In this episode of the Jesse Michaels Podcast, host Jesse Michaels sits down with his good friend and fellow archaeologist, Dr. John Reagan, to talk about his family's journey in the gold rush of the late 19th century and early 20th century.
00:01:34.000There were bandits that would hide up in the hills and they would sack Spanish caravans and drag the gold up into the hills to not get caught, to hopefully come back for it later.
00:01:43.000The Spanish are out there mining for gold and everything.
00:01:46.000My family gets caught up in one of the biggest mysteries of Texas history.
00:01:50.000If you were to go to some bookstore, there's a popular one called The Sons of Coronado.
00:01:55.000It's like this legacy of people looking for Spanish gold.
00:01:58.000Somewhere in there, my family will be in there.
00:02:00.000So this started in the 1890s, and it's this long saga of the gold being – the treasure being dragged to San Antonio and all these people get killed, and only one of these four Reagan brothers makes it out.
00:02:13.000He gets involved in oil drilling out in East Texas.
00:02:18.000And then so my family moved out to East Texas.
00:02:20.000And then his son was born, which is my grandfather.
00:02:23.000And then he continues this legacy of continuing his father's oil company.
00:02:28.000But then he also begins gold mining in New Mexico.
00:02:31.000And while he's out in New Mexico, he hears these legends of these seven lost Spanish gold mines.
00:02:35.000And because there was a local police officer who was like a treasure hunter.
00:02:40.000And he knew who my grandfather was and the story behind our family.
00:05:06.000I think everybody, when you start looking at the history of the human race and you start looking at the history of civilizations, everyone gets fascinated.
00:05:14.000Because we kind of like woke up in this life.
00:05:19.000You know, we didn't choose to be born during this timeline.
00:05:58.000There's a lot of people that have been teaching a narrative and teaching them in school, and they don't want anyone else teaching this stuff.
00:06:08.000They want to be the only people that can tell people what the history of the human race is.
00:06:13.000And unfortunately for them, There's too much other evidence.
00:07:15.000Like if you're in conflict with people about this very thing that we're talking about, And these people that you're in conflict with keep winning.
00:07:24.000I remember there was an old documentary that was narrated by Charlton Heston.
00:07:36.000Yeah, I believe it was on television at the time.
00:07:39.000And one of the things in that was they were trying to talk about Robert Schock's work with the water erosion around the Temple of the Sphinx.
00:07:51.000And there was this very arrogant archaeologist.
00:07:54.000I don't remember his name, but I remember he had a smackable face.
00:08:09.000So, like, Gobekli Tepe threw a giant monkey wrench into the gears of this narrative.
00:08:16.000And now they're forced to reckon with this.
00:08:19.000Zahi didn't even know what Gobekli Tepe was, which was insane.
00:08:23.000There was a lot of things that he wasn't familiar with, like Zeptepe.
00:08:28.000It's either the Turin or the Turid Kings List, which talks about the pre-dynastic, semi-mythological kings going back tens of thousands of years.
00:08:54.000And then it was also the data from the Italian scientists that were studying this tomography and this ability to look underground with satellite radar and also dismissing that.
00:09:07.000But then I brought up the Temple of Osiris.
00:09:58.000And it's like one side is accosting the other over their fascinations and their interests and the fact that they're able to talk about.
00:10:06.000to make a living from the things that they're fascinated about and talking about it.
00:10:09.000And it feels like academia has become bitter because being in the academic world is a very rough and jaded place.
00:10:21.000And a lot of young, aspiring archaeologists who existed, who maybe would have had an approach like me, but existed during this time where you could only have your pursuits if the university signed off on it, right?
00:10:35.000But now universities are like ideologically captured and every little thing that you do has to be aligned with the university.
00:10:42.000And so all of your fascinating ideas that you have in your mid-20s to your mid-30s when you're young and able to go off into the jungle and find something, they all get shut down by people who had their ideas shut down.
00:10:53.000But now it's like it's the Wild West where you can have somebody like me or whoever put together an expedition and I legally cannot.
00:11:09.000Can you legally dig things up in certain countries if you get permission?
00:11:15.000Oh, well, I mean, yeah, if I got permission, but, I mean, it would be next to impossible for me, for somebody like me to do that.
00:11:26.000Oh, well, you would have the local universities there who also have their own, you know, high-credentialed people who are going to, you know, if I don't come in with a PhD, I'm never going to go get a PhD.
00:11:35.000But if I don't come in with something like that, then I don't have the experience, I don't have, you know, the authority to be able to do something like this, and they would never trust me to carry out, like, a good excavation.
00:12:35.000And this is why I don't think that – like I love the mystery of the ancient world and why I'm so baffled when people want to immediately shut anything down because of the amount of history that is lost to us is – You know, Egypt has been getting looted, we know, for the last, let's say, 3,000 years at least.
00:13:01.000Foreign nations have been coming in and raiding Egypt and taking the artifacts out.
00:13:06.000And so, you know, so much of the artifact record is lost.
00:13:10.000And I think that the real problem is the confidence with which somebody like Zahi speaks.
00:13:26.000But when you're so confident about your opinions that you then begin to chastise other people, put them down for it, and then go the next mile and start making accusations of them being racist and things like that.
00:14:21.000Like, well, okay, even if you didn't blatantly do it, you insinuated it and you were okay with insinuating it.
00:14:25.000And some of these people exist in a realm where, in their little bubbles, where they throw around the word racist all the time.
00:14:33.000And then when they get to the wider world where the rest of us exist, they find out very quickly that we don't throw that term around lightly and accuse people of these things.
00:14:42.000And then, you know, at the end of the podcast, When he said, you asked, you know, the kind of temperature came down, and then I think maybe you asked something like, you know, well, what can people do to help archaeology?
00:14:54.000And he was like, oh, you can donate to the SAA.
00:14:56.000But the SAA is the one that wrote the letter.
00:14:58.000And it's like, oh, man, that's just, it's not a good look.
00:15:03.000Well, it's a real problem with human beings and ego when they have positions of power and authority.
00:15:11.000especially over something that is very esoteric, something that is like...
00:15:48.000Alexandria was kind of in the basket of Rome.
00:15:52.000The Ptolemies, who are the Greek pharaohs in Egypt, so the Greeks are controlling Egypt after Alexander comes in 332 BC.
00:16:01.000So Alexander dies, his best friend Ptolemy becomes pharaoh.
00:16:05.000But the Ptolemies were very weak, not very good rulers, and so Rome kind of does like what the US does, where they get pulled into conflicts, and then once they're there and they conquer everything, they seize all the power.
00:16:20.000And so they controlled Egypt and they were pulling all of their, they were keeping the Ptolemies in power, the Roman soldiers were, and they were pulling all that grain.
00:16:28.000And so Caesar follows Pompey, chases him to Alexandria, and so that Pompey can't flee, Caesar says, we'll burn the docks.
00:16:40.000Well, when you landed in Alexandria, you would land at this dock that went to a road called Soma Road.
00:20:16.000And so that earthquake just reverberates down to Egypt.
00:20:21.000And this massive tsunami destroys the entire city of Alexandria.
00:20:24.000And it said it was so catastrophic that I think it's plenty of the elder or plenty of the younger comes down in a rescue mission from Italy.
00:20:33.000And he comes to Alexandria and he records that 50,000 people in the city are missing because of the wave that gets pushed in.
00:20:41.000And that all of the giant boats – these are giant boats.
00:20:44.000giant, gigantic boats in Alexandria's harbor are sitting on top of all the rooftops in the city.
00:20:50.000And it's after this point that the location of Alexander's body and the location of Alexandria's library just...
00:21:02.000All of the giant stones that were used to build the city were repurposed for other things.
00:21:07.000But in one fatal swoop, Alexandria's library, the Museon, and Alexandria's mausoleum completely disappear from the historical record.
00:22:38.000It just shows you how vulnerable knowledge is.
00:22:42.000I really think about that today because Obviously, we have a lot of books and most things that are like most physics work, most work on archaeology, most work on history is available in book form.
00:22:59.000But how much of what we have is on hard drives?
00:23:02.000And if there was a power outage, just a global worldwide power outage that lasted six months, we're fucked.
00:23:12.000It's a small amount of time for an enormous cataclysmic disaster to completely erase tens of thousands of years of understanding of everything.
00:23:42.000That's a precarious place for them to be.
00:23:43.000Starting from scratch, starting from scratch today, would be very similar, I think, to
00:24:01.000Civilization, if that stuff is correct, if Graham's position and Randall Carlson's position is that there was probably a much more advanced civilization than just hunter-gatherers that lived 10,000 plus years ago, how many thousands of years would it take before we started?
00:25:35.000And he was like—he's like, this isn't—he's like, these people in the Amazon are not— Primitive savages like my colleagues at the Royal Geographic Society in London believe that they are.
00:25:47.000These are people who are the descendants of a fallen great civilization.
00:25:53.000He was like, the way they interact with each other is so sophisticated.
00:25:56.000Why did he think they were the descendants of a fallen civilization and not the people that were currently living in the most modern version of this civilization?
00:26:11.000There's some things that are left out.
