Transcript: Episode 0038

WEBVTT

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Music

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Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast, I am Corey J. Mahler.

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And I'm still woe.

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On today's Stone Choir we are going to be discussing how you can safely ingest new novel

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information that flies in the face of what you knew yesterday.

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Another way of putting it more simply is what do you do with these conspiracy theories?

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Last week we talked about one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the 20th century.

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If you don't believe what we said then that was a completely insane episode out of left

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wing and also has to be very evil because of the nature of it.

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If it's not a conspiracy theory, if it's actually true, then it reshapes how you view things.

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And one of the reasons we wanted to do this episode today is that we've done a number

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of episodes, maybe not quite that earth shattering in the past.

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You know when we talked about Michael Martin Luther King Jr. being a heretic, he was never

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a Christian a day in his life and by the way the civil rights movement was invented by

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the Soviets to undermine America.

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Those are facts.

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It's both a conspiracy theory and a fact.

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You have to deal with how do you work through that, especially when everything that everyone

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knows says the opposite of it.

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So we wanted to discuss today what is important for us as individuals as we are taking in

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new information because every day in the world there's a new fad diet, there's some new scientific

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discovery that upends everything we knew, there's some political or historical revelation

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and they all have the effect of unmooring us from reality where we basically feel like

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I can't trust anything.

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And ironically, that's sort of one of the things that's undergirding a lot of the episodes

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of Stone Choir.

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We're going back and looking at things and saying, well, they were saying this for the

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last 100 years or 200 years, but if you look before that they were saying the opposite.

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So one of them is a lie.

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So although we do a lot of episodes that are kind of destabilizing in terms of what I thought

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I knew turned out not to be true.

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We don't want people to feel completely unmoored from reality.

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We try to interleave the really serious stuff with episodes that don't hammer you as hard

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because frankly, the very fact that the new cycle is dominated by this sort of disruption

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psychologically is itself psychological warfare.

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It's effectively a low-grade form of torture, which we'll be getting to towards the end

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of this episode.

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This episode is not going to be real long.

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We had originally planned on doing Bonn Offer this week, but as Corey and I were getting

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into the research for that, we realized that it's going to take more research because

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there's both so much wrong with the things that he said and there's a degree of subtlety

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to the way he hit a lot of it that we want to make sure we get that one right.

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Simultaneously, we are both tuning into the Missouri Synod's Triennial Convention that

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began on Sunday, so we're a little bit disrupted.

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This episode is not going to be a real long one.

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We're not going to do another three-hour marathon.

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We just want to talk about what do you do when someone comes along and says something

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like last week's episode because some people break.

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Some people ingest this new information and they kind of shatter some.

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It's called redpilling.

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In a lot of cases, you know what that means.

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Some people turn that into their identity, and suddenly whatever is redpilled is the

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new thing and the only thing, and they will then only believe things that are both consonant

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with this new redpilled information, and they don't want to know anything else.

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That's also insane.

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As Christians and as honest men, our fundamental pursuit should be what is true, what is truth,

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The challenge of all these things that are told as lies publicly and things that are

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confusing where they mix lies with truth is that if you are able to filter through that

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and realize some people are lying, some people are mistaken, and some people are telling

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the truth, and there's an inner mixture of those, and there are reasons for each of those.

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If you're not doing a really good job as an individual of just filtering your own inputs,

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you're going to absorb information that's false.

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You're going to believe things that are untrue, or you're going to have some mixture of truth

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and untruth that may drive you crazy.

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As we said, there are guys who believe the things that we said last week, which are true,

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but then that becomes all that they can think about, and that's part of the reason we saved

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it.

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We're well over a year into doing Stone Coir episodes.

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We always knew that we wanted to tackle the Holocaust, but we didn't jump into it right

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away because, first of all, everyone would think that this was the Holocaust podcast,

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which is not.

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This is fundamentally a podcast about religion and Christianity and truth, but as Christians,

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that's every day.

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That's 24 hours a day.

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It's not just on Sunday, and so there's other things that we all deal with in our lives

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that also need to be constant with our Christian faith and rejecting lies and embracing truth

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and balancing our focus in our daily lives is a key part of that because you can spend

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your time listening to podcasts and thinking about stuff and studying, but you also have

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duties.

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God gives you other things to do.

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Maybe your bless that your duty, your vocation in life is to focus on that stuff.

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For most people, that's not the case.

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You have a job, maybe it's tedious, maybe it's really important, maybe it's both, but

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you have to provide for your family and you have to do other things.

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You can't get bogged down in tedious details that don't seem immediately relevant.

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We have the luxury on a podcast of being able to tackle some of those subjects.

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One of the early episodes we did was on the neglected matters in Scripture.

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We'll do kind of an ongoing series of those things where we specifically made the point

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in that episode.

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We're not saying this is the meat of the Christian life.

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We are saying these are a few doctrines that are in Scripture and nobody really talks about

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them, or when they do talk about them, it's just kind of way off in the distance.

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All Scripture is breathed out by God and is useful for rebuke and reproof and correction

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of error.

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When we start throwing things away or deleting things or minimizing them, we get into trouble.

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When we talk about Scripture explicitly, we want to go back and look at some of the things

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that modern Christians don't really take seriously.

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As we're looking elsewhere in life, we have these things like today we're going to be

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discussing in some detail, just to give you a preview, the moon landing, the space race

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in general.

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We're going to be talking a bit about Flat Earth.

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We'll be talking briefly maybe about nukes, whether or not they're true.

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Basically kind of going down the list of the things that Owen Benjamin has been inserting

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into the zeitgeist, because those are pernicious lies that are really driving people insane.

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They get lumped in with things like last week's episode, and that's one of the reasons we

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want to tackle this next was that it's important as we are listening to things, not to too

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quickly jump on to things that are brand new, but to weigh them, to evaluate them based

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on reason and on what we can understand.

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As we go through some of the details of some of these things that are lies that are being

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produced today, we're going to contrast them with some of the other things that are true

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that we've talked about in the past to illustrate how superficially it may seem like the moon

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landing and what happened in the 40s in Germany are on the same level, but when you look at

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the details of the facts, they go in a completely opposite direction in terms of veracity and

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verifiability.

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As we work through this, this isn't going to be a debunking episode, it's just going

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to give some examples of how as we talk about these subjects, or as you hear about them,

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it's okay just to set it aside and not pay attention.

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If you don't want to hear it, that's completely fine.

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Everybody starts raving about whether it's the Holocaust or the moon landing or whatever,

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it's fine to tune out.

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What's not okay is to say, those people are all crazy, I don't believe any of it.

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Because if you want to engage in the veracity of the subject, you have to actually engage

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in the facts.

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You can't just say, they're nuts, I don't believe them.

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Because one of the things that all these things collectively do is convince us that anyone

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who talks about any of these things are crazy.

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That's why a lot of these things end up in the same bucket.

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You have people believing completely in the same things, like the gimmick from a few years

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ago, the birds aren't real.

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There's some guys, it was an open prank that some people then sort of turned into either

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just a personality or they wanted to believe it because, hey, it's one more revisionist

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part of history.

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We want to try to equip you today to just filter out with a few simple heuristics, am

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I being deceived here, or am I learning something new, and what do I do with it once I learn it?

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One of the conspiracy theories that really crops up constantly in the US context and

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abroad as well, there are actually some countries where an even higher percentage of the population

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would say they don't believe in this.

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That is, whether or not the moon landings actually took place.

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There are a lot of reasons that are given, none of them are good, but there are a lot

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of reasons that are given by people why they do not believe that the moon landings took place.

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Now part of this, of course, is because of all the other things that we are subjected

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to in our daily lives, we're bombarded with lies.

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We have lies about the COVID vaccines, vaccines and quotation marks here.

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We have lies about what happened with the pandemic.

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We have lies about so very many things.

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So people will go back and say, well, when did they start lying to me?

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And so if they started lying to me about the world wars, well, why would I believe them

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about the moon landing?

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But as Woe said in the introduction, the moon landing is a very different thing.

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Not only because it is just a very different thing from a war or something like that.

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Yes, it takes place in the Cold War context, but it's not itself a war.

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It is demonstrable that man landed on the moon.

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Unlike some of the historical claims where as soon as you subject them to any sort of

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serious analysis or critique, any sort of criticism, they fall apart.

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If you look at the claims around World War II and you actually subject them to scientific

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analysis, they immediately collapse.

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The opposite is actually true with the moon landing.

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If you subject the moon landing and we have a wealth of information, we'll get into, there

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are those who say they destroyed records, they didn't destroy the records, they recycled

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the tapes and for those who don't understand technology that may not make sense, we'll

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get into that though and explain why that is what you do.

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But if you actually subject the moon landing claims using the evidence on hand and there

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is still evidence today that you can use, it's very obvious it did take place.

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We did land on the moon.

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And one of the best examples, we won't bury the lead, we'll just start with one of the

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best ones, we left retro reflectors on the moon.

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Now in case you don't know what a retro reflector is, a retro reflector is essentially a very

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specialized mirror.

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If you go into your bathroom and shine a flashlight in the mirror, you know that it will reflect

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basically at an angle opposite the angle at which you shine the light into the mirror,

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which is to say it will bounce off at a different angle unless you are directly in line with

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the mirror, in which case you'll blind yourself, so maybe don't do that.

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But the reason for that, there's some physics we don't really need to get into, but a regular

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mirror is basically just the one pane.

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It reflects at an angle relative to the angle at which the light is hitting the surface.

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A retro reflector is designed not to do that for a very specific reason.

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A retro reflector is designed so that over a wide angle, it will reflect light received

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back at the center.

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Now this is useful for many reasons.

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You actually probably own a retro reflector somewhere in your house.

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If you own a bicycle, you probably have a retro reflector.

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Those are used as the reflectors on bikes and the reason for that is very obvious.

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If you have someone who is driving up behind you, you want the light from the headlights

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on that vehicle to reflect back at that vehicle so you're visible.

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If you put a standard mirror, they would just reflect off at some wild angle unless the light

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source happened to be directly in line with the mirror.

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Well we left retro reflectors on the moon.

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The reason we did that wasn't to prove we went to the moon because those who were actually

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designing that mission and the hardware and placing them weren't thinking about crazy

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people coming along later and saying this never took place.

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Rather they wanted to be able to bounce a laser off of it and receive it back, obviously.

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Same device that sent the laser out so that you can tell how far the moon is from the

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earth.

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Because now we can get extremely accurate readings of the distance from the earth to

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the moon.

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However, this is a retro reflector.

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It's just sitting on the lunar surface with maybe a thousand dollars worth of hardware

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you could go in your backyard and prove that man went to the moon.

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Not only that, you can prove, if you know a little bit of math, exactly how far it is

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from where you are standing on the earth to where that retro reflector is sitting on the

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moon.

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It's absolute concrete proof that man went to the moon.

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God didn't place a retro reflector on the moon and wait for us to discover it.

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We built that on earth and took it to the moon and placed it there.

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One of the things when people attack the idea that we went to the moon, which is almost

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a separate question from the fact, and that's one of the goals is to say they don't simply

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want to deny that we did.

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They want to deny that it's even conceivably possible the humans could, which is immediately

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where the conversation goes.

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It's not simply we didn't do it.

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It's impossible for us to have done that, which is another part of this conversation,

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but it's important to acknowledge that there are two things going on simultaneously, and

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that's frequently the case with these things.

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The way that people attack these subjects is the opposite of the way that we attack

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the subject last week, so we're going to give a couple examples by contrast.

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As I mentioned, Owen Benjamin is one of the chief, I'll say architects, but he's one

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of the chief ring leaders of the current idea that it didn't happen.

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He's certainly not the first.

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He's a very smart guy.

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He's very intelligent.

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He probably has a genius level IQ.

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He's also a comedian.

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He spent his life getting punch lines, and when you deliver a punch line and you get

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people to laugh, there's a short circuiting effect that occurs where you present your

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joke, you present the body of what it is you're doing, and then you land the punch, and the

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immediate response is for people to reel and laugh, and then they go off and it goes on.

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The joke is over.

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The whole story is over.

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The laughter is the acknowledgement that it's done, and there's no rational processing

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of what came before it, and that's a crucial part of the arguments that are used by these

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people saying that it didn't happen.

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One of the chief examples that they will give is to say, when Apollo 11 was on the moon,

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they had a phone call with Richard Nixon, and the comedians will say, I can't even make

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a phone call work well from my car on the highway.

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If in 2023, you can't get a cell phone with all this modern technology to connect a call,

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how could Richard Nixon in 1969 with a tin can have a phone call with astronauts a quarter

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million miles away?

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That's a punch line.

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That's a cheap shot.

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It's the easiest, stupidest question to ask, and if someone has no knowledge of anything

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like, oh, yeah, well, that makes sense.

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I use a cell phone every day, and I hate it.

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It's terrible.

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It doesn't work.

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It's comedian level rationality.

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I don't know what to call it.

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It's garbage.

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You can go and listen to the so-called phone call that they had.

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It was clearly scripted.

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It was timed, and it was an even more laggy version of what Corey and I do when we're

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doing this podcast.

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This isn't really a conversation.

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We're not in the same place.

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

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In the cases where we do try to interact live, usually there's some stumbling over each other.

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They were careful to avoid that.

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If you actually go listen, we'll put in the show notes the actual conversation that the

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astronauts and President Nixon had in 1969.

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Just listen to how it goes because the comedian will tell you, oh, they had a phone call.

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If you listen to it, A, these were incredibly powerful, incredibly sophisticated radios with

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directional antennae carefully tuned in a program that today is worth, I think, like

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$175 billion.

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This is not your cell phone.

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We're talking about the very best communications technology that was possible in 1969 with

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no wattage limit, which is a big deal.

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Your cell phone would always have connectivity.

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If it had 100 watts of output, it doesn't.

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That's one of the key differences.

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All you have to know is that when you listen to Nixon and the astronauts talking, they're

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not talking.

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Nixon gives us a speech that's a minute long, and then the astronauts give a canned response

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that's 20 seconds long or something.

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It wasn't a conversation.

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They each gave brief statements, and they took turns doing it.

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That's not a phone call.

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Even by itself, just that one thing, haha, it's a phone call.

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That doesn't work on the moon.

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It doesn't work on my neighborhood.

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That's the level of argumentation that you get from people who are denying what is easily

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the most well-documented event in all of human history.

19:58.780 --> 20:01.220
I don't say that with any exaggeration.

20:01.220 --> 20:06.780
The amount of documentation that went into the entire process of the Apollo program,

20:06.780 --> 20:11.580
including the launches and the return of those vehicles, it's indescribable how much

20:11.640 --> 20:17.480
data they had, radios, telemetry, just unfathomable amounts.

20:17.480 --> 20:22.760
Unfortunately, we just passed the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, and then this was back

20:22.760 --> 20:28.320
in the news a couple of weeks ago because we just passed January 20th of this year,

20:28.320 --> 20:35.000
which was, of course, the day that we landed on the moon in 1969.

20:35.000 --> 20:40.040
There was a website that was set up for 2019 for the 50th anniversary.

20:40.100 --> 20:41.940
Unfortunately, it's defunct now.

20:41.940 --> 20:44.620
I'm heartbroken because it's really cool.

20:44.620 --> 20:50.460
It was a website that basically was replaying the entire Apollo 11 mission from several

20:50.460 --> 20:53.700
hours before launch until its return.

20:53.700 --> 20:58.860
You could go to this website and you could jump between audio and video sources from

20:58.860 --> 21:02.460
every camera that they had available, every microphone they had available.

21:02.460 --> 21:04.820
You could see the telemetry in real time.

21:04.820 --> 21:06.940
You could scrub back and forth in time.

21:06.960 --> 21:12.680
You could just see the raft of data that was sent back to Earth and it was kept on Earth

21:12.680 --> 21:18.600
as part of this enormous project, just inconceivably huge project.

21:18.600 --> 21:23.120
That's a fraction of the data we have, as Cori alluded to.

