December 17, 2022 • 38 mins
Nostradamus delighted us all in grade school, but it turns out the real guy wasn't quite as prescient as we were led to believe. In truth, he wrote a lot of purposefully confusing riddles that people have twisted into meaning exactly what they want them to mean. Learn all about Nostradamus in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, it's Josh and for this week's select I've
chosen our twenty fifteen episode, Nostrodamus, Predictor of the Future.
Not so much Nostrodamus if that even is his real name,
which it isn't, must have rued the day he was born.
After you heard this episode, we disassemble his so called
prophetic abilities so hard. Plus, this has one more Adam
(00:22):
Sandler than you'd probably expected. So sit back, light a candle,
let your eyes roll back in your head, and enjoy
this skeptical episode a skep epp. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
(00:45):
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant,
there's Jerry. I predict this will be the best podcast
of the new year. Man, I don't know about that one.
And I think that predict is coming true. And the
first month when Gray filled the Sky, the recorders of
(01:06):
Gobbledegook hit a high water mark. It's a little on
the nose from Nostre Damas. Actually it's I should have
been even more vague, like way vaguer. Yeah that was
like explicit for him. Yeah, yeah, because no, Stredamus used
to like to just basically take concepts and words and
(01:27):
put them together and pretend like they were going to happen. Yeah, no,
stre Damas snort a little nutmeg. I Um. When I
was a younger person, I realized, like from this and
ESP that I was into some pretty cool occult stuff. Yeah,
read lots of books about ghosts and things like that. Sure,
(01:48):
meet to you a little bit. And then now I
was like an older person, like I wanted to go
to Duke University to study parapsychology. Oh really, I was
into like that kind of thing. And then now as
an older person, I'm like, man of the things I
used to believe, just do a face palm here there, Like,
for example, we got into real science and that's usually
what happens. Yes, so the pseudoscience has kind of fade
(02:11):
away once you start educating yourself. Well, we shouldn't say
parapsychology is necessarily a pseudoscience. That's not We're here to
poo pooh Nostradamus, not esp parasychology in general, but for instance,
you were I remember not only believing, but frequently saying, dude, Nostradamus,
(02:32):
he had to be exhumed once, like at the church
he was buried at. They were like expanding and they
had to exoome his grave and they opened his casket
and he was holding a tablet that had the day
they exhumed him. I thought that was real. I thought
that really happened when I was a slightly younger man.
That's awesome. Yeah, when you were in your late twenties, right, Yeah,
(02:56):
I remember. I didn't read up on stuff like this,
but I was a big fan of like Lennar Nimoys
in Search of and yeah, TV shows that kind of
dabbled in the fringe, And what's wrong with that. Nothing,
there's nothing wrong with enjoying that kind of thing, liking it.
Ve been wondering if possibly some of it could be real.
Nothing wrong with exploration, right, But the key to keeping
(03:20):
egg off your face as much as possible is to
doing research, especially when a claim is very extraordinary. Yeah,
really look into it. Yeah, Like had I had I
looked around, had the Internet been invented yet? And I
looked around, and I probably would have found somewhere some
entry saying like that is absolutely not true. Well, that's
(03:41):
one of the Internet is one of the big reasons,
I think because before that was around, you know, it's
you'd have to go search out a book that was
written profuing Ostradamis, Yeah, in the card catalog, and it
was just a lot harder back then, you know. Yeah,
But the Internet is a double edged fiber optic line.
I mean there's a lot out of sites out there
that I mean, No Stradamas has gotten probably even more
(04:05):
popular and even more play since the Internet was invented.
Oh sure, you know. Yeah, So let's talk about this guy.
Let's try to separate the man from the myth and
really get into who no Stredamis was. Because he was
a lot more than a crackpot writer of vague predictions.
That's true, he was. One of the tough parts is, though,
(04:26):
is that there are so many disagreements about his biography.
Even yeah, I didn't find that necessarily. Yeah, I saw
one guy wrote a book at him that said he
wasn't even a doctor. Woh, okay, that is a disagreement. Yeah,
well let's go ahead and go there then. Okay, So
he was supposedly born in fifteen oh three, No, not true.
(04:46):
In France, he was born Michel de Nostre, Dame he
became no Stredamis because he latinized his name after he
graduated from medical school, which apparently was custom at the time.
That's right. But when he was born he was Michelle
de Nostre Dame. Yeah. And his family was educated and
they believed in education. So he was from an early
age an academic in a traditional sense, right, nothing wacky
(05:10):
right out of the gate. Well, his grandfather instructed him
as when he was a younger man, taught him languages
and kind of sparked his interest in all sorts of
different topics and all things learning. Yeah. And do you
remember when we did the Inquisition episode, yeah, where there
are a lot of Jewish people who converted but just
converted in name only. Yeah. Yeah, apparently Nostradamis's family was
(05:33):
one of those. Oh so that wasn't a genuine conversion
supposedly not gotcha again, it could be myth, it could
be whatever. Because he was on good terms with the
local Inquisition and the local church officials for most of
his life. So I guess either they didn't suspect him,
or they he had a pass. I don't know. Oh,
(05:54):
it's interesting, that makes sense. He studied a straw no,
I'm sorry. Astrology, which was at the time respected well
respected as a science. Yeah, and supposedly his fellow astrologers
thought he was full of it. Oh really, his contemporary
astrologer pals Well, one of the things that he did
(06:14):
was he studied and this would play out throughout his well,
I would say his career as a predictor, but he
really just wrote the book, the Centuries book, which we'll
get to. But he studied astronomical patterns that coincided with
historical events. That's astrology. Well yeah, but he would basically
(06:38):
use those to predict the future events. Like by some accounts,
he didn't even say that he was a prophet. He said,
I study history and basically history repeats itself, and so
I'm going to use the stars and when these things
line up pattern wise in the certain year in the future,
this may happen again. Yeah, so that's like real astrology. Yeah,
(07:02):
we should do an episode on that. Yeah, I've been
thinking about that one for a while. This one, well,
the the article we have like almost like spits in
the middle. Yeah, it's so one sided in skeptical it's
just a picture of a big lugue, right, But I
looked into Um I looked into it and like, there's
the it's fascinating what they used to believe in all
(07:25):
of the holes you can punch in it, you know,
but um, it's a pretty we should do that for
some time. Yeah. I had my chart done one time,
like for real by my friend's mom, and I remember
looking at it and thinking like, wow, that's a lot
like me. Yeah, it's pretty accurate. But and even even
remove that last part, Yeah, the amount of thought and
(07:46):
effort in what it's based on, in the ancient tradition
of it and everything that in and of itself is fascinating. Yeah,
totally agree, you know, And then you can get in there.
We're totally doing astrology at some point, all right, But
um so what he was doing was astrology. Apparently where
he ran a foul of his fellow astrologers was to
make predictions of how something would come about. Rather than
(08:08):
the next time Venus is in the seventh House of
Mars and a cat catches fire, there's going to be
an earthquake, sure, something like that, he went further and
like made predictions about you know, what was going to
set this off, and like where the people involved were
going to come from and like, and then he was
(08:30):
very very vague, right, So all of that added to
the astrologers disdained for him because he gave him a
bad name pretty much because they were all right exactly.
So he left home supposedly in fifteen twenty two to
study medicine legit medicine and became a physician. Most people
(08:52):
agree that he became a professor in a physician in
southern France. And apparently it was pretty good to doctor
or at treating plague victims. Yeah, he's very ahead of
his time. Yeah, even though he lost his wife and son,
I'm sorry his children to the plague and yeah, and
that had a big effect on his life. Obviously, he
(09:15):
basically sent him on the road for a decade, which
is where he kind of came up with this plan
to write this book. So he was he was a
progressive doctor in that like he prescribed sanitation practices yea,
he prescribed fresh air. He also apparently came up with
(09:36):
a rose hip loznge to help cure plague mild cases
of plague, and that actually makes sense because rose hips
are packed with vitamin C. Yeah, so he was a
pretty good doctor and he had a good record, and
from that he lived in this village with his wife
and children and had a patron who basically supported the family.
