The FLAT EARTH Story You Were Told is a LIE

This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen. Snacks. A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. More than 2,000 years ago, a librarian in Egypt figured out that the Earth was round, using nothing but a stick and a shadow and some basic math. And turns out, he was right. But not just kind of right. He actually calculated the actual size of the entire planet and got shockingly close. And this was not recently. This was around 240 BC. And here's the crazy part. No one really thought the Earth was flat. The ancient Greeks knew. Medieval scholars knew. Sailors knew. Nobody who studied the sky for a living seriously thought that you could fall off the edge. But yet somehow, thousands of years later, we ended up with preachers and rich people and elites and rappers feuding with astrophysicists and NBA champions, accidentally confusing school kids and a group of people flying all the way to Antarctica to try to settle this once and for all. Because the history of flat Earth isn't really the story of just a dumb idea or people that didn't understand science. It's the story of a question humanity answered and then kept unanswering over and over every single time someone invented a new way to prove it. This is the complete and genuinely hilarious history of flat Earth. So, sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up, dude? Welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Wednesday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from all history from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do in this tent is I try to figure out everything that's ever happened. And this is a fascinating one. This is a fun one. It kind of intersects with like conspiracy theory, forbidden knowledge, and also just like science that I guess people have known for legit 2,000 years. But before we jump in, I want to say a few things. First, I want to say thanks to you, dude, for tuning in. Every time you click on an episode or like, comment, anything like that, you help the show grow. You help my dreams come true. You keep the lights on in the tent, and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, I also want to say a big thanks to my pal, Christos Bakanapoulos, sitting right next to me with a brand new mic. What's that for, Christos? Mic stand. What's up, everybody? Why do you have a whole new mic stand? It's nice. It's nice. I walked in today into the tent deep in the woods where we record, and Christos has a 10-foot mic stand. It got you to say something. That is a good point, and that is exactly what the audience wanted to hear. They were like, finally, Christos has a mic stand. He's got a bigger mic. Camera's next. I'm just kidding around, guys. It's just funny to bag on Christos. You know, we all love him, right? Also, my pal Jesus is here. Doesn't even have a mic. Now, anyway, let's talk about Flat Earth, okay? This is fascinating. You probably heard people say, like, oh, yeah, they were sailing to the west from Europe to see if the Earth was flat. They were afraid they were going to fall off the Earth. Probably not. So let's just go all the way to the beginning and start with the guy who should have just ended this entire debate forever, and his name was Eratosthenes, and around 240 BC, he was the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. It's probably the most important collection of knowledge in the ancient world. Unfortunately, it burned down. but there's a whole other episode on that. Eratosthenes had heard that there was something strange happening year over year and it was called the Cyene, which is in modern-day Aswan in southern Egypt. So at noon on the summer solstice, the sun sat almost perfectly overhead and people could look down into a deep well and they could see sunlight hitting the bottom. So a vertical object standing there would basically cast no shadow. You can actually still see this in parts of Hawaii to this day. It shows up all over the world, but specifically Lanai. Can you search Lanai shadows? It's fascinating. And this happens because the sunlight is coming basically straight down. Now, Eratosthenes wanted to know whether the same thing would happen farther north. But on the same day, at the same exact time, he placed a vertical stick on the ground in Alexandria, hundreds of miles away. And in Alexandria, the stick casted a shadow. And that was basically the experiment. Same sun, same day, same exact time, two different cities, one farther north, one farther south. And one had no shadow, and one casted a shadow. Now, Eratosthenes realized that if the earth was perfectly flat, well, the sun's rays should be hitting both cities at basically the same angle. But for some reason, they weren't. Now, the simplest explanation was that the surface between these two cities was curved. So he basically measured the angle created by the stick and its shadow in Alexandria, and it came out to about seven degrees, roughly one fiftieth of a full circle. And then he used that to estimate the distance of, say, 5,000 stadia between Alexandria and Cyene. And a stadion was basically like an ancient unit of length. So