The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1108

00:00:00.000 Islander issue 3 is now available to purchase from shop.notices.com and is the next step in

00:00:16.560 the story that we are telling with this magazine. For this issue we have collected piercing and

00:00:21.040 esoteric essays from the finest right-wing minds on the theme of our civilizational winter. Each

00:00:27.120 of our authors is an expert in bringing forth the most important hidden revelations from the

00:00:32.480 lowest reaches of the soul and it has all been beautifully rendered in a medievalist

00:00:36.560 revivalist aesthetic. For this issue I commissioned a new translation of the ancient anglo-saxon poem

00:00:42.560 The Wanderer and have written a companion essay exploring how it is a reflection of our modern

00:00:48.240 experience. I personally feel that this is the most important thing I've ever written so I will be

00:00:52.560 looking forward to your feedback on it. We have resolved our distribution issues with the magazine's

00:00:57.040 being printed in advance of the orders so we can guarantee that you will receive your copy very

00:01:01.520 soon after ordering it. You will also receive email updates so you can see exactly where it is.

00:01:06.880 Hopefully issue 3 can provide you with the space and context to engage in deep reflection about the

00:01:12.960 nature of our circumstances to discover hidden truths about yourself and find the resolve to make

00:01:19.040 it through our spiritual exile.

00:01:24.720 Guys, you're live. Guys, we've gone live.

00:01:40.320 What? Ah, yes. Apologies, I was absolutely enraptured by my copy of Islander 3, which was

00:01:48.800 which is very good. Bo, apparently we're live, so we have to...

00:01:53.840 Buy it. Today's D-Day.

00:01:55.680 Yes.

00:01:55.920 H-Hour.

00:01:56.560 Yes.

00:01:57.280 Went live just like a few minutes ago or now.

00:01:59.200 It did, so...

00:02:01.280 Buy it, do it, just buy it.

00:02:02.800 Yes, check out Island. Look, there we go. There's the page on the store. You can go and buy it from there.

00:02:09.360 It's another really good addition. I appreciate we may have screwed up slightly on the delivery

00:02:16.800 of the last one. However, those people have been well and truly sacked. They're gone and we're using

00:02:22.320 different people and we're tracking every addition and whatever. It's all sorted. The sorting people

00:02:29.280 have done the sorting. Anyway, yes, sorry. Back to the matter at hand. Welcome to podcast 1,108.

00:02:39.360 I believe it is, on the 25th of February, Tuesday. Something like that.

00:02:44.960 In the year of our Lord.

00:02:46.080 Yes.

00:02:46.400 In 2025.

00:02:47.280 Gregorian Gander.

00:02:48.320 And our Domino.

00:02:50.080 I'm Dan, and I'm joined by Bo.

00:02:51.680 Hello. All right.

00:02:52.720 And what are we going to discuss? Oh, we're going to discuss who the next James Bond should be.

00:02:58.960 We're going to discuss a new discovery of ancient Egypt, which I don't know anything about,

00:03:04.080 so that would be interesting to learn about. And Fort Knox Gold. Is there any?

00:03:08.960 Yeah, or lack thereof.

00:03:10.720 Yes. Something very suspect is going on there. But, yes, without further ado, who should be

00:03:20.640 the next James Bond? So Jeff Bezos, who kind of is a Bond villain. I mean, he's pretty close

00:03:30.480 at this point, isn't he? I mean, he's got the sort of the attractive mistress who would probably,

00:03:37.680 you know, jump into bed with Bond at the first opportunity.

00:03:41.360 I've never seen Bezos' missus.

00:03:44.240 I think they change.

00:03:45.200 Oh, okay.

00:03:45.680 I don't know. I've lost track. I don't know. Maybe he's a right bloke, but whatever. Anyway,

00:03:49.360 so Bezos, who is basically a Bond villain, has acquired...

00:03:53.280 I've been accused of looking a little bit like a Bond villain from time to time.

00:03:57.520 Would you be a Bond villain or would you...?

00:03:59.280 I don't know. I don't know what they're talking about, to be perfectly honest.

00:04:01.200 Oh, fair enough. Yeah, yes. Do you think you'd be the main villain or one of the...

00:04:07.120 I like to think I'm main villain material.

00:04:08.880 Yeah, but you could be one of the counter henchmen who, like, try and assassinate Bonds and almost

00:04:14.880 succeeds.

00:04:16.240 I'll take it. I'd like to be a reoccurring villain.

00:04:19.200 I don't actually die at the end. I might come back in a later one.

00:04:23.040 But Bezos, so he's finally acquired the full rights to Bond. I think...

00:04:28.000 Don't get hung up on the details, because I don't know. I don't care, really. But it's something

00:04:32.800 like Amazon bought MGM Studios, who had the back catalogue to the Bond. But the Broccoli

00:04:37.760 family still controlled Bond.

00:04:40.160 I don't think they owned it. Don't they own the IP or whatever it is?

00:04:43.440 Something like that.

00:04:44.080 The name or something.

00:04:44.560 Yeah. And, like, Eon Studios. And, basically, Bezos had to give them, like, an extra billion

00:04:51.040 to stop blocking all the shit that he wanted to do with Bond.

00:04:54.400 Okay.

00:04:55.040 Because they've got notions. Like, being Amazon, obviously, they want a Bond-iverse.

00:05:00.800 Okay. So they can have a Moneypenny TV series.

00:05:05.120 They're not going to open a Bond theme park, like the Star Wars theme park, are they?

00:05:08.800 Well, maybe. I don't know what theme park that would be.

00:05:11.760 Yeah.

00:05:12.400 It's just the Pussy Galore section.

00:05:16.320 But, yeah. So, you have to be a bit concerned about this, because, obviously, Amazon have

00:05:21.200 already ruined Lord of the Rings.

00:05:22.560 Yeah.

00:05:23.120 Like, completely.

00:05:24.800 Yeah.

00:05:25.200 There's Rings of Power, which wasn't really a thing before, but they've ruined that anyway,

00:05:29.280 just to be on the safe side. And then, of course, you've got Disney, who ruined Star Wars.

00:05:34.560 Star Wars was the most solid franchise out there. Ruined by Disney.

00:05:40.480 It really is ruined as well.

00:05:42.480 And then Amazon, so who've got a track record of ruining things, has now got Bond. So we need

00:05:47.440 to be a little bit concerned. Was it Daniel Craig?

00:05:52.640 I mean, he started off quite good, didn't he? Casino Royale was a great movie.

00:05:57.440 Yeah, it was a pretty good one, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was quite good, I thought.

00:06:00.320 There was that one scene where he gets tied to a chair with a bottom cut out, and then

00:06:04.320 he has his bollocks destroyed by the main villain.

00:06:06.400 Yeah.

00:06:06.800 Yeah.

00:06:08.880 Are there any indications that he did, in fact, have his manhood destroyed?

00:06:13.680 Yes. Because look at where he is by the end movie. He's riding bitch on the back of

00:06:18.000 a moped because a woman has replaced him.

00:06:23.360 So, yeah.

00:06:24.800 The last two Bond films have been dumpster fires, right? They've been really, really bad.

00:06:31.360 Yeah.

00:06:32.160 I remember the last one I saw. I'm not even sure if it was the last one that came out,

00:06:35.120 but the last one I saw, I think it was that one.

00:06:37.760 Yeah. That was awful.

00:06:39.440 It was awful. It was really, really bad.

00:06:42.640 I mean, I might be remembering it wrong, but I'm pretty sure there's like a 45 minute section

00:06:46.320 where he gets a diversity, equity, inclusion, sexism training when he goes back to MI5 because

00:06:52.240 he winked at Moneypenny or something.

00:06:53.520 Yeah.

00:06:54.640 I don't even remember it very well.

00:06:56.320 Yeah. I just remember it was really bad and woke, but that's the way everything is

00:07:00.880 going. At least, though, maybe timing is lined up.

00:07:08.000 Maybe the big delay in between the last movie and this one is all right, because in the

00:07:11.600 meantime, Trump has won and therefore possibly we're past peak woke and therefore Bond won't

00:07:18.320 be destroyed. Maybe.

00:07:19.760 Can you imagine if Kamala had won, who we would be getting as Bond?

00:07:25.440 It would be, it would be like that guy.

00:07:26.880 Oh, yeah.

00:07:28.480 I don't even know what his name is. The effeminate queer that, um, hang on, I'm not supposed to

00:07:32.960 say that, uh, uh, uh, man lover. I got, what is it?

00:07:37.200 Shitty Gaywar.

00:07:38.800 Shitty Gaywar.

00:07:39.440 Shitty Gaywar.

00:07:40.240 Shitty Gaywar. I can't remember.

00:07:40.880 Okay.

00:07:41.440 But, but anyway, that, so it's some effeminate, um, um, um, man who enjoys the company of

00:07:49.440 men, um, would, would probably have ended up as the next Bond if, if Kamala had won.

00:07:55.040 Problem is though, he's a, he is a man that's still, well, there's still beyond the power,

00:07:59.680 isn't it? And he's not, I don't think he's physically disabled either. So, well, the,

00:08:04.080 the, the top choice, and I've got, I've got a, I've got a midget.

00:08:07.040 I've got a hand credit to, um, what's his name? Um, is it Andrew Lawrence? Um, the,

00:08:12.640 the comedian, he's really good. We've had him in there a couple of times. He came up

00:08:16.240 with a short list of, of potential bonds, and I've got to hand it to Shamima Begum.

00:08:20.320 Oh yeah, Begum, yeah. Totally. Why not?

00:08:25.120 I mean, that, that would tick every box in the, in the woke era. He had some other

00:08:28.560 suggestions as well. Dylan Mulvaney.

00:08:32.480 I mean, why not? Um, Harvey Price.

00:08:37.040 I, I think he has a part in Rings of Power though. So, um, I could be wrong.

00:08:44.800 Are you joking about that?

00:08:45.760 I'm not sure.

00:08:46.800 Okay. Lenny Henry. We could get like 60, 70 year old Lenny Henry to do it. Couldn't we?

00:08:52.800 Oh yeah. Well, he, well, he's in, he's in Rings of, no, Lord of the Rings thing or something.

00:08:56.640 He was in something around the world.

00:08:57.760 Lord of the Rings. Um, but, but, but yes. So, so thank goodness, um, that we have got a Trump win.

00:09:07.040 Because otherwise, you know, we would have got a bad bond, almost certainly. But, but there's

00:09:12.800 another problem that remains, which is, in this modern era, the fact remains is the bond

00:09:19.520 still works for the British government. Right.

00:09:21.680 And, and Bond is supposed to be this hero archetype, but there is nothing that you can do that's heroic

00:09:28.400 or manly if you work for the British government in 2025.

00:09:34.400 Well, according to the fifth commonists at least.

00:09:37.200 Well, yeah, but what would, yeah, but you got to remember, he, he, he's like an MI6 agent.

00:09:42.240 So he, he's, he's pushing the foreign policy of the British government. So Keir Starmer's government.

00:09:48.000 So what could he possibly be doing that would, would be heroic?

00:09:53.840 I mean, the, I mean, uh, you could have like gaslighting from Russia where he goes to Russia to,

00:09:59.440 to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline.

00:10:00.960 I was going to say the Ruskies are still the baddies, aren't they?

00:10:03.360 Yeah.

00:10:03.680 In that paradigm.

00:10:04.880 So it would probably have to be another...

00:10:06.800 So he would be blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline, wouldn't he? Or, and then blaming

00:10:10.720 it on Russia. Or he would be blowing up a nuclear power station in Ukraine and then

00:10:14.720 blaming it on Russia. Or he would be fixing an election in the US and then blaming it on Russia.

00:10:23.440 What else would, would, would Bond do at the moment?

00:10:25.600 Who else are the baddies as far as real life,

00:10:28.640 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are concerned? The Russians...

00:10:31.360 Trump.

00:10:31.920 Trump, right, yeah.

00:10:32.560 So, so, so maybe Bond goes off to assassinate Trump again.

00:10:36.000 He goes and hides...

00:10:37.040 Man with a golden glow.

00:10:38.000 He goes and hides in the, the bushes at Marlago Golf Course.

00:10:41.280 Of course, waiting to take a shot at the Donald.

00:10:44.880 Yeah. Either that or he goes off to China to assassinate a whistleblower who was about

00:10:51.200 to announce that, um, Fauci was indeed paying them to do gain-of-function research.

00:10:55.600 Yeah. You know, that can be Dr. Dr. No Myocarditis.

00:10:59.920 Yeah, Bond is taking on pro-Fauci operations.

00:11:03.520 Yes.

00:11:04.000 Okay.

00:11:04.960 Or, or, or this one, um, he goes to Ukraine to rescue a Ukrainian, um,

00:11:10.960 transsexual media spokesman and then ends up bedding her.

00:11:16.400 Yes. Or him or whatever. And then make some quip,

00:11:19.040 some Bond-esque quip at the end of it about,

00:11:21.200 oh, that was a bit, you know.

00:11:26.400 But, but, but that's the problem, you see, is, is like,

00:11:29.120 Bonds, these days, I don't see how they couldn't be,

00:11:34.400 how they could do anything that's positive.

00:11:38.240 Which is why so many people are calling for Bond to be set in the 1960s.

00:11:42.320 That would be cool.

00:11:43.040 Yeah, it would be, wouldn't it?

00:11:44.240 Because there is that thing in the Bond franchise where they don't really address the fact that

00:11:50.800 James, Commander James Bond hasn't really aged or sometimes gets younger over the course of decades.

00:11:55.760 I think there's one, one of the early Pierce Brosnan ones, where Q says something like,

00:11:59.600 you're a, you're a relic, a dinosaur of the Cold War, but they essentially don't,

00:12:04.880 so that was, they don't mention it.

00:12:06.640 That, that was the thing that I always liked about Bond. So, I remember when I was,

00:12:11.120 because every so often the subject comes up of making Bond black.

00:12:16.240 Right, and I had, I had a housemate at university who was really into his Bond.

00:12:20.560 I mean, he was studying film and stuff like that, and he also happened to be black,

00:12:23.840 and he was a massive James Bond fan. And I was fairly ambivalent at the time about making

00:12:28.400 Bond black, and he was, he was dead set against it.

00:12:31.920 And his rationale was that the whole thing with Bond is it's supposed to, you're supposed to be

00:12:37.040 able to suspend disbelief enough to believe that they're all the same guy. It's just a continuation.

00:12:42.000 And something like making him black all of a sudden were just, it's just too much of,

00:12:46.320 too jarring between, between the difference. And the other thing that Bond used to do is,

00:12:50.880 is they used to be able to, they did kind of transition. So I think it was George Lazenby's Bond

00:12:55.760 who got married, and then immediately his, his missus got shot. And then later Bonds would refer

00:13:01.920 to him having been married once and stuff like that. So there was this kind of thing,

00:13:06.640 but they were actually all the same guy. And that kind of worked up until Daniel Craig,

00:13:11.120 because he got initiated as a 007, because before it was always, you join him when he's a 007,

00:13:17.840 and you leave him when he's a 007. Daniel Craig, they initiated him as a 007 and then killed him off at the end.

00:13:24.160 There was also one of the Daniel Craig ones where they gave him a bit of a backstory,

00:13:28.080 talk about his parents, where he grew up in some Scottish area.

00:13:31.840 That was in the books though, wasn't it?

00:13:34.160 I've not read the books. I've read Dr. No years ago when I was like 25. When I was in my 20s,

00:13:39.280 I read Dr. No. That's the only one I've ever read.

00:13:40.880 I think there was reference to him. So he's always been an orphan, but I think he came from Scottish

00:13:44.960 minor nobility or something like that. And that got reference in like Skyfall or something like that.

00:13:50.320 In the film franchises, like in the Roger Moore years, they never give you any of that,

00:13:53.840 do they? No.

00:13:55.040 But they have now. Have you ever done any spying?

00:13:59.760 I think possibly, no. Of course not, no. I've accidentally done spying twice.

00:14:04.160 What do you mean?

00:14:04.640 So, one time, because you know I like to go traveling and I go through a number of places.

00:14:12.720 One time I went traveling and I was going through this hot country, and because I'm in all these

00:14:17.040 like business networks and stuff, I had arranged to go to this firm, this financial firm that was

00:14:25.280 looking to get into the UK market. And I kind of pitched up at this place and it was really hot.

00:14:34.400 So I wanted to get inside and there's a security guard on the gate who doesn't really want to let

00:14:37.920 me in. But it's hot and I'm getting annoyed. But I know I've got an appointment to see the boss. So

00:14:43.040 at some point, I just clap him on the shoulder and say, look, it will be fine. I'm going in now.

00:14:47.440 Speak to the boss. Anyway, I get there and I speak to the boss and make small talk because we'd

00:14:52.720 exchanged emails before. It's like, okay, congratulations on your wedding in May.

00:14:57.040 And he said, oh yeah, it was May, but it was the year before. It's like, oh, okay, fair enough.

