Historical Parallels in Ancient Literature

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Today I'm talking with Luke Caverns, an anthropologist and explorer who's flagged over a hundred archaeological sites that aren't on any map. He's planning the largest LIDAR scan of the Amazon ever attempted. What is he trying to see Jeff Bezos naked? Not that Amazon the Amazon jungle? At that makes more sense. Lidar fires laser pulses from aircraft through the jungle canopy and maps what's buried underneath. And over the last few years it's, been revealing megacities and ancient highways , a civilization buried under the Amazon that nobody knew was there. Today we're covering that, the Minoans of Crete as Plato's Atlantis, and the Almecs and their Jaguar priest cult. Yeah, cult based on cats hot ps. He also has a theory about what happened to Alexander the Great's body that I hadn't heard before. It's pretty interesting . As always, after the episode, I'll come back in and do a breakdown of what we co vered, when I can't prove, and when I can't. Until then, let's go down to the basement. Look to the bas ement. Ay man, thanks so much for having me here. This is amazing. I'm so excited. I've got a whole so much to talk to you about. We're going to go all over the ancient world . I'm not a professional. It's chaos. Just bear with me. All right. So I just want to start with of all the sites that you've looked at , what was the what was the one or the one that sticks with you that goes that makes you go, that is not natural . That's man made. You have one favorite ? One that's now you mean as far as like a natural formation that I think looks man made ? Yes, or something that you saw in LIDAR that maybe okay that's someone made that. Yeah, absolutely . Well, you know, there's I'm running a project right now that I guess I'm announcing it right here for the first time. I don't have a name for the project but it's a Lidar project that I have been working on for about three years now across the southeastern US and now it just expanded to the Amazon, which is crazy . So I was given access a few years ago to a LIDAR data set that a team put together when they were trying to map comet impacts across the United States . And anybody can get access to LIDAR of the US. The difficulty there is having like a map that's been processed and the information has been condensed. Otherwise your computer will just shut down. It's crazy. Just like giant raw images. Yeah, yeah, you know, it could be like hundreds of gigs of data. It will just shut down your computer. So it has to be processed by a professional who really knows what they're doing. And so I was just lucky to be given that sort of dataset . And so what they realized was while they were looking for these common impacts, they were finding mound sites . And they weren't anthropologists that didn't know anything about ancient history, but they like',re oh, you know, Luke , I'm friends with one of them. His name's Chris . He sent it over to me. And so I started searching through it and there was a lot that I had to teach myself about analyzing Lidar and having to figure out what's natural and what's not or what's modern and what's ancient, that can be a big thing. And false positives with like flood zones and with dredging. So they'll try to clear up the sides of rivers and they'll make what looks like just hundreds of mounds stream together. Over time you start to realize like, oh, okay, you know, these things are too sharp, there's so many of them together, you know? So you learn how to process that all that all that image data. And all in all I've mapped at least like eighty two archaeological sites in the United States, probably a lot of them, probably so many of them are on private property that are not officially documented in books or papers that I could find or maps that I could find. Now that said , you know, there's probably some there may be some obscure papers out there that are aware of some of these, whatever. They're not popularly known . Some of them are massive, man. I've mapped sites that are way out in the forest in Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas. That's not Single structures that are two hundred and fifty yards long? Yeah , two hundred and fifty yards long by one hundred yards wide and there's probably five or six of the structures all together. Some of them have for anybody listening, you could look up something called the Hopewell Road, which looks like these highways. Huge, right? Yeah, huge. And I've found structures that have those in them. And I have a I have friend who he's about my age and he's more of like an open minded archaeologist and and more accepting to, I guess, like outlaw archaeology, which is kind of what I do . You know, now I'm working with my team at Base Map. They are providing me going to be providing me. And we've already scanned like some sites near Moundville. We discovered an ancient site near M allvillene on private property , just amazing stuff. And so I'm working with them now . But essentially, what we do is all these sites that I have mapped using USGS and charted , you know, that's probably the resolution is very, very low. And these guys can go out there and scan something that's so precise that it's down to like a golf ball. Really in resolution. And then they can build three D models of the ancient city. Would that's with satellite Lidar? Or is that with on the LIDAR? They have these Ladar drones, they've got like a full on bus. They brought us to my house a few weeks ago. It's cool. So I haven't announced this at all. This is the first time I've talked about this. I've been working on this for a long time, but essentially what we're going to do is rebuild the mound builder world. And like all these cities that people aren't aware of , I find it using US GS LIDAR , then either they go out there or if I can go with them, I go with them and send a drone up, map it. You know, it doesn't matter what property it's on because it's legal to map things with your dron . And then we can reconstruct the ancient city down to like a golf ball size resolution . And so I can have this huge three D model of the city and then I can virtually rebuild it using AI. Now you have to get very particular and you have to make sure it's historically accurate according to the sources, but we're going to start visually rebuilding the mound builder world. And we're going to do this with dozens of sites . And well, the Mound Build a world that spans thousands of years. Are you targeting thousands of years? No, not targeting any one thing in particular. Mounts? Yeah, yeah, we're not targeting like we were talking about Minigo, we're not targeting Adena or Hopewell or the Moundville sites or anything like that. It's just the sites that I have found and mapped. And so each one of them will have to be researched within the context of that site. So yeah, so that's what we're working on now. And then we've got another Lidar project that we're trying get the permission for eventually, which is going to be in American Samoa. The Polynesian world is so untouched and Light Arc can completely change that . And then we are I'm working with the Terra Incognita research institute. It's a group that's put together by a couple of archaeologists and they are , you know, it's it's sort of like independent archaeology, you know, but these guys are credentialed very, very well credentialed, like full on, you know, very professional academ and they're working on a project in the Amazon. And I can't say too much about this yet, but if we can complete this project and we can get their permits . Myself, I'm going to go down and document it and essentially publicize it. The base map team will be the one who scans everything using their LIDAR technology and then Terra Incognita Research Institute. They're the ones who will actually go out to the site, process the data, they're there, they're the guys who get all the permissions and everything . It'll be the largest LIAR scan that's ever done in the Amazon. I can't wait for that. Yeah, ever been done. Ever been done . And we've put together a I don't know how much I can get into this, but we're putting together a proposal of just at least it's myself and base map. We just played around with this idea , but of what it would cost to get the entire Amazon Lidard and how long it would take. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And they can do it. If we get the funding to do it, it could be done. And so we're just putting that together, just to throw it out there to get people, it won't actually happen probably, but just to give people an idea that it is possible. And how much would it take for that to be possible? But if this goes through a Terrain Cognitive Research Institute and Base Map and myself, it will be the largest LIRS scan ever done in the Amazon. I can't wait for that. You come from along a line of treasure hunters , cattle rustlers, outlaws . When did you realize that you were carrying on the family tradition in a methodology using methodology ? Not so much pirate. You're actually a scientist. No, no, yeah, yeah, I'm not stealing anything anymore, but when I first heard you talk about cattle rustling, I'm like, does he know that means stealing ? Yeah, they were they were they did a, you know, some of those guys did a little bit of both, right? Like you would your day job would be cattle driving , your night job would be cattle rustling, you know? They got and treasure hunting, which actually means looting and all that good stuff. Yeah . You know, so it started . My love for anthropology began when actually listening to my other grandpa, my mom's dad. He was a pastor and a missionary and he loved the ancient world . And I would be , you know, they would drag me to their like down home East Texas little church and I'd listen to my grandpa preach and they would have these old B ibles and at the front and the back of the Bibles would be these watercolor paintings of like some ancient Mesopotamian city, sometimes it would be Egypt or something like that. And there might be a little map there and it's all kind of watercolored and very sort of romantic looking . And during the whole time that I would listen to the sermon , still to this day, my favorite thing if I listen to a sermon is when they actually talk about the ancient biblical world and you get to sort of hear what that would have been like. And then it always gets dragged off into something else. But the coolest part is the history. And so I'd sit there looking at the maps, I'd look at the watercolor paintings and stuff, and I would just every Sunday I would just imagine what were ancient times like, what were ancient times like? And over time , I began becoming dissatisfied with the way a lot of sermons would be told. Not my grandf ather, but like, you know, going to church with my parents or something. And I would be like, well, you know, I wish that they would actually tell us more about what was life like for those guys. What were they telling you that you were uncomfortable with just yeah, a lot of sermons in church into becoming like a motivational speech about like, you know, let me let me take this one verse and extrapolate it on a way and pull it totally out of its ancient context to make it relevant to you. It's like, you know , the Bible's masterfully written and put together book. You can actually just tell me that story and I will be able to get the meaning out of it. Yes, you will . Or if they wanted to be more profound , educate the people that are in the church on the context of the ancient world in the world that those people are living in and teach us the Bible in the way that they would have understood it because that'll be much more profound than you trying to extrapolate this one verse and make it fit to me. I don't care about all that. And it never resonated with me. And so I remember I'd talk to my parents and be like, Yeah, but you know, what was that like? What was that like? And that was Anthropology that was the beginning of me being an anthropologist. Wanted to know what is that life like just day to day life being an ancient person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are the struggles that you live with? Because I remember saying, I had this what I thought was a profound thought when I was like a teenager and I was like, I was like, you know, the Bible is actually like a horror story. All those people's lives were awful. You know, nobody , you know, it's like I guess Old Testament for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean, you look at the disciples, the things that they went through, the way that they all ended up, the struggles that they had, they're all impoverished. It's a that's a really hard life . But that gets glossed over, you know, with the modern church and everything. And so it was me really trying to dig into the ancient world and get a sense of what that was like. And once that started happening, I started realizing, wait, my whole perception, the way that I'm being taught about this isn't reflective of the ancient world. And so that was when my love for wanting to know what the ancient world was really like came from. The idea of wanting to be an explorer along with that because that could just go into being an archaeologist or an anthropologist or a historian , you know ? And so it was that coupled with my dad's side of the family . Going back to the eighteen nineties, those guys are cat tle drivers. They were , you know, the parkers that are running cattle up and down. So they would take cattle to the parkers in San Antonio. And so it was like West Texas to San Antonio. That's where they're operating. And you know, hearing their stories of the search for the gold of these lost mines of Reagan Canyon and this huge debacle that happens when they're trying to find that gold and so many of the Reagan brothers die. And well, tell us that story real fast. Well, I love it. There's so many there's not a lot that's known about that, but this is a sort of sort of a synops is. And a lot of it like if you go to, especially here in the Southwest, like if you go to a used bookstore and you find a book called The Sons of Coronado or Lost Lost Spanish Treasure or something like that, there will be a chapter in there about my family. And the Reagan family. Yeah, yeah. And so essentially what happens is so they own these big ranches that are on these plateaus above Reagan and in around Reagan Canyon. And Reagan Canyon back in the fifteen hundreds was one of the places where the Spaniards would come through as they're exploring the American Southwest and in the sixteen hundreds as well. And there would be bandits that would sit up in, well, I guess all the way up to the eighteen hundreds, really . There would be bandits that would sit up in those situation in those hillsides and they would sack these Spanish caravans coming through, kill everybody, drag the gold and up into the crevices in these riversides or I should say little canyons all dried up. And so there's all these legends of this lost gold that's out there . Ever notice how every nicotine option makes you choose between looking dumb, smelling bad, or carrying around some weird gadget that needs charging every four hours? There's got to be a better way. And that's why people are switching to knick knacks, myself included. Nicknacks are fully dissolvable nicotine lozenges packed with real essential oils for real flavor. They come in both three and six milligram strengths and nine delicious flavors. Right now I'm loving the tangerine. It's my go to when I'm needing an afternoon pick me up. And the best part, you can use them basically anywhere. Planes, work, concerts, road trips, wherever. 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I think he's riding a mule. And he was he was an African Mexican boy who probably was a slave in Mexico and he's fleeing to the United States. And so when he arrives, he doesn't have anywhere to go. So my family just takes him in and he starts working for the heart starts working for my family on their ranch . And he is driving some of the cattle around to new grazing spots. And it was actually him and one of the other brothers that are out there. They see a crevice in the mountainside and they go over and explore it. And it's this open mine that had nobody knows where the mine was. Nobody knows where the mine is today . Something I'd like to do is go back out there. There's two places where my family is heavily involved in the American Southwest. One is in New Mexico, one's in West Texas. I fully mapped, remapped the one in New Mexico. You did. Yeah, yeah, I could tell you that story. You went out there, right Yeah, I've been out there three times. And so yeah, it's on my grandfather's oh, I'll tell you about that in just a second. But so saying in the eighteen nineties , they find that mine and they pull out all the gold, but there's no specifics of like, okay, well what was in there? They just know that it was it was treasure, it was gold, it was, you know, wealth, whatever. So they found gold ? As the story goes, sure. I have no idea where this gold is today, but yes, they found they found gold, they found they found treasure . And so essentially it launches into this huge game of thrones of like, well who really who really found it? Bill Kelly tries to run away with some of the gold. Some of the brothers try to run away with some of the gold. Anyways , this old story. Yeah, yeah, it's it's this old story. And there's so many different ways that the story is told. I've never read a book that actually I've never read two books that tell the story the same way, but essentially only one of the brothers makes it out of this huge debacle. You don't even know if he actually made it with some of the money, but and the story just ends, but my family lineage somehow disappears from West Texas and reappears in East Texas, and they're now involved in oil. So yeah, exactly. So that's it. So there's there's this gap of maybe like a decade or more and all of a sudden my family is in East Texas and now they're involved in oil and very wealthy and everything . And so they're involved in oil in East Texas and that would be my great grandfather His son, Leslie Reagan , has this idea of also wanting to be an explorer and a treasure hunter and everything. And I should say just as a preface, none of this money exists today. Nothing that I do is bankrolled by my family lineage or anything like that . But so my grandfather, Leslie Reagan, he has this dream of also being an explorer . And so what was he doing instead ? Well, he was just, he was just managing the family oil business. Like they had they had a private airport and private jets and all kinds of crazy stuff. And so yeah, it's wild. Where's your trust? I know. I know. I wish I wish we had I wish we had . I wish we had any of this today because man, I could all this liear stuff I'm talking to you about. I would have done this years ago of course. But so he goes off to New Mexico to try to find this legendary place called Coronado's Seven Lost Gold mines, or the seven lost gold mines of New Mexico. And this is written about in, I think it's True West Magazine. They did like three magazines on my grandpa. I should have brought this for you. This would have been cool. Next time I'll bring you something yeah. You can buy these on eBay for like two dollars. There's a bunch of them. Yeah, yeah. And so he tries to go out there to find these legendary lost gold mines. And he wants to get into gold mining in general. So this police officer that lives in this town, I won't say what town, but this police officer officer that lives in the town essentially knocks on his trailer door. You know, they all lived in the Chrome trailers and everything said, Hey, you know, I know you're out here looking for such, I've been doing this for years as well. You should come with me. We don't really know how long the time period is between them beginning to look for these lost gold mines and actually finding them, but they do find them. And by nineteen fifty five, nineteen fifty six Ish, they found the gold mines, these old Spanish gold mines and expanded them and turned it into I shouldn't say the company name here, but well in the fifties, this is somebody's land, right? This is my grandpa's land. Yeah. Well, now he bought it. Yeah, yeah. But it was actually it was actually state land. Sure. Yeah. So he buys it from the state. He has like a claim on it. But then I think he actually owned the land rather than just having a claim . And so he expands this and turns this into a full blown gold mining company . And the way that it got is tough because if I say the name, you can go find it. But you know, and I don't want people walking around out there, but one of the legends that he would tell my family was that at night when they were camping out at the gold mines, you could hear these bells like ringing like ding ding, ding ding, and they were very, very faint. And he never actually found the source of the bells, but what he thought it was was that when the Spaniards were mining out these in their gold mines they would have canaries, but they would also have bells. And if the bells are moving, you would know that the air is moving. You're getting clean air through the mines. And so that's like one of the main legends around these mines. And I've been out there, I've listened. I can't hear the bells. They probably rusted away since he opened them back up. But so he found this place called the Seven Lost Gold Mines of New Mexico, or Coronado Seven Lost Gold Mines, ultimately, he expanded it to between thirty eight to forty two different mines. Wow . It was a really, really profitable operation and a smelter ended up exploding. One or two guys died during this, and this was in a time, this is nineteen sixty two or ' sixty three . This was in a time where like if you were in a business partner with somebody, especially out the middle of nowhere, they could run away with the money, you never see it again, never see them again. And so my grandfather's business partner ran away with everything and my family was financially destitute . I mean like, no money at all. Nothing were dry. No, they weren't dry. They had to close in most of them . There's a few of them that were still open, like at least three of them are still open . Yeah, I'm pretty sure mine. No, no, no, no, but the whole portal is there. He closed in everything and at least in the nineteen sixties when this was more easily more easily done . He still he still owned the land, I believe, still had a claim on it, closed all the mines and all of and he made new maps and none of the maps have the actual location of the proper ty on them. So he thought one day he'd be able to build up the money to go back and reopen them. So he kept the claim on him. And I don't think the claim was relinquished until like nineteen eighty nine, so several years after he passed. And he didn't mark the mines, I guess. Not on the maps. Exactly to protect them. And so I inherited these maps four years ago, and I inherited everything that he had found. Oh, I should also say that when they were down in these mines, he would discover Native American threads and pottery and like textiles and stuff. And so he'd bring them back up and then when the wind would hit them, they would disintegrate in his hand s. So there's pottery and things that he's found . And I found I found Native American pottery when I was out there too. He find all these artifacts and they would all disintegrate. Of course, he didn't know how to preserve them. He wasn't an archaeologist, but he's fascinated about all of this. And you were able to hold on to some of that stuff. We have them in boxes at my parents' house in North Carolina. To show this to the public at some point. No, no, no, no, no, this wasn't , ye, thisah wasn't that kind of thing. This was like this is like those were his personal treasures, you know? He was he was in it for the gold money, right? And the excitement and the adventure and I think the local fame, like he was known in Texas, right ? And I guess the magazines, like he liked that. So this is treasure hunting, full on treasure hunting for notoriety and wealth, right? Americans were crazy for these stories then. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So yeah, I don't think he had any intentions of like putting them in a museum in Albuquerque or anything like that . So now they just sit at my parents' house . And so I got these maps and I was just like , I'd ask my dad, I said , Dad when's the last time somebody went out here? And he goes, Well, you know what I don't I don't really know, but I bet you know, I bet you I know the last time that it happened. And he told me he had a vague memory of sitting in a car with his mom out in the middle of the desert while his dad and some other guy that he was with got out of the car and they were gone for like hours until until nightfall and he just remembered sitting in this car for hours with my mom. And he was like, I bet you I was there. And my dad and some other guy went to go look at the minds. So he's like, I think he told me that was the seventies. He said, That was probably the last time that anybody was ever really out there . And he didn't know where it was. He didn't have the first, my dad didn't have the first idea. Now, my dad, I should say , he's a lover of history . My dad was a was a cave explorer like when he was probably about my age and younger than me in Missouri, he explored and mapped caves. He was like a splunker or a speliologist I say sort of amateur spiliologist loves . That's the word for Squonker now. Someologist. Maybe so yeah. I think so. And so he has this sense of adventure in his own unique way that wasn't based on like lost Spanish gold or anything like that. Loves American history, just obsessed with American history. And then my dad had to climb his way out of this like financially destitute place that my family ultimately ended up in. And then it was me, I was kind of more able to inherit what my grandfather and other grandfathers had, that sort of spirit that they had. But so anyways , I was obsessed with finding the location of these mines and where they were at. So they're all drawn by hand by my grandfather and of course he's drawing it by walking around and he's doing it by eye, right? So it's not exact not even close to being like what you could see on satellite imagery . And so I had to spend I had to spend the only thing I knew was the city that they were based out of. So they were based out of this one tiny little town and I have this vast open wilderness around it that I have to map. And so it took me nine months wow to find the location on Google Earth. And he didn't even have north south marked on the map. Took me nine months . What did you find ? So I knew that I found the location. It was just like I could tell you the mines you found the seven gold mines? Yeah, I did. Yeah, I found Yeah, so it was like weird. Like he found them and then he made sure that nobody would know where the location was. So then I found him. It was cool. So I took a friend of mine and a couple months later we drove out to New Mexico and And we cut a bunch of locks and drove through a bunch of private property straight out into the middle of nowhere . And we found I confirmed it on the ground. And I'm walking around out there and picking up these like old bottles and cans that are out there. It doesn't look like anybody had been there. There's no, you know, from the map and from Google Earth, you can see where these paths are where these old cars would have been driving around there, but you can't see anything when you're actually there in person. There's no remnants left of the little roads , but there's old pocket whiskey glasses . Could you feel it though? I mean , yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah . Yeah, man. It's a it's a grandpa's whisky . Well, I looked into that. So there was a I forget what the name of the brand was, but one of my buddies had a he's got grock like satellite . And so we would ask Grock a bunch of questions and he would tell me about it. And we found this one really expensive pocket whiskey. It was the bottom half of the glass that was broken and it still had the label the brand name on it. And so we looked it up and it was a very expensive pocket whiskey. It must have been his . And so I kept every little thing I could put in like a plastic bag, I kept all of it with me. I even had like rusted cans and you know just stuff that I know must have been his. I would have done the same thing. Just gathered all up. Yeah, yeah, and there's more out there too. There's so much more. Every time I've gone back, I find more laying on the ground. What about the mines? Did you get in there? I'm I want to go back but I want to go back and do it properly that means minds No, no, no, no, well I don't want to admit it's doing anything illegal but no I want to go back Windows . Yeah, I want to go back in with something that can monitor the air quality because it only takes a couple seconds to die from toxic air in a month. You did see the openings. Oh yeah, yeah . I went really close to going down in one. I went probably twenty feet in one that was open. I mean, there's one of 'em that's like as open as this room is and it just goes back forever. In fact, I saw a very endangered species in one of them, the blackotfedo black footed ferret , they're critically endangered in New Mexico. And there was one sitting up on a ledge. It was looking at me and I didn't realize it was there until it started moving. And it ran off and I was like, that wasn't a rat. That wasn't what the what was that? And so I was like going through species that live in mammals that live in New Mexico and I found a black footed ferret and I was like, oh I actually found where it lived, where one of 'em live. And obviously because it's like twenty five miles out in the wilderness, right? It's not around humans at all. So that was cool. But there's a main shaft opening. There's two other ones. That was kind of like a periphery mine that's way off to the east. The main central area , there's two so basically you would have like one shaft that descends down at forty five degrees. So it descends down at forty five degrees. It heads west and then there is a refuge shaft that comes straight up, that's probably like one hundred and fifty feet up. So it's just this hole. You walk out in the middle of a desert and there's just a massive fifteen foot by fifteen foot wide hole. And it's so deep that no matter how close you get to the edge , you can never see the bottom and you can feel the air like shooting out of it. Like you can feel the air hitting you as you as you walk up to it. There's no structure platform, nothing just hole. Well, I throw a rock down there and you can hear it go ding ding and it hits all this metal. So there's structures down there. And so my dad went and one of my other family members must be must be like a cousin of mine, but a niece of my dad . She had five other maps that we didn't have. And so we got those from her. And they were actually of the mine layouts. And one and this was after I had been to the sites. So I was now able to actually see how the mines worked and interconnected with each other under the ground. Who drew those maps? My grandfather. Yeah, so he was a cartographer. He drew all this stuff. How did she find those? Those would have been she inherited them. Yeah, yeah. So like two different, you know, my uncles and my dad inherited some of the maps and I think all the artifacts and she because her because her father was my dad's brother, right? She ended up getting some of the interior maps. So it was kind of split up. So now I have everything other than the artifacts of my grandpa's gun, everything is in my office. Like all the maps, everything . I've got them all like framed up and some people online sometimes there's photos of my office that get posted that I've posted and you can see the maps . But yeah, all drawn out by my grandpa and so much of it went unexplored. There are these huge shafts and these are diarite mines. So super they're probably still stable . I just have to know that the air quality is good enough to grow in them. But these massive shaft s that he chined flashlight down and there was no end to it. And so he has written on the map. It would say dug out by Spanish unmapped. Dug out by Spanish, unmapped. That's crazy. So they'd been there for hundreds of years and never he never got to explore everything. And down at the bottom of this hundred and fifty foot shaft, there's this massive open room with these other tunnels that take that head off, but they had collapsed and he hadn't explored them. And you know, it's very expensive to go in and like shore it all up to make sure it's safe. And so it's just this massive sprawling mine complex . And I would very much like to get lowered down into them to be able to explore them, but I've got to do it with the right equipment. It's expensive to put together . But I definitely want to monitor air quality. Now, so what would be the bad air down there? What would cause that? I don't know if I can explain it like a geologist does, but essentially, you know, if there's not enough ventilation, the oxygen will get sucked out of a room and it'll be I guess you could say it's filled with toxic gas , but sometimes it's just like it's like when people are sitting in their car in a garage and the garage fills with carbon monoxide and then they die you're out. You're going . And sometimes there's some there's some gases that can build up in minds that there's tons of people who they're walking around in the desert, there's this big mind opening, they go, oh what's they fall asleep immediately? One inhalation of that it interacts with your b rain, basically shuts your brain off, you fall unconscious and people just fall straight into a mind. Now my grandpa, what he always wrote about them was that they were clean aired minds. Like if you read the magazin es , they're granite and diarite mines. And so something about that makes them safer inherently. I'm not one hundred percent certain on that, but I just didn't I didn't want to take their So but I am going to go down in them with like a full on team and everything and we're going to explore them. But I was just there a few months ago. And yeah, when I'm there , when I'm there, it's one of those things where it's like, oh, this is a special place . This really is this is, you know, 's probably this one specific place on the planet , there's my family probably has more connect ion to this one specific place than anybody else on the planet that ever has because it's out in the middle of the wilderness, right? And yeah, I sit there and even though I don't own the property, it's like spiritually, I'm like, yeah, this is my place. This is my place . You know, my grandfather's dreams lived and died here. And my grandpa thought about this place for the rest of his life. Do you think he'd be proud to know that you took up the mantle? Yeah, man . 