Chris: Dupid banter.
Kayla: There's some word that I say, oh, steez.
Chris: Steez. Yeah, I know.
Kayla: And you're always like, what's steez mean? Steez. What's that? And I've used it a hundred times. And every single time I say it.
Chris: Used to ask, what does it mean again?
Kayla: Are you serious? Are you serious?
Chris: Yes. I don't remember.
Kayla: It's like your style, your ish, your aesthetic, your vibe.
Chris: Your ish.
Kayla: Yeah. Don't know ish either.
Chris: No, I know. Ish is short for shit. Right? Like your. But, like, I don't know. Your stuff. Your ish.
Kayla: Your Steve.
Chris: No sais quoi. I'm Chris.
Kayla: I'm Kayla.
Chris: And this is cult or just weird. Or just weird. And this is a podcast.
Kayla: This is a podcast. You're listening to it. We are on the Internet. Social mediasculturjustweirdmail. Also culturjisweirdmail.com. Also patreon.com. Culterjisweird.
Chris: Culterjustweirdos on instagram. We're everywhere, and we're on Twitter. But I don't know. I mostly just post pictures of our cat there.
Kayla: You do? Or you comment on. You reply to tweets a lot, which I appreciate.
Chris: Yeah, I'm a reply guy.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: That's what makes me a reply guy, right?
Kayla: No, being a reply guy, it's a specific thing. It would be if you. Okay. I'm just.
Chris: Well, you can explain it to our audience. They might not know what a reply guy is.
Kayla: A reply guy is a guy on the Internet, and it's, like, always a guy. And he's got a. He's got something to say.
Chris: Well, I'm a guy that has something to say, so I am a reply guy.
Kayla: It's either, like, when a woman posts something that is, like, either a picture of herself being like, I'm a girl. And then a reply guy will reply with something creepy or weird or just unnecessary, or reply guys are like, well, actually, a lady will post something like, I'm a physics scientist, and here's how the earth works. And then some reply guy will come in and being like, well, I actually. I watched this YouTube video, and the sun spins counterclockwise. So many ways to be a reply guy.
Chris: Keeping it real. Reply guys. Thank you. What if. What if the person is saying, oh, the earth is flat, and the reply guy comes in is like, well, actually, it's like, I.
Kayla: Then.
Chris: So he has to be incorrect.
Kayla: I don't know if he necessarily has to be incorrect, but his approach is incorrect.
Chris: I see. Yeah, that makes sense. So you're saying I'm not.
Kayla: That you haven't become one yet, but there's a still hope.
Chris: Okay.
Kayla: There's still time.
Chris: I'm gonna get us cancelled eventually. I think the idea is, please don't. What you do is you build up your followers to a certain amount, you get famous, and then you say something absolutely dumb fuck stupid. Then you get canceled, then you claim that it's just all of your haters, and then you end up on daily wires.
Kayla: Actually, I have something to say about this.
Chris: Okay.
Kayla: I have something to say about this.
Chris: That you've been listening to. The.
Kayla: What I have to say is that everybody should go listen to the you're wrong about podcast because you're wrong about has. They are currently in the midst of doing a series on cancel culture. They did a very. I just. I feel really akin to the series because they intended to start out with an episode about cancel culture and realized that once you start, like, pulling the thread of it, you have to, like, go back to the dawn of man.
Chris: Measure the coastline.
Kayla: Yeah, they measured the coastline a little bit. They still managed to, I think, be more succinct and clear than you or I would be able to do. But it was basically, well, they're good.
Chris: And we're like, they're professionals.
Kayla: They're still in the midst. But the first. It's a three part series. The first one. The first one is about the political correctness scare, moral panic of the 1990s. The second episode is about the.
Chris: It was like, don't eat my shorts was bad.
Kayla: No, it was when everyone was like, no, sorry.
Chris: It was eat my shorts. Not, don't eat my short.
Kayla: I don't know why you said, don't eat my shorts.
Chris: Jeez.
Kayla: No, no. It was the whole thing of, like, I know that's where Dinesh D'Souza came from.
Chris: Oh, really? I thought he just, like, crawled out of a rock, like, a few years before.
Kayla: He was, like, doing all of the shit that he's doing now. He was doing back when he was, like, in.
Chris: No shit. I do not remember him.
Kayla: All the liberals want us to replace the y in women, and we're all gonna get our heads cut off if we don't do it. Oh, no. Like, literally, that's, like, what people were worried about.
Chris: Wait, was he the one saying that it was like, you spell women with a y, like m y n. I.
Kayla: Can'T say that Dinesh D'Souza is the one who was worried about that. But part of the moral panic scare of the PC situation in the 1990s. One of the things was that like, everyone's gonna force us to write women with a y instead of an e and we're all gonna get our heads cut off if we don't. Like, we're all gonna round it up and shot. Cause you know, cancel culture by the liberals. The second episode is about the Dixie chicks incident with their criticism of George Bush in the Iraq war. How dare they post 911. And the consequences, the very steep and severe consequences that they faced. And then the third one will be about modern day cancel culture scare.
Kayla: And it's just very relevant to a lot of stuff that we've talked about, which I think is interesting because we haven't talked about cancel culture or PC scripts. Is cancel culture occult talked about moral panics?
Chris: That's true. We have.
Kayla: And it's interesting. If you like our podcast, you will like your wrong about. Go check them out. Dude, this is a really.
Chris: We are not getting paid by them. Like what?
Kayla: So I can't tell people to go listen to people that I like?
Chris: No, you can. It's just you're very persuasive. Like you sound like an ad kind of. Not in a bad way.
Kayla: I'm not.
Chris: It just sounds like you're advertising.
Kayla: You pay me to advertise for you, but this is all free, baby.
Chris: Yeah, let's cut that and then send it to them and be like, hey, give us a million dollars and we'll splice it in. Boom. Splice it right back in for our.
Kayla: Listeners who are here to not hear us talk about other people's podcasts, but are in fact here to listen to us talk about cults or just weirds.
Chris: It wouldn't be an episode of Cult or just weird unless we told our listeners to stop listening to us and go do something else.
Kayla: You want to talk for ten minutes about something completely unrelated to.
Chris: That's what we. Oh, well, cancel culture is related to the sh.
Kayla: I meant something additional.
Chris: Well, like Star Trek or some shit.
Kayla: We always talk about Star Trek.
Chris: What else we need to mention? Jurassic park is good.
Kayla: That's always there.
Chris: Bada bing, bada boom. Are we ready to get to the topic?
Kayla: I'm right, I don't have any business.
Chris: Topic of the jour.
Kayla: Pimping somebody else's podcast. Oh, actually, can I pimp another podcast?
Chris: I guess. Are they paying us?
Kayla: No, I just wanted to point out.
Chris: So neither of them are paying us.
Kayla: Just to be clear in the. You're wrong about Cu. There's another podcast hosted by Michael Hobbs called Maintenance Phase, and it's all about debunking diet, culture, myths, and wellness.
Chris: Okay, this one's better. Cause at least this ties directly.
Kayla: And I just wanted to say. I wanted to note that their most recent episode is about the wellness to QAnon pipeline, which I feel like is very much in the vein of our show. And the interview of the show is friend of our show, Mike Rothschild, who you'll remember we had him first before our QAnon episodes. Yes, we had him first after we heard him on another podcast.
Chris: Also, remember, like, were way ahead on Marjorie Taylor Greene. Cause, remember, I was still mispronouncing her name, like, in November. Oh, my God.
Kayla: I know.
Chris: And now she's just like, now media cannot get enough of this woman.
Kayla: I have any word related to her fully blocked and muted on Twitter, so it very rarely gets through for me. And I.
Chris: Smart.
Kayla: I just don't want to know.
Chris: Well, she has a way of barging, banging down doors, if you know what I mean.
Kayla: I did see that. So I do know.
Chris: Okay. But you know, what we said is that. We said we're gonna do stuff less crummy. We did all these episodes on QAnon, which is like, ugh, people getting separated from their families and insurrections sucks. And then we did episodes on anti vaxxers, like, people dying and smallpox and disease and just really bad.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And then you did a nice, fun one.
Kayla: I did.
Chris: And then I was gonna do another nice, fun one.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: Actually, this. So this is still. To me, this is fun.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: That I was gonna do another nice, fun one. I know that doesn't. For you. That doesn't reassure. You'll understand why I said that, but I was gonna do a different. A totally different thing. And actually, this one came across my. I believe it was Twitter timeline. I saw something about this topic.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: And even though I'd already done a bunch of research for the other one, I immediately switched. Cause I was like, oh, my God. Okay, that's awesome.
Kayla: That's how you know it's gonna be a good topic.
Chris: That's how. Yes. Set em up to be disappointed.
Kayla: Kayla, are you saying we're gonna be over?
Chris: Promise, under deliver. That's what I do.
Kayla: That is what you always do, isn't it?
Chris: Yes.
Kayla: So talk a big game.
Chris: Sorry.
Kayla: That's what I intended to do.
Chris: Okay, perfect. Yeah. Just. Just to throw me off. I appreciate that. So since.
Kayla: Wait, hold on. I'm sorry. I have to point out something to our listeners.
Chris: What? Don't. Don't. Please don't point out.
Kayla: I'm looking at Chris's script.
Chris: What?
Kayla: What's going on there?
Chris: What's going on where?
Kayla: You've got one little paragraph.
Chris: Maybe you shouldn't be spying on my script. Maybe you should just let me say things.
Kayla: Usually when you are. I'm just interested that this has me even more.
Chris: I thought you were gonna call out the fact that it's, like, I tried to do this one short, and I think it will be shorter, but it's like, 20, I think, 22 pages. So since this is an audio program, I felt like it would be a good idea today to open the show with just, like, a purely visual element.
Kayla: Great.
Chris: Yeah. We could alienate, like, every single person listening to the show right now, which, I mean, you've told them all to go and listen to a different podcast. It's probably, like, three people left. I just want to hemorrhage audience members. Ideally, I want to have a hemorrhage. Yeah, it's a brain hemorrhage. So how does that sound? Visual stuff.
Kayla: I love visual stuff.
Chris: Great. Let's get started then. Kayla, what I'd like to have you do now is take a look at a series of pictures. I think one of them is maybe an artist's depiction, but either way, series of pictures I stole from online. And then we are going to talk about them. And of course, as we look at this, probably goes without saying, but please feel free to react and describe to our listeners what you are seeing.
Kayla: I would love to.
Chris: Are you ready?
Kayla: Yes.
Chris: That's why the script looks weird.
Kayla: Oh, that's why you got a little baby script there. Okay. I see a big city in there. Big city. Kind of maybe like Venice, but with, like, a forest or something. I have bad eyes, so.
Chris: Oh, okay, well, let me scoot you a little closer.
Kayla: It still looks like Venice with a forest.
Chris: This is the artist depiction one, by the way, this is. Yeah. So it's like a beautiful city.
Kayla: There's like, it literally, it looks like.
Chris: Columns and domed structures.
Kayla: Like, it looks very mediterranean. Mediterranean like, it looks. It looks like Venice next to a small forest.
Chris: What do you see here?
Kayla: Okay, now I see the messiah. I don't know.
Chris: So this is actually. I think this is a real photo that's just been, like, colorized.
Kayla: It looks like we're in the city. It looks like we're in the city that were just looking at.
Chris: It actually, in fact, is. So this is.
Kayla: Okay, so we're inside of the city. And there's, like, beautiful tall tiered towers of white and a dome, and then there's a. I don't. I don't know.
Chris: Well, there's, like, a color burst coming from the background, but that's colorized. Like, that's just to fancify the fireworks.
Kayla: It's like a rainbow of light.
Chris: It's more about. Don't worry about the rainbow and the fireworks. Worry more about the actual edifices upon which you set your eyes. Yeah, well, I mean, how would you describe these? Like, how do these make you feel? These buildings?
Kayla: They look religious.
Chris: Are they. Would you say that they have, like, an aesthetic appeal to you at all?
Kayla: For me?
Chris: Yeah. Do you care for the style of architecture, really?
Kayla: I mean, like, I don't dislike it. It just, you know, it's no Howard Rourke.
Chris: Oh, Jesus. Wrong cult, Kayla. That's on the list.
Kayla: It's no Frank Gehry.
Chris: Well, it's decidedly not modernist, that's for sure.
Kayla: Well, it looks like if you were to tell me that this was, like, a. Like, this had been built last year, I'd go like, no. Yeah, well, this looks like the. Again, it looks like the city of Venice. So it looks like 16 hundreds architecture.
Chris: Yeah. It has some, like, neoclassical look going on because there's, like, colonnades and things like that and the domes. Right.
Kayla: Veronese with, like, some, like, you know, the mediterranean influence. Maybe even some, like, muslim world influence. You know what I mean? Like, Middle east influence.
Chris: Right, right. Some of those, like, mosaic y looking type the patterns. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Different thing.
Kayla: Is this just Venice?
Chris: This is not Venice, actually.
Kayla: Are you sure? Because it looks like Venice.
Chris: It's definitely not.
Kayla: You got canals.
Chris: This is another artist's depiction. Yeah.
Kayla: Canals again, the same kind of architecture. Boats again. Venice. I think this is Venice.
Chris: It's not Venice.
Kayla: That's a thousand percent Venice.
Chris: But look, I mean, this is extravagant. Yeah, very extravagant.
Kayla: That's probably gold. You know, it's black and white, but.
Chris: The rest of this is actually white. This is a black and white photo, but the rest of these buildings are actually white.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: We're looking at now. I mean, I'm not gonna spoil palace in Venice, but it's actually called the white City.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: I'll tell you a little bit more about what it is.
Kayla: This is a real place you're showing me. Is it in Vegas?
Chris: It's a real place.
Kayla: Where is it?
Chris: We'll get to that.
Kayla: Oh, my God.
Chris: But, like, look at that. Yeah, look at that. It's like, it looks like the hermitage, except, like, on the water.
Kayla: Yeah, like, literally. And not on the water, like, on top of the water.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. What about that?
Kayla: Okay, we got big old freaking fountains. We've got obelisks. We've got tall buildings.
Chris: More colonies than you can count.
Kayla: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: And the fountain is just like. I mean, it's like the size of a football field.
Kayla: Puts the Venetian to shame.
Chris: Yeah. It's enormous. I don't even know. This is pathetic compared to the previous photo. I don't even know why I included it. Look at that.
Kayla: That's St. Paul's Cathedral. Basically a gold tower with a dome. That's what it looks like.
Chris: I know. Well, it's. It's cathedral esque, for sure.
Kayla: So whose house is what single person owns all this wealth?
Chris: Look at that one. Beautiful, right?
Kayla: Are those covering up spoilers?
Chris: Just tell me what you. Just tell me about this building.
Kayla: That one's less good. That one looks like it's in New York.
Chris: Well, it's still impressive. It's just not as, like, wildly extravagant. This is not the white city. This is just another building.
Kayla: Okay, is this Bill Gates house?
Chris: What about this? That one's actually in New York City.
Kayla: This looks like if the Venetians built a skyscraper in New York City. Wait, so you're showing me a bunch.
Chris: Of different architects here?
Kayla: Yeah, at different places. So we're not looking at one single city here?
Chris: No, no.
Kayla: Please tell me this is an architecture cult. Please tell me this is a cult of architecture.
Chris: Kayla, what you just saw were photos of some of the glorious cityscapes of an advanced civilization, one you may not have heard of, known as the Empire of Tartaria.
Kayla: Who is that?
Chris: This empire was a multiethnic, vast empire that spanned multiple continents, produced incredible works of architecture, as you can see, and had technology that was way ahead of its time. Oh, and sorry, there's one more key feature of the tartarian empire.
Kayla: What's going on here?
Chris: It didn't exist.
Kayla: So what does that all mean?
Chris: It's not real?
Kayla: Just give us a summary. I need to know, actually.
Chris: Okay, so let me be a little bit more specific, please. The tartarian empire is very real online and very much exists in the mind of its believers.
Kayla: Oh, my God. I know what this is.
Chris: It just didn't exist in the real world, like, say, like the Roman Empire or the Tokugawa shogunate did. It's historical fan fiction. Or in the parlance we've heard before, pseudoscience, pseudo law. Well, this is pseudo history, so basically.
Kayla: A bunch of people saw a bunch of buildings that looked similar and maybe out of place amongst their other architecture and went like, ooh, what if there was a fake culture that made all these things? And then, like, there's a cult about that?
Chris: So that's the entire rest of the episode. Yes. You pretty much nailed it.
Kayla: Really.
Chris: Nailed it.
Kayla: Okay, do I want to go back and dig it out?
Chris: No, no. That's. In fact, I'm not even gonna cut it. No, no. You think I'm gonna cut you making the best prediction ever? Hell, no. That was great. Pseudohistory, of course, is pretty common, right? Like, oh, who really built the pyramids? Was it ancient aliens? Like, we've all heard of that. We've heard of the lost city of Atlantis. That's real big. We've even talked on this show about the lost continent of Lemuria thanks to the Ramtha episode. And then there's, like, all that weird stuff that was on Gaia.
Kayla: Like Lemuria.
Chris: Like Lemuria. So, pseudo history is actually very popular. But what's so interesting to me about Tartaria is how brand spanking new it is, at least, again, to me.
Kayla: Oh, my God.
Chris: The skeptoid podcast did a short debunking episode and found that Google search trends indicate the search terms involved. So things like tartarian empire only started cropping up around 2017, 2018 on Google.
Kayla: Wow.
Chris: And I verified this, too, by the way. It's pretty easy research, but, yeah, if you do look at those. Those trends of search trends on Google. Yeah, it was very recent. It was only the last few years that those search terms start showing up. Now, to be fair, a tartarian believer would counter this and say, well, Tartari was invented in 2017. That's just when people started waking up to the fact that it really existed before, and then it's been hidden since then.
