The sleep doctors amongst you will probably yell at me, but often I listen to podcasts while I fall asleep. I find that it helps because I often have trouble sleeping. Surprisingly there are not a lot of podcasts that are good for this (Yes, I have tried Sleep with Me). I’ve discovered that what really does it for me tend to be mildly interesting history podcasts.
Some are a little too interesting, like Our Fake History and The Constant. Some are weirdly shouty, like In Our Time. Some are too much white-libertarian-guy for me, like Hardcore History. Some are too much fun, like Ancient History Fangirl or Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!. What I need is something interesting enough that I can calm my mind by just focusing down on what I’m listening to, but not so stimulating that it actively keeps me awake.
You know what is weirdly great at this? A podcast called Fall of Civilizations, which is all about how various civilizations have collapsed throughout time. The episodes are long, they’re well-produced, the guy has a nice voice, and he never shouts. You might ask, “Doesn’t it weird you out listening to all that tragedy as you drift off to dreamland?” Good question; no, no it does not.
Another good one is called Historical Blindness and I was listening to it last night and I was still awake enough to be impressed when the dude dropped the ten dollar phrase “pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theory.”
Let me tell you, while it is often a pain in the ass living inside my particular brain, one thing I do enjoy about it is that even though I didn’t know that phrase, I knew all of the constituent terms of that phrase, so this brain processed it for me automatically and I was just all like, “Oh this is going to be awesome!”
It was episode #67 entitled, “Written in Stone: The Archaeological Frauds of Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact Theories”, but I did not know that at first, I just clicked play.
Basically it was about how in America, white colonizers throughout history have gone out of their way to fake evidence that white people were in North America before Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 (Remember, Columbus never set foot on the North American continent.)
Now, yes, Northern Europeans had been to North America prior to Columbus (the so-called Vikings even had settlements up in Canada for awhile, but they were only the Middle Age equivalent of a Flying J [also, also the Middle Ages aren’t real, but that is a discussion for another time]). However when white Christians were stealing land from Native Americans during our early settlement period, they did not KNOW that Vikings had had camps up north.
The purpose of these various hoaxes was usually to “prove” that one or more of the so-called lost tribes of Israel had gotten to North America a long time ago and — I guess — by the law of transitive property, that meant that North America was (somehow) Christian? And so they could take all the land and kill all the people who lived on it. QAnon was not always called “QAnon” folks. This is all very similar to the “ancient aliens” theory, which — by the way — is also racist.
Anyway, the fun thing was that when the dude dropped, ““pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theory” I immediately recognized that this was going to be some Joseph Smith and the Golden Plates level of crazy. There are few more fun stories from history than those of people who are simply, bold faced lying (Seriously, check out The Constant, that podcast is all about grifters). The problem is that it was too interesting of an episode, so I couldn’t fall asleep.
I blame this not on the podcaster, but rather on the 400 years ago grifters who were simultaneously so stupid and audacious that even now it is fascinating to ponder their delirium.
Someone could write a whole book (and probably has) about the simple topic of how much of our modern lives is built on a foundation of outright imaginary bullshit. I’m not going to be able to do that now though, because I’m exhausted this morning, because i couldn’t get to sleep, because of those damn grifters.
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