The Joe Rogan Experience - #226 - John Anthony West

Episode Date: June 9, 2012

Joe sits down with John Anthony West.

The Joe Rogan Experience. through Skype, and two, because it is with one of my personal heroes that I'm honored to get to talk to, a man named John Anthony West. John is an Egyptologist. Somebody on Twitter had a very great comment about you, said that you're more of a proofreader for history. You're more than an Egyptologist. Well, okay. I sometimes call, depending on my audience, i sometimes call myself a rogue egyptologist

a rogue egyptologist and if you folks who aren't seeing online if you're listening to this only on itunes john has an office that is exactly what i would hope and pray his office would look like just filled with documents and information and books. It's crazy, man. Look at all that information behind you. You look like a mad scientist. You look like Alex Jones' car. Yeah, you're a mad scientist, sir. People have called me that, yes. I first was turned on to your work by the NBC special on the Sphinx

that was hosted by Charlton Heston, special on the sphinx that was uh hosted by charlton heston right and uh which was a very controversial uh thing that that nbc aired right and it was a special on the the mysteries of the dating of the sphinx and became absolutely fascinated by the compelling evidence that you and dr shock presented to all these traditional traditional Egyptologists that the rain erosion on the Sphinx enclosure had to have come from literally 7,000 or 8,000 years earlier than they were dating the Sphinx. Yeah, probably more than that, Joe, and we'll get into that if we want to discuss it further.

But that was the most conservative date that shock as a you know as a bona fide phd geologist he's sort of constrained to take the most conservative view but he even had doubts about it when he was saying it but now he's he's loosening up by a lot and is basically on on the same card as me in other words holding open the possibility that it may be as old as actually as 36 000 bc or even older and the reason for that is not fantasizing or anything of the sort it's that the egyptians themselves in several and one in a in a tablet a stela called the palermo stone because not because it has anything to do with palermo but because that's where it is and another papyrus very fragmentary called the turin papyrus where the egyptians themselves the ancient egyptians

talk about long periods prior to the beginning of what we call dynastic Egypt, they just called Egypt, that begins around 3500 BC, where Egypt is ruled for thousands and thousands and thousands of years by the Necheru, which means the gods themselves, which actually means, I take to mean, enlightened or divinely enlightened human beings. And then another long, long period where Egypt is ruled by the Shem Suhor, which means the companions or the followers of Horus.

And the regnal, the names of these kings are given and the regnal dates of these kings are given, and though both the stone is damaged and the papyrus is somewhat fragmentary if you compute the years you end up with something like 36,000 BC which in fact is not isn't a casually chosen date because the Sphinx itself as you know it has an actually as we go along somewhere along love to talk about this because I can send you all kinds of interesting pics, illustrations where maybe you can on your end intersperse them, intercalate them into the actual video podcast I guess you call it so that viewers can see what we're talking about

as we're talking about it. Anyway, if you can do that, great. We can definitely do that. But for the audio-only people, this is a fascinating conversation either way, with or without pictures. How did you get on this path? How did you... I'll tell you in two seconds.

But first, let me just say, the reason why the 36,000th date is not as outrageous as it might sound is A, because the Egyptians themselves are talking about that sort of date and also because the Sphinx with its lion's body and human head screams out as an astronomical astrological marker and of it it's meant to commemorate the age of Leo the last age of Leo is where the Sphinx and the relationship is that the sphinx is sighted so

that it looks due east and so the last time the sphinx looked at its own image in the sky before the sun rose that's how they talk about the processional ages if we want to get into that we can um it's not complex astronomy but it's's astronomy. Anyway, the last time the Sphinx looked at its own image in the sky at sunrise on the spring equinox would have been about 10,000, 10,500 BC. But there are good reasons why 10,500 BC is not satisfactory. And the age before that, the age of Leo before that, is another 26,000 years earlier. It's the cycle, the so-called recession of the equinox cycle. It takes roughly 26,000 years. So 36,000 years would have been another time when the Sphinx looked at its own image in the sky at the spring equinox. So there are reasons.

I mean, as I said, it's not just fantasizing. It's backed up. It's conjectural. Of course, we can't prove it at the moment, but there are good reasons why it could be as old as that. But conventional wisdom is that human civilization in the form of cities and such, that didn't exist before 10,000 years ago, right? Well, it was conventional wisdom until very recently.

It's one of the battles that we've had to fight. But, you see, long story. Chuck and I are writing a book. I'll tell you more about this as we go along. I'm telling the story of this whole Sphinx thing, because we presented, and this is a geological argument, it's about the water weathering to the Sphinx, or the weathering to the Sphinx, with Jacques as a geologist and a specialist in these things. It took a lot to get him on board, mind you.

This is a long, it's a big, long, funny story, which I won't get into necessarily right now here, though, since we have an open-ended show and I have plenty of vodka in the freezer, we might go on for quite a while. But anyway, the point is that it's a geological argument and when I got shock on board he took him a while before he had acknowledged that it had to be correct I mean he was putting see for me to be a heretic as easy I don't give a damn I mean I don't like these people and I don't respect either their intelligence of their integrity so And I have nothing to lose.

Schock is a tenured associate professor of geology at Boston University, so he puts his neck on the line. That means something. Eventually, it took a bit of doing, but he did it. And then we presented this evidence first at the, you might call it the Super Bowl of geology. It's called the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America. This was in 1991. And we were the stars of the show.

I mean, they recognized the Geological Society, recognized that this was a dynamite presentation. And so all the press was there, the science press of the world and so on. and so all the press was there, the science press of the world and so on. And it was that that actually allowed us to get this thing past secretaries at NBC and put it out in prime time. They call it sweeps week. And it won me an Emmy and it was nominated for best documentary of that year, etc., etc., etc. So it was that that brought it to the event, forced the quackademics to pay attention to it. And the battle has been going on ever since. And actually, funny story, because I can say it here, but normally I can't on a normal, respectable level.

I watched a couple of your shows, so I know I can get away with it here. And when we gave this presentation initially in 1991, the geologists were unanimously in favor of it. They came to our presentation, and they walked past our display, and they said, yeah, you know, I mean, how could anybody have missed this? Well, that's another bit of the story. But the Egyptologists and the archaeologists were absolutely incensed by the whole thing, and they were calling us all kinds of names, and there was one woman, who I will go nameless here,

but she'll be coming up in the book somewhere soon, who was an Egyptologistgyptologist at boston university with shock teachers and oh yeah and earlier so we were being interviewed chunk and myself um by the world press really and so this is 90 it was 91 yeah and at one point we were being interviewed by the guy who was the science editor of the Boston Globe, and Jacques teaches in Boston, so he was a hometown boy. And so, Jacques gave his interview, and Jacques is, we're a good duo. It's not exactly good cop, bad cop, but, you know, Jacques is always civil and always professional

and always polite, really, even when he shouldn't be. And I don't have to worry about these things. I can say whatever I can, please. So, I forget his name, David Chandler, the science editor of the Boston... We should explain, before we go any further, we should explain the argument for people that don't understand it. Oh, okay. The water erosion argument

this is what people are trying to ignore um there's there's people that are still arguing that somehow or another that could have been created by sand and and wind and that this erosion um the according to most geologists that's not the case most geologists are stating that it had to be water correctly that that's correct but now they Most geologists are stating that it had to be water, correctly? That's correct, but now they've actually gone off the sand and wind thing, and now it's supposed to be what's called salt crystallization, in which water soaks through the limestone and creates chemical reactions with the rock, and that weathers off and creates the weathering that we see. This is actually a nonsensical argument, which we will be addressing very shortly. And there's an incredible amount of resistance to this idea, even though the geological science, are they in agreement on this?

Almost, most of them. There are a few who aren't, and I'll get into this too as we go along. Okay. You see, the point, what's at stake here, Joe, is not, this is not just a scholarly quibble, because for the Sphinx to be water weathered, and specifically by rainwater, means that it has to have been there when there was rain in Egypt. And you see, there's almost no rain there now, an inch or so a year. sahara desert formed around 10 000 bc before that it was fertile savannah sort of like modern day kenya maybe even wetter than that so for the springs to be weathered by by by rain water means means that it has to have been there before before or

during the time that lots and lots of rain was falling. Now, what's at stake there? You were saying before that civilization, according to the standard scenario, civilization begins around 3,000, 3,500 BC, more or less simultaneously in Egypt, in Sumeria, in China, in India. But all of it is around that date. But the Sphinx, you see is really is the most spectacular sculpture on earth it's 240 feet long and 66 feet high and it's a magnificent absolutely breathtaking sculpture even in ruins and the temples

around it which we'll get into somewhere along the line but ideally I'll send you pictures of it. The temples around them are powerful stone, limestone buildings faced with granite but what's interesting about them is not the size of the temples themselves. By Egyptian standards they're not all that big but the stones that comprise them weigh somewhere between 50 and 150 tons each. And they're set up in such a way

they're slotted into places like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We can't do that today. If you saw the old Charlton Heston video, which evidently you've seen, we have this guy, Jesse Warren, who's the project manager where they're building a cogeneration long island

and he's acknowledging he's fascinated by this because he says the our biggest trains are biggest land-based pains with list these rocks but we wouldn't know how to read them so get into place so this means is that not just that the Sphinx, this fabulous statue, is much much older, it is built before there's supposed to be any civilization at all, but it means that there's a technology in place that we with our brilliant science that you know produced hydrogen bombs and bobblehead dolls and nerve gas and all these wonderful new developments,

we couldn't build the temples around the sphinx so that's why they're all so incensed absolutely the whole idea is that we if this is finally acknowledged it means that everything but everything that these people have believed about ancient about the the onset of human civilization is completely dead wrong. So that's why they're as angry as they are. An Air Force friend of mine said a good line, that the flack is always heaviest when you're right over the target. You know, one of the things I learned from watching your documentary

is I really thought that scientists and people that were studying the history of something as important as Egypt, that they would be, we should just leave that sound on, Brian. I guess, John, you have a fan going on in the background. Is that your computer fan? Yeah, that's the computer fan. Anyway, you would think that these people would be scientific in their approach to evidence. When you guys presented this evidence that there was massive amounts of water erosion the one of the things the guy said that really disturbed me is like you're talking about a civilization from 10,500 years he was mocking he was saying where's the evidence of this civilization like what what what other evidence

do you have of this civilization and it's the way he's saying it is so ridiculous and arrogant and it was so, it was so soaked in ego because the reality is we don't really know how much evidence there would be left from 10,500 B.C.

That is a long, long, long time ago. And it might very well be that the only things that remain are things like the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure. Well, there's a good reason for that, too. Actually, Shank and I are about to set off on a new book between us called Dancing Down the Bridge of Sirah. And then the subtitle is A Scholar and a Scientist Fend Off the Unicorns and Take on the Paradigm, Please.

Because the Bridge of Sirah is a Sufi image. You know Sufism is the mystical aspect of Islam, and it's a metaphor in Sufi doctrine. And in order to get to the truth, in order to get to enlightenment, let's say the seeker must cross the bridge of Seirera, which is described as narrow as a razor's edge and on one side is the chasm of credulity and on the other side is the abyss of skepticism. So to do this stuff you really have to have, I mean it's very difficult, it's easy to say you have an open mind but you'd be surprised how few people have an open mind.

We've had some experience with this ourselves. And when you say, yeah, you expect that from science, they should be open to evidence. But in fact, they're not. So what is their issue? They don't want to admit that they're wrong and that everything they've been teaching for decades was incorrect and has proven so? So they hold on to the old truth? Well, exactly. that they're wrong and that everything they've been teaching for decades was incorrect and has proven so? So they hold on to the old truth? Well, exactly.

But, I mean, in a way, I have a little bit of sympathy for them even because they put in all of these years, and here's somebody who comes from absolutely out of left field, me, and Schott, who doesn't come out of left field, who's one of them, a Ph.D. geologist and highly respected and a number of geological, you know, solid scientific books published, who say you guys have it all wrong. Well, explain to folks what your background is and why you're such a rebel in this field. Oh, well, I'll tell you that. But in one second, let me, I don't want to lose the thread. Okay, I'm sorry. Because I'll tell you that. But in one sec, let me, I don't want to lose the thread. Okay, I'm sorry.

Because I have, no, it's okay. But when I'm on my trips, people always ask. We're going through the evidence and instead of taking half an hour the way we are now, we've spent hours down by the Sphinx studying every aspect of the geology and so on, and they always say, well, how, basically, what you said, there's the evidence, how can they deny it? And I always recount an anecdote that, you know, it's funny, when I was a kid, I read this long before I was even interested in this stuff, but it was a teaching tale, supposedly a true one, that this must be, I don't know, 1940s 1940s read this digest and there was an anecdote in there that when yasha yasha heifetz the great violinist gave his debut at carnegie hall at the age of 11. i think this must have been 44 or 43 something like that i was a kid and um and at the concert was the then reigning violin virtuoso, a guy named Misha Elman, you don't hear much of these days, but he was sort of the Pinka Zuckerman of today,

and with him was Artur Rubinstein, the great pianist, and about halfway through the concert, And about halfway through the concert, Elman turned to Rubinstein, and he said, hot in here, isn't it? And Rubinstein said, not for pianists. So with our science, the geologists have no problem with it, or the microbiologists, or the astrophysicists. But for the Egyptologists and the archaeologists,'s hot so what can what can be done I mean you guys have presented this evidence they've tried to ignore it but more things pop up that show that we might be wrong about the history of humanity like go Beckley Tepe exactly exactly we now have the smoking guns that are at our disposal we have an arsenal of smoking guns.

And you see, we have even more evidence than was in that video we presented. There's a lot more evidence just from Egypt that we presented at another GSA conference in 2000, again, with the almost unanimous assent of the attending geologists. But that one, unfortunately, didn't have much press there. So it didn't get a lot of press. The geologists but that one unfortunately didn't have much press there so it didn't it didn't get a lot of press the geologists were impressed but it didn't go anywhere but we now have we've had for a while all of the evidence at our disposal but gobekli tepe which you mentioned and i don't know how many of your audience will know about that that's serious that's the smoking gun because here's this incredible site in Turkey.

