Danny Jones Podcast - #264 - Atlantis, Ancient Egypt & Graham Hancock's Lost Civilization | Flint Dibble

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Watch the after show with Flint on Patreon - https://patreon.com/dannyjones Flint Dibble is an archaeologist whose research focuses on ancient Greece. SPONSORS https://buy.ver.so/danny - Get 15% off your first order https://chuckdefense.com/danny - Be like Chuck Norris, click the link. https://manscaped.com - Use code DANNYJONES for 20% off + free shipping. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Flint's YouTube channel: @FlintDibble   https://twitter.com/FlintDibble FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Graham Hancock 04:17 - Plato's lie about Atlantis 23:36 - Timeline of the Atlantis story 27:31 - Ammon Hillman on Plato 36:05 - Socrates 47:59 - Graham Hancock's sources & the EDFU texts 01:07:19 - Egyptian vases 01:27:32 - High precision ancient artifacts 01:34:05 - Dark magic & ancient drugs 01:47:47 - God & drugs 01:55:28 - Ancient mystery cults & Christianity 02:05:08 - Animal sacrifices in Eleusis 02:17:39 - Ergot: mind-altering fungus 02:27:10 - Socrates' noble lie 02:32:39 - The Great Pyramid & Chris Dunn's Power Plant Theory 02:46:39 - Alternative theories for the pyramids 03:05:50 - Ice core metallurgy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. Thanks for making the trip. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. A ton of shit to talk about. What have I got myself into? First of all, I want to say, I was super impressed with your podcast on Joe Rogan with Graham. I thought you were extremely reasonable. I thought some of the evidence that you came with was incredible.

I thought that you did a great job of filling in the blanks with a lot of stuff that Graham wasn't, you know, Graham was bringing a lot of points up and talking about a lot of his research. And you were doing a fantastic job filling in the gaps for him. Because it's obvious that you've spent your life in archaeology,

doing the work, hands-on, eating the gruel, as you say. The bones. You know, not just looking at the fascinating stuff, but also doing the boring shit too, right? Like doing the hard work. and I understand your perspective when it comes to people like Graham. Somebody who comes up who's sort of doing this as a fun thing and writes a bunch of books

about it and he's looking into it and getting all this attention for it, making all this money from it. And no one's paying attention to the guy who spent his whole life in the dirt, you know, knees deep in the mud, digging up all these bones and doing all this research. So that being said, I understand your perspective of it. And I think that as far as people like Graham and his followers, because the one thing I can say about Graham is that he did get people like me interested in this stuff. I mean, look, I have colleagues that got interested in archaeology because they read Graham Hancock.

Right. And now they're full-blown archaeologists. They don't anymore in any way agree with him. Yeah. But that's how they got into the field. I know several people like that. And at the same time, I think that when you believe you're on the right side of history or the right side of an argument, you can go so far to defend it that you end up becoming the very thing that you think you were fighting against.

Yeah. So I want to make clear, first of all, that I have nothing against Graham as a person. Right. Right. I want to make that really clear. And I have nothing against people who disagree with, you know, mainstream archaeology, if you will. I hate the term mainstream because it's just insulting. But I have nothing against people that disagree with archaeologists and have fun thinking about the ancient world in a variety of different ways.

Whether they're just hanging out, drinking a beer, getting stoned and saying, oh, could aliens have done this or something like that? There's nothing wrong with that, right? But part of the issue when an idea gets really popular, like say some of Graham's books on, you know, fingerprints, the gods and stuff like that. I mean, even today, if you go on Amazon.com and you look up bestsellers in the field of archaeology, his book is almost always there, often at the top, sometimes, usually in the top 10. And so what that leads to, and like I started getting on social media what? Six years ago. And you get sworn with questions about this. Yeah. And look, I, as you said, I'm knee deep in the evidence. I'm going to give the honest perspective from that evidence.

Yeah. That's what I'm here to do. Right. You know, like I'm here to tell you, honestly what the evidence says. So that's really all it is in my mind. So why are you and your colleagues trying to cover up this advanced ice age civilization? You know, we're being paid for it. The Smithsonian. Who's paying? Yeah, the Smithsonian.

Yeah, the Smithsonian. You know, the UN, like all these kind of things. George Soros. No, he doesn't really write too many checks for archaeology. But, you know, I do use Windows computers, so Bill Gates funds the technology and stuff like that. And so, you know, it's really nice to get access to this. My computer here is about four years old. And, like, you know, it's like, it still works because this was top model four years ago, like a supercomputer.

And so, you know, meaning I paid $1,000 for it four years ago. Oh, my God. But, you know, so yeah, I'm making the big bucks, right? Yeah. I would tell you before we started recording that I was talking to my friend, my new friend, Amin Hillman, who was recently on the podcast and brought me into this whole world of classics and ancient Greece. And I asked him about Atlantis. I asked him because he is, as far as I'm aware, one of the people that has read probably more Greek than,

he's read more Greek than anybody I know personally. Let's put it that way. I know a lot of people have read a lot of Greek. So he's probably up there among them. He spent 30 years reading Greek and translating Greek. And he, he, his... And it clearly shows. He knows Greek.

One thing he always says is it's all about the primary sources. He's like, if it's not a primary source, he's like, you can get lost. And I asked him what his opinion was on Plato's description. of what he thought about Plato and what he thought about Plato's writing about Atlantis. He's like, Plato to me was boring. He's like, he bores the fuck out of me

and I thought he wasn't asked. But let me look into it and see what I can find. So he spent all morning looking up everything Plato wrote about Atlantis. And his conclusion was that Plato basically lied about it which kind of bummed me out, to be honest, because I'm a fan of the Atlanta story.

And that he, He was a propagandist and a lot of people thought he lied, including Aristotle. And according to a lot of people in academia and a lot of scholars, apparently it's consensus that Plato did lie a lot about Socrates. Yeah, we can talk about that. And I think, so all right, the term lie is a loaded term, right? But when it comes to Plato, and particularly the Atlanta story, it's a perfect example of what we call a noble lie.

right and so this is actually i have a youtube video coming out in about a month on this is the reason i joined youtube was to make this video because i'm writing a book on atlantis right and so uh so my my goal here is everybody's interested in atlantis right now it's all over youtube it's all over the internet it's all over what people are talking about and so let's take an actual scholarly perspective on it and like ahman i have experienced reading ancient creek i've not read nearly as much as him because i focused on archaeology but at the same time i also have done a lot of archaeology. So I've excavated, I excavated in Athens, Greece, right? So right where Plato grew up and, and, you know, taught, I study material from there. And I work with an excavation

team there. I'm one of the, you know, one of many, but one of the world experts on ancient Athens. And so I realized it was a few years ago, actually, this is how I got started on this topic. I was on social media and there was a new TV show on the Discovery Channel coming out about Atlantis. And the host thought that he'd done some research and he wrote this paper that was hoping to get published and that's what the show was based on. And so he tried, he's like, no, this is really scholarly. Let's have scholars look at this. So I told him, I said this publicly on Twitter.

I said, if you want to send it to me, I will do a public peer review of your paper. But warning, I'm going to, you know, be honest and critical, right? That's what you do as a scholar to other scholars. And so he sent it along, and it was actually in many ways, just like Graham's books, a well-researched paper in the sense that he'd done a lot of reading, cited a lot of stuff. but sometimes people who don't have the training and the experience, they miss the forest for the trees. And so that's where some of these issues come in. And I realized that because I focus on Athens that actually I had the smoking gun on how to demonstrate to people why Atlantis doesn't exist. So let's think about this.

And I want to say first off that maybe I found Atlantis in a certain way. If you think about it like that. And we can actually sit there and fact check it. How would you, yourself, go about taking a text with descriptions of places and look for Atlantis and fact check it? And so just so you get the context of that text, it's a conversation between friends with Socrates and Critias and Tomeas. And they're sitting there and they're talking about it's set up like this where the, you know Plato's Republic? You ever heard of that? Yep.

In Plato's Republic, he has a conversation, Socrates has a conversation with other people and they build this ideal city, the perfect constitution for how people can live in. kind of peace and harmony. Right. And then like a few days later, it's a group of people that they're saying, now Socrates, he starts off, he says, now I want to see how that ideal city acts in a certain situation, in war. How is this city going to act in war? And so one of my colleagues, he's a, oh, where is the University of Vermont,

Mark Usher, he's published on Plato's Republic. And he sort of thinks of it as Sim City. You ever play Sim City? You sort of build this city block by block by block. That's what they do in the Republic. Now for the Atlantis story, Socrates is saying, let's play the game of civilization. We're going to create this civilization over here. It looks like that. This is the ideal city. And what we're going to do is we're going to make this early version of Athens from 9,000 years ago.

That's going to be our ideal city. And then we need an opponent for it to fight against. That's going to be Atlantis. And so we're going to create this Atlantis sort of thing with this island and concentric rings. And we're going to build it up block by block by block. and then we're going to see what happens if they fight. And that's what the story is, right? That's the whole war between Athens and Atlantis. And that's what the entire thing is about.

If you go and read the Plato from cover to cover, that's what it is. And so how would you actually fact-check this as a true or false story? Well, going back to Atlanta, like what his evidence was for the story of Atlantis, it was that allegedly Solon, right? and talk about that too. So, well, let's not go there yet. Let's not go there yet. Well, that's a different topic, and I have stuff ready on that as well.

Okay. But let's first think, how would you actually go and fact-check a war between Athens and Atlantis? You would have to go look for evidence of dead people? Maybe. Where would you look, though? Where would you first look? You would look somewhere between Atlantis and wherever the description of Atlantis apparently was and where Athens is, right? But what do we know?

What can we start with? If you want to fact-check something and ground truth, that archaeologists work from the known to the unknown, right? So if we're saying there's a war between Athens and Atlantis, what do we want to look for? We want to first look at Athens. Does Plato's description of Athens actually match up with what we know of Athens? Because we've done a lot of work in Athens. People have been excavating there for 200 years. We have dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands. I'm not sure. I have to count. but we have hundreds of historical sources for Athens and thousands if we include inscriptions, we include art, we include all this kind of stuff of Athens and we have millions and millions of pottery fragments and sculptural fragments, houses that stretch back 5,000 years.

Guess what they don't do? They don't stretch back 9,000 years, though. Nobody lived in Athens 9,000 years ago. So, you know, for him to say there was a city there 9,000 years ago, no fucking way. There wasn't anybody there. There's literally nothing there. and you say, oh, well, maybe archaeologists haven't dug enough. Well, you do realize that the Athenian Acropolis, here, let me pull up my screen, if you don't mind. This is the Athenian Acropolis.

This is what everybody thinks of when you think about Athens, right? And so you pull it up. This has been excavated to bedrock. You can't dig down any further. It's been fully excavated. And if you sort of look off down to the left, this is where the... Wait, yeah, I'm looking the right way. Down to the left is the Athenian Agarots, right sort of here.

This is where the Americans excavate. Further off this way, the Germans excavate, the Greeks excavate every single time there's construction going on. Everywhere around Athens, there's been hundreds of different archaeological excavations, and we're always trying to go down until there's no more human material there, until bedrock, if you see what I mean. Okay. And there might be practical reasons we can. It's dangerous to go too low or something like that. But when we can, and that's a lot of times, we dig down as far as we can until there is no human material left.

And then we keep digging to test it. There's nothing underneath that. Right? And so we can actually check Plato, does he get stuff right about Athens? And the answer is, no, he does not. Not only is the chronology of it wrong. So there's nobody here 9,000 years ago. So this is when he's writing about it in Republic, you're saying? No, he's writing about it in the Atlanta story, in the Tamaas Critias. In the Torese. Yeah, yeah. So he's writing about a hypothetical war between Atlantis and Athens. And he spends about half of the Critias describing this early Athens. And then the next half of the Critias describing it in early Atlantis. And then the next half of the Critias describing it in early Atlantis. And everybody, everybody goes and takes the descriptions of Atlantis, round circular island and stuff like that. And they're like, oh, there's something round over here. That might be Atlantis. But, dude, there's a bazillion round things.

You know what I mean? Like, you can't be confirmed one thing is Atlantis or not. So what you're saying is that when he's talking about a war between Atlantis and Athens, this is involved in his sort of noble lives. to create a society? Yes. It's involved, no, I wouldn't call that a noble lie. It's involved in his way of demonstrating the right way of creating a government. And so Athens in this story is the ideal city.

It has all the virtues, all the goodness of what they described in the Republic, while Atlantis is actually the bad guys. It's kind of, you know, it's funny because today we have this conception that Atlantis was hyper-civilized and vans and stuff like that. That's not according to Plato. According to Plato, this is a dystopia. It's a bad place to be. And so, you know, it had too much wealth. It was corrupted. And that's why it fell. So was it was the idea that he wanted to paint some sort of an enemy? Yeah. Like an enemy that only they knew didn't exist, but maybe that the population thought was real to keep everyone. Not to make it, not that the population thought it was real. The idea was to create a story that would show how his ideal city works. A clear fiction. You know, and we'll get into the dissemination of it, the story, how it got past. on and how that shows that it's a fiction. But from a modern perspective, we can actually ground truth or fact check Plato by checking what he gets wrong about Athens or right. And he gets it all wrong. What he describes. So for example, I have this arrow here on the screen, right? This episode of the

podcast is brought to you by Verso. If you ever listen to this podcast before, you are probably aware I've talked about Verso at nauseam on previous episodes. Ever since the infamous nutritional scientist, Dr. Dom Degasdino introduced me to this stuff. And I've been using Verso every morning since. So it's been like three and a half years now. I use Verso because it gives me more energy, makes my brain work quicker, I sleep better,

and it just makes me feel like a younger version of myself. But there's a totally unexpected benefit you can get from Versa, which I was not aware of. And that's weight loss. But cell being by Verso isn't just about slowing down the aging process. It's packed with research-backed ingredients

that also promote fat loss. These ingredients have been proven in both animal and human studies to boost metabolism and improve body composition through a variety of body mechanisms. One aspect is how these ingredients actually increase the body's process to break down fat, essentially fooling your body into thinking it's consuming fewer calories. They also help regulate glucose and leptin levels,

which suppress hunger and increase feelings of fullness, effectively curbing cravings. I take cell being every morning to feel like a younger me, combating the signs of aging, which is amazing on its own. Experiencing fat loss is just an added bonus and something that I'm very happy about. Plus, Verso ensures transparency and quality by publishing third-party testing results for each batch they produce. So if you want to check out Verso and support this podcast, click the link below or head on over to v-E-R.s-O-F-S-O-W-S-O-W-S-W-E-R-L-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-E-R-E-E-R-E-E-R-E-E-R-E-E-R-E-E-L-E-E-E-E-R-E-E-E-R-E-E-E-E-R-E-E-E-E-E-R-E. But he had all these ideas on how he wanted to shape society. And like re-engineered society? And that's a philosophical question rather than a material question, right? It wasn't like we need to innovate new technology. That was like we need to

understand how to educate people. That's what a lot of it was around. We want the philosophers to rule rather than the warriors, for example. We live in a society today where the philosophers don't rule and that's part of the problem. So he had this idea in the Republic of the Philosopher Kings. That's who's supposed to rule to create a just society that educates people and sort of a... the knights were below them. And he was very into censorship. They have a long discussion. Yeah, he wanted to get rid of Homer.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a good point. That's in the section on the noble lie. He wanted to get rid of a lot of different myths because he thought that like even if those myths are true, they teach bad morals. So we should instead only have myths that teach people how to behave correctly. That was like, I compare this to Santa Claus. It's sort of like, you know, you have your kids.

You're raising your children around Christmas time. And you sort of say, you got to be. good so you get presents from Santa Claus, right? And that's how Plato saw education, right? That was his way of seeing education, was to teach good behavior through the stories that you tell. And so, you know, and so, yeah, so here you can see if you just want to look at this materially, you see how there's the Athenianacropolis right here. But then to the left, there's another big hill. That's called Likavitos. I used to live right near. There's a church on it. It's a beautiful place. But in the story of Atlantis, when he's describing Athens, he described, he

describes geologically that these two hills, which are miles and miles away from each other, were actually connected and part of the same thing. And geologically, we know that's not true. They were never connected and there was no rainwater that eroded them between a way. So we just know based off of natural sciences that his description of this early Athens doesn't match up with what we can tell. Could he have meant connected in a different way? No, because he describes very clearly a rainstorm that strips the sediment and causes it to flood away. That's actually what he describes.

It's one of his floods, let's say. Yeah. And so we know that flood just didn't happen here. It was just simply knowing. Another one, let's check this out. He describes that these warriors in this early republic version of Atlantis, they had

this temple of Athena right here, right? And it's really cool. Do you see the outline of that temple there? There's like a small walls that are not a major building there, right where the arrow is pointing in the middle of. That's called the old temple to Athena. And it's the most important building on the Athenian necropolis, despite the fact that it's ruined. And so what it was was it was ruined by the Persians when they invaded in 480 BC.

And we know really well from dozens of historical sources and the archaeological evidence from the excavations that happened in the early 20th, late 19th century. They're called the Dorpfeld Foundations today after Wilhelm Dorpfeld, the archaeologist that described them. and so we actually know when it dates to and guess what? It was built around the time Solon was around. So, you know, it was not built

you know, 9,000 years earlier. In fact, it was built right when Solon lived. You know, the late 7th century, early 6th century, we have I should have put some in here, we have the sculptures from it, right? And in fact, you can still see the paint on the sculptures. We can Google it and look it up if you want.

Because they're really freaking cool. People don't really realize that paint is on, all these marble things were painted. This is what's called the blue beard sculpture. This is the sculpture. It's named after the blue beards these guys have. And so my point is that all this marble that we see from the ancient world is mostly painted. And the only time we see it, in this case, the temple was knocked down by the Persians, and it was buried rapidly.

So therefore, it was protected by being buried. And so that's why the paint is still on it. And if you go to Athens today, it's in the Acropolis Museum. They have a whole section on painted sculpture, and all this painted sculpture they found. so you can see the past like how you should see it. We see it as this bare white marble. No, it was actually really colorful. Really, really colorful.

This is faded, of course. But if you were to reconstruct it, it would almost look like Vegas. You know, like when we look at this picture, we see this bare white marble. No, it would all be very color-free painted like Vegas, like very garish. And so, you know, when Plato is describing this temple, dude, this is the most famous structure. So the Athenians, very consciously, because it was their most safe, sacred temple to Athena, and they're named after Athena and the Eccropolis is Athena's rock. After the Persians destroyed the city, they specifically did not build anything over the

foundations of this temple. They left it visible as a reminder of that destruction by the Persians. And so it was always visible through antiquity. It's something everybody knew really well. It was part of your education as an Athenian what this temple was and what it signified, you know what it meant in terms of the city, the foundation of the city as the city of Athens, and the destruction by the Persians, which also then shows how Athens ended up beating the Persians, which led to its glory days. Right? So that's like a major component of Athenian history.

So if Plato is getting that wrong, his audience, who are Athenians, are going to know that immediately. They're going to be like, no, the Archaos Naos, the old temple, that's right there. I know all about it. So everybody who read that story and who was in Athenian, the people he knew, the people he was talking to and whatnot, they would immediately know this is not a true story. Because they know the real history of that temple, which was only a few generations before them at the time Plato lived. So, you know, it's not that long. It's within living history, right? And so, you know, this is really well understood. So, you know, we can go in ground truth, Athens, and demonstrate that that's not right. So if we can't trust the details about Plato's Athens from the same story,

why would we trust the details about Plato's Atlantis as being anything worth checking for? So that's what I mean by ground-truthing or fact-checking. And we do this all the time in archaeology. We're always ground-truthing our evidence. You know, like think about it. You're out in a field with, let's say, a metal detector. We don't usually use metal detectors. We might use ground-penetrating radar or something like that.

You're trying to understand what's underneath there. You get a ping. Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. Are you going to assume there's necessarily treasure there and just walk away and say, hey, we got treasure? Cool. I got a ping on my metal detector. Or are you going to test that? You're going to test that, right? You're going to actually excavate that carefully and understand what's there. So you're not just going to assume something.

This is what we do as archaeologists. Everything we do is from the known to the unknown. When we're digging a new layer of sediment, a new layer pops up. We don't just jump to the other side of the trench and assume it's going to show up there. we peel back that layer until it's fully exposed. Same thing with a bit of a wall. We find a bit of a wall. We don't just start digging somewhere else.

No, we expose the entire wall carefully from the known to the unknown. And so that's what we do is archaeologists. And so this is how an archaeologist would look at this sort of Atlanta story, right? Now, if you want to think about it how a philosopher would look at the Atlanta story, Oh, actually, before I go on, let me go back a couple. Why is my computer being weird? Should we talk about Solon? Yeah, that's what I want to get to.

