Latest / Stuff You Should Know / Selects: Nostradamus: Predictor of the future? Not so much.
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Hey everyone, it's Josh and for this week's select I've
- 0:03Speaker 1: chosen our twenty fifteen episode, Nostrodamus, Predictor of the Future.
- 0:07Speaker 1: Not so much Nostrodamus if that even is his real name,
- 0:11Speaker 1: which it isn't, must have rued the day he was born.
- 0:14Speaker 1: After you heard this episode, we disassemble his so called
- 0:17Speaker 1: prophetic abilities so hard. Plus, this has one more Adam
- 0:22Speaker 1: Sandler than you'd probably expected. So sit back, light a candle,
- 0:26Speaker 1: let your eyes roll back in your head, and enjoy
- 0:28Speaker 1: this skeptical episode a skep epp. Welcome to Stuff you
- 0:36Speaker 1: Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
- 0:45Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant,
- 0:49Speaker 1: there's Jerry. I predict this will be the best podcast
- 0:54Speaker 1: of the new year. Man, I don't know about that one.
- 0:59Speaker 1: And I think that predict is coming true. And the
- 1:01Speaker 1: first month when Gray filled the Sky, the recorders of
- 1:06Speaker 1: Gobbledegook hit a high water mark. It's a little on
- 1:12Speaker 1: the nose from Nostre Damas. Actually it's I should have
- 1:14Speaker 1: been even more vague, like way vaguer. Yeah that was
- 1:18Speaker 1: like explicit for him. Yeah, yeah, because no, Stredamus used
- 1:23Speaker 1: to like to just basically take concepts and words and
- 1:27Speaker 1: put them together and pretend like they were going to happen. Yeah, no,
- 1:32Speaker 1: stre Damas snort a little nutmeg. I Um. When I
- 1:36Speaker 1: was a younger person, I realized, like from this and
- 1:40Speaker 1: ESP that I was into some pretty cool occult stuff. Yeah,
- 1:45Speaker 1: read lots of books about ghosts and things like that. Sure,
- 1:48Speaker 1: meet to you a little bit. And then now I
- 1:49Speaker 1: was like an older person, like I wanted to go
- 1:51Speaker 1: to Duke University to study parapsychology. Oh really, I was
- 1:54Speaker 1: into like that kind of thing. And then now as
- 1:57Speaker 1: an older person, I'm like, man of the things I
- 2:00Speaker 1: used to believe, just do a face palm here there, Like,
- 2:05Speaker 1: for example, we got into real science and that's usually
- 2:07Speaker 1: what happens. Yes, so the pseudoscience has kind of fade
- 2:11Speaker 1: away once you start educating yourself. Well, we shouldn't say
- 2:14Speaker 1: parapsychology is necessarily a pseudoscience. That's not We're here to
- 2:19Speaker 1: poo pooh Nostradamus, not esp parasychology in general, but for instance,
- 2:24Speaker 1: you were I remember not only believing, but frequently saying, dude, Nostradamus,
- 2:32Speaker 1: he had to be exhumed once, like at the church
- 2:36Speaker 1: he was buried at. They were like expanding and they
- 2:38Speaker 1: had to exoome his grave and they opened his casket
- 2:41Speaker 1: and he was holding a tablet that had the day
- 2:45Speaker 1: they exhumed him. I thought that was real. I thought
- 2:49Speaker 1: that really happened when I was a slightly younger man.
- 2:51Speaker 1: That's awesome. Yeah, when you were in your late twenties, right, Yeah,
- 2:56Speaker 1: I remember. I didn't read up on stuff like this,
- 2:59Speaker 1: but I was a big fan of like Lennar Nimoys
- 3:02Speaker 1: in Search of and yeah, TV shows that kind of
- 3:06Speaker 1: dabbled in the fringe, And what's wrong with that. Nothing,
- 3:09Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong with enjoying that kind of thing, liking it.
- 3:12Speaker 1: Ve been wondering if possibly some of it could be real.
- 3:16Speaker 1: Nothing wrong with exploration, right, But the key to keeping
- 3:20Speaker 1: egg off your face as much as possible is to
- 3:23Speaker 1: doing research, especially when a claim is very extraordinary. Yeah,
- 3:29Speaker 1: really look into it. Yeah, Like had I had I
- 3:31Speaker 1: looked around, had the Internet been invented yet? And I
- 3:35Speaker 1: looked around, and I probably would have found somewhere some
- 3:38Speaker 1: entry saying like that is absolutely not true. Well, that's
- 3:41Speaker 1: one of the Internet is one of the big reasons,
- 3:43Speaker 1: I think because before that was around, you know, it's
- 3:47Speaker 1: you'd have to go search out a book that was
- 3:49Speaker 1: written profuing Ostradamis, Yeah, in the card catalog, and it
- 3:54Speaker 1: was just a lot harder back then, you know. Yeah,
- 3:56Speaker 1: But the Internet is a double edged fiber optic line.
- 3:59Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot out of sites out there
- 4:01Speaker 1: that I mean, No Stradamas has gotten probably even more
- 4:05Speaker 1: popular and even more play since the Internet was invented.
- 4:08Speaker 1: Oh sure, you know. Yeah, So let's talk about this guy.
- 4:10Speaker 1: Let's try to separate the man from the myth and
- 4:14Speaker 1: really get into who no Stredamis was. Because he was
- 4:17Speaker 1: a lot more than a crackpot writer of vague predictions.
- 4:22Speaker 1: That's true, he was. One of the tough parts is, though,
- 4:26Speaker 1: is that there are so many disagreements about his biography.
- 4:30Speaker 1: Even yeah, I didn't find that necessarily. Yeah, I saw
- 4:34Speaker 1: one guy wrote a book at him that said he
- 4:35Speaker 1: wasn't even a doctor. Woh, okay, that is a disagreement. Yeah,
- 4:40Speaker 1: well let's go ahead and go there then. Okay, So
- 4:42Speaker 1: he was supposedly born in fifteen oh three, No, not true.
