Mistakes I made on my Joe Rogan Experience Flat Earth Episode

Mick West

Administrator
Staff member
During the course of my two hour talk with Joe Rogan on the Flat Earth theory, I made a few mistakes. Fact checkers have pointed out some of these to me, and I'll post corrections here to all the mistakes I'm aware of. I'd give timestamps to the video if that's also pointed out.

Mistake #1
I said:
[ND-46] over 80 miles moves maybe ten feet or something
Content from External Source
Here I'm referring to the longest straight road in America, ND-46, seen here in red:
20170514-213342-30wyn.jpg

It's an interesting road because it's nearly perfectly straight (there's a few very minor deviations, but then it gets back on track). It's actually laid out following a line of latitude, so if you were to draw a great circle (red) from the start to the end it would deviate from the road (green line just below the red line).
20170514-213618-y1zxl.jpg
In the middle of the road this deviation is about 2290 feet:
20170514-213820-03vgs.jpg
So obviously I was wrong about "maybe ten feet". The only thing I can think of is that I'd been looking at much shorter roads, thinking about if there was some practical demonstration people could do by driving.

However, the basic point I was making is still perfectly valid - the road is curved, and yet it looks straight. In fact the road is curved under a flat Earth model too, as it follows a line of latitude - yet it still looks perfectly straight.

Thanks to Eric Dubay for pointing this out.

Mistake #2

I said that the footage of zero-g gymnastics in the interior of Skylab was in a space that was too big to fit in any plane at the time, even the Beluga. In fact that Skylab module would (and did) fit inside the Super Guppy
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marsha...-skylab-mockup-to-california-sept-1-1967.html
20170517-103339-ol4wm.jpg

However the Super Guppy would be incapable of performing the Parabolic maneuvers needed for zero-g for more than a few seconds at once - and quite possibly would be impossible entirely.

Also the cargo space is not long enough to fit the full length of Skylab.
 
Last edited:
FE believers say that a circumnavigation of the flat earth would simply mean going in a circle around the north pole by keeping a constant east or west heading. The compass would continue to point north throughout the circular path. You would follow a (flat earth) line of latitude.

They also say that a plane on a globe earth would constantly have to "put the nose down" to follow the curve. But on a flat earth a plane following a line of latitude would constantly have to be banking left or right to follow the circular line of latitude. The farther north you are, the tighter the circle.

So by this logic, driving this road, you would constantly have to be turning left or right. Of course on a sphere earth, if this road follows a line of latitude rather than a great circle, it's also true that the road is curved left or right. So in either case - flat earth or sphere earth - the vehicle you're driving must turn to the left or right during your trip.

But by how much? What about scale? Would you notice? What about the small constant corrections you have to make while steering a car in the real world?
 
Last edited:
But by how much? Would you notice?
I've got (sphere earth) 169.8 feet in the 3 miles* our eyes can see while driving. Think I did the math right.

I don't know how big the FE allegedly is.

*that's based on if your eyes are 6 feet above the ground.
 
Last edited:
I've got (sphere earth) 169.8 feet in the 3 miles* our eyes can see while driving. Think I did the math right.
Matches Google Earth. Red line is straight (great circle)
20170515-092706-gi80s.jpg
If I use the FE route simulator in the approximate location, you see a similar effect. Here yellow = the road straight line, Green = great circle, Red = Flat Earth Straight line. So the FE curve would be even more, and it still looks straight.
20170515-093307-m4uxj.jpg
 
I'm gonna say Mistake #1 was not making a joke back when Joe did his opening "Round Earth Shill three dollars a month" routine. ;)
 
This is not so much a mistake but rather something you should have worded more carefully:
At 59:45, you said

If you got like a good camera and you zoom in far enough the windows appear, kinda like things appearing over the horizon when you zoom in
Content from External Source
I am pretty sure flat earthers would take this as you admitting that ships do not really disappear behind the horizon and all you'd have to do is zoom in some more to make them re-appear. Which is ironic because you were probably trying to say the exact opposite, which is that ships really disappear behind the horizon and that flat earthers often post incorrect experiments (youtube videos) where ships area clearly not behind the horizon but just so small that they become invisible to the naked eye.