Kayla: Wait, do these people actually believe in it, or are they, like, larping?
Chris: Oh, they believe in it.
Kayla: Wait, wait.
Chris: Oh. Oh, Kayla. No, no, no. I thought it was no Larp.
Kayla: A fun arg.
Chris: No, no. This is a larp in the same way that QAnon is Larp. And many apologies.
Kayla: No, see, when I made my prediction, I thought it was, like, people having fun on the Internet, and, like, well.
Chris: It is that, but I thought it.
Kayla: Was people, like, putting a scout, like, going, oh, these buildings. Wouldn't it be cool if. And, like, let's pretend as if. But you're saying people, because when you were saying, I almost called you, and you're like, when you were saying pseudo history and calling this pseudo history, I was like, well, is it really pseudo history if they don't actually believe it?
Chris: Oh, no, no. They do. But here's the thing. So it's, like, with all of these things where, like, sometimes it's a little hard to tell, like, how much somebody really believes it, you know?
Kayla: Like, and how much of it is a Larp.
Chris: Yeah. And I'm not even sure that, like, they, like, I don't know. Again, I don't want to, like, shit on people here, but I'm not sure with, like, a gun to their head, like, what they would say. For real, you know? Like, I'm not. I'm really not sure. That being said, for the most part, what I can tell is that, yes, this is an actual conspiracy theory that people really do believe.
Kayla: Okay. Okay.
Chris: Yes, this is not an arg. And actually, I even. I have a tangent here. It's not really a tangent. It's just. It's just this disclaimer. The same thing that we've talked about in the show before. We did this with anti vax. We did this with so many others. My aim for this episode is absolutely not to shame any members of this community or make them appear dumb. Dumb. Like, that's. I don't think that's true at all. I hope I can present their beliefs to you without going down that road, because for the most part, I think this community is, like, well, a. Is, like, pretty harmless group of people in terms of, like, what they engage with. And I think the stuff they talk about is, like, super interesting and super cool.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: I don't think the literal elements of it are literally true. And I think it would be disrespectful for any tartarian believing listeners for me to present it as, like, I don't know. Who knows? Maybe it is true. Like, that's not what I actually think. So I think it would be disrespectful for me to waffle on that, but I hope I can still remain respectful to them while presenting what it is I've learned.
Kayla: I'm a little mad. I'm a little angry.
Chris: Why?
Kayla: I'm mad that I didn't know about this first.
Chris: Well, that's, like, we'll get to that.
Kayla: I'm very angry that I didn't because this is, like, right at my alley.
Chris: Listen, Caleb, my very next sentence in the script is part of the fascination for me with this whole thing is how new it is.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: Like, that's part of the fascination. Right. Like, the same thing that you were just saying, I think, like, is what I'm about to say here is that I've always had a bit of a predilection for, like, interesting conspiracy theory stuff. I think we have that in common. Hollow Earth, lizard people, illuminati, freemasons, Jesuits. The storytelling in some conspiracy theories is very compelling.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: And with such a predilection, sometimes you kind of feel like you've heard it all, right. Especially with this show. Especially with conspiracy theories. As you well know, the tropes repeat themselves over and over. So you kind of eventually feel like, oh, it's that one. Okay. Yeah. So that's why I immediately had to click on and read this Bloomberg article when I saw its headline inside the Tartarian Empire, the qAnon of architecture. On YouTube videos and Reddit boards, adherents of a bizarre conspiracy theory argue that everything you know about a history of architecture is wrong, end quote.
Kayla: I just. I love it.
Chris: It's so great, isn't it?
Kayla: I love it so much.
Chris: Isn't it amazing?
Kayla: I want to know everything about it. I believe it now.
Chris: Yeah. Well, I mean, there's definitely. It's like, all these conspiracy theories, there's definitely elements of it where you look at that and like, oh, man, they have such a good point.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: You sometimes do have to, like, check your, in this case, historical trust network to be like, oh, wait, that can't be true. Because sometimes they do present things where you're like, yeah, that is funny. That picture looks weird.
Kayla: I want to know. I want to know everything that they know. Impart the knowledge.
Chris: Well, since one of the things is, since we are privileged enough to have a podcast where we talk about interesting stuff like this, I was able to reach out to the author of said article.
Kayla: Oh, my God.
Chris: And we chatted a bit about Tartaria.
Kayla: No, that's who you were talking to in here. You were talking to a real person.
Chris: An actual person. Yeah, yeah, a real person. Well, he says that he's just a guy on the Internet, but I'm pretty sure he's a real life journalist.
Kayla: I'm sorry. He wrote an article for Bloomberg. Like, that's just not. That's not just a guy on the Internet. They don't just let Joe.
Chris: I mean, actually, he's done a lot more than that.
Kayla: I don't know anything about Bloomberg, but maybe they do let Joe Schmoe, but I don't think they just let Joshmo off the Internet. Right?
Chris: What if it was a guy who's actually named Joe Schmo.
Kayla: That would be the coolest name of all time.
Chris: But he was just, like, the best journalist. Would they let him, you think, if.
Kayla: He were the best journalist? Absolutely.
Chris: Well, this guy's name is not Joshmo. It is Zach Mortis, and he's an architecture journalist based in Chicago. I will link his website in the show notes and probably on our Twitter and stuff like that, since he, like, he actually has too many credentials, really, to rattle off here. And in a bit, I'm going to read you a quote directly from his website as to why he is interested in architecture, because the quote is really great. It's really fascinating. But before we get to that, well, as it happens, he sort of had the same initial reaction to Tartari that I did and that you just did. So let's take a quick listen. First of all, thank you so much for your time and for agreeing to chat with me about this. I really appreciate it.
Zach Mortice: Had you heard of Cartaria and this stuff before my article?
Chris: No, I hadn't. That was the first I'd heard of it, actually. It was, I think I. So I follow a bunch of conspiracy theory type folk on Twitter, and when the article came out, there was a bit of a flurry about it, and that's why I ran. And I was like, wait a minute, I've got to click into this one. And I. Yeah. And I had never heard of it before, and it was fascinating.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, it was totally tabula Rasa for me until it's kind of almost like reaffirming that. Like, we think of the Internet and social media and Twitter as, like, throwing literally everything that exists in the world in your face, whether you want to see it or not, but apparently not because this is a complete blind alley to me. So that's interesting.
Chris: Yeah, it's funny you say that, because that was the exact same way I felt, especially doing this podcast. Like, the point of this podcast is to find stuff like that and like, oh, have you heard about this crazy community? Have you heard about this interesting Reddit thread or whatever? That's like, kind of what we do on the show. And so when this came. Came across to me, I was like, I have not heard of this. This is amazing. Like, it was. Yeah. So I had the same experience. So first things first obligatory question is just, can you introduce yourself for our audience?
Zach Mortice: Sure. Sure. I'm Zach Mortis, and I'm a Chicago based design writer and criticism.
Chris: I did listen to one of the episodes of your podcast just to sort of, like, prep for this a little bit. I just, I love the stuff about Chicago, and I love the, like, specifically, I thought you had a really interesting insight about how Chicago in its, you know, in its attempt to, like, build more modern looking architecture and become more modern, it lost some, also some of its local flavors. So there's like, this. This push and pull there. Yeah. Fanboying out here a little bit. First. I did notice that your last episode was from 2017, though. So I was curious what you're up to these days other than writing Bloomberg articles.
Zach Mortice: Yeah. So I'm the web editor at Landscape Architecture magazine. I'm contributing writer at Bloomberg City Lab, and I write for a good number of design and architecture publications.
Chris: So, yeah, I guess it's just. It's really fun to learn about something brand new for. For everyone, especially, as Zach says, like, in this Internet age where sometimes you feel like a malaise of just, you know, everything's already known about.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Is that sort of how you felt a second ago when you said those.
Kayla: Words, especially learning that it's new and it. But the problem. The problem with all the. What is the problem with all conspiracy theories? I'm just like, what's. What's the seedy underbelly of it? Like, what. What hate is it actually? I mean, it's preaching.
Chris: It's not completely absent, but I wouldn't. I wouldn't say this is a fun episode if it ultimately ended up with, like, a total mess of, like, anti semitic, like, bullshit.
Zach Mortice: Right.
Kayla: That's what I'm worried about.
Chris: So, like, again, like you said, it's a conspiracy. We'll get to that. We'll say we'll get to that. But you might be wondering by now, okay, I said a bunch of stuff about pseudo histories.
Zach Mortice: Yes.
Chris: Showed you those photos. What the heck is the empire of Tartaria anyway?
Kayla: I need to know.
Chris: And if it didn't exist, what exactly were those photos of?
Kayla: Yeah, tell me what the photos were of. I want to know.
Chris: All right, so first, the tartarian empire. What is it? It is a theory on the Internet, primarily Reddit, YouTube, and discord, but also on a site called stolenhistory.org dot.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: I love that title.
Kayla: I love that name.
Chris: I know. It's really good. Yeah. I was surprised. I was like, wow, that belongs to, like, conspiracy stuff. Shit. That's good for them. But theory of Tartaria essentially states that there is a gigantic piece of history that has been purposely erased or hidden from us. And that piece of history is the existence of a vast, multi continental, multiethnic advanced civilization known as Tartaria.
Kayla: See, I love this because I, like, I know about conspiracy theories that are, like their ones, advanced technologies and great civilizations, but that's all, like, Romtha, lemuria, ancient Atlanteans, like, shit we've heard of before this and this. What? I don't know everything about it yet, but this feels like people saw some architecture and made a whole new story.
Chris: Yeah, yeah. They saw. They saw some pretty buildings and were like, hell, no, I love that.
Kayla: That's just like the. It's wonderful what the human brain will do in the face of so much beauty.
Chris: Yeah. That's what it is. It's like, this thing is so beautiful. There's no way that.
Kayla: There's no way it'd just be.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Kayla: There's got to be something shady going on here that. That building is.
Chris: That is literally what the tartarian conspiracy theory is. All right, so as it goes, as theory goes, this empire may have collapsed as recently as. So you were just actually just talking about this ancient civilization. This may have collapsed as recently as a single century ago.
Kayla: Wow.
Chris: Now, as we know, conspiracy theories by their very nature must feature a villain, because otherwise the secret knowledge wouldn't be a conspiracy. It would just be mainstream.
Kayla: Yeah. Why don't they want us to know about Tartaria?
Chris: So, in tartarian theory, it's relatively diffuse. There's not, like, a single person or even like, a cabal. So the villain I've seen most frequently.
Kayla: In the world, it's not NASA.
Chris: It's not NASA, although there's some overlap there. The villain I've seen most frequently invoked is, quote, parasites. And what is meant by that, I believe, is basically the people currently in power stay that way by keeping important historical truths from being known.
Kayla: Well, especially if there's, like, advanced technology that they don't want us to have, because if we all have the advanced technology, then we're lessen, easy to control, and.
Chris: Wow, Kayla, what a great segue. The best way to understand this parasite thing is to look at one common conspiracy trope that happens to be very popular in Tartaria verse, which is free energy.
Kayla: Ooh, is that okay?
Chris: We haven't talked about free energy much on the show before, maybe at all, but this trope is one of the more common conspiracy buffet items that crops up all the time, and it's one.
Kayla: That I kind of believe in.
Chris: Oh, God, Kayla, do we need to have a physics lesson?
Kayla: Yes. No, we do. We do. Because I don't know I'm stupid, but also.
Chris: Okay, but I'm stupid, too.
Kayla: So, yes, we do need a physics lesson because I'm done. I don't. I don't know anything about it, but also, I kind of believe it. I know it doesn't make it. What is it that you believe?
Chris: What is it you think it is?
Kayla: It's not even honestly that I believe in free energy. I think that there's just. I've gotten to the point in my life, and I think many of us have, where we go, like, oh, yeah, the government wants to keep us down.
Chris: Well, but that's the thing.
Kayla: That's where this stuff comes from. Us want us to get that free energy because then we'll be too powerful. But after having done extensive research on the conspiracy theory about there being an existing cure for cancer that's being kept from us, it's a similar thing. It doesn't make any. It doesn't make any sense.
Chris: No, it's not.
Kayla: Especially when you're like, they don't want us to have it. Cause they make more money selling the pills that cure, that fix the symptoms.
Chris: That's literally the same argument for free energy.
Kayla: It would actually be more, and I know we've talked about this on the podcast before, but it would be more lucrative to sell the cure for cancer than to suppress the cure for cancer. So I'm assuming it would be similar for something like free energy or these other.
Chris: Yes. Generally speaking, when one technology comes in that disrupts and destroys the previous technology, it may seem like it's. Like it actually does destroy the industry, but it ends up being more valuable. I think where a free energy person, theorists might, the way they might respond to that is say, well, yeah, that's why they're keeping it down, because, like, you know, ExxonMobil is going to try to prevent, you know, free fusion power from being invented by free fusion power.com. The company.
Kayla: Is that a real company?
Chris: Totally. I just made it up. But what they don't realize is that, like. And what actually, I think even some of us on, like, the environmental left sometimes also don't realize is that ExxonMobil is also putting a ton of research into alternative fuel sources. Like alternative energy sources. Right. Companies like that know that the writing is on the wall with fossil fuels, and they are. And they attempt to hedge their bets. Bye. Putting R and D into those sorts of things.
Kayla: But they have also done suppressive tactics.
Chris: Yes. That's the thing. Our old friend, trust erosion comes back. Right. And that's so free energy is definitely.
Kayla: Back to believing it.
Chris: You're back to believing, okay, well, I'll tell you this, that there's no such thing as free energy because of the law of conservation of energy.
Kayla: It's just, it's just a frit. It's just a saying.
Chris: Well, so, yes, and actually that's another thing that's going to come up later. But when you say free energy, it's not really clear what you mean. Right. Because like, if person a over here in this corner of the Internet says free energy, and this person over here on this corner of the Internet says free energy, they could actually be talking about two just like wildly different ideas. Sometimes people are talking about like, perpetual motion machines. Sometimes people are talking about like, oh, it's the zero point quantum field.
Kayla: Did I ever tell you about how I dated a guy?
Chris: Oh, God.
Kayla: What?
Chris: This is me.
Kayla: It was definitely in the free energy realm, but he thought that we would get to a point. I don't remember if he was like, the government's keeping it from us, but he thought so you know how on Star Trek where they're just like, computer, make me a cake or whatever, and the thing makes a cake?
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: He thought that was like a thing.
Chris: So like the food replicators, he thought that was.
Kayla: But it could be like, is real.
Chris: Now or maybe might be real in 400 years.
Kayla: I think he was saying like, that's gonna be like, it's around the corner and that's, it's gonna like, solve all of our problems.
Chris: Did he mean 3d food printing with like cricket guts?
Kayla: He was like, this is gonna solve our, like the. And it wasn't just food. Cause I remember him talking about energy and I remember him talking about like, nuclear stuff. And I remember him being like, yeah, it's like just around the corner. It's gonna solve all of our scarcity problems. It's gonna solve all of this. That the other. We also believed in the bell curve.
Chris: Oh. Yeah, that's not great. I don't know. Well, okay, so that's. I don't know if. I'm sure there are some members of the community of tartarian researchers that probably also believe in the bell curve. There are probably some, but that was not ubiquitous from what I was able to understand.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: But the free energy thing was pretty well established. I'm not gonna say it was like canon, which I'll get to that a little bit. But that was definitely most of the videos most of the posts I read that talked about free energy, talked about it as sort of like a default with something that was present in Tartaria.
Kayla: Gotcha. I feel like that's also something that present in, like, a lot of atlantean lemurian culture.
Chris: Yeah, it's a common trope. It's a common trope for sure. And one of the words that comes up a lot is antiquitec, which is like, there was this technology that antiquity had that was just so much more advanced than we can ever imagine. And they love talking about the antikythera mechanism because it, like, actually is something they discovered that is highly advanced for what we thought.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: But I mean, a lot of these pseudo history things fall under that same rubric of, like, we just have, like, kind of a poor understanding, kind of almost like a reductive understanding of how culture and technology evolves.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: We think of it as, like, this straight line of progress. And, like, what does progress even mean when you take a step back and think about it? Like, for example, we think of european society was able to overcome native american society because they were further along the progress tree, and so they just killed them all. But, like, they both existed at the same time in history, right? They both had societies and cultures. Like, there wasn't actually a time portal that anybody was jumping back to go to the more, like basic savages or whatever.
Kayla: And it's weird to say, like, because you could kill a bunch of people, right? You were advanced in that way. You were more advanced than a society that, like, took care of each other better or, like, you know, knew how to grow things better. Like. Right. Why is the. You could kill people good. Like, that means you're more advanced, right, exactly.
Chris: And so I think we just. We have that sort of reductive view of progress, right? And so that leaves us open. And I do think that you can. Obviously, you can say so. There are certain trends, right? Like, technological progress is not a fake thing. That's a real thing. But I do think that it is much more wrinkly than we ever really give it credit for. And that's why when we see things like the antikythera mechanism, we go like, whoa, there must have been aliens. That must have been. They must have a free energy, too. And that's not necessarily the case. Right. Well, yeah, I know the government's probably.
Kayla: Hiding it from us, so.
Chris: Yeah, just a minute ago, we mentioned, or I mentioned that there's different definitions of free energy. The idea that I think that I'm trying to present this in the best light for conspiracy theorists that believe in free energy is that there's some technology that can pull energy from somewhere, usually it's the atmosphere, and make it available to every human for basically no cost, right? So I think I've seen analogy like this where it's like, think of a tiny village sitting on the edge of a lake in a river. They would say water. They wouldn't say water. They would say free water, right? Because they just have this abundance of water that is just available to them at all times for virtually no cost, because there's, like, ten people and a bajillion gallons of water.
