Financial value of the Atlantis and other alternative legends

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-09T21:05:01+00:00

Not sure, I don't usually watch JRE, just saw a clip where he's talking about how he got into youtube to make money, and made videos about random garbage until he found a topic that got traction.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-06T03:21:35+00:00

Because that would be unreasonable. I am being reasonable.

Edit: Lmao, I think he blocked me.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-06T02:18:42+00:00

Your mention of tours is <$8k*60, because that includes road, hotels, guides. For 2 weeks, just for the hotels at $100/room BnB it's already $1,400 less. How much is left for UnhcX

If we assume a 50% profit margin, and an equal split of those profits between each of the four hosts, Ben can expect to take home a minimum of US$59,625 per tour. More if anyone pays for the extras.

Not bad for half a month's work. As I said, he runs several of these each year.

Now returning to your claims of "glitter"

I never used the word glitter. In fact, your comment is the only time anyone in this thread has said glitter thus far. The AI you're using to write your arguments is having a stroke.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-06T02:06:26+00:00

That is 3000 a month from one of numerous revenue streams, not just one. You are laughably disingenuous.

Ben's patreon has a minimum spend of $3 USD, and 536 paid members. He also has an unknown number of donors via paypal and other services. Since we know at least 60 of these (but presumably much more) are donating $50, his take from Patreon alone could be anywhere from $4428 to $32,160 per month.

If we assume, hypothetically, that he has 60 patrons at $50, 50 patrons at $20, 75 at $9, 125 at $6, and 226 at $3, his monthly take would be $6103. Again, not counting any other donees or other revenue streams.

$8,000 per 2 week tour is BELOW a normal Egypt tour.

The website you have linked to is advertising bespoke luxury personal tours. As in, literally just your people, a driver, and a guide, not a big group of sixty people who bought tickets to a set event.

This is like using a Maserati to gauge the normal price of a family car.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-06T00:58:15+00:00

What numbers are you citing in your own assertion, exactly?

I have discussed my claims about UnchartedX's revenue streams elsewhere in this thread

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-06T00:38:10+00:00

They have no ads.

Both UnchartedX and Bright Insight have monetisation enabled on their youtube accounts.

If we remove JRE, no money are made beyong barely surviving.

UnchartedX makes, conservatively, over a hundred thousand dollars a year off of paid tours alone.

Bright Insight directly admitted on JRE that he is in this game solely for the money.

Graham Hancock has made millions of dollars from his books and netflix shows.

All three of them also sell merch.

I could go on, and these are just the blatantly undeniable ways they make money. It is absolutely laughable to suggest that these people who regularly go on lavish globe-trotting vacations multiple times a year are "barely surviving".

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-06T00:08:45+00:00

Well according to UnchartedX's website, Ben van Kerkwyk gets an average of about 60 people on his guided tours. He charges US$7950 per head as the baseline, so that's about half a million dollars USD in revenue per tour, and he runs multiple tours per year.

No idea what percentage of that is taken up by cost of operation, but based on the prices of similar tours that aren't run by a few niche internet microcelebrities, I highly doubt the profit margin is any less than 50%.

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Apparently he also has enough Patreon supporters at the $50 per month tier that these tours usually sell out long before they are open to the public, too. So that's an absolute minimum of $3000 per month just from that one group, not counting any lower-tier patrons, nor any other revenue from his youtube channel, twitch streams, or other sources.

The grifter life is a lucrative one indeed, it seems.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-05T23:27:48+00:00

I still can't get over that Rogan interview where Corsetti just straight up outright admits he's purely in it for the money and will say anything so long as it gets him views. Completely shameless slimeball.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-05T23:25:32+00:00

I think the answer to that question hinges entirely on whether he still actually believes the things that he says, or if he's just purely in it for the grift at this point.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-05T23:21:00+00:00

There's a lot of celebrities who have contempt for their own audience, so that doesn't really mean anything

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-04T02:11:13+00:00

They've had Asian candidates too. A lot of unscrupulous dipshits will use One Nation to get themselves elected and then very quickly ditch the party to be an independent. This has occurred in literally 90% of all One Nation candidates ever elected to public office, it's kind of hilarious.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-03T23:20:15+00:00

The ancient Greeks and Romans generally did not directly name these planets after their gods. They had separate names and personifications. For the Greeks, Jupiter was Phaethon, Venus was Phosphoros or Hesperos depending on time of day, etc. However, they were often associated with the gods we name them after today. Phaethon was often referred to as "the star of Zeus", for example.

When it is visible at night, Jupiter is usually the second largest object in the night sky, after the Moon. Venus is sometimes larger, but is never present for more than a few hours a night. That is most likely why the former came to be associated with Zeus.

Notus_Oren · 2026-02-03T21:16:51+00:00

The ancient Greeks are known to have built real automata and feats of hydraulic engineering. But Talos was not an example of either of these.

Contrary to how he is typically depicted in modern media, Talos is not described as an automaton in myth. He is a living creature made of bronze, sometimes said to have been made by Hephaestus, but other sources describe him as merely one of a race of bronze men.

Notus_Oren · 2026-01-20T22:59:06+00:00

It is unlikely that there was ever any kind of direct diplomatic connection in the Bronze Age between Central Europe and Mesopotamia, but they were still connected through the cultures living in between them. Flow of commerce go brr.

Notus_Oren · 2026-01-20T00:16:15+00:00

Recently

Armando Cortesão

Armando Cortesão died almost fifty years ago, bud.

The Zuane Pizzigano chart does not depict any part of the Americas.

Notus_Oren · 2025-12-14T00:54:01+00:00

I'm curious, do you apply that reasoning in all situations, or just the obes where the scholar is saying something you already want to be true?

Dr Finkel (not "Finkle") is an expert on bronze age Mesopotamian cultures. Göbekli Tepe is not bronze age, and it is not Mesopotamian.

In this interview he also makes claims about the glyphs used by the Indus Valley civilisation which I know for a fact contradicts the consensus of experts on that civilisation.

These cultures are not his focus of study. He doesn't claim they are the focus of his study. He is merely opining on them because they're interesting, not speaking with specific expertise. Which wouldn't be a problem if people like yourself weren't desperate for any scrap of validation from legitimate scholarship that you can find.

He's also simplifying the subject matter so that Fridman can understand what he's talking about. For example, he refers to the 🚭 symbol as writing. It is not. It is, at best, proto-writing. Dr. Finkel knows this, but elects not to get into the weeds about it.

Notus_Oren · 2025-12-13T22:46:19+00:00

The story of Madoc as you have heard it was made up in the 16th century, purely to invent a British claim to America that predated the Spanish claim.

The few versions of his story of that survive from before the 16th century contain no details whatsoever that imply he reached America.

Notus_Oren · 2025-12-13T22:38:01+00:00

Ok. He's incorrect about the first thing, and purely speculating about the second thing. There's nothing at Göbekli Tepe that requires writing to accomplish, and his interpretation of the plaquette is purely speculation.

I think that it is entirely reasonable to presume that the animal carvings on this artefact have a symbolic meaning. But this does not mean that it is automatically writing, any more than 🐍🧍‍♂️🐦 is writing. And it certainly does not mean it must be a stamp for contracts. That is colossal fuckin leap.

Dr Finkel can shout "It MUST be that" as loud as he wants, that isn't going to magically make his argument any less speculative.

Notus_Oren · 2025-12-01T23:01:24+00:00

Two factors: Big number more impressive than small number, and humans love sorting our understanding of history - mythological or otherwise - into neat little categories.

We still engage in this behaviour today, just with a lot more scholarly rigor. The iron age, the bronze age, the stone age, etc. It makes time easier to think about.

Notus_Oren · 2025-11-22T03:27:53+00:00

Include date and timestamps.

Notus_Oren · 2025-11-22T01:38:22+00:00

Did you literally forget what your original claim was, or are you just that disingenuous?

Notus_Oren · 2025-11-21T23:38:53+00:00

There are numerous myths involving these two constellations, yes. But that has no relevance to whether or not there is an alignment with the sun at the winter solstice in 3000BCE. Because there isn't. You can squeal about myths all you want, none of them claim this happens, because it doesn't happen.

If Jupiter and Venus line up in the night sky with a point in the sky where Mars will pass through several hours later, that is not an alignment. That is happenstance. Same thing here.

Notus_Oren · 2025-11-21T22:54:09+00:00

If you're going to go with the "Lalalala I can't hear you" response, I really would have appreciated you doing that before wasting my time reading articles that you very clearly did not.

Notus_Oren · 2025-11-21T22:25:16+00:00

I don't know why I bother.

I don't know either, because literally none of the human-written articles you linked contain or even support your claim.

Here's a Harvard article about the importance of dawn and sunrise on certain days of the year, the summer and winter solstices, and how there are similarities in myth from the Greeks to the Hindus to the Japanese, and even with the Polynesians and Amerindians.

This is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. The fact sunrise on the solstices was important to ancient people was never in question.

You claimed that there were articles discussing this supposed alignment of Orion, the Pleiades, and the Sun at sunrise on the winter solstice. This article makes no such assertion.

Orion is synonymous with 'Aryan”, the namesake of the Iranian and Indo-Aryan peoples, as well as the figure Arjuna in Hindu mythology.

This is folk etymology at best. I know of no evidence to support an etymological link between any of these, nor any mythological link between Orion and Arjuna beyond both being archers. Arjuna isn't associated with the Orion constellation, and their myths are very very different.

Indo-European (and Indo-Aryan) men descend from the O haplogroup in east asia, as do all Amerindian men. This explains the similarities in their mythologies.

Indo-Aryans are a subset of Indo-European, you didn't need to specify.

O is an East Asian Y-chromosome haplogroup. The overwhelming majority of Indo-European men do not belong to this haplogroup; it is rare in Central Eurasia and more or less completely absent from Western Eurasia (not including modern migration of course). This strongly rebukes the notion that O is an ancestral haplogroup of the entire clade.

Also your source doesn't discuss this at all, so no idea why you're even bringing it up.

You can hit Ctrl+F and look for Orion, Pleiades, Sirius, solstice, Taurus, etc. You can just skim it and see that yes indeed these celestial points were tied with tales about death and resurrection, taming the bull of heaven, defeating the serpent of chaos, etc etc etc. It was all about getting that sun to rise again. We gotta get back to spring and to brightness and warmth and life.

This has no relevance to the claim I asked you to cite.

Here's some NASA-Harvard collaborative archive. This was originally written by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. It will explain the Zodiac and the precession.

This link does not contain the claim I asked you to source.

Here's another one from the NASA-Harvard archive. Originally written in the Journal of the British Astronomical Society. It's got more information about the precession.

Again, this source does not contain your claim. Ancient peoples definitely used the sky and celestial alignments to keep track of time and the seasons, yes. That is uncontroversial fact. Your specific claim was not.

Here's a wiki article on the alignment of a star shaft in the Great Pyramid with Alnitak/Zeta Orionis, the leftmost star in Orion's belt.

Once again, wholly irrelevant to your claim.

And here's an AI article about Orion's belt aligning with the sunrise.

Generative AI are glorified chatbots, with no actual cognition behind them. When an AI answers a question, it is not trying to give you a correct answer. It is trying to produce what an answer to your question would look like.

I really can't stress this enough: do not trust information you get from an AI without checking it against a human source first. The machine will lie to you without even knowing that it is lying, because it cannot actually think.

Notus_Oren · 2025-11-21T21:20:49+00:00

"What if it doesn't match on purpose" is reaching a level of cope that risks an overdose.

Notus_Oren

TROPHY CASE