- 4:46Speaker 1: In France, he was born Michel de Nostre, Dame he
- 4:51Speaker 1: became no Stredamis because he latinized his name after he
- 4:54Speaker 1: graduated from medical school, which apparently was custom at the time.
- 4:57Speaker 1: That's right. But when he was born he was Michelle
- 4:59Speaker 1: de Nostre Dame. Yeah. And his family was educated and
- 5:02Speaker 1: they believed in education. So he was from an early
- 5:05Speaker 1: age an academic in a traditional sense, right, nothing wacky
- 5:10Speaker 1: right out of the gate. Well, his grandfather instructed him
- 5:14Speaker 1: as when he was a younger man, taught him languages
- 5:17Speaker 1: and kind of sparked his interest in all sorts of
- 5:20Speaker 1: different topics and all things learning. Yeah. And do you
- 5:23Speaker 1: remember when we did the Inquisition episode, yeah, where there
- 5:27Speaker 1: are a lot of Jewish people who converted but just
- 5:29Speaker 1: converted in name only. Yeah. Yeah, apparently Nostradamis's family was
- 5:33Speaker 1: one of those. Oh so that wasn't a genuine conversion
- 5:36Speaker 1: supposedly not gotcha again, it could be myth, it could
- 5:40Speaker 1: be whatever. Because he was on good terms with the
- 5:44Speaker 1: local Inquisition and the local church officials for most of
- 5:48Speaker 1: his life. So I guess either they didn't suspect him,
- 5:51Speaker 1: or they he had a pass. I don't know. Oh,
- 5:54Speaker 1: it's interesting, that makes sense. He studied a straw no,
- 5:58Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Astrology, which was at the time respected well
- 6:03Speaker 1: respected as a science. Yeah, and supposedly his fellow astrologers
- 6:08Speaker 1: thought he was full of it. Oh really, his contemporary
- 6:11Speaker 1: astrologer pals Well, one of the things that he did
- 6:14Speaker 1: was he studied and this would play out throughout his well,
- 6:19Speaker 1: I would say his career as a predictor, but he
- 6:22Speaker 1: really just wrote the book, the Centuries book, which we'll
- 6:25Speaker 1: get to. But he studied astronomical patterns that coincided with
- 6:31Speaker 1: historical events. That's astrology. Well yeah, but he would basically
- 6:38Speaker 1: use those to predict the future events. Like by some accounts,
- 6:42Speaker 1: he didn't even say that he was a prophet. He said,
- 6:46Speaker 1: I study history and basically history repeats itself, and so
- 6:51Speaker 1: I'm going to use the stars and when these things
- 6:54Speaker 1: line up pattern wise in the certain year in the future,
- 6:57Speaker 1: this may happen again. Yeah, so that's like real astrology. Yeah,
- 7:02Speaker 1: we should do an episode on that. Yeah, I've been
- 7:05Speaker 1: thinking about that one for a while. This one, well,
- 7:07Speaker 1: the the article we have like almost like spits in
- 7:12Speaker 1: the middle. Yeah, it's so one sided in skeptical it's
- 7:16Speaker 1: just a picture of a big lugue, right, But I
- 7:19Speaker 1: looked into Um I looked into it and like, there's
- 7:22Speaker 1: the it's fascinating what they used to believe in all
- 7:25Speaker 1: of the holes you can punch in it, you know,
- 7:28Speaker 1: but um, it's a pretty we should do that for
- 7:30Speaker 1: some time. Yeah. I had my chart done one time,
- 7:32Speaker 1: like for real by my friend's mom, and I remember
- 7:37Speaker 1: looking at it and thinking like, wow, that's a lot
- 7:39Speaker 1: like me. Yeah, it's pretty accurate. But and even even
- 7:43Speaker 1: remove that last part, Yeah, the amount of thought and
- 7:46Speaker 1: effort in what it's based on, in the ancient tradition
- 7:49Speaker 1: of it and everything that in and of itself is fascinating. Yeah,
- 7:52Speaker 1: totally agree, you know, And then you can get in there.
- 7:54Speaker 1: We're totally doing astrology at some point, all right, But
- 7:57Speaker 1: um so what he was doing was astrology. Apparently where
- 8:01Speaker 1: he ran a foul of his fellow astrologers was to
- 8:04Speaker 1: make predictions of how something would come about. Rather than
- 8:08Speaker 1: the next time Venus is in the seventh House of
- 8:12Speaker 1: Mars and a cat catches fire, there's going to be
- 8:17Speaker 1: an earthquake, sure, something like that, he went further and
- 8:20Speaker 1: like made predictions about you know, what was going to
- 8:23Speaker 1: set this off, and like where the people involved were
- 8:26Speaker 1: going to come from and like, and then he was
- 8:30Speaker 1: very very vague, right, So all of that added to
- 8:34Speaker 1: the astrologers disdained for him because he gave him a
- 8:38Speaker 1: bad name pretty much because they were all right exactly.
- 8:42Speaker 1: So he left home supposedly in fifteen twenty two to
- 8:47Speaker 1: study medicine legit medicine and became a physician. Most people
- 8:52Speaker 1: agree that he became a professor in a physician in
- 8:56Speaker 1: southern France. And apparently it was pretty good to doctor
- 9:00Speaker 1: or at treating plague victims. Yeah, he's very ahead of
- 9:03Speaker 1: his time. Yeah, even though he lost his wife and son,
- 9:08Speaker 1: I'm sorry his children to the plague and yeah, and
- 9:12Speaker 1: that had a big effect on his life. Obviously, he
- 9:15Speaker 1: basically sent him on the road for a decade, which
- 9:18Speaker 1: is where he kind of came up with this plan
- 9:21Speaker 1: to write this book. So he was he was a
- 9:25Speaker 1: progressive doctor in that like he prescribed sanitation practices yea,
- 9:32Speaker 1: he prescribed fresh air. He also apparently came up with
- 9:36Speaker 1: a rose hip loznge to help cure plague mild cases
- 9:40Speaker 1: of plague, and that actually makes sense because rose hips
- 9:43Speaker 1: are packed with vitamin C. Yeah, so he was a
- 9:46Speaker 1: pretty good doctor and he had a good record, and
- 9:48Speaker 1: from that he lived in this village with his wife
- 9:51Speaker 1: and children and had a patron who basically supported the family.
