Plato and the Atlantis Allegory

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today, Smart Choice. Make another smart choice with AutoQOTEXPLORE to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it at progressive dot com Progressive Casualty Insurance and Affiliates. Not available in all states and situations. Prices may vary on how you buy. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is out there. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 MEX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. 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 lid ar scan of the Amazon ever attempted. Uh what is he trying to see? Jeff Bezos naked? Not that Amaz Aonmazon, the jungle. Ah 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 mega cities 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 piss. 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 covered, what I can't prove, and what I can't. Until then, let's go down to the basement. Luke, welcome to the basement. Hey 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 gonna go all over the ancient world. I'm not a professional, it's chaos. Just just bear with me. It's all right. Um 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. Do you have one favorite ? One that's um now you mean uh as far as like like a natural formation that I think looks man made? Yes. Or something that you saw on LiDAR that maybe someone else was. Okay, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's someone made that. Yeah, absolutely. Um well you know there's um I'm I'm running a project right now that I I guess I'm announcing it right here for the first time. Uh I don't have a name for the project, but I but it's a um 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. Um uh so I was given access a few years ago uh to a lidar dataset that uh a team put together when they were trying to map comet impacts across the the United States. And anybody can get access to lid ar of the of the US. The difficulty there is having a um like a map that's been processed and the information has been condensed, otherwise your computer will just shut down. It's crazy. Wow, they're just like giant raw images. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's it some it could be like hundreds of gigs of of of data. It'll just shut down your computer. So it has to be processed by a by a a professional who who really knows what they're doing. And so I was just lucky to be given um that sort of data set. And so what they realized was while they were looking for these common impacts, they were finding mound sites. And they weren't anthropologists, didn't know anything about ancient history, but they were like, oh, you know, Luke, I was I'm friends with one of 'em. His name's Chris . Um , he he sent it over to me and uh so I started searching through it and and there was a lot that I had to teach myself about um analyzing lid ar and having to figure out what's natural and what's not or what's modern and what's ancient, that's that can be a big thing. And and with dredging. So they'll they'll try to clear up the sides of rivers and they'll make what looks like just hundreds of mounds stringed together. Over time you 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 all that uh all that image data. And uh all in all, I've 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, um 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 pop popularly known. Some of them are massive, man. I I've mapped sites that are way out in the forest in Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas. Single structures that are 250 yards long. Yeah. Yeah. Two hundred and fifty yards long by a hundred yards wide. And there's probably five or six of the structures all together. Some of them have um for anybody listening, you could look up something called the Hopewell Road, which look like these highways. Huge, right? Yeah, huge. And um and I've found structures that have those in them. And I have a I have a 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. Um, you know, now I'm working with uh my my team at base map they are providing me going to be providing me and we've already scanned like uh some sites near Mountainville we discovered an ancient site near Moundville on private property just amazing stuff. And um so I'm working with them now . But um essentially what we do is all these sites that I have mapped using USGS and charted, you know that's probably the the 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 3D models of of the ancient city. With that's with satellite lidar? Or is that with on the ground? No, no, it's their LIDAR. It's it's they they have these LIDAR drones. They've got like a full on bus. They brought it to my house a few weeks ago. It's cool. So uh I haven't announced this at all. This is the first time I'm talking about this. I've been working on this for a long time. But essentially, what it what we're gonna do is rebuild the mound builder world. And uh, like all these cities that people aren't aware of , I find it using USGS LIDAR, then either they go out there or if I can go with them, I go with them and we 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 drones. Um, and then we can reconstruct the ancient city down to like a golf ball size resolution. And so I can have this huge uh 3D 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 the mound builder world and we're going to do this with dozens of sites and well the mound builder world that spans thousands of years. Are you targeting thousands of years? No, not targeting any one thing in particular. Just mounds. Yeah, yeah, we're not uh targeting like what we were talking a minute ago. We're not targeting Adina or Hopewell or you know, 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 of that uh site. So yeah, so that's that's what we're working on now. And then we've got another lidar project that we're trying to get the permission for eventually, which is going to be an American Samoa. Uh the Polynesian world is so untouched. And LIDAR can completely change that um and then we are um I'm working with the Terra Incognita Research Institute. It's a group that's put together by a couple of couple of archaeologists and um they are uh you know it it's it's sort of like independent archaeology, you know, but these guys are are credentialed, uh very, very well credentialed, like full on, you know, very professional academics. And um they're working on a on a project in the Amazon. And uh I can't say too much about this yet, but uh if we can complete this project and we can get the permits myself, I'm gonna go down and document it and essentially publis 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 they're they're the guys who get all the permissions and everything. It'll be the largest slide our scan that's ever been done in the Amazon. I can't wait for that. Yeah. Ever ever been done. Ever been done. Mm-hmm. And and we put together a uh I I pr I don't know how much I can get into this, but uh we're putting together a proposal of just it it's at least it's it's myself and base map. We just played around with this idea, but of what it would cost to get the entire Amazon LIDAR and how long it would take. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And they can they can do it. If if if if we could 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 give people it it won't actually happen probably but just to give people an idea that it is possible and you know how much would it take for that to be possible. But if this goes through with Terra Incognito Research Institute and Base Map and myself, it'll be the largest lidar scan ever done in the Amazon. I can't wait for that. Um you come from a long line of treasure hunters, cattle rustlers, outlaws. When did you realize that you were carrying on the family tradition in the method using methodology? Not so much a pirate. You're actually a scientist. No, no, yeah, yeah. I'm not stealing anything anymore, but uh when I first heard you talking about cattle rustling, I'm like, does he know that means stealing? Yeah, they they were they were uh they did a l you know, uh 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. So they're they got and and and treasure hunting, which actually means looting and all that good stuff. Yep. Um you know, so it all it started uh my love for anthropology began when um actually listening to my other grandpa, my my my uh 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 uh preach and they would have these old Bibles and at the front and the back of the Bibles would be these watercolor paintings of like, you know, the 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 I 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 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, you know, 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, you know, what did ancient what were ancient times like? What were ancient times like and over over time I began becoming dissatisfied with the way a lot of sermons would be told. Not my grandfather, 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 the morality? of sermons in church end up becoming like a uh a motivational speech about like you know let me let me take this one verse and extrapolate it on away and pull it totally out of its ancient context and 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. You know, or if they want it to be more profound, educate the people that are in the church on the con text 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 anthropa, that was the beginning of me being an anthrop ologist, wanting to know what is that life like. Just day-to-day. Being an ancient person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are the struggles that you live with? Cause I I r 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, the Bible's actually like a horror story. All those people's lives are awful. You know, no nobody you know, it's like I guess Old Testament for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well and and I mean you look at the 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 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, well, my whole perception, the way that I'm being taught about this isn't 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 or an anthropologist or a historian. You know. Um and so it was that coupled with my dad's side of the family, going back to the 1890s, those guys are are cattle cattle drivers. They were they were um you know the parkers that are running cattle up and down. So so they would take cattle to the parkers in San Antonio, and that so it was like West Texas of San Antonio, that's where they were operating. And um , you know, hearing their stories of of the search for uh the the gold of of these lost mines of Reagan Canyon and and um 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 that's there's so many um there's not a lot that's known about that, but this is this is a sort of a sort of a synopsis. And a lot of it, like I I 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 um , yeah. And so essentially what happens is um so they own these big ranches that are on these plateaus above Reagan Canyon in and 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 um you know exploring the American Southwest and in 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. Uh there would be bandits that would sit up in those um sit up in those hillsides and they would sack these Spanish caravans coming through, kill everybody, drag the gold up in up into the the crevices in these rivers , or I should say little canyon sides, it's 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 Knickknacks, myself included. Knick-Knacks 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. No smoke, no clouds, no pouches littered everywhere, no awkward eye contact with security guards. Just pop one in and continue to pretend like you're a high functioning adult. That's what I do. Go to knicknack.com slash YFILES and use code YFILES for 20% off. Or use the store locator to find Nick Knacks near you. Nick knacks all the flavor, all the freedom, none of the circus. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chem ical. That's why I like it . And so , you know, in your free time you just dream of of you know, they pr they probably weren't wealthy. Um, even though they own this land, it's still a tough life. They dream of of ha you know, having some big apartment in San Antonio and having a a wagon or something like that. You know. And so um so they spend their time walking around in the hills looking for gold and that they never really find anything. Well, there's this young boy named Bill Kelly who arrives on uh arrives on a horse or maybe was on a mule. I think he's riding a mule. And uh he was a he was an African Mexican boy who probably was a slave in Mexico and he's 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 uh he starts working for my family on their on their ranch. And he is m 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 it's this uh open mine that had nobody knows when the mine was nobody even knows where the mine is today um something I'd like to do is is go back out there there's two there's two places where my family is uh 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. Uh yeah, yeah, I could tell you that story. You went out there, right? Mm-hmmah, I've been out there three times and uh so yeah, it's on my grandfather's well, I could tell you I'll tell you about that in just a second, but so staying 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. But they found gold. As the story goes, sure. I have no idea where this gold is today. But yes, they found gold, they found they found treasure. And uh so essentially it launches into this huge game of thrones of like, well, who really f who really found it? Bill Kelly tries to run away with with some of the gold. Some of the brothers try to run away with some of the gold. Any ways, 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 uh I've never read two books that tell the story the same way, but essentially, uh, only one of the brothers makes it makes it out of this huge debacle. You don't even know if he actually made it with some of the money, but and then 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. And so yeah, exactly. So that's it. So there's this 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. Um and so uh so they're involved in in oil in East Texas, and that would be my great-grandfather. His son, Les lie 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. I uh nothing that I do is bankrolled by my family lineage or anything like that. But um 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 a private airport and private jets and all kinds of crazy stuff. And so yeah, it's wild. Where's your trust ? Um I know. I know. I wish I wish we had I wish ful. I wish we had any of this today because man, I could all this LiDAR stuff I'm talking about, I would have done this years ago. Of course. But uh so he goes off to New Mexico to try to find this legendary place called Seven uh 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 on my grandpa. I should have brought this for you. This would have been cool. Next time I'll I'll bring you something. Yeah. You can buy these on eBay for like two dollars. Yeahah, yeah, ye. Um and uh so he 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. And uh and said, hey, you know, I know you're out here looking for such such such 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 1955, nineteen fift,y six ish they they found the gold mines, these old Spanish gold mines and expanded them and turned it into I shouldn't say the company name either, but um well in the fifties this is somebody's land, right? Did they This is my grandpa's land. Yeah. Well now he bought it. Yeah, yeah. But but it was actually um it's actually state land. Sure. Yeah. So he buys it from the state. He has like a claim on it. But then but I think he f actually owned the land rather than just having a claim. And uh so he expands this and turns this into a full-blown gold mining company . And the way that it got it's this is tough because if I say the name, you can just go you can go find it. But you know, and I don't want people like walking around out there, but uh um one of the legends that 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 uh when the Spaniards were were mining out these uh when 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 is moving. You're getting you're getting clean air through the mines. And um so that's like one of the main legends around around these mines. And I've been out there, I've listened, I can't hear the bells. Uh 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's Seven Lost Gold Mines. Ultimately he expanded it to between thirty-eight to forty-two different mines. Wow. It was it was a really, really profitable operation and a um 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. Um this was in a time where like if you were in a business partner with somebody, especially out in the middle of nowhere, they could run away with the money and never see it aga again, never see themin. 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. No, they weren't dry. They they um they had to close in most of them. Uh there's a few of them that were still open, like at least three of them are still open. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not really no no no no but but the whole the the portal is there. He closed in everything and he at least in the nineteen sixties when this was more eas more easily done, uh 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 property on them. So he thought one day he'd be able to build out the money to go back and and reopen them. So that he kept the claim on him. And I don't think the claim was relinquished until like nineteen eighty nine, so uh, you know, several years after he passed. And he didn't the mines, I guess, to. the map Not on the maps, exactly. To protect them. And so I inherited these maps four years ago. And I inherited everything that that he had found. Oh, I should also say that when they were down in these mines, he would discover uh like Native American threads and pottery and and you know 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 hands. So there's pottery and things that he's found. Uh and I found I found Native American pottery when I was when I was out there too. You find all these artifacts and they would all disintegrate. But he's fascinated about about all this. And um You were able to hold on to some of that stuff? And you plan to show those to the public at some point? No, no, no, no, no. This this wasn't Yeah, this 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 in the excitement and the adventure and I think the local fame, like he was known in Texas, right? Um and I guess the magazines. Like he he he liked that. So this is treasure hunting. Yes. Full on treasure hunting for notoriety and wealth, right? And Americans were crazy for these stories then. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So uh 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. Um and so uh so I got these maps and I was just like I'd asked 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 I 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 remembers 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 mine. So he's like that I think he told me that was the seventies. He said that was probably the last time that that anybody was was ever really out there . And uh and he didn't know where it was. He didn't , my dad didn't have the first idea. Now, my dad, I should say, he's a lover of history. Uh, my dad was a s was uh was a uh cave explorer, like in in when he was probably about my age and and younger than me , uh in Missouri. He he explored and mapped caves. He was like a spelunker or speleologist, I should say, sort of uh amateur speleologist. Loves a that's the word for a spelunker now? Speleologist? Maybe so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh I think so. And uh 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 uh obsessed with American history. And um 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 grandf athers had, that that sort of spirit that they had. But um so, anyways, uh, 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 on satellite imagery. And so I had to spend , I had to spend all 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 too. Took me nine months. What did you find? Uh so I I knew that I found the location. It was just like I could tell these are the mines? You found the seven gold mines? Yeah, I did. Yeah, I found uh yeah, so it's like weird. Like he found them and then he made sure that nobody would knew know where the location was, so then I found them. Yeah, it was it was cool. So um so I took a friend of mine and uh a c a couple months later we drove out to New Mexico and uh you know we cut a bunch of locks and drove through a bunch of private property straight out into the middle of nowhere. And uh and we found we I I confirmed it on the on the ground. And I'm I'm walking around out there and uh picking up these these like old bottles and cans that are out there. It doesn't look like any anybody had been there. There's no you know from from 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 d uh when you're actually there in person. There's no remnants left of the little roads and but there's old like w pocket whiskey glasses and could you feel it though? I mean, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, um you had to be thinking this. It's a is this grandpa's whiskey? Well, I looked into that. So so there was a I forget what the name of the brand was, but I I um one of my buddies had a he's got Grok like satellite um and so we would ask Grok a bunch of questions and he would tell me about it. And we found this one really expensive pocket whiskey. Uh it was the bottom half of the glass that was broken and and it still had the label the um the brand name on it. And so we looked it up and it was a very expensive pocket whiskey. It must have been his. Yes. And uh so I kept every little thing I could put in like a plastic bag. I 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 gather it all up. Yeah, yeah. And there's more out there too. There's so there's so much more. Like uh the every time I've gone back, I find more laying on the ground. What about the mines? Did you get in there? I I'm I want to go back, but I want to go back and do it properly . That means mines. No no no no no. Well I I don't want to admit to do anything illegal, but uh no I want to go back to stories. 