Science conspiracy theories (featuring Dr. Phil Plait)

0:07 We're doing our best to understand the universe. From biology to cosmology, from parasites to pulsars, we're building knowledge steadily about how things work. And we're using science because it's amazing. But sometimes, despite the torrent of information and understanding we're generating, wires get crossed. Strange theories develop and build support across the internet, cherry-picking evidence rather than fairly applying the scientific method.

0:35 These aren't science theories, they're conspiracy theories, and unfortunately, they're everywhere. From YouTube comments to the mouths of influencers, people are talking about the end of the world, or how CERN is sacrificing human children, or the Beams are responsible for the Berenstain Bears being the Berenstain Bears. I wish that last one was a joke. So today, we'll dig into some of these conspiracy theories and understand where they came from and why they are nonsense. We're joined by one of our favorite science communicators and friends, Phil Plait, who will tell us also about how he saw Vladimir Lenin in his shower curtain. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe of Conspiracies.

1:19 Intro Dr.

1:32 Phil Plait is an astronomer, author, sci-fi dork, TV documentary talking head, a science enthusiast, a pop-sci author, and a former goat owner. He writes the Bad Astronomy newsletter, which you can find on Beehive.

1:46 How is life without goats, Phil? Are you okay?

1:51 It's goatless. It's sans chevre. I don't know if that's correct French or not. Maybe Zach can help me with that.

2:00 No cheese is what I think you just said.

2:02 Yeah, exactly. It's been a while. We had four adorable mini goats when we lived in Colorado. But when we had to move from Colorado, that is, we had to rehome them. And we actually sent them to a farm upstate, which, you know, generally when you're talking to a kid is something of a euphemism. But in this case, it actually is true. We found a place.

2:29 Now they can run and jump all day long.

2:31 Yeah, well, in fact, we found a place that had a huge area with a bunch of other goats and they needed a few more, so.

2:39 Nice.

2:40 They looked pretty happy when we left.

2:42 That's good.

2:42 They needed more goats? They had a goat shortage?

2:46 They had quite a few goats, but they were on multiple acres. And Kelly, I've heard you talk about your goats. People have a lot of misconceptions about goats. They will eat until they fall over. That part is true. But they're picky. They are. And I know people who swear... I saw a goat eat a tin can once. It's like, no, you didn't. You saw it in a cartoon 50 years ago.

3:11 You're misremembering it.

3:12 Wait, cartoons are not documentaries. They're not totally science-based. What are you talking about?

3:18 The Bugs Bunny ones are, you can consider to be real.

3:22 Coyote and Roadrunner too, yeah.

3:23 Totally.

3:24 So yeah, we used to, I used to cut weeds and grass and all kinds of things. And there was some stuff they just, they just wouldn't eat. Yeah. But they looked pretty happy on the farm, though. So plenty to eat, plenty of friends, and plenty of room to run.

3:36 I'm glad.

3:37 I miss them.

3:37 Well, thanks for coming on the show and dispelling misunderstandings about science and goats. That's what we're doing today.

3:45 That's my job. I think I have that on my business card, goat debunker.

3:51 The most important job anybody can have, really. I work in that field as well.

3:56 The pay is terrible, but it's a lot of fun.

4:00 You lose money, I think, actually. Whenever you're doing anything with goats, it's a money pit. But they're so cute!

4:06 But can we really trace any harm to misunderstanding goats? Like, does it matter if people think goats eat tin cans?

4:12 Probably for the goats that are fed tin cans.

4:14 Yeah.

4:16 You know, I will say there is one big misunderstanding about goats that I've seen many times.

4:22 What's that?

4:22 People do not understand that these are herd beasts. And I will see people saying, I'm going to get a goat. And I think, no, you should get at least two or three. And this is the same thing about donkeys and horses. You can't, you know, having one is actually cruel.

4:38 Yeah.

4:39 Imagine being locked up in a room by yourself for, you know, four years. It's, actually, that sounds pretty good.

4:45 Yeah.

4:47 But for these herd animals, yeah, you need more than one. So there can be some misconceptions that lead to unfortunate goat outcomes.

4:58 Well, let's talk about the goatest of all conspiracy theories. The ones about the end of the world. Phil, you want to talk about the Mayans and the sort of popular science concept that the Mayans predicted the end of the world.

5:12 Yeah, the Maya not-pocalypse, as I like to call it.

5:16 What is the claim here? What are they talking about? What do they say was going to happen?

5:20 What's the claim? The claim is that the Maya civilization in Mexico and Central America lasted for thousands of years and at their height– quite the accomplished group of people. They had big cities and agriculture and all kinds of stuff. They also had a very sophisticated calendar. And the claim is that their calendar came to an end on December 21st, 2012, the day we all remember the earth was not destroyed.

5:53 We're all just a simulation now.

5:55 That's correct. A Maya simulation.

5:56 Right.

5:57 Which is funny because Maya, isn't that video software in that name of a video software package? So, hey, maybe I'm giving them a little bit more fodder.

6:07 They're doing it right out in the open.

6:08 Coincidence? You'll hear me saying that a lot.

6:11 Coincidence?

6:13 Yes.

6:13 Yes, it is.

6:15 When it comes to Doomsday, astronomy plays an outsized role because the entire universe basically is a gigantic threat against our planet. And so there's any number of topics you can pick from. to cause the end of the world, which is true. And a lot of these things can happen. The odds of them happening are one in a gazillion.

6:38 So that gives us pretty rich fodder. What I find funny is that the Maya have nothing to do with this. This is silly.

6:46 And real quick, if you want to hear more about various ways space is trying to kill us, you should definitely read Phil's book, Death from the Skies.

6:53 That is true.

6:54 Yeah, okay.

6:55 That's all I have to say. I'm done now. I got the plug in. We're done. See y'all.

6:58 Oh, great.

7:00 Short episode, but right to the point.

7:02 The end of my calendar.

7:03 That's right.

7:05 So the idea came about a few decades ago from various and sundry usual conspiracy theorists. The idea is the Maya had, they actually had a very sophisticated calendar. One of them is called the Long Count Calendar, and it has a series of units in it. And these units are similar to The units we have, day, week, month, year, they had a kin, which is a day. My Maya is, unfortunately, a little rusty. The only word I know in Maya that I'm pronouncing correctly is shtolak, which means lizard. That's something I learned, actually, at Chichen Itza when I visited.

