us and

congratulations on the book. it's about flat earthers and i guess the first question i've got is how did you find yourself on the flat earth beat? when did you start writing about flat earthers and people who believe the earth is flat and how did you come to decide there was a book here. huh? well, my day job is as a reporter at the daily beast where i cover extremism and fringe internet communities and a lot of that involves passively monitoring the weird parts of the internet, so and around 2017. i started noticing that people on extremists forums were posting about flat earth, and i thought they were just kidding. i thought that was too crazy for anyone to believe but i was curious about why they were saying that so i dug into it and

i found that not only were these people very serious, but there is a large flat earth movement and i started going to their conferences and talking to them and around the time i filed my first this patch from a flat earth conference for the daily beast. i realized i could have written 50,000 more words on it. so i've stuck around and then when they say that the earth is is flat. what are they imagining? i know there's some slightly different versions of the flat earth cosmology, but sort of just walk us through what they picture when when they see the earth in their head. sure, so you are right. there are several competing models, but the gist of it is that they believe earth is flat like a frisbee and they will say that it has a ring of ice around the outside and most of them say it's in closed within a dome almost like a big snow globe and the north pole was in the center. are there any versions where the south poles in the center and they have flame wars or i've

never seen a version with the south pole in the center, but you're so right to point out the flame wars because there are these competing ideologies and people will debate what they think gravity really is. they don't believe in gravity, but they'll argue that maybe the reason we don't float off the surface of the earth is due to buoyancy or other people say it's because the earth is accelerating upwards. so there are strange little twists on the theory and it's not a complete lock step within the movement. before we get very far into the current flat earth movement. i want you to talk some about the history of flat earthism. i think a lot of people have this vague idea that there used to be a time when everyone thought the earth was fed, and then around the time of columbus and magellan people figured out that it wasn't flat and there were a few holdouts and they formed the flat earth society and that is not in fact with the history looks like at all. so where was flat earthism as we think of it today born and and

when sure, so you're right to point out that that history of flat earth is kind of a myth. we've actually known for thousands of years that we live on a globe because it's very easy to prove with basic math with basic observations. but what happened in the mid 1800s was there was this quack political philosopher and quack doctor who started positing that the earth was flat based on his observations on i failed socialist commune and what happened in that moment was he was making these theories during a time when the natural sciences were taking on a much more important role in daily life. series of evolution we're starting to come to the fore and those were challenging people's preconceived ideas of the role of religion and daily life and the role of humanity and relation to nature. so in that moment a theory like

flat earth was strangely alluring to people who wanted to dismiss emerging sciences and this flat earth founder understood that he started selling books and having lecture tours and really making quite a lot of money off of this theory. and he built a movement and it's simmered along sometimes underground sometimes a bit more in the open for more than 150 years now. now i'm fascinated by this heat sort of he was on this socialist commune. there's also this attraction to as you were saying these sort of reactionary ideas. and how do i keep you keep modernity at bay? what was the relationship do you think between these two between these different forms of ideas are swirling around at the time and in the movement not just in the ether i think there was a

very strong reactionary current to early flat or theory. it was it was strongly religious. it fled. our theory doesn't need to be religious in nature. it has its own theories almost as if it's a science which of course it isn't. but it has always centered religion and it's always centered the idea that that the bible or a very little a very literal reading of scripture can tell believers more than the scientists or the elites who are pushing a phony model who are trying to keep people in the dark so from its incarnation and onward flat earth has really works is a way to reject rationalism reject science and to reject i think the the side effects of secularism and for a lot of people that is a powerful political motive as well as just the conspiracy belief. now when you were looking at the

sort of 19th century world of you know, the reactionaries the also the socialists at the opening commune the the alternative health nostrums. it sounds a lot like the world we're in today. i mean in a lot of ways the did you like get a feeling of deja vu in advance as you were looking at these past characters, do you think there's some striking differences worth pointing to or did it feel more like these are modern people just in a pre-internet pre-television era. you know in many ways i did find a lot of the same archetypes emerging in different eras of flat earth, you know, the reason people are drawn to conspiracy theories has been pretty consistent throughout time conspiracy theories speak to a desire we have to find answers that comfort us when there's not enough information or the information we have doesn't