if the distance represented about one fiftieth of the earth's curve, all they had to do was take that and multiply by 50. And just like that, Eratosthenes had an estimate for the circumference of the entire planet. And by many estimates, he landed within like a few percent of the actual number. Some people say it was like 250,000 stadia, while others say it was 252,000. Either way, it's insanely close. Now, how exactly close he got kind of depends on the length of the stadion that he used, which historians to this day still debate. It's said to be anywhere between like 490 feet to 690 feet, which, I mean, is a big difference in the calculation when you're talking about the circumference of the entire earth. But under a commonly used conversion, the answer falls within a few percent of the earth's roughly 40,000 kilometer circumference. So think about that. A guy with a stick, a shadow, and just some kind of basic geometry, measured the entire circumference and like the size of the planet, and got so close that it's still impressive literally 2,300 years later. Fun fact, actually, Eratosthenes was nicknamed Beta. It's not a slur. It's actually the second letter of the Greek alphabet, because people kind of joke that he was the second best at everything. Maybe that's where Beta kind of comes from, right? Like, people call each other Betas, and they're like, yeah, you're a Beta. But it's kind of like a, it's not, being Beta is not the worst. You know what I mean? Being a Beta is like, oh, you're actually the second best. But you're the first loser. You are the first loser. But if I'm going to be the first loser to like Michael Jordan, I'm like, that's pretty good. I'll take that. Me too. Now, roughly 240 BC, the round earth wasn't just something that philosophers were arguing about. They were actually like measuring it, which brings us to the first person who seriously tried to undo this. Now, fast forward to the sixth century, and we get a man named Cosmas Indicoplastus. Now, that name isn't even his real name. Indicoplastus is like a title that basically means the man who sailed, to India. Now, Cosmas was a merchant who traveled the seas, basically trading goods before eventually leaving the seas to become a monk. And around 550 AD, Cosmas wrote a book called Christian Topography, where he laid out basically his model of the universe. And he argued that the earth was flat and not only flat, it was rectangular, but specifically it was twice as long as it was wide. And that the whole cosmos was based like on like a tabernacle, like the sacred tent that God instructed the Israelites to build in the book of Exodus. Now, in his model, there's a giant mountain in the north that the sun basically circles behind every single day. And when it goes behind that mountain, that's what causes the night. So he basically designed the entire universe as a piece of like religious architecture. But here's a really important thing that people always get wrong. Cosmas was not a mainstream view. He was kind of a weird outlier at the time. There's a popular myth that everybody in like the middle ages was so dumb and they thought the earth was flat and that people were terrified of falling off the edge. It's just not true. Educated medieval scholars, including Christian ones, accepted a round earth. It was like really standard science and sort of geography at the time. So cosmos wasn't the last flat earther of the ancient world kind of holding out. He was more like a lone guy publishing a very specific theory that kind of satisfied his kind of religious hunch about, you know, reality. And most of his contemporaries like completely ignored it. And now this sets up a pattern that we're going to see over and over throughout this whole episode. Flat earth almost never comes from science. It comes from someone with a very particular reading of scripture, kind of deciding that the measurements must be wrong. Now, speaking of myths that everyone believes, we've got to talk about the famous round earth story of all time. And that's our boy, Christopher Columbus. Now, most of us probably grew up thinking that in 1492, everyone thought the world was flat and that Columbus was going to sail off the edge, but a very brave Christopher Columbus proved them all wrong and discovered that the earth was round. And he also discovered America and thought it was India, but called it India anyway. Hashtag Louis CK joke, all time. Great joke. Check that out. But anyway, almost every part of the story is wrong except the Lucy K part. That part is an actual joke. Now the scholars and the advisors who doubted Columbus weren't doubting him because they thought the earth was flat. They knew that it was round and they had known that for centuries. What they actually were arguing about was the size of the earth. And in fairness, they were right in doing so because Columbus's estimate for the size of the earth was wrong. You see Columbus wanted to reach Asia slash India by sailing West and to convince his advisors and the financiers. He basically used a bunch of cherry picked, outdated numbers that dramatically underestimated how big the earth was and overestimated how far East