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 monitor. But you did see the openings. Oh yeah. Yeah. I I went really close to going down in one. I w I I I went probably twenty feet in one that was open. I mean that there's one of them that's like as open as this room is and it just goes back forever. In fact I saw uh a very endangered species in one of them, the black footed black footed ferret. They're they're critically endangered in New Mexico. And uh there was one sitting up on a ledge, it was looking at me and I didn't 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 uh mammals that live in New Mexico and I found a black footed ferret and I was like oh I actually found where it live where one of them live and obviously because it's like 25 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 um mine that's way off to the east. The main central area , uh, there's two, so basically, you would have like one shaft that descends down at 45 degrees. So it descends down at 45 degrees. It heads west, and then there is a uh a refuge shaft that comes straight up. That's probably like 150 feet up. So it's just this hole. Like you walk out in the middle of the desert, and there's just a massive 15-foot by 15-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 the of it. Like you can feel the air hitting you as you as you walk up to it. So there's no structure, platform, nothing, just a whole Well I threw a rock down there and you can hear it go ding ding and it hits all this metal. So there's structures down there. Oh and so my dad went and one of my other family members um must be must be like a cousin of mine, but a a a 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 the 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 gr my grandfather. Yeah. So he was a cartographer. He drew all this stuff. Where where did she find those? Those would have been a lot of things. She she inherited them. Yeah, yeah. So like two different, you know, my uncles and my dad inherited some some of the maps and and I think all the artifacts. And she uh because her father was my dad's brother, right? S endheed up getting some of the interior maps. So it's 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. Um, I've got them all like framed up and it some people online, there I there's sometimes there's photos of my office that get post that I've posted and you can see the maps. Um but yeah, all drawn out by by my grandpa and so much of it went unexplored. There are these huge shafts in these are diorite mines. So super there's they're probably still stable. I just have to know that the air quality is good enough to go in them. But these massive shafts that he shined a flashlight down and there was no end to it. And so he has written on the map it would say uh it would say it would say dugout by Spanish unmapped. Dugout by Spanish unmapped. That's crazy. So they'd been there for hundreds of years and he 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 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 um I would very much like to get lowered down into 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. Um but I definitely want to monitor air quality. Now So what would be the bad air down there? What would cause that? Oh 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 with toxic gas, but sometimes it's just like uh it's like when people um are sitting in their car in a garage and the garage fills with carbon monoxide and then they die. You're out. You're gone. And um sometimes there's some there's some gases that can build up in minds that 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 it interacts with your brain, 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 magazines, they're granite and diorite minds and, so something about that makes them safer inherently. I'm not 100% certain on that. But uh I just didn't I didn't want to take their take the risk. So so but I am gonna go down in in them with like a a full on team and everything and and we're gonna explore them. Um but I was just there a few months ago. And yeah, when I'm there, I when I'm there it's one of those things where it's like, ah, this is a special place. Like it really is. This is you know, there there there's probably this one specific place on the planet there's my family probably has more connection to this one specific place than anybody else on the planet ever has 'cause it's just out in the middle of the wilderness, right? And uh and yeah, I s I sit there and even though I don't own the property, it's like spiritually I'm like, yeah, this is my this is my place. You know, my grandfather's dreams Yeah, man. I just went on this uh expedition in the in the Hilo wilderness recently and um and so uh I'll I'll give up a little bit of a uh a teaser of where this is. Working hard and still watching debt eat your paycheck every day you wait, that balance is costing you more. PDS Debt can fix that. Minimum payments are designed to keep you stuck. PDS Debt helps people stop juggling multiple payments and roll everything into one lower monthly payment. They may even be able to reduce up to half of what you owe on credit cards, personal loans, and medical bills. And it starts with a free 30-second assessment. There's zero credit impact, no minimum credit score required , and savings start the day you complete the assessment. If you've been making payments every month and still feel like you're going nowhere, you are not alone. PDS Debt is the top-rated company in the industry with thousands of five star reviews and an A plus rating on the BBB. Look, I know a lot of you are carrying debt that you don't talk about. I have been there. And I want you to know that there is a way out. And that's exactly what PDS Debt is there for. Get your free 30 second personalized assessment today at PDSD .com slash basement. That's PDSDEPT.com slash basement. PDSD D E B T dot com slash basement The the mines are also in the Hila wilderness and but the mines are also in the Hilo Wilderness and um and one of those magazines described him as a Gila explorer. And uh it's cool because it's it's our it's our country's first uh designated wilderness area and and uh so there's some history there and and um, you know, I don't know if people realize this, but like my connection to my grandfather on my dad 's heal of wilderness. Yeah, my my connection to my grandfather on my on my dad's side is only through stories and through like spirit. You know, um You didn't know him? No, I never actually never actually knew him. It's all it's this this it's this shadow that looms over my life. Doesn't it drive you crazy? Don't you wish you can just sit with him and ask him questions? Oh yeah, yeah. I I was uh yeah, I was um the night before I I left I went on the expedition I uh I was listened to these old like nineteen fifties uh one of my favorite songs is Cattle Call and uh these old nineteen fifties Western music, and I just imagined like I know that this is what he was listening to, and I'm packing for the expedition. And it just like it was the first time I I it 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 like started crying. I was like, I was like, I was like, I just can't believe I don't know him. I was like, I was like, I was like, I know him because he I am so much like him. And in everything that I do, it's like embedded in me. Like I look at my hand s, you know, I I probably have ticks and little weird things that I do that are him . For sure you do. And um but I don't but I but I don't know him in person. You know and, that's kind of one of those things is I I 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 you'll he'll visit you or something. And you believe that stuff? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I I had an ex experience like that with my other grandfather. We're uh we're not getting to my out line because I need to hear this story. Yeah, so with my other grandfather, um, the one who was a missionary and an ancient historian, you know, loved the ancient world. So he passed away a couple years a go and um he had had Alzheimer's for about eight years and um which is a quite a long time to survive. That's a shame actually. One of his friends uh one of his friends got uh got diagnosed with it about the same time he did and he was gone like a year. And um 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 stave it off or maybe prevent it, whatever. But um he's he lived for a long time. And uh there was one night, it was a Tuesday night, I don't know why I 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 a bed, just like I'm sitting now. I'm on like 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 only person I kiss is my wife. Like I don't kiss my family members, right? It was just like not normal for me to to behave like that in a dream. And I woke up at one a.m. and I remembered that and it was like I just remembered that. Well, I'm at work , 9 a.m. I get a call that my grandpa has been uh transferred from his nursing facility into the hospital because uh he died, his heart had stopped. And so um they went into his room, but by the time they got into his room, his heart beat to come back he was alive. And but they transferred him to the hospital so that they could monitor him more closely. And he was getting close, he was basically needed to be on hospice. Yep. And so uh 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 gonna see him when I got back from Mexico. So I drove uh from I drove from San Antonio back home and uh 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. I I it was funny. He he could not remember anything in the short term, but he could always talk about his past . Yep. And he knew who you were. Like he didn't forget you. But if you if you showed him a picture, it wouldn't connect. But if you were there in person, he would he would remember you. And uh so all these nurses and people coming in and people wanting to like talk to my grand ma and talk to me and like I never really got this like 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 uh I'm getting on the elevator and I'm just like, nah, it's not a enough of goodbye. Like, I didn't get a moment with him. So I hand my grandma, my jacket, and I walked back in there. And um, it's just it's just he and I there, and um uh I haven't like really told the story. Um you know, golly man, I uh You know, I just knew that like that was my last moment with him, you know. And I was lucky that I got that. What did you talk about? Uh you are lucky you got that. Yeah. So many of us don't. What you'd talk about? I just told him I I just asked him, I said uh I said, you remember all those westerns that you made me watch with you? Like Gunsmoke. Gunsmoke was on the TV behind me. He was like, Yeah. And I said, uh I said, you remember all the times you'd like talk to me about the Bible and the ancient world and everything? He said, Yeah. And I said, uh I l was like looking him in his eyes and I was like, I was like I'm never gonna forget that. And I said, uh 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 uh I leaned over him and I was just like crying . You leaned over him crying just like a dream. Yeah, I leaned over him. I was on the left side of the bed and uh and I I kissed him and I said and I told him I said I said, I'm gonna miss you so much. And uh I don't know how many people actually in their last moment have their loved one acknowledge the fact that they're about to die. But I just I could 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 uh and so I was he aware of what was going on? Yeah. 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 gonna ever see you again. And uh and so um and so I'm hugging him for like a long time, like a really long time. By the time I by the time I I lift my head up, I think that he had kind of fallen asleep a little bit. But he was there with him with me while I was talking to him. And so I'm I walked out of the room and um my grandma and I went something to eat. And then by the time we got home, she got a call from the hospital that he passed away. And uh and I always wondered if if like that was the moment where it just he could let go. You know, like somebody actually told him that that I know you're dying and that I'm gonna miss you and that 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've spent a lot of time like looking into that and and uh apparently that's a that's a common phenomenon like sometimes when people when they 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 they know that you're okay. They s kind of come to grips with where they are. Yeah, so uh so that was like a that dream that I had a week earlier when he died, his heart stopped at like one o'clock in the morning. That's when I had that dream and I woke up. Man, there' theres's no you know, I I I am a Christian, I'm like an un orthodox Christian, but the even if I was an atheist, that would change everything for me. Like it was it was that profound of of an experience. And um so I went to the old Mech world. I I I was there for the week. I had to like plan his funeral and everything and that was tough. And then I went to uh I went to Mexico and then right after that I turned around and went to Peru. And um 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 Barnes and Noble. Produce uh published and printed in August of 1997. That's when I was born. And uh and so my grandpa, he would that was his book, he would always read that to me. And um, you know, gosh, from uh from the time I was a young kid he would he would 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 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 is Machu Picchu. And um right where all these iconic photos are taken, I'm standing there and uh and I I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, this is the only place I've ever been other than other than Hawaii that is actually looks like the photos. You go to you go to Egypt, there's this massive mess metropolitan city behind you. You're not in the desert, right? Um this is the only place I've ever been to that actually looks and feels like all the photos that you've seen and it lives up to the photo. It's actually way better. That's why I always I'm always like, yeah, if you can only go to like Peru or Egypt, I'd go to Peru because it's amazing. Um but uh I'm standing there and I'm like, wow, this is really, really amazing. I reach in, I reach in my pocket and pull out my phone, and it's opened up to iCloud email . And uh I don't use iCloud email, I've got four thousand five hund emredails 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 it was his it was his email. I never sent him an email. I don't but it really, really was his email. Somehow it was in my phone. And it was like he wa it was like he was Yes he was touching me from the next world. He was you know and uh letting me know that he was there. And I was j I was in the place where the photo is taken that's printed in that book. Yeah. And um yeah, it was profound, profound, man. And uh you know that's like all the confirmation I need that there's something more beyond all of this, you know. Um Um I heard you say that you were gonna go to grad school in Athens and something in the jungle made you change your mind. Yeah. Uh I was uh You know what you know what's interesting is me starting my care er 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, you know, I'm 28 now, but things I said when I was 25, when 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? Um and so you know, 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. Sure. So heavily, so heavily influenced by Graham Hancock. That's as far as actually reading, um , 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 I'm reading something like a historical textbook 'cause the you know the the verbiage is very up there for me at 16 or something. And 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 uh of these ancient sites. That's the big board 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 uh I may I may step on toes by saying that. But I 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 he's a journalist telling a 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 even read Underworld, which is a great book. And so from there , Ancient History is kind of like a 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? Uh marketing. My mom is a creative. She was a she was like a marketing. Yeah, she was like a high ranking uh creative at a uh a place called Brookshire's grocery store. It's I don't even know what to what to equival it to or out here, but uh um yeah, so she' shes was like creative . And I think actually history and and the creative world, they kind of go together. Like uh 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 um so yeah, history and and art went together. But to be honest with you, I w 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 uh so I'm getting my this marketing degree in in school and I don't love it and everything 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 1.7 GPA in junior college. They're putting me on academic suspension. I don't have the will to like actually continue school uh and all the while my my girlfriend at the time who's my wife now she's like a pre-dental student so she's like this high achiever I'm like way down here right and um so I end up realizing like it all kind of comes to a head and my and my dad is like my dad's like, I'm gonna have to let you go. Like I can't I can't financially help you anymore because you're not even you're not even doing anything, you know? And so it all sort of came to a head. Well, did you agree ? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was I was like I get it. I was like deeply ashamed. Like I I I told my dad. And what's funny is like a lot of times my dad he he can be like a lecturer. Like he'll really lay it on thick. And that I it was funny this time he didn't because he knew he could tell how I just so it's like I I did you a favor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so um and so I told my girlfriend at the time who's my wife now, I 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 I uh so the closest thing to it was uh was anthropology. And so I um 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 gotta 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 and they had like uh ancient cultures of uh of Mexico and Central America. Because we're in Texas, so Texas breeds Mesoamerican archaeologists. There's tons of them there. And uh and so the dean's like , okay, uh well I want you to write this, you know, such such paper for me and let me read it. And so and I had to had all these guidelines. So I wrote it in like uh one day and uh and I sent it back to him and and it was it would uh the paper was called uh how two how it was 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 of how the Amazonian people were just decimated over the course of of a couple of centuries. And writing good YouTube Yeah, I guess that's a that's a clicker. Yeah, long before I I ever thought I'd be a YouTuber. When you were writing that paper, did you feel it coming through you? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. This is I'm supposed to do this. Oh, absolutely. And um 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 were on my laptop and we watched the movie The Lost City of Z. And I closed my laptop after that and I 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 h the only reason he took on those expeditions was to reclaim his family name. This is Percy Fossett. Percy Fawcett, yeah. Yeah, I guess. But I but I hadn't read David Grant's book or anything like that. Um 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. Uh I actually know more about Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu, and and uh and something about that guy's story is just kind of being an underdog and like wanting to to to prove himself. And I guess he had this, he was a dreamer and he was reaching for something that that almost didn't exist, right? And um 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 um so anyways, they 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 oh it was like nothing. I mean I didn't I didn't even study. Uh I I did, but yeah. So um so I made it through school and then um it was my last semester . Yeah. No, it was my second to last semester. I uh I was thinking about grad school at that point. Yeah, a little bit. A little bit. It was but it was my second to last semester, and I I was on YouTube and I saw an interview with uh with Professor Dr. Ed Barnhart, and. And I was I like was like , oh, I really like this guy. So I had listened to his uh 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 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 uh 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 this it was this 24 lecture series thing on on South America. And then eventually I found Maya to 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 the way I am why I am I am the way. I did not know the cold, sterile, jaded side of academia. I didn't I 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 but granted it would be that way. But really, the my main exposure was through Ed Barnhart, which was so warm and romantic, right? And uh I still listen to those lectures today just because it kind of takes me back to this like happy place. And sometimes I want to brush up on stuff and I think just think like this 30-minute synopsis will kind of get my brain back into it. And um so I'm in my second to last semester and uh and I start thinking about like, okay, you know, maybe um I don't think I'm gonna go work for a college because you don't get to pick the projects you work on. You're like an actor. You kinda just take take what 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 Caddo people in East Texas, which not my passion is. 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. Um, I used to love the Brave Wilderness YouTube channel. Um, back during this time. I and uh 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, right? And uh and then my sister was watching Extinct or Alive on Animal Planet, which is Forrest 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 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at progressive.com . Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states. Maybe I should be, you know, the 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 adventure Yeah, yeah. It's uh you don't realize how to my wife my wife has a great saying. She she always says to me, uh, sometimes she'll be like she'll be like it was you all along. Like that thing you were looking for, it was you all along. Mm-hmm. And um She's a good one. So then what does have to do with this? So yeah, yeah, yeah. So um so I am well Dr. Barnhart and I get very close. I start working with him. I reach out to him, I send him an email, he agrees to have uh he agrees to have a breakfast with me. What is that like when you when he's like, let's get a bite, are you freaking out? Yeah, it was pretty surreal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And um and so we meet up and we we get like tacos outside this this uh grocery store. And yeah, it was it was great. And he had an hour for me, and we ended up being there for like four hours. And um That's how you knew Oh yeah, two hours in your life he likes me. Yeah, he he liked me and and um so a month and a half later I'm in Mexico with him at Palenque. The very first pyramid I see is the Temple of Inscriptions at at the city of Palenque, and I'm standing with Dr. Barnhart. And he and I have been like thickest thieves for I don't know, like four years now since then. He's a would you consider him a mentor? Yeah, he's probably my only mentor, I'd say. Yeah. Does he watch your channel? Uh yeah, I guess so. I mean I don't know if he I don't know if he's actually I mean, I guess when it has stu stuff to do with this not not the Americans, he might learn something, but uh I'm just wondering if he ever pushes back on some of your theories. Like a O. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well I don't think that he and I agree on and we could get into this later. I don't think that he and I agree on what the wear Jaguars are when it comes to the the old max. I think he and I disagree there. Uh that might be the only thing that we disagree on. Um but yeah, but yeah, he I mean we're two different people, you know, whatever, and but it's fine, we don't argue about it. Um but yeah, we chat almost every day, and uh he's become a very close friend of mine now. And and so I had this period where when 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 archaeolog ist, very well known. Um , and uh and so I started becoming exposed to other academics as well . And and academics that I still like and still talk with today , but maybe I should have just kept my exposure mostly to Dr. Barnhart because I started getting this idea in my head of like, uh, 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 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? It's like 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 then my you know, 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 be, I want to do all of it. I want to be like Indiana Jones and go everywhere and know all this stuff . So um so I had I had this period of time where I 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. Um the Bronze Age Greeks. And uh so I had this period just over a year ago where I was thinking like you know maybe I you know I I was I was teaching myself ancient Greek and uh and I was like just I was deep into it and and I was just, you know, 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's one of the few it was one of the two times in my life that I I prayed for a clear answer . Not a not like uh oh maybe I should do this. I 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. I need you to make it very obvious. So this is 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. You felt that. And and 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 to j go around the 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 uh and I just knew like, oh, like that's I can't I can't do this. And um somewhere in there I was uh oh yeah ye,ah. I say that I do say that I had a uh a mind opening experience in the jungle. But that's actually not the jungles in America. I was in Cambodia. Okay. But uh I was in Cambodia and uh some of my buddies and I we were uh we were having some very good Cambodian uh devil's lettuce and uh it was potent, man. And I'm sitting there talking with them and I just uh I just k while while I was talking with them, um it was even more confirmed in my mind that that I had to stay with after years. This is a little bit afterwards, yeah. Um but but I knew I really, really knew um after spending a lot of time with some of my friends and kind of hearing some confirmation bias like the they were all like you had to stay with the Americas. And that's what everybody thinks because it was 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 Olmex, the you know, ancient Peru, this, that, and the other. And sometimes you have this identity crisis where you're like, well, but no, my first love was the Greeks and I like the Egyptians too. But that's not what that's not the plan that, you know, the universe has for me. And um so anyways, so that's that was kind of my struggle with with ancient Greece. But, you know, it's uh people have seen sort of this arc over time where I had some ideas I thought I was gonna do it didn't end up doing them. But you know, ultimately I'm at this place now where I have this I have this self-awareness now that like uh you know the Americas is where I belong. It's my bread and butter, and um 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 is um I spend so much time studying a topic before I ever talk about it in a uh 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. Um you know so like sometimes things slip out in podcasts or people be like you talked some about this in a podcast for an hour before you never even made a video on it. I'm like, well, you know, I I just really want to know something before I but and it's so it's taken me a long time to form the direction I'm going. But you know, now I I kind of realize like 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 uh did anything like that. And so the Americas just need that. Well well one thing I'm working on right now, um and we're gonna offer to go down there and LIDAR scan it with base map is uh a team down in southern Chile. They just found one of the lost colonies of Magellan uh down in Chile. Yes, they just found it. And they're gonna try to find the second one because there's it's twin colonies. But I don't know how good their lid ar stuff is, but we can lidar map like they sent me uh they sent me something, but I I think we can lidar like 13,000 acres in like five days. So we're gonna we would help them find that. Um but there's so many stories in the Americas that But you don't mind saying if we 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 gonna stick to the stick to the Americas forever, but I know that that is something that really needs to be like my main focus, if that makes sense. But I man, I I love ancient Egypt, I love the Greeks, I I love ancient China , you know. Um, so that that 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 hyper nich ing and that invades your way of thinking. Um and so I'm always gonna be like a global general historian, but I I really, especially now with these new lid ar projects, like I'm really gonna hone in on expanding a lot of the things that most people don't know about the Americas. Well, that's 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 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, uh, the worst I ever had them was at Machu Picchu. Really? I made a mistake of wearing a short sleeved shirt out there in the summer. Amazonian mosquitoes are unlike anything that most people have experienced. Uh they're their stings I I don't know what I don't know exactly what's in them, like uh uh like the venom or or or something that 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 the bumps are still spreading around me. Everywhere I would scratch. Luckily, I avoided getting on my face, but they were still there would new bumps would pop up on my arms every day. And so when you would read that through the journals of Percy Fawcett and you see how his his arms were scarred from the field, so I don't know if you can you you probably can't't tell because you don 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 from from two years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then these uh these straight lines, these are from thorns from the from the Gila expedition I just did. Um what else is out there? Snakes. Yeah, well so in in Mexico, Central and South America you have to worry about the fertile ants. It's the most dangerous snake. I've gotten corrected before by saying it's the deadliest snake in 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, you have to shove it up against your hand or something. But a fertilance will go out of its way. Oh it will 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 they don't retreat. So they're really, really dangerous, and they're brown. So you don't see them. You're not yeah, you're not gonna see them. You have any snake bites yet? No. No . I've never I've never been bitten by a snake. Um yeah, and I've seen I've seen two fertil ants in person. One was a baby, which are Um and then the other one was actually at the hotel. They they they they'll come up close yeah, see these guys? Wow. So they come up close to the hotel because there are rats around where humans are, you know, so that so they try to kill a rats. So what they'll do is they'll like um uh when you walk around, you know, I don't know, if you go to sometimes there are uh 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 and 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 stu You're no armchair explorer. You're out there. I would say so I just did a uh I just did an expedition on training wheels, as as I call it, to uh to the Gila. 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 in the world. And uh and I div I planned this route through the Gila, which I got a lot of pushback for because a lot of people were like, oh you know, I've been hunting out there since forever, that place isn't uncharted, blah blah blah. I'm like, I don't even think you I'm not sure if you know what charted means or whatever. But um or what exactly I'm talking about, whether it's archaeologically charted or explored or not. Um and so uh but it was 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 uh prepared and developing a plan and trying to see what does executing this plan feel like and just to give you an idea of of just how hard it is to go through even just the Gila 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 200. Oh wow so and and you know one of the other problems is like I had I had a a very nice uh pair of uh 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. Um 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 gonna be nighttime. It starts getting cold. You're not drying out your socks over a fire. A fire is not hot enough to to dry out your socks. That happens two days in a row. You have nothing but wet socks and wet boots. Uh the skin, you know, you're 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 uh my my my both of big toes uh I um I don't know if I I I didn't sever the nerves on them, but I I compressed them so much that now six weeks after we've gotten home, my both of my big toes , half of them are still numb, just from how much I my toe had to be pressed. And you know, they they say like, oh well, your boot's not big enough, but when you're going downhill, you're gonna be pressing your your toes against the side of your boot. Um so we were we went at 30% the pace I expected that we would go. 30%. 30%, yeah. So uh we had that we had this map in front of us and we thought that we were gonna be able to get from this lake down this roof I mean you're looking at it on satellite and 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. Uh I did it to a place that's historically and I guess uh nostalgically or sentimentally significant to me, right, in the Hilo wilderness and uh so I there's this place called the Mogoyon Cliff Dwellings, which is really cool and mostly like it it's like a little hidden gem. Most people don't don't go to the Gila Cliff dwellings. They'll go to like Chaco 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 uh and 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 that like cave or uh 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 we went straight down this area that there that there are no trails. Went straight down and then back out. And um you put this online yet? Yeah, yeah. It's like it's like a two hour documentary thing that we did. Okay. Um and so uh 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 we could get help. You speak the same language as everybody, right? So that that's a that's a big thing. Like if you're in Mexico, uh, you know, my Spanish isn't that good. Um and you know you have Spanish speaking people with you, but it's the Hila cliffs, yeah. I've these are amazing. Yeah, but it's just it's just more complicated to get help in a different country. In the US it can happen just like that. So um well net in like 10 years you,'re gonna be with a junior explorer who's gonna just look at a map and say, Oh, we could do this in two days, you're gonna say ten. Exactly. Exactly. I I know exactly. And so that's why I'm glad that we did this first expedition. I I had some comments. People were like, people like, oh man, this really blah blah blah blah blah I'm like, man, I'm just read the comments. I'm like, I'm like, I'm just learning how to, you know, yeah, you guys just wait till you see what what we're about to do. Um because now we're planning this one in American Samoa, that's gonna 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. Um so uh but yeah, that as far as f being in the field, everything is so much more difficult, and it takes so much longer than you anticipate it's going to. Uh like I said, we moved at 30% the speed that I thought we would. And um oh, and then there's there's food issues, right? Like I was just gonna ask, did you bring enough supplies ? We did bring enough supplies. Uh we had uh we had one hiccup with the food where uh 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 uh from you know we had planned for about eighteen hundred calories a day, um, and that took that from eighteen hundred to nine hundred calories a day. That doesn't sound like enough to do this work. Oh man, so on the last day, I was like I was like wobbly, I was pushing through. Um, you know, it everybody was wobbly by the last day. And I I lost so I so I wear a size thirty two pant and those pants were falling off of me by the last day. I had probably gone down like a like a thirty or somet hing. And um , yeah, man, it's you know, there's so many things. Uh and what's cool is I talk about this in in the expedition uh 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 go 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 f a failure, right? But he's actually such a a successful explorer I just covered him. He was a great great book. Oh, did you really and an amazing man, I'll tell you, a great book to read is uh Hey, I just Venmo'd you for Ren. Nice. Now I can instantly spend it whether I'm checking out online with Venmo or using a Venmo debit card. Say more. More exactly, because the more you do with Venmo, the more you get, like earning up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on a bundle of brands. So, order more pizza. The math demands it. Get the Venmo debit card. Venmo Stash Bundle Terms and Exclusions apply. See terms at Venmo.me slash dash term. Venmo checkout, not available with all merchants. Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bank or Bank NA Shackleton's Way. And he studied Shackleton's story and wrote this book that it's maybe like a six-hour audible listen to. Um and it 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. Um I'm pretty sure that's right. And uh 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. Um, but getting out of there was the most dramatic, getting out of the Hilo was the most dramatic part because we were running low on food, everybody was starting to get the wobbles. And uh and so we're at this point where we've got a we've got to cross 12 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 cliff sides and like all all the rubble was falling beneath you and everything. Um 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 , 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 of here in half a day rather than two more days of the expedition. And uh and I don't know, I don't know if if if everybody believed. I I think that I think on the last day everybody was ready to go and they're like, Fuck it, let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah. So um but I can't 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 if I'm wrong, everybody's gonna be fed up. Because you you think like, oh well 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 on calories, you're not in normal life anymore. You're now out in the field. Your your vision's much more like dialed in. But you're surviving now, you've been exploring. Yeah, and the small things that happen to you are more significant. You don't think about the fact that like, oh well, it's just a walk down there and it's another day. You're like, I gotta do this another day. And especially when maybe you're like like if you're not the leader of the expedition, I'm emotionally, financi ally as invested, check off everything. I'm that invested. So, you know, um my thought process is different than the guys that I'm looking out for, right? And so there's a lot of psychology there of of uh you know being a leader and um 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 um and so uh I I was that was that was the coolest part of the expedition 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. Gatorade. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, yeah. So we got we got Gator ade , we got uh ruffles, we got uh beef jerky, we got Skittles, we got ice cream sandwiches. Oh chocolate. Oh it my my buddy's truck was just filled with trash . And uh and we so we gorged after that and and that was it was it was great man. Um ultimately the expedition we um we didn't even find any artifacts like on the rivers. Now we could have spent more time like looking for arrowheads and stuff, but we we just didn't have time to do that. And uh and and the river was like brutal cold. Even sitting next to the river, the wind coming off of it, dude, your body temperature drops so fast, even in the day . Um and uh we found 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, surveying 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 like the calorie restrictions. Like we lost probably two days of survey just because we were so short on fo od. So uh we had to get back out of there. But all in all, the the main thing I learned was that it's not going to go the way you think. And you're gonna be a lot slower than you think that you are. And things are gonna get like a wrench is going to get thrown into your plant. And um yeah, that that's probably the biggest thing is is the same lesson you hear from every other explorer is that is that it's gonna be a lot longer and a lot harder than you think, and all the things you think are gonna happen are not gonna happen that way and it's gonna go wrong. Um so you know I probably I probably am a a fraction of a step closer to being more well prepared for the next expedition. Um things are still gonna go wrong. Yeah ye,ah. So so that's basically where I'm at now. And um uh so the three expedition projects I'm planning now are uh across the American Southeast rebuilding the Mountain Builder world, uh working with Terra Terra Incognita Research Institute and Base Map. We're trying to get the permissions to scan the MS. We'll cover all that. And when we come back I want your take on one of my favorite ancient stories that uh 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 been there once or twice. So I I showed you earlier that I wear a um it was a gift from my wife. It's uh it's a tetradrachma. It's uh it's uh Heracles that was stamped uh just about ten years after um Alexander the Great died. So I'm a fan of his Yeah, yeah. Uh well Alexander, I 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 uh even Caesar, not 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 uh I don't know if they're plot you know, platon ic, but they're heavily influenced by by Athens and Sparta. They have this different way of life than the Macedonians do up in 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 like barbarian Greek, right? So he's born in this fringe place, and you know, actually, uh 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 Greece. I I''mm I'm no expert really on on Philip. 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 gonna be a huge rabbit hole. But um essentially the Greek world is just a collection of city-states, and most of these city-states are not they don't have a maybe all of them other than Sparta do not have a government that's set up with a monarch or an emper or 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 Macedonia, 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. This is it's like Game of Thrones, the way he's able to do it. And this is probably a thousand city states when they're constantly fighting with each other. So powerful that he, I believe, basically had control of Athens and told Aristotle, you are going 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. There's no but the reality is nobody really know s. Um one of the popular ideas is that Alexander thought that Persia had sent assassins to uh to assassinate Philip, but uh that may or may not be true. But uh he certainly us es it to gather the Greek armies and turn his sights towards uh towards to turn his sights towards Persia because I believe that that Philip did want to do a run across the Turkish coast and free some of those Greek uh cities that are living there. And so that's what Alexander starts out doing. Well, within just a few battles between like age twenty-three and twenty-five, he 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, and the other. It's just a few battles in in one war. And sometimes they can be months or years apart from each other, but if they they lose that battle, their territory is just crippled, you know. Um, 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 and he neverver loses. Ne loses never loses a battle. Right. And he at least not yet. Uh in in India he kind of they kind of keep him out of India. I think he vastly underestimated how big India was. But rather than pushing into Babylon and conquering Babylon, uh his advisors tell him that he needs to turn around and head uh west to go secure the breadbasket 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 he goes in, he he shows up to Egypt, and the Egyptians basically welcome Alexander with open arms because the Egyptians hated Persian pharaohs. Uh the very first um we don't really know if this happens, but the st one of the stories that's passed down is Camp Isis, which is the first Persian ruler who be comes Pharaoh in Egypt. When he shows up at Egypt, he kills, I think he stabs the sacred apus bull together. He stabs it to death. And at this point , probably from about a thousand BC to the end of Egyptian culture , like 325 BC, that's when Constantine shuts down all the temples and everything. The Apis Bull is basically the main deity at this point. And so the story is that Camp Isis in like 525 BC stabs the uh stabs the apus bull to death, which just a massive middle finger to the Egyptian culture. They can't stand the Persians. 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 training Matthew. Yeah, yeah. They they had known each other for a very long time. And they had always, you know, the the the Egyptians, as far as we know, had always been open and kind to Greeks coming down. Herodotus comes to visit, Solon comes to visit. I can keep going on. Um so so he doesn't necessarily Alexander conquer Egypt as much as shows up and secures it. As much as uh the Egyptians know that they have no standing army. They're not gonna be able to stop 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 which probably would have been the case. Um actually was the case. I mean, really what happened from Alexander coming into Egypt and the Ptolemies later becoming, that was a lot better for Egypt than 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. Um I wish that we had surviving records of that. We there would have been uh Ptolemy, his best friend, is with him this whole time. He wrote an account of all this e,ither 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 uh what is it is it Ari us? One of these all these accounts of Alexander's life uh of his life, they're drawing on Ptolemy's uh writings, the which they had access to, but we don't. So there's so who knows how many small details Ptolemy wrote that you know, for whatever reason, ancient authors were like, oh well, I'm not gonna repeat that part, but you know, whatever. So um 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 and out into western Egypt and he meets with the oracle of Zeus Amun, which is basic ally a fusion of Amun Ra and Zeus. And so this oracle goes and performs this ritual or whatever where 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 Amun, right? So it's this the oracle has said that you now have the blessing of the gods to become Pharaoh. Um so he so Alexander in that moment becomes a god, which is kind of one of the interesting things, one of the only places 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 Emperors like uh 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 it's something crazy. It's like if you became a Roman Emperor, you had a like a forty-seven percent chance of dying on the job. Something like that. You know, being being assassinated. Um so uh Roman emperors get killed, they're not seen necessarily they try to show themselves as divine beings, but they're not seen that way. Kings get assassinated, but pharaohs are something different. They're they're godly, right? And Alexander played into that role. He played into it. And probably he was we don't really know if it's he's definitely knows that it is advantageous for him to play into it. The real question is how much did he believe it? You know? Um he probably did believe he probably did believe it. He he was enamored by the stories uh, you, know, Homer, uh, 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 Aristot le uh influenced him, but you know, that's interesting because Aristotle is a , you know, he's he's in that plat onic 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 uh they would say they would compare him to Hercules or they would say like 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 was m who was he was more than a he's he's greater than a god was. Exactly. What what would they be like? And um so uh essentially he becomes uh he becomes crowned pharaoh of Egypt and he heads up north. And one of the last things that he we don't know if he did this before he went to the Seawa 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 Iliad and the Od yssey. And in the Odyssey, I 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 And when he arrives there, the locals tell him, he asks 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 Pharaoh's land or what or what that means, but he called it Faros, P H A R O S in English. Which is a real small island. It's a real island. Yeah, yeah. And and um so that so he landed there and he stayed there and then he ended up leaving. Well, Alexander being twenty four, twenty-five years old, and he's like, I'm gonna go find that place. I wanna go see it. Well he he arrives and it's a little fishing village called Rakotis, I believe. And um and while he's there he realizes that that the land itself is actually kinda advantageous. So the Greeks like to build on water. The Egyptians aren't water people. They're also not desert people. They don't they don't like the water. They were called the Mediterranean the Great Green. So they 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 um like modern day Lebanon, 'cause that's where they would get their cedar wood from or the uh the uh cedars of Lebanon, yeah. And uh they would get their wood from Lebanon and they'd bounce around and do trading expeditions, but they're not launching full-on seafaring expeditions. They never really had military boats in the in the way that the Phoenicians or the Greeks did. They like to be downriver. 