Mark Steeves | Thanksgiving vs. Temperance, Explaining Tartaria To Normies, & The Syncretism Flow
Mark Steeves is the intrepid host of a podcast called My Family Thinks I'm Crazy. This guy is a budding guru in the "conspirtuality" scene, and in a very short amount of time he's built an amazing internet presence for truth, love, and good vibes with his work. We catch up with some talk about the holiday / holly-daze, discuss reincarnation and eternal life, and signs & symbols of the M-Pyre.
In the second hour Plus+ Extension we go deep into Tartaria talk, ancient earthworks, mudflood, the "underworld," the Wizard of Oz, and Mark's thoughts on staying in the flow state woo-way.
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In this episode
Core themes
Living With A Family That Thinks You're Crazy
Mark Steeves opens with his first Thanksgiving in two years, where he played unpaid babysitter to his cousins' kids to stay clear of clashing with the adults. Relatives drop sly jokes about the title of My Family Thinks I'm Crazy, and he now simply tells them to listen, since explaining Tartaria to a normie would only baffle them. He describes podcasting as balancing out the mainstream media echo chamber he grew up in. Chance answers that you can't bring the deep end to the kiddie pool, and suggests treating grown-up relatives as kids in big bodies and playing pretend with them.
Chance on Thanksgiving and the Temperance Card
Chance reads the timing of Thanksgiving astrologically: Scorpio's dissolving, truth-surfacing waters give way to Sagittarius, the sign of seeing, and the Temperance card, number 14, has been turning up everywhere he looks since Sagittarius season began, alongside Disney Plus releasing Hawkeye, the archer. He suggests a holiday built on cookies and gluttony, followed by Black Friday advertising and bright lights, sabotages a darker, colder season better spent reading, studying and combing through information. He is careful to call it a pattern of collective self-sabotage rather than pinning it on a boogeyman, and Mark agrees that much of the culture feels manufactured.
Mark's Retelling of the First Thanksgiving
Mark argues the familiar story of Squanto, the pilgrims and a shared feast is far from what happened in 1621. In his telling the Wampanoag stood around the Plymouth feast as a reminder of whose land it was rather than as guests. He points to mainstream accounts of the founding fathers learning from the Lenape and the Iroquois confederacy, and to Peter Champoux, author of Gaia Matrix and Moon Rivers, on mapping the continent's energy corridors. Mark believes replacing relationships with sacred sites by ceremonies like Thanksgiving has weakened the land, and he calls the Jesuits the original intelligence agency.
Reincarnation, Religion and the Syncretic Lens
Chance asks whether the culture's disbelief in reincarnation stems from a broken connection to ancestral energy and the land. Mark calls the heaven-forever view spiritualism light and says the YOLO mindset of his high school years feeds a parasitic system, adding that believing you might return gives people more reason to honor the planet. Chance sees both live-fast atheism and suffer-now religion as self-limiting, tracing priestcraft back to the Canaanites and Phoenicians through wordplay on empire, pirates and canon. Mark then describes a syncretic lens, modelled on Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do, for piecing an ancient, fragmented totality of truth back together.
Building Alt Media United
Mark explains that Alt Media United grew out of worries he heard as a listener about censorship and where to post content. Built with Alex Tsakiris of the Skeptiko podcast, it is a free cooperative rather than a traditional network, with no rules forcing anyone to stay, and roughly 60 to 70 shows so far. He credits Adam Curry's Podcasting 2.0 index with taking the podcast directory out of Apple's hands. He also recounts launching My Family Thinks I'm Crazy on October 5, 2020, after leaving his Amazon driving job to work for comedian Sam Tripoli, which prompted the family reaction behind the title.
Quotes
“I was raised in this echo chamber of mainstream media, so I'm not escaping to an echo chamber that suits my biases.”
“What I most agree with is that you can't bring the deep end to the kiddie pool. You can't throw them right in there.”
“What we need to do, not just as podcasters or people interested in this stuff but as a race, we need to begin to honor the earth again.”
“This time of year is really opportune to spend time reading and studying and finding the truth and combing through all the things with a fine-tooth comb.”
“I might come back to this place again, and that litter that I just littered is gonna be there when I'm born again.”
“Hopefully we're pointing people to get off the phone at some point and make these connections for themselves, do their own investigation of their area, do their own spiritual practices.”
“I think ultimately what we're finding is that Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee style of really finding what works for you as a soul, as a spiritual being.”
“We're in a subjugated part of the internet, and whatever I can do to help this content grow I think is an act of service to the whole.”
Mark Steeves hosts the podcast 'My Family Thinks I'm Crazy' and related projects (Esoteric America, S.E.E.E.N.), exploring synchromysticism, conspiracy, and alternative spirituality.
See all Mark episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
