#2328 - Luke Caverns
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I love it when young people know so much about ancient history. Like, how did you get started in this?

Um, well, it's, it's quite literally in my blood. Back in the late, well, I should say the 1890s. My family, they were cattle rustlers, right here in the hill country, actually, maybe a little bit further, quite a bit further west of San Antonio. Damn, you come from a lot of criminals?

Probably. Yeah, there's a lot of dark history in here. And so they're cattle rustlers that are out in Dryden, Texas, in Sanderson, Texas.

And I mean, right on the Rio Grande. And they were, that's how they made their money. They were fascinated, kind of like everybody, with finding gold, with finding lost Spanish treasure and Native American artifacts. So they're living in this area called the Reagan Canyon. And I've seen it all over the place. It's

If you look on – I think like the Smithsonian did something on the top 10 forgotten places in the United States. It's like the most remote areas of our country. And somewhere in there is Reagan Canyon. And so out there, they –

developed this fascination for looking for lost Spanish gold. And, you know, there were bandits that would hide up in the hills and they would sack Spanish caravans and drag the gold up into the hills to not get caught, to hopefully come back for it later. And the Spanish are out there mining for gold and everything. So my family gets caught up in one of the biggest mysteries of Texas history. Like if you were to look up, if you were to go to some bookstore, there's a popular one called the Sons of Coronado. And it's like this legacy of people looking for Spanish gold.

Somewhere in there, my family will be in there. And so this started in the 1890s. And it's this long saga of the gold being – the treasure being dragged to San Antonio and all these people get killed. And only one of these four Reagan brothers makes it out. He gets involved in oil drilling out in East Texas. And then so my family moved out to East Texas. And then his son was born, which is my grandfather. And then he continues this legacy of –

continuing his father's oil company but then he also begins gold mining in New Mexico and while he's out in New Mexico so he hears these legends of these seven lost Spanish gold mines and because this local there was a local police officer who was like a treasure hunter and he knew who my grandfather was and the story behind our family he sought him out and they went off looking together and I don't know how long it took them to find it but he found the seven lost Spanish gold mines of New Mexico and

And he opened up this company called Three Bells Mining and Milling Company. And that was open for about eight years. And they opened up these mines that go back to...

probably about the 1530s. So the Spaniards were up all the way in New Mexico in the 1530s, and they were opening up Native American gold mines and expanding them. And so he found these gold mines that go hundreds of feet into the ground as this huge, expansive gold mining operation happened.

Well, somebody dies after a smelter explodes and the company goes under. They lose everything. My family falls into poverty. My dad's born during that time. And my dad didn't really get to experience like all of that excitement. He had to spend his life climbing out of poverty. And but he had this love for history. He had this he had this love for American history, really. And he instilled in me the importance of history growing up.

And that fascination of exploration and kind of ancient American history, hearing those stories carried over into me during my childhood. And so I've just, I have always been fascinated by this. And I guess getting to where I am now, I was halfway through my marketing degree in college. And I'm sitting on my bed in my dorm room with my girlfriend at the time, who I'm married to now. And

we watched the movie The Lost City of Z about Percy Fawcett and something about that guy's journey reminded me so much of my family kind of reminded me of my dad reminded me of my grandpa and it changed something in me like that day I could not ignore I was probably 20 at the time I could not ignore this love that I always had for ancient history but you know archaeologists are poor you know they're it's an extremely hard life and it's really hard on your family too and I just knew I had to

create a life for myself where I could do what I loved because I had like a 1.7 GPA in college and I was not going to make it through my classes. And so I changed. I got a degree in cultural anthropology. I wrote like we had a mock thesis statement and I wrote it on the Amazon and the lost lost civilizations and you know how they were wiped out from from Spanish influenza and

Yes, that's where I'm at today. Wow. I think everybody, when you start looking at the history of the human race and you start looking at the history of civilizations, everyone gets fascinated because we kind of like woke up in this life.

You know, we didn't choose to be born during this timeline. We woke up in this timeline and we're like, how did collectively we get here? And then you have this narrative of how collectively we got here. But then you see there's holes in this narrative and it's real weird. Yeah.

And then you find out about asteroid impacts and super volcanoes. And then there's people like Zahi Hawass who are in charge of telling you what they know. And this is the only answer. And you're like, well, that guy's not right. And then you start looking at guys like Graham Hancock. Why is everybody calling him a Nazi? Like, what the fuck? And then you start getting deep into the weeds and this stuff. And you're like, wow, there's a lot of resentment behind.

From the gatekeepers. There's a lot of people that have been teaching a narrative and teaching it in school, and they don't want anyone else teaching this stuff. They want to be the only people that can tell people what the history of the human race is. And unfortunately for them, there's too much other evidence. It's too weird.

The whole picture is not settled. It's too strange. And they keep finding new things all the time that throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the timeline of civilization. And so then, you know, you...

you find out about Egypt. And once, I mean, that was the big one for me. Once I found out about Egypt, not found out about it, but really started exploring it. When you discovered every grain of sand in Egypt? I discovered it all. I was there. I dug the hole. When I...

That went about as well as I thought it would when you told me. I was hoping it was going to go a little better, honestly. He had a great opportunity to win over the popular audience and come in and make a really good impression. And he did exactly the opposite of that. Well, I think there was a bunch of problems there, ego being one of them, but another one being a language barrier. Yeah, I think so. Also years of battle. Like if you're in conflict with people about this very thing that we're talking about,

For years and years and years. And these people that you're in conflict with keep winning. Yeah. You know, like I remember there was an old documentary that was narrated by Charlton Heston. He was the host of it. I don't know if you ever saw it. It's The Mysteries of the Sphinx.

Yes, I've seen it. I've seen it on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. I believe it was on television at the time. And one of the things in that was they were trying to talk about Robert Shock's work with the water erosion around the Temple of the Sphinx. And there was this very arrogant archaeologist. I don't remember his name, but I remember he had a smackable face.

who's just so arrogant. He's like, "Where is the evidence of this civilization that existed 10,000 years ago?" Well, now we have evidence. So, like Gobekli Tepe threw a giant monkey wrench into the gears of this narrative. And now they're forced to reckon with this. Like, Zahi didn't even know what Gobekli Tepe was.

Which was insane. There was a lot of things that he wasn't familiar with, like Zep Tepi. It's either the Turin or the Turid Kings List, which talks about the pre-dynastic, semi-mythological kings going back tens of thousands of years. How do you... Not know that. Was he the former head of the Ministry of Antiquities and Culture? How are you not familiar with this? This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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Well, he just dismisses it. Yeah. But aggressively. Yeah. Which is like, there's no way you know everything. There's no way. And then it was also the data from the Italian scientists that were studying this tomography and this ability to look underground with satellite radar and also dismissing that. But then I brought up the Temple of Osiris. But they looked into that. Like, you could see it. Yeah. They have, like, they showed where the chambers are. It works. Mm-hmm.

But this was only 50 feet in the ground. You know, like, okay. Yeah, pretty well. Well, how do you know how deep that stuff goes? If it works 50 feet, who's to say it doesn't work two kilometers? Like they're saying.

Yeah, I was having a conversation with my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart. He's a friend of Graham. He was one of Graham's guest experts on season two of Ancient Apocalypse when he went to the Maya realm. He and I were talking this morning, and he was like, you know, it's become a battle of who has this right to talk about these things. Does the fact that I have a degree in anthropology, that's what gives me the right to have

more of an opinion on somebody else, that's kind of what it's become. And it's like one side is accosting the other over their fascinations and their interests and the fact that they're able to make a living from the things that they're fascinated about and talking about it. And it feels like academia has become bitter because being in the academic world is a very...

rough and jaded place. And a lot of young aspiring archaeologists who existed, who maybe would have had an approach like me, but existed during this time where you could only find

have your pursuits if the university signed off on it. Right. But now universities are like ideologically captured and every little thing that you do has to be aligned with the university. And so all of your fascinating ideas that you have in your mid twenties, you know, to your mid thirties, when you're young and able to go off into the jungle and find something, they all get shut down by people who had their ideas shut down. But now it's like, it's the wild west where you can have somebody like me or whoever put together an expedition and, you know,

I legally cannot start digging up the ground and excavating things, but I can go and document things and survey things on my own, you know, with local permission, whatever. But yeah, it's like... Can you legally dig things up in certain countries if you get permission? Or is it... Oh, well, I mean, yeah, if I got permission, but I mean, you would be...

It would be next to impossible for me, for somebody like me to do that. Why would that be? What would be the hurdles? Oh, well, you would have the local universities there who also have their own, you know, high credentialed people who are going to, you know, if I don't come in with a PhD, I'm never going to go get a PhD.

But if I don't come in with something like that, then I don't have the experience. I don't have the authority to be able to do something like this. And they would never trust me to carry out like a good excavation. Right, not damage anything. Yeah, yeah. So they would never trust that. There's some reasonable explanations for why. Yeah, yeah, kind of. Because people have looted. I mean who knows how much of ancient Egypt is just gone now.

I mean, who knows? Oh, man. So many wealthy people actually ate mummies. Yeah. You know about that? They actually, like for people listening, you didn't mishear me. They ate mummies. They would bring them to these European aristocrats, would bring them to parties, and people would consume the mummies, which is just like...

What were you guys drinking? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's gnarly, man. What kind of ditty party were you guys having over there where that was the idea? It's gnarly, man. Yeah, so much of Egypt is gone. And this is why I don't think that, you know, like I love the mystery of the ancient world and why I'm so baffled when people want to immediately shut anything down. Because of the amount of history that is lost to us is completely baffling. You know, Egypt has been getting looted constantly.

We know for the last, let's say, 3,000 years at least, foreign nations have been coming in and raiding Egypt and taking the artifacts out. And so, you know, so much of the artifact record is lost. And I think that...

The real problem is the confidence with which somebody like Zahi speaks. It's okay for you to have your perspective and the way that you view the ancient world based on the data that's been available to you. It's okay to have your opinions. But when you're so confident about your opinions that you then begin to chastise other people, put them down for it, and then go the next mile and start making accusations of them being racist and things like that. The Flint Dibble approach. Yeah.

That's really not good. Right. It's not good. But it's like that guy embodies what you don't like about academia. You see him physically. He embodies it. Like it's like that's what it is. It's these weak men, these weird kind of bitchy weak men that decide that they're in control of things. And the way they shut people down is by casting the worst pejoratives on them, especially like the Graham Hancock stuff, calling him a racist. Like what? Because he –

Because he's interested in Atlantis. I really did not like the letter that they wrote to Netflix to try to get season one taken down of Ancient Apocalypse. It's disgusting. And, you know, they...

sometimes they'll rebuttal and say, oh, well, you know, I never blatantly called him a racist. Like, well, okay, even if you didn't blatantly do it, you insinuated it and you were okay with insinuating it. And some of these people exist in a realm where in their little bubbles where they throw around the word racist all the time. And then when they get to the wider world where the rest of us exist, they find out very quickly that none of, we don't throw that term around lightly and accuse people of these things. And then, you know, at the end of the podcast, um,

when he said, you asked, you know, things, the kind of temperature came down. And then I think maybe you asked something like, you know, well, what can people do to help archaeology? And he was like, oh, well, you can donate to the SAA. But the SAA is the one that wrote the letter. And it's like, oh, man, that's just...

It's not a good look. Well, it's the real problem with human beings and ego when they have positions of power and authority, especially over something that is very esoteric, something that is like – and also completely complex. Like when you're dealing with trying to decipher hieroglyphs and trying to – and then –

You know, the fact that we know that the Library of Alexandria was burned down. So who knows what was lost in that? Several different times, like five different times. God. I wonder if any of that just got stolen out of there and then they blamed it on, like, how much of that shit is in the Vatican? The first time Caesar is chasing his rival Pompey across the Mediterranean and Pompey flees to Alexandria. And Alexandria was kind of in the basket of Rome.

The Ptolemies who are the Greek pharaohs in Egypt. So the Greeks are controlling Egypt after Alexander comes in 332 BC. So Alexander dies. His best friend Ptolemy becomes pharaoh. But the Ptolemies were very weak, not very good rulers. And so Rome kind of does like what the US does where they get pulled into conflicts. And then once they're there and they conquer everything, they seize all the power. And so Rome had done this to Egypt.

And so they controlled Egypt, and they were pulling all of their—they were keeping the Ptolemies in power, the Roman soldiers were, and they were pulling all that grain into Egypt. And so Caesar follows Pompey, chases him to Alexandria, and so that Pompey can't flee, Caesar says—

will burn the docks. Well, when you landed in Alexandria, you would land at this dock that went to a road called Soma Road. So you had Soma Road and Canopic Way, and it was like the street corner. It must have been amazing to see in real life. Like, think about this. You have the Library of Alexandria,

you all, this is all in one block. You have the library of Alexandria, you have the museum, which is right next to it. So both together, they make the world's first university. And I mean, you can just imagine like walking through those halls across the street from that is, uh, Alexander's mausoleum. So, uh,

His mausoleum, we think the Emperor Hadrian, if you've heard of Hadrian before, that he modeled his mausoleum on Alexander's. So we kind of have an idea of what the mausoleum may have looked like. It would have a marble statue of Alexander on top. So people are walking by every day in the middle of this town. And then across the street from that is the palatial district where all the rich people lived. And then off by the bay, you would have had Cleopatra's Palace. And so it's this beautiful place. But when the boats come into the dock...

You had to give up all the scrolls that you had because the Ptolemies are obsessed with obtaining the world's knowledge and they want the originals. They don't want a copy. So what they would tell people is you give us your writings. We'll write down a copy and we'll give you back your original. But what they would do is give back the copy and keep the original. And this is something called the library wars. This is a whole thing.

So – but this was – it was connected to the docks. And so most of the buildings in Alexandria are made out of stone to prevent fires. But the interior of Alexandria's library would have had all these wooden shelves that would cross where you'd stack all the scrolls in. So everything just – maybe the actual structure of the building doesn't burn down, but the entire interior of it burns up. And so when Caesar sets fire to the docks to burn all of Pompey's ships, it crawls up the docks and burns the library down. Well –

um, Augustus did the same thing. What a decade and a half later, Augustus came and he seized Alexandria. And this is where this is when Cleopatra and Mark Antony die. He seizes it. And then there are rebellions because the Alexandrians are very rebellious. They don't want to be ruled by, uh, by the Romans. And, um, so there's a, I think it's, I think it's Caracalla that, uh,

He was being made fun of by the Alexandrians. There was a theater in town. It's actually the place where stand-up comedy was invented in Alexandria. Yeah. Really? And the butt of all the jokes was always the Roman emperor. So you'd have people like talking shit about the Roman emperor standing up, you know, in the middle of Alexandria's theater. And so the Roman emperor was always the butt of the joke. Well, Caracalla, I believe it's Caracalla. He's one of the brothers in Gladiator 2, the new Gladiator, if you've seen it. I haven't seen it.

He's one of the brothers, but the movie doesn't really depict the actual emperors very accurately. But he gets tired of it. So he just comes down to Alexandria on like a royal visit and executes 25,000 people in the city of Alexandria and burns down parts of it.

So he burned down the library for the third time. And then there was another emperor named Aurelian when a local Alexandrian declared himself the new Egyptian pharaoh. I think he was a real Egyptian. He declared himself like the newest pharaoh and he –

created this revolt and then Aurelian had to come and put the revolt down and he burned down the library again. So this is, we're getting close to like 300 AD at this point. Now in 365 AD, there was a, um, there was a, a huge earthquake, uh,

that was off of the coast of Crete, I think, which is the most Southern, uh, Greek Isle. And it's where the Minoans lived. I believe it's there or it's off the coast of Cyprus. And so that earthquake, like, like just, uh, reverberates down to Egypt in this massive tsunami destroys the entire city of Alexandria. And it said it was so catastrophic that, um,

I think it's Pliny the Elder or Pliny the Younger comes down in a rescue mission from Italy, and he comes to Alexandria, and he records that 50,000 people in the city are missing because of the wave that gets pushed in, and that all of the giant boats, these are giant, gigantic boats in Alexandria's harbor, are sitting on top of all the rooftops in the city. And it's after this point that the location of Alexander's body and the location of Alexandria's library just...

completely go missing. So they're both utterly destroyed. And most likely, all of the giant stones that were used to build the city were repurposed for, you know, other things. But in one failed swoop, Alexandria's library, the Museon and Alexander's mausoleum completely disappear from the historical record.

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It just shows you how vulnerable knowledge is. I really think about that today because...

Obviously, we have a lot of books and most things that are like most physics work, most work on archaeology, most work on history is available in book form. But how much of what we have is on hard drives?

And if there was a power outage, just a global worldwide power outage that lasted six months, we're fucked. We don't know anything anymore. It's a small amount of time for an enormous cataclysmic disaster to completely erase tens of thousands of years of understanding of everything. Everything. Everything.