And the origin of this Atlanta story. I have that right here as a slide. So look. Okay. So, yeah, we already covered this. They start off the story by summarizing yesterday's conversation about the Republic. And then they say, here's the direct quotes from him from Socrates. he's like, I'd like to hear from someone

in account of our city, the Republic city, contending against others in a typical intercity contest. I'd like to hear how it does itself proud as it goes to war and how in wartime its citizens display qualities appropriate to education, upbringing, military, da-da-da-da-da. That's the whole setup, right, that Socrates

asks for. So then this guy, Critias, shows up and he's like, I'm going to tell you a fully true story, though. And, you know, it's this sort of rhetorical thing. When you punch in on that, like zoom in on it, A little bit? Yeah, well, so this is actually the title of an article.

Oh, okay, got it. Got it. Got it. But he sort of says, I'm going to tell you a fully true story. And, you know, have you ever watched a movie where the start of the movie is like, everything in this story is 100% true, right? Mm-hmm. Do you immediately think that every single little detail in that movie is 100% true?

Right, no. No, not at all. Like, that's just, it's, it's a, it's who accuses excuses first, right? You know, so it's like, so that's this rhetorical thing. So then you think about where does this story come from? And so Critias says, he says, I heard it from my grandfather when I was 10 years old and my grandfather was 90 years old. He heard it from his father, who heard it from Solon, who went to Egypt and talked to a priest who said that he had read texts that dated from 8,000 years ago about a story that dates to 9,000 years ago. So here we can have it all in reverse.

there's the destruction of Atlantis 9,000 years before Solon so 9600 BC that's an oral history or something for a thousand years we don't really know it's not explained then it's written down by Egyptians a thousand years later than that and there's no actual writing at this time in Egypt by the way

we have no writing from Egypt till like 4,000 years before Solon 3,000 years before Solon so that's a red flag to modern scholars there's no writing in Egypt that early in fact there's no writing anywhere in the world that early then the priest read the record years past

he tells it by memory to Solon without consulting the written records and even says, I'm not consulting the written records though. That's what I'm saying, yeah, yeah. This is just a story. This is in the fictional story, that's what he's saying.

Then Solon tells his relative Dropides who then tells it to his son Critias the elder who at the age of 90, Critias the elder tells it to his 10 year old grandson, Critias the younger. Then Critias the younger tells it to Socrates. Then 50 years later, Plato writes down the story. Is this a really secure...

But we don't even know that like, did Plato actually say he got this from Socrates? Did he say he got it from Sola? No, no, no. Plato is never there in his stories. He's never a character. He is, he's mentioned briefly in the trial of Socrates,

where he's one of the people that help post bail or whatever for Socrates. And then he's mentioned briefly in one of the conversations that happens like the night before Socrates dies. And there it's mentioned that he's sick and that's why he's not present for the conversation. But other than that, Plato

is never a character in his own stories. And nobody, no people really believe that his stories are all true either. And we don't even know this is Egyptian. Apparently it was an Egyptian priestess or something like that. No, not priest. It was, I thought it was a woman. No, no. I don't think there's any evidence that this person even existed. We don't have a name for the person.

We don't know anything about that. We don't have a name or anything, yeah, yeah. So if this, if you want to do the math, this was apparently, so apparently Lenis existed 12, 12,000 years ago, something like that? Oh, Formasu would be, like 11,500 years ago, right.

And Homer doesn't talk about it at all. Nobody in antiquity ever talks about it at all. Until Plato. Until Plato. And then Steve, can you pull up those two texts or those two, the text from Amin, the text message? He talks about a historian in the first century who wrote about it.

Just go to the text thread. Yeah, there you go. Can you punch in on that? So this is when I was texting. There's a good reason Plato is not going to. And yeah, that's actually a really good point. Go back to it. is not a historian. He's a philosopher.

His goal with all his dialogues is to make philosophy, not history. Right. He said, Plato's a goddamn liar. He is making... We'll get into that in a second. He's making up sources. And that's the title of my YouTube video. Is Plato a lying liar? Using Solon and fake Egyptian sources, typical.

Plato is a huge douche. I'll call you when I'm finished. There is a good reason Plato is not considered a historian. He fakes his sources. And then Amin goes on to show me some sources. go to the next thread with Amin, or the next text screenshot. There you go. Here's Plato and Cretace admits he's got no written sources from the Egyptians.

This is why nobody in antiquity in antiquity writes Atlantis into the histories. Greeks were very anal about written sources and quotes. Because of the above statements in Cretius, other Greeks didn't take Atlantis seriously. Herodotus, a real historian, only mentions the name as part of his Mediterranean Sea geography. Why? No sources. There are no written records of an empire that controlled all of the Western Mediterranean from Athens to Eteria. Nobody in antiquity believed Plato's bullshit.

This is why I hate Plato. The following is Strabo. Strabo. He points out that people know Plato is making Atlantis up. He appears to quote Aristotle saying Plato made it up as and was full of it. He doesn't mention Aristotle by name, but basically they think that Aristotle wrote that. There's scholars that have talked about that. And that's the source that he's talking about right there.

And there's several sources like that as well, where they're the, you know, especially in much later in antiquity, like right before the Middle Ages and the late Roman Empire, there's like the later, the neoplatonism, it's called sort of the new school of Plato and stuff like that. And you see that different philosophers had totally different ideas, but they really had no idea. And so nobody ever took this seriously as a history at all until really just a few hundred years ago. Hold on. Whatever happened to the legend Chuck Norris? That's the wrong question. What did Chuck Norris happen to? I just saw a video of him on the interweb, and I was shocked.

He's already in his 80s, but he's still kicking ass, working out, and staying active. And what's even more shocking is he's even stronger, can work out longer, and has more energy to hang out with his grandkids. And he did all this by making one change. And he said he feels like he's only in his 50s. Yeah, his wife even started doing this one thing, too, and she's never felt better. She says she feels 10 years younger. Her body looks leaner, and she has energy. all day. Go to chuckdefense.com slash Danny or click the link in the description. It will change the way

you think about your health. Just check it out. Chuck defense.com slash Danny and click the link in the description below to watch the video. You won't believe how simple it is. Just a reminder, the legendary Chuck Norris is 84 years old and has more energy than me. He discovered he could create dramatic changes to his health, simply focusing on three things that sabotage. our body as we age. Watch this method by clicking the link in the description box below at Chuck defense.com

slash Danny. Is your interest peaked yet? Don't forget, chuckdefense.com slash Danny. It's linked below. Hail Chuck Norris. Right. And we can talk about that as well because that's interesting. But I do want to, do you mind booting back up my slides?

Yeah. So this chain of transmission, which, you know, does this seem preposterous to you? Mm-hmm. Okay, guess what? Plato does the exact chain of transmission for other preposterous stories. So in Plato's Permanides, it's this great debate between Socrates, Permanides, and Zeno. So two different philosophers from earlier generations than Socrates. And it's witnessed by a guy named Pithodorus.

Pithodorus then tells it to Antiphon when he's a child. As an adult, Antiphon tells it to Kefellus. Kefellus then tells the story of a trip to Athens where he heard this story. And then decades later, Plato writes it down. But the dates we have for these people tells us that Parmenides was way too old to debate Socrates. Parmenides would have been something like 100 years old and Socrates would have been like 15. You know? And so it's just like, we do not think this debate ever happened.

It's philosophy. It's for Plato to explain how different philosophical schools of thought would argue against one another, right? Because that's how dialogues work. And that's one of Plato's geniuses. I actually disagree with Ammon. I think that Plato is a brilliant scholar, or not a scholar, he's a brilliant storyteller. Because he just writes these arguments with people arguing with one another, and he also gets to hide his own point of view, therefore.

Because his point of view is never there. It's just his characters that are speaking, right? And you can see this again. You ever heard of Plato's Symposium? That's a famous one. And so in this Plato's symposium, there's this story about the birth of love, you know, the goddess love. And Diotima tells the story to Socrates when he's a young man. As an old man, he then tells the story of this drinking party, the symposium, hosted by Agathon.

And then Aristodemus, who was there and passed out drunk at the end of the night, then tells the story to Apollodorus. Apollodorus then tells the story to Glaucon. Apollodorus then tells the story to an unknown companion about how he told the story to Glaucon. And then Plato then writes it all down. And that's the preposterous transmission of this story. And we don't think this drinking party ever happened because both Socrates and Aristophanes, the famous. comedian were there and they hated each other because Aristophanes made a comedy made fun of Socrates all the time nonstop he has a whole comedy which it's all about fart jokes right and Socrates is going

around sounding like an asshole and farting the entire time and it's called the clouds it's a lot of fun to read and and so even in the in the in the apology so the story of Plato's trial or sorry Socrates's is trial socrates in there talks about Aristophanes and other comedians and how it's their fault that he's on trial. So they hated each other, and there's no way they'd have a congenial dinner party drinking together and telling stories. And what's really cool is even in this story,

where they set up the story behind the symposium, there's a wrong version where somebody misremembered the story of this drinking party, and Apollodorus is like, no, no, that's wrong. You need to, this is the right version, you know? And so it shows how they even recognize there's this tongue-in-cheek transmission of who remembers,

what orally. And look, this all makes sense because all of the characters or most of the characters in Plato's dialogues were real people. And they're written down just, you know, while some of those real people who were there were still alive. So, you know, Plato creates a situation which explains why this is not a real story, if you see what I mean. So the Athenians who were there recognize why they didn't actually say that, but they're in the story for philosophical reasons. Right. Right? And so it's it's what it is. It's tongue and cheek. And this is where, you know, look, I hate to beat the drama of expertise and stuff like that. But having familiarity with these kind of sources, if you want to go look for Atlantis via Plato, you need to first read all

Plato. Exactly. You need to understand Plato. Because if you don't and you just start looking for Atlantis, well, you're not working from the known to the unknown. You're just jacking off if you see what I mean. No, totally. And so a good example of that is like we have this issue today. This is an image that will be in my video on Atlantis, created by my lovely wife, Yonita Martini. So I got a question for you. What is this? How did we make this image? AI.

AI. So we made this AI. What makes you think that? I'm just guessing. You're just guessing. Which makes a lot of sense, but no. That's how most people make their creative images online these days. I know it is. And we thought about it, but the results weren't real enough. The reason why is because it doesn't look real. This is this image right here of this temple on the left, That is the Hephaestine in Athens.

It is the best preserved temple in all of Greece. And you put you photoshopped it on the water. Photoshopped it in and everything. You could have just told AI. Yeah, but then it's going to make some bullshit like this. On the left is AI. Look at this. Is that really AI on the left?

Yeah, yeah. This is really AI in the left. Look at how this column has a different design at the bottom than that column. Anybody who knows their shit is going to immediately know that that's AI while the other one is real. Right. Not real, but Photoshopped off of real sources, right? And so the reality is, is you need to know the context and know the material really well. So let's look at this.

Look, Plato and Socrates, these are statues of them in marble from the ancient world. They're in museums today, right? So when you look at these are both Socrates, right? Do they look like the same dude? Yes. Yeah, they do. So what would that tell you? You think that this is how Socrates actually looked?

I'll say it's pretty, it's better evidence that they look the same as if they look the same. If they look different, it would... We have dozens of statues that seem to represent the same person. Would that tell you? Dozens of statues that look similar. That looking... So, yeah, I would guess that that's how he looked. Okay, but if you really know your sources, and you read...

So Aristophanes describes Plato. Okay. Sorry, Aristophanes describes Socrates. Jesus, there's so many names. Plato describes Socrates. Zennephan described Socrates. They all describe him in the same way, and they all knew him when he lived. Right?

So they all knew him at the time when they were. wrote their text down. Now, Deborah Nails, one of the biographers of Socrates, as she says, is a quote from her in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the extant sources agree that Socrates was profoundly ugly, resembling a Seder more than a man, and resembling not at all the statues that turned up later in ancient times, and now grace the internet sites and the covers of books. Well, I mean, those statues aren't that hot. I mean, he's kind of... He had wide-set, bulging eyes that darted sideways and enabled him like a crab to see not only what was straight ahead, but what was beside him as well.

A flat, upturned nose with flaring nostrils and large fleshy lips like an ass. So, why do all these statues of Socrates look like the same dude? Why? Because they're all marble copies of a very famous bronze statue made by the

famous sculptor Lysippus, who also sculpted Alexander the Great. He was like his personal sculptor. And he was born at well after Socrates died, like 15 years after Socrates died. So what did he base the sculpture off of? Description. Well, so... You try to make a prettier version? Yeah, it's idealizing.

So Greek statues are idealized. Fuck. Yeah. And so this is why you can't just use common sense to interpret archaeological evidence. You need to look at the history of the field and how we have all tangled with this evidence over hundreds of years to actually understand what the fuck is going on. Right. Right. And so, like, I love people being interested in archaeology, but I'm just going to tell you how it is because I'm not going to infantilize people.

Right? I'm not going to treat you like a kid who believes in the... Santa Claus, if I'm talking to an adult, I'm going to say, this is our evidence, right? And what Plato does is he talks. Do you think Plato loves to get that good looking? No, again, it's idealized. All of these sculptures from the class school. They made Plato look pretty handsome. Yeah. And so, and notice that they all look the same. They all have what you'd call a nice big beer, deep-souled eyes, a furrowed brow. That's a philosopher trope. Looks like a UFC fighter. It's the same reason why I wear an archa-eastern.

Archaeology hat, right? So when somebody sees that statue, they know that's a philosopher because that's how they always make philosophers look. It makes it easy. You don't need to think twice about it because that's a cliche, right? Same thing with an archaeologist wearing an archaeology hat. I'd rather people immediately just say, yeah, Flint's an archaeologist, not have to pay attention and think twice and instead start listening to me, right? And so you want to use cliches sometimes so that the brain doesn't want to get complicated by stuff. That's why comic book heroes all look the same. Right.

Right. It's easy. Yes. You know, it's easy. And then, yeah, as Ammon said, Plato is a philosopher, not a historian. And that's why we're not looking for Plato's cave, right? We know it's a philosophical thought experiment, which is what Atlantis was.

Right. If you see what I mean, it was that game of civilization. Yeah, I mean, it makes so much sense. It just makes so much sense. That's why I'm writing a book on it. And I'm upset because I want Atlantis to be real. I know. I know.

And if you still believe in it, I don't got a problem with you. But just don't like, you know, go crazy on archaeologists that are saying, hey, this is why it doesn't exist, you know? You can still believe whatever you want, right? That's cool. Like, this is something that comes up on this podcast all the time is that a lot of people, not scholar, not people like you, but a lot of people who write books, right, authors, who write about anything. Most of the guests that come on the show are authors. But these authors, 99% of the time, are writing their books based on other people's books. They don't go to the original source.

Very, very, very, very rarely do people go to the original source when they write books, right? And part of what I'm saying, though, is you can't just go to the original source. Because if you just go to the original source, you don't understand the context of these statutes. Right. And so, you know, you definitely also need to go to scholarship. Yes. Because you can't, here I have a good example of common sense and why it just doesn't work. So Heinrich Schliemann, you know who he is?

Yeah, I've heard of him. Okay, he's the guy who excavated Troy. And in 1872, he discovered Troy and everybody says he proved Troy existed. Bullshit, everybody already knew Troy existed because Alexander the Great visited it. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, visited it. There was a bishop of Troy up until like the 15th. century a.D. So, you know, nobody really doubted Troy existed as a city. It was just a question of where it is. Right. Right. And so he found Troy good, and he didn't actually, Frank Calvert

before him found it, who heard about it from local Turkish people. Right, right. But either way, he was the first one to do major excavations. And credit to him. But his interpretations of it used what he, his version of common sense in the 19th century. So here's a description from his publication of Troy in 1872. I cannot conclude the description of the lowest stratum, so the lowest level of earth there, without mentioning that among the huge blocks of stone, I can't do a German accent, at a depth of from 12 to 16 meters, 39 and a half to fit to two and I found two toads. And at a depth of 39 and a half feet, a small but very poisonous snake with a scutiform head. The snake may have found its way down from above, but this is an impossibility in the case of

the large toads. They must have spent 3,000 years in these depths. It is very interesting to find in the ruins of Troy, living crue. creatures from the times of Hector and Andromache, even though these creatures are but toads. And so that was his version of common sense in the 19th century. This made sense in the 19th century without a good understanding of biology of how long toads live, right? And so, you know, we cannot just go and interpret stuff with common sense. There's a whole history of the field and how to interpret this stuff. And it doesn't mean we're fossilized in our ways. We're constantly reinterpreting the past with new studies. But it's an interesting.

an incremental level, right? It's not like we throw out the baby with the bathwater and it's this kind of stuff that shows why we can't just use common sense. We have to understand the history of how everybody has talked about things like Plato or Athens or Atlantis or Troy

and Schleiman and stuff like that. Without that background knowledge, you're just lost and you're, you know, you're fantasizing is the wrong word, but you're using common sense is the right way to put it. And common sense is not the same thing as you know, using scholarship, if you see what I mean.

Oh, yeah. I totally understand what you're saying. And then, you know, it comes to just like where we are right now in the world too and how we're evolving. Like this story has been the story of Atlantis since Plato wrote it,

which was, you know, so the original source was full of shit. But since then, people have just compiled and piled and piled on it. And it's just been this like game of telephone ever since he started. Then people started making money off of it and writing books about it.

And then here, comes the internet. Now people are making videos about it, making documentaries about it. And people don't want to do the hard work. They just want to make money off of it. And it's fun to talk about. People are obsessed with the unknown and what they don't understand. It's the same thing with UFOs and with aliens and all this stuff. People just, there's something about the human mind that is gravitated towards the unexplainable. Yes, you're exactly right. And you're right. It's like a game of telephone. And we can actually trace that with Atlantis. So basically, most people didn't really believe much in Atlantis until

they discovered the Americas. As soon as people discovered the Americas, people in the 15th and 16th centuries were like, whoa, let's rethink Atlantis, right? Maybe this is what Plato's talking about, right? And so, it started off, though, still as fiction. So Sir Francis Bacon, you've probably

heard of him. He wrote the book, The New Atlantis, in the early 16th century. And this is the first time where there's a story about survivors. Plato doesn't have any survivors. the Zeus destroys Atlantis, everybody dies, you know? But in this fictional book, it's totally a fictional book, he didn't mean it in any way as nonfiction,

there's European sailors that are in the Pacific, and they find this island of refugees from Atlantis who have advanced technology and a new way of learning. It's at this, they have their capital is called New Ben Salem, and they have this whole way of, it's even sort of modeled off of Plato because it's meant to show how to do education. And our modern university system,

in many ways is based off of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. The way that it's modeled with different departments and different things, the first sort of description of that that inspired the modern university system comes from this text, which of course comes from Plato's Atlantis and was very intentionally fictional. But after he creates this fictional story, over the next 100, 200, 300 years, it starts being picked up and written about his nonfiction. And so you see this, there's a Swedish author, Olaf Rudbeck, who in the late 17th century describes Atlantis in Sweden.

And then it all comes to a big head. There's a lot of people. There's like Laplungian and other people, but the real er text is this guy Ignatius Donnelly in the late 19th century, 1882 maybe, I think, if I'm remembering that right, publishes his book, Atlantis, the Antidiluvian world. And that's where he sort of drew on a variety of fake facts,

real facts, fiction, and kind of just twisted it all into this grand name, narrative where there's this lost civilization from before a giant flood. So he combines biblical sources as well. And he says that this lost civilization had survivors that taught technology, agriculture, even gunpowder and all this kind of stuff to the hunter gatherers that were living in different places. And so, and he ended his book, the very last paragraph of his book, written in 1882, was, who shall say that 100 years from now, the great museums of the world may not be adorned with the gems, statues, arms, and implements from Atlantis,

while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of our day. The end. We're now 150 years later. We got nothing in our museums. We got absolutely nothing. As Graham Hancock said, there's no archaeological evidence for Atlantis, for his civilization.

And if you read this book and then read fingerprints of the gods, it's the same exact text. And I don't mean 100%. Graham Hancock updates it with some different things, but it's the exact same argument, 100%. Graham Hancock's not the only one. Ignatius Donnelly was a bestseller in his time. I do a lot of research into how this becomes popular. And Google has a database of words, right? And how often they're used.

And the year that he publishes this book, everybody's talking about Atlantis from that year on for like decades. And that's where all of our Atlanta stuff comes from. And Graham Hancock, look, he's honest. He gives credit. In his acknowledgments, he says Ignatius Donnelly was my biggest inspiration for that book. Really? Oh, yeah. And he cites Ignatius Donnelly through there and everything.

