Okay, we are alive. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show. I have a very special guest. Her name is Kelly Weil. Her last name is spelled W-E-I-L-L-L, and she just published a book February 22nd, 2022. Title of the book is Off the Edge, Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will believe anything. It's an excellent book.

I've read it.

A lot of names are very familiar with me.

I've interviewed and talked with Flat Earth, Dave, who she mentions in the book.

We had a pretty civil discourse about the subject of Flat Earth, so people can listen to that on my show if they want to go back through.

But Kelly Weil is a journalist at the daily beast

where she covers extremism disinformation and the internet as a leading media voice on the role of

online conspiracy theories in current affairs she has discussed flat earth and other digital fringes

on abc's nightline cnn aljaze, and other national and international news outlets. And she

lives in New York. But again, we're going to talk about this just published book off the edge.

So Kelly Weil, welcome to the show. Thanks for agreeing to the interview.

Thanks so much for having me.

Awesome. So for people may not have heard your work or your background, can you kind of talk about,

I know that you've done a lot of

articles about this subject, and can you talk about those articles and what led to you putting

together this book off the edge? Sure. So my day job, I'm a reporter at The Daily Beast, and I have

always, even before I was a journalist, been very interested in interesting online subcultures,

you know, kind of out there beliefs, little pockets of the internet that most people don't

explore. And so in my work in, you know, reporting on some of these communities, around

2017, I started seeing flat earth posts and some of the

stranger forums that I monitor. And I thought it was really interesting because at first I didn't

believe that anybody genuinely believed that. So I started digging into it and what I found was

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