Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 8 - A President, Mole People, and Hollow Earth Theory

Episode Date: November 7, 2016

John Quincy Adams was the sixth President of the United States, a Massachusetts State Senator, a Harvard professor, the Secretary of State, and a member of the House of Representatives for the last 17 years of his life. He was also a man who hoped to fund an expedition to travel into the center of the Earth via the North Pole and possibly establish trade with mole people. Yup.

I'm hoping some of you know that John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, the second president of America, and America's first vice president, was the sixth president of the United States. Guesting fewer of you, know that he was also a Massachusetts State Senator, a professor at both Harvard and Brown University, the first US diplomat to live in Russia, the Secretary of State was a former member of Congress from Massachusetts, winning a seat in the House of Representatives after losing a presidential reelection bid to Andrew Jackson, and serving as a member of Congress for 17 years until his death. And I'm guessing that even fewer still, probably much, much, much fewer know that shortly before leaving office as president, he hoped to fund an expedition by a one

Captain John Cleve Sims Jr. who for years had been trying to get funding to take a trip to the North Pole where he believed there was a giant opening that led to the center of the earth where some mole people potentially lived who he hoped to establish trade with. Yep, you heard me right. A president of the United States intended to fund an attempt to trade with mole people living in the center of the earth. This is history.

Work and wait, it's time, Suck. You're the state to time, Suck. work and wait, it's time suck. Okay, full disclaimer up top while you're hearing this, you know, at the your list in early November, due to moving kind of a busy travel schedule and a lot of other work and life commitments that's been going on the past few weeks for me. I had to record this episode Prior to the election in October. So that's I would love to be commenting right now on the results of the election You know at least at least a little bit, but I have no fucking idea who won Because right now it's still October for me So you know ideally I want to do a lot of these as close to the release as possible

But sometimes life just doesn't make that an option. But I did feel, you know, because of the crazy election that we've been experiencing, that it was fun, it would be fun to do a time suck about the craziest presidential story I've ever heard of. And that definitely is John Quincy Adams' interest in funding a journey to the center of the earth. And before I begin, I want to give a special thanks to a Kansas City comic and and and former teacher, maybe current teacher. I can't remember exactly Kevin Amend. He is the one who after a show at Stanford's I had a while back back in Kansas City. He's the one who introduced me to this crazy tale. I was talking about the lizard illuminati, and he's like, oh, well, if you like that kind of shit,

check this out. And then, yeah, he told me about this, John Quincy Adams, interest in going into the earth. Okay, so let's start with where this comes from, because there's actually not a lot of information on the web, and so I was kind of skeptical when I was first getting ready to do this episode that maybe I wouldn't be able to. That maybe it was just an urban legend.

And then in fact, you know, that John Quincy Adams never had any intention of the sort, like this is all just nonsense. But because there's a badass website called archive.org, you can find a lot of old books that are on there. And one of those books is the memoirs. It's called the Memoirs of John Quincy Adams in its part biography written by his son, the historian, politician, and diplomat Charles Francis Adams, and it's part autobiography

because it contained unedited portions of John Quincy's diary, which he started writing as a child and kept with until his death. So his life and his thoughts about his life are extremely well-documented. And on page 160, this book, if you ever want to check it out, here's what he says. I'm gonna do my old timey.

This is John Quincy Adams writing here. Mr. Reynolds is a man who has been lecturing about the country and that was like a weird Eastern European. I'm gonna start over. Which has been better with voices. I feel like I got like too funny voices I do on my show. And then the rest, it's all like forms of those voices. I used to be able to do him as a kid.

Mr. Reynolds is a man who has been lecturing about the country and support of Captain John Cleve Sims' theory that the Earth is a hollow sphere, open at the poles. His lectures are said to have been well attended, and much approved as exhibitions of genius and science. But the theory itself has been so much ridiculed, and isn't true so visionary that Reynolds has now varied his purpose to the proposition of fitting out a voyage of circumnavigation to the southern ocean. He has obtained numerous signatures in Baltimore to a memorial to Congress for the subject,

which he says will otherwise be powerfully supported. It will, however, have no support in Congress. That day will come, but not yet nor in my time. May it be my fortune and my praise to accelerate its approach. All right. So here, so it's clear when I get into the rest of this information, what is he saying here? It's clear from this diuretory that there's a man named Captain John Cleves Sim.

