American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - What's Happening Beneath the Pyramids? (Ft. Luke Caverns)

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Is ancient Egypt hiding structures far older than mainstream archaeology admits? This episode with vigilante archaeologist Luke Caverns explores the mystery beneath the Giza Plateau, from long-rumored underground chambers to the origins of the Sphinx itself. Caverns argues that many ancient monuments—once thought to be tombs— may have served for more mysterious functions. From skull-elongated pharaohs and the forbidden Amarna revolution to the buried water tombs beneath the Sphinx and pyramids, this conversation unveils a hidden Egypt erased by the modern official history. It also reframes ancient Egypt not as a primitive past, but as the remnant of a forgotten epoch where god-kings ruled, advanced technology flourished, and history was written in stone before being buried in sand. -------------------------- LMNT: Get your free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase at https://DrinkLMNT.com/alchemy Also try the new LMNT Sparkling — a bold, 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Better Help: This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/ALCHEMYPOD and get on your way to being your best self. iRestore: Reverse hair loss with @iRestorelaser and unlock HUGE savings on the iRestore Elite with the code [JESSE] at https://www.irestore.com/JESSE! #irestorepod -------------------------- ***JOIN OUR WHOP (Exclusive Episodes & Group Calls) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels ***Become a Member of American Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join -------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 03:17 Luke's Background 09:48 Philosophy of Archaeology 12:01 The Romance of Ancient History 14:57 Examining the Exodus 29:28 The Mystery of Underground Structures 32:51 The Sphinx and Its Secrets 38:01 Caves Under the Giza Plateau 42:36 Water and the Osiris Shaft 45:12 Theories on the Sphinx 47:26 The Construction of the Pyramids 1:09:04 The Purpose of the Pyramids 1:12:40 Understanding Ancient Engineering 1:23:03 Bold Hypotheses and Ancient Mysteries 1:23:41 Questioning Modern Christianity 1:23:58 Exploring Ancient Beliefs 1:27:41 The Curse of King Tut 1:58:38 The Last Frontier: Amazon Exploration 2:14:50 Expedition to El Dorado 2:26:26 Planning the Next Adventure -------------------------- SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] # Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill three-burner gas grill. Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. Amenhotep the third dies, Ammonhotep the fourth becomes king, and he says, I'm not worshipping

Amen anymore. I'm only going to acknowledge the one true sun god, the Atten. And I'm going to make my name Akhenaten. And so he changes it. And then they start depicting themselves with the elongated skulls. And where does the skull elongation come from? We don't really know. And many of the historical kings themselves were merged with divinity, the sun god, even up to Louis

the 14th. He was a sun god in the French context. I've heard a Greek college professor say, I don't mean this in any symbolic or spiritual sense. I'm telling you that this literally happened. Was this whole temple built for Amunhotep to enter it and not come face to face with Amun Ra? It wasn't actually happening.

This is all made up. This whole temple is here for nothing. So you have a 500-year period where we can see a progression of architecture getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more monumental. all these ancient temples and sites that were erected on behalf of these god beings. Every ancient culture recognizes these gods that exist on our planet. What is going on underneath the pyramids?

First, let me give you a little bit of context. In 2024, a collaborative effort between Egyptian and Japanese researchers using ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography mapped the Western Cemetery adjacent. to the Great Pyramid. Their non-invasive methods revealed a shallow, L-shaped structure approximately 10 meters long. We still don't know the function of this structure, but we do know that this underground probably man-made artifice is verified and real. Also, verified and real, former minister of antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, known for being a professional Debbie Downer and skeptic, himself has acknowledged the existence of three independent tunnels associated with the Sphinx.

So that is the context in which an absolute bomb was dropped on the internet in 2025. Just recently, a team of researchers led by Felipe Biondi used a technique called synthetic aperture radar Doppler tomography and artificial intelligence to measure and reconstruct what looks like a small city or energy grid underneath the Giza Plateau. Technically, this modality, SAR Doppler tomography, can map subsurface territory. In fact, this technique is sometimes used to map magma chambers inside of volcanoes. But the image circulating the internet involves a level of granularity and detail, and in my opinion, takes a lot of liberties. It also involves hand-wavy claims about perfectly accurate artificial intelligence.

You see, the actual tomography images don't match what's being circulated on. I think there's a good chance there is something crazy underneath the Giza Plateau, and I think it might go very deep, but this new discovery is very hard to assess. Are we being conditioned to accept a truth that the Egyptian Ministry of Culture is already aware of? Is this sort of a Rorschach test? Is this purely fake news? Or just some researchers grasping at straws? To find out, today I'm interviewing an amazing guest, what I'm calling a vigilante archaeologist in his 20s, carrying the torch of Robert Shock Graham Hancock and his mentor Ed Barnhart. Without further ado, please welcome this week's American alchemist, Luke Caverns. All right, I'm here with Luke Caverns. I couldn't be more

excited to have you. We talked about this earlier. I'll present you as a vigilante archaeologist. I think you've gone a really cool route where, you know, archaeology in some respects, I think can be at myopic at times in its kind of pure academic form. and you are of the lineage of Ed Barnhart, who is your mentor, but you've told me you are inspired by Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, people like that. And I want to get into a broader philosophical discussion about kind of hardcore, you know, academic archaeology versus, you know, some of what they do. But I'm just couldn't be more excited to have you, man. Thank you for coming. Well, thank you so much for inviting me.

Yeah, I, I, what you said about the, uh, getting into like the philosophical argument of, of, kind of like mainstream archaeology versus vigilante archaeology. That's a fascinating, uh, topic. I can't wait to get into it and swell as everything else is going on. Do you think your name, Luke Caverns? You know, there's a concept called nominal determinism, which is if your name is Larry, you're more likely to become a lawyer. And so I think about your name, Luke Caverns, do you think your name at all subliminally inspired you to pursue archaeological quests? You know what's funny? I don't think I've blatantly said this.

Caverns is just a second middle name. My last name is actually Reagan. And so the reason I did not go with my last name when I was, you know, creating a public persona or presenting myself in public was one just for privacy originally. Not that I guess I don't care about that too much now. But and also when people would search up Luke Reagan, all you would ever find was Ronald Reagan. And so it's the same family. He's like a distant, distant cousin of mine. Really? Yeah. But the determinism actually comes from my dad's side of the family. Back in the 1890s, there were people can look it up. If you pick up any book, if you go to like to half-price books down the road and you're able to find a book about the American West, like the Wild West, people searching for lost Spanish gold in the United States. This is a big thing. The Spanish were here in the mid-late,

1500s searching for, you know, ancient Native American treasure as well as gold mines to send back to Spain. There's all these great stories about them. And if you find these books about it, you'll find my family in those books. And that's kind of where my family name begins is searching for lost Spanish gold mine and treasure in the American Southwest. So in Big Bend, you can look it up. There's a place called Reagan Canyon. And there's this huge epic tale of like lost gold.

and mystery and mysterious deaths of people from West Texas all the way out to San Antonio, Texas. And it's my family, like, battling all these people for this lost Spanish gold. It's a fascinating story. One of those brothers makes it out, gets involved in the oil field, and in gold mining. Then his son picks it up after him and goes looking in New Mexico for the seven lost Spanish gold mines of southern New Mexico. and within a year he discovered them. And he opened up these 450-year-old gold mines and had this company going for about eight years. And eventually there was a tragedy that befell the company and the whole company fell apart and they fell into poverty.

And my dad was accidentally born during that time. And so my dad didn't experience any of that, didn't really inherit that adventurous spirit. And somehow I did. Like somehow it carried over to me. And yeah, I just, so I just kind of come from this lineage of people who have been interested in the ancient world. And while he was a gold miner and an explorer, he was also what we call today an antiquarian. So it's a guy, antiquarians were usually like guys who were pretty wealthy that had the money to be able to carry out pretty unorganized archaeological expeditions. and

or excavations and he would just collect the artifacts and so they're sitting in boxes today and we still have them so yeah that would be the determinism

that's fascinating it's almost like you have some unfinished business on behalf of your family that you are now pursuing and we were talking about this earlier on the phone but it's like

I think a lot of people in the kind of academic world of archaeology need to fully separate out, you know, their pursuits with anything autobiographical. So they can't say that they're, you know, inspired by anything seemingly irrational or seemingly like, you know, some hermetic lineage or, you know, whatever. It has to be like, I am engaging in perfect deductive and inductive logic, you know, and I'm figuring, you know, figuring it out. And that's so not how humans in general

interact with any subject matter. And so, you know, we were talking about Heinrich von Schleiman, the guy, He found Troy in the 1870s, this German businessman who was like, he was really interested in, like, you know, Homer and Thucydides. And so he was like, you know, I think the Peloponnesian War happened. And then that, like, you know, led him to, or Sir James Bruce, who, you know, we have the book of Enoch because he discovered it. And he was like a Scottish, you know, Freemason. And he went looking for the Ark of the Covenant and he came back with the Book of Enoch. So you have all these, like, fascinating. So you are, you know, maybe part and parcel of that, of that sort of, you know, lineage.

which is awesome. Yeah, I think I still, I hold on to that romance of the ancient world that inspired so many of the great stories that we still talk about today. That really inspired the only stories that are worth talking about, right? You know, people don't talk about centuries later, the highly logistical and ultra sterilized, you know, deductions of such and such and such and such. It's always some kind of human passion that lives on. you know um and i totally agree with you and and it's that it's sort of that that ancestral calling drive to dive into the ancient world and and uh i don't know like explore really distant places um yeah i i still feel the romance of the ancient world when there's such a drive to

sterilize everything you know i think that that is the problem with modern mainstream archaeology is that it is so sterilized and so against anything being, and of course they would never admit this. And I don't know if passion is the right word, but they don't like romance. I was having a conversation about this thing specifically with an archaeologist, or maybe he's like a geo-archologist. And I was talking to him, he was accusing me of being somebody who's wanting to sell the mystery. which that's a big thing that goes on as people sell the mystery and they kind of just they kind of inflate things where there's not really a mystery and they turn it into something and there's a lot of mystery out there but I think if I'm selling anything I'm just trying to convince people or reignite in people the romance and the wonder of the ancient world and like the magic that that that carries with it.

It's like an escape from our modern day. And of course that wasn't good either. There's no human nature is not allowed to prevail anymore or to shine. It's everything has to be so sterilized and so on just thoroughly uninteresting. And then they wonder why they're losing, you know, the popular audience and why they've never been able to connect with them. I also think it's bad thinking. Like if thinking is you have to engage in some sort of sorting mechanism of like truth and not truth, uh, they're actually subject to dogma when it comes to like a good example is like the Bible. taking that entirely throwing it out as not historical because it's religious. And we live in this

kind of age of materialist reductionism a la, you know, Richard Dawkins or whatever. So like nothing in the Bible could be true when like, yeah, some of this stuff seems to defy our kind of modern physics. But there are plenty of things we have actually like a lot of, you know, historical evidence for. And you've spoken about this. Or do you have any good examples of things in the Bible that let's be real. If you're into fasting, sauna sessions, or you just think clearly when you're dialed in physically. Hydration isn't optional. I learned this the hard way. I'd be mid-interviewed sharp one minute and then suddenly foggy and low energy the next. It wasn't burnout and it wasn't just in my head. It was electrolytes. That's why I started using one of my favorite new products, element. It's a zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix formulated with a dose

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That's drinklmnt.com slash alchemy to grab your free sample pack with any purchase. Hydrate like it matters because it does. Oh, well, I mean, there's so much. I think, yeah, I mean, if we're in the conversation of looking for historical evidence of the Bible, you would need to go back to, you know, the Old Testament, because there aren't really any historians that debate whether or not Jesus Christ was a real person. But as far as something that I have been interested that I've spoken about before is the archaeological evidence of the Exodus. And I don't know, I mean, this is such a nuanced topic.

I don't know how deeply we could go into this. But, you know, you read the Exodus, and it's fascinating as to, it's fascinating like the specific details that they get into, you know, common phrases that were said during that time. The details that are in the Exodus story when you're looking back could have only been written by somebody who was alive in Egypt during the time of the Exodus, which would be sometime during like the Mid New Kingdom period. So let's call it very roughly somewhere between 1,000 BC. And so some of the details in there as to like how the women squat on these blocks and give and give birth to children was something that you would have only known if you were living there and not living in Israel a thousand years later, right? And so it's it's just fascinating. Like getting to your point, it's just fascinating. Yeah, that that, and I have some problems with this too.

as to how we we take a religious text like that and we just completely cast it to the side. They do the same thing. They do the same thing with the Iliad and the Odyssey. You know, they do the same thing with Homer's works. I completely cast that out. And I, yeah, I think it just kind of, I don't know, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah, well, it's like, yeah, a good example is the Heinrich von Schleiman and, you know, Peloponnesian War. Well, Troy was never real.

Well, actually, he found Troy. Another good example is the myth of Atlantis, where you have Plato and Solon, you know, saying that, you know, there was a great flood here 9,000 years ago. He's saying this in 600 BC. That dates back to 9,000, 600 BC, which is, you know, the year that, you know, according to people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, there's all this archaeological interesting evidence that that, you know, the younger dry period ended. And so, and it was, you know, this, this. this great flood, this meltwater Pulse 1B. And so that that pattern matches, you know, as well. So I think it's really easy to relegate things as, you know, religion or myth when in fact, you know, like the flood myths, they're over, there are hundreds and hundreds of these flood myths and they're across completely uncorrelated disparate civilizations that, you know, didn't really have a ton of contact with each other. And so, you know, one would. I think be wise to take that seriously if you're like a modern archaeologist not just throw that out. Yeah, yeah. I think the, there's like a conservative argument there that, you know, the reason we have so many flood myths from around the world is because, well, you know, people live next to large bodies of water and large bodies of water are bound to have some kind of horrific flooding someday that people will just continue to tell. but I've talked to Dr. Barnhart about this, and even Dr. Barnhart said this on a podcast that he and I were on together, was that even he feels that to some degree, this really might be some kind of leftover ancestral memory that is passed down of this, you know, horrific events that just eviscerated so much of humanity and people have held on to that.

