 Welcome to Paranormal Episode 14. We're going to talk about the Piri race map. I think that's how you pronounce it. We'll have a picture of it on the episode website. I'm sure if you're interested in paranormal stuff or alternative history stuff or ancient aliens, you're going to have seen this map before. But we have with us most of our normal cast, Trey Strickland's with us, Doug Overmire, Brian Goddalla, and Natalina has joined us after an absence. Good to have you back, Natalina. Thank you. People were beginning to wonder, where is she? Well, she's back. So, wonder normal. This time, this is going to be a less technical subject, which I'm sure we're all glad for. But we read several articles. I'm just going to give the titles again, as I usually do. One is by Gregory McIntosh. This is something you can find online. Again, we'll have links to these on the episode page. It's called The Tale of Two Admirals, Columbus and the Piri Race Map of 1513. Now, this is actually a summary that McIntosh wrote of really his book. He has sort of the leading academic work on this particular map. So rather than say, hey, let's read this book for the episode, it was really nice to be able to find a summary by the author of the main points in the book. So the summary itself obviously isn't peer reviewed, but the larger work has been reviewed in peer reviewed journals. And we had two of those reviews. There was a review by Thomas Goodrich in Imago Mundi back in 2001, volume 53, a second review by PDA Harvey in the International History Review, same year 2001, volume 23, number four. So we had two, again, leading experts in cartography review McIntosh's work. So the summary again, just saved us time. And then there were two other articles that we I sent to everybody. One is called The Contribution of Piri Race to Cartography by N. Akmal Ayubi. The Source is the Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 1989. So it's not about McIntosh's work. This is about Piri Race in general and his map back in 1989. And then lastly, another journal article entitled Piri Race and Ottoman Discovery of the Great Discoveries by Savat. I think you say it's Sucek or Sucek. This is from the journal Studio Islamica, volume 79, 1994. So the sources show us once again that here we have a subject that people out there on the internet, you know, in Christian Middle Earth, as I affectionately refer to it, or just, you know, Internet Middle Earth in general, they see this map referenced in ancient aliens, they hear or they read this map, you know, being talked about on internet websites, again, that cater to, you know, sort of this, you know, weird alternative history or ancient astronaut ideas. So this is a subject that people out there in the hinterlands of the internet think, wow, you know, scholars are just so flummoxed and mystified by this map. And look at this, this great evidence for, you know, either alternative history or Atlantis or ancient aliens, and we got them now. And actually, no, not so much. This is something that's pretty well known in scholarship. For those who are listening that might not know what it is, the Piri Race map dates to 1513. It was discovered in 1929, you know, in a particular palace, the Tupkapi Sarai Palace, when it was being converted into a museum, they discovered this map. It's actually only a portion of a larger map, we may get into that a little bit later. But the map, you know, it's, I'll just give you the size, it's 35 inches high by 25 inches wide, so it's decent size. It has place names on it. It has inscriptions on it. I'm sure we'll be talking about those. And some, you know, once this sort of got out into the wider world, you know, that was the 1920s, you know, give it 50 or 60 years. And it's discovered by alternative, you know, historians, alternative writers, the most famous of which was Charles Hapgood, who came out with a book called Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in 1966. And he popularized this map as, you know, in his thinking, a map of Antarctica before it was ice-covered. And that led to all sorts of speculations like, oh, the original, the original map, you know, must have been written by people from Atlantis or made by people from Atlantis, or they were given advanced knowledge of earth geography, you know, from tens of thousands of years ago by aliens, you know, extraterrestrials are the ultimate source of this. It got picked up by Eric Von Daniken, for instance, again, that as part of his argument for, you know, ancient alien visitations. So this map, again, has sort of made the rounds on the internet. And, you know, we should probably say something about Piri race himself before we just sort of throw it out here topically. His actual name was Muhideen Piri. He was an Ottoman, he was a Turkish admiral, born, you know, scholars disagree, 1465, 1470, you know, somewhere in there. He later gets promoted to the rank of race, REIS, hence the name Piri race. It's a term that means admiral. And he was an Ottoman admiral during this period. He spent a lot of time, you know, sailing in the Indian Ocean in Egypt. Again, if you look at the dates, the late 1400s, the 1500s, this is the age of discovery in Europe. And one of our articles, you know, makes, you know, note of the fact that the Ottomans sort of just poo pooed, you know, discovering other worlds, and they were very insulated, you know, because of the Islamic kind of approach to the world. But here was an exception. And, you know, because he was an exception, he made significant contributions in to his countrymen and also just more, you know, more generally, you know, in the wider world through his own explorations. But throughout his career, Piri race collected charts and maps, and he sketched maps and, you know, islands and coastlines that he visited. He actually assembled a whole collection of them into a book called the Kitab-e-Bahriyah, which is Arabic for Book of the Sea. And in 1526, he presented a version of that book to Suleiman the Magnificent, who was the Sultan who reigned 1520 to 1566. He eventually had a falling out with the Sultan and wound up getting beheaded, which was sort of an ignominious end. And he was almost 90. Yeah, you know, but it's still, again, sort of a, you know, not a good way to go out, I guess, you know, on your own terms or whatever. But, you know, he was well known, you know, highly respected. Again, he runs afoul of the Sultan. They had a, you know, he was accused of betraying the Sultan because of a particular thing he did. But he had a long history, again, an important figure. And we know him because of this map. So with that as an introduction, what