Lost Civilizations of the Amazon, Why They Burned Alexandria, & What Atlantis Really Is | #698

YERRR – Luke Caverns pulled up and the boys went full lost civilizations mode. – Pyramids, Machu Picchu & how they built some insane stuff – Greeks, Romans, Aztecs & lost cities of gold – Mansa Musa and the hunt for Atlantis History, mysteries, and wild theories. All that and more on this week’s episode of FLAGRANT. INDULGE. 0:00 Intro 00:29 No megastructures in NA, why? 4:39 Massive pyramids + “Star Wars” 12:01 Immense size and scale 16:41 Technology advancement & Theories 19:59 Machu Picchu 34:32 Singular focus, Stone chipping + Acid? 39:47 Inca palace built by God 44:22 Ancient Egyptians, Nubians + Sudanese Pyramids 49:17 Alexandria, Library + Alex’s adventure 1:04:33 Ptolemy, Ancient Greeks + Alexandria + Lighthouse 1:21:04 Education, Athenian philosophy + Made of stone 1:29:37 March Madness 1:33:00 Romans Arrive, Cleopatra + Being God 1:43:21 Augustus + Marc Anthony 1:50:04 Alexander’s get back, Slavery + Athenian Socializing 2:02:34 Spartans + similarities to the Greeks 2:08:35 Cortez, The Wedding + Aztecs 2:35:51 Lost cities of Gold + BULLION 2:43:03 Our heritages + Mansa Musa 2:51:33 We need Stories 2:53:21 Where is Atlantis? + Crete 3:21:35 Werejaguars This episode is sponsored by Kalshi. This episode is sponsored by Sesh. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up guys? Today, we are joined by a real-life explorer, archaeologist, historian, YouTuber as well, and possibly my long-lost twin Lou Caverns is on the pod. And we are talking about lost cities of gold, ancient Jaguar people, the greatest city that's ever existed, in my opinion, New York City, but in Lou's opinion, the city of Alexandria, and much more. Sit back, relax, and indulge. Why is it that we see all these massive structures in Mexico and south? Why are there none of these in the northern parts?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  That is a good question. Um, well...

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Pyramids?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, one of the... This is something I've thought about, and I don't know that there's a... I don't know that there is a perfect answer for it.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Why don't you see any pyramids in California? Why don't you see any pyramids on the way? And then all of a sudden, they sprout up in... Where's the first?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Um, probably, probably the most northern is gonna be about right here at a place called Teotihuacan.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  I saw it.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  There are... Yeah, so you've been there? Okay, yeah. So, that's probably your first notable... There may be some pyramids north of that, but that's like your first... That's your northernmost stone pyramid. But that said, you know, about right here in Ohio, if I'm pointing out Ohio... Nobody really knows where Ohio is.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  But if...

• 1:24Speaker 00

  I know what you're gonna point out here.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you've got like the Adena Mounds and stuff that come from 500, 500 B.C., but they're all, they're all made out of earth, right? It's just... And so, yeah, so so much here, you have earth and, earth and timber, not as much, uh, not as much bedrock. So, you don't have as much stone to work with.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  They just didn't have access to stone? That's why we don't see it?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Well...

• 1:44Speaker 00

  There's plenty of stone on the west coast.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  And that's true. And like in the Appalachian Mountains, man, you've got so much granite and limestone that's poking out, but, but they're not using it. Not most of the time. There actually is somewhere in the Mississippi and world, there is one stone pyramid that I've seen. It might be in Ohio itself. Here in the southwest, you have lots of stone, and they're building like pueblos and, you know, huge cities and stuff like that, uh, cliff dwellings, you know? So, they're making stuff out of, out of stone, but not pyramids. But in California, you had the highest... California, Oregon, Washington, you had some of the highest densities of Native Americans in North America, and they didn't build anything like that.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Why?

• 2:21Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Well, this is something we need to understand.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Because nobody, I mean, I'm sure that people in your position have asked these questions tons of times. It's like, why all of a sudden does this modern technology, and modern for the time, right? Like, pop up in these regions, and kind of only in those regions?

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I'll give you an idea why, I think.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Why?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  So, when you're in, when you're in the Maya world, the jungle is straight up hell.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Give me the Mayan empire, like, more or less.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  So, the Maya world is gonna be the Yucatan Peninsula, about right through here, like that south central Mexico.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  El Salvador, Honduras. Yes, sir, yeah, that's right. So, the jungle out there sucks, like, which is walking through it is hell. And it floods all the time, there are, you know, the world's, some of the, well, definitely, the Americas' most venomous snakes live in the highest concentrations right here, of anywhere you're gonna find them in America. It's the Fer de Lance snakes, and you've got eyelash vipers, all kinds of other stuff. And so, there's a lot that exists on the forest floor that can kill you and your children, especially like kids, just like that. And, uh, and it floods all the time.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  So, it incentivizes you to build structures.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so what they wanna do is they wanna build platforms, and so you wanna get up off of the forest floor. And then, other people are gonna want that, so you make the platform bigger, and then it becomes bigger, and then it becomes bigger. But you, you do it out of earth, but the earth erodes, so then you gotta do it with something stronger, you gotta do it with stone. So, you're trying just to survive in this hellish jungle environment, and they have a lot of stone bedrock, which is why, like, in the Amazon, it's all clay, so they don't have, they don't have anything there. Well, when you get halfway through the Amazon, you got more granite bedrock that's out here, but a lot of here, it's just clay swamps.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  And so, um, in the Maya world, that, that is where we see the first stone pyramids pop up. There's one in a place called Coelho, Belize. Uh, I was just in Belize, maybe a month ago or so, and, um, it's just a little pyramid, like, maybe the size of this, of this room. And that, that dates beyond a thousand B.C. And then, it kind of spreads out from there into, uh, the Paten jungle in Guatemala. There's a site there called El Mirador in Nakbay, and those sites go back to, like, yeah, so that's Coelho. Um, that's a little bitty site that most people don't know about. If you look up El Mirador Pyramid, so these pyramids are absolutely massive.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  The biggest, I think.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Is this the newest one that they just discovered and they say it's like the biggest uh? Largest amount of rock.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  So that one, that's El Mirador. So get this, that's just the little tiny top section of the pyramid. The rest of it is covered up by the jungle.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Oh wow, wow, wow.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  And get this, the bottom level, yeah, so that's El Mirador, the one that's looming over everything.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  So that's roughly how big it is versus the pyramids in Egypt.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Now this graphic, this graphic is extremely controversial, uh, because it really depends on how large, or how, how you measure the pyramids, because pyramids in Egypt are straight up pyramids. It's just, it's a pyramid, right? But pyramids in Mesoamerica, it starts as a pyramid here. And so like that photo that you saw is this top level of the pyramid. But then it comes down and there's another flat level here with two more pyramids on it. And it comes down another way and then it comes down a little bit.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Height maxing in a way.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  They're height maxing. And so there's this.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  If they have a vantage point where they're standing, they're a little taller.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. And there, and there's this huge platform at the bottom. And so that pyramid at El Mirador is so large that you climb up it and you're like, wow, that's a really, really big pyramid. And you just keep on going up and up and up. And then when I came down it, uh, I, I came down the pyramid. I reached the bottom and I walked for like five or 10 minutes or so. And then I hit another ramp going down and I had been, still been on the pyramid that entire time. There's a big old flat courtyard. And so the bottom of the pyramids of El Mirador actually span the entire central part of the city. So when you get down, when you get down the pyramid, the actual base of that pyramid.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Is the entire city.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Extends out far into the jungle and then people were living on that bottom pyramidal platform, right?

• 6:36Speaker 00

  And this pyramidal platform is with rock that they placed there or it's existing bedrock that they've built on top?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  No, it's rock that they, it's rock that they brought in, all of it. And, and at El Mirador specifically, El Mirador is one of the oldest sites in the Maya world. And just like you see in so many other places, the farther you go back in time, the more sophisticated. The architecture becomes the stones like most of the Maya world is just rubble. That's about this big and it's packed in with this really sophisticated like superheated cement that they use to like bind the structure together and they have these really nice. They have this really nice like stone framing on the outside to make all the stones look square. This is in later periods, but in earliest times 3000 years ago at the side of El Mirador in the middle of the jungle, the most inaccessible place you could possibly be.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  And they're so protected, right? Because no one's traveling far out into the jungle. So they're able to build up the city without being, you know, invaded by raiders and marauders and stuff like that. So they quarry out these stones that are eight feet long, couple of feet wide, couple of feet tall, and they stack them not like Lincoln Logs, but they stack them in vertically. So or I'm sorry horizontally laying down. So they're like slid into the structure, right? So it makes the structure impenetrable like most Maya pyramids. When they're left in ruins, a tree will grow like the its roots will grow into the pyramid and pull the blocks and pull the blocks apart. Well, at that site, the jungle grows on top of

• 8:09Speaker 01

  the pyramid. But if you pull a tree down, it actually just pulls the jungle off of the stones like a carpet laying on top of it because the stones are so big and packed together that that the foliage cannot possibly penetrate.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  I don't know if this is the same thing, but when I I've seen a few different pyramids in Mexico. When I went to the ones near Mexico City, what is that site called?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Well, the big one is Teotihuacan.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  The Teotihuacan, which which is the one where you can go for the solstice? And it looks like the fire is coming out of the serpent's mouth at the bottom.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Um, oh, Chichen Itza.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  Chichen Itza. Okay, so I saw both of those. Teotihuacan is the bigger one where it's not just one pyramid. There's a huge one, but there's all these other little pyramid. It's a whole city.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  And the pyramids look functional where is it like when you go to Egypt, the pyramids, they kind of look like something to marvel at, but you don't even know what the utility is.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  This felt like, hey, shit goes down here. We got some shops.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  They're living on it. They're using it.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're playing ball over here. Like it actually felt like a proper city.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  It's public architecture.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And what was interesting, and this is kind of, I imagine what you're speaking to, I'm not exactly sure, but they had showed like images of what it looked like before, and they just looked like hills, because the ground had kind of like consumed it and grown up over it. And it really kind of makes you look at every hill in Mesoamerica, and you're like, what the fuck is underneath that shit? Like, how much, how much of the things that we're seeing as different types of elevation are actually maybe some small pyramids, maybe a big thing? I mean, this was a massive, see if you can get, is it Chichen Itza or Teotihuacan?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Either one.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  See if you can get Teotihuacan before it was excavated.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. There's a painting. Well, there's an old black and white photo.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I saw.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  There's a famous painting of it, too.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Yes, this is what I saw.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's just a massive hill.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a mountain, bro.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  So like, and when you're looking at it, there are mountains in the distance, right? And like every, I'm sure every tour guys give you a different thing, and they were like, they were making these mountains to honor the mountains they saw there. I don't know if this is something that they're just feeding me, but I'm looking at every other mountain around. Like, let's do some digging.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  The whole, the whole, they're building this.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Now show it without any of that on it.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's really cool, wasn't it?

• 10:25Speaker 00

  It's like, wow.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's freaking awesome.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  What an insane, like, it looks like Star Wars.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, yeah, Star Wars is inspired by Mesoamerica, like, completely. The whole, the whole thing is. The very word Star Wars comes from the Maya.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  Wait, really?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so, this is what's crazy. So, you remember, remember the rebel base on Yavin IV?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  No.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Like, in the jungle?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. With the little, uh-oh. The little guys are running around?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  No, that's, that's the rebel, that's the, that's the moon of Endor. But the, but the base on Yavin IV is in, it's in episode four, or A New Hope, and, and it's basically where like, I don't even know, before they go blow up the Death Star, that's where they're all at. But anyways, there are Maya pyramids at the site of Tikal, that's what's in those shots. Well, the, the Maya city of Tikal was the very center of this huge

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Maya civil war. But the Maya, the key thing about the scientific part of their civilization is that they're all astronomers. So the name through some way, the name of their civil war becomes the Star Wars.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  And it's based around the city of Tikal, which the city of Tikal becomes the rebel base in Star Wars.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Oh, shit.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, it's pretty cool. But, um, I'm sorry, what were you asking me about?

• 11:43Speaker 00

  We're just talking about like why this technology kind of exists in certain places and it doesn't. And I guess technology erupts because of necessity. So you're saying it's inhabitable? Some of these areas were inhabitable to just be like living on the ground. You got snakes everywhere. We got to elevate a little bit and.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  One of the things you were telling me about the size and the scale of their building projects. That still sticks to me. That's so crazy. And correct me on this, and maybe you can even just explain more. They would build so much and excavate so many trees that they would actually change the weather.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was, that happened a lot.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Put them on a little game right here.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Here in Honduras, there's a place called Copan. And at Copan, there is evidence that, um, so you can, there's all kinds of ways that you can date like, uh, events and drought. And if you can find pieces of timber, you can date the timber and figure out like when they're not using timber anymore. It's just a lot of relative dating methods.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Mines, Edelman, changing weather.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. We know.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, see, I see.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  We're there.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, we got it.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Still haven't told us.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, right?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  So at the, you could pull up the Maya city called Copan, C-O-P-A-N. It's in Honduras. And at this site, there is evidence that they were cutting down the trees in the use for their architecture. So what they would do is, I can't quite explain, you have to be like a chemist or scientist, like really break down how they make stucco. But they're cutting down so many trees to make what's called stucco. We use stucco in modern day, um, architecture as well. But it's like plaster that you'll put over, uh, that they would put over the stone to give it this smooth, white face. Like the Romans would do this. The Greeks would do this sometimes. And then they would paint over that. But the stucco had to constantly be repaired and it requires a lot of wood and timber.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And there may also be this psychological aspect of like, they, maybe they want to separate themselves from that jungle environment. So if you could have your whole area cleared of trees, it was like a, you were elevated on a societal level, right? Like you, you were seen as something, it's almost like you conquered the natural world, right?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Animals live in the jungle, humans live in cities.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. So you're elevated above it. And so there's evidence there that if you were standing on the principal pyramid of Copan and, and you were looking off into the horizon, 360 degrees, you would not see a single tree. That's how massive the city of Copan and it's, and in this surrounding environment really was and how many millions and millions of people live there. Well, they changed the weather patterns by eliminating all the trees. It stopped raining. And so the entire civilization just has to, just has to pick up and they all have to leave.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Oh shit.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's, there were a lot of things that all came together. And it was like the Maya world around 800 AD, 900 AD just completely collapsed and disappears for a couple of years, or for a couple of hundred years. And then reappears up in the north, like in the Yucatan where Chichen Itza is. So they were all originally, so like a lot of the tourist stuff is up here in the north, northern Yucatan. This is some of the best preserved stuff because it's a little arid and hot. But the, really the Maya world began down here in these lowlands. Or, well, I guess some of it's mountainous, some of it's lowlands. But this southern Maya area in those, in those deep jungles. And it all fell apart and they all had to move north and go. And like all the cities throughout the whole, like the Maya civil war,

• 15:21Speaker 01

  these hundreds of cities warring against each other, millions of people at war and struggling. All of them have to abandon their cities at the end of these civil wars because of just the, the trade routes are falling apart and they've used up all their natural resources in drought. And this volcano erupts in 800 AD and casts this huge black plume, you know, over the Maya world and completely buries one city in ash, at least one city, kind of like a Pompeii.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  So that's preserved?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's several cities like that. There is a Mesoamerican Pompeii, I believe it's called Kakashla. And, uh, yeah, yeah, it's really, really cool. Um, but, but yeah, about 880, that's the collapse of the classical period, and then they all have to kind of rebuild and go north. But, right here, you know, when you're, when you're asking about the, the majority of construction and pyramids and stuff, really, actually, the majority of that is just about right here. Throughout all of the Americas. I mean, we have stone architecture in South America.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, Machu Picchu, right?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but most of it is just in the center of the Inca world. You've got some stuff up here, you got a little bit. There's a little bit that's further south, some of it is kind of Inca or, or on the peripheral of the Inca world. Uh, and then you've got Tiwanaku in Bolivia. But, throughout most of South America, um, it seems to be a lot like North America, where they're building out of, uh, like, they're building structures out of earth.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Where does the technology go? What are the theories on that? Like, how does the society build all this unbelievable stuff to the point where, like, we're kind of confused how they're able to do it? And then, gone.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  And what is some of the technology that you're most impressed by?

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  It's gone.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Again, these are all theory, like, this is not fact. Don't feel like you have to get everything right here. Like, we're just

• 17:04Speaker 01

  He's not gonna fact-check me.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  I'm not fact-checking. I'm not fact-checking. We're not doing it over here.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  So, but as far as where it goes, and even where it comes from.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  It's very strange, isn't it?

• 17:15Speaker 00

  What do you think? Like, you study this more than anybody. You're watching these things, you're looking at them, you're walking around them. We don't even know if we could do them today. Of course we could. My buddy, my buddy says this, he's like, uh, uh, my buddy Benuieta, who is a craftsman, and, and his, his own regard is like, uh, you have to understand, back in the day, that's all they were doing is really just kind of finding food and then building shit, right? And there was a, there was, there was a Steph Curry of building shit. Right? So there are people that all of their expertise were, was, was pointed in this one direction.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  So it's possible that they could do these amazing things. But there has to be some conversation between you guys where you're like, okay, what, where the fuck did it go? Is there remnants of it anywhere?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  You know what's sad about, um, where we're kind of at now, is if, if you try to have that conversation with most archaeologists, they're

• 18:08Speaker 01

  They're sort of instantly repelled by it.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Take me to a bar with a few archaeologists where you've had, you know, a few Bud Lights. You guys are chilling. Nobody's listening. Nobody's recording. You guys are sitting down and you're just going, all right, what do we think happened? We're not going to write a paper on this. What are our suspicions? Again, you're not hanging your hat on this for your career. What is your just, you're going to tell me where what Atlantis is later, so.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  You might as well just, what do we think?

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Well, let's go to across all of the Americas as far as

• 18:42Speaker 01

  architecture, obvious, obvious like architectural technology that is most impressive to me is definitely centered around Cusco, which is the navel of the Inca realm. That's where the Inca emperors were and everything. You know, it's so mind blowing and the size of the architecture, the, some archaeologists hate this, but like the precision of the stone architecture, you know, it's.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Why do they hate that? The precision is what's impressive.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Well, they hate if you use, they hate if you use the word precision.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Why?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think we're in kind of like a, I think we're in sort of like an anti, I don't know.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Looks like a guy who runs a daycare's teeth.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  So that's.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  You know, you got it?

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Who runs a daycare?

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, who runs a daycare in Minneapolis?

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, okay, okay. Now I got it.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  It's a racist joke. It's a disgusting racial joke.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  So this is the side of Sacsayhuamán. If you, if you want to see the thing that I

• 19:49Speaker 01

  am impressed by the most, look up, look up the Temple of the Sun or Temple of the Moon

• 19:58Speaker 01

  at Machu Picchu.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  It should I have a lot of questions about Machu Picchu. Yeah. Are we gonna get into Machu Picchu? I think, I think much, I think the question you're asking, we should go to Machu Picchu to answer it. Okay. Yeah. Um, first I saw your breakdown, you do a great breakdown on YouTube and you talk about this story of Bingham. Who's this Yale professor, like, nobody's in his fucking class. He's like, single-digit students in the class and he's like singularly obsessed with this. And he goes out into the jungle and he keeps on asking questions. And eventually the guy's like, you know, you gotta check out this other thing. And they're trekking, they're going across rivers and there are these like wooden bridges crossing these, you know, freezing cold, fast rivers. And he's like on his hands and knees, walking across them. And they eventually come after days and days and days and they find Machu Picchu.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  And I've seen pictures of Machu Picchu, maybe we can, there's an example, but I think you can look at like, there's this town that's, you know, what, 8,000? Feet in the sky, meters? Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah, like maybe 7,700 feet. Okay, so 7,700 feet, uh, it's a four-day hike or five-day hike if you're gonna do it as just a regular person. I think they have other ways now where you can kind of drive. Take a bus up. Take a bus. And then even after taking the bus, I don't, I think it's still a hike, right? Just a little bit. Okay, fine. So here's the thing to me, which I don't get about Machu Picchu. When, and I think the part of the reason why I don't get is because the elevation doesn't do much for me. When I saw the pyramids and when I saw Chichen Itza and Teotihuacan, I, I'm just looking at these things.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  I'm seeing heavy blocks stacked on top of each other. I'm looking straight up in the sky and I go, these things get really tall. It's the same thing when I look at a skyscraper, right? I, I grew up in New York with skyscrapers. I went to Chicago and I was like, oh shit, you guys got tall buildings too. This is impressive to look at. These structures don't seem that tall. Yeah, yeah. So like, to me, it's not this like awe-inspiring moment that I had when I was in Egypt. So you've been to Machu Picchu? No, I haven't been to Machu Picchu. And the reason, I think, part of the reason why I'm not compelled to go, I'm like, okay, like, they got some, a couple stories or something like that, but the pyramid is the most miraculous thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Outside of the birth of my children, that is the, outside of the birth of my first child.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  After you saw it once, you know, it's not, yeah, it's like a rerun. No, it's, no. Every life is a miracle. No, no, they're miracles. They are miracles. I'm just saying it's, you know, you saw it, you know? No, but it's You saw it, Mark, Mark, you saw it. You know how the movie goes. Yeah. I mean, do you remember the second time you had sex?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  I was 25.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  So, so help me understand why this is so miraculous? Is it getting the stone up to that elevation? Is it the way that the structures are built? Like, and I get, I understand that my take is the weird take here. Most people are just blown away by what they created. But am I approaching this with a...

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're asking if you're seeing it the wrong way.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm assuming I'm wrong here. Help me be...

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I don't know if you're wrong, right? Like, everybody kind of has their own interests.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Nah, shit on him.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I was telling, I was telling, I was actually telling him yesterday that I am sort of passingly interested in like the medieval world, but I can't figure out what is it that people are so obsessed with about, about the Middle Ages and knights with armor and all that stuff? I haven't figured that out. So, I get what you're saying, right? It's just for some, you know, different strokes for different folks. But I'll tell you what's so amazing about Machu Picchu. And I think maybe you and I were talking about this. So I saw Machu Picchu and the Great Pyramids for the first time, like, seven days apart. And, uh, yeah, it was a while.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  You flew from Egypt to Peru?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  From Peru, from Peru to Egypt, yeah. And, uh, so it was, it was a wild time. But I have actually never been as impressed with anything in person as I was Machu Picchu when I saw it for the first time.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Take me there, please, please. I want, I want to go. I want you to inspire me to go.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  So, um, Machu Picchu is very hard to describe. This view that you're seeing right here, like, a lot, a lot of people's experience when they go to see the Great Pyramids, some people are actually disappointed when they go to see it because they'll say something, they'll say something like, "Oh, I didn't realize that it was right next to modern day Cairo and there's trash everywhere and there's people trying to bug you and this, that, and the other," and they'll be disappointed, whatever. Looking at Machu Picchu is, in real life, is even, is better and more imposing than this photo right here. The, the steepness of the mountains, like, you, you, it's, it's imperceptible. You can be standing on the top of the mountain, you can't see the bottom, it's just like straight below, it's, it's hard, it's hard to describe.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  And it's not a, it's not an easy journey to get to Machu Picchu. So by the time you, you arrive there, you feel like you've earned it. Like, if, if you and I wanted to go see the pyramids right now, you know, we go to JFK, we fly straight to Cairo, boom, we're there, within 30 minutes, we can go see the pyramids. If you and I wanted to go to Machu Picchu, we'd have to fly LaGuardia or JFK to Miami, Miami to Lima, Lima to Cusco. We'd have to get a taxi out to a place that's three hours away called Ollanta Tombo. And then we'd have to get on a train from there to go Aguadas Calientes. And then we have to get on a bus to go up the top of the mountain. And then you have to hike over the backside of Machu Picchu, and then you're there, right? So it's like, you've traveled this long, long way to get here.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  You're enduring a very privileged version of the journey that these people endured to get there.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  So, so, yeah, the, you really have to chew on that to experience it.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, it's, yeah, it's sort of one of those things, yeah, where, where the, it builds up, you know?

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  And, um, and the, as far as the, the size of the architecture, why it's so imposing, um...

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Oh, wow! I didn't realize these walls are built right on the side of this cliff.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Approximately, how many people lived there?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Um, so you see that mountain peak in the back?

