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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees SO4-O months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. In wildlife, on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ohh man. Ohh man, behind the ******** the podcast about people who aren't good by people who are good this week. Our person who are good is Jamie Loftus. How are you doing? I'm doing good. It's real hot. I'm. I'm excited for the episode. It is hot. But you know what a random lady told me once in Georgia? What? When you feel the sun on your back, that's just Jesus smiling at you. That's that's a good positive spin for global warming. I like there's just Jesus warming. There's a good chance that Lady didn't believe in global warming, so she was a white lady in rural Georgia. So there's there's not a lot of ways that story is going to end super happy. You know what a white lady in rural Georgia told me once when I tried to special order a hot dog. What was that? She said, this isn't Burger King. You don't get it your way. **** ***. I love her too. And then she gave me really hot dog. She gave me a really gnarly hot dog. It was wet. That's what you get for bringing your *** **** big city ******** to her. Her wholesome small town hot dog, whatever it was. Thought I was swinging ** **** around with a diner. You're swinging **** **** around at a hot dog shop, which is basically full of ***** already, so nobody's impressed. Yeah, I I it was disrespectful. You me and I was trying to be told off you go swing in **** **** around at a euro place, well, that's pretty much perfect because the euro is basically a pocket. You know? It's the most. Easy to start having sex with the hero. It is very. It's incredibly easy. A hero or a hero, both of them. Very easy to ****. Ohh, very ********. Yeah, yeah. Although you have more opportunity to get like some hip working with the euro, because the hero, it's just gonna come out the sides, you know? Wait, I'm trying to visualize this. It's going to come out the sides as long as you're fine with penetrating the gyro, right? Pushing through that that back. Yeah, that's not where we have a very. Then it'll it'll stay in OK, especially if you like, hold the edges up. Whereas the the hero, it's just kind of because it's an open sided sandwich, right? Hi. So that OK, the open sidedness of it. Now, I understand you're not gonna punch **** **** through the bread of the hero though, because you can just **** straight through and they're usually longer than anybody. I hope you know somebody. What's that guy out for Tiktok? What's that telling the guy who was really Wilt Chamberlain? Unless you're Wilt Chamberlain, then you might. Then you might. Of wilt. What the ****? I learned to Wilt Chamberlain was through a Cartoon Network cartoon. Same, only because, yeah, fosters home for imaginary friends. Oh, I think I learned about him from an episode of wasn't. He was a guest on scooby-doo, right? We'll check. Yes, he was. Yeah. Yeah. It was the mystery of the man with the enormous ****. OK, that's great. OK, once again, the script is really long. It is almost 16,000 words. Yes, just over there. I I'm not. I'm I'm down to **** a hero sandwich with a with a ***** **. There's absolutely no doubt. Absolutely. And and I think it's just like about finding the right shop in the right in the in the right hero, you know, you know, you don't want to be like pressured if you're not feeling it in the moment. Maybe somebody puts like, like the like the like jalapenos, but not like the pickled kind that that go really good with lettuce and you're like, well, I don't really want like just a straight up jalapeno on this. I want like that texture change you get when they're pickled, you know? And there's just some food you don't want on your crotch. It's like, have you ever accidentally? Radish, right? Yeah. Have you ever accidentally put. Doctor Bronner's soap on your privates. Ohh absolutely yeah. Oh my God. After shaving for a party once. Horrible. No one told me no. I did this. The bottle. The bottle famously has too many words. I'm not going to read that. But there are a couple of very important words. Don't put them directly onto your. Onto your peppermint ****. It burns like the gut. Yeah, it's like ******* napalm stopped listening when Jamie said it was wet. Well, showering with someone, Robert and I did that and then I had to play it off like it was humiliating. Man. And then it's like he absolutely he saw what I had done, but I couldn't admit my mistake. I was too. No, this feels good. Feels like I want to stay here. Let's have breakfast. Enjoy the feeling of my my junk getting burned by a schizophrenic man soap. Once again, if anything feels nice just to say it out loud. I've never said it out loud before. I'm glad we're having this five minute long conversation before I've introduced the topic of the episode. But before you get into that, I just wanna say that somebody please clip this out for Tik T.O.K. For me. For me? Yeah. Let's become Tik T.O.K stars. Jamie, how do you, Speaking of burning genitalia, do you think about goop often? Hi, yes, I've been thinking about goop quite a bit. Like not not the Gwyneth now, not the Gwyneth Flyer I was Speaking of the Gwyneth one, but you. Yeah, good. Gwyneth Paltrow's like like Snake oil brand. Or you think about Q Anon a lot. Q Just came back on right after the repeal of Roe V Wade started posting. That's not great. Yeah. No, on your mind a little bit. No, a little alarming. And and literal Nazis. Those are probably on your mind occasionally, right? They're on my mind far more than I'd like to admit. What if I were to tell you that the ideas behind all of these groups have a single origin point and in fact, an origin point in a single woman? They can all trace their lineage back to 1 broad. What if I were to tell you that, Jamie? I would say I know exactly who that broad is, and I can't wait for you to tell me about her. Yeah, yeah. We are talking today about Helena Blavatsky. A woman so influential that the only way to start her episode was by spending 5 minutes talking about burning genitalia as the result of a variety of mistakes and ******* sandwiches. And I honestly don't know where she would fall on any of those issues, to be perfectly honest. Well, that's interesting, we're going to get into this. But she would claim most of her her life as a prominent figure, that she was utterly celibate. But her biogr, at least one of her biographers claim she was just like as as the kids say. She was balls deep in that euro, you know. OK OK. So she she was in the in the hero. OK. I'm excited for this because she has. I mean I know we're going to talk about it, but she has a jumping off point of the that directly intersects with the show is just working on ghosts. She's she's started with some spiritualism stuff and then and then she really took it to an 11 she the least pleasant way. What's interesting so because your show is about spiritual, specifically American spiritualism, because there's different strains of it. She was kind of, you know what a magpie is. That bird that, like, lays its eggs in another bird's nest. She was that for spiritualism. She was never a spiritualist, she just snuck in there to sell her own thing. It's a very cool story. I'm very, very excited because I I started researching her for the show, and then it just quickly became apparent that not only is there at least a 16,000 word script, if he had about it, I could have gone longer. And also that, like, like, you're saying, like, she wasn't actually in, she was just interested in. Be the eyes and ears that spiritualism had. Yeah, and it's one of those things, the religion she creates. Theosophy. I'm sure there's gonna be some theosophists that are just gonna be livid with us that the things we leave out. It's I I read 2 biographies about this woman. Both of them were very long. Both of them have so much detail no one would ever need. Unless you're interested in specific arguments that weirdo occult people were having in 1885, like, and it's like pages and pages kind of. And of course, you all know who this guy is. He wrote that, like, I'm trying to boil most of that out. It's also worth noting both of the biographers I read are like believers. So no, there are no credible sources for most of this. There are a few facts that we can say for certain, and then it's like, here's one story, here's another story, because she's like, she's an L Ron Hubbard figure she she she never told the same story about her background twice, basically. So we're going to do our best here, but first we're going to start. Well before the birth of Helena Blavatsky, by talking about the concept of Orientalism now today Oxford languages describes Orientalism as quote the representation of Asia, especially the Middle East, in a stereotyped way that is regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude. I think today when people use the word they're mainly thinking of like specifically China, but this includes a lot of colonialist attitudes towards India and obviously towards like the Middle East towards northern Africa. And this is a a bad thing. If somebody accuses you of being an Orientalist, they're accusing you of a very specific kind of white supremacy, right? But back in the 1600s, Orientalism was still a thing, but it wasn't necessarily white supremacist. You could definitely say it was racist, although even that's a little off to me. Basically, it's it was based on stereotypes of Asia, many of which were wrong, but the stereotypes weren't based in hate as much as the fact that it was the 1600s and it was kind of hard to get good. Information about India if you were like living in France, right? So like people just like believed things and didn't really have any way to confirm them. Now, specifically, Orientalism in the 1600s would have actually centered more around Cairo and Egypt than it would have because that was the east, right. That was the, that was the the like, that was the the the kind of old world to people in that period of time, this enlightenment. And it was it was the center of historic knowledge, right. Cairo had had had the Library of Alexandria. This kind of mythic, I mean it did exist in some form, but this like also very mythical library that supposed to contain all of the knowledge human beings. It's this. It's this place where you go to find the secret truths of the ancients. Hey, I misspoke here and said Cairo had the library of Alexandria. I meant to say Egypt had it. Obviously the Library of Alexandria was in Alexandria. It is so fascinating. Like, whenever you look at text from that time, like, I know that we're absolutely *********** when it comes to the proliferation, like the proliferation of false info now, but just like people in the West, their perception of Egypt would have