:09:	The three-day trip, not very long, a six-month or more trip to Mars, that is an immense exposure

00:43:09 – 00:43:16:	to the hard radiation of vacuum unless we discover some new way to mitigate that.

00:43:16 – 00:43:24:	And I think that a key element of all of the various details, so-called, in the conspiracy

00:43:24 – 00:43:29:	theories that we're talking about today, is that they rely on the person listening, not

00:43:29 – 00:43:38:	being intelligent, not being smart enough to either understand the variables or to even

00:43:38 – 00:43:42:	have any conception that such a thing is possible.

00:43:42 – 00:43:46:	And so when you say cell phone, ha, ha, ha, everyone's like, yeah, I know what a cell

00:43:46 – 00:43:47:	phone is.

00:43:47 – 00:43:48:	Corey talked about it.

00:43:49 – 00:43:53:	They're different degrees of engineering required for different things.

00:43:53 – 00:43:58:	And you spend the money, you get the results you want.

00:43:58 – 00:44:01:	There's nothing abnormal about that.

00:44:01 – 00:44:04:	That's how everything works.

00:44:04 – 00:44:11:	It's, you know, the joke in racing used to be you can spend cubic inches or you can spend

00:44:11 – 00:44:12:	cubic bucks.

00:44:12 – 00:44:17:	You can have an incredibly exotic engine that can go really fast or you can have a really

00:44:17 – 00:44:21:	big engine and you'll get similar results.

00:44:21 – 00:44:25:	When these punch lines are thrown out and these stupid little gotchas like cell phones

00:44:25 – 00:44:31:	and, you know, one of the other things is they were on the moon and why are all the pictures

00:44:31 – 00:44:32:	of the sky black?

00:44:32 – 00:44:34:	Why aren't there any stars?

00:44:34 – 00:44:38:	Well, have you ever seen a difference in way your eyes can pick up in the daylight versus

00:44:38 – 00:44:39:	at night?

00:44:39 – 00:44:41:	Your eye has an iris.

00:44:41 – 00:44:43:	Your eye has light sensitivity.

00:44:43 – 00:44:49:	In fact, it has two different sets of sensors, one for regular light and one for low light.

00:44:49 – 00:44:53:	Because in regular light, you can see color and low light, you really can't.

00:44:53 – 00:44:58:	So your eyes switch between the rods and cones depending on how much light is available

00:44:58 – 00:45:01:	so that you can still see something.

00:45:01 – 00:45:06:	In space, when they were on the moon, it was always the middle of the day.

00:45:06 – 00:45:10:	There was no nighttime anywhere, anytime they were in space.

00:45:10 – 00:45:17:	They were always in full 100% sunlight, which meant that they were at the maximum possible

00:45:17 – 00:45:24:	eyeball saturation and cameras have even less dynamic range than our eyes do.

00:45:24 – 00:45:29:	Cameras are stopped down considerably compared to the range of a human eye.

00:45:29 – 00:45:34:	And so a camera, if it can see, for example, the earth, clearly without the earth being

00:45:34 – 00:45:39:	completely blown out to the point that it would just be shining white, there's literally

00:45:39 – 00:45:44:	no possible way for the same camera to show stars in the background and the earth.

00:45:44 – 00:45:49:	It's one or the other because of the difference in the albedo, the difference of the brightness

00:45:49 – 00:45:51:	of the objects.

00:45:51 – 00:45:56:	So if you don't know anything and you don't care to learn, and maybe you're not smart

00:45:56 – 00:46:01:	enough to understand, and I don't refer to intellectual capability to be insulting, God

00:46:01 – 00:46:05:	made some people does not need to be smart enough to worry about this stuff.

00:46:05 – 00:46:10:	Don't let someone like Owen Benjamin prey on your inability to understand a lot of the

00:46:10 – 00:46:16:	scientific details to convince you that something that obviously happened couldn't have happened.

00:46:16 – 00:46:18:	It's just that that's the key element here.

00:46:18 – 00:46:23:	When the claims that we made about Martin Luther King and the claims that we made about

00:46:23 – 00:46:29:	the Holocaust were simple, they're not fancy scientific claims.

00:46:29 – 00:46:30:	Cookie math.

00:46:30 – 00:46:33:	If I have four ovens in five years, how many cookies can I bake?

00:46:33 – 00:46:34:	That's not tricky.

00:46:34 – 00:46:37:	It doesn't rely on any secret knowledge.

00:46:37 – 00:46:39:	It's the opposite of what's going on here.

00:46:39 – 00:46:44:	So again, they seem similar if you're just thinking, wow, crazy guy on the internet's

00:46:44 – 00:46:46:	telling me something.

00:46:46 – 00:46:49:	The difference is in the quality of the questions.

00:46:49 – 00:46:56:	The quality of a question of where did all the bodies go is fundamentally different than

00:46:56 – 00:47:00:	the quality of the question, how did they make a phone call from the moon?

00:47:00 – 00:47:02:	There's no possible comparison.

00:47:02 – 00:47:07:	So you as a listener, I think one of the important things is this guy just preying

00:47:07 – 00:47:10:	on my scientific ignorance.

00:47:10 – 00:47:15:	As we said at the beginning of last week's episode, don't just believe what we say because

00:47:15 – 00:47:17:	we say it or even if it seems convincing.

00:47:17 – 00:47:22:	One of the really heartening things that came from last week's episode, we got a ton of

00:47:22 – 00:47:28:	feedback from people saying basically it took them a back because maybe they'd heard one

00:47:28 – 00:47:32:	or two bits of pieces, but most people had never heard any of that.

00:47:32 – 00:47:35:	They weren't necessarily going to believe it right away, but the thing that was consistent

00:47:35 – 00:47:43:	about a lot of the feedback was that everyone who heard it took pause because suddenly things

00:47:43 – 00:47:47:	that didn't make sense before are starting to make sense.

00:47:47 – 00:47:54:	That's another contrast between something that's true where there's actually a legitimate

00:47:54 – 00:48:00:	concerted effort to deceive us like COVID, for example, and something that's a lie, like

00:48:00 – 00:48:05:	denying that we'd landed on the moon when it's plainly visible and plainly obvious

00:48:05 – 00:48:09:	and easily proven.

00:48:09 – 00:48:13:	In the narrative, there's the same amount of proof for both.

00:48:13 – 00:48:18:	We could have done another three hours like last week with completely different sets of

00:48:18 – 00:48:23:	facts, completely different information, and still blown your minds the same way.

00:48:23 – 00:48:26:	There's that much incredibly obvious stuff.

00:48:26 – 00:48:31:	One thing I didn't mention was that if you go to Google engrams and search for capital

00:48:31 – 00:48:36:	H Holocaust, the word doesn't appear until the mid-60s.

00:48:36 – 00:48:37:	Compare that with the moon landing.

00:48:37 – 00:48:42:	If you search for moon landing, in 1969, everyone was talking about the moon landing, and it

00:48:42 – 00:48:44:	wasn't because they were faking it in real time.

00:48:44 – 00:48:48:	In the show notes for this episode, we'll have a few links to some different breakdowns

00:48:48 – 00:48:54:	from different groups of people about how when you look at some of the speculative denials

00:48:54 – 00:48:56:	of what happened, it falls apart.

00:48:56 – 00:49:02:	One of my favorite ones is from some movie special effects guys, because the big claim

00:49:02 – 00:49:07:	is that, well, we didn't go, we faked the whole thing, it was all a stage.

00:49:07 – 00:49:12:	It was movie producers, it was Stanley Kubrick faking the whole thing.

00:49:12 – 00:49:16:	These guys said that with current technology, we could not fake it as well as they did.

00:49:16 – 00:49:20:	They said they would have been cheaper to actually go to the moon than to fake it as

00:49:20 – 00:49:21:	well as they did.

00:49:21 – 00:49:27:	The technology absolutely didn't exist to fake the specific details that you could have

00:49:27 – 00:49:30:	only gotten right if you were actually on the moon.

00:49:30 – 00:49:35:	There's things about the alignment of the light and reflections that you can only have

00:49:35 – 00:49:38:	if your light source is millions of miles away.

00:49:38 – 00:49:43:	It can't be a light source that's hanging up on the ceiling in a sound stage.

00:49:43 – 00:49:48:	The quality of the questions and the quality of the evidence is fundamentally different.

00:49:48 – 00:49:52:	One of the key themes of this episode is that when you're weighing these things, if you

00:49:52 – 00:49:58:	want to delve into crazy guys on the internet telling you stuff for the first time, if you're

00:49:58 – 00:50:03:	willing to do that, it's okay to assume upfront that it's all crap, assume that you're being

00:50:03 – 00:50:04:	lied to.

00:50:04 – 00:50:05:	I do.

00:50:05 – 00:50:07:	Frankly, it's part of why I'm good at thinking.

00:50:07 – 00:50:11:	I assume that anything that anyone tells me, I assume every part of it is false and I try

00:50:11 – 00:50:12:	to pick it apart.

00:50:13 – 00:50:18:	Now, it's not abrasive and it's not crazy, it's just I have a filter where anything

00:50:18 – 00:50:24:	that's true is only going to get through because I picked apart all the pieces that could possibly

00:50:24 – 00:50:25:	be false.

00:50:25 – 00:50:29:	The reason I fell for the narrative of what we talked about last week was that I never

00:50:29 – 00:50:30:	did that.

00:50:30 – 00:50:33:	People said, hey, this happened, okay, whatever.

00:50:33 – 00:50:38:	When I looked at it critically, when I scrutinized it, it disintegrated.

00:50:38 – 00:50:41:	I became curious about the moon landing a few years ago for the same reason.

00:50:41 – 00:50:45:	I always assumed it was true, I believed it was true, I liked everything I'd ever heard

00:50:45 – 00:50:47:	said it was true.