But at a certain point, I had the realization that, you know, this modern fascination that, you know, millions of people. the people are wrapped up in this, this search for, you know, a lost civilization, this Atlantean civilization. And that can kind of get muddy because the term Atlantis has now kind of become an umbrella term just for this concept of a lost civilization or lost civilizations that could have existed long before. You know, it's this whole alternate space has become this huge range of belief. Yeah, it's frustrating. It's you see everybody's super, but you watch Gaia and they're like, the Atlantis. could teleport, blah, blah, blah. And then, like, even, to be honest, when I look at Graham Hancock, the super rigorous part of his work is around the younger dragsympak theory. I think he's correct on that.

I think he'll be vindicated by history. And then when he gets into the, you know, proto-civilization crossing, you know, the Atlantic, you know, where it's like you have this architecture in the Americas that lines up with this architecture in, you know, Asia or Europe or whatever,

I think it gets extremely speculative. And I think he would even admit that if you kind of, you know, push him on it. Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, there's that quote that's gone crazy viral on his, in his debate against Flint where I think Joe asks him, he said, he says, so would you say in what has been studied there's no evidence for a lost civilization? He's like, well, yes, in what has been studied, there's no evidence for it. I get what he's saying. But it, but I mean, that's a serious point is that we don't, I try to tell people this is, is that I'm very open-minded to everything, very open. open-minded to the, extremely open-minded to the fact that ancient people are achieving a lot of things that we can't really explain by conventional means. They're incredibly intelligent, far more intelligent than I think that they've been given credit for. But, I mean, we still don't have,

like, hard evidence of the fact that this civilization existed or that there were any of them. But you can see these holes in the historical timeline that need an answer. It needs to be filled. I don't know what the answer is. And so that's the approach that I've always, that I've always taken. And the more I've learned, the more I've realized that, yes, Plato is using Atlantis as a tool in his, in his works to essentially, you know, he builds up the story that Athens was, you know, 9,000 years ago was at war or he's, he's either building up the story or he's recounting the story. But he's saying that Athens was once at war with this long-lost city named Atlantis. Atlantis was overly arrogant and, you know, and disrespected the gods and they were impious and so they fell. Well, he's obviously telling a story there because Athens did not exist 9,000 years before that.

Right. I mean, as far as we have evidence for, they did not. And Athens has been thoroughly excavated. Yeah. But that part could just be an allegory. Sure, Athens did not exist 9,000 years ago. But maybe he's recalling on some kind of mythical city that people back then knew about or had heard about or that you hear in a children's story or maybe Solon really did hear about a lost city while he was in while he was in Egypt. But the reality there is that we just don't really know exactly what the reality is there.

And there's, you know, I guess mainstream archaeologists are very quick to say that they know exactly what Plato's intentions were and that the fact that he's. he just pulls it out of thin air and made it up. I don't think that that can be, I don't think that that can concretely be said. But there's no doubt that he's using it as an allegory in his story because he's making Atlantis as a mirror for Athens. He's warning people that Athens is falling, you know. So there's, there's some nuance there.

And, you know, the more I have studied the ancient world, the more I've realized just how unsure we are about the ancient world. Absolutely. Well, Plato's extremely hard to decipher because he and, Socrates had a bias against writing. And so it's all through this sort of parapetetic dialogue or whatever is how you have to interpret everything. Tamas and Cretaceous, the discussion of Atlantis, the whole thing is occurring at a mythos festival. And so it's like, and then even if you read Plato's Republic, he says at the very beginning, like a lot of what I'm about to say is a lie.

But then he goes on to describe things that I think probably speak closer to like true ontological truth, again, this is not something anybody can lay claim on, I think, in our earthly world or whatever, but in my assessment, closer to ontological truth than like anybody. But he says that up top. And a lot of this was due to the persecution of his mentor, Socrates, who, you know, the state ended up killing. And so you never know with him. It's always how much you know about this. I don't know, man. I'm very passionate about it. But, you know, it's always hard to, it's always hard to say. Okay, this is a perfect segue. Very hot in the news right now, and it goes hand in hand with what you're talking about, which is basically that maybe some of these civilizations could have been more advanced, but there is this whole grifting, you know, playing up the mystery, you know, industry around us that we have to be honest about.

There are these researchers, this Italian guy, Felipe, Biondi. And in 2022, I guess you have this peer-reviewed paper, and it's just coming out now, that through these synthetic aperture radar imagery, we have found these vast structures below the pyramids. The verdict seems like it's still out. I texted Graham Hancock about it. He said, I have no reason to believe that the source here is being honest. So, yeah, I don't know. What do you think? I'm going to have to agree with Graham.

Okay. And I'll say this for everybody watching, because I know that, you know, there's people in the audience who they hear about this and they're fascinated by it. And they're like, whoa, okay, finally what we've been searching for, something more is being vindicated. And just putting this out there, there are people out there that know that you feel that way. And they know that that's an easy way to inspire hope in people and make an incredible amount of money through funding at the same time. And so just putting it out there, every respected person in the alternate space is highly, highly, highly skeptical. I know this because we're all in a group chat with each other. And that's just the truth.

Well, they're also, you know, I invest a little bit in aerospace in my sort of investing day job. And a friend of mine, he's really deep on like synthetic aperture radar and other kind of sensing modalities. He's like, look, I have to do the exact math. but I doubt that synthetic aperture radar could ever penetrate that deeply underground. And I even actually, the companies that it came out of Capella Space and Umbra, I looked at, I diligence to them with my venture capital hat on. And that was not my impression either. It wasn't about penetrating deep below the ground.

And then you look at the granularity with which they're drawing these things and they say that their AI is infallible or whatever. That's crazy. Right. That's crazy. Yeah, because anybody who, you know, I work with AI every day. like you just, you know, trying to get easy answers about something with history, you know, I've got chat GBT or GROC or whatever on the side and I can ask it quick questions, but I can't ask it a detailed question. A.I. is not as sophisticated as human beings by a long shot. And so for someone

to say their AI is infallible is insane to me. I agree. It is insane. And it's also, just think about the way AI works, right? It's like pattern matching based on other things. So it's like when you get an answer on chat GPT. It's just like their best averaging and, you know, to their assessment, like the highest quality stuff that they're sifting through online. But it's just token prediction. It's just pattern matching on steroids and it's gotten very good. So it's like Turing passable pattern matching or whatever. If you think about the pattern matching necessary to craft together an energy generator machine underground, that is end of one. That's not like, you don't have like a large sample size to like do pattern matching on that. So like yeah, it's just literally impossible given

the way we know AI works. And the other thing is, is, you know, before they are even going deep on the ground, they're scanning into the pyramid. And supposedly, you know, they, they create this, this 3D model, I'm sure that you've seen, where they took a, they took a visual 3D model of the King's Chamber and the relieving chambers. And they, they, they duplicated it five times inside the the Koffra pyramid and they said this is what they're detecting. There's no serious team that would do that. You would not take a 3D model of a chamber inside a different pyramid and then superimpose it on top of this pyramid. You're scanning and say this is like that.

That's crazy. You wouldn't do that. It's just that's a unique structure to the great pyramid. And it's very unserious to do that, right? Now, on top of that, even with that 3D model that they, that they created, they did not include, and in their scans, you cannot see represented the chambers that we know are inside coffers pyramid. The ones that you can pay the ticket at the Giza Plateau and walk into today, those chambers aren't included. As well as there are these two cavities, ones at 69 feet below the surface and the other one's like 112 feet below the surface.

And they're big cavities that are bigger than the burial chamber inside Coffers Pyramid. those aren't represented in the scans either. You have, so you have nothing of what we know is there. The way that we know that those are there, I think we've talked about this on the phone, is Luis Alvarez, the scientist that worked on the Manhattan Project. He takes a team there in the 60s, and they do a scan in the coffer pyramid.

And I think that they just, they're standing inside the burial chamber and they're scanning up towards the, you know, towards the point of the pyramid. And they checked and tested the equipment, and they were able to detect all four sides, or all four corners as well as the sides and the pinnacle of the pyramid. So they knew that these Mouan scans were accurate.

And in everything that they scanned, they didn't see any more chambers above the chamber that they were standing in. And then in the 70s, another team from Stanford came in and did another scan. And they confirmed, they had the same results scanning up, but they also scanned the shallow bedrock around, and that's where they found these two

cavities in the ground below the coffer pyramid. So, and also we know that these are accurate because they confirmed it and tested everything. Well, this new copper scan hasn't, it's not even tested. They just pointed it at the pyramid. And then, you know, now we have this huge press release over something that wasn't tested, you know, it's just crazy. It's crazy. Well, it's funny.

Like, I'm very pro podcasting in indie journalism. And, you know, I never thought the pendulum would maybe swing this far. where it's like, I look at the incentives on Twitter and it's like, some of the tweets where I'll caveat them and I'll say, look, I don't know if I believe this. This is speculation or whatever. Like, let's speculate and see what's up. Those like do really well. You know, and then the ones where I'm like, you know, it's very, you know, more nuanced or skeptical or whatever like that, you know, those don't do well. And like I tweeted a thing. It was like, you know, this little picture of like a UFO on Mars or whatever. I'm like, you know, maybe this is a UFO. Do we have any good? debunks or whatever. And, you know, that went crazy. And then I came back and I was like, I've come to the conclusion, this is a rock protrusion. It's not a UFO. And it just didn't do as well. So the incentives lead you towards sensationalism. Oh, and that's the thing, right, is you can be so brainwash as a hard term to use. But people get so taken advantage of, you know, there are so many people that are in their nine to five,

going to work every day, looking for whether they realize it or not, like, you're just looking for more. Yeah. You know, you're just looking for more in your life, things that are interesting. And we're so consistently lied to in the media when it comes to politics and when it comes to, you know, socioeconomics, world economics, foreign affairs. We get lied to all the time and have been for decades. And people don't trust anything anymore. They don't. And so, you know, that bleeds into every facet of reality.

And then it's very easy for someone for like a third party sitting on the outside to see this huge group of people that are being taken advantage of by their government, by, you know, by the media and being lied to. And these guys are already the bad guys. So you can take this other fascinating topic that is ancient history and you just kind of wrap a whole bow around that. And man, you can make millions of views by, you know, having these huge conspiracy webs being made out of things. And if you're constantly speculative and never answer any questions, dude, you just inspire so much, like, wonder in people. But a lot of times it's based on just utter BS. Totally. And I think the distinction you have to make is, are you peddling a known lie?

Because if you are, then you should, you know, take yourself off air and do some introspection, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, your life out. If you're not and you're explicitly saying, I don't know, but we're like exploring this together. This is not some official expert view, but like this is possible. That's fine. Yeah. You know, and I think, uh, the breakdown of trust leads to, uh, another criteria, which is like, do we trust the person's thought process or the person like, you know, they're, they're, they're just being an honest actor. Yeah. Um, where if they don't know about something, you know, they'll, they can change their mind or like, say like, this is probabilistic. thinking or maintain some epistemic humility. So yeah, well, that's interesting on Luis

Walter Alvarez. So it sounds like we already have deeper knowledge on pyramid structures than what, you know, these guys are even coming out with. Do we have any evidence that there's anything underground? Because you've talked about this. And I think the Ministry of Culture, what's his name, Hawaz, like, Zaiyahuas, he's talked about, you know, maybe structures under, you know, the Sphinx. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is there, is there something there? This show is sponsored by better help.

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affordable way to get the care you deserve. Your well-being is worth it. It's the most important thing in your life, even more important than aliens. So visit betterhelp.com slash alchemy pod today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterh-E-L-P-C-E-L-P-O-D. After you sign up, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. That would go a long way. Under the Sphinx specifically? Under the Giza Plateau or under the Giza Plateau or the Pyramids. Okay. So the Sphinx thing goes back to Edgar Casey. And there's probably a lot of people who know a lot more about, you know, this guy. Supposedly he was a psychic and another Atlantis guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he, I'm, I could be getting this wrong, but I think he was on like a psychedelic trip or something. And, and he essentially, you know, had some kind of vision that there's this chamber beneath the Sphinx that holds this hall of records, you know, that tells the story of Atlantis. And so this has been, that's the 1940s. So this has been around for 80 years or so. been very popular. And the drilling that they did in the 90s to see if there was a chamber there,

that was overseen by Zahiawas. And you can see in the video when they drill, they drill away from the sphinx. You know, I don't know, just to a semi-shallow depth. And they go, oh, there's nothing there. We're not going to drill anymore. That's a little weird to me. Yeah. But I would say, as I say with my audience all the time, with these really grand ideas

visit are out there. My default position is always, probably not, but maybe. You know, that's just, like, if we're being real with ourselves, that's the reality. Now, as far as things under the Giza Plateau, absolutely, the Giza Plateau is like a honeycomb. It's as much empty space under the ground

as it is solid bedrock. And this comes from a whole host of factors. So on the northern cliff, on the northern cliff face to the west the Great Pyramid. There's this tomb called the Tumes of the Birds. And they call it that because in the 1940s when it was being excavated, so Egypt declared war on Germany, I think in 45. And they were nervous of being under attack of an air raid.

And, you know, they thought that the Luftwaffe was going to come in and bomb the pyramids or something. But there's still excavations going on. You know, they never stopped excavations during the war. So they're trying to identify like, where can we go, you know, to use as bomb shelters? So they find these tombs on the northern cliff. And while they're in there excavating it, they find this little wooden bird. And so it's been popularly thought that, or it's been speculated that this could be evidence of aerodynamics like thousands of years before, you know, it was discovered. And, of course, Egyptologists quickly brush it off.