been formed by only just like a couple of. Random Western people and it's all just so incredibly vague and entitled and it's just why. It's also, I mean, one of the things that's interesting. So again in the 1600s. Egypt is kind of like the occult center of, of Western conceptions of of like magic and stuff. The same is kind of true for the ancient Romans. That's for how ******* old Egyptian civilization is 2000 years ago and like Caesar's day, like Hip Romans are going to Alexandria, Cairo to like do some of the same **** because they're like interested in this like ancient mystical tradition and stuff and like multiple gods. Yeah, I can't believe it. Yeah, it's, it's, I mean. They had multiple gods too, but Umm yeah, it's the Romans did. But I'm talking about once, once we get to just one, one big guy. Yeah, it it remains this kind of there. There's this always been this fascination with with Cairo and with with Egypt in particular, as this kind of like center of occult traditions. And it's also worth noting that in the 1600s, like, **** like the pyramids, like, legitimately, they couldn't imagine how they could have been constructed. They addressed that in the first scene of Despicable Me. Oh, good. I'm glad. Yeah, it was the minable, though. It was inflatable ohk. OK, OK. And then the minions, and it was the minions. The minions put it there. They used all their little minion breath to. And then they went to sleep while Hitler was doing his thing. Huh. You know, it's funny. They never account for, like, the other massacres. Like, we're them. Is during Rwanda like, were they helping out with that ****? Like were the minions aiding Slobodan Milosevic and the massacre? It's rubber nitza, like with the manically canonically, the minions serve the most evil person. So I want to recut that documentary, the act of killing, for when that like Indonesian fascist is talking about God rightful people. There's like an elderly minion behind him with the wire. You are not putting minions in the act of killing. Someone needs to Jamie Loftus. So look the way in which. Europeans during the Enlightenment treat Egypt is not very different from how a lot of new age truth seekers treat India Today, right? Right down to the fact that like people from Europe would move there to like get do fancy spiritual stuff, they do the Steve Jobs. Now obviously it is kind of like India's kind of the spot for that today, right? Particularly a couple of cities like Rishikesh where like white people love to go to like learn different sort of like eastern spiritual traditions and whatnot. And a lot of research lists do that. Yeah. And and Cairo is not so much, right. You don't hear of a lot of Westerners going to Cairo to, like, get involved in spiritual stuff today. And the reason why that switch happened, why kind of the capital of, I guess, what you'd call Western Eastern Spiritualism moves from Egypt to India, has a lot to do with the dude you've probably heard of named Voltaire. And and Voltaire is real into this this idea that there are sacred truths in like kind of eastern and Asian religion and mythology that westerners have forgotten, and specifically in a way that, like he thinks, gives them kind of moral superiority over Westerners. In Candide he gives kind of the final word in the book to a Turkish dervish in the Princess of Babylon. He depicts a Golden Age civilization on the banks of the Ganges. Voltaire was probably classic Voltaire. I know so much about him. Like I I know every word. Yeah, you're I you've you've famously got Voltaire's face tattooed across your lower back. Voltaire is not mainly something I associate with one line in the Princess Diaries. One definitely not. So he was probably the best known influence and most influential orientalist of his day, which was like most of the 1700s. This guy lived for ******* ever. He was born in 1694 and died in 1778. Pretty good run. For that. In time, yeah, I think he had a lot of syphilis by the end there. But who didn't like, he does like, did he not go outside? How do you, how do you achieve that lifespan? He did alright for the day. I mean that's pretty doing pretty good for now. So one of the things that he wrote during his very long life was an essay on the Spirit of Nations, which listed China and India. He's kind of going through in a list what he views as like the oldest civilizations and it lists, he lists China and India as, as the very oldest of civilizations. Now, Voltaire was not making any kind of archaeological argument here, certainly not in the sense that you were I would talk about today. He was instead arguing in favor of a concept in vogue at the time called Diffusionism. Now, today we map cultural inventions like, say, the Phoenician alphabet back to specific origin points, right? At some point a person or persons in Phoenicia made an alphabet and it became popular, right in the same way that like at some point some ****** ******* made an iPhone and it became popular. But diffusion lists didn't think that. That's how. Inventing stuff worked. They believed that there had been some great civilization in the past in which all great cultural inventions came from, right. There was some golden age. Yeah, like an ideological Pangea situation. Like, that's exactly what they think. That's exactly what? Well, that's that's an interesting idea. I think Diffusionist believed there had been kind of like a couple of civilizations in the past, that everything came from radical diffusionist went that all believe that all human culture and technology. Had, like, a single origin point. Uh-huh. Now, one of the things that was cool about Voltaire was that he argued, and this is what he was doing by listing China and India as like, old. Because basically, if you believe this, the older a civilization is that the closer it is to like the human original ideal civilization, you know, like the further back you go. So by arguing that India and China were older than like any of kind of the judeo-christian civilizations, he was arguing against the primacy of judeo-christian beliefs and the broad sweep of human. History, which is a pretty cool thing to be doing at the time. Yeah. So when he listed India and China is coming before Judaism, in his essay, he was making the claim that Christianity and Judaism were kind of copying or descending from older belief systems. Now, a thing that doesn't rock about this is that Voltaire also described the Jews as basically stealing their culture from other people, right? It was like, that does seem exactly there's problem. It's good that, like, OK, yeah, in the 1600s, probably Christian people. Needed a little bit of like a hey, you're not the center of human development, right? That's part they don't like they have. They don't like hearing that, Robert, they hate that ****. And the bad part is that Voltaire focuses a lot on the Jews and and specifically them as stealing their culture from older cultures and not inventing anything of their own, which is a a central pillar of anti-Semitism, particularly Nazi ideology focuses a lot on like, Jewish cultural theft. It's like a huge thing the Nazis are, which for a bunch of Christians is very funny. But anyway, whatever. I mean outside, outside of like just like bald faced anti-Semitism. Is there a reason that he does not accuse Christians of the same thing like I think he kind of does, but he really just focuses on Jewish people? He yeah. I'm not an expert on Voltaire, but he spent, he does spend. I think most people will agree he was a bit anti-Semitic now, anti-Semitic for the time. That's probably too much to say because it was everyone. Like, there's regular programs and **** in this. You know? So he's, he's, he's pretty in line with a lot of Europeans in this moment. I wanna quote now from a fascinating write up by Dan Edelstein titled Hyperborean Atlantis. Quote the Jews as well as every other people that succeeded the URR civilization, which is like the the Golden Age civilization everything comes from, merely perpetuated a complete cultural system which they inherited from the prima janitors of human society. At a time when Polygenetic theories about the origin of human races were rampant, radical diffusionism was further bolstered by the notion that only certain select peoples could have had, would have had the requisite. Qualities for inventing culture. According to Voltaire, these prima janitors of all human knowledge were Indian. This hypothesis was particularly seductive as it could be extended to the most sophisticated aspects of human culture, namely the sciences. The belief in the Super sophistication of Brahmanic culture grew stronger after Sir William Jones's discovery of Sanskrit grammar. But even before the Asiatic researchers saw the day, Brahmanism was being hailed as the original science. And this is you'll see bits of this today if you listen to, like people talk about the Bhagavad Gita. There's a lot of focus, particularly in the West, on like passages that could be talking about witnessing a nuclear weapon and stuff. And right, this even goes both ways because famously was Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita when he sets off the first atomic bomb. Right now I am become death, such and such, destroyer of worlds, yada yada. But there's these like, clean, you can find a lot of conspiracies about like, oh, these, these things. In the Vedas or whatnot, are these like bits of Indian art kind of look like they could be like a spaceship or something. And so maybe like the bag maybe maybe these, these ancient Hindu texts are talking about some like prehistoric war with between advanced with an advanced human civilization that tore itself apart and we're all living in there. It's a thing people talk about today, right? That's not a particularly common Hindu belief, but it's like a thing, particularly Westerners we'll talk about today. So that's that's kind of like my, that's kind of my big question so far. It's like when Voltaire and and the Voltaire Adjacents talk about India and Egypt. Are they talking about the western perception of Egypt? Is anything they're saying based in actual fact? Yeah, there's usually 10 or 15% actual fact because you'll get like, you know, the higher rate than a lot of people. A lot of it is like some wrote for the Egyptian stuff, some Roman or some Greek like spent time in Egypt and like wrote about religious and half of what they're writing is like maybe they saw. Some like worship and half of it is like some dude at a bar told them about a ritual. And that all kind of gets like mashed together into like Herodotus writing about like what the Egyptians believed and then 1000 ish a couple of 1000 years later. Some like European in ******* Paris or London reads that and like, you know, off to the races we go. Hanging out at the wrong bars. The bar I went to last week said that