Chris: So free energy folks invoke pseudoscience and typically Nikola Tesla to argue that we are in a similar situation as the lake people that I just said, but with energy. But the Rockefellers and Standard Oil and ExxonMobil today are keeping this tech hidden from us because it would destroy their businesses. So in this scenario, the energy robber barons are what a tartarian theorist would call parasites, because they're leaching off of society, charging us money for energy that ought to be free.
Kayla: I'm really digging this.
Chris: So this guy, I know you're going to be a full on tartarian by the end of this. So that's a good way to think of the parasites in this tartarian parlance. And they invoke the word parasite frequently to explain other things, like why we don't know anything else about this vast, ancient, advanced society. Advanced enough to, yes, include free energy technology. But anyway, that actually sums up the core thesis.
Kayla: Okay, get into the architecture now.
Chris: Vast, fantastic empire, right? Hidden history. Parasites that are keeping it that way.
Kayla: Got it.
Chris: After that, well, there's, like, a whole slew of other things that their adherents adhere to.
Kayla: I love this.
Chris: But entirely expectedly, it is basically impossible to pin down a set of beliefs that really compromise, like, a core canon, because outside of the things that I just said, there isn't a core canon. As we know, this is a key feature of conspiracy theories. If a new idea weren't a conspiracy theory, then you'd have, like, a body of vetted knowledge, and professional researchers would form around it, tossing out bad ideas and evidence and incorporating good into the accepted body of knowledge. But since that's absent, you sort of wind up with this, like, anything goes smorgasbord of ideas, right? Which makes these things very difficult for outsiders to parse. Look no further than how difficult it was for us to even, like, scratch the surface of QAnon right. And it actually makes things kind of difficult for insiders as well.
Chris: So after watching a bunch of YouTube videos and reading a bunch of threads on R Tartaria, I can say for sure that folks who identify as members of this community do feel straw manned a lot. So, for example, mister mortises article mentions that a small portion of the ideology wades into antisemitism. Because, as you mentioned before, what doesn't? Right?
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So this is simply true. It's not many steps to go from like, parasites are keeping the world changing tech out of our hands to parasites control global banking to parasites that are named Rothschild and Soros. But then I also watched a video wherever the guys are reacting to the article and saying I'm the farthest thing from antisemitic, this article is ridiculous and it's just attacking us.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: And from this guy's other videos, yeah, like actually he just seems like someone who is interested in history and mistrustful of the mainstream vetted narratives. But it's not the article's fault for pointing out that others in the tartarian community hold some of these beliefs. So this feeling that you may have of being straw manned, that comes from accurate reporting on your community, but the community doesn't have a centralized canon. So it's always just kind of feels like you're being attacked for these things that you don't necessarily believe.
Kayla: That's why some of this, some of wading into some of these beliefs as a believer, it can be really tricky because something that I've been thinking about a lot is just the fact that so many conspiracy theories eventually tie on.
Chris: Back to funnel into anti semitism.
Kayla: Jews are controlling the world.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: And the source of all of our problems. And so it does, I think, become incumbent upon us when we are wading into maybe alternative facts or non mainstream stories about our reality. We just have to be aware that we can pass along and we can bolster anti semitic conspiracy theories even if we don't intend to.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: Even if we are not intending to say the Jews are behind the world banking, you do have to examine the tropes behind some of the thinking that you have in some of this stuff and go, am I passing that along? Even though I'm not intending to. Then you also could be doing it without even knowing. Because if somebody somewhere, that's how this guy felt, right? If somebody on Reddit says Tartaria exists because the Jews something, right? And then that goes through the entire vastness of the Internet a million different ways and by the time it gets to you. Yeah, we've whitewashed out the Jews part. That doesn't mean that you're not still passing on that sentiment.
Chris: I feel like there's a whole multi hour podcast just about community self policing, but it is very pertinent to this community because of how new it is. And actually, a lot of the off microphone chat. I've been emailing back and forth with Zach mortis a little bit, and some of the stuff we've been chatting about is how there's this whole. This weird, like, consolidation where it's, like, people believe different things, and then some things are getting reported on, and that doesn't reflect on us very well, and we need to have. So, like, I've actually. I was trying to get in touch with one of the members of the community, and I was unable to do so. And I think it's because they're sort of going through this.
Chris: Like, we need to, like, be careful about what we say to outsiders because we don't want to be misrepresented.
Kayla: Right, right.
Chris: And, yeah, that's. I mean, not to spoil a potential future episode, but, like, remember the brony thing that happened earlier this year with the shooter? Like, they have that community. This is not a brony episode. So I'm not gonna spend 30 minutes describing what they are. There's an online community that should just be about, like, fun, good, nice stuff, but they have, like, a bunch of nazis.
Kayla: No nazi problem.
Chris: They have a nazi problem. And it's sort of, like, well understood. And anyway, that's a whole discourse.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And I'll also say that this is part of what makes conspiracy communities sort of, like, slippery on ramps to radicalization. Because, like you said, sometimes I. You just don't even realize you're being radicalized.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And I actually have a personal anecdote about this. Many years ago, I was down some conspiracy rabbit hole, and I just thought it was, like, the most insane, cool, interesting DaVinci code shit I had ever read. And as we mentioned earlier, I've always been into conspiracies as fans of the narratives, not as believer. But this is, like one of those binges where you just read a ton about something in a short period of time and you, like, talk to, like, friends about it. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: So my best friend from back in Orlando, who happens to be jewish, I'm getting dinner with him. And so, of course I'm rambling about this stuff. And at one point, I go like. And, dude, have you heard of this, like, awesome thing called the protocols of the learned elders of Zion?
Kayla: Oh, boy, I'm sorry.
Chris: And he was like, yeah, I've definitely heard of that one. I'm not sure how awesome it is, but I've heard of it. And then we had a conversation. So even me learning about this stuff, as a fan, not a believer, what that is, I didn't realize the anti semitism I was wading into, even with something as severely antisemitic as the protocols of Zion. So I just say that anecdote as a. It can be easy to not realize you're even being radicalized. It's not that I believed in this stuff even then, but, like, look at this still. It was like, look at this crazy world building thing. And my friend was like, actually, that sucks a lot, so just be careful. And I was like, oh, okay.
Kayla: How old were you?
Chris: Mmm, mid twenties.
Kayla: That's so fascinating to me.
Chris: I'd never heard about it before, so it's just. It's. Do you want to describe what it is real quick?
Kayla: My understanding of it and what the Internet says is that it was a book that was written in 1903. It was a completely fake, presenting itself as real text about, like, it was anti semitic text purporting that the jewish people were plotting global domination. And it was used to. It was a really big reason why the Holocaust of World War Two happened.
Chris: Right?
Kayla: It was like, oh, this. This is. This is why we got. It was one of the reasons for why we gotta put jews in concentration camps.
Chris: It wasn't the only anti semitic thing in the milieu of anti semitic things, but it was a super big, important one. And it was sort of like the part of anti Semitism that really gets into the cabal. Conspiracy theory, global conspiracy stuff, I feel like, mostly has its roots with that text.
Kayla: Yeah, it all goes back to that.
Chris: So anyway, I didn't even realize. So I can see how you can. If I didn't even realize something that extreme, and I wasn't a believer, I was just a fan.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: I can see how a lot of people would, like, not even understand, like, if somebody says the word Rothschild, you just think, okay, we're Rothschild. Okay, like, you don't necessarily know all the context that comes with that.
Kayla: And I do think that's where. I think that some bad actors operate under that, where they. They are intentionally. The. The protocol, the elders of Zion. Intentionally written to be anti semitic text.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: But I don't think it was necessarily important for them that the people reading it made the connection. I mean, that made the connection of, like, this guy is saying I should hate Jews because what's important is that you continue on the conspiracy theory thinking, and as an adult, it will go back to the Jews.
Chris: Yeah, I think there's definitely some not think. I know there are, because I've seen the instructions on how to red pill people from QAnon.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And part of it is that is like, just. Just keep them coming into the funnel. Like, don't. You know, you don't drop the really crazy stuff right off the bat. You say, like, oh, isn't it weird that you can't trust anything? And it's like, yeah, you can't trust anything, can you? And then it's just gradual steps from there. So that's why it does become a bit of a slippery slope. But at this point, I do want a reality check a little bit here in case there's anybody still listening that maybe believes in Tartaria. I really did have to look to find the overtzen like style anti semitism. Almost everything else I looked at, text or video or audio, didn't really contain any of that.
Chris: For the most part, this community seemed to me to just be harmless people who love history but don't trust the scholarly narratives for whatever reason.
Kayla: Gotcha. There's a lot of reasons.
Chris: So. Right, right. So back to tartarium. You might also be wondering then, those pictures I showed you back at the.
Kayla: Top of the show, where were they from?
Chris: If Tartaria doesn't exist, then what the heck were those photos?
Kayla: Tell me. Especially the one with the rainbow light again.
Chris: That was stylized. But let's go back and take a look at them again, and I will tell you exactly what they are.
Kayla: That was supposed to be what the free energy looked like.
Chris: Oh, maybe if we all had the.
Kayla: Free energy, we'd be in this rainbow utopia of light.
Chris: Oh, great. Oh, my God, you're right.
Kayla: I am.
Chris: And of course, to our audience, as always, these will be going up on our instapage. Ulterjustweirdos on Instagram.
Kayla: Did you say instapage?
Chris: Yeah, instapage. Insta account. Can I show my. Is that Cheugy? What did I do?
Kayla: That was pretty cheugy.
Chris: All right, teach me the pictures.
Kayla: Show me the spoilers.
Chris: These first two pictures are of the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.
Kayla: Oh, wow. That's San Francisco.
Chris: So this is.
Kayla: Oh, no. Okay, it's not San Francisco, California.
Chris: No, San Francisco.
Kayla: That's the San Francisco, California. But that architecture. So can I go see this now?
Chris: You cannot, because this was a world's fair, was an exposition. So that's all temporary buildings is temporary buildings.
Kayla: What the hell, man?
Chris: So now put your tartarian lens on.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Look at this and say, look how beautiful that is. Look how amazing that architecture is.
Kayla: I mean, there's no way that's fucking temporary.
Chris: That's exactly what the tartarian theorists say, word for word.
Kayla: There's no way it's temporary. Okay. What's this?
Chris: This, I told you at the time, is the white city.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: It was located in the city of Chicago, Illinois.
Kayla: What?
Chris: And it was the site of the Columbian Exposition and World's Fair in 1893. Do you see?
Kayla: I'm sorry.
Chris: This beautiful, incredible thing that looks like the hermitage except on water the size of the football field, fountains.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: I don't think the monuments and statues. This domed building, it's really sus to me. Built in a year.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Then torn down. That sus to me, that is exactly what Tartarians say.
Kayla: I don't. I don't buy it. And also, I don't buy it. Like, they've both. They're both under the COVID of, like, it was just the World's Fair.
Chris: That's what they call it. They call it cover.
Kayla: Third question.
Chris: Yes?
Kayla: What happened to the World's Fair?
Chris: Like, it just stopped happening. I don't know.
Kayla: Why don't we do that anymore?
Chris: Probably World War one.
Kayla: God damn it.
Chris: Yeah. Guess. I don't know. That's. That is beyond the ken of this episode. I'm sure there's a reason. My guess is World War one.
Kayla: You just stop covering up the Tartarians.
Chris: So. So let's cover a couple things that you just said. First of all, yes? Tartarian theorists will say this was a cover to destroy all of these beautiful, ancient tartarian buildings.
Kayla: Oh, so they're saying that they got.
Chris: Destroyed erasure on purpose. Okay, so basically, America was like, there's all these buildings from tartarian empire, which, because this is the 18 hundreds, was like, not that long ago, kind of still around according to. So I'm in Tartariaverse now.
Kayla: You're right. Yes.
Chris: So in the 18 hundreds, to them, like the. Like, the empire was either, like, crumbling or had just crumbled or was about to crumble, whatever. Either way, the american government was interested in erasing any knowledge that it existed, because fucking government. I know. Cause otherwise people would learn about free energy, and then the Rockefellers wouldn't be able to make money. So what they did is they held this world's fair at this location where this tartarian capital used to be.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: And they said, oh, let's have all this awesome stuff and do all these awesome things, and then we're gonna tear it all down and claim that we tore it down because it was a world's fair.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So that's what they say. In reality, what these things are made of is actually things like plaster and building materials that are easy to put up and easy to take down. And they use, like, hemp weave and other things like that.
Kayla: But why the way they look like that? Why do they have the same, like, steez.
Chris: So the. So this world's fair, again, so this is called the white. And the idea behind the white city and behind a lot of the world's fair expositions in general was that you were, like, building this, like, example. You were building this beautiful example of what a city could be, what a city of the future would be. And so, actually, that is what this is about, is like a city of the future would, like, be on the water and have these awesome, like, neoclassical designs.
Kayla: That's my question, is, why would the city of the future look like a city of the past?
Chris: Well, don't forget, this was in 1893, and so, like, the style of the time wasn't like, modernism hadn't come about.
Kayla: So they're like, everything's like Venice.
Chris: Yeah, basically.
Kayla: Interesting.
Chris: Yeah. By the way, this was also the world's fair at which the Ferris wheel debuted and was the. Do you know the story behind the first elevator? Well, this is the first elevator there was.
Kayla: Would you like to tell me the.
Chris: Invention of the elevator? People were, like, not super into it because they didn't think it would be safe.
Kayla: Oh, yeah. Also, do you know how safe they are?
Chris: They're, like, the most safe thing that is ever safe in the history of safe, literally. And part of that was, like, this initial invention. I forget the name of the guy, but he demonstrated at the world's fair that this world's fair by trying it on himself. He's like, I'm gonna go up and down my own elevator. And then, like, all these thousands of throng of people watched him and was like, oh, yeah, well, it must be safe because he's doing it. So then elevators started getting installed anywhere. The white city was also credited with sort of kicking off the city beautiful movement, which.
Kayla: No idea what that means.
Chris: Okay, well, it's basically, this is not a podcast about that, so just real quick. It's just the. The idea that you can. It's about urban planning, basically. Like, with urban planning and by bringing together diverse professions, you can make, like, this just beautiful working city with plants and just beautiful for humans. And people love living there. And it's like a city optimization thing. Well, you know, we have talked about city planning before on the show, episode three.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Irvine planned city. You have that same utopian that frequently happens when you plan a city and you don't do a great draw about it.
Kayla: I want my city to look like a world's fair, not like Irvine.
Chris: Yeah. There were another few notable firsts at this world's fair. So we already talked about the elevator. We talked about the Ferris wheel. The third rail made its technological debut at this world's fair.
Kayla: Can I tell you something?
Chris: Yes.
Kayla: I don't know what the third rail is.
Chris: Phosphorescent lamps.
Kayla: What is it?
Chris: And also, Harry Houdini performed at this world's fair. To answer your question, a third rail is just a source of electricity for the thing that it's on.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: So, like the.
Kayla: So how did things work before that?
Chris: The subway needed a third rail. It needs a third rail to provide it with electricity to go room. Vroom.
Kayla: So how did it work before that?
Chris: You didn't have electric trains before that? You had, like, diesel trains. You had, like, coal powered trains.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: There are actually still a couple of buildings left. So I said that they're all gone. There actually are a couple left. And the reason that there are a couple. So one of them, for example, is the arts building. And the reason that the arts building is still standing is because for the arts building to display fine art that was donated from countries around the world, they said, you cannot house this art. It is far too priceless unless you house it. Something that is fireproof.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: So they had to build an actual, like, stone and mortar and metal building for that. And that's why the arts building is still around.
Kayla: So do, like, tartarian believers, like, go pilgrimage to these places?
Chris: Sort of. Some definitely do. Which is part of what's so delightful about this whole thing is that, like, there's just like, a very sort of, like, tactile, like, you can go visit a building.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: But we'll get to that.
Kayla: Okay. What's that one?
Chris: This one is the San Francisco City hall.
Kayla: Okay, here's a question I have for.
Chris: You, and it's still standing. It's still their city hall. That's still built in 1913.
Kayla: Are all of these things in the US?
Chris: All of the things that I am showing you now? Yes. But that's. But there are buildings outside of the US, particularly Shang. There's several buildings in Shanghai that tartarian theorists.
Kayla: Okay, but what about, like, the entire city of Venice?
Chris: I didn't see very much about Venice.
Kayla: Because Venice looks like this.
Chris: There's a lot of conflation here of like, styles and culture and history and motivated reasoning.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: Okay.
Kayla: Okay, so that's the San Francisco City hall.
Chris: So. Yeah. And then this one is the Chicago Federal building.
Kayla: Yeah, I knew that one looked Chicago y, New Yorky like it looked.
Chris: Yeah. And this building, again, only stood for 60 years. It started construction in 1898, it finished in 1905, and it was torn down in 1965.
Kayla: Why?
Chris: But now look at this. Well, a variety of reasons, but look at this building.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: And doesn't it, don't you look at that and go like, why would you tear that down?
Kayla: Yeah, I don't know why you tear that down.
Chris: Beautiful edifice that, like, seems like it can be very functional and serve a purpose. And now this is the singer building. And I mentioned that this one is in New York City.
Kayla: Yeah, that one.
