Due to a frustratingly renewed interest, we're revisiting the Deconstructing Atlantis series.
Today's episode features conversations from last year's Deconstructing Atlantis series: with Flint Dibble, David S. Anderson, and Steph Halmhofer. Check out Flint's twitter relevant threads: Atlantis in current pop culture, the dangers of Atlantis "lore", erotic vases. Follow David, and Steph on Twitter.
Further Reading: Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, quotes translated by Benjamin Jowett; A Brief History of Atlantis: Plato’s Ideal State by Stephen P. Kershaw (includes alternate translation of Plato); PDF: Truth, Lies, and History in Plato's Timaeus and Critias by Thomas K Johansen, 1998.
CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.
Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Special podcast artwork by Sara Richard.
Oh well, hello there, Yes, that's right, I am back again with still more Atlantis. This is Let's talk about Mitt's baby, and I am your host live. Just like I told you on Tuesday's episode, Atlantis is back in the so called news again, and so I am here to remind the world why searching for it is not only a pointless endeavor, but one rooted in racism and white supremacy. This might be getting repetitive, but Atlantis wasn't ever real. There is no debate about this amongst people who pay attention to the sources and the evidence. Plato made it up. He made that very clear, and no one in the ancient world questioned that like at all. No one in the ancient world believed it to have been real or even a myth. It was an invention, an allegory, a nritological device to prove a point about tyranny and governing in ancient Athens. In fact, not only is that absolutely certain that it was never anything at all, but even if it were, if we were to believe Plato believed it, there still is absolutely no evidence because again, it did not ever exist. There was no ancient apocalypse, no Ice age, civilization lost to time there was no Atlantis. If there were again, there would be actual material evidence. And because it's not only the new documentary that isn't a documentary ancient Apocalypse that's claiming Atlantists, but also a nonsense YouTuber who doesn't care for again, actual evidence claiming he's claiming that it's like the eye of the Sahara. Anyway, it's all nonsense. But here I am again to remind you why it's not only nonsense but dangerous. Archaeologists are hiding something, they say, but seriously, I mean, like, this is an honest question. Just like last week, I'm just repeating myself, but why would archaeologists hide it? Like, why would they do that when it would bring them worldwide a claim, It would affirm all of their work. It would be incredible if it were true anything that these people claim that archaeologists are hiding because they're not, Like, why would they hide it? So, once again, in an effort to counter these new and exciting bits of extremists information, I am here to remind you all of the Atlantis series that I created last year. Today's episode is all of the incredible conversation episodes that featured into last year's series, except for the bonuses conversations with Flint Dibble, David s Anderson, and Steph Holmhoffer, all of whom have been once again coming forward to debunk all of this nonsense that's being spewed about Atlantis and an ancient apocalypse. Fortunately I caught them before the current mess, and before they were I can only imagine quite sick of talking about Atlantis. So let's have another listen to those absolutely fascinating conversations about why we know that Atlantis isn't and wasn't ever a thing, and why pseudo archaeology and popular figures denouncing archaeologists broadly is bad and dangerous actually, in addition to just being like weird and mean and rude. Oh hi, hello, welcome. This is Let's talk about myths, baby, But this week, once again better known as Let's Talk about Things Plato invented Baby, doesn't have the same ring to it. I am your host, live, the woman who's trying to very kindly and considerately destroy all your childhood dreams about a lost island of Atlantis. But hey, we'll always have the Disney movie, right Milo. This week is the first in my series of Atlantis related conversation episodes. Honestly, this is kind of what sparked the idea for me in general, or more so made it clear that my covering Atlantis, while non traditional and tricky and requiring heavy, heavy amounts of research into things I'm much less familiar with, is important. The idea of Atlantis as a myth from ancient Greece or a story from actual history has picked up in recent years, with so called documentaries covering Atlantis on major networks and in often deceptive sorts of ways. There's a group out there who would suggest that it's harmless to search for Atlantis, a concept that we heard on Tuesday's episode is truly based in Plato's imagination, and as we'll cover on next Tuesday's episode, serves explicitly as an allegored proof of philosophical point about ideal societies and hubris. But the truth is that searches for things like that, things that are inherently false and not based in reality, take away from real archaeology, a field that is supremely important to understanding ancient cultures and human history. But on top of that, Atlantis is linked with really dark conspiracy theories and bad actors online who promote nonsense science and nonsense pseudo archaeology that often devolves into racist theories on human evolution. Unfortunately, the idea of Atlantis maybe being real is no longer harmless, and I'd rather you all hear me talk about the truth of the story of Atlantis rather than accidentally stumbling upon some of those dark and troubling racist theories and ideologies. So today I'm bringing you the first of these conversations I've had with archaeologists, real archaeologists. Today's episode is with Flint Dibbel, a researcher at Cardiff University who studies animal bones and who's knowledgeable on the Bronze Age Mediterranean, particularly Bronze Age Athens, which is the best starting point for looking at why Atlantis isn't something anyone should bother looking for. We talked about Mediterranean archaeology of the Bronze Age zo archeology, that is, animal bones and what they mean about these time periods. Fascinating. I got to ask about hecatombs, a special interest of mine since reading you while the Iliad. We talked about the dangers of pseudo archaeology and the importance of working from the known to the unknown rather than the other way around. We talk about these recent so called searches for Atlantis and the issues around them, and so much more. It's seriously fun in addition to being fascinating, important and full of Bronze Age archaeological tidbits. Oh, I think you'll all really enjoy this episode and you will absolutely learn something. A couple notes. This was recorded back in November, as you'll hear with the connection to American Thanksgiving and if you can believe it, hecatoms. And you'll also just note a couple moments where I've removed or silenced a couple of people's names because well, I don't want to get sued in Atlantis is touchy as hell. I am nervous enough about this series without naming people. As always, I absolutely love these conversation episodes. I learned so much and then I get to bring it to you. These special Atlantis conversations are no different. Oh, is there so much to learn? So much? I didn't know until I started digging into this and speaking with these archaeologists, you were in for a wild ride. As if I haven't said that enough. When it comes to Atlantis conversations from the Known to the unknown Atlantis versus Mediterranean archaeology with Flint Dibbel. I think a lot of people come at it from a really like, really honest place of just growing up in a world where you think it's at least a Greek myth. I mean, even I saw I thought that for a while until I sat down and looked into it and I realized what it was coming from. And so you know, yeah, it's something that's totally understandable. It's just presented in that way you're sort of brought up to think it. Like I grew up, you know, I'm in my thirties, which means I was a kid when that Atlantis movie came out, in the Disney movie, right, And like, I think that one's so fascinating, and that's definitely going to tie in to these series of episodes. That's some kind of funny bonus. But I sort of definitely always thought that Atlantis was at the very least a Greek myth. Like I don't think I ever thought it was real or something that could be found, but I at least associated it with Greek mythology, in the Greek mythology that I study now. In a way that it is deeply not It is just a thing that Plato wrote, so I'd loved to I mean, I guess just generally your thoughts on that, but also how it kind of how you think it sort of exploded from beyond That's that's actually a tough question for me to answer, because you know, I'm in my thirties too, barely but still am. And so I grew up thinking that as well, watching the same movies and seeing the same TV shows, and reading the same comics comic books, and so, you know, in many ways, I thought it was kind of like a Greek myth as well, and it actually wasn't until I got on Twitter back in twenty eighteen, when I started seeing people like David Anderson and Steph Holmhover tweeting so much about pseudo archaeology and the problems that it has in the world. I always thought of stuff like ancient Aliens as something to joke about, Right, you can make a joke, Oh yeah, Aliens did this, that kind of thing. And I slowly and I even said that on Twitter, you know, look, this is just all fun in games. What's the real harm? And so I started doing some more reading and research and I started realizing that this is harmful, partly because there is a rise in conspiracy theories of late, partly because this oftentimes does connect to racism. White people can't White people can do this, but people of color cannot. Indigenous people throughout the world in Atlantis one of those that has been used to kind of steal people's accomplishments and to promote different groups of people, like the Arians. And so it's only slowly dawned upon me how harmful this kind of stuff is. But as I've started recognizing it, of course I've started to do more research on it and to get at the core of that. And so, I being an archaeologist who focuses on ancient Greece and who focuses on classical Grease, I'm very very familiar with Plato, but I had not actually read the feed Risks or the Timaeus in detail until that the latest TV series on Atlantis came out and I got involved with the host on Twitter, and so I sort of sat down and I read it, and I sort of dawned on me that this isn't like other myths. This very much comes out of Plato's imagination, and there's a few reasons that I can see that. Sorry, now I feel like I'm rambling the thing right. Once you actually sit down and you read it, I think it becomes so much more clear how bizarre it is, that it has become what it is, this thing that people think they can find because you're reading it. And not only is it pretty clear that it's out of Plato's imagination, but he often doesn't even seem to be totally serious, like there's some tongue in cheek, like there's some you know, it is so an allegory, but it's almost kind of like a nudge nudge, like, look, how salious is kind of allegory? Yes, I think there's a lot of that there. There's actually a fantastic article written by M. Thomas Johansson in nineteen ninety eight called truth Lies in History and Plato's to Maus Critius, And that's the entire part of the article is this is all this tongue in chief thing where they set up they first say we're lying to you. Then they set up the history behind how this lie gets built in a way that seems truthful, so there would be historiography, and then and then they do this nudge n ug wink wink thing. We're telling the truth about this, right, there's all these there's this history behind it. My great grandfather told this to or heard this from Solon and Da da da da da, And so they build this kind of fake history and it's all done completely in this nudge nudge wink wink way. And and you know, and like you sit down and you read the Iliot and the Hodyssey, it's nothing like that. That's done is if it's a myth, it's a sing to be muse about what happened with these heroes. But you go and you kind of think about the dialogues of Plato and you read, say the Republic, which you know they set it up as if that took this. These dialogues take place right after the Republic. It's done kind of in a similar way where they sort of you think about the City of Pigs, where Socrates kind of says, oh, imagine this city where a boom, and then they build off of that with that kind of imaginary thought experiment. And so yeah, it's very different within the narrative of Plato in that sense. Yeah, and it's just so intentionally, you know, he's He's the whole thing is to make a point, you know, the whole thing is an unrelated point about Hubris. And the thing that gets to me most, and you know, I think we can go lots of different ways with this conversation, but the thing that stands out to me when you're reading that and looking for, you know, the reasons why it's so obviously nonsense, is this idea that at the exact same supposed time that Atlantis was this like powerhouse of super technologically advanced, like all of this stuff there. The idea is that Athens was also and they give a timeline right, like, what is it? It's like eight thousand years before when Plato was writing or something in that nine thousand Yeah, and then he's like, yeah, so nine thousand years ago you know Atlantis. For one, it says specifically that it's also Atlantis was bigger than Asia and Libya, and I'm kind of like, well, you know, given Libya when they say that, they mean like most of northern Africa, Like okay, so how could it possibly be that big? And we don't know where it is whatever, you know, it's huge, and nine thousand years ago, this huge epic place was so technologically advanced, and at the same time Athens was too, and they were equally amazing, and they fought. You know, when you're like, why does everyone like everyone leaves out that Athens was too whenever they wanted this idea that Atlantis was real, it's like, ignore Athens because that's easily provably wrong. That's exactly what I thought when I sat down to write my first Twitter threat in May was at first I was invited to write this thread by a colleague of mine to debunk this show, and so at first I was like, I don't want anything to do with this. I just want to stay away. And then I kind of looked at the theory behind the show and it was like, well, the problem is not that people have been working in the wrong places, that they've been looking in the wrong time, right, And so Plato says nine thousand years before Solon, so we're talking ninety six hundred BC. There's just no way there's no archaeology from that period of settled societies in these areas. There's there's no archaeology from Athens, right, So you know, that's that's always been a problem with people looking for Atlantis. Is ninety six hundred BC. You just have the beginnings of maybe some settlements in the Near East, and then that's it. There's no Egypt, there's no Grease, there's no people settled down in farming in these areas like the Greek world. Not at all. There's still thousands of years prior to farming in the Greek world, and so yeah, there's just no way. There's not a single fining from Athens from that time period. But so I sit down and reading and it's like saying, well, let's redate it to you know, four thousand years before Plato for X Y Z reason. And I'm even then thinking, yeah, that's really easy to disprove because we can still go to Athens because Athens, all right, at this time there's archaeological evidence, but it's the very first archaeological evidence from Athens. It's basically like twelve wells full of people's trash, and then up on the acropolis there's a fragment of a figurine and that's basically and by trash, I mean like broken up pot shirt, so your plates and your bowls and your cups and then animal bones and that's it. One figurine and there's like, you know, Plato describes the temple of Athena, and he describes the warriors that live on the acropolis and all this kind of stuff. We've excavated the acropolis down to bedrock, and none of that stuff exists. It's not like we're not sure about it. It certainly did not exist. And so yeah, it sort of became easy to kind of say, well, the archaeology can't back it up. And it always surprised me why people never thought about this. In the public imagination. Everybody goes immediately to disproving Atlantis. They pay attention to the description of Atlantis that Plato gives and they say, well, this might match this, it might match that, it might not match that, And they always play this game with his description of Atlantis, but they never even look for his description of Athens and think about how it doesn't work. And on that note, sorry I'm still rambling. No, no, on that note, it doesn't really work at any time period, you know. So when you sit down and you look at the description of Athens, it doesn't match any periods. So another time period that people like to think of for Atlantis is Santorini, So you know, the time of the Minoans, the Bronze Age and the volcanic eruption at Santorini that destroys the city of Acritiri there, right, And so it's obviously a major natural disaster, a catastrophe that destroys the city that we you know, like Pompei type style, let's say, freezing it in time, bigger, bigger in some ways. Yeah, exactly, it caused a major tsunami that people think could be felt on different islands, including crete. But even then, if you go and look at Athens from that period, now, Athens it's bigger. At that time, we have more evidence, but it's certainly not what Plato is describing. And even the clearest thing that you could even say, maybe as bronze age, he describes a wall around the acropolis, right, And there is a Bronze age wall around the acopolis, but it's built after Santorini by several hundred years, and so it clearly doesn't match that. And so yeah, nothing about it can really match Athens. I had reading this fairly recently. I have this idea that what Plato used when he described Ath and so just to step back a second, when Plato what he's doing, is he's trying to He builds this city in the republic that's the ideal city, and then he wants to set up the story of what happens when that city goes to war. So they say, let's make Athens that city, and then let's make Atlantis the city they're fighting against. And so it's kind of like. He then looks around the city of Athens and he finds three things that he knows are pretty old. And so one of those is the early Acropolis Wall, which we just mentioned, that's built right near the end of the Bronze Age, so you know, twelve fifty BC certainly well after the eruption of Santorini theorem. Then he finds the Athena temple that's built around six fifty BC. And and that's really cool because the Persians destroyed that right around four ADBC. When the Persians came, they take over Athens and they destroy him. So this is like a generation before Plato and the people. Then that generation, after it was destroyed, they said, we want to leave these ruins visible, so they they they they didn't build anything on the Acropolis for fifty years until Pericles came around and built the Parthenon and the Raphion, but even then they didn't touch those ruins. Those ruins. If you go on Google Map today, Google Earth today, and you zoom in on the Acropolis, you can see the outline of that Athena temple. It was left untouched. It's still visible today if you go up to the Acropolis or you zoom in on it, because they monument they memorialized it, let's say, and so that was visible for Plato to see. He knew about it, so he knew this was an earlier thing to put into this story, right, So he has that wall from twelve fifty BC, the temple the Athenas from six to fifty BC, and then he adds one other thing, which is this spring called the Clipseedra, which is right at the Acropolis. Basically, all the bedrock is limestone, so when water rains on it, it absorbs into it and creates these channels which you can tap as a spring. And so that's what the Clipseedro is. And we know that the clipseither was used during the Bronze Age and down the Archaic period, but right around the time Plato was writing was when they built it up. They built some walls around it and turned it into something sort of more formal to use. And so these were the three sort of archaeological artifacts at the past that he could use to build his early Athens, let's say. And so those were accurate, though the timeline is not very accurate. Never were they in use, all three of them at the same time. The walls around the acropolis were destroyed before the Athena Temple, for example. But then he then builds up this idea of like geology, because this is kind of it's a story about the natural you know, natural disasters destroying Atlantis, right, because Zeus does that he buries it in water. But it's also a story about Athens where he talks about how he Athens, I guess, experienced these natural disasters in a more plausible believable way with erosion, for example. So he describes how, you know, you go out to Attica and you see the hills, and the hills have been they used to have all the soil, but due to the rainfall, the big sort of rainfall that happened, the soil washed away, very believable, like, right, And so he describes the acropolis, for example, is much bigger, it used to be huge. It would stretch from the Acropolis to Lekavitos, and we know our modern geology shows that can't happen. And it's also kind of ironic because his acropolis wall is around the acropolis as he saw it, So if the acropolis was bigger, then the acropolis wall would have to be somewhere else, right, And so it's even like kind of ironic in his own description of it. And yeah, it just can't match for all these various reasons. And so yeah, that's the thing that always gets me. And then you know, you even think just even from a complete, like lay person, just base level mythology, you know, the thing that always gets me is Athens is barely in the Iliad. It's like it's like a tiny little footnote almost like in the catalog of Ships, and I think, like maybe somebody is from Athens and that's it. And so it's just such an obvious thing to me where it's like from that time period, from that, you know, even just the time period of the Iliad and the Odyssey, let alone earlier, Athens was nothing like they weren't a major powerhouse. They weren't you know, they weren't a region to be worried about or to be like looked up to, you know, like we've got my scene and you know, the Minoans and all of that was they were major players in the Bronze Age, and Athens just wasn't like they were around. But they weren't like them, right, I mean, well maybe that's actually an open ended question. A lot of people think they were like them. So that wall I was telling you about, now not much of it's left, you know, we just have little fragments of it because it's the later rebuilding of the wall of the Acropolis after the Persian destruction that where they built the column drums from the earlier parthen On into it, that destroyed most of that Bronze Age wall, and so you can kind of peek through and see some of it. Though as you're going up to the Acropolis, there's the bastion where the temple of Athena Nique city, and you can kind of look in and you can see parts of the Bronze Age wall that are left. And so and again remember that rebuilding that I'm talking about that happened during Plato's lifetime, so it's kind of freshened his mind, that Bronze Age wall, and so because of that leveling of stuff, there's actually some thoughts that there was a pretty large palace at Athens. People oftentimes think that part of the reason that Athens was not a major player in the ilia An odyssey was just partly the types of groups that were writing the orally communicating that mythology. It wasn't that Athens wasn't big, because we have pretty important burials and graves from the Bronze Age. UM. There's Doloi in Attica, for example. UM. So like at Marathon there's a really large dolos with some horses buried in the Dromos and some of the other burials inside UM and then in the Agara. So downtown, the marketplace and stuff, there's all these civic buildings. UM there's the civic building called the Stoa Bazilaus, the Royal Stoa, and so right there in front of it is the largest architectural block in Athens, and that's where the archons would swear their oath of office. It was it was a very important stone and one of the there's a pretty important hypothesis. Oh, I'm trying to I'm blanking on who came up with it was decades ago that that was actually a lintel block from Atholos in Athens, that it had been destroyed and dismantled in the cemetery underneath the agora in that area, and so it probably was a pretty important city really from the from the late Bronze Age on at least it was certainly one of the larger settlements in Greece, and the burial evidence would confirm that, but it might not if we don't have like the gold and the wealth of Mycene and Kenosos and things like that, So it's not quite necessarily on that scope, but it's still it's pretty important. Um. But that addition in the Iliad, that's that some people think that's something called the piesistratid recension. So you know, when when the Iliad starts, it's it's oral poetry and it eventually gets written down, and that's a long process probably, and some people think that that the writing down the majority, but might have happened in in an orthodox sort of form uh during or at least semi attacks form during the sixth century when Pisistratus was ruling Athens. He was a tyrant and was fairly powerful, and so he might have lobbied to include Athens in there in that cattle, because that's an easy place to slip. Somebody got a lot of ships named twelve hundred different city states, right, and so yeah, yeah, that's that's interesting. I actually I just recently had Joel Christensen on to talk about Homeric epic and when it was written down and all those different things, and yeah, he also mentioned that it was probably written down in Athens and therefore maybe they got included in that way a little bit of a you know, propaganda going on. Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. I love that. Um. Yeah, so, I mean it's just it's so fascinating to me. That's the number one thing that this idea of like looking, you know, looking at Atlantis as if you know, in the furthest reaches of whatever, you know, that it could possibly maybe even slightly be anything real. But then everyone forgets about Athens, like as if that is not part of the story. And it's just it's such an obvious way to completely you know, to to just completely fudge your argument by by like forgetting this vital piece that makes it easily you know, provable or disprovable, and I like to think that that's a big difference between pseudo archaeology and real archaeology. So real archaeology one of the rules when you're excavating, let's say, right, and so you're excavating and you start hitting upon a new layer of dirt, let's say, or a couple of stones that might be a wall, but you're not sure. One of the rules of thumb is you work from known to unknown. And so because you start with what you know and you you you uncover in that direction towards what you're trying to find out. And so you do that when you're surveying in the landscape, you do that when you're when you're excavating, you do that when you're trying to understand the past period. And pseudo archaeology, on the other hand, is going for this really large, big fake atlantis thing. So you just start with that. You say, oh, Plato mentioned round settlements, Well, there's only round settlements here. There's round settlements everywhere. You realize you can find round settlements in almost all every single period of history and prehistory. And wherever people are settling, they're they're off times building round settlements. And so you know, you start finding these things and you say, well, this kind of looks like it you squint a little bit. But but what real scientific archaeology does as it works from no, don no, and so and that's where you know, that's what that's what really struck me with that Athens thing was we need to start with that. And it's also an easy way to kind of disprove it um. You also mentioned the mythology aspect, and that's another important way to be able to disprove this as well. This just doesn't read like mythology, you know, and it doesn't appear in a single myth like exactly if it was a myth, if it was a story, if it was history, if it was literally anything except a thing out of Plato's mind, it would appear in at least one other story or a piece of art because we get we get mythical mythical representations on art that we don't always have mythical stories of, like this is really famous one of I think it's Achilles and Odysseus playing to play the game in the game. Yeah, or you get you get you get repre presentations of Eneas carrying his father out the city of Troy three hundred years before the Eneas, four hundred years before the Enias. So we know that that was a story in circulation as an oral story, right, and so but yeah, Atlantis, you have none of that, nothing, nothing, So there's the only the only thing is in Plato, and Plato has all kinds of stuff that doesn't exist elsewhere except for afterwards by other philosophers, and so yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the thing. And I mean yeah, especially you know if you look at Okay, so the story it says that Solon, you know, told it to somebody or to this guy's great grandfather or whatever it is, you know, and then Solon heard it in Egypt. So okay, why is there not a single piece of representation of it into any kind of history or art or anything from Egypt. It's like, you know, we also know there's nothing there. So if the Egyptians were watching, you know, and paying attention, and they had these stories, they would have also referenced it in some kind of way. Like it's just I mean, it seems so easy to just say that, but it is. It's simply impossible that something this major, this important, this kind of this like the thing that Atlantis is supposed to be, that something like that could have ever existed or happened, and not a single other reference, people serious reference, like Herodotus would have heard something. That dude was wandering around everywhere, you know, like Herodotus would have heard something. He would have said, he would have written it down. You know, there would be a minute, there was done so many things. He would have done his Grandpa Simpson thing and told like a long story about it. Again, Yeah, we would have something, you know. No, and I mean archaeologists have looked, you know, like it's not like in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were not a lot of scholars looking for it. There were, but you know, in the last seventy years, I don't think there's any serious archaeologists that have even tried to look for it, because it's now every single avenue of possibility has been explored. It's not like there's there's all kinds of things that I know people are searching for that I even think is kind of silly, certain things from myth, for example, but searching for things from myth has a better basis to a certain degree. But at the same time, I mean searching for this. Every single avenue has been explored, and the issue is is now it's just being misused, and sometimes just on a greedy level to sell books and TV shows, sometimes on a more sinister level, to you know, bring people back towards Nazi level of thinking. I was attacked by this YouTuber who basically is an outright Nazi. He consistently tweets about the meanings of swastikas and how they're good and things like that, like literally a Nazi. I don't mean like that in any sort of exaggerated way. I mean he is literally a Nazi, reading Nazi scholarship and sharing it with his audience on his YouTube channel. And so, you know, this is my issue with sort of popularizing this kind of thing, because if you start getting people to think that, hey, there's actually some archaeologists maybe out there looking for atlantis, you go and google it, you you might find the they're not good either. They're just trying to sell books and stuff like that for money and TV shows. But you could also find actual Nazis. And so you know, it's just I don't want people going in that direction. I want them to go towards real archaeology because it's pretty cool. Yeah, well, yeah, that's the thing, right, like real archaeology, real history, very cool. And yeah and then that's you know that too. Yeah, absolutely big fan over here, I hear that. Yeah, yeah, that's the thing too that you know. That just reminds me that the Nazis were looking for Atlantis, and I think that really says something too, right and that that has spread further. But they actually had like a subsection looking for Atlantis in seriousness, and and I think that's I mean, the suggestive of the the bigger problem. Like a lot of people can go to Atlantis out of curiosity, out of interest, just thinking that's cool. And I get that, you know, it is cool, especially if you know, you grew up watching the Disney move and you think, man, that'd be kind of cool, Like if that was real, that would be cool. The problem is is that if you're not one of those people, but or even if you are, you can find your way, you can accidentally get into this world of the very dark side of it, which you know, to my understanding, is along the lines of a way to disprove the theory that everyone came out of Africa is to say well, no, this subset of white people came out of Atlantis, and thus there's absolutely no you know, Africa in them, and that is horrifying and dark. And then you're suddenly in this like deeply horrifically racist realm of the Internet and then maybe real life. Yeah no, And I mean early archaeologists also took away credit for from African nations and and and American indigenous peoples saying that this was Atlantis, right, because that's the explanation for these kind of things. And so you know, there's all kinds of different let's say, degrees to this of but none of them are good. It's all just pseudo archaeology that's made up, and there's always some underlying level of racism there, unfortunately, I mean, with much of that exists in our world. We live in a world that has been built upon white supremacy within the last several hundred years. So it's very pervasive. But this is an easy one to at least try to tackle because it's not part of there's there's nothing for it at all now other than fiction, which you know what our fictions fiction. There's different ways to use fiction, but to argue that it's real has these real problems and can lead people even further towards other kinds of conspiracy theories that are out there today, because there's a lot of them. They're really quite pervasive, let's say in our twenty first century. Ever, Yeah, well, one thing I could say about the racism is I think a lot of that actually can even be laid it back to Plato. So Plato really talks about the you know, because the ancient Greeks were really into pure bloodlines and things like that, and Plato really talks about eugenics in his Republic, and so part of the reason why Zeus destroys Atlantis is because their bloodline started becoming mixed. And so even that very aspect builds into ideas of eugenics today that are and you can see why it's immediately quickly adopted by racist elements and white supremacist elements, because this story that Plato told has that sort of baked in um, and so you know, it's it's, it's, it's it's why we don't necessarily philosophy has moved on from Plato, for example, And at the same time, you know, we need to be careful with how we read these kind of things and how we how we interpret them and how they can be picked up. Um. Yeah, sorry, just as an aside. No, that's interesting. I've I've not read any Plato except for this because I really don't have a ton of interest. Uh and just wild stuff. Um, but yeah, I know, that's that's good to know. I mean I also think it, you know, and this is the trouble with the whole like a whole realm of this world of you know, the the amount of you know, quote unquote whiteness that has been put on ancient Greece, you know, for for what, you know, nothing to be said about you know, the races or skin colors back then, because they just didn't have any kind of frame of reference. It wasn't it wasn't the same thing, you know, they weren't. They weren't thinking that way. They were they had their their major you know issues, their their xenophobias and everything. But it was not necessarily to do with skin color. But there's been a huge amount of whiteness that has been placed upon Greece, specifically ancient Greece, as a way to you know, you know, account for a quote unquote Western civilization. And you know, the invention of all of the good things and all the you know, I recently got into a Instagram. I've been attempting to do Instagram reels, which I should learn that it's a bad idea, but you know, I just made the They're just like basically sixty seconds worth of video, which means you're really limited in terms of what you can say. And yeah, they're like TikTok exactly, unt a touch ham because I'm like Instagram instead of the cool one, which is TikTok. But but basically, I just made the point of, you know, the way in which we talk about um or with some basically just some something connecting the whiteness that has been put upon each and Greece and how raising them up as this like special, most incredible, like the best group of the Mediterranean is inherently linked to white supremacy. And oh my god, the way people lose their minds and prove my point by saying I'm wrong. Um you know, they're like, what are you talking about? Greece invented literally everything arts and poetry and fluff, and I'm like, well, you've just proved my point. My point is we can't. That's not true, and we can't be saying stuff like that promote the white supremacy. And the Greeks were pretty terrible people. They ate dogs pretty regularly, a whole lot of butcher dog bones. So you know, if you're supporting the ancient Greeks, you're supporting dog eating. Then again, if you're supporting most ancient cultures, you're probably supporting dog eating, because you know, it's just a fairly recent thing that we stopped eating dog to be honest. No, but that's the thing, right, It's like any anything that suggests that one culture was better than another, you know, and then when you have that culture be the one that whiteness has been put upon in such a like strong and you know, overarching way, like there's gonna be a problem. But it's yeah, yeah, of course it links back to all of that from a I suppose an archaeology side, or just like a you know, myth versus nonsense from Plato side. I'm interested in in the fact that like we've we've found something that they can call Troy. So I guess the search for Troy has become you know, less of the forefront, and it doesn't have the same racial implications as looking for Atlantis. But do you have any thoughts on like the yeah, the you know, proving of things from Homer. Yeah, I think that that's important too, because I think that actually builds into this. Having engaged on Twitter with a lot of these pseudo archaeologists, UM, a lot of people will say, well, you know, Schliemann found Troy when everybody thought that nobody could find that, and it's sort of like, well, you know, Schliman was like one of the first archaeologists ever, and so it was before archaeology. Well, sure, I'm not saying he was a good archaeologist, that's not the point here is that there wasn't a field of archaeology at the time of Schliman, and so you know, it's kind of different to bring up that kind of analogy. And even then there's all kinds of it's a big can of worms. The reason we know that that city is Troy has nothing to do with us knowing that it's the Troy from the Iliad. It has to do with the fact that the later Greeks and Romans thought that that was Troy, and so certainly there was a city there from twelve hundred BC. From earlier there there's the city goes back by millennia. But at the same time, there's no real clear evidence for like a Trojan war right there. So it's not like we have Hector's grave or Patroclus's tumulus. We don't have that kind of stuff. It's not like we have we hear about the mask of Agamemnon back at Mycene. No, that's not Agamemnon's mask. That dates from a completely different period then the twelve hundred BC that we think that this war, if it could have happened, could have happened. We really don't have any evidence for some kind of large conflict at that time. What we have is a sort of collapse a civilization that occurs at that time, but that's much more widespread than the area where the Trojan War took place. That includes from the entire eastern Mediterranean, from Egypt all the way up through the Near East, all the way through Turkey, all the way through Greece and potentially beyond. And like, I just had an article coming out about how that can relate to climate change and how people adapted to it and change their ways of producing food, and so you know, that's a bigger issue than a trojan war. And so what we do have in myths, of course, our pieces of material culture, so descriptions of armor and weapons and things like that that we can relate to things on the ground, right, And that's actually really fascinating too, because it's all mixed and mashed up. I always love it when we go and you you think of like your your stereotypical historian or archaeologists in a movie. So you know, like let's say I'm watching the movie Troy with Brad Pitt, You'd probably be thinking, God, I'm gonna critique that armor, right, and I'm gonna critique that the way that that wall is built or something like that. Well, you could do that to Homer because the Iliot and the Odyssey just mixes and matches shield types. So it mentions shields that we know from burials, the date to sixteen hundred BC, twelve hundred BC, eight hundred BC, they're all in there, right. There's it's full of anachronisms. It's like Brad Pitt on his mobile phone, you know, like it's that kind of thing that's right there in the Iliot, and you even get it within the very same scene. So I'm forgetting the name of the hero. So we know different spear types, right, So you have like the big, hefty spear that you'll sort of have to stab people with versus the lighter spear that you'll throw. And we know that these days to different periods from the Bronze Age, which is when we think the Trojan War happens, and the Iron Age when Homer's writing or composing, not writing whatever, when he's when he's telling his story. That's right, I know what I'm talking about, but I need to make it simple. Okay, Homer was writing, he wasn't actually and you thought it wasn't realm was even a person, right, yeah? A guy or a girl or a guy and a girl, I don't know. And and so we have these different types of spears within the exact same scene, like within a couple lines of each other. It goes from one spear to another in the hands of this one hero. And so it's just like Homer, Homer the poet. God damn it, I do it too, but my listeners should understand I do this in class as well. I mean, you know, whatever, It's fine. Homer is a metaphor. For the poets, right, yeah, And so so the poets they're using what works for the meter, because everything's defined by that jack tail hexameter. And so if the terms they're using, they have these different phrases that they're repetitively using. Sometimes they fit right there at that point in the line, and so that fits for that kind of long spear. Other times it's for the short spear. And so you'd expect that kind of change because it's not consistent narratively or material culturally. It's a totally anachronistic. And so if you ever have me in the movie, I just care if the movie's good. I don't care if it's accurate if it's anachronistic. And and and and Brad Pitt phones up Fetis on his cell phone saying, tell Zeus to send an explosion towards the Trojans rolling barrels on fire. I'm all for that if it's fun, because that's who the Iliad was, you know, Yeah, that's really interesting. I had no idea because I obviously don't know any of the I mean warfare, let alone just like the the intricacies of you know, that kind of historical part. But that's really that's really interesting just to hear the level of anachronisms that even existed in that it's such as mash it. So it's so funny and you can't What that means though, is you can't really pick out exactly which parts or scenes that you're not sure of our early Iron Age from Late Bronze Age. You have to work from known to unknown, so you can only go with what you already have. We have these spear types that we have already given chronology to, and then we can try to pick them out in Homer. You can't go from Homer to archaeology. It has to go from archaeology to Homer if you want to if you want to look at what's real, let's say, right, and so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah no, that's really important and interesting, and I mean it's definitely the most obvious way to differentiate between this like pseudo archaeology nonsense, where it's like, I want to prove this thing, so I'm going to go and I'm going to find all these things that I think prove this thing. Because I'm going to prove what I want to prove. I'm not going to look at what the actual you know, evidence is what the what the history, the archaeological evidence, whatever. I'm just going to prove what I want to prove. And and if you do it that way, it's really easy to prove nonsense things because you're just picking and choosing, and you're just connecting random dots. And so that's the problem with conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theorists, in my mind, they do a lot of real good research, but the problem is is they're starting from the unknown and then just dipping into the known, and they're saying, oh, that's a circular settlement, not realizing that there's circular settlements all over, or saying, oh, that's a spear type, you know. And so early scholars had to do this too, after all, because the most known thing was like the iliot, you know, because archaeology had not started right, and so you're working from the iliad at that time, that's the most known thing. And that's why there's so many crazy, what we think of as crazy today, hypotheses and theories and very early scholarship non history and archaeology, and so it took time to really sit down and build up this giant corpus of evidence we would call the archaeological record to really be able to say, or even the epigraphic record, inscriptions and letter forms and things like that. Art, you know, all the different iconography on Greek phases or sculpture, all those kind of things had to be built up really really slowly over the last two hundred years. And then once you now that we have that, that's actually firmer evidence in some ways of life on the ground than a lot of our textual sources. I oftentimes sort of like in textual sources to like Facebook today or Instagram or TikTok in a sense, I have this project. I study animals, right, and so what I do is my job is basically at account animal bones. So that's why I'm kind of boring, right, you know. So I'm sitting there just counting one bone after another sheep tibia that's a goat humorous, and then I end up counting thousands and hundreds of thousands of them, and so I'm constantly thinking to myself, how can I link this to ancient texts, because that's something that's more engaging and people recognize what they're saying. So I started counting animals in there. I'm basically counting sheep and goats and cattle. And it's really interesting because the animal bones. When I count those, I get a lot of sheep, and I get a lot of goat. When I counted in texts or in art, I get a lot of cows. And Yeah, people write about what's really cool and sexy. They just like what we do on Facebook and Instagram. We we post the photo of us looking at our best. We don't post the photo of us with BedHead. We post the photo of that meal that is just going to make all of our friends jealous. We don't post the crappy little lunch we have on the bus on the way to work. And so you know, there's something different, or at least percentage wise, obviously we occasionally make a joke. But uh, but yeah, so I see that in ancient texts as well, and myths and things like that. It's it's not there. The truth is in the trashes. I like to say, you know, it's a little different than what you actually do. Yeah, because I mean, I think you know, it's there's this I think expectation or or understand or like this idea that the ancient people wouldn't have lied that they wouldn't have made stuff up. They wouldn't have you know, invented or exaggerated or all these different things. And and yeah, you used to look at the world around now where you're like, well, why would they not like if we do it now? Nonsense. I mean, there's that woman on TikTok who says the Rome wasn't real, and there's a whole hell of a lot of people who are believing her right now, and you're saying, well, like, I mean, go back to herodotus. There's a lot of stuff that herodotus said that we can now be like, dude, what what were you doing? You know, like, there's no there's no reason why they wouldn't have invented stuff or exaggerated, wanted to make their their writing sound more exciting or you know or whatever. But now I have to ask because of animal bones, because it's something that comes up for me a lot, and I'm fascinated and it blows my mind. Hecatombs, hecatombs tombs whatever did they do that often? It's horrifying. Did they like actually sacrifice like a heck tome of animal I'm not sure why it's horrifying, because we do it today. All the time, I know, but I can't think about how many turkeys do you think we're consumed over Thanksgiving last weekend? Last week? Well, as a Canadian, I don't know how many we're okay, but you know, like that idea still stands where now you look at the modern world. If you I lived in Athens, Greece for a while, and there's this holiday they're called seek no Pempty, which means smokey Thursday. And this is so much better than any Thanksgiving because whatever, it's a barbecue in February where the weather of course is nice and Greece, and you just barbecue. That's the smoke. And so if you go into a butcher right before it seek no Pempty, it is just lamb carcasses everywhere or on Easter, you know that kind of thing. And so yeah, it certainly happened in the past. Oh, of course, only in larger cities or larger sanctuaries. Are you going to have enough people to justify a hypotone? I guess that's my point. So it would it would be justified by the number of people that needed to eat it. It wouldn't just be like zoo quants like atoms, and the idea of a hecatom is totally a mythological thing. You Yeah, you look at like you know, the Alien and the Odyssey, they talk about slaughtering a hecatomb, this nice even number of one hundred. You look at the inscription evidence of the records of the receipts of what the Athenians were doing. We don't actually have a receipt of the number of animals they're killing, but what we have is receipts afterwards. They would sell the skins and the hides tanners to make in the leather, and so we have the receipts from that from which we can estimate the amount of animals slaughtered. And it certainly varies, and so we have a pretty decent sense of the economy behind this. And so it's not like it's always this neat number. It's kind of like what they had the funds for this year versus next year, versus whatever. And so, yeah, it's not always neat, neat and nice like a hecatom. But certainly, you know, there's times when they're slaughtering more than one hundred, and other times where it's less. And yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of people can eat a cow. I mean, I I cook, I cook Easter. I've I've roasted lambs for Easter for many hungry Americans and Greeks and other nationalities in Athens. And two lambs I can feed seventy people easily with side dishes and stuff. But you know, so imagine what a hundred cattle it can feed. Yeah, well that's the thing, and it's you know, I read, I've done like obviously episodes on the Eliad and the Odyssey, but I've also uh, during the beginning of the pandemic, was bored and I just started reading them out loud, just like public domain translations. And that's when I finally was like, oh my god, the number of hecatoms that they are sacrificing to the gods. Like guys, I call that many food porn. It's food porn. Seriously, yeah, simple, I know. And it's like for a long time, actually, scholars thought that that was reflective of society, and so there was this The biggest hypothesis before I started doing animal bones, when I first got involved in my PhD helped disprove this was that so the Bronze Age palaces collapse and then people. What they do to respond to that is they become basically herders and cowboys. And they looked to Homer where there's all these animals. People are stealing cows from one another, you know, like cattle rustling. And so there was this one site where they studied the bones, and the bones go from mostly sheep to mostly cattle in the Iron Age, and so I had to go restudy this. This was called the pastoral hypothesis, and the paleontologists before there was an archaeologists who studied these bones. Even in his autobiography, he's like, I proved that the Greeks were gauchos cowboys basically at that time. And so all that was was that this soil was more acidic at that site. The upper layers, which is where the early Iron Age layers, they were over the Bronze Age layers because the stratigraphy, you know, nobody can see the emotions I'm doing. I'm trying to build particle it down, and so the upper layers were more acidics. The smaller animal bones were destroyed. The cattle survived. But if you look at what you can do to study people's diet, besides studying what they eat, so foods and plants is you can study their bones and their teeth, and you can do you can do isotope analysis, is what it's called. And the nitrogen isotope that's locked into your teeth and bone give you a sense of where you are on the food chain. So if you eat more animal protein, you have an elevated isotope ratio compared to somebody who's like a vegetarian. Right and in the early Iron Age, so at the time of Homer and those poets, I got it right that time. At the time and those poets, people were eating a lot less animal protein. And so you know, people were in general there were smaller settlements then they have much poorer material culture, and they were also eating a lot less animal protein. They also have a lot more dietary issues. You can see this in their bones and their teeth as well. Um, and so people were a lot less well nourished and more malnourished even and uh so to me, I tend to think of the home eric epics as food porn, you know, And and you can think about how modern fantasy. You go and you sit down and read Jerrar Tolkien and those hobbits are having like twelfth breakfasts and like they're eleven zeas and that's food porn too. Taken from that, it's adapted to the modern world, you know. And so that's what I think of it as I have an article I'm writing on I have a Twitter threat on too, and uh, but a lot of the ancient texts for food porn all those big cows, you know. Yeah, even if the classical Greeks did eat more animal protein, they still ate a lot less than we eat now. And so yeah, yeah, oh that's really interesting. That makes so much sense of just yeah, I mean, it would have been like almost aspirational, like look how much they could eat, like yeah, and it's sort of like you're just sort of salivating. Yeah, the burger are steak, yeah, Like I mean, and that's the thing. It's just so funny and interesting to read about it an Iliad because you just kind of wonder, like, what's the logic on where would they have gotten that many hecatombs of cattle if they're just like camped down on the beaches of Troy, Like I know, they stole a lot of things. You know, You're like, okay, sure they raided a lot of town. They did a lot of stuff. There's some explanation, but like there's just no way that. It's like, I want you to sacrifice five hecatombs of cattle and they're like cool, yeah, yeah, we've got those. Yeah. Our beach camps no problem. Like the side of the Mediterranean. Yeah, we're ten and our tents keep getting bigger as we sacrifice cattle and we can expand them with the leather. But yeah, oh that's really that's really interesting. Do you know anything about UM. I'm interested in the varied theories, the like less problematic theories if there are some of Atlantis, you know, in terms of you know, I think I know Santorini is the big one, right of like, well, Santorini is Atlantis, which, of course, you know, we've kind of already talked about the volcanic eruption, while enormous and troubling UM, you know, and certainly like affected the region in a lot of ways, was definitely not Atlantis. UM. But do you know, like I wonder about Crete. I guess I've never heard anything about it being a big contender, but to me it seems like it would be no because the Cretan one is connected to Acriti to Santorini because you know, at that time people think that the Manoans were sort of in charge of acritiri Um. You see this change in the fresco style and the pottery style and whatnot, and so you know, people think that they were the Manoans. And there is an idea that the eruption of of theory the volcano there caused a tsunami which then impacted crete itself. Um. There's also an idea that the ash might have made it might have screwed up agriculture for a year that could have affected crete. But now that we've gotten closer dating on this stuff, Minoan civilization thrived for you know, centuries after this, and so it doesn't seem as if the as if this really destroyed the the you know, conosos or anything like that. Um. And so yeah, so that's not a super popular theory. I don't know about all of them. Once you get further afield. There's a big theory that Troy was Atlantis um. And in fact, an archaeologist wrote about that one of the former excavators at Troy, but like decades decades ago, not not not today. The current archaeologists certainly would not believe in that having talked with him. So yeah, so there there. There doesn't seem to be any much scholarly plausibility for Troy, though there's there's this one geoarchaeologist ever heard, Zengger, who has a lot of crazy theories. Um, he for a while, I think, promoted that Trojan thing, and now he's promoting some other Luvian. He founded some institute for Luvian studies. I don't know, but he has some weird theories about Atlantis that I don't even know what they all are, because people just try to find it everywhere rather than you know, because it's so easy you have circular settlements, you have a natural disaster. I mean, come on, when you're talking about thousands of years of time scale over the entire world, let's say when you're looking for Atlantis, Well, you're gonna find some places that have, you know, natural disasters, whether at a rapid pace like a volcano or at a slow pace like erosion or coastal change, that you can match to stuff. And so you know, I think that the vault cann elogists on or the recent show about atlantis her entire time. She's like, there's a thousand ways that geology can kill civilizations. And so that's the point. I mean, you know, we know this. It's not like that doesn't mean that they're all atlantis. Yeah, maybe they all are. Everything's atlantis. Atlantis is the friends you make along the way. Yeah, that's the thing, right, It's I mean, it all goes back to the pseudo archaeology of it, right, the idea that if you want to prove a thing, everything, yeah can suggest proof to that thing. If you want to ignore all the context of everything and just doing in one read one article that to look at for your idea, you're going to find some sentence in that article that fits. And so you know that's pretty easy too. That's why to get a PhD, you spend you know, however, many countless years reading all this stuff to have a better grounding, a context to even be a successful podcast host. You know, if you're going to stick to truth, you're going to take years of reading this stuff and rereading this stuff to be able to have the broader context. And so you know, yeah, exactly, And so it's not even about credentials. It's just about sitting. I'm doing that for years, but doing it in a way that's guided by having a context for something, not guided by that unknown. First right, guided by the unknown is gonna lead you dipping into all the nons. But if you're guided by the known, then you can start to look for, you know, things that are plausible, were interesting. Yeah. I feel very proud of my podcast evolution just based on that alone, because that's exactly what I've done too, perhaps to a fault sometimes where I'm like, okay, but the sources say this, this, this and this, and I'm like, is this still a good episode? Is this a good narrative story? When I just tell you all the different sources and all the random crap they all said, people, Yes, exactly, we're listening. I can't hear anybody out there. Hello, Hello, dude. That's the key to podcasting. You just put it out there and you never have to if you're listening, to find me on Twitter and send me a message so that I know somebody heard this episode. This far out, lots of people are going to hear this episode. I'm so excited for this series. It's oh my god. I've hinted it at covering Atlantis before, and I've wanted to, but then, you know, the more I look into it and I'm just like, oh my god, there's just so so much. But yeah, no, I mean, I think the thing is Atlantis, right, people want to hear Atlantis, So I'm just excited to be the voice in their heads being like, I know you want to hear about Atlantis. I'm going to tell you why you should want to hear about it. But it's not what you think. It's not true. It's not yeah, exactly exactly, like yeah, but I think what's most fascinating is how it has become this thing. You know, for all the bad you know, ultimately it's not good that it has become this thing. But to me, it's just so interesting that it has based on the fact that there is just absolutely no evidence for it. I'm like, how did this happen? You know? And that alone, I think is is so fascinating, and it says a lot about humanity, you know, again, not in a great way, but the fact that Plato just wrote a thing that he clearly was not trying to say it was true, you know, and it becomes this it's a it's a fascinating I mean, humans have always believed things that are not true. I mean, I'm not sure. I believe a whole lot of things that are not true, and so you know, I'm just gonna chalk that up to reality and us that's okay. What worries me is how prevalent, how it's getting worse right now. I don't mind the history of what has happened in previous generations. Um, I wasn't there to tell them no, but uh not that I have much sway, but you know what I mean, Like, like, it's just it's worrisome to live through a period right now where these kind of things are getting worse. A lot of different conspiracy theories and they all build upon each other. And uh it's why I've taken to being more active on Twitter and online. I'd like to join TikTok one day if I ever find the time. I have a series i'd love to do, but it's just time consuming. Um, somebody wants to fund me, I'll do TikTok all day, but uh no, it's just it's we need to get out there and spread reality and knowledge and actual facts and move people back towards the known. Because I think a lot of it is I think the ecosystem that is the Internet. A lot of the early movers on there were bad actors, and it's taken some time for better actors, whether it's academics or whether it's people like you who are doing outreach from a grounded point of view, to get on there and build up a following and to do that. But we're all so far behind by like a decade, and so you can see that on YouTube, that's for sure, you know. And so it's just like, we need to do this, and I'm trying to convince everybody I can to do more of this, and because we have to fight against this and I definitely think it can't all just be debunking this stuff. But at the same time that's part of it as well. I think there needs to be a big tent room for you know, real knowledge. Let's say, it's to get out there and be accessible and fun. And yeah, I think that's important. H Well, I mean, yeah, you know, the whole the whole reason I have this podcast, started it and keep it going is is that but in the mythological realm and that you know, you know, you read through most older even more recent mythological retellings, and the way they talk about the treatment of women is utterly wild. It's like I mean, I and I get it. It's because it's from the original sources. But just because the original sources didn't care like what happened to women doesn't mean we have to continue on like that. And like I said, there's anachronisms throughout those This is my whole point. People say, oh my god, we need this because it's there, or you can't have a black Achilles or something like that, and it's just like, what do you mean? There was nothing real or realistic about the Iliot or the Odyssey. It was full of anachronisms that were used and changed for each retelling and each new iteration of the story. So us doing anything we want that's creative and compelling and fun. It's fine by me with the leader in the Odyssey as an archaeologist and historian, I am all for that. And if you can have a better way to tell that story which promotes a different way of looking at women or people, minoritize people or whatever, a more just for society, let's say, but still fun and entertaining, I'm all for that, you know, The only reason the fun and entertaining is important is because that helps to get traction inter Yeah, that's important to make it a fun thing. But yeah, I think we need a juster way of a better way of telling these stories and to be pedantic about whatever. Most of the time that's just racist or sexist. Well that's the thing, you know, And in my case, I'm not saying anything that is inherently untrue. I'm just saying the things that we don't necessarily have a written record for because they weren't keep they weren't like copying down the things women wrote if women were able to write at all, and thus we don't have it, That doesn't mean it didn't exist. Yeah, Plus we don't have to anyway, so you know, yeah, like you know, it's I mean, this is why I'm writing this, This is why I'm trying to work on these threads about the relationship between mythology and archaeology. It was actually this experience with Atlantis that made me realize that people don't actually understand the reality of what these myths are. The myths are great stories, they're fantastic, but they're not real, and they weren't real, and they weren't even real in the eyes of the Greeks, and so you know, they obviously have this long oral tradition behind them, but for us to treat them as if that's a justification for saying a movie or a book or whatever is crap. What the fuck that is? Sorry, I don't know if I can curse there, please I shouldn't warn't you the beginning? What the fuck? I mean? You know, like it doesn't matter. The ancient Greeks wouldn't have cared, so why we care, right, Yeah, so no, it's just yeah, yeah, yeah, like this in the past and oh yeah, yea yeah, and most of again, most of that is it just comes down to racism and sexism every time, especially the really strong arguments for this. Yeah yeah, yeah, I see that all the time. I yeah, oh yeah, it's not it's just silly. It's people that don't know what they're talking about in the end, and oh yeah, it's yeah. It's fascinating the way people use this stuff to prove what they want. It's a messy time, you know, it's a messy world on the line, especially when you're when you're discussing something that is so linked to this, like nonsense view of whiteness and Western civilization and all of that, and you know there's always there's always somebody to come and scream about it. I know that's the problem is has become battlefield, and I mean that's just a problem as well. It's a problem because you can't actually do education in an educational way because it becomes a battle rather than you're just sharing real evidence and inform people about what they say archaeology or history and how it can relate to the world Santino climate change as well. If it becomes this ideological battle, then you can't break through the noise. And so it's part of the reason I try not to fight it too hard because if I'm too overt about it, then you get just so much dig back and I'd rather try to get people hooked. And if you follow me on Twitter, don't listen to me this. I try to get people hooked with jokes or whatever. But then you don't use buzzwords to try to get a more nuanced, less prejudiced way of looking at the world across to people, and it just becomes a fight. I have full respect for people want to engage in these fights, but I don't. I don't have the energy, and it doesn't to me seem to accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish. And I don't know if I'm accomplishing what I'm trying to accomplish, but I'm trying trying. Yeah exactly, Yeah, yeah, but I mean I agree completely. There's a there is a reason why my podcast does not have the word feminism in the official description on podcast apps. It's because people are gonna listen and if if they get it and they're learning, great and they cut out the whole part, or you're gonna lose half your audience. Nah. Now they know at this point the word feminism certainly appears in the episode, and the same with my Twitter followers, they certainly know. It's just but it's about thinking about how to how to do it with also without stressing yourself out too much. Or look, we all do this in our free time. It's not like it's it's it's a job and of itself, even though we have jobs to do things and we're trying to pay bills and things like that, and so you know, it's it's it's it's a lot of energy. I see a lot of people I respect fighting these battles, and yeah, it's it's hard and stressful. Well, yeah, you gotta keep yourself, you know, mentally healthy too when it comes to that stuff, right, you gotta prioritize that as well. Yeah, it's real hard. Respect to everybody that's doing what they can to fight for what's right. That's say, yeah, yeah, right, well okay, I mean I feel like we've come to a sort of natural conclusion as well. But is there anything else you you feel like you want to yell about? Like Atlantis pseudo archaeology. I don't know, tune in the real archaeologists if you can, UM check out who live follows on Twitter, UM or Instagram. I'm not on Instagram, so I don't know. UM, try your best. I tend to think that the best history and archaeology out there is actually just made organically right now. I hope one day that'll change. So yeah, and Atlantis is not feeling neither of his ancient aliens and the what I really want to say though, is that there's a lot of really cool archaeology out there, And there really is, and so go and find it. There's a lot of us on social media, YouTube, etc. Sharing TikTok even a few people, and uh try to get into that ecosystem and branch out and find more really cool people. So yeah, yeah, no, that's absolutely true. I mean, real archaeology is completely fascinating. I took a couple of courses in it in my undergrad ten years ago and it was great and I would love to do more. So yeah, no, it's that's the thing where the real stuff is is interesting enough. You don't have to go something it's really dark. It's really cool. Yeah, absolutely lovely, and it's usually pretty dirty as well. Yeah, I mean I got covered in dirt and also in a sexual way. God's ancient Greece and Rome lurd. I say, room there, because that's where all the really dirty stuff, arty Greek stuff on erotic vases. There we go. Yeah, well, I will absolutely include your your Twitter handle in the episode's description, as well as some Twitter threads that you've mentioned about the Atlantis mess. But do you want I guess perfect, Yeah, please send me that one and I'll add the erotic vases in as well. But do you want to mention your Twitter handle as well? So I'm named after a rock flint and Divil's my last name. That's an ancient digging implement to plant seeds. So it's like a good archaeology named Flint. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, well, thank you so much for doing this. I really really appreciate it. Oh Nerds. Thank you as always for listening. I'm thrilled to be bringing you this series. Like I've said, both because it's fascinating and also important to look at these stories and how they've morphed into what they are today and what that means. As mentioned in the episode, Flint does a lot of really interesting Twitter threads, both on Atlantis and the issues surrounding these searches and archaeology that the actual archaeology that he studies. I've linked to them in this episode's description, and their referenced a bit in the episode itself. You can also find Flint's Twitter linked in the description as well, so go ahead and follow him so you can learn even more. I know it's disappointing to learn that Atlantis isn't some super cool Greek myth that I've just somehow avoided all these years. That everything we've learned from pop culture adaptations actually perpetuates an idea that's become, if very separate from the fun pop culture, a dark and dangerous notion. But hey, like I've said, you can still be interested in Atlantis, but this way you have all the information, so you can stay interested in Plato's dialogues, what he was doing with this allegory and why and what his points were. Just don't go looking for a lost city because there isn't one. On Tuesday, more about that allegory and why he used it, what it means, how we know that it's fictional, and what it really means to have no sources beyond Plato and more. Stay tuned if I've gained any new listeners or are these episodes too. Thank you for joining. You'll find actual mythology and the rest of the show and a much more narrative storytelling style. But narrative storytelling doesn't actually fit with Atlantis, so I've had to adapt. Thank you all, You're truly the best. I'm live and I love actual mythology and history very much. Philosophy I could take or leave. Oh hi, Hello, welcome. This is Let's talk about Myth's baby, and I'm your host Live, the woman who's here telling you all about something that is explicitly not a myth, even if it's being covered on her myth show. I'm just thrilled to have the ability to share all this with you, particularly as always these conversation episodes. Last week, when I spoke with Flint Dibble, we covered the true archaeology of the region, Why we know that Atlantis isn't a place anyone should bother looking for because every bit of real evidence that we have enforces the idea that it was simply something Plato made up to prove his philosophical theory. We touched upon why it's an issue to be looking for places like Atlantis, how it hurts real archaeology, and how it's linked to some really dark and racist shit. But this week we are really diving into that. I spoke with David S Anderson, an archaeologist who studies pseudo archaeology, archaeology that purports to be real archaeology but ignores methodology and simply wants to prove something they've already decided it is true, even if none of the evidence suggests that it is. We talked about pseudo archaeology and how it's become a pop culture sensation. We talked about why It's so dark and dangerous that shows exist where the entire premise is theorizing on whether or not non white ancient peoples were capable of building things like the Pyramids. Even just editing this episode, I learned so much all over again. It's so true, so interesting and dark at the same time. And I'm so thrilled I was able to have David on the show to talk about this. It's seriously important, especially when one is talking about Atlantis, and speaking of Atlantis, David gives a bit of a breakdown on when and how Atlantis transformed from a thing that Plato invented to what it is today. Spoiler, it happened very recently, at least in comparison to when pet Plato actually wrote it. Before we dive in. We did record this episode back in October, so you'll have to bear with past live who hadn't had the chance to reread the Timius and the Crittius before recording. But oh I certainly have now. Also listening back, I found myself sounding very judgmental on believers of Atlantis, and so I just want to clarify that any of that judgment or annoyance or even disdain is for those people who believe it against all of the facts, who dispute all of the facts and continue on with this theory that has so much basis and racism and a willful ignorance of act ual archaeology and history. Those people are shit, and I'm actually afraid of them with every moment that I prepare and record these episodes, because even if you haven't encountered it, there is a whole wide world of this shit, and it's scary. But if you just believed Atlantis like I did when you were a kid, because you never knew any better because you were raised to believe it was a myth or even history, and you're listening to this now, oh you are so welcome here, Welcome to the other side. Conversations Deis x Alien Ancient Realities versus pseudo Archaeology with David S Anderson. One of the questions I get all the time is like it goes to Troy in Atlantis. It's like, well, there was this myth about Troy and that was real, and so if there's a myth about Atlantist, it must be real. And for me, it's really important to approach that and say, like, wait, a second, these are not the same kind of stories and they don't have the same kind of origin to them. Well. Also, I mean, the idea of Troy being real in the way that it's real in the Iliad is not at all confirmed. Yeah, it's not even like there's total consensus on that. And yeah, exactly. Yeah, Well we'll just dive right in, I mean talking about pseudo archaeology and sort of how that interacts with I guess real archaeology in the ways it causes trouble. But I mean, yeah, all of this came up because the huge subset of the world seems to believe or want to believe that Atlantis is a myth and therefore could be a real place. But it's neither. It's not even a myth, which is what the thing I always go back to is, as somebody who you know, tells mythology for a job, it isn't one. And I'll by the time this air is I'll have gotten into that more in depth in my podcast. But you study pseudo archaeology, I know, not specifically Mediterranean or anything, right, you do you focus on Mesoamerica, did I see? Yeah? So, my my background as an archaeologist is working in Mexico studying the ancient Maya. I've done field work, you know, in many sites in Mexico. I've done some fieldwork in North America, and I've been lucky enough to work in Egypt ones. But yes, this is my traditional archaeological background is not in the Mediterranean per se. And so how did you get into sort of the more the pseudo archaeology aspect, the sort of and maybe we should define that as well if you want to do that. Yeah, no, I think it's actually important to talk about, like what do I'm you know, what do we mean when say pseudo archaeology, because especially I get a lot of kickback online if people are like, oh, you just don't like that interpretation, or you don't want to believe that, or you're denying or covering up the truth in some way, shape or form. The reality is a pseudo archaeology is something very particular, and it's one that you know, it's making claims about the archaeological record while and sort of using archaeological data sometimes to do that, but totally sort of ignoring, throwing out the window any kind of archaeological methodology. And so you know, a common example a way of looking at this is cherry picking. Right. When somebody scrabs a couple of things and tells you, oh, you don't have to worry about that other stuff, you know, then you know it's you're dealing with some form of pseudoscience or pseudo archaeology in that process. And I think Atlantis is an interesting one when I talk about this with my students and whatnot. It Atlantis doesn't become what I would call pseudo archaeology until like the nineteenth century, because it's not until the nineteenth Well, we've got some people in the fifteen hundreds who try to claim it might have been a real place and try to kind of, you know, suggest the Americas where Atlantis, by and large, we don't get any sort of serious claims of trying to allegedly find or interact with the archaeological record until the late nineteenth century when Ignatius Donnelly publishes his book. And Donnally if for those who have not heard of this guy Minnesota congressman, because you know, I guess I don't know. I think when you're not in Congress, I guess you just have stuff to do, so you write Atlantis books. But he wrote this book Atlantis in the Antediluvian World, and he was, in the modern era, basically the first person to try to say I can find Atlantis. And he does so by looking at the archaeological record of the world, and in particular, he looks at the Maya and Egypt and he basically tries to say, like, you know, these, you know, these two cultures and other cultures are so similar they must have a common origin. And the reality is is that, you know, when he wrote his book, and we didn't know very much, particularly about the Maya. We knew like practically nothing about the Maya when he wrote his books. It was very easy for him to kind of draw these parallels and claim that these two cultures were super similar because he didn't have a very critical audience. Because his audience there wasn't much information they could push back on him with, but Atlantis. You know, so if we like, what is pseudo archaeology for me, Atlantis doesn't become that until, you know, the ignacious Donnely comes along and says, hey, I can find or pinpoint where Atlantis was using the archaeological record. That's yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, I've seen that book because it's very old, it's in the public domain and kind of just like flipped through it, and I'm sure by the time this is out, I'll have gone into it a bit in the episode, because I think it's one of the only I mean, if you if you look up books on Atlantis when it I mean, obviously it's not coming up very often because it's incredibly old. But certainly the used bookstore used books are near me, there's they have this series of like it's some kind of series of like really old public domain, weird books that they've kind of republished and like people are just trying to make money off of it, you know, good or bad. But I think you could definitely pick that up and be like, oh, this is like a this is an old book, and therefore, you know, I'm sure there's some real interesting stuff in here. And then it's like and there's another you know, especially to think of it that way, these kind of books that show up, you know, free online and one not people can look for. There's a whole other crop of books about Atlantis that come out sort of in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century that can look very serious well, and they are they are very serious. I shouldn't say that. It can look very legit, but they're not archaeological. They are spiritual books. The rise of the spiritualism movement in the late twentieth century gets very invested in Atlantis. This happens with the writings of Helena Bovatski from the Theosophical Society. This happens with Rodolph Steiner. This happens with Edgar Casey, the American psychic Edgar Casey. These folks get super into Atlantis and write a lot about it, and they add a lot to what we think we know about Atlantis, especially if you kind of slide into the pop culture world. I love to play this game. I do it with my students every year or so with a new crop of students, and I'll just say, hey, what do you know about Atlantis? Anything? Go what do you know? Tell me anything? And I start writing stuff on the board as they tell me stuff. And I always kind of start dividing it up the big chalkboard or the white board in front of the room and put stuff on. All the stuff that came from Plato one are sort of on one side, and then all the stuff that actually comes from these sort of late nineteenth century spiritualists on the other side of the board, and both side of the board. Sides of the board end up being pretty full by the time we're done with this exercise. And then I, you know, I try to ask them, well, how do you know any of this stuff? And it's it's this great sort of moment where they're like, I don't know. And I'm not trying to pick on my students. This is what we all do. They're like, I don't know. I mean I saw a movie or I saw something on TV, and they have these little factoids that they remember, but you know, where it actually came from is sort of all over the map and isn't even coming all the way from Plato sometimes or for that matter, Donnally even well, I think, you know so often it's like you just take in information throughout your life. You often can't call back exactly where you heard it. We're like, I've seen this thing or I've heard this thing, and I mean, for me, you know, I forget when it came out, but I think I was like a early teenager, young teenager when the Disney Atlantis movie came out, which is you know, I'll stand by it's a very entertaining thing of nonsense, Like yeah, it's it's really enjoyable. It's I think more interesting when you know that there is a not you know, this like backstory, this history, this mythology around it. The last time I watched it, I was like I had just started trying to dive into it. I tried to do it for an episode of the podcast ages ago, but it is it's such a daunting task trying to properly convey it. And so I'd read the tims and critius of Plato and just it's like, Oh, this is it. How did I not know that this is it? This is like the only thing from the ancient Greek world that we have on Atlantis, And somehow it's become this thing that like I think there's so much more based unless you have looked or you know, are in this world, Like you think that there is so much more to base everything we know Atlantis on. Oh and it's and the Disney Atlantis is a perfect one for just where I was talking. So much of how Atlantis is represented in that movie actually comes from Edgar Casey. Edgar Casey talks a lot about how Atlantis had these crystalline energy sources, which of course everyone's got the crystal necklace in the movie, that you know, they can turn things on, including the flying cars. Edgar Casey also says that Atlantis had flying vehicles of sorts powered by these crystals and other things. And the big underlying theme, which is a little less explicit than Disney, is just sort of this air of spiritual wisdom. And certainly, you know, for Casey and for a lot of these other spiritualists, they're very interested in the ancient world as a source of wisdom. And I would say, I think you have to kind of read into it. I don't think I'm excessively reading into the Disney Atlantis, but the Atlanteans are certainly presented as wise and sort of you know, profound in a way that the upper world or people are not. Yeah, I mean, there's there's so much in that of how they're meant to be this, yeah, this incredibly special people in some way. Yeah. I mean, it's just it's sort of forming all of my thoughts on it because I think I'm just I'm still not over how much I sort of feel like I was led to believe that there is you know, more to it well, you know, and I'm just going to keep harping on the Disney here really too, because it really is truly a phenomenal example. But there's a lot of others. I mean, this didn't come out of nowhere. There's lots of pop fiction that started this back in the twenties and the thirties, and the comic books pick it up and continue it as well. But you get that intro, which was what I deal with, where I was trying to tell the establishment about his amazing ideas and they won't listen to him. And that's a great narrative. We all love that narrative of an underdog who's fighting for the truth and it has the truth on his side, but nobody will listen to them. And so, you know, this is the kind of thing I get plastered with all the time. I got you don't believe in Atlantis because you're covering it up. But no, it would be so it would be totally cool if this was true. I've got nothing invested in you know, trying to say this isn't real. It doesn't help me in any way, shape or form. In fact, you know, it might even hurt me, like to spend so much time talking about things that aren't real. It that kind of narrative that you know, thrives in the subculture, thrives in the conspiracy circles and in the sort of the anti academia circles. It's the fictional trope, like it's been there all along. Yeah, And I think, I mean, it would be so satisfying too, if if you know, there was this all these little bits of evidence that you could find for real that suggested it, or I mean, for me coming from the side of looking at the ancient Greek sources all the time, if there was a single, i mean even one other source from the ancient Greek world that made reference to it, you know, I think it would be just a tiny bit more convincing. But it's the fact that it's it's just Plato. And when you read it, I think the key is to read it too right, and to read it with the open mind or a you know, historical minded brain of just he doesn't even sound like he's serious. And that's how I go, like, how did we get here? Because he does not sound serious. I mean, he pulls the whole this happened nine thousand years ago, beyond the pillars of Hercules, like he's he's pretty like like it's out there and the distant passed. You know, it's he's and I always fall back on too. It's like we have to think about who Plato is and what kind of author Plato is. There's a reason we referred to him as a philosopher. Everything he wrote is debating, you know, different philosophical ideas and repeat eedialy. He uses metaphorical examples or thought experiment style examples. This is not an unusual thing for him to do, to make up a story to try and prove a point. He does it time and time again. He doesn't talk about history. He's not known as a historian. No, I mean, I've not read a ton of Plato. I think I've read probably some of it in my undergrad but otherwise probably just the Atlantist bit. But yeah, I mean, he's Plato. He's not a mythologer, or it's not a mythographer. He's not writing down stories from his people like he is. What you're saying, he's doing thought experience. He's he's an analogies and metaphors. He's he's like making a point through a larger fictional telling in order to demonstrate his point. And you know, we we even have the the Athens part of it all right, which I think is another good example of how obvious it is that he wasn't serious the idea that that at the same time the Athenians were like equally advanced, but you know, they didn't get punished in the same I'm forgetting exactly all of the details, but basically the idea that there was an Athenian people who were, you know, as sort of ahead of their time, all the way back, you know, nine thousand years before Plato, which is of course absurd according to like all of the physical evidence and textual evidence that we have. Yeah, yeah, no, And that's the you know, there's this kind of a boundary. I feel like that some of these authors of pseudo archaeological claims feel like, if they're at least ten thousand years in the past, they know that the rest of us don't know much about that, and so we can kind of imagine it as a blank landscape that they can paint on. But well, and behold, we have a good archaeological record from ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years in the past. We know not everything, but we know a lot about what was actually going on during those time periods. And so yeah, like there's talk to flint Table, he will be great about this. But like Athens was not the city of Athens nine thousand years earlier than Plato. It does not even remotely correlate. And that's not because we know well other things that are going on in Greece in the Mediterranean at that point in time. It's there's something that resonates to me in this idea that every couple of years somebody comes out like I have solved the mystery. I have found Atlantis, and it's actually here. It's actually there, and it's always somewhere else. It's always you know, like in the Mediterranean, outside of the Mediterranean, in North America, in Spain, in Ireland, it's all over the map. And it reminds me of you know, so the axiom I was taught a long time ago when I was learning statistics and analysis. It's like garbage in, garbage out. If there's something wrong with your sort of original premise, it does not matter how sophisticated your analysis, how detailed your breakdown of the text, does not matter. If you can break down Plato word by word by word, that doesn't prove it was real in any way, shape or form. And so I think you know, to me that garbage in garbage out really to the idea of Atlantis, because there's a reason that every time someone claims to find Atlantis, it's in like a totally different place, over and over and over again, because there's there's no actual basis to start with for whatever analysis somebody wants to pull on Plato or anyone else to come along since then well and if and if you're ignoring such important parts of or such important you know, facts about the situation, it becomes useless analysis. Like if you're ignoring the fact that Plato did not tell myths in his works, that he was not in the business of talking about ancient history or mythology generally. And then you break it all down, you say, well, this is why it's here or why it's real or whatever. But if you're ignoring that that inherent nature of Plato, well then you know your whole argument is tainted by that. Yeah, And this is where it has been said to me many a time, And I've seen TV shows try to do this, and I were discussing, like some people like, well Troy, maybe Troy is a real place. It's from you know, there's a written record to talk about Troy, and the archaeologists seemingly found Troy, which is it's way more complicated than that, but there's there's some reasonable arguments to be had there. So if Troy's real, maybe Atlantis is real. It's it's not that simple that that completely assumes that the texts about Troy and the text about Atlantis come from the same place and have the same kind of origins, and they don't. I'm like you said that Plato is not a historian. He's not a mythographer, as you said, like he is a philosopher. He is making up examples to prove his point. And that's great and that's wonderful. But if we ignore that, if we ignore who he is, of course we're going to get all of our interpretations of his work wrong. Well exactly, and you know, Troy's inherently even if what we think of as Troy as a real location, it doesn't also prove the Trojan War, So you know it doesn't. The point remains, like, yeah, but Troy might have been a real place, is based on this, but even still, like that doesn't make the Trojan war reel and you know, I doesn't the ideas that they're just so you can't you can't equivocate them like at all. Well, but I think it's you know, it's an important thing for us to discuss because so much, you know, it's hard for me sometimes, like I eat, drink and sleep this stuff. Like I love the ancient world. I focus on it, I teach it, I talk about it, I write about it. But most people don't spend that much time in these spaces, and so it's pretty easy for someone to say like, yeah, I've heard of this, I've heard of that, and let them slide together. But that's where you know, I think I say about my own fellow archaeologists, And I think part of the problems that we have in archaeology with the prevalence of pseudo archaeology and the media, is that archaeologists aren't good enough about showing their work. We're not good enough about demonstrating how we come to the results that we do. Because sure, there's a lot of doubt and archaeological interpretation, there's a lot of room for reinterpretation new discoveries to change our minds. But that doesn't mean that our interpretations are just completely pulled out of the blue, that they're just complete malarchy. There, there's something real, you know, they're based on actual information that even if we get new information or better analyzes that come along later, doesn't inherently change or get rid of those original facts underneath them. I suppose it's just the nature of these things. Like, I'm not I'm not going to be able to understand how these people get to their arguments, because I, you know, have a mind that's willing to look reasonably at these things. But I just can't ever wrap my head around the idea that Plato white and I suppose it comes back to, you know, while he's talking about yeah Solon, Yeah, yeah, he says that, you know that hears it from Solon, except there's a couple of generations removed here, so even within the realm of his storytelling, the story has already been passed down by a couple of generations. M Yeah, it's the idea of I heard it from this guy who heard it from this guy who heard it from this guy who heard that nine thousand years ago. Yeah, you know, absolutely and the and the you know, quote unquote foreigner told them this too, right, and Egypt is a great even for the Greeks. Egypt is this wonderful mystical place of sort of lost knowledge and lost wisdom as well. And it really it's an air of mysticism to say that you got something from a foreigner and sort of in that sense an air of plausible reality but distant. If I don't know if there's there's probably an exact term for this that I'm missing, but it's like that, you know, it's kind of like orientalism in the modern world, like, you know, we heard about it from the foreigners, and so as this are more plausibility to it. Well, and then you add to that that the Egyptians, you know, already were around so many thousands of years earlier that then you know, and at another level of well, of course they would know, because you know they were, but even still, it's like the idea is that Atlantis was even way more you know, ancient than even the Egyptian I always love I think I see a few eyeballs pop every once in a while when I talk, because in my classes, I'll talk about the Egyptian pyramids, and we'll we always talk start at one point or another with Herodotus, because it is from Herodotus that today we have this idea that the pyramids are built by slaves, and there isn't. Actually the archaeological data is actually pretty good to show that these were not slaves. But we talked about it in class and it's like, all right, so you know, what's the evidence you know for the workers at Giza, what do we know about them? What? You know, why did Herodotus say slaves? And ever, eventually I point out to them that Herodotus was, you know, as was further if when I get this quite right, is further away from Yeah, that there's more time between Herodotus and the construction of the pyramids at Giza than there is between us today and Herodotus, like this is an ancient place and he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just sort of like running with it and going with what people tell him, and you know, it's a long time ago. Yeah, that's the thing. And you know, that comes up for me a lot in the stories, because there's a lot of oh, well, why is this one different than that one? And I'm like, well, you know, there's like five hundred years in between some of these versions of stories, and things change in five hundred years, oh gosh. Yeah. And it's that we're so willing to accept sort of contradictions or multiple versions in our own world, but if we see that in someone else's culture or someone else's religion, it's like, wait, but how could they have a contradiction. It's like we kind of do that all the time. Well exactly, and you know, it's the idea of specifics is mythology. But you know the difference between Ovid's version of something and you know, an archaic text that we have from Greece and somebody like, well, what one's right and one's wrong or whatever, it's like, no, there's just like seven hundred years there. You know. It's like saying that everything Shakespeare said should be exactly the same as how we live now, and like, yes, I mean I think even just using that as an example, it's a good like wake up call of oh right, you know, a few hundred years matters quite a bit. But that's yeah, that's that's fascinating with the timeline. And I actually didn't realize I knew that, you know that what we know now suggests that the pyramids weren't built by enslaved people. But I didn't realize that it was Herodotus, which I was meaning to bring up Herodotus earlier because I think he's such a good example of you know, even if Plato was a historian, that doesn't mean shit, Like Herodotus said a lot of crazy things. Yeah, and we'd call him the first historian. Yeah, and he got things right too, And it's a great read, and it's a fun thing to go back to. But you know, you wouldn't read, you know, one single historian today and assume that they are completely and utterly uncontroversial or that they couldn't have gotten something wrong. And so, you know, we should never look at somebody like Herodotus and assume that there couldn't be errors or anything else at that point too, well, exactly, And you know, you're working off of a lot of oral traditions and traveling and talking to people who don't speak the same languages, and yeah, I mean there's so many things, but it's just fascinating to me. I think what's most fascinating to me is just how people can look at what Plato said and decide that that means that Atlantis definitely existed. There's from my perspective talking with people outside of the disciplines of classics and archaeology in general, it seems like if somebody sees a really old book, the older that book is sort of like the greater air of authenticity that it tends to have. And we don't think about people in the past lying, not not saying Plato's lying, but I mean just we don't think about people in the past, as you know, lying or mischievous or inventing examples. We sort of ossify them into this block and say that they are this great, you know, carved in marble bust of an individual who you know, is austere and important and couldn't possibly have been wrong about something or made something up just for the fun of it in that whole process. Well, and I think that's especially true when it comes to ancient Greece, you know there, and there's a much darker side to that of the inherent you know, morality kind of of ancient Greece and the way they're sort of put up on this pedestal of ancient people. And therefore, you know, especially someone from there and Plato, you know, this philosopher that everyone knows his name. It's it's not like it was, you know, I mean, even somebody like Herodotus or Thucidides, like, if you're not in the realm of classics, you're a lot less likely to know who they are. But Plato, his name has sort of gone much further than even some of the historians. So it's, yeah, it's certainly the idea of him telling the sort of ultimate truth because he's this ancient Greek philosopher is Yeah, that's convincing to a lot. Atlantis has definitely hit that point too, though, with as I said, when I like to do this exercise with my students and where I ask them what they know about Atlantis, and when I ask them those questions about sources, how do you know these things? Somebody in the room always knows who Plato is or has some idea of who Plato is. And there's always some students who just don't want to raise their hand. But there are absolutely students in the room who can tell me things about Atlantis who don't necessarily know who Plato is and maybe don't even know his name. Sometimes, you know, this information has percolated so far that you know, and it kind of don't know where it came from anymore for a lot of people. Well, I'll admit even I'm not sure if I knew offhand that it was from Plato before I started, you know, being as deep in the myths as I am now before the podcast, even though I did a classics degree. Because the thing is, I just always assumed that Atlantis was some kind of myth because of everything that surrounded me. So I just assumed there was a myth that I hadn't heard, you know, even having done a classics degree that told of Atlantis. I didn't think it was convincing. I didn't believe it, but I figured there was, you know, something that I could call a myth that told him. Until it's like, no, there's not even that. And I realize now in hindsight, you know, the reason it didn't come up in my degree is because it's not anything. It's just like a thing. Plato talked about it, and I didn't. I didn't, you know, study philosophy or the philosophers generally, and so that's why I didn't hear it. But I think unless you have that contradiction unless you have a reason to learn that it is only in Plato and it wasn't presented seriously, it is a thought experiment, then you're just sort of going to take in what's around you and just assume it's a myth, even if you don't necessarily assume it was a real place. And I think, especially for modern Americans, there's a very real issue here that it is part of our modern mythology. That is, Atlantis is regularly a feature of things like Marvel and DC comics and other movies that are going on out there. In the Disney movie that we were talking about, and this is literally one hundred years of storytelling in the modern American landscape, and it goes back to that pulp fiction era with particular writers like Roberty Howard was one of the most influential. Howard is known today best known today for his character Conan the Barbarian, but he had regularly featured Atlantis in his stories. He had a character cal who was from Atlantis, who was a king of Atlantis. A whole bunch of the other pulp fiction authors picked up the same thread and started writing Atlantis stories of great warriors from this mythical place, and it's there's a very real tie from that pulp fiction world over back to those spiritualists for the late nineteenth century early twentieth century, because you know, especially if we slide over into HP. Lovecraft, Lovecraft and some of the other pulp fiction authors were very deliberately lifting from that world of spiritualism because they wanted to add sort of an air of authenticity to their stories about occult and demons and other sundry things. And so that basically that spiritualism world brit large becomes sort of a regular dipping well for these pulp fiction authors who are looking for story ideas. And so Atlantis La Muria Moo. There's some different histories to all of these lost continents and how they came about, but they all end up part of the canon of pulp fiction and early science fiction and fantasy that works its way into the comic books in the movies to this day. And so like, why do we think it's a myth today, because we've got a hundred years of mythological style storytelling about it that you know, everyone's heard of Atlantis. They don't always know why or how, but absolutely everyone's heard of it because of that last sort of one hundred years of storytelling. Hmm. Well, and even just you talking about that, it reminded me that the Little Mermaid lives in Atlantis. Like I actually, now that I say that, I think it's so. I think it's like maybe a bit of a suggestion and interesting, but even one thing. So, I'm a big fan of the Assassin's Creed Odyssey game, you know, wandering through ancient Greece, and it's it's so accurate in so many ways, and you can tell they did some really incredible research in so many ways. And then they toss in an additional one you can go to, and it's Atlantis. And it's such a huge bummer to me because truly, so much is incredibly well researched and accurate historically, and then and then there's Atlantis. And just like you ryally did well, I was working with a student last year to do doing some database sing like we're trying, I'm trying to combile lists of different pop culture appearances of Atlantis and others through archaeology stuff, and she came across I don't know how representative it necessarily is, but she actually came across some blog posts from players of Assassin's Creed who the players, there's the authenticity and the game is valued by the players, and so there were at least some players who are apparently pretty upset that they added Atlantis to the game as they were stepping away from that accuracy world. Well, I'm glad to hear that and not the other way around. Of players then went on to assume that Atlantis was a myth because they put it in. It was an unusual counterexample. It's usually goes the other way around. Basically, yeah, I mean it certainly annoys me, and I like, I played that those levels just like angrily, like why am I even here? This is particulous. It's a loser. And you know, people who are deep in Assassin's Creed will have a lot of explanations for why it makes sense in the lore or whatever. But ultimately they make a very real ancient Greece with incredible like archaeological evidence, and then they throw an Atlantis. Well, and I don't know, see, this is one where you're gonna have to help me, because I know there are some vague freemasons and templars references and the Assassin's Creeds series there are also in the realm of some Masonic authors. There are some Masonic authors that try to tie things back to Atlantis as well, including ignacious Donnally. Donaldy is actually kind of a weird one, So, I mean, he was the one who got us started on this Atlantis boom. He suggests that the Masonic traditions originate in Atlantis. It's not a big part of his book. It's like one line, one paragraph. And there's a very real question whether he was a Mason or not, because there's like one photograph of him with his hand sort of in his shirt between his shirt buttons that some people claim as a Masonic hand sign. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, it's you know, it's certainly not. Wouldn't have been unreasonable that he could have been a Mason, but we don't know for sure. But he does literally say in his book that these traditions Masonic tricians go back to Atlantis. And then we have there's I kind of defy Masonic authors into sort of secular Masonic authors and esoteric Masonic authors, and the secular are certainly the more common and more popular within Masonry. But you get to people like Augustus Laplan Jean, who was absolutely a Mason, and he goes way further down the well here of basically suggesting that Masonic traditions came from the Maya, and the Maya took it to Atlantis, and from Atlantis that went to Egypt, and you get all the sort of sundry stories going on. And Laplan Jean was super influential, and he has sort of long threads that still hit people to this day. Wow, I guess at least he thinks the Maya are older than Atlantis. Yeah, the chronology is all a total mess, it is, and he's you know, it's funny. He hits an unusual place in the history of my archaeology because he's did some of the very first sort of quasi official excavations at chichen Itza, this famous Maya city in the northern Lowlands. He is the first person to have excavated a chalk mule statue, which is a very famous style of statue found in among the Maya, particularly among Central Mexico. But at the same time all those he chose where to excavate by psychic powers, he told all the workers that he was reincarnated. He used to be a Maya prince himself and whatnot. He is very very specifically in this world of spiritualism and he for him, not for all Masons, but for him, there was this very real overlap between Masonic tradition and esoteric spirituality. And then yeah, it's like he's let's just throw an Atlantis and everything else into it. That's fascinating. He sounds like a much more out there like Heinrich Lehmann. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean he's in the same time period. He's in Yucatan in the eighteen seventies, and he's he's got the beard like all the way down to his belly button, and he's got his wife Alice is a real pistol. Like they're they're quite the couple, and they were really like in exciting and fun people. Yeah, it's fascinating those. I mean, I don't know if he accounts as the the gentleman scholars they call back and we're allowed to just go do whatever they wanted because they had money, and we're right, Yeah, he had money, power and influence, and yeah he could just kind of go and follow, you know, wherever he wanted to go and get it done and you know. That's that's yeah, it's very much the way that archaeology began. And he's we don't want to claim him, but he's kind of, you know, hard to totally ignore. M That's fascinating. Yeah, it's interesting the way that Atlantis has become something, you know, so far beyond ancient Greece. I don't know much about Lemuria or those other places. I don't know if it's something that I've missed or they just Atlantis really fills the space. Now. Lamaria and MoU are both sort of modern world lost continents in that they they Lamuria gets its start in the nineteenth century as well, and is actually Lemuria actually was proposed by geologists and are natural historians is probably a better term here. Really that they were suggesting there might have been a land bridge between Madagascar and an Asia, because they were trying to suggest some there there's some biological similarities between lemurs from Madagascar and other animals in throughout the Old World, they thought, and so they the sort of explanation of the day is like, well, maybe there's this Lemurian land bridge connecting the two and that disappears really fast because it doesn't work at all geologically, it does not it's not necessary for the evolution of any of these species that were involved. Uh, the natural historians stopped talking about this really quick. But then a Lemuria for gets picked up very specifically by Helena Bovatski, who is one of this author from the Theosophical Society whose rights about Atlantis, and she suggests that humanity sort of used to live in Atlantis and Lemuria and that we work I did out of both of these places by spirits from beyond this world, and there's some ancient alien origin points and all of this stuff. But she's there's she makes this Lamaria and Atlantis sort of very deliberate parts of her spiritual world. And yeah, and mood doesn't come along till the actual twentieth century with a guy named James No, actually might be nineteenth century after double check this, but it's a guy James Churchward who is trying to sort of create his own version of history for the Pacific and South America and whatnot. And it's yeah, these they get equated though, because they're like, oh, lost continents, they must all be ancient, they must all come from these ancient myths. And it's like now, those two are totally modern creations entirely and from not ancient sources or mythographers or anything like that. Yeah, not even a Plato. Yeah yeah, oh that's really interesting. I had no idea. And is it just named for Lemurs then? Yeah? La Mauria was actually named after Lemurs, right, I mean I Lemurs. Yeah, they have their own fake con that named after them. Yeah and so, and you know you mentioned that aliens part, So I mean, how prevalent is that? Like before I guess is what I'm asking, Like before, you know, there were TV shows and the internet, Like when did the Aliens built pyramids? Aliens did all this nonsense? When did that sort of start coming out? It's got a long history. So the ancient alien concepts you can absolutely trace back to Lane of Vatsky in her book in the eighteen nineties, The Secret Doctrine, where she does she's very spiritual about or esoteric about it, where she talks about humans being guided by spirits from beyond this world. And it's not clear that, you know, if you could tire down and talk to her today, like I'm not sure she meant extraterrestrials necessarily, but it is something that she alludes to as something they're not of this planet, but it's kind of hard to pass around. You get fictional stories in the eighteen nineties as well, of you aliens building pyramids or aliens being involved in the pyramids, and it sort of grows from there, where as we get into the pulp fiction era. As I said, they're readily borrowing from these spiritualist authors Lovecraft in particular Lovecrafts Old Ones sort of his like really creepy extraterrestrial Spirits is of course the most famous of Lovecraft's old Ones. These are definitely cribbing off of some of these spiritual traditions. If you read Call of Cthulhu, sort of his most famous story, he directly cites Theosophy and the Theosophical Society and there several times, and it blossoms from there. The real sort of like breakout Ancient Aliens moment is in nineteen sixty eight when Eric Vandoniican publishes a book called Chariots to the Gods, and this was like a real pop culture sensations, sold millions of copies translated into Humptin languages sort of book, and it's you know, he was ultimately claiming that the arch He's the kind of the first one who says the archaeological record contains evidence for all of this alien contact in sort of such specific ways. But at the same time, he's so not new in his ideas that he actually gets taken to court for plagiarism when his book gets it's popular, Like he's he's not the originator of any of these ideas, but he is the one who popularized all of these ideas. And ultimately the TV show Today, by the you know, was the original season one of Ancient Aliens was an Omah. She was like a four episode homage to Eric Vondonikan and it was so popular that they just kept going, and so I actually lost count. I think they're in season sixteen now. They don't do annual seasons. They started in twenty ten, but they don't do annual seasons, and so I've kind of lost count of exactly how many seasons they have. But they are just churning this stuff out over and over again, and truly, you know, I actually I have fun with this because you know, this is a hundred plus year old idea. The show itself is at least a fifty plus year old idea because it is deliberately based off of Eric Vondonikan's work, and so I always show my archaeology students episode one from season one of Ancient Aliens. It's like, let's they've had fifty years to work on this, what do they got? And you know, it was like they they've trot out stuff that it's like, it's just it's just ridiculous, Like it's just not even remotely good or reasonable evidence of alien contact of any kind. And so it's like, you know, I always tell my students, like, you can't. You know, you got to watch this stuff. You've got to read the original sources. You've got to watch the TV shows if you're going to say that they're not true. But you know I'm not, And I just let them have at it and they just tear it to pieces, like it's so logically inconsistent. Yeah, I mean, it's that's fascinating. I don't think I've seen any of it, um, but was I'm fine with. But I mean the idea alone, you know, I know enough about the Egyptian Pyramids certainly, and just the history there and all of that. It's always sounded like a real bummer to me. Just the idea of even suggesting that aliens did anything, you know, and it's it's one of those things. Like I said earlier, I think archaeologists need to do a better job of showing their work, because not only do we have a good idea of how the pyramids are built, but like I said, we have we actually have. You know, Mark Laner has excavated the workers village at Giza. We have the houses they lived in. We have inscriptions about the teams that they were organized into for hauling blocks. We have names of the teams they were organized into. We were particularly looking at in class just the other day, some of the skeletal remains, and we have literal bodies of people who lived, worked, and died working on these pyramids, and their bodies are riddled with arthritis and broken bones and strain injuries because they were doing this hard task. Not only do we have like some decent evidence, we literally have the bodies of the people who did this, and the hard work that they did shows on their skeletons to this day. To claim like, oh, the deosx alien is how I usually referred to, It's like it must have been. It's a big building. I don't know it must have been the aliens. It's like a you know, it's kind of a spit in the eye of that guy literal body that is riddled with arthritis and broken limbs that from building these structures. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean that's I can't believe or I'm just amazed to learn that we have their bodies and the names and all of that, because I wasn't aware of that, and I think that's so important and interesting and I mean great evidence. Not that it really helps for people who are already going to believe what they're going to believe, but I'm sure some people can be turned. But yeah, the idea, you know, it's just it says so much about you know, I'm gonna be speaking with others as well about this, but obviously, you know, it's inherently taking away from the people the culture who did this, who use their skill and their you know abilities, and did this incredible thing, and then we come in later and it's like, no, no, it was people from the rest of the world. Yeah, like the Dasx aliens perfect term for it, of they just came in and they figured it out right, and they just they gave it to the Egyptians. It was a nice gift. That's where, you know, one of my favorite lost city topics that I've written about is the so called lost city of z that this British explorer, Percy Fawcett, when looking for in the nineteen twenties, and Hollywood made a movie about him, and there's all sorts of He's got kind of a cult following out there about him, and I was there has been a couple of people who have tried to retrace this. There are many people who have tried to retrace his steps and look for this city and whatnot. And it's it's really kind of it's sad. It's this is just one of these sad stories out there because Fawcett became convinced that, you know, he had heard allegedly heard rumors about a city somewhere in the jungle, and he became convinced in particular that it was a colony from Atlantis, that it was a set of refugees from Atlantis. And the Fawcett's reputation gets bolstered in the media often because he you know, they say like, oh, he believed that Native Americans could build cities like no, he didn't he thought why the Atlanteans built cities and in his own published memoirs that I literally bought an Amazon. It's not like they're hard to find. Like in his published book that he wrote about this, you know, he has at one point he's interviewing an Amazonian native and who says like, oh, yes, my ancestors built pyramids and built big cities in the jungle. And Fawcett, in his notes writes down like, but I know that's not true because he is of the brown skinned variety, you know, and he and he thought that this city of z was built by you know, white skinned people with red hair and hazel eyes. Like he's very explicit that. And this is just, you know, another one of these examples that pull pools into you know, how we understand the Americas Atlantis over and over again has been used as sort of an attempt to explain like, well, you know, those Native American populations couldn't have done this stuff in one way, shape or form. It had to have been some other. You know, the Greeks were great, right, so it's like a Greek thing actually going on here. And so it's these these ideas are not just fun and you know, like maybe a mystery to solve they have done literal harmed how we understand people it's around the world, well exactly. I mean, yeah, it's just it's just obvious racism that it perpetuates, right, it's just because I mean, and I don't know again, like I don't know all the claims of Aliens, but like I've certainly heard the ones about Aliens building the Pyramids and building Sphinx and all this. I've never heard them saying that the Aliens built the Parthenon. Yeah, you know, like we're not. There's no claim that the Greeks didn't build the Greek stuff, Yeah, there's it's only the claim that the Brown people didn't build like the impressive Like we're perfectly happy to let medieval cathedrals be built over multiple generations. But yeah, Like there's one of my favorite bits in that season one episode one of Ancient Aliens. They're interviewing a stonemason and the Stonemason's like, oh my god, there's no way the people of Tiwanaku could have possibly carved this stone in South America. But at the very end of his interview, he's he i'd have to I'm paraphrasing, but he more or less says like, well, they could have, but it were taking a lot of time. Yeah, yeah, could Yeah, they absolutely could have. Like just because you know, they were maybe smarter in certain ways than we a lot of people are now, doesn't mean that they were like too smart to be realistic, right. They just came up with things differently, and they you know, used different skills and you know, they just figured things out in a fascinating way. It's why we should be so interested in them and not you know, debating whether or not they physically could do these things. Yeah. It reminds me too, because there's the common sort of theme and ancient aliens and other pseudo archaeological claims to find some big rock like that rock, that one, it's too big, no one could have moved it. There must be alien technology. There must be Atlantean technology or levitation rais or something like that. There's a couple of years ago Stonehenge, the heritage site in England, invited some school child or an out for a Solstice celebration and they as part of the celebration, they had a block not from not from the original site, but they had another like multi ton. I think it was a three ton stone block, and they invited the school children to move the block and they did, like you know, you strap a bunch of people onto a rope and get them to pull and walk it around, and like you can do that. And that's just school children moving one of these blocks around of a similar size. It's so tempting to just look at these things. They're like, well, you know, I couldn't move that myself, and so it must be aliens or something else under there. And it's like it's it's actually not even that hard to do some of these things. And it's like just because you haven't set out to try your personal self, because you have other things you're doing, doesn't mean that people couldn't do it. Well. I remember, I very much remember a personal conversation I was somebody once where he made some sort of argument about like laser. You know, lasers couldn't cut the blocks at Giza as nicely as they are cut and I and my first question like, well, are you suggesting the Egyptians use lasers? And he's like, oh, no, no no, no, I'm not suggesting that. It's like, well, what are you even suggesting them? Like it's yeah, your stone flat fractures on flat planes. You know, My favorite, like Instagram meme are these like quarry guys who go in and just hit rocks with hammers and they hammer in some nails into them and after a bunch of hammers, like the rock just splits open on this nice long flat plane like low and behold, doing stuff by hand is totally feasible and fine and can be done. We just don't do it anymore, so people don't see it or think about it well exactly. And then you know, what's the argument for why Greek columns have those perfect flutes, like they're doing that by hand? You know, it's not they can do that by hand. They the carvings, the statuary, like, all of that's by hand. What's what on earth is the difference between carving marble into like a perfectly realistic looking human and figuring out how to cut blocks for pyramids. Now, and this is you know, the ultimate thing is that people done so many amazing things all around the world, and these pseudo archaeological claims, in one way or another take them away from those people they at their best. They take them away and they give them way to another group of mythical people and at their worst to take them away and give them extraterrestrials and say people couldn't have done this, or particularly these people couldn't have done this, and so we're going to find some sort of diosex alien to bring in and have do it for them instead. M well, that's it. Like the whiteness ascribed to Atlantis becomes one of the biggest problems of it. You know, anything to suggest that white people were somehow the fanciest and most like, oh my god, you know what would that math be, Like eleven thousand years ago, the Atlanteans were this white race that were the most incredible, Like, it's inherently horrifying. And then to suggest that, I mean, certainly in the case of building pyramids in the Americas, that Atlanteans did it, it's like, oh my god, like stretch of horror to just make sure that it was the white people doing impressive things. It's so troubling. It is the perpetual sort of underbelly of all these pseudo archaeological claims, and it's one that I think it's important to talk about, but I'm important to engage with because I don't think like if you were like, hey, maybe Atlantis is real, it doesn't mean you're a white supremacist. But a lot of white supremacists did think that, and so we need to dismantle these ideas and talk about where they came from and how we can come up come up with better interpretations and understandings of the past. Absolutely, I think the more people who come at it with like a genuine interest or just fascination, and then they start to look at these things and be interested. And you know, if you're finding those people and you're pointing out the inherent racial aspects that they did not you take into consideration when they started being interested, Like most people, the good people are going to see that and be like, oh my gosh, you're right, Like that's you know that this is a problem. And yeah, I think that's the most important part because it can be interesting and entertaining to think about how on earth do these people think this? Like what are they? You know, how do they get there? But then you do have to look at it and see like, well, it's not harmless. You know, it might seem silly, but it's certainly not harmless. Oh, in no way, shape or form, m Oh, it's all I mean, the pseudo archaeology generally is is fascinating. So yeah, it's it's such a piece. And this is where so much of where my work and my writing has been turning over the last couple of years is looking at how much overlap there is between these claims and the end fiction and how much this stuff shows up in fiction all of the time. And I think that's not a coincidence, because I think that pseudo archaeological claims tend to paint a sort of misngaging, mysterious past that draws people in. And it's a very real part of why archaeologists need to do better public outreach and when we need to work on engaging publics in the same way. When I do talk about this stuff, especially it's the professions getting better, but especially when I was a grad student and just say like talking about this stuff, you know, my advisors and my senior people in the field be like, that's not worth your time, That's just a lunatic fringe. You don't want to talk about that, you don't want to deal with that. And I have sort of two response in my response in the day was always like, you know, I don't think any problem goes away by ignoring it, and quite literally, you know, I, when I was an undergrad read one of these pseudo archaeological books and thought it was really cool and started taking archaeology classes. So you know, it's a very real effect in this world, in my world. But in particular, I think you know that we've actually have some survey data nowadays too. That is important to talk about because the most recent survey was done out of Chapman University in twenty nine teen. They've not brought it back since coronas started, so hopefully they're gonna get some more data for us soon. But in twenty nineteen, they had forty one percent of Americans saying that ancient alien contact was real, and that number had doubled over like five years or so of the survey running they had. They have an Atlantis number as well. I believe in twenty nineteen the Atlantis number was fifty seven percent of Americans saying that Atlantis was real. But the Atlantis question was really problematic, and I've talked with some of the people behind this survey and they're thinking and the wording of the Atlantis question was something to the effect of did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? And they were trying to cast a wide net to catch things like La Mauria and Moo and some of the work of some claims of other claims that are out there by other authors about these like twelve thousand year oldlaws civilizations. So they were trying to cast it wide net. But I think I think a lot of people reading that question to ancient advanced civilizations exist. I think a lot of people will be like, yeah, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Miyans, you know they. I think there's a lot of people who would just checked the yes to that. So I think that fifty seven percent is a harder number to really deal with. But the ancient alien questions really blunt. It's like, you know, it's you know, was there ancient is there evidence for ancient alien contact? Yes? Or now? And like you know, it's, well, there's an agree, strongly agree breakdown in all of this, but the agrees come up to forty one percent. And I always look at that number as an example of like me and my profession aren't doing enough and we need to be out more and talking to more people because there's no evidence for ancient alien contact, not even remotely. Is there any way, shape, or form decent evidence. That's also since we're on a podcast and people always hit me for this, that doesn't mean I think that aliens could not possibly exist out there somewhere in the universe. It's a big universe. Like the question does alien life exist is a separate question to have. Has it visited us in the modern day, another separate question. I can we can talk about my opinions on those, but they are separate from my opinions as an archaeologist about ancient alien contact. The claims are horrible. The evidence is ridiculous. It is cherry picked, it's taken out of context, it's misinterpreted, sometimes deliberately, and there's just no evidence for it. But when we have forty one percent of Americans saying that it's real, then we've got a problem, and it's that problem starts with the archaeologists not talking enough. Yeah, that's a huge, huge number. I mean, I'm sure the as much as I'm sure that's true, the archaeologist not speaking enough, But it's also a matter of who has the voice right and not to say that people shouldn't continue to try to have a louder voice. That's absolutely true. But it's just, you know, it's unfortunate that's where the money is is, because that's where the excitement is. Is these you know, and I think that, you know, maybe there's somebody who can make archaeology seem as exciting as I'm sure that it is, but just without you know, it's yeah, I mean, I keep thinking of this is sort of leaping back a little bit, but I meant to bring it up earlier. But the um, the latest, the fourth and bad Indiana Jones movie. I like to refer to that as the fourth film in the Indiana Jones trilogy. Yeah, that's that's good. That's certainly how I see it. Like, I know, you know, there's a lot to be said about the first three and the archaeology obviously, but it was the introduction of aliens that made me even then go oh okay, no you jumped the shark, like this is not you know, but yeah, it's things like that. It's it's the voices. The loudest voices in the room are the ones talking about aliens. Yeah, now, and there's I love to hate the fourth Indiana Jones film because it hits some of these themes we've been talking about it brings. And the rumor for years was when they were trying to make that film was that you know that Lucas kept coming to Spielberg and Harrison forward with scripts saying like you wanted to do this, you want to do that, and then and they said no to him several times apparently, and allegedly he would not give up his main hook. And that main hook, from my impression, either has to be the aliens themselves or the crystal skull as an object. And the crystal skulls are one of my other favorite pseudo archaeological topics, like there are actual crystal skulls that exist. They have been alleged to be ancient. The scientific data with suggest that none of them are. That they're all products of the modern world, but they are. They're all kinds of again going back to that, these have been picked up by New age spiritualism movements that have been alleged to come from myasite or astic site through other sites out there, and they've absolutely wrapped up. In that movie, they referenced the Mitchell Hedge's Skull of Doom, which is an actual, real Crystal Skull. In that movie, they reference some of the Spanish conquistadors who went and maybe did see cities in the Amazon and whatnot. Like that, That film The Crystal Indian Jones and the Crystal Skull is a really good example of like how fiction takes real elements and intersperses them in between that fictional narrative. And when you walk out from the movie like, oh, I've heard of crystal skulls. Maybe they're real, maybe they're not. They are, they're not, we don't know. And ten years later, fifteen years later, twenty years later, when you see a documentary on TV about this subject, you don't quite remember where you heard it from anymore, and it all gets mixed up, and we get to that point where everyone's heard of Atlantis but not quite sure what the real original data might have been. Yeah, I didn't know that about I suppose I might have heard of the Crystal skulls, but I I just remember watching a movie and thinking, this is awful. What's happening. I love the other three? Why but it is? It's just like that's something and this is probably just the way I see the ancient world too, Like I'm almost curious how people came at it when they don't already have an interest in the ancient world. But immediately seeing aliens even back then, I was like, oh no, now I'm mad, Like, you've just taken away everything, all the agent see of this ancient civilization. You've taken it away and you've given it to aliens, and now I'm angry. Yeah. Yeah, we have great evidence up down sideways all directions that all of these cities in the Americas were in fact built by indigenist American People's m yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's it's fascinating. But I mean, I'm glad whether are people who are doing this, and specifically that so many wanted to talk to me on this show, because I'm really excited about it. This is going to be like the first time I've really dived into archaeology specifically and something that is explicitly not a myth that I'm going to be covering in an explicitly this is not a myth kind of way. It's perfect though, because so many people think it's a myth when it's not a myth, and there's a very real difference to be talked about there. Yep, exactly, and I'm still kind of working out how I'm going to do it, but I'm very excited to make it as dramatic a reveal and like, really really make it good because it's just fascinating. I'm also very proud to have I'm lucky enough to be able to publish a book of Greek myth themed cocktails and oh fantastic it's gonna be. It's very dorky and silly, and one of them is called Plato's Theory of Atlantis, and like, I think the first line is, like, Atlantis is not a myth. I don't think it's a myth. I think we need two shots of alcohol in that drink. It's pretty strong if I recall it very blue, and yeah, no, I've it's basically I've used a cocktail to debunk Atlantis in a way that I think is just very sun That's fabulous. That is exactly that. I think. That is important work. Yeah, thank you, it's otach. It is spreading the work well. And this is you know, I mean, obviously probably you know where I'm going from here. But it's like academia has been so goddamn serious for so long, and I don't. You know, we do need to do our research seriously, but we don't. That doesn't mean everything has to be drum and dullin that that's the best way to reach people well exactly. And I'm that's why I'm thrilled, you know, people on the show all the time, because that's sort of what I'm trying to do, is, you know, have an accessible mythology podcast that is like incredibly accurate and well researched, and you know, I dive into all the primary sources at all of it and have scholars on But at the same time, you know, I'm trying to come at it away that is not academic because I personally found academia stifling. I didn't feel like I fit into it. It was it was too serious. So yeah, I think it's it's great to have so many different like avenues to be able to spread, you know, important things, and academia is one of those important avenues and certainly vital, but that there are so many other ways as well. So it's all to say, I'm thrilled to be talking about this. It's so interesting. I'm super happy you're talking to all three of us, and I think it'll all come together really great. Thank you so much for doing this. To appreciate it now, thank you for doing it. Like I said, I mean, this is I mean, I'm serious. I say yes to these kind of requests whenever I can, because I think that it's like we need to be talking to more people about these topics and they're only on it better if we do. Yeah, And I'm glad a lot of people feel that way. So that's really wonderful. All right, Well, thank you so much, oh nerds, Thank you so much for listening. I'm thrilled with this Atlanta series, even if I'm a little bit afraid of who might discover the series. And you know, I've struggled on how to form episodes around something that is not a myth and thus completely an entirely out of my narrative wheelhouse. But these conversation episodes are really something else I learned so much, so you can too. But also it's just so important. These things run so rampant in our world today, this distrust in history and archaeology in exchange for the idea that ancient people, usually not white ancient people, were just incapable of all the incredible feats of ingenuity and genius that they accomplished. It's sad and dark, and even if it seems funny and silly, it perpetuates a really dangerous idea and allows people to believe that there is some conspiracy amongst academics to hide these things. I've talked to enough academics to learn that they are neither coordinated nor well paid enough to deal in group conspiracies to cover up the truth. They're just nerds like us, and I'm so glad I get to talk with them and spread the word. So I hope you enjoyed this. I certainly did, and in honor of all the chatting we did on Disney's Atlantis, tomorrow I will be dropping a bonus episode all about Disney's Atlantis. Lisa Charlotte of Sweetbetter and I watched the movie and we talked about it and everything they did within it when it comes to Atlantis conspiracy and lore Lisa didn't know the realities of Atlantis. You know, she was me before I discovered she is most of you, and so going into it, we had some really good fun breaking it all down. Tuesday's episode, I'm back with more on the how and the why of the Atlantis story, the history and lack thereof behind it, as well as the conspiracy around it. I'm not going into modern theories of location because they're all based in inherent bullshit. But I was too intrigued by the origins of the lore of it all not to dip my toe in that origin story from so many hundreds and hundreds of years after Plato. And next Friday, I spoke with Steph Helmhoffer, another archaeologist specializing in pseudo archaeology. But Steph is even deeper into the darkness of it, the links to the old Right, the inherent racism, all the dirty details. Stay tuned. Thank you all so much. I'm really grateful for everyone who's listening. I am live and I absolutely love real mythology from ancient Greece. Oh hi, hello, Yes it's me again. This is Let's talk about Myth's baby, and I'm your host Live she who has learned so so much during this run of Atlantis episodes. I've honestly been so blown away by what I've learned, both in research and in speaking with these archaeologists. I'm willing to bet most of you have learned a few things along the way. Too. I mean, honestly, who knew Atlantis wasn't even a myth let alone all the other wild and often troubling things floating just below the surface. Get it anyway, bad jokes aside. This is the last episode of my series of conversations with archaeologists about Atlantis, the real archeology of the Mediterranean, pseudo archaeology, and even conspiracy. There is truly, deeply so much to say about the thing that the story of Atlantis has become. I mean, honestly, what would Plato have to say about the way his philosophical allegory has shifted into well, what exactly it's become? His best explained in this very episode, I spoke with archaeologist Steph Holmhoffer about Atlantis, but not really the Atlantis of Plato. Instead, Steph gives us a rundown on what Atlantis has become and how it got there. Steph is not only an archaeologist, but an archaeologist studying pseudo archaeology and conspiracy, straight up cult style groups and even the alt right. It blew my mind just learning this was a field of study, let alone it's connections with Atlantis and even an unrelated group that Steph studies that is from my own home island. But more on that later. This episode was so incredibly fun to record and to edit and thus learn it all over again. Steph and I had so much fun chatting, not least because we're both from BC and like I said, she studies a group that was on Vancouver Island, where I live and where I grew up. I can't wait for you all to hear this episode. Conspiracy, conspiratuality, pseudo archaeology. We dive into it all and then some conversations the conspiracy and conspirituality of Atlantis with Steph Holmhofer. In theory, we're talking about Atlantis, but also kind of everything that stems from Atlantis and the idea of those kind of dangerous conspiracy theories. Right, yes, oh boy, Atlantis it. I have these sort of like two sayings where I'm like, it's always Atlantis. One of them is, it's always Atlantis because so many conspiracy theories tie in these elements of Atlantis, or conspiracy theory shows or just anything with the M word mysterious always draws in Atlantis. So I'm like, oh, it's always Atlantum. But then the other thing I always say, is it's always Blevatsky, Helena Blovotsky, and so Helena Blovotsky is one of the reasons Atlantis is so popular today. Um, she was an occultist in the nineteenth century, I started the Theosophy Society or Theosophy movement, and I mean Atlantis could be traced back to her popularizing it, helping to popularize it. But also so many other conspiracy theories also draw from Blovatsky, or or movements or religious move or spiritual movements and conspiritual movements. It's it is always Blevatsky. I will go digging through these ideologies and I will always find Blevatsky in there. Interesting. Okay, So that just made me realize that I should probably also ask you to tell my listeners a bit about like why I'm talking to you. So, what are you studying? You are you're you're doing your PhD in this right now? Is that right? Yes? Yes? And great? And in your Canadian I want to say too, which is very exciting. Or are you Canadian? Are you just studying in Canada? I am Canadian. I am Canadian. I rarely get to talk to Canadians, so it's an extra thrill so Philly. Yeah, it's funny. Is like, I have the same thought when it comes to like certain subjects that I'm interested. I'm like, you know, I don't often get to talk to Canadians, but when I started diving into extremism research and getting to know the extremism experts, there are a lot from Canada, some really wonderful Canadian experts. So that was very exciting for me. That is good. We do love other Canadians, right, Like, yeah, I have so many problems with this country, but I'm still like, oh, you're Canadian. Oh that's cool, Like they're Canadian. Very It's true. It's her thing. I think it's like just bread into you. Right. Do you remember the you remember the Tim Hornons commercial whereas like this couple was traveling and they had their like Tim Horns travel mug and everywhere they went they're like, oh, hey, I'm from Calgary, I'm from Toronto. Yeah. Yeah, we love to say that. Yeah. I've made it my thing on the podcast, certainly when I'm having conversations with people, like anytime like an actor is mentioned, like I find it's my obligation to point out if they're Canadian, and I'll just like make make a point, even interrupt, just like really quiet to a Canadian, like it's necessary. It comes from my mother, who always says it comes from my grandmother. So it's a long studying Yeah yeah, so yeah, so you're studying, like please tell me, yeah, tell me what you're studying. It's it's so weird that sometimes it's hard to like summarize, right, Um, I saw Honestly, one of the best recent descriptions was yesterday, I saw him just pulling it up right now. There was a tweet from somebody who was kind of just joking around, but they said, um, they were joking around about the Q and one of the big qan on conferences. That's not a Q and on conference, definitely not a Q non conference. And so there was this person who would have would mean and that memetic warfare. So memes are very popular within the alt right, and there's been this sort of warfare actually going on for a time now. And this person was like, oh, mememic warfare has been going on for forever. And then this other person just retweeted that and said, I picture archaeologists dusting off a faded peak peppymine. They just dug up on the battlefield, marveling at the number of spelling errors it contains, and I was like, oh, yeah, that's my PhD. So basically, yeah, my PhD is in archaeology. I've been archaeologist for a number of years before I went back to school, and I am studying what's called conspirituality, so ideologies that are built from blending New Age spirituality with conspiracy theories, and so I study how archaeology and pseudo archaeology in particular are sort of embraced within conspirituality used to justify and support and build these beliefs in contemporary North America, but also historic North America as well. And so there's a particular conspiritual movement that I'm studying from the nineteen twenties and thirties that had a settlement on Vancouver Island, Vancouver Island to Corsi Island and Valdez Island. They had three settlements spread across these three islands, so local for me, I'm thrilled, I thig Idea would probably know. So yeah, I study this movement called the Aquarium Foundation. They were called the Aquarium Foundation. They were led by a man who called himself Brother twelve. He claimed, I mean, he didn't give himself the name. He said it was the Ascended Masters that gave him the name Brother twelve. That is the Bulbotsky connection. So yeah, he had a settlement and they're really into theosophy. He was also really into other conspiracy theories, and they kind of people end at theosophy and these conspiracy theories, and that's sort of what the Aquarium Foundation was built off of. But they draw there are a lot of parallels between this group in the nineteen twenties and movements like qan On today, which are nearly one hundred years apart, but they're still into kind of the same things. The same basic conspiracy theories are prevalent in both and they're still very popular today as they were in the nineteen twenties. So that is kind of what I do. That's fascinating. Where on the island just south of Nanaimo. Okay, you can tell him from here, because I realized I'd literally just say the island and then I assume everyone knows what I'm talking about. But it's yeah, it's true. If you're from BC and somebody says the island, even though there are so many islands, there are so many exactly which island you're referring to? So yeah, well, Cedar by the Sea is where Brother twelve in the Aquarian Foundation built their first headquarters when they first came to Canada. He was British and he came to Canada. He had actually lived in Canada for number years, moved back to Britain or a year if I should say, had this encounter with the Ascended Masters in nineteen twenty four who told him he was going to be the twelfth Brother of the Great White Brotherhood. And then in nineteen he sort of published a bunch of stuff, gained some popularity, and then in nineteen twenty seven is when he came back to Canada. He believed that humanity was transitioning into I guess, kind of two different things. So one transition was we were moving into the Age of Aquarius, hence he named his group the Aquarium Foundation. But also he believed that there's so much like context and backstory here. The Blavatsky thing is, basically she argued for seven root races, that there were seven root races, that we're sort of basically just different time periods in human evolution, and each root race had seven sub races as well. Oh my god, right, So we start off with the Polarians. They are very ethereal race of people. They just kind over these little lobs. The Plarians evolved into the Hyperboreans, the Hyperboreans evolved into the Lamarians. Lamarians evolved into the Atlanteans, and the Atlanteans evolved into the fifth and the greatest of all the root races, the Arians. Oof right, big oof, big oof. And then the sixth and seventh sub ray or root races hadn't yet come to happen. They were kind of going to happen in the future. Brother twelve believed that he was going to begin the transition of humanity into the sixth sub race of the fifth root race, which was apparently very important. So and all of this was going to happen in British Columbia on these islands. So he took his disciples with him. They collected more because they landed. They landed in Toronto first, right, obviously it's Toronto. They landed there. He gave a bunch of talks to some of the local theosophies because he was really really into Theosophy, even though he had kind of separated himself from the Theosophical official Theosophical Society, which is also other backstory. But he so he gave these talks, and he collected a bunch of a bunch more disciples and followers from the Theosophical Societies. I think either the Toronto chapter or the Ottawa chapter of the Theosophical Society had to fully shut down because everyone left to John b Other twelve. And he did this, and he moved his way across west, collecting very wealthy followers until they got to Cedar by the Sea and they bought the first of the three properties they ultimately would own where the transition into the sixth sub Race would begin. That is wild the way. I did not expect that this call was going to end up with my island, where not only I still live, but I fully grew up here. Like this is so weird. Oh my gosh, that's so interesting, and I can't believe I didn't know that. I went through a whole period where I was really obsessed with cults and everything. And I've been recently talking to somebody about do you know this is like, I mean, it's still equally, I would say conspiracy but very religious. But do you know the book Michelle Remembers about Victoria, it's about Yeah, it's about it's like basically started the Satanic panic. The idea of this woman like remembers that she was a child like basically sacrificed to Satan in Victoria and turns out like, oh, this Invictoria is like this extremely satanic place. Anyway, So all the say, I like research all that when I was young, and I can't believe I didn't come across this like local wildness. That's fascinating. Um. Yeah, so I'd love to hear then how this I mean, I want to make sure we're talking about I mean definitely, like I think it's inherent how problematic stuff like this is. But I want to make sure that that is a big focus of this. But when it comes to the idea of these you know, the Atlanteans in this, So I'm fascinated because you also said Hyperboreans, which is I'm not as familiar, but is a term from Greek mythology. Um. And then but so where does the Atlanteans come in? Because in theory, they're like some of the most ancient but they were really far down on your list, right kind of how that yeah, um, well to learn how that works, yeah, we'd have to read them. The Secret Doctrine in particular, so Blavatsky m wrote a couple of um, these occult cosmologies, Ices Unveiled. She wrote in I Want to Say No eighteen seventy fives when she started these Opical Society, it was at eighteen seventy she wrote Ices Unveiled. Then a few years later she wrote The Secret Doctrine, and these were she claimed, this was knowledge that had been found in these secret texts. The dayson there's a d and there's a stead in there, and I to remind myself. So in the Secret Doctrine in particular, she goes into a lot of detail about each of these sort of root races and the history behind all of them, the history of the planets, and it's like millions and millions and millions and millions of years of history, and each each root race also evolved from a particular sub race of the previous root race as well. Yeow, it's very very complicated, I find her. And these two cosmologies, A Secret Doctrine in particular, became kind of the doctrines of the Theosophical Society. So she had already started co founded the Theosophical Society by the time she wrote the Secret Doctrine. But they really adopted all of these cosmologies, and they're really difficult to read, to be honest, I have copies of both and I've gone through them, and I it's just it's so complex and difficult to tease out what she's sort of saying and how she talks about the actual evolution. So, to be honest, I'm not I'm not really sure why Atlantis ended up kind of middle of the list. It just sort of fits in with her idea of these evolutions and life cycles and whatnot, So I'm sure the complexity is part of it too, right. It's just that like, the more complex, the more confusing and ridiculous to read, like, the more likely it is that people are going to believe that she's really got all this knowledge, because like, oh, how could it be so detailed and complex a cosmology if it wasn't true. So yeah, I can imagine it's just so troublingly exactly right, and she got this knowledge from the Secret Text that nobody has ever seen right, and for also from these ascended masters who also have all this like intense knowledge, and they are they're not like physical beings, they are these ethereal beings on this other plane that she could communicate to. And how do you doubt that, right, Like, especially at that time, how do you doubt something like that just you can't see it, but doesn't mean that this person isn't communicating with them. So yeah, and she was also quite inspired by Ignacious Donnelly and his version of Atlantis as well. So it's a time. It was a time where people were so curious about where did we come from as people? And she and Ignacious Donnelly and so many others were kind of just trying to fill in these blanks. M Yeah, I was going to say, he's the other one that I think, between the two of them, that's we can probably trace all of the current Atlantist everything to those two people, both of whom came, you know, a couple thousand years after Plato wrote about that nonsensical thing that he was not trying to say was history and he did not believe and he is not telling a myth and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You know, an allegory, Plato wrote an allegory, and then suddenly, two thousand or so years later, these people are coming up with these wild stories of how real it was. And then how you know, I think Ignacious done. I have not read. I have it, but I've not read through that yet. I don't want to say yet. I probably won't read the whole thing at least, But you know, I think his was more about proving it existed. And then it seems this Blovatsky was more about the spirituality section that then people think have taken hold of. Yeah, yeah, Ignacious Donnely in the Atlantis the Antidiluvian world, he kind of was like, Okay, look guys, I haven't found Atlantis, but it was real, and these are my thirteen points to prove it was real. We just need to find a proof for that. So his kind of I always think of the Antidiluvian world is almost like a call for help, one of those Okay, I'm giving you all this information, now, historians and archaeologists and linguistics folks like you, go find me that proof. That's the way I've sort of always thought about the anti Duluvian world. So, and it's just yeah, it's interesting to listen to people talk about Atlantis today when they talk about these Atlantis theories, and everybody mentions Plato and they're like, well, Plato first mentioned Atlantis, And I'm like, yes, he did, but you're telling me Ignatious Donnelly's Atlantis. You're not telling me Plato's Atlantis. Plato didn't actually even write that much about Atlantis. No, there was like a few odds and end's mentions here, but not really that much, that's the thing. And it was so like you can tell by the way people talk about it that they want to call back to Plato because then they've got this ancient Greek source, right, you have to have this ancient Greek name in order to make it sound legitimate. But they clearly or if they have read Plato, they're not paying attention to Plato or they don't know what he was writing. And like, I don't study the philosophy firs. You know, like I did my degree and I somehow managed to like never read any philosophy in an entire classics degree. And I'm fine with that. But even I know, thank you mythology, right, But I think I mean, even I know enough about Plato to know that he's not a mythographer. He's not trying to tell mythology. He has no interest in that side of it. Not to say he doesn't have an interest in mythology because it was part of their world. They didn't consider it mythology. They considered it part of their world. So he certainly cared, He certainly like mentioned gods and things, but he wasn't telling a story from myth He was making an allegory to prove an unrelated point about Hubris. And it's so interesting to me the way people reference Plato but then don't reference what he actually said, because in order to believe Atlantis from Plato, you have to believe that Athens was equally advanced in that time period, which is historically and archaeologically untrue. And nobody ever mentions this incredibly advanced Athens. That's like it doesn't matter because it's not lost and it's provably untrue, and so it's like, no, no, no, in my theories of Atlantis, there's no Athens. I don't know what you're talking about. It's fascinating and I think it's so telling about the things the way that these conspiracy theories pick what they want and ignore the rest, and I think that's basically pseudo archaeology too, right, yeah, yeah, exactly pseudo archaeology. It's just a type of conspiracy theory, and archaeological conspiracy theory is the way I've been defining it, and it is. Yeah, it's very much just cherry picking what suits the narrative. And it's not to say that the information that's being used is incorrect. At times, like if people are pulling from archaeological sources historical sources, they're using information, but they're forcing it from its context, and they're leaving out certain bits and pieces and I guess counting on their audience to not go looking for that. And then, of course the other idea too, is that this idea of suppression and circular reasoning and where if you're trying to argue like no, that that's not true, like there's here's the evidence to help us say that's that's not likely, not how it happened, that is taken to mean it is true because we're now trying to suppress that information or reject that information, stigmatize it. And then of course if they do find something that does support them that also means it's true. So if yeah, conspiracy theories are difficult to deal with because of that fact. They can be tricky because the real conspiracy, they say, would then be everyone hiding the truth. Yes, you know, it's everyone's teamed up. All the historians and archaeologists have teamed up to talk about how it ittis isn't real because they're hiding the real Atlantis. What would be the point of that is always my question. It's how I felt about all the COVID conspiracies. It's like, why would the whole world team up to pretend that there was a pandemic? And also talk to me about how you think the US and Russia and China are going to come together and plan this, because historically I think this is unlikely. Any getting into my own but like I think and I think that that sort of is inherently you know, the nature of the way certain people think is like there's a government conspiracy for everything. It's true, it's true. Conspiracy cases are actually just really easy to fall into. Um and then you get the idea also the idea of community being part of this group of like minded individuals and who are supporting you and when you find that sense of community. It's like cults, right, people doing cults to find community, get this community like individuals. Once they find that, that's so hard to break people out of that, right. So um, yeah, it's fine. Conspiracy theories are They are a lot easier to fall into than what you think. And just I've had conversations where recently I had a conversation, for example, where this woman was telling me, no, I don't believe in any conspiracy theories and immediately launched into a particularly aggressive conspiracy theory. In this conversation, I was like, Oh, there it is. There's a conspiracy theory. But the issue that then, like sort we were just talking up about, is how do we address that without feeding into that idea of suppression and stigmatization. And that's that's the struggles. How do we address these issues, confront these issues without being suppressive. It's hard. M Do you have any like strategic ways that you try to go about it or are you just sort of constantly learning, constantly learning. I Yeah, it's tough. I'm working on finding ways to address and discuss conspiracy theories without amplifying them. That for me, it's kind of the first step, because I think it is important to talk about these and I think it is important to highlight these ideas that are being shared, and these ideologies and these beliefs when they're built from archaeological knowledge, when they're built from our information. I think it's really important to address that and talk about that. But have to find a way to do that without amplifying the message, and especially when we're dealing with the ultright, and social media is a great wonderful tool to have these discussions on, and especially because we see examples of this everywhere, it's also a really easy tool to amplify these messages. So that's where I'm kind of out right now, is trying to find the best way is to talk about without adding oxygen to it and driving attention and followers and elevating that. Another thing that I find sort of helps is when I talk about the historiography essentially of these ideas, the development of these ideas. So when I talk to somebody about Atlantis and they say, well, you know what Atlantis might be real, I like to talk about how Atlantis went from fiction to fact essentially, and I trace this path, and I find sometimes that that helps people sort of take an extra breath, and they it doesn't escalate in more in at least in the experiences I've had, it doesn't always escalated as much as just outright being like, no, you're wrong. There are always exceptions to that rule. Oh Man, Atlantis has some fierce fan boys that I've tangled with a few times, but currently deciding how I'm how best to release these and how much to put myself out there with them. I'm like, right right, yeah, it's tough. It's really tough. And yeah, especially, oh man, there's this one guy who likes to email me just these these epic emails in defense of Atlantis, and he got particularly riled up by all the discussions that led to this podcast interviewing. You clearly remember those discussions that were I do, and I appreciate how cryptic you're being about them. Yes, So these discussions happen on Twitter, and this man got even angry about it and was harping at me on Twitter and sending more, more and more emails. And it's especially it impacts women marginalized genders far more than it impacts men. So that's also something we have to consider when we're trying to discuss these as. Yeah, like you were just saying, how much can we discuss that's not going to or that's also going to minimize potential harm to ourselves. So it's yeah, there's so many different things to think about when discussing these, and something that I also want to be part of my PhD is trying to come up with the best way to discuss these and address these without amplifying and trying not to feed into that stigmatized mindset either. So right now, still learning, still practicing different things, but maybe one day we'll have a good idea. Yeah, I mean, just the way you were saying about tracing the historiography of it, that's sort of what I and I haven't I haven't written at the time of this recording. I have not written the episode or episodes that will accompany them, and so I intend to have these narrative episodes that basically just track what happened, because I do think might go to and you know, it tends to be I don't. I don't really dive in on Twitter because I sort of learned my lesson there, but I just kind of go straight to the Plato didn't believe it was real and let me tell you about that kind of right. I think that's it's one of the simplest and it's certainly, you know, unless you pople are really deep, Like if people just have a basic idea of it that they think is real, they're going to second guess everything by just hearing it, Like you don't. No, Plato, that wasn't even what Plato was doing. He didn't seem to believe it at all. If you read it, it's it's definitely an allegory. It might even be tongue in cheek. Like there's so much you can read into the very the only ancient sources we have for Atlantis. That's the clear the clear point to make too, is it is the only ancient source that mentions Atlantis. There is not a single other. And thus like that, you know, there's there's so many things that should make it obvious, and then it's interesting when it's it doesn't make it obvious to people. Yeah, Atlantis. From what Plato wrote of Atlantis, Atlantis sound like an amazing place, Like what a cool place to be with all these like gold dolphin statues and these like rings of land and these huge ampitheaters and structures and all these things like what a cool place. An enormous too, I think he described as larger than Asia and Libya combined. And of course this is based on what the Greeks knew of those land masses and how they've napped at that time show, so not necessarily Asian and Libya as we know it today, But the general idea still exists that Atlantis was enormous. So why was Plato the only one talking about it? Where were the people traveling to Atlantis? Where where are the people trading and living there and moving in and out? Because we know that the Greeks were record keepers. They love to write shit down. Yeah, even if it's just like a linear B reference too, because of course this is bronzeged and you know, the whole thing then is well it was so many thousand years before blah blah blah. But even still, like you know, the likelihood is that we would have a linear B reference to like, well, we gave them some wine, or we gave some wine to some people who were just passed those ruins of Atlantis. You know, like there certainly would be something, you know, Herodotus would have heard about it, and even he made up a lot of history at times, but he also did travel around and talk to a lot of people, and you know, Herodotus would have heard about it at the very least in you know, all of his talk, and yeah, that's the thing, you know, there there would be at least one other reference, but there would certainly be lots of references. Were it true or or were there some kind of um, you know, epic event that caused the fall of Atlantis? And then of course the ultimate thing is, well, where is this super advanced Athens? Then, because we have all the archaeology of Athens, and like Bronze Age, Athens was pretty met comparatively to other Bronze Age sites in the area, right, Like you know, I think, yeah, it's best described as met. It wasn't not there, but it wasn't one of the big ones, No, not at all. And you know, we're always we're always learning more. Obviously, we're always uncovering more. We're always learning more. Part of archaeology is being flexible and accepting new ideas. And we're always accused. I'm always told, oh, your closed minded archaeologrits are closed minded. No, we are extremely open minded. That's how our knowledge shifts and we learn more and we adjust our thoughts as they come about most of us. So yeah, I mean you could argue, sure, maybe there's the possibility that one day all this information will be uncovered, but what like I would expect to it. It has been uncovered by now, so many people have gone looking and again, thinking of the size the materials that they had, I honestly would expect we would have found it by now, to be honest. Well, also, Plato is quite clear about where it is, right, He's like billows of Pericles, right, So he's basically saying it's at the Strait of Gibraltar. So if we you know, well, then we'll argue it's like somewhere in the middle of nowhere. And I'm like, okay, But he says very clearly colors of Heracles, which is the straight of g Berraltar, you know, So yeah, it's that's the thing, right. He's not being cryptic about it because it's an allegory, because he's not presenting something that he believes as real and that he is presenting as fact. Now, one thing I really want to make sure that we talk about with you, because I think you're probably my best source for it. Is how harmful these things can be specifically, and I know base level amounts of this, but the way that it's then used to justify white supremacy. Yes, right, So again, if we think about Bolovatsky, we can start with Pulvovski. It's always Bolvovski. But yeah, so Bulovowski talked about how the Arians, which were the best of the best of the root races evolved from Atlantis, and Germany went through this really intense period of re enchantment trying to find their history, trying to find their stories leading up to World War One world War Two. It didn't the stuff didn't just start in World War two. It started a long long time before that. And some of the influential thinkers who were part of this re enchantment that ultimately the Nazis ended up attaching themselves to this line of thinking. They were really enthralled by Bolvovski's idea of Arians and Atlantis, and they combine that with many other sources to essentially create this idea of these Arians as being like almost supernatural beings, these incredible beings with just like super white skin and blue eyes and super super powerful. And so during World War two. The Nazis, they had the what was called Amna Airbae, the ss on An Airba. It was like their archaeology and heritage division, and they were very interested in finding proof of the Arians, kind of the ignacious Donnelly approach to Atlantis. They were interested for the Arians, so looking for this archaeological proof of Aaryan homelands and centers and all this stuff. But part of that involved also looking for Atlantis, because they were looking for their homeland essentially, so they're looking for the Arians, but where the Arians come from, So they were looking for Atlantis. And so yeah, that was a bigger part of the war. It wasn't like an enormous part of the war, but it was a bigger part of World War two in Nazi ideologies and beliefs than many people realize. And so since then you have Atlantis, at least from what I've been looking at, Atlantis traveling into from the original Nazis right into Neo Nazism as well. And this I threw this idea of Aryan. So there are a lot of and again I'm just focusing on North America, not necessarily European groups, but in North American groups you have a lot of a lot of neo Nazi movements or individuals, high level individuals who have spoken about Atlantis and talked about this history and because of its connections to Aryan, you've got leaders. There was one man who was a leader of some major American neo Nazi parties in the sixties and seventies who now writes books, book after book after book about Atlantis and Atlantis in North America. North America rewrites North American history to suit these ideologies. You have other folks today who his most recent book actually was published just this last July. You have other folks who write for some big time white nationalist websites and they also talk about Arians and Atlantis and they pull it. They even actually pull in ancient Aliens. I've seen one guy talking about the show Ancient Aliens, and he just argues, well, no, no, no, they're not. They're mistaken when they're describing aliens. They haven't found proof of aliens. They found proof of these arians. And they just need to recognize that there was another neo Nazi group in seventies. I have to find it again who had Atlantis in their name. There's other neo Nazi