Joe Rogan & Lawrence Krauss on why Flat-earthers exist

Hello freak bitches. One of the biggest issues I think that people are having with religion in the 21st century is these areas where you're not allowed to question and explore. That things hit these walls where this is God's will and this is the way it is. In my mind what we say, that is just code word for I don't want to think about it. It's too confusing, it's too complicated. Or too terrifying. Too terrifying. Whatever people say, and this amazes me, I get people, people say, you will never understand the origin universe. You'll never understand what love is. Science will never ever explain love. Science will never ever explain X. Well what will? Then I say to them, well that's incredibly pompous statement. Because if you say that science will never explain this, you must understand it. Because how do you know that we'll never explain it? We never know what we won't be able to explain until we try. Maybe there are things about our universe that we'll never understand. But we don't know until we try. You can never say upfront that science will never explain this or that because you haven't tried. In my experience as a scientist, there could have been brick walls, but I've watched progressively those brick walls crumble as we move around them or we break them. It is so exhilarating and that's why it's the greatest story I've ever told. It's so exhilarating to see them knock down and things you thought we'd never understand. I remember one of the forces in nature, a very prominent physicist in the 1960s or early 1960s, actually 1969 said it will be 100 years before we understand this interaction. Next year the theory came out. It's so wonderful to see how the story surmounts the biases and the anticipation of individual scientists. That's the greatest story I've ever told so far. What's ridiculous about saying no one will ever figure anything out is that what we've figured out over the last 200 years is monumental and that human language has only been around for 40,000. Absolutely. If we live another 50,000 years, 100,000 years. As long as we don't, as long as we keep open inquiry. You could imagine moving, I mean look, we went through a few hundred years of the Middle Ages where the incredible inquiry based culture of the Greeks was just forgotten. Greeks had determined the circumference of the earth, not only that it was round, but what its circumference was by simple measurements that were then not accepted because of dogma. If we want to progress, we have to beware of dogma. How did they figure out the circumference of the earth? Oh, it's really neat. I think it was Aristarchus. I figure out which of the Greeks now. It's amazing. What he said was, look, at a certain time of day, a certain time of the year, the sun is directly overhead at 12 noon. I can tell that by looking down a deep well and I see the reflection of the sun exactly in that deep well. The rays of the sun which are coming down in the same direction towards the earth everywhere, it comes down to the deep well. But 100 miles away, the well, because the surface of the earth is curved, the well is pointing in a little bit different direction. The sun's rays come at a slightly different angle. On this day, I will measure that the sun is directly overhead for me, but I'll get my friend 100 miles away to measure the angle of the sun relative to the well. That tells you that the earth is curved. If you do the geometry, you can work out if 100 miles of the earth's surface causes the sun's rays to suddenly be at that angle, how curved the earth is and what the circumference of the earth is. It's a geometry that in principle any high school student could do. When you say 100 miles away, first of all, how are they communicating with this guy 100 miles away? They're not immediately, but the guy writes it down and then he takes a horse and they come and compare notes later. They use a sundial to determine the time? The sundial to determine the time and the ... But 100 miles away, would there be a deviation at all in the time, a minute or two? Well, yeah, but to some accuracy, you get it wrong to some accuracy. But they did pretty damn well. They came up with the circumference of the earth was darn close to the circumference of the earth. It's amazing that they use these techniques. They were just so confused and so curious about it all. They just tried to figure out what ... There's got to be a way to figure this out. They didn't and they weren't forced with the dogma that the earth is flat. As I'm told today, you were dealing with some people who are still forced with that dogma. It's very strange. How do you feel about that in 2017? It's amazing. Nothing surprises me anymore. Not only that, gravity's not real and dinosaurs aren't real. The people who say gravity aren't real, I have a great solution. It's a great solution. Jump up a building. Walk out the window on the 13th floor and test your ideas. The great thing is do it before you reproduce. It's a magnetism thing, they believe. It's electromagnetism or something like that that sucks people down to the ground. Yeah, that's what they can think. Fascinating. Carry a magnet and look at what happens as you're falling to the earth. It's even more hilarious is that they ... Well, we talked about this before the podcast started, the Japanese weather satellite that takes an image, a full image of the earth. What is the name of that satellite again, Jamie? It takes a full image of the earth from 22,000 miles away. People keep saying in this flat earth theory thing that there's no images of the earth in full, that they're all composites. That's not true. It's not true. There are images of the earth that are taken every 10 minutes by this one satellite and they're high resolution. You can access them online anytime you want. People see those and they want to think they're fake, but yet they believe there's an ice wall around Antarctica that you cross over and you fall to the abyss. Where's this photo of the ice wall? Where is it? Or have they never ... Well, how does someone fly from Japan to the United States? They don't believe that people can fly around the world. I've done it. I've done it and that they're all lying. Here's another one. Have they ever thought of time zones? Why are there time zones if the earth is flat? Why are there time zones? The only reason they're time ... They should go from New York to LA and see, you know what? The time is different. That percolates. Well, no, but they probably think it's a human invention. But you know, the sun is still shining in LA when it's gone down in New York and they can call their friends and check. If the earth was flat, that wouldn't be the case. It's only the case because the earth is curved. Those simple things should convince people, but people are willing to throw out evidence if they have a belief that's really firm. What I said before is we have to realize the easiest person to fool is yourself. If you're not willing to question your beliefs, especially those that you hold particularly cherished beliefs in, if you're not willing to question those, you're not going to ever grow. Yeah, well, that's a good way to put it, particularly cherish, because I think a lot of people do cherish these ideas, things like the earth being flat, because it gives them some sort of information, leg up on everybody. I know something that people don't know. Or makes them feel better about themselves. They may hate gays because it makes them feel better about not being gay. Or maybe they're gay. Yeah, they're gay. Yeah, exactly. You always worry about that. So I think we all, that's what I mean about believing 10 impossible things for breakfast. I don't want to make fun of people because we all do think of things to make us feel better about ourselves. It's part of being human. The psychological pitfalls. Yeah, and so we should be aware of those. And I have them and you have them. And I don't pretend I don't. What I do try and do is question them. But we can all do that. And I don't, I understand why people believe certain things. And you can be, you know what, again, Richard Dawkins tells me about an astrophysicist he knows who during the day studies objects in the sky and looks at galaxies or stars and measures that they're 12 billion years old or whatever. And yet he goes home at night and is convinced that the Earth is 6,000 years old. So somehow we can do both. Really? Yeah. He knows a guy like that? Oh yeah. And people can, and we're all capable of believing in two mutually contradictory things at the same time. It's just the way we're built. And so. How does this guy measure the age of these planets? Somehow it doesn't affect his fundamental beliefs. And it's amazing. It's true because we can all believe things that are wrong. And so it doesn't mean they're stupid. It doesn't mean, because this guy's apparently a fairly accomplished astrophysicist. It's a psychological pitfall. But we all have. It's a trap. So many people, you know, when I talk about this, I don't want to seem pompous in the sense of saying, oh, I'm better or scientists are better. Science is better because science helps us overcome those pitfalls. Why do those pitfalls exist though? Because obviously I would argue that they have an evolutionary purpose. But somehow if they didn't have an evolutionary purpose, then they wouldn't have been selected for. Right. There does seem to be some weird inclination or some desire to expose secrets, to find secrets and to know them. Yeah, it's nice. But on the other hand, that's great. Let's exploit that. Discovering secrets is about discovering mysteries. Discovering mysteries is what motivates us to do science. So let's put it in positive light. We all want to solve puzzles. We all want to understand something and maybe we're the first one to understand it. We all want to access information maybe and make us feel special for doing it. That's the reason I do science, right? It's not to save the world. It's because I really want to be. No one understands it. And it's nice to be the first person to maybe understand stuff. It's gratifying for your ego. And we are driven by ego. And let's not pretend otherwise. Right. But I think you're talking about measurable things and elements and things that you could sort of expose and explain. But what these people seem to be really obsessed with is people lying about stuff and covering up secrets about the earth being flat or chemtrails. Yeah, they like to believe there's a conspiracy. Yeah. Yeah, conspiracies are very, very attractive. Yeah, because I'm not a psychologist. So what I say here is just a speculation. But the world doesn't care what you believe and it doesn't treat you fairly. Right? Right. In fact, the world doesn't treat me fairly. It doesn't treat you fairly. It doesn't give a damn about my well-being or ... Okay. So hey, I'm being treated unfairly. Isn't it better for me to think that someone is actively being unfair to me than to assume it's just the way it is? Because then I can blame it. And so I tend to think conspiracy theorists tend to say, you know, the things I don't like there's a real reason for it. It's not an accident. It's not just haphazard. It's not anything. I've lost my job because there's got to be a reason. There's got to be a villain. There's got to be someone making it happen, just like the reason we burned witches. Right? Because there were storms or there wasn't crops that year. And a lot of people say, it's an interesting historical theory, which I think seems quite plausible to me, that when Newton discovered the universal law of gravity, it contributed to the burning of witches. Why? I thought that that was a myth, the burning of witches. I thought they drowned them mostly. Well, they hung a lot of them too. They drowned them. I don't care whether it's burning. They killed them. Right. I understand. Okay. They blamed crops. They blamed bad things. And then when Newton discovered that even the planets are affected by the same laws that Annapolis, there's a universal laws. It meant that physical effects had physical causes. And when bad things happen, there's a physical reason. There's not someone you can blame and witches or whatever. And so there's a lot of arguments that suggest that that kind of development in physics led to the end of blaming people for bad crops or for bad things happening. But I think that's the kind of thing when we want to find someone to blame rather than just saying, the universe doesn't give a shit about me. And anybody interested in this is a really fascinating subject, but the whole Salem witch trial thing. There's a lot of really convincing evidence that seems to point towards ergot poisoning that there was a late freeze and that this particular type of fungus grew on some of their wheat that makes ergot, which has very LSD-like properties. And they think these people thought they were being bewitched because they're being contaminated. It's a great idea. It's fascinating. I don't know the evidence for it, but it's an interesting idea. Yeah, it is fascinating. But let's understand. I think behind that is we've all had... I think what we're seeing are extremes of characteristics that we all have. I think many of us assign blame when we shouldn't. When I lose my keys, sometimes I say to my wife, where did you put the keys? And then I learned very quickly that I shouldn't have said that. And so I think it's a characteristic of being human and accepting it as a characteristic of being human doesn't diminish us. But what's really great is we can understand that and try and work and try and figure out ways to avoid those pitfalls.