Chris: I feel like this is how Zach kicks off his articles. He talks about, like, the beauty of this building. And it was really famous at the time. It was actually the smallest building in the world for a few years. And again, it stood from 1897 to 1968. And the reason that this one was, I do know why the reason this one was torn down was basically just because it was monetarily inefficient, like the land that was on and the amount of like, office space they rented out and the maintenance costs, although whatever that equation was, made it financially untenable for the singer corporation to keep maintenance. So then they tore it down. But again, in the tartarian lore, this was actually a building from the tartarian empire.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And it was torn down to hide the history from us.
Kayla: What, what's the reasoning for there being some building still standing?
Chris: That's a good question, and I'm not sure that they have a good answer to that.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: Because when I look at some of these things, like particularly the white city, right, where there's two buildings that are still standing, and we have good reason to understand why they are, whereas others aren't, I don't know what the tartarian researcher reasoning is for that. I don't know why. Because in my mind, if I'm the us government trying to hide history, like, why would I leave two out of the, like, why wouldn't I just tear down all of them? Maybe they have a reason maybe they say, like, well, these two were too hard to tear down, so they just couldn't or something.
Kayla: Okay.
Chris: I don't know. But, yeah, they might have a reason, but I don't. It doesn't seem like I couldn't find one. So along with history, erasure, architecture is one of the only few things I can say is really core to the tartarian theory. Okay, I'd like to read you a quote from Zack mortises homepage, and then we'll hear a bit from him again. This is what he has to say about why he studies architecture. I write about architecture because, unlike nearly every other design discipline, it always invariably reflects the culture of the society that creates it. If you're a painter, maybe you're a graffiti artist, you can create your own totally idiosyncratic vision. But architecture requires massive amounts of capital, time, and collaboration to happen. It can't be created in total opposition to society.
Chris: So it gathers up just about everything floating through culture that's great or terrible and makes it into a designed object that can't be ignored, like a sculpture in a museum you never go to. This is history, class, demographics, inequality, politics, media, religion, technology, etcetera. It's all there, always, all the time. End quote.
Kayla: It's hella good.
Chris: Isn't that a great quote?
Kayla: That's a great quote. That's a fantastic quote. And it's, like, so, yeah, so very clearly true. And then it's just yet another reason why the book, the fountainhead just doesn't make any damn sense.
Chris: Actually, it's funny that you say that. I meant to ask Zach about the fountain. I meant to ask him about that because that's exactly where I think the fountainhead. But I don't know if I want to call it a miss. But, like, certainly Roark's ethos is contra to that, right? Like, the fountainhead is presented as a book where the heroic artist really can and does have his own idiosyncratic vision of architecture, but it seems like that's, like, antithetical to architecture. And, in fact, the culmination of the book is kind of about that, right? He's like, well, you changed my vision, so I get to blow it up. But really, like, there's spoilers. So many people that were involved in the building of those things. Like, is it his to blow up?
Kayla: Like, I think maybe you might be, like, poking at the chink in the armor a little bit of some of the problems with some of the spoilers, maybe beliefs of the writer, but I do think it's interesting.
Chris: That's a whole nother episode.
Kayla: She chose to write specifically for a book that's so about the singular vision of an artist and personal ownership of one's work. It's very interesting that she chose an art form that's inherently collaborative.
Chris: Honestly, now that I think about it, she probably did that on purpose.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Anyway. Yeah, I just love that quote because it's why the built environment is so fascinating. And I think it's like, I don't know, it's like why ancient ruins mesmerize us so much. Because it just really feels like you're, when you're looking at, like, roman ruins, it doesn't feel like you're looking at some shitty marble with some grass. It feels like you're looking at Rome.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: I think that's part of what's so fascinating about it. So I talked about this a little bit with Zach. The other thing I loved about your website is you have this quote about why you study architecture.
Zach Mortice: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, it's an idea of architecture that kind of starts with the belief and assumption that it's a completely kind of synthetic cultural thing. It's determined by, well, I mean, it's determined by politics and the economy. And those things come from the actual kind of material resources and ways we organize them. So kind of extrapolate from what's there in the earth, how we organize ourselves around them out to kind of embodying that in this kind of sort of collective artwork. Right. Architecture, which, because it's called to be functional and usable by different people, it can't be as idiosyncratic as a graffiti mural or a sculpture or even like a monument, which has less of a functionless need. So I think architecture reflects the forces at power, the dominant forces at power that create it. Right.
Zach Mortice: So in an american context, we have a certain set of ideas about what our culture is. We're capitalists. We give markets wide sway to organize how our lives are going to be and who has what resources. We have a specific kind of ethnocentric idea about what's important culture and what kind of architectural forms and traditions need to be celebrated. And in a lot of situations, that paints like a pretty dark picture and there's a reaction to it. There's kind of a critical kind of leftist reaction to looking at architecture that way, but there's also a reaction to it with the Tartarians. Right. Because I think in a lot of ways these folks are sort of dissatisfied at a really structural, systemic level with contemporary culture and society.
Zach Mortice: And they see that culture and society quite accurately reflected in the cities and built environment and architecture around them. And they get kind of conflated in some ways that are pretty fascinating.
Chris: Yeah, that's actually why I asked about that quote is because I felt like that is exactly how this ties together. That's how the architecture piece ties together with conspiracy theories. It's like a lot of times they're related to this. They come from this sense of cultural anxiety of some kind. Right. That's true with QAnon. It's true with moon landing and flat earth and whatnot. And clearly it's true here too. And so it was that quote you had about like, how much architecture is reflective of society. So what is, like, what is the specific architecture related anxiety, do you think that Tartaria address, that the tartarian theory addresses?
Zach Mortice: They're most concerned, I think, with modernism, probably articulately about what modernism is and the role it's played. I think they see modernism as kind of this alienating kind of other, these abstract kind of glassy black towers that all of a sudden we're told this is what architecture is. This is the height of human civilization and city building, and they don't see themselves in it. They're kind of more comforted by traditional forms of architecture, Second Empire, Beaux arts forms of architecture that you can see, a sense of human handcraft. There's some figures filled into a freeze or there's some fluted columns with this texture you might want to reach out and touch. And modernism architecture doesn't have that in quite the same way. You can see the imprint of the machine with modernism.
Zach Mortice: And that seems a bit alienating, I think, to some kind of tartarian partisans. So they in turn, they kind of find another way to other, that other modernist architecture and kind of re embrace and create a new narrative about why we don't have these kind of traditional forms of handicraft and architecture anymore. And yeah, I think a lot of ways there, they're uncomfortable with modernity. There are sociopolitical critiques. I've seen that they lobby where it's, they talk a lot about whether they use this word a lot, kind of commodification and how in kind of a contemporary western society, everything is a commodity. Your time is a commodity. It seems like your very commodity. And you're kind of pressed into that mold to be productive. And I have enough resources to earn the things you need to stay alive.
Zach Mortice: And they, yeah, they associate with this kind of equally kind of inhuman, really strict systemic system of discipline they see in modern architecture. And, I mean, it's interesting because, I mean, there's kind of systems of coercion. I mean, serfs who are, like, forced to do the cathedral in, you know, Germany or wherever. I mean, they were being pressed into service as well.
Chris: Right.
Zach Mortice: And it was just human in a lot of cases, probably even more inhuman and hierarchical and crappy. So it's odd. I mean, there's this ambiguity, I think, about kind of the contemporary capitalist economy in these discussions with tartarians, tartarian folks. And it's. It's sort of unclear. Like, do they, like, are they quite saying that we might be happier kind of in a feudal system where, like, we didn't, sure, we didn't have our time and attention shredded by Twitter and, you know, the Internet, we wouldn't have that cultural atomization. We'd live a more kind of connected to the earth, even keeled life, but we would also be serfs and have almost no kind of independence. Is that's better than the situation now?
Zach Mortice: It's not really clear how far back they want to take that at times, but, yeah, they're definitely kind of questioning the kind of deep structure of how things are set up in ways that in some ways make sense. They're peering beneath the hood in a ways that a lot of people don't go. And like most conspiracy theorists, they come back with this really incredible, powerful sense of solidarity and exploration, and they can kind of band together around. They ignore some stuff, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit and come up with some kind of pretty upside down conclusions.
Chris: Yeah, it's funny, like, studying. We studied QAnon quite a bit for our QAnon episodes, obviously. And this one was much more like, when I ran across. When I read your article, I was more like, man, this is cool. You know, like, with QAnon, it's like, oh, this is scary and fucked. Whereas with tartaria, it's like, it's a much more appeal, at least to me, it was much more appealing. But. But also, just hearing you talk now, too, it, like, do you empathize at all with. With kind of. With some of that anxiety, with some of that, like, modernist, you know, like, atomization stuff? Because I feel like I do.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, I do. I mean, I discovered that my secret superhero power is sympathizing with conspiracy theorists.
Chris: Yeah.
Zach Mortice: Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, I've got. I've got. I've got the gripes that everyone has. You know, like, it's $1,400 to send your kid to daycare. You know, the median wage hasn't increased since the time I was born, which is almost 40 years ago. And I. Richest man in the world has 150 plus billion dollars, depending on what the stock market says. Any given give or take 10 billion. So, yeah, I mean, there is something unbalanced happening right now. And, yeah, so I definitely understand that discontent. And it's. So you can kind of lay it. There's another layer to add on top of that as well. I mean, so there's this kind of the economic state of social inequality right now. If you look back through history, conspiracies do exist, right? Like, COINTELPRO was real. They killed Fred Hampton. Right?
Zach Mortice: That was a direct outgrowth of a very big conspiracy to undermine a larger movement towards freedom. The civil rights movement. Mkultra was real. There were never any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, contrary to what the New York Times and other folks says. But at the same time, the Covid-19 vaccine is safe. I mean, that doesn't mean big pharma's good, but tartarians, go get that Covid-19 vaccine so you can stick posting. So, I mean, if you add all that together, like, it's. It's gonna not compute Yemenite for some people, and it's going to come out the other end wrong. So, yeah, I do have some sympathy for this sort of thing.
Chris: Yeah, you hit on there like, the institutional lack of trust institutions is something we go back to again and again on the show because we actually, our last episode was about anti vax. And there's just so much institutional mistrust that pours into that. There's so much that poured into QAnon. The analogy I use with my co host is like, it's QAnon is a cancer, but institutional mistrust is whatever the carcinogen is. We should definitely cut out the cancer, but also, what's giving us this cancer? Well, it's all these things that you just mentioned, so it seems like that's definitely true with ductaria as well.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, that's a great metaphor for it.
Chris: Yeah.
Zach Mortice: I mean, dynamic that I think is really important with conspiracy theories is that there's sort of an unwillingness to take the win. Like, if there are underlying truths, for example, that the entire built environment changed absolutely radically from, you know, with the advent of modernism. And we do not care about architectural preservation and our history as encoded in our buildings. If you've kind of peered through the looking glass and see that's the case, just take the win and work within the structures instead of extrapolating out even further. In so many cases with QAnon and Jeffrey Epstein, it's like, oh, this guy was arrested and was in custody back in 2008, but people still, powerful people, still kept hanging out with him. That's weird.
Zach Mortice: And I'm sure in 2008, that was on the New York Times front page for a day or two, then it receded into the woodwork. And if you've found that pattern and sussed it out and said, hey, there's more here. Good. That's good. There are people who are paid to know better who did not make that leap. But, like, in so many situations, like the Tartari and everything else, like, people can't just take that wind. I think there's this kind of like a psychic horror to realize that powerful people are unaccountable and sometimes have very bad motives, that they have to just absorb that. That's in the oxygen distributed everywhere. It has to be located in a very specific place amongst a very specific group of people doing very specific things, so they can kind of keep it under a microscope.
Zach Mortice: It doesn't kind of invade the air around them.
Chris: So, yeah, I got to say, it is. It's easy to empathize with these tartarian guys, with these tartarian theorists. The anxiety that naturally accompanies fast change, which is impossible to ignore when I quote unquote beautiful old buildings get torn down to be replaced with brutalist concrete gray boxes. I get that. Right.
Kayla: I will say you guys are talking about modernism. So why are you throwing brutalism in there? Why are you throwing the brutalism out?
Chris: So. Fair point. Zach, in our interview, says that they mostly have an issue with modernism, but that's nothing. The only thing that they have an issue with, it's more the. I think it's more about the tearing down of these particular buildings than it is about what they're replaced with.
Kayla: You can be anti brutalist architecture too.
Chris: But they also are. So again, it's not a monolith. Like, not everybody hates the same stuff or maybe even knows the word brutalism, but, like, brutalism is a big villain in Tartaria world as well.
Kayla: It's interesting to me that any of this actually has anything to do with architecture. Like, it's interesting. It's interesting in what way? It's interesting to me that this is less about, like, okay, I know it's about. They're hiding stuff from us and the government, blah, blah. But it's interesting to me that there's even, like, talking about the value of certain kinds of architecture versus the other, because that's not.
Chris: Oh, well, now you're talking about aesthetic moralism, which also comes up here.
Kayla: I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about, like, if the conspiracy theory here is that there are buildings that point to the hidden reality that the government is hiding ancient civilization from us that had free energy, it's interesting to me that the evaluation of certain kinds of other architecture even plays into it because it's like, well, it's not really about the architect. If the conspiracy theory is about, like, the government's hiding free energy from us, it's like, well, wait, why is this about whether you prefer modernism to post modernism or whatever?
Chris: I'm not even so, okay, so part of that, I think, is going to be. So there is a subreddit specifically called r tartarian architecture. So I think it's sort of begging the question of, like, we are going to be talking about architecture.
Kayla: Right, right.
Chris: So. And once you start down that, once that's what you're discussing, you're gonna start talking about styles, whether you like it or not. I don't think it's necessarily that, like, that's what's generating the conspiracy, that, like, oh, fucking brutalism.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: I think it's just, that's what gets discussed. And when these buildings that these, these folks see that seem like they're either too advanced for their surroundings, too advanced for their age, or too advanced for the fact that they were supposedly torn down immediately thereafter, then the question is, well, or not. The question is it's more just when they get torn down, what replaces them? It could be if something else replaced it other than modernism or brutalist, then maybe they would have anxiety about that as well. But it's just, I think it's just the nature of. Well, at a certain point, and actually Zach talks about this in his article, at a certain point, architecture just became about modernism, and everything got torn down and everything that was built up was built is modernist.
Kayla: I hate it.
Chris: Or depending where you live, brutalist.
Kayla: I hate it.
Chris: And so this is like, he points that out as, like, part of what the Tartarians are saying happened, did actually happen. Like, there were a bunch of old buildings that looked beautiful and to a certain aesthetic that did get torn down and that did look out of place. When you're trying to figure out and you're using a modern context. He also talks about things like cost of labor versus cost of materials. Labor used to be cheap, and materials and process used to be expensive. And so that's why you have, like, all these, like, ornate buildings, right? Kind of like these, like he's saying, like, beaux arts and second empire style. And now it's the other way around. It's like machinery and process and materials are cheap and labor is expensive.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: So that's why now it's like, well, you got to do the mass produced glass facade type thing versus, like, all this detailed filigree. So that's part of it as well, is just like the changing circumstances of economics. But it all comes back to his quote is that the buildings that you see are a reflection of how your society works from economics to culture to politics to whatever, right. And, you know, sometimes that can be misunderstood or misinterpreted like anything else.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Just real quick for our audience, since I don't know how, like, up everybody is on, like, architecture style. Architectural styles. So the easiest one is brutalism. Brutalism is just picture, like, a communist block. Picture a conc. Gray concrete box, maybe with windows. That's brutalist.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: And then modernism is just like, think of, like, yours. Picture an american skyscraper in your head. It's just like a tall, glass sharp knife in the sky. Like, that's like a typical modernist skyscraper building. And then we also talked about neoclassical. So neoclassical is basically just neo classical and classical meaning. So if you see, like, if it looks like a roman, it looks like Venice. Like you were saying, like, that's neoclassical columns. Lots of columns. It looks like Washington, DC. Yeah.
Kayla: Obelisks are involved.
Chris: And then he also talked about. So we. I don't want to get too into the weeds here. We talked about Beaux arts, and I. What was the other we talked about? Oh, Second Empire. It's a second empire. Like, think of sort of. You know what? I'll just have to. This one's really hard to describe, so it'll be a. Check out our Instagram. But it's like, when you have those, like, slightly, like, not quite domed, but, like, curved roofs with, like, lots of ornate detail. Like, kind of picture, like, what you think, like, turn of the century New York City.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Like, when I showed you the singer building, it's like that second empire style. So we'll post about a lot of these styles on our Instagram. I just wanted to make sure that listeners could be at least caught up with that. Okay, so, yeah, so I get some of that anxiety, and I also feel kind of like disconnected from my past as well, like particularly as an american. Right. So in Europe you can't walk 10ft without coming across like some built structure that connects you to heritage that may be like over a thousand years old.
Kayla: Old, right.
Chris: That's not the case here. Right. And I feel like that's also, that's part of why, that's why. Part of why Tartaria feels very like american to me. I don't think it's american. Like, my guess is probably most people that adhere to this theory are Americans. I don't know that for sure, but. So we talked before about how Tartarians think that a lot of those buildings that I just showed you standing here in America were actually built by the tartarian empire where powerful cities built by some other, much more ancient, much more advanced, much more like cultural heritage empire, right. So think of all the cultural heritage, think of all that cachet, all that cultural heritage power you bring into play by invoking something like Tartaria as an American. Suddenly our 200 year history is not just 200 year history.
Chris: It's like, no, there were these Tartarians here and they built these incredible buildings.
Kayla: But how does it, how does it go along with like the actual history of like what was here?
Chris: It's complicated.
Kayla: Like how, like what? Like you're saying ancient civilizations. So like, how was, how you asking?
Chris: Like how did it go away to make way for what's here now?
Kayla: I'm saying how were the Tartarians here and also like the indigenous people?