00:50:47 – 00:50:50:	All these people suddenly start saying, oh, it's fake, it's all made up, it's insane,

00:50:50 – 00:50:55:	it's crazy, they're lying to you, man, okay, I don't believe that, but I'll go look at

00:50:55 – 00:50:56:	your evidence.

00:50:56 – 00:50:57:	I did.

00:50:57 – 00:51:00:	I spent a while looking at the evidence the same way I looked at last week's evidence.

00:51:00 – 00:51:02:	What I found was the exact opposite.

00:51:02 – 00:51:07:	When you actually look at the raw materials, it's just inconceivable that it could have

00:51:07 – 00:51:08:	been faked.

00:51:08 – 00:51:09:	Never mind that it wasn't.

00:51:09 – 00:51:11:	We have all the physical evidence that it was.

00:51:11 – 00:51:16:	We have reams, just a virtually infinite amount of proof.

00:51:16 – 00:51:18:	There was no way to fake it.

00:51:18 – 00:51:23:	One of the things I looked at, I've never seen written about, but one thing I personally

00:51:23 – 00:51:28:	came up with was there were multiple Apollo missions where we sent men up and they went

00:51:28 – 00:51:30:	into orbit.

00:51:30 – 00:51:33:	Even the narrative that says that we never went to the moon because we couldn't leave

00:51:33 – 00:51:38:	the Van Allen belts, still says that we sent men up into outer space because obviously

00:51:38 – 00:51:42:	everyone saw Saturn V rise and then saw the Apollo caps will come back down.

00:51:42 – 00:51:46:	That means the guys went into at least low Earth orbit.

00:51:46 – 00:51:51:	Well, when you go up into space in low Earth orbit and then you come back down, you have

00:51:51 – 00:51:59:	a return trajectory and you can look online, we won't put this on the show, it's not important.

00:51:59 – 00:52:02:	When I looked, I found that for the Apollo missions where the astronauts went up into

00:52:02 – 00:52:08:	space and just circled the Earth, they had one return trajectory.

00:52:08 – 00:52:12:	It was relatively shallow, if I remember correctly.

00:52:12 – 00:52:17:	We have another one for the missions where they returned from the moon and the numbers

00:52:17 – 00:52:21:	for the return trajectory for the moon were off by like 50 degrees.

00:52:21 – 00:52:22:	It was a massive difference.

00:52:22 – 00:52:27:	I can't remember which direction, but it was substantially different to the point that

00:52:27 – 00:52:33:	if Apollo 11 had only gone into low Earth orbit and faked it, their return trajectory

00:52:33 – 00:52:35:	would have been physically impossible.

00:52:35 – 00:52:39:	They wouldn't have been able to return to Earth on the trajectory they did unless they'd

00:52:39 – 00:52:41:	been coming from the moon.

00:52:41 – 00:52:46:	That was something I just dug into myself because I'd never seen anyone talk about it,

00:52:46 – 00:52:52:	but when I found that data, it seemed like that's a pretty obvious example.

00:52:52 – 00:52:55:	Someone who's intelligent is going to find that and say, yes, this adds up or it's a

00:52:55 – 00:52:56:	lie.

00:52:56 – 00:53:02:	If all the return trajectories had been identical, I would have needed for my own edification

00:53:02 – 00:53:05:	and explanation for how that could be possible because it wouldn't make sense.

00:53:05 – 00:53:11:	When I saw the two numbers were wildly disparate for low Earth orbit versus lunar return trajectory,

00:53:11 – 00:53:15:	I'm like, okay, here's just another piece of evidence that it wasn't even typically

00:53:15 – 00:53:19:	used that when I look at it, like, yeah, it all adds up.

00:53:19 – 00:53:22:	Even the stuff nobody's talking about adds up.

00:53:22 – 00:53:25:	That's what you'll find when something is true is in the nooks and crannies where no

00:53:25 – 00:53:28:	one's looking and no one's talking, it all still makes sense.

00:53:28 – 00:53:30:	That's how reality works.

00:53:30 – 00:53:36:	The truth is true everywhere in every direction and a lie, even if something can be convincing

00:53:36 – 00:53:40:	to someone and some narrow point, it falls apart as soon as you step back just a little

00:53:40 – 00:53:41:	bit.

00:53:41 – 00:53:47:	Obviously, we aren't going to try to go over every single objection, supposed objection

00:53:47 – 00:53:50:	that has been raised to the moon landing.

00:53:50 – 00:53:55:	That's not the goal of the episode and we don't want to spend six hours talking about

00:53:55 – 00:53:58:	the most insane things you've ever heard.

00:53:58 – 00:54:04:	But I think there are two that are worth addressing quickly simply because they are very easy

00:54:04 – 00:54:08:	to address and they're completely ludicrous claims.

00:54:08 – 00:54:12:	The first is that the footprints are obviously fake.

00:54:12 – 00:54:16:	That's what they try to argue and they argue this for a number of reasons.

00:54:16 – 00:54:19:	One they'll say they're much too defined, they're too perfect.

00:54:19 – 00:54:25:	If you are so inclined, I don't recommend doing this, but if you are so inclined to prove

00:54:25 – 00:54:30:	this as possible, buy a bag of flour, go outside, don't do this in your kitchen, go outside,

00:54:30 – 00:54:34:	dump it on the ground, put on your hiking boots, and step in it.

00:54:34 – 00:54:40:	You'll reproduce the same sort of footprint that we see in the photographs from the moon

00:54:40 – 00:54:45:	because the dust on the moon is very fine and flour is fine.

00:54:45 – 00:54:47:	That's the sort of footprint it produces.

00:54:47 – 00:54:54:	But another thing that they will argue about the footprint, the boot print, well the pattern,

00:54:54 – 00:54:56:	the tread doesn't match the boots.

00:54:56 – 00:55:01:	That's because they mix up the boots in question.

00:55:01 – 00:55:09:	The astronauts had one set of gear, one suit that they wore in the spacecraft and they

00:55:09 – 00:55:15:	put another over it to go out on the moon because of course you would do that.

00:55:15 – 00:55:21:	You don't wear the same clothing for everything, clearly not when you're going into hard vacuum.

00:55:21 – 00:55:28:	And so the boot prints that you see are from the exterior boot that goes over the interior

00:55:28 – 00:55:29:	boot.

00:55:29 – 00:55:31:	Well, they're mixing up the two.

00:55:31 – 00:55:34:	These are just very easy things to show.

00:55:34 – 00:55:36:	The claims are just silly.

00:55:36 – 00:55:40:	If you actually look at the evidence, they're just silly, they're very easy to dismiss.

00:55:40 – 00:55:48:	But the other is that they will argue about the shadows on the moon and the way that the

00:55:48 – 00:55:53:	light source appears in relation to objects and shadows.

00:55:53 – 00:55:59:	This is something that if you are a photographer, you can just skip the next minute or whatever

00:55:59 – 00:56:02:	because this is something you already know.

00:56:02 – 00:56:06:	The concept that you need to understand here, they're a handful but the core one is vanishing

00:56:06 – 00:56:08:	point.

00:56:08 – 00:56:16:	Now if you live somewhere like the northeast, you're not going to have experienced this as

00:56:16 – 00:56:22:	much in the natural environment or the man made environment as if you've lived somewhere

00:56:22 – 00:56:24:	like the southwest.

00:56:24 – 00:56:30:	And the reason for this is the most obvious example in daily life is going to be a desert

00:56:30 – 00:56:36:	road or a very long stretch of train tracks.

00:56:36 – 00:56:42:	If you look at two parallel lines that run for a long distance off toward the horizon,

00:56:42 – 00:56:47:	they are going to appear to converge as they go.

00:56:47 – 00:56:49:	They aren't converging.

00:56:49 – 00:56:53:	It's your perspective that makes it look like they are converging.

00:56:53 – 00:56:57:	And where they supposedly converge is called the vanishing point.

00:56:57 – 00:57:02:	This is used in art, it's used in photography.

00:57:02 – 00:57:07:	But that is what is happening on the moon with some of these shadows and the perspective

00:57:07 – 00:57:09:	of the cameras.

00:57:09 – 00:57:15:	You have a single point of light, obviously the sun, and then you have a vanishing point

00:57:15 – 00:57:22:	away from that, away from the perspective of the camera, which is going to cause certain

00:57:22 – 00:57:23:	effects.

00:57:23 – 00:57:28:	It's going to look like things are moving toward or are oriented toward this point,

00:57:28 – 00:57:31:	this vanishing point, when they aren't really.

00:57:31 – 00:57:33:	It is an effect of perspective.

00:57:33 – 00:57:38:	It is not something actual in the physical environment.

00:57:38 – 00:57:43:	There are certain things that you see in one way, because that's how your visual system

00:57:43 – 00:57:49:	processes it, that's just how things interact in the real world.

00:57:49 – 00:57:54:	But if you go and examine it, it's other than what you saw.

00:57:54 – 00:57:58:	And this is one of those examples, it's not saying don't trust your eyes, it's just

00:57:58 – 00:58:02:	saying recognize what your visual system does, recognize the limitations.

00:58:02 – 00:58:05:	You don't have infinite range on your vision.

00:58:05 – 00:58:08:	So there's going to be a point at which you can no longer see something.

00:58:08 – 00:58:12:	If you've stood on the shore by the ocean or a large lake or something like that or

00:58:12 – 00:58:17:	top of a mountain, you know intuitively that there's a point out in the distance where

00:58:17 – 00:58:21:	you can no longer see beyond that, or I guess if you're in the middle of the country where

00:58:21 – 00:58:25:	it's just completely flat, then you've also experienced this.

00:58:25 – 00:58:28:	But that's what's happening with those photographs.

00:58:28 – 00:58:33:	It's not that they're on a stage in Hollywood, that they have a bunch of lights set up, and

00:58:33 – 00:58:37:	that you have different shadows because of that.

