Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 170. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, and do me. Not too long ago in fact in September I was invited to Sweden by the fine people who run the

Gather festival which is sort of a Swedish

South by Southwest. And they asked me to come so that I could interview on stage

in front of an audience, Mark Sargent, who is one of the most famous people in the flat earth community, if not the most famous person in that community, and that community is made up of people who believe that the earth is flat, but it's not round and that there's a conspiracy to hide all of this from just about everybody.

And that interview is what you're going to hear in this episode after this introduction, after this backstory.

And here's the backstory. Earlier in the year, we did an episode about Behind the Curve, a documentary about flat earthers. And in that episode I sat down with the producers to talk about belief. What is belief? How is it form in the mind? What do we do when people believe strange things that seem to run counter to all the evidence we've gathered so far?

We talked about all of that, science denialism, science literacy, and many other ideas which had all come to the

surface during their investigation into the flat earth or subculture. Soon

after the organizers of Gather who had seen the documentary and listened to the episode of the show,

they thought it would be interesting if I were to demonstrate on stage the ideas presented in that

episode about how to have respectful conversations with people who believe or feel differently than you do.

To maintain respect and empathy and to avoid arguing or debating until you truly understand where the person across the aisle,

across the table, is coming from, until you understand their reasoning and motivations

for arriving at their conclusions.

Since Mark was sort of the main character in Behind the Curve,

they thought it would be a great way to start their festival of ideas

by showcasing how ideas like Marx form and how to approach ideas like that with skepticism,

but without allowing the conversation to devolve into an all-out battle.

I said yes, of course, I would love to do this.

On the condition that Mark be treated as an intelligent rational human being and not as a fool on display for an audience to

laugh at and they said that was why they had asked me to do it in the first place.

...