How to Challenge Moon Landing Hoax Theories: Insights from Brian Keating

James brings back astrophysicist Brian Keating for a practical takedown of moon-landing conspiracy claims—and a wider lesson in how to reason when everyone has a microphone. From the Van Allen belts to “the flag waving,” Keating separates physics from folklore, explains what evidence actually looks like (hello, laser retroreflectors), and gives a playbook for engaging friends who’ve gone down the rabbit hole—without losing your mind. MAKE SURE TO WATCH: Brian Keating's Video Debunking the Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGwjE7seBs8 What You’ll Learn: A simple framework for arguing well: define the claim, demand specific evidence, check physics and history, and compare against competing explanations. Why the Van Allen belts don’t “fry” astronauts and how Apollo minimized exposure (trajectory + speed + shielding). How we still verify Apollo today (lunar laser ranging off Apollo-placed mirrors). How to spot trope-based arguments (appeals to vibes, selective papers, “we haven’t gone back, therefore it never happened”). Timestamped Chapters: [00:00] Opening: “What’s up with Candace Owens?” Setting the table: Bart Sibrel, viral platforms, and why this matters.[02:30] Rogan, Jesse Michels, and the megaphone effect. Platforms amplify doubt; why it sticks.[04:20] Thiel salons & the culture wars around ‘science.’ Belief, institutions, and physics “stagnation.”[06:15] The debate that never happened. Why Sibrel refused; what counts as a real debate.[15:45] Physics 101: Van Allen belts. Charged particles, trajectories, dose vs. time.[23:10] “We haven’t gone back” ≠ “we never went.” South Pole analogy; politics, cost, and program shifts.[30:00] Flag shadows, cameras, and remote control. Why the photo/camera myths fail basic engineering.[35:05] Apollo 1, the ‘lemon,’ and what actually happened. Tragedy, design fixes, and conspiratorial leaps.[44:10] Keating’s NASA work. Aviation safety, non-destructive evaluation, and why ‘NASA is useless’ is unserious.[57:10] Hard evidence you can measure: Apollo retroreflectors, seismographs, and international confirmations. Core references: Van Allen radiation belts — NASA overview. NASA Science https://science.nasa.gov/biological-physical/stories/van-allen-belts/Lunar laser retroreflectors (Apollo 11/14/15) — NASA & background. NASA https://www.nasa.gov/missions/laser-beams-reflected-between-earth-and-moon-boost-science/Soviet Luna 15 crashed during Apollo 11 (context on USSR verification/competition). NASA https://www.nasa.gov/history/50-years-ago-national-goal-nears-fulfillment/ People, platforms, and episodes mentioned: Buzz Aldrin vs. Bart Sibrel (2002 incident) — background. HISTORY https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/september-9/buzz-aldrin-punches-moon-landing-conspiracy-theorist-bart-sibrelBart Sibrel — Danny Jones episode featuring Charles Duke (context). YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMn6sI4X66sJesse Michels on The Joe Rogan Experience (recent appearance). YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Ldl70x5Fg Historical context: Apollo 1 fire & the “lemon” (hung on a simulator, not the flight capsule). Space https://www.space.com/17338-apollo-1.html Cultural notes referenced in-episode: Celebrity moon-hoax chatter (recent coverage of the Kardashians’ comments). People.com https://people.com/khloe-kardashian-says-kim-thinking-moon-landing-is-fake-is-her-fault-exclusive-11851878 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  You know you don't have to wait to shop Black Friday at Lowe's, right? Save up to $150 now on select power tools, equipment and accessories. Got gifts to get? We've got plenty under $50. Plus, MyLowe's Rewards members get same-day delivery for free. Shop Black Friday deals before the rush at Lowe's. Valid through 11/18. $25 minimum and loyalty membership required. Order eligible items by 2 P.M. Subject to weight and size restrictions and availability. Terms at Lowe's.com/shippingterms.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  This message is brought to you by the Capital One Venture X Card. Venture X offers the premium benefits you expect, like a $300 annual Capital One Travel Credit for less than you expect. Elevate your earn with unlimited double miles on every purchase, bringing you one step closer to your next dream destination. Plus, enjoy access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. The Capital One Venture X Card. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See CapitalOne.com for details.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  So Brian, what is up with Candace Owens? What was your beef with her? You made a whole video about it. How can you describe like how this kicked off in your brain? Your very significant brain.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, she just refuses to host me on her podcast to ask her the hard question, despite my best efforts to get, you know, placed on her. No, I've no interest in going on her podcast. But recently, there's been a great deal of skepticism, of conspiratorial thinking, and many other kind of pernicious applications of rationality or irrationality to, you know, what should be the greatest accomplishment of humanity, certainly of America. And these people position themselves as America firsters, are very patriotic Americans. And so it's really spread courtesy of this.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  One guy who I call the super spreader of moon hoax landing denial. His name is Bart Cibro and he's this like, you know, kind of quirky bald guy. I, you know, he shows up and, and like, in, in the past, he was very aggressive. I think he, you know, claimed to Buzz Aldrin's face that he didn't land on the moon and Buzz Aldrin punched him in the face 10 years.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I heard about that.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  And he's just a very, you know, as you might say, very cantankerous person in a lot of ways, but people love him because he's just asking questions and he's just pointing out things that are proof that the moon landing didn't happen. So Candace Owens hosted him, Joe Rogan has hosted him. And then people like Kim Kardashian leverage off the suspicion that he generates on these bigger platforms. And then it trickles down to smaller platforms, this guy Danny Jones, who's a podcaster in the floor of his show I've been on. And, you know, recently it came up that Joe Rogan was on my friend Jesse Michels's podcast.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Wait, Joe Rogan was on Jesse Michels. So Jesse, I've been on his podcast and he's been on my podcast a bunch of times. We know him very well. I didn't know Joe Rogan was on Jesse's podcast.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, he almost never goes. I mean, I've only seen him on Lex Friedman's podcast. No, I mean, Jesse built this huge set. It looks like the inside of a kid's bedroom on a spaceship with buttons and knobs and dials and it looks like they're flying on a spaceship. And yeah, Joe is the guest. Jesse was interviewing him. It's gotten a million plus views in just the past four or five days, but this, you know, it's kind of the last straw of Joe Rogan going all in, so to speak. Um, the moon landing was fake with most of the episodes about this disclosure that aliens are real. Jesse's kind of gone off into the deep end, in my opinion, you know, he's a very smart kid.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, he worked for Peter Thiel for a long time.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, he sort of still does, you know, Peter hosts these things in Italy that I've been invited to a couple of times where he gets together, mostly pro creationist or pro Christian apologist or Jewish messianic Jews, Jews that converted to Christianity. I've been the only Jew, me and Eric Weinstein, you know, kind of the only two Jews for Judaism that show up to these conferences and meetings organized by David Berlinsky and Peter Thiel and Jesse's always there.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Do you think Peter Thiel is a creationist? Or?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  No, he's not a creationist. He's a very religious Christian. He's a devout Christian. You know, takes his faith very seriously, as far as I can tell, and thinks a lot about religion and philosophy of religion. He's an interesting, hard to kind of inscrutable guy, I would say. Very bright legally. We talk a lot about legal implications and cultural things, but he also has his opinions about technology and the stagnation of physics, which a lot of which he gets from Eric Weinstein. But he's incredibly quotable and just fascinating individual.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  I first met Eric Weinstein at Peter's house, actually, at a party at Peter's house.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I met, that's where I met, uh, that's where I met Peter about seven or eight years ago. And, um...

