This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jeff Sandhu with all the information and technology that are available to even the least intellectual gifted amongst us. It's incredible to see how wrong people can be about almost everything. One person who quite obviously never bothered to pick up his intellectual gifts is called to pop some man, amity?
Hey Jeff. Hey man. Today Matt wants to show you how wrong he can be. It's time to match Spain.
So Matt, what are you wrong about this? Which is very surprising. This is very unusual that you're wrong about something. Well, you know, I was flying some potential investors down to the culture rocket launch site in my golf stream.
Have I mentioned the rocket on the show? Not yet. OK. Well, we're calling it the the FUBA, which is the fairly useful big appendage rocket.
I bet Elon Musk won US dollar that I could set up a Mars colony before he could. And since I was forced to shut down the culture pot, Cobot mines last year, I have a lot of spare labor to build rockets. So we're back on track now. We had some early teething troubles.
Who knew rocket fuel, melted people's hands off. But you know, you learn. Anyway, we will come back to the rocket another day and stick with this story now. Good.
Obviously, the chitter chatter from my investors about risks and returns was boring me stupid because everyone knows that they're throwing their money into my bottomless bit. So it left my mind free to wander. And as I was staring out of the window of the jet, I came to the conclusion that the Earth is flat. Now, we were flying really high.
Could I see any curves? No, of course not, because they aren't there. Someone has been selling us a lie for years about all this round earth nonsense. I can't believe you're a flat earther.
Well, that's the thing. I didn't know I was a flat earther until I went online and realized that I wasn't the first person to come up with this idea. I found a community of other incredible minds and visionaries who all have their own Eureka moments. And I came to the same momentous conclusion.
So I want to take today's show to explain and demonstrate how we've all been duped and manipulated by a mendacious scientific community. Because when you think about it, this is enormous. If they're lying to us about the shape of our planet, what else are they going to be hiding from us? How deep does this conspiracy go?
Is there anyone or anything that we can trust? So you want to fly in the face of centuries of scientific knowledge, the importance of astronomy and physics and the rotation of the Sun, man? I think of it more as new knowledge that has come to light. So earlier this show, we did an episode about the technologies and solutions that progress has forgotten to improve.
Things like belts and shoelaces and forks. So I see this as being very much part of the same exercise. Yes, in the past science has led us to believe that the earth is round. That doesn't mean that new information can't challenge those beliefs.
I don't think this is going to go on very well. And I'm not going to regret it as well. But where should we start? Well, when you have to look at the world to find where something is, say a particular town or city, even a mountain range, where do you look?
Most people head to their computer or their phone and pull up something like Google Maps. So for the sake of fairness, other map alternatives do exist if you can be bothered. But when you look at that map, is what you see flat around. Flat.
Exactly. For most people, unless they have some crazy spherical screen, they're going to say that the map is flat. You can't look at a mountain range if it keeps moving. It makes a lot more sense that the ground is flat.
And why is the map flat? Because the earth is flat. But isn't it the other way round? The monitor is flat so that the map is laid out in a way that makes sense on the screen.
Which is exactly what they want you to think. But then, when you think about it a bit more deeply, you come to some other conclusions. What does a company like Google fear more than anything else? It fears being sued.
Of course, Google, like most of the world's major companies, must have bought into the round earth conspiracy. But when it comes to their own services, they can't afford to have that legal exposure. Imagine if the truth came out and it became obvious that Google's map services had perpetuated this lie of the round earth. Think about the class action suits that the company would face.
It could potentially bankrupt them. So what they've done is sell us the truth packaged as convenience. It's flat because the screen is flat. That way, they're still legally compliant when they tell us it's a design work that allows us to understand the world on a screen or a page.
Now, if that was true, wouldn't that kind of information be dangerous? I'm sure an international conspiracy theory of this size wouldn't want you to be blowing this apart on air. I do take precautions. I know that I'm at risk.
I know that there is probably a team of experts from NASA trying to jam the signals of this broadcast. That's why the podcast is so important because they can't block that, at least not yet. Think about it. Why has the US moved to NNET neutrality?
They need to have more control so that information like this can't make it into the hands of the people who need to hear it. NNET neutrality isn't about a two-speed internet. It's not about corporate greed because those companies are going to make their money anyway. It's about controlling us and preventing the truth tellers, people like me, from informing the masses.
I know it makes me sound like I'm crazy. But that's one of the reasons I live here in Malaysia because it's so darned hot. That way you can quickly spot the men in black because the suited and booted look is pretty uncommon on the streets here. Now, before we dive back into your madness, what about the fairly obvious evidence in the shape or photos of the planet taken from space?
And I'm glad you asked me that. First, who goes into space? There are only a few organizations that have the ability to travel into space. You've got NASA, you've got the European Space Agency, you've got Russia's Roscosmars.
There are only a few other countries in the space club, India and China being some of the newer examples. So when you look at it from that point of view, it makes a conspiracy like this quite a simple thing to achieve. When you think about it, just a handful of people control pretty much all the information that we have and that we get about space. That's an amazing amount of power to concentrate in the hands of this very small group of people.
So as long as the people at the top are protecting the secrets, they don't even need to get the people below them to buy in. Everything is channeled to their screens anyway, so any computer generated image of the Earth can be made spherical before they reach the screens. You know, the simpler these things are, the more easily they can be made watertight. One more, what about the commercial companies like SpaceX?
Are they in on this conspiracy as well? What about all the commercial satellites that take pictures and send them back down? Well, I'm not sure that someone like Elon Musk would buy into this kind of conspiracy, but he's yet to send human beings into space. So who knows how his data is being intercepted or corrupted?
NASA has been doing this for decades. I think they're more than a match for fledgling outfits like SpaceX. And you have to bear in mind that a lot of the guys in the commercial space companies have served time in national space agencies. So that's why I'm so concerned for Musk and his mass economy, because if he is laboring under the false assumption that Mars is also a sphere, I think it's quite likely that the first colonists will overshoot and miss their landing zone.
And I hate to think that his mission would fail because his astronauts get fired further out into the solar system than they need to be. But, you know, they always say the truth often has a body count, just like my teenage animals. What about these satellite photos then? That's the thing.
These photos actually help to prove that our planet is flat. And you see a picture of New York, Kuala Lumpur, or Berlin taken from space. Do you see a sphere? No, you see a flat piece of land outlining the local topography.
Their argument is that the photo covers too small an area to illustrate the curvature of the Earth. Isn't that really convenient? Isn't that exactly what someone would say if they were trying to hide the fact that the planet isn't round? Commercial spaceflight is precisely what the space agencies are so afraid of, because it's the beginning of the end for their secrets.
Once we can send truly independent observers beyond our atmosphere, these secrets are going to break like the rotten egg they are. Baffled? Well, I certainly am. Let's hope that we can shed some light in the shape of our planet after the break and also bring back the real man-amma-tage after this BFF 8.9.
Be firmly motivated. BFF 89.9. And welcome back. This is a fun Friday.
Now, before the break, Matt was telling us why the Earth is flat. It isn't, Matt. It's really not flat. But we can't kick him out of the studio for another 10 minutes, so we have to carry on with this very silly game that you're playing.
I hope it's a game. Matt, what about the pictures of our planet from space? That's a really easy one to clear up. We've all seen the pictures of the planet taking from places like the International Space Station, or even from supposedly the surface of the moon.
All the cameras have very thick lenses, and it has the effect of turning all the pictures into those fisheye style shots. You've all seen them, a lot of us have got apps on our cameras and phones that simulate these kind of rounded fisheye shots. So what we're seeing is not around Earth, but a flat one reinterpreted by these lenses. As for the astronauts themselves, of course, they have to buy into the conspiracy, or they wouldn't be allowed to be up there in the first place.
What about the astronauts they take selfies of themselves with the Earth in the background? More smoke and mirrors, or rather thick glass. We've all been seduced by the sci-fi movie image of space travellers looking wistfully and longingly through a window at the stars, and it always looks like you're living room window minus the cobwebs and the smears. We forget that those windows contain the pressure of the spaceship inside a vacuum, so it's natural that they will distort the image of anything beyond them.
They have to be thick enough that they can maintain structural integrity and to filter out the cosmic radiation that would otherwise pick all the astronauts. So once again, you get that same fisheye effect that flat Earth becomes round. I agree, you don't seem to be getting far with all this anecdotal evidence. So let's take your nonsense down with science.
If the Earth is flat, where are its ages? Well, there's no single universally accepted explanation because it's been covered up. Until the powers that be stop blocking us from accessing the truth, we can really kind of only guess. One theory and the one that I'm happiest with is that our perception of the planet has been deliberately distorted.
So when you look at a traditional map, you see the two poles north and the south at either end of the planet or at the top of the bottom of the page, as a flat Earth, I believe that our planet is a flat disk. So not dissimilar to Terry Pratchett's disworld, but without the silly stuff like an elephant holding it up, which would just be ridiculous. What about the poles? Or have they been made up to?
No, of course. Nobody could make up the poles. And I want to keep it scientific. It's just that the term poles isn't correct.
What you call the North Pole is actually at the center of the continental mass of the planet. And what you call the South Pole is actually an ice wall that brackets the entire planet. It's about 150 metres high. And it prevents the seas from spilling out.
If you accept this model of the planet, the prospect of climate change is an even more frightening one, because it holds the very real possibility of our entire planet's water supply simply trickling away into space. So while a lot of people call us nuts, some of us are actually amongst the planet's fiercest advocates and defenders. So if the South Pole is a wall, what stops it from people just going over it? Well, you know, you occasionally hear reports on the news about the various research stations in Antarctica.
There are dozens of them. You have to ask yourself, when you look at the shape of the round atlas, the one that you're used to, why would countries like India, Russia, the US, the UK, Bulgaria, Norway, Sweden, China, all of these northern hemisphere countries, why would they have bases in the Antarctic? I can understand Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Peru, because they are amongst what you normies consider to be the most southern most countries. So their presence would make sense in your model.
The others, not so much. Why would Norway be interested in the Antarctic? When it's practically a stone's throw from the North Pole. Why?
Because the South Pole is all around us, and all of these countries are guarding it. Forget Donald Trump's wall, the world is already defending a giant ice wall. And that's why a lot of us believe that George R.R. Martin is one of the flat-earth believers.
His ice wall, the castle black, and the night's watch are all his nod to the conspiracy that's going on around us. But why would anyone want to hide this? Like, if it was true, wouldn't it just be easy to fess up and admit it? Well, they can't think of the embarrassment.
You might as well just say that centuries of knowledge and development was wrong, that we wasted our time. Well, we used to think that bloodletting and leeches were a good idea, and we changed our mind on those things. And that's kind of a shame, because if the world economy was geared around leeches, Malaysia would be one of the world's economic giants. There are just too many vested interests.
The space agencies, map makers, graphic designers, all these people who have built their livelihoods around the concept of the planet being a sphere. You can't go up against that kind of power and money. You can't annoy graphic designers. What about gravity?
Well, what you believe to be gravity is actually the wrong way round. Our planet is in constant motion, but we move through space in a linear fashion. So when you talk about gravity, you're talking about a force that holds everything in place and brings it back down to earth. What we're saying is that we are constantly accelerating forwards, so those gravitational forces don't need to be as strong.
You throw a ball up in the air and it starts to come back down to you. Well, you are actually being propelled towards the ball at a faster rate than it's coming towards you. You are reaching the ball before it gets to you. I'm trying to think of more examples.
What about the sun and the moon? Well, the thing that the sun and the moon is they're not as big as traditional scientists tell us. And they're not as far away as you think. I think that the sun is something like 32 kilometers across, and it's only about 3000 kilometers up in the sky.
So it simply isn't possible for the sun to illuminate the entire disc at one go. It's more like a spotlight moving across the disc. So when the sun isn't on you, it's dark, and you can see the moon and the stars. It literally isn't rocket science.
It's just flat. GPS. Exactly. The system perfectly designed by space agencies to convince us that we're moving in straight lines on our planet when actually we're moving around the edges of a disc.
It's all sleight of hand, and this kind of technology just makes it easier for them. 50 minutes on or probably even more. Are you done now, Matt? Do you think your arguments have persuaded anyone?
Okay, hand up. I don't believe the earth is flat. Probably very few of our listeners do either. One of the things about a lot of conspiracy theories is that they choose things that are difficult to prove or disprove.
Was there a conspiracy to murder JFK? Before the archives were unlocked, it was that act of keeping information secret that illustrated the conspiracy. When the information was made public, it was the parts that were redacted or kept secret that proved the conspiracy. The Bilderberg Group and the New World Order, a shadow UN army sitting in the wings ready to put us all under this global dictatorship.
There isn't even time to begin unpicking that lot. But the flat earth is a kind of an anomaly because they persist even though the theories seem to be so easy to disprove. I was going easy on you, but you always had a comeback no matter what the question was. That's because this is a conspiracy that's very much of our fake news internet era.
It's very much about building a belief system. The facts are rebutted with counter facts. It doesn't matter if those counter facts aren't true. As long as the pieces fit, that jigsaw puzzle that creates that entire belief system.
Does it fit with other conspiracy theories? Well, that's kind of a hard one to negotiate. We like to think that people are all the same. So if they buy into one conspiracy theory, they buy into all of them.
In some ways, flat earth is the ground zero of conspiracy theories. When you believe that even the most basic information about this planet is wrong. And more than that, there's an active conspiracy to hide that information. Then it's easier to start disbelieving all official information.
It takes us back to what we were saying on MSP 19, which was our episode on trusting technology and all about the emergence of this neo-ludite movement. It is interesting, however, that despite rejecting a lot of mainstream scientific facts, especially regarding the science and technology industries as being part of this movement that wants to enslave us. These people are still happy to make use of technologies like phones, computers, the internet, YouTube, Facebook, all the other social media sites, as well as all manner of gadgets that are based on the exact scientific principles that they reject. So it's like a shadow belief system?
I know I'm probably insulting a lot of people here, but it's Friday. We all have weird little belief superstitions and fancies in our skeleton closets. For example, I tried to avoid stepping on the lines between the paving slabs. There's no superstition attached to it.
I don't think it's unlucky, but some weird little motor in my brain is more comfortable if I don't upset the symmetry. Other things are just programming. I think I may have mentioned on the show before. I grew up in the countryside, so we were often around animals like ducks and geese and chickens.
And we were always told, not by my parents I might add, to make sure that your fly was done up or a goose might, you know, pick it off. Complete and utter nonsense. But to this day, if I find myself around decent swans, I automatically check that my fly is up. It lives in that part of the brain that logic just can't penetrate.
I feel that this is genuinely an area where we should just get away from. Okay, the thing is that some people take the fantasies a stage further. They treat reality as though it were their own kind of steampunk sci-fi story. One of the reasons I love Terry Pratchett is because he makes his fantasy so ridiculous.
But even within that, there's a certain logic and people live out normal lives within the principles that guide the world. To me, the theorists like Fat Earthers, they're trying to create a reality that makes sense of their worldview that turns established facts on their head and creates, if not logical, then a densely interwoven belief system that allows them to make sense of the world around them. And it generally has the added advantage of proving them to be smarter than everyone else. You know, they become the enlightened outsider, whereas we're the sheep that they look down on with a mixture of scorn and pity.
Why haven't we spent time unpicking the arguments, like, you know, throwing where logic and science shattered them? Because there is absolutely no point. When I was doing the research for today, and yes, it may have been nonsense, but I did actually research it. When I was doing research for today, I came across a sentence, I can't remember where from now, but the gist of it was this.
There isn't a large and vocal round Earth movement to counter the Flat Earthers because most of us really don't care. We know the Earth is round because the Earth being round makes sense of all the things we see in the sky, the planet, the Scutars, the sun and the moon. Gravity sticks us to the ground, it helps to stop our atmosphere and water from wandering off. You know, physics and chemistry and biology and mathematics, none of that stuff really makes sense unless the Earth is round.
For most of us, this is just normality. We're not going to be bothered setting up groups to point out how silly the idea of a Flat Earth is because it is so silly, we just won't think about it. And that's exactly why the Flat Earthers and other conspiracy theorists get coverage because they have something unusual to say, and they're happy to say it very loudly. So if we go back to your question, why not debunk their argument?
Like I said, there's no point, they're not interested in facts, they've already run away from truth and logic. You can't deprogram them any more than you can stop my hand moving to my groin every time I see a goose. What's more important is to make sure that the conspiracies don't spread and infect larger populations because if the world turns upside down and their views gain prominence, we won't be looking at a functioning alternative model. We'll kind of be looking at the sky crashing in.
Well, if you're a Flat Earth and you want to get in touch with CultureBobs Matt, I'm just going to head on to his site, it's CultureBop.com, Culture with a K. I don't think we have any K reference to Flat Earth today. We're not coming up with one thing. No, we're not coming up with one thing.
No, I was just looking at the best place for the Flat Earth is to contact me is on Twitter because I'm not there. You can also head on over to the site for full transcripts of this show as well as information about CultureBop's consulting services and mentoring services and also about all these conspiracy theories. That's right. And I've just remembered Kate's for Krypton.
Oh, there we go. Sometimes the brain goes a bit more slowly like our planet. We'll be right back with a very special episode of Greek Squax after this BFM 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast.
To find more great interviews go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9. The Business Station.