How many times have you read those books, fingerprints of the gods? I mean, I've read them all the way through once and then I've gone into different sections at different points. Yeah. Because you show those, you show blocks of paragraphs that he wrote. Yeah. Right? Or where he sources, where he'll combine sentences from vastly different parts of the book. So he'll put like a sentence followed by from like one page of a source book and then follow it up with a sentence from like a hundred pages later that are completely out of context from each other. And it's even worse from that. Let me explain. So I can't believe this episode is brought to you by Manscaped, the global leader in men's lifestyle and grooming. The only thing smoother than your face after meeting the chairman pro electric foil shaver

is a silky smooth skin of those little angelic shrubs painted on vault ceilings. I have always dreaded having to shave because A, I hate the clean shaven look and I hate having to spend the time in the bathroom, shaving under my neck, under my chin and all those weird little crevices on my face because I always miss a spot and my wife always makes fun of me. So when I threw away my old face tremor and got the new chairman, it's made my shaving experience so much more enjoyable. My favorite part is I don't have to shave it all the way down to the skin because I like to have a little bit of scruff, a little bit of stubble. So when I attach the stubble trimmer to the chairman,

it shaves my face to the perfect length. So there's a little bit of stubble. So I no longer hate shaving my face. All right. So what makes the chairman pro stand out? Well, it's all about versatility and precision. It comes with two interchangeable skin-safe blade heads. You have the skin-safe four-blade foil for that close, smooth shave when you're looking to go completely clean.

And if clean shave isn't your shave style like Danny, just switch to the skin-safe stubble trimmer to keep your stubble looking sharp and polished. Both heads are designed with skin-safe technology to help reduce razor burn and irritation. So your skin feels smooth and comfortable after every shave, reducing redness or discomfort. A standout feature that truly differentiates the chairman pro from the rest is the flex adjust technology. This innovative technology ensures a superior shave by allowing both blades and the pivoting head to seamlessly adapt to the unique contours of your face and neck, helping you maintain great contact with your skin at every angle. And if you want even more precision, on the right side of the bracket, there's a precision lock. When you lock it, the blade head sits firm so you can achieve a more precise shave.

And there's something that's going to make your grooming routine even easier. The chairman pro is waterproof. Yep, you can keep it right in the shower. And the waterproof feature doesn't just make shaving easier. It also simplifies clean up too. Just a quick rinse under the sink and you're all set. The chairman pro isn't just for daily shaves either. It is powerful enough to tackle up to five-day growth, making it perfect, whether you're shaving every day or just tidying up after a few days.

And with up to 75 minutes of runtime on a single. charge, you can take your time getting the perfect shave. It even has a travel lock to help make sure it doesn't accidentally turn on in your bag and an LED spotlight to help you see every detail ensuring nothing gets missed. Get the chairman pro today and experience a shave that is as smooth as you deserve. Get 20% off plus free shipping with the code Danny Jones at manscape.com. That's 20% off plus free shipping by using the code D-A-N-N-N-Y-J-O-N-E-S, no spaces at manscaped.com. It's linked below. Now back to the show.

If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level. Overtime. Big hits and no one coast. The studio crew with Paul Bissonette cracking jokes and Wayne Gretzky breaking things down makes it even more fun to watch. Every shift matters and the personalities keep things lively. Watch the Stanley Cup playoffs on TNT, TBS, True TV, and HBO Max.

He has an argument in magicians of the gods. Right. So his more recent book from what was it 20, I'm going to get this wrong. I should know what year he published it. I don't know, it was around 2012, I think, maybe 2015. I can't remember exactly. People can look it up. We can look it up.

So in there, he talks about these hieroglyphic inscriptions from Egypt, called this temple in Edfu, which he claims describe Plato's Atlantis. So he thinks that these are a record of those Egyptian sources that we talked about earlier that Solon apparently talked about the with the priest, right? Okay. Now, there are 10,000 things wrong with this. And where is this? It's in Egypt.

In Egypt. Yeah, it's a place called Edfu. It's a well-excavated site. Okay. It's very well known. This temple that they come from, here's a drawing of it from a really older book, a German book, because I think the Germans excavated it. And you can see all these hieroglyphs. This temple is filled with hieroglyphs.

It's just, it's really impressive. I've never been there, but I've seen a lot of photos and stuff. Really impressive. So many crammed in hieroglyphs. And they tell a series of different stories of origin and stuff like that, different Egyptian mythological stories. Right. Now, there's several problems with connecting this to Atlantis, though. For one, this temple was built after Plato wrote about Atlantis.

It was built 100 years after Plato. And Graham absolutely uses this as evidence for Atlantis. He claims that even though it was built and recorded 100 years later, it's based off of earlier stories. Which arguably maybe, but stories change over time. That's just life, right? We know stories change. We can talk about how Homeric stories have changed over times and stuff like that. Happy to talk about that.

It's like you're not going to take the movie Troy. and think that's an accurate representation of Homer's Iliad, right? Especially if it's a story 9,000 years earlier, just like, you know, our movie Troy, that's thousands of years after the Iliad, right? It's created in our own context for our own audience, for our own people. We want to see a hunky Brad Pitt, right? That's what we want. That's not how Homer describes it, though.

So that's one problem. The second problem is he makes a mistake, and I'll grant it, it's probably an honest mistake. But I think, I hope most of these are honest mistakes. but he is not actually quoting from the Ed Food Text themselves. He is quoting from a book on Egyptian religion by Eve Raymond, published in 1969, which is describing the Ed Food Text and stuff like that, but not quoting them. It's not a translation of them. So that's another issue.

He thinks that he's quoting from these actual primary sources when he's not. He's quoting from a book on Egyptian religion, which addresses the Ed Food Text at various points. And David Miano, Dr. David Miano has a video on this, by the way. So so far, a lot of what I got came from David Miano's video, the World of Antiquity. Big shout out to David Miano. He's a great ancient historian who has a big YouTube channel. He's close to here, didn't he? I don't know where he lives.

That's actually in Bradenton. I should ask him. I don't know. He's like an hour away from there. We're in touch sometimes. But then when I'm reading through this, you know, I always tell my students and I'm going to tell everybody in public as well, read the footnotes. For fuck's sake, please read the footnotes and track down the sources. Do your own research.

I'm fully with that. But that means going and checking people's sources, right? So, for example, here are direct quotes from chapter 9, from magicians of the gods, on the Ed Food text quoting Eve Raymond. And so here's quote number one. And he does this as a single block paragraph, right? So does he, in his book, do you see these page numbers? There is footnotes that you have to then go track down and find the page numbers.

At the bottom of the page. Yeah, at the bottom of the page. But when you're reading, I can't remember if they're end notes or footnotes, but they're there to find it. But when you're reading the book. You don't see it. You don't, you see all this text minus the page numbers. Yes. Okay.

And you just see the dot, dot, dot, with a footnote, right? I see. And I added the page numbers so we can see this. Okay. So he says first, and it's quoted all in one quotation mark, right? So it literally looks like it's a single quote. So it's not clear when he writes this that it's, that it's from separate pieces of a source book. Unless you track down the footnotes.

So it deceptively looks like it's one paragraph written together in context. It appears that way at first, yeah. Okay. To anyone who's not tracking it. down carefully. And he says, an upheaval, quote, so violent that it destroyed the sacred land. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. The primeval water, dot, dot, dot, dot, submerge the island. Dot, dot, dot, dot, and the island became the tomb of the original divine inhabitants. Dot, dot, dot, dot, the homeland ended in darkness beneath the primeval waters.

Does it again, I think it's on the same page of the book? And what you just said are three sections of a source book from three separate pages. Not even a source book, remember, it's a book on, it's a scholarly book. It's a book written about a book. And so that first sentence comes from page 113. The next group comes from page 109, and then the next group comes from page 127. Okay. Then he has another of these block quotes.

A process of dot dot dot dot, continuous creation by the emergence of a progressive series of plots of land. Dot, dot, dot, dot, the creation of these, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, the creation of fact a resurrection and restoration of what had been in the past but had vanished. dot, dot, dot, in any place in which they settled, they found new sacred domains. And this, as you can see, stretches hundreds of pages. The first bit comes from page 173, the middle bit from page 373,

and the last bit from page 324, and the last bit from page 190. And again, he's trying to make everything you just said sound like it was one coherent statement. And you can even read it, and it does sound vaguely like Plato's, not even Plato's Atlantis, more like Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis with survivors and stuff like

that and or Francis Bacon's Atlantis that has survivors. But it sounds like that story of Atlantis everybody's familiar with. A flood, survivors, teaching stuff. That's what it sounds like. Right? It really does. But he's creating this. Or the quote three where he does it again, that the gods left the pey lands, page 274. They sailed to another part of the prime evil world, page 187, and journeyed through the lands of the prime evil age, page 274. In any place in which they settled, they found new sacred domains. This is a lot of work for you to go through

the, what was the book, the original book that came from? Magicians of the gods. Oh, Eve Raymond, 1969. Well, I didn't have to because he did leave footnotes that said this. But you actually went and pulled up. I checked to make sure he was

side of the right pages. Yeah, yeah, he did. And some of his dot, dot, dot, dots don't actually change the meaning. Some do, though. Some very much are linking together things that don't make sense in the book that he's quoting from, yeah. You can find this book online, by the way, the Eve Raymond book.

It's on Archive.org. Though there was a big lawsuit against them, so I hope it'll still be up there. But it was, at least until recently. So, you know, I actually prepared this for my conversation with him on Joe Rogan. And when he mentioned, what about the Edfut text? And I said, let's go there. And I think he saw the glint in my eye and then he never brought it up again. Because it was near the end of the conversation.

And I was, I think I did pretty well. And so he was just like, ooh, maybe I shouldn't go there. And so what I did to prepare is I created the Hancock texts, right? So here's the Hancock text with my dot dot dot dots, my dastardly ellipses. Flint dot dot dot had been involved in another project. I was a young archaeologist, he explains. I was looking for my own project. Soon afterwards, the American archaeologist made a second unsettling discovery.

All was confusion. All was paradox and all was mystery. The extraordinary story of Atlantis, the whole tale of the Lost Ice Age civilization, was not and never under any circumstances could have been a high civilization at that time because of hard evidence, which absolutely rules out the existence of an Atlantis type civilization in the Upper Paleolithic. These are all words that Hancock wrote it. You just did some magic and put them all together out of context. Because if you're going to use a series of dot, dot, dot, dots and a series of footnotes, you take stuff out of context. You can say whatever you want.

It's really easy. This is how a lot of people deal with real archaeology. They take something that looks like something else and they say, voila, they're like the same thing. And it's like, dude. How did you and Graham first get in contact with each? How did this first start? Do you want the story? Yeah.

I was told by Mini Minuteman. I met Mini Minuteman when I was in Miami last week. And he was like, you got to make this into a video. The story of how I got into this. So there's the long version and the short version. I'm just going to skip through and get to the Graham Hancock version. In a sense, I started realizing Atlantis was a big deal. And I realized that I, as a scholar, am uniquely placed to address Atlantis.

Just because of my own experience and background, my dad was a Paleolithic archaeologist. I grew up on Stone Age digs. And I'm really familiar with Paleolithic archaeology. But to get out of his shadow, I went into classics. Because, you know, in America, you have archaeology. There's no archaeology departments. There's anthropology departments. And then there's classical archaeology departments, classics departments.

And nobody in Classics departments had heard of my dad. So I said, I'm going to go do ancient Greek stuff where I don't have to look like some little nepo baby, right? I can actually do stuff on my own and build my own name. And so that's when I started doing ancient Greek stuff. And I'm an expert in ancient Greece. I work on projects all over the ancient Greek world. And when you talk about the modern version of what Atlantis is, it takes this Greek myth. It's not really a myth, but it takes this Greek story.

And it then uses, says that it talks about the Ice Age. And I'm one of the only people in the world. There's a few, I'm sure, besides me, but I'm one of the only ones who has really a whole lot of hands-on experience with the archaeology of the Greek world and the archaeology of the Ice Age world. Interesting. And so I can, because they're not taught in the same department.

The archaeology is a huge field. Right. And there's millions of sites. Nobody can cover everything. It's not. There's fair to people that are multidisciplinary in that sense. And so in that sense, I realized, look, this stuff is so popular right now.

Somebody that can actually talk about the hands-on evidence. and describe it in a real way that represents the field. Because, you know, you always have to worry when you're talking about a field that's not your own or a sub-discipline that it's not your own, that even though I'm a scholar, I'm misrepresenting them. I don't want to do that, right? I would say that this happens sometimes with archaeology where you get somebody who's writing a big book, the overall picture of archaeology, and they're familiar with this stuff, but they're less familiar with that stuff, and therefore they make mistakes.

It's accidental. And so I don't want to do that. So, you know, I try to focus on what my expertise is, right? And so that's where I got started. And so, excuse me. So I'm reading more and more on Atlantis because, you know, it's not something you're taught in school. That's so interesting, man. Your specialty just happens to line up perfectly with the story of Atlantis.

Exactly. Greek classical period and the archaeology that goes back to when it apparently existed, the Ice Age. Exactly. That's why I started getting it. And at the same time, I'm active on social media. I've always done a lot of Twitter threads that go, that people read and stuff like that. And I think you do a great fucking job, man. I think you're doing, you're, you're, you're a tremendous communicator.

You're really good at explaining this stuff. And you've done, yeah, yeah, I'm going to link it below. And there's a, it's crazy how diabolical the backlash has been towards you online. I don't know what to say. I'm just trying to tell the truth. I'm not even trying to tell the truth. I'm sitting with you listening to you. You're super reasonable.

You make so much sense. You've done the fucking work. You've done the, you've eaten the gruel, and you've studied this stuff, your whole goddamn life. And I just, I don't see where it's coming from.

I just don't understand it. So that's why I'm trying to ask you more about the Graham origins. Yeah, yeah. So how did I get into that? So I started researching at last. Why is there so much hate towards you? That's a different question.

Look, I think, I don't actually quite understand it myself. I think that people really, really like the narrative Graham tells because Graham, look, let's be honest, he's an amazing storyteller. You read his books, they're very compelling. I mean, like I said,

he's gotten now archaeologists into archaeology. Like, I'm not, there's no denying his ability to tell a story. He is gifted, and he's a great public speaker as well. And so, you know, I'm not denying that, and he's a smart guy, and when I met him, he was kind and everything, right? But he, a lot of people,

he's developed a fan club, I guess, of people that are just really attached to these ideas, and they don't like the idea of being told that they could be wrong. And I don't quite understand why that's the case, but it is the case. And I wish people would simmer down a little bit, because I'm just trying to, really, my main goal is to share what archaeology is. As I think I started on Joe's podcast, one of the things I've learned over the years of communicating with the public

is nobody really gets what we do today. The only way you understand archaeology is if you took it at University of level because it's not taught in, you know, kindergarten through 12th grade. It's not taught at university unless you choose to take that class. And so nobody understands it in a lot of the popular communicators for archaeology, they're not archaeologists. Even the ones who try to do a good job with it, like who don't want to say they're, they know more than the archaeologist. Because there's some people, and Graham does this. He says, he's right, archaeologists are wrong. He says that in ancient apocalypse all the time. He's like, I am overturning the paradigm of history,

which means we're all wrong and he's right, right? And so there's a lot of YouTubers that do that as well. They say, I'm right, but this discipline with tens of thousands of people that have been working for 200 years, they're all wrong. And it's like, this is a problem. The public understanding of what I do is totally warped. And not just by them, it's by people who don't think we're wrong. By people who think we're right. But, you know, a lot of the biggest channels that share archaeology on YouTube, some of my friends.

I'm not like David Miano. He's a historian. He has a PhD in ancient historian. He's an amazing historian, and he's an amazing public communicator. But because he doesn't have the same level of archaeological experience, he's not presenting it in the same way I would, having that depth of experience, if you see what I mean. And so I don't think he's doing anything wrong,

but it means that the perspective of an archaeologist is not represented, if you see what I mean, in the public consciousness. And so, you know, on most of the big YouTube channels, most of the big authors on archaeology, with few exceptions, are historians or there are people that somehow want to challenge our field

and so it's like that's an issue we need to have people that know the field really well sharing it with the public Eric Klein is one of several Jennifer Raff

she has a great book on the people of the Americas so there are real legit archaeologists that are doing big things and becoming famous for it best sellers they have lectures on YouTube

I have a video with Jennifer Raff coming out actually next week just had one with Eric Klein and so you know but my goal is to get an archaeological perspective out there because archaeology is not history.

We're dealing with the material sources, those statues of Socrates that don't talk to you if you see what I mean. You don't have those words there. And so, you know. Amin was telling me he did an archaeological dig in Israel. Yeah, I think he said Maggiito.

Mattel McGito. Eric Klein worked there. He did not remember him. Really? I couldn't get any words on him. Yeah. Interesting. Eric Klein directed the project. He said that there was astrological zodiacs. There were zodiacs on the ceilings of the temples there.

I have no idea. I have never been there. I have no idea. Like I said, Eric Klein would be the person to ask because he directed the project and he's published on it. There's a book, I think, like excavating Armageddon or something like that.

Right, right, right, right. Yeah. Can we talk about this shit? Oh, Jesus. That's by some people who think that all archaeologists are wrong. Maybe you can, Is that a real one? I have, no, this is a 3D print.

Okay, good. I've never heard you talk about this. This is the one thing I cannot get a reasonable explanation for. Because these things, from my understanding, and I had a, my friend Matt came in here and brought like a couple dozen of these things that he purchased. And they're made out of like red granite. And they had them measured in light scanners at an aerospace, big aerospace company. And they found out that they are completely perfectly symmetrical within the deep. deviation is like within less than the width of a human hair.

Yeah, I don't agree with that. And that's measuring like literally in here, the dimension between the opening, the edge here, and then all around the whole thing is like so perfectly symmetrical. It had to have been made on like a CNC machine today. I disagree with them. Sorry. Sorry, guys. What part do you disagree with? I have, let's see, I have, so I've, I'm trying to eventually do a video on this.

Okay. But it's not my specialty. I am not an Egyptologist, but I've been talking with people who study this material from archaeological sites, right? So this is something, it's something that right now I'm focusing on Atlanta, so it might take a year before I do a video on this. But here's some initial thoughts. Okay. Let's just go with initial thoughts. And this is just me having seen a few videos that these people have done.

Okay. So your expertise is not involved in, like, Egypt or Egyptology? No, I worked in Abidos when I was an undergrad, so a long time ago when I was, you know, before I really got into my expertise and stuff like that. At the time, I did a lot of digital mapping. I've done a lot of digital mapping. I've designed large-scale GIS and database systems for projects. And so that's what I was doing at that time

before I got into environmental archaeology. And so I was at Abidos, which is, you know, that's one of the major pre-dynastic cemeteries right before the next dynasty that builds the pyramids. And it's where a lot of these stone vessels come from. And they also, the consensus is that these things were from four to five thousand years ago. and I believe the lave, correct me if I'm wrong, but we know that the Egyptians didn't,

the earliest we know they had the lathe was 1,300 years BC, 13 BC? I don't know. I don't know that. That's what I heard. Maybe we can fact check that Steve. I talked briefly on Matt on Twitter, but I think that we do know that they had rotating devices like a ceramic wheel around that time.

Around 5,000 BC? Yeah, yeah. In the Near East and in that area, I think around that time, even in Egypt, they had the ceramic wheel. So to assume that they would not use something that rotated around to make a stone vessel is a big assumption if you see what I mean There's I don't think any reason to assume that we also have Tomb paintings that show how these are being made with a drill that you rotate around

And so with a flint drill bit and stuff like that So really? Yeah Paintings of a drill bit yeah really and we have reconstructions I just saw them in the British Museum Ancient Egyptians used late sorry go up I'm going to go up used lathes for a variety of reasons I I'd be careful with the term lathe, though. I'd be careful with the term lathe because that is... Okay.

Egyptians developed a two-person lathe around 1,300 BC. Yeah, and I'd also be careful with Google. I'd go with scholarship. Right, of course, right. Especially AI stuff. But they certainly, before 1,300 BC, there's a tomb painting that I saw a depiction of just now. Recently, in the British Museum.

I was there, and I was looking at some of these stone vessels. How would we search for this if we wanted to find it on YouTube? Or on Google, rather. Hmm. Like an Egyptian tomb painting of a drill? Stone vessels, maybe? Oh, look, is this what you're talking about? It's something else with a drill, yes.

The one on the left is, I think, an example of drilling a stone vase. There's several of them, actually. It's not just one. There's a bunch of different examples of people making stone vases. And in the British Museum, they actually had flint artifacts that were the drill bits themselves, and they reconstructed it on the wood and stuff like that. And so they had a whole section on exactly how these vases were made, as the Egyptians themselves described it, if you see what I mean.

Now, don't get me wrong. these tomb paintings are later. Because at the time that some of these really early ones were made, they weren't painting their tombs. It's just how it was. But later on, they show what they do to make stone vases. And there's a YouTube channel,

scientists against myths, a few Russian scientists who have reconstructed stone vases. I watched it. It was terrible. The recreation they made, it took them years. Well, okay, because... And they did a terrible fucking job.

It was awful. They had one that measures more accurate. than the ones that uncharted access. No, they did it. I watched the video. Well, they have several videos. You need to find one of their more recent ones where they actually make one where they do the measurements, and it's more accurate than the measurements on charted X. Steve, you got to find it.

Because I watch one recently. I don't know which video it is because they have several videos on this topic, but they definitely have a video where it's more accurate. And just because something takes years, Danny, by people who are trying to figure out how to do it as they go, when there's an industry of people that have passed on over generations how to do something, they know how to do it. Right? They have the expertise of having made many of them so it won't take them years.

