The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2374 - Ben van Kerkwyk

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 3, 2025 - The Joe Rogan Experience

02:59:26

Joe Rogan Experience #2374 - Ben van Kerkwyk

Participants

Main voices

ben van kerkwyk

02:20:06

joe rogan

34:54

Appearances

Clips

jamie vernon

00:43

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		The Joe Logan experience.
unidentified		Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night all day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So excited to talk to you, man.
		I have been so looking forward to this.
		Since I saw your video on the labyrinths in Egypt.
		Spoiler alert.
		There appears to be a forty-meter long metallic tic-tac-shaped object.
		How m how deep into the ground?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh it's in that so it's in the central atrium, which we'll get into what that is, but somewhere in the realm of 60, 70 meters.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So man, what's that in feet, like 200 feet, 150 to 180 feet down, something like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So for anybody who's interested, what is the name of that video that you put out?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I think it's the ancient structure, like it's said to be greater than the pyramids.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I try to tease it a little bit, but it's it's it's on that it's on my channel.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's a good tease.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You got me.
unidentified		Thank you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I I dove right in.
		And I I remember I was in the gym while I was watching it, and I I literally stopped working out.
		I was like, okay, I gotta pause this.
		This is not something that I can consume while I'm working on.
		I need to like really pay attention to this because it's so wild.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and and I I honestly that I'm grateful for how like that video took off.
		Like it for me it took off.
		But way bigger than than ones that I've done in the past.
		I talk about the labyrinth in the past, and it's uh it's a much longer video, and uh I was I was really glad to get the chance to dive into these details because I've been wanting to revisit the labyrinth for a long time.
		However, there's just been recently a bunch of new data that came up about things that happened a decade or two ago, or in yeah, in inside the last decade that really changed that picture, and that was it was things like the Merlin Burroughs scans that that correlated other scans and also reported on yeah, there seems to be a metallic object down there.
		And this isn't you know, this isn't sort of crazy emerging science.
		This is a uh a legitimate company that ha is using technology that's been well established in defense and in in the UK defense.
		It came out of the the UK military as a technology that's been more or less proven.
		So and the guy that that Tim Acres, Rest in Peace, unfortunately, he's since passed, but he uh you know what he said about this object, like he's he is a credible guy to to say this.
		He he doesn't draw conclusions about what it might be, but it's definitely it's not wood, it's not stone, it's metal, it's not unlike other metal that he's seen, although he they couldn't classify what exact type of metal it is, but he said, yeah, there is a in this central atrium because the labyrinth has multiple levels,
		and it's it's almost like you're imagine yourself standing in a shopping mall and and you have that central atrium where you can see all these levels, and it's like this big central chamber that connects to these multiple levels that's open, it's at least forty meters long, it's really tall, and in the center of it is what's more than forty because it contains this single sort of 40-piece, forty-meter long object that's sitting in there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, how did you find out about the labyrinths?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like th this is something that has been talked about for a long time.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Thousands of years.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		But no one it's not in any like traditional archaeology books.
		It's not is it?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, no, it is.
		So the labyrinth is kind of that this is the other part that draw that drew me to it, uh, is that it isn't something that's coming out of left field, right?
		It's it's not like this, oh no one ever heard of this before.
		It it's literally a structure that was written about extensively over hundreds of years in antiquity by authors like Herodotus, Deodorus Siculus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Polonius Mello, like there's there's all of these these writers of antiquity, and you're talking about time for instance from like 500 BC up to the first century AD.
		Had visited it and they'd they'd written about it and talked about it, and they gave it this legend.
		Guys like Herodotus said that it surpasses the pyramids in grandeur, and then you have Yeah, so this is the this is from Herodotus' histories in the fifth century BC, and he says for this I saw myself and I found it greater than words can say.
		For if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all of the great works produced by the Hellenes, the Greeks, they would prove to be inferior in labor and expense to this labyrinth.
		So he's he's saying that all of the temples of the Greeks of ancient Greece, you've been there, you've seen the the Acropolis, and just if you added them all up, the labor to produce them would be inferior in what it would take to just make this one thing in Egypt, a labyrinth.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is underground.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That's underground.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		How do conventional archaeologists approach this?
		Do they discuss this at all?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so they do.
		It's it's been discuss it basically What happened was so you had they always we always kind of knew where it was.
		So, you know, you have the the classical authors of antiquity which coincides with what you might call the Ptolemaic period of ancient Egypt.
		It's a transition from like dynastic Egypt into it becoming essentially a a Roman province, like an imperial province of Rome.
		And that runs you up to about, you know, f four or five hundred AD.
		And then sort of, you know, civilization has we have the dark ages, sort of have Roman Empire collapses, and it's not until again you get to the Renaissance and you you have uh artists and other authors are looking at these historical accounts and they're talking about it, they're drawing it, some of the depictions you see from the labyrinth are in that.
		And then again, not until the emergence of what I would call modern archaeology in the eighteenth century.
		So guys like Carl Lepsius in the 1700s started to look at these accounts and go and and survey the place where they said it was.
		So it you know, Herodotus and these authors, I I selected the quotes here to just there's a lot more that they say about it.
		What then but one of the things they talk about is they kind of give descriptions of where it is.
		They say it's near what was called Lake Moiris, and um and it's near the what uh a a city that's was the the temple of the crocodiles crocodile Crocodilopolis or or ancient arseno is the other name for it.
		And we know where that is.
		And Lake Moiris sort of somewhat still exists, it's much smaller now, but it's in this region called the Fayum of Egypt.
		So if you ever look at Egypt on a map, you can imagine it's desert, and you have from north to south you have this green line of the Nile, traces it down.
		But on the left side, you look at there's this leaf-shaped depression that's all green, it's called the Fium.
		It's a depression which used to flood with the Nile.
		Today they use it for agriculture.
		And it's right at that neck of the Fayum where it connects up to the Nile Valley.
		And he also described it, they also described the pyramid that's at the site because there is a the pyramid to Aminabhap the Third on that site.
		So they give us all these descriptors, and everyone kind of agreed, yeah.
		So it's at this place called Hawara, where I've been to several times.
		There's still a pyramid there, and there's this great fields of sand and and and like open little open air libraries with chunks of stone.
		And what happened was so Carl Lepsius went there and he said, Well, I've discovered the ruins of like a Roman town that's built on the surface, there's nothing crazy about it.
		Flinders Petrie was the guy who kind of got the closest.
		Now Petrie went there in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
		And he was excavating, he dug down seven or eight meters.
		He got down and he found this massive stone slab of of beton or plaster that was huge, like a thousand feet long.
		Like it was as much he sort of traced the edges of it.
		And he's like, I'm standing on the foundation of the labyrinth.
		So what he said, he's like, it's all gone.
		Like it's basically Petrie said it's been quarried.
		This place has been a source of stone for literally millennia.
		So it's gone.
		So pretty much everyone since then in archaeology, Egyptology is like, and if you look on Wikipedia, they'll tell you, oh, it's it's gone.
		It was destroyed, it was quarried away.
		Petrie says, you know, I'm standing on the the foundation of it, the bottom layer, and that's it, it's there's nothing here.
		And so that's always been kind of the position of orthodox Egyptology, look in the textbooks, that's where it is.
		But that's all changed because there's been a whole bunch of different now scientific expeditions there.
		This is where it gets into some intrigue because that the the Matahar expedition, the Cara University expedition.
		I mean, these these happened, their results have come out since, but they were covered up at the time.
		They were suppressed.
		So the first guy to real year was this?
		2008 was the Matahara Expedition.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They were covered up.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter.
		The hiring process can be absurdly time consuming.
		Like when you're looking for a new doctor, you spend hours searching when you finally feel like you found the right one, it turns out they're not accepting new patients.
		The same thing happens when you're hiring.
		You scan through hundreds of resumes, you find one you like, only discover they aren't actively looking for a job.
		Well, good news for all you hiring managers out there, your search looks a little less frustrating now, thanks to ZipRecruiter.
		And bonus, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com/slash Rogan.
		ZipRecruiter has added new tools and features to help speed up the hiring process and save you valuable time.
		They can easily connect you with qualified candidates in minutes.
		They also have a wide pool of talent to choose from, and it's continuously growing.
		Over three hundred and twenty thousand resumes are added monthly, so you can reach More potential hires.
		Use ZipRecruiter and save time hiring.
		Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.
		And if you go to zirecruiter.com slash Rogan right now, you can try it for free.
		Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan, ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So what is this our boys Aui?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Zahi.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sorry.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It was.
		And look, and again, not my words, this is the words of Louis DeCordier, who was he's a Belgian artist and entrepreneur who who funded and drove the Matahar expedition.
		He did it in conjunction with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, which at the time was helmed by Zahi Huas.
		Also with the NRIAG, which is the uh National Research Institute for like basically subsurface studies, so that's those guys dragging that box around.
		So they used a whole bunch of different techniques to look at these areas around that pyramid at the site of Hawara, things like ground penetrating radar, geomagnetism, very low frequency, like seismic tomography, electrical resistivity tomography.
		There's uh there's a bunch of different techniques that are well established.
		Known science.
		This isn't like the Kuffrey scan stuff, where it's like you can debate the the merits of the technology.
		This is established technology.
		And they found the labyrinth.
		So and what he found was is that yes, so what Lepsier said about the ruins of a Roman or Greek or Persian town with mud bricks and stuff, yep, that's there in the first few meters.
		You go down, then you hit the water table.
		So that there's the other issue on this site is the water table.
		So the water's at like five meters below the surface.
		And under that is the slab that Petrie found.
		So like six, seven meters is is that that that huge slab that that Petrie found that he thought was the foundation.
		And then below that, Petrie didn't dig deep enough.
		Below that we can find essentially a labyrinthian structure of granite and very dense rocks uh and walls and and um like a maze-like structure that's that has walls that are meters thick.
		There's another great slide in there that's that's the green and it's the actual VLF right-that's it there.
		So Yeah, so this is at eight meters with VLF sounding, so you can see like this labyrinthian structure of these walls and all of these lines and walls.
		So these are like granite and the scale of this, it's a hundred meters vertically by a hundred and fifty meters.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A hundred meters tall.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, so vertically.
		No, no.
		So the the the y-axis, I guess, of this.
		So we we're looking down in the ground here.
		But you've got to look at the scale.
		Like across the top, that's a hundred and fifty meters, right?
		So I mean, what, four hundred and fifty feet?
		So these are big walls.
		So it's big chambers and big walls.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		For people at home is like a football field.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's a football field.
		Uh well, it's more.
		I mean, a hundred meters.
		In Australia, it's my hundred meters as the football field, I think.
		I don't know how big.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is the difference between a hundred yards and a hundred meters?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's a hundred yards is a little less.
		A little less.
		So a hundred and fifty met and and this is only a section of the labyrinth.
		They they scan two sections.
		Uh the labyrinth itself is said to be much, much larger than this.
		They so they found it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Much larger than that.
unidentified		Oh, that's huge.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, it's it's it's a overall structure, like a thousand feet at least.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like like three three, four, five times that size.
		I mean, you have to go back to the we we have some better indication with the more modern space-based scans now, but when they did those the geophysical, like the the ground penetrating radar scans.
		So they scanned two areas.
		That was the bigger one, like in front of the pyramid, then they did another one on the other side of the canal that runs through the site today, and they found they found it on both sides.
		So that's the difference between like what we say about the lab, like what the textbooks will tell you about the labyrinth, it not being there and it it being destroyed to No.
		We've actually now there's been the Madahar expedition confirmed it was there.
		And they so what happened w this was interesting, and I I have I have I think reasoning for why this happened, it but it was covered up, and these are the words like Louis deCordier.
		He eventually got sick of waiting, because what happens in Egypt, anything you do, whether it's you're you're an academic institution or you're an individual or a group that's funding some sort of expedition.
		You work with the Council of Antiquities today, it's the um Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
		But they essentially, you know, you gotta it takes years to get ex access.
		And then once you do though, they control release of information.
		So that's always part of the deal, right?
		It's the Egypt gets to do the announcing and if and when they choose.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And they have dismissed things in the past that they've then accepted later.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Aaron Powell Yeah, a great example is the honestly the the Scan Pyramids project.
		So when so they got ahead of themselves a little bit, this is the the muon detection, the cosmic ray detection stuff.
		They've been running that experiment for years at the at Giza in the Great Pyramid.
		They put the and every time I go in there, there's always different sets of equipment at different places on it.
		But these muon detectors, they they have them under the ground and in the Grand Gallery, and it just takes years to collect data.
		Occasionally these cosmic particles, they'll pick one up and it's you're able to detect voids or you know they have a they can somehow tell the difference between it it travelling through solid matter versus a void.
		Takes years to build up a a resolute picture.
		But once they did, they said, Oh, okay, so we've discovered that big void in the pyramid, but they'd also discovered the small void at the at the main entrance, if you if you look up at it today, there's those chevron blocks.
		Like above you you go in down here at the Alma Moon's tunnel, but at the top where the descending passage actually exits the pyramid, the original entrance, there's this big chevron blocks, and behind that's that chamber.
		So you remember a few years ago they made a big fuss.
		But as an example, like when the when the scan pyramids guys on their own initiative announced that we've made these discoveries.
		I mean, they Zahi basically came out and said this is bullshit, this doesn't exist, there's nothing there, and if there is something there, we knew about it already, you know.
		And and you go on a couple years, and when now it's time to do the press releases and to roll out um you know the footage, and he's who's standing at the at the podium making the announcement and showing the face.