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I have been there. I want you to know that there is a way out . And that's exactly what PDSD is there for. Get your free thirty second personalized assessment today at pdsdet com slash basement. That's pdsdopt com. slash basem ent PDS BT com slash basement The mines are also in the Helo Wilderness Yeah I won't I won't but the mines are also in the Hela wilderness. And one of those magazines describe him as a Hela explorer. And it's cool because our it's our country's first designated wilderness area and so there's some history there and and you know, I don't know if people realize this but like my connection to my grandfather on my dad 's healing . Yeah my connection to my grandfather on my dad's side is only through stories and through like spirit. You know, you didn't know him. No, I never actually never actually knew him. It's all it's this shadow that looms over my life. Doesn't it drive you crazy? Don't you wish you could just sit with him and ask him a question? Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was the night before I went on the expedition, I was listening to these old nineteen fifties . One of my favorite songs was Cattle Call. And these old nineteen fifties Western music and I just imagine like I know that this is what he was listening to and I'm packing for the expedition and it just was the first time it hit me this hard and I was like I went up and I sat on the edge of my bed and my wife was like going to bed and I just started crying and I was like , I just can't believe I don't know him. I was like, I know him because I am so much like him and in everything that I do, it's like embedded in me. Like I look at my hands, you know , I probably have ticks and little weird things that I do that are him for sure you but I don't know him in person, you know? And that's kind of one of those things my dad he told me one time he's like, you know, maybe you'll be out in New Mexico or on an expedition at some point, and you'll have a dream and he'll visit you or something. And that stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I had an experience like that with my other grandfather. We're not getting to my line because I need to hear this story. Yeah, so with my other grandfather , the one who is a missionary and ancient historian, you know, loved the ancient world . So he passed away a couple years ago and he had Alzheimer's for about eight years . And which is quite a long time to survive. This is Shane actually. One of his friends one of his friends got diagnosed with it about the same time he did and he was gone like a year . And but my grandma got on it and he was taking all the right vitamins and stuff and apparently there's a lot you can do to kind of st ave it off or maybe prevent it, whatever. But he lived for a long time . And there was one night was a Tuesday night. I don't know why exactly I remember that, but I woke up around one thirty , and I had just had this very profound dream where I was in a hospital room, sitting in front of bed, just like I'm sitting now on the left side of the bed. My grandpa's right here and I have my arms over him and I'm crying and I'm telling him I love you, I'll miss you and I kissed him. And I'm not like the only person I kiss is my wife. Like I don't kiss my family members, right? It's just like Not normal for me to behave like that in a dream. And I woke up at one AM and I remembered that and it was like, I just remember that. Well, I'm at work nine AM, I get a call that my grandpa has been transferred from his nursing facility into the hospital because he died. His heart had stopped. And so they went into his room. But by the time he got into his room, his heartbeat had come back, he was alive , but they transferred him to the hospital so they could monitor him more closely. And he was getting close. He basically needed to be on hospice. Yeah . And so I'm about to go to the Olmec realm for three weeks and I live like seven hours away, like a seven hour drive, but I know I knew that if I didn't go see my grandpa, I wasn't going to see him when I got back from Mexico . So I drove from I drove from San Antonio back home and went to go visit him and I was there with my grandma and you know there were nurses and doctors and people coming in and out and you know my grandpa's there and he's like sentient and it was funny. could not He remember anything in the short term, but he could always talk about his past and he knew who you were. Like he didn't forget you. But if you showed him a picture, it wouldn't connect. But if you were there in person, he would remember you. And so there's all these nurses and people coming in and people wanting to talk to my grandma and talk to me. And like I never really got this quiet moment with them, but we're there for a couple hours and we're never left alone. So we're about to leave and I'm getting on the elev ator and I'm just like nah, that's not enough of a goodbye. Like I didn't get a moment with him. So I hand my grandma, my jacket, and I'll walk back in there . And it's just it's just he and I there. And I haven't like really told the story . You know, goley man . I know I just knew that that was my last moment with him, you know ? And I was lucky that I got that. What did you talk about ? You are lucky you got that. Yeah , so many of us don't . What'd you talk about? I just told him I just asked him. I said I said, you remember all those westerns that you made me watch with you? Like gunsmoke. Gunsmoke was on the TV behind me. And he was like, yeah. And I said, I said, You remember all the times he'd like talk to me about the Bible and the ancient world and everything? He said, Yeah . And I said was like looking him in his eyes. And I was like, I was like, I'm never gonna forget that. It's so important to me . And I said, I said, I love you. And he said, He said, I love you too. And I said, Do you know who you're talking to? And he looked at me and he said my full name to me. And so I knew he was there with me. And I leaned over him and I was just like crying . You lean over him crying just like yeah. Yeah, I leaned over him. I was on the left side of the bed . And I kissed him and I told him I said I said I'm going to miss you so much. And I don't know how many people actually in their last moment have their loved one acknowledged the fact that they're about to die . But I just I just had to actually be real, you know, be I think we try to be like subtle for some reason, you know , and not just acknowledge the reality, but I just had to. I just had to actually tell him goodbye . And so and so I was he aware of what was going on ? Yeah he must have he must have known that like I am actually saying goodbye to you. You know, I know that I'm not going to ever see you again . And so and so I'm hugging him for like a long time, like a really long time. By the time I lifted my head up I think that he'd kind of fallen asleep a little bit. But he was there with me while I was talking to him and so I walked out of the room and my grandma and I went something to eat . then And by the time we got got home, she a call from the hospital that he passed away. And I always wondered if like that was the moment where it just he could let go. You know, like somebody actually told him I know you're dying and that I'm going to miss you and I loved you and like acknowledge his existence, right? Like he knew that his existence was witnessed and loved and appreciated and he could go. And I spent a lot of time like looking into that. And apparently that's a common phenomenon. Sometimes when people when they have an actual heart to heart conversation in their last moments, it makes them feel complete. They don't feel the need to hold on anymore. And you're okay. They come to grips of where they are. Yeah . So that was like that dream that I had a week earlier when he died, his heart stopped at like one o'clock in the morning. That's why I had that dream and I woke up . Man, there's no , you know, I am a Christian. I'm like an Orthodox Christian, but even if I was an atheist, that would change everything for me. Like it was that profound of an experience . And so I went to the Olmec world. I was there for the week. I had to plan his funeral and everything. And that was tough. And then I went to I went to Mexico and then right after that I turned around and went to Peru . And the very first time I ever saw Machu Picchu was in this coffee table book called Lost Cities. And it was a collection that was produced by Barn es and Noble , published and printed in August of nineteen ninety seven, that's when I was born. And so my grandpa, that was his book, he would always read that to me . And you know, gosh, from the time I was a young kid he'd flip through the pages. And what's funny is I still have that book. I stole it from him when I was a teenager . I still have that book and if I go it's cool now flipping through all those, I was maybe a year ago I was going through it with my wife and I was like, I've been there now, I've been there now, I've been there now. There's only a few places in that book I haven't been now. But the one I was always captivated by is Machu Picchu. And right where all these iconic photos are taken , I'm standing there and I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, this is the only place I've ever been other than other than Hawaii that actually looks like the photos. You go to you go to Egypt, there's this massive metropolitan city behind you. You're not in the desert, right? And this is the only place I've ever been to that actually looks and feels like all the photos that you've seen and lives up to the photo. It's actually way better. That's why I always I'm always like, yeah, if you could only go to Peru or Egypt, I'd go to Peru because it's amazing . But I'm standing there and I'm like, wow, this is really, really amazing. I reach in my pocket and pull out my phone and it's opened up to iCloud email . And I don't use iCloud email. I've got four thousand five hundred emails I haven't opened up here that are all just spam . And it's already selected a recipient and the little thing is blinking for me to start typing. And the recipient was my grandfather forty three at Yahoo dot com. It was his email . I'd never sent him an email. But it really was his email. Somehow it was in my phone and it was like he was it was like he was yes he was touching me from the next world you know and letting me know that he was there and I was just I was in the place where the photo is taken that's printed in that book. Yeah . And yeah, it was profound, profound, man. And you know that's like all the confirmation I need that there's something more beyond all of this , you know I heard you say that you were going to go to grad school in Athens and something in the jungle made you change your mind. Yeah. I was you know, you know what's interesting is me starting my career and being independent from like the very beginning. I never worked for a university or anything like that. All of my flaws and missteps and things that I said when I was I'm twenty eight now, but things I said when I was twenty five and I'm still trying to figure out it's all publicly documented. People get to watch me progress over time. I feel like just now I'm kind of getting it all together , right ? And so I would go through these phases where when I first started this journey, I was so heavily influenced by I saw you had a Graham Hancock book around here somewhere. So heavily, so heavily influenced by Graham Hancock. That's as far as actually reading , I'd say fingerprints is probably like the first book I read where I remember I had this big old book in front of me and my mom would be like, What are you reading? And I was like, I was like, I'm reading something like a historical textbook because the verbiage was very up there for me at sixteen or something. And as far as reading and really putting effort into diving into the ancient world started with Graham Hancock, and it gave me this idea of like this wide open ancient world of all these possibilities and mysteries and the wonder of these ancient sites . That's the big word possibilities. That's what he created. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I know that there were people that came before him, but I don't think anybody did it as well as he did. And I may step on toes by saying that, but Graham Hancock captured and presented things in a way that was plausible , you know , it didn't wasn't filled with like fantasy. You're not reading his books necessarily and journalists telling the story. Yeah, exactly. And so it filled me with this wonder of the ancient world, the possibility . And so I devoured Graham Hancock's book. I haven't read Underworld , which is a great book. And so from there , ancient history is kind of like a pastime. It's like my side thing where I'm just watching videos about it on YouTube or reading about it. Never really never really thought I could actually do this as a job. What was your main thing? Marketing. My mom is a creat ive. She was she was like a marketing. Yeah, she was like a high ranking creative at a place called Brookshire's Grocery Store. It's I don't even know what to equivalent to her out here, but yeah, so she was like creative. And I think actually history and the creative world they kind of go together. Like people who are historians are more artistic than they are like numbers oriented, right? Like a lot of people who are numbers people, they don't really history doesn't really click with them because history is not as defined or it's not as neat, right? It's a story. History is a story. Yeah, exactly. And so yeah, history and art went together. But to be honest with you, I didn't I wasn't in love with marketing. It was just kind of one of those things where I would Google like how much does such and such job pay? You know, like, oh, okay. And so I'm getting my this marketing degree in school and I don't love it and that they're teaching in school I already know is like, well, you know, I actually use this other , I actually use this other platform which I think is better and I already know how to do what you're teaching me to do and I just didn't care. And so I'm flunking out all my classes. I've got like a one point seven GPA in junior college. They're putting me on academic suspension. I don't have the will to actually continue school . And all the while my girlfriend at the time, who's my wife now, she's like a pre dental student. So she's like this high achiever crushing it. I'm like way down here, right? And so I end up realizing like it all kind of comes to a head and my dad is like, my dad's like, I'm going to have to let you go. Like, I can't financially help you anymore because you're not even doing anything, you know? And so it all sort of came to a head. Did you agree? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was I get it. I was like deeply ashamed. Like I told my dad and it was funny is like a lot of times my dad he can be like a lecturer like he'll really lay it on thick . And that was funny. This time he didn't because he knew he could tell how I just was like, I did you a favor. Yeah, yeah. And so and so I told my girlfriend at the time is my wife now was like I was like, I'm actually not gonna get a degree or graduate college if I don't do something that I like and that I'm good at even if it's just to get the degree . So the closest thing to it was anthropology. And so I appealed to the dean and I'm about to be on so first they put you on semester suspension. Then they put you on a year. So you got to take a year off of school. So they had put me on a year and I wrote something to the dean and I was like, I was like, listen, I don't even try because I feel like because I'm just not invested in anything . I want to pursue anthropology and I want to study these ancient cultures they. had And like ancient cultures of Mexico and Central America. Because we're in Texas. So Texas breeds Mesoamerican archaeologists. There's tons of them there. And so the dean's like , okay, well, I want you to write this, you know, such and such paper for me and let me read it. And so had all these guidelines. So I wrote it in like one day and I sent it back to them and it the paper was called How To How It was How Two Million People Disappeared Overnight in the Amazon. And it was basically like a breakdown of everything I had already known of how the Amazonian people were just decimated over the course of a couple centuries. And writing good YouTube titles back then. Yeah, I guess. That's a clicker. Yeah, long before I ever thought I'd be a YouTuber. When you were reading the paper, did you feel it coming through you? Oh yeah, yeah. I'm supposed to do this. Oh, absolutely. And one of the things it was around that time. I don't remember if it was before or just after this, but my wife and I we were in my college dorm room and we're on my laptop and we watched the movie The Lost City of Z and I closed my laptop after that and my life was never the same after I watched that movie. It was just it was like the final domino had been pushed over and something about that guy's journey about, you know , the only reason he took on those expeditions was to reclaim his family name. Miss Percy . Percy Fawcett. Yeah, had you heard about him before? Yeah , I guess. I had Butn't read David Grant's book or anything like that . You know he was such a badass. Yeah, I didn't really know too much about him. I didn't really know anything about the story. I just thought it was cool. I actually know more about Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu. And something about that guy's story is just kind of being an underdog and like wanting to prove himself. And I guess he had this he was a dreamer and he was reaching for something that almost didn't exist, right? And something about that story just really resonated with me. And I was never quite the same after I watched that movie. So it was either right after or right before I switched my major that that happened. And so anyways , he reluctantly let me into the anthropology program and I just smashed the last year and a half of school. Yeah, I had like a four point zero it was like nothing. I mean, I I didn didn't't even study I did, but yeah, so I made it through school . And then it was my last semester . Yeah , no, it was my second to last semester . I thinking about grad school at that point? Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. It was my second to last semester and I was on YouTube and I saw an interview with Professor Dr. Ed Barnhart. And I was like, I was like, oh, I really like this guy. So I had listened to his lost worlds of South America while I was maybe it was right before I switched my major or it was right afterwards, but he has this great lecture series called Lost World of South America produced by the Great Courses. And I had only listened to the audio of it. I think later on I listened or I watched the actual watch the video , but it was the way that he told the stories , the way that he pulled you in and made it personal. And then he would put his own personal opinion in the episodes . And actually , actually, it was my only real exposure to academics because I got my degree during the whole like COVID thing. So I never had a personal relationship. My personal relationship with a professor was one sided and it was there was twenty this four lecture series thing on South America. And then eventually I found Maya Aztec, his other one that's on Mesoamerica and just devoured both of those. And actually that was my exposure to academia. I did not know and this may be the way I am why I am the way I am. I did not know the cold, sterile jaded side of academia. I didn't was never exposed to it. I was only exposed to , you know, just kind of like doing school virtually which was cold in nature , but granted it would be that way. But really my main exposure was through Ed Barnhart, which was so warm and romantic, right? And I still listen to those lectures today just because it kind of takes me back to this happy place. And sometimes I want to brush up on stuff and I think just think this thirty minute synopsis will kind of get my brain back into it. And so I'm in my second to last semester and I start thinking about like, okay, you know, maybe I don't think I'm going to go work for a college because you don't get to pick the projects you work on. You're like an actor. You kind of just take what take what comes to you. You know, so if I so if I'm passionate about the Maya or the Inca , I'm actually probably going to be working on like the cato people in East Texas, which is not my passion . And I don't want to be forced to do stuff that's not my passion. So I start thinking about like, well, maybe I can get into YouTube. And what's funny, I've never said this before . I used to love the Brave Wilderness YouTube channel back during this time and you know, it's made for kids, but it's cool. And I was like, I was like, you know what? There needs to be like a coyote Peterson of history . And then my sister was watching Einxtct or alive on animal Planet, which is Forest Galante. And she was like, You have to watch this show. I'm watching the show and I'm thinking, there's not a history version of this. There's not like a history guy that does this . And so one day I was I was kind of I started tinkering with the idea my last semester in college where I was like, well commit to the shot. Tempo, hold your finish . Golf is a mental game, but you can't focus if you're not comfortable. Lululemon golf gear frees your mind and your swing with fabrics that breathe, wick sweat and block UV. Streamline cuts clear distractions from your backswing and your follow through. So whether it's the first tee or the last hole, your mind stays where it matters. On your next great shot, dial in your game this summer with Lululemon Golf Gear, available in stores and at Lululemon. com Maybe I should be, you know, the history , Coyote Peterson or something like that. Maybe it's me, you know, maybe all this stuff that I've been influenced by like maybe maybe that's what I should do and I should tell stories and go on adventures and film it. Of course, I did not know what I was getting into . This story sounds very familiar, my friend. Yeah, yeah. You're looking for a show that doesn't exist so you just created it. Yeah, yeah. You don't realize how my wife, my wife has a great saying. She always says to me sometimes she'll be like, she'd like, it was you all along. Like that thing you were looking for, it was you all along . And she's a good one. So the one things have to do with this. So yeah, yeah. So So I am well, doctor Barnhardt and I get very close. I start working with him. I reach out to him, I send him an email. He agrees to have he agrees to have a breakfast with me. What is that like when you when he's like, let's get a bite. You freaking out? Yeah, it was pretty surreal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we meet up and we get like tacos outside this grocery store isn't it? Yeah, it was great. And he had an hour for me and we ended up being there for like four hour s. And that's how you knew. Oh yeah, you know, I knew he liked me. And yeah, he liked me and so a month and a half later, I'm in Mexico with him at Palenke. The very first pyramid I see is the Temple of Inscriptions at the city of Palenke. And I'm standing with Dr. Barnhardt. And he and I have been like thick as thieves for, I don't know, like four years now since then. You consider a mentor? Yeah, he's probably my only mentor, I'd say. Yeah. Does he watch your channel? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don't know if he don't know if he's actually, I mean, I guess when it has stuff to do with not the Americas, he might learn something. But I'm just wondering if he ever pushes back on some of your theories. Like oh yeah yeah well I don't think that he and I agree on and we can get into this later. I don't think that he and I agree on what the wear jaguars are when it comes to the Omex. I think he and I disagree there that might be the only thing that we disagree on . But yeah, but yeah, I mean, we're two different people, you know, whatever. But it's fine. We don't argue about it. But yeah, we chat almost every day and he's become a very close friend of mine now. And so I had this period where I was with when I first started working with him that I was like, oh, wow, you know, I'm working with this guy who's like a world class archaeologist , very well known so I started becoming exposed to other academics as well . And academics that I still like and still talk with today , but maybe I should have just kept my exposure mostly to Dr. Barnhardt because I started getting this idea in my head of like , you know, being Dr. Luke might be kind of cool or maybe I should specialize or maybe I should do this and that and I was very in I was becoming very influenced in my early days of my channel of these highly credentialed people around me and constantly talking to them. There's like this hierarchy, right? And I'm like appealing to that. And it makes you want to become equals to them , right ? But the more I did that , the further away I was getting from this adventurer spirit that my grandfather had and that my family had had, and that first spirit I had from reaching from reading like fingerprints of the gods, this idea of like, I want to travel around the world and see all these places. I want to do all of it. I want to be like Indiana Jones and go everywhere and know all this stuff . So I had this period of time where I'd become really fascinated with the Greeks again. When I watched Troy as a kid, like the ancient Greeks were the first civilization that I really sucked my teeth into and learned a lot about the Bronze Age Greeks. And so I had this period just over a year ago where I was thinking like, you know may,be I , you know, I was I was teaching myself ancient Greek and and I was like just I was deep into it and I was just I was too influenced by academics that were around me, way too influenced by it. And the day I was supposed to pay the tuition , it was one of the two times in my life that I prayed for a clear answer. a Not like not oh maybe I should do this I remember I remember in both times I'd have to sit down on the shower floor and I'd pray God , I don't want you to show me what to do. I need you to tell me and need you to make it very obvious. So this was the second time and it happened. The day I woke up to pay the tuition , everything in me was like, If you do this, you betray who you are, and you betray your whole family. I felt that. And it was and it was and it was I opened up , I allowed it was like God telling me, I allowed you into that anthropology course to study the Americas , not to study the Greeks , not to not go around the other world. The Americas opened itself up to you. That's what your grandfather explored in the American Southwest. Of course, we're Americans, but you know, it was like, no, that's the world that opened up to you and that's your, that's who you are. It chose you. And I just knew like, oh , that's I can't I can't do this. And somewhere in there I was oh yeah, yeah, I say that I do say that I had a mind opening experience in the jungle. But that's actually not the jungles in America. I was in Cambodia . But I was in Cambodia and some of my buddies and I were we were having some very good Cambodian devil's lettuce. And it was potent, man. And I'm sitting there talking with them and I just while I was talking with them , it was even more confirmed in my mind that I had to stay with you. There's a little bit afterwards, yeah. But I knew I really, really knew after spending a lot of time with some of my friends and kind of hearing some confirmation bias like, if they were all like, you had to stay with the Americas. And that's what everybody thinks because it's so natural. But the difference is like sometimes when people watch you , they can see you more clearly than you can see yourself. Of course . And so I have always struggled with the fact that the Americas opened itself up to me. Like people see me as the Americas guy. He's a guy that knows a lot about the Maya, the Olmecs, the ancient Peru, this that and the other. And sometimes you have this identity crisis where you're like, well, no, my first love was the Greeks and I like the Egyptians too. But that's what that's not the plan that the universe has for me. And so anyways , so that was kind of my struggle with ancient Greece. But you know, it's people have seen sort of this arc over time where I had some ideas I thought I was going to do I didn't end up doing them. But you know, ultimately I,'m at this place now where I have this self awareness now that like the Americas is where I belong. It's my bread and butter. And there's so many stories here that need to be told that nobody else is telling and there's so many lost worlds here that like, you know, what's funny is I spend so much time studying a topic before I ever talk about it on an actual video and produce something about it . I haven't even slightly scratched the surface of the things that I will make videos on Like sometimes things slip out in podcasts or people be like, You talked about this in a podcast for an hour before you never made a video on it. I'm like, well, you know, I just really want to know something before I write. But so it's taken me a long time to form the direction I'm going. But now I kind of realize there's so much in the Americas that people know about, they should talk about, man, I just did, I just did the first the world's first as far as I know , historical breakdown, basically according to the sources, proving the fact that Jaguars were in the east coast of the US three hundred years ago. Nobody else did anything like that. And so the Americans just need that. One thing I'm working on right now , and we're going to offer to go down there and Lidar scan it with Base Map is a team down in Southern Chile . They just found one of the lost colonies of Magellan down in Chile. Yes, they just found it. And they're going to try to find the second one because it's twin colonies . But I don't know how good their light our stuff is, but we can light our map like they sent me they sent me something, but I think we can light our like thirteen thousand acres in like five days. So we would help them find that. But there's so many stories in the Americas that you don't mind. If we travel a little bit around the world. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I should say that said, it's not like I'm just going to stick to the stick to the Americ faore'vers, but I know that is something that really needs to be like my main focus if that makes sense. But man, I love ancient Egypt, I love the Greeks I love ancient China, you know . So that will always be an aspect of mine. I'll never niche down again. That was kind of one of the other things is being around so many academics , they're so geared towards hyperniching and that invades your way of thinking And so I'm always going to be like a global general historian, but I really , especially now with these new Lidar projects, like I'm really going to hone in on expanding a lot of the things that most people don't know about the Americas. Well, that brings me to something before we go to break. If you could just tell us what it's really like when you're in the field, not the glory . I want to know about the mosquitoes and the logistics problems and when things go wrong. What is that like? Well, mosquitoes, man, the worst I ever had them was that Machu Picchu. I made a mistake of wearing a short slee ve shirt out there in the summer . Amazonian mosquitoes are unlike anything that most people have experienced . They're stings , I don't know, I don't know exactly what's in them , like the venom or something that's in that's in their stings that makes your skin like inflame and cause these bumps, but it's so contagious that I would scratch myself and I would actually spread it across my arms and across my body . Three weeks after I'd gotten back from Peru , the bumps are still spreading around me. Everywhere I would scratch , luckily I avoided getting on my face, but they were still there new bumps would pop up on my arms every day. And so when you would read through the journals of Percy Fawcett, you see how his arms were scarred from the field. So I don't know if you can you probably can't tell because you don't stare at my arms every day. But like every little dark spot that you see where you're like, oh is that a dark spot? Yeah, that's a mosquito bite two years ago. This mosquito scar. Yeah, yeah. And then these straight lines, these are from thorns from the Hela expedition I just did . What else is out there snakes ? Yeah, well, so in Mexico, Central and South America, you have to worry about the fertile ants . It's the it's the most dangerous snake I've gotten corrected before by saying it's the deadliest snake in the Americas . I still think that it is. Maybe it's not the most venomous. They say it's the coral snake. But the problem is that to get a coral snake to bite you have to shove it up against your hand or something. But a fertilise will go out of its way. Oh no, no, it won't go out of its way, but it won't run away from you. It'll stay coiled up and you know, a lot of animals have fight or flight, it's all fight. And they and they and they repeat strike too. So they'll bite you once and they'll bite you again, and they'll bite you again, and they'll bite you again. They don't retreat . So they're really, really dangerous and they're brown. So you don't see them. Yeah, you're not gonna see them. You have any snake bites ? No, no I've never been bitten by a snake. Yeah, and I've seen I've seen two fertile ants in person. One was a baby, which are extremely dangerous because they'll give you all their ven . And then the other one was actually at the hotel. They they'll come up close . Wow. So they come up close to the hotel because there are rats around where humans are you know so they try to kill a rat. So what they'll do is they'll like when you walk around , you know, I don't know, if you go to sometimes there are hotels that you go to where you have to go out at night to go to the restroom. And so sometimes the restrooms are built up on like a stilt in that little area between the ground and the floor of the restroom, they'll sit right there and they bite people on the ankles as they're going to the restroom in the middle of the night. Yeah it's wild. It's wild stuff . So but I would say Armshire Explorer, you're out there . I would say so I just did a I just did an expedition on training wheels as I call it to the Hela. And this was basically myself and a group of guys, we got ourselves equipped, we bought all the equipment that you'd need for an expedition pretty much anywhere anywhere around the world. And I planned this route through the Hela, which I got a lot of pushback for because it a lot of people were like, Oh , I've been hunting there since that place isn't uncharted blah blah blah. I'm like, I don't even think I'm not sure if you know what charted means or whatever but or what exactly I'm talking about whether it's archaeologically charted or explored or not . And so but it was like an expedition on training wheels. I got to see and feel what it what it was like to invest so much into all the equipment and getting everybody prepared and developing a plan and trying to see what does executing this plan feel like? And just to give you an idea of just how hard it is to go through even just the Hila wilderness, which is pretty fairly dry and you think that it's open , it's way more dense and hard to get through than you think, especially with river crossings. Like I went in thinking we'd have to do a few river crossings and by the time the expedition was over, we had done over two hundred. Oh wow. So and you know, one of the problems is like I had I had a very nice pair of crispy boots. People are hunters they'll know what those are, but they're they're mostly they're waterproof if you can keep your , you know, the boot above above the water level . But you know, if you get if you get water in your in your boots, your socks get wet. You can only bring so many socks . By the time you get to the camp, it's going to be n ighttime and starts getting cold. You're not drying out your socks over a fire. A fire's not hot enough to dry out your socks. That happens two days in a row. You have nothing but wet socks and wet boots . The skin, you know, you're walking so much that the skin on the bottom of your toes is like peeling back, especially if they're wet, the skin on your toes is peeling off. This is like trench foot. Yeah, my both of my big toes , I don't know if I didn't sever the nerves on them, but I compressed them so much that now six weeks after we've gotten home, both of my big toes, half of them are still numb, just from how much my toe had to be pressed. And you know, they say like, oh well your boot's not big enough, but when you're going downhill, you're going to be pressing your toes against the side of your boot. So we were we went at thirty percent the pace I expected that we would go thirty percent. thirty percent. Yeah. So we had we had this map in front of us and we thought that we were going to be able to get from this lake down this river valley, across the Southervern R vialley and then over the top of this mountain , all I don't know why I thought we could do all this in one day. I mean, you're looking at it on satellite and you can't see what the terrain is like. So you go down there to find out. And this is why we did an expedition in the States . I did it to a place that's historically and I guess nostalgically or sentimentally significant to me, right? In the Hela wilderness. And so there's this place called the Mogoyon Cliff Dwellings , which is really cool and mostly like it's like a little hidden gem. Most people don't don't go to the Hela Cliff Dwellings. They'll go to Chako Canyon or something . And up that river about twenty five miles up , there's a place where it gets much more green and all of the and the canyon is very, very dense so like flash floods are super dangerous. And all of the trails to the Hila wilderness go around this area . So it's this area that doesn't get a lot of traffic. And you would watch videos and people would say the river continues this way, but we have to stop here because there's no more trails going through there . They say that's where all the wildlife fled to in these tight canyons. So they think like caves or bears and mountain lions and stuff are living in that one area. That's where the food is. And so that's where the expedition. That's where we went. We went straight down this area that there are no trails. We went straight down and then back out. And you put this online yet? Yeah, yeah. It's like a two hour documentary thing that we did. Okay And so yeah, so you know, I just I did this to see I did this because I knew that if something ever went wrong , we could get help. You speak the same language as everybody, right? So that's a that's a big thing. If you're in Mexico , you know, my Spanish isn't that good . And you know, you have Spanish speaking people with you, but it's the cliffs, yeah, these are amazing. Yeah, but it's just more complicated to get help in a different country. In the US, it can happen just like that. So in like ten years, you're going to be with a junior explorer who's going to look at a map and say, yeah, we could do this in two days. You're going to say ten . Exactly. Exactly. I know, exactly. And so that's why I'm glad that we did this first expedition. I had some comments, people were like people like, Oh, man, this really bu bubbbleble . I'm like man, I'm just read the comments. I'm like, I'm just learning how to, you know, you guys just wait till you see what we're about to do because now we're planning this one in American Samoa. That's going to be a big deal. And then we're doing this one in the Amazon. If it goes through, it'll be the biggest scan that's ever been done in the Amazon . So but yeah, as far as being in the field , everything is so much more difficult and it takes so much longer than you anticipate it's going to. Like I said, we moved at thirty percent the speed that I thought we would and oh and then there's there's food issues, right? Like I was just gonna ask, did you br enoughing supp lies? We did bring enough supplies. We had one hiccup with the food where one person did not have food . So we had to divide the food amongst everybody. This is how stories begin. Yeah, yeah. So we had to divide the food, which took our calories from we had planned for about eighteen hundred calories a day and that took that from one thousand eighteen hundred to nine hundred calories a day. That doesn't sound like to do this work. Oh man, so on the last day I was like I was like wobbly, I was pushing through body was wobbly by the last day. And I lost wear a size thirty two pant and those pants were falling off of me by the last day. I'd probably a thirty or something yeah, man, it's, you know, there's so many things . And what's cool is I talk about this in the expedition documentary. I basically say that, you know, most expeditions, the most dramatic part of it is never the discovery because one , most expeditions don't find anything . Right. You read through Percy Fawcett, he found a lot of cool stuff, never found what he was looking for. That's right. Ernest Shackleton, greatest explorer of all time , also the most unsuccessful explorer of all time. The only reason he's famous is because he's a failure, right? But he's actually such a successful explorer because he was able to protect all of his men. Nobody died on his expedition. I just covered him. It was a great book. Oh, did you really? Okay, yeah, yeah. and an amazing man. I'll tell you, a great book to read is ever think a lyrics says one thing and it's actually something totally different ? See, not everything is what it sounds like. But hotels dot com It's exactly what it sounds like. Go to hotels. com to choose from hundreds of thousands of hotels, instantly get up to twenty percent off with November prices and earn rewards on every stay. Sign up for free and book today. Hotels. com. It's all in the name . Shackleton's Way it's a guy who's a, I think he's a psychologist and he studied Shackleton's story and wrote this book that it's maybe like a six hour audible listen to . And it writes it basically encapsulates his whole philosophy. Shackleton was writing a book on the philosophy of being an explorer before he died and it was never published. He never he never finished it . I'm pretty sure that's right. And so this guy kind of writes that book and it's fascinating hearing a psychologist go into why Shackleton would have made the decisions that he did , but getting out of there was the most dramatic. Getting out of the Helo was the most dramatic part because we were running low on food, everybody was starting to get the wobbles and and so we're at this point where we've got to we've got to cross twelve miles in a single day and then the next day we can decide if we want to go back through Iron Creek, which was hell to get through . It was so difficult to get through Iron Creek that most of it wasn't filmed because we all needed both hands to be able to hold on to the cliffsides and like all the rubble is falling beneath you and everything . And so we would go back through that and then that would take us all day and then we'd have to camp again and we'd have another day . Why I told the guys I was like I was like , and nobody thought that it was possible until the morning of. And I was telling the guys, I was like, I was like, guys, I can take us. If we can climb up this mesa that's right in front of us, we can get out here in half a day rather than two more days of the expedition . And I don't know, I don't know if everybody believed I think that I think on the last day everybody was ready to go and they're like fucking let's do it. Yeah, yeah. So but I was telling the guys for days leading up to that. I was like, I was like, I think we can go over that Mesa and get out of here. I think we can, I think we can. Of course, you never know for certain. And in my mind, I'm like , if I'm wrong, everybody's going to be fed up. Because you think like, oh, it's not that big of a deal. You just go back down, blah, blah, blah. No, when you're seven, eight days in and you've been walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and you're low in calories, you're not in normal life anymore. You're now out in the field. Your vision's much more like dialed in. You're surviving now exploring. Yeah, and the small things that happen to you are more significant. You don't think about the fact that they're like, oh well it's just a walk down there and it's another day. You're like, I got to do this another day . And especially maybe like if you're not the leader of the expedition, I'm emotionally , financially as invested, check off everything. I'm that invested. So my thought process is different from the guys that I'm looking out for, right? And so there's a lot of psychology there of , you know, being a leader. And did you get over that Mesa? Yeah, we got over it and we were out in half a day. So I was luckily I was right . And so was that was the coolest part of the expedition. It was just getting everybody out way faster than we expected and getting to the nearest gas station which was like two and a half hours away. What did that feel like? Oh man, we got Yeah, yeah, so yeah yeah so we got we got Gatorade , we got ruffles , we got beef jerky, we got Skittles, we got ice cream sandwiches. That had to be so good. Chocolate. Oh buddy's truck was just filled with trash . And so we gorged after that and that was it was great, man. Ultimately, the expedition we didn't even find any artifacts on the rivers. Now, we could have spent more time like looking for arrowheads and stuff, but we just didn't have time to do that. And the river was like brutal cold. Even sitting next to the river, the wind coming off of it, dude, your body temperature drop so fast, even in the day . And we found a site that really looked like it would have been an archaeological site and had I spent a week there dedicated sleeping at that site, surving it and looking around for just any kind of ground artifacts, we could have confirmed it was a site, but we just weren't able to, especially not with the calorie restrictions. It's like we lost probably two days of survey just because we were so short on food. So we had to get back out of there. But all in all, the main thing I learned was that it's not going to go the way you think and you're going to be a lot slower than you think that you are and things are going to get like a wrench is going to get thrown into playing road. And yeah, that that's probably the biggest thing is the same lesson you hear from every other explorer is that is that it's going to be a lot longer and a lot harder than you think and all the things you think are going to happen are not going to happen that way and it's going to go wrong . So I probably I probably am a fraction of a step closer to being more well prepared for the next expedition . Things are still going to go wrong. Yeah, yeah. So that's basically where I'm at now. And so the three expedition projects I'm planning now are across the American Southeast rebuilding the mound builder world , working with Terra Terra Incognita Research Institute in Basemap, we're trying to get the permissions to we're going to cover all the skin take a quick break. Yeah, cover all that. And when we come back, I want your take on one of my favor ite ancient stories that it all starts with a corpse. Oh, really? Okay, cool, cool, cool. Hey, have you ever heard about this city called Alexandria? I've heard about it once or twice. So I've been there once twice. So I showed you earlier that I wear a it was a gift for my wife. It's a tetra dropma. It's a Heracules that was stamped Just about ten years after Alexander the Great Died. So I'm a fan of his. Could you tell us his life story really quick? But I really want to know where his body went. Yeah, yeah. Well, Alexander probably I mean probably the most exceptional person that lived in the ancient world. Like I think the only guy who really comes close is probably Julius Caesar, but even Caesar not the , I don't know, the kind of crazy enigma that Alexander was. He's this kid that's born in northern Greece in this fringe Greek kingdom . You know, at this at this point, a lot of the Greek world , I don't know if they're, you know, platonic, but they're heavily influenced by Athens and Sparta. They have this different way of life than the Macedonians do up in Northern Greece. And in fact, if you're Athenian, you might not even see the Macedonians as being Greek. You might see them as barbarian Greek, right? So he's born in this fringe place. And actually Philip, his father is also maybe just as miraculous a story because he's a king in Northern Macedonia that is so intelligent he manipulates all of the Greek world to falling under his control. He becomes the king of grease. I'm I'm no expert really on Phillip. I just know that I know that the story is so impressive and nuanced because I have stayed away from diving into it because I know it's going to be a huge rabbit hole. But essentially the Greek world is just a collection of city states and most of these city states are not they don't have maybe all of them other than Sparta do not have a government that's set up with a monarch or an emperor in charge, right? And so Philip is able to unite all of the Greek world under his power in Macedonia. So in one lifetime , all of the Macedonian Greek kings born before Alexander are like minor rulers that aren't very powerful. Macedonia is not even on the map. If you ask most Greeks, where's Macedon ia? They're like God. I don't even know what that is. One lifetime this guy is born in an obscure kingdom and becomes basically emperor or king of all of Greece, unites the entire Greek world underneath him. It's like Game of Thrones the way he's able to do it. And this is probably a thousand city states it's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. And they're constantly fighting with each other. So powerful that he I believe basically had control of Athens and told Aristotle, you are going to come up to Macedonia my tutor my son. That's right. So that guy's story to be able to conquer the Greek world in itself is mind blowing. And then his son turns around and you know, so we don't really know why Philip died or why he was assassinated. You know, there's all these stories about like his lover, this that and the other. But the reality is nobody really knows . One of the popular ideas is that Alexander thought that Persia had sent assassins to assassinate Philip , but it may or may not be true, but he certainly uses it to gather the Greek armies and turn his sights turn his sites towards Persia because I believe that Philip did want to do a run across the Turkish coast and free some of those Greek cities that are living there. And so that's what Alexander starts out doing. Well, within just a few battles between age twenty three and twenty five , he has some of these key decisive victories. And you know, ancient wars are not like they're fighting every single day, they're doing this that the other. It's just a few battles in one war. And sometimes they can be months or years apart from each other, but if they lose that battle, their territory is just crippled, you know ? So in a few decisive battles, he essentially pushes the Persian Empire all the way back to Babylon. They don't have Anatolia anymore. And then he moves down to Egypt and he never loses. He never loses never loses the battle. Right. And he at least not yet . In India, he kind of they kind of keep him out of India. I think he vastly underestim ated how big India was , but rather than pushing into Babylon and conquering Babylon , his advisors tell him that he needs to turn around and head west to go secure the bread basket of the Persian Empire, which what fed the Persian Empire, what fed their whole army is the grain that's coming coming from the Nile. It's the most fertile place in the ancient world . So he goes in, he shows up to Egypt , and the Egyptians basically welcome Alexander with open arms because the Egyptians hated Persian pharaohs . The very first , we don't really know if this happens, but one of the stories that's passed down is Camp Is , which is the first Persian ruler who becomes Pharaoh in Egypt . When he shows up at Egypt, he kills, I think he stabs the sacred apis bowl together. He stabs it to death . And at this point probably from about a thousand BC to the end of Egyptian culture like three hundred and twenty five BC, that's when Constantine shuts down all the temples and everything The apus bull is basically the main deity at this point. And so the story is that Camp Ice in like five twenty five BC stabs the apis bull to death, which is just a massive middle finger to the Egyptian culture , they can't stand the persons. So they essentially welcome Alexander with open arms. And Egypt has a diplomatic relationship with Greece at this point, anyway. Right. Pythagoras is going back and forth trading. Yeah , they had known each other for a very long time. And they had always the Egyptians, as far as we know, had always been open and kind to Greece coming down. Herodotus comes to visit. Solong comes to visit. I can keep going on . So he doesn't necessarily Alexander conquer Egypt as much as shows up and secures it. As much as the Egyptians know that they have no standing army, they're not going to to stop be able Alexander from coming in, but they know that maybe if they welcome him with open arms, he'll be a better ruler over them than the Persians had been, which probably would have been the case It actually was the case. I mean, really what happened for Alexander coming into Egypt and the Ptolemies later becoming that was a lot better for Egypt than the Persians . But they essentially welcome Alexander with open arms as much as they can, you know , there's nothing they're going to do about it. And so Alexander comes to Memphis. He probably sees the pyramids . I wish that we had surviving records of that. There would have been Ptolemy, his best friend is with him this whole time. He wrote an account of all of this, either during his life or later in his life . Those were lost probably with the library being destroyed so many times. But all of these accounts that we have like from Plutarch and what it is Arius ? All these accounts of Alexander's life of his life, they're drawing on Ptolemy's writings which they had access to, but we don't . So there's so who knows how many small details Ptolemy wrote that's, you know, for whatever reason ancient authors were like, well, I'm not going to repeat that part, but you know, whatever. So Alexander to become officially pharaoh of Egypt , they have to make this pilgrimage to the Siwa Oasis . So they cross this vast desert out into Western Egypt and he me ets with the oracle of Zeus Amun, which is basically a fusion of Aman Rah and Zeus . And so this oracle goes and performs this ritual or whatever they where they become overcome with the presence of this god and they come out and they essentially give this confirmation to Alexander and to the Egyptians he is the literal or adoptive son of Zeus Amoon, right? So it's this the oracle has said that you now have the blessing of the gods to become Pharaoh . So he so Alexander in that moment becomes a god, which is kind of one of the interesting things. One of the only plac es in the ancient world. Like a Roman Emperor is a politician. A Greek king is a king . Roman emperors get assassinated and killed all the time. You know, Roman Emperor is like I believe it's the deadliest job in human history. Have you ever seen this stat before? I haven't, but I believe it. Yeah, it's something crazy. It's like if you became a Roman emperor, you had like a forty seven percent chance of dying on the job , something like that, you know, being assassinated . So Roman Emperors get killed. They're not seen necessarily. They try to show themselves as divine beings, but they're not seeing that way. Kings get assassinated, but pharaohs are something different. They're they're godly , right? They're part deity played into that role. He played , he played into it and probably he was we don't really know if it's he definitely knows that it is advantageous for him to play into it. The real question is how much did he believe it, you know? He probably did believe. He probably did believe it. He was enamored by the stories of, you know, Homer , the Iliad and the Odyssey. He loved the legends of the Greek world because of Aristotle . Maybe. I mean, I don't know if we if we know, you know, why his fascination happened. I mean, definitely Aristotle influenced him, but you know, that's interesting because Aristotle is a , you know, he's he's in that platonic like philosophy heritage and Plato and Socrates are not really big believers. And so, you know, there's a lot of things playing here. And Alexander is very different. Like, you know, a lot of people try to go. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, as if Alexander is a descendant of those guys, not really. Alexander he's much different than Aristotle. So we don't really know exactly what he believed or really what he saw himself as probably he saw himself as a god or more than a god because his generals would like challenge him. And I think that they would say something like they would say they would compare him to Hercules or they would say like you shouldn't compare yourself to Hercules. And he's like, he's like, Why not? I've done more in my lifetime. He 's right. Who's more than a he's greater than a God was. What would any twenty two year old who conquered half the world be like? Exactly. What would they be like? And so essentially he becomes he becomes crowned pharaoh of Egypt and he heads up north and one of the last things that he don't know if he did this before he went to the SeaWell Oasis or if it was right after, but he went up north and one of the things he always carried around with him was Homer's Zilliad in the Odyssey. And in the Odyssey , which I hope that we see this in this new Christopher Nolan movie , Odysseus, one of the places that he finds refuge at as he's being bounced around the Mediterranean is this little island on the coast of Egypt. And when he arrives there, the locals tell him he asked them where they're at, and they say Pharos. This is Pharos. We don't know if that's supposed to mean this is the pharao hs land or what or what that means, but he called it pharaohs pH AR S in English which is a really small island. It's a real island. Yeah, yeah And. so that so he landed there and he stayed there and then he ended up leaving. Well, Alexander being twenty or twenty five years old and he's like, I'm going to go find that place. I want to go see it. Well he, arrives and it's a little f ishing village called Rockotis, I believe and while he's there he realizes that the land itself is actually kind of advantageous. So the Greeks like to build on water. The Egyptians aren't water people. They're also not desert people. They don't like the water. They were called the Mediterranean the Great Green. So that's why you don't see Egyptian expeditions going out to conquer places across the ocean. They will bounce around the coastline to get up to like modern day Lebanon because that's where they would get their cedar wood from or the cedars of Lebanon. Yeah. And they'd get their wood from Lebanon and they'd bounce around and do trading expeditions, but they're not launching full on seafaring exp editions. They never really had military boats in the way that the Phoenicians or the Greeks did. They like to be down river to guard the Delta. Yeah, and they want to be right there. They want to be right there in the green that's next to the river. They don't even go into the desert. They avoided the desert because it was a place for the dead, right? They would send their dead out into the desert, but they didn't live out there. If you went out there , the people living out there were marauders and barbarians and raiders and they'll kill you, you know? Well, we think of ancient Egypt as this giant world, but it really was just the Delta 's tiny little place. And actually get this, dude . So this is one of these anthropology things. All right, so this so this is ancient Egypt in a nutshell . You've got, let's say, after the unification of Egypt. So after the pre dynastic era, around three thousand one hundred BC we will get back to Alexander, but you know, you've got North and South Egypt , which south is upper, north is lower. We don't have to get into that It's just the way the direction flows weird. Yeah, the way the river flows. But you've got these three different places in Egypt essentially. You've got Southern Egypt, which is a collection a collection of cities along these in this fertile valley. Then you have this vast area that's not really very fertile and then you get to Northern Egypt at the bottom of the delta . And that's where Memphis and some other and some other cities were. And then you have the Delta, which there were some cities living out there because it's a much more lush area. But the Egyptians that were living in the north, they saw the Delta as being a good defensive place. So you would hear if people ever tried to invade, they would have to navigate through the waters of the Delta and Mesters could go back to the city that's at the bottom of the Delta, which is Memphis, right? So you're defended in the north and no one's going to attack you from the south because they're also Egyptian, but they're not like unified with us, but they live really, really far up the river , but far south. And so it's a defensive place. But really you have some villages in the delta, you've got these main a few cities in that northern area and a few cities in the south . 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People don't realize how separated that they are . The distance I'm almost certain about this. We should measure it right now. The distance Memphis , which across the river where is the pyramids were being built. Yeah . The distance between Memphis and southern Egypt where people were living is farther than the distance between northern Egypt and Athens, Greece .. Wow It's farther? Yes, we should measure that. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it is though . So think about that. They were moving those Aswan blocks when they're moving into the pyramids. Those are traveling further hundreds of miles than it would take than it would take to get from the pyramids to Athens . That's wild. Yep. I've never I actually figured that out just like in the last week or so . But so then you have to think like, oh, that's how big Egypt is. You think about like Greece is so far away? No it's not. Actually actually Aswan is further. Sure . So it kind of plays into like, oh, well how big did the Egyptians see their world ? Like they must have known their world was actually absurdly large . Anyways, that's kind of one of those cool anthropology things. It changes the way that you think about Egypt when you're studying it . So Alexander he's up at he's up at Azwan and he sees this good defensive posture that the later city of Alexandria would have. There's this little strip that the north side of it is connected to the Mediterranean. On the south side is a lake called Mariotus, I think, Lake Mariotus. There's just this little strip of land that's only exposed on the east and west sides. And right out in front of that is that little island of Faros that's nearby this fishing village . So he pulls up with his convoy into this little strip of land and he doesn't have chalk or anything, so he grabs like some grain out of the saddlebag, throws it down onto the sand , and he marks out the way the city is going to be built. So he's thinking I'm going to build a city here. He's going to build Alexand.ria Now I don't think this is the first Alexandria. I think I think that this is I think this may be one of the last ones. There's a funny joke in the classics that's like if somebody asks you to name ten cities of the ancient world just say, Alexandria because they're I think there were ten of them or there were more than ten . But Alexandria, Egypt is the one that stuck. So he grabs this grain out of this saddlebag , throws it, throws it on the ground, and he marks out that the city is going to be built around these two major roads, and they're each going to be something like a hundred feet wide, absurdly wide and lined with stone, which is very rare in ancient times. Most of the time it's just packed dirt roads and they're going to line up with the Mediterranean winds so they could determine which way the winds come from and both the roads are going to be pointing towards the wind so that the winds will sweep down the city and cool theed people down living in Egypt or living in the city . So he maps it all out and then he leaves one of his architects. He says you're going to stay here with, you know, who knows how many men are with him? We have this idea that it's just like this caravan of like maybe a couple dozen people, but probably it's like hundreds or thousand people with him, you know ? So after he gets done laying it down, this flock of sea birds come and they just devour all the grain right in front of him. Now he's very superstitious and he looks at one of his looks at one of his guides that are with him and he thinks that this is a bad omen and maybe they shouldn't build the city here. And the guy says, No, no, no, no, no this is a good omen. This means that this city is going to feed many nations for many years to come or something like that. So Alexander ends up leaving Alexandria. He leaves his architects back and they start building the city immediately right then. Does he plan the lighthouse in the library at that point or no? I don't think so. I mean if he did never comes back, right? If he did, we don't know. We don't know that's the thing . So he leaves Alexandria and he goes on to conquer Babylon and he tries to move into India. It doesn't really work out, goes back to Babylon, ultimately dies. We don't know why he dies . Some people think that he could have been assassinated, they could have been poisoned to death His death certainly seems a bit like poison or maybe it's alcohol poisoning, you know, just living a very, very rough life . I don't know, but he's not injured in battle . Well, he gets injured but not like not mortally wound and I think he takes an arrow to the to his chest at some point or to his stomach . I think he does, but it's not it's not life threatening . So a lot of people think that it was alcohol poisoning, just living a very rambunctious life and ultimately poisoned themselves. And some people think it could be some form of cancer that obviously he not's able. So anyways when he's on his deathbed, his all of his men come to him and they say they say Alexander, you don't have he don't have an old enough heir. He's got a son with either a Persian woman or an Indian woman . But the son is like an infant and they're not going to be heir. They want a Greek, right? Right. So there's there's no obvious heir to the throne and he says he says to the fittest. That's essentially what he says . And so what does that mean? To the fittest. So yeah, so initially they divided it up into around half a dozen different territories. They divide up the Macedonian Empire . Which is how big at this point Well, it's the Persian Empire plus Greece. So it's all the east to India, west to through Europe, down the entire Mediterranean . Yeah , I mean, we don't really know beyond well, beyond Greece as you go west , like maybe Syracuse is part of the empire, but I don't think he didn't have Italy . The attack like the early Romans are around . He probably would have set his sights west and gone and conquered Italy. But I think maybe they had Syracuse, but they didn't have Italy . Yeah, there you go. Yeah, they didn't have so it stopped at Macedonia. So this is still, I think, the third biggest empire in history behind England and the Mongols. Yeah, exactly , exactly. And so yeah, he dies in he dies in Babylon at thirty two years old and to his empire goes the fittest. They divide it up into I think it's just a little bit more than a dozen different territories and Ptolemy like Alexander because they bonded over fascination with the Egyptian world . The Egyptians were seen as being otherworldly ancient to the Greeks, right? Like they were this civilization that had still existed and been around since the beginning of time and they were still around. Like the Greeks at the fall of the Bronze Age, they lose their they lose their memory. One of the things that the Egyptians say about the Greeks is that there's no old Greeks. They don't remember anything . And we're going to cover that later with the Minoans. It's fascinating. Yeah, so much they remember so little to the point that this is probably one of the one of the slight problems I take with when we look for Atlantis that we treat like we hang on every word that we think that Solon said but, solon is alive he's alive in the six hundreds to the to the early five hundreds. Yeah, it's like three hundred years And even that is semi mythical to the classical Greeks. Like they have a really hard time remembering their past. Right. And Solan even says I'm telling the story from I learned it from Magician priests. I didn't exactly. So and that gets passed down orally, we think, to Plato. So anyways. So even to those guys start to interrupt. Yeah, ancient Egypt is still ancient. It's still ancient and still continuing. The Menethos history of ancient Egypt which he I think that Maneth he was an Egyptian and he wrote it in Alexandria, I'm pretty sure in one of the latter three centuries BC and that history of ancient Egypt has stood up with the archaeology . So the Egyptians from three thousand one hundred BC, all the way down to the time of Alexander, they remembered their history. Now there is probably we do see myths come through like Herodotus says that Herodotus says that the Egyptians told him that Khufu hoard out his daughter to be able to build the pyramids or something like that . Well, the Egyptians say all kinds of crazy stuff you go get a tour guide there today. Like there's a massive difference between a tour guide and a historian living in Egypt, right? Like you can't take both of them, you know, right. Both them, you can't put the same amount of weight behind their opinions. But there's definitely legends and stuff that get twisted up. But as far as the broad history, the Egyptians, even thousands of years later, they still understood their history. And they look at the Greeks as being like little children that don't know anything So Ptolemy goes to Egypt and he's basically a governor of Egypt living out of Alexandria. They've now built up the city much more. I think another decade has gone by. What about Alexander's body? So Alexander's body is kept in Babylon for a while for a while, okay? And so I forget who one of Alexander's heirs were the general that wanted to bring his body back to Greece. I forget his name. But as Ptolemy is rising in power and kind of consolidating and getting everything going in Egypt , at least my interpretation and in the agreement of private conversations I've had with other histori ans . Ptolemy has a huge dilemma here because he's not a warlord , semi divine god mythical being that Alexander was, and the Egyptians know that. They're not stupid. You know, like even though they're this is really interesting . The other day, I was just reading the writings of Patah , which was written around twenty four hundred BC he's the world's first philosopher and I think it's the world's first book actually. It's the oldest book that we know of a collection of writings . Yeah, he was a Vizier living under one of the pharaohs that comes shortly after Kufu Kafara and Karl I think sixth dynasty or fifth No it must be fifth dynasty. Anyways, it's this book of like sixty some odd lessons to live your life correctly and how to interact with other people and treat them is just mind blowing. You will read he has very specific scenarios that he'll mention and you're like, Oh, I've been in a situation like that. It's freaking crazy. But one of the things that he says in the book is that the it's something like listen to what every person has to say because often the wisest words you'll hear will be spoken the women at the fountain or something it's something like that and basically what he's saying is that these poor peasant women, women have obviously no rights that no standing, no nothing. They're lower class citizen than men . Oftentimes these normal peasants will have the most intelligent things to say that you've ever heard of. So thousands of years earlier, he's telling us that even the peasants in Egypt are very intelligent people, right? So wow . So Ptolemy's not fooling anybody by just posturing like he's this great ruler. He actually has to appeal to the Egyptian people because the Egyptians will revolt. I mean, they tried to revolt against the Greeks. They tried to revolt against the Romans. They still want independence, even though they like the Greeks more than they like the Persians, they still want their own independence , and you can't fool these peasants. And if you can, you can't do it forever. You know, if anything, and these rulers knew this, you can't rule with an iron fist. You will get your head chopped off. So you actually have to live up to the expectation . And that is the expectation of a ruler in ancient Egypt. They were supposed to live in accordance with Mahat. They had to be philosopher kings that were focused on morality and keeping justice in the way of the universe, the divine order of the universe together , if you were not legitimately a good person as the ruler of Egypt, Egypt would be cursed. That's crazy to me. So Ptolemy obviously got through to them. He did . But he had but he had he had a dilemma. He had to figure out a way to do that. He had to this normal guy who's just a politician in the Greek world had to figure out a way to break through. So he does let's say like three and a half things . He builds the lighthouse of Alexandria, essentially it's a symbol of Egypt's he's got to do a lot too. He has to appeal to the Egyptians because he's now their their governor. He's soon he's going to he's just going to proclaim himself Pharaoh because the whole all these governors that are now ruling over Alexander's empire break up and start war against each other, the lines become cut, right? He's now not aligned with the Greeks anymore. He's a Greek family that ended up stranded in Egypt and in control of Egypt. So he has to become like Greek Egyptian now because he can't go back to Greece. Right. And didn't his empire stop in Turkey or so ? Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, I think they I think that they controlled a little bit of that. There's the lighthouse that was over three hundred feet tall. Yeah, well it's it's actually well I'll tell you in a second. Okay . So he's got to do two things. One , he wants to send a big middle finger back to Greece. And he's going to say look at what I'm going to build. So he so he's worried about impressing the Greeks. I was told this by a Greco Roman historian as well. He was like, Oh, also think about the fact that he's trying to impress the Greeks and make a statement to them. And I was like, okay, that's true. That's true. So that was told in stone, that told it to me. He's a great guy. So he's trying to impress the Greeks and he has to impress the Egyptians. So he builds the lighthouse of Alexandria, which is a calling back to Odysseus finding refuge basically at Alexandria because they build the lighthouse on the island of Farros. And essentially what that lighthouse is it was burning twenty four hours a day and it was a welcoming to the Mediterranean world. You're welcome here. This beacon is a safe refuge. This is the first lighthouse in history, but that's what it meant. It was a safe ref uge calling back to that like primordial Greek world, but it's also built within just a few feet of being the same height as the Great Pyramid. Oh , and it's built and according to the sources, it's built out of like sixty five tonne red as one granite stones, which architecture like that had not been produced in Egypt for more than two thousand years. It depends on how old you think that the Osir ion is if you're familiar with the Osirion. A lot of people try to date that to I think it's established dated to nineteenth dynasty under Seti I don't agree with that. I think I think it's definitely contemporaneous with the Valley Temple. You do. Yeah. Back that far. Yeah, I mean, however , however old the pyramids and the valley temple and the Sphinx is I think the Osiran is the same age built by the same architecture. Oh, I would agree architecture. Yeah, I mean the original excavators of the Osirion thought that it's pretty it seems pretty seems pretty obvious so and they weren't really using Oswan granite in the so there's some Aswan in the King's chamber, there's some in Syrian and right? Well it is it is always incorporated like the obelisks are raised and those are red aswan granite. But the way the granite is used just changes. It becomes more like we don't have statues made out of red as one granite during the Old Kingdom, you know, made out of any of the old Kingdom Pharaohs at all. But we do have massive statues made out of single pieces of red as one granite that come from all periods of the New Kingdom, but the gr ant it being's used in a totally different way . We even have some of the largest single standing statues actually come from the time of Alexandria . But so they're using Aswan stones. They're bringing them now like seven hundred miles. People always say the stones from Masalon came five hundred miles. Well, in Alexandria, they went seven hundred miles to be used for the lighthouse. So the lighthouse is built within just a few feet of being the same height as the Great Pyramid. So Ptolemy is telling the Egyptians, we're going back. We're going all the way back . Those pyramids that have loomed over your civilization for the last two hundred years that you always say you wish you could go back to the golden days like in the Middle Kingdom there are these things that are called the laments, which are these writings that come out that come out of the Middle Kingdom. And it's basically these people like lamenting over like how crappy early old kingdom or her early Middle Kingdom was. And they wish that they could go back to the time with their great grandfathers. And so they would call it the golden age the golden days or golden age of Senefu, which is supposedly he lived before the Great Pyramids, but it was a time of like immense wealth in Egypt. And so the Egyptians throughout all their history they look at those pyramids and they're like, man, like Egypt after the nineteenth dynasty kind of becomes a backwater of the Mediterranean. Everyone around Egypt becomes just as powerful as them and then they eclipse the Egyptians and the, Egyptians this backwater dump that all these people live in in the shadow of the pyramids. And so Ptolemy goes, No, we're going back now. So he fuels Egypt with all this money that came from Alexander's empire . And now and now the grain that comes from Egypt is not being extorted by the Persians or anyone else or the Assyrians. I think they were conquered by the Assyrians shortly. They're not being extorted, even though it's a Greek in power , it's now like the old days because that Greek lives solely in Egypt, just as the capital moved north. And so brought back national pride. Exactly, exactly. It's actually the second time it happened in Egypt. The Nubians did that too. The Nubians came north and they conquered Egypt, and there's this saying that the Nubians were more Egyptian than the Egyptians. So the Nubians restored Egypt to the way of the old. Isn't Herau for a couple hundred years as well ? Yeah, five generations of that. That's that's a long time. Yeah . So , you know, the Egyptians , yes, it's a fascinating history. So he brings so Ptolemy brings back like national pride. And you know, he also has nowhere else to go. So he's got to make this thing work. So then he builds the library of Alexandria. Now when I say three and a half things, the half is that the museum is connected to it. So it's actually a uni versity, not just a library . And so in that library, everybody's heard the way it operates. You would be going down the Mediterranean, you see the lighthouse off in the distance, you come into the main harbor, opens up massive city made out of gleaming Tura white limestone, which is the same casing stones on the outside of the pyramids . Marble that would be imported from I think there's some marble in Egypt, but they were also importing marble from Gree ce through the markets and all kinds of Egyptian granite. Like it just would have been a prince would have been a crazy city . Great city greatest city ever built up to this point, far more impressive than Athens . And way more impressive than Rome. Rome is nothing at this point . And so you'd pull in, you'd come up to the dock, and then officials would board your ship and they would want to see your writings like what you had. They wouldn't take everything you had, but they would take the things that were important or things that they would like to have a copy of. So say, We're going to transcribe this, copy it all down. And then upon when you leave, we'll have these ready to give back to you. But actually they would keep the original and give you back the copy of what you had. So they're collecting this massive archive of all the known literature of the ancient world and people are studying things . When it comes to what your family eats and drinks, you know your choices matter. You're the expert because you know what fits your life . And getting it right starts with good information. That's why America's beverage companies are sharing more information about our ingredients at good to knowfacts. org . No spin, no judgments, just the facts straight from the experts for more than one hundred and forty beverage ingredients . Visit good to knowfacts. org . I'm pretty sure it's a scientist that's living in or scholar that's living in Alexandria who has the realization that the earth is a sphere Aeratoshenes. I'm pretty sure he's living in Alexandria when he performs this experiment. And you mentioned that it's more than a library because it was, it was kind of like DARPA back then. Experiments and science and all kinds of things going on. Yeah, and you had, you know, people showing up to the library to learn about a number of things. I mean, they're studying sacred geometry, they're studying the pyramids. We have a surviv ing piece of a papyrus that's like the geometry of the pyramid that they're writing down. And you got these Greeks trying to figure out the way you know why the pyramids were built the way that they were. It's really, really interesting. Manetho is writing his history of ancient Egypt, probably in the library or associated with it at some point. And all the archaeology has backed up that he was correct. There's even some particulars that I'm forgetting right now, but there were particulars that archaeologists disagreed with and then later on realized that they were wrong by disagreeing with him. So it's really cool . So Alexandria is like this amazing beacon, but it needs one more thing. It needs Alexander's body. And so he launches this expedition and intercepts Alexander's body on the way back to Macedonia . And I think there's a little skirmish over it, but essentially, Ptolemy's army is much more powerful . They confiscate his body. They bring it down to Memphis, they hold it in Memphis for a very short period of time . I think it was temporarily held in a tomb in Memphis, and we might actually know what tomb that was . I saw like a lecturer or presentation on this a few years ago , but they decided to move his body north and they built this mausoleum for him. And he was buried in a solid gold sarcophagus with all of his treasures in the sarcophagus with him. And so the idea of the mausoleum what we think was that it sat in the center of the city. It was right across the street. So he had Soma Road and Canopic Way. Those are the two main roads of Alexandria and it sits right across the street from the Library of Alexandria in the museum. So if you're walking to work in the morning, you got to walk underneath this huge mausoleum with a statue of Alexandria on top of it, and then to the right is the library in the muse um as you're going wherever it is that you're going in town that day. And so every day people would have walked by and seen, you know, seen right in the center of town Alexander's mausoleum. They must have been so proud to live there.. Exactly Just glory all around. Exactly. There's nothing like this in the world. And so by Ptolemy securing Alexander's body, he's much more able to then declare himself the heir to Alexander. He's now going to be he's now not just the governor of Egypt, which is what he was for a long time . Let me see. He becomes governor of Egypt . When does Alexander die like three hundred twenty three BC or . Yeah, because he visits Egyptian three hundred and thirty one and then he leaves and never comes back. Yeah . And I think it's not until about three ten BC. So it's more than ten years later that told me finally he in' as place where he declares himself pharaoh. And we have like these diarite busts of him as a pharaoh. And so he declares himself Pharaoh and now the Ptolemaic dynasty begins, and that's going to go on for three hundred . And so at the beginning of that dynasty, we have what's called the three good Ptolemies . And so Ptolemy one, he's the one that really expands Alexandria. He gets the we don't actually know when the when the library, the museum and the lighthouse were done with their construction . Or we don't know if they were done during his lifetime, but Ptolemy II , they are complete during his lifetime. And then Ptolemy three is born and they're just constantly expanding Ptolemy as the Pharaoh yeah. Yeah, it's really cool. So they're just constantly expanding Egypt's wealth during this time period. Egypt is filthy rich now. Yeah . Probably the Egyptians were like, well, I wish our pharaoh was Egyptian, but things are going pretty good for us right now. Then we have Ptolemy four that's born and game of Thrones begins. And I don't know exactly when he's born. It must be probably sometime around two hundred and fifty BC, I would guess, maybe a little bit after that . But start going south right here. These Ptolemy's don't really care about being involved with Egyptian culture at all. They don't really care about being invested into the Egyptian world. None of them speak Egyptian. None of them can read Egyptian hieroglyphs. They're like disconnected. They live in their palace they're kind of like let them eat cake, you know? That's sort of it's kind of like Neppo babies. It's Yeah, exactly. But that's really what they were spoiled brats. Yeah, and it all starts falling apart. And then by about one hundred and fifty yeah, I think it's about one hundred fifty BC . Ptolemy the tenth is born and And Alexandria is so far in debt that things are so bad actually . Think about how think about how far Egypt has fallen in one hundred and fifty years . That they're so far in debt that Ptolemy X has no choice but to go down into the mausoleum of Alexander. They exhume his body from the gold sarcophagus, and they bu himilt what they call crystal sarcophagus, which is probably alabaster, which is like , you know, some mid level people throughout Egypt could afford an Alabaster sarcophagus. So it's really not a high honor to be put in an alabaster sarcophagus. They melt down all of the gold that Alexander was born with that he had been resting in for the last one hundred and seventy years and that is gone. You know, it gets melted down and it probably gets sold off to partly pay the debt. So Ptolemy the eleventh is born and he's not a very good pharaoh. Ptolemy the twelfth is born. Now we're getting close to Cleopatra Mark Anthony time. Ptolemy twelfth is Ptolemy Twelfth is Cleopatra's father, I believe or maybe it's Polemy XIII, but I think Ptolema XII is her brother. So long story short with Cleopatra and we're getting to like what happened Alexander's body. Yep . So long story short with Cleopatra . She for some reason , I heard Dr. Bob Breyer like imagine this one time and he was like he was like, you know, we have a record of Cleopatra's family going on a family vacation down to Memphis . Probably they spend the vast majority of their life in Alexandria . And there was something about Cleopatra that just made her curious about her world. She was clearly invested in the library , judging by when the library gets attacked and part of it gets burned down. She's devastated by that. Mark Antony gives her a gift to repay her by donating like two hundred thousand books to the library this was Caesar who burned it that first time . First time, yeah, yeah, and then it's burned again by Augustus later on. So and then it's burned again by Aurelian and it's burned by Karacala . Yeah, it actually gets destroyed like five times , but most people just only remember the first but I think the first is probably the least damaging. Oh, the last one is the last one is the most we'll get there . So there's this family there's this record of them going on family vacation. They go on a family vacation, but a royal visit to Memphis. And one of the things she would have definitely been taken to is to go see the pyramids. But at this point in time, like we were talking about earlier, the Apus Bull is the central deity of the Egyptian world. Well, from what we know the Egyptians interpreted whether people agree with it or not, the Serapium , which is that labyrinth that's under the ground where these massive bull boxes are , they call 'em the Sarapian boxes, the bull sarcophagi, whatever . They would have definitely gone down in there. There's no question that Cleopatra walked those halls as a little girl, and she probably was mystified by the mystery of this underground place that's super ancient and she's hearing Egyptian being spoken next to her. And you know, it's kind of like one of those people who break out of some kind of family cycle. Something is ticking in their brain differently than everybody else and she's captivated by all that. Well, she becomes like a polyglot and starts learning like every language. I think they say she could speak like seven language seven languages fluently or maybe more , but she could speak, read and write, Egyptian . And she loved that culture. And through by hook or by crook, she finds herself as Pharaoh. Whether or not she had her siblings killed, all of them killed on purpose, whether or not she had her brother killed, we don't really know. They say he drowned . You know, so we don't we don't really know . But she becomes a pharaoh and everybody knows the famous story, but ultimately at the end of Cleopatra's life , the Romans have fully sunken their claws into Alexandria. And the way that this started was the original Ptolemies. So the Romans built up their power throughout the Mediterranean world by being mercenaries for other people. So they have this great standing army that nobody else has . But the city of Rome is just mud and bricks. It's nothing special at all. It's just it's literally a dump . There's no amazing public architecture, there's no colosseum, there's no Circus Maximus. I don't think the Circus Maximus is there, at least not in the way that it later would be , even while Cleopatra is alive, which is , you know let,'s call it for roughlyty BC. Rome is just a city of mud brick . And the only reason it has power is because it's got this amazing well trained standing army. So when the Ptolemy's power is waning over these last few hundred years following Ptolemy III . What they do to keep the rebellions down in Egypt is they hire Roman mercenaries to come in. So all of a sudden Egypt gets politically invaded. The Romans are basically performing espionage inside inside Alexandria. They're sinking their claws in and becoming more powerful. Alexandria slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly over time until the Ptolemies are so weak that all the pharaohs got to do is walk in and all that Roman emperor or A wealthy Roman is going to walk in and be like, well, what are you going to do now? Right. And that was that and Cleopatra knew that. That's why she seduced Julius Caesar because rather than being conquered by him, if she could marry him, she could pull the Roman capital down to Alexandria instead. And that's what Julius wanted to do. That's why that's ultimately why he got killed. There's this rumor that they had a child together. Oh, they definitely did. Caesarean. Yep. Yeah . Augustus killed him for sure. What is there to the story that Augustus knocked off Alexander's nose when he went to visit the body? Oh, is that Augustus or is that I thought it was Augustus Octavian I could be wrong . I talked to a fish I think you might be right. It's one of those it's one of those Roman emperors and I bet that's true. He bends down to kiss him and the nose like the nose disintegrates . Yeah , but there was another there was another guy who was more obsessed with Alexander, I believe . It may have been Caligula or it may have been Karacala who comes to Alexandria and wants to see Alexander's tomb and puts on Alexander's breastplate. Oh my goodness. Yeah, takes it off of his body and puts it on. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure . Yeah, some of those Roman emperors you should have on a guy who 's an expert in Rome stuff because those emperors are crazy. That sounds like a Caligula move to me. Yeah, it does sound like something Caligula would do. But it could be Caracola too. Caracalla is a crazy guy also . But Augustus was very respectful. Augustus is like, you know, a lot of people hold Julius Caesar up as being like the truest Roman. I don't know. It might be Augustus because Augustus is ruthless but respectful . So I think it's the story of Augustus or it might be Julius Caesar . When he shows up to Alexander, he wants to see Alexander's tomb . So they bring him down to the mausoleum, but also buried there were the sarcophagi of all the other Ptolemaic kings. They're all buried around Alexander. So it's this huge mausoleum and they're all buried in it, right? So it's like a museum. You could see, well, here's here's Alexander in the center. Over there's Ptolemy one all the way to Ptolemy thirteen . It might be Augustus or Astreleuses has this funny thing where they ask him, okay, do you want to see the other guys? And he's like, No, I came to see a king. Or something like that. And he basically just like shits on all the other potomies. And so anyways, Cleopatra knew that the Romans were on the doorstep of Egypt, and the only thing she could do is seduce the most powerful man in Rome because you got to keep in mind, Julius Caesar was never a Roman Emperor, he was just a very wealthy warlord, and he controlled a vast portion of the Roman world . And so she knew if I can get this guy on my side , I can pull him down here and we can be co regents together and Egypt won't be conquered, right? Egypt will still have its autonomy , it'll just be fused with a new civilization. Or maybe she would maybe she was thinking that Julius Cedar would break off from the Romans altogether and bring all his men down there. He's happening before Crassus and Pompey or after during Yeah, yeah during during all that . Yeah. So anyways I think that Pompey has perhaps already died at this point and there are some people that Julius Caesar for some reason for years I had thought that that Pompey was in Alexandria and to prevent him from fleeing Julius Caesar had the docks burned. But I think it was it was it was part of his ar my and something like that. Julius Caesar doesn't want this group of guys leaving, so he burns the docks and destroys their ships so that they can't even escape. So he's going to find them and kill them all. Well, when that happens you know, you can imagine like the docks connected by ropes and wood and you know, the library itself is built out of stone, but the floorboards are all made out of wood. And so think about the imagine like a wine cellar, the little diamonds slot that you put the wine bottles in, that's how that's how the papyri were stored. And those were all made out of wood. So the interior of the library burns up, but the stone architecture survives, right? And so a massive portion of the library is destroyed. I don't know why , you know, you hear a lot of historians they repeat the pop the popular like debunk. That's like, oh well it's not really that bad. The library had already been in dec ay. Well, that's not really supported by the fact that it devastated Cleopatra so badly that Mark Antony feels compelled later on to gift her like two hundred thousand books back to the library. So that tells us that this was something that was so detrimental that it actually affected Cleopatra on an emotional level that Mark Antony had to make up for that later. So it may have made the library great again . Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing so that she invested, she poured a whole bunch of money back into it because clearly she's very, very well educated and must have spent a lot of time there. And the lighthouse is still this beacon. The lighthouse is still there. The lighthouse, get this, man. The lighthouse is so well built that it was standing within just a few years of Columbus arriving in the Americas. It was still standing. That's crazy. I know a couple of earthquakes hit it pretty bad over the years . Yeah, and then they decided to tear it down to build to build a new, I forget there's some citadel that's there today, but some of those blocks are still there and the blocks are still like laying in the water around that there's just tumbled and fallen into the water. But you can see these massive granite Aswan blocks laying there. Well , then give me your take, where's the body? Is it St. Mark's? Yeah I'm sorry, this is the most long winded answer of all time. No, I love this stuff. So long story short , Julius Caesar is killed before he can move Rome's capital . Augustus essentially becomes the son, the adopted son of Julius Caesar's empire. He wages war on his rivals , kills them all, comes down to Alexandria and basically Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, they know that if they go back to Rome with Augustus, they're going to be paraded around and then they're going to be executed. So they kill themselves and Augustus being actually a classy guy . When he visits Alexander's tomb, he's respectful, very respectful of the tomb. He looks up to Alexander sees him as like this mythical hero . And he allows, as far as we know, he allows Cleopatra and Mark Antony to be buried where they wanted to be buried. Nobody's ever found their bodies, and he gave the Egyptians one year to mourn Cleopatra . And most people don't realize this . Augustus became just pharaoh. It wasn't like the pharaohs ended. There's still another three hundred twenty five years of pharaohs to go. Right? Like most people realize that that's crazy . Most of the time we look at Egypt's history from three thousand one hundred BC to thirty BC, but no, it goes on, it keeps going on . So Augustus was a great politician because he would have had a revolt if he didn't allow that. Exactly. And he knew that. And he never calls himself emperor, he doesn't ever call him self king, he calls himself first citizen. And he's one of the few emperors that gets to live a full life. He dies of old age and yeah, just a cunning , merciless but smart and respectful guy really interesting story . So Alexandria continue continues on from there. Mostly business as usual. Like the average guy his life is like , oh wow, that was dramatic. Right. Back to you know, back to work. And so is the body Alexander still there? The lighthouse is still there. Yeah. So when Augustus invaded, he burned down Alexandria's library part of it. We don't know how much . Caracalla , there are all these Alexandrians that are telling these jokes about Caracalla in the theater in town and you know, making all these jokes at his expense or whatever. Well, he pays Alexandria a royal visit and lines up twenty five thousand people and slaughters them and burns down and burns down the palisades. Now the Palisades are connected directly to the library. So the library gets gets damaged during this time. Kirichola doesn't care . Aurelian has to come and squash a this isn't Marcus Aurelius, this is A rlian. He has to come and squash a revolt where an Egyptian rises up and declares himself Pharaoh of Egypt And there's there's also another attack. There's an eastern empire that rises up, but I can't think of the name, I can't think of the name of it, but there's another two battles that take place in Alexandria and they reference again the palisades burn down. The palisades are connected to the library. So the library gets affected . Then in three hundred and sixty five AD there is a massive tsunami off the coast of Crete or Cyprus . And it's so enormous that by the time like the seismic activity reaches Alexandria and the waves hit Alexandria . No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the one dollar slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Co pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hank hass a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza co pilot, handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M three sixty five copilot dot com slash work . The devastation was so dramatic that all of the boats and the docks had crashed onto the roofs and of the ruins of the toppled cities of Alexandria. There was another historian that arrived, another name that you would recognize you and I would recognize. And he arrived and he reports that there were fifty thousand people that he knew of from the city that were missing that were, you know, that had gone unreported. People looking for the bodies of these people throughout the city . And the city is completely demolished, completely devastated . The waves came up and crashed over the walls that surrounded the city and toppled everything. And it's from that exact moment, that day in the historical time period that we do not know where I believe, we don't know where the library is anymore. We don't know where the museum is anymore. We don't know where the mausoleum is anymore and with his body. It's gone. And myself and and Told and Stone, we were talking about this while we while we were in Alexandria. And we were thinking probably during that time period , there were people so his mausoleum was underground. Yeah. Well probably , you know, that water floods in and just like when that when that when his body in this crappy alabaster sarcophagus he's left with. Thank you, Tolemay Ten . When that gets flooded with that with that salty water, I think it's salt water is fresh water. But when it gets flooded, his body just turned into just mist, you know, it's turned into nothing. All those bodies. All those bodies just turn all those bodies just turned into nothing. And think about the chaos that had broken out throughout the last centuries of all the things we talked about, this war, this that and the other. Well, how many seventeen year old kids do you know that were like, I bet you there's not any guards at the mausoleum? Let's go. Of course. So little by little, it gets picked away and picked away and picked away and picked away. And then when that city is destroyed, all the block s from his mausoleum and all of the glorious Alexandrian architecture that Augustus used to model Rome, by the way. The whole model of Rome is pulled from Alexandrian architect ure and Greek architecture , but those projects didn't begin until Augustus went back home when he got back home from Alexandria. And one of the last things he says is when I was born, I found this city a, city of mudick Br, I leave it a city of marble. And he 's a great line. A lot of historians think that he was inspired by what he saw in Alexandria, and that's why he starts the building projects as soon as he gets home . But I think that most likely his body was pulverized by the Mediterranean and doesn't exist anymore. That's what I think. . Yeah, there may be some other some other ideas to the story like this there's a lot of theories there's Marks that it's in what's the Daniel Mosque that's there is that theory? Yeah, I've I haven't looked into that in years . The other theories, but I think that the main thing that you have to grasp with is the flooding of the city, you know, because it'sn't it 's like several hundred years later when Christianity is much more widespread that you, hear about the supposed place of Alexander's body again. But you have to you have to grapple with well, what happened when Alexander was flooded and the whole city is destroyed. I'm with you. I don't think anything survives that. Yeah, you know, boats on the roof. It's crazy. I'd be talking thirty, forty foot waves. Yeah, boats landing on the roof, you know, it's it's wild that the lighthouse even survived that, but it shows you how well built that thing really was. Yeah, you know , crazy. Take a quick break and come back and talk about yeah , we had a lot to talk about still. We got to talk about where jaguars and we have to get to the Manoan culture somehow . Let's do it back in a minute. I want to hear about the Almecs and solve for me how those giant ten, twenty ton heads get moved down a river on a raft . Man I wish I could solve that. I mean, is there a resolve for that ? Somewhere, if you were to ask an ancient Omelc how it was done, I'm sure they could explain it. Yeah . So the Olmecs , man, they're they're one of my favorite ancient civilizations . Why? They're they're Well, they're the oldest known civilization in North America . And actually, the very first ancient monument that I ever saw that wasn't in the United States was an Olmec head. If you look up the it's actually at the bottom right of the screen right here the second the one that's just the left of that. That guy right there, that's the main head at Levinta. And Dr. Barnhardt and I are walking around the city of Vir Mosa and we're walking on the outside of this park and there's this opening where you can see into the park and we're talking about the Omex and he sent I'm looking at him to the right and there's this lake next to us and the park is right here and doctor Barner goes, Look, and I look right in and the very first ancient monument I ever saw outside of the United States was that guy right there . And from that moment, that civilization like I saw the size of the heads, I saw the size of that head and, you know, it was like a silent witness to time. How big is that head? You can't really tell from the picture. Oh, enormous. I mean, five feet high. My head probably comes up to that ridge where the helmet is like just above his eyes I'm probably like eye level with that. And that guy there probably weighs fifteen to twenty tons or so. It's solid gray like basalt . Comes from the Sierra dela Tuchela volcanic bel t is probably like ninety kilometers away as the crow flies. But it's not like moving something through Egypt where all you got to do is you got to get on the river while the tide is high and float that baby down the river These guys have to go through rivers and swamps and valleys and over hills to get to the next river. It's just I mean, it's crazy . But the Olemecs they emerge on the archeologicala timeline as a fully fledged and organized civilization . From the very beginning the civilization is formed. We don't have a We don't have a formation period . That's very strange. I know all the ancient astronauts people are going nuts right now. Oh, they are. Well, it's one of the civilizations that just appears. And you know this thing gets this thing gets thrown, that idea gets thrown towards ancient Egypt a lot . But in reality, that's actually not the case. I mean, if the pyramids are around twenty four, twenty five, twenty six hundred BC , well we have about eight hundred years of known history leading up to that point . Now the technology kind of just appears out of nowhere, but the civilization is there. They're forming for a long time. We don't have any evidence of anything that's in any sort of formative period at all whatsoever before these heads arrive. Where was the center of the Omec society Like that it's weird how Mexico is broken up because southern Mexico is actually like in the east and you know, it's Mexico's weirdly shaped country. But south central Mexico like Veracruz and Tabasco and a little bit of Oaxaca , so you know kind of where Mexico comes down and it gets thin at this point, right there . So this it's like this swampy , hot, humid flat area. It's it's not the most appealing place to live which is funny because it's actually the place where most civilizations form. It's like the least likely place. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Isolation , there's nobody that's vying for their land. There's nobody that's going to try to come kill them for their land for their lands. They get to live in this quiet, isolated existence and build and build and build and build and build their wealth until boom, you know, they've arrived . But they arrive at about two thousand BC and we don't have anything before that. I mean, we don't have like bodies, we don't have sites . We don't have archaeology, pottery, even nothing before that. They just boom, they're there. And then they just disappear just as quickly . So they increase in power, we think two thousand BC and then somewhere between about sixteen hundred to nine hundred BC is like the peak of their power . We don't but we don't know if they're city states. We don't know if they are an empire, we don't know if they're clusters of kingdoms. We have no idea. We just know that they had let's call it like a dozen sites, three major sites, but in all, probably about a dozen sites. We don't even know what they call themselves, right? We have no idea what they call themselves, we don't know what language they spoke. So when the Aztecs found those sites were they already ancient? So the Aztec well,, we don't know that the Aztecs ever found the sites. They found we know that the Aztecs had artifacts that come from the Olmec world, like you have these Olmec jade little pendants that we think would have been worn as like a necklace around the chest. That's the idea . The Aztecs had those. We found those in Snowsteitlan, but we don't know at all that the Aztecs actually found these Olmec sites. It's very possible because there are some so the first Olmec first major Ulmec cultural center that rises up is called San Lorenzo. The full name of it is San Lorenzo Tinos Titlan because way out in these fields like way out here in this field there's this the ancient city, the ancient Olmec city. And then like a fifteen min driutvees away there's, this modern Mexican city called San Lorenzo T Nos Tilan that's built in the ruins of the Aztec city. So they're not that far apart from each other , but we just don't know if the Aztecs knew that the origins of Mesoamerica itself was like , you know , I don't know, an hour walk away outright out into the bush because it would have all probably been grown over and forgotten . So and you have to keep in mind the Aztecs, the height of their empire is three thousand years later . So wow. It's possible that the Aztecs never knew that the Olecs had ever existed or known anything about them at all. It's possible. One of the interesting things is that we know that the Aztecs found the city of Teotibukan, and that Teotibukhan had been abandoned for about a thousand years at this point and they thought that it was the city of the birthplace of the gods, you know ? So yeah, it's crazy how much stuff gets like abandoned and forgotten in Mesoamerica and rediscovered later. And the history and the density of Mesoamerica is unlike anywhere else in the ancient world. It is vast and dense . There's nowhere in Mesoamerica that went uninhabited. But again, the Olemecs are the origins of that whole world . But the interesting thing about the Olmecs is you look through all the Mesoamerican cultures that come later and they all have like vaguely similar pantheons of gods. You know, you've got Chak the Rain God and Chak you also have the rain god in so many different other cultures and you've got Kukul Kanh which, is the servant god and Quazokoat which is this god and you know the only one that actually of this massive pane and Mesoamerican gods, the only one that we can see in the Omec world is actually the feathered serpent Kukul Khan or Ketal Ko is depicted on Monument nineteen in the Olmec world , but it seems like the Olmec religion is more based on shamanism and everything. So it's like it's almost like a pre mesoamerican civilization. They see feathered serpent later anywhere? Oh yeah, yeah. That's very random to put feathers on a snake. Yeah, well, it plays into this whole dragon fascination . So it is so It is so it is such an odd thing. So the first time we see it is around a thousand BC Olec Monument nineteen. It was found in the city of Leventa. It's on display in Mexico City today. Probably my favorite Omelc monument . Such a particular depiction and it's monument nineteen. What do you like about it? What's so special? Is that it right there? No, so that's a Ketal Coco at Terotibukon, which is interesting because at Terotubicon we don't actually know Ketoko has an Aztec word, but the Aztecs adopted the feather shirp and the Teotubo Conos also had it, but we don't know what the Teotibukanos call it, just like we don't know what the Oelmcs called two thousand years earlier, right? So think about this. The Aztecs find Teotibucon been abandoned for around a thousand years. Okay, that's two Teotipukan was abandoned two thousand years after the Olmec per iod. Like the stretches of time we're talking about are enormous. I don't think people really fully grasp how much time that is. Well, and that's kind of the thing is one is one of the things as I've oh there's the monument. There we go. yeah Yeah, . So look at the, look at the art style of its face, how proportional it is and how aesthetically pleasing it is. This is like professional artistry even by today's standards, right? How does this appear out of the ether of Time? How do you and this is made with stone tools somehow? Yeah, the precision and there's present verse. Yeah, you the, you got the handbag guy. And it's fascinating. He's being carried by you can like the serpent is wrapped around him and the serpent's carrying. I see that. Yeah . So where does this come from? Like how do ancient people first come up with this iconography . And you know, this kind of art style, the ability to be able let's say to have the economy developed to be able to commission things like this because the Omecls don't have this kind of stone in their land. It's being exported from outside of their land . And that's been traced. We know where that stone is. Yeah, yeah, the Sierra de La Touchla volcanic belt . And so it's it a's a peripheral obscure culture that was in control of that area, but the Olmecs are paying to have that querried and then either the Omecs are bringing it or that other culture is bringing it and we don't really know. And this is supposed to be pre agriculture which just doesn',t work because the society would need to be separated at this point. Oh, no, this here is well into agricultural times. Yeah, yeah. So the Omex they're getting so the Koetz Kalkos River is one of the largest rivers. Like it goes from I could I could be wrong here, but it might connect the oceans you know between the or I should say the Gulf like you may be able to at least I know that it cuts down that massive narrow area because you have you have Olmec sites that dot it all the way from the Gulf Coast, all the way to the Pacific, along that Coes Calcos, these really fertile river valleys. And so these ol' Mecca, I didn't know they went that far west. Oh yeah, yeah, we have we have Olmec cities on the Pacific Ocean right next to the beach. I didn't know that. This is a hidden empire . Probably. guess My is it's an empire. Nobody calls it that. We just call it a culture because we don't even know we don't even have the slightest understanding of how their government operated, right? But we know that they're super powerful . And that power, my guess, must have come from lush how lush the valley is because I've stood over it before and I've taken a picture isolated of just the Koet Calcos Valley at the base of the city of San Lorenzo. And one of my buddies who was there with me who's also been to Egypt, I showed him that picture. I said, If I told you that was in Egypt, you would think it was because it looks just like Egypt. You look at photos of the Mesopotamian valley of, you know, the fertile crescent looks exactly the same. It's just that fertile valley where things can grow just at a level that no one else can. So the Omecs, they're profiting off of all of that and they become the first emergent civilization in Mesoamerica. But again, it's like instant just more than any other culture in the ancient world, far more it's not even comparable because by definition the, Olmecs appear on the historical record fully formed. Not like, oh, well, you know, it was super fast. So I'm just saying that. No, I'm not just saying it. That's actually the way it is in the archaeological record. There's no formative period. They just boom, they're there. Do we know genetically who they were? Yeah, well, I mean, all you can do is you can go to the most and they've done this. You can go to the most isolated like indigenous villages in Mexico today . You got these little tiny towns where people still live in huts in the same way that ancient people have been doing for thousands of years. There's Maya people still living in the traditional Maya huts. So you get their DNA and yeah, it's like ancient American DNA connected to connected to the people who came across the Bering Strait. It's the same sort of DNA and Asian. You know what's interesting is it's actually Southern Chinese. It's not even Northern Chinese, it's Southern Chinese DNA. That's a whole mystery, like what caused people from southern China to migrate and not people from Northern China or North of that, but it's Southern Chinese DNA that's at the root of Native Americans . Yeah, that's interesting. And the Olmeg people are born with birthmarks that come that come from Mongolia. They got these little the babies will have birthmarks on their butts and then the birthmark will disappear. That's a Mongolian trait. It happens to Mongolian babies too. I never heard that yeah, I'm pretty sure that that's right. Dr. Barnhardt, he documented this . It is a birthmark that disappears but I think it's on their butt. And yeah, so they are , you know, they're just the descendants of the people that came across either with the Clovis or after them or, you know , at some point in far distant past , but they as far as we know, they are Native American. But what's really interesting about Mexico is the genetic diversity is just crazy. You can actually look at people from different parts of Mexico and you can tell the difference. And you know, we think of Native Americans as being this monolithic people. They all sort of look the same. But the deeper I've gotten into it, the more I've realized like no , Camches look a lot different than Cherokee. The Cheroke e look a lot different than the Iroquois people, the Irquoisian people. Natives from California look a lot different of the planet. I know, but you just don't, you know, you don't think about it, right? We have like these implicit biases where we kind of oversimplify other places for it to make sense in our mind, you know what I mean? And in Mexico in particular, man, Maya people look so much different than Zapatex or Wahakins. And those all look different than the Olmecs. The Olmecs are so the Omecs have the roundish, puffy faces, and they actually legitimately have that. They don't really look like they have these skinny Maya have these skinny long angular faces. The Omecs are exactly the opposite of that. And I should have gotten a photo of it, but I didn't want to ask the guy. I was on a flight . You know what You know what the real dream is to have more weekend in our week? And that's what happens when you stay at Treasure Island, Las Vegas. I mean, they've got it all. High stakes adventure at the tables, death defying thrills at Mistair. You can saddle up to the bar at Gillies, and the ultimate jackpot, discovering nonstop fun in the heart of the strip. At Treasure Island, every day feels like the weekend. Room rates start at just sixty nine dollars with no res ort fees and no hidden fees. So book your escape now at treasure island. com Into Veracruz and the guy sitting next to me was an Olmec. I don't know if he knew that , but he was an Olmec. Like, if I turned his face into stone, it would be an Olmec head. He was this big sort of Samoan looking guy real puffy, puffy face, big nose, big lips, big eyes and he's sitting there and I just was like, I want to sneak a photo of this guy to so I'd have proof but beanie on him. They still look that way today What do we think that hat is that helmet that the peds are wearing? I mean, I don't buy the ball court thing. Oh, that is that is a depiction of ball court player crown, right? I think I think it's a fusion of that because we know that the ball game is at the center it's at the cent er of Mesoamerican mythology. Like, you know, you got you got the hero twins that are playing the ball game and , you know, the ball game goes to the center of their primordial worldview. It's tied to the very essence of the universe itself . And I think that it's more than just like , oh, they're ballgame players and it's about the game. I think it's about I think it's about like the order of the entire universe it self . And probably also about looking tough . What's the most do you know, do you know the most common way that communist depicts himself? As a gladiator. Yeah, yeah. So I think it's I think it's a similar thing to that. That's interesting. I think it's a similar thing to that they depict themselves because people, you know, you know, normal Roman people would actually glorify the Gladiators because it was so cool, but there was a weird paradox there because it was like this show of physical display, but yeah, the people are slaves. Right. So you're like idolizing a slave, right? So inherently we can't help but idolize athletes or like physical competition or whatever. So I think that if those guys really are kings and I think that they might be, I think that they are. Well, it's a lot of resources . Yeah I think that it's I think that it's more than just the game . It's the fact that the game is infused with the culture and their religion altogether. And also by proverbially presenting yourself as a gladiator , you look cool. You do. So that's my thought is that maybe it's all of these things put together . In our Western way of thinking because we're so platonic, like we you and I, the way that we think comes from the Athenians. They're categorical in nature . Well , so we've got these categories here . Either when you're thinking of Native Americans, either you have to like comprehend the fact that like we're either getting rid of those categories or we are inverting the categories where they're complete they're the actual opposite of ours. And the way that they compute and merge things together is totally different than the way that we do. So it's like what you mean? It's like we're the feathered serpent is a perfect is a perfect example here. They know Native Americans know that the feathered serpent is not real . It is an amalgamation of different esotic, spiritual, almost like philosophical parts of their world and what the feathered serpent represents Native Americans don't have any problem with taking multiple elements of their natural world and fusing them together in a way that wouldn't traditionally make any sense to us, but in a way that makes sense to them. And so what that fe seratheredpent , probably what I think that it represents . There's no real academic consensus on this. It's just me and Dr. Barnhardt bullshitting for years about these ideas . I think it's an esoteric symbolism of the conquering of the three realms . A snake is born underground . It rises up so it's born it's born in the underworld, it rises up and conquers the mid realm . And what I think that Mesoamericans , maybe they originally were seeing, but they knew that these were actually two separated things because we can see on the Olmec Monument nineteen that they knew I'll tell you probably like ten thousand years ago , Mesoamericans are seeing what's called the Ketsal bird fly around. Yep. And it's this bird with this little bitty body and these two wings that come off of the body and this massive tail . So what it looks like is a snake because you have this long tail and this little body here. Oh , it looks like a snake and you add the wings onto it. And so you could look up something you could look like up a Ketzel bird flying. And so it looks like a snake that's flying with wings coming out of its head. That's why these wings come out on Monte nineteen. That's why the wings come out of the head. It's actually the same thing in the mountain builder world they also there's also a dragon up here in like the United States . And what I yeah, so there you go. There it is. So that tail is actually much, much longer than that . You just can't tell by this angle , but it looks like wings coming out of a and I've seen one Quetzel bird in person. I walked into a temple in the Yucatan and a Ketzel bird flew straight over my head out of the temple. But it looks like a snake with wings . But we know that they didn't actually think it was a snake with wings because if you go back to monument nineteen, there are two ketzelbergs depicted on the monument. So they weren't being fooled . What I think it is is it's a the feather serpent is a symbol of the fact that whoever this person is, whoever the ruler is, this person that is essentially summoning the power of the Quetzalebird or ofet zQuel Koat or the feathered serpent. It's like it's symbolic of the fact that this person is fully awakened and they have conquered all three levels of existence. They've been born in the underworld, they came to the midworld, and they ascend ed probably through hallucinogenic practices or something like that. They ascended to where their soul is able to fly like this dragon, which is basically what this feathered serpent is. So they never they knew that that thing didn't actually exist, but they created it as a symbol of almost like awakening itself. If that makes it spiritual awakening, conquering all three levels of existence. Maybe conquering death, that might be what it is, flying in the air. It's really hard to it's really hard for us to try to like get in their mind and understand what they were thinking. But that's what I say that their ways of categorizing things and understanding the world is inverse to the way that we think in a lot of ways. And it's not it's not natural to us to think like a Native American does, you know? Well, you brought up dragons and what makes it hard for me to try to define a wing ed serpent is because it shows up everywhere . So yeah, it does. Was it really a I don't know, man. I don't know. You know, I've seen the argument that's like we have these massive I've seen the argument before that not all the times do wings and fossils not all the times are they preserved in fossils and that the wings, the cardilers that they're made out of could disintegrate. And so we could be finding animals that existed any time between fifty thousand years ago to fifty million years ago or more. No, we definitely but two hundred fifty million years ago, maybe before the time of the dinosaurs, that there could be fossils that we've had and we've created an entire animal around it, but actually that animal had wings at one point in time, you know. And feathers . Feathers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So many of the dinosaurs had feathers, which seems obvious because we paint them all as being like fully reptilian , but birds are reptiles too and they also have feathers, you know? The serpent I can get aroundly.ing F is a little harder , but I can see it. But the breathing fire, that's so, I don't know where they got that from. Yeah. And I did a little tracing of the dragon through some parts of the ancient world recently. And I think the breathing fire thing comes in the Middle Ages a lot . And so I wonder if the Middle Ages are like very far removed from the purer dragon. Like if we wanted a pure example of the dragon , I would probably point to ancient China and Mesoamerica , maybe ancient India too . And I wonder if you know, the other thing I wonder there are so many people who go down to the Amazon and they'll take in Ayahuasca and they'll have a vision of a snake like a like a an anaconda swallowing them. I have a buddy who told me that an anaconda swallowed him while he was on Ayahuasca and it wrapped around his body and whispered in his ear, it told me to be qu iet and it told him, I'm going to kill you. I love you, though. Or something like that. I love you, now I'm going to kill you. And it would swallow him. And it was almost like it was like spiritual awakening. Sometimes I wonder maybe dragons are real , but there's only one way to access them. And dragons interesting. And dragons are always maybe they're real just not real here . Maybe dragon and dragons are always associated with with rulers like the Chinese emperor, he wore the dragon pendant. He was a representative of the dragon. It seems like in Mesoamerica, you know, in the later Maya world , that Kuku Khan is the Maya ruler is the human embodiment of Kuku Khan, and the Aztec ruler was the human embodiment of Quizoko. It was probably the same thing in Teotibukan too , which is where the Aztecs get that from because probably the Teotubocano still live but like dispersed and their mythology carries down and the Aztecs absorb it and kind of reinvigorate it. But was it a positive symbol like it was in ancient China . Because dragon was a positive symbol of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not in Norse mythology or everywhere else. Oh no, no, it wasn't. Norse mythology is, yeah, that's it, because the dragon's eating the entire universe in Norse mythology . Yeah, it's it's interesting. No, but yeah, I mean it was it's funny to say a positive thing in Mesoamerica. Dr. Barnhard and I were in , we were in Mexico city at the museum and we're looking up at this, you know, so they have they'll have like modern indigenous people who , you know, still carry on the artistic traditions, but they'll have these massive murals painted. And so there's this mural that's like a modern interpretation of the whole pantheon of Maya gods interacting with each other. And Dr. Barnhardt he's like, he's like, he goes, he goes, you know what's interesting ? Where's all the love in Mesoamerica? Because it's all about death and war and destruction. And he goes, he goes, religion, their whole culture is so macabre and dark and about killing people and sacrifices and war and he's like where's all the love? And you know, he's alluding to the fact that there are levels of their culture that are invisible to us. It was definitely there. You know, these weren't like dark, brooding evil people, but when you say, well, is it positive, it's like, that's funny in Azo America. It's hard to know if anything's positive. Yeah . But yeah, I mean, I would say it's a positive thing for the civilization itself. Like if your ruler is the human embodiment