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 . This tiny little place. And it and actually get this, dude. So this is one of these anthropology things. Alright, 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 thirty one hundred BC, e and then we'll we will get back to Alexander, but um you know you've got north and south Egypt, which south is upper, north is lower. Uh we don't have to get into that. Uh it just just it's the way the direct flows weird. Yeah, the way the the way the river flows. Um but you've got these three different places in Egypt essentially. You've got southern Egypt, which is uh um you know, a collection, a collection of of cities along these this 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. Um, and that's where Memphis and some other and some other cities were. And then you have the Delta, which there were so 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 try to have to navigate through the waters of the Delta and Messers could go back to the city that's at the bottom of the Delta, which is Memphis, right? So you 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, um, but far south. And so it's a 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 . No AC Call We Care. We'll come out and inspect your air conditioner top to bottom so you can stay comfortable in your home all day long. It's recommended to have your air conditioner serviced annually to avoid breakdowns and extend the life of your system. For over 20 years, WeCare has been helping homeowners throughout Southern California with their heating and air conditioning needs. Right now, we'll tune up your AC for only $44 . Call WeCare or schedule your forty-four dollar tune-up online at weCare team.com. We care to go the extra mile. License number 779604 . Well, over time there uh over time there the delta up there so we can take a look at how small it was. Yeah, yeah, tiny. And so you have these two main places, but you know what's really crazy is they call it um they call it the two lands because they're so heavily separated. People don't realize how separated that they that they are. The distance I I'm almost certain about this. We should measure it right now. The distance between Memphis , which across the river is where the pyramids were being bu ilt. Yep. 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. Um so think about that. They were moving those those As wan 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. That's why I've never I I actually figured that out just like in the last week or so. Um but you so 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 actually absurdly lar ge . Anyways, that that's kinda one of those cool anthropology things. It changes the way that you think about Egypt when when you're study ing it. Um so Alexander he's up at he's up at Aswan and he he sees this good defensive posture uh 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 uh Mariotis, I think. Lake Mariotis. It'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 uh nearby this this fishing village. So he pulls up with his convoy into this little strip of land and um and he 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 Alexandria. 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 uh if somebody asks you to name ten cities of the ancient world, just say Alexandria, because there I think there were ten of them or there were more than ten . Um but Alexandria Egypt is the one that stuck. So he grabs this the grain out of this saddlebag throws it on throws it on the ground and he marks out that the city's going to be built around these two major roads and they're each gonna 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 um uh roads . And um and they're gonna line up with the Mediterranean winds so they could determine which way the winds come from and both the roads are gonna be pointing towards the wind so that the winds will sweep down the city and cool the 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 gonna stay here with you know who knows how many men are with him. You know, 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. Um so after he gets done laying it down, this flock of seabirds 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 uh looks at one of his uh 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 uh 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 and the library at that point? No, I 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 whether that's a thing. Um 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. Um people think that he could have been assassinated, that he could have been poisoned to death. Uh his his death certainly seems a bit like poison, or maybe it's alcohol poisoning, you know, just uh uh living a very, very rough life . I don't know. But um 'cause he's not injured in battle. Well he gets injured, but not like not mortally wounded.. Right And uh I think he takes an arrow to to the to his uh chest at some point. Or to his stomach. Um I think he does, but but it's but it's not it's not life threatening. So um a lot of people think that that it was alcohol poisoning, just just living a very like rambunctious life and ultimately poison himself. And some people think it it could be some form of cancer that obviously is not able. So anyways, um when he's on his deathbed his all of his men come to him and they say they say Alexander you don't have you don't have an old enough heir he's got a he's got a son with e Iither a Persian woman or an Indian woman, um but the but the son is like an infant and they're not gonna be heir they want a Greek, right? Right. So um there's no there's no obvious heir to the throne and he says he says uh to the fittest that's essentially what he says. And so what does that mean? That means to the fittest. So yeah so initially they divide it up into um around half a dozen different territories. They divide up the mas the Macedonian Empire. Which is how big at this point ? Uh well it's it's the Persian Empire plus Greece. So it's all the way e ast to India, west to through Europe, down the entire Mediterranean? Yeah, I mean I 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 he didn't have Italy. Um the the Ital like the early Romans are around. He probably would have set his sights west and gone and conquered Italy. But uh I think maybe they had Syracuse, but they didn't have Italy. Uh Yeah, there you go. Yeah, they didn't. 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 uh so yeah, he he dies he dies in Babylon at uh thirty-two years old. And um to his empire goes the fittest. They divide it up into I think it's j just a little bit more than a than a dozen different territories and Ptolemy like Alexander because they they bonded over their their fascination with the Egyptian world. The Egyptians were seen as like 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 at the fall of the Bronze Age, they lose And we're gonna cover that later with the Minoans. It's fascinating. Yeah, so much this they they remember so little to the point that this is probably one of the one of the slight problems I take with with when we look for Atlantis that we treat like we hang on every word that's 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 and even that is semi-mythical to the class ical Greeks. Like they were have a really hard time remembering their past. Right. And Solon even says, I th I'm telling the story from I learned it from Egyptian priests. I didn't remember. Exactly. So um and and that gets passed down orally, we think to to Plato. So you know, anyways. So even to those guys, sorry to interrupt. Yeah. Ancient Egypt is still ancient. It's still ancient and still continuing. The Monetho's history of ancient Egypt, which he I think that Manetho, he was an Egyptian and he wrote it in Alexandria, I'm pretty sure in uh one of the latter three centuries BC . And uh and that history of ancient Egypt has stood up with the archaeology. So the Egyptians from 3100 BC all the way down to the time of uh Alexander, they remembered their history. Now there is their prop there we do see myths come through, like Herodotus says that the um Herodotus says that the Egyptians told him that Khufu whored out his daughter to be able to build the pyramids or something like that. Well the Egyptians say all kinds of crazy stuff when 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, both of them uh you can't put the same amount of weight behind their opinions. But uh the uh there's definitely legends and stuff that get twisted up. But as far as the broad history, like 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. Um so 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. Well what about Alexander's body? So Alexander 's body is kept in Babylon for a while. For a while, okay. And um 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. Um, but as Ptolemy is is rising in power and kind of consolidating and getting everything going in Egypt, he at least my interpretation and in the agreement of private conversations I've had with other historians . 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. Um, I was the other day, I was just reading uh the writings of Pata hotep, which um was written around 2400 BC, and 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 Khufu K,afara, Mankarl. Um I think Sixth Dynasty or Fifth Dynasty Fifth Dynasty. Anyways, it's this it's this book of like 60 some odd lessons of how to live your life correctly and how to interact with other people and treat them is just mind blowing. You will read he 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 uh is that the po it's it's something like like listen to what every person has to say because often the wisest words you'll hear will be spoken from 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 no high standing, no nothing. They're they're a lower class citizen than you know men. Um oftentimes these normal peasants will have will 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? Oh there's the book. Wow. So Ptolemy's not fooling anybody by just posturing like he's this great ruler. He actually has to appe al 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 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. Um, you know, you if anything and these 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 Ma'at. 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 . Yeah, it's crazy to me. So so told him he obviously got through to them. He did. But he had but he had a 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 uh uh it's a symbol of Egypt's Well he's got he's gotta do a lot too. He has to appeal to the Egyptians because he's now their their governor. He's good soon he's gonna he's just gonna proclaim himself Pharaoh because the the whole all these governors that are now ruling over Alexander's empire break up and start warring 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 uh didn't his empire stop in Turkey or so? Like months. Yeah, yeah, I I think think yeah, that they I think that they c control 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 gonna say, look at what I'm gonna 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, oh, okay, that's true. That's true. So um so that was told in stone that told it to me. He's a he's a great guy. Um 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 Faros. And essentially, what that lighthouse is it was burning 24 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 in history, but that's what it meant. It was a safe refuge calling back to um 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 it and according to the sources, it's built out of like 65 ton red Aswan granite stones, which architecture like that had not been produced in Egypt for more than 2,000 years. It depends on on how old do you think that the Osirion is if you're familiar with the Osirion. A lot of people try to date that to uh oh I think it I think it's established dated to nineteenth dynasty under Seti the First. I don't agree with that. I think it's I think it's definitely contempor aneous with the Valley Temple. You do? Yeah. Uh yeah. I mean however old however old the pyramids and the valley temple in the Sphinx is, I think the Osiron is the same age, built by the same architecture. Oh, I would agree. Architecture. Yeah, c I mean the original excavators of of the Osirion thought that. Yeah. It's pretty it seem it's pretty seems pretty obvious. So um And um they weren't really using Oswan granite in the k they so there's some Oswan in the King's Chamber, there's some in the Syrian, and that's it, right? Well i it it's a it is it is always incorporated like the obelisks are raised and those are read Aswan Granite. But the uh the way the granite is used just changes. It becomes more like uh we don't have statues made out of red aswan 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 granite's being 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 700 miles. Like people always say the stones from Aswan came 500 miles. Well, in Alexandria, they went 700 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 that come come out out of of ancient uh the Middle Kingdom. And uh 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-great-great-grandfathers, and so they would call it the golden age of the golden days or golden age of Sinefru, which is supposedly he lived before the Great Pyramids, but it was it was a time of like immense wealth in Egypt. And so the Egyptians throughout all their history they they look at those pyramids and they're like man like you know e Egypt after the 19th 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 just it's just this backwatered 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 the uh 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 Order brought back national pride. Exactly, exactly. Um it's actually the second time that 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. Um didn't they rule for a couple of hundred years as well? Yeah, five five generations, I think. That's that's a long time. Yeah. So um, you know, the Egyptians uh Yeah, it's it's a it's a fascinating history. So he brings so Ptolemy brings back like national pride. And he, 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 museon is connected to it. So it's actually a university, not just a library. And so in that library, everybody's heard the way it operates. You would you would be going down the Mediterranean, you see the 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. Uh marble that would be imported from uh I think there's some marble in Egypt, but they were also importing marble from Greece through the markets and um all kinds of Egyptian granite. Like it just would have been a pretty crazy city. Greatest city, greatest city ever built up to this point, far more impressive than Athens. And um and way more impressive than Rome. Rome is nothing at this point. Um and so uh so you'd pull in, you'd come up to the dock, and then it and then officials would board your ship and they would want to see your writings, like what you had. And 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 this 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 of what you had. So they're collecting this massive archive of of all the known literature of the ancient world and people are studying things. Um equipment breaks down and operations come to a halt, every single second counts. So why is your maintenance team spending 60% of their time doing anything but turning wrenches? Ah . Maintain X is the AI-powered maintenance and asset management system that helps your team get back to actually fixing breakdowns. No more searching for manuals. No more hunting down parts. No more drowning in paperwork. With maintain X, your team can access manuals from anywhere, create new procedures in minutes, and turn voice notes into clear and complete work order feedback. What used to take hours now only takes minutes. Keep your operations moving and your wrenches turning. Join over 13,000 maintenance teams that are already fixing more and filing less. Try Maintain X for free today. Go to maintain X dot com slash AI. That's maintain and the letter X dot com slash AI . I'm pretty sure it's a scientist that's living in uh or scholar that's living in Alexandria who has the realization that's um that the earth is a sphere. Yeah uh Eratosthenes. I'm I'm pretty sure he's 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 a ex things going on. Yeah, and you you had you know people showing up to the library to learn about a number of things. I mean, they're they're studying sacred geometry, they're studying the pyramids. We have a surviving uh 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 that the, you know wh,y the pyramids were built the way that they were. It's it's really, really interesting. Uh 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 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 it's it's really cool. Um so so Alexandria is like this amazing beacon, but it needs one more thing. It needs Alexander's body. Okay. And so he launches this expedition and intercepts Alexander's body on the way back to Macedonia. And I 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. Uh I saw a lectur I saw like a lecture or presentation on this a few years ago. But they have 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 you know treasures in the sarcophagus with him. And so the idea of the mausoleum um was what we think was that it's set in the center of the city. It was right across the street. So you 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 museon. So if you're walking to work in the morning, you got to walk underneath this huge mausoleum with a statue of Alexander on top of it. And then to the right is the library and the museon 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. There's 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 let me see. He becomes governor of Egypt . When does when does uh Alexander die? Like like three twenty three BC or so? Yeah, because he visits Egypt in three 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 10 years later that Ptolemy finally is in a place where he declares himself pharaoh, and we have like these dior ite uh um 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 300 years. And so at the beginning of that dynasty, we have what's called the three good Ptolemy '.s And uh so Ptolemy one, he's the one that really expands Alexandria. He gets the um we don't actually know when the light the when the uh when the library, the museon, and the lighthouse were done with their construction . Um or we don't know if they were done during his lifetime, but Ptolemy two they are complete during during his lifetime. And then Ptolemy three is born and they're just constantly expanding the Ptolemy as the pharaoh, yeah. Yeah, it's really, 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 um I don't know exactly when he's born. It must be it's probably sometime around two fifty BC, I would guess, maybe a little bit after that. But things start going south right here. These Ptolemies don't really care about being involved with Egyptian culture at all. They don't really care about being invested into the Egyptian uh world. None of them speak Egyptian. None of them can read Egyptian hieroglyphs. They're they're like disconnected. They live in their palace and they're kind of like let them eat cake. You know, that's that's sort of it's kinda like Nepo babies. It's dismissive to say that, but that's really what they were spoiled brats. Yeah, and it all starts falling apart. And then by about one fifty uh yeah, I think it's about one fifty BC, uh Ptolemy the tenth is born and Alexandria is so far in debt that it things are so bad actually. Think about how think about how far Egypt has fallen in 150 years. That they're so far in dead that Ptolemy the 10th has no choice but to go down into the Mausoleum of Alexander, they exume his body from the gold sarcophagus, and they build him what they call a crystal sarcophagus, which is probably alabaster, which is like you know, some mid-level people throughout Egypt could afford an alabaster sarcophagus. Um it's really not a high honor to be put in an alabaster sarcophagus. And he just wants the gold. You know, it gets melted down and it probably gets sold off to partly pay the debt. So uh Ptolemy the 11th is born , and he's not a very good pharaoh. Ptolemy the 12th is born . Now we're getting close to Cleopatra, Mark Anthony time. Ptolemy the Twelfth is um is Alex or Ptolemy the Twelfth is Cleopatra's father, I believe. Or maybe it's Ptolemy the Thirteenth, but I think Ptolemy the 13th is her brother. So long story short with Cleopatra, and we're getting to like what happened to Alexander's body. So long story short with Cleopatra, um , she for some reason, I I I heard Dr. Bob Breyer like imagine this one time and he was like he was like, you know, we have 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.' Ss likehe devastated by that. Mark Antony gives her a gift to repay her by donating like two hundred thousand books to the library. Um which is This was Caesar who burned it that first time, right? The first time, yeah, yeah. And then it's burnt again by August us uh later on. So um and then it's burnt again by uh Aurelian and it's burned by Caracalla. Yeah, it's uh it it it actually gets destroyed like five times. Um but most people just just only remember the the first. But um And I think the first is probably the least damaging. Oh, the last one is the last one is the most. So there's this family, there's this record of them going on a family vacation. They go on a not 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 Ser apium, um, which is that labyrinth that's under the ground where these massive, you know, bull boxes are. They call them the serapium boxes, the bull sarcophagi, whatever. Um sh d sh 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 y ccle, some something is ticking in their brain differently than everybody else, and she's she's captivated by all that. Well, she becomes like a polyglot and starts learning like every language. I think they say that she could speak like seven languages flu sec seven languages fluently or maybe more. Um but she could she could speak, read and write Egyptian, and uh 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. Um, you know, so we don't we don't really know. But she becomes uh Pharaoh and everybody knows the the famous story. But ultimately, at the end of Cleopatra's life, um the Romans have fully sunk in 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 a, it's literally a dump. There's no amazing public architecture, there's no Coliseum, 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 roughly 40 BC, Rome is just a city of m mud brick. And um 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 , uh 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. Like the Romans are basically performing espionage inside the inside Alexandria. They're sinking their claws in and becoming more powerful in Alexandria slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly over time until the Ptolemies are so weak that all the pharaohs gotta do is walk in and or all the Roman Emperor or or a wealthy Romans are gonna walk in and be like, Well, what are you gonna do now? Right. And that was that and Cleopatra knew that. That's why she seduced um 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 Caesar wanted to do. That's why he that's ultimately why he got killed. Uh there's this little rumor that they had a child together. Oh they definitely did. Uh Caesarean. Yep. Yeah. U h Augustus killed him for sure. Um 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 um I thought it was Augustus Octavian . Could be wrong. I talked to a fish. I think I think you might be right. It's one 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. Um Yeah, but there was another there was another guy who was more obsessed with Alexander, I believe. It may have been Cal igula or it may have been Caracalla, uh, 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. Uh yeah, some of those Roman emperors, they're they're you should have on a guy who's who's an expert in in Rome stuff because those emperors are crazy. That sounds like a collegial move to me. Yeah, it does sound like something Caligula would do, but it could be Caracalla too. He Caracalla was a crazy guy also. Um but but uh 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. Um, when he shows up to um Alexandria, he wants to see uh Alexander's tomb. So they bring him down to the mausoleum. But also buried there were the uh 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 Alexander, here's Alexander in the center. Over there's Ptolemy 1, all the way to Ptolemy 13. And it might be Augustusus or it's Juli Caesar 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 something like that. And he basically just like shits on all the other you know Ptolemies. And uh so anyways, Cleopatra knew that the Romans were on the doorstep o of Egypt. And the only thing she could do is seduce the most powerful man in Rome. 