- 9:55Speaker 1: And then once his wife and children died, he couldn't
- 9:58Speaker 1: cure them. His star really he fell in this village.
- 10:01Speaker 1: And about the same time, he also had a pretty
- 10:03Speaker 1: good sense of humor. About the same time, they were
- 10:06Speaker 1: raising a statue of the Virgin Mary in the local church,
- 10:10Speaker 1: and he thought it was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen,
- 10:13Speaker 1: and he was making a comment on the artist's abilities. Yeah,
- 10:17Speaker 1: not the Virgin Mary, but he said, these guys are
- 10:20Speaker 1: casting demons, like basically saying, that's a really ugly Virgin Mary. Right. Well,
- 10:25Speaker 1: the artist didn't like this and turn him into the inquisition.
- 10:27Speaker 1: And that's about the time when he ended up on
- 10:30Speaker 1: the road. Yeah, and he went all over Europe just
- 10:34Speaker 1: basically he was described as sort of wandering. But he
- 10:38Speaker 1: did meet another woman and get remarried on his wanderings,
- 10:43Speaker 1: I think toward the tail end of his wanderings about
- 10:45Speaker 1: eight years later, and moved to Salon in France, and
- 10:50Speaker 1: then he started kind of getting his getting his act
- 10:55Speaker 1: together in a in a real way to publish, like
- 11:00Speaker 1: he he said, you know what, I'm gonna put together
- 11:02Speaker 1: this book of prophecies. I've been messing around, I've been
- 11:05Speaker 1: kicking the idea around. I'm just gonna do it. So
- 11:07Speaker 1: we'll talk about what came out of that. Right after
- 11:10Speaker 1: this story, So Chuck, Nostre Damas is settling down in
- 11:34Speaker 1: Solon Solon, Yeah, selectives, and he is deciding to put
- 11:42Speaker 1: his awesome thoughts down into quatrains, that's right, into a
- 11:48Speaker 1: book called The Centuries. But at the time he just
- 11:51Speaker 1: called it the Prophecies. Yeah, the Prophecies of Michel Nostre Damas.
- 11:56Speaker 1: I think when did they rename it um? I think
- 11:58Speaker 1: after his death. Yeah, apparently the centuries had nothing to
- 12:01Speaker 1: do with time. But it was in the structure, the
- 12:03Speaker 1: organized structure of the book itself, because there are a
- 12:06Speaker 1: thousand quatrains or four line verses in hundreds. Yeah, for
- 12:11Speaker 1: some reason. So that's the Centuries. And it wasn't it
- 12:14Speaker 1: wasn't chronological or anything like that. No, and it was
- 12:18Speaker 1: it was a It became a huge sensation due to
- 12:21Speaker 1: a few things. One, simply enough, was that the printing
- 12:26Speaker 1: press was a recent invention and books were a big deal.
- 12:32Speaker 1: Now you know, like widespread books like there was now
- 12:35Speaker 1: something could literally be a best seller for the first time.
- 12:39Speaker 1: So it aligned in that way. And another is that
- 12:43Speaker 1: he just sort of fit the dark times. It was
- 12:47Speaker 1: a book and of its time with all his dire predictions.
- 12:51Speaker 1: It was, you know, when the Catholics and Protestants were
- 12:54Speaker 1: warring and there were all kinds of people saying the
- 12:57Speaker 1: end of the world was coming, and it was just
- 13:00Speaker 1: it was basically put out right at the right time
- 13:03Speaker 1: and widespread because of the printing press. And then Queen
- 13:07Speaker 1: Catherine de Medici of France was a really superstitious queen
- 13:13Speaker 1: and he predicted her husband Henry the second's death, yeah,
- 13:17Speaker 1: pretty specifically for once. Yeah, but we'll poke holes on
- 13:20Speaker 1: that too, and it happened a few years later, and
- 13:24Speaker 1: so she invited him to the court, which was like
- 13:27Speaker 1: the most popular court in Europe at the time, and
- 13:29Speaker 1: so he got a lot of attention there. So he
- 13:31Speaker 1: was sort of like a big writing superstar of his
- 13:35Speaker 1: day because of all these things aligning. Yeah, I mean,
- 13:37Speaker 1: like he wasn't one of those posthumously honored authors like
- 13:41Speaker 1: he was celebrated during his time. Supposedly he met some
- 13:44Speaker 1: monks on the road once and correctly said that one
- 13:49Speaker 1: of them was going to be the next pope. Bam,
- 13:52Speaker 1: no way case solved. Nostronomous is the real deal, because
- 13:56Speaker 1: that supposedly happened. So he had like a whole whole
- 14:01Speaker 1: jam going where he would retire in the evenings. Yeah,
- 14:06Speaker 1: and he would concentrate on maybe a fire, the flames
- 14:10Speaker 1: of a fire, meditate on it, yeah, Or he would
- 14:13Speaker 1: take a bowl with some herbs or something in it
- 14:16Speaker 1: and just zone out on those, try to read the herbs.