groups who write these very long manifestos talking about the history of there's one in particular thinking of who has this very very long manifests, so describing the history of arianism, and they also draw in Atlantis. So it's yeah, it's just through these like it's almost like the telephone game. You start off with this one idea Blavatsky, and then as it gets passed on, it changes and it changes, and it changes into what a lot of white nationalists and theo Nazis are using today. Well, I think, you know, even just simply and from my non research in it, it seems like the easiest way to counter the idea that everyone came from Africa is to say that, no, there's a subset that came from Atlantis, we just don't have it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, It's true. And I think that's also why so many people, a lot of these sort of groups latch onto archaeological knowledge, and because it's this idea of Atlantis is very intangible. Archaeology provides tangible. It provides these things you can hold, you can go see, you can travel through these rooms at these sites, So it gives something tangible to the intangible so I see a lot of groups and individuals trying really hard to pull in archaeology and tie it to things like Aryan Atlantis or just these other white European ancestors thinking about the slutrain hypothesis in particular, just to find to be able to say, look, here is this tangible item that proves this all true, even though it does anson again, like what we were talking about earlier, it's that divorced from context and filling in these blanks with our own narratives. It's extra fascinating too, because I mean, if you think about it, if you just let yourself kind of believe that sure actually the one time, you know, Plato was actually secretly telling us this history, even though you know he didn't actually do that. Yeah, you know, even if so that you have to still connect to the other problematic idea that exists within study of the Greek and Roman world, this idea that they were particularly white in the way that we see whiteness now. Like you know, there's I've been trying of learning to put the phrase on it that we you know, the way we see whiteness now impacts that versus them being white or not white. Yeah, because obviously they did not see race in any of the same ways that we did. And like they didn't really care about scale, skin color. It was all about whether or not you spoke Greek. That's what made you a good person or or like worthy of you know extreme. You know, what's the word I want prejudice against you is what if you did you speak Greek, you could be you know, person that we would call black. But if you spoke Greek, you're fine, because yeah, I mean, in the ancient world, they they traded throughout the whole Mediterranean, which includes Africa and the Middle East, and they absolutely traveled around and emigrated and all of these different things, where the idea of whiteness placed upon Greek or Greece and Rome is so absurd and nonsensical that you know, you have to have this just this alternative view of all of it. You know, you have to believe Plato and you have to believe that everyone was white, even though it's simply marble has lost its color. Polychromy you know, existed and it all just came off and we all just see marble and men think of this whiteness. It's it's so I mean, I find it fascinating. It's so dark too, but it is just so interesting the way these things have become the mass that they are. Yeah, it's true. And the thing about conspiracy theory too, and stigmatize knowledge, which is a particular term coined by Michael Barkin who has written some wonderful, wonderful work about conspiracy theories. But people who believe in one conspiracy theory tend to believe in others, and all of those come together to form a particular worldview that this person holds. So, yeah, this idea of ancient Greeks being only white and tying that to Atlantis, you have to also believe, like you're just explaining in other sort of conspiracy theories that help support each other to create this particular world view. I mean, and all of these reasons are why I want to create these episodes on Atlantis, because it's not about just like disproving Atlantis. That's not the point, right, Like, if it was just about people believing in this like ancient world that was kind of cool and that's all it was, then who cares, like let them believe that, you know, But it's it's all of the problems that stem from this belief and all of the racial issues and the straight like dangerous racist ideologies that come out of this, and you're like, okay, well, I would like my listeners personally, who are goodhearted and not racist, and not sexist and not misogynists and all of these different things. I would like them to understand that Atlantis is not real for all of these reasons. And it just interests me so much in the idea of how it became this because yeah, you know, growing up, I think we're probably a similar age. Growing up, we had the Disney movie, you know, and I always just believed Atlantis was a not necessarily that I believed it was real, but I believed it was a Greek myth. And then getting to a point where I learned that it is not remotely a Greek myth, that alone was mind blowing to me. And I think most people think it's a myth, even if they don't have any strong views about it as history or conspiracy or whatever, but they at least think it was a myth because the world treats it like a myth. Yeah, it's true, it's true, and especially, I mean, it doesn't help that we have all these these documentaries coming out on History Channel or Discovery Channel or Travel Channel or whatever that are all about finding that evidence for Atlantis. There's this this concept called discovery paranormalism, which comes from David Anderson and Jeb Card. They didn't come up with this term, but they've sort of begun applying it to pseudo archaeology, and discovery paranormalism sort of prefers to being the first to find the proof of something. That is a very simplistic way of arming it, but that's part of the thrill. And so when you watch these shows, it's kind of like equal parts finding proof of Atlantis, to prove these conspiracy theories true or prove your ideas right, but also just that thrill you get from finding being the first to find this evidence, and that just when you have folks who don't really know the history, and they don't really know all this background context that we are all very privileged to have because we happen to be within these fields and these disciplines and we have access to these resources, it's kind of easy to fall for it. I don't blame anybody for falling for pseudo archaeology, any pseudo archaeological theory I'll never be mad at anybody who falls into that. It's really easy to see why, Like, those are the books you get on the bookshows, those are the shows you get on Netflix and Prime and TV channels and whatnot. So we just need to I'm a big advocate of giving folks the tools that I use to deconstruct these and assess these and hoping that it's sort of makes people a bit more aware. I don't think it's a bad thing to talk about Atlantis. I don't think it's a bad thing to have books and shows and movies that use Atlantis as a plot line. But you do have to acknowledge that side of the Atlantis story, this dark side, how Atlantis has been used to cause some really serious harm to people. And I'm talking like physical harm to people. If you're going to use Atlantis as a plot line, acknowledge that shit, talk about it, make people aware, make yourself aware, and don't repeat that. Yeah, those are my concerns. Yeah, I think that's so valid. I mean, yeah, And to be clear, like I think that Disney movie is great, Like it's so fun, I love it, it's wonderful. It's an incredibly entertaining movie. It's more entertaining even when you understand how little there actually is, like you know, how little history, how little you know. There's the whole sort of beginning scene where he's laying out his whole argument and you think, oh my god, look at all of this, so much evidence, and it's like no, literally no. Yeah, so that's the thing, right, It's well, and that's why, you know, to any of my listeners who didn't know that Atlantis wasn't a myth, or who didn't know all these problematic things and just assumed Atlantis was like this cool idea or this cool lost city or all of these different things. Yeah, like, no blame, Like I used to think it was a myth until probably until this podcast, where I you know, just read up enough. Like I don't even think in my degree, there was any reason for anyone to just come out and say Atlantis was never a myth. Right, it just doesn't necessarily come up, whereas it does come up in pop culture to teach you that it is a myth. Yeah, and so yeah, it's more about just pointing out that, you know, it's it wasn't a myth, it was not history, you know, all these different things and but also specifically the harm that has been caused in its name, and thus why you have to be a little careful about the idea of it and you know what you believe and why and where you've gotten it from and who had these ideas also, And yeah, I mean the fact that the Nazis were looking for Atlantis, I think is it's a good thing to know because I think it makes a connection there between you know, perhaps you know what can become a problem with believing. We're not necessarily believing, but you know just the side, the different aspects of it and where it has gone over time. Yes, exactly, And especially I like your point about knowing where that information came from. If you're going to use something, know where it came from. I think about like a comic series that I read that I really enjoy but was based on Atlantis and kind of in the back of each issue. To Dave Anderson talked to you about pop culture. I'm assuming he talked about pop culture. He's a pop culture kind of to an extent. We talked about the movie, the Atlantis movie, and like a couple of other things, but I don't think about Okay, so yeah, I'm not sure if he would have talked about this series or not, but it's it's a great series. I really enjoyed it. But at the back of each issue, they were, like, I guess, supposed to be like diary entries from the character that the other characters were looking for in the series. He had disappeared while searching for Atlantics, and so they find his diary, and I guess each of these issues is sort of a diary entry. And it's clear that these comic creators did a lot of research by like the information that's in these diary issues or diary entries. You could go on Google and you can find a lot of this information, these theories that people believed, or these like illustrations of maps that actually exist, stuff like that, which is great, Like I like detail and accuracy, but also in this case, like where did that information come from that you are now putting into your comic and broadcasting out to your audience. And I see, I've seen some of the things in those diary entries picked up by some Qann believers who talked about kind of the same things and stuff like that. So that's why I think it's it's so important to know where that information came from acknowledged that own that too. Like I know other pseudo archaeologists and conspiracy theorists. I've seen one in particular. I'm thinking of a video or one of his books where he was writing about something to do with Mars if I remember correctly, in this particular section, and he's quoting this one person quite often information from this one person, and it's basically like, yeah, this guy was a Nazi, but that doesn't really matter. It actually does matter, So yeah, be aware of where that information is coming from. I mean, I think it should always matter if a person was a Nazi. There's a lot of groups where it maybe matters less. I think it always matters if somebody was a Nazi. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been I've been told when talking about this the Nazis and Atlantis. I have been told by this individual how I mentioned earlier, who likes to email me and on Twitter, that you know it's time to let's let's move past the Nazis. Stop talking abou the Nazis. It's time to kind of move on. We've heard enough about the Nazis. I'm like, m, I don't think we have no, I don't think we are as a humanity are ever allowed to move one. That should be the point. We are not allowed. You're not allowed to ever say like we've boothed past the Nazis. Nope, No, that's that's why they say history repeats itself, Like right now, history is repeating itself right now. So you are more so than ever? Yeah, absolutely, exactly. Yeah, oh man, Atlantis always an interesting conversation. Yeah, well, um, I mean what else, Like this is just fascinating and it's fun, and I uh, yeah, it's nice talking to a woman about this as well, because I think you get it. You have a different side of it. Yes, it's also damn fascinating, So it is, it is. It's just yeah, it's um, it's one of those things that I think archael just are really really opening up to. I think, you know, we we knew it was there, um, but to what degree we weren't entirely aware? And I um, I've spent time going into really terrible places on the Internet and just see what people are saying, and it is shocking even to me. Like I expected to find archaeology, I expected to find pseudo archaeology, but even then, I'm still surprised at how much is in there. But yeah, I think it just sort of all comes down to this idea of just trying to find this tangible proof of something. And and it's certain certain thirties more so than others like Salutrian, it's very very popular Atlantis. The Salutrian hypothesis, So Salutrie hypothesis is this idea that was proposed. It's proposed I think originally in the thirties and then it kind of died away because even back then archaeologists were like this, now, this isn't very credible theory, and then it was revived in the nineties. Is the idea that about twenty ish thousand similar I think it's somewhere between seventeen and twenty thousand years ago. The Salutrian folks which were culture within southwestern Europe France and Spain, Portugal, Portugal, France in Spain in any case, they're known for their like beautiful artwork. Also they have these very particular stone lithic points called salutrim points for the and it's the way they're crafted and whatnot. They're known for these. So the solutre In hypothesis suggested that sometimes shone fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, Salutrim people came across the Atlantic, which was frozen, so they partially climbed across, almost like portaging across this frozen bridge, also with boats, and they came into North America was now in North America. And it's entirely based on a couple of fluted lithic points that were found that resembles Solutrean. They really do look like Salutrim points. But like that, people can sort of come up with the same thing and independently, so anyway, yeah, it was this idea. Also, like there's no evidence for Lutrians having watercraft at all, so where did this idea of them taking boats come across? And especially thinking about how they were known for their artwork. They have this just beautiful, beautiful artwork. Nowhere do boats appear in that artwork. So there are sort of many it's it's not a lot of archaeologist disagree with this theory. They don't find it very credible. They've discredited it for decades now. The Salutrity hypothesis has become very very popular within white national circles because of this idea of Europeans. First, even though recent genetic evidence suggests that Salutrian folks, or people who were living around that time period twenty two ish thousand years ago, likely had darker skin. Yeah, especially in that area. Yeah, exactly, that does not matter. So yeah, within white nationalist circles, the Slutrian has been very, very adopted. It appears on particular white national's websites within this sort of manifesto on one White Nationals website, like the first thing that's discussed, and yeah, they these nationalists sort of use it to say, you know, white Europeans were here first, and then First Nations people came and violently displaced us and we were Oh. It feeds into this this conspiracy theory called the Great Replacement theory. Oh ye yes, and and this is viewed as as proof physical proof of that, even though there is no evidence for any sort of violent displacement of white Europeans at any point. But yeah, that is a very popular popular theory. It also, like I was saying, it's been widely discredited by archaeologists. But a few years ago, the CDC on the Nature of Things had a documentary dedicated to the salutary hypothesis and the what if it is real? Type of thing, and that was a whole thing the director archaeolgists Immediately We're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, Hang on, this isn't particularly great. Part of the issue was in the early two thousands on Discovery Channel, there was a documentary about Solutary and Hypothesis that used only white actors, and that also sort of is what fed into this idea of or why white nationalists adopted is they cite that documentary quite often too. So there was concern about that essentially being repeated through the CBC questions about are you going to address the white nationalists appropriations of this theory? And CBC was like, or the director, I should say, it was like, nah, Like I don't want to give any licku of air to that discussion at all, because their idea was by not talking about it, you're not amplifying it or not supporting it, but you're also not saying no to that. Yeah, and you're not pointing out the problematic nature of the theory. And yes, So that was there was an interview for one of the big newspapers about that, and that's where this director was saying that. But then also one of the archaeologists also said that that that racist appropriation side was not his issue and he can't control how people are going to use the theory and oh definitely, h yeah, white middle aged man, Oh right, had they that weird? Yeah, yeah, exactly if And that line, Like, I think about that line all the time. It just drove me bananas, because I think it is your issue, Like, yes, you can't control how people are going to to appropriate your work, but I do think you have a responsibility to speak out against that. Also, keeping in mind like what we were talking about earlier about how certain um folks do have to be more concerned about their safety than other folks that they're going to confront us, but we do, we do have to confront it, and it is our issue. So yeah, I think about that. And one of the one of the neo Nazi groups I mentioned also ties Atlantis to Solutrians, so they sort of all run in the same circles. Well, and I think as Canadian two we have a I don't I mean, I don't think it's bigger than those in the States, but I certainly think, you know, given our world at this current moment, like white Canadians have a real responsibility to not perpetuate problematic theories that affect you know, Indigenous people that we have already yeah, like completely ruined over generations. The idea of then adding something on top of that that that like suggests that they were not you know, here first, and that we you know, any of it. Like, it's such a important issue in Canada specifically. Yeah, it is, it really is. It's that history we can't deny. Don't deny that history except that has happened and it's really it's not history. M Yeah, don't deny it, don't re write it, don't try to like alter it to make yourself feel better as a white settler Canadian, you know. Hmm yeah, gosh absolutely, Oh my gosh, I guess this is just when it's occurred to me. But are there archaeologists working on residential schools then? Is that like a thing happening in Canada? Yeah, so archaeologists. It's it's not archaeology that work is. Yeah, it's very clearly not archaeology. Archaeologists have some archaeologists too, not all, but some have a very particular skill set in using GPR equipment to be able to analyze the data in particular ways to determine if there are graves or not. And it's a very particular skill set, and it's a very small number of archaeologists who have that skill set. One of my my PhD colleagues, he's also doing his PhD. He and my supervisor, he's also my supervisor student. They are some of them, some of those very small group of archaeologist who have those skills. And the group that I'm part of has sort of my supervisor in particular, has really taken the lead on starting those conversations, drawing together these archaeologists. We've been putting together resources to give to communities because not there are so few of us that we can't possibly expect to go and do the physical work ourselves. But we also want to make sure that communities are going to hire like geophysics companies, they know the right questions to ask to help them feel more sure that they're going to get the right information or get as much information as they can. So, yes, we've been very very involved in that. That's great. Yeah, we've been. We've been working with several communities. We've gone and done a few services. That's where I was the other week as on one of those surveys, and so yeah, there are a lot of a fair number of archaeologists now who are working with communities for that work specifically. That's great. I didn't know that. That's yeah. I mean that's so important, and yeah, the government should be doing it, but hey they're not. Yeah, they definitely should be funding it, and they're yeah they are to some degree, but it's the fun is not enough? No, no, not enough? No? Oh lord, anyway, Canada, I so hardly talk to Canadians as you like, oh my gosh, things that other people understand that. It's so it's I'm usually like explaining half the things to anybody, right, nice, yeah, oh my gosh. Okay, well this turns out when I get along with people. That means for a really disjointed but really entertaining conversations. Thank you so much. I just want to kind of wrap things up for however I cut this together, But thank you Steph so much for doing this. Is so fascinating and interesting and I mean, obviously it's so dark. I've so much trouble with I sound so excited talking about how interesting, but it just I mean that the way all of these things happen and how they get to these horrifying points interest me so much. It's just my god. I mean, I must interest you too, because you're doing your PhD's and we should be interested in it because yeah, it's through that interest that we become more aware, right, So that's so true. Yeah, good to hear it. Well, do you want to share where people can maybe learn more about your research or follow you or anything? If you don't want to, that's also fine. I am not a hard person to find. You can find me on Twitter. Are you gonna Are you gonna include like links on your website? I can yeah, okay whatever, Yeah, yeah, that's totally fine. Yeah, you can find me. Twitter is where I'm most active. I'm all over Twitter, and that is definitely the best place to find me. Wonderful. I think it's such really interesting and obviously important work that you're doing researching this kind of stuff, and I didn't even I guess it didn't even occurred to me that, I mean, certainly archaeology, and it is so interesting. And now, of course, the more we hear about Atlantis, like, the more I think it's obviously important. But I'm glad to hear people are doing it. If not always specifically Atlantis, but you know, it's all so interconnected, but it is, it is sometimes Atlantis pops up in surprising places. I bet. Yeah. The more I hear, the more that does not surprise me. It has gone everywhere up always Atlantis, always, Lebowski. Well, thank you so much. This has been so great. Thank you very much, oh nerds, Nerds, Nerds. This Atlantis series has been so incredibly fun, and I certainly hope you felt the same way. It was definitely a departure from my regularly scheduled programming covering the story that is so explicitly not a myth but also is something in itself somewhat bizarre and interesting. And then to look at what it's become, the links to outright racism, straight up Nazism, among so much more, it blew my mind every step of the way. I want to give a huge thank you to my archaeologists, to my archaeologist guests Flint Dibble, Davids Anderson, and Steph Holmhoffer. Their expertise added so so much to this series and I'm just so thrilled I was able to share their knowledge with all of you to help it influence my research the whole thing. Also to my other guests, one of whom you haven't even heard from yet, Kira Jones and Lisa Charlotte, who joined me to talk about Atlantis in pop culture and what that means for the story that isn't a myth. Truly, truly, this has been so much fun, it's been so rewarding. I'm so thrilled I got to bring all of this to you, to teach you all of this, to learn it myself. Fucking Atlantis like who fucking new god A. Thank you all so much for listening back to some mythology very soon, some regular old, just lovely oral tradition mythology of ancient Greece. What a time. Thank you all so much for listening. Thank you to my guests. Thank you to anyone who cares about learning the truth about Atlantis so that you don't fall into some dark and dangerous conspiracy hole that you don't even know is there. I am live and I love this shit being learning not the conspiracies of Atlantis.