00:15:00.640 I've got that wrong. And I know you've got a daughter on the way and she's already two and

00:15:05.120 stuff like that. Anyway, so I meet this guy, make some small talk, and then I'm going around the

00:15:09.360 installation and I'm expecting to see loads of people doing finance stuff. And I start going

00:15:15.600 around and it quite quickly becomes apparent that I've gone to the wrong building. And what they're

00:15:22.880 doing is like national security adjacent stuff. And I really shouldn't be in there.

00:15:29.040 So I just kind of made some excuses and then kind of left.

00:15:34.720 But then you didn't come home and go straight to SIS and tell them what you saw.

00:15:41.760 No.

00:15:42.160 So it's not real intelligence gathering or anything.

00:15:44.400 No, but we live in a world where if you like do train spotting in a foreign country,

00:15:49.120 people are arrested for that. So I thought I definitely shouldn't have been

00:15:52.640 seeing the things I've been seeing. So I just kind of made my excuses and

00:15:55.920 just kind of left the country.

00:15:56.960 Well, I've certainly never been involved with the intelligence services,

00:16:01.520 but I've known a fair few people who have. I've known people that are

00:16:04.320 in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, people that have been in military intelligence

00:16:07.840 and all sorts of things. And I've spoken to them and off the books,

00:16:11.840 they're usually reasonably candid about it, actually.

00:16:14.240 Are they?

00:16:15.120 Well, reasonably, not giving away state secrets or anything,

00:16:17.680 but they just will tell you stuff, low level stuff. And quite often,

00:16:22.000 it's people that are entirely off the books. They're not actually an intelligence officer.

00:16:25.760 They're just a friend of the family or a friend and acquaintance.

00:16:28.160 Oh, apparently that's how it works a lot of the time.

00:16:29.840 Yeah. And they get you to do something that's actually quite innocuous.

00:16:34.640 Like you go somewhere like Tajikistan and just take a few pictures of the airport.

00:16:38.560 Yes.

00:16:39.680 Something like that.

00:16:40.480 Yes.

00:16:41.040 Stuff like that.

00:16:41.680 So you can imagine how low level stuff gets picked up on.

00:16:44.320 Yeah.

00:16:45.040 Yeah.

00:16:45.520 Yeah.

00:16:46.080 Yeah.

00:16:46.240 I was a bit concerned.

00:16:47.120 Plus in the modern world, the old school 1960s James Bond type spying.

00:16:52.160 Yes.

00:16:52.720 I think it's actually really rare, quite rare. It's not, you don't,

00:16:56.160 you're not going to get much doing intelligence gathering that way.

00:17:00.160 Turning up at a country club or something.

00:17:02.160 It's all electronic now. You just get GCHQ or the...

00:17:06.480 Yeah, do it electronically.

00:17:07.280 Yeah.

00:17:07.680 Just to tap into someone's phone or laptop and you're going to get far more info than

00:17:13.280 trying to smooch someone in a casino.

00:17:15.280 Yes, playing back to that with them for free hours or something.

00:17:16.800 Yeah, right.

00:17:16.880 Yeah.

00:17:17.360 Yeah.

00:17:18.640 Bond girls, we should mention them as well.

00:17:23.760 It's probably going to be, what's her name? Rachel Zelga, isn't it?

00:17:27.920 Ziegler.

00:17:28.960 Ziegler. It's probably going to be her, isn't it?

00:17:30.560 Ziegler. Or if you do that one.

00:17:32.800 With her ocular hypotellarism.

00:17:35.840 What?

00:17:36.320 Ocular hypotellarism, when your eyes are too far apart, go back.

00:17:40.480 Is that what she's got?

00:17:41.520 Well, I would say it's quite, I'd say it's quite an acute case, quite an acute case really of it.

00:17:47.760 Right. But she's, she, but she's already destroyed the Disney thing, the Snow White thing.

00:17:54.880 So if you're trying to destroy a movie franchise, she would be ideal for it.

00:17:58.320 And for some reason, she's in absolutely everything these days.

00:18:01.360 Because she is now considered to be the example of beauty.

00:18:10.320 Okay.

00:18:10.720 Yeah.

00:18:12.000 As Cheney there in June, she's actually made to look less attractive than she is.

00:18:16.480 But still, Snow, it's not ideal, is it?

00:18:21.040 There have been some, there have been some great Bond girls through the years.

00:18:28.320 Yeah.

00:18:29.760 I like the French one, it might be on the next page.

00:18:32.240 Very good night. That's a good name. Swedish.

00:18:39.600 Well, she was lovely.

00:18:42.160 What's that? Andrea Anders.

00:18:46.400 Yeah.

00:18:47.280 Yeah, most of them are absolutely beautiful. That's the whole point, isn't it?

00:18:49.840 That's supposed to be.

00:18:50.160 Xena Omotop.

00:18:51.280 Yeah.

00:18:52.640 Golden Eyes, that was from Golden Eyes.

00:18:54.560 Yes. Oh, Golden Eyes was a great film, wasn't it?

00:18:56.080 Yeah. It's one of my favourite ones.

00:18:58.000 Yes. Made by the same director who's made Casino Royale.

00:19:01.440 Right.

00:19:01.840 10 years apart.

00:19:03.280 What's your favourite Bond movie, if you've got to pick one?

00:19:06.480 Oh, probably, probably GoldenEye.

00:19:07.760 Oh, really?

00:19:08.480 Yeah.

00:19:10.720 Well, Boseline was actually really quite good at it.

00:19:12.640 I mean, the correct answer is Goldfinger, but that is the, objectively the correct answer.

00:19:18.640 No, I like Connery. For me, Connery is the best Bond.

00:19:22.480 Yeah.

00:19:23.040 I like Dr. No from Russia We Love, Goldfinger, the earliest ones.

00:19:27.040 Yes.

00:19:27.360 But Brosnan, for me, is probably second favourite, and GoldenEye is probably the best one, as

00:19:32.960 well as spending hundreds, maybe thousands of hours playing GoldenEye on the N64.

00:19:37.120 I've got them here. We're a bit zoomed in. Can we zoom out a bit, because we've got them all.

00:19:41.520 I don't really like the Roger Moore stuff. I mean, I like Roger Moore, but he just ranks

00:19:47.520 lower. It's not that I don't like Roger Moore's Bond, but I just

00:19:52.400 feel like...

00:19:52.960 That was the first Bond I saw, and you tend to gravitate to whichever Bond you saw first.

00:19:57.680 Right.

00:19:58.000 So for a long time, I did quite like Roger Moore, but I mean, he wasn't...

00:20:00.640 Did you not see Sean Connery on TV first?

00:20:03.680 Well, I mean, I think he had stopped making Bonds by the time that I was born.

00:20:07.840 Yeah, yeah, but you just see it first, see it on TV.

00:20:10.000 Yeah, no, I think I saw the Roger Moore ones first, and then I saw the Sean Connery ones.

00:20:14.160 I don't know.

00:20:14.720 But yeah, Connery was... In fact, all of them were great. What did you think of Dalton?

00:20:18.160 Well, Licence to Kill was one of the first Bonds I happened to see when I was a kid.

00:20:25.120 I get, oh no, can that be right? I don't know. Anyway, I think Licence to Kill is not bad.

00:20:30.000 A lot of people rate him quite low, but I think he's all right.

00:20:32.720 In retrospect, I hated him at the time.

00:20:35.680 Oh, really?

00:20:36.640 In retrospect, I think he wasn't actually that bad.

00:20:40.240 I mean, Ladies and Beasts almost doesn't count because he was only a one-time shot thing.

00:20:43.600 He was good in that.

00:20:44.320 It's actually quite a good one.

00:20:45.200 Yeah.

00:20:46.320 I don't think there's any... I mean, again, I would rank more bottom, but he's still good.

00:20:52.000 I think Dalton would have done better if he'd done it when he was 10 years older.

00:20:56.880 10 years older?

00:20:57.840 Yeah.

00:20:58.400 Oh, I thought he was already like old and paunchy by the last ones.

00:21:01.680 I thought he was already...

00:21:02.000 Dalton.

00:21:02.720 Oh, sorry, Dalton. Sorry, I thought we were talking about Roger Moore still.

00:21:04.480 No, no, no.

00:21:04.880 Yeah, no, Dalton. Yeah, yeah.

00:21:05.840 Whereas Roger Moore did get a bit old and heavy by the last ones, didn't he?

00:21:08.720 Yeah.

00:21:09.120 Yeah.

00:21:09.680 You're not really believing that he's doing roundhouse kicks and stuff.

00:21:12.720 Yes, and having 19-year-olds throw themselves at him.

00:21:16.960 The point I was going to make was there's not really a weak link.

00:21:19.360 There's not one for me anyway.

00:21:20.400 It's not one that stands out where they were crap at Bond.

00:21:23.680 They're all pretty good.

00:21:24.560 No, until the last one decided to go a bit woke in the end.

00:21:27.920 But he looks the part and he's a good actor.

00:21:30.000 He's definitely a good actor.

00:21:30.880 You've got to give him that.

00:21:31.760 Yes.

00:21:32.320 And yeah, he didn't write the screenplays, did he?

00:21:35.200 So I don't think you can blame him, really.

00:21:37.520 So let's go through the list, shall we?

00:21:39.520 All right.

00:21:40.080 Let's have a look.

00:21:41.280 List of what, all the films?

00:21:42.880 No.

00:21:43.200 The actors?

00:21:44.880 Oh, who might be the new Bond?

00:21:47.200 Right.

00:21:47.600 So-

00:21:48.000 It's Caval, isn't it?

00:21:48.880 The answer, again.

00:21:50.560 Oh, possibly.

00:21:51.360 I don't even know who that guy is.

00:21:53.120 Aaron Taylor Johnson.

00:21:56.160 Apparently he was in something.

00:21:57.200 I'm not sure why.

00:21:57.840 I mean-

00:21:58.480 Tom Hardy.

00:21:59.520 Yeah, could possibly.

00:22:01.120 I mean, it's not a stupid-

00:22:02.400 I don't know if he's got-

00:22:03.760 Stupid child.

00:22:04.320 I don't know if he's-

00:22:04.880 I mean, he's got the sort of menace and presence and stuff,

00:22:07.440 but I don't know if he's quite suave enough.

00:22:09.520 No.

00:22:11.360 If he was picked, it wouldn't be terrible.

00:22:13.440 No.

00:22:13.840 I think he could pull it off.

00:22:15.440 Yeah.

00:22:16.560 But it wouldn't be my first-

00:22:19.120 He's a bit too-

00:22:20.240 He's a bit too, you know, stout yeoman rather than cavalier.

00:22:26.480 What do you think?

00:22:27.360 Well, he's supposed to be an officer and a gentleman.

00:22:28.800 Yes.

00:22:28.960 You don't think Hardy pulls off like a naval officer?

00:22:32.320 No.

00:22:32.720 No, I think he's-

00:22:33.840 Okay.

00:22:34.160 I think he's enlisted.

00:22:35.840 Okay.

00:22:37.200 In Band of Brothers, he was just an enlisted man, wasn't he?

00:22:39.920 Absolutely.

00:22:40.560 Oh, yeah.

00:22:41.440 So if it's-

00:22:42.320 If it is going to be a black guy, they've talked about Idris Elba for ages.

00:22:45.920 Mm.

00:22:46.000 But-

00:22:46.880 Heard him touted all the time.

00:22:48.960 Yeah.

00:22:50.800 If you're going to make it a black guy, might as well just make it a woman.

00:22:52.800 Yeah.

00:22:53.520 But that's actually what they did do in the last Bond, wasn't it? He was replaced by a black woman.

00:22:56.480 Well, why black? Why not Bangladeshi? Why not Eskimo?

00:23:01.200 I don't know.

00:23:02.640 But to be fair, if Anne Boleyn can be played by a black woman, surely Bond can.

00:23:09.440 And was.

00:23:10.320 If you're going to pervert everything inside out, then sure, why not? Yeah, do it. Go for it.

00:23:17.280 Whoever that is, I've no idea who that is.

00:23:19.200 No, never seen that person.

00:23:20.560 Oh, Latasha Lynch, that actually was the last James, the last 007.

00:23:26.240 Yeah, gross.

00:23:26.800 So, uh.

00:23:27.680 Gross.

00:23:29.440 Cillian Murthy. I hate Cillian Murthy. I don't know why.

00:23:31.680 Oh, do you?

00:23:32.640 I've, I've, he, he's, he's done nothing to earn it. He just irritates me.

00:23:38.160 Yeah.

00:23:38.720 And he's too small to be Bond as well.

00:23:41.600 That guy, he looks like he could do it. I don't know who he is.

00:23:45.040 Yeah, I've seen him in stuff, I think. Um, yeah, maybe. What? Who?

00:23:51.360 I don't know who that is. Apparently he was in, he was in Gangs of London, which I think

00:23:56.160 I watched, but I don't remember him at all. Oh, I remember him now.

00:23:59.200 I haven't seen that, so.

00:24:00.240 But no. Um, Richard Madden, he was in Gangs of London as well, wasn't he?

00:24:04.720 Uh, but, but no, he's just, with a Bond, they've either got it or they haven't.

00:24:10.880 Yeah, you've certainly got to have the, the just obvious charisma.

00:24:15.840 You need the, you need the confidence, the charisma, the suave, the, you know, the.

00:24:20.480 That's why Brosnan was very good.

00:24:22.080 Yes.

00:24:22.480 Wasn't it? Because he's sort of at a glance, suave.

00:24:25.600 There you go. If you want, if you want somebody from the Asian subcontinent, you got, you got

00:24:29.600 Dev Patel is being, is being listed as, as a somebody.

00:24:33.600 Harry Dickinson, no, don't know him.

00:24:36.080 Tom Hiddleston, or maybe.

00:24:39.040 If he bulked up.

00:24:40.800 Yeah.

00:24:41.680 He'd have to put on some weight, get some traps going on him.

00:24:44.800 Yes.

00:24:45.360 He's got, oh, he's got a skinny neck at the minute.

00:24:47.200 He's a bit too skinny jeans at the moment, isn't he?

00:24:49.120 Yeah, right.

00:24:50.000 Get rid of that bouffant for a start.

00:24:51.840 Yeah, but he could do it.

00:24:53.200 I don't know who that is.

00:24:56.080 Oh, because they're actually, at some point, one of these mentioned slow horses,

00:24:59.280 because they did actually make an MI6 series recently, which my mum really liked.

00:25:03.360 And she said, oh, you've got to watch slow horses.

00:25:04.960 It's about MI6 spies and stuff like that.

00:25:07.680 And it's, and literally the whole thing is MI6 going after basically people like the Lotus Eaters.

00:25:13.920 Yeah.

00:25:14.400 Is that with Gary Oldman in it?

00:25:16.320 Yes.

00:25:17.120 Yeah.

00:25:17.280 I saw the first episode of that.

00:25:18.880 And yeah, it's where the right wing skinheads are beheading people on camera.

00:25:24.880 Yeah.

00:25:25.040 It's a, it's an obvious inversion, but that is what they, but they do spend 40% of their budget

00:25:31.120 and time and effort clamping down on the right wing who don't actually do anything in favor

00:25:36.160 of not spending that time on people who actually behead people.

00:25:39.680 Jonathan Bailey, apparently he was in some sort of period drama in regard.

00:25:44.480 Again, I don't know.

00:25:45.120 I, I, I probably should have looked into who the hell these people are.

00:25:49.360 He might have been in something.

00:25:50.160 John Boyega from Star Wars.

00:25:52.000 Did he cry a lot in Star Wars?

00:25:55.680 Please.

00:25:56.080 Please.

00:25:56.480 And he spent his whole time basically pining for some girl.

00:26:00.880 And he hates the West and England and whiteness.

00:26:04.000 Okay.

00:26:04.320 So maybe.

00:26:06.320 Yeah.

00:26:06.800 Maybe that's who Amazon will pick.

00:26:08.320 Yeah.

00:26:08.720 Maybe the casters at Amazon will go for him.

00:26:10.720 Will Porter, who was apparently.

00:26:12.400 Yeah.

00:26:12.640 I've seen him in a bunch of things.

00:26:14.000 He's quite a good actor, but I don't think he's Bond.

00:26:16.640 No.

00:26:17.520 Again, with Bond, you know Bond when you see it.

00:26:20.800 Right.

00:26:22.960 Daniel Caliuga, maybe.

00:26:26.880 I don't know.

00:26:27.520 Who the fuck is that guy?

00:26:30.000 Don't know.

00:26:32.320 Clive Standen, apparently he was in Vikings.

00:26:34.560 I watched Vikings, but I don't remember him, but I don't know.

00:26:36.960 Maybe he was quite good.

00:26:38.640 Tom Hopper.

00:26:39.600 Oh, I've seen him.

00:26:42.400 But now again, he has, he, he, he's not got the touch of the officer about him.