- 14:19Speaker 1: Like you said, I don't know if he was doing
- 14:21Speaker 1: lines of nutmeg, but he was ingesting nutmeg most likely, yeah,
- 14:24Speaker 1: which could be hallucinogenic. Right, And he had to have
- 14:27Speaker 1: been rich to just be doing nutmeg, you know, Yeah,
- 14:31Speaker 1: because they had just discovered that. Yeah, And he would
- 14:35Speaker 1: just kind of zone out. He would apparently he got
- 14:39Speaker 1: help from an angelic figure, that's what he says said,
- 14:43Speaker 1: and then he would just see the future. It would
- 14:45Speaker 1: come to him. The thing is is no stredamis these
- 14:51Speaker 1: prophecies didn't come to him, all convoluted and kukie and
- 14:56Speaker 1: however he put them, he understood exactly what was going
- 14:59Speaker 1: to happen. Well, yeah, he supposedly convoluted them on purpose
- 15:03Speaker 1: to avoid persecution during his lifetime. Yeah, that is supposedly
- 15:06Speaker 1: what he told his son from a second marriage, is that, Caesar, Yeah,
- 15:12Speaker 1: I'm doing all this on purpose, and because they will,
- 15:16Speaker 1: you know, string me up as a heretic, because I'm
- 15:20Speaker 1: so eerily accurate. Yeah, they will find out, which I
- 15:24Speaker 1: mean at the time, it was a genuine concern. So
- 15:28Speaker 1: it's it's not like this is just a preposterous claim
- 15:31Speaker 1: on Nostre Damas's part. It's just that for skeptics of Nostradamas,
- 15:35Speaker 1: it's just one more convenient little thing because if you
- 15:39Speaker 1: read the quatrains, they make almost no sense in all
- 15:43Speaker 1: sense simultaneously. Yeah, depending on whether you're reading them on
- 15:48Speaker 1: their own or whether you're trying to look at them
- 15:50Speaker 1: in context. Well yeah, well we might as well go
- 15:53Speaker 1: and talk about that. That's one of the big reasons
- 15:57Speaker 1: you can poke holes in it is because there were
- 16:01Speaker 1: even experts say, it's hard to find two copies of
- 16:04Speaker 1: this book that are the same. Oh yeah, yeah, because
- 16:07Speaker 1: it was translated, you know, hundreds of times. It was
- 16:10Speaker 1: the early printing presses were you know, they weren't super
- 16:14Speaker 1: accurate and they would if the printer maybe didn't know
- 16:17Speaker 1: exactly what he meant, they would say, well, I think
- 16:19Speaker 1: he meant to actually have an apostrophe here, and in
- 16:22Speaker 1: Middle French, that apostrophe could completely change the meaning of
- 16:26Speaker 1: the word. So beyond that confusion and the translation confusions,
- 16:32Speaker 1: there are, like you said, there are many different ways
- 16:36Speaker 1: to interpret something, and if something didn't come true, you
- 16:39Speaker 1: could probably find a version out there of it that
- 16:41Speaker 1: supports whatever you think he predicted, right, you know, Yeah,
- 16:45Speaker 1: there's a pretty good example that people give of a
- 16:49Speaker 1: translation problem after nine to eleven, which we'll talk more
- 16:53Speaker 1: about in a second. Yeah, they some quatrain of or
- 16:59Speaker 1: I guess in a semige of nostredamis. Quatrains were kind
- 17:03Speaker 1: of bandied about as proof that he predicted it right.
- 17:06Speaker 1: One of them was there would be smoke in the
- 17:09Speaker 1: new city. Well, in his actual text in the centuries
- 17:14Speaker 1: he wrote a villa noeuve Vienneuve, which means in French
- 17:20Speaker 1: the new city. Yeah, but it was also a city
- 17:23Speaker 1: in France at the time he was probably talking about. Yeah,
- 17:28Speaker 1: So there's a lot of translation and interpretation that can
- 17:33Speaker 1: come together and really lead to a misunderstanding. If there
- 17:37Speaker 1: is even such a thing at all with nostre damas.
- 17:40Speaker 1: Can you misunderstand him? I don't think it's possible. Can
- 17:43Speaker 1: you misunderstand what's not understandable words? Yeah, Well, since we're
- 17:47Speaker 1: talking about interpreting, we might as well go onto the
- 17:50Speaker 1: famous Hitler prediction. Beasts ferocious with hunger will across the
- 17:56Speaker 1: rivers a greater part of the battlefield. Wainst into a
- 18:01Speaker 1: cage of iron iron with the child of Germany, he observes,
- 18:05Speaker 1: or thing, man, I wouldn't I hope we added some
- 18:10Speaker 1: effect to that, Jerry, Yes, vocal effects, Yeah, something menacing maybe,
- 18:17Speaker 1: or maybe we should do like clown music. Um So,
- 18:22Speaker 1: histor this was has long been looked at as the
- 18:25Speaker 1: prediction of the rise of Hitler. Yeah, he says Germany
- 18:28Speaker 1: in there. Yeah, it's Germany and hisstor Yeah. Um, but
- 18:33Speaker 1: hisstor was actually the lower Danube River, and so most people,
- 18:38Speaker 1: um or skeptics would say, well, he didn't say Hitler,
- 18:41Speaker 1: he said Hister since that was a place. Um, that's
- 18:45Speaker 1: probably what he meant. Yeah, or he would have said Hitler. Yeah,
- 18:49Speaker 1: it kind of a miss right there. Um. Some people say, well,
- 18:54Speaker 1: Hitler was born around the Danube, so he still met Hitler.
- 19:00Speaker 1: That's exactly the point is that people will find a
- 19:04Speaker 1: way to interpret it if they choose to. But the
- 19:07Speaker 1: Nazis still use this to their advantage. They actually dropped
- 19:12Speaker 1: pamphlets containing this prediction onto France from planes because they
- 19:17Speaker 1: wanted to scare them, like, hey, even Nostradamas said we're coming, yeah,
- 19:21Speaker 1: and we're coming, and it worked. I guess it did
- 19:24Speaker 1: for a while. So there's basically that if you're a
- 19:28Speaker 1: skeptic of Nostradamus, you say, okay, first of all, he's
- 19:33Speaker 1: not really saying anything right or anything concrete right, And
- 19:37Speaker 1: a believer of Nostredamas would say, well, he even said that,
- 19:41Speaker 1: you're not supposed to get it unless you're one of
- 19:42Speaker 1: the enlightened few who happen to be one of that.