7:48 And I found that a lot of Maya sounds Vulcan. So if you're a Star Trek fan, you're going to love this stuff. So there's the kin, which is a day, and a winal, which is 20 days, short of a month, but call it a month. A tun, which is 260 days. And then a baktun. And a baktun is 394 years, roughly. It's 144,000 days. Now, these numbers are different than ours because they were fanatics about different bases. We do everything sort of in base 10 or 12. I mean, there's seven days in a week and all that. But typically, we try to keep these numbers round. They have things that are divisible by 12 and 18 and 20 and all these different things. And all of these different cycles come together. They all, you know, at some point they

8:38 all cycle together. They each have a common denominator, a greatest multiplicative factor. You know, it's been like 50 years since I took that kind of math and I can't remember what the term is. When you have like five things that all multiply together to get a number.

8:52 Yeah.

8:53 But why did they choose these cycles? Like in the case of our calendar... Some of it makes sense. It's physical, like the length of a day, the length of a month, the length of a year. A week is totally arbitrary. But why do they choose these lengths?

9:06 Thousands of years ago.

9:08 Ah. That's part of the conspiracy. Well, that's true. I mean, we are talking about things that happened a thousand years ago, and I'm not that familiar with the history of the calendar. And to be honest, I'm not even sure why they had two. I think there was this sort of a fiscal– governmental calendar, and then an everyday calendar, which is kind of neat. We have sort of the same thing. We have a fiscal year, which starts on October 1st in the United States and runs through September 30th for reasons.

9:37 And they had these two calendars as well. It just so happens that these are the units they picked. They may have had religious overtones or just sacred meanings or something, or they could have just been nuts about certain numbers like 12 and 18.

9:53 Right.

9:54 And that's how this all worked out.

9:55 Right.

9:56 I was going to guess they had 12 fingers or something because I feel like when it comes to counting.

10:00 These are humans we're talking about.

10:02 I know.

10:03 I'm just joking.

10:03 I feel like when it comes to counting, I want like bases that match the number of like digits on my hands. But anyway, I'm sure, you know, archaeological evidence suggests that was not the case.

10:14 The polydactyl calendar that they used. That's right.

10:17 That's right.

10:18 They were big about cutting off heads and stuff, so they may have had base eight because they cut off people's thumbs. I don't know.

10:24 Hard to say.

10:25 They were an interesting civilization. Anyway, and I'm making that up. The point here is that their calendars were very similar to ours. You have a month, and at the end of the month, you cycle back to day one of the next month. So January 1st through January 31st, the next day becomes February, the next month, but then you go back to day one. And you do this over and over again until you get to the end of the year, December 31st. And then you go to January 1st, you go all the way back to the beginning of those units. And then the next biggest unit, which is a year, goes up one. So you go from 2026 to 2027, that sort of thing. Their calendar did the same thing. Well, when you look at all these numbers,

11:04 they considered year zero to be 3114 BCE. So roughly 5,000 years ago, as our calendar works now. That was just where they sort of started. That was the creation of the world in their mythology. When you look at this, the 13th Bakhtun ends on December 21st, 2012. What does this mean? Well, honestly, what it means is that they've recycled their calendar. All the numbers go back to zero, and then the next biggest unit goes up by one.

11:38 But in fact, if you're a conspiracy theory, the term in fact is meaningless and you can make up whatever you want. And so clearly these guys are saying that the Mayans predicted the end of the world. And that was going to happen on December 21st, 2012, a day where it did not happen. And let me say, like most conspiracy theories that are. Based on science, you know, based is a funny word, like that are, you know, off into another dimension, you know, starting with some sort of scientific fact. This is ridiculous on its face. For example, when you look at the Maya calendar. They had bigger units than the Bakhtun. The Bakhtun ticks over. It's like, oh, we're out of Bakhtuns. What do we do? We go

12:20 to the Pictun, which is like, I think, 20 Bakhtun. They even had the Alawatun. This is, oh, any Maya out there, you can correct me on my pronunciation. This is an even bigger unit that is... 63 million years.

12:36 Wow.

12:37 63.

12:38 Apparently they knew about the dinosaurs being extinct.

12:40 So that lines up. That's not a coincidence, I'm sure.

12:43 Except it was 66 million years ago. But the point being, you know, why would they have bigger units if when they ran out of Bactuns, I don't know what the plural of Bactun is.

12:54 Bactuni.

12:54 Bactuni, Bactuna, Bactunum. Why Bactuna? I like that.

13:00 Yeah.

13:01 It sounds like a brand of fish. It does.

13:03 I'd eat that.

13:04 It sounds like a sushi roll or something, yeah.

13:05 Right. The next unit would be the sashimi.

13:09 But there is something cool about numbers turning over. I'm sure people went crazy with the year 2000 thinking it was going to be the end of the world for no other reason than the numbers are cycling over. Exactly. When I'm driving a car and it hits 100,000 miles, I'm like, ooh, 100,000 miles. I'm like, I don't think it's going to be the end of the world. But there is something kind of, I don't know, not spiritual, not chilling. But something cool about seeing the numbers take over.

13:35 It could be the end of your service warranty. So that could be an issue. And no, I agree. We love round numbers. We celebrate anniversaries that are based on fives and tens. The 25th is a big anniversary, 50, 100. This year was my 31st anniversary of getting married? Yes, 31. Why don't I feel that that's as important as 30? Well, 31 is a prime number, so it's hard to get a base of 31 out of anything. But 31 is prime?

14:08 I think 31 is prime. So it's just a thing. And we do have these sort of atavistic attitudes, these attitudes that come from deep, deep, deep back in our evolutionary history that make us kind of be in awe of things that aren't really deserving of them necessarily. And so we celebrate these things. And hey, you know what?

14:32 Celebrating the end of the year is fun. It's a good unit. It covers a decent segment of a life and four seasons. It makes sense. So when a new year is coming, a time of renewal and refreshing and celebration, I totally get it. And to all of my knowledge, the Maya did this as well. When they came to the end of a big unit, they celebrated They did not think it was the end of the world.

14:59 Did they party like it was 1999?

15:02 I don't think they had a Y2K problem in their issue.

15:06 But it's a shame they didn't have Prince.

15:08 Exactly.

15:09 Yeah. So that's the basis of this conspiracy. And then you say to yourself, well– What can happen? You know, destroying a planet is hard. You know, Earth's been around for four and a half billion years and it's been around. It's not vapor right now. So clearly, gigantic solar flares, asteroid impacts, these kind of things, they have a very difficult time wiping out a planet. So the fun part is when you start reading about how they say this is going to happen. And the beauty of this– and this is another part where I have to put my head in my hands and say, what are you doing?

15:48 Nobody agrees on this. You talk to a different conspiracy theorist, you get a totally different answer. All they know is that the world is going to end.

15:55 They need to coordinate.

15:57 Honestly. And some of them– sometimes they do. You get little cult-like groups that cluster, nucleate around– I was going to say a charismatic figure. Not always charismatic. I'll say that. Sometimes you're like, this person has a cult following?

16:13 We're just jealous. Where's our cult following?

