The Basement: Luke Caverns | LiDAR Is Revealing Ancient Cities the Amazon Was Hiding

Go to https://nicnac.com/whyfiles and use code WHYFILES for 20% off, or use the store locator to find Nic Nacs near you. Get your free, 30-second personalized assessment TODAY at https://PDSDebt.com/BASEMENT The Basement: Luke Caverns | LIDAR Is Revealing Ancient Cities the Amazon Was Hiding Luke Caverns is an anthropologist and explorer who's mapped over 80 ancient archaeological sites using LIDAR — sites that don't appear on any map. His grandfather found and lost seven gold mines in New Mexico. Luke found them again. Now he's planning the largest LIDAR scan ever done in the Amazon. We also go deep into Alexander the Great's missing body, the Were Jaguar cults of the Olmecs, and the Minoan civilization that may have been Atlantis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:00AJ Gentile?

  Today, I'm talking with Luke Caverns, an anthropologist and explorer who's flagged over 100 archaeological sites that aren't on any map. He's planning the largest LiDAR scan of the Amazon ever attempted.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  What is he trying to see, Jeff Bezos naked?

• 1:15AJ Gentile?

  Not that Amazon, the Amazon jungle.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Ah, that makes more sense.

• 1:19AJ Gentile?

  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 megalopolises and ancient highways. A civilization buried under the Amazon that nobody knew was there. Today, we're covering that, the Minnawans of Crete as Plato's Atlantis, and the Olmecs and their Jaguar priest cult.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, cult based on cats, hard pass.

• 1:42AJ Gentile?

  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 prove, and what I can't. Until then, let's go down to the basement.

• 2:04AJ Gentile?

  Luke, welcome to the basement.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Hey, man. Thanks so much for having me here. This is amazing.

• 2:08AJ Gentile?

  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 bear with me.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  That's alright.

• 2:20AJ Gentile?

  So, I just wanna start with, of all the sites that you've looked at, what was the, what was the one, or the one that sticks with you that goes, that makes you go, "That is not natural. That's man-made." You have one favorite?

• 2:34Speaker 03

  One that's, um, now, you mean, as far as like, like a natural formation that I think looks man-made?

• 2:41AJ Gentile?

  Yes, or something that you saw on LiDAR that maybe someone else didn't see?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46AJ Gentile?

  And you're like, "No, no, no, that's, someone made that."

• 2:47Speaker 03

  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, 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, so,

• 3:17Speaker 03

  I was given access a few years ago, uh, to a LiDAR dataset that a team put together when they were trying to map comet impacts across the, the United States. And anybody can get access to LiDAR of the, of the US. The, the difficulty there is having a, um, like a map that's been processed and that information has been condensed. Otherwise, your computer will just shut down. It's crazy.

• 3:42AJ Gentile?

  What, they're just like, giant raw images?

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you know, it's, it's some, it could be like, hundreds of gigs of, of, of data. It'll just shut down your, your computer. So, it has to be processed by a, by a professional who, who really knows what they're doing. And so, I was just lucky to be given, um, that sort of dataset. And so, what they realized was, while they were looking for these comet impacts, they were finding mound sites. And they weren't anthropologists, didn't know anything about ancient history, but they're like, "Oh, you know, Luke," I was, I'm friends with one of them. His name's Chris. He, he sent it over to me and so I started searching through it and there was a lot that I had to teach myself about analyzing LiDAR and having to figure out what's natural and what's not,

• 4:29Speaker 03

  or what's modern and what's ancient. That's, that can be a big thing.

• 4:33AJ Gentile?

  A lot of false positives with like flood zones.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  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, all that image data. And all in all, I've, I've mapped at least like 82 archaeological sites in the United States. Probably a lot of them, probably so many of them are on private property that are not officially documented in books or papers that I could find or maps that I could find. Now that said, you know, there's probably some, there may be some obscure papers out there that are aware of some of these, whatever. They're not pop,

• 5:18Speaker 03

  popularly known. Some of them are massive, man. I, I've mapped sites that are way out in the forest in Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas. That's not just...

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Single structures that are 250 yards long.

• 5:36AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. 250 yards long by 100 yards wide. And there's probably five or six of the structures all together. Some of them have, for anybody listening, you could look up something called the Hopewell Road, which look like these highways.

• 5:50AJ Gentile?

  Huge, right?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, huge. And, 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. You know, now I'm working with my, my team at BaseMap. They are providing me, going to be providing me. And we've already scanned like some sites near Moundville. We discovered an ancient site near Moundville on private property. Just amazing stuff. And so I'm working with them now, but...

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Essentially, what we do is all these sites that I have mapped using USGS and charted, you know, that's probably, the resolution is very, very low. And these guys can go out there and scan something that's so precise that it's down to like a golf ball.

• 6:45AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 6:45Speaker 03

  In resolution. And then they can build 3D models of, of the ancient city.

• 6:49AJ Gentile?

  That's with satellite LiDAR? Or is that with on the ground?

• 6:52Speaker 03

  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, it's cool. So, uh, I haven't announced this at all. It's 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, cause 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.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  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 gonna start visually rebuilding the mound, the mound builder world. And we're gonna do this with dozens of sites and...

• 7:53AJ Gentile?

  Well, the mound builder world, that spans thousands of years. Are you targeting?

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Thousands of years. No, not targeting any one thing in particular.

• 7:58AJ Gentile?

  Just mounds?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we're not targeting like, like we were talking a minute ago, we're not targeting Adena 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 gonna be in American Samoa. Uh, the Polynesian world is so untouched and LiDAR can completely change that. Um, and then we are, I'm, I'm working with the Terra Incognita Research Institute.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  It's a group that's put together by a couple, a couple of archaeologists and, um, they are, uh... You know, it's sort of like independent archaeology, you know, but these guys are credentialed, very, very well credentialed, like full-on, you know, very professional academics. And they're working on a project in the Amazon. And I can't say too much about this yet, but if we can complete this project and we can get their permits, myself, I'm going to go down and document it and essentially publicize it. The base map team will be the one who scans everything using their LiDAR technology. And then Terra Incognita Research Institute, they're the ones who will actually go out to the site, process the data.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  They're the guys who get all the permissions and everything. It'll be the largest LiDAR scan that's ever been done in the Amazon.

• 9:32AJ Gentile?

  I can't wait for that.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, ever been done.

• 9:35AJ Gentile?

  Ever been done.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  And we've put together a, I don't know how much I can get into this, but we're putting together a proposal of just, at least it's myself and base map. We just played around with this idea, but of what it would cost to get the entire Amazon LiDAR and how long it would take.

• 9:55AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they can do it. 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 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 Incognita Research Institute and base map and myself, it'll be the largest LiDAR scan ever done in the Amazon.

• 10:19AJ Gentile?

  I can't wait for that. 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 a method, using methodology? Not so much a pirate, you're actually a scientist.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  No, no, yeah, yeah, I'm not stealing anything anymore, but.

• 10:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, when I first heard you talking about cattle rustling, I'm like, does he know that means stealing?

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were, they were, they did, you know, some of those guys did a little bit of both, right? Like you would, your day job would be cattle driving, your night job would be cattle rustling, you know? So they're, they got, and treasure hunting, which actually means looting and all that good stuff.

• 11:02AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  You know, so it started.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  My love for anthropology began when, actually, listening to my other grandpa, my mom's dad, he was a pastor and missionary and he loved the ancient world. And I would be, you know, they would drag me to their, like, down-home East Texas little church, and I'd listen to my grandpa preach, and they would have these old bibles. And at the front and the back of the bibles would be these watercolor paintings of like, you know, the, some ancient Mesopotamian cities. Sometimes it would be Egypt or something like that. And there might be a little map there, and it's all kind of watercolored and very sort of romantic-looking. And during the whole time that I would listen to the sermon,

• 11:51Speaker 03

  still to this day, my favorite thing, if I listen to a sermon, is when they actually talk about the ancient biblical world, and you get to sort of hear what that would have been like. And then, 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 were ancient times like? What were ancient times like? And over time, I began becoming dissatisfied with the way a lot of sermons would be told. Not my 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?"

• 12:32AJ Gentile?

  What were they telling you that you were uncomfortable with?

• 12:34Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, yeah, a lot of sermons in church ended up becoming like a motivational speech. About like, you know, "Let me, let me take this one verse and extrapolate it in a way, and pull it totally out of its ancient context and make it relevant to you." It's like, you know, the Bible's a 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.

• 12:58AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you will.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Or, if they wanted to be more profound, educate the people that are in the church on the context of the ancient world.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  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 the beginning of me being anthropologist, wanting to know, "What is that life like?" Just day-to-day life. Being an ancient person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are the struggles that you live with? Because I remember saying, I had this, what I thought was a profound thought when I was like a teenager, and I was like, "You know, the Bible's actually like a horror story." All those people's lives were awful. You know, nobody, you know, it's like... Old Testament for sure.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean, you look at the disciples, the things that they went through, the way that they all ended up, the struggles that they had, they're all impoverished. It's a, that's a really hard life. But that gets glossed over, you know, with the modern church and everything. And so it was me really trying to dig into the ancient world and get a sense of what that was like. And once that started happening, I started realizing, "Wait, my whole perception, the way that I'm being taught about this isn't reflective of the ancient world." And so that was when my love for wanting to know what the ancient world was really like came from. The idea of wanting to be an explorer along with that, because that could just go into being an archaeologist, or an anthropologist,

• 14:35Speaker 03

  or a historian, you know. And so it was that coupled with my dad's side of the family, going back to the 1890s, those guys are cattle drivers. They were, you know, the parkers that are running cattle up and down? So they would take cattle to the parkers in San Antonio. And so it was like, West Texas to San Antonio, that's where they're operating. And... You know, hearing their stories of the search for the gold of these lost mines of Reagan Canyon and this huge debacle that happens when they're trying to find that gold and so many of the Reagan brothers die and...

• 15:14AJ Gentile?

  Well, tell us that story real fast.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Well, there's so many, there's not a lot that's known about that, but this is a sort of a synopsis and a lot of it, like if you go to, especially here in the southwest, like if you go to a used bookstore and you find a book called "The Sons of Coronado" or "Lost Spanish Treasure" or something like that, there will be a chapter in there about my family.

• 15:37AJ Gentile?

  This is the Reagan family.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and so essentially what happens is, so they own these big ranches that are on these plateaus above Reagan Ca- in and around Reagan Canyon. And Reagan Canyon back in the 1500s was one of the places where the Spaniards would come through as they're, you know, exploring the American Southwest and in the 1600s as well. And there would be bandits that would sit up in, well, I guess all the way up to the 1800s really, there would be bandits that would sit up in those hillsides and they would sack these Spanish caravans coming through, kill everybody, drag the gold up into the crevices in these riversides or I should say little canyon sides that's all dried up.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  And so there's all these legends of this lost gold that's out there.

• 16:25AJ Gentile?

  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 Nicknacks, myself included. Nicknacks are fully dissolvable nicotine lozenges packed with real essential oils for real flavor. They come in both 3 and 6 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.

• 17:08AJ Gentile?

  Just pop one in and continue to pretend like you're a high-functioning adult. That's what I do. Go to knickknack.com/whyfiles and use code WHYFILES for 20% off. Or use the store locator to find knickknacks near you. Knickknacks, all the flavor, all the freedom, none of the circus. Warning: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. That's why I like it.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  And so, you know, in your free time, you just dream of, of, you know, they probably weren't wealthy, even though they own this land, it's still a tough life. They dream of, of, you know, having some big apartment in San Antonio and having 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 it was on a mule. I think he's riding a mule. And, uh, he was, 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.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 18:59AJ Gentile?

  You did?

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I could tell you that story.

• 19:02AJ Gentile?

  You went out there, right?

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've been out there three times. And, uh, so yeah, it's. On my grandfather's, oh, I could tell you, I'll tell you about that in just a second. But so staying in 1890s, 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.

• 19:22AJ Gentile?

  But they found gold?

• 19:24Speaker 03

  As the story goes.

• 19:25AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  I have no idea where this gold is today, but yes, they found, they found gold, they found, they found treasure. And so essentially it launches into this huge Game of Thrones of like, well, who really, who really found it? Bill Kelly tries to run away with, with some of the gold. Some of the brothers try to run away with some of the gold. Anyways.

• 19:45AJ Gentile?

  This old story.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's this old story. And there's so many different ways that the story is told. I've never read a book that actually, I've never read two books that tell the story the same way. But essentially, uh, only one of the brothers makes, 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.

• 20:12AJ Gentile?

  Interesting.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  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. And so, uh, so they're involved in, in oil in East Texas. And that would be my great grandfather. His son, Leslie Reagan, has this idea of also wanting to be an explorer and a treasure hunter and everything. And I should say, just as a preface, none of this money exists today. I, 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.

• 20:54AJ Gentile?

  What was he doing instead?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Well, he was just, he was just managing the family oil business. Like they had, they had a private airport and private jets and all kinds of crazy stuff. And so, yeah, it's wild.

• 21:05AJ Gentile?

  Where's your trust?

• 21:06Speaker 03

  I know, I know. I wish, I wish we had, I wish we had. I wish we had any of this today, cause man, I could, all this Lidar stuff I've been talking to you about, I would have done this years ago.

• 21:14AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  But, um, so. He goes off to New Mexico to try to find this legendary place called Coronado's Seven Lost Gold Mines, or the Seven Lost Gold Mines of New Mexico. And this is written about in, I think it's True West Magazine. They did like three magazines on my grandpa. I should have brought this for you.

• 21:34AJ Gentile?

  Would have been cool.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  Next time I'll bring you something, yeah. You can buy these on eBay for like $2.

• 21:38AJ Gentile?

  We'll throw them up on screen.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he tries to go out there to find these legendary lost gold mines, and he wants to get into gold mining in general. So this police officer that lives in this town, I won't say what town, but this police officer that lives in the town essentially knocks on his trailer door. You know, they all lived in the chrome trailers and everything. And said, "Hey, you know, I know you're out here looking for 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, 1956-ish, they found the gold mines, these old Spanish gold mines,

• 22:23Speaker 03

  and expanded them and turned it into, I shouldn't say the company name either, but...

• 22:28AJ Gentile?

  Well, in the 50s, this is somebody's land, right?

• 22:31Speaker 03

  This is my grandpa's land, yeah. Well, now he bought it, yeah, yeah. But it was actually, it was actually state land.

• 22:37AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he buys it from the state. He has like a claim on it. But I think he actually owned the land rather than just having a claim. And so he expands this and turns this into a full-blown gold mining company.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  And the way that it got its... It's 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 one of the legends that he would tell my family was that at night, when they were camping out at the gold mines, you could hear these bells. Like ringing like ding ding ding ding and they're very, very faint and he never actually found the source of the bells, but what he thought it was, was that when the Spaniards were mining out these, 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 moving. You're getting, you're getting clean air through the mines. And so that's like one of the main legends around, around these mines and I've been out

• 23:37Speaker 03

  there, I've listened, I can't hear the bells, they've probably rusted away since he opened them back up. But, so he found this place called the Seven Lost Gold Mines of New Mexico or Coronado Seven Lost Gold Mines. Ultimately, he expanded it to between 38 to 42 different mines.

• 23:52AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  It was, it was a really, really profitable operation and a, and a smelter ended up exploding. One or two guys died during this and this was in a time, this is 1962 or 63. 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 again, never see them again. And so my grandfather's business partner ran away with everything and my family was financially destitute. I mean, like, no money at all.

• 24:25AJ Gentile?

  So the mines were dry?

• 24:27Speaker 03

  No, they weren't dry. They, they, they had to close in most of them. There's a few of them that were still open, like, at least three of them are still open. Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

• 24:39AJ Gentile?

  Still mining?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, but, but the whole, the portal is there. He closed in everything and he, at least in the 1960s, when this was more eas, more easily done, he still, he still owned the land, I believe, he still had a claim on it, closed all the mines and all of, and he made new maps and none of the maps had the actual location of the property on them. So he thought one day he'd be able to build up the money to go back and reopen them so that he kept the claim on them. And I don't think the claim was relinquished until like 1989, so, you know, several years after he passed.

• 25:16AJ Gentile?

  And he didn't mark the mines, I guess?

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Not on, 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, 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, and I found, I found Native American pottery when I was, when I was out there too. He'd find all these artifacts and they would all disintegrate. Of course, he didn't know how to preserve them, you know, he wasn't an archaeologist. But he's fascinated about, about all of this.

• 25:56AJ Gentile?

  And you were able to hold on to some of that stuff?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  We have, we have them in boxes at my, at my parents' house in North Carolina.

• 26:01AJ Gentile?

  And you plan to show those to the public at some point?

• 26:04Speaker 03

  No, no, no. This, this wasn't, yeah, this wasn't that kind of thing. This was like, this was like, those were his personal treasures, you know? He was, he was in it for the gold money, right? And the, and the excitement and the adventure and I think the local fame, like he was known in Texas, right? And I guess the magazines, like he, he liked that. So this is treasure hunting.

• 26:23AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Full-on treasure hunting for notoriety and wealth, right?

• 26:27AJ Gentile?

  And Americans were crazy for these stories then?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:38AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  So now they just sit at my parents' house. 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 mines. And he's like, that, I think he told me that was the seventies.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  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 have the first, 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, was a, was a cave explorer, like 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 speliologist, I should say, sort of amateur speliologist. Loves Amer-

• 27:49AJ Gentile?

  Is that, that's the word for a spelunker now?

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Maybe so, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so. And so he has this sense of adventure in in his own unique way that wasn't based on like lost Spanish gold or anything like that. Loves American history, just obsessed with American history. And and then my dad had to climb his way out of this like financially destitute place that my family ultimately ended up in. And then it was me, I was kind of more able to inherit what my grandfather and other grandfathers had, that that sort of spirit that they had, but um. So anyways, I was obsessed with finding the location of these mines and where they were at.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  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, the only thing I knew was the city that they were based out of. So they're 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.

• 28:59AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  To find the location on on Google Earth. And he didn't even have north, south marked on the maps either. Took me nine months.

• 29:07AJ Gentile?

  What did you find?

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Uh, so I I knew that I found the location. It was just like, I could tell.

• 29:12AJ Gentile?

  Did you the mines? You found the seven gold mines?

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did. Yeah, I found. 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 cool. So um, so I took a friend of mine and a couple of months later, we drove out to New Mexico. And, you know, we cut a bunch of locks and drove through a whole bunch of private property straight out into the middle of nowhere. And and we found, we, I I confirmed it on the on the ground. And I'm I'm walking around out there and picking up these these like old bottles and cans that are out there. It didn't look like anybody had been there. There's no, you know, from from

• 29:55Speaker 03

  from the map and from Google Earth, you can see where these paths are, where these old cars would have been driving around there. But you can't see anything when you're actually there in person. There's no remnants left of the little roads and but there's old like pocket whiskey glasses and.

• 30:09AJ Gentile?

  Could you feel it, though?

• 30:10Speaker 03

  I mean, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, man.

• 30:14AJ Gentile?

  You had to be thinking, is this grandpa's whiskey?

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Well, I looked into that. So there was a, I forget what the name of the brand was, but I, um, one of my buddies had a, he's got Grok like Satellite. 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 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've been his.

• 30:41AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  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 have like rusted cans and you know, just stuff that I know must've been his.

• 30:50AJ Gentile?

  I would've done the same thing. Just gather it all up.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:00AJ Gentile?

  What about the mines? Did you get in there?

• 31:02Speaker 03

  I, I'm, I wanna go back, but I wanna go back and do it properly.

• 31:07AJ Gentile?

  That means.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  Mines. No, no, no, no, no. Well, I,

• 31:11Speaker 03

  I don't wanna admit to doing anything illegal, but, uh, no, I want to go back in.

• 31:14AJ Gentile?

  Stories. Who knows if it's true.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  I wanna go back in with something that can monitor the air quality because it only takes a couple of seconds to die from toxic air in a mine.

• 31:23AJ Gentile?

  But you did see the openings.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I went really close to going down in one. I, I, I went probably 20 feet in one that was open. I mean, that, there was 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 realize it was there until it started moving and it ran off and I was like, that wasn't a rat. That wasn't, what the, what was that? And so I was like going through species that live in, uh, mammals that live in New Mexico. And I found a black-footed ferret and I was like, oh, I actually found where it lived, where one of them live. And obviously, cause it's like 25 miles out in the wilderness, right? It's not around humans at all. So that was cool.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Uh, there's two. So basically you would have like one shaft that descends down at forty-five degrees. So it descends down at forty-five degrees. It heads west and then there is a a refuge shaft that comes straight up. That's probably like a hundred and fifty feet up. So it's just this hole. Like you, you walk out in the middle of desert and there's just a massive fifteen foot by fifteen foot wide hole. And it's so deep that no matter how close you get to the edge, you can never see the bottom and you can feel the air like shooting out of the of it. Like you can feel the air hitting you as you, as you walk up to it.

• 32:55AJ Gentile?

  So there's no structure, platform, nothing, just a hole?

• 32:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:02AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 33:33AJ Gentile?

  Who drew those maps?

• 33:34Speaker 03

  My, my grandfather. Yeah. So he was a cartographer. He drew all of this stuff.

• 33:38AJ Gentile?

  Where, how, where did she find those? Those would have been helpful.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  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? She ended up getting some of the interior maps. So it's kind of split up. So now, uh, I have everything other than the artifacts and 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, there's sometimes there's photos of my office that get posted, 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 and these are diorite mines. So super, they're, they're probably

• 34:24Speaker 03

  still stable. I just have to know that the air quality is good enough to go in them. But these massive shafts that he'd shine 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 dug out by Spanish, unmapped. Dug out by Spanish, unmapped.

• 34:42AJ Gentile?

