Speaker 1: Hello, good morning, Hey, good morning, good afternoon. At twelve
Speaker 1: o two. Yeah, here, where are you guys? We are
Speaker 1: in Portland, Oregon. Oh my god, you got up early?
Speaker 1: Did just for you? I'm sorry. I didn't know you
Speaker 1: were that far west. It's okay, We're used to it.
Speaker 1: We we actually have phone conversations with people all over
Speaker 1: the place. Oh really, okay, yeah, well I appreciate you
Speaker 1: doing this early too, for my sake and your Oh well, Mark,
Speaker 1: I am Steve by the way, nice to meet Steve.
Speaker 1: The other gentleman would be Joe. Okay, hey, how you doing?
Speaker 1: And by the way, can you hear us? Okay? I can't?
Speaker 1: Can you hear me? Yes? Alright? Well shall we shall?
Speaker 1: We talk about some Atlantis today? Do you want to
Speaker 1: talk about it? By the way, before we get into
Speaker 1: the whole thing. Uh, you're you're about to head off
Speaker 1: to Alaska to research your name? Am I am? Talk
Speaker 1: about that at all? Sure? Sure? Um. You know, you know,
Speaker 1: people who don't know my other work, they see I've
Speaker 1: written a book about Atlantis, and you tend to get
Speaker 1: categorized as one of them, as one of those guys
Speaker 1: who's you know, got got Atlantis? Hypothesis that he's talking
Speaker 1: and they're all guys with the exception of maybe like
Speaker 1: Madame Blavatsky, and you know, they're they're surprised to hear that.
Speaker 1: You know, this is actually just one sort of thing
Speaker 1: that I do. Um. I wrote a book about Machu
Speaker 1: Picchu in Peru a few years ago, and UM, you know,
Speaker 1: I sort of retraced the expedition from nineteen eleven um
Speaker 1: on which fella him Hiram Bingham Um rediscovered Martu Pichu
Speaker 1: almost accidentally. And this new book in Alaska, it's a
Speaker 1: little bit more like that. It's um retracing an expedition
Speaker 1: from where the railroad tycoon Um E. H. Harriman, who
Speaker 1: is just uh sort of done an aggressive takeover of
Speaker 1: the Union Pacific Railroad. His doctor tells him, you know,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have a heart attack if you don't go
Speaker 1: on vacation for the summer. So Harriman, being the type
Speaker 1: of person he is, decides he's going to sort of
Speaker 1: outfit a boat into a luxury yacht and take two
Speaker 1: dozen of America's smartest scientists, environmentalists, artists, etcetera, and bring
Speaker 1: them on this boat. And they're all going to go
Speaker 1: off together and explore this unknown coast of the territory
Speaker 1: of Alaska, which is still you know, pretty pretty much
Speaker 1: terra incognated at that point. UM. And it is. And
Speaker 1: and it's what's interesting is it's you know, it's like
Speaker 1: the height of the gold rush. Uh. You were switching
Speaker 1: from like the Yukon Gold Rush to the Nome gold Rush.
Speaker 1: And one of the people on the boat is John Muir,
Speaker 1: who at that point has just written the two or
Speaker 1: three articles that are sort of like the cornerstone of
Speaker 1: American conservation. UM. And he has, you know, just founded
Speaker 1: the Sierra Club. And the sort of clash of personality
Speaker 1: between Harriman and mu were at this exact moment in
Speaker 1: Alaska history, which sort of parallels Alaska right now. I
Speaker 1: don't know how much you've been keeping track of, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the the oil problems they're having in Alaska. UM.
Speaker 1: But I was up there talking to the state economist
Speaker 1: about three or four weeks ago up in Anchorage, and
Speaker 1: I was like, how bad is it? And he said,
Speaker 1: Alaska gets nine percent of its income directly or indirectly
Speaker 1: from oil. We have a six point five billion dollar budget,
Speaker 1: and we have a four point five billion dollar deficit
Speaker 1: in that budget. Now I've heard the off fields after
Speaker 1: there have been dropping in their production, and that the
Speaker 1: had no taxes and also got a check in the
Speaker 1: mail from oil is kind of over I heard, Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's what they're worried about. They they're like, you know,
Speaker 1: they get this thing is what it's called the Permanent Fund,
Speaker 1: and you get a dividend every year. I think last
Speaker 1: year it was two thousand dollars for every man, woman
Speaker 1: and child in Alaska. So on top of not having
Speaker 1: any sales tax, not having any state income tax, they
Speaker 1: expect money back every year. Um. And now one of
Speaker 1: the big fights they're having is, you know, how much
Speaker 1: of that can we cut without you know, getting voted
Speaker 1: out of office? You know. So it's an interesting time
Speaker 1: up in Alaska, and it'll be an interesting trip, um.
Speaker 1: You know, once you if you follow the coast of
Speaker 1: Alaska from like the southernmost point of the Panhandle out
Speaker 1: to the end of the Aleutians. Actually have a map
Speaker 1: in my office from National Geographic It's it's almost like
Speaker 1: driving from Jacksonville to Kansas City, down to Phoenix and
Speaker 1: then up to San Francisco. Yeah, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: big place. It's a really long trip. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: to go to Nome would be you know, which I'm
Speaker 1: also going to do with. Maybe even Siberia would be
Speaker 1: like you know, I don't know, going to Jackson Hole
Speaker 1: or something. Um so it's a huge place. Yeahs, I
Speaker 1: need to get up there one of these days. I've
Speaker 1: been to a lot of exotic places, but I've never
Speaker 1: to my same been to Alaska, and it's not that
Speaker 1: far away really from where No, no, you guys could
Speaker 1: get there in a few hours. And this breathtaking beaut
Speaker 1: I've never been there either, and I was just like, wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. Well it's unfortunately, I know I mentioned to
Speaker 1: you in that email that you should go check out
Speaker 1: the story of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that might be subject for a later book or
Speaker 1: something like that. Yeah, definitely looks like a great story. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's an amazing story. And the guy that was kind
Speaker 1: of superhuman, I mean he was he had a personality
Speaker 1: disorder obviously, but he did some amazing stuff. Yeah. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that's a great stuff. And those are the kind of
Speaker 1: stories you guys do so well. You know that sort
Speaker 1: of slightly out of the mainstream story that hasn't been
Speaker 1: told that much. Mad Trapper is kind of an obscure story.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but yeah, we find the weird little stories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we tried to. Yeah, well from the world folks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, seriously,
Speaker 1: I actually, uh, I wanted that first off, say you
Speaker 1: you've got off a great little singer the beginning of
Speaker 1: chapter eleven in your book. Oh when you talk about
Speaker 1: uh Maxie and Asher, Yes, powers to to find the
Speaker 1: list and I love this. I'm going to quote your
Speaker 1: book here. Asher was careful not to overstate the importance
Speaker 1: of her findings. Quote, this is probably the greatest discovery
Speaker 1: in world history a reporter, and then she goes down
Speaker 1: to stay like this will change the fields of archaeology, anthropology,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. You know, And that's the that's the
Speaker 1: problem with Atlantis. There are you know, there are so
Speaker 1: many people out there making these these outlandish claims for
Speaker 1: Atlantis based on you know, next to nothing or absolutely
Speaker 1: nothing that you know, anyone who wants to take it seriously. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know can't even get a foot in the door anywhere. Now,
Speaker 1: I know, I know it's it definitely puts it makes
Speaker 1: the whole thing kind of a stink, you know. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, I would guess that the way I
Speaker 1: read your book, and you're not You're not one of
Speaker 1: those people. You're not a crime, thank you. I pretty ship.
Speaker 1: You really tell the history of Atlantis, and you talk
Speaker 1: about a lot of the people who are looking for
Speaker 1: and there are lots of people who are looking for Atlantis.
Speaker 1: Would you not agree there are more people looking for
Speaker 1: Atlantis now than probably in the entire year history of
Speaker 1: Atlantis up to this point, so you know, and and
Speaker 1: a lot of that is because you know, things like
Speaker 1: Google Earth, um. People can now sit at home on
Speaker 1: their computer and you know, look at translations of ancient
Speaker 1: manuscripts and look at sites around the Mediterranean that you
Speaker 1: know might coincide with the original description of Atlantis. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't have to go out there with a pick
Speaker 1: axe and one of those you know screen things that
Speaker 1: archaeologists used to, uh, you know, shake the dirt through
Speaker 1: for relics and things like that. You can be it is.
Speaker 1: I've actually got the American Archistic Archeological Association guide book
Speaker 1: right here, and it is it's just listed as that
Speaker 1: screen thing that we use sometimes exactly that I like
Speaker 1: shaker thing for the dirt. Yeah, that's got to be
Speaker 1: frustrating to be because you know, you're an archaeologist. You
Speaker 1: want to burrow down there as fast as you can,
Speaker 1: and I would be wanting to get a bacco in there.
Speaker 1: But those guys are down there with toothbrushes. You know
Speaker 1: what's funny is there's actually an Atlantis kind of connection
Speaker 1: there in that. The whole reason why people decided in
Speaker 1: the in the latter part of the nineteenth century that
Speaker 1: it might be possible to look for Atlantis was because
Speaker 1: this fellow Schliemann Heinrich Schleiman from Germany, who was not
Speaker 1: an archaeologist, went to a site in what is now
Speaker 1: Turkey and followed the clues from Homer's Iliad looking for
Speaker 1: the city of Troy. Up until that point, no one
Speaker 1: was sure whether Troy had existed or not. It was,
Speaker 1: you know, it was a myth to be interpreted, you know,
Speaker 1: whether you interpreted as fact or fiction or somewhere in
Speaker 1: the middle. We're not sure. But he goes in there
Speaker 1: and he finds this ancient city, uh in a spot
Speaker 1: where where no one had ever bothered to look for,
Speaker 1: you know, just using the clues from the manuscript. But
Speaker 1: in the pro as sss, he digs down so deep
Speaker 1: and so fast looking for what he assumes is going
Speaker 1: to be this you know, like treasure hoard that he
Speaker 1: obliterates the city of Troy that he's looking for and
Speaker 1: gets down to like earlier version for Yeah. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, people have been trying to like put back
Speaker 1: together the Troy that he destroyed with his team of diggers.