00:26:47.200 He's Sergeant Major material, not.

00:26:48.720 Okay.

00:26:49.840 If you are going to have a black Bond, it should be that guy.

00:26:52.560 Okay.

00:26:52.880 Why is that?

00:26:54.000 Because he, because he can do the suave thing.

00:26:57.440 Bond with cornrows.

00:26:59.360 Yeah.

00:26:59.680 I don't, I don't think it should be a black guy for the reasons previously discussed,

00:27:02.640 but if you are going to do a black guy, do, do this guy.

00:27:05.520 Because I actually like some of his stuff.

00:27:07.120 He was, he was the one in 12 Years a Slave.

00:27:09.600 All right.

00:27:10.000 Yeah.

00:27:10.160 I've not watched that.

00:27:10.800 Yeah.

00:27:11.040 But he's done some other stuff where he's, he's, he's, he's been slightly swerved.

00:27:14.000 So anyway.

00:27:14.320 If you're going to have a black Bond, cornrows have got to be better than the, than the

00:27:18.080 pure fro.

00:27:19.760 Can you have Bond with a big massive 70s fro?

00:27:23.200 Well, that'd be good, wouldn't it?

00:27:24.160 Would it?

00:27:25.520 Well, if you're going down that route, you might as well commit.

00:27:27.840 Okay.

00:27:29.120 Set it in the 70s.

00:27:30.480 Set it in 1971.

00:27:31.840 Yes.

00:27:32.160 Bond is black with a giant fro.

00:27:34.320 But I mean.

00:27:35.040 Do that.

00:27:35.440 But obviously.

00:27:36.160 It's got a, yeah.

00:27:37.120 It's got to be Cavill.

00:27:38.080 He's the obvious pick.

00:27:39.200 Yes.

00:27:39.760 Because if we're talking about that sort of at a glance, suave charisma thing.

00:27:44.080 Oh yeah.

00:27:44.640 I mean, he's just, he's got it.

00:27:45.680 He's just effortlessly got all of it.

00:27:48.000 And he did that man from uncle thing, which is basically a Bond warmup.

00:27:52.080 Right.

00:27:53.120 I didn't see that either.

00:27:54.160 Right.

00:27:54.720 There's loads of things I haven't seen in the last 10, 15 years.

00:27:57.040 Loads.

00:27:57.520 But I don't bother watching it anymore.

00:27:58.880 Yeah.

00:27:58.960 I mean, whoever mocked that image up, it's just, it works, doesn't it?

00:28:02.480 But he's got to be, it's got to be Henry Cavill set in 1965.

00:28:08.160 Okay.

00:28:08.240 Because I just don't believe that there's anything that a modern Bond could do that is in any

00:28:13.360 way heroic, apart from, well, I mean, what would they do?

00:28:19.120 Taking out Yemeni terrorists.

00:28:20.720 Socks war-eating nationalists.

00:28:22.160 Yeah.

00:28:23.440 I mean, that is what a modern Bond would be doing.

00:28:25.360 Sponsor transgender rights in Uganda.

00:28:29.360 What if the storyline is, is actually that he infiltrates the Lotus Eaters?

00:28:33.040 Yeah.

00:28:33.360 I mean, that is, that is what modern MI6 agents would actually be spending their time doing.

00:28:37.680 Um, you know, maybe, and, and if they did make it set in modern day, rather than Bezos

00:28:45.440 being like the, the villain, they would basically cast a proxy for, for Elon, wouldn't they?

00:28:50.960 Yeah.

00:28:51.360 Try and stop him from delivering, like, Skylink, or was it Starlink, cheaper, affordable internet.

00:28:58.240 A mashup between Iron Man, Musk, and, and just a fictional multi-multi-billionaire baddie.

00:29:06.000 Maybe that's what, if, if they, okay, either do Cavill, set it in 1965 and make it based,

00:29:12.960 making proper Romanizer, all that kind of stuff, all the stuff that he's good at, or set it in

00:29:18.480 the modern day and the movie can be, and I'm, I want to call this one, um, uh, basically Bond gets an

00:29:27.360 email from Elon Musk asking him to list five things that he got done that week.

00:29:34.160 And, and, and he has to identify the one person in the government who actually is productive and

00:29:39.120 break into their office and read their emails. Or another one would be, uh, Bond has to infiltrate

00:29:45.520 Spectre only to discover that it's, that Spectre is actually just the US government and you can call

00:29:51.760 that one USA another day. Nice. Yeah. Nice. So anyway, um, that's our thoughts on Bond.

00:30:02.080 Henry Cavill, 1965. Forget all of that other nonsense. Make it post-Woke. Please don't ruin this

00:30:10.800 franchise like you ruined all the other ones. Please. Oh yeah. An Islander shill. Bye Islander.

00:30:19.920 And remember to, because Bondrew, Bond would. Yeah. Yeah. That's what, that's what he reads on the planes

00:30:26.720 in between missions.

00:30:31.520 Okay. Over to you. Well, there's a bunch of, uh, you've got a bunch of super chats. Oh, yes.

00:30:36.240 All right. Idris Elba. Oh, hang on. Idris Elba played Reed in Cyberpunk. He's actively pushing

00:30:46.800 for a movie based on the character. He wants his Bond. Um, oh, maybe you get it then. They go with

00:30:53.360 Henry because that's what the women want to watch and men can visualize themselves being Bond. Yeah,

00:30:58.320 but they may, I don't know if you ever watched the, was it the, um, the Witcher thing that Cavill did.

00:31:04.960 No, I'm aware of it. Yeah. By the second season, he's hardly in it. It becomes a girl boss thing.

00:31:10.480 Right. Because there's two women characters and they basically, the whole thing becomes

00:31:13.600 about them. And he's like a sideline in his own series. That's a classic thing. They've done that

00:31:17.920 with loads of TV and movie franchises where the first one is based and people love it. Yeah.

00:31:23.200 And then the sequels, they get in a woke writing team, woke producers and directors, and again,

00:31:29.200 just subvert it. Yeah. So many examples of that. However you rank Bonds, the best Q was John Cleese

00:31:35.680 and Rowan Atkinson for the next Bond. Rowan Atkinson hasn't actually been Q, is he?

00:31:42.080 Desmond Llewellyn is the best Q. The old guy. Yeah. Do pay attention 007. Yes.

00:31:50.880 That guy. John Cleese was all right, but. Yeah. Josh could do Q. You think?

00:31:55.360 Yeah. Um, Dan just stopped for a minute and, uh, drooled like a perv while scrolling Bond

00:32:03.920 girls. Uh, yes. Guilty as charged. What's the, what's the problem? Yes. Um, uh, Connor Smugmug

00:32:13.920 says, uh, when I said Islander three will be out before I get my number two, I was joking.

00:32:19.040 It was a meme. Hopefully I get them both at once. Yeah. Apparently the, the people that

00:32:23.200 we've sacked who deliver Islander two assure us that they are coming through, but they're

00:32:28.960 just, they're just rubbish. So anyway, they've been sacked. Um, Bob O'Bad says Dylan Mulvaney

00:32:35.280 is the spy who trans me. Oh yes. Bud light shaken, not stirred. Yes. Very good. Um, uh, the

00:32:42.240 engaged for you says the movie with a transgender soldier could be called Octobussy.

00:32:50.000 People are laughing. I don't, I don't get that. What's a bussy?

00:32:54.240 It's just a pussy. Is it? Yeah. A bussy. Oh yeah. It's just an American. Yeah. Is it,

00:32:59.920 is it like a, just a, just a weird bussy? Just a, I don't know actually. Okay. I've not encountered

00:33:05.040 that, that terminology. All right. Okay. Um, I want to see Bo holding a white long haired cat,

00:33:11.360 stroking it and looking evil. Yeah. Again, I, I, I think you're the counter spy, not the,

00:33:17.280 not the, not the boss in the layer. Like a 005. Yes. Like another 00 agent. Yes. Who's

00:33:22.880 turned bad. Who's Bond's nemesis. Yeah. Or yes. It's almost as good as Bond, but not quite.

00:33:29.280 And then there's a fist fight at the end where I lose. Yes. Okay. Yes. Got it. Um,

00:33:33.440 hedgehog's dilemma says Bo looks more like he should be in a Guy Ritchie film as a Cockney gangster,

00:33:38.160 henchman called Jimmy the fist. That's also right. And a bald eagle says Bo wants to become famous

00:33:44.160 like Jaws. The only Bond villain to show up in multiple films, not die and get a happy ending

00:33:49.280 with a woman he loves. Yes. Right. I'll take it. Yep. Very good.

00:33:56.960 All right. We're just going to go on to the next segment then. Um, so, uh, Samson,

00:34:02.880 have you got all my links? Is that the page? This is it. Okay. Yeah. Uh,

00:34:09.600 all right. So to begin the segment, uh, today Islander three comes out. Do you buy it? It's

00:34:16.000 brilliant. Loads of, loads of good people in actually, as always, loads of people you would

00:34:23.040 have heard of have written articles and the, uh, the aesthetic is really good. There's always

00:34:28.000 thank Rory for that. He's done tons and tons of work on it. So if you're interested, do consider buying that.

00:34:33.120 Okay. I'm going to talk a little, a little bit about Egypt now then, because there's been some

00:34:37.280 things that have been in the, the news that a new tomb has been discovered.

00:34:42.720 Well, they found Tutankhamun again. No, no, no. There's just parallels with

00:34:48.160 the Howard Carter 1922 Tutankhamun discovery. There's a few vague parallels with that.

00:34:56.080 Um, oh, to be fair, the headline just say of his dynasty.

00:34:58.880 Yeah. It's 18th dynasty. Okay. So, um, how, how far ago is that?

00:35:04.160 So we're talking like the 15th, 16th century, 15th century BC, 1490, 1480 odd BC.

00:35:14.480 Was that when they were relatively near the peak of their power?

00:35:17.440 Well, that's a good question. Um, depends how you measure it. It's the new kingdom.

00:35:22.400 Right. So, I mean, different historians, there's peaks and troughs. Egyptian history is so long,

00:35:29.760 um, that there's peaks and troughs. Some would say that, um, parts of the new kingdom,

00:35:34.720 you could argue they had sort of golden ages there.

00:35:37.680 Yes. Um, I mean, by the time you get to Cleopatra and the Romans turn up, they're pretty weak

00:35:42.240 by then, aren't they?

00:35:42.960 Yeah. They're not even Egyptians really. The Ptolemaic dynasty are Macedonians. They're not,

00:35:47.520 they're not even Egyptians. I mean, so I would say, this is just my personal take is that, um,

00:35:53.600 the pyramid builders represent the zenith. And that's really early on. They're like the third,

00:36:00.880 fourth dynasty. They're like, it's the old kingdom. It's really the pyramid.

00:36:04.080 How far back is that? Oh, you're talking 24th, 25th, 26th century BC. Okay. So I get a thousand

00:36:12.000 years before this. So again, quite a long time. Egyptian history is so long. Do you put any stock

00:36:18.560 into that idea that the Sphinx is even much, much older than that? I mean, like we're talking about

00:36:24.320 like another 5,000 years earlier. Probably not that much. Right. But maybe. Because that's

00:36:30.640 the Graham Hancock thing, isn't it? That he's got water erosion around it and all that kind of stuff.

00:36:34.720 Yeah. The, the, the area, the pit that the Sphinx is in. Yeah. Um, people said that the

00:36:40.160 water erosion on the sides of that suggests that it's, there's, it's from a much, much deeper

00:36:45.040 antiquity. I think it's at least fair to say that the Sphinx has been reworked a number of times

00:36:51.040 over the centuries, over the millennia. The, uh, the original, original thing.

00:36:56.000 You should have a dog face or something. Well, we don't, we don't know. The head doesn't seem to

00:37:00.160 be right, does it? The head seems too small for the rest of the body. Yes.

00:37:03.360 That's what a lot of people have said. Um, and most of the Sphinx is sort of natural bedrock.

00:37:10.080 So I think I wasn't going to talk about the Sphinx, but why not? Um, it seems like originally,

00:37:14.800 in the first instance, it was sort of a natural outcropping that probably vaguely looked like

00:37:20.960 a lion or, or something like that. A dog, a jackal or something.

00:37:25.600 And one day the Egyptians got bored and thought, why don't we actually make it look like a lion?

00:37:28.720 Yeah. And then at some later date, recarved the head into a pharaoh's head and various things.

00:37:35.200 I mean, it wasn't until the 18th or even 19th century, they dug it out of the sand.

00:37:39.840 Oh really?

00:37:40.400 Yeah. People did sketches and drawings of it in the 18th century, and it's only like the head

00:37:45.280 sticking out of the sand.

00:37:46.240 Oh.

00:37:46.800 Um, but anyway. Anyway, um, so this new discovery, um, is, uh, what's, what's the pharaoh's name?

00:38:01.600 He's not that important one. His, his son was much more important.

00:38:06.400 Um.

00:38:06.800 Oh, don't worry if you don't remember the name, I would know him anyway.

00:38:11.040 Uh, what is his name? Thutmose II.

00:38:15.040 So, I'm probably not.

00:38:16.240 Thutmose II.

00:38:17.280 Thutmose II.

00:38:18.240 Thutmose II. Now, Thutmose III was sort of an important one, sort of had a relatively long reign

00:38:23.280 and was sort of militarily successful. But this guy didn't rule for very long.

00:38:28.000 Right.

00:38:28.880 And didn't sort of achieve great things.

00:38:31.760 So, anyway, it was back in 2022, so a few years ago, when they first discovered his tomb.

00:38:38.320 And it's not even in the Valley of the Kings. It's a few miles away, like three miles away from the Valley of the Kings.

00:38:43.600 And there had been some sort of natural flooding and natural backfill.

00:38:48.880 Uh, but it had been either plundered by tomb robbers or just deliberately emptied and moved somewhere else in antiquity.

00:38:55.920 So, the parallels with Tutankhamun don't really hold because the headline about Tutankhamun is it had been unplundered when Howard Carter broke into it in 1922.

00:39:06.800 Famously, he looked through and saw the shining gold, and it was filled with golden artifacts and things. This wasn't.

00:39:14.880 So, Thutmose II, he's been robbed.

00:39:19.440 Either robbed or they think now that possibly they'd made this tomb, they'd realized for whatever reason that it wasn't going to work or it was going to keep getting flooded naturally.

00:39:30.160 So, they sort of abandoned it, made him another, another chambered tomb complex and moved everything there.

00:39:39.040 Uh, because actually some of the links I was going to talk about much later were that in this, this got in the news about a week ago.

00:39:44.960 But in the last day or so, they're saying they found another portion to it.

00:39:49.920 Okay.

00:39:50.720 Um.

00:39:51.480 Has that got loot?

00:39:52.520 No.

00:39:53.040 No, right.

00:39:53.540 Okay.

00:39:54.120 Because they found his body or what they thought was his body, his mummy, back in the late 19th century,

00:39:59.600 in like 1881 or something.

00:40:01.340 Thutmose II.

00:40:02.000 Yeah.

00:40:02.600 They'd found a mummy, and the archaeologists thought that that was this Thutmose II.

00:40:08.360 Um, and now they think probably it wasn't.

00:40:11.020 It was someone else.

00:40:12.080 Yeah, but if you, if you found a mummy, I mean, they're not in, they're not in the best nick, are they?

00:40:16.720 So, how, when you look at it, what makes you think, yeah, that, that's Thutmose II.

00:40:21.700 Well, it's the job of the archaeologists, isn't it?

00:40:23.540 That you find them, they'll usually have inscriptions, there might be hieroglyphs on the wall,

00:40:27.480 or they might have things actually on them, which suggest it's from this dynasty, or,

00:40:31.580 it might even just say, you might even find papyrus or, or hieroglyphs on the wall that

00:40:35.600 explicitly say, this is the tomb of da-da-da-da-da.

00:40:38.540 Oh, okay, right, fair.

00:40:39.240 So.

00:40:39.540 Yeah, that's, that's fairly conclusive there.

00:40:40.840 But sometimes it, you have to, you might get a tiny fragment of something.

00:40:44.580 In fact, that's why they think this one was either the tomb or the abandoned tomb of Thutmose II,

00:40:50.460 because they found relatively small artefacts, which say it was.

00:40:56.000 So that's quite good evidence, but still.

00:40:58.760 Well, I'm convinced.

00:40:59.920 So what, what, what's interesting about this then?

00:41:03.840 Well, just that even this, as, as relatively empty as it was, is still very, very rare.

00:41:11.120 It's very, very rare for archaeologists to find, see, look, that's the, what they thought,

00:41:15.300 and some people still do think is the mummy of Thutmose II, yeah, it's still very rare

00:41:20.460 to find any sort of burial chambers that have been closed since antiquity.

00:41:27.220 So, although it wasn't full of golden things or a mummy, it's still worthy of note, still

00:41:33.260 absolutely worthy of note.

