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