Asia had stretched. So in his math, Japan was only like 2,300 miles West of Europe, but the real distance is closer to like 12,000 miles. So the experts who told Columbus, no, this is way too far. They actually weren't ignorant. They were right. Like Asia was way farther West than he thought because there was an entire continent, really two continents in the way. So if these two enormous continents that no one in Europe really knew about hadn't happened to be sitting right in the middle of his path, well, Columbus and his crew would have run out of food and water and probably died out in the open. an ocean. So Columbus didn't discover that the earth was round. People already knew it, but he did get extremely lucky that America was in the way. So where did this whole story come from? This whole idea that Columbus was afraid of sailing off the edge of the earth? Well, it came mostly from one book. This was a wildly popular 1828 biography of Columbus written by a guy named Washington Irving. This is the same author that wrote Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Well, basically Irving dramatized a scene of Columbus being laughed at by flat earth believing clergy. And it was so entertaining that it basically became like history for the next two centuries. So even the story that we tell to basically prove that the earth is round and how Columbus figured it out and how everyone at the time thought that he was crazy, that's fiction. And that takes us to the modern flat earth movement, which starts with really one guy staring down a canal. So in England in the 1830s, there's a man named Samuel Rebotham. And Rebotham was a character. He was a self-taught inventor and a traveling lecturer, but also kind of like a little bit of like a con artist, you could say. He was kind of like selling like bootleg medicines under like different names. He actually later marketed a life-extending tonic and claimed that people could live to be hundreds of years old. But ironically, Rebotham himself died of lung disease in like his 60s. So whatever it was, he wasn't taking it. But his real legacy came from a stretch of water in the English Fens called the Old Bedford River. This is like a long, dead straight six-mile canal with no like locks, like no like you think like the Panama Canal, how it has like kind of ways to like control like water flow. Didn't have anything like that. No bends, just like perfect flat water for miles. Now around 1838, Rebotham waded out into that canal and basically kind of laid down near the surface. And he watched a boat with a flag on its mast kind of sail slowly away from him for six miles. And according to his math, if the earth was actually curved, the bottom of the boat should have dropped below the horizon. And if the earth was actually curved, the bottom of the boat and vanished long before it ever reached the end. But Rebotham claimed that he could see the entire boat with the flag all the way down to the waterline the entire six miles. So his conclusion was pretty clear. He was like, there's obviously no curve. And if there's no curve, the earth is flat. Now, the actual explanation for what he saw is something called atmospheric refraction. Light bends as it passes through layers of air of different temperatures, especially right over cold, flat water. So it genuinely can make distant objects appear to float up into view that should have been hidden by the wind. And so Rebotham was able to see the entire boat with the flag all the way down to the waterline. And so Rebotham claimed that he could see the entire boat with the flag all the way down to the It's like a known measurable effect. We were talking about this on another episode, the Flying Dutchman. It's the same exact phenomenon where people were like, I saw a boat that was flying. And they didn't see a boat that was flying. But to them, they did see a boat that was flying because basically it created a mirage effect. And the boat was sitting high up in the air. It looks crazy. You can actually see like modern day tankers that have the same exact thing. But, you know, for Rebotham, he didn't see refraction or some type of like, you know, weird science talk about air and light. He saw proof. So Rebotham, he didn't see refraction or some type of like, you know, weird science talk about air and light. He saw proof. So he took that experiment on the road and started giving lectures across England and then eventually published a book under a pen name, Parallax. And he literally called the book Zetetic Astronomy, Earth, Not a Globe. Now that word Zetetic comes from a Greek word meaning to seek or to inquire. So the whole pitch was, hey, don't trust the authorities and their fancy math. Just trust what your own eyes seem to tell you. And that idea, trust for your eyes, distrust the experts, that is the motive that has really powered this movement ever since. So Rebotham, built a genuine following. And when he died, his believers didn't stop. They doubled down, which leads to one of like the pettiest, funniest, most drawn out feuds in the history of science. So in 1870, one of Rebotham's followers, a wealthy man named John Hampton, he put out a public