'Cause you gotta keep in mind, Julius Caesar was never a Roman emperor. He was just a very wealthy warl ord 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 Caesar would break off from the Romans altogether and bring all his men down there and it 's this happening before Crassus and Pompey or after during during all of that. Yeah. So um so anyways, uh I think that Pom pey 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 to to prevent him from fleeing, Julius Ca esar had the docks burned. But I think it was it was it was a spart of his army, something like that. Julius Caesar doesn't want this group of guys leaving, so he burns the docks and and destroys their ships so that they can't even escape. So he's gonna find them and kill them all. Well when that happens, the you know you can imagine like the docks connected by ropes and wood and you know the the library itself is built out of stone, but the floorboards are all made out of wood. And the um so think about the uh imagine like a wine cellar the little sl uh uh diamond slots that you put the wine bottles in that's how the uh that's how the papyri was were stored and those were all made out of wood. So the interior of the library b urns up, but the stone architecture survives, right? And so a massive portion of the library is d is destroyed. And I don't know why you know, you hear a lot of story historians they they repeat the pop the popular like debunk 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 200,000 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 I'm guessing so that 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 at the end. 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 and then they decided to tear it down to build to build the new uh I forget, there's some citadel that's there today, but some of those blocks are still there. And the blocks are still likeing lay in the water around that. It's just tumbled and fallen into the water. But you can see these massive granite Aswan blocks laying there. Well, then give then give me your take. Where's the body? Is it St. Mark's? Yeah, yeah. So so so I'm sorry. This is the most long-winded answer of all time. No, I I love this stuff. So uh so long story short, Julius Caesar is killed before he can move Rome's capital. Uh Augustus is 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 gonna be paraded around and then they're gonna be executed. So they kill themselves. And Augustus, being actually a classy guy, um, 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 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 found their bodies. And he gave the Egyptians one year to mourn Cleopatra. And most people don't realize this . Augustus just became pharaoh. It wasn't like the pharaohs ended. There's still another 3 25 years of pharaohs to go. Right. Like that most people don't realize that. that That's crazy. Uh most of the time we we look at Egypt's history from thirty one hundred BC to thirty BC, but no, it goes on it keeps going on. So um But 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 himself king. He calls himself the first citizen. And um and he's one of the few emperors that gets to live a full life. He dies of old age and and uh yeah, just a cunning , mercil ess but smart and respectful guy. Really interesting story. Um 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 back to work. And um so Is the body Alexander's still there, the lighthouse is still there. Yeah, so when when Augustus invaded, he burned down Alexandria's library. Uh part of it. We don't know too how how much. Uh Caracalla . There are all these Alexand rians that are telling these jokes about Caracalla um in the theater in 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 damaged during this time. Kerakalla doesn't care. Aurelian has to come and squash a uh this isn't Marcus Aurelius, this is Aurelian. He has to come and squash a revolt where an Egyptian rises up and declares himself Pharaoh of Egypt. And um and there's also there there's also another attack. There's a 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 and they reference again the Palisades burn down. The Palisades are connected to the library, so the library gets affected. Then in 365 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 , the devastation was so dramatic that all of the boats and the docks had crushed onto the roofs and the of the ruins of the toppled cities of Alexandria. There was another historian that arrived, uh, another name that you would recogni you and I would recognize. And he arrived and uh and he reports that there were 50,000 people that he knew of from the city that were missing, that were that were, you know, um that had gone unreported, people looking for the bodies of these people throughout the city. And the city is completely demolished, completely devastated. Uh 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 uh myself and uh and uh Tolden Stone, we were talking about this while we were while we were in Alexandria, and we were thinking probably during that time period there were people so his his mausoleum is underground. 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, Ptolemy 10. Uh when that gets flooded with that with that salty water, I think it's salt water or 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 turn 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 17-year-old kids do you 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 blocks from his mausoleum and and all of the you know glorious Alexandrian architecture uh that that um Augustus used to model Rome, by the way. The the whole model of Rome is pulled from Alexandrian architecture 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, I when I was born, I found this city, uh a city of mud brick. I leave it a city of marble. And um and he uh what a great line. He thinks 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. Um but I think that most likely his body was pulverized by the Mediterranean and it doesn't exist anymore. That's what I think. Yeah, I I there may be some other some other ideas to the story like there's a lot of theories that Yeah, I I've um I haven't looked into that in in years, the the other theories, but I think that the main thing that you have to grasp with is is the flooding of the city, you know, because it's isn't it is like several hundred years later when Christianity is much more widespread. Sure. That you hear about the supposed place of Alexander's body again. But you 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 think I don't think anything survives that. Yeah. You know, boats on the roofs are crazy. I mean you're talking thirty, forty foot waves. Mm-hmm. Yeah, boats landing on the roof. You know, it's it's wild that the that the lighthouse even survived that, but it shows you how well built that thing really was. Yeah. You know crazy. We got a lot to talk about still. We got to talk about where Jaguars and we have to get to the Minoan culture some how. Let's do it. Back in a minute. I want to hear about the All Mex 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'd be I mean is there a solve for that Somewhere. If you were to ask an ancient olmec how it was done, I'm sure that they they could explain it.. Yeah So the Olmecs man, they're they're one of my favorite ancient civilizations. Why? Well they're they're the oldest known civilization in North America. And um 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 uh, it's actually at the bottom right of the screen right here, the uh the second one, the one that's just to the left of that, that guy right there, that's the main head at Le Venta. And Dr. Barnhart and I are walking around the uh city of Villa Hermosa 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 Olmex and and uh and he's standing he's I'm I'm looking at him to the right and there's this lake next to us and the park is right here and Dr. 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 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 my my head probably comes up to that ridge uh where the helmet is. Like just above his eyes. That's probably I'm I'm probably like at eye level with that. And um that guy there probably weighs 15-20 tons or so in a solid gray like basalt. Uh comes from the Sierra de la Tushula volcanic belt. It's probably like 90 kilometers away as the crow flies. But it's not like moving something through Egypt where all you gotta do is you gotta get on the river while the while the tide is high and and uh and float that baby down the river. These guys have to go through rivers and swamps and valleys and you know over hills to get to the next river. It's just I mean it's crazy. Um but the olmecks they emerge on the archaeological timeline as a fully fledged and organized civilization. From the very beginning, the civilization is formed. We don't have like a um we don't have a a a formation period. That's very strange. I know all the ancient astronaut people are going nuts right now. Oh they are. thrown that that idea gets thrown towards ancient Egypt a lot. But in reality that that's actually not the case. I mean it 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. Yep. We don't have any evidence of anything that's in any sort of form ative period at all whatsoever before these heads arrive. Where was the center of the Omex society? It's weird how Mexico is broken up because southern Mexico is actually like in the east, and you know, it's Mexico's a weirdly shaped country, but uh south central Mexico, like Veracruz and Tabasco and a little bit of Oaxaca. Um, so you know, kind of where Mexico comes down and So this it's like this swampy , hot , humid , flat area. It's it's not the most appealing place to live. What which is funny because that'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 land so 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, we got nothing before that. They just boom, they're there. And then do they just disappear just as quickly? So they they increase in power, we think, from um , from 2000 BC, and then somewhere between about 1600 to 900 BC is like the peak of their power. They they uh 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 Aaron Powell , 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 Aztecs Well we don't know that the Aztecs ever found the sites. They they found we know that the Aztecs had m had artifacts that come from the Olmec world. Like you have these uh Olmec jade little pendants that we think w would have been worn as like a necklace around the chest. That's the idea. Um the Aztecs had those. We found those in Tenochtitlan, but we don't know at all that the Aztecs actually found these Olmec sites. It's very possible because there are some uh so the the the first Olmec, the first major Olmec uh cultural center that rises up is called San Lorenzo. The full name of it is San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan because way out in these fields, um , so like way out here in this field, there's this the ancient city, the ancient Olmec city, and then like a 15-minute drive away, there's this modern Mex ican city called San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan that's built in the ruins of the Aztecs city. So they're not that far apart from each other. Right. 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 out into the 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 emp their empire is three thousand years later. So it's possible that the Aztecs never knew that the Olmecs had ever existed or known anything about them at all. It's possible. Uh one of the interesting things is that we know that the Aztecs found the city of Teotibacon. Um, and that Teotibacon had been abandoned for about a thousand years at this point, and uh and they thought that it was the 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 that was that went uninhabited. But again, the Olmex are the origins of that whole world. But the interesting thing about the Olmex is you look through all the Mesoamerican cultures that come l ater, and they all have like vaguely similar pantheons of gods. You know, you've got Chalk the rain god, and Chalk you also have the rain god in so many different other cultures, and you've got uh Kukul Khan, which is the serpent god, and Ketzilkoat, which is this god, and you know, the only one that actually of this massive pantheon of Mesoamerican gods, the only one that we can see in the Omek world is actually the feathered serpent. Kukul Khan or or uh Ketzilkoat is depicted on monument nineteen in in the Olmec world. But it seems like the Olmec religion is more based on shamanism and everything. So it's like a it's almost like a pre-Mesoamerican civilization. They see feathered serp ent later anywhere? Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, it plays into this whole dragon fascination that I have in. So um it it it is so it is such an odd thing. So the the first time we see it is around a thousand BC. Uh Olmec Monument 19. It was found at the city of La Venta. It's on display in Mexico City today. Probably my favorite Olmec Mon ument. Such a particular depiction. And it's Monument Nineteen. What do you like about it? What's so special? W ell Is that it right there? No, no. So that's that's uh Ketzel Co. at at uh Teotibucan, which is interesting because at Teotihucan we don't actually know the Ketzalkoat's N Aztec word, but the Aztecs adopted the feathered serpent, the Teotihuacanos also had it, but we don't know what the Teotibucanos called it, just like we don't know what the old mechs called it two thousand years earlier, right? So think about this. The Aztecs find Teotibuchon been abandoned for around a thousand years. Okay, that's two Teotibuchon was abandoned two thousand years after the Olmec period. Like the the 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 is one of the as 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. That precision. Mm-hmm. And there's the the the omnipresent purse. Yeah. You got you got the you got the handbag guy. And um it it's it's fascinating. He's being carried by you can t like he's the the serpent is wrapped around him and the serpent's carrying. I see that, yeah. So where does this 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 to let's say to have the economy develop to be able to commission things like this because the olmex don't have this kind of stone in their land. It's being exported from outside from outside of their land. And that's been traced. We know where that stone is from. And so I i it's a it's a peripheral obscure culture that was in control of that area, but the Olmecs are paying to have that quarried and then either the Olmecs are bringing it or that other culture is bringing it. I mean 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 this here is well into agricultural time. Yeah yeah yeah so the so the Olmex they are getting so so the the uh Coetz Kalkos River is one of the largest rivers . Like it goes from uh I I could I could be wrong here, but it it might connect the oceans. Um , between the or or I should say the Gulf. Like I you you may be able to all at least I know that it cuts down on that massive narrow area because you have uh 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 Pacific, I didn't know they went that that far west. Oh yeah, yeah. We have we have Olmec um cities on the on the Pacific Ocean. I didn't. This is a uh an empire. Probably. My guess, my guess 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? Um, but we know that they're super powerful, and that power, my guess , must have come from how lush the uh how lush the valley is. Because w I I've stood over it before and I've taken a picture isolated of just the Coet's Calcos Valley at the base of uh 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 the Fertile Crescent looks exactly the same. It's just that fertile valley where things can grow just at a level no one else can. So the Olmecs, they're profiting off of all 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, ain't the the olme appchesar on the historical record fully formed. Not like, oh well, you know, it was super fast. So like I just 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 I and they've done this, you can go to the most isolated like indigenous villages in Mexico today. You've got these little, little tiny towns where people still live in huts and in the same way the 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 it's like ancient American DNA connected to uh uh connected to the people who came across the the Bering Strait. It's the same sort of DNA. You know what's interesting is like it's 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. Um yeah, it's interesting. Uh and the Olmec people are born with um birthmarks that come from uh that come from Mongolia. They they got these little the babies will have birthmarks like on their butts and then the birthmark will disappe ar. That's a Mongolian trait. It happens to Mongolian babies too. I never heard that. Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure that that that that's right. Dr. Barnhart, he did he documented this. Um it it is a birthmark that disappears, but I think it's on their butt. And um yeah, so they so they are uh you know, they're just the descendants of the people that came across either with the Clovis or after them or, you know, some point in far distant past. But they they they as far as we know they are uh 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 a difference. And uh, you know, we think of Native Americans as being this monolithic people. They all sort of look the same. But the deeper I've gone into it, the more I've realized like, no, no, no, Comanches look a lot different than Cherokee. The Cherokee look a lot different than the Iroquois people. The Iroquoian people. Well it's kind 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 uh other places for it to make sense in our mind, you know what I mean? And um and in Mexico in particular, man, Maya people look so much different than Zapotex or Oahawkins. And those all look different than the Olmex. The Olmex are so the Olmex have the roundish, puffy faces, and they actually legitimately have that. They don't really look like uh they have these skinny the my have these skinny long angular faces. The olmechs are exactly the opposite of that. And there were I should have gotten a photo of it, but I I didn't want to ask the guy. I was on a flight 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 just this big sort of Samoan looking guy, you know, real puffy, puffy face, big nose, big lips, big eyes. And he's sitting there, and I just I was like, I want to sneak a photo of this guy to so that I would have so I'd have proof. But uh beanie on him. They still look that way today. Oh, that is that it's a depiction of ball court players. Right . I think I think it's a fusion uh of of that because we know that the ball game is at the center it's at the center of Mesoamerican mythology. Like you know, you got the you got the hero twins that are playing the ballgame, and uh you know the ballgame goes goes to the 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 like the I think it's about like the order of the entire universe itself . And probably also about looking tough. What's the most do you know do you know the most common way that commodist 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 that they're 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 yet 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 it's the fact that the game is infused with the culture and their and their religion altogether. And also by proverbially presenting yourself as a gladiator, you look cool. You do. So so that's my thought is that maybe it's all of these things put together. In 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 they're categorical in nature. Well, so we've got these categories here. Either g 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 do you mean? It's like we're The feathered serpent is is a perfect is a perfect example here. Um they know Native Americans know that the feathered serpent is not real . It is an amalgamation of different esoteric, 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 di in a way that makes sense to them. And so what that feathered serpent probably what I think that it represents, there's no real academic consensus on this, it's just me and Dr. Barnhart bullshitting for years about these ideas. Um I think it I think it's an esoteric symbolism of the conquering of the three realms. A snake is born underground. Yep. It ri it rises up. So it's born in it's born in the underworld, it rises up and conquers the mid-rem. 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 19 that they knew, I'll tell I'll tell you , probably like 10,000 years ago . Mesoamericans are seeing what's called the Quetzal bird fly around. Yeah. 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, that's it. It looks like a snake and you add the wings on to it. And so and you could look up something like you could look up like a quetzal 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 Monument 19. 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 uh up here in like the United States. Um and um what I yeah, so there you go. So that tail is actually much, much longer than that. Um you just can't tell by this angle. But it looks like wings coming out of a uh and I've seen one ketzel bird in per in in person. I walked into uh a temple in the Yucatan and a Ketzel bird flew straight over my head out the uh 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 Ketzel birds depicted on the monument. So they weren't being fooled. What I think it is, is it's a um the feathered 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 Quetzalbird or of Quetzal Koat or the Feathered Serpent, it's it's like a s it's symbolic of the fact that this person is fully aw akened and they have conquered all three levels of existence. They've been born in the underworld, they came to the midworld, and they ascended probably through hallucinogenic practices or something like that. They ascended to where their soul is able to fly, like 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 its itself, if that makes it spiritual awakening, conquering all three levels of existence. Maybe conquering death, that may that might be what it is, flying in the air. It's really hard to uh 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 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 it's not it's not natural to us to think like a like a Native American does, you know it? Well you brought up dragons and um what makes it hard for me to try to define a winged serpent is because it shows up everywhere. So Yeah it does. Was it really a th ing ? I don't know, man. I don't know. You know, I've seen the argument that's like um we have these massive um I've seen the argument before that not all the times do wings in fossils um not all the times are they are they preserved in fossils and that the wings of the cartilage that they're that they're made out of could disintegrate and so we could be finding animals that existed anytime between 50,000 years ago to 50 million years ago or more. No, definitely but 250 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. Right. And feathers, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So many of the dinosaurs had had feathers, which seems obvious because we we paint them all as being like fully reptilian, but birds are reptiles too, and they also have feathers, you know. So Yeah, this the serpent I I can get around. Flying is a little harder, but you I can see it. But the breathing fire, that's so I don't know where they got that from. Yeah, and and um I did a little tracing of the um of the dragon through some parts of the ancient world recently and it I think that the I think that 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 pure dragon. Like it like if we if we if we wanted like 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 is 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 uh an anaconda swallowing them. I have I have a buddy who told me that an anaconda swallow ed him while he was on ayahuasca and it wrapped around his body and whispered in his ear, it told him to be quiet, 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 uh there's only one way to access them. And dragons and dragons are always Maybe they're real, just not real here . And maybe dragon and dragons are always associated with um 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, the the that Kukul Khan is the Maya ruler is the human embodiment of Kukul Khan, and the Aztec ruler was the human embodiment of Quetzalkoat. It was probably the same thing in Teotihuacan too, which is where the Aztecs get that from. Um 'cause probably the Teoti huacanos still live but like dispersed and their mythology carries down and the Aztecs absorb it and kind of reinvigorate it. But um was it a positive symbol like it was in ancient China? Because dragon was a positive symbol for them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But not in Norse mythology or everywhere else. No, no, no, it wasn't. Norse mythology is yeah, that's a because uh the the dragon is eating the entire universe in Norse m in Norse mythology. Um Yeah, it's it's interesting. No, but it Yeah, I mean it was a it's funny to say a positive thing in Mesoamerica. Dr. Barnard and I were in um 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 uh so there's a there's this mural that's like a modern interpretation of the whole pantheon of Maya gods interacting with each other. And uh and Dr. Barnhart he, he's like he's like goes he goes, you know what's interesting? Where's all the love in Mesoamerica? And 'cause it's all about like death and war and destruction. And he goes, he goes, they're their whole 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? There must and you know, he's 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 was it positive, it's like that's funny, Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um but uh 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 you you would like to think you're being ruled over by somebody who's extremely powerful, right? Um, but the dragon , especially in China, the dragon is not a foe, it's not a monster to be slayed. It's uh is an embodiment of of well in China, it's actually the dragon is actually in um an em an amalgamation of all the animals of their world. So it's like a it's like a a tiger and a camel and eagles and all these animals brought in together into this strange creat ure. Um, but yeah, you know, I w I 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 can only answer the question by going through the mysteries, to be honest with you. That's actually what I think it is. Like the cult of the cult of Eleusis, 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 anymore 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 Olmex. 