The Joe Rogan Experience - May 28, 2025


Joe Rogan Experience #2328 - Luke Caverns


Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 57 minutes

Words per minute

165.3346

Word count

29,278

Sentence count

2,364

Harmful content

Misogyny

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

83

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:13.000 What's up?
00:00:14.000 How are you, man?
00:00:15.000 How are you?
00:00:15.000 It's a pleasure to meet you.
00:00:16.000 It's a pleasure to meet you as well.
00:00:17.000 I really enjoyed you on the Jesse Michaels podcast, so I had to have you on.
00:00:21.000 Yeah, well, thank you so much, man.
00:00:22.000 I love it when young people know so much about ancient history.
00:00:26.000 Like, how did you get started in this?
00:00:28.000 Well, it's quite literally in my blood.
00:00:32.000 Back in the late, well, I should say the 1890s, my family, they were cattle rustlers right here in the hill country. 0.99
00:00:41.000 Actually, maybe a little bit further, quite a bit further west of San Antonio.
00:00:45.000 Damn, you come from a lot of criminals?
00:00:47.000 Probably.
00:00:48.000 Yeah, there's a lot of dark history in here.
00:00:53.000 And so they're cattle rustlers that are out in Dryden, Texas, in Sanderson, Texas, right on the Rio Grande.
00:01:02.000 And that's how they made their money.
00:01:04.000 They were fascinated, kind of like everybody, with finding gold, with finding lost Spanish treasure and Native American artifacts.
00:01:11.000 So they're living in this area called the Reagan Canyon.
00:01:14.000 And I've seen it all over the place.
00:01:18.000 If you look on, I think like the Smithsonian did something on the top 10 forgotten places in the United States.
00:01:23.000 It's like the most remote areas of our country.
00:01:26.000 And somewhere in there is Reagan Canyon.
00:01:28.000 And so out there, they...
00:01:34.000 There 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.
00:01:43.000 The Spanish are out there mining for gold and everything.
00:01:46.000 My family gets caught up in one of the biggest mysteries of Texas history.
00:01:50.000 If you were to go to some bookstore, there's a popular one called The Sons of Coronado.
00:01:55.000 It's like this legacy of people looking for Spanish gold.
00:01:58.000 Somewhere in there, my family will be in there.
00:02:00.000 So 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.
00:02:13.000 He gets involved in oil drilling out in East Texas.
00:02:18.000 And then so my family moved out to East Texas.
00:02:20.000 And then his son was born, which is my grandfather.
00:02:23.000 And then he continues this legacy of continuing his father's oil company.
00:02:28.000 But then he also begins gold mining in New Mexico.
00:02:31.000 And while he's out in New Mexico, he hears these legends of these seven lost Spanish gold mines.
00:02:35.000 And because there was a local police officer who was like a treasure hunter.
00:02:40.000 And he knew who my grandfather was and the story behind our family.
00:02:43.000 He sought them out.
00:02:44.000 And they went off looking together.
00:02:46.000 And I don't know how long it took them to find it.
00:02:48.000 But he found the seven lost Spanish gold mines of New Mexico.
00:02:51.000 And he opened up this company called Three Bells Mining and Milling Company.
00:02:56.000 And that was open for about eight years.
00:02:59.000 And they opened up these mines that go back to...
00:03:06.000 So the Spaniards were up all the way in New Mexico in the 1530s, and they were opening up Native American gold mines and expanding them.
00:03:16.000 And so he found these gold mines that go hundreds of feet into the ground as this huge, expansive gold mining operation.
00:03:23.000 Well, somebody dies after a smelter explodes and the company goes under.
00:03:27.000 They lose everything.
00:03:28.000 My family falls into poverty.
00:03:30.000 My dad's born during that time, and my dad didn't really get to experience all of that excitement.
00:03:36.000 He had to spend his life climbing out of poverty.
00:03:39.000 But he had this love for history.
00:03:41.000 He had this love for American history, really, and he instilled in me the importance of history growing up.
00:03:47.000 And that fascination of exploration and fascination And so I've just, I have always been fascinated by this.
00:04:01.000 And I guess getting to where I am now, I was halfway through my marketing degree in college.
00:04:06.000 And I'm sitting on my bed in my dorm room with my girlfriend at the time, who I'm married to now.
00:04:13.000 We watched the movie The Lost City of Z about Percy Fawcett.
00:04:15.000 And something about that guy's journey reminded me so much of my family.
00:04:20.000 Kind of reminded me of my dad, reminded me of my grandpa.
00:04:22.000 And it changed something in me.
00:04:23.000 Like that day, I could not ignore...
00:04:27.000 I could not ignore this love that I always had for ancient history.
00:04:31.000 But, you know, archaeologists are poor.
00:04:32.000 You know, it's an extremely hard life.
00:04:35.000 and it's really hard on your family too.
00:04:37.000 And I just knew I had to...
00:04:48.000 And so I changed.
00:04:49.000 I got a degree in cultural anthropology.
00:04:51.000 I wrote, like we had a mock thesis statement, and I wrote it on the Amazon and the lost civilizations and how they were wiped out from...
00:05:02.000 And yes, that's where I'm at today.
00:05:05.000 Wow.
00:05:06.000 I 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.
00:05:14.000 Because we kind of like woke up in this life.
00:05:19.000 You know, we didn't choose to be born during this timeline.
00:05:21.000 We woke up in this timeline.
00:05:23.000 And we're like, how did collectively we get here?
00:05:27.000 And then you have this narrative of how collectively we got here.
00:05:30.000 But then you see there's holes in this narrative.
00:05:33.000 And it's real weird.
00:05:34.000 And then you find out about asteroid impacts and super volcanoes.
00:05:39.000 And then there's people like Zahi Hawass who are in charge of telling you what they know.
00:05:44.000 And this is the only answer.
00:05:45.000 And you're like, well, that guy's not right.
00:05:46.000 And then you start looking at guys.
00:05:48.000 It's like Graham Hancock.
00:05:49.000 Why is everybody calling him a Nazi?
00:05:51.000 And then you start getting deep into the weeds in this stuff, and you're like, wow, there's a lot of resentment from the gatekeepers.
00:05:51.000 Like, what the fuck?
00:05:58.000 There'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.
00:06:08.000 They want to be the only people that can tell people what the history of the human race is.
00:06:13.000 And unfortunately for them, There's too much other evidence.
00:06:18.000 It's too weird.
00:06:20.000 The whole picture is not settled.
00:06:23.000 It's too strange and they keep finding new things all the time.
00:06:28.000 That throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the timeline of civilization.
00:06:33.000 And so then, you know, you find out about Egypt.
00:06:37.000 And once, I mean, that was the big one for me.
00:06:39.000 Once I found out about Egypt, not found out about it, but really started exploring it.
00:06:44.000 When you discovered every grain of sand in Egypt.
00:06:46.000 I discovered it all.
00:06:47.000 I was there.
00:06:49.000 I dug the hole when I...
00:06:57.000 I was hoping it was going to go a little better, honestly.
00:07:00.000 He had a great opportunity to win over the popular audience and come in and make a really good impression.
00:07:05.000 And he did exactly the opposite of this.
00:07:07.000 Well, I think there was a bunch of problems there.
00:07:09.000 Ego being one of them, but another one being a language barrier.
00:07:12.000 Yeah, I think so.
00:07:13.000 also years of battle.
00:07:15.000 Like 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.
00:07:24.000 I remember there was an old documentary that was narrated by Charlton Heston.
00:07:30.000 He was the host of it.
00:07:32.000 I don't know if you ever saw it.
00:07:32.000 It's The Mysteries of the Sphinx.
00:07:34.000 Yes, I've seen it on YouTube.
00:07:36.000 Yeah, I believe it was on television at the time.
00:07:39.000 And 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.
00:07:51.000 And there was this very arrogant archaeologist.
00:07:54.000 I don't remember his name, but I remember he had a smackable face.
00:07:58.000 He was just so arrogant.
00:07:59.000 He's like, where is the evidence of this civilization that existed 10,000 years ago?
00:08:06.000 Well, now we have evidence.
00:08:09.000 So, like, Gobekli Tepe threw a giant monkey wrench into the gears of this narrative.
00:08:16.000 And now they're forced to reckon with this.
00:08:19.000 Zahi didn't even know what Gobekli Tepe was, which was insane.
00:08:23.000 There was a lot of things that he wasn't familiar with, like Zeptepe.
00:08:28.000 It'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.
00:08:37.000 How do you not know that?
00:08:40.000 Was he the former head of the Ministry of Antiquities and Culture?
00:08:44.000 How are you not familiar with this?
00:08:46.000 Well, he just dismisses it.
00:08:46.000 Right.
00:08:48.000 Yeah.
00:08:48.000 But aggressively.
00:08:50.000 Which is like, there's no way you know everything.
00:08:50.000 Yeah.
00:08:53.000 There's no way.
00:08:54.000 And 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.
00:09:07.000 But then I brought up the Temple of Osiris.
00:09:08.000 But they looked into that.
00:09:10.000 Like, you could see it.
00:09:11.000 they have like they showed But this was only 50 feet in the ground.
00:09:18.000 You know, like, okay.
00:09:19.000 Yeah, pretty well.
00:09:20.000 Well, how do you know how deep that stuff goes?
00:09:23.000 If it works 50 feet, who's to say it doesn't work 2 kilometers, like they're saying?
00:09:28.000 Yeah, I was having a conversation with, like, my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart.
00:09:34.000 He's a friend of Graham.
00:09:35.000 He was one of Graham's guest experts on Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse when he went to the Maya realm.
00:09:41.000 He and I were talking this morning and he was like, you know, it's become a battle of like, who has this right to talk about these things?
00:09:48.000 You know, does the fact that I have a degree in anthropology, that's what gives me the right to have more of an opinion on somebody else?
00:09:57.000 That's kind of what it's become.
00:09:58.000 And 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.
00:10:06.000 to make a living from the things that they're fascinated about and talking about it.
00:10:09.000 And it feels like academia has become bitter because being in the academic world is a very rough and jaded place.
00:10:21.000 And 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?
00:10:35.000 But now universities are like ideologically captured and every little thing that you do has to be aligned with the university.
00:10:42.000 And 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.
00:10:53.000 But 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.
00:11:09.000 Can you legally dig things up in certain countries if you get permission?
00:11:15.000 Oh, 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.
00:11:24.000 What would be the hurdles?
00:11:24.000 Why would that be?
00:11:26.000 Oh, 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.
00:11:35.000 But 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.
00:11:45.000 Right, not damage anything.
00:11:46.000 Yeah, yeah, so they would never trust that.
00:11:48.000 There's some reasonable explanations for why.
00:11:53.000 Yeah, yeah, kind of.
00:11:55.000 Because people have looted.
00:11:56.000 I mean, who knows how much of ancient Egypt is just gone.
00:12:01.000 I mean, who knows?
00:12:02.000 Oh, man.
00:12:03.000 So many wealthy people actually ate mummies.
00:12:05.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:12:06.000 They actually, like, for people listening, you didn't mishear me.
00:12:10.000 They ate mummies.
00:12:12.000 They would bring them to these European aristocrats, would bring them to parties, and people would consume the mummies. 0.87
00:12:22.000 Yeah.
00:12:23.000 Which is just like, what were you guys drinking?
00:12:27.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:12:28.000 It's gnarly, man.
00:12:29.000 What kind of ditty party were you guys having over there where that was the idea?
00:12:32.000 It's gnarly, man.
00:12:33.000 Yeah, so much of Egypt is gone.
00:12:35.000 And 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.
00:13:01.000 Foreign nations have been coming in and raiding Egypt and taking the artifacts out. 0.99
00:13:06.000 And so, you know, so much of the artifact record is lost.
00:13:10.000 And I think that the real problem is the confidence with which somebody like Zahi speaks.
00:13:16.000 It's okay for you to have your...
00:13:26.000 But 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.
00:13:37.000 The Flint-Dibble approach. 0.84
00:13:39.000 That's really not good.
00:13:41.000 It's not good.
00:13:41.000 Right.
00:13:42.000 But it's like that guy embodies what you don't like about academia.
00:13:46.000 You see him physically, he embodies it.
00:13:49.000 Like it's like that's what it is.
00:13:50.000 It's these weak men.
00:13:51.000 These weird kind of bitchy weak men that decide that they're in control of things. 1.00
00:13:57.000 And the way they shut people down is by casting the worst pejoratives on them.
00:14:01.000 Especially like the Graham Hancock stuff, calling him a racist.
00:14:04.000 Like what?
00:14:07.000 I really did not like the letter that they wrote to Netflix to try to get season one taken down of Ancient Apocalypse.
00:14:14.000 And, you know, they...
00:14:14.000 It's disgusting.
00:14:21.000 Like, well, okay, even if you didn't blatantly do it, you insinuated it and you were okay with insinuating it.
00:14:25.000 And some of these people exist in a realm where, in their little bubbles, where they throw around the word racist all the time.
00:14:33.000 And 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.
00:14:42.000 And 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?
00:14:54.000 And he was like, oh, you can donate to the SAA.
00:14:56.000 But the SAA is the one that wrote the letter.
00:14:58.000 And it's like, oh, man, that's just, it's not a good look.
00:15:03.000 Well, it's a real problem with human beings and ego when they have positions of power and authority.
00:15:11.000 especially over something that is very esoteric, something that is like...
00:15:16.000 and also completely complex.
00:15:18.000 Like when you're dealing with trying to decipher hieroglyphs and trying to...
00:15:28.000 So who knows what was lost in that.
00:15:30.000 Several different times.
00:15:31.000 Like five different times.
00:15:32.000 God.
00:15:33.000 I wonder if any of that just got stolen out of there.
00:15:37.000 And then they blamed it.
00:15:38.000 Like how much of that shit's in the Vatican?
00:15:40.000 This time, Caesar is chasing his rival Pompey across the Mediterranean.
00:15:45.000 And Pompey flees to Alexandria.
00:15:48.000 Alexandria was kind of in the basket of Rome.
00:15:52.000 The Ptolemies, who are the Greek pharaohs in Egypt, so the Greeks are controlling Egypt after Alexander comes in 332 BC.
00:16:01.000 So Alexander dies, his best friend Ptolemy becomes pharaoh.
00:16:05.000 But 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. 0.52
00:16:16.000 And so Rome had done this to Egypt.
00:16:20.000 And 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. 0.98
00:16:28.000 And so Caesar follows Pompey, chases him to Alexandria, and so that Pompey can't flee, Caesar says, we'll burn the docks.
00:16:40.000 Well, when you landed in Alexandria, you would land at this dock that went to a road called Soma Road.
00:16:47.000 Canopic Way.
00:16:48.000 And it was like the street corner.
00:16:49.000 It must have been amazing to see in real life.
00:16:51.000 Think about this.
00:16:52.000 You have the Library of Alexandria.
00:16:55.000 This is all in one block.
00:16:56.000 You have the Library of Alexandria.
00:16:57.000 You have the Museum, which is right next to it.
00:17:00.000 Both together, they make the world's first university.
00:17:02.000 And, I mean, you can just imagine, like, walking through those halls.
00:17:05.000 Across the street from that is Alexander's mausoleum.
00:17:09.000 So his mausoleum, we think, the Emperor Hadrian, if you've heard of Hadrian before, that he modeled his mausoleum on Alexander's.
00:17:18.000 So we kind of have an idea of, like, what the mausoleum looked like.
00:17:21.000 And we have a marble statue of Alexander on top.
00:17:23.000 So people are walking by every day in the middle of this town.
00:17:26.000 And then across the street from that is the palatial district where all the rich people lived.
00:17:29.000 And then off by the bay, you would have had Cleopatra's Palace.
00:17:32.000 And so it's this beautiful place.
00:17:34.000 But when the boats come into the dock, you had to give up all the scrolls that you had.
00:17:38.000 Because the Ptolemies are obsessed with obtaining the world's knowledge. 1.00
00:17:41.000 And they want the originals.
00:17:42.000 They don't want a copy.
00:17:43.000 So what they would tell people is, you give us your writings, we'll write down a copy, and we'll give you back your original.
00:17:51.000 But what they would do is give back the copy and keep the original.
00:17:53.000 And this is something called the Library Wars.
00:17:55.000 This is a whole thing.
00:17:57.000 But it was connected to the docks.
00:17:59.000 And so most of the buildings in Alexandria are made out of stone to prevent fires.
00:18:04.000 But the interior of Alexandria's library would have had all these wooden shelves that would cross where you'd stack all the scrolls in.
00:18:10.000 So everything just...
00:18:16.000 And so when Caesar sets fire to the docks to burn all of Pompey's ships, it crawls up the docks and burns the library down.
00:18:26.000 Augustus did the same thing a decade and a half later.
00:18:31.000 Augustus came and he seized Alexandria.
00:18:33.000 And this is when Cleopatra and Mark Antony die.
00:18:36.000 He seizes it.
00:18:37.000 And then there are rebellions because the Alexandrians are very rebellious. 0.88
00:18:40.000 They don't want to be ruled by the Romans. 0.99
00:18:44.000 And so there's – I think it's Caracalla that – I
00:19:18.000 haven't seen it.
00:19:19.000 He's one of the brothers, but the movie doesn't really depict the actual emperors very accurately.
00:19:24.000 But he gets tired of it.
00:19:26.000 So he just comes down to Alexandria on like a royal visit and executes 25,000 people in the city of Alexandria and burns down parts of it.
00:19:34.000 So he burned down the library for the third time.
00:19:36.000 And then there was another emperor named Aurelian when a local Alexandrian declared himself the new Egyptian pharaoh.
00:19:45.000 I think he was a real Egyptian.
00:19:46.000 He declared himself like the newest pharaoh and he created this revolt. 0.91
00:19:52.000 And then Aurelian had to come and put the revolt down and he burned down the library again.
00:19:56.000 So this is – we're getting close to like 300 AD at this point.
00:20:12.000 It's where the Minoans lived. 0.81
00:20:14.000 I believe it's there.
00:20:15.000 Or it's off the coast of Cyprus.
00:20:16.000 And so that earthquake just reverberates down to Egypt.
00:20:21.000 And this massive tsunami destroys the entire city of Alexandria.
00:20:24.000 And 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.
00:20:33.000 And he comes to Alexandria and he records that 50,000 people in the city are missing because of the wave that gets pushed in.
00:20:41.000 And that all of the giant boats – these are giant boats.
00:20:44.000 giant, gigantic boats in Alexandria's harbor are sitting on top of all the rooftops in the city.
00:20:50.000 And it's after this point that the location of Alexander's body and the location of Alexandria's library just...
00:21:02.000 All of the giant stones that were used to build the city were repurposed for other things.
00:21:07.000 But in one fatal swoop, Alexandria's library, the Museon, and Alexandria's mausoleum completely disappear from the historical record.
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00:22:37.000 Wow.
00:22:38.000 It just shows you how vulnerable knowledge is.
00:22:42.000 I 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.
00:22:59.000 But how much of what we have is on hard drives?
00:23:02.000 And if there was a power outage, just a global worldwide power outage that lasted six months, we're fucked.
00:23:10.000 We don't know anything anymore.
00:23:12.000 It's a small amount of time for an enormous cataclysmic disaster to completely erase tens of thousands of years of understanding of everything.
00:23:23.000 Everything.
00:23:23.000 We would have no knowledge.
00:23:26.000 One generation removed from electronics would have no knowledge of how to recreate it, what steps need to be taken.
00:23:33.000 You have to build a chip plant?
00:23:36.000 Where are they right now?
00:23:37.000 They're in Taiwan?
00:23:38.000 What the fuck are you talking about?
00:23:40.000 How are we going to do this?
00:23:41.000 Hard drives?
00:23:42.000 That's a precarious place for them to be.
00:23:43.000 Starting from scratch, starting from scratch today, would be very similar, I think, to
00:24:01.000 Civilization, 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?
00:24:20.000 Calming down again.
00:24:21.000 Well, it seems like it took about five, four or five thousand years before civilization emerges.
00:24:27.000 A really long time.
00:24:28.000 A really long time.
00:24:30.000 Foraging, you know?
00:24:32.000 I was reading, yesterday I was reading Exploration Fawcett.
00:24:36.000 Have you ever read this before?
00:24:37.000 No.
00:24:37.000 Listened to the audiobook.
00:24:39.000 It's Percy Fawcett's?
00:24:41.000 Personal Diary.
00:24:41.000 Oh, wow.
00:24:43.000 There's an audiobook of that?
00:24:44.000 Yeah, it's on Audible.
00:24:47.000 Dude, you'll get wrapped up in it.
00:24:48.000 You won't be able to stop listening to it.
00:24:51.000 He just has these amazing experiences.
00:24:54.000 Oh, man, he would be like your best, like your all-time guest, you know, if you could have him on.
00:24:58.000 Sure.
00:24:59.000 He had a great accent, too.
00:25:01.000 Yeah, yeah, for sure.
00:25:02.000 And so you listen to his audio book and the way he talks about meeting the indigenous people that live deep in the Amazon.
00:25:12.000 You know, it would take him weeks to get to these little villages.
00:25:14.000 And while he was out there, he would see like the.
00:25:29.000 And these people were—he said that they had, like, beautiful skin.
00:25:32.000 They spoke elegantly.
00:25:33.000 They sang songs.
00:25:35.000 And 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. 0.94
00:25:47.000 These are people who are the descendants of a fallen great civilization.
00:25:53.000 He was like, the way they interact with each other is so sophisticated.
00:25:56.000 Why 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?
00:26:09.000 I don't quite know.
00:26:11.000 There's some things that are left out.
00:26:13.000 Before he started writing this, I think he always had these ideas in the back of his mind.
00:26:19.000 And so you don't really get the origin of why he initially started thinking this.
00:26:23.000 But while he's exploring South America, he's hearing all these stories of semi-contacted people.
00:26:32.000 Natives 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.
00:26:38.000 So he would hear about, oh yeah, there's this huge city of gold off in the jungle, months traveled that way.
00:26:46.000 And it's the same kind of legend that all these Spaniards had heard.
00:26:49.000 So it's this idea of, well, there was this civilization that used to be out there.
00:26:53.000 And so Percy thought that maybe it has something to do with Atlantis.
00:26:57.000 And so that was part of his journey looking for it.
00:27:01.000 It's actually his wife, Nina Fawcett, I believe.
00:27:04.000 When she's in a library in England, she finds a Portuguese document.
00:27:10.000 I think it's Manuscript 512.
00:27:13.000 Have you ever heard of this?
00:27:14.000 I could have the name of it wrong, but I think it's Manuscript 512.
00:27:18.000 In that, it's these guys who are kind of like semi-professional Portuguese explorers.
00:27:24.000 In 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.
00:27:36.000 And 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.
00:27:41.000 So 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.
00:27:49.000 So that's how they communicate this idea.
00:27:50.000 But they found this big stone city.
00:27:55.000 I'm pretty sure it's Brazil's jungle.
00:27:57.000 And so this was completely forgotten until Percy's wife found this.
00:28:01.000 So 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.
00:28:11.000 I'm guessing that that's what was actually happening there because he was a spy when he was in the military.
00:28:15.000 And I think what he was doing is on an official basis, he's charting the border around Brazil.
00:28:21.000 With the Amazon River.
00:28:23.000 But really what he's doing is collecting information so that maybe Great Britain can have a colony there someday.
00:28:28.000 But then the war disrupts all of that.
00:28:31.000 And 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. 0.50
00:28:38.000 But 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.
00:29:05.000 He 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.
00:29:18.000 I've seen stones like this in the Aztec realm.
00:29:21.000 They have these scepters that have these orb things on the top.
00:29:24.000 And if you shine a light on it, it's like this otherworldly looking thing.
00:29:26.000 I can only imagine if you're on like peyote.
00:29:28.000 What is the stone?
00:29:29.000 I don't know.
00:29:30.000 And it's missing now.
00:29:31.000 It's lost.
00:29:32.000 It went missing with him or somewhere in his expeditions that doesn't exist anymore.
00:29:36.000 But there's an illustration of it in Exploration Faucet that you could find.
00:29:40.000 And 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.
00:29:51.000 This is an advanced culture.
00:29:53.000 There's something that's lost here.
00:29:55.000 And so Percy didn't know if it was a fallen civilization that lived in the Amazon or whether it was still out there somewhere.
00:30:01.000 And he was trying to find either the ruins of it or the living.
00:30:07.000 It'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.
00:30:17.000 I feel like a preconceived notion that he had that there was an advanced civilization and that it had fallen.
00:30:23.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:30:23.000 Because if you're looking at the way the people were living, the way he's describing it, it sounds pretty advanced.
00:30:27.000 Sure, sure.
00:30:28.000 Why wouldn't you assume that these people had lived for thousands of years and eventually risen to this current level?
00:30:34.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:30:35.000 I don't know.
00:30:36.000 I don't know.
00:30:37.000 That's the problem with preconceived notions, too.
00:30:39.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:30:39.000 But I do know that he had...
00:30:41.000 He had the utmost admiration and respect for these people.
00:30:44.000 Like 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.
00:31:03.000 And so he had a great admiration for these people.
00:31:06.000 And he wanted to try to find like a big, big civilization.
00:31:11.000 Something with enough people that could rival Europe.
00:31:15.000 And where he went missing was in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.
00:31:21.000 And the last place that they know that he was at was on May 29th, 1925.
00:31:26.000 And he wrote a letter to his wife from Dead Horse Camp.
00:31:28.000 And he was like, it may be a while before you hear from me.
00:31:30.000 It could be up to a year or two before you hear from me.
00:31:33.000 I'm about to head into a very dense area.
00:31:35.000 And 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.
00:31:41.000 And that was the last letter that he had written.
00:31:43.000 And he was heading off into what's called the Zingu region, which is like the Zingu River.
00:31:50.000 And it's one of the most hostile regions in the Amazon, maybe even today.
00:31:56.000 Teddy Roosevelt had trouble when he went there.
00:31:58.000 But the Zingu region is where all of the major LIDAR came out within the last 10 years.
00:32:04.000 They found all the ruins of these giant cities.
00:32:07.000 And there's a city called Kiriguyu, I think.
00:32:11.000 And it had an estimated...
00:32:18.000 And, you know, when you look at the LIDAR images, you can't get a perspective of how big they are.
00:32:23.000 I 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.
00:32:34.000 I have hundreds of sites marked.
00:32:36.000 And 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.
00:32:42.000 No, 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.
00:32:55.000 Like, raised platforms are a mile long.
00:32:58.000 And they have highways.
00:33:00.000 Maybe we should pull up just an image of a LIDAR scan from the Amazon.
00:33:04.000 But you'll see this central city area.
00:33:09.000 You'll see step pyramids and raised platforms.
00:33:12.000 Maybe this is where people lived or maybe this is where the market was.
00:33:14.000 And there will be a road that cuts straight through it.
00:33:16.000 And you can see the road just goes off.
00:33:24.000 So this is one of these sites.
00:33:27.000 I believe this is in Brazil or maybe it's in northeast Bolivia.
00:33:30.000 And is all that area covered completely with jungle right now?
00:33:33.000 Completely covered in jungle.
00:33:34.000 Yeah, so if you went out there You may not realize that you were standing on a mound.
00:33:40.000 Like you really got to train your eyes.
00:33:42.000 You 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.
00:33:50.000 And we charted this city that had 16 pyramids in it.
00:33:54.000 You know, we were there all day long and we charted 16 pyramids.
00:33:58.000 And 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.
00:34:04.000 The jungle just claims everything back.
00:34:06.000 So 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.
00:34:15.000 And so Percy Fawcett, where that LIDAR came out, is one of the places that he told his wife.
00:34:21.000 He didn't share this publicly where he thought that the city was, but it's like bang on.
00:34:26.000 He was exactly correct about where he thought a city would be.
00:34:29.000 And we don't know if he reached it or not.
00:34:31.000 Wow.
00:34:34.000 It's so interesting because how long has LIDAR been around for?
00:34:38.000 I don't know.
00:34:38.000 And how long has it been used?
00:34:40.000 I mean, think about for how long people had no idea that this existed because it was completely covered with jungle.
00:34:46.000 They just assumed that there was evidence of a civilization.
00:34:50.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:34:50.000 Pretty obvious.
00:34:51.000 But it's not.
00:34:51.000 And 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.
00:35:11.000 This century, for sure.
00:35:13.000 This century is going to be insane.
00:35:15.000 It's going to be insane.
00:35:16.000 Like, you're going to have everyone scanning everything.
00:35:19.000 All of the Amazon will be mapped with LIDAR by the end of the century.
00:35:23.000 All of the Sahara is going to be mapped with LIDAR by the end of the century.
00:35:26.000 The Sahara is a big one.
00:35:28.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:35:28.000 Well, those are my two big things.
00:35:30.000 Like when we talk about Atlantis and we talk about lost civilizations, I mean, my thing is the Sahara and...
00:35:40.000 Both of these things existed pre-Ice Age, especially if we're talking about pre-Ice Age civilization.
00:35:44.000 The Sahara is an oasis.
00:35:48.000 10,000 plus years ago.
00:35:49.000 It's an oasis.
00:35:50.000 You have, what, two or three of the world's largest lake systems on there.
00:35:54.000 You have rivers everywhere.
00:35:56.000 You know, it would have been like a beautiful place to live.
00:35:59.000 Abundant resources, so there's no worry about food and shelter.
00:36:04.000 You have plenty of time to figure things out, which is the thing that has always made sense to me.
00:36:08.000 If you know the history of the Nile Valley and where Egypt was, like – Because you have so much food.
00:36:18.000 And once you have so much food and you're kind of separated from everybody, it's really tough to get to you.
00:36:22.000 So, like, they lived unchallenged in that civilization for thousands of years.
00:36:29.000 Well, yeah, that's amazing.
00:36:31.000 And you know, whenever I, you know, so growing up, And my dad comes up to me, he's like, that's a big book.
00:36:43.000 And I go, I know, it's like I'm reading a textbook for fun, you know?
00:36:46.000 And it was dense reading for me as a 16-year-old.
00:36:50.000 And so, you know, I was so inspired by Graham.
00:36:53.000 And then I went off and, like, got traditionally educated.
00:36:57.000 And so I kind of have both of these perspectives.
00:36:59.000 And 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.
00:37:20.000 And it was just so subpar, I was shocked.
00:37:23.000 And I was like, I'm not even an Egyptologist.
00:37:24.000 I know how to explain these things.
00:37:25.000 And I felt the same way about Zahi.
00:37:27.000 Maybe there's some kind of language barrier there, but it was also like...
00:37:32.000 a basic level.
00:37:34.000 But one of the things that I never see talked about is the concentration of energy along the Nile Valley.
00:37:41.000 Like, 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.
00:37:55.000 And then later on, as Say beginning around like 800, I'm sorry, 8000 BC, it starts rapidly drying up.
00:38:05.000 It's probably a little bit before that.
00:38:06.000 And then by about 4000 BC, it's completely dry.
00:38:09.000 So your Saharans only have a few places that they can go. 0.97
00:38:12.000 They can go to the Mediterranean coast.
00:38:14.000 They can go to the Atlantic coast.
00:38:15.000 They can go down kind of into the Congo and in the savannas.
00:38:18.000 Or they can go to this fertile valley oasis where it's like five And so some people went there.
00:38:30.000 And so you have this hyper concentration of energy and all these people living somewhere together.
00:38:36.000 For what we know is the first time in history.
00:38:38.000 We can verify it, I guess, if that makes sense.
00:38:41.000 And 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.
00:38:51.000 Now you have to live on top of each other and you have to build up these cities.
00:38:55.000 know, you're like building cities.
00:38:57.000 And 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.
00:39:20.000 Just like New York City.
00:39:21.000 We did it, you know, and I've never seen any I think that's a good explanation, at least.
00:39:31.000 And I'm open to things in Egypt being much older.
00:39:32.000 Like the Sphinx is definitely older than the pyramids.
00:39:35.000 But 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?
00:39:49.000 Explain that to me in a way that I can understand.
00:39:51.000 How do you know this?
00:39:52.000 And there's never a proper explanation.
00:39:54.000 and I don't know what that is.
00:39:55.000 It's like they strongly dislike the fact that there's That's exactly it.
00:40:10.000 So they have this knee-jerk reaction to it all.
00:40:12.000 They hate all of it.
00:40:13.000 They don't want to be a part of all of it.
00:40:14.000 And that's not going to work going forward.
00:40:16.000 Like, you know, not to be political, but this recent election showed that you're going to have to appeal to...
00:40:26.000 Everyone is.
00:40:27.000 Especially when there's these forums now like YouTube where someone like you can put up videos explaining things or Jimmy Corsetti or Graham Hancock.
00:40:37.000 The access to people to share fascinating ideas, it's not limited to universities anymore.
00:40:45.000 And I think that drives them crazy because they spent so much time being in control.
00:40:50.000 And then all of a sudden it's just like...
00:41:02.000 And then there's people that are going to support both of them on either side.
00:41:05.000 And 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.
00:41:19.000 So we don't even know, like, how much of it is organic until you see something like voting.
00:41:24.000 And then you go, oh, this is how people really feel.
00:41:27.000 But how much of that has even been influenced by all these AI campaigns?
00:41:32.000 But what we do know is that human arrogance has always been a real problem.
00:41:36.000 And 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.
00:41:45.000 It's like this arrogance that human beings People love to be experts.
00:41:50.000 They 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.
00:42:00.000 Exactly.
00:42:00.000 Instead of just being humble but yet knowledgeable, which is a great position.
00:42:05.000 And when you talk to someone and they're humble and knowledgeable, that's a wonderful thing.
00:42:15.000 Archaeologists are not doing that, which is why they're rejecting people like Graham Hancock.
00:42:19.000 What they should be doing is embracing the work that he's doing because he's self-funded.
00:42:25.000 And 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.
00:42:38.000 He's in Iraq right now, studying the ancient Sumerian civilization with the remnants of it.
00:42:44.000 There's two things I'll say there.
00:42:50.000 I guess a running theme of this is we're about to enter into like archaeological wild west in a way.
00:42:55.000 You know, I think that, you know, Jimmy getting involved with with.
00:43:06.000 And they're removing them now.
00:43:08.000 Yeah.
00:43:08.000 Because of him.
00:43:09.000 And it's just proof that a guy I mean, gosh, was I – I just graduated from high school.
00:43:17.000 And 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.
00:43:33.000 And, you know, lo and behold, I guess, what, six, seven years later, he's still at it.
00:43:38.000 And he's actually...
00:43:46.000 Like 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.
00:43:54.000 Sure enough, they removed the trees.
00:43:56.000 And then there's kind of like the backpedaling of, oh, well, it was always in the plan to remove the trees.
00:44:00.000 But I think it's – I think people might disagree with Jimmy's approach, whatever.
00:44:04.000 But 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.
00:44:28.000 And these are things I had planned in Florida, here in the Southeast, in the States, in Central America, and in the Amazon.
00:44:34.000 and it's like encouraging like wow I mean we're really approaching Right, but in the physical archaeology world.
00:44:49.000 Exactly, exactly, yeah.
00:44:50.000 Jimmy's so meticulous too.
00:44:51.000 He's such a good representative because he's really intelligent, really And he has counter-arguments to his own points.
00:45:03.000 He'll tell you something.
00:45:05.000 But also, it could be this.
00:45:07.000 And this is what we know.
00:45:08.000 And because he's been really careful in the way he expresses himself, he's established this community that understands what he does.
00:45:19.000 And they trust him.
00:45:20.000 And they go, no, no, no.
00:45:22.000 He's going to tell you the truth.
00:45:23.000 He's going to tell you what we know and why we know it.
00:45:25.000 He's not going to make any weird ideological leaps.
00:45:27.000 He's not going to make any weird judgments.
00:45:29.000 He's just going to lay out what is fascinating about these things.
00:45:34.000 And because of that, whether he has a degree or not a degree, that guy's having a massive impact.
00:45:41.000 I mean, I don't know how many What does Bright Insights YouTube channel have for subscribers?
00:45:47.000 And it's, by the way, if you haven't watched any of his videos, Love the guy.
00:45:52.000 Love the stuff.
00:45:53.000 1.7.
00:45:55.000 By the way, he's been called a Nazi.
00:45:59.000 Which is – that's just – that's what they use.
00:46:03.000 These are the terms.
00:46:04.000 He's been called all sorts of terrible things.
00:46:07.000 None of them are true.
00:46:07.000 He's a wonderful guy and just a man who's deeply fascinated with these mysteries.
00:46:13.000 And when he's pointing out the things that we cannot – it's Baalbek and Lebanon, the trillion – what do they call the trillion stones?
00:46:22.000 Trilithon stones.
00:46:23.000 Trilithon stones.
00:46:25.000 There's certain things that you can point out that people go, okay, what the fuck?
00:46:29.000 He gets to the what the fuck stuff where everybody's like, okay, what else you got?
00:46:34.000 How come I didn't know this?
00:46:36.000 How come this isn't like something like when you're talking about ancient history, the history of whether it's Lebanon or Egypt.
00:46:42.000 And when they start talking about these things and they lay out the histories of the pharaohs.
00:46:47.000 And why aren't you?
00:46:52.000 They carry these fucking enormous 80-ton rocks through the mountains and how they cut them.
00:46:59.000 That's the mystery.
00:47:01.000 This is the big piece of evidence that these guys just want to dismiss.
00:47:05.000 Oh, it was the national project.
00:47:09.000 You know, like, okay, yeah, but that doesn't say how you did that 5,000 years ago.
00:47:14.000 You need to help me out here.
00:47:15.000 And 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.
00:47:28.000 And then it creates – And then because of that enormous audience, he has a huge impact on actual archaeology.
00:47:38.000 And that's why they hate him.
00:47:39.000 It's just because he's doing their job better than they're doing their job because he's not trapped.
00:47:46.000 He's not stuck in this compartmentalized, ideological.
00:47:54.000 And he doesn't have to worry about funding.
00:47:56.000 And he doesn't have to worry about, you know, being chastised by his peers because they're all a bunch of bitches. 1.00
00:48:01.000 He doesn't have to worry about that.
00:48:02.000 So he's free.
00:48:03.000 And there's a bunch of those guys that are emerging now.
00:48:07.000 And guys like yourself.
00:48:08.000 And I think that's really important because the gatekeepers have been wrong every step of the way with almost everything.
00:48:15.000 Whether it's medical science, whether it's health and nutrition, whatever it is.
00:48:20.000 They've been wrong every damn step of the way.
00:48:23.000 So maybe open it up.
00:48:25.000 Just 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.
00:48:38.000 We can see how they behave.
00:48:40.000 We can see the things they say and the way they do things and the way they act and even the way they affect enrollment.
00:48:47.000 Based on race and gender and sexual preference, you guys are fucking crazy. 0.99
00:48:52.000 This is not how you're supposed to handle knowledge and information.
00:48:56.000 This is a dumb approach.
00:48:57.000 And 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.
00:49:13.000 It's just a danger that the human ego and the human mind fall prey to almost every single time.
00:49:22.000 The internet, what it's done is it's like this great equalizer.
00:49:27.000 It is.
00:49:28.000 It has allowed people to have these associations.
00:49:32.000 You shouldn't be doing this.
00:49:33.000 Don't do your own research.
00:49:36.000 Those are stupid sayings.
00:49:38.000 Like, you can't think like that.
00:49:39.000 There'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.
00:49:54.000 I know he's not gonna lie, you know, and there's too many Yeah, yeah.
00:50:06.000 attacking each other.
00:50:07.000 I mean, I just experienced this the other day.
00:50:10.000 You know, so I had a, a This is what I'm going to do.
00:50:21.000 And 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.
00:50:28.000 And then I just had this – let's just say I was in the jungle, and I had a mind-opening experience.
00:50:34.000 And 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.
00:50:44.000 And I'm not going to specialize.
00:50:46.000 I'm not going to like hunker down in this academic path or whatever.
00:50:49.000 And so I just decided I'm not going to go through with this.
00:50:53.000 So I start publishing content in my research on the Americas again.
00:50:59.000 And the Americas are very mysterious.
00:51:04.000 Very comparable to Egypt.
00:51:05.000 The amount of questions that haven't been answered is insane.
00:51:09.000 And the Olmec world is fascinating.
00:51:15.000 Graham, in Fingerprints of the Gods, he talks about how the Olmecs, he thought that they may have African features.
00:51:23.000 And of course, that was 1995.
00:51:25.000 And 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.
00:51:42.000 But in the Olmec world, there's this monument. 0.69
00:51:45.000 that is actually called El Negro and you look at it And it's not an Olmec. 0.83
00:51:49.000 It is an African man.
00:51:51.000 And so I post about this on my X account and I just kind of like list everything I've seen in the Olmec world. 0.97
00:51:57.000 And I'm like, you know, this is really fascinating.
00:51:59.000 Maybe this is evidence of Africans who were in the Olmec world. 0.99
00:52:03.000 And I hadn't seen this monument before I saw it in person.
00:52:05.000 Because 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.
00:52:17.000 It was six months before that.
00:52:19.000 And these monuments just kind of sit underneath these metal roofs to protect him from the rain.
00:52:25.000 It's like this completely lost civilization.
00:52:28.000 Is there an image of this that's available online?
00:52:30.000 Yeah.
00:52:31.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:52:32.000 There we go.
00:52:33.000 So if you pull up an Olmec head, you'll see that these guys are very different looking. 1.00
00:52:33.000 There we go. 1.00
00:52:39.000 Yeah, yeah, there we go.
00:52:42.000 Look at...
00:52:46.000 So you can see that these are two different races of people.
00:52:50.000 You know, the Olmecs have very soft features, round faces, big eyes, big lips, kind of big noses. 1.00
00:52:57.000 They have very soft features.
00:52:58.000 And this El Negro monument has these high cheekbones, this defined jawline. 0.86
00:53:04.000 But isn't there a lot of variety just in, like, let's just say Italians?
00:53:08.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:53:09.000 There's a lot of variety.
00:53:10.000 So couldn't this just be someone who's on a spectrum of features?
00:53:15.000 I mean, I don't think it's that much different than Olmecs.
00:53:18.000 You don't think so?
00:53:18.000 No, when I'm looking at it, I could imagine.
00:53:22.000 Like I said, just, you know, So there's Italians with very thin faces, and there's these big, thick ones. 1.00
00:53:29.000 And, like, people vary quite a bit.
00:53:32.000 There's enough similarities that I could say, oh, those could be the same people.
00:53:35.000 Well, the only counter I give to that is when you visit the Olmec realm, you see a lot more than just the heads. 0.87
00:53:41.000 You see a lot of Olmec faces, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, maybe well over a hundred.
00:53:46.000 And 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.
00:53:53.000 I 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.
00:54:01.000 Well, certainly the thick brow is unique to all the OMICs wearing helmets. 1.00
00:54:06.000 And that hair as well.
00:54:08.000 It's kind of that curly hair.
00:54:12.000 Or at least it looks like it to me.
00:54:14.000 And so anyways, you know...
00:54:19.000 My identity is not tied up in what I think this is or is not.
00:54:23.000 Also, Olmec could be African, like very, very clearly.
00:54:26.000 That one on the left easily could be an African man.
00:54:29.000 Which one?
00:54:30.000 This guy right here?
00:54:30.000 This one, the one next to the white one, to the left of that.
00:54:34.000 Yeah, right there.
00:54:35.000 Easily could be an African man. 1.00
00:54:36.000 It 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.
00:54:46.000 I looked to the left of me, and he was an Olmec man sitting next to me.
00:54:50.000 And he was, you know, he looked like, he didn't look like any Mexican I've ever seen. 0.98
00:54:54.000 There's something there with the DNA of the Olmec people that is definitely... 1.00
00:55:06.000 They have something in their DNA.
00:55:07.000 They have this very specific look about them, and I don't know exactly what it is.
00:55:11.000 But I'm, like, looking, and I'm like, this old Mac guy next to me.
00:55:14.000 So fascinating, because it clearly could have been African explorers that made it.
00:55:19.000 Yeah, well, I'll tell you what.
00:55:21.000 Could we look up...
00:55:25.000 Look up the Traveler Olmec Monument, if you would, please, Jamie.
00:55:30.000 It's the Traveler.
00:55:31.000 I want to call him, I think he's Monument 13. There's another one called Monument 19 that we should look at.
00:55:36.000 But he's this man that's very clearly not, there we go, top left, the one that's on Reddit.
00:55:42.000 In fact, this might be my post on Reddit.
00:55:44.000 Yes, yes, sir.
00:55:46.000 So this guy right here.
00:55:48.000 All right.
00:55:48.000 So this is really, really fascinating.
00:55:50.000 So let's diagnose this.
00:55:52.000 All right.
00:55:52.000 So flags.
00:55:53.000 Flags are invented.
00:55:55.000 This is a very unknown fact.
00:55:58.000 Flags 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.
00:56:09.000 They would make little paintings on them.
00:56:11.000 And people have these riverboats that have these flags on them.
00:56:13.000 And the flags would say what city you had come from or what village you had come from.
00:56:18.000 And so flags are an old world thing.
00:56:21.000 We don't have any evidence of flags in the new world.
00:56:23.000 All right.
00:56:24.000 He's also wearing a turban.
00:56:25.000 He's got this big turban that's draping off the back of his head, and he very clearly has this distinct beard that's popping out.
00:56:32.000 Now, Native Americans, sometimes, They have Asian DNA.
00:56:39.000 And Asians don't really grow typically.
00:56:43.000 Sometimes they'll grow with a little, like, stash and a little bit of a beard here.
00:56:46.000 But they don't have that big, thick beard that you would see, you know, like in Europe or along the Mediterranean in the Middle East.
00:56:53.000 And so this guy has this big, thick beard.
00:56:55.000 And then he's got boots on his feet as well.
00:56:57.000 And we think that these are these glyphs that you see to his left and right.
00:57:01.000 These are really, really early Olmec glyphs, and they interpret that foot to the left as saying that he came from somewhere.
00:57:10.000 He was a traveler.
00:57:19.000 They really have no idea when these are made.
00:57:21.000 Like you go to all the monuments and it says made somewhere between 1500 BC and 400 BC.
00:57:27.000 They'll say 1500 BC and 400 BC.
00:57:30.000 And so they really are uncertain about how old a lot of these monuments are.
00:57:35.000 Make a big again, Jamie, please.
00:57:36.000 But if we shoot for dead center 900 BC, the Phoenicians – These are the ancient world's greatest sailors that we know of.
00:57:49.000 And 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
00:58:21.000 into the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and straight into the Gulf of Mexico.
00:58:24.000 And if that had happened, if people who had looked like they're in the old world like this guy, if that had happened...
00:58:38.000 And the reason I feel so strongly about that is because we do not have flags, turbans, or boots in the ancient Americas.
00:58:44.000 This guy looks nothing like a Native American. 1.00
00:58:47.000 And the flag, turban, and boots are all Old World features. 0.79
00:58:52.000 You know what's fascinating to me, too?
00:58:54.000 The image on the lower right of the bird's head looks very similar to the carvings on Gobekli Tepe.
00:59:01.000 Doesn't it?
00:59:02.000 Yes, very.
00:59:03.000 The curve of the beak, that's not how birds' beaks look.
00:59:07.000 That's a very distinct style of artwork.
00:59:10.000 If you can find the images of the birds from Gobekli Tepe.
00:59:14.000 It's this raised relief art style.
00:59:17.000 So people talk about it a lot with Gobekli Tepe.
00:59:20.000 I mean, think about this.
00:59:20.000 This is 11,600 years ago, and you have...
00:59:37.000 Not carve the artwork into the stone, but carve the stone away and reveal this sculpture from underneath.
00:59:43.000 How similar does that look?
00:59:44.000 It's bizarre, right?
00:59:45.000 Real similar.
00:59:46.000 And so it's the exact same kind of Art style that you see in the Olmec realm.
00:59:53.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:59:53.000 The 3D stone carvings.
00:59:56.000 Instead of carving it directly into the stone, carve the stone around it.
00:59:59.000 They're both doing the same thing.
01:00:00.000 It takes a lot of time.
01:00:04.000 Could you imagine?
01:00:04.000 Weird.
01:00:05.000 Weird stuff.
01:00:07.000 It's also, like, the idea that this is documenting time.
01:00:11.000 You know, the handbags or whatever those things are, what it actually is, is the sun going over the earth.
01:00:20.000 You know, I'm writing a paper about this, but this might be a good place to talk about it.
01:00:26.000 So you know, the handbag mystery is very fascinating.
01:00:30.000 We have them in Assyria.
01:00:32.000 We have them, um, uh, Mesopotamia, As far as I know, I don't think one's been found in Egypt.
01:00:39.000 You can see them on the top of those T pillars in Gobekli Tepe.
01:00:42.000 And there's one in the Olmec realm. 0.94
01:00:44.000 Are you familiar with this?
01:00:45.000 No.
01:00:46.000 Monument 19, if we can look that up.
01:00:51.000 And when I saw it in person, I jumped.
01:00:53.000 I had been waiting years to see it.
01:00:55.000 That's crazy.
01:00:55.000 Same thing?
01:00:56.000 Olmec Monument 19. So this guy, he's wrapped in, he's sitting in Quetzalcoatl.
01:01:05.000 Could you do the one at the top left where we get the full picture?
01:01:07.000 There we go.
01:01:08.000 So this stone is probably about this big.
01:01:10.000 It's probably about this big, and it sits on a table like this.
01:01:13.000 So he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl.
01:01:17.000 And so he's sitting inside the feathered serpent and he's holding this handbag.
01:01:20.000 And I'm not sure.
01:01:21.000 So he has this...
01:01:27.000 I'm not sure what exactly is above him.
01:01:29.000 Well, there are actually two...
01:01:39.000 But the important thing here is the fact that this is the first depiction of the feathered serpent in all of Mesoamerica that we know of.
01:01:46.000 And it might be the oldest handbag known as far as what we have official dates for.
01:01:53.000 And so the idea here is that he's some kind of sacred shaman, bringer of enlightenment, bringer of knowledge, something like that.
01:02:02.000 And so I had been on the hunt.
01:02:05.000 For another handbag.
01:02:06.000 Everywhere I go, I'm always looking for a handbag.
01:02:08.000 I was in Cambodia a couple weeks ago.
01:02:09.000 I'm going around the temples of Angkor Wat, and there's hieroglyphs and carvings all over the walls.
01:02:15.000 I'm looking for a handbag.
01:02:16.000 I can't find one.
01:02:17.000 But when I was in Central Mexico, I was at a site called Kakashla, and I found another handbag person.
01:02:27.000 I've never officially published it.
01:02:29.000 It's on my X if you'd want to look it up.
01:02:31.000 What is the timeline for that one?
01:02:33.000 They don't really know.
01:02:34.000 When you look at the monument, it says anywhere from 1400 BC to 400 BC.
01:02:39.000 That's just what they think.
01:02:40.000 I mean the Olmec realm is so uncertain and we don't have hard dates for almost anything.
01:02:48.000 They appear on this historical timeline as a fully-fledged civilization capable of creating what you're seeing from the very beginning.
01:02:56.000 Just like so many civilizations, as soon as they arrive in the world, they're doing everything to the fullest capacity.
01:03:05.000 And we don't have any evidence in the Olmec realm of them working their way towards being able to do things like this. 0.97
01:03:12.000 It's just from the very beginning they're able to make monuments like this, move these 50-ton Olmec heads. 1.00
01:03:18.000 The largest head is – There was a nautical engineer that MEC, which is an organization I'm with.
01:03:27.000 It's the Maya Exploration Center.
01:03:29.000 It's run by Dr. Ed Barnhart.
01:03:31.000 I'm a member of it.
01:03:33.000 And one of the guys that worked with us traveled into the Olmec realm.
01:03:38.000 he's a nautical engineer.
01:03:39.000 He's fascinated with So they live in like the rivers, swamps.
01:03:48.000 They have to cross some mountain ranges.
01:03:50.000 How are you getting these heads 90 miles away from the Sierra de la Tuchela volcanic belt?
01:03:55.000 That's where they're pulling the basalt from.
01:03:57.000 Because we found unfinished heads like at the base of these big basalt quarries.
01:04:00.000 And they're transporting them 90 kilometers away through.
01:04:04.000 You know, like I was saying, rivers and valleys.
01:04:06.000 Not any miles or kilometers?
01:04:07.000 I think it's kilometers.
01:04:09.000 It's kilometers as the crow flies, I'm pretty sure.
01:04:11.000 And so much further when you're actually dealing with the complications of the terrain.
01:04:17.000 And so he was fascinated, like, okay.
01:04:21.000 How do they get them to the river?
01:04:23.000 And then how do they get them on the boat?
01:04:25.000 And when it's on the boat, how exactly does this work if they're transporting it by boat?
01:04:29.000 And kind of the same mystery in Egypt too, right?
01:04:32.000 How do the nuances of these things work?
01:04:35.000 So 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.
01:04:47.000 And when you made a raft...
01:04:56.000 When the raft was too big and too wide to actually go down the river, and you put a 5-ton Olmec head on it, it would sink that raft. 1.00
01:05:03.000 But the smallest Olmec head is 6 tons, and the largest one is 52 tons. 0.76
01:05:08.000 So how are they doing it?
01:05:11.000 And this is something that all archaeologists have quietly known.
01:05:14.000 This idea of they're just being transported on these simple balsa rafts must be wrong.
01:05:19.000 It's unexplained.
01:05:20.000 How are these things being done?
01:05:22.000 I just find this realm really fascinating.
01:05:25.000 Wow.
01:05:26.000 It is right.
01:05:27.000 And then when, do they even know what language they spoke?
01:05:30.000 No, we don't know what language they spoke.
01:05:33.000 We don't even know what they called themselves.
01:05:35.000 The only reason we call them the Olmecs is because Cortez, 1519 to 1521, he's moving through Mexico to conquer Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital.
01:05:44.000 During 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.
01:05:52.000 You know, all these people are dying from this disease and influenza.
01:05:57.000 And there's a record of what the people who lived in the Olmec region are called at that time in 1520, let's say.
01:06:07.000 And the Aztecs called them the Olmecs in their language, Nahuatl.
01:06:12.000 And those Olmec people, the name means the rubber people or the people of the land of rubber.
01:06:17.000 They produced rubber.
01:06:18.000 And that's how the Olmecs were so rich so early on in time. 1.00
01:06:20.000 But these were not...
01:06:24.000 The Olmecs have fallen and there are other cultures that have arisen and fallen in this same region as well. 0.75
01:06:30.000 The Olmecs are far, far, far, far into the distant past. 1.00
01:06:35.000 The Aztecs maybe didn't even know who the Olmecs were.
01:06:38.000 You know, so are you familiar with Teotihuacan?
01:06:41.000 Yeah.
01:06:42.000 You know, the three massive, where you have the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Moon, and then the Temple of Quetzalcoatl.
01:06:49.000 and they form this kind of like Orion's belt alignment similar to Giza.
01:06:55.000 Well, you know, when the Aztecs arrived in Mexico, Teotihuacan So when they arrived, Teotihuacan is already gone.
01:07:05.000 We don't even know the name of Teotihuacan.
01:07:08.000 We don't know the name of the people.
01:07:09.000 We don't know the name of the city.
01:07:12.000 We know their relationship with other people around them, like the Maya were at war with Teotihuacan, but the civilization had already fallen.
01:07:18.000 So when the Aztecs arrived, the Olmecs had been gone for – The Olmecs had already been gone. 1.00
01:07:27.000 Teotihuacan had been gone for 1,000 years.
01:07:29.000 The Maya had already collapsed. 1.00
01:07:31.000 The Maya collapsed long before the Spanish got there. 0.79
01:07:35.000 And so it's just again like the Americas are just so mysterious and there's so much to know there.
01:07:41.000 And 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?
01:08:04.000 And I'm like, so I can't talk about anything that's fascinating.
01:08:07.000 I need to talk about things that are boring so you don't get upset with me.
01:08:11.000 And now it's just like the...
01:08:21.000 It's fun to watch.
01:08:22.000 Yeah, and they'll be like, okay, this is a perfect representation of what you guys do.
01:08:28.000 I 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.
01:08:38.000 These people, they don't like you, they don't like the people that you have on.
01:08:43.000 How many people do you think you've sent to Egypt?
01:08:45.000 You know, like, you had a significant impact.
01:08:48.000 This show had a significant impact on me being interested in the ancient world.
01:08:52.000 And I have traveled all over the world, you know, because largely, you know, some of the show inspired me to do that.
01:08:59.000 And I'm probably one of the few people that found you because of Graham Hancock.
01:09:05.000 That's awesome.
01:09:05.000 Yeah, rather than the other way around.
01:09:08.000 And 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.
01:09:13.000 So, 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?
01:09:23.000 And, 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.
01:09:31.000 You're always going to have people that are threatened by an emerging new thing.
01:09:37.000 And they're going to attack it.
01:09:39.000 Like, you know, famously in this world, Howard Stern used to attack podcasts as being useless.
01:09:46.000 Oh, really?
01:09:46.000 Like, why are you wasting your time?
01:09:47.000 Yeah.
01:09:48.000 You know, get a radio show, figure out how to do it.
01:09:50.000 This is the beginning, the early days.
01:09:52.000 You know, obviously you can't do that anymore.
01:09:54.000 But 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.
01:10:06.000 I saw that.
01:10:06.000 This is why.
01:10:09.000 You're in this survival mode, this famine mode.
01:10:12.000 It's terrible.
01:10:13.000 But famine thinking is always very dangerous.
01:10:17.000 You see it with people that don't want other people to be successful.
01:10:22.000 It exists in the comedy world.
01:10:24.000 There's famine thinking.
01:10:25.000 When other people start doing better, they start attacking those people.
01:10:27.000 They never attack people that aren't doing as well as them.
01:10:29.000 It's just a natural human instinct, unfortunately.
01:10:32.000 And it's a natural human instinct from people with poor character.
01:10:34.000 And I think that these academic institutes, they reinforce poor character.
01:10:38.000 And they actually encourage it.
01:10:41.000 Poor character and this labeling people in the worst possible light.
01:10:48.000 In order to make your point, which is like ad hominem attacks are always a sign that your argument sucks.
01:10:53.000 Everybody knows that.
01:10:54.000 If 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.
01:11:06.000 And you go, oh, that guy's argument probably sucks, like instantaneously.
01:11:10.000 So they're destroying themselves while they're doing this.
01:11:13.000 But you'll see this in every walk of life.
01:11:17.000 You'll see this in everything.
01:11:18.000 It'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.
01:11:25.000 Like 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.
01:11:32.000 And 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.
01:11:41.000 Half-assing it and hiding behind these – It's not going to work anymore.
01:11:54.000 It doesn't work anymore with podcasts.
01:11:56.000 It's not going to work anymore with your kind of work in archaeology.
01:12:01.000 It's not going to work anymore with UFO disclosure.
01:12:04.000 It's not going to work anymore with any of this stuff.
01:12:07.000 Way more interested in getting to the bottom of things, and they don't trust institutions anymore.
01:12:13.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:12:14.000 And the institutions are feeling the pressure of independent media, you know, like going back to the Gobekli Tepe tree situation.
01:12:24.000 It'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.
01:12:45.000 You know how that would work?
01:12:46.000 People like you become the head of an archaeology department.
01:12:50.000 That's, this is really the only way it's gonna work.
01:12:52.000 It'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.
01:13:07.000 We gotta get rid of Don Lemon and Brian Stelter.
01:13:10.000 Oh, actually, he's back.
01:13:11.000 So they try to course-correct because that's the only way to survive.
01:13:15.000 Because it's not working.
01:13:17.000 what you're doing is not working.
01:13:18.000 From 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.
01:13:29.000 And 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.
01:13:39.000 And then all the other people that are pretty agreeable, they just kind of sit on the sideline, right?
01:13:45.000 It'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?
01:13:53.000 And some of the young people I talk to, they are fascinated by Graham Hancock.
01:13:56.000 They may not agree with – I guess in a way I could say this.
01:14:00.000 They may love the first nine episodes of Ancient Apocalypse.
01:14:03.000 But in the 10th episode where Graham gives the end of his thesis, they'll be like, OK, I see the evidence differently.
01:14:09.000 But this is really fascinating.
01:14:10.000 And some of the mysteries you pointed out along the way are valid.
01:14:13.000 Like the idea of – well, you know, the – Okay, what's the answer to this mystery?
01:14:28.000 Could it have been that we're missing a chapter of history that's before that where a different civilization did it?
01:14:35.000 Or is there, for some reason, there's an artifact record that's lost to us today?
01:14:40.000 And so you have guys like Graham who will come in and posit, well, there could have been a lost civilization that did this.
01:14:48.000 An 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.
01:14:58.000 And how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery.
01:15:00.000 This is worth considering.
01:15:01.000 And they like Graham.
01:15:02.000 So 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.
01:15:12.000 And 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.
01:15:21.000 The world's poisoned, and the people at the top are not going to let go.
01:15:24.000 They're going to stay in there until the Noam Chomsky's age.
01:15:28.000 I just think it's never going to end in that way.
01:15:31.000 I think it's got to become some sort of an independent Branch like you know a break off.
01:15:37.000 Yeah, you know Zahi is a is a You know, you have a lot of different missions from different countries working in Egypt.
01:15:49.000 You have like a German mission, you have the American mission, you know, different people working at different sites.
01:15:53.000 And I can't speak to every country that's working there.
01:15:56.000 You have Australian missions that are working in Egypt, digging at certain sites.
01:15:59.000 But, you know, when I watch Zahi, I'm like, yeah, this is the what you're seeing.
01:16:07.000 This is the attitude that has been at the spear point of Egyptology for the last lifetime.
01:16:20.000 Think about working in his industry underneath him.
01:16:23.000 Think about all the people that were a part of the discoveries that he made that feel so disrespected and so overlooked.
01:16:29.000 Not once during that podcast did he ever acknowledge all the hardworking archaeologists that – He just took all this limelight.
01:16:39.000 And so, you know, clearly his identity is tied into what's in his coffee table book.
01:16:46.000 And, you know, for him to act like that's the Bible of Giza is insane.
01:16:49.000 I own the book, and I've read it, and it has half of a page about the subterranean chamber in Khufu's Pyramid.
01:16:56.000 So you could write a whole book about that.
01:17:00.000 I don't mean to interrupt.
01:17:01.000 Keep going.
01:17:02.000 I 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. 1.00
01:17:15.000 I 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.
01:17:29.000 And there's a turd on the side of the pyramid.
01:17:32.000 A human turd?
01:17:33.000 Yeah, and it's from the guard that's like sitting up on top of the hill, the Egyptian guard looking down at me.
01:17:37.000 And I go around to Land of Kim, who I'm traveling with. 0.96
01:17:42.000 Have you heard of him before?
01:17:43.000 No.
01:17:43.000 He's an American that lives in Egypt and he's got his theories on the pyramids.
01:17:47.000 And I'm traveling with him and I was like, there's a turd on the pyramid over there.
01:17:51.000 And he's like, yeah, yeah, you know.
01:17:53.000 And I was like, a tourist?
01:17:54.000 And he goes, no, not tourist.
01:17:56.000 And so, you know.
01:17:58.000 The poop on the pyramid is pretty much like, that's kind of my mental, that's burned into my brain, my image of Egyptology.
01:18:07.000 In 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?
01:18:13.000 I don't remember.
01:18:14.000 Where were we at when I was going to interrupt?
01:18:17.000 Oh, this is what I remember.
01:18:19.000 What is your opinion about Christopher Dunn's ideas?
01:18:24.000 I don't know.
01:18:25.000 I really don't know, man.
01:18:26.000 For people that don't know, Christopher Dunn has a theory that the Great Pyramid was actually some sort of a power generator.
01:18:36.000 Mm-hmm.
01:18:37.000 That it produced hydrogen gas.
01:18:39.000 I don't know.
01:18:40.000 I mean, you know, I know that the Egyptians, it's obvious that they have technology that...
01:18:47.000 The drill holes.
01:18:49.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:18:49.000 The way they cut the concrete, excuse me, the granite.
01:18:53.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:18:54.000 But, you know, I really don't know.
01:18:57.000 As far as the manufacturing aspects, the engineering, the potential usages of these artifacts, it's not really my specialty.
01:19:10.000 These 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?
01:19:31.000 And so I just don't know about Chris Dunn's theory.
01:19:34.000 You 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.
01:19:40.000 I 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.
01:19:49.000 Right.
01:19:49.000 It is absolutely fascinating, though, because if he's accurate, if he's onto it, boy, does that change everything.
01:19:57.000 And if those Italian scientists that believe that there's literally a two-kilometer deep structure underneath the pyramid, if they're correct, boy. 0.56
01:20:07.000 Yeah.
01:20:08.000 The whole thing is like, what are we even talking about now?
01:20:10.000 Yeah, I find that fascinating.
01:20:12.000 I 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.
01:20:20.000 I think it was like they had the...
01:20:29.000 And I think a lot of people were like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
01:20:31.000 Yeah, that was a little weird.
01:20:32.000 Because even me, I was a little bit like, huh?
01:20:36.000 When 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.
01:20:47.000 And they, I guess, quintupled it.
01:20:50.000 they made five of them and I was thinking like wow why do that?
01:20:54.000 Like 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.
01:21:07.000 So, like, Luis Alvarez, are you familiar with him?
01:21:09.000 He worked on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer.
01:21:12.000 And after the war in the 50s or in the 60s, he got to go to Egypt and he scanned in the coffer pyramid.
01:21:18.000 He did the muon scans.
01:21:19.000 And when he was in there, they tested.
01:21:22.000 They tested it all before.
01:21:23.000 So he was able to scan up through the pyramid, and he got the pinnacle of the pyramid, and he got all four corners.
01:21:28.000 And so they tested it, and they did it several times just to confirm that what they were getting was right.
01:21:33.000 And I think the Muon scan only scanned like 19% of the pyramid.
01:21:37.000 This is the 60s.
01:21:39.000 But they didn't find anything, but the Stanford project came the next decade, and they found subterranean chambers under Koffer's pyramid.
01:21:47.000 There's one like 69 feet down and another one 120 feet.
01:21:55.000 And so, yeah, I mean, I guess we just have to wait and see what's going to happen.
01:22:00.000 And 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.
01:22:14.000 Yeah, I'm interested in seeing how this goes.
01:22:16.000 This could be a big year, man.
01:22:17.000 If they actually drill into that void above the Grand Gallery, that's going to be a big deal.
01:22:24.000 What do you think's in that void?
01:22:27.000 I have no idea.
01:22:29.000 It's pretty big, right?
01:22:30.000 It's the size of two semi-trucks?
01:22:34.000 It's the same size or bigger than the Grand Gallery itself.
01:22:37.000 The Grand Gallery, when you go in, it's a huge building.
01:22:41.000 You're inside a building inside of the pyramid.
01:22:44.000 It's as big or bigger than that.
01:22:46.000 And 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.
01:22:55.000 Nobody really knows exactly how they were built.
01:22:58.000 And the angle of that grand gallery is really, really steep.
01:23:03.000 I don't know that you could pull an 80-ton granite block up an angle that steep.
01:23:07.000 It seems like everyone who's an expert in that – To be honest, I have no idea.
01:23:20.000 I 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?
01:23:27.000 And he was telling me, I think that that's where Khufu is buried.
01:23:31.000 And I was like, oh, okay, really?
01:23:32.000 So you actually think that he's still in the pyramid?
01:23:34.000 And he was like, yeah, I think all the rest of it was a decoy.
01:23:37.000 And I think that his son, who's able to continue his legacy, like permanently sealed him in that tomb.
01:23:43.000 And I was like, that's fascinating.
01:23:45.000 And I said, you know, there's other voids that they found too.
01:23:49.000 What do you think of those?
01:23:50.000 And so we're standing on this felucca at 1am on the Nile, and we're just, you know, shooting the shit.
01:23:54.000 And he was like, he's like, I have something to show you.
01:23:56.000 And he pulls out his phone, and he was like, I cannot send to you, but I will show you.
01:24:00.000 For one second, he showed me a photo of the inside of a chamber that I hadn't seen before, and it hasn't been published yet.
01:24:09.000 I'll let you know when it comes out.
01:24:11.000 But it's burned into my mind.
01:24:13.000 It's from the floor, shooting across the room.
01:24:15.000 All you can see is two walls meeting each other and a roof.
01:24:18.000 And I said, that's in the Great Pyramid?
01:24:21.000 And he was like...
01:24:25.000 I didn't want to press him too much.
01:24:27.000 I stole his phone.
01:24:29.000 Give me that phone, motherfucker. 0.99
01:24:30.000 Shut up. 0.95
01:24:31.000 You can't keep this.
01:24:33.000 Get the fuck out of here.
01:24:34.000 Well, you know, man, that's happening all over the world.
01:24:37.000 Like, this delay of information is all over the world.
01:24:41.000 Do 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?
01:24:56.000 They knew about that a long time ago.
01:24:57.000 Oh, yeah.
01:24:58.000 Yeah.
01:24:58.000 It's documented.
01:25:00.000 In fall of last year, I made friends with the head archaeologist at that site.
01:25:06.000 And one early morning at like 4 a.m., he took me down inside part of the tunnels.
01:25:11.000 And yeah, I was in there before it all came out.
01:25:14.000 And he took me into...
01:25:19.000 And these are all Inca people. 0.73
01:25:21.000 So they believe that they're studying their ancestral heritage.
01:25:24.000 These are really good people.
01:25:26.000 And I'm in their, you know, shoddy little home.
01:25:29.000 It's all on the archaeological site.
01:25:30.000 I mean, they probably make no money.
01:25:32.000 But 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.
01:25:39.000 Have you been to Peru?
01:25:41.000 No.
01:25:41.000 When you go to Cusco, man, the Sacred Valley, it has something there that not even Egypt has.
01:25:46.000 I don't know how to explain it.
01:25:47.000 Really?
01:25:48.000 It's a sacred place.
01:25:51.000 The Sacred Valley is exactly right.
01:25:54.000 It's a magical kind of place.
01:25:56.000 Machu Picchu...
01:26:01.000 But 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.
01:26:09.000 And you're just in this sacred place in the middle of the Amazon, up in the mountains.
01:26:13.000 And it's just a different place, man.
01:26:16.000 It has a type of charm that not even Egypt has.
01:26:19.000 Egypt, you're going to be blown away by the structures. 1.00
01:26:21.000 You're going to be blown away by the pyramids and the temples.
01:26:24.000 But this is something else.
01:26:25.000 It has an otherworldly...
01:26:31.000 It's fascinating.
01:26:32.000 Because of the environment?
01:26:34.000 Yeah, it's like the environment.
01:26:35.000 I wondered if it was...
01:26:42.000 And I wondered if I was missing oxygen to my brain.
01:26:44.000 And I was like, whoa, this place is awesome!
01:26:47.000 But no, it really is amazing.
01:26:49.000 And the people are so nice.
01:26:52.000 Machu Picchu is a trip.
01:26:54.000 What was that?
01:26:57.000 I think it was very similar to Alexandria's library.
01:27:01.000 I think it was a place of study where people are studying the stars.
01:27:06.000 Archeoastronomy is like the next frontier of archaeology.
01:27:10.000 It's the way that ancient people are interacting with the night sky and what they know about the cosmos.
01:27:14.000 You know, the Maya were calculating like millions of years into the future and millions of years into the past. 0.99
01:27:19.000 And they had this numerology system that's just amazing.
01:27:24.000 But anyways, so I'm at Sokse Oman, and they take me into this back room.
01:27:29.000 And they show me all these bodies that they pulled.
01:27:32.000 I probably shouldn't be saying this, but whatever.
01:27:34.000 They show me all these bodies that they pulled out of the tunnels.
01:27:37.000 And it was these, they thought that they were like sacred guardians of whatever is inside of this tunnel.
01:27:43.000 And these are all buried at Sac Stable Mont.
01:27:45.000 So there's like skulls everywhere.
01:27:46.000 There's boxes and all these bones.
01:27:48.000 There was like an obsidian mirror with like a little stick on it.
01:27:53.000 A bunch of gold artifacts in this room.
01:27:54.000 It was just boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes.
01:27:58.000 I haven't seen any of this stuff published yet.
01:28:00.000 So this is how much of a delay there is on archaeology.
01:28:05.000 What is the delay in that stuff?
01:28:07.000 Because it would seem like such an enormous discovery.
01:28:11.000 Yeah.
01:28:12.000 What I think it is is, well, you kind of have – I would say it's a mix of a lot of different things.
01:28:19.000 Let'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.
01:28:40.000 You know, it's all, it's about, it's a money-making machine, right?
01:28:43.000 It's their biggest draw to come and see this part of the world.
01:28:47.000 That seems so counterintuitive because new discoveries would make people want to visit.
01:28:51.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:28:52.000 They just want to hold it off to like the right part of the year.
01:28:55.000 This is something I've heard in Peru.
01:28:57.000 something I've heard in Egypt.
01:28:58.000 You know, the...
01:29:06.000 I heard about that.
01:29:08.000 So let me think.
01:29:09.000 That came out two or three months ago.
01:29:11.000 And when I was there in October, I had heard that it was found.
01:29:15.000 So these things are happening way, way in advance.
01:29:17.000 Now, the other side is there's sort of this Zahiwas effect, like Ed Barnhart, my professor and mentor, he wanted to study...
01:29:37.000 So you've seen how the stones fit together in the same way that they do at the Valley Temple in Egypt, the red granite.
01:29:43.000 So they're using this gray andesite, which is sometimes the andesite is harder than the granite in Egypt.
01:29:51.000 Like morphing these stones together at impossible angles.
01:29:54.000 I'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.
01:30:03.000 And 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.
01:30:18.000 And these roads weren't initially, the foundations weren't laid by the Inca.
01:30:22.000 They 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.
01:30:29.000 The 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.
01:30:36.000 And for a long time, it's been a mystery of...
01:30:43.000 What is it down there?
01:30:44.000 What's a resource that they need?
01:30:45.000 But there are these acid deposits that are down in that desert.
01:30:50.000 Somehow 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.
01:31:00.000 There's evidence of this at Tiwanaku as well, which I'm sure you've heard of Tiwanaku.
01:31:04.000 There'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...
01:31:18.000 And so there's all these, you know, ideas or these myths about the stones melting.
01:31:23.000 Anyways, 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.
01:31:33.000 And 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.
01:31:40.000 The stones are morphing together.
01:31:41.000 And so there's two reasons, but you see them a lot as to why he thinks this.
01:31:55.000 So 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.
01:32:02.000 In 1650, this In 1950, another earthquake happened, knocked down the Spanish city, and the ancient city was still standing.
01:32:16.000 So now these are preserved as cultural heritage monuments, and they don't build over them.
01:32:21.000 But they're like a Starbucks.
01:32:27.000 building.
01:32:28.000 You'll walk in and it's like megalithic stonework inside of KFC.
01:32:31.000 It's amazing.
01:32:32.000 Wow.
01:32:33.000 But it's everywhere.
01:32:34.000 It's the whole city.
01:32:35.000 It's the whole modern city.
01:32:36.000 When you go one day, you just walk, walk, walk, walk, walk.
01:32:38.000 One 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.
01:32:49.000 There is a map that tourists get, but it's a shitty map.
01:32:51.000 It's not even accurate.
01:32:52.000 So 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.
01:33:02.000 But yeah, it's just incredible.
01:33:05.000 So they preserve the stones.
01:33:06.000 And so when you're walking around, getting back to why.
01:33:09.000 Can we see some images of the stones that would indicate that they possibly were melted?
01:33:16.000 How could you search this up?
01:33:18.000 Maybe just look up Cusco We may be able to find an image.
01:33:24.000 And I could show you something on my phone.
01:33:26.000 I know I've got it on my phone.
01:33:27.000 Okay.
01:33:28.000 Maybe I could send it to you, but I'll actually send you the photo.
01:33:33.000 So some of these are from Sacsayhuaman.
01:33:36.000 Okay, so to the top left.
01:33:38.000 So that's the 12-sided stone.
01:33:39.000 It's on this building.
01:33:41.000 When you walk around this building, the name is escaping me right now.
01:33:44.000 It's the Palace of Something.
01:33:47.000 When you walk around this building, you're going to see some of the stones where an earthquake has separated.
01:33:54.000 So you have two stones that sit perfectly on top of each other.
01:33:57.000 And when an earthquake happens, one of these stones will slide back.
01:34:00.000 And when it does, you'll see an angle that ramps up like this up to the exterior.
01:34:05.000 And so what it looks like is the stone is placed on top and it smushed the stone down.
01:34:10.000 Does that make sense?
01:34:10.000 Whoa.
01:34:12.000 Man, if we searched hard enough we could find it here.
01:34:15.000 I will send you this photo.
01:34:17.000 I've got it on my phone.
01:34:18.000 Wow.
01:34:19.000 Yeah.
01:34:21.000 Yeah.
01:34:22.000 Just that idea is fascinating.
01:34:25.000 It melted into place.
01:34:28.000 Yeah.
01:34:28.000 Oh, okay.
01:34:31.000 So they cut these stones, used acid.
01:34:34.000 This is the theory.
01:34:35.000 Is that it right there?
01:34:36.000 No.
01:34:36.000 So they cut these stones, use the acid, and set them in to seal...
01:34:43.000 so that there's no gap in between the stones.
01:34:45.000 So it's not that they have to carve it perfectly, but rather that the weight of the other stone...
01:34:55.000 Wow.
01:34:56.000 It's on one of these walls.
01:34:57.000 So that one you have your cursor on, that's fake.
01:34:59.000 I walked up to it and it's like hollow.
01:35:00.000 I was like tapping on it.
01:35:02.000 just a fake wall.
01:35:04.000 I don't know why in Cusco they have some...
01:35:10.000 You go knock on it and it's like plastic.
01:35:12.000 But there's tons and tons and tons and tons.
01:35:14.000 The majority of the city is just the ancient city.
01:35:16.000 What is this?
01:35:17.000 Inca Stone Monument?
01:35:18.000 Irreparably damaged?
01:35:19.000 It's like someone cut out a piece of it.
01:35:21.000 Yeah.
01:35:21.000 Somebody went up to it in the middle of the night, like a drunk tourist and started hitting Yeah.
01:35:46.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:35:47.000 That's what's so weird about it.
01:35:49.000 Like, look at this stupid house that's falling apart that's on top of these ancient stones.
01:35:55.000 Yeah, it's crazy, man.
01:35:57.000 It's an amazing place.
01:35:59.000 You'll walk around and just be consistently stunned by the amount of stonework that's there and what they are able to achieve.
01:36:06.000 And this kind of Cyclopean stonework where the stones all have these, you know, no two stones are exactly alike.
01:36:14.000 You see that stonework in one place in Egypt, which is at the Valley Temple next to the Sphinx.
01:36:23.000 And you don't see that, as far as I know, recreated anywhere else.
01:36:27.000 But in Peru, it's everywhere.
01:36:30.000 Wow.
01:36:31.000 Yeah, so that's kind of a repaired wall.
01:36:33.000 You can see that it fell apart and they put it back up.
01:36:36.000 But these are mortarless buildings.
01:36:38.000 Oh, hey, if you go just one below the one that you're at right now, so this is the Temple of the Moon at Machu Picchu.
01:36:45.000 Look at the size of the stone wall.
01:36:47.000 That's one stone on the lower part of it.
01:36:50.000 And 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.
01:36:58.000 It bends and holds together completely more.
01:37:00.000 It's just fascinating.
01:37:02.000 And on top of that, Machu Picchu itself, 60% of the megalithic construction work is in the foundation of Machu Picchu.
01:37:11.000 So it's underneath what you're seeing.
01:37:13.000 And 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.
01:37:22.000 I got a little bit of a photo of where you can go down into these.
01:37:26.000 I think they're like man-made labyrinths that are underneath the city, but there's a lot more there.
01:37:31.000 And so when you're there, you just get this intrigue.
01:37:34.000 And 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.
01:37:45.000 Damn, what a life.
01:37:46.000 You've got a great life, dude.
01:37:48.000 That's cool.
01:37:49.000 Yeah, well, thank you.
01:37:49.000 That's really cool.
01:37:51.000 How far is this from Nazca? 0.59
01:37:54.000 Very far.
01:37:54.000 Peru is deceivingly big.
01:37:56.000 Peru is like half the size of the United States.
01:37:59.000 Really?
01:38:00.000 It's really, really big.
01:38:01.000 Wow.
01:38:02.000 I had no idea.
01:38:03.000 Yeah, the Nazca lines are really, really, really far away. 0.99
01:38:05.000 It's very hard to do a...
01:38:14.000 It's too big.
01:38:15.000 It would be like if you were going to go on a United States tour.
01:38:18.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:38:48.000 Man, there's going to be so much like that that's going to be found.
01:38:51.000 What is all that stuff?
01:38:53.000 Well, you know, it's amazing, like, how exactly...
01:38:57.000 One, what's the inspiration for making these giant...
01:39:01.000 You 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.
01:39:14.000 Like if you look at the spider.
01:39:19.000 And 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.
01:39:28.000 But the legs, man, they're mapping.
01:39:30.000 I 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.
01:39:39.000 That you did it precisely, right?
01:39:41.000 Or unless you had very meticulous planning and everything.
01:39:44.000 But again, what's the inspiration for this?
01:39:46.000 What's the inspiration?
01:39:46.000 Why would you be doing this?
01:39:48.000 What is this for?
01:39:49.000 Why does it have that one leg that hooks off to the left?
01:39:52.000 I don't know.
01:39:52.000 See that?
01:39:53.000 That one lengthened piece?
01:39:55.000 very strange well you know the Nazca they But, I mean, they had disappeared more than a thousand years before the Spanish arrived.
01:40:10.000 Jamie, can I ask you, what is that all about?
01:40:11.000 Why does it have all those additional lines?
01:40:13.000 I don't know.
01:40:14.000 Someone's doing different Is that just art?
01:40:17.000 Yeah, I think they're making it on...
01:40:22.000 That'd be a cool t-shirt.
01:40:24.000 There's other weird ones, like the one that looks like an astronaut.
01:40:27.000 Yeah, he does.
01:40:28.000 I actually think that's a Pulpa line, which is a different culture that does the same thing.
01:40:35.000 If you look up Pulpa lines, you may be able to find it.
01:40:37.000 Oh, so there's quite a few of them.
01:40:38.000 Look at that one, the jester one, the one with the antenna on the upper left.
01:40:41.000 Oh, yeah, look at him.
01:40:42.000 No, no, no.
01:40:43.000 Yeah, there it is.
01:40:45.000 Like that one.
01:40:46.000 Where does that come from?
01:40:46.000 I guess you just can't make it that big.
01:40:48.000 Make it a little smaller.
01:40:49.000 There you go.
01:40:50.000 What is that?
01:40:51.000 AI Uncovers.
01:40:52.000 What's that?
01:40:53.000 It says AI Uncovers.
01:40:54.000 Oh, are they AI?
01:40:55.000 Yes.
01:40:55.000 But this is AI.
01:40:56.000 Oh, okay.
01:40:56.000 I'm sorry.
01:40:57.000 This is the AI.
01:40:57.000 Oh, hey.
01:40:58.000 Look at the shark.
01:40:59.000 Look at the shark on there.
01:41:01.000 Isn't that cool?
01:41:02.000 So you have seafaring.
01:41:03.000 Dude.
01:41:03.000 Okay.
01:41:04.000 Do you know of Vanapu in Easter Island?
01:41:09.000 I think it's called Vanapu.
01:41:19.000 These people are traveling out into the Pacific Ocean and back.
01:41:22.000 You know, it just, it's...
01:41:26.000 Thor Heyerdahl with Kontiki.
01:41:27.000 He proved it.
01:41:28.000 Yep, there we go.
01:41:29.000 Yeah, so, you know, it's fallen apart.
01:41:31.000 It's not the same stone.
01:41:32.000 It's a local volcanic sandstone, I think.
01:41:36.000 I don't think that this is basalt.
01:41:38.000 It might be basalt.
01:41:39.000 But it's a volcanic stone.
01:41:42.000 I'm actually pretty sure it's basalt.
01:41:43.000 It's made out of the same thing of the Easter Island heads.
01:41:46.000 So 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.
01:42:05.000 And there's another site down on the remote end of the island where there's another structure like this that you never see mentioned.
01:42:13.000 And so we're going to document that and put that out.
01:42:16.000 So there's no doubt that, I mean, these people are incredibly advanced, incredibly connected, incredibly intelligent, and it's just so mysterious.
01:42:24.000 Okay, do you know of the Blythe lines?
01:42:26.000 Have you heard of this?
01:42:27.000 Blythe, California.
01:42:28.000 There are NASCA lines up there.
01:42:30.000 Really?
01:42:31.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:42:31.000 We should look this up.
01:42:33.000 Where's Blythe? 1.00
01:42:35.000 I think it's right before you get to Nevada.
01:42:38.000 You're like driving.
01:42:39.000 So you'll pass right by if you're driving from Las Vegas into California, I think.
01:42:45.000 So Blythe lines, yeah. 1.00
01:42:47.000 Yeah, we should zoom in from Google Earth.
01:42:49.000 This would be cool.
01:42:51.000 Where is it, Jimmy?
01:42:52.000 It's on the 10. It's on the 10. It's right where my cursor is.
01:42:56.000 Oh, so that's Blythe, California.
01:42:58.000 You might be able to look up Blythe lines.
01:43:00.000 No, I did, but I was trying to show you where it was.
01:43:03.000 Oh, sorry.
01:43:04.000 So these are the lines.
01:43:05.000 Oh, whoa.
01:43:06.000 Yeah, they're huge.
01:43:07.000 Whoa.
01:43:08.000 So, dude, this is not...
01:43:11.000 What the fuck is that?
01:43:13.000 This is, I mean, to me, it's pretty obvious that there are people who are, and this is It's all interconnected.
01:43:35.000 How many of these lines exist?
01:43:39.000 It'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.
01:43:48.000 One of them was a monkey.
01:43:50.000 How do they even know what monkeys are?
01:43:51.000 Well, okay.
01:43:54.000 That's a great question.
01:43:56.000 Were there monkeys in California?
01:43:58.000 No, I doubt it.
01:43:59.000 But there are...
01:44:07.000 There were monkeys that we have found that were in zoos in Teotihuacan, like dead monkeys that are buried.
01:44:14.000 And this species of monkey is only found in the southern Amazon.
01:44:17.000 So it's all the way up in northern Mexico.
01:44:20.000 So all of these things are connected.
01:44:22.000 Okay, another...
01:44:28.000 Just for clarity, that one was a Nazca line.
01:44:30.000 The monkey was not in the California.
01:44:31.000 Oh, okay, okay.
01:44:33.000 It came up just to check.
01:44:33.000 That makes sense.
01:44:35.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:44:36.000 Those monkeys are in Peru.
01:44:37.000 Well, even so, there are Amazonian monkeys that are coming all the way up there.
01:44:40.000 Let's see what the other Blythe lines are.
01:44:41.000 That's what I was trying to go through.
01:44:42.000 The article started showing different stuff because I was explaining what they were.
01:44:46.000 So comparisons to Nazca images.
01:44:47.000 They're found in 1932 by a pilot.
01:44:50.000 That's what I was trying to figure out.
01:44:51.000 So that's one of them?
01:44:52.000 It looks like a giraffe.
01:44:54.000 It could be a deer.
01:44:56.000 Yeah, it could be a deer.
01:44:57.000 But are deer out there?
01:45:01.000 Well, there's deer in California for sure.
01:45:04.000 There's probably mule deer in that part of the country.
01:45:09.000 There certainly is in Nevada.
01:45:12.000 Nevada has a big population of deer.
01:45:15.000 California's figure represents horses, reintroduced, historical date sometime after the 1500s, so maybe they don't know when these are going to go.
01:45:20.000 Scroll back up again?
01:45:21.000 Yeah, they have no idea.
01:45:24.000 I don't know if that's a horse.
01:45:25.000 Doesn't look like a horse to me.
01:45:26.000 I think you're right.
01:45:27.000 The tail, though, is a lot longer than a deer's.
01:45:29.000 Oh, yeah, a deer, they've got the little tails. 0.98
01:45:31.000 It's like a shitty artist horse.
01:45:33.000 I was stumbling down something with the Olmec stuff.
01:45:36.000 I think it was the Olmec.
01:45:38.000 there is a bunch of this because I see a zoom or seer.
01:45:40.000 It's a bunch of other weird rocks that had like anthropomorphic animals playing on top of humans.
01:45:47.000 Okay, do you know about...
01:45:51.000 No.
01:45:52.000 Oh, dude.
01:45:54.000 Okay, so wear jaguars.
01:45:57.000 It is another piece of evidence of at least...
01:46:05.000 Oh, dude.
01:46:06.000 This is this is badass.
01:46:08.000 All right.
01:46:08.000 So So you think of, like, where do you imagine that people migrate into the Americas?
01:46:19.000 Like, where do you think we would find the first evidence at?
01:46:22.000 Oh, boy.
01:46:27.000 Well, I would imagine it would be somewhere where the Olmecs were. 0.84
01:46:30.000 Yeah, maybe so.
01:46:32.000 Yeah.
01:46:32.000 Or, you know, traditionally.
01:46:34.000 Sure, sure.
01:46:35.000 Traditionally, people think that maybe you would find it, you know, in Alaska.
01:46:41.000 You know, people migrating over during or before and after the Ice Age.
01:46:47.000 Sure.
01:46:47.000 Or I'm sorry, during and before the Ice Age.
01:46:49.000 And then some people might think that, you know, you have Polynesians that are skipping across the Pacific that are coming into.
01:46:55.000 But most of the time, it's West Coast.
01:46:58.000 People think you'd find something out there.
01:47:00.000 Some of the oldest evidence that we have.
01:47:02.000 Are 30,000-year-old caves on the east side of the Amazon.
01:47:07.000 On the east side.
01:47:08.000 the opposite side of the Americas, as far away as you can possibly get from...
01:47:13.000 where people would have traditionally arrived in the Americas.
01:47:17.000 Now, that evidence is constantly changing.
01:47:19.000 There'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.
01:47:30.000 But 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...
01:47:42.000 I think it may have been Teddy Roosevelt's granddaughter that found this.
01:47:47.000 She was a South American archaeologist.
01:47:49.000 She was inspired to go to the Amazon.
01:47:51.000 And so it's really interesting.
01:47:56.000 In the Olmec realm, there's what's called a werejaguar. 0.99
01:48:00.000 It's just like a werewolf, spelled sort of the same.
01:48:04.000 But you have these two different dichotomies in the Olmec world.
01:48:08.000 You have the Olmec heads, which, by the way, I brought you a head. 0.95
01:48:10.000 Ooh.
01:48:13.000 Nice.
01:48:13.000 More stuff for this table.
01:48:17.000 Sit right next to hecklefish.
01:48:21.000 So this is made from basalt by the modern Olmec people.
01:48:24.000 Whoa, that's cool.
01:48:27.000 Yeah, super cool.
01:48:28.000 So these guys...
01:48:31.000 These guys, we don't know who they are.
01:48:33.000 We don't know exactly what they represent because they're just – They have Olmec faces, but they're all wearing this helmet. 1.00
01:48:43.000 What the hell does the helmet mean?
01:48:45.000 It could be two different things.
01:48:47.000 It's a signature of their divine rulership, like we think they might be kings.
01:48:52.000 Somebody who can commission a monument this big.
01:48:55.000 This is a testament to his power.
01:48:57.000 Or these are revered ballgame players, the Mesoamerican ballgame.
01:49:01.000 I'm sure you've dove into this a little bit.
01:49:03.000 Or it's both.
01:49:06.000 The most masculine thing that you can be is a great Mesoamerican ballgame player.
01:49:10.000 And that's the king.
01:49:11.000 He wants to see himself out of it.
01:49:12.000 It's the same thing as Marcus Aurelius' son.
01:49:16.000 Why am I forgetting his name?
01:49:18.000 The really bad emperor.
01:49:20.000 God, I can't remember his name.
01:49:21.000 But anyways, he wanted to be seen like Hercules fighting in the Colosseum.
01:49:25.000 And so we think this might be a kind of similar thing.
01:49:28.000 There's a whole different type of people that are existing in the Olmec realm.
01:49:33.000 We can look up Olmec.
01:49:38.000 Thank you.
01:49:39.000 And there's a whole different type of person.
01:49:42.000 So here's one image.
01:49:43.000 If you keep scrolling, you'll see images that are carved into...
01:49:47.000 So this is a little bit of a better image right here.
01:49:49.000 But 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.
01:50:02.000 Oh yeah, there we go.
01:50:03.000 Uh, top, top right.
01:50:06.000 Yeah, check that guy out.
01:50:07.000 So that's a human.
01:50:09.000 That's not an animal.
01:50:10.000 It is a human who has turned into the essence of a jaguar.
01:50:15.000 And we see this everywhere, all over the Olmec world.
01:50:18.000 But they're never the colossal heads.
01:50:20.000 They're always in jade or they're smaller Olmec monuments.
01:50:23.000 And sometimes the heads are maimed, like the head is just completely destroyed and there's these jaguar claws.
01:50:34.000 Claws that are carved into an Olmec face, like tearing apart its face, tearing apart the symbol that's on the top of their head. 1.00
01:50:41.000 And so a lot of people have wondered, like, why are these scratch marks in all of these Olmec monuments?
01:50:46.000 But 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.
01:51:01.000 And 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.
01:51:16.000 And 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.
01:51:27.000 I'll be like, so these mushrooms, do you think that these depict hallucinogens that they may have been taking to get high?
01:51:34.000 Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
01:51:35.000 No.
01:51:36.000 I'm like really If you look at ancient American artwork anywhere, you can tell it's all, like, mind-bending stuff to look at.
01:51:46.000 They're clearly, I think, they're being influenced by plants.
01:51:50.000 Now, this were jaguar isn't just isolated to the Olmec world.
01:51:54.000 It also pops up at a place called Chavin de Wontar.
01:51:58.000 No.
01:51:58.000 Have you ever heard of this?
01:51:59.000 This is in the Andes.
01:52:00.000 It's one of the oldest cities in the Andes.
01:52:02.000 So before Chavine...
01:52:06.000 Like 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.
01:52:14.000 So you're trying to piece together this DNA web, but it's very, very loose.
01:52:19.000 So there's a place called, there's a culture called Coral Supe culture, and they are building pyramids. 0.99
01:52:26.000 Before the old kingdom of Egypt ever even existed.
01:52:29.000 This is 5,500 years ago at least.
01:52:32.000 On the coast of Peru, like right on the beach.
01:52:35.000 And there's like 15 huge pyramids out there.
01:52:37.000 But this is a non-pottery, non-artistic culture.
01:52:42.000 So we don't have pottery and we don't have art from them.
01:52:44.000 And we don't have stone statues or anything like that.
01:52:46.000 Just these structures.
01:52:47.000 And from what we can tell, they keep getting hit by these apocalyptic storms, these tropical El Ninos and La Ninas that are just destructive.
01:52:56.000 They're trying to rebuild it again.
01:52:59.000 And eventually they say, you know what?
01:53:00.000 We're moving up into the Andes.
01:53:00.000 Forget this.
01:53:02.000 Well, when they move up into the Andes on Chavin de Wontar, they then come in contact with Amazonians. 0.98
01:53:08.000 They meet Amazonians for the first time.
01:53:10.000 And 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.
01:53:19.000 They are these shamanic people.
01:53:20.000 Oh, this is from...
01:53:22.000 Oh, is this on my...
01:53:25.000 So I posted about this today.
01:53:28.000 So these faces right here, these are on the side of the temple of Chavin that faces east off into the Amazon.
01:53:37.000 And when you look at Chavin pottery, it's the same as Amazonian pottery in the region.
01:53:41.000 So the people of the Andes, as soon as they interact with the Amazon, they acquire this religion, this culture, this iconography.
01:53:51.000 They completely change as a people, and they start building the first structures that we know of that have interiors.
01:53:59.000 Because before this, these pyramids that were out on the coastline, you're like walking on top of this big stone mound.
01:54:05.000 But at Chavin, it's a huge square-style building that has open doors that you can walk in through.
01:54:13.000 And all of this happens as soon as they interact with Amazonians. 0.89
01:54:17.000 And so, yeah, it's a huge structure.
01:54:23.000 And the stones that make up the staircases, oh my god.
01:54:27.000 Okay, 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.
01:54:38.000 Do you remember this?
01:54:39.000 Giant stones.
01:54:41.000 That white stone is the same white stone that's used in the staircases and on the door jams and the lentils here at Chavine.
01:54:48.000 So you see the open door right there at the bottom?
01:54:51.000 Yeah, 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.
01:55:01.000 How far is that?
01:55:02.000 It's really, really far from here.
01:55:03.000 I don't know.
01:55:04.000 That would be something good that I should know.
01:55:08.000 So some of it's megalithic, some of it's decent size.
01:55:10.000 It's really that front wall right there with that entrance, the steps going up to it.
01:55:14.000 And then on the inside of the temple, you have the megalithic stonework.
01:55:18.000 And then you have this monolith on the inside.
01:55:21.000 So you see this guy?
01:55:22.000 Look at that.
01:55:23.000 That's a human with jaguar fangs coming out of his mouth.
01:55:28.000 And all of these Tenenheads that are on the side of the temple, they're facing out towards the Amazon. 1.00
01:55:32.000 It'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.
01:55:51.000 Like you and Paul Rosalie talked about this.
01:55:54.000 And when he was talking about his...
01:55:56.000 his 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.
01:56:08.000 And this is something that- Yeah, yeah.
01:56:12.000 So this is something that I think it's evidence— Oh, isn't this cool?
01:56:21.000 Yeah.
01:56:22.000 Well, there's also evidence that jaguars eat the same plants.
01:56:25.000 Yes, yeah.
01:56:26.000 Have you seen this on, what is it, Weird Nature?
01:56:29.000 There's a documentary out there called Weird Nature.
01:56:32.000 The war is tripping.
01:56:33.000 Yeah, and it's like, This is why I brought this up.
01:56:42.000 Terrence Magetta had a very fascinating theory about why ketamine in particular feels like an empty office building.
01:56:50.000 And his theory, it's like ketamine is like you enter a realm, but there's no one there.
01:56:56.000 And this is, by the way, he's talking about ketamine in, like, the 80s and 90s.
01:57:04.000 is 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.
01:57:15.000 You 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.
01:57:41.000 You're taking this psychedelic that allows you to interact with all the experiences anyone has ever had with those, including jaguars.
01:57:52.000 Now, also, there's always been this conflict between the ruling class and the shamanic rituals.
01:57:59.000 This is the Eleusinian mysteries.
01:58:01.000 They shut all that stuff down.
01:58:03.000 Wouldn't it make sense that the claw marks would represent?
01:58:08.000 The 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.
01:58:19.000 It'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. 1.00
01:58:28.000 And then you got all these people that are tripping balls that have completely different ideas that you have to silence that.
01:58:34.000 Well, what's the issue here?
01:58:35.000 The issue is these guys, they get together in a circle and they drink this stuff and they start having these wacky ideas.
01:58:40.000 Let's put a stop to that.
01:58:41.000 Let's put it the same way they did with the Illicinian Mysteries, the same way they've done countless times.
01:58:46.000 Shamans that were like the whole Santa Claus things where he's coming down the chimney. 0.96
01:58:51.000 Why was that?
01:58:51.000 Well, it was because Siberian shamans were ostracized.
01:58:55.000 They were forced to actually not go through the doorways because they had to sneak into people's homes.
01:59:00.000 So they came down chimneys.
01:59:02.000 This is the theory.
01:59:03.000 Oh, that's fascinating.
01:59:04.000 Which is like, why the fuck would Santa come down that chimney?
01:59:06.000 It doesn't make any sense.
01:59:07.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:59:08.000 Well, that was the idea.
01:59:09.000 Like, Santa's a shaman.
01:59:10.000 Also, Santa, at least in modern depictions, has the exact same coloration as the Amanita muscaria mushroom.
01:59:17.000 Oh, wow.
01:59:18.000 You've never seen the comparison, she's Santa and the mushroom? 0.69
01:59:21.000 No, no, no.
01:59:21.000 The 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.
01:59:30.000 Maybe.
01:59:31.000 But there's old pictures of Christmas images that always include elves.
01:59:37.000 And Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
01:59:40.000 There's old Christmas cards from like the turn of the century.
01:59:43.000 There's old like Merry Christmas.
01:59:45.000 It's fucking mushrooms.
01:59:47.000 There's mushrooms everywhere.
01:59:48.000 So mushrooms have a mycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees.
01:59:53.000 Particularly Amanita muscaria.
01:59:55.000 you would find them underneath pine trees, the same way you find brightly colored presents under Christmas trees.
02:00:04.000 In order to dry them, they would pick these mushrooms...
02:00:08.000 and hang them in the trees so they would air dry just like ornaments on a tree.
02:00:13.000 Wow.
02:00:14.000 There's so many parallels.
02:00:16.000 It's really weird.
02:00:18.000 The Santa was a mushroom one is a weird one.
02:00:21.000 It's a really weird one because there's a ton of the...
02:00:24.000 Like, why are we so interested in fucking pine trees?
02:00:27.000 Those trees had this very connected relationship with those mushrooms.
02:00:33.000 Yeah, well, you know, I find that...
02:00:36.000 See if you can find some of them ancient pictures of Christmas, ancient Merry Christmas images.
02:00:44.000 Look, look at that shaman, that shaman to the left.
02:00:47.000 Go back, scroll back, look out, look at that.
02:00:49.000 Siberian shaman looks exactly like the coloration of an Amanita Mascaria.
02:00:54.000 Now go to that Merry Christmas image that you have there right next to your cursor.
02:00:57.000 Look at that.
02:00:58.000 Amanita Mascaria.
02:01:00.000 A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
02:01:03.000 Amanita Mascaria image. 0.83
02:01:05.000 These women with good times Christmas, or these children rather, with good times Christmas.
02:01:10.000 Have you ever tried these mushrooms?
02:01:11.000 Yes.
02:01:11.000 Didn't work.
02:01:12.000 Really?
02:01:13.000 Yeah.
02:01:15.000 I think there's, well, McKenna didn't have a good experience with him either.
02:01:20.000 And 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.
02:01:31.000 Sort of like, you know, there's different versions.
02:01:36.000 Obviously manipulated, but there's a very different version of banana that we're enjoying today.
02:01:41.000 Yeah.
02:01:41.000 Versus the wild banana.
02:01:42.000 Oh, corn too.
02:01:43.000 Yes.
02:01:44.000 Maize.
02:01:44.000 Oh my gosh.
02:01:45.000 So different.
02:01:45.000 A lot of different plants have like similar history.
02:01:49.000 I mean, fungus is a very different thing, right?
02:01:52.000 Because fungus actually breathe air.
02:01:54.000 They're not plants.
02:01:55.000 They're much closer to animals than they are to plants.
02:01:59.000 Oh, that's fascinating.
02:01:59.000 Yeah, they're real weird.
02:02:00.000 And they're also really weird that they seem to be like the internet for plants.
02:02:05.000 Like the mycorrhizal relationship and the fact that they have this very bizarre network of mycelium that's under the ground.
02:02:13.000 Like the largest living organism is a mushroom colony that exists.
02:02:18.000 I believe in the Pacific Northwest.
02:02:20.000 Oh, really?
02:02:21.000 Yeah.
02:02:21.000 Let's see who can find that.
02:02:22.000 Yeah.
02:02:22.000 So instead of like saying, oh, there's a mushroom that pops out of the ground.
02:02:27.000 No, that's like the fruiting body of the entire thing.
02:02:31.000 And the entire thing is enormous.
02:02:33.000 Yeah.
02:02:34.000 It's communicating with plants.
02:02:37.000 It's helping the plants distribute and share resources.
02:02:40.000 It's helping them get information.
02:02:42.000 It's very strange.
02:02:44.000 You know, Paul Stamets is like the best guy to talk to about this stuff.
02:02:47.000 He's a mycologist, and he actually gave me that big-ass mushroom at the end of the table.
02:02:52.000 Oh, wow.
02:02:53.000 That's a mushroom.
02:02:53.000 Yeah.
02:02:54.000 It's weird.
02:02:56.000 They're weird.
02:02:57.000 You know, this whole conversation...
02:03:00.000 The largest organism on Earth is a fungus.
02:03:03.000 The blue whale's big, but nowhere near as huge as a sprawling fungus in eastern Oregon.
02:03:07.000 Yeah.
02:03:08.000 Holy crap.
02:03:09.000 Yeah, and again, it fucking breathes air.
02:03:12.000 Could be as ancient as 8,650 years.
02:03:17.000 Yeah.
02:03:18.000 Good night.
02:03:19.000 Good night.
02:03:20.000 Wild.
02:03:22.000 Wild stuff.
02:03:23.000 And, you know, this is what we know about, right?
02:03:25.000 What about, what the fuck is in the Amazon?
02:03:27.000 Oh my god, man.
02:03:29.000 Okay, so two things there as far as what's in the Amazon.
02:03:32.000 First, think about how, let's just talk about North America above Mesoamerica.
02:03:37.000 So let's just include the modern day United States.
02:03:41.000 Think about all the tribes that existed here, how complicated these histories are.
02:03:45.000 Squanto is born in the early 1600s among these tribes in Massachusetts.
02:03:52.000 And when he comes back, he forms this thing called the Wampanoag Confederation, whatever, whatever.
02:03:56.000 Just in that little area, there's all these different cultures with their own histories.
02:04:00.000 their own knowledge and everything.
02:04:01.000 That's one little part of Massachusetts.
02:04:04.000 Now think about the rest of the country and how vast and sprawling and intricate and how deep that history really goes.
02:04:12.000 And you can just, you could place the United States inside the Amazon.
02:04:16.000 That's how big the Amazon is. 0.74
02:04:17.000 And we just refer to natives, tribes who lived in the Amazon as Amazonians, but it's so much more complicated than just that.
02:04:25.000 Now 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?
02:04:49.000 And 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.
02:05:11.000 And I was like, I asked him, I said, okay, so what kind of hallucinogens do you think they would have had?
02:05:15.000 And I think he told me like peyote and cannabis and stuff like that.
02:05:18.000 And 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.
02:05:27.000 You 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.
02:05:35.000 I'm sure you know very well what I'm talking about.
02:05:37.000 And so he's sitting around with all of us and he doesn't want, you know, he's not interested.
02:05:42.000 And I'm like, so you've been studying archaeoastronomy for this long.
02:05:47.000 Have you ever tried cannabis or peyote or anything that's up there?
02:05:50.000 I think there's another one called Detura.
02:05:51.000 Have you ever heard of this?
02:05:52.000 That one's supposed to be very weird.
02:05:54.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:05:55.000 McKenna had terrible experiences with that.
02:05:57.000 Well, maybe...
02:06:00.000 He 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.
02:06:07.000 Oh.
02:06:08.000 Yeah, like it does weird things.
02:06:10.000 Yeah, 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.
02:06:24.000 Oh, boy.
02:06:25.000 Yeah, yeah.
02:06:26.000 Oh, so that's a weird one apparently.
02:06:28.000 So their whole civilization is like very dark and scary.
02:06:31.000 But I asked this archaeologist.
02:06:33.000 I 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? 0.94
02:06:43.000 And 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.
02:06:52.000 And you, as someone who.
02:06:57.000 You don't want to put yourself in the shoes of these people.
02:07:01.000 I 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.
02:07:17.000 And he was very slow to be open to this idea.
02:07:23.000 And, 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.
02:07:32.000 And 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.
02:07:44.000 And that's why the widely...
02:07:57.000 I 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.
02:08:11.000 Yeah, unquestionably.
02:08:12.000 Unquestionably.
02:08:13.000 It's totally obvious.
02:08:14.000 It's completely obvious.
02:08:16.000 Yeah.
02:08:17.000 Well, it's also these people that haven't had these experiences, so they don't know what the effects would be.
02:08:21.000 Yeah, yeah.
02:08:22.000 So they're basically just guessing, and a lot of it is based on just-say-no propaganda from the fucking 80s.
02:08:28.000 It really is, man.
02:08:29.000 I was telling my wife this.
02:08:31.000 I don't smoke a lot.
02:08:33.000 When I do, I'm out in Big Bend, out looking at the stars and stuff.
02:08:37.000 Every time I smoke, it's some kind of purpose.
02:08:39.000 I'm in some kind of sacred place.
02:08:42.000 I don't do anything harder than just smoke cannabis.
02:08:51.000 I don't know, six or seven years ago when I first smoked.
02:08:54.000 I 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.
02:08:59.000 And as I was looking at myself, I had disassociated.
02:09:01.000 And I was like, this person does not represent the brain that's in my mind.
02:09:05.000 I need to lose some damn weight.
02:09:07.000 You know, I had this realization about myself.
02:09:08.000 The 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.
02:09:29.000 And I had this realization that the most important thing I do is make dinner for my wife and take my dog on walks.
02:09:37.000 And I would have never – And this is the stuff that you love.
02:09:45.000 Your purpose is to take your dog on walks and spend time with your wife.
02:09:49.000 And one day it's going to be to spend time with your kids.
02:09:51.000 And every time I go into it with this idea that I hope that I have some kind of realization, I always do.
02:09:57.000 And it's just like I have this – I know that ancient plant medicine is like the key to And so, yeah, it's fascinating.
02:10:09.000 To ignore that, knowing that they imbibed, to ignore that, knowing that it was a part of these sacred rituals, is kind of silly.
02:10:17.000 Especially when you deal with the Amazon and ayahuasca.
02:10:20.000 Yeah, I mean, if you're going to be in a place where you want to completely convene with nature, like, that's the place.
02:10:20.000 Oh, yeah, right?
02:10:27.000 Like, that's the place.
02:10:28.000 And if there's this...
02:10:46.000 which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and you're combining them together in the perfect amount and boiling it.
02:10:53.000 It tastes like shit.
02:10:54.000 Like, why are you doing this?
02:10:56.000 And then when you ask them how they learn how to do this, they're like, Yeah, I know, right?
02:11:02.000 And 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.
02:11:25.000 Which is another reason why I don't think that Native Americans are responsible for these. 0.99
02:11:33.000 I'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.
02:11:39.000 Have you heard of the Caddo Indians before?
02:11:41.000 And 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.
02:11:49.000 And the words came to me and I was like, I was like, if nature itself took an anthropomorphic form, that's the Native American.
02:11:56.000 These are people that lived perfectly with their environment or tried to, at least most of them did.
02:12:06.000 So much can be learned from that.
02:12:07.000 They did some wasteful things.
02:12:08.000 I know, I know.
02:12:09.000 Like the buffalo jumps.
02:12:11.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:12:12.000 Well, yeah, that's true.
02:12:13.000 And I'm really speaking in generalities.
02:12:16.000 I could go on and on about all the horrific things that the Aztecs did.
02:12:20.000 This is just a general rule.
02:12:21.000 Or the Comanches.
02:12:22.000 Or the Comanches.
02:12:24.000 It's not at all like this was a utopia at all.
02:12:29.000 It was complete and utter war. 0.69
02:12:31.000 But then again, you're saying embodiment of name.
02:12:33.000 Well, nature's not utopia.
02:12:34.000 Exactly.
02:12:35.000 Jaguar's not utopia if you're an antelope.
02:12:37.000 Yeah, yeah, very much so.
02:12:40.000 So, you know, there's some nuance there.
02:12:42.000 But, yeah, it's just fascinating.
02:12:47.000 You had a good point in a podcast.
02:12:51.000 I think you were talking about Oriana.
02:12:54.000 His expedition down the Amazon, and you were talking about how he was able to use the stars to navigate back to Spain.
02:13:01.000 And you were like, well, you know, that's what, or not ancient people, but that's what people used to do.
02:13:05.000 Everybody was an astronomer.
02:13:07.000 How much of this experience has gone to us today?
02:13:10.000 We don't sit around and look at the stars anymore.
02:13:12.000 And that's one aspect.
02:13:13.000 We don't interact with natural plant-based hallucinogens anymore.
02:13:18.000 There's so many things about the natural world that we don't interact with.
02:13:21.000 Those two are huge, and particularly the one, the first one, the stars, because people don't even consider how much light pollution.
02:13:28.000 If you ask the average person… The night sky is polluted.
02:13:36.000 You just don't think it's polluted, but it's polluted by light, and you're missing this.
02:13:43.000 Incredible, majestic image of the cosmos that's so humbling that it puts you in check.
02:13:48.000 Yeah, for sure.
02:13:49.000 It puts you in check.
02:13:50.000 Anybody that has a deluded ego, that's going to go away if you're confronted with the Milky Way.
02:13:50.000 It really does.
02:13:55.000 Yeah, absolutely.
02:13:56.000 You have some delusions of grandeur and your place in everything.
02:14:00.000 You're like, well, it's not possible.
02:14:01.000 Just look at this.
02:14:02.000 It's like, I am nothing.
02:14:04.000 I am nothing, and I am everything.
02:14:06.000 I'm a part of everything, but I am nothing.
02:14:07.000 And so many of these people who still today exist in the, in These people are still around.
02:14:20.000 Paul Rosely sent me a video a month ago.
02:14:23.000 Oh, really?
02:14:24.000 Sure, yeah, absolutely.
02:14:24.000 Yeah.
02:14:24.000 You want to see it?
02:14:25.000 Check this out.
02:14:26.000 I'll show this video.
02:14:26.000 I can't share it with the world.
02:14:28.000 So, haha, sorry.
02:14:29.000 I'm a gatekeeper.
02:14:32.000 Like, everybody's a gatekeeper, I guess.
02:14:34.000 But Paul doesn't want people to know where these people are, so he's trying to hide this stuff.
02:14:40.000 But he took this video while he was out in the Amazon, like, helping these people.
02:14:47.000 So this is, like, video from his phone.
02:14:51.000 God, where is it, Paul?
02:14:55.000 Oh, here it is.
02:15:01.000 I can't share it with anybody.
02:15:03.000 I want to share it with you.
02:15:04.000 Just make sure the camera's not on it.
02:15:09.000 Wow.
02:15:12.000 Man, that is crazy.
02:15:14.000 Wild.
02:15:16.000 I mean, you're looking into the past.
02:15:19.000 You're looking way into the past.
02:15:21.000 I mean, way into the past.
02:15:22.000 Just in your frame right there.
02:15:24.000 What you were looking at.
02:15:25.000 Has existed since the beginning of time.
02:15:27.000 Yes.
02:15:28.000 And 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.
02:15:46.000 The moment this episode gets uploaded on Spotify, people will click it and watch it on their phone instantly.
02:15:53.000 Like, all at the same time where these people are living in a homemade canoe.
02:15:56.000 They're in the same time zone as you are right now.
02:15:58.000 Same time zone.
02:15:59.000 Whatever it is right now, it's the same time there.
02:16:01.000 That's crazy.
02:16:02.000 And 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.
02:16:12.000 Well, I wonder if those people are the preppers.
02:16:15.000 Of the Amazonian world.
02:16:17.000 Do you know what I mean?
02:16:18.000 Like if everything did go sideways because the Europeans came over and brought all the diseases and civilization collapsed, who's going to live? 1.00
02:16:25.000 No, you are exactly right.
02:16:28.000 So when when the Spaniards That's like the Hank Williams Jr. song in reality.
02:16:34.000 Dude, you are exactly correct.
02:16:36.000 I mean, you're exactly correct.
02:16:37.000 So when the Spaniards arrive, they obviously, they land in the Bahamas with Columbus, 1492, but they come down to like Hispaniola, Jamaica.
02:16:46.000 And in the early 1500s, they start poking around on the shores of the Yucatan.
02:16:53.000 And they're kind of trading and interacting with these people.
02:16:56.000 You know, these are explorers.
02:16:57.000 They're all curious.
02:16:58.000 But they didn't realize that they were giving these Native Americans disease. 0.98
02:17:01.000 And that disease was spreading through the Maya world. 0.99
02:17:04.000 And 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. 1.00
02:17:12.000 He didn't realize they were all dying off.
02:17:14.000 So 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.
02:17:31.000 He goes down to South America and he conquers the Inca Empire.
02:17:35.000 And then after that, Oriana descends down the Amazon. 0.69
02:17:39.000 And when he descends down the Amazon, he sees these cities that would go on for 15 miles long.
02:17:46.000 I mean, these 15-mile-long cities full of millions and millions of people, these giant circular stone buildings, these huge bustling civilizations.
02:17:54.000 And 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.
02:18:11.000 And 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.
02:18:26.000 Proves that these civilizations were there.
02:18:28.000 Now, the stuff that's been excavated in the Amazon, we haven't excavated anything in the center of the Amazon.
02:18:33.000 It's really expensive.
02:18:34.000 It's hard to do.
02:18:35.000 Archaeologists don't want to live out there.
02:18:37.000 Whatever, whatever.
02:18:38.000 There's a million reasons why it doesn't happen.
02:18:40.000 But on the peripheral of the Amazon, there are areas that get cut flat for logging.
02:18:45.000 Like, you know, as civilization slowly encroaches on the Amazon, they are finding these – Have you seen these in the Amazon?
02:18:59.000 They're huge.
02:19:00.000 I believe so.
02:19:01.000 I believe this is some stuff that Graham was showing.
02:19:03.000 Maybe so.
02:19:04.000 I think Graham has talked about this before.
02:19:06.000 Maybe he was in America before.
02:19:08.000 Which did he look if he's looking for image?
02:19:10.000 Just Amazon geoglyphs.
02:19:12.000 They'll come up.
02:19:13.000 They're these huge squares.
02:19:14.000 Yeah, perfect.
02:19:15.000 Yeah, we definitely talked about this.
02:19:17.000 These things are gigantic, and they're all over the peripherals of the Amazon.
02:19:21.000 But these were the preppers living on the outside.
02:19:25.000 They weren't living in the hustle and bustle of the million-plus population city in the middle of the Amazon.
02:19:31.000 These are the guys living on the outside, and they all survived.
02:19:33.000 This apocalyptic disease that went through.
02:19:36.000 They're the people living in Appalachia.
02:19:38.000 Exactly.
02:19:39.000 Mountain folks.
02:19:40.000 Actually, I'm moving there tomorrow.
02:19:43.000 Are you really?
02:19:43.000 Yeah, I'm in the middle of moving right now.
02:19:45.000 What a cool place to live.
02:19:47.000 It's beautiful up there, man.
02:19:48.000 Dude, it's an ancient place.
02:19:50.000 Have you heard of the Nantahala Rainforest?
02:19:52.000 Oh, you gotta go there tomorrow.
02:19:52.000 No.
02:19:54.000 It's in western North Carolina, in Appalachia.
02:19:59.000 I grew up going to Nantahala every year.
02:20:03.000 My parents live in Nantahala now.
02:20:05.000 And it's a beautiful, completely magical place.
02:20:09.000 And it was part of what inspired this, like, exploration.
02:20:16.000 When you're there, even as a kid, I knew that this was an ancient place.
02:20:19.000 It turns out, as an adult, when I start researching it, it's this pocket of green, I mean solid, dark green rainforest.
02:20:26.000 In the U.S., we have three rainforests.
02:20:28.000 We have Hawaii, we have Oregon, and we have the Nantahala rainforest that most people don't know about.
02:20:33.000 It's this pocket in the middle of these mountains that has looked exactly the same since before the Ice Age.
02:20:39.000 It's one of the oldest places in North America.
02:20:41.000 And it's just an incredibly magical place.
02:20:46.000 Old, ancient place.
02:20:48.000 And I'm just, like, drawn back there.
02:20:50.000 But anyways, yeah, you should go check that out.
02:20:53.000 That sounds incredible.
02:20:54.000 Yeah.
02:20:54.000 Yeah.
02:20:55.000 You're going to live out in that area?
02:20:57.000 In the Appalachians?
02:20:58.000 Yeah, yeah.
02:20:58.000 Well, so my wife is, so she's, like, from South Carolina.
02:21:04.000 And she came to Texas when she was younger.
02:21:08.000 And then we met in college.
02:21:10.000 And my family, when we first moved to the States, like, my family moved to North Carolina.
02:21:15.000 Like, 1694 or something crazy like that.
02:21:18.000 And so we have some roots up there.
02:21:20.000 Have you ever been to Gatlinburg, Tennessee?
02:21:22.000 So the first name of Gatlinburg was Reagan Town.
02:21:22.000 No.
02:21:25.000 And so that was where my family were one of the founders of that town.
02:21:30.000 There's an old hotel there called Reagan Motel.
02:21:31.000 So my family's originally from there, and then they moved down to Texas and started cattle rustling in the late 1890s.
02:21:38.000 But I don't know, just drawing back up there.
02:21:40.000 I always loved vacationing there.
02:21:41.000 And so my wife and I are like in the middle of moving right now.
02:21:44.000 And 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.
02:21:52.000 Tonight we drive back to East Texas, and then tomorrow we drive to North Carolina.
02:21:55.000 Wow.
02:21:56.000 Yeah.
02:21:56.000 So what is the history in terms of like human occupation in that area?
02:22:01.000 Man.
02:22:02.000 The people sprouted out of the ground.
02:22:05.000 Yeah, it's that old, man.
02:22:07.000 There are...
02:22:11.000 And 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. 1.00
02:22:18.000 Austin, this was an ancient Native American settlement here that we have built this city on top of.
02:22:25.000 The Alamo in San Antonio was built on top of a Native American settlement.
02:22:30.000 And all of our major cities are just a reskin of an ancient city.
02:22:34.000 And in Texas, it's really hard.
02:22:35.000 We have the Galt site that's here.
02:22:37.000 That's here in Austin that proves that Clovis I was wrong.
02:22:41.000 Maybe you're familiar with this.
02:22:44.000 But up there, you're closer to mound country, where all the mound builders are.
02:22:49.000 I'm a little bit north of that.
02:22:50.000 But 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. 1.00
02:22:59.000 And so the archaeological projects up there are headed up by two hillbillies that live in the country, and they're the coolest guys.
02:23:06.000 They own this little department store called the Tiger Store in Hayesville, North Carolina.
02:23:13.000 We have dug up Spanish armor under the ground and Spanish swords and all kinds of crazy stuff.
02:23:19.000 And I've gone hiking out there.
02:23:21.000 Oh, we got to look this up.
02:23:23.000 Jamie, can we please look up Judacula Rock?
02:23:25.000 It's one of the only megaliths in North America.
02:23:27.000 And it's this gigantic...
02:23:36.000 And it's some kind of primordial map of Western North Carolina.
02:23:39.000 It's massive, dude.
02:23:40.000 You couldn't fit it in this room.
02:23:42.000 It's called Judacula.
02:23:44.000 If you just try to spell it in some way, you might find it.
02:23:46.000 There you go.
02:23:46.000 And there's an old photo of an archaeologist laying behind it.
02:23:50.000 There you go.
02:23:50.000 To the top left.
02:23:51.000 That one, or maybe the one that's colorized.
02:23:53.000 There.
02:23:53.000 That one's really, really pretty.
02:23:56.000 So nobody knows what this is.
02:23:58.000 And 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.
02:24:12.000 And 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.
02:24:24.000 And of course, you know, there's no funding that's out there.
02:24:27.000 There's not even a police department out there.
02:24:32.000 So no research is being done out there.
02:24:35.000 But it's a fascinating place as old as time itself.
02:24:38.000 And all of these people are from like a chapter before contact period.
02:24:45.000 Whoa.
02:24:45.000 Yeah, it's fascinating, man.
02:24:46.000 It's a very ancient, mysterious, mystical place.
02:24:51.000 It'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.
02:24:58.000 And of course, the Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world.
02:25:01.000 Is there any theory as to the age of that?
02:25:05.000 Well, I think when you go there, they attribute it to a culture that lived in the area between 100 AD and 1000 AD.
02:25:14.000 But, you know, that's just totally guesswork.
02:25:17.000 Wow.
02:25:19.000 Judicula and the Cherokee Indians.
02:25:21.000 Yeah.
02:25:21.000 Now, 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...
02:25:39.000 When 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.
02:25:57.000 But 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.
02:26:07.000 They were very tall people or whatever.
02:26:09.000 And there's no evidence behind that at all.
02:26:12.000 And so it's hard to like, okay, we have Cherokee bodies.
02:26:16.000 So are these oral memories that are being passed down through time that come down to the Cherokee?
02:26:22.000 And, you know, as like a...
02:26:34.000 They want to build it up.
02:26:34.000 Or are they really holding on to something that's true?
02:26:37.000 Because, man, I would love to talk to Graham about this.
02:26:40.000 Okay.
02:26:41.000 So, 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.
02:27:04.000 You've heard this before, right?
02:27:05.000 Like, how do we know that people in 10,500 BC even recognize the constellation of Leo?
02:27:10.000 And how is that knowledge carried down?
02:27:13.000 Dude, there is evidence of this.
02:27:15.000 Okay, the squared spiral.
02:27:17.000 Have you seen this motif anywhere?
02:27:19.000 We can look it up.
02:27:21.000 Greek meander pattern.
02:27:23.000 But you'll also see it in the American Southwest.
02:27:26.000 You'll see it out in the Mississippian cultures.
02:27:29.000 You'll see it in Mexico.
02:27:30.000 You'll see it in South America, Peru.
02:27:32.000 You'll see it in Greece.
02:27:33.000 You'll see it in Egypt, Rome.
02:27:36.000 Yeah, this pattern.
02:27:37.000 So, 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.
02:27:50.000 That's what it is.
02:27:51.000 Yeah, so it's a squared spiral.
02:27:53.000 But when you take two of those and lay them on top of each other, it becomes a swastika. 0.81
02:27:56.000 And you and I recognize where these meanders connect because of a certain recent culture that perverted this symbol and turned it into something evil.
02:28:05.000 But this is an ancient symbol, and it's found all over the world.
02:28:10.000 And it even dates back to Ukraine.
02:28:13.000 You may be able to find this.
02:28:14.000 There's an ivory bone handle in Ukraine from like 11,000 years ago that has this squared spiral that's on it.
02:28:22.000 So this is 11,000 years old, found on every continent on the planet.
02:28:27.000 Oh yeah, so it's even found in pottery.
02:28:29.000 You can see it in pottery in ancient China, ancient Japan.
02:28:33.000 It's in Cambodia.
02:28:34.000 it's all across the ancient world and I was asking uh uh Could you look up the Temple of Mitla in Mexico?
02:28:45.000 It's a Temple of Mitla. 0.95
02:28:46.000 And if we look there, you'll see it all up and down.
02:28:48.000 Now, the Temple of Mitla is a shamanic temple.
02:28:52.000 They think it was like a mecca site that people would go to.
02:28:55.000 It was built to last for all of eternity.
02:28:57.000 And of all the megaliths in all of Mesoamerica, or ancient Mexico and Central America, this site uses the largest stones.
02:29:04.000 So each one of these lentils that you see, this is like one solid piece of volcanic stone.
02:29:09.000 Very, very hard stones.
02:29:11.000 Okay, so you can see the squared spiral, right?
02:29:13.000 Can you see the step pattern that leads up to them?
02:29:15.000 And you can probably find another photo where you see the step pattern leading up to the spiral.
02:29:20.000 So it's like you're walking up steps into a spiral, and it's this loop that continues on forever.
02:29:25.000 I have a ton of these photos on my phone.
02:29:27.000 They're found all over Peru.
02:29:29.000 There we go.
02:29:30.000 Now, this is not quite exactly it.
02:29:45.000 You can go look at the Big Dipper and the Big Dipper changes over the course of the year.
02:29:50.000 So 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.
02:30:00.000 And the Big Dipper is spinning in the night sky throughout the year.
02:30:03.000 So this ancient symbol is them documenting a constellation.
02:30:07.000 For over 11,000 years human beings have been documenting a constellation.
02:30:11.000 So 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.
02:30:20.000 This is 11,000 years old.
02:30:22.000 Yeah, okay, so look in here.
02:30:24.000 So it's a step up to a spiral, a step up to a spiral.
02:30:27.000 And, dude, it's the Big Dipper.
02:30:28.000 Just look at the Big Dipper in the future as though it's this constellation, and it's the same thing.
02:30:32.000 Is this a theory that it's a Big Dipper?
02:30:34.000 Is this being corroborated?
02:30:35.000 This is my theory.
02:30:36.000 This is my theory and like something I've been studying for a long time.
02:30:36.000 Your theory.
02:30:40.000 But 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.
02:30:57.000 You know what I mean?
02:30:58.000 So 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?
02:31:08.000 When I'm in the Mediterranean, I'll ask people, what does this mean?
02:31:11.000 I'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.
02:31:21.000 It's not a river.
02:31:21.000 Bullshit.
02:31:22.000 And then in Latin America, I get a bit better of an explanation, and maybe this is really it.
02:31:29.000 They think that it's like the step.
02:31:33.000 The steps through life and the rejuvenation of life, right?
02:31:37.000 So it's like the Big Dipper has some kind of esoteric meaning with it.
02:31:42.000 But 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.
02:31:58.000 And that's all, you know, I'm trying to explain something that's 11,000 years old.
02:32:01.000 What is the earliest evidence of the understanding of the procession of the equinoxes?
02:32:07.000 Oh god, I don't know.
02:32:08.000 I don't know.
02:32:09.000 That's getting, like, beyond my level of knowledge with archaeoastronomy.
02:32:16.000 Because Graham's theorized that the Egyptians were aware of it.
02:32:19.000 I mean, I don't doubt that they were aware of it.
02:32:23.000 Yeah, Buval, I think, believed that.
02:32:24.000 Or I know for sure John Anthony West believed that.
02:32:27.000 Yeah, I don't know, man.
02:32:30.000 I 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.
02:32:50.000 Let's explain to people what it means.
02:32:52.000 So what it means is that the Earth, as it spins, it doesn't spin perfectly.
02:32:57.000 Like there's a pin in the top and the pin in the bottom, and it spins like a globe.
02:33:00.000 It spins in a wobble, and that wobbles a 24,000-year cycle.
02:33:05.000 The earliest understanding of the procession of the equinox is typically credited to Greek astronomers.
02:33:10.000 How do you say his name?
02:33:11.000 Yeah, Hipparchus.
02:33:11.000 Hipparchus?
02:33:13.000 Hipparchus in the 2nd century BCE, around 130 BCE.
02:33:17.000 I bet you he did it in Alexandria too.
02:33:19.000 Hipparchus noticed the position of the equinoxes, the points where the celestial equator intersects with the elliptic.
02:33:25.000 We're shifting westward over time relative to the fixed stars.
02:33:29.000 He 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.
02:33:42.000 From 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.
02:33:52.000 Approximately one degree every 71.6 years.
02:33:56.000 There'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.
02:34:14.000 Yeah, well, and then check this out.
02:34:16.000 Hipparchus' discovery detailed in his lost work, but referenced by Ptolemy, the pharaoh over Alexandria in the Almagest, 2nd century CE.
02:34:26.000 So this is happening in the city of Alexandria.
02:34:29.000 All this is being studied in Alexandria's library.
02:34:31.000 Marks the earliest confirmed understanding of procession in scientific sense.
02:34:35.000 Dude, that was lost in the burning of Alexandria's library.
02:34:39.000 Yeah, how crazy is that?
02:34:41.000 It's all crazy.
02:34:42.000 It's so fascinating because it's...
02:34:53.000 Yeah.
02:34:53.000 Why would you just say, oh, it's just stars?
02:34:55.000 Of course you would.
02:34:56.000 It's so silly.
02:34:57.000 Of course.
02:34:59.000 They're so majestic.
02:35:00.000 You would have to be transfixed.
02:35:03.000 You know something interesting that I was just reminded of is this meandering pattern.
02:35:08.000 It continues in...
02:35:19.000 You see it on the monument of Augustus, which dates to about 9 BC, but that's for his death.
02:35:29.000 But Augustus would have seen Alexandria.
02:35:30.000 He would have been familiar with these motifs.
02:35:32.000 I believe after that in Rome we don't see this motif anymore of the squared spiral.
02:35:37.000 In 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.
02:35:50.000 He gathered all of the writing in the Maya world together in the city of what is modern day Merida.
02:35:57.000 And it was called multiple pyres.
02:35:59.000 So imagine, let's say a pyre is at least from the floor to the ceiling stacked with codexes.
02:36:04.000 Like have you ever seen the sticky notes that are connected on each side?
02:36:07.000 That's how the Maya books looked.
02:36:10.000 And he burned all that history.
02:36:11.000 Today we only have three or four that exist.
02:36:14.000 And one of them is like controversial as to whether or not it's a forgery.
02:36:17.000 So he destroyed all of the written history of the Mesoamerican world in like one fell swoop.
02:36:24.000 And 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.
02:36:35.000 The Aztecs were producing 250,000 pieces of paper a year.
02:36:42.000 It's something like that.
02:36:43.000 It's an incredible amount of written knowledge, and all of that knowledge is burned and gone.
02:36:49.000 And so, you know, just again, when archaeologists – It's so silly because we're disconnected from the ancient world by a considerable margin.
02:37:06.000 I mean, none of us really understand what's going on.
02:37:09.000 I 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?
02:37:33.000 Like, you know, where are all the doves that you see like in Christian churches and stuff?
02:37:37.000 And 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.
02:37:52.000 Because, 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.
02:38:02.000 We could be completely wrong, and we probably are completely wrong.
02:38:05.000 You know, think about, like, if you died and...
02:38:12.000 What would they think of you?
02:38:13.000 It probably wouldn't be a very good representation of you.
02:38:15.000 It depends on who's writing the story, right?
02:38:17.000 If CNN wrote it, it'd be terrible.
02:38:19.000 It'd be pretty bad.
02:38:21.000 It's really dependent upon who, again, is the gatekeeper of information.
02:38:24.000 Yeah.
02:38:25.000 If 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.
02:38:50.000 I'm not going to say Egypt.
02:38:52.000 I feel like Egypt is such a, like, everyone says Egypt.
02:38:54.000 I would say Egypt.
02:38:55.000 I know, I know.
02:38:56.000 If 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...
02:39:21.000 No one can scout me.
02:39:23.000 No one can see you.
02:39:24.000 You exist in a time warp inside there.
02:39:26.000 You could observe all of it.
02:39:27.000 It's got to be Egypt. 0.89
02:39:29.000 Well, yeah, yeah.
02:39:31.000 You'd have to figure out what time.
02:39:32.000 Because if you got there and they had already built it, you're like, shit!
02:39:34.000 God damn it.
02:39:35.000 Yeah, like maybe you say, let me go 10,000 BC.
02:39:38.000 And you go there and it's already there.
02:39:40.000 You're like, fuck!
02:39:42.000 Fuck!
02:39:42.000 You go back 20,000 BC.
02:39:43.000 Yeah, you can only do it once.
02:39:44.000 Like, fuck!
02:39:45.000 But if you go back 30,000 BC, maybe there's nothing.
02:39:49.000 Um, man.
02:39:51.000 Egypt is a creme de la creme, man. 0.99
02:39:54.000 It's the most monumental, beautiful, like, you know, when you try to imagine what it would have looked like.
02:39:59.000 If you've seen visual recreations of the Giza Plateau, the Valley Temple must have been absolutely stunning.
02:40:07.000 Okay, 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.
02:40:23.000 The blocks are absolutely gigantic.
02:40:25.000 Like, one block is bigger than this whole wall.
02:40:29.000 Brought from 500 miles south in Aswan.
02:40:32.000 These are the ones with the cyclopean strangely angled stones like you see in Peru.
02:40:35.000 And when you walk in, most people ignore it.
02:40:39.000 But that floor is a calcite white crystal floor.
02:40:44.000 And so imagine when it was polished and when it was finished off, it must have been gleaming.
02:40:48.000 And at some point in time, there were these diorite kofra statues.
02:40:53.000 Maybe you've seen them before.
02:40:55.000 They're like impossibly well made out of the hardest stone in Egypt.
02:40:58.000 The heart of stone in Egypt. 0.57
02:41:01.000 And it's this black diorite gleaming polished statues.
02:41:05.000 And 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.
02:41:14.000 And 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.
02:41:21.000 And so you're walking in and it's like glowing inside of the temple.
02:41:25.000 And 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.
02:41:33.000 The Nile is much further to the east now.
02:41:36.000 But the Nile came straight up to the front step of the Valley Temple. 0.78
02:41:42.000 So 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. 0.99
02:42:01.000 It's this huge temple.
02:42:03.000 It's the largest building on the planet at the time, probably, other than the pyramids themselves.
02:42:12.000 Then you step into it and it is the most sacred, most impressive thing that exists on the earth at that time.
02:42:20.000 No 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.
02:42:28.000 And what exactly was going on in these buildings, I don't know.
02:42:31.000 This is kind of another hot take of mine is, man, I don't believe that.
02:42:49.000 I mean, it's extensive.
02:42:50.000 Amount of work all across the entire world.
02:42:53.000 You know, the Maya are building temples for these gods, these beings that they're meeting.
02:42:58.000 The 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...
02:43:12.000 To meet the god Amun-Ra. 1.00
02:43:14.000 And I'm standing there inside the chamber looking around.
02:43:17.000 He's the only person supposedly that's allowed in.
02:43:19.000 That's a story that we know.
02:43:20.000 How true that is, I don't know.
02:43:21.000 And 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?
02:43:31.000 and they're really interacting with these beings.
02:43:33.000 And the most realistic way I can think of is by...
02:43:48.000 And 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?
02:43:56.000 So after going through all that, I have to say Egypt. 0.99
02:43:59.000 You have to!
02:44:01.000 As cliche as it might be.
02:44:03.000 My second one would be like, if I could be like, okay, take me to the height of Amazonian culture.
02:44:08.000 Just let me see just how amazing it is because, you Now, where Paul lives, it's all clay on the ground.
02:44:18.000 But when you get halfway through the Amazon, you start reaching like granite and limestone bedrock.
02:44:23.000 And that's on the eastern side.
02:44:24.000 So you're in like Guyana, French Guyana, Brazil.
02:44:28.000 And it's treacherous places to go through in the middle of the Amazon.
02:44:32.000 But I think that that's where cities in the Amazon are going to be found one day.
02:44:36.000 And it was towards the end of Oriana's expedition.
02:44:38.000 So that's about where he would have been.
02:44:40.000 And man, I bet you there's stuff out there that would just amaze us.
02:44:45.000 I 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.
02:44:57.000 I think it's the origin of their religion and shamanic practices.
02:45:00.000 I think it's spread out all the way up to Mexico.
02:45:08.000 But I think before that, they had this were-jaguar religion where people are taking hallucinogens and psychedelics.
02:45:15.000 And so I think that all the evidence points towards that.
02:45:19.000 The origin of civilization in the Americas begins in the Amazon and spreads out from there.
02:45:23.000 And I would love if a time machine could pull back that canopy and show me what the actual height of that was like.
02:45:30.000 It's just so interesting.
02:45:32.000 It never stops being interesting.
02:45:33.000 And it's one of those things, it's a mystery that will never truly be totally solved because it's not possible to go back in time.
02:45:39.000 So we're always going to have this thing in our mind like, I wonder.
02:45:44.000 And it's such a fascinating inclination to sit and just wonder about the past.
02:45:49.000 And to look where we are now and how ridiculous life today is.
02:45:53.000 This was undeniable.
02:45:55.000 Humans are fools, particularly today.
02:45:57.000 And I think one of the reasons why we're fools is we're denied these experiences that these people probably had.
02:46:02.000 We've outlawed them.
02:46:04.000 Just like they did in ancient Greece.
02:46:06.000 just like they did, I'm sure, throughout history and all these different cultures.
02:46:10.000 You know, have you ever heard the...
02:46:20.000 Have you ever heard this before?
02:46:21.000 When I study, I only study native people in the Americas.
02:46:26.000 I've got my hands full with that.
02:46:27.000 I can't really start studying.
02:46:30.000 I'm fascinated by the people that live on Sentinel Island.
02:46:33.000 And akin to that are the people, the semi-contacted people of Papua New Guinea. 0.97
02:46:37.000 And when you listen to the songs that they sing, it reminds me so much of what I heard yesterday and what I've known.
02:46:43.000 But when Percy Fawcett says he hears the songs they sing, it reminds him like, oh, this is an advanced culture.
02:46:50.000 This is something that's being handed down through time.
02:46:51.000 It's beautiful.
02:46:52.000 It's timeless.
02:46:53.000 And 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.
02:47:06.000 Does that make sense?
02:47:07.000 Can we hear that?
02:47:08.000 Yeah.
02:47:12.000 This may not be the one I'm talking about.
02:47:13.000 This may not be the one I'm talking about.
02:47:22.000 It's beautiful though.
02:47:23.000 There's one of a man.
02:47:26.000 He's right next to the camera and he's singing and you have all these people around him and it's just like stunningly beautiful.
02:47:31.000 Here it is.
02:48:03.000 Wow.
02:48:06.000 It's an extra love on it.
02:48:08.000 Yeah.
02:48:12.000 I think it's just on loop.
02:48:14.000 Ten hours.
02:48:15.000 It's a ten-hour video.
02:48:16.000 But, you know, hearing that makes me, like, emotional hearing it.
02:48:18.000 Five grams and you listen to that.
02:48:19.000 It's beautiful, you know?
02:48:21.000 It's gorgeous.
02:48:21.000 Oh, my God.
02:48:22.000 And you look in his eyes and it's like he has very innocent eyes.
02:48:27.000 You know, it is the...
02:48:36.000 And what's really fascinated by human cultures is the most satisfied, least anxious people are subsistence livers.
02:48:43.000 People that live off the land.
02:48:45.000 It's so true. 0.84
02:48:46.000 Have you ever seen the Vice piece about this guy named Heinmo, Heinmo's Arctic Adventure?
02:48:54.000 No.
02:48:54.000 There's a great bit.
02:48:56.000 A 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.
02:49:06.000 and he's one of the last people that's allowed to live off the land.
02:49:10.000 And he's a very intelligent guy who...
02:49:17.000 And he's essentially just hunting caribou and fishing.
02:49:20.000 And he lives, like, in peace and harmony.
02:49:23.000 And he never wants to live in a city.
02:49:25.000 Like, this is a natural way for us.
02:49:27.000 Does he have a little daughter with him or a little girl?
02:49:29.000 And he, like, cuts up the fish and he hands it to her and they give each other, like, an Eskimo kiss?
02:49:33.000 I don't believe it's that.
02:49:33.000 Have you seen?
02:49:35.000 His daughter's full grown at the time.
02:49:38.000 But I'm sure there's many people living like this.
02:49:43.000 If you look at modern society, we're so anxious and weird and depressed and all these things wrong with us.
02:49:49.000 I think a lot of that is because, A, we're disconnected from nature.
02:49:55.000 Especially if you're living in a city.
02:49:56.000 I mean, there's no more insulation from nature than a skyscraper.
02:50:00.000 I mean, you're completely removed from it.
02:50:01.000 You've covered the ground in concrete.
02:50:03.000 You're not interacting with nature at all.
02:50:05.000 Like, that's why everybody goes to Central Park.
02:50:07.000 They're like a little piece.
02:50:08.000 So give me a little bit of nature, right?
02:50:10.000 So you're disconnected from nature, which I think is a vitamin.
02:50:13.000 I genuinely believe.
02:50:15.000 It's just like the sun gives you vitamin D. I think nature gives you some unmeasured vitamin that we just haven't figured out yet.
02:50:23.000 And then we're removed from these ancient experiences that connected people to the spiritual world.
02:50:28.000 Yeah, yeah.
02:50:30.000 Yeah, it's so true.
02:50:32.000 I've been having these conversations with my wife recently.
02:50:37.000 You know, like all of our friends are sort of, you know, we're all kind of newlyweds.
02:50:41.000 Like my wife and I are about to approach our two year.
02:50:43.000 And our relationship is interesting because it kind of mimics like ancient people.
02:51:04.000 And they'd be rewarded by the gratification of the women that are there.
02:51:07.000 and then they would play their part in helping to feed everybody.
02:51:09.000 And you have this like a...
02:51:13.000 The man's helping take care of her.
02:51:15.000 You have this.
02:51:15.000 And then the men also get their time away to be manly and be masculine and brave.
02:51:21.000 Now, 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.
02:51:31.000 And I'm existing in this digital world that doesn't even exist.
02:51:35.000 I produce ads for companies that don't even have a physical brick-and-mortar store.
02:51:39.000 It's all completely made up.
02:51:42.000 And I come home, I would come home every single day and I had no like, My wife is in the middle of dental school. 1.00
02:51:53.000 And so we're both going off and coming back and doing the same thing every day.
02:51:56.000 And it's like this unnatural cycle.
02:51:58.000 and you wonder why people are so unhappy.
02:52:00.000 And now that I've been traveling, You know, I go off.
02:52:05.000 You know, I go off.
02:52:06.000 I travel.
02:52:07.000 I'm able to, you know, help provide for us.
02:52:09.000 I'm gone.
02:52:10.000 I come back and our relationship is strong and it's intimate and romantic.
02:52:13.000 And she like, you know, admires that kind of aspect about me.
02:52:16.000 And I'm like, oh, this is kind of how this is a healthy, this is actually a healthy thing for our relationship.
02:52:23.000 And it's just reminding me more and more of how this modern world is so dystopian and so sick and poisonous to our minds.
02:52:31.000 We're operating in a made-up realm.
02:52:34.000 It's just so much of what we do is completely made up and unnatural.
02:52:38.000 We 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! 1.00
02:52:48.000 That's what life should be like.
02:52:50.000 But it's unfortunately science fiction.
02:52:53.000 I think you can live in this world and Yeah, for sure.
02:52:59.000 That's what I do.
02:53:00.000 For sure.
02:53:00.000 Yeah, I've seen that.
02:53:01.000 I mean, you go off on your hunting expeditions.
02:53:03.000 Those are like, to me, spiritual journeys.
02:53:06.000 It is.
02:53:07.000 It sounds ridiculous.
02:53:07.000 Totally.
02:53:08.000 But 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.
02:53:19.000 Here we are.
02:53:20.000 Where are you at when you do that?
02:53:21.000 Well, I really love Utah.
02:53:22.000 I really love the Wasatch Mountains.
02:53:25.000 I love that area.
02:53:26.000 I'm scared of the Northwest.
02:53:29.000 My wife wants to take me to Montana and go hiking.
02:53:32.000 I'm like, I'm not going hiking out in the Northwest.
02:53:34.000 I don't belong out there.
02:53:36.000 There's grizzly bears.
02:53:36.000 I mean, those things, there's nothing you can do, man.
02:53:38.000 Nothing you can do.
02:53:39.000 I'm okay on the East Coast when it's just black bears.
02:53:42.000 They're like rabbits.
02:53:44.000 Dude, a grizzly bear?
02:53:45.000 Yeah.
02:53:46.000 Have you seen the video of the guy who's up on top of this granite facing?
02:53:49.000 And he goes, he's like filming and he goes, there's a young grizzly bear down at the river below me.
02:53:53.000 And he's up on this granite face.
02:53:54.000 And he was like, I'm going to scare him off.
02:53:56.000 And he goes, hey bear, hey bear.
02:53:58.000 And the bear goes and charges directly to him and knocks down all the little trees.
02:54:02.000 And it comes up to the granite face and it can't reach him.
02:54:04.000 But I'm like, dude, I would never want to go up there.
02:54:09.000 Your food.
02:54:11.000 You're food, man.
02:54:12.000 Yeah, you're a part of the chain and not the good part.
02:54:14.000 No.
02:54:14.000 You're not the hunter with the deer.
02:54:16.000 No.
02:54:17.000 There's an 800-pound super predator that can run 40 miles an hour, and he's headed right towards you.
02:54:23.000 Yeah, and if you're a good shot with a high-powered gun, you might be able to kill it, but you'll be mauled to death.
02:54:27.000 By the time it wanders off into the forest and dies.
02:54:30.000 Yeah, you might be able to kill it.
02:54:32.000 You need a large caliber rifle and shoot it in the head.
02:54:37.000 And a pistol, that's the other thing.
02:54:39.000 If 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.
02:54:46.000 Oh, it's terrifying.
02:54:47.000 Could you imagine people trying to navigate or migrate into the Americas and they have to deal with the short-faced bear and polar bears?
02:54:56.000 Right.
02:54:57.000 The short-faced bear, which makes a grizzly bear look like a poodle.
02:55:00.000 It's utterly insane, man.
02:55:02.000 People lived in a gnarly place in the U.S. We had American lions that are twice.
02:55:08.000 Bigger than the African lions.
02:55:09.000 Yeah, exactly.
02:55:10.000 We had elephants.
02:55:11.000 We had woolly mammoths.
02:55:13.000 We had camels here.
02:55:14.000 We had gigantic horses.
02:55:16.000 We had huge dire wolves.
02:55:18.000 Giant sloths.
02:55:20.000 Oh, there's giant sloth caves in Nantahala.
02:55:23.000 And you can see them, and they're carved out.
02:55:25.000 And it's cool.
02:55:26.000 Because there's multiple layers of history there.
02:55:28.000 So you have this megafauna Ice Age history of these huge giant sloth caves carved out in these prehistoric mountainsides.
02:55:36.000 Wow.
02:55:37.000 But the Cherokee used those caves to hide in to escape the Trail of Tears.
02:55:42.000 Wow.
02:55:43.000 Yeah, that's fascinating stuff up there, man.
02:55:45.000 So you have like levels of history just in that one area of the country.
02:55:48.000 If you go out there, you'll feel like you're in a primordial place that's, you know, kind of spiritual.
02:55:55.000 I'll check it out.
02:55:55.000 Yeah, you definitely have to.
02:55:57.000 Listen, thank you so much for being here.
02:55:59.000 I really, really enjoyed this conversation.
02:56:00.000 And I think we could do a bunch more.
02:56:02.000 So let's do it again sometime.
02:56:03.000 I feel like I could have talked to you for 10 more hours.
02:56:05.000 I feel like we could too.
02:56:06.000 Yeah.
02:56:07.000 So tell everybody if they want to get into more of your work.
02:56:10.000 Where should they go?
02:56:11.000 Yeah.
02:56:12.000 So everything I do is just under my name, Luke Caverns.
02:56:15.000 You know, Caverns was just a name that like my wife and I came up with to use like a nomer because of privacy.
02:56:22.000 But my real last name is Reagan.
02:56:24.000 And, you know, like I shared, I have this family history.
02:56:27.000 Loosely connected to the presidential family.
02:56:29.000 That's like a different branch of our family from Tennessee.
02:56:33.000 And so I kind of want to do it for privacy, but that's impossible.
02:56:37.000 So I've just run with it.
02:56:39.000 But yeah, loot caverns, you can find everything I do under that.
02:56:43.000 And for a long time, I thought maybe I'd specialize in one area, but man, I'm interested in...
02:57:00.000 I'm glad you're out there, man.
02:57:01.000 I really appreciate it.
02:57:02.000 Thank you for being here.
02:57:03.000 It was really fun.
02:57:04.000 Thank you.