00:41:34.220 Was there some, some common loot items in there?

00:41:37.440 There were some, some small things, yeah.

00:41:39.280 Right, okay.

00:41:39.640 And some things on the wall, some plaster on the ceiling, where it shows stars.

00:41:43.780 So, you know, it's almost certainly, well, it is a burial chamber of some type, but by

00:41:49.560 the 18th dynasty, you're, you're a long way off of, um, sort of giant, giant burial complexes

00:41:58.040 or pyramids, yeah.

00:42:00.200 Because in the Valley of the Kings, there's some massive ones.

00:42:03.440 In fact, his wife stroke sister, his half sister stroke wife, Hapshitzit, she's got a giant

00:42:10.020 complex.

00:42:10.620 In fact, Samson, can you find the images?

00:42:11.900 I would have put some Hapshitzit images of her, her thing.

00:42:16.460 Um, so, anyway.

00:42:19.500 Uh, it's still a relatively minor pharaoh in the scheme of things.

00:42:24.320 Um, here's just some, look, if you go back one, actually, go back one.

00:42:27.520 That's one of the things they found there, sort of basically saying that this is the utmost

00:42:32.760 the second.

00:42:34.440 Okay.

00:42:35.160 So, it's not a great deal.

00:42:36.280 Weird disc thing.

00:42:36.920 Okay.

00:42:37.100 It's not a great deal, but, um.

00:42:39.360 Right.

00:42:40.020 Still.

00:42:40.900 Yeah, I think that there's, yeah.

00:42:42.480 So, far from being filled with golden things like Tutankhamun.

00:42:47.320 Yes.

00:42:47.740 King Tut.

00:42:49.520 Um.

00:42:50.360 Do you think this is, I still hope that one day we'll find another Tutankhamun style thing

00:42:54.740 where there's loads of real treasure.

00:42:56.340 Can you work it out by process of elimination of, like, these are the ones that are counted

00:43:00.380 for, and look, here's a really rich important one.

00:43:02.460 There you go, that's actually sort of stuff.

00:43:03.540 Sorry, there you go.

00:43:04.000 Look.

00:43:04.320 Right, that's a bit.

00:43:05.100 Yeah.

00:43:05.500 That's a bit epic, isn't it?

00:43:06.780 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:07.320 Well, his sister, so, he was the king, and he got that little grotto.

00:43:11.280 Yeah.

00:43:12.260 And his sister gets that.

00:43:13.580 Yeah, well, his sister, who, also wife, and she went on to rule in her own right as something

00:43:17.780 like a female pharaoh.

00:43:21.340 So.

00:43:21.880 That's much better.

00:43:22.620 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:23.060 Yeah, it's incredible.

00:43:23.620 It's one of the most, it's like something out of a movie, isn't it?

00:43:26.160 Yeah.

00:43:26.400 Something you can scarcely believe.

00:43:27.640 Back in the day, that must have been epic.

00:43:29.700 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:30.960 You can tell that Thutmose was a very practical man, where his sister was like, no.

00:43:36.080 Well, with a lot of these things, if you didn't rule for a long time, because what usually

00:43:39.280 happened, when you died, they just stopped working on your, on the things they were going

00:43:44.060 to do for your burial.

00:43:44.880 So, if you only ruled for four years, they just haven't got time to build you something

00:43:49.040 grandiose.

00:43:50.340 Right.

00:43:50.580 Well, if you ruled for 40 years, they're working on it for 40 years, say.

00:43:55.440 So, that's why.

00:43:57.020 You must have to start out with a plan in mind.

00:43:59.540 It's not like every year you put an extra year's worth of work in it and you end up with

00:44:04.460 that.

00:44:04.860 I mean, you have to start out with that in mind.

00:44:07.240 Well, yeah.

00:44:08.280 Yeah.

00:44:09.980 That's what I think.

00:44:10.700 One of the things I, because I'm obviously a history nerd.

00:44:13.160 I've, of course, been fascinated with Egyptian history ever since I was a child.

00:44:17.940 When I was a small child, I wanted to be an Egyptologist.

00:44:20.520 Right.

00:44:20.920 I still sort of had that dream when I'd started my undergrad.

00:44:23.720 You could have been with Ken Jackson then.

00:44:24.720 Yeah.

00:44:25.980 When I started my undergrad, I still sort of was interested in that.

00:44:30.440 And one of the things I'm fascinated in is just the so-called pavement at Giza, where

00:44:37.060 the great pyramids are built.

00:44:39.760 Yeah.

00:44:40.020 Right.

00:44:40.700 You have to do all the groundwork first.

00:44:43.140 Right.

00:44:43.240 You can't just start building a giant pyramid on sand.

00:44:47.020 No.

00:44:47.680 Or even on any sort of ground, which isn't perfect for it.

00:44:51.920 Yes.

00:44:52.480 Because there's all sorts of, there's a couple of different pyramids that are half slumped

00:44:56.060 and flat.

00:44:56.120 It must have been a pitch to get a site that big flat and properly drainageed and...

00:45:01.060 So the ground that the Great Pyramid is built on, they call it the pavement.

00:45:05.400 Right.

00:45:05.600 That itself is a giant, giant engineering project with massive stones, giant, giant thing, just

00:45:13.160 to get the foundations in place.

00:45:15.560 And was that done in one bloke's lifetime?

00:45:16.960 They say it was, yeah.

00:45:18.800 That's the official narrative.

00:45:20.500 It's a big project.

00:45:21.660 A lot of modern scholars, sceptics say...

00:45:24.780 So the thing I was going to ask is...

00:45:26.960 I don't know.

00:45:27.960 No one knows.

00:45:28.600 You must presumably know who the big wigs were, like who the various kings were.

00:45:34.220 So are there any proper serious kings who are unaccounted for, and therefore we think

00:45:40.480 we might be able to find a big stash of loot and a nice tomb one day?

00:45:44.800 Yeah, there's some.

00:45:45.120 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:45:45.660 Right.

00:45:45.780 One thing to say about that is the king lists are sort of hotly debated by historians and

00:45:51.320 scholars, whether they're real or at what point does it descend into legend and they're

00:45:56.900 fictional.

00:45:57.900 Right.

00:45:58.020 And also over the centuries or millennia, different political factions have come and gone, and

00:46:05.040 it seems almost certainly tried to distort what came before.

00:46:09.220 Oh, I see.

00:46:09.760 And stuff.

00:46:10.280 So it's...

00:46:11.220 I can believe that.

00:46:11.600 You'll find some Egyptologists who say, no, we've got everything down, we know pretty

00:46:15.500 much the exact dates, and there's no gaps.

00:46:17.720 Yeah, they would say that, wouldn't they?

00:46:18.720 Right.

00:46:19.140 And others that say, no, come on.

00:46:21.120 The reality is that we can't be certain about this or that.

00:46:24.640 Right.

00:46:24.920 So I'm personally probably more in that camp, a little bit sceptical about things.

00:46:31.660 Yeah, but that's nice too.

00:46:32.800 But yeah, it's on my bucket list to go to Egypt.

00:46:35.180 I've travelled all over the place, but I've never been to Egypt, and it is now top of

00:46:39.480 my bucket list to go there.

00:46:42.380 And I'd want to go to the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, and see things like

00:46:47.560 that with my own eyeballs.

00:46:49.460 Absolutely want to.

00:46:50.840 If we keep going through a few images, if you...

00:46:55.020 Oh, can I do it?

00:46:55.820 Let's go...

00:46:57.180 Oh, yeah.

00:46:57.720 So...

00:46:58.820 What's that?

00:47:00.200 A place called Saqqara.

00:47:01.640 So the obvious thing is to go to the Giza Plateau in Cairo, just outside Cairo, and see

00:47:05.900 the Great Pyramid.

00:47:06.840 I'm fascinated by the Great Pyramid, but there's other things.

00:47:09.860 At Saqqara, there's the Serapium, where there's these giant enigmatic boxes.

00:47:18.180 They're not coffins?

00:47:19.360 Well, we don't know.

00:47:20.540 No mummies were ever found in them, ever.

00:47:22.960 Can't they open one and find out?

00:47:24.200 Well, no, they have been opened, and they're empty.

00:47:26.480 Right.

00:47:27.300 It seems like they've always been empty.

00:47:28.700 Some say they were supposed to, at one point, hold sacrificial balls, the apis balls, but

00:47:35.320 there's no evidence of that.

00:47:36.240 There's certainly no real evidence that they ever held, like, the bodies of pharaohs or

00:47:39.900 anything like that.

00:47:40.720 And they're giant, and also, sort of, the precision engineering of them is sort of off

00:47:48.520 the scale, because that's super hard stone, a super hard type of stone, and they're not

00:47:54.620 really sure how that was done in ancient times with the tools that they were supposed to have

00:47:59.080 had at their disposal to do it.

00:48:02.660 Look, like, it really is precision engineered.

00:48:05.700 Oh, yeah.

00:48:06.300 And, I mean, there's lots of channels.

00:48:11.200 I'm a big fan of Uncharted X.

00:48:15.320 The History of Granite.

00:48:16.420 There's a great channel called History of Granite.

00:48:19.960 Curtis Ryan Woodside.

00:48:21.760 Graham Hancock is great.

00:48:22.960 Yeah.

00:48:23.140 And these guys just put forward often, well, they just pose difficult questions.

00:48:30.160 Like, how was that supposed to have been made?

00:48:31.720 Well, exactly.

00:48:32.000 But if you've got somebody to come around and do you an extension, or your kitchen, and

00:48:36.380 you could put a set square to any part of it, and it lined up like that, you'd be well

00:48:40.640 impressed.

00:48:41.200 Yeah.

00:48:41.780 But to do it in ancient times in granite with hand tools, that is quite interesting.

00:48:47.500 Say, with diorites pounding stone.

00:48:49.740 I went to Sri Lanka once.

00:48:51.300 It doesn't make sense.

00:48:51.900 And there's this couple of big temples in this bit that I passed through.

00:48:55.940 One was this big blingy temple, loads of gold and stuff like that.

00:48:59.240 And that's the one where everyone went.

00:49:01.220 And I thought, oh, yeah, this is reasonably impressive.

00:49:03.720 And then there was another temple that I went to that nobody ever goes to, and it was far

00:49:07.960 more impressive, because it was much more humble, but it was carved out of solid granite.

00:49:14.280 So a whole temple carved out of granite, like the inside and everything.

00:49:17.760 And it was way more impressive.

00:49:19.920 No matter what, it must have taken to do that.

00:49:22.580 I went to Angkor Wat once in Cambodia, and there's two main temples there that everyone

00:49:28.360 goes to.

00:49:29.160 They're the first ones you come to.

00:49:31.220 And on the face of it, they're the most impressive.

00:49:33.900 But actually, in that area, there's loads, a dozen or more.

00:49:36.220 And I would advise if anyone, if you end up in Cambodia, and you visit Angkor Wat, make

00:49:43.300 the time to go to some of the other ones.

00:49:45.540 Yeah.

00:49:45.900 Unfortunately, I didn't do that.

00:49:47.060 I should do.

00:49:47.860 Yeah.

00:49:47.940 So yeah, how granite was precision engineered, apparently, with diorite pounding stones is

00:49:54.700 just not really clear.

00:49:58.260 There's a scale of it.

00:49:59.860 And you can see the small area that it's been put into.

00:50:02.320 How did they even move it into that area?

00:50:05.980 Like, we're not sure.

00:50:06.820 Even if you had a hundred strong chaps.

00:50:11.140 There's not enough room to do it.

00:50:12.440 Yeah.

00:50:12.640 Yeah.

00:50:13.420 Yeah.

00:50:13.800 Because they get in their way.

00:50:15.100 Yeah.

00:50:16.700 Yeah.

00:50:17.200 How did you move that?

00:50:18.180 There's always some people.

00:50:19.140 You'll find some fedora tippers in the comments always saying, oh, well, they just understand

00:50:23.240 it.

00:50:23.380 And it may be true, but they just understood leverage really, really well, how to lever

00:50:28.500 and walk things along delicately, but still, still kind of beggars belief.

00:50:35.020 There's even one that was left abandoned in a hallway there that hadn't been finished

00:50:39.120 and obviously hadn't been put in place.

00:50:40.760 And it's just left there.

00:50:42.740 Again, quite enigmatically.

00:50:45.280 What's that like?

00:50:46.040 What's going on there?

00:50:49.000 Also, the Valley Temple, sometimes known as the Asarion.

00:50:52.360 There's loads of things that I would like to see.

00:50:54.360 There's sort of megalithic size stonework.

00:50:58.560 Yes.

00:50:59.200 Right.

00:50:59.640 It kind of, it's on a scale even bigger than Stonehenge.

00:51:04.120 Oh, yeah.

00:51:04.460 Stonehenge.

00:51:04.680 And the engineering is much more impressive and precise.

00:51:09.080 Yes.

00:51:09.400 And that's right.

00:51:10.260 That's on the Giza Plata.

00:51:11.080 That's right near the pyramids and the Sphinx.

00:51:14.120 Again, how did they do that deep in antiquity?

00:51:17.640 Again, there will be some people say it's not that difficult.

00:51:20.020 They had loads and loads of time and sort of endless energy.

00:51:24.080 But still, it's the precision, which is the wonder.

00:51:30.780 Yeah.

00:51:31.340 I could spend weeks or months in Egypt easily.

00:51:35.380 And they've got one picture where it shows the scale of it.

00:51:37.520 Look at the size of that block at the top.

00:51:40.080 That is ridiculous.

00:51:40.920 If you see on the left-hand side of it, that little niche that's being cut out of it and

00:51:46.220 things.

00:51:48.900 But that gives you an idea, I think, of the scale of some of these things.

00:51:54.120 There's sort of endless things to see in Egypt.

00:51:56.960 One of the things I'm fascinated by is the so-called unfinished pyramid.

00:52:00.880 Just off the Giza Plateau, there's this basically just a big hole in the ground, which many people

00:52:06.160 say it was the beginnings of going to be a big pyramid.

00:52:10.420 Yeah.

00:52:10.940 It was going to be a pyramid.

00:52:12.240 But then the pharaoh died before they got anywhere near actually building the pyramid structure

00:52:17.240 on top of it.

00:52:18.540 Why didn't the next one just say, OK, carry on, but make it for me?

00:52:22.360 Not a bad question, but maybe it's to do with pride.

00:52:28.820 You want your own project from the beginning.

00:52:31.280 But you can see it's like a massive slope down.

00:52:33.740 I think that picture is actually taken from when they used it as a movie set.

00:52:36.560 You can't go there now these days, this particular site.

00:52:40.240 The Egyptian army said tourists just aren't allowed there, but they did a film there at

00:52:45.800 some point in the past.

00:52:46.760 You can see where, because under the Great Pyramid, there's sort of a subterranean passage

00:52:55.180 and then a subterranean chamber.

00:52:58.400 Right.

00:52:58.600 The subterranean chamber in the Great Pyramid is one of the most fascinating things for me.

00:53:04.480 I didn't even know there was one.

00:53:05.740 Yeah.

00:53:06.080 But it looks like this, maybe this was going to be something like that and they never actually

00:53:09.960 finished it.

00:53:10.980 And down there, there's like this, at the bottom of it, there was this, again, this pavement,

00:53:14.160 this sort of perfect floor, which they dug up.

00:53:18.960 This is back in the 19th century when Western archaeologists would just dig stuff up.

00:53:23.500 Just get stuff done back then.

00:53:24.660 Yeah.

00:53:25.060 Yeah.

00:53:25.460 Yeah.

00:53:26.080 And under this, under the floor, they found this, a weird sort of bathtub type, oval bathtub

00:53:32.700 type thing, which again was empty with the lid on it.

00:53:37.180 You can see the lid there with the niches on the side, but it was empty.

00:53:40.280 So, yeah, again, just mystery piled upon mystery.

00:53:46.800 But if only they had a habit of labelling things, it would have been so helpful.

00:53:51.300 Yeah.

00:53:52.440 It's like just a lost world, isn't it?

00:53:54.420 A lost culture.

00:53:57.020 I've not seen a lot of these things before.

00:53:58.640 I mean, this place really has scale, even in the like, the ancillary bits.

00:54:04.020 It's giant.

00:54:04.940 Giant engineering projects.

00:54:07.580 Right.

00:54:07.860 And this is basically for just like a nation of river people, because like the whole Egyptian

00:54:14.380 thing was basically just five miles either side of the Nile River, 800 miles long, five

00:54:21.000 miles wide, just a bunch of river folk who made this stuff.

00:54:27.380 I mean, that particular one's cut into the bedrock.

00:54:29.720 People used to think, oh, they just had tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of

00:54:33.260 slaves.

00:54:33.760 But now they think almost certainly, no, they were more like an artisan class or more like

00:54:38.320 a professional builder class that just worked in the off season.

