S2E4: Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken

The book club don their sun hats and carefully excavate a pseudoscience classic, Erich von Däniken's 1968 Chariots of the Gods. 

Brushing off this dusty tome, they dig deep into a convicted fraudster with seventy million copies sold, alien eugenics and Nazi ghostwriters, and the origins of an enduring theory that every great ancient civilization was built by aliens.

Leave us a voicemail: https://www.speakpipe.com/POS_book_club

Transcript

Intro

0:00

I like purposely avoided the 2012 end of the world thing. I was too busy trying to catch Joseph Coney. Of course. That's where the real intellectuals are putting their effort in 2012. To all members present and worldwide, I hereby call this meeting of the Piece of Shit Book Club to order. I'm your esteemed chair, Kate P. Bandegaart. Thanks for making time in your busy schedule to attend today. We've got a jam-packed agenda. Looking around the room, I see we have Quorum. Great to see all your beautiful faces. So let's take a moment to introduce the piece of shit members present today. Chip Wilson, welcome in. Hey, good to be here. KP, you look very handsome today. Thank you. You are looking jacked yourself, my man. Uh Jane Lynch, welcome. Thank you for coming. Always a pleasure. Thank you. And welcome in our Resident Extraterrestrial Antiquities Expert, Dr. Bo Dashn in PhD. Doctor, thank you so much for making time in your schedule. Hey, pleasure to be here. What does uh, by the way, what does KP stand for, Mr. Van Der Fart? KP. Hmm. I should have thought of that beforehand, right? Kirk Pierre. Guys, we have dead air. We have dead air. Five seconds in, and yeah, you've derailed the show. We're off scripts. I apologize. Oh, I also want to welcome in. So we actually had an interesting revelation last week or so. I want to welcome in all the strong, powerful female members listening in. Um, we looked at some stats, and it turns out that more than half of book club members are in fact women, which I I mean, I was floored. I I I still think it might be a bunch of dudes listening, like just deadbeat dudes listening in on their girlfriends' Spotify accounts. There's a few of us out there. Anyways, hats off to you, ladies. I mean, you guys are all married. Like, your wives don't even listen to this podcast, do they? No, I begged her to. All right, well, welcome in, ladies. Um, returning to new business for today's feature read, we're tackling the original Just Asking Questions Manifesto, a monument to the power of pure unadulterated confirmation bias. Yes, it's Eric von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. If you're not familiar with this book, it is a cornerstone of modern conspiracy literature that operates on the ironclad scientific principle that brown folks couldn't have built anything decent without the help of space magic. So we'll be cracking into that. But before we do,