00:58:37 – 00:58:40:	That claim is also ridiculous for another reason.

00:58:40 – 00:58:45:	The men working on the space program were highly intelligent.

00:58:45 – 00:58:50:	If they had wanted to fake this material, they wouldn't have screwed up something as

00:58:50 – 00:58:54:	simple as lighting.

00:58:54 – 00:58:59:	The claim is just ludicrous on its face.

00:58:59 – 00:59:03:	And that's the case with the rest of the things we're going to talk about today.

00:59:03 – 00:59:08:	We're not going to spend any more time on the moon, but we did talk a lot about radiation.

00:59:08 – 00:59:12:	One of the other things that's been pushed more recently by the same group is the claim

00:59:12 – 00:59:14:	that nukes aren't real.

00:59:14 – 00:59:16:	Just like birds aren't real, nukes aren't real.

00:59:16 – 00:59:19:	Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, it's all fake and never existed.

00:59:19 – 00:59:21:	Some permutation of that.

00:59:21 – 00:59:26:	The theories about how it was faked vary, but the gist of it is that there's no such thing

00:59:26 – 00:59:27:	as nuclear weapons.

00:59:27 – 00:59:33:	It was all invented as a scyop to scare people as part of the Cold War.

00:59:33 – 00:59:38:	Amusingly recently, when Benjamin put some of his so-called proof out for this, even

00:59:38 – 00:59:42:	his own fans dragged him for how retarded this one was.

00:59:42 – 00:59:48:	He claimed that there was the videos of the atomic detonations where the government set

00:59:48 – 00:59:54:	up cameras and they built Potemkin villages that they leveled so that they could see the

59:54 – 01:00:00
effects of a blast at various ranges on typical residential construction.

01:00:00 – 01:00:05:	Because there's one thing to know what it's going to do to a military bunker that's hardened.

01:00:05 – 01:00:12:	It's another thing to know what it's going to do to just a stick frame house.

01:00:12 – 01:00:17:	There's videos you've all seen in slow motion of these barns and homes just being completely

01:00:17 – 01:00:22:	leveled by the blast wave from the nuclear detonation.

01:00:22 – 01:00:34:	One thing to keep in mind, when a nuclear bomb is detonated in the atmosphere, the explosion

01:00:34 – 01:00:35:	radiates outward.

01:00:35 – 01:00:40:	Obviously, there's radiation coming from the center, there's the explosion itself, there's

01:00:40 – 01:00:48:	the force also coming from the center, radiating out equally in all directions roughly.

01:00:48 – 01:00:53:	As that explosive force moves through the atmosphere, it compresses the atmosphere in

01:00:53 – 01:00:55:	front of it.

01:00:55 – 01:01:01:	What that means is that the air right in front of the explosion gets compressed a lot.

01:01:01 – 01:01:07:	There's a difference in the explosive space between regular explosives and what's called

01:01:07 – 01:01:08:	high explosives.

01:01:08 – 01:01:13:	It has to do with the velocity of the detonation above everything else.

01:01:13 – 01:01:18:	You can hear this sometimes when you hear different audio of different types of explosions.

01:01:18 – 01:01:23:	Some of them just sound kind of boomy and some have a lot of a crack.

01:01:23 – 01:01:28:	When a nuclear detonation occurs, the air in front of the detonation is compressed so

01:01:28 – 01:01:31:	that it is denser than steel.

01:01:31 – 01:01:36:	The air itself, the wave of air in front of the wave of explosion, because remember the

01:01:36 – 01:01:42:	explosion is creating a vacuum behind it, it's pushing everything outward.

01:01:42 – 01:01:46:	At the edge of the explosion, you have a blast wave.

01:01:46 – 01:01:51:	The blast wave isn't the explosion, the blast wave is actually the compressed air that has

01:01:51 – 01:01:55:	the density of steel out for a great distance.

01:01:55 – 01:02:01:	When you see those buildings being flattened, it is the function of the explosion, but it's

01:02:01 – 01:02:07:	actually the air that's been compressed to the density of steel or close to it that's

01:02:07 – 01:02:10:	hitting those buildings, so it's just air.

01:02:10 – 01:02:14:	It's just like the big bad wolf huffing and puffing and blowing on the house, knocking

01:02:14 – 01:02:18:	it over, except that when it's going faster than the speed of sound and it's compressed

01:02:18 – 01:02:22:	to the density of steel, it's like being hit by a freight train.

01:02:22 – 01:02:28:	There's the video of the houses being flattened and there were cameras pointed at the houses.

01:02:28 – 01:02:32:	Benjamin and some others have claimed, well, how is it that they could build a house so

01:02:32 – 01:02:35:	it would be flattened but the camera was fine?

01:02:35 – 01:02:38:	Cameras were fragile, how could it possibly survive?

01:02:38 – 01:02:41:	Nobody dragged them forward because it was such a stupid take.

01:02:41 – 01:02:47:	Those cameras were five miles away in specially reinforced bunkers, particularly oriented away

01:02:47 – 01:02:52:	from the blast itself, shielded as much as possible from the blast, and they were five

01:02:52 – 01:02:58:	miles using extreme telephoto lenses to look at the buildings that were flattened.

01:02:58 – 01:03:05:	Once again, this is just an example of when a narrative is true and someone comes up with

01:03:05 – 01:03:09:	nonsense evidence like this, it just crumbles.

01:03:09 – 01:03:13:	It's almost stupid on its face and as soon as you look at it, it's like, how could anyone

01:03:13 – 01:03:15:	possibly fall for that?

01:03:15 – 01:03:20:	But if your mind is primed so you're like, well, someone says that the government lied

01:03:20 – 01:03:21:	to me about this thing too.

01:03:21 – 01:03:24:	If you get to the point that you're just willing to believe anytime someone tells you something

01:03:24 – 01:03:31:	is a lie, you're functionally every bit is demoralized as if you believed everything that

01:03:31 – 01:03:33:	they told you was true.

01:03:33 – 01:03:39:	If you're just believing everything unthinkingly, uncritically, that's the danger spot.

01:03:39 – 01:03:42:	And disbelieving has the same effect.

01:03:42 – 01:03:46:	If you disbelieve every single thing that anyone tells you, no matter how much evidence

01:03:46 – 01:03:51:	is brought before you, you're in the same boat, you're unanchored from reality.

01:03:51 – 01:03:53:	And that's the real danger of all this.

01:03:53 – 01:03:57:	Not only does it deceive people about something like, you know, this is a religious podcast.

01:03:57 – 01:04:01:	We're not saying if you don't believe in the moon landing, you're going to hell.

01:04:01 – 01:04:07:	We're saying if you're falling for really dumb excuses for some of these things, it's

01:04:07 – 01:04:12:	putting you in a position where you can be easily deceived because people are going to

01:04:12 – 01:04:16:	come along and say, oh, well, here's the next thing they lied to you about.

01:04:16 – 01:04:19:	And frankly, as I said earlier, it's kind of ironic for that to be coming from Corey

01:04:19 – 01:04:24:	and me on Stone Choir because a lot of our episodes are specifically about that.

01:04:24 – 01:04:28:	But it's why we're very careful to lay out a simple case for this where you can go look

01:04:28 – 01:04:30:	at the evidence for yourself and it doesn't fall apart.

01:04:30 – 01:04:34:	We could make elaborate arguments for the things we claim.

01:04:34 – 01:04:35:	We don't.

01:04:35 – 01:04:41:	We make simple, straightforward, verifiable arguments because truth is not esoteric.

01:04:41 – 01:04:43:	Truth is not hidden.

01:04:43 – 01:04:44:	It's not secret.

01:04:44 – 01:04:46:	It's just right there.

01:04:46 – 01:04:50:	And it's the lie that requires complicity from everyone for it to propagate.

01:04:50 – 01:04:54:	The truth, just like the truth of the Rapallo reentry trajectories, it's just sitting there

01:04:54 – 01:04:55:	waiting for someone to look.

01:04:55 – 01:04:57:	And when you look, you're like, well, yep, there it is.

01:04:57 – 01:04:59:	That makes perfect sense.

01:04:59 – 01:05:05:	We want the arguments that you're willing to accept to be those arguments that are predicated

01:05:05 – 01:05:11:	on truth that are based on something that adds up and are simply going along either

01:05:11 – 01:05:16:	because everyone says, believe this because everyone says to believe it.

01:05:16 – 01:05:20:	Or if you're in the minority camp, don't believe anything they tell you.

01:05:20 – 01:05:21:	Everything they're telling you is a lie.

01:05:21 – 01:05:23:	You shouldn't fall for that either.

01:05:23 – 01:05:26:	You're in a bad way either in either case.

01:05:26 – 01:05:32:	So when you look at stuff like our nuke's reel, is the moon reel, is space reel, there

01:05:32 – 01:05:35:	are literally people who believe that space is fake and gay.

01:05:35 – 01:05:40:	They think that outer space doesn't exist, which on a matter of theology, directly contradicts

01:05:40 – 01:05:41:	scripture.

01:05:41 – 01:05:47:	Scripture repeatedly has God pointing to the heavens to creation in the sky, the stars,

01:05:47 – 01:05:53:	all the wonders of creation outside of the earth as examples of his glory.

01:05:53 – 01:05:58:	So when you say space is fake and gay, you're denying scripture.

01:05:58 – 01:05:59:	You can't do that.

01:05:59 – 01:06:02:	God put that stuff there to declare his glory.

01:06:02 – 01:06:05:	And when he talks to us in scripture, he says, look it up.

01:06:05 – 01:06:06:	This is how awesome I am.

01:06:06 – 01:06:09:	Look at the stars and see my glory in them.

01:06:09 – 01:06:11:	They testify to me.