overturning Roe V Wade was good for me. I just didn't know it yet. Ohh well, that's sounds like a bar in Florida. Or Orange County. Parts of San Bernardino was Atwater Village. Shout out Atwater Village for having some anti abortion. Old men continue. That sounds right. So Speaking of old men, Voltaire argued strongly that India, not Egypt should be considered the front of civilization. So he's saying that like even the Egyptians are just kind of like copying off of this great original Indian civilization. And as you've probably has occurred to a couple of people listening right now, the things that he's. Arguing about and that other argue, like writers in the same vein are arguing about meshes pretty well with like the most popular myth in Western mythological Canon. Atlantis, right? OK, yes, you're there. There's not made that connection, but there's like this perfect Golden Age civilization with advanced technology that that's like somehow got destroyed and we're all descended from them. Like that's not that far off from how a lot of people interpreted Lantis now the the original myth of Atlantis. Comes from like, Plato as written by some other dude, right? Like, it's not not like a play Michael J. Fox movie. Yeah, no, this is like, this is like when Plato got played by you and McGregor 20 years later, or when Salvador Dali got played by Robert Pattinson. I feel like people. Oh my God, that did happen. What a pleasant thing to do. Especially absolutely unhinged. If you are casting Dolly ******* Pedro, Pascal is right there, and he is. Proven his willingness to grow a mustache. Ohh, he said. And he can actually do it. You know who didn't do it for the role? And maybe it's that and Remember Me iconically bad. Robert Pattinson joins absolutely outstanding ****. Good movie night vibe. Anyways, continue according to Plato was written by some other dude. Atlantis was the home of a very advanced people. Modern writers always take that to mean like spaceships and free energy and Plato's day and advanced civilization, like their aqueducts, worked better, right? Like that's what he was, not advantage imagining starships. He was like, yeah, and they're really good at making water move. The mother should get money incredible at. **** it. In time, Atlantis mutated as a myth into a pre Egyptian globe spanning civilization that had colonized the world in a manner similar to how Europeans have started to colonize it in the 1600s. Right? The Atlanta Smith kind of transforms to ape what Europeans are doing at the same time, right? Europeans see themselves conquering the entire world and colonizing it. And because these myths like they kind of adapt the Atlantis myth in media res to be, oh, this happened before and you know, just confirmation bias. I love it when people manufacture their own confirmation bias myths. Yeah, Galaxy brain ****. There's a lot of guys who are, like, super hard for this. Or a good example. Sir Francis Bacon gets his like, like, it's just coming constantly over ******* Atlantis and the early 1600s. And yeah, in the late 1700s, near the end of Voltaire's life, an astronomer named Jean Sylvain Bailly decides to find Atlantis. Right this, like, because it's all it's this. They've decided there's this because of folks like Voltaire. They don't really believe that Atlantis is this like Greek island anymore. And in fact a lot of people are like placing it in the east, but nobody knows where it was. So they all very much believe in this place, that kind of it's existence. Especially if you if you imagine that you're going to find some artifacts that like maybe have some writing and stuff that looks Latin or something in there, it's existence could kind of justify what you're doing and colonizing the world, right? If some previous civilization had ruled the world. And you're kind of descended from them, you know, that's how what a lot of people are thinking, right? Right. So funny to me, it's like the fact that there are people looking for Atlantis back in the day and people like it. They are just like the Bigfoot hunters of their time, basically. And people act like it's the most uncivilized thing in the world. I just like, dude, this used to be a thriving industry. It's a dying industry. If I were at the point I am in my career now in like the early 1990s, which was famously a period in which there were no problems. I would be doing nothing but looking for Atlantis in Bigfoot. Like, yeah, I The thing is, it's not the silliest thing you could do. I don't like when it's treated that way. The silliest thing you could do is is write a book about how history has come to an end. Like Fukuyama, go look for Atlantis, ************. So Jean, Sylvain Bailey decides I'm going to find Atlantis. And because history is actually not as cool as fiction, he does not put together a ****** steampunk expedition with hot air balloons and ****. Which is a devastating Jamie. What an absolutely devastating. So he is not doing the steampunk cartoon movie that I used to love. No, it is she. It wrenches my soul in Twain. But he writes a bunch of really boring books trying to use math and logic. Like, figure out where it would have been. ******* yawn, you know? **** you, Jean. Sylvain Bailly. Like, go to suck * **** for homework? I want to go to Atlantis. Yeah, *****. Yeah, OK, anyway, whatever. In Bailey we see the synthesis of the diffusionist trend with a new 18th century appreciation for the value of myths previously rejected as being the beliefs of pre rational civilizations. Which is ****** ** term, but that's what they're talking about, right? They view civil earlier civilizations as pre rational. They don't believe that's the case because you can't survive as a hunter gatherer if you're not pretty rational. But whatever. Scotland also are. Even arguing that the West was rational at this time exactly is a stretch. There's nothing wrong with that. This is, this is how they were talking about it. Scholars in this. Though, this is actually kind of kind of in some ways a positive trend where like they're they're a lot of scholars are going against this attitude that earlier civilizations had been like just fundamentally irrational and there's nothing to learn about their mythology. Scholars start to argue like, well, no, there's actually a lot of truth in in certain myths. That's why, like, they spread. And the good, the the aspect of this is healthy is and so we should like study and appreciate the different mythologies and whatnot. Human beings have embraced over time because they can teach us a lot about ourselves. Instead, a lot of scholars decide like well, this must mean that all of these myths are like branches of some great historic truth that has been corrupted over time. And if we can figure out like a secret set of codes that allow us to, like, peel away the parts of the myths that have gotten corrupted overtime, you could unlock a sacred discourse that reveals the truth about history. No, that's not what you said. A sacred discord for a second. And that was a very funny there is a special discord board that people are doing that there is now. Sorry, so Dan Edelstein writes. Quote Hercules is 12th, and last labor in the traditional sequence led him beneath ground to capture Cerberus, just as Persephone and other solar figure had disappeared underground for half the year. These episodes and others, Bailey surmised, symbolized the complete disappearance of the sun. The inventors of the myth must therefore have lived at a latitude where the sun periodically vanished from the sky. Dismissing earlier theories about the location of Atlantis, Bailey thus reached the surprising conclusion that Atlantis lay near the North Pole, roughly where the Novaya Zemlya archipelago is situated. So you see what he's doing there. He's being #1. He's saying that like, well, because all of these myths have a common origin point, and it's much older. It can't be like Greece, like it has to be older. The Hercules myths can't have just been some things some Greek dudes came up with when they were drunk as **** around a campfire. It used to originate from somewhere, so let's well, let's pinpoint within the story. Uh, they're talking about an eclipse, which must mean that they live near the North Pole. I in some ways you gotta hand it to. It's very funny. It's very funny the way the logic works, like. Obviously, my dear Africa, Africa is also here. Like there there's other places we can explore and trace the myth. I mean, not exploit. But again it is funny that like this is one of those cases where the the the people earlier and who were generally wronger about a lot of things were right about the origin of civilization or writer when they like proposed that it was in Egypt because like yeah, it did start. And like North Africa, like that's more more or less not Africa and like bits in the Middle East. Only Egypt. That is worth exploring. It's just so they go to the Hercules myth too. Yeah, they they go. I mean, Hercules clearly grew up in the North Pole. Jamie, I don't know if you've read Hercules. Look what I watched that movie. 1,000,000%. I would watch that movie there. I I like to think I was like, what would be the like, popular current myth that people could that once society collapses? That future cryptids can assume is based on truth and like, is it Eragon? Is it? Let's let's let's have it be the rip off of Jay or token? Like, yeah, let's have it be Eragon or my favorite vampire story. Cirque du freak. Let's have it be Cirque du freak. There you go, Jamie. Let's yeah, yeah, have it. It'll be Cirque du freak. That's our our foundational myth. Also, I think that Santa Claus should start traveling. Around with Hercules. Ohh 100%, but. But specifically young Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hercules, where he can't really talk like in English. Like he's just like he's just like pronouncing words phonetically because he doesn't know what he's saying. Oh my God. Yeah, I want that. Hercules hanging out with Santa Claus just hucking people into the East Bay. Hercules is a strong idea for a franchise. Free IP, folks. Go now. Come on, Disney. Money on the table. You know what else is money on the table? Jamie Loftus. Tell me what the products and services that support this podcast money we're taking. Which is why you're about to hear these ads. I hope they're about to try. I hope gwynnie's about to try to sell you a jade egg. Wouldn't that be amazing? Fingers crossed. Well, other things crossed. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twist at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy. At mintmobile.com/behind now a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just, you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy. And better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try. Better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey. And if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behindbetter. Dot com slash behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart. We're back. Ohh. So have you ever, have you ever seen a jade egg, Robert? I've seen jade eggs. I haven't seen anyone the kind that you stick in your. I've seen some people put some things inside them. I'll tell you that much. Oh my God, I got this friend who can put one of those metal coke straws all the way up. Anyway, I used to use. I used to use one as a stage prop where I did a show where at the end like I would have the jade egg in. I would put it in at the beginning of the show and then people would totally forget I had done that and they would also assume I never actually did it. And then at the end, yeah. And then at the end I would they would watch me pull it out and then and and people hated it, Robert. They did not like it. But I had a great time. You don't even know it's good. I had great parties. That only happened because somebody was able to hide a bag full of pills inside themselves in a similar way and drive across Dallas when there were a lot of good checkpoints set up. That's a good comrade. That's a good. That's a good buddy. Yeah. So we're talking about Bailey and his conclusion that Atlantis lays near the North Pole, right? And this, this is what brings us the concept that is called today, like Hyperborean Atlantis, Hyperborea. Is this like mythical in some myths? It's like this. It's like a whole like Pangea style continent way back in the day. But the Hyperboreans are like this mythical people who had supposedly existed somewhere in the far north of Greece, like far north of Greece and worshipped Apollo and these kind of Hyperboreans kind of. That hyperbolic becomes kind of the word for the the civilization, the great civilization that everything had originated from. It's also the civilization that Conan the Barbarian comes from in the Robert Howard novels. But that's because Howard is specifically a fan of this, like mythology. He's like growing up. This is all still very white when Robert Howard, the guy who creates Conan the barbarian, is like writing a stories. This mythology is incredibly common because of Helena Blavatsky. But yeah, so hyperborean Atlantis is the concept that kind of comes out as a result of of Bailey's work. And Bailey argues that the Hyperboreans had been real and that they'd lived up near the Arctic back when the world was warmer, and again, it's face failure. That's just another silly myth theory. There's a bunch of different myths about early human beings that are all very, very fun, but not literally true. Literally true. I mean, for example, the the opening of the movie Minions offers some really interesting. Ideas about how Minions came to be? Well, you know, and and Jamie, actually, that's based heavily on Catholic doctrine that's been buried beneath the Vatican for centuries. But minions do believe in in dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are a thing for minions. There is for books. Yeah, really. Catholicism. They've always been ****** about abortion, but like, they've been good about evolution for a long time. OK, well, that's good to know. There you go. I lapsed his account with their bad about is molestation, which the minions probably helped with. You have to assume, right? OK. No, they didn't. Robert. Jamie, they're helping all of the villains. What's more of a villain than the Catholic Church in Ireland and like the last 150 years. Well, the English in Ireland over the last time, you do see them, I believe unless I'm unless I was misreading who they were. You see them help at the beginning of the movie, you see them help the dine. You see them help with T Rex. You see them help the meanest caveman. Why is the T Rex a bad guy? It's just an animal. I hate the **** this ******* show. You see? You see them help Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon was not a bad guy. He was the only hero in European history. Look, that's my opinion. What happens in the movie? That. And then they find grew. Who is Steve Carell? And he's Hitler. Yeah, I'm going to. I'm going to take that. Is given, so Jamie. He is Hitler. Yeah, again. At face value, this idea of like a hyperborean Atlantis just sounds like another silly myth. But as Edelstein continues, the impact of Bailey's conclusions here was significant quote. Bailey dissociated Atlantis from the Atlanteans, the place from the people he thus mobilized the myth, tracing its progress from the North Pole, through Asia, via Mongolia down to India, and from there, from east to West. Atlantis became a floating signifier, an indicator of cultural superiority. And originality that could be affixed to any place in people with whom the migrant Atlanteans might have come into contact. By situating their original homeland beyond the scope of empirical inquiry under the concealing lid of polar ice sheets, he turned the Atlanteans into what would soon become the 19th century myth par excellence, the myth of race, and more specifically, the white of the white races, peregrine. Peregrination, yeah, I don't know to say that word. So basically what he's doing is, let me tell you, let me explain this. So basically what he's doing is he's saying, like the Atlanteans came from this area near the North Pole, which is now under ice. You can't find it, so there's no documentation of it. And after this great calamity, the Atlanteans migrated down, like, through China and then into India and then through the Middle East and then eventually to Europe, right. So that, number one, there's elements of like. Actual history that gels with, right, you have like, the Indo Aryans, we're not coming from the North Pole, but you have these, like, different groups of people primarily defined by like their language that do migrate from vast swaths of, like of of the globe over periods of time. And so there's bits and pieces of like evidence that shows like, oh, these people here, you know, originally like came from or at least people migrated down from this area and like, you can see evidence of that, which when you just have bits of it kind of seems to confirm there's this. Migrating race that's bringing civilization in its wake, right. So basically a lot of white supremacists will eventually this will evolve into like the Aryan myth, right, that there's this like ancient Aryan race that brought civilization to Europe and it's being corrupted now. But there is this like original pure race that you can trace and like the Nazis do trace and they always get back around to that. Like, yeah, I mean, and it again, there's bits of actual because there there is like an Indo Arian, like people that travel up from India and eventually make it into Eastern Europe. And stuff. But it's not like what the Nazis are talking about. The Nazis do. They sit the Nazi cinder researchers to India to like the ******* Himalayas and **** to talk with them. People that they believed are like the ancestors of the Arians. Like there's a lot. When are they, when are they doing that? And like the in the Thirties, 20s and 30s, there's an s s well in the 30s, particularly once the Nazis gain power. There's an s s division called on an Air Bay, which is like the S kind of a cult history division. A lot of, like, historians and researchers are funded by the Nazis to go over into India and find evidence of the ancient Aryans because the Nazis believe so strongly in this idea that there's this error culture, that error our ancestors that traveled through the world, and they've just been kind of, like, corrupted by mistakenly breeding. And, like, the Jews come into this at a certain point, so you just have to, like, send someone to find a scrap of information to create your confirmation bias myth. Yeah. And we can. Yeah. I'm going to continue that quote. We can now fully fathom the political thrust of Bailey's gesture. Rather than Orientalized Atlantis, which is what Voltaire had done, he Atlanticism used the Orient, making a Snow White northern European people the Hyperboreans responsible for the cultural achievements and splendors of the east. He did not deny Oriental achievements. On the contrary, he bent over backwards to concur with Voltaire that Asian civilizations were truly awe inspiring. But a hyperborean Atlantis allowed him to credit a European stock with the foundation of these ancient cultures. So, well, there's like, obviously, like, we, we we in Europe are not so fancy, and we shouldn't be as proud of ourselves. Look at how much, like, grander these civilizations in the east were. And Bailey comes along. He's like, yes. And it's because these white hyperborean Atlanteans brought them civilization before they brought it here when their civilization was, like, closer to peer, and that's why they had all these achievements. But it's still like white people, right? Yeah, yeah, it yeah. OK. So Bailey's ideas did not grant gain tremendous ground in his time. Jules Vern actually mocks it. The whole book, 20,000 leagues under the sea, is Jules Vern making fun of this guy? Pretty much. It's one of those things you don't catch now because, like, it's this argument between dudes who've been dead for 100. Yeah, but Vern is kind of like mocking Bailey specifically in that book. I always enjoy something like that where you're like, yeah, you could read the like, when do you find out, though, was it of Oz as an allegory for something that you're like? Yeah, I didn't know about these agrarian like what? This is not relevant to me, but at the time people were like, oh, he got their *****. Well, and that is the mark to me of like, great, like, like, you know, ****** political ****** fiction. It's very obvious that, like, oh, this is just some, like, stupid political rant. And if it's really good fiction, you know, there's probably some dumb political rant there because All authors do that kind of **** but you don't notice it. It's like talking was actually extremely angry about about Tory. Fiscal policy, and that's really what he's talking about. When he discusses the delineation of the different orcish peoples from the elves, it's all. It's all that was. I have not found Tory economic policy to continue this joke. That was a lie. The patients in this lifetime to to dive into Tolkien lore. I don't think it's going to happen for me. Ohh, it's funny he he really hated the idea that anybody would read anything into his books but like but but the elves, and that works like he's like. He. The man lives through a battle of the Salem in which thousands of his comrades are like sucked into mud and drown in it, like while he watches. And then he like writes in his book about this battle where thousands of corpses are like trapped forever in a bog and people are like. Was this about like you like writing about World War One at all and he like hits them in the face