00:54:42.380 When they weren't working the fields, they would be working for the pharaoh's building

00:54:47.260 projects.

00:54:47.960 I mean, that...

00:54:48.320 But either way, it's a vast amount of human labour.

00:54:50.660 That in itself is quite impressive because you've got to have, you've got to produce such

00:54:54.540 a huge surplus from everything else that you're doing to support however many thousands of

00:55:00.960 artisans or whatever it was to do nothing but tinker away at granite all day long.

00:55:05.960 If nothing else, it infers quite a sophisticated society.

00:55:10.560 Yes.

00:55:11.340 Otherwise, you just wouldn't be able to do it.

00:55:13.100 Oh, yeah.

00:55:13.540 We wouldn't be able to do this today.

00:55:14.560 That's a chance.

00:55:18.060 Not for a lack of engineering know-how or anything.

00:55:21.600 It's just organisational people skills.

00:55:23.720 We wouldn't have it.

00:55:24.460 If we didn't have any modern diggers and stuff.

00:55:26.780 Even if we had them.

00:55:28.460 Do you think the UK government could organise something like that?

00:55:30.520 They can't organise a rail system.

00:55:32.500 I see what you're saying.

00:55:33.780 Because we had this...

00:55:35.700 History knows love to discuss that exact question.

00:55:38.300 And some say, yeah, it's right.

00:55:39.600 Like, look how long it takes to build a railway or something or a new bridge.

00:55:44.820 And then others will say, no, if there was a political will and the money was there,

00:55:49.000 we'd get it done in a month flat.

00:55:50.300 But that is our point.

00:55:51.240 We don't have the political will to do anything apart from destroy ourselves slowly.

00:55:54.580 If there was the political will and the investment, we would definitely be able to do stuff like this.

00:55:59.340 But you're right, there isn't.

00:56:00.520 Well, yeah, but that's a bit like saying if aliens turned up.

00:56:04.380 Or look at something like the Burj Dubai, the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.

00:56:07.800 Yeah, that's not a Western democracy though, is it?

00:56:10.280 I know, but yeah.

00:56:12.540 Could the modern Egyptian government do stuff like this?

00:56:16.440 Get it done in one year or five years?

00:56:19.740 I think if Elon became king of Dubai, he might be to get it done.

00:56:25.180 I do like to think this is an insight into my psyche.

00:56:28.840 I do like to think if I had $200 billion, like Elon Musk, I might commission my own pyramid.

00:56:35.360 Oh, yeah.

00:56:35.680 Yeah, so to be fair, if there was, say, a big solo event and we all got wiped out and the cockroaches formed a society like a million years later, the only things left would be things that you made out of stone.

00:56:49.800 So you might have a little bit of Mount Rushmore left and maybe the pyramids would still be a bit left.

00:56:53.800 If you want to build something at the last, do it in stone and do it at scale.

00:56:57.600 See, if I was a billionaire, I'd 100% be commissioning something massive out of stone.

00:57:02.260 And do it somewhere in the world where it's not going to fall down through earthquakes or get subsumed by the sea or anything like that.

00:57:10.000 No earthquakes, not humid, just dry and stable.

00:57:13.460 Yeah.

00:57:13.620 Yeah.

00:57:14.180 Yeah, either my own pyramid or a colossus, a giant statue in my own image.

00:57:18.920 Yeah, that might fall down though.

00:57:20.660 Okay, just in low relief on the side of a cliff like Mount Rushmore style.

00:57:24.440 Yeah, yeah.

00:57:25.140 High relief, actually.

00:57:26.020 Make that high relief.

00:57:26.760 Yes.

00:57:27.220 Yeah.

00:57:27.620 And I'm buried in the head of it.

00:57:29.200 I'm with you.

00:57:29.820 Yes.

00:57:31.440 I'm with you on that.

00:57:33.240 Okay.

00:57:34.740 There's just some more pictures.

00:57:36.520 Islander.

00:57:37.480 Are we going back to the beginning of things?

00:57:39.620 Am I going back?

00:57:40.140 Yeah, you've gone back to the beginning now.

00:57:41.780 Okay.

00:57:42.600 Let's go forward.

00:57:44.560 I think you've got them all.

00:57:46.060 Oh, I've gone through them.

00:57:46.800 Yeah, you've got them all.

00:57:47.260 All right.

00:57:47.580 So I thought I'd had loads more images of other things as well.

00:57:51.620 Yeah, I'm fine.

00:57:52.880 Okay, fair enough.

00:57:53.800 But there are so many things to mention about Egypt I'd like to see.

00:57:56.140 There's a very small stone circle at Napta Playa, which Graham Hancock talks about, which is not that impressive compared to some of the grand building projects.

00:58:06.940 But it's really, it's older than the Old Kingdom.

00:58:09.640 I'd like to see that.

00:58:11.660 There's the temple complex at Karnak.

00:58:14.480 There's the Step Pyramid, the Colossae of Memnon, the Red Pyramid, the Bent Pyramid, Menkare's Pyramid.

00:58:20.580 You know, there's the three big pyramids on the Giza Plateau.

00:58:23.760 Yes, I know those.

00:58:24.260 The smallest one of the three.

00:58:25.720 I'm fascinated just by that alone, Menkare's Pyramid.

00:58:28.400 Just that.

00:58:30.440 I've got to go to Egypt, saying I've got to get that done.

00:58:34.740 But okay, the point is there's been some new developments in Egypt.

00:58:40.000 Did you hear recently or a year or so ago, they did some sort of geophys or some sort of advanced techniques,

00:58:46.520 and they realised that there's some sort of void above the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid.

00:58:51.900 There may be another big...

00:58:52.820 Yeah, I heard something about that.

00:58:53.680 There may be some sort of...

00:58:54.900 Well, there probably is a big chamber above the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid.

00:58:58.400 They need to get their drill out.

00:58:59.160 And they haven't...

00:59:00.380 They haven't done it.

00:59:01.040 The Egyptian authorities are sort of not...

00:59:03.400 They don't seem particularly interested in finding out what's there.

00:59:08.380 Right.

00:59:09.820 I'd light a fire under it if it was me.

00:59:11.600 Get it done.

00:59:12.740 Oh, look.

00:59:13.400 Big void.

00:59:15.360 They're able to sort of penetrate it with...

00:59:17.600 Not radar, but something or other, which suggests there's a big void there.

00:59:23.080 Could be filled with golden things.

00:59:24.780 Could be filled with treasures.

00:59:25.760 Yeah, you want to get on that.

00:59:28.900 Yeah.

00:59:30.020 But yeah, the Egyptian authorities of antiquities are very...

00:59:35.700 It's difficult to explain why they don't...

00:59:38.780 Why they're very, very conservative with this stuff.

00:59:43.660 Yeah.

00:59:44.280 Why the rest of the world don't pile tons of pressure on them constantly to get it done,

00:59:50.460 but they just don't...

00:59:52.340 Or why underneath, for example, underneath the Giza Plateau,

00:59:54.860 it seems to be riddled with a maze, a labyrinth of underground tunnels and things,

01:00:01.020 aquifers and stuff.

01:00:02.540 And it's not really been explored, or not formally.

01:00:04.820 It's not really been properly explored or stuff.

01:00:07.840 If it was up to me...

01:00:08.860 Yes.

01:00:09.460 I'd get all the archaeological...

01:00:12.780 Best archaeological departments from universities all around the world,

01:00:16.020 some massive project...

01:00:17.420 Maybe...

01:00:17.800 To get it all mapped, to get it all done.

01:00:19.760 Anything new that comes out,

01:00:20.880 a suggestion of a hidden chamber behind something or other.

01:00:24.240 Like, look into it right away.

01:00:25.920 Maybe they're waiting for tiny AI-controlled robots or something.

01:00:29.740 Maybe.

01:00:30.620 Well, there's the so-called...

01:00:31.620 The shafts or air vents that poke out from the Great Pyramids.

01:00:36.100 Yeah.

01:00:36.300 Have you ever seen...

01:00:36.720 They put a little robot up there to find out what's up there.

01:00:39.800 And it's sort of a bit of a dead end,

01:00:41.280 but there's like some weird...

01:00:43.160 There's some odd stuff going on there,

01:00:44.760 which hasn't been completely explained or explored.

01:00:47.020 You've got a little robot with a drill.

01:00:48.460 Yeah.

01:00:48.900 Yeah.

01:00:50.080 Okay.

01:00:50.980 Some Egypt things in the news.

01:00:52.580 All right.

01:00:52.960 So, we've got some...

01:00:55.960 Siglasone17 says,

01:01:01.320 The worst part of discovering Egyptian tombs

01:01:03.500 is the anxiety of waiting for either Scooby-Doo music

01:01:06.420 or Dark Souls music to start.

01:01:10.040 Okay.

01:01:10.760 Hogshead Dilemma says,

01:01:12.420 Linking the last two segments together,

01:01:14.260 that apparently Daniel Craig will play Caesar

01:01:16.900 in a new Cleopatra biopic.

01:01:19.180 That'd be cool.

01:01:19.940 With Zendaya in the role...

01:01:21.420 Yeah, obviously.

01:01:22.720 She's in everything.

01:01:24.660 What, Zendaya as Cleopatra?

01:01:27.380 Why not?

01:01:29.100 Why not?

01:01:29.800 I mean, she gets every female role now,

01:01:32.540 so obviously, yeah.

01:01:33.800 Amen Dines 512 says,

01:01:37.880 Bo, when I was in grade school,

01:01:39.840 I wanted to be an Egyptologist.

01:01:41.440 I did my 10th grade science project on it.

01:01:43.580 I'm 50 now.

01:01:44.640 Is it too late?

01:01:47.520 It's never too late.

01:01:49.020 Yeah, get on with it.

01:01:50.180 Yeah, do it.

01:01:50.700 The reason why I got to undergrad level

01:01:54.080 and realised it was not for me

01:01:56.140 is that you have to be a linguist.

01:01:59.500 You almost certainly have to have Greek and Latin,

01:02:01.700 like de rigueur.

01:02:03.160 You have to have that

01:02:04.080 to even be taken remotely seriously,

01:02:06.340 even to start down the path of being...

01:02:09.600 And then you've got to learn the pictology stuff.

01:02:12.280 Yeah.

01:02:12.780 And I just didn't...

01:02:13.860 I didn't go to public school,

01:02:15.380 so I didn't start Latin at year seven.

01:02:17.720 Yeah.

01:02:18.140 And I just have got hardly any...

01:02:19.420 No Greek, really.

01:02:20.740 So...

01:02:21.340 I've got no Greek.

01:02:21.940 It was going to be difficult for me to do it.

01:02:25.360 And there's so few opportunities to do it

01:02:27.600 that there's a lot of nepotism as well.

01:02:29.440 You sort of need to know someone and stuff.

01:02:32.080 But it could be an amateur one.

01:02:34.780 It could still be an amateur one.

01:02:36.460 What's this?

01:02:36.820 The boom thing's in the way.

01:02:37.720 You can go there on holiday.

01:02:38.420 I mostly subscribe to Graham Hancock's line

01:02:40.520 of thinking a lot of the detractors

01:02:42.900 are Muslim scholars

01:02:44.720 because the Sphinx can't be older than the Quran says

01:02:49.440 because Egypt is Muslim.

01:02:51.980 Yeah.

01:02:52.960 It's not a really PC take,

01:02:54.940 but I actually really agree with that

01:02:56.900 because modern Egyptians...

01:02:58.360 It sounds right, doesn't it?

01:02:59.200 Modern Egyptians are Muslims, mostly.

01:03:02.180 Obviously, there's Coptic Christianity.

01:03:03.820 Not every single modern Egyptian national is a Muslim,

01:03:06.580 but nonetheless, it's a Muslim country.

01:03:08.920 And yeah, there's a thing in Islam

01:03:11.200 that anything that predates Islam

01:03:13.960 is sort of...

01:03:16.020 I have to say it, Islam.

01:03:18.520 Oram.

01:03:19.140 Yeah, right.

01:03:19.720 That is the way to say it, yeah.

01:03:21.220 And so they're not breaking their neck

01:03:22.880 to pour more glory on ancient Egypt

01:03:27.000 because it's pre-Koram.

01:03:29.020 Islam only rocked up in like 1400,

01:03:31.320 so there's quite a lot of history before that.

01:03:34.980 Yeah, it was earlier than that,

01:03:36.100 but still, yeah.

01:03:36.880 Yeah, yeah.

01:03:38.020 What, those, like the 7th or 8th century?

01:03:40.000 Oh, was it?

01:03:40.420 Oh, okay, fine.

01:03:40.880 But still, but still.

01:03:41.600 Still, loads of history before that.

01:03:42.920 Yeah, tons, yeah.

01:03:44.560 What's the...

01:03:45.120 Got one more.

01:03:45.840 Can't read it because of the glare.

01:03:47.320 Sometimes it's best to leave things alone, Bo.

01:03:50.460 I think the Egyptians may have reached that point

01:03:52.660 or there was some other underlying reason

01:03:54.620 to not look into those things.

01:03:58.700 No, don't leave things alone.

01:04:00.040 No, no, I don't agree with that.

01:04:02.060 There's a school of thought in archaeology

01:04:04.680 to just leave it be.

01:04:06.600 We've got enough knowledge.

01:04:08.040 Yeah.

01:04:08.560 No, I don't agree with that.

01:04:09.400 Somebody in the chat said that Gal Gadot

01:04:12.720 should be Cleopatra.

01:04:13.720 I agree with that.

01:04:14.200 That could work.

01:04:14.980 Yeah, that works for me.

01:04:16.660 Because, of course, the real Cleopatra

01:04:17.720 probably wasn't beautiful.

01:04:21.080 Yes.

01:04:21.480 But she was in charge of the reporting mechanisms

01:04:26.200 and therefore has been described as a famous beauty

01:04:30.400 because she was in charge of the people

01:04:32.440 who got to record whether she was beautiful or not.

01:04:35.160 Yeah, no, not really, though.

01:04:36.220 On her coins, she's depicted with quite a big nose,

01:04:39.440 like a hook nose.

01:04:40.360 Right.

01:04:40.800 And the accounts that survive are, what,

01:04:42.980 so Plutarch, Appian.

01:04:46.820 Yeah, in Plutarch, it's like Life of Antony

01:04:49.100 and Life of Caesar.

01:04:52.440 She's not described as this, like, knockout beauty.

01:04:56.400 Because people think of Liz Taylor

01:04:57.900 in the 60s Cleopatra film, really beautiful.

01:05:01.660 Or Gal Gadot, let's get Gal Gadot to do it.

01:05:03.800 She probably, there's no accounts

01:05:05.520 that she was, like, disgustingly ugly or repulsive.

01:05:08.360 Just a bit hook nose.

01:05:09.140 But just probably not a movie star good looks.

01:05:12.320 But anyway.

01:05:12.900 Yeah, well, most people aren't, so.

01:05:14.000 Yeah, right.

01:05:14.700 Yeah.

01:05:15.240 Hardly anyone actually is.

01:05:17.840 All right.

01:05:19.280 So, talk about our third segment.

01:05:21.700 Talk about gold.

01:05:22.880 Oh.

01:05:23.240 Talk about Fort Knox.

01:05:24.760 So, between us, we probably should be able

01:05:27.360 to have a half-decent take or two on this.

01:05:29.480 You're a.

01:05:29.820 At least half.

01:05:30.540 You're a successful venture capitalist, investor.

01:05:34.260 I worked in asset management, asset servicing, commodities.

01:05:37.160 I bought gold for a long time.

01:05:38.440 Every time I got.

01:05:38.980 Best part, 20 years, we should.

01:05:40.440 For many years, every time I got paid,

01:05:42.160 I'd go to this little gold dealers

01:05:43.840 and buy a one ounce.

01:05:46.480 Actual physical gold.

01:05:47.960 Yeah.

01:05:48.320 Right.

01:05:48.920 So, I've racked up some gold ounces.

01:05:51.360 Nice.

01:05:51.660 I'm a fan of gold.

01:05:53.680 Good.

01:05:54.060 Nice.

01:05:55.040 Anyone out there that's got any money to burn,

01:05:57.540 I know we're few and far between,

01:05:59.520 but do you get a little bit of physical gold, right?

01:06:02.360 If nothing else,

01:06:03.160 if the world economy completely collapses

01:06:05.960 and we have to go back to barter.

01:06:07.560 Yeah.

01:06:07.920 If you've got money to burn,

01:06:09.340 keep it in paper money.

01:06:11.420 But if you've got money you want to preserve,

01:06:13.360 gold's good for that.

01:06:14.240 Right, yes.

01:06:14.720 If you're doing it for the...

01:06:16.120 I have got some silver as well

01:06:17.720 because it's a much smaller denomination.

01:06:20.200 An ounce of silver is like,

01:06:22.100 I don't know, like 40 pounds,

01:06:23.220 something like that.

01:06:24.280 Whereas an ounce of gold is like a couple of grand.