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. On top of that, the city is still up there. The city still continues all the way up to the top of that mountain and around the sides of it. So those walls go around the sides of it.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Oh, I thought it's just this area. Which mountain peak are you talking about? The one where the, the arrow is right now?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Both of them. So that's Huaynapichu, and then there's another structure on top of the little peak to the left of it. And you can walk from this thing that we're looking at, this plane, all the way up to that other? Yeah, I've walked the whole thing, like, four times. Oh, I thought it was just this plane here. No, no, it's the entire... So where he's standing, he's actually standing on the mountain of Machu Picchu. The city itself sits on the low end, and then that mountain on the back end is called Huaynapichu. But the actual city itself of Machu Picchu wraps and consumes the entire mountain, both mountains. Holy shit. So, um, so do you see that, you see that kind of grassy knoll? If you're able to go, you can go back to that frame that we were just on.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  That, there's a, yeah, so you see that grassy knoll that's kind of back in the middle? Yep. So if you walk beyond that, it's just jungle, and there's a little, there's a little, like, muddy trail through there. And you can walk that trail all the way up to the back, uh, to that back peak of Huaynapichu. And throughout the entire time, there are structures in there just covered up and, like, swallowed up by the jungle. And so you're really, like, walking in the steps of Hiram Bingham when he's there, sort of, for the first time, and seeing these structures, like, popping out of the forest. The thing for me that captivates me, and why Machu Picchu is definitely the most

• 27:36Speaker 01

  imposing archaeological site that I've ever been to, is, one, it gives you a sense of the sheer scale of this civilization, and how powerful they really were, to be centered in Cusco. And you start from Cusco, and you take this taxi ride three hours out to Ollantaytambo, and then you take this, you know, this train is moving, you know, like, fifty, sixty miles an hour, through the mountains, and then you reach the Amazon, and then you're just looking around, and you're like, this, you're like, this whole area was conquered by this one ancient civilization. Like, this entire region that I'm in was owned by them. And everywhere you go, you see, like, ruins, ruins on the side of the mountains,

• 28:19Speaker 01

  and you see these terraces, like, lining the sides of the mountains, and you can see how they were feeding millions and millions of people. You get out into the Andean Amazon where this is, and you go up to the top of this mountain, and you're standing up there, and you're like, okay, so at what point do people... And we gotta remember, they had no pack animals. There's not horses, there's not oxen.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  So they're carrying all of this?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  They're carrying all, the weight of all of this. They, they, okay, so the Egyptians may have had pack animals. Like, we, we, we see, well, I mean, we know that they did, but whether or not they had them during the time of the pyramid.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  They also had a waterway, right? If you're gonna excavate from some quarry miles away, you could potentially.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  You can put the, you can put the stones on the water and transport them there. And then it's only a short way to get them, you know, I mean, it's, it, in ancient times.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  It was probably right next door.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Do you remember, you remember, um, the temple that's right next to the Sphinx?

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's the Valley Temple. When you're standing out in front of that Valley Temple, the Nile was actually right there.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, yeah, I read about this.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Right there. So when they got the stones off, they just have to take them a few hundred feet to get into where the pyramid's gonna be. And, and how you get the stones up is a logistical, like, nightmare. I don't, I don't actually understand how they could possibly do something like that. But we're looking at much of the equivalent things happening here. There, they have roads going up the side of the mountain where they're transporting stones up.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  So these stones are not quarried from the mountain itself? They're coming from?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Well, most of them are.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they're definitely bringing a lot up into the mountain.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  So, so these.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  So it's the sheer scale of the city at this altitude?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  It's the scale of the city at the altitude, how treacherous the actual mountainside is, that it was clearly made to be a defended and beautiful but protected fortress. And some of the architecture there, um, is only rivaled in Egypt.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Some of the architecture there is only rivaled in Egypt in one or two places. Like, a lot of the architecture, um, in, in Peru, in the Inca realm, is vastly superior to most of ancient Egypt. I mean, there, there are places like, like, the pyramid itself is amazing, but a lot of it is carved out of soft limestone, right? But that, but that inner chamber, that's, that's that red rose granite, which is mind blowing, that those lentils that sit up in the ceiling are like 80-ton stones.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Well, and they're made out, they're made out of red granite. Well, here we have, here we have gray andesite, which, which is sometimes, depending on where it's quarried from.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Just as dense?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Just as dense, maybe a little bit more so.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  And, uh, and they're using stones that are the equal size, in equal size and weight, to, um, the lentils in the king's chamber of the Great Pyramid. And the way that they fit those stones together. Well, it's all done, it's all done on purpose, um, cuz they know that Peru has been a seismic area for millions of years, probably, and the ancient Peruvians were very keenly aware of this. So there, um, there are like sites out in Lima where they would use these little vertical bricks and they would stack them up and, and this site, I believe, is much older than most of the Inca realm, so.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Sorry, seismic, what do you mean by that?

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Seismic is like, like an earthquake, yeah, yeah, prone to earthquakes. And so, um, I think it's called Wakahaya Marka in Lima. Um, there's a, there's a site there where they use these little bricks and they stack them up vertically and they have, um, little spacers between the bricks, so that when an earthquake comes, the whole structure will just wiggle back and forth and it won't fall. And so this is, yeah, that's Wakahaya Marka. Uh, so you can see the, the stones are stacked vertically there. So this is, this is telling us that these people were, one, very sophisticated, very familiar with their, with their natural environment, and how to avoid catastrophe during it. So, so what it's doing is it's showing us that, you know, this isn't something that you figure out in one lifetime. This

• 32:11Speaker 01

  isn't something you figure out in three or four or five lifetimes. This is thousands of years of studying your natural environment and trying to figure it out. And so it shows us that, okay, a lot of this technology, this understanding of your natural world goes really far back in time. Now Machu Picchu is essentially the precipice of all of these things brought together. It's, it's all built up on this huge mountainside. Um, and now, not all of the architecture is that incredibly precise megalithic, uh, stone architecture. Some of it is like cruder, cruder, uh, rubble and mortar put together for, I don't know, I don't know if anybody's living there who is actually a normal person, but maybe not for royalty, but for these sacred places that are.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Almost obviously astronomical observatories where they're studying the night sky and they're studying they're studying the the sun and the moon. These places all have this huge megalithic architecture like one of the stones that's in, I think it might be the Temple of the Moon.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  I think I saw this.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  One of the stones, you could only fit a couple of those stones in the studio and

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Is this the one that has the thirty six different?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  So that's, so that one would be in Cusco.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, okay. No, no, no, there was two, I remember in your video you were talking about, there's one in Cusco, which is the most famous one that has like sixteen different etchings.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right, okay.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  And then what's the other one that?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, yeah, that is the one I'm talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's um

• 33:37Speaker 00

  I know your shit, dude.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  You do, though, you actually do.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  But you said that this was actually more impressive than the one in Cusco.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  The one in Cusco is the famous one, I think you you can describe it.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so so there's a there's a stone in Cusco that's got

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Twelve, is it?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  It's maybe it's twelve different angles.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Sixteen different angles, kind of.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Fourteen different sides, it's something like that. And that's the famous one because whenever you get to go to, whenever you go to Cusco, you walk down the marketplace next to, ah, it's the Temple of, ah, I'll think of it, but

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Just put Cusco.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, Cusco twelve sided stone. And that's the one that's that's the most famous, everybody walks

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Everybody's seen an image of this.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, everybody walks up to it and takes a photo with it.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Look at this, and the precision of this.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing. There you go. And you can get, there's, so yeah, it's that huge stone that's there on the left. So what's interesting about this stone, so this is the twelve angled or twelve sided stone or something like that. So what's interesting is this stone has all of the hallmarks that people are so fascinated with this kind of architecture. One, at the bottom left, you've got these nubs that sit on a lot of these stones.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  Oh, I've seen this, yeah, yeah. What is the purpose of the nub?

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Uh, my guess is, um, my guess is pivoting. So you have this, so you've got this big ass stone and if you can

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Oh, this is so cool.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  If you can put the whole weight of the stone on one little point.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  On one tiny little thing, yeah.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  You can twist it around and move it and drag it.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Have you ever seen that guy, I forget where he is, but he is, he was doing these experiments on how to move the megalithic.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Wally Wellington?

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Is that his name?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  And he found if you put a pebble underneath them on flat enough earth, that you could completely rotate them three hundred and sixty degrees. So you don't need to lift the entire thing, you need to lift them enough where there's a a leverage point, I don't know what you would call it, and

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just call it a pivot point.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  A pivot point, yeah, yeah, so that's really great. So they use that as a pivot point so that they could rotate them. Oh, yeah, this is the guy.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, Wally Wallington. So you know, so a lot of people, um, a lot of people will look at this and they'll go, yeah, Wally Wallington's work is genius, but it doesn't fully explain how, let's say, the pyramids were built.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  He's, he can't really explain, at least on his own, in his lifetime of, of doing this. He's not able to explain, you know, you can move these stones on a flat plane, but how do you get them up?

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  But here's the difference. In ancient times, it wasn't just Wally Wallington. It was an entire industry of these people trying to figure these things out over the course of hundreds of years.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  So if you had 50 Wally Wallingtons for 500 years, you would build the pyramids.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  This is the, what Benioe was saying, my buddy, about it. It's just like, yeah, when you have, the smartest people have one singular focus. Like, right now, the smartest people are probably running fucking hedge funds, developing AI, you know, bombing everywhere. And, uh, and instead, they're just worrying about how do we get this heavy shit over here?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, and then the other thing that's interesting here is, do you see some of the places where the stone has chipped off?

• 36:30Speaker 00

  No. Like that little section right there?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, where, where it's almost like, it's almost like a part of it was scraped away, or it was brittle and it broke off. You can, you can tell. So, what's really interesting is that this is gray andecite. Gray andecite doesn't just chip off. It's not like chert or something like that. It doesn't just chip away. So, one of the things that my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart, thinks, and there are other people who think this maybe because, because of him,

• 36:58Speaker 01

  so, south of Peru, in Chile, in the Atacama Desert, there are these Inca and the empire of those before the Inca called the Wari. They were creating these roads that like go off into the desert and then they just like fade off into the desert. And, and they end there. They're not, the roads don't pick up again further south. So,

• 37:20Speaker 00

  This is the desert that leads into the ocean?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if the Atacama Desert leads into the ocean. It's in Chile, right? But it's definitely near the ocean. Yeah, the Atacama Desert might be, might be, might be northern Chile a little bit. I've never actually been there. Yeah, okay. But, um, but the, the roads that lead into the desert and they don't pick up again further south, they just stop in the desert. So they were doing something out there. Well, one of the things that's out there are these acid deposits, these natural acid deposits. And the, uh, the Peruvians had, um, they had ceramics that you could hold the acid inside of, like, the, like, the ceramic would not, uh, would not be eaten away by the acid. So you could essentially, um, harvest it. This is just a theory. And, uh, at, like, at the site of, uh, the site of Tiwanaku, which is in Bolivia, which

• 38:08Speaker 01

  is the place, was the, this primordial place that existed long before the Inca Empire that the Inca were clearly inspired by. There are stories there that the acid from like birds' mouths and the, and acid was used to melt the stone and, or soften. Or shape it, yeah. Soften the stone, yeah. And so a lot of people will get this confused with, uh, like geopolymer where you're like mixing concrete, but that's not what's happening here. What I think it is, is that they are, you know, they've got some metal tools. I forget if it's copper, if it's bronze chisels, um, they've got some metal tools, but they're not that efficient. But you can smash apart the stones, right? You can get a rough shape. But if you want to get the exact shape. That precision, you need to soften it. You soften the stones.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  And, and one of the other things that you can do is you can get this rough shape and you can put, if you soften the top of one stone and the bottom of another. They'll start to blend into one another. You just, you just place one stone on top of the other and it'll become, it'll flatten itself and become perfectly flat. And how you do the, the mechanics of that, I, I couldn't really begin to approach, but... How, uh, how old is this? Well, nobody really knows. I mean, you know, we... Estimate. Yeah, um... We're talking about thousands of years? Well, what's, what's cool is they're actually about to do a core sample beneath, um, the site of Soto Oman in Cusco, and we're gonna know for sure without a doubt. Yeah, this is something that's been highly debated forever. You know, a lot of people say, well, this has to be anti-Diluvian, 12,000 years old. 12,000 years old.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  People say that. Um, my guess is, my guess is...

• 39:44Speaker 01

  At most, a couple thousand.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Okay, so, and this-

• 39:47Speaker 02

  You were telling, there's like a story, like lore amongst the people from anthologies written hundreds of years ago, where if you ask them where the stones came from, they'd be like, "The stones were always here."

• 39:57Speaker 01

  That's true too. So, so there's evidence of habitation at Cusco going back to, um, which, Cusco is, is the seat of the Inca world.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  I got you, I got you, I got you, I got you.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  There you go. So, so Cusco is the seat of the, of the Inca world, it sits at like 12,500 feet. Um, incredibly like protected, isolated, natural environment. Um, and so what, it's a great place to live, the ground's very fertile, there's rolling hills, it's just, it's a nice, very nice place, the weather's great. Um, and so there's evidence of people living there, it's either 2,000 or 4,000 B.C. Was some of the earliest evidence that they found of little like campsites and stuff of, of people living out there. Now, there's this period before the Inca Empire called the Kingdom of Cusco. And, um, we don't really know exactly when it begins, we know that I think they expanded to an empire around 800 A.D. According to their oral history that they told the Spaniards, right?

• 40:52Speaker 01

  But the Spaniards, when they're walking around, gosh, why, I always forget the name of this, uh, temple, but there's a, um, I'm looking at the photo of it right now, actually, um-

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Which one, which evidence?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  It's the one with the, with the, the girl standing in front of the corner of the building.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  A 12-angle?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, for some reason I am forgetting the name of this building. But it's this building right here that the Spaniards are walking around in the 1500s, talking to the, to the Inca. And they're asking him, "How did you guys build these walls?" And, uh, gosh, I can't believe I can't think of the name of this temple. Um, what does it say? Palace of Inca Roca. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, um, so they're walking around this palace and the Spaniards ask them, "How did you guys build these stones? Like, what did, what did you do?" And they were told by the Inca, "Well, this place was built by the gods, this was, this was here."

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Which would imply that the Inca stumbled upon it, maybe tried to continue building it.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  I'm not sure if it's the Inca, but isn't there some evidence of-

• 41:58Speaker 02

  A lesser masonry done on top of certain structures that existed.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Well, and that's, that's kind of a.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Maybe you can formulate my sentence a little better.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, so one of the things that you see a lot is that you'll see this lower level that's really sophisticated architecture.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  The megalithic.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  The megalithic stones, and then on top of it, you'll have this, uh, what people will call like Inca construction, which is just rubble, you know, like.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Packed together.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Rubble packed together, sometimes with, uh, sometimes with like cement or, or, um, mortar between the stones to get the stones to like stick together. Um, that's not always the case. It's kind of like, uh, that's a, it's a tough argument for people to make because, um, if you go to Machu Picchu and you, if you look at the, the architecture of Machu Picchu and you think like, well, you know, maybe the, the Inca came and found this and they built on top of it, whatever, whatever. When you go around that entire city, there's only, there's actually only two buildings there that are made out of the megalithic stone. The rest of it is in that, is in that mortar. Um, and so it's like, it's like, okay, well, did, did this pre-civilization come out here and just

• 43:11Speaker 01

  build these two buildings way, way, way out here up on top of this mountain? Maybe they did. Well then, you know, we have to come up with a theory of, well, why did they, you know, what is the actual purpose of that? Of course, there's, there's never actually a theory that's proposed. It's just, with some of this stuff, it kind of sits in mystery. Nobody, people like to talk about the mystery, but don't actually want to come up with a reason to like expand on it, right?

• 43:31Speaker 02

  The mystery is really fun.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And yeah, the mystery is fun and it sells, right?

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Trying to, trying to explain the mystery doesn't always sell.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Um, which is sort of a big thing in my space.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  What's up people? World's fastest ad reads, all right? I'm going to New York City Sesh Comedy Club, April 3rd. That is gonna be my show. It's gonna be me, a bunch of other comedians, magicians, musicians, who knows? It's gonna be awesome and I'll see you guys there. And then I'm gonna be hitting the road throughout the year, specifically at the end of the year. Plano, Texas, Chandler, Arizona, Pasadena, California, San Diego and Detroit. I can't wait to see you guys there. Come out, shake my hand, take a pic and come enjoy some stand-up comedy.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  There's tons of stuff that I will say about the ancient world. I'll say, oh, you know, I don't think it's that way. I still think it's amazing. Like here, here's.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, give me, give, give.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Here's a big thing. Um, the evidence.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  I love this stuff, Luke.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  The evidence.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  I love it all. I love it all. I love it all. Keep going. This is great.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  As disappointing as it is to most of the history, ancient history space, the evidence is overwhelming that the dynastic Egyptians themselves built pyramids.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  The dynastic Egyptians themselves?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  So these are the people that existed in Egypt at the time?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's, let's, the dynastic Egyptians would be 3100 B.C. to the death of Cleopatra and 30 B.C. That's the dynastic period.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  And you would, you would posit that the dynastic Egyptians also built the pyramids down into Sudan?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  No, so that's, that's the, those are the Nubians, the Kushites.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  So the Nubians and Kushites had their own, there's no like exchange of information, technology?

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Huge exchange.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  They were influencing one another?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  So the Nubians were getting beat up so much by the Egyptians for thousands of years. The, there's no gold in Egypt. All of the, all of the gold comes from the Kushite mines, like, like down in the Nubian world. So, so all the pharaohs would ride down there in these like yearly, annual raids. They'd take all the gold. Of course, they would do this in the Levant too, like out Mesopotamia. And then they would do these raids where they gather up all the gold and loot and bring it back to Egypt. So I think it's like, maybe in the 900s or 800s B.C., maybe the 700s B.C., the Nubians, while Egypt is like falling apart, the Nubians, who are so familiar with Egyptian culture, which are basically, they've been colonized by it for thousands of years,

• 45:52Speaker 01

  they actually march forward, take over Egypt, and then for five generations, you have Nubian black pharaohs.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Really?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Ruling over Egypt. And they're more Egyptian than the Egyptians had been for hundreds of years.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Crazy. Why are they more Egyptian?

• 46:06Speaker 01

  They just go back to the old ways.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  They make Egypt great again.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they made Egypt great again, yeah. Yeah, so.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  What a story.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  And then eventually they're, they're overthrown again. But anyway.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Why is there, why is there not a lot of conversation about the pyramids in Sudan? Aren't there more pyramids in Sudan than there are in Egypt?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that might be right. I think in Sudan, there should be around 200 or more pyramids. And then, and then in Egypt, you're looking at like 127 to 140. But some of them were completely quarried. So they had this foundation of a pyramid, but they don't actually know if that was like a pyramid.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  So it's also probably British archaeology plus Indiana Jones.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  And then the biggest ones are in Egypt, so naturally they're gonna get the credit for it.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  And when you say completely quarried, meaning there was a pyramid structure that was there and then those stones were removed to build whatever.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  But it's interesting, it's kinda like lost in history. You never hear much conversation about it.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  And whenever I talk to somebody Sudanese and I bring up the pyramids, yeah, why don't we hear about the pyramids? There's always this reaction, it's like, "Thank you, can you talk about this, please, it'd be really nice."

• 47:08Speaker 01

  I think a big thing is, is how, how stable Sudan is. Like, I was down, I was down in-

• 47:13Speaker 00

  So you can't evoke your history, you can't evoke your past if you don't have enough stability to maintain.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't go see it.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Oh, that's also true.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And you know, they really should do, um, they really should do something because it's not, it shouldn't be that hard. Like, if you're in, if you're down in South Egypt, I was down in Abu Simbel, and, uh, which is the place where you, you have the four giant statues of, of Pharaoh Ramses carved into the mountains.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Unbelievable.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Did you go see that?

• 47:37Speaker 00

  No, I, I didn't make it down to, uh, what is that area called, uh, where you see the majority of the pyramids in Egypt?

• 47:44Speaker 02

  What, the King's, Valley of the Kings?

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, Valley of the Kings, which is in-

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Luxor.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Luxor. I didn't make it down to Luxor.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  But-

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Really?

• 47:51Speaker 00

  No, I, I, I was there for three days or four days or something like that.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Have you ever been to Egypt?

• 47:57Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  My mom went.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Which do in Egypt, true.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Dude, that would be it. I, yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Luxor is the place.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  No, I, I, I believe it, but like, yeah, what I would love to see is Alexandria too. But that's just for like, you know, ancient European remnants and like, cool, wait, why'd your eyes light up on that one?

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Face lit up.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Alexandria, that's my expertise in ancient Egypt.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Really?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I know more about Alexandria than I do all this stuff.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Oh, Luke, we're just getting cooking.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  I love this stuff, okay.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  But, uh, okay, just wrapping up the thing about the pyramids.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the evidence is so overwhelming of when the pyramids were built, and we don't, I know, you talked about pyramids a lot on this, that, that even Graham Hancock has come around and said that he knows it's a product of, of the reign of Khufu in the Old Kingdom.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  Right, okay.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  So, I mean, people can go look into that, and that, and it's disappointing, but it does not, it does nothing, not at all. It does not minimize the insane achievement of the pyramids.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  How they were constructed, still nobody knows.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  It's way easier to date something than it is to figure out-

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Explain it.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  -how it was created, why it was created, and what it was used for, and those are the real juicy bits there.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  I mean, it's a testament to the achievement that people are going- It must have been something that happened in previous generations, or like a period of time in history, 12,000, 20,000 years ago, because there's no way people, what would that be, 5,000 years ago, 4,000 years?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, 4,500.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  4,000 years could have done this. Yeah, why'd your eyes light up at Alexandria? Why do you marvel at Alexandria?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  It's the height of the ancient world. There is no, if you're a time traveler...

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Explain Alexandria in Egypt to the people.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so...

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Listening, watching.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  So, ancient, ancient Egyptians, let's say during the time of the pyramids, they are isolationists. The reason that Egypt becomes so powerful is because it's not connected to the rest of the ancient world. You have to cross these vast deserts to get there, or you have to go through the swampy Nile Delta to be able to penetrate into ancient Egypt. And so, and then the Nile itself is naturally inundated. So, it brings this fertile topsoil like every year when it inundates, and it creates the... I think it was Herodotus that had a great saying that he was saying, he said...

• 50:10Speaker 00

  When the Nile something?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, he said something like, like, like Egypt is a gift of the Nile. It's something like that, where essentially the Nile River itself created ancient Egypt. All of the monumental structures that you see and all the wealth that they had was because the river just gave all that.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Unbelievable, like every time it would overflow, or whatever that's called with a river, like the fertility of the grounds was just something, you could grow anything there. So, they're plentiful with food, it was very hard to attack.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  So, you basically have this like ideal situation for passivity and thought. You can't really sit around and think if you're being attacked every five minutes from all different angles, right? Which is I'm sure like what also probably helped the Incas. It's like if we're gonna create this thing at the top of this mountain, nobody's really gonna come attack us up here.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  That earliest city in Central America, El Mirador, in the middle of the jungle and nowhere. So, that's why these civilizations start, because they're isolated.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Also, if you wanna know like how difficult it is to really pass through the jungle without doing it in a... You know, trip to the Amazon, go to Costa Rica and just drive from one town to the next.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  And you will, and we're talking about 2026 Costa Rica, the dense, I don't even think they have an army. Cause they're just like, who's invading?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  One road, it's so dense.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  And like, the jungle almost overtakes the, it almost goes from, there's barely beach, is what I'm trying to say. Like, you could see the trees almost like creeping out towards the water.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  Like, that's how powerful and potent the jungle is when it's just, uh, not like held back. There's that, there's those cool like Elizabethan mansions that were constructed, I believe it was like in the Congo, during Belgian rule, was it in the Congo?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  I don't know. And like, they made these like, these beautiful mansions during this like horrible colonial time. And the, the jungle has just consumed them.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Really?

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Like, trees growing through them.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  And it's just relentless if you don't keep it back.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  So like, that is protection in of itself, and you see why people went into the jungles.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Can I ask you about Alexandria?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  I was talking to a historian that says he doesn't think that the Library of Alexandria, which held so much of the ancient world.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Here we go, here we go, Luke.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  So much of the ancient world. He was saying that perhaps it never burned down. And that it actually just eroded from the elements, intellectual decay, invasion, you know.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  He's saying that it never burned down? Like, he really said that?

• 52:43Speaker 02

  That there's a part of it that burned down, but perhaps the burning was more of a metaphorical burning.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, see, that's kind of the thing is, is, you know, you, you could talk to an Egyptologist who specializes in the 18th Dynasty, like, as a lot of them do. That's, that's like the golden age of, of ancient Egypt, where you have all your iconic pharaohs that you know the names of, other than Ramses, he's 19th Dynasty. But, um,

• 53:05Speaker 01

  And he may be like speaking off the cuff about Alexandria and just kind of posing an idea that's popular among scholars. But it's surprising that any scholars say that it didn't burn down, because it's in the primary sources that it burned down like three or four times. Hmm. So. Who burned it down? Well, it starts with, so we're getting to some Roman stuff here. And when it comes to the Mediterranean world, Egypt and Greece is my thing. When you get into the Roman world, it's a whole other realm. But I believe that it first starts with Julius Caesar is chasing his rival Pompey across the Mediterranean into, Pompey is fleeing from Rome to Alexandria.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  And Pompey, you know, in Rome, basically, the armies were made up by like really rich guys who would take up like a portion of the Roman Empire, right? So you have like these unofficial mini emperors, like nomarchs that sort of run shit. And so these two rivals, as they do, chasing each other, they're at war with each other. Julius Caesar's chasing Pompey down into the Mediterranean. And I believe that when Pompey is trying to flee the city of Alexandria, his military boats were brought up to the port that was connected to the library. And so Caesar ordered for the docks to be burned, to burn the boat, so that Pompey's guys couldn't flee.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  And that, so essentially, when you landed in Alexandria, your boat would be boarded by city officials, Ptolemaic soldiers, or sometimes, at certain points, they were Roman soldiers, because the, this was like the beginning of the fall of ancient Egypt. But eventually, Ptolemaic rule, which is the Greek dynasty that's ruling over Egypt, after Alexander conquers, Alexander dies, his best friend Ptolemy becomes Pharaoh of Egypt, and then his line, all the way down to Cleopatra, for the next 300 years, rules over Egypt from the city of Alexandria. So the Ptolemaic power starts dwindling, so they reach out to Rome and start hiring essentially like Roman military backing.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  And that's kind of the foot into the door for the Romans to start conquering Egypt from the inside. That's the beginning of the end for Egypt. But essentially, your boat would be boarded by city officials, and they would essentially scour your boat, or just ask you, be like, okay, what writing do you have with you? What documents did you bring? They'd look over your documents, if it was something valuable that they didn't have. They would bring that into the library, they would copy it down, they would give you the copy.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  And they would keep the original, wow!

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and um...

• 55:42Speaker 00

  So you have the original source material of everybody that passes through that city?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  And so this is, this is something that, uh, I'd love to see Wes Huff talk about this, but there's uh, something that's here that's called, I've heard it informally referred to as the Library Wars, but you had like, the Library of Alexandria, the Library of Babylon, the Library of Pergamum, I believe, uh, up on the Turkish coast, I believe that's where that city is, and so you had all these uh, cities, essentially warring against, yeah, exactly, warring against each other, um, trying to get original source material and the oldest, the oldest documents, and so in the city of Alexandria, you had so much knowledge of the ancient world, all in one place, I mean, there, uh, when I was, uh, when I was chatting with, uh, when I was on Joe's show,

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  We were going through something that was written by, I believe it was written by one of the Ptolemies, it was a second-century B.C. document, that was being referenced by like a first-century A.D. document, but we found out on the show, I start, I like called out the date, I was like, "Look at that!", so we looked into it, and essentially we, on the show, even though this is probably known by some scholars, um, but we found another document that was being referenced that doesn't exist anymore, that was definitely destroyed or existed in Alexandria.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  A proof of destruction.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so, and there's all kinds of stories like that, like the, the best, the greatest biography that was written about Alexand, that was written about Alexander the Great, um, from his most trusted advisor, Ptolemy himself, who becomes the first Ptolemaic Pharaoh of Egypt. He wrote this whole biography of his own life and from, and an account of Alexander's life, and that did not survive, the, it did not survive the period of Alexandria, but it's referenced by other, by other authors later on. Uh, so we know that it used to exist, and there's all kinds of...

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Why this obsession with Alexandria? Why was Alexander obsessed? Why did he want to, you know, bring his dynasty? And why was it so important to him that this existed there? What is special about this place?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Well, so for Alexander, I don't actually know if Alexandria itself in Egypt was as important to him as it would be to later people. Because there's a joke that if you're in, if you study classics, which is the Greco-Roman Egyptian world, there's a joke where they'll say, "Name 10 classical cities," and you can say Alexandria. Because there's 10 Alexandrians.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  So anywhere he goes.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  And so anywhere he goes, he builds a lot of Alexandrians. But the one that stuck was Egypt. And so Alexander, there's this great story of when he comes, when he, when he's conquering the Persian realm. Okay, so he's 23 years old or 25 years old. He leaves Macedonia right here, Persia's beating up on the Greeks for, let me see, he's, you know, I guess the, around like 325 B.C. or 323 B.C. he sets out, it's somewhere around there. Or maybe, no, it's earlier than that, 331 is when he arrives in Egypt, or something like that. Anyway, so this crazy 23-year-old, 25-year-old kid takes on the Persian Empire, marches through in these three very important battles, pushes the Persians back.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Eventually, he wants to march to Babylon, but he shouldn't do that until he turns west and goes and captures Egypt. Because Egypt is known as the breadbasket of the Mediterranean. Because all the grain and the food to feed, at many points, to feed most of the eastern Mediterranean came out of Egypt.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  So if you secure the food and the grain, then you can actually, this military campaign.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Then you can turn around and go, and go stomp Babylon. And so, so he goes and captures, he goes and captures Egypt. And he eventually goes to Memphis. He must have seen the pyramids, although maybe that was in Ptolemy's account. What Alexander, walking around the pyramids and looking at them. Maybe that was in Ptolemy's account. But eventually, Alexander wants to go to the northern port because...

• 59:42Speaker 01

  The book that exists in the back of the Greek mind, all Greeks, their sacred biblical texts essentially is Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey, the story of Troy, right? And so in that book, in the Odyssey, which maybe we'll even see a scene of this in this new movie, when Odysseus is essentially being like kicked around the eastern Mediterranean, he lands on an island or a little port town on the northern coast of Egypt. And I think as the story goes, I forget exactly how it goes in the Odyssey, but he asks the people, you know, where am I? And they say, you're on Pharos. And so maybe that means you're in, maybe that means this is Pharaoh's land, maybe that means this is the Pharaoh's island. But it's called Pharos.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  So Alexander, being this huge fan of that great story, and just a kid, he's 23 or 25, and he's like, he's like, I'm gonna go find Pharos. So he goes, so he goes to northern, to northern Egypt. Now, the Egyptians, they don't like the water. There are not really that many Egyptian cities that are on this northern coast of the Mediterranean. They like to be pushed further back. This is another thing about, we think of the Egyptians as like riding these camels through the desert or whatever. The Egyptians did not want anything to do with hanging around in the Mediterranean or being in the desert. This isn't even ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt is just the river and like a mile on each side of the river where it's, where it's green and tropical.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  That's where the Egyptians lived. They didn't like the desert because that's where the roaming barbarians hung out. And you know, if you, if you wandered out in the desert, you were gonna get killed. So you needed to live literally on the Nile, on the Nile. That was your whole world.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  And this is most civilizations.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  This is, yes.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  There are very few civilizations choose to develop in like, You're gonna be near your life source. Exactly.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  And so, but,

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  But it is, the perception is kind of odd. This is like, They had rigid borders and a control agency.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  But Alexander, he comes from a civilization of sea people. Cause ancient Greeks, we look at Greece as this little peninsula that sticks out here. But yes, it's actually the coastlines and the isles. So ancient Greeks is is not this, it's this. It's all these little islands right here and like some of the coastal areas. And so that was the Greek world and so so Greeks really like water and they like defensive positions with water.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  So when he's in northern Egypt, he sees, I think it's, I think it's the the lake of Marius or something like that. But there's this little band that basically connects to the Mediterranean and then it's fortified by a lake behind it. So it's this little band of of land and he looks at it and he's like, this is where a city needs to be because you can.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Now have a natural border.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so he hops off of his horse and he's looking for like chalk or something, but he doesn't have any chalk to lay it to make a city layout. So he goes and grabs some grain out of a saddlebag. Throws the grain in the dirt and then Alexander himself by his own hand laid out the initial like core city plan. And he had an architect, I forget the architect's name, but he had an architect like jump down with him and they lay it out so that so that the breeze will like sweep through the city and he says, I want the roads to be a hundred feet wide or you know, something equivalent to that. He wants this to be a grand city. So he lays it all out and then as soon as he, as soon as he lays it all out, this flock of seabirds like swoop down and they eat all the, they devour all the grain in front of him.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  And and you know, ancient people are very.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Superstitious.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Superstitious. And so he thought that that was a bad omen. He was like, maybe I shouldn't, maybe I shouldn't build the city here or whatever. And one of his guys like reassured, no, no, no, this means that this city is going to feed many nations. It's going to feed many people. So so Alexander gets back on his horse, leaves his architect and a group of people behind. They start construction on the city.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Isn't history fun when you can make it up after?

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  I mean, what a story, right?

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  And yeah, exactly. So. So Alexander, he has to leave. He's got to go to a place in in the western desert called Siwa where he's going to be essentially like proclaim the son of Amen Ra. And he's going to be proclaimed pharaoh. He never goes back to Alexandria. He, you know, he he goes and conquers Babylon, then he tries to push into India and he eventually dies in Babylon at like thirty two or thirty three. But Alexandria lives on without him. Ptolemy, his best friend, they divide up Alexander's massive empire. Like, think about this, dude.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  Do they bring his body back to Alexandria?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Ptolemy went and stole it. So I think that his body was gonna go back to Macedonia. So they were gonna take his body from wherever Babylon is, if it's in Iraq or Iran.

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Iraq.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  So they're gonna take his body back. They gotta go up through Anatolia, modern day Turkey. And so Ptolemy sends out an expedition and they go and capture his body and then they bring his body back.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  And what is the significance of that? People would pay homage to the body?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, you're able to, so think about, think about this from Ptolemy's standpoint. All of a sudden, this dude who's best friends with this king, think about, think about this for a second.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  Like a political move, you're saying?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Kinda, yeah, yeah. So, and, and just like, from a life perspective, like imagine this guy's life, okay? You grow up, you're lucky enough to be this, to be best friends with the son of this minor Greek kingdom. You know, and, and, but you're kind of an outsider in ancient Greeks. Like the Macedonians are in, are there, are in northern Greece. And they're kind of discriminated against by the Athenians and the Spartans.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  They're getting bullied their whole life.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they're getting bullied by them.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  Nothing's changed.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  So you're this.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Shout out to Macedonians, man.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  So not only, not only do you live in this like sort of Greek kingdom. And you're kind of discriminated against by the rest of the Greek world. But you're, you're not like a peasant, but I mean, you're, you're just friends with this like minor prince, right? And then so the prince's father is killed and then he's elevated to, he's elevated to king. And the prince's father conquered a lot of Greece, like got them on the side of the Macedonians, like changed a lot politically.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Philip the Second.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  But then, Philip the Second. And then you see your, and then you see your, your like, you know, you see your 20 something year old friend be like, "I'm gonna go to war against Persians, we're gonna go to war against them." And so you're right there with this dude the whole time. And you watch this guy take over the, the biggest empire that the world has ever seen. And you're right there with your buddy the entire time. You go see him become crowned pharaoh in, out in the western deserts of Egypt.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  This is what Steve Witkoff is hoping for right now.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  And Ptolemy, his main fascination along with Alexander, something they bonded over, was their fascination of ancient Egypt. Because Egypt was, by 300 B.C., Egypt has fallen off. Like, the pyramids are more than 2,000 years old. I mean, it's just, it's this deep, deep, deep, deep primordial time that nobody remembers or really understands anymore. So you're fascinated by it. And then you march out here, and you conquer Babylon, and you move into Turkey, blah, blah, blah. But then he dies. All of a sudden, you've gone from this, like, minor noble in this obscure little kingdom up here.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  To the king of the world?

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Now, Alexander has left you in charge of Egypt, and all of a sudden, you have to be the pharaoh of Egypt itself.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  Kind of crazy.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  So Ptolemy, but Ptolemy, the officials that live in Egypt and the civilians there, they know that Ptolemy isn't the great chosen warlord that Alexander was, right?

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  You need the body.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  That's why you need the body.

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a lot of political moves that you've got to pull here. Now, this is the thing that makes Alexandria so amazing. Ptolemy and his son and his grandson, those are known as the Great Ptolemies. All the ones after that, it becomes Game of Thrones. Like, it's a vicious, really, a show should be, like, be made about it. But, um, so the first three Ptolemies, they have to convince the Egyptians that they are worthy of being pharaoh, right?

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  They're outsiders that have been placed here by this, you know, masterful, like, engineer of war and conquering, but he's no longer alive. And that was your connectivity to power, so that power is gone. Why should we trust you?

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Not to mention, wasn't the entire Greek world very, sort of, hierarchical? And it was all succession based off of, like, dynasty? And from what I understand, like, Ptolemy was seen as, like...

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  What do you mean by that, Mark?

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Like, it was just like, your dad was the king, so now you're the king, then your son will be king.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  And it's just all passed through bloodline. And Ptolemy was one of the first people that was very meritocratic, where, like, Alexander loved him and was like, "You're a beast, and even though you come from, like, a fine, sort of, military family, I'm going to elevate you to this high political status purely based off your merit," which was never done. I mean, is that roughly the story?

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Um, Greece is very diverse, like, as far as, as far as the way that their politics go. You know, in Athens, the idea of people governing themselves was born in, um...

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  I don't know, it was when they got the tyrants out. I think it was in the 600s B.C. or the 500s B.C. So they had like, they had kings and then they had tyrants, which is like a political king, but not like a, you know, not the same thing. And then, and then they formed the Athenian democracy. And then some other places follow suit with this idea of democracy and people ruling over themselves. But the Macedonians held on to this traditional sort of medieval, um, you know, I guess this is, this is pre-medieval, right? Mm-hmm. But, um, you know, they, they sort of held on to this royal bloodline succession, succession. And then Sparta had kings, even though it's different, they would have like two kings. So the Greek world is like super divided. This is why there was never really much of a Greek empire. Because the Greeks could never like fully come together.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, my understanding from even talking to people, I was, now, listen, I'm talking to people when I'm in Turkey.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  So obviously they're gonna be biased. There's, you know, some historical beef. But what the guide that I had was telling me is that like Greek was the dominant, was just a dominant culture. Like wherever it existed, that became the language and people wanted to embody it for whatever reason. So our idea of a Greek empire isn't like there are all these interconnected states that were maybe as, as, uh, interwoven as like Rome was.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  But kind of like different nation-states that all spoke a language and shared a culture.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Like cultures permeating across.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  Yes, like culture was the valuable thing. So even if you were living in Turkey at the time, you still, even, my understanding was, and I could be completely wrong to this, but like even when Constantinople falls and Istanbul is there, they're still speaking Greek.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Oh, maybe they are. That's, that's, that's, that's a.

• 1:10:21Speaker 00

  That's much later. This is, what is it? Fif- fifteen? No, no, the fall. When is, when is the Ottoman Empire take over? 1500? I can't say. I don't know.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  I don't know either.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  But we diverted you.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, go, go, go.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  And this guy went from like a lowly dude to now being Pharaoh.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  So he's got, so he's got to come up with these public projects to, well, one, you want the regular people to be happy with you. If you're a ruler and all the citizens hate you.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  And you're an outsider.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna get, you're gonna have a revolution. There's gonna be a revolt of some. Kind and you don't want to do that. It's not like you can, you can't really just rule people with an iron fist forever. They will rise up and cut your head off. Um, so Ptolemy and Ptolemy was, was, was actually inspired by Alexander. He actually wanted to be a good ruler. Um, so, so he had this, you know, this genuine, um, he had this like a genuine nature about him as a ruler. Now certainly still a ruler, did bad things, whatever. All the ancient rulers did, but, um, so he has to create these public projects in Alexandria, which is now the new capital. The capital has moved from, you know, the religious capital was Luxor.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  The economic capital was Cairo or Memphis. Well, he's moved all of it now to Alexandria. All of it is out there. There's still a lot of stuff going on down in the south. Ptolemies are still building temples down there, but mainly the heart of, of Egypt is at Alexandria and Alexandria is really, really advantageous place. Because when Alexander took over so much of, of this world, he can, a lot of those ports became connected to Alexandria and Alexandria became the center of trading across the Mediterranean and out into the Indian Ocean. So they're filthy, filthy rich. So essentially, um, the Ptolemies take all this money and they, uh, start these two primary projects. One, the lighthouse of Alexandria, if you guys are familiar with this.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  The second one, the library of Alexandria is gonna be the center of knowledge of, of all of the ancient world. Um, and there were other projects, uh, that they started, but those are, those are the two primary ones. I feel like there's, there's one right now that I'm just blanking out on. Now, what's really interesting here is Ptolemy

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  gathers his architects, like the probably, probably native Egyptian architects. And we have a lot of evidence that scholars in the library of Alexandria were going and studying the pyramids and studying the obelisk. They were studying ancient Egypt during ancient Egypt, right? And so the Greek Alexandrian scholars are very fascinated by these marvels that are just sitting quietly out in the deserts for thousands of years, right? Like they, they want to go study the geometry and how they're created and things like that. Um, you know, the, the idea that the earth is, uh, the earth is a sphere was discovered in, in Alexandria by Eretostenes, uh, I believe. Um, and so, um, what's really interesting is for the first time,

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Perhaps since the pyramids were built,

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  I can't think of other examples. For the first time since the pyramids were built, megalithic architecture using red Aswan granite, down from Aswan, same granite that's used in the Valley Temple next to the Sphinx, the same granite that's used in the King's Chamber, is employed again in architecture on the same scale. So, the ancient sources tell us, and the Library of Alexandria, or I'm sorry, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, was built so well that it fell the year before Columbus arrived in the Americas. I'm pretty sure, it's very, very, very close.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  So how long is that?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  It must have stood for 1,600 years or so, or 1,700 years, or something like that. But there were travelers throughout antiquity, like, let's say, the late ancient times, medieval, Dark Ages, they're traveling to Egypt and seeing it, and they see it slowly decay, but they describe the materials that were used to build it, and they say that there were 65-ton red granite stones that were used to build the lighthouse. And we have some dimensions of it. And the blocks are just sitting in the water today, if you go to Alexandria. Like, another friend who's a historian, who's a Roman historian, he and I went and looked, and there's these massive stones sitting out there. And they say that the library was made out,

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  it was this huge stone building made out of like, you know, the greatest marble and granite that could be quarried, or that could be, you know, gathered. And the lighthouse itself was within just a few feet of being the same height of the Great Pyramid. So it's the Ptolemies showing the people of Egypt were going back.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. And that's how you get the people hyped.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  It's like, this is gonna be the heyday, and we'll run it right back, and the entire world is gonna come here the same way they came 1,000 years, 2,000 years ago.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  And it was the single greatest city ever built in the ancient world, arguably. Rome at no point would have ever, at no point would have ever had the kind of magnificence that Alexandria had.

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  No, no, I mean Rome had a lot of great public monuments, but if you walk outside of your apartment building, you immediately step in horse shit. You're walking around in the mud. And Rome was extremely dirty, like busy place. It honestly would have been magnificent to like most people.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  But if you were in Alexandria and you went and visited Rome, you'd be like, man, this place is a frickin' dump.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  And what happened to the lighthouse?

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  The lighthouse, I believe that in like 1490 or 1491, it's very, very close to that, to that year, there was an earthquake and the whole thing came down. Well, maybe there were earthquakes over time, but at some point, there was, there was a decision made to quarry and level the entire thing and turn it into, it's now like, it's now like a castle. It's a, it's like a port castle now. I forget exactly.

• 1:16:14Speaker 00

  Can we see the stones in the water?

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you may be able to find, yeah, so that's, so that's what it was turned into today.

• 1:16:21Speaker 00

  Oh, it was built on an island?

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was built on the island of Pharos.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  So, so you're getting all that stone from a quarry somewhere into the water. You're getting it from Aswan, which is like southern Egypt.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's about 700 some miles away.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  Bringing it up the Nile, bringing it across the water, right? Because there's a, what is the distance? A kilometer or something like that?

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Well, you have to bring it, yeah, yeah, you would have to bring it all the way up the Nile, up into the delta, following the rivers, out of the delta.

• 1:16:55Speaker 00

  Into the Mediterranean?

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Into the Mediterranean and kind of sail around the city, pull up to the island and then unload the blocks.

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  And the idea was, the first thing a ship is going to see as they approach the greatest city in modern civilization at the time.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  Is this massive megalithic structure on an island. It's awe inspiring, you're like, how could you do this?

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  It's the world's first lighthouse, right? It's just this beacon that you could see that showed you where this calm water port was. And I believe it was a giant bronze mirror with like a statue of Poseidon in it. And I think it would spin, but it would stay constantly burning. And so, yeah, at night, you would see this torch off in the distance. And so you pull up. Yeah, and then so once you made port, then you would make port on the backside of Alexandria's library. So you'd see this huge public library in front of you, yeah. And then they would come in and they'd take all of your valuable knowledge, right?

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Like, they're probably not taking like petty documents, but they're taking all your important documents and copying them down. And then you would walk into the city. I think you had, it was called Soma Road and Canopic Way. And so when you entered into the city, if you didn't come in from a side gate or whatever, whatever, but if you entered in the primary way that the city was designed, especially for like political figures, like the first time, you know, some king or something is brought in from, say Cyprus, like a Cypriot, say a Cyprus king is brought into Alexandria on a royal visit. He's gonna be given the royal tour. He's gonna go underneath the lighthouse and he's gonna look at this, you know, massive tower that doesn't look like anything else.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  That's the other thing you gotta think. There isn't anything else like that in their world. You know, I mean, there is amazing architecture, but that is something completely different. This massive tower with this burning flame on top of it. Exactly, so he's gonna come in this port, a little bit, let's say up to the, where you see that dock kind of coming down the middle. That might, of course, they draw these in all different types of ways.

• 1:19:04Speaker 00

  The dock that he's on right now?

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  Uh, to the right, far to the right. Uh, up a little bit.

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  Oh, just go to the middle of the image. Center of the image.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that might be the main dock that it. Diagrams of Alexandria are drawn in so many different ways. But um, you would be, you would pull up to that dock, you'd walk down it. You may or may not enter the library, but you might walk around it. And then you would be on Soma Road or Canopic Way. But it's the main two, it's the main two streets that go down the center of the city. Now, on your right side, you would have, let's say theoretically, on your right side, you would have the Library of Alexandria. Right next to that would be a place called the Museon, which was, um, so the library is a library, but the museon is a university. So that's where, um, that's where all of your, um, like all of your scholars would be getting other people who want to study. They get together, they run experiments, they're teaching things.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  And then connected to that would be like lecture hall after lecture hall after lecture hall. There's a place in modern day, if you go, if you go to, if you go to Egypt, you can go to Alexandria and see a portion of the library still there. It's called Komeldeka.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  How do you spell it?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  K O M E L D I K K A. And you can see some of the lecture halls from, these are from later periods, but these would have connected to the overall campus of Alexandria. So you'd walk down, you'd walk down these, uh, these alleyways that are covered up. So you see these little pillars that are standing?

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  There were huge, um, sort of half, or like a, a half circular awnings that would, stone awnings and wood awnings that would sit over that. So, so everywhere you would go would be fully shaded. This was not out in the open, there was a whole roof over this that would allow natural light in. So you can walk around the whole city and, and the, the campus itself kind of spread across a large part of the center, the central city. But in Alexandria itself, you'd see scholars like coming and going and people learning.

• 1:21:04Speaker 00

  Why was there such a priority put on the scholarly activities? Why was education so sought after or rewarded? And did this exist in other parts of, uh, or other major cities during antiquity?

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This, this is just, this is just the culmination of centuries of this beginning. Uh, it really begins with the pre-Socratic fall, uh, philosophers in, um,

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  In ancient Greeks, so like Athens, so pre-socratic means all the scholars before Socrates. Socrates wasn't really a scholar, he was more like a hobo. That was super, you know, really smart and thoughtful guy. But it's this idea of pondering your own existence and pondering reality and thinking about like, how does a man master himself? And what is the purpose of my existence? And what is the reality of nature itself? What is nature? What is my nature? This all started in Athens, pretty much.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  And, and it really explodes during about 450 B.C. There's, there's this classical Athenian period that's, that's, that's framed by two wars. You've got the Persian Wars and then you've got the Peloponnesian Wars. The Persian Wars is actually the first Persian Wars where like Leonidas is standing.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  This is the Spartans.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is at Thermopylae, yeah, the stand of at Thermopylae, that's the Persian Wars.

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  300.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Where the Greeks, yeah, where the Greeks repel the Persians. And then that causes this explosion of Greek identity and thought and imagination and philosophy. There's so much, it's the birth of comedy itself happens right after that. The first stand-up comics in the world are, are in Athens, in the theater of Athens in Greece. And it was, and it was such a separation from the ancient world that existed before that. It was the only time where you had these people who were not ruled over by a king. They're ruled over by politicians who are elected, or maybe they assassinate all their political rivals and they become elected. But they, everyone, you would announce when there would be a show.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  There'd be some, you know, you'd go watch plays like all day long. Some of them would be an actual theatrical play. Some of them would be like a comedy stand-up thing. This was big in Alexandria. They would have, they would have comics like stand up and just rip on the emperor of Rome. Like all day long, and people get together and just say the most heinous jokes about the emperor of Rome. And the word would get back to the emperor and he'd come down and just slaughter like 20,000 people. Yeah, because of, because of, you know, so, so in, but in- Cancel culture, bro. But in- Cancel culture, yeah, we're doing alright. In Athens, you could stand out in the, in the theater and you could wear, you'd like, everybody would wear a mask and a robe. So you wouldn't like quite know who is saying what.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  And, uh, and so you could stand out there and you could make jokes criticizing your own politicians to their face as they're sitting in the crowd. And have the whole crowd erupt and it was like, it was just a, it's just this revolutionary way of thought in the ancient world that happens in Greece. And it spreads through there. So Alexandria is like the most powerful, wealthy culmination of all of that where you have, you know, it, it's, it's gone from just like naturalistic philosophy of what is nature itself to categorizing philosophy to coming up with different genres of study and then they're organized and then, you know, it becomes like similar to a modern day- Yeah.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  -university. And so Alexandria is like, if, if you can have a university on this scale where this many people are literate and this intelligent, the separation between your power and, and even like, uh, the, the intellectual and psychological effect that it has on your contemporary neighbors, like people who are outside of Egypt. The effect that it has on their perception of you is immense, right? Like they see you as an intellectual giant compared to them, you know? So there's an intimidation factor that comes with it? It's, it's everything all in one, right? And, um, and so Alexandria is, is kind of the culmination of all of the great things of the ancient world, all arriving in one place.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  And one, you know, one of the biggest things was that nearly the entire city was built out of stone itself. That was not a thing. Like if you go and you look at the, all the great temples that are in Egypt, if you go and look at all the great temples that are in Egypt, um, according to the ancient sources, like when Herodotus is visiting Egypt, whatever, the, the, the town, the city that exists around it, and all the thousands of people who live in the cities, it's, it's really no more grand than just a poor village. Like all the normal people are building houses leaning up against these solid walls of the temple. Hmm. But in Alexandria, the average quality of life is so much higher and everyone's apartment buildings are all made out of stone. Like it, like there's, there's this famous saying that in Rome-

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  There's no single time in Roman history where a part of the city wasn't burning down because all of the apartment buildings, even during the height, let's say during the period of the five good emperors, which ends with Marcus Aurelius, Gladiator. That's, that's the height of ancient Rome. A lot of people say, and it began with, with, with the Emperor Trajan. A lot of people say that the period of those five emperors is the happiest time in all of humanity. It's when the Roman Empire was the most stable. Okay, even then, the vast majority of the architecture in Rome was made out of wood and the buildings were constantly just burned down and like, it was, it was so common that Augustus, Rome's first emperor, had to create the world's first fire brigade

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  to be watching out for fires to go like put them out. Alexandria didn't have to deal with this because the whole city was made out of stone.

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• 1:29:38Speaker 00

  All right, before we get back with Luke, um, are you watching the, uh, March Madness at all?

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yep. Who do you got? I guessed it last year. Let the record show.

• 1:29:49Speaker 00

  You did not guess shit.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, you didn't. I said who, I said who would win. I said Florida. Yeah, you know it's a sin to lie, right? We can pull up the tapes. If only I said this on a recorded platform. If only I said this way, you guessed it. You did not guess it. Yes. No, you didn't. It was the championship game.

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  Oh, you guessed it at the end.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Who cares? Why does it matter when you guess?

• 1:30:08Speaker 00

  Well, because it's a 50% chance.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, okay. Heaven forbid. I have a little bit of sauce going on my side. You guys don't want to win any money or to succeed in any way.

• 1:30:16Speaker 00

  Get out of here.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  UCF, where's UCF at, Miles? Center of Florida. Go Knights. No, they're not in that shit anymore. Nah, they were.

• 1:30:21Speaker 00

  Kansas. You think Kansas got it? I don't even think Kansas is in it anymore. You know who I think got it, bro?

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  If you just say Arizona, I'm gonna grab that chopstick.

• 1:30:31Speaker 00

  I think, I think Arizona got it, bro. I'm not gonna lie to you.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  What makes you think that? I don't know.

• 1:30:38Speaker 00

  It's more of a gut. Like I just have a gut instinct that's telling me Arizona got it. What do you think?

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  Yep, Kansas.

• 1:30:45Speaker 00

  You think Kansas has got it?

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  Can we scroll down a little more?

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  Back draw?

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  It looks like Cal she's saying Arizona, Michigan, Duke, Houston, Purdue, Illinois.

• 1:30:53Speaker 00

  Ah, okay.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:30:56Speaker 00

  St. John's, isn't that a New York team?

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, St. John's is in there. Well, I mean, you're not going to show them any love at all?

• 1:31:02Speaker 00

  No, I think Arizona got it.

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  No, that's what I meant by Kansas. I meant St. John's. You meant our Kansas.

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  Got it, okay. Kansas lost.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  What does Cal she have? Hold on, what does Cal she have St. John's at?

• 1:31:13Speaker 02

  3%.

• 1:31:13Speaker 00

  All right, let me, I mean, I kind of.

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  This is delusional New Yorkers.

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I gotta rock with St. John's.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  It should be 0%, but you guys are mentally ill enough to be like, no, we got it.

• 1:31:20Speaker 00

  No, I gotta rock with St. John's.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  Where's Florida? Let's go down. It's somewhere in there. I don't even know if you guys got a team in the whole state. Where's Florida? Florida lost Iowa by one point. By a point? Sucker. Where's Iowa at?

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  Sucker. I hit my ball. That ball was. I was less than 1% chance. Nah. I mean, they were the favorites when they played UCF, right? Is that what you meant? Where's UCF at? Mark, Mark don't know shit about basketball, bro. I do. I know stuff. Bam Adebayo, 83 points. You should go for St. John, you Catholic. Is that a Catholic school?

• 1:31:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude.

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  Saint.

• 1:32:00Speaker 00

  Do you know who St. John was?

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:04Speaker 00

  Who?

• 1:32:05Speaker 02

  St. John, he's an apostle. He wrote one of the Gospels.

• 1:32:08Speaker 00

  That's a different one.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  No, the saint of.

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  You don't even know your shit.

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  What? I don't know what I was talking about. Look, St. John's pulling it off. I don't care if Cal she has him at 3%. New York, oh, it's down to 2%.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  You need Luke Havens.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  The second we started talking about it, went down a percent.

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  You need him to go discover the trophies for St. John's. They're lost. Anyway.

• 1:32:35Speaker 00

  You bailed Alex out?

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  I know, thank you.

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  You bailed Alex out?

• 1:32:39Speaker 03

  My guy.

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  No good deed, bro. No good deed.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  My guy.

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  Are we being silly? Yo, are we being silly, Ethan?

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Oh, man, it's just so hard to joke for me.

• 1:32:50Speaker 00

  St. John's got it, okay?

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  Just so hard to think of jokes.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  Ow, ow. St. John's got it. All right, can we get back with Luke, bro? We got more. Yes. All right, let's get back with Luke. So what was the demise of this, like, amazing city?

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  So, um, well, one, it begins with, with, um, Egypt losing their independence to the Roman Empire.

• 1:33:11Speaker 00

  So the Romans come on, come over, and they recognize the greatness of Alexandria, and they're like, "Hey, you need to be, you gotta choose up or it's over for you."

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it kind of, um, the later Ptolemies, like, let's say Ptolemy IV. So you've got Ptolemy I, II, and III. Those are the three great Ptolemies.

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  This is the Game of Thrones.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and so, so Game of Thrones starts to begin, and these Ptolemies do not care about learning the ways of the old gods of Egypt. They only care about being rich Greek kings and princes.

• 1:33:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Extrapolating the resources, or extracting the resources from the local, poor indigenous people, and, you know, it's like, uh, the British in Africa. It's the same sort of thing.

• 1:33:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're just plundering the spoils.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, and so at the very end, Cleopatra is born, and she's the first Ptolemy since the earliest times who is in awe of what this ancient world was that she was born into.

• 1:34:05Speaker 00

  And how is she so aware of it?

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Well, it is probably just an intrinsic curiosity. Uh, we have, there, there is a surviving record of her family going on, like, a family vacation through Egypt when she's just a little girl. And we know that one of the places that she would have been taken to was the Serapeum, where the giant, like, bull box sarcophagi are underground. You may have seen them. They're, like, only one of them could fit in this room. It's crazy.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  They had these Apis bulls that they would worship and they would supposedly bury them in these giant diorite granite boxes, whatever. It's just a marvel. And so, her family would have been taken there, would have been taken to see the pyramids. And she definitely would have heard the indigenous Egyptian language being spoken. And, you know, it's kind of like one of those people who grow up in a disaffected household where they just innately know this isn't the way it has to be and they change all of that.

• 1:34:57Speaker 00

  So her act of rebellion is to lean into the history?

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  And lean into who these people are. And then does she become, even though she's an outsider ethnically, does she become the embodiment of this old time?

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  She does. Yeah, yeah. She's loved by the Egyptian people. And she's pretty vicious. Like, she gets rid of her siblings and everything.

• 1:35:15Speaker 00

  What do you mean, get rid? She kills them all?

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  Um...

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  Give us the Cleopatra. Are you guys familiar with the Cleopatra lore? Like, I know this name.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  I know she's a baddie, she's a seductress.

• 1:35:24Speaker 00

  Alright, give us the whole...

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  But even that's contested.

• 1:35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I'm no Cleopatra expert because usually a Roman historian would be more of a Cleopatra expert because she's such a core figure of the Roman world. She's not really a core figure of the Egyptian world. Not in the same way that like a pure Egyptian pharaoh would have been 1,800 years before she was alive, right? But essentially, she's born into this long lineage, this 300-year-long dynasty of Greek rulers, ruling over the Egyptian people from Alexandria. So Alexandria has really greatly expanded. It's extremely wealthy. What's the makeup? Is it mainly Greeks or it's mainly Egyptians?

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  That's a great question. What does it look like at the time?

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  The city of Alexandria was broken up into ethnic neighborhoods. So you had Greek people, you had Egyptians.

• 1:36:21Speaker 02

  Spanish Harlem.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  You had a Jewish neighborhood.

• 1:36:25Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And...

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  And you may have had a neighborhood for,

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  you may have had a neighborhood for, for like Sub-Saharan Africans, but like a small one. I forget exactly, but I know that those are the big three, Greek, Egyptian, and like Semitic people are living there.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  And so Cleopatra is born at the very end of this dynasty, although nobody knows this at the time that this will be the end. But through hooker by crook, she essentially rises her way to power. She, there she ride, she's in this situation where she has to like, she can't actually be Pharaoh herself. She's got to politically, like dynastically marry her 13-year-old brother. You know, and it's probably just like, they're probably not actually having sex, whatever, but you know, he's like 13 years old. He ends up suspiciously being drowned in this, I think it's an attack on this boat. It's something like that, but anyways, she becomes, she becomes Pharaoh. She marks her brother so she can be in charge. Yeah, exactly. So, so she becomes, she becomes Pharaoh of Egypt.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  And, but Egypt is in this very precarious situation now where all of these incompetent, all of her incompetent grandfathers, who let power slip and slip and slip away. Actually, one of the things that's the, that is the worst travesty of the, of the slip of Alexandrian Ptolemaic rule, was Ptolemy the 10th. He had bankrupted Egypt's economy by like wasting all, all of the money. And so he had to go down into Alexander's mausoleum. Alexander had this huge monument that, that sat across the street from the Library of Alexandria. And he had this huge monument and you know, you'd see this, you'd see the statue of Alexander. And then it was under the ground that Alexander is buried in this solid gold sarcophagus,

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  surrounded by the burials of all of the other Ptolemaic kings that are around him. And Ptolemy the 10th goes in and pulls Alexander out of his coffin, puts him in a crystal or alabaster sarcophagus, melts down the gold and he has to use that to pay off debt. Wow. And so, yeah. Nasty work. Yeah, it's tragedy. It is symbolic though, the like.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  Alexandria by the very end is getting destroyed and the way that they're trying to pay for it is by destroying the founder.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Oh, exactly.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  There's like a poetry. It's crazy.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  So, so they put him in an alabaster sarcophagus and then a few generations later, uh, or a couple of generations later, Ptolemy the 12th, who I believe is Cleopatra's father, um, is born, he dies away. Ptolemy the 13th is Cleopatra's brother, they have to get married. He suspiciously dies by drowning in the river. All of a sudden Cleopatra is alone in the palace and she's, she is the ruler. And, um, and so her political move from here to allow Egypt to not become swallowed up by the Mediterranean growing in wealth and rising up around Egypt is, she only has, she really only has one move

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  because all of her incompetent grandfathers have, there is no Egyptian military anymore. Not like, not like a unified, strong military. There's no Ptolemaic military made out of like Greeks living in Egypt. Now they're contracting soldiers from Rome.

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  Oh, shit.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  So they're paying soldiers from Rome. So all of a sudden, who really runs Egypt?

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  Rome.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  Right? So Cleopatra, um, she sees that there's a civil war that's going on in, that's going on in Rome. And one of the things that she can do, this is like a highly simplistic explanation. Roman historians, don't attack me over this. But one of the things that she can do is pull Julius Caesar into, uh, into Egypt. And so there's this fight over, you know, who is going to essentially have the most control in, in, um, in Rome. And Julius Caesar is so popular and has this such a great following that he's almost able to sway the Roman people to move the capital of Rome itself from Rome down to Alexandria if he, if he marries Cleopatra.

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  And so essentially Julius Caesar has this like personality complex where, you know, he's, he's conquered so much land. Um, he's acquired such a vast amount of wealth. He goes on a vacation down the Nile with Cleopatra. And this is probably the first time in his life, he's always been treated like a king. He's never been treated like a god.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  Oof.

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  The only god that Julius Caesar knows is Cleopatra. Because Cleopatra is god to the Egyptian people, right?

• 1:40:57Speaker 02

  Oh, man. He's like, I like that.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of a sudden he's being worshipped as it, not only am I this super rich warlord. I kinda like this idea of me being a god, you know? And so, so think about what that does to his personality. So he starts going back to Rome and he's like, you know, if we had our, if we had this capital down in Egypt, we could rebuild the economy of Egypt and we'd have the, all of our food that all the Roman people already eat that comes from Egypt.

• 1:41:24Speaker 00

  Is ours.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  Why do we need to take it across Mediterane? Let's just move down there. So all the politicians in Rome are like, oh, we can't let this happen. Obviously, you know, we can't let this happen. So they stabbed Julius Caesar to death.

• 1:41:35Speaker 00

  Over that?

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that.

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  Plus a lot more. This is a lifetime of.

• 1:41:41Speaker 00

  Also huge move, though. You don't want to move the whole capital down to Alexandria.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, so anyways, uh, that kind of.

• 1:41:48Speaker 00

  So what does Cleopatra do when that?

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  I, I believe she's in Rome at the time and she has to flee back to, to Egypt.

• 1:41:54Speaker 00

  Doesn't she linger with Mark Antony after that?

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  I think Mark Antony, I don't know if he.

• 1:41:58Speaker 00

  You gotta taste it.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Mark Antony, I think he's got it. I think he hangs around in, so he and Cleopatra would have made eyes at each other. They would have known each other. And there's this huge idea that maybe Julius Caesar and Cleopatra never actually loved each other, but this is a dynastic, like, this is a money move here. But if you can imagine Julius Caesar's much older, Cleopatra's much younger, Mark Antony is much younger. They're all hanging out in the same rooms. Mark Antony and Cleopatra are making eyes at each other and they're like, well, you know, if this guy wasn't here, maybe we, you know, you can tell the attraction may have been there. And by their behavior later on in life, you can tell that they actually loved each other. It was a real romance. But Mark Antony's got to stay behind in Rome. He and Augustus, long story short, they get together.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  They take out all of the guys who, who stabbed Julius Caesar in the back, literally. And then Mark Antony and Augustus, they start feuding with each other over, okay, well, now it's this, it's this reverse of Julius Caesar versus Pompey. Well, Pompey dies, Julius Caesar takes hold, Julius Caesar's gone. These two guys come up, they take everyone out. Now it's them butting heads. So Mark Antony eventually, um, has to go to Alexandria. He's got this marriage. He has two kids with Cleopatra. But eventually this dog, Augustus, is gonna come down and, uh, this guy's gonna be Rome's first emperor. Augustus is just a crazy, amazing story, but I'm not, I'm not.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not really a Roman historian, but it's this, just think about like. We're not really a history podcast. Yeah, I know, I know. So you're in the perfect place. Yeah, yeah, but essentially, think about this, think about this young kid who, who is kind of growing up in the shadow of Julius Caesar, who sees this wild Game of Thrones being played in Rome, where politics is literally life and death. Like, if you're on the wrong side of the political spectrum, you will be assassinated. And you're so smart and you're so cunning, and the right things happen in your life, and you make the right choices,

• 1:44:10Speaker 01

  and you don't have this arrogant bravado that Julius Caesar has, and you're able to, you're like calculating every move of all your political rivals, and then you win, and you win big. And you're the greatest emperor that Rome ever had. When Alexander came down to Egypt, he was gonna bring, he was gonna bring Cleopatra and Mark Antony? Yeah, he's gonna bring Cleopatra and Mark Antony back

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  to essentially show them off in a parade in Rome. And the idea is that he presented it in such a way where it's like, "Oh, we're gonna show the unification of our two lands", but really, he was gonna have them assassinated, and he was gonna parade them around Rome and show. You mean Augustus or? Augustus was gonna have Cleopatra and Mark Antony assassinated. Gotcha, gotcha. And at least, that's what Cleopatra and Mark Antony suspected. And so ultimately, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, they commit suicide because they know what's gonna happen to them. And so they have this Romeo-Juliette story. Get the fuck outta here. Yeah. So all of a sudden... And the way they kill themselves is crazy. How? Yeah. It's contested whether or not it really happened. Well, give me the fun version. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so the romantic story is...

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  That is that Mark Antony is told, I believe he's told that Cleopatra has committed suicide and he's so heartbroken by that that he runs a sword through his stomach. But then his messengers go tell Cleopatra that he stabbed himself. So Cleopatra sends her messengers to drag him to her quarters. And so she's like sitting on, he gets pulled up onto her bed and she's like basically holding him as he's dying in her arms, like bleeding all over bed. You know, you can just imagine this and she's so distraught and she knows what's gonna happen. She doesn't, she can't run, she has no, you know, she can't do anything.

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  And so the story is she has an asp, which is like a very venomous Egyptian snake brought and bites her on the wrist and then she dies. Probably not how she actually killed herself, but they killed themselves in the presence of each other and died together, like Romeo and Juliet.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  By a viper, like chewing on your neck.

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  And Augustus.

• 1:46:24Speaker 00

  And this, when is Romeo and Juliet? This is like thousands of years.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  Romeo and Juliet's like 1500 years.

• 1:46:29Speaker 00

  15 years.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, Romeo and Juliet's like Renaissance era.

• 1:46:32Speaker 00

  But is this kind of?

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Maybe it is.

• 1:46:34Speaker 00

  The inspiration for that love story?

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  That's why Cleopatra's always depicted like with snakes and stuff. Like statues of her, it's like her. Shakespeare's a hack.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  And so, and so Augustus knew this whole time that if I praise myself too much for the things that I've accomplished, if I rule with too much of an iron fist, I'm gonna get my head cut off someday. I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get assassinated. So what he does, he's, he kind of is a classy guy. He knew that he was, at a certain point, he knew he was emperor of Rome, but he would never actually call himself that. I think he would call him like first citizen or like the first citizen of Rome or something like that. But classy enough.

• 1:47:11Speaker 00

  When you're strong, appear weak. When you're weak, appear strong.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he allowed Cleopatra and Mark Antony to be buried in Egypt and honored. And he gave the Egyptian people, I believe, a year to mourn the dead pharaoh. And then a year later, he becomes crowned pharaoh of Egypt. But really, he's like the emperor of Rome now. And so he, he returns back and essentially for the rest of his life, he plays his cards. You know, one of the deadliest careers throughout all of history is to be emperor of Rome.

• 1:47:39Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  I think it's, what is it? It's like a 40 something percent fatality rate or 60%.

• 1:47:44Speaker 00

  Does he die of old age? Whoa.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:48Speaker 00

  So he is Caesar Augustus.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  Caesar Augustus, yeah, but Octavian.

• 1:47:52Speaker 00

  Octavian, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, it's a crazy story and um,

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  and so that's, that's kind of the thing that's amazing about Alexandria is just, so when he's in Alexandria.

• 1:48:04Speaker 00

  What a politician. That's some fucking next level stuff. Yeah. Where every single move could get you killed and you're applauding that for the entirety of your life.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  So he's, he's got this, he's got this stella that's erected and I think it's called.

• 1:48:16Speaker 00

  What does that mean?

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  A stella is like a billboard, sort of. It's like, maybe it's the size of this wall right here. It's written in stone. It's meant to be read for all of eternity. And he's got this stella that basically says something along the lines of like, of like, things I did. And that, that's sort of what it translates to in Latin. And it lists out all of his accomplishments. And, and he essentially says that, that when I came to Rome, he's saying it in an elegant way, but he's saying, when I, when I was born here as a Roman citizen, I founded a city of, I founded a city of mud brick. I leave it a city of marble. And so he, he is the one that started erecting Rome's, because before that was made out of red brick and like timber and it was like a really, like janky, muddy, just trashy town. It was a big town.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  He started erecting the white marble stone monuments that you see in Rome. He was inspired to do that.

• 1:49:06Speaker 00

  By Alexandria.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, because when he arrived in Alexandria, you have to imagine his thought process was like.

• 1:49:12Speaker 00

  How can there be a city greater than ours?

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, how can there be, so Alexandria inspires.

• 1:49:16Speaker 00

  What is it called? The Palladium? The Roman Palladium? What is that area when you go visit Rome right now? Where you see all of the, basically the remnants of these old marble structures that are there? The Roman?

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's a Pantheon. There's a Roman Pantheon, which is, which is a, but the Palladium may be a region of the city, but I'm really not sure.

• 1:49:37Speaker 00

  Look that up for us, Joey.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:39Speaker 00

  If I'm not mistaken. Yeah, Rome is the most amazing city I've ever been to.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Speaker 00

  And like, New York is the greatest city in history. I'm a little bit biased, but if there wasn't New York, it's, it's Rome. Like, you go, you go indulge in Rome and then you go to Paris and you're just like, oh, you guys are just knocking off Rome.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:54Speaker 00

  Like, all this existed.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  But Rome.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  Roman Forum, sorry, the Roman Forum.

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But to that extent, Rome was really just a knockoff.

• 1:50:03Speaker 00

  Now I have to look at Alexandria and be like, oh shit.

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  Well, and Alexandria was a knockoff of Athens.

• 1:50:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  So it all, it all sort of starts in Athens. But then, you know, Athens, Athens itself is revolutionary in many ways, but, you know, they're also so inspired by the Bronze Age Greeks. Like, you can kind of follow these webs as it goes back, you know?

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  And doesn't Alexander get get back against the Persians? Like, that's one of the things that I think Alexander is like so interesting to me is like, I don't know if it's on purpose or if it's incidental, but like Cyrus goes through, or maybe it's Xerxes, and basically goes through and burns down all of Athens during like the Greco-Persian Wars. And then years later, Alexander the Great, like, sort of, kind of unites these like Greek city-states, becomes like this great like Greek leader, and then goes to Persopla.

• 1:50:53Speaker 00

  Exac- for them.

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  And then burns it down himself. Like, kind of like an F-U to the Persians that burned down Greece.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was, um, yeah, the Persians, I forget, it may have, it may have been Cyrus the Great, uh, invades Greece and then burns down a massive temple, uh, on the Acropolis of Athens. And then the Athenians, uh, they, they made the decision to never rebuild it, to leave it there in its topless, permanent state. As a reminder to everybody what, what would happen if they allowed invaders to come in again. Yeah.

• 1:51:24Speaker 00

  So the, the Athenians, are these like the aristocrats of that Greek empire at the time?

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:32Speaker 00

  If each one is their own little nation-state, but is this like the elites of the elites? Is that kind of how they see themselves?

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It's, it's the, uh, it is the height of all of, of the Greek world, at least the classical Greek world.

• 1:51:44Speaker 00

  At what time in history is this?

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Uh, 450 B.C., just like approximately.

• 1:51:49Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  Um, and so, one of the reasons for that is, um... They, you know, the Athenians and the Greeks in general have like a very young memory. There's an Egyptian saying that there are no old Greeks because the Greeks can't remember their ancient past, whereas the Egyptians have this continuous legacy going all the way back to 3000 B.C. But the Greeks fall apart at the end of the Bronze Age.

• 1:52:14Speaker 00

  Which would be what time?

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  Uh, like, let's say 1150 B.C.

• 1:52:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  So there's this huge Bronze Age collapse. The Greeks are hit the hardest. You have these, you have these massive civilizations like, okay, Agamemnon in the movie Troy waging the war. So those are the Mycenaeans. That's this massive Greek Bronze Age empire and it all collapses and falls apart. The Greeks fall into this Bronze Age. They hardly remember their ancient past anymore. And so throughout Greece as it rises again, each little place has their own new philosophy. And the Athenians rise, I think that they have kings at first and then they have like political tyrants, but then the people overthrow the political tyrants and they create a new form of government, a democracy.

• 1:52:56Speaker 00

  Democracy, yeah.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  Now, this is all out democracy. So this is literally straight up just like individual votes, right? Or say, men who own property or freemen or something like that. But it's like individual votes. And so you have this whole new philosophy. And that is why, you know, that revolutionary thought that came from the ancient world, that people could be free and rule over themselves was so profound that we still erect our capital buildings in that Athenian.

• 1:53:29Speaker 00

  In honor of that?

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Athenian style.

• 1:53:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  It's all Athenian.

• 1:53:34Speaker 00

  And how were they able to have the security, safety and food in order to focus on like a human being's right to, you know, sovereignty and thought and like, like what created that kind of security?

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is, yeah, so this is the dark.

• 1:53:50Speaker 00

  Because this is what we're learning, right? Throughout history, everything, every single civilization that you touch on, they have security, they have borders and they have food.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  So this is the-

• 1:53:58Speaker 00

  For a long time.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  This is the dark side of the Athenian world.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  They had a lot of slaves, a lot of slaves. But the slave wasn't, it wasn't based, it really wasn't based on like, race or anything like that. A lot of it was based on, on the subservient or captured culture. So if you could, if you could go capture this culture of people, and you could essentially pull them in and they would become like your slave, right? So like,

• 1:54:27Speaker 00

  But were the Athenians warmongers? Like where was their muscle?

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so they, they participated in a lot of wars. They made a, if I remember correctly, they made an incredible amount of money, repelling the Persians during the Persian War of the early 400s B.C. They were able to recruit, they were finally able to convince the Spartans to go all in against, against the, against the Persians. And long story short, as a result of the success of that war, Athens accumulated so much of the power and the wealth of Greece by taking those taxes. That's what it was. So they, they took a huge amount of taxes because of how much money Athens spent to be able to repel the Persians. And so as a result of that, all the money, just this gravitational pull, all the money just got sucked into Athens.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  So they put up these massive walls, they build this huge port, I think the port's called the Port of Piraeus. And then they have all these slaves or people they brought in from around, from around the way. Now, these aren't slaves that are like, what we may imagine like colonial America to be like. This is more like the working class that exists subservient to the political class. So a regular free Athenian male would wake up and would tell his slaves, and maybe the word slave didn't actually exist, it's a different, it's a different, it's a Greek word. But essentially, you just had your workmen, but they were obligated by the very institution itself to work for you, right? And maybe they can be punished or killed if they didn't, or they tried to escape. But, but they would work for you, they tend your, to your fields, they would harvest your crops,

• 1:56:00Speaker 01

  like on the outside of the city walls, or they may take care of like, official business that your family has been involved in. Your job was to go up to the Acropolis and participate in politics. And that was, that was literally your job, was to be a politician and to be actively involved in the way that the city itself is being run and give your opinion and give your thoughts. And go to war when the time came. So you would, you would need to buy your own armor. You need to have it smithed out. You need to make your, you know, make your own swords and shields and everything. And so you were obligated, this, I don't believe that the slaves were ever obligated to actually bear arms and go to war. You were a political man.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  It was your job to be invested in what was actually good for the city itself and then defend the city.

• 1:56:47Speaker 00

  And what about people who ran restaurants, farms, like security, policing? Like, there must have been jobs to maintain infrastructure in the city.

• 1:56:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, that gets a little bit more complicated. I mean, we don't, um, we only catch glimpses of that from like primary sources. We know that all that existed, but it was probably a mixture of like, uh, free men and, and slaves, uh, providing, you know, those services. Like you may have, you may have a free man who owns a restaurant. There, there were, there were restaurants. There was fast food in, in Rome for sure.

• 1:57:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Um, but in, uh, in Athens itself, you would have, uh, what was called the Agora, which was the marketplace that existed in the center. And you'd have people at their little markets selling stuff. So now though, are those free men or women that are selling everything?

• 1:57:37Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  We don't really know. I mean, it was probably a mixture, right? And there were definitely free people who didn't have slaves. So then what happens? Well, maybe there's an exception made for them. So all of the variation that exists in our modern world certainly existed back then. So rather than, I guess, my explanation is rather than it being one thing or the other, it's probably all of it. You know, probably there were free people who really couldn't be involved in politics because I gotta work. Uh, you know, and people are like, hey, man, you should come up and blah, blah, blah. Okay. Well, who's gonna man my stand? Oh, you should get a, you know, go get a certain, well, how am I gonna do that? I can't afford to go do that. And then they're just, you know, this person is trapped in the working world. They can't participate in the high aristocratic society of politics.

• 1:58:17Speaker 00

  So is this what happens with society once AI and robots become functional?

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  God, I don't know.

• 1:58:25Speaker 02

  Just get like indentured servants type vibe?

• 1:58:27Speaker 00

  Essentially you have indentured servants and you have a obligation to take part in government, society, or whatever it is. And like, these indentured servants, like, or these robots, or whatever, fighting each other in a war doesn't really make any sense. I mean, that's just like, who runs out of robots first? And then eventually it's people, but.

• 1:58:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I don't know, you know, I just don't know that we'll ever come to a, you know, Athens, Athens was a very unique place with so much personality and this like explosion of revolutionary thought. And people that were really, really, you know, they would, they would, could you imagine our society today paying people to go watch professional football games? Because that's what happened in Athens.

• 1:59:16Speaker 00

  They would pay people to watch sports?

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  They'd pay you to go watch sports. They'd pay you to be, because they wanted you to be a part of the community. Like, the city itself knew that, okay, so, so this is the, this is one of the different, like, we are very Roman in the way that we like to decorate our homes and fill our homes with a lot of like, you know, gorgeous decor, this, that, and the other. We want the inside of our house to be pretty, we want the outside of our house to be pretty. But Athenians, and most Greeks were not that way. You would go through a Greek town, and you may not be impressed by any of the, of the, of the homes that are there, because the Athenians didn't really like care about that. It was more so about when you went downtown.

• 1:59:56Speaker 00

  What are the public spaces?

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you went to the Agora, there was a big, there was a big, long building that was like a colonnaded, sort of that typical Greek column-style building. Two, two, uh, two stories deep, it had this open space at the bottom, open space at the top, and then like, uh, cubbies, almost rooms in the back where little markets would be. And people would hang out underneath that colonnaded area. And it's funny, there was a group of philosophers there that would always gather in one of the corners and like that. That little gang of philosophers grew so big and people didn't really want to be around them. So, uh, and that building's called the Stoa, so those people hung out there. So much that the Athenians started calling them the Stoics. And that's where the that's where the term Stoic philosophy came from. Not because they named themselves that or that's the name of their philosophy.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  But the philosophers who believed what we call Stoic philosophy hung out in the Stoa.

• 2:00:47Speaker 00

  So Marcus Aurelius was just ripping off the Stoics.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Oh, he was obsessed with ancient Greeks. Yeah, yeah. So much of it goes back to Greece. And and so the Greeks knew that the so like Pericles, he's one of the greatest political leaders of all time. He's basically known as like the greatest Athenian. And and he is going to use. I believe he's gonna, he wants to build a new temple on the Acropolis of Athens, which is Parthenon. If you guys have ever been to Athens, or I'm sure you've seen photos of Parthenon. And he wants to, he wants to build this and he's essentially giving the speech and he's like, he's like, all right, guys. I got this new project that I want to build. I want to build this, this huge temple. It's going to be the glory of Athens and the fact that we, you know, we kicked Persia's ass.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  And, you know, we basically saved ancient Greeks, you know, along with Spartans, but basically it was us.

• 2:01:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  And I want this, I want this temple to be built. And I'm going to raise some of the taxes to be able to do this for the city. Do you guys want to do this? And the Athenians are like, are like, uh, I don't know if we want to spend the money. Really, you're going to raise our taxes? I don't know if I should do that. And then and then Pericles goes, all right, well, I'm gonna do it. And then I'm gonna put a plaque on there that says, built and paid for by Pericles. And then all the Athenians go, no, fuck, no, we're gonna, you know, and then so they like hand over their money. So they're all invested in the public architecture.

• 2:02:07Speaker 00

  Public architecture.

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it was all about the community. You would wake up as an Athenian.

• 2:02:12Speaker 00

  High trust society.

• 2:02:13Speaker 01

  You get right out of your house to go to go into town. Immediately, the first thing you do in the morning is go to the agora and you hung out in town all day long. And you basically just slept at home. And so it wasn't about your personal. It was about your personal glory in what other people thought about you in the acts that you did, but not the things that you own. So I don't know that we can have a society quite like that again.

• 2:02:34Speaker 00

  How did, how did they keep the Spartans at bay? If you have this dominant military force, why don't they just take over all of Greece?

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  The Spartans?

• 2:02:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, why wouldn't they take over Athens? Why wouldn't they take over Macedonia?

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so this is, this is a period called the Peloponnesian War. And this is sort of that, this is sort of the, the backslide of the classical period, this, this height of, of, of ancient Greeks. And, um, actually, the Athenians didn't keep the Spartans at bay. The Peloponnesian War was between Sparta and Athens, and Sparta won. And, uh, there was a, I believe there was a Greek traveler named Mabin Polybius, um, in the second century AD, or maybe it's, maybe it's before that. But he essentially has something where he writes, maybe it was Thucydides that wrote this, I think it was Thucydides. Uh, he was an Athenian that was living during the Peloponnesian War and writing about it

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  while he was alive. And he said that if you visited the city of Athens, you would think that it was twice as powerful as it was. If you visited Sparta, you would think it was half as powerful as it was. And, um, and, uh, so, so Sparta, what's interesting is they had no stone public architecture, it was all wood. And, um, all like wood and perishable materials. They didn't care about like the, you know, the big grand public architecture, but their, um, their philosophy and their way of waging war. I, I, I actually basically know nothing about the Peloponnesian War, but I know that ultimately, the Athenian, basically their empire was stretched way too thin. They tried to send an expedition off to conquer some cities on the island of Syracuse, which a lot of, uh,

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  A lot of southern Italy was occupied by Greeks at the time, and there were a lot of Greeks living on Syracuse. And so Athens sends out an expedition to Syracuse. It goes horribly because Sparta is somewhere right in here. Sparta, basically, I think there's a massive military defeat where they just destroy this entire Athenian fleet, send their economy, even, send Athens' economy even further down. And then Athens, the Spartans don't go into Athens and raid it, but they essentially tell the Athenians to like back off. You know, like you're not gonna take over all of Greece. And, uh, and then so, that's not the downfall of Athens, but it certainly is the frame to like this height

• 2:04:58Speaker 01

  of Athenian power that had never been seen before in the world. It never would be seen again until the founding of the United States. There would not be anything similar to it until the United States was created.

• 2:05:11Speaker 00

  What do you mean? Not the Roman Empire?

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  No, no, it's just, yeah, the Roman Empire is just not similar to ancient Greeks in any way other than the way it looks. Like you don't, you don't have, uh, you did not have the political freedom. Like one of the big things was the theater.

• 2:05:26Speaker 00

  Oh, that's what you mean. You mean the political structure is most similar.

• 2:05:29Speaker 01

  The political freedom and the philosophy behind the very existence of the people itself is not similar. Um, we're probably much more similar to the Greeks, even though, you know, we have a constitutional republic and the Greeks were like an absolute democracy. Um, we, we carry so much of the same kind of like primal nature of the Greeks, this, this fight for independence, this fight to be, to be your own people who rule over each other that aren't ruled by a king, to have, uh, to have freedom of speech, to be able to represent yourself, you know, even though we're actually way more free than they were, but...

• 2:06:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, but this idea of self-determination.

• 2:06:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it was born there.

• 2:06:10Speaker 00

  But were the founding fathers like astute observers and consumers of Greek philosophy?

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:06:16Speaker 00

  So are we crediting the French a little bit too much in their inspiration?

• 2:06:20Speaker 01

  Well, I think the founding fathers are heavily influenced by the French, right?

• 2:06:23Speaker 00

  Well, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:25Speaker 00

  From my, you know, understanding of history, it seems like these ideas are coming from the French.

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:30Speaker 00

  But do these ideas really emanate through Athens, then to the French, and then to the New World?

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. I mean, there is, there is neoclassical France, which I don't know too, too much about. But I think that perhaps...

• 2:06:47Speaker 01

  Maybe, gosh, maybe my American bias is totally showing, but uh.

• 2:06:51Speaker 00

  I like this idea of us being inspired by the Greeks.

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there is no doubt. You know, if you go to Thomas Jefferson's house, I was, I was standing in his library.

• 2:07:00Speaker 00

  Big fan of France.

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, big fan of France, but big fan of ancient Egypt and Greece. And a huge fan, and he's got books on ancient Egypt and Greece. The bed that he died in, his, um, his clock that sat above him was like two Egyptian obelisks.

• 2:07:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, you see all this like Greek and Egyptian architecture all throughout the United States. And everybody does this whole like Illuminati thing and you know, we're worshiping some sort of satanic stuff. But is it just, hey, these were the dominant cultures of antiquity and this is the inspiration for us?

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  And by, by aligning yourself with those things, you are aspiring to be something that is higher and older than you are, right? Like you're aspiring to, almost like it, like an unachievable, you know, goal. But by doing that.

• 2:07:45Speaker 00

  You might get close.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you might get close. And so that, and so I think a lot of the founding fathers were really inspired by antiquity. Obviously they're culturally inspired by the contemporary French. But, um, am I wrong in saying that the United States might be like a, a much more successful uh, attempt at like this absolute freedom and, you know, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know much about, about the French Revolution and, and, uh.

• 2:08:11Speaker 00

  Neither do I, but yeah, I guess I don't know enough to comment if they achieved it or, or if we have. But I'm sure the perception within the United States of America, and there might be, you know, propaganda that's, that's holding that up. Yeah, but no, of course, yeah. Now, we didn't get it right for a long time.

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:30Speaker 00

  You know, but, uh, the goal always is to be held to that standard.

• 2:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:35Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  Can I ask you another great story?

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 2:08:37Speaker 02

  This is not pertaining to Europe, but this is my favorite story that you told me when we did the pod.

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:08:43Speaker 02

  And this is the Aztecs going back to Mexico.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, okay, yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  Wandering through as warriors and they stumble across a land and then they ultimately take over the land through potentially betrayal. Can you tell me that story?

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  If we still have time, I gotta tell you what I think about Atlantis also.

• 2:08:59Speaker 00

  Yes, we have time, we have time.

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  So, um.

• 2:09:01Speaker 00

  I want to make sure you have time because you have a flight, but we're, we're good.

• 2:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:05Speaker 00

  We're good right now.

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're good. So, um, so.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  The Red Wedding. Alright, so, I'm trying to think of like how I can, how I can start this.

• 2:09:18Speaker 00

  What year roughly are we looking at?

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Cortez invades Mexico in 1519 without the permission of the Spanish crown. And he marches his way over the course of several months to, when he lands, he lands among the Maya people. And he writes that the Maya people are like short and sickly and they're kind of ill. Well, they're being affected by Spanish or European influenza from in the decades prior, when the Spaniards were out in like the Bahamas and Jamaica and the Caribbean Islands. Well, some of the traders and people who are naturally curious are poking around on the shorelines of Mexico, interacting with the native people, but they don't realize they're getting them all sick.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  And so that disease is starting to move into the Maya world. Well, from, let's call it 1492-ish, maybe the year 1500 more accurately, over the next 19 years of 1519, a lot of people are getting sick in Mexico. So Cortez arrives and he starts noticing these sickly people and he's essentially saying what all aliens would say, and he's saying like, "Take me to your leader." You know, he wants to know like, "Where's the head honcho of all this world?" So he finds his way to Tenochtitlan. And while the Spaniards are there...

• 2:10:33Speaker 00

  This is modern day Mexico City, right?

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  This is modern day Mexico City, yeah.

• 2:10:37Speaker 00

  At this point in time when he's there, has the city already been cultivated? Like, it is originally just these like island chain, has it now been built up?

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Hey, could we look up Tenochtitlan Aztec city reconstruction? And you'll see, it's...

• 2:10:56Speaker 00

  It's a miracle what they did with this place.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  So amazing that the Spaniards, the soldiers who are, say, walking alongside Cortez as he's riding his horse, you know, and they're looking up at him and when, once they've left Tenochtitlan for the first time, yeah, if you zoom in on that, they, they look up at Cortez and they're like, they're like, they're like, "Can you believe what we've seen? I feel like this was all a dream. I can't actually believe that we found this." They are... Four hundred Europe, there are, there are four hundred Europeans in all of the Americas at this point, and they're all together.

• 2:11:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  In this city, right? They went and found some alien planet.

• 2:11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  It's just, it's wild.

• 2:11:39Speaker 02

  How many millions of people here, you think?

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  Millions, I mean, we don't, there's not really much of an estimate, but I mean.

• 2:11:45Speaker 00

  It's rare that the.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  I think that they say that the, there were, there were, there were 10 million Aztecs or something like that, but maybe that was 10 million people that were under Aztec control, right?

• 2:11:56Speaker 02

  Four hundred Europeans.

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  And what they did was wrong, but it's kinda cool.

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's bal- it's ballsy, right?

• 2:12:03Speaker 00

  So.

• 2:12:04Speaker 02

  A million versus four hundred.

• 2:12:06Speaker 00

  Millions of them, four hundred, this is 300, right? This is, yeah, okay.

• 2:12:12Speaker 02

  But what is bad, what they did?

• 2:12:13Speaker 00

  It was horrible what they did.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  This is reverse 300.

• 2:12:15Speaker 00

  It is, yes, it worked, okay.

• 2:12:18Speaker 01

  This is 300, this is like, 300 is 300 men stopping a million people.

• 2:12:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:12:23Speaker 01

  Uh, from, from invading their land, but this is 300 people invading a million people.

• 2:12:27Speaker 00

  Balls, because, and again, I don't know technologically where things are at Spain in, you know, 1492, but are they reaching the shores?

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Height of the world, Spain, 1492.

• 2:12:38Speaker 00

  Yes, but are they reaching a more sophisticated civilization? Do they feel intellectually intimidated when they're looking upon this city? Or are they going, these are still people that will be subservient to us. At the end of the day, we found them.

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  I think, I think that's more, I think that's more.

• 2:12:55Speaker 00

  Got it, so they're marveling at what they're seeing, but they're not intellectually intimidated? They're like, we got guns, like, they don't even have that shit.

• 2:13:01Speaker 01

  I think, I think that that's probably fair.

• 2:13:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  Um, and also, when you say like, where did they get the balls? Well, one of the things is, you know, we, people look at, uh, people look at the entire colonial world as being, you know, this inherent like, uh, great crime that was done, you know, to, to many, many different cultures. But the reality of the people who committed those crimes was they either do that, or they die in the slums back home. Like, there are not, there are not rich, wealthy people being born in Spain who are like, "Man, I'm gonna go be a boat captain and learn how to do the hardest job imaginable, and then I'm gonna go lead an army to conquer these people and probably die." This is crypto.

• 2:13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is, this is, this is people who grew up in the slums that don't really have any opportunity back home. This is my way to, this is my way to have some wealth. And they didn't realize when they set out that they were starting in un- you can't change the course of what you're about to do. You can't turn around. You're gonna be militarily obligated to do this. This is apparent in the whole, like, "Burn the ships" philosophy. You know, they burned the ships so that they couldn't retreat, right? This is what you're gonna do. And, and if that meant killing thousands of people and slaughtering a whole civilization to take every, everything that they had and take it back home to enrich yourself, you didn't have a choice. Right. You didn't have, and, and you probably didn't even know that that was gonna happen when you set out to do this.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  So colonization is something, like, this, this establishment of the global market was something that was always going to happen, and it was always going to be indescribably horrific. Yeah, still wrong. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we're not justifying. Yeah, but had it not been Europeans, it would have been somebody else. Right, right. 100% without a doubt, it all would have happened. And so, when you become a historian, you really start studying it, you eventually, you stop seeing, now, there, there are cases where there are legitimately bad guys. Like, this, this is the bad guy in the story. But most of history is actually way more complicated than that, where you realize the two people are pitted against each other and they neither had a choice. Right. Okay, so they're there. So, so they conquered the city of Tenochtitlan over the course of a couple of years.

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  And then you have Spanish chroniclers going through the city, and they're, they are taking an account of, you know, how the Aztecs came to be. And they hear this story that is essentially this red wedding. And so, it paints this picture of how the Aztecs came to power. So, the Aztecs were not from Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica, class. Mesoamerica is this El Salvador, Honduras, up to here. Uh, somewhere in north, in north Mexico, maybe even sou- southern New Mexico. Like, just where, where I was on that expedition a little bit, a couple of weeks ago. That may have been the northern tip of Mesoamerica, but it's just this- It's just this way of life. It's kinda like the eastern Mediterranean.

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  They're all inspired by each other and they all share the same trade routes and everything like. You can kind of look at it all as one civilization broken up by many different cultures and kingdoms and stuff. So that's sort of what Mesopotamia is. And but the Aztecs probably came from somewhere in the American Southwest.

• 2:16:16Speaker 00

  They're colonizers too.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 2:16:20Speaker 00

  I understand your framing now. You're like, they have done this, somebody else is gonna do this. And this is the history of the world and it doesn't mean it's okay. It just is what it is.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  It's the history of particularly the Americas. Nobody. The Americas colonized each other over and over and over and over and over and over again. Like just for for for at least 13,000 years, that's what was going on. The the first ones were the Clovis culture that came in and they pushed all the pre Clovis people out and just like took over the Americas. And then you've got Folsom culture and it goes on and on and on and on and on forever. And you can just see cultures just disappearing and being swallowed up by other cultures. I mean, it's just, that's what was going on. And and so the Aztecs, somewhere around the 1100s.

• 2:17:02Speaker 00

  Now I understand why white people have history.

• 2:17:06Speaker 00

  Right? Cause you're like, yeah, we're not that bad. We're just the latest.

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  I still gotta answer your question.

• 2:17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll get there.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  So, well, as a very side note, the reason that Europeans are conquerors and explorers and raiders and everything is because this is a very inhospitable place and it's really, really hard to survive. In Africa, this is where people sprouted out of the damn ground. You don't have to do anything to live here. You can just live.

• 2:17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  This is where we're, right here, is where we're supposed to live. Uh, no, I'm sorry. Right here is where we're supposed to be.

• 2:17:39Speaker 00

  Tanzania.

• 2:17:39Speaker 01

  Tanzania and Kenya.

• 2:17:40Speaker 00

  Kenya.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Serengeti. This is where humans are supposed to be. But they left. They went all the way up here. Up here is a very inhospitable place, place to be. And so it really benefits you.

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  If you start becoming a marauder and a raider and you start stealing from other people and going on these huge raiding expeditions and stealing shit. And so that's how Europeans survived for a long time. So it breeds this kind of like idea and way of life of like, we're gonna set off on this thing and go on this huge adventure and slaughter all these people and take all their stuff and bring it back for our glory. Like that, that's the way of life there. It was the way of life for a lot of other people too, but really particularly Europe. And many different, many similar situations.

• 2:18:28Speaker 00

  So you have no choice but being white devils, I get it. It was put upon us. It was cold, Al. It is so cold.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so in the Americas.

• 2:18:40Speaker 00

  The most dangerous thing in the world is a white man that's cold. You do not want it, Al. Turn the heat up. That chair looks cold.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  So a lot of Native Americans find themselves in these similar situations. The Aztecs are up here, living in the middle of a damn desert, and they get pushed out. Their culture apparently was not very compatible with the people that they were living in, they were living with. And they weren't very compatible when they came into Mesoamerica either. The Mesoamericans were not, they were warlike, but they weren't warlike and vicious in the same way that the Aztecs were. So the Aztecs get pushed out, according to their history, they get pushed out. At the lowest, they live somewhere up here, at the highest, they live somewhere up here. But somewhere in this area is where the Aztecs.

• 2:19:29Speaker 00

  So basically, southern United States, northern Mexico.

• 2:19:32Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Yeah, so then they get pushed out and they come down and they find this really nice area in the Valley of Mexico. And they start, almost like vultures, they're like circling around the Valley of Mexico and they're trying to find a place that they're gonna settle down. But all of the cultures of the Valley of Mexico are, you can never say they're peaceful, right? But more, way more peaceful. Like, they're all up for war, but not...

• 2:19:57Speaker 00

  It's not their main prerogative.

• 2:19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they're all pushing, they're pushing the Aztecs out. "Ah, no, no, no, no, you guys don't belong here, we don't want, we don't want your kind here, you know, you guys are too vicious, you're too savage, you're too barbarian."

• 2:20:11Speaker 00

  Go back to America.

• 2:20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, go back to America. And so, so one of the kingdoms here decides, well, you know what?

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  We can use these guys. They're kind of like savage barbaric people, but I think we can find a use for them. So they call the Aztecs in. And this is the Kingdom of Calwakan. And so they're living in the Mexican Valley amongst all these other pre Aztec cultures. And they eventually tell the Aztecs, okay. We're gonna give you a place to live. That you can settle on. And in return. You, you're going to unite as an army. And you'll come whenever we call on you. Right, so they're gonna be mercenaries for the Kingdom of Calwakan. So they say-

• 2:20:55Mark Gagnon?

  Shit, that's the Egyptians paying for the Roman fire. Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know what, I'm gonna tell you something crazy. You're, you're, that's very, very observant. So. They tell, they give the Aztecs a little plot of land that they can live on. And it's this little rocky outcropping out in the middle of Lake Tenochtitlan. Which is, you know, when we were looking at the city of Tenochtitlan, it's surrounded by water. Originally, that was just a tiny little rock outcrop and just like a piece of crap land that they couldn't imagine anybody could live on it. So they send the Aztecs there. Well, the Aztecs are looking for this prophecy. And the prophecy says that they'll know where their promised land is, you know, proverbially.

• 2:21:40Speaker 01

  When they see a serpent and then an eagle come down and clutch the serpent and fly away with it. That's why we have, that's why we have that imagery of, of the serpent and the eagle. So when they get out there, there's this snake on the rocks. An eagle comes down, picks up the snake and flies off. And so the Aztecs go, okay.

• 2:21:58Mark Gagnon?

  This is it.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  You know, like this is what the gods telling us that we have to make it work here. So over the course of the next couple hundred, maybe 150, 200 years. They're working as mercenaries for the Kingdom of Calwakan. And Calwakan lives on the coastline while the Aztecs are in this crappy land in the center. And so they're acting as mercenaries for Calwakan. And Calwakan is marking off all these other kingdoms around the lake of Tenochtitlan. They're sacking them and pulling them into the Kingdom of Calwakan. Sacking them, killing all their lords and stalling your own lords, pulling them in. So the Aztecs helped Calwakan do all of this. And during this time, the Aztecs are being paid very well. They're now building their town. And so it's now sprawling out into this metropolis.

• 2:22:43Speaker 01

  That's a lesser version of the photos that we've seen. And then, um.

• 2:22:47Speaker 00

  How are they getting rid of the water? Or how are they elevating the?

• 2:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they must be quarrying stones in and building up like the land that's actually, you know, you you're in this rocky outcropping, so you're so you're building up the sides of it.

• 2:22:59Speaker 00

  Because it's below sea level, right?

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, well, it's below the the level of the lake. Yeah.

• 2:23:04Speaker 00

  In a lake bed.

• 2:23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:05Speaker 00

  In a lake bed.

• 2:23:07Speaker 01

  In a lake bed. So they're so they're bringing in stones. See, you gotta.

• 2:23:09Speaker 00

  That's why when you go to Mexico City, you see a lot of the buildings are actually like tilting.

• 2:23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:13Speaker 00

  Have you seen that?

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:15Speaker 00

  And it's just because they're built on this lake bed.

• 2:23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're all they're all like sinking.

• 2:23:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:23:19Speaker 01

  Now, in ancient times, they were repairing all that constantly. So the city would have just been perfectly flat and level the whole, you know, um, had the Aztecs not fallen, it would have stayed that way. But this is all manmade, the whole, I mean, the whole city from the very center, where the center of the city is there, where you see like the royal palisades and everything, that was where that little rocky outcropping was, and they just brought up the land itself from inside the water and then expanded the city on top of that. And so you would traverse the city on like manmade sidewalks and little ravines where you could sail boats between buildings.

• 2:23:52Speaker 00

  It's like a Venice, if you will.

• 2:23:53Speaker 01

  Very similar.