Sure. And remember, these guys are just doing it in their free time. There's a difference between somebody doing it as a job versus doing it in their free time. You need to find scientists against myths. Oh, oops. Scientists. Steve, see if you can just find it. We'll keep going. So that's one reason I have an issue with is scientists against myths. So how were they able to get it so goddamn perfect? Well, I think it just has to do with the circuit.

you're spinning something. You make a compass and you spin it around, you make a perfect circle. Within the within one one thousandth of an inch variation. Yeah, if you have a compass, that should do that, yeah. With that kind of... Yeah. And how do people... Like, that's how a compass works. What tools did they use? Like, what kind of drill bits did they use?

And what kind of... I think for these, they used Flint. And it was all by hand? There was no pal-lop. Yeah, it's something that spun. And they might have had a pallet. They put it on. I don't really know. That's something we can't tell. And these handles that were built into it, with the tubes that go through, like with the holes they go through.

Now that's actually one of my problems. One of my problems is every single one of these I've seen. This is a replica. These are a little bit off. Or something's off. Sometimes you can look inside and you can see bits

where it's not perfect inside where the drill bit has left an impression. So, you know, that tells me you can see. The insides are more imperfect than the outside. Which if you're doing it with a modern machine wouldn't happen, right? And so one of the things that I would say is, I, technically, I also think that they're measuring this with the wrong technology, these scanning light measurements.

They should be using CT scans. That's kind of the standard. They do. They did that too. Okay. Good. They did that too. But the aerospace, I think it was light scanners or something. Whatever they did was able, that was the one that was able to measure the variation and how symmetrical it actually is. Well, no, that's just about capturing a 3D. You can do that with anything. And the thickness of the walls and how, and how. CTC scan gets that. and how, like, thick it is on this side versus that side. What a CT scan does is it shoots x-rays through it. A series of x-rays.

Right. That's what a computerized tomography, I think, is what it's called stands for. So it shows a series of x-rays through something to get fully measured the inside, outside, down to the most precise measurements. Right. It is the state of the art for us doing kind of measurements in archaeology at precision levels. Okay. That is what I use. I know people that do this with animal bones.

I know people that do it with pretty much everything, just to get tiny little anatomical differences to be able to see. if a goat was moving up and down a mountain. So, with the naked eye. Okay, so let's talk about this. Let's talk about this. So what do you want to ask? You want to ask me something first? You're saying that they did this out of granite by hand, by with the naked eye, no measuring.

Think about it like this, Danny. Within one one thousandth of an inch. Well, let me explain why. It's just like a compass. You have a compass. That's another question. Why? Why does it have to be so perfect?

Well, it's just the way they're making it that makes it so perfect is what I'm trying to explain. When you have something that's rotating around, so you have the drill, and then you have the bit that comes out here. That's at a set distance from the center of that, it's the radius of a circle, if you see what I mean. As it spins around, it's just making a perfect circumference. Just like how a compass works. You don't need high tech to do that. It's just the motion of creating it in a circular way that's going to naturally make it reasonably perfect. if you see what I mean.

It's not like they're pounding at it. If you're pounding at it to make it or you're jamming something in there to go tink, tink, tink, like imagine using like a pick, right? If you're doing that, making something perfect is going to be pretty much impossible.

So is that what the Egyptologists, the conventional Egyptologists say about these? They were made on circular. Circular bits. So drill that's moving around circular. Drill bit. Yeah. But how did they open it up on the,

I'm sorry, how did they open it up on the inside? Well, you put something in and then you attach it. So there's a wooden thing going in and you attach the drill bit on it so that it circles around. If you're making it, the thing you're spinning is wood and stone is attached to it. So there's a, they put, they, how, okay, so they put a stone and they somehow go like that and hollow out the inside of the granite. Well, they put the lever. Let's go back to those tomb paintings.

They show them best. Let's look at the actual ancient Egyptian evidence of how they tell us they made these. Okay. Like, let's stick with the evidence, guys. Yeah. This is what I say. Go from the known to be under. Sure. I totally understand what you're saying.

Yeah. So it's something exactly like that. Yeah. I mean, that was the tool in the video. Well, how did they suck so bad at drawing, but they were so good at making... Oh, they didn't suck at drawing. Remember, these are... Come on. Compared to this?

They can do this, but that's what they're drawing. Art is not value judgments. But so that's the thing that comes down. You're spinning that around. At the bottom of that are these drill bits that are attached. that's rotate around. Okay. Do you see what I mean?

So that's a different kind of drill with a bow, and that lets you go back and forth with a bow to make it spin very quickly and effortlessly. So that's a bow drill right there. Okay. You see what I mean? Totally. So that's sort of how these kind of, and this kind of drilling technology, it's around for thousands of years. This is a really, and not just in Egypt elsewhere too.

I would have to see somebody use this and create something like this, that's this perfect. And to answer the question of how can you fit the bit in there? The same thing would be true if you made it on a machine. You still have to figure out how to get the thing in there. Of course. Yeah. So that's not an issue. We know that whether they made it on a machine or whether they did it by hand,

they were able to get a damn drill bit in there that could go around in a circle to get it to work. Right? And so obviously, look, now that takes a long time. That's a lot of effort to do that by hand. And there's thousands of them. But it's doable. Yeah, but dude, they have a lot of people who are constructing these over thousands of years, by the way. It wasn't like there's thousands of them constructed in a 10-year span.

we're saying there's thousands of them constructed in a several thousand years span. Do you see what I mean? So I don't know why that's such a huge issue because, look, these pharaohs and wealthy people, they had huge numbers of people that they controlled it could have worse. It's just the perfection is ungodly. And that's why I think we sometimes in our world with modern technology, we underestimate our ancestors, you know? We can't even do it now.

Like it's, were they that much, that's the whole argument for them being more like an advanced civilization making this. Or rather they were smart people with simple technology and effort to make that is what they were. They were smart, skilled people who had a tradition of how to do this and they did it. You know, like these were people like you and me who are as smart as you and me. They just don't have the technology around us that other people created, by the way, that we use in our day-to-day lives. and so, you know, they had their own technology and they knew how to master it. People in the past were fucking smart.

They lived in a tough environment and they survived and thrived. What do you make of the giant saw blade marks in some of those stones that are found around the pyramids? Like there's giant stones with like perfect cuts that looked like they were done with circular saws that you can fit a credit card into. And they even measured the depth of it

and it's like a circular, the depth gets deeper towards the middle and like it looks just like a circular saw did it. So look, I mean, some of this is I find it silly because people say this about the Egyptians, but like the Romans also have those same perfect cuts. The Greeks have those same perfect cuts. We don't assume they couldn't do that stuff.

So why is it that we assume the Egyptians couldn't? That's kind of one of my... I'm saying to like, what is the... Like, yeah, this stuff. Look at that. Yeah. Dude, that's just very careful slow. Look at the one with the three. The three cuts? Yeah, they realized they fucked up and they went and did it again. How the hell did they do that?

Well, so they probably had, you know, a saw blade with copper, but then they used water and sand. because the copper is not dense enough so it's going to wear down really badly. It's actually the granite sand and other kinds of sand that you put there

and again, scientists against myths and others have done a lot of videos on this that show that you can cut through very precisely and slowly slowly, no doubt, and you are going to use a lot of copper blades because they wear down eventually. But if you use sand and water there,

you can saw very precisely through stuff through hard granite. It's just, you know, I mean, people have done it. I know, they look cool. I'm not denying that. It's mind-blowing. I just don't doubt that these people could do it because they were smart.

And they had time. They had time and expertise is what they had. You know, I mean, people will say the same thing about us in the future. They're going to be like, how the hell did they make these highways? That was so much work. And it's like, well, yeah, it was a lot of work, but we did it. You know, with the technology we had, in the future, they'll have some faster way to do that kind of stuff.

And they'll be mind-boggled at the civilization. we built and they'll be like, nah, they probably had our future technology, right? Because that's what makes sense to them because they see that all around. This doesn't make sense to us because we don't live back then, you know? So in Christopher Dunn's book, he interviewed a guy who runs a granite core, a guy who was a huge company that produces granite. They make countertops. They make all kinds of crazy stuff out of granite.

And he basically said to him, he goes, he was showing him. some of like the big granite blocks that exist like in the serra i think the serapium the granite the big granite boxes and he was asking him like if you were to recreate this a how would you do it be how much would it cost and he first said he said just the freight alone would be like 250 000 to move this thing and it would be so ridiculously it would be so much more expensive which is by the way why we don't redo this stuff because we can't meaning we don't have the money to employ thousands and thousands of people for years to build a pyramid. Who's going to fund that?

You know what I mean? Because if you want to do that, you have to employ, look, everything in our world the most expensive thing is human labor. Let's be honest, if you're doing something in America, the most expensive thing is human fucking labor and skilled human labor, right?

And so if you're going to build a pyramid, you need to be able to employ thousands of people over years to build it. So how are we going to do that if we don't get Elon Musk or someone like that or Bill Gates to actually employ thousands of people to reconstruct a fucking pyramid. So if you're going to say

I've never seen someone build a pyramid well fuck you. Like seriously how are we logically going to do that in our world today? Because we'd have to pay all those people. So like of course nobody's done it because we'd have to get those skills and teach the people these kind of traditional stone mason crafts and then get enough people to do that. Get them all together

and spend like 10 years of their lives doing it. And like we don't have the resources to do that. we have some guys, some scientists in Russia who are willing to invest a couple years into making a stone vase in their free time to show that it can be done. Yeah, but they failed. No, they did not.

The one I saw they failed. Steve, you've got to find the consensus. They have one from a few months ago where they measured it and it's more precise is what they said. They compared it to one of the... We need to find the video. Look for scientists against myths,

stone vase more precise maybe. I mean, it doesn't look too bad to me. Look at all the flat... No, it looks terrible. I mean, the one on the right is like... They said that they use the same exact measurements. And so can we go on to my second critique of these people on Chartered X and Map Beyond? Well, first of all, we got to find out, like, what is the actual consensus of what they finished?

Like, can we find something? Go on Reddit. Go on somewhere. So some of the reasons why that exterior surface looks less perfect is because they didn't do the last step, which would be to polish it. Polishing. Right? Yeah. So that's just how do you make the stone vase?

The last step would be, let's polish it. smooth. I want to see a write-up somewhere, like find on Google or on Reddit or on Twitter, somebody who did like an unbiased, basically analysis of the video and compare it to like some of the things that Ben, the vases that Ben talks about. I know David Miano has a large, a long video that critiques the stone vases. No, but he's, he's, no, he's biased. We got to find, we got to find somebody. Who's not biased? Come on. We got to find somebody. The world, everybody is biased. We got to find somebody who doesn't have a YouTube channel that's dedicated to one side. Like you have people like, like Ben who makes the stuff that shows the evidence for and you have people like David who everything on their YouTube channel is based on deep-punking. And you're going to have to do it if you claim you're not biased. Right. No, I don't know if you are not biased though. I think I'm biased.

I think I have not seen any evidence and you're not convincing me that this stuff was done by hand. So second critique. I have three critiques. And the last one is the most important, by the way. Second critique. Okay. Whenever I've seen one of these videos and I'm not going to lie, I've not seen all their

videos, I'm not ready to make my video on this. Right. Okay, so this is my impression. I could be wrong, but I've seen a few videos. I've seen a few critique videos. I've seen some sort of sample of both sides, let's say. And I am not an Egyptologist, so I don't have a horse in that race, let's say.

But I am a scholar, and I think that in general my colleagues are more correct than not. So that is my bias, let's say. Every time I've seen measurements on a stone vase, there are always different measurements from vase to vase.

Sometimes it's the angle of the lip. Sometimes it's the circumference. Sometimes it's this. Sometimes it's that. Yes. I've also never seen two stone vases that are exactly the same. Again, yeah, and let me say, even when he brought in all his vases, he made it very clear that not all of them were perfect. A lot of them are very imperfect.

And so to me, that's what I would call a red flag, where if you have something where you're trying to argue that this is machine made, and maybe, look, machines usually make the same thing, over and over again. That's what factories do, for example, right? They make the exact, you have a blueprint, you have a design, and you make it there. And what you don't have

is because you make your blueprint perfect, you don't have other imperfections in there. Everything is perfect when you make it with a machine. And so when you can look at the handles being wonky, that doesn't make sense to me if it's machine made. Maybe the handles didn't matter. Well, but why

would they just, if they're making everything perfect, why would you not make the handles perfect? That's a good question. I mean, I just don't get that. Right. And at the same time, why would you have some dimensions perfect in one vase, but in a different phase it's different dimensions that are perfect? But why were these things so perfect, so precise? But I'm saying they're not, is what I'm trying to explain. A lot of them are.

No, they're not. They're not all perfect in the same way. If they're all perfect, they'd be perfect in the same way. This thing is per- there are, they don't all look the same, right? There's different ones that are different shapes, different sizes. But the ones which a vast majority of them are perfect, the ones that are perfect are perfectly symmetrical from side to side going from the top to the bottom. I don't know. I've seen videos where they don't even talk about the symmetry and they talked about the... This guy brought in the scans. Mad Bell brought in the scans. Yeah, I've not seen them all now. Let's get to the server. So wait, wait, wait, hold on. Why is it that these are apparently

from earlier than the ones that are older and imperfect and look like they were, they're in the the museums in Egypt and they came from later, it looks like they came in and they made them out of softer stones. I think that's just the bias of our own part. I think this is something, for some reason, a lot of people that think archaeologists are wrong, claim that older stuff is more perfect than later stuff, and that's just not true.

I mean, it's just not. This idea, I don't know why it pervades in public culture, that that's the case. Like they talk about, for example, the Great Pyramid being better than later pyramids. And it's like, but wait a second, And we also have pyramids that are earlier than the great pyramid that show the progression up there, right? Or one of my examples that I like to give.

A good example is Graham Hancock sometimes talks about Quebec-Lepepe. Where you have the ceremonial core with the stone circles with the megalithic stones and the beautiful sculpture. And then you have outside of it, you have less perfect stuff, right? These houses on my last video on my YouTube. It will be second to last when you see this is about Gobeckley-Tepe with the director of excavations. and we talk about what those less perfect structures are, let's say, less perfect. And what that is, is think about it like this, Danny. You ever been to Washington, D.C.?

Yeah. Is the White House really impressive? Sure. Is the Capitol building really impressive? Yeah. Yeah. How about just the houses? That big statue of Lincoln.

How about just the houses in downtown? Are they as impressive as the White House in the Capitol building? No. Okay. And yet they're built more recently. Is our technology now worse than the technology of the people that built the 19th century White House? The function's different, yeah. Yeah, it's meant to be presented as phenomenal.

And so that's what the issue is at Quebec-Tepa. You have the ceremonial core where people are going for their ceremonies. They're politicking. They're doing religious stuff. They're doing whatever. And then you have the houses where people are living. And guess what? The houses are shittier than the fucking ceremonial core.

Right. Right. That's just function. Sure. It's what you're doing. And so that's oftentimes a lot of these kind of things. The Egyptian tombs changed in style as time went on. because of grave robbers, because of the amount of wealth that the state had,

it doesn't mean they have less technology. It means that they're doing something different, right? And so they're still doing some things that are extremely perfect when they try to make them extremely perfect. But now stone vases, everybody wants to stone vases, so they figure out how to mass produce it. You have the same thing with Athenium painted pottery. You have the Athenian painted pottery.

It starts off in this kind of geometric, you know, it's more simple, more crude, let's say, style. Right? And then they develop black figure at the archaic period. It's called 6th century BC. And that looks pretty good. It's getting better. Then they develop what's called red figure. And the way they do that is so tough.

Right. So you think about it like this. You have orange clay and you paint on a glaze that's black and that's black figure, right? But if you want to do red figure, what you do is the red clay is still the vase color. And then the black is the glaze you paint around it. So you're painting the outline of the characters. And then what that lets you do is the character now, you can put on little details with a very thin paintbrush

of little black things that show what they're holding or whatever, right? And so it looks beautiful. This is the height of Athenian vase painting is that red figure. And then guess what happens? Then they realize, oh shit, we can make pots using a mold really quickly and mass produce them so that everybody gets pots really fast. And then it doesn't look as good. Right.

And it's like, dude, it's not that they got less technology. it's that they started doing mass production. And we see this all the time. You look at stuff made 100 years ago by hand, and it's durable. And it lasts. I have my cast iron frying pan that's been in my family for 150 years or something like that, right? It is the best frying pan you could imagine. Perfectly non-stick.

It's durable. You go buy some frying pan in the supermarket. It lasts you like two years with a stupid Teflon non-stick shit. But it's cheap and it's fast and it's simple to make. And so, you know, you have to, recognize that the way people produce stuff changes over time for different reasons. Right? Sometimes they're just interested in mass producing schlock. And that's what we see in America around us too, right? So we live in that kind of world where sometimes it looks like things are

not as perfect as they used to be. You know, they're not as glorious and grand and monumental. And then we say, hey, America is not like it used to be. Other things are better today, though. Right? You know, the quality of certain things is much better. I would really like to hear, which I don't know why I haven't done it yet, but I would love to hear a mainstream academic Egyptologist explain exactly how these were made because I haven't...

Yeah, I don't study these. I know some people that do it. I'm trying to get in touch with some people that do it even more so. Because look, my YouTube channel is all about actually talking to the actual expert who does this stuff. Right.

So, you know, that's why I have on the director at Gobeckle-Tepe. That's why I had on the director of excavations at Gunung, Padong. That's why, you know, this is who I go to because I know them all. I've been in the field for 30 years. I've worked on the, I don't know, a few dozen different projects. I am active on social media. So, you know, like I know most of the people around the world that do archaeology. So when I look at an archaeological question, I recognize, hey, I can kind of answer this,

but I'm not the expert. And so that's who I always try to talk to. And, uh, okay, well, isn't can't we say isn't it fair to say that in academia there's something to be said to where don't question the narrative if you want to climb the ladder and have a career in this stuff like not at all go back to Amman Hillman okay

when he went to do his when he went to submit his dissertation to get his PhD the head of the department of the classics department there said you have to remove any references to recreational drugs in antiquity by the Romans and he said why he said because they wouldn't have done such a thing

So he went out and he, at the time, he took it out so he could get his Ph.D. Now I'm sure he regrets doing that, but he did get his Ph.D. So there is pressure. So you can say, it's true, that there is pressure in academia to follow the narrative and go with the consensus. That is not pressure? No, I would argue that it depends on a case-by-case basis. The same year that Amin-Hilman, or a year after Amin-Hilman submitted his Ph.D., what was it, 2002, 2003.

I looked it up because you asked me to address the mom and Hill and stuff. I looked it up. I think it was like 2002, 2002, 2003. In 2003,

I was finishing my undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, right? We're talking bastion of academic archaeology. The Penn Museum has been excavating around the world

for hundreds of years, right? And it's Ivy League school, that kind of thing. You know, you're talking literally one of the epicenters in the world

of academic archaeology. Right. And me at the time, I'm like a dude who gets stoned. Right? So I'm like, you know what? I didn't even know I really wanted to be an archaeologist at that point. Even though my dad was one, I really didn't want to be one for a while because I was like, I don't want to just following my dad's footsteps, right? In the end, I realized, look, I actually loved this stuff. So I went to it. So I said, all right, what am I going to write my undergrad honors thesis on, right?

To graduate with honors? Because I was a good student despite being a stoner. And so, and I also smoked pot because I have a chronic disease and it helps with it. And I smoked a lot of pot. And so I asked my advisor And I said, head of the department at the time, I said, look, what should I write my honors thesis on it? Do you have any suggestions? He's like, you're about to go on a dig in Ukraine. Why don't you ask them if they have any projects? So I get in touch with them and they just ghost me.

But because of the rules, I had to do an honors thesis if I wanted to graduate honors and I had to decide in my junior year before my senior year started so I can get going. And he's like, just pick anything you like. And I think it over and then I go in there and I'm like sweating bullets. I'm like, can I do something on drugs in the ancient world? That would be really cool. And he's like, yeah, man, go for it. Go talk to Peter Struck.

He studies like ancient religion and different stuff like that. Go talk to him. He might have some ideas. And so I talked to Peter and he's just like, dude, that sounds like an interesting idea. People don't look at this. And so you should come and take my classes next year. Let's think about how you could study drugs in the context of ancient religion. Right?

Because that's what he focuses on. So the next term, he teaches a course on ancient Greek magic, or ancient magic in general, Greco-Roman, Babylonian, et cetera. And I'm sitting there and we read the Greek magical papyri. And I'm just reading through that. I'm still trying to get my specific thesis topic. At the same time, you know, this is 2003, so we don't have the same kind of library resources we have today. So I'm going and Googling around drugs in the ancient world and I'm getting old issues of High Times Magazine where they're like, this is the argument in there is like the Romans used hemp fiber. for their ropes, so therefore

they're getting stoned all the time. And me being, I hope, a smart stoner, I'm thinking to myself, that's not the best argument. Like, hemp rope is useful. You know, hemp fiber we know today is very useful. It's a very strong fiber to make, you know, textiles out of. So, but that doesn't mean

they're getting high off the stuff. It means they're making, you know, rope. And so I wanted real evidence that's direct that tells me they are using drugs 100%. Right? So as I'm taking this course, I'm reading the Greek magical papyri, which are a series of about a hundred different papyri. Yeah, that are, they're all found in Egypt, and they date from something like,

I think the earliest are from like the second or third century BC, so when Egypt is ruled by the Greeks, and the latest are something like the 6th century AD, so like, you know, sort of early medieval period, right? But most of them are from like the third century AD, the height of the Roman Empire type period, right? And what's really cool is even though you can only find papyri in Egypt because it's so dry, they preserve. We do have some papyri elsewhere like Herculaneum, the lava flow from Vesuvius preserve this ancient library there. It's a philosophical library. And AI just helped unpeel it and translate it, the big news like six months ago. So we do have some from elsewhere. But we get most of our papyri from Egypt. That's where we get fragments of like Homer that dates, you know,

from the oldest fragments of Plato and Homer and whatnot, usually come from papyri, right, in Egypt. So we have all these papyri. Some of them are used as mummy cartonage. They're recycled on these mummies. And when they take apart the mummies in the 19th century, they see there's writing on it. And they're like, and then they read it.

And at the time, in the 19th century, this stuff was like satanic, right? Because it's like the mishmash of polytheism. It's the stuff that ends up becoming, you know, the witch trials and stuff like that. Right. Yeah. And so scholars did.

didn't want to touch it with like a 10-foot pole back in the 19th, early 20th century. The first class ever taught on... Did something just happen? Yeah, I saw the light change. A light just went out or something. That was weird. It did change. I'm with you.

But, okay, so the very first class, early 20th century on this stuff, they couldn't even call it ancient magic because they were worried about the reaction. So they called it selected papyri. And that was it. And then, of course, it's a class... They were worried about the reaction from who? I don't know, fellow scholars or the church or something like that because everybody's very conservative.

and then over time especially in the last 30 years 40 years the first translation the major translation of them by what, Betts and Scarborough was the guy who did all the plants in them and stuff like that. That came out in the 90s and since then it's been exploding

the field of ancient magic is huge because it actually changes how we understand ancient religion and so what's really cool is we have throughout the Mediterranean world and even as far north as Bath England for example there's You know, we have these lead curse tablets, right?

And these are, you know, this is when you do magic. You basically inscribe a lead curse tablet. You roll it up because it's paper thin. And then you put it in a grave or you put it in a well or you put it underground. You bury it. If you're trying to curse your neighbor's business because they're your competitor and you don't like them, you bury it under the doorstep. If you want to curse that chariot driver because you root for the other team,

you bury it on the racetrack. And we still have examples of this today. when they were doing Yankee Stadium, one of the construction workers was a Red Sox fan, or maybe it's vice versa, it's in the news. One of the construction workers was either a Yankees or Red Sox fan, the opposing team, and they actually put in the whole jersey of the opposite team

as a curse in a sense, right? Because this stuff pervades, right? And so what's really cool is we have some of these lead texts that are word for word, the exact same spell on these papy in Egypt. So we know this culture of magic and what's going on is very widespread. read. We don't know whether the Egyptian sources are a little biased. They have a lot of kind of

Egyptian religion in them, like a larger amount than one would expect. But the whole culture of magic, it mishmashes different religions. It has kind of a little bit of Babylonian religion, a lot of Egyptian religion, Greek religion, Roman religion, Phoenician religion, different kinds of sources, Jewish religion, Christian religion, all in there, all within the same spell, because it's what's called synchartism. It's paganism. It's just a mish-mash stuff, right? They want to appease everybody they can to get the result they want, right?

So I'm reading these, and guess what? A lot of these have drugs in them. Very clear drugs, things like opium, right? That is very clearly described. You burn opium incense. That then is supposed to summon a lover. And they even, I like this one. This is my favorite, actually.

So it tells you how it works, right? because it's this spell to get a lover. You're in love with somebody. You want to get them. So what you do, let me find it. Sorry, I'd like to read it on air because it's frigging cool. Apparently, Gailen wrote about Marcus Aurelius's physician

wrote about how much opium Marcus Aurelius was taking. He kept having to up his dose. And he said he was getting so annoyed by it. He's like this fucking guy. He keeps having to get more and more opium for him. Okay, so here we go. the spell to sword of Dardanus, it immediately bends

and attracts the soul of whomever you wish. So you basically need to be a stalker to do this. Don't fucking do this. Just go like, buy whoever you love some roses or something. Do something good, okay? But what you do is you sort of inscribe some charms and stuff on these statues that you make. And then what you do is you

burn... Why is my computer stuck right now? And then you burn this offering to Eros, which includes four drams of opium, which is a lot of opium, right? we're talking like grams and grams of opium. And then you say this incantation.

I call upon you unmoved by prayer by your great name. Azarokhtar, Azalatai, al-a-a-a-a-a-a-law. You want to go next? Lathai, atalaf. I make my students do this. Yo, yo, yo, I, you are, I'm a rotagal.

You've practiced. I read this from my YouTube video on this. And I like I said, I make my students do it sometimes when I'm teaching ancient religion. First shining, night shining, night rejoicing, night engendering, witness, erikisthé, arachara, all right, whatever. You got to read all that stuff, and you've got to get it perfect. And you're supposed to say it, I forget how many times, but you're supposed to say it several times.

And so it's really cool because the spell actually says it has an excuse if it doesn't work. So you make the burnt offering and you continuously say the spell of invocation and send him, the daimunun that you summon. And he will act without fail. And whenever you bend her to your will with the stone, on that night it sends dreams. For on a different night, it is busy with different matters. Now, think about it. You're doing this spell. You're obsessed with somebody.

You're going, ah, that's, fuff, fuff, you're inhaling all this opium. You go to bed. You have a bunch of dreams. Right? Because that's what's going to happen, right? Right. And, whoa, that spell worked. The diamond was summoned.

I had all these dreams. It didn't quite work right. I need to say Azarathvah instead of Azaraka. You know, that kind of thing. And so it's an explanation kind of for how it can work. And so I started reading these and I found dozens of spells that involved ingredients that would, in our mind, alter your mind state. Right?

They'd get you high, let's say, right? Something like that. And so I realized actually in these texts, there's a whole bunch of evidence for actual ancient drug use that isn't hemp fibers on rope. It isn't saying, well, this is a code word that might mean drugs. This is saying, these are the drugs. This is warmwood. This is opium.

This is nightshade. This is henbane. This is what they're using. And they're using it oftentimes ingesting it in some way or another. Not always, but sometimes. And so, like, the nightshade ones are great. They have these ones that nightshade. Some of them involve warmwood as well,

where they actually rub, night shade on their body. There's one where they draw the diamond, they paint it on with this ink that's infused with the juice of warm wood, and then they put some night shade in their ear, and then they have this the description is amazing. They have this vivid, vivid vision

of this dimoon that comes to them and talks to them and answers any question they want to have answered about the past, present, and future. And it's like super described, there's some there, it's like everything becomes light. You know, anybody who's elucinated will know that this kind of stuff sounds like

what you experience, right? Light gets changed and things become trippy and stuff like that. And so you have these texts where they're describing it to you directly. We are taking a substance that alters the mind. We are having visions. And so I did a statistical analysis of it. Every single one, I mean, there's like a couple exceptions, but there's like several dozen examples of spells that involve clear mind-altering substances. And 90% of them involve some sort of altered state of mind that's very clearly altered state of mind, usually a vision. and so it's like this is evidence of ancient drug use and I wrote my honors thesis

my committee fucking loved it they were like this and so I guess my point is it's not a thing as a field sometimes it's just individuals that are assholes and I was scared of this I was like I now applied in grad school a different group of people and I'm like fuck what are they going to think of this

but this is my writing sample I have to use something for a writing sample it's going to come from what I know best that I'm at that point that was my expertise And so I'm like, man, everybody's going to reject me. I didn't. I got into grad school. And, you know, my very first conference paper was about this. And everybody in the audience loved it.

They were like, that's really interesting. And so, I mean, there are some people that were probably like, nah, fuck this. And I talk about this even on my YouTube video and in my conference paper how especially early scholars, up until the late 20th century, maybe middle 20th century with the hippie movement coming in, they really did sneer at this stuff. And you could see it in their text. I criticized this guy, E.R. Dodds, who is one of the preeminent scholars of ancient Greek religion. And he has this, he describes this vision that this guy, alias Aristides, saw, where he sees the God coming to him and he describes how the emotions he feels. He's full of joy.

It describes exactly what you think of somebody who's high, right? They're seeing stuff. Their state of mind has changed. And then he's like, I loved it so much. that the next day I drank even more and I saw God again. And then I, you know, and so it's like, bam. And then ER Dodds, in his book, he cuts out the segment of that, of that passage from Alias Aristides, The Sacred Tales, that says that what he's drinking is warmwood, a warmwood

concoction. The same thing in absinth. And then he's like, no, drugs couldn't have been the result. And so, like, don't get me wrong. There are biases. But to think it's everybody, my experience is not that. My experience is that there are plenty of people who are open-minded about this. And I think especially in the last 10, 15 years, the younger generation is now much more open-minded towards that kind of thing.

It's like nobody cares. Totally. I think it's responsible for the foundation of religion and the idea like of these pagan religions and dying and rising gods and experiencing these states of mind that is like tearing open the fabric of the universe. I mean, it is like the closest you can get to God to the universe to like it's something. I think it's one tool. So if you're, Elias Aristides is a great example. So this dude, he's like a really wealthy Greek guy from what we would call modern day Turkey, super wealthy. But he's always sick.

He's just a sickly dude, right? He has chronic illnesses like you could not imagine. But he's also very famous because he is one of the best public speakers in the Roman Empire. So he travels around the Roman Empire giving speeches. You know, like he knows the top people, like the imperial. family and different senators and everything, right? He is super wealthy, super popular. He is love for giving speeches and he's also a priest to Asclepius, the god of healing and stuff like that. And I think he's been initiated into different sort of religions as well. So he's the upper crust.

And he left for us his autobiography. This is Euphoria Calvin Klein, the new Elixir Collection featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord paired with vanilla, each with a its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe. Bold elixir. Sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic, magnetic, like a lingering touch. Solar elixir, a radiant expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power. Find your euphoria. Discover the euphoria elixir collection by Calvin Klein. Right? It's called The Sacred Tales. There's some translations in English that you can find online. Maybe not online. You probably might just go to a library.

Suck it up. Go to a library, kids. If you want to read this stuff. So he left this autobiography and it's really cool. It's like, you know, on this day I saw God, on that day I saw God, on these days I did this and that. And he's so trippy that he doesn't even do things in chronological order. So parts of it he starts off with like later on in his life, then he goes back to early in his life and he just jumps around. It's really kind of fascinating and it gets you kind of out of your mind a little bit because you're like following it is tough. But the thing is, is if you want to look at it from say a modern perspective, how is he altering his mind to see God?

And he sees God a lot. And this is one of the big questions. How do people actually see God, right? How do you get to that kind of state where you believe that you have an encounter with God? And how would a scientist approach that, right? And so one explanation is certainly drugs. Yes.

He used drugs. He especially warm wood. He also drank a lot. He also did use this Egyptian incense type thing, which we don't have any recipes. It's called Kufi. We don't have any recipes from his period, but later periods, like a few hundred years later, we have the recipe for Kofi and different ones. So it's not always made the same way.

But oftentimes, narcotics. Also, like, near-death experiences. Often in modern times, they explain that to be very similar to, like, DMT trips. Exactly. And that's what I was going to say. He doesn't just do drugs. He does a lot of different things that alter his mind. He won't eat for, like, a week and a half.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. The next thing he does is he eats a whole chicken. And it's like, dude, that's going to make you high. He's like, I'm sorry. You don't eat for a week and then you devour a whole chicken. That's going to give you some feels, right? Or when there's a blizzard outside, he goes swimming naked in the river.

That's going to do something to you. One of my favorite stories. There's specific types of meditation and breathwork and yoga you can do to achieve these states, all kinds of things you can do. All these kind of things. And, you know, the asclepiest cold is all about incubation. And this is also key. You know, scholars oftentimes call it culture patterning. So when you expect to have a certain kind of experience,

because everything around you is just right, right? It's set up with the images of different deities and you have the chanting around you and it's a dark space. And you've heard before you came in that this is what happened with people and you have inscribed on the walls around you the experiences of previous people.

And you believe when you're surrounded by these people and you have the symbolism and you believe you're channeling something it makes it more real. Exactly. And so, you know, and we have this and especially these Slepius temples, the people, the priests that worked there, they knew how to initiate visions.

You know, they had it down to a science in a sense. And it's clear because, you know, Aristides is our best example of what they did. Unfortunately, he's one of the only ones. So we can't tell if maybe in different periods they did different stuff. If different temples did different stuff, did different stuff.

Who knows, but what he's doing is a little grab bag of everything. Right? My favorite story is he always has an entourage around him, right? Because he's just rich, right? And he has his entourage and he goes around and he travels all the time.

And he always has his entourage do like fucked up crazy shit, right? And so like one day he's taking this plant called Hellebor, which don't take it. It's poisonous. And, you know, and that's one of the problems is a lot of the things. Like today, we really mostly,

mostly. Don't take drugs that can possibly kill you. You know, like obviously drugs can kill you. So like don't overdose on shit, guys. Like it's stupid. Take something like pot where you're not going to die, right? Or mushrooms or something like that where we know you're not going to kill yourself.

Don't go take Hellebore because you take too much of it. You die. So he's taking this Hellebork. Where does Hellebork come from? It's in the Mediterranean. It's a type of plant. I think it's type of root. Yeah. And what is the effect that you get?

I have no idea. Is it a upper downer? It's a toxic substance. So it's like taking a small dose of poison. Okay. Yeah. And so he's, and the Hellebore is also throughout the Greek magical papyria. It's one of the more common toxic substances that's used.

It's like nightshade. Nightshade is used by witches even in the 17th century. Right. There's this guy, Johann Weir, who describes seeing, yeah, it's a flower. Who describes, I got that wrong, I said it was a root. Johann Wire in the 17th century he describes seeing witches and what they do is they rub their bodies full in nightshade

and then they claim that they're flying you know but don't do that because you can fucking die like I mean that you can fucking die and so I want to be sure to say that when I have an audience like here according to Carl Ruck about it when he wrote his book Road to Illusus he was saying that a lot of people died

during those during the Ellicinian Mysteries that happened every year example, maybe. Because they didn't have the dose right. A lot of people would drink too much and they would die. I need to reread Roteauulus. I don't remember anyone dying, but maybe.

I need to reread it. Yeah, so it was Carl Ruck, and it was Strassman and Hoffman. Watson. Gordon Wosson and Albert Hoffman. Yeah, Albert Hoffman was the inventor of LSD. Yes, exactly. And Gordon Waston was an ethnographer who studied Siberian shamanism and mushrooms. And we can get in that to a second.

Let me just finish the story about Hellebor. Yes. Because Elyos Areserastides, he takes his entourage, he does Hellebore and he says, let's go sailing. They go sailing. Then he sees God and God tells him to crash the boat. So he crashes the boat and then they have to swim to shore. Right, right, right, right. That's the kind of shit that happens when you take hellibor.

Don't do that. But, yeah, so, all right, I got some problems with that road to elusis. It's been a while since I read it, but I'm going to tell you what my issue is with it. So as far as I remember, and I was reading it when I was doing it, doing my undergrad thesis, the same thesis where I did this stuff. And I was trying to figure out what am I going to write on? I read the book and I left my reading

dissatisfied. And this is also something that I really want to do a YouTube video on, especially because I didn't realize that it's still really popular in pop culture. So I'm going to do a YouTube video on this in the nearest future in the next, let's say, a few months. Especially since I mentioned it here. I got to fucking do it now. But

so when reading the book, I remember being very dissatisfied because what they claim So let's think about what the mysteries of a lusus are. Okay. First of all, just get out the idea of mystery as we think of mystery. It's this very flashy word and stuff like that. It had what it meant was unlike most religions that are open to all, this was only the only people that could know the details of it were those who chose to go and become initiated.

And you had to pay a lot. It was expensive, right? No, actually enslaved people did it as well. Yeah, it was available to all. I thought the way he described it in the book was that you had to pay a lot of money. money to go do that. If you want, you had to be able to buy a little pig.

Okay. And it's not a long trip. It's a day's hike. It's just, it's only a few hours. People came from all over. Later on, in the Roman period,

yes. In the Roman period, people came from all over and it became an extremely popular cult that sort of got exported from Athens elsewhere. Palsanius talks about it to Palestinians.

He's the, Palestinians is this Greek dude who did these trips around the Roman Greece. And he described it all for us. He's actually like one of the best sources for archaeologists. He like describes stuff that's no longer there. And he does it and we've tested him.

We've ground truthed him, just like with Plato. I was talking about ground truth in a text. With Palsanius, his description of the Athenian Agarrah matches exactly what we find. Right? This is there. That's there. That's there. Boom.

We know he's telling the truth. If you see what I mean. It's just right there. And so he loves the Olympics. He's like the Olympic Games are the badass thing. The rights in honor of the Zeus, Olympian Zeus. That's the greatest thing. And the other greatest thing is the mysteries of Elusis.

And so he tells us a little bit about it, but he's also like, I can't tell you too much because that part's hidden. That's only if you're initiated. It was very secret, right? Well, only if you're initiated. Yes. But anyone could be initiated, but only the initiates can know what's up with it. So you have to choose to do that. And in many ways, these mystery cults, a lot of scholars think they are the early versions that Christianity ended up developing out of.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. that talk about saving your soul. And Christianity denies that vehemently, right? I don't think so. I think they say that none of it. They said Christianity was in its own bubble and not, they didn't take anything from the pagan cults. They didn't take anything from,

but there's clearly lots of evidence of. I don't think scholarly Christians say that. Most, most, most. Yeah, I had a, I had a Bible scholar in here a couple months ago and he said absolutely not. He goes, none of it came from any of the pagan stuff. I mean, I've talked to the Bible scholars who teach what I'm teaching. So there again,

I mean, there's evidence of like, like Persephone and, like, the dying and rising gods. And there's, what was the, there was the, what was the thing that was, came, the Easter came from.

There was a festival. Hararia, what was it? Hararia festival or something like that. That was like very similar to Easter. There's all these crazy parallels to some of these ancient mystery cults and what you find in modern Christianity and in the Bible.

Okay. Yeah, no, I agree with you there. There are a lot of parallels. And Christianity did not develop in a vacuum. It developed within, you know, the Roman world. Right.

Where there's a whole bunch of cults that are becoming very popular. There's a huge amount of Bible scholars that completely disagree with that. But I mean, you can see this in their iconography. It matches. There's a lot of comparisons between Christian iconography and Dionysic iconography. Because one of the big competitors to Christianity at the same time. So in the Roman Empire at around that time, mystery cults are becoming big. So, you know, before that, mystery cults were kind of a side show.

If you see what I mean, some people did it. A lot of people didn't. Right. But in this sort of early Roman imperial period, in middle Roman imperial period, the people were really interested in mystery cults. And so the Dionysus mystery cult was big. The one to Mithras was another one.

Yes, yes, yes. The one to ISIS, the Egyptian goddess was another big one. And we have all sorts of texts and iconography for all of these cults. Yeah, you talked about this a lot. You talked with my friend Neil on his channel, Nosti conformant. Yeah, yeah, he was here before, yeah. That was a fascinating discussion you guys had. Yeah, I really liked it too.

He was a good guy. Check out Nostak informant. Yeah, check out Nostak informant. So, yeah, so it's not developing in a vacuum. I mean, look, dude, Christianity today, as it is, is part of our culture in today's world. It's not the same thing as 2,000 years ago. And so, you know, everything we do is part of the culture we're in. It just is what it is.

And anybody that denies Christianity was related in part of a conversation that was going on 2,000 years ago is not looking at the historical sources in an honest way. And that's an interesting thing to me too about Bible scholars and people who go and get a degree in the Bible is that the vast majority of them subscribe to the very religion that they're dedicating their studies to. So they're doing a scientific endeavor that is directly aligned with their spiritual beliefs. I know. I share an office with a guy who studies biblical law and stuff like that. And he's not religious? I don't think so. Yeah, I mean, a lot of, I mean, if you're at a Christian university maybe, but, and I've met, you know, religious scholars who are religious, too. I've just meant that there's both out there.

There's plenty of people who are interested in this just as a phenomenon to study historically. Right. From a more dispassionate point of view. Right. Like I said, everybody has biases. That's just fucking life. Right. Not going to say that from an unbiased point of view, because screw that.

But from a more dispassionate point of view, they're not there to prove Christianity right or wrong. That's not the emphasis of their study. The emphasis of their study is to understand how Christianity developed and changed over time with the cultures that it existed in, the practice of Christianity, if you see what I mean. Right. And so, you know, that is, yeah, there's lots of people that study it that way. Lots of them. In fact, I've taken classes from them and stuff, yeah. But where were you?

Alusis. Yes, Alusus. Okay, so let's bring us back to Alusus for a second. And are you familiar with Brian Mara Rescu and his work? No, this is why I need to read that before I actually do this video. I know the road to Alucis, and I've read it, and I had notes on it from the time that I've read before coming here so I could talk to you. But I also did have not read it for a while. So I'm going to admit that, whatever, take what I say with a grain of salt.

I'm giving my own opinion that I have had for 20 years. Okay. So our sources for the mysteries of Alusis, are difficult. Yes. Because nobody's allowed to write certain details, if you see what I mean. And because certain details are allowed to be public information, other details are not allowed to be public information.

And so what that means is we don't have the full picture of what's going on with these mysteries of elusis. There's an incomplete picture of what our sources are. And that, to me, is one red flag. If our picture of what's going on is incomplete and they're only allowed to present one side of the story in these written sources, the initiates, because that's what they're allowed to talk about but they can't talk about other things. That's a very biased picture we're getting, right?

Then the other bits we have, so we have people like Pausanias, who was an initiate, who talks about it, but he holds back because he can't reveal everything. And he loves it, right? He's all into it. Then we have this trial that happened at the end of the 5th century, where so what happened is the Peloponnesian wars are going on, and this group of young wealthy people who, one of them Alcibiades, he's the one that convinced Athens to go fight the Sicilians,

but then he didn't hand it up not leading that failed expedition because of what's happened. He got drunk with a bunch of people. He's also in the symposium. He gets drunk with Socrates and stuff like that. He gets drunk with a bunch of people and a bunch of these rich young men get very, very drunk and they

go out and they vandalize stuff like sometimes young men do when they're really drunk. It happens today. And what they vandalize is you know, have you ever seen Greek statues and how they have wangs on them, right? So there's these statues of Hermes, which are like a bust and then they have a phallus sticking out. And they knocked off the dicks. They were erect weaners, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, dude, like, I could see drunk young people doing that today. Right? Like, this is, a lot of times you look at the past and things are different from what we imagine today.

Sometimes you can say, actually, that makes a lot of fucking sense, right? That shit happens today. I don't know if I think drunk young dudes should do that, but we know that happens. So this is sacrilegious, of course. These are statues of a deity. So there's a big trial. And in this trial, a lot of these people are initiates of Volus. And so it becomes this big scandal. And we have these texts of legal. You know, at the time, some of these speeches in law courts are recorded by people like Ande Dekides.

I'm blanking right now, but whatever. The main ones are from Andokides. And he has this speech on the mysteries and stuff like that. But again, this is going to have a lot of biases involved in what it's describing because it's in a very legal context. And he's still not allowed to say everything because they can't talk about what they're talking about. But here it's used as a defense and prosecution and shit like that. And that's, of course, biasing what you get. And then the third source we have, that's a sort of type of source we have, that's a lot later, is Christian sources.

Where they talk about this, like Christian bishops describe this kind of stuff. And that, of course, is going to have its own set of biases. these people were never actually initiated into it, and they're describing it as like this pagan type thing that is evil and da-da-da-da-da, right? And so all this stuff gives us this really tricky picture of what goes on in the mysteries to elusus. So now, think about how are possibly the ingestion of drugs happening in these mysteries? So there's all sorts of cool things that happen for these mysteries, for example. If you're going to be initiated, you've got to walk from Athens to Ellusis, which is a doable walk.

It's just a few miles, you know. And you have to do this, you have to lead a little piggy. So you have the little pig that you're leading along. And then at one point you go by this bridge. And the bridge, on the bridge is all the former initiates. And what they do is they insult you from above. So you sort of have to break you down, right? They're shouting insults like, hey, you're ugly, you know, like that kind of shit.

And then you get through that. And then you get to a lusus. And one of the things you do is your sacrifice your pig. so that's a big thing and there's been some scholars this is again something you could debate this is something I'm really interested in this is I study animals and food and stuff like that

but you kill the pig and everybody dumps them in these pits called the Telestheria I think and we've actually excavated some of them at Illusus I've been to Illusus several times and I know somebody who studied some animal bones there in fact found some pig bones and stuff like that and you throw them in these pits

and then later on the women when they do the lesser mysteries, it's for the, what is it for the Thesmaphorea, I think it is, they then take the soil and scatter it in the fields, because it's all in honor, it's a meter, the goddess of agriculture. Right. And so one of the modern interpretations, which might be right, might be wrong, is that's a form of fertilizer. You have these dead decomposing pigs, they decompose for six months, and then you take them and you scatter them in the fields, and even though they don't know why, it actually improves the crops, right? So I think Kevin Clinton, Dr. Kevin Clinton, who's

one of the main scholars on the mysteries of Elusis has published on that idea. So you do that. And then the main ritual, we don't have a lot of evidence for. One of the key things we do have evidence for, and this is where there might or might not be drugs, is they drink this drink called a kakeon. Kikion, yeah. Yeah. And this thing, it's actually a fairly common drink, right? It's used in other contexts as well.

It's basically like milk and grains. So like barley and stuff like that Which makes a lot of sense when you have Demeter Goddess of Agriculture, goddess of grains And stuff like that And in the hymda Demeter Which is a it's called a Homeric hymn These Homeric hymns

They probably weren't ever written down By the same people that recorded The Iliad and the Odyssey Whether there even is a Homer Fuck, that's a big question. It's called the Homeric question even And so, but these Homeric hymns They're probably written down

In the 6th century BC Which is about the time when we start seeing maybe the first bits of this Elusis cult. There was culted Elusis earlier, but it doesn't seem to be the same thing as what's going on later because religions change over time, right? The consensus of Elusis was going on for like 1,500 years, right? Well, so the Elysinian mysteries, as we know them,

probably a good start date could be that hymn to Demeter, late 6th century BC, and then they went on until kind of really the end of the Roman period. So over a thousand years, I guess a good thing would be about 1100 years, 1,200, where we have firm evidence of it being practiced. Okay. Right? There's a lot of questions about earlier.

I am very skeptical of sort of Bronze Age interpretations there. That's not what I see at all. My colleague, Deborah Rusil Kosmopoulos, who studied animal bones from Alusis, for example. What is the Bronze Age interpretation? What do you mean by that? Well, some people think that what you see at Alusis, even though that we don't have many buildings, even though we don't have that much evidence for cult in the same way, that the mystery started that early.

But we don't have any writing from that period, right? The only writing we have is in these palaces, and it's just, it's receipts. It's like, this much stuff comes into the palace, that much stuff goes out. Okay. Right? And we do know that there's evidence for a certain level of continuity of certain aspects of Greek cult between this prehistoric Bronze Age and classical Greece when we have all these texts that describe this stuff, because we have the same name as some of the gods.

we have animal sacrifice and that's where I'm very familiar because the idea that you slaughter an animal feast on much of its meat but then you burn some of the bones for the gods the burning of the bones of the gods is the physical evidence for this that's what I study right physical evidence

that certainly begins in the Bronze Age but it's not the same as what shows up in the classical period so you know if you read this guy Hesiod he was assuming it's one person he was around around the same time as Homer assuming that's a person. And these are all oral poetry. We can get into that later because that's really interesting. But if there is these figures that existed, they existed in like the eighth, maybe

seventh century BC. He wrote a series of books on Greek religion, theologna, which is how the world is formed and stuff like that. And then he has a book on agriculture, works and days, how to grow crops in the right way, right? And in these books, he described sacrificing animals. And he explains why the Greeks burn these bones. And the story is is that basically Prometheus, you know, the guy who stole fire, the guy who was chained up and his liver was eaten. One of the ways that he tricked Zeus

besides stealing fire and shit like that is he killed a couple cattle. He invited the gods and people to the feast. And what he did was he divided the portions up. And he got the bones and wrapped them in

fat and he got the meat and wrapped them in like the intestines. and the hides. Right, trying to trick Zeus. Yeah, and the story goes, as he sees his text in, I think it's the Theogony, he mentions this, and he talks about how Zeus knew what was up, but he chose the fat-wrapped bones anyway. And then it says, that's why we burn bones for the gods, right? That is the Theogany for sure.

That's why we burn bones for the gods. And look, dozens and dozens of sites, many I've studied, I've studied probably a dozen sites with these kind of burn bones for the gods, right? Hundreds of them. And I've studied them in the Bronze Age. I've studied them all the way through the Roman period. We're talking 1,500-plus years of activity of people burning bones at different sites in temple contexts, sometimes in household contexts, in different places, right?

Very clearly sacrificial ritual, because it isn't just random burning. So, you know, and that's the key here, right? It's not just random burning. He's not just random burning. Easea doesn't tell you which bones to burn. He just says we burn bones. Homer, though, in the Illyid and the Odyssey, dozens and dozens and dozens of times,

he tells you exactly which bones are burned. You wrap the thigh bone in fat and burn that for the guts. And what we see, this is an article I'm actually working on right now, so if you're a scholar listening, you're getting a heads up on this. So what we actually see is in the Bronze Age, they're burning, they're selecting certain body parts to burn, but it's sort of different in different places. So at the palace of Nestor and Pilos,

we have this great archive room, which is where when the palace burned down, so those clay tablets that we have with writing on them, they're just receipts that are like, this stuff comes in and out of the palace. It's like two oxen go there to plow fields, then they go there to plow fields. We collected this much wool.

Now we gave it to these people to spin it into garments, right? That's what it is. Or we have a feast in honor of Zeus and we sacrifice this many animals, right? That's what these tablets are. And they're temporary, accounts. So they're made on clay, they're inscribed with their linear B text is what it's called.

Then they're stored for a little bit. And then they're actually, Tom Palima has a great article on this with the spatial aspect of this room. And you can see where different tablets are and how they're stored and stuff like that. But then they get melted back down into raw clay and then reformed into new tablets when that receipt is no longer needed. Right? But what happened is the palace burned down so it baked the clay. So we have tablets that date right to the end of the palace's life. as a palace, as a function as a palace.

Right, right. And so that's what we have. But right in that room, and one of the, my, actually was my supervisor that studied this,

Paul Halstead and Valci, Izekiel, they studied the animal bones there. One of the interesting ideas is that maybe these are, are a receipt as well of a feast, because what they have is they have the burned jaw bones, upper forelims,

and thigh bones of cattle and red deer. And red deer, by the way, at that time, were as large, if not larger than cattle. So they're big, deer, right? They don't exist in Greece today of that size because they've been pushed out due to

deforestation and shit like that. And the few that exist are in Scotland and they're tiny. But they're not extinct, but they're just, yeah. Yeah, those guys. I have found some giant red deer bones that are bigger than cattle bones. They're like, an elk. They're like the elk of Europe is the right way to think about them even. Wow. They're really impressive and really cool. And so in this room, they have a series of deposits of these specific burn bones and that's why we can tell it's ritual because it's the same bone burned over and over again. The jaw bone

the upper forelim or the upper hind limb the thigh bone, right? But elsewhere in the Ranjia, at a lusus it's something else. We have the burned lower legs of pigs. At this other sanctuary at Ios Constantinos on the little peninsula of metana

studied by Eleni Konsolaki and Janis Hamilakis they also have the lower legs of pigs. at a site that I studied on Crete, Halas Menos, it's the lower legs of sheep and cattle. And then what happens is so you have all this different stuff. You have thigh bones and jaw bones here.

You have lower legs there of one species, but over there you have lower legs. So it's like a mishmash of different ways of burning bones for the gods, but it's not done all the same way, right? So time goes on, and over time it becomes much more orthodox. In temples, it ends up becoming. only thigh bones. So, you know, when you think of classical Greek temples, whether in Athens, I've studied some of this in Athens, I've seen some of it, though, it was published by David

Reese at Isthmia. People have published it at, I don't know, temples all over the Greek world, really. It's always the thigh bones, right? That's what you see. But in houses, sometimes still people burn different things. So at this site I work on in Crete, one of my big projects is this super cool site called Zoria. It's like a totally modern excavation where we've uncovered the entire city core and right when they they intentionally abandoned the site and burn it down when they leave. And we know this because there's no signs of violence

and they actually purposely dismantle the buildings. So like they take apart some of the interior walls to cause them to cause them to collapse in. So it's kind of like an abandonment ritual and they also do a sacrifice and when that sacrifices those burned lower legs if you see what I mean. But but right after that

that's like one of the last examples of that. After that anything that's at a temple is burn thigh bones. And I actually, my main argument is that this is because Homer, Homeric poetry, is becoming so popular, everybody sees that and they say, oh, we got to do it like that. You know, this is our religious text. This is why we're going to do this. So we're going to do it just like they do in Homer. Even though at the time of Homer, let's say, when those poems were really crystallizing into their more final version, they're doing things actually in a lot of

different ways, if you see what I mean. Right. And so at Alusus, if you see what I mean, at Alusus, you have the, let's go back there, we have these mysteries going on, and these mysteries, we know what they do with the pigs. Guess what? They don't burn them. They throw the pigs still alive into that pit, the Talisterion. They let it decompose. They don't even eat it. And then they take that soil and spread it in the fields later on during the Thesmiaphoria.

Right? And so that's different, though, from what was going on at Alusus, a thousand years earlier, which Deborah Cosmopoulos Rusillo is published and her husband Michael Cosmopoulos. And they have published that they're burning these bones. So stuff has changed in that intervening period. Whatever's going on is a different form. And they're doing it in like a household. It's not like a giant temple or anything in the Bronze Age. It's not the big sanctuary we think of.

So we want to always avoid thinking the same thing is always happening all the time in the same place, right? Right. And so when you look still, so okay, so now we have this mystery, we have the cult of Demeter, and they're drinking this cacao. That's going to be the best potential vector for consuming some sort of drugs. Maybe there's something else they're doing that we don't know about, but again, we just don't know then, right? So the argument that Carl Ruck and Albert Hoffman and Gordon Wasson make in Road to Illusis is that they think that the grain that's growing, I think it's barley, that's growing near elusis, is infested with ergot. Yes. Which is a type of fungus. Yep. And there's an alkaloid that comes out of the fungus. And there's, there's, ergot, especially at that time when they published it and in a few

decades afterwards, was really popular among scholars to explain weird things. So some people think that the witch trials were because of infested ergot, causing people to behave irrationally. Right. But in many of these cases... A lot of things apparently accidentally were infested with the ergot. Yeah, yeah. And so in many of these cases, the problem is we just don't know.

The ancient people, the people even, you know, a few hundred years ago, they didn't know what air got was in the same way we do. It's just some mold growing on stuff. There's a lot of different molds that can grow on stuff, right? Right. And so that's a possibility without a doubt. But the problem to me with their argument is the only evidence that it is Ergot is because the color purple is described as sacred at Elusis. And Ergot has a purplish color. And that was my big red flag.

Ergot does have a purplish color? Yeah, I think I've looked it up. We can look it up here, actually. I don't look at it up in a while. And look, and I want to clarify, again, I tried to look for the book before I came here. My library did not have it. I have to enter a library alone and it to find it to read it again. But I did write about it in my thesis, and so I went back and re-read this.

that and that's what this is coming from so i just want to be really clear about this this is my impression 20 fucking years ago but it's based on what i read and and it had good footnotes if you see what i mean yeah and so uh so my main issue with the hypothesis that ergot was at a lusus was the evidence of purple and it sounds intriguing as a possibility hey ergot is purplish color they describe purple as an important color at elusis so maybe that's where you're what that's referring to. The problem is, is that purple is like the most prestigious color in ancient Greece and Rome and the ancient Near East and everything like that. Purple is the color that was meaningful for religious purposes and political purposes

throughout the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age and even earlier down through the Roman Empire. And the reason why is because it's extremely expensive to make. It's the dye, the purple dye they used was worth more than its weight in gold by a lot. And so it dyed sort of fabric, this brilliant, bright color that everybody wanted, right? It was how you stood out, was with that purple. The problem is, is to get purple dye, you get them from this snail shell, this sea snail called Murex, right? And so you have to extract this gland from the sea snail that is the purple. And it's an extremely laborious process. Yeah, exactly. I have studied. I've studied hundreds if not thousands

of these kind of Murex shells and I've seen them on various sites and I have colleagues like Demetra Milana who studied a purple dye manufacturing workshop from Bronze Age Crete actually a little tiny island off the coast of creek called Creecy and so I've seen

Roman period purple dye manufacturing workshops there's this myth that goes around the Greeks actually this myth that it all comes from Phoenicia it's like it's Tyrion purple not true people have been making it in Greece and elsewhere where our Murak's comes about

but that's what it was associated with right it's kind of like how we call the Turkey Turkey we associated it with Turkey when it's actually not from Turkey right and so that's just life

and so they did don't get me wrong they did make these in Phoenicia I'm not trying to argue that and that's where probably much of the purple dye came from

but it wasn't only from Tyre and Phoenicia what do you think contributes to it seems like the classical period in Greece was just It's just known for this incredible explosion of intellect and philosophy that was happening then.

And then it seems to have died off. Oh, I wouldn't say it died off. Three to 400 AD. It seemed to die. Like after it just changed. It just changed. So, I mean, you know, again, I think that we have this perception of these ebbs and flows to history. And I think that that's not, I think that's more of a public perception than what we would say.

in academia. I think that like if things change is what happens and we still have people writing stuff down. So ancient Athens is a cool example, right? So why do we get this stuff from ancient Athens? And people have always started to look at it and say, is it democracy that led to this flourishing, right? It's one of the really common explanations. But, you know, I think that one of the most important explanations that sometimes we forget is just how evidence survives for us, which means they wrote it down. And I think that's really important because the Athenians, for whatever reason just like to write shit down.

Like, they just really like to write shit down. And it's not just the poetry and the philosophy and all that kind of stuff. They inscribed every single law they made on marble, right? They, you know, they

scratched graffiti on pottery, right? They wrote stuff down all the time. It was a very, it wasn't that everybody was literate, but it was a very, it was a culture that prized writing stuff down in that medium, if you see what I mean. While other cultures didn't prize that as much, and so to say that some culture, just because they didn't write stuff down, wasn't doing that kind of stuff, like philosophizing

or having cool poetry and stuff like that, I think that's a mistake. That's a bias based on what survives for us today. Are the Greeks the ones that came up with democracy? Well, I think the Athenian democracy probably is the earliest version of democracy recorded. And that was Solon? Well, no, he developed the Constitution. Solon was kind of like the George Washington. Yeah, well, he developed the Constitution, and he's also very much a mythical figure.

He comes from a period of the late 7th century BC where we don't really have many sources. So we have people that are describing him 200 years later. And just like today, we think of George Washington as like this crazy fucking dude, you know, like that kind of stuff. He probably was totally different back then. The people who read like 18th century stuff, they probably have a totally different picture of George Washington than you and me do. You know, because they read what he wrote. and they read the people that knew him. We don't have any of that for so long.

We don't have the people that knew him. We don't have what he wrote. But he didn't establish the democracy. The democracy was established in the late 6th century, BC, by Kleistines. And it kept changing. So the Persians then invade. And the fact that the Athenians beat the Persians was like a big rah-rah sort of win for democracy. Sort of showed, hey, this system of government can work, right?

And then they sort of created what scholars call the Athenian Empire. It's actually like a Deelian League. And so, but throughout this, even it begins in the sixth century, we get this kind of culture of let's write stuff down. And that's what, and we have other places. There's, on Crete, there's this city state that was there earlier than Athens in the 7th century BC and into the sixth century where they have a ton of writings of laws and stuff like that, right? And so for whatever reason, they're alone. They're the ones doing that at that time. They're writing down these early legal codes and shit like that.

And it's really cool. It's a bunch of inscriptions with it. And nobody hears of it, though, because it's not a famous city. Right. And so that's why I always say we don't want to be biased by what survives. Survivorship bias is a big problem. And it's something that scholars always have to overcome and it's tough. Right. It's tough as hell to sort of say, hey, I'm biased by what actually survived. A lot of our biases of what survives is due to Christian monks choosing what to write copy or not in medieval libraries.

Like, everybody thinks that the burning of Alexandria is what does. destroyed knowledge. No. What destroyed knowledge was slow decay over time and then what preserved knowledge was monks copying it. Right. And that was like a, from what I understand, that was like a long, laborious process of rewriting those books because the Alexandria was right near the water. A lot of those books were decaying and not and they had to preserve them by like copying them all the time. Oh yeah. And same thing in the medieval period. You have to constantly copy stuff because it's decaying, right? And so every few hundred years you better copy that text or it's going to be gone. So if you don't have somebody that's invested in doing that, doesn't survive. This is why we have all of Plato's works because the Christians really like Plato. Augustine was a huge fan of Plato. And he became known as the divine philosopher in the medieval and Renaissance period. So there was a huge concerted effort to preserve what he wrote because it was useful for Christians. On the other hand, other shit was chosen not to be recorded and preserved.

And so, you know, that impacts what we know. That's interesting. It's funny because Amund said Plato, Plato was the enemy of classical culture. And Aristotle knew it. No, I don't think they thought that because Plato was worshipped in the neoplaton, neoplatonists and stuff like that. The second sophisticate in like the second century AD, they love Plato. And I mean, he set up an academy that persisted for centuries. Yeah. I mean, Aristotle was his student. Right. Yeah. Aristotle was students. But apparently Aristotle talked a lot of shit about him, said he was a liar. Maybe a little bit. Well, no, but Plato himself praised lying. is the point. We didn't get to that part of my PowerPoint. So Plato actually makes a big, I mean, not him, Socrates in the Republic, makes a large argument. We talked about how you might not do a

myth because it's not moral, right? So Plato, or Plato Socrates came up with this idea of what's called a noble lie. Ganeos Sethos, right? You know, a good lie. And the entire idea is that the Socrates and the Republic thinks that it's a good idea to make new. myths so that we can teach citizens. A framework for society. Yeah. And this is a key part of the Republic, right? But what I love...

Well, this sounds like it's the foundation of religion as we know it. Huh. It sounds like it's the... A little bit, but I think a lot of ancient religion is less moralizing than we think. No, but I'm saying new religions. Like Christianity. I can see that, yeah. Because a lot of ancient religion is just a weird...

You know, there's a difference between belief and faith versus practice. And so a lot of ancient religion was not about belief and faith. It was about a community coming together to practice. Right. If you see what I mean. Yeah, totally. It's just what we always did. And they didn't, and because of polytheism, you were free to believe whatever you wanted.

And dip and dive into different cults you could belong in a bunch of cults. Nothing wrong. And everybody belonged in different cults, sometimes based on family, sometimes based on citizenship, sometimes just based on your own interests. Right? Or even your profession. If you're this job, you might have your own cult. right that kind of thing and so you know but but yeah and so plato in socrates in the republic he argues strongly that the philosophers should create new myths that embody what to do and my

favorite thing let me pull up this quote because it's just so cool because this is to me what I love about Atlantis this is how I end my my YouTube video that we're working on with I got animation and voice actors and everything it's fucking cool and then I got I also end part of my book on this. So times when it's good to lie. This is according to Socrates, telling children's stories to teach morals, telling lies to trick an enemy, telling lies to help a friend who is making a mistake. And then the rulers, the philosopher kings, to control information for citizens, discard harmful myths, even if true, discard even harmful genres of storytelling. And then make up new myths that demonstrate good morals.

This is kind of, it's a long, complicated conversation that I'm trying to summarize in one slide. So don't get me wrong. They even try to outlaw certain meters of music because that meter of music is associated with a certain kind of storytelling. So like the Dorian mode or stuff like that. Because a lot of stories were told to music back then, right? You can see how this can become a slippery slope.

Oh, yeah. And then the Atlanta story, wait, wait, wait. This is the end of the section of the noble lie in the Republic. Socrates asks Plato's brother, Glaucon, how then could we devise a useful noble story? lie. It would certainly take a lot of persuasion to convince people to believe in it. And Glauqon says

I can't see any way to make them believe it themselves, but perhaps their children and later generations might believe such a story. And it's like that's like Atlantis. If you see what I mean. Nobody around Plato's time believed in Atlantis. 50% of

Americans believe in Atlantis today. That's what the polls show. 50% of Americans believe in Atlantis today. So if you believe in Atlantis, No harm, no foul on you. Like, you're just normal if you see what I mean. That was the plan. This is the kind of evidence.

Yeah. Though it's now totally different morals and story than Plato intended. But yeah. Yeah. You can see how this all can go to hell, though, with corruption. When you get people, bad actors in the philosopher kings or whoever they are getting replaced by people who have financial incentives or have their own. And there's a lot of questions of whether Plato tried to set up like his own version of the Republic in Italy or Sicily. what state was that? I forget. But he was associated with one of the tyrants there, and it was a disaster. And the oligarchy that ruled Athens after the democracy ended, after the Athenians lost to the Spartans, the Spartans said, no more democracy, you're going to be ruled by an oligarchy. And guess who ruled that oligarchy, by the way?

Who? Critius, the guy who tells the story about Atlantis. Critias, the tyrant. And he slaughtered his own citizens. He's like a distant cousin to Plato. Plato, and he was a student of Socrates. Socrates and him got into big argument. Socrates was like, what the fuck are you doing? And he would like dis him in the, in the, in the, agarrah. And then Critias summoned Socrates at one point. There's the story in Xenophon about that. And like, you know, so Plato and Socrates sort of distanced themselves from Critias, which also should be a signal to you.

Why would Plato have Critias, the tyrant, tell this story? Critias, the tyrant who he thought was totally bad actor. Everybody thought was a bad actor. and he's the one telling the Atlanta story it's almost like a signal in and of itself this ain't trustworthy because that dude's not fucking trustworthy right he has betrayed Socrates's ideals

he has gone and ruled this state in a capricious way until he was overthrown you know and so that itself is another key thing that I write about in my book that I'm writing right now about the issues with this story you need to know the context you know who's telling it right all down to that level

I want to go back to the Egypt stuff for a little bit. Okay. Have you, are you familiar with Chris Dunn's Pyramid Power Plant Theory? I've not read the book at all. I've seen some YouTube videos, so I'm probably not going to address it very well,

but I can address to you the modern consensus on the pyramids. No, I know the consensus is that there are tombs, right? Yeah, I can explain why, though. Okay, go ahead. Yeah. Okay, so why are they tombs?

Hmm. Let's think this through. What do you find in tombs? Dead people. Yeah, what have we found in pyramids? Dead people. We've found pieces of dead people in most pyramids. Yes. Why have we not found many?

Because we have found some. It's really common on the internet where people say, there's no mummies in the pyramids. Bullshit, there are a few that have complete mummies, but there's others where they have pieces of mummies. Is it possible that a civilization came to these pyramids, or these pyramids existed before they were there, right? And they saw these things.

Maybe they weren't a part of them, but they thought they were these grandiose structures that were unexplainable to them. They looked like they were built by gods. And they thought, this makes sense. This is the perfect place to bury our dead people. The most important people, the pharaohs, the kings, we're going to make these the places we bury them.

Okay. Does that make any sense at all to you? Not if you know the evidence. So, okay, let's think about it this way then. So what's happening before the great pyramids are built, right? So we have two major cemeteries. I've worked at one of them. Abidos. There's another one called Heroncapolis. And these are the two sort of pre-piramid cemeteries

where extremely wealthy royal people were being buried. Right? And it's in these cemeteries that we can see the developments that lead to the pyramids, if you see what I mean, in a step-by-step way. And these cemeteries, by the way, are radiocarbon dated, as are the pyramids. We can get to that in a second. And so you have it, you have two different ways of the tombs at that point. One of them at Obidos is the idea of a large fucking tomb, right? And what they did there, and this is like the first dynasty in Egypt, they built these giant mud brick enclosures. I mean, you know, far bigger than this room. I've excavated in one of them.

It's the last one. The last one is still standing. We could Google it. It's called the Shuna. It's the tomb for Qasem Kemi, who is the last pharaoh of the first or second dynasty. I'm not an Egyptologist. I should know since I've worked there, though. but the thing is

each ruler always tore down the previous enclosure for his previous ruler and then built their new one and they keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger so you see this trend towards monumentalization not in a pyramid form though

it's not even a roofed it's just a rectangular enclosure but enormous the walls are way up there and it's huge right and the last one especially but the other ones are really big too that have been excavated by plenty of really cool people like Matt Adams and David O'Connor and people I've worked with Laurel B. Stock. And the other cemetery,

and this is where, so you have monumentality developing over here. So that's key ingredient number one for pyramids. They're big, right? The second key ingredient is what are pyramids made from? How do they actually physically come to be? And we can see that in the very first pyramid ever built. And so at this other cemetery here on Compolis, all the royal people are built in these rectangular sort of structures. They're rectangular still, but they are covered. It's a room. It's like a mausoleum. We could think of it like this. It's probably about the size of this room. A little smaller sometimes, right? So that's where they're all buried with their sort of grave goods and animals and whatever, that kind of shit. And then when you get the very first pyramid, the step pyramid of Joser at Sakara, you can actually see this. If we get the right photo, we could try to find it. I should have gotten one. You can find it. But you need the right photo. photo is the point. There's plenty of little drawings of it, but if you want to trust it by seeing it with your own eyes, it's good, right? And you can see it, but we need the right photo. I don't have one because I've never been there. But what they do when they build this step period is they first build this mastaba, this rectangular thing, the size of the room. Then they decide, you know what, let's build another mastaba on top of it. And then another one. And so they expand the mastaba in different directions until it ends up as a And you can see that in the phasing of the walls, right? You can see it really clearly.

Yeah, here it is. The drawing on the right is the key one, where you see that red part at the bottom. No, no, not that one. The one to the left of that. Oh, this guy. Yeah. So the original tomb is just that rectangle at the bottom, with a chamber below. And then they choose to expand it, and then they choose to build another mastab.

Then they end up with a smaller step pyramid. the smaller step pyramid, and then they turn it into a bigger step period. And in that one pyramid, you see the development, the invention of a pyramid, if you see what I mean. It's invented right there from the mastaba. And we have those mastabas even earlier, right? And so then after that, they start getting even fancier, they build different kinds of step pyramids, then eventually they put them with smooth sides, and then boom, the pyramid is born as you have it. And so we see this step-by-step progression.

I have a video I've interviewed Dr. Beth Hart on this. She's an expert on this stuff. And so it's called from Heroncopolis to Giza. And it's not done yet. It's coming out soon. The interview's done. But so that's the development that we see. So we can see that in construction.

And it all well dated from context. What are all these shafts doing? The burial shafts, yeah. How big are those shafts? I don't know. I've never been down there, but they'd be big enough to walk in in a lot of them. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. And the purpose of those shafts is to walk the- biggest pyramids. And they're small the shafts into even the great pyramid. But yeah, it's very walkable. Yeah, yeah. Well, the purpose was probably to bury the Pharaoh down there, right? And so having it underground gives it extra protection and stuff like that.

So the second reason why you want to talk about the Great Pyramid of Giza. Sure. Yeah, the Great Pyramid of Giza has the key thing there is that it actually has wood in it within the stones, right? And in plaster. From what I understand, from what I've heard is there's only been wood found in other. pyramids. The bent pyramid had wood in it that was radio-carbondated to much later.

Much later than what? Later than when they think, well, basically what they're carbon-dating the wood at is what they're saying when the pyramid was built. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the wood could have been added later, right? Not if it's like fixed within the stones, so that's why Graham Hancock

even accepts the dates of the great pyramid. So it is absolutely, it's a fact that it would not be possible that would could have been added after. You'd have to basically deconstruct and reconstruct a big part of it. Do we have any photos of this?

I don't know. There's a big article on it, but I haven't read it in a while. We pulled it up on a previous podcast, I believe. But, uh, I mean, the bent pyramid wood, the cedar.

This is where you want to get someone like Zahiawas or Mark Lainer because this is their stuff, right? Uh-huh. But, uh, you know, yeah,

they took, and they, they, they, they have a map of it at least. I imagine they must have archival photos of well. Mm-hmm. But they took samples from the great pyramid of Giza

and the other pyramids at Giza. Yeah, see, I'm not talking about wooden beams, though. I'm talking about plant material that's in the plaster. Right? That's part of it. And in between the joints, in between the joins of the stuff. And they took the plant material and radiocarbon dated it, and it dates to the old kingdom of Egypt.

Right. And so... So the arguments that are made about this is that the plaster and the wood came later to try to repair it and restore it and make it look better. Yeah, but again, it's multiple lines of evidence. here. And I want to be clear. But what, what, what is that? Like, if the plaster's there and it's radiocarbon data to...

But I guess my point is, if you want to make that argument, that's also the argument that I'm making is built up also by that development from Mastabah to a pyramid. Right? So we have multiple lines of evidence that to the same period. We have more than that, by the way. For example, when is Giza, when do we have our first evidence of people on Giza? During Old Kingdom, Egypt, right around there. We have plentiful tombs. It pops up as a cemetery, right? Right. at that time. And so, you know, the reality is all the artifacts date to that time, all the radio carbon dates to that time, and we can see at a variety of sites this development that gets to that point. And so with those three independent

lines of evidence, it seems pretty secure that the pyramid was built at that time. If you see what I mean. And to argue otherwise, I'm not saying that it's not impossible, but it's really fucking unlikely. You have a lot of evidence, a lot of data points of artifacts and radio carbon dates and different sites that show

this change in tomb construction that are all securely dated. And then you even have the text that come later, yes, admittedly, the texts from ancient Egypt are dating later than the construction of it, but they describe a consistent story as well. So you even have the historical sources from the Egyptians of what their ancestors did that says that what they're doing matches are archaeological evidence. And so, you know, that's multiple lines of evidence built by so many different experts from so many different excavations, that's why I'm really damn sure, 99.9% sure, the pyramids were built by the Egyptians during Old Kingdom Egypt. And I can't see how anything that, I've never heard anything,

at least, that would make me even remotely consider otherwise. Not even like the, all the shafts and the chambers that are in there and those 500, like 500 ton granite blocks that are inside these chambers that are cut perfectly and placed perfectly. And like, like even the how would you get the giant granite box up that tiny little shaft what was the purpose of the tiny

little shaft? Probably to make it tough to access. There it is, yeah. Pull up that. Yeah, they don't want it to be robbed. These were all and so here's another thing, Danny. So you know, we talk about well like our mommy's there and like well they're probably robbed right and the reality is is the Egyptians tell us about the struggles

they have with tomb robbing. And so at the end of the old period, you have the intermediate period during these intermediate, at the end of the Old Kingdom, during various intermediate periods when the state's power breaks down, we have papyri that talk about tomb robbing. And in fact, the Egyptians, what they need to do is they need to collect the pharaoh's bodies and protect them.

So they take them out of their original tomb. We have this one tomb, I forget. And I'm sure they kept treasure in their tomb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's why they're robbing. Yeah, yeah. Sure. And so, you know, we have textual descriptions of the Egyptians

moving their pharaohs to protect them from being desecrated from generations ago. right? And then we have these caches of pharaohs. They end up all in one tomb because they're hidden there so that they couldn't be found because their other tombs were found. And so, you know, we have all, again, that's part of the independent evidence that even though we don't find a complete mummy in here, that's got to be a pyramid, a tomb. We have the sarcophagus, we have grave goods. We're missing the mummy, but they move these mummies because they had to move them to protect them. And they tell us they do this. And they tell us about puns. punishing tomb robbers by killing them. You know, all this stuff is written down. It's actually in the beginning of Eric Klein's book. I found out about this. No, I don't, I don't doubt that these were used as tombs. Yeah. I think that this was built for a different reason initially. I think that if you look at the shafts that go in, the way the chambers are constructed, the subterranean chamber, all these shafts that are clearly meant, I mean, I've never been in there, but I've talked to a lot of

people who have. And everyone I've talked to that's been inside these pyramids say that it does not feel like something that was made for people to move through. You've talked to me now. I've been in them. Right. I've been in that pyramid. And I'm telling you that's, I think it was built. You think it was built for people to move through? I think it was built for people to get the grave goods and the Pharaoh in there.

And what do you think the reason is for the shafts that go out on the top out of the king's chamber? Is that go exit the pyramid? Some of those air shafts, I think, actually are really well lined up with astronomical stuff. And so there's actually some good articles on that. So they're intentionally lining that up with Archaeos, We call it archaeostronomy, sorry, that's the archaeology of astronomy. But it does seem to match because, look, the Egyptians did want to orient things very precisely. That's actually another argument that they are built by the Egyptians because they are oriented like others of their structures.

The due north, right? And to get due north isn't too hard in a desert. On the equinox, you hold up a stick, you see its shadow and you draw the line from dawn to dusk, and you have a direct east-west line that you can then make a north-south line on. And of course, it's a square. So when we say north-south, it's actually a line perfectly. the east west, right? So, because it's a square. And, and I mean, you know, again, the other reason, like I said, that it was designed as a tomb is because you can see the development of tombs,

and it matches because you go from Mastaba to step pyramid to, you know, true pyramid, like this, smooth pyramid. And so seeing that step by step by step progression over a thousand, I don't know if it's a thousand years, but over hundreds of years, that's really compelling evidence in my mind, you know and let alone the Egyptians telling us these were tombs and have always been tombs you know I just I I I look and don't get me wrong I am the first one to say hey when you go in there it's a creepy otherworldly feeling I am not denying that like at all it is creepy and otherworldly and I can see why people would be enamored by it and interested in it and come up with different explanations because they're describing what they feel, if you see what I mean.

Right. And so I can totally get that. But to me, the independent lines of evidence are damn convincing it's been argued about for a while. And the radiocarbon dates are fairly new in the last 20 years, 30 years. But the rest of it has been known for a while. And they've been putting together this picture very slowly. And what is the consensus that for why some of these pyramids smell like ammonia on the inside?

Like some of them wreak of ammonia. I've never heard that or smelled that. Is that the... It was the red pyramid. It was the red pyramid. I've not been in the red pyramid, so I don't know. Okay. Yeah, apparently there's a lot of those pyramids.

There's this guy by the name of Jeffrey Drum, who has this channel called Land of Chem, where he has a theory that these things were chemical plants. And he thinks that they were used to... They were creating... They were using like sulfuric acid and these other, there was acids and chemicals and they were producing ammonia

and they were using these chemicals for metallurgy and to create fertilizer. No idea. I mean, to be honest, creating fertilizer is pretty easy. You just take your shit. And we know people did that in antiquity.

I don't know about Egypt specifically. I know about in Greece that they're using fertilizer quite a bit. Meaning just poo. And animal dung as well. A lot of animal dung. I thought it was They would collect the fertilizer And shove it into

Into one of these chambers And close it off And then through some action They would create ammonia And they would use the ammonia for a variety of things It was to extract the ammonia Out of the Out of the fertilizer

For other chemical uses This is a new one to me I think it's a really interesting idea I think a lot of these These alternative theories on the pyramids being power plants or chemical manufacturing plants. I think there's something to it. I think it's really interesting.

I don't think it should just be dismissed. I mean, I understand that archaeology is important and we need to look at it from the lens of archaeology and excavating and radiocarbon dating and figuring out like human remains and, you know, domestication of plants and all this stuff and looking at it from that lens. But I also think it's important to consider and not just dismiss. some of these other ideas because I think I like to think I'm not a total idiot but... So let me explain

my problem with some of these ideas. Okay. Like, ethically speaking. Like, uh, the... And I don't think just believing this stuff is an ethical issue. That's fine. Just believing this stuff. If that's what you're doing, you're doing your own research. Totally cool. That's cool. I would say the problem comes about

when it leads to damage to archaeological sites. Because sometimes that does happen. There's this guy on Twitter I can't remember who it was I don't know his name He believes that the stones are not stones But they're like

Fucking concrete or something like that There were geopolymer Something yeah Which is totally ridiculous Because we have the evidence Of where they're quarried Okay we have done chemical testing On the stones on the pyramid

To the quarries where they are We know exactly what they are There'd be a mixed up signal If you did What is it geopolymer Geopolymer Yeah whatever how you call it It would just be mixed up then.

It would be crushed up, mixed up. You couldn't say this stone came from that area of the quarry, and that stone came from this area of the quarry. It wouldn't work, and this is just basic geological sourcing. I do it on animal teeth. People do it on human teeth. I know the methods. I use a mass spectrometer all the time to do this.

So it's really well known and studied and been published at Giza for 20, 30 years, right? Which, by the way, is another evidence for the date of the pyramid, because we have the quarries, and we can actually source those stones back to the quarries and archaeological artifacts in the quarries tell us when they were built or when they were carved out, right? So that's another independent line of evidence, if you see what I mean. Explain, so how can archaeological artifacts in the quarries tell us exactly when those stones? Well, if we have pottery that's old kingdom pottery, right there at the bottom of the quarry, that's when that stuff was cut out, right?

So we can tell like where in the quarry the stone was cut. Yeah. We can compare it to other things that they've used. And we can see, so a lot of people think that archaeological dating is only radiocarbon. or something like that, because that gives you like a hard date. But to be honest, and this is where it's sort of like I wish people talk to more archaeologists, a lot of what we do is we have a handful of radiocarbon dates on a site. But what we've done before we get the radiocarbon dates,

because we selected samples and sent them off to labs, is we've already done a sequence of phasing on the site. Physical relationships. You cannot have built that wall before that wall because you see that it abuts like this, right? So this one had to come first. That stone had to be placed first. architects work with us all the time. I've worked with an architect that designed skyscrapers in Dubai.

Right. We work with people that know this stuff. Right. And so, same thing with geologists. They put together a geological phasing. And then once you have the relative sequence, this comes first, then that, then that, then that, then that, you get some radiocarbon dates to lock that sequence into absolute chronology.

