Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 3: Name is Noel.
Speaker 4: They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 4: super producer Paul Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you are here,
Speaker 4: and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
Speaker 4: to know. Tonight we're exploring a conspiracy theory that believers
Speaker 4: will tell you experienced a resurgence recently, and we'll see
Speaker 4: if that's actually the case. But look, folks, we've all
Speaker 4: heard of lost civilizations like Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis, all the hits.
Speaker 4: But tonight's question, what about the Tartarian Empire? Here are
Speaker 4: the facts.
Speaker 3: You know, we talked a bit about this off Mike,
Speaker 3: and this is not something that I was familiar with.
Speaker 3: I think maybe y'all had delved into this in some
Speaker 3: previous videos back in the day. But Matt, you had
Speaker 3: some strong feelings about this topic.
Speaker 2: Oh man, yeah, uh no, we never covered this back
Speaker 2: in the day. This is fairly recent, like twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: to twenty eighteen. This is I'll just be upfront, this
Speaker 2: is a topic that brings me a lot of personal frustration,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to do my best to be even
Speaker 2: keel on this and really think about it.
Speaker 4: And I hesitated from this topic as well as things
Speaker 4: like Kazarian stuff because of the virulent anti semitism that
Speaker 4: pops up, which I personally find profoundly offensive, but not
Speaker 4: all the Tartarian Empire stuff starts out as an anti Semitic.
Speaker 4: The phrase may sound unfamiliar or anachronistic to a lot
Speaker 4: of people the modern day, probably the mainstream, but a
Speaker 4: few centuries ago, the phrase, or some derivation thereof, was
Speaker 4: pretty common in the West. When Europeans heard the word
Speaker 4: tartary for several centuries or one of its many versions
Speaker 4: like Tartaria and Latin tatarre in France and tata in
Speaker 4: Germany and so on, it was a term that had
Speaker 4: this sense of far flung lands, exoticism, mystery. Way over
Speaker 4: in the East, they thought there was a great and
Speaker 4: strange area full of unknown treasures, probably weird animals, great
Speaker 4: terrible warriors, so on and so on. That might seem
Speaker 4: like an overdone opinion in the modern day. But we
Speaker 4: have to realize cartography, the science and art of making maps,
Speaker 4: was still a budding craft at this time. And I'm
Speaker 4: just gonna put it bluntly. Let's pretend I rolled a
Speaker 4: one on diplomacy with this one. A lot of those maps.
Speaker 3: Sucked understandably, so, right, I mean they didn't have mapping technology.
Speaker 3: I mean, well the head like you know, what do
Speaker 3: you call them? Sextants and things like that, and compasses,
Speaker 3: but certainly not any kind of geo location or the
Speaker 3: kinds of stuff we have today, or even more rudimentary
Speaker 3: versions of that. So it's understandable that there would be
Speaker 3: some issues.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, and depending on how far back you go,
Speaker 2: everybody's using different measurement systems. That's so, you know, the
Speaker 2: problem that we have with translation when it comes to
Speaker 2: words also exists when it comes to things like maps.
Speaker 4: Look at the Torah into the Bible, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean, like, look at the idea of spans and
Speaker 4: cubits and shout out to shout out to our Canadian friends.
Speaker 4: I was talking to some Canadian contacts and they broke
Speaker 4: down the weird discrepancies between which measurement systems are used
Speaker 4: for what like, you'll travel several miles to the grocery store,
Speaker 4: but you'll do it at blank kilometers per hour. It's
Speaker 4: just very confusing.
Speaker 3: North of the border, I mean, the rest of the
Speaker 3: world still kind of you know, rolls its eyes of
Speaker 3: the fact that we don't use the metric system over
Speaker 3: here except for certain things. All that to say is
Speaker 3: that discrepancies between measurements is a historical problem that can
Speaker 3: persist to this day. If not on the same page,
Speaker 3: you don't have the same you know, base level, it's
Speaker 3: hard to understand what you're looking at.
Speaker 4: So the point is, because there were not really great
Speaker 4: maps of most places, and definitely no great map of
Speaker 4: the world, entire people were left to largely speculate and
Speaker 4: to attempt to assemble puzzle pieces into a greater hole
Speaker 4: fantasizing we could say about what possibly could be over
Speaker 4: there across the horizon on the other side of the world.
Speaker 4: And at this time I think we should pause and
Speaker 4: shout out other map related conspiracies. One of my favorite
Speaker 4: the puri raised map. We did do a video on
Speaker 4: this back in the day because it's a it's a
Speaker 4: centuries old map that appears to depending on how you
Speaker 4: read the tea leaves appears to describe the coast of
Speaker 4: Antarctica without ice.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, with all kinds of different animal species that
Speaker 2: were hanging out there.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, it's pretty neat one. It's a fun rabbit
Speaker 4: hole to go down. So do check out our earlier
Speaker 4: videos on that. I think we also had an episode
Speaker 4: just on some of those maps in general.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think the most astounding thing about that
Speaker 2: map is that it was created in I think the
Speaker 2: early fifteen hundreds, right, yeah, So if you imagine early
Speaker 2: fifteen hundreds, Wait, there wasn't ice on Antarctica, your brain
Speaker 2: can kind of reel and you can go down that
Speaker 2: rabbit hole of like, well, whoa were they hiding something?
Speaker 3: What's going on? Was this I don't remember the story,
Speaker 3: I'm not aware of it. Was this unknown hoax? Or
Speaker 3: was it? Well meaning? Where did that shake out?
Speaker 4: It appears to it appears to have been made in
Speaker 4: good faith. It was after the journeys of Crystabaul Cologne.
Speaker 4: It comes from. It was drawn on like gazelle skin
Speaker 4: by a professional cartographer. Is also a military man from
Speaker 4: the Ottoman Empire. And the thing that's interesting is while
Speaker 4: this guy appears to be acting in good faith, not
Speaker 4: pulling a hoax. The most historians will tell you that
Speaker 4: European culture at least was not aware of Antarctica at
Speaker 4: all until about eighteen twenty. So this is an interesting
Speaker 4: look at possible discrepancies in the timeline of human exploration.
Speaker 4: And we know real discrepancies do exist. People have gotten
Speaker 4: things wrong. That's not because they were all dunderheads or something.
Speaker 4: It's just because they did not have the benefit of
Speaker 4: all the information people have today. The lack of quick
Speaker 4: communication roots meant trade could be dangerous, unreliable over distance
Speaker 4: rumors for some reason then as now I'll tend to
Speaker 4: spread faster than true accurate information. And as a result,
Speaker 4: Europeans did not have accurate information of this place on
Speaker 4: the map that was just called tartary you would call
Speaker 4: it today we call it Siberia Manchuria, which is like
Speaker 4: northeast China and Central Asia, which is the huge, huge
Speaker 4: inland spot of land that people have fought over for ever.
Speaker 4: So cartographers back in the day in Europe looked at
Speaker 4: what they knew and they said, screw it, let's call
Speaker 4: this whole part tartary, because you know that'll help us
Speaker 4: finish a lot of the map because that's a big spot.
Speaker 2: Well, imagine you have a deadline right from a king
Speaker 2: or something like, we need to have this map by
Speaker 2: this time. You're like, oh, Tartary, just call it Tartary.
Speaker 3: Would they have had knowledge of the different cultures in
Speaker 3: this area at the time or do they just not care?
Speaker 4: Figure, It's a good question. It would have been severely
Speaker 4: limited because for time, the information that would be getting
Speaker 4: was going to be third or fourth hand or outdated,
Speaker 4: or they might speak to someone who traveled some part
Speaker 4: of the Silk Road going through Central Asia. But in general,
Speaker 4: their knowledge was so limited that they just referred to
Speaker 4: the people who lived in this area as Tartars because
Speaker 4: they're from Tartary.
Speaker 3: Well, and also, I mean, like the the map makers
Speaker 3: are kind of probably favoring their own culture, and they're
Speaker 3: looking at their you know, their bosses as kind of
Speaker 3: the bosses of the world, perhaps the.
Speaker 4: Non universe a little bit. Also, they famously at bad teeth,
Speaker 4: which is where the phrase tartar comes from. Nobody fact
Speaker 4: check that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, we have to remember no human
Speaker 2: is perfect, right, So the cartographers at the time aren't
Speaker 2: making perfect maps. Their measurements aren't perfect. The peri Ras
Speaker 2: map that we just spoke about, the big problem is
Speaker 2: that it's probably not Antarctica that is depicted that. Yes,
Speaker 2: it appears that's what Antarctica would be, because of the
Speaker 2: orientation of what they're drawing. I think it isn't it
Speaker 2: south north and South America and then all the way
Speaker 2: down to the tip that's where you see the body
Speaker 2: that is supposedly Antarctica. But it's probably not that. It's
Speaker 2: just somebody got something a little wrong.
Speaker 4: Like look at the scale of these things. So right
Speaker 4: over here, in a big shout out to our friends
Speaker 4: down Under, I have above one of my monitors here,
Speaker 4: I have a full map of Australia, and it's just
Speaker 4: a map of Australia instead of the world, because the
Speaker 4: representation of continents on a flat surface is still phenomenally misleading,
Speaker 4: you know what I mean. I hate to say it.
Speaker 4: Greenland's not that big goes and the African continent is
Speaker 4: much larger than it is depicted on these flat maps,
Speaker 4: which is why on a globe we're just saying the
Speaker 4: problems still exists.
Speaker 3: It's a two D depiction of a three D problem, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and look, it's still better than nothing. And that's
Speaker 4: what these cartographers were working on too. They were working
Speaker 4: on better than nothing, and they knew that they would
Speaker 4: be able to improve maps as they acquired more information,
Speaker 4: better technology for measuring stuff. This idea, this like four
Speaker 4: point thirty pm on a Friday, energy of we got
Speaker 4: to turn in the map. Let's just call this whole
Speaker 4: third of it tartary. That might sound like they're bad cartographers,
Speaker 4: but the reality is this happened all the time in
Speaker 4: world maps. You look at early maps from again from
Speaker 4: Europeans of North America, and that is way off.
Speaker 3: You guys know what got me excited about the idea
Speaker 3: of maps. I bet that y'all experienced or had experience
Speaker 3: with this too. The book and Chuck Jones movie adaptation
Speaker 3: of The Phantom Toll Booth and the book. There are
Speaker 3: tons of these maps of this you know, crazy world
Speaker 3: of that book, and they talk about cartographers. I think
Speaker 3: that was the first place I ever learned what a
Speaker 3: cartographer was. Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2: If we're gonna go personal, I think we all grew
Speaker 2: up with some kind of map or globe like in
Speaker 2: our house. Maybe that's the nature of having a teacher
Speaker 2: as a parent or something. I had a cousin who
Speaker 2: gave me when I was very young a large, like
Speaker 2: oversized map of the United States, and I just remember
Speaker 2: trying to understand how when you're mapping this thing, you
Speaker 2: get the details on the coast and like imagining someone
Speaker 2: in a ship somehow I guess sketching, right, the intricacies
Speaker 2: of that coastlinelets.
Speaker 3: And all the little jagged little features.
Speaker 4: Right, I thought they used hot air balloons from a
Speaker 4: young age, like the theory about the Osca lines.
Speaker 2: That's brilliant. I never would have even had that thought.
Speaker 4: I was also wrong.
Speaker 3: Well, but to that point though, guys, a lot of
Speaker 3: styling going into these, right, Like these are not intricately detailed,
Speaker 3: you know, accurate depictions of those coasts. It's just sort
Speaker 3: of like it looks a little jagged, you know, this
Speaker 3: far definitely goes out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that's is.
Speaker 2: That true though, or are they actually, like I don't know,
Speaker 2: a cartography.
Speaker 4: The problem is that they're often agendas, so there's a
Speaker 4: lot of nationalism mixed up in this loyalty to king
Speaker 4: and country. That's why Greenwich meantime is in Greenwich, what
Speaker 4: far from the center of modern civilization, to be honest,
Speaker 4: and that's not a ding on the good people of
Speaker 4: the United Kingdom. But what we see is, and this
Speaker 4: will come into play later in the show this evening,
Speaker 4: what we see is, yes, there were agendas at play.
Speaker 4: That's why you look at early maps and you see
Speaker 4: the center of the map is often going to be
Speaker 4: the home country of the photographer. Now that's not necessarily wrong,
Speaker 4: but it does put a spin into the mix, and
Speaker 4: it's a spin that you could have missed back in
Speaker 4: those earlier centuries. It's a spin you could miss today
Speaker 4: when you watch certain YouTube videos, which is peak foreshadowing.
Speaker 4: So not everybody accepted this idea, this explanation that map
Speaker 4: making was an imperfect science back in the day. That's
Speaker 4: why if you ask about Tartary or Tartaria nowadays, you
Speaker 4: will find no shortage of people arguing this was not
Speaker 4: in fact a generic geographic term, but instead it was
Speaker 4: the name of an ancient, powerful empire which has largely
Speaker 4: been erased from history and literally buried by natural disaster.
Speaker 4: What are we talking about, We'll tell you after a
Speaker 4: word from our sponsors, Big Map. Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 4: Strap in we got to introduce you to something called
Speaker 4: the mud flood hypothesis. Who doesn't love an abbreviated rhyme
Speaker 4: like that?
Speaker 3: So, I mean when you say strap in followed by
Speaker 3: the mudfla, it makes me feel like we're about to
Speaker 3: go on a ride at six flags or something that sounds.
Speaker 2: Like it's going to be about of diarrhea.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it makes me think of that plane in
Speaker 4: that sailed to Spain. Another rhyme with just the torrential
Speaker 4: biblical poop crisis. The mud flood hypothesis is what happens
Speaker 4: in our office restrooms, right, But this one is centered
Speaker 4: around the idea that this geographical thing on maps, which
Speaker 4: is true. You can see old maps of plenty that
Speaker 4: say Tartaria or tart Tartary or whatever. The idea is
Speaker 4: that these maps were not describing a general geographic area
Speaker 4: where photographers had limited information. It was instead describing an empire,
Speaker 4: an empire that may have stood for centuries. Increasingly people
Speaker 4: are saying it stood for millennia, spread hudos how far,
Speaker 4: and it at least ranged the continent of Eurasia. The
Speaker 4: borders of it change as well, which is interesting. And
Speaker 4: the further down the rabbit hole you go, you will
Speaker 4: see that this empire, at least proponents of this theory
Speaker 4: believe that before it was destroyed, it had enormously advanced architecture,
Speaker 4: amazing transportation, wireless technology, and technology that doesn't exist today,
Speaker 4: like free energy.
Speaker 3: I mean, it does have a certain gravitas to it.
Speaker 3: The name alone, right, especially when it's just plopped on
Speaker 3: this giant land mass. I could see an initial inkling
Speaker 3: being like, huh, what's this about? This seems like some
Speaker 3: sort of kingdom, you know, like something out of the
Speaker 3: Phantom tot Mooth.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well, well it's just thinking about a flood.
Speaker 2: This conspiracy has flooded social media, and I as as
Speaker 2: more and more people make videos about this on YouTube
Speaker 2: and Instagram and TikTok. That the thing that you're talking about,
Speaker 2: ben at the expansion of the theory itself. It's the
Speaker 2: ones that I'm seeing now are saying it was a
Speaker 2: global civilization, right, cover everything including Antarctica and.
Speaker 4: New Zealand and the Mallori. You were part of it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we'll get to that. We'll get to that later, because
Speaker 4: this is actually a pivotal piece of the turn here.
Speaker 4: So this concept, right, this already doesn't it feel kind
Speaker 4: of familiar to anybody who read about Atlantis theories? Yeah,
Speaker 4: like that's it's like we have Atlantis but at home.
Speaker 3: You know what you know, Ben, You and I just
Speaker 3: did an episode about toilets on Regular's History, wherein we
Speaker 3: discussed how advanced the Roman Empire was and how they
Speaker 3: had all of this poop technology, uh that was then
Speaker 3: wiped out by the fall of Rome. So there is
Speaker 3: historical precedent for stuff being lost to history and buried,
Speaker 3: you know, their advanced civilization. So I think probably there's
Speaker 3: some of that feeding into folks like wanting to believe
Speaker 3: this to be true.
Speaker 4: Sure. Check out our episode on anachronistic technology or lost technology,
Speaker 4: Damascus steel, the Bagdad battery, which is electrolysis kind of
Speaker 4: or electroplating excuse me?
Speaker 2: And how control the historical record?
Speaker 3: How? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Who controls the past? Thank that? Yeah, shout out to
Speaker 4: that one. And we also know that humanity is super
Speaker 4: talented at losing stuff. You know, That's why the city
Speaker 4: of Troy was lost and considered mythical. It can happen.
Speaker 4: These are not coming out of just whole cloth or
Speaker 4: some kind of sudden fictional bout of revelation and epiphany.
Speaker 4: Tartari is currently in the mainstream. It's general or the
Speaker 4: mainstream version of this conspiracy theory says. Look, it's a
Speaker 4: huge part of Asia and Russia up to the Caspian Sea,
Speaker 4: in the Ural Mountains, all the way out to the
Speaker 4: Pacific Ocean, all the way out to Bulgaria. It hits
Speaker 4: the southern borders of China, India, Iran slash Persia. So
Speaker 4: it's not just an advanced empire, but it's an extremely
Speaker 4: large one. And again to your point, Matt, as the
Speaker 4: folklore splinters and evolves in the game of telephone continues playing,
Speaker 4: more and more people will make increasingly extravagant and bold claims.
Speaker 3: I love this idea of wireless technology that certainly would
Speaker 3: come in handy with an empire of that size. So
Speaker 3: I don't know if I buy it.
Speaker 4: Though, Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess just talking to
Speaker 4: people as wireless technology.
Speaker 3: Too, shouting loud enough. Yeah, well, smoke signals is technically
Speaker 3: less technology.
Speaker 4: Pigeons, wireless technology, crows a lot of Actually, most technology
Speaker 4: back then was wireless because they hadn't invented wires either.
Speaker 3: Not to mention that who was it it was like
Speaker 3: the seed of bluetooth technology was actually invented by like
Speaker 3: an actor of a woman whose name is totally is
Speaker 3: giving me now, in like the twenties or something like that.
Speaker 3: It was long ago and the seed that led to
Speaker 3: ultimately bluetooth technology was invented way before anyone figured out
Speaker 3: quite what to do with it, just just.
Speaker 4: Saying yeah, and this this happens pretty often. It was
Speaker 4: heady Lamar, that's right, right, this Happenstarion. Yes, of course
Speaker 4: check out my YouTube videos, bro, but actually no, do
Speaker 4: check out our YouTube channel. We promise it's a little
Speaker 4: bit different from this stuff, although in stuff they don't
Speaker 4: want you to know, not not tooting our own Eldridge horn.
Speaker 4: I think you can find some precedents for format of
Speaker 4: a lot of these videos, quite honest with you. But
Speaker 4: before we dive deeper into the mud, we got to
Speaker 4: ask ourselves logically, all right, there's this huge thing. It's
Speaker 4: the biggest thing ever. They're super advanced. They're all over
Speaker 4: at least Eurasia, if not the world. They're running stuff.
Speaker 4: They're in the catbird seed of civilization. But what happened
Speaker 4: to them? This is where the mud flood idea comes
Speaker 4: into play, which very interesting. How would we describe that
Speaker 4: in like a high level term mud flood hypothesis?
Speaker 2: Well, you have to explain, how in the heck did
Speaker 2: this giant civilization with all this intense architecture that we
Speaker 2: haven't even really get fully gotten into the architecture yet,
Speaker 2: how did it disappear? Why is it not in the
Speaker 2: historical record? Well, maybe there was a natural disaster that
Speaker 2: caused all of this stuff not to just be you know,
Speaker 2: the buildings to be destroyed, but the remnants of those
Speaker 2: buildings to be covered up literally in dirt.
Speaker 4: To be literally buried to time. Yeah, that's an excellent
Speaker 4: that's an excellent summation of it. You know. Then there's
Speaker 4: the idea that this occurred in step with two other
Speaker 4: intervening variables. The first is that there was a tremendous war.
Speaker 4: Either sometimes it's called an internal war. Sometimes it's more
Speaker 4: of a tartaria versus everybody on the planet war. But
Speaker 4: either way, the idea is that this ancient war involved
Speaker 4: the equivalent of what we would call modern energy weapons
Speaker 4: or nuclear power, or possibly technology is still not possessed
Speaker 4: by modern nations today. This is similar to the idea
Speaker 4: that ancient Vedic text described nuclear war, so it's pulling
Speaker 4: from that as well.
Speaker 2: But you'll often hear about frequency tools and weapons like
Speaker 2: that can somehow lock into the well. I forget some
Speaker 2: of the terminology that's used in these, but you levitate
Speaker 2: things by shooting sound at large objects and things like that.
Speaker 3: And this is the same kind of stuff that comes
Speaker 3: up about Atlantis too, that they had like advanced weaponry
Speaker 3: and potential technology that doesn't exist. I think it's he
Speaker 3: can't ignore the parallels.
Speaker 4: And along the way you'll see, folks, we're pulling out
Speaker 4: pre existing pieces of other conspiratorial beliefs or alternative revisionist
Speaker 4: slash pseudo history. The big thing is to a point
Speaker 4: you were talking about earlier, Matt. Proponents of the Tartaria
Speaker 4: Empire conspiracy will often also accuse other civilizations of actively
Speaker 4: erasing Tartaria from the history books. And usually though they'll
Speaker 4: be accusing civilizations that are a bit older, but still
Speaker 4: we're around at the time photography was invented or went mainstream,
Speaker 4: because the proof is in the picture, right, So you'll
Speaker 4: see a lot of pictures that purport to pardon the
Speaker 4: alliteration pardon the alliteration that purport to prove this theory.
Speaker 4: That's a heck of a story. That's the tartaria thing.
Speaker 4: At the basics. Your mileage may vary. We're giving you
Speaker 4: the factory issue conspiracy, but you need to understand most
Speaker 4: of the videos or most of the stuff you encounter
Speaker 4: arguing that this is true. They're going to have their
Speaker 4: own custom add ons. They're going to talk about vaccination,
Speaker 4: they're going to talk about flat earth. They're going to
Speaker 4: say some pretty screwed up stuff about different ethnicities, religions,
Speaker 4: or creeds, and they're going to say it in a
Speaker 4: feedback loop form, which is very yes, and and we'll
Speaker 4: get to that at the end of tonight's show. But
Speaker 4: why don't we let's look at the proof for this story.