01:06:27.840 So, for the apocalypse,

01:06:29.780 you actually want silver.

01:06:31.080 And some tin snips

01:06:32.180 so you can clip your own coins.

01:06:34.120 Yeah, all that, yep.

01:06:35.720 I do think that if there was a true global economic collapse

01:06:39.900 and everything went back to barter

01:06:41.760 and you've got some gold coins...

01:06:44.020 Yeah, you can go and buy...

01:06:44.900 You can't barter much with that

01:06:47.860 because it's worth so much.

01:06:49.580 You want to swap a chicken and some bread with someone.

01:06:53.220 One gold coin is way too much.

01:06:55.020 Even one silver coin would be way too much.

01:06:57.100 You're going to want to clip your own coins.

01:06:58.940 Yeah.

01:06:59.780 But I could say, for example,

01:07:01.520 buy five chickens with a silver coin.

01:07:03.300 I'd be happy with that deal.

01:07:04.240 Okay.

01:07:04.640 Or maybe a big cow for one gold coin.

01:07:07.100 But it had to be a big one.

01:07:09.680 Like a massive...

01:07:11.240 I think we got off topic.

01:07:12.740 Yeah, we're immediately getting off topic.

01:07:15.000 Fort Knox.

01:07:16.180 So, yes.

01:07:16.720 Is it all fake?

01:07:17.760 Well, that's the question, isn't it?

01:07:19.720 So...

01:07:20.200 They're definitely faking something.

01:07:21.600 You think so?

01:07:22.060 They're definitely hiding something.

01:07:23.660 Well, because senators and congressmen keep saying,

01:07:26.940 can we have a look around?

01:07:28.320 And they're like, no, because it's a military base.

01:07:31.640 It's like, well, yeah,

01:07:32.200 but we get shown around military bases all the time.

01:07:35.080 Yeah.

01:07:35.520 Why can't we see this one?

01:07:36.640 It's not even a military base.

01:07:37.980 It's the security of it is by...

01:07:40.100 They've got like the special mint police.

01:07:42.820 It's like a little...

01:07:43.440 Fort Knox is a military...

01:07:44.460 It's a big military base.

01:07:45.820 Okay.

01:07:46.120 It's got lots of personnel on it,

01:07:47.840 but it also has the gold thing in it.

01:07:49.740 Yeah, okay.

01:07:50.360 That is protected by its own little police force, isn't it?

01:07:53.260 But yeah, no, the story goes...

01:07:55.200 So, where to begin?

01:07:56.700 Gosh.

01:07:57.780 Last time it was audited was in the early 50s under Eisenhower.

01:08:04.040 Well, they claim that they audited it every year,

01:08:07.840 but they don't release the results in secret.

01:08:12.360 They don't even do that, I don't believe.

01:08:13.800 Well, they claim to.

01:08:14.580 I think on paper they're supposed to,

01:08:16.880 but in reality they don't...

01:08:19.400 The last time they did a public audit was like 1954 or something like that.

01:08:23.200 Yeah.

01:08:23.600 So, under Eisenhower, they did one,

01:08:26.400 and apparently everything was tickety-boo at that point.

01:08:30.220 America hadn't gone off the rails in 1950.

01:08:33.200 Yeah, right.

01:08:34.160 That was like the 60s onwards.

01:08:36.100 Well, so America's history with gold.

01:08:38.300 So, in the Great Depression, under FDR,

01:08:40.820 FDR put through an executive order, actually,

01:08:47.020 saying normal people aren't allowed to really own hardly any gold.

01:08:51.120 You're certainly not allowed to hold any gold.

01:08:53.940 There was an exemption for like wedding rings and stuff like that.

01:08:56.400 Yeah, you're allowed some gold,

01:08:59.160 but you weren't allowed to hold bullion, put it that way.

01:09:01.860 Yes.

01:09:02.120 Gold bars, you just weren't allowed to.

01:09:03.520 Talk about land of the free.

01:09:05.120 Yeah.

01:09:05.620 Anyway, so it was to do with the Depression and to do with...

01:09:10.580 Well, it was massively unconstitutional.

01:09:12.540 Yeah.

01:09:13.300 Yeah.

01:09:13.580 It does feel like that's infringing your liberties, doesn't it?

01:09:16.620 Anyway, that was actually repealed by Jerry Ford, I believe,

01:09:22.780 in the 70s after Nixon.

01:09:25.220 But anyway, for a long period there,

01:09:27.820 the federal government was hauled in gold.

01:09:30.200 And in fact, I think the higher watermark was like 1941,

01:09:35.060 i.e. during World War II.

01:09:37.320 America had said to loads of countries in the world,

01:09:39.860 or in Europe really, basically had said,

01:09:42.080 look, Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini might conquer your country,

01:09:48.580 and why don't we hold your gold reserves for you in case that happens?

01:09:51.180 And then after that, Stalin might rock up.

01:09:55.140 So we'll keep your gold safe for you.

01:09:56.980 So that's basically my starting piece for Brokernomics.

01:10:00.340 It's that at the end of the Second World War,

01:10:01.800 the Americans had all the gold,

01:10:03.320 which is partly as a function of they're the only people

01:10:05.200 that had a functional economy while everyone else was getting bombed,

01:10:07.860 and partly as a function of they were safekeeping for everybody else.

01:10:10.900 And basically they just didn't want to give it back.

01:10:13.680 And that's why we have a dollar-based system today.

01:10:16.520 I think the high watermark was in 1941,

01:10:18.280 where they had something like two-thirds of all the gold in the world was with them.

01:10:24.840 I mean, even to this day, like in, I can't remember the exact date,

01:10:28.400 but in like 2007 or 2011, something like that,

01:10:31.220 Germany said, we want loads of bullion back that you've had for years,

01:10:36.180 for decades.

01:10:36.740 And it took Fort Knox, like, or the treasury,

01:10:41.520 it took them like seven years to give it back.

01:10:43.700 So this is the problem with gold, about going back to a gold system.

01:10:47.580 Well, I don't think it could be done today.

01:10:49.420 It's because the whole logic...

01:10:50.140 The gold standard.

01:10:51.120 Yeah, the gold standard.

01:10:52.980 Because the whole logic of gold is that you kind of need to centralize it.

01:10:56.460 Because if you don't, you know, you can just, you have to believe when somebody else tells you

01:11:03.820 they've got a certain amount of gold, you need to believe them.

01:11:05.880 So the Russians and the Chinese say we've got this amount of gold,

01:11:08.280 and therefore our currency is backed by gold.

01:11:10.480 You have to believe them.

01:11:11.860 Trust.

01:11:12.140 Or they need to let you come in and start drilling into their gold bars

01:11:16.060 to make sure they're not tungsten inside.

01:11:17.560 Right, I was going to talk about that.

01:11:18.460 So that's why gold was always concentrated, basically in two places,

01:11:22.500 in the US and the city of London.

01:11:25.640 And of course, we just don't have that level of trust anymore.

01:11:28.320 So you basically just can't go back to a gold standard.

01:11:31.320 So there's loads of things to say.

01:11:32.620 I haven't got a massive amount of time left.

01:11:34.240 But yeah, so FDR took them off the gold standard.

01:11:37.160 They went back on again.

01:11:38.780 Then Nixon took them off again in like 1971.

01:11:41.520 And they haven't gone back on the gold standard since then.

01:11:45.480 There are other places than Fort Knox.

01:11:47.240 Fort Knox, there's sort of the Federal Bank building in New York.

01:11:51.460 And there's one or two other locations.

01:11:53.660 But Fort Knox is sort of the main one.

01:11:55.060 50, 60% of all America's supposed bullion reserves are supposed to be at Fort Knox.

01:12:00.240 Apparently.

01:12:00.820 Apparently.

01:12:01.300 So after the 50s, when there was supposed to have been an audit there,

01:12:06.540 people were talking about it because the 70s were an economic,

01:12:10.020 time of economic upheaval with the oil crisis and all sorts of things.

01:12:13.560 So in 1974, there was sort of, by 1974, there was a big calling for,

01:12:19.720 to let people see that the bullion is still there.

01:12:22.720 In 1971, they'd come off the gold standard, basically,

01:12:25.280 because the American government, as it is inclined to do,

01:12:28.780 was spending too much money.

01:12:30.820 And so they had to come off the gold standard.

01:12:32.500 By 1974, things were going badly because they later shored up the dollar

01:12:38.060 by backing it to oil, basically, by doing a deal with the House of Saud

01:12:41.540 in Saudi Arabia.

01:12:42.920 But in that interim period, it was highly suspect whether they actually had the gold.

01:12:48.380 And so I think they let a bunch of senators in then.

01:12:50.220 But it was just a PR stunt, an exercise in PR, as far as I can tell.

01:12:55.000 Anyway, just say, I wrote an article a while ago about Yellen's time bomb,

01:12:59.820 Janet the felon Yellen.

01:13:01.500 Basically, during the Biden years, they didn't do anything.

01:13:06.520 I had a very good conversation all about the history of money,

01:13:09.320 and in fact, quite a lot of talking about gold with godders.

01:13:12.600 What was that?

01:13:13.360 Godfrey Bloom.

01:13:14.340 I missed that one.

01:13:14.760 When?

01:13:16.180 A fair while ago now, six months ago or something.

01:13:18.900 Yeah, last summer.

01:13:19.820 I was going to dig that one out.

01:13:20.840 Last summer.

01:13:21.560 We made some content about the history of bubbles.

01:13:24.560 Do you remember that?

01:13:24.880 Oh, yes.

01:13:25.440 That was ages ago, wasn't it?

01:13:26.300 Yeah, we were going to cover like 12 of them, and we did two or something.

01:13:29.840 Yeah.

01:13:30.720 Yeah, that's back in Feb 23.

01:13:32.240 Yeah.

01:13:33.140 We made another bit of content talking about the Wall Street crash

01:13:35.420 and other crashes and depressions, didn't we?

01:13:37.860 Yeah.

01:13:38.260 You've got your own show all about economics.

01:13:40.820 I've done a gold one.

01:13:42.100 So Elon Musk treated this not very long ago,

01:13:45.080 looking for the gold in Fort Knox, and it's gone.

01:13:48.480 But he said they're going to have a look at it.

01:13:50.600 Can we play that by Trump?

01:13:52.000 Can we play this?

01:13:53.320 Well, happening today, President Donald Trump said he wants to visit Fort Knox

01:13:57.040 to make sure the gold is still there.

01:13:59.200 The depository at Fort Knox has stored precious metals for the United States since 1937.

01:14:05.020 During a meeting with the French president sitting right next to him,

01:14:07.960 the president mentioned the possible audit again.

01:14:10.780 We're actually going to Fort Knox to see if the gold is there,

01:14:13.300 because maybe somebody stole the gold.

01:14:16.300 Tons of gold.

01:14:18.400 Treasury Secretary Scott Besson says there is an audit every year.

01:14:21.860 It doesn't actually put that big, does it?

01:14:22.980 No.

01:14:24.060 That's the interesting thing about gold.

01:14:25.260 If you were to take all of the gold that's ever been mined,

01:14:28.100 it would only fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools.

01:14:30.760 I've heard that, yeah.

01:14:31.440 I've heard it's only one Olympic-sized swimming pool.

01:14:33.580 I might have to check that.

01:14:34.340 But either way, it's less than you think.

01:14:36.800 Yeah.

01:14:37.160 It's much less than you think.

01:14:38.440 Yes.

01:14:38.760 Because you know you walk past...

01:14:39.540 It genuinely is rare.

01:14:41.140 You walk past...

01:14:41.680 Yeah, yeah.

01:14:42.020 You walk past some random jewelers in some nothing town,

01:14:46.380 and the shop front is filled with gold chains and stuff,

01:14:49.180 and you think, oh, there must be thousands, millions of tons of gold in the world.

01:14:53.880 No, not at all.

01:14:54.740 No, it's really not that much.

01:14:55.860 No, no, certainly not millions of tons.

01:14:57.860 Play this clip, actually, for us as well.

01:15:00.500 We're also going to Fort Knox.

01:15:02.900 I'm going to go with Elon.

01:15:06.780 And would anybody like to join us?

01:15:14.200 Because we want to see if the gold is still there.

01:15:16.860 We want to see.

01:15:18.260 Wouldn't that be terrible if we open up this Fort Knox?

01:15:20.860 It's got...

01:15:21.540 It's just solid granite that's five feet thick.

01:15:25.380 The front door, you need six musclemen to open it up.

01:15:29.400 I don't even think they have windows.

01:15:31.280 Wouldn't that be terrible if we opened it up and there was no gold there?

01:15:36.500 So we're going to open those doors, we're going to take a look,

01:15:39.080 and if there's 27 tons of gold, we'll be very happy.

01:15:41.960 I don't know how the hell we're going to measure it, but that's okay.

01:15:44.980 We want to see lots of nice, beautiful, shiny gold in Fort Knox.

01:15:48.600 Don't be totally surprised we opened it up.

01:15:51.820 It's just remarkable that it's actually a real political issue.

01:15:58.320 It's not conspiracy theory.

01:16:01.240 It's a real question that needs answering one way out of it.

01:16:03.420 This is a great time to be in political commentary because basically America's had this massive regime shift and they don't believe anything that went before them.

01:16:13.680 And they're right to question it.

01:16:16.260 Yeah, no, absolutely.

01:16:17.160 I just think it's remarkable that it's even a question, really.

01:16:24.560 Well, just to quickly say about the 1974 thing.

01:16:27.720 Oh, yes.

01:16:28.020 When they went in there, they showed, yeah, there was a few senators and a few journalists,

01:16:35.980 like a dozen or two hand-picked members of the federal government and a few hand-picked journalists.

01:16:42.080 And they showed them into one vault and they showed them loads of apparently gold bars,

01:16:49.480 whether they could have been tungsten or something.

01:16:51.900 Some people said that, that maybe it's tungsten sprayed gold because tungsten is about as heavy as gold.

01:16:58.020 But they didn't do any purity tests.

01:16:59.860 They didn't check them against serial numbers.

01:17:02.480 They didn't show them many, many vaults worth.

01:17:04.840 They just showed them one.

01:17:05.740 That's why I always...

01:17:06.260 And they said, okay, we're done, right?

01:17:07.940 Questions over.

01:17:08.560 No more questions, right, guys?

01:17:09.760 But it wasn't an audit.

01:17:11.380 It was not an audit.

01:17:12.500 No.

01:17:13.140 Okay.

01:17:13.380 And actually, assaying gold is quite hard work.

01:17:15.820 That's why I always stick to the coins, not the bars.

01:17:18.080 Because if you buy a bar and then you try and sell it,

01:17:20.740 they need to re-assay it every time to make sure it's not got tungsten inside.

01:17:24.880 Yeah, right.

01:17:25.440 Yeah, it could be.

01:17:25.820 The other thing is they've said that in the late 70s through to 1981,

01:17:31.600 they did audits, but they weren't released to the public.

01:17:35.440 You didn't get any old person allowed,

01:17:37.960 like a truly independent body to go to Fort Knox and check.

01:17:41.600 So is that worth much?

01:17:43.480 You want a great story about the British gold?

01:17:45.860 So this is going back to like the early 1900s.

01:17:49.200 But basically, there was this guy who sort of rocked up outside the gold place.

01:17:56.160 And he said, you guys need to be in the gold vault tomorrow at 3 p.m.

01:18:02.080 And then he kind of wandered off.

01:18:03.840 At the Bank of England, you mean?

01:18:04.900 Yeah.

01:18:05.380 And they were like, okay then.

01:18:06.840 But for whatever reason, they were in the middle of the gold vault the next day at 3 p.m.

01:18:10.620 And basically, there's like a grate at the bottom of where they were holding the gold.

01:18:16.140 And it pops open.

01:18:17.080 He pops up.

01:18:17.720 And it turns out he was a sewage worker.

01:18:19.660 And he realized that you could just get into the gold vault from the sewage.

01:18:23.880 Is that a true story?

01:18:24.580 Is that not apocryphal?

01:18:25.520 No, that's a true story.

01:18:26.900 Okay.

01:18:27.320 I've not heard that one before.

01:18:28.380 But he was just an honest fellow.

01:18:30.080 So he was just making them aware of it so that they could secure it.

01:18:33.680 But if he wanted to, he could have run off with like millions of pounds worth of gold.

01:18:38.760 But he just didn't.

01:18:39.860 It's great.

01:18:40.200 It's like hacking into the NSA or NASA or something.

01:18:43.380 And then telling the government you've done it.

01:18:45.860 You say, look, I could have done some nefarious stuff.

01:18:48.560 I haven't.

01:18:49.300 But this is how easy it was to do.

01:18:50.720 I don't think if a sewage worker today found himself in the gold vault, he would do that.

01:18:55.600 But it'd be hard to find someone to sell bullion, like a big bar of bullion to, right?

01:19:00.740 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:19:01.860 To get rid of it after the fact.