And Chuck and I have visited there and spent about a week there. That was discovered in 1994. And I hope we'll get pictures of this up there. But it was discovered in 1994 absolutely by accident. It looks like a big hill. I mean, it is a big hill. And you'd never know that there was anything there. And in 94, the farmer was plowing the top of the field it was his it was his hill and he hit what he thought was a

boulder and plow hit the boulder and he ran the plow back over the boulder to try to dislodge it and it wouldn't dislodge and they tried a couple of times nothing happened except they bent their plow and so they dug around it and they discovered that it wasn't a boulder after all it was the top of a stone column so they started digging some more and then finally they called in the archaeologists which now they're sorry about because the archaeologists commandeered the site and these guys 20 years 15 years later fighting the Turkish government to get some kind of financial redress for stealing their hill. Anyway, once they got excavating,

they discovered that this is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries probably of all time. I mean, from a historical point of view, it's even more significant than, let's say, Tutankhamun's treasure because once they dug up the first of these and they found, and they did ground-penetrating radar and maybe seismographs, I'm not sure, but certainly radar, and this huge hill has at least 22 closely packed stone circles like mini stone hinges, but not so many. The central columns, there are central columns, two central columns in each of these stone circles, and then ringed around with other

stones. I mean, everybody listening to this or watching this will have an image of Stonehenge in their heads. So it's like that, except not as massive. But then, further as they were digging, they realized that this entire hill, which had been at one point or another exposed to the elements of course, had been deliberately filled in for what reason nobody knows. I mean this is a lot, this is acres of land and the thing had been completely covered and they were able to date the fill because the fill has all kinds of organic material in it.

And so the fill they dated to 8000 BC. And that means that the Gobekli Tepe itself, this incredible site, nobody knows what it's there for or who did it or anything, is at least 10,000 BC. And those central columns that I was talking about are 10 to 15 tons. They know that the, I think they're limestone, but the stones come from a quarry about three-quarters of a mile downhill, so they have to drag these up.

Now, we're talking 10,000 B.C. There's not supposed to be any civilization, much less tools or anything of that sort. So here are these, and there are 22 of these stone circles. Only four have been partially excavated. Wow. And not only are these stones— Only four out of 22. Pardon?

I said only four out of 22 have been excavated? All this time, archaeology is unbelievably, if it's done meticulously, and nowadays it tends to be, not so long ago it was just grave robbery, but now it's really meticulous. They're going at this stuff with teaspoons, so it takes them years and years and years to do it. And I guess there isn't a gigantic amount of funding available. I don't know who's funding it. It's a German team that's doing it with a really nice, really good guy named Klaus Schmidt, German archaeologist, who's in charge there. He's not into the esoteric side of things as Schock and I are, but he's a solid guy as archaeologists go. He's pretty good and a nice man too. Anyway, apart from the size of these stones and the finesse that goes into creating them, they're also elaborately decorated and they're high relief. It's called high relief. In other words, let's say you want to do a, you want to carve in a wild boar or a bird

or in one case a lion or some sort of a feline. You cut the back, you cut the stone away so that the image springs out of the stone. This is ten times more work than carving something into the stone. And this is all without any tools as far as anyone knows, certainly any metal tools. It's done with flint somehow or another. And you've got acres of these things and they, the archaeologists, do not dispute the dating of 10,000 BC or earlier. So that's our smoking gun. I mean, we've been looking at this for a long time, Jacques and I, and we've found all kinds of evidence.

And some of it, a lot of the evidence is really commanding, but it's not spectacular looking. Now it's spectacular looking. What I found, sorry, what I found amazing about it was that they were trying to attribute these constructions to hunter and gatherers well maybe they are hunter and gatherers I mean you have to be a fool if there's plenty of animals and stuff around there are plenty of things around to eat why should you go to the back-breaking job of farming it's plent Actually, I have in my first non-fiction book, I don't know if you know this, I started out as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and I had a lot of things done.

It never made me money, which is probably a good thing for Egyptology. But there's a, I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but the first book was called The Case for Astrology, which is out of print now, but which put together all of the scientific evidence that says there's actually something behind it. It's not just what's a good day to buy a poodle. So in that book, as I said, my first nonfiction book, but I quote a wonderful ethnologist, Conrad Lawrence, who was brought up in South Africa he wrote a wonderful book Bushman probably still around Bushman of the Kalahari about his own experience and he relates how the Bushman of South Africa the missionaries are trying to teach them how to farm and the

Bushman looks at him and he says why why should we farm when there are so many Mongo Mongo nuts in the world? Whatever that is. Why would anybody in their right mind bother to plow the land and cut everything down when you can go outside your door and fish and hunt all day? So just because they were hunter-gatherers

doesn't mean they hadn't figured out amazing constructions, the ability to make these huge cities and these just knew that yeah and and in this last in the couple of decades i mean i've been on this quest for what and i discovered all the swallow the lubits in the late 60s so that's i said i've been at this for 50 years yes something like that close to it and and but in the last 10 or 12 a whole lot of really interesting work has come to the fore proving that not only that in these in these so-called primitive societies that maybe were not intellectually sophisticated they nevertheless had they had a precise cosmological science and actually some of

some of my pals involved in this you may know some of them but you may not know some of them they might be interesting guests for you and in upcoming shows if people you know people really really get tuned into this sort of thing so it's becoming quite clear that that the knowledge was all there i mean the knowledge was all there. I mean, the knowledge was there. The groundbreaking book was, you may know about it, it's called Hamlet's Mill. I've heard you discuss it.

Do you know that? Have you discussed that one? Yeah, I've heard you discuss it. You're right. I mean, these are two impeccable historians of science. At MIT, Giorgio de Santillana and Herth von Deccan, and the book is, I think, published in 68. But again, this is the thing you have to go through when you're dealing with these heretical things.

I mean, these were guys with all of the right credentials, not like me. I mean, I come from out of left field, and they managed to stonewall them and tried to And they managed to stonewall them and try to ignore their evidence that underlying the world's mythology, all of these strange stories of incestuous gods and all of this kind of thing, was astronomy. And astronomy presupposes the Santayana and Vandeca didn't go into that much because they were in enough hot water as it was, but there is absolutely no point to a sophisticated astronomy unless there's an astrology behind it, at least in the old days. Nowadays they're busy looking for quasars and black holes and all of that sort of thing,

which have no meaning, at least, let's say, at least in the emotional and philosophical sense. But in the old days, whole civilizations, Egypt included, were attuned to the motions of the stars. In other words, there's a lot of literature on this. Why do you think that this culture that we live in right now is so reluctant to accept anything like astrology why do you think they would like to dismiss it so quickly well because because because this is a materialistic this is a materialist culture that denies anything that has any meaning i mean materialism is materialism which is the reigning philosophy. This is what everybody learns in school. I mean, you certainly get nothing esoteric out of school, nothing mystical. And unfortunately,

the skeptics are basically rationalism, materialism, atheism, basically, is it's basically the religion of the emotionally defective and spiritually dyslexic. And in contemporary materialistic science, value does not exist. In other words, value is by definition subjective. So these people are determined because they can't find any meaning in their own lives, in their own existence, to foist that emptiness, that nihilism, upon everyone else, but they call it rationalism or reason. It's nothing of the sort. It is nothing but. Nothing but. It just seems to reason that our bodies are affected by the moons and the tides and women's periods are, and people behave differently during different moon cycles.

The oceans, they're affected by the tides. I mean, that's affected by the fact that the moon can affect the oceans, and we're mostly water. Wouldn't we just assume that planets are having some sort of an effect on people that's right where did it all come from where did astrology originate from like what is the what is the bottom what is at the end of it like who invented it we we don't know but but what we can say is that if if going back into the Paleolithic, now we're talking, I mean we think actually those figures, Chuck and I think, that the figures in the Paleolithic in Gobekli Tepe are probably cosmological and astronomical, we can't prove it yet. However, de Santayana and Vandeca do a very good job of showing that astronomy underpins the most ancient mythologies that we have. And since these guys, since the ancients are not just interested in

quasars and pulsars and all of these sorts of things, it presupposes an astrology. And in fact, in Egypt, and Egypt is the the one once you know the one society that i know the most about but the same i'm sure applies to ancient china and india and mayans and so on that the entire society is orchestrated in such a way that that it is attuned to these cosmic cycles. And we still have, you know, there's a reason why Christmas is the day that it is and there's a reason why Easter is the day that it is.

It's supposed to commemorate historically certain elements in the life of Jesus Christ, but actually it's much older than that. And the ancient societies knew what they were doing. I mean, when you get deep into Egypt, you see that life itself is a kind of a magical, it's like a magical recreation of the genesis of the universe in which by celebrating it in certain ways and certain kinds of ceremonies and so on, human beings are reliving the cosmic process and thereby accessing the divinity that is responsible for us being here, which is not

creationism. You see, any time you try to say to a rationalist scientist that, hey, there really is a meaning to life, there's, oh, you're a creationist. You think the world was created in seven days? No, it doesn't mean that God with a big white beard was up there in the sky saying, well, today I think I'll create mosquitoes.

It has nothing to do with that. It's a much more profound philosophy, but it is not amenable to study by a system together, conned into believing that their science is the only science. The ancients knew much better, and they did much better. I mean, all you have to do is go to Egypt to experience these unbelievable temples and this fabulous art to understand that something is going on that isn't going on now this is one of the i mean this is a big subject we won't even get into it in an open-ended in an open-ended talk like this but this this is what chalk and i will be talking about in the book that we're that we're planning this dancing down the bridge of sarah and um and video the big follow up to the mystery of the shrinks that we're hoping to

put together funding for which we hope to do as a theatrical release not just on television and so on but you know to get it out in the theaters first and then onto the videos and theaters and TV and all that sort of stuff

you have to have like an animated dog or something to go with you to Egypt. If you want to get it in the theaters, to get people to really get interested in the history of the Sphinx and all that stuff, that's going to be difficult to get in a theater. No, it shouldn't be. Silly people we have in this world. I mean, we had our show, The Mystery of the Sphinx, was a huge success. Unfortunately, my ex-partner, now deceased, stole a whole box of 150 grand from the till,

so he never made any money out of it. Oh, that dirty bastard. But he was an interesting guy, and without him, it never would have happened, because he had the energy, and I mean, me, I'm I can think but I don't I'm not a manifester and he got the whole thing going so I don't maybe if you had a penguin a penguin that travels to Egypt and you get Morgan Freeman to narrate it no we don't need it actually that video had was on sweeps week and had it had a huge audience over the course of its lifetime. It still gets shown every once in a while.

It was amazing. It was probably seen by, I tried to figure it out one day, it was probably seen by at least 250 million people over the number of years that it was being shown internationally and so on. People are really interested in this stuff. Oh, absolutely. We don't get a chance to express it. We don't need any penguins. We just need, in this stuff oh absolutely chance to express it we don't need any penguins we just need in this case we just need the science because and the you see the

material is glamorous in its own right and now we have all of this other stuff it's not just egypt we have turkey there are these i don't know if you've seen this the shock shot was very fascinated by easter island which may be connected with these things you know the moai of easter island right yes yes no did you know that up until quite recently it looks like they're just kind of these big figures that are their heads basically heads and torsos right yeah well i can't imagine why it took them 100 years 200 years to figure it out they started excavating these things and they're finding that they're full full length statues so in other words they have built up around them maybe 25 feet 30 feet of silt and now the question

is and this should be relatively easy to determine this is part of our big project that we're calling Zep Tepi and the Dawn of Civilization, the follow-up to Mystery of the Sphinx, because it should be possible to carbon date the lower layers of the fill. And our conviction is that these things may date back, again, thousands and thousands and thousands of years. Have they done this? I mean, I've seen the excavations.

No, well, they're excavating, but we don't know if they've done any carbon dating. Oh, they have to, though, right? Chuck has a buddy, a Chilean, who is the ambassador somewhere or another. Anyway, he's connected to Easter Island. He should be able to find out for us. And then not only is, you see,

we've got all this new stuff now. It's really exciting. Not only Gobekli Tepe, but have you heard about the bracelet that was found fairly recently in Turkey? No. Are you on, I know Graham Hancock's been on your show. Are you on that mailing list that he has? I believe so. I'm not sure.

I get some mail. He sends out, I mean, that's his whole job. That's what he does. And he sends out this enormously comprehensive list of everything that's interesting happening in science that either directly or tangentially affects this whole lost civilization hypothesis. Anyway... Are you familiar with the object that they found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea? Recently.

Yeah, very recently. It looks like a Millennium Falcon. It looks like, you know, if you took the Star Wars spaceship Millennium Falcon and put it in the bottom of the ocean. That's what it looks like. They don't know what it is. But they're sending divers down, like, I believe it's this week. Oh, yeah, I heard about that.

Yeah, and somebody's saying, well, it's not that. We'll see. We'll see when they figure it out because you have to be seriously careful about that stuff. You know about shocking myself diving? Yes. You know about that? We are convinced, Graham thinks otherwise,

but we are, shocking myself, convinced that this amazing looking place is in fact perfectly natural. Wow, really? Yeah, we can pretty well explain how it's done. And we didn't want to think that. That would have been our smoking gun. But we're convinced that it's natural. You saw those two giant pizza box looking pieces of rock that were

stacked next to each other side by side. Did that look natural to you? It's hard to describe without having the pictures there. But if we had more time and I had the pictures with me, we could show you why we're convinced that it is indeed completely natural. You've seen all the images on Graham Hancock's site, I'm assuming. Yes, all there. Did you do any diving yourself at Yonaguni?

Yeah, yeah, we were there for a week, and Chuck's been there a couple of times. And he's, as I said, it's in our own interest to see this as the evidence we're looking for but we don't think it is and we think graham is making a big mistake and insisting that it is well dr shock is the geologist what was his explanation for how it was created how all those you see if you go because the people who are taking the pictures initially and it's they're not to fool anyone, they're just taking the cool, exciting-looking pictures. But if you follow some of those ridges that look so perfectly vertical and so perfectly horizontal, you see them just kind of taper in to disappear into the living rock face.

And when you get really down there and your nose to the rock, you see that the corners aren't finished. You see that the rocks have been wrenched out of their place. It's a place that's dangerous diving there, and I'm not a diver. Very, very strong currents. And, I mean, I have a master diver glued to me. So, I'm nice right and down. diver glued to me. So, I'm nice and down. But when you go down the shore, I mean, Chuck and I went there on this very nice Japanese billionaire, financed the whole thing, who was really interested in it. And we hated to do it, to be wet blankets. But on the last day

that we were there, we went looking around the island and we were looking at other stuff and we went to a place about a couple of miles um from the actual yonaguni site and there at the water's edge and you see it's a certain kind of shale it's a very hard shale formation that is laid down in very regular horizontals, but that is cross-cut by fault lines. And it's like, if you imagine, a gigantic stone layer cake that's already cut into pieces, but the pieces haven't been served. And so what happens is that by the action of the wind and the waves, because this other

formation, the similar formation, was right at the water's edge, and you could watch the waves pounding up against it and the current running, and what would happen is that eventually the water, the running water and the waves and tides and who knows, typhoons and all the rest, sort of work into the fault lines which are softer rock and eventually they get it to the point that the action of the waves pulls away a big chunk of rock which is all set down in layers so that falls into the water and again we're talking about thousands and thousands of years gradually the whole the

whole piece of rock disappears because it's all laid down in these kind of layer cake layer cake levels and so we when we saw this we because we had our own misgivings over the course of the week it was the last thing in the world we wanted to... Right, you would be happier if you believed that it was an ancient civilization. Well, we had it all planned. I was going to write it up for the National Geographic or Smithsonian or something like that, and Chuck was going to write it up for the geological journals and all of that sort of stuff. And we had to say, well, no. Did you see the stone circle?

It's like there's pillars arranged in a circle. Did you see that? Again, we're convinced that there's no context for anything there, and things that are man-made have a context. And as I said, when we saw, we would still be uncertain about it if we did not go a couple of miles down and watch a similar sort of thing being formed right in front of our eyes. And when we go back there, when we do this next film,

Zeb Tevi, Yonaguni will be one of our sites that, you know, assuming we can get the funding together, that we will be, you know, we'll be concentrating upon because it's an object lesson both in how careful you have to be when you're looking, you know, I mean we have a stake in this too. And as I said, we had to give up on this. I had a moment, a slight pang, not much because I don't really like the quackademics, but we had a slight pang of compassion for them when somebody comes along and destroys their paradigm, which is us. So anyway, so that's Yonaguni. But anyway, oh back to this incredible bracelet.

This was just a couple of months ago. They found a bracelet somewhere in Turkey. Turkey's turning out to be more and more interesting. There are all kinds of great places in Turkey. And it's a round bracelet made of obsidian. Obsidian is an incredibly hard stone and very difficult to work. And they dated it. I'm not exactly sure how they dated it. Maybe where it was found, the strata where it was found. They dated it to around 8000 BC. But it's a very elegant, little, I mean it didn't look like that much, it's just elegant

and beautiful. And the archaeologists realized when they studied it that the finish on it was something that nowadays you could only do with the most sophisticated instruments, lasers or something of the sort, and moreover, that it had a very complex and subtle geometrical shape. So in other words, you can't do a thing like that, or it's very hard to imagine doing something of that nature that's really rigorously geometrical without having the geometry at your fingertips so you'd have to have some sort of a computer a machine something has to

you have to have something that you're you built to construct this right is that what you're saying we don't know this is this is the contention of chris christopher Do you know Chris? No. Well, he's a high-tech guy. I mean, he designs I forget what kind of an engineer he is, but he's the guy who designs the instruments, sort of the really precise

instruments that do things like make pieces for the space shuttle and stuff. They're instruments that are calibrated to ten thousandths or hundred thousandths of an inch. And he's done studies in Egypt and finds that that's what you see all over the place, that there are monstrous pieces of granite. And he's been on a couple of trips with me. He's a good guy. And he has this fine special instruments that are know are calibrated to a ten thousands of an inch and he places this on you know on a piece of granite old kingdom granite and the granite is 100

completely true and and chris is you know is fairly adamant that in order to do this, they had to have had some sort of technology that would allow them to do that. And I am not so sure because technology is technology, unless they have some miraculous form of technology that we can't even imagine because you would have expected particularly in a place like Egypt where you have so much from the past that somewhere along the line you'd have some evidence of it, of this kind of technology and you don't. You mean

by saying technology you mean something that cuts a machine, something that can cut the marble and polish it down to be 100 flat yes exactly what is the conventional what is the conventional egyptologists how do they say they built it they don't even they don't address the question i mean since there is no since there is no um there is no evidence for that technology they just assume that they did it by hand somehow or another, and maybe they did, but when you realize the level of perfection of these things and how

impossible it would be today to do them by hand, I mean, they just say, oh, well, in those days, everybody had lots of time, and time was not of any concern. They thought they could work on it until they got it right. Well, that's a sort of a fudge. On the other hand, you can't legitimately postulate an advanced technology when you don't have any evidence for it. Right. There was another issue with the vases, correct? The stone vases that were made that we can't duplicate today. No! Or maybe we could, but we'd have to

go, we'd have to use a lot of very special machinery to do it. And since there's no evidence that they had this kind of machinery, you know, these round vases that are, you know, they're shaped like this and they have

a narrow neck and they're hollow on the inside. And they're perfect. I mean, they can look into the inside and see that the inside is hollowed out perfectly. And we don't know how they could possibly have had, what kind of a drill or anything they could have had to do this in a very hard stone vases and they date from a very early dynastic egypt not um you know not a later period they lost the ability this is one of the strange things some of the most spectacular stuff comes from the earliest periods in fact right now there's a terrific there's a terrific show in the uh Museum of Art called, I think, The Dawn of Egyptian Art. And it's all the pre-dynastic work, 4,000, 5,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 BC. And they collected it. It's not, you know, it's not as they do a retrospective. They get bits from here and

bits from there and so on. So they put together this really fabulous show, because normally you don't see much pre-dynastic art together in one place. And when you look carefully and you see what's going on and you know what you're looking at, I mean, if it were somebody who's not spent 30 years studying Egypt, you know, they'd be really impressive bits and pieces they're mostly quite small but if you have an eye for this and you've done a lot of study and asked a lot of questions you see how spectacularly

beautiful these things are so shows on till August so anybody in the neighborhood make sure you get to the Met hasn't had an awful lot of press but it's a terrific show so you guys want to put a date of the civilization of Egypt to somewhere around 30,000 BC that's your idea right? yeah probably it could even be earlier

we don't know actually we're let me backtrack a little bit my question is how did one civilization like Egypt, how did that one thing rise up? And it seems so much more advanced than any civilization anywhere around it. How did that take place so long ago? It might not have been that much different.

You see, the physical situation of Egypt is such, because it's bone dry, you know, nowadays, I mean, since 4,000... But your theory, I'm sorry, your theory puts it in a time where it wasn't, though. Your theory puts the creation of Egypt in a time where it was lush and rained all the time. It was essentially a rainforest. Well, that takes it way back further, but then we've got Gobekli Tepe. Now we're talking 10,000 B.C. And who's to say what they haven't discovered yet?

What was the climate in it? This was an accidental find. And the other civilizations, you see, Egypt has this physically unique situation where things don't weather away. I mean, once they get covered up with sand, they're just there. And plus the fact that, you know, in the old days, this was a kind of blessed civilization in which you hardly had to do any work to get fed. The Nile would flood and you planted some seeds and they grew up. When the flood season came again, we had a fairly populous, season came again, we had a fairly populous there was a substantial

population there with nothing to do, no television, no American Idol, nothing to do all day long or all night long and so they the whole the entire society was put to work

building these fabulous temples and monuments and doing the artwork and so on. So the other places, I mean, I'm pretty well convinced because the doctrine, all of this work in the last decade or so, proving that the cosmology, in other words, the sophisticated understanding of life and significance of life and the geometry and the astronomy and so on was all there universally. India and China and the other places just didn't have the physical capacity to build on that scale, or maybe they just plain didn't do it anyway. They had other ways of manifesting this kind of, let's say,

this kind of understanding. This is another thing that is just not even taken into consideration by the academics. You don't need sacred architecture, you know, magnificent sacred architecture to express spirituality. You could have a a society and there probably are some that express their let's say their their their spiritual longings it's only in dance and at the end you would have no evidence even of the society right that's a very good point for example there are sacred dances in the gergiev work that's a very good point. For example, there are sacred dances. In the Gurdjieff work that I do, they have what are called the movements.

And boy, you get into these things. I mean, they're pretty amazing. And yet, we do them today but because he's, you know, the sacred dance exists in lots of different societies. But you don't need to build temples in order to

express it. The Egyptians did it that way. And the Chinese and the Indians did it too, but not that early and there isn't that much left of it. How did this civilization just spring up like this, though? They created such incredible works of art and incredible, you know, the

architectural designs of these buildings. We don't know. But't know we don't know but when you see that was see that's one of the eye openers of this very interesting um dawn of civilization exhibit at the met because i mean you don't have temples and you don't have you don't have big buildings, but you have very, many instances of very sophisticated sculpture done with very hard stones, I mean, beautifully finished. So, they had it, they could do it.

And as I said earlier, you've got Gobekli Tepe, there's no argument about Gobekli Tepe. If the Moai of Easter Island turn out to be ancient, well, then they are. I mean, if you can date, and it's sort of amazing that they haven't done it, or maybe they haven't, I don't know about it, but if you can show that the earliest levels of fil that have buried them up to their chests goes back to, let's say, Gobekli Tepe time. Well, then we've got another instance of spectacular artwork at a time when there's not supposed to be such a thing. I mean, the whole thing is in the process of being turned upside down,

ideally by us. It's an incredibly fascinating subject and one that it drives me crazy it's uh it's the the the timeline is such a fascinating thing like where did civilization emerge from when how did it get so incredibly sophisticated at one point in time ancient egypt and then somehow or another all that stuff was lost. You know, somehow or another, through the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the Romans and the Greeks and everything throughout history up until today,

so much information has been lost. Is there a natural disaster in the middle of there somewhere? Did something happen to the human race where it wiped out a significant number of us and then we had to refigure things out? Is that what happened? Well, could be, or it stayed there in sort of a dormant state

until it was time to reinvent it. And actually, it does go further back than that. For example, you see, when you're dealing with crackademia, they're very resistant to interpreting their own data in any way that disagrees with their preconceptions but you're familiar for sure with the Paleolithic caves, right? Yes.

Do you know the most recent one discovered in the early 90s called Chauvet? Also in the same area. Do you know that one? No, I don't know that one. C-H-A-U-V-E-T, I think. And what's going on in that one? And this was discovered.

It's named after the guy who discovered it. And this is, up until now, the most spectacular of the caves was the one at Lascaux with the famous Hall of Bulls and the other one at a place called Altamira, which again is a very high level of artwork. And both of those caves are dated to around 17,000-18,000c on the basis of evidence in the caves well show bay has the most spectacular art of all i mean it's it's as though it were designed by a you know drawn by a whole bunch of paleo picasso's i mean it's spectacular stuff when you when you pull it

up online you'll see it and spell it again please c-h-a-u-v-e-t or v-e-z i think c-h-a-u-b-e-t i think it's v-e-t yes it is wow this is amazing stuff you got it up right yeah i'm looking at some of it now this now you see this they date to 31 000 bc wow Wow. 31,000 BC. But they don't, see, they don't put two and two together. They can't do higher mathematics in academia because two and two tells you that artwork at this level, and I mean, where are they getting the paint from? What are they doing with their fingers, presumably? They can't go into the local art supply shop

and get acrylic paints. They're painting this on the inside of a cave. It's got to be pitch black. And when you look at the level of artwork, you realize that this is not done by primitives. In order to do art of that level, you have to have your act together, even if you're wearing bear skins. It really does look like the animals they're chasing, and it's all done from memory. That's very impressive.

Well, we, Sean and I think that, because he's been a very good guy, I haven't been in touch with him forever, for a long time. He was at a conference that we did, named Edge who interpreted the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux as an astronomical, basically as having astronomical significance of dots and daubs on the wall that represented the Pleiades and other constellations. And I think he's probably correct. And it wouldn't surprise me. See, the usual explanation is, oh well, it's magic because if they paint the water these animals on the

wall will be able to hunt them I'm not so sure I'm more inclined to think that it may be in some in some way or another a star map or have some sort of cosmological significance. There's a book, for example, by a French member of the Academy, actually, called Jean Richet, called The Sacred Geography of Ancient Greece. No, it's another one. It's a different one than that. That's one book. There's another one by amateurs, in other words, not credentialed, whatever, not that that means anything, called Plato's Secret Iliad, in which they show that the Iliad, which is the most boring book ever written, is actually a gigantic, it's like a planetarium,

and all of these so-and-sos being killed, and war, the heroes are here and the armies are doing all of this sort of stuff. It's a terrible bore to read. But if it's decoded as a star map, like a planetarium in action from about 9000 BC on, the whole thing makes, all of a sudden, vivid sense. This is where they're going to all of that trouble to do all of this work. Decoded as a sky map how? How do you decode it as a sky map?

You have to read the book. It's complicated because the stars, let me see if I remember correctly, the armies represent constellations. The heroes are the particular bright stars in the in the in the particular constellation and the Iliad is all about this army is going here and that army is going here and this one is overpowering this one and if you decode it astronomically it's tracking the constellations across the

sky because the the relationships of the stars in the constellations to each other change over time. So everybody knows. Why should they do that? Yeah. I don't know. Like I said, the astronomy and this is now even getting even the academics are realizing that astronomy plays this huge role in very ancient civilizations. And the only reason, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't prove it, the only reason has to be that it is astrologically significant, because otherwise who would care?

Who would care? I mean, for example, Hamlet's Mill. The Sant'Iano and Vendetta can go to a lot of trouble to show that very ancient myths, as far back as you go, know about the procession of the equinoxes. I was just about to ask you about that. What? I said I was just about to ask you about that. That's amazing.