01:06:11 – 01:06:16:	When we on the earth are saying, I don't believe anything's real, you either become a nihilist

01:06:16 – 01:06:22:	or you become a gnostic, but you're ultimately going to become led down a path of spiritual

01:06:22 – 01:06:23:	decay.

01:06:24 – 01:06:26:	Or falling for some meme on the internet.

01:06:26 – 01:06:30:	It's about being unmoored from the things that actually do matter.

01:06:30 – 01:06:35:	And so don't lose your bearings as you're navigating this stuff.

01:06:35 – 01:06:40:	It's fine to treat things lightly and to work through them casually.

01:06:40 – 01:06:44:	Don't fall for things and don't disbelieve things either because no one agrees with

01:06:44 – 01:06:45:	them.

01:06:45 – 01:06:46:	You have to think.

01:06:46 – 01:06:48:	There's no shortcut for this one.

01:06:48 – 01:06:50:	You have to think things through.

01:06:50 – 01:06:54:	And if you know that you're just not equipped for that sort of thing, and some people aren't.

01:06:54 – 01:06:57:	God did not equip some people for doing a lot of heavy thinking.

01:06:57 – 01:06:58:	That's fine.

01:06:58 – 01:07:02:	It's nothing to be ashamed of, but don't then go listen to when Benjamin run his mouth

01:07:02 – 01:07:07:	for two hours and say, yeah, this is, I believe all this, I'm not going to spend any time

01:07:07 – 01:07:10:	investigating the science, but this adds up that this comedian is definitely telling

01:07:10 – 01:07:11:	me the truth.

01:07:11 – 01:07:14:	Now he's, he's selling something and he's entertaining you.

01:07:14 – 01:07:19:	I don't care about entertainment, but don't lie to people when you're entertaining them.

01:07:19 – 01:07:27:	According to nuclear explosions and the shockwave in that front of compressed air, some people

01:07:27 – 01:07:36:	have spun up crazy theories about the lines that appear in some videos of nuclear explosions.

01:07:36 – 01:07:41:	This again is one of those things that is very easily explained on the same level as

01:07:41 – 01:07:45:	the boot prints on the moon.

01:07:45 – 01:07:51:	When they were conducting one of the nuclear tests, one of the scientists noticed that

01:07:51 – 01:07:58:	a cable that was used as a tether for a balloon, one of the measuring devices, appeared to

01:07:58 – 01:08:00:	have a break in it.

01:08:00 – 01:08:08:	But as the video progressed, as the frames progressed, the break moved along the cable.

01:08:08 – 01:08:12:	Well, breaks don't move along a cable.

01:08:12 – 01:08:15:	If a cable breaks, the break is where it is.

01:08:15 – 01:08:18:	And so obviously it's an optical illusion.

01:08:18 – 01:08:24:	And the optical illusion is going to be caused by basically incandescence, the compression

01:08:24 – 01:08:30:	of the air, that wall of air expanding outward the shockwave.

01:08:30 – 01:08:34:	It's causing refraction with the light.

01:08:34 – 01:08:41:	And so they decided to use this because it's very difficult to see where that border is

01:08:41 – 01:08:47:	when you're trying to see how quickly the mushroom cloud, how quickly the explosion,

01:08:47 – 01:08:51:	whatever it is you're measuring at the time, how quickly that's expanding.

01:08:51 – 01:08:56:	Even when you're using a camera that takes 10,000 frames per second, which one of the

01:08:56 – 01:08:58:	cameras they use did that.

01:08:58 – 01:09:04:	But they figured out an ingenious way to test this, to make it easier to see where

01:09:04 – 01:09:06:	the edge of that shockwave is.

01:09:06 – 01:09:07:	That is very simple.

01:09:07 – 01:09:10:	They use smoke rockets.

01:09:10 – 01:09:17:	So right before, as basically as tight a tolerance as they could get right before the nuclear

01:09:17 – 01:09:20:	detonation, they launch smoke rockets.

01:09:20 – 01:09:21:	That's what you see.

01:09:21 – 01:09:23:	Those lines are smoke trails.

01:09:23 – 01:09:29:	And the reason they look bent is because of the effect that I just described, this refraction

01:09:29 – 01:09:35:	of the light dealing with that wall of compressed air moving outward.

01:09:35 – 01:09:40:	And so they use that as a way to measure how quickly the shockwave was expanding.

01:09:40 – 01:09:41:	And so that's what those are.

01:09:41 – 01:09:47:	Those are literally just smoke lines created by smoke rockets.

01:09:47 – 01:09:54:	They were used in order to test some of the numbers related to the explosion, how quickly

01:09:54 – 01:09:56:	things traveled.

01:09:56 – 01:10:02:	It's not some weird, I've seen all sorts of crazy claims, won't go over the exact claims

01:10:02 – 01:10:03:	themselves.

01:10:03 – 01:10:05:	But it's not a conspiracy.

01:10:05 – 01:10:11:	It's literally just making it easier to see the edge of the shockwave.

01:10:11 – 01:10:15:	So the last one we want to touch on just briefly today is flat earth.

01:10:15 – 01:10:20:	It's probably the stupidest of the entire bunch.

01:10:20 – 01:10:25:	And it's also probably the most pervasive and persistent.

01:10:25 – 01:10:30:	In part because there's historical warrant for it, at some point in the past, people

01:10:30 – 01:10:36:	didn't necessarily understand that the world was a globe, that it's a sphere, incidentally

01:10:36 – 01:10:40:	like every other heavenly body ever discovered.

01:10:40 – 01:10:46:	And so that's a historical claim, that's a sort of claim that we do make on Stone Choir

01:10:46 – 01:10:51:	and other circumstances to say, well, everyone believed this for a long time, and then somebody

01:10:51 – 01:10:55:	comes along and believes something else, what do?

01:10:55 – 01:10:57:	Somebody got it wrong, who got it wrong?

01:10:57 – 01:11:03:	The difference is that when it comes to whether or not the earth is flat, people for thousands

01:11:03 – 01:11:06:	of years have understood that it was a globe.

01:11:06 – 01:11:11:	We've understood that we had a shape that was not a pancake.

01:11:11 – 01:11:13:	I alluded that before.

01:11:13 – 01:11:17:	The Milky Way in every galaxy is basically like a pancake.

01:11:17 – 01:11:23:	It's not two-dimensional, but it's oriented as a disk.

01:11:23 – 01:11:26:	That's what God does for certain types of patterns.

01:11:26 – 01:11:29:	And other patterns are globular.

01:11:29 – 01:11:33:	The moon is a sphere, the sun is a sphere.

01:11:33 – 01:11:35:	All the heavenly bodies are spheres.

01:11:35 – 01:11:36:	Why?

01:11:36 – 01:11:38:	Because that's how gravity works.

01:11:38 – 01:11:46:	Gravity, the collection of mass in space, causes there to be a center of gravity.

01:11:46 – 01:11:51:	And then all of that mass naturally orients around the center.

01:11:51 – 01:11:56:	And the more that orientation is self-reinforcing, the more it collapses until you eventually

01:11:56 – 01:11:58:	have almost a perfect sphere.

01:11:58 – 01:12:03:	Now, obviously, as creationists, we believe that God put all those things together, but

01:12:03 – 01:12:05:	He didn't put them together haphazardly.

01:12:05 – 01:12:09:	He put them together preassembled for us.

01:12:09 – 01:12:12:	He gave us a globe and put Adam and Eve on it.

01:12:12 – 01:12:18:	There are other heavenly bodies that are being formed today, or were formed in the past and

01:12:18 – 01:12:21:	we can see the light appearing today.

01:12:21 – 01:12:28:	So the physical rules, the physical laws of the universe established by God in creation

01:12:28 – 01:12:30:	are consistent everywhere.

01:12:30 – 01:12:37:	I think the stupidest thing about clinging to the basic lack of understanding about how

01:12:37 – 01:12:43:	the heavens and the earth worked from ancient, ancient days is that when you get new evidence,

01:12:43 – 01:12:44:	you incorporate it.

01:12:44 – 01:12:50:	And when it makes more sense than the explanation you had before, you run with it.

01:12:50 – 01:12:56:	And literally nothing that we know about anything would actually work with a flat earth.

01:12:56 – 01:13:00:	We couldn't have gone to the moon if the earth were flat.

01:13:00 – 01:13:02:	All the math would have been completely off.

01:13:02 – 01:13:03:	None of it would have worked.

01:13:03 – 01:13:06:	And as soon as they took off, they would have seen it.

01:13:06 – 01:13:11:	It's one of the things, it's part of the reason that those two conspiracy theories travel

01:13:11 – 01:13:15:	together is that the moon landing had to be fake, because if you put somebody out there

01:13:15 – 01:13:22:	and he looks back over his shoulder and says, hey, that's a globe, it proves it wrong.

01:13:22 – 01:13:23:	That's not big brained.

01:13:23 – 01:13:26:	Forget the geniuses that it took to put a man in space.

01:13:26 – 01:13:30:	Once there's a dude sitting up there looking out a window, you don't have to be a genius

01:13:30 – 01:13:33:	to see that it's not a pancake, it's actually a globe.

01:13:33 – 01:13:38:	When you can make out the continents and you can see the oceans and you can know that's

01:13:38 – 01:13:40:	not the whole earth.

01:13:40 – 01:13:42:	It's only a part of it that I recognize.

01:13:42 – 01:13:44:	The other parts got to be on the other side.

01:13:44 – 01:13:48:	The moon is the same way, except the moon is tidally locked, so we only ever see one

01:13:48 – 01:13:49:	side of the moon.

01:13:49 – 01:13:52:	The earth is turning, the sun is turning.

01:13:52 – 01:13:54:	We can see them.

01:13:54 – 01:13:59:	Everything that we know about everything only works if the earth is a globe.

01:13:59 – 01:14:04:	And so this, I think, is the one that frustrates me the most, and it's one which online I have

01:14:04 – 01:14:07:	the least patience for, which is just say zero.

01:14:07 – 01:14:11:	If someone pops up in my mentions and says, oh, a flat earth, blah, blah, blah, they're

01:14:11 – 01:14:13:	blocked within a half a second.

01:14:13 – 01:14:17:	I want nothing to do with anyone who is spouting that stuff.

01:14:17 – 01:14:21:	For the very reason that we were talking about in the Generations episode, the reason we're

01:14:21 – 01:14:28:	doing this episode, if you get to the point that you are believing completely insane,

01:14:28 – 01:14:35:	trivially falsely viable things like the earth is flat, you're no longer capable of

01:14:35 – 01:14:38:	discerning reality at all.

01:14:38 – 01:14:42:	It's effectively transmissible schizophrenia.

01:14:42 – 01:14:48:	If I can feed you lies and I can fracture your mind so that suddenly you can't tell

01:14:48 – 01:14:52:	real from fake, I've destroyed you.

01:14:52 – 01:14:53:	You're still alive.

01:14:53 – 01:14:58:	You might still be going to work, but as a human being, you're a gibbering idiot.

01:14:58 – 01:15:01:	You can be cajoled into doing anything at that point.

01:15:01 – 01:15:06:	If you'll fall for that sort of lie, you're lost.

01:15:06 – 01:15:11:	I don't block to be mean, it's just I want nothing to do with it and I'm severe about

01:15:11 – 01:15:16:	it online because I want to get across that this is not a small matter.

01:15:16 – 01:15:18:	It's not a matter of salvation.

01:15:18 – 01:15:23:	It's not that if you have the wrong cosmology or the wrong idea about the shape of the earth,

01:15:23 – 01:15:25:	you can't go to heaven.

01:15:25 – 01:15:29:	Obviously, there were people at some point that had no idea, they didn't care, whatever.

01:15:29 – 01:15:30:	It's not salvific.

01:15:30 – 01:15:35:	However, if you crack your head open, you're going to let demons in.

01:15:35 – 01:15:41:	If you start letting lies in like this stuff that's so trivially falsified, it's a danger

01:15:41 – 01:15:45:	to your soul for the other reasons because when you crack your head open, whether it's

01:15:45 – 01:15:52:	with DMT or it's with stupid YouTube videos or stuff like the Paranormies, eventually

01:15:52 – 01:15:57:	something evil is going to say, hey, this is a waterless space.

01:15:57 – 01:15:58:	This is wide open.

01:15:58 – 01:16:00:	I'm going to come here and I'm going to have a party.

01:16:00 – 01:16:06:	That's the danger and that's why I care because I can't reason with someone who's beyond

01:16:06 – 01:16:07:	reason.

01:16:07 – 01:16:09:	By definition, that's tautological.

01:16:09 – 01:16:18:	If you will reject plain facts and accept plain lies, I cannot have a conversation with

01:16:18 – 01:16:19:	you.

01:16:19 – 01:16:20:	Maybe somebody else can.

01:16:20 – 01:16:22:	I hope someone will try, but it's not going to be me.

01:16:22 – 01:16:27:	It's all we can do to try to get these things across to people who haven't yet lost their

01:16:27 – 01:16:31:	minds and to try to protect some people from going down the path of losing their minds

01:16:31 – 01:16:34:	because that's what fundamentally happens.

01:16:34 – 01:16:38:	You start making up these crazy stories and they are crazy.

01:16:38 – 01:16:42:	The reason we're talking about this right after last week is everyone says that last

01:16:42 – 01:16:45:	week's is crazy too.

01:16:45 – 01:16:49:	When they get lumped together, people throw up their hands or like I said, they believe

01:16:49 – 01:16:51:	everything or they deny everything.

01:16:51 – 01:16:55:	They're independent facts or they're independent lies.

01:16:55 – 01:17:00:	When someone's lying to you, the goal is always to harm you.

01:17:00 – 01:17:07:	Lies are always told to harm people, whether it's to steal or just to deceive or to humiliate

01:17:07 – 01:17:12:	or maybe just to soften them up so that later on something worse can happen to them.

01:17:12 – 01:17:14:	But it's never good for you.

01:17:14 – 01:17:19:	It's why Corey and I are so adamant about the truth even when it makes people really

01:17:19 – 01:17:20:	dislike us.

01:17:20 – 01:17:22:	No one likes hearing the truth most of the time.

01:17:22 – 01:17:28:	It's not popular to say something unpopular and that's part of the trick is that these

01:17:28 – 01:17:34:	things like Flat Earth are also unpopular so they say, look, no one likes us either.

01:17:34 – 01:17:35:	We must be right.

01:17:35 – 01:17:36:	We must be edgy.

01:17:36 – 01:17:40:	We must be in the vanguard of the truth because everyone thinks we're insane.

01:17:40 – 01:17:42:	Well, unfortunately, sometimes it's true.

01:17:42 – 01:17:48:	Some people need the padded room because they're so far gone that you got to bring them back

01:17:48 – 01:17:49:	forcibly.

01:17:49 – 01:17:52:	You can't bring them back with reason.

01:17:52 – 01:18:02:	I think part of the problem when people discuss the supposed Flat Earth is they mix up a few

01:18:02 – 01:18:10:	different types of narratives and so they'll take mythology which figuratively or symbolically

01:18:10 – 01:18:15:	describes the Earth as being flat and take that as a scientific treatise.

01:18:15 – 01:18:17:	These are very different things.

01:18:17 – 01:18:24:	If you're reading European mythology and it describes the Earth as a disk and you have

01:18:24 – 01:18:29:	the world tree in the center, it's not giving you a literal description of the physical

01:18:29 – 01:18:31:	world.

01:18:31 – 01:18:36:	This is mythological and the same thing is true in various other mythologies as well.

01:18:36 – 01:18:41:	There's no need to go into the details of those.

01:18:41 – 01:18:48:	But you have these descriptions that are poetic, you have that in the Greeks, or symbolic.

01:18:48 – 01:18:54:	They're not meant to be taken as a literal description of the actual physical shape of

01:18:54 – 01:18:55:	the Earth.

01:18:55 – 01:19:00:	Yes, historically, there were some people who did literally believe that the Earth was flat.

01:19:00 – 01:19:07:	They had no reason not to believe that because they didn't have evidence one way or the other.

01:19:07 – 01:19:13:	Because in their daily experience, there wasn't really...

01:19:13 – 01:19:17:	I wouldn't say a way for them to test it because it's very easy to test.

01:19:17 – 01:19:22:	But there was nothing in their daily experience that would conclusively show them no the Earth

01:19:22 – 01:19:23:	is actually round.

01:19:23 – 01:19:24:	It must be round.

01:19:24 – 01:19:31:	You could explain it as being round or being flat with what say the average peasant saw

01:19:31 – 01:19:33:	in his daily life.

01:19:33 – 01:19:40:	However, using only high school math, you can figure out not only that the Earth is a

01:19:40 – 01:19:45:	sphere, it's actually an oblate spheroid, but we'll say sphere because saying the other

01:19:45 – 01:19:49:	one sounds silly and it takes too long, but you can figure out that the Earth is a sphere

01:19:49 – 01:19:55:	and you can not only figure out the shape, you can figure out the circumference of the

01:19:55 – 01:19:56:	Earth.

01:19:56 – 01:19:58:	It's not very hard to do.

01:19:59 – 01:20:06:	It was calculated many centuries ago, and there were also many who believed that the

01:20:06 – 01:20:12:	Earth was, they believed correctly the Earth is a sphere, Pythagoras being one, Aristotle

01:20:12 – 01:20:20:	being another, many medieval scholars could list many names, but the Greek gentleman who

01:20:20 – 01:20:27:	actually calculated the circumference of the Earth, the first of which we know was Eratosthenes,

01:20:27 – 01:20:37:	and he was born in 276 BC, so this was thousands of years ago, and he calculated the circumference

01:20:37 – 01:20:42:	of the Earth within 2%.

01:20:42 – 01:20:52:	And he did that with nothing more than a well, an obelisk, and some Greek dude that he paid

01:20:52 – 01:20:58:	to walk 800 kilometers and count his steps.

01:20:58 – 01:21:08:	So what he did was he measured the shadow in one location in Egypt and then measured

01:21:08 – 01:21:15:	a shadow in another location in Egypt at the same time.

01:21:15 – 01:21:23:	Now if you do that, you can figure out the angle at which the light is hitting the obelisk

01:21:23 – 01:21:29:	by the shadow it is casting, and if you compare the angles, you can figure out very easily

01:21:29 – 01:21:38:	using just, again, high school math, whether the surface is flat or round.

01:21:38 – 01:21:43:	Because if it's flat, the shadows will be the same, because you have one source of light,

01:21:43 – 01:21:51:	the sun, hitting these two, whatever they happened to be, he would use an obelisk or

01:21:51 – 01:21:55:	something similar, you could do this with a stick if you were so inclined.

01:21:55 – 01:21:58:	But the shadows will be the same.

01:21:58 – 01:22:02:	You're dealing with the same angles, if they're the same height, it'll be the same length,

01:22:02 – 01:22:05:	and that's the case if the Earth is flat.

01:22:05 – 01:22:12:	As it turns out, the shadow in the first location where he was located in Alexandria was significantly

01:22:12 – 01:22:22:	longer, because the Earth is a sphere, and so the light is hitting them at the same angle,

01:22:22 – 01:22:29:	but they are located in different positions on the surface of a sphere, and so the shadow

01:22:29 – 01:22:31:	cast is different.

01:22:31 – 01:22:37:	I'll link a video in the show notes that will explain exactly what he did.

01:22:37 – 01:22:39:	It's from Carl Sagan.

01:22:39 – 01:22:44:	You can say whatever you want about him, but the information is accurate in the very short

01:22:44 – 01:22:46:	video on this.

