What's Happening Beneath the Pyramids? (Ft. Luke Caverns)

Is ancient Egypt hiding structures far older than mainstream archaeology admits? This episode with vigilante archaeologist Luke Caverns explores the mystery beneath the Giza Plateau, from long-rumored underground chambers to the origins of the Sphinx itself. Caverns argues that many ancient monuments—once thought to be tombs— may have served for more mysterious functions. From skull-elongated pharaohs and the forbidden Amarna revolution to the buried water tombs beneath the Sphinx and pyramids, this conversation unveils a hidden Egypt erased by the modern official history. It also reframes ancient Egypt not as a primitive past, but as the remnant of a forgotten epoch where god-kings ruled, advanced technology flourished, and history was written in stone before being buried in sand. -------------------------- LMNT: Get your free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase at https://DrinkLMNT.com/alchemy Also try the new LMNT Sparkling — a bold, 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Better Help: This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/ALCHEMYPOD and get on your way to being your best self. iRestore: Reverse hair loss with @iRestorelaser and unlock HUGE savings on the iRestore Elite with the code [JESSE] at https://www.irestore.com/JESSE! #irestorepod -------------------------- ***JOIN OUR WHOP (Exclusive Episodes & Group Calls) ➤ https://whop.com/jessemichels ***Become a Member of American Alchemy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuG2KzrIMe3qoNcuDVpwnXw/join -------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 03:17 Luke's Background 09:48 Philosophy of Archaeology 12:01 The Romance of Ancient History 14:57 Examining the Exodus 29:28 The Mystery of Underground Structures 32:51 The Sphinx and Its Secrets 38:01 Caves Under the Giza Plateau 42:36 Water and the Osiris Shaft 45:12 Theories on the Sphinx 47:26 The Construction of the Pyramids 1:09:04 The Purpose of the Pyramids 1:12:40 Understanding Ancient Engineering 1:23:03 Bold Hypotheses and Ancient Mysteries 1:23:41 Questioning Modern Christianity 1:23:58 Exploring Ancient Beliefs 1:27:41 The Curse of King Tut 1:58:38 The Last Frontier: Amazon Exploration 2:14:50 Expedition to El Dorado 2:26:26 Planning the Next Adventure -------------------------- SPOTIFY ➤ https://tinyurl.com/jessemichelsspotify INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichelsofficial TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [email protected] # Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:27Speaker 01

  Amenhotep III dies, Amenhotep IV becomes king, and he says, "I'm not worshiping Amen anymore. I'm only going to acknowledge the one true sun god, the Atun, and I'm going to make my name Akhenaten." And so he changes it. And then they start depicting themselves with the elongated skulls. And where does the skull elongation come from? We don't really know.

• 0:48Jesse Michels?

  And many of the historical kings themselves were merged with divinity. The sun god, even up to Louis XIV, he was a sun god in the French context.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  I've heard a Greek college professor say, "I don't mean this in any symbolic or spiritual sense. I'm telling you that this literally happened." Was this whole temple built for Amenhotep to enter it and not come face to face with Amen Ra? It wasn't actually happening? This is all made up? This whole temple is here for nothing? So you have a 500-year period where we can see a progression of architecture getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more monumental. All these ancient temples and sites that were erected on behalf of these god beings. It's every ancient culture recognizes these gods that exist on our planet.

• 1:39Jesse Michels?

  What is going on underneath the pyramids? First, let me give you a little bit of context. In 2024, a collaborative effort between Egyptian and Japanese researchers using ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography mapped the Western cemetery adjacent to the Great Pyramid. Their non-invasive methods revealed a shallow L-shaped structure approximately 10 meters long. We still don't know the function of this structure, but we do know. That this underground, probably man-made artifice is verified and real. Also, verified and real, former Minister of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass,

• 2:21Jesse Michels?

  known for being a professional Debbie Downer and skeptic, himself has acknowledged the existence of three independent tunnels associated with the Sphinx. So that is the context in which an absolute bomb was dropped on the internet in 2025. Just recently, a team of researchers led by Filippo Biondi used a technique called synthetic aperture radar Doppler tomography and artificial intelligence to measure and reconstruct what looks like a small city or energy grid underneath the Giza Plateau. Technically, this modality, SAR Doppler tomography, can map subsurface territory. In fact, this technique is sometimes used to map magma chambers inside of volcanoes.

• 3:06Jesse Michels?

  But the image circulating the internet involves a level of granularity and detail, and in my opinion, takes a lot of liberties. It also involves hand-wavy claims about perfectly accurate artificial intelligence. You see, the actual tomography images don't match what's being circulated online. I think there's a good chance there is something crazy underneath the Giza Plateau, and I think it might go very deep. But this new discovery is very hard to assess. Are we being conditioned to accept a truth that the Egyptian Ministry of Culture is already aware of? Is this sort of a Rorschach test? Is this purely fake news? Or just some researchers grasping at straws? To find out, today I'm interviewing an amazing guest,

• 3:49Jesse Michels?

  what I'm calling a vigilante archaeologist, in his 20s, carrying the torch of Robert Shock, Graham Hancock, and his mentor, Ed Barnhart. Without further ado, please welcome this week's American Alchemist, Luke Caver.

• 4:23Jesse Michels?

  All right, I'm here with Luke Caverns. I couldn't be more excited to have you. We talked about this earlier. I'll present you as a vigilante archaeologist. I think you've gone a really cool route where, you know, archaeology in some respects, I think, is can be myopic at times and it's kind of pure academic form. And you are of the lineage of Ed Barnhart, who is your mentor. But you've told me you are inspired by Graham Hancock, Randall Carlson, people like that. And I want to get into a broader philosophical discussion about kind of hardcore, you know, academic archaeology versus, you know, some of what they do. But I'm just couldn't be more excited to have you, man. Thank you for coming.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah, I, what you said about the getting into like the philosophical argument of like mainstream archaeology versus vigilante archaeology. That's a fascinating topic. I can't wait to get into it as well as everything else that's going on.

• 5:22Jesse Michels?

  Do you think your name, Luke Caverns, you know, there's a concept called nominal determinism, which is if your name is Larry, you're more likely to become a lawyer. And so I think about your name, Luke Caverns. Do you think your name at all subliminally inspired you to pursue archaeological quests?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  You know what's funny? I don't think I've blatantly said this. Caverns is just a second middle name. My last name is actually Reagan. And, and so the reason I did not go with my last name when I was, you know, creating a public persona or presenting myself in public was one, just for privacy originally.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Not that I, I guess I don't care about that too much now. But, and also when people would search up Luke Reagan, all you would ever find was Ronald Reagan. And, and so it's the same family. He's like a distant, distant cousin of mine.

• 6:20Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:21Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  But the, but the determinism actually comes from.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  My dad's side of the family, back in the 1890s, there were, you, people can look it up. If you pick up any book, if you go to like to half price books down, down this road, and you're able to find a book about the American West, like the Wild West, people searching for lost Spanish gold in the United States. This is a big thing. The Spanish were here in the mid to late 1500s, searching for, you know, ancient Native American treasure, as well as gold mines to send back to Spain.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  There's all these great stories about them. And if you find these books about it, you'll find my family in those books. And that's kind of where my family name begins, is searching for lost Spanish gold mine and treasure in the American Southwest. So in Big Bend, there's, you can look it up. There's this place called Reagan Canyon. And there's this huge epic tale of like lost gold and mystery and mysterious deaths of people from West Texas, all the way out to San Antonio, Texas. And it's my family like battling all these people for this lost Spanish gold. It's fascinating story. One of those brothers makes it out, gets involved in the, in the oil field. And in gold mining, then his son picks it up after him and goes looking in New Mexico for the

• 7:44Speaker 01

  the seven lost Spanish gold mines of Southern New Mexico. And within a year, he discovered them. And he opened up these 450 year old gold mines and had this company going for about eight years. And eventually there was a tragedy that befell the company and the whole company fell apart. And they fell into poverty and my dad was accidentally born during that time. And so my dad didn't experience any of that, didn't really inherit that adventurous spirit. And somehow I did, like somehow it carried over to me. And yeah, I just, so I just kind of come from this lineage of people who have been interested in the ancient world.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  And, and while he was a gold miner and an explorer, he was also what we call today an antiquarian. So it's a guy, antiquarians were usually like guys who were pretty wealthy that had the money to be able to carry out pretty unorganized archaeological expeditions.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Or excavations and he would just collect the artifacts and so, you know, they're sitting in boxes today and we still have them. So yeah, that would be the determinism.

• 8:59Jesse Michels?

  That's fascinating. It's almost like you have some unfinished business on behalf of your family that you are now pursuing. And we were talking about this earlier on the phone, but it's like, I think a lot of people in the kind of academic world of archaeology need to fully separate out, you know, their pursuits with anything autobiographical. So they can't say that they're, you know, inspired by anything seemingly irrational or seemingly like, you know, some hermetic lineage or, you know, whatever. It has to be like, I am engaging in perfect deductive and inductive logic, you know, and I'm figuring it out. And that's so not how humans in general interact with any subject matter. And so,

• 9:42Jesse Michels?

  you know, we were talking about Heinrich von Schliemann, the guy who found Troy in the 1870s, this German businessman who was like, he was really interested in like, you know, Homer and Thucydides. And so he was like, you know, I think the Peloponnesian War happened. And then that like, you know, led him to, or Sir James Bruce, who, you know, we have the Book of Enoch because he discovered it and he was like a Scottish, you know, Freemason. And he went looking for the Ark of the Covenant and he came back with the Book of Enoch. So you have all these like fascinating, so you are, you know, maybe part and parcel of that, of that sort of, you know, lineage, which is awesome.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I still, I hold on to that, that romance of the ancient world that inspired so many of the great stories that we still talk about today. It really inspired the only stories that are worth talking about, right? You know, people don't talk about centuries later, the highly logistical and ultra sterilized, you know, deductions of such and such, such and such. It's always some kind of human passion that lives on, you know? And I totally agree with you. And it's that, it's sort of that ancestral calling drive to dive into the ancient world and, I don't know, like explore really distant places.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still feel the romance of the ancient world when there's such a drive to sterilize everything. You know, I think that that is the problem with. Modern mainstream archaeology is that it is so sterilized and so against anything being, and of course, they would never admit this, and I don't know if passion is the right word, but, but they don't like romance. I was having a conversation about this thing specifically with an archaeologist, or maybe he's like a geo-archaeologist, and I was talking to him, he was accusing me of being somebody who's wanting to sell the mystery, which that's

• 11:43Speaker 01

  a big thing that goes on as people sell the mystery and they kind of just, they kind of inflate things where there's not really a mystery and they turn it into something. And there's a lot of mystery out there, but I think if I'm selling anything, I'm just trying to convince people or reignite in people the romance and the wonder of the ancient world and like the magic that that has, that that, that that carries with it. It's like an escape from our modern day. And of course, that wasn't good either. There's no, human nature is not allowed to prevail anymore, or to shine. It's, everything has to be so sterilized and so un, just thoroughly uninteresting. And then they wonder why they're

• 12:24Speaker 01

  losing, you know, the popular audience and why they've never been able to connect with them.

• 12:29Jesse Michels?

  I also think it's bad thinking. Like if thinking is, you have to engage in some sort of sorting mechanism of like truth and not truth, they're actually subject to dogma when it comes to, like a good example is like the Bible. Taking that entirely, throwing it out as not historical because it's religious and we live in this kind of age of materialist reductionism, Allah, you know, Richard Dawkins or whatever. So like nothing in the Bible could be true, when like, yeah, some of this stuff seems to defy our kind of modern physics, but there are plenty of things we have actually like a lot of, you know, historical evidence for, and you've spoken about this, or you have any good examples of things in the Bible that?

• 13:10Speaker 01

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• 13:24Jesse Michels?

  It wasn't burnout and it wasn't just in my head. It was electrolytes. That's why I started using one of my favorite new products, Element. It's a zero sugar electrolyte drink mix formulated with a dose of sodium, potassium, and magnesium that actually makes a difference. No artificial stuff, no weird additives, just what your body needs to stay sharp, especially if you're on a low carb diet, intermittent fasting, or working out intensely. Seriously, if you have an active lifestyle, Element is a game changer. Element was co-founded by a super interesting guy. His name is Rob Wolf, a former research biochemist and bestselling author who now works with the Navy SEAL Resiliency Team.

• 14:05Jesse Michels?

  Since I started using Element, my focus is more locked in, I recover faster, and I've stopped dealing with the late day energy crash. Here's the best part, you can try it totally risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. Honestly, their customer service is some of the best I've ever seen, and the formula is clean and healthy. Get your free Element sample pack with any purchase at drinklmnt.com slash alchemy. Again, that's drinklmnt.com slash alchemy. Also, try the new Element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. That's drinklmnt.com slash alchemy to grab your free sample pack with any purchase.

• 14:49Jesse Michels?

  Hydrate like it matters, because it does.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I mean, there's so much. I think, yeah, I mean, if we're in the conversation of looking for historical evidence of the Bible, you would need to go back to, you know, the Old Testament. Because there aren't really any historians that debate whether or not Jesus Christ was a real person.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  But as far as something that I have been interested, that I've spoken about before, is the archaeological evidence of the Exodus. And I don't know, I mean, this is such a nuanced topic. I don't know how deeply we could go into this, but you know, you read, you read the Exodus and it's fascinating as to.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  It's fascinating like the specific details that they get into, you know, common, common phrases that were said during that time. The, the details that are in the Exodus story, when you're looking back, could have only been written by somebody who was alive in Egypt during the time of the Exodus, which would be sometime during like the mid New Kingdom period. So let's, let's call it very roughly somewhere between 1500 and 1000 B.C. And so some of the details in there as to like how the women squat on these blocks and give, and, and give birth to children was something that you would have only known if you were living there and not living in Israel a thousand years later, right? And so it's, it's just fascinating, like getting to your point, it's just fascinating.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that, and I have, I have some problems with this too. As to how we, we take a religious text like that and we just completely cast it to the side. They do the same thing, um, they do the same thing with the Iliad and the Odyssey. You know, they do the same thing with Homer's works, like completely cast that out.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And I, yeah, I think it just kind of, uh, I don't know, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

• 16:47Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, well, you, it's like, yeah, I think a good example is the Heimlich von Schleim and, you know, Peloponnesian War, well, the Troy was never real. Well, actually he found Troy. Another good example is the myth of Atlantis where you have, you know, Plato and Solon, you know, saying that, you know, there was, there was a great flood here 9,000 years ago. He's saying this in 600 B.C. That dates back to nine, you know, 9,600 B.C. Which is, you know, the year that, uh, you know, according to people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, there's all this archaeological interesting evidence that that, you know, the Younger Dry period ended. And so, and it was, you know, this, this, this great flood, this meltwater pulse one B. And so that, that pattern matches, you know, as well.

• 17:32Jesse Michels?

  So I think it's really easy to relegate things as, you know, religion or myth. When in fact, you know, like the flood myths, they're over, there are hundreds and hundreds of these flood myths, and they're across completely uncorrelated disparate civilizations that, you know, didn't really have a ton of contact with each other. And so, you know, one would I think be wise to take that seriously if you're like a modern archaeologist and not just throw that out.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think the, there's, there's like a conservative argument there that, you know, the reason we have so many flood myths from around the world is because, well, you know, people live next to large bodies of water and large bodies of water are bound to have some kind of horrific flooding someday that people will just continue to tell. Uh, but I've talked to Dr. Barnhart about this and even Dr. Barnhart, uh, said this, uh, on a podcast that he and I were on together was that even he feels that to some degree, this really might be some kind of leftover ancestral memory that is passed down of this, you know, horrific event that just eviscerated so much of humanity and people have, have held on to that.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  But at a certain point, I had the realization that, you know, this modern fascination that, you know, millions of people are wrapped up in this, this search for, uh, you know, a lost civilization, this Atlantean civilization and that kind of, that can kind of get muddy because the term Atlantis has now kind of become an umbrella term just for this concept of a lost civilization or lost civilizations that could have existed long before. You know, it's, this whole alternate space has become this huge range of belief.