- 19:46Speaker 1: It's not for this time. It's for people far from
- 19:50Speaker 1: now to understand, right, And so the skeptic that's arguing
- 19:53Speaker 1: will sigh and then say, okay, Um, here's the thing though,
- 19:57Speaker 1: even if even if he is saying something like even
- 20:00Speaker 1: if there's something clear, he's making a prediction and it
- 20:03Speaker 1: does seem to come true if you look at events
- 20:08Speaker 1: in human history as numbers on a graph. Yeah, eventually.
- 20:14Speaker 1: Statistically speaking, one of Nostredams's very vague predictions about the
- 20:18Speaker 1: rise of a power, a war, Sure, an earthquake, something
- 20:23Speaker 1: like that is going to happen, and maybe something will
- 20:28Speaker 1: have even a couple of predictions that will fit one
- 20:32Speaker 1: event yeah, like the date might align somehow or something. Yeah,
- 20:36Speaker 1: because every once a while he used dates, but for
- 20:38Speaker 1: the most part he didn't. But if you look at
- 20:41Speaker 1: it statistically, yes, even Nostre Damas' predictions are going to
- 20:46Speaker 1: come true over a long enough period of time. Right Again,
- 20:51Speaker 1: if you read the predictions, it's hard to say his
- 20:53Speaker 1: predictions come true because he's not really predicting anything. It's
- 20:56Speaker 1: not like he sat back and said, sometime in the
- 20:59Speaker 1: twenty century, a guy with a terrible mustache is going
- 21:03Speaker 1: to come to power and there's going to be a
- 21:06Speaker 1: horrific war as a result. Nothing even approaching that. Yeah,
- 21:11Speaker 1: I mean you read what the Hitler prediction was, like,
- 21:14Speaker 1: it could be anything. Yeah, But even if you had
- 21:17Speaker 1: predicted something, if you take his predictions as predictions, if
- 21:20Speaker 1: you put them over the arc of time, sure eventually
- 21:23Speaker 1: you're going to get hit. So that's one argument A
- 21:25Speaker 1: skeptical argument against Nostredamas. Yeah, especially if you believe, like
- 21:30Speaker 1: most people do, that history repeats itself in some fashion
- 21:33Speaker 1: over a long enough timeline. When he himself said that
- 21:37Speaker 1: that's the model he used, was using the stars to
- 21:40Speaker 1: look at past historical events to predict future events, right,
- 21:43Speaker 1: so it kind of makes sense. And also some people
- 21:47Speaker 1: say these aren't even predictions because a prediction is something
- 21:50Speaker 1: that you realize before the fact. And despite the fact
- 21:55Speaker 1: that thousands of scholars have studied Nostradamus and millions of
- 21:59Speaker 1: people have read him, no one has ever pointed out
- 22:02Speaker 1: something before it happened. It's always afterward that they go
- 22:05Speaker 1: back and see, look, see here, he said this was
- 22:08Speaker 1: going to happen, and it happened because we interpreted that way.
- 22:11Speaker 1: But no one's ever said stopped anything in its tracks
- 22:15Speaker 1: because nostredamis predicted it As an excellent point, you know,
- 22:18Speaker 1: it also raises another argument against no strudomas, and that
- 22:22Speaker 1: the people who follow no stream, like you said, it's
- 22:26Speaker 1: always the interpretation is always after the fact. And allegations
- 22:30Speaker 1: of shoehorning occur where basically you make something fit, you
- 22:35Speaker 1: shoehorned into the context and in doing so, you cherry
- 22:39Speaker 1: pick stuff that makes sense and you ignore stuff that
- 22:42Speaker 1: doesn't make sense. Yeah. In fact, I think this article,
- 22:45Speaker 1: this one line says it best imprecise language lends itself
- 22:48Speaker 1: well to subjective interpretation. Yeah. I mean, if you throw
- 22:51Speaker 1: something super vague out there, you could come up with
- 22:54Speaker 1: a hundred different interpretations of it. Yep. You know that's
- 22:58Speaker 1: what poetry is exactly. And you know, despite all of
- 23:02Speaker 1: these very great arguments, there's still plenty of people out
- 23:06Speaker 1: there who believe in Nostre Damas. It almost seems like
- 23:09Speaker 1: there should be a phase in life where you do
- 23:11Speaker 1: go through believing that Nostre Damas is real, because it
- 23:14Speaker 1: does kind of lend some sort of something to life.
- 23:18Speaker 1: It also coincides with being really into Pink Floyd exam
- 23:21Speaker 1: it's true. So we'll talk a little more about some
- 23:25Speaker 1: of the people who argue for and against Nostre Damas,
- 23:28Speaker 1: specifically centered around nine to eleven. Right after this, okay, Chuck,
- 23:48Speaker 1: nine to eleven happened, and almost immediately people said Nostre
- 23:52Speaker 1: Damas predicted this. Yeah, his sales went through the roof, apparently,
- 23:57Speaker 1: and supposedly his name was googled more than Usama bin
- 24:02Speaker 1: Laden or George Bush after nine eleven. Really, that's what
- 24:05Speaker 1: they say. That sounds like something someone just writes on
- 24:09Speaker 1: the internet exactly, but I believe it. Well, here's why
- 24:13Speaker 1: his star rose again was because this quatrain emerged where
- 24:16Speaker 1: it was like, yeah, that's pretty close to what happened. Yeah.
- 24:20Speaker 1: I remember hearing it and thinking, oh my gosh, so
- 24:23Speaker 1: you want to read this one. You're pretty good at reading. Here.
- 24:25Speaker 1: Can we get the sound effect again? Please cue the
- 24:28Speaker 1: clown music. In the City of God, there will be
- 24:31Speaker 1: a great thunder or two brothers torn apart by chaos,
- 24:35Speaker 1: while the fortress endures, the Great Leader will succome The
- 24:39Speaker 1: third big war will begin when the big city is burning.
- 24:43Speaker 1: That's super specific. Yeah. The only thing I don't know
- 24:46Speaker 1: if most people would agree on is calling New York
- 24:49Speaker 1: the City of God or George Bush the Great Leader. Yeah,
- 24:54Speaker 1: but the two brothers clearly those are the two towers. Yeah,
- 24:57Speaker 1: the fortress endures, the Pentagon the Great Leader Bush. Yeah,
- 25:02Speaker 1: some people said, and then the third war will begin
- 25:05Speaker 1: when the big city was burning. Well, at least one
- 25:09Speaker 1: more war. I don't know if it was World War three,
- 25:11Speaker 1: but a pretty huge couple of Wars started up as
- 25:14Speaker 1: a result. So people are saying, here it is finally
- 25:18Speaker 1: evidence that shows almost incontrovertibly that Nostre Damas was the
- 25:23Speaker 1: real deal. What's the argument against it, Chuck, Well, it
- 25:27Speaker 1: was made up. Yeah, Nostre Damas didn't write that. No,
- 25:30Speaker 1: it was apparently written by several years ago by a
- 25:34Speaker 1: guy named Neil Marshall, was a student in Canada and
- 25:37Speaker 1: said he was actually using that as a demonstration of
- 25:41Speaker 1: what bunk Nostre Damas was like. I could write something
- 25:45Speaker 1: like this and people would think he predicted nine to eleven,
- 25:48Speaker 1: and somehow it became something that Nostre Damas wrote. He
- 25:51Speaker 1: actually proved it by writing that in nineteen ninety seven
- 25:56Speaker 1: and then it getting picked up in two thousand and one. Yeah,
- 25:58Speaker 1: so what he set out to do worked worked perfectly.
- 26:01Speaker 1: He didn't even have to wait more than four years.
- 26:04Speaker 1: So he basically showed just how um man. I hate
- 26:09Speaker 1: to use this word, but global people can be when
- 26:11Speaker 1: they're reading no Stredamus's work, because no one checks anything. Dude.
- 26:15Speaker 1: They see it and they click on it and they
- 26:18Speaker 1: post it to social media and then it's done. And
- 26:21Speaker 1: here's here's another really good example of that a little
- 26:24Speaker 1: while ago. This still cracks me up. ClickHole you know
- 26:28Speaker 1: the onions like, uh, BuzzFeed like site. Oh is that onion? Yeah?
- 26:33Speaker 1: I didn't know that, I believe so yeah, I'm almost
- 26:35Speaker 1: positive I know ClickHole Yeah, okay, so ClickHole satirical site
- 26:40Speaker 1: of like buzzfeedy sits um. They released something called five
- 26:45Speaker 1: Tragedies Weirdly predicted by Adam Sandler and dude they are
- 26:51Speaker 1: so can I read a couple? Yeah? So, in the
- 26:54Speaker 1: wake of the nineteen ninety three tragedy um, apparently people
- 26:59Speaker 1: went back and saw that Adam Sandler, during his early
- 27:02Speaker 1: stand up career, would mutter something's coming to Waco, something
- 27:07Speaker 1: dark like during his stand up show. Is that true?
- 27:11Speaker 1: None of this is true? Okay? I thought they just
- 27:13Speaker 1: picked apart real things and no. Okay. So the nineteen
- 27:17Speaker 1: ninety seven car crash that killed Princess Diana, apparently if
- 27:21Speaker 1: you go back and watch Happy Gilmore, which was made
- 27:24Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six, Sandler looks directly in the camera
- 27:27Speaker 1: and says, Our Queen's eldest, the beautiful flower will will
- 27:31Speaker 1: under a Parisian bridge. Can I keep going? So? The
- 27:35Speaker 1: BP oil spill that happened in twenty ten in the Gulf. Yeah.
- 27:38Speaker 1: Apparently Adam Sandler was on Conan O'Brien in two thousand
- 27:41Speaker 1: and five and he was just wearing a t shirt
- 27:44Speaker 1: that said BP oil spill in five years the twenty
- 27:52Speaker 1: ten Haitian earthquake. Yeah, the UN estimates that two hundred
- 27:55Speaker 1: and twenty two thousand, five hundred and seventy people were killed.
- 28:00Speaker 1: Apparently in Adam Sandler's funny People, he estimated two hundred
- 28:03Speaker 1: and twenty thousand on the notes. And then lastly, the
- 28:07Speaker 1: Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy Adam Sandler when he was operaman. Yeah,
- 28:13Speaker 1: there was a nineteen ninety three operaman sketch where he says,
- 28:16Speaker 1: I'm missing plane. It's from Malaysia. Makes me insane. This
- 28:22Speaker 1: will all make sense in due time. That's good man.
- 28:26Speaker 1: Here's the thing, man, people believe that viral, I'm not
- 28:32Speaker 1: kidding you. It went viral that like somehow Adam Sandler
- 28:35Speaker 1: had made all these crazy predictions. And this is a
- 28:38Speaker 1: real thing because apparently they didn't announce that when clickbait
- 28:43Speaker 1: came out that it was a satirical site that BP
- 28:45Speaker 1: oil spill and the teacher it's pretty good. Yeah, well,
- 28:50Speaker 1: let's get into some of these then. First of all,
- 28:55Speaker 1: to further than nine to eleven thing, there were a
- 28:57Speaker 1: couple of other quatrains which have been cobbled together to
- 29:03Speaker 1: try and support the nine to eleven thing. But like
- 29:07Speaker 1: I said, they weren't as he wrote them. They like
- 29:09Speaker 1: would combine things, which is just silly because that goes
- 29:12Speaker 1: against everything that he was saying was each quatrain is
- 29:16Speaker 1: its own thing. One of them Century ten Quatrain seventy two,
- 29:21Speaker 1: the year nineteen ninety nine. Seven months from the sky
- 29:23Speaker 1: will come the great King of Terror to resuscitate the
- 29:27Speaker 1: Great King of the Mongols before and after Mars reigns.
- 29:30Speaker 1: By good luck. That last part sounds like it's from
- 29:33Speaker 1: a fortune cookie. That before nine to eleven back in
- 29:38Speaker 1: ninety nine, some people thought he was foretelling the end
- 29:41Speaker 1: of the world would be on July twenty fourth, nineteen
- 29:43Speaker 1: ninety nine. And I remember this happening, and I remember
- 29:47Speaker 1: it being a big deal. There was like genuine concern
- 29:50Speaker 1: from some people, like some stores and France had like
- 29:54Speaker 1: closeout sales. There was this one French designer who like
- 29:58Speaker 1: canceled his big He was a big believer, and he
- 30:01Speaker 1: canceled this big show, and of course it didn't happen,
- 30:04Speaker 1: And then it was recalculated and everyone said, no, no, no,
- 30:07Speaker 1: it wasn't supposed to be July twenty fourth. If you
- 30:09Speaker 1: read it this way, it means August eleventh, and of
- 30:12Speaker 1: course the world didn't and then either in August. How
- 30:15Speaker 1: do you get August eleventh from seven months into nineteen
- 30:19Speaker 1: ninety nine. Well, again it was there were some different
- 30:22Speaker 1: translations that maybe we're different enough to recalculate. Yeah, yeah,
- 30:27Speaker 1: But then that one was also used for nine to eleven,
- 30:30Speaker 1: was repurposed for nine to eleven. Right, they're like, he
- 30:33Speaker 1: was just close, Yeah, exact, it's a couple of years off. Well,
- 30:36Speaker 1: they combined that one with Century six Quatrain ninety seven,
- 30:39Speaker 1: which says, at forty five degrees, this guy will burn
- 30:41Speaker 1: fire to approach the great new city. In an instant,
- 30:44Speaker 1: a great scattered flame will leap up when one will
- 30:47Speaker 1: want to demand proof of the normans, what is that
- 30:51Speaker 1: last thing? I'm not sure that's the thing. Like, you
- 30:55Speaker 1: can't just pick part of it and then discount the rest,
- 30:58Speaker 1: right and say that you know he was wrong on that,
- 31:01Speaker 1: But that's exactly what people did. Well, they did because
- 31:05Speaker 1: several quatrains referred to an anti Christ's figure called Mabus,
- 31:09Speaker 1: and if you rearrange the letters it could be Ussam
- 31:13Speaker 1: b Yeah, and so people use that as proof. But
- 31:16Speaker 1: they also didn't they failed to mention that previous to that,
- 31:21Speaker 1: they used it as Saddam, like up to the day
- 31:23Speaker 1: before nine to eleven. Yeah, they were saying it was
- 31:26Speaker 1: Saddam Hussein was Mabus because maybe's spelled backwards as sue bomb.
- 31:32Speaker 1: Kind of a reach if you ask me. It is. Well,
- 31:34Speaker 1: in that forty five degrees part of the quad trains,
- 31:37Speaker 1: some people said that New York cities around forty degrees
- 31:40Speaker 1: five minutes north latitude, so that's close. But again he
- 31:45Speaker 1: was said the new city will burn at forty five
- 31:48Speaker 1: degrees Villanueva or Vienneuve, Yeah, is that about forty five
- 31:54Speaker 1: degrees latitude? So it could just be interpretation. I don't
- 31:59Speaker 1: know who who's really at fault here. Is it Nostredama,
- 32:02Speaker 1: Is it the people who just blindly accept nostredas predictions?
- 32:07Speaker 1: Is it? Though? Because Nostre Damas purposefully obfuscated his stuff,
- 32:12Speaker 1: so I think he's a little bit responsible. For this too,
- 32:15Speaker 1: I imagine since he has that great sense of humor.
- 32:18Speaker 1: It made fun of that one guy's statue of the
- 32:20Speaker 1: Virgin Mary. Yeah, he is sitting in his coffin holding
- 32:23Speaker 1: a plaque with some future date when he'll be exhumed
- 32:26Speaker 1: his laughing and laughing. Yeah maybe. Yeah. We mentioned Henry
- 32:30Speaker 1: the second. He predicted his death this quatrain, the young
- 32:35Speaker 1: lion will overcome the old one on the field of
- 32:38Speaker 1: battle in single combat. He will put his eyes in
- 32:41Speaker 1: a cage of gold two fleets one then to die
- 32:46Speaker 1: in a cruel death. So that means two injuries. And
- 32:50Speaker 1: this actually happened. King Henry was in a jousting competition,
- 32:53Speaker 1: but it wasn't on the field of battle. It was
- 32:55Speaker 1: a friendly It was a party basically, and Captain Montgomery,
- 33:00Speaker 1: who was younger the younger lion did joust, hit him
- 33:04Speaker 1: in the in the eye and through the throat. So
- 33:06Speaker 1: the two injuries supposedly from one man. Yeah, but that
- 33:10Speaker 1: was all that his wife Dimdici, Queen Dmadicici, needed to know.
- 33:14Speaker 1: She was like, you know, holy crap, this has come true. Yes,
- 33:18Speaker 1: and he knows what he's doing. John F. Kennedy, the Challenger,
- 33:22Speaker 1: the Great Fire of London. People have said that he's
- 33:27Speaker 1: predicted all these things. But we could sit here all
- 33:30Speaker 1: day poking holes in the you know that, not that
- 33:33Speaker 1: we're poking holes, but other people have poked legitimate holes.
- 33:38Speaker 1: I think we poked a few holes. Well yeah, but
- 33:41Speaker 1: I mean it's all been from other people's stuff. Oh
- 33:43Speaker 1: that's true. You know I didn't do my own hole poking. No,
- 33:46Speaker 1: we should probably say we'd never begrudge anybody that believing
- 33:49Speaker 1: in something like that or enjoying like I don't think
- 33:53Speaker 1: it hurts anything behind it or anything like that. Yes,
- 33:56Speaker 1: if you go out dump all your stocks and sell
- 33:58Speaker 1: your worldly possessions, or you cancel your big fashion debut, yeah,
- 34:02Speaker 1: that's all that just hurts you. Yeah, although that may
- 34:06Speaker 1: have hurt the fashion world. Yeah, he probably had it
- 34:09Speaker 1: the week after. You want to hear something crazy. Yeah,
- 34:12Speaker 1: about the day before September eleventh, this group called the Coup.
- 34:16Speaker 1: They're a rap group out of Oakland. They're pretty awesome.
- 34:20Speaker 1: They were releasing their album I can't remember what's called.
- 34:23Speaker 1: I want to say, like party Time or party Fever,
- 34:26Speaker 1: party something Yeah, and like the day before and it
- 34:32Speaker 1: had the guy Boots Riley, who is like the MC
- 34:37Speaker 1: for the group. It had him like standing there pressing
- 34:40Speaker 1: a button in the twin towers were coming down, like
- 34:43Speaker 1: blowing up. They were going to release it like the
- 34:45Speaker 1: day before. It was scheduled to release in September two
- 34:48Speaker 1: thousand and one, and then nine to eleven happened. They're like, well,
- 34:51Speaker 1: let's change the cover. And that's why you've never heard
- 34:54Speaker 1: of the coup I wonder Actually, yeah, well they were
- 34:58Speaker 1: getting kind of big right around that time. The album
- 35:00Speaker 1: had like good buzz around it, and then yeah, they
- 35:04Speaker 1: just went away. They're still around there. Well, all the
- 35:06Speaker 1: all the entertainment that was released around that time notoriously suffered. Yeah.
- 35:12Speaker 1: I can't remember what movies in particular, but yeah, exactly,
- 35:16Speaker 1: there are a lot of things. Later on, the people
- 35:18Speaker 1: are like, wow, we've released it right before nine eleven,
- 35:20Speaker 1: so we were you know, we were doomed. Yeah, but
- 35:23Speaker 1: it was a movie. Who cares, you know? So if
- 35:26Speaker 1: you want to know more about Nostradamis, you can go
- 35:29Speaker 1: look this up on how still works dot com by
- 35:31Speaker 1: scanning the search bar, or you can just kind of
- 35:35Speaker 1: look around the internet, because there is plenty of stuff
- 35:37Speaker 1: about that dude on there. And enjoy yourself. And since
- 35:41Speaker 1: I said enjoy yourself, it's time for listener. Now, I'm
- 35:45Speaker 1: gonna call this um trailer builder. Hey, guys, Chuck and
- 35:51Speaker 1: Josh or Josh and Chuck, whichever you prefer. We prefer
- 35:54Speaker 1: Josh and Chuck. I think it goes either way. Yeah,
- 35:57Speaker 1: well that's what we kind of settled on, consistent branding. No,
- 36:00Speaker 1: it goes both ways. We go both ways. Yeah, all right,
- 36:03Speaker 1: Chuck and Josh, Josh and Chuck. Hey, guys, I must
- 36:06Speaker 1: admit that I tried very hard not to listen to you.
- 36:08Speaker 1: I was told by several of my friends that I
- 36:10Speaker 1: absolutely must subscribe to your show. However, as to stay
- 36:13Speaker 1: at home dad by day to a beautiful three year
- 36:16Speaker 1: old and three month old boys, a very busy small
- 36:18Speaker 1: business owner by night, had trouble finding enough time to
- 36:21Speaker 1: go poop, let alone indulge in any form of entertainment.
- 36:24Speaker 1: Needless to say, I did listen in wonder and became
- 36:27Speaker 1: instantly addicted. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed learning, and
- 36:30Speaker 1: the two months since I first gave you guys a shot,
- 36:32Speaker 1: had been on a steady binge. And I'm quickly running
- 36:35Speaker 1: out of back episodes to listen to, which is a
- 36:38Speaker 1: frightening prospect to me, considering your podcast as a fuel
- 36:41Speaker 1: that powers my motivation engine. While I work, my brother
- 36:44Speaker 1: and I own and operate Oregon trailer. That's trail Apostrophe
- 36:49Speaker 1: are where the two of us built high end, tiny
- 36:52Speaker 1: teardrop style camp trailers. Have you ever seen those? Yeah?
- 36:56Speaker 1: Really cool? Yeah, like I want one of these? Dotty's
- 37:01Speaker 1: gonna send anyone. I found that while my hands are
- 37:04Speaker 1: on autopilot building trailers, my brain has been totally neglected
- 37:07Speaker 1: listening to my requisite Pandora stations. But now that I'm
- 37:10Speaker 1: listening to you, fellows and receiving constant brain stimulation, I'm
- 37:14Speaker 1: getting more done than ever and enjoying every second. And
- 37:17Speaker 1: my wife and sons thank you, as well as my
- 37:18Speaker 1: general mood is improved despite the potentially unhealthy lack of sleep. However,
- 37:23Speaker 1: my lovely wife is still getting a little tired of
- 37:24Speaker 1: the phrase. So. I was listening to stuff you should
- 37:26Speaker 1: know last night dot dot dot. So I just want
- 37:30Speaker 1: to say thanks for everything you guys do, have done,
- 37:32Speaker 1: and we'll do in the future. Large amounts of platonic love.
- 37:36Speaker 1: That is Sawyer Christiansen and I'm gonna plug Oregon Trailer
- 37:40Speaker 1: dot net just because those things are really cool. Yeah,
- 37:43Speaker 1: Oregon trail apostrophe or no, on the website it's trailer, Okay,
- 37:49Speaker 1: Oregon trailer dot Net. Good point. And if you're in
- 37:52Speaker 1: the market for one of those, like check him out
- 37:54Speaker 1: small business handmade ye send me one, send Josh one
- 38:00Speaker 1: and they'd be sweet. Yeah, they're pretty neat. Thanks a lot,
- 38:02Speaker 1: Sawyer Christensen, great name, by the way, and we appreciate
- 38:06Speaker 1: the kudos. And if you out there, everybody else who
- 38:10Speaker 1: isn't Sawyer Christiansen wants to get in touch with us
- 38:12Speaker 1: to say anything at all. You can tweet to us
- 38:16Speaker 1: at sysk podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot
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