But I've always wondered if it's been tested. And apparently MythBusters did a little thing on it and could determine that it actually could fly if you added like one thing to it. Anyways. Interesting. At the back of that tomb, there was something that wasn't recorded by the original explorers in that the tomb builders as they're chipping away everything. Yeah. And it's amazing. Have you ever been to Egypt?

Yep. Okay. So you probably went to the Valley of Kings. I did. And so you think about how big of a project that is when you go all the way down to the back of those tombs. It's insane. Every square inch of that tomb is quarried away and carried out. It's a big project, you know, to do that.

And so while they're doing that, they hit a cavern. And you go through, like, one of these cracks in the walls, and there's these caves that go under the Giza Plateau, the whole plateau. And the further they go back in these caves, the more little artifacts and stuff that they find. And as they, the more they've explored the Giza Plateau, the more they have found examples of these tombs going,

you know, these shaft tombs that they're building going deep underground and then they hit a cave. And so the Egyptians obviously explore it. We don't really know what the Egyptians thought of these caves or what they believed by them. That's like invisible in the historical record. What else is under the Great Pyramid is you probably know is, you know, the Giza Plateau, the limelight is taken, is completely taken up by the pyramids and rightfully so. But when you visit the pyramids and you're trying not to stumble over all the stones, you will notice how many holes just descend down in the ground into nowhere, right? And 5,000 years of sand has been blowing in these things and it's never filled up, you know, these holes and shafts and labyrinths underneath the plateau. And truth be told, I mean, we know that some of them were either vertical shaft tombs or their 45-degree shaft tombs and they'll go down into this labyrinth where we'll find tombs there.

Um, many of these are later periods. So let's call it a thousand BC to well into the Roman period. 300 AD, you know, up until, uh, Constantine becomes Christian and all the temples are closed and everything. You know, you have Roman, you have Romans who want to be buried at the foot of the great pyramids. So they go in, they take out the old Greek, Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian bodies and replace them with themselves. So, um, you know, you have, you just have an incredible density under the great pyramids. further than that would be the Osirishhaft, which I'm sure you've heard of. You know, as famous as the Osir Shaft is, there's such little amount of literature about it and what exactly it was used for. It's if you're walking on the causeway, so from the middle pyramid, coffers pyramid, the thing that's the center point of this whole SARS scan, you have that causeway that goes down to the sphinx.

You may remember this, just a big stone road. Well, the Osir's shaft is totally inconspicuous. You wouldn't even know where it was if somebody didn't show you. I was with Land of Kim, and he showed me if you're familiar with him. And so you go down in the Osir's shaft and it drops down. You have this initial chamber that's got seven chamber extensions. What those were used for, we don't really know. Exactly.

We don't know. There's another descending chamber that goes down. You go down this huge ladder. And there's this room that's filled with water. And they don't know to what. extent it was filled with water in ancient times, but in the center, there's this elevated platform that has this huge sarcophagus in it. And what's really interesting is that in the 5th century, Herodotus is exploring in Egypt. And he's told about this huge shaft that goes underneath

the Great Pyramids. And we don't think that he actually went down there. Maybe he didn't know where the entrance was or maybe the entrance was lost or maybe this was just even a legend in his time. We don't really exactly know. But he records that. down in the Osir shaf, there was the tomb of a great king on an island surrounded by a lake of water. Whoa. What is that? You know, like, what? On an island under the Giza Plateau surrounded by a lake of water.

Well, sure enough, I think it's in the 80s or the 90s that this expedition is carried out. Of course, all the credit is taken by Zahiawas. I read his paper recently on, I think it's called Giza and the Osir Shep. And at the very beginning, he takes soul credit for it. He's like, he's like, this is my single greatest discovery in, you know, in my Egypt's logical career or whatever. But that's fascinating. There's like a lake in the, where the tomb possibly was.

It's probably a little bit bigger than the size of this. No, it's maybe like two or three times the size of this room. Yeah. And it was filled with water. And it's underground. And it's underground. And there's this huge sarcophagus that's elevated sitting in the middle of it. Today, the water table is risen and it's covered up the sarcophagus.

But in ancient times, they think that the water was actually lower. That's fascinating. And that there was a there was a sarcophagus raised up above the water. So when you went down there, it'd be a sarcophagus surrounded by water. Do we have any other historical writing about that outside of Pherodotus? Not that I know it. That is fascinating. That's so interesting.

Wow. Do you, yeah, go for it. Well, I was going to say, the thing that I, that struck me as similar to that, is the Osirion. Have you heard of this before? No. Okay. So the Assyrian is probably one of the most mysterious places in all of Egypt. It was constructed in Abidos, which is, Abidos, according to the traditional Egypt's logical timeline,

Abidos is even older than Giza, was around long before the pyramids. And so the traditional Egypt's logical explanation is that in the 19th Dynasty Sedi the First builds this temple and it's this oddly shaped L temple. And behind that he created, and I should say this temple is made out of like modestly sized limestone blocks. So the blocks are maybe this big. Big, but not something that a few men couldn't carry and stack. And it's a beautifully made dynastic temple. You know, you recognize it as an iconic Egyptian style.

But then behind it and lower into the ground, maybe another 30 feet into the ground before you get to the roof, is something called the Osirion. And it is made out of the biggest stones in all of Egypt. They are in these temples. This is in southern Egypt. And it's the biggest stones in all of Egypt. And rather than how the rest of the temple was made out of modestly sized limestone blocks, this is made out of gigantic red azon granite stones. only two of those stones could fit in this room. This huge square pillars, none of it has hieroglyphics on it or anything like that.

Just the utterly completely different construction style. So this is a really fascinating topic in this space, and people who are interested in ancient Egypt will know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't believe that the Osirion was created by SETI. I think it was far older than SETI. When people say that they think it's 12,000 years old, It's more so just a popular belief. It isn't actually based on, you know, anything. I think that whoever built that also built the Sphinx Temple.

You may remember this. It's that huge red granite temple next to the Sphinx. I'm sorry, the Valley Temple. Gigantic stones. I mean, some of them couldn't even fit in this room. Those two architects must be the same. And I think that they're much older than the 19th dynasty, more than 2,000 years old. In the Sphinx itself, Robert Schock, John Anthony West,

talk about limestone water erosion damage on the nose or whatever. And so they think that indicates that the Sphinx existed at a time where you didn't have this arid kind of desert climate in Egypt. And so that would predate, you know, obviously, even the old kingdom in Egypt. Do you believe that the Sphinx itself was also kind of far, far older than? I think that the Sphinx is probably the strong. strongest argument in all of Egypt of an exceptionally old artifact or monument.

You know, even Graham Hancock has come around. If you really study the pyramids, you get to a certain point where you become locked in a certain time frame. And that time frame is the fourth dynasty. Anybody who studies it objectively will eventually come to this. What dates are the fourth dynasty? 20 well so the fourth dynasty is um well and it's very rough but let's call it 2,600 to like let's call it like 2650 to 2450. Okay. It's a 200 year period, uh, BC.

Um, a lot of people don't like that because, you know, this idea like the 12,000, Egypt being 12,000 years old is so popular. Um, but unfortunately that actually isn't based in anything. Um, the only evidence for Egypt being considerably. older is the sphinx and um well it sounds like the sphinx and the these granite structures well well i think that i think that that is contemporaneous with i think it's contemporaneous with the sphinx temple when those two things were built that can be argued okay um but both you'd say are older than you know egypt itself is a civilization or would you say i think i think almost to me almost certainly the sphinx definitely is i can say that i can say that in the other two it's more speculative it more But clearly there's some conflation going on between these structures that we can't date that seem presumably older and then these, you know, traditional Egyptian structures. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just finishing up on the pyramids and then we go to that, you know, even Graham Hancock, like when he was on, when it was just him on Rogan a couple years ago, they talked about it and he said that he that he believes that the vast majority of the great pyramid.

was constructed during the reign of Kufu and that he wonders at the subterranean level and that lower mound structure of the work that was done under the pyramid if that's not part of this you know something that's inherited from this even older civilization and even um are you familiar with bin van kirkwick uh yeah he's he does stuff with randall carlson yeah so he was on a podcast called lost ancient technology or something and they were in front of the pyramids and and they talk about how Graham has come around to believing that the pyramids are fourth dynasty. And I think that that's where the evidence points. Now, talking about the, talking about the sphinx, that erosion on the sphinx is just, if the sphinx was really constructed under the reign of Koffra,

because what they say that they think happened is that you had this huge limestone outcropping. in a canal from the from the from the from the Nile River used to come right out to the base of the pyramids you know when you're out the Sphinx was if you're standing at the base of the Sphinx without any effort you could throw a stone into the Nile River without any effort at all that's how close the Nile was coming up to the Giza Plateau and so as people are sailing by they almost certainly would have noticed this huge. limestone outcropping the top of the sphinx head think about if that's how how high up that limestone used to go it was no surprise that it was there um which contradicts what they what they what the traditional idea is about the construction of koffra's uh pyramid complex and that they accidentally hit this huge limestone outcropping and then decided to turn it into a sphinx or something like that there's a big hole there there's something there that doesn't quite make sense it's not like they accidentally ran into this If anybody here, you could go on Google Earth and do this, it's much more obvious when you're there in person. If you look at the height of the sphinx's head and you look around you,

you're like, there's no way they accidentally hit this thing. This is a huge limestone outcropping that they always had to have known was there, especially if you're sailing by. You would see that limestone goes, you know. So I think that it's not unlikely that this could have been a venerated monument. in pre-Dynastic times. It's obvious that it would have been there. And there's another spot on the Giza Plateau

down on the southeastern side near what's called the Workers' Tumes. It's this, I think it's near Kent Cowaste Pyramid, and it's really not much of a pyramid anymore. All the stones were taken away. I mean, it's not even, you can't even see it as a pyramid anymore. It's completely unrecognizable. But down in there, there's this little piece of the limestone

that's eroded in this really strange way where when you walk up to it, it looks like the back of another sphinx head. It's still there today. And you can tell if that's what that formation with the sphinx head used to look like, it was some weird rock formation. Yeah. You can see how someone would turn it into something. You know, you could you could mistake it for a head. Anyways, I don't know what the sphinx originally looked like. It sure as hell looks like it used to be a lion and that the lion's head was shaved down.

turned into something else. That's what Graham Hancock and Robert Schock think is that when the procession was in Leo or whatever it was made as, you know, a lion as kind of, you know, paying homage. And then the pharaonic headdress was sort of retrofitted onto it, you know, based on, you know, Egyptian customs. Yeah. So I don't know. Well, and I don't think that that's a completely crazy idea.

The best thing that would substantiate that is if we could figure out a means by which, the labeling of constellations is preserved over the course of 10,000 years. How far back does astrology go? I would love to find some kind of evidence of people really far back in history recognizing the same constellations. Well, it's funny. That's always the most fantastical thing that I think people like Robert Schock or Graham Hancock say that to me, it's either not real or if it's real, then you have to get.

into ontologically trippy territory vis-a-vis people from the stars or something because they're talking about monuments being made over cosmic time scales based on processions and stuff paying homage to star alignments and so I mean maybe the Occam's razor explanation for that is like you have a lot of time

to like stare at the sky or something so like that becomes like a way more part and parcel part and parcel of any ancient culture but there might be I don't know It's still crazy. It's still really fascinating. I was having the same conversation.

So I was telling you yesterday, I was out in Big Bend, Texas. For anybody watching, Big Bend is just this huge national or state park in West Texas where you have 100% visibility of the night sky. And you go out there and it's just daunting. It reminds you of how small and insignificant and of a speck you are in all reality. And I was talking to my buddies while I'm out there, and they probably get tired of hearing me talk about ancient history and you know the cosmic scale of everything and um but i you know i find it fascinating and and um i was telling them you know imagine this is at least 30 percent of human reality

until we create lights that just you know have an insane amount of light pollution we can't see the stars anymore you know at least 30 percent of our lives was supposed to be sitting underneath the night sky looking up in the night sky what kind of psychological effect does that happen does that have on us negatively that removes us from the way that we were intended to experience the world you know and so i think that a caveat to saying that i'd love the caveat to saying that i would love to see evidence of of the recognition of constellations be preserved throughout you know thousands of years a caveat to that is that um maybe human beings are just all wired the same you know and that can get into a

a whole other thing where I was in Mexico. I was at this Olmec site called Leventa. I'm standing at the base of the Great Pyramid of Lamenta. And I've been down and I'm looking at these ant hills. And I realize like these ant hills have streets in the middle of them. These are leaf cutter ants. They have these, I think they're leaf cutter ants. They have these streets in the middle of them.

And these highways like go off into the jungle and across like the flat ground. and I've got these big ant mound pyramids, and I realize, like, oh, this looks exactly like a Mesoamerican city. I mean, exactly like it. And it just dawned on me, what if human beings witnessed this and saw that this is like a civilization grid layout? And then they model themselves after ants. But then it also thought about the fact that it doesn't matter where you put ants on the planet. They will do that because that makes the most sense. And so is it like, because they're all wired the same.

The same organism, right? And they do the same things. In the same way that the other day I was in my kitchen and I make these like chick-fil-a grilled or chick-fil-a chicken sandwiches. And I'll make the breading by hand. And so I'll get like corn flakes and I'll crush them up in my hand. Well, after a while, your hands get rubbed sore from crushing these kernels. And so I have it in this bowl and I look around. I'm like, what's something hard I can just use to crush this instead?