do you all think, you know, is this a smoking gun, you know, for Atlantis and ancient alien visitation? And I mean, were you surprised at what you read in these articles or did you have prior exposure to this maplet? You know, feel free, anybody can jump in here and just give us your thoughts. This is Doug. Back in college, I discovered Fingerprint of the Gods by Graham Hancock. And that was not a signed reading. But, you know, just perusing the library. Yeah, I know. Perusing the, you know, the bookstore. And anyway, it really captivated my imagination. And I was trying to, were in that book, you know, it's typical, it's what we wouldn't describe as ancient alien stuff. But he basically, that's where I ran into this map, the first place. And it just says, look, there's a southern continent on the map. But actually, there isn't a southern continent. It's just that South America just kind of at the very bottom of the map, the southernmost part, South America just kind of becomes a horizontal landmass, you know, an east-west landmass. And so people say, well, that must be Antarctica. And I remember reading that Hancock says, this is an accurate map for the landmass underneath the ice, right, underneath the however tall the glaciers or the ice is. And I remember being so impressed by that, like, wow, you know, how could that be? You know, the ice has covered Antarctica since, you know, thousands of years. And it's just, I haven't really thought of it, given that much thought since, but it's just one of those things that people glob onto to support the idea of ancient, you know, ancient aliens or ancient technology. And it's just, it's just not what it is. It's not like you can make any landmass look like any, you know, it's not Antarctica. You know, it doesn't actually look like the landmass of Antarctica. It's in, I think in Macintosh's, the summary, he said, look, you can just sort of jury rig anything on a map. He said, well, the dimensions are wrong here. And this is really a distortion that, you know, they didn't really couldn't correct. But if you change all these things, then it looks just like Antarctica. And it's like, no, it really doesn't. Okay. And you can't change all the things to make, you know, like that's begging the question. If I could, if I could piggyback on just quoting from Macintosh, I've got that he talks about how Hapgood assumed that the original source maps that he was drawing from, okay, resulting from an ancient survey of Antarctica were accurate. So he assumed that the differences between the depictions on the Periris map and the depictions on these accurate, but unknown source maps were the result of copying errors made during the compilation. So, and then he says, with these two basic assumptions, it was an easy matter for Hapgood to move land masses, adjust scales, alter orientations, rearrange landforms, redraw coastlines, twist the geographical depictions and quote correct errors on the Periris map. So yeah, that was really, I thought that was amusing. My first exposure to this, I can remember, was listening on Coast to Coast and back then the Lorely show, but they both had Rand and Rose Flemath on the show. And this would have been late 90s, you know, early 2000s, something like that, talking about Atlantis in Antarctica, you know, and this was the thesis. I mean, and they're still pushing this idea, you know, that here we have Atlantis, you know, beneath the ice, this is the lost continent of Atlantis. Now, that adds an element of sort of bizarreness to it that we could get Atlantis all the way down, over and down, you know, into Antarctica. But, you know, they combined it with a bunch of other stuff about pole shifts and catastrophism and whatnot. But it was my first exposure to this idea, you know, and this map that supposedly was some kind of evidence, you know, for this notion, you know. I remember thinking, well, that's really interesting. Wow, that wouldn't that be something, you know, if this was really like, if you really just sort of were able to take the ice off and look at the continent and it lined up with this thing, you know, like how in the world did you explain that? So I had the same, you know, kind of, you know, I guess, entry point, you know, introduction, you know, to this whole thing. Yeah, this map has been on my radar for years. And I remember being fascinated by it too, because it's all, of course, in the presentation, you know, most people presented it as, well, it's been proven. It's been absolutely proven that this is exactly what Antarctica looks like under the ice. And so, and then from there, it's the speculation of how did they know. There's really not any discussion in any of those forums that maybe that's not even what it looks like, you know. But interestingly, of course, I had to go see, forgive me, I had to go see what the Flat Earthers thought about this. No, we'll edit this out later. I was just, I knew they were gonna have something to say. And although I was surprised, and it made me a little bit hesitant to do this episode, because we might be helping their case a little bit, that I was on the Flat Earth Society forums. And there was a big argument about this map. Everybody was working under the assumption that this map was an accurate representation of Antarctica. So that part they had already settled, pro and con. But the challenge was to Flat Earthers, assuming that this map is correct, it disproves their giant ice wall around the perimeter of the Flat Earth theory, because it seems to depict Antarctica as a continent like any other continent. So the Flat Earthers were having a really hard time explaining that, working under the assumption that this was a that part of the map was accurate. So it was like, shoot, now we're going to prove that that's not true. And they're going to be like, see, but follow the truth where it leads. Yeah, let not your heart be troubled, because the map is well known by people who don't buy into the Flat Earth. So, you know. Well, you know, as an artist for me, I think that one of the more, actually one of the more interesting points that stuck out to me was on an, forgive me for appealing to an article outside of the ones we're talking about. But Michael, you actually had this website on your own on the Naked Bible website or whatever. Diego Cuoghi, he's an art expert. I don't know how to say that name accurately. He's Italian. But anyway, he did an analysis of Periere's map, and he has a lot of visuals, of course, and as an artist. But I think this was said by one of the articles we read, but he actually shows it physically, where the idea that so-called the landmass that goes around and supposedly Antarctica is actually a common thing. First of all, you've got the end of the map. He didn't have any more paper. So, you know, if he wanted to keep sort of showing the rest of the landmass, he had to spin it around sort of thing, twist it around, you know. So, it's actually, you know, he shows how it follows the edge of South America, and it's just been warped in order to fit within the map, which is something that they've done as well, you know. And that to me was the most fascinating explanation for it, because it made sense, and it also visually does actually match. I mean, you know, relatively speaking. Well, we'll put a link to that. He believed in a globe. So, you know, the Ottomans actually believed in a globe. They actually created globes based on his maps, because so, you know, hate to break it to our flatters friends. But I thought it was interesting that the people, they misdrew the southern part of South America, but I thought it was interesting that it was widely believed that there was a southern continent and the ancient world going back to ancient Greece, just because they needed something to balance the globe, balance the earth. And, you know, that makes, I can see the logic, sort of in a pre-scientific era, that, yeah, okay, yeah, there's all these, all this landmass in the north, you probably need some landmass in the south. And so, it was commonly assumed that there would be land. The globe would spin because of imbalance, yeah. Right. So, they made that simple assumption. Yeah, you're right. One of the articles does point out, I think it's the one on the contribution of cartography or something like that. But I don't know, maybe it's one of the other ones. But yeah, I thought that was interesting, too, that they just sort of had this intuition that, well, you know, the earth is a globe and you'd need it to be balanced or, you know, it would just be spinning too fast, you know, it would have some, you know, unfortunate effect. If you didn't have this other continent down there, and they just assumed that, and, you know, maybe not for the right reasons, but they assumed correctly. But that was kind of interesting. Makatash actually says that in his article. Yeah, that's an interesting thought. You know, all of this, I mean, again, not to keep, we don't need to be beating on the flat earth because that horse is already dead, you know, it was still born, I think, but, you know, it's actually a good example of how people can have a lengthy discussion and be so convinced about something without ever looking at data. Yeah, you know, in this case, it's not just them, it's the it's the Atlantean guys and, you know, the ancient astronauts, because another thing that Makatash points out is you have to ignore all of the inscriptions on the map. Right. And you got to ignore the place names. Oh, they're just, this can't be right. We're going to put another one in there or just erase that or forget it. You know, you have to ignore a pile of stuff that's actually on the map, you know, to draw these conclusions. And, you know, the inscriptions, you know, one of them actually identifies the sources that peri-race used. He actually lists them for you. He tells you what he used. And it's like, it doesn't make any difference at all to people who want to use this as a point of evidence for whatever crazy view they're they're articulating. It's like, whatever happened to whatever happened to data, you know, like when did it die? When did it just become a non-factor in thinking? It's, I mean, I've seen it so many times, but it's still just so odd to me. Like, how does a person's mind work where they can just, you know, I'm not going to look at that or that doesn't matter. And in this case, it's right on the map. Yes. And as Brian pointed out, the most popular writing about this being anything other than what it is and what it says it is, is relying on maps that we've never seen and assuming that they were more accurate. And then, you know, the writer uses his imagination, I guess, to correct the Peer Erase map. I mean, it's actually probably of everything that we've discussed, the least based in anything where you could say, well, yeah, I kind of see where they get that, you know, it's literally made up. It's absolute fiction where this comes from, because it relies on something that doesn't exist to prove your point. It's fascinating to me. Yeah, it's not just Paridolia. It's like imagined Paridolia. Well, you know, I think related to the sources, you know, I think one of the things that these reviewers brought out about McIntosh is that McIntosh actually, the new element that he brought in was that he showed how, in particular, the Peer Erase map was drawn from Columbus' second voyage, not his first one, I guess. And so originally, they thought it was the first one, and he kind of showed how it knows based on his second. I don't remember how, but they show some of the commonalities between the two to make that point. And one of them was there's this the island off the coast, Hispaniola, I guess, you know, that it looks the same and has the same orientation as what they thought Japan was, at least on Columbus' map, and they called Japan, I guess, Kipongo or something. And so that was one of the elements they were showing how, yeah, this is how he got it from Columbus' map, because that was Columbus' whatever his original thought. And the idea that Cuba was actually part of the mainland, that's part of that, too. And so he proves that where some of those sources actually drew from. Yeah, he actually has a screenshot that's pretty useful in his summary of Hispaniola and Cuba, again, mistakenly thought to be part of the larger continent. But again, for people who either this is new material to them or listening to this, oh, you guys just hate, you know, the ancient aliens. No, look, look, the place names are actually on the map. I'll say it real slow. The words, you know, Cuba is on the map. Panama, you know, Hispaniola, the Bahamas, you know, they're on the map. So that alone tells you that, okay, we've got, we know what part of the world this comes from. And it ain't Antarctica, okay? You know, and this is again, an older representation without, you know, geographical knowledge beyond, you know, the 16th century of what they thought they were looking at. I mean, it, and, you know, you can compare it like Macintosh does to other maps, he had Portuguese maps and of course the Columbus material, you just know immediately what this is. And then that, you know, for Macintosh and others, it became a question of, you know, what's the chicken and what's the egg, you know, what