00:26:13.000Before he started writing this, I think he always had these ideas in the back of his mind.
00:26:19.000And so you don't really get the origin of why he initially started thinking this.
00:26:23.000But while he's exploring South America, he's hearing all these stories of semi-contacted people.
00:26:32.000Natives who still live the native life, but they can speak Spanish, and he can speak a little bit of Spanish and communicate with these people.
00:26:38.000So he would hear about, oh yeah, there's this huge city of gold off in the jungle, months traveled that way.
00:26:46.000And it's the same kind of legend that all these Spaniards had heard.
00:26:49.000So it's this idea of, well, there was this civilization that used to be out there.
00:26:53.000And so Percy thought that maybe it has something to do with Atlantis.
00:26:57.000And so that was part of his journey looking for it.
00:27:01.000It's actually his wife, Nina Fawcett, I believe.
00:27:04.000When she's in a library in England, she finds a Portuguese document.
00:27:14.000I could have the name of it wrong, but I think it's Manuscript 512.
00:27:18.000In that, it's these guys who are kind of like semi-professional Portuguese explorers.
00:27:24.000In the mid-1700s that are going around Brazil, and they find this huge stone city with statues that they thought looked like Greek gods in the middle of the Amazon.
00:27:36.000And so, you know, the perception, like my perception looking back through it is like, well, I mean, yeah, these are Portuguese guys who come from Europe.
00:27:41.000So when they see something that's native, their only lens to see it through is what they've grown up knowing, which is the Greek and Roman world.
00:27:49.000So that's how they communicate this idea.
00:27:57.000And so this was completely forgotten until Percy's wife found this.
00:28:01.000So when he first went down to the Amazon, he was only there on a mapping expedition on behalf of Great Britain, which he was probably a spy.
00:28:11.000I'm guessing that that's what was actually happening there because he was a spy when he was in the military.
00:28:15.000And I think what he was doing is on an official basis, he's charting the border around Brazil.
00:28:23.000But really what he's doing is collecting information so that maybe Great Britain can have a colony there someday.
00:28:28.000But then the war disrupts all of that.
00:28:31.000And he has to go fight in World War I, which is funny because it's the same thing the Nazis were doing in the 1930s.
00:28:38.000But anyways, so while he's there on his first – while he's there on his first expedition, he's – really elegant little statues and things.
00:29:05.000He found one that was made out of this like solid black stone that he could never, and it had this glow to it, and he could never, maybe not a glow, but like, Like if you shine the light on it, you can tell that it's translucent in a way.
00:29:18.000I've seen stones like this in the Aztec realm.
00:29:21.000They have these scepters that have these orb things on the top.
00:29:24.000And if you shine a light on it, it's like this otherworldly looking thing.
00:29:26.000I can only imagine if you're on like peyote.
00:29:32.000It went missing with him or somewhere in his expeditions that doesn't exist anymore.
00:29:36.000But there's an illustration of it in Exploration Faucet that you could find.
00:29:40.000And so he thought like when he was seeing all this on his first expedition, he's like, wait, these aren't these primitive savages that all my colleagues that I don't even like back home think that these people are.
00:29:55.000And so Percy didn't know if it was a fallen civilization that lived in the Amazon or whether it was still out there somewhere.
00:30:01.000And he was trying to find either the ruins of it or the living.
00:30:07.000It's still interesting that he would think that way instead of this is the pinnacle of civilization in the Amazon, which is why they're so advanced.
00:30:17.000I feel like a preconceived notion that he had that there was an advanced civilization and that it had fallen.
00:30:41.000He had the utmost admiration and respect for these people.
00:30:44.000Like he was completely infatuated with their way of life and trying to – you know, what his goal was was to prove that the – like the narrow-minded perspective – He was determined to prove them wrong.
00:31:03.000And so he had a great admiration for these people.
00:31:06.000And he wanted to try to find like a big, big civilization.
00:31:11.000Something with enough people that could rival Europe.
00:31:15.000And where he went missing was in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.
00:31:21.000And the last place that they know that he was at was on May 29th, 1925.
00:31:26.000And he wrote a letter to his wife from Dead Horse Camp.
00:31:28.000And he was like, it may be a while before you hear from me.
00:31:30.000It could be up to a year or two before you hear from me.
00:31:33.000I'm about to head into a very dense area.
00:31:35.000And my trail runners who would go back and forth with his notes, they weren't going to follow him out there because it's too dangerous.
00:31:41.000And that was the last letter that he had written.
00:31:43.000And he was heading off into what's called the Zingu region, which is like the Zingu River.
00:31:50.000And it's one of the most hostile regions in the Amazon, maybe even today.
00:31:56.000Teddy Roosevelt had trouble when he went there.
00:31:58.000But the Zingu region is where all of the major LIDAR came out within the last 10 years.
00:32:04.000They found all the ruins of these giant cities.
00:32:07.000And there's a city called Kiriguyu, I think.
00:32:18.000And, you know, when you look at the LIDAR images, you can't get a perspective of how big they are.
00:32:23.000I have access to a LIDAR database of the entire United States, and I've mapped all kinds of huge, uncharted mound sites in Florida, all of the southeast.
00:32:36.000And when you first look at them on a map, you're like, oh, okay, maybe that looks like it's 50 feet long or something.
00:32:42.000No, they'll be like 300 yards long, like these giant raised platforms in the middle of the forest here in the U.S. And if I had access to LIDAR data like that, where I could measure it down on the Amazon, some of these things are miles long.
00:32:55.000Like, raised platforms are a mile long.
00:33:34.000Yeah, so if you went out there You may not realize that you were standing on a mound.
00:33:40.000Like you really got to train your eyes.
00:33:42.000You know, I put out this, I filmed this little series about a year and a half ago called Jungle of Stone where I was going through the jungles in Central America.
00:33:50.000And we charted this city that had 16 pyramids in it.
00:33:54.000You know, we were there all day long and we charted 16 pyramids.
00:33:58.000And when I put it out, I got all these comments are like, you're not doing anything but walking on a bunch of hills because it's so hard to see it.
00:34:04.000The jungle just claims everything back.
00:34:06.000So it takes, you really have to sit with seeing these things in person for a while before it's, That is a structure under the jungle.
00:34:15.000And so Percy Fawcett, where that LIDAR came out, is one of the places that he told his wife.
00:34:21.000He didn't share this publicly where he thought that the city was, but it's like bang on.
00:34:26.000He was exactly correct about where he thought a city would be.
00:34:29.000And we don't know if he reached it or not.
00:34:51.000And it makes you wonder, as technology increases in its potential, what other new technologies will be discovered that will allow you to, instead of having this ambiguous view of under the pyramids, have a crystal clear, accurate dimension by dimension, almost like a 3D map.
00:36:31.000And you know, whenever I, you know, so growing up, And my dad comes up to me, he's like, that's a big book.
00:36:43.000And I go, I know, it's like I'm reading a textbook for fun, you know?
00:36:46.000And it was dense reading for me as a 16-year-old.
00:36:50.000And so, you know, I was so inspired by Graham.
00:36:53.000And then I went off and, like, got traditionally educated.
00:36:57.000And so I kind of have both of these perspectives.
00:36:59.000And I'm often shocked and disappointed at how other professionals There was an Egyptologist on another popular podcast, and the podcast host asked him to properly explain the mystery around the pyramid.
00:37:20.000And it was just so subpar, I was shocked.
00:37:23.000And I was like, I'm not even an Egyptologist.
00:37:34.000But one of the things that I never see talked about is the concentration of energy along the Nile Valley.
00:37:41.000Like, okay, so, you know, if I had to drop a pin anywhere on the earth where I think Atlantis would be, I would probably put it like in the Sahara somewhere, you know, along one of these major lakes where there's a lot of people living at one time.
00:37:55.000And then later on, as Say beginning around like 800, I'm sorry, 8000 BC, it starts rapidly drying up.
00:38:05.000It's probably a little bit before that.
00:38:06.000And then by about 4000 BC, it's completely dry.
00:38:09.000So your Saharans only have a few places that they can go.
00:38:12.000They can go to the Mediterranean coast.
00:38:15.000They can go down kind of into the Congo and in the savannas.
00:38:18.000Or they can go to this fertile valley oasis where it's like five And so some people went there.
00:38:30.000And so you have this hyper concentration of energy and all these people living somewhere together.
00:38:36.000For what we know is the first time in history.
00:38:38.000We can verify it, I guess, if that makes sense.
00:38:41.000And so rather than being able to have these huge pieces of property where they can all live separated from each other, kind of like in the Sahara, you have all this space and it's so luxurious.
00:38:51.000Now you have to live on top of each other and you have to build up these cities.
00:38:57.000And so all that energy compacted into one place in this fertile oasis is either destined to completely crumble and fall apart, or it's It's this thin strip of highly concentrated, genius, hardworking people figuring out how to extrapolate the most out of their natural world and create some of the greatest things the world has ever seen.
00:39:21.000We did it, you know, and I've never seen any I think that's a good explanation, at least.
00:39:31.000And I'm open to things in Egypt being much older.
00:39:32.000Like the Sphinx is definitely older than the pyramids.