And so I grab like a seasoning thing and I start grinding it down and it just realized me I invented a mortar and pestle in my own kitchen without thinking about it. Why? Because I'm wired that way. I'm wired to do that. You know, and people all over the world invented mortar and pestle independently. Right. Yes. So often at the same time. Often at the same time. And it's with a wheel and, you know, all these sort of inventions to pop up in disparate cultures that don't have contact at the same time. Yeah. And if you look at us on the scale, I think, I think one thing is, is there's a lot of magic and mystery to our reality. But then at the same time, some things can just be simple. Like, you know, it is hard for us to understand each other because we, and understand our psychological processes and because we look at each other at eye level. But when we look down on ants, it's pretty easy to understand why they work the way they do. So like, try to take another step. back and look down on human beings as if we're ants. And the explanation is simple is because we're all the same being. Totally. I mean, um, I think, I think that that's, I think that's very interesting. And we have information encoded in us. Like if you look at DNA, you can store like a book on DNA. You can store semantic information on DNA. It's, it is a hard drive of sorts. And like, you know, semiconductors or transistors, you know, certain chunks of DNA can be activated and deactivated via

methylation and acetylation. And so, yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people believe in sort of this idea of transmission theory of consciousness that maybe we are like antennae for something higher or whatever. Well, didn't Tesla, he like directly says that, right? He thought his brain was an antenna for ideas. That would make sense. If you read his book, My Inventions or whatever, it's like he just visualizes these he'll like, he'll work through an entire experiment in his head before doing a thing.

Yeah. So I believe he said that. Yeah, it's fascinating. I think you'd need a new model of electro dynamics because these things kind of, you know, a signal would attenuate too quickly or something. You put somebody inside a Faraday chamber, they can still think, right? Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, it's probably the ultimate hubris to say that we have, you know, we're at the end of history as far as our physical models of how these things work. And I think, yeah, there's a lot to lead one to believe that there's sort of.

of a client server relationship. There's something, you know, where the clients, that's server or something, we're sort of, we're downloading. Even look at base pairs of DNA are, you know, AGCT and it's always, it's, they're called base pairs because it's always the same combination. So it's like ones and zeros on, you know, semiconductor. Let's talk about something a lot of us quietly deal with. Hair loss.

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You know, there were cultures that existed prior to the unification of Egypt. And really all that was in a simple way is... Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary.

You in? Must be 21 to enter. You have a bunch of people who migrate to Egypt when the Sahara dries up. You only have a few places to go. You have this huge green Sahara, 10,000. years ago or 12,000 years ago. And it starts drying up over the course of about 5,000 years. And, you know, these Saharan's only have a few choices to make. They can go to the Mediterranean coast. They can go to the Atlantic coast. They can go down towards the Congo and the savannas. Or they can go to this huge river to the east. And the people who go to this river to the east,

this fertile oasis, which is the Nile River, they are packed into this, you know, on the east side. there's a mile wide of really lush fertile terrain. On the west side, there's a mile wide as well. And you have this really compacted area, and they're all living on top of each other. And so they are not able to have this roaming nomadic lifestyle that they used to, where you could have your herds of cattle and you could have them graze on this grass and graze on this grass,

and you just go up and down the Sahara, you know, or back and forth on the Sahara. Now you have to invent sedentary lifestyle. and that blossoms into civilization because people are living on top of each other. But it doesn't just start that there's like one guy who can rule over the whole Nile. It's the strongest, I mean, literally the strongest guy in each little compacted area. So we call them chieftains. And we have a little bit of evidence for them.

But we kind of just assume, well, this probably did happen. But you have these chieftains that rule in these little areas. And then those chieftains war against each other. the territories, you know, one guy conquers the other, his territory doubles. Well, eventually you end up in this period called the two lands, which is lower Egypt, which is in the north because the Nile runs north. So the lower end of the Nile River is in the north, upper Egypt is in the south. And all the unification of Egypt was, was when both areas had completely unified into their own kingdom, this, the king of the southern kingdom marched his army north and smited the king of the northern kingdom. And I'm sure you've seen this

pose before, where it's this Pharaoh grabbing the hair of a man and he's got his scepter in the air and he's about to crush his head in. Well, that's a pose that every Pharaoh did for the next 3,000 years. That's the unification of it. Inside both lands, you have all these different subcultures of people, like you have the Bidarian culture, the Maadi culture, the Nacotta culture. It goes on and on and on. Well, you have the Maadi culture that lived in the area of Giza. And I've always thought that it was perfectly possible that the sphinx could have been their god or some kind of representation of some divine celestial deity maybe leo you know something along those lines um that was a carved out and venerated lion uh monument that had been venerated long before the

pyramids were ever there before anything else was ever there that this could have been a venerated monument. And I've like often said in jest like yeah, there could have been some kind of sphinx cult, some kind of lion cult that existed there long before the pyramids were ever there. That's more of my belief. When exactly that is, Robert Schock's first estimate was anywhere between 5 and 7,000 BC, I believe, and then he pushed it back further because he had some other evidence that that seemed to align better. I would be, I would be. I wouldn't really feel crazy about saying that the Sphinx could be 5 to 7,000 BC. Going beyond that, I don't know.

Yeah. But it certainly seems like something that is incredibly old. The water erosion around the enclosure just doesn't make a lot of sense. I've seen so many people attempt to debunk it, and I've openly listened to it. But I just don't see a convincing argument for the Sphinx being 2450 BC. Yeah. Oh, here's another thing. Yeah.

is the Pharaoh, Tutmos the 4th from the New Kingdom. Let's call this. Tupmos the 4th is probably born around 1350 BC. And when he's there, the, he, well, during his reign, he erected something called the Dream Stella. And it was him talking about how when he was a young kid before he became Pharaoh, he went and slept under the shade of the sphinx, and the Sphinx visited him in a dream and said,

And the Sphinx essentially tells him through what we can translate, you know, I used to rule over the desert and now the desert disrespects me and rules over me and it's covered my enclosure. Free me from this and I will make you the Pharaoh of Egypt. So Tupmost does this in about 1350 BC. So what this says is that around 1,000 years after the youngest date of the Sphinx being cut out, it was already covered up and buried. So in that thousand years, really less than that, all that water erosion had to have occurred. It's not possible. It's just not possible for that kind of water erosion to occur. Because what they'll say, what scientists will say is, well, you know, it's been 44, 4,500 years since the sphinx was cut out.

That kind of erosion can certainly happen in that period. No. That's totally ignoring the fact that a thousand years later, Tupmo's the 4th says it was covered, says it had filled in and he had to, excavate all of it and clean out the Sphinx enclosure to become the pharaoh. So really, it's in like, let's call it five to 800, 900 years, all that had to be filled in. It's just not, the logic just doesn't work. And so I think, I think it's perfectly plausible that the Sphinx goes back further. Fascinating. Yeah. Two crazy questions that I know are on everybody's mind. One is how were the pyramids built? Maybe impossible to answer, but you have, you know, uh, uh, uh, who Danes,

in France saying that it was built from the inside out. You have other theories that, you know, water was used. The big question is, how are these sort of 20, 30, 40 ton, you know, granite blocks moved from the, you know, Aswan River Valley 500 miles away? And then the second question is you talk to, you know, Graham Hancock. And he says that he says adamantly, he's like the pyramids were not just a tomb. They were, you know, something else. and, you know, maybe like some sort of like celestial ascent chamber portal thing. You know, you have Christopher Dunn saying that they were an energy generation machine.

So how are they built and what were they used for? Impossible to answer. Sure. So just putting this out there, you know, my main interest is not architecture or engineering. I find the mystery of how they were built compelling. I don't spend really much time studying it. of my interest is, is how are ancient people interacting with the pyramids? What is their lives like during the time of the pyramids? What is their relationship to the pyramids like? I find that,

that personal aspect really interesting. And it sheds a, it gives a very fleshy, alive feeling to the ancient world that really gets overlooked in, in this space. Because there's so many people who are already talking about, you know, going through the logistics of the engineering and stuff, and that's very interesting, but there's the human thing that can, that grips you and connection to it. Well, what,

I mean, that definitely connects with the possible why of how these things were built. So, yeah, but as far as the how, I've looked into this, um, the water theory.

I, I've heard about the blocks being floated up, but I don't know how that's feasible. Yeah, I don't either. Because you would have to, you would have to drown all of Egypt to get water that high. Um, blocks may have been, well, I mean, they definitely were floated on boats along the Nile. Um, but, uh, you know, I, when I really think about it practically, I think that some kind of, some kind of there, there's this idea of the internal ramp theory. Have you heard of this? Yes. Where it starts at one corner and it just barely goes up. This is who Dan, this French guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, um. Um,

When I really try to think about it practically, I can't think of anything better than that. But then you get to a point where you're getting so high up on the pyramid. You know, when you get to the King's Chamber, which is made entirely out of the Azwan granite stones, you know, the vast majority of the stones on the pyramid are limestone. And they're sourced from right next to the pyramid. You can see the quarries next to the pyramid. Then the casing stones are Turro limestone, which are, I think, are 15 miles. south found on the opposite side of the river and we have a we have a ledger of those being brought up to giza it's called the diary of merere and he says that he's bringing these turro limestone blocks

up to the horizon of kufu now granted we don't really know what the horizon of kufu is maybe it's the geese plateau but i've also heard a proposal it could just as easily be like kufu's palace which is lost we don't know where kuf's palace was um anywho uh we do know that their terr limestone that come from south of geiza um so those are the three types of stones now it's not it's not really infeasible as to how they move giant limestone blocks i mean even as big as it is it's only like two and a half tons you can move that but it's the 80 ton red granite stones that have to be hoisted up 140 feet into the you know up from the ground and placed into the ceiling of the king's chamber. Yes, I mean, I can sort of see how you could build half of a pyramid with an

internal ramp. But when you go, when you get to the second half and everything is so steep and tightly compacted, I don't know how you finish that job, you know. But granted, have you ever heard of a guy named Wally Wallington before? No, but I love that name. He's the dude that maybe you've seen his videos before where he erected Stonehenge and his backyard by himself. Whoa, cool. So he's moving these 100 ton stones like on a single pivot point by himself. Wow. Now, this will get thrown out there by, you know, you know there's people who are like professional debunkers, like archaeologists, their whole YouTube channel is just debunking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they'll say, oh, it's no mystery as to how these huge stones removed.

Look at Wally Wallington doing it. Well, Wally Wollington's not building a pyramid. He's not putting these stones 150 feet into the air. Yeah. At the same time, though, if you have 500 Wally Wallington's working for 500 years, you can probably build a pyramid. Sure. And so I think what I'm getting at here is... But it's in the Fourth Dynasty 200 years?

Well, so here's the thing, is that the Fourth Dynasty, you know, there's this idea that the pyramids like spring out of nowhere, it just boom, they arrive. well it's kind of true but at the same time you know the fourth dynasty is this 200 year period let's say roughly 2650 to 2450 but they were arriving the if you if we go from the end of the third dynasty to dynasty zero well that's 2650 all the way back to 3100 bc so now we have 500 600 years of history and stone masonry leading up to this explosion of of of archaacetely. So you have a 500-year period where we can see a progression of architecture getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more monumental. But then there is a jump in the fourth dynasty where it's like they just, it's like they figured out flight or something. You know how we, like we figured out, you know, there's in 1911, we figure out flight or 1910 and then just boom, you know, everything explodes. It's like that. There's this progression and then boom, it just exploded.

Now we have stealth aircraft. Exactly. And so take our evolution of technology, how we go, let's call it the 1500s. Technology goes like this and then boom, 1900. It just explodes. It was just ready. Well, think about stone masonry in Egypt. It was progressing for so long. And then all of a sudden Egypt has this incredible amount of power and they just explode in capability. It's like this endless capacity of monumental architecture. And we can get into that. And I, the more I've studied it, the more I have explained to myself the rationale of like how these things happen. But it isn't in line with stuff I learn from academics, which I constantly get accused of like, of, you know, drinking through the straw of academia. I hardly have any connections in academia. I'm friends with approximately one academic who's Dr. Ed Barnhart. I just study this a lot and make, and I look at the evidence and make it make sense.

my head. Now, getting to building the pyramids, yes, I think that with five or six hundred years of expert stone masons, they developed an understanding of how to move, lift, carve, cut, transport, megaliths in a way that even 5,000 years later, we don't understand this. It gets to a certain point where it's like, it seems infeasible to us, but they probably had all kinds of tricks and, like, genius nuances. I mean, I think the best way I can describe this is they knew they had a perfect natural, non-upgradable technology and use of techniques, right? Like perfect, natural, and non-upgradable.

And when it's done, there's no evidence of how they did it because it was so clean, right? Like, the finished product is there, but the evidence of how they did it is gone because they were that good at it, right? that's kind of the way that that I explain it to myself. So I think that a ramp only gets you so far. I don't know what the next steps are. I don't know how you finish it. I don't know how you get the casing stones that slide perfectly in place up at the top of the pyramid with a capstone sitting up on top of it. That's another thing is a lot of people don't know.

A lot of people think that their Egyptologists think there never was a capstone. I think there almost certainly was. But I think the ramp theory only gets you so far. Beyond that, I don't know. Yeah. I do think in some ways the why is more interesting than the how. It's like why, you know, it's like clearly so much effort for this thing that does seem sort of timeless and is fascinating and it's amazing when you go. But it's like it's just an inordinate amount of effort and techniques that, you know, we can't readily explain, you know.

Wally Wally Wally or not. What's his last name, Wally Wally Wally Wollington or not? Yeah, exactly. Well, you're really more, I mean, I appreciate. you, you know, indulging all my Egypt-based questions, but you're really more of an America's guy generally. Is that right? Or? No, actually. I heard you say that on a podcast, so I'm just repeating it. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, there were periods where, where, yes, that was my expertise at that time. The way it started was, so my grandfather was a missionary. And he was, but he was also like a historian of the ancient world.

and this is my grandfather on my mom's side. So I had this influence of this explorer on my dad's side, but then I had a missionary and like a biblical historian on my mother's side. Both of those influenced me. I was always a classical guy. Classical would mean Egypt, Greece, and Rome. More so Egypt and Greece.

