Professor Dave, the popular science educator behind the YouTube channel ‘Professor Dave Explains,’ recently released a video debunking moon landing denier Bart Sibrel. During the episode, the professor took time to acknowledge podcaster Joe Rogan pushing back on Sibrel’s claims.
In his analysis of Sibrel’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Professor Dave noted how Rogan, often criticized for platforming controversial guests without sufficient scrutiny, actually demonstrated genuine skepticism when confronted with moon landing denial.
Over three hours of conversation with Bart Sibrel, Rogan repeatedly challenged claims that NASA faked the Apollo missions. While Sibrel presented his case with confidence, Rogan consistently played devil’s advocate, offering alternative explanations and questioning the logic behind various assertions.
When Sibrel showed footage claiming to prove NASA staged being “halfway to the Moon,” Rogan suggested the astronauts might simply have been practicing. “If I was going to steel man it, what I would say is if I’m training these guys to film things and they’re training all day long to do a bunch of different things, one of the things I would do is to train them how to film the Earth from the Moon,” he explained. Sibrel countered that the footage was dated two days into the flight when they were supposedly halfway to the Moon.
Regarding photographs with shadows moving at different angles, which Sibrel claimed proved electrical lighting rather than sunlight, Rogan proposed the Earth itself could be acting as a secondary light source.
“The Earth, which is also now a second source of light coming from a different angle that the sun is, could create potentially different shadows,” he said. Jamie, the podcast’s producer, agreed that reflective surfaces on the lunar module could have created multiple light sources.
When discussing NASA employee Kelly Smith’s 2014 statement about solving radiation challenges “before we send people through this region of space,” Rogan noted Smith was specifically talking about instrumentation. “He’s talking about instrumentation he didn’t say it was dangerous in terms of like to people,” Rogan pointed out.
Perhaps most significantly, when Sibrel presented a deathbed confession from someone claiming to have witnessed Apollo 11 being filmed at an Air Force base, Rogan reminded viewers that elderly people sometimes experience mental decline.
“When people have dementia they think they’re secret agents, they don’t know what’s going on,” he said, suggesting the confession might not be reliable evidence.
This represented a departure from interviews where Rogan has been accused of being too accommodating to fringe theories.
Dave stated: ” Oh, Joe, if only you would actually engage with any information on the internet that debunks all of the piece of s**t fr*uds you endlessly platform. ”
Professor Dave’s commentary suggested that Rogan’s pushback against Sibrel demonstrated what his interviews could look like when he actively engaged his critical faculties.
Dave stated: “Joe, be this generous as possible version of yourself on a weekly basis, please. This is probably the best I’ve seen you in any episode ever. Seeing you express a shred of skepticism makes it all the more painful when you fall for what dozens of other loser fr*uds tell you.”
