Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / Science conspiracy theories (featuring Dr. Phil Plait)

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Science conspiracy theories (featuring Dr. Phil Plait) · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: We're doing our best to understand the universe. From biology
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: to cosmology, from parasites to pulsars, we're building knowledge steadily
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: about how things work. And we're using science because it's amazing.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: But sometimes, despite the torrent of information and understanding we're generating,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: wires get crossed. Strange theories develop and build support across
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: the internet, cherry-picking evidence rather than fairly applying the scientific method.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: These aren't science theories, they're conspiracy theories, and unfortunately, they're everywhere.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: From YouTube comments to the mouths of influencers, people are
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: talking about the end of the world, or how CERN
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: is sacrificing human children, or the Beams are responsible for
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: the Berenstain Bears being the Berenstain Bears. I wish that
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: last one was a joke. So today, we'll dig into
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: some of these conspiracy theories and understand where they came
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: from and why they are nonsense. We're joined by one
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: of our favorite science communicators and friends, Phil Plait, who
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: will tell us also about how he saw Vladimir Lenin
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: in his shower curtain. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Universe of Conspiracies.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: Intro Dr.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: Phil Plait is an astronomer, author, sci-fi dork, TV documentary
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: talking head, a science enthusiast, a pop-sci author, and a
• 1:40
  Speaker 3: former goat owner. He writes the Bad Astronomy newsletter, which
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: you can find on Beehive.
• 1:46
  Speaker 4: How is life without goats, Phil? Are you okay?
• 1:51
  Speaker 5: It's goatless. It's sans chevre. I don't know if that's
• 1:58
  Speaker 5: correct French or not. Maybe Zach can help me with that.
• 2:00
  Speaker 4: No cheese is what I think you just said.
• 2:02
  Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly. It's been a while. We had four adorable
• 2:07
  Speaker 5: mini goats when we lived in Colorado. But when we
• 2:12
  Speaker 5: had to move from Colorado, that is, we had to
• 2:15
  Speaker 5: rehome them. And we actually sent them to a farm upstate, which,
• 2:20
  Speaker 5: you know, generally when you're talking to a kid is
• 2:24
  Speaker 5: something of a euphemism. But in this case, it actually
• 2:26
  Speaker 5: is true. We found a place.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Now they can run and jump all day long.
• 2:31
  Speaker 5: Yeah, well, in fact, we found a place that had
• 2:35
  Speaker 5: a huge area with a bunch of other goats and
• 2:38
  Speaker 5: they needed a few more, so.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 2:40
  Speaker 5: They looked pretty happy when we left.
• 2:42
  Speaker 4: That's good.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: They needed more goats? They had a goat shortage?
• 2:46
  Speaker 5: They had quite a few goats, but they were on
• 2:49
  Speaker 5: multiple acres. And Kelly, I've heard you talk about your goats.
• 2:55
  Speaker 5: People have a lot of misconceptions about goats. They will
• 2:57
  Speaker 5: eat until they fall over. That part is true. But
• 3:00
  Speaker 5: they're picky. They are. And I know people who swear...
• 3:06
  Speaker 5: I saw a goat eat a tin can once. It's like, no,
• 3:08
  Speaker 5: you didn't. You saw it in a cartoon 50 years ago.
• 3:11
  Speaker 5: You're misremembering it.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Wait, cartoons are not documentaries. They're not totally science-based. What
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: are you talking about?
• 3:18
  Speaker 5: The Bugs Bunny ones are, you can consider to be real.
• 3:22
  Speaker 4: Coyote and Roadrunner too, yeah.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Totally.
• 3:24
  Speaker 5: So yeah, we used to, I used to cut weeds
• 3:26
  Speaker 5: and grass and all kinds of things. And there was
• 3:28
  Speaker 5: some stuff they just, they just wouldn't eat. Yeah. But
• 3:31
  Speaker 5: they looked pretty happy on the farm, though. So plenty
• 3:33
  Speaker 5: to eat, plenty of friends, and plenty of room to run.
• 3:36
  Speaker 4: I'm glad.
• 3:37
  Speaker 5: I miss them.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Well, thanks for coming on the show and dispelling misunderstandings
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: about science and goats. That's what we're doing today.
• 3:45
  Speaker 5: That's my job. I think I have that on my
• 3:47
  Speaker 5: business card, goat debunker.
• 3:51
  Speaker 4: The most important job anybody can have, really. I work
• 3:54
  Speaker 4: in that field as well.
• 3:56
  Speaker 5: The pay is terrible, but it's a lot of fun.
• 4:00
  Speaker 4: You lose money, I think, actually. Whenever you're doing anything
• 4:02
  Speaker 4: with goats, it's a money pit. But they're so cute!
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: But can we really trace any harm to misunderstanding goats? Like,
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: does it matter if people think goats eat tin cans?
• 4:12
  Speaker 4: Probably for the goats that are fed tin cans.
• 4:14
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 4:16
  Speaker 5: You know, I will say there is one big misunderstanding
• 4:20
  Speaker 5: about goats that I've seen many times.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: What's that?
• 4:22
  Speaker 5: People do not understand that these are herd beasts. And
• 4:26
  Speaker 5: I will see people saying, I'm going to get a goat.
• 4:29
  Speaker 5: And I think, no, you should get at least two
• 4:32
  Speaker 5: or three. And this is the same thing about donkeys
• 4:34
  Speaker 5: and horses. You can't, you know, having one is actually cruel.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:39
  Speaker 5: Imagine being locked up in a room by yourself for,
• 4:41
  Speaker 5: you know, four years. It's, actually, that sounds pretty good.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:47
  Speaker 5: But for these herd animals, yeah, you need more than one.
• 4:50
  Speaker 5: So there can be some misconceptions that lead to unfortunate
• 4:56
  Speaker 5: goat outcomes.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about the goatest of all conspiracy theories.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: The ones about the end of the world. Phil, you
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: want to talk about the Mayans and the sort of
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: popular science concept that the Mayans predicted the end of
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: the world.
• 5:12
  Speaker 5: Yeah, the Maya not-pocalypse, as I like to call it.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: What is the claim here? What are they talking about?
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: What do they say was going to happen?
• 5:20
  Speaker 5: What's the claim? The claim is that the Maya civilization
• 5:26
  Speaker 5: in Mexico and Central America lasted for thousands of years
• 5:31
  Speaker 5: and at their height– quite the accomplished group of people.
• 5:35
  Speaker 5: They had big cities and agriculture and all kinds of stuff.
• 5:38
  Speaker 5: They also had a very sophisticated calendar. And the claim
• 5:42
  Speaker 5: is that their calendar came to an end on December 21st, 2012,
• 5:47
  Speaker 5: the day we all remember the earth was not destroyed.
• 5:53
  Speaker 4: We're all just a simulation now.
• 5:55
  Speaker 5: That's correct. A Maya simulation.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 5:57
  Speaker 5: Which is funny because Maya, isn't that video software in
• 6:00
  Speaker 5: that name of a video software package? So, hey, maybe
• 6:04
  Speaker 5: I'm giving them a little bit more fodder.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: They're doing it right out in the open.
• 6:08
  Speaker 5: Coincidence? You'll hear me saying that a lot.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Coincidence?
• 6:13
  Speaker 5: Yes.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Yes, it is.
• 6:15
  Speaker 5: When it comes to Doomsday, astronomy plays an outsized role
• 6:19
  Speaker 5: because the entire universe basically is a gigantic threat against
• 6:24
  Speaker 5: our planet. And so there's any number of topics you
• 6:29
  Speaker 5: can pick from. to cause the end of the world,
• 6:32
  Speaker 5: which is true. And a lot of these things can happen.
• 6:36
  Speaker 5: The odds of them happening are one in a gazillion.
• 6:38
  Speaker 5: So that gives us pretty rich fodder. What I find
• 6:41
  Speaker 5: funny is that the Maya have nothing to do with this.
• 6:45
  Speaker 5: This is silly.
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: And real quick, if you want to hear more about
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: various ways space is trying to kill us, you should
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: definitely read Phil's book, Death from the Skies.
• 6:53
  Speaker 5: That is true.
• 6:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, okay.
• 6:55
  Speaker 5: That's all I have to say. I'm done now. I
• 6:56
  Speaker 5: got the plug in. We're done. See y'all.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: Oh, great.
• 7:00
  Speaker 4: Short episode, but right to the point.
• 7:02
  Speaker 5: The end of my calendar.
• 7:03
  Speaker 4: That's right.
• 7:05
  Speaker 5: So the idea came about a few decades ago from
• 7:11
  Speaker 5: various and sundry usual conspiracy theorists. The idea is the
• 7:16
  Speaker 5: Maya had, they actually had a very sophisticated calendar. One
• 7:20
  Speaker 5: of them is called the Long Count Calendar, and it
• 7:23
  Speaker 5: has a series of units in it. And these units
• 7:27
  Speaker 5: are similar to The units we have, day, week, month, year,
• 7:32
  Speaker 5: they had a kin, which is a day. My Maya is, unfortunately,
• 7:36
  Speaker 5: a little rusty. The only word I know in Maya
• 7:40
  Speaker 5: that I'm pronouncing correctly is shtolak, which means lizard. That's
• 7:44
  Speaker 5: something I learned, actually, at Chichen Itza when I visited.
• 7:48
  Speaker 5: And I found that a lot of Maya sounds Vulcan.
• 7:52
  Speaker 5: So if you're a Star Trek fan, you're going to
• 7:53
  Speaker 5: love this stuff. So there's the kin, which is a day,
• 7:57
  Speaker 5: and a winal, which is 20 days, short of a month,
• 8:00
  Speaker 5: but call it a month. A tun, which is 260 days.
• 8:04
  Speaker 5: And then a baktun. And a baktun is 394 years, roughly.