We would have no knowledge. One generation removed from electronics would have no knowledge of how to recreate it, what steps need to be taken. You have to build a chip plant? Where are they right now? They're in Taiwan? What the fuck are you talking about? How are we going to do this? Hard drives? That's a precarious place for them to be. Starting from scratch, starting from scratch today, we're...

would be very similar, I think, to probably what starting from scratch was post the Great Flood, post the great common impacts, all the Younger Drivers Impact Series stuff. Civilization, if that stuff is correct, if Graham's position and Randall Carlson's position is that there was probably a much more advanced civilization than just hunter-gatherers that lived 10,000 plus years ago,

How many thousands of years would it take before we started calming down again? Well, it seems like it took about five, four or 5,000 years before civilization emerges. A really long time. A really long time. I think about that with like foraging, you know, I was reading, uh, yesterday I was reading, uh,

Exploration Faucet. Have you ever read this before? No. Listen to the audio book. It's his... It's Percy Faucet's? Personal Diary. Oh, wow. Yeah, so you have... There's an audio book of that? Yeah, yeah. It's on Audible. Dude, you'll get wrapped up in it. You won't be able to stop listening to it. You know, he just has these amazing experiences and...

Ah, man, he would be like your best, like your all-time guest. You know, if you could have him on. Sure. He had a great accent, too. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so you listen to his audio book, and the way he talks about meeting the indigenous people that live deep in the Amazon. You know, it would take him weeks to get to these little villages. And while he was out there, he would see, like...

the systematic mathematical structure with which they would set up these giant villages and how they would build these huge thatch wood homes with foundations that are stones. And these people were – he said that they had beautiful skin. They spoke elegantly. They sang songs. And he was like – he's like, this isn't – he's like, these people in the Amazon –

are not primitive savages like my colleagues at the Royal Geographic Society in London believe that they are. These are people who are the descendants of a fallen great civilization. He was like, the way they interact with each other is so sophisticated in the way they speak to each other. Why did he think they were the descendants of a fallen civilization and not the people that we're currently talking about?

living in the most modern version of this civilization? I don't quite know. You know, there's some things that are left out. Like he has some... Before he started writing this, I think he always had these ideas in the back of his mind. And so you don't really get the origin of why he initially started thinking this. But, you know, while he's exploring South America, he's hearing all these stories of, you know, semi-contacted people. Like you have...

who still live the native life, but they can speak Spanish. And he can speak a little bit of Spanish and communicate with these people. So he would hear about, oh yeah, there's this huge city of gold off in the jungle, months travel that way. And it's the same kind of legend that all these Spaniards had heard. So it's this idea of there's, well, there was this civilization that used to be out there. And so Percy thought that maybe it has something to do with Atlantis. And so that was...

part of his journey looking for it. And then he, it's actually his wife, Nina Fawcett, I believe, when she's in a library in England, she finds a Portuguese document. I think it's manuscript 512. Have you ever heard of this? I could have the name of it wrong, but I think it's manuscript 512. And in that, it's these guys who are kind of like semi-professional Portuguese explorers,

in the mid 1700s that are going around Brazil and they find this huge stone city with statues that they thought looked like Greek gods in the middle of the Amazon. And so, you know, the perception, like my perception looking back through it is like, well, I mean, yeah, these are Portuguese guys who come from Europe. So when they see something that's native, their only lens to see it through is what they've grown up knowing, which is the Greek and Roman world. So that's how they communicate this idea.

But they found this big stone city in the middle of, I think it's, I'm pretty sure it's Brazil's jungle. And so this was completely forgotten until Percy's wife found this. So, you know, when he first went down to the Amazon, he was only there on a mapping expedition on behalf of Great Britain, which he was probably a spy. I'm guessing that that's what was actually happening there because he was a spy when he was in the military. And I think what he was doing is on an official basis, he's charting the

border around Brazil with the Amazon River. But really what he's doing is collecting information so that maybe Great Britain can have a colony there someday. But then the war disrupts all of that and he has to go fight in World War I, which is funny because it's the same thing the Nazis were doing in the 1930s. But anyways, so while he's there on his first expedition, he

He doesn't initially – I think he's interested in these ideas of ancient history, but it's when he's there and he's off in the jungle. He's finding all these artifacts on the ground, and he was like – he's like the way that the pottery – there's clay pottery, and then there's stone vessels and like eating utensils that he was finding, really elegant little statues and things. He found one that was made out of this like solid black stone that he could never – and it had this glow to it, and he could never – maybe not a glow, but like –

Like if you shine the light on it, you can tell that it's translucent in a way. I've seen stones like this in the Aztec realm. They have these scepters that have these orb things on the top. And if you shine a light on it, it's like this otherworldly looking thing. I can only imagine if you're on like peyote. What is the stone? I don't know. And it's missing now. It's lost. It went missing with him or somewhere in his expeditions that doesn't exist anymore. But there's an illustration of it in Exploration Faucet that you could find. Okay.

And so he thought like when he was seeing all this on his first expedition, he's like, wait, these aren't these primitive savages that all my colleagues that I don't even like back home think that these people are. This is it. This is an advanced culture. There's something that's lost here. And so Percy didn't know if it was a fallen civilization that lived in the Amazon or whether it was still out there somewhere. And he was trying to find either the ruins of it or the living ruins.

Right. So he didn't really know if it was fallen or not. So that's it's still interesting that he would think that way instead of this is the pinnacle of civilization in the Amazon, which is why they're so advanced.

I'm not sure. Is that like a preconceived notion that he had that there was an advanced civilization and that it had fallen? Yeah, yeah. Because if you're looking at the way the people were living, the way he's describing it, it sounds pretty advanced. Sure, sure. Why wouldn't you assume that these people had lived for thousands of years and eventually risen to this current level? Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. That's the problem with preconceived notions, too. Yeah, yeah. But I do know that he had...

he had the utmost admiration and respect for these people. He was completely infatuated with their way of life and trying to, you know, what his goal was, was to prove that the narrow-minded perspective of the English aristocrats who thought that they were the pinnacle of civilization, he was

And so he had a great admiration for these people. And he wanted to try to find like a like a big, big civilization, something with enough people that could rival that could rival Europe. And where he went missing was in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.

And the last place that they know that he was at was on May 29th, 1925. And he wrote a letter to his wife from Dead Horse Camp. And he was like, it may be a while before you hear from me. It could be up to a year or two before you hear from me. I'm about to head into a very dense area. And my trail runners who would go back and forth with his notes, they weren't going to follow him out there because it's too dangerous. And that was the last letter that he had written. And he was going –

He was heading off into what's called the Zingu region, which is like the Zingu River. And it's one of the most hostile regions in the Amazon. Maybe even today. Teddy Roosevelt had trouble when he went there. But the Zingu region is where all of the major LIDAR came out within the last 10 years. They found all the ruins of these giant cities. And there's a city called Kiriguyu, I think. And it had an estimated –

of about a million people, which is the size of Rome. And when you look at the LIDAR images, you can't get a perspective of how big they are. I have access to a LIDAR database of the entire United States, and I've mapped all kinds of huge uncharted mound sites in Florida, all of the southeast. I have hundreds of sites marked.

And when you first look at them on a map, you're like, oh, okay. Like maybe that looks like it's 50 feet long or something. No, they'll be like 300 yards long, like these giant raised platforms in the middle of the forest here in the U.S. And if I had access to LIDAR data like that where I could measure it down on the Amazon, some of these things are miles long. Like raised platforms are a mile long. And they have highways. Wow.

Maybe we should pull up just an image of a LIDAR scan from the Amazon. But you'll see this central city area. You'll see step pyramids and raised platforms. Maybe this is where people lived or maybe this is where the market was. And there will be a road that cuts straight through it. And you can see the road just goes off in the distance for miles and miles and miles. And so what they would do...

Here we go. Yeah, this is... So this is one of these sites in... This is one of these sites. I believe this is in Brazil or maybe it's in northeast Bolivia. And is all that area covered completely with jungle right now? Completely covered in jungle, yeah. So if you went out there... You wouldn't see any of this. You may not realize that you were standing on a mound. Like, you really got to train your eyes. You know, I put out this...

I filmed this little series about a year and a half ago called Jungle of Stone where I was going through the jungles in Central America and we charted this city that had 16 pyramids in it. We were there all day long and we charted 16 pyramids. And when I put it out, I got all these comments that were like, you're not doing anything but walking on a bunch of hills because it's so hard to see it. The jungle just claims everything back. So it takes –

You really have to sit with seeing these things in person for a while before you start recognizing, oh, that is a mound or that is a pyramid. That is a structure under the jungle. And so Percy Fawcett, where that LIDAR came out, is one of the places that he told his wife. He didn't share this publicly where he thought that the city was, but it's like bang on. He was exactly correct about where he thought a city would be. And we don't know if he reached it or not. It's so interesting because how long has LIDAR been around for?

I don't know. And how long has it been used? I mean, think about for how long people had no idea that this existed because it was completely covered with jungle. They just assumed that if there was evidence of a civilization, it would be pretty obvious. Yeah, yeah. But it's not. And it makes me wonder, like, as technology increases in its potential, like, what other new technologies will be discovered? Yeah.

That will allow you to, instead of having this ambiguous view of under the pyramids, have a crystal clear, accurate dimension by dimension, almost like a 3D map. This century for sure. This century is going to be insane.

It's going to be insane. Like you're going to have everyone scanning everything. All of the Amazon will be mapped with LIDAR by the end of the century. All of the Sahara is going to be mapped with LIDAR by the end of the century. The Sahara is a big one. Yeah, yeah. Well, those are my two big things. Like when we talk about Atlantis and we talk about lost civilizations, I mean my thing is the Sahara.

and the Sahara and the Amazon. Both of these things existed pre-Ice Age, especially if we're talking about pre-Ice Age civilization. The Sahara is an oasis, a

10,000 plus years ago. It's an oasis. You have, what, two or three of the world's largest lake systems on there. You have rivers everywhere. You know, it would have been like a beautiful place to live. Abundant resources. So there's no worry about food and shelter. You have plenty of time to figure things out, which is the thing that has always made sense to me. If you know the history of the Nile Valley and where Egypt was, like,

That was a wonderful place to live to try to figure things out, right? Because you have so much food. And once you have so much food and you're kind of separated from everybody, it's really tough to get to you. So, like, they lived unchallenged in that civilization for thousands of years. Well, yeah, that's amazing. And, you know, whenever I...

You know, so so growing up, I mean, gosh, I read Fingerprints of the Gods when I was 16. I remember like sitting on the couch after school and reading it. And my dad comes up to me like, that's a big book. And I go, I know it's like I'm reading a textbook for fun, you know, and it was it was it was dense reading for me as a 16 year old. And so, you know, I was so inspired by by Graham. And then I went off and like got.

traditionally educated. And so I kind of have both of these perspectives and I'm often shocked and disappointed at how other professional archaeologists and anthropologists explain

popular mysteries, you know, like there was an Egyptologist on another popular podcast and the podcast host asked him to properly explain the mystery around the pyramid. And it was just so subpar I was shocked. I was like, I'm not even an Egyptologist. I know how to explain these things. And I felt the same way about Zahi. Maybe there's some kind of language barrier there, but it was also like

He didn't want to explain these things on a basic level. But one of the things that I never see talked about is the concentration of energy along the Nile Valley. Like, okay, so, you know, if I had to drop a pin anywhere on the earth where I think Atlantis would be, I would probably put it like in the Sahara somewhere, you know, along one of these major lakes where there's a lot of people living at one time. And then later on, as the Sahara dries up, you know,

say beginning around like 800 – I'm sorry, 8,000 BC, it starts rapidly drying up. It's probably a little bit before that. And then by about 4,000 BC, it's completely dry. So your Saharans only have a few places that they can go. They can go to the Mediterranean coast. They can go to the Atlantic coast. They can go down kind of into the Congo and in the savannas. Or they can go to this fertile valley oasis where it's like –

500 yards on each side where it's just completely lush tropical oasis. And so some people went there.

And so you have this hyper concentration of energy and all these people living somewhere together for what we know is the first time in history. Like we can verify it, I guess, if that makes sense. And so rather than being able to have these huge pieces of property where they can all live separated from each other, kind of like in the Sahara, you have all this space and so luxurious. Now you have to live on top of each other and you have to build up these cities. You're like building cities.

And so all that energy compacted into one place in this fertile oasis is either destined to completely crumble and fall apart or it's New York City. It's this thin strip of highly concentrated, genius, hardworking people figuring out how to extrapolate the most out of their natural world and create some of the greatest things the world has ever seen.

Just like New York City, we did it, you know? And I've never seen any Egyptologist explain things that way. I think that's a good explanation at least. And I'm open to things in Egypt being much older. Like the Sphinx is definitely older than the pyramids. But I'm just always disappointed at like the very low level with which –

archaeologists and anthropologists will come in and try to explain things to a popular audience. And it's kind of like you were asking, okay, but how do you know that? Like, explain that to me in a way that I can understand how do you know this? And there's never a proper explanation. And I don't know what that is. It's like they...

strongly dislike the fact that there's mystery out there and that there are other people who are attempting to answer the mystery that are not part of the good boys club you know so they have this exactly so they have this knee-jerk reaction to it all they hate all of it they don't want to be a part of all of it and that's not gonna work going forward like you know not to be political but this

but this recent election showed that, uh, you're going to have to appeal to the popular audience in the future. Everyone is, you know? Yeah. And especially when there's these forums now like YouTube where someone like you can put up videos explaining things or Jimmy Corsetti or Graham Hancock, like the,

The access to people to share fascinating ideas, it's not limited to universities anymore. And I think that drives them crazy because they spent so much time being in control. And then all of a sudden it's just like – and then through a lot of these appearances like Flint Dibble and Zahi, their credibility erodes publicly in front of everyone's eyes. And then –

You know, there's people that are going to support both of them on either side. And who knows how much of it is even real? Because now we have AI bots that get turned loose by whether it's universities like the University of Zurich that just got in trouble for running that experiment with social media, which is really wild. Yeah. So we don't even know like...

how much of it is organic until you see something like voting. And then you go, oh, this is how people really feel. But how much of that has even been influenced by all these AI campaigns? But what we do know is that human arrogance has always been a real problem. And the same thing that Percy Foster was probably dealing with, or Percy Foster rather, was probably dealing with when he was, you know, the

the people back home that thought these people were primitive. Yeah. It's like this arrogance that human beings... Looking down their nose at everybody else. People love to be experts. They love to be experts and they love to... And they also equate their own self-worth with being accurate about information that you really can't be accurate about. Exactly. Instead of just being humble but yet knowledgeable. Yeah. Which is a great position. And when you talk to someone and they're humble and knowledgeable, that's a...

Those are my favorite conversations because they'll tell you what they know and what they don't know, and this is why. Archaeologists are not doing that, which is why they're rejecting people like Graham Hancock. What they should be doing is embracing the work that he's doing because...

Because he's self-funded and because he's just selling books and doing his thing and appearing on podcasts and developing this audience, he's allowed to do all these fantastic voyages. Like he's in Iraq right now, like studying the ancient Sumerian civilization with the remnants of it. Well, there's two things I'll say there. You know, kind of like I guess a running theme of this is we're about to enter into like a

archaeological Wild West in a way. You know, I think that, you know, Jimmy getting involved with Gobekli Tepe and the trees that were there, having the trees, the orchards planted over the sites. And they're removing them now. Yeah. Because of him. And it's just proof that a guy, like, I started watching Jimmy 2018. I mean, gosh, was I...

I just graduated from high school. And so he was kind of – like inspired me to be like – he was this young charismatic guy that could go online and research topics and enthusiastically present these topics. And he was effective at doing it and inspired me for a long time. And lo and behold, I guess what, six, seven years later, he's still at it. And he's actually –

Not just inspired people to be interested in the ancient world but had an actual effect on something on the opposite side of the planet. Like when all this happened, I was like – I was like, yeah, I mean I get the concern but I don't think the Turkish government cares what any of us over here in the US think.

sure enough, they removed the trees. And then there's kind of like the backpedaling of, of, oh, well, it was always in the plan to remove the trees. But I think it's, I think, you know, people might disagree with Jimmy's approach, whatever, but, um, but it's, you can't deny the fact that he himself, an independent guy, uh, well,

was able to make so much noise that he affected a government on the opposite side of the planet, you know? And it's, and in a way it's like, it shows me like, oh, you know, these, these expeditions that I'm planning and things that I'm going to go out and survey and document for myself, like these can make, these can make real changes. And these are things I had planned in Florida, here in the, here in the Southeast, in the States, in Central America and in the Amazon. And it's like encouraging, like, wow, I mean, we're really approaching a

when independent people are going to start making real noticeable differences and not just in the digital space that

where people are interested in. Right, but in the physical archaeology world. Exactly, exactly, yeah. Jimmy's so meticulous, too. He's such a good representative because he's really intelligent, really thought-provoking, but also really honest about what he knows and what he doesn't know, and he has counter-arguments to his own points. He'll tell you something, but also it could be this, and this is what we know. And because he's been really careful in...

the way he expresses himself, he's established this community that understands what he does and they trust him and they go, no, no, no. He's going to tell you the truth. He's going to tell you what we know and why we know it. He's not going to make any weird ideological leaps. He's not going to make any weird judgments. He's just going to lay out what is fascinating about these things. And because of that, you

Whether he has a degree or not a degree, that guy's having a massive impact. I mean, I don't know how many... Yeah, nobody can deny that. What does Bright Insights YouTube channel have for subscribers? And by the way, if you haven't watched any of his videos, can't recommend them enough. Love the guy. Love the stuff. 1.7. 1.7. By the way, he's been called a Nazi. Yeah, yeah. I just...