affirm our prior beliefs so and that respect people are coming to conspiracy theories for very much the same reasons and 1840 is they do in 2022 and what's struck me reading these old texts was these people would have been youtubers in the modern day. they were promoting funny theories and trying to build very engaged audiences. they were relatable figures in their way, but they didn't have the benefit of social media now when i've you know interviewed conspiracy theorists and look through their texts and so on. i've that's one sort of framework frame of mind. i've encountered her people trying to find this sort of simplifying comforting model. there's also some people who just love to complicate things. they they love to find make the world harder to understand almost like they want to throw on one everything, you know is wrong theory after another even if they don't entirely fit

together. did you encounter a lot of people like that as well? i think there is certainly a degree of that and flat earth and especially other conspiracy theories that i delved into in this book. i think for some people the idea of being on this eternal treasure hunt is really compelling they want to look for clues and pieces of a puzzle that they think will bring together some greater picture. and in fact, there is no greater picture there. they're just sort of like magpies picking up little pieces of evidence and hoarding them in some mishmash of strange beliefs and it does actually cause quite a lot of confusion and complication and those people's lives. i before we leave the history, i like you to talk about the story of zion, illinois, which nowadays is just a sort of small town in illinois. probably best known for the fact that gary coleman is from there, but a century ago was run by

flat earthers and just walk us through the the rise and fall of flat earthism in zion. sure, so in the early 1900 zion, illinois was almost close to a flat earth cult and that emerged in a very unusual way that town was originally founded as a very fundamentalist religious town. it was mainly run by one church who had a very charismatic leader that leader was quickly deposed by another arguably even more ruthless leader who during his time at the head of the church became a militant flat earther, and he used that theory to his to his advantage. he called himself a theocrat and he absolutely was he took over the town schools and promoted flat earth theory through them. he would even outlaw references to to like the globe in church

hymns. so he ruled with an iron fist and part of his very militant belief. was flat earth and he had this town under his thrall for decades and that is what people believed at the time. and there was even a case with a disputered election another one of those feels pretty modern as you're reading the old story. do you want to talk a bit about what happened there? absolutely. i think this was 1919 and yes, there were enough outsiders in the town who weren't a members of the church that they said this is gone on too long. we need to vote this fellow out and they succeeded they voted for a mayor who was not aligned with the church was not aligned with these cookie theories and rather than accept defeat this flat earth leader wilbur glen volva said, no. no, there's been a mistake. there's been fraud in this

election people have been importing votes from outside the city limits. he said he was gonna hire a lawyers who would expose the fraud and it turned into this wild scene where they had two competing police chiefs who won built a barricade in the jail and said he wouldn't come out the other was threatening to storm it. they had supporters and either side ready to war against each other and i wish i could say that there was a very peaceful long-term resolution. but the reality was that even though the courts decided in favor of the real winner the non-flat earth faction. the flat earthers took power after they didn't stay defeated very long and zion remained a flat earth town for a couple more decades. if someone were to go to zion today, is there a flat earth museum or anything? is this history part of what's told there or is it sort of

swept under the rug not talked about much? um, it's a mix they do have a lot of history of the old times. there was some a church leader who built this stunning house and that's been turned into a historical society, and i was also very grateful for some help from a librarian there who helped me find a lot of historical records, so it's not swept under the rug, but it's also not something that people keep alive and i can sympathize with that. it's a strange episode in a town's history. the other moment of power for flat earthism that you mentioned the past was in south africa. do you want to say a bit about the time they had a flat earther as was it their president? what was what was the office that was held? sure, so this was a short-lived south african republic. this was a the leader was kruger namesake of kruger national park there and he was a flat earther

and he would get very irate with people who said who talked about traveling the world, you know sailing around the world and he would say no. no you're sailing within the world because he did not believe that earth was rounded that you could transverse it that way and a ship. he thought it was a disc that you could just travel across the flat surface and there are several very funny accounts of navigators who met with him who realized that he was pretty serious about this belief, and he didn't take kindly to references to the globe. so after flight comes along and then even more so after space flight comes along flat earthism goes into decline for pretty obvious reasons. i mean to the extent that it was even a substantial thing before then but you write about one guy basically keeping it alive with the flattered society, but even then it's within its membership a lot of the people in quite possibly most of the people were treating it as a joke, and that's kind of a theme.

that's throughout this book. sometimes you can't tell who's kidding and who's not you've got a great line in here that the line between skeptic and believer can be porous. can you talk some about that and just how you dealt with it in your reporting like not always being able to tell which people were taking this seriously in which people were you know, at least some level trolling sure, so it's funny because there has always been trolling engagement with flat earth theory that dates back to its inception people would show up at those original lectures in the 1800s and just come there to heckle just you know, make fun of the lecturer or pretend to take his side because in essence, i think flat earth is kind of a funny theory. it's understandable to laugh at but what happened through, you know, mid-20th century and into the 21st. is that the flat earth society, although it was founded in earnest by a flat earth or got a lot of its lifeblood from people

who are joining as a joke, and they would you know apply for a membership card and it was all a big laugh and yet in some ways that sustains this movement it kept it around and even the joking engagement was enough to keep the idea on the forefront of people's minds and although we can't be entirely sure how much of flat earth society leadership was always earnestly flat earth. they kept the founding documents in circulation. they had magazines and eventually they digitized those documents and those documents became a foundation for a later movement of flat earth. that was very serious indeed about their beliefs. when interesting thing about the flat earth society that you mentioned was the when the founder finally died there were basically two rival successors one of whom was sincere and one of whom was probably kidding and these sorts of succession crises

keep happening and in the movement as in a lot of like french movements, do you i why don't you take us through to sort of like the end of the flat earth society as an organization and the emergence of the modern flat earth. movement online you sort of talk about 2014 as the breakthrough year and we'll get in a moment to actually before we even get to that. how big is it now? i know an absolute terms. it's pretty small, but it's obviously much larger than i mean, it's not big big that's not a couple dozen people anymore. how many people would you estimate our sincere flat earthers nowadays? you know, it's really hard to get hard numbers on flat earthers because a lot of people are a little embarrassed about their beliefs. they're not going to come out and say it out, right? i can tell you that i've been to flat earth meetups where there were 600 attendees who are fully on board with the theory and

i've been to multiple flat earth conventions at this point. there has been some polling about people's belief in flat earth, and i think maybe the most reliable polling his indicated around 1% but it's difficult with that kind of questioning on a survey because people will even answer ingest sometimes and i think also the questions can be a little leading so in short it's hard to tell how many people are flat earthers, but what i want to get at here. is that in our modern understanding of the world there should be zero flat earthers. it's not a valid theory. so the fact that i can show up to a conference and be surrounded by 500 600 flat earth. there's i think that is indicative of a problem in itself. so presumably you've also been interacting with these folks online the ones who are not going to go to a conference but are willing to be sort of armed share flat earth.

there's again, i'm asking you to get inside people's heads in a way that you might not be comfortable doing. but i mean what percentage of when you were interacting with these folks? how often did you think someone was pulling your leg versus? how often did you think this is like the guy at the flat earth conference selling this literature and trying to organize an expedition to antarctica? um, usually they were quite genuine again. it's a little bit harder to tell when you're not face to face with someone, but there are pretty significant signs the fact that people invest real money and their real reputation in this theory a lot of flat earth. there's online are not just reading the material but there are creating their own youtube channels and there i think doing quite a lot of reputational harm for themselves. they can often alienate friends and family and at that point, i think people who were joking

would have realized it's not so funny anymore and disengaged with the theory. so now the big question like what was in the air eight years ago that people got interested in this idea again and this activity in places like youtube started up. so i think what was in the air was where social media algorithms that hadn't quite figured out how to responsibly deal with. conspiracy theories you mentioned youtube and that was one of the biggest sources of energy for the reemerging flat earth movement. and the reason for that is that youtube has a video recommendation algorithm. they want you to keep watching videos that are engaging to you that will keep you on the website. and so it recommends things that it thinks you will like and unfortunately the things that people like are often sensational they are very often

something something like a conspiracy video or a flat earth video that is really it provokes your curiosity and you want to on when you see it in the video sidebar. so people who were watching unrelated videos, maybe about outer space or religion or tamer conspiracy theories would find themselves funneled into a growing genre of flat earth videos. and people started converting on the basis of those videos people started making their own flat earth channels and even people who weren't flat earthers realized that they could get decent engagement and viewership on a video about flat earth because they performed so well in this algorithm so for about five years from 2014 to 2019 youtube's recommendations heavily promoted flat earth, and it would many people in until they were able to flip the