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 organiz ation that safe holds sacred cosmological, scientific, astronomical, astrological knowledge, it's all fused together. And it these are the people who preserve and safekeep and try to uphold the very universe itself by carrying out these rituals. And you know, we don't exactly know what they were doing, but you're describing like a familial shamanistic culture that you're passing down the secrets of the universe. So those noise. So those are called the mysteries. Right. And every ancient culture has them. And rather than most archaeologists who look back and you know no archaeologist is gonna 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 and that it was all sort of like a uh you know people coming and leaving uh offerings to dead people like leaving food. They 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 a thousand BC, the entire ancient world is populated with massive civilizations all doing roughly the same thing. That's true. And um and I don't think that that's just because all those people are dumb. I think that they one of the one of the coolest quotes I ever heard was uh from the professor Jeremy McInterney, and he was talking about the temple of Apollo at Delphi. And he was, he's like, I'm not gonna get overly into this in in this lecture. And uh and he's like, he's like, but I'm just gonna say this, I don't mean this in any sort of metaphor ical way or uh I don't mean it in a symbolic or he said he said I don't mean this any sort of symbolic 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. He just leaves it at that. This is like a credentialed world-class Greek archaeologist. And he just leaves it that. I've never ever heard him extrapolate on that before. And I I don't know what I don't know what exactly he's getting at there. Um I don't know if if he means that So you mean the gases within the mountain that gave her visions? Yeah, yeah. I think he just means yeah, I think he just means that that I don't think he he's saying that he actually believes that Apollo is real . I think he's just saying that the Oracle is actually chan is there's something real, there's a real element to that. And he just kind of leaves it at that. I think that's a psychedelic experience. Yeah, yeah. And um, you know, and the question is when you when you're uh taking part in psychedelics, or 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? Well what do you taking the journey yet? No. I mean not not I I I have a I have a very low tolerance to like cannabis and so you know in in extremely strong doses that that's been enough for me. You know you're gonna have to walk the walk at some point. Yeah, yeah. See the thing for me is um 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 gotta wait smart. Yeah, I gotta wait till it I gotta wait till it calls me. Um but I I I will will do it. do it at some point, but it just has to be the right the right time. Right now I don't feel the need to do it. But uh yeah I've I've my friends and I talk about this a lot, and um I need to I need to put together a presentation, like really putting my thoughts together on this too, because I I've juggled it around for so long. But I'm I'm comfortable saying it. I I think that 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 the 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 it are we all just uh Forrest Gump has a great line, a deep, profound line where he says he' hes's like, like, I wonder if we're all just out here on this, you know, 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 I think that the cosmos is so much more intertwined and so much more purposeful and larger and uh 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 if these things live, if there's if they're 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 how do we square both? I think that God is uh I think that God is a lot more um I think that God's a lot more complicated than uh like a man floating on a white cloud and in you know, some renaissance painting. Uh I think that when the Bible talks about like angels being cast out of heaven and everything, you know, I 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 wanna I'm really getting way off on this, but you know, may maybebe they maybe they want to be moral and maybe they want to be actually worshipped as a moral god and so you can go down to the Amazon, you can interact with those you can interact with those things and they're they're really there. Um, but I think that I I I agree with like um the Greek philosophers, they thought that Logos was at like the core of of the universe. Yes. And that even with all these other gods, there was something that existed before that, which was logic itself. It was it was it was it was reason. And that reason its elf may have had e 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 it's I think it's real. And that's what I think that God is . Um 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. I sometimes I sometimes I wrestle with that and like Christianity, but uh well people are seeing the same things on your DMT experiences. And so they are seeing the same things. Maybe it's because our brains are the same, or maybe they're seeing something. 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 not 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 can that's me connected to s to something larger. All ancient people felt this way. All ancient people um you know were were were I don't know if religious is the right word, but spiritual. They I think that ancient people were very open and connected to something that we're so like sh calloused and cut off from these days. Our our world has for all of the benefits that modernity has brought to us with science, everything has also become so sterile. Of science will make you an atheist, but at the bottom, God's waiting for you. And uh, you know, you there's so many people like Stephen Hawking. I don't think he admitted at the end of his life that uh that that God was real, but one of the last uh something he talks about in one of his last publications was that he could s it was something along the lines of like he couldn't see any other way uh 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 that's God to me. So um yeah, but it it's 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. And they respected it. Oh Oh I'm forgetting his name, but um it'll come to me in just a moment. But uh he was a Spaniard that was born in Cusco in the mid early fifteen hundreds. He was the daughter of a wealthy Sp aniard and uh and or I'm sorry, he was the son of a wealthy Spaniard and the son of an Inca princess . Um very famous book, uh, but it's called um A Royal Account of the Incas. And it's basically him in his early 20s, 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 uh man, Cusco's an amazing place. Have you been? No . Just thinking about it right now. I'm I'm going back in the summer. I just can't wait to go back. It's one of the one of the greatest cities on the planet. Is it that's and that's the heart of the Inca Empire, yeah, it's the navel of the Inca world. And um you know, they they thought it was the like the center of the universe itself, you know. It's uh there's no place that's like Cusco. It's amazing. And the people there are so nice. The Inca people and and like just really But Peru is very open to excavation and their history and all that. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Well for a little bit there I was the um I was the American representative to uh to get funding for the uh excavation of the uh Chincana tunnels. Uh not not through them. It was just me working directly with uh Cusco's Ministry of Antiquities. So we were able to we were able to secure some of the funding for for uh the excavation 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 um ambassador for them, just trying to get funding to come in to to get the project off the ground and now it's going so we're gonna uh I'm gonna go in and check in with them um this summer but so um so this so this uh guy who had grown up in uh in Cusco late in his life in Spain, he's writing about all the things that he learned about. He's one of the sources for the uh for the legendary tunnels that are underneath the city as well. Um he's got he he alludes to them about. I've never heard of these. This is um the mysterious chinkana subway tunnels. Wow, so they Wow they uh I've never heard it referred to as subway tunnels, but uh clickbait. Yeah, yeah. Probably it was uh it was it was connected to the to the uh to the Inca mysteries. You know, you you would they would probably go under the tunnels and who knows what would go on down there and then they do you could emerge up at Saxe Wamon, like you could go down in Saxe Wamon, you go down into the mountain and you would emerge inside the city. We don't know if they' re if they're natural tunnels that were modified or if the Inca themselves made it, but we know that they were real. Um but anyways, so he writes about these tunnels and he also writes about he tells us how the In cas, which Inca is actually the term of the ruler. Uh you know, y that's the name for the Inca emperor, right? Um so you had like Monco Inca, goes on and on and on. I didn't know that. But when it talks about uh 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 Garcilaso de la Vega . There we go. I always forgot that one. Royal commentary of the Incas. Yeah, I know. So but he gives us an account of what he was taught from his mother's side of the family about , you know, the the early philosophy of the Inca Kings. And I about a year ago when we got back from um no for my birthday, my wife got me the original printing of that book, uh like hardback copy. Yeah. Original? Well well I s I don't know why I said original. Um they were brought to the US in like the early nineteen hundreds and there was a printing of them then. Yeah. Yeah. So um so uh the original American one, they were made in New York. It's really, really cool. It like deteriorates in my hands every time I hold it. But um so I'm flipping through pages and I read the philosophy of of of like the founding of the Inca world and um and I'm reading this to her and I 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 to to to Cusco and she loves the Peruvian people. And um 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 to goodness. They're just good hearted people. And um and I was telling her, I was like, I was like, I was like, it just doesn't make sense to me that if that if God's real, that He didn't have a relationship with these people. If if these 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 you can feel it when when like 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 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. You there's no there's nothing you can come up with, there's no actual argument p,hilosophical 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, there 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, you know, the pull to be good. We know what that means. And um I 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, Oh, I 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 with people who don't believe in God, but then you really start talking to 'em about it and they're like, Well, okay, well yeah, I mean I I yeah, I recognize there's there's gotta be something that's like more than all you know, you'll get that. Um 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 uh a few years ago I had this I had this thought that I was like it feels so much more likely that you and I were always intended to exist and that our 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 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 erup ts and you know, like at the beginning of time, say the big bang, there's this massive explosion and vast expanse of nothing. I think that all the threads of time already existed in that moment. Time can't exist without light. Those two things, those two things work together. Um we were all touching. 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 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 happen just happen or 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. Um tell me your theory about the where Jaguars. I don't I don't want to forget that one. Yeah, yeah. So uh so this is actually where um And then we'll see if we can get to Atlantis. Yeah, yeah. So this is where Dr. Barnhart and I, we probably I don't know, uh we might disagree with each other on this, but it's it doesn't really matter. Wow, it's actually called a were jaggered. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like a werewolf. Yep. Yeah, yeah. Oh man, we've got werewolves and were jaguars and were tigers and I think there's a were hippo out there somewhere. Yeah, yeah. I I I gotta do a video at some point on on all the wares and uh these different human you know, fusions with these creatures. But so my first introduction to the Wear Jaguar was um well it was it was actually the day before I was at Palenque for the first time with uh Dr. Barnhart you. If go to see Palenque, the likelihood is you'll have to land in Vieira Mosa and there is where you can go to Leventa 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, yeah. They thought they were just gonna pulverize the whole thing. So uh one of the wealthy patrons of the city of Villamos a bought all of those, or maybe he bought them or he did something. He he paid for them all to be transported to Villamosa and put in this huge park. So he's like a he's like a local a local a local hero. Yeah. And um 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 he and I visited that before uh Palen que and I've been back like four or five times now. I've been across the old Mech world like maybe maybe four times now. And um and what's really interesting, and I tell people this every time I I'll take like s we'll have students who sign up to go on a Maya Exploration Center, that's our organization, MEC. We'll have students that'll sign up to go on like these educational tours. And so I'll tell them at the on the first day, I'll be like, What do you think of when you think of the olmics? They say head they'll say the heads. I'll say by the time you leave this, when you think of the Olmex, you'll think of a Ware Jaguar. It won't even be close. You'll think of a Ware Jaguar. Yeah, because there are 17 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 Le Venta 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 opened up these doors, and there's these three massive sandstone Olmec 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'd never seen them before. And uh they're larger than what's in the park? Yeah, yeah. They're yeah, oh it's crazy. It's really crazy. And they're all my head spread throughout Mexico, but all the ones from La Vinta , almost all of them are are at that park. Um, but they're larger than all the Olmec heads throughout all of Mexico. Um almost like twice as big in size. Wow. And uh but what's funny is those heads are not humans, they're wear jaguars. Oh But they're not basalt. So there's there's some there's some so so this slowly started eating away at me. I should say American archaeol ogy, is that it's underpublished, underfunded. It's not quite as popular. You know, Egypt vastly overshadows so much of the ancient world as far as popular interest, right? Um , and there are so few people professionally studying it that an outlaw like myself or Dr. Barnhart 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, you know, for 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 Omek world, Matthew Sterling and the Smithsonian. When was that? Um it was uh what was the first year? Nineteen it was mid-1930s to just after World War II, nineteen forty six, I believe, was the last uh Sterling expedition to the Olmec world. But yeah, it was it it was American teams that did that. It's a it's kind of cool. It's an exclusive it's like a it's like a specifically American story where where we went down in the Mexico and and launched these major expeditions uh with Smithsonian, obviously working with their government, but fully American teams. Yeah, I mean we talked earlier about the early Smithsonian was very racist against indigenous people. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because they believe that there's no way savages could build these basic things. Which I think is one of the reasons why we don't hear those stories as much as we hear about Egypt. Yeah, yeah. There's there's a lot of weird, complex, like dark stuff that the Smithsonian has gotten up to. I I haven't done a whole lot of looking into it, but I I will I will feed the the giant skeletons uh community. There were three massive skeletons that were discovered at the Olmec site of San Lorenzo in the early 1900s. And an old man that doctors. How big are we talking? Are we talking giants? Uh 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 80s, Dr. Barnhart 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 erected or get excavated from the Red Palace and they were taken to Mexico City and never seen again. Wow. Never published. There's no photos of him. That guy said he was 16 years old and he saw it. And other people who saw it as well. And that this was a known thing that giant people were found in these mounds and taken away. You're not really a giant skin. And this was and this was the Smithsonian doing this. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we have the documented hiding things. I don't know if I'm I don't know if I'm a Giants guy. Um I'm not really. I I kinda wanna believe, but I kinda 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're because they have was it gigantism or gigantism? 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. Mm-hmm. Can you tell us about that real fast? Yeah, absolutely. 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. Sure. 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 um This audience knows what Yavin for is. Yeah, yeah. So Yavinfor, T Call. Yeah. Well, Jabba's Palace is actually pulled from uh from Moctezuma's palace when the Spaniards arrived. And I don't know if there's any other modern scholars out there that agree with me on this or or or they might all think I'm crazy for thinking this. Um but this was 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 olmecs were or knew about any other sites, I knew that they had Olmec artifacts and probably knew it came from a time before time, right ? And then I got thinking about uh when the Spaniards arrived at Moctezuma's palace in the Aztec capital of Snochtilan, they go up into his palace and they see that surrounding the emperor 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 um 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 gonna get left up on top of a mountaintop. Bye. And um 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 is the continuity of cultures, that they're very traditional. At the top of their pe 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 of a wooden and thatch hut. It's the same way within um within Egyptian temples, the pillars themselves are actually just bundles of reeds and lotus flowers that are all wrapped together. That's what the pillar itself uh 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 , you go back just a thousand years, you can see that the Maya are venerating dwar ves. They say that the 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 dwar ves and the ball game all the way around the temple. The Maya people venerated dwarves as being special and being touched by the gods. Uh, you see that Pakal's son at the city of Palenque, 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 um you know you have you have all these depictions of of where Jaguar people who uh you know they look like they have the downturned mouths and cleft lips with fangs coming out. They do. Um and then you also see a lot of depictions of they some people call them like Downs babies, but they're babies that you can tell are 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 were jag or a baby. But if you go to like a a 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, um, you'll see that that they do look like like children with Down syndrome. And so I think that the reason that we have thousands of these little statues, and and they're they're like life size, they look just like a baby. You can 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 gonna make it through childhood. And so they venerate these babies by making all these statues for them because they know these children aren't gonna survive. And I think they're they're venerating their lives. And the babies that are born with these cleft lips . In the 1970s, there was a survey that was done in Veracruz, like a medical survey. And one of the things that they documented, this didn't have to do with like research in the olmex, it was just something that that that they documented. Was that there's 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. Do you see underneath the lips how gummy that is? Yep. There's no question. So my wife has worked on children with ectodermal dysplasia. My wife's a dentist. I refer to her about this stuff, so I feel a little more sure, you know, uh free to talk about this. But um she'll have kids come in with ectodermal dysplasia. They got a couple of fangs. Like sometimes it's two fangs in the front, or sometimes it's wide two fangs. They have no learning disability. Just normal. Really? Yeah. Just totally normal kids. But they but they're their mouths are gummy and they'll have two fangs on the top, and maybe sometimes fangs on the bottom or, they 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 um, it doesn't come with learning disabilities. And she had a whole period in college where she learned about this, which was 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 jung les 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', I don'tt 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 how did this happen? And you see depictions in the city of Chao Catsingo of Jaguars and people uh like interloping with each other, like having sex with each other. Uh some people think that they're dancing, but they 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 ectodermal dysplasia. And that's why throughout the Olmec world, you only see 17 depictions of colossal Olmec heads, but you see thousands of depictions of wear Jaguar people. Thousands. Thousands. And what I think it is is just like in ancient Egypt, where you had this this is I mean, I I just feel so certain saying this. In ancient Egypt , you have um we know that the Pharaoh and the priests were warring against each other. The priests had risen up. They they're they become so powerful that they start to challenge the pharaoh's power and it's almost like the pharaoh has to obey the the priests and you know, that's not the cosmic order of of things and they they have this huge feud. Well, I think that there's a priestly class of shamanic people in the Olmec world that are the were 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 from that. And we can see all throughout the Olmec world of the Olmecs actually, and I actually think that it's it's a