In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, the guys talk with author Eric Von Danniken about his new book, Chariots of the Gods. They discuss ancient alien civilizations, the disappearance of the dinosaurs, and the possibility that we got all of our technology from otherworldly sources. Plus, we talk about some of the most compelling pieces of evidence that point to the existence of otherworldly civilizations. This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced by Riley Bray. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. If you like conspiracy theories, you'll love this episode! It's a conspiracy theory about aliens, and it's a good one. Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends about this podcast! And don't forget to subscribe and tell a friend about it! Also, if you're a fan of conspiracy theories and want to share it on your socials, we'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the conspiracy theories you've been hearing about on this episode. Send us your thoughts, and we'll get them on the show! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What's the strangest conspiracy theory you've ever heard of? 2:30 - What do you think of aliens? 3:20 - Is there a planet out there? 4:15 - What would you like to see in a movie? 5:40 - What are your favorite conspiracy theory? 6:00- What are you think we should know? 7:00s - What kind of alien civilization? 8:30s - Is it all about? 9: What are we going to be? 11:40s? 12:00 szn=1? 13:00? 14:00 15:30 16:20s 17:00 Is there any evidence of a planet X? 16 - What is the best piece of evidence we ve seen so far? 17 - How do we know that szn? 18:40 19: What do we think we can we know about the evidence? 21:20 22:10 27:00 | 16:30 | 17:40 | Is it possible? 26:20 | What s the best thing we can see from the evidence we know from the Sphinx? 25:00 + 16:00 ? Is it real?
00:00:54.000The problem with someone, I mean, he's not a dishonest person, I'm not saying that, but the problem with anybody that is involved with a book like this is that you're so all in.
00:01:59.000The more interesting ones in the art depictions, there's some really ancient depictions of people that look like they're in these flying saucer type things.
00:02:08.000Like they're flying through the air and they're in some sort of painting.
00:02:13.000Those are really interesting because what were they trying to say?
00:02:17.000What were they depicting in those things?
00:03:02.000They're as good as it gets, and he was saying that he thinks that there was a mass coronal ejection somewhere around 12,000 years ago, and it was literally raining lightning all over the world, and it decimated the population of land mammals and people.
00:03:32.000This is what Graham Hancock's work indicates as well.
00:03:36.000See, Graham Hancock and him were together on the Sphinx because Robert Schock was the geologist they brought in to examine the erosion marks on the Temple of the Sphinx.
00:03:47.000And his conclusion was that this is the result of thousands of years of rainfall.
00:03:52.000The problem with that was the last time there was significant rainfall in the Nile Valley was 9000 BC. So you'd have to have thousands of years before that to create these deep water-based fissures or water-created fissures.
00:04:05.000So they're saying the Sphinx was there a lot longer than we imagined.
00:04:08.000So that coincides with a lot of these, the people that want to push back the dates of civilization, what they think is, it all points to something big happening at the end of the Ice Age.
00:05:03.000And so then they have to say, okay, well then hunter-gatherers must have made this, because 12,000 years ago, that's all we had was hunter-gatherers.
00:05:09.000But it's really sophisticated construction, and it's very difficult to do, and they're enormous, and they have three-dimensional animals that are carved into them.
00:07:11.000But I think that people think that conspiracy theories got Trump elected.
00:07:16.000So now it's cool to hate conspiracy theorists.
00:07:20.000Or people that are like, let's take another look at this.
00:07:23.000There's so many factors that got Trump elected.
00:07:25.000It's a perfect storm of people getting fed up with political correctness.
00:07:31.000Someone coming along that's not a politician.
00:07:34.000The system is so rigged that after a while you're just like, Jesus Christ, how many more of these fake puppets are we going to put in office?
00:08:28.000And he's talking about Ben Carson's book and that Ben Carson had admitted to going after his mother with a hammer and trying to stab his friend.
00:09:54.000It's very bad to look at candidates and go, who's the most entertaining?
00:09:58.000Well, it's also a bad idea to have one person, right?
00:10:01.000It's a bad idea to have this same system that was in place back when there was fucking, you know, a thousand people here.
00:10:08.000But I think we really don't, like we have one person that seems like we have one figurehead, but we have kind of this permanent political class of people, a nexus of powerful institutions where you have career politicians, career diplomats, career military service people that kind of don't leave.
00:10:26.000So I think that's one of the reasons that we haven't changed the system is because one person can't ever do that much.
00:10:34.000Even though Trump is wild and crazy and he's done a lot of bad things, I don't think he would be allowed to deviate from many of the policies that his predecessors had kind of established.
00:10:47.000I think that the American government – and that's why the term like the deep state, which a lot of people ridicule.
00:13:13.000It's under the United States Department of Defense, an intelligence agency of the United States intelligence community with the primary mission of collecting, analyzing, and distributing geospatial intelligence in support of national security.
00:13:45.000It's probably something simple, and now I'm going to look like an idiot.
00:13:47.000It says its intelligence about the human activity on Earth derived from the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information that describes, assesses, and visually depicts physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth.
00:17:46.000Like, real investigative journalism, and I've had some of these guys on my podcast, they come on, they go, they've ruined their life, they spent five years looking into something nobody cares about, they figured out it was true, and now nobody wants to talk to them.
00:17:56.000They love white hair, their families hate them, they live in a little apartment in New York City.
00:18:02.000Well, sometimes people do journalism right, and they do spend a long time working on a project, and it's in something like the New York Times, and no one cares.
00:18:11.000Like the thing about Trump, like the report on Trump, the scathing report they thought was going to bring him down, literally it was in and out of the news cycle in a day or two.
00:28:27.000And they buy them, not even under their real name, they buy them under the name of a shell corp, like an LLC. And And then they have these investments, and it really makes everything insanely expensive.
00:28:38.000That's what's making everything insane?
00:28:39.000That's what's making a lot of real estate in New York City expensive.
00:28:42.000If you've got to guess, what percentage of expensive apartments are owned like that?
00:28:46.000I'll tell you, between 2008 and 2014, I think 50% of apartments going into contract were...
00:28:51.000Because I do a show, but I used to be a double-decker tour guide in New York City.
00:28:54.000And so I do a show, like a funny comedy show where I take, I sell tickets, I put people on a tour bus, and then we'd go around to these buildings and just scream at these buildings.
00:29:06.000And no one cares because they're not home because they're somewhere.
00:29:10.000I mean, if you look at who owns these buildings, it's a guy who like, is maybe a guy who owns a mining company and he poisoned a river in Zambia.
00:29:17.000A lot of these guys are doing things they shouldn't be doing and they want to stash their money in real estate.
00:29:22.000London is more expensive than New York because London is all essentially shell corporations, these phantom buyers buying up real estate in London, in New York.
00:29:34.000So you have people in New York that know the system is fucked.
00:29:37.000They know the market's being artificially manipulated.
00:30:01.000And dude, when I had my tour bus, people would get on from regular places like Pennsylvania, and I would just point and go, 10 million billion.
00:34:06.000I was in LA and an actor was at the table and he was talking and I'm like, I don't know who this guy is but he's not even the person he is at this table.
00:36:02.000There's a few of those people that really don't have any talent, but they made the right friends and they cling on to folks and everybody gets real uncomfortable in that realm.
00:38:51.000And that predetermined pattern of behavior might be, I'm a guy, I drink every night, we go hard, I'm an artist, I smoke cigarettes, I don't give a fuck, I'm not trying to get on TV. Yeah, so to me it was incredibly disingenuous.
00:39:06.000You had all these people, and a lot of them are angry and they're doing fine.
00:39:18.000Artie Shafir told me something that made a lot of sense once.
00:39:19.000He goes, it can really be a waste to get into this type of business and end up in an office writing for a show you don't care about, in a job you hate.
00:39:32.000And I always think it might be harder to go the other way and to build a fan base and to do what you want, but it's going to be better in the end.
00:39:43.000And I think a lot of the people that were, again, shitting on his comedy, not so much his behavior, but his comedy, are people that would want more in this than they have.
00:39:54.000And they're resentful at guys like Louie because it's not fair how talented he is.
00:39:59.000Well, it's not just how talented he is.
00:40:07.000He always has, whether you agree or not.
00:40:09.000Like, one of the things about the Parkland thing, you know, when he got in trouble about, you know, saying that all he did was push some fat kid out of the way.
00:40:21.000The idea that anybody's saying, like, oh my god, he's punching down, like...
00:40:26.000You need to go review his material again, because he said a lot of risky shit because it was funny, and he had really good points about it.
00:40:35.000Now, is that something that I would joke about?
00:40:51.000I think, honestly, you're dealing with, first of all, the embryo of a bit.
00:40:56.000I mean, he's really only been doing stand-up again for a couple of months, and back then it was even less.
00:41:01.000And I think, ultimately, his idea, that bit, rather, is that kids today, like, they want to be a they and a them, and they have 78 different genders, and why am I... Why are you interesting?
00:41:13.000You're interesting because you didn't get shot?
00:41:25.000You know how it works when you construct...
00:41:27.000I think part of it is too, I was attracted to comedy because of guys like Bill Hicks or Patricia, the things that those guys said you could only say on a stage if you were really funny.
00:42:12.000But these guys have gotten so funny and they've perfected their craft to the point where they can get away with these things that the goal is to elicit laughter.
00:42:21.000You're not going to change your mind, but the goal is to make you laugh about something that's dark and horrible.
00:45:00.000If someone in your family is mentally ill and you're not making fun of them, it's your problem.
00:45:03.000The difference is between East Coast and West Coast comedy is that West Coast comedy, they hold that carrot of a sitcom or hosting The Tonight Show or something like that above your head.
00:51:23.000I don't know if he did this one, but he built a lot of his shows out there because he goes out there and he says, if it's good, they're really going to let you know.
00:51:30.000So it's where a lot of comics will go and test, similar to those rooms in Boston.
00:52:38.000They're like embryos to so young, the agents.
00:52:40.000And agents and managers, for the most part, excluding mine, who I love, but agents and managers, they're rich kids who can't do tech or finance.
00:55:41.000But what they do is, they don't, back in the day at least, they didn't change the crowd.
00:55:49.000So you would go out, like say if there's like four comics on the lineup, there's an MC and three other comics, and then there's the next show, it starts all over again.
00:55:58.000The audience is there, so they want you to do the exact same act so that the kids will leave.
00:56:04.000Because they have no account of the kids.
00:56:05.000So the buses pull up, and they're just stuffing these kids in there, and they're hoping that if you do the same bits, the kids will get bored.
00:56:12.000And they got mad at me, because I'm like, look, I'm not doing the same material.
00:58:23.000When it's a small crowd, they're really clunky.
00:58:26.000When you're working on material, every time I have a premise or even if I'm fucking telling a story, a lot of times as I'm starting to tell the story, the beginning part is a little fucking clunky and maybe I'm saying something the wrong way and it doesn't make total sense and then eventually it catches on.
00:58:41.000If you do that in front of two people...
00:59:12.000He just showed him this doll and then the owner just pointed and then the guy carried this Rodney Dangerfield doll down the stairs and just put it in like storage.
00:59:23.000It was just such a dark moment to sit there, silent, just, the owner went, meh, and pointed, and the guy just took this Dangerfield doll, and he walked it down into, God only know, the Phantom of the Opera, whatever the hell goes down under that club.
00:59:35.000But yeah, that's a real, that's like the oldest club in the country.
01:00:01.000It's like a great joke about Nanette that my buddy Nick Mullen, who's an amazingly funny comedian, said he's like, Nanette, no one's seen it.
01:05:01.000He was like the first, I mean, obviously Lenny Bruce was the first really honest comedian, or one of the first honest social commentators, and then Carlin.
01:05:14.000But Pryor took it to a weird, personal place where you were rooting for him.
01:05:20.000He was the most personal of all of those guys, because the Hicks and Carlin were famously not personal.
01:05:54.000Yeah, because I couldn't believe how funny this guy was just talking.
01:05:57.000I remember looking around the theater and these people were falling out of their chairs laughing and I'm like, I can't believe this guy is just talking.
01:06:04.000Yeah, because all these movies that I'd seen that were really funny, there was a bunch of things happening and explosions and fucking stripes.
01:06:13.000Yeah, I saw Eddie Pepitone tape his special a few days ago at Dynasty Typewriter, and he's one of those guys who's so funny and so electric that you have a room full of, you know, the type of people we're kind of talking about.
01:06:25.000You're more button-up, you know, more of that kind of alternative crowd.
01:06:29.000They were barking and howling at how funny he was.
01:06:33.000And some of the things he said, the first thing he does, he grabbed the microphone and he's like, I'm on Molly!
01:10:37.000I go on stage with an idea and I started doing these little videos on Instagram where I actually kind of rant about an issue and if people kind of respond positively to them, sometimes I'll take that to the stage and I'll just try to rant about an issue and find a few lines that are keepers that are funny.
01:10:55.000And then I'll sit down and rewrite it and re-look at the bit.