  That's crazy.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  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 150 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 I would very much like to get lower 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, but I definitely want to monitor air quality.

• 35:18AJ Gentile?

  Now, so what would be the bad air down there? What would cause that?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  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 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 sometimes there's some, there's some gases that can build up in mines that there's tons of people who they're walking around in the desert, there's this big mine opening, they go, oh, what's it, 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 mine.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Now, my grandpa, well, he always wrote about them was that they were clean aired mines. Like if you read the magazines, they're granite and diorite mines. And so something about that makes them safer inherently. I'm not a hundred percent certain on that, but I just didn't, I didn't want to take their, take the risk. So, so, but I am going to go down in, in them with like a, a full on team and everything and we're going to explore them. But I was just there a few months ago and yeah, when I'm there, I, when I'm there, it's one of those things where it's like, ah, this is a special place.

• 36:38AJ Gentile?

  It really is.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  This is, you know, there, there, there's probably this one specific place on the planet.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  There's, my family probably has more connection to this one specific place than anybody else on the planet ever has, because it's just out in the middle of the wilderness, right? And, uh, and yeah, I sit there and even though I don't own the property, it's like spiritually, I'm like, yeah, this is my, this is my place. You know, my grandfather's dreams lived and died here. And my grandpa thought about this place for the rest of his life.

• 37:12AJ Gentile?

  You think he'd be proud to know that you took up the mantle?

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. I just went on this expedition in the, in the Gila Wilderness recently. And, um, and so, uh, I'll, I'll give up a little bit of a teaser of where this is.

• 37:27AJ Gentile?

  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

• 38:12AJ Gentile?

  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 pdsdebt.com/basement. That's P D S D E B T dot com slash basement. P D S D E B T dot com slash basement.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  The mines are also in the Gila Wilderness.

• 38:43AJ Gentile?

  Don't give too much.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I won't, I won't. But the mines are also in the Gila Wilderness. And, um, and one of those magazines described him as a Gila Explorer. And it's cool because it's our, it's our country's first designated wilderness area. And, uh, so there's some history there. And, um, you know, I don't know if people realize this, but like my connection to my grandfather on my-

• 39:06AJ Gentile?

  There's a Gila Wilderness.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  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-

• 39:15AJ Gentile?

  You didn't know him?

• 39:16Speaker 03

  No, I never actually, never actually knew him. It's all, it's this, this, it's this shadow that looms over my life.

• 39:24AJ Gentile?

  Isn't it drive you crazy? Don't you wish you can just sit with him and ask him questions?

• 39:27Speaker 03

  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 always listened to these old like 1950s, uh, one of my favorite songs is Cattle Call. And, uh, these old 1950s Western music. And I just imagine like, I know that this is what he was listening to and I'm packing for the expedition. And it just like, it was the first time 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 and 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 know him because he, I am so much like him. And in everything that I do, it's like embedded in me.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Like I look at my hands, you know, I, I probably have tics and little weird things that I do that are him.

• 40:13AJ Gentile?

  For sure you do.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  And, um, but I, but I, but I don't know him in person, you know? And that's kind of one of those things is 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 he'll, he'll visit you or something.

• 40:27AJ Gentile?

  And you believe that stuff?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I had an experience like that with my other grandfather.

• 40:33AJ Gentile?

  We're, we're not getting to my outline because I need to hear this story.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so with my other grandfather, um, the one who was a missionary and ancient historian, you know, loved the ancient world. So he passed away a couple of years ago and, um, he had had Alzheimer's for about eight years. And, um, which is quite a long time to survive.

• 40:54AJ Gentile?

  It's a shame, actually.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  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, he lived for a long time. And, uh, there was one night, it was a Tuesday night, I don't know why exactly I remember that, but I woke up around 1:30 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."

• 41:40Speaker 03

  And I kissed him and I'm not like, the only person I kiss is my wife. Like, I don't kiss my family members, right? It was just like, not normal for me to, to behave like that in a dream. And I woke up at 1:00 AM and I remembered that and it was like, I just remembered that. Well, I'm at work, 9:00 AM, 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 heartbeat had 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.

• 42:19AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  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, it was funny, he, he could not remember anything in the short term, but he could always talk about his past.

• 42:55AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  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 grandma 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 enough of a goodbye. Like, I didn't get a moment with him. So I handed my grandma my jacket and I walked back in there. And, um, it's just, it's just he and I there and, um,

• 43:31Speaker 03

  uh,

• 43:36Speaker 03

  I haven't like really told the story. Um, you know, golly, man. I, uh,

• 43:47Speaker 03

  you know, I just did it like that was my last moment with him, you know? And I was lucky that I got that.

• 43:52AJ Gentile?

  What did you talk about?

• 43:55AJ Gentile?

  You are lucky you got that.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:57AJ Gentile?

  So many of us don't. What'd you talk about?

• 44:00Speaker 03

  I just told him, I, I just asked him, I said, I said, you remember all those westerns that you made me watch with you? Like Gunsmoke. Gunsmoke was on the TV behind me. He was like, yeah. And I said, uh,

• 44:15Speaker 03

  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 was like looking at him in his eyes. I was like, I was like, I'm never gonna forget that. It gets, you know, so important to me. And I said, uh, I said, I love you. And he said, he said, I love you too. And I said, 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.

• 44:44AJ Gentile?

  You leaned over him crying, just like a dream?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  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, I just had to actually be real, you know?

• 45:10Speaker 03

  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'm

• 45:22AJ Gentile?

  Was he aware of what was going on?

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, he must, 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 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 walked out of the room and, um, my grandma and I went, went got 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?

• 46:09Speaker 03

  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 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

• 46:31AJ Gentile?

  You're okay. They come into grips with where they are.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  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's, there's no, you know, I, I, I am a Christian. I'm like an unorthodox Christian, but 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 Olmec world. I, I, I was there for the week. I had to like plan his funeral and everything.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  You know, it's 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, produced, uh, published and printed in August of 1997. That's when I was born. And, uh,

• 47:32Speaker 03

  And so my grandpa, that was his book, he would always read that to me. And, you know, gosh, from the time I was a young kid, he 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 cool now flipping through all those. I was, maybe a year ago, I was going through it with my wife, and I was like, I've been there now, I've been there now, I've been there now. There's only a few places in that book I haven't been now. But the one I was always captivated by is Machu Picchu. And right where all these iconic photos are taken, I'm standing there. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, this is the only place I've ever been,

• 48:15Speaker 03

  other than Hawaii, that actually looks like the photos. You go to Egypt, there's this massive metropolitan city behind you. You're not in the desert, right? 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'm always like, nah, if you can only go to Peru or Egypt, I'd go to Peru, because it's amazing. But I'm standing there, and I'm like, wow, this is really, really amazing. I reach in my pocket and pull out my phone, and it's opened up to iCloud email. And I don't use iCloud email. I've got 4,500 emails I haven't opened up here that are all just spam.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  And it's already selected a recipient, and the little thing is blinking for me to start typing. And the recipient was my grandfather, [email protected]. It was his email. I never sent him an email, but it really, really was his email. Somehow it was in my phone. And it was like, it was like he was

• 49:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he was.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  touching me from the next world, you know? And letting me know that he was there. And I was in the place where the photo is taken, that's printed in that book. Yeah. And, yeah, it was profound, profound, man. And, you know,

• 49:41Speaker 03

  that's like all the confirmation I need, that there's something more beyond all of this, you know?

• 49:45AJ Gentile?

  Totally agree. I heard you say that you were gonna go to grad school in Athens, and something in the jungle made you change your mind.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  I was, uh...

• 50:00Speaker 03

  You know, you know what's interesting is

• 50:05Speaker 03

  me starting my career and being independent from like the very beginning. I never worked for a university or anything like that. All of my flaws and missteps and things that I said when I was, 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

• 50:37Speaker 03

  when I first started this journey, I was so heavily influenced by, I saw you had a Graham Hancock book around here somewhere.

• 50:43AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  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'm reading something like a historical textbook." Because, you know, 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, of these ancient sites.

• 51:22AJ Gentile?

  That's the big word, possibilities. That's what he created.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I know that there were people that came before him, but I don't think anybody did it as well as he did. And I may, I may step on toes by saying that, but Graham Hancock

• 51:36Speaker 03

  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...

• 51:44AJ Gentile?

  It's a journalist telling a story.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  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, um, which is a great book. And, um, so from there...

• 52:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 52:15AJ Gentile?

  What was your main thing?

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Uh, marketing. My mom is a creative. She was a, she was like a-

• 52:21AJ Gentile?

  Marketing?

• 52:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, she was like a high ranking, uh, creative at a, a place called Brookshire's Grocery Store. It's, I don't even know what, what to equivalent it to out here, but, uh, um, yeah. So she, she 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's not as defined or it's not as neat, right?

• 52:51AJ Gentile?

  It's a story. History's a story.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And so, um, so yeah, history and, and art went together. But to be honest with you, I, 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.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 53:45AJ Gentile?

  She's crushing it.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 54:04AJ Gentile?

  Well, did you agree?

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, I was like-

• 54:07AJ Gentile?

  You're like, I get it.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  I was like deeply ashamed. Like 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 was funny, this time he didn't because he knew, he could tell how I just, I was like, ah.

• 54:21AJ Gentile?

  He did you a favor.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  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, so the closest thing to it was anthropology. And so I, 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,

• 54:59Speaker 03

  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 ancient cultures of Mexico and Central America. Because we're in Texas, so Texas breeds Mesoamerican archaeologists. There's tons of them there. And, and so the dean's like, "Okay, well, I want you to write this, you know, such such paper for me and let me read it." And so, and I had, had all these guidelines. So I wrote it in like one day. And, and I sent it back to him and it was, it would, the paper was called, "How to, how, it was, it was how 2 million people disappeared overnight in the Amazon."

• 55:38Speaker 03

  And it was basically like a breakdown of every, I had already known of, of how the Amazonian people were just decimated over the course of a couple of centuries.

• 55:46AJ Gentile?

  You're writing good YouTube titles back then. That's a clicker.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, long before I, I ever thought I'd be a YouTuber.

• 55:54AJ Gentile?

  When you were writing that paper, did you feel it coming through you?

• 55:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:58AJ Gentile?

  I'm supposed to do this.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. And one of the things, it was around that time, I don't remember if it was before or just after this, but my wife and I, we were in my college dorm room and we're on my laptop and we watched the movie The Lost City of Z. And I closed my laptop after that and 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 only reason he took on those expeditions was to reclaim his family name.

• 56:31AJ Gentile?

  This is Percy Fawcett.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  Percy Fawcett, yeah.

• 56:33AJ Gentile?

  Had you heard about him before?

• 56:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess, but I hadn't read David Grand's book or anything like that.

• 56:39AJ Gentile?

  Didn't know he was such a badass.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  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. And I actually know more about Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu, and something about that guy's story, just kind of being an underdog and like wanting to prove himself. And I guess he had this, he was a dreamer and he was reaching for something that almost didn't exist, right? And something about that story just really resonated with me. And I was never quite the same after I watched that movie. So it was either right after or right before I switched my major that that happened. And so anyways, he reluctantly let me into the anthropology program and I just smashed the last year and a half of school.

• 57:23AJ Gentile?

  Did you?

• 57:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had like a 4.0. I was like, nothing. I mean, I didn't, I didn't even study. I did, but yeah. So I made it through school and then it was my last semester. Yeah. No, it was my second to last semester. I was-

• 57:44AJ Gentile?

  Were you thinking about grad school at that point?

• 57:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. It was my second to last semester and I was on YouTube and I saw an interview with Professor Dr. Ed Barnhart. And I was like, I was like, oh, I really like this guy. So I had listened to his Lost Worlds of South America while I was, maybe it was right before I switched my major or it was right afterwards. But he has this great lecture series called Lost Worlds of South America produced by The Great Courses. And I had only listened to the audio of it. I think later on I listened, or I watched the actual, watched 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, in the episodes. And actually-

• 58:32Speaker 03

  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, there was this 24 lecture series thing on, on South America. And then eventually I found Maya to Aztec, his other one that's on Mezzo America and just devoured both of those. And actually, that was my exposure to academia. I did not know, and this may be the way I, why I am the way I am, I did not know the cold, sterile, jaded side of academia. You 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

• 59:16Speaker 03

  way. But really, the, my main exposure was through Ed Barnhart, which was so warm and romantic, right? And I still listen to those lectures today, just because it kind of takes me back to this 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 so I'm in my second to last semester and, and I start thinking about like, okay, you know, maybe, um, I don't think I'm going to go work for a college because you don't get to pick the projects you work on. You're like an actor. You kind of just take what, take what comes to you. You know, so if I, so if I'm passionate about the Maya or the

• 59:57Speaker 03

  Inca, I'm actually probably going to be working on like the Caddo people in East Texas, which not my passions. And, 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. Yeah. 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 used to be like a Coyote Peterson of history. Right. And then my sister was watching Extinct or Alive on Animal Planet, which is Forrest Galante. 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

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  I was kinda, I started tinkering with the idea my last semester in college where I was like, well.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  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 adventures and film it. Of course, I did not know what I was getting into.

• 1:01:33AJ Gentile?

  This story sounds very familiar, my friend.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:36AJ Gentile?

  You're looking for a show that doesn't exist, so you just created it.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's a...

• 1:01:40AJ Gentile?

  And you don't realize how hard it is.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  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." And, um...

• 1:01:50AJ Gentile?

  She's a good one. So then what does Athens have to do with this?

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  So, 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.

• 1:02:08AJ Gentile?

  What is that like, when you, when he's like, "Let's get a bite"? Are you freaking out?

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was pretty surreal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, um, and so we meet up and we, we get like tacos outside this, this grocery store.

• 1:02:20AJ Gentile?

  Amazing.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  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...

• 1:02:26AJ Gentile?

  That's how you knew?

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:28AJ Gentile?

  Two hours and you're like, "He likes me, we're good."

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, he, he liked me 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 thick as thieves for, I don't know, like four years now, since then.

• 1:02:47AJ Gentile?

  He's, would you consider him a mentor?

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's probably my only mentor, I'd say, yeah.

• 1:02:51AJ Gentile?

  Does he watch your channel?

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Ah, 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 stuff to do with not, not the Americas, he might learn something, but uh.

• 1:03:00AJ Gentile?

  I'm just wondering if he ever pushes back on some of your theories.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't think that he and I agree on, and we can get into this later. I don't think that he and I agree on what the where Jaguars are when it comes to

• 1:03:11AJ Gentile?

  We're gonna get to those.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  The Olmecs. I think he and I disagree there. Uh, that might be the only thing that we disagree on. Um, but yeah, but yeah. 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, I'm working with this guy who's like a world-class archaeologist, very well-known, um, and uh, and so I started becoming exposed to other academics as well. And academics that I still like and still talk with today, but

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  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 kinda 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,

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  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,

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  so I had, I had this period of time where I'd become really fascinated with the Greeks again. When I watched Troy as a kid, like, like the ancient Greeks were the first civilization that I really sunk my teeth into and learned a lot about, um,

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  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 two times in my life that I prayed for a clear answer. Not like, "Oh, maybe I should do this." 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."

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  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."

• 1:05:58AJ Gentile?

  You felt that.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  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 go around the other world. The Americas opened itself up to you. That's what your grandfather explored in the American Southwest." Of course, we're Americans, but you know, it was like, "No, that's the world that opened up to you and that's who you are. It chose you." And I just knew like, "Oh, I can't do this." And somewhere in there, I was, oh, yeah, I say that, I do say that I had a mind-opening experience in the jungle.

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  But it's actually not the jungles in America, I was in Cambodia. But I was in Cambodia and some of my buddies and I, we were having some very good Cambodian devil's lettuce. And it was potent, man. And I'm sitting there talking with them and I just, while I was talking with them, it was even more confirmed in my mind that I had to stay with the Americas. This is a little bit afterwards, yeah. But I knew, I really, really knew, after spending a lot of time with some of my friends and kind of hearing some confirmation bias, like they were all like, "You had to stay with the Americas." And that's what everybody thinks because it was so natural.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  But the difference is like, sometimes when people watch you, they can see you more clearly than you can see yourself.

• 1:07:30AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  And so I have always struggled with the fact that...

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  The Americas opened itself up to me. Like, people see me as the Americas guy. He's the guy that knows a lot about the Maya, the Olmecs, the, you know, ancient Peru, this, that and the other. And sometimes you have this identity crisis where you're like, whoa, 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 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, you know, the Americas is where I belong. It's my bread and butter.

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  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. You know, so like sometimes things slip out in podcasts or people will be like, you talked to some, about this in a podcast for an hour before, you never even made a video on it. I'm like, wow, you know, I, I just really want to know something before I, Right. But, and it's, so it's taken me a long time to form the direction I'm going. But, you know, now I kind of realized like, there's so much in the Americas that people know about, they should talk about.

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  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 300 years ago. Nobody else did anything like that. And so the Americas just need that. Well, one thing I'm working on right now, um, and we're gonna offer to go down there and lidar scan it with BaseMap, 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, cause there's, it's twin colonies. But I don't know how good their lidar stuff is, but we can lidar map like,

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  They sent me, they sent me something, but I, I think we can light our 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.

• 1:09:58AJ Gentile?

  But you don't mind to say if we, if we travel a little bit around the world?

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  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 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-nishing. 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 light art projects, like I'm really gonna hone in on expanding a lot of the things that

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  most people don't know about the Americas.

• 1:10:48AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 1:11:06Speaker 03

  Well, mosquitoes, man, uh, the worst I ever had them was at Machu Picchu.

• 1:11:10AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  I made a mistake of wearing a short sleeve shirt out there in the summer. Amazonian mosquitoes are unlike anything that most people have experienced. Uh, their, their stings, I don't know, I don't know exactly what's in them, like, like the venom 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 bumps are still spreading around me. Everywhere I would scratch, luckily I avoided getting in my face, but they were still, there were new bumps would pop up on my arms every day.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  And so when you would read through the journals of Percy Fawcett and you see how his arms were scarred from the field. So I don't know if you can, you probably can't tell because you don't stare at my arms every day. But like every little dark spot that you see where you're like, oh, is that a dark spot? Yeah, that's a mosquito bite from two years ago.

• 1:12:10AJ Gentile?

  There's a mosquito scar.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And then these, these straight lines, these are from thorns from the Gila expedition I just did.

• 1:12:18AJ Gentile?

  What else is out there? Snakes?

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so in Mexico, Central and South America, you have to worry about the fertile ants. It's the, it's the most dangerous snake. I've gotten corrected before by saying it's the deadliest snake in the Americas. I still think that it is. Maybe it's not the most venomous. They say it's the coral snake. But the problem is that to get a coral snake to bite you, you have to shove it up against your hand or something. But a fertile ant will go out of its way. Now, it won't go out of its way, but it won't run away from you. It'll stay coiled up and you know, a lot of animals have fight or flight. It's all fight and they, and they, and they repeat strike too. So they'll bite you once and they'll bite you again and they'll bite you again and they'll bite you again.

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  They don't, they don't retreat. So they're really, really dangerous and they're brown. So.

• 1:13:06AJ Gentile?

  So you don't see them?

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  You're not, yeah, you're not going to see them.

• 1:13:09AJ Gentile?

  You have any snake bites yet?

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  No, no, no. I've never, I've never been bitten by a snake. Yeah. And I've seen, I've seen two fertile ants in person. One was a baby, which are like extremely dangerous because they'll give you all their venom. And then the other one was actually at the hotel. They, they, they'll come up close. Yeah. So they come up close to the hotel because there are rats around where humans are, you know, so they try to kill the rats. So what they'll do is they'll like. When you walk around, you know, I don't know, if you go to, sometimes there are hotels that you go to where you have to go out at night to go to the restroom. And so sometimes the restrooms are built up on like a stilt. 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.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's wild. It's wild stuff. So, um, but I would say-

• 1:14:00AJ Gentile?

  You're no armchair explorer. You're out there.

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  I would say, so I just did a, I just did an expedition on training wheels, as I call it, to, 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, and I, 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. Like, I don't even think, I'm not sure if you know what charted means or whatever, but, or what exactly I'm talking about, whether it's archaeologically charted or explored or not. And so, but it was, it was like an expedition on training wheels. I got to see and feel what it, what it was like to invest so much

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  into all the equipment and getting everybody prepared and developing a plan and trying to see what does executing this plan feel like? And just to give you an idea of just how hard it is to go through even just the 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.

• 1:15:16AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:17Speaker 03

  So, and, and, you know, one of the other problems is like, I had, I had a very nice pair of crispy boots. People are hunters, they'll know what those are, but they're, they're mostly, they're waterproof if you can keep your, you know, the boot above, above the water level. But, you know, if you get, if you get water in your, in your boots, your socks get wet, you can only bring so many socks. By the time you get to the camp, it's going to be nighttime and it starts getting cold. You're not drying out your socks over a fire. A fire is not hot enough 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.

• 1:16:02AJ Gentile?

  This is like trench foot.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, my, uh, my, my, both of my big toes, uh, I, um, I don't know if 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.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  So we were, we went at 30% the pace I expected that we would go.

• 1:16:37AJ Gentile?

  30%?

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  30%, yeah. So, uh, we had, we had this map in front of us and we thought that we were going to be able to get from this lake, down this river valley, across this other river valley, and then over the top of this mountain. All, I don't know why I thought we could do all this in one day. I mean, you're looking at it on satellite and, 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 Gila wilderness and, uh, so I, there's this place called the Mogollon Cliff dwellings, which is really cool and mostly like, it's like a little hidden gem. Most people don't, don't go to the Gila Cliff dwellings.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  They'll go to like Chaco Canyon or something. And up that river, about 25 miles up, there's a place where it gets much more green and all of the, uh, And, and the canyon is very, very dense. So like flash floods are super dangerous. And all of the trails to the Gila Wilderness go around this area. So it's this area that doesn't get a lot of traffic. And you would watch videos and people would say, "The river continues this way, but we have to stop here because there's no more trails going through there." They say that's where all the wildlife fled to in these tight canyons. So they think like cave, or bears and mountain lions and stuff are living in that one area.