The Book Report

2:50

let's dip into the book report. The book report is, of course, our grab bag segment of news, doings, happenings, new releases. Before I open it up to the members present, you lads, I want to reach into the mailbag. We got mail from our resident Africa listener. So we aim for global representation on this podcast. The hosts of this show have a good geographic spread. Asia, Europe-ish, North America, or the Americas, perhaps. We haven't had a lot of African representation on the show since we did the TB Jonathan episode. TB Josh. Um, let's read it here. So, a few further questions, suggestions from the last few episodes. First, some positive feedback. Great job getting Jane to contribute to the analysis of the boy in the striped pajamas, including a discussion on a topically relevant film he saw. It ain't a book, but it's something. Treating Jane like he's 12 years old. Questions that would be great for you to discuss on a future podcast. Question number one What makes you, four grown men, the authorities on nine-year-old boy relationships? Well, we were all nine-year-old boys once, so we're all qualified. Next question. I think also cornerstone of the show is that we don't claim to be authorities on anything. That's the whole point. It's four white guys just kind of jawjacking on stuff that they have no business giving an opinion on. The original tagline was who elected these guys critics or something or something like that. No, that's it. No one. Who elected these guys critics or something like that? That was like one of the first comments we got in a discussion on the old blog in like 2014. I always liked it, so we just use it as a tagline. Question number two why aren't the panel capable of following Robert's rules? I I love this book club members' insistence on the rules. I it's near and dear to my heart. I'm starting to suspect that any of these emails we get are just another one of your identities at just always talking about how the Robert rules need to come back. Yeah, there's there is a theme here. And the last point uh since the Holocaust has now been covered, any interest in other genocide, First They Killed My Father was also made into a movie. So maybe John's Jane saw that on an airplane once too. Keep up the good work overall, anonymous PSBC member. How would you assess that letter? Like, it's this isn't the Piece of Shit Letter Club podcast, right? I wonder if we'll get more mail if we're not like immediately hostile to every message we get. Fair point. Well, to that end, uh, we have created a piece of shit book club voicemail. We would love to get some of that hostility directed back towards us. The link to that voicemail is going to be in the show description. So if you have something to say to us, click the link in the show description and give us a little uh snippet. And if it's any good, we might play it on uh next week's meeting. Okay, with that, I'll open it up to the floor for your book report contributions. Anyone want to jump in? I'll start with just the book that recently came out, and there's a quote here Ever since childhood, I've always wanted to be abducted by aliens. Hmm. By America's favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, a book titled Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter. And I just find that Neil deGrasse Tyson was like one of those guys that, you know, when I was younger, I was like, this guy is so cool. And like the more and more he's just around and you just hear him, I just absolutely just do not like this guy. Is he ripping off Goodfellas with that? Like the Ever Since I Can Remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I guess you're right. Throne in the trunk of a UFO. So yeah, that's it came out May 12th, and it's uh number one right now in history of science. I've always just like disliked him just because they like a lot of American academics, when they write sort of more popular nonfiction, they adopt this really annoying folksy tone of like kind of talking down to the audience, which always like his books are always just like imagine the solar system was like a game of basketball. And I always just fucking hate that. Like, yeah, you're an expert. You can talk like an expert, it's fine. That was because of like Sagan and Feynman and stuff like that. Like they they kind of did that as well, but they did it very, very well. And so they tried to replicate that, but just no, no, it's it's a fine art. Our man this week does it as well, uh, Eric Von Danekin. Neil deGrasse Dyson kind of makes me understand like what it what it's like to be mansplained to, you know. I think I get it when I listen to him. Thank you for that contribution, Jane. That's the good work that uh our writer, our letter writer was talking about. Uh so yeah, keep it up. Thank you. I've got a genuinely good book that I'm I'm reading at the moment. We did agree a few meetings ago that yeah, you can talk about good books in this segment now. So, yeah, all right. Cool, and I can and I could do it without you interrupting me then. That's awesome. Uh so the book, the book I'm reading is is called The Power and the Glory, a new history of the World Cup by um the British football journalist uh Jonathan Wilson. I just strongly it's it's football season, World Cup starting up again next week. I don't know if you've heard, but Canada is in with a shot. Football is is is definitely not going home. Uh it's probably not coming to Canada either. But uh very, very good book. Interesting book covers the World Cup from its origins through to the present. Very funny. I will be paying zero attention to the World Cup. I was looking at they they don't make any like, first of all, in this entire region, there's only two teams that made it Japan and Korea. Uh, they're the only teams in all of East Asia or Southeast Asia. And then the games start at midnight and run till like nine in the morning. So uh Seth Bladder and the rest of those corrupt bastards can suck a dick. I won't be paying attention. Seth Bladder. Sorry, Seth Bladder's been out for a long time. Well, he can still suck it. He probably got up to shenanigans as well. Splitting it up into multiple host countries is a bad idea. Like, I don't know. I just don't care about it. And you're living in a host city and you still don't care. No, I don't know. There's like six games or something like that happening here. We have a few, but I haven't been following that closely. I mean, I'll watch when it happens. I always like with the World Cup at least here, like when Italy's on, you go to like Italian cafe, hang out with all the old guys there to watch that. That kind of thing's fun. But yeah, we did that at the Portuguese club uh two World Cups ago. We saw that Spain-Portugal game that it did 3-3. And I we were having a conversation. I think we'd had a few too many beers, and and I was talking about how much I fucking hated Ronaldo, and it was just uh I never really liked the guy. He's uh very skilled, just don't like him as a person. And then we kind of stumbled outside to have a smoke, and I just immediately had a camera shoved into my face. What do you think about Ronaldo? And then I was just on the news that night like an idiot. Yeah, what can you say? Ronaldo is a very talented football player. You're like, you know, you can't deny his impact on the game. And I forgot about that. Three three goals. What can you say? It's reminiscent of the the classic move where it was Nelson Mandela night, and do you know the clip I'm referring to? I do. So good. Yeah, it was Jonathan Bernier, uh former goalie of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and they're going a Nelson Mandela tribute, whatever gala, and he's on the red carpet, and they're like, So what what does Mandela mean to you? And he's like, Yeah, growing up, we all looked up to Mandela. You know, he was such a leader off and on the ice. So good, man. Word. It just bluffed his way right through it. Uh, Chip, anything that you wanted to share uh in the book report? You're always harping about Robert's rules and how we're not following them, but we did specify we're following Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s rules. 100% we are. Yeah, I've been wrangling snakes all day. Yeah, I looked those up. I thought maybe I could uh just refresh the audience on them really quickly. Please. Number one, any individual wishing to speak must hold the fresh head of a pig. When the pig's head turns over, the man who has fasted longest may speak. If a goat enters the meeting grounds, all should remain silent until the goat's sex is determined. If the goat is male, the meeting may continue. If the goat is fed, all participants must name the first bird they consumed at earliest memory. If any participant fails to name the bird correctly, he will be ejected if he does not eat the goat. All men who eat from the goat are considered unfasted for the remainder of the meeting and must cede their time to the chair. So I think those are the rules we're following for these meetings, right? I'll do my best. That's a tall order. Keep your eye out for goats. I also want to note that I don't think you ever explained what Robert's rules were to the rest of the participants and then just my responsibility. If you're gonna show up for a meeting like this, the onus is on you to understand how they're run. It's literally your responsibility to explain how the meeting is run, isn't it? You're chairing the meeting. Checkmate. All right, uh, some uh new releases that we're keeping an eye on here. Uh, first book, Man Therapy. Therapy, the way a man does it, by some fellow named uh Joe Conrad. Um that's a good one. Uh Man Therapy gives men straightforward tools for dealing with real life challenges without the lecture, jargon, or awkward therapy speak, powered by the wildly popular man therapy brand. Think of it as a mental health tune-up for your brain, part therapist, part drill sergeant, and part wise uncle who tells it like it is. Joe Conrad is a creative entrepreneur and digital health pioneer who believes that the power of innovation and technology can solve any problem. 196 pages, uh 1695 on paperback coming out June 15th. What is it with that type of thing where you've they the person has to be like they it's almost like like Tim the Toolman, where you've gotta you've gotta idealize someone who can't be better educated than you. Like they've gotta be like you can't acknowledge that an expert might know more than you. It's gotta be like your uncle. Yeah. And somehow therapy is is automatically feminized uh and full of jargon and awkward therapy speak. I mean, I appreciate the name is just man therapy. Yeah, man therapy. So something that would be like Spartan therapy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like it like if you're feeling down, like you get a guy to come over, like a hunky muscle man to like you know give you a HJ or something like that. Like that's man therapy. Uh, next book that we're keeping an eye on is The Alchemy Transmissions, a pathway to miracles, Yeshawa's wisdom, transform suffering into service and joy. That's the whole title there. That's it's a fucking mouthful by Carissa Schumacher. Uh, I'm reading from the back cover here. Channel Transmission from Yeshua, the true name of Jesus, provides a pathway to transform and evolve mentally, emotionally, physically, and consciously. So you may receive and create miracles. That's uh $31.99, 496 pages, but you gotta wait until September 22nd for it to come out. I think like $31 is not bad if it's actually the channeled word of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, talking about like pulling back the curtain on how we did the miracles. So that's a steal. Yeah. Stealing directly from the hands of the Lord. And the last book that we're keeping an eye on, Shit Magnet. Seeing as this is the piece of shit book club, we love all books that are literally about shit or have shit in the titles of Shit Magnet by some fellow named Robert Gillis. Number one new release in law enforcement biographies. Uh actually, the book sounds kind of sort of dull. Uh, in his gripping memoir, a veteran law enforcement officer takes readers inside a career marked by violence, split second decisions, and moments that never fully leave you. Uh, from multiple officer-involved shootings, yeah, okay, to the to the heartbreaking loss of fellow officers in the line of duty. This is not a sanitized version of policing. It is the lived reality. When I look on Amazon, there's like at least three or four completely different books with different authors, all called Shit Magnet, all about police officers. Absolute shit magnets for police officers who attract shit by Rochelle something. And then shit magnets, a frontline officer story may have been madness, Paul Cooper. Then shit magnet by Jim Goad. What's going on? Is shit magnet a cop term or something? Is that how they like to refer to themselves? I never heard that term, but it must be, right? More like a donut magnet. These fucking pigs. Right. Okay. Uh, well, that that's been the book report. Uh the chair now recognizes Chip Wilson. We're not going to talk about what just happened. We're just going to pretend it didn't happen. The chair

