The Joe Rogan Experience - June 09, 2012


Joe Rogan Experience #226 - John Anthony West


Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 56 minutes

Words per Minute

153.22552

Word Count

27,006

Sentence Count

1,833

Misogynist Sentences

7


Summary

John Anthony West is an Egyptologist, genius, and doesn t know too much about Ustream. He's a very limited genius. And he's also a mad scientist. And that's exactly what John has in common with the rest of us: he's an Egyptianologist. And in this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, we talk to John about his love of the ancient world and his obsession with the mysteries of the Sphinx. And we talk about how he became fascinated with the dating mysteries of The Dating Game, and how he came to be the man he is today. And how he's more than just a Mad Scientist, he's a man of many talents, and that's why he's one of my favorite people in the entire world. Use the code "ROGAN" at checkout to save 10% on the Fleshlight. The Fleshlight is the number one sex toy for men, and it's the best sex toy I've ever had. Save yourself 15% with code ROGAN and get 10% off your first purchase! You'll also get 20% off the next Fleshlight purchase when you enter the code: JOERogan at checkout. It's the most affordable sex toy in the world, and the only sex toy you can get without a credit card, and you'll get an ad-free version of the most popular sex toy on the market. You won't want to miss it! . Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast by the world's biggest podcaster and podcaster, and he's favorite podcaster. . . . and he does it all in one place. Just paypal.me/joeoganexperience and get 15% off of your first week of the entire month of the month, plus an additional $5 off your membership when you buy a copy of the book, and get an extra $5 or more when you sign up for the next month and receive an ad discount when you redeem your first month, you get $10% discount, plus a FREE shipping offer, and a free shipping offer when you use the code name "JOEJOGAN at checkout, and they also get the deal starts on the first month they receive $10,000 and receive $5,000 in the second month. Joespires is the best podcaster in the US, and gets an ad free version of The Joesophian Experience. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I really appreciate it.


Transcript

00:00:01.000 Alright, we are live, ladies and gentlemen, the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast.
00:00:05.000 Yes!
00:00:07.000 Whoops, that's me.
00:00:09.000 I'm the one in the...
00:00:10.000 He has to turn off his volume.
00:00:12.000 Oh, you have to turn off your volume, John.
00:00:14.000 On your computer.
00:00:15.000 On your computer?
00:00:16.000 On your computer.
00:00:18.000 Do you hear the delay, John?
00:00:20.000 Okay, I put down the volume.
00:00:23.000 Oh, there we go.
00:00:23.000 Okay.
00:00:24.000 The Joe Rogan Experience podcast is brought to you by The Fleshlight.
00:00:27.000 If you go to JoeRogan.net, click on the link for The Fleshlight and enter in the code name ROGAN. You will save yourself 15% off the number one sex toy for men.
00:00:35.000 Are you there?
00:00:36.000 Yeah.
00:00:36.000 Can you hear us, John?
00:00:37.000 Are you there?
00:00:38.000 John?
00:00:40.000 The speakers are on mute.
00:00:41.000 No.
00:00:43.000 Hey, John Anthony West is trying to figure out his phone.
00:00:46.000 Did we lose the Skype connection?
00:00:51.000 Did we lose a Skype connection with him?
00:00:53.000 No.
00:00:53.000 Yeah, but he doesn't hear us.
00:00:56.000 No, he doesn't hear us.
00:00:57.000 Hey, Nat, when I put the volume...
00:00:59.000 Hey, Nat, when I put the volume all the way down, I can't hear you.
00:01:03.000 Can you hear me?
00:01:05.000 When he turns the volume off on his computer, were you listening to us through your computer or through your phone?
00:01:10.000 You need to turn the volume off on the Ustream page.
00:01:14.000 If you're looking at Ustream, there should be a mute button on the actual video that you're watching.
00:01:21.000 Because what I'm guessing is that you are using a Skype phone, and so when you muted your computer, it probably mutes everything.
00:01:32.000 Oh, that makes sense.
00:01:33.000 There you go.
00:01:34.000 So, sir, if you see the lower right-hand corner of the video, where under the words Joe Rogan Experience, the lower right-hand corner is like a little volume icon.
00:01:41.000 If you just kill that, that should fix everything.
00:01:46.000 lower right hand corner of the window the video window there's a thing that literally circle thing and then there's like the other there's like uh...
00:01:59.000 there should be a volume button Yes, the far left.
00:02:05.000 And just turn off the volume.
00:02:08.000 There you go, beautiful.
00:02:12.000 John Anthony West, Egyptologist, genius, and doesn't know too much about Ustream.
00:02:19.000 A very limited genius.
00:02:21.000 We've got one more commercial, sir, and then we'll just get cracking.
00:02:24.000 Our podcast is also brought to you by...
00:02:27.000 I think we have a little delay.
00:02:29.000 Is there a bit of delay?
00:02:31.000 We're going to get this worked out.
00:02:32.000 Okay.
00:02:33.000 Our podcast is also brought to you by Onnit.com.
00:02:36.000 That's O-N-N-I-T. Makers of Alpha Brain, New Mood, Shroom Tech Sport, Shroom Tech Immune, and we do have kettlebells coming very soon.
00:02:45.000 Some people have already started ordering them because they've gotten to the website already.
00:02:48.000 But we're getting all the details worked out about shipping and things along that nature and the hemp powder.
00:02:54.000 Hemp protein powder is coming out soon as well.
00:02:57.000 So go check out all that.
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00:03:07.000 Alright.
00:03:07.000 Hit the music, Brian.
00:03:08.000 We're going to start this bitch.
00:03:13.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.
00:03:15.000 Train by day.
00:03:16.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night.
00:03:18.000 All day.
00:03:22.000 This, ladies and gentlemen, is a very, very special edition of the Joe Rogan Experience.
00:03:27.000 First of all, because it is the first one we've ever done through Skype, and two, because it is with one of my personal heroes that I'm honored to get to talk to, a man named John Anthony West.
00:03:40.000 John is an Egyptologist.
00:03:42.000 You know, somebody on Twitter had a very great comment about you, said that you're more of a proofreader for history.
00:03:48.000 You're more than an Egyptologist.
00:03:51.000 Well...
00:03:52.000 Okay.
00:03:53.000 I sometimes call, depending on my audience, I sometimes call myself a rogue Egyptologist.
00:03:58.000 A rogue Egyptologist.
00:03:59.000 And folks who aren't seeing online, if you're listening to this only on iTunes, John has an office that is exactly what I would hope and pray his office would look like.
00:04:10.000 Just filled with documents and information and books.
00:04:13.000 It's crazy, man.
00:04:14.000 Look at all that information behind you.
00:04:17.000 You look like a mad scientist.
00:04:18.000 You look like Alex Jones' car.
00:04:21.000 Yeah, you're a mad scientist, sir.
00:04:24.000 People have called me that, yes.
00:04:26.000 I first was turned on to your work by the NBC special on the Sphinx that was hosted by Charlton Heston, which was a very controversial thing that NBC aired, right?
00:04:41.000 And it was a special on the mysteries of the dating of the Sphinx.
00:04:45.000 I became absolutely fascinated by the compelling evidence that you and Dr. Shock presented to all these traditional Egyptologists that The rain erosion on the Sphinx enclosure had to have come from literally 7,000 or 8,000 years earlier than they were dating the Sphinx.
00:05:07.000 Yeah, probably more than that, Joe, and we'll get into that if we want to discuss it further.
00:05:12.000 But that was the most conservative date that Schock, as a bona fide A PhD geologist, he's sort of constrained to take the most conservative view, but he even had doubts about it when he was saying it,
00:05:28.000 but now he's loosening up by a lot and is basically on the same card as me, in other words, holding open the possibility that it may be as old as Actually, it's 36,000 BC or even older.
00:05:44.000 And the reason for that is not fantasizing or anything of the sort.
00:05:48.000 It's that the Egyptians themselves, in several, one in a tablet, a stela, called the Palermo stone, because, not because it has anything to do with Palermo, but because that's where it is.
00:06:02.000 And another papyrus, very fragmentary, called the Turin papyrus, where the Egyptians themselves, the ancient Egyptians, Talk about long periods prior to the beginning of what we call dynastic Egypt, what they just called Egypt, that begins around 3500 BC,
00:06:19.000 where Egypt is ruled for thousands and thousands and thousands of years by the Necheru, which means the gods themselves, which actually means, I take to mean, Enlightened or divinely enlightened human beings and then another long long period where Egypt is ruled by the Shem Suhor which means the companions or the followers of Horus and the regnal that the names of these kings are given and the regnal dates of these kings are given and though both the stone is damaged and the papyrus is
00:06:49.000 somewhat fragmentary if you compute the years you end up with something like 36,000 BC which in fact is not It's not a casually chosen date because the Sphinx itself,
00:07:05.000 as you know, it has an actually, as we go along, somewhere along the line, we'll have to talk about this, because I can send you all kinds of interesting pics, you know, illustrations, where maybe you can, on your end, intersperse them, them into the actual video on podcast I guess you call it so that viewers can see what we're talking about as we're talking about it anyway you do that great yeah no we can
00:07:33.000 we can definitely do that but for the audio only people this is a fascinating conversation either way with or without pictures How did you get on this path?
00:07:43.000 How did you...
00:07:47.000 The reason why the 36,000th date is not as outrageous as it might sound is, A, because the Egyptians themselves are talking about that sort of date, and also because the Sphinx, with its lion's body and human head, screams out as an astronomical astrological marker.
00:08:06.000 And it's meant to commemorate the age of Leo.
00:08:10.000 The last age of Leo is where the Sphinx and The relationship is that the Sphinx is sighted so that it looks due east.
00:08:19.000 And so the last time the Sphinx looked at its own image in the sky before the sun rose.
00:08:25.000 That's how they talk about the processional ages.
00:08:27.000 If we want to get into that, we can.
00:08:30.000 It's not complex astronomy, but it's astronomy.
00:08:33.000 Anyway, the last time the Sphinx looked at its own image in the sky at sunrise on the spring equinox would have been about 10,000, 10,500 BC. But there are good reasons why 10,500 BC is not satisfactory,
00:08:49.000 and the age before that, the age of Leo before that, is another 26,000 years earlier, because the cycle, the so-called procession of the Eponarch cycle, takes roughly 26,000 years.
00:09:05.000 So 36,000 years would have been another time when the Sphinx looked at its own image in the sky, At the spring equinox.
00:09:16.000 So there are reasons.
00:09:18.000 I mean, as I said, it's not just fantasizing.
00:09:21.000 It's backed up.
00:09:22.000 It's conjectural.
00:09:23.000 Of course, we can't prove it at the moment.
00:09:25.000 But there are good reasons why it could be as old as that.
00:09:29.000 But conventional wisdom is that human civilization in the form of cities and such, that didn't exist before 10,000 years ago, right?
00:09:39.000 Well, it was conventional wisdom.
00:09:42.000 Until very recently, it's one of the battles that we've had to fight.
00:09:46.000 But, you see, it's a long story.
00:09:50.000 Chuck and I are writing a book, and I'll tell you more about this as we go along, telling the story of this whole Sphinx thing, because we presented, and this is a geological argument, It's about the water weathering to the Sphinx, or the weathering to the Sphinx, with Chuck as a geologist and a specialist in these things.
00:10:09.000 It took a lot to get him on board, mind you.
00:10:11.000 This is a long, it's a big, long, funny story.
00:10:14.000 I won't get into necessarily right now here, though, since we have an open-ended show and I have plenty of vodka in the freezer.
00:10:23.000 We might go on for quite a while.
00:10:25.000 But anyway, the point is that it's a geological argument.
00:10:38.000 And when I got Chuck on board, it took him a while before he acknowledged that it had to be correct.
00:10:44.000 I mean, he was putting, see, for me, to be a heretic is easy.
00:10:47.000 I don't give a damn.
00:10:48.000 I mean, I don't like these people, and I don't respect either their intelligence or their integrity.
00:10:53.000 So, and I have nothing to lose.
00:10:55.000 Schock is a tenured associate professor of geology at Boston University, so he puts his neck on the line.
00:11:03.000 That means something.
00:11:04.000 Eventually, it took a bit of doing, but he did it.
00:11:07.000 And then we presented this evidence first at the You might call it the Super Bowl of Geology.
00:11:15.000 It's called the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.
00:11:20.000 This was in 1991. And we were the stars of the show.
00:11:24.000 I mean, they recognized the Geological Society, recognized that this was a dynamite presentation.
00:11:30.000 And so all the press was there, the science press of the world and so on.
00:11:34.000 And it was that...
00:11:36.000 That actually allowed us to get this thing past secretaries at NBC and put it out, you know, in primetime.
00:11:44.000 What do they call it?
00:11:45.000 Sweeps Week.
00:11:46.000 And it won me an Emmy and it was nominated for Best Documentary of that year, etc., etc., etc.
00:11:53.000 So it was that that brought it to the...
00:11:55.000 that forced the Crackademics to pay attention to it.
00:11:58.000 And the battle has been going on ever since.
00:12:02.000 And actually, funny story, because I can say it here, but normally I can't on a normal, respectable show.
00:12:11.000 If you'll appreciate it, I've watched a couple of your shows, so I know I can get away with it here.
00:12:17.000 And when we gave this presentation initially in 1991, The geologists were unanimously in favor of it.
00:12:27.000 They came to our presentation, and they walked past our display, and they said, yeah, you know, I mean, how could anybody have missed this?
00:12:34.000 Well, that's another bit of the story.
00:12:37.000 But the Egyptologists and the archaeologists were absolutely incensed by the whole thing, and they were calling us all kinds of names, and there was one woman who I I'll go nameless here, but she'll be coming up in the book somewhere soon.
00:12:53.000 Who is an Egyptologist at Boston University where Shock teaches.
00:12:58.000 And, oh yeah, and earlier, so we were being interviewed, Shock and myself, by the World Press, really.
00:13:05.000 And so this is 91, yeah.
00:13:09.000 And at one point we were being interviewed by the guy who was the science editor Of the Boston Globe, and Schach teaches in Boston, so he was a hometown boy.
00:13:20.000 And so Schach gave his interview, and Schach is, we're a good duo.
00:13:25.000 It's not exactly good cop, bad cop, but, you know, Schach is always civil, and always professional, and always polite, really, even when he shouldn't be.
00:13:37.000 And I don't have to worry about these things.
00:13:39.000 I can say whatever I can, please.
00:13:40.000 So, I forget his name, Dave.
00:13:44.000 It's Chandler.
00:13:45.000 David Chandler was science editor of the book.
00:13:48.000 We should explain, before we go any further, we should explain the argument for people that don't understand it.
00:13:52.000 The water erosion argument, this is what people are trying to ignore.
00:13:58.000 There's people that are still arguing that somehow or another that could have been created by sand and wind, and that this erosion...
00:14:09.000 According to most geologists, that's not the case.
00:14:12.000 Most geologists are stating that it had to be water, correctly?
00:14:15.000 That's correct, but now they've actually gone off the sand and wind thing, and now it's supposed to be what's called salt crystallization, in which water soaks through the limestone and creates What's it called?
00:14:31.000 Chemical reactions with the rock.
00:14:33.000 And that weathers off and creates the weathering that we see.
00:14:37.000 This is actually a nonsensical argument which we will be addressing very shortly.
00:14:42.000 I'll talk about that.
00:14:42.000 And there's an incredible amount of resistance to this idea, even though the geological science...
00:14:47.000 Are they in agreement on this?
00:14:51.000 Almost.
00:14:51.000 Most of them.
00:14:52.000 There are a few who aren't.
00:14:53.000 And I'll get into this, too, as we go along.
00:14:55.000 You see, the point...
00:14:56.000 What's at stake here, John?
00:14:57.000 It was not...
00:14:58.000 This is not just a scholarly quibble, because for the Sphinx to be water-weathered, and specifically by rainwater, means that it has to have been there when there was rain in Egypt.
00:15:09.000 You see, there's almost no rain there now, an inch or so a year.
00:15:12.000 The Sahara Desert formed around 10,000 BC. Before that, it was fertile savannah, sort of like modern-day Kenya, maybe even wetter than that.
00:15:22.000 So for the Sphinx to be weathered by rainwater, It means that it has to have been there before or during the time that lots and lots of rain was falling.
00:15:34.000 Now, what's at stake there?
00:15:35.000 You were saying before that civilization, according to the standard scenario, civilization begins around 3,000-3,500 BC, more or less simultaneously in Egypt, in Sumeria, in China, in India, but all of it is around that date.
00:15:53.000 But the Sphinx, you see, is really the most spectacular sculpture on Earth.
00:15:57.000 It's 240 feet long and 66 feet high, and it's a magnificent, absolutely breathtaking sculpture, even in ruins.
00:16:05.000 And the temples around it, which we'll get into somewhere along the line, but ideally I'll send you pictures of it.
00:16:14.000 The temples around them are powerful stone Limestone buildings faced with granite, but what's interesting about them is not the size of the temples themselves.
00:16:26.000 By Egyptian standards, they're not all that big.
00:16:29.000 But the stones that comprise them weigh somewhere between 50 and 150 tons each.
00:16:37.000 And they're set up in such a way they're slotted into places like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
00:16:42.000 We can't do that today.
00:16:44.000 If you saw the old Charlton Heston video, which evidently you've seen, we have this guy, Jesse Warren, who's the project manager of a Where they're building a cogeneration plant out in Long Island, and he's acknowledging, he's fascinated by this, because he says, yeah, our biggest cranes, our biggest land-based cranes could lift these rocks, but we wouldn't know how to rig them so that we could get them into place.
00:17:11.000 So what this means is that, not just that the Sphinx, this fabulous statue, is much, much older.
00:17:18.000 It is built before there's supposed to be any civilization at all, but It means that there's a technology in place that we, with our brilliant science that, you know, produce hydrogen bombs and bobblehead dolls and nerve gas and all of these wonderful new developments, we couldn't build the temples around the Sphinx.
00:17:36.000 So, that's why they're all so incensed.
00:17:38.000 Absolutely, the whole idea is that if this is finally acknowledged, it means that everything, but everything that these people have believed about ancient About the onset of human civilization is completely dead wrong.
00:17:57.000 So that's why they're as angry as they are.
00:18:00.000 An Air Force friend of mine said, good line, that the flak is always heaviest when you're right over the target.
00:18:08.000 You know, one of the things I learned from watching your documentary is I really thought that scientists and people that were studying the history of something as important as Egypt, that they would be...
00:18:18.000 Just leave that sound on, Brian.
00:18:20.000 I guess, John, you have a fan going on in the background.
00:18:23.000 Is that your computer fan?
00:18:24.000 Yeah, that's a computer fan.
00:18:26.000 I feel about that.
00:18:29.000 Anyway, you would think that these people would be scientific in their approach to evidence.
00:18:33.000 When you guys presented this evidence that there was massive amounts of water erosion, one of the things the guy said that really disturbed me is like, you're talking about a civilization from 10,500 years.
00:18:44.000 He was mocking.
00:18:45.000 he was saying, where's the evidence of this civilization?
00:18:47.000 What other evidence do you have of this civilization?
00:18:51.000 And the way he's saying it is so ridiculous and arrogant, and it was so soaked in ego, because the reality is we don't really know how much evidence there would be left from 10,500 B.C.
00:19:06.000 That is a long, long, long time ago, and it might very well be that the only things that remain are things like the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure.
00:19:15.000 Well, there's a good reason for that too.
00:19:18.000 Actually, Shank and I are about to set off on a new book between us called Dancing Down the Bridge of Sirah.
00:19:25.000 And then the subtitle is a scholar and a scientist fend off the unicorns and take on the paradigm, please.
00:19:33.000 Because the bridge of Sirah is a Sufi image.
00:19:36.000 You know what Sufism is, right?
00:19:37.000 It's the mystical aspect of Islam.
00:19:41.000 It's a metaphor in Sufi doctrine.
00:19:45.000 In order to get to the truth, in order to get to enlightenment, let's say the seeker must cross the bridge of Sara, which is described as Narrow as a razor's edge.
00:19:59.000 And on one side is the chasm of credulity.
00:20:03.000 And on the other side is the abyss of skepticism.
00:20:07.000 So, to do this stuff, you really have to have...
00:20:11.000 I mean, it's very difficult.
00:20:12.000 It's easy to say you have an open mind, but you'd be surprised how few people have an open mind.
00:20:16.000 We've had some experience with this ourselves.
00:20:19.000 And when you say, yeah, you expect that from science, they should be open to evidence.
00:20:24.000 But in fact, they're not.
00:20:27.000 So what is their issue?
00:20:29.000 They don't want to admit that they're wrong and that everything they've been teaching for decades was incorrect and it's proven so?
00:20:35.000 So they hold on to the old truth?
00:20:37.000 Well, exactly, but I mean, in a way, I have...
00:20:41.000 A little bit of sympathy for them even because they've put in all of these years and here's somebody who comes from absolutely out of left field, me, and Schott, who doesn't come out of left field, who's one of them, a PhD geologist and highly respected and with a number of geological, you know, solid scientific books published who say you guys have it all wrong.
00:21:03.000 Well, explain to folks what your background is and why you're such a rebel in this field.
00:21:10.000 Oh well, I'll tell you that.
00:21:12.000 I don't want to lose the thread about it.
00:21:15.000 Okay, I'm sorry.
00:21:16.000 No, it's okay.
00:21:17.000 But when I'm on my trips, people always ask.
00:21:22.000 We're going through the evidence and instead of taking...
00:21:24.000 Half an hour, the way we are now, we spend hours down by the Sphinx, studying every aspect of the geology and so on.
00:21:31.000 And they always say, well, how?
00:21:34.000 Basically, what you said, there's the evidence.
00:21:37.000 How can they deny it?
00:21:38.000 And I always recount an anecdote that, you know, it's funny, when I was a kid, I read this long before I was even interested in this stuff, but it was a teaching tale Supposedly a true one, that this was the 1940s Reader's Digest,
00:21:56.000 and there was an anecdote in there that when Yasha Heifetz, the great violinist, gave his debut at Carnegie Hall at the age of 11, I think this must have been 44 or 43, something like that when I was a kid.
00:22:13.000 At the concert was the then reigning violin virtuoso, a guy named Misha Elman, who you don't hear much of these days, but he was sort of the Pinker Zuckerman of today.
00:22:26.000 And with him was Artur Rubenstein, the great pianist.
00:22:30.000 And about halfway through the concert, Elman turned to Rubenstein and he said, hot in here, isn't it?
00:22:40.000 And Rubenstein said, not for pianists.
00:22:44.000 So, with our science, the geologists have no problem with it, or the microbiologists, or the astrophysicists, but for the Egyptologists and the archaeologists, it's hot!
00:22:56.000 So, what can be done?
00:22:59.000 I mean, you guys have presented this evidence, they've tried to ignore it, but more things pop up that show that we might be wrong about the history of humanity, like Gobekli Tepe.
00:23:09.000 Exactly, exactly.
00:23:10.000 We now have the smoking guns at our disposal.
00:23:13.000 We have an arsenal of smoking guns.
00:23:15.000 And you see, we have even more evidence than was in that video we presented.
00:23:20.000 There's a lot more evidence just from Egypt that we presented at another GSA conference in 2000. Again, with the almost unanimous Ascent of the attending geologists, but that one unfortunately didn't have much press there, so it didn't get a lot of press.
00:23:36.000 The geologists were impressed, but it didn't go anywhere.
00:23:41.000 But we now have, and we've had for a while, all of the evidence at our disposal, but Gobekli Tepe, which you mentioned, and I don't know how many of your audience will know about that, that's serious, that's the smoking gun, because here's this incredible site In Turkey, and Chuck and I have visited there and spent about a week there.
00:24:00.000 That was discovered in 1994, and I hope we'll get the pictures of this up there.
00:24:05.000 But it was discovered in 1994, absolutely by accident.
00:24:09.000 It looks like a big hill.
00:24:10.000 I mean, it is a big hill.
00:24:12.000 And you'd never know that there was anything there.
00:24:15.000 And in 1994, the farmer was plowing the top of the field.
00:24:19.000 It was his hill.
00:24:21.000 And he hit what he thought was a boulder.
00:24:24.000 And the plow hit the boulder and they ran the plow back over the boulder to try to dislodge it.
00:24:29.000 And it wouldn't dislodge.
00:24:31.000 And they tried a couple of times.
00:24:33.000 Nothing happened except they bent their plow.
00:24:35.000 And so they dug around it and they discovered that it wasn't a boulder after all.
00:24:39.000 It was the top of a stone column.
00:24:42.000 So they started digging some more.
00:24:44.000 And then finally they called in the archaeologists, which now they're sorry about because the archaeologists commandeered the site.
00:24:54.000 They're fighting the Turkish government to get some kind of financial redress from stealing their hill.
00:25:01.000 Anyway, once they got excavating, they discovered that this is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries probably of all time.
00:25:14.000 I mean, from a historical point of view, it's even more significant than, let's say, Tutankhamun's treasure because Once they dug up the first of these and they found and they did ground-penetrating radar and maybe seismographs, I'm not sure, but certainly radar.
00:25:31.000 And this huge hill has at least 22 closely packed stone circles like mini stone hinges, but not so many.
00:25:43.000 The central columns, there are central columns, two central columns in each of these stone circles and then ringed around with other stones.
00:25:52.000 I mean, everybody People listening to this or watching this will have an image of Stonehenge in their heads.
00:25:59.000 So it's like that, except not as massive.
00:26:04.000 But then further as they were digging, they realized that this entire hill, which had been at one point or another exposed to the elements, of course, had been deliberately filled in.
00:26:18.000 What reason?
00:26:19.000 Nobody knows.
00:26:20.000 I mean, this is a lot, this is acres of land, and the thing had been completely covered, and they were able to date the fill, because the fill has all kinds of organic material in it.
00:26:30.000 And so the fill they dated to 8000 BC. And that means that the Gobekli Tepe itself, this incredible site, nobody knows what it's there for, or who did it, or anything, is at least 10,000 BC. And those central columns that I was talking about, These are 10 to 15 tons.
00:26:49.000 They know that, I think they're limestone, but the stones come from a quarry about three quarters of a mile downhill, so they have to drag these up.
00:26:57.000 Now we're talking 10,000 B.C. There's not supposed to be any civilization, much less tools or anything of that sort.
00:27:04.000 So here are these, and there are 22 of these stone circles.
00:27:07.000 Only four have been partially excavated.
00:27:10.000 Wow.
00:27:10.000 And not only are these stones- Only four out of 22?
00:27:14.000 Pardon?
00:27:15.000 I said only four out of 22 have been excavated?
00:27:18.000 All this time, archaeology is unbelievably, if it's done meticulously, and nowadays it tends to be, not so long ago it was just grave robbery, but now it's really meticulous.
00:27:30.000 They're going at this stuff with teaspoons, so it takes them years and years and years to do it, and I guess there isn't a gigantic amount of funding available.
00:27:38.000 I don't know who's funding it.
00:27:39.000 It's a German team that's doing it with a really nice, really good guy named Klaus Schmidt, German archaeologist, who's in charge there.
00:27:48.000 He's not into the esoteric side of things as Schock and I are, but he's a solid guy, as archaeologists go.
00:27:55.000 He's pretty good and a nice man too.
00:28:01.000 Apart from the size of these stones and the finesse that goes into creating them, they're also elaborately decorated and they're high relief.
00:28:14.000 It's called high relief.
00:28:14.000 In other words, let's say you want to carve in a wild boar or a bird or, in one case, a lion or some sort of a feline.
00:28:26.000 You cut the back, you cut the stone away so that the image springs out of the stone.
00:28:32.000 This is ten times more work than carving something into the stone.
00:28:37.000 And this is all without any tools, as far as anyone knows, certainly any metal tools, done with flint somehow or another.
00:28:43.000 And you've got acres of these things, and they, the archaeologists, do not dispute the dating of 10,000 BC or earlier.
00:28:53.000 So that's our smoking gun.
00:28:54.000 I mean, we've been looking at this For a long time we've found all kinds of evidence and some of it, a lot of the evidence is really commanding but it's not spectacular looking.
00:29:06.000 Now it's spectacular looking.
00:29:08.000 What I found, sorry, what I found amazing about it was that they were trying to attribute these constructions to hunter and gatherers.
00:29:18.000 Well, maybe they are hunter and gatherers.
00:29:21.000 I mean, you have to be a fool if there's plenty of animals and stuff around.
00:29:25.000 There are plenty of things around to eat.
00:29:27.000 Why should you go to the back-breaking job of farming?
00:29:30.000 The food is plentiful.
00:29:32.000 Actually, in my first non-fiction book, I don't know if you know this, I started out as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and, you know, I had a lot of things done.
00:29:41.000 It never made me money, which is probably a good thing for Egyptology.
00:29:48.000 I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but the first book was called The Case for Astrology, which is out of print now, which put together all of the scientific evidence that says there's actually something behind it.
00:29:59.000 It's not just what's a good day to buy a poodle.
00:30:04.000 In that book, as I said, my first nonfiction book, but I quote a wonderful ethnologist, Conrad Lawrence, who was brought up in South Africa.
00:30:17.000 He wrote a wonderful book, it's probably still around, Bushmen of the Kalahari, about his own experience.
00:30:23.000 And he relates how the Bushmen of South Africa, the missionaries are trying to teach them how to farm, And the Bushman looks at him and he says, why should we farm when there were so many mongo-mongo nuts in the world?
00:30:37.000 Whatever that is.
00:30:38.000 Why would anybody in their right mind bother to plow the land and cut everything down when you can go outside your door and fish and hunt all that?
00:30:48.000 So just because they were hunter-gatherers doesn't mean they hadn't figured out amazing constructions, the ability to make these huge cities and these just...
00:30:56.000 You bet.
00:30:57.000 And in this last...
00:31:00.000 In the couple of decades, I mean, I've been on this quest for what?
00:31:03.000 I discover all the Shvala de Lubitsch in the late 60s, so that's...
00:31:07.000 I've been at this for 50 years, yes.
00:31:10.000 Something like that, close to it.
00:31:13.000 But in the last 10 or 12, a whole lot of really interesting work has come to the fore, proving that not only in these...
00:31:24.000 So-called primitive societies that maybe were not intellectually sophisticated, they nevertheless had a precise cosmological science.
00:31:37.000 And actually some of my pals involved in this, you may know some of them, but you may not know some of them.
00:31:41.000 They might be interesting guests for you in upcoming shows if people really get tuned into this sort of thing.
00:31:49.000 So it's becoming quite clear that That the knowledge was all there.
00:31:55.000 I mean, the knowledge was there.
00:31:56.000 The groundbreaking book was, you may know about it, it's called Hamlet's Mill.
00:32:01.000 I've heard you discuss it.
00:32:03.000 Do you know that?
00:32:04.000 Have you discussed that one?
00:32:04.000 Yeah, I've heard you discuss it.
00:32:06.000 You're right.
00:32:07.000 I mean, these are two impeccable historians of science at MIT, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Decken, and the book is, I think, published.
00:32:18.000 In 1968. But again, this is the thing you have to go through when you're dealing with these heretical things.
00:32:25.000 I mean, these were guys with all of the right credentials, not like me.
00:32:28.000 I mean, I come from out of left field.
00:32:30.000 And they managed to stonewall them and try to ignore their evidence that underlying The world's mythology, all of these strange stories of incestuous gods and all of this kind of thing, was astronomy.
00:32:47.000 And astronomy presupposes that Santayana and Van Decken didn't go into that.
00:32:54.000 Much, because they were in enough hot water as it was, but there is absolutely no point to a sophisticated astronomy unless there's an astrology behind it, at least in the old days.
00:33:05.000 Nowadays they're busy looking for quasars and black holes and all of that sort of thing, which have no meaning, at least, let's say, at least in the emotional and philosophical sense.
00:33:16.000 But in the old days, whole civilizations, Egypt included, were Attuned to the motions of the stars.
00:33:25.000 In other words, there's a lot of literature on this.
00:33:28.000 Why do you think that this culture that we live in right now is so reluctant to accept anything like astrology?
00:33:37.000 Why do you think they would like to dismiss it so quickly?
00:33:40.000 Well, because this is a materialistic, this is a materialist culture That denies anything that has any meaning.
00:33:49.000 I mean, materialism, which is the reigning philosophy, this is what everybody learns in school.
00:33:56.000 You certainly get nothing esoteric out of school, nothing mystical.
00:34:01.000 And unfortunately, the skeptics are basically rationalism, materialism, atheism basically, is It's basically the religion of the emotionally defective and spiritually dyslexic.
00:34:23.000 And in contemporary materialistic science, Value does not exist.
00:34:30.000 In other words, value is, by definition, subjected.
00:34:35.000 So, these people are determined, because they can't find any meaning in their own lives, in their own existence, to foist that emptiness, that nihilism, upon everyone else, but they call it rationalism or reason.
00:34:50.000 It's nothing of the sort.
00:34:51.000 It is nothing but.
00:34:53.000 Nothing but.
00:34:54.000 It just seems to reason that our bodies are affected by the moons and the tides and women's periods are and, you know, people behave differently during different moon cycles.
00:35:05.000 The oceans, they're affected by the tides.
00:35:08.000 I mean, that's affected by the...
00:35:09.000 The fact that the moon can affect the oceans and we're mostly water.
00:35:13.000 Wouldn't we just assume that planets are having some sort of an effect on people?
00:35:17.000 Sure.
00:35:18.000 That's right.
00:35:19.000 Where did it all come from?
00:35:20.000 Where did astrology originate from?
00:35:22.000 What is the bottom, what is at the end of it?
00:35:25.000 Who invented it?
00:35:26.000 We don't know, but what we can say is that if going back into the Paleolithic, now we're talking, we think actually those figures, Chuck and I think, that the figures in the Paleolithic, in the In Gobekli Tepe are probably cosmological and astronomical.
00:35:48.000 Well, you can't prove it yet.
00:35:49.000 However, De Santillane and Van Deccan do a very good job of showing that astronomy underpins the most ancient mythologies that we have.
00:36:03.000 And since these guys, since the ancients are not just interested in quasars and pulsars and all of these sorts of things, it presupposes in astrology And in fact, in Egypt, and Egypt is the one society that I know the most about,
00:36:19.000 but the same, I'm sure, applies to ancient China and India and Mayans and so on, that the entire society is orchestrated in such a way that it is attuned to these cosmic cycles.
00:36:35.000 And we still have, you know, there's a reason why Christmas is the day that it is, and there's a reason why Easter is the day that it is.
00:36:43.000 It's supposed to commemorate historically certain elements in the life of Jesus Christ, but actually it's much older than that, and the ancient societies knew what they were doing.
00:37:01.000 I mean, when you get deep into Egypt, you see that life itself was a kind of a magical...
00:37:09.000 It's like a magical...
00:37:12.000 Recreation of the genesis of the universe in which by Celebrating it in certain ways, in certain kinds of ceremonies and so on, human beings are reliving the cosmic process and thereby accessing the divinity that is responsible for us being here, which is not creationism.
00:37:34.000 You see, any time we try to say to a rationalist scientist that, hey, there really is a meaningful life, that, oh, you're a creationist.
00:37:41.000 Do you think the world was created in seven days?
00:37:43.000 No, it doesn't mean that You know, God with a big white beard was up there in the sky saying, well today I think I'll create mosquitoes.
00:37:50.000 It has nothing to do with that.
00:37:52.000 It's a much more profound philosophy, but it is not Amenable to study by a materialist science, but who said materialist science is the be-all and end-all and the answer to everything?
00:38:10.000 Only the materialists say that, but they've got everybody, including the people who put the educational system together, conned into believing that their science is the only science.
00:38:21.000 The ancients knew much better and they did much better.
00:38:25.000 I mean, all you have to do is go to Egypt to experience these unbelievable temples and this fabulous art to understand that something is going on that isn't going on now.
00:38:36.000 This is a big subject.
00:38:39.000 We won't even get into it in an open-ended talk like this.
00:38:44.000 But this is what Chuck and I will be talking about in the book that we're planning.
00:38:50.000 Dancing down the Bridge of Seurat.
00:38:53.000 And in the video, the big follow-up to the Mystery of the Sphinx, that we're hoping to put together the funding for, which we hope to do as a theatrical release, not just on television and so on, but, you know, to get it out in the theaters first and then onto the videos and theaters and TV and all that sort of stuff.
00:39:14.000 You have to have like an animated dog or something to go with you to Egypt.
00:39:19.000 If you want to get it in the theaters, to get people to really get interested in the history of the Sphinx and all that stuff, that's going to be difficult to get in the theater.
00:39:26.000 No, it shouldn't be.
00:39:27.000 The silly people we have in this world.
00:39:31.000 I mean, we had our show, The Mystery of the Sphinx, was a huge success.
00:39:37.000 Unfortunately, my ex-partner, now deceased, Stole a whole lot of $250,000 from the till, so he never made any money out of it.
00:39:44.000 Oh, that dirty bastard.
00:39:46.000 But he was an interesting guy, and without him, without him, it never would have happened, because he had the energy, and I mean, me, I can think, but I don't...
00:39:56.000 I'm not a manifester, and he got the whole thing going, so I don't begrudge him.
00:40:00.000 Maybe if you had a penguin, a penguin that travels to Egypt, and you get Morgan Freeman to narrate it.
00:40:07.000 No, Joe, we don't need it, actually.
00:40:09.000 That video was on Sweets Week.
00:40:12.000 It had a huge audience over the course of its lifetime.
00:40:15.000 It still gets shown every once in a while.
00:40:17.000 It was amazing.
00:40:18.000 It was probably seen by...
00:40:20.000 I tried to figure it out one day.
00:40:21.000 It was probably seen by at least 250 million people over the number of years that it was being shown internationally and so on.
00:40:30.000 People are really interested in this stuff.
00:40:33.000 Oh, absolutely.
00:40:33.000 Because we don't get a chance to express it.
00:40:35.000 We don't need any penguins.
00:40:37.000 We just need, in this case, we just need the science because...
00:40:41.000 You see, the material is glamorous in its own right.
00:40:45.000 And now we have all of this...
00:40:46.000 Other stuff, it's not just Egypt.
00:40:48.000 We have Turkey.
00:40:49.000 There are these, I don't know if you've seen this, Shrok-Chak is very fascinated by Easter Island, which may be connected with these things.
00:40:57.000 You know the Moai of Easter Island, right?
00:40:59.000 Yes, yes.
00:41:00.000 Did you know that up until quite recently, it looks like they're just kind of these Big figures, their heads basically, heads and torsos, right?
00:41:10.000 I can't imagine why it took them 100 years to 200 years to figure it out.
00:41:15.000 They started excavating these things and they're finding that they're full-length statues.
00:41:21.000 So in other words, they have built up around them Maybe 25 feet, 30 feet of silt.
00:41:29.000 And now, the question is, and this should be relatively easy to determine, this is part of our big project, we're calling it Zeptepe and the Dawn of Civilization, the follow-up, The Mystery of the Sphinx, because it should be possible to carbon date the lower layers of the fill.
00:41:46.000 And our conviction is that these things may date back Again, thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
00:41:53.000 Have they done this?
00:41:54.000 I mean, I've seen the excavations.
00:41:56.000 No, well, they're excavating, but we don't know if they've done any carbon dating.
00:42:00.000 Oh, they have to, though, right?
00:42:02.000 Shock has a buddy, a Chilean, who is the ambassador somewhere or another.
00:42:07.000 Anyway, he's connected to Easter Island.
00:42:10.000 He should be able to find out for us.
00:42:12.000 And then not only, as you see, we've got all this new stuff now.
00:42:15.000 It's really exciting.
00:42:16.000 The...
00:42:18.000 Not only Gobekli Tepe, but have you heard about the bracelet that was found fairly recently in Turkey?
00:42:25.000 No.
