I've seen you be half a million dollars up. I've been up two and a half million dollars. What do you got on you? Nothing. That's John Goodman, The Gambler 2014, and that has to be probably one of the greatest skeptical movie clips of all time. And if you are struggling, which you might be once you get to the end of the show to try and figure out how that fits with my upcoming very excellent interview with Joe Atwell and our first of what I hope will be an ongoing series of dialogues about Caesars Messiah 2.0. Well, if you're wondering how this fits, well then you're probably going to have to keep wondering, here's a clip from the upcoming interview. I'm not going to legitimize your misrepresentation of the facts by agreeing to disagree. I don't like to the point where we simply agree to disagree. If I had a philosophy, it would be the Socratic method, you don't try to win, but you don't try to shy away from difficult subjects either. I think a lot of times the expression is used just because someone either feels they're going to lose or they are simply dislike the individual that they're exchanging with and they just want to end the conversation. Okay, and because I'm always about level three, here's the level three part. Somebody wants you to do something?     You're a king, you have an army, greatest navy in the history of the world?  This is the grandson of the 17th richest man in California. Does he drink? What do you want? I have a beer just to get anybody else. Thank you. What kind? Any kind. I got 37 beers.  But he did put it on you, mess. What do you want to be able to say to me?  Thanks for indulging me. I have a great interview with the excellent Joe Atwell. Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host Alex then you know that Joe is one of my favorite guests. Somebody I really respect and has really in some very important ways has been a significant influence to my worldview as I've been going along and doing these Skeptico interviews. So Joe, of course, is the author of Caesar's Messiah, the Roman conspiracy to invent Jesus, a book that had really, I think a very, very big impact on biblical scholars, historians, as well as just a ton of average everyday people who read the book and were just incredibly impressed blown away like I was by the research. This is basically a testament to the one man can make a difference kind of theory, which is kind of an interesting point in history because that's being debated in history right now. Even when you think of all the great figures in history, it shouldn't be a debate that one person can make a difference. Well, in a smaller way, but in a very significant way, Joe researching on his own, not with a team of Oxford PhD candidates who are running around and doing all his research form or anything like that on his own came up with a very unique analysis based on his research, which he documents in the book of the conspiracy or the alleged conspiracy that might exist between the Roman Empire and the creation of the Christian church. So just to kind of further wrap up this story because I have had Joe on several times. Ever since I talked to Joe, it's been one of my missions because it was so significant to me to really continue to test his theory and my way of testing is interviewing other people. So at this point, I've interviewed, oh, a lot, five, ten, world-class biblical scholars, people with PhDs, teaching positions at major universities, written books, and I always bring up the Caesar's Messiah theory. And not everyone agrees, but no one's able to counter it in any significant way. And I've also found that that's really the way to tell whether or not somebody has the goods. It's not whether everyone agrees with them. It's whether they can put up a better counter argument. And I still haven't heard one. And I always have to add as a caveat, Joe and I take his groundbreaking fundamental paradigm shifting research in some significantly different ways. So I don't want to sound like I'm contradicting myself because I don't agree with Joe and everything. And that might be part of our discussion here. But the paradigm shift that he has brought to us by really combining a deep, deep understanding of conspiracy and conspiracy science, if we could even say that, social engineering, parapolitical, how that has always been in play and the enormous impact it can have on history and institutions and with the structure of our society as we understand it. Well, Joe's unique understanding of that is just phenomenal. And that's why I'm sorry to go on and on, but that's why I'm so excited to have you back and connect with you again, Joe. So thanks for being here. I'm really looking forward to this. Wow. Thank you, Alex. After that introduction, maybe I should just not say anything to the rest of the show. Now, thank you so much. That's very kind of you. Yeah, I mean, the Caesar of Messiah has really been a strange sort of academic phenomenon because it has become more and more popular through time. Most of the, you know, like the typical academic research books fade, but Caesar of Messiah just gets more and more popular. And this is simply because, you know, it just is a very strong argument and people can understand it. A lot of the New Testament scholarship, like the classic mythicism concepts, you know, are plausible, but they're so esoteric, so hard to understand that it's hard for me to imagine the public would ever change their opinion regarding the historicity or, you know, the origins of Christianity with that kind of analysis. But the analysis in Caesar of Messiah is different in that I would describe it as basically as archeologic. In other words, at its core, I don't really get involved that much with, you know, the system that I've discovered. I simply present the system. I simply lay the text side by side and just ask the reader to make up their own mind whether or not there's dependency. And since in my opinion, this is just completely obvious that one story, the story of Jesus is based on this other story, tip to stern.  You know, these things become more and more self-evident, but it always surprises me, I suppose, even at this point, you know, how popular the book has been and is. And this, just as an example, this month was the highest selling sales month of the book 20 years after I brought it out.  And of course, now with our current situation in which the government is, you know, restricting us, taking away civil liberties, the skeptical aspect of my analysis, I think is very useful for people because it becomes a platform from which you can sort of create some plausible conjectures about the rationale that the governments have for the lockdowns, which perhaps we'll talk about later, but I am, you know, very opposed to. Right. So, you know, there's a couple of different points there. The connection between this work, Caesars Messiah, and in particular, the speculation on your part that there was a conspiracy, a parapolitical, political Psiop going on by the Romans. And it was using religion and the deepest beliefs, the deepest spiritual beliefs that people had about who they are and how they should live their lives, that it was trying to manipulate those in order to bring about their political goals is, I think, what really resonates through time, as you're saying. So we look at that and we go, oh my God, if Joe is right, and the Romans were that adept at playing the game way back then, then what can we even imagine is going on now in terms of that game playing? So there's really a lot to kind of dive into. And as I was explaining to you in the email, I've made it kind of my mission in the last six months to really do a rebooting of Caesars Messiah 2.0 in my own way. So it's not really the Caesars Messiah that you're familiar with, because I'm kind of taking it in some other directions. I'm very interested in, for example, Josephus and more of the Jews, and his attempted political Psiop, that is, Vespasian through Josephus, to tell the Jews that, hey, you know what? Vespasian is the Messiah. Vespasian is who was always, you know, was the one who was always prophesized. You don't need Judaism, just I see that really as kind of Caesars Messiah 1.0, you know, that was the first attempt at that. But here I am getting into a lot of details. Like, I want to kind of pull that back off the table and not even go there because I think that's a discussion we need to have. We need to spend an hour on that. I almost feel like, and we were talking about this a little bit before we kind of turned on the record button. If you're up for it, we might even use this interview to kind of sketch out some potential areas for further dialogues between us so that people can get kind of a fuller picture of this worldview that we're trying to develop. How does that sound? I think it's a great idea. It couldn't be more timely. Okay. Well, if you're on board, then, you know, I'd almost start with this and that is process. So if we were going to engage in this dialogue and you engage in these dialogues all the time, one of the things that's great about you is you are so open and so just out there in terms of sharing ideas, genuinely, openly, give and take if people come against you and you handle that with grace and yet you still make your points. And I think that's unbelievably terrific. I'm not an academic, so it's a little easier for me to be polite. I don't know. I've spoken to... My point is, is that I think a lot of individuals, you know, it's a very low resource environment, New Testament scholarship. And so many people, I think, are, they struggle with the idea of like this book from an academic and so successful. And so it's harder for them to be, you know, just sort of open and clear-minded. Whereas, I actually enjoy criticism of it. I find it to be, you know, these are, for me, it's more fun than just having. So it's, you know, I think it's very gracious of you to describe me like that. But actually, it's just simply more fun to have someone that is critical than someone that simply wants to, you know, go over the theory. I totally agree. And I say that to people when people, I swear, when I say that, Joe, people look at me like I'm of a different species or something like that. When I say, I love when I'm proven wrong. When I'm proven wrong, I'm learning something. I'm moving forward. And why would I want to go forward with ideas that are, you know, incorrect or can easily be countered? Great. So in that sense, in that spirit, I welcome that kind of debate in the same way that you do. But one thing I wanted to throw out there, because this I caught in the interview, I was just mentioning before that you did with Mo on the Gnostic Warrior podcast, which I really enjoyed and Mo just had me on the show. But you guys got to a point and you said, Hey, you know, and agree to disagree, we have to be open to agreeing to disagree.  And I can be a nice guy. I don't know if I really am a nice guy, but this agree to disagree thing is something that drives me kind of nuts. And I would throw that on the table. First thing is in this dialogue and in the dialogues that we might do in the future, let's not agree to disagree. When I hear that, I always think of the interview I had with the skeptic, Michael Shermer, who I consider a frenemy in every sense of the word. I genuinely like Michael. I enjoy talking to him. And I definitely consider him an enemy. He's certainly an enemy when it comes to intellectual honesty, an enemy when it comes to good science, an enemy when it comes to being kind of a bullshitter. But nonetheless, so just a quick story and then I'll stop stealing the mic here. But I was interviewing Michael about a book he'd written. The book was Heavens on Earth, the Scientific Search for the Afterlife in Mortality in Utopia. This is Michael's book. So the book leans on something that I happen to know a great deal about, which is near death experience science. And the only reason I know about it is because I've interviewed about 50 or 100 scientists who've actually done research and published it in peer-reviewed journals on this topic. And Michael had completely botched the research in some rather obvious ways. And I called them on it. And I further called them on the fact that one of the most prominent researchers, a guy named Dr. Pen van Lommel was a cardiologist, had was so infuriated by Michael's mishandling of the data, the scientific data, that he called him out publicly and said, you're misrepresenting what I said. And Michael was like, well, I guess we'll just agree to disagree on that. And then he said that to me. Well, I guess Alex, we'll just agree to disagree. And it's like, no, I, I, awesome Joe. And I do think that it's worth talking a little bit about these kind of process things, the process of the dialogue things, because I do feel like they're lacking a lot of times. And they slip by in some subtle ways that people don't realize. And again, it's this kind of social conditioning, social reinforcement. Oh, it's always good to agree to disagree. Here's another one. Respect my beliefs. Why would I want to respect your beliefs? Isn't that why? I mean, that's some, I get it on one level, right?  Absolutely. 100%. I respect you. I respect, and I respect everything you've done. I also respect you intellectually based on your track record. So I am liable to give more leeway to your beliefs. But at the end of the day, I enter into the dialogue, not respecting your beliefs and not asking you to respect my beliefs. I mean, that's what we're supposed to figure out, right? Yeah. And I also don't like when this perspective is used as propaganda. In other words, the idea of keep calm and carry on being given by mainstream media during a time when nefarious activity could require citizens to take action, stand up. Exactly. And so I'm really, you know, whenever I hear, you know, kind of what should be trajectories leading to conclusions that might inspire political activity, when I see it being hijacked with the idea of, you know, nonviolent communication keeps us from moving down this path. Here's another direction. And it always goes back to a kind of psychological condition. You know, that is a way of living that some people may find valuable. But it is certainly not appropriate in our present moment when you have so many, you know, actions from governments that are restraining freedom. This is when we really, you know, we cannot have as our perspective that, well, you know, we're just going to, you know, we may not agree with what the government is doing, but we're simply going to respect and stay calm and we'll just carry on with our lives as best we can. I mean, this is when you really want to not only, you know, to agree to disagree and to keep thinking and to keep talking.  It's too complicated, or I have to be too, you know, visible as a personality or whatever. You know, this is when you need courage. And that encourages what will move the kind of discussion you're talking about forward. You've got to have courage. And so, you know, when we discuss, I think we'll both find it's, you know, it will be, you know, it'll be a process that'll be enjoyable and hopefully will provide courage for the people who listen to it. Well, the other way this respect my beliefs thing comes up, of course, you've run into this time and time again, because you've been at this Caesar's Messiah thing, you've been the pioneer out there with the arrows in your front and the arrows in the back, because you do get stabbed in the back. But when it comes to these deeper beliefs, we are conditioned to believe that we should respect someone's religious beliefs certainly. And that the freedom of expression of religion carries with it this idea that we should respect their religious beliefs. I don't agree with that. I don't think we should respect people's Christian beliefs, Muslims, Muslim beliefs, atheistic beliefs, Satanistic beliefs. I think we should challenge them. And this is something really that the atheists and I don't have a lot of nice things to say about the atheists as a group. But I do have some nice things to say. And one of the things that they made clear, you know, 20 years ago with the whole Dawkins kind of new atheist kind of thing, was that these are ideas that have to stand up in the public forum on par with all the other beliefs we have. And you can't run and hide behind the idea that no one should pick on you because your beliefs are religious. Absolutely. In fact, it's completely incoherent. If you want to have religious beliefs, which is to say broadly socially important in terms of perspective on existence, then axiomatic to that is you have to become public and accept public criticism. And this is just clear. And that's one really going to praise you here. You do such a good job of this, of encouraging your positions to be criticized. I've listened to a lot of your shows. And so this is, you know, it's just how public people should behave, you know, and how we should care. And gee, you know, it's like, think of how long we've known each other, who would have thought at the beginning we'd be where we are now politically. You know, it's all the more, you know, it's more important than ever to try to get this perspective, the perspective of criticism and skepticism out there. You chose a really good title for your show very timely in terms of our current political world. You know, it's funny you should say that because on one hand, I totally understand what you're saying. I agree with it at a level that kind of shakes me to my core. I never would have imagined we'd be where we are now. Never would have contemplated it. Anyone of our generation, it just was inconceivable that, you know, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution would just be pulled apart piece by piece, and everyone would just be cheering its demise, you know, like, but I at the same time, I feel that I resist going there, you know, because we are just where we are. And I love that you are fully engaged in everything that's come about partially as a result of this book that you wrote 20 years ago. Strange that Caesar's Messiah would end up being somehow related, and it might have been useful to, you know, the political conditions imposed by exactly, exactly, exactly. And in your work since then, I mean, I think people, hopefully people are listening to the show know this, but in case they don't, it's not like you've stopped. You've continued to move on. And there's many new issues that you actually read a book on Shakespeare and with similar kind of connections, hypotheses and stuff like that. But you know, I always credit you with the one who turned me on to the glorious dynum lifetime player kind of thing, which is incredibly important in understanding the parapolitical and how things are so you multiple, multiple, you know, you alluded to in the interview, I just heard, and I have not read this, but you did an analysis of the catcher in the rye and similarly, drawing out the the parapolitical conspiratorial aspects of it and stuff like that.  Yeah, I'm a curious individual. And, and I have, in fact, you know, kind of been inspired by the insights into propaganda that I got doing the research on pseudo to Messiah to look really as best I could at my world. And, you know, like you talked about the catcher in the rye analysis, you know, very important in my opinion, because you can see that our literature is, you know, it has a surface level that the public understands, but that the oligarchs are in communication. And they have a different world that then we are permitted to enter into. And it's exactly the same thing that was going on with the Gospels. The insiders could see the humor and see that how they were creating legacy for themselves with this story about Jesus. But the plebeian saw nothing. They just saw the surface narrative. So that, that kind of ignorance. And the way that it was used by the oligarchs to ossify their power and, you know, is, it's the, in my opinion, it's the most critical issue that we are facing. We have all these issues right now, so many of them. But this one issue has stayed throughout our civilization for thousands of years, which is that humans believe what we're told. And so this is something the oligarchs have learned how to manipulate. And we are, I think, suffering and are in danger of being genocided because of this systemic weakness that we have about how, when information comes from above us in the social structure, we have this innate sort of acceptance of it. And fortunately, even though this might be a good way to create social harmony, that would be in a, you know, in a situation where the social structure had the protection of the individual as, you know, part and parcel here and looking backwards, that, that trust between the authority and the citizens of a society has been broken. It's been broken. It's, and therefore it's been used. And now, you know, we're being told one thing after another. None of it really can stand up to any scrutiny, but few citizens are doing the analysis to really see how obviously fake, unreal some of the things are being told are. And, and we really need to, at this point, to quickly rev up skepticism on a wide scale. So one of the reasons why I'm, you know, my ears pricked up when you were talking about doing more shows, because I think that's be some one of the things that we would no doubt just because of how we are, we would get into and I would love to do that right now just to just be a process by which, you know, people would just create more skepticism. And then from that, learn how to think, because the oligarchs use our ignorance as a primary tool, we don't get taught how to think very well, how to analyze, how to use logic, how to evaluate facts. And these things just have to be developed now. It's just critical that the oligarchs have developed technological powers.  But now they have technology, they have snooping, they have the iPhone, they have drugs, you know, so the oligarchs have developed their power to ossify themselves and their rules. The citizen has to develop, we have to develop our skills at democracy.  Yeah, but Joe to, you know, throw a Shakespeare line, it was always thus. That to me is one of the things we take away from Caesar's Messiah. If you really dig into it and you start digging into it further and further, you know, and it's always been like that. And the tools aren't really that much. They've changed a lot and we've layered on some fancy technology, but it was always thus. And that's what I think is also interesting about history, you know, and maybe I can jump out of the process mode because I could go on and on and talk about the process and how we do what we're going to do. But maybe we need to jump into it. But I always pull up a little bit when you mention oligarchs, you know, because I think of oligarchs. But I also think of this idea of these lifetime players.  I think of the game master. I think of the monarchs. And I think of all these people as being white hats and black hats. You know, well, just I'll tie it to one little tidbit that I think will kind of maybe take us in a different direction. And then we'll get back to I can't wait to talk about Caesar's Messiah 2.0 and everything that I'm learning about that Roman history. And we'll have lots of fun with that. But I love laying out this groundwork with you. So I jump to FDR and the attack on Pearl Harbor. And it's always been an interesting point in history because it popped up on my radar screen when I first got interested in conspiracies. And that is the idea that perhaps we were willing to be surprise attacked. I know that's an oxy warren, but people get what I mean. And the evidence that that starts mounting up the deep you look into it. And the most significant evidence that I think is layered with the kind of complexity that we need to really analyze this game player kind of thing. And whether it's a white hat game player or a black hat game player is that I think the really smart Pentagon military industrial complex people and some of them are damn, damn smart. But they realized at that time in the in the 30s 1930s and early 1940s that World War Two is going to be a war that was won or lost with aircraft carriers. So before the Japanese and we had done everything at this point to bait Japan into attacking us, hell, we had we had basically committed an act of war by blockading all the oil from reaching Japan, which is an act of war, you know. So we were ready for the attack. We had intercepted information knowing that they were going to attack. FDR sends all the aircraft air here, all the aircraft carriers out to sea, which is the telltale sign of two things.  And if they put them to the bottom of the ocean, it wouldn't really make any difference. And it really didn't make any difference. And in fact, once they bombed those ships, he sent them back to port in San Francisco and in Los Angeles to guard the coastline like we needed it guarded. But here's the point in all that.  Because you could make the case that we needed that we needed that kind of Pearl Harbor event, which echoes with the 911 thing, but we won't even get there for a minute.  What do you think about all that? Yeah, I mean, I think it was the World Wars, both of them were artificial. They were theatrical productions. Gee, it's such a long analytic path. But I mean, you know, things that you can do just to kind of accelerate that understanding is look at the Fran Ferdinand license plate on the car he was in when he was assassinated. It's A111118, which ended up being Armistice Day three and a half years later. So they knew the dates that they would conclude the war before they began it. In WWI, you have the Kaiser and the King of England, but they were first cousins. They played together as children. And of course, they were both masons. They were part of the secret society. So this looks very artificial. It looks like it's simply population reduction. And it's upsetting to me because my grandfather was mustard gassed at the Somme, where they just pushed these people into automatic weapons. 60,000 people, I think, died in a two-day period. Just unbelievable carnage. So that was just like how and there's just there's be something to go into that stream of analysis would be kind of a long diversion. But I'm just giving you my opinion. I mean, I would say another way you can look at it is look at 911. 911 is the that is the date in the Hebrew Bible that the temple was destroyed. If you look at the analysis of Caesar's Messiah, you can see that the destruction of the temple was the Roman touchstone point for when they claimed to be ending the Jewish religion and replacing it with this Flavian version of Judaism. So the idea that the central turning point in history was at that could be seen as 911. It's a little it's different because the numbers are slightly different. I mean, they're not they're not different. They're the same numbers, but the months and the dates are inverted. But this is how the typology works. I mean, typology is never verbatim. But you can people wonder why that date was chosen. I mean, it's in my opinion, it's an obvious artificial government project. So the fact that this date was chosen, the fact that three buildings collapsed, I mean, this is like representing the Trinity.  You have to do a lot of sort of background work and look for how they represent these things. But WW2, I mean, I've always thought that the kind of the most, you know, like the beginning of kind of like the humor of the thing was just they called the attack Torah Torah Torah, which, you know, if you know, at that time, the Freemasons had become very powerful politically. And so I've always thought that this was just a Japanese pun, you know, on the on the relationship there.   And as you say, there was very good political reasons. I mean, but, you know, it's they could have easily or could have possibly found other ways to deal with it. It's sort of like the wars, Alex, are very, you know, you will look go back to the revolutionary work. You want to see another example? Why couldn't the large brothers Washington and King George just work it out?  They traumatize the population, they they depopulate certain groups. And so you just always have to ask yourself, you know, like, what is what is really in fact the big picture? I would say World War Two, you have this bizarre influence on both on two key components of what's going on historically. The Quadro Coronadi Lodge was producing both the Nazi party through Helen Bovatsky and the Theosophical Society and other people that they had set out there. So they have the Nazi party is very, very easily identified once you kind of get into the like who is actually developing the different things, you know, the money, the philosophy, the swastika, the anti-Semitism, the Aryan supremacy. I mean, these things are all coming from different individuals, but they're all part of this, you know, by the organization that Bovatsky set up. Bovatsky, of course, I talk about lifetime actors, you know, she claims to have been in Himalayas and this, you know, deep religious spiritual thing where she develops this bizarre and weird, you know, like Theosophical Society. Actually, she wasn't there at all. She was in Italy with Manzini and Garibaldi fighting in the Masonic Army against the Pope. She was at the Battle of Montana where Garibaldi and the Pope, you know, had this bloodbath, they lost. She was wearing the red shirt.  And when Garibaldi brings her back to England, she is still wearing the red shirt. The red shirt was the freemason symbol of the group that Garibaldi had developed, which then becomes the brown shirt and the black shirt, you know, it's the Nazi party goes for it. But anyway, I mean, this is kind of rambling here, but I'm just in complete agreement that you, when you look at Pearl Harbor and you start seeing strange things, you know, like how that appears like they may have had foreign knowledge.  What you've posited is a portal. And I would just encourage all citizens to walk down that opening that you created. What we have is history is nonsense. It's sort of like the the history of Jesus Christ being given to us, you know, as this is why we should, you know, be a part of this religion. I'm sorry, these are stories that are given to us for control. And the world wars are incredibly important to understand as stories told by lifetime actors.  Remember, his first cousin is running the Russell Trust Opium business in China. He was the head of it. And so you have these oligarchic, I would call them oligarchic connections inside that family going in all different directions. These people are created and set up, you know, we see them as whatever, you know, they're the representation of their role is how we perceive them, you know, Obama, for example. But if you look in their background, you start to see things, you know, that just seem inexplicable. You look at Ken Kesey or, you know, the Stuart brand, the people are creating the counterculture, you go backwards a bit and you start seeing things that connect them into, you know, this, this longstanding process by which the counterculture is being produced. And so this is, you know, Alex, this is my honest opinion is that we, what we have is history is actually a system of social control. And it's tip to stern and there is, you just can't believe a darn thing of it. What you can get, I mean, it'd be like trying to recreate the history of the first century. If you understand the typology and how the oligarchs are using the story of Christianity, you can kind of tease a history out of it. You can sort of say, well, maybe this was how, you know, the struggle between the Romans and the Jews went, went down because you have some basis in the typology to make sense out of it.  So this is a, this is a 100% device for social control. Once you have that understanding, the world is more brutal. You know, you can see that, that there, that what a lot of the things that we thought were benevolent or not, but it's also a lot clearer, a lot easier to understand. You can have decisions now that will hopefully protect yourself in the future. Okay, so you just covered the world there. Here's what I would, here's what I would kind of suggest. Like, whenever we hit these topics that require additional kind of work, then we should break them off as separate topics. I think Votsky, Alistair Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, who is really a white hat in there as well. But I've just interviewed a guy who's the head of the Theosophical Society. That would be a great show to have and a great show to discuss. And I don't think I kind of agree with you on a lot of that stuff. But I agree with enough of it that we'd have a good dialogue. So I'd almost break that out. Go ahead. I will. I wanted to conclude with one little thing, because I just, in case people, you know, want to, like, go into that, one of the things that is overlooked so often when people talk about Hitler is that he was actually a creation of Dietrich Erkhardt. And this is known. I mean, he's one of, like, taught him how to talk, how to have a stage presence. He bought him the overcoat, because he thought he wasn't manly looking enough. But on his deathbed, he created a quote, which is in existence. And Erkhardt said, you know, don't feel bad for me. I'm going to have more influence in Germany history than any other person, because I'm the one who turned Adolf Hitler on to Blavatsky and the secret doctrine. Adolf is dancing to my tune.  I mean, to me, it's just too many points of connection, and it's all going in one direction. And it's been completely overlooked. I mean, just shocking that this hasn't actually gotten more attention, because remember that when you talk about National Socialism, you're talking about the Bellamese. The Bellamese are the ones who actually came up with the term. They developed the flag salute in America before they went to Germany to introduce the philosophy there. And the Bellamese were strict followers of Blavatsky. Blavatsky, you know, has letters with them and writes about them as though they were basically, you know, her creations and doing her bidding. And so, you know, these connections have always been there, not given to the public. I mean, try to find Erkhardt's deathbed quote, the one I gave you. Man, it's very, very hard to find it. They've scrubbed it. So, you know, we won't agree on a lot of stuff, but I think we'll both agree on this principle, you know, that we really need to go into our history and to see how, you know, what the stories have been given and how they have influenced us. Well, how our beliefs now create a relationship to government, you know, to our role in the world, to ourselves. This wasn't, you know, done by people who were trying to develop us spiritually. These things are given to us for control. So, great. I like the way you teed that up there at the end. So, I actually have a lot to say about Blavatsky, in particular Alistair Crowley, and all that stuff. And Richard Smolley was the guy I was trying to think of who was at the esophageal society now when I just interviewed him, and, you know, he wrote a terrific book, How God Became God, and he's written some other books. Anyways, what I wanted to kind of shift focus on a little bit, because I think it'll get us to the same place, and because we can't talk about everything and I wanted to kind of return it back to the World War II thing, is history. You know, and I just had a great interview with a guy named Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, who is primarily at this point, he is like a writer. He writes history books and people love him and he writes about Augustus and about Caesar and Pax Romana, and he's an expert on military history. But he has a PhD in history from Oxford, and we talked a lot about how history is done, you know, and I love his approach, I love his rigor, and I think it paints to me, I'm more siding with him on some of these things than I am with you. I think this idea is that gets kind of bandied around a lot, is that history is nonsense. We can't trust history, don't trust anything they're telling you about history. To me, it plays into some of these other things we hear. It's like the whole Flat Earth thing, which I think is really, really an important topic. We could spend the whole hour talking about Flat Earth and how I believe that that is definitely an engineered meme, because if we can break people off and make people feel like it's okay to express ideas that any halfway scientific person would just dismiss out of hand, but hey, it's okay, you got to have everything. I'm going to go off on that, I don't want to. So we can have a whole discussion on Flat Earth as well as a meme as a social engineering project. I want to return to history, I want to return to Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy, because what Goldsworthy, I love the way that this guy does his stuff, and I kept pushing them, because like one of the things, and I mentioned this at the very beginning of the show, I said, you know, Adrian, your stuff is kind of subtly subversive in some kind of important ways. One of the ways it's subtly subversive is this great man theory. And I was at the beginning saying, I am amazed at what you, one person, were able to not only create in your head, but the effect that that was able to have on our society. Well, look at somebody like Julius Caesar, and multiply that times 10. Look at somebody like Augustus, who was really shouldn't have even risen to that level. Again, it's multiplied by 10. It's interesting to note that in history as an academic discipline, the way that it's done, this idea has been under attack for the last 20 years. And it's part of this postmodernism, well, like, no, people don't matter. It's really a product of systems and environmental factors, and other factors that are not the individual.  So Caesar, there's no Julius Caesar, he wasn't important. What's important is the system, the state.  And, and Adrian was able to kind of point that out, or we were able to kind of bond on that. But the other thing that we were, he really did a great job of, and I think he does in his research, is that there's this kind of no looking forward, no looking back discipline that I think we have to have in history. And the no looking forward is, we can't create a historical figure of Blavatsky, if you will.  Because whenever she encounters something else on the historical timeline, we're always going to insert our understanding of that person. I think that's a huge mistake to make. And I think where that really comes comes home is in this idea I've been playing around with, which I think is kind of fundamental to my re-understanding of not only Caesar's Messiah 2.0, but what's lacking in history. And that's, that is this idea that we're, we are all leading rich spiritual lives. So, you know, the Spasian is leading a rich spiritual life. And sure he's doing all these shenanigans, he's doing all these other things, or I'll give you better, a better example that people, I feel a little tired of this one too, but Constantine, Constantine is leading a rich spiritual life, even though his conversion at the bridge to Christianity is completely fake, and can be demonstrated to be fake. And the arch that he builds years later doesn't have any Christian iconry in it anywhere, which is clearly evidence that there wasn't a real conversion there, but also his whole building of Constantinople, which is nothing Christian about it, except when he adds these fake churches at the end, it's all about the Sun God and Sol Invictus and all the rest of that stuff. But the point is that he is also somebody who kills his son because his wife comes to him and says, Hey, your boy there, he's leaning up on me, man, he's trying to get with me. And Constantine goes into a rage. He kills his son. And then some of the people close to him said, Hey, your wife, she totally worked you man, she was trying to get her boy in there. He never did any of that stuff. So he goes into a rage, and he kills his wife. So, but all along, here's my point, he's still leading a rich spiritual life.  Might there really be an afterlife? I'm a Roman, I've always believed in the afterlife. What is coming for me? What is my relationship to this higher consciousness? However it is, it is always on his mind. It is always there because it's on all our minds. When we go to bed, when we wake up at two o'clock in the morning, when we stare at that seedling, we all have the same same thing, the same questions. So history has been written by atheists for atheists. And it's denied this fundamental reality that we all experienced that we're all leading these complicated rich spiritual lives. So I would maybe I'll pause there and say, I think we have to be really careful in analyzing history and looking how the best historians do history. So many of them do it terribly, but some of them do it right. Right. Well, let me give you a couple of bonbons about Constantine that will sort of flesh out this idea. The the arch you're referring to was actually designed to align with the prior Flavian religious edifices that were there in the Colosseum complex. Yeah. So he was acknowledging the spiritual perspective of his of the Flavian namesakes. I mean, he this is not the way he re where he structured his arch was absolutely had one purpose and that was to align him with the the Flavians who invented Christianity. And then the thing that always amused me is his his burial church, because what he did was is he gathered in the relics of all of the 12 apostles, which were available at this time for a price in the Roman Empire, but he got 12 of them and arrange them in a circle around his grave. So he was sort of giving a pretty nice clue as to who Jesus Christ was, you see. So that's this is Constantine. He's, you know, he has the idea he has a rich spiritual life. No doubt is correct. I think it's just a question of how we understand spiritual. So that's a fundamental question, Joe. How do we how do we understand spiritual? I can tell you mine, but you tell me you tell me yours. And in particular, if we're going to play around with this idea that the history is lacking and that it fails to acknowledge that the spiritual life of these people is fundamental to them, whether it's Montezuma tearing the hearts out of people because some demon told them to do it or whether it's the most, you know, who pick your pick your most saintly leader. It's there. It's this interaction with this extended consciousness that we have to factor in. Well, my belief, I mean, I was raised a Catholic, I don't think I was ever particularly devout, but I did believe it. I mean, you know, when I was particularly in first, second grade, made perfect sense to me or sense, but it was influential. But as I've gotten older, I mean, I really think that to experience spirituality is best done through the Socratic method. I think that we come into a clear understanding of ourselves and and have the communion, the connection between humans that is, you know, one of the real essences of what I would see is spirituality. I think that in isolation, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have, of course, social meaning. But I also think it's that we are designed as social animals. And so I think that spirituality needs to, you know, be within that context. And so I think the best way to achieve, you know, the sort of what as Hegel described, you know, as the two mirrors held up to each other, creating infinity, that that people would knowingly be Socratic, you know, where we are when we can agree on a point of fact or an aspect of truth. And we have shared this with one another, that we are at the point of spirituality where we are in connection with the natural world. And so I think we've got to what I would regard as the highest kind of spirituality, because this would be coming from the the ethnic connections, you know, that from which, you know, our species emerged. And so I think that they're that deeply ingrained in us.  But it's still there. It's just that it's we don't recognize, I think that our spirituality is made more clear and dense and and and elevated through one another's reasoning and and understanding of the world, because the oligarchs have used this, you know, that that part of our mind for particularly for religion, but also for patriotism, you know, for different things that they they need to get us to walk out into the battlefield and to create more territory for them. So this would be how I would would characterize spirituality as it's when when we are able to recognize one another's truths in ourselves and and particularly when we have earned it through a process. So I think that's really interesting. And we could actually break that off, if we want, at any time into a whole other topic of discussion, because you're coming at it from a very humanistic standpoint, and a lot of the words and phrases that you do reflect that. I always find that kind of inferior to the scientific, you know, I mean, first, you have to start with the scientific. Is there an observable phenomenon to even talk about? So when I talk about spirituality, I start with the scientific understanding that you are more than a biological robot, and that has been proven. So then once we take that step, then we have to ask how much of this extended realm that we don't understand, are we willing to bring into our worldview? And so when I talk about Montezuma's connection to a spiritual world, I'm not saying I know what the hell it is, but I'm saying when he says that there is a spirit entity, a very malevolent spiritual entity, what we'd call a demon, then I do not dismiss that as a possibility. When somebody says they had an encounter with what they understand to be Christ consciousness, I don't dismiss that, even though I'm very doubtful of a historical Jesus, because I realize that we are going to always be limited by our understanding of that extended consciousness realm. But the last thing we want to do is deny the fact that it comes into play, and it comes into play over and over again. And history has done the thing of they lost their keys in the parking lot, and they're looking for them over under the lamppost because the light's better. Well, you're never going to find them over there. So one of the keys to understanding history is to understand that we are connected to this extended consciousness realm in some way that we don't understand, but some of the factors we do understand is that number one, it seems to transcend space and time. It certainly transcends time. So we no longer have to hypothesize about bloodlines or about any of the rest of this stuff. There is a real possibility, and I would just frame it up as a possibility, that the connection between these people in history is an ongoing connection with an extended consciousness realm that is intelligently informing them in the same way. I say that is a more parsimonious explanation for the connection we see between what's going on in history and how it echoes with our present day situation or other points in history than we can look at. So I'd chalk that up as to something we can kind of explore a lot further, but as kind of teeing it up, that's where I'd kind of stake my claim. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that position. The problem is only identifying motivation because the history can be distorted deliberately for political purposes. In other words, you can have artificial, the leaders can lie, and so now you don't have the correct understanding of how did we get here. So this is a possibility, but beyond that, we went through this once where I totally agree with your analysis, it's just that unfortunately we do have the problem of that history can be distorted, that people can deliberately lie, and so it's another aspect that we have to always be aware of when we're trying to understand what is real. I mean, when you try to understand the rationale behind the attack on Pearl Harbor, I think the influences from what can be seen as the spirit life of the individuals who are involved in these decision-making is important, of course. You can't really say this doesn't exist, but you also have to kind of look at the ways in which this could be a deception, and so in fact, perhaps knowing one from the other is like the key skill that we would ever teach children. If you lose the spirit understanding that you're describing, I think as you point out, you succumb to the idea that is certainly being given to us just for social control that we're biological robots. I mean, that idea is ground zero for social control, so if they can get people to believe it, then it's very easy from there to just say, okay, here, take your Soma, enjoy your experience, and do what I tell you. Exactly. As a function of social control, it's literally perfect. I don't want to take it too far because I totally agree with what you're saying in terms of deception, and there's some other places we can go with that, but I don't want to hit too heavy on the spiritual thing because that's not the core of it. I mean, it's one aspect of it, but the other is what you're talking about, which is the conspiratorial, and that there's these other agendas going on, and they're always in play. They're not sometimes in play. They're always in play. Anyone who has amassed wealth, power, influence has done it with conspiracies. I mean, it's like, it's another one of these things where you kind of want to go when people are so conditioned to say, God, I just interviewed this couple, this father-daughter, check this out. She has a degree from Harvard and a PhD from Columbia. He teaches at Columbia Med School and is an MD, and they wrote this book, Denying to the Grave, which is this kind of why people believe weird things, and it's a whole, you know, manifesto for shut up and do what you're told and take the vaccine and wear your mask and the whole thing, and it was an uncomfortable discussion. I'm glad that they engaged with it, engaged in it, but one of the chapters, Joe, was on conspiracy theories, and I just, I could barely read the first line of her chapter without laughing right in her face, which I kind of did, and it said, I'm sure that none of you have ever been involved or know anyone who's been involved in a conspiracy, and I just said, and I said to the dad, who was obviously kind of sitting in the background, is an old Jewish guy from New York, is much more worldly.  So I don't want to just dwell on the spiritual thing, because what you're saying about the conspiracy thing and the lack of understanding at a deep level how fundamental conspiracy is to everything we look at, I think is absolutely central to this. Yeah, I would actually start my analysis of the lady's book with from the perspective that she's probably engaging in a conspiracy. I mean, that is so preposterous that you have to wonder if there's an agenda in the back of it. I mean, what is she trying to get me to believe? That's where I have to talk, because that's a whole other topic of conversation, because you are the original guy who really woke us all up to the lifetime player. And so another topic that we need to spend the whole hour on is the subtleties of the different players on the field. Because I'll tell you what, Sarah Gorman, she is not smart enough to be that.    Well, but the people who would be able to determine that she would be in the media, I have perhaps they would be the origin of the conspiracy. But I just think that it just strikes me as silly that position. And I would wonder if it's not organic. You talk about the lifetime actor, I just wanted to give like a real quick and easy to verify way of kind of seeing how it works. Aldous Huxley, he gave an interview with Mike Wallace, which is online, anyone can go and look at it. And he talks about how dangerous you know, the government gaining technology that could control the mind of the people is. And he gave all, you know, he comes across as the kind of left wing, you know, Aldous Huxley that is sort of well known for being. Okay, so that's that is the public perspective of him. And then it as it turns out, there was documents discovered in the cache of MK Ultra, which listed him as organizing it and specifically creating experiments for the very purpose that he, you know, had gone to the public and warned us about. He gave Jolly West the instruction of what kind of experiments he wanted to do to control people's memory through the use of LSD. And of course, you know, won't go into Jolly West, but he just couldn't be a more malevolent individual. And everything that he did for MK Ultra was, you know, was to develop mind control so that the government could have a robotic control could turn us into these biological robots. So the, but the point is, by denying, or excuse me, by, by being the person to bring the idea of this being evil, Huxley was creating a complete perfect camouflage for himself, right? Who would ever accuse him of doing this because he's the one who actually brings these ideas to us as being dangerous. So this is, but you can see how hard it is to be a citizen. Can you see? I mean, it is. It's just so tough because the media, you know, this was on a 60 minutes interview with Mike Wallace, I believe, or perhaps 60 minutes, but anyways, Mike Wallace doing the interview. The media is controlled by individuals who are engaged in the conspiracy. And therefore, we get this information coming to us from the top down. And it just, they always have the first shot at our mind. You see, this is why just, you know, you're kind of asking people to take this a different way of looking at spirituality. Man, it couldn't be more time near more important because you can see how valuable that would be to dealing with something like Huxley's mind control attempts at us, you know, that we would be more skeptical if we would just kind of open ourselves up to just core criticism of everyone who brings ideas to us like that. Yeah. So I think that's going to get, as we get more into this, that's going to get super, interesting because the good stuff is all down on the layers on the bottom. Throw out a couple of names because, you know, as part of these ongoing dialogues, which the more we talk about, the more I'm super excited to do this with you because you're just so, I just love the way you think. I love that mind. I always have. I wish I was sitting across the table from you there and Santa Barbara and I always think about doing it and then it's like that four hour drive. I come down to San Diego at a time and I next time I do it, I promise you we will get together. We can have one of these shows face to face. It'd be fun. Great. Great. Okay. The next time please, if you get down to San Diego, please, please do that. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And I mean it so sincerely on air, off air. So Joe, it just, we don't even have to get recorded. We just go walk on the beach and just have a good time. But I'll throw a couple of names out that I definitely think we would want to introduce to this. One is Colonel Michael Aquino. Do you know who he is? Sure. Okay. So I think he's a very, very interesting player in a couple of ways. One is in the Huxley way where he's on one hand saying kind of the complete opposite of what he's doing and putting up this whole thing about Satanism that's really kind of absurd, but at the same time he's a chaplain in the army and he writes the manual for all the chaplains, but his is from a satanic perspective. But what we're supposed to understand really about that I think is that it was kind of meant to just rile people up, you know, to go on Donahue and to, you know, where the ridiculous, you know, he had these eyebrows that were turned up like horns and he had this little pitch on the widow's peak and the whole thing was just to stir people up and it's traceable back to his days in Vietnam where he was engaged in pre-MK Ultra mind games where they would fly in helicopters and they would broadcast these recordings to the Viet Cong saying, your soul will wander forever when you're died on the field and all this kind of deep psychological shit. So there's two parts to that story.  That's something to explore. So I just kind of stick that out there. But the other one and I don't know if you've talked about, if you've done this, but we will have a great discussion on this. Do you know who Lou Elizondo is? No, I don't. This is like, people get all worked up about COVID, which they should. No question. I am not minimizing that. But were you aware that just a couple weeks ago, the Pentagon published their preliminary assessment of what they're now calling the UAP, but what we all understand is the UFO phenomenon? No, I know they've been kind of hinting about this for the last few months. Yeah. Yeah, it's really much, much, much bigger. It is the biggest story in, again, like we were talking about at the beginning, our lifetime and it's all just accelerated in the last 20 years.  So all the way back to Roswell, which was real in every way. But the kind of real turning point event on this was what was published in the New York Times in December of 2017. And I actually have the, had the fortune, good fortune of interviewing two of the reporters who published that piece. One is a woman named Leslie Cain, who I love and respect. And she has a great Netflix series on After Death that was very well done. And the other is Ralph Blumenthal, who is a, love the guy. And he just wrote a book, an excellent book on John Mack, who was a Harvard professor and the first person to work with abductees way back in the 1990s and stuff like that. But Blumenthal's career at the New York Times is just a reporter. I mean, he reported on the mob. He had a 40 year career. He was, you know, he was a mainstream reporter. And both of these people got, in my opinion, got kind of duped into doing this story about the official rollout by the government of acknowledging that the UFOs are real. And that was done in the New York Times in December 2017. And there was a huge deal made of it. But the, for the most part, the general public was like, I already know that I've seen all the movies on TV for the last, I've seen all the movies in the theater and everything else for the last 20 years. Well, they didn't stop though. They kept coming out with more leaks and information and all the rest of this stuff. So we will have a good time talking about that whole thing, because that ties into a bunch of stuff. One, there's reason to believe that one of the goals of the MK Ultra program was to get a better handle on the communication that they knew existed between ET in the extended consciousness realm, because ET is telepathic. We don't know what that means, but we know that that's what people report all the time. And we also know that ET seems to be mixed up in this space-time kind of thing in a way that we don't understand. So there's a lot of evidence pointing towards, and I'll share it with you, and then we can talk about it, including the personal account of Whitley Strieber, who was a witness not only to ET and a personal witness and personally attacked, but also, when he was a kid, was subjected to an MK Ultra program that attempted to create disassociative identity disorder in him as a tool to weaponize this kind of vaulting into this extended consciousness realm.  This is probably, in my mind, the biggest event that's going on right now. The government's acknowledgment that they have completely lied about their knowledge of ET and UFOs for the last 60 years is probably the biggest story that there is right now. Because along with that, where they're trying to take that, you can take that information two ways. One place you can take it is to say, which is what they're trying to do, is that ET is a threat, and we need to treat this as a defense issue. The other way to take it, which some people are taking it, is ET is probably our source of origin in some way that we don't fully understand, and is in some way trying to steer us towards not killing ourselves. And the evidence for that is quite substantial. If you ever read Robert Hastings book about UFOs and nukes, the evidence is absolutely overwhelming in its eyewitness evidence of some of the highest ranking military officials who were there, who were buried in the bunkers 30 feet underground and had their nuclear silos shut down one after another in sequence while above ground they were reporting UFOs that were shooting beams down into the silos. Now, each one of those silos is completely independent of the other. Their power system is independent. Their computer system is independent. You can imagine just anyone, the redundancy there is like, you know, crazy because it's a nuclear war kind of thing. ET was in complete control of that. In Russia, ET did the opposite. They activated the silos one after another after another, and the Russians were freaking out. Now afterwards they shut it down, but the point was clear.  So to me, I think we have to keep looking, you know, we have to look in all the ways that we're talking about. But I think we have to keep asking, is this the biggest game that's in play? Is this the biggest game that's in play? What is the bigger game that might really be in play? And when I compare what's going on with ET to what's going on with COVID, one looks like kind of child's play compared to the other. So, you know, Joe, we ought to move towards wrapping up this first session because we've laid out so many, so many possible... I agree. And we can like compartmentalize them into smaller units so that we can give them the depth that will give your listeners the best understanding of each of our positions on these things. These are the critical issues, you know, many ways, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, this is great. I am so excited to go there and to do it. And I'm also excited to dive into this Roman history because as grim as it is in a way, because it does reflect on, it's like looking into the mirror in some ways to where we're at now, it's also fun to go play in that Roman sandbox. It feels a little bit less threatening, a little bit lighter. Let me give you like a bonbon, sort of like my Constantine bonbon. You know, St. Peter's has the huge open space in front of the courtyard that has the obelisk in the middle of it. If you look at the Vatican today, you know, just think of it of like this courtyard. It's a huge courtyard that in the back of St. Peter's and right in the middle of it, they have this giant obelisk Egyptian thing that goes straight up to the sky. Do you know that that is actually the original Flavian chariot racing pavilion? I mean, they literally built the Vatican right out of the Flavian palace there. It's just incredible. And they left the, it was a chariot racing arena called a circus. And Domitian had kind of refined it, but it was left intact and then just became the Vatican. So I always thought that was kind of amusing that you'd have, yeah, you'd have the Flavian circus as the basis for the Vatican, because they also have the Pope called the Pont of Maximus, which was the title that the Flavian Caesar's held. So you can see that these guys, they not only... Our guest again has been, oh, they're just extraordinary Joseph Atwell. Please check out the previous interviews we've had. I think you'll enjoy them. If you enjoyed any part of this, I think you'll enjoy those. And do check out Joe's websites. He has a website for Caesar's Messiah that he continually updates. And Joe, where else are you publishing some of the stuff that you are continually working on? You know, I am going to be doing a whole series of publications on the Caesar's Messiah website. I think one important piece of analysis is available at Post Flavian, which is another site where I publish. Post Flavian has the analysis that you mentioned concerning Ketcher and the Rye, and also one that's very relevant to our current moment on the Tempest. And this is an analysis of the Shakespearean play, which is not in the book on Shakespeare, because it is so explosive that I didn't want to put it inside the book, but it is available Post Flavian. You can also just pull these things up by just googling my name, Atwell, and the Tempest are Atwell and Ketcher and the Rye. And, you know, I wanted these analysis because they are relevant to our current moment to be available for the public, you know, with not hidden behind a paywall or anything. Just do that and check it out. And if you have questions, just at joatwellandgmail.com. I get a lot of emails, so I can't always get back immediately, but I do try to respond to all the emails. Excellent, Joe. Excellent. Well, thanks again. And I couldn't be more excited to continue this with a series of additional interviews. So, folks, stay with us for that. Thanks again to Joe Atwell for joining me today on Skeptico, the one question I tee up from this interview is the oligarch question and the citizen's responsibility question. What is our responsibility and what power do we have against the oligarch, as Joe likes to say? And I don't like to say, but it's his word, so we'll go with it. Let me know your thoughts. I'm going to do more dialogues with Joe. Love this guy. Stay with me. More to come. Until next time, take care. Bye for now.


Now, one thing that this document won't tell you is in and of itself, and I can't say that I know the answers to this myself, but who William Hall and Charles Shield are. But you can kind of make some educated guesses. This is happening. The sale is recorded in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk is on the coast. It's 1853. Virginia is an old part of the kind of slave south of Chesapeake. There are hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in Virginia. But the real money in 1853 to be made in slavery is not in Virginia. It's in the New Southwest. It's in places like Louisiana and Alabama, Mississippi. A lot of legal cases developed over this because people wanted to make sure they were getting maximized profits for the sale of the estate, including slaves. And it was found that items sell best when sold separately. In other words, given the opportunity to sell a family self-contained as a lot to an individual or to sell them as individuals, more money would be made selling them as individuals. And because the courts have a fiduciary responsibility in making sure that the errors get the best bargain that they can from the estate, they're mandated to sell separately. So it reminds one that there are hundreds of thousands of families that are being broken up through these types of trade. It's also a good thing to stop and think about how often we talk about the transatlantic slave trade. But to consider the domestic slave trade as well as being a great tragedy and something that continued to repave it for years and years, some of the saddest documents that one can find are in African-American newspapers and magazines. Sometimes 10, 20 years after the Civil War, they're often called information-wanted notices looking for a mother or a sister or a child still trying to find their family members.