Feature: Chariots of the Gods

16:21

now recognizes Chip Wilson, who presents our feature book, Chariots of the Gods, Unsolved Mysteries of the Past by Eric Von Daniken. Chip, the floor is yours. Great. Yeah. I was excited to read this book. I think you were too when I when I selected it. Me, yeah. No, I've been wanting to read this book for a long time and um it sucks. Why did you want to read it? Well, so I've I've always had, like ever since I was even a kid, an interest in conspiracy culture. I used to listen to Art Bell growing up. Um I and this is just one of the like the OG conspiracy books. Um, and so I never really knew much about it. I don't know much about the author, but it's just one of those books that's considered like a foundational text. So yeah, I I'd always thought that if it's as famous as it is, there must be something interesting or fun about it, at least. Even though I don't, you know, obviously I don't I don't give any creeds to the theories within the book. I'm not a proponent of ancient aliens, but I I had the same kind of feeling. Like it was super popular in the 70s. It's kind of like the shogun of like conspiracy theory books, like it's really popular with like Boomer Dads, you know? Pink swastika of alien extraterrestrial aliens banging cavemen books. The the documentary based on the book won an academy award. So you gotta figure there's something to it. It's kind of like this like seminal text in pseudoscience, but it wasn't it wasn't really the first in the in the ancient aliens idea, because like when this was written, uh 1969 was when it was published, it was our that was already like really well established as a sci-fi trope, but Eric von Daneken was the first to kind of just present these things as reality, and so it's easy, you know, kind of an icon in the space. He's sort of like a uh like a Jack Radcliffe of the genre. I don't know the reference. Dr. Dash didn't he said too. And I mean he's he's themed. You don't know Jack Radcliffe? No, he's he's like one of the icons of gay male bear culture, so he's like the first bear. You don't know this guy, Radcliffe? Yeah. Jack Radcliffe was huge in like I think 80s, early 90s. Oh, I know exactly who you're talking about, actually. He was like uh he was an illustrator. No, no, this guy's uh I I'm looking up videos of what he's doing, and it is not illustrating. It's illustrating something. Painting only with white. I don't know. He kind of like just helped define that whole aesthetic for uh for bears. But that's sort of what Eric von Doneken did, uh, I think for ancient alien conspiracy theories. No, go just try to Jack Radcliffe. Okay. Just putting up some screenshots of Jack Radcliffe. So Eric von Danekin passed this year. He died uh January 10th. Yeah, poor one out. Yeah, and then I saw online like quite a bit of discussion of his legacy, and there's like a popular opinion that's like, well, I don't like what he did for uh misleading people for science and stuff, but I appreciate his uh his inspiration for sci-fi and things. Like a lot of people kind of view him as the person that invented the whole idea, but he was actually taking stuff that was really, really well established in sci-fi, probably unsurprisingly beforehand, because it's it's not terribly inventive to think of the idea of perhaps aliens visited Earth a long time ago. Well, he's also accused of ripping it all off from some French author, basically whole cloth. Yeah, there's that as well. But but the point I'm trying to make here is uh his his cultural impact, uh, I think maybe we can tone it down a little bit on uh on what an inventor he was, on the concept, uh, generally speaking. Are you saying like are are you saying like we as a society need to like tone down his involvement in this and this prom his promotion of these ideas? Okay. Yeah. I'm just okay. I'm on board with that. Yeah. Agreed. And I just don't think a lot of these things are um wild ideas, you know. He believes that ancient aliens are responsible for a lot of antiquities' developments and innovation. The idea that the gods, as they're described in um religious texts like the Bible and others, are actually aliens that came down. He believes that these aliens instituted a selective breeding program with humans uh in order to help accelerate human development. Um, and that these basically these extraterrestrials were masters of human evolution. So uh it's a it's a meta-creation story for humanity. There was some eugenics that these aliens practiced, so they like annihilated degenerate stalk. He refers to the freaks that were weeded out. Um, and he doesn't say which continents, but some of these freaks were then cast off to other continents. So a lot of this happened in South America and in uh Sumeria, and so he focuses a lot on this place in Bolivia as well as in Peru, as as sort of these uh spots where aliens had landed. Um he's not necessarily an atheist, so he he's clear that he believes in some sort of metaphysical, theological god independent of these aliens who he. Believes, as I said, were sort of the um were mistaken for gods by ancient peoples. But yeah, that that's kind of the the basic idea. They these ancients were so stupefied by this advanced technology, they mistook these aliens for gods and uh and so the rest of history. You you said that these are not wild ideas, so that you you would think that these are normal kind of just I don't think that these take a tremendously brilliant mind or a lot of imagination to conjure up. Like I said, like that these are common ideas in sci-fi prior, you know. So just to back to setting like the context for the book, it's 1969, he publishes this. Uh, it's it's like a big, big hit. Um, but these this is like uh, you know, in the mid midst of the Apollo missions, there's a lot of excitement around space. Uh, a lot of people in you know, in it's the it's the 60s, right? Like a bit of the counterculture movement, break down, break down the institutions. Yeah, exactly. So perfect timing, right? Um, but a lot of it is kind of just like reworking and then making literal all the all these kind of concepts that were popular in Pulp SciFi at the time and so on. A little bit about Eric von Doneken himself, his background. Uh he's he's got a funny background, this guy. He's a Swiss German fraudster, I guess is the easiest way to put it. Broadly speaking, and and convicted criminal. Both before and during the production of this book, he was convicted of fraud uh in multiple endeavors. Uh he was running a like running multiple hotels. He was basically charged for like embezzlement at each of them, uh, including something to do with jewels in Egypt. So when this was published, he was serving he served like the first year of a four-year sentence for fraud. He ran off with like a hundred thousand dollars from his employer to fund his research travels around the world in order to write this book. Yeah, which I'm pretty sure were also fraudulent. I don't think he actually did much travel for this book. Are you saying it's not well researched? Yeah. No, but he kind of talks about it in the book as if he's traveled all over the world, but I'm pretty sure he has not. Um and he's just kind of like looking at pictures uh uh on his desk of things. At some point in his in his career fraud, he got obsessed with discovering alien artifacts. He's a little bit like a shady side character in like an Indiana Jones movie, uh, is the impression I've I've gotten of him. And speaking of Indiana Jones, uh, there's also Nazis involved, which I'm sure you noticed, KP. Yeah, 100%. The book was rejected by uh several publishers when he was trying to get it published, and he only found a publisher, uh, and this is straight from Wikipedia here. Uh, after a complete reworking by a professional author, Ultz Uderman. Uderman was a former editor of the Nazi Party's newspaper and had been a Nazi best-selling author. Uh so the book was literally rewritten by a Nazi propagandist. Uh, and that's that's the the text that was published and uh got so popular. He wrote the sequel to the book from prison when he was serving his fraud sentence for embezzling all the money. But yeah, you're right. He's like he's definitely some, he's got like a shady sort of like if if Alan Quartermane is like the B version of Indiana Jones, like this guy is the B version of Alan Quartermane. Um I don't know if you listen to any interviews with him, but he sounds exactly like you'd want him to sound. Like he's got a thick Swiss German accent. Um, he uses like a lot of big words to sound intelligent. Um he clearly doesn't have a very high opinion of anyone who's like not European. He, in one interview, I heard him, he's talking about um traveling through Tibet to try to find the uh Ark of the Covenant, you know, if if you want to talk Indiana Jones and Nazis. So yeah, this guy is like he's the real deal when it comes to just like greasy Swiss fraudsters. Yeah, and uh 70 million copies sold. Uh I think around the time of his death. I think he sold like 5 million in the 70s, it was huge. And uh you can't really overstate the the cultural impact, I think. Like ancient aliens, the history channel was based basically entirely on this book. Yeah. You know, the whole meme of the guy just going aliens. Um, but I think that that whole theory, this whole idea of like, hey, maybe aliens contacted the Mayans and spoke to them and shared things with them. For people who are allured by that, I think if you interact with it just kind of like online or in other media other mediums, it's more interesting and more compelling than in this actual core book. Because if you read this, like I not that I was a believer to begin with by any means, but I I still believe in ancient aliens less after reading this book because it's such an absolute piece of shit. Yeah, this is a nice return to form for the book club because like last week we had said that oh, we don't think that this book is actually a piece of shit. This book is a this a fucking piece of shit. In many ways, it's shit on many layers, sort of a shit layer cake. In the intro, he says it takes courage to read this book. And this is like a kind of a funny thing that we keep coming across is these guys doing these these little intros they think are cheeky and engaging, and you know, that it's it's it's a way of trying to compliment the reader, I guess, and and and get them on your side. But really, they're just saying their own book is a pile of shit that takes a lot of work to get through. Hegseth had one. I think the uh Juan Falan, the Falan Ganga, had one. Yeah. Um his bad grammar. Yeah. There there's been others too. One thing I did appreciate with Eric von Donekin is a lot of use of exclamation marks. I it's always funny to me when I read any sentence, I think, with an exclamation mark at the end. It always sounds to me like a little boy stating it with emphasis. Um, and if I could put his kind of core argument in his own words, like just as a little piece here, there's something inconsistent about our archaeology because we find electric batteries many thousands of years old, because we find strange beings in perfect spacesuits with platinum fasteners. But how did these early men talking about ancient civilizations acquire the ability to create such incredible things? And I thought what I'd do so his examples that he uses in this book are vast, and part of his style is to just hey, look at this thing, this can't be explained. Hey, look at this other thing, can't be explained. I think Gish Gallup, it's called. Yeah, there's no point in us trying to just debunk, yeah, one by one, because that's not the point. No, and if you're reading, I think there's some that are kind of funny to talk about. Um, but if you, you know, really when you're reading this book, if you look up any single thing he says, um, it's it's a very clear explanation, or it's going to be debunked pretty easily. That's what I found so frustrating, is because like not only is the book not that interesting, but when there are passages where you're like, oh, that kind of makes you that's sort of interesting. And then you like quickly Google it, you're like, oh, it's it's he completely misrepresented it, it's he omitted important pieces, whatever. So it's like the guy, he has zero credibility, and so it just makes you angrier and angrier. And I was listening to it on book on tape, and it's just read by this smug sounding fuck. You don't even get like the Swiss German accent from this guy, and you're just like, what if it was ancient aliens? You're like, oh, you just want to like reach out into your computer and strangle the guy reading the book. It's this book really made me angry. Yeah, I I had the exact same thing at the beginning because I I made that mistake of uh there are a few things piqued my interest. And I thought, oh yeah, I'll look that up. And and the first one was like there's that section about like the ancient maps, the the the Ottoman maps from like the 15th century that are found. Yeah. And it's like these maps perfectly detail everything from the Atlantic all the way down to the coast of the Antarctic, and how could this possibly have happened? And then I was like, oh wow, that's pretty crazy. And I look up the maps, and they just clearly don't do that. They just clearly show the Mediterranean and then copies of European maps of like the eastern part of Brazil, which is still you know impressive for the time, but it's just completely misrepresenting things that can be very, very quickly fact-checked nowadays, but probably couldn't have been fact-checked by someone buying this uh, you know, next to the National Inquirer at the grocery store in Des Moines in 1980, whenever it was. No, exactly. And so what I want to kind of do is like just the way I've tried to organize what I think is his like rhetorical playbook to kind of illustrate like why this, why this had success and like how you know just his his style of communication. The one thing is that he does present a bunch of optimism about like the present and the future, but it's this, and I I think that's appealing to people. You pick up something and you're taught you you're talking about how we live in this glorious age of progress, and the future is going to be so unbelievable we can't even imagine what we'll be able to do. That's like exciting for people, but it's presented in this way that's done to undermine consensus knowledge, uh, consensus understanding of things. It's and it's this kind of thing where you're like, you know, well, not so long ago, everyone thought the world was flat. Um, and those who questioned it were burned at the stake. This kind of like really, really cheap kind of argument is is the way how he's using that. The other one that, you know, when we get into debunking things, is like just these really fantastical, like exaggerated description of the sites or the um any artifacts he's talking about. Like if something in real life weighs 100 pounds, he'll describe it as weighing a thousand pounds. You you you look because when you when you look up any of these things, you're like, okay, I mean, I'm not trying to poo-poo on the success of these uh civilizations, but they're they're not as impressive as he presents some of them, right? His thing is claims that the modern engineering can't build the pyramids, it would be impossible for any road or bridge um that is currently exist to move the olmec heads in Mexico. Um, yeah, he makes these really like fantastical claims that that can easily be debugged. Yeah, it's this kind of thing where it's like these close-up images of like so-called impossibly precise masonry. And I always look at those things, I'm like, it's definitely impressive, but I don't know if it's impossible. The other thing is completely throwing out the ingenuity and the knowledge of the people of the time that were actually building these things. He takes this tone where he's totally incredulous that like anyone could have had calendars at any point in time in history. I have a I have a quote about that right here, actually. So uh the Mayans left behind them calculations to last 64 million years, later inscriptions dealt in units which probably approach 400 million years. The famous Venusian formula could quite plausibly have been calculated by an electronic brain. At any rate, it is difficult to believe that it originated from a jungle people. Yeah. Um, the the Nazi comes out uh pretty often, I think. Um but this is like so stupid. I don't know if it's deliberate, like it's a bit, because like he's uh he's a fraudster, but you know, like any any like agrarians civilization that like scales and is low large scale, they have to have like a good understanding of of calendars and stars. It's like necessary for for achieving that, right? Sorry, not to get too off topic, but I just realized why does any calendar have an end date? What why wouldn't it just keep going? If you can go to 64 million years, why is there this like point of like, oh well, we can't go further than that? Well, you just run out of stone to to write on carve into, I think. I don't know, but I would think that maybe with early calendars, like people understood that there was some imprecision to them. Um, and and so maybe at some point you're like, it's you can't we should probably just reduce accuracy over time. The audiobook had an interview with him at the end. I listened to a couple interviews from him, and they asked him, so what's gonna happen in 2012 at the end of the Mayan calendar? And he's like, Well, yeah, so at the end of the Mayan calendar, of course, the aliens are coming back. Like everybody knows that it's it's undisputed, but people are kind of unsure when the Mayan calendar actually started. There may have been like someone forgot to carry the one in calculating the start date. So I can't guarantee you that the aliens are gonna come back on uh you know whatever it was. Good way to cover your ass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like purposely avoided the 2012 end of the world thing. I was too busy trying to catch Joseph Coney. But uh of course, yeah. So I that's that's where that's where the real intellectuals are putting their effort in 2012. Uh I'm not too well versed in it, but I'm not even sure if their calendar does end on that date. I thought it was more like a it's a cyclical era thing. But at any rate, but yeah, there's this there's this like total disregard and and a lack of willingness to engage with the actual civilizations that exist in those times or like why they might be doing what they're doing, you know, why might why would they develop elaborate ceremonies or why would they have all this symbolism baked into their works, that kind of thing. The other one is like applying his approach is to just apply like the most common, accessible, basic modern knowledge when you're interpreting anything. So it's like when you look at a carving from from 4,000 years ago, you don't try to understand what the people at that time might be trying to uh uh impart into it. You just look at it and you go, holy shit, it looks like a fucking astronaut. Yeah, he talks a lot about people with antenna on their heads, not recognizing or acknowledging that it's it's widely understood to be people wearing deer antlers, um, you know, sort of shamanic kind of, I don't know, ritual or whatever. But to him, now the the the most clear explanation, of course, they're depicting aliens with antenna on their heads. Now, I don't know if he was watching like a lot of Jetsons or what, like why the aliens have antenna on their heads, but that's his theory. Well, it's it's also it's so silly because he also he includes pictures of astronauts from like the Apollo missions and things for comparison, right? But why would advanced aliens look exactly like the first people that humans sent up to space to, right? Like they they these hypothetical interstellar travelers are not using just like the beat up piece of shit material that the that we're firing people up into space in, you know. He doesn't like his evidentiary standard is very low. So it's another thing that's sort of frustrating. Like he doesn't he doesn't use the scientific method in order to rule out um ideas that might be completely improbable or that are completely crazy. His kind of evidentiary standard is like, well, you're willing to believe this as part of your religions with less evidence. So I'm giving you more evidence, so you bit you might as well accept it. Which I I I mean, I don't want to, you know, I I think the the members on the podcast here probably range from agnostic to atheist. So uh it's not a real compelling argument to say that, well, you know, if you're gonna believe the Bible, then you gotta believe this. I'm Quaker, by the way. Just in case a draft happens. Um yeah, but but also, you know what's weird about that with like the religious angle is that um he doesn't acknowledge like mythmaking and the the the sort of the sort of power of myth making over generations. He takes all of the things that are included in in religious beliefs as literal events that people 100% witnessed at the scale that they describe them at. And then he says, okay, those must be nuclear weapons launched by aliens or those must be aliens appearing, rather than engaging with the idea that these might be stories that over time developed and were were even like imaginative for the purpose of expressing an idea or a moral or something. That's impossible for him. He says time and again, like, you can't have original thoughts out of thin air. Like, there's no way that they can conceive of these ideas unless aliens had come down and demonstrated this for them. Like, there's no you you couldn't imagine a bird flying through the sky carrying you off into you know distant lands. Like, how would you come up with that? If you saw it, if you saw it, you wouldn't you wouldn't know what it was. Like Columbus's ships, if they just suddenly appeared, the native people didn't know what they were, you know, wouldn't be able to see them see them because they had no frame of reference. But yeah, like his example with the nukes was like describing the people, like the the accounts of like smoke and fire and and clouds in the sky. And it's like, well, it must have been a nuke. Yeah, it could have been, you know, chip, as you said, people just telling their own creation myth or whatever. Could also just be smoke and fire and clouds in the sky. I mean, there's still fires a thousand years ago, forest fires, everything, volcanoes, every every piece of like historical testimony is just like panel beaten into shape to fit exactly this theory that, yep, aliens, aliens once again. The next one I had is that you know, I think it's useful because it's like his just all these angles or his approach is I I think so commonly replicated by others. Um, but the other one is like misrepresenting contemporary interpretations from academics. I mean, you could call it like straw manning, but it's basically like he hardly engages with what archaeologists actually say about these things. Um, those narrow-minded stuffy academics. Get me started on, yeah, archaeologists, please. I mean, like podcasting with uh Dr. Bo Dash in it here is unbearable. Guys gonna stick up his ass. Bring you down the vibe. But no, like like he first off, it's like this victim thing where it's like, you know, scientists. There's a quote, like, scientists do not take the posing of such questions, his questions obviously, seriously, and they ridicule them. Anyone who asks questions like that ought to see a psychiatrist. But but also like uh when he's talking about like one later, he's talking about the Nasca lines, for example, and he's like, archaeologists sit just say these are roads. And it's like I looked it up, and even at the time in the 50s, like, no, they didn't say that. No, they didn't say that. They said they were elaborate ceremonial um uh places. So, like, you know, he just tends to, it's both saying that the established academic perspective is is stuffy and slow, and also just not actually presenting what it really is. Well, and then also, so in it in one of the interviews I was listening to him, he's like, Look, people have since pointed out that of course UFOs don't need landing strips to land on Earth. So, what it was actually was of course the aliens came down, they didn't use the landing strips, and then the NASCA people wanted them to come back, so they built these alien runways to try to encourage them to come back, to lure them back. And that's that's absolutely what it was. And he's he's talking about the criticism of the book. He's like, people didn't realize. So I I read the audiobook, so I didn't catch it, but he's like, people didn't realize, you know, I was asking questions. There was 280 some odd question marks in the book. People took them as statements, they were questions. He's just asking questions. Just ask the original just asking questions guy. Just to show an example of some of those questions on the NASCA lines, he says, the archaeologists say they are Inca roads. A preposterous idea, exclamation mark. What use were roads that run parallel to each other, that intersect, that are laid out in in a plane and come to a sudden end? And I was like, I can think of a lot of roads that run parallel that intersect or end at some point. It's like I think most roads do that. Most have a beginning and an end. Yeah. But again, it's like archaeologists you didn't even they weren't even saying that they were just roads. Um, so yeah, that kind of comes to the final thing is he just makes his final technique is to just sort of make shit up. Yeah. There's there, I I mean, I I don't think any of us are experts in antiquity. Uh of course, Dr. Bodash in PhD, I don't mean to speak to you. I'm you're you're an expert in all things ancient aliens and of course uh what have you. But what's frustrating in the book too is that I don't know enough to know that the guy's bullshitting me or which parts are he's just making up whole cloth and which he's kind of stretching the truth on. Like you suspect throughout the whole book, you're like, this guy's not on the level, like he's he's not giving it to me straight. But I don't know enough to fact-check him, and I don't care enough to fact-check him. And and probably just gets away with a lot of what he's done over his career, is people are just kind of willing to accept it at face value when a lot of it, as you say, is just out and out raw uh lies. One thing that I thought was interesting is at one point I think he actually like perfectly articulates what's wrong with his own approach. He says, and he's saying this is a great thing. To quote, he says, as soon as we look at the past with our present day gaze and use the fantasy of our technological age to fill up the gaps, the veils that shroud the darkness begin to lift. And I thought that was incredible because like that's exactly what's wrong with his methodology, if there is one. Is everything is fixated in present day gaze? It's like that looks like a landing strip, that looks like uh an astronaut I saw on TV. And uh using the literally he says using the fantasy. Of our technological age to fill up the gaps. So just just kind of um daydreaming about what the heck could be going on. Was there anything about the book that you actually enjoyed? I mean, you were you wanted to read this book. This I thought this was one of the least enjoyable books that we've read, maybe the least enjoyable book since the Falun Gong. And it actually, this book reminded me in some ways of the Falun Gong book because it was nonsense dressed up as science. Yeah. Um, I I would say this was a real letdown. Like it's not like this is a topic that I've had no interest in, obviously. Right. Ancient aliens. Me neither. Um, but I really feel like this is for for people who might be interested or might be lured into it. This is like probably the worst way to approach the subject. Like there's no spooky moose music to go along with that, like you might find on like a weird YouTube video. Right. You know. Um, but uh the what I did like, I would say is that that some there's just sometimes his examples are are just so dumb that uh that I had a laugh. And the way he writes, I think, is kind of funny. Uh I don't know what it how it translated in an audiobook. Like I said, I love exclamation marks. Uh there's so many of those in the book. That was probably the highlight for me. Any thoughts as to why it's so popular? Like I was just looking it up, and this guy's sold like tens of millions of like its first year, it sold seven million copies, like in 1968 or 1969 or whatever. Like, and now the guy has sold 70 million copies worldwide. Yeah, chip touch on a little bit. I think it's sort of right place, right time, riding a wave of counterculture. Um, people were really suspicious of institutions, you know, it's the middle of the Vietnam War. He he also, I think his approach gives readers a way to kind of know the universe that feels really empowered and provides a clean meta-narrative. So any it's kind of like QAnon. You know, QAnon, I think, is a lot more sinister, but how it's similar is both of them are these overarching theories where any event can kind of be plugged into it. So there's you don't hit any brick walls, you can kind of run with it for as long as you want to, and you can go into it as deep as you want to, and every sort of little piece of information, every artifact can be fit into the theory. It also allows people to do their own research, which we now know that you know these sort of conspiracy types love. So, you know, you can back in the 60s, you go to the library, pull out the microfiche, pull up old, uh, old Nazi newspaper editions, and really kind of dig into the meat and potatoes of the issue and see where you've been lied to the whole time by the establishment. So it, you know, it makes people feel smarter than the rest of the room. I think like simple explanations also sell well, right? Like there's a reason that the National Inquirer was always by, you know, had pride of place by the by the till in the grocery stores, and it it offers a really simple explanation that anyone can access. You don't have to be educated, you don't have to be an academic. Here is this shocking thing. I think even what and even when we were kids, like the 90s, there's this kind of stuff was still regularly going like extremely popular. Like there's that one huge. Do you remember the Bible code? That was the one that went huge in the late 90s. Numerology kind of stuff? Yeah, it was basically like if you look at every thousandth word and like if you made the entire Bible one long string of just characters without spaces, then look at every, I don't know, a hundred and ninety thousandth letter, and then it spells out you know different combinations of things that then cross each other, and and supposedly it would predict the future and it predicted current events. But you can do that with pretty much any book. Uh you can you know you take War and Peace and do the exact same thing. But yeah, that sold millions and millions of copies. I remember that one when 9-11 happened, uh, where you put like the flight number into wingdings. Never forget. You guys didn't do that? It's like you changed the font of the flight number or something, and then it looks like it makes a plane, and then I think it uses does two like notepad things that look like the twin towers. I can't remember. I don't even know it was the right number. And Nostradamus predicted all of that. Yeah. Um predicted wing ding. Yeah, big time. Uh and uh one thing I'd add though for for like why this is popular is I think that it's uh there's like an optimism to it as well. Especially in the final third. Yeah, I think it's proven time and time again. If you're like a pseudo intellectual techno-optimist charlatan, uh, I think you'll get a lot of followers. You'll do pretty well, raise capital or sell a lot of books. Sorry, I was distracted for a second because I was actually just typing in the uh I was I was checking out this little wingdings conspiracy. This is 26 books too late. Folks at home, this is live science. This is how we do it here at the PC Book Club. But yeah, it's basically like there's if you look up one uh a flight, apparently Q39, Q sorry, Q33 NY. I'm not even sure what what flight that would be. But the when you translate to Wingdings, it's a plane, a building, a building, and then a skull and crossbones and a Star of David. I forgot about the last one. You're hanging out promulgating anti-Zionist conspiracies on the uh the book club podcast. Way to go, Chip. I only remembered the plane and the buildings. I haven't looked at it since I was like 13. But it's it's hard to it's it's impressive that the guy managed to get this traction in a pre-online world when like what what was his channels? How yeah, the he he got the documentary made, and it sounds like that was relatively commercially successful, but like you just get your publisher to stick this book next to the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout. Like, how does this guy reach 70 million people in an era with before the internet? Yeah, I mean, I guess like if you get good distribution through a publisher, there's a lot more people reading for fun than that might not read it all now that are it's crazy to me though enjoy it. This guy made like his entire career is just this. There's just yeah, there's a there's a ton of these books. There's like 20 of them. There's one that came out in 2025 with a co-author, I guess, that he was writing before he Well, I mean he's a career fraudster, right? Absolutely but to do this for 55 years or whatever, 60 years of your life writing these things, that's crazy. Well, okay, what else are you gonna do? And not to be a charlatan, I guess. Yeah, you're right. He's like a Swiss waiter, essentially. He's not this guy isn't has like a you know a career in uh software development to fall back on. Yeah, well, it but it's like that old joke. It's like you write one book about ancient aliens. Um how does that joke go again? I don't know. We that was we covered that in Wet Goddess, I think. I think so. Um I just wanted to go back to uh a coup the things that I liked about the book. There's just a couple quotes that I thought were kind of funny. He's talking about uh Saxe Huaman, I think. I don't know. The giant steps. But he says this is part of a huge monolithic block weighing an estimated 20,000 tons. What Titanic first forces turned it upside down? And what did these steps lead to? A throne for giants, perhaps? And he'll just kind of throw this stuff out here and there. Maybe it was giants. I remember talking to a guy not not that long ago, um, that just somehow the pyramids came up extremely briefly, and he was like, Yeah, it must have been giants, it had to be giants. It permanently changed how I viewed that guy, like for the in my mind. Like, what do you mean it had to be giants? You're a fully grown man and you believe in giants. Like how giant, like sort of seven-foot African guys built it, or very big. I think he meant like Eric von Donnegan uh throne for giant giants. Like 100 meter tall kind of thing? I don't know how big they were, but they had to be able to move a monolithic block wing an estimated 20,000 tons. But you look that up, and then that stone only weighs like a fraction of 2.5 tons was the the average size block for the pyramids. It's still impressive because I was looking it up. He he got me, he piqued my interest on that one because if it took 20 years to build the pyramids and they were working 10 hours a day, they would have had to set a block every, I think, one minute and 45 seconds or so, um, which is a really impressive pace. Now, I'm sure they had tons of teams, and it's you know, you've got multiple people working on kind of multiple blocks at the same time. But it's still it still makes you go, hmm. Uh, but the conclusion you reach is not that aliens came down and built it. Or that there's giants. In fairness to him, though, he doesn't blame everything on giants. Like there's he talks about, like, as Chip just said, saxway him on like the big thing in Prub, but there's also like the really small one that's near it. And he describes that one. He says, What is this? A ruin for ants? So it's not all giants, it's also ants. Uh, if I if I could do a reading as well, um, I got a paragraph here. Uh, the and this this is his uh origin theory about how human beings came into uh to being. The spacemen artificially fertilized some female members of this species, put them into a deep sleep, so ancient legends say, and departed. Thousands of years later, the space travelers returned and found scattered specimens of the genus Homo sapiens. They repeated their breeding experiments several times until finally they produced a creature intelligent enough to have the rules of society imparted to it. The people of that age were still barbaric. Because there was a danger that they might retrogress and mate with animals again, the space travelers destroyed the unsuccessful specimens or took uh took with them to settle them on other continents. We know which con then. We know which one. This thing I guess was is worth touching on a little bit more. But yeah, he it's this believes that aliens um helped engineer humans, and there's this it it alludes to like a fairly like kind of Aryan sort of lost superior race notion. There's a part also in the book where he as a as an example, um, or as a hypothetical rather, he says that you know, imagine we created like a colony ship and went to another planet. What would we do when we got there? He's like, right away we'd meet the the the primitives that live there, we'd share uh basics about civilization, a select group of the scientists would start breeding with the local women to create a genetically superior race. And it's like that's what we do right away? That's his thought exercise right at the front of the book, isn't it? It's like he he treats it as like obviously, obviously, we're there's a lot of genetic engineering going on here. And it and that's that's that's and the other side of that coin is obviously like it's just the book is just this like complete disrespect for for ancient cultures or really humanity, generally speaking. The idea that people living anywhere could have any ingenuity, uh, could could create great works uh of their own volition and from their own um ambition and so on, right? So it's uh there's definitely a very like it's like kind of colonial, kind of just straight racist. I don't really know how to describe it, but it's uh it's it's certainly something. Yeah, it's it's mid-century Swiss German thinking. Yeah, I'm trying to say in a way that's not like racist myself, but he's kind of nailed it. No, but there's there's something weird about it because it's it's it's undermining like the proud ancient achievement of basically every non-European culture around the world, and everything that the rest of the world is able to do that Europeans didn't and couldn't. Well, I guess it was aliens, and I guess they came to bang the women. And like, you know, it's uh a little guy. I don't know if you guys want to look this up, but it's the maybe I'll share it. There's the Pakal sarcophagus that he talks about in this. Is this the one with the sliding top? Uh it's the one with because there's there's one he describes it has like a sliding top, and they opened it up and they found there was nobody inside, but all of the jewels were still in the chamber. So presumably the mummy had gotten up and walked away. No, this this is so this is the Palenque stone relief. This is uh the sarcophagus of the Mind King uh Pakal. And if anyone's listening, encourage them to just Google this uh and and take a look at it. Um, so it's really nice elaborate carvings um depicting him and you know all kinds of symbolism around it. And I just wanted to give like a read his description of this. And if you look at it while I'm reading it, like see if you see anything he's talking about here. This is one I kind of sat with for a while, giving him the benefit of the doubt, trying to see his interpretation. Von Danekin says, There sits a human being with the upper part of his body bent forward like a racing motorcyclist. Today any child would identify his vehicle as a rocket. Our space traveler, he is clearly depicted as one, is not only bent forward tensely, he is also looking intently at an apparatus hanging in front of his face. The astronaut's front seat is separated by struts from the rear portion of the vehicle, in which symmetrically arranged boxes, circles, etc. can be seen. And I was like, I'm just looking at this. I'm like, I don't see a rocket at all. I can see it. I gotta you're you gotta rotate it. You gotta rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. And then he's kind of sitting on like a rocket motorcycle. Oh, he's going sideways. He's going right to left. I mean, look, it doesn't look like let's be very clear. That's not what it looks like, okay? If if you said he was playing a pinball machine, I would have gone, oh yeah, he is playing a pinball machine. Looks to me like he's just bouncing around picking like a fruit or like a grape or something like that and sniffing a petal or something, like sniffing a flower petal. That's what he looks like he's doing to me. But it is sort of crotch rocket kind of pose, yeah, where he's like head over, you know, head of shoulders and ass. But it doesn't, I don't see rocket. But his his right leg is like lifted way up high to his chest, so that he can't be riding a rocket. It's funny that he said any child would identify this vehicle as a rocket, and Bo caught it immediately. Yeah, I do have no idea what that thing above him is, but this is the perfect example of his confirmation bias of just looking at something and seeing exactly what he wants to see. Because you really have to struggle to see that. But yeah, it uh technically some of it kind of fits, although it doesn't actually look like a like a spaceship or anything. There's there's nothing, yeah, if that's the conclusion that like you look at that, you're like, well, gotta be ancient aliens, then even if it I you grant him that it maybe it looks like a rocket, which I I don't really see, it doesn't, it still doesn't deserve the conclusion that well, it must have been some sort of alien came down and created a hybrid species by batting our women, yeah sending the feet off. And why would the astronaut be riding on the outside of the rocket? Yeah. Anyone else see the anyone else see the boobs at the bottom middle there? Boobs. Oh, yeah, nice. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people just see what they want to see. The only the one other quote I had from the book that I liked, very simple one. He says, the god Shemasi was from the third millennium BC. Depictions of him show stars and figures with particular headgear. He says, Why should ancient gods be associated with the stars? And it's like, I don't know. Like, why would people associate gods with the eternal bright lights shining down on humanity? It's kind of my final one, but that was the funniest, like ridiculous uh just asking questions question. It's like, why would people associate gods with the stars? Yeah, I have no idea, Eric. All right, well, Bo, you had your hand up earlier. Something else that you wanted to share about uh this meaty tome. I was just going to just something I thought was kind of funny, which is a in the Wikipedia page for Chariots of the Gods, if you scroll down to the bottom under Legacy, it says, you know, this book has influenced a lot of pop culture, including the Alien franchise, most notably Prometheus, the worst of the alien movies, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the worst Indiana Jones movie, and The Eternals, the worst MCU movie. It's kind of funny. And Ancient Aliens was sort of single-handedly destroyed the history channel. Yeah, that's yeah, no kidding. We we played a fun game

Is it worse than Hitler? V2

1:01:40

before that we retired, but maybe it's worth bringing back for this book. Uh, I've altered it slightly. Um so yeah, in the past, we did play the Is It Worse Than Hitler's book game, but we found that Hitler's book was too highly rated by the Goodreads community. So is this book higher or lower than the Unibomber Manifesto? Do we get to know what the Unibomber Manifesto rating is, or just that is it higher or lower? For the purposes of today's game, I'm gonna keep it secret for now. Two seminal tickets. I would think that the Unibomber has uh like is that Kazinski? No, is that Ted Kaczynski or is that the Bombay? Dr. Theodore Kaczynski. One doctor recognizes another doctor, of course. Yeah, of course. Um yeah, I I would bet that he's seen a resurgence in popularity lately with sort of the resurgence of the American right militant. Uh sorry, the American militant right. Um, perhaps. Yeah, I would bet that people are reading him and liking him. And I I would I wouldn't be surprised if if he was up in the fours in uh on Goodreads. And I bet Chariot of the Gods has got to be hovering down somewhere in the threes. So I'm I'm my vote is for Ted. Ted Theodore Logan. All right. We got one Unibomber. Yeah, I'd go Yumabomber. A lot of what he expresses in that is very anti-technology uh narrative, so I think that it may have had a resurgence for those reasons. So I think it might have a surprisingly good score on Goodreads. Jane? I'll flip it. Alright. So Chariots of the Gods coming in 17,000 reviews at 3.5 stars. That's described as a work of monumental importance. That's better than Hitler, in case anyone's curious. Better than Hitler. The Unibomber Manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, uh, 1971 Dr. Theodore Kaczynski book. 13,000 reviews, 3.8 stars. 3.8? Mm-hmm. Yeah, all right. What do you have to do to get a bad review around here? To to be fair, I think it is one of the more well-written of like the violent manifestos. Yeah. Um, this nice looking lady says, I expected this is the Unabomber manifesto, I expected this book to be a paranoid rant by a mad dog, but was pleasantly surprised. It's straightforwardly written. So yeah, maybe there is something to I I mean, I haven't read it, so I don't maybe it is a great book. Uh who knows?

Epilogue

1:04:27

Uh okay, anything else that uh we wanted to cover uh on ancient aliens, cherry to the gods? Nothing nothing else really from me. Um just like my final thought on it is that like in the end, he kind of you know, he's his whole ostensible goal here is to like dispense myths, but he ends up just creating more myths. Um and a really enduring one. And that's kind of a funny thing is that he doesn't understand how myths are developed, apparently, or why these things are meaningful to people, but he's really contributed to major ones today, and uh yeah, that's all it is. Well, if the goal of the person selecting the book is to choose a shitty book for the podcast, I'd say uh job well done, Chip. And thanks for leading us through that fascinating discussion, yeah. Music pairings. Did you do any music pairings? But you read audiobooks, so uh I started reading the regular book. I got about three chapters in before I switched to the audiobook. When I read these, like this book, I think a lot of 60s futurism. So I can't remember the name of the artist, but I put on this Spotify playlist of sort of moogue synthesizer sounds. Um sort of, I don't know, Wendy Carlos, like that's sort of like, but more ambient. There was also a Spotify playlist from Disney Imagineers, and so they've taken all of the soundscapes that you'd hear at Epcot Center, going through all those sort of like, you know, America of the future sort of rides they have at Epcot. And um yeah, it's uh I again I can't remember any of the the specific artists, but yeah, that's that's what I had put on because I thought we might have this conversation. I went uh I think that's a nice choice. I went not someone reading it at the time, but a guy reading it like today. So I went through a lateralis from Tool. Uh yeah. I thought it was a pretty good pairing. Uh, because I think that this book ultimately ends up being, or the ideas end up being digested, like one layer removed from it for most people. So I kind of went that approach. Um, and then maybe a guy that eventually tries to pick it up and read it and is incredibly disappointed at uh what a pile of shit it is. So everyone, please read the book. Uh if you believe in ancient aliens, you won't after reading this. All right. Well, uh having no further business, the chair will now entertain a motion to adjourn. Anybody? Yeah, yes. Sorry, whatever. Do we vote on do we vote yes on that? No. Fuck off. Yeah. Someone's gotta someone's gotta advance a motion. There's no motion on the table, and the chair can't put forward motions. Well, I gotta get going, so fuck you and your Robert's rules. All right, well, thanks so much for joining us. Uh, it's been great having all of you here in person and listening at home. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to attend the book club meeting. Tell us, so as I said before, we open up our voicemail lines, jump on them, tell us what you think, why we're idiots, why we got it all wrong. Hit up POSbookclub.com. We've got dozens of reviews live there. Visit our subreddit, our piece of shit book club. We've relaunched the YouTube channel. Help us out at POS Book Club on YouTube. And as ever, our email is open, POS Book Club at gmail dot com. Thanks so much for attending. Love having you with us. Your support keeps the book club going. Meeting adjourned.