of a freaking dragon . Yeah, you know, you would like to think you're being ruled over by somebody who's extremely powerful, right? But the dragon, especially in China, the dragon is not a foe. It's not a monster to be sl ayed. It is an embodiment of well in China, it's actually the dragon is actually an amalgamation of all the animals of their world. So it's like it's like a tiger and a camel and eagles and all these animals broadened together into this strange creature . But yeah, you know , I often wonder how many times in the ancient world the answer to so many of our questions can only be acquired by leaving this world , you know? You can only answer the question by going through by going through the mysteries, to be honest with you, that's actually what I think it is. Like the cult the cult of Ellus, the Egyptian mysteries that Herodotus writes about . He writes about it all the time and then when he gets initiated into the mysteries, he doesn't write about it any more because he can't he can't reveal it. And so you know the Chinese had the mysteries, you know the Maya had them. I've stood in the chambers where they're performed . And it all starts with the Olemex. There's actually a depiction of one of the and when I say mysteries for people watching, it's different than like how are the pyramids built? A mystery is almost like the religious organization that safe holds sacred cosmological scientific astronomical, astrological knowledge. It's all fused together . And these are the people who preserve and sa fekeep and try to uphold the very universe itself by carrying out these rituals. And we don't exactly know what they were doing, but no, but you're describing like a familial shamanistic culture that you're passing down the secrets of the universe. So those are called the mysteries . And every ancient culture has them. And rather than most archaeologists who look back and, you know, no archaeologist is going to like openly say, Oh yeah, that's the way I feel, but I think that I think so many of them just implicitly think that ancient people were naive and that their ancient religions were just like hokey and they were a way to manipulate the common man and that it was all sort of like a , you know, people coming and leaving offerings to dead people like leaving food. They say that the priests would just take the food just to feed themselves. Like it was all it was all hoax, but man, look throughout the entire ancient world . At one thousand BC, the entire ancient world is populated with massive civilizations all doing roughly the same thing. That's true. And I don't think that that's just because all these people are dumb. I think that they one of the coolest quotes I ever heard was from the professor Jeremy McNerney and he was talking about the temple of Apollo at Delphi. And he was he's like, I'm not going to get overly into this in this lecture. And he's like, he's like, but I'm just going to say this. I don't mean this in any sort of metaphorical way or I don't mean it in a symbolic or he said, I don't mean this sort of in sy anymbolic or metaphorical way. I mean this in a literal way and I'll just leave it at that . When the Oracle of Delphi was possessed by the essence of Apollo, she was actually possessed by the essence of Apollo . And he just leaves it at that. This is like a credential world class Greek archaeologist. He just leaves it. I've never ever heard him extrapolate on that before . And I don't know what I don't know what exactly he's getting at there. I don't know if he means that you mean the gases within the mountain that gave her visions? Yeah, yeah. I mean , I think he just means yeah, I think he just means that I don't think he's saying that he actually believes that Apollo is real . I think he's just saying that the oracle is actually there's something real , there's a real element to that. He just kind of leaves it at that. I think that's a psychedelic experience. Yeah, yeah. And you know, and the question is when you're taking part in psychedelics, are you actually interacting with something or are we all wired the same way to interact with plants the same way or when you interact with that plant, are you stepping into something else? What do you think have you taken the journey? No, I mean not I have a I have a very low tolerance to like cannabis and so you know in extremely strong doses that that's been enough for me. You know, you're going to have to walk the walk at some point. Yeah, yeah. See, the thing for me is I don't want to go visit the serpent until it calls me. I feel like if I do that, I'm gonna like mess up my brain in some way. I got to wait . Yeah. I gotta wait. I gotta wait until it calls me . But I will do it. I will do it at some point, but it just has to be the right time. Right now, I don't feel the need to do it . But yeah, my friends and I talk about this a lot and I need to put together a presentation, like really putting my thoughts together on this too I've juggled it around for so long . But I'm comfortable saying it. I think that like when people go down to the Amazon and they say that they meet some kind of female Amazonian goddess or they interact with a snake that coils around them and speaks to them . I think in some way that is two things at once. Like in the same way that like are we all just Forest Gump has a great line, a deep profound line where he says he's like he's like, I wonder if we're all just out here on this rock kind of like floating through the air or if it's all destined to be. And he's like, I think maybe it's both in some way. That's what I think. I think that the cosmos is so much more intertwined and so much more purposeful and larger than we can than we can possibly fathom . And I think that when people are interacting with things like that that are on the other side, I wouldn't be surprised if it's real. I wouldn't be surprised if these things live, if there are conscious beings that exist in some kind of other parallel dimensions that you're able to interact with, and maybe those beings are the universe itself or it's a reflection of us, but do you believe in God? Yeah, I do. Yeah. So how do we square both ? I think that God is I think that God is a lot more I think that God's a lot more complic ated than like a man floating on a white cloud in, you know, some renaissance painting. I think that when the Bible talks about like angels being cast out of heaven and everything. You know, we always have this idea of like demons being this antithesis being that's just pure evil . Well, I mean I don't feel like it's unlikely that some of these ethereal beings exist in this gray zone that want to be like maybe they want to be moral or they want to I'm really getting way off of this but you know maybe they want to be moral and maybe they want to be actually worshiped as a moral god and so you can go down to the Amaz on, you can interact with those, you can interact with those things and they're really there . But I think that I agree with like the Greek philosophers , they thought that logos was at like the core of the universe and that even with all these other gods, there was something that existed before that, which was logic itself It was reason and that reason itself may have had they personified it or we personify it, but they see something at the core of all of existence that actively made decisions that were logical , that created everything . And is that thing conscious or not? It's probably not conscious in the way that you and I think about it being conscious, but I think it's real. And that's what I think that God is. But yeah, you know, I wrestle with with like , you know, what do I think of interdimensional beings? I'm not talking about aliens, but like, you know , spiritual beings and how people interact with them Sometimes I sometimes I wrestle with that and like Christianity. But people are seeing the same things in their DMT experiences and they are seeing the same things. Maybe it's 'cause our brains are the same or maybe they're seeing something . You started your business with a great idea and a ton of hustle. Letcotprint. com help you look the part. Grow your business by getting professional marketing that works. Need business cards before a networking event, high impact postcards for a promotion or sleek signs for your storefront? We offer a huge selection, reliable quality and low pricing. Right now, get twenty percent off your first order with a code podcast. So don't worry about printing, worry about growing your business. Start today at got print. com and print with confidence. Yeah, well and then you know when I when I have a straight up vision about my grandfather's death and my last moment with him, where what is that? You know, that's that's not a coincidence of me being wired like a human. You know, that's no, that's you connected to something bigger. That's me connected to something larger. All ancient people felt this way . All ancient people , you know, were I don't know if religious is the right word, but spiritual. I think that ancient people were very open and connected to something that we're so calloused and cut off from these days. Our world has for all of the benefits that modernity has brought to us with science . Everything has also become so sterile. And I think that's a there's a great quote, I don't know who said it, but he says he's like, he's like the first sip from the glass of science will make you an atheist, but at the bottom God's waiting for you. And you know, there are so many people like Stephen Hawking. I don't think he admitted at the end of his life that God was real, but one of the last something he talks about in one of his last publications was that he could it was something along the lines of like he couldn't see any other way other than the fact that the universe was able to consciously make decisions on its own. That's God to me. Prove them wrong. Yeah, yeah. That's God to me. So yeah, but it's tough to it's tough to juggle these things and rationalize them together. But I think you're right. I think native people, especially in the Americas, just were much closer to whatever that realm is. Oh yeah , they respected it. You know, there's a there's a great book that's written by oh I'm forgetting his name but it'll come to Man just a moment. But he was a Spaniard that was born in Cusco in the mid early fifteen hundreds . He was the daughter of a wealthy Spaniard And I'm sorry, he was the son of a wealthy Spaniard and the son of an Inca princess . Very famous book, but it's called A Royal Count of the Incas . And it's basically him in his early twenties he left and went back to Spain to like reclaim his family's wealth and everything. And when he's an old man, he writes about his experiences growing up in Cusco and all the things that he learned. And man, Cusco's an amazing place. Have you been? No . Just think about it right now. I'm going back in the summer. I can't wait to go back. It's one of the one of the greatest cities on the planet. And that's the heart of the Inca Empire. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's the naval of the Inca world. And you know, they thought it was like the center of the universe itself, you know? There's no place that's like Gusco. It's amazing. And the people there are so nice. The Inca people in like just really, really amazing place place but it's Peru's very open to excavation and their history and all that . Oh yeah. Well for a little bit there I was the I was the American representative to get funding for the excavation of the Chin a tunnels. When you MEC Not through them. It was just me working directly with Cusco's Ministry of Antiquities. So we were able to we were able to secure some of the funding for the excav ation that they have for the tunnels that's there. And we kind of got that off of the ground. And so I was like the English speaking ambassador for them, just trying to get funding to come in to get the project off the ground. And now it's going . So we're going to I'm going to go in and check in with them this summer. But so this so this guy who had grown up in Cusco late in his life in Spain, he's writing about all the things he learned about. He's one of the sources for the legendary tunnels that are underneath the city as well . He's got he alludes to them. I've never heard of these. This is the mysterious china subway tunnels. Wow, so they wow I've never heard it referred to as subway tunnels, but yeah, yeah, probably it was it was it was connected to the to the to the Inca mysteries, you know, you would they would probably go under the tunnels and who knows what would go on down there and then they could emerge up at Saksewoman. Like you'd go down in Saksaywan, you go down into the mountain and you would emerge inside the city. We don't know if there if there are natural tunnels that were modified or if the Inca themselves made it, but we know that they were real . But anyways, so he writes about these tunnels and he also writes about, he tells us how the Incas, which Inca is actually the term of the ruler . You know, that's the name for the Inca emperor, right ? So you had like Monco Inca, goes on and on and on. I didn't know that. But when it talks about when the emperor himself would consult with the sun god, kind of like the pharaoh , the teachings that the sun god instructed the Inca emperor to have to be a good and moral emperor, which was such an important thing in all these ancient civilizations. It's such an important thing to be a good and moral person that's in line Garciasso de la Vega, there we go 's Royal commentary of the Incas. Yeah, I know that's a big one. So but he gives us an account of what he was taught from his mother's side of the family about the early philosophy of the In ca Kings . And about a year ago when we got back from no for my birthday, my wife got me the original printing of that book like hardback copy . Yeah. It's original . Well, well, I don't know why I said original. They were brought to the U. S. in like the early nineteen hundreds and there was a printing of them there. Yeah, yeah. So the original American one. They were made in New York. It's really cool. It's like deteriorates my hands every time I hold it. But so I'm flipping through the pages and I read the philosophy of like the founding of the Inco world and I'm reading this to her and I tell her I'm like, I'm like, how similar does that sound to Christianity? How similar does that sound? And she was she had just come with me to Cusco and she loves the Peruvian people and you know, you could just see how kind that they were and it's almost like , you know, it was like they were connected to goodness. They're just good hearted people . And I was telling her I was like, it just doesn't make sense to me that if God's real that he didn't have a relationship with these people. If these teachings seem so similar to everything we know , you know what goodness is, you know what it means to be good. You can feel it when there's a reason that all these philosophers come up with these rules of life and ways to treat each other because inherently we know what's good and what's not and you have this and if you're connected to that, that's what I feel like you being connected to God is we don't need the Ten Commandments. We already know and you know and you know the reality is there's no sense in even trying to have an argument for morality if you don't believe in something higher than just humanity. There's nothing you can come up with. There's no actual argument, philosophical argument you can come up with for why anybody should even care about how we treat each other if you don't believe in anything higher than this three dimensional realm. That's true. You know, you can you can try and you and the only reason they try is because they feel it too. We all feel the pull to be the pull to be good. We know what that means. And I believe very few atheists are truly atheists down deep. I think everyone believes something . I don't want to speak for everybody, but I think there are a lot of people who say, I, Oh don't believe in God. You kind of believe in something. Yeah, yeah, that's that's all of my interactions I've had with people who don't believe in God, but then you really start talking to him about it . Well, okay, well yeah, I mean, yeah, I recognize there's got to be something that's like more than all you know, you'll get that . But I think that's how everybody is because we all recognize it. There's so many things about our existence. I actually think it feels a few years ago I had this had this thought that I was like it feels so much more likely that you and I were always intended to exist and that and that our existence is not accidental , that feels so much more likely than you and I just being some of the luckiest beings to ever exist. You know what I mean? I do. It's actually more likely that we were always supposed to exist. And I think that that could be explained as simply as when the universe erupts and like the beginning of time, say the big bang , there's this massive explosion expansive nothing . I think that all the threads of time already existed in that moment. Time can't exist without light. These two things work together . We were all together. We were all together at some point. Yeah, matter can't be created or destroyed. Right . And so all of time was compressed into the size of a pinhead and those threads already existed and now they're just they're expanding out across the universe , but everything that was already gonna happen was born in that moment. There's nothing that's up to chance. It all existed from the very beginning of time. That makes so much more sense to me than this idea that like the things that happened just happened, whatever, whatever. I think everything that happens was already determined from the very second creation existed, if that makes sense. It does. Yeah. Yeah, because we're all connected. Tell me your theory about the wear j aguars. I don't want to forget that one. Yeah, yeah. So this is actually where and then we'll see if we can get to Atlantis. Yeah, so this is where doctor Barnhardt and I probably I don't know . We might disagree with each other on this , but it doesn't really matter. Wow , it's actually called a where jaguar. Where jaguar? Yeah, yeah. So like a werewolf. Yep, yeah, yeah. Man, we've got where wolves and where jaguars and we tarigers and I think there's a wear hippo out there somewhere. Yeah , I gotta do a video at some point on all the wares and these different human fusions with these creatures. But so my first introduction to the Where Jaguar was well it was actually the day before I was at Palenke for the first time with Dr. Barnhardt. If you go to see Palenke, the likelihood is you'll have to land in Vierimosa and there is where you can go to Levinta Park where a bunch of these, uh where a bunch of these Olmec monuments were like rescued when, uh I think it was Pemex was taking over the oil company? Yeah, yeah, it was taking over a lot of Mexican land and one of them was the archaeological side of Levinta. They thought they were just going to pulverize the whole thing. So one of the wealthy patrons of the city of Viaramosa bought all of those or maybe he bought them or he did something he paid for them all to be transported to Veramosa and put in this huge park. So he's like a local local local hero . And it's an amazing park. One of my favorite parks in the world. And it's also a little zoo as well. It's really cool. So you and I visited that before Polenke, and I've been back like four or five times now. I've been across the OlMec world like maybe maybe four times now. And what's really interesting and I tell people this every time I'll take like we'll have students who sign up to go on a Maya exploration center. That's our organization MEC. Well, our students that will sign up to go on like these educational tours. And so I'll tell them at the first day I'll be like, what do you think of when you think of the Omex? They say they'll say the heads. I'll say by the time you leave this, when you think of the OLEMX, you'll think of a wear jaguar. It won't even be close. You'll think of a wear jaguar. Yeah, because there are seventeen known basalt olmec heads, and there are three more that are sandstone that Dr. Barnhart and I, we publicized to like the popular audience just a few years ago because no one had ever seen them. He and I hadn't even seen them in person. There was this little there's this little museum that has been like closed at Leventa for years because I guess like rain damage and they reopened it back up and the floor was like still covered in water and so we're walking around this museum like inch deep of water. He and I open up these doors and there's these three massive sandstone ulnec heads standing in front of us that are far larger in size , not weight, but in size compared to all the other Olmec heads. And yeah, I look at each other and we go, what the hell are these? We've never seen them before. And they're larger than what's in the park. Yeah, yeah, they're yeah, oh it's crazy. It's really crazy . And there are omech heads spread throughout Mexico, but all the ones from La Venta , almost all of them are at that park , but they're larger than all the olmec heads throughout all of Me xico . Almost like twice as big in size. Wow. And but what's funny is those heads are not humans, they're wear jaguars . But they're not basalt. So there's there's some there's some so this slowly started eating away at me I just what's really cool about Mesoamerican archaeology or I should say American archaeology is that it's under published , underfunded , it's not quite as popular. You know, Egypt vastly overshadows so much of the ancient world as far as popular interest, right ? And there are so few people professionally studying it that an outlaw like myself or doctor Barnhardt can come in and look at the stuff that's on display , read the academic literature of what's been of what's been discovered like a hundred years ago or more eighty years ago when it comes to the Olmecs. That's another thing. You know, the Olmecs are an American discovery. Americans discovered and made the major exploration or the major expeditions in the Olmec world, Matthew Sterling and the Smithsonian. What was that? It was what was the first year nineteen it was mid nineteen thirties to just after World War two nineteen forty six, I believe, was the last Stirling expedition to the Olmec world. But yeah, it was it was American teams that did that. It's kind of cool. It's an exclusive it's like it's like a specifically American story where we went down in Mexico and launched these major expeditions with Smithsonian, obviously working with their government, but fully American teams. I mean, we talked earlier about the early Smithsonian was very racist against indigenous people. Oh yeah , they believe that there's no way savages could build these exactly , which I think is one of the reasons why we don't hear those stories as much as we hear about Egypt. A hundred percent true. Yeah, yeah, there's there's a lot of weird, complex , like dark stuff that the Smithsonian has gotten up to. I haven't done a whole lot of looking into it, but I will I will feed the giant skeletons community. There were three massive skeletons that were discovered at the Olmec site of San Lorenzo in the early nineteen hundred s and an old man that doctor how big are we talking? Are we talking giants? More than six and a half feet tall. Okay, that's that's what the guy that's what this old man who was probably in his eighties, doctor Barnard and I met him. He came out with the archaeological team to the site of San Lorenzo, got talking to us, and he told us he saw three massive skeletons get or get excavated from the Red Palace and they were taken to Mexico City and never seen again. Wow. Never published, and there's no photos of them. That guy said he was sixteen years old and he saw it. And there are other people who saw it as well. And this was a known thing that giant people were found in these mounds and taken away. You're not really a giant And this was the Smithsonian doing this. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, we have the documented hiding things. Man, I don't know if I'm I don't know if I'm a giant's guy. I'm not really, I kind of want to believe, but I kind of don't. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I don't know, I mean, I don't know if giants are a race or if they're just venerated because they have was it gigantism or gigantis m? Right. I mean, I think your theory is the first I heard of someone talking about a cleft palate as being a positive trait in a culture. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah . Can you tell us about that real fast? Yes. Absolutely. So this is so this is this is the way that this started for me was I was actually just playing around with I was putting together the ways that that star Wars is inspired by the Mesoamerican world. People don't realize that there actually was something called the Star Wars. It was the Maya Civil Wars , and that so much of George Lucas Star Wars is actually pulled from the Mesoamerican world , even though they don't publish it. Like you would think he would write that in a book. It's so obvious to me, but this audience knows what Yavin four is. Yeah, yeah. So Yavin four, T al. Well, Job's palace is actually pulled from Machtazuma's palace when the Spaniards arrived this is the beginning of me thinking about this . And I don't know if there's any other modern scholars out there that agree with me on this they might all think I'm crazy for thinking . But this is what got me thinking about this. I had known that the Aztecs had Olmec artifacts, even though they may have never known who the Omecs were or knew about any other sites. I knew that they had O l armteifc acts and probably knew it came from a time before time, right? And then I got thinking about when the Spaniards arrived at Maktazuma's palace in the Aztec capital of Snowshit Lan, they go up into his palace and they see that surrounding the em peror are all these people with weird deformities . And he saw them as being touched or blessed by the gods and that they could be clairvoyant, that they could be , you know, they were valuable people. And so they were all spoiled and they were kept up in the palace and they were venerated. They weren't discarded like the, you know , if you're born deformed in ancient Greece, you're going to get left up on top of a mountain top. So that's another reason that I say that their way of thinking is inverse to ours. They're so much different than us. So they see these people as being touched by the gods or blessed by them . Well, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot in Mesoamerican archaeology is the continu ity of cultures that they're very traditional . At the top of their of their stone pyramids, if you look at the architecture in the Maya world, the top of the stone pyramid in stone will be a stone recreation of a wooden and thatch hut that the normal people would live in. So the top of the pyramid is just an architectural recreation of a wooden and thatch hut. It's the same way within within Egyptian temples, the pillars themselves are actually just bundles of reeds and loaded flowers that are all wrapped together. That's what the pillar itself represents . And so they really care about staying with tradition. That's why these people for so long, even as wealthy as they were, they always lived in huts because it's a way of honoring the ancestors and honoring tradition itself. You know, they're like conservative people. They hold on to these traditions and carry them with them. And so I thought, well, you know, the Aztecs are fourteen hundred AD . If you go back just a thousand years, you can see that the Maya are venerating dwarves . They say that that dwarves built the pyramid of Ushmal in a single night. If you go up to Temple thirty three at the city of Yashilan, there's like depictions of dwarves and the ball game all the way around the temple . The Maya people venerated dwar ves as being special and being touched by the gods . You see that Paul's son at the city of Palenke, he had six fingers and six toes and that was something that they that they saw as being significant about him, that he was blessed by the gods. Well, let's let's go back to let's let's take that just one step further back to the Olmec world where we have even more deformity . We have , you know, you have you have all these depictions of where jaguar people who , you know, they look like they have the downturn mouths and left lips with fangs coming out. They do . And then you also see lots of depictions of some people call them like downs babies , but they're babies that you can tell . Looking for the ultimate escape, head over to Harris Resort Southern California where you can float your worries away at the twenty one and over main pool or swim right up to the bar for a drink, bring the whole crew and enjoy the four hundred foot lazy river perfect for families. And for soccer fans, you can watch games bullside this summer when you book an exclusive game day package. Kick back in Funner, California in your own private cabana and enjoy fun soccer themed extras while watching the action live. Book today at HarrisoCal. com not , you know, they're born with some kind of deformity. There's there's something there's something , you know, wrong with them. That's a wear jaguar baby. But if you go to like a regular baby, that guy, he's actually a little bit different . So I think he has ectodermal dysplasia, but if you look at a different baby statue , you'll see that they do look like children with Down syndrome. And so I think that the reason that we have thousands of these little statues and they're like life size. They look just like a baby. You could put a real one next to them . They're the same size and everything. It's a portrait of a literal baby . And I think that what I think is happening is that when these babies are being born, the Olmec people know that something is special about them. They're blessed by the gods and they're not going to make it through childhood . And so they venerate these babies by making all these statues for them because they know these children aren't going to survive. And I think they're venerating their lives . And the babies that are born with these cleft lips , in the nineteen seventies, there was a survey that was done in Vera Cruz, like a medical survey. And one of the things they documented, this didn't have anything to do with research in the olmex. It was just something that they documented was that there was a disproportionate amount of indigenous children born with ectodermal dysplasia. I mean, there's no question that's what this is. We're seeing this over and over again. Yeah. No question. Do you see underneath the lips how gummy that is? Yep, there's no question. So my wife has worked on children with dermal split. My wife's a dentist. I refer to her about this stuff so I feel a little more free to talk about this. But she'll have kids come in with ectoderm as. They got a couple of fangs. Like sometimes there's two things in the front or sometimes it's wide two things . They have no learning disability, just normal. Really? Yeah, just totally normal kids. But their mouths are gummy and they 'll have two fangs on the top and maybe sometimes fangs on the bottom or won't have teeth that grow in the bottom. Nowadays they'll get implants, you know, dentures, whatever. They have different ways of helping kids with this. But it doesn't come with learning disabilities. And she had a whole period in college where she learned about this, which is actually at the same time that I was researching this when I first started researching it. And so what I think is that these people are interacting with the most ferocious animal in the jungles of the Americas, the Jaguar. All of a sudden you have kids that are born with jaguar fangs. You start taking DMT and Ayahuasca and peyote, and just like you hear people who take these hallucinogenic drugs in the jungles of Central America, Mexico and South America, they will wake up looking through the eyes of a jaguar. They will be inside a jaguar going through the jungle And I think that all of these things over thousands of years fuse into this culture that venerates the most ferocious beast in the forest , that is taking hallucinogenic psychedelics and looking through the eyes of a jaguar, whether or not it's really happening. I don't exactly know . And then you have children that are being born with fangs that people are looking at like , this person is a human jaguar. How did this happen? And you see depictions in the city of Chocatingo of Jaguars and people like interloping with each other, like having sex with each other. Some people think that they're dancing, but they do look like they're having sex with each other and they're like human jaguars. And so I think you get this, I think over the course of thousands of years of this happening, you get these people that are like selectively breeding and engineering a whole population of people to be born with ectod ermal dysplasia. And that's why throughout the Olmec world, you only see seventeen depictions of colossal olec heads, but you see thousands of depictions of where Jaguar people. Thousands. Thousands, thousands. And what I think it is is just like in ancient Egypt where you had this is I mean I just feel so certain saying this in ancient Egypt you have You have we know that the pharaoh and the priests were warring against each other. The priests had risen up, they become so powerful that they start to challenge the pharaoh's power. And it's almost like the pharaoh has to obey the priests and,, you know that',s not the cosmic order of things and they have this huge feud . Well, I think that there's a priestly class of shamanic people in the Omec world that are the wear jaguars, and it's this whole breed of people. They're not kings, but they're the religious leaders. They're the religious guides in this civilization. And the king himself is separate from that. And we can see all throughout the Olmec world of the Olmecs actually and I actually think that it's a totally one sided thing as far as I can remember so many of the Ulmec altars which are it's basically like this huge stone table and inside of the table you see a man who's clearly a wear jaguar with what looks like an elongated skull and have this big hat thing on top of him with a ureaus just like this is crazy . like Just the Egyptian Uraeus with the really. Yeah, he has a he has a he has a it's either a fertilance or it's a rattlesnake right here on the on the front of his headdress. You can look up Levinta Levinta Olmec or Olmec Laventa altar and it will pop up . And he's emerging from a cave and he's carrying a baby with him. The man has downturn lips and so does the baby. And on the sides on the sides of the monument, you have other grown people . Okay, so it's going to be one of these it's it's the photo right below this one . Yeah. Oh, that's no question. Yeah. So look at that. So he's got so he's got a if you look really, really closely, there is a snake that's coming out of the top of his hat . And so he's got downturn lips and he's holding a baby while emerging from the cave. And next to him you can see other people who also have the downturn lips also holding babies who have the downturn lips. Now what I think that this actually is and one day I got to make I got to make something like this is let's unwrap the monument where you have a scene here on the front here scene here on the side. Let's unwrap it and flatten it out. What I think it is is it's a procession of these children because we found we know where the caves are that these people were making pilgrimages to in Guerrero, Mexico. They're going inside the caves, they're performing these mysteries inside of them. There's depictions carved into rocks at Chow Katz Ningo of a man sitting on a throne inside a cave. You can see the opening of the cave and you can see the wind like billowing out of it. He's also holding a baby. So what I think that they're doing is there's this ride of passage that a baby born with ectodermal dysplasia, a wear jaguar , has to go through as a baby to be oh it's like it's like having a having a Christian king being baptized as a baby, right? You have to go through the rights . And so they're going through their mysteries, their rights as children. And what I think that these altars are is I think that that is a snapshot in time of when the shaman wear jaguar who's going to sit on top of it , that baby being carried by the man, the baby is him. It is a snapshot of when he was given the right of the power of the wear jag uar as a baby, right? And we know that they're sitting on top of it because there's a rock art painting of a Ware Jaguar ruler sitting in this yoga pose on top of one of those altars . So we know that they're sitting on top of them. What is the quote unquote mainstream view of those ? Man, I don't I don't think that there really is one . I still hear it. Yeah, I saw I saw well, I mean, I know that they're it's kind of like they they mostly mostly what they do is they call it ancestor veneration. It's all these broadly vagay terms. I saw a guy recently who he's like a really mainstream sort of academic and he did a video on the Olmecs and I was curious what he was going to say about these monuments. And I saw like his little part where he's standing in front of it and explaining it and I was like no , it's not even just it's missing all of the nuances it's fine but it's missing all of the everything . So anyways but I think that as you go throughout the Olmec world, you can see that there's two different groups of people. You've got these royal families that are headed by these Olmec heads. Those guys are probably kings. Each of them are portraits and there's just no other way to explain it other than the fact that the most powerful guy around had to have commissioned that. But you also have massive monuments, never really heads that are made out of basalt, but you got these big altars like we were looking at are made for the Wear Jaguars. But you know what's really interesting is if all those altars are typically smaller than like the average Omec head and you can tell on some of them that there's an ear on the backside of it. It was a head that used to exist that was carved down in a way and turned into a wear jaguar. Wow, monument . And there's even there's even an Olmec head that was never actually a head, but it was a smaller piece of smaller flat like rounded piece of stone that they carved a face into it and then they carved these jaguar claw mark across the head and just like maimed and destroyed the face on it. And I think that it's I think this public architecture that's showing that the Wear Jaguar priest class is warring with the Omecs. Yeah, that's telling a story. And they often say that this is kind of like it's kind of like the mystery of Gobeckle Teppy. We don't know what was intentionally buried and what wasn't. Like if it was intentionally buried, they call it ritual deactivation where it's like taking away the power from it. Now, we don't know if it's the Olecs doing it themselves or if it's warring factions inside the Olec world the heads were intentionally buried. Yeah, yeah. And we don't know if it was other civilizations that came and buried them. Like if they got conquered and the civilization that conquered them buried their buried their monuments, which I don't think that I don't see any evidence behind that at all . And then they think that the Olmecs may have done it themselves , but not out of the official narrative, the official idea is that it was they were done it was done themselves, but not out of confrontation. It was like ritual deactivation. So maybe at the end of the ruler's life, they bury the head. I don't agree with that eith because at the top of all the heads, the thing that's ignored here is the only claw marks that you actually see on top or the only claw marks that you will see on the Olmec heads. We could look them up right now. They're on the top of the head and I think it's I think it's probably at certain points throughout the civilization the where jaguars topple the control of the Olmec kings , bury it down, maybe the head is maybe the top is exposed and they claw up the whole top of the helmet where the symbols are. Yep. They claw those away , but it's actually a carving of a claw mark because you can put all five of your fingers in it and follow it like it's a deep claw mark. So they're carving, they're taking the time to cost this is vandalism. This is sculpture. Sculpture , sculptural vandalism. Okay, right. It's like this was this sculpture was created one hundred fifty and years ago or something . Well, now we're going to bury it and we're going to carve claw marks into it to make it known that this is what happens when you challenge the cult of the Wear Jaguar, right? You know, something like that . And all over the Olmec world, you can see it's not just claw marks like they scratched into it with something . They took the time with tools to chisel long, deep five finger claw marks throughout throughout these monuments. This happens hundreds and hundreds of times. Claw marks on hundreds of these? Yeah, yeah, hundreds of different monuments throughout . And several different like a dozen different times like you can imagine yeah, you know that a wear jaguar clawed at a monument and they make it look like that like a wear jaguar just mauled this guy the top of this guy's helmet took away his whole insignia , you know, just disgraced his power and then they buried him. That's what I think that I'm seeing, especially when you see the monument of what looks like an Ulmec face and his whole face is just torn to shreds. Could it be possible that the Wear Jaguar is a later culture and they're just the heads are there and they want to bury these and dominate that earlier culture? Or do you think it's just they're contemporaries . That's a good question. I don't know. I think it all happens at the same time because well, I mean, I love stuff that Yeah that we just find. See the top of the top of the thing? Yeah, that's that's vandalism sculpt ure. That's clearly intentional. That's an interesting question about can both these be happening at the same time. I think that they're happening at the same time because it's you see the similar art sty les between the heads and everything else. They're also using the same trade routes. Like we have found some of the roads all the monuments are being transported across the land and everything. So I think it's all interacting with each other happening at the same time. But what I think it is is that let's say the royalty versus the shamans, these rise, these rise. First of all, you know, it's like this. So at certain points in times there might be not a be king at all. It's just the wear jaguars dominating everything and burying all these people. And so I think this is going on for like almost two thousand years. Yeah . And I actually I believe I'm standing out on an island by myself with this theory. I don't think there's a single other academic that would that would back this up, but it seems obvious to me that that it's two different factions like warring against each other. Ultimately, though , the last main Olmec cultural center is a place called Treasipotes . And that rises somewhere around two hundred fifty BC, so like Olmcs have been around for two thousand years at this point. And when that cultural center takes hold and they build this massive city , they've got a few heads there, a bunch of bunch of stone monuments, nowhere jaguars . So somewhere between about five hundred BC towards the latter part of Levinta and the rise of this next cultural center called Treesipotes, the WAR Jaguar just disappears into time. That's interesting. From that point on , dominating Mesoamerica will be the pantheon of gods that's worshipped by the Maya and the Zapotecs, later the Teotibucons and this shamanistic culture that's like supreme ly shamanistic, where people are almost like transforming into other beings becomes secondary if not completely disappears . We see in some places in the Maya world like out in Belize , where Belize was connected to the Omecs in a way in a particular way. The Maya people of the Belize of Belize were connected to the Omecs in a particular way that the rest of the Maya world was not . And I just learned when I was in Belize like a couple months ag o from Belize is so overlooked and so underfunded and understudied in archaeology that I learned that there are only five active PhD archaeologists in the entire country of Belize. What? Only five. Oh, I just say, no , there's only five of 'em and like two or three of 'em are active. Yeah, how crazy is that? It's crazy. So you have this whole massive world there, but we know that the Maya of Belize were interacting with the Olecs because way early on before the rest of the Maya world even accepts or adopts divine kingship, there was a kingdom in the king dom on the coast there that had trade connections all the way back with the Omec world because we can see that they're sharing things. Like the Omec people have artifacts that you'd only find on the coast of Belize and vice versa. And so these people on the ity called Cerros , they try a kingdom and it works for like one hundred and fifty years and collapses . But surviving there throughout the rest of the Maya world just in Belize, and you have to think the Maya world is not a monolith. They're not like one guy when makes a decision in T Call, it doesn't become law for everybody else. It's like it's like the Greeks, they have city states . But the where Jaguar survived in Belize for all the way until the classic peri od, like two, three thousand years later, where for thousands of years the where jagwar continued survived and bleed. And I did not know that. And I that was shown to me by an archaeologist named Raphael he took us on a he took us on a tour through ATM cave which is really, really cool. And he showed me on the side of this pot a wear jaguar. It was made in like classical Maya form, but it was a man who was actually a jaguar. Yeah. And that doesn't exist anywhere else in the Maya world, but of course it exists in the one place that was actually connected to the Olmecs thousands of years earlier. So that influence that the Olmecs had on those people if the wear jaguar stuck with them for a thousand years after the Olmecs had fallen. That's amazing. It's really cool Can I keep you for one last quick second? Sure, let's do it. So we were talking about half man half jaguar when we come back and we talk about half man, half bull. Half man half bull, let's do it. Yeah. Great, thanks for hanging out for one more. I appreciate it. I had so much. I know, did we get to most of it? Almost. I was really excited to hear you talking about the Minoans because I don't think they get enough love. Yeah . Can you tell us a little Minoan story? Who were they? Yeah, so the Minoans are , you know, they're another one of these civilizations sort of like the Olmecs. They're a if the Olmecs are a pre Mesoamerican society, well, the Minoans are like a pre Greek society. The Minoans really might not even be Greek at all . We don't quite understand their racial composition or where they came from or what culture they subscribe to. They're like their own people but and we don't know what they call themselves. We don't know what they do. We don't even know what they call themselves. Yes. How crazy is that? We don't even know what language they spoke. Same, same sort of thing. But the Minoan society is , man, I love the Minoans It's I got fascinated with the Minoans . The movie of Troy, all the architecture that's pulled from that is mostly from Kinosis . And so this was so Kinos, the Oncrete. Kinosis, which is which is they call it the Minoan capital, but we don't even know if that's what it was . But so the Minoans they arrive , we start seeing their culture form whether coincidentally or not coincidentally on the island of Crete around three thousand one hundred BC . Same century, same century as when Egypt arises. My guess not a coincidence . My guess, the ancient world's much more interconnected with each other than we can possibly understand. Oh my gosh, I gotta tell you this Did we talk about ? I don't know if I told you this yet or if I was talking with your brother about this. What happened? No, you and I returned to the other room when I told you about that Roman city in the Docklo Oasis way out in the middle, way out in the middle of Egypt. So in southern Egypt , you follow the Nile seven hundred miles after you get into Egypt, and then you go you head west for who knows? It probably takes a week to get out there from the Nile itself. But you reach this place called the Docklo Oasis, which are these huge reservoirs that create fertile land just next to the reservoirs. Ancient people have been living there since twelve thousand five hundred BC and they eventually were consumed into and wrapped into the dynastic Egyptian world. Well , when the Romans, as we were talking about, when they took over Egypt , they built a Roman colony down there and the ancient world was so interconnected, news could spread so quickly that even during this period of like seventy emperors in seventy days or something . R Inome , they changed the inscriptions on one of the temple walls to reflect an emperor that was only alive as emperor on the throne for ninety days. That's crazy. So they were able to change the yeah, so there's there's Daklo Oasis. So they were able to change the inscription of the emperor that quickly. So that's twelve hundred twelve hundred plus miles. Right. That's unbelievable. Yeah, yeah. So there so information gets around just like that. And my guess is it always had been and and we just it's invisible, but it's hard we can't see it , but when you see the fact that Mesopotamia really starts kicking off around thirty we can push it back a little bit, but maybe three thousand three hundred, thirty two hundred, thirty one hundred BC, the Minoans kick off in three thousand one hundred BC, the Egyptians kick off in three thousand one hundred BC. That's not a coincidence. These people all know each other and when these little revolutionary ideas spark people who are trading in those areas, they go immediately back home and say, You're not going to believe what I just saw. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and that's why they all progress next to each other, right? They all rise sort of at the same time. And but the Minoans are the ones that get overlooked because we look at Mesopotamia and Egypt as being the origins of civilization itself, but the Minoans were right there too. I mean, I think you could say Crete is one of the birthplaces of civilization. You can certainly I mean it's the first written language in Europe . I gotta start saying that more of. Linear A no? Yeah. First written language. Yeah, linear A. And we don't know what it says . Yeah, yeah. Well, first written language at least in the Greek world, like, you know, Egyptian hieroglyphs and there's Egyptian hieroglyphs and then there's then there's a Mesopotamian writing and there's the Phoenician writing and they think that linear A is pulled from the Phoenician writing, but yeah, that's that's fascinating . Well, hang on a second. You have linear A undecipherable. Then you go linear B, which is like proto Greek . Then language then writing language goes away for four hundred years and then Greek re emerges based on the Phoenician alphabet. Oh, is that what it is? Okay, okay. I'm sorry. I was a Homer . For some reason I was thinking that that linear A, that they thought that linear A was pulled from I can be wrong. I don't even know it's like pictures of c ats. It is yeah, it's pictographic and logograms. Which is loosely inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs because Egyptian hieroglyphs are logograms and pictograph s. And I think that early Chinese is sort of the same way. It's like pictures and the pictures like fuse symbols, you know ? But yeah, so they 're their culture they ar,rive there. I think the earliest that we see their culture emerging is like four thousand BC, which is at the same time Mesopotamia and Egypt. And then the actual civilization fully existing is about is three thousand one hundred BC. There's a lot of different things that check boxes for civilization. One of the things they're starting to take off of that is writing though. You know, it's like that used to be that used to be one of the boxes you'd have to check to be a civilization. Now they're realizing like that's not really if you have all the other tenets of a civilization, you don't have to be writing because you don't have to write to have a civilization. A lot of civilizations survive off of oral history. So they're taking that one off, which I sort of agree . But nonetheless, the Minoans are riding. So man, they are so much more ancient than the rest than the rest of the Greek world . So between three thousand BC and two thousand BC , they start building these towns and cities across the island of Crete. They say it's it's it's like the island of the island of a hundred cities or the island of a hundred palaces. And so you have all these you have all these cities that are being built that are inordinarily wealthy compared to other people that are living in, you know, between two thousand and three thousand BC around the Mediterranean world. Well, explain how big these palaces are because so right now we're in like the pre palatial period. We start entering palatial when we get to about two thousand BC. Okay . That's when the big buildings go up . Yeah. So so the Minoans , they really they realize that they're the Mesopotamians, they They make a lot of their wealth from I believe a lot of it is gold mining and valuable resources as well as it is farming. The Egyptians, it's farming straight up. They don't even have gold in Egypt. All their gold comes from Sudan and Nubia . But massive massive amounts of farming. And so the Minoans , they make their money in the copper trade and copper. Yeah, yeah. So one of their most valuable one of the places I was able to mine the most copper was their city of Akrotiri. Acratiri it's a modern day Santorin i just north of the island of Crete. They're able to mine a lot of copper there and on the various islands. And the island of Crete itself does have some copper, it does have silver as well. So it's metals. Once the metals starts kicking off, that's why like Egypt and Mesopotamia kind of they all emerge at the same time, but these two guys grow way faster. But once these guys, once everyone else starts realizing that they want copper, boom, the Minoan civilization explodes. And so about twenty one hundred BC to , let's say, nineteen hundred BC, that's kind of when this massive it probably goes back further than that because we know that the Egyptians are buying copper from them like in the fourth dynasty. There's all that copper that they've got . So much of that comes from comes from the Aegean . But the Minoans are slowly building up that wealth to about the point that by seventeen hundred BC , the whole island is covered in like ninety nine of these, I think it's like ninety nine to one hundred of these massive palaces. That many, wow. I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. Now there's about a dozen of them that are absolutely enormous, but in all it's like it's like a hundred palisade towns. You have this big town and you have this massive public architecture center in the middle of it. But there's twelve of them, I believe, that are just absolutely enormous. I wish I had a measurement of the acreage . That's something I should know, but they were so enormous and so strange to visitors that this is sort of where the labyrinth myth comes from. There was no actual that we have found, no labyrinth of the Minotaur and the Minotaur is their cultural creature. It's this man bull. So kind of like the Omex, you know, you got this man jaguar. So you had to wear a bull. And so the labyrinth of the Minotaur, it's possible that it's actually just referencing the palaces because the palaces are these labyrinths of like four floor palaces with all these winding hallways. You know, in ancient times, people don't think about this . There were no wide open rooms in ancient times because the technology to create a roof that would still hold up to be large hadn't been invented yet. They hadn't figured out how to do that with the architecture. So you would have small rooms and winding hallways. And so these palaces are labyrinths with like thirteen hundred rooms. Yeah, exactly. With thirteen, thirteen, fourteen hundred rooms. Yeah, it's something it's something insane, especially at Kenosis. And we call 'em palaces, but it's possible that everybody lived there, no? Like shopping malls? Yeah, yeah, that would be more so what I would say. You have these you have these you have these villas that are built right up on the walls on the outside. And from those villas that surround the palaces , it starts out at this really high level super expensive homes and it gradually descends out as you get further away. You know, you got thousands of people living here. And then you've got these other nicer areas that are way out in the countryside. People that are, you know, have like wine vineyards and farms and everything . And keep in mind, even the lower class people, their homes are much larger and much more well built than anybody's homes in Egypt. Like in Egypt, if you're not born royal, even a priest granted, some of the some of the wealthy , some of the high ranking priests were like mob bosses . But in general, by principle in Egypt, if you weren't born royal, you lived in a dump . You lived in a shack . So even the normal people in the Minoan world are more wealthy than the average Egyptian. There is not any sort of normal circumstance where the average Minoan person would ever even dream, they would laugh at the idea of trading places within Egyptian. And when you know that it kind of changes your perspective of the ancient world, like, yeah, these temples were amazing, the pyramids are amazing. That world is amazing, but you know, the average life of a Minoan was considerably better than anybody else in the Mediterranean world . Considerably better. They had flushing toilets and water that's flowing through their city and they've got fountains in the center of the city, which was something that , you know, people always look at like the Roman aqueducts bringing fresh water into the cities already existed. The Minoans already had this, but it was all underground. Underground plumbing. Yeah, they had ceramic pipes. Underground plumbing, ceramic pipes, they had marble toilets on the fourth floor of palaces with that could flush. They could on the island of Akiri specifically , your bath you could choose between cold and hot water. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah. So it just mind so they're mind. They're drawing from two different like a hot spring and a so one is coming from a spring that's next to the volcano and one is coming from a cold spring. That's amazing. And you could you could cut off where the water is coming from to fill up your bath. And you know, the baths are made out of like alabaster crystals, some of them are made out of polished marble. It's like crazy. And it's just an unbelievably wealthy society . And as much as we've studied the societal makeup, like the structure of the culture , there's no sign of kings, there's no sign of lords , there's these aren't kingdoms. They're the way I've seen them describe is consumer societies. So it was a capitalistic enterprise society. So So it's a dog eat dog world based on what you provide and having connections inside the business realm. So what makes sense to me is that those palaces are actually malls. It's not a palace. It's public architecture. And in the center you,'d have a big courtyard. So there'd be festivals that were played there. All the depictions you see of the guys jumping over the bulls. Yeah, that all happened. It must have happened in that central courtyard. So you'd have parades there. And then the cubbies on the sides, you'd have people selling things and as you went up , maybe you know, who knows maybe the copper salesmen are up at the top floor and that's where the aristocrats are really trading and down on the bottom you got like, you know, hey, do you want to buy the you want to buy these , you know, these olives, you want to buy these seeds, this grain, this cheap wine, you know, and then you probably have you probably have like on the third, you know, on the top, I'm guessing it's going to be like copper trade. You're gonna have this, you know, thousandaire that's going to come in like a millionaire or billion aaire back then, but you know, he's going to come in and he's got to go to the top floor where all the copper salesmen are, the super rich people with the finest wine being brought to these businessmen. And just below that, it's probably like, oh, you know, well, while I'm visiting Kenos is, I want to buy this really , I want to buy this really nice cup that I can drink with. You know, so you go up to the third floor where all the Faones is being sold and you know that's probably what I think it was a big mall. I think you're right . Ryan showing the horracleon right now. You don't see an architecture like this for a thousand years. When this falls, yeah, you don't see anything like this. Actually, I should say on a scale that size . No classical Greeks are ever building anything that big . All of their buildings are like single buildings that are clustered together. That is one massive building. The only time you'll ever see anything like that I would say two thousand years later height of the Roman Empire . That's the only forum and all the temples that are not clustered together, but they're like built on top of each other. That's the only time you ever see anything like this again, especially with the running water, with the flushing toilets, with the aqueduct systems, with the public bathrooms, with the public fountains . All of that is height of the Roman Empire . You know, so when people say a lot of people will conflate Atlantis, like you'll ask people, okay, well, I mean, you don't actually think Atlantis was like spaceships and lasers and aliens and stuff. Like what do you think it was? People will go, well, I'm not saying I think Atlantis was on par with what we had today, but maybe more like the Roman Empire. Where you go. You know, there you go. Minoans are right there are right there with the Romans. Maybe not as power, but sophistication and technology for sure it's really right there. That's a great segue. So what happened to the Minoans ? Yeah, this is a huge mystery, man. Because suddenly they're gone, right? Yeah, yeah, greatest archaeological mystery of all time, really most famous one . So one of the central core aspects to the Minoan world, which we touched on a little bit earlier, is the copper trade. Well, that copper trade comes out from this little Minoan colony of Akrotiri . Akratiri was settled around four thousand to three thousand BC. It's just like right after Minoan culture really appears on Crete. You got some people who move up there and when they start mining their resources that are found on the island, it becomes important. So they kind of get absorbed by Min aoan society and Akratiri or Santorini becomes a part of the Minoan world . And so copper trade is coming out of there. And so Akratiri controlled the copper trade from the Mino going out to the rest of the Mediterranean world , it also controlled the copper trade going from the Minoans to the Greek mainland . So think about Mycenae out in mainland Greece, all the way up to Maced onia, all the way around the Turkish coast . They all want to come down to Crete. All the travel that comes down to Crete, whether it's for copper trade or whether it's for anything, would go through raceteria. So this is a wealthy, important place. Very wealthy , very important. Probably it's possible . I mean it's not possible. It's probably a fact that in sixteen hundred BC, sixteen fifty BC Akirroti was the wealthiest est, great city on the planet at that time. Wow. And wow. Yeah, at that point , right, at that very moment. Yeah . And it makes sense with why the So think about the story of Atlantis that's told . One of the things that were told about Atlantis is that they were very, very wealthy and that they were greedy and that their civilization was destroyed as a result of that. Well, Minoan society itself is a consumer society based on money from what we can tell. The whole society is based on money kind of like the US like in some ways. It's a consumer society, filthy rich. Yes . Well , that idea idea of Atlantis . I think that that's well, we should get into that in just a moment, but I'm not telling you what happened to the Minoans . So So Akrotiri in sixteen fifty BC is the wealthiest city I shouldn't say wealthiest city the best place to live on the entire planet . Per individual wealth, wealthiest city on the planet. Now, you know, you compare that to Babylon. It's not going to or you compare it to Memphis and Egypt. Memphis has more wealth, but the quality of life is so much less fishermen and Akrotiri is living a great . That's exactly right. And so you have all these other Greek civilizations in the mainland looking at the Minoans like look at these wealthy guys, especially Mycenae. Mycenae is chomping at the bit to get a piece of that a piece of that wealth. And Mycenae is Mycenae is the civilization that's depicted in the movie Troy, the king Agamemnon. So the whole rise and fall of the Minolan world actually happens long before the story of Troy . Well, we could detour for a second there if you want to talk about the Trojan War because it's one of my favorite things ever. Yeah, yeah. Well, it happens after this . Yeah, let's go to that after this because 'll I think it'll make more sense chronologically. Okay. I have a question. Yeah, absolutely. So what's crazy is at the height of Minoan power , this island this island of a hundred palaces or a hundred cities far more wealthy and well to do per person , you know, on a one to one scale than the rest of the ancient world controlling the copper, trade which is the most widely used metal in the ancient world . Around the year sixteen fifty BC sixteen actually , around the year sixteen hundred BC , maybe maybe fifteen fifty BC, they're still kind of playing with the dates there . Around then Akratiri starts having these earthquakes that are going off and they're rattling the city and they're rattling the city and it starts happening on a regular basis and we know that it knocked down large parts large parts of the buildings there. They built they rebuilt the buildings and put them back