The Basement: Cassie Coppersmith | Ancient Sites That Rewrite Human History

-Get the free Precious Metals Info Kit from GoldenCrest Metals and see how to buy physical gold and silver with cash or move an old IRA or 401(k) into metals. Visit https://whyfileslovesgold.com, text FILES to 638257, or call (888) 949-9172. -Get your free, 30-second personalized assessment today at https://pdsdebt.com/BASEMENT -Download Cash App today. Click here to get started: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/re0kp2pw #CashAppPartner Bitcoin services by Block, Inc. See the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. Cassie Coppersmith spent years buying and selling gold mines before she walked away to chase a different kind of treasure. Now she travels to the world’s oldest megalithic sites, asking the questions few others will. Cassie joins AJ to unpack what LiDAR scans uncovered beneath Angkor: geometric mound fields, mile-long spirals, and a water network that behaves like a machine. She explains why Cambodia’s finest stonework sits at the bottom, and why the carbon dates refuse to match the official story. From lathe-turned pillars in India to the giants lining Easter Island’s ancient road, the same pattern keeps appearing. Then there’s the night in the world’s largest cave, when something out in the dark started knocking. The past is far stranger than the textbooks admit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30AJ Gentile?

  Today, we're talking with Cassie Coppersmith. She grew up on a Nebraska corn farm, 12 kids in her graduating class, and spent 12 years buying and selling gold mines for the biggest gold miner on earth. Then she quit with no plan, spent four days alone on a mountain with no food, and came out looking at rocks.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, four days alone, no food, hearing voices. It sounds like someone got a hold of the good blorpess.

• 0:54AJ Gentile?

  Today, we're covering the LiDAR scans of Anchor, the water system she thinks the Kamara inherited rather than built, the stone spindle she says came off a lathe, and why she's at 75% on Bigfoot.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  75%? I'm 100%. That hairy bastard owes me 40 bucks.

• 1:10AJ Gentile?

  And the three nights in the largest cave on the planet? Before lights out, the guide told her, if you hear a baby crying, don't worry about it.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Don't worry about it. Same thing the Air Force said about Roswell.

• 1:21AJ Gentile?

  After our conversation, I'll come back and break down the talk. Let's go down to the basement.

• 1:33AJ Gentile?

  Cassie's here. So you worked in mining and now you study rocks for a living. Is Coppersmith the stage name like Lou Cavers?

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Coppersmith is my maiden name.

• 1:42AJ Gentile?

  But it's real?

• 1:43Speaker 03

  It's real.

• 1:45AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  And what's interesting is my grandfather, so Coppersmith's on my dad's side, obviously. My grandfather, on my mother's side, worked in the Copper Queen Mine in Bisbee, Arizona, his whole life. So it's a very strange coincidence, but yes, I was a Coppersmith until I got married.

• 2:03AJ Gentile?

  That's funny.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:05AJ Gentile?

  So we have to do the Wallace to Wall Street tour. So did you say that there were 12 people? I'm lisping because I'm missing a crown right now. I apologize. So I'm just gonna lisp through this whole thing and wince when I drink coffee. You had 12 kids in your class?

• 2:21Speaker 03

  12, K through 12. It was the same class of 12 kids.

• 2:25AJ Gentile?

  How do you field a basketball team?

• 2:28AJ Gentile?

  And what position did you play?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  I was a post. So we only had three sports, volleyball, basketball, and track. The only three options. So we did all of them. Everybody did everything. And you, you know, I was a starter my freshman year. So you just get all four grades to play and you can, you know, it's eight-man football.

• 2:49AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  So it's like a track meet.

• 2:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Is everyone in the school plays too?

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Yes. Oh, school plays, speech and drama.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  You know, you name it, we were in everything. I was almost never actually in school. I was off doing events all the time.

• 3:06AJ Gentile?

  What was your favorite extracurricular thing to do?

• 3:08Speaker 03

  I think it was sports. We were very good at speech and drama. So we were state champions in high school.

• 3:15AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  And you'd, you know, you'd go and you'd perform any number of things. You know, sometimes you were just teaching people things. Sometimes you were performing a play or whatever. But we went and competed at the state level and won multiple times when I was in high school. So it was just this funny little small town where you, you were prepped for anything in life because you were one of the only kids that, you know, that could participate.

• 3:39AJ Gentile?

  Did they, did they give you like a parade when you came home?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  No. No, you know, it's funny. With the, with the 12 kids in my class, I think maybe half of us ended up going to college and the other half just went straight into the trades, you know, whether it was diesel mechanics or you name it. So it was, it was not a, an environment where you're constantly thinking about college prep or my career or what's life gonna look like outside of this small town. It was very, very tiny. I grew up on a dirt road and everybody knew everything that was going on in your life all the time, and for better or worse.

• 4:15AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  You know, they're, they know when you go out too late on a Friday night with your friends in the cornfields, but they're also there for you if something goes down that you need help. So that's just the nature of growing up in a very tiny town.

• 4:27AJ Gentile?

  What do they think of you now?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know that they do think of me now.

• 4:31AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  I think I'm friends with a couple of them on Facebook, in touch with a couple of them today. I think most people are just surprised that I decided to leave corporate America and pursue this weird YouTube thing, so.

• 4:45AJ Gentile?

  It's definitely weird. On Joe's show, you brought out a point that your grandfather found?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:54AJ Gentile?

  What was, why did he have rocks delivered? What was going on that day?

• 4:58Speaker 03

  So we, we grew up.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  My family emigrated from Germany six generations ago. And they, they were on their way across America and they stopped in Wallace, Nebraska. I don't know why they didn't continue going to like Fort Collins, Colorado. That's much prettier. They stopped in Nebraska. And we've been there ever since. You know, my grandfather was born in the house that he died in, that my father was born in. I was raised, you know, two miles away from that house. My brother lives three miles away from that house today. So it's just a very tight little family unit. And back in the day, farmers were not nearly as good as they are today. So there used to be, you know, or efficient and effective. So you would get these situations where wind would blow the tops of your, the topsoil of your fields away.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  That doesn't happen today, but it did back in the day. And so when I was growing up, the whole family are pilots. And there was a grass runway at my grandfather's house. And we would, my dad would literally fly over fields and look for blowouts in like the neighbors' fields and our fields and things like that. And we would go out on Sunday afternoons after church and go arrowhead hunting.

• 6:07AJ Gentile?

  I was gonna ask you about the airstrip because that's, that's still registered with the FAA.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Is it really?

• 6:12AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Did you see your, your farm from the sky? Who was the pilot?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  I don't know. Who took the photo, you mean?

• 6:19AJ Gentile?

  No, I mean, did you ever see, did you ever go up in a plane?

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Many times.

• 6:24AJ Gentile?

  So who was flying?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  My, either my grandfather or my father. My brother also has a pilot's license, so. My grandfather used, he has a, he had a little air coop airplane. And he would, he loved to take you out and fly around. And if my dad needed a part from the field, he would call my grandpa. My grandpa'd jump in the air coop and fly to town and get the part and fly home. And, you know, even some of my, my birthday parties when I was a little girl, we would all be playing outside and then we'd hear the plane coming.

• 6:53AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  And it would be my grandpa in his air coop. And he would fly over our birthday party and he'd drop candy bars with parachutes.

• 7:00AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Because in the air coop, you can just pull the, the window down on top and he would just throw them out. And so these, this candy would fall from the sky and everybody would cheer. So it was, it was really special. It was a very small town, very special life.

• 7:14AJ Gentile?

  I thought it was cool getting picked up on a Harley, but that's way cooler.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I used to get flown to track meets because, you know, going from a, a speech and drama competition in the daytime, or a track meet, and then a speech and drama competition or a track meet, and then prom, my dad, it's too far out there. So he would just fly me from one place to another in our little airplane.

• 7:33AJ Gentile?

  Your dad and grandpa seemed very cool.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Very cool.

• 7:36AJ Gentile?

  How did he know, your grandfather, how did he know that was an arrowhead or a spearpoint?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  I mean, I think everybody knew that. I think, you know, his father picked him up. If, if you walk across an open landscape and you look down and you see a Native American point, you recognize it immediately. You just know. In that instance, the, the point that I brought on Rogan was, it's a very sandy area where I grew up. And so in your yard, you wanted it to be gravel because then you don't get puddles and mud and things like that. And so he would, they would take gravel from the, the Platte River. And they would bring it to the yard and they would just dump it. And of course, my grandpa was just walking out in his yard because there's all sorts of stuff that comes out of the Platte River. You can find fossilized teeth and you can, you can, you can walk the Platte River today. In the spring, it'll flood.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  And then, once it floods and comes down, you can walk in the river and look for things. And so he kind of knew, I think he probably, I don't know this for a fact, but I would guess every time he got a load of gravel delivered, he went out and looked.

• 8:39AJ Gentile?

  And looked.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  But he did find that Jimmy Allen point out just right in his front yard.

• 8:42AJ Gentile?

  Did he give it to you that day or did you inherit that?

• 8:45Speaker 03

  I inherited it after he passed away.

• 8:47AJ Gentile?

  So Joe pulled out his own point and you dated it?

• 8:50Speaker 03

  It was an archaic point. So you can tell the date of the stone of the point by the width of the base. And that would have been indicative of the type of shaft it was attached to. So if it's very small, like a bird point, then there, it's gonna be a bow and arrow situation. His point had a wider base, which means it would have been like a mid, a mid-archaic kind of point, so potentially an adalatta point.

• 9:16AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  So he, he would have, they would have thrown it in a different way and you can just kind of tell it's older by, I'm not super familiar. I think that was a Texas point, so a little out of my wheelhouse, but that's what it looked like to me.

• 9:27AJ Gentile?

  But it's still impressive. You have that baby bird point that you talk about. Is that, is that an arrowhead?

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:33AJ Gentile?

  That little one?

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Very tiny.

• 9:35AJ Gentile?

  So your channel is Secrets and?

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Secrets and Stone.

• 9:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay. There's a plug. Everyone go watch it. Super fun. Did you get part two up yet? You just got back from India, right? I don't think you posted that yet. So here's a case file almost nobody opens. August 15th, 1971, Sunday night. The president goes on TV and without a vote from Congress, cuts the last link between the dollar and gold. He called it temporary. That was more than 50 years ago. Since then, the dollar has lost over 85% of its buying power. Pretty much every paper currency in history ends up the same way. Gold? Gold has been money for thousands of years. Barrows, Romans, pirates, all of them knew. And here's the strange part.

• 10:20AJ Gentile?

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• 11:03AJ Gentile?

  Visit Yfileslovesgold.com or take out your phone and text the word files to 638257.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  I haven't done my India videos yet.

• 11:10AJ Gentile?

  What's going on?

• 11:11Speaker 03

  I just, I'm a little behind.

• 11:12AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  I had a very, I had a very busy summer, lots of travel and things. I'm Joe Rogan. And so I wanted to get my Easter Island videos out. I just released my second Easter Island video, I think, last week. And so when I get home, I'm going to get started on India. And it's gonna, it's gonna blow people's minds.

• 11:33AJ Gentile?

  Is it?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Yes. The, the things in India are fully unexplainable. And, and these sites are, you know, I didn't see any American or European tourists anywhere at any of these sites. It was all, you know, locals, local families walking around and things like that. And so they're not heavily trafficked and they're not heavily researched. There's not, if you think about researching Easter Island or even Cambodia, there's gonna be just a wealth of archaeological reports and historical accounts you can read. These sites that I went to in southern India, there's almost nothing. So it's really interesting how few people have focused on them. And so I'm gonna put a couple of episodes probably out on Hampi and then one on the

• 12:19Speaker 03

  giant Baobabli statue. So I'll get at least three episodes out of my India trip, maybe four.

• 12:24AJ Gentile?

  I think the ancient Indian civilization should get more credit for, I think they're part of Cambodia, I think they're part of all of that.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  And I think they're as old as Egypt.

• 12:35AJ Gentile?

  Yes. I think you're right. Maybe older.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  And if you think about, you know, if I think about, if you asked me what were the three oldest places in the world, I'd have to say Peru, India, and Egypt.

• 12:47AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  It's just, and those were land masses that would not have suffered the way that North America did, you know, during a younger dryas kind of event.

• 12:58AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  So, you know, India used to be connected to Sri Lanka. It was actually a bigger landmass than it is today. So yeah, it's preserved, who knows how old the things are in India. And there's just, you can plan, I probably have 10 trips that I could do to India and still not even come close to scratching the surface of it.

• 13:17AJ Gentile?

  Of course. Okay, so you go to school for finance?

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Finance.

• 13:22AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 13:23Speaker 03

  I don't know. I, I went there thinking, I went to Creighton University in Omaha, thinking I would, you know, I was like, no, I'll be a doctor. That's what everybody thinks when they go to school.

• 13:31AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  And I took chemistry and I was like, this is terrible. I hate this. And so I took a finance class and I got a straight A. And I was like, oh, this is my thing. So I graduated, because I grew up in a very tiny town, I had 23 college credits when I graduated from high school. And so I went to Creighton and I said, I'm gonna graduate in three years. And they were like, mm, that's gonna be too hard. And I was like, no, I'm gonna do that. And I did. I graduated Creighton in three years in finance. I got to work for a private equity firm in Omaha that was connected loosely, it was like the relatives of Warren Buffett.

• 14:08AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  And being in Omaha was neat with a finance degree because our finance classes got to go volunteer at his annual meetings.

• 14:16AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  So I got to attend a Warren Buffett, you know, giant annual meeting in Omaha and we got to help set up chairs and, you know, watch Charlie Munger sit up there and drink Coke and...

• 14:26AJ Gentile?

  That's kind of awesome, though.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  It was so cool. So yeah, I grew up, you know, it's, it's still Nebraska, but it was a really neat finance experience before I even went out into the world to do jobs.

• 14:37AJ Gentile?

  How'd you end up in New York and why are you hating on my town everywhere you go?

• 14:42Speaker 03

  New York was very difficult on me.

• 14:45AJ Gentile?

  Why? Where'd you live?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  I, I lived on the Upper West Side.

• 14:48AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  And worked on kind of Fifth Avenue-ish. So I walked, I hated the subways. I walked across Central Park every day to go to work. Why was, it was...

• 15:03AJ Gentile?

  New York was not great when you were there?

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Well, I think it was, I think New York itself was fine and the people were fine, all of that. It was a very difficult transition for me, being a very small-town girl. Even Creighton's a small school. It's, you know, a Jesuit school. And then suddenly I was living in a city of, how big is it? Eight million people in New York City? And it was the most alone I had ever felt in my life.

• 15:30AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Hmm. And, you know, I was working 12, 14 hours a day, seven days a week. It was a very intense work experience. So I never had a chance to make friends. I never really had a chance to rest or really experience the town or anything. And so it, it was just a, it was one of those life experiences that I'm great, very grateful for. I learned so much about myself and what I did and didn't want in this life. But it was, you know, when you're a finance kid, you wanna be an investment banker.

• 16:02AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  You know, that's what you're told, you know, it's like the pinnacle of, if you're gonna be in finance, you gotta go do that sexy investment banking job in New York City. And that's what I did.

• 16:10AJ Gentile?

  So what was a Tuesday like? A bad Tuesday?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  A bad Tuesday was, wake up, you probably slept six hours. You go in, you're already behind, you've got a pitch that you need to do to a potential client, you're creating the pitch book, you get 15 rounds of edits on said pitch book. Every time they find an issue with your spreadsheet or your comps or whatever, you're getting, you're getting told how you need to be so much better. You process edits all day long for this pitch book. Everybody, you order dinner at the, at the office because there's no way you're gonna be done before 10:00 PM. You eat dinner at the office, something very fattening and unhealthy.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  You haven't seen the sun in 10 hours. And then because you're the lowest on the totem pole, it's your job, it's, you know, it's, what's that movie with Meryl Streep? The fashion one in New York City?

• 17:09AJ Gentile?

  Devil Wears Prada?

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Devil Wears Prada. I was the one that took the pitch books to my boss's house at 10 o'clock at night, once they were all, and we, we printed them and bound them and put the spiral in it. And I would take a cab to her house at 10:00 PM and I'd have a stack of pitch books, I'd put it on her porch, and then I'd go home and I'd just cry.

• 17:29AJ Gentile?

  Cause this was a...

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Cry myself to sleep and then start over the next day.

• 17:34AJ Gentile?

  Is she still in business?

• 17:36Speaker 03

  I don't know if she is.

• 17:38AJ Gentile?

  Did you, did you hate her?

• 17:40Speaker 03

  I didn't hate her. I, she was tough. She was the, one of the first female managing directors at Lehman Brothers. So she was hardcore and she was wicked smart, but she was extremely tough. Like not in a, I'm gonna make you feel okay about your mistake, like I'm, if you made a mistake, and certainly if that mistake made me look like I didn't know what was happening in the meeting, you were berated.

• 18:06AJ Gentile?

  Well, she came out of the bailout culture.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Totally. And she was, you know, she was a woman that was forging a new path on Wall Street. So I, I still have a lot of respect for what she was able to build for herself.

• 18:18AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  I mean, she, she started at a major investment bank, she went and started her own firm. And I went and worked for that small firm and she was out there, you know, eating what she killed.

• 18:28AJ Gentile?

  She had to be tough.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  She was extremely tough. But it taught me a lot also about the type of boss I never wanted to be when I was in higher up levels in my organization. So it, you know, you learn, like everything in life, I feel like you learn way more from the difficult experiences than you do the good ones.

• 18:47AJ Gentile?

  You do. From the bad bosses, you definitely do.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 18:50AJ Gentile?

  You were in New York how long?

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Just a, like a year and a half.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  When you're an analyst, you're supposed to be there two years, then you get promoted. I couldn't make it to two years. I was just.

• 19:01AJ Gentile?

  Wow. So is New York on the front end of your career or the end?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  It was the very first job I had out of college.

• 19:07AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:09AJ Gentile?

  So you left New York, but you stayed in corporate in gold mining?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  I didn't go into gold mining directly. I went into like real estate finance in Denver. So I moved to Denver after New York City, did real estate finance for maybe three or four years, real estate development for a year, and then I went to grad school. And at grad school, then I got the internship at the gold mining company.

• 19:31AJ Gentile?

  Buying and selling gold mines?

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:34AJ Gentile?

  How does that work?

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Well, these, you know, Newmont Mining is the world's largest gold mining company based in Denver. And I never, I never set out to be a gold miner. My goal was to get paid to travel the world. That was it. And I knew that that's all I wanted. And so I interviewed at oil companies and gold mining companies and, and things like that. And this, this company was based in Denver. I wanted to be in Colorado. And I thought, well, that's perfect. I've got a little investment banking experience. It was a corporate development internship.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  So, so I got in on the finance side of this company. And if you're mining, you know, six million ounces of gold a year, you have this natural problem you're facing where you need to either be discovering or purchasing ounces to replace what you mined. And so the exploration team and the geologists did an awesome job of discovering. My job was if we have a mine that's been depleted or economically, the gold price is too low, so you can't make money. So is that a candidate for divestment? So you were divesting used up mines and you were out there looking for and competing for the new property that needed to be part of your portfolio. And so that was basically my job.

• 20:50AJ Gentile?

  This sounds like high pressure again.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was very high pressure. It wasn't high pressure in the way that New York was because it's, you know, it's a corporate environment where people, people at Newmont were there for their entire careers, 25 years.

• 21:04AJ Gentile?

  How much money is moving in a gold mine deal?

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Oh, billions.

• 21:09AJ Gentile?

  Billions?

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, a couple hundred million will buy you a medium sized mine. But we did, we did mega mergers while I was there. So we bought a company called Goldcorp up in Canada, and that was a multi billion dollar deal. And I was actually on the integration team for that deal, which was really interesting. So you purchase this huge company and you have to try to merge the portfolios and figure out who do you let go and what do you need? And how do you find these efficiencies that you promised the market you were going to find? And so that was one of the really interesting times in my career was integrating those two companies.

• 21:46AJ Gentile?

  I guess it's a low margin business, right?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Very.

• 21:48AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  I mean, maybe not right now. It's probably, you know, fuel prices are high. I haven't been reading their reports, but I can imagine at $4,000 gold, they're making pretty good bank.

• 21:59AJ Gentile?

  Is it going to six?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Maybe. I don't know. I've never been good at predicting gold price.

• 22:05AJ Gentile?

  And nobody has.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 22:08AJ Gentile?

  I kind of bought at the top.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  I sold my Newmont shares at the bottom. I sold them, I think they're at like a hundred dollars right now, and I sold them at 60.

• 22:17AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  So I left a lot of money on the table, which is okay.

• 22:21AJ Gentile?

  You don't know.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:23AJ Gentile?

  You said that if you went back, you would probably be a geologist.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:27AJ Gentile?

  Cause you mentioned geologists now, reminded me of that. What can they see in this, in a rock or a stone that you can't see?

• 22:33Speaker 03

  First of all, what you may not know about geologists is they are the most optimistic human beings on earth.

• 22:40AJ Gentile?

  Just broad brush?

• 22:41Speaker 03

  The happiest people, every small test result is going to be the next multi billion dollar mine. You know, they just, they are so optimistic about what's in the ground. You know, so I really, of all, you know, we would put these big due diligence teams together. So I never had to specialize in engineering or geology or anything like that. My job was to analyze the math and negotiate the deal. The geologists were always my favorite people on our due diligence teams because they were super happy. They'd come in in jeans and t-shirts. They didn't, they didn't dress up. You couldn't make them, you know, if they were presenting to the board, maybe they would. But other than that, there's no chance you're going to see them in a suit.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  And when we would go out and do due diligence on the ground, I would always choose to go with the geologists because, you know, some people are going to be standing in the mill talking about the equipment there. And geologists are up on the hill overlooking the site and saying, you know, I, I think the big one is over there. We've got to get drilling over there. So, and their knowledge was so deep. I mean, they fundamentally understood the cycles that the earth has gone through. So they know why the earth folded over itself and a certain mineral and a certain deposit was created here or there. So it was really cool to see them look at like a cliffside and they just, they just know what's there and they know what happened. And I thought that was just a really amazing skillset that I would love to have.

• 24:12AJ Gentile?

  And you'd find them being right a lot?

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're right a lot. They're wrong a lot too. I mean, it's kind of a, it's like gambling, you know, especially if you're, you know, it's expensive to drill. So you have this constant trade off and tension between how much money do you put in the ground to prove out the resource? And when do you just go mine it? And the geologists would drill all day long if they could, because they love getting those results and saying, oh, the high grades over there or whatever. And you've got, it's just an economic trade off. But yeah, they're, they're right a lot.

• 24:46AJ Gentile?

  Did you ever find a geologist who could just sniff the gold, who just could find the color? I'm using Deadwood lingo. I don't know if it still applies.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  There were very talented geologists and Newmont had a bunch of very big discoveries on their own. Nowadays, most, most of the big discoveries are made by exploration companies. So it's their only job and they're, they're the true wildcatters, right? Like they're out there. They're like, you know, in Northern Canada, under that glacier, I bet you there's a huge gold mine. So they'll go up, they'll raise the funds, they'll drill it out, and then they'll try to sell their gold mine to us, right? So.

• 25:23AJ Gentile?

  So you're looking at samples and all kinds of stuff like?

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Totally. And yeah, so if you're, if you're doing these five year plans in the, in the mine, in Newmont, in my mining company, you're, you're doing a lot of trade off between how much money are we going to put into the ground exploring and how much are we just going to set aside to buy? So yeah, the, there were some geologists that were very, very good at finding things. But as the company gets bigger, it feels like more of the big discoveries are made by the smaller companies and the bigger ones just purchase them. It's like less risky.

• 25:54AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  You know?

• 25:55AJ Gentile?

  Let someone else do, dig in the dirt.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Let them do what they're good at.

• 25:58AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm. How was that different than New York, just day to day?

• 26:06Speaker 03

  I had a real problem. So I grew up on a corn farm where the money you make is because you grew something. You produced something. In investment banking, it's all transactional. It's like being a lawyer.

• 26:20AJ Gentile?

  You don't make anything.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  A banker. You don't make anything. You literally just skim money off the top of deals from other people who actually make money.

• 26:27AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  And I didn't like that. I wanted to, to make something. I wanted to be involved in a company that didn't have to go to meetings and pitch why they should get paid 3% of a deal. I wanted to be the one with the money, make, making the product and making the decisions. And gold mining is 100% that, you know, they've got the money and they're a publicly traded company and I was working for the biggest one. So I appreciated that every day I went to work and, you know, you go out to those mines and the guys are in the bottom of those pits digging out the gold and they're producing the gold and they're selling the gold and they're making the money. And I liked that.

• 27:04AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  Much more than banking.

• 27:08AJ Gentile?

  Well, you got a finance degree. Didn't you get your masters in finance?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:11AJ Gentile?

  Like international business?

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, it's a mouthful.

• 27:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  Global finance trade in economics.

• 27:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes, that's, that's what it was.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:20AJ Gentile?

  What point were you like, I made a terrible mistake?

• 27:23Speaker 03

  In my career?

• 27:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  I, I never thought that.

• 27:26AJ Gentile?

  You didn't?

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 27:27AJ Gentile?

  What burned you out then?

• 27:31Speaker 03

  I had a, well, my, I would say the big thing that changed my mind about my life path was when my mother passed away. She passed away when I was 33 or 34.

• 27:45AJ Gentile?

  Oof.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  And, you know, before then, I was like, Miss Career Woman. Like, no question about what I was going to be doing with my life. I was going to work my way. I was going to get my master's degree because you have to, it's like a ticket punch. You have to get that to get that corporate job. Then I was going to work my way up from intern to the big boss.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  And nothing was going to stop me. And in my early 30s, I had this, this life event happen that just fundamentally, it just, it knocked me on my ass. And it fundamentally changed the way that I looked at life. And it took me a while to digest it. I was like, do I really not want to do this anymore? Like, do I really want something different with my life? And after, I stayed for a couple of years after that.

• 28:33AJ Gentile?

  What did your mom think?

• 28:35Speaker 03

  About gold mining?

• 28:36AJ Gentile?

  About your happiness?

• 28:39AJ Gentile?

  Did you ever call her and you're like, Mom, it's not?

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Both my mom and my dad have always been very proud of me. I don't think they necessarily, like, I remember my grandpa came and visited me in New York City. And he's like, so what do you do here? I think he thought I was like a bank teller.

• 28:54AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  So I'm not sure that they necessarily understood why I did what I did or made the choices I made, but they were always really proud of what I was doing.

• 29:04AJ Gentile?

  Well, who'd you call when you were, when you were feeling,

• 29:08AJ Gentile?

  I don't know, blue or burnt or whatever it was?

• 29:10Speaker 03

  I've got a great friend network and, you know, my dad and I are extremely close. My brother and I are best friends, like best friends in the whole world. I would do anything for my brother. I give him both of my kidneys, for sure.

• 29:21AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I mean, he's all over your channel.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's great.

• 29:24AJ Gentile?

  And his, and his wife.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're, they're wonderful.

• 29:26AJ Gentile?

  And she's Stacy, right?

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Stacy, yeah.

• 29:28AJ Gentile?

  She's super fun to watch.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  She's the best. And my, you know, of course, eventually my husband was the one person I always went to. And, you know, all of them, very, very proud. But yeah, it took me three, probably three years after my mom's death to be like, I just, my, my passion for it just died. So I wasn't, I didn't regret it. I wasn't mad about it. I just, it all felt like a bunch of energy that I didn't want to expend anymore on, it felt meaningless. And so I told myself, every year you get a big bonus, right? So you work toward that big bonus. And I told myself, it was a year before the big bonus. So like right after my bonus, and I was like, I'm going to stay one more year. Which I would, I would recommend to never give yourself a one-year timeline or anything.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  It's way too long. So it was literally a year-long countdown before I was ready to actually submit my resignation.

• 30:22AJ Gentile?

  So you committed to that?

• 30:24Speaker 03

  I committed to it with myself.

• 30:26AJ Gentile?

  And weren't you like six more months, five more months?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Like, four months and 15 days, four months and 12 days. I mean, it was that kind of a countdown for me. A lot of journaling. You can make it. It's okay. It's worth it. Like, you're going to have that big bonus at the end of it, and then you're free to do whatever you want.

• 30:44AJ Gentile?

  What's in your journal the day you gave your notice?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Just elation.

• 30:48AJ Gentile?

  I bet.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Elation. And there were some interesting questions that came out of my resignation. And in a company like that, women are a major minority. I think like 11% of the global workforce at this company are women. And so they're very protective of their female executives. And so when one leaves, you naturally ask a lot of questions and you do your best to try to retain them. And so that when I resigned, the question was, oh, no, that's terrible. I'm so sad. Where are you going?

• 31:23AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  And when I said nowhere, that was like the biggest shock. You know, I was 39 years old.

• 31:33AJ Gentile?

  Like, what do you mean nowhere?

• 31:34Speaker 03

  What do you mean nowhere? What are you going to do? I don't know what I'm going to do, just not this. You know, I'm going to, I'm just done. So it was.

• 31:42AJ Gentile?

  And you really didn't know?

• 31:43Speaker 03

  No. I didn't know I was going to be doing this.

• 31:46AJ Gentile?

  No, you didn't.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  And I didn't have any intention really to go back to work. I knew that I, that I wanted to find something I was passionate about. I don't necessarily, it wasn't necessarily for me about money. It was about if I'm going to spend my day doing something, I want it to be something that's meaningful for me. And so I took a full year off where I didn't do anything. I read books and I backpacked and I did yoga. I did things like that.

• 32:13AJ Gentile?

  Well, hang on, you planned out your whole career. You planned out your whole career and suddenly you just throw it away?

• 32:18Speaker 03

  I did. I did. And I never looked back. There was not one moment. That's when you know you've made the right decision in your life. And I knew it intuitively. I knew it as deep as you can get that internal feeling that it was the right decision for me.

• 32:34AJ Gentile?

  So after that good breakup, the feeling, like, oh, it's like, what did I, it takes so long for?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly.

• 32:41AJ Gentile?

  Colors are brighter.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Yes. And that's exactly what it was for me. And what's interesting is you can spend 12 years somewhere in a place that is all-consuming for you. All of your hobbies go out the window. You're not playing volleyball in the park at night anymore because you're too busy and you're too big of a deal. You're traveling all over the world. I was doing a ton of traveling. And so every, all of my personal hobbies went away when I was working in corporate America. And my social group and my friend group were coworkers.

• 33:10AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  And it's amazing when you leave how few people come along with you.

• 33:15AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  I don't, I am maybe in touch with three people from Newmont still today.

• 33:24AJ Gentile?

  So you end up on the side of a mountain for three days, three, four days with no food?

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:30AJ Gentile?

  So you said that after a while, the voices get quieter?

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:33AJ Gentile?

  What are they saying before they go quiet?

• 33:36Speaker 03

  All the things that happen in your brain. So just to provide context, if people don't know what we're talking about.

• 33:42AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  This is something I mentioned on my Rogan interview. But if you didn't watch that interview, there's, it's, it's basically, it's a company called Rites of Passage. And they, they basically create, it's kind of like a Native American vision quest. And the idea is that you're allocating 10 days of your life. The first three days, you're with the group of people that have also signed up. I think there were like eight of us total. And the, the people that are kind of hosting you. And you're going through all these different tools that you can use when you're out in the wilderness by yourself. So if I want to process grief, what are some of the things you can think about? If you want to try to quiet your mind, if you, you know, there are different tools and methodologies that they kind of give you some insight.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  They also teach you, like, if, if it's going to start pouring rain, here's how you put up a tarp.

• 34:33AJ Gentile?

  Sure. I didn't think of that. Yeah, that's true. You're not in a tent.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:37AJ Gentile?

  What were you processing?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Sorry?

• 34:39AJ Gentile?

  What were you processing?

• 34:40Speaker 03

  I was processing, I would say probably first and foremost, my mom's death.

• 34:44AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  She was young. She didn't die well. It was a very traumatizing experience for me.

• 34:51AJ Gentile?

  Sorry to hear that.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  So it was a lot of that. It was a lot of, okay, that was a big career. With a lot of energy expended, I was Newmont. What am I now? Who am I now? And if I'm going to be deliberate about, I called it my first half and second half of life. So if I'm going to be deliberate about the second half of life,

• 35:15Speaker 03

  how do I want to live it? Who do I want to be? How do I want to spend my time? And that was, that was my intention going into that. So you spend three days preparing and then you go out into the wilderness. You pick your spot, which was, I picked the farthest spot away you could possibly pick on top of a mountain. Other people stayed closer to camp, but I was like, I'm going.

• 35:37AJ Gentile?

  Alone?

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Way out. You go out with a partner.

• 35:39AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  So my partner was actually a Native American guy from California. His tribe sends his people to this group for their vision quests.

• 35:48AJ Gentile?

  Hardcore.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  So he was amazing. And so he and I went out together. He was on the other side of the peak. And the way the safety protocols are, in the morning, I, we had like a circle that we had drawn in the ground. And in the morning, I would go put a pebble in the circle and then I'd go back. And in the evening, he'd put a pebble in the circle. And then the next day, if I didn't see a pebble in that circle, I'm going to go look for him and see if something happened.

• 36:11AJ Gentile?

  I kind of love that.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  It's great. And he, you know, we would leave each other little presents. So I would like, I would take like my colored pencils and I would draw on a rock, like a hummingbird on a rock. And then I would leave it in the circle. And then he would leave like a rock with like a, like stick carving that he had done or something. And so it was kind of fun. Like, it was your only connection with humans for, it was three, four, well, almost four days. So you went in one day, you spent three nights, and then you came out on the fourth day. And so you're by yourself on the side of this mountain. It was in the Inyo Mountains in Southern California, like basically Death Valley in the spring. And it was just freak weather. It was freezing cold. So like my water was frozen when I woke up in the morning, kind of cold. Yeah. So it was, you know.

• 36:58AJ Gentile?

  So what's your shelter? What did you build?

• 36:59Speaker 03

  I, I didn't build a shelter. I just slept in a sleeping bag. So no, because I wanted to see the stars. I mean, you could, you didn't, they didn't want you to have tents. But if there was torrential rain or something, then they would teach you how to put up a tarp so that you could kind of tuck yourself under it and not get rained on. But I, it didn't rain, so I was just out in a, in a sleeping bag, just staring at the sky. And what I brought with myself, brought with me was colored pencils, a journal, and a book of poetry. It's cowboy poetry because cowboy poetry reminded me of my grandpa. And that was what I brought. And so you end up spending, you know, you, you eat your last meal, you hike up there.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  You have, you know, a gallon of water a day. And then you just sit.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  So that to, back to your original question, the voices are all of the voices you have every single day. What am I going to wear today? I wonder what that person thought about the way I ate breakfast this morning. Gosh, I wonder what that person's background is. It's just the chatter that happens in your head.

• 38:04AJ Gentile?

  You can get rid of that?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  You can get rid of that.

• 38:06AJ Gentile?

  The monkey mind.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  You can get rid of the monkey mind.

• 38:08AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  It helps when you're really hungry.

• 38:16AJ Gentile?

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• 39:00AJ Gentile?

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• 39:28Speaker 03

  You know, so day one is the hardest because by that night, your stomach's growling and you're like, I'm not gonna make it three days without food. This is crazy. You wake up the next morning and suddenly everything just starts getting really quiet. And it's like, so, it's so peaceful. And the silence is welcome. But then through that silence, at least for me, my experience, you start to hear God. You start to hear your higher self, whatever you want to call it. And I got such important, beautiful, direct messages from the divine up on that hillside.

• 40:07AJ Gentile?

  Like what?

• 40:10Speaker 03

  I did a lot of healing with my mom. I felt like she was there with me, like I could feel her presence. And I told her how angry I was at her, and I told her how sad I was about the way she went down. And I spent so much time writing about and thinking about the way that she raised me and our life together. And, you know, it was just this, it was a beautiful, quiet place to just assess my relationship with my mother and to forgive her and to start a new relationship with her, even now that she's on the other side. Which I believe you can do that with anybody who's passed away. I think you can, you can put aside the human experience you have

• 40:52Speaker 03

  and you can have a totally different relationship with them after the fact, while they're on the other side, which I have with my mom now. I spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of person I wanted to be, the kind of wife I wanted to be, the kind of friend I wanted to be. And I would say the biggest, so those start coming in on day two. And then on the last night that you're there, you're supposed to spend, you're supposed to do an all-night vigil. So I created like this circle of rocks. And at sunset, you watch the sun go down, and I stepped into the circle. And the idea is you spend all night just sitting and waiting. And the next morning, you stay in there all night, you try to stay awake.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  The next morning, you, when the sun comes up, you can step out of the circle and you're reborn. So it's a full transformative experience. And there's no psychedelics or anything happening here. This is just dead sober. You know, the food is, you're, you're in a fully fasted state. Everything's quiet and you're just having these profound revelations.

• 41:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, you don't need mushrooms for this.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Not at all. Nature is the most healing medicine that you can possibly get. I believe that with my whole heart.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  The biggest, the coolest experience on that hillside was, I was sitting there, literally, this is how I looked. I was like so weak, I couldn't even sit up. And my hat was on because the sun was shining in my face. And I was like snuggled up in my sleeping bag, just sitting there. And then I hear

• 42:32Speaker 03

  and the wind is like gale force. And I was like, what is that? And I pick my head up and the brim of my hat comes up and there's a hummingbird right in front of me, like literally this far from my face. And it's just and I was just like just start sobbing.

• 42:53AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Because think of the energy that little bird expended to sit in front of me on a freezing cold day in gale-force winds to come see me at the top of that mountain. And it just felt so profound. It felt like God was just right there, you know? And I was, I just, I cried for way too long after, after that little humming. And I, to this day, like hummingbirds are like my spirit animals. I love them so much.

• 43:19AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna say that, like, native tribes would be like, well, of course you had that experience, that's what you went there for.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, and it, it was beautiful.

• 43:27AJ Gentile?

  You know, that was mom speaking through the bird and all of that.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  It just felt like, it felt extremely profound. And to this day, every time I see a hummingbird, I think of that experience.

• 43:37AJ Gentile?

  They're amazing.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I have so many hummingbird feeders, I bring them to me. So that was the coolest experience, the most profound experience for me, which I didn't understand when I was there, was I got clear as day the words, "You will save the children." Which is a weird thing to hear because I don't have children of my own. So I immediately thought, is my brother gonna die? And I'm gonna be like the stepmom or the whatever adoptive parent of his kids? Like, I don't understand what that means.

• 44:10AJ Gentile?

  Do you hear this as words?

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Words.

• 44:12AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Clear as day, "You will save the children." And I had no clue, I sat with it for months, months and months. So I don't know what that means, I don't know what that means, I don't. But I knew I heard it, I knew it was a message for me. And eventually, so this is in April, and by like August of that year, so I sat with it for that long. I started getting all of these interesting little messages and tidbits. And it just became super clear to me that I needed to get involved in anti-human trafficking. With the intention of really focusing on, look, there's these kids out there.

• 44:56AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know if you were gonna talk about this, I'm glad you are.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  That are being trafficked. And so I, I was like, well, I don't know what to do about this. I don't know anything about human trafficking. I have no background in this whatsoever. I had not deeply gotten involved in really any nonprofits, but it felt like the right time after my retirement. And so I just emailed, just cold email, the CEO of a nonprofit called The Exodus Road. And it took maybe a week, I just attached my resume and I said, "Would you be interested in me helping you? I'm not sure how I could be helpful, but if you think there's any way I can help you, here's my background. I'm very interested, I'd love to volunteer." And a week later, I got an email from the CEO and she's like, "Oh my God, yes! When can we meet? I would love that so much."

• 45:42Speaker 03

  And it just felt, it just felt like the full circle experience for me. And so, yeah, that was three years ago. And so I've been on the Board of Directors of Exodus Road. I volunteered for six months and then joined the board. And I've been on the board of that organization for six months and it's been super profound for me.

• 45:59AJ Gentile?

  What do they do?

• 46:00Speaker 03

  They are an anti-human trafficking organization who are, who was founded by Matt and Laura Parker, who lived in Thailand. And when they were living in Thailand 12 or 13 years ago, Matt started seeing, you know, in Thailand, it's obviously very prevalent. And he started seeing the issue and he got involved helping with investigations, just on a volunteer basis. And investigations to help take down traffickers and free victims and things like that. And they came back to America and they looked at each other and they said, "We've gotta just start a nonprofit, we've gotta do this. This is our passion." And here we are today, and it's, it's an amazing organization.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  They've got regional, six regional offices, they work in 25 different countries. It's a very small, super talented team. And they help with, they do a bunch of prevention education. They, you know, because especially with the online situation today, to help kids understand when they're in a dangerous situation online.

• 47:05AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  If you can keep them from getting into a situation where they get trafficked, that's the best outcome. So they do prevention education, they, they do intervention, not in a Sound of Freedom kind of way, but in a private citizens helping collect data, collect research, build a case file, hand it over to the police, and the police go and make the arrests. And then rehabilitation, so they, they, like in, in Thailand, we have these things called Freedom Homes. And it's homes we own where we bring underage children in that have been rescued. And we give them a safe place to grow up, we help them get educated.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  It's, it's incredible. I think since they started, they've, they've rescued 6,300 people.

• 47:55AJ Gentile?

  Wow, they take donations?

• 47:58Speaker 03

  They take donations.

• 47:59AJ Gentile?

  Okay, I'm gonna support, I'm gonna support.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you, AJ, that's so nice of you.

• 48:03AJ Gentile?

  No, it's important work.

• 48:04Speaker 03

  It's critical work.

