Deftones’ Stephen Carpenter was a guest on Wednesday’s episode of the conspiracy theory podcast Tin Foil Hat With Sam Tripoli, and as Metal Injection and The PRP point out, he had a lot of controversial and/or deeply misguided things to say. During the course of the interview, Carpenter affirmed his belief that Earth is flat, denied that any effective vaccine has ever been created, and expressed doubt about the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic. He also doesn’t believe nuclear weapons exist and says dinosaurs never roamed the Earth (which, again, he believes is not round).

Regarding the shape of this planet, Carpenter weighed in, “If you think you live on a spinning, flying space ball, you’re in a cult.” He later elaborated, “The simplest terms for my perspective with flat Earth is simply, I know we’re not on a spinning, flying space ball. Now, what it actually is and all that and, and, and to what depths it goes to, that’s all still to be discovered and people are are working on those things.”

Relatedly, Carpenter suggests that we are living in a Matrix-like simulation and that outer space does not exist: “I realized that there was no such place as space and we’re in this, you know, created environment, if you will. It changed everything. I immediately lost all the space fear. Like I have no fears of us ever being struck by some rogue asteroid, meteor, comet, rogue planet, no solar flares, none of this space fucking devil’s gonna get ya.” The skepticism regarding nukes and dinosaurs is somehow tied into his doubts about space.

On the subject of medicine and infectious disease, Carpenter told Tripoli, “[There’s] never been one single vaccine that’s ever worked ever. All poisons, you can never get it out of your body, [your] body has no means to expel it, it’s stuck in you forever and you just suffer with whatever it becomes.” With all this in mind, you will probably not be surprised to learn that he also implied that COVID-19 is an overblown hoax, there’s some other mysterious explanation for all those dead people, and masks are not effective at preventing disease (“mind over matter” is his strategy for preventing contagions).

A lengthy excerpt on all that:

All propaganda all the time. No matter how many times you want to present to people that it says right on the box that it says that this protects you against nothing, you know it won’t matter. I mean they could read it themselves and who wants to admit they’ve been played? I mean who wants to own that they were the sucker. That’s hard I guess for most people, because that’s what we’re going through.

Most people know that it’s bullshit. The germaphobes we’re not… we can’t do anything but try to help them out because they genuinely believe that there’s a deadly virus going around and they would have believed it already. They already thought life was deadly and dangerous. So this is no help to them. But everyone else part-time wears the mask, they already know it’s worthless. You know they all got their little favorite little logo matching their outfits. It’s like clown show. Please stop, you’re embarrassing yourself.

And that’s no disrespect to those who’ve fallen ill and even those who died from whatever they may have died from. Obviously none of that is disregarded, but I do not connect that to what this is, you know? What this is some, this is just some mental trickery.

And it’s unfortunate that everybody just gave in. It was a two week event when it started, and then it just now it’s forever… Thank you to all your mask wearers for making this permanent, good job.

This is wild stuff — even wilder than the metaphysical concepts Chino Moreno espoused on Ohms. The full podcast is available to hear below, though like most podcasts, it’s so ridiculously long that I cannot imagine carving out the time to listen to it.