21:23.120 --> 21:24.120
Some of the data was lost.

21:24.120 --> 21:26.200
Yeah, it's a government program.

21:26.200 --> 21:28.840
You ever hear government records getting misplaced?

21:28.840 --> 21:30.160
That's not a conspiracy.

21:30.160 --> 21:34.040
That's the realest part of the whole story, to say they're covering something up because

21:34.040 --> 21:36.040
they lost records.

21:36.040 --> 21:38.900
There's nothing I find more believable than that.

21:38.900 --> 21:40.780
Even at that, there's all this data.

21:40.780 --> 21:44.940
Again, it's available elsewhere, but it was just really nice that that website existed.

21:44.940 --> 21:47.100
You can go see the bones of it still.

21:47.100 --> 21:52.340
Even now, the telemetry data is widely available.

21:52.340 --> 21:57.460
As we talked about last week, if someone wanted to fake an event, as the event we talked about

21:57.460 --> 22:02.900
last week, if the Germans had wanted to cover up what they did and they falsified records

22:03.160 --> 22:09.240
by going in and modifying or deleting things, it would never withstand any sort of forensic

22:09.240 --> 22:11.360
scrutiny.

22:11.360 --> 22:15.360
That's absolutely the case with the Apollo missions.

22:15.360 --> 22:17.920
They were going out into space.

22:17.920 --> 22:21.080
One of the key parts of that is that everyone can see space.

22:21.080 --> 22:24.400
The moon is not over the United States of America.

22:24.400 --> 22:26.720
Everyone on the planet gets a shot at the moon.

22:26.720 --> 22:31.360
Everyone on the planet with a radio receiver or today a laser transmitter can do the same

22:31.360 --> 22:32.720
things that we could do.

22:32.720 --> 22:38.420
In 1969, when the astronauts were there, anyone with a radio receiver that was correctly

22:38.420 --> 22:41.620
set up and strong enough would be able to pick them up.

22:41.620 --> 22:44.580
That wasn't common in 1969, but you know who did have it?

22:44.580 --> 22:45.900
The Soviet Union.

22:45.900 --> 22:50.900
The Soviets were paying a great deal of attention to what we were doing in space.

22:50.900 --> 22:54.420
As Corey said, it was part of the Cold War.

22:54.420 --> 22:59.820
This was a military endeavor as far as the Soviets were concerned.

22:59.840 --> 23:05.800
One of the chief arguments from silence in all this is that if we had pretended to go

23:05.800 --> 23:12.240
to the moon and we hadn't, and we had been transmitting fake radio data from either moon

23:12.240 --> 23:16.880
orbit or from low Earth orbit, the Soviets would have known and they would have told

23:16.880 --> 23:21.920
the world because everything that the Soviets did at the time when they were a communist

23:21.920 --> 23:27.200
empire was to try to demonstrate to the world that communism was supreme over all reforms

23:27.200 --> 23:28.200
of life.

23:28.580 --> 23:34.100
Atheism, atheist communism was the way humanity was going to be ruled in the future.

23:34.100 --> 23:35.660
They were the first into space.

23:35.660 --> 23:38.460
They were the first to orbit.

23:38.460 --> 23:39.780
They did things before we did.

23:39.780 --> 23:41.660
The rocketry program was more advanced.

23:41.660 --> 23:46.940
We were playing catch-up when we did the Apollo and Gemini missions.

23:46.940 --> 23:49.980
They would have absolutely mocked us very publicly.

23:49.980 --> 23:53.780
If there was a shred of evidence that they could have collected from space that we didn't

23:53.780 --> 23:56.780
do this, it would have been everywhere in 1969.

23:56.780 --> 24:01.760
You had to wait for some idiot comedian 50 years later to say, oh, by the way, they didn't

24:01.760 --> 24:02.760
do it.

24:02.760 --> 24:05.480
The Russians would have told that before most of us were born.

24:05.480 --> 24:11.000
On a technical note about the supposed loss of data and one could argue that it is a loss

24:11.000 --> 24:20.960
of data, many of the reels would simply have been reused and that sounds crazy to the modern

24:20.960 --> 24:26.700
home user, let's say, of technology because you think, well, I just store everything on

24:26.700 --> 24:31.740
my hard drive and it seems to have infinite space, perhaps not your phone.

24:31.740 --> 24:35.860
You've run into a lack of space on your phone and that's a good example.

24:35.860 --> 24:40.420
If your phone fills up, you clear it and reuse the space.

24:40.420 --> 24:46.020
The same thing happens with certain systems that have high volumes of data passing through

24:46.020 --> 24:47.020
them.

24:47.040 --> 24:51.640
The best modern example would be a surveillance system.

24:51.640 --> 24:56.240
When you set up a surveillance system, yes, the cameras can be somewhat expensive, but

24:56.240 --> 25:01.600
the real expense winds up going into the back end where you actually store that data.

25:01.600 --> 25:05.760
I won't get into the specific numbers that much because no one really cares about the

25:05.760 --> 25:07.960
math.

25:07.960 --> 25:13.000
But the core point is that you are going to have a limited amount of space to store the

25:13.000 --> 25:19.900
data that you are collecting and you aim for X days of retention.

25:19.900 --> 25:25.620
So if you have an incident that occurs, you want to have back 90 days, say, and so you

25:25.620 --> 25:29.620
calculate your storage needs and you have enough storage for 90 days.

25:29.620 --> 25:39.580
Well, what happens is the video from 91 days ago drops off and gets reused for your current

25:39.580 --> 25:40.580
day.

25:40.580 --> 25:41.580
And that keeps happening.

25:42.000 --> 25:44.440
Cycling through that storage space.

25:44.440 --> 25:48.600
They did the same thing back when they had reels or whatever else they happened to be

25:48.600 --> 25:54.120
using, magnetic tapes, because they didn't have an infinite number of them.

25:54.120 --> 25:58.360
And back then it was very expensive to make more of them and they were large and you had

25:58.360 --> 26:02.320
to store them somewhere and they're somewhat delicate.

26:02.320 --> 26:08.480
So the fact that they were reused and that some of the data were lost is not at all surprising.

26:08.480 --> 26:14.580
That is exactly what you expect to happen with that kind of system.

26:14.580 --> 26:22.100
And the joke about, you know, my phone drops all the time and blah, blah, blah, okay, fine.

26:22.100 --> 26:27.460
If you wanted to build a system that was completely rock solid, you could do it.

26:27.460 --> 26:30.060
And it wouldn't even be that expensive today.

26:30.060 --> 26:35.940
Earlier I was looking at some hardware for something completely unrelated, but you can

26:35.960 --> 26:46.320
set up a 10 to 20 kilometer link for about $2,000 that will be completely stable.

26:46.320 --> 26:51.880
You could have a constant stream of data over this with no interruptions and it has enough

26:51.880 --> 26:58.080
throughput to do a little math.

26:58.080 --> 27:01.120
There's enough throughput in that to fill your hard drive.

27:01.120 --> 27:06.220
If you have an average size hard drive in about two hours, that's a lot of data, which

27:06.220 --> 27:11.720
is to say that if you wanted to build a system that was completely stable, you could do it.

27:11.720 --> 27:18.340
The phone system, your cell phone is not completely stable and reliable because of cost.

27:18.340 --> 27:24.460
It's the same thing as when you're storing X days worth of video of surveillance.

27:24.460 --> 27:29.420
You could store it indefinitely, but the cost keeps going up because you're going to have

27:29.440 --> 27:33.920
to buy new storage every time you fill your old storage.

27:33.920 --> 27:39.680
Well the phone system, the cellular system could be entirely reliable if that's what

27:39.680 --> 27:41.560
we wanted, if that's what we needed.

27:41.560 --> 27:48.640
We have systems like that for emergency services and things that are more sensitive to drops

27:48.640 --> 27:53.140
in quality or just entirely drops in service.

27:53.140 --> 27:56.660
We don't do it because of cost.

27:56.660 --> 28:03.000
The cost of building out that sort of system is extremely prohibitive unless you live in

28:03.000 --> 28:05.440
an area that is extremely dense.

28:05.440 --> 28:13.800
For instance, when I lived in Southern California, I had nearly perfect cell service basically

28:13.800 --> 28:17.840
everywhere I spent my time, unless I was hiking in the middle of nowhere, obviously in the

28:17.840 --> 28:23.560
depths of Sequoia National Forest, okay fine, I don't have service there, but everywhere

28:23.580 --> 28:27.860
in LA and in the surrounding areas, perfect service.

28:27.860 --> 28:32.820
Because of density, it makes sense to build out the network where you have literal millions

28:32.820 --> 28:35.180
of users.

28:35.180 --> 28:39.540
Now I live somewhere that is significantly more rural.

28:39.540 --> 28:45.060
My service here happens to be pretty good, but there are many places around where I live

28:45.060 --> 28:48.340
now where I don't have very good service.

28:48.340 --> 28:51.900
Because of the cost it would not make sense to build it out.

28:51.920 --> 28:58.840
And so it makes perfect sense that you would have good connection for something like the

28:58.840 --> 29:04.080
Apollo mission, which is critical, and yes, your cell phone doesn't perform to the same

29:04.080 --> 29:05.240
standard.

29:05.240 --> 29:07.480
It's insane to compare the two.

29:07.480 --> 29:10.840
And as Will mentioned, the point is the joke.

29:10.840 --> 29:12.960
It's a joke being told by a comedian.

29:12.960 --> 29:17.720
Aha, it's funny that my cell phone dropped service, no really, it's actually a wonder

29:17.740 --> 29:23.220
device that I have in my pocket that can do this virtually unlimited list of things that

29:23.220 --> 29:27.700
were inconceivable 40 years ago.

29:27.700 --> 29:31.260
Certainly inconceivable 100 years ago, 200 years ago.

29:31.260 --> 29:36.820
But yes, haha, it doesn't work all the time, okay fine, we understand the joke.

29:36.820 --> 29:43.060
Don't let the joke become warrant to believe something that is insane.

29:43.060 --> 29:46.380
Because then you've just made yourself the joke.

29:46.380 --> 29:53.160
Why would you take a joke from a comedian and turn that into one of your actual beliefs

29:53.160 --> 29:56.680
about the real world?

29:56.680 --> 30:01.960
That is an insane thing to do.

30:01.960 --> 30:05.840
Another common example that comes from the folks who say that we couldn't have gone to

30:05.840 --> 30:08.200
the moon is the Van Allen belts.

30:08.200 --> 30:09.960
You may have heard the term before.

30:09.960 --> 30:14.480
They're these belts of ionizing radiation around the earth.

30:14.480 --> 30:21.860
It's radiation that's held by the magnetism of the earth itself that does exist in places

30:21.860 --> 30:24.060
in lethal levels.

30:24.060 --> 30:30.260
And so the theory from guys on Twitter and YouTube who are not nearly smart enough to

30:30.260 --> 30:35.540
actually do any of this math is that the earth is surrounded by this murder cloud and no

30:35.540 --> 30:43.780
one can possibly transit that cloud or they all die instantly because it's radioactive.

30:43.780 --> 30:45.200
So it was worried about this.

30:45.200 --> 30:46.960
They were worried about the Van Allen belts.

30:46.960 --> 30:47.960
They knew about them.

30:47.960 --> 30:49.200
They knew of their existence.

30:49.200 --> 30:54.640
They had correctly modeled them in the 60s so that they knew that they were uneven.

30:54.640 --> 30:59.440
They're these multiple layers and pockets of radiation that are unevenly distributed

30:59.440 --> 31:08.480
because the galaxy and the solar system are basically is an illusion to the flat earth

31:08.480 --> 31:09.480
thing later.

31:09.480 --> 31:10.480
They're kind of a pancake.

31:10.480 --> 31:13.540
They're basically oriented in a flat fashion.

31:13.540 --> 31:21.200
So the earth's radiation belts, the Van Allen belts are oriented basically towards the sun.

31:21.200 --> 31:23.200
They're oriented with the poles of the earth.

31:23.200 --> 31:27.480
So it's not quite aligned, but more or less it's off to one side and the other.

31:27.480 --> 31:33.200
So you have up and down and you have left and right and north, south, east, west.

31:33.200 --> 31:36.600
That's important because the Van Allen belts are not perfect spheres.

31:36.600 --> 31:40.680
We're not talking about electron shells around a neutron.

31:40.680 --> 31:43.520
We're talking about a torus.

31:44.500 --> 31:51.260
It's a round donut basically around the earth of, yes, lethal levels of radiation.

31:51.260 --> 31:52.700
So NASA mapped it.

31:52.700 --> 31:55.420
They made sure that they understood all the risks.

31:55.420 --> 31:59.140
One of the other things that you'll hear from the Benjamins of the world is they would have

31:59.140 --> 32:02.860
had to have so much lead shielding they couldn't have possibly taken off.

32:02.860 --> 32:06.620
We'll link a video in the show notes that goes in briefly in just a bit of details.

32:06.620 --> 32:09.900
And it talks about some of the specifics that you can go Google if you actually care about

32:09.900 --> 32:10.900
the science.

32:10.900 --> 32:16.320
If, for the sake of argument, these idiotic internet comedians were right and you would

32:16.320 --> 32:21.760
have needed very thick lead shielding to protect the astronauts from the radiation.

32:21.760 --> 32:25.960
The scientific fact is that if they had had heavy lead shielding, it would have actually

32:25.960 --> 32:30.080
increased the amount of radiation they would have been exposed to.

32:30.080 --> 32:34.080
Because although the lead shielding would have kept the ionizing radiation on the outside

32:34.080 --> 32:38.560
of the lead shielding, the lead shielding itself would have been emitting X-rays inside

32:38.560 --> 32:39.960
the spaceship.

32:39.960 --> 32:45.940
So the light, aluminum skin, and the Mylar sheathing and the other things in this tin

32:45.940 --> 32:48.100
can of a spaceship, that's not a joke.

32:48.100 --> 32:49.100
That was real.

32:49.100 --> 32:53.220
It was incredibly light, not only because it had to be, but because it could be.

32:53.220 --> 32:55.580
And the materials that they used, they did the math.

32:55.580 --> 32:56.580
They were careful.

32:56.580 --> 32:58.980
They didn't just yolo into space.

32:58.980 --> 32:59.980
They were careful.

32:59.980 --> 33:00.980
They didn't want to kill people.

33:00.980 --> 33:05.340
They'd already killed three guys in the oxygen fire in Gemini.

33:05.340 --> 33:09.940
They wanted to make sure they didn't have that happen again by anything.

33:10.920 --> 33:11.920
It was a PR thing.

33:11.920 --> 33:14.440
It was a human thing.

33:14.440 --> 33:18.320
The mission was to send men to the moon and bring them back alive.

33:18.320 --> 33:21.960
Everything that went into that mission was important to them, and that included not having

33:21.960 --> 33:23.720
radiation poisoning.

33:23.720 --> 33:25.720
So what do they do for the Van Allen belts?

33:25.720 --> 33:30.440
They made sure that the spaceships had the appropriate materials to minimize as much

33:30.440 --> 33:33.800
of the radiation that they were going to be exposed to as possible.

33:33.800 --> 33:35.520
And then they went around the belts.

33:35.520 --> 33:40.300
And they cut through the edges of the Van Allen belts where it was not lethal.

33:40.300 --> 33:45.260
And they did it quickly enough that they were only exposed for a total of about six hours

33:45.260 --> 33:47.460
inside any portion of the belts.

33:47.460 --> 33:51.940
And all three of the astronauts were wearing dosimeters, so they knew how much radiation

33:51.940 --> 33:53.900
they were exposed to.

33:53.900 --> 34:00.460
Their entire trip through the Van Allen belts in the deepness of outer space with no magnetic

34:00.460 --> 34:02.940
shield from the Earth protecting them.

34:02.940 --> 34:10.800
They received less radioactivity exposure than a nuclear worker would today in a nuclear

34:10.800 --> 34:11.800
plant.