Explain that to people. Okay, the procession of the equinoxes is because, supposedly because of the wobble of the Earth, but there are other explanations that I like better, the whole solar system that's turning around a binary star. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The fact is that, let's say if you look the way that this, now we're still in the age, let's say we're in the way that this now we're still in the age let's say we're in the age of

pisces which means that if you look at the spring equinox if you watch wait for the sun to rise it's rising an hour before the sun rises you see the sun coming up and the constellation behind the sunrise is the very last degrees of Pisces. And pretty soon, you can't get up to the size of it, pretty soon it will be Aquarius, so the age of Aquarius, from what was it, air or whatever the musical was. Now, very gradually, it's called the precession, Very gradually, it's called the precession, the entire zodiac precesses against the sun. So in other words, it doesn't go, when you look at astrology, Aries is whatever it is,

April, March 22nd, and then it goes Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, and so on. Precesses means it goes backwards. So it's in in pisces now and it'll soon be in aquarius now the the the rate at which that cycle takes canonically it's actually not exactly that 25 920 years so what this means is that for the sun means is that for the sun to precess one degree takes 72 years now how do they figure that out and why should it be important can you imagine looking at the sky how many people have to be looking at the sky for some reason or another and realize that the sun takes 72 years to go one degree there was a book that that Graham Hancock had discussed once on an interview. I wish I could remember the name of it, but it was discussing

this number, 72, and that this knowledge of the procession of the equinoxes has been installed in many, many ancient cultures and religions. Exactly it has, and that gets you into number symbolism, and that gets you into sacred geometry

so it lets us know that they knew a lot more than we thought they knew just about the universe itself the constellations themselves the wobble of the earth's axis a 26 000 year cycle they knew about this somehow or another 10 15 000 years ago right that's right. That's incredible. It is. And you see, it's this kind of thing that is rigorously excluded from any kind of academic discussions until it's stuffed down their throats, which is exactly what we plan to do. The conventional Egyptologists date the construction of the pyramids to 2500 BC, right? Is it correct? Yes. What's that based on? Well, it's based on the reigns of Khufu, Khiaps, Khafra, Khefren, and so on.

and so on. And this is again, this is very complicated because we're, Chuck and myself and my colleagues, think that in all likelihood the pyramids that we see today do indeed date from that period. However, and this is again formally easily provable, they are built, they are either superimposed or replaced structures that were there earlier. And even the academics acknowledge that the Giza Plateau was a single template. There's some very interesting work coming up soon proving that that's the case. So whenever the Sphinx was built, there were also structures there. We don't know if there were pyramids or not, but in the pyramids, particularly the second pyramid, the Khafre Pyramid that's associated with the Sphinx, you can see that there are two different styles, two radically different styles of masonry in it. The lower courses are built of these gigantic blocks

the size of practically the size of this room. Well, not quite, but anyway, massive, maybe 80, 100-ton blocks. And then piled on top of them are the much, and very finely finished, are the much lesser, smaller, cruder masonry that's rather typical of the old kingdom. Now whenever in architectural history, no architectural historian would, an architectural historian knows instantly that when you see two different styles of architecture in the same building, you know you're looking at two different periods

of building. I mean, just as a rough example, suppose you have a Victorian house, but you've got a modern kitchen in it. A hundred years from now, or five hundred years from now, if the archaeologists come and discover that house, they will know in two seconds that the house is built in the 1900s, or the 1800s rather, and the kitchen is built in 2005 or something of that sort. So this is a given.

So when you see two different, radically different styles of architecture, you know you're dealing with two different periods of construction. And then there are other factors in this, the so-called Red Pyramid, and Dashur, which is about 20 miles away, where the whole pyramid is built and the interior chambers are in perfect condition, are built over a ruinous megalithic chamber that they call a plundered tomb chamber. But it's not a plundered tomb chamber because the stones in it have been exposed to the weather for a long, long time. It's an earlier megalithic construction.

We don't know what the dating is. But all of this, you see, is evidence that we will be using in our septepi if we manage to put the budget together and do it. And there's a great history of people building on top of ancient structures, the Parthenon and the Acropolis, which doesn't get explained. Nobody explains where those gigantic stones came from and how they got into place.

Massive, monstrous stones. And so the other thing that you guys had shown that I thought was really fascinating was that below ground, when you showed the really ancient constructions a lot of them were uncovered a lot of them had to be dug out they were they were actually the the ones that were under the ground under the sand were the ones that showed the earlier construction methods which is pretty obvious that much like the Sphinx when they first discovered it it had been taken over

by saying this is you're talking about really really ancient stuff yeah yeah well the Sphinx when they first discovered it. It had been taken over by sand. You're talking about really, really ancient stuff. Yeah. Well, the Sphinx is a bit different because it's cut into a hollow. In order to produce the Sphinx, they had to carve quarried stone around from it. So why they did that in the first place, nobody really knows. But once they did it, once Egypt turned to desert, you leave it for 20 25 years without sweeping it out it goes buried right up to the neck again who uh what who was responsible for cutting the face into the sphinx oh we don't know we're convinced we're convinced that it was

re-carved because it's much too small for the body it It's disproportionate to the body. And it's in better shape. Well, it looks in better shape for two reasons. One, it's a much harder outcrop of stone. And B, it's been restored, the headdress and all of that. If you look at old photos of the Sphinx, say taken around 1900 or so, you see that it's really much more weathered than it's looked, but they've repaired the face and so on. But, I mean, this has all kinds of repercussions. For example, you know the story.

We were doing the video, Mark Lehner, who's the loyal opposition, as it were, in the 80s, because the Sphinx is supposed to look like the pharaoh khafra he doesn't look the least bit like the pharaoh khafra but laner did an early computer study when back in the 80s when computers were still pretty primitive in which he fed khafra data into the pyramid and sorry into the computer and then superimposed the results upon the head of the swanks and said voila the sphinx is confron well to us this was sort of silly but it got a lot of press it was in the new york times and i think the smithsonian all over the place so when we finally got funding together to do our mystery of the swinks we really had to address that because it was it was um

it was well known. And people say, well, you know, it's been proved that the Sphinx is the face of Khafre. So how do you disprove it? Well, I wanted to actually use exactly the same method that Lehner used, but feed Elvis data into the computer and prove that the Sphinx was really meant to be Elvis. We thought that was

a cool idea, but what happened was that the Elvis Foundation wouldn't let us use the King's image in that context. And I think Elvis would have been furious. He would have loved to have been the Sphinx. But what happened then was my criminal criminal partner Boris who was an interesting guy who's an ex ex race driver he drove for Ferrari for years and a year for Porsche it was an interesting character

anyway he came up with the idea well let's get a forensic detective to go with us to Egypt to you know do a study of these faces and see if they really could be the same modeled upon the same human being and so phone couple phone calls and we got in touch with a guy named Frank Domingo who is the senior forensic detective from the NYPD and he came to Egypt with us and this is more a long story about how we got Frank to agree to go, and he did his study and showed unquestionably that the two faces could not possibly have been the same. And then the question came up, because when you look at the profile of the Sphinx, even

though it's pretty ruinous because it's been severely damaged, even though it was damaged, it's quite clear that not only is it a different face than that of Khafre, but it's probably a different race. In other words, it really looks like a sub-Saharan African face, not even like an Egyptian face. Which would mean it was done by the Nubians who took over Egypt. Not even the Nubians, earlier south. who took over Egypt. Not even the Nubians,

earlier, you know, further south. Because the Nubians, the Nubians don't look like, don't look the same quite as the, as the sub-Saharan Africans. So, and in fact, the, the, the Egyptologist, the Egyptian Egyptologist

is prejudiced as everyone else. The last thing they want to know is that, you know, is that the Sphinx is a, is a, is an African African. But in the earlier, in the 19th century, lots of people just, you know, there was no Egyptology then. Lots of travelers, Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale and all kinds of people who wrote very beautifully about Egypt, traveling

in Egypt in the 19th century, said, well, you know, this is a negroid face. And the Egyptologists simply ignored that. Well, anyway, with Frank, so he did this careful forensic study. I think it's on my website. I'm not sure. Actually, I should tell people my website's jawest.com or.net. And anyway, it's in there somewhere. And so we asked him about it, that, you know, what do you think?

Can this be an African face? And Domingo is cautious, but he said, well, he said, you can't prove that it is, but it is consistent with sub-Saharan physiognomy. And so actually, that was actually my friend Boris, my partner, was very funny when he said that. He said, boy, this is bad news for the for the academics he said not only he said first of all it means that you know there is an atlantis well there was an atlantis and second of all they were black we thought that was pretty funny uh but anyway subsequently i did an op-ed piece for the new york times and i carefully left out this whole, because this was, you know,

we wanted to go back there and do some more work, and I was in enough hot water with the academics to begin with, so I didn't mention anything about this sub-Saharan African sphinx. But a few weeks later, the New York Times published a letter from an orthodontist, a Massachusetts orthodontist the Massachusetts orthodontist and the north of nonsense is another expert in in facial you know and faces and he came up with it not us he came up with it said yeah this is this is an African face so that was very interesting and now when we when we write our book when we write

the shock and I get cracking on the Brids of Syrah, we will go into that and actually interview, track him down, he lives in Newton, Massachusetts, the orthodontist who wrote that letter and see what he has to say about it. But anyway, that was an interesting thing about the head of the Sphinx. It's not original to the Sphinx because it's much too small proportionately to the body and it seems to be a sub-Saharan African face. We don't know when it was re-carved but maybe the Sphinx is as we think over 30,000 years old, and it has to be re-carved at some period of time in between. Well, it may be that that's who was living in Egypt at the time. That was the civilization of Egypt.

You see, when you get back far enough, there's not much left. This is why, for example, the Paleolithic caves. There were a bunch of caves, but nothing else. We didn't know what anybody else was doing. Along comes Gobekli Tepe, and suddenly the whole, everything changes because you've got this extraordinary structure that they date to 10,000 B.C. So this comes up, and it's very difficult to create a detailed picture of what was going on then. are they doing work on the sphinx why are they like fixing the paws and fixing the ears and or fixing the headdress and all the the different

things that they've done to the sphinx that seems to me to be very confusing i mean you have this amazing ancient structure and they're building on it to like recreate the the toes of the lion and just seems very odd to me well it is actually very odd i mean it really is when you get up next to it it's pretty crumbly and so and but there's the jury's still out if they're repairing if the repairs are not actually doing more damage than would be done if they just left it to the elements we don't know but they are doing it and very often they're doing it and it's a pretty botched up job it looks terrible yeah it does mostly look pretty there's like little bricks bricks on the toes yeah yeah it's really it's really quite horrible but you see it's been repaired the repair campaigns it's not just modern the earliest repair campaigns this is another piece to the

big puzzle the earliest repair campaigns our old kingdom in other words the time that the Sphinx was the time that the Sphinx was supposedly built it was already weathered well isn't that part of the hieroglyphs involved in attributing to one particular pharaoh's name that he fell asleep and he had a dream that if he uncovered the Sphinx, he would control Egypt? Yeah, that's... Thutmose III, the fourth? 1400 BC.

And in that tablet, that stela, there was, it's subsequently flaked off, the first syllable of Khafre's name, Khaf. And from that, they deduced, they extrapolated rather, and said, oh, well, Khafre must have been the builder of the Sphinx. But there's nothing that says that. What we think is that Khafre was the repairer of the Sphinx, because even, I mean, Mark Lehner, the loyal opposition, notes that when the Sphinx was first repaired, it was already weathered to its present condition,

and he nevertheless says that, oh, well, the old kingdom blocks that were repaired, it were cannibalized from somewhere else. It's really a cockamamie explanation but you know when you when you're playing in their arena and they don't like what the evidence is they move the goal posts and if that doesn't work well then they change the rules of the game is it their contention is the conventional contention that the Sphinx was carved with that face originally? Yeah, even though it's way out of, even though it's way out, even though it's much too small proportionately, and the rest of the Sphinx is spectacularly accurate proportionally.

Well, not only that. Masters of proportion, they stick with that because it's too inconvenient you know you don't until you've dealt with these guys and other fields of science of scholarship are not much different people are particularly men very stubborn you know we're we're upsetting the apple cart and they make a living selling apples. Well, what doesn't make any sense to me is that they're completely discounting the actual hard evidence of erosion. There's a very different level of erosion on the face than there is on the rest of the body. But that's okay, because that's a much harder outcrop of limestone.

So that's been fully exposed. Whenever it was carved, fully exposed, it's not really weathered that much, but more than it looks. Because if you look at the old photographs, you see the back of the head has been fairly severely weathered. But nothing like the body. Yeah, that seems crazy, right?

Actually, what you have to do, Joe, is you've got to come to Egypt with us. I would love to. I'm scared, though. Isn't Egypt scary right now? isn't it dangerous oh no well not really only if you're like trying to run it no the this is the these are the prostitutes who it's not that they're lying but only unrest is news so even under the worst of circumstances when the revolution was going on i was there for the entire revolution and i refused to leave with the group that i was with i lead turks the egypt you

know that and um why did you refuse to leave what why did you refuse to leave because the government said we were supposed to leave and he said the hell with this we're not they're not after us so let's see what happens so we waited a few days and the tanks were in the streets and all of that sort of stuff and you could smell the tear gas but nobody was after us so there were a few places we didn't get to but for the rest we had the time of our lives because here we were the only gringos in egypt and it was quite an experience when you used to you know crowds like the super bowl to be there when the place was empty and we didn't miss a couple places but we had this fantastic time so in the middle of the revolution you're taking tours on and through the the sphinx

and the temple and man and all that yeah they were not after us happy to have us there and They're not after us. They're happy to have us there. Wow. That's a dude who's dedicated to Egyptology. When you see, no, and again, see, at the worst in the revolution, they were talking about this,

there were a million people protesting in a couple of different cities. But if there are a million people protesting, it means that there are 82 million who aren't. So all you have to do is not be on Tahrir Square where the protests are going on which nowadays with cell phones is very easy to avoid oh my god that's hilarious

and they're not after us, they like having us there we're a source of income to them so I'm still doing my trips actually and you know it's not as easy to get them together because i have to go through this explanation all the time but this is the time to go tourism's running at about 20 percent so that revolution is good for business well no it's terrible terrible for business but it's okay for us good for the experience yeah and actually i um in fact i said

the next trip is in the next trip is in october and i have a i mean you with your interest you you owe it to yourself to get to egypt i do i have a friend who's been the only ancient ruins i've ever seen were mayan ruins in chichen itza that's uh that's about as as far as i've seen they're pretty impressive but egypt is a different kettle of civilization because this we know so much about it yeah well you you know so much if i did go i would unquestionably go with you uh magical egypt that dvd series that you have is one of my all-time my my wife would come into the room and look at me and go, fucking Egypt again? Because I'd be sitting there watching this DVD series. She's like, how many of these are?

