We're running low on water, supplies, and then we're tired.   That's how long their journal said it would last. We got it from one of the prisoners. I heard. Don't you just love the Romans? I know I do. That's a short clip from a BBC documentary on ancient Rome, and that's Vespasian talking about those pesky Jews that he's trying to put down in the first vault in 66 AD. And most importantly, he's talking about that strange prisoner general, Josephus, who makes all these amazing predictions. Boy, oh boy, I don't know where to begin, folks. You're going to hear a lot on this history of Josephus, Vespasian, the fake, fake history that's told to us that can be demonstrated as fake and can be demonstrated has some deep, deep implications for what the real history probably was. It would take a long time to fill in all the gaps. And I can't really do it here. You're going to get bits and pieces like you normally do in the show. And maybe you can help guide me towards how we can compile this into something meaningful. Maybe you can even help. Maybe you know more about these topics than I do. There are many of you out there that I know have some very specialized knowledge. But I have a terrific interview to kick off this series. It's with a gentleman I really like and respect. And I think he's written a great book that you'll enjoy. And he certainly has a fascinating story to tell about the Romans in America in the second century. And he has, I would say, overwhelming archaeological evidence, at least compared to the mainstream historical narrative, which I gotta tell you when he get into this with Dave, but like one little story he tells is he has all this solid archeology that he's done, coins that he's found, forts that he's uncovered or the Army Corps of Engineers have uncovered, which date back to the second century, date back to being in the hands of the Romans and date back to having connections with Jewish people and what he faces in opposition to that research from the mainstream, the ordained history is unbelievably ridiculous. Like, again, I was gonna tell you this little story. Like one of the explanations from mainstream history in terms of how these coins from the second century wind up in the Ohio Valley is, well, maybe a bird flew over, you know, and had the coin in his beak and dropped it.  Maybe there was a flock of birds and they all had coins and they dropped them in and around the same place. Another explanation, this is from mainstream history in order to prop up the ridiculous narrative that they need to promote on this, is maybe a coin collector went to the beach, I can't even say it, and lost his coins on the beach and then they got washed up and they got found. Like, yeah, you know, hey, we're going to the beach, let me swing by my safe deposit by set the bank and pick up my collection of golden Roman coins. What's, you know, it's funny, except that this really is kind of what we sometimes square up against when we're dealing with mainstream history and religious history, which we'll get later into on this topic.   As I said, there's a lot more to come on this topic, but I hope you enjoy this one with Dave Brody. So there's a human element involved in this as well, but for whatever reason, I think the pieces fell together that day, it happened to be the right people making the right deal. There was enough treasure to grease the skids. They somehow knew where to go. Don't forget the Roman legions were comprised of the conquered Phoenician and Carthaginian groups. So they, you know, they're like the Borg and Star Trek. They basically, they just take everybody in and that becomes who they are. And so to the extent they would have, the 9th Legion, by the way, was based in the Iberian Peninsula. So they would have had plenty of members who have family experience as part of the Punic Wars and the Carthaginians and the Phoenicians and history of crossing the Atlantic and navigating all that. All those skills would have been part of the 9th Legion. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cacaris. And today we welcome David Brody to Skeptico. Dave is an attorney turned historical fiction writer, author of multiple Amazon best sellers and Boston Globe best sellers, including his latest, which is probably headed in that direction. I think, Romerica Roman artifacts in America, which is a great fiction story, but also is kind of wrapped around this history or this kind of forbidden history kind of thing that there's a lot of evidence, archeological findings and other historical evidence, highly suggestive of Romans being in America in second century. So this is kind of right up my recent interest in this ancient history. I'm of course interested in where that takes us in terms of consciousness and spirituality and some of these other things. But I was really, really impressed with Dave's work, particularly what he brings as an attorney, someone who's used to kind of sorting through evidence, translate as sorting through bullshit to get to the truth. So I just thought it was a great opportunity and I really enjoyed the book, which the book, by the way, I just pull it up. That's another one of those. Free read if you're on Kindle Unlimited. Now buy it, of course, buy Dave's book, but if you wanna read it for free and if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can do that too. So without any further, David Brody, welcome to Skeptico. Thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks, Axon. Thank you for the kind words. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. So tell us more about your background, who you are. Right, so I'm one of those, law school graduates, one of those lawyers who always wanted to be a fiction writer.  Those are sort of the three options for English majors. And I went to law school, but I'd always wanted to be a writer and over the years I would sit down on a weekend trying to do something. And finally, when my wife and I settled in, we had children, I started writing legal thrillers and I had written three of those legal thrillers and was looking around for an idea for a fourth one. This was 2005, 2006 kind of period living in the suburb of Boston, Westford, Massachusetts, looking for an idea for what I thought was going to be a fourth legal thriller. And my daughter came home from school one day in the fourth grade and said, and I said, what would you do today, of course? And she was young enough to actually give me an answer at that point instead of nothing, you know, she gave me the answer. And she said, we learned about the legend of Prince Henry Sinclair coming to America a hundred years before Columbus and coming to Westford, the town we lived in. And I was like, I had never heard of that, but it turns out there's a legend in our town of Scottish explorers, basically island hopping their way across the North Atlantic, much as the Norse had done in the early 11th century, coming down the coast from Nova Scotia down past Maine and up the Merrimack River and into the Merrimack Valley. And as the legend went, one of the guys in this group, his name was Gunn, James Gunn died. And to memorialize the death of this night, the group carved an effigy of a knight into the rock ledge top the highest hill in the area. And that effigy still exists today. And there's a, you know, tourist marker and people come and visit and basically carved into the ledge. You can faintly make out a knight. You can very clearly make out his sword, his battle sword. And that's the Westford Knight legend. And I started looking at other sites and artifacts that might be consistent with that legend. This is where the lawyer in me comes out. You talked about it earlier. To me, it's all about evidence. And if we're gonna have a legend like that, okay, legends are fun, but if we're gonna try to rewrite history and talk about Columbus being 100 years late to the party, then we should have other evidence. It's like trying to convince a jury of your case. You're not gonna be able to win the case with one piece evidence. But if you have six or seven really compelling pieces, you can win that case. And so I said, if they really were here, there should be other evidence for that. And so I went down that rabbit hole and quickly what I thought was gonna be my fourth legal thriller turned into a series of 11 historical fiction novels entitled The Templars in America series. And Romerica is the 11th in that series, really not having much to do with The Templars, but all of them relate to this whole concept of groups of European and Mediterranean explorers coming across the Atlantic prior to Columbus, the idea that the Atlantic Ocean was a highway and not a barrier. But as you said, it's all evidence-based. You've got these sites, you've got these artifacts, you've got these ancient maps, you've got pieces of evidence and either we pay attention to the evidence or we sort of ignore it and put our head in the sand and wonder why we can't see. And that's why I'm here today talking to you about this stuff. I'm very passionate about it. Well, that's awesome. And one of the things I really enjoyed about the book and I think other people will too, is you have all these links at the end. I don't know how many pages in Romerica, this latest book, but 50, 60, depends on if you're reading on Kindle, I don't know, but with all these links. So here are good historical links of ships around Plum Island. And boom, you can link to it and hear those are. So what you've really done here is combining, sifting through the archeological work, the good historical work that it's out there, but you're also pointing out some of the kind of shoddy historical work that's out there and particularly, I love the whole pre-Columbian idea. Because even the term pre-Columbian already kind of pigeonholes you as some kind of a conspiracy guy, going against the grain kind of thing, rather than just, hey, what is the evidence about the earliest visitors to the Americas? Yeah, you make a good point. So when I started doing this, I started lecturing probably 12 years ago on the subject. And at that time, most people were skeptical to the possibility of anyone here before Columbus. We all grew up with in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and we celebrate Columbus Day in October. But over the past dozen years, that ocean liner really has redirected itself. And now people like you say things like what you just said, which is, why are we even propping up that whole Columbus thing anymore? So in half a generation, we've actually made a lot of headway. And now people realize, yeah, the Norse were definitely here. To me, I always say to people, look, we know for a fact, the Norse were here in the early parts of the 11th century, Leif Erikson, all those Icelandic sagas, the Norse sagas, we know they were here. We know they came down at least as far as northern New Finland. And now most experts say that Lanso Meadows site, which is just a stopover point, they came down probably as far as Maine and New Brunswick, but we're sure of at least New Brunswick. So they're right on the doorstep of New England already. To me, it would be more surprising if over the next 500 years after the Norse were here, that nobody came back. That's way more surprising than the idea that people did. Like to me, it's 500 years, there's great reasons to come over here, trading, mining, whatever it was, economic advantage, lots of all the land, the land of plenty, there's plenty of great reasons for coming over here. And it's part of the human condition to seek out new life and new civilization, as Star Trek says. And so again, the idea that the Atlantic Ocean was a barrier during medieval times and before, that's a fiction that the church wanted people to be afraid of falling off the edge of the earth if they crossed the Atlantic. But that was because they wanted to maintain control. They didn't want people exploring and being scientific, but most educated people understood that the earth was round and that there were other lands across the Atlantic. And this goes back to ancient Atlantis and whatever, it goes way back. But again, to me, the takeaway, the surprising thing would have been if nobody came back between the Norse and 1492, that's almost 500 years, that would be surprising to me. Well, what I think is kind of really interesting where you went there a couple of ways, Davis, one, you're pushing it way back. At least it seems to us you're pushing it way back and we'll dive into that in a minute because you're pushing it back to the second century and you're pushing it back to Rome. But let me just throw in a couple of things that I picked up from another interview that I heard you do because you have a kind of broad knowledge of all this stuff that I wanna kind of tap into. And that's that we've kind of moved from one kind of wacky paradigm that we shouldn't look before Columbus and we've moved off of that. And now we've moved to the, oh, okay, we can look to kind of the medieval period like you're saying and the Norse did it. But we wanna stop there when really we have no reason to stop there. Like you point out the Phoenicians who are the people in Lebanon, right? And they were great seafarers and they kind of sailed all around in boats bigger than Columbus. You could also point out that the whole Easter Island thing, I mean, that's a harder ocean to cross and you got all that and then you got all the connections in South America. You also got all this other archeological evidence and archeological evidence that's popped up with, you know, Pompey is showing up with cannabis and with cocaine and with other products that only come from the Americas. As are even, you go back to the Egyptians and the mummies, they're finding cannabis and cocaine.  And so you kind of bust through that in kind of a really direct way and just say, well, clearly that's all out the window. I'm gonna focus on second century and the reason you focus on it is because, you know, I didn't really bust through the door like you just said, I really, I sort of went through it very slowly as when it gets to the second century. So as I've been doing the research over the past 14 years about the medieval stuff, periodically I would find sites and artifacts that were older than that. We'll talk about a lot of them as we go along today. And I would set them aside and say, that's an interesting curiosity. It's an outlier or a one off or whatever it might be. And at a certain point about a year ago, I started looking at my pile of outliers and started realizing that an awful lot of them are second century Roman. Like more than you would expect to just have random. And I started saying, huh. And it was about the same time, my wife and I relocated to the North Shore of Massachusetts. And I started learning about all the Roman era coins that had been found after major storms in the area. People got metal detect out on a barrier island in Plum Island. And as you showed earlier, a link to shipwrecks. There's so many shipwrecks off of Plum Island. And I said, geez, all these Roman coins, where are they coming from?  Maybe there's a Roman era ship out there that got disturbed during a storm and coins that were sort of nestled in them got freed up and washed ashore. And that would explain why six or seven different places along the North Shore have people have found these Roman era coins around the second century. So again, there's evidence. And if we have evidence, we either have to throw it away and say it's not credible. But if we do think it's credible, and in this case, I did think it was credible, there has to be a story behind it. How did it get here and why? And again, to go back to your question, it took me a while, but I suddenly realized that there's a lot of it that is second century that I haven't been able to explain. And so now looking at it sort of freshly and saying, okay, maybe all the second century evidence tells a story and that's how I ended up with the book, Romerica. And again, I might have the details of that story wrong. I'm gonna have the story wrong, but there is a story to be told here. There is real evidence, real artifacts that have been scientifically proven to date back to the Roman era. There has to be an explanation for how they got here. They didn't swim across themselves. Well, it's a fun story, if you will. It's a fun book put in a narrative and it's storytelling and you kind of bounce back and forth between saying, stay with me for the story. It'll be fun, but what I'm really trying to do is sprinkle in all this important new history and archeological stuff. So talk a little bit about the story. It is part of a series, but it's not like somebody has had to read a bunch of the other books in the series. Talk about the book itself. You read this one first, I have a guessing. You didn't read the other ones, I assume. You didn't do that time. Yeah, so it designed to be standalone. And basically the story, I was told as a young author that the best way to be successful as a writer is to write in the genre that you like to read in. And I love to read historical fiction, Clive Custler, the thrillers based on historical artifacts, Da Vinci code type things. So I try to write in that genre too. So people say, well, why don't you write nonfiction, all these artifacts, all this history? And my response is I think it's more fun to have a little spoonful of sugar as you're taking your historical medicine. And history can be fun, but can also be exciting. It can be a roller coaster ride. You can have really fun time with it. And that's what I try to do with this. You'll get plenty of history. You earlier, Alex showed that all the footnotes at the end, my law professors are really happy with me for putting footnotes at the end and my sources and stuff. Most fiction writers don't do that. But I want the readers to understand that the history and the sites and the artifacts that I'm writing about, they're real and they're authentic, even though the story that carries a reader through the journey, the story itself is fictional, but the history that we're learning about is real. And so that's one of the reasons why I put the artifacts, the footnotes at the end. And I also put, as you mentioned, pictures of all the sites and pictures of all the artifacts in because I want the readers to understand, these are real. We're looking at the terracotta, if we're looking at a terracotta head for Mexico, I want the readers to see that. I'm not making that up. And when I say it dates back to a certain date, luminescence testing tells its second century, I'm not making that up. And that's why I put those footnotes in there because, again, even though the story itself is fictional, the historical parts of the story are authentic and real. Yeah, I was just popping up on the screen and maybe you want to talk through. You have a number of interesting photographs in the book and then you also sent me some additional ones, coins that have been found. And we'll talk about this. This is a fort shaped like a Medora, right? We've got a menorah and a oil lamp. That's a fort that was, and this is a drawing from the Army Corps of Engineers from 1823. And this is a fort, they call it fort works. Basically, the fort itself is no longer there, but you can see that where the outline of the Palisades would have been and whatnot, the outline of the old fort. This is 1823 in Ohio. And for folks, just let me just interject, for folks who can't see it because most people listen to this show and don't watch it, but the menorah is clearly, clearly can't be anything else in this drawing. And even the lamp can't be anything else. So this is going to kind of launch us into a really interesting discussion. But again, I just wanted to emphasize, 1824, Army Corps of Engineers, where did you find this document? The internet's a great thing. I mean, a generation ago, Alex, I couldn't have done this research. It would have been impossible just, you would have to go down to Washington, DC and crawl your way through the stacks and microfission and whatnot, but everything's been digitized now. And so if you want to look at Army Corps of Engineers drawings, you can go find them. And it really has made, I get the question all the time, how come we're just learning about second century Roman occupation or exploration of America? And I think the answer is, the clues have always been out there, but no individual researcher has been able to put their hands around more than one or two pieces of it because it was also scattered and spread out now with the internet, someone like myself can come along and I can find 15 or 20 artifacts and sites in the matter of a few weeks on the internet, whereas 30 years ago, it would have taken me decades to do that. Yeah, that's cool. I mean, totally, I think there's another reason for it. It's the obvious reason is that, there's a narrative that people are following. And if I want to switch a little bit from talking about this excellent book that I really do want people to check out, Romerica, because the research I think you'll find, if you're at all intrigued by this point, half an hour into this interview, then you gotta read the book because it's all there, all the links are there, all the information's there. But I wanna try and pull Dave in a little bit of a different direction for selfish reasons for this project that I'm doing because what intrigued me about Romerica was second century Rome and this strange relationship that it reveals about the relationship between the Roman military and kind of a breakout of that, the relationship between Judea and Rome. But also before we even get there, I wanna go back to what you just said. I'm really suspicious because of my investigation science is that to the extent to which this narrative is intentionally being controlled, which is really kind of obvious, we talked about the pre-Columbian thing, but even controlled in the sense that you couldn't have written this. I'm not so sure you could have written this as a non-fiction book, but certainly if you were an academic historian, you couldn't have written it. And what does that say about just the state of academia in general? I've been more on the hard sciences, but in the soft sciences, it's even worse. I mean, it's just really kind of controlled, completely controlling the narrative. You're 100% right about that. I could not have written this as an academic type unless I wanted to basically commit professional suicide. I would have been laughed out of the faculty lounge whatever university I would happen to be working at at the time. And what's really telling, I belong to an organization called New England Antiquities Research Association. And what we do, we go out in the woods and do this research. We look for these ancient sites and artifacts, and there's a few hundred people, at least in our organization, four or 500 people, and very, very, very, very few of them, probably a minuscule number of them are actual historians or archeologists. Most of them are people like myself who do this as a hobby because we're passionate about it, but the people trained in history and archeology want nothing to do with this. And this goes back to what you said, is they're sort of indoctrinated into these ideas. They learn them going through college. They are punished for thinking outside of that box. I'm gonna say punished. They're not allowed to do with thesis on that subject. If they do, they're not gonna be hired or get tenure. They're basically hurt it along in a certain way to think the way their professors are thinking. And it's hard to break out of that. And I don't think it's necessarily because there is a conspiracy to keep the reality and the truth away from us. I don't think that's what's happening. I think instead it's just basic human nature that people have staked out a position, academics have staked out a position that certain things are the truth and certain things are reality, and they don't wanna be proven wrong because they don't wanna have egg on their face. And so they dig in their heels.  Again, it's not because there's a great conspiracy, but mostly just because people are selfish and don't want to have egg on their face, like I said. We don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but to me, the evidence of the conspiracy is evident in what you just said in that at the middle management level that you're talking about, yeah, there's no conspiracy. I control your job, dude. I control your tenure. I control what conferences you go to or don't go to. It doesn't have to look like a conspiracy to you.  But at a level above that, which you just, as you just talked about, you said the church wanted to control the narrative because they wanted to be in control. Well, that's conspiratorial and it clearly is right now as more and more it gets revealed today about how completely corrupt the church is, but we don't ever wanna call the church on that. You know, we still have to walk carefully. In science, you know, my thing has been this idea of controlling the narrative about consciousness, that there can be no extended consciousness, that any kind of spiritual experience that people are having is completely a delusion. It doesn't happen. And the holding to that in the face of all evidence, to the contrary, is conspiratorial. It's a way to control and social engineer people. So I think this idea of when you look through the all this stuff from the social engineering lens and start accepting that, and this is Rome. This is what I love about Rome is that, you know, the Romans knew this 2000 years ago, that when you, about social engineering, about controlling the people as an alternative to dominating the people through war, we can dominate the people through beliefs and ideas and stuff like that. So we don't have to kind of agree on that or don't have to hash that out any further because let's get back to kind of the book a little bit indirectly. And that's that this story about second century, Rome and Judea is just, it's a phenomenal, phenomenally important to our history, to our present day history because it's all about the forming of Christianity. It's all about the control of the Jewish tradition and the Jewish religion and why it gets pulled along in the whole thing. And it also points to a different way that the Romans thought about these different evolving religious ideas and religious traditions. So enough of me going on, what did you find out that is so stunning about this second century Romans? Right, so I mentioned earlier in the interview that there was a number of sort of pieces of evidence that I found that were clustered around the second century that I put aside over the years and eventually came back to in writing this book. And one of them was a researcher in Indiana by the name of Rick Osman, about 10 years ago wrote a book about how he had come across and documented a bunch of Roman era fortifications in the Ohio River Valley. And he came up with a theory that in the second century, and this is true historians, this is mainstream historians, that the ninth Roman legion, which was stationed at Hadrian's Wall between England and Scotland in the second century. For some reason that legion, which is probably 10,000 people, essentially disappeared. No one's quite sure what happened to that legion. And Rick Osman speculated that perhaps that these forts in the Ohio River Valley were related to the legion that for some reason he didn't really put a finger on it. The legion decided to cross the Atlantic, either they were blown off course or they came over here for a reason and ended up being the reason why there's so many Roman era artifacts and fortifications and coins in the Ohio River Valley. I took a little further, I did a little more research and I found that after leaving Hadrian's Wall in the early parts of the second century, the ninth legion actually was redeployed to Jerusalem and then disappeared. What they were doing in Jerusalem was putting down something called the Barkhaka uprising, Barkhaka revolt. This is about 132 AD. You'll listen if you may remember that in about 70 AD, we had something called King Herod's War, where Herod put down the rebelling Jews and the Temple of Solomon was destroyed, the rebuilt Temple was destroyed. About 70 years later, the Jews rose up again. And this time led by Simon Barkhaka, freedom fighter, Barkhaka being Hebrew for son of the star or also known as the comet, which is another word for son of the star. And the slogan for this uprising was a comet for the Jews, Barkhaka comet for the Jews, that was the slogan. So one of the possibilities, and we also know by the way that during this uprising, we know this from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls called the Copper Scroll of Huron, which is actually not, most of the scrolls are partially, this was on copper, and this scroll lists 70 or so locations of hidden temple treasure. Basically as the Romans came in to put down the rebellion, the priestly families who were in charge of the temple. So we better hide our treasures and our gold furnishings and whatever, before the Romans come, and we'll retrieve them later. And so they made this list carved into the copper as to where these things were, in case they weren't around to tell the survivors where to find all this stuff. So one of the possibilities is, I'm taking this whole scene, the ninth legion goes to Jerusalem, puts down the revolt, at some point all the Jews are being either murdered or sold into slavery, and the priestly family say, time out, hold on, ninth legion, hold on guys, wait, we got a deal for you. We've got about $1.5 billion, that's in today's money, worth of temple treasure. And we want to get out of here. We need our lives saved. If you take us with you out of Europe, out of the Mediterranean, away from the emperor, we'll give you the 1.5 billion. And that I thought may explain how they ended up collectively, the Romans and the Jews. We have Roman artifacts, and we have Jewish artifacts. Again, the Hanukkah Fort, there's no reason for the Romans to build something like that. And when you have other artifacts, we can look at also. But that would collectively explain how we have Roman and Jewish artifacts in the Ohio River Valley in the second century. So that's, again, that's the fiction writer in me, putting pieces together. And that's speculative. I can't say for certain that happened. And that's why I say, something happened, I'm not sure if I have it right, but that's definitely a possibility. The pieces of evidence support that possibility. Dave, what have you found out about the relationship between the Romans and the various Jewish groups, the groups in Judea? Because a lot of people don't understand this, but Judea, like all these clients, states in the Roman Empire, there's a lot of kind of Vichy France thing going along, like, hey, the Romans aren't so bad and look at all the good things and hey, let's give unto Caesar. What is Caesar's kind of thing? So it's not like, so they have their rebellion flank and then they have their Herod, give unto Caesar. So what is in this time period at this second revolt, what do you, did you dig up anything interesting about the relationship there? Because what you're speculating about is, to me doesn't even sound like a timeout, timeout. It sounds like a, hey guys, here's an idea kind of thing, you know? Well, so the relationship with the Romans and the Roman Empire and the Jewish group, this is all during a time period where, and the reason why Jesus was able to start preaching and be welcomed as a potential Messiah, the prophecies where this was a time period where a Messiah would be coming. And so it's a lot of upheaval and right around this time period. And so there were different factions of Jewish groups all looking for different things.  And you know, it's a mess right now. It's a time of upheaval. And so we see these constant uprisings. Again, Herod's uprising and then Barca's uprising. By the time Barca's uprising is over, basically there are no Jews left in Jerusalem. That's the end of it. But at the same time, we lose all the temple treasures like the stuff that was supposed to be in Jerusalem, the golden menorah, the Ark of the Covenant, the table of true bread, the Aaron's rod, the pot of manna, if you want to go to Christian side of things, the holy grail, the cross of Jesus was crucified on it. None of those things ever been found again. So the Jews leave at around this time period, but so do all the artifacts, the religious artifacts from Judaism and Christianity. And some of them ended up back in Rome. Can I interject a question there? Sure. And I just don't know this. What do we think happened to all those super valuable Jewish artifacts during Titus's sacking of Jerusalem? Some of it gets bring back and brought back to Rome and they parade down. We've got the Arch of Titus which shows the carving. I think you just said that of some of the artifacts. But even those ones seem to have disappeared, but that's not all of them. That was the main one being the temple of true bread and the golden menorah. And I use the golden menorah as sort of a plot device in my story because that's never been found. No one knows where that is. But others of them, the rumors have it that the Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia. There was a story a couple of weeks ago about a militia group attacking the church in rural Ethiopia trying to capture the Ark. And I've always laughed at that because if you know the World War II history and you know how obsessed Hitler was with finding the Ark of the Covenant. And we all saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and that's basically the Nazis trying to find the Ark of the Covenant. Mussolini controlled Ethiopia during World War II. If the Ark of the Covenant was in Ethiopia in World War II, Mussolini's forces would have found it and given it to Hitler. I mean, there's no doubt about that. So I don't believe that the Ark is in Ethiopia being guarded by a handful of priests. That just doesn't make any sense to me. If it's not there, you know, where is it? There's evidence that the Portuguese in medieval times went down to Ethiopia and may have taken it. But again, where did it go after that? So part of what makes writing fiction so much fun is because there's all these treasures that have never been found and everyone loves a good treasure hunt. Everyone goes, you know, the Curse of Oak Island on History Channel. Everyone watches that because everyone wants to find the treasure. And so one of the fun things I do in my books is, you know, I weave these in. Is the golden menorah, is it in play? Is the Ark of the Covenant in play? You know, are we gonna find those things? The Holy Grail, whatever it might be. Because I think that's, you need, if you're gonna have characters motivated to do, you know, really extraordinary things, you need to have extraordinary high stakes. You need to have high stakes. People aren't gonna do extraordinary things over, you know, 20 bucks.  Well, that's certainly the line that you're going down. Let me just kind of bounce a couple of things off you that I've been working on and kind of investigating at the very early stages. And I don't have nearly the depth of knowledge that you do. So I'm just kind of stumbling through this, but I'm kind of intrigued by what you said because I think sometimes we misunderstand the Roman agenda as it's being disclosed to us. Like Josephus, I think is a super interesting character, obviously in that first uprising, right? And Josephus is there and supposedly he's this Jewish general who fights bravely against the Vespasian who comes in and he stands them off at a siege and then he goes into commit suicide. The story always gets really flaky at this point. And invariably, historians leave the most important part of the story out. And that's that Josephus goes into the cave, they all commit suicide.  I just had a revelation.   Come along and write this history down for us because we don't know how to write it. You're the only guy who can write it. I mean, this whole thing is just preposterous. Go ahead. I love the book talking about this. If you get a chance, it's called The Secret Society of Moses by Barbiero. But yeah, exactly what you were saying there were, how convenient is it for Josephus that they draw lots and everyone's gonna kill themselves in the order of their lot. And he's the last guy standing and like he's the last one.  And essentially what I think happened in this book talks about it and what you hinted at, he basically cuts a deal. This is back to, again, Josephus is part of the priestly family and they're the guardians of the temple treasure. And you can ransom yourself out of a lot of predicaments if you've got enough money. And I think what happened is Josephus said to Vesuvius, us to Vespicius, sorry, that I've got this temple treasure and you need it if you wanna become emperor. Here it is. Let me come back to Rome with you and eventually he was adopted into the royal family, right? Josephus was, even though he was supposed to be a Jewish freedom fighter, all of a sudden he's adopted into the family and the treasure is used to bring about the next emperor. And so the deal is made. That's a great point, David. You just added something really cool to that about the treasure. So I'm so glad you did that. But here's the other thing I wanna kind of throw on the table and see what you think. Cause everyone leaves this out. Josephus not only says, Vespasian, you're gonna be the next emperor, which is supposedly prophecy, but he also says the most important thing in terms of the social engineering conspiracy kind of thing, which it just clearly is.  At 14 years old, I was in the temple kind of talking down to the priest, telling him what it is. Cause I knew the Jewish law so completely, which he kind of contradicts himself later in his works cause he doesn't really even know the Jewish law. He's just talking about it. But he wants his readers to think that he's this kind of super Jew from a very exclusive family. And he's seen all the different tribes of Israel and he knows there's the zealots and he gets along with all of them. It all builds up because what he says in more of the Jews is that I now understand that our tradition, all our prophecies point to Vespasian as the Messiah. And this is super important. And it's buried because again, it's one of these things that doesn't fit in the story because like you gave a very kind of worldly explanation for the negotiation he might have done which is awesome about going to get the treasure. But we also have to look at from a spiritual standpoint, right? This is after all a spiritual guy who's speaking to a spiritual religious group. And he's saying, and he never backs down from this. He's saying Vespasian is the Messiah. He's saying all of our Jewish traditions should be rewritten so that Vespasian and the emperor, and this I think is really a turning point for the whole thing because it points to me clearly an attempt to socially engineer, to kind of quell the masses, to re-engineer their religion as a way of controlling that. Do you remember coming across that in Josephus? Because I can send you obviously the exact class. So I'm more cynical about it than you are. Because I think Josephus basically, he got religion or spirituality because he was on the verge of having to commit suicide. The rest of that story, not only did he save himself, but he was able to convince the Romans to free about 200 of his friends and family. Again, these people were all ready to be executed. They were in prison camps or whatever.  And they're all free. And they all get to go back to Rome with him. So I think what happened was, you know, he sold his soul in that situation. It wasn't a spiritual transformation. It was basically self-preservation. He said, my only chance to get out of this predicament with my friends and family, by the way, we can all go back to Rome and start over again. Is I got to sell this guy Vespasian on the belief that I think he's the next, the prophesied one, whatever. And make it happen. And once I do make it happen, now all of a sudden I'm the favorite son. And it turns out he was. He was adopted into the family. He was given his own chalet. He gets to write his histories. And, you know, things are great, but I guess I'm more cynical about it. I don't think it was spiritual as much as it was self-preservation. Well, kind of saying the same thing kind of a different way, but maybe not exactly. Because if you take the cynical approach and say that it wasn't a genuine spiritual transformation, which I would agree with you, then I think it's hard to not say that it was engineered by the Romans. Because this is what the Romans did, right? With every territory. They'd go in and they'd co-op the people's religion.  It turns out you have these gods. We have kind of the same God. So, you know, we're really not that different after all. So the idea of this co-opting of your most sacred beliefs as a way of controlling you is kind of well-established. So I think that that becomes the only way to understand Josephus, is that he's writing on behalf of the Romans. Because otherwise he has no, he really has no reason to do this or maybe put it a different way. The benefits for Rome, for the potential of doing this are just fantastic. I think one of the reasons that we don't quite grab onto it so much is it's a failed proposition, right? Even though they bring over, that he brings over his 200 and they probably bring over 50,000 slaves, there isn't this mass conversion to this new idea that this Bayesian is the Messiah. The Jews don't leave their religion in masses as the second revolt says. But I think to understand it as anything less than an attempt to engineer the religion, to co-opt it, to me, that's kind of self-evident. What do you think? Yeah, no, I agree. I don't think you and I disagree very much on this at all. I think we're basically on the same page. In the end, it didn't work. I think partly because this Bayesian died so quickly after that. And partly because it's hard to convince people that there's a new, it's one thing to convince somebody that there's a prophecy that he's supposed to be the next emperor. It's another thing when you take the next leap into the Messiah. And I know that other Roman leaders tried to do that, but that's a tougher leap. And it worked like Jesus was able to accomplish it. It was a time period for this kind of thing to have happened. I don't think you and I are too far apart. Yeah, and the whole thing about Jesus, which I don't want to get into because it kind of distracts from the whole conversation. But I think this part does cause us to look at the Jesus narrative differently as well because now they've tried it. They've tried engineering the religion. It doesn't work. In the New Testament and the gospels, we wind up with a lot. Josephus is all over the place, right? Josephus' historical accounts now show up as prophecy. Jesus is saying line for line almost, right out of the war with the Jews, only now it's coming out as prophecy rather than an historical account. So what the scholars will say, the biblical scholars will say is the gospels are dependent on Josephus. It looks like they had access to Josephus, at least during some rewrites of them that cause it's so closely tied to Josephus. But in order to kind of shift it back to your book, Romerica and what you're speculating about in terms of the second uprising in the second century, what do we think is, how big of an uprising is it? Because the other thing I'm kind of stumbling across is that like Josephus when he writes that, I think he has a tendency to exaggerate how big of a deal it was.  I mean, so first of all, hard numbers. Do you know how many Roman legions they sent into Jerusalem to put down the second rebellion? I think there were eight or nine. So that would be 80 or 90,000 troops, the ninth legion being one of them. So what you said is totally correct.  I mean, we saw that in the first rebellion with the assault on the Mossad, the desert fortress out in the high, eventually they just built a ramp and mowed them over, but it takes time. And so, and again, that's what happened during the Barca uprising is that eventually you just can't fight them off any longer. They're too massive a force, too well-trained. I do wanna just circle back for a second back to some of the evidence about, we talked about the Hanukkah Fort, but there's also a fascinating artifact in Tennessee which ties us all together. I don't wanna get off before we're done. And that's something called the Bat Creek Stone. If you remember, I said that the battle cry for the Barca revolt was a comet for the Jews. And there's a stone carving that was found by a Smithsonian archeologist in the late 1800s that was displayed at the Smithsonian upside down for a number of decades because I thought it was Cherokee script. It was found in a burial mound and it was carbon dated artifacts with it. There we go. We're carbon dated back to the second century.  That's paleo Hebrew, second century Hebrew. And that says a comet for the Jews. And so this was like a huge thing because I had known about this artifact for quite a while and it's always been one of those outliers. But now we've got the actual Barca uprising battle cry carved on an artifact in the Ohio River Valley that we know dates back to the second century. We've also got coins in the Ohio River Valley that are Roman, including in particular a Barca uprising coin. Those are the ones from the North Shore of Massachusetts. I'm not sure if I gave you a picture of the, those are also North Shore but there's an actual Barca coin. So we have not just Roman artifacts in the Ohio River Valley but we have very specific artifacts that tie exactly to the Barca uprising. And to me that's what, that's what sort of pushed us over the edge. It's like, wow, we don't only have Roman stuff but we have second century Judea stuff that also the, the, the, the Decalogue. So the Ten Commandments don't, again, the Ten Commandments written around this. It's almost like a channel clicker like thing. It says the Ten Commandments and Moses in it. But again, there's no reason for the Romans to have fashioned these artifacts or had to have been Jews with them. And so we have these Jewish artifacts, again, carbon dating, the stand to the second century tells us exactly when that was carved. Okay, so Dave, let's start pulling together some of the pieces. This is fun and it's kind of on the fly and I've just picking your brain because you know this stuff. I feel like anywhere I go, you're going to have like 10 new ideas. So the ninth legion shows up and I even want to say like, one of the things that's interesting in that and that when you start studying it, you immediately, it ties back into this Atlantic barrier, right? These guys are floating all around, you know, one day they're up in Scotland, the next thing up, redeploy over to Jerusalem. Okay, no problems down. I mean, yeah, that's a tough trip. Yeah. I mean, it's like, no, it's not crossing the Atlantic, but you know, it's like just to, just to have kind of a routine redeployment. It's not like the end of the world to move the ninth legion down there, but what I really wanted to ask you. And that's why it took the Romans so long to put these rebellions down.  Eventually you're going to win, but it just takes a while to get everything together. So yeah, go ahead, sorry. No, no, exactly. Because this time thing is super important as you point out. The other thing about that, like you said, is that, you know, the people in the know, the upper class, the ruling class, the give unto Rome, what is Rome, playing the smart moves. Like you said, they're looking this and that, okay, they're going to mow us down, right? So that's going to happen. How do you think it works out if there are eight or nine legions there? Number one, do you really, do you think that might be a bit of an exaggeration? Do you think there's any chance that the ninth legion either gets there first and kind of makes a deal? Or because how would they make a deal with all the other legions being there? Is there another part of that story maybe that we're not getting? You know, I don't know, we're speculating here, but I think it's, you know, somebody has got to be the legion that happens to take the temple while other legions are doing mop up duty in the suburbs and other legions are out at Masada or whatever, you know, it's just, somebody's got to be the legion that happens to be there that day. And the priestly families are cowering in the corner saying, time out, we're going to waving our white flag, saying, we surrender, we want to make a deal. And now the deal is, okay, let us live and we've got access to all this gold and silver and treasure, and we want to buy our freedom, you got to take us with you. And then it requires somebody in that ninth legion to say, deal, as opposed to no way we're bringing it back to the emperor. So there's a human element involved in this as well. But for whatever reason, I think the pieces fell together that day. It happened to be the right people making the right deal. There was enough treasure to grease the skids. They somehow knew where to go. They had either blown off courts earlier or somehow knew about this land across the Atlantic. Somebody had maybe been there. Maybe, don't forget the Roman legions were comprised of the conquered Phoenician and Carthaginian groups. So they're like the Borg and Star Trek. They basically, they just take everybody in and that becomes who they are. And so to the extent they would have, the ninth legion, by the way, was based in the Iberian Peninsula. So they would have had plenty of members who have family experience as part of the Punic Wars and the Carthaginians and the Phoenicians and history of crossing the Atlantic and navigating all that. All those skills would have been part of the ninth legion. So, yeah, again, this is speculative. The pieces that we spoke together. No, no, it's great. Can you speak to the independence of the different legions? Again, this is kind of an interesting time period. So Vespasian follows Nero and not directly because in between Vespasian and Nero is this famous, the Four Embers in a year kind of thing which we all kind of gloss over and we talk about these eras like you were talking about the Obama, Trump, Biden era. These are completely different people at all this but with our lens, we kind of just put them all down as one thing. But imagine four different embers in a year and when Vespasian takes over, I know I'm going back a little bit but this is the part that I know, it's a military thing, right? His soldiers kind of promote him because in the streets of Rome, there's basically these different legions fighting over who is going to control and who is going to take power. So what have you learned about particularly, the ninth legion, are they these kind of breakaway, kind of do-it-our-own-way kind of guys? Does it fit, does what you're suggesting fit their personality? One point on Vespasian, the reason his soldiers are so loyal to him is because he was able to pay them. A lot of times these guys don't get paid, all of a sudden he's got the temple treasures, he can start handing out bonuses and everyone's like, yeah, Vespasian, okay. So that makes sense, right? You follow the money, okay. As far as the ninth legion goes, the ninth legion had been stationed in England for a couple of generations. I don't know the number of decades, many decades. And so many of them were English in the sense that they spoke Welsh. They had quote-unquote English cultural attributes and whatnot. And so when they go off to the Middle East to put down the rebellion, they have no interest in staying there. They probably have no real ties to Rome at that point. They've been generations worth of them. They've married local women in England. Their kids have been raised in England. Maybe they've been raised in England. So they're already inclined to go back and not stay in the Mediterranean area because they're basically English. And what we find when we get to America, in the Ohio River Valley, not just Roman stuff, we find artifacts with Welsh writing on it. And Welsh armor, Welsh skeletons. So we find a lot of stuff that ties back to England because that's where the ninth legion was based and a lot of their cultural attributes were English or Welsh. And so that, again, that part of the story ties together. But it goes back to your question, which is the ninth legion, even though they're quote-unquote Roman, doesn't mean they're Italian. It just means they're part of the sombrella that was the Roman Empire, which essentially encompassed all of Europe and the Middle East and Northern Africa. I mean, it's huge. So to be Roman back then really just meant part of an empire, but that wasn't your ethnicity necessarily. So Dave, we could go on and on and I could try and pepper you with questions and learn more and more. But as far as the book, Romerica, Roman Facts in America, which again is a great read and you can get the Kindle version for five bucks or unlimited. If you're Kindle unlimited, you can actually read it for free. You can check out all of these. I don't want you to, authors make a nice royalty even when readers do it from Kindle unlimited. I don't know if you knew that or not, but... Yeah, yeah. I mean, different as to whether people buy the Kindle or read it on Kindle unlimited. I basically make the same. So not that I do this necessarily for the money. I try to make these books affordable, but you're not taking anything out of an author's pocket if you read it on Kindle unlimited. Great, great to know. I thought it was a little bit less, especially... Marginally, it's not a big difference. Okay, great. So please do check out Dave's work, all those other great books. What else do we want to tell people? Do we want to leave them with in terms of Romerica? I realize we haven't talked about it. I think we talked about it a lot, but what else do we do to talk to you? That's a lot of it, sure. Sure. Yeah, so as you said, Kindle or paperback version, I try to keep them affordable. As you said, 15 bucks for the paperback and less than five bucks for the Kindle. I can make a lot more money practicing law if that's what I was doing it for. You know, that's not my agenda, but I am passionate about this and I do want other people to start focusing in on the idea that the history that we've been taught really isn't as accurate as it could be in that there are waves of explorers who've been crossing the Atlantic long before Columbus. I think that's an important part of understanding who we are and what the world history is. So I always want to sort of make that commentary at the end, but I'd love to hear from readers if you have any feedback, if you have questions, if you have artifacts. I think one of the things we didn't talk about today, I'll talk real quickly, is just two days ago, I got an email from a guy down in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia who found an ancient ironworks facility there and he carbon dated the bricks. He did luminescence testing on the bricks, second century. And he was already convinced that they were Roman and this guy came back second century. And he was all excited because my research book ends his and I'm all excited because there's another artifact. And so, you know, readers, if you read my stuff and you've got stuff in your backyard, give me a call, let me know because it might all fit together. Another puzzle piece added to the gestalt there. Yeah, absolutely. I'd go so far as to say, this is the future of really the breakthrough work in this area. And we have to kind of recondition ourselves and say goodbye to academia because every once in a while, they'll stumble on something and it'll trickle out of their corrupt machine. But really this is the way that information is gonna come out. And I think we just need to change our focus and not be so surprised, you know, oh my God, Dave Brody, an attorney has written this. We have to go, no, the other systems completely corrupt and completely rigged to project a certain narrative. So yeah, that's where you would expect it to come out. Yeah, you know, the Launceau Meadows site in Northern Newfoundland, they were amateur archeologists. He was an attorney that, you know, they had to drag the mainstream archeology community kicking and screaming up there. You know, they wouldn't didn't want to come look at it, but it seems to be, like you said, it seems to always be the amateurs who are pushing the envelope on this and the professionals who are getting dragged along, you know, hesitantly. But yeah, I think you're right about that, Alex. I think this is the way, this kind of research is the wave of the future. Dave, great work and thanks again so much for joining me on Skeptico, it's been great. My pleasure, you're a great host. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. Thanks again to Dave Brody for joining me on Skeptico. Check out his book, Romerica. I think you really enjoyed it. It's a great read and as I mentioned, lot of great historical references and links if you have the Kindle version, you just tap and you can write over to the real archeological finds and other information that he has in there. Do check that out. Question to tee up from this interview. Oh boy, I don't even know where to begin. Maybe this one, a simple one. How fake do you think this history is? And part two, Skeptico second level is why is it fake? Why is this history so fake? Why do they care about keeping this history fake? Oh boy, I'm tipping my hand and where I intend to go on this stuff. Let me know your thoughts. Talk to me, talk to me out there. Skeptico former wherever you reach me. Lots of shows coming up till next time. Take care and bye for now.