totally one-sided thing as far as I can remember. So many of the Ol mec alt ars, 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 ureus just like this is crazy. Just like uh the Egyptian Urausy with the Really? Yeah, he has a a uh he has a uh it's either a fertilance or it's a rattlesnake right here on the on the front of his headdress. You can look up a Leventa uh Laventa Olmec or Olmec Leventa altar and and it'll pop up. And he's emerging from a cave and he's carrying a baby with him. The man has downturned lips and so does the baby. And on the sides of the on the sides of the monument you have other grown people. Okay, so it's gonna be one of these . Uh it's the it's the photo right below this one . Yeah. Oh that's no question. Yeah, so looking at so he's got so he's got a um if you look really really closely there there is a snake that's coming out of the top of his hat. Um and so he's got downturned 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 gotta make I gotta make something like this, is let's unwrap the monument where you have a scene here on the front and here's a 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 Cat Zingo 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 rite of passage that a baby born with ectodermal dysplasia, aware jaguar, uh has to go through as a baby to be oh well I mean it's like it's like having a it's like having a a Christian king being baptized as a baby, right? You have to go through the rites. And so they're going through their mysteries, their rites as uh children. And what I think that these altars are is I think that that is a snapshot in time of when the shaman wear Jagu ar who's going to sit on top of it, that baby being carried by the man, the baby is him. That it is a snapshot of when he was given the right of the power of the wear jaguar as a baby, right? And uh and we know that they're that they're sitting on top of it because there's a rock art painting of a uh of a of a where jaguar ruler sitting in this like yoga pose on top of one of those altars. So we know that they're sitting on top of them. What is the quoteote unqu mainstream view of those of man I I I I don't I don't think that there really is one. Yeah, I saw I saw a well, I mean I know that there I it's kind of like um they they mostly mostly what they do is they they call it ancest or veneration. It's all these broadly vague terms. I saw a guy recently who uh he's like a really main stream sort of academic and he did a video on the Olmex and I was curious what he was gonna 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. No, it's not even it it just it's missing all of the nuance. It's fine, but it's missing all of the uh everything. So anyways, um but I think that I think that' its um as you go throughout the olmec world, you can see that it's two different um groups of people. You've got these royal families that are headed by these olmec heads, that those guys are probably kings. They're they're 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 that 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 Olmec head, and you can tell on some of them that there's an ear on the back side of it. It was a head that used to exist that was carved down in a way and turned into a ware jaguar. Wow. Monument. And there's even a there's even a an olmec head that was never actually a head, but it but it was a smaller piece of um smaller flat like uh rounded piece of stone that they carved a face into it and then they carved these j these Jaguar claw marks across theed head and just just like maimed and 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 Olmex. Yeah that's telling a story. And and they often say that uh this is it's kind of like it's kind of like the mystery at Gobekli Tepi. We don't know what was intentionally buried and what wasn't. Like if it was intentionally buried, they they call it ritual deactivation where it's like taking away the power from it. Now we don't know if it's the Olmecs doing it themselves or if it's warring factions inside the Olmec world. Meaning 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 uh buried their monuments, which I don't think that that's I don't think there's any evidence behind that at all. Um and then they think that the Olmex may have done it themselves, but not out of the official narrate 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 I don't agree with that either. Um because at the top of the all the head s, 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 Olmet Kings, bury it down, maybe the head is ex maybe the top is exposed, and they claw up the whole top of the helmet where the symbols are. Yep. They they claw those away. But it's 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 like it's a deep claw mark. So they're carving. They're taking the time to call. it This isn't vandalism. This is sculpture. Sculpture . Sculptural vandalism. Okay. Right? It's like this was this sculpture was created 150 years ago or something. Well, now we're going to bury it and we're gonna carve claw marks into it to make it to make it known that this is what happens when you challenge the cult of the wear Jaguar, right? You know, somet something like that. Um 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hundreds of different monuments throughout. And and several different like a dozen different times, like shh sh like you can imagine a where jaguar clawed at a monument and they make it look like that. Like a were jaguar just mauled this guy the top of this guy's helmet, took away his whole insignia, you know, just just disgraced his power and then they b uried him. That's what I think that I'm seeing, especially when you see the monument of what looks an like an Olmec uh head 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 and dominate that earlier culture? Or do you think it's just or you think they're contemporaries? That's a good question. I don't know. I think it I think it's all happens at the same time because um well I mean I love stuff that yeah that we just find see the top of his see the top of his head? Yeah that's that's vandalism sculpture. That's clearly intentional. That that's an interesting question about can can both these be happening at the same time? Um I think that they're happening at the same time because it's you see the similar art styles between the heads and and everything else, they're also using the same trade routes. Like we we have found some of the roads where the where the all the monuments are being transported across land and everything. So I think that it's all interacting with each other happening at the same time. But what I think it is is that the let's say the the the royalty versus the shamans, these rise, these fall. You know, it's like this. So at certain points of times there there might be not be a 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. And and I actually I'm I believe I'm standing out on an island by myself with this theory. I don't think there's I don't think there's a single other academic that that would that would back this up. But it seems obvious to me that it that it's two different factions like warring against each other. Ultimately, though, um the last main Olmec c ultural center is a place called Tres Cipotes , and that rises somewhere around 250 BC. So, like the Olmecs have been around for 2,000 years at this point. And uh, when that cultural center takes hold and they build this massive city. Uh, they've got a few heads there, a bunch of bunch of stone um monuments, nowhere jaguars. So somewhere between about 500 BC towards the latter part of La Vinta and the rise of this next cultural center called Tresopotes, the where Jaguar just disappears into time. That's and from that point on, dominating Mesoamerica will be the pantheon of gods that's worshipped by the Maya and the Zapotex, later the Teotihuacans, um and and this shamanistic culture that's like supremely shamanistic where where people are almost like transforming into other beings, becomes secondary, if not completely disappears. Uh we see in some places in the Maya world, like out in Belize , where Belize was connected to the Olmex in a way in a particular way. The Maya people of the Belize of Belize were connected to the Olmecs 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 ago from you 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 no. There's only five of 'em and like two or three of 'em are active. Yeah, how crazy that 's crazy. So you have this whole massive world there. But the we know that the Maya of Belize were interacting with the Olmecs because way early on before the rest of the Maya world even uh even accepts or adopts divine kingship, there was a a kingdom in the there was a kingdom on the coast there that had trade connections all the way back with the Olmec world because we can see that they had that they're sharing things like the Olmec people have artifacts that you'd only find on the coast of Belize and vice versa. And so these people on the uh city called Ceros, they try a kingdom and it works for like 150 years and 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 when one guy makes a decision and tea call, it doesn't you know 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 period, like two, three thousand years later where for thousands of years the where Jaguar continue. And I didn't I did not know that. And I I uh I was sh that was shown to me by an archaeologist named uh Raphael and um he took us on a he took us on a tour through uh ATM cave, which is really, really cool. And he showed me on uh the side of this pot a uh a wear jaguar would made in like classical Maya form, but it was a man who was actually a jaguar. Yeah, and it doesn't exist anywhere else in uh in the Maya world, but of course, it exists in the one place that was actually connected to the Olmex thousands of years earlier. So that influence that the Olmex had on those people, of the wear jaguar, stuck with them for a thousand ye ars after the old mechs had fallen. That's amazing. 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, can we talk about half man, half both? Half man, half bull, let's do it. Yeah, yeah. All right. Thanks for hanging out for one more. I appreciate it. I had so much. I know, did we get to most of it? Mo 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 min Minoan story? Who were they? Yeah, so the Minoans are um 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. Um we don't quite understand their racial composition or where they came from or what or what culture they subscribe to. They're like their own people. But uh And we don't know what they call themselves. We don't know what they we don't even know what they call themselves. How crazy is that? We don't even know what language they spoke. Same, same sort of thing. Um but the Minoan society is uh man, I I I love the Minoans. Um it's uh uh I got fascinated with the Minoans the the movie of uh Troy all the architecture that's pulled from that is mostly from uh Kenosis and um so this was So Kenosis the on Crete. Kenosis, which is which is they call it the Minoan capital, but we don't even know if that's what it was. Um but um so the Minoans they arrive we start seeing their culture form , whether coincidentally or not coincidentally, on the island of Crete on around thirty one hundred BC . Same century, same century as when 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. What ? 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? Um No, it was you and I were talking about the other room when I told you about the the that Roman city in the Doclo Oasis way out in the middle, way out in the middle of Egypt . So in southern Egypt, you follow the Nile 700 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 from the Nile itself. But you reach this place called the Dockla Oasis, which are these huge reservoirs that create fertile land just next to the reservoirs. Ancient people have been living there since 12, 500 BC. Um and they eventually were consumed into and wrapped into the dynastic Egyptian world. Well, when the um 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 uh during this period of like uh 70 emperors and 70 days or something in Rome, they changed the inscriptions on one of the temple walls to reflect an emperor that was only alive as emperor and and and on the throne for ninety days. That's crazy. So they were able to change the uh yeah, so there's there's Doclo Oasis. So they were uh they were able to change the inscription of the emperor that quickly. So that's 1200 1200 plus miles. Right. That's unbelievable. Yeah, yeah. So they're so information gets around just like that. And my guess is it always had been, and uh 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 uh we can push it back a little bit, but maybe thirty three hundred, thirty two hundred, thirty one hundred BC. The Minoans kick off in thirty one hundred BC, the Egyptians kick off in thirty one hundred BC. That's not a coincidence. These people all know each other and when when these little revolutionary ideas spark people who are trading in those areas, they go immediately back home and say, you're not gonna 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 um, but the Minoans are the ones that that get overlooked because we look at Mesopotamia in 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. I guess we're saying that more often. First written language. Yeah, yeah. Linear A. And um 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 uh and uh there's Egyptian hieroglyphs and then there's um then there's Mesopotamian writing and there's the Phoenician writing and they think that linear A is pulled from the Phoenician writing but um 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 reemerges based on the Phoenician alphabet. Oh Oh, is that what it is? Okay, okay. I'm sorry. Because of Homer. For some reason I was thinking that that linear A, that they thought that linear A was pulled from I could be wrong. They don't even know that it's like pictures of cats. It is.. Yeah, yeah, yeah It's yeah, it's it's pictographic and and logograms. Which is which is loosely probably inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, because Egyptian hieroglyphs are logograms and pictographs. And I think that early Chinese is sort of the same way. It's like pictures and the pictures like fuse and become symbols, you know. But um yeah, so um they uh their their culture they arrive there. I think I think that the earliest that we see their culture emerging is like 4000 BC, which is the same time Mesopotamia and Egypt. And then the actual civilization fully existing is about is 3100 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 it's like you know, 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 that 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 with. But um nonetheless, the Minoans are riding. So um man, they are so much more ancient than than the rest of uh than the rest of the Greek world. So between three thousand BC and two thousand BC , they start building these uh towns and cities across the island of Crete. They say it's it's uh 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 um 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 Well Well so so right now we're in the like the pre palatial period. Okay. 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 uh they re they realize that they're the Mesopotamians they they they m make a lot of their uh wealth from I believe i a lot of it is gold mining uh and 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 comes from Sudan in in Nubia. Um but massive massive amounts of farming. And so the uh the Minoans they make their money in the copper trade. And so one of their most valuable uh one of the places that was able to mine the most copper was their city of Acrateri. Acrateri it's uh modern day Santorini, 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 metal starts kicking off, that's why like Egypt and Mesopotamia kind of they all mer 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 uh 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 dynast y. There's all that copper that they've got. So much of that comes from the uh 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 a hundred of these massive palaces. That many, wow. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's there's about a dozen of them that are absolutely enormous, but in all it's like it's like a hundred uh 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 uh sort of where the labyrinth myth myth comes from. There there was no actual that we have found, no labyrinth of of the Minotaur, and the Minotaur is their cultural creature. It's this man bull. So kind of like the Olmex, you know, you got this man Jaguar. So you had a wearable . And uh so the labyrinth of the Minotaur, it's possible that it's actually just rep uh referencing the palaces because the palaces are these labyrinths of like f fourloor palaces with all these winding uh hallways. You know, in ancient times, uh people don't think about this. There were no wide open rooms in ancient times because they the technology to create a roof that would still hold up to be large, um it it just it just hadn't it 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 i these palaces are labyrinths. With like thirteen hundred rooms. Yeah, exactly. With like 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 Yeah, m yeah, that that would be more so what I would say. You have these um you have these uh 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 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 um vineyards and and farms and and everything. And I should keep 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 uh in general, uh by principle in Egypt, if you weren't born royal, you lived in a dump. Yeah you lived in a shack. So even the normal people in the Minoan world are far 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 with an 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, there that world is amazing, but you know, the average life of a Mino of a Minoan was consider ably 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 cities. Already existed. The the Minoans already had this, but it was all underground. Underground plumbing yeah. They had they had ceramic pipes. Underground plumbing, ceramic pipes. They had marble toilets on the fourth floor of palaces with you know that could flush. They could on on the island of Acritory specifically, your bath you could choose between cold and hot water. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah. So uh it just just mind mind So 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 the other one is coming from a cold spring. That's amazing. And uh and you could you could cut off the uh where the water is coming from to to fill up your bath. And you know, the baths are are made out of like alabaster crystal, some of them are made out of polished marble. It's just like crazy. And and um it it's just an unbelievably wealthy society. And And as much as we've studied this the societal makeup, like uh how the the structure of the culture, there's no sign of kings, there's no sign of lords, there's it the these aren't k ingdoms. They're um the way I've seen them described is is is consumer societies. So it was a capitalistic enterprise society. So you know 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, 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 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 uh you know these olives, you want to buy these seeds, this grain, this this cheap wine, you know, and then you probably have you probably have like uh on the third, you know, on the top I'm guessing it's gonna be like copper trade. You're gonna have this, you know, thousandaire that's gonna come in. Like a millionaire or a billionaire back then, but you know, he's gonna come in and he he's got to go to to thep 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 Kenosis, I wanna buy this really nice uh 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 faience is being sold and uh you know it that's probably what I think it was, is a big mall. I think you're right and um, Ryan's showing the Heracleon right now. You When this falls, yeah, you don't see anything like the actually I should say on a on a on a scale that size, no classical Greeks are ever building anything that big. Um 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 is I would say 2000 years later, height of the Roman Empire. That's the only like like the 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, you know, a lot of people will will conflate Atlantis. Like you you you uh you'll ask people, okay, well I mean you don't actually think Atlantis was like like spaceships and lasers and aliens and stuff like well what do you think it was? People will go, well I'm not saying not to think Atlantis was on par with what we had today, but maybe more like the Roman Empire. Well there you go. You know the Minoans are right there are right there with with the Romans. Maybe not as power, but sophistication and technology. For sure. Yeah, it's it's really right there. That's a great segue. So what happened to the Minoans ? Yeah. Uh this is a huge mystery, man. Um 'cause suddenly they're gone, right? Yeah, yeah. Greatest archaeological uh mystery of all time, really like most famous one. Um So the the one of the central core aspects to the Minoan world, which we touched on a little bit ear earlier, is the copper trade. Well, that copper trade comes out from this little Minoan colony of Akriteri Akriteri was settled around 4000 to 3000 BC. It's just like right after Minoan culture really appears on Crete. You got some people who move up there and it's and when they start mining their resources that are found on the island, it becomes important. So they kind of get absorbed by Minoan society and and Acriteria or Santinior becomes a part of the Minoan world. And so copper trade is coming out of there. And so Acroti controlled the copper trade from the Minoans going out to the rest of the Mediterranean world, it also controlled the copper trade going from the Minoans to the Greek mainland . So uh think about Mycenae out in mainland Greece, all the way up to Macedonia, 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 it's whether it's for anything, would go through Rakatiri. So this is a wealthy, important place. Very wealthy. Very important. Probably it's possible . Yeah, I mean it's not possible. It's uh it's probably a fact that in sixteen hundred BC, sixteen fifty BC, uh Akratyri was the wealthiest, greatest city on the planet at that time. Wow. And uh Wow. Yeah. At that very moment. Yep. And and it makes sense with why the um so think about the story of Atlantis that's told. One of the things that we're told about Atlantis is that they were very, very wealthy and that they were greedy and that their civilization was destroyed bec 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 you know the US, like in some ways. It's a consumer society. Filthy rich. Yes. Well, that ide a of Atlantis . I think that that's well, we should get into that in just a moment, but I'm telling you what happened to the Minoans. So Acrateria in sixteen fifty BC is the m is the wealthiest city . I shouldn't say a wealthy city, the best place to live on the entire planet. Per individual wealth, wealthiest city on the planet. Now, you know, you you compare that to like Babylon, it's not gonna or or you compare it to to Memphis and Egypt. Memphis has more wealth, but the quality of life is so much lower than the other fishermen and acreteries living a great life. That's exactly right. And um and so uh and so you have all these other Greek um 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 yeah, a piece of that wealth. And Mycenae is uh Mycenae is the civilization that's depicted in the movie Troy, the king Ag Agamemnon. So the whole rise and fall of the Minoan world actually happens long before the the story of Troy. Um Well we could detour for a little 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. It'll I think it'll make more sense chronologically. Okay. Because I have a I have a question. Yeah, absolutely. So um so what's crazy is at the height of Minoan power, this island of this island of a hundred palaces or a hundred cities , um far more wealthy and and well to do per person, uh you know, on a one-to-one scale than the than the rest of the ancient world, controlling the copper trade, which is the most widely used , you know, metal in in the ancient world. Um around the year 1650 BC or 16 uh I should say around the year 1600 BC, maybe, maybe fifteen, fifty BC. The'yre still kind of playing with the dates there. Um around then Ac Acriteri 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 of the large parts of the buildings there. They built the they rebuilt the buildings and put them back together. We can see that in some of the buildings that still survive today. Yep. And it's not known how long this period of time is between the earthquakes beginning and people realizing that these earthquakes aren't gonna stop and they have to leave the city. This is the what I'm gonna about to get to is one of the most amazing things about about these people and how sophisticated and how smart and capable they were. Go ahead. They ultimately decide that that this this island that they're living on and Sans Terrain Acertyri, they can't live here anymore. The buildings are shaking, they're falling apart. It it must have been so bad because every single person, not an elderly person, not a child was left behind, not an an animal, not animal, not a pet, not nothing. Every living thing on the entire island of Akratyri was evacuated . And then they were all 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 turned 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 from 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'm I think that that might be right. The largest volcanic eruption during the time of humanity just take us through the day. What what it would have been like. Yeah. So um it's because it's three or four stages of hell. Yeah, yeah. It's it it is . Um, and this is the thera eruption, I believe. Yeah, Tera. Yeah, yeah. Um so so it's the uh so the city is called Akratyri, the island is Thera, and today it's known as Santorini. Um so you know, geologists have gone through. Obviously, there's no 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. Um so the island uh I forget the the the the chronological order of the different uh of the different stages but um you have this initial eruption that causes this like tw I think it's a it's a twenty mile high column. It's a it's a column that's three times the height of Mount Everest. That's that's what they estimated the the eruption to be. And it it sends this huge plume over the entire uh island of Crete, which we'll get to in just a moment as well, because that causes some havoc uh on Crete. And um but what's what's fascinating is that when it sends this rubble into the city of Acritary, it knocks down s it knocks down some of the buildings. And this all happens over the course of just like forty-eight hours, 72 hours. And it it it sends rubble and shrapnel onto uh onto Acritary 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 that smashed into the island. But mostly it was this white pumice that would that would uh kind of like um fall down like snow. And it covered the city in twenty feet of volcanic ash and pumice. And which eventually packed and became like this solid rock. 20 feet in a probably in a day, right? 