Chris: I don't know what they think about indigenous people because there's also, like, I haven't seen anything about that because there.
Kayla: Are still standing indigenous structures like in the american southwest that are several hundred years old from like ancient, quote unquote ancient times for this country.
Chris: Here's what my guess is, and this is purely a guess, so don't, you know, take this with a grain of salt. My guess is that they would say that those civilizations were also part of Tartaria. We just didn't know it.
Kayla: So even though they have a different style of architecture, like I'm thinking of like in the american southwest, there are still like pueblos and things like that standing from a long time ago.
Chris: I don't know how much of America. I guess the bottom line is I'm really not super clear on the answer to this. I don't know if they're clear on the answer to this because it didn't exist. So like, I don't know how they reconcile the.
Kayla: Like, pilgrims came here from England, and there was, like, already people here. Or we knew that there are people here. Like, how does it work?
Chris: In some cases, yes, but I think the bottom line to all this is at some point, you get to a point where they say, like, all the history that you've been told, Kayla, is lies.
Kayla: It's wrong.
Chris: It's all lies, and it's actually happened this other way, and it's being hidden from you. Right. So I talk about this in a minute, but, like, there's one of the videos I watched, literally, the guy, every five minutes, he would say, it's all lies. Everything you've been told.
Kayla: So it's similar. It does have some similarities to some of, like, the ancient alien stuff where it's not intentionally racist, but there is some racism. There's definitely some, like, erasing.
Chris: Egyptians couldn't have made the pyramids.
Kayla: Yeah, there's.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some of that, too.
Kayla: Okay. And I'm not. I'm not. I'm not trying to shame anyone for what. No, no belief in this. I'm just saying. Oh, it's interesting that, like, some of these other. I don't use the term alternative history beliefs. It gets complicated in.
Chris: Right. Because of the erasure that happened. Yeah, there's all kinds of, like, erasure going back and forth here. Like, we'll talk about that a little bit more. But, yeah, I get some of the going back to the empathy thing. I also empathize with the, like, again, as an american, having that sort of, like, lack of deep history. And I get the anxiety that comes with, like, tearing down old buildings and the rapidity of chains.
Kayla: I hate it.
Chris: And I empathize with the trust erosion stuff. Like, certainly with history. One redditor pointed out, hey, history is written by the victors. So are we really that crazy for not believing the narratives that we've been taught? Which. Yeah, actually, like, really excellent point, Tartaria guy. Now, I don't think that this means that there's a vast empire that could have possibly been erased in this way that we're talking about. And by the way, I'm not gonna, like, take a ton of time to do much debunking. We're just gonna more talk, like, as we've been doing, talk about the community and about theory. But you should go check out that skeptoid episode about it. They do a pretty good job of the debunking.
Chris: But anyway, I don't think that a healthy skepticism of historical narratives is bad, but I also don't think that it gives me license to believe in something as totally fantastic and conspiracy as tartaria. Right. I understand the impetus, but this is, like, this is big. This isn't like, did Genghis Khan really say x instead of y? We may never know. This is, like, enormous. It's multiple, continent spanning. But, I mean, like, Dan Carlin talks a lot about this on hardcore history that you can't just believe a written record at face value because the written record comes from human beings with agendas. So, like, half the time you're reading about a war or a battle, you're reading the official propaganda about how awesome your king's armies were on the battlefield.
Chris: And as a historian, you're like, this is a document, but at the time, it was just, like, propaganda. So how accurate is it, really? So, as Dan says, a lot of historical research is like this CSI style forensic analysis of trying to imperfectly figure out what really happened. Bye. Corroborating written records with other written records of the time and physical evidence and blah, blah. And that's why the word revisionist history exists, right? Like, we're constantly revising the way we understand history based on new research and new evidence and better corroboration.
Kayla: I'll also point out that, well, you mentioned at the top of this podcast episode, our shadow.
Chris: The look on your face tells me you're about to say something either sarcastic. No. Or smartass no.
Kayla: I'm just saying that the shout out we made to the year wrong about podcast totally ties in here, because a lot of what they talk about is like, oh, hey, that thing you think you know about how the world, the history of the world works, it's actually wrong. Here's how the OJ trial really went down. Here's what really happened with Princess Diana. Here's why. Like, right. What we believe about history is not always fact, right?
Chris: It's. It's. Yeah. And especially when your. Your primary sources are written records. You know, it's. That's like. That's why you need to have all this corroboration. That's why it's like, you can't just say, like, well, you know, Herodotus wrote this. You also have to say, like, okay, this. This does.
Kayla: Why did you mention Herodotus?
Chris: Cause he's a historian for, like, an English.
Kayla: He's getting dragged on Twitter right now, bruh.
Chris: Is he getting dragged? Why?
Kayla: I.
Chris: Did he. Like, he probably wrote a bunch of propaganda that wasn't correct.
Kayla: I think he's a. I think. Okay, he's not getting dragged on Twitter. He's getting dragged on classics Twitter.
Chris: Okay. I'm sure Herodotus cares. Dragged on Twitter?
Kayla: Yeah, he's getting canceled right now.
Chris: Oh, no. Cancel culture strikes again. What is he gonna do? Did he molest somebody?
Kayla: Came for. I think he just lied.
Chris: Okay, well, that again, there lies abound in the historical record.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And I. That's why it's important to try to corroborate things with things like physical evidence and whatnot.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Just because lies abound because people are motivated, individual agents doesn't mean that there's enough evidence out there for this giant hidden empire.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Speaking of history and culture, I want to talk a little bit more about how Tartaria is this really fascinating confluence of these different cultural elements and anxieties. And we hit on it a little bit a minute ago when were talking about, like, erasure and colonialism and that kind of stuff. But I talk about it a little bit more with. With Zack as well. So take a listen. I read a really interesting response, actually, to your article. His response was like, yes, and there's also this sense of, like, erasure of history by modernism. Like, if you view modernism as this sort of, like, postcolonial capital. I'm using all these crazy ism words, by the way. I'm sorry. I'm like.
Chris: But anyway, he was talking about how if you view modernism as sort of like, this postcolonialism way of sort of, like, imposing the sameness on all, you know, the entire world, and that erases cultures that were there before then that also has this sort of, like, power, this explanatory power for Tartaria, because that's some of the anxiety that's coming from that.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you do. You can catch some of these folks in certain moments, and they sound. They sound just like your local preservation nonprofit saying, oh, people don't know their history. We should be teaching, you know, why these are unique and valuable. And. Absolutely, I would kind of push back on any kind of singular idea about what modern architecture is. Was used in that way in some situations to kind of stamp out local indigenous cultures, to create new beachheads for capital. But, I mean, there are very pretty intense, flagrant violations of that, too. In Africa, a lot of more socialist leaning countries would adopt modernist forms because it was something new. It was a way to throw off the yoke of the colonizer. And in, you know, 1920, 1898, whatever the colonizer was doing, these impeccably detailed beaux arts buildings. Right.
Zach Mortice: So again, I mean, the architecture, like its forms, are really malleable symbols and can be adopted to just about any use if you really want to. And you can. You can kind of identify genres within that. I mean, the Soviets built in kind of classical oriented stuff and modernist stuff in Russia, and you can kind of reinforce, find a narrative with either of those styles. But if you look across the entire totality of architecture everywhere, there's no one set of forms and styles means one thing. But if you don't know that and you're kind of more familiar with your local context and that set of narratives. Yeah, that can be a jumping off point to make some assumptions that aren't going to bear out kind of real.
Chris: Large, as you were saying that it made me think like, oh, yeah, actually it seems to. And this is, correct me if I'm wrong, but from my research, it seems to be that it's like the 18 hundreds sort of timeframe that. That, like, that architecture. Buildings that were created then, right? Like things like world's fairs and, you know, these dome structures and whatnot, and apologies for my. My very amateur understanding of architecture, by the way. But, you know, if that's. If that's the ideal, that was also, like, peak colonialisms, you know, so that doesn't quite compute with it.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, like the bund in Shanghai is often pointed at by Tartarians to illustrate a perfect example of the grandeur of the tartarian empire. But, like, really, I mean, those are all banking buildings. It's this. These incredibly ornate, domed banking buildings. Like, what were those banks doing? They were money switchboards for, like, the British East India Company, who were, like, dropping pallets of opium and making a lot of money, getting the people of China addicted in really brutal, intense colonial projects. But that kind of all that all gets lost with the tartarian discourse.
Chris: I have a question here about more the specific architecture. Why do you think it is that 18 hundreds aesthetic, for my lack of a better word, there. But there are some dome structures, and they have this obsession with the world's fairs. A couple videos I watched, they talk about star forts. They seem to be really into star forts. So I was just wondering what it was about those things.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, I mean, I think in a western american context, those particular forms and buildings, they speak to history and mythology that is attractive to some people. They speak to, you know, stability. They speak to, I think, like, people think of that time in history as maybe more stable, or at least more stable for people like them. Like, if you were a white guy, you were at the top of the food chain, right? That's part of it. The star forts are interesting because that's, you know, that. That those are the. It's military power, right? In a lot of ways, it's military power spread across the globe by imperialist colonizers. From a tartarian point of view, you would hope that they would see those people as the bad guys, right?
Zach Mortice: Like the rubber barons burning villages down in the Congo or whatever kind of malignant social force. But they say, no, the true hearted tartarians built these star forts, and they were destroyed by these kind of satanic parasites. But when they describe them, they do the things that the British East India Company might have done. So, yeah, there's some weird juxtapositions, but I think it. Yeah, I think it really just all kind of hearkens back to reaching back towards these ancestral ideas of stability and continuity. Simpler time, so on, do you think?
Chris: I couldn't shake the idea that. And this may be a dumb question, but this, with the star forts in particular, like, some of it just comes down to just, like, the fact that they're geometrically, like, pleasing aesthetically.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, yeah, I think there's something to that. I mean, I think all of these buildings, frankly, like modernism, is relatively new in our history. So you kind of have to be taught what's interesting about it, why it's valuable. We just haven't kind of culturally adjusted that, you know, if you're, you know, making a logo of a government building for a kindergarten class, you'll probably draw the Capitol dome and not mise federal center, which is this icy black, really austere, but I think really beautiful modernist office towers, like the head of the federal government in Chicago. So, yeah, so there's kind of a shorthand. There's more immediate recognition of traditional notions of beauty. Traditional also kind of ethnocentric, western centric notions of beauty and proportion with these buildings from the 18 hundreds and classical notions of architecture and beauty.
Chris: One of the things that you're, like, really kind of crystallizing for me here, too. And I'm like, by the way, I'm like, totally. You're getting me to, like, totally riff off of my off script here. So this is a really good. Yeah, yeah. You're really kind of making me think about the, like, tartarian theory seems to be this interesting synthesis of, like, western centrism, but also, like, eastern and, like, colonialist repression. Energy, like, seems to be sort of, like, commingling here. Does that make sense? Am I sort of like.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, yeah, there's. There's something there, like you. The thing. Yeah. The things that the tartarian partisans describe happening to the Tartarians are what the colonial powers of Europe did to Africa and the vast majority of the world. Basically, those positions are swapped.
Kayla: All right, what do you got to say about that?
Chris: I don't know. Maybe it's just because so much tartarian architecture, as we talk about in the interview is from the 18 hundreds, but it just feels like colonialism is just sort of weirdly in the DNA of this theory. But as I was just talking about with Zach, it takes multiple different perspectives, though, and mixes them together and creates this really bizarre thing. Right. So, for example, one hand, you have this perspective, this colonialist perspective, that feels very much like it comes from the victims of colonialism, right? So you have this anxiety about global powers erasing history, destroying culture. Everything you've been told is a lie. And the sameness of culture everywhere emanating from this dominant globalist power. Right. I mentioned before that there was the video where the guy was like, oh, it's all lies. Everything you've been taught is a lie.
Chris: He says that for every five minutes, like clockwork. Right? And these particular tartarian theorists were persons of color. So it was hard to not see a direct relationship between the actual erasure of african culture and history for black Americans and this guy who just didn't believe anything society had to tell him about his past anymore.
Kayla: Right, right.
Chris: So that victims of colonialism is definitely feels like it's one major sort of perspective in the mix here. But then you also have this other perspective that feels like it comes more from the colonizers. So this feeling that there's this grand tradition of western, classical, second empire style architecture from the peak of when the US and Europeans were out doing their age of colonization type stuff in the 18 hundreds. And with the tartarian theory that tradition is something that's being slowly encroached upon in this very physical way, sometimes with the destruction of buildings, which is like, that's such a weird mixture, right? Because it's like a mixture of, like, this victims of colonialism sentiment, but also this sentiment from, like, the perpetrators of colonialism as well. And then you also have, like, I don't know, this very.
Chris: This very, like, nouveau riche american style thing where we have, like, this culture that we're exporting everywhere, and we always tout it as, like, the greatest culture ever. But then we clearly have this insane insecurity about our relatively short history as a country.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: But again, you know, we mentioned this before. If we here in America hold the legacy of the greatest empire in history, that goes a long way towards giving a feeling of historical legitimacy. Right.
Kayla: It's got some. It's not great in some ways.
Chris: Which ways?
Kayla: It's just that. That kind of desire to. The desire to erase that aspect of our colonial history. A, I just don't really under. I just. I need to learn more about this because I don't really understand logically how this works.
Chris: Right.
Kayla: B, it just feels like rather than trying to uncover the secret history that's being hidden from us about these tartarian buildings, there were people existing here that are written about in our standard history books. Like, yes, it wasn't America as we know it today, but there were great civilizations here already. And I find it interesting to eschew that for these other buildings.
Chris: Well, I don't think that it's a choice. Like, I don't think they're sitting there and, you know, and behind door number one is, you know, research indigenous cultures, and behind door number two is Tartaria. I think it's more that something about Tartaria enters their psyche, enters someone's psyche for whatever reason, however, which way, and then that becomes something that you become interested in. And, yes, it is sort of, like, inherently tied to all of these things. And we can point that out sort of from, like, a non tartarian. Yeah. From, like, an outsider perspective, we can be like, hey, look at all these contextual things. But, like, if you're a fan, if you're a person on the subreddit or whatever, you might just. It's. It's not. It's not that either.
Chris: Or I think to most of these folks, I think for them, it's mostly about, like, look at this building. Like, there's no way that this building was built by people with the technology they had in the 18 hundreds.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: And look at this historical photograph. It's surrounded by hovels. But then there's this big, beautiful building.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: No way. That had to have been there already. Okay, so it's more that than, like, the, you know, the thing of, like, trying to uncover all this additional, like, cultural context that we're doing on the show here.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: But I. But I do think it still is. It's interesting, the different flavors to me that come together that don't usually feel like they do. Like, especially that, like, history, erasure plus pro. I don't know, but they see. But the Tartarians wouldn't say that the buildings that I'm talking about were built by colonial powers. They would say they were built before.
Kayla: But that's the thing that I don't. I just. I guess I wish I knew more about the actual, like, conspiracy theory. And what the tartarian theory says about, like, here is how this ancient world worked.
Chris: Like, mostly from what I've seen. Yeah. So, mostly from what I've seen is just a lot of, like, we'll talk a little bit about this, but it's like, a very visual thing is. So they'll. They'll look at some piece of, quote unquote evidence, right. Some. Some map or some document or something, and they'll be like, look at that. I speculate this, okay? And there's not a lot of, like, well, okay, what about the mechanics of how this worked? Like, who conquered who? When? What was the line of succession? Well, it's more just like, oh, I found this thing that says there was a tartarian flag. Look at it. Or, like, oh, I uncovered this. Look at this building. There's no way. This building must have been used to dock airships.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: There's no way. It's a railway station like they say it is. So there's not a lot of, like, any way, at least, that I was able to tell. And correct me if I'm wrong, someone that's listening, but I couldn't discern whether there was, like, somebody compiling, like, a timeline.
Kayla: Okay. And it's also still very new.
Chris: Yeah, it's very new. And like I said at the top of the show, like, there's not really, like, a canon of, like, here are the things. It's more of, like, this loose coalition. Right. So that's why I think that the stuff that we normally expect from that sort of research, like, where are my dates?
Kayla: Where are my dates?
Chris: It doesn't exist, really. Right. Because it's more about. It's more about, like, pecking at the outside of it from these, like, right. Look at this thread I found. Something's not right here than it is about, like, building this cohesive.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: Internally consistent.
Kayla: I get it now.
Chris: Yeah. Another interesting thing to me is that, again, supposedly the capital of the tartarian empire was in the east of asian steppes, even though they had buildings in, like, Chicago and stuff.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So this might be a good time to answer another question that maybe you've been thinking of is where the heck does the name come from?
Kayla: Yeah, actually, I hadn't thought of that, but that makes sense.
Chris: But now you did because I said it from taters. Well, it's actually from tartar sauce. Actually. It's really funny. One of the guys in one of the videos actually does say, like, look at tartar sauce. Why do you think we have tartar sauce? It's because the Tartarians were around. They think tarte, like, tartar sauce came from.
Kayla: Anyway, where does tartar sauce come from?
Chris: That's a good question. I'm gonna look it up for the show. So, actually. So I just. I just looked this up because I would have told. I would have been like, I don't know, Boston, where they have all the fried seafood. Love tartar sauce, but it actually is from an area that. Well, actually, let's. Let's get to that right now. So if you are listening and you're a history or geography buff, you might already know or have a sense of the answer to this question. Kayla, though, I'm going to make you look at another picture.
Kayla: Kayla, though, you're an idiot.
Chris: Kayla, as the resident dumbass, would you like to see another picture? Time.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: Okay, so I'm gonna put you on the spot again and ask you to tell me what we're looking at. Hyah.
