Astrophysicist Dan Batcheldor does something unusual with his time: He joins Flat Earth groups to find out how and why they believe the “conspiracy.” And in a recent interview with Seth Andrews, he talked about how wide the conspiracy has to go in order for the Flat Earthers to be right.

You’ll start out laughing… and by the end, you’ll be amazed by how idiotic those views really are.

… When we talk about conspiracies, you can kind of gauge how desperate that conspiracy has to be by the number of people that have to be involved. And in the case of the Flat Earth Society, it’s not just a question of governments, and the airline industry, and every country’s space program, all of the technology that we use that’s based on satellite imagery. But it’s even members of the Flat Earth Society themselves! Because if you’re a Flat Earther in New York, calling one of your Flat Earth colleagues in Los Angeles, and [you] simply ask them a question about the current altitude of the sun, the Flat Earth Society member in Los Angeles has to lie to you in order to maintain your Flat Earth worldview. And so the Flat Earth Society members… it’s a particularly special, particularly extreme case, I think, for these conspiracy spectrum-type problems, in that not only does it have to be everyone in the world, but… even members of the Flat Earth Society [must be] involved in essentially a personal global conspiracy against one person.

I’d love to say checkmate. But if the Flat Earth types understood that kind of logic, they wouldn’t be Flat Earthers now, would they?

The video isn’t just mockery of that worldview, though. Batcheldor does a nice job explaining why belief in a Flat Earth is just a symptom of a larger problem.

(via TheThinkingAtheist)