And so that's what you can do with a quarry, if you see what I mean. When you have a quarry, you can tell physically which parts were carved out before other parts. And then you put together the data. evidence you have from each of those parts. You see, you therefore check yourself as well. If you said this is earlier, but somehow the radiocarbon data is later, well, that's a problem, right? Or the

pottery is later. And so that's actually how we do this. And so the chronology of the quarrying also matches the chronology of the construction, if you see what I mean, that we're proposing. So it's another independent line of evidence. And so this guy, he was talking about how it's

this geopolymer, whatever it is. And he was saying how he was licking a stone from the pyramid that somebody stole from Giza. Because this shit happens. You know, there was an example, I think it was one of Graham Hancock's friends. This is why Zahi Awas stormed out of that debate with him was because Graham Hancock wanted to highlight Robert Boval. And Robert Boval had been prosecuted by the Egyptian government for taking antiquities out of the country illegally. And so, you know, like Zahiawas, I'm not going to talk about this, dude. this guy is, he's robbing our heritage, right?

Now, this is where it gets into a gray area, but to me as an archaeologist, gray areas matter. When we talk about Matt Bial coming in here with all those stone vases, and we didn't get to that part, all those stone vases, we don't know where they came from. They were not excavated by archaeologists that took photos and documented them with a total station or a plan or anything like that. We don't know where they came from, which means one of two things. Either they're illegally looted or their forgeries.

And we have no idea. Sure. He had missed that too. Yeah. And we have no idea. He's not dogmatic on it at all. No, no, no. But then you're missing my main point here where if some of those could be illegal looted stuff,

looters are my enemy. I've worked on sites where people come and loot. Yeah. They go into my trench and they fucking loot. And they're robbing and then sending it to a black market where wealthy people somewhere else are buying it. Oh, yeah. This happens. Car tells in Mexico are doing this. This is why I've decided I can't speak to Mapiol. I wish, if he's listening, I don't think you're a bad person. I think that you just don't understand some of the ethical issues involved in collecting antiquities. And it's all, and these kind of, there's a lot of research that shows much of the looting that happens, particularly in the Near East, not necessarily in Egypt, but in Near East, when ISIS, the terrorist organization, not the Egyptian goddess, took over different areas of Syria. You can see this. People, people,

were tracking this, people who I know were tracking this with satellite imagery, you could just see looters trenches popping up everywhere. Oh yeah. And then the black market explodes. Boshi Diane. Yeah. Yeah. And then you see this in areas where drug cartels in South America, they control the antiquities trade. And so, you know, like, it is written very strongly into the Code of Ethics of the Archaeological Institute of America. I can do nothing to not, not by. So to eat, not just not buy. I can't even talk about, like look at Matt Bial's stone vases and authenticate them. Because if I was to do so, that would potentially increase their value, which would therefore feed into the antiquities market. So me as a member of the AIAs, I would be kicked out immediately if I did something like that. That's one reason I could never sit down with Matt Bial and his stone vases. Because as soon as an archaeologist looks at something and publishes it, it's been a authenticated and it becomes worth more money, which therefore fuels the antiquities market. And so, because as soon as a scholar gives it a seal of authenticity, now all of a sudden, boom, it's worth more, right?

It's worth a lot more if I was to go say, yeah, I think that's authentic, right? I think that's that thing. And so, you know, there's a real ethical conundrum in my mind with people going and doing it for themselves. like I when I go and study stuff I have to submit permits to the Greek government or the Romanian government and it's not easy you know I get permits denied all the time right I'm not trying to say this is a walk in the park

but we have to do things and go about it in the right way if you see what I mean we can't do it in a way that's promoting looting or forgeries or whatever we need to be careful about what we do because it has knock on effects and so you know I don't think he's I don't think he considered what you're talking about?

And that's why I said I don't hate him. I think he's just fascinated by this stuff. I don't hate him for it. I don't hate him at all for it. I'm not trying to say that I fully accept that he's not heard this argument before and that he's not a bad person. I'm not trying to make that argument at all. I'm not even trying to say all his stuff is illegal or whatnot.

I'm just trying to explain the rationale that archaeologists have and the ethics we have and this is why I think it's important to inform the public of this stuff. So that hopefully Matt, if you are watching and listening, you don't go buy more of this stuff. Go do it the right way, figure out a way to get a permit to study stuff. And that's not easy.

Like I said, just this last summer, or spring, in March, I had a permit from the Greek government to go collect, what, a hundred or so animal jaws from Canosos. You've heard of Canosos, it's the big palace on Crete, Minos and everything. So, you know, that's one of the sites I work on. So I had this permit in hand. All stamped, sealed, everything. Turns out the British School of Athens had made a mistake. a mistake and had not gotten the approval from the Central Archaeological Council because they

were told by somebody they didn't have to. So I got there. I flew there. I spent my own money. I got there. I'm ready to take my material to go study it. Nope. Sorry. You cannot go. You're stuck. I had to come. I had to go back in June. Despite the fact that my grant was almost up and I had to just get everything done as quickly as I could. And I'd already delayed going there for so long because I was dealing with fucking cancer and I was on chemo and I didn't want to travel. And so it's just like, you know this is unfortunately life it's not easy to get a permit i'm not denying that i've had them rejected and i've had i ended up getting that one but you know it totally screwed up my project if you see what i mean and so you know like i i it's just unfortunately not unfortunately ethically that's the

right way to do things and we should always try to do things the right way and not fuel you know illegal antiquities trades or forgeries or shit like that sure but there's still like i was originally saying, I think it's important to not just dismiss some of these alternative theories to what these things were. I mean, a lot of it is super compelling and makes a lot of sense, and they're looking at it through a

different lens. They're looking at it through a non-academic lens. They're not going through the process you're going through. They're just going through it. They're looking at it because they're interested in it, and it's mysterious. There's things like Gate and Brinks door in one of the shafts

of the King's Chamber, the Queen's Chamber in the Great Pyramid where there's these two electric, they're metal, they look like metal diodes. These two little metal prongs that are hanging out of this block that they had to drill through to find out there was another cavity behind it. And like, what was the purpose?

We don't know the purpose of that, but Chris Dunn came up with a, he reverse engineered by recreating the great pyramid with all the shafts that are in it. And he found out a way to reverse engineer it to figure out how it was able to create some sort of free energy. And it's an interesting theory.

And if he's tested it, yeah, there's the two little electrodes. There's like two little, I don't remember what they were made of. I think it was maybe copper. Yeah, two little pieces of copper that were hanging out. And he believes that there was some sort of acid, I think it was. Or no, it was a hydrochloric acid maybe that filled up that chamber. and then when it touched those two little electrodes, it somehow knew to not fill anymore.

And I can't remember all the details of how the theory worked, but it's compelling. And I don't know what the, I would love to hear what the academic, conventional explanation for those little metal prongs were sticking outside of that. That I do not know. That door.

But look, just to get back to compelling or dismissing or whatnot, I'm not here to dismiss stuff. I'm here to express the evidence that I know about. Right. I want to be really clear about that. If people have an idea and they want to pursue it, I'm fine. Right. But I want to make it clear I want them to do so in an ethical manner.

Right. I think that that's what's important. Right. Go there, look at it. Yeah. You don't have to steal shit. Yeah. I mean.

And please don't go buy antiquities. It's not good. Yeah. I've never heard until now that buying antiquities is a frown thing. Yeah. Most, almost, I cannot think of any field archaeologists that would support it. Because we deal with looters. you know i've had sites where there

i had one time in ukraine where i had you know we set up these total stations on tripods like this to map out sites in 3d with lasers in a sense you shoot at a prism and it reflects back and measures and uh you know so you set it up on a known point and those known points are oftentimes nails in concrete that you lay and so some looter thought that that was marking where treasure was so they dug up our fucking datum

we were fortunately they didn't actually dig in our trench that time though we've seen in nob of that happening but uh was wasted the entire day with 30 people couldn't dig because we couldn't map, which meant we had to go set up new datums, shoot them all in, get them ready so we're in the right coordinate system before we can start digging in the right way. And so it's just like, I just, you know, I don't have any issues with people believing and pursuing different ideas. I am not here to dismiss them. I'm here to present the evidence that I know and to try to make the argument for the academic point of view because in my mind it's grounded in clear evidence. And just that's it. I really, I really,

do not have a problem with people believe in different stuff, I fully expected. It's just like with religion. I'm very tolerant on that too. If you don't believe what I believe, that's fucking cool. Would you ever consider, like, actually investigating it and looking into it and maybe trying? That's what I'm doing right now with Atlantis. The entire argument I just presented to you, the entire argument I presented on Joe Rogan was me taking Graham Hancock's argument seriously and trying to look at the evidence for and against it. Totally agree. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I went in there expecting not to find evidence. for or against it. But look, if I could prove Atlantis in an evidence-based way, I would be far more famous than I am now, having just been on Joe Rogan, disproving it. If you see what I mean, like, I would be 10 times, 100 times, a million times more famous.

Everybody would know my name. So, I mean, like, when you talk about academia's, you have to parrot the line. Actually, it's the opposite. You become famous by changing the minds of your colleagues. That's actually what makes you famous and prominent in the field. If you can actually make an argument that convinces your colleagues that the standard explanation is the wrong explanation and this explanation is better, that's actually how you get promoted in academia. And so that's what we're all trying to do. One of my big claims to fame is I overturned something called the pastoral hypothesis, which is basically at the end of the Bronze Age, the climate changes, it gets dry, the palaces collapse, that one burns down, several of them actually burned down.

And then for a long time, people called it a dark age. We no longer think of it that way because people were living their lives and whatnot. But, you know, writing disappears. Art disappears. What years are we talking about? So we're talking 1,200 BC is when the palace is burned down. The Bronze Age actually ends 1,100 BC, and then the early Iron Age starts at that time. Okay.

And then 500 years goes by with no writing. Art takes maybe 200 years till it really, figural art. rather than just a geometric scroll. A figular art doesn't appear for another couple hundred years. You don't get monumental construction until much later. And so it's this period where the society is what we'd call today a collapse, right? And for a long time, people read like the Iliad and the Odyssey. They see these Homeric heroes feasting on cattle, cattle, cattle.

And they're like, you know what happened? Everybody became cowboys, right? They became pastoralists instead of agriculturalists. And so one of my big claims to fame is I said, no, that's wrong. If you actually study all the animal bone evidence, you look at the totality of evidence for what people were eating. It actually is the opposite. They're eating less animal protein and more plants. We had it completely wrong.

And so, you know, I have a couple articles on this and also how it relates to how food production has to change and adapt related to climate change at that time because it gets very dry. There's a big drought. And so, you know, like that's my claim to fame is overturning the person. previous thought on what the Greeks were doing at that time. Right. And so, you know, that's why I get funding is because I did that. So, you know, the idea that we're supposed to parrot the party line, no, we're supposed to overturn and rewrite the past.

We're supposed to find new evidence, use new methods, have new questions to be able to add to our understanding in the past is maybe the right way to put it. Right. It's not always meant to overturn what we know. It's meant to say something different, though, for sure. Can you explain Before we wrap it up We'll talk about I want to talk about the ice cores that you guys talked about with Graham and Rogan

There was a point in there in that podcast where you were explaining how the ice cores don't show evidence for Metallurgy used during the ice age Or at least global large scale metallurgy Global large scale metallurgy right So there was claims on the internet that you used a graph that didn't show the ice age And you were basically basically trying to deceive or con them. That's one of the claims, yeah.

So can you lay out what you were trying to explain there and what people are saying online about how you got that wrong? Yeah, I think this is a good question, especially because this has become so popular. And as I told you beforehand, I have a video dropping today on that topic. Because I realize I have to address this. So many people think I lied,

which is, to be honest, ludicrous. I had citations on the screen where people could go and do their research. So you could argue I was wrong, but to argue I lied is just insulting. But whatever, let's just take it at face value. So Graham Hancock in several different appearances has argued that his lost civilization had 18th or 19th century technology. Yes. And I did not know what that meant, of course, because he's not always clear on what that technology means, right? and so I said, I put up a quote that he gave when he was on London Real, I think, with Brian Rose in 2017 or 18.

And he mentioned that they have 18th or 19th century technology. And I sort of said, look, the last time you had a debate, it was with this guy, he was a skeptic, not an archaeologist, Michael Shermer. And the start of it was, you know, hey, Graham, what kind of technology you're talking about? You're talking about metals? Are you talking about writing? And Graham says, well, perhaps the technology for metals was chosen not to be used, right? So meaning, no, I don't think they had metals. So I acknowledge that, and I said that's good.

If you don't think there's metals, because if you go and you look at ice core evidence, we can trace large-scale regional metallurgy activity in ice cores. It's been done for Roman period. It's been done for medieval period. It's been done in different areas of the world. We can look at different glaciers and test for that. And I showed an example of that from a colleague of mine at Oxford, Andrew Wilson, who's a Roman archaeologist.

I don't know him personally, but he's a great guy. I know people that work with him and stuff like that. And so I use that as an example of how we detect this. And I said, well, this has not been detected in ice age layers of ice cores. And people are saying, but you didn't show the ice age on that graph, right? That's what you just said. Well, dude, of course not. I was using a published graph.

This is the graph that was in that article. Like, what do you mean as an example of what we do? Is there another graph that shows the ice age? Are there ice cores? There's not another graph that I know of. Well, there are other graphs, and we can talk about it. Can you pull up my screen? Boom.

All right. So, I don't know. It was a few weeks, I think, after I was on Rogan. Chris Dunn went on Rogan. Yeah. And he said that Flint's wrong about this. He was the first person to say that I'm wrong about this because of this article. This article from what?

1996. And he says, now, look, in this Greenland Ice Corps, there are changes in metals in there. Right? And I don't have access to the full thing right. second, I have it somewhere. But I just want to point out that like, yeah, there are changes to metals in there, but they are all natural lead, copper, zinc, and cadmium concentrations in central Greenland ice. So how do you distinguish these metals from metallurgy metals, right? And this article actually does this. The reason why is the graphs that it shows here, wait a second, let me just pull up the damn paper.

I should have access to it since I think I am logged in. there we go oh no it's just being weird oh shit it's flashing no I know there we go here's the actual paper we can scroll through it so what is this paper explaining it's saying that the that during the ice age there's variations

in copper lead etc different metals in these ice cores right and it shows the graphs that go back to the ice age these graphs go back to the ice age this is uh goes back 160,000 years okay wow Okay, so we're talking into the Ice Age.

Man, I'm sorry. That's okay. We're back. Stop! All right, I need a new computer. I knew I needed a computer. I got to wait until January 1st. So the reality is, though, that yes, this stuff varies, but we know it's not related to

metallurgy for like three different reasons. Some of them's in later papers that I'll show you. But one of the main reasons is these changes in metals, they actually don't relate anything to do with human civilization. In fact, during the end of the Ice Age, when Graham claims there's a lot of the lost civilization. There's not a spike in metals in these ice cores, right? It's during other periods, and specifically

it even says it in the title, changes in natural lead copper, zinc, and cabium concentrations in the ice cores, and their association with climatic changes and result in variations of dominant source contributions. So in a sense, when the planet gets drier, there's more

desert, which means there's more dust that gets kicked up into the atmosphere, and then it deposits these different metals in ice cores. This is 100% different than the paper that I showed about Roman period metallurgy where it's not all these different things, zinc, cadmium, copper, lead. It's just lead associated with silver mining because lead is there with silver. Okay.

Right? And it matches up with a cultural change, not a climatic change. And who presented this paper? Where did this come from? Chris Dunn was the one who presented this originally. Oh, Chris Dunn presented this as an argument. And then other people on Twitter and elsewhere and YouTube have presented it as well against me. And to me, I'm sort of like...

So it's lead natural. This one just says natural lead, copper, zinc, and cadmium. So how do we like... And their association with climatic changes. I want to be clear that the title of the article supports what I was saying and not what these are people are saying. Okay. Just really, really clear. Just read the title.

And I know you just said this, but how again do we decipher the difference between climate or from natural lead and silver mining? So there's several different ways. Okay. So in this paper, they're fairly sure. that it's due to climate change because these changes correlate with changes in the climate. So when the climate's getting drier, you see changes in these metals showing of. And the explanation for that is when it's drier, there's more deserts, so there's more wind-blown dust, which deposits a variety of different minerals in the ice course. The second argument

is when you mine silver, the metal that occurs with it is lead. So what shows up when they're mining is lead, not zinc and cadmium and shit like that. It's not just random stuff. It correlates with what we expect from climate, and the other one correlates with what we expect from what people are doing. Right. And the other one, by the way, the Roman and medieval one, it does not correlate with a change in climate. It just correlates with the adoption of metallurgy at large scale. So it's this independent sources of evidence. The other argument where people say I'm lying is because the article I used also went one step further and used one last

test to demonstrate it where you get this lead let's get that article up this is the article that I showed on Rogan lead pollution recorded in Greenland Ice indicates European emissions tracked plagues wars imperial expansion

yada yada yada so they did a series of things not only did they produce this graph and this graph is really cool it lines up but then what they did is they went a step further they said you know what we can do we know where the Romans mine silver. We can actually do an isotopic analysis of these traces of lead in the ice cores and see if they fingerprint on known mines and known silver sources. And lo and behold,

they did. Right? So this one's really clear. This lead came from those mines over there. Wow. If you see what I mean. Super fucking cool. Where were the ice course taken from? These ones were they all greenlands? I think these are also Greenlands, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so, so that's that's this fingerprinting in a sense, which like I said, we do. this with the stones at Giza. I do it with animals. They're doing it here with lead at ice cores. It's a really common method for archaeology and geology, climatology, et cetera. And so this was the other argument, well, they never tested these natural ones in the same way isotopically. They never tested them for metallurgy. A, you don't test it for metallurgy. What you're testing for is the

source of these materials. B, there's a big difference because, and we'll get it, we'll get to even more in a second. Here, it's just lead pollution. because that's associated with silver. Here, it's a range of different metals that are what you'd expect when you have wind-blown dust of minerals. It's a range of stuff. But guess what?

Now that I've been accused of this stuff, I've done even more research into this because it's important to check yourself. And it turns out that they have isotopically tested ice-age layers from ice cores, including lead, isotopic composition in Southern Hemisphere. And here, we're talking back to 220,

thousand years ago, right? We're talking lead isotopic composition, so doing that fingerprinting to see where they come from. And guess what? They come from the suites of soil and low-est samples in the southern hemisphere to figure out where they come from. They all come from, I think, South America in this one and from this dust that gets kicked up. No, no, no, wait, wait. I have a few different articles. Is the problem? Yeah, there it is. Yeah. You can just search through these. Dust, man.

And so there's dozens of articles. If you start searching for ice cores, dust and metals, different metal types, so many articles. This is a well-known phenomenon of studying this kind of stuff. And there's like services here. These guys do services. We will do your isotope analysis from dust cores, ice cores. And they even say right here, the source of dust within ice cores provenancing can be predicted by analyzing the isotopic composition

of various elements, including strontium, which is a method I use in animal teeth, and neodymium, which I don't use, which can be matched to geological mineralogy of potential dust sources. This is what's going on here, and so to argue I lied is just like, A, that's just insulting and ridiculous.

I didn't create the graph. I used a published source. As an example. That's just malicious to assume that like that. B, go do your damn homework. Read the damn title of the paper. Read the damn. This the taper they all have used. And it's like right in the title. So, uh, sorry guys. I didn't lie. Yeah, I mean, you sure brought your receipts, man. That's what I do. I appreciate it.

Yeah. I'm glad you had me. This has been super fun. Thank you. I learned a lot. And, uh, I think you're doing, I think you're doing great work. You do, uh, you bring your receipts and you've dedicated your life to this and it's, it's obvious. So I appreciate that. And seriously, if you believe in different stuff, you're a cool person. I don't have a problem with that. I really don't. But at the same time, I'm going to share the evidence I have because if I'm asked these questions, that's what I have to do, you know, but I don't have a problem with people that believe in different stuff. I don't have a problem with people pursuing research into those different avenues. My only issue is, I hope that you do learn about a little bit about archaeological ethics,

how archaeology works and stuff like that. Beautiful. Tell people where they can follow it. Oh, we're going to do Patreon. We got Patreon. We got Patreon. Oh, God, we got Patreon questions. We're going to do like 10 minutes of Patreon after when we wrap this up. But before that, tell people where they can follow you on YouTube, Twitter, all that. Yes, my username on all social media is just Flint Dibble, my name. And so I'm on archaeology with Flint Dibble on YouTube. I'm Flint Dibble on Twitter, Instagram, Blue Sky.

Don't follow me on Facebook. I mean, you could follow me on Facebook, I guess. I do post some stuff publicly. But I'm fairly easily findable because my name is so recognizable. Yeah, great name. It makes it easy. Yeah. Cool.

My brother's name is Chip. My dad was an archaeologist to study stone tools, made a flint that were chipped to make them. He built robots to test it and stuff like that. Yeah. That's dedication, man. Yeah, seriously. He was crazy. Well, thanks again, man.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much. All right. Goodbye, everybody.