• 8:09
  Speaker 5: It's 144,000 days. Now, these numbers are different than ours
• 8:13
  Speaker 5: because they were fanatics about different bases. We do everything
• 8:19
  Speaker 5: sort of in base 10 or 12. I mean, there's
• 8:22
  Speaker 5: seven days in a week and all that. But typically,
• 8:25
  Speaker 5: we try to keep these numbers round. They have things
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  Speaker 5: that are divisible by 12 and 18 and 20 and
• 8:30
  Speaker 5: all these different things. And all of these different cycles
• 8:35
  Speaker 5: come together. They all, you know, at some point they
• 8:38
  Speaker 5: all cycle together. They each have a common denominator, a
• 8:43
  Speaker 5: greatest multiplicative factor. You know, it's been like 50 years
• 8:47
  Speaker 5: since I took that kind of math and I can't
• 8:48
  Speaker 5: remember what the term is. When you have like five
• 8:50
  Speaker 5: things that all multiply together to get a number.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: But why did they choose these cycles? Like in the
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: case of our calendar... Some of it makes sense. It's physical,
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  Speaker 1: like the length of a day, the length of a month,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: the length of a year. A week is totally arbitrary.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: But why do they choose these lengths?
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  Speaker 4: Thousands of years ago.
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  Speaker 5: Ah. That's part of the conspiracy. Well, that's true. I mean,
• 9:13
  Speaker 5: we are talking about things that happened a thousand years ago,
• 9:16
  Speaker 5: and I'm not that familiar with the history of the calendar.
• 9:19
  Speaker 5: And to be honest, I'm not even sure why they
• 9:21
  Speaker 5: had two. I think there was this sort of a fiscal–
• 9:25
  Speaker 5: governmental calendar, and then an everyday calendar, which is kind
• 9:29
  Speaker 5: of neat. We have sort of the same thing. We
• 9:30
  Speaker 5: have a fiscal year, which starts on October 1st in
• 9:33
  Speaker 5: the United States and runs through September 30th for reasons.
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  Speaker 5: And they had these two calendars as well. It just
• 9:40
  Speaker 5: so happens that these are the units they picked. They
• 9:44
  Speaker 5: may have had religious overtones or just sacred meanings or something,
• 9:50
  Speaker 5: or they could have just been nuts about certain numbers
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  Speaker 5: like 12 and 18.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 9:54
  Speaker 5: And that's how this all worked out.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
• 9:56
  Speaker 4: I was going to guess they had 12 fingers or
• 9:57
  Speaker 4: something because I feel like when it comes to counting.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: These are humans we're talking about.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: I know.
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  Speaker 4: I'm just joking.
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  Speaker 3: I feel like when it comes to counting, I want
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: like bases that match the number of like digits on
• 10:08
  Speaker 3: my hands. But anyway, I'm sure, you know, archaeological evidence
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: suggests that was not the case.
• 10:14
  Speaker 5: The polydactyl calendar that they used. That's right.
• 10:17
  Speaker 4: That's right.
• 10:18
  Speaker 5: They were big about cutting off heads and stuff, so
• 10:20
  Speaker 5: they may have had base eight because they cut off
• 10:23
  Speaker 5: people's thumbs. I don't know.
• 10:24
  Speaker 4: Hard to say.
• 10:25
  Speaker 5: They were an interesting civilization. Anyway, and I'm making that up.
• 10:31
  Speaker 5: The point here is that their calendars were very similar
• 10:33
  Speaker 5: to ours. You have a month, and at the end
• 10:34
  Speaker 5: of the month, you cycle back to day one of
• 10:37
  Speaker 5: the next month. So January 1st through January 31st, the
• 10:40
  Speaker 5: next day becomes February, the next month, but then you
• 10:43
  Speaker 5: go back to day one. And you do this over
• 10:45
  Speaker 5: and over again until you get to the end of
• 10:46
  Speaker 5: the year, December 31st. And then you go to January 1st,
• 10:49
  Speaker 5: you go all the way back to the beginning of
• 10:51
  Speaker 5: those units. And then the next biggest unit, which is
• 10:53
  Speaker 5: a year, goes up one. So you go from 2026
• 10:56
  Speaker 5: to 2027, that sort of thing. Their calendar did the
• 11:00
  Speaker 5: same thing. Well, when you look at all these numbers,
• 11:04
  Speaker 5: they considered year zero to be 3114 BCE. So roughly
• 11:08
  Speaker 5: 5,000 years ago, as our calendar works now. That was
• 11:14
  Speaker 5: just where they sort of started. That was the creation
• 11:16
  Speaker 5: of the world in their mythology. When you look at this,
• 11:20
  Speaker 5: the 13th Bakhtun ends on December 21st, 2012. What does
• 11:27
  Speaker 5: this mean? Well, honestly, what it means is that they've
• 11:31
  Speaker 5: recycled their calendar. All the numbers go back to zero,
• 11:34
  Speaker 5: and then the next biggest unit goes up by one.
• 11:38
  Speaker 5: But in fact, if you're a conspiracy theory, the term
• 11:40
  Speaker 5: in fact is meaningless and you can make up whatever
• 11:43
  Speaker 5: you want. And so clearly these guys are saying that
• 11:47
  Speaker 5: the Mayans predicted the end of the world. And that
• 11:49
  Speaker 5: was going to happen on December 21st, 2012, a day
• 11:53
  Speaker 5: where it did not happen. And let me say, like
• 11:57
  Speaker 5: most conspiracy theories that are. Based on science, you know,
• 12:01
  Speaker 5: based is a funny word, like that are, you know,
• 12:05
  Speaker 5: off into another dimension, you know, starting with some sort
• 12:07
  Speaker 5: of scientific fact. This is ridiculous on its face. For example,
• 12:13
  Speaker 5: when you look at the Maya calendar. They had bigger
• 12:15
  Speaker 5: units than the Bakhtun. The Bakhtun ticks over. It's like, oh,
• 12:18
  Speaker 5: we're out of Bakhtuns. What do we do? We go
• 12:20
  Speaker 5: to the Pictun, which is like, I think, 20 Bakhtun.
• 12:25
  Speaker 5: They even had the Alawatun. This is, oh, any Maya
• 12:29
  Speaker 5: out there, you can correct me on my pronunciation. This
• 12:31
  Speaker 5: is an even bigger unit that is... 63 million years.
• 12:36
  Speaker 4: Wow.
• 12:37
  Speaker 6: 63.
• 12:38
  Speaker 5: Apparently they knew about the dinosaurs being extinct.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: So that lines up. That's not a coincidence, I'm sure.
• 12:43
  Speaker 5: Except it was 66 million years ago. But the point being,
• 12:47
  Speaker 5: you know, why would they have bigger units if when
• 12:50
  Speaker 5: they ran out of Bactuns, I don't know what the
• 12:52
  Speaker 5: plural of Bactun is.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: Bactuni.
• 12:54
  Speaker 5: Bactuni, Bactuna, Bactunum. Why Bactuna? I like that.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 13:01
  Speaker 5: It sounds like a brand of fish. It does.
• 13:03
  Speaker 4: I'd eat that.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: It sounds like a sushi roll or something, yeah.
• 13:05
  Speaker 5: Right. The next unit would be the sashimi.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: But there is something cool about numbers turning over. I'm
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: sure people went crazy with the year 2000 thinking it
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: was going to be the end of the world for
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: no other reason than the numbers are cycling over. Exactly.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: When I'm driving a car and it hits 100,000 miles,
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: I'm like, ooh, 100,000 miles. I'm like, I don't think
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: it's going to be the end of the world. But
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: there is something kind of, I don't know, not spiritual,
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: not chilling. But something cool about seeing the numbers take over.
• 13:35
  Speaker 5: It could be the end of your service warranty. So
• 13:39
  Speaker 5: that could be an issue. And no, I agree. We
• 13:42
  Speaker 5: love round numbers. We celebrate anniversaries that are based on
• 13:47
  Speaker 5: fives and tens. The 25th is a big anniversary, 50, 100.
• 13:50
  Speaker 5: This year was my 31st anniversary of getting married? Yes, 31.
• 13:59
  Speaker 5: Why don't I feel that that's as important as 30? Well,
• 14:02
  Speaker 5: 31 is a prime number, so it's hard to get
• 14:04
  Speaker 5: a base of 31 out of anything. But 31 is prime?
• 14:08
  Speaker 5: I think 31 is prime. So it's just a thing.
• 14:11
  Speaker 5: And we do have these sort of atavistic attitudes, these
• 14:17
  Speaker 5: attitudes that come from deep, deep, deep back in our
• 14:20
  Speaker 5: evolutionary history that make us kind of be in awe
• 14:23
  Speaker 5: of things that aren't really deserving of them necessarily. And
• 14:29
  Speaker 5: so we celebrate these things. And hey, you know what?
• 14:32
  Speaker 5: Celebrating the end of the year is fun. It's a
• 14:35
  Speaker 5: good unit. It covers a decent segment of a life
• 14:41
  Speaker 5: and four seasons. It makes sense. So when a new
• 14:44
  Speaker 5: year is coming, a time of renewal and refreshing and celebration,
• 14:49
  Speaker 5: I totally get it. And to all of my knowledge,
• 14:53
  Speaker 5: the Maya did this as well. When they came to
• 14:55
  Speaker 5: the end of a big unit, they celebrated They did
• 14:57
  Speaker 5: not think it was the end of the world.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Did they party like it was 1999?
• 15:02
  Speaker 5: I don't think they had a Y2K problem in their issue.
• 15:06
  Speaker 4: But it's a shame they didn't have Prince.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 15:09
  Speaker 5: Yeah. So that's the basis of this conspiracy. And then
• 15:14
  Speaker 5: you say to yourself, well– What can happen? You know,
• 15:18
  Speaker 5: destroying a planet is hard. You know, Earth's been around
• 15:23
  Speaker 5: for four and a half billion years and it's been around.
• 15:26
  Speaker 5: It's not vapor right now. So clearly, gigantic solar flares,
• 15:31
  Speaker 5: asteroid impacts, these kind of things, they have a very
• 15:33
  Speaker 5: difficult time wiping out a planet. So the fun part
• 15:37
  Speaker 5: is when you start reading about how they say this
• 15:40
  Speaker 5: is going to happen. And the beauty of this– and
• 15:45
  Speaker 5: this is another part where I have to put my
• 15:46
  Speaker 5: head in my hands and say, what are you doing?
• 15:48
  Speaker 5: Nobody agrees on this. You talk to a different conspiracy theorist,
• 15:52
  Speaker 5: you get a totally different answer. All they know is
• 15:54
  Speaker 5: that the world is going to end.
• 15:55
  Speaker 4: They need to coordinate.
• 15:57
  Speaker 5: Honestly. And some of them– sometimes they do. You get
• 16:01
  Speaker 5: little cult-like groups that cluster, nucleate around– I was going
• 16:06
  Speaker 5: to say a charismatic figure. Not always charismatic. I'll say that.