Uh, he references, just reference to as a theory about the earth being hollow, uh, about believing there are entrances to the inside of the earth. The polls, that's why he wants to circumnavigate over the polls. And about wanting to get funding for an expedition to prove he's right. And I don't think he actually just referenced, I don't know. No, he does see a holosphere there. Okay, exactly. And this is an expedition that Congress is not into, but the John Quincy Adams clearly believes they should be into as proven by him saying,

may it be my fortune and my praise to accelerate its approach? Like he fucking, he's like, yeah, man, I wish, if I had a chance, I I'm gonna do what I can to help fund this expedition, you know, and start finding out about this kind of stuff. So that's, and actually, he was going to, if he would have been reelected, he don't need to serve one term, Andrew Jackson beat him, but if he, if Andrew Jackson wouldn't have beat him,

a lot of people believe that, you know, one of the things he would have done in his seconds, you know, lame duck term would have been like, fuck yeah, get fuck yeah, go check out those polls, man, check them out. Get over there, find that hole in the center of the earth. So before we get into what exactly this theory was, a little more details and who this guy Sims was. I'm sorry, let's find out who this guy Sims was. So there's Captain John Cleves Sims,

and often referred to as Captain John Cleves Sims Jr. to distinguish him from an uncle of the same name, who that guy probably appreciated, because Sims Jr. was seen at the end of his life, he's just a lunatic by most people. He was born in 1780, lived until 1829, served as a military for 13 years, participated in the war of 1812, even had a duel with the fellow officer. Both men were shot, both survived and became friends.

Just quick, no, now how come I can cool is that? It's so weird to me to think about, you know, there wasn't that long ago when people had duels. I mean, really think about that. That's just, this is a quick little side note has nothing to do with the main thrust of this podcast. But this dude, this sims, you know, he gets an argument with some guy

when he's serving in the military, and he's, you know, and it reaches the point where they're like, let's have a duel and not like a fist fight, which to me, that's pretty macho in and of itself. You know, I remember kids in school who just like, let's, let's throw down. And they would like rotate around. I remember that one time with the basketball court, this kid, Ronnie Shepherd, back in Riggins, and some other kid that was like, uh, he was only around for

a couple years and Riggins, but he was a big tough kid. I want to say his name was Micah, but I could be completely wrong. It's so long ago. It doesn't matter. But I remember the three of us were playing pick up basketball. I couldn't have been more than 11. And the two of them got into an argument and then decided to fight.

And then did like an old timey circle in each other, throwing punches, punch each other in the face, they each snuck some punches in, and like not just like a sloppy fight that I would have done, like I tried to box later in high school, I do MMA a little bit now, and actually finally know how to like throw some punches,

but I remember one time I tried to box in high school, we just got like backyard boxing, we just threw gloves on and just wailed on each other. And, I had no technique, like the person when they would try to throw a punch against me, I remember my friend, Tyler Wilson, punching me, my technique was not a good one,

my defensive technique, it was to kind of huddle down to avoid the punch, like bend over from the waist, looking down at the ground. Turns out what that does is it opens up the back of your head to take a lot of damage. And I had a headache for several days after my... I probably got a concussion.

I got hit in the back of the head by like, you know, and they're able to get like full haymaker momentum as they swing down into the back of your head and do that. So that's not good. But these guys had clearly... Someone had shown them a little bit how to fight and they were like, you know, ducking punches,

like dodging to the side, throwing punches, and then they smacked it to the ground for a little bit. And then like as they were punched each other, I just watched this like mutual admiration grow where they're like, they respect each other for fighting each other. And then they went to the grocery store and got like sodas and were like cool and then they were always cool after that

God, I wish I would have I wish I had a personal version of that. I was so fucking tiny as I was tiny and cowardly Which is which is a rough combination as a kid when you're very small and scared of violence So I'm fascinated when people aren't in this guy Sims, you know, he did a duel with somebody. One guy got shot in the shoulder, camera, which one, that one got shot in the leg. And then afterwards, I think they had that equivalent of what I saw, it was like, hey man, respect, respect.