• 48:07AJ Gentile?

  When um, when were you married during all this? Were you married when you went to the mountain?

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:13AJ Gentile?

  Was he?

• 48:14Speaker 03

  He was hilarious. We-

• 48:15AJ Gentile?

  Should we introduce him? Were we allowed?

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Yes, my husband's name is Blake. He, we had been married for a couple of years. You know, Blake married a big career woman. With a nice paycheck. And I duped him, you know, I was like, I'm not gonna do that anymore. And, and you know, he's, he's very supportive of everything that I do and extremely open to it. He's not necessarily gonna do what I do right away. He's, he's more critical. He's like, hmm, I'm gonna see how that works out for you. And then if you, if it works out for you, then maybe I'll think about doing it.

• 48:48AJ Gentile?

  Well, because he was thinking about doing it?

• 48:50Speaker 03

  Hmm, I don't know if he would. He might do it after he retires, you know, kind of as a post-career, pre-retirement thing, but, but yeah, just everything I get into, he's, he's suspicious at first. You know, I'm not eating seed oils anymore. And he's like, what's the big deal with seed oils? Come on. And then I'm just throwing away all the seed oils in our kitchen and he kind of rolls his eyes. But when I did do this retreat, I remember plain as day, I came home and he looks at me and he goes, "So do you still love me?" And I was like, so much more than I did before. And he's like, oh, thank God. You know, because he just, he didn't know what to expect.

• 49:24AJ Gentile?

  Well, you said you came down a different person.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  I came down a different person.

• 49:28AJ Gentile?

  So yeah, I would also be worried.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You know, you've got this, this very straight-laced finance wife and, and then she becomes just this crazy hippie.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Like, I feel for him sometimes, but he's a great, he's, he's wonderful.

• 49:45AJ Gentile?

  I've heard you say that you'll be just watching TV while you're like reading archaeology papers. What's on TV? What do you guys watch together?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  He watches a lot of metal detecting.

• 49:59AJ Gentile?

  Metal detecting?

• 50:00Speaker 03

  YouTube, which is really annoying because it's like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And it's like, ah, he, he is as big of a nerd as I am. It's just different hobbies. So he took up metal detecting recently. So he watches a lot of that. He's a great hunter. So he watches a lot of hunting videos. We watch a lot of ancient history stuff. All the people in the same field that I'm in. We watch all their stuff. We watch your show.

• 50:22AJ Gentile?

  No, you don't.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  But we do.

• 50:24AJ Gentile?

  What do you, what do you guys hunt?

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Elk and deer.

• 50:27AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  And he went and got a caribou last year.

• 50:29AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had an employee that hit 20 years and so he took him up to Alaska and did a caribou hunt.

• 50:35AJ Gentile?

  Since there's always meat around the house.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  There's a fresh, amazing, organic, beautiful meat is what we eat. Yeah. So he actually just got an elk two days ago. I helped him pack it out on Saturday.

• 50:48AJ Gentile?

  What is he hunting with?

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Oh, hmm, a giant rifle.

• 50:53AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  And I do not know.

• 50:55AJ Gentile?

  I was just, I didn't know if it was bow hunting or-

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Oh, no, yeah, rifle, yeah.

• 51:00AJ Gentile?

  Metal detecting YouTube. I guess there's a YouTube for everything.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  There is. And metal detecting is one of those kind of addictive hobbies. He's much more addicted than I am. He bought me one because he wants us to do it together and I'm less enthusiastic about it than him. But it's fun, you know, in Colorado, you can find, you know, I have found dimes, silver dimes from the 1880s. You know, so you, the fun part about it is researching, where are you gonna go? So you try to find old mining camps or lumber camps or, you know, train stations or things where the, the people in the late 1800s hung around. And then you go metal detect it and see what you can find. So it's, it's a fun hobby.

• 51:39AJ Gentile?

  It is. We did it as kids and we-

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Did you?

• 51:41AJ Gentile?

  We found a lot of just pop tops, nothing, nothing cool.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  There's great stuff on the East Coast.

• 51:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Old coins, stuff from Europe and the Spanish and things like that, that you can find out there. And I know this because these silly videos are playing in the background when I'm doing research.

• 51:56AJ Gentile?

  And you're absorbing it.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:00AJ Gentile?

  Last you guys watched the same stuff, ancient history wise?

• 52:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And he's, you know, he likes that stuff. My brother and sister-in-law have started really liking it. So, yeah. He did make a comment to me that it's okay for us to go on a vacation that doesn't involve megaliths.

• 52:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  And I conceded that that's probably true. But yeah, so, but that's been the bulk of our travel for the last couple of years.

• 52:26AJ Gentile?

  I know. I want to go see megaliths and the wife wants to go see shopping.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's, or, or go for a hike or do, you know, sit on a beach.

• 52:35AJ Gentile?

  That's allowed.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  It's not easy travel to go see these places for sure, but it's worth it.

• 52:41AJ Gentile?

  So when did you go on Hugh's tour?

• 52:46AJ Gentile?

  What made you just?

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Well, so I had already, I had been to Egypt and I had been to Peru and Bolivia and-

• 52:57AJ Gentile?

  For work or for?

• 52:58Speaker 03

  For megalith hunting.

• 52:59AJ Gentile?

  Wow, so you were-

• 53:00Speaker 03

  This was at the beginning of my-

• 53:02AJ Gentile?

  You were getting into it?

• 53:03Speaker 03

  Getting into it, going down the rabbit hole. And Hugh, I loved Derek Olson and megalithic marvels. And I loved Hugh Newman. And I saw that they were co-hosting a tour in England and I was like, we've got to go. We've got to go see Stonehenge and we've got to go to the British Museum. And so we just booked the tour. And it was great. You know, he was a great storyteller.

• 53:24AJ Gentile?

  He is.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  He knows, you know, he found us a crop circle while we were there.

• 53:27AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 53:28Speaker 03

  Yes, which was awesome. You got to go walk around in it and um-

• 53:32AJ Gentile?

  So all around Wilshire, Avesbury?

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Correct. Avesbury.

• 53:36AJ Gentile?

  He knows where the good pubs are too.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a great trip and the people on it were so fun. And, and you know, I got to meet Derek and Derek changed everything for me. He, and he and I were just like walking around, chit-chatting about different ancient history things. And, and he said, you know, you know, a lot about this. Maybe you should start a podcast. And I was like, absolutely not. There's no chance I'm gonna do that. No chance at all. And I just wrote it off and he sent me a note after the trip and said, I'd like to have you on my show. Would you be interested? And I kind of hemmed and hawed, like I just, I'm an introvert, believe it or not.

• 54:16AJ Gentile?

  No, I believe it.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  I really enjoy being at home. My favorite person to hang out with is me.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  If I get to be home for three or four days, not see anybody, that's great.

• 54:26AJ Gentile?

  I know you.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  You recognize it?

• 54:28AJ Gentile?

  Yes. What did you know that impressed Derek so much?

• 54:32Speaker 03

  I think I was talking about, I don't know, I was just talking about Bolivia. I was talking about like some of the trips we had done and the things we had seen. And of course, you know, before we went to England, I had done a bunch of research on-

• 54:43AJ Gentile?

  Of course you did.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  All the stuff that we were about to see. And we talked about the, you know, I was giving him advice for where to go in the British Museum because we had already been there twice on that trip.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  And so it was just, you know.

• 54:54AJ Gentile?

  So Blake was with you?

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:56AJ Gentile?

  Was he just rolling his eyes?

• 54:58Speaker 03

  He didn't know what he was in for yet.

• 55:01AJ Gentile?

  No, he didn't.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. He was like, I mean, she likes this stuff. That's kind of cool. And it's really interesting. But he had, you know, none of us had any idea it was gonna turn into this.

• 55:09AJ Gentile?

  And 15 months later, you're sitting across from Joe Rogan.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Which is crazy.

• 55:14AJ Gentile?

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• 55:59AJ Gentile?

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• 56:32Speaker 03

  You know, he, he, I don't know how he contacted you, but for me, I just got like a notification on Instagram that said, Joe Rogan has followed you. And I was like, that's not the real Joe Rogan. And I click on it, it's like 200 million followers. I'm like, what? So I, I was freaking out. It was like 10 o'clock at night on a Saturday night, losing my mind because he was following me.

• 56:57AJ Gentile?

  When, how far along in your channel was that?

• 56:59Speaker 03

  I started it in May of last year and this was, I think it was beginning of June of this year. So it was basically right out of here.

• 57:07AJ Gentile?

  I have a cheat code. It's a Gino, my brother Gino and Joe go back a long, long time. My cheat code, yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:13AJ Gentile?

  So I just got the text, yo dude.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, he didn't have to find you on social media. Yeah. And I, it was just a little message in a direct message on Instagram that said, "Hey, I saw your video with Derek on the ancient Chinese artifacts. Super interesting. Would you want to be on the show?" And of course I didn't sleep a wink.

• 57:31AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  That night. It just changed everything.

• 57:33AJ Gentile?

  Did you ever consider saying no?

• 57:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 57:36AJ Gentile?

  You did not?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  I mean, I knew, I knew that it was, I, I think I would, would have liked for it to have been like a year from now.

• 57:46AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Just so I was, I could have more experiences like this or Matt Bell, you know, just kind of less, lower pressure kind of. Not that this is low pressure, but-

• 57:56AJ Gentile?

  Have you seen the numbers that we do here?

• 57:58Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I, I have, for sure. Yeah. So this, this is my third live interview, me and you right now.

• 58:07AJ Gentile?

  Third.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  The first one was Matt Bell. The second one was Joe Rogan. So I think I would have liked to have had a little more experience in it before.

• 58:14AJ Gentile?

  You will always just put it off then?

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 58:16AJ Gentile?

  It was the right move?

• 58:17Speaker 03

  You're never gonna be ready.

• 58:18AJ Gentile?

  Nope. Just go for it.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  It's like having a family. You gotta just dive in. So, so yeah, I, I said yes, for sure. And I told him, I'm about to go to India. I would love it if we could do it after India so I can tell you about all the stuff I saw there. And he said, sounds great. So we did it in early July.

• 58:35AJ Gentile?

  He invite you back yet?

• 58:36Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 58:38AJ Gentile?

  Don't laugh, he's going to.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 58:40AJ Gentile?

  I mean, it performed really well.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:43AJ Gentile?

  It was a good-

• 58:43Speaker 03

  It was fun.

• 58:44AJ Gentile?

  You did great.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  No, thank you.

• 58:46AJ Gentile?

  You didn't, didn't choke.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  It was, it was the most nervous I've ever been.

• 58:53AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 58:54Speaker 03

  For anything in my life.

• 58:56AJ Gentile?

  When you got to his studio, let me tell my story real quick. So Joe and my brother go back a long time. I did his show a million years ago. Then when I went back to Austin, this is, I was on a show in LA, go back to Austin, find out he's a fan. And the first thing he does is give me a hug and say, it's nice to meet you. I'm like, dude, I've been on your, that's fine. It's fine. He doesn't remember. And then I give him a hecklefish doll and some merch and he goes, let me grab-

• 59:32AJ Gentile?

  He goes, what the hell is this? I said, it's just, you know, it's merch from the show. Maybe you give it to your daughters. He's like, my daughters are teenagers. I'll give it to the dog to play with. Come on, you ready? I was like, whoa, he hates me already. And we get in there, we had a great time. So I don't know if it was a move to like, throw me off. But if you watch my first 10 minutes, I'm just like stuttering and stammering. So you walk into the studio.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  I had a similar experience.

• 59:55AJ Gentile?

  What was it like?

• 59:57Speaker 03

  He, I think his car had broken down on the interstate. So he was late and flustered.

• 1:00:03AJ Gentile?

  And flustered?

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was, you know, it's Austin in the middle of the summer. It's hot.

• 1:00:08AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  Car broke down. He had to go home and get a different car. He was late. So we walked in, he's like, hey, Joe Rogan, nice to meet you.

• 1:00:14AJ Gentile?

  Took him an hour to pick which car to take.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  Exactly. Nice to meet you. And I was like, oh, it's great to meet you too. Where are you from? Colorado. Cool, let's head in.

• 1:00:23AJ Gentile?

  He's a Colorado kid.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Is he?

• 1:00:25AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  We never even talked about it.

• 1:00:28AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  And it was the same situation. I was like, I don't know if he likes me. This is weird. And we sat down and he hands me the headphones and I put them on. I don't even get to look and see, do I have a hair sticking straight out? How does it look? He's like, you ready? He's like, let's go. And then it was just. And it just felt so abrupt.

• 1:00:49AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Yeah, you went to slides real fast.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  I was nervous for longer than you were. I was, I felt out of sorts for like, the first half. And then in the second half, I felt like we had finally become comfortable enough that it felt comfortable for me. And we were talking about the things I really wanted to talk about. And so for me, my experience was super, super stressful, the first half, and beautiful, the second half. And then the goodbye was just as abrupt as the hello. You know, he just like, sat down to record some commercials. And it was like, see you later.

• 1:01:23AJ Gentile?

  He said, see you, he didn't walk me out?

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  And I was absolutely convinced it was so bad that he wasn't even going to air it.

• 1:01:31AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  I just, I was like, that didn't feel good. I don't think he liked it. Maybe he's just, and then of course, J D Vance was recorded right after me. And then I think Mr. Beast. And so my interview actually didn't get posted for a while. So I just sat with it for weeks.

• 1:01:49AJ Gentile?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  We went on like, a rafting trip in Idaho. And we were out of cell phone service for a full week. And my friend had Starlink. And every day I would log into, see if it got posted. And then I'd log back out, like, okay, not today. Log in, log out. And it got posted on my drive home from Idaho, so.

• 1:02:08AJ Gentile?

  This is the life of this businessman.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  It's, it was incredible. Like, if he asked me, of course, I would go back. And I would be just as nervous and flustered the second time as I was the first, I'm sure of it.

• 1:02:21AJ Gentile?

  I keep putting it, I keep putting it off. I'm like, yeah.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a taxing experience.

• 1:02:27AJ Gentile?

  You gotta.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:02:28AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:02:31AJ Gentile?

  And you can't really prep for him. Because I went in there, prepped for all a bunch of stuff. And we did crop circles for an hour and a half. It's like, I guess we're doing this today.

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:02:40AJ Gentile?

  Because it's just going to go where he wants.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you gotta just roll with it.

• 1:02:43AJ Gentile?

  Just roll with it.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Yep. Try to be amenable.

• 1:02:47AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, as soon as you got to the slides, you're, you're definitely fine.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's the stuff I love. I really want the world to know about these places. And I think the world really wants to know about these places. So there's, I think, a reason that my channel and other people's channels are doing well. Because people are really curious about our ancient past.

• 1:03:07AJ Gentile?

  Before we get to PowerPoint, I would like to hear the click clack story. I think it was water. They said it was water dripping down, but that's probably not true.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Are you talking about Vietnam?

• 1:03:21AJ Gentile?

  Hmm?

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24AJ Gentile?

  This is a Bigfoot story, right?

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Potentially.

• 1:03:26AJ Gentile?

  I think it could be.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  It could be. Absolutely.

• 1:03:29AJ Gentile?

  This audience loves Bigfoot. I do not.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  You don't?

• 1:03:31AJ Gentile?

  I don't. I want to. I want to believe.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  I watched Harry and the Hendersons when I was a little girl.

• 1:03:37AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  And it just planted a seed in me where I always thought, and of course, because of that movie, you just think Bigfoot's the coolest.

• 1:03:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  You kind of wish that your family would run into him with your suburban and you'd put him on the roof and take him home and befriend him. And so, you know, that movie planted a seed in me very early on. And it's, it's just one of those amazing mysteries, you know? So it's fun to think about. And I understand why people like thinking about Bigfoot. I certainly do. I've never seen him with my own eyes. I don't know for a fact that he exists, but he's just so fun to contemplate.

• 1:04:13AJ Gentile?

  He is. He's all over the studio, if you look around.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  Is he? I saw the one out in the hallway.

• 1:04:18AJ Gentile?

  He's always watching.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20AJ Gentile?

  So what, tell us your story. What happened that night?

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  So we were touring, it's the largest cave in the world. It's called Sundong Cave in Vietnam. And it's a tour you have to sign up for years in advance.

• 1:04:34AJ Gentile?

  Years?

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  Years.

• 1:04:35AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Because they, the season is on, you know, the flood, the cave is flooded most of the year. So there's a certain season where the waters are low enough that you can actually go through the cave. So you sign up, you train. I had actually, we did this trip in February. And in September of the year before, I had broken my pelvis in a bike accident in Mallorca.

• 1:04:58AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  And to, to even get approved to go on this tour, you have to send photos of yourself backpacking. You have to tell them the routes you've done in the course of your life. Because if you're not actually ready to do this, if you've never been on rappelled with ropes and you've never actually done anything hard, you could get into real trouble down there.

• 1:05:19AJ Gentile?

  So this isn't tourists with little maps walking around?

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Not at all.

• 1:05:22AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  So you have to apply to become part of the tour. And, and so I had done all of the, you know, I'm proving that I'm tough enough to do it or whatever. And then I broke my pelvis. And so I was completely out of commission for two full months. And then had, you know, I was on crutches still in November. And in December, they sent a note and they said, has anything with your health changed since you originally applied?

• 1:05:45AJ Gentile?

  You lied.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  And I was like, I'm good.

• 1:05:48AJ Gentile?

  I'm good.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  And so I worked very hard in P T for the two months.

• 1:05:53AJ Gentile?

  I bet.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  December and January before going on this tour. And I still probably wasn't ready enough. Like, I probably shouldn't have done it. I, I was fine, but it was, there were moments where I was like, if I fall and this thing cracks again, this is not going to be good. So we, we went, we went on this tour. It's, it's four days. And they, you kind of hike across the jungle and then you enter the cave. And you spend three nights in the cave. And then you come out on the fourth day. And it's a, it's an amazing tour. If anybody is even thinking about doing it, they need to pull the trigger because it's one of the most amazing places on planet Earth. And so we did it. And in the first night, I woke up to use the restroom.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  And I saw one of the guides, one of the porters, just scanning a flashlight across the cave wall. And I was like, what? Because we had come across water to get to our first campsite. So you're camping across about, on the other side of a body of water. So there's no animals that are going to be crossing that to get into camp to bug us. And so I had no idea what he was looking for. And we also kept hearing this lake, it sounded like rocks falling in the middle of the night, which is a very disconcerting sound when you're in a cave.

• 1:07:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  You don't want rocks to be falling. And, you know, this room is big enough that you can fit a 747 in there. It's huge. And so the next morning, I asked, what, what was the porter looking for? And they said, oh, he was scanning for water buffalo.

• 1:07:29AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  I was like, I don't think so. I don't think they would come down into the cave, swim across the lake and come bother a bunch of campers.

• 1:07:36AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  So that didn't, I was like, that doesn't make any sense. But I still wasn't suspicious at this point. And then I asked about the sound. And they said it was a porter slamming his mat down on the ground. But it was clearly rocks. It was like, clearly some loud clacking sound. So anyway, fast forward, you kind of continue through this cave. And on the third night, you end up in this beautiful, where the limestone ceiling has collapsed. It creates these amazing gardens inside the cave. And this one is called Garden of Edom, E D O M. And.

• 1:08:12AJ Gentile?

  We've all seen these famous pictures.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Famous photos, the wedding cake and all of the cool things. You know, I think that Nat Geo has like, gone down in there in 60 Minutes. And people like that have done documentaries on it. So we're in, in this area and you come out of one path and you go down into another. But to the right, there's another path. And so I asked about it, still not suspicious, just curious. And they said, no, we don't go over there. And one guy told me that they'd never explored it. Another guy said, you can't go in there because there's too much mud. So the stories are just a little inconsistent.

• 1:08:48AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  But you don't go over there. You, you go this way. And then in the Garden of Edom, on the ground, there are bones.

• 1:08:56AJ Gentile?

  Bones.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  Which could be because something lives in there and is killing things. It could be because something's living above and throwing bones in.

• 1:09:05AJ Gentile?

  Big bones?

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  Big bones.

• 1:09:07AJ Gentile?

  Big bones.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's, there's like, was it goats or sheep? I can't remember which one. They found like skeletons of those in there and things like that. I think for the most part, it's pigs or birds or things falling, you know, falling in and dying in there.

• 1:09:25AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  But the bones are suspicious. They're a little suspicious. And then we went to bed that night. And right before bed, the main safety guy says, if you hear a baby crying in the middle of the night, don't worry about it.

• 1:09:42AJ Gentile?

  Don't worry about it?

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  It's just the giant flying squirrel.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  And immediately I was like, I know exactly what causes baby crying in the middle of the night sounds, and it's all over Bigfoot lore.

• 1:09:55AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Which I'm sure you've heard, if you've done any research on Bigfoot.

• 1:09:58AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Bigfoot's apparently supposedly a mimic. So to the point that in some stories, women have talked about, you know, they're like breastfeeding and the mimic sound is so, is so accurate that their body reacts when they hear this baby crying sound. So it's very realistic, according to the stories. So immediately I knew that I was, I was like, there's something happening down here that's very suspicious.

• 1:10:26AJ Gentile?

  What's Blake saying through all this?

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Oh, he's, he's like half rolling his eyes.

• 1:10:30AJ Gentile?

  Right, right.

• 1:10:32Speaker 03

  Because I talk about Bigfoot a lot. I think it's fascinating and he does not believe. He is a full skeptic. You know, I asked him the other day, after everything you know, what do you think the odds are that Bigfoot exists? And he's like, oh, 3%. Like after all the stories I've told him on the hours that we've hunted together, because that's what I do when we're hunting. So I'm like, oh, and then I heard this one story and this happened. And he's like.

• 1:10:51AJ Gentile?

  Okay, here she goes.

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  Stories.

• 1:10:53AJ Gentile?

  Save it for the channel.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  Exactly. So anyway, so I go to bed and I'm super suspicious. And that night, all of the porters had set up their tents around us. And the other two nights, they were far, far away because it's loud and echoey and you want to sleep well and they want to stay up later. And so this night, the porters were, their camps were all around us. We were like in the middle, which was suspicious. So we go to sleep and I'm super, super excited. Can't sleep. I'm like, there's Bigfoot up there. There's gotta be, there's gotta be.

• 1:11:24AJ Gentile?

  You want it to be.

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  Because the Vietnam rock ape, rock ape stories from the Vietnam War.

• 1:11:29AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Are prolific.

• 1:11:30AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  And they're super interesting. And so I knew that those stories existed. I had never thought that there would be potentially one near this cave or in this cave.

• 1:11:40AJ Gentile?

  Every vet comes home hating monkeys.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, my, my husband's father had an experience when he was in the Vietnam War, when he was in Vietnam.

• 1:11:49AJ Gentile?

  You can tell that story too. That's a good one.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So at 11:00 PM, we're just lying in bed and I'm wide awake, just staring, listening. And then we hear clack, clack.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  Blake. It's like, what? And I was like, listen, clack, clack. Did you hear that? And he's like, I heard that. It's like, what is that? And, you know, there's tree knocks and things that Bigfoot are known to do as well. So these sounds went on for a very long time. Eventually I fell asleep and they were still going on when I fell asleep.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  And we woke up the next morning and I said, well, did you, I asked the safety guy, and now I'm in like interrogation mode, you know? So I asked him, did you hear the baby crying? And he goes, and that's what I asked him. And his response was, no, I woke up at 3:00 AM to listen and I didn't hear it. I was like, that's suspicious. And one of them told us that it was a bird, not a squirrel that makes that noise. And then I asked about the rock clacking and he said it was water dripping on a stool, a metal stool. And there's, that is not how water sounds when it drips on a metal stool.

• 1:12:59AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  And so I just peppered him with questions the entire hike out, the whole day. I was just right on his heels, just peppering him with questions. And, you know, we did hear a story about when they initially explored the cave, the exploration team was getting hit by rocks. No, sticks. They were getting hit by sticks. And he got mad at his crew and he's like, stop throwing sticks at me. And the crew said, it's not us, it's the monkey. The monkey's throwing sticks at you, which is interesting. So I, I think it's absolutely possible that we encountered something in that cave. And like I said, that cave has flooded most of the year, but that area isn't. It stays dry. So logically, if you live in

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  that third tunnel and you climb up and down these steep limestone walls and you go hunt up, up on top, it would be a beautiful place to live.

• 1:13:51AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  90% of the year.

• 1:13:53AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  And then you have to deal with the tourists. And you're like a little angry. So you clack some rocks and stuff when they're in there making noise. So it was a, it was a really interesting experience. And just to, to close on what happened with my father-in-law, when he was there in the Vietnam War, he, he was out in the jungle and they were camping in tents. And he said, one of his, one of the other soldiers had his feet sticking out of the tent and something grabbed his foot and shook it. It's like, knock it off. You know, he thought it was like his friends or whatever. And he like tries to go back to sleep and then it grabs his foot and shakes it again. And he sits up to yell at him. This thing just reaches through and just punches him straight in the face and flattens his

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  nose. And he ends up getting medevac'd out, straight to the hospital, Purple Heart, straight back to America. And he told people that a monkey punched him. A big monkey punched him in the face, flattened his nose.

• 1:14:48AJ Gentile?

  A big monkey?

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  A big monkey.

• 1:14:49AJ Gentile?

  Which they don't.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  There aren't big monkeys there.

• 1:14:52AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  There aren't orangutans and things in Vietnam. So.

• 1:14:57AJ Gentile?

  Is this the first Bigfoot Purple Heart?

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  Maybe. Oh, my gosh.

• 1:15:01AJ Gentile?

  Right?

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  That would be a great book. Bigfoot Purple Heart. Or a t-shirt or something.

• 1:15:06AJ Gentile?

  So Blake's a 3%. Where are you?

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  I mean, I am a much more optimistic. I think there's too many stories. There's too many, too much anecdotal evidence for it to not be some sort of something. So I'm probably at like 75%.

• 1:15:26AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  I need to get eyes on, but.

• 1:15:29AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  I just think there's something going on out there and I don't know what it is. And I've watched the David Politis episode and, you know, I, I've read his books and I've read lots of books and watched lots of documentaries. And so I'll wait, you know, we spend enough time in the wilderness. I think it's going to happen.

• 1:15:45AJ Gentile?

  It might.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  And when it does, I'll report back. I'll let you know.

• 1:15:48AJ Gentile?

  I'll be watching your channel.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  Then I'll be at 100%.

• 1:15:51AJ Gentile?

  So you said, there's too many witness accounts. So you tend to believe those. But with some of the megalithic sites, there's a lot of expert accounts and you are suspicious of those.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03AJ Gentile?

  I think there's, uh, there's something to that.

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yep. I am suspicious of those. I mean, no, I'm not suspicious of those in the sense that were the Incas in Cusco? Yes.

• 1:16:16AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  Did the Khmer live all over Siem Reap?

• 1:16:21AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  And build the Bayon Temple and To Prom? Yes. I absolutely believe that happened. What I question is, can you date these sites from the ground all the way to the newest construction from the same era? And that's what I'm suspicious of. I don't think that they're being analyzed in the way that they should be.

• 1:16:42AJ Gentile?

  Mainstream is just shaking their head at another independent investigator getting on the scene.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:48AJ Gentile?

  Another Graham Hancock.

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:16:50AJ Gentile?

  Here she goes.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  Yep. Just there for the clicks and.

• 1:16:53AJ Gentile?

  No, I don't think you're there for the clicks.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. But it, you know, I understand why they're frustrated. This is their, they spent years and years getting PhDs in archaeology and they specialize on certain sites and somebody like me comes in and says, gosh, that just looks so different, doesn't it? I wonder, I wonder if maybe there's more to this story.

• 1:17:14AJ Gentile?

  Now, when you steel man them like that, which I, I believe you're sincere when you do that, you, you see it also as armor that you're putting up to protect yourself from them? Because you're giving them credit.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  Oh, I see what you're saying. I'm not interested in having fights with archaeologists. I think they're out there doing very good work.

• 1:17:34AJ Gentile?

  Most of them are?

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  Just like anything, if you are, you know, I saw it in corporate America all the time. You're, you build up your little function and you have your budget and you don't want anybody messing with that.

• 1:17:48AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  And I think that's what's happening. And I think, you know, maybe I just have, I have a very hard time believing that they all are looking at the same stones I am. And there's no questions at all in their minds on why are they so different? I wonder how on earth did they make that? It's like, I feel like maybe they think that and they just don't say it because they know it's not going to be well accepted. Just like, I thought things all the time in corporate America that I never said, because I knew it wasn't going to be well accepted.

• 1:18:17AJ Gentile?

  Like what?

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  You've got to be politically correct in any, any career, right? If you're going to survive and thrive, you're not going to say all the things you think.

• 1:18:27AJ Gentile?

  And what's funny is everybody thinks them.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29AJ Gentile?

  And what he says them, everybody's thinking the same stuff.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I do, I don't say that I appreciate the work they do because I'm trying to make them kind to me or less aggressive toward me. I genuinely do appreciate the work that they do because I spend countless hours reading their reports. Now, do I find issue with some of those reports? Sure. I have questions. But that doesn't mean that they're not out there doing the work that they're paid to do. So.

• 1:18:56AJ Gentile?

  But I mean, if, if some of your theories are correct, they're going to lose grant money.

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Well, they should just apply for a different grant.

• 1:19:03AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:19:04AJ Gentile?

  I mean, I agree, but.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06AJ Gentile?

  The more, the more fans you get, the more they're going to come after you.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And it's a different kind of come after too. It's, it's not like the politically correct, I'm going to try to take you down quietly, the way they do in corporate America.

• 1:19:21AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  It's an in-your-face, very aggressive. And the ones who are the most aggressive aren't even archaeologists. You know, they just feel like they're defending some ideal, you know, and they're, they're like, well, if, you know, if I can call her a racist and get her to shut up, maybe she'll stop.

• 1:19:38AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, they are. That's, that's super effective, but it doesn't work anymore.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  And it's not, yeah, it doesn't. It's not true.

• 1:19:46AJ Gentile?

  It's not true.

• 1:19:47Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:19:47AJ Gentile?

  And we talked a little bit about this before we came on, which I think it's okay to talk about, is I get criticized all the time by some pretty well-known people. I don't acknowledge it at all. I don't even tell the team, like, you know, this reporter's gone after me. There's this article about all the things I got wrong. It's like, I'm working on the next episode.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you, does it bother you? You just don't acknowledge it? Or have you gotten to a place now after this long where you just kind of let it slide off of you?

• 1:20:15AJ Gentile?

  It took like five years to stop reading about it?

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:19AJ Gentile?

  The awareness bothers me. Like you just kind of want to read. Like, what did he say?

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23AJ Gentile?

  Like, what did I get wrong? But then after a while, it's like, I, I know what he's going to say.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:20:28AJ Gentile?

  But I can always fall back on, look, I'm an entertainer. I'm not a journalist. I'm here to make people happy and I get things wrong.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:37AJ Gentile?

  I think you're in a trickier spot.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  Well, and I will gladly admit when I get something wrong. You know, you can't catch up on an entire region's worth of history, hundreds of years of reports, put together your case for the questions you have for a place and not get a fact or two wrong. And if I do, I will admit it. So that, but yeah, I think it's a, it's harder when you, I haven't yet gotten to a place where I'm, I'm still in the process of developing my theories about what some of these places actually were. So right now I'm still new at all of this. I'm gathering the evidence. And at this point, I'm mostly just asking questions and pointing out things, irregularities.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  But at some point I do expect I'm going to have a theory or two that I want to actually put out there. And I, you're right, that's a difficult position to be in.

• 1:21:34AJ Gentile?

  Cause I've heard you talk about some, some sites as being like power generators and stuff, like the, like Chris Dunn's theories, which I kind of believe a lot of that stuff. Boy, mainstream doesn't like us talking about it.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  No, it doesn't fit. It doesn't fit. It's not, it doesn't fit into the story that all of us were taught in history class growing up and, but that doesn't mean the story can't be rewritten. You know, what, what kind of evidence would it take to do that? It would take either an amazing discovery that there's no other explanation except for there was something about our past we don't, we didn't know and we didn't understand. So say it's that metal object supposedly in Hawara. Say that gets unearthed. It's something like that would be, nobody would ever be able to argue with that. I suspect that that huge aha moment is not going to happen.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  Maybe it would, but we shouldn't plan on that. The other scenario is you just start chipping away at it. And what I like to do is go to places that other people don't go to. And then you create this portfolio of evidence and you start to really gather enough similarities between sites around the world, enough examples of how the technology of the time most likely could not have created what you're looking at with your own eyes. And you, you convince enough people, or at least encourage enough people to question

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  the official story, that suddenly there's just this wave of, okay, enough people believe. And then I do think that the research would follow. That's a much slower, longer process to get through. I would love it if something beautiful and shiny was discovered. I don't think that's going to happen.

• 1:23:31AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  So I'm going to keep working over here, asking questions, going to the different places, documenting the different sites, showing what doesn't make sense and making a case for, we need to think about this in a little bit of a different way. And who knows, maybe in my lifetime, people will fundamentally change their minds, maybe not.

• 1:23:52AJ Gentile?

  I think, I think a lot more people are interested in alternate theories now, mostly because of Graham.

• 1:23:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58AJ Gentile?

  And I read his books in the nineties. Got me thinking, and Chris Dunn also kind of changed my whole thinking about stuff.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:04AJ Gentile?

  We were chatting about the Serapeum earlier, which is an episode I have coming up. And it's a place that doesn't make sense, man.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  No. And there's so many places that don't make sense. And kudos to Graham and Chris Dunn and people like that. They're not tiptoeing.

• 1:24:16AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:24:16Speaker 03

  You know, they came out with their, their theories or, you know, Land of Chem, like he's out there saying, here's what I think this was. And I think there's a lot to that. I'm not ready to do that yet because I don't have that kind of a background. I'm not a chemical engineer. I'm not a water expert.

• 1:24:32AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  I'm used to gathering teams of experts together to do diligence, something, and I'm right now just doing it on my own. And so I'll, I'll analyze, I'll travel the world. I'll get the actual footage. I'll make a case. I'll read the, the reports. I'll show the evidence. And in some of my videos, I say, here's what I saw at like Coqere in Cambodia. If anybody is a chemical engineer or a water expert or a geologist, and you have thoughts about what I, if there's something you saw where you're like, oh my gosh, I know exactly what that is, I'd love to hear it.

• 1:25:04AJ Gentile?

  Have you? Have they reached out?

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  Some people have, some people have, you know, there's a lot of people that have theories.

• 1:25:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, a lot of theories.

• 1:25:12Speaker 03

  A lot of theories, which, you know, that's all you can do unless you're on the ground doing the tests and things like that. But in these big systems, like the one you see in Angkor, where you can look at the scans from space and you can see there's clearly something much bigger going on here.

• 1:25:30AJ Gentile?

  Do you want to show us some pictures?

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  Than the official story. I think you can start to put together some theories about that, you know, without being on the ground digging.

• 1:25:39AJ Gentile?

  I was shocked at the, the Angkor Lidar images, which I know you have. This is insane right here.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  We're going to start with this one.

• 1:25:49AJ Gentile?

  Where is Wat?

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  Angkor Wat is right in the middle of that big square. And Angkor Wat faces west. Just, so the Lidar scans that happened in Cambodia happened in 2012 and 2014. There was an amazing archaeologist who has since passed away named Damian Evans, who put together these Lidar scans. He was with a university in Australia, but he was, he was amazing. And reading his reports are really interesting because you can tell he's kind of doing a little poking.

• 1:26:22AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:26:22Speaker 03

  You know, he's like, these are unexplainable. And he points out things. So in this, just this one photo, they scanned, they scanned how many? 2,500 square kilometers of land, I think, as part of this effort. So it's Angkor proper, and then a bunch of different sites outside of Angkor.

• 1:26:41AJ Gentile?

  Like, we all know what Angkor Wat looks like. And this is, this is insane how big this is.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46AJ Gentile?

  And these parallel lines.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the two major things they discovered at Angkor itself, there is this pattern of mounds. And I think they, you know, they were aware that the land was undulating, but they didn't understand how geometric these mound shapes were. I mean, they're like four mounds in a square, four mounds in a square. They're very mechanical. There's mounds within the Angkor Wat moat. There's mounds outside to the east. So you can see the ones to the right of the moat. And then across the south of the moat, there are these mile long earthen spiral embankments. And if you look at that, you know, Damian Evans says, we don't know what they were.

• 1:27:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  You know, some people have speculated they were royal gardens. Some people have said it was a staging area for construction. The most compelling part of those spirals for me is that Angkor Wat was supposedly built in the 12th century. There was a trench dug through these, through these spirals. Here's a great picture of it. See the trench dug through that?

• 1:28:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  That was supposedly dug like within a hundred years of Angkor Wat being built. So you're telling me that the builders of Angkor Wat built those spiral embankments south of Angkor Wat for whatever reason. And within a hundred years, whatever reason they had for building those was no longer relevant and the new king built an entire trench through it as if possibly the new king didn't even know they were there.

• 1:28:36AJ Gentile?

  That makes sense to me.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  That makes sense to me too. It, the two options are it was there for not very long, or nobody ever knew they were there in the modern Khmer Empire. And they just built, you know, these are huge. You can't really see them when you're on the ground. You can only see them from space.

• 1:28:56AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. How wide is that yellow rectangle?

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  It's a mile long.

• 1:28:59AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:29:01Speaker 03

  So the, yeah, it's a, it's a mile across and it's like half a mile or a little bit more north to south. And it would have been, you know, those spirals would have been all the way, all inside that green yellow square, except for that trench that was dug through it later.

• 1:29:19AJ Gentile?

  These are perfectly straight lines, perfect right angles. This is the Serapeum is the same, same thing. It's like down to a thousandth of, of an inch. It's like, they polished it with stones.

• 1:29:29Speaker 03

  And why build that?

• 1:29:31AJ Gentile?

  Why is that, why, like, look at all the resources that would be deployed just to, to make those gardens?

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  So Angkor Wat itself is 400 acres.

• 1:29:40AJ Gentile?

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  And so look at the size of Angkor Wat compared to the square below it. This is a huge amount of land that they're terracing with these incredible earthen embankments. They tested them. There are not cultural layers within these.

• 1:29:54AJ Gentile?

  There's not?

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:29:57AJ Gentile?

  What's in there?

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  It's just, it's just built of sand. It's just earth, you know, it's just earthen embankments.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  They tested the cultural layers, of course, on the inside of the moat. And people were living in the inside of the moat forever. And so, yes, there's pottery, there's household items, there's things in these, these mounds. But in other places in Cambodia, they discovered a massive amount of mounds, like on the top of the Penam Kulen Plateau, which are the mountains that they quarried all of the limestone or the sandstone. On top of there, there were 300 mounds.

• 1:30:37AJ Gentile?

  300?

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he, in Damian Evans' reports, he describes those as culturally sterile. So they were not living on those mounds. They also discovered this. So this is a mound field to the east of one of the large water reservoirs. There's 100 mounds in there. To me, that doesn't look like habitation. That looks like something else.

• 1:31:04AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it looks like industrial engineering.

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:31:07AJ Gentile?

  And this is a mile wide, right? So these are three, 200-foot mounds, maybe?

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  They're big. I saw them with my own eyes. I parked in the northwest corner of this mound field and looked over it. It's like a orchard now. But you can see, you can see the mounds with the trees on them and around them. So they're still there. You can still see them if you look at them.

• 1:31:31AJ Gentile?

  Do the locals have any legends, ancient stories?

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  I haven't heard any about the mounds from them. I don't know.

• 1:31:39AJ Gentile?

  You can't date them, right?

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  The only thing you can date is any cultural deposits that you find on or in them.

• 1:31:49AJ Gentile?

  It doesn't, it's not enough?

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  It's not enough.

• 1:31:52AJ Gentile?

  Because you would just show up and say, oh, someone already flattened this. Let's move in here.

• 1:31:57Speaker 03

  I mean, if you live in a, a place that's wet and you want to live in a dry place, you live on top of that hill.

• 1:32:04AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  People do it all the time.

• 1:32:05AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  It's a great place to live. I live on a hill. You know, it's so...

• 1:32:10AJ Gentile?

  You find a pyramid the king says, I made, that's mine, I made that. You found that.

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  Yes. And, you know, it's interesting with Cambodia because these scans, they really blew my mind. And I started doing a lot of thinking about, what could this be? Like, I'll show you. So here's, this is an interesting photo. This is a heat map of the Angkor complex. So you've got Angkor Wat down in the bottom with that moat through the spiral embankments that you see. The two giant water features are called berets. The one on the left still has water in it today.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  Eight kilometers long, two kilometers wide.

• 1:33:02AJ Gentile?

  What is that in English? Mile and a, mile and...

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  Eight kilometers would be, what, six miles? Is that right?

• 1:33:10AJ Gentile?

  Five.

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  1.85. Long.

• 1:33:13AJ Gentile?

  Long.

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  Real big. The one on the, the east beret, the one on the right, is almost as big as the west one.

• 1:33:19AJ Gentile?

  You couldn't cut these lines in a jungle?

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  The 100, 100 mound, on the right side of the eastern beret, that's where you see that mound field with the 100 mounds. And you see this gentle slope. So red is high, green is low.

• 1:33:37AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  So this, this was engineered to go, and the water comes from the east, engineered to go from the right to the left of this screen. And it was, when I started seeing images like this, that I started thinking, the story we're being told about Cambodia just doesn't make any sense.

• 1:33:59AJ Gentile?

  Well, a Nebraska farm girl would know how to get water to places. And some, some of this doesn't make sense, like the dog leg coming down.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  And that was a much later, like, very late Khmer. I think what was happening is, I think that, you know, this is the one, one of the only places that I've done research, where I've put out some of my opinions on what this is. And in my opinion, these features were already here. And I think the Khmer worked with them. What a great gift to have this massive reservoir that you can pull water out of and you never have to worry about it. In the dry season, you have water.

• 1:34:43AJ Gentile?

  It still works.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  It still works. But toward the end of the Khmer Empire, you start to see them making changes to this system. In the dry season, they're cutting trenches straight down from the river. They're not dog legging it to slow it down because they're trying to feed water directly in because their berets are drying up. And then suddenly, they would experience a wet, a wet time of year or a wet season, a couple of years that were wetter than normal. And you see these examples of the banks of these berets starting to blow out.

• 1:35:14AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  And so they're trying to reinforce them. And so I think it was a system that they inherited and they were trying really hard to get going again and making it, to try and make it useful for themselves, but they couldn't quite get it to work from whoever built it originally.

• 1:35:31AJ Gentile?

  And don't we see that everywhere? This advanced engineering that can't be replicated for thousands of years somehow?

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  Yes. And you see...

• 1:35:40AJ Gentile?

  On every continent.

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  Advanced engineering at the lowest levels. Take Saxay Waman, take, take any site. In each, in India, the sites I went to, you see this amazing, beautiful stonework that is almost unexplainably perfect. And then above it, you see stonework that looks like it. It's like they tried to match it or mimic it, and it's just not the same. It's not even close. So you start to see these layers of attempting to build on these sites and replicate them, and it's just, it's off.

• 1:36:12AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, and I, there's a valid argument that says, well, they didn't have the resources, they were just trying to repair the sites. But then you've shown, like, statues that are worse years later. So those are, that's artwork. That's not engineering.

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31AJ Gentile?

  That they're trying to replicate.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  And, you know, I think if you see something beautiful and you, it becomes, so say you do stumble across one of these absolutely incredible statues from the ancient world. And it becomes the central statue in your pyramid temple or whatever. If you're an artisan of the day, and that is the recognized form of art, you're going to try to replicate it so that you can have statues like that in other places in your empire, because it's beautiful. When you look at it, it, it blows your mind. And so, of course, you want to replicate it. I think that's exactly what was happening with the stonework. So, yeah, I think it's a natural human inclination to try to recreate beautiful things.

• 1:37:17AJ Gentile?

  Do you have any pictures of the spindles that, they're perfect, and then years later, they're just kind of, just kind of carved into the wall?

• 1:37:28Speaker 03

  So what you were talking about with the spindles, these are...

• 1:37:31AJ Gentile?

  Is that what they're called?

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  That's what I call them. I think in a lot of the research reports, they're called window dressings.

• 1:37:36AJ Gentile?

  Or air conditioning units?

• 1:37:38Speaker 03

  Or air conditioning units. That's what I was told in Laos was the air blows in and moves around the window dressings and creates an air conditioning effect, makes the air move and cools you down, which maybe it does. So on the left is a site called Bantie Sray, which is the red sandstone temple in Cambodia. It's absolutely, it's my favorite site. Who cares, my favorite site. Bantie Sray is my second favorite. And these spindles, as I call them, are, in my opinion, clearly lathe-turned.

• 1:38:10AJ Gentile?

  They have to be.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  They are incredible. And you can see where the machine went in and out, and you can see them replicated across. You can see how all those are the same.

• 1:38:20AJ Gentile?

  Well, you just said "machine." That's where it gets controversial.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  It, true, true. It could be a lathe that was turned very quickly with some sort of mechanism powered by an animal. You're right. It doesn't need to be machined. I don't know how you build the, the pillars in India that way, because they're so big and they're so heavy. But you're, I totally concede that point. It definitely didn't need to be machines.

• 1:38:51AJ Gentile?

  But it, but it makes more sense to me that it is. How are the spindles attached to the posts?

• 1:38:56Speaker 03

  There's a, a peg on the top and the bottom, and they're just inserted.

• 1:39:01AJ Gentile?

  So they're brought in.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  Inserted in. And you can see they're laying all over the place in Cambodia, so you can see how they were inserted. The case I'm making in this slide is, I believe that the oldest sites in Cambodia have these very interesting standalone precise spindles. And I believe that later, they wanted to have spindle decorations in their temples, but they didn't remember how to do it. And so, the temple on the right is Teprom, the famous Lara Croft temple.

• 1:39:36AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  With the trees. It's such a cool place. I think that Teprom was genuinely built by the Khmer Empire. And I think that they wanted to honor the spindles that they found at the other places, and so they replicated them. The question I would have is, if you have the ability to make the spindles, why don't you do it? Why do you create just an impression of spindles? And you see it, you see it with brickwork, too. There's impressions of spindles on the sides of the structures that are created with brick.

• 1:40:11AJ Gentile?

  Well, what I noticed about the before, and I guess before and after as well, is the frescoes around the spindles. You can see how the, the characters are all a little bit different, which makes sense to me if you're kind of drawing it. But in the earlier ones, they're perfect as if it, like, a template was used.

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  Yes. And it's the same images across all of the sites that I think are the oldest.

• 1:40:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  Very similar. So, and it's, it's beautiful 3D stonework, almost unexplainably perfect. And then in these...

• 1:40:41AJ Gentile?

  And here, it's just...

• 1:40:42Speaker 03

  It's fine. It's fine.

• 1:40:45AJ Gentile?

  But it's clearly 2D. They're a little janky. I mean, I couldn't do it. But the other ones are perfect.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:40:51AJ Gentile?

  And they're... Perfectly relieved.

• 1:40:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there's a lot of examples of this in Cambodia. There's the statues. There's the spindles. There's the construction techniques you see in the older structures. And when I say older, I mean what I believe were the oldest ones in Cambodia, like the pyramids. Huge stonework, perfect, you know, these amazing lions. And then you go to the later sites and it's really tiny stonework. It's all stacked on top of each other and kind of falling apart. You know, when you look at 1930s excavation photos of these pyramids. They were in amazing shape. Koh Khair looked just as cool in the 1930s before it had been excavated and repaired as it does today.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  So it just stood the test of time. It was a

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  a perfect kind of construction that could withstand that jungle. To prom is being torn down every single day by trees. And it's just, it doesn't have the same kind of structure that allows it to hold itself up. So, yeah.

• 1:41:59AJ Gentile?

  We see the same thing with the pyramids. You know, the mud brick later ones are falling apart.

• 1:42:05AJ Gentile?

  But

• 1:42:07AJ Gentile?

  but the big pyramids, they're just there forever.

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. And in, you know, in Cambodia, the general theory is that they started building with brick. Then they eventually moved to stone. But you see this weird dynamic where the brick is always above the stone. And, and it's not just a, you know, you can make an argument that, well, they needed the bases of these buildings to be stone. And then the rest they built with brick.

• 1:42:31AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  But you see at some of the pyramids, like Pre Rup Pyramid. In the excavation photos, the stone goes down feet and feet and feet and feet into the depths of the site. And then there's these brick towers on the very top of the pyramid. It just, that timeline doesn't make any sense to me. You don't start with brick and then move to stone. But somehow the stone ends up underneath the brick.

• 1:42:58AJ Gentile?

  Well, let's get into some trouble and speculate. How old do you think they are?

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  That is a way to get into trouble.

• 1:43:05AJ Gentile?

  Are we talking younger Dryas?

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  The, there's a site in Cambodia called Koh Khair.

• 1:43:13AJ Gentile?

  Is that how you say it? I can't ever pronounce. My Khmer is terrible.

• 1:43:16Speaker 03

  In, in like the 60 Minutes episode that they did on Koh Khair, they called it Kokei.

• 1:43:22AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:43:24Speaker 03

  And I think if you want to be completely correct, that's probably how you pronounce it. But everybody calls it Koh Khair.

• 1:43:32AJ Gentile?

  Barnhart calls it Koh Khair. Right. If Barnhart calls it Koh Khair, that's what I'm going with.

• 1:43:35Speaker 03

  Barnhart called it Koh Khair. That means that I can call it Koh Khair.

• 1:43:38AJ Gentile?

  Agreed.

• 1:43:39Speaker 03

  He's the expert. So, so yeah, that, you know, that site, I think, in my opinion, is the oldest. And it's interesting because it's outside of the core of the Angkor complex. It's miles to the northeast. How old is that? I, I don't know.

• 1:43:55AJ Gentile?

  I know.

• 1:43:56Speaker 03

  It's oriented, it's oriented north of east, 12 degrees. So it's got this strange orientation. It has the most extraordinary versions of everything you see in Cambodia. It's got the biggest pyramid, the only one that's solid stone. It has the largest statues, you know, some of which were these monumental statues in the entrance pavilions. It has these amazingly huge lingas.

• 1:44:26AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:44:27Speaker 03

  That are, you know, bigger than me. If I go just down one slide, that Linga photo in the middle there is is way taller than I am. And you don't see lingas of that size anywhere. There's the Koh Khair Pyramid on the left. At Koh Khair, there's a seven kilometer long dam north of Koh Khair that was found using LIDAR very recently. So it had the largest manmade body of water in Cambodia at this site.

• 1:44:53AJ Gentile?

  What would a Linga be used for?

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  You know, traditionally, the Linga is a

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  it's meant to represent Shiva. It's a merging of the masculine and the feminine.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  The Linga is the pointy part at the top. The yoni is the base. So, you know, you could make an argument that it's a spiritual tool. These giant ones, I, you know, there's seven of them. There were seven of them at Koh Khair. I saw a huge one in Camp, in India that was 15 feet tall. It's like the size, size of a car.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  And in the ancient traditions. So in like the Shiva Piranha, they describe it as an infinite pillar of fire and light.

• 1:45:46AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 1:45:47Speaker 03

  So what was that implying about potentially the use of these? They're all housed in roofless shrines. The spout of them always faces north and they're always adjacent to a massive body of water.

• 1:46:01AJ Gentile?

  Well, the mainstream view is that just represents Shiva and Vishnu.

• 1:46:04Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:46:05AJ Gentile?

  But it sounds like technology and Mahabharata.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  Looks like technology. And they talk about it like technology in the ancient texts.

• 1:46:13AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  So are, is it technology today and these little ones you see in the temples? No, those are, those are spiritual tools.

• 1:46:20AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:46:20Speaker 03

  These are different. They're fundamentally different. The one at Hampi is sitting in its own body of water. I have a video of it on my Instagram. And you can, it's in a cage now, like they won't let you go in, but it's standing in the middle of this body of water. It's huge.

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  I'll find it right here. There it is. So

• 1:46:46AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  The one on the left is Koh Khair. That's the one that you visit in Cambodia. The top right one is at Hampi, India. That's the site that I visited in June. So you see it compared to the size of this man and look at it. It's sitting in water, in a roofless shrine, and the spout is facing north. And this one is locked off. The one in the bottom right is one in northern India, and it's 40 feet tall. Also in a formerly roofless shrine, they have since covered it.

• 1:47:22AJ Gentile?

  That looks like technology.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  Also facing north and also next to a giant manmade reservoir.

• 1:47:27AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:47:29Speaker 03

  I don't think that's a coincidence.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  They're doing something specific with these. And even if you look at the one in India and the one in Cambodia, the designs they have on the front of them. I don't know what those designs mean, but you see those all over. And, you know, I saw a Linga in Thailand that had that same design on it.

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  So there's something going on. Nobody talks about these huge ones. They only talk about the little ones that you see at Angkor Wat or whatever. But so to get back, this was a very long answer to your very short question. To get back to your question.

• 1:48:01AJ Gentile?

  I forgot what I asked.

• 1:48:02Speaker 03

  Any site, how old are the sites in Cambodia? If you want to get in trouble.

• 1:48:07AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  If there's any site that you can make a case for, it's probably the oldest. My argument would be Koh Khair is the oldest. It has the most monumental, the most standout properties of any of the sites in Cambodia.

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  So that would be the one I would say is the oldest. Do I want to speculate? Would it, could it be older than younger Dryas? Yes, it could be.

• 1:48:30AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:48:30Speaker 03

  For sure. Is it? I don't know. I don't know. You know? As I understand it, Cambodia was part of a much larger landmass called Sundaland a long time ago. So it was, again, not a landmass that was destroyed the way that North America was.

• 1:48:48AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  It could preserve things for a very long time. You know, back before the younger Dryas, it was a grassland. It was a different kind of paleo environment than it is now. It's much wetter, much more jungle now. So would there have been some incentive to try to preserve water in a different kind of way, in a different environment? Maybe.

• 1:49:09AJ Gentile?

  Well, that was what I was kind of implying earlier was at, at Angkor. That kind of engineering would be much easier to do if it was just kind of a grassland or a plain.

• 1:49:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:19AJ Gentile?

  In the jungle, it's hard to do.

• 1:49:21Speaker 03

  Very hard to do. And to maintain, it's, the jungle is constantly trying to rip down what you put up.

• 1:49:25AJ Gentile?

  And yeah, in a, in a, in a season.

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's super interesting about Siem Reap is there's a very large lake, I think the largest lake in Asia, it's called the Tonle Sap, and it's south of Siem Reap. And the Mekong River comes down from Laos on the east side of Siem Reap. And then south, it's the only, one of the only lakes in the world where the river into the lake changes direction throughout the course of the year.

• 1:49:56AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  So normally, water flows from the Kulin Mountains through the anchor complex, south into the lake, and then it goes south into the Mekong River. But when the Mekong River swells, it reverses course, the water goes back up into the inlet of the lake, and it expands the lake massively. So it's this very weird water dynamic in Siem Reap. I don't know of any other rivers that just reverse course.

• 1:50:23AJ Gentile?

  No, I mean, the Nile floods.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  But it doesn't change directions.

• 1:50:27AJ Gentile?

  No, it doesn't.

• 1:50:29Speaker 03

  So it's interesting.

• 1:50:30AJ Gentile?

  It's interesting.

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:31AJ Gentile?

  I don't know what that means, but that's interesting to me.

• 1:50:36Speaker 03

  I don't know what it means either, except that they had substantial water resources as part of this landscape, were dependable, and they engineered it, fully understanding how it all, you know, so they engineered it from the Kulin Mountains, down into the plains, they diverted rivers 12 kilometers, I'll show you a photo here. So here's a landscape photo of Siem Reap. You've got the west beret, the water feature you can see from space. The old international airport is south of that beret, you can see the runway there, that's the scale of this thing. So what they did is they took the water from the Kulin Mountains, down the Phuk River,

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  they created a 16-kilometer diversion channel, which they call the Siem Reap Channel. They diverted it then to the east, instead of taking it straight down to the eastern beret, past Penong Bagh Mound, which had a giant lingo on top of it, past the Hundred Mound, mound field, into the eastern beret. Every one of these berets has a temple in the middle of it, an island temple. This particular beret has two pyramids connected to it, one on the west and one on the south. Then the water exits the east side of that beret, it goes down the Rulis River, and into a beret in the south that also has its own island temple and is also connected to a pyramid.

• 1:52:04AJ Gentile?

  Let's say there's a bunch of people living here, do you need that much water?

• 1:52:09Speaker 03

  Not for agricultural purposes.

• 1:52:10AJ Gentile?

  That's

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  And I can say that because I grew up as a farmer.

• 1:52:13AJ Gentile?

  That's why I asked, is, that, because that's a lot of water.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  It's, and it's a lot of land to use up

• 1:52:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:52:20Speaker 03

  for storing water. I mean, all of those could have been rice fields without creating, you know, eight-kilometer-long reservoirs. So you don't, you definitely don't need that for agricultural purposes. You know, if you look at Wikipedia's definition of these berets, they say they were used for agriculture and spiritual purposes.

• 1:52:39AJ Gentile?

  I don't go by Wikipedia.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  Nor do I.

• 1:52:42AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  Nor do I, but that's what they say, so.

• 1:52:45AJ Gentile?

  So what was that for?

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  What was it for? Why go through that kind of an effort? And why are there all these weird pyramids? Like, the western beret, the one I don't have highlighted on this map, that still has water in it, also has its own island temple. Just next to it is Penong Bakhang Pyramid, Vaxay Cham Krong Pyramid is next to it, like, Bapuan Pyramid is next to it, it just goes up the line, they're all, it's all part of this crazy network.

• 1:53:16Speaker 03

  Here's another kind of high-level photo of the different waterways that were happening there, it looks like a giant industrial process.

• 1:53:23AJ Gentile?

  It does.

• 1:53:24Speaker 03

  And they had ways to divert water, like, from the Angkor moat, they could take it down to the southern beret, or they could drop it straight into the river, the Tonle Sap, or the, the lake down south of Siem Reap. So they had ways to recycle water and move it back in, or dump it. You know, in the west beret, you could dump it and go straight southwest, or you could divert it slowly along the plain all the way to the south. That's different water speeds, that's different, who knows what they were doing? I'd love to hear some sort of an expert in this, give me some ideas, I'm extremely open to them, but.

• 1:54:07AJ Gentile?

  Well, in your career, you were with companies that moved mountains to get at gold, so if this is a machine, what's the product and who's the customer?

• 1:54:17Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:54:19AJ Gentile?

  Crap.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  I don't know, I don't know the answer to that.

• 1:54:22AJ Gentile?

  I want it to be an energy network for obelisks or something cool like that.

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  You know, was it, were they treating the water, were they mining minerals? There were lots of minerals in this area.

• 1:54:35AJ Gentile?

  Because we can't tell.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  Were they generating energy?

• 1:54:39Speaker 03

  I don't, were they generating chemicals? I mean, I know the way Land of Chem thinks about these things, Jeffrey talks about a lot of these things as chemical industrial processes. Here's what I think about, I think that these sites were multi-use, so were they smart enough to create a system that not only creates the minerals or chemicals or energy that you need, but maybe also helped humans be healthier, and created structured water so that crops grew well? And you have the pyramids that are changing the energy, and so it's, it's a multi-purpose system and not just one thing.

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  It's not just creating chemicals, it's also treating water, and it's giving it special properties, and it's all working together to create this beautiful land, beautiful lush, vibrant, productive landscape, and maybe healthy people.

• 1:55:35AJ Gentile?

  Any chance there's hydrofluoric acid around?

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  I don't know the answer to that.

• 1:55:40AJ Gentile?

  That would be interesting to know.

• 1:55:41Speaker 03

  It would be.

• 1:55:45Speaker 03

  So this is, this is the landscape that I dream about, this is the landscape that I read all of the research reports for.

• 1:55:55Speaker 03

  The pyramids are extraordinary, you know, there's eight of them in Cambodia, and I don't think a lot of people know that, so.

• 1:56:02AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  And they go all across the official Khmer timeline. So they, the very first thing that was built in Cambodia was supposedly the pyramid, you know? Right out of the gates, in 880 AD, they made Bakhong Pyramid, which is one of the most impressive pyramids in that landscape.

• 1:56:22AJ Gentile?

  I don't think there's any way.

• 1:56:24Speaker 03

  Doesn't make any sense.

• 1:56:24AJ Gentile?

  No. Did the temples come before the water?

• 1:56:30Speaker 03

  So the same king that built the Bakhong Pyramid in 880 AD is credited with, and that's the pyramid down south, is credited with, so the Bakhong Pyramid you see on this map here, he's credited with building Bakhong, the Priyako, which is a temple just north of Bakhong, and the beret. And in some of the inscriptions, he says, he dedicates the, he dedicates the pyramid, it doesn't say he constructs it, but he dedicates it.

• 1:57:03AJ Gentile?

  That's in Sanskrit, right?

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  And then he says the words, something like, "And tomorrow," or something like, "And tomorrow I will begin to dig." And so that's how they've, they've used those, that language to say, well, he must have dug the beret, "Tomorrow I will begin to dig."

• 1:57:22AJ Gentile?

  Now, this is the Sanskrit inscriptions that were translated.

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  Found at the site.

• 1:57:25AJ Gentile?

  Found at the site.

• 1:57:26Speaker 03

  Yes. And so.

• 1:57:27AJ Gentile?

  And the translations are very honest about, I forget who translated them, but he says, "I think this word means this, but it could mean this, this, or this."

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and it's, you know, it's Sanskrit, they're, the French did all of the initial translations, so if you want to find these translations, you have to look deeply in these French documents. But my, my general impression of the inscriptions are that the conclusions that have been, the conclusions that they've come to, the archaeologists have come to around this landscape, are a bit of a jump from what the inscriptions actually say. And I've made this case in multiple videos. And we, we know, and in these instances, they don't even claim to have built them, they

• 1:58:15Speaker 03

  just are dedicating, you know, a shibalinga at the summit of this pyramid, or something like that. But we know in Egypt, they also stamped their cartouches on the shoulders of statues, and to your point earlier, they look different

• 1:58:30AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  than the underlying statue, so.

• 1:58:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  Even if they would have gone all the way to say, "I built this," which in many instances, they don't say that, it still doesn't necessarily mean they built it.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  The, the beret, I think it's possible that you could translate that inscription to say, "I'm going to redig the beret, I'm going to clear it out because it's full of silt, and I want it to have water again for my people."

• 1:58:55AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:57Speaker 03

  So did that king that came right out of the gates, you know, the Indirvarman I, one of the first kings in the Khmer Empire, did he settle there because there was an incredible state temple, the pyramid, Priyako north of it, which is a beautiful nether temple, and then a beret with the temple in the middle of it? And did he fix it up? Because at the, at Bakhong Pyramid, there are six towers around the outside of it that are all made of brick.

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  And here's an interesting thing. They did some carbon dating of, so in these brick structures outside of the pyramid, still within the moat, but outside of the pyramid proper, made of brick, there's wooden doorways, like reinforcements at the top, which you can date that.

• 1:59:47AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  And they did. They did date that wood.

• 1:59:50AJ Gentile?

  And?

• 1:59:51Speaker 03

  The wood came back at 680 AD, 200 years. So that's the low end of the range.

• 1:59:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:59:58Speaker 03

  200 years before the supposed construction of the entire site.

• 2:00:03AJ Gentile?

  That's a lot of years.

• 2:00:04Speaker 03

  It's a lot of years.

• 2:00:06AJ Gentile?

  To be wrong.

• 2:00:06Speaker 03

  Did they use a 200-year-old tree?

• 2:00:08AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:00:08Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 2:00:09AJ Gentile?

  Maybe.

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  You know, and that's what people would say. And in the archaeological report that talks about those carbon results, they say, they don't even make a comment about the fact that the wood is 200 years older than the site itself. They just say it's in line with the results. And so in this, in this hypothetical scenario where he's finding this site, is the pyramid itself the oldest? Did they come in and did they repair the site and rebuild the towers around it with brick? Even if they did all of that, it still shows that the repair work is 200 years older than the inscriptions at the top of the pyramid, say, of when it was built.

• 2:00:53AJ Gentile?

  It's a lot of years. Have you heard of luminance testing?

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  I have.

• 2:00:57AJ Gentile?

  Have they done that on this site yet?

• 2:00:58Speaker 03

  No, they did it in a site, Phnom Penh, on the brick at Phnom Penh down in southern Cambodia.

• 2:01:05AJ Gentile?

  What is luminance testing, now that you mention it?

• 2:01:08Speaker 03

  I'm no expert. As I understand it, it's a way to measure light exposure on the brick or stone itself. So like quartz, high quartz or natural things like bricks will absorb light and you can test the last time they were exposed to light and it changes. I might be doing a terrible job of explaining this, but that's

• 2:01:31AJ Gentile?

  That's how it works.

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  As I understand it.

• 2:01:33AJ Gentile?

  That's how it works.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  And there were anomalous results at Phnom Penh too. The bricks themselves were much older than the site was supposed to have been. And that was one of the oldest sites in Cambodia. So it's, it's a real problem and it goes completely unacknowledged.

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  And that's the science themselves. There's another really interesting

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  carbon date that came out of Kookair, where they drilled seven feet into the moat, on the moat that's in front of the Kookair Pyramid. Drilled seven feet down, and that was as far as their drill would go. And

• 2:02:14AJ Gentile?

  That's it?

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:02:16AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:02:16Speaker 03

  Because in the report, they described why that was their limitation. It had something to do with where they had to mount the drill above the water and it was a whole thing. But that's as far as they were able to go down. And, you know, Kookair was, was built in, give or take, about 920 AD, according to the mainstream narrative. The bottom of the drill results into the sediment inside the moat came back 200 years before Kookair was supposedly built. And that, if you think about that scenario.

• 2:02:52AJ Gentile?

  That matches the date of the wood, yes?

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  They're drilling into a moat that had already, was already being refilled with silt.

• 2:03:00AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:03:01Speaker 03

  And yes, there are cultural layers in there and things you can test. But in that scenario, did the moat and the site already exist? Was it already out of commission? Had the moat already been filled and maybe partially re-excavated from the king that lived there? And when they're dating seven, seven feet down into this, this moat, are they dating the silt that filled it up later? And had they gone all the way to the bottom?

• 2:03:31AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, seven feet doesn't seem like enough.

• 2:03:32Speaker 03

  Who knows how old that would have been?

• 2:03:34AJ Gentile?

  What if you go 40 feet down?

• 2:03:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And theoretically

• 2:03:38AJ Gentile?

  No one knew Pompeii was there for hundreds of years.

• 2:03:41Speaker 03

  Theoretically, the bottom, you know, they would have, if you built, if you went to that much trouble to build a moat like that, would you not keep it fully cleared of debris and waters all the way down to the original level at which you excavated it? So they're just testing things that seem to be the wrong kinds of things to be testing.

• 2:03:59AJ Gentile?

  Sophie, unlimited budget, what would you do? What's the test that proves this?

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:04:11Speaker 03

  Oh, man, that is an excellent question. And I

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  I mean, I would continue to do scans for sure, or I would release all of the data of the scans that already got done.

• 2:04:23AJ Gentile?

  Oh, they're holding data?

• 2:04:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, they scanned a massive amount of land and the only publicly available data is what was released as part of research reports. So that's not a public database. And there's reasons for that. You know, you don't want people looking in the database, finding a bunch of sites that haven't been

• 2:04:43AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:04:44Speaker 03

  acknowledged by archaeology yet and going out and digging it themselves. You know, you need to protect these places. But that, that data is not publicly available. So I have an entire PowerPoint of Cambodia LiDAR, and that's just images that I've hunted and pecked off of all of the reports that were written after those scans happened. So I would definitely put together all of the LiDAR results. That would be step number one for me. And then I would hire a multifunctional team to go in and actually look at these different systems and see, is there an explanation for what was happening here?

• 2:05:19AJ Gentile?

  How cooperative is the government?

• 2:05:22Speaker 03

  I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I think that they're definitely, the Asparo National Authority does a great job preserving. So there's a lot of incentive to preserve these sites.

• 2:05:35AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  Because in Cambodia, one of the biggest industries is tourism. So you want these sites to be built back up, maintained, and you want tourists to be paying their money to go look at them as often as possible. So I think that that's the number one priority. If you're going to have, if you have a finite amount of money to spend, you want to make sure to prom stays

• 2:05:54AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:05:54Speaker 03

  in an upright position so that people can go take pictures where Lara Croft was.

• 2:05:58AJ Gentile?

  Right, of course.

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  So I don't know, I don't know if they're, you know, it seems like they're very cooperative with other archaeological groups doing digs there. And the Japanese have been in there doing some interesting stuff. The Australians have, the French, obviously. So I think that they're cooperative. I haven't heard anything directly from them, you know, to me. So.

• 2:06:22AJ Gentile?

  I was just, wanted to see how it compared to Egypt, where it's, you can't dig. No, now you can, now you can't.

• 2:06:26Speaker 03

  It doesn't seem like, you know, I think it's more of like, how much money do you have? And it's such a giant complex. It's got 4,000 temples, like

• 2:06:36AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:06:36Speaker 03

  You've got to maintain that stuff. It's, and you don't have a lot of money. So I think it's more, how, how much work can you do on these sites to keep them up? Is, I don't, they don't seem to be like Hawas in Egypt.

• 2:06:50AJ Gentile?

  No. But just to clear, clear this would be insane.

• 2:06:55Speaker 03

  It's, it's a, I mean, if you look at this with all the things you know, what comes to mind for you?

• 2:07:02AJ Gentile?

  When I look at this?

• 2:07:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:04AJ Gentile?

  I want to say there's a machine.

• 2:07:09AJ Gentile?

  Because it reminds me of what we see in Peru and in Egypt as well.

• 2:07:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:15AJ Gentile?

  It's always the same stuff. It's, it's the stone and the water. I don't know, but this is, this is mostly sandstone, right? There's no granite here.

• 2:07:22Speaker 03

  No. It's sandstone. It's different

• 2:07:24AJ Gentile?

  So it's not that

• 2:07:25Speaker 03

  Levels of sandstone hardness.

• 2:07:27AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:07:28Speaker 03

  So like, I did an episode on the Takao Pyramid, and the towers of the Takao Pyramid are made of something called greenish graywack sandstone, which is, it's what they carved all of those beautiful sculptures out of that almost look like granite. That is a much harder form of sandstone that was quarried very far away. And they built all of the towers of that pyramid with greenish graywack, which is much higher in quartz.

• 2:07:52AJ Gentile?

  I was just going to ask how the quartz content is in that rock.

• 2:07:54Speaker 03

  I mean, the quartz content is higher in the Kookair Pyramid than it is in the other ones as well. This Japanese team, the researcher is named Uchida is his last name, U-C-H-I-D-A. He's done a lot of work on the different stonework, the different types of sandstone and their properties. And the, the greenish graywack and the red sandstone is much harder, which is why it's able to preserve the carvings the way that you see. But they have different qualities, including like Kookair Pyramid is much higher in quartz.

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  The sandstone and laterite both have different properties than the, the general sandstone used more broadly in Ankor and in the newer temples.

• 2:08:39AJ Gentile?

  Like, I want to ask, what could exert pressure on those? And I don't see anything that would. But the spindles come to mind.

• 2:08:48AJ Gentile?

  Where I think about the gallery leading up to the King's Chamber and the reeds that were there and it's kind of a wave guide, where what if you pushed, if you pushed a lot of hot air through the spindles, what would happen?

• 2:09:03AJ Gentile?

  Because who knows what they were really used for?

• 2:09:05Speaker 03

  I know.

• 2:09:07AJ Gentile?

  Who knows if they were even were in those windows in the first place?

• 2:09:10Speaker 03

  Well, and there's much bigger versions of those all over India.

• 2:09:13AJ Gentile?

  There are?

• 2:09:14Speaker 03

  Huge, huge lathe pillars in India. Sorry, lathe turned pillars. If you say lathe.

• 2:09:20AJ Gentile?

  I know.

• 2:09:20Speaker 03

  Then people get angry. But yeah, there's a lot of lathe turned pillars in India that are almost indescribably huge. I saw those on my recent trip there.

• 2:09:32AJ Gentile?

  So we're still waiting for that episode, yes?

• 2:09:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:09:35AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:09:36Speaker 03

  Those are going to be the next ones I produce. And I'm super. So here's a great example.

• 2:09:43AJ Gentile?

  Wow. Oh, come on.

• 2:09:44Speaker 03

  These are the ones in India or in Cambodia on the left. That's a close up of the the red sandstone is Bantier Stray. So you can see how detailed those are. The right one is one of the pyramids. I believe it's Takao. The one on the right is in these Hoysala temples in southern India, and these things are this big around.

• 2:10:07AJ Gentile?

  What kind of stone is that?

• 2:10:09Speaker 03

  That is a soapstone.

• 2:10:11AJ Gentile?

  Soapstone.

• 2:10:11Speaker 03

  Which is not, you know, it's soft when it's quarried and then it hardens after it leaves the quarry.

• 2:10:18Speaker 03

  But it's incredible to see those. I mean, you you stand in front of those and you can see your reflection. They're wider than you are, and you can see at the bottom exactly where whatever was creating this, when it started and when it stopped. Like, you can just see them, like, the shape of the lathe.

• 2:10:35AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:10:35Speaker 03

  You can just see it stop.

• 2:10:37AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, that tells a story.

• 2:10:38Speaker 03

  And there's nubs at the bottoms of a lot of these pillars in India.

• 2:10:43Speaker 03

  This very famous stone protrusion that you see all over the world.

• 2:10:48AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:10:49Speaker 03

  In Peru and Egypt and all over.

• 2:10:52AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:52Speaker 03

  In the bottoms of a lot of these pillars in India, there's nubs on all four sides.

• 2:10:58AJ Gentile?

  Has anyone done any AI math analysis on the spindles?

• 2:11:02Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't think so. I haven't seen anything like that.

• 2:11:05AJ Gentile?

  I wonder what the ratios are. Because there's there's intent to that, to the design.

• 2:11:11Speaker 03

  I agree. And they're different. You know, they're they're usually the same within the same line. Then if you go to the next line, they're different from the ones before.

• 2:11:20AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  So producing different harmonics or who knows?

• 2:11:23AJ Gentile?

  Right. Different harmonics.

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  It's not decorative.

• 2:11:27AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:11:29Speaker 03

  I mean, it's pretty. I would put it in my windows, but I don't think that that was the purpose of these.

• 2:11:35AJ Gentile?

  No, I think the builders would say, you're doing what with with those?

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:39AJ Gentile?

  That's not what those are for. That was that we were heating water with those. Oh, well, we put them. We put them up.

• 2:11:46Speaker 03

  And then in Hampi, you see a lot of examples. Hampi is an amazing site. Anybody who has a little travel money should go there. You see things like this.

• 2:12:00Speaker 03

  So here we are at the Hampi Museum out in the back.

• 2:12:03AJ Gentile?

  If you have a little travel money, I think I think I'd still go Italy over India.

• 2:12:08AJ Gentile?

  That looks machine to me.

• 2:12:12Speaker 03

  Which is what something was turning on that stone.

• 2:12:14AJ Gentile?

  No, it clearly was.

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  Connected.

• 2:12:16AJ Gentile?

  Clearly was. You could see the anchor in the rock.

• 2:12:20Speaker 03

  And these are just sitting out behind the museum at Hampi. You know, it's like their little stone cemetery. Look at that.

• 2:12:30Speaker 03

  You can see the lines in it.

• 2:12:32AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. So if you're just listening, the lines basically looks like the grooves on a record. They're perfect. So that's obviously it's turned.

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  This is granite.

• 2:12:40AJ Gentile?

  That's granite.

• 2:12:41Speaker 03

  It's granite. Everything at Hampi is granite.

• 2:12:45AJ Gentile?

  So is that stone the base that was used to to turn the others?

• 2:12:50Speaker 03

  I think so. I think it was the

• 2:12:52AJ Gentile?

  It looks like.

• 2:12:53Speaker 03

  You know, what was left over from creating it. Here's another picture of one.

• 2:13:00AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:13:01Speaker 03

  And they don't hide it. It's just sitting out there, just right in the back. And if you look at it, you don't think, oh, somebody must have taken a chisel and carved that out.

• 2:13:10AJ Gentile?

  That's there's no way.

• 2:13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:12AJ Gentile?

  What do they say that that is?

• 2:13:15Speaker 03

  I think that they believe that that's part of the it has to do with the lathe turned spindles. In India, they admit that they were lathe turned, but that was animal powered.

• 2:13:24AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:13:25Speaker 03

  Or human powered lathes. So.

• 2:13:28AJ Gentile?

  Which that's feasible.

• 2:13:29Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 2:13:29AJ Gentile?

  I acknowledge it.

• 2:13:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Personally, I think it's more likely it was some sort of a machine of some sort and not an animal. But who knows?

• 2:13:40AJ Gentile?

  Well, that's why everyone's accusing you of that aliens built everything.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  I have never said that, not once.

• 2:13:45AJ Gentile?

  You've never said it, but that's that's on the internet now.

• 2:13:47Speaker 03

  I actually believe.

• 2:13:48AJ Gentile?

  Oh, she the alien lady?

• 2:13:50Speaker 03

  I believe that humans built all of it. I think that humans are extraordinary. There's in Hampi, there's this 40 foot stone horse trough.

• 2:14:00AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:14:00Speaker 03

  So that was made for watering horses.

• 2:14:03AJ Gentile?

  Nope. And I found interesting the steps of what was that temple that you basically had to crawl up?

• 2:14:12AJ Gentile?

  Like, everyone was just crawling up the steps because the steps are huge.

• 2:14:15Speaker 03

  That was the Takao Pyramid in Cambodia with the greenish gray rock towers.

• 2:14:20AJ Gentile?

  Why build steps that are like that?

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  And they're, you know, on most sides, you can't even they have most of the steps closed off because they're they're this wide. You can barely set up your foot on it. And so tourists started falling down and it's not safe. So, yeah, that's not, that's not unless you had very small feet.

• 2:14:37AJ Gentile?

  Or very.

• 2:14:38Speaker 03

  Very small feet and very long legs.

• 2:14:40AJ Gentile?

  Or very big builders.

• 2:14:42Speaker 03

  Or very big builders.

• 2:14:43AJ Gentile?

  I've got a hardcore segment of the audience that says giants built those.

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  I mean, we know giants existed.

• 2:14:50AJ Gentile?

  Do we know that?

• 2:14:51Speaker 03

  Well, I think we've seen large skeletons.

• 2:14:53AJ Gentile?

  Do we know that?

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  We've heard of. Yes, that's a proper challenge.

• 2:14:58AJ Gentile?

  Okay, hang on. We're we come. Hang on. Hang on. This is getting too exciting now. We got to take a break. We'll come back. We're going to talk giants.

• 2:15:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:15:05AJ Gentile?

  Let's generate some hate articles and hate videos now. Wanna wanna?

• 2:15:09Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 2:15:09AJ Gentile?

  You got to learn to love it. Got to laugh at it.

• 2:15:11Speaker 03

  You've got to embrace it.

• 2:15:14AJ Gentile?

  You said that we know that there was giant skeletons, just as if that was a fact.

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  Well, there are a lot of news articles about the mounds in America that describe large skeletons being found in these mounds.

• 2:15:28AJ Gentile?

  When you say a lot, you mean like 10?

• 2:15:29Speaker 03

  No, I think there are books. There are books that are written that gathered all of these old articles. So I think that not unlike Bigfoot, there's a lot of evidence.

• 2:15:40AJ Gentile?

  There's about over 1,000 articles.

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  Yes. Okay, you know the answer.

• 2:15:43AJ Gentile?

  I do. I'm playing. I'm playing coy.

• 2:15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of articles about this. Now, do we have them today? No. So, of course.

• 2:15:50AJ Gentile?

  Now, the Smithsonian has receipts that they received bones, large bones.

• 2:15:55Speaker 03

  Do they?

• 2:15:55AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. But they don't. They lost that. They lost them.

• 2:15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:59AJ Gentile?

  It was like a famous coffin that was found with eight, like eight and a half foot skeletons. And they said, Sony, and they said, we received it. And then years later, someone did like a voyeur crest. They're like, no, we don't.

• 2:16:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:11AJ Gentile?

  We don't have that. It's, you know, it's down here somewhere.

• 2:16:13Speaker 03

  It's in the Bible. Talk about giants in the Bible.

• 2:16:16AJ Gentile?

  The Nephilim.

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  They talk about the Nephilim, but they talk about, you know, Goliath. Yeah. Extraordinary size.

• 2:16:23AJ Gentile?

  How about the Vedic texts?

• 2:16:26Speaker 03

  Well, in so the Bhagwali statue that I saw in India, that was created by the Jains, J A I N S. The Jains believe, so they have these

• 2:16:41Speaker 03

  these spiritual beings called the Turin Karas. And the first Turin Kara was so big, he was miles tall.

• 2:16:48AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  And over time, in these, they call them half cycles. Over the time of the Turin Karas, I think there's been 24 of them in a half cycle. They've progressively gotten smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And now they're about human size.

• 2:17:03AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:17:04Speaker 03

  So that is a very long tradition, and they talk in scopes of millions of years and miles tall. But, you know, they're talking about massive beings.

• 2:17:13AJ Gentile?

  Do you know the Rapa Nui creation story?

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  I do.

• 2:17:18AJ Gentile?

  How does that go?

• 2:17:20Speaker 03

  Well, creation story of when it was settled or how Earth started.

• 2:17:23AJ Gentile?

  How how Easter Island became to be.

• 2:17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:27AJ Gentile?

  That's not a trick question. I'm like curious because I know they have a cool creation story.

• 2:17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, they there was a an island, a homeland, Hiva, that was sinking into the ocean. So that implies some sort of cataclysm or catastrophe. And their king had a dream about an island that looked a whole lot like Easter Island, that had a crater at the south end. And he sent out his seven explorers in a boat to go find said island. And they found it, reported back, and he and his Hotumatuwa was his name. He and his family and his people settled Easter Island after he found it in his dream

• 2:18:15Speaker 03

  after his homeland sunk into the ocean.

• 2:18:18AJ Gentile?

  So Secrets in Stone has very good coverage of Easter Island recently.

• 2:18:22Speaker 03

  It was an amazing trip. Easter Island is so special.

• 2:18:25AJ Gentile?

  It it's very weird because if you look at it, good luck finding it on a map, by the way.

• 2:18:29Speaker 03

  I know.

• 2:18:30AJ Gentile?

  Good luck. So they just found it, I guess.

• 2:18:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:18:33AJ Gentile?

  Do you know the legends of like that it was part of the island of of Mu or Mew?

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  I've heard that.

• 2:18:40AJ Gentile?

  It's my favorite. That Easter Island was sort of the bottom part of the continent out to the Hawaiian Islands.

• 2:18:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it would have been a much larger connected or mostly connected land mass, or at least one that's easy to get from place to place.

• 2:18:52AJ Gentile?

  It would explain why there's Greek words and Polynesian languages.

• 2:18:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:57AJ Gentile?

  That's odd.

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:58AJ Gentile?

  And same with the Easter. Rapa Nui, they have some Egyptian words.

• 2:19:03Speaker 03

  Oh, do they?

• 2:19:03AJ Gentile?

  I think their sun god is Ra'ah.

• 2:19:07AJ Gentile?

  It's pretty close.

• 2:19:08Speaker 03

  I didn't know that.

• 2:19:08AJ Gentile?

  It's pretty weird.

• 2:19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:12AJ Gentile?

  Any theories about what the Moai statues really are?

• 2:19:16Speaker 03

  I don't have theories about what they are. I don't think they were anything.

• 2:19:20AJ Gentile?

  And I don't call them heads.

• 2:19:21Speaker 03

  Industrial or anything like that. I think that they were statues.

• 2:19:25AJ Gentile?

  Of, I mean, Barnard says that those, those are actually people.

• 2:19:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. That they represent, that's what the Rapa Nui say is that they represent actual people and that they, they come, come to life or, you know, be, become real once the eyes are set in.

• 2:19:41AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  It's interesting because, and I talk about this in my videos. There's a lot of different sizes and a lot of different shapes of these Moai. The very, very large ones are at the crater. And they are, like you said, whole bodies. You know, and they're huge and they're buried up to here or here. So it looks like a, just a graveyard of Moai as you're traveling there. I have a pet theory that the largest ones were meant to be part of a sacred landscape. In my research, I found there's a road. Catherine, Catherine Ruthledge, who was a British archaeologist in the 1930s,

• 2:20:25Speaker 03

  traveled to, to Easter Island and lived there for like six months. And she did a lot of work with the locals. She heard all the stories. She attempted to translate the Rongorongo text. She did all of it. And she was there on the ground, hearing the stories from the people there. But she describes this ancient road that went around the top of the island. I talked about this in my video. And the way she described it, it's, it was called Mara, no. Mahiva. The word heva was in the name of the road. But they just, she describes it as just going around this crater. And she said, where the cliff, where the, where the land had dropped down, the road just stopped.

• 2:21:11Speaker 03

  And then it started on the other side of the cliff. Almost like it was there before the land had washed away or changed. And she described it as, it must be incredibly ancient. And this, this road, which you can't, I've looked on Google Earth. I can't see it anymore. Nobody really talks about it. They talk about it because she talked about it.

• 2:21:32AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:21:32Speaker 03

  But below this road is, you know, there are megalithic walls. If you do the, the West Coast hike, you can see these megalithic walls, very beautiful ones that look almost like Ahu Vanapu, just below this ancient road. And all along the craters on the north side of the island are these huge Moai. And the way they described the crater is it was the quarry. And they necessarily moved the Moai from the quarry down the transport roads to the Ahus on the coast. But I don't think that that is necessarily the case. I think that a lot of the very, very large Moai up at the crater

• 2:22:16Speaker 03

  were actually positioned along the roads because I think it was a sacred entrance way, entrance way to a sacred center at the volcano. So imagine the impression that would have made on you. If you're on Easter Island and you're going up this sacred road and there are these giants.

• 2:22:32AJ Gentile?

  Not heads.

• 2:22:33Speaker 03

  Not heads.

• 2:22:34AJ Gentile?

  Giants.

• 2:22:35Speaker 03

  All along this road. And along these road systems, you'll see them on their faces. And there's a lot of evidence that they,

• 2:22:45Speaker 03

  that there was a lot of water erosion going down these stones. So down the back, like they stood for a very, very long time. And then they toppled over. And Catherine talks about that in her book. She said, the erosion patterns, patterns don't indicate that, that they spent their whole lifetime on their faces. They were standing up for a very, very long time. So I think it's possible that there were different phases of these Moai. The, the actual way that the Moai are built are different. The ones on the Ahus are built differently than the ones at the crater.

• 2:23:20AJ Gentile?

  And what, how they different?

• 2:23:21Speaker 03

  They changed the, the

• 2:23:25Speaker 03

  center of balance, the center of gravity on them. So the ones at the crater and some of them along the road have a very forward center of gravity. And the people who did that famous Moai experiment where they walked the Moai, they said they were built like that because it helped them to walk them. It leaned them forward. So when they pulled on the ropes, they took steps. But then they make an observation that in order to finish them, they must have completely, because they won't stand up.

• 2:23:54AJ Gentile?

  They will not.

• 2:23:54Speaker 03

  No, they turned forward. So if you want something to stand on an Ahu platform, it needs to have a different center of gravity. So they describe it being carved down and, you know, the front is kind of taken off of it and the bottom is changed so that it can stand up. And then the eyes, you know, they like carved, they put in the eyes. And so that's the, that's kind of the evolution or progression that made sense to them when they did that experiment. But to me, those look like two different Moai. I don't think necessarily one turned into the other. And I actually don't know how you do that. I think that there were the Moai that were around the crater and along the roads. And then I think there were

• 2:24:38Speaker 03

  Moai from a different time period that were put on the Ahus. Even their facial structure is very different. The ones at the crater look totally different. They have the straight brow line.

• 2:24:48AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:24:48Speaker 03

  The ones on the Ahu have set in eyes where they put the top hats on and the eyes. So if you compare them side by side, which I do in the video, they look totally different.

• 2:24:58AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 2:24:59Speaker 03

  They're like cousins from different families. They're not siblings, you know? So it's just a pet theory, obviously. I can't prove it. It's just the, the questions that I ask and the, the little bit of poking that I do. But when I was there, you know, the boathouses were really interesting. These structures that they say were houses. You can see small ones along the coast that are much inferior stonework. And then you hike the West Coast and there's, their boathouses are huge. And the stonework is very sophisticated. And it, it just doesn't look like a house to me. It, it looks like something else.

• 2:25:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:25:37Speaker 03

  You know, so I think that the mysteries of Easter Island are much deeper than people think.

• 2:25:43AJ Gentile?

  What kind of stone were they using on all that stuff?

• 2:25:45Speaker 03

  It's a volcanic tough. And then there's, you know, there's some basalt there.

• 2:25:49AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:49Speaker 03

  So, you know, the famous Moai in the British Museum is made of basalt. There was a basalt Moai that was placed into one of the walls on our hike. There's another basalt Moai kind of by the crater, crater that's like buried in some grass. And so there's examples of that on the island, too.

• 2:26:07AJ Gentile?

  That's why I asked, because if it's tough, that's pretty easy to erode. But igneous rock takes a long time.

• 2:26:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:14Speaker 03

  But the, you know, the really huge ones were all volcanic tough. And you can see there's a scan project. The name of it is escaping me. Easter Island Scan Project. But they actually scanned the whole crater and you can, and that's available publicly. So you can, you can't walk up to the crater anymore. They closed it off after COVID.

• 2:26:30AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 2:26:31Speaker 03

  So you can't, you know, you can just walk the little pathways. It's very restrictive there now. You know, there's fences. That's why the West Coast hike is so special, because you can walk right up to the Moai, right up to the walls and there's no limitations.

• 2:26:45AJ Gentile?

  You could touch the walls.

• 2:26:47Speaker 03

  You could, if you wanted to, for sure. Yeah. So you can't go up into the crater now, but you can go online and you can look at the scans and you can, you know, run your cursor around and go inside the crater and flip it around and look. And it gives you a sense of the scale of the work that was being done there. I mean, they were producing hundreds of these things. And there were so many of them that were still in the crater, still in the quarry. And then the work just stopped.

• 2:27:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. It's, the whole island had to be working on it. I mean, how, Easter Island, its height was what, 30,000 people?

• 2:27:19Speaker 03

  I don't even know if it was that many.

• 2:27:20AJ Gentile?

  So these, this is the entire population working on this project?

• 2:27:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then who's growing all the crops?

• 2:27:27AJ Gentile?

  I don't know.

• 2:27:28Speaker 03

  Who's making the clothes? Who's building the houses? Who's going fishing?

• 2:27:31AJ Gentile?

  The PhDs will tell us.

• 2:27:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a, it's a real mystery. The people on the island are, I have to shout out the people on Easter Island because they are super special.

• 2:27:42AJ Gentile?

  Go ahead.

• 2:27:42Speaker 03

  And if you ask them questions about, they're, they're the kinds of people that are very upfront and open about talking about the mysteries. So I had a dream, I, you know, I saw this being, like, there's stories that I share in my video where I interviewed some of our tour guides and they, they love to talk about, you know, she talked about reptile, reptilians, lizard people is the words that she used.

• 2:28:08AJ Gentile?

  Easter Island?

• 2:28:09Speaker 03

  That supposedly lived in the water of the crater.

• 2:28:13AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:28:13Speaker 03

  And she talks about that in her video that she recorded with me. You know, she said lizard people and I was like, oh my gosh, lizard, you know, so they're very, they're not embarrassed to talk about things like that, the way that we are. Like when we talk about Bigfoot, I'm like, oh, you know, I guess I kind of believe, but they're just, they're like, yeah, I had a dream and I encountered one of these beings. And, you know, there's lizard people in, they're, they're very open about their beliefs and their myths and their legends. And it's, I just think it's refreshing to be in that kind of an environment.

• 2:28:43AJ Gentile?

  Is Alejandro one of the guides there?

• 2:28:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:28:45AJ Gentile?

  What was his story? He was very interesting.

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  He's a, he's a pakarati, so he's one of the original, you know, his family goes all the way back. And when I was, when I, we were booking our trip on this recent trip, I emailed Brian Forrester and I said, Brian, will you please show us around Peru? And by the way, I'm going to Easter Island. Do you have anybody you recommend? And Brian said, you have to go with Alejandro. And so it was a personal recommendation. Brian connected us and it was, I mean, he could have charged me four times what he did and I would have paid it. Cause it was such a beautiful experience with him and he, you know, I was like, we want to do the west coast hike. And he's like, well, I don't want to do that, but my mom will take you. And she was amazing.

• 2:29:27AJ Gentile?

  She cooked for you guys?

• 2:29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it was just a day hike. It was like six hours, but she, you know, just, she's like, and look at this and look at that and look at that. Okay, now on to the next and here's the mango tree. And so it was a beautiful, very special experience being on Easter Island with the pakaratis.

• 2:29:43AJ Gentile?

  Does his family have any theories, stories?

• 2:29:48Speaker 03

  No, not really. I mean, he's very well versed in the myths.

• 2:29:52AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:29:52Speaker 03

  One of the stories he shared with me that I have in my video is that his great grandfather was the first, um, the first person that was at the, one of the Ahus after a tsunami hit it. And the tsunami had totally wiped out the Ahu. And his great, great grandfather was the first person on the scene with his horse. And he found in, in all the rubble, he found rongo rongo tablets. He found skulls that appeared to be, as he said in the video, slightly elongated.

• 2:30:23AJ Gentile?

  Uh oh.

• 2:30:23Speaker 03

  He said, they're not, they're not like the skulls you find in Paracas. But he said, they're definitely were longer than normal skulls.

• 2:30:33AJ Gentile?

  What happened to those?

• 2:30:34Speaker 03

  They're in museums. So both the rongo rongo tablets and the skulls that his grandfather found, there's apparently a picture of his grandfather on his horse on that day with the tablet sticking out of his saddlebag. But I, apparently I think one of the tablets is in Chile. I think the other one is in the Vatican. So they ended up in museums all over the world or locked away in the case of the Vatican.

• 2:31:01AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, we can't see that.

• 2:31:02Speaker 03

  Can't see it, but.

• 2:31:04AJ Gentile?

  Wouldn't you like to get down there in those archives for an afternoon?

• 2:31:06Speaker 03

  I would give almost anything.

• 2:31:08AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:09Speaker 03

  I would give almost anything to snoop around the Vatican archives. Imagine what they have in there.

• 2:31:14AJ Gentile?

  So much good stuff.

• 2:31:17AJ Gentile?

  Diana Pasulka's been down there. She talks about it's pretty, pretty wild.

• 2:31:21Speaker 03

  But they're pretty, even if you are allowed to go down there, they're pretty.

• 2:31:24AJ Gentile?

  They're right on.

• 2:31:25Speaker 03

  Controlling of what you're able to see.

• 2:31:27AJ Gentile?

  They stand right over you.

• 2:31:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not like you're wandering around going, ooh, that's cool.

• 2:31:30AJ Gentile?

  No, you have to tell them in advance what you want to see.

• 2:31:33Speaker 03

  And show your credentials.

• 2:31:34AJ Gentile?

  Yes. It's like, no, I just want to wander the 50 miles or shelves, please.

• 2:31:39Speaker 03

  You know what I'm going to do when I die is I'm going to come back as a ghost and I'm going to let myself into the archives. And, you know, at that point I'll have perfect knowledge anyway, but I'm still going to do it.

• 2:31:49AJ Gentile?

  Do it.

• 2:31:49Speaker 03

  Still going to go look.

• 2:31:50AJ Gentile?

  Of course, that's a great idea to do when I die.

• 2:31:53Speaker 03

  It's going to be my first haunting.

• 2:31:56AJ Gentile?

  Speaking of, one of your videos, a dog walked by. I think it might have been when you're talking to, to Kay and Mike. Was that Ghost?

• 2:32:03Speaker 03

  Ghost, my border collie.

• 2:32:04AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:32:04Speaker 03

  He's the best. Yeah, he's, we volunteer for an organization called Western Border Collie Rescue. And they, border collies are like this extremely intelligent, but kind of persnickety dog.

• 2:32:18AJ Gentile?

  Can confirm.

• 2:32:19Speaker 03

  And they don't do well in, in shelters. Like if you go into a shelter and you want to adopt a dog, the border collie is in the back corner saying, don't you dare come near me. So they're not going to get adopted. They don't do well, their nervous systems don't do well. So this organization pulls them out of the shelters in like a five state area and puts them into foster homes. We're one of the fosters. And so like a couple of times a year, we'll have a sweet little dog that's from, you know, Vernal, Utah or something. And we'll watch over her and train her and get her to stop pooping in the house and give her, give her a couple of tricks to put up her sleeve and then she gets adopted. And it's just a beautiful way to save, to save these little border collies. And so that's how we got Ghost. He was one of the little adopted dogs.

• 2:33:00AJ Gentile?

  How do you not end up with a house full of border collies?

• 2:33:02Speaker 03

  If I were allowed to make the decisions.

• 2:33:05AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:33:05Speaker 03

  We would have many, many, many.

• 2:33:07AJ Gentile?

  You get to make plenty of decisions.

• 2:33:08Speaker 03

  My husband vetoes me on that one. He said, we're a one dog family.

• 2:33:13AJ Gentile?

  I, I pulled that same veto.

• 2:33:15Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. Your family would have many more dogs if.

• 2:33:19AJ Gentile?

  If she, if she said yes, yes, but no, I pulled the veto.

• 2:33:22Speaker 03

  They're so sweet. You know, the argument for not keeping him is you get to be a foster many more times if you don't have a house full of dogs.

• 2:33:29AJ Gentile?

  So.

• 2:33:29Speaker 03

  That's true. I guess, but they're just the most beautiful. Do you have a dog?

• 2:33:33AJ Gentile?

  No, cats.

• 2:33:34Speaker 03

  Cats.

• 2:33:35AJ Gentile?

  Can't do a dog. It's too much commitment.

• 2:33:38Speaker 03

  They're high, especially border collies.

• 2:33:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:33:39Speaker 03

  They're like a kid. And, you know, they just stare at you constantly. You know, I had a border collie before Ghost and when I was in grad school, I'd be writing a paper and I would look down and I'd have like eight tennis balls in my lap.

• 2:33:52AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:33:52Speaker 03

  Cause he would go all over the house and find him and put him in my lap and just stare at me until it, until I kind of threw him and then he'd run around and have fun. So.

• 2:34:00AJ Gentile?

  Let's go mom.

• 2:34:00Speaker 03

  High maintenance dog.

• 2:34:01AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, we had a collie mix, she was like that.

• 2:34:03Speaker 03

  You're so sweet though.

• 2:34:04AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:06AJ Gentile?

  Let's go back to giants for a quick second. Let's get him angry. So we covered, I think we have giants in every continent, don't we?

• 2:34:14Speaker 03

  I believe so.

• 2:34:16AJ Gentile?

  I've covered the Sisuna story on Malta. And the, the hypogeen there is supposedly built by giants. You come across any of those?

• 2:34:25Speaker 03

  There's elongated skulls at the hypogeen as well. I went to the hypogeen the week before I broke my pelvis in Mallorca.

• 2:34:33Speaker 03

  And it was extraordinary. And they don't let you take pictures in the hypogeen.

• 2:34:38AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 2:34:38Speaker 03

  So you go, you go down into it and it's all, you know, rock cut. They're very, it's very limited on the places within the hypogeen that you can go. But the things you are able to see, they did a great job lighting it up. But the stories at the hypogeen, um, are incredible. And there was apparently school kids that went in there and never came out and.

• 2:35:01AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 2:35:01Speaker 03

  Elongated skulls and.

• 2:35:03AJ Gentile?

  Yep, the giants.

• 2:35:04Speaker 03

  Giant lore. Malta's a fascinating place.

• 2:35:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:35:08Speaker 03

  The cartwrecks in Malta are incredible.

• 2:35:10AJ Gentile?

  It's on my shortlist to go there.

• 2:35:12Speaker 03

  You know, what's interesting about Malta and maybe I wonder, I would wonder if anybody feels the same way as me. There are places you go in the world that have this extraordinary healing energy. So like Cusco and Easter Island, there are places where you go and you like, feel like you're aging backwards. You have beautiful dreams. Malta was for me, a much darker energy. It felt very like human sacrifice-y. It had a different energy for me. I didn't, I didn't enjoy being at the actual ancient sites, the way I do in some other places in the world. Like I never had any desire to like, go sit in the corner of one of these temples and meditate.

• 2:35:52AJ Gentile?

  That's interesting.

• 2:35:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it felt, it felt different to me than the other places in the world. And I don't know why, and I can't put my finger on it, but it just felt a little bit like an affront. The energy was different.

• 2:36:04AJ Gentile?

  I kind of believe it. I, you know, I, I had a certain feeling when I touched the Pantheon and I had another very strange experience, uh, in Naples that I eventually learned I had an experience that was like two blocks from my great, great grandfather where he was.

• 2:36:20Speaker 03

  Did you know he was there?

• 2:36:21AJ Gentile?

  No. I did, I found this out six months ago because my aunt's like, here's, here is where he lived. I'm like, oh my God, that's where I had like an experience. So I believe that there's energy in, in the earth and the rock. And you had a very interesting experience about the stones being sad. Do you remember that story?

• 2:36:39Speaker 03

  Sad?

• 2:36:40AJ Gentile?

  Cause they dynamited the top?

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  Oh yes, in Peru. Yeah, it was a, a feeling of, um, yeah, it, this is a little woo, but every time I'm at an ancient site, except for Malta, I try to go find a quiet place to meditate. And we were actually there with Brian Forrester and he is, he's an, he's an amazing human.

• 2:37:09Speaker 03

  And he asked, you know, he said, this is a great place to sit down and just, just be, just sit and meditate. And we did that and we sat for a while and, um, and you get this, I had a very interesting sensation of all this energy coming from above down to me. And then this feeling of being sad, like there was a time that I was whole and I was operating in a different way. And now I'm kind of a shell of myself or I've been injured. And it, what's interesting is that's the same feeling I got on top of the Coqere pyramid. It felt like you could still feel the energy of that place, like it's beating heart, but

• 2:37:52Speaker 03

  there was like this little bit of sadness that it's not, it's not operating anymore. Like it, cause Coqere, according to the stories, had a giant linga mounted at the top of it. And the linga is no longer there. It's gone. So when it was operating, it had one at its peak. And imagine what it was doing and the energy that was there when it was in full swing. And now, you know, the top is all collapsed and you can see these really old, like Atlantean lions.

• 2:38:22AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:23Speaker 03

  They're holding up the platform and some of them are like just cracked, like on their side. And so you get this sense like it's still, it's still a energetic being, but it's not what it was at its prime.

• 2:38:37AJ Gentile?

  When you see the lidar, you can kind of imagine. What this place looked like when it was clear and everything was intact?

• 2:38:43Speaker 03

  I can't even imagine how glorious it was. It had to have been one of those places to just fundamentally changed you when you were there. Cause the energy today is still really good there.

• 2:38:52AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:52Speaker 03

  So imagine what, when it was all operating, what it was like.

• 2:38:58Speaker 03

  It's like being in a specialty ancient spa.

• 2:39:01AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:39:01Speaker 03

  Just there to make your cells just hum.

• 2:39:06AJ Gentile?

  And you felt that, didn't Stacy also have the experience in similar places?

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  Stacy is a mystic. So yeah.

• 2:39:13AJ Gentile?

  Is she?

• 2:39:13Speaker 03

  She, she drops in much faster than me. She has much more access to the other side. And she, she and I love sneaking off together. And when we're together, it's, it's always much more profound. So that's why I like to take her on every single trip that I go on.

• 2:39:27AJ Gentile?

  You guys are a lot of fun. One of my favorite videos of yours is with you and Stacy are just eating like dwarf themed popsicles.

• 2:39:34Speaker 03

  Dwarf ice cream.

• 2:39:35AJ Gentile?

  Ice cream on a dwarf bench.

• 2:39:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:39:37AJ Gentile?

  I'm like, I love this channel.

• 2:39:38Speaker 03

  Bless her heart. She, she just is down for whatever adventure I'm dragging her on. And she, you know, that day it was like a hundred degrees. It was so hot. And there are these trolleys that take you around. This is CTEP in Thailand. Trolleys that take you around the site. And I was like, no, I don't want to ride those trolleys. I want to walk it. You know, so we're out there just bushwhacking and it is hot.

• 2:40:03AJ Gentile?

  Isn't she like, really? Can't we?

• 2:40:05Speaker 03

  Just the best attitude. She's so happy about it. But yeah, the, at this, at this site, when you're just at the peak of your heat, they have dwarf themed popsicles and iced coffee. And in Thailand, they have orange coffee. So it's like orange juice and coffee and it's delicious.

• 2:40:20AJ Gentile?

  Thai coffee is the best.

• 2:40:21Speaker 03

  It's so good. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of special memories and experiences at these places. They bring out the best in me.

• 2:40:31Speaker 03

  I get angry at an all inclusive beach, but I am very, very happy in Easter Island.

• 2:40:36AJ Gentile?

  Kind of the same way.

• 2:40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:38AJ Gentile?

  Um, I think it might've been your first video, um, where you talked about your favorite mythologist, Martin Shaw. How did you come across his work?

• 2:40:46Speaker 03

  My, one of my really good friends told me about him. And it was actually, so he's a mythologist. He lives in England. His, do you, are you familiar with him?

• 2:40:54AJ Gentile?

  A little bit.

• 2:40:55Speaker 03

  The way he writes about myths and relates them to your life today, he's just a very profound human being. I just love him. Never met him in real life. I just love him from afar. But he actually leads wilderness quests in England. That's one thing he does. And I learned about that concept of the wilderness quest from Martin Shaw. Tried to book his quest. It was like a two year wait. I was like, I don't want to wait that long. So I found a quest in America. So he's actually responsible for the one that I ended up doing.

• 2:41:28AJ Gentile?

  Wow. Did you ever try to get back into his?

• 2:41:31Speaker 03

  Um, no, I've considered flying over. He does these like five day kind of retreats where he just sits around the campfire and reads you these ancient stories. And I mean, it's just like, imagine.

• 2:41:42AJ Gentile?

  Absolutely.

• 2:41:43Speaker 03

  The experience. And so I, at some point I will pay to go to England, go, you know, check out the British museum again, and then go hang out with Martin. He's a special human.

• 2:41:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he is. Are you doing tours? Is that part of your thing?

• 2:41:56Speaker 03

  I'm doing my first tour in Cambodia and Laos in January. And I'm doing it with Derek Wilson. So he and I are co-hosting it. So we'll see how it goes. I had a lot of fun on my tour with Derek last year. And I just piggybacked on his, that wasn't my tour. But I went over and hung out, gave a presentation and things. But, um, we're doing it together and it's the only one I've planned. And I'm currently in a place where like, this all came at me very fast. Like started my channel and then it just kind of, it just went very fast. So I'm in a place now where I'm trying to take a step back and figure out, how do I want to progress in the next couple of years? What do I want to focus on? Who do

• 2:42:40Speaker 03

  I want to be? You know, if I'm going to do a career planning session for podcasting, I've got to figure out where I want to put my energy. If I want to keep, you know, if I, if I want to go, if I could pick my next four vacations, right? It's Ethiopia, it's Indonesia, and it's probably two trips to India. And do I want to keep doing that kind of travel? Or do I want to really dive deep into one region? Like Cambodia just keeps calling me back, keeps calling me back. I don't think I want to get into like the conference circuit. I don't know that I want to do four tours a year. It's just, I'm just trying to figure out what I want to do next. So.

• 2:43:24AJ Gentile?

  How much will the audience have to say in that?

• 2:43:27Speaker 03

  Um, I don't know.

• 2:43:29AJ Gentile?

  Like, do you remember how excited you were when that first video kind of took off?

• 2:43:33Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes. I lost my mind. I didn't know how, that was such an amazing feeling. And it was fully unexpected. And I, my, the people that I engage with are amazing. Like they send me emails and they're like, hey, I went to, uh, the Sea and Reap Museum and I took all these photos. And do you have a shared drive? I'd love to upload them and you can use them however you want. Or hey, there's these petroglyphs in Thailand and I took videos of it. So the people that I have engaged with, of course, there's been some negative people for sure.

• 2:44:02AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:44:03Speaker 03

  But most, the majority of the people that I engage with are super thoughtful, very interesting, really kind, very curious. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I guess if there's like popular demand, maybe. And I know that the tours I've been on have changed my life. You know, my time with you, the, the spending a week with Brian Forrester in Peru, forget about it. Like you can't beat that experience.

• 2:44:25AJ Gentile?

  Absolutely not.

• 2:44:26Speaker 03

  So I'm not saying no, I'm just trying to figure out.

• 2:44:30AJ Gentile?

  I mean, that's why I asked, that's why I asked about, cause, cause I'm someone who understands, you know, the feeling of that first one going bananas. And it's like, I'd like to feel that one more time.

• 2:44:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:41AJ Gentile?

  And then again, and again. And next thing you know, you're writing for the audience, not really for your passion.

• 2:44:46Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 2:44:46AJ Gentile?

  It's like, they want a Bigfoot story? I'll do a Bigfoot story.

• 2:44:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:44:51AJ Gentile?

  So is that a compromise?

• 2:44:52Speaker 03

  It gets its own legs, you know, its own energy. What I don't want it to become is another job. Like I already did that. I already gave up my hobbies and was chained to my desk. I already did that. And I don't want another J O B. Right now, this is an extreme passion. I can earn $0 for the next 10 years and I don't care because this is the stuff that I dream about. This is what I think about. This is what I love. And I love getting at these sites, figuring out the mysteries, looking at these stones, and then producing a video where I ask questions. I show everybody the footage. And, you know, either it inspires people to travel there, or people that are never going to travel there get to experience

• 2:45:37Speaker 03

  it. And in my mind, it's a way to start to piece together that portfolio of sites that have all these consistent questions, right? The, the lower level of stonework and the nubs and the stones that turn around corners. And I mean, they're all over the world. So if you can go to places like China and Indonesia and Ethiopia, and you can start to say, look, nobody else is doing episodes on Ethiopia. As soon as it's safe enough, I'm going there. I've got the whole trip planned. Um, it just adds to that list of, gosh, that's pretty hard to refute. The evidence is compelling.

• 2:46:15AJ Gentile?

  And Ethiopia as well?

• 2:46:17Speaker 03

  Ethiopia is my number one travel goal.

• 2:46:20AJ Gentile?

  No one's really covering that.

• 2:46:22Speaker 03

  It's got this obelisk, this Stella Park. There's a 500 ton obelisk that was stood up.

• 2:46:30AJ Gentile?

  Wow. I need to look into Ethiopia.

• 2:46:33Speaker 03

  It was incredible. And it's, it's extremely megalithic. All of these, the most interesting stuff is in Aksim.

• 2:46:40AJ Gentile?

  Oh yeah. There's a lot of stuff there.

• 2:46:42Speaker 03

  And then of course you have the churches of Lalabella that are the rock cut churches. So that's like Kailasa Temple in, in India where the oldest levels are at the top.

• 2:46:51AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:46:52Speaker 03

  And then you dig down and you see it get younger and crappier.

• 2:46:55AJ Gentile?

  Do you think the Ark of the Covenant is in Aksim?

• 2:46:57Speaker 03

  I mean, I read Graham's book.

• 2:46:59AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:47:00Speaker 03

  That was really, really interesting.

• 2:47:01AJ Gentile?

  It was compelling.

• 2:47:02Speaker 03

  It was compelling.

• 2:47:03AJ Gentile?

  There's a lot of video of that. I mean, I've covered that story. There's video of those priests coming out with cataracts.

• 2:47:08Speaker 03

  Cataracts and, and they die early too, don't they?

• 2:47:11AJ Gentile?

  Like three years down.

• 2:47:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:14AJ Gentile?

  I don't, I don't think it's there, though. I think it's, I think it's a fake.

• 2:47:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe. I mean, it is the oldest Christians in the world.

• 2:47:22AJ Gentile?

  I mean, that's why I've covered it is because of the Ethiopian Jews go back a thousand years.

• 2:47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:27AJ Gentile?

  It's a pretty crazy place.

• 2:47:28Speaker 03

  No, I, I had the, I had the plan already. We were just getting ready to pull the trigger and buy plane tickets in June, my brother and I, because I just asked him if he wanted to go and he said yes. And right before we bought our plane tickets, the security situation went south.

• 2:47:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:45Speaker 03

  And so we backed off and went to India instead, but it's very top of my list.

• 2:47:51AJ Gentile?

  I'd like to see a cover. Um, yeah, you've got the Kebren Agast and all kinds of interesting literature there.

• 2:47:58AJ Gentile?

  That could maybe line up with some of the landscape. There's, now that you mention it, there are places there that don't make a lot of sense.

• 2:48:03Speaker 03

  There's fields of standing stones from like 50 B.C. The mono, you know, the, the 500 ton obelisk was quarried like eight miles away.

• 2:48:15AJ Gentile?

  That's in Axum as well?

• 2:48:16Speaker 03

  In Axum.

• 2:48:17AJ Gentile?

  So the

• 2:48:18Speaker 03

  It was, it was stood up and then it, I've got pictures. It was stood up and then it, it fell down. Here, here it is.

• 2:48:27AJ Gentile?

  So where was it quarried? Because Axum is one of the highest elevated cities in the, in the world.

• 2:48:33Speaker 03

  Well, they, they say that the quarry was like six or eight miles away and there's

• 2:48:37AJ Gentile?

  Down the mountain.

• 2:48:38Speaker 03

  Legends that it was transported using mammoths.

• 2:48:42AJ Gentile?

  Whoa, I love that story. See, this is, this is incredible work.

• 2:48:45Speaker 03

  The churches in Lalibela were supposedly carved by angels at night and humans by day. So there's all of these amazing legends. So that, yeah, this, this was a 500 ton obelisk that at one point was standing. Now it's since fallen. The other obelisk in the background that's supported by a crane was taken by Mussolini in World War II back to Italy. And stood up in Rome and eventually Ethiopia petitioned for years and years and years, finally got it back. In order to get it back, they had to split it up into three pieces, extend the runway, put it in a Eastern European, I keep saying Russian and then I get pushed back that it wasn't Russian cargo plane.

• 2:49:28Speaker 03

  And flown from, from Italy to Ethiopia, landed on the extended runway. All of the bridges were reinforced so that they could drive it back here and stand it back up where the ancients had no problem putting it up.

• 2:49:43AJ Gentile?

  I have never heard of this obelisk and the craftsmanship on it, there's no animals, there's no people, it look, it's geometry.

• 2:49:51Speaker 03

  Very stark, just like all of the other ancient.

• 2:49:54AJ Gentile?

  So it looks functional.

• 2:49:58AJ Gentile?

  That looks like sci-fi, that obelisk.

• 2:50:00Speaker 03

  Here's another, these are like the underground structures in Axum. This is the tomb of the false door and it has nubs.

• 2:50:09AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:50:09Speaker 03

  On the wall. It looks very Egyptian as far as these very large stones. There were boxes in there that were, you know, this whole place was pillaged. So the, the boxes were all chiseled out, looking for treasure and stuff, but they had these stone boxes in these underground chambers right in Axum.

• 2:50:32AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know this.

• 2:50:36AJ Gentile?

  What are the nubs for, do you think? Cause we see those all over the place.

• 2:50:40Speaker 03

  I've heard a lot of theories. I mean, archaeologists say it's for propping up the stones. So they used it as a leverage point to lift stones into the air.

• 2:50:48AJ Gentile?

  You think concave would be easier?

• 2:50:49Speaker 03

  It doesn't make any sense at all. You know, you, you hear about geopolymer. I think there's in some cases, especially the stuff in Peru. I can see that as plausible. It, you know, as it was, as the geopolymer chains were forming and the water was draining out, it leached out of the bottom. And if they didn't get the recipe quite right, then there was too much water in the, in this mixture and it needed to drain out. If they got the recipe right.

• 2:51:20AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:20Speaker 03

  Then you don't need a nub because nothing needs to drain out, but

• 2:51:23AJ Gentile?

  But this is in a hallway.

• 2:51:24Speaker 03

  Drain out and not, they're, they're not on all the stones.

• 2:51:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:51:30Speaker 03

  They're not always at the bottom. Like this one's right in the middle of the stone. And you see them also in quarries and you don't need, your quarries are not geopolymer. That's earth.

• 2:51:40AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:51:41Speaker 03

  And you haven't moved that stone. So you don't need it for leveraging it. So there's, I think that the nubs are a true mystery. Were they an ancient signature? You know?

• 2:51:51AJ Gentile?

  Like a maker's mark?

• 2:51:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:51:53AJ Gentile?

  There's no mortar here, is, is there?

• 2:51:55Speaker 03

  No, no. It's, yeah, Ethiopia is my number one. You know, here's the Church of St. George in Lalibela.

• 2:52:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:52:08Speaker 03

  Carved from the top down. They did a bunch of, the Zamani project did a bunch of scans of these. So you can like get on their website and go on inside and outside and start looking around the way the churches were built. And to me, there's a signature of several of them being very old, very, and they had the same designs as that obelisk.

• 2:52:29AJ Gentile?

  They do, huh?

• 2:52:29Speaker 03

  Supposedly they're a thousand years apart and the builders had nothing to do with each other. But if you look at the ones that are the most precise, which is only like three or four of the 12 churches, you can see the signature of it being extremely old. And then you see some of them that seem much newer to me. And in many cases are deeper. So there is an argument that they're newer. The construction's just shoddy. You know, it just looks nothing like the other churches.

• 2:52:53AJ Gentile?

  So it's once again, it's the same old story.

• 2:52:56Speaker 03

  It's an incredible site that was found and lived at, and it's a, you know, you, archaeologists can't even really work here because it's a religious site. You know, the, the Ethiopians revere this site. They have pilgrimages there every year. So they're not going to let

• 2:53:12AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:53:13Speaker 03

  People dig around. And even if you do, it's all stone. So I don't know what you're going to find.

• 2:53:18AJ Gentile?

  And we know from Cappadocia, like Darren Cuyu, Muslims, Christians, they're very happy to just move in and just carve out a temple.

• 2:53:25Speaker 03

  Heck, yeah.

• 2:53:26AJ Gentile?

  Like, oh, someone was, someone already dug this. We just got to put a, a nave in here. We're good to go.

• 2:53:30Speaker 03

  I mean, all of us like living in cool places.

• 2:53:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:53:33Speaker 03

  We all seek that out. So it's a natural human instinct. If you see this and you're like, this is really cool. I'm going to live here.

• 2:53:40AJ Gentile?

  You had a cool quote, which was something like, if I move into a house and put my name on the mailbox.

• 2:53:45Speaker 03

  I didn't build the house.

• 2:53:45AJ Gentile?

  I didn't build the house. So it's probably a pharaoh's name on a lot of mailboxes.

• 2:53:50Speaker 03

  And a lot of inscriptions in Cambodia and India, and that's used to date a whole lot of sites. And if there isn't an inscription, then if there is an inscription and another site looks a lot like it, then they're, they're the same and they must be the same time period because the buildings look the same. So it's just this, this effect, this downstream effect of things just getting grouped together and different age groups without really a whole lot of actual evidence.

• 2:54:19AJ Gentile?

  Do you definitely see that in Egypt with all the different sites?

• 2:54:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:54:25Speaker 03

  This world is full of amazing mysteries and I will endeavor to go see all of them.

• 2:54:32AJ Gentile?

  You're going to cause a lot of trouble out there.

• 2:54:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:54:36AJ Gentile?

  Okay, last question for you.

• 2:54:41AJ Gentile?

  Did you see me turning these pages for this whole thing?

• 2:54:43Speaker 03

  I really want to read those questions.

• 2:54:45AJ Gentile?

  You can if you want to. There's no secrets.

• 2:54:49AJ Gentile?

  And what was cool is I just kind of let you talk and you just walked through, you walked through my whole script anyway. It was very nice. You made it very easy.

• 2:54:56Speaker 03

  Look at that. There's media training right there.

• 2:54:59AJ Gentile?

  You're born to do it.

• 2:55:02AJ Gentile?

  Look, you can become a YouTuber in your 40s.

• 2:55:04Speaker 03

  You can. You did it.

• 2:55:06AJ Gentile?

  It's been done.

• 2:55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm just following in your footsteps.

• 2:55:09AJ Gentile?

  When you walk

• 2:55:10Speaker 03

  My idol AJ.

• 2:55:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, right. When you walk around here, you're like, oh no, I never want to do any of this.

• 2:55:15Speaker 03

  This seems very, I don't know that I could handle like a big production, a consistent schedule, a staff at this point in my life. I kind of just want, I want to just kind of quietly research.

• 2:55:28AJ Gentile?

  But aren't you secretly managing a business?

• 2:55:30Speaker 03

  Well, we have an electrical company. So yes, we're, we're managing. My husband does most of the managing, but

• 2:55:36AJ Gentile?

  So you're doing the books and payroll and all that?

• 2:55:38Speaker 03

  I am, fortunately.

• 2:55:39AJ Gentile?

  So you just have to shift into media.

• 2:55:42Speaker 03

  In college, all of my professors wanted me to be an accountant and I said, absolutely not over my dead body. And now I'm an accountant.

• 2:55:49AJ Gentile?

  That's what you said about doing YouTube, right? Absolutely not.

• 2:55:51Speaker 03

  Exactly. I need to stop saying that.

• 2:55:54AJ Gentile?

  I think it was Matt that you were talking to.

• 2:55:58AJ Gentile?

  You said that when you're 90, you hope you can still crawl around these sites.

• 2:56:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:56:03AJ Gentile?

  So what do you think 90 year old Cassie would know that you don't know yet?

• 2:56:10Speaker 03

  I think technology is going to change so much in our lifetime. I have this dream of being able to come in with, and I don't think it exists today. Being able to come in with a scan and scan these buildings from the bottom up. And to be able to place the different portions of these buildings into different time periods. To really look at the structure of it, the way it's constructed and start to break down these sites and say, this is definitely the oldest and we need to be researching this and comparing this to structures in all these other places that we've scanned. And I think with technology, you might be able to get there in my lifetime.

• 2:56:51Speaker 03

  You might be able to scan the ocean floor in my lifetime and uncover some really incredible things. I think that people are hungry to understand our distant past. I think right now this conflict we feel between the accepted story and all of these crazies out here, these pseudo archaeologists out here spouting their theories, I think that's going to die down. And I think I, what I hope is by the time I'm 90, I'll talk fondly about the days when nobody believed. And by the time I'm 90, everybody will generally accept that we've got a much more mysterious past than we believe.

• 2:57:30Speaker 03

  And people will be excited about it and will have discovered so many more sites than, than we know of even now. I mean, every year they're getting discovered. And I think it's, you know, I hope to look back and be like, that was fricking awesome. That was so fun.

• 2:57:46AJ Gentile?

  That's how to land a plane. Bye, everybody.

• 2:57:48Speaker 03

  Thanks, everyone.

• 2:57:49AJ Gentile?

  That was Cassie Combersmith. She ended on what she hopes to know at 90, so I'll start with the mountain. Four days, no food, no mushrooms, and she came down with one sentence. You will save the children. She cold emailed an anti-trafficking group, and I checked the board list. She's on it. The rest I dug a little deeper. In 2015, Damien Evans' team published the Ankerwatt lidar in the journal Antiquity. My long coils of sand, south of the moat with nothing in them, and later, a canal cut through. Their words, "Quite how the spirals functioned is not at all clear." That's the people who found them in a peer-reviewed journal, shrugging. I love that. Now, the Coquere moat they drilled seven feet into, I read that paper.

• 2:58:31AJ Gentile?

  The archaeologist's conclusion is that Coquere was not an ephemeral city established in a virgin forest. They think there was an earlier temple. She thinks it's older than that. Look, Cassie spent a career doing due diligence on billion-dollar holes in the ground. And when asked what the anchor machine makes, she said she did know, three times. I trust people who can say that. Her channel is Secrets in Stone, and she's leading a Cambodia and Laos tour in January. The Exodus Road and everything I mentioned are linked below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 3:02:57Speaker 00

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