16:15 Yeah, I know. I feel like I've been ripped off. If I'm getting paid by big astronomy and big pharma and big climate, where's my check? Where's my cult?

16:24 And big goat.

16:25 Wearing white robes and throwing tiny pickles at me.

16:27 Tiny pickles.

16:28 No? No real genius fans here? Okay.

16:32 No.

16:32 Somebody in your audience will recognize that quote. Okay.

16:35 Okay.

16:35 Valcom, a real genius. Anyway.

16:37 Different theories.

16:38 People have written books and they always wind up making a lot of money from this kind of stuff. And I think, what good is your money going to be on December 22nd, 2012? And it turns out, yeah, actually pretty valuable. It turns out because it's still around. Bunch of different ideas. So one of the ones that a lot of people heard of is that there is another planet in the Nibiru or Nibiru, different people pronounce it a different way. I tend to pronounce it bull shenanigans.

17:15 So however you want to pronounce it. This is an idea that's been around for a long time. Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-American psychoanalyst in the 20th century. And he came up with this idea of trying to prove that the Bible was literally true, that everything that happened in the Bible really happened. And he did this by... And also, I should say, some ancient culture myths and things like that.

17:38 So he said, look, with Joshua, the earth stood still for a day, manna fell from heaven, there were the plagues. How do we explain this scientifically? And he said, well, maybe the Greeks were right in that Venus sprang from the forehead of Zeus. If you remember your Greek mythology, Aphrodite. In Roman, it was Venus springing from Jupiter's forehead. He said, hey, what if that really happened?

18:04 What if the planet Venus got shot out of Jupiter and ping pong balled around the solar system, causing all kinds of havoc and mayhem, and then settled into orbit around the sun?

18:15 And he said, well, this is what caused the earth to stop spinning in the Joshua part of the Bible that It passed by the Earth and slowed our rotation and then somehow miraculously started to back up. Venus had an atmosphere that's filled with hydrocarbons. And at the time, that's what was thought. And that stuff rained down on Earth.

18:35 And that's what the manna from heaven was. He kind of confused carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. These are two very different things. I know how much you two love chemistry. Chemistry, the one true science, the best science. What?

18:47 Oh, boy.

18:48 The only science we really need.

18:50 Whoa, whoa.

18:50 You didn't get a degree in chemistry.

18:52 Why are you getting all chemistry? I love chemistry.

18:55 Big chemistry has paid you, haven't they?

18:57 I've written a poem to chemistry.

18:59 What?

19:01 Oh, chemistry. Oh, chem. No, no, no.

19:06 Oh, no chemistry.

19:09 No, I do like chemistry, but it plays into, you know, like any science, every science plays into each other. And there's a lot of chemistry in astronomy. And you kind of have to know the difference between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, unless, of course, you're writing a book full of bull shenanigans.

19:24 And are trying to sell nonsense to people. And then it doesn't matter.

19:28 Maybe you should write a diet book about how people should eat a low hydrocarbon diet.

19:32 Oh, God, that's a good idea. Are you feeling out of gas? So Velikovsky, I could go for 17 hours about this guy. He was way off. His history was terrible. His astronomy was terrible.

19:49 But.

19:51 he kind of became a cult figure because scientists tried to suppress him in the 1950s and 60s. And they basically, people were trying to teach his stuff in college. And the science professors came in and were blacklisting his book. And basically, Barbra Streisand affected him. into becoming a much more popular person than he was, if you know about the Streisand effect.

20:11 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

20:12 It's making a lot of noise about something that should have been just nobody talking about. That's it. And then it becomes much more popular than it ever would have been if you had just ignored it. The same thing with Velikovsky. Another guy, Zacharias Sitchin, came along, an Azerbaijani author. He also was big into Mesopotamian misinterpretation. You're going to have that honking noise because I mispronounced Mesopotamian, right?

20:35 Matt is pretty consistent. He's pretty good with that button. We mispronounce a lot of things.

20:39 Yeah, I know.

20:41 And I'm not an archaeologist, so I'm going to mispronounce a few things. He came out with a series of books saying that the Mesopotamians knew about 12 planets, and that included the moon and the sun and this mysterious other planet. He included Pluto in this as well. And he basically is misinterpreting some scrolls that they had and some texts that they had. But he was saying there's this 12th planet, which is called Nibiru, that had these aliens on it called the Anunnaki, which were part of the Sumerian myth. They were like gods, kind of. They visited Earth long ago. They created humans genetically. You know, da-da-da-da-da.

21:20 He wrote seven or eight books about this.

21:23 Wow.

21:25 Loosely based on Velikovsky. And then finally... Nancy Leder shows up, and this was a woman in the late 1990s and early 2000s who said that she was, and this is absolutely true. She was being communicated with by Zaytans, which I believe was from Zeta Reticuli, which is the Betty and Barney Hill UFO case. They were abducted, lost time, kind of what made abductions popular in the 50s and 60s.

21:53 The Zaytans telepathically communicated with Nancy Leder, told her about Nibiru passing Earth on May 27, 2003.

22:01 And when you say this is absolutely true, you mean.

22:05 The claims that she was making. This is what she claimed.

22:07 Oh, it's true that she claimed it. Okay.

22:09 She was being telepathically communicated with by the Zaytans who told her about Nibiru. I cannot remember if Nibiru was populated or not. Maybe the Anunnaki were there. She had a lot of stuff that she said. And that this planet was going to sweep by Earth and wipe us all out on May 27, 2003. Again, a day you may remember.

22:29 Waking up and brushing your teeth and going about your life and not having the planet destroyed.

22:33 Or a day you forgot about because nothing happened.

22:36 Yeah. Or we're a simulation now. She also claimed the comet Hale-Bopp wasn't real, which I found very funny, personally, because this was literally one of the brightest comets in the 20th century. I saw it from inside my house. It was so bright, I could look out a window and see it in the night sky.

22:53 Wow.

22:53 A bunch of amateur astronomers went to her house, her apartment. And tried to get her to come outside and they could show it to her and she refused to come out. It was the whole thing. So Nancy notwithstanding, there were a lot of people who believed this stuff at the time. And it got serious. Nancy claimed, and this is a trigger warning here if you like pets, she claimed she killed her dog to prevent it from having to suffer through the devastation that was going to happen in 2003 from this. We do not know if she really did that.

23:22 Don't even know if she had a dog because she said a lot of weird stuff. And I think she honestly believed this stuff, but she's wrong. And this was one way. So Nibiru is a gas giant planet like Jupiter or maybe a brown dwarf that was coming in from the outer solar system. It's on a 3,600-year orbit that passes by the sun every 3,600 years, which explains, again, some biblical disasters. It was coming back in 2003 and was going to cause floods and tsunamis and earthquakes and cats and dogs living together, all that kind of stuff.