That was always my interest. And a little bit of the holy land of the biblical world. As far as my future career in the Americas, I will still do expeditions in the Americas and carrying out exploration here. But I think it's going to be in North America. I think it's going to be in the U.S. There's a lot left in the U.S. I mean, they're...

Like where? I can't say specifically. Interesting. But Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, West Texas, Mexico. I can't tell exactly where. But yeah, yeah, there's a lot left. I mean, there are entire, I call them cities, but they're like small ancient cities that have never been discovered that are in the United States. Absolutely. Yeah. Crazy. A hundred percent. And are you working with Ed Barnhart on this stuff? Interesting. Yeah. I have never talked about this publicly before. He and I may have barely touched on it when we were on Danny Jones together. But I've never really talked about this in depth before.

How old are we talking? It ranges, you know, some are 1,000 years, some can be 5,000, 6,000 years old. Wow. Yeah, there's a, there's an ancient city in Texas that was discovered recently that's 10,000 years old. That's unbelievable. Yeah, yeah. Do you think, you know, we have this narrative that's been popularized in anthropology that's

like sort of primitive to progress, do you think that some of these ancient civilizations outside of the, you know, evidence we have in Egypt and other places like that? And outside of the woo-woo thinking, a lot of people like to kind of engage in, do you think that there are civilizations that were just way more advanced than meets the eye? Like, for example, you look at the Amazon and, you know, it's so undiscovered still. And what if we was talking to Graham Hancock about, like, lidering, you know, over the tree tops of the Amazon forest, and you can see the topology, and then you see your little geoglyphs kind of popping out, and then you go down. And we're doing this all the time and finding all the time.

and finding all sorts of crazy stuff. And so, you know, if archaeology as a field is only, you know, a little under 200 years old, you know, where we found, you know, Assyria, Babylonia, you know, 200 years ago, isn't there sort of a law in archaeology that the farther you go, the longer you go, the older civilization actually gets? And Gobeckley-Tepi is just the tip of the iceberg. And you have a lot more advanced stuff that's we're going to uncover that's, you know, way older. civilization's more like an S-curve and not like this hockey stick, you know, thing. Well, yeah, I would absolutely say it's an S-curve. I mean, ancient Greece is a perfect example of that. You have the height of the Bronze Age.

Then you have the Trojan War. And then the Trojan War seems to coincide with the fall of the Bronze Age. Greece falls into the dark, you know, the dark period. And then it comes out of the archaic period. So you have this huge dip in, you know, in their technological. capabilities. There's no more writing anymore during for some of that period. That's just one perfect example. That same thing also happened in Egypt where you have these long periods of centuries where nothing is happening. It's like this, it's like this invisible dark period where we

don't have any more literature or anything. Now, those are on microscales, but like a macro scale, yeah, I mean, definitely there have to be periods where civilization as a whole is flourishing and then everything crashes. A macro scale would also be like the collapse of the Bronze Age. I mean, all around the Eastern Mediterranean, every ancient civilization was heavily impacted or their infrastructure collapsed and had to recover. And that's on a macro scale.

Like an ultra macro scale, if we're looking at civilization all across the world, yeah, yeah, there definitely had to be periods where things happen that impact society, like stun it or, you know, like stuns progression or, you know, completely eliminates humanity. Nobody knows exactly what was going on during the Ice Age. But I guarantee you that the North Atlantic ice cap and this dramatic event that, that I say instantly, but rapidly ended the Ice Age, I mean, it eviscerated North America.

The reason that we don't go to, you know, when you go to a zoo, there's never a North America section? You know, what do we have in North America? We have bears, deer, foxes, rabbits, not a whole lot else. Snakes. Snakes? Sure, yeah, you have that like in the aquariums or whatever, not the aquarium, whatever. But you don't have a North American section because we lost so much of our megafauna at the end of the Ice Age. But man, we used to have giant sloths. We had woolly mammoths and elephants. We had large saber-toothed cats. We had the short-faced bear. We had the American lion, which was twice the size of the African lion. I mean, we had so much wildlife here, and it was all destroyed. It just disappeared at the end of the Ice Age. Now, sometimes they

say that they were all hunted to extinction by nomadic people. I just spoke to an evolutionary biologist last week, and he and I were both like, I mean, humanity had been around for over. 100,000 years before that. You don't think during that 100,000 year period, humanity was able to realize if we kill off our food source, the food source doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me. And it's like, what do you have, like, spears at the time? Are you really, like, expirings and bow and eras? But are you extincting woolly mammoths with that technology? I don't know. I don't think you're eviscerating entire populations of it. It just doesn't seem feasible to me. And human beings, they were ignorant to the things that we know.

today, but they weren't ignorant to their natural world. And what's, what is the pillar of their world is their food source? It's the pillar. They're, as far as we know, agriculture doesn't exist at this point. They are hunting animals and living side by side. So you think there was an extinction event, like some larger, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, this brings up a question, which is, you know, you brought up Luis Walter Alvarez, you know, he had this theory that an asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago and that caused, you know, dinosaurs to go extinct. You now have Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock talking about the Younger Dryus impact theory that, you know, a comet impact from the, it was an airburst, I guess, in their opinion, from the torrid meteor stream, you know, hit the Earth's atmosphere and then caused, you know, the Ice Age and then also brought us out of the Ice Age.

Is there something that you, Luke Caverns, believe, will get proved down the line? Do you have a big, bold hypothesis? It could be on anything. It doesn't have to be on an extinction event. But I always think that. think, you know, it's a very interesting, my former employer, Peter Thiel, has a question, which is, what's the thing that you believe that very else, very few other people agree with you on? So what's something you're high conviction on that no one else agrees with you on? And, you know, you're at the tender age of 27, so maybe you don't need a great answer to this question. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people.

people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. You know, about five years ago, no, it's been longer than I know. It's been like 10 years ago. I started asking myself really hard questions about Christianity.

I was raised Christian. Still am, but I'm writing a video right now titled Why I'm no longer a modern Christian, like quotations. And in studying the ancient world, and really in studying the Americas, it changed my perspective on so much. You know, modern-day Christians,

21st century first world Christians have are so ignorant of of like the grand scale or large scale humanity. And they almost never juxtapose that or try to compare it or rationalize it with their religious beliefs. And this can this can go in so many different directions like even as simply as a direction of okay, why did God only present himself to a small minority of people living on the eastern Mediterranean 2,000 years ago when civilization was already blossoming all across the Americas. What about people in the Americas? What happens to them?

Well, you really never get an explanation from that from your average Christian, or even like you're exceptionally educated Christian. These are just hard questions that most never ask themselves. Another thing is, you always hear a Christian say, there's only one God. There's only one God.

but they never go beyond that because the Bible clearly states that there's more than one God, clearly states that. I mean, even God Himself, the Hebrew god Yahweh, recognizes and acknowledges the existence of the gods of Egypt. In Exodus, he tells Moses that he's going to execute his, I think it's Exodus 12. He tells him that he's going to execute his wrath on the gods of Egypt. And even during the Genesis story, you know, there's this, there's an interesting thing that happens here where it seems like, I say it seems like. I'm not saying this is what it is. But it seems like God doesn't tell the truth to Adam and Eve because he tells Adam, you know, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for you'll, you will surely die. And then the serpent, you know, comes to Eve and essentially tells her like, what do you mean that you'll surely die? You'll surely die. And then the serpent, you know, comes to Eve and essentially tells her like, what do you mean that you'll surely die? die. You're not going to die. He's afraid that if you eat this tree, you'll become like him, which is odd. And then Adam and Eve eat from the tree, which I have my own idea of what I think that that tree is. And then God's immediate reaction to that is he turns to this divine counsel,

this mysterious counsel full of other beings in heaven that's way, very much often overlooked. And he says, behold, man has become like us. So they didn't die. They became like God. So it's like weird that God didn't, It's like God didn't tell them the truth or is it that they died, that their innocence died. That can be a whole other thing. And I don't have a hard opinion about that. But these are hard questions I was asking myself. And then I came to the realization during this period. I was like, if I'm going to be a Christian, I have to rationalize and accept some of these beliefs.

And when God in the Old Testament acknowledges the existence, of the gods of Egypt and says he's going to cast his judgment on them. Does that mean that the gods of Egypt are real? Does that mean that these experiences that the Egyptian priests and that the Pharaoh are having, that they so commonly talk about, these gods coming and speaking to them, and they're convicted with this purpose of this thing that they have to do, which seems so bizarre to us. Like, you know, people who are fans of the Atlantis hunt,

if you try to talk to them about ancient religion and say, well, you know, these are spiritual people, these are very religious people that are convicted. They go, oh, come on, man, nobody would do that. Well, they might do it if it's really happening. And that is, that's something I almost never talk about. Because I don't know quite how to explain it. But I certainly think that when you look at all of these temples in Egypt,

you look at the obelisk of Hacheptsuit, where at the top of the obelisk and at the bottom of the obelisk, like, right at eye level, you can go up to it and read it. And I've read the translated hieroglyphs. And she said, she said, as for this obelisk, it's something, I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, as for this obelisk, I erected this from, from Electrum, which was just like gold and, and your wealth. So she paid to have these two obelisk erected. She said, like any good king, wood for their father, Amun, which is this God. And she goes on to talk about how she did this for the God and everything. And then at the Temple of Luxor, the back chamber was a chamber, you've been to it. So this huge chamber and you go to it at night. It's the one that's always lit up at night. That huge chamber in the back, as far as we know, was reserved only for Amunhotep to connect to his father, Amun Ra, the God.

And I'm standing there in the middle of this back chamber that not even the priest are allowed in, and only the pharaoh. And I'm thinking, was this whole temple built for Amunhotep to enter it and not come face to face with Amun Ra? It wasn't actually happening. This is all made up. Yeah. Why would you expend so much effort? This whole temple is here for nothing?

Yeah. No. It's not. Look at, I mean, everything that just the Egyptians achieved, then let's jump over to ancient Greece. Look at all the temples that they erected. The Parthenon. Look at everything that they did on behalf of their gods. I mean, so significant to the point that Leonidas goes to visit the Oracle of Delphi to determine as to whether or not they should fight against the Persians.

I mean, they really believed in the gods. They actually believed in them. And I've heard Greek professors say that, you know, these women who would become, like as the vapors came up under the ground of Delphi, the woman would become possessed with the spirit of Zeus. And I've heard a Greek historian, you know, college professors say, I don't mean this in any symbolic or spiritual sense. I'm telling you that this literally happened, that the woman was literally possessed with the spirit of Zeus. And that was absolutely jarring for me to hear that from a professor. He wasn't kidding at all. He's like, it's not spiritual, it's not metaphysical.

Or it's not metaphorical. It is actually happening. And he talks about these other women that would become possessed by the gods and they'd run around naked on these mountain sides and everything. And he was like, they'd wake up the next day and not remember anything. He's like, it's not an exaggeration. It was actually happening. Yeah. And you look at the Americas, man. All these ancient temples and sites that were erected on behalf of these god beings. It's every ancient culture recognizes these gods that exist on our planet. And I think that my hill. that I die that I would die on if there is one is that ancient people were not making it up yeah I love that they weren't making it up well it's an assertion of modernity to say that they were it's just as much an assertion to say that they were then like we don't know it's it's really impossible to say and then if you were to put yourselves in their shoes like it seems like they actually weren't making it like they weren't talking about it in mythological terms yeah there's a guy named julian janes i don't know if you've

heard of him. He was a Yale professor. He wrote a book called On the Origins of Consciousness and the bicameral Mind. And he used to say that, you know, we, like, basically we shifted towards left brain thinking. And we have this modern divided brain. But that was really, that really occurred post-1000 BC. And it's this very kind of gestalt, big history view. It might be very imperfect. Post-1,000 BC. 1,000 BC. And he was kind of laughed out of the room, but there are people who definitely take him, you know, pretty, pretty seriously today. Do you remember why exactly he says post 1,000 BC? I don't. I have to go back and read the book. But even if you look at the New, the Old Testament, the God speaks, you know, directly through signs and through, you know, you know, great, great signs or Sodom and Gomorri, destruction in many cases. And then he speaks through prophets. And then he sort of goes away. And so there is something about. the arc of God even in the Bible himself. And then he has to sort of anthropomorphize himself in the form of Jesus in the New Testament. So there is this arc of, you know, direct intervention to leaving. And that, you know, begs all sorts of really interesting, interesting question. So I'm with you. Also, it's like we were talking about the why, you know, on a lot of these like really crazy megastructures. And it's like maybe you'd be way more motivated if these gods were actually real to you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's the thing about the pyramids is, you know, even I cringe at the idea of a, of a structure that massive being erected and prepared for the burial of a single man. Yeah, I cringe at that idea because it's hard for me to fathom somebody, you know, I inherently have a negative perception of that person that is being built for, you know, like if, like if there were. was some guy today, like let's say Jeff Bezos wanted a, wanted a pyramid for his own burial. I just think that's like, ugh, it's gross, right? But at the same time, for someone in the modern day to immediately dismiss that as a possibility, it's like an arrogance of modernity, right? Because, okay, I would ask that person, I see this all the time in my comment section, the comment section of every video, you know, nobody would do this for, for, you know, whatever. Okay. I would tell that person, okay, please dive into the mindset of somebody living in the early 1900s for me. Yeah. It'd be really hard. Okay. Please dive into the mindset of somebody living in the early 1800s for me. And let's go back every single century. Yeah. And go, let's go back 47 centuries and please dive in and tell me logically how they're working in. No, totally. You read we know nothing. You read pride and prejudice and you're like, this is the weird Victorian, you know, It's like you're looking across the room and you have, you know, Darcy and all these characters.

Like, you read that. And that's like, oh, that's like another planet. You go to Tokyo now and you're on like another planet or something. You know, it's like so different from American culture. And so, yeah, completely. Yeah, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years. What I think happens is we psychologically spend so much time with this time period that you feel more connected to it than you are. And you have this like cognitive dissonance because you're forgetting how disconnected you are from these people.

you are becoming so familiarized with the data that you have been exposed to and you spend so much time with it that you develop such a connection to it that you have to remind yourself. You have to constantly keep a reminder that you are so incredibly disconnected for these people so disconnected that it doesn't matter. Like I've tried to tell people the difference between as far as our connection to the pyramid builders between 4,700 years ago and 12,000 years ago, they may as well be the same. Because we're that disconnected from them. It doesn't make much of a difference. And that's the thing. It's trying to come up with a rationale behind why they did it is fascinating. But to have such a strong opinion over it is ridiculous and foolish. And it doesn't matter if you think that they were tombs or not. Being so tied to your opinion that you can so quickly dismiss someone else's opinion or say that anything is ridiculous is foolish.

because you can't even tell me the rationale behind people living 100 years ago. Yeah. It's like you think you're an expert. You think you can possibly know something 4,700 years ago. You can't. Yeah. You know? So that's why there has to be, there needs to be this like moderate tone coming in where, hey, this is the evidence that I personally am aware of and that I have studied.

This is what I think makes sense. What, there's so much else out there. Yeah. And many of the historical kings themselves were merged with divinity. Aunt Gaten is a good example. Or it's like the sun god, you know, or even up to, you know, Louis XIV. He was the sun god in the French context. But it was literally ruling under divine right. And that was not like some metaphor. It wasn't some joke. That was, you know, he was seeing as sort of godlike. Well, Henry V, he's, he believed that he was the conduit of God himself, that he was performing, he was performing the will of God to expand England's, you know, kingdom. I mean, yeah, yeah, this, this idea.

of, you know, your king being the direct conduit of God himself can have a tremendous impact on a, on a civilization. This was happening in the fourth dynasty too. You know, prior to that, there was an element of piousness that, you know, pious means that means just being, having a reverence for like a certain deity, having a respect for a deity, submitting to a deity to a certain deity in a way. religion in a way. There's this element of piousness. But then in the fourth dynasty, that is still there, but there's an elevation of the king or the pharaoh status, where he is now becoming merged with the God. And I've often wondered, and I don't really see this proposed by any Egyptologist, but I often wonder, you know, prior to the great pyramids, people don't realize this, tomb building is this

it's either a vertical shaft going straight into the ground or it's a shaft that goes about 45 degrees into the ground. The exact opposite is true with the pyramids if we're to assume that those are tombs. And I mean, here's like a simple thing. I know people don't like the tomb idea. Sometimes I cringe at it as well. There are sarcophagus, sarcophagi in the chamber.

Like if you're going to now explain to me why that's not a sarcophagus, You're really getting out there now, you know. I'm not opposed to that, but I'm just saying that's the reality of it. And the sarcophagi are too big for the entranceways. So they're not brought in later. They were placed in the room while the room was created. And that's why, you know, that is such a hard thing to get around that even, you know, Graham Hancock gets to a point where he's now saying on the Joe Rogan think, well, perhaps it's not a sarcophagus.

Perhaps it's a place where you lay down inside of, so now we're laying a person in it. It's very akin to a sarcophagus. But he's saying this may be a place where you. your consciousness is being elevated and you're gaining some kind of, you know, cosmic wisdom. Okay, that's interesting. But we're still laying people in it. That's how compelling just a simple human-sized boxes in that room that had to be laid there when it's made. But these chambers are now above ground.

They're, you know, let's call it roughly like 45 degrees above ground. I've tried to get into the psychological aspect of this. And I have wondered if now that we're seeing. the pharaoh being merged with the god raw, perhaps he is now a divine being that needs to be buried above ground. He's not supposed to be buried below ground. Or let's go another step further.

Here's another one of my theories that no Egyptologists and no alternate person agrees with is the inside of the pyramids, it's very odd that there's no hieroglyphs on the inside of it. I hear a lot of Egyptologists will brush this off

I was like, well, you know, there's no hieroglyphs inside of it because tomb decoration just hadn't got to that point yet. But that's, but that's not accurate because we see older tombs that have tomb decorations in them. It was okay, so you have the chronology of the pyramids is you have the step pyramid, then you have the pyramid of my doom, then you have the bent pyramid, then you have the red pyramid, then you have the great pyramid. Okay. the Sakara Step Pyramid, down in those labyrinths below that, there are depictions of the Pharaoh Josier up on the wall in his iconic like striding forward in the Hebsed Festival imagery. And he's visiting these divine sanctuaries and casting these spells in the afterlife, all in hieroglyphs depicting the pharaoh himself.

Immediately after that, there's no more interior tomb decoration. Why is that? I don't know. because on the outside of the temples in the, in the, uh, funerary temples on the outside, there are depictions of, there are hieroglyphs. There, there is artwork. Why is it now disappearing from the inside? Well, the only crazy explanation I can come up with in my mind that nobody agrees with, um, is I think that there maybe is some kind of elevation where the pharaoh himself is no longer the pious king serving the god, but now he,

is the god and that the pyramids themselves this is actually something that um the archaeologist his name starts with the p that excavated the pyramid of amenem hat the third um he asserted that this was never a tomb and that this was a symbolic tomb for this for the pharaoh's caw so you have the caw which is the divine essence so you have the caw and the ball you have these two separate parts of your soul that have to coexist in your life and then they have to to meet later on in life. So that's why the body is preserved so that the body can last longer with the ca or with the ba and that the caw, the divine part of the spirit can find the body in the next world. When we have hieroglyphs that depict that this is what they think, that the

Egyptians believe this is what was happening. And so I've heard this thrown out there before by one Egyptologists back in the late 1800s. He asserted this and I believe it too. And I think it's true for the fourth dynasty. Now Amin Hothep, or Aminemhat the 3rd, he's Middle Kingdom. This is, call it 1900 BC. So I am kind of graphing that onto the fourth dynasty, which is five to 700 years earlier. I think that these pharaohs were ascending to the status of a god

and that the pyramid was not for the body of the pharaoh, but for the divine essence of the pharaoh that belonged to the God. And that's why there's nothing inside of it Because you don't need to write hieroglyphs inside of a pyramid for the divine essence of a God. You need an impenetrable building that the divine soul of the God is buried in. And that Pharaoh himself is buried somewhere in the south. The reason I think that is because Amenem Hat the Third, his pyramid is a model of the old kingdom pyramids. And he was like hearkening back to this lost, or I should say he's harkening back to this older kingdom.

and his body was buried in the south down in a place called Abidos. Abidos is where the earlier pharaohs were buried. So he gave himself two burial sites. And because his pyramid complex is a model for the old kingdom, I think he knew something that's invisible to us today that the pharaohs of the old kingdom were never buried in their pyramids and their tombs are down south. Because the south is the religious capital of Egypt.

That's where you're supposed to be buried. but the pyramids up north that's the economic capital of egypt and it's the pyramid is like symbolic it's symbolic of egypt's power it's symbolic of the divine power of the god and it's symbolic of the divine power of the king so there was never a pharaoh buried in those pyramids it's the it's the burial of the divine essence of the pharaoh's spirit that's a crazy explanation but we're talking about people who were basically aliens yeah like we don't know we we we we we don't relate to these people in any way. The life is nothing like ours.

Yeah. And so it's just you get to this point of crazy speculation, you know. And my explanation there has only slightly more evidence to it than the pyramid power plant idea. You know what I mean? Sure. We're just getting so far out. It's hard to explain. Yeah.

As long as you demarcate the thing is speculation, I think it's totally fine and great. And it creates in science, you need a hypothesis, right? So you need to get crazy in the hypothetical stage. and then, you know, you got to corroborated or whatever. But even if you go to the, you know, National Museum in Cairo, and you see some of these mummified, you know, pharaohs, they look very short. Clearly they've engaged in some sort of cranial deformation to mimic the gods.

And they look like gray aliens. They look so strange. Especially during the Amarna period, which is what you were talking about with Akhenaten. Mm-hmm. Man, that's a fascinating time period where Akhenatenaten like flips Egypt on its head. And what I think was happening here, I'm going to dive into this at some point, like do a big video essay on it. You have the priests and you have the temples that are becoming really, really powerful. And I wonder, this is why I said like the author of the book you were saying that this impiety, this not respecting of the gods, this losing our religion begins around 1,000 BC.

because that's about the fall, that's about the collapse of the Bronze Age and really that's the fall of Egypt is where it takes this downturn. And it's the end of the chapter of the corruption of the temples, I should say, or it's where the corruption of the temples had permanently solidified

its negative impact on Egypt. Egypt would just collapse forever. At the beginning of ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh and his family were the sole rulers of Egypt. And as long as you, had an unquestionably powerful ruler, Egypt prospered greatly. But think about the logistics of this. You become Pharaoh. Your wife is like the divine mother, the king. And then you give all of your

brothers and sisters, which you probably had a lot, and you gave all of your cousins and their, you know, spouses, jobs. Everybody has your best interest at heart. But your brother dies. And you don't have a great replacement for him. But you have your friend. that you're really close to. He's not part of your divine family, but you're going to make an exception for him. Fast forward 600 years, only 20% of the government is now part of the Pharaoh's family, and everybody else's is competing for power against the Pharaoh through one way or another. This is what happened with the temples. And what I think you have is you see this feud starting with the, with the Pharaoh Aminhotep III, who is the father of Akhenaten. And what I can just

imagine happening is Aminhotep III is absolutely fed up with the temple. competing with him for economic power. You have so many people bringing money and incredible amounts of meat. You know, meat is extremely expensive in the ancient world to bless their ancestors in the afterlife. So you leave these offerings at the temple

or you leave the offering at your ancestors' tombs to feed them in the afterlife. And do you think the priests are just going to let that food rot there? No, the symbolic gesture is now over. Now all the priests take the food. They take the office. offering and consume it themselves. That's why you have all these statues of these fat priests because

they're so wealthy. And clearly they're they're wealthy in food, they're wealthy in resources, and they're wealthy in money, and they own the land around Egypt. So they're budding heads with the Pharaoh. And what I just imagine is the 18th dynasty is the most powerful part of Egypt. It's the it's the it's the juiciest, most dramatic chapter in ancient Egyptian history, unless you want to count Alexander de Cleopatra, which is at the very end. And, but anyway, you have this dramatic increase in power. And it basically reaches its pinnacle under the reign of Amunhotep III, who is also competing with the priesthood. And I can just imagine him in the palace, like pacing back and forth with his little son, Aminhotep IV, listening to him.

And he's saying, you know, Egypt should be like the way it was in the old days, where the Pharaoh himself was the king, was the divine ruler, and he was the high priest. Not some other high priest that now competes with the Pharaoh. If I had it, you know, if I could really have it my way, I would erase all of them. I would destroy the temples. I would eliminate all the priests. I would declare myself the high pharaoh. Egypt just isn't what it used to be. And the pharaoh's power is diminished.

And you have this little boy who's growing up like, yeah, you know, those guys. And Aminhotep the third dies. Aminhotep, the fourth, becomes king. And he says, I'm not worshipping Amman anymore. This god that Karnak temple was built to worship, it's done. Karnak temple, I'm closing. the doors, I'm closing the doors of all the temples. I'm only going to acknowledge the one true sun god, the Atten. And I'm going to make my name Akhenaten. And so he changes it and he moves

the capital somewhere else. It's just a fascinating era. And then they start depicting themselves with the elongated skulls, which is really fascinating. It's like the art just completely changes. And where does the skull elongation come from? We don't really know. We don't know why it arrived right then. And then the Yamarna period ends within that same generation and the elongated skull thing goes away. Whoa. Yeah.

So it's like this little period of time where the skull elongation shows up. Why does it show up? What period of time was the skull elongation happening? I'm going to say that this is like 13th century BC, like 1250 BC somewhere. That's really, really rough. Fascinating. Maybe even a little bit before, maybe even another century before that. You know, the numbers get real messed up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's the thing I wonder. It's like, where did that skull elongation depiction come from? Because it's so similar to what you see in other places around the world. Oh, yeah. I wonder, you know, the very speculative part of me wonders, is the God that Akhenaten is interacting with? Is that where the influence of that comes from? You know, is it?

And when I say God, sometimes I wonder, are these actual cosmic beings? beings that are interacting with people? Or is it a manifestation and anthropomorphized version of things that people are seeing while they're on certain substances, right? Like, do we have certain substances around the world that have similar effects on people because we're all wired the same, right? Yeah. So, you know, you have people that go down to the Amazon today and they take ayahuasca and they

will meet a goddess down and you have thousands of reports of people meeting this similar goddess being woman that automatically knows everything that's wrong with you and can have such profound effects on you psychologically that it can cure your addictions and things like that and and i wonder it's one of two things it's our brains are all wired to receive this image of this goddess woman that has this crazy effect on us because we're all wired the same, so we're all bound to have the same effect of this plant. Well, in Egypt, you have your own,

you have your own hallucinogens. You know, you have the lotus flower, which is this huge mystery. You have opium. Yeah, acacia trees. Exactly. DEMT rich. And so you wonder if these people are taking these hallucinogens

and these gods are like the anthropomorphic manifestations of what they're experiencing, right? Yeah. or whether or not Well, it's fascinating Like even the, like the, uh, the idea of combining this, you know, uh, DMT with this M-A-O inhibitor or whatever, which is us putting that in the kind of modern pharmacological context, but it's combining this, you know, substance with this vine in the

Amazon is such a, an improbable, you know, thing to find in the first place, which begs the question of like, you know, was that just trial and error? or what sort of divine inspiration or what inspiration led them to sort of find this stuff in the first place. And then you have, yeah, you have in Athens as well. You have the L. Elysinian mystery rituals, elucis being 13 miles northwest of Athens, it's the spiritual capital. And you have all the guys who we consider the fathers of Western, you know, thought and civilization today, Plato, Socrates, Alcibiades, all these guys, you know, taking this Kekegon drink and seeing all sorts of. of crazy things and experiencing noisis and knowledge of their primordial soul, but, you know, it's sort of under, uh, under death that they can't actually talk about the mystery schools. And, uh, clearly it had this profound effect on their, on their thought process. Yeah, well, you know, uh, Herodotus talks about

these mystery cults in Egypt. And he speculates on like, I wonder what's going on here. And then while he's in Egypt, he's allowed to participate in them and then he doesn't talk about it again. It's fascinating. Yeah, Alcibiades is a good example. He talked about... Just the fact that you know the name Alcibiades, I respect you. Thanks, man. Well, he got in trouble for talking about the mysteries

because you're not supposed to talk about Fight Club or whatever. So I didn't know that about Arranta. That's so interesting. Yeah, it's... I mean, the other interesting cut at this is like, you look at all these gaps in civilization generally. So it's like the Terence McKenna's Stone-Dape Theory or what. whatever, like you could explain the doubling in cranial size from homo habilis to homo sapiens. So two million

years ago to 300,000 years ago, uh, with, you know, human hunter-gatherers were following scat, basically shit because they were trying to hunt for prey or whatever. And you had, uh, you know, um, psilocybis cubensis, you know, mushrooms, magic mushrooms growing in the shit in like, you know, Africa. Yeah. And so that, it's a, it's a reasonable explanation because you get all these, you know, new neural pathways, neurogenesis, you know, epigenetic changes, and you get this kind of stepwise leap in cranial size and functioning. And then you think about, like, what's the next big leap? You know, that's a physiological leap. What about a cultural leap? It's like the agrarian revolution. And it was wheat, barley, and rye that we were growing.

And I think the kind of conventional narrative is like you have more time for specialization, for urbanization, because you have, you know, agriculture, takes care of you don't have to you know hunt and gather constantly 24 seven um but what grows on wheat barley and rye it's ergot and ergot is the substance that is probably in the in you know the kekion and the drink and the mystery rituals and if you talk to people like brian murrescu who wrote the immortality key about the mystery rituals he'll say they go like you're saying way back to egypt and you know even to you know uh mycenia to like you know really uh you know uh pre 1,000 BC and even before that.

And so that begs this question, is modern civilization actually a function of visionary experiences? You know, maybe it's not just this like Occam's razor, like, oh, they had more time. So they sort of like built all these things. Maybe they were engaging in these sort of mystery rituals well before the L. Yusinian mystery ritual. I don't agree with the they had more time thing. It doesn't seem, I don't know, man.

that just seems so outside of human nature. I agree. When have you ever felt like, oh, I just had this abundance of time? I'm going to go erect a megalithic temple. Totally. It just doesn't, that's just not how reality works out, you know? And it's, we've been physiologically the same for 200, 300,000 years. Why in the last few percent, you know, three to five percent of our existence do we create all this stuff?

You need some inspiration for, you know, I find, I find that jarring to, you know, we have, at least 200,000 years of homo sapiens being anatomically the same as we are now. Our brains are the same size. So you had 100,000 years ago, you had people being born with the same mental capacity of Einstein. Yes. And what were those people doing? Yeah. They were definitely doing something.

They were doing something. And is it, you know, at least my opinion is that, one, we haven't found the archaeological evidence of it yet. or what they were doing just didn't preserve. It just disappears, you know. I mean, buildings will go away and how, gosh, what is it? That I read something that was like, if you let New York City sit where it is, that, you know, more than 90% of New York City

wouldn't be around in like 40,000 years or 50,000 years or something like that. So 150,000 years ago, what are people building that would possibly be preserved later on? Yeah. You know, the likelihood is, the likelihood that they're producing toxic materials that are going to that are impossible to be destroyed like what we're doing to the planet right now is low i think yep i agree i don't

i just say my hunch which i i guess it's not based on anything but just my hunch of what i deem to be realistic is i don't think that there was another civilization that existed before us or our period in time where people were ever pursuing technology that's like what we have to day with, you know, plastics and electronics and stuff like that, whatever they had, I think it probably falls in line with something being like simple, natural, non-upgradable. It is the perfect extrapolation of their natural resources. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I would say. If there's a high civilization that existed before this chapter, it was something similar to that, that, of course, it's not preserved because these are people who know how to extrapolate to the absolute

maximum their resources from their natural world. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's, maybe we see a renaissance of thought around that sort of thing. You look at like, you know, biosphere technology from like New Mexico or like, I don't, watch the movie Avatar. And it's like they're, they're in these like, you know, perfectly, ecologically consistent sort of habitats or whatever. And a lot of what we're doing now, I mean, we brought up SpaceX earlier. It's like with, you know, Starship. They have like 36 Raptor engines and it's like an enormous amount of mass ejection. And I'm probably marginally, you know, way more pro-Spacex than I am the FAA and, you know, EPA trying to like stop them or whatever.

But it's still brute force. It's super brutish. And like I think a lot of our tech is. So yeah, maybe maybe a lot of that stuff was more advanced. Okay. Going back to ancient Egypt, the curse of King Tut's team. Oh my gosh. Do you think there's a there there?

You know, I've thought about this. And maybe set it up for the audience. What is the curse of King Tut? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I really read about this about four years ago. But King Tut is the final king of, he's a young boy. He's the son of Akanaten. And he's the final king of the 18th dynasty of the Amarna period.

And this is what we were talking about earlier, where Egypt just flipped on his head and they're, they're, um, they're forced, everyone's forced to worship the Aten, the one single monotheistic god. It's actually the first example of monotheism in all of the ancient world. This predates, uh,

the Exodus and Moses by probably a century or more. Um, so, uh, King Tutank Amun is born King Tutank Aton. And, uh, when,

when Nefertidi dies, who is the wife of Akanatun, when she passes away, the crown is handed to Tutank Otin. And his advisor, a guy named I, who's one of the high-ranking nobles in that government, basically advises to Tutank Atten. You know, the entire country is very displeased with your father. And the fact that all of Egypt has been thrown on its head, we should probably go back to the way things were.

There may be some truth to that. You know, that their whole revolution of the Aten may not have been very good for Egypt's economy. And pretty much all the documentation we have at that time supports that. However, all that documentation comes from the people that wanted them dead. So there's that. So one way or another, they convince Tutank Atten to return everything back to the way it was. And he changes his name to Tutank Amun, which may or may not have been his own choice. But he is Pharaoh at this time.

And he's only Pharaoh for a very short period of time. And then something happens to him. I don't really know how he died. It looks like from the way that the blood pulled on the back of his head, you've probably seen his body in person. I have, yes. So, Dr. Bob Breyer did an investigation on him maybe back in the 90s and examined his body. And the way that the pool, the way that the blood pulls in the back of his skull looks like he was hit in the back of the head.

His brain, you know, he had a brain bleed or he was bleeding inside of his skull. And he was laying, he was laying on his skull. back for an extended period of time. And so all that blood pulled. So they think that he may have died to a blunt force injury on the back of his head. That's just a, that's just a theory. But one way or another, he's buried with an incredible amount of treasure in this rushed tomb, though. It's a shallow rock-cut tomb.

But he's buried with an incredible amount of treasure. And then I think it's Aminhotep the second or maybe it's Aminhotep the third. his tomb No, I don't think it was them Because they came Never mind Ammon The First and Third

Came before Two Tank Ammon But somebody's tomb Was cut into the ground Above his And all the rubble covered up King Tut's tomb

So his state preserved And overlooked Until I think 1923 When Howard Carter discovered it Now if my memory serves me correctly

And there's a lot of legend about this But as they're trying to open the tomb There's some kind of hieroglyph on the outside that that apparently said something along the lines of of of of cursing anybody it's a rough translation but it basically curses anyone who should violate or open violate or open this tomb well of course they're going to open it and howard carter in the little in the vault opening he shines a light through there and somebody asks him do you see anything and he says yes wonderful things and that's like a very iconic egyptological quote And so they opened it up, and of course, they find the richest tomb that's ever been found in the history of archaeologies, the biggest discovery ever of this very minor, unimportant young kid who was Pharaoh. Now, if you asked me three years ago, I could go through the whole chronology of how every single person died.

But almost every person that was in this excavation had something tragic happened to him. And several of them died from poisoning from being exposed to the air inside the chamber. And so you had this paint that's up on the walls and that paint ruminates in the air and it makes the air toxic. So it's like radiation or something? I don't know. I don't know. It's something to do with the paint ruminating the air for thousands of years. It makes it, you know, you can imagine like the carcinogens in that air.

It's just straight up poison, you know. It must be like smoking a thousand cigarettes in a second, you know, just crows. Crazy. And so some of them died from poisoning from being exposed to the air. And then some people like their homes would burn down with them in it when they were back in the Americas or they'd get some kind of crazy disease and die or their spouse would die. I think there was like a scorpion bite for one of them. That's right. There's something like that too. And then I forget how Howard Carter died, but he died in some strange way, but he was the last person.

Okay. Everybody before him died leading up. I've thought about this before, you know, is it all coincidence or was there really a mummy's curse? And sometimes I wonder if it's not both. If it's, if it's, you know how I've talked to some of my friends about this, about this before, how some people seem to just have a will that is so strong that the world moves out of their way. Yes. You know, I mean, look at, look at so many successful people. Yes.

There will is. Like Trump or Elon Musk. That's what I was thinking is. It's like they shift timelines according to their well or something. And Steve Jobs thought about this. Steve Jobs. He called it magical thinking that you could ignore things and they would go away, that you could believe things so strongly that the earth would morph itself around your will. And I've always wondered if with something like that, if it's, yes, the paint inside of the chamber did poison these people and kill them.

but that was that was what two tank almond would have wanted you know what i mean uh but then you have this like cosmic element that goes beyond that like did these people violating two tank almond's tomb really results in this lady's house burning down with her in her family in it it's certainly ominous and it's certainly fascinating to us you know observing it from the outside uh i don't know yeah i don't know you know i i think that there's definitely elements of in our natural world and the way that our brains connect to the world around us, that isn't measurable. Yes. At least to us yet.

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I definitely agree with that. And I think belief is incredibly, like, a good example of our modern paradigm writing that off is like in medicine, you have like the placebo effect, which often is way more effective than, you know, the pharmacological, you know, a thing that you're taking or whatever. And then you just write that off. You go, oh, it's placebo. And then it's like, well, wait, belief is extremely powerful.

And like, you can take a sugar pill and believe a thing. And it's more effective in certain cases than biochemistry. Like, that's, like, a big deal. But it's sort of, we live in this age where, like, you're not supposed to trust your eyes and your mind is irrational. And, you know, I think, I think we're probably on the verge of sort of a quote unquote, reenchantment of reality. I think that's, that's ending for better and for worse. Like, you have, you know, Gen Z astral projecting on TikTok. And it's like weird, right?

Yeah. Like you have this, what we're talking about, the opening of the floodgates of the relativization of like all information, the death of expertise. It's like there's some bad that comes with that. So, yeah, well, this is, this is a sad thing is that, you know, the, the institutions that used to feed us information became politicized and corrupted and weaponized against normal people. people. Yes. You know, I don't want to get overtly political, but it is, well, I mean, it's, it's so obvious as to how we've been, you know, normal people have been manipulated and lied to by by the media, by our government, by everything. And I think the pandemic woke a lot of people up. Yeah, it definitely did. I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous the things that we were being told in,

you know, from 2020, even up until now, you know, it just, the things that we're made to believe is absolutely insane. And, you know, people, like, we just don't, we have no reason to trust the authority anymore. And a really sad side effect of that is that anti-intellectualism is on the rise now. Because, I mean, there really is, there really are amazingly intelligent people who are devise. to their area of expertise in their field of science, whether it's, you know, biology, archaeology, whatever in medicine, that are really, really devoted to that and that you need these people who are wildly intelligent that study these really strange fields to be able to tell you information. But now, like, we just don't trust any of that at all. And that's sad. But it's the fault of, it's the fault of those. institutions for allowing themselves to be weaponized for modern politics. My opinion is I think it's really all about modern politics. It's all about modern politics and money. Personally, I do not

think that there were, that there have been archaeological discoveries that change all of known humanity that are so impactful that like a secret cabal came in and covered it all up I hate it from humanity. Those people don't give it. They do not care about that. What they care about is geopolitics and making money. Totally. And manipulating the modern world.

Yeah. It's all, all the corruption is based on the modern world. I don't think they're trying to cover up the past. Because what would it do? Like, like, if all of a sudden we knew that Atlantis really existed 12,000 years ago,

and now it's ruins under the ground. Yeah. What's going to happen? No, totally. It's incredibly fascinating. But why would somebody cover that up? No, I generally agree. I also think some of these discoveries might not happen because, yeah, like you said, politics are like basic bureaucracy, slowness.

We talked about, you know, Hawaz earlier, you know, Ministry of Culture. It's like you want certain things claimed by the local governments or like you want them sort of, you know, to be involved in the national history of that government. So you don't want anything to predate, you know, you want to go again. the Robert Schock, John Anthony Westrant narrative. Another thing is Egypt doesn't have a lot of interest. Let's just highlight on Egypt. They don't have a lot of interest in another Howard Carter, another white guy making a huge discovery.

