Bonus: Mark Adams Interview

The other gentleman would be Joe. Okay, hey, how you doing? And by the way, can you hear us? Okay? I can't? Can you hear me? Yes? Alright? Well shall we shall? We talk about some Atlantis today? Do you want to talk about it? By the way, before we get into the whole thing. Uh, you're you're about to head off to Alaska to research your name? Am I am? Talk

about that at all? Sure? Sure? Um. You know, you know, people who don't know my other work, they see I've written a book about Atlantis, and you tend to get categorized as one of them, as one of those guys who's you know, got got Atlantis? Hypothesis that he's talking and they're all guys with the exception of maybe like Madame Blavatsky, and you know, they're they're surprised to hear that. You know, this is actually just one sort of thing

that I do. Um. I wrote a book about Machu Picchu in Peru a few years ago, and UM, you know, I sort of retraced the expedition from nineteen eleven um on which fella him Hiram Bingham Um rediscovered Martu Pichu almost accidentally. And this new book in Alaska, it's a little bit more like that. It's um retracing an expedition from where the railroad tycoon Um E. H. Harriman, who is just uh sort of done an aggressive takeover of

the Union Pacific Railroad. His doctor tells him, you know, you're gonna have a heart attack if you don't go on vacation for the summer. So Harriman, being the type of person he is, decides he's going to sort of outfit a boat into a luxury yacht and take two dozen of America's smartest scientists, environmentalists, artists, etcetera, and bring

them on this boat. And they're all going to go off together and explore this unknown coast of the territory of Alaska, which is still you know, pretty pretty much terra incognated at that point. UM. And it is. And and it's what's interesting is it's you know, it's like the height of the gold rush. Uh. You were switching from like the Yukon Gold Rush to the Nome gold Rush.

And one of the people on the boat is John Muir, who at that point has just written the two or three articles that are sort of like the cornerstone of American conservation. UM. And he has, you know, just founded the Sierra Club. And the sort of clash of personality between Harriman and mu were at this exact moment in Alaska history, which sort of parallels Alaska right now. I don't know how much you've been keeping track of, like,

you know, the the oil problems they're having in Alaska. UM. But I was up there talking to the state economist about three or four weeks ago up in Anchorage, and I was like, how bad is it? And he said, Alaska gets nine percent of its income directly or indirectly from oil. We have a six point five billion dollar budget, and we have a four point five billion dollar deficit

in that budget. Now I've heard the off fields after there have been dropping in their production, and that the had no taxes and also got a check in the mail from oil is kind of over I heard, Well, that's that's what they're worried about. They they're like, you know, they get this thing is what it's called the Permanent Fund, and you get a dividend every year. I think last year it was two thousand dollars for every man, woman

and child in Alaska. So on top of not having any sales tax, not having any state income tax, they expect money back every year. Um. And now one of the big fights they're having is, you know, how much of that can we cut without you know, getting voted out of office? You know. So it's an interesting time up in Alaska, and it'll be an interesting trip, um. You know, once you if you follow the coast of Alaska from like the southernmost point of the Panhandle out

to the end of the Aleutians. Actually have a map in my office from National Geographic It's it's almost like driving from Jacksonville to Kansas City, down to Phoenix and then up to San Francisco. Yeah, it's a it's a big place. It's a really long trip. Yeah, and then to go to Nome would be you know, which I'm also going to do with. Maybe even Siberia would be like you know, I don't know, going to Jackson Hole or something. Um so it's a huge place. Yeahs, I

need to get up there one of these days. I've been to a lot of exotic places, but I've never to my same been to Alaska, and it's not that far away really from where No, no, you guys could get there in a few hours. And this breathtaking beaut I've never been there either, and I was just like, wow, yeah, it's amazing. Well it's unfortunately, I know I mentioned to you in that email that you should go check out

the story of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that might be subject for a later book or something like that. Yeah, definitely looks like a great story. Oh, it's an amazing story. And the guy that was kind of superhuman, I mean he was he had a personality disorder obviously, but he did some amazing stuff. Yeah. Yeah, No, that's a great stuff. And those are the kind of stories you guys do so well. You know that sort of slightly out of the mainstream story that hasn't been

told that much. Mad Trapper is kind of an obscure story. I don't know, but yeah, we find the weird little stories. Yeah, we tried to. Yeah, well from the world folks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, seriously, I actually, uh, I wanted that first off, say you you've got off a great little singer the beginning of chapter eleven in your book. Oh when you talk about uh Maxie and Asher, Yes, powers to to find the list and I love this. I'm going to quote your

book here. Asher was careful not to overstate the importance of her findings. Quote, this is probably the greatest discovery in world history a reporter, and then she goes down to stay like this will change the fields of archaeology, anthropology, blah blah blah. You know, And that's the that's the problem with Atlantis. There are you know, there are so many people out there making these these outlandish claims for Atlantis based on you know, next to nothing or absolutely

nothing that you know, anyone who wants to take it seriously. Uh, you know can't even get a foot in the door anywhere. Now, I know, I know it's it definitely puts it makes the whole thing kind of a stink, you know. And yeah, and you know, I would guess that the way I read your book, and you're not You're not one of those people. You're not a crime, thank you. I pretty ship.

You really tell the history of Atlantis, and you talk about a lot of the people who are looking for and there are lots of people who are looking for Atlantis. Would you not agree there are more people looking for Atlantis now than probably in the entire year history of Atlantis up to this point, so you know, and and a lot of that is because you know, things like

Google Earth, um. People can now sit at home on their computer and you know, look at translations of ancient manuscripts and look at sites around the Mediterranean that you know might coincide with the original description of Atlantis. You know, you don't have to go out there with a pick axe and one of those you know screen things that archaeologists used to, uh, you know, shake the dirt through for relics and things like that. You can be it is.

I've actually got the American Archistic Archeological Association guide book right here, and it is it's just listed as that screen thing that we use sometimes exactly that I like shaker thing for the dirt. Yeah, that's got to be frustrating to be because you know, you're an archaeologist. You want to burrow down there as fast as you can, and I would be wanting to get a bacco in there.

But those guys are down there with toothbrushes. You know what's funny is there's actually an Atlantis kind of connection there in that. The whole reason why people decided in the in the latter part of the nineteenth century that it might be possible to look for Atlantis was because this fellow Schliemann Heinrich Schleiman from Germany, who was not an archaeologist, went to a site in what is now Turkey and followed the clues from Homer's Iliad looking for

the city of Troy. Up until that point, no one was sure whether Troy had existed or not. It was, you know, it was a myth to be interpreted, you know, whether you interpreted as fact or fiction or somewhere in the middle. We're not sure. But he goes in there and he finds this ancient city, uh in a spot where where no one had ever bothered to look for,

you know, just using the clues from the manuscript. But in the pro as sss, he digs down so deep and so fast looking for what he assumes is going to be this you know, like treasure hoard that he obliterates the city of Troy that he's looking for and gets down to like earlier version for Yeah. So, I mean, you know, people have been trying to like put back together the Troy that he destroyed with his team of diggers.