23:58 And of course, it didn't happen. And I wrote about this quite a bit. I said, listen, you can see Jupiter, even though Jupiter is 600 million kilometers away, something like that. It is one of the brightest objects in the sky. A brown dwarf would be just as bright. A Jupiter-sized planet would be visible to the naked eye from well over a billion kilometers away, and it would take years to get from there to here. So even in the year 2000, it's like, well, where is it? Why can't we see it? Oh, it's cloaked. It's invisible. It's infrared.

24:29 It's this and that.

24:31 The lack of evidence is evidence for an even more sophisticated conspiracy.

24:36 Precisely. And Daniel, you said this in the episode about UFOs. And that, when I was driving along in my car, I do listen to this podcast, clearly. And you said that in the UFO episode, that that plays into it because... If you could see this evidence, it wouldn't be a cover-up. To have a cover-up, there has to be something that is up-covered. Am I getting that grammatically correct?

25:00 Probably.

25:03 And so that's how good the government is. They're able to cover up.

25:06 Right.

25:07 A gas giant planet heading toward Earth? Yeah, no. As I like to point out to people, you remember the Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky conspiracy? And how many people knew about that? Four, if you include Hillary Clinton and Monica's friend who leaked this whole thing. Four people knew about this, and yet it got leaked out. If you're telling me that tens of thousands of astronomers planet-wide– are not going to be standing on their roofs screaming about a planet heading toward Earth, you don't know any astronomers because you cannot shut us up. Clearly, I've been talking for like three hours here without even taking a breath. So, you know, clearly.

25:45 So that's one. The planet extinction is something I debated and wrote about for years, which is why I'm a little passionate about it. I even debated Nancy Leder personally on Coast to Coast AM. What? which is a conspiracy theory radio show. I don't know if it's still on. It was on for years and years with Art Bell.

26:03 I don't think so.

26:04 And then George Nury. And I was a guest. I was on quite a few times talking about real science. They asked me to debate Nancy Leder. And contrary to every instinct I had, I said yes. And she– I mean, it was very clear that this person's grip on reality was tenuous. And it became a very difficult situation for me because– It is easy to have fun with grifters, to make fun of them, to mock them and all that kind of stuff. But when somebody is clearly having issues that way, it's a much more delicate situation. I did not enjoy that at all. And that was one of the last times I ever did something like that.

26:44 It sounds like a mental health issue.

26:47 Yes, very much. And I'm not a psychologist. I cannot diagnose her. I'm saying that's what it sounded like to me. I have run into... Any number of con artists with the face on Mars we're going to talk about and with people who said the moon landings were faked, horoscopes, anti-vaxxers, any sort of anti-science conspiracy, you will find people who are making tons of money on it. Sometimes they become head of health and human services on this country. It's weird that way.

27:19 Speaking generically, yes.

27:21 But other times these are folks who are– having mental issues, and it's sad. It's awful. And there's not much you can do about that. Yeah. Well, that was one thing. That was one cadre, one cohort of conspiracy people saying it. Another one was that a solar flare was going to wipe out all life on Earth. Now, the sun has a magnetic field, and the magnetic field gets stronger and weaker over time over this 11-year solar cycle. When it peaks, when it's very strong... You get a lot of sunspots and a lot of solar storm activity, solar flares, coronal mass ejections. These are immense explosions on the sun. Solar flares are very bright. They blast out gamma rays, high energy radiation. Coronal mass ejections are more like a release

28:09 of vast amounts of matter, about a billion tons of hydrogen blown out from the sun, sometimes at extremely high speed. These can interact with Earth's magnetic field and create all kinds of problems, blackouts, they can destroy satellites. We've had issues like that in the past. And as it happens, 2012 was kind of looking like around the time the sun was going to have a maximum of activity. But then five and a half years earlier, when it was at solar minimum, that kind of dragged on for longer than people expected. And so the solar peak didn't actually happen until 2014.

28:45 Because the sun is kind of mysterious and hard to describe and not fully understood, right?

28:49 Yeah, the magnetic field is driven by processes inside the sun, movement of mass, parcels of hot hydrogen. This stuff is incredibly difficult to work with because, you know, it's hot and under pressure. We can't really work with it. But I mean, work with it theoretically. The equations that define how fluids flow, very complicated. You throw in magnetism, which is a nightmare. And you've got some of the most complex physics you can do. And so it's very, very difficult to predict what's going to happen. So the Sun cycle was delayed by a year or two. And we just didn't see that kind of activity. It can cause a lot of grief. The 1859 eruption that actually is when we discovered all of this stuff caused widespread problems,

29:37 even though we didn't have electronics. That's called the Carrington event. If the Carrington event were to happen today, yikes, we'd have blackouts. You'd lose computer accessibility. Banks would go down. It would be a disaster. Ironically, and I love pointing this out to people, in 2012... There was a gigantic storm that blasted off the sun.

29:59 But it missed us.

30:00 By a lot?

30:01 Yeah. If you think the directions around the sun is like a clock, the earth was at like at two o'clock and this thing shot off at 12 o'clock. So it missed us by, you know, 20, 30 degrees, something like that. Had it hit us, it would have been devastating. Wow. But it missed. So the Maya were wrong again. Those are boneheads. So that turned out to be a nothing burger.

30:24 The last one, and this one's kind of my favorite because it's so silly. There is a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A star. Four million times the mass of the sun. It is a beast. Wow. As it happens, every big galaxy has one of these. And ours is actually a little underweight. For a galaxy our size, we should have a much bigger black hole. We don't know why.

30:48 That's a thing. But it still is. It's there. It's big. But it's what we call quiescent. Sometimes these things are actively feeding, material falls in, gets very hot, blasts out X-rays and gamma rays, and these can be so bright that just this phenomenon can outshine all the other stars in that galaxy, and we can detect them from billions of light years away. They're powerhouses. Our galaxy is not one of them. However, the Earth orbits the sun, and so as we sit here on the Earth and we look up at the sun and we compare it to the background stars, It appears to move through the sky relative to these background stars. There are a dozen or so constellations it moves through, and you've heard of them. Leo, Aries, Pisces, Gemini.

31:35 One of them is Sagittarius, the archer. Sagittarius, that is the direction in the sky towards our black hole. That's why it's called Sagittarius A star. When the sun passes by that black hole, according to the conspiracy theorists, Their gravity is going to align, and then something terrible is going to happen. The Earth is going to be destroyed, floods, tsunamis.

31:58 The moon is going to fall into us. Something horrible is going to happen. And in 2012, that was supposed to happen. Same thing with this black hole. The sun aligns with this black hole on December 21st, 2012, according.

32:13 To these people.

32:14 And this is going to cause all of these kind of problems. And it turns out, no. A– This happens every year, right? The earth orbits the sun every year. So the sun passes through Sagittarius every year and it passes by this black hole every year. Nothing happened. Two, it doesn't get that close. It actually gets about five degrees from the black hole. So that's not that close together.

32:37 That's about half the size of your fist held at arm's length in the sky. So that's pretty far in astronomical terms. So that's another problem. Another one. Is that even though, yes, this thing has 4 million times the mass of the sun, it's like a billion times farther away, like literally a billion times. Gravity drops with the square of distance. A billion squared is 10 to the 18th.

33:01 What is that, a quintillion?

33:02 It's a lot.

33:03 So this black hole has about a quintillionth of the gravitational effect on Earth that the sun does.

33:10 Wow.

33:10 So literally, or a trillionth, I think. I did the math. I think it's a trillionth when you do all the math together. So literally, Mercury, the planet Mercury, has a far stronger gravitational effect on Earth than this black hole does. And it aligns with the sun every four months. And so every four months, you are not experiencing tsunamis and floods and cats and dogs living together. So clearly, this is all nonsense. And I could go on and on and on. Those are sort of the big claims. They get smaller and smaller and more and more ridiculous. But in the end, the Maya were not magic. They were not in touch with some spiritual realm that could predict the end of the world. It was just simply the

33:54 odometer on their calendar ticking over and time to buy a new warranty on their calendar.

34:00 Yeah.

34:02 Amazing.

34:02 All right, let's take a break.

34:03 And when we come back, we're going to move from the Mayans up to the modern era and talk about how CERN is going to end the world.

34:10 A matter of concern.

34:39 All right, Daniel, we're passing it off to you. You are leading the next conspiracy theory.

34:45 And try to be quick, will you? My God, that first guess. Holy crap.

34:51 I thought the millennium was going to take over before he was going to finish.

34:54 That was just because we were whizzing around at almost the speed of light. It just made it seem a lot longer.

34:59 One of the most pervasive and frustrating and amazing conspiracy theories I hear a lot is that CERN is opening portals to other dimensions, summoning demons.

35:10 This one's true.

35:11 I'm pretty sure.

35:14 I heard it on the internet.

35:15 It's amazing. I've appeared on other podcasts with a broader audience. And whenever I check the YouTube comments, they're always like, this guy's from CERN. Why didn't you ask him about the demons? Or like, we should shut CERN down until they stop opening portals. And it's like people actually believe this stuff. It's what a lot of people think about CERN.

35:33 What does it even mean? I don't think I understand.

35:35 I mean, you open a rift in space-time, you let in demons, and then they come and ravage Earth's children. I mean, what's complicated about that, Kelly?

35:46 I hadn't heard demons. I heard black holes and other things like that and time ships.

35:50 Exactly.

35:50 But demons, that's awesome.

35:52 So there's demons. There's black holes also. Then there's the people who look at the CERN logo, which has– a bunch of loops that represent the colliders, and they see 666 hidden in the logo. And they're like, see, that confirms it.

36:06 What?

36:06 Oh, yeah. Check out the CERN logo. And also, there are folks that think that turning on CERN shifted the timeline and put us in an alternate universe where, like, The Bernstein Bears are now the Berenstein Bears, and Fruit of the Loom now doesn't have a cornucopia on it, and Mandela died in prison or something. You know these Mandela effects where people feel like things are different from what they remember as a child, and they're roughly connected to something that happened in the 2000s and CERN turned on in the 2000s, and so therefore it must be Daniel did this to you.

36:42 And is there any, like, particular... I'm still trying to understand. So is the idea that, like, if you're shooting particles really fast, that's what opens the rift in the time continuum? Or, like, is there any.

36:55 You are already thinking about this in more detail than anybody who's made these claims, Kelly.

36:59 Okay.

36:59 But so Phil had, like... I mean, those were pretty detailed conspiracy theories.

37:03 Like, the science was wrong, but they had thought about it pretty hard to try to make the pieces fit together. There's nothing like that happening here. It's just, like, physicists are evil.

37:12 Demons.

37:12 Yeah, demons. And there's another connection with demons, which is people think that CERN is actually performing occult rituals and that we're sacrificing children and all sorts of crazy stuff. It's amazing what people out there think. Now, like many conspiracy theories, there are some nuggets of information out there that have been misinterpreted that are the source of these things.

37:35 So you can understand this better maybe when I tell you like, where this all comes from. And some of it is popular science's fault. Some of it is scientists' fault, right? We're going to put blame everywhere it belongs. So number one is Dan Brown, right? His book, Angels and Demons, shows the control room at CERN, and it's all amazing and fancy and, you know, incredible technology. And it sort of puts CERN in the popular culture. And it's there because they're creating antimatter, which they're going to take to Rome and, you know, set up a whole plot there.

38:06 But that sort of like makes CERN more publicly aware than it had been before. And then in 2004, CERN gets a gift from India, and it's a statue of the god Shiva, which is the god of destruction and creation. And it's a very appropriate statue because at CERN, what do we do? We smash protons together, destroying them, and we create new kinds of stuff. And so like, hey, kind of cool artistic sculpture. But if you don't know anything about Hinduism, it just looks a little bit mystical and occult, I suppose. And then in 2009, a guy who actually worked for CERN, the research director, was trying to make a comment about how we can explore new things and discover new stuff. And he used a metaphor.

38:53 He said that we are going to open a door to extra dimensions. And at CERN, we can explore whether space has additional dimensions. But this term dimension, to a lot of people, doesn't mean like a new direction of travel, another coordinate in your system. It means like, You know, a place you go where there are demons.

39:15 Or the metaverse.

39:16 Yeah, the metaverse. And so this was covered breathlessly in a newspaper. You know, here's the quote. Top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider says the Titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific properties. or unknown unknowns. For example, an extra dimension out of this door might come something or we might send something through it, said Sergio Bertolucci, director for research and scientific computing at CERN.

39:44 So the guy actually did say that to a And that is the origin of the, like, we're opening a door to demons story.

39:53 Wait, he said something about sending stuff through the door or something coming through the door?

39:57 He, like, went... Yeah. I mean, that sounds like... Yeah.

39:59 He was speaking metaphorically. He's trying to talk about, like, the kinds of things we can discover, you know, conceptual doors. Not like we're literally opening a door and, like, walking through it and bringing in demons or sending human children or something like that.

40:11 This is why scientists need PR training.

40:14 Yes.

40:14 Like.

40:15 A lot of us just don't know what we're doing.

40:16 Exactly.

40:17 That would help. But, you know, even so, there are just metaphors and analogies that you kind of have to use to say stuff to the press. And no matter what you say, something is going to get misinterpreted. And so at some level, you know, you got to be careful and don't say, well, yeah, sure, this could cause the flaming death of every human being on the planet.