• 1:17:55AJ Gentile?

  That's where the food is.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  And so that's where the expedition, that's where we went. We went straight down this area that there, that there are no trails. Went straight down and then back out. And, um.

• 1:18:05AJ Gentile?

  You put this online yet?

• 1:18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like a two hour documentary thing that we did.

• 1:18:09AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:18:30AJ Gentile?

  The Gila Cliffs, yeah. These are amazing.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:18:39AJ Gentile?

  In like 10 years, you're going to be with a junior explorer who's going to look at a map and say, "Yeah, we could do this in two days." You're going to say 10.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  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, be like, "Oh, man, this really blah, blah, blah." I'm like, man, I'm just.

• 1:18:56AJ Gentile?

  Read the comments.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  I'm like, I'm like, I'm just learning how to, you know, you guys just wait till you see what we're about to do. Um, cause now we're planning this one in American Samoa. That's going to be a big deal. And then we're doing this one in the Amazon. If it goes through, it'll be the biggest scan that's ever been done in the Amazon. Um, so, uh, but yeah, that is, as far as being in the field, everything is so much more difficult and it takes so much longer than you anticipate it's going to. 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.

• 1:19:33AJ Gentile?

  I was just going to ask, did you bring enough supplies?

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  We did bring enough supplies. 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.

• 1:19:49AJ Gentile?

  This is how stories begin.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So we had to divide the food, which took our calories, uh, from, you know, we had planned for about 1,800 calories a day. Um, and that took that from 1,800 to 900 calories a day.

• 1:20:03AJ Gentile?

  That doesn't sound like enough to do this work.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Oh, man. So on the last day, I was like, I was like wobbly. I was pushing through. You know, everybody was wobbly by the last day. And I lost, so I, so I wore a size 32 pant, and those pants were falling off of me by the last day. I had probably gone down like a, like a 30 or something. And, um, yeah, man, it's, you know, there's so many things. And what's cool is, I talk about this in, in the expedition documentary. I basically say that, you know, most expeditions, the most dramatic part of it is never the discovery because, one, most expeditions don't find anything.

• 1:20:44AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  You read through Percy Fawcett. He found a lot of cool stuff, never found what he was looking for.

• 1:20:48AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  Ernest Shackleton, greatest explorer of all time, also the most unsuccessful explorer of all time. The only reason he's famous is because he's a failure, right? But he's actually such a successful explorer because he was able to protect all of his men. Nobody died on his expeditions.

• 1:21:06AJ Gentile?

  I just covered him. He was a great, great.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  Oh, did you really? Okay. Yeah, yeah. They, um, just, and amazing, man. I'll tell you, a great book to read is, um,

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  Shackleton's Way. It's a guy who's a, I think he's a psychologist. And he studied Shackleton's story and wrote this book that, it's maybe like a six-hour audible listen to. And it writes, it basically encapsulates his whole philosophy. Shackleton was writing a book on the philosophy of being explorer before he died and it was never published. He never, he never finished it. I'm pretty sure that's right. And so this guy kind of writes that book. And it's fascinating hearing a psychologist go into why Shackleton would have made the decisions that he did. But getting out of there was the most dramatic, getting out of the Gila was the most dramatic part. Because we were running low on food.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  Everybody was starting to get the wobbles. And so we're at this point where we've got to, 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 is falling beneath you and everything. And so we would go back through that and then that would take us all day and then we'd have to camp again and we'd have another day. Why, I told the guys, I was like, 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.

• 1:23:14Speaker 03

  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, and I don't know, I don't know if, if everybody believed. 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, but I was telling the guys for days leading up to that, I was like, I was like, I think we can go over that mesa and get out of here. I think we can, I think we can. Of course, you never know for certain. And in my mind, I'm like, If I'm wrong, everybody's gonna be fed up. Cause you, you think like, oh, it's not that big of a deal. You just go back down, blah, blah, blah. No, when you're seven, eight days in and you've been walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and you're low 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.

• 1:23:59AJ Gentile?

  But you're surviving now, you're not exploring.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the small things that happen to you are more significant. You don't think about the fact that like, oh, 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 like, like if you're not the leader of the expedition. I'm emotionally, financially, 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.

• 1:24:31AJ Gentile?

  Did you get over that Mesa?

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  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. It was just getting everybody out way faster than we expected and getting to the nearest gas station, which was like two and a half hours away.

• 1:24:48AJ Gentile?

  What did that feel like?

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  Oh, man, we got, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, yeah, so we got, we got Gatorade. We got, uh, Ruffles. We got, uh, beef jerky. We got Skittles. We got ice cream sandwiches.

• 1:25:01AJ Gentile?

  Oh, it had to be so good.

• 1:25:02Speaker 03

  Chocolate. Oh, my, my buddy's truck was just filled with trash. And, uh, and 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 dropped so fast, even in the day.

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  And 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. It's like, we lost probably two days of survey just because we were so short on food. So we had to get back out of there. But all in all, the, the main thing I learned was that it's not going to go the way you think. And you're going to be a lot slower than you think that you are. And things are going to get, like a wrench is going to get thrown into your

• 1:26:11AJ Gentile?

  Things are gonna go wrong.

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  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 going to be a lot longer and a lot harder than you think. And all the things you think are going to happen are not going to happen that way. And it's going to go wrong. Um, so, you know, I probably, I probably am a fraction of a step closer to being more well-prepared for the next expedition.

• 1:26:34AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, things are still gonna go wrong.

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. 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 BaseMap. We're trying to get the permissions to

• 1:26:53AJ Gentile?

  We're gonna cover all this.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  Scan the Amazon.

• 1:26:55AJ Gentile?

  Can we take a quick break?

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:57AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  Oh, really? Okay, cool, cool, cool.

• 1:27:05AJ Gentile?

  Hey, have you ever heard about this, this city called Alexandria?

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  I've heard about it once or twice. Been there once or twice.

• 1:27:12AJ Gentile?

  So I, I showed you earlier that I wear a, um, it was a gift from my wife. It's a, it's a tetradrachma. It's, it's, uh, Herakles that was stamped, uh, just about 10 years after, um, Alexander the Great died. So I'm a fan of his. Could you tell us his life story really quick? But I really, really want to know where his body went.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, well, Alexander, probably, I mean, probably the most exceptional person that lived in the ancient world. Like, I think the only guy who really comes close is probably Julius Caesar. But, uh, even Caesar, not, not the

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  You know, at this, at this point, a lot of the Greek world, I don't know if they're, you know, platonic, but they're heavily influenced by, 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 Philip, his father, is also maybe just as miraculous a story because he's a king in northern Macedonia that's so intelligent. He manipulates all of the Greek world to falling under his control. He becomes the king of Greece. I, I'm, I'm, I'm no expert really on, on Philip.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  I just know that, I know that the story is so impressive and nuanced because I have stayed away from diving into it because I know it's going to be a huge rabbit hole. But essentially the Greek world is just a collection of city-states. And most of these city-states are not, they don't have a, maybe all of them, other than Sparta, do not have a government that's set up with a monarch or an emperor in charge, right? And so Philip is able to unite all of the Greek world under his power in Macedonia. So in one lifetime, all of the Macedonian Greek kings born before Alexander are like minor rulers that aren't very powerful. Macedonia is not even on the map.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:29:49AJ Gentile?

  And this is probably a thousand city-states.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  It's a lot. It's a lot, yeah.

• 1:29:54AJ Gentile?

  And they're constantly fighting with each other.

• 1:29:56Speaker 03

  So powerful that he, I believe, basically had control of Athens and told Aristotle, you are going to come up to Macedonia and tutor, and tutor my, tutor my son.

• 1:30:06AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  We don't really know why Philip died, or why he was assassinated. You know, there's all these stories about like his lover, or this, that, and the other. There's... But the reality is, nobody really knows.

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  One of the popular ideas is that Alexander thought that Persia had sent assassins to assassinate Philip, but it may or may not be true. But he certainly uses it to gather the Greek armies and turn his sights towards Persia. Because I believe that Philip did want to do a run across the Turkish coast and free some of those Greek cities that are living there. And so that's what Alexander starts out doing. Well, within just a few battles between like age 23 and 25, 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 one war.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  And sometimes they can be months or years apart from each other, but if they lose that battle, their territory is just crippled, you know? So in a few decisive battles, he essentially pushes the Persian Empire all the way back to Babylon. They don't have Anatolia anymore, and then he moves down to Egypt.

• 1:31:32AJ Gentile?

  And he never loses.

• 1:31:34Speaker 03

  He never loses a battle. And he, at least not yet. In India, 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, his advisors tell him that he needs to turn around and head 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 from the Nile. It's the most fertile place in the ancient world. So he goes in, he shows up to Egypt, and the Egyptians basically welcome Alexander with open arms. Because the Egyptians hated Persian pharaohs.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  The very first, we don't really know if this happens, but one of the stories that's passed down is Camp Isis, which is the first Persian ruler who becomes pharaoh in Egypt. When he shows up at Egypt, he kills, I think he stabs the sacred Apis Bowl together, or he stabs it to death. And at this point, probably from about 1,000 B.C. to the end of Egyptian culture...

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  Like 325 B.C. 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 I sees in like 525 B.C. stabs the Apis Bull to death, which is just a massive middle finger to the Egyptian culture. They can't stand the Persians. So they essentially welcome Alexander with open arms.

• 1:33:04AJ Gentile?

  And Egypt has a diplomatic relationship with Greece at this point, anyway. Right, Pythagoras is going back and forth.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, they had known each other for a very long time. And they had always, you know, 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.

• 1:33:25AJ Gentile?

  So he doesn't necessarily, Alexander conquer Egypt as much as shows up and secures it.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  As much as the Egyptians know that they have no standing army. They're not going to 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 probably would have been the case. It 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 the Persians. But they essentially welcome Alexander with open arms as much as they can, you know. There's nothing they're going to do about it. And so Alexander comes to Memphis. He probably sees the pyramids. I wish that we had surviving records of that.

• 1:34:15Speaker 03

  There would have been, Ptolemy, his best friend, is with him this whole time. He wrote an account of all of this, either during his life or later in his life. Those were lost, probably with the library being destroyed so many times. But all of these accounts that we have, like from Plutarch and what is it, is it Arius? One of the, all these accounts of Alexander's life, of his life, they're drawing on Ptolemy's writings, which they had access to, but we don't.

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  So there's so, who knows how many small details Ptolemy wrote that's, you know, for whatever reason, ancient authors were like, oh, well, I'm not going to 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 in, out into Western Egypt and he meets with the oracle of Zeus Amun, which is basically 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

• 1:35:29Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:36:03AJ Gentile?

  I haven't, but I believe it.

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's something crazy. It's like, if you became a Roman emperor, you had a, like a 47% 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? Um, they're, they're part deity.

• 1:36:33AJ Gentile?

  And Alexander played into that role.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  He played, he played, 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, the legends of, of the Greek world.

• 1:37:00AJ Gentile?

  Because of Aristotle.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  Maybe, I mean, I don't know if we know, you know, why his fascination happened. I mean, definitely Aristotle influenced him, but you know, that's interesting because Aristotle is a, you know, he's, he's in that Platonic like philosophy heritage and Plato and Socrates are not really big believers. And so, you know, there's a lot of things playing here and Alexander is very different. Like, you know, a lot of people try to go Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, as if Alexander is a descendant of those guys. Not really. Alexander, he's much different than Aristotle. So, we don't really know exactly what he believed or really what he saw himself as. Probably he saw himself as a god or more than a god because his generals

• 1:37:46Speaker 03

  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 more than a, he's greater than a god was.

• 1:38:02AJ Gentile?

  What would any 22-year-old who conquered half the world be like?

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  Exactly. What would they be like? And, um, so essentially he becomes, uh, he becomes crown 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 Siwa 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, Ziliad and the Odyssey. And in the Odyssey, which I hope that we see this in this new Christopher Nolan movie, um, Odysseus, one of the places that he finds refuge at as he's being bounced around the Mediterranean is this little island on the coast of Egypt. And when he arrives there, the locals tell him, he asked them where they're at and they say Pharos. This is Pharos. We don't

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

  know if that's supposed to mean this is the Pharaoh's land or what, or what that means, but he called it Pharos, P-H-A-R-O-S in English.

• 1:38:56AJ Gentile?

  Which is a real small island.

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  It's a real island, yeah, yeah. 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." Oh, 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.

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  They will bounce around the coastline to get up to, um, like, modern-day Lebanon, cuz that's where they would get their cedar wood from. Or, or the, uh, the, uh, Cedars of Lebanon, yeah. And, uh, they'd 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, in the way that the Phoenicians or the Greeks did.

• 1:39:57AJ Gentile?

  They like to be downriver. Guard the delta.

• 1:40:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they wanna be right there. They wanna be right there in the green that's next to the river. They don't even go into the desert. They avoided the desert cuz 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?

• 1:40:17AJ Gentile?

  Well, we think of ancient Egypt as this giant world, but it really was just the delta, no?

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  This tiny little place. And, 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 predynastic era, around thirty-one hundred B.C. And then we, we will get back to Alexander, but, um, you know, you've got north and south Egypt, which, south is upper, north is lower. We don't have to get into that. Uh, it's just, it's just the way the direct-

• 1:40:48AJ Gentile?

  It flows weird.

• 1:40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, the way, the way the river flows.

• 1:40:51AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:40:51Speaker 03

  Um, but you've got these three different places in Egypt essentially. You've got southern Egypt, which is, uh- You know, a collection, a collection of cities along these, in this fertile valley. Then you have this vast area that's not really very fertile. And then you get to northern Egypt at the bottom of the delta.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  And that's where Memphis and some other, and some other cities were. And then you have the delta, which there were, there were some cities living out there because it's a much more lush area. But the Egyptians that were living in the north, they saw the delta as being a good defensive place. So you would hear if people ever tried to invade, they would have to navigate through the waters of the delta. And messengers could go back to the city that's at the bottom of the delta, which is Memphis, right? So you're defended in the north and no one's going to attack you from the south. Cause they're also Egyptian, but they're not like unified with us, but they live really, really far up the river. But far south. And so it's a, 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.

• 1:41:53Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps. OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews. OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Well, over time, there, uh, over time, there was a pharaoh called, uh, Narmer or Menes. And he was from the south and he marched north and conquered the north and then unified them and started dynastic Egypt.

• 1:42:36AJ Gentile?

  Hey, can you boys throw the delta up there so we can take a look at how small it was?

• 1:42:40Speaker 03

  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 are. The distance, I, I'm almost certain about this, we should measure it right now. The distance between Memphis.

• 1:43:03Speaker 03

  Which across the rivers where the pyramids were being built.

• 1:43:05AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  The distance between Memphis and southern Egypt where people were living is farther than the distance between northern Egypt and Athens, Greece.

• 1:43:17AJ Gentile?

  Wow, it's farther?

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  Yes, we should measure that.

• 1:43:20AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:21Speaker 03

  I'm pretty sure it is, though. So, think about that. They were moving those, those Aswan blocks when they're moving into the pyramids. Those are traveling further.

• 1:43:31AJ Gentile?

  Hundreds of miles.

• 1:43:31Speaker 03

  Than it would take, than it would take to get from the pyramids to Athens. That's wild.

• 1:43:37AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:43:37Speaker 03

  That's why I've never, I, I actually figured that out just like in the last week or so. But 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.

• 1:43:51AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  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 large.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  Anyways, that, that's kind of one of those cool anthropology things. It changes the way that you think about Egypt when, when you're studying it. So, Alexander, he's up at, he's up at Aswan and he, he sees this good defensive posture that the later city of Alexandria would have. There's this little strip that the north side of it is connected to the Mediterranean. On the south side is a lake called Mariottis, I think, Lake Mariottis. 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, is that little island of Pharos that's nearby this, this fishing village. So, he pulls up with his convoy into this little strip of land and, and he, he doesn't

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:44:56AJ Gentile?

  So he's thinking, I'm going to build a city here.

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  He's going to build Alexandria. Now, I don't think this is the first Alexandria.

• 1:45:01AJ Gentile?

  Probably not.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  I think that this is, I think this may be one of the last ones. There's a funny joke in the classics that's like, if somebody asks you to name 10 cities of the ancient world, just say Alexandria, because there, I think there were 10 of them, or there were more than 10. But Alexandria, Egypt is the one that stuck. So he grabs this, the grain out of the 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 going to be something like 100 feet wide, absurdly wide, and lined with stone, which is very rare in ancient times. Most of the time it's just packed dirt, roads. And, and they're going to line up with the Mediterranean winds, so they could determine which way the winds

• 1:45:46Speaker 03

  come from, and both the roads are going to be pointing towards the wind, so that the winds will sweep down the city and cool 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 going to 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, a thousand people with him, you know. 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, looks at one of his guides that are with him, and he thinks that this is a bad omen, and maybe they shouldn't build the city here. And the guy says, no, no, no,

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  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, so Alexander ends up leaving Alexandria. He leaves his architect back, and they start building the city immediately right then.

• 1:46:44AJ Gentile?

  Does he plan the lighthouse and the library at that point?

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  No, I don't think so. I mean, if he did-

• 1:46:49AJ Gentile?

  Because he never comes back, right?

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  If he did, we don't know. We don't know, that's the thing. So he leaves Alexandria, and he goes on to conquer Babylon, and he tries to move into India. It doesn't really work out. Goes back to Babylon, ultimately dies. We don't know why he dies. Some people think that he could have been assassinated, that he could have been poisoned to death. His, his death certainly seems a bit like poison, or maybe it's alcohol poisoning, you know, just living a very, very rough life. I don't know, but um.

• 1:47:17AJ Gentile?

  Cause he's not injured in battle.

• 1:47:19Speaker 03

  Well, he gets injured, but not like, not mortally wounded.

• 1:47:22AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  And uh.

• 1:47:26Speaker 03

  I think he takes an arrow to, to the, to his chest at some point, or to his stomach.

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  I think he does, but, but it's not, it's not life threatening. So, um, a lot of people think that it was alcohol poisoning. Just, just living a very like rambunctious life and ultimately poisoned himself. And some people think that 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, either a Persian woman or an Indian woman. Um, but the, but the son is like an infant and they're not going to be heir. They want a Greek, right?

• 1:48:08AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:48:09Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:48:22AJ Gentile?

  That means to the fittest, find it out.

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. So initially they divided up into around half a dozen different territories. They divide up the Mast, the Macedonian empire.

• 1:48:33AJ Gentile?

  Which is how big at this point?

• 1:48:35Speaker 03

  Uh, well, it's, it's the Persian empire plus Greece.

• 1:48:39AJ Gentile?

  So it's all the way east to India, west to through Europe, down the entire Mediterranean.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, we don't really know beyond, well, beyond Greece as you go west. Like maybe Syracuse is part of the empire, but I don't think, he, he didn't have Italy. Um, the, the, 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.

• 1:49:10AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, there you go. Yeah. They didn't have it. So it stops at Macedonia. So this is still, I think the third biggest empire in history. And England and the Mongols.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And uh, so yeah, he, he dies, he dies in Babylon at, uh, 32 years old. And, um, to his empire goes the fittest. They divide it up into, I think it's just a little bit more than a, than a dozen different territories. And Ptolemy. Like Alexander, they bonded over 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 fall of the Bronze Age, they lose their memory. One of the things that the Egyptians say about the Greeks is that there's no old Greeks.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  They don't remember anything.

• 1:50:03AJ Gentile?

  And we're gonna cover that later with the Minnolans, it's fascinating.

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so much, they remember so little to the point that this is probably one of the slight problems I take with when we look for Atlantis, that we treat like we hang on every word that we think that Solon said, but Solon is alive, he's alive in the 600s to the early 500s.

• 1:50:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it's like 300 years.

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

  And even that is semi-mythical to the classical Greeks. Like they have a really hard time remembering their past.

• 1:50:39AJ Gentile?

  Right, and Solon even says, "I'm telling the story from, I learned it from magician priests."

• 1:50:44Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, and that gets passed down orally, we think, to Plato, so, you know, anyways.

• 1:50:50AJ Gentile?

  So even to those guys, sorry to interrupt. Ancient Egypt is still ancient?

• 1:50:55Speaker 03

  It's still ancient and still continuing. The Menethos history of ancient Egypt, which he, I think that Menetho, he was an Egyptian and he wrote it in Alexandria, I'm pretty sure, in one of the latter three centuries B.C. And that history of ancient Egypt has stood up with the archaeology. So the Egyptians, from 3100 B.C. all the way down to the time of Alexander, they remembered their history. Now, there is, we do see myths come through, like Herodotus says that the...

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  Herodotus says that the Egyptians told him that Khufu hoard out his daughter to be able to build the pyramids, or something like that. Well, the Egyptians say all kinds of crazy stuff 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, 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

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  of Egypt, living out of Alexandria. They've now built up the city much more. I think another decade has gone by.

• 1:52:16AJ Gentile?

  What about Alexander's body?

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  So Alexander's body is kept in Babylon for a while.

• 1:52:21AJ Gentile?

  For a while, okay.

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  And, uh, 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

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  of Patahotep, which, um, was written around 2400 B.C. 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, Khafir, and M'karl. Um, uh, I think 6th Dynasty or 5th? No, it must be 5th 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

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  freaking crazy. But one of the things that he says in the book is, uh... Is that the 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. Oftentimes, these normal peasants will have 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?

• 1:54:32AJ Gentile?

  There's the book, wow.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  So Ptolemy is not fooling anybody by just posturing like he's this great ruler. He actually has to appeal to the Egyptian people, because the Egyptians will revolt. I mean, they tried to revolt against the Greeks, they tried to revolt against the Romans, they still want independence, even though they they like the Greeks more than they like the Persians, they still want their own independence. And you can't fool these peasants. And if you can, you can't do it forever. You know, 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 and that is the expectation of a ruler in ancient Egypt. They were supposed to live in accordance with Maat. They had

• 1:55:12Speaker 03

  to be philosopher kings that were focused on morality and 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, crazy to me. So so

• 1:55:32AJ Gentile?

  Ptolemy obviously got through to them.

• 1:55:34Speaker 03

  He did. But he had but he had he had a dilemma. He had to figure out a way to do that. He had to this normal guy who's just a politician in the Greek world, had to figure out a way to break through. So he does, I'd say like, three and a half things.

• 1:55:52Speaker 03

  He builds the lighthouse of Alexandria. Essentially, it's a symbol of Egypt's... Well, he's got to do a lot too. He has to appeal to the Egyptians. Because he's now their governor. Soon, he's just gonna proclaim himself pharaoh. Because 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.

• 1:56:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:56:30Speaker 03

  And...

• 1:56:31AJ Gentile?

  Didn't his empire stop in Turkey or so? Like...

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think that they controlled a little bit of that.

• 1:56:39AJ Gentile?

  There's the lighthouse. That was over 300 feet tall.

• 1:56:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's actually... Well, I'll tell you in a second.

• 1:56:46AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  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's worried about impressing the Greeks. I was told this by a Greco-Roman historian as well. He was like, "Also think about the fact that he's trying to impress the Greeks and make a statement to them." And I was like, "Okay, that's true, that's true." So, that was told in stone. That told it to me. He's a great guy.

• 1:57:12Speaker 03

  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 Pharos. 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 history. But that's what it meant. It was a safe refuge, calling back to that primordial Greek world. But it's also built within just a few feet of being the same height as the Great Pyramid.

• 1:57:51AJ Gentile?

  Oh!

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  And it's built... 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 how old you think that the Osirion is, if you're familiar with the Osirion. A lot of people try to date that to... Oh, I think it's established dated to 19th Dynasty under Seti I.

• 1:58:17Speaker 03

  I don't agree with that. I think it's, I think it's definitely contemporaneous with the Valley Temple.

• 1:58:21AJ Gentile?

  You do?

• 1:58:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:22AJ Gentile?

  You don't think it goes back that far?

• 1:58:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean however old, however old the pyramids and the Valley Temple and the Sphinx is, I think the Osirion is the same age, built by the same architect.

• 1:58:31AJ Gentile?

  Oh, I would agree with that.

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the original excavators of the Osirion thought that.

• 1:58:36AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  It's pretty, it seems, it seems pretty obvious. So, um...

• 1:58:41AJ Gentile?

  And, um, they weren't really using Aswan granite. And they, so there's some Aswan in the King's Chamber, there's some of the Osirion.

• 1:58:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:50AJ Gentile?

  And that's it, right?

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it is, it is always incorporated, like the obelisks are raised, and those are red 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 Aswan granite that come from all periods of the New Kingdom, but the granite's being used in a totally different way. Um, 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.

• 1:59:34Speaker 03

  Like, people always say, "The, the stones from Aswan came 500 miles." Well, in Alexandria, they went 700 miles to be used, uh, for the lighthouse. So, the lighthouse is built within just a few feet of being the same height as the Great Pyramid. So, Tuttle me 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 200 years, that you always say you wish you could go back to the golden days, like in the Middle Kingdom, there are these things that are called the laments, which are these writings that come out of, that come out of ancient, uh, the Middle Kingdom. And, uh, it's basically these people like lamenting over like how crappy early Old Kingdom, or early Middle Kingdom was. And they wish that they could go back to the time of their great, great, great grandfathers, and so they would call it the golden days of, the golden days or golden age of Seneferu,

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  which is supposedly he lived before the Great Pyramid, 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 backwater dump that all these people live in, in the shadow of the pyramids. And so Ptolemy goes, no, we're going back now. So he fuels Egypt with all this money that came from Alexander's empire. And now, the uh, and now the grain that comes from Egypt is not being extorted by the Persians or anyone else, uh, or the Assyrians, I think they were conquered by the Assyrians shortly.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  They're not being extorted, even though it's a Greek in power, it's now like the old days because that Greek lives solely in Egypt, just as the capital moved north.

• 2:01:14AJ Gentile?

  The foreigner brought back national pride.

• 2:01:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:01:30AJ Gentile?

  And they ruled for a couple of hundred years as well?

• 2:01:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, five, five generations, I think.

• 2:01:34AJ Gentile?

  That's, that's a long time.

• 2:01:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, you know, the Egyptians, um, yes, it's a, it's a fascinating history. So he brings, so Ptolemy brings back like national pride. And, 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 museum 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,

• 2:02:21Speaker 03

  I think there's some marble in Egypt, but they were also importing marble from Greece through the, the markets and, um, All kinds of Egyptian granite, like it just would have been a

• 2:02:30AJ Gentile?

  Pretty would have been a spectacle.

• 2:02:31Speaker 03

  Crazy city. Greatest city, greatest city ever built up to this point.

• 2:02:35AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:35Speaker 03

  Far more impressive than Athens. And, and way more impressive than Rome. Rome is nothing at this point.

• 2:02:42Speaker 03

  And so, so you pull in, you come up to the dock and then, 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 they'll, so they'll say, "We're going to transcribe this, copy it all down, and then upon, when you leave, we'll have these ready to give back to you." But actually, they would keep the original and give you back the copy of what you had. So they're collecting this massive archive of, of all the known literature of the ancient world and people are studying things. I'm pretty sure it's a scientist that's living in, or scholar that's living in Alexandria who has the realization that, that the earth is a sphere.

• 2:03:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:27Speaker 03

  Eretostenes. I'm pretty sure he's, he's living in Alexandria when he performs this experiment.

• 2:03:31AJ Gentile?

  And you mentioned that it's more than a library, because it was, it was kind of like DARPA back then.

• 2:03:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:36AJ Gentile?

  Experiments and science and all kinds of things going on.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and 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 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, why the pyramids were built the way that they were. It's, it's really, really interesting. Minetho 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, there's even some particulars that I'm forgetting right now, but there were particulars that archaeologists disagreed with and then later on realized that they were wrong by disagreeing with him. So it's, it's, it's really cool.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  So Alexandria is like this amazing beacon, but it needs one more thing. It needs Alexander's body.

• 2:04:30AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:04:30Speaker 03

  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. I saw like a lecture or presentation on this a few years ago. But they decided to move his body north and they built this mausoleum for him. And he was buried in a solid gold sarcophagus with all of his treasures in the sarcophagus with him. And so the idea of the mausoleum, what we think was that it's set in the center of

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  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 and the museum. So if you're walking to work in the morning, you gotta walk underneath this huge mausoleum with a statue of Alexander on top of it. And then to the right is the library and the museum 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.

• 2:05:43AJ Gentile?

  They must have been so proud to live there.

• 2:05:45Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:05:46AJ Gentile?

  There's just glory all around you.

• 2:05:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:05:48AJ Gentile?

  There's nothing like this in the world.

• 2:05:49Speaker 03

  And so by Ptolemy securing Alexander's body, he's much more able to then declare himself the heir to Alexander. He's now going to be, he's now not just the governor of Egypt, which is what he was for a long time. Let me see, he becomes governor of Egypt. When does Alexander die?

• 2:06:09AJ Gentile?

  323 B.C. or something?

• 2:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, because he visits Egypt in 331 and then he leaves and never comes back.

• 2:06:16AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:17Speaker 03

  And I think it's not until about 310 B.C. 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 dire rights 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 Ptolemies. And so Ptolemy, one, he's the one that really expands Alexandria. He gets the, we don't actually know when the library, the museum and the lighthouse were done with their construction.

• 2:06:57Speaker 03

  Um, or we don't know if they were done during his lifetime, but Ptolemy II, they are complete during during his lifetime. And then Ptolemy III is born and they're just constantly expanding.

• 2:07:10AJ Gentile?

  Oh, there's Ptolemy as the pharaoh, yeah.

• 2:07:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really, really cool. So they're just constantly expanding Egypt's wealth during this time period. Egypt is filthy rich now.

• 2:07:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:19Speaker 03

  Probably the Egyptians were like, well, I wish our pharaoh was Egyptian, but but things are going pretty good for us right now. Then we have Ptolemy IV 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 250 B.C. I would guess, maybe a little bit after that. Um, 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 the meat cake, you know, that's that's sort of.

• 2:08:02AJ Gentile?

  It's kind of like nepo babies. It's dismissive to say that, but that's really what they were spoiled brats.

• 2:08:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it all starts falling apart. And then by about 150, uh, yeah, I think it's about 150 B.C. Uh, Ptolemy the 10th 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 debt that Ptolemy the 10th has no choice but to go down into the mausoleum of Alexander. They exhume his body from the gold sarcophagus and they build him what they call a crystal sarcophagus, which is probably alabaster, which is like,

• 2:08:49Speaker 03

  you know, some mid-level people throughout Egypt could afford an alabaster sarcophagus. Um, so it's really not a high honor to be put in an alabaster sarcophagus.

• 2:08:59AJ Gentile?

  And he just wants the gold.

• 2:09:00Speaker 03

  They they melt down all of the gold that Alexander was born with that he had been resting in for the last 170 years. And that is gone. You know, it gets melted down and it probably gets sold off to partly pay the debt. So uh, Ptolemy the 11th is born.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  And he's not a very good Pharaoh. Ptolemy the 12th is born.

• 2:09:21AJ Gentile?

  Now, we're getting close to Cleopatra Mark Antony time.

• 2:09:23Speaker 03

  Ptolemy the 12th is, um, is, or Ptolemy the 12th is Cleopatra's father, I believe. Or maybe it's Ptolemy the 13th, 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.

• 2:09:39AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  So, long story short with Cleopatra, um, she, for some reason, 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, uh, judging by when the library gets attacked and part of it gets burned down. She's like devastated by that. Mark Antony gives her a gift to repay her by donating like 200,000 books to the library. Which is-

• 2:10:20AJ Gentile?

  This was Caesar who burned it that first time, right?

• 2:10:22Speaker 03

  The first time, yeah, yeah. And then it's burned again by Augustus, uh, later on. So, um, and then it's burned again by, uh, Aurelian and it's burned by Caracalla. Yeah, it's, it, it actually gets destroyed like five times, um, but most people just, just only remember the, the first. But, um-

• 2:10:42AJ Gentile?

  And I think the first is probably the least damaging.

• 2:10:45Speaker 03

  Oh, the last one is, the last one is the most. We'll, we'll get there.

• 2:10:48AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:10:49Speaker 03

  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 Apis 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 Serapeum, um, which is that labyrinth that's under the ground where these massive, you know, bull boxes are. They call them the Serapeum boxes, the bull sarcophagi, whatever. They would have definitely gone down in there. There's no question that Cleopatra walked those halls as a little girl.

• 2:11:30Speaker 03

  And she probably was mystified by the mystery of this underground place that's super ancient. And she's hearing Egyptian being spoken next to her and- You know, it's kind of like one of those people who break out of some kind of family cycle. 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 to learning like every language. I think they, they say that she could speak like seven language flu, seven languages fluently, or maybe more. But she could, she could speak, read and write Egyptian. And she loved that culture. And through, by hook or by crook, she finds herself as Pharaoh. Whether or not she had her siblings killed, all of them killed on purpose, whether or not she had her brother killed, we don't really know.

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  They say he drowned. Um, you know, so we don't, we don't really know. But she becomes a 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 Colosseum. There's no Circus Maximus. I don't think the Circus Maximus is there, at least not in the way that it later would be.

• 2:13:00Speaker 03

  Even while Cleopatra is alive, which is, you know, let's call it roughly 40 B.C., Rome is just a city of 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...

• 2:13:31Speaker 03

  Invaded, like, like, the Romans are basically performing espionage inside the, inside Alexandria. They're sinking their claws in and becoming more powerful. And Alexandria is slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, over time, until the Ptolemies are so weak that all the pharaohs gotta do is walk in and, or all, all the Roman emperor or, or a wealthy Romans are gonna walk in and be like, "Well, what are you gonna do now?"

• 2:13:53AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:13:54Speaker 03

  And that was, that, and Cleopatra knew that. That's why she seduced Julius Caesar, because rather than being conquered by him, if she could marry him, she could pull the Roman capital down to Alexandria instead. And that's what Julius Caesar wanted to do. That's why, that's ultimately why he got killed.

• 2:14:10AJ Gentile?

  There's still a rumor that they had a child together.

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  Oh, they definitely did, Caesarion.

• 2:14:15AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:18Speaker 03

  Augustus killed him, for sure.

• 2:14:21AJ Gentile?

  What is there to the story that Augustus knocked off Alexander's nose when he went to visit the body?

• 2:14:28Speaker 03

  Oh, is that Augustus, or is that?

• 2:14:30AJ Gentile?

  I thought it was Augustus Octavian.

• 2:14:34AJ Gentile?

  I could be wrong. I talk to a fish.

• 2:14:37Speaker 03

  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. Yeah, but there was another, there was another guy who was more obsessed with Alexander, I believe. It may have been Caligula, or it may have been Caracalla, who comes to Alexandria and wants to see Alexander's tomb and puts on Alexander's breastplate.

• 2:15:07AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 2:15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, takes it off of his body and puts it on. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, some of those Roman emperors, 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, man.

• 2:15:18AJ Gentile?

  That sounds like a Caligula move to me.

• 2:15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does sound like, like something Caligula would do. But it could be Caracalla, too. He, Caracalla was a crazy guy, also. But, but Augustus was very respectful. Augustus is like, you know, a lot of people hold Julius Caesar up as being like the truest Roman. I don't know, it might be Augustus, because Augustus is ruthless, but respectful. So, I think it's the story of Augustus, or it might be Julius Caesar. When he shows up to Alexandria, he wants to see Alexander's tomb.

• 2:15:52Speaker 03

  So they bring him down in the mausoleum, but also buried there were the sarcophagi of all the other Ptolemaic kings. They're all buried around Alexander. So it's this huge mausoleum and they're all buried in it, right? So it's like a museum. You can see, well, here's Alexander in the center, over there is Ptolemy I, all the way to Ptolemy 13. And it might be Augustus or it's Julius 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 like that. And he basically just like shits on all the other, you know, Ptolemies. And so anyways, Cleopatra knew that the Romans were on the doorstep of Egypt. And the only thing she could do is seduce the most powerful man in Rome. Because you gotta keep in mind Julius Caesar was never a Roman emperor.

• 2:16:36Speaker 03

  He was just a very wealthy warlord and he controlled a vast portion of the Roman world. And so she knew, "If I can get this guy on my side, I can pull him down here and we can be co-regents together and Egypt won't be conquered, right? Egypt will still have its autonomy, it'll just be fused with a new civilization." Or maybe she was thinking that Julius Caesar would break off from the Romans altogether and bring all his men down there.

• 2:17:04AJ Gentile?

  Was this happening before Crassus and Pompey or after?

• 2:17:09Speaker 03

  During.

• 2:17:10AJ Gentile?

  During.

• 2:17:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:11AJ Gentile?

  During all of that.

• 2:17:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so anyways, I think that Pompey has perhaps already died at this point. And there are some people that Julius Caesar, for some reason, for years I had thought that Pompey was in Alexandria and to prevent him from fleeing Julius Caesar had the docks burned. But I think it was this part of his army, something like that. Julius Caesar doesn't want this group of guys leaving, so he burns the docks and destroys their ships so that they can't even escape. So he's gonna find them and kill them all. Well, when that happens, you can imagine like the docks connected by ropes and wood. And you know, the library itself is built out of stone, but the floorboards are all made out of wood.

• 2:17:53Speaker 03

  And so think about the, imagine like a wine cellar, the little diamond slots that you put the wine bottles in. That's how the papyri were stored and those were all made out of wood. So the interior of the library burns up, but the stone architecture survives, right? And so a massive portion of the library is destroyed. And I don't know why. You know, you hear a lot of historians, they repeat the popular debunk. That's like, oh, it's not really that bad. The library had already been in decay. 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.

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:18:49AJ Gentile?

  They may have made the library great again.

• 2:18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'm guessing so that she invested, she poured a whole bunch of money back into it. Because clearly she's very, very well educated. It must have spent a lot of time there.

• 2:19:01AJ Gentile?

  And the lighthouse is still this beacon.

• 2:19:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:19:13AJ Gentile?

  That's crazy. I know a couple of earthquakes hit it pretty bad over the years.

• 2:19:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then they decided to tear it down to build the new, I forget, there's some citadel that's there today. But some of those blocks are still there and the blocks are still like laying in the water around that. It was just tumbled and fallen into the water, but you can see these massive granite Aswan blocks laying there.

• 2:19:36AJ Gentile?

  Well, then give me your take. Where's the body? Is it St. Mark's?

• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm sorry. This is the most long-winded answer of all time.

• 2:19:44AJ Gentile?

  No, I love this stuff.

• 2:19:45Speaker 03

  So, so, long story short, Julius Caesar is killed before he can move Rome's capital. 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 Antony, they know that if they go back to Rome with Augustus, they're going to be paraded around and then they're going to be executed. So they kill themselves. And Augustus, being actually a classy guy, when he visits Alexander's tomb, he's respectful, very respectful of the tomb. He looks up to Alexander, sees him as like this mythical hero.

• 2:20:30Speaker 03

  And he allows, as far as we know, he allows Cleopatra and Mark Antony to be buried where they wanted to be buried. Nobody's ever found their bodies. And he gave the Egyptians one year to mourn Cleopatra. And most people don't realize this. Augustus just became Pharaoh. It wasn't like the Pharaohs ended. There's still another 325 years of Pharaohs to go.

• 2:20:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:20:53Speaker 03

  Like, most people don't realize that. That's crazy. Most of the time, we look at Egypt's history from 3100 B.C. to 30 B.C., but no, it goes on, it keeps going on. So,

• 2:21:05AJ Gentile?

  But Augustus was a great politician because he would have had a revolt if he didn't allow that.

• 2:21:08Speaker 03

  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, uh, yeah, just a cunning, merciless, 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.

• 2:21:41AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:21:41Speaker 03

  Back to, you know, back, back to work. And, um, so-

• 2:21:45AJ Gentile?

  Is the body, Alexandria's still there? The lighthouse is still there?

• 2:21:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so when, when Augustus invaded, he burned down Alexandria's library. Uh, part of it. We don't know, you know, to how, how much. Uh, Caracalla, there are all these Alexandrians 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 25,000 people and slaughters them and burns down, and burns down the Palisades. Now, the Palisades are connected directly to the library. So, the library gets, gets damaged during this time. Caracalla doesn't care. Uh, Aurelian has to come and squash a, uh, this isn't Marcus Aurelius, this is Aurelian. He has to come and squash a revolt

• 2:22:32Speaker 03

  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 burned down. The Palisades are connected to the library. So, the library gets affected. Then, in 365 A.D., 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.

• 2:23:13Speaker 03

  The devastation was so dramatic that all of the boats in the docks had crashed onto the roofs and of the ruins of the toppled cities of Alexandria. There was another historian that arrived, another name that you would, you and I would recognize, and he arrived and, 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, that had gone unreported, people looking for the bodies of these people throughout the city. And the city is completely demolished, completely devastated. The waves came up and crashed over the walls that surrounded the city and toppled everything.

• 2:23:55Speaker 03

  And it's from that exact moment, that day in the historical time period, that we do not know where, I believe, we don't know where the library is anymore, we don't know where the museum is anymore, we don't know where the mausoleum is anymore, and with his body, it's gone. And myself and, and Tolden Stone, we were talking about this while we, while we were in Alexandria, and we were thinking, probably during that time period, there were people, so his mausoleum is underground. Yep. Well, probably, you know, that water floods in and just, like, when that, when that, when his body, in his crappy alabaster sarcophagus he's left with, thank you, Tolemy

• 2:24:36Speaker 03

  Ten, when that gets flooded with that, with that salty water, I think it's saltwater or freshwater, but when he 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

• 2:25:15Speaker 03

  all of the, you know, glorious Alexandrian architecture, that, that 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, from Alexandria. And one of the last things he says is, When I was born, I found the city, a city of my brick, I leave it a city of marble. And, um, and he, uh,

• 2:25:43AJ Gentile?

  What a great line.

• 2:25:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:25:52Speaker 03

  But I think that most likely his body was pulverized by the Mediterranean and doesn't exist anymore. That's what I think.

• 2:26:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, there may be some other, some other ideas to the story like,

• 2:26:03AJ Gentile?

  There's a lot of theories that, there's marks that is in, um, what's the, uh, the Daniel mosque that's there, is that theory?

• 2:26:12Speaker 03

  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, it's like several hundred years later, when Christianity is much more widespread.

• 2:26:30AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:26:30Speaker 03

  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 Alexandria was flooded and the whole city is destroyed.

• 2:26:42AJ Gentile?

  I'm with you. I don't think anything survives that.

• 2:26:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:45AJ Gentile?

  You know, boats on the roofs, it's crazy. I mean, we're talking 30, 40 foot waves.

• 2:26:48Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, boats landing on the roof, you know, it's, it's wild that, uh, that the lighthouse even survived that. But it shows you how well-built that thing really was.

• 2:26:58AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:26:58Speaker 03

  You know, crazy.

• 2:27:00AJ Gentile?

  We're gonna take a, uh, quick break and come back and talk about,

• 2:27:04AJ Gentile?

  we got a lot to talk about still. We gotta talk about where Jaguars and we have to get to the Minoan culture somehow.