together. We can see that in some of the buildings that still survive today. Yeah. And it's not known how long this period of time is between the earthquakes beginning and people realizing that these earthquakes aren't going to stop and they have to leave the city. What I'm about to get to is one of the most amazing things about these people and how sophisticated and how smart and capable they were. Go ahead. ultimately decide island that they're living on and Santorini Akertiri , they can't live here anymore. The buildings are shaking, they're falling apart . It must have been so bad because every single person , not an elderly person , not a child was left behind, not an animal, not an animal, not a pet, not hing. Every living thing on the entire island of Akrotiri evacuated. And then they were all brought probably mostly to Crete, they must have been. I mean, there are some other Minoan Islands. And shortly after that, the entire sky over Crete just completely turn s black . And the fourth largest volcanic eruption in the history of planet Earth just erupted from the core of the island of Santorini. And the Minoans were so capable that they prevented every single person . It's amazing single perishing, not a single casualty of the fourth largest eruption on planet Earth . And I think the largest one during the time of humanity. I'm pretty I think that that might right. The largest volcanic eruption during the time of humanity just take us through the day what it would have been like . Yeah, so it's 'cause it's three or four stages of hell. Yeah, yeah, it's it is This is the Thera eruption, I believe. Yeah, Thera. Yeah, yeah. So it's the so the city is called Akratiri, the island is Thera and today it's known as Santorini . So geologists have gone through, obviously we don't think there's anybody there to witness it. Who knows? Maybe there were people out in the water that saw this. Maybe they didn't survive, but I don't know. So the island I forget the chronological order of the different of the different stages, but you have this initial eruption that causes this like , I think it's a it's a twenty mile high column. It's a column that's three times the height of Mount Everest. That's what they estimated the eruption to be. And it sends this huge plume over the entire island of Crete, which we'll get to in just a moment as well because that causes some havoc on Crete . And but what's fascinating is that when it sends this rubble into the city of Akrachiri, it knocks down it knocks down some of the buildings and this all happens over the course of just like forty eight hours, seventy two hours . sends rubble and shrapnel onto Akrotiri, knocks down some of the buildings, but not actually too many of them. And they think that it's the shaking of the island because most of the shrapnel actually gets launched into the island of Crete itself. Like there are boulders that smashed oh yeah there are boulders that smashed into the island . But mostly it was this white pumice that would that would kind of like fall down like snow and it covered the city in twenty feet of volcanic ash and pumice and of which eventually packed and became like this solid rock. twenty feet in it probably in a day or twenty feet in a day . So imagine you can't see anything. If you were there , there's no visual at all. It's just black. This is Vesuvius just without the people. Exactly, exactly, yeah. Yeah . And so if you were there, there would be no sunlight coming through the sky. That's how dense the pumice and ash falling from the volcanic eruption. It's just straight up blackness . And but there were there were parts of the city that were not actually for some reason, you know, maybe it has to do with the wind or the way that the way that the air is circulating inside the explosion. There are places where that air is not blowing the ash onto certain corners of the city . So there's a part the geologists estimate that happened later in the eruption when the caldera fell , there's like all of a sudden there's this bubble. There's this huge like vacuum, I guess in the island. And so the caldera sinks in after it erupts , but the caldera is superheated and you have this cold water from the Aegean that spills into it. And when it does, it causes these steam explosions. Explosions. And those explosions that are, I mean, who knows as hot as the sun are coming up and sweeping over the city and just scorching the sides of the buildings and knocking them down. So you can find the buildings where they're knocked down. They have like these burn marks all on one side and when they somehow investigate the burn marks or take samples of it, they can tell that these came from somehow they can tell that it came from steam that had burned it because it's not the same sort of the same kind of burning out. I don't know how these guys do the things that they do, but yeah, I mean just devastating but what's so it erupts and completely throws an entire wrench in the core island that sort of facilitated the wealth in and out of Crete, especially with the mainland. And there's so much copper coming from Ak iri back to Crete to be sold into the Mediterranean it's disrupting their economy, but also the waves are just like just like Alexandria getting hit with that massive wave. The whole northern side of Crete, all their docks that so many other palaces were built on, the docks are just uplifted and thrown into the mainland . And we have archaeological evidence of parts of the docks and I'm not sure how they do this, but they're able to find evidence that the water came up like fifty feet or fifty meters, something like that and like five hundred yards inland. So it went and just covered that northern part of Crete and went way up into the hills . We have no idea how many people died during this . I mean, we just we just don't know. So at some point between right then during the time of this eruption and the carbon dating it kind of goes back and forth like one decade or one half century they think that it happened immediately after the eruption and right now just as of the last couple years they think that this happened like a hundred years later , I don't know that happening immediately after the eruption makes sense to me, but immediately after the eruption , the entire island of Crete becomes covered with this thin burn layer . And it's not a thick burn layer, it's a thin burn layer. And nobody could explain why that is. And the only theory I've heard proposed that makes sense is when that plume covers covers the country or covers the island of Crete. Actually it was so significant that I think it was one of the no, I think it was almost the first . The founder either the founder of Egypt's new kingdom or he's the first pharaoh to use the valley of kings . But he writes about personally witnessing him self this massive storm that covered all of Egypt. Some people link this to the plagues to the plagues of the ex act right. It's possible. I think it's possible . And And because I mean gosh, you can only imagine what that would cause in a country . And what's interesting is those plagues are also naturally occurring phenomenon if something is a catalyst that starts it right. So that's kind of interesting. And also that story can be like an amalgamation of different things that actually did happen in Egypt and they're sure condensed into a story like I think it's I think that they try to say the Exodus began being written in like nine hundred BC, something like that . But so the best theory I've heard of why Minoan civilization collapsed is not only is the copper trade being disrupted by the eruption of Thera, the destruction of Akratiri, the wiping out of the copper trade, at least most of it, and the pummeling of all these northern shore docks where the palaces are at, which obviously erupts the trade. People arrive on Crete and like what, happened to this place, you know The other cascades throughout the entire world is the collapse of the Bronze Age. Yeah, yeah. The other thing is that the whole island of Crete itself is covered with this thin burn layer and it doesn't look like some archaeologists look at it and they don't think that it's consistent with an attack because you can see what burn layers look like in attacks like the city of Troy when they finally found it and they excavated it. They see they've seen what those burn layers look like and they're more intense, they're more spotty . And so the theory I actually like this idea that the whole island would have been night for a day, two , three days at most. Think about how quickly chaos erupts and even more candles and torches are lit than ever before. Everybody has them everybody has them lit and chaos erupts and crime is probably rampant. People start going hungry , right? Like within twelve hours, people start going hungry and doing crazy things for food. Crime is probably rampant . And the best idea, I think is that the Minoans burned down the island wow in the chaos of the dark ness. I have not heard that theory. Yeah, yeah, that they, you know, they kick over the kick over lance and lanterns and they burn down their own cities by accident because there's so much chaos, nobody can see anything , nobody showing up for work. You know, it's just you 't even imagine it. It's like the end of the world. You know, it's literally the end of the world. So they accidentally burned down everything because you think of how many fires you have to light just to be able to see. And Kinos is the only city to even survive that ? Well, it only survived because when beyond this point of this burning, the Minoan world is gone. It's gone. It's gone. Because when Kenosis comes back , it comes back with linear B . Mycenaeans The Mycenaeans , whether they saw the declining of like again, archaeologists don't necessarily know if that burning happened immediately following the eruption or if it happened fifty to one hundred years later. If it happened fifty to one hundred years later, that means it was a massive invasion of the Minoan mainland by Mycenae on a scale that makes the Trojan War look like this. Right. Literally the Trojan War is nothing compared to the scale of the invasion that it would have taken to conquer Crete . Nothing , not even close. Troy is only significant because it gets told in that story. Right. But all it is is a tiny little port city that controls the entry to the Black Sea . Troy was not a significant it wasn't like an overly wealthy place . The artifacts that come out of Troy aren't really that impressive . Maybe ten thousand people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Minoan world . You're talking about you're talking about World War zero conquer that place, you know? Couldn't the Mythicans just went the island was basically empty and they just rolled over there It's no evidence of war, is there? No, no other, than the burn ing. No, other than the burning. No. And so the other thing is if they went over and conquered , there was a little bit of fighting, that's why the burn, that's why the burn marks are there . Something had to have happened if that wasn't a direct result because it's across the entire island so the thin burn mark. So there had to have been conflict. And that's why people say if that doesn't if that doesn't happen as a direct result of the Mino ans accidentally one of the other things I thought was that it was shrapnel from the volcano landing on the island and causing fires, but that's the island's massive. I don't think that that stacks up. So it's like one hundred and sixty miles wide rises. I think that's right. Yeah, it's one hundred and sixty miles wide and three hundred yards like north to south or yeah, I'm sorry, three hundred miles right thirty miles north to south. Yeah . So yeah, that doesn't really stack up. So if they didn't burn down the island accidentally right after the eruption, then it had to be like a light some kind of skirmishing across the island , but regardless, the only palace that re emerges is Kenosis, which is the biggest and most lavish one, and the Mycenaeans must have known that. And so they rebuild the palace and put it back together , but the art style has changed , the architecture has changed, the pottery changes, and that official language that's used to kind of log trading coming in and out changes from linear A to linear B, which is Mycenean writing language that they were also using. And so now they're speaking Greek. Now they're speaking Greek. And so the Mycenaeans just permanate permeate throughout the entire island of Crete and take that over and the Minoan civilization just like disappears in a time . And I think when Plato is talking about , you know, in his writings in the Republic and all the times he mentions Atlantis. I think the dialogues. Yeah, I think he's drawing on at least two different things. Maybe there's a third thing , but you know, the city of Hiliki had just been it's a Greek city on the western coast or on the eastern coast of mainland Greece, and it was sunk in by a tsunami just ten or thirteen years before he even mentions Atlantis. So I wonder if that got him thinking. But then also oral traditions survive . Nobody had forgotten about the Minoan world being destroyed. People don't forget cataclysms, you know? That's why the flood myths exist for all of time. Right . And I think that even though it's invisible to us and we can't really see it and we can't see the connections , I think that Plato is drawing on these early fuzzy myths that survive from the Bronze Age when he's telling the story of Atlantis. And I'm not sure what to think of necessarily of the Solon story. I just don't know. Have you heard the theory about how they may have got the math wrong ? No . Ancient Egyptians weren't great at math. Okay , so their symbol for a hundred could have been misinterpre ted as a ten. Oh yeah. So Plato saying that this happened nine thousand years ago, if that theory is correct, it would have happened nine hundred years ago, and that would place it right at the twelfth century BC, right at the collapse of the Bronze A ge like right dead there if that theory is correct . So Plato's four hundred BC . Now you know what's interesting is that works in two different ways because if it's nine hundred years before Plato, it's the collapse of the Bronze Age. But if it's Solon saying that it's nine hundred years earlier instead , then that's the collapse of the Minoans . That's true. Yeah. So either way I like it. So either way it works. It works. Yeah, because I think it might be Solon that's saying, I think it might be I think it's Solon saying that in his time I think it's Plato saying that Solon said in his time it, was nine thousand years earlier. So if that's instead nine hundred , Solan is, let's say, around is he is he late six hundreds BC? So if that's nine hundred years before, that's about sixteen hundred BC. Yeah. That works it works. Those numbers are there . Now what's really interesting is okay the story of Atlantis itself is Athens conquering Atlantis. That's what that's what they say. People forget that part. Well, Athens didn't exist eleven thousand BC wh.atever You can you can excavate down to the bedrock. There's just no evidence that there were people living at that specific place up on the plateau where Athens up at the Acropolis where Athens was because originally the Acropolis was not that was not that political religious sort of center. It was actually a castle. It was walled off during the Bronze Age . But here's what's really interesting is you know the story of Thessius and the Minotaur . Of course, Cusaes kills the Minotaur . Well , during the time of Mycenae conquering Crete , which Crete is the Minotaur, the Minoans are the Minotaur . Well Athens is just a vassal of Mycenae itself. So Athens is part of the greater Mycenae world. So Athens was a part of that conquering of the Minotaur. So when they talk about Theseus killing the Minotaur , Athens being a part of Mycenae did kill the Minotaur. That's true. That actually is what happened. So when we talk about Athens killing Atlantis and Theseus killing the Minotaur, those two things are parallel to each other. That's interesting because you've got King Minus at odds with the Mycenaeans and that happens with the Minotaur , then his grandson is Idominius and they actually team up with the Mycenaeans to go and invade Troy with the eighty black shims . So that all lines up. Yeah, the Iliad becomes a historical document . And then have you read about the Hit tablets regarding the Trojan War? No . It's recorded in Hit Clay tablets about this diplomatic situation that's happening in this city that's, I forget what they call it, I have it written down somewhere, but it's Ilium . And there's a war with Illium that finally gets resolved with the Treaty of Alex andre and Alexandra is, of course, Alexander , which is the other name for Paris . Okay , in the Iliad. So the Hittites have documented the Trojan War. So now we have it from the other side . Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, that's that is one of those things where you know, there's so many times that that academics and archaeologists like blow something off as being totally myth and it's not myth. You know, the myth is based on something that really did happen. You know what you know what's really funny is I will catch some flack sometimes for my Minoan Atlantis theory. There's no archaeologist thats even slightly agree with the Minoan and Lanceis theory. Well, I mean, I say slightly agree. It's less common now. It used to be more common . Well, what are some problems with the theory? We can do Steel Manchra Man. Yeah, yeah. Oh gosh . I don't know if I can if I can come up with someone on the spot. Like, okay, well, okay, well one of hercules . Yeah, okay, pillars of Hercules, elephants, the type of stones that are there, this that and the other Elephants we can solve . How so? Because they're dwarf elephants found. Ooh, I can't leave you know that. I was gonna see if that's what you're gonna say. Yeah, there are yeah, they are. The pillars of Hercules bother me, though, I can't square it. Yeah, I know. I agree. I agree. It's when he describes the location of it, it's not describing a location that's in that's in the Greek Isles . One of the ways that I try or attempt to rationalize that is that the Greeks are pretty bad historians and they're not very good at telling their history especially, even something that, you know, Plato's living in four hundred BC and you know, between four hundred and three hundred and fifty BC and he's talking about something that Solon went and did over two hundred years ago or around two hundred years ago . I don't know, you know, man, I don't know if I it's funny like in our modern day culture, we hold Plato and Solon's word as being biblical, but it's like, okay , let's be real. Like they could just be wrong, you know? Plato enjoyed a metaphor. Exactly, exactly. And in Plato's his whole everything that he did was putting words in other people's mouths and playing metaphors, right? Literally in the dialogues as that's literally what he does. And so if some of those little facts are wrong or he just pulls it out of his ass because it's more important for him to get the point across, you know? Exactly right. We tie Plato just right now in this blip in our time. We tie Plato and Atlantis together because that's what's important to us. But if we were talking to Plato, Plato might go , Plato might look at the last two thousand years or everybody right now obsessing over him with Atlantis and be like , guys, that's no, I was talking about I was talking about, you know, this phenomenon ancient civilizations rose and fell in our time, you know , in our civilization . And I'm talking about the symptoms of those civilizations and what destroy them. And why are you ignoring that? You know, I think you're right. That's probably what he would think. You know, the other thing that I think is pretty funny is that is that the whole allegory, even if even if he is really drawing on something important, he is telling an allegory that is all about the consequences of greed . And what I think is so funny is that there's probably it's just ironic that people run with the story of Atlantis just to make money sometimes and ignore all the actual evidence , ignore, you know, empirical review or whatever, whatever, whatever . And it's like exactly the opposite of why Plato even brought the story up to begin with, you know, so it's almost irony. It is ironic , but it actually just proves Plato alright. What do you think about the idea that the Trojan War, Iliad Odyssey, Eeneid is all really part of the same in history, ten, twenty years, the fall of the Bronze Age . It's all part of one big story and the eruption The go into that a little bit . Where we have documentation now from the Hit es of the Trojan War, but it wasn't like a big thing to them. It was a diplomatic situation . They got a treaty. But then there's another war with Troy ten, twenty years later. And I think they're just discovering within the last few years another layer underneath. I think it's Troy six and seven . It's something it's much bigger, not necessarily more populous, but bigger city . And so we've got all these stories coming around the same time. Elite odyssey happens right after the elite, right ? Yeah. And the Eid essentially is right after the outside. It's all supposed to be right supposed to be one long story and all centered around basically it's the story of the collapse of everything . Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's their way of acknowledging it. And I think it's the end of the world. Yeah, I think that that's so interesting. And I'll tell you, I really think it's fascinating when you get into the Aeneid too. That's something so I haven't really got taltenking about it. I've done a lot on the Omecs, doing some on the Minoans. I'm going to do more on it . But the next thing I want to get into is the Etruscans and early Rome because that's the Etruscans are another overlooked civilization . And we don't know if the Aeneid really comes from the Romans or if it comes from the Etruscans, or if it's some other early Italians, you know, we don't really know where that comes from. Is it likely that there was a guy named Aeneas that really escaped Troy and went and established Italy. It's possible but it could be more likely that there were Italians that were living in that area of the world at the time and when all that collapsed, they had to come back to Italy and restart, you know, who knows, or that they were a people that were cast out of that bronze age world that came as refugees to Italy. That was a common thing. Like refugees getting sent from one place to the other. And I think you're right in that it is their way of acknowledging and telling a story of where they came from . And probably the core of that story is true, the spine of the story is true. And all the ribs that come off of it are, you know, maybe it didn't happen, but it's created to tell a story and the point of the story is more important than the actual historical accuracy of the story itself. But I agree with you that it's a way for the Iliad and the Odyssey or a way for the Greeks to acknowledge what happened to them, that collapse of the whole world. Everything . Yeah, it's not just about the significance. You're right. Yeah, the significance is not just about the story itself . It's about how everything fell apart and the Greeks ended up where they were at that point in time where they're just like just farmers, you know? They lost all their power , they lost this whole magnificent world and that's this thing that ties them back to this early time . And I think the Enid is the same thing. It's a way to tie the people living in the classical area to the Bronze Age and acknowledge the collapse of just the whole world itself. And it's amazing that the Egyptians were able to escape that. You know, I think it's Ramses III that he says that he repelled the sea people, he drove them out. That's right. And Egypt survived. And that can you imagine the Greeks and other Bronze Age people thought when they go to Egypt? And they're like, they're like, these guys survived the end of the world. They were around way before everybody else was and they still survived all of it. And you know, that really comes that really comes from the Egyptians being the most conservative civilization in human history. They don't change. They don't change the rules Art itself in Egypt didn't evolve. It may have changed and they made new forms of it. But the art itself was actually an expression of eternity, an expression of divinity itself . And that depiction of the pharaoh smiting his enemy began in three thousand one hundred BC and never ended throughout all of Egyptian history. Even the Ptolemies presented themselves that way. It was so important and vital and crucial to the success of the Egyptian world that everything stayed the same forever and they never changed. So they were they were as defensive and aggressive as they needed to be . They really controlled like their immigration . I mean, they kept they kept the percentages of Egyptians like just right, like everything was just right from the very beginning and they never changed any of it because they saw other cultures around them evolving and changing over time and they would collapse. These people would change over time and they would collapse. Egyptians never changed and it's a long , slow grind to a halt for the Egyptians. And you know, that's why people looked at them as like just these giants that loomed over the ancient world. It's really amazing man. That's the thing is when you were talking about, when you said earlier, when we were talking about the Olmecs, and you were saying, I really don't think people understand these vast periods of time the longer you spend in the ancient world playing around with if you spent anybody, anybody watching, if you spend a year intensely studying all the events that happen , let's say between the Bronze Age collapse and like the beginning of civilization as we acknowledge it around thirty one hundred BC, when all these cultures really pop off , you will realize how long two thousand years is. You'll have a newfound respect for it because we spend so much time thinking about like what happened twelve thousand years ago when you think about five or six thousand years ago you're like that's not really that you if you really get into studying it, you'll realize, oh my god, that's a long time ago because you'll have a newfound appreciation for how long a thousand years is, you know a person who grew up as an Almec, those heads had been there forever. Their grandfathers grandfathers knew they were there forever and as far as they knew always would be. Yeah , it's that long of a time. What are you working on now before I let you know? Yeah, so we got those Lidar projects we spend some time talking about. Just going over it. We got this LIDR project working with Base Map, Terra Incognita Research Institute. We want to perform the biggest LIDAR scan ever done in the Amazon. Should we join your Patreon and support your work? No, I don't have anything like that live yet. But if people want to learn more about it, they can go to Terra Incognita Research Institute . By the time this comes out, I'll have it linked somewhere on my social media or on my YouTube or somewhere where people can go check out. They can donate if they want. But I think the biggest thing is just being aware and supporting when we, you know, do put out , you know, calls for people to be able to help or put out videos or something like that. So we're doing that in Amaz on. And then I'm working with Basemap. We're scanning a bunch of sites in the Mallon Builder world to try to recreate and revitalize civilization in the American East Coast coast on I'm working I got two series on YouTube that I do. I do one that's the first explorers where I take people back to like the first time documented explorations happen in certain periods. Your videos are great there's loo ns on the thank you. And so I do that. And then I started this one called the called American Wilds , which is it's like frontier history. So it's all the weird stuff that people didn't know was going on in the Americas. Like when Europeans first arrive in the Americas, they get a glimpse of what this world looked like and they ride it down and nobody is making anything about them. So episode one was me basically pro ving that jaguars were on the east coast . This next one I'm doing one right now on this lost colony of Magellan that was found in Chile . So that's kind of what I'm working on and then yeah Yeah, I got a later this year. I've been teasing this book called Olmec enigma that I'm going to write, but actually I think that my time is better spent making virtual lecture series . So it's going to be like a so the chapters of the books, you know, it's going to be ten chapters long. There are actually going to be I don't know roughly forty to an hour long videos and it'll be like a series that people can get in one way or another. I don't know, but that's kind of that's kind of the stuff I'm working on right now. I love it. Yeah. Fascinating conversation, hopefully the first many. And I think that LIDAR is I think LIDAR is the future of outlaw archaeology , archaeology in general. Like people say the Age of Exploration died in the age of exploration, but man, Lidar and GPR with it's still expensive, but I'm just so lucky I'm able to work with these guys and they do a freaking crazy job. Maybe I come back we can go through some images . Well, yeah, man, if we want to do this Lidar project later this year, it's there's going to be some amazing stuff that comes out of that , especially here in the Mound Builder world too. I know you have a big respect for the Mound Builder people, which is which is key, man. So many people overlook them because I think the mounds aren't impressive because they're hills of dirt. Dude, there's so much more going on in the Mississippian world than people realize. So dude, we should definitely do definitely do some Lidar stuff in the future. We're going to do it. Luke Caverns everybody. Thanks for brother. Thanks, man. That was Luke Caverns. We covered the Omex, the Minoans, Alexander the Great, and what Lidar is finding underneath the Amazon. Let's break it down. Here's what checks out. The Lidar disco veries are real. Published archaeological surveys have confirmed three Columbian cities in the Amazon. We're talking geometric monoliths, super highways, settlements far larger than anything anyone thought possible. It is there. The Lidar is finding it. The Minoan facts are solid. There's no debate about that. Their script, linear A, their writing, still hasn't been deciphered. We don't even know what they call themselves. Now think about this. They built over a hundred palaces on Crete. We're talking a thousand rooms palaces. They dominated the Mediterranean for a thousand years . A thousand years , we don't know what they call themselves. Operatiri on Santorini was the wealthiest city on Earth before the eruption. Zero bodies, zero valuables. They knew something was coming . But where do they go? I love that story. Ectodermal dysplasia is a real condition that causes fang like teeth and abnormal nail growth like claws. Luke's rare jaguar theory that the Olmecs selectively bred people in this condition as a shamanic priestly class? Well, that's his original take . But the ratio is real . There are only seventeen Olmec heads. There are thousands of stone wear jagu . I never heard that one before. The Atlantis math, I love this too. Plato's Tamaus puts Atlantis nine thousand years before Solon, so that places it at nine thousand six hundred BC. Guess what? That's the younger Dryas. So that date matches the flood myths . But there's a theory that the Egyptian priests were telling Solon the number of lunar months, not years. Now, if that's true, nine thousand becomes nine hundred years before Solan, about fifteen hundred BC. The Minoan collapse happened around sixteen hundred BC . Scholars have made this argument in peer reviewed journals. Either day is cool. The three hundred and sixty five tsunami hit Alexandria. That's documented. Ships were being thrown on top of buildings. It was insane. Now, whether it destroyed Alexandria's tomb or not, is speculation. People still debate it. The mainstream, for the most part, says the tomb was lost sometime in the fourth century AD. The tsunami gives a mechanism, so Luke is picking the most dramatic explanation from real evidence. I tend to agree. What could really survive that? Luke Caverns is rebuilding lost world s with technology that didn't exist fifteen years ago. Now, whether you accept every claim or not, the sites he's flagging are going to produce papers. You can find him at YouTube dot com slash Luke Caverns. Until next time, be safe, be kind , and know that you are appreciated. I believe Libya Senario if they want a secret code inside the Bible I was I look like you embossing paranormal as well as music. So singing the like I then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends and it never ends . I know it never ends A fear of the crap guy I got stuck in Side Mouse Hole with McAltra way Did Stanley Cubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set of where the shadow people there ? The Roswell are as just fought the smiling man, I'm told and his name was Cole . 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