• 19:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's frustrating. You see everybody's super and but you watch Gaia and they're like, the Atlanteans could teleport, blah, blah, blah. And then like even to be honest, when I look at Graham Hancock, the super rigorous part of his work is around the Younger Dryas impact theory. I think he's correct on that. I think he'll be vindicated by history. And then when he gets into the, you know, proto civilization crossing, you know, the Atlantic, you know, where it's like you have this architecture in the Americas that lines up with this architecture in, you know, Asia or Europe or whatever. I think it gets extremely speculative and I think he would even admit that if you kind of, you know, push him on it.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, there's that quote that's, that's gone crazy viral on his, uh, in his debate against Flint where, uh, I think Joe asks him, he said, he says, so would you say in, in what has been studied, there's no evidence for a lost civilization? He's like, well, yes, in what has been studied, there's no evidence for it. I get what he's saying. But it, but I mean, that's a, that's a serious point is, is that, is that we don't, I, I try to tell people this is, is that I'm very open minded to everything, very open minded to the, extremely open minded to the fact that ancient people are achieving a lot of things that we can't really explain by conventional means. They're incredibly intelligent, far more intelligent than I think

• 20:33Speaker 01

  that they've been given credit for. Um, but I mean, we still don't have like hard evidence of the fact that this civilization existed or that there were any of them. But you can see these holes in the historical timeline that need an answer. It needs to be filled. I don't know what the answer is.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  And so that's, that's the approach that I've always, that I've always taken. And, um, and the more I've learned, the more I've realized that, yes, Plato is using Atlantis as a tool in his, in his works to essentially, you know, he, he builds up the story that Athens was, you know, 9,000 years ago was at war, or he's, he's either building up the story or he's recounting the story, but he's saying that Athens was once at war with this long lost city named Atlantis. Atlantis was overly arrogant and, you know, uh, and disrespected the gods and they were impious and, and so they fell. Well, he's obviously telling a story there because Athens did not exist 9,000 years before that.

• 21:36Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Um, it just, I mean, as far as we have evidence for, they did not.

• 21:40Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And Athens has been thoroughly excavated.

• 21:43Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  But that part could just be an allegory. Sure. Athens did not exist 9,000 years ago. But maybe he's recalling on some kind of mythical city that people back then knew about or had heard about, or that you hear in a children's story, or, or maybe Solon really did hear about a lost city while he was in, while he was in Egypt. But the reality there is that we just don't really know exactly what the reality is there. And there's, you know, I guess mainstream archaeologists are very quick to say that they know exactly. What Plato's intentions were and that the fact that he just pulls it out of thin air and made it up. I don't think that that can be, I don't think that that can concretely be said.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  But there's no doubt that he's using it as an allegory in his story because he's making Atlantis as a mirror for Athens. He's warning people that Athens is falling, you know? So there's, there's some nuance there and you know, the more, the more I have studied the ancient world, the more I've realized just how unsure we are about the ancient world.

• 22:44Jesse Michels?

  Absolutely. Well, Plato's extremely hard to decipher because he and Socrates had a bias against writing. And so it's all through this sort of peripatetic dialogue or whatever is how you have to interpret everything. And the Timaeus and Cretaeus, the discussion of Atlantis, the whole thing is occurring at a mythos festival. And so it's like, and then even if you read Plato's Republic, he says at the very beginning, like, a lot of what I'm about to say is a lie. But then he goes on to describe things that I think probably speak closer to like true ontological truth. Again, this is not something anybody can like claim on, I think in our earthly world or whatever, but in my assessment, closer to ontological truth than like anybody.

• 23:25Jesse Michels?

  But he says that up top and a lot of this was due to the persecution of his mentor Socrates, who, you know, the state ended up killing. And so you never know with him.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  I love how much you know about this.

• 23:36Jesse Michels?

  I don't know, man. I'm very passionate about it. But you know, it's, it's always hard to, it's always hard to say. Okay. This is a perfect segue. Very hot in the news right now and it goes along hand in hand with what you're talking about, which is basically that maybe some of these civilizations could have been more advanced, but there is this whole grifting, you know, playing up the mystery, you know, industry around us that we have to be honest about. There are these researchers, this Italian guy, Filippo Biondi. And in 2022, I guess you have this, this peer reviewed paper and it's just coming out

• 24:17Jesse Michels?

  now that through the synthetic aperture radar imagery, we have found these vast structures below the pyramids. The verdict seems like it's still out. I texted Graham Hancock about it. He said, I have no reason to believe that the source here is being honest. So yeah, I don't know. What do you think?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm gonna have to agree with Graham. And I'll say this for everybody watching, because I know that, you know, there's people in the audience who they hear about this and they're fascinated by it and they're like, whoa, okay, finally, what we have been searching for, something more is being vindicated. And just putting this out there, there are people out there that know that you feel that way and they know that that's an easy way to inspire hope in people and make an incredible amount of money through funding at the same time. And, uh, and so just putting it out there, every respected person in the alternate space is highly, highly, highly skeptical. I know this because we're all in a group chat with each other.

• 25:24Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  And, uh, that's just, that's just the truth.

• 25:28Jesse Michels?

  Well, they're also, you know, I invest a little bit in aerospace in my sort of investing day job and, um, a friend of mine, he's really deep on like synthetic aperture radar and other kind of sensing modalities is like, he's like, look, I have to do the exact math, but I doubt that synthetic aperture radar could ever penetrate that deeply underground. And I even actually, the companies that it came out of, Capella Space and Umbra, I looked at, I diligence them and with my venture capital hat on, and that was not my impression either. It wasn't, it wasn't about penetrating deep below the, the ground. And then you look at the granularity with which they're drawing these things and they say that their AI is infallible or whatever.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 26:07Jesse Michels?

  Right?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  That's crazy. Uh, yeah, cause anybody who, you know, I work with AI every day, like you just, uh, you know, trying to get easy answers about something with history, you know, I've got chat GPT or Grok or whatever on the side and I can ask it quick questions, but I can't ask it a detailed question. AI is not as sophisticated as human beings by a long shot. And so for someone to say their AI is infallible is insane to me.

• 26:30Jesse Michels?

  I agree. It is insane and it's. Also, you just think about the way AI works, right? It's like pattern matching based on other things. So it's like when you get an answer on ChatGPT, it's just like their best averaging and, and, you know, to their assessment, like the highest quality stuff that they're sifting through online. But it's, it's, it's just token prediction. It's just pattern matching on steroids and it's gotten very good.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:56Jesse Michels?

  So it's like Turing passable pattern matching or whatever. If you think about the pattern matching necessary to craft together and any energy generator machine underground, that is N of one. That's not like, you don't have like a large sample size to like do pattern matching on that. So like, yeah, it's just literally impossible, given the way we know AI works.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And the other thing is, is, you know, before they are even going deep underground, they're scanning into the pyramid and supposedly, you know, they, um, they, they create this, this 3D model, I'm sure that you've seen where they took a, they took a visual 3D model of the king's chamber and the relieving chambers. And they, they, um, they duplicated it five times inside the coffre pyramid. And they said, this is what they're detecting. There's no serious team that would do that. You would not take a 3D model of a chamber inside a different pyramid and then superimpose it on top of this pyramid you're scanning and say, this is like that. That's crazy that you wouldn't do that. It just, that's a unique structure to the great pyramid.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  And it, it's very unserious to do that, right?

• 28:04Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Um, now on top of that, even with that 3D model that they, that they created, they did not include, and in their scans, you cannot see represented the chambers that we know are inside Koffers Pyramid. The one that, the ones that you can pay the ticket at the Giza Plateau and walk into today. Those chambers aren't, aren't included as well as there are these two cavities. One's at 69 feet below the surface and the other one's like 112 feet below the surface. And they're big cavities that are bigger than the, you know, burial chamber inside Koffers Pyramid. Those aren't represented in the scans either. You have. So you have nothing of what we know is there. The way that we know that those are there, I think we talked about this on the phone, is Luis Alvarez,

• 28:48Speaker 01

  the scientist that worked on the Manhattan Project. He takes a team there in the 60s and they do a scan in the coffer pyramid. And I think that they just, they're standing inside the burial chamber and they're scanning up towards the, you know, towards the point of the pyramid. And they, they checked and tested the equipment and they were able to detect all four sides, or all four corners as well as the sides and the, and the pinnacle of the pyramid. So they knew that their scans were, that, that these Muon scans were accurate. And in everything that they scanned, they didn't see any more chambers above, above the chamber that they were standing in. And then in the 70s, another team from Stanford came in and did another scan. And they confirmed this, they had the same results scanning up,

• 29:31Speaker 01

  but they also scanned the shallow bedrock around. And that's where they found these two cavities in the ground below the coffer pyramid. So, and also we know that these are accurate because they confirmed it and tested everything. Well, this new copper scan hasn't, it's not even tested. They just pointed it at the pyramid. And then, you know, now we have this huge press release over something that wasn't tested. You know, it's just crazy.

• 29:56Jesse Michels?

  It's crazy. Well, it's funny, like, I'm very pro podcasting and indie journalism. And, you know, I never thought the pendulum would maybe swing this far where it's like, I look at the incentives on Twitter and it's like, some of the tweets where I'll caveat them and I'll say, look, I don't know if I believe this. This is speculation or whatever, like, let's, let's speculate and see what's up. Those like do really well, you know? And then the ones where I'm like, you know, it's very, you know, more nuanced or skeptical or whatever like that, you know, those don't do well. And like I tweeted a thing, it was like, you know, this little picture of like a UFO on Mars or whatever. And I'm like, you know, maybe this is a UFO. Do we have any good debunks or whatever? And, you know, that went crazy.

• 30:40Jesse Michels?

  And then I came back and I was like, I've come to the conclusion, this is a rock protrusion. It's not a UFO. And it just didn't do as well. So the incentives lead you towards sensationalism.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Oh, and that, that's the thing, right? Is, um, is you can be so, brainwash is a hard term to use, but people get so taken advantage of, you know? There are so many people that are in their nine to five, going to work every day, looking for... Whether they realize it or not, like you're just looking for more.

• 31:12Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  You know, you're just looking for more in your, in your life, things that are interesting. And we're so consistently lied to in the media when it comes to politics and when it comes to, you know, socioeconomics, world economics, foreign affairs. We get lied to all the time and have been for decades. And people don't trust anything anymore.

• 31:34Jesse Michels?

  They don't.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And so, you know, that bleeds into every facet of reality. And then it's very easy for someone, for like a third party sitting on the outside to see this huge group of people that are being taken advantage of by their government, by, you know, by the media and being lied to. And these guys are already the bad guys. So you can take this other fascinating topic that is ancient history and you just kind of wrap a whole bow around that and man, you can, you can make millions of views, you know, by, you know, having these huge conspiracy webs being made out of things. And if you're, if you're constantly speculative and never answer any questions.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Dude, you just inspire so much like wonder in people, but a lot of times it's based on just utter BS.

• 32:22Jesse Michels?

  Totally. And I think the distinction you have to make is are, are you peddling a known lie? Cause if you are, then you should, you know, take yourself off air and do some introspection, you know, and, and figure your life out. If you're not, and you're explicitly saying, I don't know, but we're like exploring this together. This is not some official expert view, but like this is possible. That's fine.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:45Jesse Michels?

  You know, and I think the breakdown of trust leads to another criteria, which is like, do we trust the person's thought process or the person like, you know, they're, they're, they're just being an honest actor.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:58Jesse Michels?

  Where if they don't know about something, you know, they'll, they can change their mind or like say like this is probabilistic thinking or maintain some epistemic humility. So. Yeah, well, that's interesting on Luis Walter Alvarez. So it sounds like we already have deeper knowledge on pyramid structures than what, you know, these guys are even coming out with. Do we have any evidence that there's anything underground? Because you've talked about this and I think the Ministry of Culture, what's his name? Hawaiz? Zahi Hawaiz. Yeah, Zahi Hawaiz. He's talked about, you know, maybe structures under, you know, the Sphinx. Yeah, yeah. So is there, is there something there? This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

• 33:41Jesse Michels?

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• 34:26Jesse Michels?

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• 35:11Jesse Michels?

  After you sign up, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we- Sent you. That would go a long way.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Under the Sphinx specifically?

• 35:20Jesse Michels?

  Under the Sphinx or under the Giza Plateau or the pyramids.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so the Sphinx thing goes back to Edgar Cayce. And there's probably a lot of people who know a lot more about, you know, this guy. Supposedly he was a psychic and, uh.

• 35:33Jesse Michels?

  Another Atlantis guy.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he, I, I'm, I could be getting this wrong, but I think he was on like a psychedelic trip or something. And, uh, and he essentially, you know, had some kind of vision that there's this chamber beneath the Sphinx that holds this Hall of Records, you know, that, that tells the story of Atlantis. And so this has been a, that's the 1940s. So this has been around for 80 years or so. Um, then been very popular and the drilling that they did in the nineties to see if there was a, to see if there was a chamber there. That was overseen by Zahi Hawass. And you can see in the video when they drill, they drill away from the Sphinx. You know, I, I don't know, just to, to a semi shallow depth and they go, oh, there's nothing there. We're not going to drill anymore. That's a little weird to me.

• 36:19Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Um, but I, I, I would say, as I say with my audience all the time, with these really grand ideas that are out there. My deep, my default position is always probably not, but maybe.

• 36:31Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  You know, that's just like, if we're being real with ourselves.