Kayla: China.
Chris: What does it say at the top, though?
Kayla: Tartary.
Chris: A new map of chinese and independent tartary.
Kayla: Oh, wait, you wanted me to read that? You thought I could read that?
Chris: Is it too small for you, bro?
Kayla: I got bad eyes.
Chris: I'm sorry.
Kayla: Well, that's what it says, tartary. And I see China.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, what you're looking at is basically East Asia, right? You're looking at, like, you can see India, you can see China, you can see Mongolia, you can see Korea, so on and so forth. So I'm just going to summarize here and say that basically, Tartary does exist.
Kayla: Okay?
Chris: And there have been many historical documents that reference tartary. Tartars. Tartaria.
Kayla: See, I've heard tartars.
Chris: That's where tartar sauce actually does come from. It comes from that region. And the word tartary means many things.
Kayla: I have heard of tartars before, but.
Chris: The one thing it doesn't mean is that there was a political entity that went by that name and spanned the globe. So Wikipedia actually does, I think, probably the best job of summarizing what tartary means in the real world. So I'm just going to quote that.
Kayla: Please do.
Chris: Tartary was a blanket term used in western european literature and cartography for a vast part of Asia bounded by the Caspian Sea. The Ural Mountains, the Pacific Ocean, and the northern borders of China and India at a time when this region was largely unknown to european geographers. So this is me breaking from the quote here. Basically, what it was like a catch all term for Europeans that didn't really know very much about that part of the world. The active use of the toponym can be traced from the 13th to the 19th century in european sources. Tartary became the most common name for Central Asia in a series of negatively colored names that had no connection with the real polities or ethnic groups of the region. So if you had gone to.
Chris: If you had actually gone to this place, right, and you've been like, hey, you a tartar? They would have been like, what the fuck you talking about?
Kayla: What are you talking. Get out of here.
Chris: So it's. It's what? It's. I believe that, yeah, the. The name for that is exonym versus endonym. So an endonym is like something that a group calls themselves. Okay, so, like, we call ourselves the United States of America, right? And an exonym is something that, like, you call something else that they didn't have.
Kayla: Burma versus Myanmar.
Chris: Exactly that. Yes. So tartary was an exonym for this vast region of Asia. Going back to the Wikipedia quote. Until the 19th century, european knowledge of the eyrie remained extremely scarce and fragmentary. In modern England's english speaking tradition, the region formerly known as tartary is usually called inner or central eurasia. Much of this area consists of arid plains, the main population of which in the past, was engaged in animal husbandry, end quote.
Kayla: Aw. Animal husbands.
Chris: So basically, tartary was like medieval and renaissance European speak for this whole area over here to the east of us.
Kayla: Interesting.
Chris: And sometimes it was used in reference to people that we might call Mongol today or some of the mongol successor states. Sometimes it would be used to reference regions instead of people. It wasn't super precise.
Kayla: Gotcha. Okay, so kind of similar to the modern Tartary theory, right?
Chris: But it sure as hell appears on maps and in writing. So people on the Internet doing what they think of as primary research into these documents, one of the guys channels, by the way, that I watch, is called autodidact, which.
Kayla: So, wait, so that tartary guy was right? The tartar sauce guy was right?
Chris: Well, he was right. And that it came from that. Yeah, okay, fair, fine. He was right. It came from that region. He was not right that there was an empire that invented it. But you're right. Props where credit.
Kayla: Where credit is due, I do like the idea that there was a vast, advanced empire that had free energy that has been totally wiped from our, like, history.
Chris: But tartar sauce by the parasites.
Kayla: But tartar sauce persevered.
Chris: Can't. You can't.
Kayla: That's actually.
Chris: Again, you can't erase that.
Kayla: That is such good story to tell.
Chris: I know, I know. Actually, now that you're walking me through it, that is beautiful.
Kayla: It's great.
Chris: Especially because tartar sauce is delicious.
Kayla: Like, imagine if that were something you, like, read in a novel that would just be, like, so fucking cool.
Chris: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Kayla: Good storytelling guy.
Chris: Huge storytelling boner for that. So one of these channels I watch is called autodidact, which literally means self taught. So they. These guys, these tartarian researchers, they see these references to tartary on these maps, like the one you just saw, right? And these documents, and then they say, what? I never learned about this in school, which, by the way, american schools spend, like, a total of 30 minutes on non european history in the course of your entire schooling. So most of us don't really know what the hell's going on over there. So it really does feel like you're uncovering this hidden knowledge, right? They're looking at primary sources, right? The definition of what tartary was in the primary sources of the time was just so loose, so they can kind of look at it and go like, oh, look, this. This hidden thing, right?
Chris: So it's kind of like how today, by the way, we might talk about, like, Germany back in the Middle Ages, okay, right? At that point, Germany.
Kayla: There weren't no Germany.
Chris: There wasn't? No, it was. It was just a region. Like. Well, there, again, sort of like Tartary. There was. It just wasn't like a nation state the way that it is today. Right, right. So some combination of hundreds of kingdoms, part of the Holy Roman Empire, or maybe part of Prussia, depending on. Definitely part of Prussia when we're talking. Well, Prussia was the primary state that drove german unification.
Kayla: You don't have to tell me about Prussia. You know, who's got prussian jeans?
Chris: Oh, that's right.
Kayla: You're a girl.
Chris: Here you are from the sort of.
Kayla: Nazi land doesn't exist anymore.
Chris: Yeah, but you can find documents and maps that say, like, Germania on them, like, all the way back to the Roman Empire. So pretend for a second that Germany never unified to become a nation state. And you were researching these historical documents, you might start saying, hey, there was this hidden empire of Germany that existed that nobody's telling us about. It's very similar to that. So while we're talking about maps, I want to show you one more map.
Kayla: I'm really digging, looking at these maps.
Chris: Yeah, check out this map. It's a dope map.
Kayla: Wait, why is the US so fat? Well, this isn't none of what's wrong with North America.
Chris: This is a map.
Kayla: It looks so different from the rest.
Chris: Of the world because this is a very old map and it's not super accurate. I mean, look at Florida. Florida's like this big, like, udder. It's really weird looking at South America. Look, it's an old timey map. So what I want to call your attention to on this map, because this is a very common map, this is one map that comes up on lots of different Tartaria YouTube channels and whatnot, is they like to point out that America is colored in yellow.
Kayla: Yeah, I was gonna say.
Chris: And Asia is also all colored in yellow. So therefore, according to this map, they're all part of the same empire, because that's how that works.
Kayla: Makes sense.
Chris: Just ignore for a minute the fact that all of Europe and Scandinavia and Russia are all colored red and all of Africa is all colored greenhouse. Ignore that.
Kayla: We're not looking at that. We're looking at the yellow.
Chris: We're just looking at the yellow. But this is the type of thing that they do. They'll bring up this evidence of, like, I looked at this primary source and look at this thing I found. Oh, my God. America was part of this tartarian empire. I just cross referenced it with this other map and with this building I saw. All right, so let's go listen to Mister mortis a bit more so we can talk about some of the other really juicy buildings, bits of theory.
Kayla: Oh, please. How can it get juicier?
Chris: What, a vast, advanced empire that ruled over America from time immemorial wasn't juicy enough for you? Oh, just wait. Another huge trope that seems to come up is mud floods. So what are the mud floods like, what is that all about?
Zach Mortice: Yeah, so it's difficult to parse all the permutations of authoritarian theory because they're pretty decentralized and they haven't coalesced into factions. Exactly. But there's the idea that some cataclysm caused a flood of mud, quite literally, that buried a lot of pre modern buildings. And so we're sitting on top of a mud flood. And maybe if you're in the bay basement of a state capitol building, you know, maybe there's like five or ten or 50 stories below it.
Chris: Right.
Zach Mortice: That are. That are secret and cordoned off and are part of a secret history or something. The idea that maybe the mud was like molten rock or lava or molten buildings. This is the melted building theory, which a few people have, which is that there was some sort of cataclysm. Some people say that the world's a circuit board, and the circuit board was overloaded, which caused buildings as big as mountains to melt. Which buildings.
Chris: Yeah.
Zach Mortice: So, yeah, so that's. I mean, that this. This idea of different permutations, I think, is really fascinating, because that seems to me like the mark of maturity for a conspiracy theory.
Chris: Like.
Zach Mortice: Like, I have some understanding that in. In QAnon there are different factions that kind of beef it out with each other. There's like the. The JFK junior folks versus the non JFK junior folks.
Chris: Have you.
Zach Mortice: Oh, yeah, sure. So, but there. Those sort of battle lines and factional lines don't really seem to have matured in the tartarian theory there. There's different people with different ideas, and they kind of jockey back and forth a little bit, and there's, like, sort of some, like, fear that, you know, those battle lines and factional lines will coalesce more and the community will come, like, divided amongst itself. So there, you know, there are many, many pleas for unity. And so, yeah, I think that's an interesting kind of growth check. Conspiracy theory is kind of how they organize themselves.
Chris: Yeah, I love that you said that, because we have this thing that we say on the show a lot where we say, like, oh, schism. That's how, you know, how you've made it. I mean, that's. Yeah, yeah, I love that you just, like, totally reinforced that. Thank you.
Zach Mortice: Someone made a debunking video debunking my debunk. Yeah, yeah. So that was, like, one of their main concerns. They're like, we gotta. We gotta hang together. We gotta keep an open, collegial atmosphere of intellectual curiosity. So that's. That's their task.
Chris: Yeah, I've definitely seen some flavor of that, too, on the. I had noticed in some of my reading that, I mean, there's definitely some, like you said, there's. There's a wide. There's a range of beliefs. Definitely noticed some that were a little crazier than others. But I also definitely noticed that there were some people that were just like. You use the word intellectual curiosity, right. Like that, where it just seems like they're mostly interested in, oh, my gosh, there's this building that I didn't know existed here. And how could it be so big and crazy and beautiful and whatever? And I, you know, there's this, like, I didn't know about this sort of like, vibe too.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of the action on Reddit is really just people like, gee whizzing and like, oh, wowing about. That's great, man. You literally love to see it. And it's interesting because the Tartarians.
Chris: They.
Zach Mortice: Have an enthusiasm about the design of the built environment that I think is good and cool. Architects are very often they're so disappointed and so upset that people just don't care about where they live and the places they work and their, they're upset that strip malls look like dog shit. And so they want that attention. And they should have. Yeah, we should all, it would be a better place if we all had as big an intense and magnifying glass about our built environment and the architecture that kind of shapes our lives we spend 90% of our lives in. That would be good, I think. But, yeah, that's coming from this direction. It's hard to know what to make of it.
Chris: Yeah. About the mud floods specifically, why do they invoke that? Why is that even part of this theory? Why isn't it just about the buildings?
Zach Mortice: So, I mean, one of the one important subgenre of tartarian photographic evidence are pictures of buildings with, like their dug, like dug out from their foundations with some of their foundations exposed. That's sometimes the point. It's like, hey, this building keeps going down for. That's a good question. I don't have an exact answer for why the mud flood as an origin story is taken on so intensely.
Chris: It's hard to know what's chicken and egg with that because I've definitely seen some stuff where it's like, how do you explain that the basement windows look this way or is it the other way around? Is it like the basement windows look this way because of the floods or. So it's Like a litTle, it was hard for me to kind of parse whether THEy needed the mud flood to explain theory or theory to explain the mud flood.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, I mean, the basement windows are like, that's like the easiest one of the easiest, like, things to sort of debunk. I mean, that was like, that was how you got light and air into big buildings before air conditioning and widespread electric lights.
Chris: Right.
Zach Mortice: You'd, you dig out a little, like a teen little moat and you'd put a window in there that you know, maybe peaks a third, two thirds, a half sidewalk, which is like, then, like, sort of fenced out beyond the moat and, yeah, and it's like, I don't, I've never, I don't know. I've never SEen an architect, you know, jump into the comments at Reddit or onto YouTube. I'm sure. I'm sure it's happened at some point. Doesn't even happen very often. Just be like, hey, no, listen, this is a very common thing. Yeah.
Chris: This is a design trope that. Yeah. Just kind of speculating on the mud flood thing, especially what you find with QAnon and with moral panics is there's a lot of, they invoke underground. A lot like pizzagate. Oh, there's an underground pedophile dungeon or whatever. And with the satanic panic in the eighties, there was underground tunnels, supposedly, that they were using for the trafficking. And there's some factions of QAnon that think that there's a big underground under the Getty where they're hiding children for their adrenochrome. It was just like, a very common theme of, like, underground. So I, you know, if I had to speculate, I would say part of it is with the mud floods, it helps explain away why I like where all the stuff that they can't like, that they theorize is true.
Chris: But you don't see, they just say, well, it's underground. So I feel like that maybe that's what's going on here.
Zach Mortice: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Zach Mortice: I mean, I think you can also kind of look at, like, you can look at a flood, like a deluge of mud material is kind of, I don't know, like, the accumulated weight of history that settles around you and sort of in tunes you in a way that could be really constrictive. I think that's kind of consistent with the tartarian mindset. I'm sure there are, like, a million kind of architectural and geological explanations for how ideas of the underground fit into the modern psyche that I can't quite reach to right now. But, yeah, I mean, it's this idea of the subterranean, the hidden, the dark, the inaccessible. Yeah. And I think that's all pretty relevant.
Chris: Yeah. And I think it also dovetails a little bit. I wanted to ask you about, like, how older parts of a city will literally become buried. I remember this was, like, the first time I visited Rome that became very, that was, like, mind blowing to me. Right. I was like, wait, hold on. Why is. Why is the, I forget the building. But there was like, there's this like famous building from ancient Rome, and it's like literally you have to walk down to it. You have to walk down this sort of ramp to it because it's just so far below the current city level. And that was the first time I'd ever learned that cities sort of become literally just from accumulation of dust and material, become buried over time.
Chris: I'm wondering if that has, that's the kernel of reality that's also being, you know, misinterpreted here as well.
Zach Mortice: Yeah, I mean, in Chicago they raise the level of the street to put sewers in, right? So you can find pictures of a building with this, you know, strange, unrecognizable jacking equipment, lifting up either the building itself or, you know, changing, like changing the elevation of the door. Like all of this stuff, I think would be like great fodder for the tartarian partisans. Yes. I mean, we, yeah, I don't know. It's part of the tartarian theory. It places these really intense limits on what human beings can do. They say, like people with horses and buggies, they could never make a beautiful chapel, courthouse or cathedral. And, you know, similarly, they say kind of implicit there is, you know, they could never raise the level of a street across a major metropolitan area with their horse and buggy technology.
Zach Mortice: And kind of similarly, were talking about in terms of star force, they say only the Tartarians, only this hyper advanced race of people, can move culture across space and time. So it's almost like a learned helplessness, with that idea.
Chris: Yeah, I get the sense of like people in the past, how could they do these things that, you know, that we even struggle to maybe do today, right? Like the, like a lot of the, you know, geoengineering stuff that was happening in the 18 hundreds, like, how could they possibly do that? Like they didn't have computers. That makes no sense. Right? Like, same with, it's like with the pyramids, right? It's like the pyramids must have been built by aliens because there's no way that ancient people could have done that when in fact they were very resourceful. And people have always been resourceful.
Kayla: I think something that's interesting just to immediately respond to what you were talking about there at the end with Egypt and the pyramids is that, and this is something that I have to, like, this is something that's within me too. It feels like when I think about ancient peoples and we look at these ancient structures and we're like, how did they do it? Oh God, we think that, like, these people were just way dumber than us when, like, why would they be way dumber than us?
Chris: Well, in the ways that we're talking about, they actually might have been smarter. Because when you have the amount of infrastructure and technology that we have, I don't really have to know that much about bricklaying. I can just get a bricklaying robot and. You know what I mean? Like, and that makes it easier. But that doesn't mean that because they didn't have the bricklaying robot, they were incapable of laying bricks. In fact, they knew a lot more about bricklaying than I will ever know, and that's how they built this stuff.
Kayla: Like, I think it's interesting that we can sit here and totally accept that Plato and Aristotle and Pythagoras, we can accept, oh, these ancient greek people or whatever were so smart that they invented philosophy that we still believe today. And they wrote books that we still, like, teach in school today. And they created the math that we use. But they were real idiots and couldn't build. You know, they were real idiots.
Chris: The laborers were idiots. Right?
Kayla: And the engineers, like, even if the.
Chris: Laborers were idiots, I'm not saying they were. I'm saying the. That's the how it goes, right? It's like the laborers and the engineers were dumb, though. They couldn't do it.
Kayla: Yeah. Like, why would it be? Why. Why are we so willing to accept that? Like, these ancient people were geniuses when it comes to ABC, but had to have alien help from for D? It's just interesting.
Chris: I don't really know. I think it. Sometimes I think human achievement when it comes to things like, we just don't.
Kayla: Want to admit in high school is what it is.
Chris: Yeah, I think that's it. No, I mean, like, when you think about a massive project that maybe takes generations or thousands of people coordinated to build, sometimes it's just, like, hard to fathom how it can happen. Versus, like, Pythagoras is like, oh, he thought about it hard enough and then came up with a squared plus b squared equals c squared. Okay, that's. I can picture him writing that down, right? Whereas, like, what am I picturing when I'm picturing the pyramids? I don't fucking know. And also, there's. So here's just for me. I don't know about you, but, like, when I first learned about the pyramid, like, what the. The purpose that we currently think that the pyramids are for, which is like, just a large, elaborate tomb, I was just like, wait, that's it.
Chris: You know, and you look at the cross section and it's like. Of the entire pyramid, it's like, this is one vault in the middle that's, like, for the king. I know there's like, probably vaults that we haven't discovered and whatnot. But it just. I. You know, you look at that and like, you look at the pyramids from outside as a kid and you're like, oh, my God, there's Indiana Jones in there.