switch and make those videos a little bit more obscure. so the algorithms might help explain how people found the videos, but i i still kind of wonder why this is supposed to something else with strike a chord with people and with a lot of friends theories. you can make an educated guess i when people talk about the idea that the world is really a simulation you can think about early 21st century reasons why someone would sort of feel like a simulated world as an appealing idea. what is it about the flat earth that would be appealing to somebody in the early 21st century when you know, you're using a medium that's in part relying on things like satellites that what is appealing about the idea of a flat world. you know, there are a lot of alluring components to flat earth. it's a very it's a very large-scale conspiracy theory. it's not something smaller like chemtrails in the sky. it really invites people to

knock down all the facts. they previously held and replaced them with new information. i think even that in itself is a an interesting exercise for a lot of people it leaves a lot of creative space, but one thing that i found in talking to a lot of flat earthers is they found that the theory is actually comforting to them. i remember one saying that previously she had felt very small in the scale of the universe the idea of an infinitely expanding outer space which flat earth there's don't believe in was frightening to her and she felt small both literally and theologically in that sense and when she found flat earth that compressed the universe into a very noble and understandable and safe scale for her. so that's one reason the people will go for the theory. they'll go for it because it is a foundation on which they can refute things like evolution of you know, more secular sciences.

so there are a number of reasons and like i mentioned previously some people do get into it as a joke because it just sounds so funny. but flat earthers are able sometimes to make arguments that trick people and so out of a mixture of i think motivated reasoning people want to believe this and not doing enough credible research people do get duped into this belief. i want to read a passage from the book which also sort of speaks to the way. this is more about the way people find the information then. then what they find appealing about it, but speaking of uncomfortable realities, maybe some of flat earth's current reach is my fault years ago. i started writing about flat earth is something close to a joke. i saved the most batshit comments. i found in flat earth forums. i tweeted about factional rivalries playing out in conspiracy groups when trump announced the creation of a

space force as a new military branch. i convinced my editors at the daily beast to let me interview the flattered society about the new organization on the grounds that flat earthers generally think space is a hoax my colleagues and i put in a sarcastic exclusive banner on the story and thought it was very funny and years later knowing that flat earth has torn families apart and that some flat earthers are neo-nazis who make rap songs about killing people like my own jewish family. i still find the exclusive banner and really the whole article very funny. it's flat earth for christ's sake. how absurd now. i i appreciate the tension that you're sort of talking about in your in your thinking there. how much of the modern attention to my flat earth do you think has come from this media coverage? and what do you think you know is the proper role of someone writing about this who says this is a good story. this is something i want to write about. but how should i approach it? i think it's a very difficult

line to navigate and it's certainly one that i've done a lot of soul searching on. ultimately, i think it's very important that we do interrogate conspiracy theories and more than that why people believe in conspiracy theories? the role of conspiracy theories right now is so much larger than something like flat earth or something much larger than something like a youtube algorithm could promote. we have a major political party right now. that is promoting really just dangerous conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. so i think a lot of the underlying motivations for belief are similar from flat earth to political conspiracy theories. and for that reason, i think they're very important to interrogate and i thought flat earth was a good lens to show that the reality of a conspiracy theory or the arguments that makes the alleged truths of it aren't so much is important as

the emotional appeals that said, i think we in the media and i especially consider myself here need to take a good look at what exactly we're highlighting when we cover conspiracy theories. is this something that is crucial to our understanding. the world and i hope that you'll find that my book is or is it something that's sensational? is it something that's funny and as i alluded to in that passage, i think maybe calling up the flat earth society and asking about space force. it doesn't really contribute that much to the discourse. so it's something that i've learned and grappled with over about five years writing about misinformation now and i think a lot of other reporters have been on a similar knowledge journey in guided by experts and people who've been very generous with their time and i think we're all still learning. for what it worth it's worth. i think interviewing the flat earth society about the space

force is a great idea. i went through that once that has occurred to you you absolutely there's there's no way you can't do a story like that. but i also appreciate the the thinking that you went through afterwards. so there's there's more than one kind of flat earth or there's more than one kind of person involved in the movement you talk a bit about just sort of the range of personalities the range of backgrounds and just and the range of ways people were engaged engaged with the movement you encountered sure, and you're right that there's no real one profile for a flat earther. i found it to be a multiracial multi-class movement. i've asked a lot of flat earthers about their politics and a good number of them describe himself as kind of politically disengaged. of course, they believe the government is one great plot to conceal the flat reality. i would say that they broadly skew conservative. i think a lot of that has to do

with the very religious path that many took to flat earth. but there is a range and they do again range from independence, too. i have encountered a number of extremely far right flat earthers, and those who even dabble in things like neo-nazism. how did flat earthism affect their lie affect people's lives in relationships they get involved especially if they're not the only if they're the only person in their family or friend group that gets converted to this this idea. very poorly flat earth is not a popular theory it will make you the ad person out at the thanksgiving table if you start talking about it. and the trouble with it is that it's not just a funny theory. it's something that people believe with all their hearts and when they find themselves at odds with their friends and

their family they often start to find themselves at a certain remove from those people they get alienated. they isolate themselves from people who believe in the globe and i think that is a very destabilizing pattern. i think we need to have those real-world relationships to ground us and to firm up our shared reality, but the opposite happens and when people start to lose real world connections, they often turn to their online conspiracy communities for friendship and for support and those communities are going to reinforce their false beliefs and tell them that you are right and your families are either actively acting against you or their their blind their sheep. and this is it's a very corrosive pattern of of belief that happens with not just flat earthers, but with other people

involved in very strange conspiracy theories. was there anybody who told you the opposite who said? oh, actually everybody loves what i'm talking about. they think i'm the funny guy at the party or was that just not something that came up? i've never heard that happen, you know, it's it's possible, but the only people who give me positive accounts of their social lives post flat earth are people who were big hits that flat earth conferences and you know found a small community there. let's talk about mike hughes who's a fellow, you know, who comes up a few times in the book. who is he? how did you meet him? and what did you learn from your interactions with him? mike hughes was one of the most prominent faces of the flat earth movement for a few years. he was a really interesting guy because he was sort of an evil knievel figure. he was a stuntman by trade and he would build these steam-powered rockets.

he had this idea that he would launch himself up in us steam rocket. he would deploy weather balloons and those would lift him high enough off the earth's surface that he could take a picture and see whether earth was flat around. and he got a lot of attention in the flat earth community for this a lot of funding. he had flat or slogans all over his rocket and i talked to him for about a year and a half. because i was both intrigued by this venture and also a bit frightened by it. it seems very dangerous. i knew he had had one very dangerous crash that he survived and he always told me that it would be worth it to go up that high to heaven's theories validated. but that's not what happened in february 2020 one of his launches went disastrously wrong and he would have died on impact. so he was a really tragic case

study in how far people will go to explore their beliefs and i i didn't think he would do it and that actually is what happened you you write about. thinking that on some level. he didn't believe it in that he would keep finding excuses not to do this stunt. and that you know his death kind of drove home for you that that he believed it and then i thought it was interesting that after he died there were some people suggesting. well, maybe he wasn't sincere and there was kind of a posthumous debate about what he was up to you want to walk through what happened there? sure. so after my dad his agent said, you know, i'm gonna tell you the truth. he was not a flat earther. he was using this theory to raise funds and that's something i had been curious about before one thing that a lot of flat arthurs will do is make conspiracy theories about each other saying that this person's only in it for the fame.

so i started digging into that claim and you know one one thing that i discovered in talking to mike for quite a long time is that he was a very earnest conspiracy theorist in other ways. he was a believer in things like sovereign citizen legal theory and but he in his final days. he was always extremely engaged in conspiracy theories and i spoke with a lot of his friends who said that not only was he a flat earth or we tried very hard to talk him out of this theory. they said there was no convincing him and maybe the best answer i got was from one of his friends. who said yes. he did get into flat earth from a maybe less than earnest angle. he thought it was an interesting theory and he thought it might help fund his rocket washes, but as he became more involved in the movements as somebody who's already involved in conspiracy

thinking he started to earnestly believe it and i think my takeaway here was that even if he was somewhat in doubt in those final moments, he had been spending the past couple years earnestly preaching flat earth and was one of the most recognizable flat earthers and i think what he did and the beliefs that he lived in public said so much more than doubt, he might have entertained in private. the question i had the most about him and this isn't even so much a question for you. i want to know your your thoughts on it, but just what i was wondering about reading about him as a person is is this somebody who? given as long history of stunts. he eventually would have done something dangerous and self-destructive if any way if it hadn't been the flat earth or did was there something about flat earthism that led him to this particular fate and i don't