01:10:59.000But a lot of what I do has to be like, how does it sound?
01:11:19.000Well, I'm not saying I do, but I mean, that's a skill some people have.
01:11:22.000There's great monologue joke writers and stuff.
01:11:24.000But if I see something that's ridiculous that I'm, like, perplexed by or I think is funny, I can devote attention and energy into making that funny.
01:14:04.000These comics, they get pigeonholed and stuck into these gigs where they don't want to fuck up the gig, so they don't want to say anything controversial, so their material gets bland.
01:14:15.000And some of them take these big moral stands, and it's like, well, you're making a crazy amount of money.
01:14:18.000Some of them are like, I won't work here, and I won't work...
01:14:20.000If that person is on a lineup, I won't do it.
01:14:22.000And I'm like, yeah, but you're making a lot of money.
01:15:25.000Because we, as comics, especially comics like you and I that say fucked up shit, you can get away with things that are really not supposed to be in society anymore.
01:16:27.000Because sometimes, like you were saying, you go on stage with a premise, and then in the middle of doing that premise, you'll find the beats.
01:17:07.000It's like waving a stake in front of our junkyard dog and you keep tossing them little bits and then eventually you have to throw them the stake.
01:18:50.000She'd already made the decision, but you could kind of see it in her face, that I think she knew that she was going to try to be this daytime TV queen and like, let's bake cupcakes, you know?
01:26:52.000They would have a pro-Muslim group, and they would put on a demonstration right across the street from a pro-Texas group, and they would organize both of them.
01:27:31.000I wrote off a lot of that Russian stuff as people's wishful thinking, but the more and more I read about it, the more there is a coordinated attempt, seemingly, to infiltrate these social media, and so Discord, yeah.
01:27:41.000Yeah, there's 100% a real thing going on, because this woman documented it, and it was also really funny.
01:27:46.000She was talking about how many of the memes that they created that were really funny.
01:32:15.000If there were two white guys with MAGA hats who got caught, they'd be in jail right now because the detective said to him, we have two suspects on camera.
01:36:06.000Conspiracies are too fucking, it's too exhausting.
01:36:08.000I got exhausting because I would do a show and then somebody would come up to me after this show and they'd be like, they'd show me a pizza menu.
01:37:30.000Well, I'm sure there was a lot of shit happening, but there is not a fucking intelligence agency in the world that can create a Jimi Hendrix.
01:38:12.000I mean, I always think about that Hunter S. Thompson quote about, you know, like we talked about the 60s and that in the 70s it was almost like the wave crested and then just pulled back.
01:38:22.000It's crashed out from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
01:39:09.000And that came out in a memo and there was another memo.
01:39:12.000These are declassified FBI memos, Freedom of Information Act.
01:39:14.000There was another memo that said after the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover briefed George Bush of the CIA. The problem was George Bush should not have been working for the CIA at that point.
01:39:24.000He should have been just a private citizen.
01:39:25.000So it suggested he was working for the agency for a very long time.
01:39:29.000And he was made the director of the agency for one year after the family jewels came out, which was this whole thing where the CIA went to Congress and they admitted that they had done all these things from, you know, coups and fomenting revolutions in countries.
01:39:43.000And they made him the director for one year after that happened to make a clean break.
01:40:17.000He was never a guy that had serious political capital and he was made the head of the CIA. And then after that memo was unearthed, people were saying, oh, he had – this was an extension of the cover-up.
01:40:28.000He was being made the director at this very interesting time in history because he actually had worked with the agency forever and he was not at all a lightweight.
01:40:36.000He was a serious operator and he was going in there to kind of clean up and transition them into a new era.
01:45:03.000If you were from a prominent family, if it had been like a religion to stay silent, if you had had CIA training, if you would, these people don't talk and we know that there have been plots that have gone unknown for a very long time, including the coup in Iran.
01:46:01.000How about that judge in Pennsylvania that was taking underage kids and just giving them sentences, ridiculous sentences for shit, in exchange for money.
01:47:56.000Download Tor, and let's get moving, because we've got to figure shit out.
01:48:00.000Yeah, you've got to get a VPN. Well, that's like the FBI will take over ChildPoint's hat on Tor and then run it for a year, like on the dark web.
01:48:18.000There's a video of him doing something with an underage girl, and I think some people at CNN say, we've seen it, and that's led to him going, and it's like, well, what did you watch?
01:48:39.000And the fact that there's these networks of people that are trying to, you know, cultivate these experiences.
01:48:48.000It's crazy, man, but if you're a rich person and you have that sick predilection, you're going to find a way to, you know...
01:48:56.000Okay, they posted remarks that praised the girls, asked whether they were wearing underwear or simply carried a string of sexually suggestive emojis.
01:49:03.000About two years ago, hundreds of companies pulled money from YouTube over concerns about ads showing up next to problematic content from terror or hate groups and videos that seemed to endanger or exploit children.
01:49:14.000I think, you know, we've talked about this before with YouTube with the issues that we've had with them.
01:49:19.000They have way too much content and way too few people.
01:49:24.000There's no way they can watch all of it.
01:49:26.000And when shit like this or people are doing things in the comments, it's almost impossible to check.
01:50:01.000They can figure out a way to snuff all that out.
01:50:04.000It's harder now than ever before, I imagine.
01:50:06.000It's very tough, and it's tough, I think, because so few people want to believe that it's a problem in the way that it is.
01:50:15.000Because there's good people in the world that don't think these things are issues.
01:50:18.000So I think the political will isn't there because people aren't...
01:50:23.000Really, they don't understand that it's, you know?
01:50:25.000And then the people that are doing these things are very wealthy, powerful people, and they have a lot of control, and they can kind of cover their tracks.
01:51:01.000When you're talking about child molesters and stuff like that, which crazy is the Catholic Church is still around and still they're catching people left and right when it's known for it.
01:52:12.000I was talking with Burr about this recently, about church has some good qualities, and one of the things it has is it makes you feel like, you know, it's like a community thing.
01:52:20.000You sit down and you get a chance to assess yourself and your life and sort of reaffirm your moral guidance and your moral compass, and there's some good There's some positive things to a good church.
01:52:32.000And that's how those rock and roll, culty, super Hollywood churches get started.
01:52:36.000Because people say, I want a church, I just don't want a traditional church.
01:52:40.000I want something spiritual and fun and fulfilling.
01:52:42.000It's not like the church when I grew up.
01:52:44.000I said to my dad, why do we go here every Sunday?
01:54:11.000My cousin married a Mormon who they excommunicated from the church when he was like 17. Mitt Romney's family all moved to Mexico.
01:54:19.000That's why Mitt Romney's dad could never be president, because Mitt Romney's dad was born in Mexico, because when they passed the law making polygamy illegal in the United States, they all packed up their shit and went to Mexico.
01:55:24.000You could have like nine girlfriends and all live together and no one could say shit, but as soon as you write it down, they'll lock you up and put you in jail.
01:55:31.000There was a show called like Sister Wives or something.
01:55:33.000It was about people that I think they were living in the States and they had like multiple wives.
01:56:22.000Yeah, because I think when they made it illegal in the 1800s, look at this, as a polygamous community crumbles, sister wives are forced from homes.
02:00:23.000All of these industries were just emerging, and these guys took it over.
02:00:27.000Bezos, tech is, and somebody said this on my podcast recently, tech is the closest thing we have now to that.
02:00:32.000Where you have these, you know, masters of the universe that are going to be, I mean, those guys, JP Morgan was like bailing the government out.
02:00:40.000These guys had an insane amount of power.
02:00:43.000They were more powerful than political figures.
02:00:45.000I was just, when I told you I was doing this Chariots of the Gods lunch today with a bunch of very influential people, and one of them said, it's really ironic that Apple used to be Think Different.
02:00:56.000That was the whole thing about Silicon Valley.
02:02:13.000And those guys are the ones that are...
02:02:15.000As powerful as Rockefeller and Carnegie and JP, all of those guys, they are the next generation of people who their amount of power is unmatched anywhere in society.
02:03:37.000He'd be checking social media constantly.
02:03:39.000And also, if you're controversial like he is, a lot of people are talking shit to him and that would hurt his feelings and saying mean things to him.
02:03:45.000Social media has gotten to the point where I'm on it all day and I'm like, I'm not having any fun.
02:05:19.000And then you hear, and I love the day when we all found out he was, social media was great the day that we all found out he was full of shit.
02:07:10.000And then I was afraid because I'm like tweeting things in support of the kids, but I'm like, what if the next video is just the kids in Klan outfits like this?
02:07:18.000And just dancing around with torches like Charlottesville.
02:07:20.000And I'm like, well, then now I look like an idiot.