You know, I'm glad we're both not dead, you know. From here on out, let's agree to disagree. Let's go grab a drink. Let's get our wounds taken care of. Let's get these bullets taken out. Hopefully not have to have a limb sought off. And then let's grab a drink. I mean, geez, that is bad ass, man.

Took bullets in our arguments. Okay, so then this Sims guy, he leaves the military in 1815, moves to St. Louis, where he kind of opened up this trading business selling supplies to the army, obviously with his military background that makes sense. You know, there's a lot of military people do kind of become a consultant or work with the military post military life. And then this company fails in 1819 and he moves his family to Newport, Kentucky, where

he spends the last almost 10 years of his life. And one of the reasons his business may have failed is because he wasn't totally focused on work when he was in St. Louis. He had been focusing on this new theory he'd been cooking up. And on April 10, 1818, he published a pamphlet called Circular Number One that announced his new hollow earth theory. Quick side note on that, he wasn't the only person promoting some version of a hollow earth.

So it wasn't like he came out with this theory in a vacuum. But this is the one that John Quincy Adams got a hold of, was his version. And in it, he states, quote, I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within, containing a number of solid concentric spheres one within the other, and that is open at the polls 12 or 16 degrees.

I pledge my life in support of this truth and I'm ready to explore the hollow if the world will support and aid me in this undertaking. The hollow man, that reminds me of this movie in the city as we were talking about exploring the further, this like further expanse of the galaxy where you can ask for a project, I'm gonna do a lot of weird shit.

As far as entertainment, I don't believe in it, but okay, so small, and in a small, he says that he puts out this pamphlet. I love when people, by the way, publish like a pamphlet. I feel like that's, you never hear, you've ever heard about anybody super successful that their success is traced back to this pamphlet.

They've published, they self-published a pamphlet. Especially when it's pseudo-science. It's like, oh yeah, that's how money of our top scientists got started, they fucking wrote a pamphlet in their basement. So a small percentage of people though, did support this and some people even called him the Newton of the West and he travels around the country after he gets you know he moves back to Newport, uh, travels around the country and he's lecturing on this theory and over the next, you know, almost decade with the help of this Ohio millionaire who

believed him one of his biggest disciples named James McBride, he lobbies for government and private funding for this expedition to prove his theory right. And he did suggest as I'm going to reference here in a bit the quotes, but that there could be people living in there. These, you know, that have been called by some people as referred to later as mole people for living underground, that you could maybe do some trade with, you know, maybe make some profit. And this McBride guy, who is the biggest swimmers, threw some influential friends, you know, as he was a millionaire, they did actually get a proposal to Congress and it was shot down 56 to 46, which fucking blows my mind.

So that does put John Quincy Adams in some context. He wasn't a complete nut. It is a super crazy idea, but apparently 46, you know, Congressmen were like, eh, maybe, maybe, maybe we should check it out. We should we should check it out at the very least. Just to be sure there's not giant holes into the center of the earth at our poles. Yeah, and by the way, the Sims guy, he never did put out a book about a thing, but McBride did. The guy just referenced, did publish a book of Sims thoughts called The Sims Theory of Cocentric Spheres. That was published in 1826. And

and little interesting stuff on Sims here, and the balls this guy had to pursue this I'm fasting when people do this kind of stuff He he was married. He married a widow who already had six kids when he was 28 this lady Mary I knew still in the army so she so this lady Mary. She's a she's a widow. She has six kids to feed She marries a dude who has a job You know who has a military job, a good job. And then they have, depending on what report you read four or five kids. So they end up with either 10 or 11 kids.

By the time he is 39, by the time he's in St. Louis, my age now. And then, so this dude, his business fails, he has at least 10 kids that it's his job to provide for in this day and age. And instead of continuing to work, he's like, nah, fuck, and the hollow earth theory is too important. I need to get my expedition going.

I need it. And he does this. I say lecture circuit, but from what I've read, it seems very small time. Like he's, I don't know, putting lectures on at various, that's some kind of speaker circuit back then where people would talk about their crazy ideas and you'd see who'd show up. And he would, but he's never really getting paid.

He's just hoping to get backers like this McBride guy who did, you know, give him some financial backing. And he's trying to find funding for this expedition. And he does this for like the last nine years of his life. He puts out several more pamphlets. And then when he dies at 48, he leaves the family in a huge amount of debt. Like what a dick.

That's like, okay, that's like me right now. I've got like the two kids. And I'm divorced and luckily, like their mom has a stable job. But let's say she doesn't. Let's say that I'm providing for them solely. And right now in my home you know I'm the one working. And let's say I'm like you know what yeah I know I can make some money continue to put out you know

comedy albums and tour and stuff. But I just have a an inkling I just have this this thought that won't let me go where I just I just feel like there are Golden worms living in the earth because that's how gold got in there these worms They run around and they poop out gold and that's how we get gold in the ground and You know everybody's been fucking approaching it the wrong way Everybody's been trying to mine their the worm poop gold and that's what that's what they think like oh I got if I just to mine the worm poop gold. And that's what they think, oh, I got, if I just get enough of the worm poop, then I'll have enough gold for my wealth.

But if you can get the worm itself, that I've thought into my head exists, then, well, then you got, you know, you just, you keep me in the cage, keep me in a worm cage, and you feed them dirt, and you get gold. You, check out how great is that. you feed them dirt, and you get gold. You, check out how great is that. You feed them dirt, that costs you nothing. You just take your dirt, you go down to,

okay, you buy a couple acres of dirt, all right? And then you, don't even worry about it. Take out a loan, we'll just put all the family money into that, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take all our savings, we're gonna buy two fields of dirt. I'm gonna search for these, for the rest of my life, I'm gonna search for goldworms. And I'm gonna put them in cages.

And then everybody's laughing now about my theory that comes from only my head. But no one's gonna be laughing when I just have never any gold supply. So, I mean, I just made that up in the spot. But that is basically fucking what he did. There's this guy, McBride, or sorry, Sims. I got these old timers confused. He didn't have a scientific background. He just, he had like his son

and who wrote some stuff about him after he died, just said that he had like a proper English education, which to me means like he went to high school and stuff. He wasn't a scientist, he wasn't Newton, he wasn't, he wasn't, he had no scientific, you know, he showed earlier in life no predilection for, for being good at science. But he just thinks that there is a tallow and then he just like works these ideas over in his head.

And then just abandones his family, his financial responsibility to his family and there are reports by the way, like they lived in squalor The rest of the life these kids just grew up in squalor because dad's out looking for fucking mole people Which I know I do have a quote up here that where he does reference thinking that people live in there and you know In people man people point to like people like Bill Gates and stuff about people who take big chances in life and it pays off and do Something that everybody thinks is stupid and it pays off. And like, you know, how he dropped out of Harvard,

when nobody knew what really computers and what the commercialization of them could be. I'm sure people thought he was an idiot, but now he's a billionaire and there you go. Yeah, but for every gate, there's this, like, a way more Sims. There's way more Sims juniors out there who just don't do shit, other than be a laughing stock of their peers for the rest of their lives.

Okay. So another article I want to reference though about this guy Sims just to talk about what he did. This is from slate.com says eccentric would be explore John Cleve Sims Jr. address this circular to the city of Wilmington, Delaware in 1888. He solicited a fellowship of 100 like-minded brave souls to come with him on a polar journey, supplied by quote-ringed air in slaves, to discover the center of the earth, which declared was hollow and habitable within. And he also, he sent 500 copies of this message to distinguish individuals and groups around the country, scientists, like the, you know, learned societies, universities. He also attached a certificate of his own sanity to each copy, which I think is hilarious. He's like, eh, no, I'm not insane.

Yeah, you are. And like, where does this come from? I mean, really, there was other people like astronomer Edmund Hayley, better known for the comment, the Hayley's comment, who did hypothesize about a hollow earth in 1691. So there was, I mean, again, this is pre-having photographs from spaceships and the moon and satellites where you can't see

for sure that it's round, but fucking come on. You've been on, people have been on boats, you can see the horizon drop off in the distance. So there was thoughts of this, you know, before. And in the circular sims made it try to associate himself with prominent respected scientists, you know, like Humphrey Davies and British chemist and vendor, Alexander Humboldt, some Prussian explorer and Geographer.

And these guys didn't want to associate with him. He really was a laughing stock. He never raised the money. Never did any of that. And I want to get into a little bit, I referenced it before, the details of what he thought was inside the earth. So here's what he thinks.

He thought that the theory came up with, he thought that the inner surfaces, it was kind of like these levels of rings. It's really weird. Like the earth was hollow. Like basically like picture an apple if you took out the core. And then inside the apple,

every couple centimeters, you put like a ring and that people lived on these rings. He said it was quote, a warm and rich land stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals if not men. So he believed that there were definitely animals probably men living on these rings in there. And he thought also you could just kind of walk,

like if you walk along up to the North Pole and then some weird gravitational theory of his where you would just kind of like go, or like over the bend and all sudden you're walking Inside the earth like you wouldn't just fall through the middle Like the gravity shifted and pulled you along the sides and then I don't know how the It's very it's very complicated mostly because it's based in nonsense Okay

so So yes, so that's this guy that is, and that in and of itself is super crazy. But then extra crazy that John Quincy Adams, as I stated at the top, he was like, yeah, man, let's check this shit out. Like he wanted to try and, you know, if there's people living in the center of the earth, we need to find them. And we need to, you know, see what else is in there. Oh, unbelievable.

But I will say, let's give some context to what was going on around there. This is some other things people believe in the early 19th century. They believe, they still believed, this was an older belief, that animals sometimes came from nothing. Now, here's to check this out. Before microscopes and theories of cells and germs, people had other ideas about the creation of living things. People like bizarrely believe that life arose

from inanimate matter. For example, people thought that maggots just kind of spontaneously arose from rotting meat. And then at one time, virtually everyone believed this. And I guess the Bible was kind of a source of evidence due to the fact that God made man from dust. So it kind of came out of that logic. Like if he made dust from dust, maggots come from mate.

And this view did, you know, last right up until the 19th century. So people, you know, in John Adams Day, there was in, you know, were you thinking like, how could they believe the earth was hollow? Will they also believed that, you know, that animals, there was one common thing, that there was some tree, some mythical tree

that lambs could grow from. That was something that people believed in medieval Europe, some people. And then there was even like recipes about how to make animals that got thrown around from the, I guess the nuts of that day, but it wasn't just immediately laughed off for everybody. Like there was one in the 19th century, like a recipe from scorpions that got passed around.

Didn't get put to rest completely until 1859 when Louis passed your approved it wrong once and for all. So like scientists had to disprove things such as a recipe that called for basil and and placing the basil between two bricks and leaving it in sunlight. And if you did that, voila, scorpion. And flat earth theory. That was also around the time. So even though people had like Magellan's up had been going around the earth, not only did some people believe that there was holes through the earth

where people lived inside, they also believe still, a lot of people that the earth was flat. And people, again, fucking still believe this, still believe it, unbelievable to me. Here is how flatter theory, it supposedly works. I just found this out, because I heard about it, but I did a little research for this one. And apparently the sun and the Moon are the same size according to Flat Earth theory people.

They're 32 miles across, which is like the length of Manhattan's coastline, so not really big. The Earth doesn't orbit them. It doesn't orbit. Instead, the Sun and the Moon kind of move in rotating spheres, 2500 miles above us. So these little flat spheres are rotating. Why is such insanity? Like, how is one of the flat spheres super warm? Like, how does that, anyway? How does the other flat sphere affect the tides? They don't have answers for a lot of that.

But the flat earth, it finds basically that the North Pole, if you look at a map of flat earth theory, the North Pole is like in the middle of this flat disk and the outer edge is Antarctica. And then all the continent, like if you flattened a globe, like if you had a globe and you pushed down the North Pole and you flattened it and somehow stretched the bottom so that Antarctica now kind of goes all around the edge. They believe that we're just in space this flat disk floating around, which I've met people who fucking believe this.

It's on what? And so if you went to Antarctica, even though we have a base there, oh, I guess they just disregard that. They probably think it's just fake, like the moon landing. You, it's flat earth theory, you could just like fucking walk out into space. Like you can walk to space.

Which, I've only NASA knew that. They could save so much money on shuttles. It's like, hey guys, you don't have to fuck and get your shuttle anymore. You just push it off the edge of Antarctica. Just take your shuttle, you don't need to launch it from Florida. Just, we'll drag it to the Antarctica and then just kind of push it off. And then it'll just fly into space. Because it's, you know, it's right there.