know the answer to that. i you know him you liked him. i should say, i mean you seem to really enjoy his company, but what's your thought on thoughts on that? i think there's a good chance of that one of his good friends did indicate that to me. he was a daredevil by trade. he was someone who's always pushing limits, but i think in a very real sense flat earth accelerated that trajectory and when he died, he was not doing the launch that would have gone all the way up into space. he was doing a preliminary one one that would take him higher than he'd ever been but not all the way there and two people i spoke to said his heart wasn't in it that day. he was kind of rushing it because he wanted to do this space launch, which was what he was famous for what he was most known for in the flat earth community. it would have been the proof for lack thereof and they seemed to think that due to his eagerness

to get the ball rolling on his flat earth project that maybe he was a little less cautious. day, or he rushed things maybe he didn't do his measurements, right? so we won't know exactly the craft was destroyed on impact and on impact but yes, i think he was always drawn to danger and i think flat earth exacerbated that. now another interesting thing about him was just the fact that you clearly personally liked. there's a another way that there's a range of people that some of them come across in the book as pretty creepy. we'll get into the the nazi flat earthers in a bit, but also some of them at least i got the impression you were charmed by them on some level, but would you say that would be a fair comment to make i think that is fair. you know, it's funny not just with flat earthers, but with a whole host of strange political

and religious beliefs, even if you don't share them with a person you can get along with them very well, and i found that time and time again with flat earthers. there's this character of them being tin foil hatters or very dumb and i didn't find that to be the case. maybe because they just like chatting with people, but i found that we could hang out we could grab a drink. and that was true of mike and with other people not everybody. i've received my fair share of insults from that movement, but i think it's absolutely true that you could be talking to a flat arthur and unless they bring up the theory you wouldn't know it. and you also there was at least one moment when you were looking at the historical literature where there was what was it called a songwriter story. what was the name of this text that you discussed? you seem just so utterly charmed by the weirdness of it that you were you were delighted it existed. what was that text called?

i'm forgetting the full title. i think okay. yes at the adrian galileo a songwritis story. this was a very weird and i think imaginative book by a an early flat earth movement leader one of the very rare women leading the flat earth movement and she was this eccentric english eris. her name was lady elizabeth blount and she wrote this bizarre book with flat earth sermons in it, but also flat earth song she would have sheet music in it, and i would have to go and kind of figure out exactly how the song sounded and there was something so, um, so delightfully offbeat about that for me, of course when it gets into the actual theories that this book is promoting. i think they are ridiculous and sometimes dangerous, but you know, sometimes you encounter an artifact like that and you say

it's kind of neat. and you know, maybe because it's almost quarantined in the past. i don't think about it's it's ramifications so much, but i had a very good time delving into that. so you've just been talking about how you felt about different flat earthers you met how did they tend to feel about you? i'm sure again, there's a range but what kind of reaction did you get, especially after your stories started appearing and it was clear that you were not just another person at the flat earth conference. there has been a range and i've you know received very crass messages that i can't repeat on air but i've also had a bit of outreach from flat earthers. i think a lot of them just as we hope that they can change their minds. they think that i might convert to flat earth, which is not happening, but i found that even more than wanting to discuss the

theory with me. they've wanted somebody to talk to somebody who was actively listening to them and that's what i try to do as a journalist. so at flat earth conferences, even when i've been there a couple times and people knew my stance and probably what i was going to write i found that people would come talk to me and not just about the reasons for their beliefs, but they would soon start to get into they're pretty deep emotions and the social impact the movement had had on their lives and things that they hoped for in the future and i thought it was very strange that people were opening up to me on that level when again there was this supposed antagonism between us. i think a lot of them really. just wanted to be heard. do you know if any of them have seen the book yet? i i just came out as we speak but there have been advanced reader copies traveling around. have you gotten any feedback from someone who got a hold of a review copy and read it?

you know, i haven't and it's frustrating because i've actually done some outreach on that. you know, you've got a fact check a book and we've been doing that with the book and with excerpts of it as well and i think some folks don't really want to engage. it's one thing to sit down and you know, we'll have a coffee for an hour and we'll talk about someone's feelings. but i think people are a bit hesitant about how exactly they'll be portrayed in the book. and i think i i'd like to think i did a very honest job and i honored their feelings, but it's it's rough, you know as a i don't tend to rewatch my interviews that i do on air and i think a lot of people don't want to read a book in which their portrayed so we'll see, you know, it's it's early days and i'm my email inbox is always open. if if you were invited to go on a flat earth podcast or youtube

show to talk about the book would you go on? no, i wouldn't you know, i am i tend to try and disengage from things that would artificially promote the theory and in a lot of those cases. they're not really interested in discussion so much which i'm happy to do, but they want to try and debate and i think the whole framework of trying to debate flat earth is is um, it's a misframing because when you pit flat earth against round earth, you're suggesting that there are two equally valid or comparably valid sides of an argument and there's not you know, the globe established science and trying to debate is i think a waste of time and energy and credibility even so i don't get involved with that kind of thing. and i also you know, i i don't really like to meddle so much. i know that my presence there. is you know now known people by

the end of my reporting would come up to me because they knew that i was the person writing a book, but i don't want to be in the flat earth movement. i would just much rather my my own business now. one thing that's come up a few times in this conversation is the connection between flat earthism and conspiracy theories. obviously there's a reason why someone who believes the earth is flat would be drawn to to conspiracy theories. you want to explain because you have to explain a lot of things by saying they're faked but even beyond the conspiracies that you need to imagine to have a flat earth that people are drawn to other conspiracy theories as well. so setting aside for a moment the nazi flat earth because that's a whole other topic in himself. could you talk a bit about some of the other outside the mainstream ideas that people either in the history or in the contemporary movement talk to that you encountered sure, so

there is a lot of crossover between flat earth and other conspiracy movements and i i think that's accelerating. it's a trend. i've noticed over the past couple years, but one thing to remember is that one of the best indicators for someone's their potential to believe a conspiracy theory is whether they believe in other conspiracy theories people who are drawn to those alternate explanations will look for them and other contexts. so one thing that i've found a lot in flat earth is an increasing prevalence of the human on conspiracy theory again, there's no real reason that those two theories should be linked. they don't share many. claims across the same theory but i found that people who are willing to believe that the entire government is concealing the shape of the earth are also willing to believe that democrats are eating babies,

which is a queue and unclaim and so i've seen an increase in sharing q&a memes and flat earth forums and vice versa flat earth and queuing on forums. so there has been that cross pollination. there's always been flat earth used a reaction against theories that are antagonistic to fundamental religious beliefs, so a flat earth has been used as a reaction against evolution. it's increasingly used i think is a pushback against facts about climate change people saying well climate change can't happen because the climate doesn't work the way the scientists do and i think that is in itself a very dangerous and potent form of conspiracy theorizing. one of my favorite conspiracy theories that popped up in the book just because i had never encountered it before and i've encountered i've encountered a lot. so i'm always glad to see fresh territory was charles k johnson

had the idea about the true meaning or the true purpose of the united nations and just for the c-span viewership. could you tell everyone what he thought the united nations was supposed to be for? he he believed the united nations was part of a a broad political plot. and you know, i'm so sorry. the finer details are escaping me because they are just so bizarre that sometimes they lost in the just the melee of strange claims, but he thought that it was kind of a one-world government type organization. i believe he thought that a us president would be installed as world president and he was able to craft this really kooky political belief and again the very specific escape me without doing his text right now. i will say then the thing that was new to me was the idea that it was originally formed to reveal that the earth was flat

and had been diverted from that. that was a maction that laugh out loud moments in the book, but that was when they got me so i i yeah go ahead and part of the evidence he had for that thing. thanks for the prod. there. was that the united nations flag has a slightly different map of the world kind of top-down model and he thought that was proof and strangely that claim has endured in some form and modern flat earth. they don't have now that the united nations are a secretly pro flat earth organization, but they do believe that there's something to be said for that map of the world and well, why is it promoted like that? all right, so i said we get back to the nazis and we should stress for everyone's sake, you know, the flat earther is watching this that you know, the majority of people you you met were not nazis usually if they brought up hitler it was to compare their enemies to hitler but you've got this one group that was doing something else.