with a beer bottle? Like **** you for assuming. Exhausting. What a king. So, Jamie. Yeah. This somewhat meandering discussion, you know, Bailey, it's been very on topic. Yeah. Thank you. So Bailey is kind of ignored in this time, mocked by guys like Jules Vern. But about 60 years after he publishes his work, a woman is going to be born who will take his ideas, expand them, and carry them forward into a new and bloodier age. Her name is Helena Petrovna Vohan. And she's born. On August 12, 1831, in a Catarina Slav, now denied, proves she's Alia brain. She's a Leo, so she's probably gonna be a little bit showy, Robert and her her whole childhood is in in Ukraine specifically, it's in like a lot of the parts of Ukraine that are people are fighting and dying over right now. Her hometown, it Katarina Slav, was a very modern city by the standards of the Russian Empire. It had been built just a century before, and it specifically was like a city they had established. And like honor of Catherine the Great, who is the ruler of Russia for quite awhile. Very interesting lady. Also a good friend of Voltaire. Just interesting. Yeah. Note now, you may have noticed that she is. There's a Vaughn in her name, right? She's she's Helena Petrovna. Vahan, this means that she's nobility. But you also might notice that, like Vaughn is is German, right? Yeah. If you're Vaughn, is is like a marker that you're a member of, like the nobility in in German culture? No word. I feel like I should have known that. Does it? Does everybody know that? Yeah. Like the guy who assassinated Hitler. close. Von Stauffenberg was Prussian nobility, right? I don't know that. Alright. Yeah, it's why a lot of grifters put Vaughn in their name and like the 1800s. Nineteen hundreds. It's because they're pretending to be European nobles. And obviously Von Hahn is a German name. She's German, but she's Russian because a huge chunk of the Russian aristocracy are actually German. This is going to cause serious problems. For some of them in about a century. But at the time everybody's fine about it because, like their serfs, and they don't have any choice but to be fine about it. So anyway, she's German, but she's Russian and she lives in Ukraine. This is the Russian empire. Not weird at the time, the first great event of her childhood would have been a cholera epidemic, which killed so many people that coffins piled up in the streets of her hometown unburied. Now, her mother was 17 when she had her, which we're going to be talking about that quite a bit. Her mom is also named. Lena and she is not in particularly good health. She and her new baby both catch cholera and nearly die. And in fact young Helena the baby was so sick that her godparents and and household called for a priest to baptize her immediately as a newborn infant because, like, they thought she was going to die. And according to family legends, Helena's aunt, who was actually also a child at the time, accidentally set the priest's robes on fire during the baptism, which is a pretty cool thing to have happen at your baptism. That's pretty funny. You have to you have to hand it. It's there is something, there is something about a near death experience as a baby that will just like set you on the most bizarre life paths. And unfortunately I am thinking about an Elvis Presley and how his twin died and now they're like, you have to live the life of two men and then like you just if if something happened, if you almost died as a baby, you're going to have a very ****** ** life due to the baggage that. You're like, constantly reminded of. Yeah, that's why. We should hollow out the center of the country and make it a giant child prison. But that's a story for another day. So, Jamie, OK? Helena and her mom both survived the epidemic. You may notice that I have not mentioned her father yet. This is because he was a captain with Russia's Horse Artillery. What, some fancy royal unit, and he was generally not at home. He first meets his daughter when she's six months old and this is going to be like the pattern for her life. He is away all the time now, her daily in the horse force. Poor Sara Tillery is like an elite military unit in this. Like you're you're dragging, like it allows you to, like, drag cannons around and move them into position quickly. And Peter von Hahn is kind of like an elite military commander for Czar Nicholas. The first he wins awards for helping to suppress a bunch of different uprisings. He is a shock trooper for the empire. And Nicholas the first, who is like the car at the time, is one of the most brutal and effective zars in the history of the Russian Empire. So while Peter's daughter is struggling with her. 17 year old Mom to survive cholera. He is helping to crack down on an uprising in Poland and they kill thousands of people like stopping this uprising. It is Nat blood running through the streets. ****. Now, the primary impact that all of this has on young Helena's life is that they move constantly. Also, her dad is 34 and her mom is 17, which is not cool. Also, Elvis parallel. Not at all uncommon for the aristocracy at the time. This would have been kind of weird, I think, for like normal people, but for aristocrats. Not uncommon. Were they? Were they vaguely related? Do we know? I mean, probably, right. But I don't, I don't specifically know. Yeah, I'm not gonna do we. We could get into their genealogy, I'm sure, a lot more if we wanted to. But who's got that kind of time? So the primary impact, again, they move constantly and they're generally because he's like a military officer whose job is to help put down rebellions. They're not saying in the good cities in Russia, right? They're in backwaters, you know, they're far from famous, all like from the art and cultural scene in in Russia. And this is a problem for helenae. Mother who's again also Helena because she becomes a celebrated novelist. She's a really interesting lady, actually. Again, she's she marries her husband when he's like, she's a child. But she as a young adult, she starts writing novels that become actually very popular in Russia. And they're all about women who are in unhappy marriages to brutes. So this is like a part of her history that I was like, this is very cool, like this dope. Her mom is a really interesting person. I want to quote a passage from one of her books titled The World's Judgment, which I found exerted, exerted in a Gary Lachman's biography of Madame Blavatsky, the Fine, Sharp and fast mine of my husband, as a rule, accompanied by a cutting irony smashed every day, one of my brightest, most innocent and pure aspirations and feelings. All that was sacred to my heart was either laughed at or was shown to me in the pitiless and cynical light of his cold and cruel reasoning. Ooh, so. I think you can grasp a lot about their relationship from that passage I love. I mean it's it's I just always. I don't know my my favorite areas of history are women with no rights. Finding the way to to subtweet their oppressors into ******* oblivion like that is so fun. And not to draw another minions parallel, Robert, OK, but the man who is at least the Co creator? One could argue that. Creator of the Minions Co, director of the Despicable Me franchise Pierre Coffin, raised by a very famous Indonesian feminist who wrote novels when she was still working as a flight attendant. That became very famous, very influential. She marries a French guy. They have a, you know, a little Pierre coffin. And what does he do to thank her? Creates the minions. An entire great work. Just a bunch of from 2 generations of a family or you can interpret it as all the minions are are men. They're all men doing evil things. And you're like, where where is he going with this? Does he realize it's all connected in the way that I I do when I go on my long walks, you know, we don't know. We don't know. So Jamie, that's that's that's pretty and I think we can assume from that passage also, sex probably wasn't great. No, probably not. Probably not very good. Probably. Probably. I'm gonna guess Peter worse at sex than say, here's him a foot a foot long subway sandwich. One of the ones on the the the the that herbs and spices bread. That herbs and spices. Well, that's the best bread to ****. If you're going to **** some bread, you want to be ******* that herbs and spices, you know, that's the best bread. But I feel like it might have a doctor Bronner's kind of effect on. Yeah, it's. It's gonna be a little peppery. That's why you have a mad extra Mayo. Yeah. You really need to wash right away. Yeah, you want and wash with Mayo, right? It's it's like washing your eyes out with milk. If you get. Don't do that. If you get teargassed. I'm sorry. I don't even want to spread that. Funny, though, right? So I don't know. Anyway, Helena, the mom was never in because again, they're both named. Helena was never in good health, so she doesn't ever fully get better from getting horribly sick. And they move constantly, which is bad for her. Health they live in army housing, which isn't good either, although she and her baby still have like, again, they're rich. They have a small army of servants at their beck and call, so it's like hard, but not hard compared to how most people in Russia would be living at the time. When she was two, when Helena, the baby, our Helena was to her mom. Also, Helena has another baby named Sasha who dies immediately, which was tradition for roughly half of babies at the time. And you know who else kills babies roughly half the time? Is it the people who sponsor this show? On their special child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia that's been leaving a chicken with its throat slit on my front porch every week for six years. I can't pay them to stop. That's right, Jamie. You know why they're doing that? So you keep your mouth shut about the child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. My God, you're right. And and and here we are. It's never going to end. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate. Whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint mobilcom slash behind. Now, a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com. Slash behind betterhelp.com/behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Fried true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREAK. R.com get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Ah, we're back. OK, after making Sophie Mark a bunch of places in the episode to bleep out the name. Cool. So I like how you keep calling her Helena the baby. It does make her sound like a tick tock rapper. Test maker sound like * **** doctor Pepper? She would have. Oh my God. I have to say of all of the ******** we've talked about on this show, easily would have had the best Tik T.O.K. I do see what you're saying, unfortunately, yeah, we'll get to that. She would have. I mean, her legacy lives on on Tik T.O.K, unfortunately. But now Saddam Hussein, that's a Twitter head, that's a Twitter guy. You get Saddam on Twitter. Ain't nothing else happening on Twitter. Oht. A man that would have been a good time he would be making. He would be using the threat emoji often. Oh my God, it would have been incredible. So after this the family moved to briefly to Saint Petersburg, right? They get like stationed there for a year or two, which thrills mom Helena because Saint Petersburg is like the Cultural Center of Russia. She's this is when her her literary career starting to take off and she's able to like go to art galleries and fancy parties and and sit at salons. With other adults who aren't like drunken soldiers, this is like her dream life she finally gets to live for, like the only two years or a year or whatever that she will actually get to be anything close to happy. When Baby Helena is 6, Peter tells them that they're going to have to move again to the middle of nowhere to brutalize people. And this time, Mom Helena says no, she refuses to move with her husband and like, go with the army, basically. So she stays in Saint Petersburg a while and then her father comes to her. And asks if she and her daughter want to go on an adventure now. Helena's maternal grandfather father had been made a trustee for the KALMAK, which was a wandering tribe of horse riding warriors who like the part of the area that they lived in. They had like a moving city and stuff that they took with them. And like part of the area that they they live in is in is in Russia. I think they go to a number of places, but like they live like within kind of the bounds of the Russian Empire because it's big and. There's different kind of rules for tribal peoples, and one of the things is you've got like this guy who's appointed by the government to be the intermediary of the tribe, and the Russian government and Helena's maternal grandmother gets that job for this, this group of like horse riding warrior Nomads who are also Buddhist, right? So again, Russia's very ******* big. So he takes his daughter and his granddaughter on a journey to a city called Ostracon in the very distant steps where the Kalmyk are like camping out and young Helena as like 7 something 8 years old gets to spend time in direct contact with Buddhists. This is her first experience with eastern religion and this legitimately happens. Gary Lachman writes. Quote here the young Helena Blavatsky was exposed to the Mongolian lemec system and had her first taste of Tibetan Buddhism. Her mother too was inspired by the meeting. Later wrote a novel about Kalmak life, which was translated into French. The Prince spent his days in prayer in a Buddhist temple he had built himself. The colors, the images, the incense, the strange words murmured in an unfamiliar tongue. Must have made a deep impression on the six year old. I guess she was six who had already led a remarkably adventurous life. Blavatsky would later say that her interest in Tibet began at that time. So and again, Tibet is this kind of mythical place. It is a real place. But like, you can't go to Tibet if you're like a Westerner. It's it's pretty, it's, it's closed. But, you know, this guy tibets, you know, obviously like kind of one of the centers of Buddhism. And so this like horse nomad Prince is like talking to this little girl about Tibet and she kind of falls in love with with, you know, Eastern religion and mysticism. And after this period of time, which legitimately sounds like a pretty rad experience to have as a 6 year old uh, the family all wind up back together with Peter in Odessa. Mainly because Helena, the mom, is really sick again and Odessa has these mineral baths that are thought to be good for her health. Yeah, like most, I love old school rich people. It's like you just just go sit in some salt water. You'll be fine. It'll be good. You're just gonna do rich people ****. You'll be fine. Back then. So they just go sit in baths when they could take simple prescription medicine any of us could get from a pharmacy today, like, go to Walgreens. **** *****. I'm sorry, did you not consider going to CVS? Yeah, *************. Loser your deaths on you. I don't even care. Like it takes. We're about to take. We're about to get canceled. Yeah, we are. Yeah. So she probably had. What's the thing? Uh, it was like consumption, I think is generally like what people assumed she had, right? They just kind of describe her as sickly. So she had some sort of like chronic lung illness that eventually kills her, that again, you could probably knock out in like 10 minutes today. Anyway, she dies in 1842. Her baby, Helena, now the only Helena, was 11 at the time. Her mother was 28 years old when she died. Wow. Yeah. So that's has your kid at 17, she got her novel travel. She got her novels done before. That's impressive ****. That's impressive ****. And probably what killed her ultimately was the fact that her doctors kept taking all of her blood because again, medicines not great. In 1842, she dies in her mother's arms, which is one of the saddest ways a 28 year old can die. And yeah, yeah, that's not not great. Her mother, who's. Probably like 48. Find. So Helena was presumably like, you know, the daughter, Helena was presumably pretty devastating. Baby's life goes on, though, and soon she and her siblings, she has two siblings now, are all sent to live with her grandparents because army guy like Army dad's not going to take care of, like, he's not going to be a single army dad. Like, no, they're going to go live with her mom. Grandpa grew from Despicable Me. In fairness, these are all rich people. So they're staying with their grandparents at like, basically a castle, you know? Like they're they're living in like a mansion type Palace deal, you know in, in, in kind of like the Eastern any well not E for Russia, but E for Europe, part of of Russia. Gary Lachman writes quote she was, according to her sister Vera, the strangest girl one has ever seen with a distinct dual nature. One side of her was mischievous, combative and obstinate, while another was mystical and metaphysically inclined, characteristics that those who got to know the mature Helena Blavatsky would agree on. Her aunt Nadia, just a few years older than her, tells us that from an early age she was sympathetic to the lower classes and preferred to play with the servants children rather than those of her own class, and often made friends with Ragged Street Boys. This solidarity with her social inferiors wasn't uniform, and she once had to apologize to an elderly servant whom she had slapped. And again, Lochman likes Blavatsky and defends her. So it's very funny that he's like she loved the poor. She did slap that guy, she loved the poor. Well, I also like how it's included in Texas. Well, she apologized, so, you know, she must have just been having a bad day. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean, she was made dual. He does say she had to apologize, right? So we're not. Oh, OK. So also, she didn't mean it. So also, she did not mean that. I mean, again, This is why the servants are a bad thing to have. Because any kid who has the chance to slap an adult and get away with it, it's going to try. You know, that's just being a child. I mean, that is true. Yeah. So yeah. Again, Lachman claims a lot that she, like, deeply loves the poor and the lower class. I have. I don't see any. Actual documented evidence of that at all, and the fact that even he is like, yeah, she would slap around the servants makes me wonder, maybe she wasn't playing with the servant kids just because they had to do what she told them because she's the noble girl. I don't know. I do appreciate that he that he left it in anyways, even though it directly undermines his point. I'm like, OK, not the worst journalism, but I mean, the logical thing to do would be to just simply omit that. But yeah, I mean, like, like all of these. By people who write about Blavatsky, he's like, enthralled by her, but there's a there's so much shady **** she does like. He can't keep it out. So there's these moments where you can tell like he just he has to include something negative about her, even though it hurts him. Anyway, it's very funny. All of these books about Blavatsky are a little like that. Yeah, so there is some ample evidence that she was kind of a a pretty, what I would call a fun kid. She the most detailed stories about her makes her sound like the proto Wednesday Addams, right? Like she she's she's constantly hearing spirits and ghosts, the the family manner, like that she grows up on. There's this subterranean basement system that she spends her time exploring. She's often found down there by manservants like sleepwalking or talking to invisible companions. They're like servants will find her wandering the catacombs, talking to ghosts. Yeah, that's dope. That's a cool kid I like that is. Man, she frequently played with beings no one else could see, who she called the Hunchbacks. And sometimes she would threaten other kids to, like, sick her invisible friends on them if they didn't do what she said. And I bet they totally believed. Man, witchy kids are so funny. It does sound pretty cool. Yeah, that's that's that's a great use of of child ghost power. That ******* rocks. Absolutely, her sister later recalled. Quote. Helena used to dream aloud and tell us of her visions. Evidently clear. Dividend is palpable is life to her. It was her delight to gather around herself, a party of us younger children at Twilight, and after taking us into the large dark museum, to hold us there spellbound with her weird stories. Then she narrated to us the most inconceivable tales about herself, the most unheard of adventures of which she was the heroine every night, as she explained. So she's like, telling them lies about going on adventures with her. I was in the I got taken by like a spirit to this place and like, I had to do this and, you know, fought this other spirit or whatever. Like, she's, you know what? You know what Helena Blavatsky really would have thrived with? Is, is is some friends to play D&D with when she was like, 11. It does it just yeah, it's it's a big imagination kid thing. And it just sounds like she didn't have anyone matching that level of imagination around her. Which just means that you'll be a weird finally gets it. It's going to be with adults. But like, also, this is a period in which, if you're into that, there's not like a fictional outlet like today, a lot of the bad stuff maybe wouldn't have happened. Maybe she would have gotten really into fanfiction and eventually started writing around **** and stuff like, well, I think it's interesting because her mom was a novelist. So you would think that there would have been that, like, baseline of like, hey, right, some of this **** down, you know, there's