So you know there's a lesson for archaeology in there that kind of like the role model for Indiana Jones, you know, because Indiana Jones as an archaeologist was you know, he just go in and basically steal crap out of a sacred site. Let's get this thing from its original place and send it to a museum. Yeah exactly. Yeah where. Yeah, we're very belongs. So your book is, by the way, it's called Meet Me in Atlantis. Uh, and you've written

previous books. He wrote turn Right at Mochi Pichu. Yes, and uh, this is like kind of like turn Right at Mochi pich was. So you're kind of like talking about stuff that has happened in the past, combining it with mythology. But it's also a little different. Now, why did you decide to write about Atlantis? Well, it actually

sprang directly from the research of Toady Machu Picchu. I was looking through some microfilm from nineteen eleven, the year when when Machu Pichu was rediscovered, and I came across the front page story in the New York Times that said German discovers Atlantis in Africa. In Africa, Yeah, And I was like, what, hey, people are have been looking

for Atlantis. I thought Atlantis was this like you know bubble city at the bottom of the ocean where they had you know, nuclear powered chips and you know Scrooge McDuck kept his millions of dollars or whatever. And uh, you know, I read this story from nineteen eleven and says, you know, all the clues from the dialogues of Plato.

And then I was like Plato, you know, because at the same time I was working on a story about the great philosophers of all time for a magazine and uh, you know, every every single philosophy professor I called was like, I was like, who are the greatest philosophers of all time number one, Plato, number two, Aristotle. After that, you can argue every single one was like Plato greatest, Aristotle number two. And I was like, okay, so the greatest philosopher of all time is the sole source for the

Atlantist story. There's you know, there's got to be something there that I haven't heard. So then I started digging into it, and you know, realized that, yes, there are a lot of people using the details and there are a lot of details in the original Aliantist story to try to a prove it was real and be uh show where they believe it had been located. Um, And

that's how we got started. And then, you know, three years later, after traveling around the world, you know, I had met a lot of these people and heard their hypotheses and visited the sites that they thought might have been the original Atlantis. There are a lot of interesting, intriguing sites out there, and I was looking at the Atlantopedia, which is run by Tony Is it's Tony O'Connell, right, Tony O'Connell, Yeah, Oconnell, Yeah, who you mentioned in your book.

The Atlantipedia is vast, Oh my god, yeah, it's huge. And I was just looking. Yeah. Yeah, he's got a couple of lists out there of all the places that people have hypothesized Atlantis might have been. And there are literally hundreds of places. Oh yeah, I couldn't even count them. I mean I could have, but I chose not to. You picked for your book, you picked four four places. You picked Malta, the island of Santa Reini, on the coasts of Morocco, and the coast of Spain to go investigate.

So why did you pick those four spots? Well, you know, first of all, a lot of times you'll see locations for Atlantis that don't make any sense if if you, you know, look at the original details. Assuming that Plato's story is real, let's start with that assumption, which is, you know, rocky to be certain, I mean, to assume the Atlantic story is real. First of all, you have to believe that a sea god named Poseidon created the the island of Atlantis. Uh. So you know, you're making

some some pretty big leaps here to start with. But let's assume that it's real. It's a story about a sea battle between Atlantis and Athens. So you know, for for an ancient uh navy to be able to travel to attack Athens. It doesn't really make sense that it's outside of a certain area. You know, it's not going to be crossing the Atlantic Ocean, so it's not the Bahamas, it's not coming from uh, you know, Indonesia, as some

people have said. You know, there's a guy out there with a theory that Atlantis was in the Bolivian Altiplano, which which is right two miles up, hundreds of miles from the ocean. Uh. And you know I've been to the uh and I gotta tell you this. It's not underwater. It is about the lead underwater place you can imagine. Uh. You know, So I I drew a you know, sort of a circle around Athens of of a certain distance. And then you know, Plato gives clues in the story.

He says, you know, it was opposite the pillars of Heracles or Hercules is it's usually called um. It was um near the land called Goddies. It was an island um. You know, it was near the Pan Pelagos or the

the Infinite Sea. So you know, once you you start listing these things, you get the sense it had to be in the Mediterranean a certain distance from Athens and the four places that made sense to me Um after a week of deliberations with Mr Tony O'Connell over in Ireland were probably the most famous Atlantist site, the one that shows up on TV specials all the time, which is Santorini and of Greece, Uh, the island of Malta

in the center of the Mediterranean. There is a site just outside Um the strait of Gibraltar in southern Spain. And then there's a spot in Morocco near the city that's now called Aga deer Um, also just outside Um the Straight of Gibraltar, but to the south Um. And those are the four sights that I went and explored

at length. Yeah, and uh, I gotta I gotta say the one of Morocco is it's the same that the locals of carding off all the stones from the ruins, because I don't think that that was Atlantis, because it's just too high up. I mean, what's the elevation of that side? Is what sixet it's pretty high up, I

mean to have been hit by a wave. And we should point out that Plato's description in the Atlantis story is is not the island sank to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, as is often you know, bandied about. But um, it was destroyed by earthquakes and floods in a single night. So the site you're talking about in Morocco. The guy who came up with this idea, UM, Michael Hubner, who was an I specialist in Bond, Germany. You know,

he decided that this sort of circular structure um stone structure. UM. I don't know, it's like ten or fifteen miles inland from the Atlantic coast could have been hit by a huge tsunami. And the area has been hit by earthquakes and tsunamis frequently over the years. But yeah, it would have to be you know, a thousand foot high wall of water or something to get to that site. You know, could it be uh? And this is what human proposes, you know, two or three ancient stories that were put

together as they sometimes are, and remembered as a single myth. Um. Maybe you know, it's possible, It's definitely possible. UM. You know, people love that theory because you know, we're in this age of big data. And what Michael Hubner did was he he found fifty one clues from Plato and you know, he plugged them into this algorithm and when it spat out at the end, it pointed him to this one spot in morocc Go And as he described it to me, it was he's like, you know, six stigma, this is

seven sigma. You know. It's like it's it's impossible, you know. And it's like, you know, when you talk to one of these people who was like a pure you know, mathematician, it's like, well, yeah, but you you're controlling the variables here, right, You're plugging in the data that you want. He's like, yes, but if it did not work, we would have an old set. I just Francky wanted to loop background. You said something that was kind of stuck out to me, which was that Plato was the soul source of the

story of Atlantis. And it just seems frankly kind of insane to me. I mean, Plato is well respected and that's fine, but a lot of he he wrote a lot and used metaphors a lot and you know, things like that. So it's it's interesting to me that, Um, I wonder if you can just talk to to that and you know, was he really the only source for this?