contributed in what direction and, you know, how did, you know, how do we account for sort of the, you know, the birth of this particular map, but also the development, you know, of the knowledge. I mean, this, if you actually take the map for what's on it, you're not going to go to Atlantis. You don't need advanced alien math or something, you know, you just don't, it, like, like Nat said, it's, it's just made up. I mean, there's really no other way to put it. The idea is just made up. I found myself kind of in awe of these map makers, you know, on their boats and they have a compass. Can you imagine that? I mean, immediately they, it's how impressive are, you know, Columbus gets a criticize so much today, but I mean, man, these guys were really good with just how, how brave are these people? And then they're able to draw a map on from their boat and their compass and, you know, whatever else they used. And even Piri Reese, you know, I mean, this poor guy, he just loved maps and ended up being not a very good military admiral apparently, but he was smart too. I mean, that's the thing. This guy was brilliant and it's, his work has sort of been bastardized to promote something that's not there. Yeah. And that's the end of the show. The one, no, I have, I have a question, you know, a bigger question to throw out then, but the one, I think it was McIntosh again, you know, he talks about, you know, they used a magnetic compass to do this. And then they used the technique of dead reckoning, which I'm, I'm not, I don't sail or do anything like that. So I'm not quite sure, you know, what that is, but I'll just read the Wikipedia thing here. In navigation, dead reckoning is the process of calculating one's current position by using a previously determined position or fix, and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course. You know, not only do you have to be smart to do that, you got to have an amazing attention space. Yeah, do something like that. And, you know, we can look at the results and say, oh, boy, this just doesn't look anything, you know, you know, comparing it, you know, to modern, you know, methods. And now, of course, even, you know, satellites. But I'll tell you what, for them to get anywhere close, you know, just being, you know, on the ground or in the sea and, and this is how they're doing it, taking a point out there in the horizon and then, like, counting and, you know, recording the time and, you know, then when they're on top of a feature trying to represent that in two dimensions. That's just, it's kind of staggering. You know, I agree with you. Like, I mean, if we were just imagine if you got tasked to do this, just as like a science experiment. I mean, really? Yeah, good luck. Right. I'll take the F right here. I don't need the humiliation on top of it. Yeah, it's quite remarkable. So what? Go ahead. Somebody was going to jump in there. Well, I just want to say, I found myself really that that soul crushing sadness. Sometimes you get I found myself really sad reading these articles like, man, how, how, how confused, how wrong people are about this map and how, how what a wonderful tool, this not tool, but what a wonderful snapshot of history. You know, what a memorial. This thing is to so many really brave and brilliant people. And I found myself really sad. And I thought, man, this Charles Hopgood, who sort of popularized it in the, I think, 60s or 50s, that it was, you know, an ancient aliens map, basically. And I was looking at some of the other things that this that he wrote. I didn't know who he was. Charles Hopgood. But I mean, he wrote a book called God Within You, a Testament of Vishnu talks with Christ and his teachers through the psychic gift of Elwood Babbit, voices of spirit through psychic experiences. I mean, so this guy has an agenda, you know, and those are a little bit later after he became sort of popular with this period re-smap book. But his worldview is not a good worldview that maybe we should be paying attention to. But it really does segue perfectly with the ancient aliens and the Graham Hancock and, you know, that that whole perspective that sometimes Christians are taking and trying to run with also. And I think we just need to consider that his perspective is so off. You know, get to the root, like you said, get to the root of it and look at some data points before you assume what he's saying about this map was correct. Yeah, you just have to really, I think anytime you examine something that's presented as a, quote unquote, scholarly work, if you look at, if it points to ancient aliens, if it points to Lemurians or whatever, you can usually back up a few steps. The person who's presenting that argument and find that they had the preexisting worldview of those things. And therefore, what they're pushing will go in that direction. And in your right, Doug, I had the same feeling as I was reading this of like, you know, this age of discovery that that was happening during this time when these maps were being made. And it almost like it almost make it's kind of like a romantic feeling. Like they're just discovering all of these things that were previously unknown. And, and you know, reading about, you know, charting all of these unknown areas and creating maps and then presenting them to the Sultan, you know, just think of what all of the things that these people went through to provide us even now with this information that it was previously unknown. As a side note, I think it was kind of funny because I was reading about these sultans. And I think it was in one of the reviews, but it Macintosh refers to Sultan Selim the Conqueror. And I think it was in one of the reviews where it said that's a bad translation. And actually he was known as Sultan Selim the Grim or the Stern. And that made me laugh for some reason, because history, you know, knows him as a conqueror, but really he was just known for being moody. Man, he didn't appreciate his map. He's like, yeah, whatever, you know, poor guy. My life's work, you know. Well, go ahead, finish that. Oh, just all I was trying to get at was, you know, these are real people who went through like incredible experiences to create these maps and leading up to even being beheaded at 90 years old. And then how flippantly we treat these things. Yeah, it's impossible to appreciate them, you know, and their legacy when, honestly, you take their work and just make nonsense out of it. You know, it, you know, Doug, you know, you said you had, you felt this was a soul crushing experience. Well, welcome to my every week. Because, you know, you, you know, I have to prep, you know, different topics, you