bits of that happening here. But especially, like, it's this. I mean, again, we're kind of like in the period where, like, Mary Shelley's gonna invent. The concept of science fiction. So there's not a lot of there's not a ton of role models in terms of like, taking your weird dreams about ghosts and spirits and turning it into a mythology. Learning that Mary's learning that Mary Shelley lost her virginity against her mother's own grave was really just like. I think maybe the highlight of my 2022 so we'll we'll we'll we'll do Mary Shelley in behind the ladies who rocked yeah. Behind behind behind the unimpeachable women. God, sorry. So so. OK, so she's she's so she's ******* cool thing making up stories about spirits and ghosts hanging out in the catacombs, scaring kids. Pretty dope. So while she's living with her grandparents and this is in a town on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan, she she claims now we're getting into the things that I don't think happened. She claims during this. She discovered her great grandfather's massive occult library. Now I want to read you how one reasonably credible account written for an unpronounceable. Polish magazine by Tomas Stawinski describes it. Quote there she found hundreds of decaying books by the 16th and 17th century, masters of Alchemy and Hermetic philosophy such as Paracelsus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Heinrich Konrath, Helena's great grandfather, a high ranked Freemason, who in the 1770s was initiated into the Rosicrucian mysteries, selected the books for his whole what meticulous kit? We're talking about that. So the Rosa is crucial. We'll talk about it, OK, did the books for his. Election with meticulous care, Helena devoured them with passion and it wasn't long until she became an expert in the field of occultism. The only other person she could tell about her spiritual adventures was Prince Alexander Golitsyn, a colorful character and a frequent guest at Helena's grandparent's House. Gulutzan was a Freemason and a practicing mage who searched for ancient occult secrets had led him to travel to Greece, Iran, India, Egypt and numerous other places. We don't know much about his relationship with Alina, but without doubt it is Gallitzin who instilled the yearning for faraway. Travels in her, Helena wanted to seek out the unknown, the magical, the mysterious. Now there is a lot going on in those paragraphs, so that is. Alright, hang out as like a 15 year old girl. Her best friend is a Prince wizard, the wizard Prince Gallitzin, which is pretty cool. That's again very cool. There is it. I know that Bolotsky goes in a wildly different direction, but it's like, I don't know, just like imaginative kids creating, going on to create controversial religions, huge in this time because that was also how spiritualism started was with like and there's two sisters playing a prank. Right. Like, yeah, like, so Gulutzan is legitimately interesting guy. He he was in the circle of a lot of major Masonic and spiritual proto gurus in it in the day. One of his good friends was a Christian Mystic named Karl von Eckert, Houston, who was like like one of the major dudes who inspired Alistair Crowley. Again, Crowley is like a generation later basically. So that's the set that Helena is hanging out with as like a teenage girl, these weirdo occultists who are like a generation back from Crowley. Now, Galitzen circle of dudes are all just super obsessed with secret societies. Eckert Chaussons wrote about a secret interior church, and they were all very into the Rosicrucians. Now, you had a reaction to that you probably you don't know who the Rosicrucians are, right? I don't know who the Rosa Crucians are, but I know to know that the first know about them is that they didn't exist. Probably didn't exist. So when she claims her great grandfather was one, that's her myth making, right? But I'm going to quote again from stawinski about the Rosa. Solutions in 1612, in the German city of Castle, an anonymous brochure was published. It was a manifesto of the Rosicrucian Order, an organization nobody had ever heard of before. The manifesto claimed that medieval occultists Christian Rosenkreutz had founded an order that gave its members access to the Universal mystical truth about human nature and the ways of the world. Two years later, another manifesto was released, called the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz Rosenkreutz. It's krutz rosenkreutz, I don't know ROSENKREU. Easy? I don't know. Rose Lacroix. Rose and Croix? Yeah, Rose Lacroix, the hero of the story, is presented as Hermes Trismegistus. Try majestas, a God of Hellenic and Egyptian origin. Hermes getting heady, Robert. This is getting pretty heckin. Hermes is the alleged author of the Emerald Tablet, which is like an European alchemical text and definitely like a central Mystic document of the Renaissance era. And both of those books have been written by a guy named Johan Andrea, who was a writer, a mathematician at Theologists. And a kabbalist. So the history of the Rosicrucian order and its founder were like. Books written by this that by by Johann Andre. This like Mystic theologist and kabbalist who like invents this guy Rosen Kroy who isn't real and a mysterious order. It's like it's not it's it's a it's a it's. I don't know if it's a prank because I don't know the degree to which this guy doesn't know. I mean like writes a fake manifesto that he that he he credits to a guy who doesn't exist who's based in part unlike Hellenic and Egyptian mythological figures. It's a little too it's a little bit too calculated to be classified as a prank, like. So basically in 1612, this, like Rosicrucian manifesto gets like posted up in Germany. And again, there's not real Rosicrucians as far as anyone's ever been able to prove. But because this thing it gets goes kind of viral, this like manifesto being published, they become like a conspiracy theory, right? Like people are like, oh, the Rosicrucians are behind this or that. They're the secret order, and they have all this influence here and this influence here, and. It's like a popular belief. Or is it kind of a little more esoteric? The dudes are ******* writing conspiracy theories about the Rosicrucians into the 21st century. It goes very viral, so Helena is hanging out with dudes who are super into the idea of the Rosicrucians in this. With the cultists, and she has another entry point into. Weird occult conspiracy theories from the 17th century anyway, so, so she has another entry point into kind of like a cult conspiracy culture, which are the books of her favorite author, Edward Bulwer Lytton. Now this guy's number one. Her mom had translated a number of the student books into Russia. This is like one of her moms side jobs. Boomer Litton publishes a very famous book in 1871 titled The Coming Race, and now it's about an underground master race. Ring race, yeah, yeah, the coming race, baby. Coming into a euro. I've watched that one. It's like the Great American Bake Off, but less *****. So the coming race is about an underground master race who have a secret energy called vrill that they used to like. It's their kind of a cult. Electricity almost. And yeah, this book it's not, but we're letting obviously this is published in 1871. Not a Nazi. I don't even think he's particularly a white supremacist. But his book is going to become extremely influential to the weirdest kind of Nazis. Nazis love talking about real today. And secret underground Nazi bases in the Arctic. All of that has its origin point and bulletins the coming race so. Bulwer is a Edward Bulwer. Lytton is a very popular author. His books have been translated again, his Helena's mom translate them when she's a little girl, and one of the books that Helena would have grown up loving from this guy is Zanoni, which is about a secret order of Rosa Crucians, who had psychic powers and lived forever. This is probably why Helena later claimed that her great grandfather had been a Rosicrucian, because she loves these books as a kid, and she wants to, like, tie herself and her family to them so that she can claim to have some connection with these, like Rosa Crucians. From her favorite book that become part of her, like, conspiratorial belief system about the world, right. It's like she's making her own occult superhero origin story, right, by tying herself. And like, no, my grandfather was with the Rosicrucians. And like, you know, these, these fiction books by Bulwer Litton aren't fiction. They're him telling the real story, but he has to keep it secret because it's like a conspiracy, you know? God. I mean, this is such fantasy kid behavior. Still, still. I mean, it's like there's variants of this this basic art, like the a lot of secret knowledge conspiracy grifters in the modern era have similar stories. Bill Cooper, who's the father of modern conspiracy theories, the 1st Alex Jones? Yes, his whole back story is that, like he when he was working at the Pentagon, he snuck into his boss's file cabinet and he, like, saw evidence of all the conspiracies he would spend the rest of his life talking about. Keith Ranieri claimed that he had, like, interviewed all of the most successful people in the world and had, like, synthesized. The secret information about how to have success from their backgrounds and stuff, right. This is like well trod, guru, grifter ground. The idea that like at some point as a younger person you came across like the font of all secret knowledge and so you got it directly from the source and you can't show anyone else for like whatever reason, right? You don't have it anymore, but you remember it all and that's why they should listen to you. OK, so that that brings up an interesting point too, which is like it's not, yeah, it's not just like fantasy fan. Behavior because most fantasy fans don't have the access and like wealth to take it as far as what you just described and like what Blavatsky would have had access to. It's like, Oh yeah, you can like try to attempt to make it happen because you have more influence and power and money and all that ****. And this brings us to the last well documented part of her early life, her marriage at age 17, just like her mom to a middle-aged *** man named Nikifor Blavatsky. He was the vice governor of Aravon. In modern day and also within day, Armenia like I think today it's the capital of Armenia. So he's like, he's like the second guy in command of basically that of of Russian art, like Russian controlled Armenia in the period of their marriage, Lachman writes. Quote. One story is that she did so to spite her governess who said that no man would have so unruly, ill tempered and unpredictable a woman for a wife. Not even the old gentleman she had recently taunted and laughed at so much. Faced with such a challenge, the teenaged. Blavatsky cast her spell