Some interesting tidbits:
Pete sounds in this interview so level headed, fair, reasonable, objective. It really doesn't sound like the Pete we see doing the things Pete does.
NOTE: These videos are linked to the time at which he said what I quote or paraphrase, they are not all the same starting time!
(I tried to make them inside the url tag so they would just be clickable and not inline, but it made them embedded anyway. Sorry to show the same thumbnail so many times in a row. The urls do have ?t=nnn start time codes, hopefully they work.)
EDIT: Ugh. It's ignoring the start times. I thought that worked. oh well, I'll change it to just the timestamp, people can copy it into URL if they want.
The video:
?t=476
Above: "We are running the website so in a way we have some power, but at the end of the day, if someone wants to do something that's popular with the community, then they should just go ahead and do it. .... We don't want to have this sort of power."
Again, power seems to be what keeps Pete going. This isn't the Pete I know.
?t=557
Above: Pete says that Tom Bishop is the one doing most of the wiki updates.
That makes sense, it seems the wiki was Bishop's baby.
?t=1134
"If you are going to try to try and promote an idea that is currently alternative, you have to engage with people who don't agree with you. If you're only engaging the people who agree with you, you're just created an echo chamber..."
Again, that's not the Pete I know. If someone makes too many convincing arguments, they get canned, thus enhancing the echo chamber.
?t=1496
Above: Pete says "I am a flat earth believer, but I do not consider it to be some unquestionable truth that...."
and "I don't consider it so much a fight against the round earth model, but I am particularly taken back by the decline in critical thinking..."
and "So this is sort of my focus, my focus is much more on encouraging people engage in sort of an extreme skepticism and question anything are presented with..."
That all sounds well and good, but I've found experience to show that critical thinking and extreme skepticism and questioning what Bishop writes in the Wiki is not much appreciated by Pete.
Following the above video section, he goes on to explain he doesn't believe in the dome, the edge. Not very flat there.
?t=2090
Above: "The argument I find the most convincing myself.... it's the relative inability to observe the curvature by yourself in any major way.... it is very hard to directly observe by the human eye.."
What? wow, a water level even at 50ft above sea level shows clearly to the eye that the horizon drops down. Measuring the drop to confirm the curve would be simple.
And at observer=1000ft above sea level, entire snow capped mountain ranges (who are obviously numerous thousands of feet tall) are all below eyelevel if a long ways away.
And you can go to the beach, look at a city across 20 miles of water, and not see a thing. Go up 10 feet, and begin to see the tops of the sky scrapers, go up 50 feet, and see entire sky scrapers.
And ships vanishing bottom first, and doing so at a faster rate with distance than they shrink in the horizontal direction.
Very hard to observe by the human eye? Not hardly.
Pete's definitely an interesting character. He has the intelligence to look out to the horizon and see that there is strong direct visual indication of a curve of 8"/mile^2.
And yet he doesn't bother.
Very interesting all in all.
That is an odd accent.