Don't know how many people believe that because there's no studies, no one's bothered to like do a legitimate survey of like how many people believe in Flat Earth that I can find. But there is a Facebook page. It's the Flat Earth Society and it has over 40,000 likes. And I'm guessing not all those can be mocking. So wow, man. Wow. So really this is just about crazy ideas.

More than it's about John Quincy Adams, but again, with the recent presidential stuff, it just shows that like, I know with Trump especially people like, man, how could he believe all this crazy shit? Well, you know, if he's president or not, whatever, right now or just the fact that he ran, people have former presidents have believed crazy things.

It would not be new for president to believe something really, really insane, like a giant wall that you're gonna build to keep Mexicans out of the country as if they can't dig tunnels. And I haven't been doing that as far as the drug cartels very successfully for a long time. But crazy stuff. And I'm always fasting with these ideas in general.

I don't want to make this a conspiracy theory podcast, but I'm amazed with people believing in just non-scientific things. I grew up with a stepmom for a while that was like that. She would just get into these weird, she would get a book. I remember one was like this, Indigo children books.

And then all of a sudden, she would just read it and just because she had read a book, she would turn that into, well, there you go, these are facts. No, books do not equate facts. You know, the author of the book, fairly important to how much in the book you should believe. You know, if you're reading a book by somebody who has an incredible scientific pedigree

and was like a Rhodes scholar, I would think that should carry a little more weight than somebody who is writing books in their parents' basements and have only worked at RVs. That's me. That's just me. And again, I grew up in Riggins around a lot of people who did not have a high level of education and did have a lot of fucking theories. Like I remember the area getting real worked up about Y2K.

That, you know, the year 2000, that shit was gonna go crazy, and all the computers gonna go down, and the stock market was gonna crash, and you better have gold hidden your walls, which I knew people that did literally had gold in the wall, and you better bear your guns, cause the government's gonna use this economic collapse

to bring in their UN forces that they've been hiding, and, you know, cause they've been working with the trilateralists and they're going to come take all of our stuff and make us some kind of 1984 or well-earned society and we're just going to be drones if I fucking bunch of horseshit just a bunch of horseshit Okay, all right. Well, I hope this was interesting horseshit. That's that that could be the name. I feel like of this podcast. I like time suck could also be known as interesting horseshit. It's hot five takeaways from this one from this journey to the center of the earth. Number one, some people used to believe that the earth was hollow. People like our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, who was interested in funding and expedition

to see what was inside. You know, possibly more people. I just love that term. Number two, don't abandon your family to pursue your stupid fucking idea. You're going to be John Sims, probably more likely than you're going to be Bill Gates. Number three, can't make a scorpion out of basil, but how sweet would it be if you could, right? I mean, if you could do that,

I'd be watching YouTube videos right now about scorpion pranks instead of doing this podcast. I mean, how cool would that be? One second, you know, your buddy's eating some delicious spaghetti. And the next second, that sweet marinara sauce, it's full of scorpions, motherfucker, gotcha. Ha ha, scorpion prank. Mm-hmm.

Number four, the earth isn't flat, egyptia. If you believe that to be true, I can't know everything about you, but I do know you did not receive a good education. For sure, I know that. Cause you know who doesn't believe in flat earth? MIT grads. You have fucking moron. Number five, education, very important to build off number four, very important.

I think that's what that's with this podcast episode and a lot of them really prove. And man, we got a value education and not just liberal arts. Take a science class here and there, you know, if you're still in school, or read the occasional nonfiction book by someone who did take a science class, you know? Not by someone who, you know, wrote it in between acid trips at Burning Man. You dumb hippie. And keep listening to Time Suck, everybody.

I appreciate the nice comments on iTunes and the feedback at timesockpodcast.com where you can leave your comments on each and every episode. I do read them and I am going to put an even more work into this going forward after this episode. My other work commitments are going to lessen for a while, which makes me very happy that I can work on this, making better and better and better. If you have any suggestions, man, feel free hit me up you can email me

danandand comes out to be can drop a drop a comment on stichard right toons you can drop a comment on time-sec podcast dot com and because again i read them i care about it all right stay curious everybody Thank you.