And yeah, I mean thing appears before Plato and you know, we think that that the Atlantis story, which is written in two parts, appeared around three sixty b C. So there's no reference to Atlantis or you know, a city at war with Athens, that is, you know, struck by a cataclysm suddenly before three BC. A lot of people seem to have picked up on it afterwards, especially people in the last hundred hundred fifty years. You know, you've got Edgar Casey with his psychic visions of Atlantis going

under the waves and blah blah blah um. You know, none of that would have been possible without Plato's original story. The really odd thing about Atlantis and Plato absolutely you know, used a lot of made up stories and myths and things like that, you know, stories about magic rings and and uh, you know, people dying and coming back at thousand years later and things like that. Yeah in the cave,

Yeah exactly. Know. As as one archaeologist said to me, you know, one of the world's leading archaeologists who is a big doubter of of Atlantis, He's like, you know, you know, why don't if you're going to look for Atlantis, why don't you go look for for Plato's Caves. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's my question to Yeah. Well, prior to reading the Tomaus and Critias, the only Plato that I

had ever read was The Republic. I read that for political theory class years ago, and I remember the Cave and and he was quite explicit when he tells the tale of the cave that this is just an allegorical tale. He he never actually makes it out to be true, right,

you know. And of course, the the fact that a lot of Atlantologists says, as I called him in the book people looking for Atlantis Cling to is that the character Critias, who is the narrator of the story of Atlantis and Plato's Dialogue, says, you know, this is a true story. You know, this is this was handed down to me by my great great great great grandfather Solon, who heard it in Egypt and so on. Is a real character. Um. They he almost certainly did go to Egypt.

What he heard there, we don't know, um, you know. But what I found really striking about the Atlantist story and this doesn't necessarily, you know, make it any more true or any more false. But you've got the Republic, you know, which is Plato's master work arguably the most influential book in Western civilization. And then you've got the Timaus, which is his attempt to give a sort of mathematical

logic to the cosmos. I think if you had asked Plato, he might have said that Tomaus was his most important work. At the start of the Tamaus as a sort of bridge from the Republic to the Tamaus, and he he, you know, makes a clear link at the beginning of the story. He says, you know, hey, Socrates says, hey, you know, could you could someone tell a story illustrating all of this stuff that I talked about in my speech yesterday, which is a reference to the Republic as

the bridge between those two. Critias starts telling this story of Atlantis, of a you know, an island nation that you know, it was located opposite the pillars of Heracles, and you know, blah blah blah. I was very noble for a while and then became debased and was destroyed in a day and a night. And it's like, okay,

well that's that's interesting. So then Plato goes into the meat of the Timaus, where he does things like explain how the universe is made up of two kinds of tiny triangles, and you know the four elements you know, earth, fire, water, and air, um, and how the cosmos all you know, sort of have this geometric circular logic to them, blah

blah blah blah. And then right after that he comes back to Atlantis again, and this time he started giving all of this, you know, numerical detail, and you know what the circles of Atlantis were like, it's, you know, three concentric circles of land and water, and here's how big they were. And he gives measurements in states, which was a measurement that was about six hundred feet long used in ancient Greece. And at that point you start

to want to say, why is he doing this? You know, why is he giving all of this detail for a story that he's already used, you know, for whatever purpose he was going to do to link the Republic to the Tamaeus. Why is he coming back to this and all of a sudden giving all of this detail um. And I think that's what sucks a lot of people in it. It's a really vivid, um, you know, very

specific portrayal of this place. And he's he's obviously doing something there, but whether he's trying to make it sound real when it's not, or whether he's you know, using detail that he believes to be real, or whether he's doing something else, is you know, something that no one has been able to solve up to this point. That's one of the questions I had for you is and

he probably can't answer it. But it seems to me that this is a tale that grew in the telling and that somebody you know, sort of tacked on a few elements, just like you know, the Internet today. I'm just curious, did Plato do that? Did he do it for a reason, or did the Egyptians do it? Back when you don't know? We don't know, you know, I think the only way we could figure out how much of this Plato made up and how much of it he believed, um, because we can't we can't know what

the original story was. But what all we can tell is, you know, how much of it did Plato believe to be true? Um? Would be if some sort of inscription showed up in Egypt and some ancient temples somewhere that matched the Atlantis story. Um, It's it's possible you know, they're still digging in that in that area. You know, I think they've probably found just about everything they're going to find it in Egypt, but it's not impossible, you know,

they could find something that would match it. Um. You know. The other thing they could do is, you know, find a place that's located opposite one of the pillars of Heracles um. And there are a few there's the most famous one is the Straits of Gibraltar um, straight of Gibraltar in between southern Spain and Morocco, because we've got that giant rock of Gibraltar there it's feet high. But you know, there's also the Straits of messina Um and

a few other spots around the Mediterranean. Um. So if you found a former you know, capital city type place from the ancient world that was hit by a cataclysm you know, water and earthquakes before Plato's time and also had some sort of you know, three ring circular structure attached to it, then I think you would probably have to say, wow, there's probably you know a good chunk of truth to this, uh, this Atlantis story. Whether that's ever gonna happen, who knows, but that that would you

prove it. Yeah, I mean, all of this stuff is just guesswork because we don't know, you know, there's so many I mean, there's the problem that Plato does sometimes use uh, you know, figurative language, and sometimes he is you know, he makes jokes. He you know, there's riddles and Plato people. You know, people still haven't figured out what Plato was talking about, you know, definitively, you know, and here we are twenty years later. He's probably the

most written about philosopher of all time. So you know, people peop will come to me and they're like, well, I need the definitive explanation of I'm a you know, I'm a guy who writes the travel books exactly. You kind of touched on this, but maybe you can expand

on it. The way that Atlantis is telling of Atlantis fits in is like right after the Republic and then like right before he starts talking about math, the first part of it, the first part of okay, and then he talks about it more direct or, and then he goes into the Tumaus, which is you know, sort of um. The Tomas is sometimes cited as like the first great work of science. You know, it's his way to try to give a sort of logic. And to back up

just a second. You know, Plato was was heavily influenced by the Pythagoreans um, who were a sort of like religious cult slash uh, you know, group of math professors who lived in southern Italy and who. You know, we're trying to find the athematical and and you know, geometric essentially like the secret code behind the universe. It's it's it's almost like the first attempt to find a physics,

you know, and explain everything through numbers. You know. At the same time they're doing very strange things with numbers there, you know, to them, numbers are living beings, some numbers are female, some numbers are male. You know. So there's there's odd stuff going on with the Pythagoreans as well. Um, So the Tomaus has a lot of Pythagorean stuff in it.

And then you know, here he is with this this you know, first work of science, trying to explain how the cosmos work, even though the telescope hasn't been invented yet.

And then to come back to it in a separate dialogue called the Critios, which immediately follows the Tamaus, and that's when he gives probably eighty or nine of the details about the story of Atlantists and what Atlantis looked like, and you know, measurements, and you know, he talked about this enormous plane that was attached to the city of Atlantis, a field plane, not at like an airplane, although some have made that some have made that claim as well.