01:19:03.660 That would be difficult, wouldn't it?

01:19:04.900 Yeah.

01:19:05.320 You don't sell that behind the back of the pub, do you?

01:19:07.460 Another thing is in 2017, in Trump's first administration, there was a very, very, very limited audit, apparently.

01:19:15.680 But again, it wasn't the full-blown, let's look in all the vaults, count how much is there, if there's anything there,

01:19:21.240 and check the purity of it, check the serial numbers.

01:19:24.060 It still wasn't that.

01:19:26.200 So that hasn't been done, some say, since the Eisenhower era, and some say since the Truman era, since 1947.

01:19:33.940 Either way, the Treasury, because it comes under the Treasury, not the Federal Reserve, it comes under the Treasury.

01:19:42.160 Either way, it seems like they've got something to hide.

01:19:46.080 Now, whether it's that it's not there anymore, or there's only a tiny fraction of it, or even possibly there's more gold.

01:19:53.680 It's possible that there's more gold than they thought was there, which is also an issue in a completely different sense.

01:20:00.940 Of course, it wouldn't mean the collapse of the American economy or the collapse of the dollar, but that's also bad.

01:20:05.960 If they've got way more gold.

01:20:07.300 So that was the theory that I was going to throw up, which is this one.

01:20:13.840 Is that from Iraq?

01:20:15.380 What if the problem isn't that the gold's not there?

01:20:20.340 What if there's too much gold?

01:20:22.240 Because basically, the story is, is that ever since World War II, America has been going around invading places.

01:20:29.100 And if you ever read accounts of the troops who actually did it, it's very obvious.

01:20:33.520 The first thing they do when they get into a country is not rush to the central bank and secure the paper money.

01:20:38.780 It's they rush to the gold and they secure the gold.

01:20:41.620 And if they've got oil, they secure that.

01:20:43.220 That's like every time you read accounts of what troops did, it's they hit the ground, beeline for the oil, the actual oil and the actual gold and secure them.

01:20:52.400 And then everything else follows after that.

01:20:54.740 But so America's been going around.

01:20:56.680 And this is like a famous photo from Iraq where they, you know, one of the gold deposits they sort of secured.

01:21:03.560 And the official story is, is that whenever the US does this, is they then give that money back to that country.

01:21:10.880 So in the case of Iraq, the story is, is that it was used to used for redevelopment efforts.

01:21:17.620 So it was, it was, it was spent on Iraq's behalf in order to fund development.

01:21:25.440 But what if that's a load of baloney?

01:21:27.560 Yeah, well, if that's just simply not true.

01:21:28.940 What if ever since World War II, America has just been invading places, stealing their gold and then sticking it in Fort Knox.

01:21:36.420 So the other possibility is, is that actually they've got far too much.

01:21:39.360 And that's the other reason why they don't want to get ordered.

01:21:42.800 Well, it seems like some of the massive gold holders in the world, like JP Morgan and HSBC, they're shipping over at the moment, shipping over tons of gold from London to New York and then maybe onto Kentucky.

01:21:58.080 But who knows?

01:21:59.100 It seems like something's going on at the moment.

01:22:01.520 Oh, every, every central bank.

01:22:02.760 That may just be arbitrage.

01:22:04.100 That may just be, so JP Morgan and HSBC can make money because it's worth more if you sell it in New York.

01:22:09.060 So every central bank, apart from the British, are desperately buying gold and have been for the last few, basically since 2008.

01:22:16.720 They've all been buying gold as fast as they can, apart from the British, because of course we sold all our gold.

01:22:21.960 And also, I think it is politically good for a country to underplay how much gold they've got.

01:22:28.060 Apparently the Chinese do that.

01:22:29.700 The amount of gold the Chinese say they've got and the amount of gold everyone thinks they've got.

01:22:33.820 Yeah.

01:22:34.360 We think they've got way more than they say they've got.

01:22:36.900 That's, that's what.

01:22:37.880 Deliberately saying they've got less than they have.

01:22:39.440 They might have 20,000, was it 20 tons or 20,000 tons, whatever it is.

01:22:43.520 But yeah, they might have, because they're supposed to have like 3,000 tons and they might have 20 because they're basically, if you look at Hong Kong, which is a major gold exchange, massive flows have been going through that for years and it's all going into China.

01:22:58.860 In fact, another thing a gold fund manager told me, and this was 20 years ago, is that gold, China is actually one of the world's largest producers of gold.

01:23:07.180 And you think of it being South Africa and Canada and Australia, but no, actually China is one of the biggest producers of gold.

01:23:13.840 Every single ounce that is mined, the government buys at full market rate and puts it in a vault somewhere.

01:23:20.620 So if you work all of that backwards, it's possible they've got 20,000 tons, which means they've got far more than the US.

01:23:27.560 Right.

01:23:28.000 Now, why is that important?

01:23:29.120 Because what happens if one day there's another 2008 financial crisis where the dollar is really teetering on the edge and people are like,

01:23:36.500 yeah, I don't like this dollar business.

01:23:38.700 And then China suddenly announces, yeah, we've got 20,000 tons of gold.

01:23:42.760 And from now on, the yuan is going to be backed 15% by gold.

01:23:47.480 That could be enough to tip the dollar over the edge and for China to basically take over as world hegemon at that point.

01:23:54.960 Yeah, maybe, yeah.

01:23:56.400 In other words, it's politically a sticky wicket for the United States if they've got significantly less or more than what they say to them.

01:24:03.740 Either they're much weaker than they were or they're much more corrupt than they said they were.

01:24:09.460 It's still way worse if they've got none or hardly any.

01:24:12.760 That is still way worse.

01:24:14.160 It's not great to have tons more than they thought.

01:24:16.400 Yeah, because they've basically been stealing from everybody for years.

01:24:19.100 Whether they've got 8,000, 8,500 tons in Fort Knox or what.

01:24:22.760 If they've got exactly what they're supposed to have, that's probably the best outcome.

01:24:25.760 Whether it's worth 250 billion or more like 425 billion, it needs to be audited, basically, in order for the trust, any sort of trust.

01:24:35.040 There's no good reason for them to not do it if they've got what they claim they've got.

01:24:38.460 Yeah, right, exactly.

01:24:39.680 So that's why it's odd it hasn't been done for 50 years plus.

01:24:42.280 The other question, just to ask, is does it matter?

01:24:47.360 Because I retweeted Elon about when he said, and it's gone, about the footlock.

01:24:52.100 And some people said, it's a reasonable thing to say.

01:24:54.760 I'm not saying, I think they're wrong, but it's not unreasonable to say it doesn't even matter because they haven't been on the gold standard since 1971.

01:25:02.460 And the dollar or American power is backed up by aircraft carriers and the U.S. Air Force.

01:25:08.220 So it doesn't matter.

01:25:09.600 But I think it still certainly still does matter, though.

01:25:12.520 I'm of the view that it massively matters.

01:25:14.320 When it all goes to shit, gold is what will count.

01:25:20.100 And it's just, OK, they're not on the gold standard.

01:25:23.180 OK, every paper dollar isn't backed up by gold.

01:25:25.780 Fine.

01:25:26.000 But that doesn't mean that the U.S. economy, the house of cards is the U.S. economy, wouldn't still collapse.

01:25:34.380 That all confidence and trust in that system wouldn't collapse if Fort Knox was found to be.

01:25:40.740 Imagine if there was some huge cyber attack or a big Carrington event or something like that.

01:25:46.540 And, you know, the modern computer system went out for a couple of years.

01:25:51.380 The whole dollar system would collapse because the dollar is basically just a ledger of this bank owes that bank and that bank owes that bank.

01:25:58.340 And it's basically just a big ledger of who owes who.

01:26:00.620 So the lights go out for a couple of years.

01:26:03.060 The dollar just gets reset.

01:26:05.400 The gold is proper.

01:26:07.960 It's sanity.

01:26:08.820 It's at the end of the day, gold still counts.

01:26:12.580 Yeah, no, sure.

01:26:13.260 Absolutely.

01:26:13.720 So 100% it still matters.

01:26:15.120 And, you know, being an investor, whereas I worked in asset management and commodities trading, just the power of confidence that this house of cards is.

01:26:26.040 There's something real at the base level.

01:26:29.660 Well, all value, the value of everything and anything is to do with confidence.

01:26:34.500 Yeah.

01:26:35.240 And so if.

01:26:36.360 And if it turns out you've been blagging it for 60 years.

01:26:38.560 Confidence would fall out of many different types of market, not just the forex and commodities trading, but all sorts of things.

01:26:46.880 Well, it'd be a knock-on effect.

01:26:48.300 Yes.

01:26:48.780 Into the whole world's economy.

01:26:51.460 Oh, it hugely matters.

01:26:52.500 Yeah.

01:26:52.660 Yeah.

01:26:53.200 Yeah.

01:26:53.800 Okay.

01:26:54.280 So.

01:26:54.880 Yeah.

01:26:55.220 All right.

01:26:55.640 Yeah, we agreed on that.

01:26:56.500 Right.

01:26:57.580 All right.

01:26:58.120 A couple of comments then from the super chats.

01:27:02.940 Do you mind reading them, actually?

01:27:04.740 Yeah.

01:27:04.920 I've got glare in my boom.

01:27:05.980 The Puck has been coming up with some names for Bond films, which is slightly out of order,

01:27:10.200 but I'll go.

01:27:11.000 No worries.

01:27:12.160 Dr. Nomoranuts.

01:27:15.300 Oh, I'm probably pronouncing that one.

01:27:16.640 From China with COVID.

01:27:18.080 Gay Finger.

01:27:18.760 Oh, Gay Finger's a good one.

01:27:21.760 Sunderballs.

01:27:22.500 You Only Trans Once.

01:27:24.420 On His Majesty's Secret Cervix.

01:27:26.820 Oh.

01:27:27.500 Diamonds for Reparations.

01:27:29.120 Oh, I like that one.

01:27:30.260 Live and Let Diversity.

01:27:31.740 Man with a Golden Butt Plug.

01:27:33.800 Yes.

01:27:34.060 On Her Majesty's Secret Cervix is quite funny.

01:27:37.080 That's funny to me.

01:27:37.660 He's got more.

01:27:39.140 He's donated again.

01:27:40.380 The Guy Who Transed Me.

01:27:42.220 That should be The Spy Who Transed Me.

01:27:44.280 Man Raker.

01:27:46.040 For Your Bonus Hole Only.

01:27:50.060 Octogender.

01:27:50.680 Oh, I like that one.

01:27:52.020 A View to Gang Enrichment.

01:27:53.640 I like that one.

01:27:55.200 The Living Gay Lights.

01:27:57.100 Yeah, this second one's much better.

01:27:59.080 I love a good pun.

01:28:00.300 A really obvious pun.

01:28:01.400 I love them.

01:28:01.940 License to Mean.

01:28:02.860 Brown Eye.

01:28:05.240 Yes, very good.

01:28:06.780 Tomorrow Never DEI.

01:28:08.780 And The World Is Not Gay Enough.

01:28:10.800 Yes, well done, O-Puck.

01:28:11.740 Yeah, that's very good.

01:28:12.800 Yes.

01:28:13.640 I wonder if he came up with all those himself personally.

01:28:15.780 Some of those are very good.

01:28:17.820 Dan, any chance of doing a segment on Peacoin?

01:28:20.460 No, because I have no idea what it is.

01:28:22.400 And I...

01:28:23.460 It's...

01:28:24.020 No.

01:28:25.660 My mate's trying to get me into it.

01:28:26.720 Just say no.

01:28:27.480 Funny, we didn't really talk about Bitcoin when we were doing that segment on gold.

01:28:30.220 Could have talked a bit about Bitcoin there.

01:28:31.600 Yeah, we've run out of time now, haven't we?

01:28:34.280 If there's no gold in the fort, then the rest needs to be made, says Siglestone.

01:28:39.780 Habitification says a future gold collapse could happen due to space mining.

01:28:44.660 Well, yeah, possibly.

01:28:46.540 Hedgehog's Dilemma says Oliver Anthony is writing lyrics as we speak.

01:28:51.600 There ain't no gold in Ford Knox.

01:28:53.180 And Siglestone says,

01:28:54.780 Plot twist, America's been singing Barrett's privateers in reverse.

01:29:00.140 Bet some people will soon wish they were in Sherbrooke.

01:29:02.400 Don't know what that means.

01:29:03.900 Right.

01:29:04.140 Have we got any videos?

01:29:06.420 I went down to the river on the weekend.

01:29:09.740 It was a beautiful day to see Foraker, Hunter and McKinley.

01:29:19.020 Wow, that is beautiful.

01:29:26.520 See, we haven't really got anything like that in Britain.

01:29:28.660 It looks like the front cover of Eidander.

01:29:30.560 Yeah.

01:29:31.420 Like McKinley, where is that?

01:29:32.860 Oregon or Washington State?

01:29:35.220 I forget now.

01:29:35.800 Anyway, yeah, like the best we've got is like Snowden or Ben Nevis.

01:29:44.000 It's a bit more impressive than Ben Nevis, isn't it?

01:29:46.640 Yeah.

01:29:47.360 Yeah, it's wonderful.

01:29:48.160 I love mountains.

01:29:49.080 I love being among mountains.

01:29:50.640 I love it.

01:29:51.480 I haven't got any.

01:29:52.220 Proper epic stuff.

01:29:53.740 Have we got any more videos?

01:29:56.260 Oh, yeah.

01:29:56.680 Here's one from Sophie.

01:29:58.340 So, Stelian's Ford, I was trolling when I said that the Danish version of the toys was

01:30:03.680 called not D-Left, but just Left.

01:30:08.380 No, it's true.

01:30:09.940 It's called Venstre, which is the Danish word for Left.

01:30:15.000 But I guess that's sort of right from the Social Democrats.

01:30:20.580 Although, in spite of us being controlled by Social Democrats and Left, we have an immigration

01:30:26.060 law that's like a thousand times stronger than England.

01:30:29.200 So, you win some, you lose some.

01:30:33.080 Yeah.

01:30:34.240 Thank you, Sophie.

01:30:35.020 I feel sorry for Denmark.

01:30:36.220 They're so small.

01:30:37.700 Yeah.

01:30:38.440 Natively small population.

01:30:39.180 At least they're going to get some cash for Greenland soon.

01:30:41.300 Hmm.

01:30:42.300 Right.

01:30:48.660 Two minutes later.

01:30:54.020 Holy.

01:30:54.940 Huh?

01:30:57.720 Okay.

01:30:59.000 What was that thing that you put up against it?

01:31:01.040 It was like one of those lighters that's actually like a little blowtorch.

01:31:05.300 I think that's what it was, anyway.

01:31:07.520 Yeah.

01:31:08.100 It was like a blowtorch lighter, right?

01:31:10.220 I can't see the flame on it.

01:31:11.380 It doesn't come out.

01:31:11.720 No, I couldn't really see it, the flame.

01:31:13.200 Okay, fair enough.

01:31:13.880 I'm pretty sure that's what it was.

01:31:14.820 Don't blowtorch coke.

01:31:16.900 Yeah.

01:31:18.040 I think that's the point.

01:31:19.380 Don't put eggs in a microwave.

01:31:21.580 A whole egg with its shell on in the microwave.

01:31:23.740 Oh.

01:31:24.040 It'll blow up.

01:31:24.880 It'll blow up.

01:31:25.820 Any more video comments or?

01:31:28.140 No, we're slightly over time, but I think people need their money's worth, so let's read some

01:31:31.500 comments.

01:31:33.020 Hazer Bazaar says, didn't get Islander 1 or 2 as I'm not much of a reader, but Island 3

01:31:37.480 has just been ordered.

01:31:38.180 Yes, good man.

01:31:38.880 Well done.

01:31:39.420 That's what we need.

01:31:40.580 Hugo Bossman says, just bought Islander 3.

01:31:43.380 Thanks for the work you do, lads.

01:31:44.620 Yes, very important.

01:31:46.180 What would Bond do?

01:31:47.240 He would buy Islander.

01:31:48.140 Josh the Jew Hendon Reform Candidate says, just ordered my Islander 3.

01:31:54.040 It will look nice next to my Islander 1 and 2.

01:31:57.560 And then he's also said some other stuff, which has been edited out, and I don't know

01:32:01.000 what it is, so we're not allowed to read that.

01:32:04.440 Right.

01:32:04.740 On the next James Bond thing, Baron von Warhawk says, take your bets, boys, and who do you

01:32:09.980 think will be the new Bond villain?

01:32:11.600 Trump, Musk, Alex Jones, or Carl Benjamin?

01:32:15.080 Well, you could be the, that would, you fulfill your arc of being the henchman who goes after

01:32:22.960 Bond.

01:32:23.360 I could do evil genius.

01:32:24.640 I could.

01:32:25.240 Yeah.

01:32:25.660 I could do that.