There's like eight DVDs. So how many DVDs is the Magical Egypt set? Eight. Eight. It's amazing. I've watched it 30 times. I just go back and watch it over again. But, you know, she got a little pissed off at me.

She was like, enough, stupid. Because I was watching it in the you know and then she would come in and have to see sphinxes and shit she not is she not interested oh no she is a little bit but not not to the extent i'm a very obsessive person and when i first uh watched your this uh the documentary you did with charlton heston narrating that i became obsessed with the whole idea. And then I bought Graham Hancock's book, and then it was all downhill. Oh, it's huge. And it's really going exponentially now. But actually, I have on my list here, I wanted to mention it to you

because you have a pretty big audience. And I have a standing incentive offer that anybody who gets 10 people together to go on an Egypt trip gets a freebie. Minus the airfare and the baksheesh, the tips. What we might do, sir, is we might buy out the whole thing. Buy out your whole tour. And then, Brian, are you down? Are you down to go to Egypt? I'm talking to my co-host. My co- says fuck yeah he's down to go and we'll get all our friends together except joey because joey can't leave the country and uh we'll we'll take a death squad tour

to egypt that might be amazing well i would i'd be down with that kid would it be safe to take children yeah normally but but how old are the kids? Really young, two and four. You know, they're portable at that age, but it can be done. It can be done? That's not what I want to hear. I want to hear, yeah, it's like Disneyland. Yeah, no, I mean, see, it depends on the kids,

but they're not going to get anything out of it. If a 10 expelled 14, they do get something out of it. But what you can do is, you know, the Egyptians loved kids. So you just, wherever your hotel is, you hire a nanny who plays with the kids while we go out and look. That's not going to happen. That'll never happen. No, that'll never happen. But let's talk about the temple in man,

because that was one of the most fascinating things of that Magical Egypt series, was how the Egyptians, their construction wasn't just beautiful, it wasn't just functional art. There was a methodology to what they were making, where they were literally in that one temple, they mirrored the human body. Explain that, because it's really fascinating. It's like a tribute to the human anatomy.

Well, it's not only a tribute to the human anatomy, but it's Schroeder-Lubitz, the great genius with the unpronounceable name. I mean, names mean a lot. For example, Einstein is a great name for a genius. His name was Manny Plotnik. No one ever would have heard of him. Right. But Schwaller de Lubitsch was a genius scholar.

I mean, he really was brilliant. And he realized it's, again, a more long story. Have you read Serpent in the Sky? no I have not Serpent in the Sky it's called Serpent in the Sky the High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt

anyway he realized as he was doing the work on on Egypt on the Temple of Luxor. He had actually, he went to Egypt, he was a very interesting man, died in the early 60s, I never met him, and he was a practicing alchemist. There are not many of those floating around these days. But he went to Egypt because according to the, and I only realized this quite recently I thought the opposite until quite recently but you see the the Egyptian tradition

percolated down to the West and what I call the hermetic tradition which is astrology and magic and number symbolism and neoplatonism and all bunch of these other disciplines never coherent as in Egypt. And Schwaller went to Egypt in 37 in order to see if, because the Renaissance scholars, people like Giordano Bruno and Kepler and all of them were convinced, I mean they took it on trust, that Egypt was the fount of wisdom. The Greeks agreed with that, but nowadays civilization is supposed to have started with the Greeks,

but it didn't. The Greeks got most of what was consequential or accurate in their own civilization from the Egyptians, and they're very open about it. It's the modern day quackademics that don't want to understand that because a very interesting book called Black Athena, the Afro-Asiatic roots of Greek civilization by a very fine Cornell scholar called Martin Bernal. Basically he proves that what we call history is really a white supremacist Eurocentric invention put together mainly by the 19th and early 20th century historians because they were determined to prove that real civilization began with the Greeks, because the Greeks were, you know, swarthy little guys, but white enough. They weren't Egyptian or Semitic or black or anything like that. Or sub-Saharan African like the Sphinx. Certainly not.

So really, history as it's taught, even to this day, is really a white supremacist con job. So it really is possible that sub-Saharan Africans might have built all that stuff. Well, maybe. Yeah, they could be. They obviously built that face, or likely built that face. Well, it's very likely.

Hey, can I take a break? Sure. Get myself a vodka? Yeah, get yourself some vodka. Okay. I wish I had some over here. Well, why don't you? I'll fly you out, fella.

Okay. Anytime you want to come to hell to la do this in person let me know right back all right we'll be right back with john anthony west as john goes and uh get some more vodka fucking love it the computer fan i love all of it i love his computer fan going off his every time he gets an email it's a beep every time you get a fucking text message or a message from skype that shit comes out yeah can you turn that off yeah turn off skype messaging whatever the hell that is but uh everybody who's listening to this thank you uh very much for uh

for being patient and then uh and if you're not familiar with this um particular subject it's one of my my personal favorites and John's DVD series, which is called Magical Egypt, which you can still purchase online. I think it's magicalegypt.com. I believe you can also get it on Amazon and a bunch of different places, but it is just fantastic.

And it's really, really entertaining stuff and it has to do with so much of why Egypt is such a fascinating and mysterious culture. It's really one of the most amazing DVD series you can get, and it's no one, but it would take a guy like John, who's spent his whole life being obsessed with Egypt, to produce something like this. It's a real work of passion and interest. And like I told him, I've watched it like a hundred times. It's incredible. It's great stuff. Is he still gone? Do we have an image of him? I'm back. Oh, you're back. There you go.

No, I don't think you can get it on Amazon. You can't? I don't think you can, but you can get it direct through me or through that website. So you can go to my website and get it as well i thought someone was selling it on amazon sometimes they do that like they'll have yeah i don't think it's on amazon and actually it's really it's not me it's my let's say it's my work that sets it off but it's really my genius partner it's called named chance gardner who's responsible for that but I mean he he was a guy making a lot of money in LA as a 3d animator and he got fascinated with this whole subject sort of like you well John John just to let you know just to let people know and let you know because you might not know this it is available

on amazon.com not only is it available on amazon.com it's also available on amazon.com not only is it available on amazon.com it's also available on amazon instant video people can watch it instantly is amazon jacking you are they paying you for this john god i don't know it's my partner who handles the the uh it's amazon it's it's my partner who handles the business side of things but i know really well you've been ripped off before right you told us you got ripped off for the other one i but in this case i think i'll have to check with chance check in on that guy oh i know that it's it's you know the whole thing is just brings in no money you know he's he's sacrificed four or five years of his life putting this extraordinary thing together and then people pirate it all the time yeah and this thing you can do about it people pirate it all the time yeah and

there's nothing you can do about it i mean it's really criminal yeah people if you if you want to watch the magical egypt series don't watch it on youtube or watch it on any of those places where it is pirated please go and and support it because uh like i was saying john when you went to get your vodka it's one of my favorite all-time dvd series and it would take a guy like you to put something like that together it was such a work of passion like no very few people are going to put together eight DVDs you know that's Chance who did that really see I mean he he got it going and I supplied obviously I supplied the Egyptology and we conferred on how to do it but he single-handedly produced it shot it i mean it's it's really brilliant and you know it's as i said it's done on a shoestring so it doesn't look like a glossy

nbc production but it's beautiful it doesn't really i'm proud to have been a part of that but it's you know i mean we're partners but credit where credit is due i mean left to my own devices you know i could write i could the script, but I couldn't do the production. Yeah, it's really an amazing piece of work. This is well worth getting hold of. And actually, on the subject of putting stuff together, I've been talking on any number of occasions about us doing the next video, the Zep Tappy, the Dawn of Civilization.

And actually, I should mention this because I have a, you know, non-profit foundation that we set up about 10 years ago, but called the Ancient Wisdom Foundation. But it's been quiescent most of this time you know people would contribute now and again we use it for travel and research and that sort of thing but now i've got a really bright guy who contacted me a fan of the whole work and you know fascinated by the whole thing and he's really he's got the smarts and the drive to put it all together and the drive to put it all together and revivify it.

So it's now, the website is under construction, but we're now looking to both microfinance and macrofinance this show. And it's funny because it's been an idea of mine for decades, and now it's become a possibility. I mean, years ago, see, I haven't devoted my entire life to Egypt and these things because I started out as a novelist and playwright and screenwriter and had a lot of things done. And actually, I think you asked me this earlier and I wandered off from the subject, but as a young young kid how did I get into this and I started out I mean I realized that at the age of 12 or 13 that I was living in a lunatic asylum everyone else called it progress but I mean I knew it was

madness but you know I couldn't put it together but by the time I was 19 or 20 I knew what I wanted to do I knew I was in a lunatic asylum. And what I wanted to be was I wanted to be the little boy who said the emperor has no clothes. That's when I started out writing satires, brutal satires, plays and things that were done. This never made me money. I'm trying to resuscitate some of that stuff now.

But anyway, and then gradually, gradually, gradually, I understood that there was another, that human beings were not always insane. And one music, classical music, Beethoven's late quartets and Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, and then when I was in the army in Germany, needless to say, I didn't enlist. They drafted me. But I had a great time. I was in Germany. I had my one and only Porsche that I bought for $2,400 from the list. They drafted me. But I had a great time. I was in Germany. I had my one and only Porsche that I bought for $2,400 from the factory. Wow.

55, talking about. Yeah, well, that's what it was in those days. And I remember driving as I was driving to France and early, it was in November, all by myself, early in the morning, and went to the Cathedral of Chartres. It was absolutely empty. I mean this is before there was any travel to Europe and I realized it was an epiphany that however monstrous the church was and is, somebody, geniuses built this incredible structure. And then it took another few, I still didn't put it all together, it took another few years before, and by this time I had my first short story

published and I was living in Spain on the island of Ibiza. And gradually, gradually I understood, you know, there was another side to this. And then all of a sudden, again, more complicated story, but I got interested in the Gurdjieff work and the Bisa would become all touristed up and I was connected with my first wife and we moved to England she was an actress I wanted to get into the Gurdjieff work and there the first the first nonfiction book the case from astrology showed up and that's how I got into Schwaller. So that's about the late 60s when I got interested in, you know, when I really got interested in all of this stuff. Anyway, but I always had this idea because I had enough experiences with you know with

Hollywood and you know the film the film industry and and and even theatrical side of things that you know that the the producers own you and to get anything that's really original done the way that you want it done is next to impossible and i had this idea of somehow or another micro financing projects but of course you couldn't do it in those days i mean how are you going to send out a billion mailings or anything like that but now with the with the internet you can get to these huge databases. And so now we're putting in place a micro-financing aspect of it. And actually, I've always been good at thinking up good marketing ideas. I just never do them.

Well, John, just get on Twitter. You need to get on Twitter and then get a Kickstarter account. But what we're doing, when I talk about it now, it's not yet a promise because we have to make sure through the lawyers that it's legal. But we think it's legal. We're pretty sure it can be legal, but we have a cool, I came up with a really cool incentive offer, which is that if you put in, if you get, if you have a fit for a fifty dollar donation and you can split it you know you ten guys can put in five each and one of them is going to win that but you put in 50 bucks and that buys you a ticket to effectively a raffle and when when we get up to fifty thousand we get up to fifty thousand dollars we have a drawing and somebody wins a free trip to Egypt with me.

So we think that that's because I'm very interested in getting to the young people, actually. You know, people my age, well, most of the people my age are dead anyway. But I'm particularly interested in getting this message to young people. And, you know, 50 bucks for some young people is a lot, but it isn't really a lot if you figure it out. I mean, what's 50 bucks? It's 10 beers at a not very good bar or a meal for two at a not very good restaurant. Anybody can figure it out, can afford 50 bucks. So we're putting this into place.

And if you go online, I think the website is up already. It's ancientwisdomfoundation.org. Now, when you go on these Egyptian trips, how long do they take? The standard trip is now, I think it's 15 or 16 days door-to- and they're really intense i mean i'm i'm talking what's going on now goes on all day long so it's all day you talking for 15 16 days yeah that's got to be exhausting yes but it must keep you uh pretty pretty sharp on Egyptian history. Well, it gave me... Not only that, actually.

It's that... You see? See, Egypt, nobody in America has ever experienced a real civilization. What we have progressed, what we call progress, is the antithesis of civilization. This is shiny barbarism.

And so Egypt is an eye-opener. And as I said, I came to it, you know, through art, through great sacred music, and through the Cathedral of Shatr, and then suddenly I realized how important this was, and along came Schwaller and all of this study. came Schwaller and all of this study. But what Egypt does is that it introduces, and through this symbolist interpretation, which was what Schwaller de Lubitz put together,

otherwise it was just quackademic Egyptology, you come away angry, actually, because you've experienced this fabulous art, and you listen to all this bullshit that they're telling you that has no connection with what you've actually experienced. So Egypt is, I often start lectures off by saying, Egypt is like sex. And that gets everybody's attention. Why is Egypt like sex? Well, you can read all about it, and that's kind of interesting.