That was hundreds of square miles surrounded by it an ormous ditch and yeah, yeah, and as I crossed and stuff, I did the you know, I did the math on this, and it's like, you know, okay, so they dug this giant canal and I was like, wait a minute, if they were going to dig this canal, this would be like a hundred times the amount of earth that was moved to make the Panama Canal. You know, this doesn't

make any sense at all. So you know, it's like, well, okay, maybe Plato is using these numbers and a Pythagorean sense that we don't understand. Um, in which case, uh, you know, we we can't use these numbers as like you know, modern GPS coordinates. Maybe he's doing things here that uh, you know, had completely been erased overred years that we

just you know, simply can't understand anymore. Um. You do know that the numbers, like you know, he goes, he uses stage and I did a little research on stage. And of course you probably know this too, is that there's no actual agreement on what a state was. I've seen. No, there's kind of a rough number. Um, you know, like I said, of a round six hundred feet. But you know what what people will do a lot is they'll find a location and then they'll choose the definition of

state that fits their location. You know. And in ancient Portugal a state was you know, you know, like, well, I I'm sure Plato wasn't from ancient Portugal. I think we I think we know where he was from. U a few certainties in dealing with Plato in Atlantis. Uh yeah, so you know that. But you know, there are these people out there who who are like you know, um, you know they're like, uh, these you know judges who who interpret the constitution uh in a in a fundamental sense.

It's like, you know, well, this is Joe, this is what the Founding fathers were thinking on this day when they wrote this, And they're like, you know, everything in the atlantis has to be true. The numbers all have to be true. So you know, they twist their theory to to fit the numbers, um, and usually it comes out, you know, sounding pretty ridiculous. Every once in a while you see something and you're like, huh, wait a minute, that's weird. You know, like when I went up and

talked to John Bremer, who is um uh. He's been studying Plato for I think sixty years um and for fun he counts the syllables of the ancient you know, the ancient Greek versions of of Plato's works, and there's his fame. Well, he has found patterns. There's there's a lot of interesting things, one of which was, you know, as I mentioned Plato, was you studied with the Pythagoreans. Um.

You know, the Pythagoreans. One of the reasons why they thought there might be this secret mathematical code that they could crack was that, you know, in according to lore, it was Pythagoras himself. But we people generally believe that anything that Pythagorians found is attributed to Pythagoras. Um. You know, he was probably the first person outside of maybe some some Babylonians UM to realize that there was math behind music.

You know, when you make a clear tone. That's because certain ratios already play here a one to two ratio or a two to three ratio. So they established this twelve note Pythagorean musical scale, the first musical scale that

we know of UM. And what John Bremer and another person UH computer scientists in England who confirmed this um separately UH found was that in a lot of Plato's works, including the Timaeus, he seems to be using a structure almost like an outline, based on this twelve note scale. And there are twelve parts two the dialogue, and if you hit a part like say midway through um, you know your six out of twelve here, that's a one to two ratio, which is which is um um harmonious

note um. And in those spots Plato tends to be writing about good things, about harmonious things. If you hit a where it's like seven out of twelve, which is not a harmonious note um. And I'm probably butchering the terminology here because I don't know music that well, but um, you know, that's when he's talking about you know, chaos

and disorder and things like that. Um and you know, Bremer seemed to think that the structure of Plato's works might be you know, every bit as important as the words themselves, you know, and no one has really dug that deep into this. There may be things about this that we don't even understand yet. And I would say that almost certainly there are things about this we don't understand. You know, Plato plays all sorts of you know, math

games and you know, things like that. That the trouble is that, as somebody, you know, a great uh, you know Platonists pointed out about a hundred years ago, they said, you know, the mathematics in Plato is the most difficult part of the most difficult philosopher of all time. So nobody really wants to take this stuff on. It's kind of like the Da Vinci code, you know, it is

in a lot of ways. And there are you know, nobody doubts that Plato is making references to things like the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio in his works. You know, he's he's you know, and in something like his book The Laws, which I think the last dialogue he wrote notorious for being like the most uh boring uh thing that from ancient history. You know. I met

a philosophy professor and he starts paging three. I was like, if you ever read this, He's like, you know, even people who study Plato don't read the laws, who just got it just kind of dip into it, you know, But there are you know, there's the number of fifty forty, which he calls this this you know, super important number. Well, if you break it down, fifty is the sum of one times two times three times four times five times six times seven, and it appears seven times in the laws.

So it looks like, you know, at the very least, Plato is playing some sort of number games here, and you know, the the the idea that he you know, there's also an instance in the Republic where he refers to maybe misquoting this the three and the four attached to the pen pad, and somebody pointed out at some point they're like, well that's a three or four and five that's the Pythagorean triangle. So you know, he's dropping

little hints that there's other stuff going on here. But you know, whether anyone's ever going to to decode what he was doing is you know, you know, the future may know that, but I certainly don't, you know, because you remember, he's he's not writing these dialogues, you know, to be read by a modern audience. Two years later, he's using these to teach his students at the Academy in Athens, which was the first university. Um. You know,

he's Tea's teaching a classic pythagoryan uh quadrivium. I think they called it four part curriculum to students. So they whatever he was doing, his students, you know, sitting around uh in the garden and Athens, they would have known what he was doing, But we have completely lost whatever

it was. Um. And if you know, if if somebody can at some point starting to figure that out, maybe we'll have a better sense of how much of Atlantis could have been based on historical events, or or even just how much of it did Plato himself actually believe. The answer could be none, the answer could be a lot. Yeah. Well, I I tend to think that he believed at least part of it. And this is something I wanted to ask you about. Is he uh, he invokes his ancestors

Solon and also his mentor Socrates. You know and who both swear that this is true for Plato and it is called in that culture. Would that have been disrespectful to an ancestor to basically involved them and attested to the truth of a fairy tale? You know it It

might have been. But again, you know, um, I don't want to go back into my like post structuralist terminology that drove me out of grad school in the early night that you know, he's using a series of masks here, you know, he's he could be hiding behind Socrates to say something that he wants to uh, you know, play with. So we you know, we can't know whether he intended that to be real, or whether he you know, was using that as some sort of rhetorical device or or

you know whatnot. Um So, you know, if if we knew for a fact that this was intended as a piece of written history, yes, it would have been disrespectful for him to put those words in the mouth of of Socrates or into the mouth of Solon, you know. But that's that's another thing that we have to deal with here. Another layer, which is that written history in three six b C. You know, this is still new technology.

This is you know, as far as the Greeks are concerned, this is technology that's less than a hundred years old. You know, Herodotus has has you know, the father of history has just started doing this stuff about a hundred years before, you know, writing down history rather than allowing it to be passed on orally. And it's when history has passed on orally, it's done in the form of stories which have become myths. You know. So now from our vantage point, we have to decode those myths and

try to pluck the truth out. And this is you know, this is a lot of what archaeologists and anthropologists do. So, you know, Plato, through the character of Socrates, wrestling with this idea, you know, is written history true or is oral history true? Things that are passed down to story is true? And I think it's in the republic um. No, it's actually in a different word, but I can't remember which. You know, Socrates comes out and and says, you know, look,

I actually trust oral history more. I you know, trust things that are that are passed down not in writing, because you can engage with them, you can argue with them, you know, whereas written history is just sort of this lump right here and you can't. You can't sort of you know, poke the holes in it. It is what it is, um, you know. So that's just one more gigantic problem sitting in the middle of the attempt to

try to solve the Atlantis story. Yeah. The thing about the written history though, is that and this is one of the reasons I think that probably this is true, is that finds that from the Egyptians that the Greek at one actually had a written language and they had lost Well that's you know, that's the half of the story that everyone tends to ignore, which is the Athens

half of the story. And there's a fascinating guy gego physicist in Greece named Stavros Papameranapolis, and he's probably the guy who has done the most work on trying to figure out that the truth from the fiction in the Atlantis story. And he's I mean, he's a real geophysicist. He's found uh, you know, ancient ancient canals and things like that that um, people weren't sure if they were

real or not. And he you know, he went down to southern Greece and you know, did the the soundings and such, and it's like okay, well, Yeah, actually they did build this canal where two ships could pass, and it was a mile long, and that sort of thing.