01:22:46 – 01:22:50:	And so he calculated the circumference of the Earth, and as I said, he was off by less

01:22:50 – 01:22:54:	than 2%.

01:22:54 – 01:22:56:	This is not something that is difficult to do.

01:22:56 – 01:23:01:	This is not something that you couldn't go out and do right now if you were so inclined.

01:23:01 – 01:23:06:	This doesn't even take $500 or $1,000 worth of hardware, which is what you'd have to do

01:23:06 – 01:23:10:	if you wanted to bounce the laser off the retro reflector on the moon.

01:23:10 – 01:23:13:	Still very doable, more expensive.

01:23:13 – 01:23:19:	This can be done with some sticks, some time, and a lot of walking, and then a little bit

01:23:19 – 01:23:20:	of math.

01:23:20 – 01:23:25:	We know that the Earth is a sphere.

01:23:25 – 01:23:28:	If you've flown anywhere, you've seen that the Earth is a sphere.

01:23:28 – 01:23:31:	You can tell when you're in a plane, the Earth is a sphere.

01:23:31 – 01:23:32:	There's no doubt.

01:23:32 – 01:23:38:	If you live near the ocean, you can tell the Earth is a sphere because you can watch ships

01:23:38 – 01:23:41:	sail over the edge.

01:23:41 – 01:23:45:	They're not sailing over the edge, they're not falling off the disk.

01:23:45 – 01:23:50:	They're simply sailing over the horizon because they are sailing far enough away that the

01:23:50 – 01:23:53:	curvature of the Earth hides them from your view.

01:23:53 – 01:23:58:	The same thing happens if you're out in the ocean and you're approaching or receding from

01:23:58 – 01:24:05:	an island, or if you have the misfortune of having wind turbines, windmills out in

01:24:05 – 01:24:10:	the water where you are, you can see that you can see the top of them in some places

01:24:10 – 01:24:14:	and if they're farther away, then they start to disappear beyond the horizon.

01:24:14 – 01:24:20:	This is something that is very easily verified in modern life.

01:24:20 – 01:24:24:	There's no reason to believe that the Earth is flat.

01:24:24 – 01:24:29:	It just makes you sound like an insane person, of course that's the point.

01:24:29 – 01:24:34:	Because if you start to believe things that are insane, you start to become untethered

01:24:34 – 01:24:39:	from reality itself, you become untethered from the truth.

01:24:39 – 01:24:43:	Just because you have been lied to about a great many things in life, and that is most

01:24:43 – 01:24:49:	certainly true, we've gone over a number of some of the big ones and some small ones,

01:24:49 – 01:24:53:	but just because you've been lied to about certain things in life does not mean you've

01:24:53 – 01:24:58:	been lied to about everything, particularly something that you can go outside and see

01:24:58 – 01:25:00:	with your own eyes.

01:25:00 – 01:25:06:	Go stand on a really tall mountain and you can see the curvature, or go stand next to

01:25:06 – 01:25:09:	the ocean or just a large lake.

01:25:09 – 01:25:18:	This is something you can see and verify with your own eyes relatively easily.

01:25:18 – 01:25:25:	I think one of the things that people have trouble with is the sheer scale of space,

01:25:25 – 01:25:28:	including the Earth itself.

01:25:28 – 01:25:33:	The Earth's diameter is about a little over 7,900 miles across depending on where you

01:25:33 – 01:25:34:	measure it.

01:25:34 – 01:25:40:	I think it's about 7926 at the equator.

01:25:40 – 01:25:47:	When you see videos from low Earth orbit, for example when Jeff Bezos took his rocket

01:25:47 – 01:25:52:	up when he did his launch, he went up 66 miles.

01:25:52 – 01:26:01:	66 miles is a long way to fall, but in terms of a globe that's over 7,900 miles across,

01:26:01 – 01:26:03:	he barely got off the surface.

01:26:03 – 01:26:09:	When you do see videos from great heights, there's a perceptible curve, but it's very

01:26:09 – 01:26:10:	small.

01:26:10 – 01:26:14:	As Corey said, there are various examples you can see from the ground and it becomes

01:26:14 – 01:26:21:	clearer the higher you go, but no matter how high humans go up to the point of the

01:26:21 – 01:26:26:	space shuttle when we had one and the space stations, they're all in low Earth orbit.

01:26:26 – 01:26:29:	They're only a couple hundred miles up.

01:26:29 – 01:26:30:	That's not very far at all.

01:26:30 – 01:26:39:	If you're up 250 miles and the planet is 7,900 miles across, you're small in terms of distance

01:26:39 – 01:26:46:	relative to the immensity of the planet beneath you.

01:26:46 – 01:26:50:	I think one of the things that's tricky when people see stuff from space, one of the things

01:26:50 – 01:26:56:	that will happen when you're looking at video from space is that camera lenses themselves

01:26:56 – 01:26:59:	will impart a degree of curvature.

01:26:59 – 01:27:05:	It's easy to misread the curvature from a camera lens and mistake that for the curvature

01:27:05 – 01:27:11:	of the planet because it will swap.

01:27:11 – 01:27:18:	If the camera seems like it shows a curved horizon and you pan across, it's actually

01:27:18 – 01:27:23:	possible if it's a fisheye lens for the curvature to swap so that they look like the horizon

01:27:23 – 01:27:28:	was in one direction and then it will curve in the other direction.

01:27:28 – 01:27:34:	That means it's a fisheye and it's not a neutral perspective from the camera.

01:27:34 – 01:27:37:	We don't need to speculate on whether or not the Earth is a globe.

01:27:37 – 01:27:43:	There's literally a satellite in orbit right now at a higher Earth orbit.

01:27:43 – 01:27:45:	It's at 22,000 miles away.

01:27:45 – 01:27:49:	It's three times further away from Earth than the diameter of Earth.

01:27:49 – 01:27:53:	That's more than enough distance to get some perspective.

01:27:53 – 01:27:59:	It's called Himawari-9, it's a Japanese satellite that they put up in order to monitor weather

01:27:59 – 01:28:02:	patterns because in Japan, they get a lot of typhoons.

01:28:02 – 01:28:07:	It matters to them a great deal to detect and predict if there's a possibility of severe

01:28:07 – 01:28:11:	weather coming from the sea because they're surrounded by it.

01:28:11 – 01:28:19:	There's a camera up there continuously transmitting the entire globe in color all the time.

01:28:19 – 01:28:23:	You can find videos on YouTube, we'll link one, I might know if there's a live feed

01:28:23 – 01:28:28:	somewhere, almost live feed, showing the regular transmission of this data.

01:28:28 – 01:28:30:	You can see the thing turning.

01:28:30 – 01:28:34:	It's 22,000 miles away looking back over its shoulder at us.

01:28:34 – 01:28:39:	It's looking at the planet that God created for us.

01:28:39 – 01:28:43:	This stuff is so trivially falsifiable that someone has to believe that everything they're

01:28:43 – 01:28:50:	hearing is a lie in order to believe any of what they tell you about this stuff.

01:28:50 – 01:28:57:	As I mentioned at the beginning, fundamentally, there's an element of mind control to shaking

01:28:57 – 01:29:04:	someone's confidence in reality, to snatching them away from what they know and substituting

01:29:04 – 01:29:06:	some other thing.

01:29:06 – 01:29:10:	As I said, something Cori and I are sensitive to because this podcast doesn't certainly

01:29:10 – 01:29:17:	intend to dislodge you from reality, but we intend to carve out those places where what

01:29:17 – 01:29:21:	we perceive as reality has been malformed, which again, it's what the Flat Earth guys

01:29:21 – 01:29:22:	are trying to do too.

01:29:22 – 01:29:27:	It's potentially a noble cause, but you have to also be right.

01:29:27 – 01:29:30:	It's not just enough to say, I want to be a red pill dispenser.

01:29:30 – 01:29:33:	I want to tell everyone all the hard truths, well, whatever.

01:29:33 – 01:29:34:	Tell the truth.

01:29:34 – 01:29:39:	If the truth is hard to swallow, that's maybe a separate conversation.

01:29:39 – 01:29:40:	The truth shouldn't be hard to swallow.

01:29:40 – 01:29:43:	If it is, there's probably something else going on.

01:29:43 – 01:29:45:	I want to read this quote.

01:29:45 – 01:29:50:	It came up on 4chan about eight years ago on the subject of John Oliver's show from

01:29:50 – 01:29:51:	Comedy Central.

01:29:51 – 01:29:57:	It's a 30-minute show where they'll do brief skits and he talks about the news and everybody

01:29:57 – 01:29:58:	laughs.

01:29:58 – 01:30:04:	This description of how that show is conducted, I think, is a great microcosm of how some

01:30:04 – 01:30:10:	of this stuff plays out and how our perceptions get twisted by just how information is coming

01:30:10 – 01:30:13:	into us.

01:30:13 – 01:30:15:	The post reads as follows.

01:30:15 – 01:30:19:	The subject of John Oliver came up when a colleague, a fellow psychologist and I were

01:30:19 – 01:30:21:	discussing politics a few months ago.

01:30:21 – 01:30:26:	Although we were both in agreement regarding the general inaneity of the HBO show, my

01:30:26 – 01:30:31:	friend was surprised when I explained that the real insidiousness of its unmistakably

01:30:31 – 01:30:33:	hypnotic structure and pacing.

01:30:33 – 01:30:37:	I ended up pulling up an episode or two off YouTube to show her what I meant.

01:30:37 – 01:30:41:	All the segments I've ever seen from this show follow the same repetitive format, present

01:30:41 – 01:30:46:	some argumentation and facts, quote unquote, for about 10 seconds, then quickly follow

01:30:46 – 01:30:52:	these up with a snarky quip, which themselves overwhelmingly take the form of complete non-sequitur

01:30:52 – 01:30:58:	or otherwise absurd metaphor, before any rational processing of the preceding argument can take

01:30:58 – 01:31:00:	place in the mind of the viewer.