They wanted to be in Egyptian. And really Zahi Was wants it to be himself. And I've spoken to lots of Egyptologists. And, you know, this even happened in Peru. You know those big tunnels that were discovered under the ground in Peru recently. Have you heard about this? No, actually. In Cusco, butsac de Waman. Interesting. This just popped up on the news maybe a month ago or so. This is a big, big ordeal that these

tunnels were finally discovered and they're going to start exploring them. I was in those tunnels in September. That's how long ago that they had known about them. And it only just now became a press release. Yeah. Why? Because the government has got to get everything together to make the most money possible, to make the biggest splash possible. So interesting. It's all a marketing campaign. Yeah.

You know, to drive tourism, to drive interest, to drive funding, to drive money. Everything is so premeditated. It's not like, hey, we just found this. Let's post this on X for a lot of C. It's the same thing in Egypt, man. It, they discover, um, they just discovered the tomb of, was it,

Tupmo's the, Tupmo's the second, I believe, is a tomb that they just discovered in, in Egypt. and it's kind of unremarkable on the inside. It's crumbled away a lot. It looks like it was never even completed. I heard about that tomb in October. And the publication just came out, I don't know, within the last couple months or so.

When I was there in October, I heard about that tomb, having been discovered earlier in 2024. So over a year later, they released the publication. So this is all on a timeline because they're constantly discovering things in Egypt. But they don't want to, if they dropped 10 new discoveries, nine of them would get overshadowed and not get the kind of press that they want, which may cause a burst in tourism and then it slows back down. So it's all in this timeline. Archaeology is, tourism keeps archaeology alive, right?

Yeah. It's almost like planned obsolescence or something. Like people have conspiracies about, you know, like Apple products or something. It's really fascinating. I mean, think about this Felipe Beyondy paper around the, you know, these structures below the pyramids. If that was 2022, why is it coming out now?

You know, that's an interesting question. Or I remember, you know, doing this piece with David Grush, this UFO whistleblower who testified before Congress, you know, in a end of summer of 2023. And it was this big deal. It's like all these people started across the Rubicon of maybe this UFO stuff is actually real.

And then the day, after we put our like documentary out which i thought was you know it's pretty pretty comprehensive and good uh if i do say so myself uh the next day there's this like mexico city congress thing about uh these peruvian you know uh alien mummies or whatever and i'm out i'm now actually looking into that case and i think there's some interesting stuff there but like the way it was presented was such a jokey weird, you know, way. And it was, you know, a lot of what was ended up being popularized were these knockoff, you know, kind of, it was like chicken bones and, and rooster head or what was like clearly fake stuff. It was presented in this weird way. And I wonder some of this might be

this emergent, you know, the wheel gets, you know, created in South America at the same time as Africa. And then some of it might be this sort of political Me Too syndrome where it's like, oh, you discovered that. Well, I've been sitting on this. Me too. You know. And then you have to put out your thing. And it's, uh, it's, it's,

it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, there's, there's, uh, the, uh, the mummy thing. I think there probably actually is some interesting stuff going on there, but that's for a later date. Um, I have an excursion to pitch you on. Okay.

Okay. Okay. So I, six or seven years ago, met a guy named Luis Felipe San Salvador. Okay. And he's a super eccentric guy. He has, uh, he's directed a couple of movies. movies under the name Jamaica No Problem.

Okay. This is like larger than life guy. Anyways, I became friends with him, and I realized that he was not lying about the fact that he came from a long line of conquistadors from the 16th century. He's Ecuadorian. And he lives on this massive compound in Ecuador. And he even came out with a movie called The Son of Man, because he has maps in his family that go back to that time around Attawapa's ransom, El Dorado.

And he goes searching literally with like a team of like 10 people or whatever into the Amazon every single year to find El Dorado. And he also, so he has maps to El Dorado and then he also has maps to something called the Teos Cave or the Teos Library. Neil Armstrong in 1969 went to the moon, of course, and came back and his sixth. second expedition was in the Amazon to find this Teos cave, this Teos library, and a BBC film crew followed him around trying to find this thing, and he couldn't find it. And my friend, Luis Felipe San Salvador, says that his father sent Neil Armstrong in the wrong direction, and that he has the real location of this thing. And it's this, if you talk to people in the local area, it's this well-known myth that there are these caves that exist with this

kind of ancient alien-looking metallic artifacts, like metallic artifacts that seem so anachronistic and like, you know, beyond human capabilities even now. And so I think we should go and try to find these things. I would be down. So this is in Ecuador. Yes. Let's get, we, well, we have, let's get on a Zoom with Luis. And I would be down. I'm so down. Let's do it. I would love that, man. I have lots of experience in the jungle at this point. quite a lot. Have you seen where they just found like 11,000 structures in the Ecuadorian jungle recently? 11,000?

Yeah, yeah. They found a city, I think, with 11,000 structures. And the city layout is on like the top of these mountain ridges. And all the city layouts are these four long structures with this huge, you know, maybe 200 foot by 200 foot wide square plaza in the center of them. And it's thousands of these plazas that are made. And it's the exact same layout as what we see in Central America and in Mexico with the Maya world, Mesoamerica. And, man, there's no doubt that civilization, I mean, think about this, man. Think about how many different, just out of the top of your head.

And, you know, neither one of us are an expert in this, but I can name a lot of different North America. American in the borders of the United States, Native American cultures, whether it's like the Creek Indians, the Apaches, the Comanches, the Cherokee, the Sioux, I can go on and on and on and on and on. Okay, the Amazon is the same size of the United States. So crazy. Imagine how many different civilizations existed beneath the canopy of the Amazon. You know, and how expansive and in depth that history is. I mean, North American native history is so complicated. You even have this, uh, Even there's a there's a federation of tribes that were united under. Oh my goodness. Who's the, who's the Native American Squanto? Squanto unites, creates this federation of these three tribes that were all rivals against each other during his childhood. But he gets captured and enslaved in London and then comes back. And then he unites these tribes.

I mean, that's just one little place where you have a confederation of three different tribes that come together and form their own government. in one little area of Massachusetts. Imagine the rest of the continent. And they project that onto the Amazon of how expansive and complicated and nuance that is. I mean, the Amazon is incredibly dangerous, whether you're dealing with humans or the natural world.

And almost impenetrable. But beneath that canopy really is the widest, deepest frontier of studying human history. And it's kind of like the last frontier. I think another frontier is the Sahara, which is equally as large and equally as dangerous

and infeasible to explore. Not that it's not feasible, but it is very difficult. I mean, I did a six-hour excursion in West Texas a few days ago, and every time I do that in the desert, I'm reminded of the fact that you wouldn't make it very long if you had to do a serious,

expedition in the desert and you weren't really, really well prepared. Yeah. You know, just in those six hours, I was like, I was like, you know, if I go another two hours, I would probably die. Yeah. If I didn't get water, you know. And in the, in the jungle, it's exactly the same, except it's worse because you sweat more. Uh-huh.

The sun might not be right on you, but man, you'll, you'll sweat an insane amount. All of your hydration is gone. Uh, you know, you'll be dehydrated in one afternoon. Going through Guatemala is brutal. Yeah. And you have all these different plants that have effects on you that even modern medicine hasn't journeyed out there to study. That's what I worry about with the Amazon where it's like, this little thing bites you where you like, you know, you like come into contact with some plant that, you know, messes with you. You know, it's like poison ivy on steroids.

And in, I'll tell you, in October, I did back to back to back, I did. I did Peru for 11 days. I did Egypt for 20 days. And I did Guatemala for nine days. Unbelievable. And I was only home for one day during that whole period. And in Peru, when we went out to Machu Picchu, we were there for two full days. And the mosquitoes that bit me out there were so strong that they left scars on my arms.

Like, if you look close, you'll see all these little dots all over my arms from where I got bit. And what they infect you with is so potent that when you see. scratch it, it will stay in your fingernails and it'll spread around your body. And two weeks later, when I was in Egypt, I was still having dots pop up on my arms from these

mosquitoes that bit me in the Amazon. And then in Egypt, I'm mostly fine. Egypt's real easy to get around. Then I go to the jungles in Guatemala, which is essentially the Amazon. You know, not the same geographically, but like the environment is very similar.

And something happened to me while I was in the jungle and I got really sick not food poisoning sick not a cold sick and even the local guys could tell that the local Guatemalans they were like they were like they were like they were like oh you have what I say jungle fever you have jungle sickness because they could tell how tired and like drained I was and they thought it was the mosquitoes biting me that it was giving me something and I was 75% deaf in each year by the no trip I couldn't hear anything oh jeez no I was re freaking out out. No, I knew it would go away. I've just figured it would, but I didn't know what, I didn't know what was like oppressing me. I was just so run down and tired, but I didn't have any symptoms other

than I was almost deaf. You know, we could be talking like this and I would barely hear you. Whoa. It was so bizarre, man. On that note, let's go to the Amazon. On that note, let's do it. Um, you know, but that was actually the only time of anything like that has ever happened to me. I've, I've been back to the jungle since then. twice and uh and i was fine okay so i don't know something something happened to me i don't know it was you were initiated now you're fine and only in guatemala yeah yeah i've gotten very sick in guatemala as well so oh really yeah maybe it's a thing you just have to go through it's like montezumer have you have you have you've got to t-call okay okay it's amazing that's that's where i was at that's that's

that's where i got sick was in t-call okay so i don't know what i don't know what it was that happened and then i went out to uh el mirador have you heard of this i've never heard of el mirro it's It's a two-hour helicopter ride into the jungle north. And so you drop down and it's this giant pyramid that is supposedly similar to the size of the great pyramid in Egypt. But you can't really tell because it's just this big hump in the middle of this flat jungle. And the pyramid was so large, man, that when I was coming back down from it, I walked down the pyramid. and then I walked along this trail for about five minutes and then arrived on a staircase that went down

and I was like, for the last five minutes, I was walking on the pyramid straight. That's how big it was. So I came down from a certain portion and I reached this flat platform and I walked for five minutes before reaching the next slope of the pyramid. That's how large it is.

And to your point that you were saying earlier is the farther they go back in time with so many cultures, the bigger the structures get. Yeah. That is the first known pyramid in, it's called La Danta. La Danty, there are these two giant pyramids that face each other. They're about equal in size.

Those are the oldest pyramids known in the Maya world. Wow. Made out of the largest stones ever used in the Maya world. Unbelievable. But instead of these huge rectangular stones that you see in Egypt, they're like these Lincoln logs. But the Lincoln logs aren't stacked on top of one another in the way that we would think that they would be used.

Imagine a Lincoln log laid this way and they're stacked on top of each other like this. So in the least, in the least easy way possible, the least efficient way possible is the way that it was done. And it was built, it is so massive, like the actual mass, the structural mass inside of them, is so impressive that the jungle, unlike most Maya pyramids where you have blocks

are about this big and most Maya pyramids, And the roots of the trees wrap around those little blocks and dig into the pyramid. And then a tree will grow out of the pyramid and rip all the blocks apart from each other. So you see like the jungle growing out of these huge pyramids. This pyramid, no. The jungle is growing on it. But all the roots grow flat against the stone because the stones are impenetrable. So you can grab a piece of the jungle and peel it off the side of the, and peel it off the side of the pyramid.

in the pyramid's still there. The roots never penetrated between the stones. Wow. That was at the beginning of time in the Maya world, and it was never surpassed since then. Kind of the same way in ancient Egypt. Wow. Yeah.

Fascinating, man. Well, I'm going to follow up with you if you're serious. We'll do it. We'll seriously do it. Yeah, yeah. I would love to return to South America. Yeah. Yeah, I've never been to Ecuador.

I've only ever been to Peru. Cool. Have you ever been to Peru? I'm going. I think, in the next month, but I've never been. Are you really? Where are you going to Peru? I am going to Lima for sure, and then I want to go to Machu Picchu because I'm going to be there.

And otherwise, I'm kind of open if you have any suggestion. Yeah, well, the Sacred Valley, man. I mean, that's, that's Cusco. So what you would probably do is you would land in Lima. I'm sure you'll go see the archaeological side of Lima. But then you'll probably go to the, there's a famous museum there. with all the pottery. I forget what it's,

I forget what it's called. And you'll go there, but then you'll probably fly from Lima into Kusko, I'm guessing. And Kusko is like one of the, maybe the best city I've ever been to in my travels. Cool.

The nicest, cleanest, most beautiful city I've ever been to. You can walk down any, any, um, alleyway, any part of the city and it's perfectly safe. Really? Yeah, man. You, you would love it.

I mean, no surprise that there's so many Americans that live in that in Kuska. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Can you hit the tunnels there or is that like blocked off? No, I got access to it, uh, through the head archaeologist. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. And, uh, so they, they, uh, somebody on their team watches my channel. Okay. And as seen, as seen some podcasts I've been on. And so I was able to get in and, and check out the, check out the tunnels. But you would go there, see Soxaywaman, go see the Coracancha, which is in the center of the city of Kusko, which is like, the most impressive stonework in all of the ancient world, the most precise, I mean, just razor sharp. Like the sides of the Egyptian architecture of actual buildings that people walked inside of it has nothing on the Korakancho. No, nothing. Crazy.

It's made from great. gray and a site and the blocks like lean in on each other. So the walls are like trapezoidal. And so you can just imagine the sophistication of taking gray and a site, which is, you know, as hard as granite. And just it has these razor sharp edges on the architecture. Just absolutely stunning. And then from there you would take a bus to Oiante Tombo or a taxi or something like that to Oiante Tombo, whereas another megalithic site. And then from there you take the train to Machu Picchu.

epic i think i just got my whole itinerary laid out yeah yeah yeah luke i appreciate your time man this is a blast and i'm so grateful that we were able to speak before you hit singapore and then he moved out of texas so uh appreciate you man yeah man thanks so much for having me this flew by ambition comes in all shapes and sizes at first citizens bank we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building fit for your ambition for citizens bank