challenge and he bet 500 pounds, which is a lot of money for the time, 500 pounds to anyone who could actually prove that the earth was curved. That's like $90,000 in today's money. And someone actually took him up on it, but not just anyone. The man who accepted this bet was a man named Alfred Russell Wallace. Now that name may sound familiar because Wallace was a naturalist who co-discovered evolution by natural selection. Literally, he was doing the same exact research at the same time as Charles Darwin. He's one of the most important scientists of like the whole 19th century. We know about Darwin. We don't really talk about Wallace, but Wallace being like, you know, like a legit scientist designed a much smarter version of this Bedford canal experiment. So he set up three markers along six miles of the canal, each at the exact same time. And so he was able to do that. And so he was able the exact same height above the water. And then he looked at all three through a telescope. Now, if the earth was flat, the three markers would line up perfectly in a straight row. You should see right through them. Instead, the middle marker appeared to be noticeably higher than the other two ends, which is exactly what you would expect if, you know, the water between them was basically like bulging up with like a curve. So even after the official looked in the telescope himself and declared Wallace the winner, Hampton refused to accept it. Hampton demanded his money back and declared the whole thing was a fraud. So he was able to do that. and it was set up against him and that, you know, he basically then launched what can only be described as like a years-long harassment campaign against Wallace. So he was writing letters and publishing pamphlets, calling Wallace a swindler and a con man. He even sent a letter to Wallace's wife telling her that her husband was a convicted felon and that she would soon be a widow, which is, I mean, just straight up like a threat. Like, yo, like, you're about to be single out here. So he got taken to court for libel multiple times and was even jailed for it. And even then, he still wouldn't quit. The whole ordeal dragged on for like over a decade. Now, Russell Wallace technically like won the 500 pounds, but between the endless lawsuits and legal fees, basically fighting off Hampton, historians agree that the entire thing ended up costing Wallace more money than he ever collected. He later called taking the bet one of the biggest regrets of his entire life. So the very first time a real scientist beat a, like a, I guess, a flat earther in like a head-to-head public money on the line experiment, the flat earther was just like, yo, this whole thing is going to be like, yo, this whole thing is going to be like, yo, this whole experiment is rigged and just went out of his way to make the winner miserable for the next 15 years. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about getting old. I turned 30 this month. Yeah, it's sad. And my body is not responding the way that it used to. I could feel exhausted all day and then I get into bed and then now I'm suddenly wide awake. I'm not recovering as quickly. My motivation is kind of inconsistent. My gym habits are not as sharp as they were. And it felt like a bunch of unrelated problems. But the one thing that I can connect to all those issues is that I'm not as sharp as they were. And I'm not as sharp as cortisol. It's my body's stress hormone. And it's supposed to rise when I'm under pressure and then come back down. The problem is between work and podcasts and stand up and answering emails and meetings and trying to raise a family and being a dad and staring at screens all day and doom scrolling, my stress response is constantly activated. And that's why I've been taking Mars Men. You can hear it. This bottle is basically empty because I legit take this every single day. And they sponsor the episode and I love them. 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And for a limited time to listeners of this show, we're going to get 50% off for life plus free shipping and three free gifts when they go to men go to mars.com. That's men go to mars.com for 50% off and three free gifts at checkout. And after you purchase, tell them that Mark and Christos sent you. Now let's get back to the show. By the late 1800s, this idea of flat earth had crossed the Atlantic and picked up some genuinely odd characters. So the first is Orlando Ferguson. He's a real estate man from hot spring, South Dakota, who in 1893 produced one of the most famous documents in the entire movement called map of the square and stationary earth. Now the map basically shows the earth as a flat kind of like squarish disc set inside a curved basin with the sun and the moon in like these little orbital tracks above it. There are four angels standing at all four corners. This is like a direct nod to the biblical phrase, like the four corners of the earth. And on the side of the map, there's a little cartoon of two men desperately holding on to a spinning ball, kind of mocking the global model with like a caption pointing to these poor guys, basically, you