20 feet in a day. So imagine Imagine it's just like you can't see anything. There's n if you were there, there's no visual at all. It's just black. This is Vesuvius, just without the people. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Um and so if 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 uh 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 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 that geologists estimate that happened later in the erup tion where when the caldera fell . There's like all of a sudden there's this bubble. There's this huge uh like vacuum, I guess, um in the 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 like 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 that they have like these burn marks all on one side. And when they somehow investigate the the burn marks or take samples of it, they can tell that these came from uh somehow they can tell that it came from steam that had burned it 'cause it's not the same sort of uh you know the same kind of burning. I I don't know how these guys do the things that they do. But uh yeah, I mean just just devastating. But what's so it erupts and completely uh throws an entire wrench in the core island that sort of facilitated the wealth in and out of Crete, especially with the with the mainland. And there's so much copper coming from Actuary back to Crete to be sold into the Mediterranean. Uh it's it's disrupting their economy. But also the waves are just like uh 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 um we have uh archaeological evidence of parts of the docks and um 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 it went and just covered the, you know, the the 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 the the carbon dating it it kind of goes back and forth like one decade or or one half century they they think that it happened immediately after the eruption and right now just as of like the last couple years they think that this happened like a hundred years later . I don't know. 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 they nobody could explain why that is. And the only theory I've heard proposed that makes sense is when that plume covers the uh covers the country or covers the island of Crete. Actually it was so significant that um I think it was uh one of the no I think it was almost the first the founder either the founder of the uh of Egypt's new kingdom or he's the f or he's the first pharaoh to use the Valley of Kings. Um but he writes about per personally witnessing himself this massive storm that covered Some of the some people link this to the uh the plagues. To the plagues of the Exodus. That's right. It's possible. I think it's possible. Um and because I mean gosh, you can only imagine what that would cause in in a country. Um and and what's interesting is those plagues are are also naturally occurring phenomena if something is a catalyst that starts it. Yes. Right. So that's kind of interesting. And also that story can be like an amalgam ation 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 that uh they try to say the Exodus began being written in like nine hundred BC, something like that. But uh so the the best theory I've heard of of why Minoan civilization collapsed is not only is the copper trade being uh disrupted by the eruption of Thera, the destruction of Akratyri, the wiping out of the copper trade, at least most of it, and the pummeling of all these uh northern shore docks where the palaces are at, which obviously erupts the trade. People arrive on Crete and like, what the happened to this place? You know? There's cascades throughout the entire world. This is the collapse of the Bronze Age. Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't look like uh some archaeologists look at it and they're and they don't think that it's consistent with an attack because you can see what burn layers look like in attacks, like like the 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 sp otty. And so the theory I actually like is 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 within 12 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 burn down the island in the chaos of the darkness. I have not heard that theory. Yeah, yeah. That they you know, they kick over they kick over lamps and lanterns and they burn down their own cities by accident because there's so much chaos, nobody can see anything, nobody's showing up for work. You know, it's just you c you can't even imagine. 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 about how many fires you have to light just to be able to see. Wasn't Kenosis the only city to even survive that? Well, it only survived because when at beyond this point of this burning, the Mino an world is gone. It's gone. It's gone. Because when Kenosis comes back, it comes back with linear B. My Myccenaenaee. The Mycena 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 50 to 100 years later. If it happened 50 to 100 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 the artifacts that come out of Troy aren't really that impress ive. Um maybe ten thousand people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Minoan world? You're talking about you're talking about World War Zero to to conquer that place, you know? Couldn't the Mycenaeans just went the island was basically empty and they they just rolled over there. There's no evidence of war, is there? No, no, other than the burning. No. Other than the burning, no. And so the other thing is is um if 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. Um something had to have happened. If that if that wasn't a direct result of because it's across the entire island, it's a thin burn mark. So there had to have been conflict. And that's why people say if if that doesn't if that doesn't happen as a direct result of the Mino ans accidentally one of the other things they thought was that it was shrap nel 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 um it's like a hundred and sixty miles wide. Right, is it a good thing that's right. Yeah, it's a hundred and sixty miles wide and three hundred yards like north to south. Or yeah, I'm sorry, three hundred yards. Thirty miles. Right. Thirty miles north to south. Yeah. So um yeah, that that doesn't really stack up. So if 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 Mycenaean you know, writing language that they were also using. So now they're speaking Greek Now they're speaking Greek. And so so the Mycenaeans just permanate permeate throughout the entire island of Crete and take that over, and the Minoan civilization just dis like disappears into time. And I think that when Plato is talking about, you know, in his writings in the Republic and uh in all the times he mentions Atlantis, I think . Yeah, I think he's drawing on at least two different things. Maybe there's a third thing. But um you know, the city of Hiliki had just been it's a Greek city on on the on uh 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 s even mentions Atlantis. So I wonder if that got him thinking. But then also oral tradition s 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 um 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 um Plato is drawing on these early fuzzy myth s that survive from the Bronze Age when he's when he's telling the story of of Atlantis. And I'm not sure what to think of necessarily of the Solon story. Have you heard the theory about how they may have got the math wrong? No. Okay. So their symbol for a hundred could have been misinterpreted 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 Age, like right dead there. If if that theory is correct. So Plato's four hundred BC. Now now you know what's interesting is is that works in two different ways because if it's if it's 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 I think it might be Solon that's saying I think it might be I think it's Solon saying that in his t I think it's Plato saying that Solon said in his time it was nine thousand years earlier. I think you're right. So so if that's instead nine hundred, Solon 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. Yep. That works. It's the the you know those those numbers are there. Um now what's really interesting is okay um 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 in 11,000 BC or whenever. 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 where Athens um or you know up at the Acropolis where Athens was because originally the Acropolis was not that was not that political uh religious sort of center. It was actually a castle. It was walled off during during the Bronze Age. But here's what's really interesting is you know you know the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Of course Theseus uh 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 uh at at odds with the Mycinians and that happens with the Minotaur. Then his grand son is Idom inius and they actually team up with the Mycenaeans to go and invade Troy with the eighty black ships. So that all lines up. Yeah it it the Iliad becomes a historical document. Yeah. And then have you read about the Hittite tablets regarding the Trojan War? No. It's recorded in Hittite 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 it's Ilium . And there's a war with Ilium that finally gets resolved with the treaty of Alexandru. And Alexandra is, of course Alex ander, 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 it makes sense. I mean that's that's that is one of those things where um 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. It it you know, the myth is based on something that really did happen. You know what's you know what's really funny is uh I will catch some flack sometimes for my Minoan Atlantis theory. There's no archaeologist that even that even slightly agree with the Minoan Atlantis 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? Well let's we can do steel man straw 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 the pillars of Hercules. Um Hercules, elephants, the type of stones that are there, this, that, and the other. Um Elephants we can solve. How so ? Because there are dwarf elephants found in Creek. Ooh, I can't leave you know that. I was gonna I was gonna see if that's what you're gonna say. Yeah, there are. Yeah, they are. It the pillars of Hercules bother me though. I can't square it. Yeah, I know. I agree. I agree. Um it's uh when he describes the location of it, it's 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 um is that the Greeks are are pretty bad historians and um and they're not very good at telling their history, especially even something that you know Plato's living in 400 BC, um and and and you know, between 400 and 350 BC, and he's talking about something that Solon went and did over 200 years ago or around 200 years ago. I don't know. I mean 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, well let's let's be real, like it they could just be wrong Yeah, Plato enjoyed a metaphor. Exactly, exactly. And um 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 is that's literally what he does. And so um 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 we we 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 uh no, I was I was talking about I was t I was talking about you know this phenomena of ancient civilizations that that rose and fell in our time, you know, in our civilization. Um , and I'm and I'm talking about the symptoms of those civilizations and what dest roy them. I think you're right. That's probably that's probably my what he would what he would think. You know, the other thing that I think is pretty funny um is that the the whole allegory, even even if if he is really drawing on something important, he is telling an allegory that is all about uh the consequences of greed. And what I think is so funny is that there's probably I it's just ironic that um you know people run with the story of Atlantis just to make money sometimes and ignore like all the actual evidence ig,nore , you know, empirical review or whatever, whatever, whatever. And it's like exactly the opposite of the of why Plato even brought the story up to begin with. You know, so it's almost irony. Yeah, it it is it is ironic . Um, but uh but it actually just proves Plato right. What do you think about the idea that the Trojan War, Iliad Odyssey, Iene id is all really part of the same point in history, tend Go into that a little bit. We're um we have documentation now from the Hittites 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. I th I think they're just discovering within the last few years another layer underneath. There's there's I think it's Troy six and seven or Troy seven and eight. So it's much it's much bigger. Mm-hmm. Not necessarily more populous, but bigger city. And so we've got all these stories coming around the same time. Odyssey happens right after the Iliad, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the Aeneid essentially is right after the Odyssey. It's all one long story. And uh all centered around basically it's the story of the collapse of everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's their it's their way of acknowledging it. And 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 talking about it. I've done a lot on the Olmex, doing some on the Minoans. I'm gonna do more on it. Um but the next thing I want to get into is the Etruscans and and early Rome, because that's a the Etruscans are another overlooked civilization. They are indeed. And we we don't know if the Aene id 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 we don't really know where that comes from. Is is it likely that there was a guy named Aeneas uh that really escaped Troy and went and established Italy. It's possible, but it could be more likely that there were Italians that were that were living in 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 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 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 of 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 are a way for the Greeks to acknowledge what happened to them, that collapse of the whole world. Everything. Right. 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 they lost all their power, they lost this whole magnificent world and and that's this thing that ties them back to this early time. And uh and I think the Aeneid is the same thing. It's a way to tie the people living in the classical era 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 uh he says he says that he repelled the sea people, he drove them out. That's right. And Egypt survived. And that I mean, can you imagine what 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 from that really comes from the Egyptians being um 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 changed and and and they made new forms of it. But the but the 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 3100 BC and never ended throughout all of Egyptian history. Even the Ptolemies present 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 they kept the they kept the percenta ges 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 then the it it it's a long, slow grind to a halt for the Egyptians. And you know, that's why people looked at them as like uh just these giants that loomed over the ancient world. It's really amazing, man. And you know, that's the that's the thing is when you were talking about when you said earlier when we were talking about the Olmex and you were saying, I really don't think people understand this these vast periods of time. The longer you spend in the ancient world playing around with if you spent anybody or 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 of civilization, yeah, as we acknowledge it around 3100 BC, when all these cultures really pop off, you will realize how long 2,000 years is. You'll have a newfound respect for it because we spend so much time thinking about like what happened 12,000 years ago. When you think about five or six thousand years ago, you're like, ah, it's not really that if you if you really get into studying it, you'll realize, oh my God, that's a long time ago. Because you'll you'll have a newfound appreciation for how long a thousand years is, you know. A a a person who grew up as an Almec, those heads had been there forever., their Their grand grandffathathersers , 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 uh so we got those LiDAR projects we spent some time talking about, just going over it Should we join your Patreon and support your work? No, I don't I don't have anything like that live yet. Uh but if people want to learn more about it, they can go to Terra Terra Incognita Research Institute. Um I'll uh by the time this comes out, I'll have it linked somewhere on my social media or on my YouTube or somewhere. People can go check out. They can donate if they want. But I think the biggest thing is just being aware and and supporting when we, you know, do put out uh you know calls for people to be able to help or put out videos or something like that. So we're doing that in the Amazon. And then uh I'm working with Baseap M. We're uh scanning a bunch of sites in the Malin Builder world to try to recreate and revitalize civilization in the American East Coast. Um I'm working on uh I'm working on 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 Luke Caverns and so uh so I do that and then I had started this one called the called American Wilds which is um 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 a of what this world looked like and they write it down and nobody is making anything about them. So the f so episode one was me basically proving that Jaguars were on the East Coast. Uh this next one I'm uh I'm doing one right now on uh this lost colony of Magellan that was found in in Chile. Uh so that that's kind of what I'm working on. And then um yeah I got a um later this year, I have been teasing this book called uh Olmec Enigma that I'm gonna write. But actually, I think that my time is better spent making uh virtual lecture series. So it's gonna be like a rather so the chapters of the books, you know, is gonna be ten chapters long. They're actually gonna 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 uh I think LIDAR is the future of uh of outlaw archaeology, archaeology in general. Like people say the age of exploration died in the age of exploration, but man, lid ar and GPR with um, you know, it's still expensive, but I'm just so lucky I'm able that I'm able to work with these guys and uh they do a freaking crazy job. Maybe if you come back, we can go through some images . Well, yeah, man. If uh we want to do this lidar project later this year, uh it's there's gonna be some amazing stuff that that comes out of that. Um, especially here in the mound builder world too. I know you have a big respect for the mound builder people, which is uh which is key, man. The so many people overlook them because they think the mounds aren't impressive because they're hills of dirt, but dude, there's so much more going on in uh the Mississippian world than people realize. So dude, we should definitely do uh LIDAR stuff in the future. We're gonna do it. Luke Caverns, everybody. Thanks, 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 lid ar discoveries are real. Published archaeological surveys have confirmed pre-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 called themselves. Aquatiri 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 wear Jaguar theory that the Almex 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 17 Olmec heads. There are thousands of stone wear jaguars. I never heard that one before. The Atlantis math. I love this too. Plato's Timaeus puts Atlantis 9,000 years before Solon. So that places it at 9600 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, 9,000 becomes 900 years before Solon, about 1500 BC. The Minoan collapse happened around 1600 BC. Scholars have made this argument in peer-reviewed journals. Either date is cool. The 365 tsunami hit Alexandria. That's documented. Ships were being thrown on top of buildings. It was insane. Now whether it destroyed Alexander'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 tsun ami 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 worlds with technology that didn't exist 15 years a go. Now whether you accept every claim or not, the sites he's flagging are going to produce papers. You can find him at youtube.com slash Luke Caverns. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. I believe Philippias are 5 1. A secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my UFOs and paranormal buns as well as music songs hanging the like I should then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my fri ends, and it never ends, no it never end s I feel the crap got I got stuck inside Mel's home with MKO truck. I be an only two oh well Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set with a shadow people there ? The eyes well ain't just thought the smiling man I'm told And his name was cold And I can't believe I'm dancing with the bitches Have a fish on Thursday next Wednesday changing Well Web The truth so the white was on the beat, all through the night The mouthman's identity and the solar stone still come to a gather the secret city underg round Mysterious number stations, planets are photo , practic al And what the dark watchers found a simulation, don't you worry though , the black knights that alight it's only so I can't believe I'm dancing with the film fish on Thursday next Wednesday changed him when the weapons are through the night . I am what it was to do the truth So one beat all do go The dance war because she is a camel and camel of the dance when the feeling is right all the way with him Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But or it goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to five million dollars in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S. based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring or just a VPN. Aura gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove.