Behind the Curve

So where are you, right now?

You think you're on a globe spinning

at a thousand miles an hour.

That globe is spinning around the Sun

at 60,000-plus miles an hour.

That solar system is flying sideways through the galaxy

at half a million miles an hour,

and that galaxy is going through

the rest of the universe at millions of miles an hour.

And you feel nothing.

In reality, you are actually

in a giant planetarium,

slash terrarium,

slash soundstage,

slash Hollywood backlot

that is so big

that you and everyone you know

and everyone you've ever known

never figured it out.

At 17,000 miles an hour, the second stage leaves

the abandoned first stage far behind

as it soars 5000 miles downrange.

The curvature of the Earth is plainly visible.

I have a beautiful view of the S4B

and the Earth here all at once.

I'll try and get a picture for you.

Our planet is beautiful. It's not really a planet.

A strange message of words "Google Flat Earth"

were carved into Mt. Rubidoux.

How would you feel if I say

there's absolutely zero real pictures from space?

Flat Earth theory is actually getting popular.

My children will have to pay

for the lies that NASA gives.

The number of people who think

the world is flat is growing.

Thousands, if not millions of people--

A lie is a lie, even if everybody believes it.

These people live amongst us. I wanna point this out.

What drives such theories?

Why are people flocking to this absurd belief?

Thank you for sailing aboard the Washington State Ferries.

We look forward to seeing you again soon.

Everybody's been fed.

Except now we've got to--

Where's the silly chicken?

Right there. Oh!

We're having one of Mark's favorites.

We're having iced applesauce, with our--

It's not.

It was one of my favorites when I was young.

Well, you like it now too.

What are we having?

We're having chicken noodle soup,

iced applesauce, and some rolls.

Homemade rolls?

Homemade rolls and homemade jam.

He's spoiled.

I don't deserve you.

Okay, here we go.

So Mark called and said that

he was a member of the Flat Earth Society,

and I said, "Oh, Mark, what are you on to now?"

How do you know it's a globe? It's 'cause you saw this.

It's not like you've been there in your Jetson's car.

Nobody's got a spaceship.

You've been looking at this for 30 years?

You can throw that away.

This is the domed version

of the flat Earth model.

The south pole, it's like a 200-foot wall of ice,

straight up, Game of Thrones style.

And the sun and the moon are just lights in the sky.

I love movies, always have,

and so I try to compare it to The Truman Show.

You know, The Truman Show was just

a giant Hollywood stage 20 miles wide.

If you built a stage that was a thousand miles wide,

how many people could you fool besides just Truman?

Of course you're gonna have questions. Everybody does.

Because, it's like, "Okay, how does everything work?"

Here's a perfect example, if you wanna see it real quick.

So like, those buildings in the distance?

Right out there? That's Seattle.

You shouldn't be able to see it.

There should be hundreds of feet

of curvature between us and them.

You should barely be able to see those buildings.

When you're doing the curvature of the Earth,

here's what the Earth looks like.

What we're saying is, and of course this is exaggerated,

is that if you're here, eventually,

if there's an object far enough,

you won't be able to see it over here,

because the curvature of the Earth puts it on

the other side of the hill.

You could say, "Oh, well, it's refraction,

or it's atmospheric effects, or mirage."

No, no, no. Not every weather condition,

not every light condition.

Science is having a problem combatting what we're doing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson-- I hate saying his name.

We call him "He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named."

--says that it's a growing anti-intellectual movement

which borders on the end of civilization

and democracy as we know it.

The Earth isn't flat.

And by the way,

this is called gravity.

The reason why we're winning versus science,

against science, is science just throws math at us,

whereas we go "Hey, by the way, there's Seattle.

You can see it right now with your camera."

That's it. A picture says a thousand words.

I was well-versed in just about

every conspiracy you can think of.

I had heard about every conspiracy.

Flat Earth was the last book on the shelf.

It was the DVD that somebody gave you for Christmas

that you knew you weren't gonna open

'cause the title was horrible.

It's like How To Make A Poop Sandwich.

Or Poop Sandwich Volume Three.

But when you get bored enough with normal conspiracies,

you're looking for something new.

There was a certain novelty to it.

I do think that he gets a little off

on some of the conspiracies.

I don't think that everything is a conspiracy.

Mom's always doing the whole glass half full,

and I'll go on and say, "Well,

the glass is probably controlled by

some sort of sinister group." Yeah, right.

There was a video, a guy talking about

flight paths in the southern hemisphere,

how they didn't make sense.

Then I stumbled across a video by Matt Boylan,

and he was a contract artist for NASA.

I guess this is a photo of the Hubble Telescope

taking a picture of itself.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

And at a high-level NASA party out in the Hamptons,

they told him the GPS system doesn't work out

in Antarctica because the world is flat.

They started laughing. They all started laughing.

And my superior had quite a weird smirk on his face,

watching me to see how I would take all this.

This, this is what it is.

What do you think your first reaction's gonna be?

BS, no way.

If you don't make fun of this the first time you see it,

there's probably something wrong with you.

I became a flat-Earther 'cause I tried to debunk flat Earth.

Everybody that becomes a flat-Earther

does the same thing.

They say, "It's a stupid idea.

I'm gonna debunk flat Earth,"

and then they get sucked in like the La Brea tar pits.

When it came to this, I looked at it

for literally nine months before I turned around.

The Jerry Maguire moment that I had, I remember the date,

I remember the time, it was February 10th, 2015.

Three o'clock in the morning. Three-thirty, to be exact.

And I woke up and I said:

"This is now gonna flip."

Once I had my arguments down, I made the series of videos.

I tried to be as rational as possible,

I did a lot of editing,

and I made connections to dots that no one had done before.

This is a Reader's Digest version

containing many of the interesting parts

of the flat Earth theory.

The first question is invariably:

"Is this a joke? Because it's a joke, right?"

And that's where we start.

Because it's one of our two basic childhood facts:

one plus one equals two,

and the Earth is a globe.

When I put the "Clues" out,

I partially thought

that this thing was gonna crash and burn,

because I thought some guy with a master's

in astrophysics or astronomy was gonna call me up and say:

"You forgot to do this math, you forgot to carry the two,

and that's it. You screwed up, you can shut down your channel,

and everyone can go home."

The first part of the clue is the utter lack

of nonstop flights from anywhere

in the southern hemisphere,

or in the flat Earth model,

the land masses closest to the outer ring.

So I spend day after day looking at

the Plane Finder global map.

I need to watch a few as they cross

either the South Pacific or Indian Oceans.

For the first 30, 45 days, I was just holding my breath.

I wait for an ocean plane.

And I wait. And I wait. And I wait some more.

Hours pass, days pass, and no red planes to entertain me.

And before I even got the first five "Clues" out,