• 36:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  That's the, that's the reality. Now, as far as things under the Giza Plateau, absolutely. The Giza Plateau is like a honeycomb. It's, it's as much empty space under the ground as it is solid bedrock. And, um, this comes from a whole host of factors. So on the northern cliff, on the northern cliff face to the west of the Great Pyramid, uh, there's this tomb called the Tombs of the Birds. And they call that, they call it that because, uh, in the 1940s, when it was being excavated,

• 37:08Speaker 01

  so, so Egypt's declared war on Germany. I think in 45 and they were nervous.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Of the of being under attack of an air raid. And you know, they thought that the Luftwaffe was going to come in and bomb the pyramids or something. And but there's still excavations going on, you know, they never stopped excavations during the war. So they're trying to identify like, where can we go? You know, to use as bomb shelters. So they find these tombs on the on the northern cliff. And while they're in there excavating it, they find this little wooden bird. And so it's been popularly thought that or it's been speculated that this could be evidence of aerodynamics, like thousands of years before, you know, it was discovered. And of course, Egyptologists quickly brush it off, but I've always wondered if it's been tested. And apparently Mythbusters did a little thing on it and could determine that it actually could fly. If you added like one thing to it anyways. Interesting.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  At the back of that tomb, there was something that wasn't recorded by the original explorers in that. The tomb builders, as they're chipping away everything and it's amazing. Have you ever been to Egypt? Yep. Okay, so so you probably went to the Valley of Kings. I did. And so you think about how big of a project that is when you go all the way down to the back of those tombs. It's insane. Every square inch of that tomb is quarried away and carried out. It's a big project, you know, to do that. And so while they're doing that, they hit a cavern. And you go through like one of these cracks in the walls. And there's these caves that go under the Giza Plateau, the whole plateau. And the further they go back in these caves, the more little artifacts and stuff that they find.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  And as they, the more they've explored the Giza Plateau, the more they have found examples of these tombs going, you know, the shaft tombs that they're building going deep underground. And then they hit a cave. And so the Egyptians obviously explore it. We don't really know what the Egyptians thought of these caves or what they believed by them. That's like invisible in the historical record.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  What else is under the Great Pyramid is, you probably know, is, you know, the the Giza Plateau, the limelight is taken is completely taken up by the pyramids and rightfully so. But when you visit the pyramids and you're trying not to stumble over all the stones, you will notice how many holes just descend down in the ground. Nowhere, right? And 5,000 years of sand has been blowing in these things and it's never filled up. You know, these holes and shafts and labyrinths underneath the plateau. And, um, and truth be told, I mean, we know that some of them were either vertical shaft tombs or they're 45 degrees shaft tombs and they'll go down into this labyrinth where we'll find tombs there.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Many of these are later periods, so let's call it 1,000 B.C. to well into the Roman period, 300 A.D. You know, up until Constantine becomes Christian and all the temples are closed and everything. You know, you have Roman, you have Romans who want to be buried at the foot of the great pyramids. They go in, they take out the old Greek, Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian bodies and replace them with themselves. So, um, you know, you have, you just have an incredible density under the great pyramids. Further than that would be the Osiris shaft, which I'm sure you've heard of.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  You know, as, as, as famous as the Osiris shaft is, there's such little amount of literature about it. And what exactly it was used for, it's, uh, if you're walking on the causeway, so from the middle pyramid, Coffers pyramid, the, the thing that's the center point of this whole SARS scan. You have that causeway that goes down to the Sphinx. You may remember this, just a big stone road. Well, the Osiris shaft is totally inconspicuous. You wouldn't even know where it was if somebody didn't show you. I was with Land of Kim and he showed me, if you're familiar with him. And, um, so you go down in the Osiris shaft and it drops down. You have this initial chamber that's got seven, uh, seven chamber extensions. What those were used for, we don't really know.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. We don't know. Uh, then there's another descending chamber that goes down. You go down this huge ladder and there's this room that's filled with water. And they don't know to what extent it was filled with water in ancient times. But in the center, there's this elevated platform that has this huge sarcophagus in it. And, and what's really interesting is that in the fifth century, Herodotus is exploring in Egypt. And he's told about this huge shaft that goes underneath the great pyramids. And he would, and we don't think that he actually went down there. Maybe he didn't know where the entrance was, or maybe the entrance was lost, or maybe this was just even a legend in his time. We don't really exactly know. But he records that down in the Osiris shaft,

• 41:48Speaker 01

  there was the tomb of a great king on an island surrounded by a lake of water.

• 41:54Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  What is that? You know, like, what? On an island under the Giza Plateau, surrounded by a lake of water? Well, sure enough, they, I think it's in the eighties or the nineties that this expedition is carried out. Of course, all the credit is taken by Zahi Was.

• 42:10Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  If you, I read his paper recently on, I think it's called Giza and the Osiris shaft. And at the very beginning, he takes sole credit for it. He's like, he's like, he's like, this is my single greatest discovery. And, you know, in my Egyptological career or whatever.

• 42:26Jesse Michels?

  But that's fascinating. There's like a lake in the, where the tomb possibly was?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  It's probably a little bit bigger than the size of this, no, it's maybe like two or three times the size of this room. And it was filled with water.

• 42:39Jesse Michels?

  And it's underground.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  And it's underground and there's this huge sarcophagus that's elevated, sitting in the middle of it. Today, the water table is risen and it's covered up the sarcophagus. But in ancient times, they think that the water was actually lowered.

• 42:51Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  And that there was a, there was a sarcophagus raised up above the water. So when you went down there, it'd be a sarcophagus surrounded by water.

• 42:59Jesse Michels?

  Do we have any other historical writing about that outside of Herodotus?

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Not that I know of.

• 43:06Jesse Michels?

  That is fascinating. That's so interesting. Wow. Do you, yeah, go for it.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Well, I was gonna say, the thing that I, that struck me as similar to that is the Osirion. Have you heard of this before?

• 43:17Jesse Michels?

  No.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so the Osirion is probably one of the most mysterious places in all of Egypt. It was constructed at a site in Abydos, which is,

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Abydos, according to the traditional Egyptological timeline, Abydos is even older than Giza. Was around long before the pyramids. And so the traditional Egyptological explanation is that in the 19th dynasty, Seti I builds this temple. And it's this oddly shaped L temple. And behind that, he created, and I should say, this temple is made out of like modestly sized limestone blocks. So the blocks are maybe this big.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Big, but not something that a few men couldn't carry and stack. And it's a beautifully made. Dynastic temple, you know, you just, you recognize it as that iconic Egyptian style, but then behind it and lower into the ground, maybe another 30 feet into the ground before you get to the roof is something called the Osirion. And it is made out of the biggest stones in all of Egypt that are in these temples. This is in southern Egypt and it's the biggest stones in all of Egypt. And rather than how the rest of the temple was made out of modesty sized limestone blocks, this is made out of gigantic red azwane granite stones. Only two of those stones could fit in this room.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  This huge square pillars, none of it has hieroglyphics on it or anything like that. Just utterly, completely different construction style. So this is, this is a really fascinating topic in this space and, and people who are, who are interested in, in ancient Egypt will know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't believe that the Osirion was created by Seti. I think it's far older than Seti. When people say that they think it's 12,000 years old, it's more so just a popular belief. It isn't actually based on, you know, anything. I think that whoever built that also built the Sphinx temple. You may remember this, it's that huge red granite temple next to, next to the Sphinx. I'm sorry, the Valley Temple.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Gigantic stones, I mean, some of them couldn't even fit in this room. Those two architects must be the same. And I think that they're much older than the 19th dynasty. More than 2,000 years old.

• 45:40Jesse Michels?

  Well, in the Sphinx itself, Robert Shock, John Anthony West talked about limestone, water erosion damage on the nose or whatever. And so they, they think that indicates that the Sphinx existed at a time where you didn't have this arid kind of desert climate in, in Egypt. And so that would predate, you know, obviously even the Old Kingdom and, and Egypt. Do you, uh, do you believe that the Sphinx itself was also kind of far, far older than?

• 46:07Speaker 01

  I think that the Sphinx is probably the strongest argument in all of Egypt of an exceptionally old artifact or monument. You know, even Graham Hancock has come around. If you really study the pyramids. You get to a certain point where you become locked in a certain timeframe. Uh, and that timeframe is the fourth dynasty. Uh, anybody who studies it objectively will eventually come to this.

• 46:34Jesse Michels?

  What, what dates are the fourth dynasty?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Twenty, well, so the fourth dynasty is, um. Well, I mean, it's very rough, but let's call it twenty six hundred to like, let's call it like twenty six fifty to twenty four fifty.

• 46:49Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Two hundred year period, uh, B.C. Um, a lot of people don't like that because you know, this idea like the twelve thousand, Egypt being twelve thousand years old is so popular. But unfortunately, that actually isn't based in anything. Um, the only evidence for Egypt being considerably older is, is the Sphinx and, um.

• 47:09Jesse Michels?

  Well, it sounds like the Sphinx and the, the, these granite structures and.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Well, I think that, I think that that is contemporaneous with, I think it's contemporaneous with the Sphinx temple. When those two things were built, that can be argued.

• 47:21Jesse Michels?

  Okay. But both you'd say are older than, you know, Egypt itself as a civilization or would you say?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  I think, I think almost, to me, almost certainly the Sphinx definitely is. I, I can say that, I can say that with.

• 47:34Jesse Michels?

  The other two, it's more speculative.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  More speculative.

• 47:36Jesse Michels?

  But clearly there's some conflation going on between these structures that we can't date that seem presumably older. And then these, you know, traditional Egypt, Egyptian structures, is that right?

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just, just, uh, finishing up on the pyramids and then we go to that. You know, even Graham Hancock, like when he was on, uh, when it was just him on Rogan a couple of years ago. Uh, they talked about it and he said that he, that he believes that the vast majority of the great pyramid was constructed during the reign of Khufu. And that he wonders if the subterranean level in that, that lower mound, uh, structure, the work that was done under the pyramid, if that's not part of this, you know, uh, something that's inherited from this even older civilization. And even, um, are you familiar with Ben Van Kirkwick on X?

• 48:25Jesse Michels?

  He's, he does stuff with Randall Carlson.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he was on a podcast called Lost Ancient Technology or something. And they were in front of the pyramids and, and they talk about how Graham has come around to believing that the pyramids are fourth dynasty. And I think that that's where, I think that's where the evidence points. Now, talking about the, uh, talking about the Sphinx. Uh, that erosion on the Sphinx is just.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  If the Sphinx was really constructed under the reign of Khafra, because what they, what they say that they think happened is that you had this huge limestone outcropping in a, a canal from, from the, from the Nile River used to come right out to the base of the pyramids. You know, when you're out, the Sphinx was, if you're standing at the base of the Sphinx, without any effort, you could throw a stone into the Nile River without any effort at all. That's how close the Nile was coming up to the Giza Plateau. And so as people are sailing by, they almost certainly would have noticed this huge limestone outcropping the top of the Sphinx's head. Think about if that's how, how high up that limestone used to go,

• 49:36Speaker 01

  it was no surprise that it was there, which contradicts what they, what they, what the traditional idea is about the construction of Khafra's pyramid complex in that they accidentally hit this huge limestone outcropping and then decided to, to turn it into a Sphinx or something like that. There's a big hole there. There's something there that doesn't quite make sense. It's not like they accidentally ran into this. If anybody here, you could go on Google Earth and do this, it's much more obvious when you're there in person. If you look at the height of the Sphinx's head and you look around you, you're like, there's no way they accidentally hit this thing. This is a huge limestone outcropping that they always had to have known was there, especially if you're sailing by, you would see that limestone

• 50:19Speaker 01

  goes, you know. So I think that it's not unlikely that this could have been a, a venerated monument in pre-dynastic times. It's obvious that it would have been there. And there's another spot on the Giza Plateau, down on the southeastern side, near what's called the workers' tombs. It's this, I think it's, it's near Kent Coway's pyramid, and it's really not much of a pyramid anymore. All the stones were taken away. I mean, it's not even, you can't even see it as a pyramid anymore. It's completely unrecognizable. But down in there, there's this little piece of the limestone that's eroded in this really Really strange way where when you walk up to it, it looks like the back of another Sphinx's head.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  It's still there today and you can tell if that's what that formation with a Sphinx's head used to look like. It used to was some weird rock formation.

• 51:13Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  You can see how someone would turn it into something, you know, that you could, you could mistake it for, for a head.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Anyways, I don't know what the Sphinx's originally looked like. It sure as hell looks like it, it used to be a lion and that the lion's head was shaved down and turned into something else.

• 51:30Jesse Michels?

  That's what Graham Hancock and Robert Shock think is that, um, when the procession was in Leo or whatever, it was made as, you know, a lion. As kind of, you know, paying homage and then, uh, the pharaonic headdress was sort of retrofitted onto it, you know, based on, you know, Egyptian customs. So I don't know.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Well, and I don't think that that's a, a completely crazy idea. The, the, the best thing that would substantiate that is if we could figure out a means by which,

• 51:59Speaker 01

  the labeling of constellations is preserved over the course of 10,000 years. You know, how far back does astrology go?

• 52:06Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  You know, I would love to, I would love to find some kind of evidence of people really far back in history, recognizing the same constellation.

• 52:15Jesse Michels?

  Well, that it's funny, that's always the most fantastical thing that I think people like Robert Shock or Graham Hancock say that, to me, it's either not real, or if it's real, then you have to get into ontologically trippy territory, vis a vis people from the stars or something, because they're talking about monuments being made over cosmic time scales based on processions and stuff, paying homage to, you know, star alignments. And so, I mean, maybe the Occam's razor explanation for that is like, you have a lot of time to like stare at the sky.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 52:49Jesse Michels?

  Or something. So like that becomes like a, a way more part and parcel, part and parcel of any ancient culture. But there might be, I don't know, it's still crazy. It's still really fascinating.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  I, I was having the same conversation. Um, so I was telling you yesterday, I, I was out in, uh, Big Bend, Texas. For anybody watching, Big Bend is just this huge national or state park in, in West Texas, where you have a hundred percent visibility of the night sky. And you go out there and it's just daunting. It reminds you of how small and insignificant and of a speck you are in, in all reality. And I was talking to my buddies while I'm out there and they probably get tired of hearing me talk about ancient history and you know, the cosmic scale of everything and um, but I, you know, I find it fascinating and and um, I was telling them, you know, imagine this is at least thirty percent of human reality until we create lights that just, you know,

• 53:44Speaker 01

  have an insane amount of light pollution and we can't see the stars anymore. You know, at least thirty percent of our lives was supposed to be sitting underneath the night sky, looking up at the night sky. What kind of psychological effect does that hap- does that have on us negatively? That removes us from the way that we were intended to experience the world, you know? And so I, I think that a caveat to saying that I'd love, the caveat to saying that I would love to see evidence of, of the recognition of constellations be preserved throughout, you know, thousands of years. The caveat to that is that um, maybe human beings are just all wired the same, you know, and that can get into a whole other thing where um,

• 54:29Speaker 01

  I was in Mexico, I was, I was at this Olmec site called La Minta. I'm standing at the base of the Great Pyramid of La Minta and I've been down and I'm looking at this, these ant hills and um, and I, I realized like, these ant hills have streets in the middle of them. These are leaf cutter ants. Um, they have these, I think they're leaf cutter ants. They have these streets in the middle of them and, and these highways like go off into the jungle and across like the, the flat ground and they've got these big ant mound pyramids and I realized like, oh, this looks exactly like a Mesoamerican city. I mean, exactly like it. And it just dawned on me, what if human beings witnessed this and saw

• 55:10Speaker 01

  that this is like a civilization grid layout and then they modeled themselves after ants? But then I also thought about the fact that it doesn't matter where you put ants on the planet, they will do that because that makes the most sense. And so is it like, because they're all wired the same. They're the same organism, right? And they, they do the same things. Uh, in the same way that the other day I was, uh, I was in my kitchen. And I make these, uh, I make these like Chick-fil-A grilled, uh, or Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches. And I'll make the breading by hand. And so I'll get like corn flakes and I'll crush them up in my hand. Well, after a while, your hands get rubbed sore from crushing these kernels. And so I have it in this bowl and I look around, I'm like, what's something hard I can just use to crush this instead?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  And so I grab like a seasoning thing and I start grinding it down and it just realized me. I, I invented a mortar and pestle in my own kitchen without thinking about it. Why? Because I'm wired that way. I'm wired to do that, you know? Um, and people all over the world invented mortar and pestle independently, right?

• 56:13Jesse Michels?

  So Often at the same time.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Often at the same time.

• 56:16Jesse Michels?

  And it's with a wheel and, you know, all these sort of inventions to pop up in disparate cultures that don't have contact at the same time. Fascinating.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and if you look at us on the scale, I think, I think one thing is, is there's a lot of magic and mystery to our reality. But then at the same time, some things can just be simple. Like, you know, it is hard for us to understand each other because we, and understand our, our psychological processes and, because we look at each other at eye level. But when we look down on ants, it's pretty easy to understand why they work the way they do. So like, try to take another step back and look down on human beings as if we're ants. And the explanation is simple is because we're all the same being.

• 56:57Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  I, I think, I think that that's, I think that's very interesting.

• 57:02Jesse Michels?

  And we have information encoded in us. Like if you look at DNA, you can store like a book on DNA. You can store semantic information on DNA. It's, it is a hard drive of sorts. And like, you know, semiconductors or transistors, you know, certain chunks of DNA can be activated and deactivated via methylation and acetylation. And so, uh, yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people believe in sort of this idea of transmission theory of consciousness, that maybe we are like antennae for something higher or whatever.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Well, didn't Tesla, he, he like directly says that, right? He thought his brain was an antenna for ideas.

• 57:39Jesse Michels?