• 2:23:54Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 2:23:55Speaker 01

  And so you can imagine they're being paid royally for their mercenary work, more and more and more and more and more. And, um, eventually, I I don't know about about what year this would be, maybe about the year 1350, so maybe 200 years supposedly after the Aztecs arrive. The Aztec priest goes into his inner sanctum and, you know, takes like an absurd amount of peyote or whatever, and he goes to meet the god Huetsipotli, which is the war god. And the war god tells him, "It's now time to have our prince marry the princess of Kauakon and form the dynasties into one." And so that's the that's the Aztecs. Now they help Kauakon conquer everybody.

• 2:24:40Speaker 01

  It's the Aztecs going to them and saying, "We want to marry our princess to you and become one kingdom." So it kind of brings them up. So they go give the proposition to the kingdom of Kauakon, and you can just imagine the king there is like.

• 2:24:54Speaker 01

  Well, if they're proposing this, that means they're probably willing to go to war with us if we say no. And we don't want to fight with these guys, cuz... Yeah, we don't want to fight with them cuz we just built them up and they are our army now. So the king of Kauakon is like, and they're proposing a possibility where I remain king. Sounds great. So I guess, like, I don't have a choice. You know, you can just imagine, like, that's what was going through his head. Very reasonable offering, by the way. Yeah, yeah. And so, um, and so the king of Kauakon accepts, and, um, they plan out this wedding where the prince, they're gonna have the wedding in the sitter... No, I'm sorry, they have the wedding in Kauakon.

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  So the prince and the king of the Aztecs come into Kauakon, they do this, they do this huge wedding. And then they bring the princess back. And they're, now they're gonna have this celebration over, over the, um... So they've had the wedding in Kauakon, now they're gonna do a celebration of the, of the merging of the two families. So then there's gonna be a parade that comes, you can just imagine. It would come down this bridge that crossed from the mainland, from the city of Kauakon to Chinoj Tietlan. So there's gonna be this big royal parade coming into Chinoj Tietlan. The priest goes back into the sanctum to meet with Huitztopoli, and Huitztopoli says, "We're going to ambush the kingdom of Kauakon when they come into the city gates."

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  You are going, the prince is going to flay, which is to skin the princess, take all of her skin off. And he's gonna kill her, like, rip her heart out, sacrifice her to Huitztopoli, flay her, which is, uh, you know, you would flay her, and by doing that, you would bring honor to the flayed god, I forget his name. Uh, but there was a god of flaying people, of cutting their skin off. And so, they, they kill the princess, they cut her heart out, sacrifice her. I say "cut her heart out," but, you know, however, they really sacrificed people, whether Mel Gibson was right or not. But, uh, they, they sacrifice her, they flay her, cut all of her skin off. And then the prince slips himself into her skin, puts on her skin, puts on her head.

• 2:27:02Speaker 01

  And then when they bring in the royal procession of, of, uh, Kauakon, they, they are gonna bring the princess out, and the prince comes out wearing her skin. Holy shit. And essentially, just causes mass hysteria, and then... Caitlyn Jenner. Takes over.

• 2:27:19Speaker 01

  And then

• 2:27:20Speaker 00

  Yucatan Peninsula. Oh wow.

• 2:27:24Speaker 01

  And then, and then the Aztec warriors just come out of nowhere ambush the

• 2:27:28Speaker 00

  What do all the Aztec people that don't know that's gonna happen, what are they thinking? Are they like, damn, you wanna marry this ugly bitch?

• 2:27:38Speaker 00

  They're like, don't do it, Prince.

• 2:27:40Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:27:41Speaker 00

  You deserve better. Like, that's crazy. Okay, go on, go on.

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And so, so they, after they basically horrify, you know, I think that there was an element of shock, right?

• 2:27:55Speaker 00

  Your thing?

• 2:27:55Speaker 01

  Well, of course, of course, of course. But I think that, I think that shock and fear made the sacrifice more

• 2:28:03Speaker 00

  Fervent.

• 2:28:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? So, so that fear, if you could cause like a mass amount of chaos and really scare somebody and just petrify them, and then you sacrifice them, well, that means more to the gods, right? And so, all these Aztec warriors come in and they just ambush the Kaukakon army,

• 2:28:22Speaker 00

  This is crazy.

• 2:28:23Speaker 01

  Slaughter all of them, they capture, they capture the king and the whole royal procession. And then, it doesn't say, but you can imagine, they march them to the top of the pyramid and sacrifice them to Huistapotli. And then, move the army across the bridge and invade the city of Kaukakon. Basically burn the whole thing to the ground, capture everyone, sacrifice a lot of them, I'm sure. And then, all of a sudden, the Aztecs are sitting out fortified in this massive city in the middle of this lake with this huge moat around it. And they just conquered the whole Mexican valley.

• 2:28:53Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 2:28:54Speaker 01

  Over the course of like 200 years or so.

• 2:28:56Speaker 00

  How crazy is that?

• 2:28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:58Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 2:28:58Speaker 02

  And they all sit around at dinner after the wedding, they're just like, oh.

• 2:29:01Speaker 00

  We, damn.

• 2:29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:03Speaker 00

  That shit worked.

• 2:29:04Speaker 02

  They're dapping each other up, he's taking the skin off, like, bro, you killed me.

• 2:29:07Speaker 00

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• 2:31:23Speaker 01

  Throughout all of that, as scary as that sounds, when the Spaniards arrived and they would go into the marketplaces of Tnoshtetlon. And you know, the Spaniards are pulling out their steel swords and just slicing people up. I mean, you know, you could, with those blades, I mean, you could just, you can cut somebody in half. You can cut their head off. You can cut their arm off like so easily. And it was the brutality of how swiftly and mercilessly and without a thought, the Spaniards would slaughter people and then just leave their bodies to rot in the streets. That actually horrified the Aztecs because the Aztecs at least saw the value in your soul. They actually really saw the value in your soul. So even if they hated you.

• 2:32:06Speaker 00

  I'm killing you without a sacrifice.

• 2:32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:08Speaker 02

  For no reason.

• 2:32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, for no reason at all.

• 2:32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so, so the Spaniards would just like, you know, just slice this person's head off, slice this guy's arm and leg off, just leaving people like, you know, rolling around in pain on the sides of the streets.

• 2:32:22Speaker 00

  So there's an Aztec dude in some chick's skin looking at the Spaniards like, these people are demonic.

• 2:32:28Speaker 02

  Imagine robbing someone, taking their money, then throwing it away.

• 2:32:31Speaker 00

  That's the Joker.

• 2:32:32Speaker 02

  For no reason.

• 2:32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:33Speaker 02

  Whereas like if a robber would be like, yeah, you take the money.

• 2:32:35Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's, that's really like an astute observation. There, there was not, there was not currency in any of the Americas. It, it was, uh, you know, they had different things that they valued, whereas in the old world, we have, we have all kinds of different forms of currency. But, uh, in the Americas, it was really about trade or what you could offer or like the esoteric value, the spiritual significance of things. And so they really saw value in people's souls, like that wasn't something to just be thrown away, even if it was your enemy, you needed to sacrifice him to your god so that in return the god would bless you.

• 2:33:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:33:13Speaker 01

  And wasting that is really just like taking somebody's like, you kill somebody for their money and then you throw their money on the street. And then it's like.

• 2:33:21Speaker 00

  That guy's insane.

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  It's totally antithetical to your whole existence. So the Aztecs were actually horrified by how mercilessly the Spaniards could just, you know, like march through thousands of people and slaughter them without a second thought.

• 2:33:33Speaker 00

  And then the Spaniards betray the Aztecs, right?

• 2:33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:38Speaker 00

  Like Montezuma, right?

• 2:33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so nobody, um, nobody really knows what exactly happened, but the Spaniards are held up in a palace with Montezuma and one way or another, Montezuma dies while he's in the palace with the Spaniards.

• 2:33:52Speaker 00

  Alone.

• 2:33:53Speaker 01

  Alone with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's all different kinds of ways that, that people think it happened. Probably the Spaniards, um, probably the Spaniards just killed him.

• 2:34:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:34:02Speaker 01

  Often.

• 2:34:02Speaker 00

  Montezuma's who?

• 2:34:04Speaker 01

  Uh, he, he was the emperor of, of the Aztec world.

• 2:34:07Speaker 00

  And that's the Montezuma's revenge when like you drink the water in Mexico and you get sick. That's what they call Montezuma's revenge.

• 2:34:13Speaker 02

  But it's actually, what's the name of the people that the Aztecs conquered? The ones you just said.

• 2:34:18Speaker 01

  Calwcon.

• 2:34:19Speaker 02

  It's Calwcon's revenge.

• 2:34:21Speaker 00

  Facts.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  It is Calwcon's revenge.

• 2:34:22Speaker 02

  Right, like, the Aztecs take out Calwcon and then all of a sudden the Spaniards come in and take out the Aztecs in a betrayal.

• 2:34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:30Speaker 02

  It's not the same thing, it's not as dramatic, but it's like, yeah, come up to the temple, we'll talk, and then knocks him out.

• 2:34:35Speaker 00

  Was it a freshwater lake?

• 2:34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:37Speaker 00

  Okay, so they had access to water?

• 2:34:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:41Speaker 00

  Wow, man.

• 2:34:42Speaker 01

  All the sites across Mesoamerica are built on, you know, it's all built right next to water. I mean, when we were on that expedition in the Gila, man, it was just so obvious. It's that, it's that southern tip of New Mexico that I was talking about might be the northern end of Mesoamerica, of ancient Mesoamerica.

• 2:34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34:59Speaker 01

  And so when we were there, man, it was just so obvious, like, how crucial, not only being near water, but being right on it was, because, think about how much water you drink all the time, you know, I mean, you gotta be right there on it. And so those waterways kind of determine, if you go to REI and you're checking out, usually on the, on like, behind the counter, there will be an inverted map of the, of the United States, and it'll, the, the country will be blue, but the only thing that's actually highlighted in white are the rivers. And that's the ancient map.

• 2:35:30Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:35:32Speaker 01

  Isn't that weird?

• 2:35:33Speaker 00

  Meaning that's where all the civilization popped up.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the Mississippian world, which we know, like, so many mound builders, from the Ohio mound builders all the way down Louisiana, that river is massive, it's just so dense, and it just, it's no surprise.

• 2:35:47Speaker 00

  Right?

• 2:35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's our Nile, it's exactly right, that's exactly right.

• 2:35:50Speaker 02

  Wow, okay. I had another question. Oh, how many lost cities of gold are there still today? Undiscovered.

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Well, the, the LiDAR team I'm working with, they may have, may have found one this morning.

• 2:36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, Luke is holding back, bro. He hit us up with a picture of his LiDAR team somewhere, where I can't say, that discovered some wild stuff, and not willing to share.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  So, so I'm working with, I'm working with a team run by Daniel Wyndham, out of Georgia. It's a company called BaseMap, and we're doing several LiDAR projects in the southeast US, and then we're gonna be doing one later this year, maybe in August or September down in the Amazon.

• 2:36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:32Speaker 01

  But this morning, he sent me a new image of a LiDAR scan that they had done. Down in the Amazon, just like running the drone straight over this, uh, straight over this, uh, huge piece of land. And there are these huge circular geometric earthworks connected to each other. Uh, but as far as-

• 2:36:49Speaker 00

  It looked like roads, dude.

• 2:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're huge, they're massive highways, yeah.

• 2:36:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:36:54Speaker 01

  And, uh, those highways went all through the Amazon. Um, I mean, all through the Amazon. Um, but as far as how many are there? Dozens. I mean dozens, dude. There's no, there's no one El Dorado. The whole story of El Dorado is a bunch of different Spaniards hearing a bunch of different stories about a bunch of different places that had a lot of gold. And then getting confused and it all kind of melds into El Dorado. But El Dorado was half of the continent of South America itself, you know? So everywhere you go, if you find a city that's got gold artifacts in it, if you could excavate the whole thing, you'd be like, whoa, this is El Dorado.

• 2:37:31Speaker 00

  Has anybody found a bunch of gold, like the Count of Monte Cristo stuff? Has that ever happened where it like fundamentally changed somebody's life? Now, I'm not talking about a gold mine. I'm talking about like lost or buried treasure.

• 2:37:44Speaker 01

  Um, well, okay. So there's a lot of stuff when it comes to finding like Spanish shipwrecks that have changed people's lives. Uh, but as far as ancient sites, I think that there are maybe times early on where people would find ancient sites and you would buy the property and excavate it and you could sell the, all the artifacts. Um, but as far as, I don't know about like enriching one person's life because he found a bunch of stuff and was able to sell it or whatever. But as far as finding sites that are filthy rich with gold, oh, hell yeah. Yeah. Northern Peru, uh, out in the deserts had tons of them, man. There was so much gold there that the kings there would wear gauntlets of gold. With like fabric woven in them and you could just wear these like golden gloves and your whole body would be covered in gloves. Yeah, your whole body would be, I mean, it's crazy stuff.

• 2:38:29Speaker 00

  So there, you're saying that there are modern people? That existed within our parents lifetime. That found these massive gold.

• 2:38:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 2:38:40Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they find them all the time.

• 2:38:41Speaker 00

  Like treasure hunter people who for decades have been looking, eventually stumble across it and they are rich.

• 2:38:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, maybe, yeah, yeah, possibly. It's probably rarer because I think that the, the local government will come in and grab.

• 2:38:55Speaker 00

  Confiscate it.

• 2:38:56Speaker 02

  Or you're gonna do it with a university and you have to turn stuff over with the.

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  That happens a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:01Speaker 00

  That's whack.

• 2:39:02Speaker 01

  That, that happens a lot.

• 2:39:04Speaker 00

  That's whack. No, that don't count. I'm talking about gold, bro. Artifacts you gotta give to the museums, but the raw? The raw gold is the raw gold.

• 2:39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:13Speaker 02

  But how much raw gold do you find? Like if you're gonna go into someone's tomb, it's all gonna be decorative gold.

• 2:39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's all gonna be decorative gold or like blocks of gold or ink.

• 2:39:20Speaker 00

  Blocks.

• 2:39:21Speaker 01

  That kind of, that kind of thing.

• 2:39:22Speaker 00

  Bring it over here. Bring it over here. Boolean? That's fair game. But I, don't you think Boolean is, if it's art or something like that, then you give it to the museum?

• 2:39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:32Speaker 00

  But Boolean?

• 2:39:34Speaker 01

  What are we talking about?

• 2:39:35Speaker 00

  I don't know. Just gold, gold, nah.

• 2:39:41Speaker 01

  Like gold ore almost like.

• 2:39:42Speaker 00

  If you got ore, ore.

• 2:39:44Speaker 01

  I could be.

• 2:39:45Speaker 00

  If you got a satchel, if you got that.

• 2:39:48Speaker 02

  That's gold Boolean.

• 2:39:49Speaker 00

  That right there, that's free game. But if you got a satchel of gold, that's, you got, even coins aren't art. Excuse me. If it's art, you gotta give it to the museum. If it's any other form.

• 2:40:02Speaker 01

  If it's just like a, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:03Speaker 00

  Cause they got it from somewhere.

• 2:40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:06Speaker 00

  Finders keepers.

• 2:40:07Speaker 02

  Nah, what if you're related to, if I'm related to you, then I'm pissed.

• 2:40:11Speaker 00

  Talk to me.

• 2:40:12Speaker 02

  Oh, we just discovered a tomb and there's millions of dollars of gold. And I go, oh, whose tomb was it? And they go, oh, it was some guy. And I go.

• 2:40:18Speaker 00

  Tombs don't count.

• 2:40:20Speaker 02

  Well, who gets the tomb? So if it's another race, it's fine.

• 2:40:23Speaker 00

  Tombs don't count.

• 2:40:24Speaker 02

  Take the gold.

• 2:40:24Speaker 00

  No, tombs don't count.

• 2:40:25Speaker 02

  If I'm related to the guy that's getting raided, I'm gonna be like, that's my tomb. That's my great, great, great grandfather's. That belongs to me.

• 2:40:31Speaker 00

  I'm kind of like even a little bit now on that.

• 2:40:35Speaker 03

  You guys.

• 2:40:35Speaker 00

  I'm kind of even a little not on that. Art is different. If you make art that should be preserved, there's a story to be told. We can understand these cultures, et cetera. But just raw gold? Bullion? Bullion, though?

• 2:40:48Speaker 01

  You know, there's a big, there's a big controversy about this in, in the United States where, you know, it's, it's a, it's a federal crime.

• 2:40:54Speaker 00

  I'm the sovereign right now. Go.

• 2:40:56Speaker 01

  If, if, if you find a Native American, like arrowhead on the ground.

• 2:41:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:41:01Speaker 01

  And it's on, uh, public land and you pick that thing up and put it in your pocket, that's a felony.

• 2:41:05Speaker 00

  You should give that back. You should give that to the museum.

• 2:41:08Speaker 03

  Everything you should give back.

• 2:41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:41:09Speaker 03

  Everything.

• 2:41:10Speaker 00

  You should give that back. Now, I will say, there's nothing we have to land. But we don't have to study that, right? Like, we don't have to, like, cause obviously those arrowheads weren't really effective. So there's nothing we're gonna learn. We could study about what not to do, right? That'd be helpful. We'd be like, let's never make arrowheads like that when people have bullet heads. Right? That's something we could learn. But in terms of giving it to a museum, I believe that. I support that. But if right next to the arrowhead, there is a little patch of bullion.

• 2:41:41Speaker 00

  What are, what are we gonna do for that? Like, am I gonna give that to the museum? Oh, here's bullion. Like, get out of here.

• 2:41:47Speaker 03

  You give it to the people.

• 2:41:49Speaker 00

  What people?

• 2:41:50Speaker 03

  The natives.

• 2:41:51Speaker 00

  Which natives, bro? Which natives? They got it from someone else. I gotta find some Quak'akans?

• 2:41:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:58Speaker 00

  There's no more Quak'akans.

• 2:41:59Speaker 03

  There's a few of them.

• 2:42:00Speaker 00

  The Aztecs took them out.

• 2:42:01Speaker 03

  There's a few of them.

• 2:42:02Speaker 00

  If there was a few, then they get it. If you can prove Quak'akon, if you can 23andMe and prove Quak'akon, you get it. Anything the Aztecs got, that's fair game. Now they know that story?

• 2:42:13Speaker 03

  Quak'akon's still alive?

• 2:42:15Speaker 01

  I mean, there are probably people who have their blood, yeah, probably.

• 2:42:19Speaker 00

  I don't even think leprechauns get to keep their gold. If we're really gonna go that far back, like.

• 2:42:25Speaker 01

  Are leprechauns Irish?

• 2:42:26Speaker 00

  They are.

• 2:42:27Speaker 03

  How much gold is in Ireland?

• 2:42:28Speaker 00

  That's what I'm saying.

• 2:42:29Speaker 03

  Where the hell did he get all this bullion?

• 2:42:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, where'd they get the bullion is the real question.

• 2:42:34Speaker 01

  Not much.

• 2:42:34Speaker 03

  When?

• 2:42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't think there's much other than that. They, they had to get it from like, uh, gosh, I think all, I think all that gold comes from Africa. I'm pretty sure.

• 2:42:41Speaker 00

  That's not good.

• 2:42:42Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:42:43Speaker 00

  Black Irish.

• 2:42:44Speaker 03

  Finally somebody says.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  I think it comes from, or maybe like, uh, like, uh, Iran, Iraq area.

• 2:42:51Speaker 00

  Why, they have no gold up here?

• 2:42:53Speaker 01

  I don't know. Well, I mean, I'm sure that there is in the modern day. I don't know if ancient people were, were mining it.

• 2:42:57Speaker 00

  Were even looking for it.

• 2:42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know that there are silver mines in Greece, but I'm really not a hundred percent sure. Now we're talking about this, I'll answer your-

• 2:43:06Speaker 00

  Yes, what are you? What are you?

• 2:43:08Speaker 01

  So, I had thought for a long time, just listening to like Family Legends and stuff, that I would be like Italian, or that I would have a little bit of Native American in me, which I do, but it doesn't actually-

• 2:43:22Speaker 00

  So insignificant.

• 2:43:23Speaker 01

  Doesn't actually come up on a DNA test. So I went and got a DNA test done, and my family got them too, so we really know. I am 40% Scottish, 38% English, 4% Welsh, 4% French, and then uh-

• 2:43:43Speaker 00

  Bam bam bam!

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  Something else in there.

• 2:43:45Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 2:43:46Speaker 01

  But what's really interesting-

• 2:43:48Speaker 00

  Scots, the greatest people in this- Which is crazy, because people say that you look like someone else who's also Scottish. Who? You think people say we look similar? Yeah. Honestly, sitting here during this whole podcast, it's been delightful.

• 2:44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:44:04Speaker 00

  You guys are lucky, bro. You guys can do this every week? This is crazy. This is insane.

• 2:44:09Speaker 01

  But, so-

• 2:44:10Speaker 00

  People have said we look similar?

• 2:44:12Speaker 01

  Oh, hell, yeah, yeah.

• 2:44:13Speaker 00

  No way.

• 2:44:13Speaker 01

  When I was on-

• 2:44:17Speaker 00

  It's hard not to, right?

• 2:44:20Speaker 01

  I've been trying not to touch it as much.

• 2:44:23Speaker 00

  You study Latinos, you make fun of Latinos? Yeah, exactly.

• 2:44:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:44:26Speaker 00

  We're both observing the culture.

• 2:44:27Speaker 01

  That's right. But, no, no, so like when I was on camp, when I was on Rogan, people were always like, people were always like, they'd be like, "I really enjoy listening to Andrew Schulz's little brother talk about ancients."

• 2:44:42Speaker 00

  Damn, why they gotta age max me? Little brother. How old are you?

• 2:44:47Speaker 01

  28.

• 2:44:48Speaker 00

  Ah, you're a young'un, dude.

• 2:44:50Speaker 01

  So, finishing what I was saying, so you can also, it's really cool, you can see the DNA that you would have during the Middle Ages, like the medieval period, and you can see what you would have during the Roman period, and then like ancient, you know, like hunter-gatherer DNA. So what was really interesting was, like, my skin tans so easily. I don't tan like a, technically I'm a Scottish Highlander, but I don't tan like a Scottish Highlander, so somewhere in me-

• 2:45:17Speaker 00

  Shut the fuck up. Yeah, go on, bro. He does say that. Talk your shit, or our shit.

• 2:45:23Speaker 01

  So what I found out, the city of London, founded by the Romans-

• 2:45:29Speaker 01

  In my

• 2:45:30Speaker 00

  Londinium.

• 2:45:31Speaker 01

  Two thousand years ago.

• 2:45:32Speaker 00

  Londinium.

• 2:45:33Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 2:45:33Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 2:45:35Speaker 01

  Two thousand years ago.

• 2:45:36Speaker 00

  Come on, bro.

• 2:45:37Speaker 01

  My DNA was fifty-three or fifty-seven percent insular Celt, which would be like King Arthur's, like the Knights of the Round Table, like those.

• 2:45:45Speaker 00

  Illegal immigration.

• 2:45:46Speaker 01

  The Italians come in.

• 2:45:48Speaker 00

  Yup.

• 2:45:48Speaker 01

  They build the city of London.

• 2:45:50Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:45:50Speaker 01

  And today, twenty, like twenty percent of the people living in the UK have upwards of forty percent.

• 2:46:01Speaker 00

  Pakistani DNA.

• 2:46:06Speaker 01

  Forty, forty percent Roman.

• 2:46:07Speaker 00

  Roman, Roman, Roman, Roman.

• 2:46:08Speaker 01

  And so, so, so what I, so when people always say I look Italian, it's actually the ancient Roman, really far back in my DNA.

• 2:46:16Speaker 00

  I've always felt that way, too.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's.

• 2:46:20Speaker 00

  Have I not told you guys this? You've never said you're Italian. You talk kind of Italians.

• 2:46:24Speaker 01

  So you and I, we're like, we're like Nero. We're like a Nero. We're like the original colonizers.

• 2:46:32Speaker 00

  We are the, the OGs.

• 2:46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:46:34Speaker 00

  But we did, we did like create a little bit of civilization. Who, the Scots? Or the Italians? You know, how badass were the Scots?

• 2:46:42Speaker 01

  The Romans, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:43Speaker 00

  How badass were the Scots, though? Even the Romans couldn't handle that.

• 2:46:46Speaker 01

  Dude, so I live in, uh, so I live in North Carolina. North Carolina, this is, this was really cool.

• 2:46:51Speaker 00

  That.

• 2:46:51Speaker 01

  So North Carolina.

• 2:46:52Speaker 00

  I know exactly where you're going.

• 2:46:53Speaker 01

  The Scots-Irish people leave during the seventeen hundreds, come to North Carolina. And they, they find, like in the Piedmont, where it leads up to the Appalachian Mountains, looks so similar to the.

• 2:47:03Speaker 00

  To the Highlands.

• 2:47:04Speaker 01

  The Scottish Highlands.

• 2:47:04Speaker 00

  I know.

• 2:47:05Speaker 01

  Turns out, it's the same damn mountain range.

• 2:47:07Speaker 00

  Of course it is.

• 2:47:08Speaker 01

  The Appalachian Mountains and the Scottish Highlands are the same, are the same mountains.

• 2:47:11Speaker 00

  You didn't know that?

• 2:47:12Speaker 01

  And, and.

• 2:47:15Speaker 01

  And, and today, there are more Scottish descendants living in North Carolina than there are in Scotland.

• 2:47:20Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 2:47:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:47:22Speaker 00

  I, I, it's shocking to me that you guys don't know our, our history. When they film Scottish TV shows, they film them in North Carolina.

• 2:47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, why don't you know more about Scottish?

• 2:47:29Speaker 00

  You know more, dude? Why don't you know more? What food did the Scottish invent that's very popular in North Carolina? Do you know this one?

• 2:47:35Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 2:47:36Speaker 00

  Do you know this one? Nope. Do you know this one? Of course I do. Barbecue.

• 2:47:41Speaker 01

  Is it really?

• 2:47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna say fried chicken. We also did invent that. No, you didn't. We did invent fried chicken. We did invent fried chicken.

• 2:47:48Speaker 01

  How good is Braveheart?

• 2:47:50Speaker 00

  My mom took me when I was a kid and she was depressed for a week. She cried in the movie theater and then didn't talk to our family for two days.

• 2:47:58Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:47:59Speaker 00

  Swear to God.

• 2:47:59Speaker 02

  Wait, why not? What's your family have to do with it?

• 2:48:01Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:48:02Speaker 00

  She was going through it, bro. She was going through it. That movie, that was some serious shit. My family doesn't like the English to this day.

• 2:48:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. They ride for the Bonnie Prince Charles. They're like, they're...

• 2:48:12Speaker 01

  You know what's crazy is...

• 2:48:13Speaker 00

  Keep talking that shit, my boy. Keep talking that shit.

• 2:48:16Speaker 01

  It's probably the most, most of our English DNA is from Scots who, like, when the English are moving forward...

• 2:48:23Speaker 00

  And then what we did, what we did.

• 2:48:25Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So today, it's categorized as English DNA, but there's a significant amount of that Anglo-Scottish DNA.

• 2:48:32Speaker 00

  It's actually Scottish. And they tried to build that wall to keep us out.

• 2:48:35Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:48:36Speaker 00

  They tried to build two.

• 2:48:37Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:48:37Speaker 00

  Didn't stop it.

• 2:48:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:48:39Speaker 00

  And then, the English tried to pull a Aztec move. They tried to pull a little Aztec move to the Kwak'akans. They're like, "We'll marry you and then we'll be one nation together." And they just couldn't pull off murdering all of us. And they just had to blend the flags.

• 2:48:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:48:55Speaker 00

  And that's why the UK flag is the Scottish flag and the English flag together.

• 2:48:59Speaker 01

  We need to go back, we need to go back...

• 2:49:01Speaker 00

  You can't get us out of here, no matter what you do.

• 2:49:02Speaker 01

  We need to go back to the red lion on the, on the yellow banner, like Robert, Robert the Bruce.

• 2:49:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:09Speaker 02

  All right, what do you got for, because where's your ancestry from?

• 2:49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:49:12Speaker 02

  West Africa?

• 2:49:12Speaker 00

  Who's the Puerto Rican Braveheart?

• 2:49:15Speaker 00

  Who's the Puerto Rican Braveheart?

• 2:49:16Speaker 02

  Bad buddies.

• 2:49:17Speaker 01

  Mance Mousa.

• 2:49:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  Maybe that's your dude.

• 2:49:19Speaker 00

  Mance Mousa.

• 2:49:20Speaker 02

  You might be related to him. From Mali, from the Malian Empire, right?

• 2:49:24Speaker 00

  Definitely am, yeah. Why is nobody looking for Mance Mousa's gold? If he had all the gold and he's traveling all over Africa, there's gotta be some...

• 2:49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I probably stole that shit. Really?

• 2:49:34Speaker 00

  Come on now, we were in, we were in Scotland.

• 2:49:36Speaker 02

  How you gonna steal a guy's grill?

• 2:49:37Speaker 01

  He and I, he and I were barbarians.

• 2:49:40Speaker 00

  How you gonna steal a guy's grills? Yo, Johnny Dang is digging through the sand right now looking for it.

• 2:49:48Speaker 02

  That's racist, bro. They found Mance Mousa, and they're like, "Where's his gold?" He's like...

• 2:49:56Speaker 00

  Why don't we know more about Mansa Musa, Mark?

• 2:49:59Speaker 02

  We know about Mansa Musa.

• 2:50:00Speaker 00

  Why don't we know more?

• 2:50:02Speaker 02

  He was smart.

• 2:50:03Speaker 00

  Clearly, the guy was the richest guy in history.

• 2:50:05Speaker 02

  He developed a big like, uh, intellectual capital Alexandra type beat.

• 2:50:09Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:50:09Speaker 02

  Timbuktu.

• 2:50:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Is Timbuktu Mansa Musa?

• 2:50:12Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:50:13Speaker 00

  I thought Timbuktu was, uh, Nepal.

• 2:50:17Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 2:50:18Speaker 00

  I thought Timbuktu was-

• 2:50:18Speaker 02

  You're thinking Kathmandu.

• 2:50:19Speaker 00

  Kathmandu.

• 2:50:20Speaker 02

  Kathmandu.

• 2:50:22Speaker 00

  That one. Oh, so Timbuktu is his creation. That's his brainchild.

• 2:50:26Speaker 02

  I'm not think, you gotta, you gotta go to-

• 2:50:27Speaker 01

  Maybe he was born there, I don't know.

• 2:50:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:50:29Speaker 02

  No, no, I think he was born in like Bamako or some shit.

• 2:50:31Speaker 00

  Low key, we need it-

• 2:50:32Mark Gagnon?

  You gotta go to Africa next, yeah.

• 2:50:34Speaker 00

  What do you mean, Africa? He's been, let me show you the map.

• 2:50:37Speaker 02

  Not using it.

• 2:50:38Speaker 00

  Let me show you the map.

• 2:50:39Speaker 02

  Like, real Africa.

• 2:50:40Speaker 00

  That's Africa.

• 2:50:41Speaker 02

  Nah, real Africa.

• 2:50:42Speaker 00

  That's where civilization started.

• 2:50:44Speaker 01

  Have you ever done a DNA test? Do you know where your folks come from?

• 2:50:46Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah, I have Nigerian, Congo, and then a few other things. I got a little white in me.

• 2:50:55Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like 8%.

• 2:50:56Speaker 00

  You want a little more? You're 8% white?

• 2:50:58Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 2:50:59Speaker 00

  That's a lot.

• 2:51:00Speaker 02

  Hey, relax, relax.

• 2:51:01Speaker 00

  That's a lot.

• 2:51:02Speaker 01

  Do you know what it is? It's probably, it's probably like Spain or something.

• 2:51:06Speaker 02

  No, it's probably slave bastard. Whoa, whoa, dude, come on, why are you gonna bring that up, dude? What the hell?

• 2:51:12Speaker 00

  Probably.

• 2:51:13Speaker 02

  Nah.

• 2:51:13Speaker 00

  You, why you gotta do this to the mood? We're having fun talking about colonization and the eradication of cultures. And then you're gonna bring that up? That's insane.

• 2:51:21Speaker 02

  You want me to lie?

• 2:51:22Speaker 00

  Think about the Kwak'akans, what they went through.

• 2:51:24Speaker 01

  Have you guys ever talked about death this much on a-

• 2:51:27Speaker 00

  Oh, it's our favorite thing, dude.

• 2:51:29Speaker 01

  It's our last patron.

• 2:51:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have.

• 2:51:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is, that is very true. Okay, okay, okay, okay, we need to know about Atlantis, bro.

• 2:51:37Speaker 01

  Alright, let's do it.

• 2:51:37Speaker 00

  Let me just tell you something. I love this. I love hearing stories about ancient cultures and learning about history specifically through story.

• 2:51:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:51:46Speaker 00

  Like, learning the facts of history is interesting, but learning the, learning history through story, I don't care if it's like real or not. Oh my god, it's almost like, that's what people did before books.

• 2:51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:59Speaker 00

  Right? You just sat around and like, they told you what happened? And it just got a little bit more sexy and I think we kinda gotta get rid of the textbook shit. Like, I don't wanna learn the dates. I wanna learn the story and how it informs the dates.

• 2:52:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:12Speaker 01

  I totally agree, man. I totally agree.

• 2:52:14Speaker 00

  Oh, this is so lovely.

• 2:52:15Speaker 01

  I think that the best, I think that the best historians are able to- Not make it so sterile. That's kind of the, that's kind of the problem.

• 2:52:22Speaker 00

  Again, I'm not saying we shouldn't learn history, but like you can learn history through the oldest, uh, through the oldest medium of digesting and retaining information, which is story. Like our brains are like Yeah, but then it's a game of telephone and then by the time you get the What you think history is? Yeah, but if you put, put it down on books, then it's more accurate. You think FDR was really paralyzed? Come on, bro. Like, you gonna believe that? I do think he was. Nah. Yeah. Nah. You're just buying the propaganda. Yeah.

• 2:52:51Speaker 02

  Mark?

• 2:52:54Speaker 02

  He had a boner. Couldn't stand up.

• 2:52:55Speaker 00

  Definitely. Definitely. I had a few dollars. Come on, there's different things in history that we just accept. We just accept as reality and it's not the case. Give me any time in history and then Mark will tell you how it's Atlantis. Atlantis. They're gonna go off.

• 2:53:14Speaker 02

  I have one other crazy one about the Were Jaguar.

• 2:53:16Speaker 00

  Tell me about the Were Jaguar.

• 2:53:18Speaker 02

  But after Atlantis.

• 2:53:19Speaker 01

  Okay, after Atlantis. Alright, alright. So, so

• 2:53:22Speaker 00

  Before you start, I need you to give us what the idea of Atlantis is. Let's not, you know, just, just give us the idea of Atlantis in most people's heads. There's a

• 2:53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:33Speaker 00

  Hotel in the Bahamas. That's the Atlantis. Please, take my war.

• 2:53:37Speaker 01

  In most people's, in most people's minds,

• 2:53:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:53:40Speaker 01

  there was an island chain. Well, some people think it was the Azores, that this, that this, uh, ancient lost empire civilization, uh, existed on and it was like a, a city of concentric circles. You guys have probably seen this.

• 2:53:55Speaker 00

  Yes. Who said this? This is like Plato or some shit?

• 2:53:58Speaker 01

  This is Plato. He was in Athenian.

• 2:54:00Speaker 00

  He didn't see it. He heard from a guy. So this is secondhand.

• 2:54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're definitely

• 2:54:04Speaker 00

  And you want word of mouth shit. Word of mouth is fine, bro. The entirety of our friendship is word of mouth. Where else do words come from?

• 2:54:11Speaker 01

  That's a very Scottish idea. The, uh, the Scottish Celts didn't believe in writing down their custom. They believed in

• 2:54:17Speaker 00

  Well, you know, write that, I fucked three sheep to get, like, you don't want that, right? You just be like, a girl from Wales came.

• 2:54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But you know what was interesting is that, is that, uh, the Celts, who really the Scottish people come from, they were actually literate in all of the ancient languages.

• 2:54:35Speaker 00

  That's what I tell people.

• 2:54:35Speaker 01

  And they could read and write in all of them.

• 2:54:37Speaker 00

  I tell people this all the time.

• 2:54:38Speaker 01

  But they chose not to write in their own language.

• 2:54:39Speaker 00

  It was our choice.

• 2:54:40Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah.

• 2:54:42Speaker 00

  Doesn't that seem? Very calculated. Oh, we're a literate. We knew every single language.

• 2:54:46Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right, it's a fact.

• 2:54:47Speaker 00

  We knew all the languages. But that's not true. How is it not true? That's like him being like, "I speak Chinese." I'm like, "Prove it." You're like, "I just choose not to speak it." Yeah. Bro, I do speak it, and you know, and you've heard me speak it. You heard me speak it. Well, I don't know Chinese either, so I don't know if what you're saying is Chinese. One of my favorite accounts right now. I can't believe I haven't sent you this, and then we're gonna get to Atlantis. But there's a guy, and he's gotta be a polygot or something, because he's so good at it. But what he does is, and I wish I had his fucking name, maybe Joe, you can look it up for me, because I would love to credit him. He goes up to people in the street, I think he's in Paris or something like that. He goes up to different tourists. Is this an Asian dude? No, he's a white guy. But he goes up to the street, and he speaks fake their language.

• 2:55:32Speaker 00

  And he goes, "Where are you guys from? Where are you guys from?" And they're like, "Oh, we're from Japan." And he goes, "Okay, okay, okay, tell me this, tell me what I'm saying." And then he speaks the most perfect fake Japanese you've ever seen in your life. He'll do it with Chinese people.

• 2:55:45Speaker 01

  But he's gibberish.

• 2:55:45Speaker 00

  It's gibberish. But it's so close that they think his accent's bad. So they're like, really trying to figure it out. You know, and they're going, "Oh, no!" But it sounds so good. He's this like skinny white guy, he almost kind of looks Russian-y. Oh, you gotta see it. I can't believe I haven't sent you this. I just die laughing at this guy. That's so funny. Atlantis, okay.

• 2:56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so most people think it's this lost ancient empire. And I should say, what most people think about it isn't actually like really in line with what Plato said. It's just like, it evolves into our modern day mythology, right?

• 2:56:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:56:26Speaker 01

  Um, so, most people think it was, maybe it was out here, or maybe it was some, somewhere here in Africa, and that, you know, it, and that the Atlanteans built all of the major ancient structures you see around the world, like the stuff down in Cusco, and some stuff that you see out in Asia, whatever, whatever. Um, now, what Atlantis really was, was, um, I was just gonna make a joke.

• 2:56:48Speaker 00

  Do it, do it, do it.

• 2:56:49Speaker 01

  So what Atlantis-

• 2:56:50Speaker 00

  Just make it, make it.

• 2:56:51Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:56:52Speaker 00

  We can cut it.

• 2:56:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I was just gonna say, "Nothing."

• 2:56:57Speaker 01

  This is great. Why? No, I'm just kidding. Did you piss a lot of people off? No, it just sounded funny, but yeah, I didn't want to like... Insult Atlantis, conspiracy theories. So anyways, no, it wasn't actually nothing. I mean, you know, so Plato, his writings, you have to, you really kind of need to be a historian to sort of interpret what Plato is saying, or the context with which he's saying is so important. So Plato is an Athenian that lives in the late 400s, early 300s B.C. I believe that's right. He was, he was one of these young kids that was influenced by, or younger people that

• 2:57:42Speaker 01

  was influenced by the teachings of Socrates. But Socrates did not write down his teachings, he just spoke to people in the marketplace. One of his closest students was Plato. Well, Socrates was eventually put to death, I forget the year, maybe it was like 401 B.C. or something like that, but he, or maybe it was 399 B.C. He's put to death by the court of Athens for corrupting the youth and essentially suggesting that perhaps the Greek gods don't exist, because he's so deep down the rabbit hole of intellectual thought, that he's thought himself into being an agnostic, right? So Jordan Peterson. Sort of, yeah, yeah. And so he is, he's, he's put to death, and Plato spends the rest of his academic career

• 2:58:26Speaker 01

  in, you know, writing his philosophies down and teaching people, essentially telling people the, the stories and the points, the philosophical points that Plato, that Socrates was making throughout Socrates' life. So all of Plato's written philosophy is not like Aristotle, where if you were to read the Nicomachean Ethics, it is, which... That's just like Aristotle's writings of how to be a good person, right? How to treat other people. It's Aristotle speaking directly to you. It's just you and Aristotle. But Plato creates these plays, almost like a scene, where you've got Socrates and you've

• 2:59:09Speaker 01

  got these other characters and they're interacting with Socrates. And the characters ask Socrates questions and Socrates answers them. Well, some of those lessons are Plato's ideas, his own, putting them in Socrates' mouth. And some of them are ideas that Socrates gave Plato and Plato puts it back in Socrates' mouth, right? So in Plato's writings, they talk about this lost city of Atlantis at various different times. And so essentially, the chain of custody of the story is that Solon, an Athenian lawmaker in the 600s B.C. or early 500s B.C., he's an Athenian lawmaker that basically goes on this vacation for, I think, a decade. And he eventually goes to Egypt. And when he's in Egypt, he's taken to the...

• 2:59:54Speaker 01

  I think that Sais was the capital at the time because it was the Sait empire or the Sait kingdom. And so he's taken to the city of Sais where he meets a priest. And the priest essentially tells him about this, about when Athens was at war with this ancient civilization called Atlantis at one point in time. The whole story is told to Solon supposedly in the 600s in Egypt. Solon goes back from Egypt. He goes back up to Athens. He lives the rest of his life. He tells that story to some people. And over the course of much more than 100 years, almost 200 years, the story supposedly comes all the way down to Plato.

• 3:00:34Speaker 01

  And then Plato is the first one to write that down inside a philosophical story that's telling like a bigger tale that's more relevant to the Athenians. And so people take that story. And basically what the story is, is there was this ancient civilization that existed in a certain place. Just insert all the descriptions that he adds of Athens or of Atlantis. And that Atlantis rises and that it's at war with Athens and that Athens eventually defeated Atlantis, you know, some 9,000 years ago, according to what Solon says that the Egyptians told him.

• 3:01:12Speaker 01

  9,000 years before, which would be 9,600 B.C. And then, and then this massive like cataclysmic wave washed over the city of Atlantis and sunk it into the depths of the sea, right? And so the moral of the story is that this civilization was so powerful and so wealthy and so successful that it essentially spoiled itself and it lost all of the original foundations of what had made it great, which allowed Athens to conquer the city and then eventually the gods destroyed. It's about greed, really. It's about greed, yeah. And so, and so he is telling, the reason that Plato is telling that story is to be a reminder to the Athenian people who you should strive, who you should strive to be, right?

• 3:01:56Speaker 01

  Um, now, people have, people sort of, most people sort of ignore why Plato is telling this story and then they just focus on Atlantis. And so that has led us on this huge rabbit hole hunt. Now, here's the thing is, I, some people, just because they're so caught up in the story of Atlantis, they sort of take Plato as like a, some kind of biblical figure, right? Where, where you have to hang on every word and every precise description of what he's saying about this place, or the story that he is relaying, right? Um, but in reality, no classical Greek author would ever do that. Because Greeks are notoriously the worst historians in the entire ancient world because there are no old Greeks.

• 3:02:41Speaker 01

  The Greeks lost their memory. The Egyptians know that the Greeks don't know anything about their ancient past. So whenever the Greeks in classical periods are writing down about their, about their past, they never are. That's why there's so much Greek mythology. They're, so they're always, they're always making up some kind of story. Everything is lore. Yeah, and so even by- And that's what you want. And that's why we love them. And so even by- It's the most interesting. 450 B.C., where all that power is kind of culminating and they're really coming together, they're really writing a lot, they have modern historians like Thucydides that's writing down the Peloponnesian War. And he tells it in a, in a, like as honest as he can be, uh, the best historian of his contemporary time, and he was a good historian of his contemporary time.

• 3:03:25Speaker 01

  But it was really difficult for the Greeks to reach back in time because it was such a hazy, like they don't really understand their distant past. So Plato's existing here in 450 B.C. And he's relaying a message from Solon who lived in the 600s. Even people who lived in the 600s are semi-mythical legendary people to people in the 400s, because the Greeks don't really have a historical chronology that they can follow very well. It's all kind of oral tradition and not so much of it was written down. So you wouldn't even take a Greek who's writing about his world just 150 or 200 years earlier seriously, because everything else that they write about that was happening in the 600s is wildly inaccurate according to what we found in the archaeological data.

• 3:04:10Speaker 01

  Now, does that mean that, does that mean that the entire story of Atlantis is bullshit? Well, no. I, I think that there are kernels of reality that are, things that actually happened in the Greek world that exist in legend and they still remember and kind of know about, but maybe, you know, it's, these are stories you grow up hearing about, but things that really did happen. Like, for, for centuries, archaeologists questioned whether or not the city of Troy, that was in Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey, was even a real city, let alone did the Trojan War even happen? Well, then, I think it's, I think it's a Schliemann, or Schliemann finds the city of Troy right here near the gates to the Black Sea. And then they find the city of Troy and they realize that it was real. And this whole time, the Greeks were able to like, hold on to

• 3:04:54Speaker 01

  the story of the end of the Bronze Age. That, that, that war was probably about 1150. And then surely after that, Bronze Age collapses. That's a cataclysmic collapse. Every, all the civilizations fall apart. They abandon the cities and everyone goes back to being nomadic, like farmers, right? So they lose their whole cultural memory. But maybe some of those grand stories survive. Clearly, the Trojan War, that this, there was a grand event that, that survived and eventually was written down by Homer, whoever Homer really was.

• 3:05:24Speaker 01

  Now, the first thing that I think that Plato was drawing on when he wrote about Atlantis was there was a city called Helike that was on the coast of, that was on the Greek coast, just a bit north of, of Athens, I believe. And in- 373 B.C. There was an earthquake somewhere in the Aegean and it cast this huge wave over the city and sunk the entire city. And so, just like, you know, in one day, all these people, all these people are drowned. That had happened about 13 years approximately before the story of Atlantis appears in Athens and Plato was talking about it. So, there's this, there's this story of this flood that's sitting in the back of his mind.

• 3:06:04Speaker 01

  But even more so than that, the Greeks definitely would have remembered a much, much, much, much more dramatic cataclysmic event that happened further back in, in time for them. And it was the first civilization of ancient Greeks. So, right here in the mainland and across these islands, this is, this is classical ancient Greeks. But really, it started here on this little island called Crete. And there was a civilization there called the Minoans. We don't know much about the Minoans. They existed before the time of the Trojan War, long before that. But on this island right here, this island is called the Island of a Hundred Cities.

• 3:06:45Speaker 01

  And there's all these big, super-rich, like, palisade cities that dot the entire island. And the cities will be like, three to four stories tall, these huge labyrinthine palaces. It's the kind of architecture that you did not see in ancient Egypt. You didn't see it anywhere. It's the kind of public architecture that was possibly never recreated until Roman public architecture, like the Roman forums, you know, these big, multi-level buildings for people to be walking around in. They had, they had marble private toilets up on their fourth floors. They had like indoor plumbing. They had, they had aqueducts that ran throughout the cities and brought fresh water, water into the cities. I mean, the most sophisticated...

• 3:07:31Speaker 01

  Ancient culture of the Bronze Age by far. If one of those, if an average person living on Crete traveled to Egypt, he'd be walking around Egypt thinking this place was a fucking dump. And this place right here, the center of the Mediterranean, obviously, the center of all the trade routes. They were, they were a seafaring empire. And they were filthy, filthy, filthy rich. From about the years, let's say 2000 B.C. Maybe, well, definitely before that because they were interacting with the Egyptians during the time that the Egyptians were building the pyramids. They're, these guys are here. But let's, let's say from the earliest times, maybe like 2500 B.C. At the very, very, very earliest times, all the way to,

• 3:08:14Speaker 01

  let's say like 1450 B.C., 1400 B.C. So they've got this, maybe a 600, 800 year period where they're just the kings of the Eastern Mediterranean. Well, they had this little island north of that. And in ancient times, the island is called Thera. In modern day times, it's called Santorini. I don't know if you guys have ever been. So there are ruins on Santorini. It's a city called Accretiri. And Accretiri was one of the most elaborate and wealthy cities throughout all of the Minoan world. It was where, it was kind of like Pompeii. Like Pompeii was a, was a vacation retreat for the rich people of Rome to go and gamble and have sex and party. And if you lived in Pompeii, you were super wealthy, right?

• 3:08:59Speaker 01

  Well, Accretiri was very, very similar to that. It was the wealthiest people of Minoan society are living there. Well, about the year 1600 B.C. The fourth largest volcanic eruption in the history of the entire planet erupted out of the island of Santorini. And blackened the skies of the, of the Aegean Sea and the nearby Mediterranean for days at a time. The, the, uh, the, um,

• 3:09:28Speaker 01

  What expelled out of the volcano was so significant that there might even be records from the same time in Egypt of phenomena happening in Egypt that was affecting their weather. And a lot of, some people even theorized that the effects, because we found the pumice from the volcano in Egypt. And some people wonder if the, if the plagues of Exodus were not caused by the eruption of Santorini. And so it was such a cataclysmic eruption, it instantly buried the city of Akrotiri in like dozens of feet of volcanic, of volcanic material and ash that hardened over time. And then it blackened the sky over the main island of Crete for days at a time.

• 3:10:11Speaker 01

  Now, a lot of people thought that the whole city of Crete, when they first found the first palace at Canosus, and then they started excavating all, you know, these dozens of other palaces, they would find this thin burn layer that came from 1600 B.C., about, about when the volcano erupted. And it was, it was kind of an anomaly, because nobody understood, like, why is it such a thin burnt layer? Why is it not just cataclysmic, like raining down on, on the island? Because all 100 cities burned down at the, at the exact same time, across the entire island, the whole island like fell apart. Well, nobody really understood why. And, but there's a theory that's, that's proposed that I think is kind of interesting, that when it blackened the sky, every single person on the island

• 3:10:56Speaker 01

  had to pull out their torches and their candles. And so while it's absolute chaos, it's hard to get food, you can't go to the market, you don't know what's happening. I mean, the sun isn't even coming back up anymore. The smoke is like coming down over the cities and everything. It's absolute chaos. People burned down their own cities because, because you, just the chaos. So there's this thin burn layer over the entire island. So all the cities burned down at exactly the same time in the midst of all this chaos. Then, it's not like Minoan culture disappears, but it, but over the next 100 years, it slips into control of the Mycenaeans, which is like Agamemnon, the guys who waged war on Troy. They came in and wiped out the people, the Minoans who were living in the islands.

• 3:11:41Speaker 01

  Who were living in the islands and then were living on the main island. Just wipe them out, basically consume their whole culture. They rebuilt the Palace of Knosis, but that's it. All other 99 some odd buildings or some odd cities stayed burned down. And the Mycenaeans built up new ones. Now, these guys had ruled over the whole Greek world for the last 800 years. Okay. Their, their principal, uh, I don't want to call it a deity, but like their cultural monster, the thing that you would use to identify them. Whereas like some later Greek cultures, it might be, uh, it might be like Medusa or something like that. Um, for them, it was the Minotaur, the, the, the bull headed man or just a, a bull's head.

• 3:12:25Speaker 01

  So what's really interesting is when Plato is talking about the city of Athens crushing Atlantis. And then Atlantis gets destroyed in this huge cataclysm, this big wave, whatever, whatever. One of the things that's analogous to that and that, and that is kind of in the back of the Athenian mind, their mythology is this, is this myth of Theseus or Theseus and the Minotaur. But they don't, but the Athenians may not even know who the Minoans ever were, because this is such an ancient civilization that's been buried for so long and, and, and in ruins. But one of their core mythologies is Theseus, this Athenian

• 3:13:10Speaker 01

  rising up and going off to this distant land and killing, killing the Minotaur, right? But then along with that, you have Athens rising up and going and killing Atlantis. Okay. Athens was controlled by the Mycenaeans who then swept into the Minoan area. So Athens during the Bronze Age was a Mycenaean city who went into the land of the Minotaur and conquered, and conquered them. And one of the modern comparisons that you get for Atlantis that a lot of people will make is, some people will go, well, you know, I don't think that Atlantis had like space age technology that's more advanced than us. But I think that they were probably maybe like on par with the Roman Empire. That's what, you know, but it's like a global Roman Empire.

• 3:13:52Speaker 01

  Well, after the Minoans fell, the only civilization that would ever reach the illustrious level of the Minoans again was the Minoan, or was the Roman Empire. Some thousand or 15, 1600 years, years later. And so what I think that

• 3:14:10Speaker 01

  Plato is drawing on is this story that sits somewhere deep in the subconsciousness of the Greek world, of the greatest richest empire that the ancient world ever saw, far more, like the average person, far more wealthy than an Egyptian. They didn't have the same kind of huge temples, whatever, whatever, but the, but the way of life, far superior to, to an Egyptian, or anybody else. These guys controlled all the trade routes of the Mediterranean, especially of the Greek world, and then, and then the fourth largest volcanic eruption in world history, basically brought down the end of their civilization. In fact, I ran the numbers on it. I might get this, the categorization of, of the energy

• 3:14:51Speaker 01

  expelled, but the bombs that we dropped on Japan were 15, can be measured as 15 kilo tons of energy that was expelled from the bomb. This volcano was 30 million kilo tons of energy. That's how, that's how.

• 3:15:07Speaker 03

  Oh shit.

• 3:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how cataclysmic something like this, something like this was. So you can imagine that something like that sits permanently in the back of the minds of a Greek person. And so I think in Plato's Atlantis, you have these kernels of truth. You have, you have, this, this was actually Europe's first ancient civilization, Crete. So they, so the, the Minoans of Crete. So the Greeks definitely remember it. They definitely remember the dramatic events that led to them being destroyed. They remember the Mycenaeans, which had colonized Athens. The, uh, the Athenians, um, like core principal mythological figure is Theseus, who was an Athenian, but also, also a Mycenaean as well, who went into the

• 3:15:51Speaker 01

  land of the Minotaur and killed the Minotaur, basically. And, uh, so yeah, I think, I think that that is what Plato was drawing on. And that's a, that's a, like, you know, it's a, it's an actual, like, robust archaeological idea, rather than, they like, you know, sometimes I just. Sometimes I get tired of like talking about the mystery with no actual theories. You know what I mean? And so that's sort of if I have to put a theory as to what I think it is.

• 3:16:17Speaker 00

  Does anybody other, does anybody else share this viewpoint on it?

• 3:16:21Speaker 01

  There are archaeologists who agree and then there are archaeologists who like.

• 3:16:25Speaker 00

  Completely.

• 3:16:26Speaker 01

  Out and out completely disagree because they say, because they say, well, oh, and you know, you know, what's really interesting is, uh, well, they say how Atlantis was like a circular sort of island or whatever. Well, Santorini, even before it erupted, was a circular island. Like it was a circular island with, with water in the middle. You can look up the way like it's, it's geologic or geographic formation, but it was a circular island. But there's all kinds of different discrepancies, right? Like, uh, where it says that Atlantis was beyond the pillars of Hercules. Well, this is supposed to be the pillar of Hercules, the Strait of Gibraltar. It's supposed to be out here and the geology that they described there isn't the same as what it would be on Crete. And then they say that Atlantis had elephants or whatever.

• 3:17:07Speaker 01

  Now, one of the things that's really interesting is that there is a miniature African elephant that used to exist on, on Crete.

• 3:17:13Speaker 00

  A pygmy elephant or something like that?

• 3:17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I maybe didn't live on Crete at the same time as the Minoans.

• 3:17:20Speaker 00

  Oh, this is Santorini?

• 3:17:21Speaker 01

  But there were bones of these mini elephants.

• 3:17:24Speaker 00

  On the, uh.

• 3:17:25Speaker 01

  Found down inside the caves that definitely the Minoans would have known about. So there's all these little clues that like, it's the Athenians having this really fuzzy memory of the ancient past of the Greek world. And he's like explaining it in such a way where Athenians will listen to him and what he's saying, right? But there are kernels of truth in there. And I think that it's at least the city of Heliiki and the Minoan civilization falling apart. And maybe it's other things, but I think that it's Plato drawing on different things that he was aware of growing up and telling this story that is particularly relevant to the Athenians. This, who, the Athenians at this point are, have now become the new Minoans. They, they rule.

• 3:18:10Speaker 01

  They rule the seas, they rule all the trade routes. They're just like the Minoans. And so Plato is telling a new story that they'll listen to, right?

• 3:18:18Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 3:18:19Speaker 01

  So it's a, so it's partly-

• 3:18:21Speaker 02

  It's all little, like, the pieces of truth. It's like, well, there was a battle. Where the Athenians did defeat this really wealthy culture.

• 3:18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:28Speaker 02

  By proxy.

• 3:18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:29Speaker 02

  But they did. And then there was this cataclysm that did destroy the culture. It wasn't a flood, but there was a flood nearby, but this one technically wasn't a flood, it was a volcano that also caused the plagues.

• 3:18:38Speaker 01

  Well, well, and when Santorini erupted, it did push a tsunami down into Crete. It did, it did mess up some of these cities on the north side of the island. But most of the destruction was, is that, is that small burn layer that they think was from people accidentally lighting their own towns on fire.

• 3:18:54Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 3:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:55Speaker 02

  Fuck. And then Plato writes a story about greed and not being too greedy. And then ironically, people create these, like, entire internet profiles trying to find Atlantis.

• 3:19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:19:07Speaker 02

  Purely for the, purely for money, yeah.

• 3:19:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I haven't thought about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, so yeah, that's a, I'm, I'm, um, later this year, I'm, I'm doing expedition to, uh, Crete. I'm gonna write a, I'm gonna write a book called, uh, called, uh, Lost Cities of the Minotaur. And, uh, it's gonna be, it's gonna be the theory, like, kinda getting into it and explaining, like, if we're gonna come up with an actual archaeological explanation.

• 3:19:32Speaker 02

  This could be it.

• 3:19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:19:33Speaker 02

  Mark has been to Crete. Yeah.

• 3:19:35Speaker 01

  Have you really?

• 3:19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Went to Hania.

• 3:19:37Speaker 01

  Really?

• 3:19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was amazing. It's unbelievable.

• 3:19:39Speaker 01

  Did you go see Knossos, like, the palace or anything?

• 3:19:41Speaker 02

  No. It's one of the most interesting places of all time. Cause like, even within semi-modern history, it was controlled by everyone. Like, it was like, the Greeks had it, the North Africans had it, the Nazis had it, Jews had it. Like, there's like-

• 3:19:55Speaker 01

  Really? I didn't know that.

• 3:19:56Speaker 02

  The oldest synagogues in Greece, I'm pretty sure, in Crete, cause there was an exile where they told all the Jews to go over there. And so there's like, a Muslim section, Christian section, Jewish section, the food is amazing, the Turks owned it for a period of time. And it's like, maybe the best food ever had, because it's this influx of like, Greek food, Turkish food, it's got like, this insane freshness, and they also have- Ideology where they're like really proud. Like the Cretans are like, we're not Greek.

• 3:20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're Greek.

• 3:20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, like low key, like they're like, yeah, we're Greek, but like, no, we don't. Like I asked, we had dinner and every time we had dinner, I was like, where's the farthest piece of food on the plate? And they'd be like, ah, the goat cheese. I was like, how far? They're like, other side of the island. I was like, nothing's from the mainland? They're like, no. Why would we drink wine from Athens? It's like, we have the best wine in the world on Crete. It makes no sense.

• 3:20:44Speaker 00

  Really?

• 3:20:45Speaker 02

  They were so proud. They're almost like Texans. It's also the highest gun ownership and maybe like all of southern. Yeah, they all have like shotguns and shit.

• 3:20:53Speaker 00

  I mean, when you're, you know, invaded like a hundred different times in history, self-defense is probably pretty important for our culture.

• 3:20:59Speaker 02

  People call them like the Texas of Southern Europe.

• 3:21:02Speaker 00

  I did not know this.

• 3:21:03Speaker 02

  That's what people say.

• 3:21:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's good for your book, my boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:21:06Speaker 02

  I'll write the floor.

• 3:21:07Speaker 00

  I may have to use you as a, as a resource.

• 3:21:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 3:21:10Speaker 00

  Brother, I don't want you to miss your flight. We could talk for hours. We will do it again some.

• 3:21:15Speaker 02

  This is so fun.

• 3:21:15Speaker 00

  This is so awesome. Thank you so much. I still got plenty of time. You do? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there anything else you want to go over before we get out of here?

• 3:21:25Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 3:21:26Speaker 02

  I mean, the where Jaguar thing.

• 3:21:28Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Finish on this one.

• 3:21:29Speaker 02

  The fun way to set this up is that at a certain point in Central American history, there were people that were born with a very specific disability or a birth malformation, you could say. And they were deified.

• 3:21:44Speaker 00

  Because of it.

• 3:21:45Speaker 02

  And raised to a high status within the culture because of this disability, because it looked like something else.

• 3:21:51Speaker 00

  Oh, no way.

• 3:21:53Speaker 02

  Is that a fair way to set it up? Maybe it's sensationalizing a little.

• 3:21:56Speaker 00

  No, no, it's right. It's right. Yeah, so, um, the first time that Europeans. Is this going where I think it's going? I don't know. Is it the captain of the ship? Is it going that way? Oh, my God. Is it going that way? No, no, no. So, uh, so, phew.

• 3:22:17Speaker 01

  Dastardly dog. No, no, no, no. So, um, so, let's say, there...

• 3:22:27Speaker 01

  I'm gonna give this example and then we'll go back. In ancient Greeks, if a kid was born with a birth defect, you would walk them to the top of a mountain and you'd lay them on the mountain. People will say that, like, threw them off the mountain. No, they would just lay the child on top of the mountain, and it's called exposure. You would expose the kid to the elements, give him back to the gods, because you can't afford to take care of someone who's lame, right? Like, someone who has a birth defect, that's not gonna be able to be like a participating part of society, that's gonna hold you back. Can't do that. Also, the Greeks, and which permeates into the rest of the European world, we care about aesthetics. You know, like, you would like your kid to be born

• 3:23:06Speaker 01

  fully anatomically normal and healthy, and, uh, and so they really prioritize that. But, when the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec capital, uh, in Motecumã's palace, when they got up into his palace, they saw that his palace was filled with people of all different kinds of deformities and strange, like, people who were so deformed that they were almost like creatures, almost like they had been bred to be that way. Like, they were really, really strange people. And, uh, and this surprised the Spaniards that these were like venerated people that Motecumã wanted to hang out with. He saw them as being blessed by the gods, that there was something, there was something unique and important about them. They saw this with, uh, with like dwarves, like dwarves would, uh, dwarves would have high status,

• 3:23:50Speaker 01

  because they would look as people who were touched by the gods, that maybe they were clairvoyant of some kind, or, you know, there's something special and different about them. So the Native Americans had this inverted view of deformities and things like that. Well, in the Olmec world, this is my personal theory, I don't know that there's a single other scholar on the planet of like the 12 of us that there are for the Olmec world that would agree with this. But, uh, in the Olmec world... You see, there are no gods. There's no pantheon of gods. All we see is ancestor worship. And then we see some people who have the anatomical features of a jaguar. Sometimes it's only their teeth. Sometimes they're like fully a jaguar.

• 3:24:32Speaker 01

  Like they're a person with jaguar claws and they've got fangs and their nose has changed into a jaguar. And they've got like cat eyes and everything. And so throughout the Olmec world, you can see this thing that has been dubbed like a werewolf, the ware jaguar. And it's these, what I think it is when I interpret it. So like you look at the Olmec heads. We could pull up an Olmec head if we're here. So you look at the Olmec heads, they interpret these as being kings or rulers. You never, ever, ever see an Olmec head who is also a ware jaguar. So, and there's about 17 of these basalt heads. But there's thousands of examples of, if we could look up ware jaguar,

• 3:25:15Speaker 01

  it's W E R E and then jaguar. You'd put in Olmecs or something. So there are thousands, oh wow, there's a lot of drawings here. Let's do, if you put the word jade behind it.

• 3:25:31Speaker 01

  So this will bring up, there we go. So any one of these will do. So there are thousands and thousands and thousands of these examples of these artifacts of people who are ware jaguars. And you can tell that there are people with anatomical features of a large cat.

• 3:25:49Speaker 00

  Is this, is this Asians reaching Mesoamerica?

• 3:25:54Speaker 01

  Well, well, Mesoamericans, they are, they are Asian. They're Asiatic in general.

• 3:26:01Speaker 02

  And all the jade though is like coming from this kingdom.

• 3:26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, actually, all of, all of the Olmec gold actually came from that Maya city I was telling you about with those giant pyramids that began at the beginning of their time at El Mirador in the middle of the jungle. That was how El Mirador got so rich, was the jade quarries that were nearby. And they were selling them to the Olmecs. And so they were using that money, the Maya were using that money to build up their civilization. Now,

• 3:26:29Speaker 01

  What's really interesting about the Olmec realm? And what got me thinking about this idea of people being born with deformities? And this maybe having something to do with that. Could we look up Olmec baby statues? So there are all these statues of Olmec babies that you can tell are not anatomically normal children. They're children that are, I don't know if they're, uh... Yeah. The one that's on the right at the bottom. Yeah, with the blue background. If we can zoom into that one. So, a lot of these babies are born with like little cleft lips and they're real fat and chubby. They look like babies that have like downs or they have something, you know, there's something wrong with them.

• 3:27:14Speaker 01

  Or as western people would say.

• 3:27:18Speaker 01

  And so, uh, but you see thousands of these baby statues, like these babies are being revered. Why would we have baby statues? Well, just my theory. Uh, and one of the only, actually, one of the only skeletons that we have ever found of the Olmec world is a baby. Uh, we hardly ever find adult skeletons. But what I wonder is if when children were born with deformities, they were revered and they were seen as being touched by the gods and they were honored with these little statues. Like maybe their parents would have them commissioned when they would die. And maybe a lot of children, well, we know in general that a lot of, that a lot of children died in ancient times. Infant mortality was extremely high. Five out of, out of seven of Marcus Aurelius's children died, I'm pretty sure, uh, in, in

• 3:28:03Speaker 01

  childhood. But the, all of these babies look like they may have some kind of, that look like they may have some kind of condition. Now, what I wonder is when you look at Olmec artifacts, um, can we, can we look up, uh, maybe look up Laventa, L-A, and then L-A-V-E-N-T-A? But there's this scene here of like, uh, maybe a couple dozen people who all have wear jaguar, um... Features about them. And you'll see in lots of other scenes where you just see these massive groups of people who have these, uh, yeah, so you see the, yeah, that right there, that gathering of people. So this is like a, this is really, really cool. These are statues that are a screenshot in time.

• 3:28:47Speaker 01

  So those big pillars standing next to them, those are known as stele and they had carvings on them. Well, we found those stele in the, in the jungles or like in the ruins of the city of La Venta and then they found this cache here. And what this cache is showing is these ware jaguar people walking in front of a stele in like a, uh, in a, in a procession, some kind of ancient ritual. It's like a screenshot of their world, but we don't, obviously we don't know the context or understand what's going on here. But the point I'm getting across is that the Olmec heads themselves, which always depict normal looking men are vastly, vastly outnumbered by the amount of artifacts that depict people with ware jaguar features.

• 3:29:30Speaker 01

  And so what I start wondering here is, well, my, my first thought was, okay, this is a whole different class of people. You clearly have kings that never looked like ware jaguars and you have all of these ware jaguar people who are, they're like priests or something. They're like involved in the shamanic realm. And, uh, so I started wondering,

• 3:29:53Speaker 01

  are they, are there people being born with deformities in their world? Is this some kind of deformity that they like revered and it gave you the right to be a part of the priest class? So I started looking into, um, to mid 1900s Veracruz, Mexico, which is the heart of the Olmec world. And in the 1970s, there was one, uh, medical survey done that showed that a disproportionate amount of indigenous kids had, uh, what's known as ectodermal dysplasia compared to, uh, these were kids that were in small villages, uh, in, in Veracruz, not living actually in the city of Veracruz. And what ectodermal dysplasia is, it is a disability that does not come with, with a learning disability.

• 3:30:37Speaker 01

  So you're still fully there, but it's, it's a, it's a complete dental disability where you don't grow any teeth in your gums other than two fangs right here. Look up ectodermal dysplasia fangs, do that. So look at that. So kids would be born like this and with, without a learning disability and it would look like. They had the teeth of a jaguar of some kind.

• 3:30:59Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 3:31:00Speaker 01

  And so what I wonder is were the Olmecs not trying to genetically like breed people who looked like this? And if you were born with ectodermal dysplasia.

• 3:31:10Speaker 00

  That gave you higher status.

• 3:31:11Speaker 01

  Gave you higher status and you were born with some kind of intrinsic power.

• 3:31:14Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 3:31:15Speaker 01

  The thing on top of this is there are all these things called Were Jaguar altars. If we could look up altar for Olmec.

• 3:31:23Speaker 01

  We have all these Were Jaguar altars that we know that Were Jaguar priests would like sit on top of it. But the depiction, so you could go to, so that one right there, if you can, if you could possibly zoom in on that. So that is a, that is a Were Jaguar priest with an elongated skull underneath that hat. He's carrying a baby and he's emerging from a portal, which is actually a cave. These caves are in Guerrero, Mexico. That, that baby, when you stand over him, I've been, I've been to this, to this site many, many times. That baby, when you stand over him, he's got these downturned lips like a cat. He's got fangs coming out of his mouth and so does the man carrying him. And what I think this depicts is a sacred procession

• 3:32:08Speaker 01

  that is symbolizing the priest who would actually be sitting on top of this monument, like this powerful priest. The image below him is a screenshot of his sacred procession that he went through as a child, being carried in and out of the caves of Guerrero, Mexico. And it's like the procession that when he was born as a Were Jaguar, he was taken on and essentially imbued with the power of the Were Jaguar and came, and came back out. And so from, this is, this is all just my theory. And I think that we see examples of, like in ancient Egypt, how we see that the pharaohs were warring against the priests because the priests had become super powerful. You see the same thing in the Olmec realm. You'll see Olmec heads. Lots of archaeologists can determine the way that something is buried.

• 3:32:52Speaker 01

  If it's buried immediately because the stratigraphic layers are all messed up. They don't form naturally, they form like immediately and geologists can tell that, archaeologists can tell that. And so a lot of the Olmec heads were buried instantly. In the tops of some of the heads, in the backs of them, and sometimes the faces, have claw marks on them, like intentional claw marks that are chiseled in. But each claw mark is a space of your hand away from each other. So it's like an aesthetic figure of a jaguar slicing this Olmec king's face open, or the top of his head, or the emblem that's in the top of his helmet, open. And what I think it was, is there were periods where the Were Jaguar priestly class would probably overcome and assassinate and kill the kings, bury their heads under the ground, cut it up as a statement to everybody

• 3:33:37Speaker 01

  that the Were Jaguars predominant. And then there's these warring classes back and forth with each other. How long ago would this be? This is, uh, this is over 3,000 years ago. And this is, this is, um, this is America's first civilization. The Olmecs. Yeah, and, um, so the Olmecs rise and fall in- Before- Before anything else is really going on. So they rise and they fall. And then about the time they fall is when the Maya start taking off, and then the Zapatecs start taking off. So, um, oh yeah, so that's, uh, that's Matthew Sterling next to, uh, next to the main head at La Benta. You see all those markings on the top of his head? Yeah, yeah. So my thought is, they would, they would push that head down into the ground

• 3:34:19Speaker 01

  and carve up the top of it and maybe leave it exposed as a statement that the Were Jaguars had taken over. Wow. Um, but later on in Olmec civilization, like their last capital city of Tracy Potes, the Were Jaguar is gone. So the Olmec heads, the, the kingdom, or whatever it is, the non-Were Jaguar class wins out. They expelled the Were Jaguar people, they ultimately win.

• 3:34:41Speaker 01

  And then so, what's crazy about the Olmecs is they're, they are just like the Minoans, which is probably why I'm interested in the Minoans. They are the most powerful civilization of their region. They rise and fall before really anything else is going on. And we don't know their name. The reason that we call the Minoans the Minoans, I'll tell you the origins of both their names, is because we name them after maybe, or at least what, uh, Greek, um-

• 3:35:11Speaker 01

  Greek mythology tells us about the ancient lost kings of Crete, or one of them, his name was Minos, which may have just been the title of what it meant to be a king on Crete. So when Sir Arthur Evans finds the palace of Knossos, he just calls them, rather than after Minos, he calls them the Minos. The Olmecs are people who live right here, but when the Spaniards were going through Mexico, 3,000 years after the Olmecs were around, they're probably what, the Olmecs are so old that the Aztecs probably never even knew the Olmecs had existed. But the Spaniards are asking, they're learning everything about Mexico, and the Aztecs still know that the people who live in this land that farm rubber are the rubber people,

• 3:35:56Speaker 01

  but that translates in Nahuatl to Olmecus. So they just name the ancient people after the name of the modern people. But the Olmecs had risen and fallen before the Maya had really, really gotten started. And so we don't know the name of the Olmecs, we don't know what language they spoke, we don't know what they called themselves, we don't know their history. All we can do is look at the artifact record and try to put puzzle pieces together.

• 3:36:21Speaker 02

  Fuck.

• 3:36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36:22Speaker 02

  It's just so crazy, the idea of going back in time, seeing this shamanic ritual with this ware jaguar priest. He's standing on top of this altar, he has ectodermal dysplasia, these two teeth coming out. It's like in the middle of the night, it's like rainy, you can hear the forest over you. And he's standing on top of this giant sculpture of himself as a baby getting brought out of a portal by the priests before him. And he's basically telling the people like, yo, we're gonna kill the kings. And he's got these fangs, and you're just like, what the fuck?

• 3:36:50Speaker 01

  Imagine, man.

• 3:36:51Speaker 02

  Like, what an insane thing to go back in time and see.

• 3:36:54Speaker 01

  No less complicated, dramatic, nuanced, or intelligent than any of the other ancient civilizations that we've known about. This is, you know, when you imagine all those conversations that Greek and Roman politicians must have been having with each other when both their lives are on the line politically, same thing's happening in the Olmec world. It's just, we don't have a record of it. But must have been, you know, these aren't primitive people to be able to erect... So those megalithic heads come from 100 kilometers as the bird flies, or as the crow flies away, and they have to be transported, they think possibly through the Gulf Coast a little bit, down into the Coatzacoalcoas River, over swamps and down

• 3:37:39Speaker 01

  through valleys and stuff, and they've never been able to figure out like how big the boats had to be to transport them. There was this nautical engineer that worked with Maya Exploration Center, which is the center I'm a part of, and he created this like algorithm thing where you could put in the hypothetical size of your Olmec head and the hypothetical size of the raft that it would be sitting on, and if you put in the hypothetical size of, say, if you created a raft that was too long to be able to go down the narrow stretches of the river that they would be moving these heads down, and you put a five-ton head on that raft, it would flip the raft and sink it. But the smallest head is six tons and

• 3:38:24Speaker 01

  the largest head is 50 tons.

• 3:38:26Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 3:38:27Speaker 02

  50?

• 3:38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's just, you have, yes, 50. And so you have all these mysteries that are so similar to Egypt, but most people don't talk about it or know anything about it.

• 3:38:36Speaker 00

  You never hear anything about the Olmecs.

• 3:38:38Speaker 02

  A crafted stone sculpture that's 50 tons, made 3,000 years ago.

• 3:38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:38:43Speaker 02

  It's really remarkable.

• 3:38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and some of the main ones are, I think, I think they're about three, yeah, yeah, they're about 3,500 years old, 3,200 years old. Yeah.

• 3:38:59Speaker 00

  Luke.

• 3:38:59Speaker 01

  It's really, really crazy.

• 3:39:01Speaker 00

  This is mind blowing. Thank you so much for being here and just doing this. This was awesome. We gotta do it again sometime.

• 3:39:06Speaker 01

  We definitely will.

• 3:39:07Speaker 00

  This is great. Luke Caverns, everybody. Make sure you go check him out on YouTube. He can expose some big shit in the Amazon soon. I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for.

• 3:39:15Speaker 01

  I'll come back.

• 3:39:17Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 3:39:18Speaker 02

  Hell yeah.

• 3:39:18Speaker 00

  Peace.