know, hurling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour and somehow not flying off. Now, Ferguson actually sold copies of this map for 25 cents and then claimed that it was backed up by 400 passages in the Bible. But the second promoter is even better because she was kind of in high society. She was in aristocracy and her name was Lady Blount. This is a real English aristocrat. And in 1893, the same year as Ferguson's map, she founded the Universal Zetetic Society. You've heard that word, Zetetic. It's literally named after Robotham's book. Now, Lady Blount was a Victorian era one woman media operation. She was like writing flat earth essays and poetry and like straight up novels kind of pushing this idea. And then in 1904, she went back to Robotham's holy site, this old Bedford Canal, and she staged the experiment all over again. But this time with a photographer using a telephoto lens. She published these photos and basically claimed once again that this proved that the water and by extension the entire earth was flat. And it was this photograph that really kept the movement alive and respectable looking, which really mattered because the next guy took flat earth and kind of turned it into an entire kingdom. So in the early 1900s, there's a man named Wilbur Glenn Vileva, and he basically took control of an entire town. The town is called Zion, Illinois, and it was basically a community founded as a strict religious utopia. So when its founder lost his power, Vileva took over and he ran the place like kind of like a religious like theocracy, So he basically controlled the businesses, the schools, all the rules, smoking, drinking, and even whistling on Sundays were basically frowned upon, like borderline illegal. But Vileva wasn't just like your casual kind of like, you know, ruler of a theocracy in, you know, Illinois. He was a devout and aggressive flat earther. So he didn't just believe flat earth. He was actively teaching it. Children in Zion schools were educated on the flat earth as fact curriculum. And when Vileva did something that no flat earther had ever been able to do before, he straight up got a radio station. So Zion was home to WCBD. It's one of the most powerful broadcasting stations in the region at that time. And Vileva used it to broadcast this flat earth theory to a huge audience across the country for years. So in the 1920s and 30s, this man had a mass media platform dedicated in part to basically convincing America that the globe was a lie. He was basically like the first like flat earth utopian. He was like the first YouTuber decades before the internet. And maybe my favorite detail of this whole thing is that Vileva actually traveled around the world multiple times in his life. Like he literally was traveling all over, like going around and literally was kind of, you know, moving around the earth that he claimed was flat and still came back and was like, no, it's for sure flat. So once Vileva died in 1942, the movement sort of went quiet for a little bit. And then eventually humanity did one thing that should have just ended flat earth forever. We left the planet, allegedly. Now, the modern Flat Earth Society was founded right at the dawn of the space age. So in 1956, a man named Samuel Shenton founded the International Flat Earth Research Society in England. And barely a year later, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. And the timing wasn't great for them. Over the next decade, rockets were going up, more satellites were sent, and then cameras started sending back images of what seemed to be a circular round planet. But this is the moment that defines the entire. movement going forward. When Shenton was shown the early photographs of curved earth from space, he didn't really care. He reportedly brushed it off with like, ah, it's easy to see how a photo like that could fool the untrained eye. And, you know, the photos aren't really proving anything. And then in 1969, Apollo 11. Allegedly, these astronauts landed on the moon and the astronauts were basically looking back at what they called the round blue marble floating in space. That was the earth. And for most people, that was proof that the earth was round. But for the Flat Earth Society, that was proof that the earth was round. But for the Flat Earth Movement, it was just a bigger conspiracy. The response was essentially like, OK, NASA is lying. And in fairness, NASA has, you know, not been fully truthful about everything. And they basically were like, all right, all of this is BS. So shortly after Apollo 11, an American named Charles K. Johnson took over the Flat Earth Movement in the 70s and basically ran an entire operation out of California. Sunscreen. Snacks. A stapler? Yeah, where he straight up declared that the moon landing was a Hollywood production, claiming that they were scripted by science fiction writers, that Kubrick was involved, which, maybe. Now, you have to appreciate the logic here, because it's kind of the same move. Robotham's Canal supposedly proved that the Earth was flat, and then Wallace did a better experiment and proved that it was round, and then the experiment was considered rigged. And now there are, you know, basically