00:42:26.000 Are you on...
00:42:27.000 I know Graham Hancock's been on your show.
00:42:29.000 Are you on that mailing list that he has?
00:42:33.000 I believe so?
00:42:34.000 Not sure.
00:42:36.000 I get some milk.
00:42:37.000 Every week he sends you...
00:42:38.000 He sends out...
00:42:40.000 I mean, that's his whole job.
00:42:41.000 That's what he does.
00:42:42.000 and he sends out this enormously comprehensive list of everything that's interesting happening in science that either directly or tangentially affects this whole lost civilization hypothesis.
00:42:56.000 Anyway...
00:42:58.000 Are you familiar with the object that they found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea?
00:43:03.000 Recently.
00:43:04.000 Yeah, very recently.
00:43:05.000 It looks like a Millennium Falcon.
00:43:08.000 It looks like, you know, if you took the Star Wars spaceship Millennium Falcon and put it in the bottom of the ocean, that's what it looks like.
00:43:16.000 They don't know what it is, but they're sending divers down, like, I believe it's this week.
00:43:20.000 Oh, yeah, I heard about that.
00:43:22.000 Yeah, and somebody's saying, well, it's not that.
00:43:24.000 We'll see when they figure it out, because You have to be seriously careful about that stuff.
00:43:30.000 You know about Shaq and myself diving?
00:43:34.000 Yes.
00:43:35.000 You know about that.
00:43:35.000 We are convinced, Graham thinks otherwise, but we are Shaq and myself convinced that this amazing looking place is in fact perfectly natural.
00:43:45.000 Wow, really?
00:43:46.000 Yeah, we can pretty well explain how it's done.
00:43:49.000 And we didn't want to think that.
00:43:51.000 That would have been our smoking gun.
00:43:53.000 But we're convinced that it's natural.
00:43:55.000 You saw those two giant pizza box looking pieces of rock that were stacked next to each other side by side?
00:44:04.000 Did that look natural to you?
00:44:06.000 It's hard to describe.
00:44:12.000 Just, you know, without having the pictures there.
00:44:15.000 But if we had more time and I had the pictures with me, we could show you why we're convinced that it is indeed completely natural.
00:44:22.000 You've seen all the images on Graham Hancock's site, I'm assuming.
00:44:26.000 Yeah, it's all there.
00:44:26.000 Did you do any diving yourself at Yanaguni?
00:44:29.000 Yeah, yeah, we were there for a week and Chuck's been there a couple of times.
00:44:33.000 As I said, it's in our own interest to see this as the evidence we're looking for, but we don't think it is, and we think Graham is making a big mistake and insisting that it is.
00:44:44.000 Well, Dr. Schock is the geologist.
00:44:46.000 What was his explanation for how it was created?
00:44:49.000 You see, if you go...
00:44:52.000 Because the people who are taking the pictures initially, they're not trying to fool anyone, they're just taking the cool, exciting-looking pictures.
00:44:59.000 But if you follow some of those ridges that look so perfectly vertical and so perfectly horizontal, you see them just kind of taper in to disappear into the living rock face.
00:45:09.000 And when you get really down there and you get your nose to the rock, you see that the The corners aren't finished.
00:45:16.000 You see that the rocks have been wrenched out of their place.
00:45:21.000 It's a place that's dangerous diving there.
00:45:22.000 And I'm not a diver.
00:45:25.000 Very, very strong currents.
00:45:28.000 And, I mean, I have a master diver glued to me.
00:45:35.000 But when you go down the shore, I mean, Shaka and I went there and this very nice Japanese billionaire financed the whole thing, who was really interested in it.
00:45:46.000 And we needed to do it to be wet blankets.
00:45:51.000 But on the last day that we were there, we went looking around the island and we were looking at other stuff and we went to a place about a couple of miles from the actual Yonaguni site and there, at the water's edge, and you see it's a certain kind of shale, it's a very hard shale formation.
00:46:10.000 That is laid down in very regular horizontals, but that is cross-cut by fault lines.
00:46:22.000 And it's like if you imagine a gigantic stone layer cake that's already cut into pieces, but the pieces haven't been served.
00:46:30.000 And so what happens Is that by the action of the wind and the waves because this other formation, the similar formation, was right at the water's edge and you could watch the waves pounding up against it and the current running and what would happen is that eventually the water,
00:46:47.000 the running water and the waves and tides and who knows, typhoons and all the rest, Sort of work into the fault lines, which are softer rock, and eventually they get it to the point that the action of the waves pulls away a big chunk of rock, which is all set down in layers, so that falls into the water.
00:47:11.000 And again, we're talking about thousands and thousands of years, gradually the whole piece of rock disappears because it's all laid down in these kind of layer cake levels.
00:47:24.000 And so when we saw this, because we had our own misgivings over the course of the week, it was the last thing in the world we wanted to...
00:47:33.000 Right, you would be happier if you believed that it was an ancient civilization.
00:47:37.000 Well, we had it all planned.
00:47:39.000 I was going to write it up for the National Geographic or Smithsonian or something like that, and Chuck was going to write it up for the geological journals and all of that sort of stuff.
00:47:51.000 And we had to say, well, no.
00:47:55.000 Did you see the stone circle?
00:47:58.000 It's like there's pillars arranged in a circle.
00:48:02.000 Did you see that?
00:48:03.000 Again, we're convinced that there's no context for anything there, and things that are man-made have a context.
00:48:14.000 And as I said, when we saw, we would still be uncertain about it if we did not go a couple of miles down and watch a similar sort of thing being formed right in front of our eyes.
00:48:27.000 I see.
00:48:27.000 And when we go back there, when we do this, our next, this next film, Zef Tevye, Yonaguni will be one of our One of our sites, assuming we can get the funding together, that we will be concentrating upon, because it's an object lesson, both in how careful you have to be when you're looking...
00:48:51.000 I mean, we have a stake in this, too.
00:48:54.000 And, as I said, we have to give up on this.
00:48:58.000 I had a moment, a slight pang, not much, because I don't really like the quackademics, but we had a slight pang of compassion for them when somebody comes along and destroys their paradigm, which is us.
00:49:12.000 So, anyway, that's Yonaguni.
00:49:18.000 But anyway, oh, back to Back to this incredible bracelet.
00:49:22.000 This was just a couple of months ago.
00:49:24.000 They found a bracelet somewhere in Turkey.
00:49:29.000 Turkey is turning out to be more and more interesting.
00:49:31.000 There are all kinds of great places in Turkey.
00:49:37.000 It's a round bracelet made of obsidian.
00:49:42.000 Obsidian is an incredibly hard stone and very difficult to work.
00:49:46.000 I'm not exactly sure how they dated it.
00:49:49.000 Where it was found, you know, the strata where it was found.
00:49:54.000 They dated it to around 8000 BC, but it's very elegant.
00:50:00.000 It didn't look like that much, it's just elegant and beautiful.
00:50:04.000 And the archaeologists realized when they studied it that the finish on it was something that nowadays you could only do with the most sophisticated Um, instruments, lasers or something of the sort, and moreover, that it had a very complex and subtle geometrical shape.
00:50:26.000 So in other words, you can't do a thing like that, or it's very hard to imagine doing something of that nature.
00:50:33.000 That's really rigorously geometrical without having the geometry at your fingertips.
00:50:38.000 So you'd have to have some sort of a computer, a machine.
00:50:42.000 You have to have something that you built to construct this, right?
00:50:47.000 Is that what you're saying?
00:50:48.000 We don't know.
00:50:48.000 This is the contention of Christopher Dunn.
00:50:52.000 Do you know Chris?
00:50:53.000 No.
00:50:57.000 High-tech guy.
00:50:58.000 I mean, he designs...
00:50:59.000 I forget what kind of an engineer he is, but he's the guy who designs the instruments, the really precise instruments that do things like make pieces for the space shuttle and stuff.
00:51:13.000 They're instruments that calibrate it to ten thousandths or hundred thousandths of an inch.
00:51:18.000 And he's done studies in Egypt and finds That's what you see all over the place, that there are monstrous pieces of granite.
00:51:28.000 He's been on a couple of trips with me, he's a good guy.
00:51:31.000 And he has his fine special instruments that are calibrated to a ten thousands of an inch.
00:51:38.000 And he places this on a piece of granite, Old Kingdom granite.
00:51:45.000 And the granite is 100% completely true.
00:51:49.000 And Chris is...
00:51:50.000 You know, is fairly adamant that in order to do this, they had to have had some sort of technology that would allow them to do that.
00:52:02.000 Chuck and I are not so sure because technology is technology.
00:52:08.000 Unless they have some miraculous form of technology that we can't even imagine, because you would have expected, particularly in a place like Egypt, where you have so much from the past, that somewhere along the line you'd have some evidence of this kind of technology, and you don't.
00:52:25.000 You mean, by saying technology, you mean something that cuts, like a machine, something that can cut the marble and polish it down to be 100% flat?
00:52:37.000 Yes, exactly.
00:52:39.000 What is the conventional, what do conventional Egyptologists, how do they say they built it?
00:52:44.000 They don't even, they don't address the question.
00:52:47.000 I mean, since there is no, since there is no, um, There is no evidence for that technology, they just assume that they did it by hand somehow or another, and maybe they did, but when you realize the level of perfection of these things and how impossible it would be today to do them by hand,
00:53:09.000 I mean, they just say, oh, well, in those days everybody had lots of time and time was not of any concern, so they could work on it until they got it right.
00:53:17.000 Well, that's a sort of a fudge, but on the other hand, you can't Legitimately postulate an advanced technology when you don't have any evidence for it.
00:53:28.000 Right.
00:53:28.000 There was another issue with the vases, correct?
00:53:31.000 The stone vases that were made that we can't duplicate today.
00:53:35.000 No!
00:53:36.000 Or maybe we could, but we'd have to go, we'd have to use a lot of very special machinery to do it.
00:53:42.000 And since there's no evidence that I had this kind of machinery, you know, these round vases that are...
00:53:49.000 You know, they're shaped like this and they have a narrow neck and they're hollow on the inside.
00:53:59.000 And they're perfect.
00:54:00.000 I mean, they can look into the inside and see that the inside is hollowed out perfectly.
00:54:06.000 And we don't know how they could possibly have had what kind of a drill or anything they could have had to do this.
00:54:12.000 And they're very hard stone vases.
00:54:14.000 And they date from a very early dynastic Egypt, not a later period.
00:54:21.000 They lost the ability.
00:54:23.000 This is one of the strange things.
00:54:24.000 Some of the most spectacular stuff comes from the earliest periods.
00:54:28.000 In fact, right now, there's a terrific show in the Metropolitan Museum of Art called, I think, The Dawn of Egyptian Art, and it's all the pre-dynastic work, 4,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 BC, and they're collected.
00:54:48.000 It's not, you know, it's not...
00:54:50.000 As they do a retrospective, they get bits from here and bits from there and so on.
00:54:54.000 So they put together this really fabulous show because normally you don't see much pre-dynastic art together in one place.
00:55:02.000 And when you look carefully and you see what's going on and you know what you're looking at, I mean, if it were somebody who's not spent 30 years studying Egypt, you know, they'd be really impressive bits and pieces.
00:55:17.000 They're mostly quite small, but If you have an eye for this and you've done a lot of study and asked a lot of questions, you see how spectacularly beautiful these things are.
00:55:27.000 Show's on till August, so anybody in the neighborhood, make sure you get to the Met.
00:55:32.000 Hasn't had an awful lot of press, but it's a terrific show.
00:55:36.000 So, you guys want to put a date of the civilization of Egypt to somewhere around 30,000 BC. That's your idea, right?
00:55:45.000 Yeah, probably.
00:55:46.000 It could even be earlier.
00:55:47.000 We don't know.
00:55:48.000 Actually, we're...
00:55:50.000 Let me backtrack a little bit.
00:55:53.000 My question is, how did one civilization like Egypt, how did that one thing rise up?
00:56:00.000 And it seems so much more advanced than any civilization anywhere around it.
00:56:06.000 How did that take place so long ago?
00:56:09.000 It might not have been that much different, you see.
00:56:12.000 The physical situation of Egypt is such, because it's bone dry.
00:56:18.000 Nowadays, I mean, since 4,500...
00:56:21.000 But your theory puts it in a time where it wasn't, though.
00:56:26.000 Your theory puts the creation of Egypt in a time where it was lush and rained all the time.
00:56:30.000 It was essentially a rainforest.
00:56:32.000 Well, that takes it way back further.
00:56:33.000 But then we've got Gobekli Tepe.
00:56:35.000 Now we're talking 10,000 B.C., and who's to say what they haven't discovered yet?
00:56:39.000 This was an accidental find.
00:56:41.000 So, and the other civilizations, you see, Egypt has this physically unique We're in a situation where things don't weather away.
00:56:53.000 I mean, once they get covered up with sand, they're just there.
00:56:56.000 And plus the fact that, you know, in the old days this was a kind of blessed civilization in which you hardly had to do any work to get fed.
00:57:04.000 The Nile would flood and you planted some seeds and they grew up.
00:57:08.000 When the flood season came again, we had a fairly populous There was a substantial population there with nothing to do.
00:57:18.000 No television, no American Idol, nothing to do all day long or all night long.
00:57:23.000 And so they, you know, the whole, the entire society was put to work building these fabulous temples and monuments and doing the artwork and so on.
00:57:37.000 So the other places, I mean, I'm pretty well convinced because the doctrine All of this work in the last decade or so, proving that the cosmology, in other words, the sophisticated understanding of life and significance of life and the geometry and the astronomy and so on, was all there universally.
00:58:00.000 India and China and the other places just didn't have the physical capacity To build on that scale, or maybe they just plain didn't do it anyway, they had other ways of manifesting this kind of, let's say, this kind of understanding.
00:58:19.000 And this is another thing that is just not even taken into consideration by the Crackademics.
00:58:24.000 You don't need sacred architecture, you know, magnificent sacred architecture to express Spirituality.
00:58:35.000 You could have a society, and there probably are some, that express their, let's say, their spiritual longings only in dance.
00:58:47.000 And at the end you would have no evidence even of the society.
00:58:51.000 Right, that's a very good point.
00:58:52.000 For example, there are sacred dances.
00:58:55.000 In the Gurdjieff work that I do, they have what are called the movements.
00:59:00.000 And boy, you get into these things, I mean, they're pretty amazing.
00:59:04.000 And yet, I mean, we do them today, but because he, you know, the sacred dance exists in lots of different societies.
00:59:12.000 But you don't need to build temples in order to express it.
00:59:16.000 The Egyptians did it that way.
00:59:18.000 And the Chinese and the Indians did it too, but not that early and there isn't that much left of it.
00:59:24.000 But how did this civilization just spring up like this, though?
00:59:27.000 It created such incredible works of art, the architectural designs of these buildings.
00:59:35.000 We don't know.
00:59:38.000 But when you see, that's one of the eye-openers of this very interesting dawn of civilization.
00:59:47.000 Exhibit at the Met because, I mean, you don't have temples and you don't have big buildings, but you have very many instances of very sophisticated sculpture done with very hard stones.
01:00:03.000 I mean, beautifully finished.
01:00:05.000 So they had it.
01:00:06.000 They could do it.
01:00:07.000 And as I said earlier, you've got Gobekli Tepe.
01:00:10.000 There's no argument about Gobekli Tepe.
01:00:12.000 If the Moai of Easter Island turn out to be ancient, well, Then they are.
01:00:19.000 I mean, if you can date, and it's sort of amazing that they haven't done it, or maybe they haven't, I don't know about it, but if you can show that the earliest levels of fill that have buried them up to their chests goes back to, let's say, go back to Itepi time, well, then you've got another instance of spectacular artwork At a time when there's not supposed to be such a thing.
01:00:47.000 I mean, the whole thing is in the process of being turned upside down, ideally by us.
01:00:53.000 It's an incredibly fascinating subject and one that drives me crazy.
01:00:59.000 The timeline is such a fascinating thing.
01:01:04.000 Where did civilization emerge from?
01:01:06.000 How did it get so incredibly sophisticated at one point in time, ancient Egypt, and then somehow or another all that stuff was lost?
01:01:15.000 You know, somehow or another through the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the Romans and the Greeks and everything throughout history up until today, so much information has been lost.
01:01:24.000 Is there a natural disaster in the middle of there somewhere?
01:01:28.000 Did something happen to the human race where it wiped out a significant number of us and then we had to re-figure things out?
01:01:34.000 Is that what happened?
01:01:35.000 Well, could be, or it stayed there in sort of a dormant state until it was time to reinvent it.
01:01:43.000 And actually it does go.
01:01:44.000 Further back than that, for example, you see when you're dealing with Crackademia, they're very resistant to interpreting their own data in any way that disagrees with their preconceptions, but you're familiar for sure with the Paleolithic caves, right?
01:02:05.000 Yes.
01:02:05.000 Of Southern France, of Lascaux.
01:02:07.000 Do you know the one The most recent one, discovered in the early 90s, called Chauvet, also in the same area.
01:02:16.000 Do you know that one?
01:02:17.000 No, I don't know that one.
01:02:18.000 C-H-A-U-V-E-T, I think.
01:02:22.000 And what's going on in that one?
01:02:24.000 And this was discovered, it's named after the guy who discovered it.
01:02:30.000 And this is, up until now, The most spectacular of the caves was the one at Lascaux with the famous Hall of Bulls and the other one at a place called Altamira, which again is a very high level of artwork.
01:02:47.000 Both of those caves are dated to around 17,000-18,000 BC on the basis of evidence in the caves.
01:02:57.000 Well, Chauvet has the most spectacular art of all.
01:03:00.000 I mean, it's as though it were drawn by a whole bunch of paleo Picassos.
01:03:06.000 I mean, it's spectacular stuff.
01:03:08.000 When you pull it up online, you'll see it.
01:03:12.000 Spell it again, please.
01:03:13.000 C-H-A-U-V-E-T Or V-E-Z, I think.
01:03:18.000 C-H-A-U-V-E-T. Oh, you were right the first time.
01:03:20.000 It's V-E-T, yes it is.
01:03:22.000 Wow, this is amazing stuff.
01:03:24.000 You got it up right.
01:03:25.000 Yeah, I'm looking at some of it.
01:03:27.000 Now this, now you see, this, they date to 31,000 B.C. Wow.
01:03:33.000 31,000 B.C. But they don't, see, they don't put two and two together.
01:03:38.000 They can't do higher mathematics in academia.
01:03:41.000 Because two and two tells you That artwork at this level, and I mean, where are they getting the paint from?
01:03:47.000 What are they doing with their fingers, presumably?
01:03:49.000 They can't go into the local art supply shop and get acrylic paints.
01:03:54.000 They're painting this on the inside of the cave.
01:03:57.000 It's got to be pitch black.
01:03:59.000 And when you look at The level of artwork, you realize that this is not done by primitives.
01:04:06.000 In order to do art at that level, you have to have your act together, even if you're wearing bear skins.
01:04:14.000 It really does look like the animals they're chasing, and it's all done from memory.
01:04:20.000 That's very impressive.
01:04:22.000 Well, Schalke and I think that Because he'd been a very good guy.
01:04:28.000 I haven't been in touch with him forever, for a long time.
01:04:32.000 He was at a conference that we did named Frank Edge, who interpreted the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux as an astronomical Basically, having astronomical significance of dots and daubs on the wall that represented the Pleiades and other constellations.
01:04:49.000 And I think he's probably correct.
01:04:51.000 And it wouldn't surprise me.
01:04:52.000 See, the usual explanation is, oh, well, it's magic because if they paint these animals on the wall, they'll be able to hunt them.
01:05:01.000 I'm not so sure.
01:05:03.000 I'm more inclined to think that it may be in some...
01:05:07.000 in some...
01:05:10.000 Way or another, a star map or have some sort of cosmological significance.
01:05:15.000 There's a book, for example, by a French member of the Academy, actually, called Jean Richet, called The Sacred Geography of Ancient Greece.
01:05:25.000 No, it's another one.
01:05:26.000 It's a different one.