34:11.800 --> 34:17.640
It was a completely safe, innocuous, not even interesting level of radiation.

34:17.640 --> 34:20.280
It wasn't like they couldn't do that.

34:20.280 --> 34:24.880
If they went up every day, yes, they would start to get into levels that would be dangerous.

34:24.880 --> 34:29.440
But for the trips that they took, they went through it for about two and a half hours

34:29.440 --> 34:33.020
one way and about three and a half hours the other way.

34:33.020 --> 34:35.020
And in between, they had several days of rest.

34:35.020 --> 34:38.780
And so their bodies were able to repair some of the damage that may have been caused by

34:38.780 --> 34:39.780
the radiation.

34:39.780 --> 34:44.700
Because another problem with that sort of radiation is it's the continuous exposure

34:44.700 --> 34:47.380
that causes your body to break down.

34:47.380 --> 34:49.540
Our bodies are constantly being injured and damaged.

34:49.540 --> 34:51.740
We have cells that are dying all the time.

34:51.740 --> 34:55.220
Our bodies are always cleaning up some mass, some injury internally, and we never know

34:55.220 --> 34:56.220
about it.

34:56.220 --> 34:58.820
So they took all those things into account.

34:58.820 --> 35:04.280
So just as these two very brief examples, you have radioactivity and you have ha-ha

35:04.280 --> 35:06.240
phone calls.

35:06.240 --> 35:10.920
When you examine those gotcha claims, they disintegrate.

35:10.920 --> 35:13.600
There's a very plausible explanation.

35:13.600 --> 35:18.280
And on the flip side, when you look at all the proof that it actually happened, it's

35:18.280 --> 35:19.920
overwhelming.

35:19.920 --> 35:25.200
So the gotchas fall on their face and everything that the guys want to ignore is staring you

35:25.200 --> 35:27.440
right in the eyes.

35:27.440 --> 35:31.380
Last week's episode, by contrast, the opposite is true.

35:31.380 --> 35:37.020
See if all the bodies are missing and there have been all these millions killed, that's

35:37.020 --> 35:38.220
a big deal.

35:38.220 --> 35:39.900
That's not a phone call.

35:39.900 --> 35:44.300
And that's part of the reason we wanted to contrast these is that if you just bucket

35:44.300 --> 35:49.180
these together as, these are crazy conspiracy theories that guys on the internet make up

35:49.180 --> 35:53.180
and I don't know what to believe, it's all crazy, I don't want anything to do with it.

35:53.180 --> 35:56.300
If you just want to check out completely, that's fine.

35:56.480 --> 36:02.040
If you want to engage in the veracity of these things, take a look at the claims.

36:02.040 --> 36:05.400
If six million bodies vanish, that's a big deal.

36:05.400 --> 36:09.800
If something that someone calls a phone call, it was called a phone call at the time, but

36:09.800 --> 36:10.800
it wasn't.

36:10.800 --> 36:13.600
It was a scripted radio transmission.

36:13.600 --> 36:17.440
One guy pressed the button and talked for a minute or two and then the other guy responded

36:17.440 --> 36:19.720
when his time was up.

36:19.720 --> 36:23.040
All of the possible gotchas fall apart.

36:23.040 --> 36:24.040
I used to work in tech.

36:24.040 --> 36:25.040
I used to work at Apple.

36:25.040 --> 36:26.980
I've done demos before.

36:26.980 --> 36:33.220
Sometimes parts of demos are faked, not in the sense that the thing couldn't be done,

36:33.220 --> 36:36.700
but at the exact moment that you were asked to present it.

36:36.700 --> 36:41.060
Maybe it wasn't in a state that you could make it work as well as it was going to work

36:41.060 --> 36:42.060
in the end.

36:42.060 --> 36:46.100
Now, I'm not saying that the moon landing was a demo, but some of the other minor gotchas

36:46.100 --> 36:50.900
are that there's videos that were taken inside the capsules at different distances from the

36:50.900 --> 36:51.900
earth.

36:52.440 --> 36:55.680
You can do the math on the size of the earth and say, well, they were this far away when

36:55.680 --> 36:57.640
they were saying they were this far away.

36:57.640 --> 37:02.440
It's important to keep in mind that the astronauts, every minute of that three-day journey was

37:02.440 --> 37:06.960
scripted because this was not a canoe trip down a river.

37:06.960 --> 37:13.280
They had to do certain things at precise intervals at certain moments or they would all die.

37:13.280 --> 37:14.920
It's rocket science.

37:14.920 --> 37:19.600
We're talking about being in space where one accident, one mistake can potentially kill

37:19.600 --> 37:20.600
you.

37:21.300 --> 37:25.620
Miraculously, we were able to recover from on Apollo 13 when a whole bunch of things

37:25.620 --> 37:26.620
went wrong.

37:26.620 --> 37:30.100
They did recover because they were brilliant men and they were hard workers and they had

37:30.100 --> 37:32.860
enough of a safety margin to make it back.

37:32.860 --> 37:34.900
Frankly, God saved their lives too.

37:34.900 --> 37:39.060
You can't, humans can't take all the credit for that.

37:39.060 --> 37:45.700
The difference between the so-called conspiracy theory where the couple gotchas blow a hole

37:45.800 --> 37:51.200
in everything and something like the moon landing where the gotchas are themselves in

37:51.200 --> 37:54.560
A.N., it's not even apples and oranges.

37:54.560 --> 37:57.480
It's apples and elephants.

37:57.480 --> 38:03.520
On the topic of radiation, I think a lot of people get the wrong conception of radiation

38:03.520 --> 38:06.340
and radiation risks.

38:06.340 --> 38:14.400
If you are an international traveler, you have increased exposure to radiation because

38:14.420 --> 38:20.540
when you fly, you are outside some of the protection of the Earth's atmosphere because

38:20.540 --> 38:25.540
you are above much of it when you are flying at altitude, particularly if you are taking

38:25.540 --> 38:30.940
international trips where you are at altitude for many hours.

38:30.940 --> 38:38.820
And so you have an increased risk of cancer over the long term because of that travel.

38:38.820 --> 38:42.640
The same thing is very true for astronauts.

38:42.640 --> 38:48.640
Astronauts, in some cases, face an increased risk of cancer.

38:48.640 --> 38:54.480
Now, we may get into nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

38:54.480 --> 39:00.800
It's not always true that being in the vicinity of nuclear energy is going to result in an

39:00.800 --> 39:02.360
increased risk of cancer.

39:02.360 --> 39:08.360
For instance, our submariners actually have a decreased risk of cancer.

39:08.900 --> 39:15.460
Because our nuclear submarines are designed in such a way, there's no radiation risk for

39:15.460 --> 39:16.460
the crew.

39:16.460 --> 39:18.940
They don't have any exposure.

39:18.940 --> 39:23.180
They actually have less because they are protected by the volume of water and the metal

39:23.180 --> 39:24.180
tube.

39:24.180 --> 39:28.140
They're actually getting less radiation than you would just being on the surface on an

39:28.140 --> 39:29.140
average day.

39:29.140 --> 39:34.300
I'm getting more right now from the open window, well, the unshuttered window next to me.

39:34.300 --> 39:35.300
Obviously not open.

39:35.300 --> 39:37.780
It's very warm outside.

39:37.780 --> 39:42.960
But radiation risk is a matter of longitudinal risk.

39:42.960 --> 39:50.040
It is exposure over a very long period of time unless you have an acute exposure, Chernobyl,

39:50.040 --> 39:51.280
for instance.

39:51.280 --> 39:57.840
But one of the reasons that people get this wrong is they don't understand longitudinal

39:57.840 --> 39:58.840
risk.

39:58.840 --> 39:59.840
It's not just acute risk.

39:59.840 --> 40:01.520
It's not like being poisoned.

40:01.520 --> 40:05.160
Yes, it is poisoning over a long period.

40:05.160 --> 40:09.380
So yes, you could compare it to a mild toxin, but it's not like cyanide poisoning where

40:09.380 --> 40:11.940
you take it and you die.

40:11.940 --> 40:18.420
This is one of the reasons when Japan had their nuclear incident in the wake of the tsunami,

40:18.420 --> 40:21.340
many elderly volunteered to help clean up.

40:21.340 --> 40:27.100
If you are already elderly, you don't run the risk of that longitudinal increase in

40:27.100 --> 40:33.100
cancer, the risk of cancer, well, really cancer because we all eventually get cancer if you

40:33.100 --> 40:35.100
live long enough.

40:35.100 --> 40:41.880
But you don't run that risk if you're already elderly because it is the dose over your life

40:41.880 --> 40:46.000
that increases the likelihood of getting that cancer.

40:46.000 --> 40:54.120
And we mistakenly believe that somehow we can just remove all of these risks.

40:54.120 --> 40:58.280
There were very real risks, including radiation risks for these astronauts.

40:58.280 --> 41:03.080
Yes, they did as much as they possibly could to reduce those risks, but they couldn't eliminate

41:03.080 --> 41:04.280
them.

41:04.280 --> 41:11.580
In the end analysis, we were blasting human beings into a vacuum in a metal tube.

41:11.580 --> 41:16.500
We'd already sort of done so and learned many things obviously from submarines because that's

41:16.500 --> 41:19.620
the best comparison for this.

41:19.620 --> 41:24.940
Submarine versus spacecraft because both are dealing with a very inhospitable external

41:24.940 --> 41:28.260
environment that if you do anything wrong, you're going to die.

41:28.260 --> 41:32.900
If you get a hole in your craft, you're probably going to die.

41:32.900 --> 41:37.560
But for instance, to compare these radiation risks, to understand them perhaps a little

41:37.560 --> 41:43.560
better, there's actually a monument, I guess this tangentially ties into last week's episode

41:43.560 --> 41:50.800
since it was built in 1936 and in Germany, but there's a monument on the campus of St.

41:50.800 --> 41:58.360
George's Hospital in Hamburg that has a list of, I think it's up to maybe 400 names now,

41:58.380 --> 42:05.060
of those who died learning about basically x-rays.

42:05.060 --> 42:09.380
These technologies, when we are experimenting with them, when we are first learning to use

42:09.380 --> 42:14.420
them, have very real risks that come with them and the astronauts knew those risks and

42:14.420 --> 42:16.180
undertook them.

42:16.180 --> 42:20.940
So when people say that, oh, you couldn't do it because of x, y, and z, no, that's a risk

42:20.940 --> 42:22.220
that you run.

42:22.220 --> 42:27.180
You account for the risk, you minimize the risk, but you can't eliminate it.

42:27.200 --> 42:32.840
And so it's not an argument against the moon landing that there was some sort of risk involved

42:32.840 --> 42:36.120
in radiation exposure.

42:36.120 --> 42:42.880
That's going to be the case with human spaceflight unless we figure out some way to totally

42:42.880 --> 42:46.040
mitigate radiation, which we have not done yet.

42:46.040 --> 42:54.840
That's actually one of the biggest hurdles in getting men to Mars because that is significantly

42:54.840 --> 42:59.100
more radiation exposure than just a trip to the moon.

42:59.100 --> 43:00.700
The moon's not that far away.

43:00.700 --> 43:09.060
The three-day trip, not very long, a six-month or more trip to Mars, that is an immense exposure

43:09.060 --> 43:16.260
to the hard radiation of vacuum unless we discover some new way to mitigate that.

43:16.260 --> 43:24.020
And I think that a key element of all of the various details, so-called, in the conspiracy

43:24.040 --> 43:29.760
theories that we're talking about today, is that they rely on the person listening, not

43:29.760 --> 43:38.960
being intelligent, not being smart enough to either understand the variables or to even

43:38.960 --> 43:42.440
have any conception that such a thing is possible.

43:42.440 --> 43:46.440
And so when you say cell phone, ha, ha, ha, everyone's like, yeah, I know what a cell

43:46.440 --> 43:47.440
phone is.

43:47.440 --> 43:48.440
Corey talked about it.

43:49.060 --> 43:53.740
They're different degrees of engineering required for different things.

43:53.740 --> 43:58.180
And you spend the money, you get the results you want.

43:58.180 --> 44:01.220
There's nothing abnormal about that.

44:01.220 --> 44:04.060
That's how everything works.

44:04.060 --> 44:11.460
It's, you know, the joke in racing used to be you can spend cubic inches or you can spend

44:11.460 --> 44:12.820
cubic bucks.

44:12.820 --> 44:17.020
You can have an incredibly exotic engine that can go really fast or you can have a really

44:17.020 --> 44:21.760
big engine and you'll get similar results.

44:21.760 --> 44:25.680
When these punch lines are thrown out and these stupid little gotchas like cell phones

44:25.680 --> 44:31.520
and, you know, one of the other things is they were on the moon and why are all the pictures

44:31.520 --> 44:32.520
of the sky black?

44:32.520 --> 44:34.040
Why aren't there any stars?

44:34.040 --> 44:38.520
Well, have you ever seen a difference in way your eyes can pick up in the daylight versus

44:38.520 --> 44:39.920
at night?

44:39.920 --> 44:41.640
Your eye has an iris.

44:41.640 --> 44:43.200
Your eye has light sensitivity.

44:43.780 --> 44:49.540
In fact, it has two different sets of sensors, one for regular light and one for low light.

44:49.540 --> 44:53.780
Because in regular light, you can see color and low light, you really can't.

44:53.780 --> 44:58.340
So your eyes switch between the rods and cones depending on how much light is available

44:58.340 --> 45:01.300
so that you can still see something.

45:01.300 --> 45:06.940
In space, when they were on the moon, it was always the middle of the day.

45:06.940 --> 45:10.620
There was no nighttime anywhere, anytime they were in space.

45:10.620 --> 45:17.560
They were always in full 100% sunlight, which meant that they were at the maximum possible

45:17.560 --> 45:24.760
eyeball saturation and cameras have even less dynamic range than our eyes do.

45:24.760 --> 45:29.240
Cameras are stopped down considerably compared to the range of a human eye.

45:29.240 --> 45:34.840
And so a camera, if it can see, for example, the earth, clearly without the earth being

45:34.840 --> 45:39.320
completely blown out to the point that it would just be shining white, there's literally

45:39.320 --> 45:44.780
no possible way for the same camera to show stars in the background and the earth.

45:44.780 --> 45:49.780
It's one or the other because of the difference in the albedo, the difference of the brightness

45:49.780 --> 45:51.540
of the objects.

45:51.540 --> 45:56.820
So if you don't know anything and you don't care to learn, and maybe you're not smart

45:56.820 --> 46:01.660
enough to understand, and I don't refer to intellectual capability to be insulting, God

46:01.660 --> 46:05.460
made some people does not need to be smart enough to worry about this stuff.

46:05.460 --> 46:10.360
Don't let someone like Owen Benjamin prey on your inability to understand a lot of the

46:10.360 --> 46:16.280
scientific details to convince you that something that obviously happened couldn't have happened.

46:16.280 --> 46:18.920
It's just that that's the key element here.

46:18.920 --> 46:23.960
When the claims that we made about Martin Luther King and the claims that we made about

46:23.960 --> 46:29.200
the Holocaust were simple, they're not fancy scientific claims.

46:29.200 --> 46:30.200
Cookie math.

46:30.200 --> 46:33.520
If I have four ovens in five years, how many cookies can I bake?

46:33.520 --> 46:34.520
That's not tricky.

46:34.580 --> 46:37.580
It doesn't rely on any secret knowledge.

46:37.580 --> 46:39.980
It's the opposite of what's going on here.

46:39.980 --> 46:44.740
So again, they seem similar if you're just thinking, wow, crazy guy on the internet's

46:44.740 --> 46:46.620
telling me something.

46:46.620 --> 46:49.500
The difference is in the quality of the questions.

46:49.500 --> 46:56.020
The quality of a question of where did all the bodies go is fundamentally different than

46:56.020 --> 47:00.300
the quality of the question, how did they make a phone call from the moon?

47:00.300 --> 47:02.580
There's no possible comparison.

47:02.640 --> 47:07.680
So you as a listener, I think one of the important things is this guy just preying

47:07.680 --> 47:10.480
on my scientific ignorance.

47:10.480 --> 47:15.280
As we said at the beginning of last week's episode, don't just believe what we say because

47:15.280 --> 47:17.920
we say it or even if it seems convincing.

47:17.920 --> 47:22.040
One of the really heartening things that came from last week's episode, we got a ton of

47:22.040 --> 47:28.640
feedback from people saying basically it took them a back because maybe they'd heard one

47:28.700 --> 47:32.660
or two bits of pieces, but most people had never heard any of that.

47:32.660 --> 47:35.980
They weren't necessarily going to believe it right away, but the thing that was consistent

47:35.980 --> 47:43.500
about a lot of the feedback was that everyone who heard it took pause because suddenly things

47:43.500 --> 47:47.780
that didn't make sense before are starting to make sense.

47:47.780 --> 47:54.140
That's another contrast between something that's true where there's actually a legitimate

47:54.140 --> 48:00.480
concerted effort to deceive us like COVID, for example, and something that's a lie, like

48:00.480 --> 48:05.960
denying that we'd landed on the moon when it's plainly visible and plainly obvious

48:05.960 --> 48:09.160
and easily proven.

48:09.160 --> 48:13.720
In the narrative, there's the same amount of proof for both.

48:13.720 --> 48:18.880
We could have done another three hours like last week with completely different sets of

48:18.880 --> 48:23.440
facts, completely different information, and still blown your minds the same way.

48:23.440 --> 48:26.540
There's that much incredibly obvious stuff.

48:26.540 --> 48:31.020
One thing I didn't mention was that if you go to Google engrams and search for capital

48:31.020 --> 48:36.060
H Holocaust, the word doesn't appear until the mid-60s.

48:36.060 --> 48:37.500
Compare that with the moon landing.

48:37.500 --> 48:42.020
If you search for moon landing, in 1969, everyone was talking about the moon landing, and it

48:42.020 --> 48:44.660
wasn't because they were faking it in real time.

48:44.660 --> 48:48.780
In the show notes for this episode, we'll have a few links to some different breakdowns

48:48.780 --> 48:54.600
from different groups of people about how when you look at some of the speculative denials

48:54.600 --> 48:56.920
of what happened, it falls apart.

48:56.920 --> 49:02.400
One of my favorite ones is from some movie special effects guys, because the big claim

49:02.400 --> 49:07.720
is that, well, we didn't go, we faked the whole thing, it was all a stage.

49:07.720 --> 49:12.200
It was movie producers, it was Stanley Kubrick faking the whole thing.

49:12.200 --> 49:16.160
These guys said that with current technology, we could not fake it as well as they did.

49:16.160 --> 49:20.180
They said they would have been cheaper to actually go to the moon than to fake it as

49:20.180 --> 49:21.860
well as they did.

49:21.860 --> 49:27.620
The technology absolutely didn't exist to fake the specific details that you could have

49:27.620 --> 49:30.660
only gotten right if you were actually on the moon.

49:30.660 --> 49:35.620
There's things about the alignment of the light and reflections that you can only have

49:35.620 --> 49:38.340
if your light source is millions of miles away.

49:38.340 --> 49:43.580
It can't be a light source that's hanging up on the ceiling in a sound stage.

49:43.580 --> 49:48.720
The quality of the questions and the quality of the evidence is fundamentally different.

49:48.720 --> 49:52.880
One of the key themes of this episode is that when you're weighing these things, if you

49:52.880 --> 49:58.120
want to delve into crazy guys on the internet telling you stuff for the first time, if you're

49:58.120 --> 50:03.560
willing to do that, it's okay to assume upfront that it's all crap, assume that you're being

50:03.560 --> 50:04.560
lied to.

50:04.560 --> 50:05.560
I do.

50:05.560 --> 50:07.160
Frankly, it's part of why I'm good at thinking.

50:07.160 --> 50:11.760
I assume that anything that anyone tells me, I assume every part of it is false and I try

50:11.760 --> 50:12.760
to pick it apart.

50:13.100 --> 50:18.820
Now, it's not abrasive and it's not crazy, it's just I have a filter where anything

50:18.820 --> 50:24.940
that's true is only going to get through because I picked apart all the pieces that could possibly

50:24.940 --> 50:25.940
be false.

50:25.940 --> 50:29.380
The reason I fell for the narrative of what we talked about last week was that I never

50:29.380 --> 50:30.460
did that.

50:30.460 --> 50:33.300
People said, hey, this happened, okay, whatever.

50:33.300 --> 50:38.580
When I looked at it critically, when I scrutinized it, it disintegrated.

50:38.580 --> 50:41.620
I became curious about the moon landing a few years ago for the same reason.

50:41.640 --> 50:45.200
I always assumed it was true, I believed it was true, I liked everything I'd ever heard

50:45.200 --> 50:47.000
said it was true.

50:47.000 --> 50:50.600
All these people suddenly start saying, oh, it's fake, it's all made up, it's insane,

50:50.600 --> 50:55.040
it's crazy, they're lying to you, man, okay, I don't believe that, but I'll go look at

50:55.040 --> 50:56.440
your evidence.

50:56.440 --> 50:57.440
I did.

50:57.440 --> 51:00.560
I spent a while looking at the evidence the same way I looked at last week's evidence.

51:00.560 --> 51:02.400
What I found was the exact opposite.

51:02.400 --> 51:07.040
When you actually look at the raw materials, it's just inconceivable that it could have

51:07.040 --> 51:08.280
been faked.

51:08.280 --> 51:09.280
Never mind that it wasn't.

51:09.280 --> 51:11.280
We have all the physical evidence that it was.

51:11.280 --> 51:16.180
We have reams, just a virtually infinite amount of proof.

51:16.180 --> 51:18.500
There was no way to fake it.

51:18.500 --> 51:23.060
One of the things I looked at, I've never seen written about, but one thing I personally

51:23.060 --> 51:28.660
came up with was there were multiple Apollo missions where we sent men up and they went

51:28.660 --> 51:30.620
into orbit.

51:30.620 --> 51:33.540
Even the narrative that says that we never went to the moon because we couldn't leave

51:33.540 --> 51:38.500
the Van Allen belts, still says that we sent men up into outer space because obviously

51:38.500 --> 51:42.920
everyone saw Saturn V rise and then saw the Apollo caps will come back down.

51:42.920 --> 51:46.040
That means the guys went into at least low Earth orbit.

51:46.040 --> 51:51.520
Well, when you go up into space in low Earth orbit and then you come back down, you have

51:51.520 --> 51:59.280
a return trajectory and you can look online, we won't put this on the show, it's not important.

51:59.280 --> 52:02.800
When I looked, I found that for the Apollo missions where the astronauts went up into

52:02.800 --> 52:08.400
space and just circled the Earth, they had one return trajectory.

52:08.820 --> 52:12.980
It was relatively shallow, if I remember correctly.

52:12.980 --> 52:17.260
We have another one for the missions where they returned from the moon and the numbers

52:17.260 --> 52:21.380
for the return trajectory for the moon were off by like 50 degrees.

52:21.380 --> 52:22.500
It was a massive difference.

52:22.500 --> 52:27.620
I can't remember which direction, but it was substantially different to the point that

52:27.620 --> 52:33.380
if Apollo 11 had only gone into low Earth orbit and faked it, their return trajectory

52:33.380 --> 52:35.260
would have been physically impossible.

52:35.260 --> 52:39.520
They wouldn't have been able to return to Earth on the trajectory they did unless they'd

52:39.520 --> 52:41.800
been coming from the moon.

52:41.800 --> 52:46.240
That was something I just dug into myself because I'd never seen anyone talk about it,

52:46.240 --> 52:52.040
but when I found that data, it seemed like that's a pretty obvious example.

52:52.040 --> 52:55.640
Someone who's intelligent is going to find that and say, yes, this adds up or it's a

52:55.640 --> 52:56.640
lie.

52:56.640 --> 53:02.320
If all the return trajectories had been identical, I would have needed for my own edification

53:02.500 --> 53:05.580
and explanation for how that could be possible because it wouldn't make sense.

53:05.580 --> 53:11.420
When I saw the two numbers were wildly disparate for low Earth orbit versus lunar return trajectory,

53:11.420 --> 53:15.900
I'm like, okay, here's just another piece of evidence that it wasn't even typically

53:15.900 --> 53:19.460
used that when I look at it, like, yeah, it all adds up.

53:19.460 --> 53:22.140
Even the stuff nobody's talking about adds up.

53:22.140 --> 53:25.380
That's what you'll find when something is true is in the nooks and crannies where no

53:25.380 --> 53:28.820
one's looking and no one's talking, it all still makes sense.

53:28.820 --> 53:30.380
That's how reality works.

53:30.440 --> 53:36.080
The truth is true everywhere in every direction and a lie, even if something can be convincing

53:36.080 --> 53:40.600
to someone and some narrow point, it falls apart as soon as you step back just a little

53:40.600 --> 53:41.600
bit.

53:41.600 --> 53:47.880
Obviously, we aren't going to try to go over every single objection, supposed objection

53:47.880 --> 53:50.760
that has been raised to the moon landing.

53:50.760 --> 53:55.280
That's not the goal of the episode and we don't want to spend six hours talking about

53:55.280 --> 53:58.240
the most insane things you've ever heard.

53:58.240 --> 54:04.460
But I think there are two that are worth addressing quickly simply because they are very easy

54:04.460 --> 54:08.260
to address and they're completely ludicrous claims.

54:08.260 --> 54:12.220
The first is that the footprints are obviously fake.

54:12.220 --> 54:16.060
That's what they try to argue and they argue this for a number of reasons.

54:16.060 --> 54:19.960
One they'll say they're much too defined, they're too perfect.

54:19.960 --> 54:25.060
If you are so inclined, I don't recommend doing this, but if you are so inclined to prove

54:25.080 --> 54:30.480
this as possible, buy a bag of flour, go outside, don't do this in your kitchen, go outside,

54:30.480 --> 54:34.800
dump it on the ground, put on your hiking boots, and step in it.

54:34.800 --> 54:40.480
You'll reproduce the same sort of footprint that we see in the photographs from the moon

54:40.480 --> 54:45.040
because the dust on the moon is very fine and flour is fine.

54:45.040 --> 54:47.760
That's the sort of footprint it produces.

54:47.760 --> 54:54.120
But another thing that they will argue about the footprint, the boot print, well the pattern,

54:54.120 --> 54:56.900
the tread doesn't match the boots.

54:56.900 --> 55:01.220
That's because they mix up the boots in question.

55:01.220 --> 55:09.620
The astronauts had one set of gear, one suit that they wore in the spacecraft and they

55:09.620 --> 55:15.820
put another over it to go out on the moon because of course you would do that.

55:15.820 --> 55:21.580
You don't wear the same clothing for everything, clearly not when you're going into hard vacuum.

55:21.580 --> 55:28.360
And so the boot prints that you see are from the exterior boot that goes over the interior

55:28.360 --> 55:29.360
boot.

55:29.360 --> 55:31.800
Well, they're mixing up the two.

55:31.800 --> 55:34.640
These are just very easy things to show.

55:34.640 --> 55:36.200
The claims are just silly.

55:36.200 --> 55:40.640
If you actually look at the evidence, they're just silly, they're very easy to dismiss.

55:40.640 --> 55:48.000
But the other is that they will argue about the shadows on the moon and the way that the

55:48.000 --> 55:53.340
light source appears in relation to objects and shadows.

55:53.340 --> 55:59.620
This is something that if you are a photographer, you can just skip the next minute or whatever

55:59.620 --> 56:02.340
because this is something you already know.

56:02.340 --> 56:06.580
The concept that you need to understand here, they're a handful but the core one is vanishing

56:06.580 --> 56:08.860
point.

56:08.860 --> 56:16.460
Now if you live somewhere like the northeast, you're not going to have experienced this as

56:16.480 --> 56:22.240
much in the natural environment or the man made environment as if you've lived somewhere

56:22.240 --> 56:24.280
like the southwest.

56:24.280 --> 56:30.400
And the reason for this is the most obvious example in daily life is going to be a desert

56:30.400 --> 56:36.020
road or a very long stretch of train tracks.

56:36.020 --> 56:42.640
If you look at two parallel lines that run for a long distance off toward the horizon,

56:42.660 --> 56:47.580
they are going to appear to converge as they go.

56:47.580 --> 56:49.500
They aren't converging.

56:49.500 --> 56:53.420
It's your perspective that makes it look like they are converging.

56:53.420 --> 56:57.580
And where they supposedly converge is called the vanishing point.

56:57.580 --> 57:02.620
This is used in art, it's used in photography.

57:02.620 --> 57:07.500
But that is what is happening on the moon with some of these shadows and the perspective

57:07.500 --> 57:09.040
of the cameras.

57:09.040 --> 57:15.580
You have a single point of light, obviously the sun, and then you have a vanishing point

57:15.580 --> 57:22.580
away from that, away from the perspective of the camera, which is going to cause certain

57:22.580 --> 57:23.660
effects.

57:23.660 --> 57:28.860
It's going to look like things are moving toward or are oriented toward this point,

57:28.860 --> 57:31.180
this vanishing point, when they aren't really.

57:31.180 --> 57:33.980
It is an effect of perspective.

57:33.980 --> 57:38.500
It is not something actual in the physical environment.

57:38.500 --> 57:43.800
There are certain things that you see in one way, because that's how your visual system

57:43.800 --> 57:49.480
processes it, that's just how things interact in the real world.

57:49.480 --> 57:54.760
But if you go and examine it, it's other than what you saw.

57:54.760 --> 57:58.160
And this is one of those examples, it's not saying don't trust your eyes, it's just

57:58.160 --> 58:02.680
saying recognize what your visual system does, recognize the limitations.

58:02.680 --> 58:05.520
You don't have infinite range on your vision.

58:05.520 --> 58:08.120
So there's going to be a point at which you can no longer see something.

58:08.140 --> 58:12.140
If you've stood on the shore by the ocean or a large lake or something like that or

58:12.140 --> 58:17.900
top of a mountain, you know intuitively that there's a point out in the distance where

58:17.900 --> 58:21.020
you can no longer see beyond that, or I guess if you're in the middle of the country where

58:21.020 --> 58:25.660
it's just completely flat, then you've also experienced this.

58:25.660 --> 58:28.500
But that's what's happening with those photographs.

58:28.500 --> 58:33.500
It's not that they're on a stage in Hollywood, that they have a bunch of lights set up, and

58:33.500 --> 58:37.660
that you have different shadows because of that.

58:37.660 --> 58:40.960
That claim is also ridiculous for another reason.

58:40.960 --> 58:45.360
The men working on the space program were highly intelligent.

58:45.360 --> 58:50.560
If they had wanted to fake this material, they wouldn't have screwed up something as

58:50.560 --> 58:54.080
simple as lighting.

58:54.080 --> 58:59.800
The claim is just ludicrous on its face.

58:59.800 --> 59:03.920
And that's the case with the rest of the things we're going to talk about today.

59:03.940 --> 59:08.660
We're not going to spend any more time on the moon, but we did talk a lot about radiation.

59:08.660 --> 59:12.540
One of the other things that's been pushed more recently by the same group is the claim

59:12.540 --> 59:14.140
that nukes aren't real.

59:14.140 --> 59:16.420
Just like birds aren't real, nukes aren't real.

59:16.420 --> 59:19.620
Nuclear weapons, nuclear power, it's all fake and never existed.

59:19.620 --> 59:21.340
Some permutation of that.

59:21.340 --> 59:26.060
The theories about how it was faked vary, but the gist of it is that there's no such thing

59:26.060 --> 59:27.580
as nuclear weapons.

59:27.580 --> 59:33.960
It was all invented as a scyop to scare people as part of the Cold War.

59:33.960 --> 59:38.560
Amusingly recently, when Benjamin put some of his so-called proof out for this, even

59:38.560 --> 59:42.120
his own fans dragged him for how retarded this one was.

59:42.120 --> 59:48.800
He claimed that there was the videos of the atomic detonations where the government set

59:48.800 --> 59:54.520
up cameras and they built Potemkin villages that they leveled so that they could see the

59:54.520 --> 01:00:00.900
effects of a blast at various ranges on typical residential construction.

01:00:00.900 --> 01:00:05.380
Because there's one thing to know what it's going to do to a military bunker that's hardened.

01:00:05.380 --> 01:00:12.220
It's another thing to know what it's going to do to just a stick frame house.

01:00:12.220 --> 01:00:17.700
There's videos you've all seen in slow motion of these barns and homes just being completely

01:00:17.700 --> 01:00:22.940
leveled by the blast wave from the nuclear detonation.

01:00:22.940 --> 01:00:34.920
One thing to keep in mind, when a nuclear bomb is detonated in the atmosphere, the explosion

01:00:34.920 --> 01:00:35.920
radiates outward.

01:00:35.920 --> 01:00:40.960
Obviously, there's radiation coming from the center, there's the explosion itself, there's

01:00:40.960 --> 01:00:48.560
the force also coming from the center, radiating out equally in all directions roughly.

01:00:48.560 --> 01:00:53.780
As that explosive force moves through the atmosphere, it compresses the atmosphere in

01:00:53.780 --> 01:00:55.060
front of it.

01:00:55.060 --> 01:01:01.700
What that means is that the air right in front of the explosion gets compressed a lot.

01:01:01.700 --> 01:01:07.100
There's a difference in the explosive space between regular explosives and what's called

01:01:07.100 --> 01:01:08.100
high explosives.

01:01:08.100 --> 01:01:13.480
It has to do with the velocity of the detonation above everything else.

01:01:13.480 --> 01:01:18.860
You can hear this sometimes when you hear different audio of different types of explosions.

01:01:18.860 --> 01:01:23.300
Some of them just sound kind of boomy and some have a lot of a crack.

01:01:23.300 --> 01:01:28.660
When a nuclear detonation occurs, the air in front of the detonation is compressed so

01:01:28.660 --> 01:01:31.580
that it is denser than steel.

01:01:31.580 --> 01:01:36.900
The air itself, the wave of air in front of the wave of explosion, because remember the

01:01:36.900 --> 01:01:42.980
explosion is creating a vacuum behind it, it's pushing everything outward.

01:01:42.980 --> 01:01:46.320
At the edge of the explosion, you have a blast wave.

01:01:46.320 --> 01:01:51.640
The blast wave isn't the explosion, the blast wave is actually the compressed air that has

01:01:51.640 --> 01:01:55.400
the density of steel out for a great distance.

01:01:55.400 --> 01:02:01.640
When you see those buildings being flattened, it is the function of the explosion, but it's

01:02:01.640 --> 01:02:07.240
actually the air that's been compressed to the density of steel or close to it that's

01:02:07.240 --> 01:02:10.080
hitting those buildings, so it's just air.

01:02:10.080 --> 01:02:14.060
It's just like the big bad wolf huffing and puffing and blowing on the house, knocking

01:02:14.060 --> 01:02:18.380
it over, except that when it's going faster than the speed of sound and it's compressed

01:02:18.380 --> 01:02:22.500
to the density of steel, it's like being hit by a freight train.

01:02:22.500 --> 01:02:28.260
There's the video of the houses being flattened and there were cameras pointed at the houses.

01:02:28.260 --> 01:02:32.700
Benjamin and some others have claimed, well, how is it that they could build a house so

01:02:32.700 --> 01:02:35.660
it would be flattened but the camera was fine?

01:02:35.660 --> 01:02:38.780
Cameras were fragile, how could it possibly survive?

01:02:38.780 --> 01:02:41.280
Nobody dragged them forward because it was such a stupid take.

01:02:41.280 --> 01:02:47.480
Those cameras were five miles away in specially reinforced bunkers, particularly oriented away

01:02:47.480 --> 01:02:52.560
from the blast itself, shielded as much as possible from the blast, and they were five

01:02:52.560 --> 01:02:58.720
miles using extreme telephoto lenses to look at the buildings that were flattened.

01:02:58.720 --> 01:03:05.160
Once again, this is just an example of when a narrative is true and someone comes up with

01:03:05.160 --> 01:03:09.300
nonsense evidence like this, it just crumbles.

01:03:09.300 --> 01:03:13.860
It's almost stupid on its face and as soon as you look at it, it's like, how could anyone

01:03:13.860 --> 01:03:15.780
possibly fall for that?

01:03:15.780 --> 01:03:20.100
But if your mind is primed so you're like, well, someone says that the government lied

01:03:20.100 --> 01:03:21.700
to me about this thing too.

01:03:21.700 --> 01:03:24.860
If you get to the point that you're just willing to believe anytime someone tells you something

01:03:24.860 --> 01:03:31.180
is a lie, you're functionally every bit is demoralized as if you believed everything that

01:03:31.180 --> 01:03:33.900
they told you was true.

01:03:33.920 --> 01:03:39.040
If you're just believing everything unthinkingly, uncritically, that's the danger spot.

01:03:39.040 --> 01:03:42.880
And disbelieving has the same effect.

01:03:42.880 --> 01:03:46.880
If you disbelieve every single thing that anyone tells you, no matter how much evidence

01:03:46.880 --> 01:03:51.720
is brought before you, you're in the same boat, you're unanchored from reality.

01:03:51.720 --> 01:03:53.760
And that's the real danger of all this.

01:03:53.760 --> 01:03:57.360
Not only does it deceive people about something like, you know, this is a religious podcast.

01:03:57.360 --> 01:04:01.000
We're not saying if you don't believe in the moon landing, you're going to hell.

01:04:01.020 --> 01:04:07.300
We're saying if you're falling for really dumb excuses for some of these things, it's

01:04:07.300 --> 01:04:12.580
putting you in a position where you can be easily deceived because people are going to

01:04:12.580 --> 01:04:16.260
come along and say, oh, well, here's the next thing they lied to you about.

01:04:16.260 --> 01:04:19.580
And frankly, as I said earlier, it's kind of ironic for that to be coming from Corey

01:04:19.580 --> 01:04:24.420
and me on Stone Choir because a lot of our episodes are specifically about that.

01:04:24.420 --> 01:04:28.100
But it's why we're very careful to lay out a simple case for this where you can go look

01:04:28.100 --> 01:04:30.900
at the evidence for yourself and it doesn't fall apart.

01:04:30.920 --> 01:04:34.680
We could make elaborate arguments for the things we claim.

01:04:34.680 --> 01:04:35.680
We don't.

01:04:35.680 --> 01:04:41.320
We make simple, straightforward, verifiable arguments because truth is not esoteric.

01:04:41.320 --> 01:04:43.160
Truth is not hidden.

01:04:43.160 --> 01:04:44.400
It's not secret.

01:04:44.400 --> 01:04:46.080
It's just right there.

01:04:46.080 --> 01:04:50.840
And it's the lie that requires complicity from everyone for it to propagate.

01:04:50.840 --> 01:04:54.720
The truth, just like the truth of the Rapallo reentry trajectories, it's just sitting there

01:04:54.720 --> 01:04:55.720
waiting for someone to look.

01:04:55.720 --> 01:04:57.920
And when you look, you're like, well, yep, there it is.

01:04:57.920 --> 01:04:59.880
That makes perfect sense.

01:04:59.900 --> 01:05:05.780
We want the arguments that you're willing to accept to be those arguments that are predicated

01:05:05.780 --> 01:05:11.460
on truth that are based on something that adds up and are simply going along either

01:05:11.460 --> 01:05:16.260
because everyone says, believe this because everyone says to believe it.

01:05:16.260 --> 01:05:20.420
Or if you're in the minority camp, don't believe anything they tell you.

01:05:20.420 --> 01:05:21.740
Everything they're telling you is a lie.

01:05:21.740 --> 01:05:23.940
You shouldn't fall for that either.

01:05:23.940 --> 01:05:26.660
You're in a bad way either in either case.

01:05:26.680 --> 01:05:32.120
So when you look at stuff like our nuke's reel, is the moon reel, is space reel, there

01:05:32.120 --> 01:05:35.040
are literally people who believe that space is fake and gay.

01:05:35.040 --> 01:05:40.800
They think that outer space doesn't exist, which on a matter of theology, directly contradicts

01:05:40.800 --> 01:05:41.800
scripture.

01:05:41.800 --> 01:05:47.600
Scripture repeatedly has God pointing to the heavens to creation in the sky, the stars,

01:05:47.600 --> 01:05:53.620
all the wonders of creation outside of the earth as examples of his glory.

01:05:53.640 --> 01:05:58.080
So when you say space is fake and gay, you're denying scripture.

01:05:58.080 --> 01:05:59.800
You can't do that.

01:05:59.800 --> 01:06:02.080
God put that stuff there to declare his glory.

01:06:02.080 --> 01:06:05.200
And when he talks to us in scripture, he says, look it up.

01:06:05.200 --> 01:06:06.800
This is how awesome I am.

01:06:06.800 --> 01:06:09.120
Look at the stars and see my glory in them.

01:06:09.120 --> 01:06:11.200
They testify to me.

01:06:11.200 --> 01:06:16.160
When we on the earth are saying, I don't believe anything's real, you either become a nihilist

01:06:16.160 --> 01:06:22.320
or you become a gnostic, but you're ultimately going to become led down a path of spiritual

01:06:22.320 --> 01:06:23.320
decay.

01:06:24.020 --> 01:06:26.340
Or falling for some meme on the internet.

01:06:26.340 --> 01:06:30.580
It's about being unmoored from the things that actually do matter.

01:06:30.580 --> 01:06:35.100
And so don't lose your bearings as you're navigating this stuff.

01:06:35.100 --> 01:06:40.220
It's fine to treat things lightly and to work through them casually.

01:06:40.220 --> 01:06:44.340
Don't fall for things and don't disbelieve things either because no one agrees with

01:06:44.340 --> 01:06:45.340
them.

01:06:45.340 --> 01:06:46.340
You have to think.

01:06:46.340 --> 01:06:48.460
There's no shortcut for this one.

01:06:48.460 --> 01:06:50.300
You have to think things through.

01:06:50.300 --> 01:06:54.520
And if you know that you're just not equipped for that sort of thing, and some people aren't.

01:06:54.520 --> 01:06:57.560
God did not equip some people for doing a lot of heavy thinking.

01:06:57.560 --> 01:06:58.560
That's fine.

01:06:58.560 --> 01:07:02.720
It's nothing to be ashamed of, but don't then go listen to when Benjamin run his mouth

01:07:02.720 --> 01:07:07.060
for two hours and say, yeah, this is, I believe all this, I'm not going to spend any time

01:07:07.060 --> 01:07:10.520
investigating the science, but this adds up that this comedian is definitely telling

01:07:10.520 --> 01:07:11.520
me the truth.

01:07:11.520 --> 01:07:14.400
Now he's, he's selling something and he's entertaining you.

01:07:14.400 --> 01:07:19.000
I don't care about entertainment, but don't lie to people when you're entertaining them.

01:07:19.000 --> 01:07:27.380
According to nuclear explosions and the shockwave in that front of compressed air, some people

01:07:27.380 --> 01:07:36.940
have spun up crazy theories about the lines that appear in some videos of nuclear explosions.

01:07:36.940 --> 01:07:41.780
This again is one of those things that is very easily explained on the same level as

01:07:41.780 --> 01:07:45.620
the boot prints on the moon.

01:07:45.620 --> 01:07:51.760
When they were conducting one of the nuclear tests, one of the scientists noticed that

01:07:51.760 --> 01:07:58.480
a cable that was used as a tether for a balloon, one of the measuring devices, appeared to

01:07:58.480 --> 01:08:00.280
have a break in it.

01:08:00.280 --> 01:08:08.240
But as the video progressed, as the frames progressed, the break moved along the cable.

01:08:08.240 --> 01:08:12.240
Well, breaks don't move along a cable.

01:08:12.240 --> 01:08:15.360
If a cable breaks, the break is where it is.

01:08:15.360 --> 01:08:18.340
And so obviously it's an optical illusion.

01:08:18.340 --> 01:08:24.980
And the optical illusion is going to be caused by basically incandescence, the compression

01:08:24.980 --> 01:08:30.740
of the air, that wall of air expanding outward the shockwave.

01:08:30.740 --> 01:08:34.220
It's causing refraction with the light.

01:08:34.220 --> 01:08:41.900
And so they decided to use this because it's very difficult to see where that border is

01:08:41.900 --> 01:08:47.120
when you're trying to see how quickly the mushroom cloud, how quickly the explosion,

01:08:47.120 --> 01:08:51.240
whatever it is you're measuring at the time, how quickly that's expanding.

01:08:51.240 --> 01:08:56.040
Even when you're using a camera that takes 10,000 frames per second, which one of the

01:08:56.040 --> 01:08:58.840
cameras they use did that.

01:08:58.840 --> 01:09:04.720
But they figured out an ingenious way to test this, to make it easier to see where

01:09:04.720 --> 01:09:06.400
the edge of that shockwave is.

01:09:06.400 --> 01:09:07.920
That is very simple.

01:09:07.920 --> 01:09:10.000
They use smoke rockets.

01:09:10.000 --> 01:09:17.820
So right before, as basically as tight a tolerance as they could get right before the nuclear

01:09:17.820 --> 01:09:20.180
detonation, they launch smoke rockets.

01:09:20.180 --> 01:09:21.180
That's what you see.

01:09:21.180 --> 01:09:23.620
Those lines are smoke trails.

01:09:23.620 --> 01:09:29.940
And the reason they look bent is because of the effect that I just described, this refraction

01:09:29.940 --> 01:09:35.060
of the light dealing with that wall of compressed air moving outward.

01:09:35.060 --> 01:09:40.800
And so they use that as a way to measure how quickly the shockwave was expanding.

01:09:40.800 --> 01:09:41.800
And so that's what those are.

01:09:41.800 --> 01:09:47.280
Those are literally just smoke lines created by smoke rockets.

01:09:47.280 --> 01:09:54.560
They were used in order to test some of the numbers related to the explosion, how quickly

01:09:54.560 --> 01:09:56.120
things traveled.

01:09:56.120 --> 01:10:02.840
It's not some weird, I've seen all sorts of crazy claims, won't go over the exact claims

01:10:02.860 --> 01:10:03.860
themselves.

01:10:03.860 --> 01:10:05.740
But it's not a conspiracy.

01:10:05.740 --> 01:10:11.460
It's literally just making it easier to see the edge of the shockwave.

01:10:11.460 --> 01:10:15.860
So the last one we want to touch on just briefly today is flat earth.

01:10:15.860 --> 01:10:20.060
It's probably the stupidest of the entire bunch.

01:10:20.060 --> 01:10:25.540
And it's also probably the most pervasive and persistent.

01:10:25.540 --> 01:10:30.860
In part because there's historical warrant for it, at some point in the past, people

01:10:30.880 --> 01:10:36.160
didn't necessarily understand that the world was a globe, that it's a sphere, incidentally

01:10:36.160 --> 01:10:40.840
like every other heavenly body ever discovered.

01:10:40.840 --> 01:10:46.880
And so that's a historical claim, that's a sort of claim that we do make on Stone Choir

01:10:46.880 --> 01:10:51.920
and other circumstances to say, well, everyone believed this for a long time, and then somebody

01:10:51.920 --> 01:10:55.280
comes along and believes something else, what do?

01:10:55.280 --> 01:10:57.480
Somebody got it wrong, who got it wrong?

01:10:57.480 --> 01:11:03.380
The difference is that when it comes to whether or not the earth is flat, people for thousands

01:11:03.380 --> 01:11:06.940
of years have understood that it was a globe.

01:11:06.940 --> 01:11:11.380
We've understood that we had a shape that was not a pancake.

01:11:11.380 --> 01:11:13.420
I alluded that before.

01:11:13.420 --> 01:11:17.140
The Milky Way in every galaxy is basically like a pancake.

01:11:17.140 --> 01:11:23.060
It's not two-dimensional, but it's oriented as a disk.

01:11:23.060 --> 01:11:26.560
That's what God does for certain types of patterns.

01:11:26.560 --> 01:11:29.920
And other patterns are globular.

01:11:29.920 --> 01:11:33.160
The moon is a sphere, the sun is a sphere.

01:11:33.160 --> 01:11:35.280
All the heavenly bodies are spheres.

01:11:35.280 --> 01:11:36.280
Why?

01:11:36.280 --> 01:11:38.640
Because that's how gravity works.

01:11:38.640 --> 01:11:46.480
Gravity, the collection of mass in space, causes there to be a center of gravity.

01:11:46.480 --> 01:11:51.200
And then all of that mass naturally orients around the center.

01:11:51.220 --> 01:11:56.220
And the more that orientation is self-reinforcing, the more it collapses until you eventually

01:11:56.220 --> 01:11:58.660
have almost a perfect sphere.

01:11:58.660 --> 01:12:03.100
Now, obviously, as creationists, we believe that God put all those things together, but

01:12:03.100 --> 01:12:05.420
He didn't put them together haphazardly.

01:12:05.420 --> 01:12:09.180
He put them together preassembled for us.

01:12:09.180 --> 01:12:12.580
He gave us a globe and put Adam and Eve on it.

01:12:12.580 --> 01:12:18.820
There are other heavenly bodies that are being formed today, or were formed in the past and

01:12:18.840 --> 01:12:21.400
we can see the light appearing today.

01:12:21.400 --> 01:12:28.600
So the physical rules, the physical laws of the universe established by God in creation

01:12:28.600 --> 01:12:30.600
are consistent everywhere.

01:12:30.600 --> 01:12:37.240
I think the stupidest thing about clinging to the basic lack of understanding about how

01:12:37.240 --> 01:12:43.640
the heavens and the earth worked from ancient, ancient days is that when you get new evidence,

01:12:43.660 --> 01:12:44.660
you incorporate it.

01:12:44.660 --> 01:12:50.120
And when it makes more sense than the explanation you had before, you run with it.

01:12:50.120 --> 01:12:56.260
And literally nothing that we know about anything would actually work with a flat earth.

01:12:56.260 --> 01:13:00.580
We couldn't have gone to the moon if the earth were flat.

01:13:00.580 --> 01:13:02.460
All the math would have been completely off.

01:13:02.460 --> 01:13:03.740
None of it would have worked.

01:13:03.740 --> 01:13:06.940
And as soon as they took off, they would have seen it.

01:13:06.940 --> 01:13:11.580
It's one of the things, it's part of the reason that those two conspiracy theories travel

01:13:11.600 --> 01:13:15.920
together is that the moon landing had to be fake, because if you put somebody out there

01:13:15.920 --> 01:13:22.200
and he looks back over his shoulder and says, hey, that's a globe, it proves it wrong.

01:13:22.200 --> 01:13:23.840
That's not big brained.

01:13:23.840 --> 01:13:26.920
Forget the geniuses that it took to put a man in space.

01:13:26.920 --> 01:13:30.160
Once there's a dude sitting up there looking out a window, you don't have to be a genius

01:13:30.160 --> 01:13:33.600
to see that it's not a pancake, it's actually a globe.

01:13:33.600 --> 01:13:38.880
When you can make out the continents and you can see the oceans and you can know that's

01:13:38.880 --> 01:13:40.080
not the whole earth.

01:13:40.080 --> 01:13:42.020
It's only a part of it that I recognize.

01:13:42.020 --> 01:13:44.300
The other parts got to be on the other side.

01:13:44.300 --> 01:13:48.420
The moon is the same way, except the moon is tidally locked, so we only ever see one

01:13:48.420 --> 01:13:49.940
side of the moon.

01:13:49.940 --> 01:13:52.540
The earth is turning, the sun is turning.

01:13:52.540 --> 01:13:54.660
We can see them.

01:13:54.660 --> 01:13:59.740
Everything that we know about everything only works if the earth is a globe.

01:13:59.740 --> 01:14:04.860
And so this, I think, is the one that frustrates me the most, and it's one which online I have

01:14:04.860 --> 01:14:07.100
the least patience for, which is just say zero.

01:14:07.720 --> 01:14:11.440
If someone pops up in my mentions and says, oh, a flat earth, blah, blah, blah, they're

01:14:11.440 --> 01:14:13.520
blocked within a half a second.

01:14:13.520 --> 01:14:17.480
I want nothing to do with anyone who is spouting that stuff.

01:14:17.480 --> 01:14:21.880
For the very reason that we were talking about in the Generations episode, the reason we're

01:14:21.880 --> 01:14:28.800
doing this episode, if you get to the point that you are believing completely insane,

01:14:28.800 --> 01:14:35.720
trivially falsely viable things like the earth is flat, you're no longer capable of

01:14:35.720 --> 01:14:38.500
discerning reality at all.

01:14:38.500 --> 01:14:42.300
It's effectively transmissible schizophrenia.

01:14:42.300 --> 01:14:48.060
If I can feed you lies and I can fracture your mind so that suddenly you can't tell

01:14:48.060 --> 01:14:52.620
real from fake, I've destroyed you.

01:14:52.620 --> 01:14:53.700
You're still alive.

01:14:53.700 --> 01:14:58.180
You might still be going to work, but as a human being, you're a gibbering idiot.

01:14:58.180 --> 01:15:01.100
You can be cajoled into doing anything at that point.

01:15:01.100 --> 01:15:06.400
If you'll fall for that sort of lie, you're lost.

01:15:06.400 --> 01:15:11.720
I don't block to be mean, it's just I want nothing to do with it and I'm severe about

01:15:11.720 --> 01:15:16.800
it online because I want to get across that this is not a small matter.

01:15:16.800 --> 01:15:18.280
It's not a matter of salvation.

01:15:18.280 --> 01:15:23.920
It's not that if you have the wrong cosmology or the wrong idea about the shape of the earth,

01:15:23.920 --> 01:15:25.240
you can't go to heaven.

01:15:25.240 --> 01:15:29.960
Obviously, there were people at some point that had no idea, they didn't care, whatever.

01:15:29.980 --> 01:15:30.960
It's not salvific.

01:15:30.960 --> 01:15:35.140
However, if you crack your head open, you're going to let demons in.

01:15:35.140 --> 01:15:41.140
If you start letting lies in like this stuff that's so trivially falsified, it's a danger

01:15:41.140 --> 01:15:45.740
to your soul for the other reasons because when you crack your head open, whether it's

01:15:45.740 --> 01:15:52.340
with DMT or it's with stupid YouTube videos or stuff like the Paranormies, eventually

01:15:52.340 --> 01:15:57.100
something evil is going to say, hey, this is a waterless space.

01:15:57.100 --> 01:15:58.100
This is wide open.

01:15:58.240 --> 01:16:00.640
I'm going to come here and I'm going to have a party.

01:16:00.640 --> 01:16:06.360
That's the danger and that's why I care because I can't reason with someone who's beyond

01:16:06.360 --> 01:16:07.360
reason.

01:16:07.360 --> 01:16:09.680
By definition, that's tautological.

01:16:09.680 --> 01:16:18.320
If you will reject plain facts and accept plain lies, I cannot have a conversation with

01:16:18.320 --> 01:16:19.320
you.

01:16:19.320 --> 01:16:20.320
Maybe somebody else can.

01:16:20.320 --> 01:16:22.960
I hope someone will try, but it's not going to be me.

01:16:22.960 --> 01:16:27.480
It's all we can do to try to get these things across to people who haven't yet lost their

01:16:27.500 --> 01:16:31.980
minds and to try to protect some people from going down the path of losing their minds

01:16:31.980 --> 01:16:34.580
because that's what fundamentally happens.

01:16:34.580 --> 01:16:38.300
You start making up these crazy stories and they are crazy.

01:16:38.300 --> 01:16:42.220
The reason we're talking about this right after last week is everyone says that last

01:16:42.220 --> 01:16:45.140
week's is crazy too.

01:16:45.140 --> 01:16:49.580
When they get lumped together, people throw up their hands or like I said, they believe

01:16:49.580 --> 01:16:51.980
everything or they deny everything.

01:16:51.980 --> 01:16:55.780
They're independent facts or they're independent lies.

01:16:55.780 --> 01:17:00.560
When someone's lying to you, the goal is always to harm you.

01:17:00.560 --> 01:17:07.280
Lies are always told to harm people, whether it's to steal or just to deceive or to humiliate

01:17:07.280 --> 01:17:12.080
or maybe just to soften them up so that later on something worse can happen to them.

01:17:12.080 --> 01:17:14.080
But it's never good for you.

01:17:14.080 --> 01:17:19.280
It's why Corey and I are so adamant about the truth even when it makes people really

01:17:19.280 --> 01:17:20.680
dislike us.

01:17:20.680 --> 01:17:22.920
No one likes hearing the truth most of the time.

01:17:22.920 --> 01:17:28.820
It's not popular to say something unpopular and that's part of the trick is that these

01:17:28.820 --> 01:17:34.100
things like Flat Earth are also unpopular so they say, look, no one likes us either.

01:17:34.100 --> 01:17:35.100
We must be right.

01:17:35.100 --> 01:17:36.100
We must be edgy.

01:17:36.100 --> 01:17:40.020
We must be in the vanguard of the truth because everyone thinks we're insane.

01:17:40.020 --> 01:17:42.340
Well, unfortunately, sometimes it's true.

01:17:42.340 --> 01:17:48.500
Some people need the padded room because they're so far gone that you got to bring them back

01:17:48.500 --> 01:17:49.500
forcibly.

01:17:49.500 --> 01:17:52.540
You can't bring them back with reason.

01:17:52.540 --> 01:18:02.640
I think part of the problem when people discuss the supposed Flat Earth is they mix up a few

01:18:02.640 --> 01:18:10.400
different types of narratives and so they'll take mythology which figuratively or symbolically

01:18:10.400 --> 01:18:15.880
describes the Earth as being flat and take that as a scientific treatise.

01:18:15.880 --> 01:18:17.560
These are very different things.

01:18:17.560 --> 01:18:24.780
If you're reading European mythology and it describes the Earth as a disk and you have

01:18:24.780 --> 01:18:29.940
the world tree in the center, it's not giving you a literal description of the physical

01:18:29.940 --> 01:18:31.220
world.

01:18:31.220 --> 01:18:36.420
This is mythological and the same thing is true in various other mythologies as well.

01:18:36.420 --> 01:18:41.460
There's no need to go into the details of those.

01:18:41.460 --> 01:18:48.880
But you have these descriptions that are poetic, you have that in the Greeks, or symbolic.

01:18:48.880 --> 01:18:54.080
They're not meant to be taken as a literal description of the actual physical shape of

01:18:54.080 --> 01:18:55.080
the Earth.

01:18:55.080 --> 01:19:00.920
Yes, historically, there were some people who did literally believe that the Earth was flat.

01:19:00.920 --> 01:19:07.600
They had no reason not to believe that because they didn't have evidence one way or the other.

01:19:07.600 --> 01:19:13.440
Because in their daily experience, there wasn't really...

01:19:13.440 --> 01:19:17.780
I wouldn't say a way for them to test it because it's very easy to test.

01:19:17.780 --> 01:19:22.620
But there was nothing in their daily experience that would conclusively show them no the Earth

01:19:22.620 --> 01:19:23.620
is actually round.

01:19:23.620 --> 01:19:24.960
It must be round.

01:19:24.960 --> 01:19:31.820
You could explain it as being round or being flat with what say the average peasant saw

01:19:31.820 --> 01:19:33.940
in his daily life.

01:19:33.940 --> 01:19:40.580
However, using only high school math, you can figure out not only that the Earth is a

01:19:40.580 --> 01:19:45.780
sphere, it's actually an oblate spheroid, but we'll say sphere because saying the other

01:19:45.780 --> 01:19:49.920
one sounds silly and it takes too long, but you can figure out that the Earth is a sphere

01:19:49.920 --> 01:19:55.040
and you can not only figure out the shape, you can figure out the circumference of the

01:19:55.040 --> 01:19:56.040
Earth.

01:19:56.040 --> 01:19:58.920
It's not very hard to do.

01:19:59.900 --> 01:20:06.260
It was calculated many centuries ago, and there were also many who believed that the

01:20:06.260 --> 01:20:12.860
Earth was, they believed correctly the Earth is a sphere, Pythagoras being one, Aristotle

01:20:12.860 --> 01:20:20.460
being another, many medieval scholars could list many names, but the Greek gentleman who

01:20:20.460 --> 01:20:27.660
actually calculated the circumference of the Earth, the first of which we know was Eratosthenes,

01:20:27.660 --> 01:20:37.480
and he was born in 276 BC, so this was thousands of years ago, and he calculated the circumference

01:20:37.480 --> 01:20:42.920
of the Earth within 2%.

01:20:42.920 --> 01:20:52.960
And he did that with nothing more than a well, an obelisk, and some Greek dude that he paid

01:20:52.960 --> 01:20:58.860
to walk 800 kilometers and count his steps.

01:20:58.860 --> 01:21:08.920
So what he did was he measured the shadow in one location in Egypt and then measured

01:21:08.920 --> 01:21:15.280
a shadow in another location in Egypt at the same time.

01:21:15.280 --> 01:21:23.680
Now if you do that, you can figure out the angle at which the light is hitting the obelisk

01:21:23.680 --> 01:21:29.520
by the shadow it is casting, and if you compare the angles, you can figure out very easily

01:21:29.520 --> 01:21:38.860
using just, again, high school math, whether the surface is flat or round.

01:21:38.860 --> 01:21:43.840
Because if it's flat, the shadows will be the same, because you have one source of light,

01:21:43.840 --> 01:21:51.040
the sun, hitting these two, whatever they happened to be, he would use an obelisk or

01:21:51.040 --> 01:21:55.800
something similar, you could do this with a stick if you were so inclined.

01:21:55.800 --> 01:21:58.160
But the shadows will be the same.

01:21:58.160 --> 01:22:02.080
You're dealing with the same angles, if they're the same height, it'll be the same length,

01:22:02.080 --> 01:22:05.000
and that's the case if the Earth is flat.

01:22:05.000 --> 01:22:12.360
As it turns out, the shadow in the first location where he was located in Alexandria was significantly

01:22:12.560 --> 01:22:22.960
longer, because the Earth is a sphere, and so the light is hitting them at the same angle,

01:22:22.960 --> 01:22:29.760
but they are located in different positions on the surface of a sphere, and so the shadow

01:22:29.760 --> 01:22:31.000
cast is different.

01:22:31.000 --> 01:22:37.720
I'll link a video in the show notes that will explain exactly what he did.

01:22:37.720 --> 01:22:39.880
It's from Carl Sagan.

01:22:39.880 --> 01:22:44.200
You can say whatever you want about him, but the information is accurate in the very short

01:22:44.200 --> 01:22:46.480
video on this.

01:22:46.480 --> 01:22:50.240
And so he calculated the circumference of the Earth, and as I said, he was off by less

01:22:50.240 --> 01:22:54.280
than 2%.

01:22:54.280 --> 01:22:56.800
This is not something that is difficult to do.

01:22:56.800 --> 01:23:01.740
This is not something that you couldn't go out and do right now if you were so inclined.

01:23:01.740 --> 01:23:06.640
This doesn't even take $500 or $1,000 worth of hardware, which is what you'd have to do

01:23:06.760 --> 01:23:10.280
if you wanted to bounce the laser off the retro reflector on the moon.

01:23:10.280 --> 01:23:13.040
Still very doable, more expensive.

01:23:13.040 --> 01:23:19.640
This can be done with some sticks, some time, and a lot of walking, and then a little bit

01:23:19.640 --> 01:23:20.960
of math.

01:23:20.960 --> 01:23:25.000
We know that the Earth is a sphere.

01:23:25.000 --> 01:23:28.980
If you've flown anywhere, you've seen that the Earth is a sphere.

01:23:28.980 --> 01:23:31.480
You can tell when you're in a plane, the Earth is a sphere.

01:23:31.480 --> 01:23:32.960
There's no doubt.

01:23:32.960 --> 01:23:38.800
If you live near the ocean, you can tell the Earth is a sphere because you can watch ships

01:23:38.800 --> 01:23:41.360
sail over the edge.

01:23:41.360 --> 01:23:45.680
They're not sailing over the edge, they're not falling off the disk.

01:23:45.680 --> 01:23:50.440
They're simply sailing over the horizon because they are sailing far enough away that the

01:23:50.440 --> 01:23:53.720
curvature of the Earth hides them from your view.

01:23:53.720 --> 01:23:58.640
The same thing happens if you're out in the ocean and you're approaching or receding from

01:23:58.640 --> 01:24:05.960
an island, or if you have the misfortune of having wind turbines, windmills out in

01:24:05.960 --> 01:24:10.320
the water where you are, you can see that you can see the top of them in some places

01:24:10.320 --> 01:24:14.880
and if they're farther away, then they start to disappear beyond the horizon.

01:24:14.880 --> 01:24:20.560
This is something that is very easily verified in modern life.

01:24:20.560 --> 01:24:24.600
There's no reason to believe that the Earth is flat.

01:24:24.600 --> 01:24:29.480
It just makes you sound like an insane person, of course that's the point.

01:24:29.480 --> 01:24:34.280
Because if you start to believe things that are insane, you start to become untethered

01:24:34.280 --> 01:24:39.320
from reality itself, you become untethered from the truth.

01:24:39.320 --> 01:24:43.520
Just because you have been lied to about a great many things in life, and that is most

01:24:43.520 --> 01:24:49.440
certainly true, we've gone over a number of some of the big ones and some small ones,

01:24:49.440 --> 01:24:53.280
but just because you've been lied to about certain things in life does not mean you've

01:24:53.280 --> 01:24:58.960
been lied to about everything, particularly something that you can go outside and see

01:24:58.960 --> 01:25:00.960
with your own eyes.

01:25:00.960 --> 01:25:06.840
Go stand on a really tall mountain and you can see the curvature, or go stand next to

01:25:06.840 --> 01:25:09.780
the ocean or just a large lake.

01:25:09.780 --> 01:25:18.400
This is something you can see and verify with your own eyes relatively easily.

01:25:18.400 --> 01:25:25.680
I think one of the things that people have trouble with is the sheer scale of space,

01:25:25.680 --> 01:25:28.280
including the Earth itself.

01:25:28.280 --> 01:25:33.120
The Earth's diameter is about a little over 7,900 miles across depending on where you

01:25:33.120 --> 01:25:34.120
measure it.

01:25:34.120 --> 01:25:40.120
I think it's about 7926 at the equator.

01:25:40.120 --> 01:25:47.360
When you see videos from low Earth orbit, for example when Jeff Bezos took his rocket

01:25:47.360 --> 01:25:52.080
up when he did his launch, he went up 66 miles.

01:25:52.080 --> 01:26:01.120
66 miles is a long way to fall, but in terms of a globe that's over 7,900 miles across,

01:26:01.120 --> 01:26:03.720
he barely got off the surface.

01:26:03.720 --> 01:26:09.960
When you do see videos from great heights, there's a perceptible curve, but it's very

01:26:09.960 --> 01:26:10.960
small.

01:26:10.960 --> 01:26:14.040
As Corey said, there are various examples you can see from the ground and it becomes

01:26:14.040 --> 01:26:21.000
clearer the higher you go, but no matter how high humans go up to the point of the

01:26:21.000 --> 01:26:26.720
space shuttle when we had one and the space stations, they're all in low Earth orbit.

01:26:26.720 --> 01:26:29.160
They're only a couple hundred miles up.

01:26:29.160 --> 01:26:30.840
That's not very far at all.

01:26:30.840 --> 01:26:39.120
If you're up 250 miles and the planet is 7,900 miles across, you're small in terms of distance

01:26:39.120 --> 01:26:46.120
relative to the immensity of the planet beneath you.

01:26:46.120 --> 01:26:50.840
I think one of the things that's tricky when people see stuff from space, one of the things

01:26:50.840 --> 01:26:56.160
that will happen when you're looking at video from space is that camera lenses themselves

01:26:56.160 --> 01:26:59.120
will impart a degree of curvature.

01:26:59.120 --> 01:27:05.440
It's easy to misread the curvature from a camera lens and mistake that for the curvature

01:27:05.440 --> 01:27:11.800
of the planet because it will swap.

01:27:11.800 --> 01:27:18.240
If the camera seems like it shows a curved horizon and you pan across, it's actually

01:27:18.240 --> 01:27:23.840
possible if it's a fisheye lens for the curvature to swap so that they look like the horizon

01:27:23.840 --> 01:27:28.520
was in one direction and then it will curve in the other direction.

01:27:28.520 --> 01:27:34.480
That means it's a fisheye and it's not a neutral perspective from the camera.

01:27:34.480 --> 01:27:37.960
We don't need to speculate on whether or not the Earth is a globe.

01:27:37.960 --> 01:27:43.080
There's literally a satellite in orbit right now at a higher Earth orbit.

01:27:43.080 --> 01:27:45.600
It's at 22,000 miles away.

01:27:45.600 --> 01:27:49.920
It's three times further away from Earth than the diameter of Earth.

01:27:49.920 --> 01:27:53.600
That's more than enough distance to get some perspective.

01:27:53.600 --> 01:27:59.440
It's called Himawari-9, it's a Japanese satellite that they put up in order to monitor weather

01:27:59.440 --> 01:28:02.880
patterns because in Japan, they get a lot of typhoons.

01:28:02.880 --> 01:28:07.920
It matters to them a great deal to detect and predict if there's a possibility of severe

01:28:07.920 --> 01:28:11.880
weather coming from the sea because they're surrounded by it.

01:28:11.880 --> 01:28:19.440
There's a camera up there continuously transmitting the entire globe in color all the time.

01:28:19.440 --> 01:28:23.480
You can find videos on YouTube, we'll link one, I might know if there's a live feed

01:28:23.480 --> 01:28:28.400
somewhere, almost live feed, showing the regular transmission of this data.

01:28:28.400 --> 01:28:30.000
You can see the thing turning.

01:28:30.000 --> 01:28:34.220
It's 22,000 miles away looking back over its shoulder at us.

01:28:34.220 --> 01:28:39.240
It's looking at the planet that God created for us.

01:28:39.240 --> 01:28:43.680
This stuff is so trivially falsifiable that someone has to believe that everything they're

01:28:43.680 --> 01:28:50.440
hearing is a lie in order to believe any of what they tell you about this stuff.

01:28:50.440 --> 01:28:57.360
As I mentioned at the beginning, fundamentally, there's an element of mind control to shaking

01:28:57.360 --> 01:29:04.600
someone's confidence in reality, to snatching them away from what they know and substituting

01:29:04.600 --> 01:29:06.280
some other thing.

01:29:06.280 --> 01:29:10.800
As I said, something Cori and I are sensitive to because this podcast doesn't certainly

01:29:10.800 --> 01:29:17.000
intend to dislodge you from reality, but we intend to carve out those places where what

01:29:17.000 --> 01:29:21.320
we perceive as reality has been malformed, which again, it's what the Flat Earth guys

01:29:21.320 --> 01:29:22.800
are trying to do too.

01:29:22.800 --> 01:29:27.200
It's potentially a noble cause, but you have to also be right.

01:29:27.200 --> 01:29:30.000
It's not just enough to say, I want to be a red pill dispenser.

01:29:30.000 --> 01:29:33.680
I want to tell everyone all the hard truths, well, whatever.

01:29:33.680 --> 01:29:34.680
Tell the truth.

01:29:34.680 --> 01:29:39.200
If the truth is hard to swallow, that's maybe a separate conversation.

01:29:39.200 --> 01:29:40.640
The truth shouldn't be hard to swallow.

01:29:40.640 --> 01:29:43.960
If it is, there's probably something else going on.

01:29:43.960 --> 01:29:45.520
I want to read this quote.

01:29:45.520 --> 01:29:50.840
It came up on 4chan about eight years ago on the subject of John Oliver's show from

01:29:50.840 --> 01:29:51.840
Comedy Central.

01:29:51.880 --> 01:29:57.200
It's a 30-minute show where they'll do brief skits and he talks about the news and everybody

01:29:57.200 --> 01:29:58.200
laughs.

01:29:58.200 --> 01:30:04.360
This description of how that show is conducted, I think, is a great microcosm of how some

01:30:04.360 --> 01:30:10.640
of this stuff plays out and how our perceptions get twisted by just how information is coming

01:30:10.640 --> 01:30:13.040
into us.

01:30:13.040 --> 01:30:15.120
The post reads as follows.

01:30:15.120 --> 01:30:19.040
The subject of John Oliver came up when a colleague, a fellow psychologist and I were

01:30:19.120 --> 01:30:21.760
discussing politics a few months ago.

01:30:21.760 --> 01:30:26.400
Although we were both in agreement regarding the general inaneity of the HBO show, my

01:30:26.400 --> 01:30:31.000
friend was surprised when I explained that the real insidiousness of its unmistakably

01:30:31.000 --> 01:30:33.520
hypnotic structure and pacing.

01:30:33.520 --> 01:30:37.520
I ended up pulling up an episode or two off YouTube to show her what I meant.

01:30:37.520 --> 01:30:41.920
All the segments I've ever seen from this show follow the same repetitive format, present

01:30:41.920 --> 01:30:46.880
some argumentation and facts, quote unquote, for about 10 seconds, then quickly follow

01:30:46.960 --> 01:30:52.880
these up with a snarky quip, which themselves overwhelmingly take the form of complete non-sequitur

01:30:52.880 --> 01:30:58.000
or otherwise absurd metaphor, before any rational processing of the preceding argument can take

01:30:58.000 --> 01:31:00.840
place in the mind of the viewer.

01:31:00.840 --> 01:31:04.840
Further telling is that the only beats or mental pauses in the show's pace exist solely

01:31:04.840 --> 01:31:09.240
to highlight the approving laughter of the studio audience.

01:31:09.240 --> 01:31:13.920
Repeat the same basic formula without variation 20 to 40 times in a row, and you have one

01:31:13.920 --> 01:31:18.760
of the 12 to 20 minute segments that form the backbone of the show.

01:31:18.760 --> 01:31:23.120
The end effect is obviously not to deliver information, but rather to literally teach

01:31:23.120 --> 01:31:28.840
the viewers on a subconscious level to mentally associate derisive laughter with any person

01:31:28.840 --> 01:31:33.240
or opinion that is at odds with the narrative's take on the chosen issue.

01:31:33.240 --> 01:31:38.360
And it accomplishes this by maintaining a strict adherence to a roughly 20 second cycle

01:31:38.360 --> 01:31:42.040
in which a stimulus is presented and response is cued.

01:31:42.040 --> 01:31:46.640
This is the sense in which the show is fundamentally hypnotic in effect, even more so than its

01:31:46.640 --> 01:31:50.520
precursors in the genre, Daily Show, Colbert, etc.

01:31:50.520 --> 01:31:55.240
To my mind, Oliver's show is representative of the media's increasing mastery of the

01:31:55.240 --> 01:31:57.640
methodologies of mass conditioning.

01:31:57.640 --> 01:32:02.080
In fact, it is almost such a perfect technical accomplishment that I would almost have to

01:32:02.080 --> 01:32:08.840
admire it on technical grounds, which moreover is in the hands of the entirely wrong people.

01:32:08.840 --> 01:32:15.520
I think that this exemplifies one aspect of what goes on when you have guys like Benjamin

01:32:15.520 --> 01:32:20.880
and others who they're fundamentally just trying to get attention, they want to make

01:32:20.880 --> 01:32:22.800
people laugh, fine.

01:32:22.800 --> 01:32:28.040
It's one thing if it's entertainment, but if entertainment becomes the backbone of your

01:32:28.040 --> 01:32:35.200
belief system, your toast, that's not how you approach reality.

01:32:35.200 --> 01:32:38.040
It's not how you approach anything important.

01:32:38.040 --> 01:32:45.400
And so when things that get called conspiracy theories all get labeled the same and they

01:32:45.400 --> 01:32:51.480
all get packaged together, the ridicule element of the Oliver show comes into play because

01:32:51.480 --> 01:32:56.480
the same guys who are telling you that the earth is flat and we didn't land on the moon

01:32:56.480 --> 01:33:01.600
and nukes aren't real, a lot of those are also telling you what we told you last week.

01:33:01.600 --> 01:33:08.000
And naturally, if you discredit any of those claims, you know that the person is full of

01:33:08.000 --> 01:33:12.200
crap and so if the person is full of crap, why would you want to believe one of their

01:33:12.200 --> 01:33:14.280
hair brain claims?

01:33:14.280 --> 01:33:17.880
Even if it happens to be true, you're not ever going to pay attention because once you

01:33:17.880 --> 01:33:20.680
discredit one of them, you're out.

01:33:20.680 --> 01:33:22.960
Don't listen to liars, don't listen to crazy people.

01:33:22.960 --> 01:33:25.200
I completely advocate that.

01:33:25.200 --> 01:33:29.560
Stay away from people who are selling insane things.

01:33:29.560 --> 01:33:30.560
It's bad for you.

01:33:30.560 --> 01:33:31.560
It's bad for your soul.

01:33:31.560 --> 01:33:35.080
It's bad for your mind.

01:33:35.080 --> 01:33:42.240
Part of the reason that these things are permitted to exist in public discourse is that it creates

01:33:42.240 --> 01:33:49.040
this tar pit where guys who are willing to listen to things like last week's episode

01:33:49.040 --> 01:33:55.280
can't differentiate between true revisionist history that says, you know what, here's some

01:33:55.280 --> 01:33:58.880
very fundamental facts that undermine the whole thing.

01:33:58.880 --> 01:34:04.040
That looks to the same to their mind as when someone comes along and say, did you know what

01:34:04.040 --> 01:34:08.080
there was a camera recording of a nuke explosion and cameras are nuke ploof?

01:34:08.080 --> 01:34:14.000
So that means that nukes aren't real or they say that earth is flat and I can prove it

01:34:14.000 --> 01:34:18.440
and here's this diagram or here's some math that you can't understand.

01:34:18.440 --> 01:34:22.400
And if they're stride enough or they seem smart enough, they're never very smart.

01:34:22.400 --> 01:34:23.400
That's another thing.

01:34:23.400 --> 01:34:26.720
Corey and I watch a bunch of videos from these people in preparation for this.

01:34:26.720 --> 01:34:28.720
They're all dumb.

01:34:29.720 --> 01:34:32.480
I don't think he believes this stuff.

01:34:32.480 --> 01:34:34.360
I think he's just a straight up liar.

01:34:34.360 --> 01:34:36.800
I think he knows that he's deceiving people.

01:34:36.800 --> 01:34:40.720
It doesn't matter because everyone else down stream, they're dumb.

01:34:40.720 --> 01:34:43.360
They're not intelligent men.

01:34:43.360 --> 01:34:50.160
Again, I don't want to be cruel by saying that, but some men are not equipped to handle orbital

01:34:50.160 --> 01:34:51.960
mechanics.

01:34:51.960 --> 01:34:55.920
If your first instinct would not be to say, I wonder what the return trajectory was from

01:34:55.920 --> 01:35:00.080
an earth orbit versus a moon orbit, maybe you're just not equipped to tackle these

01:35:00.080 --> 01:35:02.120
subjects and that's fine.

