The trickery of understanding

What taxi drivers, dreams and Terence McKenna can teach us about the world

I sometimes talk to taxi drivers. Their worldview is sometimes unusual.

Last week, one tried to convince me that:

1. St. Petersburg is five, maybe seven thousand years old—not three hundred with change, as the authorities (ultimately, the Vatican) would like us to think.

2. Vladimir Putin isn’t a human. (“Tell me this: if you were a human, would you behave the way he does?” “How do you mean, if I were?..”)

3. At least one of the people we saw in the streets was a robot made of metal (this made me suspect Putin is a robot too—not an ancient lizard, which is what I’d assumed at first).

4. Our maps are wrong: in reality, neither of the Americas exist, Africa is connected to India, Australia is at a different angle, and Antarctica surrounds us from all sides.

I asked, “How do you know this?”

He said, “Some people get their facts from their grandma. Some, from their granddad. Some people get their facts from their heads.”