01:32:26.200 If it's Carl, though, we will get parts.

01:32:28.900 Yeah.

01:32:29.700 I'd be the financier that you see in Act 1.

01:32:33.660 But that would mean he gets my missus.

01:32:35.660 Well, just for, just so that Lotus Eaters becomes more famous, it'd be great if there was

01:32:41.420 a character that was clearly a parody of Carl Benjamin.

01:32:43.900 That would be great.

01:32:44.380 Yeah, that would be good.

01:32:46.780 Russian says, I grew up on Bosnan, Bosnan, and he happens to be my favourite.

01:32:52.460 As I type, Dan is saying this exactly, yeah, this is the one that you see first.

01:32:56.300 Golden Eye is among the best, it's among the best, in my opinion.

01:32:59.020 Oh, yeah, it's really good.

01:33:00.240 Again, I like the very earliest ones, but short of that.

01:33:03.280 Yeah.

01:33:04.140 Yeah.

01:33:04.920 Yeah.

01:33:05.100 Alex Ogle says, DEI Imonds, he's trying to do diamonds, ah, forever, DEI another day,

01:33:13.600 or as one wag put it, no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to DEI.

01:33:17.300 Yes.

01:33:18.100 Yes.

01:33:19.140 Come, come, Mr. Tubb, you enjoy making content just as much as I do.

01:33:22.560 Yes.

01:33:23.380 Justin B says, the next Bond film will track him heroically taking down the far right and

01:33:27.340 then plotting to stop the boats.

01:33:28.820 Yes.

01:33:29.380 Yeah.

01:33:29.740 If the only decent thing that a British Bond in this era could do is basically turn rogue

01:33:36.280 against his own government.

01:33:38.380 That would be a cool storyline.

01:33:39.860 Yeah.

01:33:40.200 That would actually be a cool storyline.

01:33:41.560 But they would never do that.

01:33:42.480 No.

01:33:42.780 But there's nothing heroic.

01:33:44.020 You see, this is the problem.

01:33:45.160 This is the problem.

01:33:45.860 He goes to the Calais camps and starts kicking ass and taking names among the people smugglers.

01:33:49.920 Yes.

01:33:50.280 That'd be cool.

01:33:50.800 Just blowing up the Calais camps.

01:33:53.360 Son of UCAB says they should make Zardana the next James Bond.

01:33:57.900 I mean, they probably will.

01:33:59.520 Right.

01:33:59.860 Yeah.

01:34:00.420 Probably.

01:34:00.820 Don't make her a Bond girl.

01:34:01.680 Make her a Bond.

01:34:02.660 Yeah.

01:34:03.560 Yes.

01:34:04.240 Oh, yeah.

01:34:04.700 Kevin Fox says, it would be a boring film, just Bond sat in a grey windowless room scrolling

01:34:09.480 through other people's social media posts looking for herty words, then passing the details

01:34:14.360 on to the Met.

01:34:16.240 Yeah.

01:34:16.680 That is probably what they would actually do.

01:34:18.360 The modern equivalent of Bond is not even scrolling through it.

01:34:20.940 It's just starting a program which does that for you.

01:34:24.420 Yes.

01:34:24.880 Just clicking a search function.

01:34:26.680 Yeah.

01:34:26.860 That's what Bond does now.

01:34:29.640 Well, maybe that's why they need an Indian Bond, because he's actually leading a call

01:34:32.920 centre of thousands of them going through our social media posts, so it can be then

01:34:37.680 reported to your local police station.

01:34:38.920 Some computer nerd in Cheltenham clicking search.

01:34:42.080 Yes.

01:34:42.720 Search keywords.

01:34:43.660 That's Bond these days.

01:34:44.820 Sophie Liv says, I love that Bo made the perfect villain face, and second after when he

01:34:49.580 smiled, he actually looked like Santa Claus, super jolly and wholesome.

01:34:53.020 You've got range.

01:34:55.320 Very good.

01:34:55.720 Thank you.

01:34:56.420 That's very kind to say.

01:34:58.340 So if there ever is a call for a Bond villain and a Santa in the same room, like he's got

01:35:03.840 split personality or something.

01:35:05.380 Evil Santa.

01:35:06.320 Yeah.

01:35:06.460 And Omar Waters says, it's not difficult at all to cast a good James Bond.

01:35:11.280 The difficulty is portraying a chauvinist on the silver screen that isn't appealing directly

01:35:16.420 to women's sexual fantasies.

01:35:18.940 Well, women love the old Bond.

01:35:21.160 It's just the feminist harridans who control everything these days that don't.

01:35:25.560 The old Bond, the Sean Connery, Roger Moore Bond, he'd slap a woman about all the time.

01:35:29.960 Yes.

01:35:30.640 Wasn't he?

01:35:31.380 Quite often.

01:35:32.680 She's been a bit hysterical, so he just slaps her about or something.

01:35:35.920 Yes.

01:35:37.060 The lost art of women management.

01:35:39.700 And I like the, what was the Roger Moore one, where he sorts one of them out, and then

01:35:46.100 as soon as he's done, he pulls a gun on her and says, right, I want the information.

01:35:49.700 And she says, you're not going to shoot me after what we've just done.

01:35:52.280 And he says, well, I certainly wasn't going to shoot you before.

01:35:56.200 It's a classic bit of one of the Connery ones where he's dancing with a woman on a dance

01:36:00.800 floor, and you realise there's like an assassin right near, so he just spins her around,

01:36:03.880 so she gets shot in the back.

01:36:08.680 I'd forgotten that.

01:36:09.640 Yeah, yeah.

01:36:11.260 Classic Bond.

01:36:11.940 You wouldn't get, the screenwriter just wouldn't do that now, would they?

01:36:16.980 God, that's so bad.

01:36:20.400 Which one was that in?

01:36:21.860 Oh, it's one of the early Connery ones.

01:36:23.960 I can't remember if it's, it might be, is it Doctor No?

01:36:27.260 Oh, what a total shit.

01:36:29.120 Yeah.

01:36:29.560 Was she at least like a baddie woman?

01:36:31.480 Yeah, she was sort of a baddie.

01:36:33.020 She was pretending to be with him and on his side, but was actually a double agent, and

01:36:37.320 he knew that.

01:36:38.160 Okay.

01:36:38.420 But still, he just got her murdered.

01:36:42.760 Fair enough.

01:36:44.120 Do you want to read the Egypt ones, or shall I read them?

01:36:47.120 You can, if you would, if you don't worry.

01:36:48.640 Right.

01:36:49.200 Jacob Connolly says, I forgot how good a combination Dan and Bo are together.

01:36:54.240 Dream team.

01:36:54.980 Yes, exactly.

01:36:55.980 Yeah, very true, very true.

01:36:58.300 Canis says, Egypt kind of makes me sad to think that maybe the most ancient proper civilisation

01:37:03.780 we know of that lasted through the Bronze Age collapse and survived to the Middle Ages is

01:37:07.420 now modern Egypt, basically a non-entity.

01:37:10.300 Yeah.

01:37:11.100 Yeah.

01:37:12.140 They've got a big army, modern Egypt.

01:37:14.440 Relatively, but it's...

01:37:15.760 But they don't really do anything apart from just corruption.

01:37:18.800 And it's crap.

01:37:19.460 If you look at the Yom Kippur War, the six-day war, Israel stomped a mud hole in their ass

01:37:24.660 real quick, real easy.

01:37:26.540 Kevin Fox apparently made several trips to Lunuta Ha in Belize.

01:37:34.200 Apparently, there's pyramids there.

01:37:35.520 The steps are huge, and he's emphasised huge.

01:37:39.500 So, yes, there are other pyramids, and they're really big ones.

01:37:43.140 In Mexico, there's a place called Teotihuacan.

01:37:46.100 I'm probably butchering that pronunciation.

01:37:47.980 Okay.

01:37:48.480 Where there's some giant pyramids, Moon, Pyramid of the Sun.

01:37:51.600 Yes.

01:37:51.980 Love to go there as well.

01:37:53.200 Love to go there.

01:37:53.940 Alex Ptolemy makes the point that the direction of the Sphinx is very deliberately aligned

01:37:58.040 with astrological views 12,000 years ago.

01:38:00.860 So, that's the kind of point I was making.

01:38:02.160 That's a classic Graham Hancock thing.

01:38:03.720 Yeah.

01:38:04.440 If you, the procession of the stars, if you move it back like 10,000, 12,000 years,

01:38:07.980 whatever, it's Leo, and it's looking up at, it's a lion, and it's looking up at Leo.

01:38:11.800 The constellation of Leo.

01:38:13.100 But some people say that's, not me, but some people say that's just not got anything to

01:38:18.600 do with anything.

01:38:19.140 But I think that is very interesting.

01:38:21.000 So, apparently.

01:38:21.420 At the very least, you can say that's remarkable and interesting.

01:38:24.460 One thing I didn't know until recently is apparently there was a, you know, we mentioned

01:38:29.000 the Carrington event a couple of times in the last segment, but there was a massive

01:38:32.560 one of those about 12,000 years ago.

01:38:35.680 What, the flipping of the?

01:38:37.500 Basically, a big solar event that would have been really devastating.

01:38:40.480 Okay.

01:38:40.960 All right.

01:38:41.300 Okay.

01:38:41.560 About 12,000 years ago.

01:38:42.460 So, that would have, that could have restarted civilization if there was a civilization before.

01:38:46.600 Well, there's the Younger Dryas event where, again, Graham Hancock and others say that

01:38:51.220 more than one asteroid hit the Earth, sort of causing the equivalent of a nuclear winter

01:38:57.800 and a reset of civilization.

01:39:01.420 We've got a lads hour.

01:39:02.560 No, no, no.

01:39:04.200 Oh, oh.

01:39:04.880 Oh, okay.

01:39:05.480 No, good point.

01:39:06.140 Yeah.

01:39:06.500 Well said.

01:39:06.740 I'm going to do some more for the gold thing.

01:39:09.260 Norway also sold its gold.

01:39:11.360 The stupidity is draw-dropping yet.

01:39:13.000 Gordon Brown was, and whoever the Norwegian version of Gordon Brown.

01:39:17.280 It was a really stupid decision.

01:39:19.980 Kevin Fox says, no gold in Fort Knox.

01:39:22.260 Jeremy Irons and his crew stole it years ago.

01:39:25.940 I missed that.

01:39:27.020 That is, you've not seen Die Hard 3?

01:39:29.680 Die Hard with a Vengeance?

01:39:31.680 Yeah.

01:39:32.560 Well, they made more than one Die Hard.

01:39:34.760 Yeah.

01:39:35.800 Oh, I thought there was one.

01:39:37.460 You're joking, right?

01:39:38.380 No.

01:39:38.740 They're up to like five or six now.

01:39:40.600 Die Hards?

01:39:41.220 Yeah.

01:39:41.560 With Bruce Willis?

01:39:42.220 Yeah.

01:39:43.200 I thought there was one.

01:39:44.280 No, no.

01:39:45.000 All right.

01:39:45.420 Okay.

01:39:45.540 So, Die Hard 3, Jeremy Irons is the baddie.

01:39:48.340 Yeah.

01:39:49.620 He's a soldier, not a monster.

01:39:51.280 So now that-

01:39:51.860 And the plot of that is he's trying to steal all the gold from the Federal Reserve Building

01:39:55.400 in New York.

01:39:57.140 Right.

01:39:58.300 Now that I know that there's more than one Die Hard movie, should I actually watch any

01:40:02.400 of them?

01:40:02.640 Die Hard 1, 2, and 3 are good, and the rest are dog shit.

01:40:07.240 Die Hard 1's a great film, right?

01:40:09.060 Die Hard 2's not as good.

01:40:10.220 My favourite Christmas movie.

01:40:11.500 Yeah, it's a great film.

01:40:12.240 After Gremlins.

01:40:12.820 Die Hard 1 is great.

01:40:13.840 Yeah.

01:40:14.100 Die Hard 2 isn't as good, but it's still worth watching.

01:40:16.540 Die Hard 3, in my opinion, is also great.

01:40:18.920 Oh, okay.

01:40:19.180 Brilliant film.

01:40:20.100 Then Die Hard 4 and 5 are pathetically crap.

01:40:23.520 Yes.

01:40:24.040 So don't bother with those.

01:40:25.060 But watch-

01:40:25.460 No, chat.

01:40:26.280 I did not have a sheltered childhood.

01:40:28.060 I was just doing other things, more interesting things in my childhood than watching bloody

01:40:32.600 movies all the time.

01:40:33.740 Right.

01:40:36.340 Roman, has all of the US gold been sent to the moon?

01:40:40.680 No, I don't think so.

01:40:41.720 I'm not.

01:40:42.200 That's-

01:40:43.200 That would really confound me, wouldn't it?

01:40:46.740 That would be odd, wouldn't it?

01:40:47.540 Yeah.

01:40:48.220 I'd be totally-

01:40:49.260 Yeah, would you?

01:40:50.100 If actually the Apollo site is just where they move the gold to.

01:40:55.160 David Fisher, for reference to gold quantities, 20,000 tons of gold is an Olympic pool size.

01:41:03.600 Ergo, China has half an Olympic swimming pool of gold.

01:41:08.260 Okay.

01:41:10.000 Oh, right.

01:41:10.740 Okay.

01:41:11.040 So, yeah, 20,000.

01:41:12.140 So, basically, you need about 40,000, 50,000 tons of gold to fill an Olympic-sized swimming

01:41:16.100 pool.

01:41:16.900 Right.

01:41:17.440 Well, sounds about right, I suppose.

01:41:18.960 Yeah.

01:41:19.800 And then the last one, Canis Familiar says, at Porch Fest, which I don't know what it

01:41:25.340 is, they issue gold backs, which are bills with one thousands of a troy ounce of gold

01:41:30.780 embedded in them, approximately three pounds.

01:41:33.540 Not the very smallest amount you need, but definitely useful.

01:41:35.940 I think that sounds quite very good.

01:41:37.020 Better than nothing.

01:41:38.700 Yeah.

01:41:38.940 I don't, but I would like to own a few gold coins.

01:41:42.700 Actually, I'd like a fair few silver coins, actually.

01:41:45.440 Yeah.

01:41:45.820 Because of the worry about going back to a real barter system.

01:41:50.780 Yeah.

01:41:51.040 I'd rather a bunch of silver.

01:41:52.220 I tell you what splits the difference nicely, and we'll end on this.

01:41:55.060 If you want to get into gold, and you want to do it cheaply, and you want it for post-apocalypse

01:41:58.500 collapse, basically go to any porn shop in any part of the world and buy old wedding

01:42:03.740 rings.

01:42:04.320 Right.

01:42:04.560 Because they get them all the time.

01:42:05.760 You can buy them really cheap.

01:42:06.800 You can buy a small amount of gold, and everybody kind of knows what that is.

01:42:10.100 So after the collapse, if you're trying to buy a chicken, you can hand them an old wedding

01:42:14.240 ring, and they'll just accept that.

01:42:17.360 So yeah, buy old wedding.

01:42:18.920 Apart, then you've got a big bag of things that dead people were recently wearing.

01:42:24.040 So as long as that doesn't put you off.

01:42:25.400 I'd want a score of chickens per wedding ring, though.

01:42:28.440 Not one chicken.

01:42:29.560 But yeah.

01:42:30.100 Yeah.

01:42:30.780 That's not a bad idea.

01:42:31.760 It's not a bad idea at all.

01:42:32.560 And if you're buying silver coins, just go to a dealer in Hatton Gardens or online.

01:42:37.440 Godfrey Bloom says that the markup or the VAT or something or other is not worth buying

01:42:41.680 silver, because he made a good...

01:42:43.860 I can't remember what it was, but he made a good argument why...

01:42:45.560 So gold coins is definitely the best option, but I wanted something for the post-collapse,

01:42:52.960 so I wanted a bit of silver.

01:42:54.120 Also, if we have a vampire problem one day, you want a bit of silver, or possibly werewolves.

01:42:58.940 I forget which one now.

01:43:00.120 Clever thinking.

01:43:00.640 Werewolves?

01:43:01.280 Yeah.

01:43:01.440 Is it?

01:43:02.560 Yeah, yeah, werewolves.

01:43:03.940 Yeah, no, silver bullet for a werewolf.

01:43:05.460 I mean, if it works for vampires as well, it might work for other things.

01:43:09.460 Unleashed.

01:43:10.500 Right.

01:43:11.300 Okay, so...

01:43:12.360 I don't think we can stretch this out any longer.

01:43:16.060 I think we can.

01:43:16.580 Okay, yeah.

01:43:17.060 We're only 15 minutes over, so yeah, we'd better go now.

01:43:20.900 So, yes, Order, Islander, because that's what Bond would do.

01:43:26.320 The sensible, the sensible womanizing one, not the new gay one who had his balls removed, didn't we?

01:43:31.360 and join us Des Moines

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - February 25, 2025

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1108

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