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Were we at the same party? We might have been at the same party. It was exactly seven and a half years ago.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  There's no way. You were, it was only cosmologists, mathematicians and businesses.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Well, hey, I did write the foreword to your book on thinking like a...

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Right. Here it is. Into the Impossible, forward by Nobel Prize winner and James Altucher. Um, that's right. So, exactly. So you're a member of the club. Uh, but no, I'm sure you were there for, for a different meeting that I wasn't, you know, kind of needed at. Uh, anyway, good meetings, but Jesse had on Joe Rogan. Let's just, let's stay on track there.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Had on Joe and, you know, Jesse's just really kind of extremely, shall we say, generative, creative, also sort of unbounded in how he thinks and the criticisms he makes. I think to believe things like the moon landing hoax that the physics has been stagnating for 50 years, there's been no progress in physics. And, you know, the issue is that you like to see your friends do well, but then they, they have big platforms and they get lots of attention, they get big guests, and then they kind of spread this nonsense that comes from people like Bart Sibrel. I mean, if you look him up on Wikipedia, his entry is, you know, is conspiracy theorist. That's what he's known for.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  And so I thought, you know, the best way to kind of take on these guys, and by the way, he went on Joe Rogan before I did. And then when I went on it, you know, I talked a lot about the moon and so forth, but then apparently, oh, there was another event, forget exactly what it was, but maybe Bart went on again. And he was talking all this nonsense that I just wrote to Joe Rogan that I'd like to debate this guy Bart, because I think he's a discredit NASA, America, you know, and just is completely false and his allegations are so simplistic and easy to refute, that'd be great to have a debate. So Joe asked Bart, apparently, to debate me. And Bart said, no, he doesn't want to debate me because he

• 7:13Speaker 03

  claimed that I, as a scientist and not an astronaut, are really victims of NASA's perpetrating this hoax. So he said this on Danny Jones's podcast about me, and just made all these blunders and fact and math and all sorts of physics errors and just logical errors. And so I've made a couple of videos about him, just because he is this, as I said, the super spreader who not only kind of discredits NASA, but as I said, you know, I'm a very patriotic person. And to discredit the greatest accomplishment of humankind, which includes America, it's a pretty big deal, especially since I've worked for NASA in different capacities, including capacities that benefit people like Bart and you and anybody who's ever gotten on a plane. NASA didn't just send people to

• 7:58Speaker 03

  the moon and launch the Hubble Space Telescope. They work on aeronautics. So it has to do with aviation safety, research into climate and hurricanes. They do a tremendous amount of research, as well as, you know, obviously, the scientific research, pure scientific research. But even the astronomical can be outweighed by their contributions to the safety of every human being who's ever gotten on a plane in America. And so that's really kind of the disrespect that I see towards America, towards NASA, that he cultivates. And then Joe just sucks it up because it gets, you know, attention to Joe. And then this guy won't debate me on Joe Rogan's podcast. He just debated on this guy Danny Jones's podcast, a real astronaut who walked on the moon named Charlie Duke.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  So he did confront him, but unfortunately Charlie Duke is 90 years old. He's never been on a podcast. He didn't know like basic. So it just made a little bit more questions that gave people more, you know, belief in this guy Bart's conspiracy nonsense. So I came to the, you know, to the place of record to set it straight and I'll release this on my channel. Maybe I'll put in some more of the mathematics of it. But I'd like to kind of go through at, you know, PhD level and kind of go through where this guy Bart really is doing a disservice. And I think the best way to do that is actually go through Joe Rogan's podcast with Jesse Michels, because they're bringing up what they think is the strongest evidence that Bart has presented to them. So, you know, Joe is, does, I say, he's never been afraid of a little hard work. So he'll do some research.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  But in general, he's just believe whatever is most controversial and he'll tend to not believe because COVID, you know, because Fauci and Collins lied to the American public, you know, in many ways and, and tried to discredit people like my good friend Jay Bhattacharya, who I met at this Peter Thiel conference, who's now the director of the National Institutes of Health, because he, you know, tried to destroy him personally and professionally. And that we can never trust any scientist again. And because, you know, people like Eric Weinstein and others, you know, and Jesse argue that, oh, physics has stagnated and string theory is strangled physics. Now it's like, you can't trust science whatsoever. So I'd like to go through what, what Joe claims are these like incredibly

• 10:11Speaker 03

  this positive, you know, facts about, about the moon landings that prove that they're not real, if you don't mind.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's, let's do it. And, and, and by the way, part of this was inspired by Candace Owens going all in on Bart's theories and, and, you know,

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then Kim Kardashian. So last month, the reason I made, the most recent video I made was, you know, inviting Kim Kardashian to talk and to, you know, to educate her, you know, she lives here in California, not far from San Diego. I'm sure we could have a nice conversation about it. But she, you know, she didn't respond. I don't think, you know, again, she really cares.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  I'll arrange it. We'll, we'll get it done.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  But she actually had, you know, the NASA administrator, the acting NASA administrator did respond to her and, you know, got a lot of attention. Thought that was good. But anyway, the first thing that's kind of. You know, a strike against the logical or reasoning skills that Jesse and Joe kind of go into is, you know, they talk about the press conference that the Apollo astronauts, you know, Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins had afterwards, you know, several days after landing, they're inside this trailer, this bio protective zone, and Joe's saying that they look suspicious. So that's like the first thing that they bring up, is this press conference that they're like completely tired, they've come back. Nobody disputes, even Bart doesn't

• 11:24Speaker 03

  dispute that they were somewhere off the planet Earth. Like Bart believes that, for example, the astronauts left the Earth's surface, he just doesn't believe they got anywhere near the moon. I'll explain his slam dunk evidence, which is anything but, in just a minute, that he claims is the reason that they could not possibly do it. But the first piece of evidence is suggesting in no way that they didn't at least go into space. Do you understand, like, no one's disputing, even Bart, that they left the Earth's surface.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  So for instance, you know, John Glenn, he thinks orbited the Earth.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Yes. And he believes that the NASA, the Apollo 11, you know, Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, orbited the Earth, and they were gone for a week, because it took, you know, it takes about two and a half, three days to get to the moon, two and a half, three days to get back, and they were on the surface of the moon for like two or three hours. So it was almost a week, or about a full week, you know, July 20th, 1969, very famously. And so, nobody disputes that they were in orbit. I claim there's abundant evidence, they went, they lived, they went on the moon, they traveled back and forth. There's no doubt in my mind that that actually occurred, but let's just give them the benefit of the doubt, Joe Rogan, that they actually didn't go, and the proof is they looked tired, they were speaking in sort of a script, or something like that. But he wouldn't dispute the fact, even Joe

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Rogan, that they were in orbit. Like, in other words, I don't care where you were, you've seen the capsules, it's smaller than this, you know, like two or three times the size of this office chair that I'm sitting on. So nobody could dispute that somebody would have the right to be three people crammed into a tiny little capsule for three to seven days, that they would be completely shy, introverted, you know, maybe disgruntled. They were also quite...

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Quarantine for, I think it was close to three weeks because they didn't know if they'd have some moon germs. Again, why would you quarantine people if they were just in low earth orbit? And why would you do it for three weeks? Maybe you do it for a day, but somebody had to tell NASA, according to them, that they had to quarantine them for three weeks or else nobody would believe the ruse that they didn't land on the moon, that it was all fake, so.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was my first instinct is that of course you quarantine them because that makes more credibility that, oh, why would you quarantine them if they weren't on the moon?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, but why for three weeks? Why not for a day or two day? Like, no, it's, oh, you only quarantine for forty-eight hours, not thirty, you know, not seventy-two hours. So that means that you didn't go. It's total, that to me is complete bogus, you know, reasoning. They, they were quarantined, they were in space. And so saying their, their character, the way that they acted was not really, can't be used to prove as, I mean, it was the first kind of piece of evidence that Joe talks about, like, oh, look how suspicious it was, they look like they're hiding something. Okay, so that's like Joe Rogan amateur psychologist is like now assessing the veracity of, you know, hundred billion dollar project, you know, in today's dollars. I think it's very hard for Joe Rogan to read the vibes of this person and do this meta-analysis of the psychology of astronauts,

• 14:18Speaker 03

  you know, who certainly went into space, even I think Joe would admit that. But, you know, when you compare anybody who comes back from space, even the most recent NASA astronauts that SpaceX rescued last year. I mean, they weren't like going to a rave after they landed. And so there's just this, like, the mode that I think they're trying to operate in is let's sow doubt in the moon landing. For what reason, I don't know, except that, you know, Joe takes on this countercultural, anti-authoritarian, you know, he's a comedian. You know, his, his job is to satire and poke fun at institutions, but also hold them accountable like he's in, you know, he is the most dominant force in media. I mean, he gets a lot more attention than CNN and, you know, he's the number one podcast in the world. So he is, you know, playing a role in journalism.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  He has interviewed, you know, the President of the United States and offered to interview the Vice President of the former administration. So anyway, he has this huge role.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  I do, right? He's interviewed you.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've been on the show.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at [email protected] and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

• 15:39Speaker 00

  At Lowe's, this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic Milo's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus, 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/terms. Subject to change.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  With the Amex Gold Card, you can earn five times points on prepaid hotels booked online through Amex Travel, which means five times points on the solo stay or a suite for the whole crew. Plus, earn three times points on flights booked the same way. That's three times points for touching down in new cities or revisiting places that keep calling you back. Learn more and apply for the Amex Gold Card today at americanexpress.com/explore-gold. Terms apply.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  But let me ask, in terms of this, in terms of their evidence, they're saying that, are you presenting it, I haven't seen Joe's conversation with Bart. I feel like you're presenting it, there must be something else because that does seem like very weak evidence.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Oh, so this is not, I can skip ahead to just like the, the main thrust of what Bart Cibral argues is the reason. I'll do that in one second. But what I'm doing now is assessing Joe Rogan's most recent appearance on Jesse Michaels podcast. So I, it's almost irrelevant with Bart things because Joe will just parrot the, you know, pick and choose what Bart said that fits his narrative and try to confirm it. You know, to give him credit, he did try to arrange- This debate with me and Bart on his show and Bart refused Bart was too scared to debate me. He made up some pretext that I'm a victim of NASA's brainwashing, which is preposterous.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  I have many different pieces of evidence against it. So let me just say the main piece of evidence that Bart claims is the reason that they didn't go, which is completely illogical. And I think you'll understand why it's illogical. That they claim, he claims that there's something called the Van Allen Radiation. And this is what everybody says from Kim Kardashian to Candace Owens. She called it like the firmament and she's just such a knucklehead. But anyway, let's get back to it. So it's called the Van Allen Radiation. It's not the asteroid belt, as you know, Candace has said, or whatever. It's a region of somewhat, you know, moderate to low intensity radiation. That is surrounding the earth and it's, and it's organized primarily in bands that

• 18:18Speaker 03

  are more concentrated like where you've seen maybe the Awarra Borealis. You've seen the northern lights. These are phenomena that result from the interaction of charged particles from the sun. The solar wind and space, other sources of space radiation that are charged particles. So this is where the physics starts to come in. A charged particle like an electron or a proton or an alpha particle, a helium nucleus, moving in a magnetic field will experience a force called the Lorentz force. Bart couldn't do these calculations to save his life, but we do these all the time. They're incredibly important in physics. There's aspects of them that can be treated using quantum mechanics and relativity that I, again, no way Bart has

• 19:00Speaker 03

  ever looked into this. He's looking at, and they were discovered by this NASA funded, this is important, a NASA funded research study in the 1950s by a scientist named Van Allen. His last name is Van Allen. And so he discovered, so NASA discovered this, this, let's assume it's potentially dangerous. I mean, they do, and it has some slight amount of danger associated with it, as all things do when you're off the surface of the earth. The question is, could this prevent them from going to the moon? So Bart assumes that this is this, this lethal layer. Of space radiation, which will essentially, according to him, instantaneously kill human beings if they're exposed to it, which is complete nonsense.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Even people at Hiroshima, exposed to massive, you know, much more, thousands of times the lethal dose, didn't die instantly unless they were in the actual blast zone. A few kilometers away from, from the actual blast zone, they lived for hours. And it was probably agonizing, but they didn't die, nobody dies instantly. And that's important because the Van Allen belts have a certain thickness to them. They have what's called a density profile. All of this Bart ignores. He just assumes that like, it's a solid layer, like a lead shield, but it's full of like uranium. And if you touch it, you'll die, you'll fry, your whole DNA will be destroyed and you'll die instantly.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  And so why does he say that? Like, maybe this is even a step back, like, why is he doing this? Is it just for media attention?

• 20:24Speaker 03

  He hates NASA. No, he hates NASA. He apparently says that he was a true believer and an evangelist for NASA. I don't know when, because the only time he's ever been in the public eye was when he's like, got punched out by Buzz Aldrin and would go to like astronauts' homes and scream at them and their widows. And do, like, he's never, I can't find any footage of him, maybe it exists, but I haven't personally been able to find any footage of him, you know, earnestly trumpeting, say, before, and then afterwards, when he becomes an apostate and an enemy of NASA. I've never seen any evidence of him in the before times, when he was an evangelist. I've only seen where he's an apostate, where he hates NASA.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  I mean, what's his background? Like, what, what, why does he?

• 21:06Speaker 03

  He's a filmmaker.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  So he's a filmmaker, but because of this, though? Like, he makes films about this?

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you can look it up. Yeah, we could look up what else he did. I mean, I don't know, I think he's irrelevant. Uh, you know, what, what he did before that. I mean, he makes a lot of, yeah, he appears on podcasts, he gets a lot of attention, he's done some documentaries. But he's kind of a gadfly, you know, he likes to, he likes to. Poke at NASA. And again, I'm still open, willing, I treat him respectfully if he came on my show, or if he came on Joe Rogan's show, or Lex Friedman. Also, Lex Friedman, I think, asked him to go on his podcast and debate me. And he just, for some reason, doesn't want to. His main piece of, he's got a couple pieces of main evidence, and some of that, Joe Rogan will parrot back, but most of it is reliant on what he claims are the physical

• 21:54Speaker 03

  and biophysical limitations to human traversing the distance between the moon and the earth.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  And what's his evidence that the Van Allen radiation belt would be so radioactive that it would kill, you know, rockets go to the moon, and any rockets going into space have the heat shield so they can come back in. They're, to some extent, impervious to a high amount of radiation, as we know. So what's evidence that this radiation belt is so intense that it would kill anybody crossing through it?

• 22:24Speaker 03

  So, his argument is that these papers from NASA, he finds like, one paper, which he claims is from NASA, that speaks about the level of radiation, but he's a selective synthesis, he's only reading to get the aspects that he claims are complete slam dunks, that you couldn't even set one inch into these Van Allen radiation belts. And in reality, you know, when you think about the atmosphere, James, it's not like a solid layer of constant density, just our Earth's atmosphere, okay? It has an exponential decay. The amount of oxygen here at the surface of the Earth, in Florida, and San Diego, and Atlanta, is essentially twice as much oxygen, as I feel when I go to 18,000 feet in Chile to go to

• 23:05Speaker 03

  the Simons Observatory. That level of atmospheric pressure is about half the atmosphere. That's why we wear oxygen. So, but if you go between 18,000 feet and 36,000 feet, it goes basically to zero. Even though you've doubled it, it doesn't go linearly, it goes exponentially declines, but it never goes to zero. There's no such thing as like, zero atmosphere. There's particles of the Earth's atmosphere that extend tens of thousands of miles into space. And certainly, things like the Earth's magnetic field extend into space, but they typically have either a one over r squared falloff, or they have an exponentially decaying falloff. So too do these radiation belts. They truly exist. Anyone who's ever seen Aurora, they know that they exist. Now, what he'll claim is that

• 23:47Speaker 03

  there's a temperature of these things, and that they would fry and melt aluminum, which the spaceships are made of. And then to defeat that, you'd have to make the spaceship so heavy that it could never get off the launch pad. And the proof there is that we haven't gone back to the moon. He said, "Everything's gotten easier since the 1960s. Computers have gotten smaller, cars have gotten faster and better. Everything's gotten easier since the 1960s." So the evidence that we haven't gone back is proof that we never went in the first place, because things get easier over time, right, James? It's certainly logical, right? If we couldn't go now, and he claims people like Elon Musk say, "We can't go now", but for some reason Elon's building a spacecraft to go to Mars. So apparently, he thinks he's

• 24:30Speaker 03

  smarter than Elon Musk, as does Candace Owens, which is completely-

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Okay, but let's deal with this point, though. You know, I'm not trying to play the devil's advocate, by the way.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  No, that's fine, if you do, yeah.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  I think it is so insane to not believe that the moon landing happened. I'm, you know-

• 24:45Speaker 03

  I don't think it's insane. I don't think he's insane.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  No, I'm not saying insane, but I think the idea, I almost question his motives. That's what I'm saying, is that I don't think-

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Oh, I think his motives are clear. He likes attention. He gets a lot of attention from the most famous podcast and media outlet in the world. So he gets that, he goes on, he gets to confront people. I think he feels like he's suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome or something. Like, he loved NASA so much, he was an evangelist. Again, I haven't found it, maybe it exists, maybe Bart can send it to me, somebody can send it to me. But I haven't found any pro-NASA from the before times, and then anti-NASA. So the Van Allen radiation belts, he claims because of that, there was no way to go in the 1950s. NASA knew it, and so they would never put their astronauts in danger. But he's also saying that NASA lies all the time, is a corrupt and malevolent organization, and has had people murdered. So he actually claims that astronauts, like, murdered other people in

• 25:37Speaker 03

  the air force to keep the secret that then the Apollo mission was filmed, presumably, I think he's claimed by Stanley Kubrick, and that they had all this backup footage, and then they had to, like, whack people. He actually talks about air force people that then commit suicide, and then it's just like, it's- So incredibly, you know, it it's obvious that he could make this into a movie with his filmmaking skills. So but but I want to touch on this on this on this claim that because we haven't gone back, which is true. We have not gone back since nineteen seventy three. We went in space many, many other times. We lived in space for hundreds. You know, I've talked to Chris Hanfield, you know, he lived on the space station for six months. People stay in space all the time and the amount of time that you go through the radiation belt to get to the moon.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Assuming it was even if it was a constant thickness and it was the most high dose you could possibly go through. You would still be totally fine. You would be like getting like a hundred chest X rays in a year, which is not great. You wouldn't, but there's no way you would die the next day. Do you think you'd be able to go to your? I mean, my dentist, the the medical tech doesn't have a bachelor's degree and she fires up the X ray machine at my skull. Um, do you think they would allow her to do that if there was a one in a hundred chance that I might die from that? Of course not.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  But okay, so you're saying this because you know what the Van Allen radiate.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  I'm saying, assuming the worst case of the Van Allen belt, which is in no way NASA knew exactly. It's much more dense at the poles. That's why it's called the aurora borealis because boreal means north. North pole, that's why you see these auroras much more near the north pole. That's where the concentration of the Van Allen belt. The earth's magnetic field is much stronger there. The auroras are much brighter. NASA knew that. That's why they launched from Florida. And they go out near the equator where the Van Allen belts are the most diffuse and the weakest. And they at at most would spend less than an hour, perhaps only forty five minutes in it. And this equivalent radiation exposure, according to NASA scientists, including Van Allen himself, is totally harmless. In other words, Bart says that the proof is this Van Allen belt.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  The guy Van Allen says that Bart's wrong. I mean, his research approved of the transition through the Van Allen belts to go to the moon. Um, the fact that Elon is planning to go to Mars, which you certainly have to go through there. That NASA's are launched many spacecraft through. By the way, this, as you said before. The spacecraft have to go up and come down. So even if it was on occupot, right? If then they send something around the moon. I mean, we've taken pictures, the Chinese. Taken pictures of the of the Apollo landing sites. The Indians have taken pictures of it. Uh, no one would have been happier to prove that we didn't go than the Soviets. They never once did it. They had their own Soviet space program that impacted the moon. The same day as the Apollo 11 and they did that on purpose because they knew we were gonna go there.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Can you imagine like our arch enemies? That they would say, yeah, we would agree instead of exposing us as total frauds during the height of the space race that almost bankrupted that country? That they wouldn't like expose the fact that there's no evidence for people being on the moon. But you also said one other thing. You said that the spacecraft has to come back. And that's true. So even if it was empty, let's say they sent three dummies. And they had animatronic robots and they had remote control. The spacecraft, the, the, the computer chips on the spacecraft, they could not survive this according to Bart. In other words, if it's instantaneously deadly to a human being. It's instantaneously deadly to a tiny little fragile microchip. And that's like one of, that's his biggest piece of evidence is that. It's so deadly, we couldn't go there in the first place.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  The second piece of evidence, we haven't gone back. So none of that's scientifically valid, right? The fact that we haven't gone back doesn't mean that we didn't go in the first place. The way I prove that, just on a logical basis. The first person to ever go to the South Pole, where I've been twice. Is was named Roald Amundsen. He was Norwegian. So he arrived in 1911, December 1911. When the next Norwegian to get to the South Pole was James?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Never again.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  It was in 1996.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Imagine Bart in 1995 saying, oh, we never went to the South Pole. Because we haven't gone back in 80 years. You know, it's even longer than the, than the, uh, time we have not gone back to the moon. It's so ridiculous, but that's the same type of logic. So if you believe that, you would have to say that because we didn't go for 80 years. That we never went in the first place. It's completely irrational, illogical argument, and that's one of his best pieces of evidence. And he has other pieces of evidence. So there's the psychological thing that Joe Rogan brought up. They looked like they were lying, or they weren't being truthful, or something like that, the Apollo astronauts. And despite all this, they maintain this ruse and this conspiracy. Again, the conspiracy number is extremely high.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  There was something like hundreds of thousands of people involved in this project. They would all have to keep it secret. And the other countries, including our enemies, in China and in Russia, they don't dispute that we went there. So, those are the psychological kind of objections and refutations of these claims. But they make many, many other ones, and they're just, like, a lot of them are just laughable. One of the things Bart says is that the pictures that they took on the moon were, like, impossible. A lot of people, like Kim Kardashian and Candace Owens, say, "Look at the flag on the moon. The flag was, was stand, like, looked like it was waving in the breeze." And this is like, one of the dumbest things you could possibly say is an objection. Like, if I was playing devil's advocate, those aren't any of the things I would say

• 31:03Speaker 03

  to refute the moon landing. I mean, there's a lot other things, but they're all circumstantial because it actually occurred.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, okay, so, why does she say this thing about the flag waving?

• 31:13Speaker 03

  The flag, if you look at the moon, it has a flag on it, you know, where we are. It looks like this. It looks like, you know, if you're watching, it's a, like a pole, and then there, so what they did, they knew the moon's gravity is not zero. According to Candace and Kim Kardashian, it was zero, but of course it's not. It's one-sixth of the Earth's gravity. So, it would not stay erect like this. So NASA knew that, and knew it had no wind in it. But imagine a flag picture that just looks like, you know, like, here's, here's the flag, you know, some country that's pure black. Imagine like this, so, there's just a piece of cloth I'm holding attached to this flagpole. They knew that would look horrible, and, of course, they wanted to show American exceptionalism. So they put wires and rods in it to make it permanently stand like this. And actually, some of the spacecraft, you can almost see the shadow of it.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  But so they had these wires and structures in it that were, that held it out rigidly to make it look like it was being blown in the breeze. But you just think NASA could launch a rocket, get it to the moon, and then not know that there's one-sixth the gravity and no atmospheric, you know, support for a flag?

• 32:11Speaker 02

  What was the argument? I've heard this argument, which is, and it's ridiculous, but I'm, wanna hear your reason, is that, who took the pictures?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  So they had a tremendous amount of remote controlled cameras up there. The one thing Joe talks about, Rogan talks about, and a lot of his things like, oh, it's so ridiculous. Like when the camera launched, like they just exactly matched it. They don't see any flame shooting out the back. And then the camera perfectly pans up and tilts up and gets to see the perfect launch. So again, these are like calculations that a freshman in high school could do if they were smart enough to know exactly what the trajectory is going to be, to set up a camera on a single axis mount that's remote controlled. I mean, we had Spy plane, the SR-71. We had all these incredible, you know, remote controlled, like when the planes would fly over Vietnam,

• 33:01Speaker 03

  exactly the same time, there wasn't like a guy with a camera watching, you know, taking pictures. So this is like complete idiocy to think that we don't have remote controlled cameras that are controlled electronically and can be controlled from either the capsule itself or from Houston itself, because there's only a second and a half delay. It's more or less in real time. That's a completely trivial thing. There was no photographer there to watch. It was not necessary. The technology existed. But they think it was actually, all of it was filmed and everything was filmed on a soundstage, you know, in Burbank. And somehow they maintained that conspiracy, even though Kubrick never would have admitted to that. Nobody has come forward to say that.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  That's their theory is that, well, they had to have a backup in case the astronauts died. And the astronauts didn't die, but then they just used the backup footage. So a lot of Joe's criticism is about like a couple pieces of NASA PR footage that were put out and, you know, spliced in and other things that are, again, it may prove that they were clumsy in terms of social media. Sorry, they don't have, you know, 20 million followers, Joe Rogan, you know, like you do. And maybe they didn't have the social media chops, you know, 56 years ago. But, you know, what was Joe doing 56 years ago? You know, he was soiling his mom's diapers that she had, she should have put on them, right? So I don't believe that any of these things are, you know, to a credible person who's actually going to look at the data to say that this is like proof that the, one of the greatest,

• 34:30Speaker 03

  again, I'll say the greatest accomplishment of human cock. That it didn't happen. And why does Joe want to believe it? It's very, very, you know, concerning that this is getting so much attention. Well, and of course, it's a hundred times harder to refute bullshit than than to prove, you know, to just assert it, right?

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Why does, when it's so easy to prove that it did happen? And I 100% agree with you on that. Why, and let's assume good intentions by everybody. Why do conspiracy theorists are willing to believe that the moon landing was a hoax? When it's so obvious this, but you will destroy your credibility right away. When you say the moon landing was a hoax because it so obviously happened.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  So I think that there's a lot of, there's so many threads here. Like, one of the things Joe talks about in the interview with Jesse was that this astronaut named Gus Grissom, who was the second American to go into space, that he died the day after he complained that the Apollo 1 capsule was a lemon. So according to Joe, Gus Grissom hung a lemon on the capsule, on the actual capsule. And then the next day, after this public humiliation of NASA, he burned to death in this 100% oxygen driven fire where CIA agents were roaming around on the launchpad. Okay, let's say that happened, okay, which is complete fabrication. And it's even a distortion of the facts.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  I'll get to what the actual facts were and how this occurred. But, but, but let's say it did occur, like CIA killed Grissom. And a lot of times they'll say this MKUltra thing where people have been drugged and tortured and then used to assert all, he claims that the existence of things like these secret programs is proof that almost any secret program or any conspiracy is plausible. Not just possible, fundamentally plausible, likely to do it. Maybe it's his, it's his, again, his counter-cultural, anti-authoritarian. Maybe he is very patriotic. I mean, I wouldn't like to think that an astronaut was was killed for claiming it was a lemon. But of course, what happened was it wasn't on the actual capsule.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Gus put this lemon on a simulator far away from the actual capsule itself. And what happened was it was clear that they were using pure oxygen. They should never have been using it. But that was the standard, not only in spacecraft, but in aviation to use 100% oxygen, which is now obviously not done, but that was typical of the time. That's how they would do stuff in the past. There's no evidence that there was any CIA involved in it. That's just, I don't know. Apparently, that's where Bart Sibrel comes into this conversation, where Bart talked to allegedly, again, I have to say allegedly, because I don't believe Bart in 99% of what he says. But he says that he talked to Gus Grissom's widow, who's not alive, but not anything contemporarily, and she told him this.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  So it's secondhand eyewitness, or not even eyewitness. I mean, she wasn't on the pad. So now, why would you want to have a cover up a conspiracy to kill an astronaut if your goal was, like, I don't know what Joe and Bart think NASA's goal was. I mean, let's say they were in, there was a conspiracy. They wanted to fake going to the moon. They were never going to go to the moon. That's one possibility. And they had to like justify the expenditure for the military industrial complex or whatever it was. But why would they want to do it? If they did this and they did kill somebody, it would trigger a huge delay. There was congressional hearings. It was like 18 months later, the Phillips report came out,

• 38:10Speaker 03

  and it had major design overhauls. Exactly what you don't want to do if you're running a fake program is get extra attention. Right, James?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, the key is, from what I remember of that, not that I was around then, but from what I remember reading about it, is that the door opened from the inside. So once there was no oxygen, or I forget which direction it was opening. There was some issue where the pressure on the outside was so much different than the pressure on the inside, they couldn't escape the capsule when the fire started.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  That's right. So they had-

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Three astronauts that died. There's like Ed Walker, first guy to walk in space. Uh, I think that's his name. He was one of the astronauts who died. And there was another one, a third guy, Roger or something.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I, you know, look, I've met these astronauts. I've met the mission controllers. Again, there's just a sheer amount of people involved in this conspiracy. For what purpose? I don't know. I mean, I, I actually have to confess, I don't know what Bart claims is, would be NASA's reason for doing it. I mean, I can, I can speculate, like I said, military industrial complex, that's a CIA, you know, kind of cut out thing. But again, because COVID has happened so recently, and because of these things like MKUltra and things like, you know, disclosure of UAPs and stuff. And there's just complete distrust of, you know, any American institution, which goes from like, you know, critical things like the CDC.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  And now it's down to NASA. Like, you have to ask, like, what is NASA? Like, is it, is it some huge corporation? Do they get like trillions of dollars of tax money? No, they get maybe $20 billion total per year. And of that, less than like 1% or 2% goes to manned spaceflight programs right now. A lot of it's going to SpaceX. Are they faking it too? I mean, you think like, if it's permanently fatal, like, there's just no argument, there's no universe in which Elon Musk would be risking his entire fortune, which is predicated on SpaceX, not Tesla, as most people think, but on SpaceX, by saying like, like, oh, we're gonna end up with a space colony on Mars.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Because he would know, according to Bart, that, you know, the genius of, of the, you know, the Van Allen belt, that is a permanent impediment. There's no physics solution to that. It's impossible. And that's means that we'll never go back. So we never, sorry, we'll never go to the moon at all because it's fundamentally impossible. It's too deadly. So that means that Elon is proceeding down this path to bankrupt himself to, you know, go to Mars. And I've talked to Elon. I don't think Bart ever has or Candace ever has. But that he is committed to landing on and living on Mars and dying on Mars, as he said. I said, I hope not on impact. The next sort of claims are, again, kind

• 40:51Speaker 03

  of just conspiracy tropes, like NASA destroyed the data, the high-quality videos, and that's what you'd do if it was fake. And, and they're just completely factually wrong. They claim all the telemetry, which is the position and the, you know, kind of orientation of the spacecraft has gone. That's totally wrong. There is some mission data that was overwritten, but it wasn't overwritten for decades after the mission. So it's like, you keep the package of seeds, you know, after, you know, two years after you've gotten your crop harvest? I mean, okay, so like, why would you necessarily, this wasn't like they destroyed the moon rocks? That's another favorite thing of Bart's. Bart's claims, you know, the moon rocks are all fake and that they actually gave, you know, came back and tried to pass off petrified

• 41:36Speaker 03

  wood as meteorites. And Neil Armstrong was in on this cover-up. And so, and these are other, you know, tropes that they put. It's all these cover-ups. See, James, that these people like Joe and like Bart are trying to, you know, prevent us from being hoodwinked by our government. Government here is a stand-in. NASA's a stand-in for our government, but you should never trust the US government. They're fundamentally evil, and they should always be questioned. And the more kind of sensational and titillating it is, the better.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  I wonder if someone like Candace Owens, if she hops onto this because she sees that our audience is kind of conspiracy-minded, and more extreme the conspiracy, the better. And it's just a money grab for her.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, she literally will say, using her microphone, which is transmitting, you know, via audio signals, via wifi, and video signals, she'll say that, you know, science, the internet, she says that NASA is fake and gay. Like, that's literally what she said. She said, "It's fake and gay. We know." Never went there. She says the homies were talking on the moon to Nixon with a cellphone. We didn't have cellphones back then. So she thinks they were on a cellphone call because Nixon picked up a landline. And was talking, she believes that that proves that it's totally hooked. Like, first of all, if it were true that we didn't have that technology. Then why did NASA, you know, show that they were talking to the Apollo crew after they walked on the moon with Nixon?

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Why do they do that? Um, that's the first thing. So NASA didn't know that they couldn't do that back then. I mean, it's like complete nonsense, but, but they also that the, that's how almost every single transcontinental signal is transmitted either by satellites, which existed long before the moon landings took place. Or by undersea cables that eventually get, I mean, does she think there's like a string? You know, between two tin cans, like that's the only way you could communicate is if you have physical. Like there's no cellphones, which didn't exist, which they did actually exist in the late 1960s. So this is all just like, again, just for whatever reason, I think it's sensationalism. I won't like kind of impugn their motives, but they certainly want to do that for NASA and our governments as well. And I should say,

• 44:01Speaker 03

  you know, the part of the reason I'm so chuffed about it is because I used to work for NASA in Virginia in 1992.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  What were you doing there?

• 44:10Speaker 03

  Uh, so I was on a summer program. I was a junior in college. A Case Western and I won one of these prestigious National Science Foundation summer fellowships where you go somewhere for 10 weeks and you do research. So I went to NASA Langley, which is in Virginia, and I was assigned to work on what's called non-destructive evaluation, NDE. So using ways to check airliners, uh, from developing potentially fatal flaws in the hardware that they have in the skin of the aircraft. Before they break apart and cause death and devastation. So in 1988 or 87, I forget when it was, there was an airliner Aloha Airlines in Hawaii. And the first class roof of the first class section ripped off, it failed due to microscopic

• 44:55Speaker 03

  stress cracks that occur when the airplane gets pressurized and depressurized, imagining like taking a piece of tin foil and, and crinkling it back and forth. 20,000 times, that's like 20,000 hiccups and landings, which many planes go way beyond that. Like you've been on planes that have taken off and landed more than 20,000 times. So that means this has been pressurized. So NASA wanted to find out, cause part of their mission, as I said, is to make aviation safer. For commercial reasons. And that's why Bart is an ingrate because every time he gets on a plane to fly to see Joe Rogan or Danny Jones or Candace Owens, he's benefiting from NASA, which he believes is a fundamentally corrupt, pernicious, mendacious organization. So I think he's an ingrate and a hypocrite because if he really thinks that they're willing

• 45:38Speaker 03

  to kill astronauts, recruit the CIA, according to him, according to Gus Grissom's widow, which nobody else conveniently has substantiated, but they wanted to. So would you get on a, like, let's say you had Taliban Airlines, James. Would you like to take a nice flight on Taliban Airlines? Do you trust their safety protocols, James?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Definitely not, no.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Right. So anyway, so I work for NASA and our job was to make sure that these planes wouldn't rip apart again. And part of the way we do it is use different types of technology like infrared radiation and, and ultrasonic vibrations and, and predict when a crack would occur. Because actually, when you look at these planes, they have all these rivets in them, like their aluminum skin attached to other pieces of aluminum over these ribs of aluminum. And they're just bolted in with these rivets and you think the rivets hold it in, but the rivets don't hold it in. They're actually glued. Every piece of metal that you see on the outside is glued to another piece of metal. And then the rivets hold it in place, these like little bolts, they hold it in place while the glue sets. That's basically their whole job. But eventually, after a lot of pressurization, it builds up stress at the points where the rivets are, and you can delaminate the surface. And that's what happened and it ripped apart.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  So we thought of ways and we worked on ways using different types of technology to assess whether or not a panel of the plane would break apart without having to disassemble it. That's called destructive evaluation. That's very expensive. You have to take this thing apart. Here's my alien drone that I found. You know, if I have to take this apart to see if it's still bonded together, that's very expensive, very time consuming, and it can also induce failure in future operations of the plane. So I worked on a team to do it. So I was actually at NASA Langley, where it turns out Neil Armstrong trained in a mock-up of the Eagle lander to land on the surface of, of, they had this huge contraption, like bungee cords and cables, because they had to simulate one-sixth gravity with a rocket

• 47:27Speaker 03

  engine, you know, pushing up. And then the one six gravity pulling down. And that's very technical. I saw the launch pad and Neil Armstrong almost died there. So he had to eject and bail out of this thing. And he learned how to land on the moon at that time. And so that's another thing. So NASA was putting all these people through these just like complete theatrics. You're never gonna land like it's rumored that the nine 11 pilots, you know, they were taking flight lessons here in San Diego and allegedly they say, oh, we don't need to know how to how to land. We just want to learn how to take off. Like, why would you put these people in this extreme danger? It almost killed, you know, what's great, America's greatest hero of all time, but of course, not according to Bart or Joe, maybe. But but it's certainly according to me. So these are, you know, these are some of the other ones.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  What's been the reaction to your video? You you put this video out like kind of describing all this stuff. Has anybody reacted seriously?

• 48:18Speaker 03

  I made a mistake. The first time I I made a reaction to Joe Rogan hosting Bart Sibrel, I was a little bit too ad hominem. Because I was pissed off and they're in a recording because I'd given Joe Rogan a sample of the moon. And one of the, here's a sample of it here. So you can't get a moon sample. I don't have many of them. But I do have some of them. According to Bart, me having this is a felony. And that's because he doesn't understand the basics of law as associated with space. That you're not allowed to own any of the fragments of the moon rocks that were collected by the Apollo astronauts or any NASA mission. That is a felony. But this one came courtesy of eBay. And was landed in Northwest Africa, came from a meteorite that hit the moon.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  And then eventually made its way to the earth because of our gravitational influence. And it turns out that this meteorite, so you would have to like have this incredible conspiracy because the exact rocks that they claim came back from the moon's surface. They have the exact same chemical and and optical properties as this sample that I'm holding in my hand. So they had to somehow coordinate with this guy on eBay who got it in Africa. I paid all this money for, and I gave one of these to Joe Rogan. I I keep like wondering like, what did he do with it? He put it one of his. Like, could he smoke it? Or, I don't know what he did with it, but he doesn't seem to have it anymore because he didn't show it to Bart. So I made this video where, you know, I'm just like going after, like Bart says all these completely factually erroneous things, and I'm just going through it.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  And one of my favorite things that Bart does is he kept, he has this like verbal tic and he'll keep saying the same, I think he's smart, or he's clever, but he keeps repeating the same thing. And one of the things he kept repeating over and over again in this interview, that he claimed was the proof, is that there was evidence of electrical light. I don't know if you've ever heard of electrical light? Like, I had to look up, what is electrical light? Is it light from electricity?

• 50:13Speaker 02

  I didn't think of that.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, what is it? Like, and he says it like 80 times in this interview. Like, I put together in the beginning of my video, I have a montage of him saying, "electrical light, electrical light, electrical light, electrical light." I think he means like, artificial light. And there's a huge distinction between electrical light, which may or may not be electrical, right? I mean, I can make a light source from many different ways, it's not electricity, Bart. Including using sunlight indoors. I could actually get indoor sunlight and organize. He claims the shadows prove this is not true. I mean, one of his pieces of evidence is so laughable, he comes, there's a piece of film, like, there's a photograph that one of the astronauts left on the moon. Apparently, I think Neil Armstrong did, he took a picture of his son that died before the Apollo 11 mission even, and he left it on the moon.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Bart says they took a picture of the picture, and the picture would be destroyed completely by the incredible temperature on the, they don't understand basics of physics, it's called heat capacity. Like, here in San Diego, if I'm in the sun, it's super hot, but if I, as soon as I go in the shade, even though the temperature at doesn't change from 75 and perfect, when I go in the shade, it gets freezing, it's really cold. And that's because there's no heat capacity, because there's no humidity in San Diego, because we're a desert. Well, the moon is a desert also. It's a better desert than here in San Diego even. And so, because of that, he claims that the picture would be fried and destroyed. It's just, again, basic physics, I'd love to just sit down calmly and refute it, but because I made this video reaction originally, um, you know, and it was, it was...

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Like, I just could think, like, you don't, you claim to be a filmmaker, and your biggest piece of evidence, Bart, is something that you don't know the correct technical term for. And all these people in my audience that were trolls, you know, from friends of, you know, that love him and worship Bart Sibrel or Joe Rogan. Oh, you're just making an hominid a text. You didn't address the big picture, things like the Van Allen belt. So now, when I talk about, like, Van Allen belt's like a joke, the fact that we didn't go back in 50 years, that's another proof. Like, even smart people, like, my older brother's a super smart guy. He's like, well, why didn't we go back? I'm like, so I give the South Pole exam. But even logically, that's not...

• 52:16Speaker 02

  But also, by the way, you know, there was a lot of political pressure against NASA back in 1974, that the research that we're getting back compared to the cost of going there was not sufficient. Let's focus on Skylab, which is how to create, you know, living, a living space station in space, which is a very successful program that led to the space shuttle, which then, ultimately, after that, the next program, there was no next program. It was Elon going into space decades after that. So there really wasn't an opportunity. There was political pressure to shut down the moon program. And then you can't just restart it. There was no, there's no rockets. You'd have to start from, from scratch, almost. And they were working on other things, Skylab.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're completely different technology now. I mean, the, the missions that Elon's making, I mean, they don't even have boosters anymore. And again, nobody disputes that we went into space for months at a time, you know, on Skylab. I mean, no credible person, even, I think, Joe Rogan wouldn't, wouldn't do that. So then there's a couple of other things, like, they, they claim that they were halfway to the moon, and then Bart looks at the picture, and it's like, a cardboard cutout, and, you know, that's, again, does that prove they didn't go? Let's say they did totally fake that part of it, James. Let's say they, they showed the American public during the, between the Earth and the moon, they cut, they showed, you know, fake footage of them training on Earth in a soundstage in Hollywood. Does that prove that they didn't go to the moon?

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Of course, it has nothing to do with the fact that you could go to the moon. Like, in other words, you could like, satinate Kennedy, but you could also have like, a single shooter. You could have multiple shooters, but only one of them hit Kennedy. I mean, these things don't affect the actual fact, pattern, which is that Kennedy was shot. He was killed. Lee Harvey Oswald was there. And, and the, you know, the overwhelming evidence that we have is that most conspiracies, the actual evidence for them is that they occurred. And the human mind hates conspiracies. They, I mean, they hate unresolved conspiracy. They hate uncertainty. So the only way to get perfect certainty is to make something up. And make conjecture, whether that's a theory, that's a fact, or something like that. To make up things like that. And again, I would love to talk with Bart.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  I think he, you know, he's rational enough that you can have a conversation with him. But again, he keeps claiming these things and, you know, for my benefit, for the benefit of your audience, my audience that will watch this. Again, the most significant claims they make is that the Van Allen belts are lethal. And that we haven't been back in 50 years. I mean, leave a comment below if there's other pieces of evidence that you really think are dispositive. I mean, they claim that they're 150 times more what humans can tolerate. No animal has gone through it. And Van Allen said you can't do it, which is completely false. And their computers would have been fried as well as the, you know, so again, you have to then say, well, the radiation that exists in the low Earth orbit,

• 55:09Speaker 03

  or even on the way to space, is not enough to destroy the spacecraft or an animal, but it would have killed instantly. And this just completely ignores physiology, exposure, and the fact that they were chosen on the trajectories that they went through to go through the skinniest parts of these belts and go through them very quickly. The constructions of these things and the actual readings that they took, they all wore these sensors that calculated how much radiation exposure they had. And they all lived pretty long. Buzz Aldrin is like 99ers, and he's very old.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Well, the worst case is you would just come back and turn into the Fantastic Four or something. They got exposed to that radiation and one became the thing and the other came, became invisible and the human torch.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  So that's their best evidence. I have some incredible evidence of my own that it did happen, including the fact that the first thing that astronauts did, they had two major missions. One was to bring back samples of the moon. And explore the moon's surface. They brought vehicles there. I mean, why would you just keep making like, they went, you know, six times. There was one mission Apollo 13 that failed. And they came back early and nobody disputes that they went around the moon. I mean, that they went to, they went through the Van Allen Belt, you know, it's the exact same thing. The failure occurred halfway to the moon. It didn't occur in low Earth orbit. Everyone agrees on that. And the fact, okay, so that the Americans were rivals with the Soviets. Let's take people back that might not know it. It was far worse than our rivalry right now. Let's say China or Russia.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  But the Soviet Union was our chief rival. We had spent billions, trillions of dollars on a Cold War. Which we eventually won in part because we forced them to try to keep up with us. And innovating to build a mission to go to the moon. They tried to do it too. They weren't able to send humans there and they never have. No one has besides us, but there, you know, there's a mission the Chinese have sent astronauts to go to the moon and establish a base on the moon. They're gonna be kind of trying to replicate what we did. But it's very challenging. So he also thinks they can't do it. The Chinese are incapable. Elon's incapable. Only, only Bart knows the truth that this is impossible. But the other thing is that scientists left mirrors there, James. So we went there and one of my friends uses these mirrors that were placed on the moon.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  The second thing after they collected rocks is they put these mirrors on the moon that were pointed back towards the earth. And the purpose of that was to shoot lasers at the moon. So lasers existed for a long time before, you know, 10, 10 years before the lunar missions. And by shooting a laser and knowing the speed of light, you can measure the position of the moon to less than one millimeter of precision. And if you do it at many different spots on the moon, they didn't just always land on the Sea of Tranquility. They landed on many different places. Why would you do that? Why would you fake that you landed in multiple places? It's so expensive and, and it costs these, the military contractors are just so, you know, profligate. Why would you go to multiple, anyway? You can then measure the differential properties of the moon's surface and learn what it's made up of. And we found out most of it's made up of material that was similar to the earth's crust, but it doesn't have any iron in it.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  That confirms the theory of how the moon formed, which is that the moon formed from a huge impact of a planet about the size of Mars that crashed into this giant Earth-like object and broke off the outer crust of the Earth, which has no iron in it. And that's why the moon's density is what it is, and its gravity is what it is. All that completely lines up with the samples that all these astronauts took. We have hundreds of pounds of samples. These laser measurements allow us to measure them back and forth. All these astrophysicists, like me and my colleagues that rely on these data, are using it right now to test for things like modified gravity, new particles, dark matter. We're using this technology left on the surface of the moon. How did it get there? Oh, it was dropped by a rover. It was dropped by a drone.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  So we had the technology to do all that. At some point, it becomes harder to fake the moon landing than to actually do it. And the last kind of slam dunk piece of evidence, again, is that not only did Russia confirm the day that we landed, they actually had an impact. They crashed, not far. I mean, it was kind of like, it could have been very dangerous. They crashed their lander, which just had cameras and radios on it and stuff like that. They didn't have people on it. They crashed it into the moon's surface, and we picked it up on a seismograph, or similar things have happened since. The dark side of the moon has been measured. The astronauts have measured it. On satellites that have gone there from other countries, like India and China, have imaged the footprints and the rover of Apollo 11 and all the lunar landing sites,

• 59:31Speaker 03

  and also imaged the dark side of the moon, which only person in history, the first person, was Michael Collins. So he didn't land on the moon. His job was to float around the moon for the day while the two astronauts were on the surface. He took pictures of the dark side of the moon that exactly match up with unmanned satellite images that we have today. So somebody was there. Was it a remote-controlled camera? But wait, I thought you said it was impossible to have a remote-controlled camera. It's so illogical, and you have to believe so many logical fallacies. For what purpose, James? I have no idea.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Well, I would recommend to our listeners that they watch your video on this, which we'll put in the show notes, but just Google Brian Keating on YouTube. And for the opposite evidence, I would watch the classic 1980 documentary, which was really a commercial film, but I'm gonna call it a documentary, starring the great actor OJ Simpson called Capricorn One.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  Which really told the true story of the moon landing.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. You want the truth, you gotta go to OJ. Just think what he said about the moon landing boots, you know? If they don't fit, you gotta quit. Alright, guys.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Well, Brian, thank you so much. I've never seen you so passionate.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  Oh, I love science. I love NASA. I'm not a shit. I don't get a dime from them now. They offered me that job. I turned them down, James, you know? Because I realized that if I took a job permanently, I'd be at NASA to this day. I never would have gotten a PhD. I never would have built an experiment that lost a Nobel Prize. I never would have met you. I never would have started my podcast. And I never would have had your imprimatur, your foreword on the Into the Impossible: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner Inspired by James Altucher. So thank God for NASA, but thank goodness I didn't accept their job or we wouldn't be here and I wouldn't know you. I wouldn't know Jay.

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Thanks, Brian.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys.