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"The Pyramids Are NOT What We Think!" (Ft. Luke Caverns)
becomes king. And he says, "I'm not worshiping Amen anymore. I'm only going to acknowledge the one true sun god, the Aten, and I'm going to make my name Akenatan." And so he changes it. And then they start depicting themselves with the elongated skulls. And where does the skull elongation come from? We don't really know. And many of the historical kings themselves were merged with divinity, the sun god, even up to Louis the 14th, who was the sun god in the French context. And I've heard [music] a Greek college professor say, I don't mean this in any
symbolic or spiritual sense. I'm telling you that this literally happened. Was this whole temple built for Aman Hotep to enter it and not come face to face with Aman Ra? It wasn't actually happening. This is all made up. This whole temple is here for nothing. So you have a 500year period where we can see a progression of architecture getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more monumental. [music] All these ancient temples and sites that were erected on behalf of these god beings. It's every ancient culture
[music] recognizes these gods that exist on our planet. pyramids? First, let me give you a little bit of context. In 2024, a collaborative effort between Egyptian and Japanese researchers using ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography mapped the western cemetery adjacent to the Great Pyramid. Their non-invasive methods revealed a shallow L-shaped structure
approximately 10 m long. We still don't know the function of this structure, but we do know that this underground probably man-made artifice is verified and real. Also verified and real, former minister of antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawas, known for being a professional Debbie Downer and skeptic, himself has acknowledged the existence of three independent tunnels associated with the Sphinx. So that is the context in which an absolute bomb was dropped on the
internet in 2025. Just recently, a team of researchers led by Filippo Beyond used a technique called synthetic aperture radar Doppler tomography and artificial intelligence to measure and reconstruct what looks like a small city or energy grid underneath the Giza plateau. Technically, this modality SAR Doppler tomography can map subsurface territory. In fact, this technique is sometimes used to map magma chambers inside of volcanoes. But the image
circulating the internet involves a level of granularity and detail and in my opinion takes a lot of liberties. It also involves handwavy claims about perfectly accurate artificial intelligence. You see, the actual tomography images don't match what's being circulated online. I think there's a good chance there is something crazy underneath the Giza Plateau, and I think it might go very deep. But this new discovery is very hard to assess. Are we being conditioned to accept a truth that the Egyptian Ministry of Culture is
already aware of? Is this sort of a roar shock test? Is this purely fake news or just some researchers grasping at straws? to find out. Today I'm interviewing an amazing guest, a vigilante archaeologist in his 20s, carrying the torch of Robert Shock, Graham Hancock, and his mentor Ed Barnhart. Without further ado, please welcome this week's American Alchemist, Luke Caverns. All right, I'm here with Luke Caverns. I couldn't be more excited to have you. Uh we talked about this uh earlier. I'll
present you as a vigilante archaeologist. I think you've you've gone a really cool route where you know archaeology in some respects I think is can be myopic at times in its kind of pure academic form and uh you are of the lineage of uh Ed Barnhard who is your mentor um but you you've told me you you uh are inspired by Graham Hancock Randle Carlson people like that um and I want to get into a broader philosophical discussion about kind of hardcore you know uh academic archaeology versus you
know some of what they do But um I'm just couldn't be more excited to have you, man. Thank you for coming. Well, thank you so much for for uh inviting me. Yeah, I I um what you said about the uh getting into like the philosophical argument of of kind of like mainstream archaeology versus vigilante archaeology, that's a fascinating uh topic. I can't wait to get into it as well as everything else that's going on. Do you think your name Luke Caverns, you know, there's a concept called nominal determinism, which is if your name is Larry, you're more likely to become a lawyer. And so I think about your name,
Luke Caverns. Do you think your name at all subliminally inspired you to pursue uh archaeological quests? You know what's funny? I don't think I've I've blatantly said this. Uh Caverns is just a second middle name. Uh my last name is actually Reagan. And uh and so the reason I did not go with my last name when I was, you know, creating a public persona or presenting myself in public was one just for privacy
originally. Um not that I I guess I don't care about that too much now. Um but uh and also when people would search up Luke Reagan, all you would ever find was was Ronald Reagan. And um and so it's the same family. He's like a distant distant cousin of mine. Yeah. But the uh but the determinism actually comes from uh my my dad's side of the family back in the 1890s. There were you people can look it up. Um if
you pick up any book, if you go to like to Halfpric Books down this road and you're able to find a book about uh the American West, like the Wild West, people searching for lost Spanish gold in the United States. This is a big thing. The Spanish were here in the mid to late 1500s searching for, you know, ancient Native American treasure as well as gold mines to send back to Spain. Um, there's all these great stories about them and if you find these books about it, you'll find my family uh in those books. And that's kind of where my
family name begins is searching for lost Spanish gold mine and uh treasure in the American Southwest. So, in Big Bend, there's, you can look it up. There's a place called Reagan Canyon, and there's uh this huge epic tale of like lost gold and mystery and mysterious deaths of people from West Texas all the way out to San Antonio, Texas. And it's my family like battling all these people for this lost Spanish gold. It's it's fascinating story. Um, one of those brothers makes it out, gets involved in
the in the oil field, um, and in gold mining. Then his son picks it up after him and goes looking in New Mexico for the uh the seven lost Spanish gold mines of of southern New Mexico and within a year he discovered them and he opened up these 450 year old gold mines and had this company going for about 8 years and eventually [clears throat] there was a tragedy that befell the company and and the whole company fell apart and they fell into poverty and my dad was
accidentally born during that time and uh so my dad didn't experience any of that. Didn't really inherent in inherit that adventurous spirit and somehow I did like somehow it it carried over to me and um yeah I just so I just kind of come from this lineage of people who have been interested in the ancient world and and while he was a gold miner and an explorer he was also what we call today an antiquarian. So it's a guy Antiquarians were usually like guys who
were pretty wealthy that had the money to be able to carry out pretty unorganized archaeological exped expeditions and um or excavations and he would just collect the artifacts and so you know they're sitting in boxes today and and we still have them. Um so yeah that would be the the the determinism. That's fascinating. It's almost like you have some unfinished business on behalf of your family that you are now pursuing. And uh we were talking about
this earlier on the phone, but it's like I think a lot of people in the kind of academic world of archaeology need to fully separate out, you know, their pursuits with anything autobiographical. So they can't say that they're, you know, inspired by anything seemingly irrational or seemingly like, you know, some hermetic lineage or, you know, whatever. It has to be like I am engaging in perfect deductive and inductive logic, you know, and I'm just just, you know, figuring it out. And um that's so not how humans in general
interact with any subject matter. And so you know, we were talking about uh Hinrich von Schlimman, the guy who found Troy in the 1870s, this German businessman who was like he was really interested in like you know um Homer and Thusidities. And so he was like, you know, I think the pelpeneisian war happened. And then that like, you know, led him to or Sir James Bruce who uh, you know, we have the book of Enoch because he discovered it and he was like a a Scottish, you know, Freemason and he went looking for the ark of the covenant and he came back with the book of Enoch. So you have all these like fas
are, you know, maybe part and parcel of that of that sort of, you know, lineage, which is awesome. Yeah, I think I still I hold on to that that romance of the ancient world um that inspired so many of the great stories that we still talk about today that really inspired the only stories that are worth talking about, right? Um you know, people don't talk about centuries later the highly logistical and ultra sterilized, you know, deductions of such and such such and such. it's always some kind of human
passion that lives on, you know. Um, and I totally agree with you and and it's it's sort of that that ancestral calling drive to dive into the ancient world and and uh I don't know like explore really distant places. Um yeah, I I still feel the romance of the ancient world when there's such a drive to sterilize everything. You know, I think that that is the problem with
modern mainstream archaeology is that it is so sterilized and so against anything and of course they would never admit this and I don't know if it if passion is the right word but but they don't like romance. I I was having a conversation about this thing specifically uh with an archaeologist or maybe he's like a geoarchchaeologist and I was talking to him. He was he was accusing me of being somebody who's wanting to to sell the mystery, which that's a big thing that goes on as
people sell the mystery. And they kind of just they kind of inflate things where there's not really a mystery and they turn it into something. And there's a lot of mystery out there. But I think if I'm selling anything, I'm just trying to convince people or reignite in people the romance and the wonder of the ancient world and like the magic that that has that that that carries with it. It's like an escape from our modern day. And uh of course that wasn't good either. There's no human nature is not allowed to prevail anymore or or to to
shine. It's everything has to be so sterilized and so un just thoroughly uninteresting and then they wonder why they're losing you know the popular audience and why they've never been able to connect with them. I also think it's bad thinking like if thinking is you have to engage in some sort of sorting mechanism of like truth and not truth. Uh they're actually subject to dogma when it comes to like a good example is like the Bible taking that entirely throwing it out as
not historical because it's religious and we live in this kind of age of materialist reductionism all uh you know Richard Dawkins or whatever. So like nothing in the Bible could be true when like yeah some of this stuff seems to defy our kind of modern physics but there are plenty of things we have actually like a lot of you know historical evidence for and you've spoken about this or you you have any good examples of things in the Bible that [laughter] let's be real if you're into fasting sauna sessions or you just think clearly when you're dialed in physically hydration isn't optional I
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because it does. Oh, well, I mean, there's so much I think, yeah, I mean, if we're in the conversation of looking for historical evidence of the Bible, you would need to go back to um, you know, the Old Testament. Um, cuz there aren't really any historians that debate whether or not Jesus Christ was a real person. Um, but as far as something that I that I have been interested that I've spoken about before is the uh the archaeological evidence of the Exodus.
And um I don't know I mean this is such a nuanced topic. Uh, I don't know how deeply we could go into this, but um, you know, you you read you read the Exodus and it's it's fascinating as to um, it's fascinating like the specific details that they get into. Uh, you know, common common phrases that were said during that time. uh the the details that are in the Exodus story when you're looking back could have only been written by somebody who was alive in Egypt during the time of the Exodus,
which would be sometime during like the mid New Kingdom period. So let's let's call it very roughly somewhere between uh 1500 and 1,000 BC. And so some of the details in there as to like how the women squat on these blocks and give and and give birth to children was something that you would have only known if you were living there and not living in Israel a thousand years later, right? Um and so it's it's just fascinating like getting to your point, it's just fascinating. Um, yeah, that that uh and I have I have
some problems with this too as to how we we take a religious text like that and we just completely cast it to the side. They do the same thing. Um, they do the same thing with the Iliad and the Odyssey, you know, they do the same thing with Homer's works. Like completely cast that out. Um, and I Yeah, I think it just kind of uh I don't know. You're throwing the baby out with the bath water. Yeah. Well, you It's like Yeah. A good example is the Hri von Slimman, you know, Pelpeneisian world. Well, that Troy was never real. Well, actually, he found Troy. Another good example is the
myth of Atlantis where you have, you know, Plato and uh Solon, you know, saying that, you know, there was there was a great flood here 9,000 years ago. So he's saying this in 600 BC that dates back to 9, you know, 9,600 BC, which is, you know, the year that uh, you know, according to people like Graham Hancock and and Randall Carlson, uh, there's all this archaeological interesting evidence that that, you know, the younger dry uh, uh, uh, period ended and so and it was, you know, this this this great flood, this meltwater pulse
Um, and so that that pattern matches, you know, as well. Uh so I think it's really easy to relegate things as you know religion uh or myth uh when in fact you know like the the flood myths there are over there are hundreds and hundreds of these flood myths and they're across uh completely uncorrelated desperate civilizations that you know didn't really have a ton of contact with each other and so you know one would I think be wise to take that seriously if you're
like a modern archaeologist not just throw that out. Yeah. Yeah. I think the there's a there's like a conservative argument there that you know the reason we have so many flood myths from around the world is because well you know people live next to large bodies of water and large bodies of water are bound to have some kind of horrific flooding someday that people will just continue to tell. Uh but I've talked to Dr. Barnhart about this and even Dr. Barnhart uh said this on a podcast that he and I were on together was that even he feels that to
some degree this really might be some kind of leftover ancestral memory that is passed down of this you know horrific event that just eviscerated so much of humanity and people have have held on to that. But at a certain point I had the that you know this modern fascination that you know millions of people are wrapped up in this this search for a you know a lost civilization this Atlantean civilization and that kind of that can kind of get muddy because
the term Atlantis has now kind of become an umbrella term just for this concept of a lost civilization or lost civilizations that could have existed long before you know it's this whole alternate space has become this huge range of beliefs. Yeah, it's frustrating. You see, everybody's super You watch Gaia and they're like the Atlanteanss could teleport blah blah blah. And then like even to be honest, when I look at Graham Hancock, the super rigorous part of his work is around the younger desty. I
think he's correct on that. I think he'll be vindicated by history. And then when he gets into the, you know, proto civilization crossing, you know, the Atlantic, you know, where it's like you have this architecture in the Americas that lines up with this architecture in, you know, Asia or Europe or whatever. I think it gets extremely speculative and I think he would even admit that if you kind of, you know, push him on it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know, there's that quote that's that's gone crazy viral on his uh in his debate against Flint where uh I think Joe asks him, he
said he says, "So, would you say in in what has been studied, there's no evidence for a lost civilization?" He's like, "Well, yes, in what has been studied, there's no evidence for it." I get what he's saying, but it but I mean, that's a that's a serious point is is that is that we don't I I try to tell people this is is that I'm very open-minded to everything. very open-minded to the extremely open-minded to the fact that ancient people are achieving a lot of things that we can't really explain by conventional means. They're incredibly intelligent, far more intelligent than I
think that they've been given credit for. Um, but I mean, we still don't have like hard evidence of the fact that this civilization existed or that there were any of them. But you can see these holes in the historical timeline that need an answer. It needs to be filled. I don't know what the answer is. Um, and so that's that's the approach that that I've always that I've always taken. And um and the more I've learned, the more I've realized that yes, Plato is using Atlantis as a tool
in his in his works to essentially, you know, he he builds up the story that Athens was, you know, 9,000 years ago was at war or he's he's either building up the story or he's recounting the story, but he's saying that Athens was once at war with this longlost city named Atlantis. Atlantis was overly arrogant and you know uh and disrespected the gods and they were impious and and so they fell. Well, he's obviously telling a story there because Athens did not exist 9,000 years before that, right?
Um it just it I mean as far as we have evidence for they did not and Athens has been thoroughly excavated. Um but that part could just be an allegory. Sure. Athens did not exist 9,000 years ago. But maybe he's recalling on some kind of mythical city that people back then knew about or had heard about or that you hear in a children's story or or maybe Solon really did hear about a lost city while he was in while he was in Egypt. But the reality there is that we just don't really know exactly what the reality is
there. And there's, you know, I guess mainstream archaeologists are very quick to say that they know exactly what Plato's intentions were and that the fact that he just pulls it out of thin air and made it up. I don't think that that can be I don't think that that can concretely be said. Um, but there's no doubt that he's using it as an allegory in his story because he's making Atlantis as a mirror for Athens. He's warning people that Athens is falling, you know. So, there's there's some nuance there. And you know, the more I the more I have
studied the ancient world, the more I've realized just how unsure we are about the ancient world. Absolutely. Well, Plato's extremely hard to decipher because he and Socrates had a bias against writing. And so it's all through this sort of parapotetic dialogue or whatever is how you have to interpret everything. And Tomus and Creteus, the discussion of Atlantis, the whole thing is occurring at a mythos festival. And so it's like and then even in if you read Plato's Republic, he says at the very beginning like a lot of what I'm about to say is a lie. But then he
goes on to describe things that I think probably speak closer to like true onlogical truth. Again, this is not something anybody can lay claim on. I think in our earthly world or whatever, but in my assessment closer to ontological truth than like anybody, but he says that up top and a lot of this was due to the persecution of his mentor Socrates who, you know, the state ended up killing and so you never know with him. It's always I love how much you know about this. I don't know, man. I'm very passionate about it.
Um, but you know, it's it's it's always hard to it's always hard to say. Um, okay, this is a perfect segue. uh very hot in the news right now and it goes along handinhand with what you're talking about which is um basically uh uh that maybe some of these civilizations could have been more advanced but there is this whole grifting you know uh uh playing up the mystery you know uh uh industry around us that we have to be honest about uh there are these researchers this Italian guy uh Filippo Byondi and in 2022 I
guess you have this this peer-reviewed paper and It's just coming out now. Um that through these synthetic aperture uh radar imagery, we have found these vast structures below the pyramids. Uh the verdict seems like it's still out. I texted Graham Hancock about it. He said, "I have no reason to um believe that the source here is being honest." So yeah, I don't know. Um what do you Uh I'm gonna have to agree with Graham. [laughter] Um, and and I'll say this,
uh, for everybody watching because I know that, you know, there's people in the audience who they hear about this and they're fascinated by it and they're like, "Whoa, okay, finally what we have been searching for, something more is being vindicated." Um, and just putting this out there, there are people out there that know that you feel that way and they know that that's an easy way to inspire hope in people and make an incredible amount of money through funding at the same time. And uh and so just putting it out there, every respected person um in the alternate
space is highly highly highly skeptical. I know this cuz we're all in a group chat with each other. Um and uh that's just that's just the truth. Well, there also, you know, I invest a little bit in aerospace in my sort of investing day job and um a friend of mine, he's really deep on like synthetic aperture radar and other kind of sensing modalities is he's like, "Look, I have to do the exact math, but I doubt that synthetic aperture radar could ever penetrate that deeply underground." And I even actually the companies that it came out of,
Capella Space and Umbra, I looked at I diligenced them and with my venture capital hat on and that was not my impression either. It wasn't it wasn't about penetrating deep below the the ground and then you look at the granularity with which they're drawing these things and they say that their AI is infallible or whatever that that's crazy right that's crazy yeah because anybody who you know I work with AI every day like you just uh you know trying to get easy answers about something with history you know I've got chat GBT or Grock or whatever on the side and I can ask it quick questions but I can't ask it a detailed question a
AI is not as sophisticated as human beings by a long shot. And so for someone to say their AI is infallible is insane to me. I agree. It is insane. And it's also just think about the way AI works, right? It's like pattern matching based on other things. So it's like when you get an answer around chat GPT, it's just like the their best averaging and and you know to their assessment like the highest quality stuff that they're sifting through online. But it's it's it's just token prediction. It's just
pattern matching on steroids and it's gotten very good. Yeah. So it's like touring passible pattern matching or whatever. If you think about the pattern matching necessary to craft together an energy generator machine underground that is n of one. That's not like you don't have like a large sample size to like do pattern matching on that. So like yeah it's just literally impossible given the way we know AI works. And the other thing is is you know before they are even going deep underground they're scanning into the pyramid and supposedly
you know that they um they they create this this 3D model I'm sure that you've seen where they took a they took a visual 3D model of the king's chamber and the relieving chambers and they they um they duplicated it five times inside the coffer pyramid and they said this is what they're detecting. There's no serious team that would do that. You would not take a 3D model of a chamber inside a different pyramid and then superimpose it on top of this pyramid you're scanning and say this is
what like that that's crazy that you wouldn't do that. It just that's a unique structure to the great pyramid and it it's very unserious to do that right. Um, now on top of that, even with that 3D model that they that they created, they did not include and in their scans, you cannot see represented the chambers that we know are inside Coffer's Pyramid. The one that the ones that you can pay the ticket at the Giza Plateau and walk into today. Those chambers aren't aren't included. As well
as there are these two cavities. One's at 69 ft below the surface and the other one's like 112 ft below the surface. and they're big cavities that are bigger than the, you know, burial chamber inside Coffer's pyramid. Um, those aren't represented in the scans either. You have, so you have nothing of what we know is there. The way that we know that those are there, I think we talked about this on the phone, is uh Luis Alvarez, the the scientist that worked on the Manhattan project. He takes a team there in the 60s and they do a scan in the Coffer pyramid. And I think that they
just they're standing inside the burial chamber and they're scanning up towards the you know towards the point of the pyramid and they they checked and tested the equipment and they were able to detect all four sides or all four corners as well as the sides and and the uh the pinnacle of the pyramid. So they knew that their scans were that that these muon scans were accurate. And in everything that they scanned, they didn't see any more chambers above uh above the chamber that they were standing in. And then in the 70s, another team from Stanford came in and
did another scan and they confirmed this. They had the same results scanning up, but they also scanned the shallow uh bedrock around and that's where they found these two cavities in the ground below the coffer pyramid. So, and also we know that these are accurate because they confirmed it and tested everything. Well, this new coffer scan hasn't it's not even tested. They just pointed it at the pyramid and then you know now we have this huge press release. over something that wasn't tested, you know? It's just crazy to me. It's crazy. Well, it's funny. Like, I'm
very pro podcasting and indie journalism and I, you know, I never thought the pendulum would maybe swing this far where it's like I look at the incentives on Twitter and it's like some of the tweets where I'll caveat them and I'll say, "Look, I don't know if I believe this. This is speculation or whatever. Like, let's let's let's speculate and, you know, see what's up." Those like do really well, you know? And then the ones where I'm like, you know, it's very, you know, more nuanced or skeptical or whatever, like that, you know, those don't do well. And um like I tweeted a thing. It was
like, you know, this little um picture of like a UFO on Mars or whatever. I'm like, you know, maybe this is a UFO. Do we have any good debunks or whatever? And uh you know, that went crazy. And then I I came back and I was like, I've come to the conclusion this is a rock protrusion. It's not a UFO. And it just didn't do as well. So the incentives lead you towards sensationalism. Oh, and that that's the thing, right, is um is you can be so brainwashed is a hard term to use, but people get so taken advantage of. You know, there are so
many people that are in their 9 to5 going to work every day looking for whether they realize it or not, like you're just looking for more. Yeah. You know, you're just looking for more in your in your life, things that are interesting. And we're so consistently lied to in the media when it comes to politics and when it comes to, you know, uh, socioeconomics, world economics, foreign affairs. We get lied to all the time and have been for decades. Um, and people don't trust anything anymore.
They don't. And so, you know, that bleeds into every facet of of reality. And then it's very easy for someone for like a third party sitting on the outside to see this huge group of people that are being taken advantage of by their government by you know by the media being lied to and these guys are already the bad guys. So you can take this other fascinating topic that is ancient history and you just kind of wrap a whole bow around that and man you
can you can make millions of views you know by you know having these huge conspiracy webss being made out of things and if you're if you're constantly speculative and never answer any questions dude you just inspire so much like uh wonder in people but a lot of times it's based on just utter BS. Totally. And I think the distinction you have to make is are are you pedalling a known lie? Cuz if you are, then you should, you know, take yourself off air and do some introspection, you know, and and and figure your life out. If you're
not and you're explicitly saying, I don't know, but we're like exploring this together. This is not some official expert view, but like this is possible, that's fine. Yeah. you know, and I think uh the breakdown of trust leads to uh another criteria which is like do we trust the person's thought process or the person like you know they're they're they're just being an honest actor. Um where if they don't know about something, you know, they'll they can change their mind or or like say like this is probabilistic thinking or maintain some epistemic humility. So
yeah. Well, that's interesting on Luis uh Walter Alvarez. So it sounds like we already have deeper knowledge on pyramid structures than what you know these guys are even coming out with. Do we have ev any evidence that there's anything underground? Because you've talked about this and um I think the the Ministry of Culture, what's his name? Haz like Zw. Yeah. Zia Waz. He's talked about you know maybe structures under under you know the Sphinx. Yeah. Yeah. So is there is there something there?
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up, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. That would go a long way. Under the Sphinx specifically under the Giza plateau or the pyramids. Okay, so the [clears throat] Sphinx thing goes back to Edgar Casey, and there's probably a lot of people who know a lot more about, you know, this guy. Supposedly, he was a psychic and uh another Atlantis guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so he I I'm could be getting this wrong, but I think he was on like a psychedelic trip or something. and uh and he essentially,
you know, had some kind of vision that there's this chamber beneath the Sphinx that holds this hall of records, you know, that that tells the story of Atlantis. And so this has been a that's the 1940s. So this has been around for 80 years or so. Um been been very popular. And the drilling that they did in the '9s to see if there was a to see if there was a chamber there, that was overseen by Zawas. And you can see in the video when they drill, they drill away from the Sphinx, you know, I I don't know, just to to a semi-shallow depth and they go, "Oh, there's nothing
there. We're not going to drill That's a little weird to me. Yeah. Um, [clears throat] but I I I would say, as I say with my audience all the time, with these really grand ideas that are out there, my def my default position is always probably not, but maybe. You know, that's just like if we're being real with ourselves, that's the that's the reality. Now, as far as things under the Giza Plateau, absolutely. The Giza Plateau is like a honeycomb. It's it's as much empty space under the ground as it is solid bedrock.
And um this comes from a whole host of factors. So, on the northern cliff, um on the northern cliff face to the west of the Great Pyramid, uh there's this tomb called the tombs of the birds. And they call that they call it that because uh in the 1940s when it was being excavated um uh so so Egypt declared war on Germany um I think in 45 and they were nervous
of the of uh being under attack of an air raid and you know they thought that the Luftwaffa was going to come in and bomb the pyramids or something and but there's still excavations going on you know they never stopped excavations during the war so they're trying to identify like where can we go, you know, to use as bomb shelters. So, they find these tombs on the on the uh northern cliff. And while they're in there excavating it, they find this little wooden bird. And so, it's been popularly thought that uh or it's been speculated that this could be evidence of aerodynamics like thousands of years
before, you know, it was discovered. And of course, Egyptologists quickly brush it off, but I've always wondered if it's been tested. And apparently, Mythbusters uh did a little thing on it and could determine that it actually could fly if you added like one thing to it. Anyways, At the back of that tomb, there was something that wasn't recorded by the original uh explorers in that the tomb builders as they're chipping away everything. And it's amazing. Have you ever been to Egypt? Okay. So, so you probably went to the Valley of Kings.
I did. And so, you think about how big of a project that is when you go all the way down to the back of those tombs. It's insane. Every square inch of that tomb is ciried away and carried out. It's a big project, you know, to do that. And um so [clears throat] while they're doing that, they hit a cavern and uh you go through like one of these cracks in the walls and there's these caves that go under the Giza Plateau, the whole plateau. And uh the further they go back in these caves, the more little artifacts and stuff that they find. And as they um the more they've explored the Giza Plateau, the more they have found
uh examples of these tombs going, you know, these shaft tombs that they're building going deep underground. and then they hit a cave and so the Egyptians obviously explore it. We don't really know what the Egyptians thought of these caves or or what they believed uh by them that's like invisible in the historical record. Um what else is under the great pyramid is you probably know is um you know the uh the Giza plateau the limelight is taken is completely taken up by the pyramids and and rightfully so. But when you visit the
pyramids and you're trying not to stumble over all the stones, you will notice how many holes just descend down in the ground into nowhere, right? And 5,000 years of sand has been blowing in these things and it's never filled up, you know, this these holes and shafts and labyrinths underneath the plateau. And um and truth be told, I mean, we know that some of them were uh either vertical shaft tombs or they're uh 45° shaft tombs. And they'll go down into this labyrinth where we'll find tombs there. Um many of these are later
periods. So let's call it a,000 BC to well into the Roman period, 300 AD, you know, up until uh Constantine becomes Christian and all the temples are closed and everything. You know, you have Roman, you have Romans who want to be buried at the foot of the Great Pyramid. So, they go in, they take out the old Greek, Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian bodies and replace them with themselves. So, um you know, you have you just have an incredible density under the Great Pyramids. Further than that would be the Osiris shaft, which I'm sure you've
heard of. Um, you know, as as as famous as the Osiris shaft is, there's such little amount of literature about it and what exactly it was used for. It's uh if you're walking on the causeway, so from the middle pyramid, Coffer's pyramid, that the thing that's the center point of this whole SARS scan, you have that causeway that goes down to the Sphinx. You you may remember this just a big stone road. Well, the Osiris shaft is totally inconspicuous. You wouldn't even know where it was if somebody didn't show you. I was with Land of Kim and he
showed me if you're familiar with him. And um so you go down in the Osiris shaft and it drops down. You have this initial chamber that's got seven uh seven chamber extensions. What those were used for, we don't really know um exactly. We don't know. Uh then there's another descending chamber that goes down. You go down this huge ladder and there's this room that's filled with water. And they don't know to what extent it was filled with water in ancient times, but in the center there's this elevated platform that has this huge sarcophagus in it. And and what's really interesting is that in the fifth
century, Heroditus is exploring in Egypt. And he's told about this huge shaft that goes underneath the Great Pyramids. And he would and we don't think that he actually went down there. Maybe he didn't know where the entrance was or maybe the entrance was lost or maybe this was just even a legend in his time. We don't really exactly know. But he records that down in the Osiris shaft there was the tomb of a great king on an island surrounded by a lake of water. And it's like what is that? You know, like what on an island under the
Giza plateau surrounded by a lake of water. Well, sure enough, they uh I think it's in the the 80s or or the '9s that this expedition is carried out. Of course, all the credit is taken by Zahiwas. Yeah. uh if you I I read his paper recently um on I think it's called Giza and the Osiris shaft and at the very beginning he takes soul credit for it. He's like he's like he's like this is my single greatest discovery in you know in my Egyptological career or But that's fascinating. There's like a in the where the tomb possibly was.
It's probably a little bit bigger than the size of this. No, it's maybe like two or three times the size of this room and it was filled with water and it's underground and it's underground and this and there's this huge sarcophagus that's elevated sitting in the middle of it. Today the water table is risen and it's covered up the sarcophagus but in ancient times they think that the water was actually fascinating and that there was a there was a a sarcophagus raised up above the water. So when you went down there it'd be a sarcophagus surrounded by water. Do we have any other historical writing about
that outside of Heroditus? Not that I know of. That is fascinating. That's so interesting. Wow. Do you Yeah, go for Well, I was going to say the thing that I that struck me as similar to that is the Osirion. Have you heard of this Okay. So, the Assyriion is probably one of the most mysterious places in all of It was constructed at a psycho in Abidos which is um Abidos according to the
traditional Egyptological timeline abidos is even older than Giza was around long before the the pyramids. And so the traditional Egypt's logical explanation is that in the 19th dynasty uh Si the first builds this temple um and it's this oddly shaped L temple and behind that he created and I should say this temple is made out of like modestly sized limestone blocks. So the blocks are maybe this big um big but not something that a few men couldn't carry
um and stack. And it's a beautifully dynastic temple. Um, you know, just you recognize it as that iconic Egyptian style. But then behind it and lower into the ground, maybe another 30 ft into the ground before you get to the roof is something called the Oyion. And it is made out of the biggest stones in all of Egypt or in these temples. This is in southern Egypt. And uh it's the biggest stones in all of Egypt. And rather than how the rest of the temple was made out of
modestly sized limestone blocks, this is made out of gigantic uh red azwan granite stones, only two of those stones could fit in this room. Um this huge square pillars, none of it has hieroglyphics on it or anything like that. Um just utterly completely different construction style. So this is a this is a really fascinating topic in this space and people who are who are interested in in ancient Egypt will know exactly what I'm talking about. Um, I don't believe that the Osirion was
created by STI. I think it's far older than STI. When people [clears throat] say that, they think it's 12,000 years old. Um, it's more so just a popular belief. It isn't actually based on, you know, anything. Um, I think that whoever built that also built the Sphinx temple. You may remember this. It's that huge red granite temple next to next to the Sphinx. I'm sorry, the Valley Temple. Um, gigantic stones. I mean, some of them couldn't even fit in this room. Um, those two architects must be the same.
And I think that they're much older than the 19th dynasty, more than 2,000 years old. Well, in the Sphinx itself, Robert Shock, John Anthony West talk about limestone, water erosion, damage on the nose or whatever. And so they they think that indicates that the Sphinx existed at a time where you didn't have this arid kind of desert climate in in uh Egypt. And so that would predate, you know, obviously even the old kingdom in in in Egypt. Do you uh do you believe that the Sphinx itself was also kind of far far older
I think that the Sphinx is probably the strongest argument in all of Egypt of an exceptionally old artifact or monument. Um you know, even Graham Hancock has come around. If you really study the py the pyramids, you get to a certain point where you become locked in a certain time frame. Uh and that time frame is the fourth dynasty. Anybody who studies it objectively will eventually come to What what dates are the fourth dynasty? 20 well so the fourth dynasty is um well
it's very rough but let's call it 2600 to like let's call it like 2650 to 2450. 200 year period BC. Um, a [clears throat] lot of people don't like that because you know this idea of like the 12,000 Egypt being 12,000 years old is so popular. Um, but unfortunately that actually isn't based in anything. Um, the only evidence for Egypt being considerably older is is the Sphinx. And um, well, it sounds like the Sphinx and the the these granite structures. Well, I
think that I think that that is contemporaneous with I think it's contemporaneous with the Sphinx temple when those two things were built. That can be argued. but both you would say are older than you know Egypt itself as a civilization or would you say I think I think almost to me almost certainly the Sphinx definitely is. I I can say that I can say that with the other two it's more speculative more specul but clearly there's some conflation going on between these structures that we can't date that seem presumably older and then these you know
traditional Egyp Egyptian structures. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um just just uh finishing up on the pyramids and then we go to that. Um, you know, even Graham Hancock, like when he was on, uh, when it was just him on Rogan a couple years ago, uh, they talked about it and he said that he that he believes that the vast majority of the Great Pyramid was constructed during the reign of Kufu and that he wonders if the subterranean level and that that lower mound uh, structure, the work that was done under the pyramid, if that's not part of this,
you know, something that's inherited from this even older civilization. And even um are you familiar with Ben Van Kirkwick X? He's he does stuff with Randall Carlson. Yeah. So he was on a podcast called Lost Ancient Technology or something and they were in front of the pyramids and and they talk about how Graham has come around to believing that the pyramids are fourth dynasty. And I think that that's where I think that's where the evidence points. Um now talking about the uh talking about the Sphinx uh that
erosion on the Sphinx is just if the Sphinx was really constructed under the reign of Kafra cuz what they what they say that they think happened is that you had this huge limestone outcropping um in the in a a uh a canal from from the uh from the Nile River used to come right out to the base of the pyramids. You know, when you're out the Sphinx was, if you're standing at the base of the Sphinx, without any effort, you could throw a stone into the Nile River without any effort at all.
Um, that's how close the Nile was coming up to the Giza Plateau. And so, as people are sailing by, uh, they almost certainly would have noticed this huge limestone outcropping. The top of the Sphinx head, think about if that's how how high up that limestone used to go, it was no surprise that it was there. um which contradicts what they what they what the traditional idea is about the construction of Koffra's uh pyramid complex in that they accidentally hit this huge limestone
outcropping and then decided to to turn it into a sphinx or something like that. There's a big hole there. There's something there that doesn't quite make sense. It's not like they accidentally ran into this. Uh if anybody here, you could go on Google Earth and do this. It's much more obvious when you're there in person. If you look at the height of the Sphinx's head and you look around you, you're like, there's no way they accidentally hit this thing. This is a huge limestone outcropping that they always had to have known was there. Especially if you're sailing by, you would see that limestone
You know, um [clears throat] so I think that it's not unlikely that this could have been a a venerated monument in pre-dynastic times. It's obvious that it would have been there. Um, and there's another spot on the Giza Plateau down on the southeastern side near what's called the worker's tombs. It's this uh uh I think it's it's near Kent Coway's pyramid. Uh, and it's really not much of a pyramid anymore. All the stones were taken away. I mean, it's not
even you can't even see it as a pyramid anymore. It's completely unrecognizable. But down in there, there's this little piece of the limestone that's eroded in this really strange way where when you walk up to it, it looks like the back of another sphinx head. It's still there today. And you can tell that if that's what that formation, what the sphinx head used to look like. It used was some weird rock formation. You can see how someone would turn it into something. You know, you could you could mistake it for for a head. Um anyways, I don't know what the Sphinx
originally looked like. It sure as hell looks like it it used to be a lion and that the lion's head was shaved down and turned into something else. That's what Graham Hancock and Robert Shock think is that um when the procession was in Leo or whatever, it was made as you know a lion as kind of you know paying homage and then uh the feronic headdress was sort of retrofitted onto it, you know, based on you know Egyptian customs. So I don't Well, and I don't think that that's a a completely crazy idea. the the the best
thing that would substantiate that is if we could figure out a means by which um the labeling of constellations is preserved over the course of 10,000 years. You know, how far back does astrology go? You know, I would love to I would love to find some kind of evidence of people really far back in history recognizing the same Well, that it's funny. That's always the most fantastical thing that I think people like Robert Shock or Graham Hancock say that to me it's either not
real or if it's real then you have to get into onlogically trippy territory visa v people from the stars or something because they're talking about monuments being made over cosmic time scales based on processions and stuff paying homage to you know star alignments and so I mean maybe the aams razor explanation for that is like you have a lot of time to like stare at the sky or something. So like that becomes like a way more part and pul part and parcel of any ancient culture but there might be I don't know it's
still crazy. It's still really I I was having the same conversation. Um so I was telling you yesterday I I was out in uh Big Ben, Texas. For anybody watching, Big Bend is just this huge national or state park in in West Texas where you have 100% visibility of the night sky. And you go out there and it's just daunting. It reminds you of how small and insignificant and of a speck you are in all reality. And I was talking to my buddies while I'm out there and they probably get tired of hearing me talk about ancient history
and you know the cosmic scale of everything. And um but I you know I find it fascinating and and um I was telling them you know imagine this is at least 30% of human reality until we create lights that just you know have an insane amount of light pollution and we can't see the stars anymore. You know at least 30% of our lives was supposed to be sitting underneath the night sky looking up at the night sky. What kind of psychological effect does that hap does that have on us negatively that removes
us from the way that we were intended to experience the world, you know? And so I I think that a caveat to saying that I'd love um a caveat to saying that I would love to see evidence of of the recognition of constellations be preserved throughout, you know, thousands of years. A caveat to that is that um maybe human beings are just all wired the same, you know, and that can get into a whole other thing where um I was in Mexico. I was I was at this ch
site called Lventa. I'm standing at at the base of the Great Pyramid of Lamenta and I've been down and I'm looking at this these ant hills and um and I I realize like these antills have streets in the middle of them. These are leaf cutter ants. Um, they have these I think they're leaf ants. They have these streets in the middle of them and and these highways like go off into the jungle and across like the the flat ground and they've got these big ant mound pyramids and I realized like, oh, this looks exactly like a Mesoamerican
city. I mean, exactly like it. And it just dawned on me, well, what if human beings witnessed this and saw that this is like a a civilization grid layout and then they modeled themselves after ants. But then it also thought about the fact that it doesn't matter where you put ants on the planet, they will do that because that makes the most sense. And so is it like because they're all wired the same. They're the same organism, right? And they they do the same things. Uh in the same way that the other day I was uh I was in my kitchen and I make
these uh I make these like Chick-fil-A grilled uh or Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches and I'll make the breading by hand. And so I'll get like corn flakes and I'll crush them up in my hand. Well, after a while, your hands get rubbed sore from crushing these kernels. And so, I have it in this bowl and I look around. I'm like, what's something hard I can just use to crush this instead? And so, I grab like a seasoning thing and I start grinding it down. And it just realized I I invented a mortar and pestle in my own kitchen without thinking about it. Why? Because I'm
wired that way. I'm wired to do that, you know. Um, and people all over the world invented mortar and pestle independently, right? So um often at the same times often at the same time with the wheel and you know all these sort of inventions seem to pop up in disperate cultures that don't have contact at the same time. It's Yeah. And and if you look at us on the scale, I think I think one thing is is there's a lot of magic and mystery to our reality. But then at the same time,
some things can just be simple like you know it is hard for us to understand each other because we and understand our our psychological processes and cuz we look at each other at eye level. Um but when we look down on ants, it's pretty easy to understand why they work the way they do. So, like try to take another step back and look down on human beings as if we're ants. And the explanation is simple is because we're all the same being, you know what I mean? Um, I think I think that that's I think that's very interesting. And we have information encoded in us. Like if you look at DNA, you can store
like a book on DNA. You can store semantic information on DNA. It's it is a hard drive of sorts. And like you know semiconductors or transistors you know certain chunks of DNA can be activated and deactivated via methylation and acetilation. And so uh yeah I think you know a lot of people believe in sort of this idea of transmission theory of consciousness that maybe we are like antenni for something higher or Well didn't Tesla he he like directly says that right he thought his brain was
an antenna for ideas. That would make sense if you read his book my inventions or whatever. It's like he just visualizes these exper he'll he'll like he'll work through an entire experiment in his head before doing a thing. Um so I believe he he he said that. Um yeah it's it's fascinating. I think you'd need a new model of um electronamics because these things kind of you know a signal would attenuate too quickly or something. You put somebody inside a Faraday chamber they can still think right. Uh but uh I mean it's it's
probably the ultimate hubris to say that we have you know we're at the end of history as far as our physical models of how these things work. And I think yeah it's there's a lot to lead one to believe that there's sort of a a client server relationship. There's you know we're the clients that's server or something we're sort of we're download even look at base pairs of DNA or you know AGCT and it's always it's they're called base pairs because it's always the same combination. So it's like ones and zeros on you know semiconductor. Let's talk about something a lot of us quietly deal with. Hair loss. This is something that messes
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discounts on the I restore elite. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Hair loss is frustrating. You don't have to fight it alone thanks to I restore. It's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. I I I think I think just capping off the Sphinx thing, um you know, there were there were cultures that existed prior to the unification of of Egypt and and really all that was in a in a simple way is you have a bunch of people who migrate to Egypt uh when the Sahara dries up,
you only have a few places to go. You have this huge green Sahara 10,000 years ago or 12,000 years ago and it starts drying up over the course of about 5,000 years. And you know these Saharans only have a few choices to make. They can go to the Mediterranean coast, they can go to to the Atlantic coast, they can go down towards the Congo and the savas or they can go to this huge river to the east. And the people who go to this river to the east, this fertile oasis, um, which is the Nile River, they are
packed into this, you know, on the on the east side there's a mile wide of really lush fertile terrain. On the west side there's a mile wide as well. And you have this really compacted area and they're all living on they're all living on top of each other. And so they are not able to have this roaming nomadic lifestyle that they used to where you could have your herds of cattle and you could have them graze on this grass and graze on this grass and you just go up and down the Sahara, you know, or back and forth on the Sahara. Now you have to invent sedentary lifestyle. Um, and that
blossoms into civilization because people are living on top of each other. But it doesn't just start that there's like one guy who can rule over the whole Nile. It's the strongest I mean literally the strongest guy in each little compacted area. So we call them chieftains and we have a little bit of evidence for them but we we kind of just assume well this probably did happen. Um but you have these chieftains that rule in these little areas and then those chieftains war against each other and the territories you know one guy
conquers the other his territory doubles. Well, eventually you end up in this period called the two lands which is uh lower Egypt which is which is in the north because the Nile runs north. So the lower end of the Nile River is in the north, upper Egypt is in the south. And all the unification of Egypt was was when both areas had completely unified into their own kingdom. This the king of the southern kingdom marched his army north and smited the king of the northern kingdom. And I'm sure you've seen this pose before where it's this pharaoh grabbing the hair of a man and
he's got his scepter in the air and he's about to crush his head in. Well, that's a pose that every pharaoh did for the next 3,000 years. That's the unification of it. Inside both lands, you have all these different subcultures of people. Like you have the Bedarian culture, the Mi culture, uh the Nata culture, it goes on and on and on. Well, you have the Mi culture that lived in the area of Giza. And I've always thought that it it was perfectly possible that the Sphinx could have been
their god or some kind of representation of some divine celestial deity, maybe Leo, you know, something along those lines. Um, that was a carved out and venerated lion uh monument that had been venerated long before the pyramids were ever there, before anything else was ever there. that this could have been a venerated monument. And I've like often said like, yeah, there could have been some kind of sphinx cult, some kind of lion cult that existed there long before the pyramids were ever there. Um, so
that's more of my belief. When exactly that is, Robert Shock's first estimate was anywhere between 5 and 7,000 BC, I believe. And then he pushed it back further um because he had some other uh evidence that that seemed to align better. Um, I would be I wouldn't really feel crazy about saying that that the Sphinx could be 5 to 7,000 BC. Going beyond that, I don't know. Um, but it certainly seems like something that is
incredibly old. The water erosion around the enclosure just doesn't make a lot of sense. I've seen so many people attempt to debunk it, and I've I've openly listened to it. Um, but I just don't see a convincing argument for the Sphinx being 2450 BC. Yeah. Uh, oh, here's another thing. Yeah. Is um, the pharaoh Tutmos IV uh, from the new kingdom. Let's call this Tutmos IV is probably born around 1350 BC. And when he's there, the um, he he well
during his reign, he erected something called the dream stella. And it was him talking about how when he was a young kid before he became Pharaoh, he went and slept under um the shade of the Sphinx and the Sphinx visited him in a dream and said you the the the Sphinx essentially tells him through what we can translate, you know, I used to rule over the desert and now the desert disrespects me and rules over me and it's covered my you know enclosure. Free me from this and I will make you the the pharaoh of Egypt. So Tutmos does this in about 1350 BC. So what this says is that
around a thousand years after the youngest date of of the uh the sphinx being cut out, it was already covered up and buried. So in that thousand years, really less than that, all that water erosion had to have occurred. It's not possible. It's just not possible for for that kind of water erosion to occur because what they'll say, what scientists will say is, well, you know, it's been uh it's been 44 4,500 years since the Sphinx was cut out. That kind of erosion can certainly happen in that period. No, that's totally ignoring the
fact that a thousand years later, Tutmos IV says it was covered, says it had filled in and he had to excavate all of it and clean out the Sphinx enclosure to become the pharaoh. So really, it's in like, let's call it 5 to 800, 900 years all that had to be filled in. It's just not the logic just doesn't work. Um, and so I think I think it's perfectly plausible that the Sphinx goes back further. Yeah. two crazy questions that I know are on everybody's mind. One is how were the pyramids built, maybe impossible to
answer, but um you have, you know, uh uh Houdan in in in France saying that it was built from the inside out. You have other theories that, you know, water was used. The the big question is how are these sort of 20, 30, 40 ton, you know, uh uh uh uh granite blocks moved from the, you know, Aswan River Valley 500 miles away. And then the second question is you talk to you know Graham Hancock and he says that he says adamantly he's like the pyramids were not just a tomb
they were you know something else and you know maybe like some sort of like celestial ascent chamber portal thing. Uh you know you have Christopher Dunn saying that they were an energy generation machine. Um so how are they built and what were they used for? Impossible to answer. Sure. [laughter] Um, [clears throat] so, uh, just putting out this out there, you know, my main interest is not architecture or engineering. I find the the mystery of how they were built compelling. Uh, I don't spend really
much time studying it. More of my interest is is how are ancient people interacting with the pyramids? What is their lives like during the time of the pyramids? What is their relationship to the pyramids like? I find that that personal aspect really interesting and and it sheds a it gives a um a very fleshy alive feeling to the ancient world that really gets overlooked in in this space because there's so many people who are already talking about you know going through the logistics of the engineering and stuff
and that's very interesting but there's the human thing that can that grips you and connects you to it well what what I mean that definitely connects with the possible why of how these things were built so um but as far as the how I I've looked into this. Um the water theory I I've heard about the blocks being floated up, but I don't know how that's feasible. Yeah, I don't either cuz you would have to you would have to drown all of Egypt to get water that high. Um blocks may have
been well I mean they definitely were floated on boats along the Nile. Um but uh you know I when I really think about it practically I think that some kind of some kind of there there's this idea of the internal ramp theory. Have you heard of this? Yes. Where it starts at one corner and it just barely goes up. This is whoan this French guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um when I really try to think about it practically I
can't think of anything better than that. But then you get to a point where you're getting so high up on the pyramid, you know, at when you get to the king's chamber, which is a made which is made entirely out of the azwan granite stones. Uh you know, the the vast majority of the stones on the pyramid are limestone and and they're sourced from right next to the pyramid. You can see the quaries next to the pyramid. Um then the casing stones are tur limestone which are I think are 15 miles south uh found on the opposite side of the river. And we have a we have
a ledger of those being brought up to Giza. It's it's called the diary of Morer. Um and and he says that he's bringing these Tur limestone blocks up to the horizon of Kufu. Now granted, we don't really know what the horizon of Kufu is. Maybe it's the Giza plateau, but I've also heard it propos it could just as easily be like Kufu's palace, which is lost. We don't know where Kufu's palace was. Um anywh who uh we do know that they're tur limestone that come from south of Giza. Um so those are
the three types of stones. Now it's not in it's not really infeasible as to how they move giant limestone blocks. I mean as even as big as it is it's only like 2 and a half tons. You can move that. But it's the 80ton ton red granite stones that have to be hoisted up 140 ft into the, you know, up from the ground and placed into the ceiling of the king's chamber. Yes. I mean, I can sort of see how you could build half of a pyramid with an
internal ramp, but when you go when you get to the second half and everything is so steep and tightly compacted, I don't know how you finish that job, you know? Um, but but granted, have you ever heard of the guy named Wally Wallington before? No, but I love that name. He's he's the dude that uh maybe you've seen his videos before where he erected Stonehinge in his backyard by himself. So, he's moving these 100 ton stones like on a single pivot point by himself.
Now, this will get thrown out there by, you know, you know there's people who are like professional debunkers, like archaeologists that their whole YouTube channel is just debunking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so they'll say, "Oh, it's no mystery as to how these huge stones were moved. Look at Wally Wallington doing it." Well, Wally Wallington's not building a pyramid. He's not putting these stones 150 feet into the air. Yeah. At the same time though, if you have 500 W-Ally Wallingtons working for 500 years, you can probably build a
pyramid. Sure. Um, and so I think what I'm getting at here But isn't the fourth dynasty 200 years? Well, it it so here's the thing is that the fourth dynasty, you know, there's there's this idea that the that the pyramids like spring out of nowhere. It just boom, they arrive. Well, it's kind of true, but at the same time, you know, the fourth dynasty is this 200-year period, let's say roughly 2650 to to 2450, but they were arriving the the if you if we go from the end of the third dynasty
to dynasty zero. Well, that's 2650 all the way back to 3,100 BC. So, now we 500 600 years of history and stonemasonry leading up to this explosion of of architecture. So you have a 500year period where we can see a progression of architecture getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more monumental but then there is a jump in the in the fourth dynasty where it's like they just it's like they figured out flight or something. You know how you know how we
like we figured out you know what is it in 1911 we figure out flight or 1910 and then just boom you know everything explodes. It's like that. There's this progression and then boom, it just Stealth aircraft that Exactly. Costa. Yeah. And and so take take our evolution of technology, how we go, let's call it the 1500s, technology goes like this and then boom, 1900 it just explodes. It was just ready. Well, think about stonemasonry in Egypt. It was progressing for so long and then all of a sudden Egypt has this
incredible amount of power and they just explode in capability. It's like this endless capacity of monumental architecture. Yeah. and we can get into that and the more I've studied it, the more I have explained to myself the rationale of like how these things happen, but it isn't in line with stuff I learn from academics, which I constantly get accused of of like of, you know, drinking through the straw of academia. I I hardly have any connections in
academia. I'm friends with approximately one academic who's Dr. Ed Barnhard. I just study this a lot and make and I look at the evidence and make it make sense in my head. Um, now getting to building the pyramids. Yes, I think that with five or six hundred years of expert stonemasons, they developed an understanding of how to move, lift, carve, cut, transport megaliths in a way that even 5,000 years later, we we don't understand this. It gets to a certain
point where it's like we it's it seems infeasible to us, but they probably had all kinds of tricks and like genius nuances. I mean, I think the best way I can describe this is they knew they had a they had a a perfect natural technology and and use of techniques, right? Like perfect, natural, and non-upgradable. And when it's done, there's no evidence of how they did it because it was so clean, right? Like the
finished product is there, but the evidence of how they did it is gone because they were that good at it, right? That's kind of the way that that that I explain it to myself. So, I think that a ramp only gets you so far. I don't know what the next steps are. I don't know how you finish it. I don't know how you get the casing stones that slide perfectly in place up at the top of the pyramid with a capstone sitting up on top of it. That's another thing is a lot of people don't know. A lot of people think that there Egyptologists think there never was a capstone. I think there almost certainly was. Um but
I think the ramp theory only gets you so far. Beyond that, I don't know. Yeah, I do think in some ways the why is more interesting than the how. Mhm. It's like why, you know, it's like clearly so much effort for this thing that does seem sort of timeless and is fascinating and it's amazing when you go, but it's like it's in just an inordinate amount of of of effort and techniques that, you know, we can't readily explain, you know, uh, Wall-E. Wall-ally or not. What's his last name? Wall-ally. Wally Wall-ally. Wally Wallington or not. Yeah, exactly.
Well, you're really more I mean, I appreciate you um you know, indulging all my Egypt based questions, but you're really more of an America's guy generally. Is that right? Or um No, actually I I uh I [clears throat] heard you say that on podcast, so I'm just repeating it, but yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Well, you know, there there were there were periods where where yes, that was my expertise at that time. [sighs] the the way it started was um so my grandfather was a was a missionary and he was but he was also like a historian
of the ancient world and this is my grandfather on my mom's side. So I had this influence of this explorer on my dad's side but then I had a missionary and like a biblical historian uh on my on my mother's side. Both of those influenced me. I was always a classical guy. Classical would mean uh Egypt, Greece and Rome. um more so Egypt and Greece. Um that was always my interest and and a little bit of the of the holy land of the biblical world. Um as far as my future career in the Americas,
um I will still still do expeditions um in the Americas and carrying out exploration here. But I think it's going to be in North America. I think it's going to be in the in the US. There's a lot left in the US. I mean there like where uh I can't say specifically. Interesting. But uh uh Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, West Texas, Mexico, I can't tell exactly where. Um but yeah. Yeah, there's there's a lot left. I mean, there are there are entire I call them cities, but
they're like small ancient cities that have never been discovered that are in the United States. Absolutely. And are you working with Ed Barnhart on this stuff? Yeah. I have never talked about this publicly before. Um, he and I may have barely touched on it when we were on Danny Jones together, but uh, I've never really talked about this in depth before. How old are we talking? It ranges, you know, some are a thousand years, some can be 5,000, 6,000 years
Yeah. There's a there's a there's an ancient city in Texas that was discovered recently that's 10,000 years old next to this river. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think and you know we have this narrative that's been popularized in anthropology that's like sort of primitive to progress. Do you think that some of these ancient civilizations outside of the you know evidence we have in Egypt and other places like that and outside of the woowoo thinking a lot of people like to kind of engage in do you think that there are civilizations that were just way more advanced that than meets the eye? Like
for example, you look at the Amazon and you know it's it's so undiscovered still like and what if we was talking to Graham Hancock about like lidaring you know the over over the the treetops of the Amazon forest and you can see the topology and then you see little geoglyphs kind of popping out and then you go down and we're doing this all the time and finding all sorts of crazy stuff and so you know if archaeology as a field is only you know a little under 200 years old you where we we we found you know
Assyria, Babylonia you know 200 years ago. Isn't there sort of a law in archaeology that the the farther you go the longer you go the older civilization actually gets and go back is just the tip of the iceberg and you have a lot more advanced stuff that's we're going to uncover that's you know way older and maybe civilization is more like an S-curve and not like this hockey stick you know thing. Well yeah I would I would absolutely say it's an S-curve. I mean, ancient Greece is a perfect example of that. You have
the height of the Bronze Age, then you have the Troj, you know, you have the Trojan War, and then the Trojans war seems to coincide with the fall of the Bronze Age. Greece falls into the dark, you know, the dark period, and then it comes out of the archaic period. So, you have this huge dip in, you know, uh, in their technological capabilities. There's no more writing anymore, um, during for some of that period. That's just one perfect example. That same thing also happened in Egypt where you have these long periods of centuries
where nothing is happening. It's like this it's like this invisible dark period where we don't have any more literature or anything. Now those are on micro scales but like a macro scale yeah I mean definitely there have to be periods where civilization as a whole is flourishing and then everything crashes. A macro scale would also be like the collapse of the bronze age. I mean, all around the eastern Mediterranean, every ancient civilization was heavily impacted or their their infrastructure
collapsed and had to recover. That's on a macro scale. Um, like a ultra macro scale if we're looking at civilization all across the world. Yeah. Yeah. There there definitely had to be periods where things happen that that impact society like stun it or you know like stuns progression or you know completely eliminates humanity. Um nobody knows exactly what was going on during the ice age. But I guarantee you that the North Atlantic ice cap and this dramatic event
that that inst I say instantly but rapidly ended the ice age. I mean it eviscerated North America. The reason that we don't go to uh you know when you go to a zoo there's never a North America section. You know what do we have in North America? We have bears, deer, foxes, Not a whole lot else. Snakes. Well, sure. Yeah, you have that like in in the aquariums or whatever. Not the aquarium, whatever. Um, but uh
you don't have a North American section because we lost so much of our megapa at the end of the ice age. But man, we used to have giant sloths. We had woolly mammoths and elephants. We had large saber-tooth cats. We had the shortfaced bear. We had the American lion, which was twice the size of the African lion. I mean, we had so much wildlife here and it was all destroyed. It just disappeared at the end of the ice age. Now, sometimes they say that they were all hunted to extinction by, you know, nomadic people. I I just spoke to an
evolutionary biologist last week, and he and I were both like, h I mean, humanity had been around for over a 100,000 years before that. You don't think during that 100,000year period, humanity was able to realize if we kill off our food source, the food source doesn't exist anymore? Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me. And it's like, what do you have like spears at the time? Are you really like Spears and and bow and arrows. Bow and arrows. But are you extincting woolly mammoths with that technology? I don't know. That's I don't think you're eviscerating entire populations of it. I It just doesn't seem feasible to me. And human beings
um they were ignorant to the things that we know today. Yeah. But they weren't ignorant to their natural world. And what's what is the pillar of their world is their food source. It's the pillar. As far as we know, agriculture doesn't exist at this point. They are hunting animals and living side by side. So you think there was an extinction event like some some larger? Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, I mean this brings up a question which is, you know, you brought up Luis Walter Alvarez. You know, he had this theory that an asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago and that
caused, you know, dinosaurs to go extinct. Uh you now have Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock talking about the younger Gius you know impact theory that you know um uh comet impact from the it was an air burst I guess in their opinion from the torid meteor stream you know hit the earth's atmosphere and then caused you know the ice age and then also brought us out of the ice age. Is there something that you Luke Caverns believe will get proved down the line? You have a big bold hypothesis it could be on anything. It doesn't have
to be on an extinction event, but I always think, you know, it's a very interesting my my uh former employer Peter Teal has a question which is what's the thing that you believe that very else very few other people agree with you on. So, what's something your high conviction on that no one else agrees with you on? And you know, you're at the tender age of 27, so maybe you don't need a great answer to this question, but
been longer than that now. It's been it's been like it's been like 10 years ago, I started um I started asking myself really hard questions about Christianity. Uh I was raised Christian. um still am, but I I'm writing a video right now uh titled Why I'm No Longer a Modern Christian, like quotations. And um and in studying the ancient world and really in studying the Americas, it changed my
perspective on so much. You know, uh modern-day Christians, 21st century, first world Christians have are so ignorant of of like the grand scale or large scale humanity. Um and they almost never juxtapose that or try to compare it or rationalize it with their religious beliefs. This can this can go in so many different directions. Like even as simply as a direction of okay, why did God only present himself to a
small minority of people living on the Eastern Mediterranean 2,000 years ago when civilization was already blossoming all across the Americas? What about people in the Americas? What happens to them? Well, you really never get an explanation from that from your average Christian or even like your exceptionally educated Christian. These are just hard questions that most never ask themselves. Uh, another thing is you [snorts] always hear a Christian say there's only one God. There's only one God. Um, but they never go beyond that
because the Bible clearly states that there's more than one God. Clearly states that. I mean, even God himself, the Hebrew God, Yahweh, recognizes and acknowledges the existence of the gods of Egypt. in in Exodus, he tells Moses that he's going to execute his I think it's Exodus 12, he tells him that he's going to execute his wrath on the gods of Egypt. And even during the Genesis uh story, um you know, there's this there's an interesting thing that happens here
where it seems like uh I say I say it seems like I'm not I'm not saying this is what it is, but it seems like God doesn't tell the truth to Adam and Eve because he tells Adam, you know, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for you you're you will surely die. And then the the serpent, you know, comes to Eve and and uh essentially tells her like, "What do you mean that that you'll surely die? You're not going to die. He's afraid that if you eat this tree, you'll become like him." Which is odd. And then Adam and Eve eat from the tree, which I have my
own idea of what I think that that tree is. And then God's immediate reaction to that is he turns to this divine council, this mysterious council full of other beings in heaven. That's way very much often overlooked. And he says, "Behold, man has become like us." So they didn't die, they became like God. So it's like weird that God didn't It's like God didn't tell them the truth. Or is it that they died that their innocence died? That can be a whole other That can be a whole other thing. Um, and I don't have a hard opinion about that, but these were hard questions I was asking
myself. And then I came to the realization during this period. And I was like, I was like, if I'm going to be a Christian, I have to I have to rationalize and accept some of these And when God in in the Old Testament acknowledges the existence of the gods of Egypt and says he's going to cast his judgment on them, does that mean that the gods of Egypt are real? Does that mean that these
that the Egyptian priests and um and that the Pharaoh are having that they so commonly talk about these gods coming and speaking to them and and they they're convicted with this purpose of this thing that they have to do which seems so bizarre to us like you know uh people who are fans of the Atlantis hunt if you try to talk to them about ancient religion and say well you know these are spiritual people these are very religious people that are convicted they go oh come on man nobody would do that they I do it if it's really happening. And um and that is that's something I
almost never talk about because I I don't know quite how to explain it. But I I certainly think that when you look at all of these temples in Egypt, you look at uh the obelisk of Hatchepsuit where at the top of the obelisk and at the bottom of the obelisk like right at eye level, you can go up to it and read it. and I've read the translated hieroglyphs and she said she said um she said [clears throat] as for this obelisk it's something I'm paraphrasing but it's like as for this
obelisk I erected this uh from um from electrum which was just like gold and and uh and your wealth so she paid to have these two obelisk erected she said like any good king would for their father Ammoon which is this god and she goes on to talk about how she did this for the god and everything and then at the temple of Luxor the back chamber was a chamber. This Yeah, you've been to it. So, this huge chamber, you go to it at night. It's the one that's always lit up at night. That huge chamber in the back, as far as we know, was reserved only for Aman
Hotep to connect to his father, Aman Rah, the the god. And I'm sitting I'm standing there in in the middle of this back chamber that not even the priests are allowed in, only the pharaoh. And I'm thinking, was this whole temple built for Aman Hotep to enter it and not come face to face with Aman Rah? Mhm. It wasn't actually happening. This is all made up. Yeah. Why would you spend so much effort this whole temple is here for nothing? No, it's not. Look at I mean everything that just the
Egyptians achieved. Then let's jump over to ancient Greece. Look at all the temples that that they that they Look at everything that they did on behalf on behalf of their gods. I mean so significant to the point that Leonitis goes to visit the Oracle of Deli to determine as to whether or not they should fight against the Persians. I mean they really believed in the gods. They actually believed in them. Um and I've heard I've heard Greek uh professors say that you know these women
who would become uh like as the vapors came up under the ground of Deli and the woman would become possessed with the spirit of Zeus. And I've heard um a Greek um um historian, you know, college professor say, "I don't mean this in any symbolic or spiritual sense. I'm telling you that this literally That the woman was literally possessed with the spirit of Zeus." And that was absolutely jarring for me to hear that from a from a professor. He wasn't
kidding at all. He's like, "It's not spiritual. It's not metaphysical. It's or it's not metaphorical. It is actually happening. And um and he talked about these other women that would become possessed by the gods and they'd run around naked on these mountain sides and everything and he was like they'd wake up the next day and not remember anything. He's like it's not an exaggeration. It was actually happening. And um you look at the Americas, man. All these ancient temples and sites that were erected on behalf of these god beings. It's every ancient culture um recognizes these gods that exist on
our planet. And I think that my hill that I that I would die on, if there is one, is that ancient people were not making it up. Yeah. I love that they weren't making it up. Well, it's an assertion of modernity to say that they were. It's just as much an assertion to say that they were. And then like we don't know. It's It's really impossible to say. And then if you were to put yourselves in their shoes, like it seems like they actually weren't making it up. Like they weren't talking about it in mythological terms. there's a guy named Julian James. I
don't know if you've heard of him. He was a um Yale professor. He wrote a book called um uh on the origins of consciousness and the bicamal mind. And um he used to say that uh you know we we like uh uh basically we shifted towards leftbrain thinking um and and and and we have this modern divided brain but that was really that really occurred post 1000 BC and it's this very kind of Gestalt big history view it might be very imperfect but post 1000 BC 1000 BC and he was kind of laughed out
of the room but there are people who definitely take him you know pretty pretty seriously today. Do you remember why exactly it says post 1000? I don't. I have to go back and read the book. But even if you look at the new the old testament that God speaks you know directly through signs and through you know you know uh uh you know yeah great great signs or Sodom and Gomorrah destruction in many cases uh and then uh he speaks through prophets and then he sort of goes away and so there is something about uh the ark of God even in the Bible himself and then he has to
sort of anthropomorphize himself in the form of Jesus in the New Testament. Um, so there is this arc of, you know, direct intervention to leaving. Um, and that, you know, begs all sorts of really interesting interesting questions. So I I'm I'm with you. Also, it's like we were we were talking about the why, you know, on a lot of these like really crazy mega structures, and it's like maybe you'd be way more motivated if these gods were actually real to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing about uh that's the thing about
the pyramids is, [sighs and gasps] you know, even I cringe at the idea of a of a a structure that massive being erected and prepared for the burial of a single man. I cringe at that idea because it's hard for me to fathom somebody, you know, I inherently have a negative perception of that person that it's being built for. you know, like if like if there was some guy today, like let's say Jeff Bezos wanted a wanted a
pyramid for his own burial, I I just think that's like it's gross, right? Um but at the same time, for someone in the modern day to immediately dismiss that as a possibility, uh it's like it's like an arrogance of modernity, right? Because okay, I I would ask that person. I see this all the time in my comment section, the comment section of every video. You know, nobody would do this for for, you know, whatever. Okay, I would I would tell that person, okay,
please dive into the mindset of somebody living in the early 1900s for me. Yeah, it'd be really hard. Okay, please dive into the mindset of somebody living in the early 1800s for me. and let's go back every single century and go let's go back 47 centuries and please dive in and tell me logically how they're working to you read you read Pride and Prejudice and you're like this is the weird Victorian you know is like you're looking across the room and you have you know Darcy and all character like you read that and
that's like oh that's like another planet you go to Tokyo now and you're on like another planet or something you know it's like so different from American culture and so yeah completely yeah 2,000 I think what I think happens is we psychologically spend so much time with this time period that you feel more connected to it than you are and you have this like cognitive dissonance because you're forgetting how disconnected you are from these people. You are becoming so familiarized with the data that you have been exposed to and you spend so much time with it that
you develop such a connection to it that you you have to remind yourself you have to constantly keep a reminder that you are so incredibly disconnected from these people. So disconnected that it doesn't matter. Like I've tried to tell people the difference between as far as our connection to the pyramid builders between 4,700 years ago and 12,000 years ago, they may as well be the same. Yeah. Because we're that disconnected from them. It doesn't make much of a difference. Um, and that's the thing is is trying to come up with a rationale
behind why they did it is fascinating, but to have such a strong opinion over it is ridiculous and foolish. And it doesn't matter if you think that they were tombs or not. Being so tied to your opinion that you can so quickly dis dismiss someone else's opinion or say that anything is ridiculous is foolish because you can't even tell me the rationale behind people living 100 years ago. You know, it's like you think you're an expert. You think you can possibly know something 4,700 years ago. You can't. Yeah. You
know, so that's why there has to be there needs to be this like moderate tone coming in where hey, this is the evidence that I personally am aware of and that I have studied. This is what I think makes sense, but there's so much else out there. Yeah. And many of the historical kings themselves were merged with divinity. Angoten is a good example. It's like the sun god, you know, and or even up to, you know, uh, Louis the 14th, he was the sun god in the French context, but was literally ruling under divine right. And that was not like some metaphor. It
wasn't some joke that was, you know, he was seen as sort of godlike. Well, Henry V, he's he believed that he was the conduit of God himself. That he was performing he was performing the will of God to expand England's, you know, kingdom. I mean, yeah. Yeah. This this idea of of, you know, your king being the direct conduit of God himself can have a tremendous impact on a on a civilization. this was happening in the fourth dynasty too. Um you know prior to that [gasps]
there was an element of piousness that the you know pious means that it means just being uh having a reverence for like a certain deity um having a respect for a deity submitting to a deity to a certain deity in a way or a religion in a way there's this element of piousness but then in the fourth dynasty that is still there but there's an elevation of the of the king or the pharaoh's status where he is now becoming merged with the god.
And I've often wondered and I I don't really see this proposed by any Egyptologist. Um but I often wonder, you know, prior to the great pyramids, people don't realize this tomb building is this is this um it's either a vertical shaft going straight into the ground or it's a shaft that goes about 45 degrees into the ground. The exact opposite is true with the pyramids. if if we're to assume that those are um that those are tombs. And I mean, here's here's like a like a simple thing. I know people don't like the tomb idea.
Sometimes I cringe at it as well. Um there are sarcophagus sarcophagi in the chamber. Like if you're getting if you're going to now explain to me why that's not a sarcophagus. You're really getting out there now, you know. Um I'm not opposed to that, but I'm just saying that's the reality of it. And the sarcophagi are too big for the entrance way. So they're not brought in later. They were placed in the room while the room was created. And that's why, you know, that is such a hard thing to get around that even, you know, Graham Hancock gets to a point where he's now saying on the Joe Rogan thing, well,
perhaps it's not a sarcophagus. Perhaps it's a place where you lay down inside of. So now we're laying a person in it. It's very akin to a sarcophagus. But he's saying this may be a place where your consciousness is being elevated and and you're you're gaining some kind of, you know, cosmic wisdom. Okay, that's that's interesting. But we're still laying people in it. That's how compelling just a simple humansized boxes in that room that had to be laid there when it's made. Um, but these chambers are now above ground. They're, you know, let's call it roughly
like 45° above ground. I've tried to get into the psychological aspect of this and and I have wondered if if now that we're seeing the pharaoh being merged with the god Raw, perhaps he is now a divine being that needs to be buried above ground. He's not supposed to be buried below ground. Or let's go another step further. This is here's another one of my theories that no Egyptologist and no alternate person agrees with. the inside of the of the pyramids. It's
very odd that there's no hieroglyphs on the inside of it. I hear a lot of Egyptologists will will brush this off as like, well, you know, there's no hieroglyphs inside of it because uh tomb decoration just hadn't got to that point yet. Um but that's but that's not accurate because we see older tombs that have tomb decorations in them. It okay so you have the the chronology of the pyramids is you have the step pyramid then you have the pyramid of my doom then you have the bent pyramid then you have the red pyramid then you have the great pyramid. Okay the sakara step
pyramid down in those labyrinths below that there are depictions of the pharaoh joer up on the wall in his iconic like striding forward in a he said festival. um imagery and he's visiting these divine sanctuaries and casting these spells in the afterlife all in hieroglyphs depicting the pharaoh himself. Immediately after that there's no more interior tomb decoration. Why is that? I I don't know because on the outside of the temples in the in theerary temples on the outside there
are depictions of there are hieroglyphs there there is artwork. Why is it now disappearing from the inside? Well, the only crazy explanation I can come up with in my mind that nobody agrees with um [clears throat] is I think that there maybe is some kind of elevation where the pharaoh himself is no longer the pious king serving the god, but now he is the god. And that the pyramids themselves, this is actually something that um
the archaeologist, his name starts with a P, that excavated the the pyramid of Aminat III. um he asserted that this was never a tomb and that this was a symbolic tomb for this for the pharaoh's c. So you have the call which is the divine essence. So you have the caw and the ball. You have these two separate parts of your soul that have to coexist in your life and then they have to meet later on in life. So that's why the body is preserved so that the body can last longer with the caw or with the ba and that the caw the
the divine part of the spirit can find the body in the next world. when we have hieroglyphs that depict that this is what they think that that the Egyptians believed this is what was happening. Um, and [clears throat] so I' I've heard this thrown out there before by one back in the in the late 1800s. Um, he asserted this and I believe it too and I think that it's true for the fourth dynasty. Now, Aman Hoteep or Aminat the third, he's middle kingdom. This is call it 1900 BC. So I am kind of uh graphing
that on to the fourth dynasty which is 5 to 700 years earlier. Um I think that these pharaohs were ascending to the status of a god and that the pyramid was not for the body of the pharaoh but for the divine essence of the pharaoh that belonged to the god. And that's why there's nothing inside of it because you don't need to write hieroglyphs inside of a inside of a pyramid for the divine essence of a god. You need an impenetrable an impenetrable building that the divine soul of the god is
buried in. And that pharaoh himself is buried somewhere in the south. The reason I think that is because amenhat pyramid is a model of the old kingdom pyramids and he was like hearkening back to this to this lost uh or I should say he'sarkening back to this older kingdom and his body was buried in the south down at a place called Abidos. Abidos is where the earlier pharaohs were buried. So he gave himself two burial sites. And because his pyramid complex is a model
for the old kingdom, I think he knew something that's invisible to us today that the pharaohs of the old kingdom are never buried in their pyramids and their tombs are down south. Wow. Because the south is the religious capital of Egypt. That's where you're supposed to be buried. But the pyramids up north, that's the economic capital of Egypt. And it's the pyramid is like symbolic. It's symbolic of Egypt's power. It's symbolic of the divine power of the god. And it's symbolic of the divine power of the king. So there was never a pharaoh buried in those
It's the it's the burial of the divine essence of the pharaoh's spirit. That's a crazy explanation, but we're talking about people who are basically aliens. I mean, like we don't know. We we don't relate to these people in any way. Their life is nothing like ours. Yeah. And so it's just you get to this point of speculation, you know, and my explanation there has only slightly more evidence to it than the pyramid power plant idea. You know what I mean? We're just so far out.
It's hard to explain. Yeah. As long as you demarcate the thing as speculation, I think it's totally fine and great. And it creates in science, you need a hypothesis, right? So you need to get crazy in the hypothetical stage and then, you know, got to corroborate it or whatever. But uh even if you go to the you know national museum in Cairo and you see some of these mummified you know pharaohs they look very short. They clearly they've engaged in some sort of cranial deformation to mimic the gods and they look like gray aliens. They look so strange
especially during the Amarna period which is what you were talking about Man that's a fascinating time period where Aenatan like flips Egypt on its head. And what I think was happening here, [snorts] I'm going to dive into this at some point, like do a big video essay on it. You have [clears throat] the you have the the priests and you have the temples that are becoming really really powerful. And I wonder this is why I said like um the the author of the book you were saying that
that this impiiety, this not respecting of the gods, this losing our religion begins around 10,000 BC cuz that's about the fall. that's about the collapse of the bronze age and and really that's the fall of Egypt. It's where it takes this and um and it's the end of the chapter of the corruption of the temples I should say or it's where the corruption of the temples had permanently solidified its its negative impact on Egypt and Egypt would just collapse forever. Um, [clears throat] at the beginning of ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh
and his family were the sole rulers of Egypt. And as long as you had an unquestionably powerful ruler, Egypt prospered greatly. But think about the logistics of this. You become Pharaoh. Your wife is your wife is like the divine mother, the king. Um, and then you give all of your brothers and sisters, which you probably had a lot, and you gave all of your cousins and their, you know, spouses jobs. Everybody has your best interest at heart, but your brother dies and you
don't have a great replacement for him, but you have your friend that you're really close to. He's not part of your divine family, but you're going to make an exception for him. Fast forward 600 years, only 20% of the government is now part of the Pharaoh's family. And everybody else is is competing for power against the Pharaoh through one way or another. This is what happened with the temples. And what I think you have is you see this feud starting with the with the uh um with the pharaoh Aman Hotep III who is the father of Akenatan. And what I can just imagine happening is Aman Hotep thei third is absolutely fed
up with the temples competing with him for economic power. You have so many people bringing money and and incredible amounts of like meat. You know meat is extremely expensive in the ancient world um to bless their ancestors in the afterlife. So you leave these offerings at your, you know, at the temple or you leave the offering as at your ancestors tombs to feed their to feed them in the afterlife. And do you think the priests are just going to let that food rot there? No. The symbolic gesture is now over. Now all the priests take the food.
They take the offering and consume it themselves. That's why you have all these statues of these fat priests because they're so wealthy. And clearly they're they're wealthy in food, they're wealthy in resources, and they're wealthy in money. And they own the land around Egypt. So, they're butting heads with the pharaoh. And what I just imagine is the 18th dynasty is the most powerful part of Egypt. It's it's it's the it's the juiciest most dramatic chapter in ancient Egyptian history, unless you want to count Alexander to Cleopatra, which is at the very end. Um
and [clears throat] um but anyway, you have this dramatic increase in power and it basically reaches its pinnacle under the reign of Aman Hotep thei who is also competing with the priesthood. And I I can just imagine him in the palace like pacing back and forth with his little son Aman Hotep IV listening to him and he's saying, you know, Egypt should be like the way it was in the old days where the Pharaoh himself was the king, was the divine ruler, and he was the high priest, not some other high priest that now competes with the Pharaoh. If I had it, you know, if I could really have
it my way, I would erase all of them. I would destroy the temples. I would eliminate all the priests. I would declare myself the high pharaoh. Egypt just isn't what it used to be. And the pharaoh's power is diminished. And you have this little boy who's growing up like, "Yeah, you know, [ __ ] those guys." And and Aman Hotep thei dies. Aman Hotep the fourth becomes king. And he says, "I'm not worshiping Amen anymore. This god that Carneak temple was built to worship. It's done. Carneak temple. I'm closing the doors. I'm closing the doors of all the temples. I'm only going to
acknowledge the one true sun god, the Aten, and my I'm going to make make my name Akenatan." And so he changes it and he moves the capital somewhere else. It's just a fascinating era. And then they start depicting themselves with the elongated skulls which is really fascinating. It's like the art just completely changes. And where does the the skull elongation come from? We don't really know. We don't know why it arrived right then. Um and then the Yarna period ends within that same generation and the
elongated skull thing goes away. Yeah. So, it's like this little period of time where the where the skull elongation shows up. Why does it show What period of time was the skull elongation happening? I'm going to say that this is like 13th century BC 1250 BC somewhere. Um, that's really really rough. Maybe even a little bit, maybe even another century before that. Um, you know, the numbers get real messed up. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but yeah, that's another thing I wonder is like
where did that skull elongation depiction come from? Because it's so similar to what you see in other places around the world. Oh yeah. I wonder, you know, the very speculative part of me wonders is the god that Akenatan is interacting with, is is that where the influence of that comes from? You know, is it and when I say God, sometimes I wonder, are these actual cosmic beings that are interacting with people or is it a manifestation an anthropomorph anthropomorphized
um version of things that people are seeing while they're on certain substances, right? Like do we have certain substances around the world that have similar effects on people because we're all wired the same, right? Yeah. So, so you know, you have people that go down to the Amazon today. And they take Iawaska and they will meet a goddess down and and you have thousands of reports of people meeting this similar goddess being woman
that automatically knows everything that's wrong with you and can have such profound effects on you psychologically that it can cure your addictions and things like that. And and I wonder it's one of two things. It's our brains are all wired to receive this image of this goddess woman that has this crazy effect on us because we're all wired the same. So, we're all bound to have the same effect of this plant. Well, in Egypt, you have your own you have your own hallucinogens. You know, you have the lotus flower which is this huge mystery.
Um you have opium trees. Exactly. DMT. And so you wonder if these people are taking these hallucinogens and these gods are like are like the anthropomorphic manifestations of what they're experiencing, right? Yeah. um or whether or not well what's fascinating like even the like the uh the idea of combining this you know uh DMT with this MAO inhibitor or whatever which is us putting that in the kind of modern pharmacological
context but it's combining this you know substance with this vine in the Amazon is such a an improbable you know thing to find in the first place which begs the question of like you know was that just trial and error or what sort of divine inspiration or what inspiration led them to sort of find this stuff in the first place and then you have yeah you have in in Athens as well you have the lucinian mystery rituals elus being 13 milesi northwest of Athens the sort of it's the spiritual capital and you have all the guys who we
consider the fathers of western you know thought and civilization today Plato Socrates alabi all these guys you know taking this keion drink and uh seeing all sorts of crazy things and experiencing noises and knowledge of their p primordial soul but you know it's sort of under uh under death that they can't actually talk about the mystery schools and uh clearly it had this profound effect on their on their thought Yeah. Well, you know uh Heroditus talks
about these mystery cults in Egypt and he speculates on like I wonder what's going on here and then while he's in Egypt he's allowed to participate in them and then he doesn't talk about it again. It's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Alsoes is a good example. He talked about uh the just the fact that you know the name Alabiades. I respect you. [laughter] Thanks, man. Well, he was he got in trouble for talking about the mysteries because you you know you're not supposed to talk about Fight Club or whatever. So, that's I didn't know that about Arat. That's that's so interesting.
Um yeah, it's uh I mean the other the other interesting cut at this is like you look at all these gaps in civilization generally. So it's like the Terrence McKenna stoned ape theory or whatever. Like you could explain the doubling in cranial size from homohabilis to homo sapiens. So 2 million years ago to 300,000 years ago uh with you know human hunter gatherers were following scat basically [ __ ] because they were trying to hunt for prey or whatever. And you had uh you
know um psilocybus cubensus you know mushrooms magic mushrooms growing in the [ __ ] in like you know Africa. Yeah. And so that it's a it's a reasonable explanation because you get all these you know new neural pathways neurogenesis you know epigenetic changes and you get this kind of stepwise leap in cranial size and and functioning. And then you think about like what's the next big leap? You know that's a physiological leap. What about a cultural leap? It's like the agrarian revolution and it was wheat, barley and
rye that we were growing. And I think the kind of conventional narrative is like you have more time for specialization for urbanization because you have you know agriculture takes care of you don't have to you know hunt and gather constantly 24/7. Um, but what grows on wheat, barley, and rye? It's urgot. And urgot is the substance that is probably in the in, you know, the kekon in this drink in the mystery rituals. And if you talk to people like Brian Murescu, who wrote the immortality key about the mystery rituals, he'll say
they go like you're saying way back to Egypt and, you know, even to, you know, uh, myia to like, you know, really, uh, you know, uh, yeah, pre 1000 BC and even before that. Um and so uh that begs this question is modern civilization actually a function of visionary experiences you know it's maybe it's not just this like Aam's razor like oh they had more time so they sort of like built all these things maybe they were they were engaging in these sort of mystery
rituals well before theian mystery I I don't agree with the they had more time thing it it doesn't I don't know man that just seems so outside of human nature. I When have you ever felt like, "Oh, I just had this abundance of time. I'm going to go erect a megalithic temple." It just doesn't that's just not how reality works out, you know? And it's we've been physiologically the same for 200 300,000 years. Why in the last few percent, you know, 3 to 5% of
our existence do we create all this stuff? You need some inspiration for, you know, I find I find that jarring, too. Um, you know, we have at least 200,000 years of of homo sapiens being anatomically the same as we are now. Our brains are the same size. So, you had you had a 100,000 years ago, you had people being born with the same mental capacity of Einstein. And what were those people doing? They were definitely doing something. They were doing something. And uh is it
you know at least my opinion is that one we haven't found the archaeological evidence of it yet or what they were doing just didn't preserve it just it just disappears you know I mean buildings will go away and oh gosh what is it that I read something that was like if you let New York City sit where it is that you know more than 90% of New York City wouldn't be around in like 40,000 years or 50,000 years or something like that. So [snorts] 150,000 years ago, what are people building that would possibly be preserved later on?
Um, you know, the likelihood the likelihood that they're producing toxic materials that are going to that are impossible to be destroyed like what we're doing to the planet right now is low, I think. Yeah. I agree. I I don't I I just say my which I I guess it's not based on anything, but just my hunch of what I deem to be realistic is I don't think that there was another civilization that existed before us or or or a period in time where people were ever pursuing technology that's like what we have
today with, you know, plastics and electronics and stuff like that. Whatever they had, I think it probably falls in line with something being like simple, natural, non-upgradable. It is the perfect extrapolation of their natural resources. Does that make sense? That's what that's what I would say. If there's a high civilization that existed before this chapter, it was something similar to that that of course it's not preserved because these are people who know how to extrapolate to the to the absolute maximum their the
resources from their natural world. Yeah. Well, it's it's maybe we see a renaissance of thought around that sort of thing. You look at like, you know, biosphere technology from like New Mexico or like I don't watch the movie Avatar and it's like they're they're in these like, you know, uh, perfectly ecologically consistent sort of habitats or whatever. And a lot of what we're doing now, I mean, we brought up, uh, SpaceX earlier, it's like with, you know, um, Starship, like they have like 36 Raptor engines and it's like an
enormous amount of mass ejection. And then I'm probably marginally, you know, way more pro- SpaceX than I am the FAA and, you know, EPA trying to like stop them or whatever. But it's still brute force. It's super brutish and like I think a lot of our our tech is. And um so yeah, maybe maybe maybe a lot of that stuff was more advanced. Okay, going back to ancient Egypt. Um the curse of King Tut's tomb. Oh my gosh. Do you think there's a there there? You know, I I thought about this
and maybe set it up for the audience. What is the curse of King Tut's? Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, you know, I look I really read about this about four years ago. Um, but King Tut is the final king of uh he's a young boy. He's the son of Aenatan and uh he's the final king of the 18th dynasty of the Amar of the Amarna period. And uh this is what we were talking about earlier where Egypt just flipped on his head and and they're they're um uh they're forced everyone's
forced to worship the atin the one single monotheistic god. It's actually the first example of monotheism in all of the ancient world. This predates uh the exodus in Moses by probably a century or more. Um so uh King Tuten Ammun is born King And uh when when Nefertiti dies who is the wife of of Akenatan when she passes away the crown is handed to Tutank Autton and his advisor a guy named I
who's you know one of the highranking nobles um in that government basically advises to tuten you know the entire country is very displeased with your father and and the fact that all of Egypt has been thrown on its head. We should probably go back to the way things were. There may be some truth to that. You know that the whole revolution of of the Autton may not have been very good for Egypt's economy and pretty much all the documentation we have of that time supports that. However, all that documentation comes from the people that
wanted them dead. So there's that. Um so [clears throat] one way or another they convince Tutank Autton to return everything back to the way to the way it was and he changes his name to Tutank Ammoon which may or may not have been his own choice. But he is Pharaoh at this time and he's only Pharaoh for a very short period of time. And then something happens to him. Don't really know how he died. It looks like from the way that the blood pulled on the back of his head. You've you've probably seen his body in person. I have. Yeah. [snorts]
So, um, Dr. [clears throat] Bob Brier did uh did an investigation on him maybe back in the 90s and examined his body and the way that the pool the way that the blood pulls in the back of his skull looks like he was hit in the back of the head. His brain, you know, he had a brain bleed or he was bleeding inside of his skull and he was laying he was laying on his back for an extended period of time and so all that blood pulled. So they think that he may have died to a blunt force injury on the back of his head. That's just a that's
just a a theory. Um, but one way or another, he's buried with an incredible amount of treasure in this rushed tomb, though. It's it's a shallow rock cut tomb. Uh, but he's buried with an incredible amount of treasure. And then I think it's Aman Hotep I or maybe it's Aman Hotep thei. His tomb. came. Never mind. Almonds up the first and third came came before two tank
almond. But somebody's tomb was was cut into the ground above his and all the rubble covered up King Tut's tomb. So his stayed preserved and and overlooked until I think 1923 when uh when Howard Carter discovered it. Now, if my memory serves me correctly, and there's a lot of legend about this, but as they're trying to open the tomb, there's [snorts] some kind of hieroglyph on the outside that that apparently said something along the lines of uh of of of cursing anybody. It's a rough translation, but it basically curses
anyone who should violate or open violate or open this tomb. Well, of course, they're going to open it. and Howard Carter in the little uh in the U vault opening, he shines a light through there and somebody asks him, "Do you see anything?" And he says, "Yes, wonderful things." And that's like a very iconic uh Egypt's logical quote. And uh so they open it up and of course they find the richest tomb that's ever been found in in the history of archaeology. It's the biggest discovery ever of this very minor, unimportant young kid
um who was Pharaoh. Now, uh, if you asked me three years ago, I could go through the whole chronology of like how every single person died. Yeah. almost every person that was in this excavation had something tragic happen to them. And several of them died from poisoning from being exposed to the air inside the chamber. And so, you have this paint that's up on the walls and that paint ruminates in the air and it makes the air toxic. It's like radiation
or something or I I don't know. I don't know. It's It's something to do with with the paint ruminating the air for thousands of years. It makes it, you know, you can imagine like the carcinogens in that air. It's just straight up poison, you know. Um must be like smoking a thousand cigarettes in a second, you know, just Um and uh so some of them died from poisoning from being exposed to the air. And then some people like their homes would burn down with them in it when they were back in the Americas or they'd
get some kind of crazy disease and die or their spouse would die. There was like I think there was like a scorpion bite. That's right. There's something like that too. And then um I forget how Carter died, but he died in some strange way, but he was the last person anyway. Everybody before him died leading up to him. I've thought about this before. You know, is is it all coincidence or was there really a mummy's curse? And sometimes I wonder if it's not both. If it's if it's um you know how I I've talked to some of my
friends about this about this before, how some people seem to just have a will that is so strong that the world moves out of their way. You know, I mean, look at look at so many successful people. Their will like Trump or Elon Musk. That's what I was thinking. It's like they shift timelines according to their will or something. And Steve Jobs thought about this. He called it magical thinking that that you could ignore things and they would go away. That you could believe things so strongly that the earth would morph itself around your will. You and I've
always wondered if with something like that if it's yes, the paint inside of the inside of the chamber did poison these people and kill them, but that was that was what Two Tank Almond would have wanted. You know what I mean? Uh but then you have this like cosmic element that goes beyond that. did these people violating two tank almond's tomb really result in this lady's house burning down with her and her family in It's certainly ominous and it's certainly fascinating to us, you know,
observing it from the outside. Uh I don't know. Yeah, I I don't know. You know, I I think that there's definitely elements of science and our natural world and and the way that our brains connect to the world around us that isn't measurable. At least to us yet, you know. Um, for sure. I definitely agree with that. And I think belief is incredibly like a good example of our modern paradigm writing that off is like in medicine you have like the placebo effect which often is
way more effective than you know the pharmacological you know uh uh thing that you're taking or whatever and then you just write that off you go oh it's placebo and then it's like well wait belief is extremely powerful and like you take a sugar pill and believe a thing and it's more effective in certain cases than biochemistry like that's that's like a big deal but it's sort of we live in this age where like you're not supposed to trust your eyes and your mind is irrational and you know I think I think we're uh we're probably on the verge of sort of a quote unquote re-enchantment of reality. I think that's that's ending uh for better
and for worse. Like you have, you know, Gen Z astral projecting on Tik Tok and it's it's like weird, right? Like you have this what we're talking about the opening of the floodgates of the relativization of like all information that the the death of expertise is it's like there's some bad that comes with that. But so yeah, well it this is this is a sad thing is that [clears throat] you know the um the institutions that used to feed us information became politicized and and
corrupted and weaponized against normal people. Yes. Um you know I don't want to get overtly political but it is [laughter] Yeah. Well, I mean, it's it's so obvious as to how we've been, you know, normal people have been manipulated and lied to by by the media, by our government, by everything. Um, and I think the pandemic woke a lot of people up. Yeah, it definitely did. I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous the things that we were being told in, you know, from 2020
even up till now. You know, it just the things that we're made to believe is absolutely insane. Um a and uh you know people like we just don't uh we have no reason to trust uh the authority anymore. And a really sad side effect of that is that uh is on the rise now because I mean there really is there really are amazingly
intelligent people who are devoted to their area of expertise in their field of science whether it's you know biology archaeology whatever uh medicine um that are really really devoted to that and that you need these people who are wildly intelligent that study these really strange fields to to be able to tell you information, but now like we just don't trust any of that at all. Um, and that's and that's sad. Um, but it's the fault of uh it's the fault of those
institutions for allowing themselves to be uh weaponized for modern politics. My opinion is I think it's really all about modern politics. It's all about modern politics and money. Personally, I do not think that there was that there have been archaeological discoveries that change all of known humanity that are so impactful that like a secret cabal came in and covered it all up and hid it from humanity.
PE those people don't give it. They do not care about that. What they care about is geopolitics and making money and manipulating the modern world. Yeah, it's all all the corruption is based on the modern world. I don't think they're trying to cover up the past cuz what would it do? Like like if if all of a sudden we knew that Atlantis really existed 12,000 years ago and now it's ruins under the ground. Yeah, it happen totally. It's incredibly fascinating. but why would somebody cover that
cover that up? No, I I I generally agree. I also think some of these discoveries might not happen because of yeah like you said politics or like basic bureaucracy slowness we talked about you know haz earlier you know ministry of culture it's like you want certain things claimed by the local governments or like you want them sort of you know to be involved in the national history of that government so you don't want anything to predate you know you want to you want to go against the Robert Shock John Anthony West another thing is is Egypt
doesn't have a lot of interest. Let's just highlight on Egypt. They don't have a lot of interest in another Howard Carter, another white guy making a huge They wanted to be an Egyptian and really Zahiwas wants it to be himself. Y um and I've spoken to lots of Egyptologists and you know uh this even happened in Peru. You know those big tunnels that were discovered in uh under the ground in Peru recently? Have you heard about No, actually. Uh in Cusco up at Sak Interesting. This just popped up on the
news maybe a month ago or so. This is a big big ordeal that these these tunnels were finally discovered and they're going to start exploring them. I was in those tunnels in September. That's how long ago that they that they had been that they had known about them. And it only just now became a press release. Why? Because the government has got to get everything together to make the most money possible, to make the biggest splash possible. It's all a marketing campaign, you know, to to drive tourism, to drive interest, to drive funding, to drive money. Everything is so premeditated.
It's not like, "Hey, we just found this. Let's post this on X for everyone to It's the same thing in Egypt, man. It they discover um they just discovered the tomb of was it Tutmo the Tutmos II, I believe, is a tomb that they just discovered in in Egypt. And it's kind of unremarkable on the inside. that it's crumbled away a lot. It looks like it was never even completed. Um, I heard about that tomb in October and that and the publication just came out, I don't know, within the last couple
months or so. When I was there in October, I heard about that tomb uh having been discovered earlier in 2024. So, over a year later, they released the publication. So, this is all on a this is all on a timeline because they're constantly discovering things in Egypt, but they don't want to if they dropped 10 new discoveries, nine of them would get overshadowed and not get the kind of press that they want, which may cause a burst in tourism and then it slows back down. So, it's all in this timeline. Archaeology is it
is uh tourism keeps archaeology alive, Yeah. It's almost like planned obsolescence or something like people have conspiracies about, you know, like Apple products or something. It's really pyramids. If that was 2022, why is it coming out now? You know, that that's an interesting question. Or I remember, you know, uh doing this piece with David Grush, this UFO whistleblower who testified before Congress, uh you know, in uh end of
summer of 2023. And it was this big deal. It's like all these people started to cross the Rubicon of maybe this UFO stuff is actually real. And then the day after we put our like documentary out, which I thought was, you know, it's pretty pretty comprehensive and and good. Uh uh if I do say so myself, uh uh the next day there's this like Mexico City Congress thing about uh these Peruvian, you know, uh alien mummies or whatever. And I'm out I'm now actually looking into that case and I think there's some
interesting stuff there. But like the way it was presented was such a jokey weird, you know, way. And it was, you know, a lot of what was ended up being popularized were these knockoff, you know, kind of it was like chicken bones and and rooster head or what it was like clearly fake stuff was presented in this weird way. Okay. And I I wonder some of this might be this emergent, you know, the wheel gets, you know, created in South America at the same time as Africa. And then some of it might be this sort of political meto syndrome
where it's like, oh, you discovered that well, I've been sitting on this. Me, too. You know, and then you you have to put out your thing. And it's uh it's it's it's more political than it is truth seeeking. And that's not to say that again there's there's nothing there on the uh the mummy thing. I think there probably actually is some interesting stuff going on there, but that's for a later date. Um, I have an excursion to pitch you on. Okay. So, I six or seven years ago met a guy named Luis Felipe San Salvador. And he's a super eccentric guy. He has
uh he's directed a couple of movies under the name Jamaica No Problem. He's like larger than life guy. Anyways, I have became friends with him and I realized that uh he was not lying about the fact that he came from a long line of concistadors from the 16th century. He's Ecuadorian and he lives on this massive compound in Ecuador and he even came out with a movie called The Son of Man uh because he has maps in his family that go back
to that time around Otawa's ransom, El Dorado. and he goes searching literally with like a team of like 10 people or whatever into the Amazon every single year to find El Dorado. And he also so he has maps to El Dorado and then he also has maps to something called the Teaos Cave or the Teaos Library. Okay. Uh Neil Armstrong in 1969 went to the moon of course and came back and his second expedition was in the Amazon to
find this Teaos cave, this Teaos library and a BBC film crew followed him around trying to find this thing and he couldn't find it. And my friend Luis Felipe San Salvador says that his father sent Neil Armstrong in the wrong direction and that he has the real location of this thing. And it's this, if you talk to people in the local area, it's this well-known myth that uh there are these caves that exist with this kind of ancient alien looking metallic
artifacts like like metallic artifacts that seem so inacronistic and like you know beyond human capabilities even now. Uh and so I think we should go and try to find these things. I would be down. [laughter] So this is in Ecuador. Yes. Let's get we we have let's get on a Zoom with Louise and I would be down. I'm so down. Let's do it, man. I I would love that, man. I um I have lots of experience in the jungle at this Um quite a lot.
Did Have you seen where they just found like 11,000 structures in the Ecuadorian jungle recently? No. 11,000. Yeah. Yeah. They they found a city I think with 11,000 structures and it uh the city layout is on like the top of these mountain ridges and and all the city layouts are these four long structures with this huge you know maybe 200t x 200t wide square plaza in the center of them and it's thousands of these plazas that are made and it's the exact same layout as uh what we see
in Central America and in Mexico with the Maya world meo America and Man, there's no there's no doubt that that civilization I mean, think about this, man. [clears throat] Think about how many different just off the top of your head and and you know, neither one of us are an expert in this, but I can name a lot of different North American in the borders of the United States uh Native American cultures, whether it's like the Creek Indians, the
Apaches, the Comanches, the Cherokee, the Sue. I can go on and on and on and on and on. Okay, the Amazon is the same size as the United States. So crazy. Imagine how many different civilizations existed beneath the canopy of the you know, and how expansive and in depth that history is. I mean, North American native history is so complicated. You even have this uh you even there's a there's a federation of tribes that were united um under um
oh my goodness who's the who's the Native American Squanto. Uh Squanto unites creates this federation of these three tribes that were all rivals against each other during his childhood. But he gets captured and enslaved in London and then comes back and then he unites these tribes. I mean, that's just one little place where you have a confederation of three different tribes that come together and form their own government in one little area of Massachusetts. Imagine the rest of the continent. And then project that onto the Amazon of how expansive and complicated and nuanced
that is. I mean, that the Amazon [snorts] is incredibly dangerous. um whether you're dealing with humans or the natural world [sighs and gasps] and and almost But beneath that canopy really is the widest, deepest frontier of studying human history. Um and it's kind of like the last frontier. I think another frontier is the Sahara, which is equally as large and equally as dangerous and impasable
to uh to explore. Not that it's not feasible, but it is very difficult. I mean, I did I did a uh I [clears throat] did a six-h hour excursion in West Texas a few days ago, and every time I do that in the desert, I'm reminded of the fact that you wouldn't make it very long. Yeah. If you had to do a serious expedition in the desert, and you weren't really, really well prepared. Yeah. You know, um just in those six hours, I was like I was like, you know, if I go another two I will probably die if I didn't get water, you know. Um, and in the in the
jungle it's exactly the same, except it's worse because you sweat more. The the the sun might not be right on you, but man, you'll you will sweat an insane amount. All of your hydration is gone. Uh, you know, you you you'll be dehydrated in one afternoon. Going through Guatemala is brutal. Yeah. And you have all these different plants that have effects on you that even modern medicine hasn't journeyied out there to study. That's what I worry about with the Amazon where it's like this like little thing bites you where
you like, you know, you like come into contact with some plant that you know messes with your, you know, it's like poison ivy on steroids. [laughter] In uh I'll tell you in October I did back to back to back. I did Peru for 11 days, I did Egypt for 20 days, and I did um I did Guatemala for nine Unbelievable. And I was only home for one day during that whole period. And in when we went out to Machu Picchu, we were there for two full days. And the
mosquitoes that bit me out there were so strong that they left scars on my arms. Like if you look close, you'll see all these little dots all over my arms from where I got bit. And what they infect you with is so potent that when you scratch it, it will it will stay in your fingernails and it'll spread around your body. and and 2 weeks later I when I was in Egypt, I was still having dots pop up on my arms from these uh mosquitoes that bit me in the Amazon. And then in Egypt, I'm mostly fine. Egypt is real easy to to get
around. Um then I go to the jungles in Guatemala, which is essentially the Amazon. Um you know, not the same geographically, but like the environment is very similar. And something happened to me while while I was in the jungle, and I got really sick. not food poisoning sick, not a cold sick. And even the local guys could tell that uh the local watermelons, they were like they were like they were like, "Oh, you have what do they say? Jungle fever. You have jungle sickness." Cuz they could tell how tired and like drained I was.
And they thought it was the mosquitoes biting me that it was giving me something. And I was 75% deaf in each ear by the end of the trip. I couldn't hear anything. Oh jeez. Were you freaking out? No. I knew it would go away. I just figured it would. But I didn't know what I didn't know what was like oppressing me. I was just so rund down and tired. But I didn't have any symptoms other than I was almost deaf, you know? We could be talking like this and I would barely hear you. It was so bizarre, man. On that note, [laughter]
let's go to the Amazon. On that note, let's um you know, but that was actually the only time that anything like that has ever happened to me. I I I've been back to the jungle since then twice and uh and I was fine. So, I don't know. Something something happened to me. I don't know what it You were initiated. Now you're only in Guatemala. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've I've gotten very sick in Guatemala as well. So Oh, really? Yeah. Maybe it's a thing you just have to go through. It's like Have you gone to Tall? I have. It's amazing. That's That's where I was at. That's
that's where I got sick was in Tall. So, I don't know what I don't know what it was that happened. And then I went out to Elm Miridor. Have you heard of I've never heard of Elmir. It's a It's a 2-hour helicopter ride into the jungle north. And uh so you drop down and it's this giant pyramid that is supposedly similar to the size of the Great Pyramid in in Egypt. Um but you can't really tell because it's just this big hump in the middle of this flat jungle. And the pyramid was so large, man, that when I was coming back
down from it, I walked down the pyramid Mhm. And then uh I walked along this trail for about five minutes and then arrived on a staircase that went down and I was like for the last 5 minutes I was walking on the pyramid straight. That's how big it was. So I came down from a certain portion and I reached this flat platform and I walked for five minutes before reaching the next slope of the pyramid. That's how large it is. [cough] And [clears throat] to your point that you were saying earlier is the farther they go back in time with so many cultures,
the bigger the structures get. That is the first known pyramid in it's called Ladanta. Ladanta and Ligra. They're these two giant pyramids that face each other. They're about equal in size. Those are the oldest pyramids known in the Maya world. Made out of the largest stones ever used in the Maya world. Unbelievable. it it but instead of u these huge rectangular stones that you see in Egypt they're like these Lincoln logs but the Lincoln logs aren't stacked on top of one each of one another in the way that we would think that they would
be used imagine a Lincoln log laid this way and they're stacked on top of each other like this so in the least in the least uh easy way possible the least efficient way possible is the way that it was done [laughter] and it was It is so massive, like the actual mass, the structural mass inside of them is so impressive that the jungle, unlike most Maya pyramids where you have blocks that are about this big in most Maya pyramids
and the roots of the trees wrap around those little blocks and dig into the pyramid and then a tree will grow out of the pyramid and rip all the blocks apart from each other. So you see like the jungle growing out of these huge pyramids. this pyramid. No, the jungle is growing on it, but what they'll but all the the roots grow flat against the stone because the stones are impenetrable. So, you can grab a piece of the jungle and peel it off the side of the and peel it off the side of the pyramid and the pyramid's still there.
The roots never penetrated between the That was at the beginning of time in the Maya world and it was never surpassed since then. Kind of the same way in ancient Egypt. Fascinating, man. Well, I'm going to follow up with you if you're serious. We'll do it. We'll seriously do it. Yeah, that's um I I would love to uh return to South America. Yeah. I've never been to Ecuador. I've only ever been to Peru. Um Have you ever been to Peru? I'm going uh I think in the next month, but I've never been.
Are you really? Where are you going to I am going to Lima for sure. And then I want to go to Machu Picchu because I'm going to be there and uh otherwise I'm kind of open if you have any Yeah. Well, the sacred valley, man. I mean, that's that's uh that's Cusco. So, what you would probably do is you would land in Lima. Uh I'm sure you'll go see um I'm sure you'll go see the the archaeological site of Lima. Um but then you'll probably go to the u there's a there's a famous museum there with all the pottery. Um I forget what it's I
forget what it's called. Um and uh you'll go there, but then you'll probably fly from Lima into Cusco, I'm guessing. And Cusco is like one of the maybe the best city I've ever been to in in my travels. The nicest, cleanest, most beautiful city I've ever been to. You can walk down any any um alleyway, any part of the city, and it's perfectly safe. Really? Yeah, man. You you you would love it. I mean, it's no surprise that there's so many Americans that live in that in that
city. Mhm. Can you hit the tunnels there, or is that like blocked off? No, I got access to it uh through the head archaeologist there. Yeah, you got the hookups. Yeah. And uh so so they they uh somebody on their team watches my channel. Okay. And has seen has seen some podcasts I've been on and so I was able to get in and and check out the check out the tunnels. But you would go there, see Sakiwoman, go see um go see the um the Corancha
which is in the center of the city of Cusco which is like the most the most impressive stonework in all of the ancient world. The most precise I mean just razor sharp like the sides of of the Egyptian architecture of actual buildings that people walked inside of has nothing on the corona nothing on it. It's made from gray andesite and the blocks like lean in on each other. So they're the walls are like trapezoidal and so you can just imagine the sophistication of taking
gray andesite which is you know as hard as granite and just it has these razor sharp edges on the architecture just absolutely stunning. And then from there you would take a bus to Oonte Tombbo or a taxi or something like that. Um to Oontante Tombbo whereas another megalithic site and then from there you take the train to Machu Picchu. Epic. I think I just got my whole itinerary laid out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Luke, I appreciate your time, man. This was a blast and uh I'm so grateful that we were able to speak before you uh hit Singapore and then you moved out of out
of Texas. So uh appreciate you, man. Yeah, man. Thanks so much for having me. This flew by.
Machine captions of public videos by American Alchemy (Jesse Michels); rights remain with the creator; provided for research and citation.