• 2:27:10Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 2:27:11AJ Gentile?

  Back in a minute. I want to hear about the Almex and solve for me how those giant 10, 20 ton heads get moved down a river on a raft.

• 2:27:24Speaker 03

  Man, I wish I could solve that. I'd be,

• 2:27:27AJ Gentile?

  I mean, is there a solve for that?

• 2:27:31Speaker 03

  Somewhere, if you were asking ancient Olmec how it was done, I'm sure that they, they could explain it.

• 2:27:35AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:36Speaker 03

  Um, so the Olmecs, man, they're, uh, they're one of my favorite ancient civilizations.

• 2:27:43AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 2:27:46Speaker 03

  They're, they're, 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, the one that's just the left of that, that guy right there, that's the main head at La Venta. And Dr. Barnhart and I are walking around the, uh, city of Viermosa 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 Olmecs and, and, uh, and he's saying, 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. Barnhart goes, look.

• 2:28:27Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 2:28:43AJ Gentile?

  How big is that head? You can't really tell from the picture.

• 2:28:44Speaker 03

  Oh, enormous. I mean,

• 2:28:45AJ Gentile?

  Twelve feet high?

• 2:28:46Speaker 03

  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 fifteen, twenty tons or so. It's solid gray, like basalt. Uh, comes from the Sierra de la Tushla volcanic belt. It's probably like ninety 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 Olmecs, they emerge on the archaeological

• 2:29:32Speaker 03

  timeline as a fully fledged and organized civilization. From the very beginning, the civilization is formed. We don't have like a, um,

• 2:29:43Speaker 03

  We don't have a formation period.

• 2:29:46AJ Gentile?

  That's very strange. I know all the ancient astronaut people are going nuts right now.

• 2:29:50Speaker 03

  Oh, they are. Well.

• 2:29:50AJ Gentile?

  It's one of the civilizations. It just appears.

• 2:29:52Speaker 03

  And you know, this thing gets, this thing gets thrown, that idea gets thrown towards ancient Egypt a lot. But in reality, that's actually not the case. I mean, if the pyramids are around 24, 25, 2600 B.C. Well, we have about 800 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.

• 2:30:19AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:30:20Speaker 03

  We don't have any evidence of anything that's in any sort of formative period at all whatsoever before these heads arrive.

• 2:30:26AJ Gentile?

  Where was the center of the Olmec society?

• 2:30:30Speaker 03

  Uh, like that, it's weird how Mexico is broken up because southern Mexico is actually like in the east and you know, it's Mexico's weirdly shaped country. But, uh, south central Mexico, like Veracruz and Tabasco and a little bit of Oaxaca. So, you know, kind of where Mexico comes down and it gets thin at this point, right there.

• 2:30:52Speaker 03

  So this, it's like this swampy, hot, humid, flat area. It's, it's not the most appealing place to live, which is funny because 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 lands. They get to live in this quiet, isolated existence and build and build and build and build and build their wealth until boom, you know, they've arrived. But they arrive at about 2000 B.C. 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've got nothing before that. They just, boom, they're there.

• 2:31:35AJ Gentile?

  And then do they just disappear just as quickly?

• 2:31:38Speaker 03

  So they, they increase in power, we think, from, um...

• 2:31:45Speaker 03

  From 2000 B.C. and then somewhere between about 1600 to 900 B.C. is like the peak of their power. 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, but in all, probably about a dozen sites.

• 2:32:08AJ Gentile?

  And we don't even know what they call themselves, right?

• 2:32:10Speaker 03

  We have no idea what they call themselves. We don't know what language they spoke.

• 2:32:13AJ Gentile?

  So when the Aztecs found those sites, were they already ancient?

• 2:32:16Speaker 03

  So the Aztec, well, we don't know that the Aztecs ever found the sites. They, they found, we know that the Aztecs had, had artifacts that come from the Olmec world. Like you have these Olmec jade little pendants that we think would have been worn as like a necklace around the chest. That's the idea. 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 first Olmec, the ma- first major Olmec cultural center that rises up is called San Lorenzo. The full name of it is San Lorenzo

• 2:32:56Speaker 03

  Tenochtitlan because way out in these fields, um, it's 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 Mexican city called San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan that's built in the ruins of the Aztec city. So they're not that far apart from each other, but we just don't know if the Aztecs knew that the origins of Mesoamerica itself was like, you know, I don't know, an hour walk away out, 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, their empire is 3,000 years later. So

• 2:33:39AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:33:40Speaker 03

  It's possible that the Aztecs never knew that the Olmecs had ever existed or known anything about them at all. It's possible. One of the interesting things is that we know that the Aztecs found the city of Teotihuacan. And that Teotihuacan had been abandoned for about a thousand years at this point. And they thought that it was the city of the birthplace of the gods, you know? So, yeah, it's crazy how much stuff gets abandoned and forgotten in Mesoamerica and rediscovered later. And the history and the density of Mesoamerica is unlike anywhere else in the ancient world. It is vast and dense. There's nowhere in Mesoamerica that went uninhabited. But, again, the Olmecs are the origins of that whole world.

• 2:34:22Speaker 03

  But the interesting thing about the Olmecs is you look through all the Mesoamerican cultures that come later, and they all have vaguely similar pantheons of gods. You've got Choc, the rain god, and Choc... You also have the rain god in so many different other cultures. And you've got Kukulcan, which is the serpent god, and Quetzalcoatl, which is this god. The only one that actually... of this massive pantheon of Mesoamerican gods, the only one that we can see in the Olmec world is actually the feathered serpent.

• 2:34:51Speaker 03

  Kukulcan or Quetzalcoatl is depicted on Monument 19 in the Olmec world. But it seems like the Olmec religion is more based on shamanism and everything. So it's almost like a pre-Mesoamerican civilization.

• 2:35:05AJ Gentile?

  Do we see feathered serpent later, anywhere?

• 2:35:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:09AJ Gentile?

  Because that's very random, to put feathers on a snake.

• 2:35:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it plays into this whole dragon fascination that I have. So it is such an odd thing. So the first time we see it is around 1,000 B.C. Olmec Monument 19. It was found in the city of La Venta. It's on display in Mexico City today. Probably my favorite Olmec monument. Such a particular depiction.

• 2:35:37AJ Gentile?

  It's Monument 19. What do you like about it? What's so special? Is that it right there?

• 2:35:42Speaker 03

  No, no. So that's Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan. Which is interesting, because at Teotihuacan, we don't actually know... Quetzalcoatl is an Aztec word. But the Aztecs adopted the feathered serpent. The Teotihuacanos also had it. But we don't know what the Teotihuacanos called it, just like we don't know what the Olmecs called it 2,000 years earlier, right? So think about this. The Aztecs find Teotihuacan been abandoned for around a thousand years. Okay, that's two, Teotihuacan was abandoned 2,000 years after the Olmec period. Like the, the stretches of time we're talking about are enormous.

• 2:36:13AJ Gentile?

  I don't think people really fully grasp how much time that is.

• 2:36:16Speaker 03

  Well, and that's kind of the thing is, is one of, is one of the things as I've.

• 2:36:21AJ Gentile?

  Oh, there's the monument.

• 2:36:22Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:36:37AJ Gentile?

  And this is made with stone tools somehow? Yeah. That precision?

• 2:36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41AJ Gentile?

  And there's the, the omnipresent purse?

• 2:36:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. You got, you got the, you got the handbag guy. And um, it's, it's fascinating. He's being carried by, you can, like he's, the, the serpent is wrapped around him and the serpent's carrying.

• 2:36:53AJ Gentile?

  I see that. Yep.

• 2:36:55Speaker 03

  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 developed to be able to commission things like this. Because the Olmecs don't have this kind of stone in their land. It's being exported from outside, from outside of their land.

• 2:37:20AJ Gentile?

  And that's been traced? We know where that stone is from?

• 2:37:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Sierra de la Tushla volcanic belt. Um, and so 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.

• 2:37:38AJ Gentile?

  And this is supposed to be pre-agriculture, which just doesn't work. Cause the society would need to be separated at this point.

• 2:37:44Speaker 03

  Oh no, this, this here is well into agricultural time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, so the Olmecs, they're getting, so, so the, the Coets Calcos River is one of the largest rivers. Like it goes from, uh,

• 2:37:57Speaker 03

  I could, I could be wrong here, but it might connect to the oceans.

• 2:38:01AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:38:03Speaker 03

  You know, between the, or I should say the Gulf, like you may be able to, at least I know that it cuts down that massive narrow area because you have, you have Olmec sites that dot it all the way from the Gulf Coast, all the way to the Pacific, along that Coas Calcos, these really fertile river valleys. And so the Olmecs-

• 2:38:20AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know they went that far west.

• 2:38:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. We have, we have Olmec cities on the, on the Pacific Ocean, like right next to the beach.

• 2:38:28AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that. This is an empire.

• 2:38:31Speaker 03

  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? But we know that they're super powerful and that power, my guess, must have come from how lush the, how lush the valley is because I've stood over it before and I've taken a picture, isolated of just the Coas Calcos Valley at the base of the city of San Lorenzo. And one of my buddies who was there with me, who's also been to Egypt, I showed him that picture. I said, if I told you that was in Egypt, you would think it was, because it looks just like Egypt. You look at photos of the Mesopotamian Valley of, you know,

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  the fertile crescent, looks exactly the same. It's just that fertile valley where things can grow just at a level that no one else can. So the Olmecs, they're profiting off of all of that and they become the first emergent civilization in Mesopotamia. But again, it's like instant, just more than any other culture in the ancient world, far more, it's not even comparable because by definition, the Olmecs appear on the historical record, fully formed. Not like, oh, well, you know, it was super fast. Like 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.

• 2:39:50AJ Gentile?

  Do we know genetically who they were?

• 2:39:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, all you can do is you can go to the most, and they've done this, you can go to the most isolated, like indigenous villages in Mexico today. You've got these little, little tiny towns where people still live in huts and in the same way that ancient people have been doing for thousands of years. There's Maya people still living in the traditional Maya huts. So you get their DNA and yeah, it's, it's like ancient American DNA connected to.

• 2:40:19Speaker 03

  Connected to the people who came across the Bering Strait. It's the same sort of DNA.

• 2:40:23AJ Gentile?

  Asian and Polynesian.

• 2:40:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, what's interesting is like 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 disappear. That's a Mongolian trait. It happens to Mongolian babies too.

• 2:40:57AJ Gentile?

  I never heard that.

• 2:40:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure that that's right. Dr. Barnhart, he, he documented this. Um, it is a birthmark that disappears, but I think it's on their butt. And, um, yeah, so, 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, at some point in far distant past, but 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 the 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.

• 2:41:42Speaker 03

  Comanches look a lot different than Cherokee. The Cherokee look a lot different than the Iroquois people, Iroquois people. Natives from California look a lot different.

• 2:41:52AJ Gentile?

  Well, it's half the planet.

• 2:41:53Speaker 03

  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 Zapatecs or Oaxacans. And those all look different than the Olmecs. The Olmecs are so, the Olmecs have the roundish, puffy faces and they actually legitimately have that. They don't really look like, uh, they have these skinny, the Maya had these skinny, long angular faces. The Olmecs are exactly the opposite of that. And there, I should have gotten a photo of it, but I, I didn't want to ask the guy. I was on a flight.

• 2:42:37Speaker 03

  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, 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 love, like, I want to sneak a photo of this guy to, so I would have, so I'd have proof, but.

• 2:43:00AJ Gentile?

  Put a beanie on him.

• 2:43:01Speaker 03

  They still look that way today.

• 2:43:03AJ Gentile?

  Um, what do we, what do we think that hat is, that helmet that the heads are wearing? I mean, I don't buy the ball court thing.

• 2:43:10Speaker 03

  Oh, that is, that is a depiction of, of ball court players?

• 2:43:13AJ Gentile?

  Crown, right?

• 2:43:15Speaker 03

  I think, I think it's a fusion of, 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, you got the hero twins that are playing the ball game. And, uh, you know, the ball game 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 ball game players and it's about the game. I think it's about like this, 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 Commodus depicts himself?

• 2:43:57AJ Gentile?

  As a gladiator.

• 2:43:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So I think it's, I think it's a similar thing to that.

• 2:44:01AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that, that's interesting.

• 2:44:03Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 2:44:34AJ Gentile?

  Well, it's a lot of resources.

• 2:44:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:44:53AJ Gentile?

  You do.

• 2:44:53Speaker 03

  So, 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, 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.

• 2:45:32AJ Gentile?

  What do you mean?

• 2:45:33Speaker 03

  It's like we're.

• 2:45:39Speaker 03

  The feathered serpent is, is a perfect, is a perfect example here.

• 2:45:46Speaker 03

  They know, Native Americans know that the feathered serpent is not real. It is an amalgamation of different

• 2:46:00Speaker 03

  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, 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. I think, I think it's an esoteric. Symbolism of the conquering of the three realms. A snake is born underground.

• 2:46:42AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:46:42Speaker 03

  It rises up, so it's born in the underworld, it rises up and conquers the mid realm. And what I think that Mesoamericans, maybe they originally were seeing, but they knew that these were actually two separated things because we can see on the Olmec Monument 19 that they knew. I'll tell you.

• 2:47:04Speaker 03

  Probably like 10,000 years ago.

• 2:47:07Speaker 03

  Mesoamericans are seeing what's called the Quetzal bird fly around.

• 2:47:11AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:47:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:47:21AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 2:47:22Speaker 03

  Looks like a snake and you add the wings on to it. And so, and you could look up something, 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 up here in like the United States. And what I, yeah, so there you go. So that tail is actually much, much longer than that. You just can't tell by this angle. But it looks like wings coming out of a, and I've seen one Quetzal bird in person. I walked into a temple in the Yucatan and a Quetzal bird flew straight over my head out of the temple. But it looks like a snake with wings.

• 2:48:06Speaker 03

  But we know that they didn't actually think it was a snake with wings. Because if you go back to Monument 19, there are two Quetzal birds depicted on the monument. So they weren't being fooled. What I think it is, is it's a, 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 Quetzal bird. Or of Quetzal Coatl or the feathered serpent. It's like a, it's symbolic of the fact that this person is fully awakened and they have conquered all three levels of existence. They've been born in the underworld, they came to the mid world and they ascended probably. Through hallucinogenic practices or something like that, they ascended to where their soul is able to fly like,

• 2:48:52Speaker 03

  like this dragon, which is basically what this feathered serpent is. So they never, they knew that that thing didn't actually exist, but they created it as a symbol of almost like awakening itself, if that makes sense, spiritual awakening, conquering all three levels of existence, maybe conquering death, that might be what it is, flying in the air. It's really hard to, 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?

• 2:49:29AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 2:49:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does.

• 2:49:40AJ Gentile?

  Was it really a thing?

• 2:49:43Speaker 03

  I don't know, man. I don't know. You know, I've seen the argument. It's like, um, we have these massive, um,

• 2:49:51Speaker 03

  I've seen the argument before that, that not all the times do wings in fossils.

• 2:50:00Speaker 03

  Not all the times that they are they preserved in fossils and that the wings, 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.

• 2:50:23AJ Gentile?

  And feathers, right?

• 2:50:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:50:36AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, the serpent 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.

• 2:50:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, um, I did a little tracing of the, um, of the dragon through some parts of the ancient world recently, and I think that the. I think the breathing fire thing comes in the Middle Ages a lot. And so I wonder if the Middle Ages are like very far removed from the pure dragon. 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.

• 2:51:17AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:51:18Speaker 03

  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, like a, uh, an anaconda swallowing them. I have, I have a buddy who told me that an anaconda swallowed him while he was on ayahuasca and it wrapped around his body and whispered in his ear, it told 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...

• 2:52:03AJ Gentile?

  Maybe they're real, just not real here.

• 2:52:06Speaker 03

  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 later Maya world, that, that Kukulkan is, the Maya ruler is the human embodiment of Kukulkan and the Aztec ruler was the human embodiment of Quetzalcoatl. It was probably the same thing in Teotihuacan too, which is where the Aztecs get that from. Uh, cause probably the Teotihuacanos still live, but like dispersed and their mythology carries down and the Aztecs absorb it and kind of reinvigorate it, but, um...

• 2:52:45AJ Gentile?

  Was it a positive symbol? Like it was in ancient China? Cause dragon was a positive symbol for them.

• 2:52:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:50AJ Gentile?

  But not in Norse mythology or everywhere else?

• 2:52:53Speaker 03

  No, no, no, it wasn't. Norse mythology is, yeah, that's it. Because the, the dragon is eating the entire universe in Norse, in Norse mythology. Yeah, it's, it's interesting. No, but it...

• 2:53:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it was a, it's funny to say a positive thing in Mesoamerica. Dr. Barnhart 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 so there's, 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's like, he's like, he 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, their, their whole religion, their whole culture is so macabre and dark

• 2:53:50Speaker 03

  and about killing people and sacrifices and war. And he's like, where's all the love? There might, 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, Mesoamerica. It's hard to know if anything's positive. Yeah. 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? But the dragon, especially in China, the dragon is not a foe. It's not a monster to be slayed.

• 2:54:32Speaker 03

  It's, uh, is an embodiment of, of, well, in China, it's actually, the dragon is actually in, um, in an amalgamation of all the animals of their world. So it's like a, it's like a tiger and a camel and eagles and all these animals brought in together into this strange creature.

• 2:54:53Speaker 03

  But yeah, you know, 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 know. You can only answer the question by going through the, by going through the mysteries. To be honest with you, that's actually what I think it is that like the cult of, the cult of Eleusis, the Egyptian mysteries that Herodotus writes about.

• 2:55:18AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:55:18Speaker 03

  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 Olmecs. 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, a mystery is almost like the religious organization that safeholds sacred, cosmological, scientific, astronomical, astrological knowledge. It's all fused together and these are the people who preserve and safekeep and try

• 2:56:03Speaker 03

  to uphold the very universe itself by carrying out these rituals. And, you know, we don't exactly know what they were doing, but.

• 2:56:09AJ Gentile?

  No, but you're describing like a familial shamanistic culture.

• 2:56:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:56:12AJ Gentile?

  That you're passing down the secrets of the universe.

• 2:56:14Speaker 03

  So, so those, so those are called the mysteries.

• 2:56:16AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:56:17Speaker 03

  And every ancient culture has them. And rather than most archaeologists who look back and, you know, no archaeologist is going to like openly say, oh yeah, that's the way I feel. But I think that, I think so many of them just implicitly think that ancient people were naive and that their ancient religions were just like hokey and they were a way to manipulate the common man and that it was all sort of like a, you know, people coming and leaving offerings to dead people, like leaving food. They, 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 B.C., the entire ancient world is populated with massive civilizations, all doing roughly the same thing.

• 2:57:01AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 2:57:02Speaker 03

  And, um, and I don't think that that's just because all those people are dumb. I think that they.

• 2:57:09Speaker 03

  One of the coolest quotes I ever heard was from the professor Jeremy McInerney, and he was talking about the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. And he's like, "I'm not gonna get overly into this in this lecture." And he's like, "But I'm just gonna say this. I don't mean this in any sort of metaphorical way, or I don't mean it in a symbolic..." Or he said, "I don't mean this in 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." And he just leaves it at that. This is like a credentialed, world-class Greek archaeologist. And he just leaves it at that? I've never, ever heard him extrapolate on that before.

• 2:57:52Speaker 03

  And I don't know what exactly he's getting at there. I don't know if he means that...

• 2:57:58AJ Gentile?

  Does he mean the gases within the mountain that gave her visions?

• 2:58:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think he just means, yeah, I think he just means that... I don't think he's saying that he actually believes that Apollo is real. I think he's just saying that the oracle is actually... There's something real, there's a real element to that. And he just kinda leaves it at that.

• 2:58:23AJ Gentile?

  I think that's a psychedelic experience.

• 2:58:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and the question is, when you're taking part in psychedelics, are you actually interacting with something? Or are we all wired the same way to interact with plants the same way? Or when you interact with that plant, are you stepping into something else?

• 2:58:40AJ Gentile?

  What do you think? Have you taken the journey yet?

• 2:58:42Speaker 03

  No, I mean, not... I have a very low tolerance to, like, cannabis. And so, you know, in extremely strong doses, that's been enough for me.

• 2:58:52AJ Gentile?

  You know you're gonna have to walk the walk at some point.

• 2:58:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. See, the thing for me is, I don't wanna 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.

• 2:59:04AJ Gentile?

  Probably smart.

• 2:59:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I gotta wait till it calls me. But I will do it, I will do it at some point. But it just has to be the right time. Right now, I don't feel the need to do it. But, uh, yeah, I've... My friends and I talk about this a lot. And I need to put together a presentation, like, really putting my thoughts together on this too, because I've juggled it around for so long.

• 2:59:32Speaker 03

  But I'm comfortable saying it. I think that

• 2:59:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:59:49Speaker 03

  I think in some way, that is two things at once, like in the same way that like are we all just, Forrest Gump has a great line, a deep profound line where he says, he's 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 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

• 3:00:33Speaker 03

  live, if there's, if there are conscious beings that exist in some kind of other parallel dimensions that you're able to interact with. And maybe those beings are the universe itself, or it's a reflection of us, but

• 3:00:45AJ Gentile?

  Well, do you believe in God?

• 3:00:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do. Yeah.

• 3:00:48AJ Gentile?

  How do we square both?

• 3:00:51Speaker 03

  I think that God is, I think that God is a lot more

• 3:00:57Speaker 03

  I think that God's a lot more complicated than like a man floating on a white cloud and in, you know, some Renaissance painting.

• 3:01:04AJ Gentile?

  I agree.

• 3:01:05Speaker 03

  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 want to, I'm really getting way off on this, but you know, maybe, maybe they, maybe they want to be moral, and maybe they want to be actually worshiped as a moral god. And so you can go down to the Amazon, you can interact with those, you can interact with those things, and they're, they're really there. But I think that I, I agree with like,

• 3:01:47Speaker 03

  The Greek philosophers, they thought that logos was at like the core of the universe.

• 3:01:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:01:52Speaker 03

  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 itself may have had, they personified it, or we personify it. But they see something at the core of all of existence that actively made decisions that were logical, that created everything. And is that thing conscious or not? It's probably not conscious in the way that you and I think about it being conscious, but it's, I think it's real. And that's what I think that God is.

• 3:02:30Speaker 03

  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 to them. Sometimes I, sometimes I wrestle with that and like Christianity, but uh.

• 3:02:46AJ Gentile?

  Well, people are seeing the same things.

• 3:02:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:02:48AJ Gentile?

  Under DMT experiences and.

• 3:02:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:02:51AJ Gentile?

  They are seeing the same things. Maybe it's because our brains are the same, or maybe they're seeing something.

• 3:02:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, and then, you know, when I, when I have a straight up vision about my grandfather's death and my last moment with him, where, what is that? You know, that's not, that's not a coincidence of me being wired like a human, you know, that's.

• 3:03:12AJ Gentile?

  No, that's you connected to something bigger.

• 3:03:13Speaker 03

  That's, that's me connected to something larger. All ancient people felt this way. All ancient people, um, you know, 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 calloused and cut off from these days. Our world has, for all of the benefits that modernity has brought to us with science, everything has also become so sterile. And I think that there's a, there's a great quote, I don't know who, who said it, but uh, he says, he's like, he's like, "The first sip from the glass of science will make you an atheist, but at the bottom, God's waiting for you." And uh, you know, you, there are so many people, like Stephen Hawking, I don't think

• 3:03:58Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 3:04:19AJ Gentile?

  Prove him wrong.

• 3:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's God to me. So, um, yeah, but it's, it's tough to, it's tough to juggle these things and rationalize them together.

• 3:04:28AJ Gentile?

  But I think you're right. I think native people, especially in the Americas, just were much closer to whatever that realm is.

• 3:04:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, man.

• 3:04:34AJ Gentile?

  They respected it.

• 3:04:35Speaker 03

  You know, there's a, um, there's a great book that's written by, um,

• 3:04:41Speaker 03

  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 1500s. He was the daughter of a wealthy Spaniard 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 Count of the Incas. And it's basically him, yeah, I, in his early twenties, he left and went back to Spain to like reclaim his family's wealth and everything. And when he's an old man, he writes about his experiences, um, growing up in Cusco and all the things that he learned. And, uh, man, Cusco's an amazing place. Have you been?

• 3:05:25AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:05:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:05:31AJ Gentile?

  Is it, that's, and that's the heart of the Incan empire?

• 3:05:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's the navel of the Inca world. And, um, you know, they, they thought it was like the center of the universe itself, you know?

• 3:05:41Speaker 03

  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, really amazing place. Um, but, uh,

• 3:05:51AJ Gentile?

  Peru's very open to excavation and their history and all of that.

• 3:05:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, for a little bit there, I was the, um, I was the American representative to, uh, to get funding for the excavation of the Chincana tunnels.

• 3:06:05AJ Gentile?

  Wouldn't, with, uh, when you're the M E C?

• 3:06:08Speaker 03

  Not through them, it was just me working directly with Cusco's Ministry of Antiquities. So we were able to, we were able to secure some of the funding for, for the excavation that they have for the tunnels that's there, and we kinda got that off of the ground. And so I was like the English speaking ambassador for them, just trying to get funding to come in to get the project off the ground. And now it's going, so we're gonna, I'm gonna go in and check in with them this summer. But, so, um, so this, so this guy who had grown up in, 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, for the legendary tunnels that are underneath the city as well. He's got, he alludes to them.

• 3:06:50AJ Gentile?

  I've never heard of these. This is, um, the mysterious kind of the subway tunnels. Wow, so they-

• 3:06:55Speaker 03

  Wow, I've never heard it referred to as subway tunnels, but, uh-

• 3:06:59AJ Gentile?

  Clickbait.

• 3:07:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, probably it was, uh, it was, it was connected to the, to the, to the Inca mysteries. You know, you would, they would probably go under the tunnels and who knows what would go on down there. And then they, you could emerge up at Sacse Waman, like you'd go down in Sacse Waman, you'd 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 Incas, which Inca is actually the term of the ruler, uh, you know, that's the name for the Inca emperor, right? Um, so you had like Manco Inca, goes on and on and on.

• 3:07:41AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that.

• 3:07:42Speaker 03

  But when it talks about, uh, when the emperor himself would consult with the sun god, kinda like the pharaoh-

• 3:07:51AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:07:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:08:10AJ Gentile?

  I would've forgot that one, too.

• 3:08:12Speaker 03

  Royal Commentary of the Incas, yeah, I know, it's a, that's a big one. So, um, but he gives us an account of, 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, like hardback copy, yeah.

• 3:08:37AJ Gentile?

  Original?

• 3:08:38Speaker 03

  Well, well, I don't know why I said original.

• 3:08:42Speaker 03

  They were brought to the US in like the early 1900s and there was a printing of them then.

• 3:08:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 3:08:48Speaker 03

  So, 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. So I'm flipping through the pages and I read the philosophy of, of, of like the founding of the Inca world and. 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 Cusco. She loves the Peruvian people and. You know, you could just see how kind that they were and it's almost like, you know, it was like they were connected to, to goodness. They're just good hearted people.

• 3:09:26Speaker 03

  And, 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. What's good and what's not. And you have this, and if you're connected to that, that's what I feel like you being connected to God is.

• 3:10:01AJ Gentile?

  Cause we don't need the 10 commandments. We already know.

• 3:10:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. 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, there's no actual argument, philosophical argument you can come up with. For why anybody should even care about how we treat each other. If you don't believe in anything higher than this three dimensional realm.

• 3:10:26AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 3:10:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:10:37AJ Gentile?

  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, "I don't believe in God." You kind of believe in something.

• 3:10:49Speaker 03

  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 them about it and they're like, "Well, okay, well, yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I recognize there's, there's gotta be something that's like more than all, you know, you'll get that. But I think that's how everybody is because we all recognize it. There's so many things about our existence. I actually think it feels, a few years ago, I had this, I had this thought that I was like,

• 3:11:15Speaker 03

  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?

• 3:11:34AJ Gentile?

  I do.

• 3:11:34Speaker 03

  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 erupts and, you know, like the beginning of time, say the Big Bang. There's this massive explosion into this 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.

• 3:12:01AJ Gentile?

  We were all touching, we were all together at some point.

• 3:12:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, matter can't be created or destroyed.

• 3:12:05AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 3:12:06Speaker 03

  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, whatever, whatever. I think everything that happens was already determined from the very second creation existed, if that makes sense.

• 3:12:38AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 3:12:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:12:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, because we're all connected. Tell me your theory about the wer-jaguars. I don't want to forget that one.

• 3:12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so, uh, so this is actually where, um...

• 3:12:48AJ Gentile?

  Then we'll see if we can get to Atlantis.

• 3:12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so this is where Dr. Barnhart and I, we probably, I don't know, we might disagree with each other on this, but it's... It doesn't really matter.

• 3:12:58AJ Gentile?

  Wow, it's actually called a wer-jaguar.

• 3:13:00Speaker 03

  Wer-jaguar, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:13:02AJ Gentile?

  So really like a werewolf?

• 3:13:03Speaker 03

  Yep, yeah, yeah, man, we've got werewolves and wer-jaguars and wer-tigers and I think there's a wer-hippo out there somewhere.

• 3:13:11AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:13:11Speaker 03

  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 wer-jaguar was, um... Well, it was, it was actually the day before I was at Palenque for the first time with, uh, Dr. Barnhart. If you go to see Palenque, the likelihood is you'll have to land in Viermosa and there is where you can go to La Venta 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...

• 3:13:47AJ Gentile?

  The oil company?

• 3:13:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, was, was taking over a lot of, um, Mexican land and one of them was the archaeological side of La Venta. They thought they were just gonna pulverize the whole thing. So, uh, one of the wealthy patrons of the city of Viermosa bought all of those, or maybe he bought them or he did something, he, he paid for them all to be transported to Viermosa and put in this huge park. So he's like a, he's like a local, a local, a local hero.

• 3:14:15AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:15Speaker 03

  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, Palenque and I've been back like four or five times now, I've been across the Olmec world like maybe, maybe four times now. And, um, and what's really interesting, and I tell people this every time, I'll take like, we'll have students who sign up to go on a Maya Exploration Center, that's our organization, MEC, well, 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 Olmecs? They say, they'll say the heads, I'll say, by the time you leave this, when you think of the Olmecs, you'll think of a wer-jaguar. It won't even be close, you'll think of a wer-jaguar. Yeah, because...

• 3:14:57Speaker 03

  There are seventeen known basalt Olmec heads and there are three more that are sandstone that Dr. Barnhart and I, we publicized to like the popular audience just a few years ago because no one had ever seen them. He and I hadn't even seen them in person. There was this little, there's this little museum that has been like closed at Laventha 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 he and I look at each other and we go, what the hell are these? We'd never seen them before. And uh-

• 3:15:40AJ Gentile?

  They're larger than what's in the park?

• 3:15:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, they're, yeah, it's crazy. It's really crazy. And there are Olmec heads spread throughout Mexico, but all the ones from Laventha, almost all of them are at that park. But they're larger than all the Olmec heads throughout all of Mexico. Almost like twice as big in size.

• 3:16:00AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:16:00Speaker 03

  And uh, but what's funny is those heads are not humans, they're ware jaguars.

• 3:16:05AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 3:16:06Speaker 03

  But they're not basalt, so there's, there's some, so, so this slowly started eating away at me where I, I just, what's really cool about Mesoamerican archaeology, or I should say American archaeology, is that it's under-published, under-funded, it's not quite as popular, you know, Egypt vastly overshadows so much of the ancient world as far as popular interest, right? And there are so few people professionally studying it that an outlaw like myself or 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, like a hundred years ago or more, eighty years ago when it comes to

• 3:16:49Speaker 03

  the Olmecs. That's another thing. You know, the Olmecs are an American discovery. Americans discovered and made the major exploration, or the major expeditions in the Olmec world. Matthew Sterling and the Smithsonian.

• 3:17:00AJ Gentile?

  When was that?

• 3:17:01Speaker 03

  Um, it was, uh, what was the first year? Nineteen, it was mid 1930s to just after World War II, 1946, I believe was the last- Sterling expedition to the Olmec world, but yeah, it was it was American teams that did that. It's it's kind of cool. It's exclusive. It's like a it's like a specifically American story where where we went down into Mexico and and launched these major expeditions with Smithsonian, obviously working with their government, but fully American teams.

• 3:17:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I mean, we talked earlier about the early Smithsonian was very racist against indigenous people.

• 3:17:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:17:36AJ Gentile?

  Because they believe that there's no way savages could build these things.

• 3:17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:17:39AJ Gentile?

  Which I think is one of the reasons why we don't hear those stories as much as we hear about Egypt.

• 3:17:43Speaker 03

  Hundred percent true. Yeah, yeah, there's there's a lot of weird, complex, like, dark stuff that the Smithsonian has gotten up to. I haven't done a whole lot of looking into it, but I will. I will feed the the giant skeletons community. There were three massive skeletons that were discovered at the Olmec side of San Lorenzo in the early 1900s. And old man that Dr.

• 3:18:06AJ Gentile?

  Hang on.

• 3:18:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:18:07AJ Gentile?

  How big are we talking? Are we talking giants?

• 3:18:10Speaker 03

  Uh, more than six and a half feet tall.

• 3:18:12AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:18:13Speaker 03

  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 side 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.

• 3:18:33AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:18:33Speaker 03

  Never published. There's no photos of them. That guy said he was 16 years old and he saw it. And there are other people who saw it as well. And this was a known thing that giant people were found in these mounds and taken away.

• 3:18:44AJ Gentile?

  You're not really a Giants guy.

• 3:18:46Speaker 03

  And this was and this was the Smithsonian doing this.

• 3:18:48AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:18:49AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, we have them documented, hiding things.

• 3:18:51Speaker 03

  Oh, man, I don't know if I'm I don't know if I'm a Giants guy. Um.

• 3:18:55AJ Gentile?

  I'm not really. I kind of want to believe, but I kind of don't.

• 3:18:58Speaker 03

  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?

• 3:19:09AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 3:19:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:19:17AJ Gentile?

  Right?

• 3:19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:19:18AJ Gentile?

  Um, can you tell us about that real fast?

• 3:19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 3:19:21AJ Gentile?

  Because that's really interesting.

• 3:19:22Speaker 03

  So this so this is this is the.

• 3:19:26Speaker 03

  The way that this started for me was I was actually just playing around with, I was putting together the ways that Star Wars is inspired by the Mesoamerican world.

• 3:19:37AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 3:19:38Speaker 03

  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...

• 3:19:53AJ Gentile?

  This audience knows what yavvun for is.

• 3:19:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so yavvun for, Tikal.

• 3:19:57AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:19:57Speaker 03

  Well, Jabba's palace is actually pulled from Maktazuma's palace. When the Spaniards arrived, this is the beginning of me thinking about this. And I don't know if there's any other modern scholars out there that agree with me on this, or they might all think I'm crazy for thinking this.

• 3:20:16Speaker 03

  But this is what got me thinking about this. I had known that the Aztecs had Olmec artifacts, even though they may have never known who the 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, when the Spaniards arrived at Maktazuma's palace in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, 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... 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.

• 3:21:01AJ Gentile?

  Bye.

• 3:21:02Speaker 03

  And, 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 stone pyramids, if you look at the architecture in the Maya world, the top of the stone pyramid, in stone, will be a stone recreation of a wooden and thatch hut that the normal people would live in. So the top of the pyramid is just an architectural recreation of a wooden and thatch hut.

• 3:21:40Speaker 03

  It's the same way 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 represents. And so...

• 3:21:54Speaker 03

  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 1400 AD. You go back just a thousand years, you can see that the Maya are venerating dwarves. They say that the dwarves built the Pyramid of Ushmal in a single night. If you go up to Temple 33 at the city of Yaxilan, there's like depictions of dwarves and the ballgame all the way around the temple. The Maya people venerated dwarves as being special and being touched by the gods.

• 3:22:38Speaker 03

  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 go back to, let's, let's take that just one step further back to the Olmec world where we have even more deformity. We have, you know, you have, you have all these depictions of, of Were Jaguar people who, you know, they look like they have the downturned mouths and cleft lips with fangs coming out.

• 3:23:05AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 3:23:06Speaker 03

  And then you also see lots of depictions of, they, some people call them like Down's 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 Jaguar 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, 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 could put a real one next to them, they're same size and everything. It's a portrait of a literal baby.

• 3:23:51Speaker 03

  And I think that, what I think is happening is that when these babies are being born, the Olmec people know that something is special about them. They're blessed by the gods and they're not going to make it through childhood. And so they venerate these babies by making all these statues for them because they know these children aren't going to survive. And I think they're, they're venerating their lives and the babies that are born with these cleft lips.

• 3:24:18Speaker 03

  In the 1970s, there was a survey that was done in Veracruz, like a medical survey. And one of the things they documented, this didn't have anything to do with like research in the Olmecs, it was just something that they documented, was that there's a disproportionate amount of indigenous children born with ectodermal dysplasia.

• 3:24:33AJ Gentile?

  I mean, there's no question that's what this is. We're seeing this over and over.

• 3:24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, you see underneath the lips how gummy that is?

• 3:24:39AJ Gentile?

  Yep, there's no question.

• 3:24:40Speaker 03

  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, you know, free to talk about this, but 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.

• 3:24:59AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 3:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, just totally normal kids, but their mouths are gummy and they'll have two fangs on the top and maybe sometimes fangs on the bottom, or 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 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

• 3:25:45Speaker 03

  in the jungles of Central America, Mexico, and South America, they will wake up looking through the eyes of a jaguar. They will be inside a jaguar, going through the jungle. And I think that all of these things over thousands of years fuse into this culture that venerates the most ferocious beast in the forest, that is taking hallucinogenic psychedelics and looking through the eyes of a jaguar. Whether or not it's really happening, I don't exactly know. And then you have children that are being born with fangs that people are looking at like...

• 3:26:19Speaker 03

  This person is a human jaguar. How did this happen? And you see depictions in the city of Chalkat Singo of jaguars and people like interloping with each other, like having sex with each other. Some people think that they're dancing, but they do look like they're having sex with each other. And they're like human jaguars. And so I think you get this, I think over the course of thousands of years of this happening, you get these people that are like selectively breeding and engineering a whole population of people to be born with 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 ware jaguar people.

• 3:27:00AJ Gentile?

  Thousands.

• 3:27:01Speaker 03

  Thousands, thousands. And what I think it is, is just like in ancient Egypt where you had, this is, I mean, I just feel so certain saying this. In ancient Egypt, you have, we know that the pharaoh and the priests were warring against each other. The priests had risen up. They've become so powerful that they start to challenge the pharaoh's power. And it's almost like the pharaoh has to obey the priests. And you know, that's not the cosmic order of things. And they have this huge feud. Well, I think that there's a priestly class of shamanic people in the Olmec world that are the ware jaguars. And it's this whole breed of people. They're not kings, but they're the religious leaders.

• 3:27:41Speaker 03

  They're the religious guides in this civilization. And the king himself is separate from that. And we can see all throughout the Olmec world of the Olmecs. Actually, and I actually think that it's a totally one-sided thing as far as I can remember. So many of the Olmec altars, which are, it's basically like this huge stone table. And inside of the table, you see a man who's clearly a ware jaguar with what looks like an elongated skull. And he'll have this big hat thing on top of him with a uraeus, just like, this is crazy, just like the Egyptian uraeus.

• 3:28:19AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 3:28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. He has a, he has a, he has a, it's either a fertile ant or it's a rattlesnake. Right here on the, on the front of his headdress. You could look up a Levanta, Levanta Olmec or Olmec Levanta altar and it'll pop up.

• 3:28:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:28:51AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's no question.

• 3:28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, 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 downturned lips, also holding babies who have the downturned 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, in Guerrero, Mexico. They're going inside the caves, they're performing these mysteries inside of them.

• 3:29:34Speaker 03

  There's depictions carved into rocks at Chaucazingo 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, a ware jaguar, uh, has to go through as a baby to be, oh, 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.

• 3:30:04AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:30:05Speaker 03

  And so they're going through their mysteries, their rites as, 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 ware jaguar 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 ware 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 ware 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.

• 3:30:41AJ Gentile?

  What is the quote-unquote mainstream view of those?

• 3:30:44Speaker 03

  Of- Man, I don't, I don't think that there really is one.

• 3:30:51AJ Gentile?

  Then you're it.

• 3:30:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I saw, I saw, well, I mean, I know that they're, it's kind of like, um, they, they mostly, mostly what they do is they, they call it ancestor veneration. It's all these broadly vague terms. I saw a guy recently who, uh, he's like a really mainstream sort of academic and he did a video on the Olmecs 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, eh.

• 3:31:19AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 3:31:20Speaker 03

  No, it's not even, it just, it's missing all of the nuance. It's fine, but it's missing all of the, uh,

• 3:31:28Speaker 03

  everything. So anyways, um, but I think that, I think that, um,

• 3:31:34Speaker 03

  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. 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've got these big altars like we were looking at that are made for the ware jaguars. But you know what's really interesting is if all of 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 backside of it. It was a head that used to exist that was carved down and away and turned into a ware jaguar.

• 3:32:17AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:32:17Speaker 03

  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, these jaguar claw marks across the 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 ware jaguar priest classes warring with the Olmecs.

• 3:32:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's telling a story.

• 3:32:48Speaker 03

  And, and they often say that, uh, this is, it's kind of like, it's kind of like the mystery of Go Beckley Tepe. 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.

• 3:33:09AJ Gentile?

  Meaning the heads were intentionally buried.

• 3:33:10Speaker 03

  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 see any evidence behind that at all. Um, and then they think that the Olmecs may have done it themselves. But not out of, the official narrative, the official idea is that it was. They were, 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 buried the head. I don't, I don't agree with that either. Um, because at the top of all the heads, the thing that's ignored here. Is the only claw marks that you actually see on top, or the only claw marks that you will see on the Olmec heads. We could look them up right now. They're on the top of the head.

• 3:33:53Speaker 03

  And I think it's, I think it's probably at certain points throughout the civilization, the Were Jaguars. Topple the control of the Olmec kings. Bury it down. Maybe the head is, maybe the top is exposed and they claw up the whole top of the helmet where the symbols are.

• 3:34:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:34:08Speaker 03

  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 carve.

• 3:34:21AJ Gentile?

  So this is in vandalism. This is sculpture.

• 3:34:24Speaker 03

  Sculpture. Sculptural vandalism, 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 going to carve claw marks into it to make, to make it known. That this is what happens when you challenge the cult of the Were Jaguar, right? You know, something, 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.

• 3:35:01AJ Gentile?

  Claw marks on hundreds of these?

• 3:35:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hundreds of different monuments throughout and, and several different, like. A dozen different times, like, like you can imagine.

• 3:35:12AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:13Speaker 03

  You know, a ware jaguar clawed at a monument and they make it look like that, like a ware jaguar just mauled this guy, the top of this guy's helmet, took away his whole insignia, you know, just disgraced his power and then they buried him. That's what I think that I'm seeing, especially when you see the monument of what looks like an Olmec head, face, and his whole face is just torn to shreds.

• 3:35:35AJ Gentile?

  Could it be possible that the ware jaguar is a later culture? And they're just, the heads are there and they want to bury these and dominate that earlier culture? Or do you think it's just, I think they're contemporaries?

• 3:35:49Speaker 03

  That's a good question. I don't know. I think it, I think it's all happens at the same time because, um.

• 3:35:54AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, I love stuff that.

• 3:35:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:35:56AJ Gentile?

  That we just find.

• 3:35:57Speaker 03

  See the top of his, see the top of his head?

• 3:35:59AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that's vandalism sculpture. That's clearly intentional.

• 3:36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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 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 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 royalty versus the shamans, these rise, these fall. You know, it's like this. So at certain points in time, there, there might be not be a king at all. It's just the ware jaguars dominating everything and burying all these people. And so I think this is going on for like almost 2,000 years.

• 3:36:48AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:48Speaker 03

  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 cultural center is a place called Trace Sepotes. And that rises somewhere around 250 B.C. So like. The Olmecs have been around for 2,000 years at this point. And when that cultural center takes hold and they build this massive city, they've got a few heads there, a bunch of, bunch of stone monuments, no Were Jaguars.

• 3:37:29Speaker 03

  So somewhere between about 500 B.C. towards the latter part of La Venta and the rise of this next cultural center called Tres Potes, the Were Jaguar just disappears into time. That's interesting. And from that point on, dominating Mezal America will be the pantheon of gods that's worshipped by the Maya and the Zapotecs, later the Teotihuacans. 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. We see in some places in the Maya world, like out in Belize, where Belize was connected to

• 3:38:11Speaker 03

  the Olmecs in a way, in a particular way, the Maya people of 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 of months ago, from, Belize is so overlooked and so underfunded and understudied in archaeology, that I learned that there are only five active PhD archaeologists in the entire country of Belize. What? Only five. Oh, I should say, no, no, there's only five of them and like two or three of them are active. Yeah. How crazy is that? It's crazy. So you have this whole massive world there, but we know that the Maya of Belize were interacting with the Olmecs because way early on, before the rest of the Maya world even,

• 3:38:56Speaker 03

  even accepts or adopts divine kingship, there was 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 city called Cerro, they try a kingdom and it works for like 150 years and collapses. But surviving there throughout the rest of the Maya world, just in Belize, and you have to think, the Maya world is not a monolith. They're not like when one guy makes a decision in T'Kol, it doesn't, you know, become law for everybody else. It's like, it's like the Greeks, they have city-states. But the Ware Jaguar survived in Belize for all the way until the Classic period,

• 3:39:41Speaker 03

  like 2,000, 3,000 years later where

• 3:39:43AJ Gentile?

  For thousands of years, the Ware Jaguar continues.

• 3:39:46Speaker 03

  Survived in Belize. And I did not know that. And I, that was shown to me by an archaeologist named Raphael. And he took us on a tour through ATM Cave, which is really, really cool. And he showed me on the side of this pot, a Ware Jaguar, 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 the Maya world, but of course it exists in the one place that was actually connected to the Olmecs thousands of years earlier. So that influence that the Olmecs had on those people of the Ware Jaguar stuck with them for a thousand years after the Olmecs had fallen.

• 3:40:24AJ Gentile?

  That's amazing.

• 3:40:25Speaker 03

  Really cool.

• 3:40:26AJ Gentile?

  Can I keep you for one last quick second?

• 3:40:28Speaker 03

  Sure, let's do it.

• 3:40:29AJ Gentile?

  So we were talking about half man, half Jaguar. When we come back, can we talk about half man, half both?

• 3:40:34Speaker 03

  Half man, half bull. Let's do it. Yeah.

• 3:40:36AJ Gentile?

  All right. Thanks for hanging out for one more. I appreciate it. I had so much.

• 3:40:42Speaker 03

  I know. Did we get to most of it?

• 3:40:43AJ Gentile?

  Almost. I was really excited to hear you talking about the Minoans, because I don't think they get enough love.

• 3:40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:40:51AJ Gentile?

  Can you tell us a little Minoan story? Who were they?

• 3:40:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the Minoans are, you know, they're another one of these civilizations sort of like the Olmecs. They're a, if the Olmecs are a pre-Mesoamerican society, well, the Minoans are like a pre-Greek society. The Minoans really might not even be Greek at all. We don't quite understand their racial composition, or where they came from, or what, or what culture they subscribe to. They're like their own people, but

• 3:41:21AJ Gentile?

  And we don't know what they called themselves.

• 3:41:23Speaker 03

  We don't know what they, we don't even know what they called themselves. How crazy is that? We don't even know what language they spoke. Same, same sort of thing. But the Minoan society is, man, I love the Minoans. It's, I got fascinated with the Minoans.

• 3:41:44Speaker 03

  The movie of Troy, all the architecture that's pulled from that is mostly from Canosus.

• 3:41:50AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:41:50Speaker 03

  And so this was...

• 3:41:52AJ Gentile?

  So Canosus on Crete?

• 3:41:53Speaker 03

  Canosus, which is, they call it the Minoan capital, but we don't even know if that's what it was. But, so the Minoans, they arrive, we start seeing their culture form,

• 3:42:09Speaker 03

  whether coincidentally or not coincidentally, on the island of Crete, around 3100 B.C. Same century, same century as when Egypt arises. My guess, not a coincidence, my guess, the ancient world's much more interconnected with each other than we can possibly understand. Oh my gosh, I gotta tell you this.

• 3:42:28AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 3:42:30Speaker 03

  Did we talk about?

• 3:42:32Speaker 03

  I don't know if I told you this yet, or if I was talking with your brother about this.

• 3:42:35AJ Gentile?

  What happened?

• 3:42:36Speaker 03

  Um, no, you and I were talking about the other room, when I told you about that Roman city in the Doklo 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 the Nile itself. But you reach this place called the Doklo Oasis, which are these huge reservoirs that create fertile land just next to the reservoirs. Ancient people have been living there since 12,500 B.C.

• 3:43:08Speaker 03

  And they eventually were consumed into, and wrapped into the dynastic Egyptian world. Well, when the, when the Romans, as we were talking about, when they took over Egypt, they built a Roman colony down there. And the ancient world was so interconnected, news could spread so quickly, that even during this period of like 70 emperors in 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 on the throne for 90 days.

• 3:43:42AJ Gentile?

  That's crazy.

• 3:43:42Speaker 03

  So they were able to change the, yes, there's Doklo Oasis. So they were able to change the inscription of the emperor that quickly. So that's... 1200, 1200 plus miles?

• 3:43:55AJ Gentile?

  Right. That's unbelievable.

• 3:43:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So there, so information gets around just like that. And my guess is it always had been and, and we just, it's invisible, but it's hard. We can't see it, but when you see the fact that Mesopotamia really starts kicking off around 30, ah, we can push it back a little bit, but maybe 3300, 3200, 3100 B.C. The Minoans kick off in 3100 B.C. The Egyptians kick off in 3100 B.C. 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?

• 3:44:42Speaker 03

  They all rise sort of at the same time. And, but the Minoans are the ones that, that get overlooked because we look at Mesopotamia and Egypt as being the origins of civilization itself, but the Minoans were right there too. I mean, I think you could say Crete is one of the birthplaces of civilization.

• 3:44:59AJ Gentile?

  You certainly, I mean, it's the first written language in Europe.

• 3:45:04Speaker 03

  I gotta start saying that more often.

• 3:45:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, what? Linear A, no?

• 3:45:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:45:07AJ Gentile?

  First written language.

• 3:45:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Linear A. And,

• 3:45:10AJ Gentile?

  We don't know what it says.

• 3:45:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, first written language, at least in the Greek world, like, you know, Egyptian hieroglyphs and, and there's Egyptian hieroglyphs and then there's, then there's Mesopotamian writing and there's the Phoenician writing. And they think that Linear A is pulled from the Phoenician writing, but,

• 3:45:29Speaker 03

  yeah, that's, that's fascinating.

• 3:45:31AJ Gentile?

  Well, hang on a second. You have Linear A, indecipherable, then you go Linear B, which is like Proto-Greek. Then, language, then writing language goes away for 400 years and then Greek reemerges based on the Phoenician alphabet.

• 3:45:43Speaker 03

  Oh, is that what it is? Okay, okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

• 3:45:45AJ Gentile?

  Cause of Homer.

• 3:45:47Speaker 03

  For some reason, I was thinking that, that Linear A, that they thought that Linear A was pulled from, I could be wrong.

• 3:45:52AJ Gentile?

  They don't even know. It's like pictures of cats.

• 3:45:55Speaker 03

  It is. Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, 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, yeah, so,

• 3:46:17Speaker 03

  They, uh, their, their culture, they arrive there. I think, I think that the earliest that we see their culture emerging is like 4,000 B.C., which is the same time Mesopotamia and Egypt. And then the actual civilization fully existing is about, is 3,100 B.C. 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 tenants 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 taking that one off, which I sort of agree with. But, um, nonetheless, the Minoans are writing.

• 3:47:04Speaker 03

  So, um, man, they are so much more ancient than, than the rest of, uh, than the rest of the Greek world. So between 3,000 B.C. and 2,000 B.C. They start building these, uh, towns and cities across the island of Crete. They say it's, it's a, 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 2,000 and 3,000 B.C. around the Mediterranean world.

• 3:47:41AJ Gentile?

  Well, explain how big these palaces are because.

• 3:47:43Speaker 03

  Well, well, so, so right now we're in like the pre-palatial period. We start entering palatial when we get to about 2,000 B.C.

• 3:47:50AJ Gentile?

  Okay. That's when the big buildings go up?

• 3:47:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so the Minoans, they, uh, they rea, they realize that they're, the Mesopotamians, they, they, they make a lot of their, uh, wealth from, I believe a lot of it is gold mining, uh, and, and valuable resources as well as farming. The Egyptians, it's farming straight up. They don't even have gold in Egypt. All their gold comes from, comes from Sudan and, and Nubia.

• 3:48:20Speaker 03

  But massive, massive amounts of farming. And so the, uh, the Minoans, they make their money in the copper trade.

• 3:48:29AJ Gentile?

  Copper?

• 3:48:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, so one of their most valuable, uh, one of the places that was able to, to mine the most copper was their city of Accretiri. Accretiri, it's a 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, does have silver as well. So it's metals. Once, once the metal starts kicking off, that's why like Egypt and Mesopotamia kind of, they all emerge at the same time, but these two guys grow way faster. But once these guys, once everyone else starts realizing that they want copper, boom, the Minoan civilization explodes.

• 3:49:08Speaker 03

  And so, uh, about 2100 B.C. to, let's say 1900 B.C., that's kind of when this massive... It probably goes back further than that because we know that the Egyptians are buying copper from them, like in the fourth dynasty. There's all that copper that they've got, so much of that comes from the, uh, comes from the Aegean. But the Minoans are slowly building up that wealth to about the point that by 1700 B.C., the whole island is covered in like 99 of these, I think it's like 99 to 100 of these massive palaces.

• 3:49:44AJ Gentile?

  That many, wow.

• 3:49:45Speaker 03

  I think that's right, yeah, yeah. Now, there's, there's about a dozen of them that are absolutely enormous. But in all, it's like, it's like 100, uh, palisade towns. You have this big town and you have this massive public architecture center in the middle of it. But there's 12 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 Olmecs, you know, you got this man jaguar. So you had a werewolf.

• 3:50:30Speaker 03

  And, uh, so the labyrinth of the Minotaur, it's possible that it's actually just, uh, referencing the palaces because the palaces are these labyrinths of like four-floor palaces with all these winding, uh, hallways. You know, in ancient times, people don't think about this. There are no wide open rooms in ancient times because they, the technology to create a roof that would still hold up to be large, it just hadn't been invented yet. They hadn't figured out how to do that with the architecture. So you would have small rooms and winding hallways. And so these palaces are labyrinths.

• 3:51:08AJ Gentile?

  With like 1300 rooms.

• 3:51:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. With like 13, 1400 rooms. Yeah, it's something insane, especially at Canosus.

• 3:51:16AJ Gentile?

  And we call them palaces, but it's possible that everybody lived there, no? Like shopping malls?

• 3:51:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would be more so what I would say. You have these, you have these, you have these villas that are built right up on the walls on the outside. And from those villas that surround the palaces, it starts out at this really high, high level, super expensive homes, and it gradually descends out as you get further away. You know, you got thousands of people living here. And then you've got these other nicer areas that are way out in the countryside. People that are, you know, have like wine vineyards and farms and everything. And actually, 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,

• 3:52:04Speaker 03

  if you're not born royal, even a priest, granted, some of the wealthy, some of the high-ranking priests were like mob bosses. But in general, by principle, in Egypt, if you weren't born royal, you lived in a dump. You lived in a shack. So even the normal people in the Minoan world are 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, that world is amazing. But, you know, the average

• 3:52:46Speaker 03

  life of a Minoan was considerably better than anybody else in the Mediterranean world. Considerably better. They had flushing toilets and water that's flowing through their city and they've got fountains in the center of the city, which was something that, you know, people always look at like the Roman aqueducts bringing fresh water into cities already existed. The Minoans already had this, but it was all underground.

• 3:53:06AJ Gentile?

  Underground plumbing.

• 3:53:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:53:08AJ Gentile?

  Ceramic pipes.

• 3:53:09Speaker 03

  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 Accretory specifically, your bath, you could choose between cold and hot water.

• 3:53:23AJ Gentile?

  That's amazing.

• 3:53:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So it just, just mind.

• 3:53:27AJ Gentile?

  So they're, what are they drawing from two different, like a hot spring and a?

• 3:53:30Speaker 03

  So one is coming from a spring that's next to the volcano and the other one is coming from a cold spring.

• 3:53:35AJ Gentile?

  That's amazing.

• 3:53:36Speaker 03

  And, and you could, you could cut off the, where the water is coming from to, to fill up your bath. And, you know, the baths are, are made out of like alabaster crystals. Some of them are made out of polished marble. It's just like crazy. And, and it's just unbelievably wealthy society. And as much as we've studied this, the societal makeup, like how the, the structure of the culture, there's no sign of kings, there's no sign of lords, there's, these aren't kingdoms, they're, the way I've seen them 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

• 3:54:20Speaker 03

  the business realm. So what makes sense to me is that those palaces are, 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.

• 3:54:34AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 3:54:35Speaker 03

  That all happened. It must've 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, you want to buy these, 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, 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 billionaire back then, but you know, he's gonna come in and he he's got to go to the top floor where all the copper salesmen are the super rich people with the finest wine being brought to these businessmen.

• 3:55:16Speaker 03

  And just below that, it's probably like, oh, you know, well, while I'm visiting Knossos, I want to buy this really nice. 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 feints is being sold and, uh, you know. It that's probably what I think it was is a big mall.

• 3:55:33AJ Gentile?

  I think you're right. Ryan's showing the Heraklion right now. You don't see architecture like this for a thousand years.

• 3:55:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:55:52Speaker 03

  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 conflate Atlantis, like you, you, you'll ask people, okay, well, I mean.

• 3:56:32Speaker 03

  You don't actually think Atlantis was like, like spaceships and lasers and aliens and stuff like, what do you think it was? People will go, well, I'm not saying I think Atlantis was on par with what we have today, but maybe more like the Roman Empire. There you go. You know, the Minoans are right there, are right there with with the Romans, maybe not his power, but sophistication and technology.

• 3:56:51AJ Gentile?

  For sure.

• 3:56:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really right there.

• 3:56:54AJ Gentile?

  That's a great segue. So what happened to the Minoans?

• 3:56:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, this is a huge mystery, man.

• 3:57:00AJ Gentile?

  Because suddenly they're gone, right?

• 3:57:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, greatest archaeological mystery of all time, really, like most famous one.

• 3:57:07Speaker 03

  So the, the, one of the central core aspects to the Minoan world, which we touched on a little bit earlier, is the copper trade. Well, that copper trade comes out from this little Minoan colony of Accretiri.

• 3:57:22Speaker 03

  Accretiri was settled around.

• 3:57:25Speaker 03

  4,000 to 3,000 B.C. It's just like right after Minoan culture really appears on Crete. You've got some people who move up there and when they start mining their resources that are found on the island, it becomes important. So they kind of get absorbed by Minoan society and Akrotiri or Santorini becomes a part of the Minoan world. And so copper trade is coming out of there. And so Akrotiri 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 think about Mycenae out in mainland Greece, all

• 3:58:07Speaker 03

  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 whether it's for anything, would go through Akrotiri.

• 3:58:18AJ Gentile?

  So this is a wealthy, important place.

• 3:58:20Speaker 03

  Very wealthy, very important. Probably it's possible. I mean, it's not possible. It's probably a fact that in 1600 B.C., 1650 B.C., Akrotiri was the wealthiest, greatest city on the planet at that time.

• 3:58:36AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 3:58:37Speaker 03

  And, yeah.

• 3:58:38AJ Gentile?

  You're right.

• 3:58:39Speaker 03

  At that very moment.

• 3:58:40AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:58:41Speaker 03

  And it makes sense with why the... So think about the story of Atlantis that's told. One of the things that were told about Atlantis is that they were very, very wealthy and that they were greedy and that their civilization was destroyed as a result of that. Well, Minoan society itself is a consumer society based on money, from what we can tell. The whole society is based on money, kind of like, you know, the U.S. like in some ways. It's a consumer society. Filthy rich.

• 3:59:08AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 3:59:09Speaker 03

  Well, that idea of Atlantis...

• 3:59:17Speaker 03

  I think that that's, well, we should get into that in just a moment, but I'm not telling you what happened to the Minoans. So Accretiri in 1650 B.C. is the wealthiest city. I shouldn't say wealthy city, the best place to live on the entire planet. Per individual wealth, wealthiest city on the planet. Now, you know, you compare that to like Babylon, it's not gonna, or you compare it to Memphis in Egypt. Memphis has more wealth, but the quality of life is so much lower.

• 3:59:46AJ Gentile?

  Right, but a fisherman in Accretiri is living a great state of life.

• 3:59:49Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. And so you have all these other Greek civilizations in the mainland, looking at the Minoans like, look at these wealthy guys, especially Mycenae. Mycenae is chomping at the bit to get a piece of that, a piece of that wealth. And Mycenae is, Mycenae is the civilization that's depicted in the movie Troy, the king Agamemnon. So the whole rise and fall of the Minoan world actually happens long before the story of Troy.

• 4:00:19AJ Gentile?

  Well, we could detour for a second there if you want to talk about the Trojan War, because it's one of my favorite things ever.

• 4:00:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, well, it happens after this. Yeah, let's go to that after this, because I think it'll make more sense chronologically.

• 4:00:33AJ Gentile?

  Okay, because I have a question.

• 4:00:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So what's crazy is, at the height of Minoan power, this island of, this island of 100 palaces or 100 cities, far more wealthy and well-to-do per person, you know, on a one-to-one scale than the rest of the ancient world, controlling the copper trade, which is the most widely used, you know, metal in the ancient world. Around the year 1650 B.C., or 16, I should say around the year 1600 B.C., maybe, maybe 1550 B.C., they're still kind of playing with the dates there.

• 4:01:14Speaker 03

  Around then, Accretiri 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 buildings there, they rebuilt the buildings and put them back together. We can see that in some of the buildings that still survive today.

• 4:01:33AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 4:01:33Speaker 03

  And it's not known how long.

• 4:01:37Speaker 03

  This period of time is between the earthquakes beginning and people realizing that these earthquakes aren't going to stop and they have to leave the city. What I'm about to get to is one of the most amazing things about these people, how sophisticated and how smart and capable they were.

• 4:01:51AJ Gentile?

  Go ahead.

• 4:01:54Speaker 03

  They ultimately decide that this island that they're living on, Santorini, Akrotiri, they can't live here anymore. The buildings are shaking, they're falling apart. It must have been so bad because every single person, not an elderly person, not a child, was left behind.

• 4:02:15AJ Gentile?

  Not an animal.

• 4:02:15Speaker 03

  Not an animal, not a pet, not nothing. Every living thing on the entire island of Akrotiri was evacuated. And then they were all brought, probably mostly to Crete they must have been. I mean, there are some other Minoan islands. And shortly after that, the entire sky over Crete just completely turns 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.

• 4:02:55AJ Gentile?

  It's amazing.

• 4:02:56Speaker 03

  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 think that that might be right.

• 4:03:08AJ Gentile?

  I think you're right.

• 4:03:08Speaker 03

  The largest volcanic eruption during the time of humanity just.

• 4:03:12AJ Gentile?

  Take us through the day, what it would have been like.

• 4:03:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 4:03:17AJ Gentile?

  It's because it's three or four stages of hell.

• 4:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it is.

• 4:03:21AJ Gentile?

  And this is the Thera eruption, I believe.

• 4:03:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, Thera, yeah, yeah. So the city is called Akrotiri, the island is Thera, and today it's known as Santorini. 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. So the island.

• 4:03:46Speaker 03

  I forget the chronological order of the different of the different stages, but you have this initial eruption that causes this like, I think it's a 20 mile high column. It's a column that's three times the height of Mount Everest. That's what they estimated the eruption to be. And it sends this huge plume over the entire island of Crete, which we'll get to in just a moment as well, because that causes some havoc on Crete. And, but what's fascinating is that when it sends this rubble into the city of Akrotiri, it knocks down, it knocks down some of the buildings.

• 4:04:28Speaker 03

  And this all happens over the course of just like 48 hours, 72 hours. And it sends rubble and shrapnel onto Akrotiri, knocks down some of the buildings, but not actually too many of them. And they think that it's the shaking of the island, because most of the shrapnel actually gets launched into the island of Crete itself. Like there are boulders that smashed, oh yeah, there are boulders that smashed into the island. But mostly, it was this white pumice that would, that would kind of like fall down like snow. And it covered the city in 20 feet of volcanic ash and pumice, and which eventually packed and became like this solid rock.

• 4:05:10AJ Gentile?

  20 feet in it probably in a day, right?

• 4:05:12Speaker 03

  20 feet in a day. So imagine, you can't see anything. There's, if you were there, there's no visual at all. It's just black.

• 4:05:21AJ Gentile?

  This is Vesuvius, just without the people.

• 4:05:24Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly, yeah. And so if you were there, there would be no sunlight coming through the sky. That's how dense the pumice and ash falling from the volcanic eruption. It's just straight up blackness. And, but there were, there were parts of the city that were not actually, for some reason, you know, maybe it has to do with the wind, or the way that the, 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.

• 4:05:59Speaker 03

  There's a part that geologists estimate that happened later in the eruption where when the caldera fell, there's like, all of a sudden, there's this bubble, there's this huge, like, vacuum, I guess, in the, 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 whoop, sweeping over the city and just scorching the sides of the buildings and knocking them down. So you can find the buildings where they're knocked down, they have like these burn marks all on one side. And when they somehow investigate the, the burn marks

• 4:06:44Speaker 03

  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, because it's not the same sort of, uh, you know, the same kind of burning. 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, with the mainland. And there's so much copper coming from Akrotiri 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

• 4:07:27Speaker 03

  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 archaeological evidence of parts of the docks and, um, I'm not sure how they do this, but they're able to find

• 4:07:49Speaker 03

  Evidence that the water came up like fifty feet or fifty meters, something like that in like five hundred yards inland. So it went, it just covered the, you know, 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 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 of years, they think that this happened like a hundred years later. I don't know that happening immediately after the eruption makes sense to me, but immediately

• 4:08:34Speaker 03

  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, or he's the first pharaoh to use the Valley of Kings.

• 4:09:14Speaker 03

  Um, but he writes about personally witnessing himself this massive storm that covered all of Egypt.

• 4:09:21AJ Gentile?

  Some, some people link this to the, uh, the plagues.

• 4:09:24Speaker 03

  To the plagues of the exodus.

• 4:09:26AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 4:09:26Speaker 03

  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 what's interesting is those plagues are also naturally occurring phenomenon if something is a catalyst that starts it, right? So that's kind of interesting. And also that story can be like an amalgamation of different things that actually did happen in Egypt and they're condensed into a story like. I think that they tried to say the Exodus began being written in like 900 B.C. Something like that. But, uh, so the best theory I've heard of why Minoan civilization collapsed is not only is the copper trade being disrupted by the eruption of Thera, the destruction of Accretiri,

• 4:10:11Speaker 03

  the wiping out of the copper trade, at least most of it, and the pummeling of all of these northern shore docks where the palaces are at, which obviously erupts the trade. People arrive on Crete and like, what the fuck happened to this place, you know?

• 4:10:24AJ Gentile?

  This cascades throughout the entire world. This is the collapse of the Bronze Age.

• 4:10:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. The other thing is that the whole island of Crete itself is covered with this thin burn layer. And it doesn't look like, uh, some archaeologists look at it and they don't think that it's consistent with an attack, because you can see what burn layers look like in attacks, like the city of Troy, when they finally found it and they excavated it. They see, they've seen what those burn layers look like, and they're more intense, they're more spotty. And so, the theory I actually like 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.

• 4:11:13Speaker 03

  People start going hungry, right? Like, 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 burned down the island

• 4:11:25AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 4:11:25Speaker 03

  in the chaos of the darkness.

• 4:11:27AJ Gentile?

  I have not heard that theory.

• 4:11:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that they, you know, they kick over, they kick over lance and lanterns, and they burn down their own cities by accident, because there's so much chaos, nobody can see anything, nobody's showing up for work, you know? It's just, 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, I think, how many fires you have to light just to be able to see?

• 4:11:48AJ Gentile?

  Wasn't Canus the only city to even survive that?

• 4:11:52Speaker 03

  Well, it only survived because when

• 4:11:56Speaker 03

  Beyond this point of this burning, the Minoan world is gone. It's gone.

• 4:12:02AJ Gentile?

  It's gone.

• 4:12:02Speaker 03

  Because when Kenosis comes back, it comes back with Linear B. Mycenae.

• 4:12:08AJ Gentile?

  Mycenae.

• 4:12:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:12:32AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 4:12:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:12:47AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 4:12:48Speaker 03

  But all it is, is a tiny little port city that controls the entry to the Black Sea.

• 4:12:53AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 4:12:53Speaker 03

  Troy was not a significant, it wasn't like an overly wealthy place. The artifacts that come out of Troy aren't really that impressive.

• 4:13:00AJ Gentile?

  Maybe 10,000 people.

• 4:13:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Minoan world? You're talking about, you're talking about World War Zero to conquer that place, you know?

• 4:13:11AJ Gentile?

  Couldn't the Mycenaeans just, when the island was basically empty? And they just rolled over there?

• 4:13:18Speaker 03

  It's-

• 4:13:19AJ Gentile?

  There's no evidence of war, is there?

• 4:13:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:13:36Speaker 03

  Something had to have happened if that, if that wasn't a direct result of, because it's across the entire island, so the thin burn mark. So there had to have been conflict. And that's why people say if, if that didn't, if that didn't happen as a direct result of the Minoans accidentally, one of the other things they thought was that it was shrapnel from the volcano landing on the island and causing fires, but that's, the island's massive. I don't think that that stacks up. So, um-

• 4:13:59AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it's like 160 miles wide.

• 4:14:02Speaker 03

  I think that's right. Yeah, it's 160 miles wide and 300 yards like north to south. Or yeah, I'm sorry, 300.

• 4:14:09AJ Gentile?

  Miles, right?

• 4:14:10Speaker 03

  30 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 reemerges is Knossos, 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.

• 4:14:54AJ Gentile?

  So now they're speaking Greek?

• 4:14:56Speaker 03

  Now they're speaking Greek. And so, so the Mycenaeans just permeate, permeate throughout the entire island of Crete and take that over. And Minoan civilization just disappears into time. And I think that when Plato is talking about, you know, in his writings, in the Republic, and, uh, and all the times he mentions Atlantis, I think.

• 4:15:20AJ Gentile?

  The dialogues.

• 4:15:21Speaker 03

  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 Helike had just been, it's a Greek city on, on, uh, on the western coast or on the eastern coast of mainland Greece, and it was sunk in by a tsunami just 10 or 13 years before he even mentions Atlantis. So I wonder if that got him thinking. But then also oral traditions survive. Nobody had forgotten about the Minoan world being destroyed. People don't forget cataclysms, you know, that's why the flood myths exist for all of time.

• 4:15:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 4:15:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:16:12Speaker 03

  Fuzzy myths that survive from the Bronze Age when he's telling the story of Atlantis. And I'm not sure what to think of necessarily of the Solon story. I just don't know.

• 4:16:23AJ Gentile?

  Have you heard the theory about how they may have got the math wrong?

• 4:16:27Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:16:29AJ Gentile?

  The ancient Egyptians weren't great at math.

• 4:16:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:16:33AJ Gentile?

  So their symbol for 100 could have been misinterpreted as a 10.

• 4:16:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:16:38AJ Gentile?

  So Plato's saying that this happened 9,000 years ago. If that theory is correct, it would have happened 900 years ago. And that would place it right at the 12th century B.C., right at the collapse of the Bronze Age, like right dead there. If that theory is correct.

• 4:16:53Speaker 03

  So Plato's 400 B.C. Now, you know what's interesting is that works in two different ways. Because if it's 900 years before Plato, it's the collapse of the Bronze Age. But if it's Solon saying that it's 900 years earlier instead, then that's the collapse of the Minoans.

• 4:17:13AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 4:17:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so either way.

• 4:17:15AJ Gentile?

  Either way, I like it.

• 4:17:15Speaker 03

  So either way, it works.

• 4:17:16AJ Gentile?

  It works.

• 4:17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I think it might be Solon that's saying, I think it might be, I think it's Solon saying that in his, I think it's Plato saying that Solon said in his time, it was 9,000 years earlier.

• 4:17:28AJ Gentile?

  I think you're right.

• 4:17:28Speaker 03

  So if that's instead 900, Solon is, let's say, around,

• 4:17:35Speaker 03

  is he late 600s B.C.? So if that's 900 years before, that's about 1600 B.C.

• 4:17:41AJ Gentile?

  Yep, that works.

• 4:17:43Speaker 03

  It works. It's the, you know, those numbers are there.

• 4:17:48Speaker 03

  Now, what's really interesting is, okay, the story of Atlantis itself is Athens conquering Atlantis. That's what they say. People forget that part. Well, Athens didn't exist in 11,000 B.C. 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 Athens, you know, up at the Acropolis where Athens was. Because originally, the Acropolis was not that, was not that political, religious sort of center. It was actually a castle. It was walled off during the Bronze Age. But here's what's really interesting is, you know, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.

• 4:18:31AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 4:18:31Speaker 03

  Theseus kills the Minotaur.

• 4:18:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:19:04AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 4:19:04Speaker 03

  That actually is what happened. So when we're talking about Athens killing Atlantis and Theseus killing the Minotaur, those two things are parallel to each other.

• 4:19:13AJ Gentile?

  That's interesting because you've got King Minos at odds with the Mycenaeans and that happens with the Minotaur. Then his grandson is Idomeneus. And they actually team up with the Mycenaeans to go and invade Troy with the 80 black ships. So that all lines up.

• 4:19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:19:33AJ Gentile?

  The Iliad becomes a historical document.

• 4:19:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:19:37AJ Gentile?

  And then have you read about the Hittite tablets regarding the Trojan War?

• 4:19:41Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:19:42AJ Gentile?

  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 Ilium.

• 4:19:55AJ Gentile?

  And there's a war with Ilium that finally gets resolved with the Treaty of Alexandru. And Alexandru is of course Alexander, which is the other name for Paris.

• 4:20:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:20:08AJ Gentile?

  In the Iliad. So the Hittites have documented the Trojan War. So now we have it from the other side.

• 4:20:15Speaker 03

  Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, that's, that's, that is one of those things where,

• 4:20:22Speaker 03

  you know, there's so many times that academics and archaeologists like blow something off as being totally myth. And it's not myth. It, you know, the myth is based on something that really did happen. You know, what's, you know, what's really funny is I will catch some flak 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.

• 4:20:47AJ Gentile?

  Well, what are some problems with the theory? Well, let's, we can do steel man, straw man.

• 4:20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:20:54Speaker 03

  Oh gosh, um, I don't know if I can, if I can come up with someone on the spot like, okay, well, okay, well, one of, one of-

• 4:20:59AJ Gentile?

  Pillars of Hercules?

• 4:21:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, pillars of Hercules, elephants, the type of stones that are there, this, that and the other, um-

• 4:21:06AJ Gentile?

  Elephants we can solve.

• 4:21:08Speaker 03

  How so?

• 4:21:09AJ Gentile?

  Because they're dwarf elephants found in Greek-

• 4:21:11Speaker 03

  Ooh, I can't believe you know that. I was gonna, I was gonna see if that's what you were gonna say. Yeah, there are. Yeah, they are.

• 4:21:15AJ Gentile?

  The pillars of Hercules bother me though. I can't square it.

• 4:21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. I agree. I agree. Um, it's, 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 B.C. Um, and, and, and, you know, between 400 and 350 B.C. and he's talking about something that Solon went and did over 200 years ago or around 200 years ago.

• 4:22:02Speaker 03

  I don't know, you know, man, I don't know if I, it's funny, like in our modern day culture, we hold Plato and Solon's word as being biblical, but it's like, okay, let's, let's be real, like, it, he could just be wrong, you know, that's-

• 4:22:14AJ Gentile?

  Plato enjoyed a metaphor.

• 4:22:15Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. And, um, and Plato's, his whole, everything that he did was putting words in other people's mouths and playing metaphors, right?

• 4:22:28AJ Gentile?

  Literally in the dialogues is what he does.

• 4:22:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. 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?

• 4:22:40AJ Gentile?

  Exactly right.

• 4:22:40Speaker 03

  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 2,000 years or, or everybody right now obsessing over him with Atlantis and be like-

• 4:22:58Speaker 03

  Guys, that's, I know, I was talking about, I was talking about, you know, this phenomena of ancient civilizations that, that rose and fell in our time, you know, in our civilization. And I'm talking about the symptoms of those civilizations and what destroyed them. And like, why are you ignoring that?

• 4:23:20AJ Gentile?

  I think you're right.

• 4:23:21Speaker 03

  That's probably, that's probably what he would, what he think. You know, the other thing that I think is pretty funny, is that the whole allegory, even if, even if he is really drawing on something important, he is telling an allegory that is all about the consequences of greed. And what I think is so funny is that there's probably, it's just ironic that, you know, people run with the story of Atlantis just to make money sometimes and ignore like all the actual evidence, ignore, 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

• 4:24:05Speaker 03

  begin with, you know, so.

• 4:24:07AJ Gentile?

  It's almost irony.

• 4:24:08Speaker 03

  It is, it is ironic, but, but it actually just proves Plato right.

• 4:24:12AJ Gentile?

  What do you think about the idea that the Trojan War, Iliad Odyssey, Aeneid is all really part of the same point in history, 10, 20 years, the fall of the Bronze Age? It's all part of one big story and the eruption.

• 4:24:28Speaker 03

  The, now, go into that a little bit.

• 4:24:35AJ Gentile?

  Where, 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 10, 20 years later. I think they're just discovering within the last few years, another layer underneath.

• 4:24:52Speaker 03

  There's, there's, I think it's Troy 6 and 7 or Troy 7 and 8, it's something like that.

• 4:24:57AJ Gentile?

  So it's much, it's much bigger, not necessarily more populous, but bigger city.

• 4:25:02AJ Gentile?

  And so we've got all these stories coming around the same time. Odyssey happens right after the Iliad, right?

• 4:25:08Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:25:08AJ Gentile?

  And the Aeneid essentially is right after the Odyssey.

• 4:25:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's supposed to be, yeah.

• 4:25:12AJ Gentile?

  Right, it's supposed to be one long story. And all centered around, basically, is the story of the collapse of everything.

• 4:25:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's their, it's their way of acknowledging it. And, and I think that's-

• 4:25:27AJ Gentile?

  It's the end of the world.

• 4:25:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that that's so interesting. 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 Olmecs, doing some on the Minoans, I'm gonna do more on it. But the next thing I want to get into is the Etruscans and early Rome. Because that's, the Etruscans are another overlooked civilization.

• 4:25:48AJ Gentile?

  They are, indeed.

• 4:25:48Speaker 03

  And we, we don't know if the Aeneid really comes from the Romans, or if it comes from the Etruscans, or if it's some other early Italians. You know, we don't, we don't really know where that comes from. Is, is it likely that there was a guy named Aeneas that, 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.

• 4:26:30Speaker 03

  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, of the story is true. And all of the ribs that come off of it are, you know, that maybe didn't happen, but it's created to tell a story. And, 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.

• 4:27:01AJ Gentile?

  Everything, right?

• 4:27:02Speaker 03

  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, 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 the third, that he says, he says that he repelled the sea people, he drove them out. That's right.

• 4:27:46Speaker 03

  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 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, it may have changed 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

• 4:28:28Speaker 03

  began in 3100 B.C. and never ended throughout all of Egyptian history, even the Ptolemies presented themselves that way. It was so important and vital and crucial to the success of the Egyptian world that everything stayed the same forever and they never changed. So they were, they were as defensive and aggressive as they needed to be. They really controlled like their immigration. I mean, they, they kept the, they kept the percentages of Egyptians like just right, like everything was just right from the very beginning and they never changed any of it because they saw other cultures around them evolving and changing over time and they would collapse. These people would change over time and they would collapse. Egyptians never changed and then it, it's a long, slow grind to a halt for

• 4:29:12Speaker 03

  the Egyptians. And, you know, that's why people looked at them as like, just these giants that loomed over the ancient world. It's, it's really amazing, man. You know, that's, that's the thing is when you were talking about, when you said earlier, when you were talking about the Olmecs 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.

• 4:29:37Speaker 03

  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 civilization, as we acknowledge it around 3100 B.C., 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 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, you're like, ah, it's not really that. 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?

• 4:30:17AJ Gentile?

  A person who grew up as an Almac, those heads had been there forever. Their grandfathers, grandfathers, grandfathers, they were there forever. And as far as they know, always would be.

• 4:30:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:30:27AJ Gentile?

  It's that long of a time. What are you working on now, before I let you know?

• 4:30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, uh, so we got those LiDAR projects we spent some time talking about. Just going over, it's, we got this LiDAR project, working with BaseMap, Terra Incognita Research Institute. We want to, we want to perform the biggest LiDAR scan ever done in the Amazon.

• 4:30:45AJ Gentile?

  Should we join your Patreon and support your work?

• 4:30:48Speaker 03

  No, I don't, I don't have anything like that live yet. But if people want to learn more about it, they can go to Terra Incognita Research Institute. By the time this comes out, I'll have it linked somewhere on my social media, or on my YouTube or somewhere. People can go check it out. They can donate if they want. But I think the biggest thing is just being aware and supporting when we, you know, do put out, you know, calls for people to be able to help, or put out videos or something like that. So we're doing that in the Amazon. And then I'm working with BaseMap. We're scanning a bunch of sites in the mountain builder world to try to recreate and revitalize civilization in the American East Coast. I'm working on, 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

• 4:31:34Speaker 03

  Documented explorations happen in certain periods.

• 4:31:37AJ Gentile?

  Your videos are great. There's Luke Caverns on YouTube.

• 4:31:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, thank you. And so I do that. And then I had started this one called American Wild, which is, it's like frontier history. So it's all the weird stuff that people didn't know was going on in the Americas. Like, when Europeans first arrived in the Americas, they get a glimpse of what this world looked like, and they write it down. And nobody is making anything about them. So Episode 1 was me basically proving that Jaguars were on the East Coast. This next one, I'm doing one right now on this lost colony of Magellan that was found in Chile. So that's kind of what I'm working on. And then, yeah, I got a, later this year, I have been teasing this book called Olmec Enigma that I'm gonna write. But actually,

• 4:32:23Speaker 03

  I think that my time is better spent making a virtual lecture series. So it's gonna be like a, so the chapters of the books, you know, it's gonna be 10 chapters long. They're actually gonna be, I don't know, roughly 40 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.

• 4:32:46AJ Gentile?

  I love it. Fascinating conversation, hopefully the first of many.

• 4:32:49Speaker 03

  And I think that LIDAR is, I think LIDAR is the future of outlaw archaeology, archaeology in general. Like, people say the Age of Exploration died in the Age of Exploration, but, man, LIDAR and GPR with, 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 they do a freaking crazy job.

• 4:33:10AJ Gentile?

  Maybe you can come back, we can go through some images.

• 4:33:14Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, man, if we want to do this LIDAR project later this year, it's, there's gonna be some amazing stuff that comes out of that. Especially here in the mound builder world, too. I know you have a big respect for the mound builder people, which is, which is key, man. So many people overlook them because they think the mounds aren't impressive because they're hills of dirt. Dude, there's so much more going on in the Mississippian world than people realize. So, dude, we should definitely do, we should definitely do some LIDAR stuff in the future.

• 4:33:43AJ Gentile?

  We're gonna do it. Luke Caverns, everybody. Thanks, brother.

• 4:33:46Speaker 03

  Thanks, man.

• 4:33:48AJ Gentile?

  That was Luke Caverns. We covered the Olmecs, the Minoans, Alexander the Great, and what Lidar is finding underneath the Amazon. Let's break it down. Here's what checks out. The Lidar 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 called themselves. Now, think about this. They built over 100 palaces on Crete. We're talking 1,000 rooms,

• 4:34:29AJ Gentile?

  palaces. They dominated the Mediterranean for 1,000 years. 1,000 years. We don't know what they called themselves. Apertiri on Santorini was the wealthiest city on Earth before the eruption. Zero bodies, zero valuables. They knew something was coming. But where did they go? I love that story. Ectodermal dysplasia is a real condition that causes spanglike teeth and abnormal nail growth, like claws. Luke's rare jaguar theory that the Olmecs selectively bred people in this condition as a shamanic priestly class? Well, that's his original take. But the ratio is real. There are only 17 Olmec heads. There

• 4:35:14AJ Gentile?

  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 9,600 B.C. 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 1,500 B.C. The Minoan collapse happened around 1,600 B.C. Scholars have made this argument in peer-reviewed journals. Either date is cool.

• 4:35:55AJ Gentile?

  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 4th century A.D. The tsunami gives a mechanism. So Luke is picking the most dramatic explanation from real evidence. I tend to agree, what could really survive that? Luke Caverns is rebuilding Lost Worlds with technology that didn't exist 15 years ago. Now whether you accept every claim or not, the sites he's flagging are going to produce papers. You can find him at youtube.com/LukeCaverns. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. [Music]

• 4:36:37Speaker 05

  Oh, oh, oh, yeah. I played for Libya in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. Songs singing like I should. But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth with my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends.

• 4:37:29Speaker 05

  I fear the crackhead and got stuck inside Mail's hole with MK-12. I'm being only too aware. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Would the shadows be whole there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was Cole. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And wham, I love it all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 4:38:13Speaker 05

  And wham, I love it all through the night.

• 4:38:35Speaker 05

  The Mothman sightings and the solar stones still come To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Stargate And what the Dark Watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The Black Knight said a lot of tone. It's so, I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more time for me all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 4:39:19Speaker 05

  So one more time for me all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And one more time for me all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more time for me all through the night.

• 4:39:58Speaker 05

  Girlie loves to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel, and camels love to dance When the feeling is right on waste in time. Girlie loves to dance.