know, for this, this video thing that we're creating, this YouTube channel that hasn't debuted yet, you know, the fringe pop thing and, you know, after years and years and years of, of having, you know, my head in this stuff and, and again, this is just another illustration why peer review is so important, you know, that, that there are actually people who spend their lives in an academic sense doing nothing but studying cartography of this period, not just cartography in general, but like, like a few decades in Portugal, you know, I mean, they have literally looked at everything, you know, they've, they've, you know, they've, they've translated all the stuff. There are people out there like that in every discipline. And, and you have to be able to find them. And when people publish stuff, those are the kind of people you want looking at it, you know, to, to say, okay, you got something here or no, you missed this or good grief your way out in left field over here, you know, you, you, you just need people with domain knowledge, really deep domain knowledge to evaluate things. And, you know, the internet just by and large lacks that. So you have, you have all these, you have these, this convergence, this perfect storm of problems. You have people out there studying quote unquote stuff and they are putting forth real effort. I mean, you know, they, they're people who devote a lot of time to studying lots of different things. And they could be hopelessly wrong and never know it because they don't have exposure to, you know, academic material because it's not just released on the internet. And again, you have this maelstrom of factors that just leads to all sorts of craziness and nonsense. And so you get, again, my experience is, I'm not exaggerating, like every week, you know, I'll be looking at one of these topics and thinking, what a mess, you know, I like how there's so many people who are swallowed up in this idea. And many of them are Christians who just take an intriguing topic or a controversial thought, and then they Christianize it, they baptize it, they marry it to the Bible because they think they need to, for whatever reason. And this is actually a good illustration because this is the age of discovery. This is when you're, and by virtue of what Hapgood's writing that fits in very, very well his worldview with theosophy, with spiritualism, you know, with all this, oh, the Eastern mystical stuff is better than the Bible, you know, because that all goes back to the Vedic, you know, translating the Vedic material and finding out that in terms of its chronologies and its king lists, it predates, you know, the Bible and their places here that the Bible doesn't mention. And these places are being discovered. These documents are being discovered. People are being discovered in places that the Bible doesn't comment on at all. And you've got the 17th, you know, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century, you've got 400 years of what in the world do we do with all this stuff? How do we process it? Again, all these discoveries and on one side, you've got people that this is a great time to be alive because I'm going to destroy the Bible with it because the Bible doesn't comment on this stuff. And in the end, you throw in Darwin there too, before Darwin, the birth of paleontology and geology. You throw all this stuff into the blender. And then on the other side, you've got Christians thinking, good grief, I've got to find this in the Bible somewhere to save the Word of God. You know, and it's out of this milieu that you get crazy racial theories. You get lost continent theories. You get lost tribe theories. You get bizarre interpretations of Scripture. You get everything that you have in Christian Middle Earth. Okay, this is the pool from which all of that springs and it just takes different forms. You know, you throw in Lovecraft with horror writing, the idea of other worlds, you know, it's all there. There isn't a single element of ancient astronaut thinking that you cannot find in this period. Not a single one. It's all rehashed stuff and people out there in the internet, they have access to that because it's public domain. They are they're operating from a conspiratorial mindset. Well, we really haven't learned anything new in the last 200 or 300 years. It's all been, you know, it's all been like a conspiracy, you know, to cover up, you know, what used to be now, you know, it's just this weird, you know, amalgamation of, you know, suspicious thinking, poor thinking, lack of data, you know, that's what it is. And at every turn, again, whether it be the flatter thing, the elongated skull thing, I mean, just pick a topic. It's either going to get baptized by a Christian that thinks they need it to preserve the Bible, to make the Bible true in spite of this, or it's going to be used by an enemy to attack the Bible. And that feeds the other side. And, you know, again, welcome, welcome to my world, welcome to every week, you know, in life for me, because, you know, you look at this and you just want to, do I quit or do I scream, you know, what's going to make me feel better? It's, it's, man. Yeah, one of the, one of the reviews said, well, we may have been, you know, maybe we could have been spared the discussion in McIntosh's book about this whole topic, because it's bizarre and unorthodox. The review said that, but I'm thinking, man, I'm glad, it's like experts in the field are annoyed by these, but I'm so glad that McIntosh did not spare us that he went ahead and dealt with the issue just so it could be discarded or dismissed, I should say. And, you know, it annoys scholars, but it's important that this work is important. Yeah, it's easy to make the other decision. I mean, I have had conversations with people where I've asked them, could you like produce an article or a blog post, you know, because they're, again, that they spent a lot of time in whatever area it is I'm asking about. And they're like, dude, you know, this isn't going to count toward tenure. This isn't going to, I mean, this would take me a month or two months to produce. And I've got like four other deadlines or just things that I think are more, and they just don't do it. It's really easy to look at taking the time to address something like this, like McIntosh does when he talks about Hapgood and Eric Von Daniken and all that stuff. It's really easy to just look at that and go, I don't even know where to start. You know, how, how is what I'm going to say here going to really matter? I'm not going to convince any of these people that their worldview is wrong. So why bother? I just have other, I have