• 16:10
  Speaker 5: Sometimes you're like, this person has a cult following?
• 16:13
  Speaker 4: We're just jealous. Where's our cult following?
• 16:15
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I know. I feel like I've been ripped off.
• 16:19
  Speaker 5: If I'm getting paid by big astronomy and big pharma
• 16:21
  Speaker 5: and big climate, where's my check? Where's my cult?
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: And big goat.
• 16:25
  Speaker 5: Wearing white robes and throwing tiny pickles at me.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: Tiny pickles.
• 16:28
  Speaker 5: No? No real genius fans here? Okay.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: No.
• 16:32
  Speaker 5: Somebody in your audience will recognize that quote. Okay.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 16:35
  Speaker 5: Valcom, a real genius. Anyway.
• 16:37
  Speaker 4: Different theories.
• 16:38
  Speaker 5: People have written books and they always wind up making
• 16:42
  Speaker 5: a lot of money from this kind of stuff. And
• 16:44
  Speaker 5: I think, what good is your money going to be
• 16:45
  Speaker 5: on December 22nd, 2012? And it turns out, yeah, actually
• 16:49
  Speaker 5: pretty valuable. It turns out because it's still around. Bunch
• 16:54
  Speaker 5: of different ideas. So one of the ones that a
• 16:57
  Speaker 5: lot of people heard of is that there is another
• 17:00
  Speaker 5: planet in the Nibiru or Nibiru, different people pronounce it
• 17:09
  Speaker 5: a different way. I tend to pronounce it bull shenanigans.
• 17:15
  Speaker 5: So however you want to pronounce it. This is an
• 17:18
  Speaker 5: idea that's been around for a long time. Immanuel Velikovsky
• 17:20
  Speaker 5: was a Russian-American psychoanalyst in the 20th century. And he
• 17:25
  Speaker 5: came up with this idea of trying to prove that
• 17:27
  Speaker 5: the Bible was literally true, that everything that happened in
• 17:30
  Speaker 5: the Bible really happened. And he did this by... And also,
• 17:34
  Speaker 5: I should say, some ancient culture myths and things like that.
• 17:38
  Speaker 5: So he said, look, with Joshua, the earth stood still
• 17:41
  Speaker 5: for a day, manna fell from heaven, there were the plagues.
• 17:46
  Speaker 5: How do we explain this scientifically? And he said, well,
• 17:49
  Speaker 5: maybe the Greeks were right in that Venus sprang from
• 17:52
  Speaker 5: the forehead of Zeus. If you remember your Greek mythology, Aphrodite.
• 17:56
  Speaker 5: In Roman, it was Venus springing from Jupiter's forehead. He said, hey,
• 18:02
  Speaker 5: what if that really happened?
• 18:04
  Speaker 6: What if the planet Venus got shot out of Jupiter
• 18:08
  Speaker 6: and ping pong balled around the solar system, causing all
• 18:11
  Speaker 6: kinds of havoc and mayhem, and then settled into orbit
• 18:14
  Speaker 6: around the sun?
• 18:15
  Speaker 5: And he said, well, this is what caused the earth
• 18:17
  Speaker 5: to stop spinning in the Joshua part of the Bible
• 18:19
  Speaker 5: that It passed by the Earth and slowed our rotation
• 18:22
  Speaker 5: and then somehow miraculously started to back up. Venus had
• 18:26
  Speaker 5: an atmosphere that's filled with hydrocarbons. And at the time,
• 18:30
  Speaker 5: that's what was thought. And that stuff rained down on Earth.
• 18:35
  Speaker 5: And that's what the manna from heaven was. He kind
• 18:37
  Speaker 5: of confused carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. These are two very different things.
• 18:42
  Speaker 5: I know how much you two love chemistry. Chemistry, the
• 18:45
  Speaker 5: one true science, the best science. What?
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
• 18:48
  Speaker 5: The only science we really need.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: Whoa, whoa.
• 18:50
  Speaker 4: You didn't get a degree in chemistry.
• 18:52
  Speaker 5: Why are you getting all chemistry? I love chemistry.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: Big chemistry has paid you, haven't they?
• 18:57
  Speaker 5: I've written a poem to chemistry.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: What?
• 19:01
  Speaker 5: Oh, chemistry. Oh, chem. No, no, no.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Oh, no chemistry.
• 19:09
  Speaker 5: No, I do like chemistry, but it plays into, you know,
• 19:12
  Speaker 5: like any science, every science plays into each other. And
• 19:15
  Speaker 5: there's a lot of chemistry in astronomy. And you kind
• 19:18
  Speaker 5: of have to know the difference between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, unless,
• 19:21
  Speaker 5: of course, you're writing a book full of bull shenanigans.
• 19:24
  Speaker 5: And are trying to sell nonsense to people. And then
• 19:27
  Speaker 5: it doesn't matter.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Maybe you should write a diet book about how people
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: should eat a low hydrocarbon diet.
• 19:32
  Speaker 5: Oh, God, that's a good idea. Are you feeling out
• 19:35
  Speaker 5: of gas? So Velikovsky, I could go for 17 hours
• 19:44
  Speaker 5: about this guy. He was way off. His history was terrible.
• 19:47
  Speaker 5: His astronomy was terrible.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: But.
• 19:51
  Speaker 5: he kind of became a cult figure because scientists tried
• 19:53
  Speaker 5: to suppress him in the 1950s and 60s. And they basically,
• 19:59
  Speaker 5: people were trying to teach his stuff in college. And
• 20:01
  Speaker 5: the science professors came in and were blacklisting his book.
• 20:04
  Speaker 5: And basically, Barbra Streisand affected him. into becoming a much
• 20:08
  Speaker 5: more popular person than he was, if you know about
• 20:10
  Speaker 5: the Streisand effect.
• 20:11
  Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 20:12
  Speaker 5: It's making a lot of noise about something that should
• 20:14
  Speaker 5: have been just nobody talking about. That's it. And then
• 20:17
  Speaker 5: it becomes much more popular than it ever would have
• 20:19
  Speaker 5: been if you had just ignored it. The same thing
• 20:21
  Speaker 5: with Velikovsky. Another guy, Zacharias Sitchin, came along, an Azerbaijani author.
• 20:27
  Speaker 5: He also was big into Mesopotamian misinterpretation. You're going to
• 20:32
  Speaker 5: have that honking noise because I mispronounced Mesopotamian, right?
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: Matt is pretty consistent. He's pretty good with that button.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: We mispronounce a lot of things.
• 20:39
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I know.
• 20:41
  Speaker 5: And I'm not an archaeologist, so I'm going to mispronounce
• 20:44
  Speaker 5: a few things. He came out with a series of
• 20:47
  Speaker 5: books saying that the Mesopotamians knew about 12 planets, and
• 20:51
  Speaker 5: that included the moon and the sun and this mysterious
• 20:55
  Speaker 5: other planet. He included Pluto in this as well. And
• 20:59
  Speaker 5: he basically is misinterpreting some scrolls that they had and
• 21:03
  Speaker 5: some texts that they had. But he was saying there's
• 21:06
  Speaker 5: this 12th planet, which is called Nibiru, that had these
• 21:10
  Speaker 5: aliens on it called the Anunnaki, which were part of
• 21:12
  Speaker 5: the Sumerian myth. They were like gods, kind of. They
• 21:15
  Speaker 5: visited Earth long ago. They created humans genetically. You know, da-da-da-da-da.
• 21:20
  Speaker 5: He wrote seven or eight books about this.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 21:25
  Speaker 5: Loosely based on Velikovsky. And then finally... Nancy Leder shows up,
• 21:29
  Speaker 5: and this was a woman in the late 1990s and
• 21:32
  Speaker 5: early 2000s who said that she was, and this is
• 21:35
  Speaker 5: absolutely true. She was being communicated with by Zaytans, which
• 21:41
  Speaker 5: I believe was from Zeta Reticuli, which is the Betty
• 21:43
  Speaker 5: and Barney Hill UFO case. They were abducted, lost time,
• 21:48
  Speaker 5: kind of what made abductions popular in the 50s and 60s.
• 21:53
  Speaker 5: The Zaytans telepathically communicated with Nancy Leder, told her about
• 21:57
  Speaker 5: Nibiru passing Earth on May 27, 2003.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: And when you say this is absolutely true, you mean.
• 22:05
  Speaker 5: The claims that she was making. This is what she claimed.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's true that she claimed it. Okay.
• 22:09
  Speaker 5: She was being telepathically communicated with by the Zaytans who
• 22:14
  Speaker 5: told her about Nibiru. I cannot remember if Nibiru was
• 22:17
  Speaker 5: populated or not. Maybe the Anunnaki were there. She had
• 22:20
  Speaker 5: a lot of stuff that she said. And that this
• 22:23
  Speaker 5: planet was going to sweep by Earth and wipe us
• 22:25
  Speaker 5: all out on May 27, 2003. Again, a day you
• 22:26
  Speaker 5: may remember.
• 22:29
  Speaker 5: Waking up and brushing your teeth and going about your
• 22:31
  Speaker 5: life and not having the planet destroyed.
• 22:33
  Speaker 4: Or a day you forgot about because nothing happened.
• 22:36
  Speaker 5: Yeah. Or we're a simulation now. She also claimed the
• 22:40
  Speaker 5: comet Hale-Bopp wasn't real, which I found very funny, personally,
• 22:44
  Speaker 5: because this was literally one of the brightest comets in
• 22:46
  Speaker 5: the 20th century. I saw it from inside my house.
• 22:50
  Speaker 5: It was so bright, I could look out a window
• 22:52
  Speaker 5: and see it in the night sky.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 22:53
  Speaker 5: A bunch of amateur astronomers went to her house, her apartment.
• 22:57
  Speaker 5: And tried to get her to come outside and they
• 22:58
  Speaker 5: could show it to her and she refused to come out.
• 23:00
  Speaker 5: It was the whole thing. So Nancy notwithstanding, there were
• 23:03
  Speaker 5: a lot of people who believed this stuff at the time.
• 23:07
  Speaker 5: And it got serious. Nancy claimed, and this is a
• 23:10
  Speaker 5: trigger warning here if you like pets, she claimed she
• 23:13
  Speaker 5: killed her dog to prevent it from having to suffer
• 23:16
  Speaker 5: through the devastation that was going to happen in 2003
• 23:20
  Speaker 5: from this. We do not know if she really did that.
• 23:22
  Speaker 5: Don't even know if she had a dog because she
• 23:24
  Speaker 5: said a lot of weird stuff. And I think she
• 23:28
  Speaker 5: honestly believed this stuff, but she's wrong. And this was
• 23:32
  Speaker 5: one way. So Nibiru is a gas giant planet like
• 23:36
  Speaker 5: Jupiter or maybe a brown dwarf that was coming in
• 23:39
  Speaker 5: from the outer solar system. It's on a 3,600-year orbit
• 23:43
  Speaker 5: that passes by the sun every 3,600 years, which explains, again,
• 23:47
  Speaker 5: some biblical disasters. It was coming back in 2003 and
• 23:51
  Speaker 5: was going to cause floods and tsunamis and earthquakes and
• 23:54
  Speaker 5: cats and dogs living together, all that kind of stuff.
• 23:58
  Speaker 5: And of course, it didn't happen. And I wrote about
• 23:59
  Speaker 5: this quite a bit. I said, listen, you can see Jupiter,
• 24:03
  Speaker 5: even though Jupiter is 600 million kilometers away, something like that.
• 24:08
  Speaker 5: It is one of the brightest objects in the sky.
• 24:10
  Speaker 5: A brown dwarf would be just as bright. A Jupiter-sized
• 24:14
  Speaker 5: planet would be visible to the naked eye from well
• 24:18
  Speaker 5: over a billion kilometers away, and it would take years
• 24:20
  Speaker 5: to get from there to here. So even in the
• 24:23
  Speaker 5: year 2000, it's like, well, where is it? Why can't
• 24:24
  Speaker 5: we see it? Oh, it's cloaked. It's invisible. It's infrared.
• 24:29
  Speaker 5: It's this and that.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: The lack of evidence is evidence for an even more
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: sophisticated conspiracy.
• 24:36
  Speaker 5: Precisely. And Daniel, you said this in the episode about UFOs.
• 24:40
  Speaker 5: And that, when I was driving along in my car,
• 24:43
  Speaker 5: I do listen to this podcast, clearly. And you said
• 24:48
  Speaker 5: that in the UFO episode, that that plays into it because...
• 24:51
  Speaker 5: If you could see this evidence, it wouldn't be a cover-up.
• 24:54
  Speaker 5: To have a cover-up, there has to be something that
• 24:56
  Speaker 5: is up-covered. Am I getting that grammatically correct?
• 25:00
  Speaker 4: Probably.
• 25:03
  Speaker 5: And so that's how good the government is. They're able
• 25:05
  Speaker 5: to cover up.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 25:07
  Speaker 5: A gas giant planet heading toward Earth? Yeah, no. As
• 25:11
  Speaker 5: I like to point out to people, you remember the
• 25:14
  Speaker 5: Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky conspiracy? And how many people knew
• 25:17
  Speaker 5: about that? Four, if you include Hillary Clinton and Monica's
• 25:21
  Speaker 5: friend who leaked this whole thing. Four people knew about this,
• 25:25
  Speaker 5: and yet it got leaked out. If you're telling me
• 25:27
  Speaker 5: that tens of thousands of astronomers planet-wide– are not going
• 25:31
  Speaker 5: to be standing on their roofs screaming about a planet
• 25:34
  Speaker 5: heading toward Earth, you don't know any astronomers because you
• 25:38
  Speaker 5: cannot shut us up. Clearly, I've been talking for like
• 25:41
  Speaker 5: three hours here without even taking a breath. So, you know, clearly.
• 25:45
  Speaker 5: So that's one. The planet extinction is something I debated
• 25:50
  Speaker 5: and wrote about for years, which is why I'm a
• 25:51
  Speaker 5: little passionate about it. I even debated Nancy Leder personally
• 25:56
  Speaker 5: on Coast to Coast AM. What? which is a conspiracy
• 25:58
  Speaker 5: theory radio show. I don't know if it's still on.
• 26:01
  Speaker 5: It was on for years and years with Art Bell.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: I don't think so.
• 26:04
  Speaker 5: And then George Nury. And I was a guest. I
• 26:08
  Speaker 5: was on quite a few times talking about real science.
• 26:10
  Speaker 5: They asked me to debate Nancy Leder. And contrary to
• 26:14
  Speaker 5: every instinct I had, I said yes. And she– I mean,
• 26:19
  Speaker 5: it was very clear that this person's grip on reality
• 26:22
  Speaker 5: was tenuous. And it became a very difficult situation for
• 26:26
  Speaker 5: me because– It is easy to have fun with grifters,
• 26:31
  Speaker 5: to make fun of them, to mock them and all
• 26:35
  Speaker 5: that kind of stuff. But when somebody is clearly having
• 26:38
  Speaker 5: issues that way, it's a much more delicate situation. I
• 26:40
  Speaker 5: did not enjoy that at all. And that was one
• 26:42
  Speaker 5: of the last times I ever did something like that.
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: It sounds like a mental health issue.
• 26:47
  Speaker 5: Yes, very much. And I'm not a psychologist. I cannot
• 26:50
  Speaker 5: diagnose her. I'm saying that's what it sounded like to me.
• 26:53
  Speaker 5: I have run into... Any number of con artists with
• 26:59
  Speaker 5: the face on Mars we're going to talk about and
• 27:01
  Speaker 5: with people who said the moon landings were faked, horoscopes, anti-vaxxers,
• 27:07
  Speaker 5: any sort of anti-science conspiracy, you will find people who
• 27:11
  Speaker 5: are making tons of money on it. Sometimes they become
• 27:15
  Speaker 5: head of health and human services on this country. It's
• 27:18
  Speaker 5: weird that way.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: Speaking generically, yes.
• 27:21
  Speaker 5: But other times these are folks who are– having mental issues,
• 27:26
  Speaker 5: and it's sad. It's awful. And there's not much you
• 27:30
  Speaker 5: can do about that. Yeah. Well, that was one thing.
• 27:32
  Speaker 5: That was one cadre, one cohort of conspiracy people saying it.
• 27:37
  Speaker 5: Another one was that a solar flare was going to
• 27:40
  Speaker 5: wipe out all life on Earth. Now, the sun has
• 27:42
  Speaker 5: a magnetic field, and the magnetic field gets stronger and
• 27:46
  Speaker 5: weaker over time over this 11-year solar cycle. When it peaks,
• 27:50
  Speaker 5: when it's very strong... You get a lot of sunspots
• 27:53
  Speaker 5: and a lot of solar storm activity, solar flares, coronal
• 27:57
  Speaker 5: mass ejections. These are immense explosions on the sun. Solar
• 28:01
  Speaker 5: flares are very bright. They blast out gamma rays, high
• 28:05
  Speaker 5: energy radiation. Coronal mass ejections are more like a release
• 28:09
  Speaker 5: of vast amounts of matter, about a billion tons of
• 28:12
  Speaker 5: hydrogen blown out from the sun, sometimes at extremely high speed.
• 28:17
  Speaker 5: These can interact with Earth's magnetic field and create all
• 28:20
  Speaker 5: kinds of problems, blackouts, they can destroy satellites. We've had
• 28:24
  Speaker 5: issues like that in the past. And as it happens,
• 28:27
  Speaker 5: 2012 was kind of looking like around the time the
• 28:30
  Speaker 5: sun was going to have a maximum of activity. But
• 28:33
  Speaker 5: then five and a half years earlier, when it was
• 28:36
  Speaker 5: at solar minimum, that kind of dragged on for longer
• 28:39
  Speaker 5: than people expected. And so the solar peak didn't actually
• 28:43
  Speaker 5: happen until 2014.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: Because the sun is kind of mysterious and hard to
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: describe and not fully understood, right?
• 28:49
  Speaker 5: Yeah, the magnetic field is driven by processes inside the sun,
• 28:54
  Speaker 5: movement of mass, parcels of hot hydrogen. This stuff is
• 28:59
  Speaker 5: incredibly difficult to work with because, you know, it's hot
• 29:02
  Speaker 5: and under pressure. We can't really work with it. But
• 29:04
  Speaker 5: I mean, work with it theoretically. The equations that define
• 29:08
  Speaker 5: how fluids flow, very complicated. You throw in magnetism, which
• 29:12
  Speaker 5: is a nightmare. And you've got some of the most
• 29:15
  Speaker 5: complex physics you can do. And so it's very, very
• 29:19
  Speaker 5: difficult to predict what's going to happen. So the Sun
• 29:22
  Speaker 5: cycle was delayed by a year or two. And we
• 29:26
  Speaker 5: just didn't see that kind of activity. It can cause
• 29:28
  Speaker 5: a lot of grief. The 1859 eruption that actually is
• 29:33
  Speaker 5: when we discovered all of this stuff caused widespread problems,
• 29:37
  Speaker 5: even though we didn't have electronics. That's called the Carrington event.
• 29:40
  Speaker 5: If the Carrington event were to happen today, yikes, we'd
• 29:43
  Speaker 5: have blackouts. You'd lose computer accessibility. Banks would go down.
• 29:48
  Speaker 5: It would be a disaster. Ironically, and I love pointing
• 29:52
  Speaker 5: this out to people, in 2012... There was a gigantic
• 29:57
  Speaker 5: storm that blasted off the sun.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: But it missed us.
• 30:00
  Speaker 4: By a lot?
• 30:01
  Speaker 5: Yeah. If you think the directions around the sun is
• 30:03
  Speaker 5: like a clock, the earth was at like at two
• 30:06
  Speaker 5: o'clock and this thing shot off at 12 o'clock. So
• 30:09
  Speaker 5: it missed us by, you know, 20, 30 degrees, something
• 30:12
  Speaker 5: like that. Had it hit us, it would have been devastating. Wow.
• 30:15
  Speaker 5: But it missed. So the Maya were wrong again. Those
• 30:19
  Speaker 5: are boneheads. So that turned out to be a nothing burger.
• 30:24
  Speaker 5: The last one, and this one's kind of my favorite
• 30:26
  Speaker 5: because it's so silly. There is a supermassive black hole
• 30:30
  Speaker 5: in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy,
• 30:33
  Speaker 5: called Sagittarius A star. Four million times the mass of
• 30:36
  Speaker 5: the sun. It is a beast. Wow. As it happens,
• 30:39
  Speaker 5: every big galaxy has one of these. And ours is
• 30:42
  Speaker 5: actually a little underweight. For a galaxy our size, we
• 30:45
  Speaker 5: should have a much bigger black hole. We don't know why.
• 30:48
  Speaker 5: That's a thing. But it still is. It's there. It's big.
• 30:51
  Speaker 5: But it's what we call quiescent. Sometimes these things are
• 30:54
  Speaker 5: actively feeding, material falls in, gets very hot, blasts out
• 30:58
  Speaker 5: X-rays and gamma rays, and these can be so bright
• 31:03
  Speaker 5: that just this phenomenon can outshine all the other stars
• 31:06
  Speaker 5: in that galaxy, and we can detect them from billions
• 31:09
  Speaker 5: of light years away. They're powerhouses. Our galaxy is not
• 31:12
  Speaker 5: one of them. However, the Earth orbits the sun, and
• 31:17
  Speaker 5: so as we sit here on the Earth and we
• 31:19
  Speaker 5: look up at the sun and we compare it to
• 31:21
  Speaker 5: the background stars, It appears to move through the sky
• 31:24
  Speaker 5: relative to these background stars. There are a dozen or
• 31:28
  Speaker 5: so constellations it moves through, and you've heard of them. Leo, Aries, Pisces, Gemini.
• 31:35
  Speaker 5: One of them is Sagittarius, the archer. Sagittarius, that is
• 31:39
  Speaker 5: the direction in the sky towards our black hole. That's
• 31:43
  Speaker 5: why it's called Sagittarius A star. When the sun passes
• 31:47
  Speaker 5: by that black hole, according to the conspiracy theorists, Their
• 31:51
  Speaker 5: gravity is going to align, and then something terrible is
• 31:55
  Speaker 5: going to happen. The Earth is going to be destroyed, floods, tsunamis.
• 31:58
  Speaker 5: The moon is going to fall into us. Something horrible
• 32:00
  Speaker 5: is going to happen. And in 2012, that was supposed
• 32:04
  Speaker 5: to happen. Same thing with this black hole. The sun
• 32:08
  Speaker 5: aligns with this black hole on December 21st, 2012, according.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: To these people.
• 32:14
  Speaker 5: And this is going to cause all of these kind
• 32:15
  Speaker 5: of problems. And it turns out, no. A– This happens
• 32:20
  Speaker 5: every year, right? The earth orbits the sun every year.
• 32:23
  Speaker 5: So the sun passes through Sagittarius every year and it
• 32:26
  Speaker 5: passes by this black hole every year. Nothing happened. Two,
• 32:31
  Speaker 5: it doesn't get that close. It actually gets about five
• 32:34
  Speaker 5: degrees from the black hole. So that's not that close together.
• 32:37
  Speaker 5: That's about half the size of your fist held at
• 32:40
  Speaker 5: arm's length in the sky. So that's pretty far in
• 32:43
  Speaker 5: astronomical terms. So that's another problem. Another one. Is that
• 32:47
  Speaker 5: even though, yes, this thing has 4 million times the
• 32:50
  Speaker 5: mass of the sun, it's like a billion times farther away,
• 32:53
  Speaker 5: like literally a billion times. Gravity drops with the square
• 32:57
  Speaker 5: of distance. A billion squared is 10 to the 18th.
• 33:01
  Speaker 5: What is that, a quintillion?
• 33:02
  Speaker 4: It's a lot.
• 33:03
  Speaker 5: So this black hole has about a quintillionth of the
• 33:07
  Speaker 5: gravitational effect on Earth that the sun does.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 33:10
  Speaker 5: So literally, or a trillionth, I think. I did the math.
• 33:14
  Speaker 5: I think it's a trillionth when you do all the
• 33:16
  Speaker 5: math together. So literally, Mercury, the planet Mercury, has a
• 33:20
  Speaker 5: far stronger gravitational effect on Earth than this black hole does.
• 33:25
  Speaker 5: And it aligns with the sun every four months. And
• 33:27
  Speaker 5: so every four months, you are not experiencing tsunamis and
• 33:30
  Speaker 5: floods and cats and dogs living together. So clearly, this
• 33:33
  Speaker 5: is all nonsense. And I could go on and on
• 33:36
  Speaker 5: and on. Those are sort of the big claims. They
• 33:40
  Speaker 5: get smaller and smaller and more and more ridiculous. But
• 33:43
  Speaker 5: in the end, the Maya were not magic. They were
• 33:47
  Speaker 5: not in touch with some spiritual realm that could predict
• 33:51
  Speaker 5: the end of the world. It was just simply the
• 33:54
  Speaker 5: odometer on their calendar ticking over and time to buy
• 33:58
  Speaker 5: a new warranty on their calendar.
• 34:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 34:02
  Speaker 5: Amazing.
• 34:02
  Speaker 4: All right, let's take a break.
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: And when we come back, we're going to move from
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: the Mayans up to the modern era and talk about
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: how CERN is going to end the world.
• 34:10
  Speaker 5: A matter of concern.
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: All right, Daniel, we're passing it off to you. You
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: are leading the next conspiracy theory.
• 34:45
  Speaker 5: And try to be quick, will you? My God, that
• 34:47
  Speaker 5: first guess. Holy crap.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: I thought the millennium was going to take over before
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: he was going to finish.
• 34:54
  Speaker 5: That was just because we were whizzing around at almost
• 34:55
  Speaker 5: the speed of light. It just made it seem a
• 34:57
  Speaker 5: lot longer.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: One of the most pervasive and frustrating and amazing conspiracy
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: theories I hear a lot is that CERN is opening
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: portals to other dimensions, summoning demons.
• 35:10
  Speaker 5: This one's true.
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure.
• 35:14
  Speaker 5: I heard it on the internet.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: It's amazing. I've appeared on other podcasts with a broader audience.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: And whenever I check the YouTube comments, they're always like,
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: this guy's from CERN. Why didn't you ask him about
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: the demons? Or like, we should shut CERN down until
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: they stop opening portals. And it's like people actually believe
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: this stuff. It's what a lot of people think about CERN.
• 35:33
  Speaker 4: What does it even mean? I don't think I understand.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: I mean, you open a rift in space-time, you let
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: in demons, and then they come and ravage Earth's children.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: I mean, what's complicated about that, Kelly?
• 35:46
  Speaker 5: I hadn't heard demons. I heard black holes and other
• 35:48
  Speaker 5: things like that and time ships.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 35:50
  Speaker 5: But demons, that's awesome.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: So there's demons. There's black holes also. Then there's the
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: people who look at the CERN logo, which has– a
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: bunch of loops that represent the colliders, and they see
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: 666 hidden in the logo. And they're like, see, that
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: confirms it.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: What?
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Check out the CERN logo. And also, there
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: are folks that think that turning on CERN shifted the
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: timeline and put us in an alternate universe where, like,
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: The Bernstein Bears are now the Berenstein Bears, and Fruit
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: of the Loom now doesn't have a cornucopia on it,
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: and Mandela died in prison or something. You know these
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: Mandela effects where people feel like things are different from
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: what they remember as a child, and they're roughly connected
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: to something that happened in the 2000s and CERN turned
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: on in the 2000s, and so therefore it must be
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: Daniel did this to you.
• 36:42
  Speaker 4: And is there any, like, particular... I'm still trying to understand.
• 36:46
  Speaker 4: So is the idea that, like, if you're shooting particles
• 36:49
  Speaker 4: really fast, that's what opens the rift in the time continuum? Or, like,
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: is there any.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: You are already thinking about this in more detail than
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: anybody who's made these claims, Kelly.
• 36:59
  Speaker 6: Okay.
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: But so Phil had, like... I mean, those were pretty
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: detailed conspiracy theories.
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: Like, the science was wrong, but they had thought about
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: it pretty hard to try to make the pieces fit together.
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: There's nothing like that happening here. It's just, like, physicists
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: are evil.
• 37:12
  Speaker 5: Demons.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, demons. And there's another connection with demons, which is
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: people think that CERN is actually performing occult rituals and
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: that we're sacrificing children and all sorts of crazy stuff.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: It's amazing what people out there think. Now, like many
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: conspiracy theories, there are some nuggets of information out there
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: that have been misinterpreted that are the source of these things.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: So you can understand this better maybe when I tell
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: you like, where this all comes from. And some of
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: it is popular science's fault. Some of it is scientists' fault, right?
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: We're going to put blame everywhere it belongs. So number
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: one is Dan Brown, right? His book, Angels and Demons,
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: shows the control room at CERN, and it's all amazing
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: and fancy and, you know, incredible technology. And it sort
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: of puts CERN in the popular culture. And it's there
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: because they're creating antimatter, which they're going to take to
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: Rome and, you know, set up a whole plot there.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: But that sort of like makes CERN more publicly aware
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: than it had been before. And then in 2004, CERN
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: gets a gift from India, and it's a statue of
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: the god Shiva, which is the god of destruction and creation.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: And it's a very appropriate statue because at CERN, what
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: do we do? We smash protons together, destroying them, and
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: we create new kinds of stuff. And so like, hey,
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: kind of cool artistic sculpture. But if you don't know
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: anything about Hinduism, it just looks a little bit mystical
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: and occult, I suppose. And then in 2009, a guy
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: who actually worked for CERN, the research director, was trying
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: to make a comment about how we can explore new
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: things and discover new stuff. And he used a metaphor.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: He said that we are going to open a door
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: to extra dimensions. And at CERN, we can explore whether
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: space has additional dimensions. But this term dimension, to a
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: lot of people, doesn't mean like a new direction of travel,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: another coordinate in your system. It means like, You know,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: a place you go where there are demons.
• 39:15
  Speaker 4: Or the metaverse.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the metaverse. And so this was covered breathlessly in
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: a newspaper. You know, here's the quote. Top boffin at
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: the Large Hadron Collider says the Titanic machine may possibly
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: create or discover previously unimagined scientific properties. or unknown unknowns.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: For example, an extra dimension out of this door might
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: come something or we might send something through it, said
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: Sergio Bertolucci, director for research and scientific computing at CERN.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: So the guy actually did say that to a And
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: that is the origin of the, like, we're opening a
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: door to demons story.
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: Wait, he said something about sending stuff through the door
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: or something coming through the door?
• 39:57
  Speaker 4: He, like, went... Yeah. I mean, that sounds like... Yeah.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: He was speaking metaphorically. He's trying to talk about, like,
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: the kinds of things we can discover, you know, conceptual doors.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: Not like we're literally opening a door and, like, walking
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: through it and bringing in demons or sending human children
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: or something like that.
• 40:11
  Speaker 4: This is why scientists need PR training.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 40:14
  Speaker 5: Like.
• 40:15
  Speaker 4: A lot of us just don't know what we're doing.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 40:17
  Speaker 5: That would help. But, you know, even so, there are
• 40:20
  Speaker 5: just metaphors and analogies that you kind of have to
• 40:24
  Speaker 5: use to say stuff to the press. And no matter
• 40:30
  Speaker 5: what you say, something is going to get misinterpreted. And
• 40:33
  Speaker 5: so at some level, you know, you got to be
• 40:36
  Speaker 5: careful and don't say, well, yeah, sure, this could cause
• 40:39
  Speaker 5: the flaming death of every human being on the planet.
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 40:42
  Speaker 5: Maybe not. But saying something like this, you know, we
• 40:46
  Speaker 5: say in astronomy, we're going to open a new window
• 40:48
  Speaker 5: on the universe when we launch a new telescope.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: What's coming through that window, Phil? Yeah, exactly.
• 40:53
  Speaker 5: And to be honest, there's also the thing about the
• 40:57
  Speaker 5: Large Hadron Collider causing a black hole. That was also
• 41:00
  Speaker 5: caused because of an actual paper, right?
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And that's an interesting science question. And, you know,
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: you can't control what scientists are going to say, and
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: you also can't control what students do. which caused more problems.
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: In 2016, a bunch of students at CERN, and you
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: have to understand CERN is a research lab, which means
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: there's scientists from all over the world, thousands and thousands,
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: and they bring their students. So there's like young people
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: there and, you know, they go off and do what
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: young people do. They get drunk, they have fun, they
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: have parties when they dress up in costume. Some kids
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: in 2016 thought it would be hilarious to dress up
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: in costume and and do a mock human sacrifice in
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: front of the Shiva statue and take a video of
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: it and put it on the internet. And this video
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: is out there.
• 41:45
  Speaker 5: Did they dress as Maya? Because that would be, oh man.
• 41:49
  Speaker 4: That would be too much.
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: It's, you know, it's ridiculous. And this video is what
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: people cite. I engage in the comments on YouTube. People
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: are like, well, we all know you're sacrificing children. I'm like,
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: that's not happening. They're like, I've seen the video, man. And,
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: you know, what do you say to that? Like, yeah,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: I've also seen videos of Halloween parties, right? Those are
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: not proof of sacrifice. Like, everybody's wearing a costume. Like,
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: it's not real. But, you know, it's out there and
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: it's confusing to people. And, you know, this is what
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: students do. And I secondhand even know who these people are.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: And they're just a bunch of people, you know, thinking
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: this would be fun.
• 42:27
  Speaker 5: A lot of conspiracy theories have coincidences. When you have
• 42:30
  Speaker 5: something that is so big and involves so many people,
• 42:32
  Speaker 5: and I mean the conspiracy theory idea, it's like all
• 42:35
  Speaker 5: of NASA is involved in this. And then this happened
• 42:38
  Speaker 5: with the moon hoax, people who think the Apollo moon
• 42:40
  Speaker 5: landings were faked. And then an official died. One of
• 42:44
  Speaker 5: the NASA head guys wound up dying. And that is
• 42:49
  Speaker 5: a conspiracy theorist Christmas. If somebody involved in that organization dies-
• 42:56
  Speaker 5: Then it's like, oh, they were silenced. And why at
• 43:00
  Speaker 5: that time? And then they have this sort of an
• 43:03
  Speaker 5: event that they can swirl around and try to put
• 43:07
  Speaker 5: more pieces in, find more anomalies. That they can wedge
• 43:09
  Speaker 5: into there and make it all seem real. And so, yeah,
• 43:12
  Speaker 5: a video like that is inevitable. Not necessarily a video
• 43:16
  Speaker 5: of human sacrifice at the Large Hadron Collider, but something
• 43:20
  Speaker 5: in that vein, just whatever it might be. You know,
• 43:23
  Speaker 5: you blew a magnet or there was a fireball over
• 43:28
  Speaker 5: the LHC when something happened. It's just coincidence. And if
• 43:31
  Speaker 5: you have something big enough, a coincidence is inevitable and
• 43:34
  Speaker 5: that feeds into the idea.
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. And it doesn't even have to be like obviously
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: connected to CERN. There was also a video of a
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: tunnel opening ceremony in Switzerland. So Switzerland is very good
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: at building tunnels because they're surrounded by mountains. And they
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: dug this incredible 57 kilometer tunnel through the mountains, which
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: speeds up the trip from Zurich to Milan by an hour.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: Amazing technological engineering achievement. It goes under like three kilometers
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: of rock.
• 44:01
  Speaker 5: Wow.
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: And they had a tunnel opening ceremony and they hired
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: artists to do like a dance performance. And it's kind
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: of weird. And, you know, I don't know, it looks
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: a little weird. But people think that that's like an
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: occult ceremony at CERN. And they often cite it as
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: evidence that like, why would CERN have angels and demons
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: in their dance performance as an official thing at CERN?
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: But it didn't happen at CERN. It has nothing to
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: do with CERN, except that it's also a tunnel and
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: it's in Switzerland. But that's enough, right? That's like, well,
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: obviously there's like a Swiss demon tunnel cabal going on here.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: So other than it obviously being bad PR for the
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: general public to think there's occult stuff happening at CERN,
• 44:46
  Speaker 3: has there been any implications in terms of impacts on
• 44:50
  Speaker 3: funding or anybody getting violent, trying to get into CERN
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: to get video to prove.
• 44:54
  Speaker 4: That there's demons there? To save the children. Yeah, that's right.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: I think the major impact is people's support for CERN.
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: You know, the public's support for big projects. People think
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: that scientists are wasting our time or they're doing evil stuff.
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: You know, they don't understand it. They don't trust it.
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: They see things that don't make sense and don't sit
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: right with them. And it just feeds this general, like, anti-expertise, anti-science,
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: you know, like, let's just shut it down because I
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: don't get it. What are they doing anyway?
• 45:28
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: And beyond this ridiculous demon stuff and the tunnel ceremony,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: there is the actual legitimate question of, will you destroy
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: the Earth when you do these collisions? And that's a
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: fair question, because there are theories that suggest that when
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: you collide particles at high enough energy, that you'll reach
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: some sort of quantum gravity regime where black holes can
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: be created. And like, while that would be fascinating from
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: the point of view of like, let's understand the universe,
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: you can ask like, do we want to be making
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: black holes? And this is something with a scientific answer.
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: Like CERN took that very seriously and did a bunch
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: of research into the question of like, could we create
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: black holes that are dangerous to the earth? And the
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: answer is a resounding no, because we're already doing collisions
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: in the atmosphere naturally at much higher energies than than
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: anything we can achieve at CERN. And so if those
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: collisions could create black holes, they would have already done so,
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: we wouldn't be here. So the fact that cosmic rays
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: have not obliterated the earth with black holes is very
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: strong evidence that we're not gonna produce earth obliterating black
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: holes at CERN.
• 46:34
  Speaker 5: This is perfect because this is debunking 101. If you
• 46:36
  Speaker 5: wanna know how to counter a conspiracy theory argument, and
• 46:42
  Speaker 5: people always say, you're just a debunker. And it's like,
• 46:44
  Speaker 5: do you understand what a debunker does? They correct bunk.
• 46:48
  Speaker 5: You're basically admitting that what you're saying is bunk when
• 46:51
  Speaker 5: you do this. But this is a trick that you
• 46:54
  Speaker 5: can pull out a ton of facts and numbers and
• 46:57
  Speaker 5: physics and whatever to disprove what they're saying. That's a
• 47:01
  Speaker 5: mistake for two reasons. One is that you're accepting their framing.
• 47:05
  Speaker 5: You're saying, okay, you're making this claim. Let's show why
• 47:08
  Speaker 5: the science disproves that. In detail, you're kind of accepting
• 47:11
  Speaker 5: that their claim is sort of based in science when
• 47:13
  Speaker 5: it's not. The other mistake is their eyes are going
• 47:16
  Speaker 5: to glaze over. They don't want to hear all the
• 47:17
  Speaker 5: math and physics and everything. However, if you can just
• 47:20
  Speaker 5: turn it a little bit and say, you know, if
• 47:23
  Speaker 5: that were true, the Earth would be destroyed a trillion
• 47:26
  Speaker 5: times a day because there are subatomic particles from space
• 47:29
  Speaker 5: hitting our atmosphere at far higher energies than the LHC
• 47:32
  Speaker 5: could ever produce. So clearly this is not happening. It's just, boom,
• 47:35
  Speaker 5: you're done. And that's a much more effective way to
• 47:38
  Speaker 5: debunk stuff.
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: And does that work? Like in your experience, have you
• 47:41
  Speaker 3: had conversations? Okay.
• 47:44
  Speaker 5: You do not need to finish that sentence. Sorry to interrupt.
• 47:49
  Speaker 4: No, that's fine.
• 47:50
  Speaker 5: I'm being flippant. And I interrupted you because it was funny.
• 47:54
  Speaker 5: When you have a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, they are typically
• 47:58
  Speaker 5: impenetrable to facts. You can think of them as being
• 48:02
  Speaker 5: in a cult. And there's just nothing you can say.
• 48:05
  Speaker 5: And as Daniel pointed out, anything that doesn't fit, fits.
• 48:11
  Speaker 5: Because if there's silence on this, then it's because it's
• 48:13
  Speaker 5: being covered up. If there's something that is clearly counteracting
• 48:16
  Speaker 5: what they're saying, that's a false flag operation. That's something
• 48:20
  Speaker 5: they put out there on purpose to make us look bad.
• 48:23
  Speaker 5: And so it's very, very difficult. What you can do
• 48:25
  Speaker 5: is talk about this stuff and hope that There are
• 48:28
  Speaker 5: people who maybe have heard this and they haven't heard
• 48:31
  Speaker 5: the really stuff about it and think, oh, you know,
• 48:36
  Speaker 5: if they heard demons, they'd be like, well, clearly that's wrong.