And you can look at pictures, and that's kind of interesting too. But until you've actually experienced it, you don't understand anything about it. So Egypt is like that. Once you are there, it hits. I mean, there's no mistaking about it. And so to me, it's very gratifying to be able to be the agency for allowing people to have that experience. And unfortunately, I originally hoped to have a little business where there are a handful of people who understand Symbolist Egypt

well enough to retransmit it. But actually, I'm the only one who does these trips. One other person, a very brilliant lady called Normandy Ellis, but even that doesn't have the intellectual rigor that mine, my stuff does. So I'm almost the only show in town, but it's very satisfying to me to be able to open this experience to people. And also and also invariably the trips have very interesting people on them with expertise in a number of of disciplines that are relevant to egypt so no trip goes goes by without me without me learning a lot myself i mean i send sometimes very important things so it doesn't get

tiring and yeah it's a lot of it's up physically it's a lot of work but pretty good shape John I wanted to ask you a question about the more recent idea that perhaps the blocks and the pyramid were not cut from stone but rather made out of a limestone concrete have you are you familiar with these theories very yeah that's david of it and shot that's been looked into by geologists and and it's completely untenable and david should know better he's a polymer scientist or something of the sort shock has looked at this very carefully it would be as much work to pound the stone into into powder and then put it into molds and you

see the stones are all different sizes so you can't do it that way and and when you look at the stones you see at the at the blocks they're what's called a pneumolytic limestone, which has lots of little seashells in it, looking like the shells on, you know, like cockle shells. And they're all intact. So it's a silly theory. But on the surface, it doesn't sound... On the surface, it sounds as though it might be convincing.

It was convincing enough so that somebody, a friend of mine, put together a panel of geologists who don't have an axe to grind. It's not as though they're Egyptologists or archaeologists who have a stake in the thing. They go there with an open mind to look into it, and Schock certainly does. And no, it's not. They're not. And it would be just as much work to do it when david david himself says it would take a month to produce a limestone block and cure it well enough so that you could actually use it so no it's not so it's just silliness well it's

incorrect it's incorrect yeah some things some things are silly. And then, see, the alternative side of the argument is as irresponsible as the academic side, because people get notions in their head that it's built by aliens. Well, it could be built by aliens. I can't disprove that. I can't disprove that, but they're as unwilling to let go of their fantasies as the academics are unwilling to let go of what are not fantasies. Their timeline, their incorrect timeline. Incorrectly developed theories that have been, that are being and have been solidly disproved by people like ourselves now john there's also an issue with uh the area underneath one of the sphinx's paws that uh seismic charting has uh revealed that there's some sort of a um a room down there some sort of a there there is some

sort of a cavity or chamber we don't know i mean edgar casey in one of his in one of his channeled sessions or trances whatever he called them said that that the there was a chamber beneath this one of the different descriptions of it but basically underneath one of the paws of the sphinx that contained the secrets of Atlantis. Now our seismograph tells us that there is such that there is a cavity there but and this is a question that comes up all the time and they say why can't they excavate well we're the geophysicist who did the work, I mean, Schock was there, but we had a guy named Tom DeBecke who was a geophysicist. It's like an underground radiologist.

The seismograph produces a reading that to you or me would be completely meaningless, like an x-ray was meaningless to you or me. meaningless, like an x-ray was meaningless to you or me, but the radiologist can tell you a lot of very precise information from an x-ray. So with a readout from the seismograph and Tom DeBecke said from the shape of the readout, it looks as though it is a chamber, more or less rectangular. It's under about 15 feet of bedrock on top of it. And there is actually a chamber, which Tom didn't even know about, behind this thing. It's a rough cut chamber. There's a block and you pull the block away and you have a little rope ladder. You can go down into this rough cut chamber where there's nothing and nobody had been

able to figure out who cut it or why or when. But there is such a chamber there and on the seismograph readout, this looks the same. In other words, you get certain colors and stuff like that. It looks the same as what you get under the paw of the sphinx. So, DeBecke, who put his neck on the line, said, well, this looks like, cautiously, like there is a chamber there. The problem is getting in there because it's below what's now the water level, the water table level. So you can't really excavate or it would be enormously difficult.

You go underwater, actually. You go underwater, you mean. As you would dig into it, you would actually go underwater. You get the water as you drill. But in theory, you could put down one of those little fiber optic cameras. But if it's all water in there, you're not going to see anything anyway. little fiber optic cameras but if it's all water in there you're not going to see anything anyway to actually excavate it would mean going in there with you know with huge pumps pulling the water out as fast as it came in and the sphinxes the sphinxes that would be almost impossible right

and the sphinxes it would be possible but it would be dangerous because the sphinx is you know is in pretty rough shape as it is. I mean, pieces fall off it all the time and things like that. So it may be one of these days. the powers that be realize that it's good PR, among other things, to try to excavate it and see if there is anything there. Meanwhile, for me, I'll stick with the geology and the other pieces of evidence. I don't give an awful lot of thought to that,

but the seismograph says there is something there, yes. Have they detected any other undiscovered ruins or any undiscovered areas that they would like to explore in Egypt? Or do they pretty much have the entire area mapped out? Well, they have it... It's a complex question. They have it pretty well mapped out because they recently, I forget the woman's name, very interesting, the satellites flying over have done, I'm not sure if it's infrared or

something that gives you, I think it's infrared photography that tells you if there's something underground but the photography only goes doesn't go that deep you know it goes 10 15 feet something i think and and if if we're correct if there is anything that's that's really completely buried um it will be deeper than that and and so the so the photographer the the infrared whatever it is I think in print the infrared doesn't let you know about that but it ought to be there I mean see look with the Sphinx for example if the head we're not sticking above the ground

you wouldn't even know about it to this day yeah it's true right yeah but you wouldn't know it would just be sand and why would anyone bother but the with these different new technologies certainly ground penetrating radar and seismographs will tell you if there's anything there but they're expensive and you know You've got thousands of miles of desert. This is a slow process, whereas a flyover tells you a lot. So they now know that there are lots of buried sites, but if they're that close to the surface, the chances that they're going to support the ancient, you know, what we call the lost civilization hypothesis, is not necessarily commanding.

And for our purposes, it doesn't even matter because we have enough to go by anyway. I mean, Gobekli Tepe and probably this easter island stuff and the magical bracelet and certain of the other things and there are there are megalithic sites in sardinia which are not to be believed and nobody even knows about this it's a treasure trove of megalithic sites in sardinia sardinia yeah they didn't just invent sardines there's this wonderful architecture there of these huge beehive shaped stone buildings that are really amazing so we don't need that all we need is the all we need is that is the financing to do our um to you know to do our our follow-up to the mystery of the strings.

And ideally, what we want to do really is to get it into the theaters and then go into TV and the web and all of that stuff. Well, if you see, if something has a high impact, like if you see a lot of viral videos that have been released online that have gotten millions and millions and millions of viewers just by word of mouth. I really think that, you know, video on demand as well is another great option.

Yeah, it is a great option. Part of the problem, of course, is, and you must know this, I mean, do you have ads on the show? Yeah, we do. Yeah, the problem, of course, is, and you must know this, do you have ads on the show? Yeah, we do. Yeah, the ones that we say, no, you don't see any ads. We just do them at the beginning of the broadcast, the Fleshlight ad and the On It, the Nootropics ad, those are the ones that we do. We do those and that's it. Then we have some other sponsors that

we're working with in the near future, but they're all done just by me talking. Really? I mean, because I'm blabbering on here forever and there's no ads. No, we don't have to have ads. We don't have to break any of the conversation up. That's the beautiful thing about it. We get it over with in the beginning. We mention the, we thank the sponsors again at the end and it allows

a full two-hour intensive conversation and especially something about ancient Egypt, I think, demands that. It's such a complex sort of a situation to try to figure out how... The conventional wisdom is saying that... When did they believe language was invented? About 50,000 years ago, something along those lines? They don't even know.

It's just guesswork, right? It really is guesswork when you get back that far. The only thing that you can say as a trend is that the more they study, the further back everything goes. And not only the further back in terms of time, but the further back in terms of sophistication. terms of sophistication you see i mean actually look gobekli tepe which is i mean i hope i hope you find some photos to or i'll send them to you to to intersperse with with this talk so that people can actually see what i'm well i think a lot of people google along with the show so that's probably what a lot of people are doing right now but yeah go back and do it that's oh that's fine too so so i mean with gobekli tepe we're talking about 10 000 bc now you know that's five times the span of time

from jesus and julius caesar to us it's pretty crazy That's pretty crazy if you wrap your head around that. Back to Chauvet, the cave of Chauvet, that's 30,000 years. That's three times the time from Gobekli Tepe. So you see, it means that we have this totally skewed

vision of our, of human civilization and of ourselves, basically. You you know this fucking lunatic asylum is not it's not civilization who in their right mind would invent the bobblehead doll or put on american idol or the reality shows this is insanity it is insanity but it's insanity that has achieved an incredibly high technological level of success right we it seems to be a technology of a civilization as opposed to what egypt was which was yeah we don't know that's what makes traveling there so interesting because they also had a technology i mean in cases, we couldn't build the pyramids.

Or maybe we could, but it would probably be more expensive than a space program. And they did it evidently with ease. And they did it in an era where we don't even attribute them to having metal tools. They had brass. They're not even supposed to having metal tools. They had brass. Copper. But they're not even supposed to have any tools. And, you see, I don't know about you, but to me, there's not much emotional impact from a bobblehead doll or Disneyland for that matter. And if you walk into the Egyptian temples, I mean, this happens on the trips all the time because, as I said, it's like sex.

Until you've experienced it, you really don't know what it's like. You go into these temples on my trips. Now it's easy because there's practically no tourism there. But otherwise, I go to a lot of trouble to figure out when to go to places so that relatively few people are there. Because it's important. You know, I mean, it's like trying to listen to, you know, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the Super Bowl. You can't do this. So if you get there and you have a place more or less to yourself, the emotional impact of these things is breathtaking.

And, you know, I mean, you don't get breathtaking and you know i mean you don't i don't know about you would you don't get that from walmart i don't know obviously not this is uh garbage that goes on this is a fact that lives are obsessed with technological rubbish and violence too of course really stupid violence Our setup is obviously very different than theirs, but we imagine ourselves to be the more advanced. It's just they don't have TVs, so we're like, oh, they're fucking idiots. You know, they don't have the internet.

We're like, well, they weren't advanced. But meanwhile, they're capable of these massive constructions. I wanted to ask you about the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber and the evidence that it had been made with some sort of a high speed diamond bit drill well that's that's um that's chris dunn's theory that that we talked about that i mentioned chris dunn before well we don't know i mean and chris is see chris has to be he's not a new age. My composer stepson once talked about, he's a very good composer, and he was once talking about all of the new age music and the album covers,

and he said it's all a bunch of airbrushed unicorns, and that's become a kind of metaphor for the far out new agey kind of way of looking about things. But Chris is not a new agey kind of guy. And that's his field. And he interprets it that way. Except with all of the stuff that we've discovered in Egypt, there's no evidence whatsoever of having that kind of technology. Now, the idea of the lost civilization is the idea, Graham Hancock's idea, that there's a missing era that we can't place.

When do you believe that took place in relation to the timeline of Egypt? When was all the information, or a good chunk of it lost and they had to start from scratch? Well, we don't know because you see there's enough there, not much, but scattered around so that you can say maybe it was never lost, but it was never manifested in the spectacular architecture. For example, I was talking before about the red pyramid of Dashur that's built over a ruinous megalithic structure, but that megalithic structure is pretty considerable. It's sort of like Newgrange and certain of the megalithic structures in England and Scotland and Wales, but this is not nothing. And then there's this strange stone circle, pretty ruinous,

called Nabta Playa, N-A-B-T-A-P-L-A-Y-A, in southwestern Egypt, west of Abu Simbel, not far from the Sudan border. Now this is, it doesn't look like much, but even the academics acknowledge that it's astronomically oriented and there's a lot about it that puts its date, they date it, they, academics date it to about 6000 BC. They dated, they, academics, dated to about 6,000 BC.

Well, astronomically oriented in 6,000 BC means already that it's sophisticated. If it's astronomy, you're not supposed to have astronomy back then. And then there's an interesting guy, a friend of mine, a physicist and archaeoastronomer, who looks at the evidence and interprets it in a much more sophisticated fashion that there are indications there, or at least they are referring back to a time of about 16,000 or so BC, even though the stone circle itself satisfactorily dates to about 6000 BC. And then we go to Gobekli Tepe, and we go to the bracelet.

Now we're talking 10,000 BC. And the bracelet, we're talking 8,000 BC. And Chauvet, these fabulous paintings of horses and rhinoceroses and cave bears and lions, that's 31,000 BC. So how much do you need? No, they're probably living in tents. I don't know. I mean, they certainly weren't living in condos, but they had this knowledge and this artistry at their disposal, and they had it at a fantastically early time. So we just don't know when they lost all this stuff. We don't know when the Egyptian civilization,

either whether it was a slow erosion, whether it was a massive decline, and somehow or another it sort of coincides with the end of the last ice age. Is that a fact as well? Well, yeah. Well, we think, yes, because that's when the sea levels rose 300 feet. I mean, it's a chaotic time then that's when all of the mammoths and the woolly rhinoceroses and all that of that go extinct so and and shock actually has some very interesting had some very interesting theories about not just shock but other people

about what made it go extinct and you know maybe some sort of a plasma strike like a gigantic sunspot type event there's some pretty good evidence for this but anyway it disappears this is the sphinx is the sphinx and gobekli tepe maybe after that but if the sphinx is earlier one of the one of the um objections we always had to face, well, how could the Sphinx be the evidence of this amazing earlier civilization and there's nothing else? Well, there is something else. There's lots of other stuff, water weathering and things of that nature in Egypt,

but not much of it's spectacular. Gobekli Tepe, that's spectacular. So we don't know. Are there hieroglyphs that detail any of the construction methods that were used? A little bit. There's one wall relief in nothing to do with pyramids. No, absolutely nothing, and nothing to do with these things. I mean, the Egyptians...