01:31:00 – 01:31:04:	Further telling is that the only beats or mental pauses in the show's pace exist solely

01:31:04 – 01:31:09:	to highlight the approving laughter of the studio audience.

01:31:09 – 01:31:13:	Repeat the same basic formula without variation 20 to 40 times in a row, and you have one

01:31:13 – 01:31:18:	of the 12 to 20 minute segments that form the backbone of the show.

01:31:18 – 01:31:23:	The end effect is obviously not to deliver information, but rather to literally teach

01:31:23 – 01:31:28:	the viewers on a subconscious level to mentally associate derisive laughter with any person

01:31:28 – 01:31:33:	or opinion that is at odds with the narrative's take on the chosen issue.

01:31:33 – 01:31:38:	And it accomplishes this by maintaining a strict adherence to a roughly 20 second cycle

01:31:38 – 01:31:42:	in which a stimulus is presented and response is cued.

01:31:42 – 01:31:46:	This is the sense in which the show is fundamentally hypnotic in effect, even more so than its

01:31:46 – 01:31:50:	precursors in the genre, Daily Show, Colbert, etc.

01:31:50 – 01:31:55:	To my mind, Oliver's show is representative of the media's increasing mastery of the

01:31:55 – 01:31:57:	methodologies of mass conditioning.

01:31:57 – 01:32:02:	In fact, it is almost such a perfect technical accomplishment that I would almost have to

01:32:02 – 01:32:08:	admire it on technical grounds, which moreover is in the hands of the entirely wrong people.

01:32:08 – 01:32:15:	I think that this exemplifies one aspect of what goes on when you have guys like Benjamin

01:32:15 – 01:32:20:	and others who they're fundamentally just trying to get attention, they want to make

01:32:20 – 01:32:22:	people laugh, fine.

01:32:22 – 01:32:28:	It's one thing if it's entertainment, but if entertainment becomes the backbone of your

01:32:28 – 01:32:35:	belief system, your toast, that's not how you approach reality.

01:32:35 – 01:32:38:	It's not how you approach anything important.

01:32:38 – 01:32:45:	And so when things that get called conspiracy theories all get labeled the same and they

01:32:45 – 01:32:51:	all get packaged together, the ridicule element of the Oliver show comes into play because

01:32:51 – 01:32:56:	the same guys who are telling you that the earth is flat and we didn't land on the moon

01:32:56 – 01:33:01:	and nukes aren't real, a lot of those are also telling you what we told you last week.

01:33:01 – 01:33:08:	And naturally, if you discredit any of those claims, you know that the person is full of

01:33:08 – 01:33:12:	crap and so if the person is full of crap, why would you want to believe one of their

01:33:12 – 01:33:14:	hair brain claims?

01:33:14 – 01:33:17:	Even if it happens to be true, you're not ever going to pay attention because once you

01:33:17 – 01:33:20:	discredit one of them, you're out.

01:33:20 – 01:33:22:	Don't listen to liars, don't listen to crazy people.

01:33:22 – 01:33:25:	I completely advocate that.

01:33:25 – 01:33:29:	Stay away from people who are selling insane things.

01:33:29 – 01:33:30:	It's bad for you.

01:33:30 – 01:33:31:	It's bad for your soul.

01:33:31 – 01:33:35:	It's bad for your mind.

01:33:35 – 01:33:42:	Part of the reason that these things are permitted to exist in public discourse is that it creates

01:33:42 – 01:33:49:	this tar pit where guys who are willing to listen to things like last week's episode

01:33:49 – 01:33:55:	can't differentiate between true revisionist history that says, you know what, here's some

01:33:55 – 01:33:58:	very fundamental facts that undermine the whole thing.

01:33:58 – 01:34:04:	That looks to the same to their mind as when someone comes along and say, did you know what

01:34:04 – 01:34:08:	there was a camera recording of a nuke explosion and cameras are nuke ploof?

01:34:08 – 01:34:14:	So that means that nukes aren't real or they say that earth is flat and I can prove it

01:34:14 – 01:34:18:	and here's this diagram or here's some math that you can't understand.

01:34:18 – 01:34:22:	And if they're stride enough or they seem smart enough, they're never very smart.

01:34:22 – 01:34:23:	That's another thing.

01:34:23 – 01:34:26:	Corey and I watch a bunch of videos from these people in preparation for this.

01:34:26 – 01:34:28:	They're all dumb.

01:34:29 – 01:34:32:	I don't think he believes this stuff.

01:34:32 – 01:34:34:	I think he's just a straight up liar.

01:34:34 – 01:34:36:	I think he knows that he's deceiving people.

01:34:36 – 01:34:40:	It doesn't matter because everyone else down stream, they're dumb.

01:34:40 – 01:34:43:	They're not intelligent men.

01:34:43 – 01:34:50:	Again, I don't want to be cruel by saying that, but some men are not equipped to handle orbital

01:34:50 – 01:34:51:	mechanics.

01:34:51 – 01:34:55:	If your first instinct would not be to say, I wonder what the return trajectory was from

01:34:55 – 01:35:00:	an earth orbit versus a moon orbit, maybe you're just not equipped to tackle these

01:35:00 – 01:35:02:	subjects and that's fine.

01:35:02 – 01:35:07:	But don't let someone come along and give you a bad explanation for why you should disbelieve

01:35:07 – 01:35:09:	an obvious thing.

01:35:09 – 01:35:19:	And so by permitting insane, clearly falsifiable claims to exist alongside things like last

01:35:19 – 01:35:22:	week's episode, like the Holocaust, which is it's also an insane claim.

01:35:23 – 01:35:27:	It's also plainly falsifiable, except it's in the opposite direction because what we

01:35:27 – 01:35:32:	were told was the thing that was manufactured, whereas they want you to believe the same

01:35:32 – 01:35:35:	thing is true of things that are clearly provable.

01:35:35 – 01:35:39:	And that's why fundamentally this all comes down to individuals weighing evidence.

01:35:39 – 01:35:41:	We described you last week as jurists.

01:35:41 – 01:35:43:	We're all jurists every day.

01:35:43 – 01:35:46:	We're the finders of fact with whatever's coming in.

01:35:46 – 01:35:50:	We shouldn't just be neutrally absorbing everything and say, okay, I believe the next

01:35:50 – 01:35:51:	thing I read.

01:35:51 – 01:35:53:	That's fine.

01:35:53 – 01:35:56:	It's particularly pernicious because anyone who's an expert in a field, whenever they

01:35:56 – 01:36:00:	read something in a newspaper is always going to tear his hair out because if you know something

01:36:00 – 01:36:05:	about the field, you know how poorly written your article is and yet you go on to read

01:36:05 – 01:36:10:	the very next article and just sagely scrub your chin and say, yes, I'm better informed

01:36:10 – 01:36:12:	now that I've read about this.

01:36:12 – 01:36:14:	They get everything wrong.

01:36:14 – 01:36:17:	Reporters are not bright people and they're also deceptive in their entertainers.

01:36:17 – 01:36:20:	They're there to sell a narrative and to sell advertising.

01:36:20 – 01:36:28:	So don't let someone create an environment where you can get swept up by someone saying,

01:36:28 – 01:36:30:	I can't believe anything.

01:36:30 – 01:36:32:	It's all lies.

01:36:32 – 01:36:35:	Just as you shouldn't be falling for everything that the newspaper prints or anything else.

01:36:35 – 01:36:40:	I don't want to say be skeptical of the sign because that can lead to the sort of red pill

01:36:40 – 01:36:47:	overdose that causes you to lose your mind, but just make sure it adds up and be inquisitive.

01:36:47 – 01:36:52:	It's okay to say, I need to see more proof before I'm going to buy that.

01:36:52 – 01:36:54:	That's a perfectly reasonable thing.

01:36:54 – 01:36:58:	But if someone who's always credible comes you with something, it should have more weight

01:36:58 – 01:37:00:	than someone who's a comedian.

01:37:00 – 01:37:06:	Two fundamentally different purposes and you should receive what they're telling you differently.

01:37:06 – 01:37:14:	Both in the last episode and in this episode, in a very core sense, what we are dealing

01:37:14 – 01:37:17:	with is propaganda.

01:37:17 – 01:37:22:	In the last episode, we dealt with propaganda, we could call it positive propaganda, the

01:37:22 – 01:37:26:	creation of a lie.

01:37:26 – 01:37:31:	In this episode, we're dealing with negative propaganda, which is the destruction of the

01:37:31 – 01:37:32:	truth.

01:37:32 – 01:37:37:	Both of course result in the destruction of the truth ultimately, but coming at it from

01:37:37 – 01:37:39:	different angles.

01:37:39 – 01:37:42:	This is Marxist propaganda.

01:37:42 – 01:37:47:	Now it's not to say that all of those who are engaged in this are willing or witting

01:37:47 – 01:37:51:	Marxists, of course they're not, many of them are just idiots.

01:37:51 – 01:37:57:	Some of them are malicious, many of them are just dumb.

01:37:57 – 01:38:04:	But the end result is the saying, the baby boomer generation was the perfect Marxist

01:38:04 – 01:38:10:	generation in the sense that they were completely demoralized.

01:38:10 – 01:38:16:	So propagandize that they basically lost the ability to hear the truth if it runs counter

01:38:16 – 01:38:19:	to what they were told.

01:38:19 – 01:38:23:	That's of course the goal of Marxist propaganda.

01:38:23 – 01:38:30:	However, or I guess I should say that was the goal, now there is a modified version of

01:38:30 – 01:38:32:	that goal.

01:38:32 – 01:38:39:	The goal of the current generation of propaganda is to deprive you of the ability to process

01:38:39 – 01:38:41:	the truth.