• 48:38
  Speaker 5: But a black hole, I know those are real. You
• 48:41
  Speaker 5: can hope that you can show them that this stuff
• 48:43
  Speaker 5: is nonsense. And so it's kind of those fence sitters
• 48:47
  Speaker 5: I'm typically aiming for, because I know that the cult
• 48:51
  Speaker 5: itself is very small, although they're very loud. But they're
• 48:56
  Speaker 5: typically not going to be convinced unless they predict a date.
• 49:01
  Speaker 5: And that's actually what happened, like I said, with Nancy Leder.
• 49:04
  Speaker 5: She was kind of a cult leader. She predicted a date.
• 49:07
  Speaker 5: And I said that when that date comes and goes,
• 49:10
  Speaker 5: there's going to be a coup. She's going to be
• 49:12
  Speaker 5: sort of– a lot of her people are going to leave,
• 49:14
  Speaker 5: but then her inner court is going to surround her
• 49:17
  Speaker 5: even more tightly. It's exactly what happened. And people thought
• 49:20
  Speaker 5: I was amazing that I predicted that. And it's like, no,
• 49:23
  Speaker 5: I read history. We've seen this happen over and over
• 49:26
  Speaker 5: and over again. So yeah, this is a very, very
• 49:29
  Speaker 5: tricky thing to debunk stuff like this.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: Well, I have engaged with folks about this, you know,
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: in the YouTube comments or whatever. And either they just
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: think that I'm lying, right? you're a plant from CERN
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: out here to confuse us. Or if they're not willing
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: to go that far, they're like, you know, well, then
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: you just don't know about it. You haven't seen everything
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: that's happening at CERN. You know, have you been everywhere?
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: Have you seen everything? You know, I think they're trying
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: to be kind. They're like, well, Daniel's just clueless. You know,
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: maybe he thinks he's telling the truth, but he's not aware.
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: And like, how could they keep this kind of stuff secret?
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: Like the implausibility of thousands of scientists from hundreds of
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: countries and You know, at a place where they're like
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: open tours, people can go and visit CERN, that we're
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: like somehow doing human sacrifices or opening portals to hell
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: or whatever. It just makes absolutely no sense. But you're right,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: it doesn't have to. And, you know, anything that happens,
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: they can just fold that into the conspiracy theory. And
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: I think that people have a motivation to believe that.
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: It works well in people's brains when their brain is
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: primed for that because they already have some anti-science resentment there.
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: or nerds were mean to them or something, that they
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: want to believe this. And I think we're seeing that
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: more broadly in politics, that people are accepting obvious nonsense
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: because it sits well with them, because they were primed
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: for that. And I think there's a lot of political
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: talent in identifying and exploiting that, unfortunately.
• 50:55
  Speaker 5: Sometimes people just want there to be more magic in
• 50:57
  Speaker 5: the world. And science... in their mind and the way
• 51:01
  Speaker 5: they've been taught and the way they see it on
• 51:02
  Speaker 5: TV and everything, the scientists just boil away all the
• 51:05
  Speaker 5: magic to leave fact. And that is, yeah. And Daniel's
• 51:09
  Speaker 5: laughing because that is absolutely not how science works. And
• 51:12
  Speaker 5: I tell people all the time, for example, you know,
• 51:15
  Speaker 5: when I see a rainbow, I appreciate it because it's
• 51:18
  Speaker 5: beautiful and it's lovely and it's just so amazing to
• 51:23
  Speaker 5: see it. I also understand the physics and that makes
• 51:25
  Speaker 5: it even cooler. It's like, oh, you have to stand
• 51:29
  Speaker 5: this way and the drops have to be this big
• 51:30
  Speaker 5: and all this kind of stuff. And it's like when
• 51:32
  Speaker 5: you know that, it makes it more magical to steal
• 51:38
  Speaker 5: the fantasy aspect of that word away from it and
• 51:41
  Speaker 5: make it more like emotion and wonder and awe. the
• 51:45
  Speaker 5: more you know about something, the more amazing it becomes.
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, totally agree.
• 51:50
  Speaker 5: Agreed. So if y'all are listening and wondering why it's
• 51:52
  Speaker 5: just Daniel and me talking about physics and astronomy and
• 51:55
  Speaker 5: stuff like that, that's because There are no conspiracies about biology, right?
• 52:01
  Speaker 3: We'll get to the vaccine conspiracy some other day, but
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: I'm not prepared today.
• 52:05
  Speaker 5: Or, you know, some other longstanding conspiracy about some basic
• 52:11
  Speaker 5: aspect of biology that threatens education. I don't think there's
• 52:15
  Speaker 5: anything like that. No, no.
• 52:17
  Speaker 4: Biology is conspiracy free.
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: Thankfully, everybody just accepts that we are correct, whereas y'all
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: are suspicious as heck.
• 52:25
  Speaker 5: So.
• 52:26
  Speaker 4: We've got to question everything.
• 52:27
  Speaker 5: That's true.
• 52:28
  Speaker 4: All right, let's take a break. And when we get back,
• 52:30
  Speaker 4: we're going to Mars.
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: All right, we are back, and our third conspiracy theory
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: for the day is bringing us to Mars.
• 52:55
  Speaker 4: Phil, take it away.
• 52:57
  Speaker 5: You know, this one is another one of my favorites.
• 52:59
  Speaker 5: I don't know if you all remember the face on Mars.
• 53:02
  Speaker 5: This was a photograph that was taken in 1976 by
• 53:07
  Speaker 5: the Viking 1 orbiter, and this is one of the
• 53:09
  Speaker 5: first spacecraft, not the first, but one of the first
• 53:12
  Speaker 5: that NASA sent to Mars. There was a lander that
• 53:14
  Speaker 5: landed on the surface, and there was an orbiter as
• 53:16
  Speaker 5: well that took pictures from space. And it took this
• 53:19
  Speaker 5: one picture of the Cydonia region of Mars, just this
• 53:22
  Speaker 5: named region, of a rock that was about two kilometers,
• 53:26
  Speaker 5: about a mile long. And it looked like a face.
• 53:29
  Speaker 5: It looks like a helmeted statue, like from Babylon or
• 53:34
  Speaker 5: something like that. You can clearly see an eye and
• 53:37
  Speaker 5: a nose and a mouth. Half of the face is
• 53:38
  Speaker 5: in shadow, like it's being lit from the side, because
• 53:40
  Speaker 5: it was. The sun was kind of low, and so
• 53:42
  Speaker 5: half of this rock is in shadow. But the illuminated half, look,
• 53:46
  Speaker 5: looks like a face. In fact... When they made printouts,
• 53:49
  Speaker 5: this is, you know, in the 1970s, they would print
• 53:51
  Speaker 5: out these photos. Somebody wrote face with an exclamation point
• 53:55
  Speaker 5: because it looks like a face.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 53:56
  Speaker 5: So, you know, you expect them to do that. Now,
• 53:59
  Speaker 5: of course, come along the conspiracy theorists, which say, It
• 54:03
  Speaker 5: looks like a face because it is a face. Now,
• 54:06
  Speaker 5: why it looks like a face, we don't know. Did
• 54:09
  Speaker 5: aliens carve it? Did alien gods who genetically engineered humans
• 54:14
  Speaker 5: 5,000 years ago force them to carve it? It could
• 54:17
  Speaker 5: be either of these two things. Or it could be
• 54:22
  Speaker 5: a rock that looks like a face. Now, jumping to
• 54:26
  Speaker 5: the end here is that we astronomers knew that this
• 54:29
  Speaker 5: was nothing. And in fact, there is a psychological effect
• 54:33
  Speaker 5: called pareidolia. And I think you guys have talked about
• 54:36
  Speaker 5: this on the podcast before. This is the tendency to
• 54:38
  Speaker 5: see familiar objects in patterns that are not necessarily random,
• 54:44
  Speaker 5: but don't show what you think they're showing. This is
• 54:47
  Speaker 5: precisely seeing faces in clouds. I have seen in clouds,
• 54:51
  Speaker 5: I've seen Yoda. I've seen dragons. I've seen birds. All
• 54:55
  Speaker 5: kinds of things. And faces, of course. And there's the
• 54:59
  Speaker 5: famous Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich. The Virgin Mary in
• 55:03
  Speaker 5: an underpass in Chicago, which was an oil stain. There
• 55:08
  Speaker 5: are a lot of these things.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: Every year in New Mexico, somebody finds a tortilla with
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: the face of Jesus on it.
• 55:12
  Speaker 5: Yes, precisely. I myself saw... Vladimir Lenin in my shower
• 55:18
  Speaker 5: curtain one time.
• 55:19
  Speaker 4: That's disconcerting.
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: This is true.
• 55:22
  Speaker 5: This is true. It was a water stain as I
• 55:26
  Speaker 5: brushed my arm against the fabric of the shower curtain.
• 55:29
  Speaker 5: It wound up looking like Lenin. I have a picture
• 55:31
  Speaker 5: of it. You can look this up. Look up fill
• 55:33
  Speaker 5: plate Lenin. You'll find the picture. It's Lenin. And so
• 55:37
  Speaker 5: we just tend to see this kind of stuff. And
• 55:39
  Speaker 5: we knew that when we sent more and better orbiters
• 55:44
  Speaker 5: to Mars, they would take a picture of this. And
• 55:46
  Speaker 5: they would show it's just a rock. And guess what?
• 55:49
  Speaker 5: That's exactly what happened. A later orbiter took a higher
• 55:53
  Speaker 5: resolution picture, and it doesn't look anything like a face.
• 55:56
  Speaker 5: And this is important because I would tell people, listen,
• 56:00
  Speaker 5: if we had the higher resolution picture first, you would
• 56:03
  Speaker 5: never have thought it looks like a face. And then
• 56:05
  Speaker 5: if you had seen the lower resolution picture, you'd say, oh, look,
• 56:07
  Speaker 5: isn't that funny? When you fuzz out the picture, it
• 56:09
  Speaker 5: looks like a face. But there never would have been
• 56:11
  Speaker 5: a conspiracy. So clearly, if you have a low resolution
• 56:14
  Speaker 5: image and you're basing a conspiracy on that, you got
• 56:17
  Speaker 5: to be careful because you know that higher res stuff's
• 56:20
  Speaker 5: going to come in and it's not going to be
• 56:21
  Speaker 5: a big deal.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: But Phil, I'm looking at a high res image of
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: your shower curtain and it really looks like Lennon. Oh
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: my gosh.
• 56:27
  Speaker 4: Does it? I got to see.
• 56:29
  Speaker 5: It still looks like Lennon, doesn't it? I post a
• 56:32
  Speaker 5: picture of Lennon next to the photo. And it's just,
• 56:36
  Speaker 5: it's actually, it's kind of remarkable. It's one of the
• 56:40
  Speaker 5: best examples of pareidolia I've ever seen. And it's funny
• 56:44
  Speaker 5: that it happened to me, somebody who already knew about
• 56:46
  Speaker 5: pareidolia and wrote about it. In fact, if you look
• 56:48
  Speaker 5: up angry slippers, angry slippers was a popular meme for
• 56:52
  Speaker 5: a while. I took that picture. It was a pair
• 56:55
  Speaker 5: of slippers, pink slippers that my mother-in-law gave to my daughter.
• 57:00
  Speaker 5: And they look angry. It's very funny. And they became
• 57:04
  Speaker 5: a meme for a while. So there you go.
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: So.
• 57:08
  Speaker 5: This face on Mars was championed by a guy named
• 57:11
  Speaker 5: Richard Hoagland, who makes a lot of claims. He was
• 57:14
  Speaker 5: an author. He's still alive. He's an author. He was
• 57:17
  Speaker 5: a news science advisor for CBS News for a while,
• 57:20
  Speaker 5: but he had no advanced training in science. He has
• 57:22
  Speaker 5: no classic science training or anything like that, which is fine.
• 57:26
  Speaker 5: You don't have to have all of this classic science
• 57:29
  Speaker 5: training to have a solid view of the universe. But
• 57:32
  Speaker 5: he wrote a book called The Monuments of Mars based
• 57:37
  Speaker 5: on this thing being a face. And what he said
• 57:39
  Speaker 5: was that, you know, even if this thing turns out
• 57:42
  Speaker 5: not to look like a face later, you know, hedging
• 57:44
  Speaker 5: his bet, it's sitting right next to something that looks
• 57:47
  Speaker 5: like a city on Mars.
• 57:49
  Speaker 2: What?
• 57:49
  Speaker 5: And he shows pictures of all of these rocks and hills.
• 57:53
  Speaker 5: And these are all large scale objects. These are hundreds
• 57:55
  Speaker 5: of meters across or kilometers across, big. One of them
• 57:58
  Speaker 5: looks like a pyramid. One of them looks like a
• 58:00
  Speaker 5: five-sided pyramid. And it turns out that's because there's erosion
• 58:05
  Speaker 5: on Mars. There is wind on Mars. There is sand
• 58:07
  Speaker 5: on Mars. It erodes the rocks, and you typically get
• 58:11
  Speaker 5: shapes that are simple geometric shapes like a pyramid. You
• 58:13
  Speaker 5: can get that. They're not great. They don't look like
• 58:17
  Speaker 5: the pyramids in Cairo, but they are relatively pyramid-shaped. And
• 58:21
  Speaker 5: you can get simple geometric solids like a five-shaped sort
• 58:24
  Speaker 5: of pentagonal pyramid. But he says this is clearly a city.
• 58:28
  Speaker 5: And what he did was he took a picture and
• 58:30
  Speaker 5: then he drew lines connecting all of these things together.
• 58:34
  Speaker 5: and then started playing with the math. And he's like, well,
• 58:36
  Speaker 5: here's the angle between the face and this five-sided pyramid
• 58:40
  Speaker 5: and this hill over here. And that angle is, you know,
• 58:44
  Speaker 5: when you take the sign of that angle and divide
• 58:46
  Speaker 5: it by the square root of two, you wind up
• 58:48
  Speaker 5: getting pi. And if you take the angle over here
• 58:51
  Speaker 5: or the length between this one, the face and this
• 58:54
  Speaker 5: rock and this rock and this other rock, and you
• 58:56
  Speaker 5: divide these two lengths, you get the square root of
• 58:58
  Speaker 5: five over E or something like that. I'm making these
• 59:01
  Speaker 5: numbers up. But these are his claims, right? Now, he's
• 59:05
  Speaker 5: measuring this off a photograph, so his angles are off.
• 59:08
  Speaker 5: They cannot possibly be perfect. He quotes way too many
• 59:11
  Speaker 5: decimal places a lot of the times, and then very
• 59:13
  Speaker 5: few other times. He picks a hill. that becomes some
• 59:17
  Speaker 5: sort of important hill, but not the hill right next
• 59:20
  Speaker 5: to it, which is the same size and looks just
• 59:22
  Speaker 5: the same. But you know why? It's because that one
• 59:25
  Speaker 5: doesn't give you your magic numbers when you do the
• 59:26
  Speaker 5: math to it.
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: He's p-hacking.
• 59:30
  Speaker 5: Yeah, and he picks 17 objects to draw these lines with.
• 59:33
  Speaker 5: And it turns out, if you think about it, there
• 59:35
  Speaker 5: are three points on a piece of paper. You can
• 59:38
  Speaker 5: connect them with three lines and that's it. If you
• 59:40
  Speaker 5: have four points, you can connect them with four lines,
• 59:43
  Speaker 5: the outer perimeter, And then cross two in the middle,
• 59:45
  Speaker 5: the two diagonals, the two opposites can be connected to
• 59:48
  Speaker 5: give you six lines. If you do this with more
• 59:50
  Speaker 5: and more points, the number of lines you can use
• 59:53
  Speaker 5: to connect them goes up very, very rapidly. And there
• 59:56
  Speaker 5: are zillions and zillions of angles to choose from, literally millions.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 5: When it comes to 17 objects, there are, I don't
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 5: even know, hundreds of thousands, millions of different lines and
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 5: angles that you can start playing with, especially when you
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 5: start dividing and multiplying these numbers. There is no number
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 5: you cannot find a reasonably close facsimile of when you're
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 5: doing this kind of math. So no matter what, he's
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 5: going to find magic numbers. And it's funny to me
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 5: that he didn't pick more obvious hills to do this
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 5: because then he could say, look, this hill's bigger. I'm
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 5: going to pick that one. There's our number.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 3: But also, has any city ever been built with like, well,
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: we can't put the Parthenon there because the angle isn't
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: pi to the statue.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 4: And like, is this how cities are built?
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that's feng shui. Oh, okay. And ley lines. Oh,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 5: you need to read more of the internet, Kelly.
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 4: No, I think I read the right amount of the
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 4: internet if I don't care.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 5: Yeah, there's tons of stuff like this out there. Imagine
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 5: these magic angles and numbers and everything like that. It's
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 5: all nonsense. None of it makes any sense. And the
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 5: fact of the matter is you can do this. I
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 5: actually have done this. I used to give talks on this.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 5: I would draw random dots on a piece of paper,
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 5: connect them, measure the angles and then show people, look here,
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 5: this is an angle divided by another angle and you
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 5: wind up getting this magic number. It's very easy to do.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 5: But Hoagland went– he went on TV talking about this.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 5: He wrote books talking about this, talking about these cities.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 5: And he never necessarily came right out and said it
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 5: was aliens carving these, but clearly he was saying these
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 5: were artificial cities.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 5: And it went on and on and on. And it was–
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 5: You probably never heard of this. And why am I
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 5: dredging up this thing? Well, because The Face on Mars
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 5: was a big deal at the time. In fact, they
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 5: made a movie, Mission to Mars, based on The Face
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 5: on Mars. And in fact, the My Apocalypse also had
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 5: a movie, 2012. So here we have two conspiracy theories
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 5: with terrible movies they made based on them. 2012 is
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 5: a whole other topic we can talk about some other time.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 5: With the mutating neutrinos and oh my God.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 4: That line also got me.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: But I had somebody at one of my talks the
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 3: other day asked me what I think about the face
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: on Mars. And so I think it's still in people's
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: minds today.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 5: That's interesting. That makes me happy and sad. Sad for
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 5: obvious reasons, but happy that they're sort of aware that
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 5: there are these cool things on Mars. And in fact,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 5: you can look at pictures of Mars and see smiley faces.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 5: There's a Mickey Mouse on Mars. It's very, I've written,
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 5: I don't even know how many articles about different things.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 5: You can look up, there's a nebula in Carina that
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 5: looks like it's flipping the finger at us.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: Oh, excellent.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 5: This is a real thing.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: I mean, you could just lie in the grass and
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: look at the clouds and see anything you want all
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: day long, right?
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 5: Yeah. And so this is, the reason I bring it
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 5: up is because there are an infinite number of these
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 5: conspiracy theories. They go on and on from, you know,
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 5: the World Trade Center coming down to 2012 to to anti-evolution,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 5: to CERN, to everything you can think of, they all
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 5: rely on the same sort of basic stuff. A basic
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 5: misunderstanding of science, sometimes a willful ignorance of science, manipulation
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 5: of numbers, coincidence. They don't want you to know these
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 5: things and all of this stuff.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: You're in the special club that is hearing the truth.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 5: That's right. You are intelligent enough to see through this stuff.
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 5: You're special. And so you get these very common methodologies.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 5: And if you understand them, you start to see this
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 5: stuff immediately when somebody presents you with you know, politicians
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 5: do this all the time. I'm not going to get
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 5: all partisan on you. Don't worry. But a lot of
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 5: politicians say a lot of stuff, which is clearly wrong
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 5: and involves a lot of conspiracies. And when you ask
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 5: them for evidence, they can't come up with it. Or
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 5: they just show you manipulated pictures or just a real picture,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 5: but it's misinterpreted. And this happens all the time. And
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 5: if you get your debunking kit, your skeptical kit ready,
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 5: if you always had that at the fore in your brain,
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 5: you can see through this stuff and your life is
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 5: going to be a lot better off for it.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah. All right.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 3: On that inspirational note, we're going to call it a day. Phil,
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: thank you so much for being on the show. This
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 3: was a ton of fun.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 5: Thanks for letting me blather on about this stuff.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 4: I have more.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 5: We can go on. Part two, three, ten, part pi,
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 5: any magical number you want.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a
• 1:04:36
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• 1:04:39
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• 1:04:41
  Speaker 3: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: Matt Kesselman.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: He really is a wizard. You can also find us
• 1:04:50
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• 1:05:00
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• 1:05:02
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• 1:05:07
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• 1:05:10
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• 1:05:13
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