NASA saying like, hey, we have the whole planet, and then you have the same people from the Flat Earth Society being like, no, this is a lie. So every single time there's a new way to prove that the Earth is round, the movement kind of invents a new reason to not believe it. And then the evidence keeps on getting bigger and bigger, and so then the conspiracy is required. The conspiracy is required to explain it away, also gets bigger. But then something happened that Robotham never dreamed of. The internet showed up, and Flat Earth didn't just survive, it went viral. So around the 2010s, YouTube and social media gave Flat Earth a second bigger life than anything in history before, and it picked up something that it never really had before. It was famous believers. Now, the very first big one was a musician named B.O.B. January 2016, he basically, you know, went out and started tweeting that Flat Earth was legit, and, you know, to millions. Of his followers, they were like, whoa, this guy's onto something. He posted photos of the horizon, insisted that there was no curve, and literally was, like, taking the same exact, you know, old Bedford River kind of playbook and putting it onto Twitter. And then the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson couldn't help himself. He jumped in to correct him and explained the physics of why the horizon looks the way that it does. So B.O.B. did what any rapper would do. He dropped a diss track on Neil deGrasse Tyson. The song is literally called Flatline, and it went directly at Tyson. Now, Tyson, to his credit, he didn't back down, and his own nephew, who's coincidentally a rapper, actually recorded a response diss track defending the, you know, round Earth theory and basically called it Flat to Fact. So for a brief moment in 2016, at the same time that people are, like, making vines and playing Pokemon Go, a rapper was beefing with an astrophysicist about Flat Earth. Now, another crazy little fun fact, B.O.B. later tried to crowdfund launching his own satellite into space to personally find the curve, which, low-key, support. I actually like that. Be like, dude, I'm going to find the curve. I'm going to figure it out myself. I like that. Now, of course, the fundraising didn't really hit its goal because it requires, like, billions of dollars. But regardless, there is another controversial celebrity that actually came out of the NBA. So in 2017, Kyrie Irving casually said on a podcast with his teammates that he believed that, you know, the Earth is low-key flat. And because Kyrie is genuinely famous and loved, a lot of people listened. And apparently, I don't know if this is true, it got to a point where schoolteachers reported students coming into class saying that the Earth might be flat because Kyrie, one of the greatest, basketball players of all time, said so. So now science teachers were suddenly having to, like, argue against, like, an all-star point guard. It became a whole thing. Now, Kyrie eventually took back his statement in 2018 and then apologized specifically to all the science teachers that he had inadvertently made life harder for. And he explained that he'd kind of fallen down, like, an online rabbit hole of, like, Flat Earth videos and just kind of said it casually and didn't mean for it to be a whole thing, which is a rare thing in this whole story and actually, I think, really commendable for Kyrie. Like, he basically saw the evidence and was like, yeah, I was just kind of just, I was kind of BSing, like, I might be wrong on that. And that idea, admitting that you're wrong, is exactly what makes the final part of this whole thing, I think, so incredible. So by the 2020s, the movement had a favorite unanswerable challenge. If the Earth is really a globe, just go ahead and prove it. And one of the ways you prove it is you go to Antarctica. You see, on a globe near the South Pole during the Antarctic summer, the sun doesn't rise and set. It just kind of circles the sky for a full 24 hours without ever going down. It's called the midnight sun, and it seems like it's kind of impossible in the standard flat Earth model. So, you know, the sun kind of works like a spotlight that has to move away and set. So in 2014, someone decided to do it. And to his credit, he figured it out. His name is Will Duffy, and he organized and funded a trip that he called the final experiment. And the genius of the whole thing is the setup. He brought along committed flat Earthers and globe believers together in the same spot in Antarctica to witness the same sky with their own eyes. No NASA, no photos to dispute, no experts to distrust. And all they had to do was look up and look at the sun, and that's what they saw. They watched the sun circle the sky for a full 24 hours, and it never went down. Now, one of the most famous flat Earthers on the whole trip is a guy named Jaron Campanella. And he had spent years arguing that the 24-hour sun was, you know, maybe an optical illusion. Maybe it was fake. Maybe it was a cover-up. And he kind of stood there and had watched the whole thing happen and then just straight-up admitted, like, hey, I might have been off on this. He basically said, sometimes you're wrong in life, and I thought that this wouldn't be here, and it is. And once again, it should have just been the ending, right? Like, the perfect end. Like, a flat Earther goes down, sees some evidence that is compelling to him, and changes his mind. But, of course, it isn't. Because the moment that it happened, other flat Earthers turned on all the people that went. They didn't accept this whole midnight sun thing. Instead, they accused the participants of being in on it, that they were paid actors, that they claimed the whole trip was staged, that Jaron had sold out, that Duffy was, like, a CIA plant, and that the footage was faked or filmed somewhere else. So the people who actually made the journey to test the sun were the people who were going to test this theory, got branded as a part of the very conspiracy that they were going to actually investigate. And it sounds similar, because it's exactly the same thing that happened with John Hampton and Alfred Russell back in the English Canal in the 1870s. You know, he lost the experiment, and then declared that the whole experiment was rigged and attacked the winner through, you know. Sunscreen. Snacks. A stapler. You know, like media and publishing pamphlets. 150 years later, but kind of the same thing. Now, what makes the whole story here so strange is how early it seems like humanity got an answer. More than 2,000 years ago. 2,000 years ago, Eratosthenes could estimate the size of the Earth using shadows to, I mean, percentiles of the accurate circumference. But as we've seen, having the evidence and getting people to accept it are two very different things. And for some of the people in the story, a flat Earth kind of understanding of reality fit their reading of the Bible. Which I get. I mean, you read the Bible, and you're like, no, the Bible is 100% true, and there's no metaphor or allegory in here. So if it says four corners, there's obviously four corners. Maybe, you know, if you're Catholic, for me, it's like, well, it's probably just like. Just like a metaphor. But other people trusted what they could see, you know, standing beside a canal, and they thought that that was more compelling than a calculation. I also understand that. And it's like, what I actually see with my eyes is way more compelling than like some data that some scientist is telling me. And then, you know, once they had spent years kind of preaching it and publishing it and kind of like putting their whole reputation on it, admitting that they were wrong would be kind of walking back like a whole element of their life. And you can see how that plays out when, you know, the photographs from space arrive. Like that should settle the argument. But for someone convinced that the Earth is flat, the photographs themselves become something that needs to be explained. Like the argument switches from the shape of the planet to whether you can actually trust what people are showing you. And that brings us back to why this belief has survived for so long. If every result that contradicts it gets dismissed as a hoax, you know, there's no discovery that can ever actually settle the argument. Because as Hitchin says, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason into. And I think that's the question. That's the core idea of the story. You can question what you're told. You should run your own experiments. You should see for yourself if you can. But that only means something if you're willing to accept an answer, even if it's not the thing that you're hoping for. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history of the flat Earth theory. I mean, it's a fascinating one. I've never really been a big flat Earth guy, which is kind of funny to people. I think people expect like, oh, Mark, you love conspiracies. You're obviously big on flat Earth. I'm like, first off, I find conspiracies fascinating. And I love all of them. I love the flat Earth theory. I just don't believe it. You know, I'm like, it just doesn't really fit like my experience with reality. What everyone wants to know is what does your mom think about it? My mom does not believe in flat Earth. Really? She does believe the Earth might be geocentric. I don't know what that means. So we operate on a heliocentric model. And it's basically the idea that like all the planets in our solar system are going around the sun. My mom's low-key convinced that the Earth is the center of our solar system. Our solar system, everything's actually moving around the Earth. So that means we're the only people? Likely. Okay. In her theory. Again, I don't want to put words in her mouth, but that's my understanding. We've argued about this many times. And if you look at NASA's calculations, they actually use like a geocentric model to base a lot of their calculations off of. And they say like, well, they have to because that's the only accurate measurements that we really have. They say it makes the math easier. Right. Like if you're making, if you're doing calculations based off the geocentric model, it basically doesn't make a difference. You see the grand scheme of their calculations and it simplifies the math. So technically, that's what they're doing. You can fact check that, but. I'll get on that right now. Interesting. Now, do you find it funny that B.O.B.'s the guy saying this and his most famous hit is called Airplanes? That is kind of funny. Yeah. That is actually a really, but that's the tricky thing with the airplane. You don't fully see the curve. You would imagine that a pilot would know. Well, that's the thing. You ask the pilots if it's flat Earth and there's so many, there's videos on Twitter where pilots are like, oh, it's flat. And I don't know. I don't know why they're saying that. I'm assuming they're just like messing with people. But it is funny. If you ask pilots, they go, yeah, it's flat. Have you heard this diss track? No, I haven't. Me neither. I want to, I'm going to go check it out. Yeah, I didn't. I don't know if it charted. I don't know if the Neil deGrasse Tyson diss track really made the waves. How easy would it be to make fun of Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that would probably be pretty easy. Yeah. And he would probably enjoy it too. It seems like he likes a good joke. He's great. Now, let the record be shown. I am not a scientist. I don't know if the Earth is round or flat. My assumption is that it's probably round. I'm going to give that, again, I don't really like to work in binaries, but I'll give it like a percentage. I'm going to say 98% round. I was going to go lower. What do you think? 75. 75% round. 25% what? Flat. 25% flat. Yeah. I was doing some research on this script and you could get into it. You can get into it. I understand. I see how. A stapler? See paypal.com/protectionterms. How people do. I 100% understand. I love conspiracy theories. Of course, I understand how people get into it. Don't get me wrong. I just am on the side of like, 98% probably round. Again, I don't know. I haven't done the calculations. I've never put a stick in Alexandria and then put another one in Aswan. But again, just my assumption, probably round. I just don't, I don't see why they have to convince us it's flat. Maybe there's people beyond the ice wall and reptilians and stuff, but I think it's probably more interdimensional. I think it's like, if there is like a non-human intelligence out there, which probably there is, I think it's an interdimensional thing that interfaces outside of space and time as we know it. Space and time is just the VR headset that we're using to interface with reality. That's kind of my assumption. Yeah, everyone knows that life is just simulation anyway, so none of this matters. I'm not here to tell anyone what to believe. You guys should draw your own conclusions, do your own research, get into it. I'm just telling you my opinion and my opinion says high percentage chance is probably round, but who knows? Again, I'm not, I'm not an expert. What do you guys think? I mean, drop a comment below. Are you, are you going team round or are you going team flat? All, all ideas and answers are welcome here. Again, I'm not here to convince anyone. And if there's compelling evidence that drops in the comments, I will absolutely do a revision video where I say, Hey, I think the earth is flat. If, if there's compelling evidence, I'm, I'm completely on board changing my opinion again, I'm pretty dumb, so I'm completely open to being wrong on this, but let me know YouTube, Spotify, read all the comments also have great news. If you like conspiracy theories like this, well, Camp Gagnon's for you again, this is not a debunking show. I hope this one didn't seem like too much of a debunk. I just wanted to kind of lay out the history of this whole theory, but you know, we do all sorts of crazy theories over there. Some of which I'm like fully on board with some, again, not all, but some, you can check that out. Camp Gagnon. Camp Gagnon. Also, we have another channel called Religion Camp. If you like religious topics, we touched on some of those today. You should check out Religion Camp. Also, we have a full secret society. Yeah, that's a place where we all gather and we do monthly zooms with the whole squad. We're actually gonna be doing like a team retreat this October in Joshua Tree. If you want to come by, you can check it out and get all the info within our secret society. We do episodes of this show with no ads. We do bonus episodes that never got to the public. And all of that is patreon.com slash Camp Gagnon. And it's going to cost you. This is not a free gift, but it's about the price of like a cup of coffee every single month. That's all you got to contribute. If you can do five bucks, you're going to get all that and more. And if you just like to rock with a history vibe, well, great news. We drop these episodes every single week. So make sure you subscribe, comment, like, all that stuff. And you will get every future update that we post on this channel. God bless you all. Thank you so much for tuning in. And I will see you in the future to talk about the past. Peace. Transcription by CastingWords And we'll definitely be up in each other's cases. Scrubs premieres Wednesday on ABC. And stream the next day on Hulu. Side effects may include laughing, cheering, and lots of high fives.