01:05:26.000 That's one book.
01:05:27.000 There's another one by amateurs, in other words, not credentialed, whatever, not that that means anything, called...
01:05:37.000 Plato's Secret Iliad, in which they show that the Iliad, which is the most boring book ever written, is actually a gigantic, it's like a planetarium, and all of these, you know, so-and-so is being killed in the war, you know, the heroes are here, and the armies are doing all of this sort of stuff.
01:05:59.000 It's a terrible war to read, but if it's decoded as a star map, like a planetarium in action, From about 9000 BC on, the whole thing makes, all of a sudden, vivid sense.
01:06:14.000 This is why they're going to all of that trouble to do all of this work.
01:06:18.000 Decoded as a sky map how?
01:06:20.000 How do you decode it as a sky map?
01:06:22.000 You have to read the book.
01:06:24.000 It's complicated because the stars, let me see if I remember correctly, the armies They represent constellations.
01:06:32.000 The heroes are the particular bright stars in the particular constellation.
01:06:39.000 And the Iliad is all about this army is going here and that army is going here and this one is overpowering this one.
01:06:46.000 And if you decode it astronomically, it's tracking the constellations across the sky because the relationships of the stars and the constellations to each other change over time.
01:06:57.000 As everybody knows, why should they do that?
01:07:01.000 I don't know.
01:07:04.000 As I said, the astronomy, and this is now even getting...
01:07:09.000 Even the academics are realizing that astronomy plays this huge role in very ancient civilizations.
01:07:21.000 And the only reason, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't prove it, The only reason has to be that it is astrologically significant, because otherwise, who would care?
01:07:31.000 I mean, for example, Hamlet's Mill.
01:07:35.000 DeSantyane and Van Decken go to a lot of trouble to show that very ancient myths, as far back as you go, know about the procession of the equinoxes.
01:07:44.000 I was just about to ask you about that.
01:07:45.000 What?
01:07:46.000 I said I was just about to ask you about that.
01:07:48.000 That's amazing.
01:07:50.000 Explain that to people.
01:07:51.000 Okay, the possession of the equinoxes is because, supposedly because of the wobble of the Earth, but there are other explanations that I like better of the whole solar system that's turning around a binary star.
01:08:06.000 Anyway, it doesn't matter.
01:08:07.000 The fact is that, let's say if you look the way that this Now we're still in the age, let's say we're in the age of Pisces, which means that if you look at the spring equinox, if you watch,
01:08:23.000 wait for the sun to rise, it's rising an hour before the sun rises, you see the sun coming up and the constellation behind The sunrise is the very last degrees of Pisces, and pretty soon it will be Aquarius, so the age of Aquarius.
01:08:44.000 I don't know what was it, Air or whatever the musical was.
01:08:48.000 Now, very gradually, it's called the precession, the entire zodiac precesses against the The Sun, so in other words, it doesn't go, when you look at astrology, Aries is, you know, is whatever it is, April, March 22nd, and then it goes Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, and so on.
01:09:14.000 Precesses means it goes backwards, so it's in Pisces now, and it'll soon be in Aquarius.
01:09:19.000 Now, the rate at which that cycle takes canonically, it's actually not exactly that, 25,920 years.
01:09:29.000 So, what this means is that for the Sun, To precess one degree takes 72 years.
01:09:37.000 Now, how do they figure that out and why should it be important?
01:09:40.000 Can you imagine looking at the sky?
01:09:42.000 How many people have to be looking at the sky for some reason or another and realize that the Sun takes 72 years to go one degree?
01:09:53.000 There was a book that Graham Hancock had discussed once on an interview.
01:09:57.000 I wish I could remember the name of it, but it was discussing this number, 72, and that this knowledge of the procession of the equinoxes has been installed in many, many ancient cultures and religions.
01:10:09.000 So, exactly it has, and that gets you into number symbolism, and that gets you into sacred geometry.
01:10:15.000 So it lets us know that they knew a lot more than we thought they knew just about the universe itself, the constellations themselves, the wobble of the Earth's axis, a 26,000 year cycle.
01:10:26.000 They knew about this somehow or another 10, 15,000 years ago.
01:10:30.000 Right.
01:10:31.000 That's right.
01:10:31.000 That's incredible.
01:10:33.000 It is.
01:10:34.000 And you see, It's this kind of thing that is rigorously excluded from any kind of academic discussions until it's stuffed down their throats.
01:10:46.000 This is exactly what we plan to do.
01:10:48.000 The conventional Egyptologists date the construction of the pyramids to 2500 BC, right?
01:10:56.000 Is it correct?
01:10:57.000 Yes.
01:10:58.000 What's that based on?
01:11:01.000 Well, it's based on the It's based on the reigns of Khufu, Kheops, Khafra, Kefren, and so on.
01:11:12.000 And this is again, this is very complicated because we're, Chuck and myself and my colleagues, think that in all likelihood the pyramids that we see today are Do indeed date from that period.
01:11:30.000 However, and this is again formally easily provable, they are built, they are either superimposed or replaced structures that were there earlier.
01:11:43.000 And even the academics acknowledge that the Giza Plateau was a single template.
01:11:50.000 There's some very interesting work coming up soon proving that that's the case.
01:11:54.000 So, whenever the Sphinx was built, There were also structures there.
01:11:58.000 We don't know if there were pyramids or not, but in the pyramids, particularly the second pyramid, the Khafra pyramid that's associated with the Sphinx, you can see that there are two different styles, two radically different styles of masonry in it.
01:12:14.000 The lower courses are built of these gigantic blocks, the size of practically the size of this room.
01:12:20.000 Well, not quite, but anyway, massive, maybe 80, 100 ton blocks.
01:12:26.000 And then piled on top of them are the much, and very finely finished, are the much lesser, smaller, cruder masonry that's rather typical of the Old Kingdom.
01:12:40.000 Now whenever in architectural history no architectural historian would, an architectural historian knows instantly that when you see two different styles of architecture, In the same building, you know you're looking at two different periods of building.
01:12:58.000 I mean, just as a rough example, suppose you have a Victorian house, but you've got a modern kitchen in it.
01:13:04.000 A hundred years from now, or 500 years from now, if the archaeologists come and discover that house, they will know in two seconds that the house is built in the 1900s, or the 1800s rather, and the kitchen is built in 2005 or something of that sort.
01:13:19.000 So, this is a given.
01:13:21.000 So when you see two different, radically different styles of architecture, you know you're dealing with two different periods, two different periods of construction.
01:13:29.000 And then there are other factors in this.
01:13:31.000 There's a so-called Red Pyramid in Dashur, which is about 20 miles away, where the whole pyramid is built and the interior chambers are in perfect condition, built over a ruinous megalithic chamber that they call A plundered tomb chamber.
01:13:49.000 But it's not a plundered tomb chamber because the stones in it have been exposed to the weather for a long, long time.
01:13:55.000 It's an earlier megalithic construction.
01:13:58.000 We don't know what the dating is.
01:14:00.000 But all of this, you see, is evidence that we will be using in our Zeptepe if we manage to put the budget together and do it.
01:14:08.000 And there's a great history of people building on top of ancient structures.
01:14:13.000 The Parthenon and the Acropolis.
01:14:16.000 Which doesn't get explained.
01:14:19.000 Nobody explains where those gigantic stones came from and how they got into place.
01:14:25.000 Massive, monstrous stones.
01:14:27.000 The other thing that you guys had shown that I thought was really fascinating was that below ground, when you showed the really ancient constructions, a lot of them were uncovered.
01:14:38.000 A lot of them had to be dug out.
01:14:41.000 They were actually, the ones that were under the ground, under the sand, were the ones that showed the earlier construction methods.
01:14:48.000 Which is pretty obvious that, much like the Sphinx when they first discovered it, it had been taken over by sand.
01:14:53.000 You're talking about really, really ancient stuff.
01:14:56.000 Yeah.
01:14:57.000 Well, the Sphinx is a bit different because it's cut into a hollow.
01:15:01.000 In order to produce the Sphinx, they had to carve, quarry the stone around from it.
01:15:06.000 So why they did that in the first place, nobody really knows.
01:15:10.000 But once they did it, once Egypt turned to It turns to desert.
01:15:14.000 You leave it for 20-25 years without sweeping it out.
01:15:18.000 It goes buried right up to the neck again.
01:15:20.000 Who was responsible for cutting the face into the Sphinx?
01:15:25.000 Oh, we don't know.
01:15:26.000 We're convinced that it was re-carved because it's much too small for the body.
01:15:32.000 It's disproportionate to the body.
01:15:34.000 It's in better shape.
01:15:36.000 Well, it looks in better shape for two reasons.
01:15:39.000 One, it's a much harder outcrop of stone And B, it's been restored, the headdress and all of that.
01:15:45.000 If you look at old photos of the Sphinx, say, taken around 1900 or so, you see that it's really much more weathered than it's looked, but they've repaired the face and so on.
01:15:56.000 But, I mean, this has all kinds of repercussions.
01:15:59.000 For example, you know the story.
01:16:06.000 We were doing the video, Mark Lehner, who's the loyal opposition, as it were, in the 80s, because the Sphinx is supposed to look like the Pharaoh Khafra, he doesn't look the least bit like the Pharaoh Khafra, but Lehner did an early computer study,
01:16:22.000 back in the 80s when computers were still pretty primitive, in which he fed Khafra data into the computer And then superimposed the results upon the head of the Sphinx and said, voila, the Sphinx is Comfra.
01:16:38.000 Well, to us this was sort of silly, but it got a lot of press.
01:16:42.000 It was in the New York Times and I think the Smithsonian, all over the place.
01:16:46.000 So when we finally got funding together to do our mystery of the Sphinx, we really had to address that because it was well known.
01:16:56.000 And people say, well, you know, it's been proved that the Sphinx is the face of Comfra.
01:17:00.000 So, how do you disprove it?
01:17:02.000 Well, I wanted to actually use exactly the same method that Lehner used, but feed Elvis data into the computer and prove that the Sphinx was really meant to be Elvis.
01:17:21.000 We thought that was a cool idea.
01:17:24.000 What happened was that the Elvis Foundation wouldn't let us use the King's image in that context.
01:17:31.000 And I think Elvis would have been furious.
01:17:32.000 He would have loved to have been the Sphinx.
01:17:34.000 But what happened then was my criminal partner, Boris, who was an interesting guy, A race driver.
01:17:42.000 He drove for Ferrari for years and a year for Porsche.
01:17:45.000 It was an interesting character.
01:17:46.000 Anyway, he came up with the idea, well, let's get a forensic detective to go with us to Egypt to, you know, do a study of these faces and see if they really could be the same modeled upon the same human being.
01:18:00.000 And so, a couple phone calls and we got in touch with a guy named Frank Domingo, who is the senior forensic detective from the NYPD. And he came to Egypt with us.
01:18:11.000 And this is more a long story about how he got Frank to agree to go.
01:18:15.000 And he did his study and showed unquestionably that the two faces could not possibly have been the same.
01:18:23.000 And then the question came up because when you look That the profile of the Sphinx, even though it's pretty ruinous because it's been severely damaged, even though it was damaged, it's quite clear that not only is it a different face than that of Kavra, but it's probably a different race.
01:18:42.000 In other words, it really looks like A sub-Saharan African face, not even like an Egyptian face.
01:18:48.000 Which would mean it was done by the Nubians who took over Egypt.
01:18:51.000 Not even the Nubians, earlier, you know, further south.
01:18:55.000 Because the Nubians don't look like, don't look the same quite as the sub-Saharan Africans.
01:19:02.000 So, and in fact...
01:19:04.000 The Egyptian Egyptologists are as prejudiced as everyone else.
01:19:10.000 The last thing they want to know is that the Sphinx is an African African.
01:19:17.000 But earlier in the 19th century, lots of people just, you know, there was no Egyptology then.
01:19:26.000 Lots of travelers, Gustave Flaubert, And Florence Nightingale and all kinds of people who wrote very beautifully about Egypt, traveling in Egypt in the 19th century, said, well, you know, this is a negroid face.
01:19:42.000 And the Egyptologists simply ignored that.
01:19:45.000 Well, anyway, with Frank, so he did this careful forensic study.
01:19:50.000 I think it's on my website.
01:19:52.000 I'm not sure.
01:19:53.000 Actually, I should tell some people my websites, jawest.com or.net.
01:19:59.000 And anyway, it's in there somewhere.
01:20:02.000 And so we asked him about it.
01:20:06.000 What do you think?
01:20:07.000 Can this be an African face?
01:20:10.000 And Domingo was cautious, but he said, well, you can't prove that it is, but it is consistent with sub-Saharan physiognomy.
01:20:23.000 And so...
01:20:27.000 Actually, my friend Boris, my partner, was very funny when he said that.
01:20:32.000 He said, boy, this is bad news for the academics.
01:20:36.000 He said, first of all, it means that there is an Atlantis.
01:20:41.000 Well, there was an Atlantis.
01:20:43.000 And second of all, they were black.
01:20:46.000 I thought that was pretty funny.
01:20:48.000 But anyway, subsequently, I did an op-ed piece for the New York Times.
01:20:54.000 And I carefully left out this whole, because this was, you know, we wanted to go back there and do some more work, and I was in enough hot water with the academics to begin with.
01:21:02.000 So I didn't mention anything about this sub-Saharan African Sphinx, but a few weeks later the New York Times published a letter from a An orthodontist, a Massachusetts orthodontist.
01:21:15.000 An orthodontist is another expert in facial, you know, in faces.
01:21:21.000 And he came up with it.
01:21:22.000 Not us.
01:21:23.000 He came up with it and said, yeah, this is an African face.
01:21:26.000 So that was very interesting.
01:21:27.000 And now, when we write our book, when we write the shock and I get cracking on the Brids of Syrah, we will go into that and actually interview Track him down.
01:21:40.000 He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
01:21:42.000 The orthodontist who wrote that letter and see what he has to say about it.
01:21:47.000 But anyway, that was an interesting thing about the head of the Sphinx, that it's not original to the To the Sphinx, because it's much too small proportionately to the body and it seems to be a sub-Saharan African place.
01:22:05.000 We don't know when it was re-carved, but maybe the Sphinx is, as we think, over 30,000 years old and it has to be re-carved in some period of time in between.
01:22:18.000 Well, it may be that that's who was living in Egypt at the time.
01:22:23.000 That was the civilization of Egypt.
01:22:25.000 You see, when you get back far enough, there's not much left.
01:22:29.000 This is why, for example, the Paleolithic caves.
01:22:32.000 There were a bunch of caves, but nothing else.
01:22:35.000 We didn't know what anybody else was doing.
01:22:37.000 Along comes Gobekli Tepe and suddenly the whole...
01:22:40.000 everything changes because you've got this extraordinary structure that they date to 10,000 BC. So this comes up and it's very difficult to create A detailed picture of what was going on then.
01:22:55.000 Why are they doing work on the Sphinx?
01:22:58.000 Why are they like fixing the paws and fixing the ears and fixing the headdress and all the different things that they've done to the Sphinx?
01:23:06.000 That seems to me to be very confusing.
01:23:09.000 You have this amazing ancient structure and they're building on it to recreate the toes of the lion.
01:23:15.000 It just seems very odd to me.
01:23:17.000 Well, it is actually very odd.
01:23:20.000 I mean, it really is.
01:23:21.000 When you get up next to it, it's pretty crumbly.
01:23:25.000 But the jury's still out if the repairs are not actually doing more damage than would be done if they just left it to the elements.
01:23:34.000 We don't know.
01:23:35.000 But they are doing it, and very often they're doing it, and it's a pretty botched-up job.
01:23:39.000 It looks terrible.
01:23:41.000 Yeah, it does mostly look pretty terrible.
01:23:43.000 There's like little bricks on the toes.
01:23:47.000 Yeah, yeah, it's really quite horrible.
01:23:51.000 But you see, it's been repaired.
01:23:52.000 The repair campaigns, it's not just modern, the earliest repair campaigns, this is another piece to the big puzzle, the earliest repair campaigns are Old Kingdom.
01:24:03.000 In other words, the time that the Sphinx was supposedly built, it was already weathered.
01:24:12.000 Well, isn't that part of the hieroglyphs involved in, attributed to one particular pharaoh's name, that he fell asleep and he had a dream that if he uncovered the Sphinx, he would control Egypt?
01:24:22.000 Yeah, that's...
01:24:23.000 Thutmose III, the fourth?
01:24:25.000 Which is about 1400 B.C. And in that tablet, that stela, there was, it's subsequently flaked off, the first syllable of Kaphra's name, Kaph.
01:24:38.000 And from that, they...
01:24:42.000 They deduced, they extrapolated rather, and said, oh well, Kafra must have been the builder of the Sphinx.
01:24:48.000 But there's nothing that says that.
01:24:49.000 What we think is that Kafra was the repairer of the Sphinx, because even, I mean, Mark Lehner, the loyal opposition, notes that when the Sphinx was first repaired, it was already weathered to its present condition.
01:25:04.000 And he nevertheless says that, oh well, The Old Kingdom blocks that were repaired were cannibalized from somewhere else.
01:25:13.000 It's really a cockamamie explanation, but, you know, when you're playing in their arena and they don't like what the evidence is, they move the goalposts.
01:25:26.000 And if that doesn't work, well then they change the rules of the game.
01:25:29.000 Is it their contention?
01:25:31.000 Is the conventional contention that the Sphinx was carved with that face originally?
01:25:38.000 Yeah, even though it's way out of, even though it's way out, even though it's much too small proportionately, and the rest of the Sphinx is spectacularly accurate proportionately.
01:25:52.000 Well, not only that.
01:25:54.000 Masters of proportion, they stick with that because it's too inconvenient.
01:25:59.000 You know, you don't, until you've dealt with these guys, other fields of science and scholarship are not much different.
01:26:07.000 People are Particularly men.
01:26:10.000 Very stubborn.
01:26:11.000 You know, we're upsetting the apple cart, and they make a living selling apples.
01:26:16.000 Well, what doesn't make any sense to me is that they're completely discounting the actual hard evidence of erosion.
01:26:22.000 There's a very different level of erosion on the face than there is on the rest of the body.
01:26:27.000 But that's okay, because that's a much harder outcrop of limestone.
01:26:32.000 So that's been fully exposed whenever it was carved.
01:26:35.000 Fully exposed.
01:26:36.000 It's not really weathered that much, but more than it looks, because if you look at the old photographs, you see the back of the head has been fairly severely weathered, but nothing like the body.
01:26:46.000 Yeah, that seems crazy, right?
01:26:48.000 Actually, what you have to do, Joe, is you've got to come to Egypt with us.
01:26:51.000 I would love to.
01:26:52.000 I'm scared, though.
01:26:53.000 Isn't Egypt scary right now?
01:26:54.000 Isn't it dangerous?
01:26:56.000 No!
01:26:56.000 No?
01:26:57.000 Well, not really.
01:26:58.000 Only if you're, like, trying to run it?
01:27:00.000 No.
01:27:02.000 These are the prostitutes who...
01:27:05.000 It's not that they're lying, but only unrest is news.
01:27:11.000 So even under the worst of circumstances, when the revolution was going on, I was there for the entire revolution and I refused to leave with the group that I was with.
01:27:20.000 I lead Turks to Egypt, you know that.
01:27:23.000 Why did you refuse to leave?
01:27:25.000 What?
01:27:26.000 Why did you refuse to leave?
01:27:28.000 Because the government said we were supposed to leave and we said to hell with this.
01:27:32.000 They're not after us.
01:27:34.000 So let's see what happens.
01:27:36.000 So we waited a few days and the tanks were in the streets and all of that sort of stuff and you could smell the tear gas.
01:27:40.000 But nobody was after us.
01:27:42.000 So there were a few places we didn't get to.
01:27:44.000 But for the rest, we had the time of our lives because here we were the only gringos in Egypt.
01:27:52.000 And it was quite an experience when you used crowds like the Super Bowl to be there when the place was empty.
01:27:58.000 And we did miss a couple of places, but we had this fantastic time.
01:28:01.000 So in the middle of the revolution, you're taking tours through the Sphinx and the Temple of Man and all that?
01:28:09.000 Yeah, they're not after us.
01:28:11.000 They're happy to have us there.
01:28:14.000 Wow!
01:28:15.000 That's a dude who's dedicated to Egyptology.
01:28:18.000 When you see...
01:28:19.000 No, and again...
01:28:23.000 See, at the worst in the revolution, they were talking about this, there were a million people protesting in a couple of different cities But if there are a million people protesting, it means that there are 82 million who aren't.
01:28:35.000 So all you have to do is not be on Tahrir Square where the protests are going on, which nowadays, with cell phones, is very easy to avoid.
01:28:44.000 Oh my God, that's hilarious.
01:28:45.000 And they're not after us.
01:28:47.000 They like having us there.
01:28:49.000 We're a source of income to them.
01:28:51.000 So I'm still doing my trips, actually.
01:28:53.000 And, you know, it's not as easy to get them together because I have to go through this explanation all the time.
01:29:00.000 But this is the time to go.
01:29:01.000 Tourism is running at about 20%, so you can go there and have everything for yourself.
01:29:06.000 That revolution is good for business.
01:29:08.000 Well, no, it's terrible for business, but it's okay for us.
01:29:12.000 It's good for the experience.
01:29:13.000 Yeah, and actually, I... In fact, as I said, the next trip is in October.
01:29:21.000 And I have a...
01:29:22.000 I mean, with your interest, you owe it to yourself to get to Egypt.
01:29:26.000 I do.
01:29:27.000 I have a friend who's been...
01:29:29.000 The only ancient ruins I've ever seen were Mayan ruins in Chichen Itza.
01:29:32.000 That's about as far as I've seen.
01:29:34.000 They're pretty impressive, but Egypt is a different kettle of civilization because we know so much about it.
01:29:41.000 Yeah, well, you know so much.
01:29:43.000 If I did go, I would unquestionably go with you.
01:29:46.000 Magical Egypt, that DVD series that you have, is one of my all-time...
01:29:50.000 My wife would come into the room and look at me and go, fucking Egypt again?
01:29:55.000 Because I'd be sitting there watching this DVD series.
01:29:58.000 She's like, how many of these are?
01:29:59.000 There's like eight DVDs.
01:30:01.000 So how many DVDs is the Magical Egypt set?
01:30:04.000 Eight.
01:30:05.000 Eight.
01:30:05.000 It's amazing!
01:30:06.000 I've watched it 30 times.
01:30:08.000 I just go back and watch it over again, but, you know, it got to...
01:30:11.000 She got a little pissed off at me.
01:30:13.000 She was like, enough, stupid.
01:30:14.000 Because I was watching it in the bedroom.
01:30:16.000 You know, and then she would come in and have to see Sphinxes and shit.
01:30:20.000 Is she not interested in it?
01:30:22.000 Oh, no, she is a little bit, but not to the extent...
01:30:25.000 I'm a very obsessive person, and when I first watched the documentary that you did with Charlton Heston narrating, I became obsessed with the whole idea of...
01:30:36.000 And then I bought Graham Hancock's book, and then it was all downhill.
01:30:40.000 Oh, it's a huge...
01:30:41.000 I mean, and it's really going exponentially now, but actually...
01:30:45.000 I have on my list here, I wanted to mention it to you because you have a pretty big audience.
01:30:52.000 And I have a standing incentive offer that anybody who gets 10 people together to go on an Egypt trip gets a freebie.
01:31:03.000 Minus the airfare and the baksheesh, the tips.
01:31:07.000 What we might do, sir, is we might buy out the whole thing.
01:31:11.000 Buy out your whole tour.
01:31:12.000 And then, Brian, are you down?
01:31:14.000 Are you down to go to Egypt?
01:31:15.000 I'm talking to my co-host.
01:31:17.000 My co-host says, fuck yeah, he's down to go.
01:31:19.000 And we'll get all our friends together, except Joey, because Joey can't leave the country.
01:31:23.000 And we'll take a death squad tour to Egypt.
01:31:26.000 That might be the shit.
01:31:27.000 That would be amazing.
01:31:29.000 I'd be down with that.
01:31:30.000 Would it be safe to take children?
01:31:33.000 Yeah, normally, but how old are the kids?
01:31:36.000 Really young.
01:31:37.000 Two and four.
01:31:39.000 You know, they're portable at that age, but it can be done.
01:31:45.000 It can be done?
01:31:45.000 That's not what I want to hear.
01:31:46.000 I want to hear, yeah, it's like Disneyland.
01:31:49.000 Yeah, no, I mean, see, it depends on the kids, but they're not going to get anything out of it.
01:31:55.000 At 10, 12, 14, they do get something out of it.
01:31:58.000 But what you can do is, you know, the Egyptians love kids, so you're just...
01:32:03.000 Wherever your hotel is, you hire a nanny who plays with the kids while we go out and look.
01:32:09.000 That's not going to happen.
01:32:11.000 No, that'll never happen.
01:32:13.000 But let's talk about the Temple in Man, because that was one of the most fascinating things of that Magical Egypt series, was how the Egyptians, their construction wasn't just beautiful.
01:32:26.000 It wasn't just functional art.
01:32:28.000 There was...
01:32:30.000 There was a methodology to what they were making, where they were literally in that one temple.
01:32:36.000 They mirrored the human body.
01:32:39.000 Explain that, because it's really fascinating.
01:32:42.000 It's like a tribute to the human anatomy.
01:32:45.000 Well, not only is it a tribute to the human anatomy, but it's Schroeder de Lubitsch, the great genius with the unpronounceable name, I mean, names mean a lot.
01:32:58.000 For example, Einstein is a great name for a genius.
01:33:00.000 His name was Manny Plotnik.
01:33:02.000 No one ever would have heard of him.
01:33:04.000 Right.
01:33:04.000 But Shvaler and Shvaler de Lubitsch was a genius scholar.
01:33:09.000 I mean, he really was brilliant.
01:33:10.000 And he realized it's, again, more long story.
01:33:14.000 Have you read Serpent in the Sky?
01:33:16.000 Have you read my book?
01:33:17.000 No, I have not.
01:33:18.000 Ah, okay, well.
01:33:19.000 Serpent in the Sky, it's called?
01:33:21.000 Serpent in the Sky.
01:33:22.000 It's called Serpent in the Sky, the High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt.
01:33:25.000 I hope to send you a copy.
01:33:26.000 Anyway, he realized as he was doing the work on Egypt, on the Temple of Luxor, he had actually, he went to Egypt, he was a very interesting man, died in the early 60s and never met him, and he was a practicing alchemist.
01:33:45.000 There were not many of those floating around these days.
01:33:48.000 But he went to Egypt because according to the, and I only realized this quite recently, I thought the opposite until quite recently, but You see, the Egyptian tradition percolated down through the West in what are called the Hermetic tradition, which is astrology and magic and number symbolism and Neoplatonism and all bunch of these other disciplines, never coherent as in Egypt.
01:34:16.000 And Schwaller went to Egypt in 37 in order to see if, because the The Renaissance scholars, people like Giordano Bruno and Kepler and all of them, were convinced, I mean, they took it on trust, that Egypt was the fount of wisdom.
01:34:35.000 The Greeks agreed with that, but nowadays civilization is supposed to have started with the Greeks, but it didn't.
01:34:42.000 The Greeks got most of what was consequential or accurate in their own civilization from the Egyptians, and they're very open about it.
01:34:51.000 It's the modern-day quackademics that don't want to understand that because very interesting book called Black Athena the Afro-Asiatic Roots of Greek Civilization by a very fine Cornell scholar called Martin Bernal and basically he proves that what we call history is really a white supremacist Eurocentric invention you
01:35:22.000 know put together by the mainly by the 19th and early 20th century historians because they were determined to prove that real civilization began with the Greeks because the Greeks were you know swarthy little guys but white enough they weren't Egyptian or Semitic or black or anything like that or sub-Saharan African like the Sphinx certainly not so so really history as it's taught even to this day It's really a white supremacist comm job.
01:35:51.000 So it really is possible that sub-Saharan Africans might have built all that stuff?
01:35:56.000 Well, maybe.
01:35:57.000 Yeah, it could be.
01:35:59.000 They obviously built that face, or likely built that face.
01:36:02.000 Well, it's very likely.
01:36:04.000 Hey, can I take a break?
01:36:05.000 Sure.
01:36:07.000 Yeah, get yourself some vodka.
01:36:08.000 Okay.
01:36:09.000 I wish I had some over here.
01:36:11.000 Well, why don't you?
01:36:12.000 I'll fly you out, fella.
01:36:14.000 Okay.
01:36:14.000 Anytime you want to come to L.A. and do this in person, let me know.
01:36:19.000 Alright, we'll be right back with John Anthony West as John goes and gets some more vodka.
01:36:24.000 Fucking love it.
01:36:25.000 The computer fan.
01:36:27.000 I love all of it.
01:36:28.000 I love his computer fan going off.
01:36:31.000 Every time he gets an email, it's a beep.
01:36:33.000 Every time you get a fucking text message or a message from Skype, that shit comes out.
01:36:38.000 Can you turn that off?
01:36:40.000 Yeah, let's see if I can try to do that.
01:36:41.000 Messaging, whatever the hell that is.
01:36:42.000 But everybody who's listening to this, thank you very much for being patient and...
01:36:48.000 And if you're not familiar with this particular subject, it's one of my personal favorites and John's DVD series which is called Magical Egypt which you can still purchase online.
01:37:00.000 I think it's MagicalEgypt.com.
01:37:03.000 I believe you can also get it on Amazon and a bunch of different places, but it is just fantastic.
01:37:08.000 And it's really, really entertaining stuff.
01:37:11.000 And it has to do with so much of why Egypt is so, such a fascinating and mysterious culture.
01:37:19.000 It's really one of the most amazing DVD series you can get.
01:37:24.000 And it's, no one, It would take a guy like John, who's spent his whole life being obsessed with Egypt, to produce something like this.
01:37:31.000 It's a real work of passion and interest.
01:37:35.000 Like I told him, I've watched it like a hundred times.
01:37:38.000 It's incredible.
01:37:40.000 It's great stuff.
01:37:40.000 Is he still gone?
01:37:41.000 I'm back.
01:37:42.000 Oh, you're back.
01:37:43.000 There you go.
01:37:44.000 Okay.
01:37:46.000 No, I don't think you can get it on Amazon.
01:37:48.000 You can't?
01:37:49.000 I don't think you can, but you can get it direct through me or through that website.
01:37:53.000 So you can go to my website and get it as well.
01:37:57.000 I thought someone was selling it on Amazon.
01:37:59.000 Sometimes they do that, like they'll have...
01:38:01.000 Yeah, I don't think it's on Amazon.
01:38:03.000 And actually, it's really, it's not me.
01:38:06.000 It's my...
01:38:06.000 Let's say it's my work that sets it off, but it's really my genius partner, one named Chance Gardner, who's responsible for that.
01:38:15.000 I mean, he...
01:38:17.000 He was a guy making a lot of money in LA as a 3D animator, and he got fascinated with this whole subject, sort of like you.
01:38:24.000 John, just to let people know and let you know, because you might not know this, it is available on Amazon.com.
01:38:31.000 Not only is it available on Amazon.com, it's also available on Amazon Instant Video.
01:38:37.000 People can watch it instantly.
01:38:38.000 Is Amazon jacking you?
01:38:40.000 Are they paying you for this, John?
01:38:41.000 God, I don't know.
01:38:42.000 It's my partner who handles the business side of things.
01:38:49.000 But I know, really...
01:38:51.000 Well, you've been ripped off before, right?
01:38:52.000 You told us you got ripped off for the other one.
01:38:54.000 Yeah, I got ripped off.
01:38:55.000 But in this case, I think I'll have to check with Chance.
01:38:59.000 Check in on that guy.
01:39:00.000 I know that it's...
01:39:03.000 You know, the whole thing is...
01:39:05.000 It just brings in no money.
01:39:07.000 He sacrificed four or five years of his life putting this extraordinary thing together.
01:39:12.000 And then people pirate it all the time.
01:39:15.000 And there's nothing you can do about it.
01:39:17.000 I mean, it's really criminal.
01:39:18.000 Yeah, people, if you want to watch the Magical Egypt series, don't watch it on YouTube or watch it on any of those places where it is pirated.
01:39:27.000 Please go and support it.
01:39:29.000 Because like I was saying, John, when you went to get your vodka, it's one of my favorite all-time DVD series.
01:39:34.000 And it would take a guy like you to put something like that together.
01:39:36.000 It was such a work of passion.
01:39:38.000 Very few people are going to put together eight DVDs.
01:39:41.000 Well, that's Chance who did that, really.
01:39:43.000 See, I mean, he got it going.
01:39:45.000 And I supplied...
01:39:47.000 Obviously, I supplied the Egyptology.
01:39:49.000 And we conferred on how to do it.
01:39:51.000 But he single-handedly...
01:39:54.000 Produced it.
01:39:55.000 Shot it.
01:39:57.000 It's really brilliant.
01:39:58.000 As I said, it's done on a shoestring, so it doesn't look like a glossy NBC production.
01:40:04.000 It's beautiful.
01:40:05.000 I'm proud to have been a part of that.
01:40:08.000 We're partners, but credit where credit is due.
01:40:11.000 Left to my own devices.
01:40:13.000 I could write the script, but I couldn't do the production.
01:40:17.000 Yeah, it's really an amazing piece of work.
01:40:20.000 This is well worth getting hold of.
01:40:22.000 And actually, on the subject of putting stuff together, I've been talking on any number of occasions about us doing the next video, the Zeptapi, the Dawn of Civilization.
01:40:37.000 And actually, I should mention this because I have a non-profit A foundation that we set up about 10 years ago, but called the Ancient Wisdom Foundation.
01:40:53.000 But it's been quiescent most of this time.
01:40:56.000 You know, people would contribute now and again.
01:40:58.000 We'd use it for travel and research and that sort of thing.
01:41:00.000 But now I've got a really bright guy who contacted me, a fan of the whole work and fascinated by the whole thing.
01:41:08.000 And he's really, he's got the smarts and the drive to put it all together and revivify it.
01:41:14.000 So it's now It's now, the website is under construction, but we're now looking to both microfinance and macrofinance this show, and it's funny because it's been an idea of mine for decades, and now it's become a possibility.
01:41:37.000 I mean, years ago, see, I haven't devoted my entire life to Egypt and these things because I started out I was a novelist and playwright and screenwriter and had a lot of things done.
01:41:48.000 And actually, I think you asked me this earlier and I wandered off from the subject, but as a young kid, how did I get into this?
01:41:56.000 I started out...
01:41:58.000 I mean, I realized that at the age of 12 or 13 that I was living in a lunatic asylum.
01:42:03.000 Everyone else called it progress.
01:42:05.000 I mean, I knew it was madness, but I couldn't put it together.
01:42:09.000 But by the time I was 19 or 20, I knew what I wanted to do.
01:42:13.000 I knew I was in a lunatic asylum.
01:42:15.000 And what I wanted to be was I wanted to be the little boy who said the emperor has no clothes.
01:42:19.000 And that's when I started out writing satires, brutal satires, plays and things that were done.
01:42:24.000 This never made me money.
01:42:26.000 I'm trying to resuscitate some of that stuff now.
01:42:29.000 But anyway, and then gradually, gradually, gradually, I understood that there was another The human beings were not always insane.
01:42:39.000 And one music, the classical music, Beethoven's late quartets and Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610. And then when I was in the army in Germany, needless to say, I didn't list.
01:42:51.000 They drafted me.
01:42:53.000 But I had a great time.
01:42:54.000 I was in Germany.
01:42:55.000 I had my one and only Porsche that I bought for $2,400 from the factory.
01:42:59.000 Wow.
01:43:00.000 Talking about, yeah, well, that's what it was in those days.
01:43:03.000 And I remember Driving as I was driving to France and early, it was in November, all by myself, early in the morning and went to the Cathedral of Chartres.
01:43:16.000 It was absolutely empty.
01:43:18.000 I mean, this is before there was any travel to Europe.
01:43:20.000 And I realized it was an epiphany that, you know, however monstrous the church was and is, somebody, geniuses, built this incredible structure.
01:43:32.000 And then it took another few, I still didn't put it all together, it took another few years before and by this time I had my first short story published and I was living in Spain on the island of Ibiza.
01:43:43.000 And gradually, gradually I understood, you know, there was another side to this.
01:43:49.000 And then all of a sudden, again, more complicated story, but I got interested in the Gurdjieff work and Ibiza would become all touristed up and I was connected with my first wife, and we moved to England.
01:44:04.000 She was an actress.
01:44:06.000 I wanted to get into the Gurdjieff work, and there the first non-fiction book, The Case for Astrology, showed up, and that's how I got into Schwaller.
01:44:15.000 So that's about the late 60s when I got interested in, you know, when I really got interested in all of this stuff.
01:44:23.000 Anyway...
01:44:23.000 Anyway, the...
01:44:29.000 But I always had this idea because I had brief enough experiences with Hollywood and the film industry and even theatrical side of things that the producers own you and to get anything that's really original done the way that you want it done is next to impossible and I had this idea Of somehow or another micro
01:44:59.000 -financing projects.
01:45:01.000 But of course you couldn't do it in those days.
01:45:03.000 I mean, how are you going to send out a billion mailings or anything like that?
01:45:06.000 But now, with the internet, you can get to these huge databases.
01:45:12.000 And so now we've got, we're putting in place a A micro-financing aspect of it.
01:45:23.000 And actually, I've always been good at thinking up good marketing ideas.
01:45:27.000 I just never do them.
01:45:28.000 Well, John, just get on Twitter.
01:45:30.000 You need to get on Twitter and then get a Kickstarter account.
01:45:33.000 But what we're doing, and when I talk about it now, it's not yet a promise because we have to make sure through the lawyers that it's legal.
01:45:42.000 But we think it's legal.
01:45:43.000 We're pretty sure it can be legal, but we have a cool...
01:45:48.000 I came up with a really cool incentive offer, which is that if you put in, if you get, if you have a, for a $50 donation, and you can split it, you know, you 10 guys can put in five each and one of them is going to win that.
01:46:02.000 But you put in 50 bucks and that buys you a ticket to effectively a raffle.
01:46:10.000 And when, when we get up to 50,000, we get up to $50,000, We have a drawing and somebody wins a free trip to Egypt with me.
01:46:19.000 So, we think that that's...
01:46:21.000 Because I'm very interested in getting to the young people, actually.
01:46:25.000 You know, people my age...
01:46:26.000 Well, most of the people my age are dead anyway, but...
01:46:30.000 But I'm particularly interested in getting this message to young people.
01:46:34.000 And, you know, 50 bucks for some young people is a lot, but it isn't really a lot.
01:46:38.000 If we figure it out, I mean, what's 50 bucks?
01:46:41.000 It's 10 beers at a not very good bar, or a meal for two at a not very good restaurant.
01:46:47.000 Anybody can figure it out, can afford 50 bucks.
01:46:51.000 So we're putting this into place.
01:46:53.000 And if you go online, I think the website is up already.
01:46:58.000 It's ancientwisdom.com.
01:46:59.000 I think it's ancientwisdomfoundation.org.
01:47:04.000 Now when you go on these Egyptian trips, how long do they take?
01:47:09.000 The standard trip is now, I think it's 15 or 16 days door to door.
01:47:14.000 Whoa.
01:47:14.000 And they're really intense.
01:47:16.000 I mean, I'm talking, what's going on now goes on all day long.
01:47:20.000 So it's all day you talking for 15, 16 days?
01:47:24.000 Yeah.
01:47:25.000 That's got to be exhausting.
01:47:27.000 Yes.
01:47:29.000 But it must keep you pretty sharp on Egyptian history.
01:47:34.000 Well, it keeps me...
01:47:36.000 Not only that, actually, it's that...
01:47:40.000 You see?
01:47:44.000 See, Egypt, nobody in America has ever experienced a real civilization.
01:47:50.000 What we have progressed, what we call progress, is the antithesis of civilization.
01:47:54.000 This is shiny barbarism.
01:47:57.000 And so Egypt is an eye-opener.
01:47:59.000 And as I said, I came to it, you know, through art, through great sacred music, and through the Cathedral of Chartres, and then suddenly I realized how important this was, and along came Schwaller and all of this study.
01:48:13.000 But what Egypt does is that it introduces, and through the symbolist interpretation, which was what Schwaller de Lubitsch put together, otherwise it was just quackademic, Egyptology, you come away angry, actually, because you've experienced this fabulous art.
01:48:32.000 And you listen to all this bullshit that they're telling you that has no connection with what you've actually experienced.
01:48:38.000 So Egypt is...
01:48:40.000 I often start lectures off by saying, Egypt is like sex.
01:48:45.000 That gets everybody's attention.
01:48:46.000 Why is Egypt like sex?
01:48:48.000 Well, you can read all about it, and that's kind of interesting.
01:48:51.000 And you can look at pictures, and that's kind of interesting, too.
01:48:54.000 But until you've actually experienced it, you don't understand anything about it.
01:48:58.000 So Egypt is like that.
01:49:01.000 Once you're there, it hits.
01:49:04.000 I mean, there's no mistaking about it.
01:49:06.000 And so it's, to me, it's very gratifying to be able to be the agency for allowing people to have that experience.
01:49:18.000 And unfortunately, I originally I hope to have a little business where there are a handful of people who understand Symbolist Egypt well enough to retransmit it, but actually I'm the only one who does these trips.
01:49:32.000 Well, one other person, a very brilliant lady called Normandy Ellis, but even that doesn't have the intellectual rigor that my stuff does.
01:49:41.000 So I'm almost the only show in town, but it's very satisfying to me to be able to To be able to open this experience to people.
01:49:53.000 And also, invariably, the trips have very interesting people on them with expertise in a number of disciplines that are relevant to Egypt.
01:50:04.000 So no trip goes by without me learning a lot myself.
01:50:11.000 And sometimes very important things.
01:50:14.000 So it doesn't get tiring.
01:50:18.000 Yeah, it's a lot.
01:50:19.000 Physically, it's a lot of work, but I'm in pretty good shape with my age.
01:50:23.000 John, I wanted to ask you a question about the more recent idea that perhaps the blocks in the pyramid were not cut from stone, but rather made out of a limestone concrete.
01:50:36.000 Are you familiar with these theories?
01:50:39.000 Very.
01:50:39.000 Yeah, that's Davidovitz.
01:50:41.000 And, John, that's been looked into by geologists and It's completely untenable.
01:50:49.000 And the better it should know better.
01:50:50.000 He's a polymer scientist or something of the sort.
01:50:54.000 Schock has looked at this very carefully.
01:50:56.000 It would be as much work to pound the stone into powder and then put it into molds.
01:51:04.000 And you see the stones are all different sizes.
01:51:07.000 So you can't do it that way.
01:51:09.000 And when you look at the stones, you see at the blocks, They're what's called a pneumolytic limestone, which has lots of little seashells in it, looking like the shell sign, you know, like cockle shells, and they're all intact.
01:51:23.000 So it's a silly theory, but on the surface it doesn't sound, on the surface it sounds as though it might be convincing.
01:51:34.000 It was convincing enough so that somebody, a friend of mine, put together a panel of geologists who don't have an axe to grind.
01:51:41.000 It's not as though they're It's not as though they're Egyptologists or archaeologists who have a stake in the thing.
01:51:48.000 They go there with an open mind to look into it, and Schach certainly does.
01:51:52.000 And no, it's not.
01:51:53.000 They're not.
01:51:53.000 And it would be just as much work to do it.
01:51:55.000 And Davidowitz himself says it would take a month to produce a limestone block and cure it well enough so that you could actually use it.
01:52:06.000 So, no, it's not.
01:52:07.000 So it's just silliness.
01:52:10.000 Well, it's incorrect.
01:52:11.000 It's incorrect.
01:52:12.000 Some things are silly.
01:52:15.000 And then, see, the alternative side of the argument is as irresponsible as the academic side because people get notions in their head that it's built by aliens.
01:52:29.000 Well, it could be built by aliens.
01:52:30.000 I can't disprove that.
01:52:34.000 There is unwilling to let go of their fantasies as the academics are unwilling to let go of what are not fantasies but...
01:52:43.000 Their timeline, their incorrect timeline.
01:52:45.000 ...incorrectly developed theories that have been, that are being and have been solidly disproved by people like ourselves.
01:52:57.000 Now, John, there's also an issue with the area underneath one of the Sphinx's paws that seismic charting has revealed that there's some sort of a room down there?
01:53:11.000 There is some sort of a cavity or chamber.
01:53:15.000 We don't know.
01:53:16.000 I mean, Edgar Cayce, in one of his channeled sessions or trances, whatever you call them, said that there was a chamber beneath This one of the different descriptions of it but basically underneath one of the paws of the Sphinx that contain the secrets of Atlantis.
01:53:35.000 Now our seismograph tells us that there is such that there is a cavity there but and this is a question that comes up all the time and they say why can't they excavate well we're The geophysicist who did the work, and the shock was there, but we had a guy named Tom Dobecky, who was a geophysicist, who does the...
01:54:01.000 It's like an underground radiologist, you know?
01:54:04.000 The seismograph produces a reading that to you or me would be completely meaningless, like an X-ray was meaningless to you or me, but the radiologist can tell you a lot of very precise information from an X-ray,
01:54:21.000 So with a readout from the seismograph, and Tom DeBecky said from the shape of the readout, it looks as though it is a chamber, more or less rectangular.
01:54:39.000 It's under about 15 feet of bedrock on top of it.
01:54:43.000 And there is actually a chamber, which Tom didn't even know about, Behind the Sphinx, a rough cut chamber, there's a block and you pull the block away and you have a little rope ladder.
01:54:55.000 You can go down into this rough cut chamber where there's nothing and nobody had been able to figure out who cut it or why or when.
01:55:03.000 But there is such a chamber there and on the seismograph readout, this looks The same, in other words, you get certain colors and stuff like that, looks the same as what you get under the paw of the Sphinx.
01:55:18.000 So, Debecky, who put his neck on the line, said, well, this looks like, cautiously, like there is a chamber there.
01:55:26.000 The problem is, getting in there, Because it's below what's now the water level, the water table level, so you can't really excavate or it would be enormously difficult to excavate.
01:55:40.000 You go underwater, actually.
01:55:42.000 Hmm?
01:55:42.000 You go underwater, you mean, as you drill, as you dig into it, you would actually go underwater.
01:55:47.000 But in theory, you could put down one of those little fiber optic cameras, but if it's all water in there, you're not going to see anything anyway.
01:55:55.000 To actually excavate it would mean going in there with you know with huge pumps pulling the water out as fast as it came in and the sphinxes the sphinxes that would be almost impossible right and the sphinxes it would be possible but it would be dangerous because the sphinx is you know is in pretty rough shape as it is i mean pieces fall off it all the time and things like that so it may be one of these days who knows if the theory takes If the theory takes
01:56:25.000 root and the powers that be realize that it's good PR, among other things, to try to excavate it and see if there is anything there.
01:56:42.000 Meanwhile, for me, I'll stick with the geology and the other pieces of evidence.
01:56:47.000 I don't give an awful lot of thought to that, but the seismograph says there is something there.
01:56:53.000 Yes.
01:56:53.000 Have they detected any other undiscovered ruins or any undiscovered areas that they would like to explore in Egypt?
01:57:01.000 Or do they pretty much have the entire area mapped out?
01:57:08.000 Well, they have it, it's a complex question, they have it pretty well mapped out because they recently, I forget the woman's name, very interesting, The satellites flying over have done...
01:57:24.000 I'm not sure if it's infrared or something that gives you...
01:57:29.000 I think it's infrared photography that tells you if there's something underground.
01:57:35.000 But the photography only goes...
01:57:39.000 doesn't go that deep.
01:57:41.000 You know, it goes 10, 15 feet, something I think.
01:57:43.000 And if we're correct, If there is anything that's really completely buried, it will be deeper than that.
01:57:56.000 And so the photographer, the infrared, whatever it is, I think infrared, the infrared doesn't let you know about that.
01:58:05.000 But it ought to be there.
01:58:06.000 I mean, see, look, with the Sphinx, for example, if the head were not sticking above the ground, you wouldn't even know about it to this day.
01:58:15.000 Yeah, that's true.
01:58:16.000 Right, yeah.
01:58:17.000 But you wouldn't know.
01:58:18.000 It would just be sand, and why would anyone bother?
01:58:21.000 But with these different new technologies, certainly ground-penetrating radar and seismographs will tell you if there's anything there, but they're expensive.
01:58:32.000 You've got thousands of miles of desert, and this is a slow process, whereas a flyover tells you a lot, so they now know that there's That there are lots of buried sites, but if they're that close to the surface,
01:58:49.000 the chances that they're going to support the ancient, what we call the lost civilization hypothesis, is not necessarily commanding.
01:59:03.000 And for our purposes, it doesn't even matter, because we have enough to go by Anyway, I mean, Gobekli Tepe and probably this Easter Island stuff and the magical bracelet and certain of the other things.
01:59:19.000 There are megalithic sites in Sardinia which are not to be believed and nobody even knows about this.
01:59:26.000 It's a treasure trove of megalithic sites.
01:59:30.000 In Sardinia?
01:59:31.000 Sardinia, yeah, they didn't just invent sardines.
01:59:35.000 There's this wonderful architecture there of these huge beehive-shaped stone buildings that are really amazing.
01:59:43.000 So we don't need that.
01:59:44.000 All we need is the financing to do our follow-up to the Mystery of the Sphinx.
01:59:56.000 And ideally, what we want to do really is to get it into the theatres.
02:00:00.000 And then go into TV and the web and all of that stuff.
02:00:08.000 Well, you know, if you see if something has a high impact, like if you see a lot of video, like viral videos that have been released online that have gotten millions and millions and millions of viewers just by word of mouth, I really think that, you know, video on demand as well is another great option.
02:00:29.000 Yeah, it is a great option.
02:00:31.000 Part of the problem, of course, is, and you must know this, I mean, do you have ads on the show?
02:00:37.000 Yeah, we do.
02:00:38.000 Yeah, the ones that we say.
02:00:40.000 No, you don't see any ads.
02:00:42.000 We just do them at the beginning of the broadcast.
02:00:44.000 The Fleshlight ad and the Onnit, the Nootropics ad, those are the ones that we do.
02:00:49.000 We do those and that's it.
02:00:51.000 And then we have some other sponsors that we're working with in the near future, but they're all done just by me talking.
02:00:57.000 Really?
02:00:58.000 I mean, because I'm blabbering on here forever and there's no ads.
02:01:01.000 No, we don't have to have ads.
02:01:02.000 We don't have to break any of the conversation up.
02:01:03.000 That's the beautiful thing about it.
02:01:05.000 We get it over with in the beginning.
02:01:06.000 We thank the sponsors again at the end and it allows a full two-hour intensive conversation and especially something about ancient Egypt, I think, demands that.
02:01:16.000 It's such a complex sort of a situation to try to figure out how The conventional wisdom is saying that, when did they believe language was invented?
02:01:25.000 About 50,000 years ago?
02:01:26.000 Something along those lines?
02:01:28.000 They don't even know.
02:01:29.000 It's just guesswork, right?
02:01:30.000 It really is guesswork when you get back that far.
02:01:33.000 The only thing that you can see, that you can say as a trend, is that the more they study, the further back everything goes.
02:01:45.000 And not only the further back in terms of time, But they're further back in terms of sophistication.
02:01:52.000 You see, I mean actually, look, Gobekli Tepe, which is, I mean, I hope you find some photos to, or I'll send them to you to intersperse with With this talk, so that people can actually see what I'm talking about.
02:02:10.000 Well, I think a lot of people Google along with the show, so that's probably what a lot of people are doing right now.
02:02:15.000 However they do it.
02:02:16.000 Oh, that's fine, too.
02:02:18.000 So, I mean, with Gobekli Tepe, we're talking about 10,000 B.C. Now, you know, that's five times the span of time from Jesus and Julius Caesar to us.
02:02:31.000 It's pretty crazy.
02:02:33.000 That's pretty crazy if you wrap your head around that.
02:02:36.000 The cave of Chauvet, that's 30,000 years.
02:02:40.000 That's three times the time from Gobekli Tepe.
02:02:45.000 So you see, it means that we have this totally skewed vision.
02:02:51.000 Of our human civilization and of ourselves, basically.
02:02:56.000 You know, this fucking lunatic asylum is not civilization.
02:03:01.000 Who in their right mind would invent the bobblehead doll?
02:03:05.000 Or put on American Idol, or the reality shows.
02:03:10.000 This is insanity.
02:03:12.000 It is insanity, but it's insanity that has achieved an incredibly high technological level of success.
02:03:18.000 It seems to be a technology part of a civilization as opposed to what Egypt was.
02:03:24.000 Exactly.
02:03:25.000 We don't know.
02:03:27.000 That's what makes traveling there so interesting because they also had a technology.
02:03:33.000 I mean, in certain cases, we couldn't build the pyramids.
02:03:39.000 Maybe we could, but it would probably be more expensive than a space program.
02:03:46.000 And they did it evidently with ease.
02:03:50.000 And they did it in an era where we don't even attribute them to having metal tools.
02:03:54.000 They had brass.
02:03:55.000 Copper.
02:04:00.000 I don't know about you, but to me, there's not much emotional impact from a bobblehead doll, or Disneyland for that matter.
02:04:09.000 And if you walk into the Egyptian temples, I mean, this happens on the trips all the time because, as I said, it's like sex.
02:04:19.000 Until you've experienced it, you really don't know what it's like.
02:04:22.000 You go into these temples on my trips.
02:04:26.000 Now it's easy because there's practically no tourism there.
02:04:30.000 Otherwise, I go to a lot of trouble to figure out when to go to places so that relatively few people are there.
02:04:38.000 Because it's important, you know?
02:04:39.000 I mean, it's like trying to listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the Super Bowl.
02:04:44.000 You can't do this.
02:04:46.000 So if you get there and you have a place more or less to yourself, the emotional impact of these things is It's breathtaking.
02:04:54.000 You don't get that from Wal-Mart.
02:04:59.000 No, obviously not.
02:05:01.000 This is garbage that goes on.
02:05:03.000 Our lives are obsessed with technological rubbish.
02:05:09.000 And violence, too, of course.
02:05:10.000 Stupid violence.
02:05:13.000 Our setup is obviously very different than theirs, but we imagine ourselves to be the more advanced.
02:05:19.000 They don't have TVs, so we're like, oh, they're fucking idiots.
02:05:23.000 If they don't have the internet, we're like, well, they weren't advanced.
02:05:26.000 But meanwhile, they're capable of these massive constructions.
02:05:30.000 I wanted to ask you about the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber and the evidence that it had been made with some sort of a high-speed diamond-bit drill.
02:05:40.000 Well, that's Chris Dunn's theory that we talked about.
02:05:45.000 I mentioned Chris Dunn before.
02:05:47.000 Well, we don't know.
02:05:49.000 See, Chris has to be...
02:05:52.000 He's not a new age.
02:05:54.000 My composer's stepson once talked about it.
02:05:57.000 He's a very good composer.
02:05:58.000 And he was once talking about all of the new age music and the album covers.
02:06:04.000 And he said, it's all a bunch of airbrushed unicorns.
02:06:06.000 And that's become a kind of a metaphor for, you know, the far out new agey kind of way of looking about things.
02:06:16.000 But Chris is not a new agey kind of guy.
02:06:20.000 And that's his field.
02:06:24.000 And he, you know, he interprets it that way, except with all of the stuff that we've discovered in Egypt, there's no evidence whatsoever.
02:06:35.000 Of having that kind of technology.
02:06:38.000 Now, the idea of the lost civilization is the idea, Graham Hancock's idea, that there's a missing era that we can't place.
02:06:48.000 When do you believe that took place in relation to the timeline of Egypt?
02:06:52.000 When was all the information, or a good chunk of it, lost and they had to start from scratch?
02:06:58.000 Well, we don't know because, you see, there's enough there Not much, but scattered around so that you can say maybe it was never lost, but it was never manifested in this spectacular architecture.
02:07:11.000 For example, I was talking before about the Red Pyramid of Dashur that's built over a ruinous megalithic structure, but that megalithic structure is pretty considerable.
02:07:23.000 It's sort of like Newgrange and certain of the Of the megalithic structures in England and Scotland and Wales.
02:07:31.000 But, you know, this is not nothing.
02:07:34.000 And then there's this strange stone circle, pretty ruinous, called Napta Playa, N-A-B-T-A-P-L-A-Y-A, in...
02:07:47.000 In southwestern Egypt, west of Abu Simbel, not far from the Sudan border.
02:07:58.000 It doesn't look like much, but even the academics acknowledge that it's astronomically oriented and there's a lot about it that puts its date, they date it, they, And academics dated to about 6000 BC. Well, astronomically oriented in 6000 BC means already that it's sophisticated.
02:08:22.000 If it's astronomy, you're not supposed to have astronomy back then.
02:08:26.000 And then there's an interesting guy, a friend of mine, a physicist, And an archaeoastronomer who looks at the evidence and interprets it in a much more sophisticated fashion that there are indications there,
02:08:41.000 or at least they are referring back to a time of about 16,000 or so BC, even though the stone circle itself satisfactorily dates to about 6,000 BC. And then we go to the Gobekli Tepe, And we go to the bracelet.
02:09:00.000 Now we're talking 10,000 BC. And the bracelet, we're talking 8,000 BC. And Chauvet, these fabulous paintings of horses and rhinoceroses and cave bears and lions, that's 31,000 BC. So, how much do you need?
02:09:16.000 No, they're probably living in tents.
02:09:18.000 I don't know.
02:09:18.000 I mean, they certainly weren't living in condos, but they had this knowledge and this artistry at their disposal, and they had it at a fantastically early time.
02:09:30.000 So we just don't know when they lost all this stuff.
02:09:33.000 We don't know when the Egyptian civilization, either whether it was a slow erosion, whether it was a massive decline, and somehow or another it sort of coincides with the end of the last ice age?
02:09:43.000 Is that a fact as well?
02:09:44.000 Well, yeah.
02:09:46.000 Well, we think, yes.
02:09:49.000 Because that's when the sea levels rose 300 feet.
02:09:52.000 I mean, it's a chaotic time then.
02:09:55.000 That's when all of the mammoths and the woolly rhinoceroses and all of that go extinct.
02:10:01.000 So, and shock actually has some very interesting theories about, not just shock, but other people about what made it go extinct and maybe some sort of a plasma strike like a gigantic Sunspot-type event.
02:10:17.000 There's some pretty good evidence for this.
02:10:19.000 But anyway, it disappears.
02:10:23.000 The Sphinx is the Sphinx, and Gobekli Tepe may be after that, but if the Sphinx is earlier, one of the...
02:10:35.000 Objections we always had to face.
02:10:36.000 Well, how could the Sphinx be the evidence of this amazing earlier civilization and there's nothing else?
02:10:41.000 Well, there is something else.
02:10:43.000 There's lots of other stuff with water weathering and things of that nature in Egypt, but not much of it spectacular.
02:10:50.000 Gobekli Tepe, that's spectacular.
02:10:53.000 So, we don't know.
02:10:54.000 Are there hieroglyphs that detail any of the construction methods that were used?
02:11:01.000 A little bit.
02:11:03.000 There's one wall relief.
02:11:09.000 Nothing to do with pyramids.
02:11:11.000 No, absolutely nothing.
02:11:12.000 And nothing to do with the Sphinx.
02:11:14.000 I mean, the Egyptians.
02:11:15.000 What about obelisks?
02:11:17.000 The obelisks?
02:11:20.000 That's pretty spectacular, too.
02:11:22.000 That's something a lot of people aren't even aware of, how spectacular those are.