Speaker 4: It's kind of dodgy. We talked about the countless YouTube
Speaker 4: videos bringing up in recent years, and you'll often we're
Speaker 4: not criticizing this, we're describing it. You'll often hear weird
Speaker 4: voiceover describing the conspiracy, accompanied by visuals, often out of context,
Speaker 4: old photographs of people digging through mud to unearth lower
Speaker 4: levels of buildings, or someone pointing to a building that
Speaker 4: like the like the Long Lines building in Manhattan seems
Speaker 4: unusual compared to its neighbors. And then, weirdly enough, you'll
Speaker 4: see a lot of photos of Robert Wadlow, who for
Speaker 4: a time was the world's largest man topic the guy.
Speaker 3: You always see sculptures of at like Ripley's Museums, right
Speaker 3: eight foot one.
Speaker 2: There's a connection here to the Smithsonian conspiracy about giant
Speaker 2: skeletons right right, And the other thing. I just want
Speaker 2: to point out about those videos there. In every single
Speaker 2: one I've seen, there is zero sourcing. So it is
Speaker 2: a person with an opinion about a building, and that
Speaker 2: building looks way too old to be here in the
Speaker 2: center of New York City, or way too different. That
Speaker 2: Long Lines building, like you mentioned, Ben, just sticks out
Speaker 2: too much. There's no way it wasn't here before New
Speaker 2: York City was built.
Speaker 4: You know, real buildings in Chicago, things that have easily
Speaker 4: traceable histories of construction. And then it's often it's often
Speaker 4: also presented in a just asking questions, Oh yeah, you
Speaker 4: know what I mean, Like, hey, hey bro, I'm just
Speaker 4: asking questions.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure that structure was built at the Niagara Falls,
Speaker 2: Like I can't tell, but that looks human made to me.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm asking, maybe Earth is round now, but
Speaker 4: when did that happen? Exactly? So, like when did they
Speaker 4: roll that burrito together? You know it's it's true though
Speaker 4: that hearing spooky voiceover with sinister archival footage that does
Speaker 4: sound familiar to us, very much so, and I even
Speaker 4: feel a little bit like you know, Leaves of Grass.
Speaker 4: Is this amazing, amazing poetic work by Walt Whitman, But
Speaker 4: it also gave birth to a lot of terrible free
Speaker 4: verse poetry.
Speaker 2: So is this our fault?
Speaker 4: Is this our fault? It's the question.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: We always wanted to know that we were standing on
Speaker 4: a quantitative, like a substantive series of sources. And these videos,
Speaker 4: to your point, Matt, they're heavy on good storytelling. Honestly,
Speaker 4: they're just very light on solid, much needed context, Like
Speaker 4: we were talking about this off air. They'll point to
Speaker 4: CIA documents from the nineteen fifties that were declassified after
Speaker 4: the Cold War, but at the time there were secret
Speaker 4: documents studying this efforts of Soviet Russia to yes erase cultures,
Speaker 4: to rename areas, to do the same thing that allegedly
Speaker 4: happened to the Tartarian Empire. And these are presentatives, smoking
Speaker 4: gun level proof. There's a little bit of truth to it,
Speaker 4: you know, Nola, you were talking about different etymological roots.
Speaker 4: We love etymology here. But you'll see CIA docs that
Speaker 4: are declassified that are available on the websites or on
Speaker 4: the official CIO website right now that say things like
Speaker 4: the Khanate of Kason was named Tartar stunt, it was
Speaker 4: a republic of the Russian Federation and then it wasn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there, So you show video of that document
Speaker 2: right just to still image of that document, and you
Speaker 2: sit there and you talk about it for a while,
Speaker 2: you analyze it without any other context. For a viewer
Speaker 2: who might be leaning towards wold, there might be something here.
Speaker 2: It feels astounding and real and definitely proof.
Speaker 4: As long as you don't read pass the headline. And
Speaker 4: you know that's we got to be honest. We said
Speaker 4: it before. There are a lot of hard working people
Speaker 4: in those organizations, but they're not often hired for their
Speaker 4: sexy writing skill. The format of these documents is not
Speaker 4: you know, is not purple prose page turning stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and speaking of the etymological twists, I guess I
Speaker 3: think we're all kind of like dogs with bones when
Speaker 3: it comes to this kind of stuff. The word tartary
Speaker 3: made me immediately conjure images of the Greek mythological hellscape
Speaker 3: that is tartar Us, and just I found a reference that,
Speaker 3: you know, Europeans, who were largely the ones mapping this
Speaker 3: part of the world, they had negative opinions about this
Speaker 3: part of the world, often tied to the Mongol invasions. Yeah,
Speaker 3: savage is all that kind of stuff, a lot of xenophobic,
Speaker 3: kind of racist, you know, opinions about this part of
Speaker 3: the world and their civilization. So it's almost like they
Speaker 3: were at that are because tatar was one version of
Speaker 3: it that existed prior to this. And then adding that
Speaker 3: r was almost like an intentional way in the eighteenth
Speaker 3: century of conjuring images of hell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, dude, we haven't got to yet. But this thing
Speaker 2: coincides with hollow Worth theories, right and underground civilizations and stuff.
Speaker 2: It's weird how then the words are just matching up
Speaker 2: with the how the theory has evolved.
Speaker 4: It all goes together. It's like a girl talk level
Speaker 4: of mixtape. A referenced we care about. But yes, they'll also,
Speaker 4: in addition to these to these ostensible smoking gun level
Speaker 4: proofs from the CIA, they'll also spend some time tracing
Speaker 4: the gradual disappearance of the phrase tartary from maps. So
Speaker 4: in eighteen twenty four you see that there's China and
Speaker 4: there's something called Chinese Tartaria, which is truly north of China.
Speaker 4: Simple enough, fast forward decades eighteen fifty, Mongolia begins to
Speaker 4: appear where Tartaria was, and China expands to become an empire.
Speaker 4: Eventually Tartaria disappears from view, it's no longer on the maps.
Speaker 4: If you are assuming that other cultures are actively working
Speaker 4: to hide the knowledge of some super advanced sci fi
Speaker 4: civilization from the days of YR, then it does seem
Speaker 4: like they're gradually erasing culture. But then if you realize
Speaker 4: that map making kind of sucked for a while, then
Speaker 4: you can view these exact same process as cartographers getting
Speaker 4: better at their craft, you know what I mean. It's
Speaker 4: a bit of a rorshak painting.
Speaker 3: Also, like, I know we're gonna get to more of this,
Speaker 3: but like, show me the fossilized laser gun. Where's that?
Speaker 3: You know? I want to see that?
Speaker 4: At which point there will be a slight matrix dodge,
Speaker 4: which I've done before or too in some things where
Speaker 4: it says, well, there's not proof of that, but what
Speaker 4: about the antiquate therap mechanism and then boom, you gotta
Speaker 4: stock image of that.
Speaker 2: Or or the pyramids at Giza, and the statement is
Speaker 2: always we don't understand what these were actually used for.
Speaker 2: These specific chambers were actually for this, and that's how
Speaker 2: you know they were able to send free energy out
Speaker 2: to the entire area with that singular great pyramid and
Speaker 2: all this stuff, and you know, it's stuff that you
Speaker 2: can't prove, and it's stuff that you also can't in
Speaker 2: the moment disprove, because the argument is always no, but
Speaker 2: that's a lie, like they put that story there as
Speaker 2: a lie to cover up the reality.
Speaker 4: But then yes, naturally, the next step is cool, then
Speaker 4: build it again, or say specifically why it can't be
Speaker 4: done today? Why can't it you know what I mean,
Speaker 4: And let's get let's get some of today's top scientists
Speaker 4: on it, and then the argument will become, well, they're
Speaker 4: not allowed to do it. Oh yeah, yeah, for.
Speaker 3: Some reason, it's suppressed or oppressed.
Speaker 4: And technological suppression is real it very much is. But
Speaker 4: the next thing, the one you see cited the most
Speaker 4: the other the more popular reading tea leaves or rorshak
Speaker 4: interpretation here orbits around. Architecture believers seek evidence for the
Speaker 4: existence of Tartaria in seemingly mismatched architecture found across Europe, Asia,
Speaker 4: even parts of Antarctica are very rural places where what
Speaker 4: the mainstream considers natural geographical or natural geological formations to
Speaker 4: be ancient evidence of large things like now that the
Speaker 4: climate is eroding the natural state of Antarctica and mountains
Speaker 4: are popping up out of the ice. Stuff like that,
Speaker 4: people are going people are going nuts, and no one's
Speaker 4: asking actual geologist about it. So these styles, the architectural styles,
Speaker 4: they argue, are not examples of cross culture pollination, like
Speaker 4: the onion domes that you see in Moscow and Saint
Speaker 4: Petersburg and whatever. Seeing those somewhere else like in the
Speaker 4: Middle East, that doesn't mean those people talk to each
Speaker 4: other and architects traded tips and ripped each other off
Speaker 4: and stuff. That means that they were all built by
Speaker 4: the Tartarians at some point before they were betrayed by
Speaker 4: a conspiracy of lesser later empires. Who struck during that
Speaker 4: biblical level of mud flooding. So they saw an opportunity.
Speaker 4: They hated that Tartaria was great, and for that reason
Speaker 4: alone they sank the empire.
Speaker 2: Ugh, these buildings are just too intricate. Haters for those buildings.
Speaker 1: Haters.
Speaker 3: That's the thing about a lot of these kind of
Speaker 3: like overly oversimplified kind of concepts like this. It totally
Speaker 3: discounts the notion of parallel thinking, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: It's like, no, there has to be there, there has
Speaker 3: to be a connection, it has to be there's no
Speaker 3: other way, there's another way. It's that there weren't you know,
Speaker 3: every idea under the sun didn't exist yet. It was
Speaker 3: early in the historical record. People were coming up with
Speaker 3: stuff at the same time, you know, hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 3: of miles apart from one another, with no means of communicating.
Speaker 4: Right, Like we see this all the time, Like a
Speaker 4: pyramid is just actually a very durable way to stack rocks.
Speaker 4: That's why they stick around longer than towers. So going
Speaker 4: back to the architectural idea here in the Tartarian Empire conspiracy,
Speaker 4: the concept is that there are in general, not a
Speaker 4: ton of different types of architecture. There are only two. First,
Speaker 4: modern architecture described as is brutalist, it's cheap, it's quickly produced,
Speaker 4: it has no personality, and Frank Lloyd Wright is not
Speaker 4: real or whatever. And then there's everything else. Everything you
Speaker 4: think is interesting is actually Tartarian architecture. Anything that looks ornate,
Speaker 4: pre modern, anything that's classical, anything that is an interesting
Speaker 4: Western style. Sometimes it's also applied to non Western structures,
Speaker 4: the taj Mahal, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China. Essentially,
Speaker 4: at some point in the Tartarian Empire conspiracy, they built
Speaker 4: everything that looks cool. Everything that is not cool was
Speaker 4: built by the enemies of Tartaria. You can see this
Speaker 4: as a bit of a broad brush. I, for one,
Speaker 4: think brutalist architecture looks mad cool.
Speaker 2: That's just mean.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's really interesting, and some of it's
Speaker 3: very intricate. If it's you know, it's obviously minimal, but
Speaker 3: it's like minimal maximal kind of it's interesting.
Speaker 2: I don't know, isn't There's some few energy about brutalism
Speaker 2: that I really dig I don't know. It's just that
Speaker 2: coach every geometrical simple structures with class. I don't know, man,
Speaker 2: I mean I'm into it. You guys are familiar with. Like,
Speaker 2: so we're in Atlanta, and if you look at some
Speaker 2: of these really fancy neighborhoods, they'll have a new construction
Speaker 2: that has a house, but it'll have a house that's
Speaker 2: like just rectangles kind of stacked in weird configurations.
Speaker 3: Totally out of place, stick out like a sore thumb
Speaker 3: amongst the old classic, you know, picket fence type houses.
Speaker 2: Right well, I'm trying to figure out why I'm so
Speaker 2: obsessed with it, Like I love.
Speaker 3: It in some way cool when they make sense, Like
Speaker 3: if you go to like Los Angeles or whatever, and
Speaker 3: you see all these houses in the Hollywood Hills or
Speaker 3: like San Francisco and stuff, they make sense. They're sort
Speaker 3: of like there's a certain continuity to them. But here
Speaker 3: they just feel like some rich person had a bunch
Speaker 3: of money and just plopped one down kind of just
Speaker 3: sticks out like a sore thumb. I don't dislike the architecture.
Speaker 3: I just dislike how doesn't have a continuity to it.
Speaker 3: I don't know, that's just me.
Speaker 4: So we can agree, though, you guys can agree that
Speaker 4: maybe this concept of all architecture being two schools or
Speaker 4: only two categories is a bit misleading.
Speaker 3: It's absurd.
Speaker 2: Yeahulous, I just wanted to know.
Speaker 4: I feel you, man, and it's true. Like there's so
Speaker 4: architecture is like any craft. It is an opportunity for
Speaker 4: creative expression, constrained by common things right function, right function,
Speaker 4: environmental variable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The issue
Speaker 4: is like any other art, architects, construction workers, everybody, they
Speaker 4: came up with multiple answers to this and multiple creative answers.
Speaker 4: So calling it all tartarian architecture feels cool, feel like
Speaker 4: it's part of a global conspiracy that you figured out.
Speaker 4: But it also it's kind of crappy to millions of
Speaker 4: people who worked really hard on expressing themselves or building
Speaker 4: cool stuff.
Speaker 3: It's the same way it feels crappy you to slap
Speaker 3: tartaria on this vastly culturally different part of the world
Speaker 3: with among these borders in that giant chunk on that
Speaker 3: old map, huge differences. There's no you know, singular culture
Speaker 3: in that part of the world. They're all very, very
Speaker 3: different and have their own backstories, and it seems to
Speaker 3: me like a reductive view of racist European map makers.
Speaker 4: Well, it's also you know, we see it again with
Speaker 4: ancient Aliens. There's no way people backed inn could have
Speaker 4: built that. And also I think the phrase mongol horde
Speaker 4: is a little bit of negative pr Although sup were good,
Speaker 4: they did some terrible, terrible, terrible things.
Speaker 2: Can we give one example of the architecture, just a
Speaker 2: one building, right, yeah, just we mentioned the Long Lines
Speaker 2: building right already, the crazy brutalist no window having weird
Speaker 2: structure in Manhattan.
Speaker 4: Right, but nothing sketchy.