and her clueless Raven was quickly netted. Another story is that hearing of the plan to run away with Prince Golitsyn, the family felt duty bound to protect her honour and its own, and hastily Shanghai the old by their standards, Nikifor into making an honest woman of her. A third possibility is that she married Nikifor out of anger at her father, who had recently remarried, to a Countess von Lang. Yet Blavatsky herself tells a different story. Point Prince Gallitzin, it seems, wasn't the only one who took her mystical passion seriously in the letter to her friend. Prince Alexander, I'm not gonna try to pronounce that last name mentioned earlier, she wrote. Do you know why I married an old Blavatsky? Because whereas all the young men laughed at my magical superstitions, he believed in them. She explained that her suitor had so often talked to me about the sorcerers of Aravin or the mysterious science of the Kurds and the Persians that I took him in order to use him as a latch key to the ladder. Right so #1 there's a myth that light or some people will argue. She and Prince Golitsyn had like a thing, which by the way would have been him. Molesting her because she would have been like 16, but whatever, as you're saying. Yeah, that her family, very statutory, marries her off to another middle-aged man in order to get her away from this, this, this Prince. She claims that. No, I took advantage of this guy. I married him because I wanted to get over to like these these Armenian and these Kurdish and Persian Mystics. And he was a powerful man in that area. And I knew he would like open the door to me getting into there. I actually think she's probably telling the truth about that. She has this guy kind of wrapped around her finger. For most of the time that he's alive, I don't have trouble believing that she this was a calculated move on her behalf. She's she's good at that. And obviously you're a ******* 17 year old Russian noble girl. In this period of time, you don't want to grow up like your mom did, married to some like miserable *** ******* soldier dude. If you want to take some autonomy in your life, you have to scheme a bit, right? So maybe that's what she does. Now Madame Blavatsky, as she becomes known later, would claim for the rest of her life that quote I never was his wife, by which she means that the marriage was never consummated. They did not ****. This is a topic of heavy debate, which I see no reason to wait. The two biographers that I yeah, I mean, of course the biographers who are followers and fans of hers are going to want to heavily speculate about who when she was ******* exhausting. It is. We will talk about it more because it is relevant, because a big part of the religion. He makes is like aestheticism, and a lot of it involves sex denial. And there's right credible allegations that, like, well, she was ******* the whole time. And obviously that does matter if you're like, right? Because there was the celibacy thing, right? Yes. Anyway, this is a topic of debate. Gary Lachman just takes it as, like, takes her word for it. It's like, no, she was celibate. She might even have been lochman kind of described her as possibly even asexual. Meanwhile, the other biographer I used for this, Mary and Mead, who is more both way more into woo. She describes herself as like a CYA practitioner with Syd Powers, but also a much more critical biographer of Blavatsky. Interesting? Well, we'll note that she has at least two husbands at one point. She has two husbands. At the same time, I should say she has numerous lovers. She may have had some kids. And that basically she thought, she thought she she *****. And one of the fun things is that like later again later in her life when she's a guru, sorry to skip ahead a little bit, but she gets like a doctor's to examine her her bits and the doctor's like, it doesn't look like you've had a kid. And she takes that little bit and she's strong, arms him into writing a note that says, quote, I hereby certify that Madame Blavatsky has never been pregnant for with a child and so consequently can never have had a child. And then she she uses this note to claim that. So she's a virgin, even though that's not really what the doctor says, but she, like, gets a doctor to write something and then, like, uses that as, takes it out of context. She's OK. That is kind of funny. That is kind of funny. I do. I mean, it's like any any, like, information about how doctors treated vaginas at this time is just, like, so hysterically wrong. Like, this was like the same time where you could have that, like, she had that doctor looking at her foot and he was like, this seems like a vagina to me. I'm a man in the 1870s, men in the 1870s. It would be like, OK, like, you can examine me, but the lights have to be off, like, and then you're like, OK, ghosts are coming out of my vagina. And yeah, if you don't believe me, you hate women. It's the best. It's the best time to bring it back. For her part, Blavatsky claimed, quote never. Physically speaking, has there ever existed a girl or woman colder than I? I had a volcano in constant, constant eruption in my brain and a glacier at the foot of the mountain. OK, that's kind of a sexual icon. Helena blavatsky. I've had, I've had ex boyfriends who have said similar things about me. Yeah. So again, the two the two arguments here, either she was basically asexual or she was ******* constantly. I don't know the truth, but there's a lot of fun stories. So she was about to hit the world, like about *** **** bomb, right? She's she's basically an adult. She's she's wants to get out there and travel to all the different mystical centers of the world, but she has to do one thing first, Jamie, and that's get away from her dork *** nerd of a husband, right? Yes. Can't have that dude hanging around. So she claims that like she warned her husband, she he was making a big mistake before the wedding in Barry begged him to talk. She escaped before the wedding briefly and then got caught and after they were married she escaped a couple more times. Indication of things to come when you try to flee the seed of your own way. Your husband into not doing it? Yeah, yeah. Right before their honeymoon, she like bribes some Kurdish warriors to smuggle her out and she gets caught. I think she might have made it to Iran. I hate that she was, like, put in this position, but I love her tactics. To not do is. It's pretty fun. It's pretty fun. She's like, she's like bribing these, like nomadic warriors to like, help her escape and like getting caught. And it's this, it's this. She's dealing. She's like dealing with misogyny with a real dramatic flair. She is confused. It's pretty, pretty wild stuff. So she gets caught again for a while. She's under constant guard in her husband's palace. But Helena keeps her focus, and she eventually, yeah. She escapes to Tiflis in Georgia, where she gets caught again, and her husband sends her back to her family so that they can send her and her servants to Saint Petersburg to try to, like, keep a lock on her while they figure out what to do about her. So, like, she's basically going supposed to be traveling with her servants to Saint Petersburg to be like locked up somewhere until they can break her spirit. But while she's on her way back home, she bribes the captain of an English boat to help her. And with the help of an escaped kayak, she kayaks to safety, evading her servants, and like, gets on this boat and gets taken to Constantinople. Ask yourself. I know. And that dope. That's a pretty cool story. This is cool. This is *** ****. And it's like, I know where this story is going, but I didn't know these details and they're all cool. And that's dope as hell. And that's we're going in for today. Helena Blavatsky has escaped on a kayak to Constantinople, which is pretty cool. I mean, she kayaks to the boat and that takes you to Constantinople, but still pretty cool. Really impressive. Alright, Jamie? Yeah? Have you ever had to kayak away from a bad marriage? No, I've I've kayaked towards a bad relationship. Yeah, baby. It is. Have you have you ever had to paddle away? I have had. I've had I've had some adventures while kayaking that involved a sunken kayak, and I've definitely had some some strenuous arguments while kayaking with the part. No, I don't like kayaking. I'm gonna be honest with you, not a big fan. So sorry I got so upset about your kayaking anecdote that I left. Yeah, you have, you have a tattoo of a kayak on your bicep that says. Yeah, it says do not tread on me. Right before you came in this morning, you were drilling holes and canoes. Kayakers hate canoeists. Yeah, I mean, you don't feel like you're in a safe womb like space in a canoe. I like to feel like I'm being boring when I get out of the little boat. OK, that's that's right. That's right. Like, like Jim Carrey and the 2nd Aspect sharing movie. It's like, where is this going? Yes, exactly. You want to plug your ****? Yeah, I guess that the best plug for this is is listen to ghost Church. It's the limited series I just finished that is. Savatgy adjacent, which I think will become clearer in the next episode, but it's about American spiritualism and a bunch of time I spent with some psychics and mediums in Central Florida. Roberts in it. Paul left, Tompkins is in it, Sophie produced it, Ian edited it. It's just it's just a a cool zone Jamboree and it's all, every episode is out now, so you can listen to all of it and then follow me on Twitter and Instagram. If you want to follow James and the Ghost church, it personally hurts my feelings. Yeah, if you don't listen to ghost Church, I will find you and I will put your children on the blue Apron, Iron Island, where they'll be haunted by Elon Musk for food. Yeah, it's Elon Musk and all of his his kids go, somebody's listening with his kid, their kids right now. And I want you to know children. That was a threat. They're your parents. Better listen to Ghost Church, I feel. Look, it's it's a high it's high octane ****. I just got I do what I I would just, I I still cut and check Apple Podcast reviews sometimes. And I checked. I checked them and I I had one that said I liked the whole show but I'm going to stop listening now because Jamie wants the Supreme Court to be abolished. But they still gave me 4 stars. I just lost one star. Credibly based, I think. Look, yeah, I was like, you know, that's pretty fair and balanced. Yeah, I have to give credit where it's due. You look they, they understand that this isn't the content for them, but they're not going to punish your show for it. They're like, look, I enjoyed the whole show, but we have, we have a personal disagreement and I have to dock you a star. I'm like, alright, you know what? Yeah, thanks. Fair look. You know what? Good for you. Good for them, good for them. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts.