Joe Revisits the Phil Plait Moon Landing Debate w/Penn Jillette

You know what I want to, I'm going to completely change the subject if I may. You know, I want to talk about when you came on my radio show with Phil Plait about the moon landing. Oh, it talked about the moon landing, yeah. But what I think is fascinating about this, about clubs and stuff, you know, is, you know, and I know I've read here and there that you've gone back on a lot of that and your conspiracy stuff and stuff. Yeah. But that's not- But I can explain that too. I don't know what I'm talking about. You know, this is the thing, I have zero astrophysics education. Zero. I don't know anything about whether or not it's possible to put people on the moon. I do know fuckery and I do know teams and I do understand when people are bullshitting people. And I think there's a lot of that with a lot of the NASA stuff, a lot of the older stuff in particular. There was a lot of manipulation of images and putting things online that may not have actually really happened because it was press releases. And there's an image of Michael Collins from like Gemini 15. That's a very clear image of him doing a simulation like in a studio with straps and harnesses. And then someone from NASA or someone put that exact same image, blacked out the background and used it as a photo of a spacewalk. And it's not real, you know, but they sold it as real. There was some overzealous shit like that, that if you're conspiratorily minded, you might say, once you start lying, yes, you know, it's the area of 51 and stuff. You know, we know they lied like motherfuckers and that's the problem. But what I just wanted to compliment you and I just also think this is really interesting, you know. So Joe Rogan believes this crazy shit. We didn't go to the moon. I know Joe Rogan. We're on a radio show together. He's a good guy. We did Fear Factor, but he believes this shit. Let's have him talk to someone who's real. So I call Phil Plait. Do I don't know that well, right? But he's the bad astronomer and he knows this shit. And I say, I really want you to come on my radio show and just talk to Joe Rogan about moon landing. And Phil says, oh, no problem. We'll just go on there. We'll send him straight. And I go, I just want to warn you, have your ducks in a row because Joe's really good. And he goes, well, Joe's a comic, right? Yeah. And that's your problem because Joe's better at talking than you. Joe knows when the commercials are coming. Joe knows how to make a joke and Joe knows also how to set you up and take you down. Oh, no, no, no. It'll be no problem. I said, you understand that he's smart. He's a comic, right? Yeah. Not a natural physicist, but you understand that he's smart and he's also, you are going into his form. We're going to be on radio. This guy has done a lot of radio. This guy's talked to a lot of people. So just have all your facts in line. And then we're sitting there because you know, you were on the phone and Godot, who's on my podcast with me too, sitting across from me and we're listening and you come in and you come in humble and charming and sexy and with perfect timing on everything and Phil Place. I go, oh man, Joe is wrong and Joe is going to fucking win. And I said, I set this up so that, so that, it will be a fit. It'd be fair. My whole thing of doing this the way I billboarded it was I'm just going to have two guys talk from two points of view. I'm not supposed to commit that. I don't know if you remember, but the whole show heads and I go, oh, by the way, we did lay it on the moon. And just try to do this final authority thing and Phil said afterwards, well, he he had a, I said, yes. And it's just that idea that you can't, you know, his idea was there's the science team that's right. And then there's this goofy comic and trying to get Phil play to understand that a goofy comic was not a goofy comic. And I believe that the only thing that the SATs truly test is how good you will be the comedian. That kind of verbal, it was a wonderful thing to listen to. It was wonderful to listen to someone who I believe absolutely was 100% wrong. It was just so skilled and so moral and so thoughtful and so humble. You had everything going for you that I respect except you didn't happen to be right. Well, we don't know what happened. We assume that what we see is what happened. We assume that what the scientists tell us was what happened. We assume that what NASA told us was what happened when you say I know this happened, right? You're not always correct. Exactly. Oftentimes correct. I know Kennedy got assassinated in Dallas. I've seen the video. I know he got assassinated in Dallas. I don't know if Lee Harvey Oswald did it. I don't know. I assume he was involved. It seems like he was. Was there other people involved too? I assume there were and one of the reasons why I assume there were is the magic bullet the fucking the guy who got hit with the ricochet under the overpass. I do want you to know that I made the shot with the man like her. Oh, yeah, it could be made. Oh, that's horseshit. Listen, I've talked about that in length and also the head goes towards that. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of things. There's a lot of things. There's a lot of things we could go over the Kennedy assassination. There's a lot of things. I'm not on one school or another. Are we going to solve the polarization in America or are we going to solve the Kennedy assassination or are we going to solve the bullet? All of them. Are you want to do all of them? Yeah. Okay. I just want to know what our goals were. The moon landing is a conspiracy theories dream of conspiracy theorists dream because it's got everything in place. It's got this incredible technological achievement. It's got these three guys that look incredibly nervous at the post landing press conference and they look all sketched out. It's got these guys that don't do interviews afterwards. It's got no one ever lands on the moon again after 1973 or whatever it was. It's got all these technological achievements, but we never get outside of Earth's atmosphere again. We're always inside of Earth's orbit. There's so many beautiful things that conspiracy theories can grasp a hold of them go see it's bullshit, but it doesn't mean it's but it doesn't mean it didn't happen. There's the Van Allen radiation belts. There's that we never even sent a chicken in a deep space and had to come back alive. There's all these things but it doesn't mean it didn't happen and the my problem was and this is you know, and people said, oh, you know, you've sold out. You're a shill now like no, no, no, I'm just being honest now whereas before I wasn't being honest with myself and I wasn't being honest about the subject. I do not know whether or not people went to the moon. I was pretending that I knew that people didn't go to the moon and I was arguing it that way. I was on a team. I was on team. It's bullshit. We didn't go to the moon and you you really can't do that accurately. It can't be done. You can say this is what's interesting. This is what I find curious. This is what's weird. The fact is on a single technological achievement from 1969 that's not cheaper easier and faster to reproduce today except going to the moon like one of the rare things in life still doesn't mean it didn't happen like Occam's razor is a slippery thing because there's weird shit that happens. You got to take that into account. Like there's no absolutes. It's not one thing that you can say. Well, there is a rule and this rule must be followed and here's that rule. It doesn't work that way. The world is made of weird stuff. And I'm also the the the idea there's there's a thing that's changed. There was an article in the Times about this and you might have even been mentioned in it. There's a playful space of conspiracy theories that it's taking me a long time to understand. My daughter is 14 and she talks about you know, her father did a show called bullshit and she talks about how she loves conspiracy theories and this is from Paul McCartney's Dead to We Didn't Land on the Moon to all those things, but she sees it which is so hard for me to understand. She sees it as not impacting reality, but as a playful intellectual exercise. I don't know what's going on, but there's this wonderful article in the Times and you were mentioned there too, but there's also another guy who does it who will do this to use a cliche. I can't even better one going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy stuff playing around with the logic that almost feels like a mathematical thing or a pure philosophical thing or or angels dancing on the head of a pin thing and there's a quality that you have learned that my daughter has learned indirectly I think from you through other people doing this of there is a playful space. We discuss how we share our reality that is happening in the conspiracy theory art form and the conspiracy theory art form is now seeming to me to be more like rap or rock and roll or it's just a form a thing where you play around with this kind of thing and I am so literal minded so verbal minded, you know, Bob Dylan's easy for me. The Stones are hard. You know, Zappa ZZ 20th century classical ZZ, but just funk is hard for me and it's the same kind of thing here. It's really easy for me to say we are doing the old-fashioned scientific inquiry and this is a way falsifiable, but there is something happening in our thinking that's really interesting that I had to have my daughter explained to me and the New York Times after I already knew you and watched you do it. Well, you've always been a champion of science and reason right and conspiracy theories for the most part flying the face of science and reason and it you don't want to be a buffoon. No one wants to be a fool. But there's a poetic thing happening. But it's tricky and you don't people don't want to be a fool. Well, I'm a professional fool. I don't mind being a fool and you know being self-deprecating and being a moron is part of being a comic. It's fun. The conspiracy theory world went south for me when I did a television show about it. I did that Joe Rogan questions everything shown. I spent six seven months doing this show and at the end of it, I was like, okay, I get it. This is a bunch of unfuckable white guys. That's what it really is. That's what I decided. I said, you know, I had a bit about it. I said you want the one thing you don't find when you're looking for Bigfoot black people. You're more likely to find Bigfoot than you are black eyes looking for Bigfoot. It is a bunch of unfuckable white dudes out camping and listening to what did you hear that? What is that? You know, it's like it's nonsense like you're you're wrapped up in this idea that there's a mystery and there's a something there's a thing a quality about human beings where we want to uncover secrets. We want to be the person that finds out the truth because then your miserable shitty fucking life now doesn't matter the fucking aliens are real man. They're here and aha ha ha the one of the best feelings we can get probably better than coming is that feeling of aha. I understand I've gotten a revelation and we see this all the time detective shows, you know, Sherlock Holmes, you know, nothing to do with police work. Yeah, but there is a feeling that wouldn't it be nice if in this hour I were able to figure something out because if you want to understand string theory, you're not going to do it an hour. You're not going to do it ever. I don't think those guys understand it even if they teach precisely. Let's take it easier. Why let's take a candle flame. You're never going to understand that right studying that forever and there's there's an area where conspiracy theories are exercising the muscles of logic exercising the muscles of skepticism playing around with the with the haiku of if then if then playing around with what we feel about the government and other people and stuff like that and you're playing around with all of that in kind of a semi safe zone and even watching you just do it here where you were you were you bang out that stuff and say this is the stuff I question what's coming out of that poetically and I thought that's not even talk about whether we went to the moon or not. What's coming out of your style of inquiry on that kind of thing your style of skepticism is just fascinating and beautiful and I see the conspiracy thing as not so much a breaking down which I used to see it as a breaking down of science and reason but I see it as rather a a creation of a new form of poetry. That's weird. I don't know. My daughter just said my daughter just says, you know, I really like conspiracy theories and I say to her, you know, Paul McCartney is still alive. Right, but you know, she's 14 and you're Penn Gillette. So she's rebelling. You understand that right? You're a parent. You know, it's like you may have just told me something really important. Yeah, there's two dirt. That's the only thing here's the thing. It's like Neil Gaiman's daughter coming in all goth out and you'll say to her I invented this you can't do this. This is not the way you can rebel. You can't rebel against me like this. You can't do with black hair and eyeshadow. You can't do it. But yeah, yeah. Well kids, you know, they find their own way and they want to express themselves, you know, they want to exert power over their world.