01:35:02.120 --> 01:35:07.120
But don't let someone come along and give you a bad explanation for why you should disbelieve

01:35:07.120 --> 01:35:09.040
an obvious thing.

01:35:09.040 --> 01:35:19.280
And so by permitting insane, clearly falsifiable claims to exist alongside things like last

01:35:19.280 --> 01:35:22.960
week's episode, like the Holocaust, which is it's also an insane claim.

01:35:23.000 --> 01:35:27.480
It's also plainly falsifiable, except it's in the opposite direction because what we

01:35:27.480 --> 01:35:32.040
were told was the thing that was manufactured, whereas they want you to believe the same

01:35:32.040 --> 01:35:35.760
thing is true of things that are clearly provable.

01:35:35.760 --> 01:35:39.240
And that's why fundamentally this all comes down to individuals weighing evidence.

01:35:39.240 --> 01:35:41.640
We described you last week as jurists.

01:35:41.640 --> 01:35:43.320
We're all jurists every day.

01:35:43.320 --> 01:35:46.080
We're the finders of fact with whatever's coming in.

01:35:46.080 --> 01:35:50.080
We shouldn't just be neutrally absorbing everything and say, okay, I believe the next

01:35:50.080 --> 01:35:51.080
thing I read.

01:35:51.080 --> 01:35:53.120
That's fine.

01:35:53.120 --> 01:35:56.560
It's particularly pernicious because anyone who's an expert in a field, whenever they

01:35:56.560 --> 01:36:00.800
read something in a newspaper is always going to tear his hair out because if you know something

01:36:00.800 --> 01:36:05.040
about the field, you know how poorly written your article is and yet you go on to read

01:36:05.040 --> 01:36:10.720
the very next article and just sagely scrub your chin and say, yes, I'm better informed

01:36:10.720 --> 01:36:12.920
now that I've read about this.

01:36:12.920 --> 01:36:14.240
They get everything wrong.

01:36:14.240 --> 01:36:17.520
Reporters are not bright people and they're also deceptive in their entertainers.

01:36:17.520 --> 01:36:20.760
They're there to sell a narrative and to sell advertising.

01:36:20.760 --> 01:36:28.960
So don't let someone create an environment where you can get swept up by someone saying,

01:36:28.960 --> 01:36:30.160
I can't believe anything.

01:36:30.160 --> 01:36:32.000
It's all lies.

01:36:32.000 --> 01:36:35.920
Just as you shouldn't be falling for everything that the newspaper prints or anything else.

01:36:35.920 --> 01:36:40.960
I don't want to say be skeptical of the sign because that can lead to the sort of red pill

01:36:40.960 --> 01:36:47.840
overdose that causes you to lose your mind, but just make sure it adds up and be inquisitive.

01:36:47.840 --> 01:36:52.240
It's okay to say, I need to see more proof before I'm going to buy that.

01:36:52.240 --> 01:36:54.080
That's a perfectly reasonable thing.

01:36:54.080 --> 01:36:58.280
But if someone who's always credible comes you with something, it should have more weight

01:36:58.280 --> 01:37:00.600
than someone who's a comedian.

01:37:00.600 --> 01:37:06.840
Two fundamentally different purposes and you should receive what they're telling you differently.

01:37:06.840 --> 01:37:14.400
Both in the last episode and in this episode, in a very core sense, what we are dealing

01:37:14.400 --> 01:37:17.920
with is propaganda.

01:37:17.920 --> 01:37:22.960
In the last episode, we dealt with propaganda, we could call it positive propaganda, the

01:37:22.960 --> 01:37:26.400
creation of a lie.

01:37:26.400 --> 01:37:31.000
In this episode, we're dealing with negative propaganda, which is the destruction of the

01:37:31.000 --> 01:37:32.440
truth.

01:37:32.440 --> 01:37:37.360
Both of course result in the destruction of the truth ultimately, but coming at it from

01:37:37.360 --> 01:37:39.840
different angles.

01:37:39.840 --> 01:37:42.360
This is Marxist propaganda.

01:37:42.360 --> 01:37:47.680
Now it's not to say that all of those who are engaged in this are willing or witting

01:37:47.680 --> 01:37:51.640
Marxists, of course they're not, many of them are just idiots.

01:37:51.640 --> 01:37:57.160
Some of them are malicious, many of them are just dumb.

01:37:57.160 --> 01:38:04.440
But the end result is the saying, the baby boomer generation was the perfect Marxist

01:38:04.440 --> 01:38:10.160
generation in the sense that they were completely demoralized.

01:38:10.160 --> 01:38:16.840
So propagandize that they basically lost the ability to hear the truth if it runs counter

01:38:16.840 --> 01:38:19.540
to what they were told.

01:38:19.540 --> 01:38:23.320
That's of course the goal of Marxist propaganda.

01:38:23.320 --> 01:38:30.920
However, or I guess I should say that was the goal, now there is a modified version of

01:38:30.920 --> 01:38:32.920
that goal.

01:38:32.920 --> 01:38:39.760
The goal of the current generation of propaganda is to deprive you of the ability to process

01:38:39.880 --> 01:38:41.880
the truth.

01:38:41.880 --> 01:38:48.000
It's not simply to instill lies in you, because if you instill lies in someone and make them

01:38:48.000 --> 01:38:54.720
basically impregnable when it comes to the truth, you've accomplished one sort of thing.

01:38:54.720 --> 01:39:00.760
But if you make it so that a person cannot even process the truth at all, you've accomplished

01:39:00.760 --> 01:39:07.880
something different, and if you are a malicious act or something greater.

01:39:07.880 --> 01:39:14.360
If you start to uncritically believe all sorts of insane claims, you lose the ability

01:39:14.360 --> 01:39:20.200
to process the truth, you become untethered from reality, but you can accomplish the same

01:39:20.200 --> 01:39:23.200
by not believing anything.

01:39:23.200 --> 01:39:29.200
So again, as was mentioned earlier, you can become a nihilist, believe in nothing, or

01:39:29.200 --> 01:39:36.700
you can become so wildly credulous that you assess nothing, just everything is true and

01:39:36.700 --> 01:39:39.580
I accept whatever I'm told.

01:39:39.580 --> 01:39:45.500
Neither outcome is good, neither outcome is something a Christian should permit himself

01:39:45.500 --> 01:39:48.420
to become.

01:39:48.420 --> 01:39:52.440
As a Christian, you are told to test the spirits.

01:39:52.440 --> 01:39:56.280
That doesn't just mean claims about religion.

01:39:56.280 --> 01:40:01.440
You should test every truth claim insofar as God has made you capable.

01:40:01.440 --> 01:40:06.680
If God has not made you capable, then you need other men in your life whom you can trust

01:40:07.400 --> 01:40:09.480
who can assess those claims for you.

01:40:09.480 --> 01:40:17.200
That's why it's vitally important to know whom you can trust and whom you cannot trust.

01:40:17.200 --> 01:40:24.960
If you can trust a man and he understands the subject, then you can trust the conclusions.

01:40:24.960 --> 01:40:31.480
He draws out of that subject the conclusions that he shares with you, and that is part

01:40:31.480 --> 01:40:35.560
of what all of us need to do when it comes to these subjects, because there is no single

01:40:35.560 --> 01:40:41.280
man who can assess all of these claims and understand all of them.

01:40:41.280 --> 01:40:49.000
By that I don't mean the claims in this episode or the claims in this podcast series, or the

01:40:49.000 --> 01:40:54.020
podcast more generally, I mean all of the claims in the modern world.

01:40:54.020 --> 01:40:59.400
Because all of us are specialized to some degree in what we do, and you cannot specialize

01:40:59.400 --> 01:41:07.240
in everything, there was an era in the past when the wealth of knowledge, the sum total

01:41:07.240 --> 01:41:13.680
of the store of human knowledge, was small enough that one man could in fact master all

01:41:13.680 --> 01:41:16.320
of it in his lifetime.

01:41:16.320 --> 01:41:21.520
It would take a particularly gifted man, of course, but it was still possible, that is

01:41:21.520 --> 01:41:25.000
absolutely not possible today.

01:41:25.000 --> 01:41:30.160
The average man would struggle to master a single field today, given the store of knowledge

01:41:30.160 --> 01:41:32.420
that we have.

01:41:32.420 --> 01:41:37.360
And so there is no way that anyone can tell you, reasonably, that you must go out and become

01:41:37.360 --> 01:41:41.240
an expert in everything and assess everything, that's not what we're saying.

01:41:41.240 --> 01:41:46.640
That would be to drive you into sheer insanity, because it would be, or probably despair,

01:41:46.640 --> 01:41:51.440
because it would be absolutely unattainable.

01:41:51.440 --> 01:41:58.640
What you have to be able to do is assess the reliability and the truthfulness of other

01:41:58.640 --> 01:42:06.400
men, so you know whom to trust, and also use what God gave you to assess claims.

01:42:06.400 --> 01:42:13.400
Now, as with the medieval peasant, and the shape of the earth, there are going to be

01:42:13.400 --> 01:42:16.080
things that do not matter to you.

01:42:16.080 --> 01:42:19.720
You don't have to worry about those if they don't involve you, if they don't matter

01:42:20.080 --> 01:42:21.240
to you.

01:42:21.240 --> 01:42:27.920
But when there are claims that are advanced, that make claims about God's creation, that

01:42:27.920 --> 01:42:32.880
make claims about Christianity, that make claims about your nation, your history, your

01:42:32.880 --> 01:42:40.600
people, you have to be able to assess those to some degree.

01:42:40.600 --> 01:42:45.880
Some of the claims that you need to assess are going to be relatively simple.

01:42:45.880 --> 01:42:50.240
As I mentioned with the shape of the earth, you could literally go out and with high school

01:42:50.240 --> 01:42:55.720
math figure out the shape of the earth if you just have a bit of patience and don't

01:42:55.720 --> 01:42:57.880
mind some walking.

01:42:57.880 --> 01:43:04.640
Those are the sorts of things where it's just inexcusable to believe what is false, because

01:43:04.640 --> 01:43:08.320
what is true is so readily verifiable.

01:43:08.320 --> 01:43:14.000
If it is a more esoteric claim, and you don't have reason to believe one way or the other,

01:43:14.000 --> 01:43:18.440
and don't believe one way or the other, you don't have to take a stand on every single

01:43:18.440 --> 01:43:23.480
issue despite what social media has led some people to believe.

01:43:23.480 --> 01:43:29.040
If you don't know about a subject, you don't have to have an opinion on it.

01:43:29.040 --> 01:43:34.440
I don't have any opinions when it comes to quantum chemistry.

01:43:34.440 --> 01:43:38.920
I don't know enough about the field to have any opinions, and so if you asked me a question

01:43:38.920 --> 01:43:43.920
about something in that field, I would say, I don't know.

01:43:43.920 --> 01:43:45.440
And that is a fine thing to say.

01:43:45.440 --> 01:43:52.400
In fact, the men you should never trust are the men who never say I don't know.

01:43:52.400 --> 01:43:55.280
Because those men are definitely lying to you.

01:43:55.280 --> 01:44:01.400
Because every man has to at times say, I do not know.

01:44:01.400 --> 01:44:04.240
Because there will be things you do not know.

01:44:04.240 --> 01:44:05.880
You're not an expert in everything.

01:44:05.880 --> 01:44:07.600
I'm not an expert in everything.

01:44:07.600 --> 01:44:09.560
Woe is an expert in everything.

01:44:09.560 --> 01:44:12.640
No man is an expert in everything.

01:44:12.640 --> 01:44:20.080
And so an honest man must be willing and able to say, I do not know.

01:44:20.080 --> 01:44:25.160
The claims we're talking about here and the reason we picked these ones.

01:44:25.160 --> 01:44:32.640
These are the sorts of claims that are designed to make you doubt reality itself, to drive

01:44:32.640 --> 01:44:38.120
you into insanity, to make you incapable of assessing the truth.

01:44:38.120 --> 01:44:40.920
And that's why it's important to get these ones right.

01:44:40.920 --> 01:44:44.000
You don't need to know everything about the moon landing.

01:44:44.000 --> 01:44:46.480
You're not a seven-year-old learning about dinosaurs.

01:44:46.480 --> 01:44:49.520
You don't have to memorize every single fact.

01:44:49.520 --> 01:44:53.760
But the core reality, it is vital to get that right.

01:44:53.760 --> 01:44:55.120
We did go to the moon.

01:44:55.120 --> 01:44:56.560
We did land on the moon.

01:44:56.560 --> 01:45:00.920
We left evidence of the landing on the moon.

01:45:00.920 --> 01:45:01.920
Not litter.

01:45:01.920 --> 01:45:05.320
We may have left a little of that as well, but we left retro reflectors.

01:45:05.320 --> 01:45:07.280
We left proof.

01:45:07.280 --> 01:45:09.880
We have proof of nuclear weapons.

01:45:09.880 --> 01:45:14.360
We have video, photos, eyewitness accounts.

01:45:14.360 --> 01:45:17.880
We have extensive proof that they're real.

01:45:17.880 --> 01:45:21.280
We know the shape of the earth, because again, you can calculate it, and we have satellites

01:45:21.280 --> 01:45:25.400
and orbit feeding real-time images of the surface of the earth.

01:45:25.400 --> 01:45:31.280
I will link the one that was mentioned in the show notes.

01:45:31.280 --> 01:45:38.940
And so as Christians, these sorts of claims, we need to get them right.

01:45:38.940 --> 01:45:45.820
Because if you lose the ability to assess truth in one area, that will spread to others.

01:45:45.820 --> 01:45:51.540
You will lose the ability to assess truth in other parts of your life.

01:45:51.540 --> 01:45:57.380
And Christianity, fundamentally, at its core, is a truth claim.

01:45:57.380 --> 01:46:03.860
Because the truth claim of Christianity is that Jesus Christ is God.

01:46:03.860 --> 01:46:06.940
Jesus Christ died on the cross.

01:46:06.940 --> 01:46:13.060
Jesus Christ died on the cross as a substitute for you.

01:46:13.060 --> 01:46:21.100
And if you have faith in that, in those facts, in those statements of truth, then you will

01:46:21.100 --> 01:46:22.100
be saved.

01:46:22.100 --> 01:46:25.940
Now, of course, I'm not saying that you just have to know only the history.

01:46:25.940 --> 01:46:27.780
I'm not making that theological claim.

01:46:27.780 --> 01:46:33.740
Yes, I recognize that it is notitia, ascensus, and fiducia.

01:46:33.740 --> 01:46:38.800
You must know the truth, assent to the truth, and trust in the truth.

01:46:38.800 --> 01:46:42.700
It is the trust, it is the faith that saves.

01:46:42.700 --> 01:46:46.340
But Christianity, fundamentally, is a truth claim.

01:46:46.340 --> 01:46:49.100
And again, I've mentioned the transcendentals in the last episode.

01:46:49.100 --> 01:46:55.660
I won't go over that again, but truth matters, because truth is the nature of God.

01:46:55.660 --> 01:47:00.860
And so it may seem like this episode, we went over some things that are perhaps a little

01:47:00.860 --> 01:47:06.620
crazy, which they are, or you may think, why does this matter?

01:47:06.620 --> 01:47:13.140
And I've just gone over why it matters, because as Christians, the truth matters.

01:47:13.140 --> 01:47:16.780
Because God is truth, and our religion is the truth.

01:47:16.780 --> 01:47:22.780
And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:30.860 --> 01:47:35.860
God is truth, and our religion is the truth.

01:47:35.860 --> 01:47:40.860
And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:40.860 --> 01:47:45.860
And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:45.860 --> 01:47:50.860
And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:50.860 --> 01:47:55.860
And if we reject the truth, ultimately, we wind up rejecting all truth.

01:47:55.860 --> 01:47:59.860
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01:47:59.860 --> 01:48:04.860
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