Kayla: It's a giant cavern with. Full of exploration.
Chris: Exactly. It's just. It's what's behind door number two to the nth degree. Right. And then you're like, yeah, it's like a casket.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: And you're like, no, no. It's a space laser with time travel, obviously. Do you see it?
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So I think there's just like some. Some disillusion going on there.
Kayla: I mean, I remember being a kid.
Chris: Until you learn the context of, like, when you start learning, like, how important the afterlife was to Egyptians and also, like, how important it is to the human experience.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: I think as an adult, I have no problem accepting that something so grand was built for something like death.
Kayla: Yeah. Oh, for sure.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: I also remember being a kid and, like, learning about Notre Dame or whatever and, like, learning, like, oh, it was built over the course of a hundred years and just being like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, what does that mean?
Chris: Yeah, I know, right? Like, like four generations of stonemasons made. What are you.
Kayla: Literally.
Chris: Come on.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: These days. Yeah. It's like if you work on the same thing your parents worked on, it's like, what? Why are you doing that? Back then, it was like, yeah, my great great grandfather was working on this exact same thing that I have my chisel going on right now.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: What do you think about the mud floods, though?
Kayla: I think it makes sense for a theory about a civilization to have a flood myth. You guys kind of talked a lot about, like, why is it a thing? And I kind of. You got to it, but I kind of feel like you beat around the, like, it's got. It's got a flood myth. Like, of course it does.
Chris: Right, right.
Kayla: It's a theory about a civilization.
Chris: Well, it's a theory about a civilization that's not here anymore. So part of that is, like, you were asking me before, like, why? What are the mechanics of this? We don't know all of the, like, so and so. Like, was this king and conquered this place. But there is a mechanics of where did it go? And that's where the mud floods come in, right? Like you say, it's kind of like a flood myth, actually. It's funny. Like, it did feel a little oddly specific. Like, why not just a regular flight?
Kayla: Regular flight.
Chris: Like, what's with the why?
Kayla: He said, like, oh, it could have been magma. I was like, I'm back on board. When it was just mud. I was like, what are you talking about?
Chris: Well, from what I've seen, the magma thing is not common. It's mostly about either. Yeah, it's mostly about mud flood. Why?
Kayla: Why mud?
Chris: And. Or what's muddley liquefact? So they invoke liquefaction videos. We're like, if you shake the sand just right, it turns into, like, a fluid girl.
Kayla: I'm literally on a subreddit.
Chris: This is just for that shit that is called.
Kayla: It's either called lawn popping or lawn bubbles. And it's about when people get their minds to, like, be like that. It's literally just about that.
Chris: So, yeah, if you're listening from the tartarin SUbreddit, you definitely should go check out the Lawn bubble Subreddit.
Kayla: Hold on, let me find out what it is. Yeah, I just double checked, and it is r lawn popping.
Chris: Nice. Popping off with your liquefied lawn.
Kayla: So, yeah, so go to there. If you would like to see some liquefaction happening in our current society. In our current civilization.
Chris: I think maybe that's part of it. But there's. I mean, only some people think that from what I saw, there's definitely an amount. I know it's, like, hard to believe, but there's an amount of skepticism that does exist. Like, there are people that say, like, no, I don't think it could have been liquefaction, because XYz blah, blah. Look at what liquefaction does. That wouldn't explain the mud floods. So it's interesting that there's some pushback there. As far as why it's mud, I don't know. I think it's the things I was talking about with Zach. He brings up the more metaphorical angle of, there's this sense of civilizations becoming buried under the weight of just detritus over centuries.
Kayla: Oh, when he made that metaphor, this whole thing just, like, snapped into, like, into sense for me. Like, it just. Okay, this all makes sense. Like, yes.
Chris: Yeah. But I think it also. Some of it comes back to things we've talked about on the podcast where, if you need to explain away, like, why don't I see, something underground is a very convenient place to explain that away. That's another thing too.
Kayla: And plus, like, it's. I mean, it's like you talked about on the interview. Like, yes, shit does get buried.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I won't make you look at photos again because we're doing a podcast, for God's sake. But I will definitely post more pics of this to our instagram. So there's, like, pictures that get shared around a lot of, like, sunken window basements like, were talking about, and of underground architecture being sort of exposed, unearthed during, like, street construction. And I find it, again, really interesting that this underground trope is also part of tartarian theory. So how juicy is this topic so far?
Kayla: About as juicy as a lawn bubble.
Chris: That's very juicy. That's just full of earth juice. I don't even know what the fuck that.
Kayla: Earth juice? Yeah, it's just Earth juice goes along with moon juice. Next order, moon juice.
Chris: All right, well, buckle up, because I saved.
Kayla: No, I can't. Please. You can't get a juicy.
Chris: Some of the juiciest tidbits for love.
Kayla: Oh, no, I don't. I can't handle anymore. It's too much.
Chris: So I talked about this at the top of the show, but the core elements of tartarian canon, such as I understand them, are basically that there was an advanced global mega empire that has been erased from history. But some clues remain in the form of still standing buildings that have a particular architectural style. As we go just ever so slightly further from the core canon, we get to theory about mudfloods destroying this empire. I say slightly because mudfloods seem to be, like, 99% accepted canon within the community. And I say 99% instead of 100 because there are also alternate military conflict, usually oriented theories, okay. That explain tartarian demise. Now, when I say alternate, by the way, that frequently means both, not necessarily alternative.
Kayla: Oh, just like.
Chris: Okay, yeah. So in other words, some people say it's mud floods, some people say it's war, and some people say it's like, well, it's a combination of both of these things. But the conflict theories basically say that the conflicts we all know and love from mainstream history were actually cover for invading or otherwise destroying the tartarian empire.
Kayla: Hell yeah.
Chris: For example, all of the massive bombings that accompanied world War two.
Kayla: Boo.
Chris: Because we just, like, absolutely leveled cities during that war. We reduced places to, like, Dresden, to just to dust. They say that was just cover to erase tartarian history. But here's my absolute favorite, chef's kiss. Favorite theory about what happened to the Tartarians? Kayla, you've heard of this dude called. What was his name? Napoleon?
Kayla: Yes.
Chris: Yeah. Well, Napoleon didn't really get along with most of the rest of Europe.
Kayla: True.
Chris: So he conquered most of the rest of Europe.
Kayla: Correct.
Chris: One thorn in his side, though, was the russian empire.
Kayla: Isn't it always. It's always the russian empire.
Chris: Now, Napoleon certainly had his share of victories over the Russians, as he did with everybody else. And so at a certain point, the russian emperor, Alexander I, sued for peace. There was a peace summit. Alexander busted on the English, who weren't even there, and Napoleon was like, hell yeah, the English are the worst. Let's do peace. I'm actually serious. Like, here's the alleged actual opening exchange. Alexander reportedly said, sire, I hate the English no less than you do, and I am ready to assist you in any enterprise against them. To which Napoleon replied, in that case, everything can be speedily settled between us and pieces, mate.
Kayla: Fuck, yeah. That's how you do it.
Chris: Yeah. Fuck the English.
Kayla: Right on the British. I mean, everybody in this entire exchange sucked, but.
Chris: Right, well, we also have a bunch of listeners in England, so.
Kayla: Sorry, guys.
Chris: So fuck y'all.
Kayla: Aw.
Chris: Anyway, this is all historically accurate.
Kayla: Sorry that I was on Napoleon's side so far.
Chris: Well, Napoleon had some problematic views.
Kayla: Yeah, he was not great.
Chris: Alright? But this is where it gets weird. In tartaria land, in the real world. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, this treaty that I talked about dissolved and the French and Russians were at war again. This culminated in Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. This is famous enough, you might have heard about it. Which dealt a huge blow to his overall ambitions and arguably was a sort of like a beginning of the end turning point for France. Oh, but actually, Kayla.
Kayla: Oh, no.
Chris: This was just a cover up.
Kayla: Oh, my God.
Chris: Napoleon's invasion of Russia was fake. The real story is that Napoleon and Alexander were actually still allies. And in 1812, the french forces, plus the russian forces together fought and destroyed tartarian Moscow, which supposedly was under control of the tartarian empire at the time.
Kayla: Okay, so it was like St. Petersburg was Alexander.
Chris: Exactly.
Kayla: And Tartaria had Moscow.
Chris: And so that whole invasion was not real. It wasn't an invasion of Russia. It was an invasion with Alexander into Tartaria, who currently occupied Moscow. Isn't that wild?
Kayla: That's like, qanon level of, like, conspiracy.
Chris: Yeah. Oh, also, Napoleon and Alexander may have been lovers.
Kayla: Wait, wait. Hold on.
Chris: Wait.
Kayla: Hold on. Pause. What are you saying? In real life or in tartarian theory.
Chris: Oh, real life, baby.
Kayla: Wait, what? Wait.
Chris: Sorry. So this is only sort of related to Tartaria just based on this whole, like, maybe they were friends and fought the Tartarians. So it's like tangentially related, but I'm still gonna explain it because it was too juicy of a find to not share.
Kayla: No. You're telling me that these enemies were loved?
Chris: So this. Yeah, I know it's your favorite. I told you.
Kayla: Oh my God.
Chris: So this is like one of those, like. Can't prove it for like 100% sure, but come on, type thing. It's beyond headcanon.
Kayla: Oh my God.
Chris: So there's historical speculation that I discovered, but, like. Okay, so for example, here's an actual real medallion that commemorated the Treaty of Tilsit that I mentioned earlier. There's Napoleon and Alexander the first.
Kayla: No, put it more towards me. No no. I'm not done looking at it.
Chris: Well, why don't I read you?
Kayla: They're just buddies.
Chris: Why don't I read you the letter that Napoleon sent to his wife? Joseph?
Kayla: That is the most romantic thing from the treaty summit.
Chris: I am pleased with Emperor Alexander. He ought to be with me if he were a woman. I think I should make him my mistress. That's a quote from Napoleon himself. Here's a quote from an article on historytoday.com about the treaty of Tilsit. Quote the discussions continued for several days, punctuated by entertainments in the evenings with both Napoleon and Alexander quartered in Tilsit, dining together every day and often talking alone together far into the night. They took to each other, hugged each other when they met, walked along holding hands, and exchanged cravats and handkerchiefs. End quote.
Kayla: They were lovers.
Chris: They were doifanitely lovers. Look at this medallion.
Kayla: They were both really bad dudes, right? Yeah, they sucked, so we shouldn't be like. But also.
Chris: But it's also super juicy that they were, like, enemies on the battlefield.
Kayla: But they were lovers.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was pretty tight.
Kayla: Oh my God.
Chris: Again, just speculation.
Kayla: No, I don't care. It's not speculation. They were lovers. I'm gonna need a lot of time with that.
Chris: Yeah, so they did. In the world. Yeah, in the real world, they did go to war again, unless tartarian theorists are correct, in which case they were both still friends with benefits and crushed the greatest empire of all time together.
Kayla: Either way, it's great. Either way, it's great story.
Chris: Alrighty. Believe it or not, from here it gets weirder. What? But it really does feel like the weird stuff is believed by less than the majority of tartarian enthusiasts. Again, it's really hard to say how many people believe what because of the organic nature of the thing. But, yeah, one of the weirder things, of course, that we talked about earlier was free energy. That's a thing that a lot of tartarian theorists believe. That the society, their society was extremely advanced and a lot of what they call antiquatec was either lost or suppressed, including free energy.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: In Zack's Bloomberg article, he mentions that the tartarian community is extremely visual. And I can absolutely confirm that because almost all the videos I see are of folks, like, pointing out bits on a map or bits on an old building or bits from a painting on a document and saying, see, that's Tartaria there. Look. You can tell because they have this, like, particular filigree that they only use when they have the airships or that type of thing. And the reason I bring up the visual nature of the medium here is that they frequently do that with the free energy thing. So they'll look at an old photo and they'll see some, like, weird doohickeys pointing out of a street or a building or something and say, see that there? Those are free energy towers that the Tartarians set up.
Chris: And I think one guy was even claiming that, like, some of those doohickeys were actually, like, wi fi as well.
Kayla: What?
Chris: Yeah. What?
Kayla: I have heard ancient Wi fi. I have heard that.
Chris: Yeah, of course. Oh, I know. What else? Giants.
Kayla: Oh, we're gonna talk about the giants. Wait, were the tartarians giants? I love ancient giants.
Chris: That ancient giants is a big part of the Tartarian.
Kayla: Are you kidding me?
Chris: Theory set. I didn't.
Kayla: Oh, I love ancient giants.
Chris: A significant chunk of tartarian theorists believe, and I say again, I don't know how many people believe what? And so I don't want to straw man anybody that's like, dude, I just think that the architecture is curious.
Kayla: Right, right.
Chris: Be like, oh, you also believe in giants. I don't know how many people are like that. So I don't want to strawman anybody here. But there are a chunk of people that do believe that. Well, I'm not so, like, I'm not super sure whether they thought that it was like the whole empire with giants or it was just like, part of the empire, because it was like, they make a big point of like, oh, it was like global, multi ethnic.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So it definitely wasn't all giants.
Kayla: Couldn't have been all giants.
Chris: But I don't know, if they think, like, maybe it was the ruling class with giants. I'm not, I'm not super sure. But again, being a visual oriented theory, what these folks will do is they'll pass around like, old timey photos that have, like, you know, those super tall, like, freakishly tall people in them.
Kayla: Love those people.
Chris: Yeah. And then they'll say that, like, this proves that there was a whole race of tartarian giants.
Kayla: Okay, so when we're talking. When they're talking giants, they're talking about like 8ft tall people.
Chris: Yeah. Not like, not like nephilim, like prehistoric. Yeah, yeah.
Kayla: That's really good to know. Okay, so we're talking 8ft. I need to know what kind of ancient giant.
Chris: What sort of ancient giant? Yeah. So this is like recently ancient, eight foot tall, human looking normal people.
Kayla: Gotcha.
Chris: I'm also not super clear on, like, where the giants went or why a mud flood or war would have killed them off.
Kayla: They got stuck in the mud.
Chris: Well, that's the thing. I think giants would be, like, more suited than non giants to survive a flood, wouldn't they?
Kayla: Maybe they all fell in to the mud.
Chris: Anyway. Yeah, giants. Also, our girlfriend, flat earth, seems to have a large venn diagram intersection with tartarian theory. I reason for this.
Kayla: I was going to ask about that.
Chris: Why were you going to ask about that? Because I was about to give a reason.
Kayla: I mean, I know that this is with a lot of things, but just the hidden knowledge that they want to keep from you. Also the visual nature of this. Also, you in your interview talked a lot about, like, intellectual curiosity and how it's. It just, I don't know. And just the alternative history. I feel like it often will line up with the flat. With flat earth stuff. Like, I've. In my experience with flat Earth belief, there's also a lot of atlantean and lemuria stuff going on, so it kind of would make sense for this to maybe also dovetail with that.
Chris: Yeah. So your understanding matches mine. Here's something that more or less verbatim I've seen tartarian theorists say is that. Or at least tartarian theorists that are also flat earthers will say, like, flat Earth is like the gateway. Once you've learned that you've been lied to about something as huge and ubiquitous is the shape of the earth, there's no telling what else you've been lied to about.
Kayla: That's what it was. It felt like tartarian theory is so big.
Chris: Yeah.
Kayla: That it felt similar to how big.
Chris: Yes. And you also hit the nail on the head with the. I've. I got the exact same DIY science vibe, right, from Tartaria that I get from a lot of flat earthers of, like, I'm gonna run this experiment myself just to see.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Right. Like, I. It's the same thing with, like, you can't see the past the same way you can't see the curvature of the earth. So you have to have, like, a certain amount of trust and what the things that you are reading and the body of knowledge is true. Right. Before you accept that knowledge, you have to have some trust that it's true.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So I think that's why people that have that filter will apply it in both areas and they'll say, like, I don't know if the earth is really round. I'm gonna do my own science, right. I don't know if history was really like this. I'm gonna walk around and take pictures of buildings and I'm gonna look at documents myself.
Kayla: Something that's making me, that I've been thinking about this the whole entire time is just like, it doesn't feel outlandish to me to believe some of these things because the fact that we have any knowledge of history at all is, like, bonkers to it. If you sit down and think about if we say we didn't have written language, how quickly history would be just, and knowledge would just be lost.
Chris: Kayla. I can't tell you my great grandparents names.
Kayla: Yeah. Like, it is so easy to lose the knowledge of history. And even with written language and photographs and drawings and stories that are passed down in journals and whatever the fuck, so much knowledge of history is just lost to time.
Chris: Yeah. Or like the burning of the library like, Alexandria that everybody's, like, still super sad about.
Kayla: Yes.
Chris: And that's, I mean, that's another thing that comes up, conspiracy theories because they'll say, like, oh, my God, all of the knowledge that was lost in the burning of the library of Alexandria was, like, just this insane, like, technology knowledge and whatever. And, like, honestly, I can't say that they're wrong. It's burned, it's gone. I don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what in there.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So there's just so much that history.
Kayla: Is insane that we don't know because once it is gone.
Chris: Yeah. I think I would be like, it's a lot more, it's a lot easier to debunk something like Tartaria that is purported to be something, like, in our own backyard in the last hundred years and also globe span. Like, there's no space in tartarian theory for it to, like, hide in the shadows. It's way too big.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: So that's part of what makes it easier, I think, for me to debunk. But a lot of these, you know, oh, my God, how do I really know what happened in the past? Things like, yeah. And finally, one more sort of wild thing. The alleged tartarian flag has a griffin on it.