  That would make sense. If you read his book, My Inventions or whatever, it's like, he just visualizes these experiences. He'll, he'll like, he'll work through an entire experiment in his head before doing a thing. So I believe he, he, he said that. Um, yeah, it's, it's fascinating. I think you'd need a new model of, um, Electrodynamics, because these things kind of, you know, a signal would attenuate too quickly or something. You put somebody inside a Faraday chamber, they can still think, right? Yeah. But, I mean, it's probably the ultimate hubris to say that we have, you know, we're at the end of history as far as our physical models of how these things work. And I think, yeah, there's a lot to lead one to believe that there's sort of a a client-server relationship.

• 58:23Jesse Michels?

  There's, you know, where the clients, that's the server or something. We're sort of, we're down there. Even, look at base pairs of DNA or, you know, AGCT. And it's always, they're called base pairs because it's always the same combination. So it's like ones and zeros on, you know, semiconductor. Let's talk about something a lot of us quietly deal with. Hair loss. This is something that messes with your confidence more than you'd expect. Okay, you might be wondering, Jesse, you clearly don't suffer from this. It's true. The biggest issue I face is hat hair. I actually have very thick hair, but one of my good friends deals with hair loss. So when iRestor sent me their iRestor Elite, I gifted it to him, and I've been amazed at the results it gave him. The first thing that stood out to him is it's comfortable and easy to use. You just pop it on while reading or working and it does its thing.

• 59:08Jesse Michels?

  This isn't some gimmick. It uses 300 lasers and 200 LEDs to deliver clinically backed red light therapy straight to the scalp. This is the best way to stimulate hair growth. Over the past few weeks, I've seen noticeable improvement with my friend. He says that his hair feels thicker and healthier, and it's improved his overall confidence in life. The iRestor Elite uses triple wavelength technology and Lumitec red light therapy. It's engineered for deeper penetration and broader coverage. That means more stimulation to hair follicles and better, faster results. And look, if it doesn't work for you, they offer a 12-month money-back guarantee. I've never heard of a money-back guarantee that lasts that long. Try it consistently, and if you're not happy, they get you your money back. Of course, the restocking fee applies.

• 59:53Jesse Michels?

  That made it a no-brainer for my friend. So give yourself the gift of hair confidence this spring. For a limited time only, our listeners get a huge discount on iRestor Elite when you use code JESSE, J-E-S-S-E, at irestore.com.

• 1:00:08Jesse Michels?

  Head over to irestore.com and use code JESSE, J E S S E, for our show's exclusive discounts on the iRestor Elite. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Hair loss is frustrating. You don't have to fight it alone, thanks to iRestor. Fascinating.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think, I think just capping off the Sphinx thing. You know, there were, there were cultures that existed prior to the unification of Egypt. And really, all that was, in a, in a simple way, is...

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• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  You have a bunch of people who migrate to Egypt when the Sahara dries up. You only have a few places to go. You have this huge green Sahara 10,000 years ago, 12,000 years ago. And it starts drying up over the course of about 5,000 years. And, you know, these Saharans only have a few choices to make. They can go to the Mediterranean coast. They can go to, to the Atlantic coast. They can go down towards the Congo and the savannas. Or they can go to this huge river to the east. And the people who go to this river to the east, this fertile oasis, which is the Nile River, they are packed into this, you know, on, on the east side, there's a mile wide of really lush fertile terrain. On the west side, there's a mile wide as well.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  And you have this really compacted area and they're all living on, they're all living on top of each other. And so they are not able to have this... Roaming nomadic lifestyle that they used to where you could have your herds of cattle and you could have them graze on this grass and graze on this grass and you just go up and down the Sahara, you know, or back and forth on the Sahara. Now you have to invent sedentary lifestyle. And that blossoms into civilization because people are living on top of each other. But it doesn't just start that there's like one guy who can rule over the whole Nile. It's the strongest, I mean, literally the strongest guy in each little compacted area. So we call them chieftains and we have a little bit of evidence for them, but we, we kind of

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  just assume, well, this probably did happen. We have these chieftains that rule in these little areas and then those chieftains war against each other and the territories, you know, one guy conquers the other, his territory doubles. Well, eventually you end up in this period called the two lands, which is lower Egypt, which is, which is in the north because the Nile runs north. So the lower end of the Nile River is in the north, upper Egypt is in the south. And all the unification of Egypt was, was when both areas had completely unified into their own kingdom, this, the king of the southern kingdom marched his army north and smited the king of the northern kingdom. And I'm sure you've seen this pose before, where it's this Pharaoh grabbing the hair of a man and he's got his scepter in the air

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  and he's about to crush his head in. Well, that's a pose that every Pharaoh did for the next 3,000 years. That's the unification of it. Inside both lands, you have all these different subcultures of people, like you have the Bedarian culture, the Mahdi culture, the Nakhtet culture, it goes on and on and on. Well, you have the Mahdi culture that lived in the area of Giza. And I've always thought that it was perfectly possible that the Sphinx could have been their god or some kind of representation of some divine celestial deity, maybe Leo, you know, something along those lines. That was a carved out and venerated

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  lion monument that had been venerated long before the pyramids were ever there, before anything else was ever there. That this could have been a venerated monument. And I've like often said in jest, like, yeah, there could have been some kind of Sphinx cult, some kind of lion cult that existed there long before the pyramids were ever there. That's more of my belief. When exactly that is? Robert Shox's first estimate was anywhere between 5 and 7,000 B.C., I believe. And then he pushed it back further because he had some other evidence that that seemed to align better. I would be, I wouldn't really feel crazy about saying that that the Sphinx could be 5 to 7,000 B.C.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Going beyond that, I don't know. Yeah. But it certainly seems like something that is incredibly old. The water erosion around the enclosure just doesn't make a lot of sense. I've seen so many people attempt to debunk it and I've openly listened to it.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  But I just don't see a convincing argument for the Sphinx being 2450 B.C. Yeah. Oh, here's another thing. Yeah. Is the Pharaoh Thutmose IV from the New Kingdom. Let's call this Thutmose IV is probably born around 1350 B.C. And when he's there, the, he, well, during his reign, he erected something called the Dream Stella. And it was him talking about how when he was a young kid before he became Pharaoh, he went and slept under the shade of the Sphinx and the Sphinx visited him in a dream and said, the Sphinx essentially tells him through what we can translate, you know, I used to rule over the desert and now the desert disrespects me and rules over me

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  and it's covered my, you know, enclosure. Free me from this and I will make you the Pharaoh of Egypt. So Thutmose does this in about 1350 B.C. So what this says is that around a thousand years after the youngest date of the Sphinx being cut out, it was already covered up and buried. So in that thousand years, really less than that, all that water erosion had to have occurred. It's not possible. It's just not possible for that kind of water erosion to occur. Because what they'll say, what scientists will say is, well, you know, it's been. It's been 44, 4500 years since the Sphinx was cut out. That kind of erosion can certainly happen in that period. No, that's totally ignoring the fact that a thousand years later,

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Thutmose IV says it was covered, says it had filled in and he had to excavate all of it and clean out the Sphinx enclosure to become the pharaoh. So really it's in like, let's call it five to 800, 900 years. All that had to be filled in. It's just not, the logic just doesn't work. And so I think, I think it's perfectly plausible that the Sphinx goes back further.

• 1:06:54Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Jesse Michels?

  Two crazy questions that I know are on everybody's mind. One is how were the pyramids built? Maybe impossible to answer, but you have, you know, Houdan in France saying that it was built from the inside out. You have other theories that, you know, water was used. The big question is how are these sort of 20, 30, 40 ton, you know,

• 1:07:20Jesse Michels?

  granite blocks moved from the, you know, Aswan River Valley 500 miles away. And then the second question is you talk to, you know, Graham Hancock, and he says that, he says adamantly, he's like, the pyramids were not just a tomb. They were, you know, something else. And, you know, maybe like some sort of like celestial ascent chamber portal thing. You know, you have Christopher Dunn saying that they were an energy generation machine. So how are they built? And what were they used for? Impossible to answer.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  So just putting out this out there. You know, my main interest is not architecture or engineering. I find the, the mystery of how they were built compelling. I don't spend really much time studying it. More of my interest is, is how are ancient people interacting with the pyramids? What is their lives like during the time of the pyramids? What is their relationship to the pyramids like? I find that, that personal aspect really interesting. And it sheds a, it gives a, A very fleshy, alive feeling to the ancient world that really gets overlooked in in this space because there's so many people who are already talking about, you know, going through the logistics of the engineering and stuff. And that's very interesting, but there's the

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  human thing that can that grips you and connects you to it.

• 1:08:38Jesse Michels?

  Well, what what I mean, that definitely connects with the possible why of how these things were built. So yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  But as far as the how I I've looked into this, um, the water theory, I I've heard about the blocks being floated up.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  But I don't know how that's feasible.

• 1:08:56Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I don't either.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Because you would have to.

• 1:08:59Jesse Michels?

  It's also.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  You would have to drown all of Egypt to get water that high.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Blocks may have been. Well, I mean, they definitely were floated on boats along the Nile. But, uh. You know, I when I really think about it practically.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  I think that some kind of.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Some kind of there. There's this idea of the internal ramp theory. Have you heard of this?

• 1:09:27Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Where it starts at one corner and it just barely goes up.

• 1:09:30Jesse Michels?

  This is who Dan, this French guy.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I really try to think about it practically, I can't think of anything better than that. But then you get to a point where you're getting so high up on the pyramid, you know, at when you get to the King's Chamber. Which is a made which is made entirely out of the Aswan granite stones, uh, you know, the the vast majority of the stones on the pyramid are limestone and and they're sourced from right next to the pyramid. You can see the quarries next to the pyramid. Then the casing stones are Tura limestone, which are, I think, are 15 miles south, uh, found on the opposite side of the river. And we have a we have a ledger of those being brought up to Giza. It's it's called the Diary of Marer.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  And he says that he's bringing these Tura limestone blocks up to the horizon of Kufu. Now, granted, we don't really know what the horizon of Kufu is. Maybe it's the Giza Plateau. But I've also heard a proposal. It could just as easily be like Kufu's Palace, which is lost. We don't know where Kufu's Palace was.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Anywho, uh, we do know that there are Tura limestone that come from south of Giza. So those are the three types of stones. Now, it's not, it's not really imfeasible as to how they move giant limestone blocks. I mean, even as big as it is, it's only like two and a half tons. You can move that. But it's the 80 ton red granite stones that have to be hoisted up 140 feet into the, you know, up from the ground and placed into the ceiling of the King's Chamber. Yes, I mean, I can sort of see how you could build half of a pyramid with an internal ramp. But when you go, when you get to the second half and everything is so steep and tightly compacted, I don't know how you finish that job, you know?

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Um, but, but granted, have you ever heard of a guy named Wally Wallington before?

• 1:11:24Jesse Michels?

  No, but I love that name.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  He's, he's the dude that, uh, maybe you've seen his videos before where he erected stone hinge in his backyard by himself.

• 1:11:32Jesse Michels?

  Cool.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  So he's moving these 100 ton stones like on a single pivot point by himself.

• 1:11:38Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Now, this will get thrown out there by, you know, you know, there's people who are like professional debunkers, like archaeologists, that their whole YouTube channel is just debunking.

• 1:11:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  And so they'll say, oh, it's no mystery as to how these huge stones were moved. Look at Wally Wallington doing it. Well, Wally Wallington's not building a pyramid. He's not putting these stones 150 feet into the air.

• 1:12:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  At the same time though, if you have 500 Wally Wallingtons working for 500 years, you can probably build a pyramid.

• 1:12:10Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  And so I think what I'm getting at here is

• 1:12:13Jesse Michels?

  But isn't the fourth dynasty 200 years?

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Well, it, so here's the thing is that the fourth dynasty, you know, there's, there's this idea that the, that the pyramids like spring out of nowhere. It just boom, they arrive. Well, it's kind of true. But at the same time, you know, the fourth dynasty is this 200 year period. Let's say roughly 2650 to 2450. But they were arriving the, the, if you, if we go from the end of the third dynasty to dynasty zero, well, that's 2650 all the way back to 3100 B.C. So now we have 500, 600 years of history and stone masonry leading up to this explosion of, of architecture.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  So you have a 500 year period where we can see a progression of architecture getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more monumental. But then there is a jump in, in the fourth dynasty where it's like they just It's like they figured out flight or something. You know, you know how we like we figured out, you know, there was in 1911, we figure out flight or 1910 and then boom, you know, everything explodes.

• 1:13:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  It's like that. There's this progression and then boom, it just exploded.

• 1:13:22Jesse Michels?

  Stealth aircraft.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, and so take, take our evolution of technology, how we go, let's call it the 1500s. Technology goes like this and then boom, 1900, it just explodes.

• 1:13:35Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  It was just ready. Well, think about stone masonry in Egypt. It was progressing for so long. And then all of a sudden Egypt has this incredible amount of power and they just explode in capability. It's like this endless capacity of monumental architecture.

• 1:13:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  And we can get into that and the more I've studied it, the more I have explained to myself the rationale of like how these things happen, but it isn't in line with stuff I learned from academics, which I constantly get accused of, of like, of, you know, drinking through the straw of academia. I, I hardly have any connections in academia. I'm friends with approximately one academic who's Dr. Ed Barnhart. I just study this a lot and make, and I look at the evidence and make it make sense in my head.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Now getting to building the pyramids. Yes, I think that with five or 600 years of expert stone masons, they developed an understanding of how to move, lift, carve, cut, transport megaliths in a way that even 5,000 years later, we, we don't understand this. It gets to a certain point where it's like, we, it's, it seems imfeasible to us, but they probably had all kinds of tricks and like genius nuances. I mean, I think the best way I can describe this is they knew, they had a, they had a, a perfect, natural, non-upgradable.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Technology and use of techniques, right? Like perfect, natural and non-upgradable. And when it's done, there's no evidence of how they did it because it was so clean, right? Like the finished product is there, but the evidence of how they did it is gone because they were that good at it, right? That's kind of the way that I explain it to myself. So I think that a ramp only gets you so far. I don't know what the next steps are. I don't know how you finish it. I don't know how you get the casing stones that slide perfectly in place up at the top of the pyramid with a capstone sitting up on top of it. That's another thing is a lot of people don't know. A lot of people think that they're Egyptologists think there never was a capstone. I think there almost certainly was.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  But I think the ramp theory only gets you so far. Beyond that, I don't know.

• 1:15:50Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I do think in some ways the why is more interesting than the how. It's like why, you know, it's like clearly so much effort for this thing that does seem sort of timeless and is fascinating. And it's amazing when you go, but it's like, it's just an inordinate amount of effort and techniques that, you know, we can't readily explain, you know? Wally, Wally or not, what's his last name, Wally?

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Wally, Wally.

• 1:16:16Jesse Michels?

  Wally Wallington or not, yeah, exactly. Well, you're really more, I mean, I appreciate you, you know, indulging all my Egypt-based questions, but you're really more of an Americas guy generally. Is that right or?

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Um, no, actually.

• 1:16:29Jesse Michels?

  Okay. I heard you say that on a podcast, so I'm just repeating it.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, you know, there were, there were periods where, where, yes, that was my expertise at that time. The, the way it started was, um, so my grandfather was, was a missionary and he was, but he was also like a historian of the ancient world. And this is my grandfather on my mom's side. So I had this influence of this explorer on my dad's side, but then I had a missionary and like a biblical historian on my, on my mother's side. Both of those influenced me. I was always a classical guy. Classical would mean Egypt, Greece and Rome. More so Egypt and Greece.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  That was always my interest and, and a little bit of the, of the Holy Land of the biblical world. As far as my future career in the Americas.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  I will still still do expeditions in the Americas and carry out exploration here. But I think it's gonna be in North America. I think it's gonna be in the U. In the U. S. There's a lot left in the U. S. I mean, they're

• 1:17:33Jesse Michels?

  Like where?

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Uh, I can't say specifically.

• 1:17:37Jesse Michels?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  But, uh, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  West Texas, Mexico. I can't tell exactly where. But yeah, yeah, there's, there's a lot left. I mean, there are, there are entire. I call them cities, but they're like small ancient cities that have never been discovered that are in the United States. Absolutely.

• 1:17:59Jesse Michels?

  Crazy.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:18:02Jesse Michels?

  And are you working with Ed Barnhart on this stuff? Interesting.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have never talked about this publicly before. He and I may have barely touched on it when we were on Danny Jones together. But, uh, I've never really talked about this in depth before.

• 1:18:18Jesse Michels?

  How old are we talking?

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  It ranges, you know, some are a thousand years, some can be 5,000, 6,000 years old.

• 1:18:26Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's an ancient city in Texas that was discovered recently. That's 10,000 years old.

• 1:18:33Jesse Michels?

  That's unbelievable.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  Next to this river. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:34Jesse Michels?

  Do you think, you know, we have this narrative that's been popularized in anthropology that's like sort of primitive to progress? Do you think that some of these ancient civilizations? Outside of the, you know, evidence we have in Egypt and other places like that. And outside of the woo woo thinking, a lot of people like to kind of engage in. Do you think that there are civilizations that were just way more advanced than, than meets the eye? Like, for example, you, you look at the Amazon and, you know, it's, it's so undiscovered still like, and what if we was talking to Graham Hancock about like lidaring, you know, the over, over the, the treetops of the Amazon forest and you can see the topology and then

• 1:19:13Jesse Michels?

  you see your little geoglyphs kind of popping out and then you go down and we're doing this all the time and finding all sorts of crazy stuff. And so. You know, if archaeology as a field is only, you know, a little under 200 years old, you know, where we, we, we found, you know, Assyria, Babylonia, you know, 200 years ago, isn't there sort of a law in archaeology that the, the farther you go, the longer you go, the older civilization actually gets? And Gobekli Tepe is just the tip of the iceberg. And you have a lot more advanced stuff that's, we're going to uncover that's, you know, way older and maybe civilization's more like an S curve and not like this hockey stick, you know, thing.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Well, I, yeah, I would, I would absolutely say it's a S curve. I mean, ancient Greece is a perfect example of that. You have the height of the Bronze Age, then you have the Trojan, you know, you have the Trojan War and then the Trojan's War seems to coincide with the fall of the Bronze Age. Greece falls into the dark, you know, the dark period, and then it comes out of the archaic period. So you have this huge dip in, you know, uh, in their technological capabilities. There's no more writing anymore, um, during, for some of that period. That's just one perfect example. The same thing also happened in Egypt where you have these long periods of centuries where nothing is happening. It's like this, it's like this invisible dark period where we don't have any more literature or anything.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Now, those are on micro scales, but like a macro scale, yeah. I mean, definitely there have to be periods where civilization as a whole is flourishing and then everything crashes. A macro scale would also be like the collapse of the Bronze Age. I mean, all around the Eastern Mediterranean, every ancient civilization was heavily impacted or their, their infrastructure collapsed and had to recover. And that's on a macro scale. Um, like ultra macro scale, if we're looking at civilization all across the world. Yeah, yeah, there, there definitely had to be periods where. Things happen that that impact society like stun it or you know like stuns progression

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  or you know completely eliminates humanity. Nobody knows exactly what was going on during the Ice Age, but I guarantee you that the North Atlantic Ice Cap and this dramatic event that that I say instantly, but rapidly ended the Ice Age. I mean, it eviscerated North America. The reason that we don't go to, you know, when you go to a zoo, there's never a North America section, you know, what do we have in North America? We have bears, deer, foxes, rabbits.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Not a whole lot else.

• 1:21:57Jesse Michels?

  Snakes.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Snakes? Sure. Yeah. You have that like in the aquariums or whatever, not the aquarium, whatever. But you don't have a North American section because we lost so much of our megafauna at the end of the Ice Age. But man, we used to have giant sloths. We had woolly mammoths and elephants. We had large saber tooth cats. We had the short faced bear. We had the American lion, which was twice the size of the African lion. I mean, we had so much wildlife here and it was all destroyed. It just disappeared at the end of the Ice Age. Now, sometimes they say that they were all hunted to extinction by, you know, nomadic people. I just spoke to an evolutionary biologist last week and he and I were both like, I mean, humanity

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  had been around for over 100,000 years before that. You don't think during that 100,000 year period, humanity was able to realize if we kill off our food source, the food source doesn't exist anymore.

• 1:22:51Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, this makes sense to me. And it's like, what do you have like spears at the time? Are you really like extincting?

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Spears and bow and arrows.

• 1:22:58Jesse Michels?

  Bow and arrows. But are you extincting woolly mammoths with that technology? I don't know. That's.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  I don't think you're eviscerating entire populations of it. It just doesn't seem feasible to me and human beings. They were ignorant to the things that we know today.

• 1:23:13Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  But they weren't ignorant to their natural world. And what's, what is the pillar of their world is their food source? It's the pillar. There, as far as we know, agriculture doesn't exist at this point. They are hunting animals and living side by side.

• 1:23:26Jesse Michels?

  So you think there was an extinction event, like some larger?

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:23:30Jesse Michels?

  So yeah, I mean, this brings up a question, which is, you know, you brought up Luis Walter Alvarez. You know, he had this theory that an asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago. And that caused, you know, dinosaurs to go extinct. You now have Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock talking about the Younger Dryas, you know, impact theory that, you know, comet impact from the, it was an airburst, I guess, in their opinion, from a torrid meteor stream. You know, hit the earth's atmosphere and then caused, you know, the ice age and then also brought us out of the ice age. Is there something that you, Luke Caverns, believe will get proved down the line? Do you have a big, bold hypothesis? It could be on anything. It doesn't have to be on an extinction event, but I always think, you know, it's a very interesting.

• 1:24:14Jesse Michels?

  My, my former employer, Peter Thiel, has a question, which is, what's the thing that you believe that very else, very few other people agree with you on? So what's something you're high conviction on that no one else agrees with you on? And, you know, you're at the tender age of 27, so maybe you don't need a great answer to this question, but.

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• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  You know, about five years ago, no, it's been longer than that now. It's been like, it's been like 10 years ago. I started, um,

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  I started asking myself really hard questions about Christianity. I was raised Christian, um, still am. But I'm writing a video right now titled, "Why I'm No Longer A Modern Christian", like quotations. And, um, and in studying the ancient world, and really in studying the Americas, it changed my perspective on so much. You know, uh, modern day Christians, 21st century first world Christians, have, are so ignorant of, of like, the grand scale or large scale humanity. And they almost never juxtapose that or try to compare it or rationalize it with their religious beliefs.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  And this can, this can go in so many different directions, like even as simply as a direction of, okay, why did God only present himself to a small minority of people living on the Eastern Mediterranean 2,000 years ago? When civilization was already blossoming all across the Americas? What about people in the Americas? What happens to them? Well, you really never get an explanation from that from your average Christian, or even like your exceptionally educated Christian. These are just hard questions that most never ask themselves. Uh, another thing is,

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  you always hear a Christian say, "There's only one God. There's only one God."

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  But they never go beyond that because the Bible clearly states that there's more than one God. Clearly states that. I mean, even God himself, the Hebrew God Yahweh. Recognizes and acknowledges the existence of the gods of Egypt. And in Exodus, he tells Moses that he's going to execute his, I think it's Exodus 12. He tells him that he's going to execute his wrath on the gods of Egypt. And even during the Genesis story, um, you know, there's this, there's an interesting thing that happens here where it seems like, I say, I say it seems like, I'm not, I'm not saying this is what it is, but it seems like God doesn't tell the truth to Adam and Eve.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Cause he tells Adam, you know, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for you'll, you're, you will surely die. And then the, the serpent, you know, comes to Eve and, and essentially tells her like, what do you mean that, that you'll surely die? You're not going to die. He's afraid that if you eat this tree, you'll become like him, which is odd. And then Adam and Eve eat from the tree, which I have my own idea of what I think that that tree is. And then God's immediate reaction to that is he turns to this divine council, this mysterious council, full of other beings in heaven that's way very much often overlooked. And he says, behold, man has become like us. So they didn't die, they became like God. So it's like weird that God didn't, it's like God didn't tell them the truth.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Or is it that they died, that their innocence died? That can be a whole other, that can be a whole other thing. And I don't have a hard opinion about that, but these are hard questions I would ask myself. And then I came to the realization during this period, I was like, I was like, if I'm going to be a Christian, I have to, I have to rationalize and accept some of these beliefs. And when God in, in the Old Testament acknowledges the existence of the gods of Egypt and says he's going to cast his judgment on them.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  Does that mean that the gods of Egypt are real? Does that mean that these experiences that the Egyptian priests and, um, and that the pharaoh are having, that they so commonly talk about of these gods coming and speaking to them. And, and they're, they're convicted with this purpose of this thing that they have to do, which seems so bizarre to us. Like, you know, uh, people who are fans of the Atlantis hunt. If you try to talk to them about ancient religion and say, well, you know, these are spiritual people. These are very religious people that are convicted. They go, oh, come on, man. Nobody would do that. They might do it if it's really happening. And, um, and that is, that's something I almost never talk about.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Because I don't know quite how to explain it. But I certainly think that when you look at all of these temples in Egypt, you look at the obelisk of Hachep suit, where at the top of the obelisk and at the bottom of the obelisk, like right at eye level, you can go up to it and read it. And I've read the translated hieroglyphs. And she said, she said, she said, as for this obelisk, it's something I'm paraphrasing, but it's like, as for this obelisk, I erected this from, from electrum, which was just like gold and, and your wealth. So she paid to have these two obelisk erected. She said, like any good king would for their father Amun, which is this god.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  And she goes on to talk about how she did this for the god and everything. And then at the temple of Luxor, the back chamber was a chamber, you've been to it. So this huge chamber, you go to it at night. It's the one that's always lit up at night. That huge chamber in the back, as far as we know, was reserved only for Amenhotep to connect to his father Amenra, the god. And I'm sitting, I'm standing there in the middle of this back chamber that not even the priest are allowed in, only the pharaoh. And I'm thinking, was this whole temple built for Amenhotep to enter it and not come face to face with Amenra? It wasn't actually happening? This is all made up?

• 1:30:49Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Why would you expend so much effort?

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  This whole temple is here for nothing?

• 1:30:53Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  No, it's not. Look at, I mean, everything that just the Egyptians achieved. Then let's jump over to ancient Greece. Look at all the temples that they, that they erected.

• 1:31:04Jesse Michels?

  The Parthenon.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  Look at everything that they did on behalf, on behalf of their gods. I mean, so significant to the point that Leonidas goes to visit the oracle of Delphi to determine as to whether or not they should fight against the Persians. I mean, they really believed in the gods. They actually believed in them. Um, and I've heard, I've heard Greek professors say that, you know, these women who would become like as the vapors came up under the ground of Delphi and the woman would become possessed with the spirit of Zeus. And I've heard a Greek historian, you know, college professor say, I don't mean this in any symbolic or spiritual sense.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  I'm telling you that this literally happened, that the woman was literally possessed with the spirit of Zeus. And that was absolutely jarring for me to hear that from, from a professor. He wasn't kidding at all. He's like, it's not spiritual. It's not metaphysical. It's, or it's not metaphorical. It is actually happening. And he talks about these other women that would become possessed by the gods. And they'd run around naked on these mountainsides and everything. And he was like, they'd wake up the next day and not remember anything. He's like, it's not an exaggeration. It was actually happening.

• 1:32:16Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  And you look at the Americas, man, all these ancient temples and sites that were erected on behalf of these god beings. It's every ancient culture recognizes these gods that exist on our planet. And I think that my hill that I, that I would die on, if there is one, is that ancient people were not making it up.

• 1:32:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, I love that.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  They weren't making it up.

• 1:32:43Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's an assertion of modernity to say that they were. It's just as much an assertion to say that they were than like, we don't know. It's, it's really impossible to say. And then if you were to put yourselves in their shoes, like it seems like they actually weren't making it up. Like they weren't talking about it in mythological terms.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Jesse Michels?

  There's a guy named Julian James. I don't know if you've heard of him. He was a Yale professor. He wrote a book called, On the Origins of Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind. And he used to say that, you know, we, we like, Uh, basically, we shifted towards left brain thinking. Um, and, and, and, and we have this modern divided brain, but that was really, that really occurred post 1000 B.C. And it's this very kind of Gestalt, big history view. It might be very imperfect.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Post 1000 B.C.

• 1:33:32Jesse Michels?

  1000 B.C. And he was kind of laughed out of the room, but there are people who definitely take him, you know, pretty, pretty seriously today.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  Do you remember why exactly he says post 1000?

• 1:33:41Jesse Michels?

  I don't. I have to go back and read the book, but even if you look at the new, the Old Testament, that God speaks, you know, directly through signs and through, you know, you know, the, uh, you know, yeah, great, great signs or Sodom and Gomorrah, destruction in many cases. Uh, and then, uh, he speaks through prophets and then he sort of goes away. And so there is something about, uh, the arc of God, even in the Bible himself. And then he has to sort of anthropomorphize himself in the form of Jesus in the New Testament. Um, so there is this arc of, you know, direct intervention to leaving. Um, and that, you know, begs all sorts of really interesting, interesting questions. So I, I'm, I'm with you. Also, it's like, we were, we were talking about the why, you know, on a lot of these like really crazy mega structures.

• 1:34:27Jesse Michels?

  And it's like, maybe you'd be way more motivated if these gods were actually real to you.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's the thing about, uh, that's the thing about the pyramids is, you know, even I cringe at the idea of a, of a, a structure that massive, being erected and prepared for the burial of a single man. Yeah, I cringe at that idea because it's hard for me to fathom somebody, you know, I inherently have a negative perception of that person that it's being built for, you know?

• 1:35:00Jesse Michels?

  Right.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  If, uh, like if there was some guy today, like, let's say Jeff Bezos wanted a, wanted a pyramid for his own burial, I, I just think that's like, ugh, it's gross, right? Um, but at the same time, for someone...

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  In the modern day, to immediately dismiss that as a possibility. Uh, it's like, it's like an arrogance of modernity, right? Because, okay, I, I would ask that person, I see this all the time in my comment section, the comment section of every video. You know, nobody would do this for, for, you know, whatever. Okay. I would, I would tell that person, okay, please dive into the mindset of somebody living in the early 1900s for me.

• 1:35:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. It'd be really hard.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  Okay, please dive into the mindset of somebody living in the early 1800s for me. And let's go back every single century and go, let's go back 47 centuries and please dive in and tell me logically how their world makes sense.

• 1:35:58Jesse Michels?

  You read Pride and Prejudice and you're like, this is the weird Victorian, you know, he is like, you're looking across the room and you have, you know, Darcy and all these characters. Like you read that and that's like, oh, that's like another planet. You go to Tokyo now and you're on like another planet or something, you know, it's like so different from American culture. And so, yeah, completely, yeah, 2000 years, 3000 years.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  What I think happens is we psychologically spend so much time with this time period that you feel more connected to it than you are. And you have this like cognitive dissonance because you're forgetting how disconnected you are from these people. You are becoming so familiarized with the data that you have been exposed to and you spend so much time with it. That you develop such a connection to it that you, you have to remind yourself, you have to constantly keep a reminder that you are so incredibly disconnected from these people, so disconnected that it doesn't matter. Like I've tried to tell people, the difference between, as far as our connection to the pyramid builders, between 4,700 years ago and 12,000 years ago, they may as well be the same.

• 1:37:01Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  Because we're that disconnected from them. It, it doesn't make much of a difference.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  And that's the thing is, is trying to come up with a rationale behind why they did it is fascinating. But to have such a strong opinion over it is ridiculous and foolish. And it doesn't matter if you think that they were tombs or not. Being so tied to your opinion that you can so quickly dismiss someone else's opinion, or say that anything is ridiculous is foolish, because you can't even tell me the rationale behind people living 100 years ago.

• 1:37:34Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, you think you're an expert, you think you can possibly know Yeah. something 4,700 years ago, you can't.

• 1:37:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  You know, so that's why there has to be, there needs to be this like, moderate tone coming in where, hey, this is the evidence that I personally am aware of and that I have studied. This is what I think makes sense, but there's so much else out there.

• 1:37:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, and many of the historical kings themselves were merged with divinity. Angotan is a good example.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:02Jesse Michels?

  It's like the sun god, you know, and or even up to, you know, Louis XIV, he was the sun god in the French context, but it was literally ruling under divine right. And that was not like some metaphor. It wasn't some joke that was, you know, he was seen as sort of godlike.

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  Well, Henry V, he's, he believed that he was the conduit of God himself, that he was performing, he was performing the will of God to expand England's, you know, kingdom. I mean, yeah, yeah, this, this idea of, of, you know, your king being the direct conduit of God himself can have a tremendous impact on a, on a civilization. This was happening in the Fourth Dynasty too. Um, you know, prior to that, there was an element of piousness that the, you know, pious means that, means just being, having a reverence for like a certain deity, um, having a respect for a deity, submitting to a deity, to a certain deity in a way, or a religion in a way.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  There's this element of piousness, but then in the Fourth Dynasty, that is still there, but there's an elevation of, of the king or the pharaoh's status, where he is now becoming merged with the God. And I've often wondered, and I, I don't really see this proposed by any Egyptologist, um, but I often wonder, you know, Prior to the great pyramids, people don't realize this, tomb building is this, is this, it's either a vertical shaft going straight into the ground, or it's a shaft that goes about 45 degrees into the ground. The exact opposite is true with the pyramids, if we're to assume that those are, that those are tombs. And I mean, here's, here's like a, like a simple thing. I know people don't like the tomb idea. Sometimes I cringe at it as well. There are sarcophagus,

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  sarcophagi in the chamber. Like, if you're getting, if you're going to now explain to me why that's not a sarcophagus, you're really getting out there now, you know. I'm not opposed to that, but I'm just saying that's the reality of it. And the sarcophagi are too big for the entrance ways, so they're not brought in later. They were placed in the room while the room was created. And that's why, you know, that is such a hard thing to get around, that even, you know, Graham Hancock gets to a point where he's now saying, on the Joe Rogan thing, well, perhaps it's not a sarcophagus, perhaps it's a place where you lay down inside of, so we're now we're laying a person in it. It's very akin to a sarcophagus. But he's saying, this may be a place where your consciousness is being elevated and, and you're, you're gaining some kind of, you know, cosmic wisdom. Okay, that's, that's interesting, but we're still laying people in

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  it. That's how compelling just a simple, human-sized box is in that room that had to be laid there when it's made. But, these chambers are now above ground. They're, you know, let's call it roughly, like 45 degrees above ground. I've tried to get into the psychological aspect of this, and I, and I have wondered if, if now that we're seeing the pharaoh being merged with the god Ra, perhaps he is now a divine being that needs to be buried above ground. He's not supposed to be buried below ground. Or, let's go another step further. This is, here's another one of my theories that no Egyptologist and no alternate person agrees with, is-

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  The inside of the of the pyramids, it's very odd that there's no hieroglyphs on the inside of it. I hear a lot of Egyptologists will will brush this off as like, well, you know, there's no hieroglyphs inside of it because tomb decoration just hadn't got to that point yet. But that's but that's not accurate because we see older tombs that have tomb decorations in them. Okay, so you have the the chronology of the pyramids is you have the step pyramid. Then you have the Pyramid of My Doom, then you have the Bent Pyramid, then you have the Red Pyramid, then you have the Great Pyramid. Okay, the Saqqara step pyramid down in those labyrinths below that. There are depictions of the Pharaoh Josiah up on the wall in his iconic like striding forward in a Hebsid festival.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  Imagery and he's visiting these divine sanctuaries and casting these spells in the afterlife, all in hieroglyphs depicting the Pharaoh himself. Immediately after that, there's no more interior tomb decoration. Why is that? I don't know, because on the outside of the temples in the in the funerary temples on the outside. There are depictions of there are hieroglyphs, there is artwork. Why is it now disappearing from the inside? Well, the only crazy explanation I can come up with in my mind that nobody agrees with.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  Is I think that there maybe is some kind of elevation. Where the Pharaoh himself is no longer the pious king serving the god, but now he is the god. And that the pyramids themselves, this is actually something that.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  The archaeologist, his name starts with a P, that excavated the Pyramid of Amenemhat III. He asserted that this was never a tomb and that this was a symbolic tomb for this for the Pharaoh's ka. So you have the ka, which is the divine essence. So you have the ka and the ba, you have these two separate parts of your soul. That have to coexist in your life and then they have to meet later on in life. So that's why the body is preserved so that the body can last longer with the ka or with the ba. And that the ka, the divine part of the spirit can find the body in the next world. When we have hieroglyphs that depict that this is what they think that that the Egyptians believed this is what was happening.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  And so I've heard this thrown out there before by one Egyptologist.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  Back in the, in the late 1800s, um, he asserted this and I believe it too. And I think that it's true for the fourth dynasty. Now Amenhotep or Amen, Amenemhat the third, he's middle kingdom. This is call it 1900 BC. So I am kind of graphing that on to the fourth dynasty, which is five to 700 years earlier. Um, I think that these pharaohs were ascending to the status of a god and that the pyramid was not for the body of the pharaoh, but for the divine essence of the pharaoh that belonged to the god. And that's why there's nothing inside of it because you don't need to write hieroglyphs inside of a, inside of a pyramid for the divine essence

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  of a god. You need an impenetrable, an impenetrable building that the divine soul of the god is buried in, and that pharaoh himself is buried somewhere in the south. The reason I think that is because Amenemhat the third, his pyramid is a model of the old kingdom pyramids. And he was like harkening back to this, to this lost, uh, or I should say he's harkening back to this older kingdom. And his body was buried in the south down in a place called Abydos. Abydos is where the earlier pharaohs were buried. So he gave himself two burial sites. And because his pyramid complex is a model for the old kingdom, I think he knew something that's invisible to us today,

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  that the pharaohs of the old kingdom were never buried in their pyramids and their tombs are down south. Because the south is the religious capital of Egypt. That's where you're supposed to be buried. But the pyramids up north, that's the economic capital of Egypt. And it's, the pyramid is like symbolic, it's symbolic of Egypt's power. It's symbolic of the divine power of the god. And it's symbolic of the divine power of the king. So there was never a pharaoh buried in those pyramids. It's the, it's the burial of the divine essence of the pharaoh's spirit.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  That's a crazy explanation. But we're talking about people who are basically aliens.

• 1:45:37Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:45:37Speaker 01

  Like, we don't know, we don't relate to these people in any way. The life is nothing like ours.

• 1:45:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  And so it's just, you get to this point of crazy speculation, you know? And my explanation there has only slightly more evidence to it than the pyramid power plant idea. You know what I mean?

• 1:45:55Jesse Michels?

  Sure.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  We're just getting so far out there. It's hard to explain.

• 1:45:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, as long as you demarcate the thing as speculation. I think it's totally fine and great. And it creates, in science, you need a hypothesis, right? So you need to get crazy in the hypothetical stage and then, you know, got it corroborated or whatever.

• 1:46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:11Jesse Michels?

  But even if you go to the National Museum in Cairo and you see some of these mummified pharaohs, they look very short. Clearly, they've engaged in some sort of cranial deformation to mimic the gods. And they look like gray aliens. They look so strange.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  Especially during the Amarna period, which is what you were talking about with Akhenaten.

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  Man, that's a fascinating time period where Akhenaten flips Egypt on its head. And what I think was happening here, and I'm going to dive into this at some point, like do a big video essay on it. You have the priests and you have the temples that are becoming really, really powerful. And I wonder,

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  this is why I said, like, the author of the book you were saying, that this impiety, this not respecting of the gods, this losing our religion begins around 1,000 B.C. Because that's about the fall, that's about the collapse of the Bronze Age. And really, that's the fall of Egypt. It's where it takes this downturn. And it's the end of the chapter of the corruption of the temples, I should say. Or it's where the corruption of the temples had permanently solidified its negative impact on Egypt. And Egypt would just collapse forever. At the beginning of ancient Egypt, the pharaoh and his family were the sole rulers of Egypt. And as long as you had...

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  An unquestionably powerful ruler, Egypt prospered greatly. But think about the logistics of this. You become pharaoh. Your wife is, your wife is like the divine mother of the king. And then you give all of your brothers and sisters, which you probably had a lot, and you gave all of your cousins and their spouses, jobs. Everybody has your best interest at heart. But your brother dies and you don't have a great replacement for him. But you have your friend that you're really close to. He's not part of your divine family, but you're going to make an exception for him. Fast forward 600 years, only 20% of the government is now part of the pharaoh's family and everybody else is, is competing for power against the pharaoh through one way or another. This is what happened with the temples.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  And what I think you have is you see this feud starting with, with the, with the pharaoh Amenhotep III, who is the father of Akhenaten. And what I can just imagine happening is Amenhotep III is absolutely fed up with the temples competing with him for economic power. You have so many people bringing money and incredible amounts of like meat, you know, meat is extremely expensive in the ancient world, to bless their ancestors in the afterlife. So you leave these offerings at your, you know, at the temple or you leave the offering at your ancestors' tombs to feed their, to feed them in the afterlife. And do you think the priests are just going to let that food rot there? No, the symbolic gesture is now over.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Now all the priests take the food, they take the offering and consume it themselves. That's why you have all these statues of these fat priests, because they're so wealthy. And clearly they're, they're wealthy in food, they're wealthy in resources and they're wealthy in money and they own the land around Egypt. So they're butting heads with the pharaoh. And what I just imagine is the 18th dynasty is the most powerful part of Egypt. It's, it's, it's the, it's the juiciest, most dramatic chapter in ancient Egyptian history, unless you want to count Alexander to Cleopatra, which is at the very end. And, but anyway.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  You have this dramatic increase in power and it basically reaches its pinnacle under the reign of Amenhotep III, who is also competing with the priesthood. And I can just imagine him in the palace, like pacing back and forth with his little son Amenhotep IV, listening to him and he's saying, you know, Egypt should be like the way it was in the old days, where the pharaoh himself was the king, was the divine ruler, and he was the high priest, not some other high priest that now competes with the pharaoh. If I had it, you know, if I could really have it my way, I would erase all of them. I would destroy the temples. I would eliminate all the priests. I would declare myself the high pharaoh. Egypt just isn't what it used to be and the pharaoh's power has diminished. And you have this little boy who's growing up like, yeah, you know, those guys.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  And, and Amenhotep III dies, Amenhotep IV becomes king and he says, I'm not worshiping Amen anymore. This god, that Karnak temple was built to worship, it's done. Karnak temple, I'm closing the doors. I'm closing the doors of all the temples. I'm only going to acknowledge the one true sun god, the Atun, and I'm gonna make my name Akhenaten. And so he changes it and he moves the capital somewhere else. It's just a fascinating era. And then they start depicting themselves with the elongated skulls, which is really fascinating. It's like the art just completely changes. And where does the skull elongation come from? We don't really know. We don't know why it arrived right then. And then the

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  Yamarna period ends within that same generation and the elongated skull thing goes away.

• 1:51:10Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's like this little period in time where the skull elongation shows up. Why does it show up?

• 1:51:17Jesse Michels?

  What period of time was the skull elongation happening?

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say that this is like 13th century B.C., 1250 B.C., somewhere. That's really, really rough.

• 1:51:28Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Maybe even a little bit, maybe even another century before that. You know, the numbers get real messed up.

• 1:51:35Jesse Michels?

  Sure, fuzzy, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  But yeah, that's another thing I wonder is like, where did that skull elongation depiction come from? Because it's so similar to what you see in other places around the world.

• 1:51:45Jesse Michels?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  I wonder. You know, the very speculative part of me wonders, is the god that Akhenaten is interacting with? Is that where the influence of that comes from? You know, is it? And when I say god, sometimes I wonder, are these actual cosmic beings that are interacting with people? Or is it a manifestation and anthropomorphic anthropomorphized version of things that people are seeing while they're on certain substances? Right? Like, do we have certain substances around the world? That have similar effects on people because we're all wired the same, right?

• 1:52:26Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  So, so you know, you have people that go down to the Amazon today. And they take ayahuasca and they will meet a goddess down and you have thousands of reports of people meeting this similar goddess being woman that automatically knows everything that's wrong with you. And can have such profound effects on you psychologically, that it can cure your addictions and things like that. And, and I wonder, it's one of two things. It's our brains are all wired to receive this image of this goddess woman that has this crazy effect on us. Because we're all wired the same, so we're all bound to have the same effect of this plant. Well, in Egypt, you have your own, you have your own hallucinogens.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  You know, you have the lotus flower, which is this huge mystery. You have opium.

• 1:53:14Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, case of trees.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:53:17Jesse Michels?

  DMT rich.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  And so you wonder if these people are taking these hallucinogens. And these gods are like, are like the anthropomorphic manifestations of what they're experiencing, right?

• 1:53:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  Or whether or not.

• 1:53:31Jesse Michels?

  Well, it's fascinating, like even the like the, the idea of combining this, you know, DMT with this MAO inhibitor or whatever, which is us putting that in the kind of modern pharmacological context. But it's combining this, you know, substance with this vine in the Amazon is such a, an improbable, you know, thing to find in the first place, which begs the question of like, you know, was. Is that just trial and error? Or what sort of divine inspiration or what inspiration led them to sort of find this stuff in the first place? And then you have, yeah, you have in Athens as well, you have the Eleusinian mystery rituals, Eleusis being 13 miles northwest of Athens. The source, it's the spiritual capital.

• 1:54:14Jesse Michels?

  And you have all the guys who we consider the fathers of Western, you know, thought and civilization today. Plato, Socrates, Alcibiades, all these guys, you know, taking this kekeon drink and seeing all sorts of crazy things and experiencing noesis, knowledge of their primordial soul. But, you know, it's sort of under, under death that they can't actually talk about the mystery schools. And clearly it had this profound effect on their, on their thought process.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know, Herodotus talks about these mystery cults in Egypt. And he speculates on like, I wonder what's going on here. And then while he's in Egypt, he's allowed to participate in them and then he doesn't talk about it again.

• 1:54:57Jesse Michels?

  It's fascinating.

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:58Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Alcibiades is a good example. He talked about.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Just the fact that you know the name Alcibiades, I respect you.

• 1:55:06Jesse Michels?

  Thanks, man. Well, he was, he got in trouble for talking about the mysteries because you're, you know, you're not supposed to talk about Fight Club or whatever. So that's, I didn't know that about Herodotus. That's, that's so interesting. Yeah, it's, I mean, the other, the other interesting cut at this is like, you look at all these gaps in civilization generally. So it's like the Terence McKenna stoned ape theory or whatever. Like you could explain the doubling in cranial size from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens. So 2 million years ago to 300,000 years ago, with, you know, human hunter gatherers were following scat, basically shit, because they were trying to hunt for prey or whatever.

• 1:55:45Jesse Michels?

  And you had, you know, psilocybinus cubensis, you know, mushrooms, magic mushrooms growing in the shit in like, you know, Africa.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:54Jesse Michels?

  And so that it's a, it's a reasonable explanation because you get all these, you know, new neural pathways, neurogenesis, you know, epigenetic changes. And you get this kind of stepwise leap in cranial size and functioning. And then you think about like, what's the next big leap? You know, that's a physiological leap. What about a cultural leap? It's like the agrarian revolution and.

• 1:56:17Jesse Michels?

  It was wheat, barley and rye that we were growing. And I think the kind of conventional narrative is like, you have more time for specialization, for urbanization, because you have, you know, agriculture takes care of, you don't have to, you know, hunt and gather constantly 24/7.

• 1:56:33Jesse Michels?

  But what grows on wheat, barley and rye, it's ergot. And ergot is the substance that is probably in, you know, the kekeon and the strength in the mystery rituals. And if you talk to people like Brian Murrescu, who wrote The Immortality Key about the mystery rituals, he'll say they go, like you're saying, way back to Egypt and, you know, even to, you know, Mycenae, to like, you know, really, you know, pre 1000 B.C. and even before that.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:01Jesse Michels?

  And so that begs this question, is modern civilization actually a function of visionary experiences? You know, it's maybe it's not just this like Occam's razor, like, oh, they had more time. So they sort of like built all these things. Maybe they were, they were engaging in these sort of mystery rituals well before the Eleusinian mystery rituals.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  I don't agree with the they had more time thing. It doesn't seem,

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  I don't know, man, that just seems so outside of human nature.

• 1:57:32Jesse Michels?

  I agree.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  When have you ever felt like, oh, I just had this abundance of time?

• 1:57:35Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Go erect a megalithic temple.

• 1:57:38Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  It just doesn't, that's just not how reality works out, you know?

• 1:57:42Jesse Michels?

  And it's, we've been physiologically the same for 200, 300,000 years. Why in the last few percent, you know, three to 5% of our existence, do we create all this stuff? You need some inspiration for.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  You know, I find, I find that jarring too. You know, we have at least 200,000 years of, of Homo sapiens being anatomically the same as we are now. Our brains are the same size. So you had, you had 100,000 years ago, you had people being born with the same mental capacity of Einstein.

• 1:58:15Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 1:58:16Speaker 01

  And what were those people doing?

• 1:58:17Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  They were definitely doing something.

• 1:58:19Jesse Michels?

  They were doing something.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  And, uh, is it? You know, at least my opinion is that one, we haven't found the archaeological evidence of it yet. Or what they were doing just didn't preserve. It just, it just disappears. You know, I mean, buildings will go away. And oh gosh, what is it that I read something that was like, if you let New York City sit where it is that, you know, more than 90% of New York City wouldn't be around in like 40,000 years or 50,000 years or something like that. So 150,000 years ago, what are people building that would possibly be preserved later on?

• 1:58:54Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  Um, you know, the likelihood, the likelihood that they're producing toxic materials that are gonna, that are impossible to be destroyed, like what we're doing to the planet right now is low, I think.

• 1:59:06Jesse Michels?

  Yep. I agree.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  I, I don't, I, I just say my hunch, which I, I guess it's not based on anything, but just my hunch of what I deem to be realistic is I don't think that there was another civilization that existed before us or, or, or a period in time where people were ever pursuing technology that's like what we have today with, you know, plastics and electronics and stuff like that. Whatever they had, I think it probably falls in line with something being like, simple, natural, non-upgradable. It is the perfect extrapolation of their natural resources.

• 1:59:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  Sense?

• 1:59:41Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  That's what, that's what I would say. If there's a high civilization that existed before this chapter, it was something similar to that, that of course it's not preserved because these are people who know how to extrapolate to the absolute, to the absolute maximum, their, the resources from their natural world.

• 1:59:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah. Well, it's, it's, maybe we see a renaissance of thought around that sort of thing. You look at like, you know, biosphere technology from like New Mexico or like, I don't, you watch the movie Avatar. And it's like they're, they're in these like, you know, uh, perfectly ecologically consistent sort of habitats or whatever. And a lot of what we're doing now, I mean, we brought up SpaceX earlier. It's like with, you know, um, Starship. Like they have like 36 Raptor engines and it's like an enormous amount of mass ejection. And I'm probably marginally, you know, way more pro SpaceX than I am the FAA and, you know, EPA trying to like stop them

• 2:00:38Jesse Michels?

  or whatever, but it's still brute force. It's super brutish and like, I think a lot of our, our tech is and, um, so yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe a lot of that stuff was more advanced. Okay. Going back to ancient Egypt.

• 2:00:52Jesse Michels?

  The Curse of King Tut's Tim.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:00:54Jesse Michels?

  Do you think there's a there there?

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  You know, I I've thought about this.

• 2:00:58Jesse Michels?

  And maybe set it up for the audience. What is the curse of King Tut?

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, you know, I I really read about this about four years ago. But King Tut is the final king of, uh, he's a young boy. He's the son of Akhenaten, and he's the final king of the 18th dynasty of the of the Amarna period. And this is what we were talking about earlier, where Egypt just flipped on his head and and they're they're, um,

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  they're forced, everyone's forced to worship the Aten, the one single monotheistic god. It's actually the first example of monotheism in all of the ancient world. This predates, uh, the Exodus and Moses by probably a century or or more.

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  So, uh, King Tutankhamun is born King Tutankaten. And when when Nefertiti dies, who is the wife of of Akhenaten, when she passes away, the crown is handed to Tutankaten. And his advisor, a guy named Ai, who's, you know, one of the high ranking nobles in that government, basically advises to Tutankaten, you know, "The entire country is very displeased with your father and and the fact that all of Egypt has been thrown on its head. We should probably go back to the way things were." There may be some truth to that, you know, that their whole revolution of of the Aten may not have been very good for Egypt's economy. And pretty much all the documentation we have of that time supports that.

• 2:02:27Speaker 01

  However, all that documentation comes from the people that wanted them dead. So there's that. So, one way or another, they convince Tutankaten to return everything back to the way to the way it was. And he changes his name to Tutankhamun, which may or may not have been his own choice. But he is Pharaoh at this time, and he's only Pharaoh for a very short period of time. And then something happens to him. I don't really know how he died. It looks like from the way that the blood pulled on the back of his head, you've you've probably seen his body in person. I have, yes. So, um, Dr. Bob Breyer did, uh, did an investigation on him, maybe back in the 90s,

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  and examined his body. And the way that the pool, the way that the blood pools in the back of his skull looks like he was hit in the back of the head, his brain, you know, he had a brain bleed or he was bleeding inside of his skull and he was laying, he was laying on his back for an extended period of time. And so all that blood pulled. So they think that he may have died to a blunt force injury on the back of his head. That's just a, that's just a theory. Um, but one way or another, he's buried with an incredible amount of treasure in this rushed tomb, though. It's, it's a shallow rock cut tomb, uh, but he's buried with an incredible amount of treasure. And then I think it's Amenhotep the second, or it may, maybe it's Amenhotep the third. His tomb.

• 2:03:57Speaker 01

  No, I don't think it was them because they came, never mind. Amenhotep the first and third came, came before Tutankhamun, but somebody's tomb was, was cut into the ground above his and all the rubble covered up King Tut's tomb. So his stayed preserved and overlooked until I think 1923, when, uh, when Howard Carter discovered it. Now, if my memory serves me correctly, and there's a lot of legend about this, but as they're trying to open the tomb, there's some kind of hieroglyph on the outside that, that apparently said something along the lines of, uh, of, of cursing anybody. It's a rough translation, but it basically curses anyone who should violate or open, violate or open this tomb. Well, of course they're going to

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  open it. And, uh, Howard Carter in the little, uh, in the, uh, vault opening, he shines a light through there and somebody asks him, do you see anything? And he says, yes, wonderful things. And that's like a very iconic, uh, Egypt logical quote. And, uh, so they opened it up and of course they find the richest tomb that's ever been found in, in, in the history of archaeology. It's the biggest discovery ever of this very minor, unimportant young kid, um, who was Pharaoh. Now, uh, if you asked me three years ago, I could go through the whole chronology of like how every single person died, but. Almost every person that was in this excavation had something tragic happen to them.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  And several of them died from poisoning from being exposed to the air inside the chamber. And so you had this paint that's up on the walls and that paint ruminates in the air and it makes the air toxic.

• 2:05:36Jesse Michels?

  So it's like radiation or something?

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know. It's it's something to do with with the paint ruminating the air for thousands of years. It makes it, you know, you can imagine like the carcinogens in that air is just straight up poison. You know, um, it must be like smoking a thousand cigarettes in a second, you know, just crazy. And, uh, so some of them died from poisoning from being exposed to the air. And then some people like their homes would burn down with them in it when they were back in the Americas. Or they'd get some kind of crazy disease and die or their spouse would die.

• 2:06:10Jesse Michels?

  There was like, I think there was like a scorpion bite.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  That's right. There's something like that too. And then, um, I forget how Howard Carter died, but he died in some strange way, but he was the last person. Okay. Everybody before him died leading up to him. I've thought about this before, you know, is it all coincidence or was there really a mummy's curse? And sometimes I wonder if it's not both, if it's, if it's, um, you know how I've talked to some of my friends about this, about this before, how some people seem to just have a will that is so strong that the world moves out of their way.

• 2:06:47Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, look at, look at so many successful people.

• 2:06:51Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  Their will is.

• 2:06:53Jesse Michels?

  Trump or Elon Musk.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  That's what I was thinking is.

• 2:06:55Jesse Michels?

  It's like they shift timelines according to their will or something.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  And Steve Jobs thought about this. He called it magical thinking that that you could ignore things and they would go away. That you could believe things so strongly that the earth would morph itself around your will. And I, and I've always wondered if with something like that, if it's, yes, the paint inside of the, inside of the chamber did poison these people and kill them. But that was, that was what Tutankhamun would have wanted. You know what I mean?

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  But then you have this like cosmic element that goes beyond that, like, did these people violating Tutankhamun's tomb? Really result in this lady's house burning down with her and her family in it. It's certainly ominous and it's certainly fascinating to us, you know, observing it from the outside. Uh, I don't know.

• 2:07:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  I, I don't know, you know, I, I think that there's definitely elements of science in our natural world and, and the way that our brains connect to the world around us that isn't measurable.

• 2:07:58Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:07:58Speaker 01

  At least to us yet.

• 2:07:59Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  You know, um.

• 2:08:01Jesse Michels?

  For sure.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:02Jesse Michels?

  I definitely agree with that. And I think belief is incredibly like, a good example of our modern paradigm writing that off is like in medicine, you have like the placebo effect, which often is way more effective than, you know, the pharmacological, you know, uh, uh, thing that you're taking or whatever. And then you just write that off. You go, it's placebo. And then it's like, well, wait. Belief is extremely powerful. And like you can take a sugar pill and believe a thing and it's more effective in certain cases than biochemistry. Like that's, that's like a big deal, but

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:31Jesse Michels?

  It's sort of, we live in this age where like, you're not supposed to trust your eyes and your mind is irrational. And, you know, I think, I think we're, uh, we're probably on the verge of sort of a quote unquote re enchantment of reality. I think that's, that's ending. For better and for worse. Like you have, you know, Gen Z astral projecting on Tik Tok and it's, it's like weird, right? Like you have this, what we're talking about, the opening of the floodgates of the relativization of like all information, the, the, the, the death of expertise is it's like, there's some bad that comes with that, but.

• 2:09:02Speaker 01

  So, yeah, well, it, this is, this is a sad thing is that, you know, the, um, the institutions that used to feed us information became politicized and, and corrupted and weaponized against normal people.

• 2:09:20Jesse Michels?

  Yes.

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I don't want to get overtly political, but

• 2:09:24Jesse Michels?

  You can do it.

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's so obvious.

• 2:09:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  As to how we've been, you know, the normal people have been manipulated and lied to by, by the media, by our government.

• 2:09:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  By everything. Um, and

• 2:09:38Jesse Michels?

  I think the pandemic woke a lot of people up.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it definitely, it definitely did. I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous, the things that we were being told in, you know, from 2020, even up till now, you know, it just, the things that we're made to believe is absolutely insane. Um.

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  And you know, people like, we just don't, we have no reason to trust the authority anymore. And a really sad side effect of that is that anti-intellectualism

• 2:10:11Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  is on the rise now because, I mean, there really is, there really are amazingly intelligent people who are devoted to their area of expertise in their field of science, whether it's, you know, biology, archaeology, whatever, medicine, that are really, really devoted to that. And that you need these people who are wildly intelligent, that study these really strange fields to be able to tell you information. But now, like, we just don't trust any of that at all. And that's, and that's sad. But it's the fault of, it's the fault of those institutions for allowing themselves to be weaponized for modern politics.

• 2:10:54Speaker 01

  My opinion is I think it's really all about modern politics, all about modern politics and money. Personally, I do not think that there was, that there have been archaeological discoveries that change all of known humanity that are so impactful, that like a secret cabal came in and covered it all up and hid it from humanity. Those people don't give a, they do not care about that. What they care about is geopolitics and making money.

• 2:11:27Jesse Michels?

  Totally.

• 2:11:27Speaker 01

  And manipulating the modern world.

• 2:11:29Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  It's all, all the corruption is based on the modern world. I don't think they're trying to cover up the past. Because what would it do? Like, like if, if all of a sudden we knew that Atlantis really existed 12,000 years ago, and now it's ruins under the ground.

• 2:11:44Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  What's gonna happen?

• 2:11:46Jesse Michels?

  No, totally.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  It's incredibly fascinating.

• 2:11:48Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  But why would somebody cover?

• 2:11:51Jesse Michels?

  Cover that up. No, I generally agree. I also think some of these discoveries might not happen because of, yeah, like you said, politics are like basic bureaucracy slowness. We talked about, you know, Hawa's earlier, you know, Ministry of Culture. It's like you want certain things claimed by the local governments or like you want them sort of, you know, to be involved in the national history of that government. So you don't want anything to predate, you know, you want to, you want to go against the Robert Shock, John Anthony West or Aunt Neera.

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  Another thing is, is Egypt doesn't have a lot of interest. Let's just highlight on Egypt. They don't have a lot of interest in another Howard Carter, another white guy making a huge discovery. They want it to be an Egyptian and really Zahi Was wants it to be himself.

• 2:12:36Jesse Michels?

  Yep.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  And I've spoken to lots of Egyptologists and, you know, this even happened in Peru. You know, those big tunnels that were discovered in, uh, underground in Peru recently? Have you heard about this?

• 2:12:48Jesse Michels?

  No, actually.

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  Uh, in Cusco and up at Saksewoman.

• 2:12:51Jesse Michels?

  Interesting.

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  This just popped up on the news, maybe a month ago or so. This is a big, big ordeal that these, these tunnels were finally discovered and they're going to start exploring them. I was in those tunnels in September. That's how long ago that they, that they had been, that they had known about them. And it only just now became a press release.

• 2:13:09Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:10Speaker 01

  Why? Because the government has got to get everything together to make the most money possible, to make the biggest splash possible.

• 2:13:16Jesse Michels?

  So interesting.

• 2:13:17Speaker 01

  It's all a marketing campaign.

• 2:13:18Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  You know, to, to drive tourism, to drive interest, to drive funding, to drive money. Everything is so premeditated. It's not like, hey, we just found this. Let's post this on X for everyone to see.

• 2:13:28Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  It's the same thing in Egypt, man. It, they discover, um, they just discovered the tomb of, was it Tutmose, Tutmose II, I believe, is a tomb that they just discovered in, in Egypt. And it's kind of unremarkable on the inside. It's crumbled away a lot. It looks like it was never even completed. Um, I heard about that tomb in October and that, then the publication just came out, I don't know, within the last couple of months or so. When I was there in October, I heard about that tomb, uh, having been discovered earlier in 2024. So over a year later, they released the publication. So this is all on a, this is all on a timeline because they're constantly discovering things in Egypt, but

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  they don't want to, if they dropped 10 new discoveries. Nine of them would get overshadowed and not get the kind of press

• 2:14:21Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  that they want, which may cause a burst in tourism and then it slows back down. So it's all in this timeline. Archaeology is, it is, uh, tourism keeps archaeology alive, right?

• 2:14:33Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, it's almost like planned obsolescence or something like people have conspiracies about, you know, like Apple products or something.

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:41Jesse Michels?

  It's really fascinating. I mean, think about this Filippo Biondi paper around the, you know, these structures below the pyramids. If that was 2022, why is it coming out now? You know, that that's an interesting question.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:53Jesse Michels?

  I remember, you know, uh, doing this piece with David Grush, this UFO whistleblower who testified before Congress, uh, you know, in, uh, end of summer of 2023. And it was this big deal. It's like all these people started to cross the Rubicon of maybe this UFO stuff is actually real. And then the day after we put our like documentary out, which I thought was, you know, it's pretty, pretty comprehensive and, and good. Uh, if I do say so myself, uh, uh, the next day, there's this like Mexico City Congress thing about, uh, these Peruvian, you know, uh, alien mummies or whatever. And I'm out, I'm now actually looking into that case. And I think there's some interesting stuff there. But like the way it was presented was such a jokey, weird, you know, way.

• 2:15:38Jesse Michels?

  And it was, you know, a lot of what was ended up being popularized were these knockoff, you know, kind of, it was like chicken bones and, and rooster head or what? It was like clearly fake stuff.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 2:15:49Jesse Michels?

  It was presented in this weird way. And I, I wonder some of this might be this emergent, you know, the wheel gets, you know, created in South America at the same time as Africa. And then some of it might be this sort of political me too syndrome where it's like, oh, you discovered that? Well, I've been sitting on this me too, you know? And then you, you have to put out your thing. And it's, uh, it's, it's, it's more political than it is truth seeking. And that's not to say that, again, there's, there's nothing there on the, uh, the mummy thing. I think there probably actually is some interesting stuff going on there, but that's for a later date. Um, I have an excursion to pitch you on.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:16:24Jesse Michels?

  Okay, so I, six or seven years ago, met a guy named Luis Felipe San Salvador.

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:16:32Jesse Michels?

  And he's this super eccentric guy. He has, uh, he's directed a couple of movies under the name Jamaica No Problem. He's like larger than life guy. Anyways, I I became friends with him and I realized that uh he was not lying about the fact that he came from a long line of conquistadors from the 16th century. He's Ecuadorian. And he lives on this massive compound in Ecuador. And he even came out with a movie called The Son of Man, uh because he has maps in his family that go back to that time around Ottawa was ransom El Dorado. And he goes searching literally with like a team of like 10 people

• 2:17:15Jesse Michels?

  or whatever into the Amazon every single year to find El Dorado. And he also, so he has maps to El Dorado and then he also has maps to something called the Teos Cave or the Teos Library.

• 2:17:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:17:27Jesse Michels?

  Uh Neil Armstrong in 1969 went to the moon, of course, and came back and his second expedition was in the Amazon to find this Teos Cave, this Teos Library. And a BBC film crew followed him around trying to find this thing and he couldn't find it. And my friend, Luis Felipe San Salvador, says that his father sent Neil Armstrong in the wrong direction and that he has the real location of this thing. And it's this, if you talk to people in the local area, it's this well-known myth that uh there are these caves that exist with this kind of ancient alien-looking metallic artifacts, like, like metallic artifacts that

• 2:18:09Jesse Michels?

  seem so anachronistic and like, you know, beyond human capabilities even now. Uh and so I think we should go and try to find these things.

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  I would be down. So this is in Ecuador.

• 2:18:21Jesse Michels?

  Yes. Let's get, we, well, we have, let's get on a Zoom with Luis and

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  I would be down.

• 2:18:28Jesse Michels?

  I'm so down. Let's do it.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  I would, I would love that, man. I um, I have lots of experience in the jungle at this point.

• 2:18:34Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  Um, quite a lot.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  Have you seen where they just found like 11,000 structures in Ecuadorian jungle recently?

• 2:18:43Jesse Michels?

  No, 11,000?

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they they found a city, I think with 11,000 structures and it the city layout is on like the top of these mountain ridges and and all the city layouts are these four long structures with this huge, you know, maybe 200 foot by 200 foot wide square plaza in the center of them and it's thousands of these plazas that are made and it's the exact same layout as what we see in Central America and in Mexico with the Maya world, Mesoamerica. And man, there's no, there's no doubt that that civilization, I mean, think about this, man.

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  Think about how many different, just off the top of your head and, you know, neither one of us are an expert in this, but I can name a lot of different North American in the borders of the United States, Native American cultures, whether it's like the Creek Indians, the Apaches, the Comanches, the Cherokee, the Sioux, I can go on and on and on and on and on. Okay, the Amazon is the same size as the United States.

• 2:19:47Jesse Michels?

  So crazy.

• 2:19:47Speaker 01

  Imagine how many different civilizations existed beneath the canopy of the Amazon.

• 2:19:52Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  You know, and how expansive and in depth that history is. I mean, North American native history is so complicated. You even have this, you even, there's a, there's a federation of tribes that were united under,

• 2:20:10Speaker 01

  oh my goodness, who's the, who's the Native American Squanto? Squanto unites, creates this federation of these three tribes that were all rivals against each other during his childhood, but he gets captured and enslaved in London and then comes back and then he unites these tribes. I mean, that's just one little place where you have a confederation of three different tribes that come together and form their own government in one little area of Massachusetts. Imagine the rest of the continent and then project that onto the Amazon of how expansive and complicated and nuanced that is. I mean, that, the Amazon is incredibly dangerous. Whether you're dealing with humans or the natural world.

• 2:20:53Speaker 01

  And and almost impenetrable. But beneath that canopy really is the widest, deepest frontier of studying human history. And it's kind of like the last frontier. I think another frontier is the Sahara, which is equally as large.

• 2:21:12Speaker 01

  And equally as dangerous and imfeasible to to explore. Not that it's not feasible, but it is very difficult. I mean, I did I did a I did a six hour excursion in West Texas a few days ago. And every time I do that in the desert, I'm reminded of the fact that you wouldn't make it very long.

• 2:21:30Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  If you had to do a serious expedition in the desert and you weren't really, really well prepared.

• 2:21:35Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  You know, um, just in those six hours, I was like, I was like, you know, if I go another two hours, I will probably die.

• 2:21:42Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:42Speaker 01

  If I didn't get water, you know.

• 2:21:45Speaker 01

  And in the in the jungle, it's exactly the same, except it's worse because you sweat more. The the the sun might not be right on you. But man, you'll you'll sweat an insane amount. All of your hydration is gone. You know, you you'll be dehydrated in one afternoon. Going through Guatemala is brutal.

• 2:22:04Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Speaker 01

  And you have all these different plants that have effects on you that even modern medicine hasn't journeyed out there to study.

• 2:22:11Jesse Michels?

  That's what I worry about with the Amazon, where it's like, it's like a little thing bites you, where you like, you know, you like come into contact with some plant that, you know, messes with you, you know, it's like poison ivy on steroids.

• 2:22:23Speaker 01

  In, uh, I'll tell you, in October, I did back to back to back. I did Peru for 11 days. I did Egypt for 20 days. And I did, um, I did Guatemala for nine days.

• 2:22:37Jesse Michels?

  Unbelievable.

• 2:22:38Speaker 01

  And I was only home for one day during that whole period. And in Peru, when we went out to Machu Picchu, we were there for two full days. And the mosquitoes that bit me out there were so strong that they left scars on my arms. Like, if you look close, you'll see all these little dots all over my arms from where I got bit. And what they infect you with is so potent that when you scratch it, it will. It will stay in your fingernails and it'll spread around your body and and two weeks later, I when I was in Egypt, I was still having dots.

• 2:23:10Jesse Michels?

  Geez.

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  Pop up on my arms from these mosquitoes that bit me in the Amazon. And then in Egypt, I'm mostly fine. Egypt's real easy to to get around.

• 2:23:20Speaker 01

  Then I go to the jungles in Guatemala, which is essentially the Amazon. You know, not the same geographically, but like the environment is very similar. And something happened to me while while I was in the jungle and I got really sick. Not food poisoning sick, not a cold sick. And even the local guys could tell that the local Guatemalans, they were like, they were like, they were like, oh, you have, what did they say jungle fever, you have jungle sickness? Cause they could tell how tired and like drained I was. And they thought it was the mosquitoes biting me that it was giving me something. And I was seventy five percent deaf in each ear.

• 2:23:57Jesse Michels?

  No way.

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  I couldn't hear anything.

• 2:23:58Jesse Michels?

  Oh geez, were you freaking out?

• 2:24:01Speaker 01

  No, I knew it would go away. I've just figured it would. But I didn't know what I didn't know what was like oppressing me. I was just so rundown and tired. But I didn't have any symptoms other than I was almost deaf. You know, we could be talking like this and I would barely hear you.

• 2:24:15Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:24:16Speaker 01

  It was so bizarre, man.

• 2:24:18Jesse Michels?

  On that note, let's go to the Amazon.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  On that note, let's do it. You know, but that was actually the only time that anything like that has ever happened to me. I I've been back to the jungle since then. Twice and and I was fine.

• 2:24:33Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  So I don't know, something something happened to me. I don't know what it was.

• 2:24:37Jesse Michels?

  You were initiated now.

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  And only in Guatemala. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:40Jesse Michels?

  I've I've gotten very sick in Guatemala as well, so.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 2:24:43Jesse Michels?

  Yeah, maybe it's a thing you just have to go through.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe it is. Have you gone to T call?

• 2:24:47Jesse Michels?

  I have.

• 2:24:48Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 2:24:49Jesse Michels?

  It's amazing.

• 2:24:49Speaker 01

  That's that's where I was at. That's that's where I got sick was in T call.

• 2:24:52Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  So I don't know what I don't know what it was that happened. And then I went out to El Mirador. Have you heard of this?

• 2:24:57Jesse Michels?

  I've never heard of El Mirador.

• 2:24:59Speaker 01

  It's a it's a two hour helicopter ride into the jungle north. And so you drop down and it's this giant pyramid that is supposedly similar to the size of the Great Pyramid in in Egypt. But you can't really tell because it's just this big hump in the middle of this flat jungle. And the pyramid was so large, man, that when I was coming back down from it, I walked down the pyramid. And then I walked along this trail for about five minutes. And then arrived on a staircase that went down and I was like, for the last five minutes, I was walking on the pyramid straight.

• 2:25:37Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:25:37Speaker 01

  That's how big it was. So I came down from a certain portion.

• 2:25:40Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:40Speaker 01

  And I reached this flat platform and I walked for five minutes before reaching the next slope of the pyramid.

• 2:25:46Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:25:46Speaker 01

  That's how large it is.

• 2:25:49Speaker 01

  And to your point that you were saying earlier is the farther they go back in time with so many cultures, the bigger the structures get.

• 2:25:55Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:57Speaker 01

  That is the first known pyramid in, it's called Ladanta. Ladanta and El Tigre, there are these two giant pyramids that face each other. They're about equal in size. Those are the oldest pyramids known in the Maya world.

• 2:26:09Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:26:09Speaker 01

  Made out of the largest stones ever used in the Maya world.

• 2:26:13Jesse Michels?

  Unbelievable.

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  It, it, but instead of these huge rectangular stones that you see in Egypt, they're like these Lincoln Logs.

• 2:26:19Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:26:20Speaker 01

  But the Lincoln Logs aren't stacked on top of one each, of one another in the way that we would think that they would be used. Imagine a Lincoln Log laid this way and they're stacked on top of each other like this.

• 2:26:31Jesse Michels?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:26:31Speaker 01

  So in the least,

• 2:26:35Speaker 01

  in the least easy way possible, the least efficient way possible is the way that it was done. And it was built,

• 2:26:44Speaker 01

  it is so massive, like the actual mass, the structural mass inside of them is so impressive that the jungle, unlike most Maya pyramids where you have blocks that are about this big in most Maya pyramids. And the roots of the trees wrap around those little blocks and dig into the pyramid. And then a tree will grow out of the pyramid and rip all the blocks apart from each other. So you see, like the jungle growing out of these huge pyramids. This pyramid, no. The jungle is growing on it, but what they'll, but all the, the roots grow flat against the stone because the stones are impenetrable. So you can grab a piece of the jungle and peel it off the side of, and peel it off the side of the pyramid and the pyramid's still there.

• 2:27:26Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:27:27Speaker 01

  The roots never penetrated between the stones.

• 2:27:29Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:27:29Speaker 01

  That was at the beginning of time in the Maya world and it was never surpassed since then. Kind of the same way in ancient Egypt.

• 2:27:37Jesse Michels?

  Wow.

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:38Jesse Michels?

  Fascinating, man. Well, I'm gonna follow up with you.

• 2:27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we'll do it. We'll seriously do it. Yeah, that's, um, I, I would love to, uh, return to South America.

• 2:27:48Jesse Michels?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never been to Ecuador. I've only ever been to Peru.

• 2:27:51Jesse Michels?

  Cool.

• 2:27:52Speaker 01

  Have you ever been to Peru?

• 2:27:53Jesse Michels?

  I'm going, uh, I think in the next month, but I've never been.

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  Are you really? Where are you going to Peru?

• 2:27:59Jesse Michels?

  I am going to Lima for sure. And then I want to go to Machu Picchu because I'm going to be there. And, uh, otherwise I'm kind of open if you have any suggestions.

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the Sacred Valley, man. I mean, that's, that's, uh, that's Cusco. So what you would probably do is you would land in Lima. Uh, I'm sure you'll go see, um, I'm sure you'll go see the, the archaeological site of Lima.

• 2:28:22Speaker 01

  But then you'll probably go to the, uh, there's a, there's a famous museum there with all the pottery. Um, I forget what it's, I forget what it's called. Um, and, uh, you'll go there, but then you'll probably fly from Lima into Cusco. I'm guessing. And Cusco is like one of the, maybe the best city I've ever been to in, in my travels.

• 2:28:41Jesse Michels?

  Cool.

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  The nicest, cleanest, most beautiful city I've ever been to. You can walk down any, uh, any, um, alleyway. Any part of the city and it's perfectly safe.

• 2:28:52Jesse Michels?

  Really?

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. You, you, you would love it. I mean, it's no surprise that there's so many Americans that live in that.

• 2:28:58Jesse Michels?

  In Cusco.

• 2:28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:59Jesse Michels?

  Can you hit the tunnels there or is that like blocked off?

• 2:29:03Speaker 01

  No, I got access to it, uh, through the head archaeologist there. Yeah.

• 2:29:08Jesse Michels?

  You got the hookups.

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, so, so they, they, uh, somebody on their team watches my channel.

• 2:29:15Jesse Michels?

  Okay.

• 2:29:16Speaker 01

  And has seen, has seen some podcasts I've been on. And so I was able to get in and, and, and check out the, check out the tunnels. But you would go there, see Sose Waman, go see, um, go see the, um, the Cora Concha, which is in the center of the city of Cusco. Which is like.

• 2:29:35Speaker 01

  The most impressive stonework in all of the ancient world. The most precise, I mean just razor sharp. Like the sides of the Egyptian architecture of actual buildings that people walked inside it has nothing on the coricantra.

• 2:29:50Jesse Michels?

  Whoa.

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  Nothing on it.

• 2:29:51Jesse Michels?

  Crazy.

• 2:29:52Speaker 01

  It's made from gray andesite and the blocks like lean in on each other. So they're like, the walls are like trapezoidal. And so you can just imagine the sophistication of taking gray andesite, which is, you know, as hard as granite. And just, it has these razor sharp edges on the architecture. Just absolutely stunning. And then from there, you would take a bus to Oyonté Tombó or a taxi or something like that. To Oyonté Tombó, where is another megalithic site. And then from there, you take the train to Machu Picchu.

• 2:30:22Jesse Michels?

  Epic. I think I just got my whole itinerary laid out.

• 2:30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:25Jesse Michels?

  Luke, I appreciate your time, man. This is a blast and I'm so grateful that we were able to speak before you hit Singapore and then you moved out of Texas. So appreciate you, man.

• 2:30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, thanks so much for having me. This flew by.

• 2:31:09Speaker 00

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