00:39:35.000But I'm just always disappointed at like the very low level with which our And it's kind of like you were asking, okay, but how do you know that?
00:39:49.000Explain that to me in a way that I can understand.
00:40:27.000Especially when there's these forums now like YouTube where someone like you can put up videos explaining things or Jimmy Corsetti or Graham Hancock.
00:40:37.000The access to people to share fascinating ideas, it's not limited to universities anymore.
00:40:45.000And I think that drives them crazy because they spent so much time being in control.
00:40:50.000And then all of a sudden it's just like...
00:41:02.000And then there's people that are going to support both of them on either side.
00:41:05.000And who knows how much of it is even real because now we have AI bots that get turned loose by whether it's universities like the University of Zurich that just got in trouble for running that experiment with social media, which is really wild.
00:41:19.000So we don't even know, like, how much of it is organic until you see something like voting.
00:41:24.000And then you go, oh, this is how people really feel.
00:41:27.000But how much of that has even been influenced by all these AI campaigns?
00:41:32.000But what we do know is that human arrogance has always been a real problem.
00:41:36.000And the same thing that Percy Foster was probably dealing with, or Percy Fawcett rather, was probably dealing with when he was, you know, the people back home that thought these people were primitive.
00:41:45.000It's like this arrogance that human beings People love to be experts.
00:41:50.000They love to be experts and they also equate their own self-worth with being accurate about information that you really can't be accurate about.
00:42:00.000Instead of just being humble but yet knowledgeable, which is a great position.
00:42:05.000And when you talk to someone and they're humble and knowledgeable, that's a wonderful thing.
00:42:15.000Archaeologists are not doing that, which is why they're rejecting people like Graham Hancock.
00:42:19.000What they should be doing is embracing the work that he's doing because he's self-funded.
00:42:25.000And because he's just selling books and doing his thing and appearing on podcasts and developing this audience, he's allowed to do all these fantastic voyages.
00:42:38.000He's in Iraq right now, studying the ancient Sumerian civilization with the remnants of it.
00:43:09.000And it's just proof that a guy I mean, gosh, was I – I just graduated from high school.
00:43:17.000And so he was kind of – like inspired me to be like – he was this young, charismatic guy that could – And he was effective at doing it and inspired me for a long time.
00:43:33.000And, you know, lo and behold, I guess, what, six, seven years later, he's still at it.
00:43:46.000Like when all this happened, I was like, yeah, I mean, I get the concern, but I don't think the Turkish government cares what any of us over here in the U.S. think.
00:43:56.000And then there's kind of like the backpedaling of, oh, well, it was always in the plan to remove the trees.
00:44:00.000But I think it's – I think people might disagree with Jimmy's approach, whatever.
00:44:04.000But it's – you can't deny the fact that he himself, an independent guy – And in a way, it's like it shows me like, oh, you know, these expeditions that I'm planning and things that I'm going to go out and survey and document for myself, like these can make real changes.
00:44:28.000And these are things I had planned in Florida, here in the Southeast, in the States, in Central America, and in the Amazon.
00:44:34.000and it's like encouraging like wow I mean we're really approaching Right, but in the physical archaeology world.
00:47:15.000And when these openings exist and guys like Jimmy run through them but meticulously document things and talk about them with humility and talk about them with a general understanding of the absolute undeniable facts.
00:47:28.000And then it creates – And then because of that enormous audience, he has a huge impact on actual archaeology.
00:48:25.000Just like the Internet opened up information to everybody, we need to open up the exploration of information to everybody and not have it contained with a few people that have degrees from places that we know are ideologically captured.
00:48:57.000And we see that through basically every place where there's a few group of people, this isolated, insulated group of people that has the ultimate influence.
00:49:13.000It's just a danger that the human ego and the human mind fall prey to almost every single time.
00:49:22.000The internet, what it's done is it's like this great equalizer.
00:49:39.000There's going to be people that say things that are absolutely ludicrous, and you have to be able to listen to them and then listen to people that are more intelligent and more rational and also objective and go, that guy is – I'm interested in this guy.
00:49:54.000I know he's not gonna lie, you know, and there's too many Yeah, yeah.
00:50:07.000I mean, I just experienced this the other day.
00:50:10.000You know, so I had a, a This is what I'm going to do.
00:50:21.000And so I applied to the University of Athens in Greece, and I was really into the classics, and I was going to go for that.
00:50:28.000And then I just had this – let's just say I was in the jungle, and I had a mind-opening experience.
00:50:34.000And I was reminded of the fact that my purpose here – the reason I started doing all this was – And I'm interested in a lot of different things.
00:51:25.000And so, I don't know, 2015, you guys are talking, and he's like, well, I published that then, but DNA research has come out that says that these people don't have African DNA in them, and that maybe this is Polynesian, maybe this is Australasian people intermixing, and that's why they have this unique look, whatever.
00:51:42.000But in the Olmec world, there's this monument.
00:51:45.000that is actually called El Negro and you look at it And it's not an Olmec.
00:51:51.000And so I post about this on my X account and I just kind of like list everything I've seen in the Olmec world.
00:51:57.000And I'm like, you know, this is really fascinating.
00:51:59.000Maybe this is evidence of Africans who were in the Olmec world.
00:52:03.000And I hadn't seen this monument before I saw it in person.
00:52:05.000Because you go in the Olmec realm or the region in Mexico and you go to these museums and you look at the log or the ledger that people have been on and nobody has visited this museum in the last four months.
00:53:32.000There's enough similarities that I could say, oh, those could be the same people.
00:53:35.000Well, the only counter I give to that is when you visit the Olmec realm, you see a lot more than just the heads.
00:53:41.000You see a lot of Olmec faces, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, maybe well over a hundred.
00:53:46.000And when you've seen them all and you kind of get the gist of, like, the way they generally look, this guy will really stand out.
00:53:53.000I took a group of students there, and as soon as we all came in and saw it, based on everything we'd been seeing for the past week, it immediately stood out to us.
00:54:01.000Well, certainly the thick brow is unique to all the OMICs wearing helmets.
00:54:36.000It certainly does look that way, but I was on a plane to Mexico a couple months ago, and I was going into the Olmec realm, and I was like, I wanted to take a picture of this guy.
00:54:46.000I looked to the left of me, and he was an Olmec man sitting next to me.
00:54:50.000And he was, you know, he looked like, he didn't look like any Mexican I've ever seen.
00:54:54.000There's something there with the DNA of the Olmec people that is definitely...
00:55:58.000Flags are invented, or the first place that we have evidence for it is along the Nile Valley on these pre-dynastic pots, which they're not the stone vases, but just like clay pottery.
00:56:09.000They would make little paintings on them.
00:56:11.000And people have these riverboats that have these flags on them.
00:56:13.000And the flags would say what city you had come from or what village you had come from.
00:57:36.000But if we shoot for dead center 900 BC, the Phoenicians – These are the ancient world's greatest sailors that we know of.
00:57:49.000And so there are like experimental archaeological or scientific, I don't know, expeditions done that show if you would send one of these early Iron Age boats or if you send any ship out
00:58:21.000into the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and straight into the Gulf of Mexico.
00:58:24.000And if that had happened, if people who had looked like they're in the old world like this guy, if that had happened...
00:58:38.000And the reason I feel so strongly about that is because we do not have flags, turbans, or boots in the ancient Americas.
00:58:44.000This guy looks nothing like a Native American.
00:58:47.000And the flag, turban, and boots are all Old World features.
00:58:52.000You know what's fascinating to me, too?
00:58:54.000The image on the lower right of the bird's head looks very similar to the carvings on Gobekli Tepe.
01:04:23.000And then how do they get them on the boat?
01:04:25.000And when it's on the boat, how exactly does this work if they're transporting it by boat?
01:04:29.000And kind of the same mystery in Egypt too, right?
01:04:32.000How do the nuances of these things work?
01:04:35.000So he devised this algorithm or whatever where you could put in the hypothetical size of your Olmec raft and put in the hypothetical size of an Olmec head into this database or whatever.
01:05:27.000And then when, do they even know what language they spoke?
01:05:30.000No, we don't know what language they spoke.
01:05:33.000We don't even know what they called themselves.
01:05:35.000The only reason we call them the Olmecs is because Cortez, 1519 to 1521, he's moving through Mexico to conquer Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.
01:05:44.000During this time, you have these Spanish chroniclers that are taking in information, you know, taking in information, but not at the rate that everything's being destroyed.
01:05:52.000You know, all these people are dying from this disease and influenza.
01:05:57.000And there's a record of what the people who lived in the Olmec region are called at that time in 1520, let's say.
01:06:07.000And the Aztecs called them the Olmecs in their language, Nahuatl.
01:06:12.000And those Olmec people, the name means the rubber people or the people of the land of rubber.
01:07:12.000We know their relationship with other people around them, like the Maya were at war with Teotihuacan, but the civilization had already fallen.
01:07:18.000So when the Aztecs arrived, the Olmecs had been gone for – The Olmecs had already been gone.
01:07:27.000Teotihuacan had been gone for 1,000 years.
01:07:31.000The Maya collapsed long before the Spanish got there.
01:07:35.000And so it's just again like the Americas are just so mysterious and there's so much to know there.
01:07:41.000And so kind of getting back to what I was saying is when I talk about the mysteries of the Americas, I immediately get – I don't have any colleagues in the academic realm, but other academics who will immediately jump in my comment section on X or whatever, and they'll reprimand me, and they'll be like, oh, so back to the pseudo-archaeology, is it?
01:08:04.000And I'm like, so I can't talk about anything that's fascinating.
01:08:07.000I need to talk about things that are boring so you don't get upset with me.
01:08:22.000Yeah, and they'll be like, okay, this is a perfect representation of what you guys do.
01:08:28.000I step just slightly out of this line, or what you think is appropriate for me, and I'm talking about things that are interesting, that inspire people to be interested in the ancient world, to go see these sites.
01:08:38.000These people, they don't like you, they don't like the people that you have on.
01:08:43.000How many people do you think you've sent to Egypt?
01:08:45.000You know, like, you had a significant impact.
01:08:48.000This show had a significant impact on me being interested in the ancient world.
01:08:52.000And I have traveled all over the world, you know, because largely, you know, some of the show inspired me to do that.
01:08:59.000And I'm probably one of the few people that found you because of Graham Hancock.
01:09:05.000Yeah, rather than the other way around.
01:09:08.000And so, you know, I've traveled all over the world, and then what I have done is inspired other people to travel around the world.
01:09:13.000So, you know, how many of these archaeologists that are keyboard warriors hiding behind, you know, a desk or whatever, how many of these people are inspiring people to travel around the world?
01:09:23.000And, you know, it's just, again, we're about to reach this, like, archaeological wild west where I don't really know what's going to happen in the future.
01:09:31.000You're always going to have people that are threatened by an emerging new thing.
01:09:48.000You know, get a radio show, figure out how to do it.
01:09:50.000This is the beginning, the early days.
01:09:52.000You know, obviously you can't do that anymore.
01:09:54.000But I think the same thing is happening with archaeologists because Flint Dibble's own university that has an archaeology program, they're cutting the archaeology program.
01:10:54.000If you really understand debating and you really understand like the actual impact that these kind of conversations have on people, the objective person on the outside looking at it, they see someone attacking someone, calling them all these names, unfounded.
01:11:06.000And you go, oh, that guy's argument probably sucks, like instantaneously.
01:11:10.000So they're destroying themselves while they're doing this.
01:11:13.000But you'll see this in every walk of life.
01:11:18.000It's just a human thing when they don't want to work as hard as other people or they don't have the young fire like you have.
01:11:25.000Like there's a thing that people have when they're very curious and young and they don't have maybe a lot of responsibilities or bills or problems.
01:11:32.000And they can just – they can devote their energy to this pursuit that terrifies people that have been kind of like half-assing it for a long time.
01:11:41.000Half-assing it and hiding behind these – It's not going to work anymore.
01:11:54.000It doesn't work anymore with podcasts.
01:11:56.000It's not going to work anymore with your kind of work in archaeology.
01:12:01.000It's not going to work anymore with UFO disclosure.
01:12:04.000It's not going to work anymore with any of this stuff.
01:12:07.000Way more interested in getting to the bottom of things, and they don't trust institutions anymore.
01:12:14.000And the institutions are feeling the pressure of independent media, you know, like going back to the Gobekli Tepe tree situation.
01:12:24.000It'll be really interesting to see, you know, like Jimmy's in an interesting position where maybe there's a way that like the relationship between Independent people and the popular, enthusiastic audience and the archaeological departments in Turkey can have a better relationship because of these things in the future.
01:12:46.000People like you become the head of an archaeology department.
01:12:50.000That's, this is really the only way it's gonna work.
01:12:52.000It's like, it's almost like these institutions have to feel so much pressure and so much You know, sort of like CNN is trying to hire objective journalists now.
01:13:07.000We gotta get rid of Don Lemon and Brian Stelter.
01:13:18.000From what I can see, And this is the hard part is sort of we get a skewed view into the archaeological world or the academic world.
01:13:29.000And sometimes I don't even know what's what because the archaeologists that make their opinions known are usually the ones with really bad opinions.
01:13:39.000And then all the other people that are pretty agreeable, they just kind of sit on the sideline, right?
01:13:45.000It's hard to know, like, what are most people, what are most of these future archaeologists, where are they thinking, where's their mind at?
01:13:53.000And some of the young people I talk to, they are fascinated by Graham Hancock.
01:13:56.000They may not agree with – I guess in a way I could say this.
01:14:00.000They may love the first nine episodes of Ancient Apocalypse.
01:14:03.000But in the 10th episode where Graham gives the end of his thesis, they'll be like, OK, I see the evidence differently.
01:14:10.000And some of the mysteries you pointed out along the way are valid.
01:14:13.000Like the idea of – well, you know, the – Okay, what's the answer to this mystery?
01:14:28.000Could it have been that we're missing a chapter of history that's before that where a different civilization did it?
01:14:35.000Or is there, for some reason, there's an artifact record that's lost to us today?
01:14:40.000And so you have guys like Graham who will come in and posit, well, there could have been a lost civilization that did this.
01:14:48.000An archaeologist, a young archaeologist, may disagree with the Lost Civilization, but they say, but Graham, you really pointed out the fact and made it well known that the artifact record that we have of how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery.
01:14:58.000And how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery.
01:15:02.000So a lot of young archaeologists, at least I say a lot, it's really just the ones I talk to in my spare time that are my age, they're fascinated by these ideas.
01:15:12.000And my hope is maybe these people become leaders someday, but at the same time, I don't know, to get ahead in that world, man, you've got to be a dog.
01:15:21.000The world's poisoned, and the people at the top are not going to let go.
01:15:24.000They're going to stay in there until the Noam Chomsky's age.
01:15:28.000I just think it's never going to end in that way.
01:15:31.000I think it's got to become some sort of an independent Branch like you know a break off.
01:15:37.000Yeah, you know Zahi is a is a You know, you have a lot of different missions from different countries working in Egypt.
01:15:49.000You have like a German mission, you have the American mission, you know, different people working at different sites.
01:15:53.000And I can't speak to every country that's working there.
01:15:56.000You have Australian missions that are working in Egypt, digging at certain sites.
01:15:59.000But, you know, when I watch Zahi, I'm like, yeah, this is the what you're seeing.
01:16:07.000This is the attitude that has been at the spear point of Egyptology for the last lifetime.
01:16:20.000Think about working in his industry underneath him.
01:16:23.000Think about all the people that were a part of the discoveries that he made that feel so disrespected and so overlooked.
01:16:29.000Not once during that podcast did he ever acknowledge all the hardworking archaeologists that – He just took all this limelight.
01:16:39.000And so, you know, clearly his identity is tied into what's in his coffee table book.
01:16:46.000And, you know, for him to act like that's the Bible of Giza is insane.
01:16:49.000I own the book, and I've read it, and it has half of a page about the subterranean chamber in Khufu's Pyramid.
01:16:56.000So you could write a whole book about that.
01:17:02.000I was just going to say, man, when you go to Egypt, there are some things that you're going to be appalled by, by the modern Egyptian world.
01:17:15.000I do this series on YouTube called Megaliths You've Never Seen Before, and I'm always trying to find these weird obscure blocks that you never see on Google, and I'm walking around the side of the Pyramid of Unas.
01:17:29.000And there's a turd on the side of the pyramid.
01:17:58.000The poop on the pyramid is pretty much like, that's kind of my mental, that's burned into my brain, my image of Egyptology.
01:18:07.000In some aspects, like when it's isolated to Egypt, I can't speak for all the other missions that operate in Egypt, but what were you about to say?
01:18:57.000As far as the manufacturing aspects, the engineering, the potential usages of these artifacts, it's not really my specialty.
01:19:10.000These vases are These vases are fascinating, but, you know, I guess my interest would be studying, like, what can we learn about the context around these things and how they existed in their world and how people interacted with them more so than, you know, what did these things, what were they actually used for, I guess, and how exactly were they made?
01:19:31.000And so I just don't know about Chris Dunn's theory.
01:19:34.000You know, I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is, like, well, you know, most of the pyramid is limestone and the interior is granite.
01:19:40.000I hear people talk about how the makeup of the granite could be conductive in some way, but man, it's like the farthest thing from my set of knowledge.
01:19:49.000It is absolutely fascinating, though, because if he's accurate, if he's onto it, boy, does that change everything.
01:19:57.000And if those Italian scientists that believe that there's literally a two-kilometer deep structure underneath the pyramid, if they're correct, boy.
01:20:12.000I think that the main drama around those scans was, you know, when the scans came out, I don't think anybody was denying what was seen on the scans.
01:20:32.000Because even me, I was a little bit like, huh?
01:20:36.000When they made an art concept of it and they took the king's chamber and the relieving chambers in the Great Pyramid and superimposed it onto the Middle Pyramid.
01:20:50.000they made five of them and I was thinking like wow why do that?
01:20:54.000Like you're kind of undermining what your skin is when you're creating like a fantasy image Yeah, you're getting ahead of yourself because, you know, we need to do the whole scan again, but you need to have tests.
01:21:07.000So, like, Luis Alvarez, are you familiar with him?
01:21:09.000He worked on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer.
01:21:12.000And after the war in the 50s or in the 60s, he got to go to Egypt and he scanned in the coffer pyramid.
01:21:39.000But they didn't find anything, but the Stanford project came the next decade, and they found subterranean chambers under Koffer's pyramid.
01:21:47.000There's one like 69 feet down and another one 120 feet.
01:21:55.000And so, yeah, I mean, I guess we just have to wait and see what's going to happen.
01:22:00.000And I know that the scanned pyramids guys, the ones who found the void above the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid, I know they're interested in this now and they're going to verify if this is true or not.
01:22:14.000Yeah, I'm interested in seeing how this goes.
01:22:46.000And the most conservative explanation is that it's an open interior that served as a ramp where they were pulling the blocks up higher up to the top.
01:22:55.000Nobody really knows exactly how they were built.
01:22:58.000And the angle of that grand gallery is really, really steep.
01:23:03.000I don't know that you could pull an 80-ton granite block up an angle that steep.
01:23:07.000It seems like everyone who's an expert in that – To be honest, I have no idea.
01:23:20.000I was fascinated when I heard an Egyptologist when I was in Egypt in January and I was asking him, what do you think that they're going to find in that void?
01:23:27.000And he was telling me, I think that that's where Khufu is buried.
01:24:34.000Well, you know, man, that's happening all over the world.
01:24:37.000Like, this delay of information is all over the world.
01:24:41.000Do you remember the tunnels that came out, or the, maybe it was in November, the headlines that, no, yeah, it was in November, the headlines that came out about the tunnels that were found under Cusco in Peru that connect to Sacsayhuaman and they go underneath the Cora Concha?
01:25:32.000But they're just so passionate about this, and they feel like they're doing something that's one of the most important things anybody in the world is doing.
01:26:01.000But you're out there on this 7,800 foot mountaintop and it's so steep you cannot see the bottom when you're looking over the side of the city.
01:26:09.000And you're just in this sacred place in the middle of the Amazon, up in the mountains.
01:28:12.000What I think it is is, well, you kind of have – I would say it's a mix of a lot of different things.
01:28:19.000Let's say the most non-malicious side is that these countries are totally dependent upon tourism and they want to prepare like a media – So they want to do it at the right time of the year and then it'll inspire people to book their trip down to the Sacred Valley.
01:28:40.000You know, it's all, it's about, it's a money-making machine, right?
01:28:43.000It's their biggest draw to come and see this part of the world.
01:28:47.000That seems so counterintuitive because new discoveries would make people want to visit.
01:29:09.000That came out two or three months ago.
01:29:11.000And when I was there in October, I had heard that it was found.
01:29:15.000So these things are happening way, way in advance.
01:29:17.000Now, the other side is there's sort of this Zahiwas effect, like Ed Barnhart, my professor and mentor, he wanted to study...
01:29:37.000So you've seen how the stones fit together in the same way that they do at the Valley Temple in Egypt, the red granite.
01:29:43.000So they're using this gray andesite, which is sometimes the andesite is harder than the granite in Egypt.
01:29:51.000Like morphing these stones together at impossible angles.
01:29:54.000I'm sure you've seen the 12-sided stone and maybe you've seen the scoop marks on the side of the stone where it looks like the outside of the stone was softened at one point and you could like scrape a piece off.
01:30:03.000And so it's Dr. Barnhart's idea that somehow – So in the Chilean desert, the Inca Empire were building upon roads that went all across South America.
01:30:18.000And these roads weren't initially, the foundations weren't laid by the Inca.
01:30:22.000They may have been approved by the Inca, but they go back to the Wari Empire, which predates the Inca, and it almost certainly goes back further than this.
01:30:29.000The southernmost point of these highways, it goes off into the Chilean desert, into the Atacama desert, and they just kind of disappear into the desert.
01:30:36.000And for a long time, it's been a mystery of...
01:30:45.000But there are these acid deposits that are down in that desert.
01:30:50.000Somehow they invented this clay pottery that whatever they used to make it, the acid wouldn't melt through the pottery so you could carry it.
01:31:00.000There's evidence of this at Tiwanaku as well, which I'm sure you've heard of Tiwanaku.
01:31:04.000There's evidence of this acid at Tiwanaku and people would talk about how the acid could like melt the stones and sometimes they talk about how like bird poop or bird...
01:31:18.000And so there's all these, you know, ideas or these myths about the stones melting.
01:31:23.000Anyways, Dr. Barnhart's idea was that those roads go down there because they're mining and collecting the acids and they're bringing them back and they're softening the outside of the stone.
01:31:33.000And rather than carving the stones to fit together, they're setting the stones on top of each other and it's creating its own morph, if that makes sense.
01:31:41.000And so there's two reasons, but you see them a lot as to why he thinks this.
01:31:55.000So you have this ancient city that's there, and the stones are so massive the Spanish couldn't tear them all down, so they just gave up and they built new buildings over it.
01:32:02.000In 1650, this In 1950, another earthquake happened, knocked down the Spanish city, and the ancient city was still standing.
01:32:16.000So now these are preserved as cultural heritage monuments, and they don't build over them.
01:32:36.000When you go one day, you just walk, walk, walk, walk, walk.
01:32:38.000One of the projects we're going to do for the Maya Exploration Center is I'm going to go down to Cusco for a month and I'm going to make the world's first map of where all the stones actually are.
01:32:49.000There is a map that tourists get, but it's a shitty map.
01:32:52.000So that's one of my projects is I'm going to map all of these stones and where they are around Cusco and it'll be like on an app or a website or something where you can find it.
01:36:47.000That's one stone on the lower part of it.
01:36:50.000And you can see that the size of the stones that are together, as earthquakes have rattled the city, the wall still kind of holds together.
01:36:58.000It bends and holds together completely more.
01:37:02.000And on top of that, Machu Picchu itself, 60% of the megalithic construction work is in the foundation of Machu Picchu.
01:37:11.000So it's underneath what you're seeing.
01:37:13.000And there are areas that are roped off where you can go down like underneath the city, but it's all roped off and I don't know a lot about it.
01:37:22.000I got a little bit of a photo of where you can go down into these.
01:37:26.000I think they're like man-made labyrinths that are underneath the city, but there's a lot more there.
01:37:31.000And so when you're there, you just get this intrigue.
01:37:34.000And I was curious how Egypt would stack up, because I did Peru last year, and then the day I landed from Peru, I headed off to Egypt for a month.
01:38:53.000Well, you know, it's amazing, like, how exactly...
01:38:57.000One, what's the inspiration for making these giant...
01:39:01.000You know, the sophistication is in the planning and the math behind how exactly you make these images in the ground that are miles wide and very intricate.
01:39:19.000And there's some aspect about the spider, a detail that they incorporate, that you would only know if you were like really studying these little creatures and wanted to recreate it on a massive scale.
01:39:30.000I mean, look, this is an enormous thing in the ground that if you don't have flight, you're never going to be able to know that you did it.
01:41:43.000It's made out of the same thing of the Easter Island heads.
01:41:46.000So you have this Vanapu, but another project that my exploration center is working on later this year is we're going down to – And I'm not going, but this is Dr. Barnhart doing it.
01:42:05.000And there's another site down on the remote end of the island where there's another structure like this that you never see mentioned.
01:42:13.000And so we're going to document that and put that out.
01:42:16.000So there's no doubt that, I mean, these people are incredibly advanced, incredibly connected, incredibly intelligent, and it's just so mysterious.
01:42:24.000Okay, do you know of the Blythe lines?
01:43:39.000It's not really majorly studied, but I think that there's a few of these images that are out there and more that are further off into the desert that some people have.
01:45:15.000California's figure represents horses, reintroduced, historical date sometime after the 1500s, so maybe they don't know when these are going to go.
01:47:08.000the opposite side of the Americas, as far away as you can possibly get from...
01:47:13.000where people would have traditionally arrived in the Americas.
01:47:17.000Now, that evidence is constantly changing.
01:47:19.000There's constantly new things that are being found, like white sands, and there's 150,000-year-old bone tools or chisels that are being found where people were cutting into woolly mammoth bones, crazy stuff.
01:47:30.000But one of these old evidences is people in the Amazon 20,000 to 30,000 years ago on the East Coast in Brazil, on the Atlantic Coast, and they have these...
01:47:42.000I think it may have been Teddy Roosevelt's granddaughter that found this.
01:47:47.000She was a South American archaeologist.
01:49:43.000If you keep scrolling, you'll see images that are carved into...
01:49:47.000So this is a little bit of a better image right here.
01:49:49.000But sometimes when they're carved into jade and you can see the light reflecting off of it, you get a better – you get a better – So, wear Jaguar, Olmec, and maybe do Jade.
01:50:20.000They're always in jade or they're smaller Olmec monuments.
01:50:23.000And sometimes the heads are maimed, like the head is just completely destroyed and there's these jaguar claws.
01:50:34.000Claws that are carved into an Olmec face, like tearing apart its face, tearing apart the symbol that's on the top of their head.
01:50:41.000And so a lot of people have wondered, like, why are these scratch marks in all of these Olmec monuments?
01:50:46.000But all the scratch marks And so what I think, this is a little bit of research that I'm doing, and I'm writing a book on the Olmecs right now, is what I think is there's a feud between the rulers and the shamanic class.
01:51:01.000And I think that these were jaguar people, these people who are taking some kind of hallucinogen, taking a psychedelic, and basically imbuing the essence of a jaguar in some strange, crazy way that we can't explain, these are feuding with each other.
01:51:16.000And when I'm in Mexico and I'm in these museums where you have these mushroom stone effigies that are all lined up, I'll ask a local archaeologist there.
01:51:27.000I'll be like, so these mushrooms, do you think that these depict hallucinogens that they may have been taking to get high?
01:52:06.000Like you can tell, okay, these people are younger if we carbon date their bodies that are buried underneath these temples, and they're related to these people that are older.
01:52:14.000So you're trying to piece together this DNA web, but it's very, very loose.
01:52:19.000So there's a place called, there's a culture called Coral Supe culture, and they are building pyramids.
01:52:26.000Before the old kingdom of Egypt ever even existed.
01:52:47.000And from what we can tell, they keep getting hit by these apocalyptic storms, these tropical El Ninos and La Ninas that are just destructive.
01:53:02.000Well, when they move up into the Andes on Chavin de Wontar, they then come in contact with Amazonians.
01:53:08.000They meet Amazonians for the first time.
01:53:10.000And all of a sudden, these people, they have pottery, they have art, they have gods, they have a pantheon, they have stone statues, and they are were jaguars.
01:54:23.000And the stones that make up the staircases, oh my god.
01:54:27.000Okay, have you seen, the name is escaping me right now, but Wandering Wolf went out there, Michael Collins, and he saw these big trilithon stones that are sitting on the side of the mountain in Peru.
01:54:41.000That white stone is the same white stone that's used in the staircases and on the door jams and the lentils here at Chavine.
01:54:48.000So you see the open door right there at the bottom?
01:54:51.000Yeah, so those white stones on the side, those stones may have come from that quarry that he went and visited, where those gigantic, you know, trilithon, balbeck-sized stones are.
01:55:23.000That's a human with jaguar fangs coming out of his mouth.
01:55:28.000And all of these Tenenheads that are on the side of the temple, they're facing out towards the Amazon.
01:55:32.000It's telling us that this religion, this idea of these people who are – Somehow doing these shamanic practices, which I think are so clearly, so obviously is plants like ayahuasca or whatever it is, inducing these people into a state of consciousness where somehow they're taking on the effects of the jaguar.
01:55:51.000Like you and Paul Rosalie talked about this.
01:55:56.000his experience with ayahuasca, I believe he said, and maybe it was on this show, that for a moment, like, he shrunk down to the size of an atom, and he's floating through the Amazon, and then all of a sudden, he was looking through, like, the eyes of a jaguar for a moment.
01:56:08.000And this is something that- Yeah, yeah.
01:56:12.000So this is something that I think it's evidence— Oh, isn't this cool?
01:56:33.000Yeah, and it's like, This is why I brought this up.
01:56:42.000Terrence Magetta had a very fascinating theory about why ketamine in particular feels like an empty office building.
01:56:50.000And his theory, it's like ketamine is like you enter a realm, but there's no one there.
01:56:56.000And this is, by the way, he's talking about ketamine in, like, the 80s and 90s.
01:57:04.000is that when you imbibe, when you take a psychedelic medicine, when you take any sort of psychedelic plant, mushroom, whatever it is, you're not just having an experience.
01:57:15.000You are also interacting with all of the experiences that have ever been had with these things, which is one of the And his belief or his theory was that it's far more complex than you're taking a psychedelic drug.
01:57:41.000You're taking this psychedelic that allows you to interact with all the experiences anyone has ever had with those, including jaguars.
01:57:52.000Now, also, there's always been this conflict between the ruling class and the shamanic rituals.
01:58:03.000Wouldn't it make sense that the claw marks would represent?
01:58:08.000The battle between the shamans and these ruling class who, of course, don't want people tripping and opening their mind and questioning authority and trying to restructure everything.
01:58:19.000It'd be a huge problem if you were a Zahi Hawass guy trying to keep the lid on everything and just keep control and power.
01:58:28.000And then you got all these people that are tripping balls that have completely different ideas that you have to silence that.
01:59:21.000The fascinating comparison, and this is also hotly debated, you know, they say, no, well, Coca-Cola was the ones that made them red and white, the Santa Clauses.
02:01:15.000I think there's, well, McKenna didn't have a good experience with him either.
02:01:20.000And there's a lot of thoughts that he had about whether or not they were genetically variable, whether or not they're geographically and even seasonally variable, that you're not dealing with the same mushrooms.
02:01:31.000Sort of like, you know, there's different versions.
02:01:36.000Obviously manipulated, but there's a very different version of banana that we're enjoying today.
02:04:17.000And we just refer to natives, tribes who lived in the Amazon as Amazonians, but it's so much more complicated than just that.
02:04:25.000Now the next thing is this whole conversation about talking about the were jaguar, you know, I get a lot of, I get a lot of flack for this, for this topic because, you know, you have, let's just call it like boomer archaeologists who have this knee jerk reaction to psychedelics and hallucinogens because it's so ingrained in them that like all drugs are bad as if all drugs are the same, you know what I mean?
02:04:49.000And I'm talking to this I think it's like Pueblo ancestral tribes would have interacted with the night sky and studied the night sky.
02:05:11.000And I was like, I asked him, I said, okay, so what kind of hallucinogens do you think they would have had?
02:05:15.000And I think he told me like peyote and cannabis and stuff like that.
02:05:18.000And I was like, Okay, so have you ever, you know, we were, like, every night we'd get together and we'd all smoke and just talk about ancient history and stuff.
02:05:27.000You know, you come up with so many interesting ideas and perspectives and points of view, you know, when you smoke with, like, an actual purpose and you're trying to, you know, think.
02:05:35.000I'm sure you know very well what I'm talking about.
02:05:37.000And so he's sitting around with all of us and he doesn't want, you know, he's not interested.
02:05:42.000And I'm like, so you've been studying archaeoastronomy for this long.
02:05:47.000Have you ever tried cannabis or peyote or anything that's up there?
02:05:50.000I think there's another one called Detura.
02:06:00.000He was having a conversation with a guy in a market and he realized in the middle of the conversation the guy thought that they were in his apartment.
02:06:10.000Yeah, well, it might explain why Teotihuacan Like, if you look up the great goddess of Teotihuacan, it's these guys with handbags picking this detura and, like, putting them in their handbags.
02:06:33.000I said, okay, have you ever gone out and studied the stars from the Native American point of view while you're smoking cannabis or you take pay?
02:06:43.000And I'm like, you have committed your entire life to studying this ancient culture that you know very well was studying the stars and taking hallucinogens.
02:06:57.000You don't want to put yourself in the shoes of these people.
02:07:01.000I was like, dude, if you laid out at night with everything you know about the Pueblo ancestral people and you smoked weed for the first time or you did peyote or something, you stayed up and looked at the stars, you might have an epiphany about something that you've never realized because your brain's just operating in a different way than it normally does.
02:07:17.000And he was very slow to be open to this idea.
02:07:23.000And, you know, the Zahi thing kind of reminded me of this is like, you know, he has preconceived ideas about his world and his personal beliefs that interact with the archaeology.
02:07:32.000And so it's really hard for us to study the ancient world from a completely unbiased point of view because you have so many preconceived ideas about your modern world that influence your archaeology.
02:07:57.000I really think it's because so many of these people are, you know, older archaeologists that have a knee-jerk reaction to drugs of any kind, and they couldn't possibly fathom the reality that the culture they spent their life studying are all doing hallucinogens all the time.
02:08:42.000I don't do anything harder than just smoke cannabis.
02:08:51.000I don't know, six or seven years ago when I first smoked.
02:08:54.000I was laying up looking at the night sky, and we had taken some photos out in the desert, and I was looking at myself, and I put on a little bit of weight.
02:08:59.000And as I was looking at myself, I had disassociated.
02:09:01.000And I was like, this person does not represent the brain that's in my mind.
02:09:07.000You know, I had this realization about myself.
02:09:08.000The last time I was out, I was out in Big Bend, laying under the stars in the middle of the desert, and I had this, like, realization that, you know, all the time I spend traveling and I get to see Like I'm trying to just make this life work.
02:09:29.000And I had this realization that the most important thing I do is make dinner for my wife and take my dog on walks.
02:09:37.000And I would have never – And this is the stuff that you love.
02:09:45.000Your purpose is to take your dog on walks and spend time with your wife.
02:09:49.000And one day it's going to be to spend time with your kids.
02:09:51.000And every time I go into it with this idea that I hope that I have some kind of realization, I always do.
02:09:57.000And it's just like I have this – I know that ancient plant medicine is like the key to And so, yeah, it's fascinating.
02:10:09.000To ignore that, knowing that they imbibed, to ignore that, knowing that it was a part of these sacred rituals, is kind of silly.
02:10:17.000Especially when you deal with the Amazon and ayahuasca.
02:10:20.000Yeah, I mean, if you're going to be in a place where you want to completely convene with nature, like, that's the place.
02:10:56.000And then when you ask them how they learn how to do this, they're like, Yeah, I know, right?
02:11:02.000And then you can take that same chemical and they'll pour it in the water and rather than fishing or spearing fish in the water or hooking them, they pour it into the water and they create these little canals off of the Amazon and fish, piranha, whatever will swim up in it and they pour that liquid wherever that hallucinogen isn't and it stuns the fish and they all come to the top and they only take what they need and they send the rest back.
02:11:25.000Which is another reason why I don't think that Native Americans are responsible for these.
02:11:33.000I'm out in the woods in East Texas a couple weeks ago, and we're just walking around, and we're talking about the Caddo people.
02:11:39.000Have you heard of the Caddo Indians before?
02:11:41.000And I was trying to talk to my friend who doesn't know a lot about Native Americans, trying to give him the essence of the people.
02:11:49.000And the words came to me and I was like, I was like, if nature itself took an anthropomorphic form, that's the Native American.
02:11:56.000These are people that lived perfectly with their environment or tried to, at least most of them did.
02:15:28.000And that's what's interesting is that exists at the same time as you and I talking on a podcast where millions of people are going to hear it and it's all electronic recording of our voice and images and then distributed wirelessly into your phone instantaneously.
02:15:46.000The moment this episode gets uploaded on Spotify, people will click it and watch it on their phone instantly.
02:15:53.000Like, all at the same time where these people are living in a homemade canoe.
02:15:56.000They're in the same time zone as you are right now.
02:16:02.000And when our civilization, when we all destroy ourselves and thousands of years go by and everything in this studio is gone, it all turns to dust, those people will continue the legacy of humanity.
02:16:12.000Well, I wonder if those people are the preppers.
02:16:18.000Like if everything did go sideways because the Europeans came over and brought all the diseases and civilization collapsed, who's going to live?
02:16:37.000So when the Spaniards arrive, they obviously, they land in the Bahamas with Columbus, 1492, but they come down to like Hispaniola, Jamaica.
02:16:46.000And in the early 1500s, they start poking around on the shores of the Yucatan.
02:16:53.000And they're kind of trading and interacting with these people.
02:16:58.000But they didn't realize that they were giving these Native Americans disease.
02:17:01.000And that disease was spreading through the Maya world.
02:17:04.000And maybe more than a decade later, when Cortez arrives in the Maya world, he documents how all the Maya people are very scrawny and small and sickly and weak.
02:17:12.000He didn't realize they were all dying off.
02:17:14.000So eventually Cortes conquers Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital in 1521, and he sends Pizarro down to find the gold that the Aztecs were getting from South America or from this distant land.
02:17:31.000He goes down to South America and he conquers the Inca Empire.
02:17:35.000And then after that, Oriana descends down the Amazon.
02:17:39.000And when he descends down the Amazon, he sees these cities that would go on for 15 miles long.
02:17:46.000I mean, these 15-mile-long cities full of millions and millions of people, these giant circular stone buildings, these huge bustling civilizations.
02:17:54.000And then later on in the 1700s, 1800s, And then really densely in the early 1900s, like with Percy Fawcett, Theodore Roosevelt, everyone around them, they were looking for these big cities that the Spaniards had seen, but they didn't exist, and they didn't find any evidence of it at all.
02:18:11.000And a lot of people, like the British and the Royal Geographic Society, they brushed it off as, oh, the Spaniards were lying so that they could secure funding for further expeditions, and this was like their livelihood, the way that they could stay rich.
02:18:26.000Proves that these civilizations were there.
02:18:28.000Now, the stuff that's been excavated in the Amazon, we haven't excavated anything in the center of the Amazon.
02:21:41.000And so my wife and I are like in the middle of moving right now.
02:21:44.000And so two days ago, we packed up these two U-Hauls, drove them to East Texas to my in-laws, and then we drove to Austin last night, got a hotel doing this.
02:21:52.000Tonight we drive back to East Texas, and then tomorrow we drive to North Carolina.
02:22:11.000And I'm kind of excited, in a way, to get out of Texas because it's hard to study Native American history in Texas because you've got to travel so far and everything's so arid.
02:22:18.000Austin, this was an ancient Native American settlement here that we have built this city on top of.
02:22:25.000The Alamo in San Antonio was built on top of a Native American settlement.
02:22:30.000And all of our major cities are just a reskin of an ancient city.
02:22:50.000But in North Carolina, it's one of the places that the Spaniards had a really hard time infiltrating because of the mountain ranges and because of how fierce the Native Americans were.
02:22:59.000And so the archaeological projects up there are headed up by two hillbillies that live in the country, and they're the coolest guys.
02:23:06.000They own this little department store called the Tiger Store in Hayesville, North Carolina.
02:23:13.000We have dug up Spanish armor under the ground and Spanish swords and all kinds of crazy stuff.
02:23:58.000And the Native Americans who were asked, Some of the stories about the early Native Americans who were asked how this got here, who moved it there, their stories are that giants placed this and that giants used to live in this land and that they created these stones.
02:24:12.000And I have gone around, when I was a little bit younger, I would go through the rainforest and like wandering up these hillsides and you'd find these huge stones laying there with all of these images carved into them.
02:24:24.000And of course, you know, there's no funding that's out there.
02:24:27.000There's not even a police department out there.
02:24:32.000So no research is being done out there.
02:24:35.000But it's a fascinating place as old as time itself.
02:24:38.000And all of these people are from like a chapter before contact period.
02:24:46.000It's a very ancient, mysterious, mystical place.
02:24:51.000It's one of those places that kind of gives me the feeling that Peru gives me when I'm out there, that I'm in a very, very, very old place.
02:24:58.000And of course, the Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world.
02:25:01.000Is there any theory as to the age of that?
02:25:05.000Well, I think when you go there, they attribute it to a culture that lived in the area between 100 AD and 1000 AD.
02:25:14.000But, you know, that's just totally guesswork.
02:25:21.000Now, you know, the hard part about studying some stuff with Native Americans in the U.S. is that there's a lot of, like, you know...
02:25:39.000When I go visit the—I forget what exactly it's called—but there's a Native American village that still exists in this area of the country, and it's operated, and it's kind of a tour place where they take people through what the cities would have looked like or what the towns would have looked like in the middle of the rainforest.
02:25:57.000But the hard part is when I talk to the representatives there, which are Native American, you know, Cherokee people, they'll tell me, oh yeah, you know, the ancient people that were here, they used to be six foot five.
02:26:07.000They were very tall people or whatever.
02:26:09.000And there's no evidence behind that at all.
02:26:12.000And so it's hard to like, okay, we have Cherokee bodies.
02:26:16.000So are these oral memories that are being passed down through time that come down to the Cherokee?
02:26:41.000So, you know, one of the biggest things that refutes, I know it sounds like I'm bouncing all over the place, but one of the biggest things that they tried to use to refute the Sphinx's age, you know, about the Sphinx that could date back to the time of Leo 10,500 years ago or 10,500 BC, 10,500 BC, is they say, well, there's no evidence that you could carry down the knowledge of constellations that far.
02:27:37.000So, you know, a lot of times they say that this is like, well, when people use the term swastika, the swastika is just two meandering patterns or squared spirals that are laid on top of each other.
02:27:53.000But when you take two of those and lay them on top of each other, it becomes a swastika.
02:27:56.000And you and I recognize where these meanders connect because of a certain recent culture that perverted this symbol and turned it into something evil.
02:28:05.000But this is an ancient symbol, and it's found all over the world.
02:29:45.000You can go look at the Big Dipper and the Big Dipper changes over the course of the year.
02:29:50.000So if you look at it as though it's not a Big Dipper and you look at it as though it's a staircase to a spiral, that's exactly right.
02:30:00.000And the Big Dipper is spinning in the night sky throughout the year.
02:30:03.000So this ancient symbol is them documenting a constellation.
02:30:07.000For over 11,000 years human beings have been documenting a constellation.
02:30:11.000So if you're looking for the proof as to whether or not people 11,000 years ago were recognizing a lion in the night sky, boom, there you go.
02:30:40.000But there are other archaeologists who – they're – But these then people, if I were to go to them and be like, okay, well, you know, this ivory bone handle in Ukraine goes back 11,000 years, so it's proof they'd be like, okay, stop.
02:30:58.000So this is my theory that I have been studying for a long time, and everywhere I go in the Americas, I find that spiral pattern everywhere, and I always ask people, what does this mean?
02:31:08.000When I'm in the Mediterranean, I'll ask people, what does this mean?
02:31:11.000I'm going to go to Greece at the end of the year, and I'm going to ask, because it's all over Greek temples, you know, and all I ever get from Greek archaeologists is that it's a river.
02:31:33.000The steps through life and the rejuvenation of life, right?
02:31:37.000So it's like the Big Dipper has some kind of esoteric meaning with it.
02:31:42.000But I have been thinking about this, and I think that the reason that throughout all these ancient cultures you see this meander pattern in so many different orientations is it's documenting the flipping of the Big Dipper through the night sky throughout the day.
02:31:58.000And that's all, you know, I'm trying to explain something that's 11,000 years old.
02:32:01.000What is the earliest evidence of the understanding of the procession of the equinoxes?
02:32:30.000I mean, the procession of the equinox is it takes at least, what, 12 to 24 – it's either 12 or it's 24,000 years to be able to – If we wanted to investigate an ancient culture that's possible of being able to document this, it'd be worth looking into if the Maya were aware.
02:32:50.000Let's explain to people what it means.
02:32:52.000So what it means is that the Earth, as it spins, it doesn't spin perfectly.
02:32:57.000Like there's a pin in the top and the pin in the bottom, and it spins like a globe.
02:33:00.000It spins in a wobble, and that wobbles a 24,000-year cycle.
02:33:05.000The earliest understanding of the procession of the equinox is typically credited to Greek astronomers.
02:33:13.000Hipparchus in the 2nd century BCE, around 130 BCE.
02:33:17.000I bet you he did it in Alexandria too.
02:33:19.000Hipparchus noticed the position of the equinoxes, the points where the celestial equator intersects with the elliptic.
02:33:25.000We're shifting westward over time relative to the fixed stars.
02:33:29.000He calculated this slow movement known as precession by comparing his own observations of star positions with earlier Babylonian and Greek records, particularly those of Tamarcus and Aristilus.
02:33:42.000From the 3rd century BCE, Hipparchus estimated the rate of precession to be about 1 degree every 100 years, which is remarkably close to the modern value.
02:33:52.000Approximately one degree every 71.6 years.
02:33:56.000There's no definitive evidence of earlier cultures fully understanding the procession as a systematic astronomical phenomenon, but some scholars speculate the ancient civilizations like the Babylonians, Egyptians, or Indians might have noticed relating patterns in star positions over long periods.
02:35:19.000You see it on the monument of Augustus, which dates to about 9 BC, but that's for his death.
02:35:29.000But Augustus would have seen Alexandria.
02:35:30.000He would have been familiar with these motifs.
02:35:32.000I believe after that in Rome we don't see this motif anymore of the squared spiral.
02:35:37.000In Mesoamerica, in Mexico and Central America, this squared spiral motif stops with the burning of the Maya codices from Diego de Landa in like 1574.
02:35:50.000He gathered all of the writing in the Maya world together in the city of what is modern day Merida.
02:36:11.000Today we only have three or four that exist.
02:36:14.000And one of them is like controversial as to whether or not it's a forgery.
02:36:17.000So he destroyed all of the written history of the Mesoamerican world in like one fell swoop.
02:36:24.000And to give you an idea of just how much it was, When the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec world, so the Aztec were standing on the shoulders of giants, being the Maya and all the other cultures.
02:36:35.000The Aztecs were producing 250,000 pieces of paper a year.
02:36:43.000It's an incredible amount of written knowledge, and all of that knowledge is burned and gone.
02:36:49.000And so, you know, just again, when archaeologists – It's so silly because we're disconnected from the ancient world by a considerable margin.
02:37:06.000I mean, none of us really understand what's going on.
02:37:09.000I was having a conversation with Dr. Barnhart, we were at the And we're looking up at it, and he's like, you know, I've always wondered, like, where's the love in their religion?
02:37:33.000Like, you know, where are all the doves that you see like in Christian churches and stuff?
02:37:37.000And he was like, but you know, in reality, if we could speak to them, we would probably be so embarrassed and shocked at how wrong our ideas are about who these people were.
02:37:52.000Because, you know, he just presents, like, the evidence that's available, gives his idea of what he thinks the evidence means, while also saying, you know, this is just my idea from this.
02:38:02.000We could be completely wrong, and we probably are completely wrong.
02:38:05.000You know, think about, like, if you died and...
02:38:25.000If you had a time machine and you could go and observe undiscovered any point in history, like you could put you in some time bubble where you could just like be in this invisible – Oh, God.
02:38:56.000If Egypt wasn't an option, If I gave you a legit choice, if it was a real thing, if there was real technology, if they had developed some sort of a time warp technology that allowed you to, in this controlled sphere, exist for a particular amount of time, like you have three days in this area, you bring food and water, and you just...
02:39:54.000It's the most monumental, beautiful, like, you know, when you try to imagine what it would have looked like.
02:39:59.000If you've seen visual recreations of the Giza Plateau, the Valley Temple must have been absolutely stunning.
02:40:07.000Okay, so one day when you go to Egypt, hopefully you go this year, when you go to the Valley Temple, that's the… I think it's more stunning what it must have looked like than even the pyramids themselves.
02:41:01.000And it's this black diorite gleaming polished statues.
02:41:05.000And the lentils that go above would have allowed when the sun reaches its zenith in the sky in the middle of the day, it would have shot through these holes in the ceiling.
02:41:14.000And so it would have illuminated the white floor and you would have had the solid black statues that are shining in the sun's light.
02:41:21.000And so you're walking in and it's like glowing inside of the temple.
02:41:25.000And when you walk outside the front door of the temple, There's a dock, and you can see the dock slopes into the ground, so the water isn't there anymore.
02:41:33.000The Nile is much further to the east now.
02:41:36.000But the Nile came straight up to the front step of the Valley Temple.
02:41:42.000So imagine you're going – you have someone pushing your little boat along on a pike in Egypt, and you're taking in – Imagine the sound of the water as you're coming up to the temple.
02:42:03.000It's the largest building on the planet at the time, probably, other than the pyramids themselves.
02:42:12.000Then you step into it and it is the most sacred, most impressive thing that exists on the earth at that time.
02:42:20.000No matter if it was made in 2500 BC or if it was made in 10,000 BC, it's the most impressive building that exists in the world at that time.
02:42:28.000And what exactly was going on in these buildings, I don't know.
02:42:31.000This is kind of another hot take of mine is, man, I don't believe that.
02:42:50.000Amount of work all across the entire world.
02:42:53.000You know, the Maya are building temples for these gods, these beings that they're meeting.
02:42:58.000The Temple of Luxor that you'll go to see, you know, the story goes that Amenhotep built this last chamber, which is made out of these huge...
02:43:21.000And I'm just thinking, man, either is it more likely that all this is made up or is it more likely that they went to the extent to do all this because it was all real?
02:43:31.000and they're really interacting with these beings.
02:43:33.000And the most realistic way I can think of is by...
02:43:48.000And that adds to the allure of, like, when I'm standing in the Valley Temple, I'm like, what the hell is actually going on in here at this time?
02:43:56.000So after going through all that, I have to say Egypt.
02:44:24.000So you're in like Guyana, French Guyana, Brazil.
02:44:28.000And it's treacherous places to go through in the middle of the Amazon.
02:44:32.000But I think that that's where cities in the Amazon are going to be found one day.
02:44:36.000And it was towards the end of Oriana's expedition.
02:44:38.000So that's about where he would have been.
02:44:40.000And man, I bet you there's stuff out there that would just amaze us.
02:44:45.000I think the Amazon is the origin, just me personally, I think the Amazon is the origin of American, you know, pre-Columbian American, the height of their civilization.
02:44:57.000I think it's the origin of their religion and shamanic practices.
02:45:00.000I think it's spread out all the way up to Mexico.
02:45:08.000But I think before that, they had this were-jaguar religion where people are taking hallucinogens and psychedelics.
02:45:15.000And so I think that all the evidence points towards that.
02:45:19.000The origin of civilization in the Americas begins in the Amazon and spreads out from there.
02:45:23.000And I would love if a time machine could pull back that canopy and show me what the actual height of that was like.
02:46:53.000And when you hear the sound of the Papua New Guinea people singing and the way they harmonize with each other, these people are so connected to the earth that it's the earth singing to you through them.
02:48:56.000A great video piece from Vice from back in the day, Vice Guide to Travel, where this journalist goes and lives with this guy who lives in the Arctic.
02:49:06.000and he's one of the last people that's allowed to live off the land.
02:49:10.000And he's a very intelligent guy who...
02:49:17.000And he's essentially just hunting caribou and fishing.
02:49:20.000And he lives, like, in peace and harmony.
02:51:15.000And then the men also get their time away to be manly and be masculine and brave.
02:51:21.000Now, we exist in this world where before I was able to quit my job and pursue this full-time, I was doing marketing just to make ends meet.
02:51:31.000And I'm existing in this digital world that doesn't even exist.
02:51:35.000I produce ads for companies that don't even have a physical brick-and-mortar store.
02:52:34.000It's just so much of what we do is completely made up and unnatural.
02:52:38.000We should be living by a fresh body of water, and you and I should be running off into the forest and killing something with our hands or with a bow and dragging it back, and all the women are, yay!
02:53:08.000But when I'm in the woods, like the real woods, when you're in the mountains in particular, because it's so unforgiving, it's so majestic, every part of me just goes, like, wow.
02:54:39.000If you have a 9mm pistol and you shoot a grizzly bear in the head, it's very likely it's going to bounce off of a skull, which is so scary.