02:11:25.000 Well, they're plenty spectacular.
02:11:27.000 There's one relief...
02:11:30.000 In the temple of Edfu, which is a very late Ptolemaic temple between 250 BC, you know, into Roman times, built in stages, that shows the pharaoh with a rope around an obelisk, sort of pulling it up into position by himself.
02:11:50.000 Well, that's not meant to be taken literally, unless it's a very small obelisk.
02:11:54.000 But in Egypt, what you see is what you get.
02:11:56.000 So, when you see evidence that you don't necessarily like, but it's there in the temple walls.
02:12:06.000 Well, you can't really ignore it just because you want to believe that the aliens built everything.
02:12:12.000 So, there's the Pharaoh pulling the obelisk up and there's a theory developed It's the one favored by the Egyptologists at the moment.
02:12:21.000 I mean, even they can't be wrong all the time.
02:12:24.000 And by an Egyptologist named Labib Habashi, which talks about how they take these obelisks, which weigh hundreds of tons, they somehow get them out of the quarry.
02:12:40.000 This is really, in words, it doesn't make any sense.
02:12:43.000 When we're in Egypt and you're at what's called It's called the Unfinished Obelisk in Aswan.
02:12:50.000 And here's this block of stone that they were pulling out of the rock, and they didn't make it for interesting reasons that developed the fault line.
02:12:57.000 But had they got this block of stone out of the bedrock, it would have weighed 1,200 tons.
02:13:04.000 That's a big stone.
02:13:05.000 And somehow, they got it out of the quarry and onto rafts or boats, probably in the flood season, and drifted it Down the Nile, maybe to Luxor, who knows?
02:13:19.000 We don't know where it was intended to go.
02:13:21.000 And then they would have, somehow or another, had to get it up into position.
02:13:26.000 And according to Labi Babashi, they did this by pulling it up a gigantic ramp and it was set up in such a way that with a kind of a It would come up the ramp with its bottom at the top part and then gradually with lots of people with ropes and you'd be surprised how precise you can be with lots of trained men with
02:13:56.000 ropes and they would gradually pull it up and it would go...
02:14:01.000 There was a kind of a deep shaft that was constructed that was full of sand and they'd gradually pull the sand out from under And all of these guys pulling with the ropes would gradually revert up into position and very exactly place it down on its base.
02:14:20.000 But how do they get the sand out at the last minute?
02:14:23.000 When you're there, all of this makes sense.
02:14:25.000 But it's fascinating to try to Figure out if this is how it's done.
02:14:32.000 We don't know.
02:14:33.000 But all we can say is that they did it.
02:14:35.000 And it's pretty damn amazing.
02:14:37.000 Well, one of the things I thought was really fascinating was when they had to move some gigantic statues.
02:14:43.000 They had to cut them up and then replace them in a new area.
02:14:48.000 They had to cut giant statues in half.
02:14:52.000 I mean, talk about that incredible project and what you thought about that, just from an archaeological standpoint.
02:14:58.000 That's Abu's symbol.
02:15:00.000 And it wasn't that they were statues.
02:15:02.000 This is a temple cut into the rock face.
02:15:06.000 And the four statues of Ramesses II were sculpted into the rock face itself.
02:15:14.000 In other words, they were integral.
02:15:15.000 They were not freestanding statues.
02:15:17.000 So when they built the Aswan Dam, and they would have flooded this fabulous place, they got together a whole bunch of money, 90 million dollars I think it was, UNESCO got it together and they got all of the engineers and what they had to do is they had to basically they had to move a hole so they had to cut around the temple and then they had to cut because the statues are enormous,
02:15:45.000 they're 65 feet high and then they had to cut them into four and move the blocks because they moved the entire, they moved the whole up to the top Of the hill that they were built into, because the water would have covered where they were.
02:16:06.000 So that's Abu Simbel.
02:16:08.000 And so, yeah, they had to cut.
02:16:09.000 But they weren't freestanding statues.
02:16:11.000 But still, it was a pretty considerable modern engineering theme.
02:16:15.000 Otherwise, the example is the statue of The colossal figure of Ramses.
02:16:22.000 That's the basis of Shelley's famous poem, Ozymandias.
02:16:27.000 You know, I met a traveler from an antique land, blah, blah, blah.
02:16:30.000 And this is a statue that weighs...
02:16:33.000 It's ruined.
02:16:35.000 It exploded in an earthquake somewhere around Julius Caesar time.
02:16:44.000 But this originally weighed about a thousand tons, and they got it down the river somehow, and that's amazing enough, but then how do they get it off the boat?
02:16:57.000 In other words, assuming that they're moving it in flood season on giant rafts, then they've got to get the rafts, they've got to get this thousand-ton block off the raft and move it into place.
02:17:11.000 Well, the actual moving it On the flat, there are, when you're talking about before, what evidence is there?
02:17:17.000 There's one, I forget what tomb it's from, but there's a tomb relief showing a huge sledge with a giant colossal statue of the Pharaoh on it, and then lots and lots of men pulling the sledge over the land, and somebody in the front pouring something, maybe some water, because slick mud, actually, It's remarkably slippery and you can pull things.
02:17:43.000 So, as I said earlier, what you see is what you get.
02:17:46.000 You can't deny that evidence when you see the evidence in front of your nose and say, oh, well, it's aliens dropping things from space-age helicopters or something.
02:17:56.000 When the evidence is there, that's the evidence.
02:17:59.000 But you've got to be careful about the evidence.
02:18:02.000 There are scenes, symbols, Yeah, incredibly complicated subject.
02:18:15.000 Now no subject of ancient civilizations would be complete without a discussion of ancient Sumer and the Fantastical work of Zachariah Sitchin.
02:18:28.000 I'm sure you're familiar with all that stuff.
02:18:30.000 What's your take on Zachariah Sitchin's ideas that the Anunnaki came from another planet?
02:18:36.000 For a lot of people who don't know, it's some pretty crazy stuff that states that human beings were created through genetic engineering and...
02:18:45.000 Yeah, well I think actually I'm not a Sitchinini and I find when Sitchin...
02:18:53.000 I mean I can't challenge his translations from the Sumerian because I just can't.
02:19:02.000 But they're his translations and unfortunately to the best of my knowledge I don't know Of any of the, you know, Sumerian experts who bothered to take a look at his work, which is too bad.
02:19:16.000 I mean, it's irresponsible.
02:19:17.000 But I do know that when he's talking about Egypt, he's totally off the wall.
02:19:23.000 Totally.
02:19:23.000 And from that, I extrapolate and do not much care for his work.
02:19:31.000 And when he gets into explaining who the gods were, that they're alien They're aliens as malignant as ourselves who enslaved a primitive human race.
02:19:46.000 Created us even.
02:19:47.000 And that the gods of Egypt and everywhere else are really just aliens that have been misunderstood by primitive imaginations.
02:19:56.000 This is really stupid and malignant bullshit.
02:19:59.000 And here's a bit of evidence that one of the Egyptian creation myths It concerns the god before there were any gods, the god called Atum, who exists before there is existence, as it were.
02:20:15.000 And he creates existence through an act of masturbation.
02:20:20.000 He creates the first polarization, the first female and the first male.
02:20:28.000 It's rather biblical this.
02:20:30.000 Well, now, if this is an ancient alien, And this is a Sitchin-esque interpretation.
02:20:40.000 What is it?
02:20:40.000 That the primitives saw an ancient alien whacking off behind a tree and decided that this was how the universe was created?
02:20:52.000 It has absolutely nothing to do with this.
02:20:54.000 In other words, The gods of Egypt and the gods of all other civilizations, including those we sometimes think are primitive, represent cosmic principles.
02:21:03.000 They are not people.
02:21:05.000 They are not aliens.
02:21:06.000 They are principles and they are scientific.
02:21:09.000 The scientists don't like this either.
02:21:10.000 But when you look at Egyptian mythology and try to And try to historicize it, as it were.
02:21:22.000 You find that you're in a...
02:21:25.000 You know, you're in a...
02:21:26.000 This is a ludicrous exercise.
02:21:29.000 And as far as I'm concerned, the whole notion that we human beings, the creators, not Sechin, but some others did create the Cathedral of Shatka and the Builders, the temples of Egypt and so on, are somehow or another deluded primitives who were Who were enslaved by aliens and who then found a way to set themselves free but remembered their alien backgrounds and commemorated
02:22:00.000 them in all of this wonderful architecture.
02:22:02.000 This is really stupid.
02:22:04.000 And not only is it stupid, it's malignant.
02:22:06.000 It's malignant in the same way it's the opposite of, let's say, of Darwinian evolution, which, you know, in other words, it deprives human existence Of all meaning.
02:22:22.000 And that's in fact what modern science does.
02:22:24.000 Modern rationalist science deprives us of any meaning in life and in fact they're very proud of it.
02:22:30.000 You should read some of the stuff.
02:22:31.000 Do you contemplate how we were created or how we burst out from the lower hominids, how there's all these other primates running around?
02:22:39.000 I'm not sure that we did.
02:22:40.000 Not sure that we did?
02:22:42.000 No!
02:22:43.000 I think there's no evidence for that.
02:22:45.000 There are hominids and then there's us.
02:22:48.000 And the further back you go, there we are.
02:22:51.000 So we just...
02:22:52.000 This is, again, this is a Sitchin-esque stuff, except it's called science, that we have to have had, that we have to have had more and more primitive beings that were responsible, you know, that gradually...
02:23:06.000 Became us.
02:23:07.000 ...stopped being apes and became people.
02:23:09.000 What do you think happened?
02:23:10.000 We are doing Chauvet and Gobekli Tepe and the Sphinx and so on.
02:23:14.000 I don't buy that for two seconds.
02:23:16.000 Actually, actually, Shak and I High up on our list.
02:23:21.000 In fact, one of the reasons I got on with shock.
02:23:25.000 That's more...
02:23:26.000 We need a lot of time.
02:23:28.000 Funny story.
02:23:30.000 That's how I got a hold of shock because I developed the...
02:23:35.000 Sphinx Theory, all on my own.
02:23:36.000 I'm not a geologist.
02:23:38.000 You know, months in the libraries working out the geology and convinced myself to put together the whole theory of the water weathering.
02:23:48.000 And then I just sat there for 10 years.
02:23:50.000 A Serpent in the Sky was published in, whenever it was, when?
02:23:55.000 79, something like that.
02:23:57.000 And nobody paid any attention to it.
02:24:00.000 And then I had a friend who had been teaching English American University in Cairo.
02:24:07.000 He got a hold of my work.
02:24:09.000 He was very interested.
02:24:11.000 One day we were having a talk at Boston University.
02:24:15.000 One day we were having a dinner and he said, you know, this Symbolist Egypt stuff of yours is, I think, really important.
02:24:22.000 I said, yeah, I think it is too.
02:24:24.000 He said, well, what can I do as an academic to help you?
02:24:31.000 And I said, instantly, I said, find a geologist to look into the water weathering of the Sphinx.
02:24:38.000 And I laughed.
02:24:40.000 I said, I knew from lots of experience that finding an open-minded scientist was like finding a fundamentalist Christian who loves his enemies.
02:24:49.000 And he said, wait a minute, there's a young guy teaching with me.
02:24:53.000 Anyway, one thing or another led to Robert Chalk.
02:24:56.000 And gradually, gradually, at first, he was interested in the evidence, but he didn't want to even...
02:25:01.000 I wasn't even supposed to know his name, and finally, because he was up for tenure, and if anybody thinks you're looking for a lost civilization, you're up for tenure, you're not going to get your tenure.
02:25:12.000 Anyway, eventually, Chuck and I met, and as I said, I've been...
02:25:17.000 I find, not evolution, evolution is a fact, but Darwinian evolution by natural selection It's arguably the greatest superstition ever foisted upon the human race.
02:25:29.000 What do you believe happened?
02:25:31.000 How do you believe that human beings came to be?
02:25:34.000 I don't know, but I don't know how mosquitoes came to be either.
02:25:37.000 And the Darwinian explanation, his so-called explanation, It's completely untenable.
02:25:46.000 What's untenable is that human beings would evolve or progress through natural selection?
02:25:51.000 That's untenable?
02:25:53.000 That's part of the key.
02:25:55.000 Schock and I... Let me go backtrack.
02:25:59.000 When I met up with Schock, it was a very cautious meeting.
02:26:04.000 There he was involved with this loony heretic, me.
02:26:09.000 We were getting on pretty well and having a discussion.
02:26:12.000 And I gave a lecture.
02:26:14.000 He organized a lecture for me at Boston University to the faculty and interested students.
02:26:19.000 And that went quite well.
02:26:20.000 This is what we're talking now, 89. And then I went back to Schock's house for dinner.
02:26:26.000 And the subject of evolution came up.
02:26:29.000 And he's not just a geologist and geophysicist, but a paleontologist as well.
02:26:34.000 So he's very into, you know, the whole evolutionary hypothesis.
02:26:38.000 And I mentioned, do you know who...
02:26:41.000 Stephen Jay Gould was?
02:26:44.000 No, I do not.
02:26:45.000 Well, he died not too long ago.
02:26:47.000 But he was everybody's favorite.
02:26:51.000 He was everybody's favorite.
02:26:52.000 I'm not sure if he was a geologist or biologist.
02:26:55.000 He was sort of like the equivalent of Carl Sagan.
02:26:58.000 You know who he was, right?
02:26:59.000 Sure.
02:27:00.000 Well, he was sort of the Carl Sagan of geology and evolutionary biology.
02:27:05.000 And he was in the New Yorker all the time and all that sort of stuff.
02:27:08.000 And I said to Chuck, you know, we got into...
02:27:12.000 I carefully answered the whole question of evolution.
02:27:18.000 I said, well, what do you think of Stephen Jay Gould?
02:27:21.000 He said, oh, he's a bozo.
02:27:23.000 I instantly knew that.
02:27:24.000 I had somebody I could talk to who realized that this guy was indeed literate, but a bozo.
02:27:32.000 Without getting deep into this, because this is our next book, after we write The Bridge of Seurat, Chuck is really into this.
02:27:39.000 I hope the definitive anti-Darwin book.
02:27:43.000 Not anti-evolution, anti-Darwin.
02:27:46.000 And let me just give you a little clue.
02:27:49.000 You use the language yourself.
02:27:51.000 Everybody does.
02:27:52.000 Natural selection.
02:27:53.000 A lot of...
02:27:55.000 This is not science.
02:27:57.000 This is the equivalent Of George Orwell's newspeak.
02:28:03.000 It's science-speak.
02:28:05.000 If you look at the two words themselves, natural selection is promoted as the means whereby things automatically, by a series, this is a quote from a very famous current evolution, Darwinian Daniel Dennett, a series of lucky coincidences produces mosquitoes and us and all the rest of it.
02:28:31.000 And this is supposed to be the agency for this is natural selection.
02:28:35.000 But if you look at the word natural, if you go to the dictionary, even the great big Oxford English dictionary that I have, and look up the word natural, nowhere does natural mean accidental or fortuitous.
02:28:48.000 Natural simply means of the natural world.
02:28:50.000 So to say that it's natural means that it's accidental, It has nothing to do.
02:28:55.000 The word natural doesn't describe accidental.
02:28:59.000 Nowhere does it connote or suggest fortuitousness.
02:29:05.000 And then you look at selection.
02:29:07.000 This is also.
02:29:10.000 Selection presupposes choice and purpose.
02:29:14.000 The roulette wheel does not select the number that the ball is going to fall on.
02:29:22.000 People are selected for the NBA draft.
02:29:25.000 Candidates are selected for running for office.
02:29:30.000 It suggests choice.
02:29:32.000 Natural suggests hierarchical order of the most sophisticated purpose.
02:29:38.000 So to call an accidental process natural selection is a con job.
02:29:43.000 If they want to describe it, actually, Actually, Daniel Dennett does a very good job.
02:29:49.000 He says, evolution is nothing but a series of lucky coincidences.
02:29:53.000 If they call the whole theory, the theory of lucky coincidences, it would stop sounding scientific.
02:29:59.000 We don't know how any of these things developed and the much derided, what do they call themselves, the intelligent design people, also they use the wrong A bit they use the wrong language because intelligent design suggests a designer and then you're talking about God and of course they're not going to be talking about God and getting away with it in academic circles.
02:30:28.000 But in fact if they called it intelligent creativity they'd be closer to the mark.
02:30:33.000 Creativity is built into the universal structure.
02:30:37.000 It's creativity itself but we're in the middle of creativity.
02:30:43.000 Ourselves.
02:30:44.000 So it's very difficult to discuss this, particularly because we've been brought up in this paradigm of science-speak.
02:30:54.000 And actually, after the Bridge of Ceyron, Shaka is as much into this as I am, and he's got all the credentials behind him.
02:31:01.000 We're going to do a book, I think, called, if I have my way, Darwin...
02:31:12.000 Darwin debunked, Darwin declawed, Darwin dethroned.
02:31:17.000 A scientist and a scholar deconstruct the cargo cult of the West.
02:31:22.000 It's a fraud from beginning to end.
02:31:25.000 It is not science.
02:31:26.000 Evolution is a process.
02:31:29.000 This is demonstrable.
02:31:31.000 The manner in which it manifests through supposed natural selection It's a total fraud.
02:31:37.000 So what you're saying, just to clarify, is that evolution is real but the process of natural selection due to random mutations is something you don't buy.
02:31:45.000 You think there's more of a design element to it all.
02:31:49.000 It seems to be acting and responding in a creative and intelligent way.
02:31:55.000 That's right.
02:31:56.000 In other words, it is creativity Creativity is there before anything is created.
02:32:05.000 In other words, it's the matrix in which things somehow or another, and we don't know the process, evolve.
02:32:14.000 But it's not, it probably is not random.
02:32:18.000 And in fact, there's a ton of stuff when you get into this.
02:32:21.000 I have a folder this wide on evolution that Schock and I will get into.
02:32:30.000 And I hope pretty soon, somewhere along the line, that it can't work that way.
02:32:39.000 And the deeper they look, the more they find.
02:32:44.000 I mean, I just had today, actually, you should write Hancock and get this guy who works with him, Steve Detweiler, A list that he sends out every week of interesting articles.
02:32:57.000 There was one just today, or maybe one of the other science things that I get all the time about the intelligence of plants.
02:33:09.000 They actually communicate with each other and so on.
02:33:12.000 In other words, we exist within a creative matrix.
02:33:18.000 It's not that Stuff just happens and all of a sudden there's intelligence.
02:33:22.000 It's that there is intelligence and we are the result of the intelligence.
02:33:27.000 Not that God woke up one morning and said, well, today I think I will create mosquitoes.
02:33:33.000 It's that somehow that it's like imagining, for example, do you suppose that the cells in our body have any idea Or my body have any idea that here I am talking to a guy called Joe Rogan for three hours about these subjects?
02:33:51.000 They don't know.
02:33:52.000 I don't think they know anyway.
02:33:55.000 Something knows.
02:33:56.000 So that's something like us.
02:33:59.000 We're cells in a prodigious but intelligent and directed organism.
02:34:07.000 And that's actually the Even though you'd never know it from listening to the baloney that the priests and the mullahs and all of the rabbis and all of these imbeciles talk about, this is actually what's at the basis of all of the religions, however corrupt they've become.
02:34:26.000 We have a function to perform in the whole gigantic structure and it's hierarchical and it's organized.
02:34:34.000 It's up to us to do our bit to do it.
02:34:37.000 But natural selection, as I said, it's a linguistic fraud.
02:34:41.000 It's spin.
02:34:42.000 So this is where it gets really crazy, okay?
02:34:44.000 Because where did, how did the human animal emerge?
02:34:50.000 If the human animal didn't emerge from lower hominids and we existed in this form from the beginning, is that the supposition?
02:34:57.000 Because they've absolutely proven that there have been lower forms of human beings, other different branches of the human tree that died off.
02:35:07.000 Neanderthal, for example, Australopithecus, there's a bunch of different ones from the past, they suppose, were what they call quote-unquote early man.
02:35:15.000 You don't buy that?
02:35:15.000 That's early...
02:35:16.000 We don't know where they lived within themselves.
02:35:18.000 You see, as I was saying earlier, they're assuming these are primitive beings.
02:35:23.000 When I talked earlier, I mean, we're going with our Sphinx and our Gobekli Tepe and our Chauvet.
02:35:28.000 You think that the primitive people who produce Chauvet?
02:35:32.000 And as I said earlier, really, our level of development is an inner thing.
02:35:40.000 You can't tell.
02:35:42.000 And as I said earlier, using the image of dance, Let's say an enlightened society that expressed itself only in dance and by dancing experienced the highest levels of creativity.
02:35:59.000 See, this is the thing that most of these scientists are seriously defective human beings.
02:36:07.000 They're uncreative by nature and they distrust their own emotions.
02:36:11.000 You want to know about creativity?
02:36:13.000 You listen to the Beethoven quartets or walk into the Cathedral of Shanta or the temples of Egypt and that tells you a lot, even if you can't necessarily explain it.
02:36:24.000 I mean, we, however we are, it may be, let's say, the theosophists in certain of the esoteric societies, you know, have it that we're there from the beginning, but we're only made manifest, however that happens, at a later date.
02:36:43.000 There's absolutely no evidence that, you know, they come up with Lucy or something like that.
02:36:48.000 We don't know.
02:36:48.000 We have no idea what went on inside Lucy's head and heart.
02:36:53.000 None.
02:36:53.000 But we do know that 65 million...
02:36:56.000 Sorry, we do know that...
02:37:02.000 Rationalizing.
02:37:03.000 Basically what they're doing is they're rationalizing their own emptiness.
02:37:06.000 We know that 65 million years ago there was a mass extinction.
02:37:09.000 There was no flowering plants before that.
02:37:11.000 There was a completely different sort of an atmosphere, completely different animals here.
02:37:16.000 What happened there?
02:37:18.000 Obviously if most life was wiped out and the current life that we have right now exists post 65 million years ago.
02:37:26.000 Yeah, but I mean if you follow this stuff, which I do, You know, every week there's a new theory about what happened 65 million years ago.
02:37:35.000 We don't know.
02:37:37.000 In fact, we don't even know if there were people then.
02:37:40.000 There's some pretty interesting evidence.
02:37:43.000 Tell that dog to settle down.
02:37:45.000 What?
02:37:46.000 I said tell that dog to settle down or I'm going to co-tell him.
02:37:49.000 Come here, Sabu!
02:37:51.000 Sabu!
02:37:53.000 What kind of dog is it?
02:37:55.000 Sabu, come here.
02:37:57.000 This dude's awesome.
02:38:00.000 He just goes and gets his dog.
02:38:02.000 We should probably wrap this up, too.
02:38:04.000 But I want to ask him about...
02:38:05.000 How many minutes are we in?
02:38:07.000 About 2.45.
02:38:08.000 I want to ask him about the stone-deep theory before we take off.
02:38:11.000 Hey, there he is.
02:38:12.000 What's up, buddy?
02:38:13.000 Is that a bully dog?
02:38:15.000 No, that is an ancient Egyptian greyhound.
02:38:18.000 An ancient Egyptian greyhound?
02:38:20.000 Oh, wow.
02:38:20.000 You're an Egyptian to the bone, son.
02:38:22.000 Look at you.
02:38:23.000 Well, it was the dogs that got me interested in Egypt to begin with.
02:38:26.000 When my first short story was published...
02:38:29.000 In 57 I went to the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean and these dogs stayed pure there and I've had them ever since.
02:38:43.000 They got me interested in Egypt to begin with.
02:38:45.000 I wanted to ask you one more question about the development of human beings.
02:38:49.000 Are you familiar with the work of Terence McKenna?
02:38:52.000 Yes.
02:38:52.000 Were you familiar with his stoned ape theory?
02:38:56.000 Yeah, I don't go for it.
02:38:57.000 You don't go for it.
02:38:59.000 His theory for the folks at home is the doubling of the human brain size occurred over a period of two million years, which he coincides with the rainforest receding into grasslands and then the lower hominids coming out of the trees, experimenting with new food sources and eating psilocybin mushrooms.
02:39:17.000 That's actually funny because for somebody who did a lot of experimenting with ayahuasca, which I've also done actually, he's extrapolating and trying to make his experience fit in with Darwinian theory and he should know better than that because he was a very smart guy.
02:39:39.000 So you're feeling...
02:39:42.000 I'm sorry, go ahead.
02:39:43.000 No, I'm more inclined to think...
02:39:46.000 You know, listen, virtually all of the ancient texts talk about a kind of Eden-like state, you know, an enlightened state that we've descended from.
02:39:59.000 In other words, we start at the top and degenerate.
02:40:02.000 And to me, this is not This is not so difficult to imagine.
02:40:08.000 I mean, it happens often that things, a great teacher comes along and everything disappears.
02:40:15.000 You know, we tend to think that everything is like technology and you start off with the 1892 Mercedes and suddenly we've got a 2012 Ferrari.
02:40:25.000 But with Egypt, for example, It seems to be at its height at the very beginning, with no period of development.
02:40:32.000 We don't know!
02:40:33.000 So it's such a massive mystery, and all your years of exploring it have literally got you to the point where you're like, no one knows, and any talking about it is just nonsense.
02:40:43.000 Well, anyway, talking about it as though you know is nonsense.
02:40:46.000 In definitive terms, yeah.
02:40:48.000 In definitive terms.
02:40:49.000 It's just so crazy.
02:40:51.000 We just plain don't know, but one of the things you can depend upon, actually, is that Who are you going to take your lessons from?
02:41:01.000 The guys who invented the bobblehead doll and the atom bomb, or the guys who did Schatz and the temple of Luxor and the late quartets?
02:41:10.000 Me, I'll go with the creatives any day, because I am one myself.
02:41:15.000 I've done a late quartet.
02:41:17.000 How long was a period between the decline of the Old Kingdom and the time where they discovered the pyramids?
02:41:23.000 There was no one living in them when they were discovered.
02:41:26.000 When Napoleon's army marched through Egypt, there was no one living in the pyramids.
02:41:33.000 That's where we lost a lot of information.
02:41:35.000 Nobody was living in the pyramids ever.
02:41:36.000 As far as anyone knows, they're very difficult to live in.
02:41:39.000 I'm sorry, I meant that area.
02:41:42.000 They didn't inhabit that area.
02:41:44.000 Oh, yeah, sure they did.
02:41:46.000 I mean, it was all farmland around there.
02:41:47.000 They're in the desert, but just, you know, a couple of, a few hundred yards below where the Sphinx is is all the valley.
02:41:53.000 So, yeah, so it's all farmland and everything.
02:41:56.000 Oh, yeah, it's there.
02:41:57.000 So, my point was, like, what time did it all fall apart where it was essentially the Sphinx and the pyramids and all that were stopped being used for what they were abandoned and then people had to come back to and go, wow, look at what we have here.
02:42:09.000 Yeah, that you can sort of put a date to.
02:42:12.000 I mean, the Egyptian religion died Shortly after, you know, first, second century AD. It was no longer being practiced, although the knowledge percolated down into Alexandria and, you know, dispersed around the Middle East, the Library of Alexandria.
02:42:30.000 You know, this was a hotbed of...
02:42:35.000 of intellectual and philosophical activity, always.
02:42:38.000 I mean, Alexandria was always there, but the actual Egyptian religion as such died somewhere, let's say, in the middle of the 3rd century AD. But as I said earlier, in the hermetic disciplines and alchemy and astrology and magic and number symbolism and neoplatonism, all of that knowledge continued throughout, you know, throughout European civilization.
02:43:03.000 I mean, the The Renaissance, the great figures of the Renaissance were always credited with opening the way out of superstition and so on, you know, and into modern science.
02:43:15.000 They did open the way to modern science, but they themselves believed that their own knowledge, when Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion, he said, I've rediscovered the secrets of the Egyptians.
02:43:28.000 It was a given to them that That all of this, that this advanced knowledge was available in Egypt, but it was Schwaller who actually, this is one of his great, great, great contributions to human thought, it was Schwaller who proved that they had it.
02:43:44.000 No mistaking it.
02:43:45.000 And they had it, and it came out of nowhere.
02:43:49.000 And they had it, and it came out of nowhere.
02:43:51.000 And there was nothing before it, and then all of a sudden, this incredibly intelligent civilization.
02:43:55.000 As I said, Joe, you don't know what was there before.
02:43:58.000 It's just too crazy.
02:43:59.000 You keep going back, and they keep going back, and the further they go back, all of a sudden they come across something It disproves everything they thought before.
02:44:11.000 Look, Chauvet, this is wonderful.
02:44:13.000 This is spectacular art in the cave.
02:44:16.000 How are those people living?
02:44:17.000 Well, they didn't have television sets.
02:44:19.000 The Bobblehead dolls.
02:44:20.000 But if you can paint like that, you've got something serious going on inside you.
02:44:28.000 And who says they invented it?
02:44:30.000 You see, the further back you go, the more tenuous everything gets.
02:44:34.000 Recently, there have been some interesting studies on Flint knapping.
02:44:39.000 In other words, cutting flint to make different kinds of tools.
02:44:43.000 Well, this is actually a pretty advanced art.
02:44:47.000 And they're finding flint tools, very sophisticated flint tools, that go back 200,000 years.
02:44:56.000 Well, what was going through their heads that they're doing this stuff?
02:44:58.000 We don't know.
02:44:59.000 What was going through their hearts?
02:45:01.000 They've discovered, this is again only the last couple of years, that Sea travel was going on between North Africa, and I'm not sure if it was Cyprus or some of the Greek islands.
02:45:13.000 It's either 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago.
02:45:17.000 So, if you follow this stuff, the more that's discovered, the more you become impressed that some kind of advanced knowledge was always there, and even that is based upon A technological is the only way we tend to think.
02:45:36.000 A technological assessment of what they know.
02:45:39.000 We don't know what was going on inside them.
02:45:41.000 We don't know how intelligent they were and that the possibility is that they were this intelligent from the beginning.
02:45:48.000 Maybe!
02:45:49.000 And it isn't even a question of intelligence.
02:45:52.000 It's more a question, really, of experience.
02:45:56.000 I mean, how much intelligence do you need to, let's say, to be moved by a Beethoven quartet?
02:46:03.000 So you don't think about this stuff.
02:46:05.000 It's just we're brought up in such a way by this iniquitous Church of Progress of ours to think that you have to be able to do complex mathematics and, you know, all kinds of stuff.
02:46:17.000 In order to be civilized.
02:46:19.000 And then, even when you have that point of view, the further back you go, you see that they had a cosmology and you see that they had a geometry.
02:46:28.000 And they had technology to produce a Gobekli Tepe and a Chauvet.
02:46:34.000 So the whole Darwinian paradigm is exploded when you take all of those things into consideration.
02:46:43.000 Is it possible that the Darwinian model works if you just take the timeline way back and then people evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we thought?
02:46:55.000 Well, that's what they say, but why should it?
02:46:58.000 In other words, what is there in the nature of the hydrogen atom that presupposes that things are going to get more complicated and sophisticated?
02:47:09.000 Who says?
02:47:11.000 Well, we say by our own designs on Earth, our own physical, you know, our creations.
02:47:17.000 Why should that be accidental?
02:47:19.000 Maybe, why should there not be, why should there not be, let's say, a plan to it?
02:47:28.000 Just as, for example, just as we grow from a fertilized ovum and we go through this complex process of gestation and then we're born...
02:47:35.000 And then it's up to us what we're going to do with our lives and so on.
02:47:39.000 Who says that's an accident?
02:47:42.000 Yeah.
02:47:43.000 Yeah, and who says that we're not acting?
02:47:45.000 I mean, to begin with, how do you prove an accident?
02:47:50.000 See, these assholes who have no creativity in them are determined to make the world sound as meaningless as they experience it.
02:47:59.000 As bland and passionless and as divine.
02:48:02.000 Exactly.
02:48:05.000 This is deliberate because they don't know any better, and in fact, they hate creative people for the most part.
02:48:11.000 Well, that's one of the beautiful things about the title of your DVD, Magical Egypt.
02:48:17.000 That's what it is.
02:48:18.000 It really is.
02:48:19.000 It's truly magical.
02:48:19.000 That's right.
02:48:20.000 It really is.
02:48:20.000 And thank you very much for coming on the show today, man.
02:48:22.000 You have explained a lot of things in some incredible detail.
02:48:27.000 It's been an honor to get to ask you questions because I've been a huge fan of your work for many, many years now.
02:48:33.000 And I'm a huge fan of that DVD series.
02:48:36.000 And I would love to go eventually to Egypt with you someday.
02:48:38.000 We should do that.
02:48:39.000 We should figure something out.
02:48:40.000 It doesn't have to be that eventual.
02:48:41.000 All you have to do is talk about it and get ten people from your very...
02:48:45.000 Very extensive store of people to go and even get a free trip.
02:48:49.000 I could do that.
02:48:50.000 We can make that happen.
02:48:51.000 We're going to do it.
02:48:52.000 I'd like to say one thing because I have a list of things that I want to talk about.
02:48:55.000 Okay.
02:48:56.000 One of them is, I don't know, do you know who Gerald Salente is?
02:49:01.000 No.
02:49:02.000 He's a trends analyst and he's a very, very interesting guy.
02:49:05.000 He's a colleague.
02:49:05.000 I've heard his name before.
02:49:06.000 Much of my time these days is working with him.
02:49:09.000 I'm co-writer and executive editor of the Trends Journal.
02:49:13.000 I mean, he's He forecasts trends and he's probably even more accurate over the last 30 years than anyone else.
02:49:22.000 And we put out, he puts out, we put out, he puts out, really, something called the Trends Journal.
02:49:28.000 And it's very interesting because what he sees coming up is not pretty.
02:49:36.000 And he's right a lot of the time.
02:49:40.000 And, I mean, I try to tell people that they really Because I'm talking the esotericism and the ancient Egypt and the meaning of the real civilization.
02:49:51.000 And Gerald is between us and we've got really some very high level people working with us, a brilliant illustrator.
02:49:59.000 And we put out this journal that, boy, I mean, this thing is coming unstuck in a hurry, and if people don't individually and collectively prepare for it, they're going to be unprepared.
02:50:17.000 Are you talking about a collapse in the economy, the end of civilization, that kind of thing?
02:50:23.000 Well, the end of civilization as we know it, very likely.
02:50:28.000 Unless enough people act together quickly and they probably won't.
02:50:33.000 So, in other words, buy gold.
02:50:37.000 Buy gold.
02:50:38.000 Make sure you've got a getaway plan.
02:50:40.000 Where can people get this newsletter?
02:50:45.000 It's a journal.
02:50:48.000 Go to Trends Journal or Google up Gerald Salente, C-E-L-E-N-T-E. He's a very interesting guy.
02:50:54.000 He's a real Flamethrowing.
02:50:59.000 That's excitable Italian.
02:51:01.000 He's on Alex Jones all the time.
02:51:03.000 But the journal is a really interesting publication and I'm very proud to be a big part of it.
02:51:10.000 So look it up for yourself.
02:51:12.000 Well check it out.
02:51:12.000 And your website is jawest.com and you don't have a Twitter yet.
02:51:18.000 And there you find out about the trips and all kinds of other stuff.
02:51:21.000 And you don't have a Twitter yet.
02:51:24.000 No, I'm on Facebook, but I never do anything.
02:51:27.000 My daughter is looking after it for me.
02:51:29.000 Tell your daughter to get you a Twitter.
02:51:30.000 We need a John Anthony West Twitter.
02:51:32.000 We'll populate that very quickly, and people can find out about your trips.
02:51:35.000 Yeah, my daughter will do that, because as I said, we're reviving, we're reincarnating our ancient wisdom foundation.
02:51:44.000 And by the way, I should put a plug in that before we put it up, because it's...
02:51:48.000 I told you, I mean, we're pretty sure, I can't be a promise yet, that we've got this incentive thing going.
02:51:53.000 And if you pull up ancientwisdomfoundation.org, there'll be some information about the projects that we're involved in.
02:52:01.000 And I really do believe that unless, unless enough of us of humanity goes back to, or recreates, a civilization based upon The ancient principles.
02:52:17.000 In other words, we're not going to rebuild pyramids again or mummify our pharaohs or anything like that.
02:52:23.000 But the principles...
02:52:24.000 I mean, Egypt is a one-issue civilization.
02:52:27.000 It's based upon the quest for immortality, about the notion of the immortality of the soul, which I absolutely believe in.
02:52:35.000 And without that, no civilization is possible.
02:52:42.000 And the principles upon which Egypt and the other ancient civilizations are founded is the principles are eternal.
02:52:52.000 I mean, the civilization is past.
02:52:53.000 As I said, we're not going to mummify our pharaohs again.
02:52:56.000 But without that understanding, and without an understanding of where we're heading at the moment, there's plenty of scare stuff out there.
02:53:04.000 A lot of it is valid, but most of the scare stuff doesn't have the The antidote built into it.
02:53:13.000 And I like to think that we do.
02:53:15.000 I like to think that this conversation we just had is one of, not of despair, but of the possibility of Renaissance.
02:53:24.000 And boy, it's something, you know, let's say a spiritual doctrine.
02:53:31.000 It's not something you believe in.
02:53:34.000 The belief is useless.
02:53:35.000 It's just credulity.
02:53:36.000 It's something you do.
02:53:37.000 You have to do it.
02:53:38.000 Well, John, I think also the ability to spread that kind of information and knowledge to people and to be able to do it in a form like this, it's very rare and very new.
02:53:48.000 And I think that the Internet and this open access to information that we have on it is one of the best hopes that we have for turning this whole thing around.
02:53:56.000 And thank you very much, my friend.
02:53:58.000 Thank you very much for doing this.
02:53:59.000 I would like to do it any other time with you.
02:54:00.000 We'll eventually have to work some kind of a cruise thing out, and we'll all go down to Egypt and get our minds blown with you.
02:54:07.000 Thank you very much, sir.
02:54:08.000 I really appreciate it.
02:54:09.000 Take care, John.
02:54:10.000 Take care, brother.
02:54:11.000 My pleasure.
02:54:12.000 Bye.
02:54:15.000 Are we done?
02:54:15.000 That for me, man.
02:54:16.000 That is?
02:54:18.000 Tell me when we're off Skype.
02:54:20.000 Okay.
02:54:20.000 Okay.
02:54:21.000 That for me, man.
02:54:22.000 That was amazing.
02:54:23.000 Holy shit, that guy's awesome.
02:54:25.000 Yeah.
02:54:26.000 That was, you know, I mean, you need a guy who's out there doing something like that to get that kind of information out.
02:54:33.000 I'm just so happy that he exists.
02:54:35.000 Check out his Magical Egypt DVD series.
02:54:37.000 It'll fucking blow you away.
02:54:39.000 Thank you to The Fleshlight for sponsoring our podcast.
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02:55:19.000 This is how concerned we are with making sure that people do not feel ripped off, but instead...
02:55:24.000 We provide you with something that I 100% believe in, I 100% take, and we stand behind it.
02:55:29.000 We don't want anybody getting ripped off.
02:55:31.000 It's the shit.
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02:55:38.000 That's it for this week of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast.
02:55:40.000 But if you're fucking podcast starving, you're like, dude, I ain't heard you talk enough.
02:55:45.000 We are going to be back, Brian as well, on the Ice House Chronicles tonight.
02:55:51.000 What is it?
02:55:52.000 June?
02:55:52.000 The fuck are we?
02:55:53.000 June 8th.
02:55:55.000 Friday night.
02:55:56.000 If you want to listen to it on iTunes or any other place, go to deathsquad.tv.
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02:56:05.000 And get that shit.
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02:56:08.000 Like all the shit we give you guys.
02:56:09.000 Because we love you.
02:56:10.000 Big kisses.
02:56:11.000 And we'll see you soon.
02:56:12.000 Thanks everybody for tuning in.
02:56:14.000 Ayur Baderchi.