better things to do. And, you know, I've just, I've heard that, like, in a real time personal conversation, I've probably had five or six of those. And you know what? I understand it. I mean, I don't, I wish the answer was not that answer, but it's hard, you know, it's hard to make the argument to these people that, you know, it really is worthwhile. There are really people, like, there are people in your church that believe this and they have no idea of how flimsy it is and how easily it can be demolished by somebody like you. They have no idea. And if you don't do this, you know, if somebody else might do it, I mean, I might get to it five years from now, you know, but you're going to let people persist in, in either bad Bible interpretation or just plain old nonsense. And, you know, they just, they're not moved. I mean, and, and it's not because they don't, some of them don't care, but most of them do care, but they're like, I can't justify my, this use of my time. Yeah. I feel though that like so many, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. And I think that it seems, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's just because of where I spend a lot of my mental time, but it feels to me like there's something regressive happening in the thought processes of a lot of Christians that is somewhat unprecedented because, you know, we're living in a world where technology and understanding and scholarship is advancing and progressing. And simultaneously there's this regression of thinking amongst the Christians, but I feel like, you know, whatever topic you want to, you want to choose from the list that you just provided, it's willful because just as much as there's horrible information on the internet, there are people like you and like Macintosh and like other people who are scholars who do get sufficiently frustrated to actually, you know, provide real evidence that these theories are incorrect. And that's also available to the public. So for people to cling on to these theories that have no real evidence, I feel like it's willful. And in some respect, there's, there's an intentional blind eye being turned to an opposing viewpoint that's based in, you know, rational thought. And it frustrates me because you see this every single day where people are presenting these wild theories and you present them, okay, well here's somebody who knows a couple things about this, he's actually studied this in an academic arena and here's what they have to say about it. They don't want to read it, they don't want to hear it, they don't want to listen to it. But I think the benefit of it is that for people like us and like, you know, what we do on this show is we are reading the scholarship on it and we're better equipped to come against some of these arguments as they come up because we have, you know, access to that information. But don't you think that sometimes I get, I say like the internet is so full of bad information, no wonder people have these crazy thoughts, but the internet is also full of good information. That's why it's so helpful. Well, I also think that part of the problem is Jordan Peterson, who's a psychiatrist out of the University of Toronto, he's, you know, if you guys probably heard of him, he's pretty big now, but I love the guy. And I think that he talks a lot about the marks of postmodernism in our culture and the effects of it. And one of the things he talks about is how, you know, the essence of, you know, we're in a postmodern culture in many ways. And, you know, one of the essence of postmodernism is that there is no truth, you know, truth is what you create for yourself. And so consequently, the postmodern world elevates narrative as the absolute because there's no truth. So whoever tells the best story wins. And I mean, that's partially true. You know, I mean, we're story creatures, we're narrative oriented, but they focused on maximizing the narrative at the expense of truth and facts, right? And so that's why they're very good at it. And I think that it's affected our world in a very specific way that people, this is what I see personally in the people that I know that are interested in stuff that I think is kind of wacky or whatever. And what I see is they're drawn to, like, they love science fiction, they love, you know, I mean, I know, because I love a lot of fiction stuff, right? But I can see this love for good, great, sensational storytelling. The more it's like a movie, the more exciting it is, which also places us in, and I was just thinking about this today, in fact, just this morning, the predicament of debunkers is we're not sensational, you know, we're crushing things or we're trying to deal, you know, I mean, I think we're trying to deal honestly with it, but a lot of the stuff that is crushed debunking is not as exciting as the science fiction story. And that's the sad thing is, you know, we're in a way, if you if you want to be more rational and more balanced, you're going to be at a disadvantage. And I already feel that way, you know, and it's frustrating because I see I just the way people just eat up these conspiracies, like you're saying, and it's the narrative. It's and I'll admit, the narrative is fascinating, because sometimes I'll listen to some conspiracy theory nuts, and they're very entertaining. And I'll admit, it's much more interesting to hear all the, you know, the connections that they make between, you know, things that aren't connected, you know, it's like, it's brilliant storytelling. And as a as an author, I'm like, wow, that's I hope I can write my novels as good as that, you know, that kind of goes with the Piri Reese and Ottoman discovery of the great discoveries article. That was a long article, not terribly related to discussion in the maps, but it was about why the Christian Western Christian society went into the age of discovery, but the Ottomans chose not Ottoman Islamic culture did not, and also kind of obliquely why the Chinese culture did not. And those are the three great civilizations of the time. And, you know, it's a long article, and you'll have to just listeners who just have to read it. I found it really interesting, the development of universities and, and the sharing of knowledge in Europe, whereas the Ottomans like, no, no, we're going to cling to our values. And initially, when I was reading the article, so my point is that the Ottomans sort of rejected this new knowledge and they just clung to their old values. And while I felt sort of snooty in a way towards the end of the article, I was like, maybe the Ottomans had it right, you know, like, let's keep our solid values rooted in like there is an absolute truth. And whereas Western society has spiraled into there is no such thing as truth. You know, so that's I don't believe that, but it's, you know, we have to sort of tell that our narrative is actually better. And we have to just re re re explain our narrative, the kingdom of God, you know, the advancing kingdom, and that is the ultimate most amazing narrative there is. And that there is there's such a thing as truth that is absolute. And so we need to think better about these idea, these things like the maps and the other topics we discuss, thinking better. It's more satisfying. And I tell you what, it makes living life a little more enjoyable. Yeah, that article appealed to me too. And what I took away from it in the 1400s, the three major groups were the Christian Europe, Islamic Ottoman Empire and the Confucian China. And they all had comparable level of civilization and science technology. But in Europe, humanism and the Renaissance appeared in with that a shift from the primary religious and spiritual worldview, I guess shifted more to a more earthly this world experimental viewpoint. And that's what appealed to me was like this is almost where you can point at a time where, you know, the unknown became the known. It wasn't mystical and and outer worldly and spiritual, it became we could see it and touch it and fill it. And it became more about this world rather than the supernatural. So that was pretty interesting to me. Yeah, it doesn't. I don't know if it helps or harms, I guess, both that, you know, if you if you're in a, you know, an Islamic situation, you know, and the way you know the, well, the sultan isn't just a good illustration. You know, if you stray, if you venture out into the wider intellectual world and you start asking questions and wanting knowledge, well, we know how to deal with you. Yeah, they actually destroyed burn books and things. Really sad. Right. It's not a good thing. Even though the, you know, you can look at the at the goal, you know, they're, they're circling the, you know, the Islamic wagons, you know, so to speak, and they want to preserve their, their culture and their worldview and their faith and so on and so forth. But the human cost of that, both short term and long term is just not, it's not something anybody would, you know, like, look at now and just say, boy, that, yeah, let's do that. You know, I mean, at least anybody who's not a fascist, I guess, but, you know, let's do that, you know, let's, let's control people. You know, the bottom line is you don't have to do that because, you know, in all these changes and the changes we're seeing now, I mean, you're going to have people emerge, you know, with, you know, a Christian with a biblical worldview and they're going to help, you know, people think better and adapt to, you know, to what's true. I mean, if something, if there's, if there's some, you know, point of fact out there, there really is fact, it really does correspond to reality and it's really true. Well, that's not going to, you know, upset the biblical apocard. We need to, we need to change, we need to ask ourselves, well, maybe the problem isn't the Bible. Maybe it's the, maybe the problem is the way I'm thinking about the Bible or I'm thinking about something like, you know, inspiration or I'm thinking about, you know, that's what needs to be evaluated are the way we process, you know, this, this notion, you know, that scripture gives us, you know, how, you know, God gave us revelation. Maybe we ought to re-examine that instead of, you know, throw the revelation out the window. You know, and that's what has happened in the history of the church, but we're seeing, you know, that today where, you know, there is a wagon circling going on. There is a hermeneutic of suspicion everywhere. And on the one hand, oh, it's always kind of been that way. That's not going to go away. But when you start to marry, when you make it an all or nothing proposition, you either, you either circle the wagons or you lose, you know, you lose the faith, you lose the gospel, you know, they just throw the Bible out the window, you know, if it's an all or nothing proposition to me, that's the danger. Not that, you know, you're going to have people not think as well about scripture as they could. What troubles me is just the all or nothing sort of approach that just seems to be gaining headway. You know, and again, that's, I'll grant, that's nothing new either. But because of the internet, because of the social media, you know, we have this instant access to information and instant access to each other. It just seems to be more a higher polarity. I mean, it's, it's a higher polarity, and it's more entrenched. And that's going to create the potential for greater catastrophe down the road. And that's what bothers me. You know, you could have little pockets of this happen, you know, at any given place, you know, in the world, you know, in other eras. But now, you know, we can, we can all communicate instantly. And we, I just got done reading a book that I probably shouldn't have read called The Shallows, what the internet is doing to our brains. And I happened to read that on the heels of Neil Postman's old book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, you know, and another one called The Death of Expertise. I mean, I shouldn't have read this stuff because, you know, it wasn't good for, it wasn't good for my emotional welfare. You know, but, but it's just, you know, we think we're so smart. We have more access to more information at any time in the world. And, you know, all of us read more than any other time in the world. Yeah, you know what we do? We read, we read things that are three or 400 words long. Yeah. And we have lost the ability for linear thinking. We have lost the tension span to really follow a topic in all its points, you know, to go down the river and then go off in the tributaries and come back to the river and keep going. We have lost the tension span. We've lost the ability, literally, to think long and hard about anything. Yeah. And that just isn't good. So we get, we get this suspicion that we're just so smart. Oh, we know us so much. You know, I read, you know, 10 blogs today, you know, yeah, you did, you did, you did, but can you think at all? Yeah. And it even the medium itself is designed to distract. You read a webpage, how many links are in there? You go off and visit here, you visit there, you know, and you never actually finished what you're doing. If you do it, so three or 400 words, wow, boy, that covered it. You know, it's designed to be distracting and it's designed to fragment your mind. And