Episode 113: The Flat Earth Theory — Who Believes It, and Why Won't It Die?The Earth is not flat. This has been known with certainty since ancient Greece, confirmed by circumnavigation in the sixteenth century, and settled beyond any reasonable doubt by satellite imagery, GPS systems, and space travel. And yet in 2026, the flat Earth movement is not dying. It is growing. Tonight we ask something more interesting than whether the Earth is flat — we ask why millions of people believe it is.This episode explores:* The modern flat Earth movement's origin — a 1969 pamphlet by Samuel Rowbotham, revived online in 2004, exploded by Eric Dubay's 2015 YouTube video* The first Flat Earth International Conference in 2017 — and why these events now span multiple countries* The three core claims: the horizon looks flat, stars appear to move, and NASA is lying about everything* The specific physics rebuttals — why ships disappear bottom-first, why lunar eclipses are always circular, why GPS only works on a sphere* The Soviet Union's independent confirmation of space as a decisive counter-argument* What 2024 peer-reviewed psychology research actually found about why people adopt and maintain flat Earth beliefsFor believers, the feeling of awakening — seeing through institutional deception — is real and meaningful. For scientists, the flat Earth phenomenon is a serious indicator of something important about institutional trust and epistemic authority in the digital age.What is certain: the Earth is spherical. Millions believe otherwise. And the gap between those two facts is one of the most interesting questions in the psychology of belief.Keywords: flat Earth theory real, flat Earth conspiracy, why people believe flat Earth, flat Earth evidence debunked, flat Earth 2026, flat Earth psychology, NASA conspiracy flat Earth, globe Earth proof, flat Earth movement growing, flat Earther beliefs

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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