01:38:41 – 01:38:48:	It's not simply to instill lies in you, because if you instill lies in someone and make them

01:38:48 – 01:38:54:	basically impregnable when it comes to the truth, you've accomplished one sort of thing.

01:38:54 – 01:39:00:	But if you make it so that a person cannot even process the truth at all, you've accomplished

01:39:00 – 01:39:07:	something different, and if you are a malicious act or something greater.

01:39:07 – 01:39:14:	If you start to uncritically believe all sorts of insane claims, you lose the ability

01:39:14 – 01:39:20:	to process the truth, you become untethered from reality, but you can accomplish the same

01:39:20 – 01:39:23:	by not believing anything.

01:39:23 – 01:39:29:	So again, as was mentioned earlier, you can become a nihilist, believe in nothing, or

01:39:29 – 01:39:36:	you can become so wildly credulous that you assess nothing, just everything is true and

01:39:36 – 01:39:39:	I accept whatever I'm told.

01:39:39 – 01:39:45:	Neither outcome is good, neither outcome is something a Christian should permit himself

01:39:45 – 01:39:48:	to become.

01:39:48 – 01:39:52:	As a Christian, you are told to test the spirits.

01:39:52 – 01:39:56:	That doesn't just mean claims about religion.

01:39:56 – 01:40:01:	You should test every truth claim insofar as God has made you capable.

01:40:01 – 01:40:06:	If God has not made you capable, then you need other men in your life whom you can trust

01:40:07 – 01:40:09:	who can assess those claims for you.

01:40:09 – 01:40:17:	That's why it's vitally important to know whom you can trust and whom you cannot trust.

01:40:17 – 01:40:24:	If you can trust a man and he understands the subject, then you can trust the conclusions.

01:40:24 – 01:40:31:	He draws out of that subject the conclusions that he shares with you, and that is part

01:40:31 – 01:40:35:	of what all of us need to do when it comes to these subjects, because there is no single

01:40:35 – 01:40:41:	man who can assess all of these claims and understand all of them.

01:40:41 – 01:40:49:	By that I don't mean the claims in this episode or the claims in this podcast series, or the

01:40:49 – 01:40:54:	podcast more generally, I mean all of the claims in the modern world.

01:40:54 – 01:40:59:	Because all of us are specialized to some degree in what we do, and you cannot specialize

01:40:59 – 01:41:07:	in everything, there was an era in the past when the wealth of knowledge, the sum total

01:41:07 – 01:41:13:	of the store of human knowledge, was small enough that one man could in fact master all

01:41:13 – 01:41:16:	of it in his lifetime.

01:41:16 – 01:41:21:	It would take a particularly gifted man, of course, but it was still possible, that is

01:41:21 – 01:41:25:	absolutely not possible today.

01:41:25 – 01:41:30:	The average man would struggle to master a single field today, given the store of knowledge

01:41:30 – 01:41:32:	that we have.

01:41:32 – 01:41:37:	And so there is no way that anyone can tell you, reasonably, that you must go out and become

01:41:37 – 01:41:41:	an expert in everything and assess everything, that's not what we're saying.

01:41:41 – 01:41:46:	That would be to drive you into sheer insanity, because it would be, or probably despair,

01:41:46 – 01:41:51:	because it would be absolutely unattainable.

01:41:51 – 01:41:58:	What you have to be able to do is assess the reliability and the truthfulness of other

01:41:58 – 01:42:06:	men, so you know whom to trust, and also use what God gave you to assess claims.

01:42:06 – 01:42:13:	Now, as with the medieval peasant, and the shape of the earth, there are going to be

01:42:13 – 01:42:16:	things that do not matter to you.

01:42:16 – 01:42:19:	You don't have to worry about those if they don't involve you, if they don't matter

01:42:20 – 01:42:21:	to you.

01:42:21 – 01:42:27:	But when there are claims that are advanced, that make claims about God's creation, that

01:42:27 – 01:42:32:	make claims about Christianity, that make claims about your nation, your history, your

01:42:32 – 01:42:40:	people, you have to be able to assess those to some degree.

01:42:40 – 01:42:45:	Some of the claims that you need to assess are going to be relatively simple.

01:42:45 – 01:42:50:	As I mentioned with the shape of the earth, you could literally go out and with high school

01:42:50 – 01:42:55:	math figure out the shape of the earth if you just have a bit of patience and don't

01:42:55 – 01:42:57:	mind some walking.

01:42:57 – 01:43:04:	Those are the sorts of things where it's just inexcusable to believe what is false, because

01:43:04 – 01:43:08:	what is true is so readily verifiable.

01:43:08 – 01:43:14:	If it is a more esoteric claim, and you don't have reason to believe one way or the other,

01:43:14 – 01:43:18:	and don't believe one way or the other, you don't have to take a stand on every single

01:43:18 – 01:43:23:	issue despite what social media has led some people to believe.

01:43:23 – 01:43:29:	If you don't know about a subject, you don't have to have an opinion on it.

01:43:29 – 01:43:34:	I don't have any opinions when it comes to quantum chemistry.

01:43:34 – 01:43:38:	I don't know enough about the field to have any opinions, and so if you asked me a question

01:43:38 – 01:43:43:	about something in that field, I would say, I don't know.

01:43:43 – 01:43:45:	And that is a fine thing to say.

01:43:45 – 01:43:52:	In fact, the men you should never trust are the men who never say I don't know.

01:43:52 – 01:43:55:	Because those men are definitely lying to you.

01:43:55 – 01:44:01:	Because every man has to at times say, I do not know.

01:44:01 – 01:44:04:	Because there will be things you do not know.

01:44:04 – 01:44:05:	You're not an expert in everything.

01:44:05 – 01:44:07:	I'm not an expert in everything.

01:44:07 – 01:44:09:	Woe is an expert in everything.

01:44:09 – 01:44:12:	No man is an expert in everything.

01:44:12 – 01:44:20:	And so an honest man must be willing and able to say, I do not know.

01:44:20 – 01:44:25:	The claims we're talking about here and the reason we picked these ones.

01:44:25 – 01:44:32:	These are the sorts of claims that are designed to make you doubt reality itself, to drive

01:44:32 – 01:44:38:	you into insanity, to make you incapable of assessing the truth.

01:44:38 – 01:44:40:	And that's why it's important to get these ones right.

01:44:40 – 01:44:44:	You don't need to know everything about the moon landing.

01:44:44 – 01:44:46:	You're not a seven-year-old learning about dinosaurs.

01:44:46 – 01:44:49:	You don't have to memorize every single fact.

01:44:49 – 01:44:53:	But the core reality, it is vital to get that right.

01:44:53 – 01:44:55:	We did go to the moon.

01:44:55 – 01:44:56:	We did land on the moon.

01:44:56 – 01:45:00:	We left evidence of the landing on the moon.

01:45:00 – 01:45:01:	Not litter.

01:45:01 – 01:45:05:	We may have left a little of that as well, but we left retro reflectors.

01:45:05 – 01:45:07:	We left proof.

01:45:07 – 01:45:09:	We have proof of nuclear weapons.

01:45:09 – 01:45:14:	We have video, photos, eyewitness accounts.

01:45:14 – 01:45:17:	We have extensive proof that they're real.

01:45:17 – 01:45:21:	We know the shape of the earth, because again, you can calculate it, and we have satellites

01:45:21 – 01:45:25:	and orbit feeding real-time images of the surface of the earth.

01:45:25 – 01:45:31:	I will link the one that was mentioned in the show notes.

01:45:31 – 01:45:38:	And so as Christians, these sorts of claims, we need to get them right.

01:45:38 – 01:45:45:	Because if you lose the ability to assess truth in one area, that will spread to others.

01:45:45 – 01:45:51:	You will lose the ability to assess truth in other parts of your life.

01:45:51 – 01:45:57:	And Christianity, fundamentally, at its core, is a truth claim.

01:45:57 – 01:46:03:	Because the truth claim of Christianity is that Jesus Christ is God.

01:46:03 – 01:46:06:	Jesus Christ died on the cross.

01:46:06 – 01:46:13:	Jesus Christ died on the cross as a substitute for you.

01:46:13 – 01:46:21:	And if you have faith in that, in those facts, in those statements of truth, then you will

01:46:21 – 01:46:22:	be saved.

01:46:22 – 01:46:25:	Now, of course, I'm not saying that you just have to know only the history.

01:46:25 – 01:46:27:	I'm not making that theological claim.

01:46:27 – 01:46:33:	Yes, I recognize that it is notitia, ascensus, and fiducia.

01:46:33 – 01:46:38:	You must know the truth, assent to the truth, and trust in the truth.

01:46:38 – 01:46:42:	It is the trust, it is the faith that saves.

01:46:42 – 01:46:46:	But Christianity, fundamentally, is a truth claim.

01:46:46 – 01:46:49:	And again, I've mentioned the transcendentals in the last episode.

01:46:49 – 01:46:55:	I won't go over that again, but truth matters, because truth is the nature of God.

01:46:55 – 01:47:00:	And so it may seem like this episode, we went over some things that are perhaps a little

01:47:00 – 01:47:06:	crazy, which they are, or you may think, why does this matter?

01:47:06 – 01:47:13:	And I've just gone over why it matters, because as Christians, the truth matters.

01:47:13 – 01:47:16:	Because God is truth, and our religion is the truth.

01:47:16 – 01:47:22:	And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:30 – 01:47:35:	God is truth, and our religion is the truth.

01:47:35 – 01:47:40:	And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:40 – 01:47:45:	And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:45 – 01:47:50:	And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:50 – 01:47:55:	And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:55 – 01:47:59:	Copyright © 2020 Mooji Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

01:47:59 – 01:48:04:	No part of this recording may be reproduced without Mooji Media Ltd.'s express consent.