Mark Underhill says:

Привет Макс! Невероятно, что ваш подкаст также связан с событиями в Соединенных Штатах. Я буду объяснять дальше на английском, как обычно, потому что концепции намного глубже, чем мой русский!

A personal note at first – the flat Earth thing – when you told your story I 100% understood because it happened to me too! I met a really interesting guy and we met a couple of times and then I invited him to my house for dinner with a group of my friends and…. He opened up that insane and stupid topic and wouldn’t stop. It was crazy because he was a very intelligent guy in every other way but he had been sucked in by those YouTube videos and once he got going it just wouldn’t stop.

It was my first experience of this type of – I don’t know what you call it but, it’s simply not factual and it’s so easy to debunk and its such a ridiculous theory. There are so many simple things I asked “OK, so if it is a flat disc, then how did I fly from Brazil to South Africa in basically the same time as if I flew from two points further north – in a flat earth that flight would have been twice as long” and he had an insane answer that I can’t even remember it was so weird – like gravity devices in the plane or something – but he had an answer… It was just nuts..

Anyhow, it was an eye opener.

And yes, it’s far different than an opinion, it’s far different than a Slightly different interpretation. It’s factually just simply not there.

Like the other examples that you bring up.

So, toward the US right now. It is hard to imagine it’s happening here but….. Yes, I’m a Democrat, yes I don’t vote for Republicans but my father was one and he was a man of facts who I respected and he would never imagine a situation where there was an attack at the US capital that we all saw on TV in which people died….

And we have people a huge number of people saying it wasn’t an attack, that it wasn’t violent, that even though there are all sorts of records of the participants actively saying they planned to capture and kill some congress people that it actually wasn’t that.

And I want to emphasize in relation to myself, my father, the idea of having Democrats and Republicans and also that I have friends who are Republicans that I 100% think it’s actually important to have disagreement and ideas mixing – that two parties are a good thing and that even more might be better so I’m not saying that Republican ideas are bad

What I am worried about is this idea that people can’t say “look, here’s walhat happened on TV, it is what it is, people factually died and did this so can we talk about it at that level and figure this stuff out?”

And, the concern of yours seems to be that idea as well – when pure fact, easily viewable and like 2+2=4 but someone says – no, it’s 6…. That is of real concern.

So yes, your idea that the theme is current – I don’t know if I made the case that it’s actually over here as well on a fashion that was clear enough that someone might say “oh, you are just a Democrat” – it was my hope to really show it’s deeper than that – and, as I sense from you – it’s troubling here as well.

I will leave with that – thank you for the super, super thought Provoking way to also learn Russian better each week!