40:42 Right.

40:42 Maybe not. But saying something like this, you know, we say in astronomy, we're going to open a new window on the universe when we launch a new telescope.

40:50 What's coming through that window, Phil? Yeah, exactly.

40:53 And to be honest, there's also the thing about the Large Hadron Collider causing a black hole. That was also caused because of an actual paper, right?

41:02 Yeah, absolutely. And that's an interesting science question. And, you know, you can't control what scientists are going to say, and you also can't control what students do. which caused more problems. In 2016, a bunch of students at CERN, and you have to understand CERN is a research lab, which means there's scientists from all over the world, thousands and thousands, and they bring their students. So there's like young people there and, you know, they go off and do what young people do. They get drunk, they have fun, they have parties when they dress up in costume. Some kids in 2016 thought it would be hilarious to dress up in costume and and do a mock human sacrifice in front of the Shiva statue and take a video of

41:41 it and put it on the internet. And this video is out there.

41:45 Did they dress as Maya? Because that would be, oh man.

41:49 That would be too much.

41:51 It's, you know, it's ridiculous. And this video is what people cite. I engage in the comments on YouTube. People are like, well, we all know you're sacrificing children. I'm like, that's not happening. They're like, I've seen the video, man. And, you know, what do you say to that? Like, yeah, I've also seen videos of Halloween parties, right? Those are not proof of sacrifice. Like, everybody's wearing a costume. Like, it's not real. But, you know, it's out there and it's confusing to people. And, you know, this is what students do. And I secondhand even know who these people are.

42:22 And they're just a bunch of people, you know, thinking this would be fun.

42:27 A lot of conspiracy theories have coincidences. When you have something that is so big and involves so many people, and I mean the conspiracy theory idea, it's like all of NASA is involved in this. And then this happened with the moon hoax, people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked. And then an official died. One of the NASA head guys wound up dying. And that is a conspiracy theorist Christmas. If somebody involved in that organization dies- Then it's like, oh, they were silenced. And why at that time? And then they have this sort of an event that they can swirl around and try to put more pieces in, find more anomalies. That they can wedge into there and make it all seem real. And so, yeah,

43:12 a video like that is inevitable. Not necessarily a video of human sacrifice at the Large Hadron Collider, but something in that vein, just whatever it might be. You know, you blew a magnet or there was a fireball over the LHC when something happened. It's just coincidence. And if you have something big enough, a coincidence is inevitable and that feeds into the idea.

43:35 Mm-hmm. And it doesn't even have to be like obviously connected to CERN. There was also a video of a tunnel opening ceremony in Switzerland. So Switzerland is very good at building tunnels because they're surrounded by mountains. And they dug this incredible 57 kilometer tunnel through the mountains, which speeds up the trip from Zurich to Milan by an hour.

43:56 Amazing technological engineering achievement. It goes under like three kilometers of rock.

44:01 Wow.

44:02 And they had a tunnel opening ceremony and they hired artists to do like a dance performance. And it's kind of weird. And, you know, I don't know, it looks a little weird. But people think that that's like an occult ceremony at CERN. And they often cite it as evidence that like, why would CERN have angels and demons in their dance performance as an official thing at CERN?

44:26 But it didn't happen at CERN. It has nothing to do with CERN, except that it's also a tunnel and it's in Switzerland. But that's enough, right? That's like, well, obviously there's like a Swiss demon tunnel cabal going on here.

44:39 So other than it obviously being bad PR for the general public to think there's occult stuff happening at CERN, has there been any implications in terms of impacts on funding or anybody getting violent, trying to get into CERN to get video to prove.

44:54 That there's demons there? To save the children. Yeah, that's right.

45:00 I think the major impact is people's support for CERN. You know, the public's support for big projects. People think that scientists are wasting our time or they're doing evil stuff. You know, they don't understand it. They don't trust it. They see things that don't make sense and don't sit right with them. And it just feeds this general, like, anti-expertise, anti-science, you know, like, let's just shut it down because I don't get it. What are they doing anyway?

45:28 Yeah.

45:29 And beyond this ridiculous demon stuff and the tunnel ceremony, there is the actual legitimate question of, will you destroy the Earth when you do these collisions? And that's a fair question, because there are theories that suggest that when you collide particles at high enough energy, that you'll reach some sort of quantum gravity regime where black holes can be created. And like, while that would be fascinating from the point of view of like, let's understand the universe, you can ask like, do we want to be making black holes? And this is something with a scientific answer.

46:01 Like CERN took that very seriously and did a bunch of research into the question of like, could we create black holes that are dangerous to the earth? And the answer is a resounding no, because we're already doing collisions in the atmosphere naturally at much higher energies than than anything we can achieve at CERN. And so if those collisions could create black holes, they would have already done so, we wouldn't be here. So the fact that cosmic rays have not obliterated the earth with black holes is very strong evidence that we're not gonna produce earth obliterating black holes at CERN.

46:34 This is perfect because this is debunking 101. If you wanna know how to counter a conspiracy theory argument, and people always say, you're just a debunker. And it's like, do you understand what a debunker does? They correct bunk. You're basically admitting that what you're saying is bunk when you do this. But this is a trick that you can pull out a ton of facts and numbers and physics and whatever to disprove what they're saying. That's a mistake for two reasons. One is that you're accepting their framing.

47:05 You're saying, okay, you're making this claim. Let's show why the science disproves that. In detail, you're kind of accepting that their claim is sort of based in science when it's not. The other mistake is their eyes are going to glaze over. They don't want to hear all the math and physics and everything. However, if you can just turn it a little bit and say, you know, if that were true, the Earth would be destroyed a trillion times a day because there are subatomic particles from space hitting our atmosphere at far higher energies than the LHC could ever produce. So clearly this is not happening. It's just, boom, you're done. And that's a much more effective way to debunk stuff.

47:39 And does that work? Like in your experience, have you had conversations? Okay.

47:44 You do not need to finish that sentence. Sorry to interrupt.

47:49 No, that's fine.

47:50 I'm being flippant. And I interrupted you because it was funny. When you have a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, they are typically impenetrable to facts. You can think of them as being in a cult. And there's just nothing you can say. And as Daniel pointed out, anything that doesn't fit, fits. Because if there's silence on this, then it's because it's being covered up. If there's something that is clearly counteracting what they're saying, that's a false flag operation. That's something they put out there on purpose to make us look bad.

48:23 And so it's very, very difficult. What you can do is talk about this stuff and hope that There are people who maybe have heard this and they haven't heard the really stuff about it and think, oh, you know, if they heard demons, they'd be like, well, clearly that's wrong. But a black hole, I know those are real. You can hope that you can show them that this stuff is nonsense. And so it's kind of those fence sitters I'm typically aiming for, because I know that the cult itself is very small, although they're very loud. But they're typically not going to be convinced unless they predict a date.

49:01 And that's actually what happened, like I said, with Nancy Leder. She was kind of a cult leader. She predicted a date. And I said that when that date comes and goes, there's going to be a coup. She's going to be sort of– a lot of her people are going to leave, but then her inner court is going to surround her even more tightly. It's exactly what happened. And people thought I was amazing that I predicted that. And it's like, no, I read history. We've seen this happen over and over and over again. So yeah, this is a very, very tricky thing to debunk stuff like this.

49:31 Well, I have engaged with folks about this, you know, in the YouTube comments or whatever. And either they just think that I'm lying, right? you're a plant from CERN out here to confuse us. Or if they're not willing to go that far, they're like, you know, well, then you just don't know about it. You haven't seen everything that's happening at CERN. You know, have you been everywhere?

49:51 Have you seen everything? You know, I think they're trying to be kind. They're like, well, Daniel's just clueless. You know, maybe he thinks he's telling the truth, but he's not aware. And like, how could they keep this kind of stuff secret? Like the implausibility of thousands of scientists from hundreds of countries and You know, at a place where they're like open tours, people can go and visit CERN, that we're like somehow doing human sacrifices or opening portals to hell or whatever. It just makes absolutely no sense. But you're right, it doesn't have to. And, you know, anything that happens, they can just fold that into the conspiracy theory. And I think that people have a motivation to believe that.

50:26 It works well in people's brains when their brain is primed for that because they already have some anti-science resentment there. or nerds were mean to them or something, that they want to believe this. And I think we're seeing that more broadly in politics, that people are accepting obvious nonsense because it sits well with them, because they were primed for that. And I think there's a lot of political talent in identifying and exploiting that, unfortunately.

50:55 Sometimes people just want there to be more magic in the world. And science... in their mind and the way they've been taught and the way they see it on TV and everything, the scientists just boil away all the magic to leave fact. And that is, yeah. And Daniel's laughing because that is absolutely not how science works. And I tell people all the time, for example, you know, when I see a rainbow, I appreciate it because it's beautiful and it's lovely and it's just so amazing to see it. I also understand the physics and that makes it even cooler. It's like, oh, you have to stand this way and the drops have to be this big and all this kind of stuff. And it's like when you know that, it makes it more magical to steal

51:38 the fantasy aspect of that word away from it and make it more like emotion and wonder and awe. the more you know about something, the more amazing it becomes.

51:48 Yeah, totally agree.

51:50 Agreed. So if y'all are listening and wondering why it's just Daniel and me talking about physics and astronomy and stuff like that, that's because There are no conspiracies about biology, right?

52:01 We'll get to the vaccine conspiracy some other day, but I'm not prepared today.

52:05 Or, you know, some other longstanding conspiracy about some basic aspect of biology that threatens education. I don't think there's anything like that. No, no.

52:17 Biology is conspiracy free.

52:19 Thankfully, everybody just accepts that we are correct, whereas y'all are suspicious as heck.

52:25 So.

52:26 We've got to question everything.

52:27 That's true.

52:28 All right, let's take a break. And when we get back, we're going to Mars.

52:50 All right, we are back, and our third conspiracy theory for the day is bringing us to Mars.

52:55 Phil, take it away.

52:57 You know, this one is another one of my favorites. I don't know if you all remember the face on Mars. This was a photograph that was taken in 1976 by the Viking 1 orbiter, and this is one of the first spacecraft, not the first, but one of the first that NASA sent to Mars. There was a lander that landed on the surface, and there was an orbiter as well that took pictures from space. And it took this one picture of the Cydonia region of Mars, just this named region, of a rock that was about two kilometers, about a mile long. And it looked like a face.

53:29 It looks like a helmeted statue, like from Babylon or something like that. You can clearly see an eye and a nose and a mouth. Half of the face is in shadow, like it's being lit from the side, because it was. The sun was kind of low, and so half of this rock is in shadow. But the illuminated half, look, looks like a face. In fact... When they made printouts, this is, you know, in the 1970s, they would print out these photos. Somebody wrote face with an exclamation point because it looks like a face.

53:56 Wow.

53:56 So, you know, you expect them to do that. Now, of course, come along the conspiracy theorists, which say, It looks like a face because it is a face. Now, why it looks like a face, we don't know. Did aliens carve it? Did alien gods who genetically engineered humans 5,000 years ago force them to carve it? It could be either of these two things. Or it could be a rock that looks like a face. Now, jumping to the end here is that we astronomers knew that this was nothing. And in fact, there is a psychological effect called pareidolia. And I think you guys have talked about this on the podcast before. This is the tendency to see familiar objects in patterns that are not necessarily random, but don't show what you think they're showing. This is

54:47 precisely seeing faces in clouds. I have seen in clouds, I've seen Yoda. I've seen dragons. I've seen birds. All kinds of things. And faces, of course. And there's the famous Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich. The Virgin Mary in an underpass in Chicago, which was an oil stain. There are a lot of these things.

55:09 Every year in New Mexico, somebody finds a tortilla with the face of Jesus on it.

55:12 Yes, precisely. I myself saw... Vladimir Lenin in my shower curtain one time.

55:19 That's disconcerting.

55:21 This is true.

55:22 This is true. It was a water stain as I brushed my arm against the fabric of the shower curtain. It wound up looking like Lenin. I have a picture of it. You can look this up. Look up fill plate Lenin. You'll find the picture. It's Lenin. And so we just tend to see this kind of stuff. And we knew that when we sent more and better orbiters to Mars, they would take a picture of this. And they would show it's just a rock. And guess what?

55:49 That's exactly what happened. A later orbiter took a higher resolution picture, and it doesn't look anything like a face. And this is important because I would tell people, listen, if we had the higher resolution picture first, you would never have thought it looks like a face. And then if you had seen the lower resolution picture, you'd say, oh, look, isn't that funny? When you fuzz out the picture, it looks like a face. But there never would have been a conspiracy. So clearly, if you have a low resolution image and you're basing a conspiracy on that, you got to be careful because you know that higher res stuff's going to come in and it's not going to be a big deal.

56:22 But Phil, I'm looking at a high res image of your shower curtain and it really looks like Lennon. Oh my gosh.

56:27 Does it? I got to see.

56:29 It still looks like Lennon, doesn't it? I post a picture of Lennon next to the photo. And it's just, it's actually, it's kind of remarkable. It's one of the best examples of pareidolia I've ever seen. And it's funny that it happened to me, somebody who already knew about pareidolia and wrote about it. In fact, if you look up angry slippers, angry slippers was a popular meme for a while. I took that picture. It was a pair of slippers, pink slippers that my mother-in-law gave to my daughter.