And what he has done is he has looked at the Athens part of the story and and shown that a lot of details that seem completely pointless if you just sort of skimmed the story actually coincide with Greek history, as we've come to understand in the last hundred years.

You know, he talks about um a spring on the north side of the acropolis that was destroyed by an earthquake, and well, guess what, in the nineteen thirties they found a spring that had been clogged by an earthquake around which is around the time when uh, you know, in the Atlantis story they say, uh, you know, the Greek's lost written language. Well, what did they lose around that time? Linear b the famous uh you know uh language that

was decoded in the middle of the twentieth century. Um. So there are enough of these details that you know, Plato could not have known, you know, unless he was he was you know, uh clairvoyant or something, in which case maybe Edgar Casey was right. You know, he had to have some details from the past than he believed to be true, and especially those that we're dealing with

the Greek part of the story. So you know, there's enough of that to make me think that, you know this, there are elements of the Atlantis story that can be

based in history. But yeah, and I know the like for me, the part with linear b that always kind of resonated is that we always in that oral tradition, there's things that are legends that are told from a time before, which is why how I always figured that he that's why he was making reference to these lost languages, less so from what he Solon had gotten from the Egyptians, but just it was kind of generally known that at one time people kind of knew how to do this,

and we sort of know about it, but we don't because it's such a huge fan of the oral tradition that I can see that being passed down. You know, one time we knew how to write with sticks, but now we don't. But at the same time, the spring is a trivial enough thing that you know, you can't see people like sitting around the campfire talking about the

spring on the popolis. I can't quite imagine that. No, it's it's not like you know, a grandfather pulling the young child aside and saying, let me tell you the story about the spring on the acropolis got exactly. Yeah, it's like a three thousand year old liquid plumber commercial. Or so let's uh. I wanted to I wanted to to swivel back to Atlantis a little bit. So Atlantis itself, the in generally speaking, is pretty well mocked from the

quote unquote official mainstream perspective. Nobody takes that seriously. Definitely almost nobody, right, So so my first question is is, and and I'll follow this in a second with another, but how did you sell that you were going to write a book on Atlantis when it kind of had that stigma. Well, because my publisher, Penguin, you know, they had done one book with me so far, so they knew, you know, I was, you know, a real reporter, a

real writer. Um. They knew there would be a travel component to this as well as just going back and looking at the original story of Atlantis. Um. And you know, they know that, you know, Atlantis is an evergreen story. You know, it's it's one of, if not the greatest mystery of all times. So you know, people are fascinated by this. You know, it's it's funny because you know, whenever I post something online, I'll get comments, and you know,

one of them will be, hey, that's really interesting. I never knew that, and nine of them will be you know, my psychic told me that fifty thousand years ago the continent of MW blah blah blah blah blah. So you know, a lot of people are just interested in Atlantis for their own purposes and don't want to hear what anybody else has to say. But there is a you know, a general high level of interest um in Atlantis. And I think that's why Penguin said, you know, okay, you're

not crazy, go ahead and write the book. So but but why is it? Why then, from that academic perspective, is the story rather shunned? Well, there's I think there is. From you know, a very contemporary perspective, there is just sort of a general idea that this is an area for fringe thinking and nuts and and stuff like that. You know, it's bigfoot, it's UFOs Um. Specifically, I think we can trace this back to a guy named Ignatius Donnally,

one of the great characters of Atlantology. You know, Ignatious Donnely is a U S congressman former U S congressman in Minnesota in eighteen eighty one. I think it is he sits down, he has no money. Uh, so he's he decides he's going to write a book about Atlantis. Then remember this is right after Heinrich Lehman has found Troy using the clues from the Iliad. So people have started to think, hey, you know, if we found Troy,

and maybe we'll find Atlantis. So he goes and finds like every scrap of information that could could possibly you know, relate to you know, Atlantis, and you know, some of it makes a little bit of sense. You know. He talks about events that happened in the past, He draws parallels to the the Old Testament, and there are you know, indications that maybe some of the things that are talking about in Atlantis may have parallels to um, you know,

the Ten Plagues of Egypt. But then he starts making these outlandish claims, like, you know, he's the guy who came up with the idea that Atlantis sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and the Azores Mountains, uh, the Azores Islands, that are the tips of the great mountains of Atlantis, and the Gulf stream upflows the way it does because it goes around Atlantis, and he comes, you know, he goes into like Mayan history and uh Egyptian history and Hebrew history and just tries to prove

that every great culture that uh humanity has ever produced, actually it can be traced back to Atlantis, Atlanteans getting in boats and sailing off to these different places around ten thousand BC. UM. And I think that diffusionism exactly, you know, And that's the idea that makes academics really uncomfortable, the idea of this super race that once existed. And this is this is you know, like the light bulb

that draws the moths. For a lot of these people, it's like, yes, ten thousand years ago, there was a super race that you know, created everything we've ever heard of. Blah blah blah blah. And you know, even though there's a mountain of evidence to the contrary, this is an idea that a lot of people latch onto. Um. And I think it's it's you know, Donnally and his crazy stuff. But I think there's an example I given the book.

I can't remember it precisely, but it was like, uh, you know, the Kings of Atlantis referred to a scourge of the body that they got rid of. And Donnally says, oh, really, well, you know what that means. They're referring to syphilis. And because the ancient Hebrew performs through coumcision. Uh, and because modern actuarial tables show us that Jews tend live longer than most other people, we can therefore, you know, draw

the line relatively quickly back to Atlantis. You know, if you if if you're reading very quickly, you're like, huh, and then do you stop and think about it? For like, this is nuts? You know, no wonder two thirds of the emails I sent off to addresses that ended in dot e du never were responded to. You know, this is academic kryptonite. Um Ippi a similar thing. You know, my phone calls to the FBI regarding DV Cooper so far returned. Yeah, like, yeah, we'll get on that one

right away. You know who else is really big on on Atlantis, the super Race and uh and all that stuff was the Nazis, I mean, Henri Himmler and all that stuff. For Atlantis. You know, they had They had this whole team, the Onitor, but I think it was called put together by Himmler. And the whole point was, it's very much like the first Indiana Jones movie reaiders it a lot of stark. They are looking for ancient evidence of this super Aryan race that of course eventually

became the most super race of all in their opinion. Um, you know, the National Socialists. And what what's interesting is they had planned, um, a big expedition to the Canary Islands, which is which is not you know, as far as possible sites go, it's not the worst one you can come up with, uh, for the Fall of nine. And it seems that the reason they never got there is because the Nazis decided to attack Poland instead. So it's like, wait, just one more bad thing to come out of that

whole era. But yeah, I mean they were the theories, the theories they were promoting were just completely nuts. I mean, going back tens of thousands of years and things like that. And you know, because stuff like that is interesting to a lot of people. Uh, it just it gives this tinge to Atlantis in general. That makes it sound like, you know, a subject that's only dealt with by crazy people. Um. And I don't think that should be the case. But

what what do you think it's gonna take. I mean, what would we have to find before it would suddenly come out of that that fringe into the limelight and people would be willing to take it seriously? Well, I think you'd have to find either of someone discovering what the pattern is with these numbers that Plato is using.

You know, he uses dozens of numbers in the second part of the Atlantis story, um that you know, like I mentioned, people have latched onto like their GPS coordinates, um, you know, and can be used to find a city of an exact size and this gigantic plane of an exact size. You know, if if somebody could decode those numbers and figure out what Plato was actually doing there and if it was actually referring to something that we can understand, I think that would be one form of proof.

The other form of proof, of course, would be to find some sort of ancient inscription in Egypt, you know, something that matches the story that sold On supposedly originally heard around five or six hundred BC. UM. And the other thing would be, you know, if someone could pile up enough evidence, if someone could say, okay, uh Plato said it was opposite a land called Goddis, Well here's you know, there's Kadi's in southern Spain, there's Agadir and Morocco.

Both of those come from the Phoenician word godir, meaning an enclosed city. So if you know, if you can find one of these old godders that is near uh, you know, one of the pillars of Heracles and shows evidence that, uh, you know, a civilization of some sort was struck suddenly by earthquakes and floods and was destroyed.

And if there are you know, some elements of the description that Plato gives, if there is you know, some sort of concentric circles there, then I think the preponderance of evidence would would say, okay, you know what this is, there's probably a large kernel of truth at the center

of this. You know, whether any of those is going to happen, I you know, I honestly couldn't say, but one of those three things, I think would would certainly move the needle back toward Okay, Atlantis has has got a lot of truth in it, yeah, I think, And this is one of the one of the problems that I have with the whole thing is like, so the pillars of Heracles could have been many places, as there's been.

You know, the time that Plato was writing, the Greeks had actually been exploring and colonizing the western Mediterranean for a couple hundred years as as far as I understand, So for them, the Pillars of Heracles must have been the straighter Gibraltar. But at the same time, if Athens and Atlantis were both wiped out the same day, and that means that Atlantis had to be inside the pillars of Heracles. And yet the most likely side I think is is Spain. So this is one of the things

I'm wondering about. Is um, is it really totally under present true that they were wiped out the very same day by the same cataclysm or honestly pent clarity on that. Come on, man, this was a three thousand year old story passed down maybe or maybe not through at least you know, three or four pairs of hands. Um. That's why we called you Mark. I know, I know I

would know two things. One, you know, with ancient myths of this sort, there is I can't remember the term off the top of my head, um where a bunch of things tend to come together, so they you know, there could be two or three stories that are combined

into one story. So you know, hypothetically Rome could be destroyed in an earthquake tomorrow and that could you know, be put together with the story of Lisbon in seventeen fifty five being destroyed by an earthquake, and ten thousand years from now, people are gonna say, oh, those things happened at the same time. Um, you know, just hypothetically. You know, the other thing is and and this is

much more interesting. Around the time that you know, linear b disappears, when this group called the Sea People's uh which is a still very mysterious group that seems to have shown up in various places around the Mediterranean and start you know, attacked suddenly from the sea. Around the same time that that those things are happening, there is this wave of earthquakes, floods, famines, you know, just generally

bad news. I think the dates are roughly twelve fifty b C E to eleven fifty b C. And that there's a great term I can't remember exactly. It's it's like seismological unzipping there making a fault line in the Mediterranean that just caused all sorts of chaos. And you know, one place has no food for two or three years. So they get on their boats and they attack Egypt. They attacked the Hittites and what in what is now Turkey.

You know, they end up in Israel. Um. So it's possible that there were two cataclysms occurring roughly at the same time in Athens and wherever um. You know, the the ration for Atlantis. What it is not at all impossible that in this period of chaos, which is is a um. It's it's not proven historically, but it's generally regarded as true historically. Historians pop won't argue about the sea People's or about this, you know um, this period

of great chaos. And there are actually like little fragments I think a pottery from the Hittites and such where the king of Um is that the king of the Hittites, I can't remember, but it's it's, you know, whatever the group was before the Phoenicians. There's a communication between one and the other where they're basically saying, we're being attacked, come save us. And it seems to be the same people who attacked Egypt around the same time. So whatever was going on, it was you know where it was

really bad. There was famine, etcetera, etcetera. And this may also be, uh, you know, the same thing that that wiped out Linear be wiped out whatever the Greek culture was. Now that we call that the Manoans, but obviously they

weren't the Manoans at the time. Yeah. I wondered about that that like a string of earth quicks or maybe and I'll probably get an email from a volcanologist or geologist about this, but yeah, an earthquake could have touched off the volcano in Santorini e Thera and caused interruption of that, which of course wiped out a very ancient city, their Acriteri, which you paid a visit to in your book,

by the way, I did. I did, And you know, Acritaria is fascinating and there are parallels with Atlantis, you know, but I think what the reason why Acriteri and Um Santorini are still appealing to you know, those academics who are willing to even discuss Atlantis, is that we've got some concrete evidence there, you know, there obviously was a huge explosion. There obviously was a maritime culture there. Um. But you know, beyond that, the parallels with Plato are

you know, not really that strong. But I think, you know, people say want to say, okay, we have some evidence of something here. Um, you know, why don't we relate it to the Atlantis story. My my guess is that if it was based on one cataclysmic event, it's probably a different one. Um. And I should point out that the explosion of there it does not match up with those that seismic gun zipping or whatever the exact term is um that there are. They still haven't nailed it down.

To the archaeologists who base it on pottery, I think they want to say it's around and then based on some sort of carbon dating, they say it's around sixteen ten sixteen fifteen BC, So they know roughly when it was, but they don't know exactly when it was. Um. But that's it. You know, Acriterias is fascinating. The whole island, island of Santorini is you know, amazingly beautiful. So highly recommend just that if you want to check it out

for yourself. Now I totally want to go there and and luckily I was Luckily I was able to visit it via Google street View, and and I've actually driven all over the island on Google uh. And And this really kind of annoys me is that I wanted to take a similar to of Malta, and you can't do street view on Malta. You look at Google Pictures, but there ain't no street view. That's interesting. Malta is a

strange place. It's a very I mean, it's like a a fortress mentality inside an island that is set up like a fortress. So it shocked me to hear that the Maltese didn't want Google on their island. That would you know, That wouldn't shock me at all. It's a it's a it's a strange place. Um. As I think I mentioned in the book. It one of the first things I realized when I was there is they it had like the greatest percentage of beautiful women and fat

men I had ever seen in my life. So I don't know, if you know, the mating rules are different in Malta, but I've heard things about Brazil that could be that could very well be. Yeah, um, you know, but Malta is fascinating because they have those ancient temples there um, which you know, a thousand years older than I think even the Great Pyramid in Egypt. And Malta was destroyed suddenly by a cataclysm that wiped out the population,

apparently a long time before Plato was writing. Um, you know, it's an island, it's near the straits of messina Um. So you know, I think Malta is a more appealing candidate probably than Santorini, just you know, based on comparing it to Plato's original story. Um, you know that said I came up with four candidates in the book. There are others that are you know, not far behind. You know,

we can't have two original Atlantis. Is it's possible, you know, one or two or three cataclysms were put together in one story. But it's it's you know, it's not as neat a packages we would hope it would be. What are your what are your feelings about the kind of more out there? I mean, you know people have said it's on the east coast, or it's you know, an antarctic,

or what's your sense about that? You know, I I have very little patients for that stuff, because you know, it's it's carry yeah, the earth crust displaced, and it's like, you know, uh, you know, look at this map. It matches this map of Atlantis. It's like, okay, a the map of Antarctica you're you're using, which your cherry picking,

is from the nineteen fifties. We have a lot more recent, uh maps than that, you know, be as I confirmed when I was in Alaska a few weeks ago and they're talking about how the land is rising because the glaciers are melting um there's isostatic rebound, which means that in Atlantic Antarctica that had no ice on it would be much further out of the water and have a

very different shape. So don't tell me this looks like this, and see the map of Atlantis that you're comparing it to is something that a guy drew in sixteen sixty six and just kind of made up, you know, you know, so so you know, I don't think, you know. And then they're like, well, I think that map was actually passed down from so long. It's like, you know, Plato doesn't say anything about a map. As far as we know, people were not drawing maps, you know, at that time.

So the you know, the idea that you know, we have an ancient map, while totally cool and the basis for a great fictional movie, uh, it makes you know, no no sense logically, Yeah, I gotta agree with that. So we're left with, um, I don't know, the middle of the Mediterranean or maybe the coast of Spain. I'm I'm discounting Morocco because if they did indeed kind of canal to the sea, then the canal would have had

to have been many hundreds of feet deep. So you know, you know, it's like I said, it's possible that they had um a settlement on the coast as well as this circular ring thing, which is extremely cool. There's probably the most interesting circular ring, you know, the thing I saw in all my time, um around the Mediterranean. You know. But my guess is if it did exist in you know, some form similar to what Plato described, it was probably

in the western Mediterranean, um. You know. And there's a lot of information being past worth mouth by you know, sailors, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, um around that time, and you knows, as I point out in the book, remember um, the part of the Mediterranean near the Strait of Gibraltar is um, you know, run by the Carthaginians around the time of Plato. So you know, they're passing false propaganda back to the Greek saying like, you know, here's all the crazy stuff

that's going on outside the mouth of the Mediterranean. Don't go out there, you know, because here's what you're going to encounter. Um right, exactly did some of the game that get tied in with uh, you know the stories of Plato heard while he was visiting Syracuse, you know, after the death of Socrates, who knows, who knows? You know. Unfortunately, we you know, we can't just go back to the

original sources here, um bus. Information was not invented like this yesterday, no no, no, no, no, no, no no for a while exactly exactly so now, but I would guess probably blee, you know, somewhere in the western Mediterranean. What I was I was talking to Stavros Papa Mironopolis not too long ago, or emailing with him. Um. What he wants to do is a major survey of the site in southern Spain, you know, major geophysical survey which has

not yet been done. Unfortunately that the spot he wants to look at is in a nature reserve, well, you know Dunyana National Park. It would be like going to the middle of uh, you know, Yosemite with a bunch of ground penetrating radar and things like that, being like, okay, just animals stepped aside for a little while, it's gonna be I know that this particular side has also been proposed. This is near Cadiz, Spain, has been proposed. Is also

possibly the side of Tar Tessos the lawsuit. And you talked to one academic who claimed that a massive tsunami had wiped out this city, which he believes with Atlantis, and that there were just tons and tons and tons of like stones and stone blocks from the city in the ocean. That it true or is that did he just kind of make no? I think I think that

was exaggerated. That was a TV version of events. Um, what happened is that a guy came in with a TV crew and they wanted, um, a documentary on Atlantis. So they kind of took work that one team of Spaniards was doing in the area and sort of twisted it into this more Atlantean thing that showed up on TV. And everyone except the guy who sort of parachuted in from the US. Uh was you know, shocked when the thing came out there, like, what what the hell is this?

From your book? I gathered they weren't they weren't too pleased. But no, they were not, you know. I mean that one of the guys who was with him, this this other German named Rhiner Cune. You know, he's he's a physicist. Uh, he's got as Berger's so he is like, you know, speaking you know, pure truth. He is unable to lie

about anything. And when I asked him about this, he said how did he put He's like, well, they are there with the TV crew they can say like the Spaniards, Oh look, maybe this was a horse enclosure from the fourteenth century a d. No one is going to give you money for that. So then they turned to me and I say, maybe this was Atlantis or maybe not. So they put me on TV for maybe two minutes actually I think it was one minute and thirty two seconds.

So then they turned to the other man and he says, yes, this was Atlantis, and I found stones in the water and everything, and that is how they make their money for the TV show exactly. Yeah, I think Rehner's version of events is about as unfiltered as it can get. That. Yeah, that sounds about right to me. All Right, So you guys have any more you want to talk about. No, I was gonna say, Mark, we've I know, we we've taken up an hour of your afternoon already and don't

want to take up too much more. Yeah, No, it's fine, it's fine. Is so. I mean, we've asked a bunch of questions so far, and I think we're kind of running through. So just from your perspective, is there things about Atlantis or the story of Atlantis that you want people to know that that we haven't come up or

come across so far to in today's conversation. You know, I think the thing that is really fun about the Atlantis story is that you know this, this is it's it's like a puzzle to be decoded, and nobody has

decoded it. And you know, everybody is so busy coming up with these crazy theories about how there was a you know, tropical paradise on Antarctica and then suddenly the Earth's crust shifted and it was covered by two miles of ice um or you know, the world was you know, thrown into the orbit of a comment or you know this, you know, stuff that people were talking about fifty years ago.