What about obelisks? The obelisks... Because that's pretty spectacular, too. That's something a lot of people aren't even aware of, how spectacular those are. Well, they're plenty spectacular. There's one relief in the Temple of Edfu, which is a very late Ptolemaic temple

between 250 B. BC, you know, into Roman times, built in stages, that shows the pharaoh with a rope around an obelisk, sort of pulling it up into position by himself. Well, that's not meant to be taken literally, unless it's a very small obelisk. But in Egypt, what you see is what you get. So, when you see evidence that you don't necessarily like, but it's there in the temple walls, well, you can't really ignore it, just because you want to believe that the aliens built everything. So, there's the pharaoh pulling the obelisks up and there's

a theory developed, it's the one favored by the Egyptologists at the moment, I mean even they can't be wrong all the time, and by an Egyptologist named Labib Habashi which talks about how they take these obelisks which weigh hundreds of tons they somehow get them out of the quarry this is really in words it doesn't make any sense when we're in egypt and you're at what's called it's called the unfinished obelisk in aswan and here's this block of stone that they were pulling out of the rock and they didn't make it for interesting reasons that developed the fault line. But had they got this block of stone out of the bedrock, it would have weighed 1,200 tons. That's a big stone.

And somehow, they've got it out of the quarry and onto rafts or boats, probably in the flood season and drifted it down the Nile maybe to Luxor who knows we don't know where it was intended to go and then they would have somehow or another had to get it up into position and according to the Lavi Babaji they did this by pulling it up a gigantic ramp and it was set up in such a way that with a kind of a you know, up the ramp, it would come up the ramp with its bottom at the top part and then gradually with lots of people with ropes

and you'd be surprised how precise you can be with lots of trained men with ropes and they would gradually pull it up and it would go, there was a kind of a deep shaft that was constructed that was full of sand and they'd gradually pull the sand out from under and all of these guys pulling with the ropes would gradually lever it up into position and very exactly place it down on its base but how they get the sand out the last minute when you're there all of this makes sense but it's fascinating to try to figure out if this is how it's done we don't know but all we can say is that they did it.

And it's pretty damn amazing. Well, one of the things I thought was really fascinating was when they had to move some gigantic statues, they had to cut them up and then replace them in a new area. They had to cut giant statues in half. I mean, talk about that incredible project and what you thought about that just from an archaeological standpoint.

That's Abu Simbel. And it wasn't that they were statues. They were, this is a temple cut into the rock face. And the four statues, the premises, the second, were sculpted into the rock face itself. In other words, they were integral they were not freestanding statues so when they built the aswan dam and they would have flooded this fabulous place um they got together a whole bunch of money 90 million dollars i think it was

um unesco got it together and they got all of the engineers and what they had to do is they had to and they got all of the engineers, and what they had to do is they had to, basically they had to move a hole. So they had to cut around the temple, and then they had to cut, because the statues are enormous, they're 65 feet high, and then they had to cut them into four and move the blocks, because they moved the entire, they move the whole up to the top of the hill where where that they were that they were built into because the water would have covered where they were so that's that's Abu's symbol and so yeah

they have to cut but they weren't freestanding statues but still it was a modern you know it was a pretty considerable modern engineering thing. Otherwise, the example is the statue of the colossal figure of Ramses that's the basis of Shelley's famous poem Asimandias. You know, I met a traveler from an antique land, blah, blah, blah. And this is a statue that weighs, it's ruined. It exploded in an earthquake somewhere around Julius Caesar time.

But this originally weighed about a thousand tons and they got it down the river somehow and that's amazing enough, but then how'd they get it off the river somehow and that's amazing enough but then how they get it off the boat in other words assuming that they're moving it in flood season on giant rafts then they've got to get the rafts they've got to get this thousand ton block off the raft and move it into place well the actual moving it on the flat, there are, when you're talking about before, what evidence is there? There's one, I forget what tomb it's from, but there's a tomb relief showing a huge sledge with a giant colossal statue of the pharaoh on it. And then lots and lots of men pulling the sledge over the land and somebody in the front pouring something, maybe

some water, because slick mud actually is remarkably slippery and you can pull things. So as I said earlier, what you see is what you get. You can't deny that evidence when you see the evidence in front of your nose and say, ìOh, well, itís aliens dropping things from space-age helicopters or something of the sort. When the evidence is there, that's the evidence. But you've got to be careful about the evidence. There are scenes, symbols that look like a helicopter in the Temple of Abido, but are not a helicopter.

It's a complicated subject. Yeah, incredibly complicated subject. Now, no subject of ancient civilizations would be complete without a discussion of ancient Sumer and the fantastical work of Zechariah Sitchin. I'm sure you're familiar with all that stuff. What's your take on Zechariah Sitchin's ideas that, you know, the Anunnaki came from another planet? For a lot of people who don't know, it's some pretty crazy stuff that states that human beings were created through genetic engineering. Yeah, well, I think, actually, I'm not a Sitchin, I mean, I can't challenge his translations from the Sumerian,

because I just can't, but they're his translations, and unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, I don't know of any of the Sumerian experts who bothered to take a look at his work, which is too bad. I mean, it's irresponsible. But I do know that when he's talking about Egypt, he's totally off the wall, totally. And from that, I extrapolate and do not much care for his work.

And when he gets into explaining who the gods were, his work, and when he gets into explaining who the gods were, that they're aliens as malignant as ourselves who enslaved a primitive human race. Created us, even. And that the gods of Egypt and everywhere else are really just aliens that have been misunderstood by primitive imaginations. This is really stupid and malignant bullshit. Here's a bit of evidence that one of the Egyptian creation myths concerns the god before there were any gods, the god called Atum, who exists before there is existence, as it were. And he creates existence through an act of masturbation. He creates the first polarization, the first female and the first male.

It's rather biblical, this. Well, now, if this is an ancient alien, and this is a Sitchin-esque interpretation, what is it that the primitives saw an ancient alien whacking off behind a tree and decided that this was how the universe was created? It has absolutely nothing to do with this. In other words, the gods of Egypt and the gods of all other civilizations, including those we sometimes think are primitive, represent cosmic principles. They are not people.

They are not aliens. They are principles and they are scientific. The scientists don't like this either. either but when you look at Egyptian mythology and try to historicize it as it were, you find that you're in a, this is a ludicrous exercise and as far as I'm concerned the whole notion that we human beings, the creators, not Sitchin, but some others did create the Cathedral of Shatka and the builders, the temples of Egypt and so on, are somehow or another deluded primitives who were enslaved by aliens and who then found a way to set themselves free but remembered their alien backgrounds and commemorated them in all of this wonderful architecture.

This is really stupid. And not only is it stupid, it's malignant. It's malignant in the same way it's the opposite of, let's say, of Darwinian evolution, which, you know, in other words, it deprives human existence of all meaning. And that's, in fact, what modern science does. Modern rationalist science deprives us of any meaning in life. And, in fact, they're very proud of it. You should read some of the stuff. Do you contemplate how we were created

or how we burst out from the lower hominids, how there's all these other primates running around? I'm not sure that we did. Not sure that we did? The lower hominids. No. I think there's no evidence for that. There are lower, there are hominids, and then there's us.

And the further back you go, there we are. So we just... Again, this is a Sitchin-esque stuff, except it's called science, that we have to have had more and more primitive beings that were responsible, you know, that gradually... Became us. Stopped being apes and became people. What do you think happened?

We are doing Chauvet and Gobekli Tepe and the Sphinx and so on. I don't buy that for two seconds. Actually, Schock and I, high up on our list. In fact, one of the reasons I got on with Schock. That's more, you need a lot of time. Funny story that how I got hold of Schock because I developed the Sphinx theory all on my own. I'm not a geologist and so, you know, months in the libraries working out the geology

and convinced myself, put together the whole theory of the water weathering. And then it just sat there for 10 years. Serpent in the Sky was published in whenever it was, when, 79, something like that. And nobody paid any attention to it. And then I had a friend who had been teaching English at Cairo, American University in Cairo. And he was very interested.

He got a hold of my work. He was very interested. And one day we were having a talk at Boston University. And one day we were having any talk at Boston University. And one day we're having a dinner and he said, you know, this symbolist Egypt stuff of yours is I think really important. You know, I said, yeah, I think it is too. And he said, well, how do we, how do we,

what can I do as an academic to, you know, to help you? And I said, instantly, I said, find the geologist to look into the water weathering of the Sphinx and I laughed I said I knew from lots of experience that finding an open minded scientist was like finding a fundamentalist Christian who loves his enemies and he said well wait a minute there's a young guy teaching with me anyway one thing or another led to Robert Chalk, and gradually, gradually, at first he was interested in the evidence,

but he didn't want to even, wasn't even supposed to know his name, and finally, because he was up for tenure, and if anybody thinks you're looking for a lost civilization, you're up for tenure, you're not going to get your tenure. Anyway, eventually, Chalk and I met, and as I said, I find not evolution. Evolution is a fact. But Darwinian evolution by natural selection is arguably the greatest superstition ever foisted upon the human race.

What do you believe happened? How do you believe that human beings came to be? happened? How do you believe that human beings came to be? I don't know, but I don't know how mosquitoes came to be either. And the Darwinian explanation is, so-called explanation, is completely untenable.

What's untenable is that human beings would evolve through, or progress through natural selection? That's untenable? That's part of the key. See, when we, Shock I let me let me go backtrack to when I met up with shock and so on you know it was very a cautious meeting I mean he there he was you know involved with this loony heretic me and we were getting on pretty well and having a discussion and I gave gave a lecture. He organized a lecture for

me at Boston University to the faculty and interested students. And that went quite well. This is what we're talking now, 89. And then I went back to Shock's house for dinner. And the subject of evolution came up. And he's not just a geologist and geophysicist, but an paleontologist as well. So he's very into the whole evolutionary hypothesis. And I mentioned, do you know who Stephen Jay Gould was? No, I do not. Well, he died not too long ago, but he was everybody's favorite. He was everybody's favorite.

I'm not sure if he was a geologist or biologist. He was sort of like the equivalent of Carll sagan you know he was right now well he was sort of the carl sagan of geology and evolutionary biology and he's in the new yorker all the time and all that sort of stuff and i said the shocking holding we've got into carefully into the whole question of evolution.

And I said, well, what do you think of Stephen Jay Gould? And he said, oh, he's a bozo. And I instantly knew that. I had somebody I could talk to who realized that this guy was indeed literate, but a bozo. And actually, just without getting deep into this, because this is our next book, after we write The Bridge of Sarahwell's newspeak it's science speak if you look at the two words themselves natural selection is is is promoted as the means whereby things automatically by a series, this is a quote from a very famous current evolution Darwinian Daniel Dennett, a series of lucky coincidences produces mosquitoes and us and all the rest of it.

This is supposed to be the agency for this is natural selection. But if you look at the word natural, if you go to the dictionary, even the great big Oxford English dictionary that I have, and look up the word natural, nowhere does natural mean accidental or fortuitous. Natural simply means of the natural world. So to say that it's natural means that it's accidental. It has nothing to do. The word natural doesn't describe accidental. Nowhere does it connote or suggest fortuitousness. And then you look at selection. This is also selection. Selection presupposes choice and purpose. The roulette wheel does not select the number that the ball is going to fall on. People are selected for the NBA draft. Candidates are selected for running for office.

It suggests choice. Natural suggests hierarchical order of the most sophisticated purpose. So to call an accidental process natural selection is a con job. If they want to describe it, actually Daniel Dennett does a very good job. He says evolution is nothing but a series of lucky coincidences. If they called the whole theory, the theory of lucky coincidences, it would stop sounding scientific. We don't know how any of these things developed and the much derided, what do they call themselves, the intelligent design people, also they use the wrong, bit. They use the wrong language because intelligent design Suggests a designer and then you're talking about God and of course They're not because they're not going to be talking about God and getting away with it in in academic circles But in fact if they called it intelligent creativity, they'd be closer to the mark

Creativity is built into the universal structure. It's creativity itself, but we're in the middle of creativity ourselves. So it's very difficult to discuss this, particularly because we've been brought up in this paradigm of science speak. And actually, after the Bridge of Seiran shock is as much into this as I am and he's you know he's got all the credentials behind him we're gonna do a book I think called it's like if I have my way Darwin Darwin so much title DD DD DDwin debunked darwin declawed darwin dethroned a

Scientist and a scholar deconstruct the cargo cult of the West it's a fraud from beginning to end it is not Science evolution is a process This is this is demonstrable the manner in which it manifests through supposed natural selection is a total fraud so what you're saying just to clarify is that evolution is real but the process of natural selection due to random mutations is something you don't buy you think there's there's more of a design element to it all it more it seems to be acting and responding in a creative and intelligent way. That's right. In other words, it is creativity. Creativity is there before anything is created.

In other words, it's the matrix in which things somehow or another, and we don't know the process, evolve. But it's not's it's not it's not it it probably is not random and in fact there'll there's a ton of stuff when you get into this i have a folder this wide on uh... you know on evolution that shock and i will that shock and i will get into

and i hope pretty soon somewhere along the line that it can't work that way. And the deeper they look, the more they find. I mean, I just had today, actually, he should write Hancock and get this guy, this guy who works with him, Steve Detweiler, a list that he sends out every week of interesting articles. There was, there was one just today, or maybe it was one of the other science things that I get all the time about the intelligence, the intelligence of plants. They actually

communicate with each other and so on. other words we exist within a creative matrix it's not that stuff just happens and all of a sudden there's intelligence it's that there is intelligence and we are the result of the intelligence not that god woke up one morning and said well today i think i will create mosquitoes It's that somehow that it's like imagining, for example, do you suppose that the cells in our body have any idea of, or my body have any idea that I'm here, I am talking to a guy called Joe Rogan for three hours about these subjects? They don't know.

I don't think they know anyway. Something knows. Something that they know. I don't think they know anyway. Something knows. So that's something like us. We're cells in a prodigious but intelligent and directed organism. And that's actually the even though you'd never know it from listening to the baloney that the priests and the mullahs and all of the rabbis and all of these imbeciles talk about. This is actually what's at the basis of all of the religions, however corrupt they've become.