Speaker 2: But again that kind of doesn't fit the mold of
Speaker 2: this because it is more of a brutalist structure, more
Speaker 2: modern thing of Singer Building. The Singer Building is an
Speaker 2: excellent choice to think about ben because it's built in
Speaker 2: the super late eighteen hundreds. It only sticks around until
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty seven when it is demolished. It was for
Speaker 2: a time the tallest building in the world when it
Speaker 2: was created, at like six hundred and twenty feet in
Speaker 2: the air. And it seems to fit this mold really
Speaker 2: well of this conspiracy because it was crazy intricate, the
Speaker 2: especially the work on the home thing. Yeah, and the
Speaker 2: work on the outside of the structure. Right, So if
Speaker 2: you behold it from street level there in New York,
Speaker 2: it's this incredible looking ornate thing. But then why was
Speaker 2: it you know, it was the tallest building. Why did
Speaker 2: they crash that thing down after what seventy years?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so a Chicago federal building, which was had a
Speaker 4: larger dome than the Capitol, was raised only sixty years
Speaker 4: after its completion. You'll find people arguing as well, proponents
Speaker 4: of this theory that World War two happened because modern
Speaker 4: powers were fighting over stealing secrets of old Tataria or
Speaker 4: destroying all traces of its existence. So people weren't being
Speaker 4: bombed because world powers were in a war. These places
Speaker 4: were being bombed to get rid of those buildings.
Speaker 2: And that's a theory that goes back to theories about
Speaker 2: the invasion of Iraq by the United States when we
Speaker 2: were supposed to be fighting al Qaeda and terrorism. There
Speaker 2: are so many theories out there about the true reason
Speaker 2: that we.
Speaker 4: Were getting ancient artifacts from the National Museum.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that actually was happening right with the museums
Speaker 2: were rated right, and absolutely integral historical structures were just
Speaker 2: demolished during that war.
Speaker 4: That one theory though the Artifact story just in full disclosure,
Speaker 4: that's close to me because I wrote a pretty good
Speaker 4: sci fi story about no straight up horror story about it.
Speaker 4: But yeah, the idea that there are ulterior motives behind
Speaker 4: these large scale world conflicts, that's not distinct to World
Speaker 4: War Two. It's not distinct to a rock. It's not
Speaker 4: distinct to Vietnam, the Korean War. Pretty Much every war,
Speaker 4: just because of the global toll it takes, is going
Speaker 4: to have numerous, numerous alleged ulterior motives, and sometimes, just
Speaker 4: to be completely freakin' honest, those motives are true. Sometimes
Speaker 4: there definitely are ulterior motives. Like Goddafi was a real
Speaker 4: piece issue way before he ever got deposed, and then
Speaker 4: he started messing with the hegemonic currency of the region,
Speaker 4: which is the French African dinar, right, and he wanted
Speaker 4: to make his own, the African franc and he wanted
Speaker 4: to make his own kind of African equivalent.
Speaker 3: Of the Euro.
Speaker 2: Say big no no.
Speaker 4: It was a big no no, and he can read
Speaker 4: about it. So whenever somebody says, whatever, somebody speaks to
Speaker 4: you in terms of like ideology, the greater good, we're
Speaker 4: doing the right thing. American spirit whatever, not the cigarettes.
Speaker 4: But yeah, those two ask what resources are in play,
Speaker 4: and there's where you'll find the answer. But the problem
Speaker 4: with this architecture too, and the ideas of the war
Speaker 4: well more so in the architecture, is that each in
Speaker 4: every case we have found when you see the photos
Speaker 4: that pop up about this theory, there isn't to your point, Matt,
Speaker 4: there isn't clear sourcing. You can find the providence of
Speaker 4: the photos through something as simple as Google's image search,
Speaker 4: and every time they lead back to clearly explainable, documented things.
Speaker 4: If you go back to the proponents of these theories,
Speaker 4: they may say, Okay, yes, and I acknowledge that that
Speaker 4: part might not be true, that hebro what about this,
Speaker 4: and then you have to go repeat it.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I'm just thinking about the Singer building. You
Speaker 2: can go online right now and see archival photos of
Speaker 2: that building in construction at the time in eighteen eighty
Speaker 2: nine or whatever it was, and you can actually see that.
Speaker 2: But it often it is not enough proof to convince
Speaker 2: somebody that that image isn't fake, right, And it kind
Speaker 2: of makes you question yourself to some extent. I think
Speaker 2: that's why maybe this theory is so attractive to a
Speaker 2: lot of people because it's got that matrix vibe to
Speaker 2: it where it makes you think, oh, well, maybe I
Speaker 2: don't know the whole truth. Maybe they have been pulling
Speaker 2: something over my eyes and I literally am unable to
Speaker 2: see it because of the lens I got.
Speaker 4: And I like this thing. We're going into self image
Speaker 4: because that's going to be very important to the final
Speaker 4: turn of tonight's story. The proving or disproving these concepts
Speaker 4: to it becomes even more tedious. It's like when Hercules
Speaker 4: had to do all those crazy tasks. It is indeed
Speaker 4: a herculean task to try to address each point of
Speaker 4: these theories, because these theories have become fractals. Right inside
Speaker 4: you find a larger pattern associated with another thing, and
Speaker 4: it continues ad infinitum. The more fantastical claims will argue
Speaker 4: Tartaria was home to giants, and then boom, in your
Speaker 4: that's where Robert Wadlow shows up, and they'll say the
Speaker 4: mud flood that wiped wiped out this ancient empire of
Speaker 4: superquol giants was also the basis of biblical flood myths,
Speaker 4: and people have been lying to you about the true
Speaker 4: timeline of human slash giant civilization.
Speaker 2: You haven't even thought about the Nephilim yet, dude.
Speaker 4: Right, you haven't even been by the employee only area
Speaker 4: of the Smithsonian, right, because you don't have the clearance
Speaker 4: to get past the cafe. And that's why, for this reason,
Speaker 4: Tartarian Empire conspiracies as a group have been called the
Speaker 4: QAnon of architecture. Like QAnon theories, this stuff continues to splinter.
Speaker 4: More and more people add their own spins or agendas
Speaker 4: to the modern folklore, and I think that leads us
Speaker 4: naturally to what could be called arguments against Tartaria. So
Speaker 4: maybe we take a break from our sponsor, who is
Speaker 4: of course big mud Flood, and will be back to
Speaker 4: dig into why historians don't believe this. We're back, all right,
Speaker 4: So let's set aside the easily disprovable photographs for a second.
Speaker 4: More proof against this theory or the reasons why people
Speaker 4: who don't believe it say that it's malarchy. First, despite
Speaker 4: rocking this patina of the ancient past, it turns out
Speaker 4: Tartaria and the mudflood is a very recent thing. Brian
Speaker 4: Dunning over Skeptoid says this idea exists almost entirely on
Speaker 4: the Internet, if not entirely the While it pulls a
Speaker 4: lot of ancient stuff or much older conspiracy theories as
Speaker 4: a single consolidated core idea, it only dates back to
Speaker 4: Get This twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, which means that our
Speaker 4: conspiracy to start this little show is older than the
Speaker 4: conspiracy of Tartaria, at least the way it is presented.
Speaker 4: The skeptoid investigation of this is really interesting because they also,
Speaker 4: like we were talking about, using Google reverse image search
Speaker 4: and things like that, they're using They're using Google trends
Speaker 4: to trace the popularity of phrases like mudflood, mud flood theory,
Speaker 4: or Tartaria, and it looks like the Internet overall wasn't
Speaker 4: really responding to this stuff until about December of twenty eighteen,
Speaker 4: which causes Dunning to go see if he can find
Speaker 4: an origin point for all these YouTube videos, and the
Speaker 4: closest he got is he found a one YouTube user
Speaker 4: named Philip Druzenen who had been posting videos about mudflood
Speaker 4: concepts since August of twenty sixty very low viewership at first,
Speaker 4: he keeps doing it. He's in it for the love
Speaker 4: of the game. Right, and he's probably a good faith
Speaker 4: actor too, he's not trying to like necessarily sell a
Speaker 4: book or whatever. And then in December twenty eighteen or
Speaker 4: January twenty nineteen, he got an enormous spike and downloads,
Speaker 4: right around the time the mainstream Internet started saying, tell
Speaker 4: me more about this mud flood.
Speaker 3: Interesting. I mean, it does seem that he was, like
Speaker 3: you said, you know, acting in good faith and was
Speaker 3: maybe even a little confused as to why he all
Speaker 3: of a sudden got this boost in attention.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, And there was other stuff getting real, real
Speaker 2: popular and maybe even kind of connected to this theory, what.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: And for Dunning's part, he is not so much interested
Speaker 4: in why the spike and attention occurred, why this mainstreaming
Speaker 4: occurred when it did, as he is concerned or I
Speaker 4: take it to me fascinated by the crazy growth of
Speaker 4: this theory, similar again to the growth of QAnon, as
Speaker 4: you pointed out, and that I think is what can
Speaker 4: make Tartaria as a concept dangerous because it can be weaponized,
Speaker 4: just like QAnon got started out with asking questions, which
Speaker 4: is what this show is all about, and then led
Speaker 4: to you know, led to people driven to desperation and
Speaker 4: showing up in a pizza place strapped and ready to
Speaker 4: shoot folks. Right, that's the concern people have about the
Speaker 4: leveraging or weaponization of Tartaria.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: That's why you can easily because there's a guy named
Speaker 4: Peter Diddo talks to Bloomberg and he describes Tartaria and
Speaker 4: QAnon as both having cafeteria quality. There's no single authoritative
Speaker 4: voice really, a little.
Speaker 3: Of that makes it together. Got myself a cast role.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, everybody is interpreting images in videos and just
Speaker 2: kind of giving their own spin and what they think
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 4: It's like a CP or house of leaves.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, which again makes it fun when you're in it.
Speaker 2: When you're participating in it, it's exciting you're sharing this
Speaker 2: concept that you've had, right, Oh man, I had this idea.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe people will like it.
Speaker 3: It's it's almost more like being part of a massive
Speaker 3: online game than it is actual research or actual you know,
Speaker 3: like we're being completely non biased about this. You're in
Speaker 3: a community that clearly kind of has an end goal
Speaker 3: in mind, and you're playing along. You know, I mean
Speaker 3: not to disdiminish anyone's you know, internet time or whatever,
Speaker 3: but I think it's easy to get sucked into that
Speaker 3: because it does start to feel like you're playing your
Speaker 3: you're living your own choose your adventure kind of situation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would, I would agree with that, and I
Speaker 4: would expand on it to say that this reminds me
Speaker 4: very much as a new iteration one of my favorite
Speaker 4: games from the surrealist movement, Exquisite Corpse. I write a sentence,
Speaker 4: you write, the next one pass to great, and we
Speaker 4: don't know what story will end up being. I would
Speaker 4: also say that the cafeteria quality in Tartaria is it's
Speaker 4: worse than an actual cafeteria because you don't get to
Speaker 4: just pick from the stuff that's already at the buffet.
Speaker 4: You could bring your own thing from home and share
Speaker 4: it with the class. And that's why you can easily
Speaker 4: find arguments about Tartaria descending into racism, anti semitism because
Speaker 4: of course, as well as Russian nationalism, which is huge
Speaker 4: in this shout out to Phantom time man.
Speaker 3: You can really easily in this scenario end up with
Speaker 3: something that the Zelda games called dubious food.
Speaker 4: Or chunks.
Speaker 3: It's when you're cooking in the Zelda games, and you
Speaker 3: combine ingredients that don't go together, you end up with
Speaker 3: this weird, blurred pile of sludge that they call dubious food.
Speaker 4: But when you try to make a potion blind and
Speaker 4: Skyrim and you get your ingredients wrong. And so this
Speaker 4: is something that's strange because Bloomberg and a couple of
Speaker 4: other investigators not associated with Bloomberg did what we've been
Speaker 4: describing a survey of videos and discussions in various forums
Speaker 4: and subredits and so on, and you see the conspiratorial
Speaker 4: threads all connect, and they all connect with these other agendas,
Speaker 4: other weirdly specific things like if you have you ever
Speaker 4: just had a general conversation with someone and they keep
Speaker 4: going back to a really specific thing, you know, they're like, well,
Speaker 4: you know what, that reminds me of the Byzantine Empire,
Speaker 4: And you're like, really, Tina Turner, all right, bro, walk
Speaker 4: me through it.
Speaker 2: You have some weird combos.
Speaker 3: Ben, remember if this was on the if we was
Speaker 3: on the episode, if it was beforehand. But the idea
Speaker 3: of like, well what about the anti kilar mechanism, Like
Speaker 3: that's unrelated but similar enough to like give my question
Speaker 3: about buried laser guns I think, yeah, it was, it
Speaker 3: was earlier. But it's it's a it's just a tactic.
Speaker 3: It's a it's a rhetorical tactic. You know. It's like,
Speaker 3: I don't really have any proof, I don't have a
Speaker 3: leg to stand on. Let me throw out this diversion,
Speaker 3: you know. And then there's and that's why you will
Speaker 3: see someone come in and say, well, also flat earth,
Speaker 3: don't get vaccinated. That presidential alert from a while back
Speaker 3: turns people into five G zombies. Uh, the banking cartels
Speaker 3: and you know, denial of the Holocaust and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: And you'll even see historical recasting of who who were
Speaker 3: the Tartars, right, that's the billion dollar question. You'll see
Speaker 3: arguments that actually in Central Asia during the times of
Speaker 3: the Mongol Empire, these people were red haired, blue eyed,
Speaker 3: and you're damn sure they were white. So Silk Road areas,
Speaker 3: it goes off the rails or into the mud so quickly.
Speaker 3: I think we could take just a second to shout
Speaker 3: out how Russian nationalists very effectively weaponized this. We did
Speaker 3: an earlier episode on Phantom Time. The idea of phantom
Speaker 3: Time is that several hundred years in the acknowledged mainstream
Speaker 3: timeline of human civilization are totally made up. And the
Speaker 3: implication is they were totally made up as a way
Speaker 3: of downplaying Russia's great role as the global superpower, and
Speaker 3: that all the enemies of Russia, which are everyone but Russia,
Speaker 3: has lied to their children. They're still pretty sore about that. Huh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're pretty sorry about that. Although Putin just went
Speaker 4: out and did some myth busting yesterday, guys. He says
Speaker 4: he he says they got the official conclusion back on
Speaker 4: Pregosian's plane. He said they the Wagner group was on
Speaker 4: the plane. They got drunk, they started playing with hand grenades,
Speaker 4: and they exploded themselves. Cool you that's what he said. Wow,
Speaker 4: he said that, He said they were That's that's his
Speaker 4: understanding of events from.
Speaker 2: Crazy that I could kind of see that happening.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's the thing that so wild. One person's myth
Speaker 3: buster is another myth maker. You know, this is that
Speaker 3: is out of control.
Speaker 2: Just just to stampoot for a second. Did you see
Speaker 2: the footage of him, uh cheers ing with Kim Jong un.
Speaker 2: They both had champagne. Did you see that where they're
Speaker 2: standing together for a photo op. They do a cheers,
Speaker 2: and then they both kind of look at their champagne
Speaker 2: glasses like you drink first, No, no, you drink.
Speaker 3: Somebody should memify that. That's perfect.
Speaker 4: Their lives are memes in the worst way. But if
Speaker 4: we look at this Russian weaponization of Tartaria, than what
Speaker 4: we see is the argument says Tartaria is a real
Speaker 4: lost empire. It's the actual real name of Russia. They're
Speaker 4: trying to hide the true historical glory of Russia from
Speaker 4: the world and from the Russian people. The implication being
Speaker 4: that Tartaria should rise again as what it really is,
Speaker 4: Russia the one global superpower. And so we always have
Speaker 4: to ask questions first, why would world governments cover all
Speaker 4: this amazing stuff up. There's no one answer. It depends
Speaker 4: on which version of the theory or reading on the
Speaker 4: flip side. Why would somebody enter your conversation about Tartaria,
Speaker 4: even if it's just fun, you know, creepypasta speculative stuff.
Speaker 4: Why would they enter that conversation and strongly push for
Speaker 4: one specific point about their own pet theory or belief.
Speaker 4: This teaches us a great deal about the human mind
Speaker 4: and social dynamics. People are not stupid, people are like
Speaker 4: the photographers back in the day, working with the information
Speaker 4: they have the ability or inclination to access. And that's
Speaker 4: why you see, like, Okay, this bugs me, and this
Speaker 4: might be a hot take, but I've seen it happen
Speaker 4: so many times, so many things. This happens in a
Speaker 4: lot of conspiracy theories. There's an attempt to gain community
Speaker 4: as well as, even more importantly, a sense of importance
Speaker 4: or meaning to oneself and one's own identity. That's why,
Speaker 4: you know, somebody in New Zealand says, here's the truth
Speaker 4: about Tataria and the Maori people, right, And I was
Speaker 4: shocked to find that out because.
Speaker 3: I am Maori.
Speaker 4: That's it's similar to so many genealogical groups. You guys know,
Speaker 4: I'm a lungeon. And one of the most weird things
Speaker 4: about that is whenever somebody comes up with a conspiracy
Speaker 4: theory about a real tri racial isolate, their conspiracy theory
Speaker 4: always goes back to And this changed my understanding of
Speaker 4: myself and it turns out that I'm awesome, And that's
Speaker 4: kind of sad.
Speaker 2: What kind of architecture is being hidden up in the
Speaker 2: foothills of Tennessee, man.
Speaker 3: Or there's also the flip side of that, where I
Speaker 3: forget the guy's name, but there's like a PBS show
Speaker 3: where they dig deep into people's genealogy and it turns
Speaker 3: out that my great great grandpapa owned all the slaves,
Speaker 3: and now I'm awful, or at the very least, it
Speaker 3: makes me rethink my whole perception of my family line,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 4: The inclination being hey, internet strangers, Hey, other people think
Speaker 4: more about me, because that's what humans love. They want
Speaker 4: to center themselves, right, It's a conversation is more interesting
Speaker 4: when I feel it is somehow about me says humanity,
Speaker 4: and that's not cool. It's not fun for you know,
Speaker 4: the other people who also exist in the conversation unless
Speaker 4: they can identify with that or they can have some
Speaker 4: sort of buy it if they can yes, and their
Speaker 4: way into saying yes, that's true. And also as someone
Speaker 4: like I'm just making up a weird example like and
Speaker 4: also as someone from as someone from Turkey, this is
Speaker 4: how it applies to me, and so it's it's a
Speaker 4: feedback loop, right, And that's why otherwise completely rational people
Speaker 4: will agree with folks who might be bad faith actors,
Speaker 4: might be paid internet trolls, intruding their communities, then you can.
Speaker 4: If you try to disagree, even politely, you might be dismissed.
Speaker 4: You might be confronted with hostility because you are disincentivized
Speaker 4: from disproving something that is clearly untrue. You are strongly
Speaker 4: incentivized to accept that. And yes, and your own spin
Speaker 4: of new speculation.
Speaker 3: Well, if you're the member of a society where this
Speaker 3: kind of revisionist history is kind of part of the
Speaker 3: ideology of whatever regime is in power, and you go
Speaker 3: against it, you could be killed.
Speaker 2: I mean, I do want to discount this either anytime
Speaker 2: any let's say category or style of video content, audio content,
Speaker 2: as soon as it starts to take off in popularity,
Speaker 2: right and catches fire, there are going to be countless
Speaker 2: individuals who look at that and think, Okay, I'm going
Speaker 2: to make that type of content too, because I can
Speaker 2: probably create a revenue stream for myself. Right sure, And
Speaker 2: it could be and it could not be nefarious in
Speaker 2: any way. It's just, hey, I can actually make some
Speaker 2: money maybe if I make tartarian conspiracy videos, right.
Speaker 4: And if I use chat GPT or another similar thing. Correctly,
Speaker 4: I don't have to write it either. It can just scrape,
Speaker 4: and it can scrape and make more of the same
Speaker 4: of what has already been proven to be successful. That's
Speaker 4: what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: And what you end up with is a giant Internet
Speaker 2: mud flood of videos about tartaria exactly.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, yeah, is it okay if I return to
Speaker 4: the feedback loop because they just want to finish, I
Speaker 4: want to close the loop on this. The reason it
Speaker 4: works is people are strongly incentivized to accept a proposal
Speaker 4: or speculation in this social sphere, and then further you
Speaker 4: add your own, maybe something a little more centered around
Speaker 4: your self image, your pre existing beliefs, your agendas, and
Speaker 4: you do that because you will receive validation, heightened importance
Speaker 4: to the group, and return. It's a dopamine casino all
Speaker 4: over again. And that means that everybody wants their turn
Speaker 4: on the swing, everybody wants their spot on the merry ground.
Speaker 4: So that just increases the speed of the game and
Speaker 4: then soon enough, rinse, repeat and boom. Just like swimming
Speaker 4: away from the shore in the ocean, you might turn
Speaker 4: around and think you were swimming straight, but you realize
Speaker 4: you're miles away from where you began. And that means
Speaker 4: like as much as we love improv online conspiracies might
Speaker 4: require us to trade our yes and for a little
Speaker 4: bit of well, actually, or the Socratic method, you know,
Speaker 4: which is a more friendlier way of the open hand?
Speaker 4: Why is that?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 4: What about this?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 4: And maybe we give in the interest of fairness, because
Speaker 4: again it's a great investigation. I say we give the
Speaker 4: very last word to Brian Dunning. At the end of
Speaker 4: his examination, he asked a great question, why did these
Speaker 4: tartarian giants live in houses and buildings the exact same
Speaker 4: size as ours?
Speaker 3: Mic Drop Dunning?
Speaker 4: Let us know what you think, folks, So we hope
Speaker 4: you enjoyed this. We clearly have some feelings about it.
Speaker 4: We want to hear your thoughts. We want to hear
Speaker 4: maybe the most interesting extreme versions you found. We want
Speaker 4: to hear. Yeah, just let us know what's.
Speaker 1: On your mind.
Speaker 4: Let us know what episodes you think we should cover
Speaker 4: in the future as well. We want to be easy
Speaker 4: to find on the internet. All you have to do
Speaker 4: is go to your local tartarian forum. Kidding Kitdting, I
Speaker 4: think yeah.
Speaker 3: You can find us on x KA, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook,
Speaker 3: at the handle conspiracy stuff on Instagram and TikTok. We
Speaker 3: are conspiracy stuff show.
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