so not see flat earthers. what's up with that? what is up with that? um, no, unfortunately, there is a very small but very vocal subsection of the flat earth movement that is involved in extremely far right politics and explicit praise of nazis. this isn't unique to flat earth when it comes to conspiracy theories when you think about fascism in nazism in the historical sense, they were very conspiratorial movements. they falsely blamed religious and ethnic minorities of horrible crimes against the the true people of germany or italy. those were those were just really perverse contortions of conspiratorial thinking and unfortunately, those thought patterns haven't gone away. they can be very easily grafted onto new conspiracy theories like flat earth.

so one issue that a lot of flat earthers encounter as they move through their beliefs and try and rationalize them is okay. well if earth is flat why is it being covered up who's doing the cover up? and i think from some very cynical actors and some genuine bigots have started introducing ideas about just outright bigoted ideas about jewish people into that and blaming religious minorities for the flat earth cover-up. i don't think most flat earthers are taken in by that but i've spoken to a number who when i ask who's doing the cover-up they will squarely blame religious minorities and i think that's a very dangerous dangerous place to be in. where these very old prejudices that were themselves grounded in conspiratorial thinking are

being rebooted into a new completely unrelated theory. so one really interesting dynamic in your book was that at the same time that flat earthers were dealing with you that they had, you know? fascists turning up in their community. it's nazis. we're getting disturbed by the fact that they were flat earthers turning up in their community. it's like you there's are two like rivals for the lowest rung on the social totem pole and in each a little disgusted by each other. could you talk a bit about that? dynamic? absolutely, you know, it's so funny because a lot of flat earthers are rightfully shocked and appalled to find that there are people posting neo-nazi memes in our forum and there are neo-nazis who will make fun of flat earth. there's and have a ton of people in the forum say, hang on. i think there's some truth to that. they're very strange bedfellows. most people don't want to be perceived as a nazi or a flat

earther. and yet it's something that they've had to reconcile with in recent years, and i remember reading one nazi forum attached to nazi website that this this website is famous for like never apologizing for anything because it's just absolutely horrible and they made a joking attack on flat earth. there's and so many of their readers in the forum got mad about this that they had to issue a bit of a back track. i thought that was so funny that they were willing to say just terrible things about anything, but they realized that enough of their constituency was receptive to flatter theory that they couldn't afford to bash it on air. i want to read one more passage from the book. this is from the end. and you wrote now it is dusk. and the lights in my city are coming on as the globe rotates away from the sun. these movements but these moments between day and night or the best time to watch the sink the sun sink behind the earth's

curve the way mathematicians and matt makers of old used to watch ships disappear behind the horizon. it's the gray the clarity that comes in the dim in between somewhere statistically speaking quite nearby me the flat earther has noticed the night time and chalked it up to the sun moving across the face of a flat plane tomorrow morning the sun will rise according to our various models in the day will come again. either way at least for now. we'll have to share it. so i really like that. i think you've got two great points there one being the need to live in the same society as people who live in you know, very different mental universes which obviously applies to all sorts of groups that are larger and and less comic than flat earth. there's and also this idea of the clarity that comes in the den in between. what does this book have to teach us about getting along with people who might not believe in something as weird as a flat world, but still see the

world differently than we do. i think one thing i learned is that certain ways of binary thinking and of maybe team-based thinking i'm red team blue team. i'm militantly flat and or i'm around arthur who's only here to make fun of flat earthers. they aren't especially helpful for our compassion or for our shared maintenance of reality. it's difficult to upkeep a relationship with someone with a very fringe belief and especially if that belief is harmful like religious bigotry and yet the world is so big that you can't just wall yourself off with people who agree with you. i think we need to make space for people to come back from conspiracy beliefs, and we need to have conversations that

persuade more than just argue. i think those arguments can cause people to become even more entrenched in their beliefs. so, although it's difficult. i found it heartening i think to have productive conversations with flat earthers and i think we need to leave the door open for people to return to reality and for us to welcome them back and reassert some sanity together. well with that, thank you again for being on the the show the name of the book again is off the edge by kelly weil, and it's there's a lot of interest in this book and thank you for coming and we've only scratched the surface here in this hours. so, thank you again for coming on the show and congratulations on the book. thank you so much.

of the page. weekends on c-span 2 are an intellectual feast every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sundays book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors funding for c-span 2 comes from these television companies and more including charter communications. broadband is a force for empowerment. that's why charter has invested billions building infrastructure upgrading technology empowering opportunity in communities big and small charter is connecting us. charter communications along with these television companies support c-span 2 as a public service