And then once his wife and children died, he couldn't
(09:58):
cure them. His star really he fell in this village.
And about the same time, he also had a pretty
good sense of humor. About the same time, they were
raising a statue of the Virgin Mary in the local church,
and he thought it was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen,
and he was making a comment on the artist's abilities. Yeah,
not the Virgin Mary, but he said, these guys are
(10:20):
casting demons, like basically saying, that's a really ugly Virgin Mary. Right. Well,
the artist didn't like this and turn him into the inquisition.
And that's about the time when he ended up on
the road. Yeah, and he went all over Europe just
basically he was described as sort of wandering. But he
did meet another woman and get remarried on his wanderings,
(10:43):
I think toward the tail end of his wanderings about
eight years later, and moved to Salon in France, and
then he started kind of getting his getting his act
together in a in a real way to publish, like
he he said, you know what, I'm gonna put together
this book of prophecies. I've been messing around, I've been
(11:05):
kicking the idea around. I'm just gonna do it. So
we'll talk about what came out of that. Right after
this story, So Chuck, Nostre Damas is settling down in
(11:34):
Solon Solon, Yeah, selectives, and he is deciding to put
his awesome thoughts down into quatrains, that's right, into a
book called The Centuries. But at the time he just
called it the Prophecies. Yeah, the Prophecies of Michel Nostre Damas.
(11:56):
I think when did they rename it um? I think
after his death. Yeah, apparently the centuries had nothing to
do with time. But it was in the structure, the
organized structure of the book itself, because there are a
thousand quatrains or four line verses in hundreds. Yeah, for
some reason. So that's the Centuries. And it wasn't it
wasn't chronological or anything like that. No, and it was
(12:18):
it was a It became a huge sensation due to
a few things. One, simply enough, was that the printing
press was a recent invention and books were a big deal.
Now you know, like widespread books like there was now
something could literally be a best seller for the first time.
(12:39):
So it aligned in that way. And another is that
he just sort of fit the dark times. It was
a book and of its time with all his dire predictions.
It was, you know, when the Catholics and Protestants were
warring and there were all kinds of people saying the
end of the world was coming, and it was just
(13:00):
it was basically put out right at the right time
and widespread because of the printing press. And then Queen
Catherine de Medici of France was a really superstitious queen
and he predicted her husband Henry the second's death, yeah,
pretty specifically for once. Yeah, but we'll poke holes on
(13:20):
that too, and it happened a few years later, and
so she invited him to the court, which was like
the most popular court in Europe at the time, and
so he got a lot of attention there. So he
was sort of like a big writing superstar of his
day because of all these things aligning. Yeah, I mean,
like he wasn't one of those posthumously honored authors like
(13:41):
he was celebrated during his time. Supposedly he met some
monks on the road once and correctly said that one
of them was going to be the next pope. Bam,
no way case solved. Nostronomous is the real deal, because
that supposedly happened. So he had like a whole whole
(14:01):
jam going where he would retire in the evenings. Yeah,
and he would concentrate on maybe a fire, the flames
of a fire, meditate on it, yeah, Or he would
take a bowl with some herbs or something in it
and just zone out on those, try to read the herbs.
Like you said, I don't know if he was doing
lines of nutmeg, but he was ingesting nutmeg most likely, yeah,
(14:24):
which could be hallucinogenic. Right, And he had to have
been rich to just be doing nutmeg, you know, Yeah,
because they had just discovered that. Yeah, And he would
just kind of zone out. He would apparently he got
help from an angelic figure, that's what he says said,
and then he would just see the future. It would
(14:45):
come to him. The thing is is no stredamis these
prophecies didn't come to him, all convoluted and kukie and
however he put them, he understood exactly what was going
to happen. Well, yeah, he supposedly convoluted them on purpose
to avoid persecution during his lifetime. Yeah, that is supposedly
(15:06):
what he told his son from a second marriage, is that, Caesar, Yeah,
I'm doing all this on purpose, and because they will,
you know, string me up as a heretic, because I'm
so eerily accurate. Yeah, they will find out, which I
mean at the time, it was a genuine concern. So
(15:28):
it's it's not like this is just a preposterous claim
on Nostre Damas's part. It's just that for skeptics of Nostradamas,
it's just one more convenient little thing because if you
read the quatrains, they make almost no sense in all
sense simultaneously. Yeah, depending on whether you're reading them on
(15:48):
their own or whether you're trying to look at them
in context. Well yeah, well we might as well go
and talk about that. That's one of the big reasons
you can poke holes in it is because there were
even experts say, it's hard to find two copies of
this book that are the same. Oh yeah, yeah, because
it was translated, you know, hundreds of times. It was
(16:10):
the early printing presses were you know, they weren't super
accurate and they would if the printer maybe didn't know
exactly what he meant, they would say, well, I think
he meant to actually have an apostrophe here, and in
Middle French, that apostrophe could completely change the meaning of
the word. So beyond that confusion and the translation confusions,
(16:32):
there are, like you said, there are many different ways
to interpret something, and if something didn't come true, you
could probably find a version out there of it that
supports whatever you think he predicted, right, you know, Yeah,
there's a pretty good example that people give of a
translation problem after nine to eleven, which we'll talk more
(16:53):
about in a second. Yeah, they some quatrain of or
I guess in a semige of nostredamis. Quatrains were kind
of bandied about as proof that he predicted it right.
One of them was there would be smoke in the
new city. Well, in his actual text in the centuries
(17:14):
he wrote a villa noeuve Vienneuve, which means in French
the new city. Yeah, but it was also a city
in France at the time he was probably talking about. Yeah,
So there's a lot of translation and interpretation that can
come together and really lead to a misunderstanding. If there
(17:37):
is even such a thing at all with nostre damas.
Can you misunderstand him? I don't think it's possible. Can
you misunderstand what's not understandable words? Yeah, Well, since we're
talking about interpreting, we might as well go onto the
famous Hitler prediction. Beasts ferocious with hunger will across the
rivers a greater part of the battlefield. Wainst into a
(18:01):
cage of iron iron with the child of Germany, he observes,
or thing, man, I wouldn't I hope we added some
effect to that, Jerry, Yes, vocal effects, Yeah, something menacing maybe,
or maybe we should do like clown music. Um So,
(18:22):
histor this was has long been looked at as the
prediction of the rise of Hitler. Yeah, he says Germany
in there. Yeah, it's Germany and hisstor Yeah. Um, but
hisstor was actually the lower Danube River, and so most people,
um or skeptics would say, well, he didn't say Hitler,
he said Hister since that was a place. Um, that's
(18:45):
probably what he meant. Yeah, or he would have said Hitler. Yeah,
it kind of a miss right there. Um. Some people say, well,
Hitler was born around the Danube, so he still met Hitler.
That's exactly the point is that people will find a
way to interpret it if they choose to. But the
(19:07):
Nazis still use this to their advantage. They actually dropped
pamphlets containing this prediction onto France from planes because they
wanted to scare them, like, hey, even Nostradamas said we're coming, yeah,
and we're coming, and it worked. I guess it did
for a while. So there's basically that if you're a
(19:28):
skeptic of Nostradamus, you say, okay, first of all, he's
not really saying anything right or anything concrete right, And
a believer of Nostredamas would say, well, he even said that,
you're not supposed to get it unless you're one of
the enlightened few who happen to be one of that.
It's not for this time. It's for people far from
(19:50):
now to understand, right, And so the skeptic that's arguing
will sigh and then say, okay, Um, here's the thing though,
even if even if he is saying something like even
if there's something clear, he's making a prediction and it
does seem to come true if you look at events
in human history as numbers on a graph. Yeah, eventually.
(20:14):
Statistically speaking, one of Nostredams's very vague predictions about the
rise of a power, a war, Sure, an earthquake, something
like that is going to happen, and maybe something will
have even a couple of predictions that will fit one
event yeah, like the date might align somehow or something. Yeah,
(20:36):
because every once a while he used dates, but for
the most part he didn't. But if you look at
it statistically, yes, even Nostre Damas' predictions are going to
come true over a long enough period of time. Right Again,
if you read the predictions, it's hard to say his
predictions come true because he's not really predicting anything. It's
(20:56):
not like he sat back and said, sometime in the
twenty century, a guy with a terrible mustache is going
to come to power and there's going to be a
horrific war as a result. Nothing even approaching that. Yeah,
I mean you read what the Hitler prediction was, like,
it could be anything. Yeah, But even if you had
(21:17):
predicted something, if you take his predictions as predictions, if
you put them over the arc of time, sure eventually
you're going to get hit. So that's one argument A
skeptical argument against Nostredamas. Yeah, especially if you believe, like
most people do, that history repeats itself in some fashion
over a long enough timeline. When he himself said that
(21:37):
that's the model he used, was using the stars to
look at past historical events to predict future events, right,
so it kind of makes sense. And also some people
say these aren't even predictions because a prediction is something
that you realize before the fact. And despite the fact
that thousands of scholars have studied Nostradamus and millions of
(21:59):
people have read him, no one has ever pointed out
something before it happened. It's always afterward that they go
back and see, look, see here, he said this was
going to happen, and it happened because we interpreted that way.
But no one's ever said stopped anything in its tracks
because nostredamis predicted it As an excellent point, you know,
it also raises another argument against no strudomas, and that
(22:22):
the people who follow no stream, like you said, it's
always the interpretation is always after the fact. And allegations
of shoehorning occur where basically you make something fit, you
shoehorned into the context and in doing so, you cherry
pick stuff that makes sense and you ignore stuff that
doesn't make sense. Yeah. In fact, I think this article,
(22:45):
this one line says it best imprecise language lends itself
well to subjective interpretation. Yeah. I mean, if you throw
something super vague out there, you could come up with
a hundred different interpretations of it. Yep. You know that's
what poetry is exactly. And you know, despite all of
these very great arguments, there's still plenty of people out
(23:06):
there who believe in Nostre Damas. It almost seems like
there should be a phase in life where you do
go through believing that Nostre Damas is real, because it
does kind of lend some sort of something to life.
It also coincides with being really into Pink Floyd exam
it's true. So we'll talk a little more about some
of the people who argue for and against Nostre Damas,
(23:28):
specifically centered around nine to eleven. Right after this, okay, Chuck,
(23:48):
nine to eleven happened, and almost immediately people said Nostre
Damas predicted this. Yeah, his sales went through the roof, apparently,
and supposedly his name was googled more than Usama bin
Laden or George Bush after nine eleven. Really, that's what
they say. That sounds like something someone just writes on
(24:09):
the internet exactly, but I believe it. Well, here's why
his star rose again was because this quatrain emerged where
it was like, yeah, that's pretty close to what happened. Yeah.
I remember hearing it and thinking, oh my gosh, so
you want to read this one. You're pretty good at reading. Here.
Can we get the sound effect again? Please cue the
clown music. In the City of God, there will be
(24:31):
a great thunder or two brothers torn apart by chaos,
while the fortress endures, the Great Leader will succome The
third big war will begin when the big city is burning.
That's super specific. Yeah. The only thing I don't know
if most people would agree on is calling New York
the City of God or George Bush the Great Leader. Yeah,
(24:54):
but the two brothers clearly those are the two towers. Yeah,
the fortress endures, the Pentagon the Great Leader Bush. Yeah,
some people said, and then the third war will begin
when the big city was burning. Well, at least one
more war. I don't know if it was World War three,
but a pretty huge couple of Wars started up as
(25:14):
a result. So people are saying, here it is finally
evidence that shows almost incontrovertibly that Nostre Damas was the
real deal. What's the argument against it, Chuck, Well, it
was made up. Yeah, Nostre Damas didn't write that. No,
it was apparently written by several years ago by a
(25:34):
guy named Neil Marshall, was a student in Canada and
said he was actually using that as a demonstration of
what bunk Nostre Damas was like. I could write something
like this and people would think he predicted nine to eleven,
and somehow it became something that Nostre Damas wrote. He
actually proved it by writing that in nineteen ninety seven
(25:56):
and then it getting picked up in two thousand and one. Yeah,
so what he set out to do worked worked perfectly.
He didn't even have to wait more than four years.
So he basically showed just how um man. I hate
to use this word, but global people can be when
they're reading no Stredamus's work, because no one checks anything. Dude.
They see it and they click on it and they
(26:18):
post it to social media and then it's done. And
here's here's another really good example of that a little
while ago. This still cracks me up. ClickHole you know
the onions like, uh, BuzzFeed like site. Oh is that onion? Yeah?
I didn't know that, I believe so yeah, I'm almost
positive I know ClickHole Yeah, okay, so ClickHole satirical site
(26:40):
of like buzzfeedy sits um. They released something called five
Tragedies Weirdly predicted by Adam Sandler and dude they are
so can I read a couple? Yeah? So, in the
wake of the nineteen ninety three tragedy um, apparently people
went back and saw that Adam Sandler, during his early
(27:02):
stand up career, would mutter something's coming to Waco, something
dark like during his stand up show. Is that true?
None of this is true? Okay? I thought they just
picked apart real things and no. Okay. So the nineteen
ninety seven car crash that killed Princess Diana, apparently if
you go back and watch Happy Gilmore, which was made
(27:24):
in nineteen ninety six, Sandler looks directly in the camera
and says, Our Queen's eldest, the beautiful flower will will
under a Parisian bridge. Can I keep going? So? The
BP oil spill that happened in twenty ten in the Gulf. Yeah.
Apparently Adam Sandler was on Conan O'Brien in two thousand
and five and he was just wearing a t shirt
(27:44):
that said BP oil spill in five years the twenty
ten Haitian earthquake. Yeah, the UN estimates that two hundred
and twenty two thousand, five hundred and seventy people were killed.
Apparently in Adam Sandler's funny People, he estimated two hundred
and twenty thousand on the notes. And then lastly, the
(28:07):
Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy Adam Sandler when he was operaman. Yeah,
there was a nineteen ninety three operaman sketch where he says,
I'm missing plane. It's from Malaysia. Makes me insane. This
will all make sense in due time. That's good man.
Here's the thing, man, people believe that viral, I'm not
(28:32):
kidding you. It went viral that like somehow Adam Sandler
had made all these crazy predictions. And this is a
real thing because apparently they didn't announce that when clickbait
came out that it was a satirical site that BP
oil spill and the teacher it's pretty good. Yeah, well,
let's get into some of these then. First of all,
(28:55):
to further than nine to eleven thing, there were a
couple of other quatrains which have been cobbled together to
try and support the nine to eleven thing. But like
I said, they weren't as he wrote them. They like
would combine things, which is just silly because that goes
against everything that he was saying was each quatrain is
(29:16):
its own thing. One of them Century ten Quatrain seventy two,
the year nineteen ninety nine. Seven months from the sky
will come the great King of Terror to resuscitate the
Great King of the Mongols before and after Mars reigns.
By good luck. That last part sounds like it's from
a fortune cookie. That before nine to eleven back in
(29:38):
ninety nine, some people thought he was foretelling the end
of the world would be on July twenty fourth, nineteen
ninety nine. And I remember this happening, and I remember
it being a big deal. There was like genuine concern
from some people, like some stores and France had like
closeout sales. There was this one French designer who like
(29:58):
canceled his big He was a big believer, and he
canceled this big show, and of course it didn't happen,
And then it was recalculated and everyone said, no, no, no,
it wasn't supposed to be July twenty fourth. If you
read it this way, it means August eleventh, and of
course the world didn't and then either in August. How
do you get August eleventh from seven months into nineteen
(30:19):
ninety nine. Well, again it was there were some different
translations that maybe we're different enough to recalculate. Yeah, yeah,
But then that one was also used for nine to eleven,
was repurposed for nine to eleven. Right, they're like, he
was just close, Yeah, exact, it's a couple of years off. Well,
they combined that one with Century six Quatrain ninety seven,
(30:39):
which says, at forty five degrees, this guy will burn
fire to approach the great new city. In an instant,
a great scattered flame will leap up when one will
want to demand proof of the normans, what is that
last thing? I'm not sure that's the thing. Like, you
can't just pick part of it and then discount the rest,
right and say that you know he was wrong on that,
(31:01):
But that's exactly what people did. Well, they did because
several quatrains referred to an anti Christ's figure called Mabus,
and if you rearrange the letters it could be Ussam
b Yeah, and so people use that as proof. But
they also didn't they failed to mention that previous to that,
they used it as Saddam, like up to the day
(31:23):
before nine to eleven. Yeah, they were saying it was
Saddam Hussein was Mabus because maybe's spelled backwards as sue bomb.
Kind of a reach if you ask me. It is. Well,
in that forty five degrees part of the quad trains,
some people said that New York cities around forty degrees
five minutes north latitude, so that's close. But again he
(31:45):
was said the new city will burn at forty five
degrees Villanueva or Vienneuve, Yeah, is that about forty five
degrees latitude? So it could just be interpretation. I don't
know who who's really at fault here. Is it Nostredama,
Is it the people who just blindly accept nostredas predictions?
(32:07):
Is it? Though? Because Nostre Damas purposefully obfuscated his stuff,
so I think he's a little bit responsible. For this too,
I imagine since he has that great sense of humor.
It made fun of that one guy's statue of the
Virgin Mary. Yeah, he is sitting in his coffin holding
a plaque with some future date when he'll be exhumed
his laughing and laughing. Yeah maybe. Yeah. We mentioned Henry
(32:30):
the second. He predicted his death this quatrain, the young
lion will overcome the old one on the field of
battle in single combat. He will put his eyes in
a cage of gold two fleets one then to die
in a cruel death. So that means two injuries. And
this actually happened. King Henry was in a jousting competition,
(32:53):
but it wasn't on the field of battle. It was
a friendly It was a party basically, and Captain Montgomery,
who was younger the younger lion did joust, hit him
in the in the eye and through the throat. So
the two injuries supposedly from one man. Yeah, but that
was all that his wife Dimdici, Queen Dmadicici, needed to know.
(33:14):
She was like, you know, holy crap, this has come true. Yes,
and he knows what he's doing. John F. Kennedy, the Challenger,
the Great Fire of London. People have said that he's
predicted all these things. But we could sit here all
day poking holes in the you know that, not that
we're poking holes, but other people have poked legitimate holes.
(33:38):
I think we poked a few holes. Well yeah, but
I mean it's all been from other people's stuff. Oh
that's true. You know I didn't do my own hole poking. No,
we should probably say we'd never begrudge anybody that believing
in something like that or enjoying like I don't think
it hurts anything behind it or anything like that. Yes,
if you go out dump all your stocks and sell
your worldly possessions, or you cancel your big fashion debut, yeah,
(34:02):
that's all that just hurts you. Yeah, although that may
have hurt the fashion world. Yeah, he probably had it
the week after. You want to hear something crazy. Yeah,
about the day before September eleventh, this group called the Coup.
They're a rap group out of Oakland. They're pretty awesome.
They were releasing their album I can't remember what's called.
(34:23):
I want to say, like party Time or party Fever,
party something Yeah, and like the day before and it
had the guy Boots Riley, who is like the MC
for the group. It had him like standing there pressing
a button in the twin towers were coming down, like
blowing up. They were going to release it like the
(34:45):
day before. It was scheduled to release in September two
thousand and one, and then nine to eleven happened. They're like, well,
let's change the cover. And that's why you've never heard
of the coup I wonder Actually, yeah, well they were
getting kind of big right around that time. The album
had like good buzz around it, and then yeah, they
just went away. They're still around there. Well, all the
(35:06):
all the entertainment that was released around that time notoriously suffered. Yeah.
I can't remember what movies in particular, but yeah, exactly,
there are a lot of things. Later on, the people
are like, wow, we've released it right before nine eleven,
so we were you know, we were doomed. Yeah, but
it was a movie. Who cares, you know? So if
(35:26):
you want to know more about Nostradamis, you can go
look this up on how still works dot com by
scanning the search bar, or you can just kind of
look around the internet, because there is plenty of stuff
about that dude on there. And enjoy yourself. And since
I said enjoy yourself, it's time for listener. Now, I'm
gonna call this um trailer builder. Hey, guys, Chuck and
(35:51):
Josh or Josh and Chuck, whichever you prefer. We prefer
Josh and Chuck. I think it goes either way. Yeah,
well that's what we kind of settled on, consistent branding. No,
it goes both ways. We go both ways. Yeah, all right,
Chuck and Josh, Josh and Chuck. Hey, guys, I must
admit that I tried very hard not to listen to you.
I was told by several of my friends that I
absolutely must subscribe to your show. However, as to stay
(36:13):
at home dad by day to a beautiful three year
old and three month old boys, a very busy small
business owner by night, had trouble finding enough time to
go poop, let alone indulge in any form of entertainment.
Needless to say, I did listen in wonder and became
instantly addicted. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed learning, and
the two months since I first gave you guys a shot,
had been on a steady binge. And I'm quickly running
(36:35):
out of back episodes to listen to, which is a
frightening prospect to me, considering your podcast as a fuel
that powers my motivation engine. While I work, my brother
and I own and operate Oregon trailer. That's trail Apostrophe
are where the two of us built high end, tiny
teardrop style camp trailers. Have you ever seen those? Yeah?
(36:56):
Really cool? Yeah, like I want one of these? Dotty's
gonna send anyone. I found that while my hands are
on autopilot building trailers, my brain has been totally neglected
listening to my requisite Pandora stations. But now that I'm
listening to you, fellows and receiving constant brain stimulation, I'm
getting more done than ever and enjoying every second. And
(37:17):
my wife and sons thank you, as well as my
general mood is improved despite the potentially unhealthy lack of sleep. However,
my lovely wife is still getting a little tired of
the phrase. So. I was listening to stuff you should
know last night dot dot dot. So I just want
to say thanks for everything you guys do, have done,
and we'll do in the future. Large amounts of platonic love.
That is Sawyer Christiansen and I'm gonna plug Oregon Trailer
(37:40):
dot net just because those things are really cool. Yeah,
Oregon trail apostrophe or no, on the website it's trailer, Okay,
Oregon trailer dot Net. Good point. And if you're in
the market for one of those, like check him out
small business handmade ye send me one, send Josh one
(38:00):
and they'd be sweet. Yeah, they're pretty neat. Thanks a lot,
Sawyer Christensen, great name, by the way, and we appreciate
the kudos. And if you out there, everybody else who
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(38:21):
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your favorite shows.
Hey everyone, it's Josh and for this week's select I've
chosen our twenty fifteen episode, Nostrodamus, Predictor of the Future.
Not so much Nostrodamus if that even is his real name,
which it isn't, must have rued the day he was born.
After you heard this episode, we disassemble his so called
prophetic abilities so hard. Plus, this has one more Adam
(00:22):
Sandler than you'd probably expected. So sit back, light a candle,
let your eyes roll back in your head, and enjoy
this skeptical episode a skep epp. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
(00:45):
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant,
there's Jerry. I predict this will be the best podcast
of the new year. Man, I don't know about that one.
And I think that predict is coming true. And the
first month when Gray filled the Sky, the recorders of
(01:06):
Gobbledegook hit a high water mark. It's a little on
the nose from Nostre Damas. Actually it's I should have
been even more vague, like way vaguer. Yeah that was
like explicit for him. Yeah, yeah, because no, Stredamus used
to like to just basically take concepts and words and
(01:27):
put them together and pretend like they were going to happen. Yeah, no,
stre Damas snort a little nutmeg. I Um. When I
was a younger person, I realized, like from this and
ESP that I was into some pretty cool occult stuff. Yeah,
read lots of books about ghosts and things like that. Sure,
(01:48):
meet to you a little bit. And then now I
was like an older person, like I wanted to go
to Duke University to study parapsychology. Oh really, I was
into like that kind of thing. And then now as
an older person, I'm like, man of the things I
used to believe, just do a face palm here there, Like,
for example, we got into real science and that's usually
what happens. Yes, so the pseudoscience has kind of fade
(02:11):
away once you start educating yourself. Well, we shouldn't say
parapsychology is necessarily a pseudoscience. That's not We're here to
poo pooh Nostradamus, not esp parasychology in general, but for instance,
you were I remember not only believing, but frequently saying, dude, Nostradamus,
(02:32):
he had to be exhumed once, like at the church
he was buried at. They were like expanding and they
had to exoome his grave and they opened his casket
and he was holding a tablet that had the day
they exhumed him. I thought that was real. I thought
that really happened when I was a slightly younger man.
That's awesome. Yeah, when you were in your late twenties, right, Yeah,
(02:56):
I remember. I didn't read up on stuff like this,
but I was a big fan of like Lennar Nimoys
in Search of and yeah, TV shows that kind of
dabbled in the fringe, And what's wrong with that. Nothing,
there's nothing wrong with enjoying that kind of thing, liking it.
Ve been wondering if possibly some of it could be real.
Nothing wrong with exploration, right, But the key to keeping
(03:20):
egg off your face as much as possible is to
doing research, especially when a claim is very extraordinary. Yeah,
really look into it. Yeah, Like had I had I
looked around, had the Internet been invented yet? And I
looked around, and I probably would have found somewhere some
entry saying like that is absolutely not true. Well, that's
(03:41):
one of the Internet is one of the big reasons,
I think because before that was around, you know, it's
you'd have to go search out a book that was
written profuing Ostradamis, Yeah, in the card catalog, and it
was just a lot harder back then, you know. Yeah,
But the Internet is a double edged fiber optic line.
I mean there's a lot out of sites out there
that I mean, No Stradamas has gotten probably even more
(04:05):
popular and even more play since the Internet was invented.
Oh sure, you know. Yeah, So let's talk about this guy.
Let's try to separate the man from the myth and
really get into who no Stredamis was. Because he was
a lot more than a crackpot writer of vague predictions.
That's true, he was. One of the tough parts is, though,
(04:26):
is that there are so many disagreements about his biography.
Even yeah, I didn't find that necessarily. Yeah, I saw
one guy wrote a book at him that said he
wasn't even a doctor. Woh, okay, that is a disagreement. Yeah,
well let's go ahead and go there then. Okay, So
he was supposedly born in fifteen oh three, No, not true.
(04:46):
In France, he was born Michel de Nostre, Dame he
became no Stredamis because he latinized his name after he
graduated from medical school, which apparently was custom at the time.
That's right. But when he was born he was Michelle
de Nostre Dame. Yeah. And his family was educated and
they believed in education. So he was from an early
age an academic in a traditional sense, right, nothing wacky
(05:10):
right out of the gate. Well, his grandfather instructed him
as when he was a younger man, taught him languages
and kind of sparked his interest in all sorts of
different topics and all things learning. Yeah. And do you
remember when we did the Inquisition episode, yeah, where there
are a lot of Jewish people who converted but just
converted in name only. Yeah. Yeah, apparently Nostradamis's family was
(05:33):
one of those. Oh so that wasn't a genuine conversion
supposedly not gotcha again, it could be myth, it could
be whatever. Because he was on good terms with the
local Inquisition and the local church officials for most of
his life. So I guess either they didn't suspect him,
or they he had a pass. I don't know. Oh,
(05:54):
it's interesting, that makes sense. He studied a straw no,
I'm sorry. Astrology, which was at the time respected well
respected as a science. Yeah, and supposedly his fellow astrologers
thought he was full of it. Oh really, his contemporary
astrologer pals Well, one of the things that he did
(06:14):
was he studied and this would play out throughout his well,
I would say his career as a predictor, but he
really just wrote the book, the Centuries book, which we'll
get to. But he studied astronomical patterns that coincided with
historical events. That's astrology. Well yeah, but he would basically
(06:38):
use those to predict the future events. Like by some accounts,
he didn't even say that he was a prophet. He said,
I study history and basically history repeats itself, and so
I'm going to use the stars and when these things
line up pattern wise in the certain year in the future,
this may happen again. Yeah, so that's like real astrology. Yeah,
(07:02):
we should do an episode on that. Yeah, I've been
thinking about that one for a while. This one, well,
the the article we have like almost like spits in
the middle. Yeah, it's so one sided in skeptical it's
just a picture of a big lugue, right, But I
looked into Um I looked into it and like, there's
the it's fascinating what they used to believe in all
(07:25):
of the holes you can punch in it, you know,
but um, it's a pretty we should do that for
some time. Yeah. I had my chart done one time,
like for real by my friend's mom, and I remember
looking at it and thinking like, wow, that's a lot
like me. Yeah, it's pretty accurate. But and even even
remove that last part, Yeah, the amount of thought and
(07:46):
effort in what it's based on, in the ancient tradition
of it and everything that in and of itself is fascinating. Yeah,
totally agree, you know, And then you can get in there.
We're totally doing astrology at some point, all right, But
um so what he was doing was astrology. Apparently where
he ran a foul of his fellow astrologers was to
make predictions of how something would come about. Rather than
(08:08):
the next time Venus is in the seventh House of
Mars and a cat catches fire, there's going to be
an earthquake, sure, something like that, he went further and
like made predictions about you know, what was going to
set this off, and like where the people involved were
going to come from and like, and then he was
(08:30):
very very vague, right, So all of that added to
the astrologers disdained for him because he gave him a
bad name pretty much because they were all right exactly.
So he left home supposedly in fifteen twenty two to
study medicine legit medicine and became a physician. Most people
(08:52):
agree that he became a professor in a physician in
southern France. And apparently it was pretty good to doctor
or at treating plague victims. Yeah, he's very ahead of
his time. Yeah, even though he lost his wife and son,
I'm sorry his children to the plague and yeah, and
that had a big effect on his life. Obviously, he
(09:15):
basically sent him on the road for a decade, which
is where he kind of came up with this plan
to write this book. So he was he was a
progressive doctor in that like he prescribed sanitation practices yea,
he prescribed fresh air. He also apparently came up with
(09:36):
a rose hip loznge to help cure plague mild cases
of plague, and that actually makes sense because rose hips
are packed with vitamin C. Yeah, so he was a
pretty good doctor and he had a good record, and
from that he lived in this village with his wife
and children and had a patron who basically supported the family.
And then once his wife and children died, he couldn't
(09:58):
cure them. His star really he fell in this village.
And about the same time, he also had a pretty
good sense of humor. About the same time, they were
raising a statue of the Virgin Mary in the local church,
and he thought it was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen,
and he was making a comment on the artist's abilities. Yeah,
not the Virgin Mary, but he said, these guys are
(10:20):
casting demons, like basically saying, that's a really ugly Virgin Mary. Right. Well,
the artist didn't like this and turn him into the inquisition.
And that's about the time when he ended up on
the road. Yeah, and he went all over Europe just
basically he was described as sort of wandering. But he
did meet another woman and get remarried on his wanderings,
(10:43):
I think toward the tail end of his wanderings about
eight years later, and moved to Salon in France, and
then he started kind of getting his getting his act
together in a in a real way to publish, like
he he said, you know what, I'm gonna put together
this book of prophecies. I've been messing around, I've been
(11:05):
kicking the idea around. I'm just gonna do it. So
we'll talk about what came out of that. Right after
this story, So Chuck, Nostre Damas is settling down in
(11:34):
Solon Solon, Yeah, selectives, and he is deciding to put
his awesome thoughts down into quatrains, that's right, into a
book called The Centuries. But at the time he just
called it the Prophecies. Yeah, the Prophecies of Michel Nostre Damas.
(11:56):
I think when did they rename it um? I think
after his death. Yeah, apparently the centuries had nothing to
do with time. But it was in the structure, the
organized structure of the book itself, because there are a
thousand quatrains or four line verses in hundreds. Yeah, for
some reason. So that's the Centuries. And it wasn't it
wasn't chronological or anything like that. No, and it was
(12:18):
it was a It became a huge sensation due to
a few things. One, simply enough, was that the printing
press was a recent invention and books were a big deal.
Now you know, like widespread books like there was now
something could literally be a best seller for the first time.
(12:39):
So it aligned in that way. And another is that
he just sort of fit the dark times. It was
a book and of its time with all his dire predictions.
It was, you know, when the Catholics and Protestants were
warring and there were all kinds of people saying the
end of the world was coming, and it was just
(13:00):
it was basically put out right at the right time
and widespread because of the printing press. And then Queen
Catherine de Medici of France was a really superstitious queen
and he predicted her husband Henry the second's death, yeah,
pretty specifically for once. Yeah, but we'll poke holes on
(13:20):
that too, and it happened a few years later, and
so she invited him to the court, which was like
the most popular court in Europe at the time, and
so he got a lot of attention there. So he
was sort of like a big writing superstar of his
day because of all these things aligning. Yeah, I mean,
like he wasn't one of those posthumously honored authors like
(13:41):
he was celebrated during his time. Supposedly he met some
monks on the road once and correctly said that one
of them was going to be the next pope. Bam,
no way case solved. Nostronomous is the real deal, because
that supposedly happened. So he had like a whole whole
(14:01):
jam going where he would retire in the evenings. Yeah,
and he would concentrate on maybe a fire, the flames
of a fire, meditate on it, yeah, Or he would
take a bowl with some herbs or something in it
and just zone out on those, try to read the herbs.
Like you said, I don't know if he was doing
lines of nutmeg, but he was ingesting nutmeg most likely, yeah,
(14:24):
which could be hallucinogenic. Right, And he had to have
been rich to just be doing nutmeg, you know, Yeah,
because they had just discovered that. Yeah, And he would
just kind of zone out. He would apparently he got
help from an angelic figure, that's what he says said,
and then he would just see the future. It would
(14:45):
come to him. The thing is is no stredamis these
prophecies didn't come to him, all convoluted and kukie and
however he put them, he understood exactly what was going
to happen. Well, yeah, he supposedly convoluted them on purpose
to avoid persecution during his lifetime. Yeah, that is supposedly
(15:06):
what he told his son from a second marriage, is that, Caesar, Yeah,
I'm doing all this on purpose, and because they will,
you know, string me up as a heretic, because I'm
so eerily accurate. Yeah, they will find out, which I
mean at the time, it was a genuine concern. So
(15:28):
it's it's not like this is just a preposterous claim
on Nostre Damas's part. It's just that for skeptics of Nostradamas,
it's just one more convenient little thing because if you
read the quatrains, they make almost no sense in all
sense simultaneously. Yeah, depending on whether you're reading them on
(15:48):
their own or whether you're trying to look at them
in context. Well yeah, well we might as well go
and talk about that. That's one of the big reasons
you can poke holes in it is because there were
even experts say, it's hard to find two copies of
this book that are the same. Oh yeah, yeah, because
it was translated, you know, hundreds of times. It was
(16:10):
the early printing presses were you know, they weren't super
accurate and they would if the printer maybe didn't know
exactly what he meant, they would say, well, I think
he meant to actually have an apostrophe here, and in
Middle French, that apostrophe could completely change the meaning of
the word. So beyond that confusion and the translation confusions,
(16:32):
there are, like you said, there are many different ways
to interpret something, and if something didn't come true, you
could probably find a version out there of it that
supports whatever you think he predicted, right, you know, Yeah,
there's a pretty good example that people give of a
translation problem after nine to eleven, which we'll talk more
(16:53):
about in a second. Yeah, they some quatrain of or
I guess in a semige of nostredamis. Quatrains were kind
of bandied about as proof that he predicted it right.
One of them was there would be smoke in the
new city. Well, in his actual text in the centuries
(17:14):
he wrote a villa noeuve Vienneuve, which means in French
the new city. Yeah, but it was also a city
in France at the time he was probably talking about. Yeah,
So there's a lot of translation and interpretation that can
come together and really lead to a misunderstanding. If there
(17:37):
is even such a thing at all with nostre damas.
Can you misunderstand him? I don't think it's possible. Can
you misunderstand what's not understandable words? Yeah, Well, since we're
talking about interpreting, we might as well go onto the
famous Hitler prediction. Beasts ferocious with hunger will across the
rivers a greater part of the battlefield. Wainst into a
(18:01):
cage of iron iron with the child of Germany, he observes,
or thing, man, I wouldn't I hope we added some
effect to that, Jerry, Yes, vocal effects, Yeah, something menacing maybe,
or maybe we should do like clown music. Um So,
(18:22):
histor this was has long been looked at as the
prediction of the rise of Hitler. Yeah, he says Germany
in there. Yeah, it's Germany and hisstor Yeah. Um, but
hisstor was actually the lower Danube River, and so most people,
um or skeptics would say, well, he didn't say Hitler,
he said Hister since that was a place. Um, that's
(18:45):
probably what he meant. Yeah, or he would have said Hitler. Yeah,
it kind of a miss right there. Um. Some people say, well,
Hitler was born around the Danube, so he still met Hitler.
That's exactly the point is that people will find a
way to interpret it if they choose to. But the
(19:07):
Nazis still use this to their advantage. They actually dropped
pamphlets containing this prediction onto France from planes because they
wanted to scare them, like, hey, even Nostradamas said we're coming, yeah,
and we're coming, and it worked. I guess it did
for a while. So there's basically that if you're a
(19:28):
skeptic of Nostradamus, you say, okay, first of all, he's
not really saying anything right or anything concrete right, And
a believer of Nostredamas would say, well, he even said that,
you're not supposed to get it unless you're one of
the enlightened few who happen to be one of that.
It's not for this time. It's for people far from
(19:50):
now to understand, right, And so the skeptic that's arguing
will sigh and then say, okay, Um, here's the thing though,
even if even if he is saying something like even
if there's something clear, he's making a prediction and it
does seem to come true if you look at events
in human history as numbers on a graph. Yeah, eventually.
(20:14):
Statistically speaking, one of Nostredams's very vague predictions about the
rise of a power, a war, Sure, an earthquake, something
like that is going to happen, and maybe something will
have even a couple of predictions that will fit one
event yeah, like the date might align somehow or something. Yeah,
(20:36):
because every once a while he used dates, but for
the most part he didn't. But if you look at
it statistically, yes, even Nostre Damas' predictions are going to
come true over a long enough period of time. Right Again,
if you read the predictions, it's hard to say his
predictions come true because he's not really predicting anything. It's
(20:56):
not like he sat back and said, sometime in the
twenty century, a guy with a terrible mustache is going
to come to power and there's going to be a
horrific war as a result. Nothing even approaching that. Yeah,
I mean you read what the Hitler prediction was, like,
it could be anything. Yeah, But even if you had
(21:17):
predicted something, if you take his predictions as predictions, if
you put them over the arc of time, sure eventually
you're going to get hit. So that's one argument A
skeptical argument against Nostredamas. Yeah, especially if you believe, like
most people do, that history repeats itself in some fashion
over a long enough timeline. When he himself said that
(21:37):
that's the model he used, was using the stars to
look at past historical events to predict future events, right,
so it kind of makes sense. And also some people
say these aren't even predictions because a prediction is something
that you realize before the fact. And despite the fact
that thousands of scholars have studied Nostradamus and millions of
(21:59):
people have read him, no one has ever pointed out
something before it happened. It's always afterward that they go
back and see, look, see here, he said this was
going to happen, and it happened because we interpreted that way.
But no one's ever said stopped anything in its tracks
because nostredamis predicted it As an excellent point, you know,
it also raises another argument against no strudomas, and that
(22:22):
the people who follow no stream, like you said, it's
always the interpretation is always after the fact. And allegations
of shoehorning occur where basically you make something fit, you
shoehorned into the context and in doing so, you cherry
pick stuff that makes sense and you ignore stuff that
doesn't make sense. Yeah. In fact, I think this article,
(22:45):
this one line says it best imprecise language lends itself
well to subjective interpretation. Yeah. I mean, if you throw
something super vague out there, you could come up with
a hundred different interpretations of it. Yep. You know that's
what poetry is exactly. And you know, despite all of
these very great arguments, there's still plenty of people out
(23:06):
there who believe in Nostre Damas. It almost seems like
there should be a phase in life where you do
go through believing that Nostre Damas is real, because it
does kind of lend some sort of something to life.
It also coincides with being really into Pink Floyd exam
it's true. So we'll talk a little more about some
of the people who argue for and against Nostre Damas,
(23:28):
specifically centered around nine to eleven. Right after this, okay, Chuck,
(23:48):
nine to eleven happened, and almost immediately people said Nostre
Damas predicted this. Yeah, his sales went through the roof, apparently,
and supposedly his name was googled more than Usama bin
Laden or George Bush after nine eleven. Really, that's what
they say. That sounds like something someone just writes on
(24:09):
the internet exactly, but I believe it. Well, here's why
his star rose again was because this quatrain emerged where
it was like, yeah, that's pretty close to what happened. Yeah.
I remember hearing it and thinking, oh my gosh, so
you want to read this one. You're pretty good at reading. Here.
Can we get the sound effect again? Please cue the
clown music. In the City of God, there will be
(24:31):
a great thunder or two brothers torn apart by chaos,
while the fortress endures, the Great Leader will succome The
third big war will begin when the big city is burning.
That's super specific. Yeah. The only thing I don't know
if most people would agree on is calling New York
the City of God or George Bush the Great Leader. Yeah,
(24:54):
but the two brothers clearly those are the two towers. Yeah,
the fortress endures, the Pentagon the Great Leader Bush. Yeah,
some people said, and then the third war will begin
when the big city was burning. Well, at least one
more war. I don't know if it was World War three,
but a pretty huge couple of Wars started up as
(25:14):
a result. So people are saying, here it is finally
evidence that shows almost incontrovertibly that Nostre Damas was the
real deal. What's the argument against it, Chuck, Well, it
was made up. Yeah, Nostre Damas didn't write that. No,
it was apparently written by several years ago by a
(25:34):
guy named Neil Marshall, was a student in Canada and
said he was actually using that as a demonstration of
what bunk Nostre Damas was like. I could write something
like this and people would think he predicted nine to eleven,
and somehow it became something that Nostre Damas wrote. He
actually proved it by writing that in nineteen ninety seven
(25:56):
and then it getting picked up in two thousand and one. Yeah,
so what he set out to do worked worked perfectly.
He didn't even have to wait more than four years.
So he basically showed just how um man. I hate
to use this word, but global people can be when
they're reading no Stredamus's work, because no one checks anything. Dude.
They see it and they click on it and they
(26:18):
post it to social media and then it's done. And
here's here's another really good example of that a little
while ago. This still cracks me up. ClickHole you know
the onions like, uh, BuzzFeed like site. Oh is that onion? Yeah?
I didn't know that, I believe so yeah, I'm almost
positive I know ClickHole Yeah, okay, so ClickHole satirical site
(26:40):
of like buzzfeedy sits um. They released something called five
Tragedies Weirdly predicted by Adam Sandler and dude they are
so can I read a couple? Yeah? So, in the
wake of the nineteen ninety three tragedy um, apparently people
went back and saw that Adam Sandler, during his early
(27:02):
stand up career, would mutter something's coming to Waco, something
dark like during his stand up show. Is that true?
None of this is true? Okay? I thought they just
picked apart real things and no. Okay. So the nineteen
ninety seven car crash that killed Princess Diana, apparently if
you go back and watch Happy Gilmore, which was made
(27:24):
in nineteen ninety six, Sandler looks directly in the camera
and says, Our Queen's eldest, the beautiful flower will will
under a Parisian bridge. Can I keep going? So? The
BP oil spill that happened in twenty ten in the Gulf. Yeah.
Apparently Adam Sandler was on Conan O'Brien in two thousand
and five and he was just wearing a t shirt
(27:44):
that said BP oil spill in five years the twenty
ten Haitian earthquake. Yeah, the UN estimates that two hundred
and twenty two thousand, five hundred and seventy people were killed.
Apparently in Adam Sandler's funny People, he estimated two hundred
and twenty thousand on the notes. And then lastly, the
(28:07):
Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy Adam Sandler when he was operaman. Yeah,
there was a nineteen ninety three operaman sketch where he says,
I'm missing plane. It's from Malaysia. Makes me insane. This
will all make sense in due time. That's good man.
Here's the thing, man, people believe that viral, I'm not
(28:32):
kidding you. It went viral that like somehow Adam Sandler
had made all these crazy predictions. And this is a
real thing because apparently they didn't announce that when clickbait
came out that it was a satirical site that BP
oil spill and the teacher it's pretty good. Yeah, well,
let's get into some of these then. First of all,
(28:55):
to further than nine to eleven thing, there were a
couple of other quatrains which have been cobbled together to
try and support the nine to eleven thing. But like
I said, they weren't as he wrote them. They like
would combine things, which is just silly because that goes
against everything that he was saying was each quatrain is
(29:16):
its own thing. One of them Century ten Quatrain seventy two,
the year nineteen ninety nine. Seven months from the sky
will come the great King of Terror to resuscitate the
Great King of the Mongols before and after Mars reigns.
By good luck. That last part sounds like it's from
a fortune cookie. That before nine to eleven back in
(29:38):
ninety nine, some people thought he was foretelling the end
of the world would be on July twenty fourth, nineteen
ninety nine. And I remember this happening, and I remember
it being a big deal. There was like genuine concern
from some people, like some stores and France had like
closeout sales. There was this one French designer who like
(29:58):
canceled his big He was a big believer, and he
canceled this big show, and of course it didn't happen,
And then it was recalculated and everyone said, no, no, no,
it wasn't supposed to be July twenty fourth. If you
read it this way, it means August eleventh, and of
course the world didn't and then either in August. How
do you get August eleventh from seven months into nineteen
(30:19):
ninety nine. Well, again it was there were some different
translations that maybe we're different enough to recalculate. Yeah, yeah,
But then that one was also used for nine to eleven,
was repurposed for nine to eleven. Right, they're like, he
was just close, Yeah, exact, it's a couple of years off. Well,
they combined that one with Century six Quatrain ninety seven,
(30:39):
which says, at forty five degrees, this guy will burn
fire to approach the great new city. In an instant,
a great scattered flame will leap up when one will
want to demand proof of the normans, what is that
last thing? I'm not sure that's the thing. Like, you
can't just pick part of it and then discount the rest,
right and say that you know he was wrong on that,
(31:01):
But that's exactly what people did. Well, they did because
several quatrains referred to an anti Christ's figure called Mabus,
and if you rearrange the letters it could be Ussam
b Yeah, and so people use that as proof. But
they also didn't they failed to mention that previous to that,
they used it as Saddam, like up to the day
(31:23):
before nine to eleven. Yeah, they were saying it was
Saddam Hussein was Mabus because maybe's spelled backwards as sue bomb.
Kind of a reach if you ask me. It is. Well,
in that forty five degrees part of the quad trains,
some people said that New York cities around forty degrees
five minutes north latitude, so that's close. But again he
(31:45):
was said the new city will burn at forty five
degrees Villanueva or Vienneuve, Yeah, is that about forty five
degrees latitude? So it could just be interpretation. I don't
know who who's really at fault here. Is it Nostredama,
Is it the people who just blindly accept nostredas predictions?
(32:07):
Is it? Though? Because Nostre Damas purposefully obfuscated his stuff,
so I think he's a little bit responsible. For this too,
I imagine since he has that great sense of humor.
It made fun of that one guy's statue of the
Virgin Mary. Yeah, he is sitting in his coffin holding
a plaque with some future date when he'll be exhumed
his laughing and laughing. Yeah maybe. Yeah. We mentioned Henry
(32:30):
the second. He predicted his death this quatrain, the young
lion will overcome the old one on the field of
battle in single combat. He will put his eyes in
a cage of gold two fleets one then to die
in a cruel death. So that means two injuries. And
this actually happened. King Henry was in a jousting competition,
(32:53):
but it wasn't on the field of battle. It was
a friendly It was a party basically, and Captain Montgomery,
who was younger the younger lion did joust, hit him
in the in the eye and through the throat. So
the two injuries supposedly from one man. Yeah, but that
was all that his wife Dimdici, Queen Dmadicici, needed to know.
(33:14):
She was like, you know, holy crap, this has come true. Yes,
and he knows what he's doing. John F. Kennedy, the Challenger,
the Great Fire of London. People have said that he's
predicted all these things. But we could sit here all
day poking holes in the you know that, not that
we're poking holes, but other people have poked legitimate holes.
(33:38):
I think we poked a few holes. Well yeah, but
I mean it's all been from other people's stuff. Oh
that's true. You know I didn't do my own hole poking. No,
we should probably say we'd never begrudge anybody that believing
in something like that or enjoying like I don't think
it hurts anything behind it or anything like that. Yes,
if you go out dump all your stocks and sell
your worldly possessions, or you cancel your big fashion debut, yeah,
(34:02):
that's all that just hurts you. Yeah, although that may
have hurt the fashion world. Yeah, he probably had it
the week after. You want to hear something crazy. Yeah,
about the day before September eleventh, this group called the Coup.
They're a rap group out of Oakland. They're pretty awesome.
They were releasing their album I can't remember what's called.
(34:23):
I want to say, like party Time or party Fever,
party something Yeah, and like the day before and it
had the guy Boots Riley, who is like the MC
for the group. It had him like standing there pressing
a button in the twin towers were coming down, like
blowing up. They were going to release it like the
(34:45):
day before. It was scheduled to release in September two
thousand and one, and then nine to eleven happened. They're like, well,
let's change the cover. And that's why you've never heard
of the coup I wonder Actually, yeah, well they were
getting kind of big right around that time. The album
had like good buzz around it, and then yeah, they
just went away. They're still around there. Well, all the
(35:06):
all the entertainment that was released around that time notoriously suffered. Yeah.
I can't remember what movies in particular, but yeah, exactly,
there are a lot of things. Later on, the people
are like, wow, we've released it right before nine eleven,
so we were you know, we were doomed. Yeah, but
it was a movie. Who cares, you know? So if
(35:26):
you want to know more about Nostradamis, you can go
look this up on how still works dot com by
scanning the search bar, or you can just kind of
look around the internet, because there is plenty of stuff
about that dude on there. And enjoy yourself. And since
I said enjoy yourself, it's time for listener. Now, I'm
gonna call this um trailer builder. Hey, guys, Chuck and
(35:51):
Josh or Josh and Chuck, whichever you prefer. We prefer
Josh and Chuck. I think it goes either way. Yeah,
well that's what we kind of settled on, consistent branding. No,
it goes both ways. We go both ways. Yeah, all right,
Chuck and Josh, Josh and Chuck. Hey, guys, I must
admit that I tried very hard not to listen to you.
I was told by several of my friends that I
absolutely must subscribe to your show. However, as to stay
(36:13):
at home dad by day to a beautiful three year
old and three month old boys, a very busy small
business owner by night, had trouble finding enough time to
go poop, let alone indulge in any form of entertainment.
Needless to say, I did listen in wonder and became
instantly addicted. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed learning, and
the two months since I first gave you guys a shot,
had been on a steady binge. And I'm quickly running
(36:35):
out of back episodes to listen to, which is a
frightening prospect to me, considering your podcast as a fuel
that powers my motivation engine. While I work, my brother
and I own and operate Oregon trailer. That's trail Apostrophe
are where the two of us built high end, tiny
teardrop style camp trailers. Have you ever seen those? Yeah?
(36:56):
Really cool? Yeah, like I want one of these? Dotty's
gonna send anyone. I found that while my hands are
on autopilot building trailers, my brain has been totally neglected
listening to my requisite Pandora stations. But now that I'm
listening to you, fellows and receiving constant brain stimulation, I'm
getting more done than ever and enjoying every second. And
(37:17):
my wife and sons thank you, as well as my
general mood is improved despite the potentially unhealthy lack of sleep. However,
my lovely wife is still getting a little tired of
the phrase. So. I was listening to stuff you should
know last night dot dot dot. So I just want
to say thanks for everything you guys do, have done,
and we'll do in the future. Large amounts of platonic love.
That is Sawyer Christiansen and I'm gonna plug Oregon Trailer
(37:40):
dot net just because those things are really cool. Yeah,
Oregon trail apostrophe or no, on the website it's trailer, Okay,
Oregon trailer dot Net. Good point. And if you're in
the market for one of those, like check him out
small business handmade ye send me one, send Josh one
(38:00):
and they'd be sweet. Yeah, they're pretty neat. Thanks a lot,
Sawyer Christensen, great name, by the way, and we appreciate
the kudos. And if you out there, everybody else who
isn't Sawyer Christiansen wants to get in touch with us
to say anything at all. You can tweet to us
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(38:21):
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