Speaker 1: So you know there's a lesson for archaeology in there
Speaker 1: that kind of like the role model for Indiana Jones,
Speaker 1: you know, because Indiana Jones as an archaeologist was you know,
Speaker 1: he just go in and basically steal crap out of
Speaker 1: a sacred site. Let's get this thing from its original
Speaker 1: place and send it to a museum. Yeah exactly. Yeah where. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're very belongs. So your book is, by the way,
Speaker 1: it's called Meet Me in Atlantis. Uh, and you've written
Speaker 1: previous books. He wrote turn Right at Mochi Pichu. Yes,
Speaker 1: and uh, this is like kind of like turn Right
Speaker 1: at Mochi pich was. So you're kind of like talking
Speaker 1: about stuff that has happened in the past, combining it
Speaker 1: with mythology. But it's also a little different. Now, why
Speaker 1: did you decide to write about Atlantis? Well, it actually
Speaker 1: sprang directly from the research of Toady Machu Picchu. I
Speaker 1: was looking through some microfilm from nineteen eleven, the year
Speaker 1: when when Machu Pichu was rediscovered, and I came across
Speaker 1: the front page story in the New York Times that
Speaker 1: said German discovers Atlantis in Africa. In Africa, Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I was like, what, hey, people are have been looking
Speaker 1: for Atlantis. I thought Atlantis was this like you know
Speaker 1: bubble city at the bottom of the ocean where they
Speaker 1: had you know, nuclear powered chips and you know Scrooge
Speaker 1: McDuck kept his millions of dollars or whatever. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I read this story from nineteen eleven and says,
Speaker 1: you know, all the clues from the dialogues of Plato.
Speaker 1: And then I was like Plato, you know, because at
Speaker 1: the same time I was working on a story about
Speaker 1: the great philosophers of all time for a magazine and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, every every single philosophy professor I called was like,
Speaker 1: I was like, who are the greatest philosophers of all
Speaker 1: time number one, Plato, number two, Aristotle. After that, you
Speaker 1: can argue every single one was like Plato greatest, Aristotle
Speaker 1: number two. And I was like, okay, so the greatest
Speaker 1: philosopher of all time is the sole source for the
Speaker 1: Atlantist story. There's you know, there's got to be something
Speaker 1: there that I haven't heard. So then I started digging
Speaker 1: into it, and you know, realized that, yes, there are
Speaker 1: a lot of people using the details and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of details in the original Aliantist story to
Speaker 1: try to a prove it was real and be uh
Speaker 1: show where they believe it had been located. Um, And
Speaker 1: that's how we got started. And then, you know, three
Speaker 1: years later, after traveling around the world, you know, I
Speaker 1: had met a lot of these people and heard their
Speaker 1: hypotheses and visited the sites that they thought might have
Speaker 1: been the original Atlantis. There are a lot of interesting,
Speaker 1: intriguing sites out there, and I was looking at the Atlantopedia,
Speaker 1: which is run by Tony Is it's Tony O'Connell, right,
Speaker 1: Tony O'Connell, Yeah, Oconnell, Yeah, who you mentioned in your book.
Speaker 1: The Atlantipedia is vast, Oh my god, yeah, it's huge.
Speaker 1: And I was just looking. Yeah. Yeah, he's got a
Speaker 1: couple of lists out there of all the places that
Speaker 1: people have hypothesized Atlantis might have been. And there are
Speaker 1: literally hundreds of places. Oh yeah, I couldn't even count them.
Speaker 1: I mean I could have, but I chose not to.
Speaker 1: You picked for your book, you picked four four places.
Speaker 1: You picked Malta, the island of Santa Reini, on the
Speaker 1: coasts of Morocco, and the coast of Spain to go investigate.
Speaker 1: So why did you pick those four spots? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: first of all, a lot of times you'll see locations
Speaker 1: for Atlantis that don't make any sense if if you,
Speaker 1: you know, look at the original details. Assuming that Plato's
Speaker 1: story is real, let's start with that assumption, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, rocky to be certain, I mean, to assume
Speaker 1: the Atlantic story is real. First of all, you have
Speaker 1: to believe that a sea god named Poseidon created the
Speaker 1: the island of Atlantis. Uh. So you know, you're making
Speaker 1: some some pretty big leaps here to start with. But
Speaker 1: let's assume that it's real. It's a story about a
Speaker 1: sea battle between Atlantis and Athens. So you know, for
Speaker 1: for an ancient uh navy to be able to travel
Speaker 1: to attack Athens. It doesn't really make sense that it's
Speaker 1: outside of a certain area. You know, it's not going
Speaker 1: to be crossing the Atlantic Ocean, so it's not the Bahamas,
Speaker 1: it's not coming from uh, you know, Indonesia, as some
Speaker 1: people have said. You know, there's a guy out there
Speaker 1: with a theory that Atlantis was in the Bolivian Altiplano,
Speaker 1: which which is right two miles up, hundreds of miles
Speaker 1: from the ocean. Uh. And you know I've been to
Speaker 1: the uh and I gotta tell you this. It's not underwater.
Speaker 1: It is about the lead underwater place you can imagine. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, So I I drew a you know, sort
Speaker 1: of a circle around Athens of of a certain distance.
Speaker 1: And then you know, Plato gives clues in the story.
Speaker 1: He says, you know, it was opposite the pillars of
Speaker 1: Heracles or Hercules is it's usually called um. It was
Speaker 1: um near the land called Goddies. It was an island um.
Speaker 1: You know, it was near the Pan Pelagos or the
Speaker 1: the Infinite Sea. So you know, once you you start
Speaker 1: listing these things, you get the sense it had to
Speaker 1: be in the Mediterranean a certain distance from Athens and
Speaker 1: the four places that made sense to me Um after
Speaker 1: a week of deliberations with Mr Tony O'Connell over in
Speaker 1: Ireland were probably the most famous Atlantist site, the one
Speaker 1: that shows up on TV specials all the time, which
Speaker 1: is Santorini and of Greece, Uh, the island of Malta
Speaker 1: in the center of the Mediterranean. There is a site
Speaker 1: just outside Um the strait of Gibraltar in southern Spain.
Speaker 1: And then there's a spot in Morocco near the city
Speaker 1: that's now called Aga deer Um, also just outside Um
Speaker 1: the Straight of Gibraltar, but to the south Um. And
Speaker 1: those are the four sights that I went and explored
Speaker 1: at length. Yeah, and uh, I gotta I gotta say
Speaker 1: the one of Morocco is it's the same that the
Speaker 1: locals of carding off all the stones from the ruins,
Speaker 1: because I don't think that that was Atlantis, because it's
Speaker 1: just too high up. I mean, what's the elevation of
Speaker 1: that side? Is what sixet it's pretty high up, I
Speaker 1: mean to have been hit by a wave. And we
Speaker 1: should point out that Plato's description in the Atlantis story
Speaker 1: is is not the island sank to the bottom of
Speaker 1: the Atlantic ocean, as is often you know, bandied about.
Speaker 1: But um, it was destroyed by earthquakes and floods in
Speaker 1: a single night. So the site you're talking about in Morocco.
Speaker 1: The guy who came up with this idea, UM, Michael Hubner,
Speaker 1: who was an I specialist in Bond, Germany. You know,
Speaker 1: he decided that this sort of circular structure um stone structure. UM.
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's like ten or fifteen miles inland
Speaker 1: from the Atlantic coast could have been hit by a
Speaker 1: huge tsunami. And the area has been hit by earthquakes
Speaker 1: and tsunamis frequently over the years. But yeah, it would
Speaker 1: have to be you know, a thousand foot high wall
Speaker 1: of water or something to get to that site. You know,
Speaker 1: could it be uh? And this is what human proposes,
Speaker 1: you know, two or three ancient stories that were put
Speaker 1: together as they sometimes are, and remembered as a single myth. Um.
Speaker 1: Maybe you know, it's possible, It's definitely possible. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: people love that theory because you know, we're in this
Speaker 1: age of big data. And what Michael Hubner did was
Speaker 1: he he found fifty one clues from Plato and you know,
Speaker 1: he plugged them into this algorithm and when it spat
Speaker 1: out at the end, it pointed him to this one
Speaker 1: spot in morocc Go And as he described it to me,
Speaker 1: it was he's like, you know, six stigma, this is
Speaker 1: seven sigma. You know. It's like it's it's impossible, you know.
Speaker 1: And it's like, you know, when you talk to one
Speaker 1: of these people who was like a pure you know, mathematician,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, yeah, but you you're controlling the variables here, right,
Speaker 1: You're plugging in the data that you want. He's like, yes,
Speaker 1: but if it did not work, we would have an
Speaker 1: old set. I just Francky wanted to loop background. You
Speaker 1: said something that was kind of stuck out to me,
Speaker 1: which was that Plato was the soul source of the
Speaker 1: story of Atlantis. And it just seems frankly kind of
Speaker 1: insane to me. I mean, Plato is well respected and
Speaker 1: that's fine, but a lot of he he wrote a
Speaker 1: lot and used metaphors a lot and you know, things
Speaker 1: like that. So it's it's interesting to me that, Um,
Speaker 1: I wonder if you can just talk to to that
Speaker 1: and you know, was he really the only source for this?
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean thing appears before Plato and you know,
Speaker 1: we think that that the Atlantis story, which is written
Speaker 1: in two parts, appeared around three sixty b C. So
Speaker 1: there's no reference to Atlantis or you know, a city
Speaker 1: at war with Athens, that is, you know, struck by
Speaker 1: a cataclysm suddenly before three BC. A lot of people
Speaker 1: seem to have picked up on it afterwards, especially people
Speaker 1: in the last hundred hundred fifty years. You know, you've
Speaker 1: got Edgar Casey with his psychic visions of Atlantis going
Speaker 1: under the waves and blah blah blah um. You know,
Speaker 1: none of that would have been possible without Plato's original story.
Speaker 1: The really odd thing about Atlantis and Plato absolutely you know,
Speaker 1: used a lot of made up stories and myths and
Speaker 1: things like that, you know, stories about magic rings and
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, people dying and coming back at
Speaker 1: thousand years later and things like that. Yeah in the cave,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. Know. As as one archaeologist said to me,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the world's leading archaeologists who is
Speaker 1: a big doubter of of Atlantis, He's like, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, why don't if you're going to look for Atlantis,
Speaker 1: why don't you go look for for Plato's Caves. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's my question to Yeah. Well, prior to
Speaker 1: reading the Tomaus and Critias, the only Plato that I
Speaker 1: had ever read was The Republic. I read that for
Speaker 1: political theory class years ago, and I remember the Cave
Speaker 1: and and he was quite explicit when he tells the
Speaker 1: tale of the cave that this is just an allegorical tale.
Speaker 1: He he never actually makes it out to be true, right,
Speaker 1: you know. And of course, the the fact that a
Speaker 1: lot of Atlantologists says, as I called him in the
Speaker 1: book people looking for Atlantis Cling to is that the
Speaker 1: character Critias, who is the narrator of the story of
Speaker 1: Atlantis and Plato's Dialogue, says, you know, this is a
Speaker 1: true story. You know, this is this was handed down
Speaker 1: to me by my great great great great grandfather Solon,
Speaker 1: who heard it in Egypt and so on. Is a
Speaker 1: real character. Um. They he almost certainly did go to Egypt.
Speaker 1: What he heard there, we don't know, um, you know.
Speaker 1: But what I found really striking about the Atlantist story
Speaker 1: and this doesn't necessarily, you know, make it any more
Speaker 1: true or any more false. But you've got the Republic,
Speaker 1: you know, which is Plato's master work arguably the most
Speaker 1: influential book in Western civilization. And then you've got the Timaus,
Speaker 1: which is his attempt to give a sort of mathematical
Speaker 1: logic to the cosmos. I think if you had asked Plato,
Speaker 1: he might have said that Tomaus was his most important work.
Speaker 1: At the start of the Tamaus as a sort of
Speaker 1: bridge from the Republic to the Tamaus, and he he,
Speaker 1: you know, makes a clear link at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the story. He says, you know, hey, Socrates says, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, could you could someone tell a story illustrating
Speaker 1: all of this stuff that I talked about in my
Speaker 1: speech yesterday, which is a reference to the Republic as
Speaker 1: the bridge between those two. Critias starts telling this story
Speaker 1: of Atlantis, of a you know, an island nation that
Speaker 1: you know, it was located opposite the pillars of Heracles,
Speaker 1: and you know, blah blah blah. I was very noble
Speaker 1: for a while and then became debased and was destroyed
Speaker 1: in a day and a night. And it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well that's that's interesting. So then Plato goes into the
Speaker 1: meat of the Timaus, where he does things like explain
Speaker 1: how the universe is made up of two kinds of
Speaker 1: tiny triangles, and you know the four elements you know, earth, fire, water,
Speaker 1: and air, um, and how the cosmos all you know,
Speaker 1: sort of have this geometric circular logic to them, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. And then right after that he comes
Speaker 1: back to Atlantis again, and this time he started giving
Speaker 1: all of this, you know, numerical detail, and you know
Speaker 1: what the circles of Atlantis were like, it's, you know,
Speaker 1: three concentric circles of land and water, and here's how
Speaker 1: big they were. And he gives measurements in states, which
Speaker 1: was a measurement that was about six hundred feet long
Speaker 1: used in ancient Greece. And at that point you start
Speaker 1: to want to say, why is he doing this? You know,
Speaker 1: why is he giving all of this detail for a
Speaker 1: story that he's already used, you know, for whatever purpose
Speaker 1: he was going to do to link the Republic to
Speaker 1: the Tamaeus. Why is he coming back to this and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden giving all of this detail um.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what sucks a lot of people
Speaker 1: in it. It's a really vivid, um, you know, very
Speaker 1: specific portrayal of this place. And he's he's obviously doing
Speaker 1: something there, but whether he's trying to make it sound
Speaker 1: real when it's not, or whether he's you know, using
Speaker 1: detail that he believes to be real, or whether he's
Speaker 1: doing something else, is you know, something that no one
Speaker 1: has been able to solve up to this point. That's
Speaker 1: one of the questions I had for you is and
Speaker 1: he probably can't answer it. But it seems to me
Speaker 1: that this is a tale that grew in the telling
Speaker 1: and that somebody you know, sort of tacked on a
Speaker 1: few elements, just like you know, the Internet today. I'm
Speaker 1: just curious, did Plato do that? Did he do it
Speaker 1: for a reason, or did the Egyptians do it? Back
Speaker 1: when you don't know? We don't know, you know, I
Speaker 1: think the only way we could figure out how much
Speaker 1: of this Plato made up and how much of it
Speaker 1: he believed, um, because we can't we can't know what
Speaker 1: the original story was. But what all we can tell is,
Speaker 1: you know, how much of it did Plato believe to
Speaker 1: be true? Um? Would be if some sort of inscription
Speaker 1: showed up in Egypt and some ancient temples somewhere that
Speaker 1: matched the Atlantis story. Um, It's it's possible you know,
Speaker 1: they're still digging in that in that area. You know,
Speaker 1: I think they've probably found just about everything they're going
Speaker 1: to find it in Egypt, but it's not impossible, you know,
Speaker 1: they could find something that would match it. Um. You know.
Speaker 1: The other thing they could do is, you know, find
Speaker 1: a place that's located opposite one of the pillars of
Speaker 1: Heracles um. And there are a few there's the most
Speaker 1: famous one is the Straits of Gibraltar um, straight of
Speaker 1: Gibraltar in between southern Spain and Morocco, because we've got
Speaker 1: that giant rock of Gibraltar there it's feet high. But
Speaker 1: you know, there's also the Straits of messina Um and
Speaker 1: a few other spots around the Mediterranean. Um. So if
Speaker 1: you found a former you know, capital city type place
Speaker 1: from the ancient world that was hit by a cataclysm
Speaker 1: you know, water and earthquakes before Plato's time and also
Speaker 1: had some sort of you know, three ring circular structure
Speaker 1: attached to it, then I think you would probably have
Speaker 1: to say, wow, there's probably you know a good chunk
Speaker 1: of truth to this, uh, this Atlantis story. Whether that's
Speaker 1: ever gonna happen, who knows, but that that would you
Speaker 1: prove it. Yeah, I mean, all of this stuff is
Speaker 1: just guesswork because we don't know, you know, there's so
Speaker 1: many I mean, there's the problem that Plato does sometimes
Speaker 1: use uh, you know, figurative language, and sometimes he is
Speaker 1: you know, he makes jokes. He you know, there's riddles
Speaker 1: and Plato people. You know, people still haven't figured out
Speaker 1: what Plato was talking about, you know, definitively, you know,
Speaker 1: and here we are twenty years later. He's probably the
Speaker 1: most written about philosopher of all time. So you know,
Speaker 1: people peop will come to me and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: I need the definitive explanation of I'm a you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a guy who writes the travel books exactly. You
Speaker 1: kind of touched on this, but maybe you can expand
Speaker 1: on it. The way that Atlantis is telling of Atlantis
Speaker 1: fits in is like right after the Republic and then
Speaker 1: like right before he starts talking about math, the first
Speaker 1: part of it, the first part of okay, and then
Speaker 1: he talks about it more direct or, and then he
Speaker 1: goes into the Tumaus, which is you know, sort of um.
Speaker 1: The Tomas is sometimes cited as like the first great
Speaker 1: work of science. You know, it's his way to try
Speaker 1: to give a sort of logic. And to back up
Speaker 1: just a second. You know, Plato was was heavily influenced
Speaker 1: by the Pythagoreans um, who were a sort of like
Speaker 1: religious cult slash uh, you know, group of math professors
Speaker 1: who lived in southern Italy and who. You know, we're
Speaker 1: trying to find the athematical and and you know, geometric
Speaker 1: essentially like the secret code behind the universe. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's almost like the first attempt to find a physics,
Speaker 1: you know, and explain everything through numbers. You know. At
Speaker 1: the same time they're doing very strange things with numbers there,
Speaker 1: you know, to them, numbers are living beings, some numbers
Speaker 1: are female, some numbers are male. You know. So there's
Speaker 1: there's odd stuff going on with the Pythagoreans as well. Um,
Speaker 1: So the Tomaus has a lot of Pythagorean stuff in it.
Speaker 1: And then you know, here he is with this this
Speaker 1: you know, first work of science, trying to explain how
Speaker 1: the cosmos work, even though the telescope hasn't been invented yet.
Speaker 1: And then to come back to it in a separate
Speaker 1: dialogue called the Critios, which immediately follows the Tamaus, and
Speaker 1: that's when he gives probably eighty or nine of the
Speaker 1: details about the story of Atlantists and what Atlantis looked like,
Speaker 1: and you know, measurements, and you know, he talked about
Speaker 1: this enormous plane that was attached to the city of Atlantis,
Speaker 1: a field plane, not at like an airplane, although some
Speaker 1: have made that some have made that claim as well.
Speaker 1: That was hundreds of square miles surrounded by it an
Speaker 1: ormous ditch and yeah, yeah, and as I crossed and stuff,
Speaker 1: I did the you know, I did the math on this,
Speaker 1: and it's like, you know, okay, so they dug this
Speaker 1: giant canal and I was like, wait a minute, if
Speaker 1: they were going to dig this canal, this would be
Speaker 1: like a hundred times the amount of earth that was
Speaker 1: moved to make the Panama Canal. You know, this doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense at all. So you know, it's like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe Plato is using these numbers and a Pythagorean sense
Speaker 1: that we don't understand. Um, in which case, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we we can't use these numbers as like you know,
Speaker 1: modern GPS coordinates. Maybe he's doing things here that uh,
Speaker 1: you know, had completely been erased overred years that we
Speaker 1: just you know, simply can't understand anymore. Um. You do
Speaker 1: know that the numbers, like you know, he goes, he
Speaker 1: uses stage and I did a little research on stage.
Speaker 1: And of course you probably know this too, is that
Speaker 1: there's no actual agreement on what a state was. I've seen. No,
Speaker 1: there's kind of a rough number. Um, you know, like
Speaker 1: I said, of a round six hundred feet. But you
Speaker 1: know what what people will do a lot is they'll
Speaker 1: find a location and then they'll choose the definition of
Speaker 1: state that fits their location. You know. And in ancient
Speaker 1: Portugal a state was you know, you know, like, well,
Speaker 1: I I'm sure Plato wasn't from ancient Portugal. I think
Speaker 1: we I think we know where he was from. U
Speaker 1: a few certainties in dealing with Plato in Atlantis. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know that. But you know, there are these
Speaker 1: people out there who who are like you know, um,
Speaker 1: you know they're like, uh, these you know judges who
Speaker 1: who interpret the constitution uh in a in a fundamental sense.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, well, this is Joe, this is
Speaker 1: what the Founding fathers were thinking on this day when
Speaker 1: they wrote this, And they're like, you know, everything in
Speaker 1: the atlantis has to be true. The numbers all have
Speaker 1: to be true. So you know, they twist their theory
Speaker 1: to to fit the numbers, um, and usually it comes out,
Speaker 1: you know, sounding pretty ridiculous. Every once in a while
Speaker 1: you see something and you're like, huh, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: that's weird. You know, like when I went up and
Speaker 1: talked to John Bremer, who is um uh. He's been
Speaker 1: studying Plato for I think sixty years um and for
Speaker 1: fun he counts the syllables of the ancient you know,
Speaker 1: the ancient Greek versions of of Plato's works, and there's
Speaker 1: his fame. Well, he has found patterns. There's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of interesting things, one of which was, you know,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned Plato, was you studied with the Pythagoreans. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, the Pythagoreans. One of the reasons why they
Speaker 1: thought there might be this secret mathematical code that they
Speaker 1: could crack was that, you know, in according to lore,
Speaker 1: it was Pythagoras himself. But we people generally believe that
Speaker 1: anything that Pythagorians found is attributed to Pythagoras. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: he was probably the first person outside of maybe some
Speaker 1: some Babylonians UM to realize that there was math behind music.
Speaker 1: You know, when you make a clear tone. That's because
Speaker 1: certain ratios already play here a one to two ratio
Speaker 1: or a two to three ratio. So they established this
Speaker 1: twelve note Pythagorean musical scale, the first musical scale that
Speaker 1: we know of UM. And what John Bremer and another
Speaker 1: person UH computer scientists in England who confirmed this um
Speaker 1: separately UH found was that in a lot of Plato's works,
Speaker 1: including the Timaeus, he seems to be using a structure
Speaker 1: almost like an outline, based on this twelve note scale.
Speaker 1: And there are twelve parts two the dialogue, and if
Speaker 1: you hit a part like say midway through um, you
Speaker 1: know your six out of twelve here, that's a one
Speaker 1: to two ratio, which is which is um um harmonious
Speaker 1: note um. And in those spots Plato tends to be
Speaker 1: writing about good things, about harmonious things. If you hit
Speaker 1: a where it's like seven out of twelve, which is
Speaker 1: not a harmonious note um. And I'm probably butchering the
Speaker 1: terminology here because I don't know music that well, but um,
Speaker 1: you know, that's when he's talking about you know, chaos
Speaker 1: and disorder and things like that. Um and you know,
Speaker 1: Bremer seemed to think that the structure of Plato's works
Speaker 1: might be you know, every bit as important as the
Speaker 1: words themselves, you know, and no one has really dug
Speaker 1: that deep into this. There may be things about this
Speaker 1: that we don't even understand yet. And I would say
Speaker 1: that almost certainly there are things about this we don't understand.
Speaker 1: You know, Plato plays all sorts of you know, math
Speaker 1: games and you know, things like that. That the trouble
Speaker 1: is that, as somebody, you know, a great uh, you
Speaker 1: know Platonists pointed out about a hundred years ago, they said,
Speaker 1: you know, the mathematics in Plato is the most difficult
Speaker 1: part of the most difficult philosopher of all time. So
Speaker 1: nobody really wants to take this stuff on. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like the Da Vinci code, you know, it is
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. And there are you know,
Speaker 1: nobody doubts that Plato is making references to things like
Speaker 1: the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio in his works.
Speaker 1: You know, he's he's you know, and in something like
Speaker 1: his book The Laws, which I think the last dialogue
Speaker 1: he wrote notorious for being like the most uh boring
Speaker 1: uh thing that from ancient history. You know. I met
Speaker 1: a philosophy professor and he starts paging three. I was like,
Speaker 1: if you ever read this, He's like, you know, even
Speaker 1: people who study Plato don't read the laws, who just
Speaker 1: got it just kind of dip into it, you know,
Speaker 1: But there are you know, there's the number of fifty forty,
Speaker 1: which he calls this this you know, super important number. Well,
Speaker 1: if you break it down, fifty is the sum of
Speaker 1: one times two times three times four times five times
Speaker 1: six times seven, and it appears seven times in the laws.
Speaker 1: So it looks like, you know, at the very least,
Speaker 1: Plato is playing some sort of number games here, and
Speaker 1: you know, the the the idea that he you know,
Speaker 1: there's also an instance in the Republic where he refers
Speaker 1: to maybe misquoting this the three and the four attached
Speaker 1: to the pen pad, and somebody pointed out at some
Speaker 1: point they're like, well that's a three or four and
Speaker 1: five that's the Pythagorean triangle. So you know, he's dropping
Speaker 1: little hints that there's other stuff going on here. But
Speaker 1: you know, whether anyone's ever going to to decode what
Speaker 1: he was doing is you know, you know, the future
Speaker 1: may know that, but I certainly don't, you know, because
Speaker 1: you remember, he's he's not writing these dialogues, you know,
Speaker 1: to be read by a modern audience. Two years later,
Speaker 1: he's using these to teach his students at the Academy
Speaker 1: in Athens, which was the first university. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: he's Tea's teaching a classic pythagoryan uh quadrivium. I think
Speaker 1: they called it four part curriculum to students. So they
Speaker 1: whatever he was doing, his students, you know, sitting around
Speaker 1: uh in the garden and Athens, they would have known
Speaker 1: what he was doing, But we have completely lost whatever
Speaker 1: it was. Um. And if you know, if if somebody
Speaker 1: can at some point starting to figure that out, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll have a better sense of how much of Atlantis
Speaker 1: could have been based on historical events, or or even
Speaker 1: just how much of it did Plato himself actually believe.
Speaker 1: The answer could be none, the answer could be a lot. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I I tend to think that he believed at least
Speaker 1: part of it. And this is something I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you about. Is he uh, he invokes his ancestors
Speaker 1: Solon and also his mentor Socrates. You know and who
Speaker 1: both swear that this is true for Plato and it
Speaker 1: is called in that culture. Would that have been disrespectful
Speaker 1: to an ancestor to basically involved them and attested to
Speaker 1: the truth of a fairy tale? You know it It
Speaker 1: might have been. But again, you know, um, I don't
Speaker 1: want to go back into my like post structuralist terminology
Speaker 1: that drove me out of grad school in the early
Speaker 1: night that you know, he's using a series of masks here,
Speaker 1: you know, he's he could be hiding behind Socrates to
Speaker 1: say something that he wants to uh, you know, play with.
Speaker 1: So we you know, we can't know whether he intended
Speaker 1: that to be real, or whether he you know, was
Speaker 1: using that as some sort of rhetorical device or or
Speaker 1: you know whatnot. Um So, you know, if if we
Speaker 1: knew for a fact that this was intended as a
Speaker 1: piece of written history, yes, it would have been disrespectful
Speaker 1: for him to put those words in the mouth of
Speaker 1: of Socrates or into the mouth of Solon, you know.
Speaker 1: But that's that's another thing that we have to deal
Speaker 1: with here. Another layer, which is that written history in
Speaker 1: three six b C. You know, this is still new technology.
Speaker 1: This is you know, as far as the Greeks are concerned,
Speaker 1: this is technology that's less than a hundred years old.
Speaker 1: You know, Herodotus has has you know, the father of
Speaker 1: history has just started doing this stuff about a hundred
Speaker 1: years before, you know, writing down history rather than allowing
Speaker 1: it to be passed on orally. And it's when history
Speaker 1: has passed on orally, it's done in the form of
Speaker 1: stories which have become myths. You know. So now from
Speaker 1: our vantage point, we have to decode those myths and
Speaker 1: try to pluck the truth out. And this is you know,
Speaker 1: this is a lot of what archaeologists and anthropologists do. So,
Speaker 1: you know, Plato, through the character of Socrates, wrestling with
Speaker 1: this idea, you know, is written history true or is
Speaker 1: oral history true? Things that are passed down to story
Speaker 1: is true? And I think it's in the republic um. No,
Speaker 1: it's actually in a different word, but I can't remember which.
Speaker 1: You know, Socrates comes out and and says, you know, look,
Speaker 1: I actually trust oral history more. I you know, trust
Speaker 1: things that are that are passed down not in writing,
Speaker 1: because you can engage with them, you can argue with them,
Speaker 1: you know, whereas written history is just sort of this
Speaker 1: lump right here and you can't. You can't sort of
Speaker 1: you know, poke the holes in it. It is what
Speaker 1: it is, um, you know. So that's just one more
Speaker 1: gigantic problem sitting in the middle of the attempt to
Speaker 1: try to solve the Atlantis story. Yeah. The thing about
Speaker 1: the written history though, is that and this is one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I think that probably this is true,
Speaker 1: is that finds that from the Egyptians that the Greek
Speaker 1: at one actually had a written language and they had
Speaker 1: lost Well that's you know, that's the half of the
Speaker 1: story that everyone tends to ignore, which is the Athens
Speaker 1: half of the story. And there's a fascinating guy gego
Speaker 1: physicist in Greece named Stavros Papameranapolis, and he's probably the
Speaker 1: guy who has done the most work on trying to
Speaker 1: figure out that the truth from the fiction in the
Speaker 1: Atlantis story. And he's I mean, he's a real geophysicist.
Speaker 1: He's found uh, you know, ancient ancient canals and things
Speaker 1: like that that um, people weren't sure if they were
Speaker 1: real or not. And he you know, he went down
Speaker 1: to southern Greece and you know, did the the soundings
Speaker 1: and such, and it's like okay, well, Yeah, actually they
Speaker 1: did build this canal where two ships could pass, and
Speaker 1: it was a mile long, and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And what he has done is he has looked at
Speaker 1: the Athens part of the story and and shown that
Speaker 1: a lot of details that seem completely pointless if you
Speaker 1: just sort of skimmed the story actually coincide with Greek history,
Speaker 1: as we've come to understand in the last hundred years.
Speaker 1: You know, he talks about um a spring on the
Speaker 1: north side of the acropolis that was destroyed by an earthquake,
Speaker 1: and well, guess what, in the nineteen thirties they found
Speaker 1: a spring that had been clogged by an earthquake around
Speaker 1: which is around the time when uh, you know, in
Speaker 1: the Atlantis story they say, uh, you know, the Greek's
Speaker 1: lost written language. Well, what did they lose around that time?
Speaker 1: Linear b the famous uh you know uh language that
Speaker 1: was decoded in the middle of the twentieth century. Um.
Speaker 1: So there are enough of these details that you know,
Speaker 1: Plato could not have known, you know, unless he was
Speaker 1: he was you know, uh clairvoyant or something, in which
Speaker 1: case maybe Edgar Casey was right. You know, he had
Speaker 1: to have some details from the past than he believed
Speaker 1: to be true, and especially those that we're dealing with
Speaker 1: the Greek part of the story. So you know, there's
Speaker 1: enough of that to make me think that, you know this,
Speaker 1: there are elements of the Atlantis story that can be
Speaker 1: based in history. But yeah, and I know the like
Speaker 1: for me, the part with linear b that always kind
Speaker 1: of resonated is that we always in that oral tradition,
Speaker 1: there's things that are legends that are told from a
Speaker 1: time before, which is why how I always figured that
Speaker 1: he that's why he was making reference to these lost languages,
Speaker 1: less so from what he Solon had gotten from the Egyptians,
Speaker 1: but just it was kind of generally known that at
Speaker 1: one time people kind of knew how to do this,
Speaker 1: and we sort of know about it, but we don't
Speaker 1: because it's such a huge fan of the oral tradition
Speaker 1: that I can see that being passed down. You know,
Speaker 1: one time we knew how to write with sticks, but
Speaker 1: now we don't. But at the same time, the spring
Speaker 1: is a trivial enough thing that you know, you can't
Speaker 1: see people like sitting around the campfire talking about the
Speaker 1: spring on the popolis. I can't quite imagine that. No,
Speaker 1: it's it's not like you know, a grandfather pulling the
Speaker 1: young child aside and saying, let me tell you the
Speaker 1: story about the spring on the acropolis got exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a three thousand year old liquid plumber commercial.
Speaker 1: Or so let's uh. I wanted to I wanted to
Speaker 1: to swivel back to Atlantis a little bit. So Atlantis itself,
Speaker 1: the in generally speaking, is pretty well mocked from the
Speaker 1: quote unquote official mainstream perspective. Nobody takes that seriously. Definitely
Speaker 1: almost nobody, right, So so my first question is is,
Speaker 1: and and I'll follow this in a second with another,
Speaker 1: but how did you sell that you were going to
Speaker 1: write a book on Atlantis when it kind of had
Speaker 1: that stigma. Well, because my publisher, Penguin, you know, they
Speaker 1: had done one book with me so far, so they knew,
Speaker 1: you know, I was, you know, a real reporter, a
Speaker 1: real writer. Um. They knew there would be a travel
Speaker 1: component to this as well as just going back and
Speaker 1: looking at the original story of Atlantis. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: they know that, you know, Atlantis is an evergreen story.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's one of, if not the greatest
Speaker 1: mystery of all times. So you know, people are fascinated
Speaker 1: by this. You know, it's it's funny because you know,
Speaker 1: whenever I post something online, I'll get comments, and you know,
Speaker 1: one of them will be, hey, that's really interesting. I
Speaker 1: never knew that, and nine of them will be you know,
Speaker 1: my psychic told me that fifty thousand years ago the
Speaker 1: continent of MW blah blah blah blah blah. So you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people are just interested in Atlantis for
Speaker 1: their own purposes and don't want to hear what anybody
Speaker 1: else has to say. But there is a you know,
Speaker 1: a general high level of interest um in Atlantis. And
Speaker 1: I think that's why Penguin said, you know, okay, you're
Speaker 1: not crazy, go ahead and write the book. So but
Speaker 1: but why is it? Why then, from that academic perspective,
Speaker 1: is the story rather shunned? Well, there's I think there is.
Speaker 1: From you know, a very contemporary perspective, there is just
Speaker 1: sort of a general idea that this is an area
Speaker 1: for fringe thinking and nuts and and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: You know, it's bigfoot, it's UFOs Um. Specifically, I think
Speaker 1: we can trace this back to a guy named Ignatius Donnally,
Speaker 1: one of the great characters of Atlantology. You know, Ignatious
Speaker 1: Donnely is a U S congressman former U S congressman
Speaker 1: in Minnesota in eighteen eighty one. I think it is
Speaker 1: he sits down, he has no money. Uh, so he's
Speaker 1: he decides he's going to write a book about Atlantis.
Speaker 1: Then remember this is right after Heinrich Lehman has found
Speaker 1: Troy using the clues from the Iliad. So people have
Speaker 1: started to think, hey, you know, if we found Troy,
Speaker 1: and maybe we'll find Atlantis. So he goes and finds
Speaker 1: like every scrap of information that could could possibly you know,
Speaker 1: relate to you know, Atlantis, and you know, some of
Speaker 1: it makes a little bit of sense. You know. He
Speaker 1: talks about events that happened in the past, He draws
Speaker 1: parallels to the the Old Testament, and there are you know,
Speaker 1: indications that maybe some of the things that are talking
Speaker 1: about in Atlantis may have parallels to um, you know,
Speaker 1: the Ten Plagues of Egypt. But then he starts making
Speaker 1: these outlandish claims, like, you know, he's the guy who
Speaker 1: came up with the idea that Atlantis sank to the
Speaker 1: bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and the Azores Mountains, uh,
Speaker 1: the Azores Islands, that are the tips of the great
Speaker 1: mountains of Atlantis, and the Gulf stream upflows the way
Speaker 1: it does because it goes around Atlantis, and he comes,
Speaker 1: you know, he goes into like Mayan history and uh
Speaker 1: Egyptian history and Hebrew history and just tries to prove
Speaker 1: that every great culture that uh humanity has ever produced,
Speaker 1: actually it can be traced back to Atlantis, Atlanteans getting
Speaker 1: in boats and sailing off to these different places around
Speaker 1: ten thousand BC. UM. And I think that diffusionism exactly,
Speaker 1: you know, And that's the idea that makes academics really uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: the idea of this super race that once existed. And
Speaker 1: this is this is you know, like the light bulb
Speaker 1: that draws the moths. For a lot of these people,
Speaker 1: it's like, yes, ten thousand years ago, there was a
Speaker 1: super race that you know, created everything we've ever heard of.
Speaker 1: Blah blah blah blah. And you know, even though there's
Speaker 1: a mountain of evidence to the contrary, this is an
Speaker 1: idea that a lot of people latch onto. Um. And
Speaker 1: I think it's it's you know, Donnally and his crazy stuff.
Speaker 1: But I think there's an example I given the book.
Speaker 1: I can't remember it precisely, but it was like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the Kings of Atlantis referred to a scourge
Speaker 1: of the body that they got rid of. And Donnally says, oh, really, well,
Speaker 1: you know what that means. They're referring to syphilis. And
Speaker 1: because the ancient Hebrew performs through coumcision. Uh, and because
Speaker 1: modern actuarial tables show us that Jews tend live longer
Speaker 1: than most other people, we can therefore, you know, draw
Speaker 1: the line relatively quickly back to Atlantis. You know, if
Speaker 1: you if if you're reading very quickly, you're like, huh,
Speaker 1: and then do you stop and think about it? For like,
Speaker 1: this is nuts? You know, no wonder two thirds of
Speaker 1: the emails I sent off to addresses that ended in
Speaker 1: dot e du never were responded to. You know, this
Speaker 1: is academic kryptonite. Um Ippi a similar thing. You know,
Speaker 1: my phone calls to the FBI regarding DV Cooper so
Speaker 1: far returned. Yeah, like, yeah, we'll get on that one
Speaker 1: right away. You know who else is really big on
Speaker 1: on Atlantis, the super Race and uh and all that
Speaker 1: stuff was the Nazis, I mean, Henri Himmler and all
Speaker 1: that stuff. For Atlantis. You know, they had They had
Speaker 1: this whole team, the Onitor, but I think it was
Speaker 1: called put together by Himmler. And the whole point was,
Speaker 1: it's very much like the first Indiana Jones movie reaiders
Speaker 1: it a lot of stark. They are looking for ancient
Speaker 1: evidence of this super Aryan race that of course eventually
Speaker 1: became the most super race of all in their opinion. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, the National Socialists. And what what's interesting is
Speaker 1: they had planned, um, a big expedition to the Canary Islands,
Speaker 1: which is which is not you know, as far as
Speaker 1: possible sites go, it's not the worst one you can
Speaker 1: come up with, uh, for the Fall of nine. And
Speaker 1: it seems that the reason they never got there is
Speaker 1: because the Nazis decided to attack Poland instead. So it's like, wait,
Speaker 1: just one more bad thing to come out of that
Speaker 1: whole era. But yeah, I mean they were the theories,
Speaker 1: the theories they were promoting were just completely nuts. I mean,
Speaker 1: going back tens of thousands of years and things like that.
Speaker 1: And you know, because stuff like that is interesting to
Speaker 1: a lot of people. Uh, it just it gives this
Speaker 1: tinge to Atlantis in general. That makes it sound like,
Speaker 1: you know, a subject that's only dealt with by crazy people. Um.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that should be the case. But
Speaker 1: what what do you think it's gonna take. I mean,
Speaker 1: what would we have to find before it would suddenly
Speaker 1: come out of that that fringe into the limelight and
Speaker 1: people would be willing to take it seriously? Well, I
Speaker 1: think you'd have to find either of someone discovering what
Speaker 1: the pattern is with these numbers that Plato is using.
Speaker 1: You know, he uses dozens of numbers in the second
Speaker 1: part of the Atlantis story, um that you know, like
Speaker 1: I mentioned, people have latched onto like their GPS coordinates, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and can be used to find a city
Speaker 1: of an exact size and this gigantic plane of an
Speaker 1: exact size. You know, if if somebody could decode those
Speaker 1: numbers and figure out what Plato was actually doing there
Speaker 1: and if it was actually referring to something that we
Speaker 1: can understand, I think that would be one form of proof.
Speaker 1: The other form of proof, of course, would be to
Speaker 1: find some sort of ancient inscription in Egypt, you know,
Speaker 1: something that matches the story that sold On supposedly originally
Speaker 1: heard around five or six hundred BC. UM. And the
Speaker 1: other thing would be, you know, if someone could pile
Speaker 1: up enough evidence, if someone could say, okay, uh Plato
Speaker 1: said it was opposite a land called Goddis, Well here's
Speaker 1: you know, there's Kadi's in southern Spain, there's Agadir and Morocco.
Speaker 1: Both of those come from the Phoenician word godir, meaning
Speaker 1: an enclosed city. So if you know, if you can
Speaker 1: find one of these old godders that is near uh,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the pillars of Heracles and shows
Speaker 1: evidence that, uh, you know, a civilization of some sort
Speaker 1: was struck suddenly by earthquakes and floods and was destroyed.
Speaker 1: And if there are you know, some elements of the
Speaker 1: description that Plato gives, if there is you know, some
Speaker 1: sort of concentric circles there, then I think the preponderance
Speaker 1: of evidence would would say, okay, you know what this is,
Speaker 1: there's probably a large kernel of truth at the center
Speaker 1: of this. You know, whether any of those is going
Speaker 1: to happen, I you know, I honestly couldn't say, but
Speaker 1: one of those three things, I think would would certainly
Speaker 1: move the needle back toward Okay, Atlantis has has got
Speaker 1: a lot of truth in it, yeah, I think, And
Speaker 1: this is one of the one of the problems that
Speaker 1: I have with the whole thing is like, so the
Speaker 1: pillars of Heracles could have been many places, as there's been.
Speaker 1: You know, the time that Plato was writing, the Greeks
Speaker 1: had actually been exploring and colonizing the western Mediterranean for
Speaker 1: a couple hundred years as as far as I understand,
Speaker 1: So for them, the Pillars of Heracles must have been
Speaker 1: the straighter Gibraltar. But at the same time, if Athens
Speaker 1: and Atlantis were both wiped out the same day, and
Speaker 1: that means that Atlantis had to be inside the pillars
Speaker 1: of Heracles. And yet the most likely side I think
Speaker 1: is is Spain. So this is one of the things
Speaker 1: I'm wondering about. Is um, is it really totally under
Speaker 1: present true that they were wiped out the very same
Speaker 1: day by the same cataclysm or honestly pent clarity on that.
Speaker 1: Come on, man, this was a three thousand year old
Speaker 1: story passed down maybe or maybe not through at least
Speaker 1: you know, three or four pairs of hands. Um. That's
Speaker 1: why we called you Mark. I know, I know I
Speaker 1: would know two things. One, you know, with ancient myths
Speaker 1: of this sort, there is I can't remember the term
Speaker 1: off the top of my head, um where a bunch
Speaker 1: of things tend to come together, so they you know,
Speaker 1: there could be two or three stories that are combined
Speaker 1: into one story. So you know, hypothetically Rome could be
Speaker 1: destroyed in an earthquake tomorrow and that could you know,
Speaker 1: be put together with the story of Lisbon in seventeen
Speaker 1: fifty five being destroyed by an earthquake, and ten thousand
Speaker 1: years from now, people are gonna say, oh, those things
Speaker 1: happened at the same time. Um, you know, just hypothetically.
Speaker 1: You know, the other thing is and and this is
Speaker 1: much more interesting. Around the time that you know, linear
Speaker 1: b disappears, when this group called the Sea People's uh
Speaker 1: which is a still very mysterious group that seems to
Speaker 1: have shown up in various places around the Mediterranean and
Speaker 1: start you know, attacked suddenly from the sea. Around the
Speaker 1: same time that that those things are happening, there is
Speaker 1: this wave of earthquakes, floods, famines, you know, just generally
Speaker 1: bad news. I think the dates are roughly twelve fifty
Speaker 1: b C E to eleven fifty b C. And that
Speaker 1: there's a great term I can't remember exactly. It's it's
Speaker 1: like seismological unzipping there making a fault line in the
Speaker 1: Mediterranean that just caused all sorts of chaos. And you know,
Speaker 1: one place has no food for two or three years.
Speaker 1: So they get on their boats and they attack Egypt.
Speaker 1: They attacked the Hittites and what in what is now Turkey.
Speaker 1: You know, they end up in Israel. Um. So it's
Speaker 1: possible that there were two cataclysms occurring roughly at the
Speaker 1: same time in Athens and wherever um. You know, the
Speaker 1: the ration for Atlantis. What it is not at all
Speaker 1: impossible that in this period of chaos, which is is
Speaker 1: a um. It's it's not proven historically, but it's generally
Speaker 1: regarded as true historically. Historians pop won't argue about the
Speaker 1: sea People's or about this, you know um, this period
Speaker 1: of great chaos. And there are actually like little fragments
Speaker 1: I think a pottery from the Hittites and such where
Speaker 1: the king of Um is that the king of the Hittites,
Speaker 1: I can't remember, but it's it's, you know, whatever the
Speaker 1: group was before the Phoenicians. There's a communication between one
Speaker 1: and the other where they're basically saying, we're being attacked,
Speaker 1: come save us. And it seems to be the same
Speaker 1: people who attacked Egypt around the same time. So whatever
Speaker 1: was going on, it was you know where it was
Speaker 1: really bad. There was famine, etcetera, etcetera. And this may
Speaker 1: also be, uh, you know, the same thing that that
Speaker 1: wiped out Linear be wiped out whatever the Greek culture was.
Speaker 1: Now that we call that the Manoans, but obviously they
Speaker 1: weren't the Manoans at the time. Yeah. I wondered about
Speaker 1: that that like a string of earth quicks or maybe
Speaker 1: and I'll probably get an email from a volcanologist or
Speaker 1: geologist about this, but yeah, an earthquake could have touched
Speaker 1: off the volcano in Santorini e Thera and caused interruption
Speaker 1: of that, which of course wiped out a very ancient city,
Speaker 1: their Acriteri, which you paid a visit to in your book,
Speaker 1: by the way, I did. I did, And you know,
Speaker 1: Acritaria is fascinating and there are parallels with Atlantis, you know,
Speaker 1: but I think what the reason why Acriteri and Um
Speaker 1: Santorini are still appealing to you know, those academics who
Speaker 1: are willing to even discuss Atlantis, is that we've got
Speaker 1: some concrete evidence there, you know, there obviously was a
Speaker 1: huge explosion. There obviously was a maritime culture there. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, beyond that, the parallels with Plato are
Speaker 1: you know, not really that strong. But I think, you know,
Speaker 1: people say want to say, okay, we have some evidence
Speaker 1: of something here. Um, you know, why don't we relate
Speaker 1: it to the Atlantis story. My my guess is that
Speaker 1: if it was based on one cataclysmic event, it's probably
Speaker 1: a different one. Um. And I should point out that
Speaker 1: the explosion of there it does not match up with
Speaker 1: those that seismic gun zipping or whatever the exact term
Speaker 1: is um that there are. They still haven't nailed it down.
Speaker 1: To the archaeologists who base it on pottery, I think
Speaker 1: they want to say it's around and then based on
Speaker 1: some sort of carbon dating, they say it's around sixteen
Speaker 1: ten sixteen fifteen BC, So they know roughly when it was,
Speaker 1: but they don't know exactly when it was. Um. But
Speaker 1: that's it. You know, Acriterias is fascinating. The whole island,
Speaker 1: island of Santorini is you know, amazingly beautiful. So highly
Speaker 1: recommend just that if you want to check it out
Speaker 1: for yourself. Now I totally want to go there and
Speaker 1: and luckily I was Luckily I was able to visit
Speaker 1: it via Google street View, and and I've actually driven
Speaker 1: all over the island on Google uh. And And this
Speaker 1: really kind of annoys me is that I wanted to
Speaker 1: take a similar to of Malta, and you can't do
Speaker 1: street view on Malta. You look at Google Pictures, but
Speaker 1: there ain't no street view. That's interesting. Malta is a
Speaker 1: strange place. It's a very I mean, it's like a
Speaker 1: a fortress mentality inside an island that is set up
Speaker 1: like a fortress. So it shocked me to hear that
Speaker 1: the Maltese didn't want Google on their island. That would
Speaker 1: you know, That wouldn't shock me at all. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a it's a strange place. Um. As I think
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the book. It one of the first
Speaker 1: things I realized when I was there is they it
Speaker 1: had like the greatest percentage of beautiful women and fat
Speaker 1: men I had ever seen in my life. So I
Speaker 1: don't know, if you know, the mating rules are different
Speaker 1: in Malta, but I've heard things about Brazil that could
Speaker 1: be that could very well be. Yeah, um, you know,
Speaker 1: but Malta is fascinating because they have those ancient temples
Speaker 1: there um, which you know, a thousand years older than
Speaker 1: I think even the Great Pyramid in Egypt. And Malta
Speaker 1: was destroyed suddenly by a cataclysm that wiped out the population,
Speaker 1: apparently a long time before Plato was writing. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: it's an island, it's near the straits of messina Um.
Speaker 1: So you know, I think Malta is a more appealing
Speaker 1: candidate probably than Santorini, just you know, based on comparing
Speaker 1: it to Plato's original story. Um, you know that said
Speaker 1: I came up with four candidates in the book. There
Speaker 1: are others that are you know, not far behind. You know,
Speaker 1: we can't have two original Atlantis. Is it's possible, you know,
Speaker 1: one or two or three cataclysms were put together in
Speaker 1: one story. But it's it's you know, it's not as
Speaker 1: neat a packages we would hope it would be. What
Speaker 1: are your what are your feelings about the kind of
Speaker 1: more out there? I mean, you know people have said
Speaker 1: it's on the east coast, or it's you know, an antarctic,
Speaker 1: or what's your sense about that? You know, I I
Speaker 1: have very little patients for that stuff, because you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's carry yeah, the earth crust displaced, and it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, you know, look at this map. It
Speaker 1: matches this map of Atlantis. It's like, okay, a the
Speaker 1: map of Antarctica you're you're using, which your cherry picking,
Speaker 1: is from the nineteen fifties. We have a lot more recent,
Speaker 1: uh maps than that, you know, be as I confirmed
Speaker 1: when I was in Alaska a few weeks ago and
Speaker 1: they're talking about how the land is rising because the
Speaker 1: glaciers are melting um there's isostatic rebound, which means that
Speaker 1: in Atlantic Antarctica that had no ice on it would
Speaker 1: be much further out of the water and have a
Speaker 1: very different shape. So don't tell me this looks like this,
Speaker 1: and see the map of Atlantis that you're comparing it
Speaker 1: to is something that a guy drew in sixteen sixty
Speaker 1: six and just kind of made up, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: so so you know, I don't think, you know. And
Speaker 1: then they're like, well, I think that map was actually
Speaker 1: passed down from so long. It's like, you know, Plato
Speaker 1: doesn't say anything about a map. As far as we know,
Speaker 1: people were not drawing maps, you know, at that time.
Speaker 1: So the you know, the idea that you know, we
Speaker 1: have an ancient map, while totally cool and the basis
Speaker 1: for a great fictional movie, uh, it makes you know,
Speaker 1: no no sense logically, Yeah, I gotta agree with that.
Speaker 1: So we're left with, um, I don't know, the middle
Speaker 1: of the Mediterranean or maybe the coast of Spain. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm discounting Morocco because if they did indeed kind of
Speaker 1: canal to the sea, then the canal would have had
Speaker 1: to have been many hundreds of feet deep. So you know,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like I said, it's possible that they
Speaker 1: had um a settlement on the coast as well as
Speaker 1: this circular ring thing, which is extremely cool. There's probably
Speaker 1: the most interesting circular ring, you know, the thing I
Speaker 1: saw in all my time, um around the Mediterranean. You know.
Speaker 1: But my guess is if it did exist in you know,
Speaker 1: some form similar to what Plato described, it was probably
Speaker 1: in the western Mediterranean, um. You know. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of information being past worth mouth by you know, sailors,
Speaker 1: the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, um around that time, and you knows,
Speaker 1: as I point out in the book, remember um, the
Speaker 1: part of the Mediterranean near the Strait of Gibraltar is um,
Speaker 1: you know, run by the Carthaginians around the time of Plato.
Speaker 1: So you know, they're passing false propaganda back to the
Speaker 1: Greek saying like, you know, here's all the crazy stuff
Speaker 1: that's going on outside the mouth of the Mediterranean. Don't
Speaker 1: go out there, you know, because here's what you're going
Speaker 1: to encounter. Um right, exactly did some of the game
Speaker 1: that get tied in with uh, you know the stories
Speaker 1: of Plato heard while he was visiting Syracuse, you know,
Speaker 1: after the death of Socrates, who knows, who knows? You know. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: we you know, we can't just go back to the
Speaker 1: original sources here, um bus. Information was not invented like
Speaker 1: this yesterday, no no, no, no, no, no, no no for
Speaker 1: a while exactly exactly so now, but I would guess
Speaker 1: probably blee, you know, somewhere in the western Mediterranean. What
Speaker 1: I was I was talking to Stavros Papa Mironopolis not
Speaker 1: too long ago, or emailing with him. Um. What he
Speaker 1: wants to do is a major survey of the site
Speaker 1: in southern Spain, you know, major geophysical survey which has
Speaker 1: not yet been done. Unfortunately that the spot he wants
Speaker 1: to look at is in a nature reserve, well, you
Speaker 1: know Dunyana National Park. It would be like going to
Speaker 1: the middle of uh, you know, Yosemite with a bunch
Speaker 1: of ground penetrating radar and things like that, being like, okay,
Speaker 1: just animals stepped aside for a little while, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be I know that this particular side has also been proposed.
Speaker 1: This is near Cadiz, Spain, has been proposed. Is also
Speaker 1: possibly the side of Tar Tessos the lawsuit. And you
Speaker 1: talked to one academic who claimed that a massive tsunami
Speaker 1: had wiped out this city, which he believes with Atlantis,
Speaker 1: and that there were just tons and tons and tons
Speaker 1: of like stones and stone blocks from the city in
Speaker 1: the ocean. That it true or is that did he
Speaker 1: just kind of make no? I think I think that
Speaker 1: was exaggerated. That was a TV version of events. Um,
Speaker 1: what happened is that a guy came in with a
Speaker 1: TV crew and they wanted, um, a documentary on Atlantis.
Speaker 1: So they kind of took work that one team of
Speaker 1: Spaniards was doing in the area and sort of twisted
Speaker 1: it into this more Atlantean thing that showed up on TV.
Speaker 1: And everyone except the guy who sort of parachuted in
Speaker 1: from the US. Uh was you know, shocked when the
Speaker 1: thing came out there, like, what what the hell is this?
Speaker 1: From your book? I gathered they weren't they weren't too pleased.
Speaker 1: But no, they were not, you know. I mean that
Speaker 1: one of the guys who was with him, this this
Speaker 1: other German named Rhiner Cune. You know, he's he's a physicist. Uh,
Speaker 1: he's got as Berger's so he is like, you know,
Speaker 1: speaking you know, pure truth. He is unable to lie
Speaker 1: about anything. And when I asked him about this, he
Speaker 1: said how did he put He's like, well, they are
Speaker 1: there with the TV crew they can say like the Spaniards,
Speaker 1: Oh look, maybe this was a horse enclosure from the
Speaker 1: fourteenth century a d. No one is going to give
Speaker 1: you money for that. So then they turned to me
Speaker 1: and I say, maybe this was Atlantis or maybe not.
Speaker 1: So they put me on TV for maybe two minutes
Speaker 1: actually I think it was one minute and thirty two seconds.
Speaker 1: So then they turned to the other man and he says, yes,
Speaker 1: this was Atlantis, and I found stones in the water
Speaker 1: and everything, and that is how they make their money
Speaker 1: for the TV show exactly. Yeah, I think Rehner's version
Speaker 1: of events is about as unfiltered as it can get. That. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds about right to me. All Right, So you
Speaker 1: guys have any more you want to talk about. No,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, Mark, we've I know, we we've
Speaker 1: taken up an hour of your afternoon already and don't
Speaker 1: want to take up too much more. Yeah, No, it's fine,
Speaker 1: it's fine. Is so. I mean, we've asked a bunch
Speaker 1: of questions so far, and I think we're kind of
Speaker 1: running through. So just from your perspective, is there things
Speaker 1: about Atlantis or the story of Atlantis that you want
Speaker 1: people to know that that we haven't come up or
Speaker 1: come across so far to in today's conversation. You know,
Speaker 1: I think the thing that is really fun about the
Speaker 1: Atlantis story is that you know this, this is it's
Speaker 1: it's like a puzzle to be decoded, and nobody has
Speaker 1: decoded it. And you know, everybody is so busy coming
Speaker 1: up with these crazy theories about how there was a
Speaker 1: you know, tropical paradise on Antarctica and then suddenly the
Speaker 1: Earth's crust shifted and it was covered by two miles
Speaker 1: of ice um or you know, the world was you know,
Speaker 1: thrown into the orbit of a comment or you know this,
Speaker 1: you know, stuff that people were talking about fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: You know, if you just sit down and look at
Speaker 1: the story and read a little bit about Plato and
Speaker 1: the things that he was talking about, you realize that
Speaker 1: there is it's like a treasure map that no one
Speaker 1: has figured out yet. You know, there's there's probably some
Speaker 1: sort of musical code buried in there. There's probably some
Speaker 1: sort of numerical you know, number of games buried in there.
Speaker 1: There's probably, I would guess, you know, greater than chance
Speaker 1: that there is the kernel of a historic event or
Speaker 1: maybe a series of historic defense in there. So, you know,
Speaker 1: rather than coming at it as I've got an idea
Speaker 1: of where Atlantis is and I'm going to you know,
Speaker 1: sort of retrofit this and look for evidence and cherry
Speaker 1: pick what I want to prove my theory. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: go in there and look at what's there, and you know,
Speaker 1: do a little research. There's a lot to be found
Speaker 1: out about this Atlantis story, and you know, if it
Speaker 1: does turn out to be largely true, it will you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe you know, rewrite a good chunk
Speaker 1: of ancient history and if not. There's gonna be a
Speaker 1: lot of other interesting things to be found in there. Well,
Speaker 1: there's uh, there's certainly no shortage of interesting stuff at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the ocean, I'm sure, because after the
Speaker 1: end of the last glacial period, I mean, the sea
Speaker 1: levels rose hugely, and so there's down there. You know.
Speaker 1: I went up and I talked to the guys at
Speaker 1: woods Hole who you know, found the uh, the Titanic,
Speaker 1: and they're showing, you know, all this stuff that they
Speaker 1: can use. It's like, you know, hey, we have a
Speaker 1: camera that if the water is clear, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we can see a cinder block from a mile away.
Speaker 1: And I said, Tom, They're like, you know, think about it,
Speaker 1: ten thousand years ago, fifteen thousand years ago, sea levels
Speaker 1: are rising. Um, we've already got we know there were
Speaker 1: settlements around the Mediterranean even and you know, look at
Speaker 1: the I can't remember how to pronounce the name of
Speaker 1: the place in Turkey was about ten thousand years go,
Speaker 1: Bigley Tepe or whatever. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, So you
Speaker 1: know we know that there were fairly large settlements, fairly
Speaker 1: large you know, uh structures and things like that. And
Speaker 1: he said, you know, where do you build a settlement,
Speaker 1: a city in the ancient world. You hit it where
Speaker 1: you put it, where a river hits the sea. Well,
Speaker 1: what are the first places to disappear when the water
Speaker 1: starts rising by ten fift you know, a floodplain where
Speaker 1: the river hits the sea. And you know, so many
Speaker 1: of these places have never really been looked at. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, to a really granular degree. Um. And he said,
Speaker 1: I said, you know, well, why don't people do this?
Speaker 1: Could you, you know, could you begin to start to
Speaker 1: think about, you know, where these places might be hitting
Speaker 1: sort of waves me off. He's like, we can start
Speaker 1: tomorrow if we had the money. So it's not that
Speaker 1: these things are impossible, it's just that, you know, there
Speaker 1: isn't the money to to, you know, go around with
Speaker 1: a submarine and look for the lost cities of the Mediterranean.
Speaker 1: But I think, you know, as as you know, the
Speaker 1: price of things fall over time. UM. I think we'll
Speaker 1: keep coming up with interesting stuff that's out there. I hope.
Speaker 1: I think that they're probably if they responded by emails. Ever,
Speaker 1: I think a huge fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles mapping
Speaker 1: the ocean floor could actually find a lot of interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: And and you know, I mean, let's face it, Google
Speaker 1: is going to have to be the one probably to
Speaker 1: do this or someone like that, you know. I mean
Speaker 1: the other problem is that, you know, would what you
Speaker 1: know used to occur to me at three o'clock in
Speaker 1: the morning while writing this book was you know, the
Speaker 1: chances are if there was in Atlantis on the coast
Speaker 1: of the western Mediterranean, you know, it's probably under a
Speaker 1: condo complex or a golf course exactly. You know, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the great mysteries of all time might be
Speaker 1: you know, sitting at the bottom of a landfill in
Speaker 1: you know, the Costa delle Soult. Absolutely. You know. That's
Speaker 1: the sad thing about ancient history too, is you know,
Speaker 1: I've I've studied a little bit of Greek history, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Back in the day, you know, they'd like, you know,
Speaker 1: overrun a city, kill all the men, sell the women
Speaker 1: and children into slavery, and then just as mats of
Speaker 1: the city and destroy it. Yeah. So it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of sad all this stuff that's been just destroyed, and
Speaker 1: it you know, it continues to this day in in
Speaker 1: you know Macco where I went. You know, they're pulverizing
Speaker 1: these ancient ruins to make paint. You know, um in
Speaker 1: Peru where I wrote about Machu Pichu. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a city outside or a structure outside of the city
Speaker 1: of Cousco called Saxa woman that you know, if that
Speaker 1: we're still intact as it was. You know, when the
Speaker 1: Spaniards arrived in fifteen thirty two. The descriptions they give,
Speaker 1: it's like it's like the size of a battleship but
Speaker 1: made of stone. And we still don't know exactly what
Speaker 1: it was there for. But over the next you know,
Speaker 1: four hundred something years, every time, you know, uh, jose
Speaker 1: Blow wants to build, you know, an extension on his bar,
Speaker 1: and he goes up to Saxo woman pulled down these
Speaker 1: nicely cut rocks, carts him off, and uh, you know
Speaker 1: it builds an extension on his house or whatever. So,
Speaker 1: you know, the same thing the Great Wallet's China. That's
Speaker 1: some of the problems, yeah, is that for for centuries,
Speaker 1: local guys have just been stealing rocks right and right
Speaker 1: just to make their house or their fence or whatever
Speaker 1: they needed right. So you know, just to think of
Speaker 1: the things that we are never going to know because
Speaker 1: they've been repurposed. Um, and I'm sure we're doing stupid
Speaker 1: stuff like right that right now, but we just haven't
Speaker 1: realized what it is yet. Um No, I really appreciate
Speaker 1: you taking the time to talk with this. This was
Speaker 1: fantastic pleasure. I love your podcast, and I appreciate you
Speaker 1: know the fact that you guys were able to get
Speaker 1: together on a Saturday morning. Um. I know it's not
Speaker 1: always easy to herd cats, so I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1: We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Speaker 1: And by the way, the book was great. Highly recommend it.
Speaker 1: Meet me in Atlantis. I say it it. You know.
Speaker 1: It did okay in a hardcover, but now that's in paperback.
Speaker 1: It's selling pretty well. What that means, I don't know.
Speaker 1: And maybe you know people who like Atlantis are only
Speaker 1: willing to pay twelve dollars from I could just killing
Speaker 1: you know. We we have about three listeners, so I'm
Speaker 1: sure at least a lot of that mus got to
Speaker 1: buy a copy of the book. I'll check the iTunes
Speaker 1: comments and see that's so. Just so you have an
Speaker 1: idea when we get close, I'll send you an email
Speaker 1: just so you know it's coming out. Oh cool, I
Speaker 1: appreciate that. I so you don't spend an hour and
Speaker 1: a half talking to three Yahoo's and then it never
Speaker 1: goes out. And I mean, you know, you guys are pros.
Speaker 1: You know what to do. Yeah, we're pros, right, you
Speaker 1: trust me if you could, if you know, in like
Speaker 1: the first forty eight hours after a hardcover book comes out,
Speaker 1: you essentially have to agree to do every single interview.
Speaker 1: So do you know how many drive time Yah? Who's
Speaker 1: uh you know I had to talk to about Atlantis? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the questions they're just like level the actually have
Speaker 1: a conversation, you know, did you try on the Bahamas?
Speaker 1: Heard the Atlantis down there really nice? Now they've got that,
Speaker 1: They've got that whole road system down there in the Bahamas.
Speaker 1: As someone who worked on a cruise ship in the Bahamas,
Speaker 1: that Atlantas not nice as it turns out. We hope
Speaker 1: that one gets hit by earthquakes and floods. Yeah, I hope.
Speaker 1: It's so occasionally I do that George Nourry Coast to
Speaker 1: Coast show when it is out, you know, and George
Speaker 1: is actually okay, he's you know, he's crazy, He's like,
Speaker 1: you know, Aliens really coming to take our guns. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, but if he'll allow you to direct the
Speaker 1: conversation back to uh, you know, sort of normal territory.
Speaker 1: And a lot of the times when I do shows
Speaker 1: like that, it's because I always think of like, um,
Speaker 1: you know, have you you ever seen the book Chariots of
Speaker 1: the Gods. Oh yeah, I don't know how much Tony
Speaker 1: O'Connell told me. I heard Ira Glass tell almost the
Speaker 1: identical story. There's so many people who came to things
Speaker 1: like Atlantis, starting out with Chariots of the Gods, and
Speaker 1: then at a certain point they realized that this is
Speaker 1: all a bunch of crap, but it is actually interesting.
Speaker 1: And if you know, if I can find one out
Speaker 1: of ten of those people, uh, you know, then it's worthwhile.
Speaker 1: Then it's worth you know, sitting through the the caller
Speaker 1: Question portion of George Norry's show where it's like, I'll
Speaker 1: leave you one one last anecdote that I hope it's
Speaker 1: mildly amusing. I go on coast to coast for the
Speaker 1: Atlantis book. You know. George is like, well, let's take
Speaker 1: some calls, and some guy comes on and he says,
Speaker 1: I think Atlantis was located in Finland because in the
Speaker 1: Finnish language is a weird it sounds like Atlantis. And
Speaker 1: also it's the same thank you goodbye. The next day,
Speaker 1: I'm on do you know the show, the NPR show,
Speaker 1: What is it on? Point out of Boston? And it's
Speaker 1: a it's a gas host. It's a woman. She's like,
Speaker 1: we're having a really interesting conversation here with Mark Adams.
Speaker 1: He's the author of a new book. Meet me in Atlantis.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take some calls here. Um, I got Bill
Speaker 1: from Wisconsin, the clicks. I think Atlantis is from Finland.
Speaker 1: The weird in the finish Atlantis and it's a team goodbye. Really,
Speaker 1: what I'm learning from this interview is that Mark should
Speaker 1: be a voice actor. This is really what I'm learning
Speaker 1: right now. Yeah, you might have a second career there,
Speaker 1: let's hope. Yeah, I have my founding college. Actually was asking.
Speaker 1: He's like, I think I could get a career. It's
Speaker 1: like a voice actor, you know in video games. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was like, have a plan B, you know, writing,
Speaker 1: follow your dream, but have a plan B always. Now,
Speaker 1: my backup plan is to be a hand model. If
Speaker 1: this Devin's losing it out, He's showing us alright, alright, Mark,
Speaker 1: well again, thank you so much. We really do appreciate it.
Speaker 1: All right, guys, I really appreciate you. Need anything else,
Speaker 1: just let me know, alright, contact or guys. Take care,
Speaker 1: Yeah you do. Bye bye