Kayla: Hell yeah.
Chris: So I'll post a picture of this too. It's like a yellow background of the black Griffin. And one of these guys that was way out there was actually the. The it's all lies guy that I was telling you about. And he like, whole nine yards, flat earth, everything. This guy was also claiming that Tartaria had actual real life griffins, which is why it was on the flag. And I think he was saying that they might have, like, guarded like, government buildings or something.
Kayla: That's cool.
Chris: Yeah, it was pretty rad.
Kayla: That's really dope. What happened to the Griffins, though?
Chris: I don't know. They succumbed to the mud floods, or Alexander and Napoleon killed them in their quest to be ancient lovers or something. I don't know. Anyway, before we parted ways, Zach left me with one more little anecdote from his own life, which I will share with you guys right now.
Zach Mortice: Oh, yeah. I got married in one of the buildings. That's the intense focus of tartarian speculation. Yeah. So there is this architect, Alfred Mullethenne. He did a series of post offices on the east coast and Midwest after the civil war. And when I say post offices, they're not like a place to drop your letter. They're like regional administrative headquarters for the post office. And obviously the post office was a very important american institution for, like, binding this young nation together, communicating from one from the great plains, the West coast, to New York City, so forth, just like, very important. These are beautiful, grand, kind of second empire buildings. Incredibly ornate. They look like something you would see on, like a cake sculpting competition show. My hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, has a state capital that's gold leaf, five domes, incredibly ornate.
Zach Mortice: And there are maybe some of the closest I got to really sympathizing with the Tartarians is someone found some pictures from my hometown newspaper, the Des Moines Register. There are pictures of the capital's construction and what it was like when it was brand new. And so, you know, in a state capitol, in a not quite small town, they're like these wooden, slightly better than shantytown buildings, right. Which would become like the downtown core of Des Moines over the years. And looming over them is this incredibly ornate, beautifully sculpted state capitol building. And I mean, that. That juncture, it's like, oh, yeah, I get how that looks weird.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Zach Mortice: I mean, that's a critique of what the state government and the government thought was powerful, right? Like, they didn't really care that they. People were living in, like, near shanty towns in the shadow of the literal state capital of a brand new state, which is going to be this great enterprise, like every state was going to be. They put the money and the gold leaf and kind of this institutional symbol of power and authority and prestige, and it would be like, what? Like the thirties or something before, like government said, hey, let's up the quality of housing.
Chris: So, yeah, so he even got married in an old tartarian building.
Kayla: That's cool as hell. I want to get married in a tartarian building.
Chris: I know. And all these buildings that he's describing, everything you've described on the show today, again, I know you keep saying this, but Instagram, Instagram, you gotta look at.
Kayla: This is such a visual episode. You gotta look at them.
Chris: Yeah, this is a very visual podcast audio episode. You guys, I did a good. Before we move on to criteria, I want to say one more thing about the community of tartarian believers. I said before, they seem to be mostly harmless to me, and you heard me speaking to Mister Mortis. There's a lot to empathize with here. I certainly don't think there's any factual historical accuracy to most of these claims. But as we find with a lot of these things of that nature, that doesn't mean that there's an utter lack of truth here. One of the youtubers that does a lot of tartarian research goes by the name of Berserker Bear, which is a great name, by the way. I think I already empathize with him because of the name.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And he mentioned at one point in a video that sometimes these stories should be taken more metaphorically than literally. I'd love to ask the guy, and actually, I've been trying to get in touch with him, so maybe I'll have an update for you next episode. But at what point does he literally mean that? Like, how many of the tartarian troas does he literally think happened in real life versus metaphors? Like, I really want to understand that perspective from him.
Kayla: Great information to have.
Chris: I know. I was so desperate to ask him these questions. I know. I know, hope is still out there. Personal beliefs aside. Like, I think it's perfectly healthy to engage in stuff like this as long as you are treating it in that, like, metaphorical sense. Right. Sort of the same way that, like, I justify us thinking, like, crystals are neat. Right, right.
Kayla: It's more about what the power of the story does for. Does for your internal life.
Chris: Yeah. How it helps you. Maybe it helps. Maybe tartarian theory helps process the unknown when it comes to, like, where's our civilization headed? Like, where did it come from? Why don't I have a connection to my past? Or if processing real historical erasures and the uncertainty that comes with knowing that we can never travel to the past and have imperfect knowledge based on human record keepers to know what it was. Like, if it's a way of connecting with the built environment around us in more deep and personal ways, then fucking hell. Yeah.
Kayla: Right, right.
Chris: And I don't know. I may be, like, totally off base here, but this berserker bear guy, most of his videos are just like him. Like, walking around the environs of his hometown of Buffalo, New York, and saying, like, look at this building. Isn't this awesome? Like, I bet you didn't know about this building that was probably a dock for tartarian airships when Buffalo was part of Tartaria. Which, again, factual whatever aside, like, it's still. It's just. It's hours of this kind of footage of this guy just walking around, looking at some ruins in the more wooded areas outside of town. Cross referencing that with 17th century maps of buffalo that he's found in archives. Forget there's no tartarian empire.
Chris: I just think that it's rad that there's, like, a youtuber with this really interesting hyper local, curious and diy approach to learning about his environment.
Kayla: And I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with just, like, appreciating architecture in whatever way that means to you.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Kayla: It is like you talked about in your interview and before. It's. It's art. Yeah, it's art. And so if. If this theory is what this art is bringing up for these people, like, there's some validity to all of those feelings, right? The feelings, not necessarily the facts, right?
Chris: Absolutely. Yeah. Like, honestly, it kind of inspires me to, like, want to do more of the same of that. Like, I'd love to walk, you know, more downtown, like, near, like, you know, early Los Angeles, and look at some of that architecture, you know, like Ulvera street.
Kayla: I'm literally doing that tomorrow. Going to downtown well, we should have.
Chris: Recorded tomorrow after we did literally what this youtuber does.
Kayla: Bonus content.
Chris: Oh, man. I'm actually definitely going to take pictures if I see any architecture down there that looks like tartarian. Tartarian in nature. All right, Kayla, just like you did last time. Sources at the end, there just wasn't like a really good place for them up front, but still important to do it. My sources included Reddit, multiple subreddits, including r Tartarianarchitecture, r cultural layer, and r bad history. YouTube, of course, many channels seem to need a list, but again, I want to give like a specific shout out here to berserker bear. And he does this. The channel, I think is called bushwhacking Tartaria in Buffalo. Again, bushwhacking because he just literally walks around like, takes video of stuff. Wikipedia, of course, and then a variety of, like, I guess you'd call them primary sources.
Chris: Like, I didn't check out like a bunch of books from the library, but a lot of the same maps and documents and things that tartarian researchers would show. I would obviously looked at those as well. Sort of like the map with the yellow borders that I showed you, for example, Bloomberg, of course, which is where I ran into this. And obviously the interview with author of said article, Zack Mortis. Thank you, Zack. Dylanhistory.org, comma skeptoid, podcast, Quora answers, and Google trends. All right, Kayla, it's that time again to wave a paper around that isn't even the original time for the ancient lost tradition of cult or just weird criteria.
Kayla: All right, we are up to eight criteria now.
Chris: No, seven. Oh, wait, no, you're right.
Kayla: Trying to fact check me over here.
Chris: We could have had seven and we did eight. I'm gonna cut one.
Kayla: Why? What's better?
Chris: Seven is a way better number than eight. Why it, what do you mean why? I don't understand. It just is it just, is seven better than eight? Better number? If you're stack ranking numbers, seven is at or near the top. It's certainly better than eight. Eight is.
Kayla: What are you fucking talking about?
Chris: What is so hard to understand about this?
Kayla: Does it taste better? Is it prettier?
Chris: Does it smell better overall better?
Kayla: Is it more prime? Is it lesseners?
Chris: If you agree with me on this, which I know you will, because it's objectively true, seven is better than eight. Please let us know. Either like email us or tweet us.
Kayla: Okay, you please shut up now.
Chris: Just. Is seven deadly sins? Why do you think there's seven instead of eight deadly sins. It's just. It's a better number. Why do you think there's seven continents?
Kayla: I think there's seven because seven is a religious number.
Chris: Seven is also a religious number. It's just. It's just a good number, man.
Kayla: Okay, be quiet. Now it's time to talk about our eight criteria. Charismatic leader. It does not seem to me that there is the presence of a charismatic leader.
Chris: Absolutely not.
Kayla: Ancient territory. It seems like one of the defining factors of this thing is that it's still diffuse.
Chris: Yes, precisely. There is a lack of centralized dogma that is creating some confusion there. I think skeptoid found that there was, like, an original post, like an original video on YouTube that first brought this idea up, but that person does not hold any prominence in the community. It was just like, oh, this is the first time we saw a YouTube video date wise. So there's just. There isn't. Yeah, there isn't one.
Kayla: Expected harm.
Chris: I'd say relatively low.
Kayla: I can't say I've seen any real evidence of, like, expected harm to the individual for following this belief, but I don't. What do you think?
Chris: My only thing for this is, like, as a conspiracy theory, there is a potential slippery slope to anti semitism, as there always seems. Right.
Kayla: I guess anti semitism.
Chris: I don't want to straw man or erasure. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to straw man anybody that is into this theory, because it's got cool architecture and they want to, like, walk around their hometown and talk about it.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: I just want to point out that there are some aspects of everything I've been told is a lie and the earth is flat and it's being hidden from me by the Rothschilds that it's easy to get to that place.
Kayla: Right, right. Still low presence of ritual.
Chris: I think it's pretty ritualistic, especially if.
Kayla: People are, like, literally walking around looking for things, finding maps. I mean, I know that's not necessarily.
Chris: Ritual per se, but there's some ritualistic element to it. Like, most of the videos I've seen have a similar setup where it's like, look at this image. Look at that thing on the image. This thing tells me that there was this hidden empire. Now look at this image. Like, there's a lot of similarity there.
Kayla: I think it has ritual in the same way that we would say that, like, something like flat earth or Qanon. Not to compare this to those, you know, the ideologies of those movements, but just some of the similar activities that maybe go on. The research becomes the ritual.
Chris: Yeah, for sure. There's definitely the DIY research is a big part of the ritual here. And then also there's tropes that are very tartarian tropes. So there's the mud floods. I haven't seen mud flood anywhere other than Tartaria. So there's some things, and then there's things where, even though I've seen it elsewhere, it just seems to be very part. That trope seems to be very much part of theory. So, like, free energy and that kind of stuff as well.
Kayla: Is it niche? Yes, it is.
Chris: Super niche.
Kayla: Very much. Very much. Very much niche. It is. This is a baby. A baby theory, baby conspiracy theory that's.
Chris: Rolling around out there, budding. Budding into a beautiful young conspiracy. Well, I don't know.
Kayla: Flower.
Chris: Flower. Thank you. But actually, before we go to antifactuality. Sorry, I want to address something you just said a minute ago. You said, oh, I don't want to compare it to QAnon. I have definitely seen many a comment that they were sort of taken issue with the presentation in Zack's article as the qanon of architecture. I get it. First of all, that was what made me click on. So, you know, I'm guilty. Right? But. And I get the fact that they're, you know, the. The analogy there is like, okay, it's a conspiracy theory. I've seen most of the people I've seen in Tartaria that have taken issue with that. I said, like, we're not like those wackos.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: So I want to. I just want to point that out here that they, from what I've seen, they do not choose to identify themselves in the same manner and fact, very opposed to it.
Kayla: QAnon is an inherently violent belief system. I do not see an inherently violent belief system here.
Chris: Yeah. All right, sorry. So, antifactuality, I think that we on.
Kayla: This podcast are going to say that it's high.
Chris: Yeah, very high.
Kayla: It's very high.
Chris: The mud floods are definitely an example of motivated reasoning, especially if you start looking at the mechanics behind it. Like, we need to explain why this doesn't exist, therefore, there must have been a mud flood, then. Look at all this evidence from us floods.
Kayla: And I guess I just. I'm personally having a hard time with, like, the. I cannot. And maybe there are tartarian theorists that explain this, but I cannot really parse how to. How to marry the existing indigenous populations that lived in North America and square it with, like, the Tartarian. The supposed tartarian empire that was also here. Like, it just feels like it. It butts up against my body of.
Chris: Facts too much to not call it. Yeah, it's. I think that's. You could repeat that. For as large as the empire is claimed to be and as powerful and as long lived, you could probably repeat that exact same statement for like a hundred different cultures and nations and peoples. Like, how does this comport with. And actually even you can't even just say indigenous american. Fc. How does this compare with the Navajo nation and this nation? There's a multiple nations there. American civilization itself, like the United States of America civilization. Canadian civilization. Russia. There's a big problem with, like, well, they were in Russia, but so was Russia.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Like that whole Napoleon story. Right. So there's just. There's a lot of. That's part of why it's, like, easier to debunk this, because there's so many things. It's so brave. There's so many things that it butts up against that you kind of go like, oh, I don't know how it could have possibly been real.
Kayla: And just when we start getting into things, like, there used to be airships and free energy.
Chris: Yeah. It just kind of goes over the top.
Kayla: The fact that we have this is anti them.
Chris: Yeah. Life consumption.
Kayla: Yeah, I don't. It doesn't seem like it's going to consume a lot.
Chris: Unclear to me.
Kayla: I think we maybe kind of have to wait and see how this develops.
Chris: Yeah. There's certainly been, like, a spike interest of it, like, even leading up to that article and certainly after. But I mean, I didn't. I didn't see anybody that was any more like life consumed than any other, like, YouTube influencer.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: Of which there are many like that.
Kayla: Some of those people that's. Their lives are consumed.
Chris: Well, for sure. But I didn't see anything that made me kind of go like, this is all you do, 24 7365. And you've been cut off from your family the way you do with Q and A on. Right?
Kayla: Yeah, no, it seems like it's just. It's. It's. From what you've presented, it's a hobby.
Chris: Their lives are identical by the Internet, the same as the rest of us.
Kayla: We're all sitting on the Internet too much.
Chris: All right, time for the newbies. Dogmatic beliefs.
Kayla: I don't know. I think you might have to.
Chris: I was gonna. So for me, I feel like this is low because of the whole thing we talked about that they're like, there isn't really. There's, like, a little bit of central canon.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And then there's, like, a bit of asmorgus board after that. So I just. I don't feel. I don't know, there doesn't feel like there's a right wrong, but there might start being a right wrong. Now that these guys are trying to, like, consolidate and, like, manage their image to outsiders and stuff, there might turn into, like, a. Well, if you think. If you're a flat earther, then you're not part of this community. You know what I mean? Like, they might start doing that. I don't know.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: But right now, I would say low.
Kayla: I agree.
Chris: Chain of victims.
Kayla: Chain of victims. I kind of don't think we're looking at a chain of victims here.
Chris: I didn't get the impression that they were interested in proselytizing.
Kayla: Yeah.
Chris: In fact, I mean, like, the guy has a YouTube channel. They definitely do the whole, like, oh, you know, wake up. And by the way, they're very, like, you know, they talk about mainstream media a lot, surely.
Kayla: Sure.
Chris: Especially VCV, the article that we talked about several times on the show, and Bloomberg. But, yeah, I didn't. I don't know, I didn't get the impression that they were proselytizing it and actually post that article. The. The reaction video to that article felt more the opposite. I felt like they were sort of, like, circling the wagons a little bit.
Kayla: Right.
Chris: And I feel like that's. There's a, you know, probably part of why I was not quite able to get. And get this gentleman to talk to me, which I totally understand. You're just walking around your hometown making videos and chatting with the community on subreddit, and then all of a sudden, it's like, all right, now there's going to be a Bloomberg article, and these two jackasses are going to make a podcast about it.
Kayla: Right?
Chris: So anyway, bottom line is chain of victims feels also extremely low.
Kayla: So what do you think we're looking at here?
Chris: You're the one that's supposed to decide. It's my topic. It's your decision.
Kayla: I don't think we're looking at a cult. I think that the tartarian theory is just weird.
Chris: Just weird. I totally agree. It's. It's hella weird, and I love it, and I don't think it's true.
Kayla: I'm. I cannot wait to stop talking to you so that I can go look at it on the Internet.
Chris: Yeah, I'll recommend some videos to you. And also, I'll send. I'll obviously put links in the show notes for these videos that I'm talking about. But generally, it's like a really cool narrative. I don't think that the community is harmful. And, yes, at least not yet. I don't think it's a cult. I think it's just a. It's a weird thing online.
Kayla: It's a weird thing online.
Chris: You know what else is weird online? Us.
Kayla: Every. The Internet itself is weird.
Chris: Yeah. How about them apples?
Kayla: That was beautiful.
Chris: Don't you love it? It's like. It's. It's what? It's we. All three of us, you, me, and Zach all said at the top of the show, it's like this brand new thing.
Kayla: I'm so excited for it.
Chris: New flavor.
Kayla: Thank you for discovering this. You're welcome. No, not you. The Tartarians.
Chris: Well, I discovered it for you.
Kayla: Yeah. Thank you for bringing it to the attention of this podcast.
Chris: That's true. I haven't really done any original tartarian research. This is all just content aggregation as we do.
Kayla: That's what we're here for.
Chris: Yeah. And if you somehow made it to the end of this episode as a tartarian theorist, then thanks for giving us a chance and tell me what you think. Email us@culturejustweirdmail.com. And for everyone else, remember, don't like, don't subscribe, don't even sign up for a Patreon.
Kayla: Go listen to someone else's podcast.
Chris: No, no, Kayla, no. Listen to our podcast and enjoy it. And don't do anything else.
Kayla: I'm Kayla.
Chris: And I'm Chris.
Kayla: And this has been cult or just weird.