We have a function to perform in the whole gigantic structure. And it's hierarchical and it's organized. And it's up to us to do our bit to do it. But natural selection as I said, it's a linguistic fraud. It's spin. So this is where it gets really crazy. Because where

did the human how did the human animal emerge? If the human animal didn't emerge from lower hominids and we existed in this form from the beginning, is that the supposition? Because they've absolutely proven that there have been lower forms of human beings, other different branches of the human tree that died off. Neanderthal, for example, Australopithecus, there's a bunch of different ones from the past they suppose were what they call, quote-unquote, early man. You don't buy that, that it's early early we don't know where they lived within themselves you see as i

was saying earlier they're assuming these are primitive beings when i talked earlier i mean we're going with our sphinx and our gobekli tepe and our shobe you think that the primitive people who produced shobe and as i said earlier, really our level of development is an inner thing. You can't tell. And as I said earlier, using the image of dance as an enlightened society that expressed itself only in dance and by dancing experienced you know the highest levels of creativity see this is the thing that most of these scientists are are seriously defective human beings they're uncreative by nature and they distrust their own emotions you want to know that creativity you listen to the Beethoven quartets

or walk into the Cathedral of Shanta or the temples of Egypt, and that tells you a lot, even if you can't necessarily explain it. I mean, we, however we are, it may be, let's say, the theosophists in certain of the esoteric societies, you know, have it that we're there from the beginning, but we're only made manifest, however that happens, at a later date. There's absolutely no evidence that, you know, they come up with Lucy or something like that. We don't know. We have no idea what went on inside Lucy's head and heart. None.

But we do know that 65 million... Sorry, we do know that... These are emotionally defective people extrapolating, rationalizing. Basically what they're doing is they're rationalizing their own emptiness. We know that 65 million years ago there was a mass extinction. There was no flowering plants before that. There was a completely different sort of an atmosphere,

completely different animals here. What happened there? I mean, is that obviously if most life was wiped out and the current life that we have right now exists post 65 million years ago. Yeah. But I mean, if you follow this stuff, which I do, you know, every week there's a new theory about what happened 65 million years ago. We don't know. And we, in fact, we don't even know if there were people then. There's some pretty interesting evidence. Tell that dog to settle down.

What? I said tell that dog to settle down or I'm going to go tell him. Come here. Sabu. Sabu. What kind of dog is it? Sabu, come here. Thisu. Let me go. What kind of dog is it? It's here. Sabu, come here.

Sabu. This dude's awesome. He just goes and gets his dog. We should probably wrap this up, too. But I want to ask him about how many minutes are we in? About 2.45. I want to ask him about the stone-deep theory before we take off. Hey, there he is.

What's up, buddy? Is that a bully dog? No. Can't see his face. That is an ancient Egyptian greyhound. An ancient Egyptian greyhound. Wow, wow. You're Egyptian to the bone, son.

Look at you. Well, it was the dogs that got me interested in Egypt to begin with. When my first short story was published in 57, I went to the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, and these dogs stayed pure there. And I've had them ever since. They got me interested in Egypt to begin with. I wanted to ask you one more question about the development of human beings. Are you familiar with the work of Terence McKenna? Yes.

Were you familiar with his stoned ape theory? Yeah, I don't go for it. You don't go for it. His theory for the folks at home is the doubling of the human brain size occurred over a period of 2 million years, which he coincides with the rainforest receding into grasslands and then the lower hominids coming out of the trees,

experimenting with new food sources, and eating psilocybin mushrooms. That's actually funny because for somebody who did a lot of experimenting with ayahuasca, which I've also done actually, he's extrapolating and trying to make his experience fit in with Darwinian theory, and he should know better than that because he was a very smart guy. So you're feeling... I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I'm more inclined to think, you know, listen,

virtually all of the ancient texts talk about a kind of Eden-like state, you know, an enlightened state that we've descended from. In other words, we start at the top and degenerate. And to me, this is not so difficult to imagine. I mean, it happens often that things, the great teacher comes along and everything disappears. You know, we tend to think that everything's like technology. And you start off, you know, with the 1892 Mercedes and suddenly we've got a, you know, 2012 Ferrari. But with Egypt, for example, it seems to be at its height at the very beginning with no period of development.

We don't know. So it's just, it's such a massive mystery and you are all your years of exploring it have literally got you to the point where you're like no one knows and any talking about it is just nonsense well and anyway talking about it as though you know in definitive terms yeah in definitive terms just so crazy we just we just We just plain don't know. But one of the things you can depend upon actually is that who are you going to take your lessons from? The guys who invented the bobblehead doll and the atom bomb or the guys who did Schott and the Temple of Luxor and the late quartets?

Me I'll go with the creatives any day because I am one myself. Not that I've done a late quartet. How long was a period between the decline of the Old Kingdom and the time where they discovered the pyramids? There was no one living in them when they were discovered. When Napoleon's army marched through Egypt, there was no one living in the pyramids. That's where we lost a lot of information. Nobody was living in the difficult to live in i'm sorry i meant that area there was no one there weren't they didn't inhabit that area oh yeah sure they did i mean it was all farmland around there they're they're in the desert but just you know a couple of few hundred yards below

where the sphinx is is all the valley so So, yeah, it's all farmland and everything. So my point was, like, what time did it all fall apart where it was essentially the Sphinx and the pyramids and all that were stopped being used for what they were, were abandoned, and then people had to come back to them

and go, wow, look at what we have here. Yeah, that you can sort of put a date to. I mean, the Egyptian religion died shortly after, you know, first, second century A.D. It was no longer being practiced, although the knowledge percolated down into Alexandria and, you know, dispersed around the Middle East,

the library of Alexandria. You know, this was a hotbed of intellectual and philosophical activity, always. I mean, Alexandria was always there, but the actual Egyptian religion as such died somewhere, let's say, in the middle of the 3rd century A.D. But as I said earlier, then the Hermetic disciplines and alchemy and astrology and magic and number symbolism and neoplatonism all of that knowledge continued throughout you know throughout european civilization i mean this the the renaissance the the great figures of the renaissance were always credited with with opening the way out of superstition and so on, you know, and into modern science. They did open the way to modern science, but they themselves believed that their own knowledge,

when Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion, he said, I've rediscovered the secrets of the Egyptians. It was a given to them that all of this advanced knowledge was available in Egypt, but it was Schwaller who actually, this is one of his great, great, great, great contributions to human thought, it was Schwaller who proved that they had it. No mistaking it. And they had it, and it came out of nowhere. And they had it, and it came out of nowhere.

And there was nothing before it, and then all of a sudden, this incredibly intelligent civilization. As I said, Joe, you don't know what was there before. It's just too crazy. You keep going back. And they keep going back. And the further they go back, all of a sudden, they come across something

that disproves everything they thought before. Look, Chauvet. This is wonderful. This is spectacular art in the cave how are those people living well they didn't have television sets the bobblehead dolls but if you can paint like that you you've got something serious going on inside you and who says they invented it you see the further back you, the more tenuous everything gets. Recently, there have been some interesting studies on flint knapping. In other words, cutting flint to make different kinds of tools.

Well, this is actually a pretty advanced art. And they're finding flint tools, very sophisticated flint tools, that go back 200,000 years. Well what was going through their heads that they're doing this stuff? We don't know. What was going through their hearts? They've discovered this is again only the last couple of years that sea travel was going on between North Africa and I'm not sure if it was Cyprus or some of the Greek islands. It's either a hundred thousand years ago or two hundred thousand years ago. So if you follow this stuff, the more that's discovered,

the more you become impressed that some kind of advanced knowledge was always there and even that is based upon the technologists. It's the only way we tend to think, a technological assessment of what they know. We don't know what was going on inside them. We don't know how intelligent they were and that the possibility is that they were this intelligent from the beginning. Maybe. And it isn't even a question of intelligence. It's more a question really of experience i mean how much intelligence do you need to let's say to be moved by a beethoven quartet so you don't think

about this stuff it's just we're brought up in such a way by the by this iniquitous church of progress of ours to think that you have to be able to do complex mathematics and you know all kinds of stuff in order to be civilized and then even even when even when you have that point of view the further back you go you see that they had a cosmology and you see that they had a geometry and they had technology to produce a gobekli tepe and a Chauvet. So the whole Darwinian paradigm has exploded when you take all of those things into consideration. Is it possible that the Darwinian model works if you just take the timeline way back

and then people evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we thought? Well, that's what they say but why should it in other words in other words what is there in the what is there in the nature of the hydrogen atom that presupposes that that things are going to get more complicated and sophisticated who says well we say by our own designs on earth our own physical you know our creations why should that be accidental maybe why should there not be why should there not be let's say a a plan to it just as for example just as we grow from a fertilized ovum and we go through this complex process of gestation and then we're born and then it's up to us what we're going to do with our lives and so on who says that's an accident

yeah yeah and who says that we're not acting i mean to begin with how do you prove an accident see these assholes who have no creativity in them are determined to make the world sound as meaningless as they experience it. As bland and passionless and as divine. This is deliberate because they don't know any better. And in fact, they hate creative people for the most part. Well, that's one of the beautiful things about the title of your DVD, Magical Egypt. Okay, well, that's what it is.

It really is. It's true. It's magical. It really is. And thank you very much for coming on the show today, man. You have explained a lot of things in some incredible detail.

It's been an honor to get to ask you questions because I've been a huge fan of your work for many, many years now and I'm a huge fan of that DVD series. And I would love to go eventually to Egypt with you someday. We should do that. We should figure something out.

It doesn't have to be that eventual. All you have to do is talk about it and get 10 people from your very extensive store of people to go and even get a free trip. I could do that. We can make that happen. We're going to do it. I'd like to say one thing because I have a list of things that I want to talk about. Okay. One of them is, I don't know, do you know who Gerald Salente is?

No. He's a trends analyst, and he's a very, very interesting guy. He's a colleague. I've heard his name before. Much of my time these days is working with him. I'm a co-writer and executive editor of the Trends Journal. I mean, he's forecast trend and he's probably been more accurate over the last 30 years than anyone else. And we put out, he puts out, we put out, he puts out really, something called the Trends

Journal. And it's very interesting because what he sees coming up is not pretty. And he's right a lot of the time. And, I mean, I try to tell people that they really, because I'm talking the esotericism and the ancient Egypt and the meaning of the real civilization. And Gerald is, but between us, and we've got really some very high level people

working with us, a brilliant illustrator and we put out this journal that, boy, we, I mean this thing is coming unstuck in a hurry and if people don't individually and collectively prepare for it, they're going to be unprepared and so we put out the the trends journal i think it's are you talking about a collapse in the economy the end of civilizations that kind of thing no the end of civilization is we know it very likely yeah unless unless enough people act together quickly and they probably won't so you know the workers talk about the gold and i don't think you've got to get away plan and who can't

where's the where can people get this newsletter uh... it's it's a it's a journal lookup go to friends journal of google up gerald salanti c l a m t is a very interesting guys. He's a real flame-throwing, excitable Italian. He's on Alex Jones all the time. But the journal is a really interesting publication,

and I'm very proud to be a big part of it. So look it up for yourself. Well, check it out. And your website is jawest.com and you don't have a twitter yet and there you find out about the trips and all kinds of other stuff and you don't have a twitter yet

no I'm on facebook but I never do and my daughter is looking after it for me tell your daughter to get you a twitter we need a John Anthony West twitter we'll populate that very quickly and people can find out about your trips. Maybe my daughter will do that. Because as I said,

we're reviving, we're reincarnating our Ancient Wisdom Foundation. And by the way, I should put a plug in that before we put it up. Because it's... I told you, I mean, we're pretty sure, I can't be a promise yet, that we've got this incentive thing going.

And if you pull up ancient wisdom foundation dot org there'll be some information about the projects that we're involved in and and i really do believe that that unless unless enough of us of humanity goes back to or recreates a civilization based upon the ancient principles. In other words, we're not going to rebuild pyramids again or mummify our pharaohs or anything like that. But the principles, I mean Egypt is a one-issue civilization. It's based upon the quest for immortality, about the notion of the immortality of the soul, which I absolutely believe in. And without that, no civilization is possible. And the principles upon which Egypt and the other ancient civilizations are founded is

the principles are eternal. I mean, the civilization is past. As I said, we're not going to mummify our pharaohs again, but without That understanding and and without an understanding of where we're heading at the moment there's plenty of scare stuff out there a lot of it is valid, but most of the scare stuff doesn't have the the antidote built into it and I like to think that that we do I think like think that this conversation we just had is one of none of despair, but of the possibility of Renaissance and

boy No, and it's something you know this Let's say a spiritual doctrine It's not something you believe in the police is useless. It's just credulity. It not something you believe in. The belief is useless. It's just fragility. It's something you do. You have to do it. Well, John, I think also there's just the ability to spread that kind of information and knowledge to people and to be able to do it in a form like this.

It's very rare and very new. And I think that the Internet and this open access to information that we have on it is one of the best hopes that we have for turning this whole thing around. And thank you very much, my friend. Thank you very much for doing this. I would like to do it any other time with you. We'll eventually have to work some kind of a cruise thing out, and we'll all go down to Egypt

and get our minds blown with you. Thank you very much, sir. Really appreciate it. Take care, John. Take care, brother. My pleasure. Bye. That. Are we done? That for me, man. Tell pleasure. Bye. That. Are we done?

That for me, man. That it? Tell me when we're off Skype. Okay. Okay. That for me, man. That was amazing. Holy shit, that guy's awesome.

Yeah. That was, you know, I mean, you need a guy who's out there doing something like that to get that kind of information out, and I'm just so happy that he exists. Check out his Magical Egypt DVD series. It'll fucking blow you away. who's out there doing something like that to get that kind of information out. I'm just so happy that he exists. Check out his Magical Egypt DVD series. It'll fucking blow you away. Thank you to The Fleshlight for sponsoring our podcast. Go to JoeRogan.net.

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It's the shit. I take it every day. I take it for every podcast. I take it for every comedy show. I take it before Joe Jets. Oh, that's it for this week of the Joe Rogan experience podcast. But if you're fucking podcast starving, you're like, dude, I ain't heard you talk enough. We are going to be back Brian as well, uh, on the ice house Chronicles tonight. Um, Feb, what is it? June the fuck are we? June 8th, Friday night. If you want to listen to it on iTunes or any other place,

go to deathsquad.tv. It's the Ice House Chronicles, and you can subscribe to it on iTunes and get that shit. It's all, of course, for free, like all the shit we give you guys. Because we love you. Big kisses, and we'll see you soon. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.

Ayer Badurchi. Jihad.