57:00 And they look angry. It's very funny. And they became a meme for a while. So there you go.

57:07 So.

57:08 This face on Mars was championed by a guy named Richard Hoagland, who makes a lot of claims. He was an author. He's still alive. He's an author. He was a news science advisor for CBS News for a while, but he had no advanced training in science. He has no classic science training or anything like that, which is fine.

57:26 You don't have to have all of this classic science training to have a solid view of the universe. But he wrote a book called The Monuments of Mars based on this thing being a face. And what he said was that, you know, even if this thing turns out not to look like a face later, you know, hedging his bet, it's sitting right next to something that looks like a city on Mars.

57:49 What?

57:49 And he shows pictures of all of these rocks and hills. And these are all large scale objects. These are hundreds of meters across or kilometers across, big. One of them looks like a pyramid. One of them looks like a five-sided pyramid. And it turns out that's because there's erosion on Mars. There is wind on Mars. There is sand on Mars. It erodes the rocks, and you typically get shapes that are simple geometric shapes like a pyramid. You can get that. They're not great. They don't look like the pyramids in Cairo, but they are relatively pyramid-shaped. And you can get simple geometric solids like a five-shaped sort of pentagonal pyramid. But he says this is clearly a city.

58:28 And what he did was he took a picture and then he drew lines connecting all of these things together. and then started playing with the math. And he's like, well, here's the angle between the face and this five-sided pyramid and this hill over here. And that angle is, you know, when you take the sign of that angle and divide it by the square root of two, you wind up getting pi. And if you take the angle over here or the length between this one, the face and this rock and this rock and this other rock, and you divide these two lengths, you get the square root of five over E or something like that. I'm making these numbers up. But these are his claims, right? Now, he's measuring this off a photograph, so his angles are off.

59:08 They cannot possibly be perfect. He quotes way too many decimal places a lot of the times, and then very few other times. He picks a hill. that becomes some sort of important hill, but not the hill right next to it, which is the same size and looks just the same. But you know why? It's because that one doesn't give you your magic numbers when you do the math to it.

59:28 He's p-hacking.

59:30 Yeah, and he picks 17 objects to draw these lines with. And it turns out, if you think about it, there are three points on a piece of paper. You can connect them with three lines and that's it. If you have four points, you can connect them with four lines, the outer perimeter, And then cross two in the middle, the two diagonals, the two opposites can be connected to give you six lines. If you do this with more and more points, the number of lines you can use to connect them goes up very, very rapidly. And there are zillions and zillions of angles to choose from, literally millions.

1:00:00 When it comes to 17 objects, there are, I don't even know, hundreds of thousands, millions of different lines and angles that you can start playing with, especially when you start dividing and multiplying these numbers. There is no number you cannot find a reasonably close facsimile of when you're doing this kind of math. So no matter what, he's going to find magic numbers. And it's funny to me that he didn't pick more obvious hills to do this because then he could say, look, this hill's bigger. I'm going to pick that one. There's our number.

1:00:29 But also, has any city ever been built with like, well, we can't put the Parthenon there because the angle isn't pi to the statue.

1:00:36 And like, is this how cities are built?

1:00:38 Yeah, that's feng shui. Oh, okay. And ley lines. Oh, you need to read more of the internet, Kelly.

1:00:46 No, I think I read the right amount of the internet if I don't care.

1:00:50 Yeah, there's tons of stuff like this out there. Imagine these magic angles and numbers and everything like that. It's all nonsense. None of it makes any sense. And the fact of the matter is you can do this. I actually have done this. I used to give talks on this. I would draw random dots on a piece of paper, connect them, measure the angles and then show people, look here, this is an angle divided by another angle and you wind up getting this magic number. It's very easy to do.

1:01:16 But Hoagland went– he went on TV talking about this. He wrote books talking about this, talking about these cities. And he never necessarily came right out and said it was aliens carving these, but clearly he was saying these were artificial cities.

1:01:31 Yeah.

1:01:32 And it went on and on and on. And it was– You probably never heard of this. And why am I dredging up this thing? Well, because The Face on Mars was a big deal at the time. In fact, they made a movie, Mission to Mars, based on The Face on Mars. And in fact, the My Apocalypse also had a movie, 2012. So here we have two conspiracy theories with terrible movies they made based on them. 2012 is a whole other topic we can talk about some other time.

1:02:01 With the mutating neutrinos and oh my God.

1:02:03 That line also got me.

1:02:05 But I had somebody at one of my talks the other day asked me what I think about the face on Mars. And so I think it's still in people's minds today.

1:02:12 That's interesting. That makes me happy and sad. Sad for obvious reasons, but happy that they're sort of aware that there are these cool things on Mars. And in fact, you can look at pictures of Mars and see smiley faces. There's a Mickey Mouse on Mars. It's very, I've written, I don't even know how many articles about different things.

1:02:31 You can look up, there's a nebula in Carina that looks like it's flipping the finger at us.

1:02:39 Oh, excellent.

1:02:39 This is a real thing.

1:02:40 I mean, you could just lie in the grass and look at the clouds and see anything you want all day long, right?

1:02:45 Yeah. And so this is, the reason I bring it up is because there are an infinite number of these conspiracy theories. They go on and on from, you know, the World Trade Center coming down to 2012 to to anti-evolution, to CERN, to everything you can think of, they all rely on the same sort of basic stuff. A basic misunderstanding of science, sometimes a willful ignorance of science, manipulation of numbers, coincidence. They don't want you to know these things and all of this stuff.

1:03:19 You're in the special club that is hearing the truth.

1:03:22 That's right. You are intelligent enough to see through this stuff. You're special. And so you get these very common methodologies. And if you understand them, you start to see this stuff immediately when somebody presents you with you know, politicians do this all the time. I'm not going to get all partisan on you. Don't worry. But a lot of politicians say a lot of stuff, which is clearly wrong and involves a lot of conspiracies. And when you ask them for evidence, they can't come up with it. Or they just show you manipulated pictures or just a real picture, but it's misinterpreted. And this happens all the time. And if you get your debunking kit, your skeptical kit ready, if you always had that at the fore in your brain,

1:04:08 you can see through this stuff and your life is going to be a lot better off for it.

1:04:12 Yeah. All right.

1:04:13 On that inspirational note, we're going to call it a day. Phil, thank you so much for being on the show. This was a ton of fun.

1:04:19 Thanks for letting me blather on about this stuff.

1:04:21 I have more.

1:04:22 We can go on. Part two, three, ten, part pi, any magical number you want.

1:04:33 Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

1:04:41 Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

1:04:46 He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and XDNK Universe. Come engage with us.

1:04:56 You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you.

1:05:02 And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

1:05:13 And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.