You know, if you just sit down and look at the story and read a little bit about Plato and the things that he was talking about, you realize that there is it's like a treasure map that no one has figured out yet. You know, there's there's probably some sort of musical code buried in there. There's probably some sort of numerical you know, number of games buried in there. There's probably, I would guess, you know, greater than chance that there is the kernel of a historic event or

maybe a series of historic defense in there. So, you know, rather than coming at it as I've got an idea of where Atlantis is and I'm going to you know, sort of retrofit this and look for evidence and cherry pick what I want to prove my theory. Um, you know, go in there and look at what's there, and you know,

do a little research. There's a lot to be found out about this Atlantis story, and you know, if it does turn out to be largely true, it will you know, I don't know, maybe you know, rewrite a good chunk of ancient history and if not. There's gonna be a lot of other interesting things to be found in there. Well, there's uh, there's certainly no shortage of interesting stuff at the bottom of the ocean, I'm sure, because after the end of the last glacial period, I mean, the sea

levels rose hugely, and so there's down there. You know. I went up and I talked to the guys at woods Hole who you know, found the uh, the Titanic, and they're showing, you know, all this stuff that they can use. It's like, you know, hey, we have a camera that if the water is clear, uh, you know, we can see a cinder block from a mile away. And I said, Tom, They're like, you know, think about it, ten thousand years ago, fifteen thousand years ago, sea levels

are rising. Um, we've already got we know there were settlements around the Mediterranean even and you know, look at the I can't remember how to pronounce the name of the place in Turkey was about ten thousand years go, Bigley Tepe or whatever. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, So you know we know that there were fairly large settlements, fairly large you know, uh structures and things like that. And he said, you know, where do you build a settlement, a city in the ancient world. You hit it where

you put it, where a river hits the sea. Well, what are the first places to disappear when the water starts rising by ten fift you know, a floodplain where the river hits the sea. And you know, so many of these places have never really been looked at. Um, you know, to a really granular degree. Um. And he said, I said, you know, well, why don't people do this? Could you, you know, could you begin to start to think about, you know, where these places might be hitting

sort of waves me off. He's like, we can start tomorrow if we had the money. So it's not that these things are impossible, it's just that, you know, there isn't the money to to, you know, go around with a submarine and look for the lost cities of the Mediterranean. But I think, you know, as as you know, the price of things fall over time. UM. I think we'll keep coming up with interesting stuff that's out there. I hope.

I think that they're probably if they responded by emails. Ever, I think a huge fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles mapping the ocean floor could actually find a lot of interesting stuff. And and you know, I mean, let's face it, Google is going to have to be the one probably to

do this or someone like that, you know. I mean the other problem is that, you know, would what you know used to occur to me at three o'clock in the morning while writing this book was you know, the chances are if there was in Atlantis on the coast of the western Mediterranean, you know, it's probably under a condo complex or a golf course exactly. You know, you know, one of the great mysteries of all time might be you know, sitting at the bottom of a landfill in

you know, the Costa delle Soult. Absolutely. You know. That's the sad thing about ancient history too, is you know, I've I've studied a little bit of Greek history, etcetera. Back in the day, you know, they'd like, you know, overrun a city, kill all the men, sell the women and children into slavery, and then just as mats of the city and destroy it. Yeah. So it's it's kind of sad all this stuff that's been just destroyed, and it you know, it continues to this day in in

you know Macco where I went. You know, they're pulverizing these ancient ruins to make paint. You know, um in Peru where I wrote about Machu Pichu. You know, there's a city outside or a structure outside of the city of Cousco called Saxa woman that you know, if that we're still intact as it was. You know, when the Spaniards arrived in fifteen thirty two. The descriptions they give, it's like it's like the size of a battleship but made of stone. And we still don't know exactly what

it was there for. But over the next you know, four hundred something years, every time, you know, uh, jose Blow wants to build, you know, an extension on his bar, and he goes up to Saxo woman pulled down these nicely cut rocks, carts him off, and uh, you know it builds an extension on his house or whatever. So,

you know, the same thing the Great Wallet's China. That's some of the problems, yeah, is that for for centuries, local guys have just been stealing rocks right and right just to make their house or their fence or whatever they needed right. So you know, just to think of the things that we are never going to know because they've been repurposed. Um, and I'm sure we're doing stupid stuff like right that right now, but we just haven't realized what it is yet. Um No, I really appreciate

you taking the time to talk with this. This was fantastic pleasure. I love your podcast, and I appreciate you know the fact that you guys were able to get together on a Saturday morning. Um. I know it's not always easy to herd cats, so I really appreciate that. We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. And by the way, the book was great. Highly recommend it. Meet me in Atlantis. I say it it. You know. It did okay in a hardcover, but now that's in paperback.

It's selling pretty well. What that means, I don't know. And maybe you know people who like Atlantis are only willing to pay twelve dollars from I could just killing you know. We we have about three listeners, so I'm sure at least a lot of that mus got to buy a copy of the book. I'll check the iTunes comments and see that's so. Just so you have an idea when we get close, I'll send you an email just so you know it's coming out. Oh cool, I

appreciate that. I so you don't spend an hour and a half talking to three Yahoo's and then it never goes out. And I mean, you know, you guys are pros. You know what to do. Yeah, we're pros, right, you trust me if you could, if you know, in like the first forty eight hours after a hardcover book comes out, you essentially have to agree to do every single interview. So do you know how many drive time Yah? Who's

uh you know I had to talk to about Atlantis? Yeah, and the questions they're just like level the actually have a conversation, you know, did you try on the Bahamas? Heard the Atlantis down there really nice? Now they've got that, They've got that whole road system down there in the Bahamas. As someone who worked on a cruise ship in the Bahamas, that Atlantas not nice as it turns out. We hope that one gets hit by earthquakes and floods. Yeah, I hope.

It's so occasionally I do that George Nourry Coast to Coast show when it is out, you know, and George is actually okay, he's you know, he's crazy, He's like, you know, Aliens really coming to take our guns. Um, you know, but if he'll allow you to direct the conversation back to uh, you know, sort of normal territory. And a lot of the times when I do shows like that, it's because I always think of like, um, you know, have you you ever seen the book Chariots of

the Gods. Oh yeah, I don't know how much Tony O'Connell told me. I heard Ira Glass tell almost the identical story. There's so many people who came to things like Atlantis, starting out with Chariots of the Gods, and then at a certain point they realized that this is all a bunch of crap, but it is actually interesting. And if you know, if I can find one out of ten of those people, uh, you know, then it's worthwhile.

Then it's worth you know, sitting through the the caller Question portion of George Norry's show where it's like, I'll leave you one one last anecdote that I hope it's mildly amusing. I go on coast to coast for the Atlantis book. You know. George is like, well, let's take some calls, and some guy comes on and he says, I think Atlantis was located in Finland because in the Finnish language is a weird it sounds like Atlantis. And

also it's the same thank you goodbye. The next day, I'm on do you know the show, the NPR show, What is it on? Point out of Boston? And it's a it's a gas host. It's a woman. She's like, we're having a really interesting conversation here with Mark Adams. He's the author of a new book. Meet me in Atlantis. We're gonna take some calls here. Um, I got Bill from Wisconsin, the clicks. I think Atlantis is from Finland.

The weird in the finish Atlantis and it's a team goodbye. Really, what I'm learning from this interview is that Mark should be a voice actor. This is really what I'm learning right now. Yeah, you might have a second career there, let's hope. Yeah, I have my founding college. Actually was asking. He's like, I think I could get a career. It's like a voice actor, you know in video games. Yeah. I was like, have a plan B, you know, writing, follow your dream, but have a plan B always. Now,

my backup plan is to be a hand model. If this Devin's losing it out, He's showing us alright, alright, Mark, well again, thank you so much. We really do appreciate it. All right, guys, I really appreciate you. Need anything else, just let me know, alright, contact or guys. Take care, Yeah you do. Bye bye