EDIT: Man, I should have finished the video before posting. At 1:51:35 the problem is clarified.
 
Last edited:
I am pretty sure flat earthers would take this as you admitting that ships do not really disappear behind the horizon and all you'd have to do is zoom in some more to make them re-appear.

Yeah, it's a bit of tricky thing to convey, especially without picture. Planes sometimes appear to have no windows for the same reason you can't see small boats that are near the horizon - they are very small in the image, smaller than the resolution of the camera or the effective resolution of your eye. Zooming in (or using binoculars or a telescope) makes the image larger, so it makes the features like the plane's windows or a small boat larger.

This misunderstanding is partially hard to debunk because it's so hard to believe they are actually serious. Look at this image:
20170521-081144-s4wsr.jpg

It makes no sense if you know the slightest thing about vision, but it's possibly an understandable mistake - like a child wondering why the moon is following them through the trees. What's very hard to understand is why any would persist with this misconception after it has been explained to them. So it's very hard to take them seriously.
 
While not related to the point Mick was making above, that 'football field image' is also amusing as it: a) neglects to factor in the slope football fields have; and b) says nothing about the angle of the camera lens, or where it is in relation to the grass.
 
While not related to the point Mick was making above, that 'football field image' is also amusing as it: a) neglects to factor in the slope football fields have; and b) says nothing about the angle of the camera lens, or where it is in relation to the grass.

Furthermore, it implies the "horizon" is only a couple of dozen yards away at most.
 
Furthermore, it implies the "horizon" is only a couple of dozen yards away at most.
yea the guy in yellow near the endzone (99% sure field in FE video/above pics is Brookhaven High School, MS) is about 40 yards away and i can still see his feet. so i dont think distance cuts off people's feet. in the video he takes 110 steps and he's disappeared up to his shorts.
ZcaC-110_Ld360.jpg

upload_2017-5-22_13-54-17.png
 
Last edited:
yea the guy in yellow near the endzone (99% sure field in FE video/above pics is Brookhaven High School, MS) is about 40 yards away and i can still see his feet. so i dont think distance cuts off people's feet. in the video he takes 110 steps and he's disappeared up to his shorts.
A good, obvious point I can't believe I didn't go straight to - I've played in goal enough times to know that the players at the other end of the field haven't disappeared from the waist down!

PS If Mick thinks this is all off-topic to the OP - it's probably just a testament to the absence of mistakes on Joe Rogan! :)
 
Last edited:
Last edited:
I don't get why the guy disappears behind the grass. Is there a steep slope where they took the photos?

The guy in the video made the mistake of assuming that football fields are flat. They are not flat; they are elevated in the middle to allow rain to drain from the field.
 
The guy in the video made of the mistake of assuming that football fields are flat. They are not flat; they are elevated in the middle to allow rain to drain from the field.

Sorry, I'm not american, so I know next to nothing about football. Basically football fields are elevated in the middle and sloped all around, so even towards the goal?
 
But the slope I see here is towards the point the camera is filming. The slope in the photos above is supposed to be in the direction of the goal
The field has a "crown", sloping down from the middle towards the sides and the goal lines.

My point above was that it seemed obvious to me that the guy was vanishing because he was behind the ground. The natural conclusion from this was that the ground was not perfectly flat - the actual details of how it curves are unimportant. We've got two options being offered:

  1. People alway vanish from the feet up as they walk away, because of perspective.
  2. Some fields are not perfectly flat.
Now I'd say that most people, when given these two options, if they understand what they are, will say that #2 is the simplest explanation for what we see.

However, one can also understand how people who really never think about perspective, and visibility, might initially be a bit confused.
 
Back
Top