we've got this cumulative effect of that, plus the social media, plus the immediate access. Plus, you know, we're not even talking about TV, you know, this on demand, you know, kind of, and we really are impressed with ourselves. We're a world of experts. And there isn't an expert among us. It's a situation. There's no place to get facts. I mean, you spend most of your time fact-checked, but where do you go to get the facts? It's everybody's opinion. Other website. It's ours. You know, I should be crushing my own soul, not the soul of everybody else. Soul crushing should be a private thing. Okay. But I mean, I, you know, I don't want to rehearse what I said 10, 15 minutes ago, but, you know, it Lord help us, you know, because we're not capable of fixing this ourselves to be just blunt about it. We're just not, we're just not, you know, and the Lord's going to have to do something to steer, you know, steer the ship, put it back on course. And that might not be real comfortable, but we're just not in any shape to do it. And I look at the top like this and boy, yeah, I think it'll be generational. It'll be generated. This is a, we didn't get here overnight and we're not going to fix it overnight. It is a generational problem that requires a generational solution. But, you know, I always, I always think about Christians, you know, the larger Christian world, like, like we, we should be the ones who are leading the way, you know, toward, toward doing things better, you know, thinking better, you know, help, helping people through discovery and technology and science and medicine, you know, all this stuff, we should be at the forefront of all of it. But when you get this circle, the wagons thing, you can miss generations of all. And that, that, you know, yeah, you can emerge with something wonderful on the other end, but you lose generations, you lose people, you know, when you do that. And, you know, again, it's a troubling, you know, sort of thing. But the good news is, you know, hey, the church has been here before in frankly, in worse situations. And somehow, you know, it emerged on the other side. Because our narrative is better. Because our narrative is better. Our narrative is better. And, and there are elements missing from the dominant narratives of today that are just part and parcel of the human heart, the human condition. And eventually, humans will know that they'll detect it, they'll feel it. You know, but again, this is a generational kind of thing. But I'm still stubborn enough to think we shouldn't just be, we shouldn't be surrendering the ground. But we are. But we shouldn't be. That's the torture that I am. You know, here we go. But again, I do look at this topic as just illustrative of kind of the the worst kind of thinking in the worst kind of situation. I didn't know until I read Macintosh's article, you know, I, and some other things, you know, I had an inkling that there's something more to this. And then, you know, when I found Macintosh's book, and then this summary, it's like, okay, this, this would make a good, you know, topic as, as awful as, you know, an illustration, it is because there are other topics we've covered that are like, well, you know, there really is something going on here that's really worth, you know, further inquiry. In this case, no, no, this, this is just, this is nonsense. You know, other topics we've covered aren't, aren't nonsense. There's really something, you know, to, to ponder at, you know, there's, there's this little kernel of something that's really worth putting some time and thought into it. But yeah, this one's not so much the case. But any of you have any parting thoughts to, to cheer me up? Yeah, this is good. I, I, you know, I think that in terms of trying to see, well, what's, what can we do? And I think part of the answer is for us to really, we need to build communities of like-mindedness, you know, because I mean, that's where a lot of this stuff grows, good or bad, you know, it's through communities who share, share the viewpoint and reinforce, model the way that they want to live, you know, and, and which is a, which is another good argument for having a Naked Bible Conference is, you know, for us to, to unite like what we're doing here on the show. But I mean, really seek out community where we can model and reinforce the more deep-minded thinking, the more balanced approach or what have you. And, and, and as the community builds, if we can build that presence, it becomes a voice that can be more effective than just us as individuals. And so that's why you have to have a Naked Bible Conference. To add this one element to it, I mean, you could look around the wider church, you know, where, where they're, they're doing things like that, and they're not cinder and ground. They have good thinkers, you know, but, but this is, this is Middle Earth. This is Christian Middle Earth. And I, I look at Christian Middle Earth and as much as it discourages me on a daily basis, I can't look past the potential. Again, the, the, this is, these are the people in the church that just care about content. And it might be crazy content. Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll grant you that. But they're not just sitting on their butts, you know, and, and totally passive. And it's not a cultural thing. I mean, they, they want something, you know, out of it, they, they want to learn their Bible. There's so much potential here, not only again, to, for people who love content, but actually who want to do boots on the ground kind of ministry, that I can't get past it. I wish I could just look at it and just, I'm done, but I can't. And it's for that reason. So yeah, for what we're doing, and, you know, Naked Bible kind of stuff, you know, this, this is our mission field. I mean, I hate to put it that way, but this is, this is our mission field. It's, it's not one that most are going to bother with, which I think is really unfortunate. But you know what, you know, they're going to do a good work somewhere else. And we're going to try to do something here. You know, I did, we don't know what it'll be. But, you know, that, that's just to get high. That's what floats around in my head, you know, about the whole thing. Well, just thanks again, for everybody for joining us and for slogging through some articles. At least we didn't have to deal with math this time or ignore lots of math and statistics. Nice, nice little break, you know, from all that. But we'll, we'll get together and chat about what we might want to do next. Please, again, feel free to suggest things. But thanks, you know, for, for taking the time and having a discussion.