Which is – that's just – that's what they use. These are the terms. He's been called all sorts of terrible things. None of them are true. He's a wonderful guy and just a man who's deeply fascinated with these mysteries. And when he's pointing out the things that we cannot – it's Baalbek and Lebanon, the Trillion – what do they call the Trillion Stones? Trilithon Stones. Trilithon Stones.

Whatever. There's certain things that you can point out that people go, okay, what the fuck? Like he gets to the what the fuck stuff where everybody's like, okay, what else you got? You know, like how come I didn't know this? How come this isn't like something like when you're talking about ancient history, the history of whether it's Lebanon or Egypt. And when they start talking about these things and they lay out the histories of the pharaohs and why aren't you –

talking about the distance they carry these fucking enormous 80 ton rocks through the mountains and how they cut them like why that's the mystery yeah this is the big piece of evidence that these guys

just want to dismiss, oh, it was the national project. You know, like, okay, yeah, but that doesn't say how you did that 5,000 years ago. You need to help me out here. And when these openings exist and guys like Jimmy run through them but meticulously document things and talk about them with humility and talk about them with a general understanding of the absolute undeniable facts, and then it creates...

This enormous audience. And then because of that enormous audience, he has a huge impact on actual archaeology. And that's why they hate him. It's just because he's doing their job better than they're doing their job because he's not trapped. He's not stuck in this compartmentalized world.

ideological position of working for a university. And he doesn't have to worry about funding and he doesn't have to worry about, you know, being chastised by his peers because they're all a bunch of bitches. He doesn't have to worry about that. So he's free. And there's a bunch of those guys that are emerging now and guys like yourself. And I think that

That's really important because the gatekeepers have been wrong every step of the way with almost everything, whether it's medical science, whether it's health and nutrition, whatever it is. They've been wrong every damn step of the way. So maybe open it up. Just like the internet opened up information to everybody, we need to open up the exploration of information to everybody and not have it contained with a few people that have degrees from places that we know are ideologically captured.

We can see how they behave. We can see the things they say and the way they do things and the way they act and even the way they affect enrollment.

Based on race and gender and sexual preference, like you guys are fucking crazy. This is not how you're supposed to handle knowledge and information. This is a dumb approach. And we see that through basically every place where there's a few group of people, this isolated, insulated group of people that has the ultimate interest.

influence over whatever particular field of study is their specialty. It's just a danger that the human ego and the human mind fall prey to almost every single time. The internet, what it's done is it's like this great equalizer. And it's just... It is. It has allowed people to have these... And you hear a lot of people saying, you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't be doing this. Don't do your own research. And don't like...

Those are stupid sayings. Like, you can't think like that. There's going to be people that say things that are absolutely ludicrous, and you have to be able to listen to them and then listen to people that are more intelligent and more rational and also objective and go, that guy is – that's what I'm interested in. I'm interested in this guy. I know he's not going to lie.

You know and there's too many instances of Archaeologists just lying lying and attacking each other when one of them like clothes first like that. Yeah. Yeah Well attacking each other this episode is brought to you by manscaped Father's Day is right around the corner and when you're a dad time is precious you

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I guess being early on in my career, I'm passionate about so many different things, and I'm the kind of person that's like, oh, I'm passionate about this? This is what I'm going to do. And so I applied to the University of Athens in Greece, and I was really into the classics, and I was going to go for that. And then I just had this – let's just say I was in the jungle, and I had a mind-opening experience, and I was reminded of the fact that my purpose here, the reason I started doing all this was –

continuing kind of like my family's legacy. And I'm interested in a lot of different things. And I'm not going to specialize. I'm not going to like hunker down in this academic path or whatever. And so I just decided I'm not going to go through with this. So I start publishing content in my research on the Americas again. And the Americas are very mysterious. It's, I mean,

very comparable to Egypt. It was just the amount of questions that haven't been answered is insane. And the Olmec world is fascinating. And so, you know, there's...

You know, Graham in Fingerprints of the Gods, he talks about how the Olmecs, he thought that they may have like African features. And of course, that was 1995. And so, I don't know, 2015, you guys are talking and he's like, well, you know, I published that then. But DNA research has come out that says that these people don't have African DNA in them and that maybe this is Polynesian. Maybe this is Australasian people intermixing and that's why they have this unique look, whatever. Yeah.

But in the Olmec world, there's this monument that is actually called El Negro. And you look at it and it's not an Olmec. It is an African man. And so I post about this on my ex-account and I just kind of like list everything I've seen in the Olmec world. And I'm like, you know, this is really fascinating. Maybe this is evidence of Africans who were in the Olmec world. And I hadn't seen this monument before I saw it in person.

Because you go in the Olmec realm or the region in Mexico, and you go to these museums and you look at the log or the ledger that people have been on, and nobody has visited this museum in the last four months. And before that, it was six months before that. And these monuments just kind of sit underneath these metal roofs to protect them from the rain. It's like this –

just this completely lost civilization. Is there an image of this that's available online? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go. There we go. So if you pull up an Olmec head, you'll see that these guys are very different looking. And especially if you can get... Yeah, yeah, there we go. Um...

Look at, okay, so that's a regular Olmec head. So you can see that these are two different races of people. You know, the Olmecs have very soft features, round faces, big eyes, big lips, kind of big noses. They have very soft features. And this El Negro monument has these high cheekbones, this defined jawline, this intense kind of- But isn't there a lot of variety just in, like, let's just say Italians? Yes.

There's a lot of variety. So couldn't this just be someone who's on a spectrum of features? I mean, I don't think it's that much different than the Olmecs. You don't think so? No, when I'm looking at it, I could imagine. Like I said, just my nationality, Italian. So there's Italians with very thin faces and there's these big thick faces.

ones and like people vary quite a bit. There's enough similarities that I could say, oh, those could be the same people. Well, the only counter I give to that is when you visit the Olmec realm, you see a lot more than just the heads. You see a lot of Olmec faces, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, maybe well over a hundred. And when you've seen them all and you kind of get a gist of like,

the way they generally look, this guy will really stand out. Like I took a group of students there and we all, as soon as we all came in and saw it, based on everything we'd been seeing for the past week, it immediately stood out to us. Well, certainly the thick brow is unique to all the Olmec wearing helmets. And that hair as well. It's kind of that curly hair. Or at least it looks like it to me. And so anyways, you know, he could be Olmec.

I don't, you know, my identity is not tied up in what I think this is or is not. Also, Olmec could be African, like very, very clearly. That one on the left easily could be an African man. Which one? This guy right here? This one, the one next to the white one to the left of that. Yeah, right there. Easily could be an African man. It certainly does look that way. But I was on a plane to Mexico once.

couple months ago and I was going into the Olmec realm and I looked I was like I wanted to take a picture of this guy and looked to the left of me and he was an Olmec man sitting next to me and he was he was you know he looked like he didn't look like any Mexican I've ever seen there's something there with the DNA of the Olmec people that is definitely connected with the

Something else that that you don't see if you go to the Maya realm that you don't see if you go to like Mexico City They have something in their DNA. They have this very specific look about them I don't know exactly what it is But I'm like looking and I'm like this old man guy next to me so fascinating because it clearly could have been African explorers What made it? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what um, could we look up

Oh, gosh. Look up the Traveler Olmec monument, if you would please, Jamie. It's the Traveler. I want to call him – I think he's Monument 13. There's another one called Monument 19 that we should look at. But he's this man that's very clearly not – there we go. Top left, the one that's on Reddit. In fact, this might be my post on Reddit. Yes, yes, sir.

So this guy right here. All right. So this is really, really fascinating. So let's diagnose this. All right. So flags. Flags are invented as very unknown fact.

Flags are invented, or the first place that we have evidence for it is along the Nile Valley on these pre-dynastic pots, which they're not the stone vases, but just like clay pottery. They would make little paintings on them. And people have these riverboats that have these flags on them. And the flags would say what city you had come from or what village you had come from. And so flags are an old world thing. We don't have any evidence of flags in the New World.

All right, he's also wearing a turban. He's got this big turban that's draping off the back of his head, and he very clearly has this distinct beard that's popping out. Now, Native Americans...

Sometimes they can, you know, they're Asiatic. They have Asian DNA. And Asians don't really grow typically. Sometimes they'll grow the little like stash and a little bit of a beard here, but they don't have that big thick beard that you would see, you know, like in Europe or along the Mediterranean in the Middle East. And so this guy has this big thick beard, and then he's got boots on his feet as well. And we think that these glyphs that you see to his left and right,

These are really, really early Olmec glyphs, and they interpret that foot to the left as saying that he came from somewhere. He was a traveler. And so the thought here is – so this is around 900 B.C., give or take a little bit. They don't really – they really have no idea when these are made. Like you go to all the monuments, and it says made somewhere between 1500 B.C. and 400 B.C. And

They'll say 1500 BC and 400 BC. And so they really are uncertain about how old a lot of these monuments are. Make it big again, Jamie, please. But if we shoot for dead center 900 BC, the Phoenicians out of the Mediterranean are launching these sailing expeditions around the coast of Africa. These are the ancient world's greatest sailors that we know of. And so there are...

There were like experimental, archaeological or scientific, I don't know, expeditions done that show if you would send one of these early Iron Age boats or if you send any ship to

out of the gates of Hercules or the Strait of Gibraltar, and you send it out into the Atlantic, and it drifts just a little bit too far without turning south along the African coast, it will be carried by a current across the Atlantic Ocean down into the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and straight into the Gulf of Mexico. And if that had happened, if people who had looked like they're in the old world like this guy, if that had happened...

Somebody from the Old World, the largest civilization at the time, the empire in this area would have been the Olmecs. And the reason I feel so strongly about that is because we do not have flags, turbans, or boots in the ancient Americas. This guy looks nothing like a Native American. And the flag, turban, and boots are all Old World features. You know what's fascinating to me too? The image on the lower right of the bird's head looks very similar to the carvings on Gobekli Tepe.

Doesn't it? Yes. Doesn't it? Very. The curve of the beak, that's not how birds' beaks look. That's a very distinct style of artwork. Well, and it's- If you can find the images of the birds from Gobekli Tepe. It's this raised relief art style. So people talk about it a lot with Gobekli Tepe. I mean, think about this. This is 11,600 years ago, and you have-

You have artisans and stonemasons who have been practicing for so long that now they're able to take a blank piece of stone and carve the face off to reveal the artwork from underneath it. Not carve the artwork into the stone, but carve the stone away and reveal this sculpture from underneath. How similar does that look? It's bizarre, right? Real similar. And so it's the exact same kind of...

art style that you see in the Olmec realm. Exactly. The 3D stone carvings. Instead of carving it directly into the stone, carve the stone around it. They're both doing the same thing. It takes a lot of time. I mean, how... A lot more effort. Could you imagine? Weird. Weird stuff.

It's also like the idea that this is documenting time, that, you know, the handbags or whatever those things are, what it actually is, is the sun going over the earth. You know, I have – I'm writing a paper about this, but this might be a good place to talk about it. So, you know, the handbag mystery is very fascinating. We have them in Assyria. We have them –

Mesopotamia. As far as I know, I don't think one's been found in Egypt. You can see them on the top of those T-pillars in Gobekli Tepe. And there's one in the Olmec realm. Are you familiar with this? No. Monument 19, if we can look that up. I mean, dude, I think it's the coolest handbag. And when I saw it in person, I, like, jumped. Yeah.

I've been waiting years to see it. That's crazy. It's the same thing? Olmec Monument 19. So this guy, he's wrapped in, he's sitting in Quetzalcoatl. Could you do the one at the top left where we get the full picture? There we go. So this stone is probably about this big.

It's probably about this big, and it sits on a table like this. So he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl. And so he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, and he's holding this handbag. And I'm not sure... So he has this... And if you see, he has a feathered serpent mask around his head as well. I'm not sure what exactly is above him. Well, there are actually two...

It's really hard to make it out. But what's above him, that little box-looking thing, is some kind of box that's being held up by two birds on each end. But the important thing here is the fact that this is the first depiction of the feathered serpent in all of Mesoamerica that we know of. And it might be the oldest handbag known as far as what we have official dates for.

And so the idea here is that he's some kind of sacred shaman, bringer of enlightenment, bringer of knowledge, something like that. And so I had been on the hunt.

for another handbag. Everywhere I go, I'm always looking for a handbag. I was in Cambodia a couple weeks ago. I'm going around the temples of Angkor Wat and there's hieroglyphs and carvings all over the walls. I'm looking for a handbag. I can't find one. But when I was in Central Mexico, I was at a site called Kakashla and I found...

another handbag person. I've never like officially published it. It's on my X. If you'd want to look it up, what is the timeline for that one? They don't really know. When you look at the monument, it says, uh, it says anywhere from 1400 BC to 400 BC. That's just what they think. I mean, the Olmec, the Olmec realm is so uncertain. And, um,

And we don't have hard dates for almost, for almost anything. They appear on the historical line on this historical timeline is a fully fledged civilization capable of creating what you're seeing from the very beginning. Just like so many civilizations. It's like, as soon as they arrive on, you know, as soon as they arrive in the world, they're doing everything to the fullest capacity. And, uh,

We don't have any evidence in the Olmec realm of them working their way towards being able to do things like this. It's just from the very beginning they're able to make monuments like this, move these 50-ton Olmec heads. The largest head is – you'll find this interesting. So –

There was a nautical engineer that MEC, which is an organization I'm with. It's the Maya Exploration Center. It's run by Dr. Ed Barnhart. I'm a member of it. And one of the guys that worked with us traveled into the Olmec realm. He's a nautical engineer. He's fascinated with...

He's fascinated with how were the Olmecs moving these huge heads up and down these rivers. So they live in like the rivers, swamps. They have to cross some mountain ranges. How are you getting these heads 90 miles away from the Sierra de la Tuxla volcanic belt? That's where they're pulling the basalt from because we found unfinished heads like at the base of these big basalt quarries. And they're transporting them 90 kilometers away through, you know, like I was saying, rivers and valleys. 90 miles or kilometers? 90 miles.

I think it's kilometers. It's kilometers as the crow flies, I'm pretty sure. And so much further when you're actually dealing with the complications of the terrain. And so he was fascinated, like, okay,

How do they get them to the river? And then how do they get them on the boat? And when it's on the boat, how exactly does this work if they're transporting it by boat? And kind of the same mystery in Egypt too, right? Like how do the nuances of these things work? So he devised this algorithm or whatever where you could put in the hypothetical size of your Olmec raft and put in the hypothetical size of an Olmec head into this database or whatever. And

When you made a raft that was too big to go down the narrow stretches of the Coetzcalcos River, which is like the Olmec's Nile River, when the raft was too big and too wide to actually go down the river and you put a five-ton Olmec head on it, it would sink that raft. But the smallest Olmec head is six tons, and the largest one is 52 tons. So how are they –

How are they doing it? And this is something that like all archaeologists have quietly known, this idea of they're just being transported on these simple balsa rafts must be wrong. It's unexplained. How are these things being done? And I just find this realm really fascinating. Wow.

And do they even know what language they spoke? No, we don't know what language they spoke. We don't even know what they called themselves. The only reason we call them the Olmecs is because Cortes, 1519 to 1521, he's moving through Mexico to conquer Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. During this time, you have these Spanish chroniclers that are taking in information, taking in information but not at the rate that everything's being destroyed. All these people are dying from this disease and influenza.

And there's a record of what the people who lived in the Olmec region are called at that time in 1520, let's say.

And the Aztecs called them the Olmecs in their language Nahuatl. And those Olmec – the name means the rubber people or the people of the land of rubber. They produced rubber, and that's how the Olmecs were so rich so early on in time. But these were not – the people living in 1519 are not the Olmecs. There has already – the Olmecs have fallen, and there are other cultures that have risen and fallen in this same region as well. The Olmecs are far, far, far, far into the distant past.

Whoa.

Well, you know, when the Aztecs arrived in Mexico, Teotihuacan had been abandoned for almost a thousand years, we think. So when they arrived, Teotihuacan was already gone. We don't even know the name of Teotihuacan. We don't know the name of the people. We don't know the name of the city. We know their relationship with other people around them, like the Maya were at war with Teotihuacan. But the civilization had already fallen. So when the Aztecs arrived, the Olmecs had been gone for decades.

almost 2,000 years at least the Olmecs had already been gone Teotihuacan had been gone for a thousand years the Maya had already collapsed the Maya collapsed long before the Spanish got there and

And so it's just, again, like the Americas are just so mysterious and there's so much to know there. And so kind of getting back to what I was saying is when I talk about the mysteries of the Americas, I immediately get accosted by other of my quote-unquote colleagues. I don't have any colleagues in the academic realm, but other academics who will like immediately jump in my comment section on X or whatever and they'll reprimand me and they'll be like, oh, so back to the pseudo-archaeology, is it?

And I'm like, so I can't talk about anything that's fascinating. I need to talk about things that are boring so you don't get upset with me. And now it's just like the popular audience has completely had enough of it and I'll have like 15 people jump in and –

Yeah, I've seen that. Defend me. It's fun to watch. Yeah, and they'll be like, okay, this is a perfect representation of what you guys do. I stepped just slightly out of this line of what you think is appropriate for me. And I'm talking about things that are interesting that inspire people to be interested in the ancient world to go see these sites. Like these people, they don't like you. They don't like the people that you have on. But how many people do you think you've sent to Egypt?

You know, like you had a significant impact. This show had a significant impact on me being interested in the ancient world. And I have traveled all over the world, uh,

you know, because largely, you know, some of the show inspired me to do that. And, and I'm probably one of the few people that found you because of Graham Hancock. Yeah, rather than the other way around. And, and so, you know, I've traveled all over the world. And then what I have done is inspired other people to travel around the world. So, you know, how many of these archaeologists that are keyboard warriors hiding, hiding behind, you know, a desk or whatever,

How many of these people are inspiring people to travel around the world? And, you know, it's just it's just again, we're about to reach this like archaeological Wild West where I don't really know what's going to happen in the future. We all know Americans are still recovering from years of surging prices. Now, some in Congress want to make cuts to Medicaid, a program that provides critical health care to 72 million struggling Americans.

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freshly made food a try. You can get 50% off your first box of food plus free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com slash Rogan. Tap the banner or visit this episode's page to learn more. Offer available for new customers only. You're always going to have people that are threatened by an emerging new thing and they're going to attack it. Like, you know,

Famously in this world, Howard Stern used to attack podcasts as being useless. Oh, really? Like, why are you wasting your time? Get a radio show. Figure out how to do it. This is the beginning, the early days. Obviously, you can't do that anymore. But I think the same thing is happening with archaeologists because –

Flint Dibble's own university that has an archaeology program. They're cutting the archaeology program. I saw that. Yeah, which is – this is why. You're in this survival mode, this famine mode. It's too bad. It's terrible. But famine thinking is always very dangerous. You see it with people that don't want other people to be successful.

It exists in the comedy world. There's famine thinking. When other people start doing better, they start attacking those people. They never attack people that aren't doing as well as them. It's just a natural human instinct, unfortunately. And it's a natural human instinct from people with poor character. And I think that these academic institutes, they reinforce poor character and they actually encourage it. Poor character and the – this – like –

labeling people in the worst possible light in order to make your point, which is like ad hominem attacks are always a sign that your argument sucks. Everybody knows that. If you really understand debating and you really understand like the actual impact that these kind of conversations have on people, the objective person on the outside looking at it, they see someone attacking someone, calling them all these names, unfounded. And you go, oh, that guy's argument probably sucks. Like instantaneously. So they're destroying themselves while they're doing this. Yeah.

But this is, you'll see this in every walk of life. You'll see this in everything. It's just a human thing when they don't want to work as hard as other people or they don't have the young fire like you have. Like there's a thing that people have when they're very curious and young and they don't have

maybe a lot of responsibilities or bills or problems and they can just they can devote their energy to this pursuit that terrifies people that have been kind of like half-assing it for a long time half-assing it and hiding behind these you know certificates on their wall that show that they're the these are the gatekeepers of information yeah yeah it's like

It's not going to work anymore. It doesn't work anymore with podcasts. It's not going to work anymore with your kind of work in archaeology. It's not going to work anymore with UFO disclosure. It's not going to work anymore with any of this stuff. Like people are way more interested in getting to the bottom of things and they don't trust institutions anymore. Yeah, yeah. And –

And the institutions are feeling the pressure of independent media, you know, like going back to the Go Beckley Tepe tree situation. It'll be really interesting to see, you know, like Jimmy's in an interesting position where maybe there's a way that like

the relationship between independent people and the popular enthusiastic audience and, you know, the archaeological departments in Turkey can have a better relationship because of these things in the future. You know how that would work? People like you become the head of an archaeology department. This is really the only way it's going to work. It's almost like these institutions have to feel so much pressure and so much disgust from the general public that

they start incorporating new people into it. You know, sort of like CNN is trying to hire objective journalists now. Oh, yeah. We got to get rid of Don Lemon and Brian Stelter. Oh, actually, he's back. So they try to course correct because that's the only way to survive because it's not working. What you're doing is not working. From what I can see...

in the limited amount that I see in this, this is the hard part is, is sort of, we get a skewed view into the archeological world or the academic world. And sometimes I don't even know what's what, because, because the archeologists that make their opinions known are usually the ones with really bad opinions, you know? And, and then all the other people that are pretty agreeable, they just kind of sit on the sideline. Right. And,

It's hard to know like what are most people – what are most of these future archaeologists – where are they thinking? Where is their mind at? And some of the young people I talk to, they are fascinated by Graham Hancock. They may not agree with – I guess in a way I could say it's –

They may love the first nine episodes of Ancient Apocalypse, but in the 10th episode where Graham gives the end of his thesis, they'll be like, okay, I see the evidence differently, but this is really fascinating. And some of the mysteries you pointed out along the way are valid. Like, you know, the idea of, well, you know, the artifact record of the tools that we have that the Egyptians in the old kingdom were using does not fit the megalithic architecture that they then produced. Okay, what's the answer to this mystery?

Could it have been that we're missing a chapter of history that's before that where a different civilization did it? Or is there, for some reason, there's an artifact record that's lost to us today? And so you have, you know, guys like Graham who will come in and posit, well, there could have been a lost civilization that did this. And then an archaeologist, a young archaeologist may disagree with the lost civilization, but they say, but Graham, you really pointed out the fact and made it well known that, you

You know, the artifact record that we have of how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery. And how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery. This is worth considering. And they like Graham. You know, so a lot of young archaeologists, at least I say a lot, it's really just the ones I talk to in my spare time that are my age. They're fascinated by these ideas. And my hope is maybe these people become leaders someday. But at the same time, like,

Don't know to get ahead in that world man. Yeah, you gotta be a dog the world's poisoned and the people that top are not gonna let go they're gonna stay in there till the you know, Noam Chomsky say, you know, this is I just think it's never gonna end in that way I think it's got to become some sort of an independent branch like, you know a break off. Yeah, you know Zahi is a Zahi is a really good example of what I think goes on in archaeology in Egypt is

You know, you have a lot of different missions from different countries working in Egypt. You have like a German mission. You have the American mission, you know, different people working at different sites. And I can't speak to every country that's working there. You have Australian missions that are working in Egypt, digging at certain sites. But, you know, when I watch Zahi, I'm like, yeah, this is the what you're seeing. This is the attitude that has been at the spear point of Egyptology for decades.

Yeah.

took all this limelight and so you know clearly his identity is tied into what's in his coffee table book and you know for him to act like that's the Bible of Giza is insane I own the book and I and I've read it and it has half of a page about the subterranean chamber in Khufu's pyramid so it's it's you can write a whole book about that what is your I don't mean to interrupt keep going I was just gonna say I was just gonna say man um

When you go to Egypt, there are some things that you're going to be appalled by, by like the modern Egyptian world. I do this series on YouTube called Megaliths You've Never Seen Before. And I'm always trying to like find these weird obscure blocks that you never see on Google. And I'm walking around the side of the Pyramid of Unas.

And there's a turd on the side of the pyramid. A human turd? Yeah. And it's from the guard that's like sitting up on top of the hill, the Egyptian guard looking down at me. And I go around to Land of Kim, who I'm traveling with. Have you heard of him before? No. He's an American that lives in Egypt and he's got his theories on the pyramids. And I'm traveling with him and I was like, there's a turd on the pyramid over there. And he's like, yeah, yeah, you know. And I was like, a tourist? And he goes, no, not tourist. And so, you know,

That that the poop on the pyramid is pretty much like that's kind of my that's kind of my mental that's burned into my brain, my image of of Egyptology in some aspects, like when it's isolated to Egypt. I can't speak for all the other missions that operate in Egypt. But what were you about to say? I don't remember. Where are we at when I was going to interrupt? Oh, this is what I remember. What is your opinion about Christopher Dunn's ideas?

I don't know. I really don't know, man. So for people that don't know, Christopher Dunn has a theory that the Great Pyramid was actually some sort of a power generator. Mm-hmm.

That it produced hydrogen gas. I don't know. I mean, you know, I know that the Egyptians, it's obvious that they have technology that is lost to us today. The drill holes. Yeah, yeah. The way they cut the concrete, or excuse me, the granite. Yeah, yeah.

but I, you know, I, I really don't know as far as the, you know, like the, the manufacturing aspects, the, the engine, I guess, uh, the engineering, the potential, um, usages of these artifacts. It's not really like my specialty. Like I, you know, uh, like these, uh, these vases are, are, well,

Well, this is a heavy one. These vases are fascinating. But I guess my interest would be studying what can we learn about the context around these things and how they existed in their world and how people interacted with them more so than what did these things – what were they actually used for, I guess, and how exactly were they made? And so I just don't know about Chris Dunn's theory. I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is like, well, most of the pyramid is limestone and the interior is granite. I don't know.

I hear people talk about how like the makeup of the granite could be conductive in some way, but man, it's just, it's like the farthest thing from my set of knowledge. Right. It is absolutely fascinating though, because if he's accurate, if he, if he's onto it, like boy, does that change everything? And if those Italian scientists that believe that there's literally a two kilometer deep structure underneath the pyramid, if they're correct, then,

Yeah. The whole thing is like, what are we even talking about now? Yeah, I find that fascinating. I think that the main drama around those scans was, you know, when the scans came out, I don't think anybody was denying what was seen on the scans. I think it was like they...

they had the artistic interpretations of the art concepts that they produced of what they thought was in there. And I think a lot of people were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, that was a little weird. Because even me, I was a little bit like, huh? When they made an art concept of it and they took the king's chamber and the relieving chambers in the Great Pyramid and superimposed it onto the Middle Pyramid. And they, I guess, quintupled it. Like they made five of them. And I was thinking like-

Why do that? Like you're kind of undermining what your scan is when you're creating like a fantasy image because – You're getting ahead of yourself. Yeah, you're getting ahead of yourself because we need to do the whole scan again, but you need to have tests. So like Luis Alvarez, are you familiar with him? He worked on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer. And after the war in the 50s or in the 60s, he got to go to Egypt and he scanned in the Khafre Pyramid. He did the Muon scans.

And when he was in there, they tested it all before. So he was able to scan up through the pyramid, and he got the pinnacle of the pyramid, and he got all four corners. And so they tested it, and they did it several times just to confirm that what they were getting was right. And I think the move-on scan only scanned like 19% of the pyramid. This is the 60s. So...

But they didn't find anything, but the Stanford project came the next decade, and they found subterranean chambers under Coffers Pyramid. There's one like 69 feet down and another one 120 feet down. Huge chambers, bigger than the chambers inside the pyramids. And so, yeah, I mean, I guess we just have to wait and see.

what's going to happen and i know that the scan pyramids guys the ones who found the the void above uh the grand gallery in the great pyramid i know they're interested in this now and they're going to verify whether if this is true or not and uh yeah i'm interested in seeing how this goes this could be a big year man if if they actually drill into that void above the grand gallery that's going to be a big deal what do you think's in that void

I have no idea. It's pretty big, right? It's the size of two semi-trucks? It's the same size or bigger than the Grand Gallery itself. And the Grand Gallery, when you go in, it's a huge building. You're inside a building inside of the pyramid. And...

It's as big or bigger than that. And, you know, the most conservative explanation is that it's an open interior that served as a ramp where they were pulling the blocks up higher up to the top. Nobody really knows exactly how they were built in the in the the angle of that grand gallery is really, really steep. I don't know that you could pull an 80 ton granite block up an angle that steep. It seems like everyone who's an expert in in that area.

you know, who studies independently is like, no, you're never going to pull, never going to pull weight up. Um, uh, to be honest, I have no idea. You know, I'm,

I was fascinated when I heard an Egyptologist when I was in Egypt in January, and I was asking him, what do you think that they're going to find in that void? And he was telling me, I think that that's where Khufu is buried. And I was like, oh, okay, really? So you actually think that he's still in the pyramid? And he was like, yeah, I think all the rest of it was a decoy. And I think that his son, who's able to continue his legacy, permanently sealed him in that tomb. And I was like, what?

like that's that's fascinating and and I said I said you know there's other voids that they found - what do you think of those and so we're standing on this felucca at 1:00 a.m. on the Nile and we're just you know shooting the shit and he was like he's like I have something to show you and he pulls out his phone he was like I cannot send to you but I will show you for one second he showed me a photo of the inside of a chamber that I've never I hadn't seen before and it hasn't been published yet I

I'll let you know when it comes out. But it's burned into my mind. It's from the floor shooting across the room. All you can see is two walls meeting each other and a roof. And I said, that's in the Great Pyramid? And he was like, he wouldn't share it with me. I didn't want to press him too much. That was Stola's phone. Give me that phone, motherfucker. Shut up. You can't keep this.

Fuck out of here. Well, you know, man, that's happening all over the world. Like this delay of information is all over the world. Do you remember the tunnels that came out or the – maybe it's in November, the headlines that – no.

Yeah, it was in November. The headlines that came out about the tunnels that were found under Cusco in Peru that connect to Sacsayhuaman and they go underneath the Coricancha. They knew about that a long time ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's documented. In the fall of last year, I made friends with the head archaeologist at that site. And one early morning at like 4 a.m., he took me down inside part of the tunnels.

And yeah, I was in there before it all came out. And he took me into – so all these archaeologists, they like live on site. And these are all Inca people. So they believe that they're studying their ancestral heritage. These are really good people.

people and i'm in their you know shoddy little home that's on the archaeological site i mean they probably make no money and but they're just they're just so passionate about this and they feel like they're doing something that's like one of the most important things anybody in the world is doing and uh have you been to peru no when you go to cusco man the sacred valley it's it has something there that not even egypt has i don't know how to explain it really it's um

It's a sacred place. The Sacred Valley is exactly right. It's a magical kind of place. Machu Picchu, you should book two days when you go because you're going to get rained on on one of the days. But you're out there on this 7,800-foot mountain.

mountaintop and it's so steep you cannot see the bottom when you're looking over the side of the city and you're just in this sacred place in the middle of the Amazon up in the mountains and it's just a different place, man. It has a type of charm that not even Egypt has. Egypt, you're going to be blown away by the structures. You're going to be blown away by the pyramids and the temples. But this is something else. It has a...

It has an otherworldly, like you feel like you're on some kind of like star Wars planet when you're there. It's fascinating because of the environment. Yeah. It's like the environment. Um, you know, I, I wondered if it was when you're in Cusco, you're at 11,500 foot elevation. And I wondered if I was like missing oxygen to my brain and I was like, Whoa, this place is awesome. You know, but no, it really is amazing. And, uh, the people are so nice and, um,

So anyways, it was a trip. So what was that? Uh, uh,

I think it was very similar to Alexandria's library. I think it was a place of study where people are studying the stars. Archaeoastronomy is like the next frontier of archaeology. It's the way that ancient people are interacting with the night sky and what they know about the cosmos. You know, the Maya were calculating like millions of years into the future and millions of years into the past. And they had this numerology system that's just –

But anyways, so I'm at Sacs de Beaumont and they take me into this back room

they show me all these bodies that they pull I probably shouldn't be saying this but whatever they show me all these bodies that they pulled out of the tunnels and it was these it was these they thought that they were like sacred guardians of whatever is inside of this tunnel and these are all buried at Sacs de Beaumont so there's like skulls everywhere there's boxes and all these bones there was a there was like an obsidian mirror with like a little stick on it bunch of gold artifacts in this room it was just boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes and I

And I haven't seen any of this stuff published yet. So this is how much of a delay there is on archaeology. What is the delay in that stuff? Because it would seem like such an enormous discovery. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. So my brother Shane Gillis, one of the funniest human beings that's ever lived, has a show. It's called Tires and it's returning for season two, launching June 5th on Netflix.

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Yeah, it's what I think it is, is, well, you kind of have I would I would say it's a mix of a lot of different things. Let's say let's say the most non malicious side is that these countries are totally dependent upon tourism and they want to prepare like a media, you know, like a big media buzz to drive tourism. So they want to do it at the right time of the year.

And then it'll inspire people to book their trip down to the Sacred Valley. You know, it's all – it's about – it's a money-making machine, right? It's their biggest draw to come and see this part of the world. That seems so counterintuitive because new discoveries would make people want to visit. Yeah, yeah. They just want to hold it off to like the right part of the year. This is something I've heard in Peru. This is something I've heard in Egypt. You know, the – do you remember –

The tomb of Thutmose II that was just discovered recently. I heard about that. So let me think that that came out two or three months ago. And when I was there in October, I had heard that it was found. So these things are happening way, way in advance. Now, the other side is there's sort of this Zahiwas effect. Like Ed Barnhart, my professor and mentor, he wanted to study...

in Peru, whether or not the Inca or ancient Peruvians are like fusing these andesite stones together. So you've seen how they, how the stones like fit together in the same way that they do at the Valley Temple in Egypt, the red granite. So they're using this gray andesite, which is sometimes the andesite is harder than the granite in Egypt.

And they're like morphing these stones together at impossible angles. I'm sure you've seen the 12-sided stone, and maybe you've seen the scoop marks on the side of the stone where it looks like the outside of the stone was softened at one point, and you could like scrape a piece off. And so it's Dr. Barnhart's idea that somehow –

Well, and it's not without evidence. So in the Chilean desert, the Inca are building upon – the Inca Empire were building upon roads that went all across South America. And these roads weren't initially – the foundations weren't laid by the Inca. They may have been improved by the Inca, but they go back to the Wari Empire, which predates the Inca, and it almost certainly goes back further than this.

The southernmost point of these highways, it goes off into the Chilean desert, into the Atacama Desert, and they just kind of disappear into the desert. And for a long time, it's been a mystery of what the heck are these Peruvians doing there?

down in the Chilean desert. What is it down there? What's a resource that they need? But there are these acid deposits that are down in that desert. And somehow they invented this clay pottery that whatever they used to make it, the acid wouldn't melt through the pottery, so you could carry it.

there's evidence of this at Tiwanaku as well, which I'm sure you've heard of Tiwanaku. There's evidence of this acid at Tiwanaku, and people would talk about how the acid could, like, melt the stones. And sometimes they talk about how, like, bird poop or bird –

I don't even know, like throw up or whatever could melt the stone. And so there's all these, you know, ideas that were these myths about the stones melting. Anyways, Dr. Barnhart's idea was that those roads go down there because they're mining and collecting the acids and they're bringing them back and they're softening the outside of the stone. And rather than carving the stones to fit together, they're setting the stones on top of each other and it's creating its own morph, if that makes sense. The stones are morphing together. And so he...

There's two reasons, but you see them a lot as to why he thinks this. There was an earthquake in 1650 that destroyed the Spanish city that was sitting on top of the Inca city of Cusco. So you have this ancient city that's there and the stones are so massive the Spanish couldn't tear them all down. So they just gave up and they built new buildings over it. In 1650, this

horrific earthquake knocked down the Spanish city and ancient buildings were still there hadn't moved at all in 1950 another earthquake happened knocked down the Spanish city and the ancient city is still standing so now these are preserved as cultural heritage monuments and they don't build over them but they like

like a Starbucks or a KFC or a McDonald's will be built inside of an ancient Inca building. You'll walk in and it's like megalithic stonework inside of KFC. It's amazing. Wow. But it's everywhere. It's the whole city. It's the whole modern city. When you go one day, you just walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. One of the projects we're going to do for the Maya Exploration Center is I'm going to go down to Cusco for a month and I'm going to make...

uh, the world's first map of where all the stones actually are. There, there is a map that tourists get, but it's a shitty map. It's not even accurate. So that's one of my projects is I'm going to map all of these stones and where they are around Cusco. And it'll be like on an app or a website or something where you can find it. Um,

But yeah, it's just – it's incredible. So they preserve the stones. And so when you're walking around, getting back to why – Can we see some images of the stones that would indicate that they possibly were melted? Like what's like the best – Oh, man. How could you search this up? Maybe just look up –

Cusco Cyclopean stones. We may be able to find an image. And I could show you something on my phone. I know I've got it on my phone. Okay. Maybe I could send it to you, but I'll actually send you the photo. Not these. So some of these are from Sacsayhuaman. Okay, so to the top left here. So that's the 12-sided stone.

It's on this building. When you walk around this building, the name is escaping me right now. It's the Palace of Something. When you walk around this building, you're going to see some of the stones where an earthquake has separated. So you have two stones that sit perfectly on top of each other. Well,

And when an earthquake happens, one of these stones will slide back. And when it does, you'll see an angle that ramps up like this up to the exterior. And so what it looks like is the stone is placed on top and it smushed the stone down. Does that make sense? Man, if we searched hard enough, we could find it here. I will send you this photo. I've got it on my phone. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Just that idea is fascinating. And so... It melted into place. Yeah. Oh, okay. So they cut these stones, used acid. This is the theory. Is that it right there? No. No? So they cut these stones, used the acid, and set them in to seal...

so that there's no gap in between the stones. So it's not that they have to carve it perfectly, but rather that the weight of the other stone... They get it roughly the right shape and then lay them down on top of each other. Wow. It's on one of these walls. So that one you have your cursor on, that's fake. I walked up to it and it's hollow. I was tapping on it. It's just a fake wall. I don't know why in Cusco they have some...

Some people will decorate their walls to make them look like those cyclopean walls. You go knock on it and it's like plastic. But there's tons and tons and tons and tons. The majority of the city is just the ancient city. What is this? Inca stone monument irreparably damaged? It's like someone cut out a piece of it. Yeah, somebody went up to it in the middle of the night like a drunk tourist and started hitting it with a hammer, the 12-sided stone, which is like the most sacred stone in Cusco. Oh my god.

People are fucking gross. Yeah, okay, so you see this long, the stone of the 12 angles, that one right there in the middle? That stone is in that alley right there, if you could find it. That's so crazy that there's a building on top of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what's so weird about it. Like, look at this stupid house that's falling apart that's on top of these ancient stones. Yeah.

Yeah, it's crazy, man. It's an amazing place. You'll walk around and just be consistently stunned by the amount of stonework that's there and what they are able to achieve. And this kind of cyclopean stonework where the stones all have these, you know, no two stones are exactly alike. You see that stonework in

in one place in Egypt, which is at the Valley Temple next to the Sphinx. And you don't see that, as far as I know, recreated anywhere else. But in Peru, it's everywhere. So that's kind of a repaired wall. You can see that it fell apart and they put it back up.

up. But these are mortarless buildings. Oh, hey, if you go just one below the one that you're at right now, so this is the Temple of the Moon at Machu Picchu. Look at the size of the stone wall. That's one stone on the lower part of it. And you can see that the size of the stones that are together as earthquakes have rattled the city, the wall still kind of holds together. It bends and holds together completely mortarless. It's just fascinating. And on top of that,

Machu Picchu itself, 60% of the megalithic construction work is in the foundation of Machu Picchu. So it's underneath what you're seeing. And there are areas that are roped off where you can go down like underneath the city, but it's all roped off and I don't know a lot about it. I got a little bit of a photo of where you can go down into these

I think they're like man-made labyrinths that are underneath the city, but there's a lot more there. And so when you're there, you just get this like intrigue. And I was curious how Egypt would stack up because I did Peru last year. And then the day I landed from Peru, I headed off to Egypt for a month. Damn, what a life. You got a great life, dude. That's cool. Yeah, well, thank you. That's really cool. How far is this from Nazca?

Very far. Peru is deceivingly big. Peru is like half the size of the United States. Really? It's really, really big. Wow. Yeah, yeah. I had no idea. Yeah, the Nazca Lines are really, really, really far away. It's very hard to do a – you can't do a tour of like all of Peru. It's too big. It would be like if you were going to go on a United States tour, you would have to pick a place to go because it's just so massive. Yeah.

Um, usually when people like do a tour of Peru, they'll pick like Paracas, Nazca, you know, you pick these, uh, desert coastline areas and you go see that because to get from there to the sacred Valley is quite a journey. Yeah. Yeah. It would take you, it takes like a day and a half of consistently traveling to actually get there. Have you seen the new scans of the Nazca lines where they found new petroglyphs? Yeah. Yeah. The, um,

Man, there's going to be so much like that that's going to be found. People are going to be able to fly these. What is all that stuff? Well, you know, it's amazing. Like how exactly, one, what's the inspiration for making these giant, you know, the sophistication is in the planning and the math behind how exactly you make these things.

how exactly you make these images in the ground that are miles wide and very intricate. Like if you look at the spider, the spider, there's a spider there that's anatomically correct for a local spider that's there. And there's some aspect about the spider and a detail that they incorporate that you would only know if you were like really studying these little creatures and wanted to recreate it on a massive scale. But the legs, man, they're mapping. I mean, look at this.

This is an enormous thing in the ground that if you don't have flight, you're never going to be able to know that you did it, that you did it precisely, right? Or unless you had very meticulous planning and everything. But again, what's the inspiration for this? What's the inspiration? Why would you be doing this? What is this for? Why does it have that one leg that hooks off to the left? I don't know. See that? That one lengthened piece? Very strange. Well, you know, the Nazca, they...

The exact timeline of their civilization is a little bit blurry. But, I mean, they had disappeared more than 1,000 years before the Spanish arrived. Jamie, can I ask you, what is that all about? Why does it have all those additional lines? I don't know. Someone's doing different... I don't know. Is that just art? Yeah, I think they're making it on...

Maybe one of those sand tables or something like that. That would be a cool T-shirt. There's other weird ones, like the one that looks like an astronaut. Yeah, he does. I actually think that's a pulpa line, which is a different culture that does the same thing. If you look up pulpa lines, you may be able to find it. Oh, so there's quite a few of them. Look at that one, the jester one, the one with the antenna on the upper left. Oh, yeah, look at him. No, no, no. Yeah, there it is. Like that one. Where does that come from? I guess you just can't make it that big. Oh.

Make it a little smaller. There you go. What is that? AI. And why does it – What's that? It says AI on covers. Oh, are they AI? Yes. But this is AI. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. This is the AI. Oh, wait. Look at the shark. Look at the shark on there. Isn't that cool? So you have seafaring. Dude. Okay. Do you know of Vanapu in Easter Island?

It's, I think it's called Vanapu. It's this platform building that on Easter Island with all the big heads, that is the exact same architecture as what we're seeing in Peru. These people are traveling out into the Pacific Ocean and back.

It's fascinating, man. Thor Heyerdahl with Contiki. He proved it. There we go. It's fallen apart. It's not the same stone. It's a local volcanic sandstone, I think. I don't think that this is basalt. It might be basalt, but it's a volcanic stone. I'm actually pretty sure it's basalt. It's made out of the same thing of the Easter Island heads. You have this vinapu, but...

Another project that my exploration center is working on later this year is we're going down to make a new updated map, archaeological map of Easter Island, Rapa Nui. And I'm not going, but this is Dr. Barnhart doing it. And there's another site down on the remote end of the island where there's another structure like this that you never see mentioned. And so we're going to document that and put that out.

So there's no doubt that, I mean, these people are incredibly advanced, incredibly connected, incredibly intelligent, and it's just so mysterious. Okay, do you know of the Blythe lines? Have you heard of this? No, no. Blythe, California. There are Nazca lines up there. Really? Yeah, yeah. We should look this up. Where's Blythe?

Oh, I think it's right before you get to Nevada. You're like driving. So if you, if you, uh, you'll pass right by if you're driving from Las Vegas into California, I think. Um, so Blythe lines. Yeah, we should, yeah, we should zoom in from Google earth. This will be cool.

Where is it, Jeremy? It's on the 10. It's on the 10. It's right where my cursor is. Oh, so that's Blythe, California. You might be able to look up Blythe lines. No, I did, but I was trying to show you where it was. Oh, sorry. So these are the lines. Oh, whoa. Yeah, they're huge. Whoa.

So, dude, this is not... What the fuck is that? This is... I mean, to me, it's pretty obvious that there are people who are... And this is... They think that this is younger than the Nazca lines. But even if it is, it's pretty obvious to me that you have traders and you have people who are very capable of traveling all up and down the Americas. It's all interconnected. How many of these lines exist?

It's not really majorly studied, but I think that there's a few of these images that are out there and more that are further off into the desert that some people have... One of them was a monkey. How do they even know what monkeys are? Well, I'm trying to figure out what that means. Well, okay. That's a great question. Were there monkeys in California? No, I doubt it. But there were...

An idea of how this could happen is so at Teotihuacan, like I was talking to you, this is an hour north of Mexico City. There were monkeys that we have found that were in zoos in Teotihuacan, like dead monkeys that are buried. And this species of monkey is only found in the southern Amazon. So it's all the way up in northern Mexico. So all of these things are connected. Okay, another thing.

Jamie, could we look up, please? Just for clarity, that one was a Nazca line. The monkey was not in the California. Oh, okay, okay. That makes sense. It came up just to check. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those monkeys are in Peru. Well, even so, there are Amazonian monkeys that are coming all the way up here. Let's see what the other Blythe lines are. The article starts showing different stuff because it was explaining what they were. So comparisons to Nazca images. They were found in 1932 by a pilot. That's what I was trying to figure out. So that's one of them? It looks like a giraffe.

There's a fence around it. It could be a deer. Yeah, it could be a deer. But are deer out there? Quadruped, it says. Well, there's deer in California for sure. There's probably mule deer in that part of the country. There certainly is in Nevada. Nevada has a big population of deer. Quadruped figure represents horses reintroduced historically sometime after the 1500s. So maybe they don't know when these guys came back. Scroll back up again. Let me see that again. Yeah, they have no idea.

I don't know if that's a horse. Doesn't look like a horse to me. I think you're right. Well, the tail, though, is a lot longer than a deer's. Oh, yeah. A deer, they've got the little tails. That's like a shitty artist horse. I was stumbling on something with the Olmec stuff. I think it was the Olmec. Mm-hmm. There's a bunch of... I see a zoomorphs here. There's a bunch of other weird rocks that had, like...

Anthropomorphized animals playing on top of humans. Okay, do you know about, have you ever heard of were-jaguars? No. Oh, dude. This is like, this is my shit. Okay, so were-jaguars.

It is another piece of evidence of at least – well, the lower part of North America connecting with the Amazon. Oh, dude. This is badass. All right. So the very first – some of the first evidence that we have of people in the Americas. So you think of like – where do you imagine that people migrate into the Americas? Like where do you think we would find the first evidence at? Oh, boy. Yeah.

Well, I would imagine it'd be somewhere where the Olmecs were. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. Or, you know, uh, uh, traditionally, sure, sure. Traditionally people think that maybe you would find it, you know, in Alaska coming in. Um,

you know, people migrating over during or before and after the Ice Age. Sure. Or I'm sorry, during and before the Ice Age. And then some people might think that, you know, you have Polynesians that are skipping across the Pacific that are coming into. But most of the time it's West Coast. You'd find people think you'd find something out there. Some of the oldest evidence that we have

are 30,000-year-old caves on the east side of the Amazon, on the east side, the opposite side of the Americas, as far away as you can possibly get from where people would have traditionally arrived in the Americas. Now, that evidence is constantly changing. There's constantly new things that are being found, like white sands, and there's 150,000-year-old bone tools or chisels that are being found where people were cutting into woolly mammoth bones, crazy stuff. But

But one of these old evidences is people in the Amazon 20,000 to 30,000 years ago on the East Coast in Brazil, on the Atlantic Coast. And they have these – I think it may have been Teddy Roosevelt's granddaughter that found this. She was a South American archaeologist. She was inspired to go to the Amazon. And so –

It's really interesting. In the Olmec realm, there's what's called a were-jaguar. It's just like a werewolf, spelled sort of the same. But you have these two different dichotomies in the Olmec world. You have the Olmec heads, which, by the way, I brought you a head. Ooh, nice. More stuff for this table. Sit right next to hecklefish. So this is made from basalt by the modern Olmec people. Whoa.

That's cool. Yeah, super cool. So these guys... Thank you. These guys, we don't know who they are. We don't know exactly what they represent because they're just...

Guys with normal faces, you know, they're they have all Mac faces, but they're all wearing this helmet What the hell does the helmet mean? It could be two different things It's a signature of their divine like rulership like like we think they might be Kings Somebody who can you know somebody who can commission a monument this big this is a testament to his power or These are revered ballgame players the Mesoamerican ballgame. I'm sure you've dove into this a little bit or it's both that the

you know, the most masculine thing that you can be is a great Mesoamerican ball game player. And that's the king. He wants to see himself out of it. It's the same thing as, uh, Marcus Aurelius son. Um, why am I forgetting his name? Um, the, the really bad emperor. Um, God, I can't remember his name, but anyways, he wanted to be seen like Hercules fighting in the, in the Coliseum. And, um, so we think this might be a kind of similar thing. There's a whole different type of people that are existing in the Olmec realm. Um, we can look up, uh,

Olmec wear Jaguar, please, Jamie. Thank you. And there's a whole different type of person. So here's one image. If you keep scrolling, you'll see images that are carved into... So this is a little bit of a better image right here. But sometimes when they're carved into jade and you can see the light reflecting off of it, you get a better picture.

image of what these things really look like. So wear Jaguar, Olmec, and maybe do Jade. Oh yeah, there we go. Top right,

Yeah, check that guy out. So that's a human. That's not an animal. It is a human who has turned into the essence of a jaguar. And we see this everywhere, all over the Olmec world. But they're never the colossal heads. They're always in jade or they're smaller Olmec monuments. And sometimes the heads are maimed. Like the head is just completely destroyed and there's these jaguar claw heads.

that are carved into an Olmec face, like tearing apart its face, tearing apart the symbol that's on the top of their head. And so a lot of people wondered, like, why are these scratch marks in all of these Olmec monuments?

But all the scratch marks only appear in Olmec monuments that are not the were jaguar. And so what I think, this is a little bit of research that I'm doing, and I'm writing a book on the Olmecs right now, is what I think is there's a feud between the rulers and the shamanic class. And I think that these were jaguar people, these people who are taking some kind of hallucinogen, taking a psychedelic and and.

basically imbuing the essence of a jaguar in some strange, crazy way that we can't explain. These are feuding with each other. And when I'm in Mexico and I'm in these museums where you have these mushroom stone effigies that are all lined up, I'll ask a local archaeologist there. I'll be like, so these mushrooms, do you think that these depict hallucinogens that they may have been taking to get high? Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

No. I'm like, really? You don't... Like, you look at all the crazy shit that ancient Americans are making. If you look at ancient American artwork anywhere, you can tell it's all, like, mind-bending stuff to look at. They're clearly, I think, they're being influenced by plants. Now, this were-jaguar isn't just isolated to the Olmec world. It also pops up at a place called Chavin de Huantar. Have you ever heard of this? No. This is in the Andes. It's one of the oldest cities in the Andes. So before Chavin...

We can follow the DNA evidence of burials. Like you can tell, okay, these people are younger if we carbon date their bodies that are buried underneath these temples and they're related to these people that are older. So you're trying to piece together this DNA web, but it's very, very loose.

So there's a place called – there's a culture called Kerala Supe culture, and they are building pyramids before the old kingdom of Egypt ever even existed. This is 5,500 years ago at least on the coast of Peru, like right on the beach, and there's like 15 huge pyramids out there. But this is a non-Egyptian.

non-artistic culture. So we don't have pottery and we don't have art from them and we don't have stone statues or anything like that. Just these structures. And from what we can tell, they keep getting hit by these like apocalyptic storms. These tropical El Ninos and La Ninas that are just...

destroying their civilization and they're trying to rebuild it again. And eventually they say, you know what, forget this. We're moving up into the Andes. Well, when they move up into the Andes on Chavin de Huantar, they then come in contact with Amazonians. They meet Amazonians for the first time. And all of a sudden these people, they have pottery, they have art, they have gods, they have a pantheon, they have stone statues, and they are were-jaguars. They are these shamanic people. Oh, they're tripping.

Oh, this is from – oh, is this on my – oh, cool. So I posted about this today. So these faces right here, these are on the side of the Temple of Shevin that faces east off into the Amazon. And when you look at Shevin pottery, it's the same as Amazonian pottery in the region. So the people of the Andes, as soon as they interact with the Amazon, they take – they acquire this religion, this culture, this iconography.

They completely change as a people and they start building the first structures that we know of that have interiors. Because before this, these pyramids that were out on the coastline, you're like walking on top of this big stone mound. But at Shevin, it's a huge square style building that has open doors that you can walk in through. And all of this happens as soon as they interact with Amazonians. And so, yeah, it's a huge structure.

And the stones that make up the staircases, oh, my God. Okay, have you seen – the name is escaping me right now, but Wandering Wolf went out there, Michael Collins, and he found – he saw these big trilithon stones that are sitting on the side of the mountain in Peru. Do you remember this? Giant stones. Giant stones.

That white stone is the same white stone that's used in the staircases and on the door jams and the lintels here at Chavin. So you see the open door right there at the bottom? Yeah. So those white stones on the side, those stones may have come from that quarry that he went and visited where those gigantic, you know, trilithon, ballbeck-sized stones are. How far is that? It's really, really far from here. I don't know. That would be something good that I should know. Okay.

So some of it's megalithic, some of it's decent size. It's really that front wall right there with that entrance, the steps going up to it. And then on the inside of the temple, you have the megalithic stonework. And then you have this monolith on the inside. So you see this guy? Look at that. That's a human with jaguar fangs coming out of his mouth.

And all of these tenon heads that are on the side of the temple, they're facing out towards the Amazon. It's telling us that this religion, this idea of these people who are somehow doing these shamanic practices, which I think are so clearly, so obviously is plants like ayahuasca or whatever it is, inducing these people into a state of consciousness where somehow they're taking on the effects of the jaguar. Like you and Paul Rosalie talked about this. And when he was talking about his

his experience with ayahuasca, I believe he said, and maybe it was on this show, that for a moment, like he shrunk down to the size of an atom and he's floating through the Amazon. And then all of a sudden he was looking through like the eyes of a Jaguar for a moment. And this is something that... Constant theme amongst people who've done ayahuasca. Yeah, yeah. So this is something that I think...

I think it's evidence. I mean, we can talk about this forever, but I think there's so much evidence. Oh, isn't this cool? Yeah. Well, there's also evidence that jaguars eat the same plants. Yes. Yeah. Have you seen this on...

What is it? Weird Nature? There's a documentary out there called Weird Nature. Where the jaguar's tripping? Yeah, and it makes it akin to catnip, and it's like the jaguar also has its own catnip. Well, this is why I brought this up. Terrence Mugeta had a very fascinating theory about why ketamine in particular feels like an empty office building.

And his theory, it's like ketamine is like you enter a realm, but there's no one there. And this is, by the way, he's talking about ketamine in like the 80s and 90s. Okay.

His theory is that when you imbibe, when you take a psychedelic medicine, when you take any sort of psychedelic plant, mushroom, whatever it is, you're not just having an experience. You are also interacting with all of the experiences that have never been had with these things.

which is one of the reasons why when people take certain psychedelics, they have very clear Egyptian iconography appears in their trip. And his belief or his theory was that it's far more complex than you're taking a psychedelic drug. You're taking this psychedelic that allows you to interact with all the experiences anyone has ever had with those. Oh, wow. Including jaguars. Yeah.

Now, also, there's always been this conflict between the ruling class and the shamanic rituals. This is the Eleusinian Mysteries. They shut all that stuff down. Absolutely.

Wouldn't it make sense that the claw marks would represent the battle between the shamans and these ruling class? Who, of course, don't want people tripping and opening their mind and questioning authority and trying to restructure everything. It'd be a huge problem if you were like a Zahi Hawass guy trying to keep the lid on everything and just keep control and power and everything.

And then you got all these people that are tripping balls that have completely different ideas that you have to silence that. What's the issue here? The issue is these guys, they get together in a circle and they drink this stuff and they start having these wacky ideas. Let's put a stop to that. Let's put it the same way they did with the Illicidian Mysteries, the same way they've done countless times. Sure.

that were like the whole Santa Claus things where he's coming down the chimney. Why was that? Well, it's because Siberian shamans were ostracized. They were forced to actually not go through the doorways because they had to sneak into people's homes. So they came down chimneys.

This is the theory. Oh, that's fascinating. Which is like, why the fuck would Santa come down that chimney? It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was the idea. Santa's a shaman. Also, Santa, at least in modern depictions, has the exact same coloration as the Amanita muscaria mushroom. Oh, wow. You've never seen the comparison? She's Santa and the mushroom? No, no, no. The fascinating comparison, and this is also hotly debated. They say, no, well, Coca-Cola was the ones that made them red and white, the Santa Clauses. Maybe. Maybe.

But there's old pictures of Christmas images that always include elves wearing

And Amanita muscaria mushrooms. There's old Christmas cards from like the turn of the century. There's old like Merry Christmas. It's fucking mushrooms. There's mushrooms everywhere. So mushrooms have a mycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees, particularly Amanita muscaria. You would find them underneath pine trees the same way you find brightly colored presents under Christmas trees.

In order to dry them, they would pick these mushrooms and hang them in the trees so they would air dry, just like ornaments on a tree. Wow. There's so many parallels. It's really weird. The Santa was a mushroom one is a weird one. It's a really weird one because there's a ton of the, like, why are we so interested in fucking pine trees? Why is it? Well, those trees had this very connected relationship with those mushrooms. Yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, I find that... See, you can find some of the ancient pictures of Christmas, ancient Merry Christmas images. But this is like... Yeah. Look, look at that shaman, that shaman to the left. Go back, scroll back, look out, look at that. Siberian shaman looks exactly like the coloration of an Amanita muscaria. Now go to that Merry Christmas image that you have there right next to your cursor. Look at that, Amanita muscaria. A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Amanita muscaria image. These women with good times Christmas, or these children rather, with good times Christmas. Have you ever tried these mushrooms? Yes. Didn't work. Really? Yeah. That's too bad. I think there's, well, McKenna didn't have a good experience with them either. And there's a lot of thoughts that he had about whether or not they were genetically variable, whether or not they're geographically and even seasonally variable, that you're not dealing with the same mushrooms. Sort of like...

You know, there's different versions. Like...

Obviously manipulated, but there's a very different version of banana that we're enjoying today versus the wild banana. Oh, corn too. Yes. Mays. Oh my gosh. So different. A lot of different plants have similar history. I mean, fungus is a very different thing, right? Because fungus actually breathe air. They're not plants. They're much closer to animals than they are to plants. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, they're real weird. And they're also really weird that they seem to be like the internet for plants.

Like the mycorrhizal relationship and the fact that they have this very bizarre network of mycelium that's under the ground. Like the largest living organism is a mushroom colony that exists, I believe, in the Pacific Northwest. Oh, really? Yeah. See if you can find that. Yeah. So...

Instead of like saying, oh, there's a mushroom that pops out of the ground. No, that's like the fruiting body of the entire thing. And the entire thing is enormous. And it's communicating with plants. It's helping the plants distribute and share resources. It's helping them get information. It's very strange. Paul Stamets is like the best guy to talk to about this stuff. Yeah.

He's a mycologist. He actually gave me that big-ass mushroom at the end of the table. Oh, wow. That's a mushroom. Yeah. It's weird. They're weird. You know, this whole conversation. Here it is. The largest organism on Earth is a fungus. The blue whale is big, but nowhere near as huge as a sprawling fungus in eastern Oregon. Yeah. Holy crap. Yeah. And again, it fucking breathes air.

Could be as ancient as 8,650 years. Yeah.

Good night. Good night. Wild, wild stuff. And, you know, this is what we know about, right? Like, what about, what the fuck is in the Amazon? Oh my God, man. Well, okay. Okay. So two things there, as far as what's in the Amazon. First, think about how, let's just talk about North America above Mesoamerica. So like, let's just, let's just include like the modern day United States. Think about all the tribes that existed here, how complicated these histories are. You know, Squanto is born in the early,

in the early 1600s among these tribes in Massachusetts. And when he comes back, he forms this thing called the Wampanoag Confederation, whatever, whatever. Just in that little area, there's all these different cultures with their own history, their own knowledge and everything. That's one little part of Massachusetts. Now think about the rest of the country and how vast and sprawling and intricate and how deep that history really goes.

And you can just – you could place the United States inside the Amazon. That's how big the Amazon is. And we just refer to natives, tribes who live in the Amazon as Amazonians. But it's so much more complicated than just that. Now, the next thing is this whole conversation about – talking about the were jaguar. I get a lot of flack for this topic because –

You know, you have let's just call it like boomer archaeologists who have this knee jerk reaction to psychedelics and hallucinogens because it's so ingrained in them that like all drugs are bad as if all drugs are the same. You know what I mean? And I'm talking to this. I was in Mexico last year and we were in the Yucatan and I was there with an archaeologist friend.

from the Midwest and he was an archaeoastronomer which is like I was saying earlier it's a guy who studies the way that I think it's like Pueblo ancestral tribes would have interacted with the night sky and studied the night sky and I was like I asked him I said okay so what kind of hallucinogens do you think they would have had and I think he told me like peyote and cannabis and stuff like that

And I was like, okay, so have you ever – like every night we'd get together and we'd all smoke and just talk about ancient history and stuff. You come up with so many interesting ideas and perspectives and points of view when you smoke with like an actual purpose and you're trying to think. I'm sure you know very well what I'm talking about. And so he's sitting around with all of us and he doesn't want – he's not interested. And I'm like, so you've been studying archaeoastronomy for this long.

have you ever tried cannabis or peyote or anything that's up there I think another one called detour have you ever heard of this that one's supposed to be very weird yeah I had terrible experiences with that oh really well maybe it's completely disassociates you he was having a conversation with a guy in a market and he realized in the middle of the conversation the guy thought that they were in his apartment oh yeah like it does weird yeah well it might explain why

Teotihuacan civilization and all their iconography is so terrifying. Like, if you look up the great goddess of Teotihuacan, it's these guys with handbags picking this detour and, like, putting them in their handbags. Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah. Oh, so that's a weird one.

And so their whole civilization is like very dark and scary. But I asked this archaeologist, I said, okay, have you ever gone out and studied the stars from the Native American point of view while you're smoking cannabis or you take peyote? And he's like, oh, no, I wouldn't do that. And I'm like, you have committed your entire life to studying this ancient culture that you know very well was studying the stars and taking hallucinogens. And you, as someone...

Who's supposed to be an expert in this field? You don't want to put yourself in the shoes of these people I was like I was like dude if you laid out at night with all everything you know about the Pueblo ancestral people and you Smoked weed for the first time or you did peyote or something you stayed up and looking at the stars you might have an epiphany about something that you've never realized because your brains just operating in a different way than it normally does and He was very slow to like, you know

to be open to this idea. And, you know, the Zahi thing kind of reminded me of this is like, you know, he has preconceived ideas about his world and his personal beliefs that interact with the archaeology, you know? And so it's really hard for us to study the ancient world from a completely unbiased point of view because you have so many preconceived ideas about your modern world that influence your archaeology. And that's why the widely accepted

That's why there's no widely accepted – or it's not widely accepted among archaeologists that Native Americans were heavily influenced by hallucinogens. I really think it's because so many of these people are older archaeologists that have a knee-jerk reaction to drugs of any kind. And they couldn't possibly fathom the reality that the culture they spent their life studying are all doing hallucinogens all the time. Yeah, unquestionably. Unquestionably.

Unquestionably. It's totally obvious. It's completely obvious. Yeah. But, yeah, it's just... Well, it's also these people that haven't had these experiences, so they don't know what the effects would be. Yeah, yeah. So they're basically just guessing. Yeah. And a lot of it is based on just-say-no propaganda from the fucking 80s. It really is, man. I was telling my wife this, like...

I didn't, you know, I don't smoke a lot. When I do, I'm like out in Big Bend, you know, out looking at the stars and stuff. And every time I smoke, it's like some kind of purpose. Like, you know, I'm in like some kind of sacred place and I don't do anything harder than just smoke cannabis. But whenever I do, I have some kind of realization about myself personally. You know, like the first time, uh,

I don't know, six or seven years ago when I first smoked, I was laying up looking at the night sky and we had taken some photos out in the desert and I was looking at myself and I put on a little bit of weight. And as I was looking at myself, I had disassociated. And I was like, this person does not represent the brain that's in my mind. I need to lose some damn weight. You know, I had this realization about myself. The last time I was out, I was out in Big Bend laying under the stars in the middle of the desert. And I had this like realization that

And all the time I spend traveling and I get to see so many amazing ancient sites and meet so many cool people. And I'm just constantly go, go, go, go, go, go. Like I'm trying to just make this life work. And I had this realization that the most important thing I do is –

make dinner for my wife and take my dog on walks. And I would have never had that epiphany. Like, dude, all this stuff is really cool, but it's for fun. And this is the stuff that you love. Your purpose is to take your dog on walks and spend time with your wife. And one day it's going to be to spend time with your kids. And every time I go into it with this

idea that I hope that I have some kind of realization I always do and and it's just like I have this I know that ancient plant medicine is like the key to unlocking so much of the ancient world and and so to ignore that knowing that they imbibed to ignore that knowing that it was a part of these sacred rituals and

It's kind of silly, especially when you deal with the Amazon and ayahuasca. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to be in a place where you want to completely convene with nature, like, that's the place. Like, that's the place. And if there's this...

insanely profound hallucinogen, you know, that the brain produces endogenously that can be extracted from plants through this really weird method where you're taking one plant that has the drug in it, another plant, which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and you're combining them together in the perfect amount and boiling it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It tastes like shit. Like, why are you doing this? Like, how'd you learn? And then when you ask them how they learned how to do this, they're like, the plants taught us. Yeah, I know, right? You know, and then you can take that same chemical and they'll pour it in the water. And rather than fishing or, you know, spearing fish in the water or hooking them...

They pour it into the water in these little – they create these little canals off of the Amazon and fish, piranha, whatever will swim up in it. And they pour that liquid wherever that hallucinogen isn't and it stuns the fish and they all come to the top and they only take what they need and they send the rest back. Which is another reason why I don't think that Native Americans are responsible for the extinction of all the megafauna in the Americas because – OK. So I'm out in the woods in East Texas a couple of weeks ago.

and we're just walking around we're talking about the Caddo people have you heard of the Caddo Indians before and I was trying to talk to my friend who doesn't know a lot about Native Americans trying to like tell him trying to give him the essence of the people and the words came to me and I was like I was like if nature itself took an anthropomorphic form that's the Native American these are people that lived perfectly with their environment or tried to at least most of them did and um

Yeah, it's just amazing, man. So much can be learned from that. They did some wasteful things. I know, I know. Like the buffalo jumps.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, that's true. And I'm really speaking in generalities. Like I could go on and on about all the horrific things that the Aztecs did. This is just a general rule. Or the Comanches. Or the Comanches. Did to other Indians. It's not like this was a – it's not at all like this was a utopia at all. It was complete and utter war. But then again, you're saying embodiment of nature. Well, nature is not utopia. Exactly. Jaguar is not utopia if you're an antelope. Yeah, yeah, very much so.

So, you know, there's some nuance there. And but yeah, I just it's just fascinating. You had a you had a good point in a podcast. I think you were talking about Oriana, his expedition down the Amazon, and you were talking about how he was able to use the stars to navigate back to Spain. Yeah.

And you were like, well, you know, that's what... Or not ancient people, but, you know, that's what people used to do. Everybody was an astronomer. How much of this experience has gone to us today? We don't sit around and look at the stars anymore. And that's one aspect. We don't interact with, you know, natural plant-based, you know, hallucinogens anymore. There's so many things about the natural world that we don't interact with. Those two are huge. And particularly the one, the first one, the stars. Because people don't even consider how much light pollution. If you ask the average person...

An average person who lives in New York City or Boston or wherever, the night sky is polluted. You just don't think it's polluted, but it's polluted by light. And you're missing this light.

incredible, majestic image of the cosmos that's so humbling that it puts you in check. Yeah, for sure. It puts you in check. It really does. Like anybody that has a deluded ego, that's going to go away if you're confronted with the Milky Way. Yeah, absolutely. You have some delusions of grandeur and your place in everything. You're like, well, it's not possible. Yeah, yeah. Like just look at this. It's like I am nothing. I am nothing and I'm everything. I'm a part of everything, but I am nothing. Yeah.

And so many of these people who still today exist in the natural world like the wild, you know, Percy Fawcett interacting with these Amazonian tribes that still live like this today. These people are still around. They're still existing. Paul Rosalie sent me a video a month ago. Oh, really? Yeah. Do you want to see it? Sure, yeah, absolutely. Check this out. I'll show this video. I can't share it with the world. So, ha-ha, sorry. I'm a gatekeeper.

Like, everybody's a gatekeeper, I guess. Yeah. But Paul doesn't want people to know where these people are. Sure, sure, yeah. So he's trying to hide this stuff. But he took this video while he was out in the Amazon, like, helping these people. So this is, like, video from his phone. God, where is it, Paul? Oh, here it is. Joe, you can't share this with anybody. Can't share it with anybody. I'm going to share it with you. Just make sure the camera's on it. Wow.

Man, that is crazy. Why?

I mean, you're looking into the past. You're looking way into the past. I mean, way into the past. Just in your frame right there, what you were looking at has existed since the beginning of time. Yes. And that's what's interesting is that exists at the same time as you and I talking on a podcast where millions of people are going to hear it. And it's all electronic recording of our voice and images and then distributed online.

wirelessly into your phone instantaneously the moment this episode gets uploaded on Spotify people will click it and watch it on their phone instantly yeah

Like all at the same time where these people are living in a homemade canoe. They're in the same time zone as you are right now. Same time zone. It's whatever it is right now. It's the same time. That's crazy. And when our civilization, when we all destroy ourselves and thousands of years go by and everything in the studio is gone, it all turns to dust, those people will continue the legacy of humanity. Well, I wonder if those people are the preppers.

the Amazonian world mmm do you know I mean like like if everything did go sideways because the Europeans came over and brought all the diseases and civilization corrupt collapse here who's gonna live no you you are exactly right

So when the country boy can survive, that's like the Hank Williams Jr. song in reality. Dude, you're, you are exactly correct. I mean, you're exactly correct. So when the Spaniards arrive, uh, they, they obviously, they land in the Bahamas, uh, with Columbus 1492, but they come down to like Hispaniola, Jamaica. And in the early 1500s, they start poking around on the shores of the Yucatan. And, um,

And they're kind of trading and interacting with these people. You know, these are explorers. They're all curious. But they didn't realize that they were giving these Native Americans disease. And that disease was spreading through the Maya world. And maybe more than a decade later, when Cortez arrives in the Maya world, he documents how all the Maya people are very scrawny and small and sickly and weak. He didn't realize they were all dying off. Mm-hmm.

So eventually Cortes conquers Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in 1521. And he sends Pizarro down to find the gold that the Aztecs were getting from South America or from this distant land. They didn't 100% know exactly what South America was yet. He goes down to South America and he conquers the Inca Empire. And then after that, Oriana disengages.

descends down the Amazon. And when he descends down the Amazon, he sees these cities that would go on for 15 miles long. I mean, these 15 mile long cities full of millions and millions of people, these giant circular stone buildings, these huge bustling civilizations. And then later on in the 1700s, 1800s, and then really densely in the early 1900s, like with Percy Fawcett, Theodore Roosevelt, everyone...

around them, they were looking for these big cities that the Spaniards had seen, but they didn't exist and they didn't find any evidence of it at all. And a lot of people like the British and the Royal Geographic Society, they brush it off as, oh, the Spaniards were lying so that they could secure funding for further expeditions. And this was like their livelihood, the way that they could stay rich. Of course, then the LIDAR proves that these civilizations were there. Now the

The stuff that's been excavated in the Amazon, we haven't excavated anything in the center of the Amazon. It's really expensive. It's hard to do. Archaeologists don't want to live out there. Whatever, whatever. There's a million reasons why it doesn't happen. But on the peripheral of the Amazon, there are areas that get cut flat for logging. As civilization slowly encroaches on the Amazon, they are finding these villages that are these – they're basically cities that are these huge geoglyphs that are cut in the ground. Have you seen these?

in the Amazon, they're huge. I believe so. I believe this is some stuff that Graham was showing. Maybe so. I think Graham has talked about this before. Maybe he was in America before. What should he look if he's looking for images? Just Amazon geoglyphs. They'll come up. There are these huge squares. Yeah, perfect. So these things are... Yeah, we definitely talked about this. These things are gigantic and they're all over the peripherals of the Amazon. But

But these were the preppers living on the outside. They weren't living in the hustle and bustle of the million-plus population city in the middle of the Amazon. These are the guys living on the outside, and they all survived this apocalyptic disease that went through. They're the people living in Appalachia.

Exactly. Mountain folks. Yeah. Actually, I'm moving there tomorrow. Are you really? Yeah, I'm in the middle of moving right now. What a cool place to live. Yeah, it's beautiful up there, man. Dude, it's an ancient place. Have you heard of the Nantahala Rainforest? No. Oh, you got to go there tomorrow. Where's that? It's in western North Carolina in Appalachia.

I grew up going to Nantahala every year. My parents live in Nantahala now. And it's a beautiful, completely magical place. And it was part of what inspired this like

explorer, you know, kind of thing in me. When you're there, I even as a kid, I knew that this was an ancient place. And turns out as an adult, when I start researching it, it's this pocket of green, I mean, solid dark green rainforest. In the US, we have three rainforests, we have Hawaii, we have Oregon, and we have the Nantahala rainforest that most people don't know about.

It's this pocket in the middle of these mountains that has looked exactly the same since before the Ice Age. It's one of the oldest places in North America. Wow. And it's just an incredibly magical, old, ancient place. And I'm just, like, drawn back there. But anyways, yeah, you should go check that out. That sounds incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You're going to live out in that area? In the Appalachians? Yeah, yeah. Well, so my wife is – so she's like from South Carolina and she came to Texas when she was younger and then we met in college. And my family, when we first moved to the States, like my family moved to North Carolina in like 1694 or something crazy like that. And so we have some roots up there. Have you ever been to Gatlinburg, Tennessee? No. No.

So the first name of Gatlinburg was Reagan Town. And so that was where my family were one of the founders of that town. There's an old hotel there called Reagan Motel. So my family's originally from there. And then they moved down to Texas and started cattle rustling in the late 1890s.

But I don't know, just drawn back up there. I always loved vacationing there. And so my wife and I are like in the middle of moving right now. And so two days ago we packed up these two U-Hauls, drove them to East Texas to my in-laws, and then we drove to Austin last night, got a hotel, doing this. Tonight we drive back to East Texas, and then tomorrow we drive to North Carolina. Wow. Yeah. So what is the history in terms of like human occupation in that area? Man, the people sprouted out of the ground. Yeah.

Yeah, it's that old, man. That's something I'm really looking forward to getting into. And I'm kind of excited in a way to get out of Texas because it's hard to study Native American history in Texas because you've got to travel so far and everything's so arid. Like, you know, Austin, this was an ancient Native American settlement here that we have built this city on top of. The Alamo in San Antonio was built on top of a Native American settlement.

settlement. And, you know, all of our major cities are just a reskin of an ancient city. And in Texas, it's really hard. Like we have the Galt site that's here in, uh, that's here in Austin that proves that, uh, Clovis first was wrong. Maybe you're familiar with this. Um,

But up there, you're closer to mound country and, you know, where all the mound builders are. I'm a little bit north of that. But in North Carolina, it's one of the places that the Spaniards had a really hard time infiltrating because of the mountain ranges and because of how fierce the Native Americans were.

And so the archaeological projects up there are headed up by like two hillbillies that live in the country. And they're the coolest guys. They own this little department store called the Tiger Store in Hayesville, North Carolina. And they have dug up like Spanish armor under the ground and Spanish swords and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I've gone hiking out there.

And, oh, we got to look this up. Jamie, can we please look up Judicula rock? It's one of the only megaliths in North America. And it's this gigantic rock.

megalithic stone that has the same sort of art style as all the Native American stuff that we've seen and it's some kind of primordial map of western North Carolina. It's massive, dude. You couldn't fit it in this room. It's called Judakula. If you just try to spell it in some way, you might find it. There you go. And there's an old photo of an archaeologist laying behind it. There you go, to the top left. That one or maybe the one that's colorized there. That one's really pretty. So nobody knows what this is and the Native Americans who

who were asked, uh,

Some of the stories about the early Native Americans who were asked how this got here, who moved it there, their stories are that giants placed this and that giants used to live in this land and that they created these stones. And I have gone around when I was a little bit younger, I would go through the rainforest and like wandering up these hillsides and you'd find these huge stones laying there with all of these images carved into them. And of course, you know, there's no funding that's out there. There's not even a there's not even a police department out there.

So it's nothing, no research is being done out there. But it's a fascinating place as old as time itself. And all of these people are from like a chapter before contact period. Whoa. Yeah, it's fascinating, man. It's just a very ancient, mysterious, mystical place. It's one of those places that kind of gives me the feeling that Peru gives me when I'm out there, that I'm in a very, very, very old place.

And, of course, the Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world. Is there any theory as to the age of that? Well, I think when you go there, they attribute it to a culture that lived in the area between 100 A.D. and 1,000 A.D., but that's just totally guesswork. Judicula and the Cherokee Indians, yeah. Now, you know, the hard part about...

the hard part about studying some stuff with Native Americans in the U.S. is that there's a lot of like, you know, modern Native Americans are,

They're very prideful about their culture and, you know, a little bit of mythology gets mixed in. Like when you go – when I go visit the – I forget what exactly it's called. But there's a Native American village that still exists in this area of the country. And it's like operated and it's kind of a tour place where they take people through what the cities would have looked like or what the towns would have looked like in the middle of the rainforest. Yeah.

But the hard part is when I talk to the representatives there, which are Native American Cherokee people, they'll tell me, oh, yeah, you know, the ancient people that were here, they used to be six foot five. They were very tall people or whatever. And there's no evidence behind that at all. And so it's hard to like, OK, we have Cherokee bodies. So are these people?

Are these oral memories that are being passed down through time that come down to the Cherokee? And, you know, as a as like a, you know, a modern day American anthropologist, do I brush off what they say and just be like, well, you know, they're they're they're carrying on these myths about their people. They want to build it up. Or are they really holding on to something that's true? Because, man, I would love to talk to Graham about this.

Okay. So, you know, one of the biggest things that refutes, I know it sounds like I'm bouncing all over the place, but one of the biggest things that they try to use to refute the Sphinx's age, you know, about the Sphinx that could date back to the time of Leo, but 10,500 years ago or 10,500 BC, 10,500 BC is they say, well, there's no evidence that you could carry down the knowledge of constellations that far. You've heard this before, right? Like,

How do we know that people in 10,500 BC even recognize the constellation of Leo? And how is that knowledge carried down? Dude, there is evidence of this. Okay, the squared spiral. Have you seen this motif anywhere? We can look it up. Greek meander pattern. But you'll also see it in...

You'll see it in the American Southwest. You'll see it out in the Mississippian cultures. You'll see it in Mexico. You'll see it in South America, Peru. You'll see it in Greece. You'll see it in Egypt, Rome. Yeah, this pattern. So a lot of times they say that this is like – well, when people use the term swastika, the swastika is just two meandering patterns or squared spirals that are laid on top of each other. That's what it is. Oh, wow.

Yeah, so it's a squared spiral. But when you take two of those and lay them on top of each other, it becomes a swastika. And you and I recognize where these meanders connect because of a certain recent culture that perverted this symbol and turned it into something evil. Wow.

But this is an ancient symbol and it's found all over the world. And it even dates back to Ukraine. You may be able to find this. There's an ivory bone handle in Ukraine from like 11,000 years ago that has this squared spiral that's on it. So this is 11,000 years old, found on every continent on the planet.

Oh, yeah. So it's even found in pottery. You can see it in pottery in ancient China, ancient Japan. It's in Cambodia. It's all across the ancient world. And I was asking –

Oh, I know one that we could look up. Could you look up the Temple of Mitla in Mexico? So Temple of Mitla. And if we look there, you'll see it all up and down. Now, Temple of Mitla is a shamanic temple. They think it was like a Mecca site that people would go to. It was built to last for all of eternity.

And of all the megaliths in all of Mesoamerica or ancient Mexico and Central America, this site uses the largest stones. So each one of these lentils that you see, this is like one solid piece of volcanic stone. Very, very hard stones. Okay, so you can see the squared spiral, right? Can you see the step pattern that leads up to them? And you can probably find another photo where you see the step pattern leading up to the spiral. So it's like you're walking up steps.

into a spiral and it's this loop that continues on forever. I have a ton of these photos on my phone. They're found all over Peru. There we go. Now, this is not quite exactly it. Okay.

Okay, so what this really is, this step pattern and this motif of this spiral here is it's the Big Dipper in the night sky. You can go look at the Big Dipper and the Big Dipper changes over the course of the year. So if you look at it as though it's not a Big Dipper and you look at it as though it's a staircase to a spiral,

That's exactly what ancient people are seeing the Big Dipper as. And the Big Dipper is spinning in the night sky throughout the year. So this ancient symbol is them documenting a constellation. For over 11,000 years, human beings have been documenting a constellation. So if you're looking for the proof as to whether or not people 11,000 years ago were recognizing a lion in the night sky, boom, there you go. This is 11,000 years old.

Yeah, okay, so look in here. So it's a step up to a spiral, a step up to a spiral. And, dude, it's the Big Dipper. Just look at the Big Dipper in the future as though it's this constellation, and it's the same thing. Is this a theory that it's a Big Dipper? Has this been corroborated? This is my theory. Your theory. This is my theory and, like, something I've been studying for a long time. But there are other archaeologists who – they're –

kind of have a passive interest in this and they have said oh maybe it's the big dipper or something but these aren't these then people if i were to go to them and be like okay well you know this ivory bone handle in ukraine goes back 11 000 years so it's proof they'd be like okay stop you know what i mean um so this is my theory that i have been studying for a long time and everywhere i go in the americas i find that i find that spiral pattern everywhere and i always ask people what does this mean um

When I'm in the Mediterranean, I'll ask people, what does this mean? I'm going to go to Greece at the end of the year. And I'm going to ask because it's all over Greek temples. And all I ever get from Greek archaeologists is that it's a river. Bullshit. It's not a river. And then in Latin America, I get a bit better of an explanation. And maybe this is really it.

they think that it's like the, they think that it's like the, the step, the steps through life in the, in the rejuvenation of life. Right. So it's like, it's like the big dipper has some kind of esoteric meaning with it. But I, I have been thinking about this and I think that this, the reason that throughout all these ancient cultures, you see this meander pattern in so many different orientations is it's documenting, it's documenting the flipping of the big dipper through the night sky throughout the day. And, um,

And that's, that's all, you know, I'm trying to explain something that's 11,000 years old. What is the earliest evidence of the understanding of the procession of the equinoxes? Oh God, I don't know. I don't know. That's, that's getting like beyond my level of, of knowledge with archaeoastronomy. Um,

Some people – Because Graham's theorized that the Egyptians were aware of it. I mean I don't doubt that they were aware of it. Yeah, Buval I think believed that or I know for sure John Anthony West believed that. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, man. I mean the procession of the equinoxes, it takes at least what, 12 to 24 – it's either 12 or it's 24,000 years to be able to – I think it's 24,000 years, the full cycle. If we wanted to investigate an ancient culture that's possible –

Being able to document this it'd be worth looking into if the Maya were aware Let's explain to people what it means So what it means is that the earth as it spins it doesn't spin perfectly Like there's a pin in the top and the pin the bottom and it spins like a globe It spins in a wobble and that wobbles a 24,000 year cycle the earliest understanding of the procession the equinox is typically accredited to Greek astronomer

How do you say his name? Hipparchus? Oh, yeah, Hipparchus. Hipparchus in the 2nd century BCE.

Around 130 BCE. I bet you he did it in Alexandria, too. Aparchos noticed the position of the equinoxes, the points where the celestial equator intersects with the elliptic, were shifting westward over time relative to the fixed stars. He calculated this slow movement, known as precession, by comparing his own observations of star positions with earlier Babylonian and Greek records, particularly those of Tamarcus and Aparchos.

Aristilis. Aristilis. From the 3rd century BCE, Hipparchus estimated the rate of precession to be about 1 degree every 100 years, which is remarkably close to the modern value of approximately 1 degree every 71.6 years. There's no definitive evidence of earlier cultures fully understanding the precession as a systematic astronomical phenomenon.

But some scholars speculate the ancient civilizations like the Babylonians, Egyptians, or Indians might have noticed relating patterns in star positions over long periods.

Yeah, well, and then check this out. Hipparchus' discovery detailed in his lost work, but referenced by Ptolemy, the pharaoh over Alexandria in the Almagest, 2nd century CE. So this is happening in the city of Alexandria. All this is being studied in Alexandria's library. Marks the earliest confirmed understanding of procession in scientific sense. Dude, that was lost in the burning of Alexandria's library. Yeah, how crazy is that? Whew.

It's all crazy. It's so fascinating because it makes sense that that would be something that everyone would be studying because it's the most spectacular thing you could ever see. Yeah. Why would you just say, oh, it's just stars? Of course you would. It's so silly. Of course. They're so majestic. You would have to be transfixed. You know something interesting that I was just reminded of is this meandering pattern.

It continues in the ancient Mediterranean world, so Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, until Alexandria's library is burned and stops after that. You see it on the monument of Augustus, which dates to about 9 BC, but that's for his death. But Augustus would have seen Alexandria. He would have been familiar with these motifs. I believe after that in Rome, we don't see this motif anymore of the squared spiral. In

Mesoamerica in Mexico and Central America, this squared spiral motif stops

with the burning of the Maya codices from Diego de Landa in like 1574. He gathered all of the writing in the Maya world together in the city of what is modern-day Merida, and he burned it all up. And it was called multiple pyres. So imagine, let's say a pyre is at least from the floor to the ceiling stacked with codexes. Like have you ever seen the sticky notes that are connected on each side? That's how the Maya books looked.

And he burned all that history. Today, we only have three or four that exist. And one of them is like controversial as to whether or not it's a forgery. So he destroyed all of the written history of the Mesoamerican world in like one fell swoop. And to give you an idea of just how much it was, when the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec world, so the Aztec were standing on the shoulders of giants being the Maya and all the other cultures. The Aztecs were producing...

250,000 pieces of paper a year. It's something like that. It's an incredible amount of written knowledge and all of that knowledge is burned and gone. And so, you know, just again, when archaeologists...

I mean, none of us really understand what's going on. I was having a conversation with a

Dr. Barnhart, we were at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico and we're looking at all these Maya gods up on this mural and everything in Mesoamerica, whether it's the Maya, the Olmecs, the Aztecs, Teotihuacanos, Zapotecs, whatever, it's all very fierce and dark and scary, kind of. Scary to us. And we're looking up at it and he's like, you know, I've always wondered, like, where's the love in their religion? Like, you know, where are all the doves that you see, like, in Christian churches and stuff? And he was like, but, you know...

In reality, if we could speak to them, we would probably be so embarrassed and shocked at how wrong our ideas are about who these people were. And, you know, his attitude and his approach to the ancient world, I just love it because, you know, he just presents like the evidence that's available, gives his idea of what he thinks the evidence means while also saying, you know, this is just my idea from this. We could be completely wrong and we probably are completely wrong. You know, think about...

Like, if you died and 5,000 years from now people started going through your belongings, what would they think of you? It probably wouldn't be a very good representation of you. It depends on who's writing the story, right? If CNN wrote it, it would be terrible. Exactly.

It would be pretty bad. It's really dependent upon who, again, is the gatekeeper of information. Yeah. If you had a time machine and you can go and observe undiscovered any point in history, like it could put you in some time bubble where you could just like be in this invisible bubble where you could view it, where you're not interacting. You're not – you just watch what time period and where.

I'm not going to say Egypt. I feel like Egypt is such a, like, everyone says Egypt. I would say Egypt. I know, I know. If Egypt wasn't an option. But why would you want that to not be an option? If I gave you a legit choice, if it was a real thing, if there was real technology, if they had developed some sort of a time warp technology that allowed you to, in this controlled sphere, exist...

for a particular amount of time. Like you have three days in this area. You bring food and water and you just show up. No one can hurt me. No one can scout me. No one can see you. You exist in a time warp inside there, but you can observe all of it. It's got to be Egypt. Well...

Yeah, yeah. You'd have to figure out what time because if you got there and they had already built it, you're like, shit. God damn it. Yeah. Maybe you say, let me go 10,000 BC and you go there and it's already there. You're like, fuck. Fuck. You go back 20,000 BC. Yeah, you can only do it once. Like, fuck. But if you go back 30,000 BC, maybe there's nothing. Man, fuck.

Egypt is a creme de la creme man. Yeah, it's it's the it's the most monumental Beautiful like, you know when you try to imagine what it would have looked like, you know If you've seen visual recreations of the Giza Plateau, you know, the the Valley Temple must have been absolutely stunning Okay, so one day when you go to Egypt, hopefully you go this year When you go to the Valley Temple, that's the that for me. It's the best

best thing in all of Egypt. I think it's more stunning what it must have looked like than even the pyramids themselves. The blocks are absolutely gigantic. Like one block is bigger than this whole wall. And

Brought from 500 miles south in Aswan. These are the ones with the cyclopean, strangely angled stones like you see in Peru. And when you walk in, most people ignore it, but that floor is a calcite white crystal floor. And so imagine when it was polished and when it was finished off, it must have been gleaming. And at some point in time, there were these diorite kofra statues. Maybe you've seen them before. They're like impossibly well-made out of the hardest stone in Egypt.

The hardest stone in Egypt. And it's this black diorite gleaming polished statues. And the lintels that go above would have allowed when the sun reaches its zenith in the sky in the middle of the day, it would have shot through these holes in the ceiling. And so it would have illuminated the white floor and you would have had the solid black lintels.

statues that are shining in the sun's light. And so you're walking in and it's like glowing inside of the temple. And when you walk outside the front door of the temple, there's a dock and you can see the dock like slopes into the ground. So the water isn't there anymore. The Nile is much further to the east now. But the Nile came straight up to the front step of the valley temple. So imagine you're like,

you're going, you know, you have someone pushing your little boat along on a pike in, you know, in Egypt and you're, you know, you're taking in like, uh, you know, you're taking in the nature around you and, uh, and like the seabirds that are flying over you and the palm trees that are everywhere. And like, imagine the sound of the waters, you're coming up to the temple and it's this huge temple. It's the, it's the largest building on the planet at the time, you know, probably other, other than the pyramids themselves. Um,

And then you step into it, and it is the most sacred, most impressive thing that exists on the earth at that time. No matter if it was made in 2500 BC or if it was made in 10,000 BC. It's the most impressive building that exists in the world at that time. And what exactly was going on in these buildings, I don't know. This is kind of another hot take of mine is –

is, man, I don't believe that, you know, when you see all these pantheons of these gods in the ancient world, I do not believe that ancient people are making all this shit up and building all these temples for these gods that never existed just to control the masses, whatever, whatever. I mean, it's an extensive amount of work all across the entire world. You know,

The Maya are building temples for these gods, these beings that they're meeting. The temple of Luxor that you'll go to see, you know, the story goes that Amenhotep built this last chamber, which is made out of these huge—Amenhotep III builds this last chamber, huge megalithic granite blocks to meet the god Amun-Ra. And I'm standing there inside the chamber looking around, and he's the only person supposedly that's allowed in. That's a story that we know how true that is. I don't know, but—

And I'm just thinking, man, either is it more likely that all this is made up or is it more likely that they went to the extent to do all this because it was all real and they're really interacting with these beings? The most realistic way I can think of is by –

is by being involved in like shamanic practices and hallucinogens and like, you know, interacting with things that do not exist in our 3d plane. And, um, and that adds to the allure of like when I'm standing in the Valley temple, I'm like, what the hell is actually going on in here at this time? Um, so after going through all that, I had to say Egypt.

You have to. Yeah, yeah. As cliche as it might be. My second one would be like, if I could be like, okay, take me to the height of Amazonian culture. Just let me see just how amazing it is. Because...

you know, it really seems like stone architecture comes out of the Amazon. Now, where Paul lives, it's all clay on the ground. But when you get halfway through the Amazon, you start reaching like granite and limestone bedrock. And that's on the eastern side. So you're in like Guyana, French Guyana, Brazil. And it's treacherous places to go through in the middle of the Amazon. But I think that that's where cities in the Amazon are going to be found one day. And it was towards the end of Oriana's expedition. So that's about where he would have been. And

And man, I bet you there's stuff out there that would just amaze us. I think the Amazon is the origin, just me personally, I think the Amazon is the origin of American, pre-Columbian American, the height of

of their civilization. I think it's the origin of their religion and shamanic practices. I think it spread out all the way up to Mexico. And later on, the ancient Americans have a corn god, which they call the maze god. But I think before that, they had this were-jaguar religion where people are taking hallucinogens and psychedelics. And so I think that all the evidence points towards that

The origin of civilization in the Americas begins in the Amazon and spreads out from there. And I would love if a time machine could pull back that canopy and show me what the actual height of that was like. It's just so interesting. It never stops being interesting. And it's one of those things, it's a mystery that will never truly be totally solved because it's not possible to go back in time. So we're always going to have this thing in our mind like, I

And it's such a fascinating inclination to sit and just wonder about the past. It is. And to look where we are now and how ridiculous life today is. This was undeniable. Humans are fools, particularly today. Yeah, for sure. And I think one of the reasons why we're fools is we're denied these experiences that these people probably had. We've outlawed them. Yeah, absolutely. Just like they did in ancient Greece. Just like they did, I'm sure, throughout history in all these different cultures. Have you ever heard the...

Have you ever heard the natives in Papua New Guinea and the songs that they sing that like emanate through the jungle? Have you ever heard this before? When I study, I only study native people in the Americas. I've got my hands full with that. I can't really start studying. I'm fascinated by the people that live on Sentinel Island. And akin to that are the people, the semi-contacted people of Papua New Guinea.

And when you listen to the songs that they sing, it reminds me so much of what I heard yesterday and what I've known. But when Percy Fawcett says he hears the songs they sing, it reminds him like, oh, this is an advanced culture. This is something that's being handed down through time. It's beautiful. It's timeless. And when you hear the sound of the Papua New Guinea people singing and the way they harmonize with each other,

These people are so connected to the earth that it's the earth singing to you through them. Does that make sense? Whoa. Can we hear that? Yeah. This may not be the one I'm talking about. It's beautiful, though. There's one of a man. He's right next to the camera, and he's singing, and you have all these people around him, and it's just, like, stunningly beautiful. Is that him? Here it is. Here it is.

It's got some extra love on it. Yeah.

I think it's just on loop. 10 hours. It's a 10-hour video. But, you know, hearing that makes me, like, emotional hearing it. That's what we eat five grams and you listen to that. It's beautiful, you know? Oh, my God. It's gorgeous. And you look in his eyes and it's like he has very innocent eyes. Yeah. You know, it is the...

It's the human embodiment of the planet itself is that guy that you're looking at and what you're hearing. And what's really fascinating about human cultures is the most satisfied, least anxious people are subsistence livers. People that live off the land. It's so true. Have you ever seen the Vice piece about this guy named Heinmo? Heinmo's Arctic Adventure? No. There's a great...

bit a great video piece from vice from back in the day vice guy to travel where this journalist goes and lives with this guy who lives in the arctic and he's one of the last people that's allowed to live off the land and he's a very intelligent guy who explains through the course of this like this is how people are supposed to be living and

And he's essentially just hunting caribou and fishing. And he lives like in peace and harmony. And he never wants to live in the city. Like this is a natural way for us. Does he have a little daughter with him or a little girl? And he like cuts up the fish and he hands it to her and they give each other like an Eskimo kiss. Have you seen? I don't believe it's that. His daughter is full grown at the time. But I'm sure there's many people living like this. But the point is that I think that.

if you look at modern society, we're so anxious and weird and depressed and all these things wrong with us. I think a lot of that is because a, we're disconnected from nature as

Especially if you're living in a city. I mean, there's no more insulation from nature than a skyscraper. I mean, you're completely removed from it. You've covered the ground in concrete. You're not interacting with nature at all. Like, that's why everybody goes to Central Park. They like a little piece. So give me a little bit of nature, right? So you're disconnected from nature, which I think is a vitamin. I genuinely believe. It's just like the sun gives you vitamin D. I think nature gives you some...

unmeasured vitamin that we just haven't figured out yet. And then we're removed from these ancient experiences that connected people to the spiritual world. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, it's, it's so true. I've been having these conversations, um,

with my wife recently, you know, like all of our friends are, are sort of, you know, we're all kind of newlyweds. Like my wife and I are about to approach our two year and our relationship is, is, is interesting because it kind of mimics like, like, uh, ancient people where, you know, a man has got to, you know, in ancient times, the man would go off at a certain point, uh,

He and all of his, he and all the other men of the village or the younger men would go off until they killed a big animal and they drag it back and they'd be rewarded by the gratification of the women that they're there. And then they would play their part in helping to feed everybody. And you have this, like, uh, the, the woman like admires the man, the man's helping take care of her. You have this. And then the men also get their time away to be manly and be masculine and brave. And, and, um,

Now we exist in this world where before I was able to quit my job and pursue this full time, I was doing marketing just to make ends meet. And I'm existing in this digital world that doesn't even exist. I produce ads for companies that don't even have a physical brick and mortar store. It's all completely made up. And I come home. I would come home every single day. And I had no...

Male role in my little family like my wife is go is in the middle of dental school And so we're both going off and coming back and doing the same thing every day and it's like this unnatural cycle and you wonder why like people are so unhappy and now that I've been traveling quite a lot You know I go off

You know, I go off, I travel, I'm able to, you know, help provide for us. I'm gone. I come back and our relationship is strong and it's intimate and romantic. And she like, you know, admires that kind of aspect about me. And I'm like, like, oh, this is kind of this is kind of how this is a healthy. This is actually a healthy thing for our relationship. And it's just reminded me more and more of how this modern world is so dystopian and so sick and poisonous to our minds that.

We're operating in a made-up realm. It's just so much of what we do is completely made up and unnatural. We should be living by a fresh body of water, and you and I should be running off into the forest and killing something with our hands or with a bow and dragging it back, and all the women are, yay! That's what life should be like. But it's unfortunately...

Science fiction. I think you can live in this world and dabble in that world. Yeah, for sure. That's what I do. For sure. Yeah, well, I've seen that. I mean, you go off on your hunting expeditions. Those are like, to me, spiritual journeys. It is. It sounds ridiculous. It totally is. But when I'm in the woods, like the real woods, when you're in the mountains in particular because it's so unforgiving and so majestic, every part of me just goes...

Like, wow, here we are. Where are you at when you do that? Well, I really love Utah. I really love, like, the Wasatch Mountains. I love that area. I'm scared of the Northwest. My wife wants to take me to Montana and go hiking. I'm like, I'm not going hiking out in the Northwest. There's grizzlies. I don't belong out there. There's grizzly bears. I mean, those things, there's nothing you can do, man. Nothing you can do. I'm okay on the East Coast with just black bears. They're like, you know, rabbits, but...

dude, a grizzly bear. Yeah. Have you seen the video of a guy who's up on top of this granite facing and he goes, he's like filming and he goes, he goes, there's a young grizzly bear down at the river below me. And he's up on this granite face. And, uh, and he was like, he's like, I'm going to scare him off. And he goes, Hey bear. Hey bear. And the bear goes and charges directly to him and knocks down all the little trees and it comes up to the granite face and it can't reach him. But I'm like, yeah, dude, I would never want to go up there. I'm your food.

You're food, man. Yeah, you're a part of the chain and not the good part. No, no. You're not the hunter with the deer. No. There's an 800-pound super predator that can run 40 miles an hour, and he's headed right towards you. Yeah, and if you're a good shot with a high-powered gun, you might be able to kill it, but you'll be mauled to death by the time it wanders off into the forest and dies. Yeah, you might be able to kill it.

kill it. I mean, you really, you need like a large caliber rifle and shoot it in the head. Yeah. You know, and a pistol, that's the other thing. If you have a nine millimeter pistol and you shoot a grizzly bear in the head, it's very likely it's going to bounce off of a skull, which is so scary. Oh, it's terrifying. Could you imagine the, could you imagine people trying to navigate in

into or migrate into the Americas and they have to deal with the short-faced bear and polar bears. Right. The short-faced bear, which makes a grizzly bear look like a poodle. It's utterly insane, man. People lived in a gnarly place in the U.S. We had American lions that are twice... Bigger than the African lion. Yeah, exactly. We had elephants. We had woolly mammoths. We had camels here. We had gigantic horses. We had huge dire wolves. We had... Giant sloths. Giant...

Oh, there's giant sloth caves in Nantahala. And you can see them and they're like carved out. And it's cool because there's multiple layers of history there. So you have this megafauna ice age history of these huge giant sloth caves carved out in these prehistoric mountainsides. Wow. But the Cherokee used those caves to hide in to escape the Trail of Tears. Wow.

Yeah, that's fascinating stuff up there, man. So you have like levels of history just in that one area of the country. If you go out there, you'll feel like you're in a primordial place that's kind of spiritual. I'm down. I'll check it out. Yeah, you definitely have to. Listen, thank you so much for being here. I really, really enjoyed this conversation, and I think we could do a bunch more. So let's do it again sometime. I feel like I could have talked to you for 10 more hours. I feel like we could too. Yeah.

So tell everybody if they want to get into more of your work, where should they go? Yeah. So everything I do is just under my name, Luke Caverns. You know, Caverns was just a name that like my wife and I came up with to use like a nomer because of privacy. But my real last name is Reagan. And, you know, like I shared, I have this family history and loosely connected to the presidential family. That's like a different branch of our family from Tennessee. Yeah.

And so I kind of want to do it for privacy, but that's impossible. So I've just run with it. But yeah, Luke Caverns, you can find everything I do under that. And for a long time, I thought maybe I'd specialize in one area, but man, I'm interested in...

in the ancient history of the entire world. And, and, uh, I'm just always going to embrace that and explore the, explore the ancient world on foot. And, um, yeah, I'm glad you're out there, man. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you for being here. It was really fun. Thank you. All right. Bye everybody.