		Zahi's doing it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He has to.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh yes.
		I I did a video, I just released it a few days ago that got into some even more intrigue about stuff that's happened at Giza in the in the in the at the Giza Plateau in the nineteen nineties, which we can we can get into that too.
		But so yeah, what happened with the Madahar expedition and the labyrinth was that 2008 and nine, they finished their um their on-site work, they're ready to release the data.
		They they put on a very small public lecture at Ghent University in Belgium, no one really attended it.
		And then they got told to stop, and again, in the words of Louis de Cordier, because he waited like two or three years and then he put this out there.
		He said that he was told to cease any and all discussion or release of information from the Madahar project, and him and his team members were threatened with national security sanctions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oi.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		From Egypt.
		Which means that, you know, I I think at the low level, like if you come to Egypt we'll arrest you, and if not, when maybe we'll come and get you.
		I don't know.
		It's this is national security sanctions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't there a way to sort of massage that situation and to talk to Zahi and say, listen, you can be the guy who found this.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh I think that would have been the case.
		I think that was a given if if it had been released.
		I actually think in the case so it's funny, I I d uh I kind of don't really blame him so much.
		I think this was a political uh decision, not a not so people say, oh it's hiding the truth and whatever.
		Yeah, okay, that that's happening.
		There's new data, that's an amazing, amazing find that that could change the world.
		In my opinion, honestly, the labyrinth is the biggest archaeological discovery of the millennium.
		When we get into what that structure is and how big it is and the way it's reported in antiquity, there's nothing bigger than they Herodotus says it surpasses the pyramids.
		Like it's like finding more gee like a Giza plateau somewhere.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Under the ground.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Under the ground.
		Like you can't I just think it would be the biggest discovery of the millennium, which is part of the problem.
		Because I think unfortunately in Egypt, and this is just my um intuition and my sort of read of the situation, what's happened is that the reality is is the groundwater level is rising, right?
		So it's it's kind of attacking that part of the site, at least the the higher levels of the labyrinth for sure are suffering in this salty groundwater, right?
		It is going to slowly erode because that groundwater's come way up.
		We know it's come way up because Flinders Petrie, back in the you know, late 18th, early 19th century actually got in to under the pyramid.
		And you can't today if you go to that pyramid, you there is a a passage you can go down, you go down a few steps and just throw a pebble, it's just water and and debris and mud and so this water table it has risen slowly over No, since the 1960s, since they built the dam.
		So it's the high dam.
		So what happened it's this is the problem, right?
		So you've got all these factors.
		It's where it is, so it's it Hawata, the neck to the foam.
		Now Egypt, I love Egypt.
		I go to Egypt a couple times a year every year.
		And fantastic place, but they are one of like they're food poor in terms of like they're the net biggest importer of wheat.
		They need all the agriculture they can get.
		The foam is a huge agricultural area.
		There's a huge irrigation canal called the Bawabi Canal that's been cut in there in like the 1840s, same guy built the Suez Canal, made it um cuts it in there.
		So you've got this situation of like, alright, we've got all this agriculture happening, we've got farmers' water rights messing with this, and it's and it's happens to be running through this ancient site that could be the biggest discovery of our time.
		And it's happening because we built a dam on the Nile.
		And and what happened with the the high dam in the 60s, like there's a low dam the British built in like 1901, 1902, then they actually partnered with the Soviet Union to build this high dam.
		That's actually still a monument to Egyptian Soviet Union friendship at the dam is pretty cool.
		Um but when they built that high dam, it essentially stops that yearly cycle of inundation of the Nile.
		So everyone, you know, we always talk about the Nile flooding, right?
		Every year that it rains in Africa in the south, you get this huge flood that comes up the Nile and it it it floods out and you get this deposit of of of of you know black mud and real fertile ground and they would use that to farm.
		They built the dam, it r you get rid of that yearly cycle, right?
		And what happens, people it seems counterintuitive because people are like, well, it's less water in the Nile.
		Well no, what you what the dam did was eliminate the nine-month dry season.
		So you had the three-month wet season, but then you've you don't have that uh nine-month dry season now, so you have essentially more water for more time in the Nile, which is which is having this effect of rising the water table.
		So you combine that with the size of Hawara and that the project, the scope of the project to try and remediate and save or excavate, start working at the labyrinth.
		I mean, you're talking like millions and millions.
		It's would it's not an easy problem to solve on an area that size to try and get the water out, divert the farmer's water, deal with all of those problems, you know, and then so what I think the option Zahi might have been left with here is like, well, it's either going to cost us an absolute bomb to to try and do this for like we don't know what sort of gain, it would probably be a decade before that place is suitable for tourism, it's there's not much to see there even now.
		Or we basically say we've discovered it, but we're not gonna do anything about it because it's too expensive, and you're gonna face a lot of international criticism for that.
		So I think that the the decision was likely made, in my opinion, complete speculation that it's just easy to brush this under the table.
		This never happened, we never discovered this.
		This doesn't exist, let's just go on selling tickets on the Giza Plateau and pumping water out to the FIM for agriculture.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		God.
		How short-sighted.
		Now, when you were saying millions, were you just going to say dollars, or were you gonna say gallons of water?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		No, dollars.
		I mean, I think the project, the remediation project at Hawara would not be a s it's not a simple thing.
		And in fact, they they did do there was another expedition after the Madahar expedition in like this was 2009.
		Uh Caira University along with a Polish university went out there to try and figure out what is the deal with the groundwater.
		Where's it coming from?
		You know, like what direction and what they were doing they were doing geological test pits and all these boreholes to figure out the water situation.
		Um according to them, that information was also covered up because they also did ground penetrating radar surveys, also confirmed the labyrinth.
		The guy who was in charge of that in Cairo University was actually put in jail by they again, this is on their report when the information finally came out in 2017.
		He lost his job, obviously as part of it.
		So they covered that up too.
		But they had they had tried him in jail for what?
		For I guess for working on the site.
		Like, I don't know.
		I I don't know the reason.
		It's it's on their report though, that's what they say is that he was jailed because the he Zai allegedly halted the project and then put the guy in jail.
		This is what they say on their on on the report from that uh expedition, that that that work which came out like uh a decade after they'd done it.
		And I dig it up on the internet, I'm like, well, this is interesting because their results are interesting, but they even after their work, their conclusion was, well, the water's a very complicated problem.
		It's coming from a couple different directions.
		Northeast is the shallowest, like it's coming in from this way, but it's also coming from another direction.
		They'd have to dig a lot more test holes uh in a wider area to really figure it out.
		And I think you'd have to start digging like remediation wells, put in pumps and just try and pump that down, if not canal and and trench that whole thing out, like a massive site, and then you can start to worry about all right, we're gonna get some dirt out and start to excavate.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Could it be done without interrupting the farmers?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Probably.
		Yeah, I mean it's I think it's I think we could do it.
		Uh I I think that you can divert and move the the Barwabi Canal out of the way if you had to.
		I just think.
unidentified		Someone needs to holler at Jeff Bezos.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, someone with some deep pockets.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Don't you want to know?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		No, you want to know.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I want to know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, the crazy thing is too, is is that according to the because the story doesn't end there.
		Like when you get into the modern space-based scans, Merlin Burroughs and the geoscan stuff, and I know that also I've met the the guys from the Kaffrey project, they are gonna scan that site.
		I've we talked to them about it uh recently at the Cosmic Summit, and then uh I I think you know the lower what they're saying so far is that the lower levels, like because this thing goes down, like I said, to nearly a hundred meters.
		There's there's reported like levels down to three hundred feet under the ground, and and and it seems like they might be free of water.
		So it's just it's just like shallow groundwater, and once you get into the bedrock and it's and it's like it's like a s not a porous stone or whatever's underneath just the top-level sediment, it it seems like it can it you know, Tim Aker said it looks like it's free of water, so the very bottom layers uh seem to be free of it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So the the actual labyrinth, very bottom layers.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Aaron Ross Powell, Well the Labyrinth is multiple levels at least.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it'd be like But is it possible that they could somehow or another from the side dig a tunnel below everything?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you could below the water.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you'd have to dig a deep tunnel.
		You could I mean that's also an option is to try and if you if you actually believe and you go with these scans, you know where that atrium is, we could probably try and get down there and just line a tunnel somehow get down that would be epic if we did that in our lifetime.
		I I would love to see it.
		Like be incredible.
		I agree, which is the reason I made that video in the first place.
		Um I wanted to draw attention to the labyrinth, because it's just it I think it is like the the biggest opportunity for us.
		I if in terms of massive discoveries in the ancient world, I can't think of anything that's bigger than the I know the Cafre scan stuff is super interesting and the claims are wild, and it's but this is like known about, like this has been talked about.
		And then it's been confirmed with multiple scans.
		You had you had Matahar Expedition, you had Cairo University, and I think it was uh walk rock law, I'm butchering that, the Polish um university, or then you had geoscan team, which was Klaus Doner, a friend of his who runs this German geoscan um space-based satellite thing.
		It's like a mathematical statistical approach.
		They kind of use it to determine the elemental composition of stars is the best explanation I have.
		However, they have a track record of being able to find things like water and oil and gold under the ground.
		So they've been using that as a company for like people to go basically survey and then go dig and they've done three or four of these and they're okay.
		This is where you said it was.
		They scanned the labyrinth.
		They were the first space-based scan to come out and talk about it.
		Then you had Merlin Burroughs, which is this ex-UK military technology that's very similar in technique to the Cuffrey scan guys.
		Like so they use synthetic aperture radar or Doppler tomography.
		These guys are using like high frequency orbital imaging with seismic data.
		So it's it's very similar in the way they're in that you're essentially the description I I was told is it's like imagine dropping pebbles into a container of water.
		And if you could instantly freeze that container and lift it out and shine a light from underneath it, when you look at it on the top, you can in you can see those ripples in three dimensions, but you're looking at it on a 2D scan kind of thing, and you can interpret them to show you the topography of whatever's in that three-dimensional space.
		It's something similar to that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fucking awesome.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so awesome.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's wild.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so awesome that they just have the ability to do that and look at that.
		Beyond the Cafre stuff, which you know, I I don't want to get disappointed.
		So I I I I look at that like, hmm, like it's too great.
		It's too amazing, it's too spectacular.
unidentified		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's a huge claim.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And if it's true, oh boy, does that change everything about everything.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I'm in the camp of want to believe, trust me.
		I mean I'm sure you are.
		But I'm not, but I don't I mean, I'm I was skeptical initially when it came out.
		I've talked I've since I've since certainly come around on the technol on the promise of the technology.
		I my my skepticism probably still exists in in the the layer between the scans as I've seen them and then the interpretations of the results.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The 3D.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the the sc and what their interpretations of it are a little weird.
		Because like you don't really have a crystal clear view of what this thing is.
		Yeah.
		You're making it look like it's some sort of a Tesla coil or whatever it is.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like giant cubes with these Ford tunnels.
		Yeah, I I look it we'll see.
		And I want to get into like the Osiris shaft because that's another thing that I just recently put a video out about these other scans that have happened in the nineties confirm that th have since kind of been confirmed by the Kuffray scan team work.
		But yeah, at the labyrinth at least.
		Right.
		So you have you have the geoscan, which is a statistical mathematical approach, space-based still, but then you have and the Merlin Burroughs, which is a similar tick technique to the Kuffrey scan group.
		And it was used, I mean, just so this is what Tim Akers would tell you, it was used to detect submarines.
		They would look at like surface patterns on the water and they were using it to basically track submarines under the water.
		So it's it's that's its origins, at least in the military, as far as I know.
		It's like the non-classified part of it is what he said.
		Uh at least reported to have said, I should say.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are there ancient artistic depictions?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, not ancient, but certainly Renaissance periods.
		And it it's it's it's I think some of it's symbolic, but s we do get a lot of descriptions from those authors.
		So for example, Herodotus talks about it being, you know, fifteen hundred rooms on one level.
		Total of he said there's two levels.
		He saw one level, he wasn't allowed to go to the lower level.
		He said that it's three thousand rooms in total, and not just rooms, but also courts, massive open courts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Uh these are like Herodotus didn't have access?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Aaron Ross Powell Not to the bottom level, according to him.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Interesting.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		But Deodorus Siculus did, like th these guys talk about Siculus said that you needed a guide you would get lost down there for days if you didn't have a guide who knew his way around.
		And then you have same you have the same similar accounts from Pliny the Elder and and again these these once you s I think once you get um accounts coming from multiple people over the span of centuries that are from different civilizations, both Roman and Greek, and they're they're correlating.
		It's like this is re pretty reliable data at this point.
		In it's certainly in history or in archaeology, you that's what that's your measure for like alright, there's a grain of truth in this given that we've got the same thing coming from these different accounts that are essentially different civilizations that visited the same place.
		And what they say is astonishing.
		It's but all of them talk about there being hundred if hundreds, if not thousands of rooms and twisting chambers and then also giant open courts with my that might have forty columns to a side.
		Um all of it being done with just spectacular craftsmanship.
		Yeah, this is d so Deodorosiculus, first century BC.
		Uh talking about that, you know, the in respect of carving and other works of craftsmanship, they left no room for their successes to surpass them.
		He's saying that there is this is phenomenal work.
		And in this sacred enclosure, one found a temple surrounded by columns forty to each side, and this roof had a this building had a roof made of a single stone, carved with panels and richly adorned with excellent paintings.
		So forty to a side, that's eighty.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And how was this even lit?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		What that's always a good question.
		That's a that's a core question when you get into any of these subterranean spaces, like the Serapum.
		It's the car it's always there's no soot like we don't know how the answer is they don't know.
		It wasn't with flame.
		Like I don't think it was with flame.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then go back to Strabo's depictions.
		In addition to these things, there is the edifice of the labyrinth, which is a building quite equal to the pyramids.
		A great palace made of many palaces.
		For such is the number of how's that word?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		What's peristyle?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Perstyle courts which lie contiguous with one another.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Before the entrances there lie what might be called hidden chambers, which are long and many in number and have paths running through one another which twist and turn so that no one can enter or leave any court without a guide.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So he you had Siculus's account of one of those courts being eighty columns, like forty-two aside, and there was twelve of them, at least twelve of them in there.
unidentified		Wow.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So it's absolutely crazy.
		So you have you know, three thousand rooms, twelve gigantic courts.
		Diodorus talks about the the roof being made of a single stone.
		I very much doubt that, but what I think he's describing is the craftsmanship that you see in those real megalithic buildings in Egypt where you can't see the joints.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And here uh Pliny the Elder, who lived uh between twenty-three and seventy-nine CE, which is current time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he's saying three thousand six hundred years ago this was constructed according to tradition.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Aaron Powell isn't that interesting, yeah.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So That predates the pyramids.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, by a long way, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Allegedly.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Allegedly.
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you go with the orthodox data, the pyramids, sure.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's he says that, you know, so essentially 3,600 BC, that it was built according to the tradition at the time, 3,600 years.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So with the conventional dating of the pyramids, that's more than a thousand years earlier.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		About a thousand years, yeah, a little less, maybe.
		And the conventional dating is like even the carbon dating on the pyramids doesn't quite match the conventional dating.
		It's a little earlier than that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it's they're what is the carbon dating from pieces in the phone.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So they got some mortar.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, yeah, some mortar um in the carbon dating.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what is that?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, it with the date.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So it's I believe it's it's like a wide range, but it's it's it's like several hundred years, like two hundred years prior to what they would say is that the time of Khufu of Chiops, the the ruler in the Fourth Dynasty.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Certainly on the Great Pyramid at least.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what is the room for error when they do carbon dating?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's depends on the samples and the it's a lot of specifics, but it could be plus minus twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred years.
		It depends.
		I think this the the margin of error they did multiple samples.
		I believe it's it's less than that, so that they're pretty firm that the date is earlier.
		So it gets this is um it's kind of a critical I mean, I think there's a bunch of people that have talked about the fact that the Acheola, the Egyptologists don't really reference that date because it kind of messes up their timeline a little bit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's not thousands of years.
		It's hundreds of years.
		So the explanation tends to be, well, it was old wood.
		It's like the ash that gets mixed into the mortar as the source for the carbon, and they say, well, maybe they just burnt really old trees.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's very convenient.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		It becomes convenient.
		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, all of it's convenient, which is which gets really weird because we know that they did some enhancements to the pyramid.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like they refurbished some things.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And so that's the problem.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's like would you refurbished what and how long was it there before you refurbished it?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Indeed.
		I I look, I think I don't I'm not I don't discount the carbon dating.
		I I think what you can say from the carbon dating firmly is that the that it it shows that these pyramids were being worked on.
		If you can't, I don't think you can make the jump to say this is when they were built.
		You have to you have to infer and say that I think this is when they were they were certainly being worked on in that period.
		So it I think it's possible that dynastic Egyptians could have finished the pyramids.
		They may not have been entirely pyramids originally.
		I think there's I think there's a strong chance that there were multiple phases of construction over a long time to to for them to end up being what they are in our time.
		Uh I think those are all possibilities here because it just the this is the whole when you you take a step back and look at the whole picture of ancient Egypt.
		I mean, just you you cannot attribute everything that we see in ancient Egypt to our current understanding of those dynastic Egyptians, their capabilities, their tools, their writings, and what we know about them.
		We know an awful lot.
		Like they do we we have tools from the ancient Egyptian toolbox.
		We found them.
		We have depictions shown on walls of how they did things.
		They were very good about documenting them.
		So we we have the tools, we have the depictions.
		We also have lots and lots of artifacts that match those tools and depictions, right?
		We've got these what are clearly handmade artifacts, and this is across all the categories of artifacts from things like stonework columns, obliques, ob obelisks, um sorry, yeah, obeliscs and vases, boxes, pyramids even.
		And then you have this other category of artifacts that is doesn't match and can't be explained by these tools and techniques.
		And there's there's just no there's no depictions on walls of how they made the precision artifacts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's no give me an example of these pref precision artifacts.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Of course, yeah, and any category.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Um I have it in that tale of two industries uh directory, Jamie, on there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's um Game on.
		Week one starts now, and every touchdown brings you closer to a payout with DraftKings Sportsbook, an official sports betting partner of the NFL.
		Every touchdown could hit big.
		Don't just watch the game when you can win with it.
		DraftKings Sportsbook brings the unmatched intensity of the NFL straight to your fingertips.
		Whether you're backing the first touchdown score, hitting any time, T D props, or riding the thrills of live in-game betting, every play is packed with possibility.
		New customers, this one's for you.
		Bet just five dollars and get three hundred dollars in bonus bets instantly.
		Plus, grab over two hundred dollars off NFL Sunday ticket from your YouTube and YouTube TV.
		Your season starts now.
		Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use the code Rogan.
		That's code Rogan to get $300 in bonus bets instantly when you place your first bet of five dollars or more, plus over $200 off NFL Sunday ticket from YouTube and YouTube TV.
		In partnership with DraftKings, the crown is yours.
unidentified		Gambling problem, call 1-800 gambler in New York, call 877-8 Hope and Wy or text Hobin Y 467-369.
		In Connecticut, helpers available for problem gambling.
		Call 888-789-7777.
		Or visit CCPG.org.
		Please play responsibly.
		On behalf of Boot Hill Casino and Resorting Kansas, 21 and over.
		Agent eligibility varies by jurisdiction.
		Void on Ontario, new customers only.
		Bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance.
		For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see DKNG.co slash audio.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		The vases are probably the best example.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		They're a smoking gun example of it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is a 3D printed one.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so this is these to me.
		I mean, this is why the the vase um project was so I mean to me quite validating when it came up.
		Yeah, the shist disc.
		Um these are the smoking gun because they connect to everything else, and we're learning so much about the precision of these things.
		However, but we could start with statues or boxes or you know, columns.
		It doesn't really matter.
		There there are two categories across all of these artifacts.
		And the advanced category, again, it so you can't really make them with the tools that the ancient Egyptians were just were we know they were using that we found.
		They don't show the scene.
		There's no scenes of building stone pyramids.
		There's no scenes of them making giant statues, like thousand-ton statues.
		This is the type of thing that you see on the wall, and this is in the tomb of the nobles up in um the West Bank at Luxaw.
		And here they're building mud bricks.
		So they're firing mud bricks over the fire, they're there.
		You can see them, they're pouring them, they're shaping them, they're carrying them.
		It's all very relatively primitive.
		And we know they made mud brick pyramids, they made mud brick ramps, and some of the mud bricks are big and heavy.
		But we know all about this.
		But you don't see is the is the uh is the is the the the stone pyramid building, the really massive megalith stuff.
		The next the next slide with the the vases is a good example.
		This is what I've been calling the tale of two industries.
		It's a whole theory that I've been putting together for the last few years.
		Again, you have a primitive industry that is clearly observably handmade.
		It lacks precision and symmetry.
		We found the tools, the Egyptians drew the scenes, the artifacts match the tools and techniques, and then you have this advanced industry, visibly sophisticated, usually very hard stone is the other characteristic.
		The primitive stuff is usually softer stone, although not always.
		These artifacts, as we're doing analysis on them, are showing this depth of precision and complexity that's phenomenal.
		The vases are just, this is where they become a smoking gun to this whole argument, I think.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can you for people that don't know about this stuff?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Can you just give them some numbers on what the vases go back to pre-dynastic times?
		It's uh it's it's there's no debate that these are pretty dynastic.
		They predate what we would call the dynastic civilization.
		And over the last few years, they've we've been starting to analyze them.
		We, the vase scan team, various groups of people now have been scanning these with modern technology, LIDAR scanning, um, like laser scanning, even CT X-ray scanning.
		And basically they're coming back with precision in terms of circularity, flatness, like centering.
		Um, numbers that are very much equate to some of the best industrial processes that we do today in things like aerospace industry.
		So where it's really important to be within two or three or four thousandths of an inch of perfection for like the parts we make for jet engines or rocket engines.
		Those are the numbers that we're seeing come back on a lot of these vessels.
		Not all of them, again.
		Like that I don't want to say this is uh true for all of them.
		It's not.
		It's true for a lot of them, though.
		And this is again, this is these are levels of precision that are not visible to the naked eye.
		I mean, you're talking human hair like a sheet of printer papers like six or seven thousandths of an inch thick, a human hair's two to three or four thousandths thick, and you're seeing sometimes tolerances even lower than that.
		So you you it's not something you can feel or see or touch, but we see it again and again.
		And the only way we can achieve those sort of tolerances today is with very advanced machines.
		Uh, you know, 3D five-axis mills, um, you know, really high precision lathes, cat like computer controlled equipment.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The problem with the lathe though is the handles on this, right?
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So yeah, if you get into it, so this is this is the issue with this, and and one of the craziest things about and this is the OG vase, the original granite vase.
		Um that started it all.
		It's one of the more precise ones.
		And yeah, you could you can imagine without the handles you could lathe it if you're spinning it.
		But if you if you had the handles, if you wanted these handles, you would have to leave a bull nose that runs all the way around it and then come back with a different process, a different tool to remove that space that this this basically the space between the handles off the body.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you don't see a lack of symmetry in those spaces.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, precision.
		So this is this is the thing.
		So when we do that today, it's called you you basically lose some positional calibration on your tool.
		So we account for that in the way we do industrial design of these sorts of parts.
		So we know that we're going to lose a little bit of precision when we change tools and process.
		Right?
		So we account for that.
		But you don't see that on this.
		When we did, I went back and we we did the we did analysis of this area of the vase body in between the handles, and there's no drop in precision relative to the rest of the vessel.
		So that means one of two things.
		One option is okay, they could they could handle that positional that lack of that loss of positional calibration better than we can.
		Or it wasn't done on a lathe and it was done in what you would call a single pass with a single tool.
		And the only way you can do that is on a f is is with a tool with five axes of freedom.
		So now you're talking about a five-axis C and C mill, like one of those computer-controlled things that can just cut it out in basically one pass but without changing tools and process.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		With incredibly hard stone.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And that's the other challenge with this stuff, and there's some samples of the stone there in front of you from vessels.
		These are actual pieces from vessels.
		Yeah, they got a private collector.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How old is the case?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		This piece.
		At least five, six thousand years, I think I think it potentially quite older and we can get into how old I think.
		But that's the other challenge that is rarely talked about is the material.
		Like we we these things are made from granite diorite.
		Rock crystal, that thing's rock crystal, basically quartz.
		Um feels so hard.
		It's insanely hard.
		Yeah, all these different things.
		Oh yeah, it's it's yeah, it's it's like I have a granite um mortar and pestle at home.
		This big heavy thing.
		It's like I don't need to protect it from anything.
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I have to protect my counters from it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Because if I just it's gonna destroy anything it hits.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And this is so thin.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So that's yes, so this is that's the other it's translucent.
		You hold a light up to it.
		Even the rock crystal one's translucent.
unidentified		Wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So that one gets down to about two millimeters thickness just under the lip.
unidentified		Oh wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you put a phone light on it, it's you see it comes right through it.
		And uh I mean, so with granite and with diorite, and particularly granite, I mean it's essentially a conglomerate, right?
		So it's you have it's it's not a material that's homogeneous.
		So inside a granite, you've got silica and horn blend and mica and all these different quartz and you know hence the pattern.
		Hence the pattern, but also almost microscopically, it changes hardness.
		You know what I mean?
		So some of that stuff is less hard than other bits.
		And it's the way granite takes millions of years in heat and pressure to bond those things together atomically, and that's the stone we get when it pops up out on the bedrock and we we mine it.
		But it's it just means that when you're machining a material like granite, it you know, your tool tip is going from stuff that's really hard to softer to hard, and it's like you have to account for that, yet we see this you feel the surface of it.
		It's phenomenally well polished and finished.
		I mean, if you were doing this today with a lot of modern tool tips, you'd be ripping chunks of quartz out rather than cutting them.
		So something that the actual tool tip that made these things we know is also very refined because this is a very difficult substance to choose to work in.
		No stone sculptor chooses to work in granite unless that's what the project calls for.
		There's a reason they use marble, is that it's it's both much softer and it's homogeneous, like it's the same material, it doesn't vary in hardness wildly.
		So making these sort of precision things and and objects out of stuff like granite and getting it down to two millimeters thick, like that other piece near the lip.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		This is crazy.
		And it's there's even examples that get even thinner than that.
		Flinders Petrie talked about um a diorite vessel that was one fortieth of an inch thick.
		About uh the he's he called it the thickness of stout playing card.
		Yeah, this is it here.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, look at the light going through it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That's that's about two millimeters thick.
		That one's one of Matt Bell's vases.
		It's my probably my favorite, it's like typically called the thin walled vase, but it's a phenomenal piece.
		I'm amazed it's actually survived this long.
		Because it is, that's one of the rare few delicate ones.
		Um it you could break that because it's so thin.
		Because that again, with this type of stone, it gets really brittle.
		And It's like glass, like a cube of glass, bang down on anything.
		Thin glass shatters.
		Same as this stone, yet they did this again and again and again and again.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How do we know that this is pre-dynastic?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, from where they're found.
		I mean, they they're literally found in predynastic burials.
		This is the real this is why the vases are so important to me.
		It it's and why I think they're the smoking gun.
		It's one of the big reasons is that they they're uncontrovertibly or incontrovertibly pre-dynastic because they've been found in burials that are a hundred percent pre-dynastic.
		Nikata culture, Nakata II.
		You can go to any museum that has a reasonable collection of these and find them in the pre-dynastic section.
		All over the There's no debate.
		Like they're found in these burials and they carbon date the burials or they culture date them, the reference datum to periods of thousands of years prior to the dynastic Egyptian civilization.
		There's there's good evidence that they may even stretch back as far as twelve to fourteen thousand BC that they're in burials that go back that far in like the like southern Egypt, northern Sudan area.
		Yeah, it's crazy.
		And it's um a lot of those burials, unfortunately today are underwater because of the dam that created like NASA.
		But either way, it I don't people will debate the how far back they go.
		It's just not controversial at all to say that they are pre-dynastic.
		100%.
		And I think the reason is is that they're this size, right?
		You can bury this with you.
		If you have it, then you can be buried with it.
		You can't do that with a thousand ton statue.
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It stays on the site.
		And then maybe someone down the road writes his name on it, like Ramses II or somebody put carves his name into it, and then we come along thousands of years later and say, Oh, Ramses II's name's on that.
		Therefore, he must have had it made.
		I mean that's essentially like the one of the core principles of Egyptology.
		They they do use the writing primarily as a source, not the only source, but they do.
		And the vases what's the problem with even dating them to those pre-dynastic settlements is that there is nothing about those cultures that indicates they had this capability.
		Nikada culture and even the ones like Toshka, these older ones, pretty similar in that you're talking like the burials are often like shallow fetal position graves.
		You find these precision hard stone objects with fishbone combs, sticks and stones, very primitive hand thrown pottery, not even thrown, just hand formed pottery.
		No other stonework.
		Um I've seen antiques dealers that that it that are selling these vases because there is a huge there's a lot of these in the in the private market and in uh in private possession because of their size and their availability and this how many there were, because there's hundred like are they illegal to possess?
		No.
		No no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you could get a hold of one of those legally?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's I know collectors with like eighty, ninety of them, a hundred of them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
unidentified		Really?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, they're on they're on they come up with.
		There's I would say today there's um easily over a hundred thousand.
		Hardstone vessels for sure.
		I mean they found fifty thousand of them in one spot.
		Like that's the famous discovery at the Steppe Pyramid.
		But yeah, it's crazy.
		There's a lot.
		I think there were even more.
		Like it this was an indust industry.
		Like that's the other key.
		And a lot of these are semi-exotic types of stone too.
		We don't know where the stone came from.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not local.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		In a lot of cases, no.
		We la like there's lapis uh there's lapis lazuli artifacts that are pre-dynastic, and there's no known quarry for lapis in Egypt.
		The closest one's Afghanistan.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's How far is Afghanistan from Egypt?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I don't I mean must be it's right over on the other side of the Middle East, I think, isn't it?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's over towards Yeah, it's up towards Russia and China.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's um show that image again, Jimmy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That you just pulled up?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, there's the map.
unidentified		So there well, there's the Fayoon, there's Egypt.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So Turkey, Afghanistan, over here, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan over here, like on the other side of Saudi Arabia and Iran.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So you've got to go all the way from around.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh my god.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So that's the nearest lapis quarry.
		I mean, look, there's a this this is not a problem uh restricted to the vases either.
		There's a box in the Osiris shaft, which is uh more the box itself, just they say it's what's fourth dynasty.
		It's made from a stone called Dasite.
		And again, there's no known quarry in Egypt for Dasite.
		This happens a lot.
		So it's all I'm saying.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		one of the things that freaks me out about the map is when you go out it looks like it was washed over Oh a hundred percent.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I've talked a lot with Randall about this.
unidentified		Look at that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like go go back out again.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look at that below it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the Sahara.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly what it looks like.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It looks washed out.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It is.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That's what it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but that's crazy.
		Like how much water wash that out.
		I mean and how else would you get what looks exactly like a water wash out?
		How else would those features be on the surface?
		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean some of those are mountains and mountain ranges, but I can tell you in the desert, not so much.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That just looks like channels of like it just looks like an insane amount of water literally washed over the area and smoothed it out.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean there's huge there's a massive amount of evidence for massive uh for giant floods through the Nile Valley as well, not not just across the Sahara, but I mean Petrie was talking about he was up on cliffs, you know, and finding water lines and and and flint points and stuff that were indicative of massive floods.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		This is Hawara, yeah, this is the labyrinth.
unidentified		Wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So there's a canal.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You see, that's the canal I've been talking the Barwabi Canal.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It is it's so crazy that when you get to like sub-Saharan Africa, like how little of that has been explored.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And how much of that was like insanely green and fertile.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Not that long ago.
		Well, certainly not thousands of years ago.
		Well, it it's interesting.
		I just you know, I did a it's I did this long video on the erosional features of the Giza Plateau.
		Because last year, 2024, they released a paper that um they I think some geologists um I can't remember the names unfortunately, but they talked about the fact that there was all of the all of the valley temples.
		So these pyramid, you know, on all these pyramids that are on like what you would call the I mean lower Egypt, so Giza, Abu Rosh, Abusir, Sakara, uh my doom.
		They all the pyramids aren't just a pyramid, it's a pyramid complex.
		So it's like you have a pyramid, you've got a structure in front of it, you've got this causeway that runs down to what then they would call a valley temple, a structure that's the end of the causeway.
		So that's the the the well-known valley temple that's next to the Sphinx is the valley temple for the middle pyramid.
		Like it's connected by this causeway.
		Now they figured out that during the African humid period, which ended thousands of years before dynastic Egypt ever started, there was a branch of the river Nile called the Aramat branch that ran exactly where all of these valley temples are.
		So it's it's like they were it's almost I mean, I just look at it and go, this was built, these were built for that water source because I think it's super I'm very skeptical about the idea of these all of these valley temples, particularly the one that Giza Plateau being used as harbors for like a couple months a year to transport all these blocks from the quarry in Aswan.
		Again, six hundred miles away, right, for all the granite.
		And there's thousand tens of thousands of tons, hundreds of thousands of tons of granite on that plateau that had to be transported.
		I don't think there's the depth there.
		I've seen pictures and photographs in early times, pre-dam when the Nile flooded, there's ha there's not that much water there.
		However, during the African humid period, which ended at the latest 6,000 BC, but stretches back thousands and thousands of years before that.
		That's when the Sahara was a savanna.
		You had river basins and lakes like lakes and rivers, you had you had it m much more rainfall.
		And it wasn't like a it wasn't this flood situation.
		It wasn't this annual inundation.
		There was just rainfall and there was enough water in that Nile Valley to support this Aramat branch of the Nile, which is was said to be like a mile or two miles wide in some places.
		So really not like an insignificant waterway.
		But it was high and it was it was running and and they've traced the path of this Aramat branch, and it turns out all of these valley temples from these pyramid complexes are on its banks.
		And it wouldn't it's not like it's flooding, it's like there all the time.
		And and this end this period ends and the you get the desertification of the Sahara starting around six sixty five hundred, six thousand uh BC.
		And so you know, it's not like until you know if you get five thousand, then four thousand, forty five hundred B. C. Three thousand BC, that's when you sort of that's thirty-one hundred BC is kind of when we say the Egyptian civilization started.
		So it doesn't make sense to me that if if they built these valley temples and these and these all these structures in like twenty-eight hundred BC.
		I mean, what do you would you would build it where the river is.
		Like the river was way down there at that point.
		Yeah.
		And so I think what is the response to this?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I I just put it in my I mean it's Does anybody try to debunk it?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Aaron Ross Powell No, it's a it's a peer-reviewed scientific study.
		This is what happens in these with a lot of these um these papers, and you you'll see this in it it happens in genetics and the DNA studies that have been done too.
		You don't these other scientists will not really step on the toes of the archaeologists or the historians, right?
		They'll they'll present the data but stop from inferring what it could mean for the picture of history.
		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So they just need to be left to throw the data out there and go, you guys figure it out.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, pretty much.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And they just whoop hands on the case.
unidentified		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they ignore it usually.
		They're not gonna care.
		It's yeah, it's left to like rogue scholars and idiots like me on YouTube or people that write books to really try and put the pieces together.
unidentified		Dude.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, thank God there's a place where a video like yours can get millions of views where so many people all around the world can watch that and go.
		Wait.
		What's going on, Dell?
		Like this who really knows?
		And why do these people why are they so sure?
		Like, why are they so arrogant in their ideas?
		Because it's c very clear that the it's not it's there's not a cle you know, like we know civil war ended in 1865, right?
		It's like it's all written down, everybody knows people were alive.
		There's like photographs of the soldiers.
		We're pretty accurate with that.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You get to fucking six thousand BC man, you're just guessing.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		It's it's a it's yes, further back you go, the much hazy you can't take.
		There is way less evidence.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
		Yeah.
		And it's also it it scares them.
		Because something like that, if if you really do find advanced structures that are at 6,000 BC.
		Well you know, before go back Leitepe, we didn't even know that that was even possible.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's that famous uh conversation that uh happened with Robert Schock and that really arrogant uh archaeologists.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Mark Lana.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes, which is he's laughing.
		Like, why would you laugh about ancient history, first of all?
		What ancient civilizations are is that guy still alive?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Lana, yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Show me the pot shirts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He must feel so stupid now.
		Well, yeah.
		Someone should show him that video and go, why are you laughing?
		Like because this is just human ego.
		This is human ego on display for the world.
		You want to be the gatekeepers of this information.
		You want to be the one person or the person that represents this group of human beings that are the scholars that have published work, that have taught at universities, and you're the only ones.
		You're the only ones that know the the ancient history of Earth, despite the fact that there's people like yourself and Graham Hancock and all who've spent a lot of time and they're very careful about what they say, and spent a lot of time investigating this.
		And they just want to dismiss those people because they don't have the proper credentials or what are you talking about?
unidentified		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's I think it's yes, that's that's that's exactly what's happening.
		I think it and it is as a result of the fact that the conversation is getting out of their hands, right?
		If you one of the things I admire so much about the the f the people who started this what we would call archaeological or Egyptological space, guys like Flinders Petrie, you know, they're very open about what they didn't know.
		Like one of my like Petrie would tell he talks about the machining marks and you can read between the lines at the wonder at what he's finding, and he's like, I don't get it.
		Like I don't we can't do it.
		We don't know how they did it.
		And this is I think because the conversations happening in those halls of, you know, the academic halls or the geographical club or whatever these pieces get out to the whole thing.
		Doesn't get out.
		And then so that slowly changes with the rise of initially like alternative authors, you know, you you you which best represented by Graham Hancock, a good friend of mine as well.
		And he uh you know, his books and they start to gain in popularity, and now these I guess the people in the in the academic halls of residence that are typically considered the authority are seeing this conversation get out of hand and now you get to YouTube where you know it's it to some extent I think it is possible to do an end run and end run around what they're saying,
		and I do watch people and there are guys like Flint that are trying to embrace that the new media space and try and get on podcasts and you know, if you read the SAA journals and articles, the Society of American Archaeology, they're literally writing to themselves saying, how can we become more popular in this space and how do we start podcasts and get into it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The problem is they're still doing it the same way.
		They are and it's like when CNN journalists get fired from CNN and start a podcast and everybody like No.
		You're doing CNN outside of CNN.
		That's what they're doing.
		They're doing academia, which is like gatekeeping of information and also like pejoratives, mocking.
		Really shitty behavior towards anyone who's outside of it, including calling them racists, calling them white supremacists.
		It's it's so dumb.
		It's so dumb because one of the dumbest parts about it is no matter what, those are the s the people that lived in Africa.
		So no matter what.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No matter what hap nobody whoever built that is people that lived in Africa.
		Shut the fuck up.
		Like the white supremacy thing makes no sense.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's cra I mean.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's Africans.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's Africans.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look, that's the people that were living there.
		If if humans made it, you know, if you're not in the alien camp, which is a bizarre camp.
		But if you're not in the I'm in the ancient civilization, incredibly advanced, cataclysmic disaster, wipes them out.
		Civilization takes a long time to rebuild, finds the remnants of these ancient civilizations, and then sort of claims them over generations.
		After a thousand years, nobody really knows who fucking built it.
		And then this is this is where I think we find ourselves.
		That's that's where I'm at.
		But if you're in that camp, you're talking about Africans.
		Yes.
		So all these shitty things they do just show their hand.
		Just show what they're really all about.
		What you're really all about is silencing anything that really throws a monkey wrench into everything you've been teaching for decades.
		Like you've claimed that you're the expert.
		You've claimed arrogantly that you have all the information when you clearly are wrong.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		That that is what's happening.
		It's actually I it's a quote that I I steal from my friend Christopher Dunn quite happily, which is you know, you wouldn't trust an archaeologist to design the chair is sitting on, but if it's an ancient chair, he's gonna claim he's the expert on it.
		Like this.
		And this is what happens.
		I I had Joseph Wilson on a podcast talk about he I had this great quote from him, he said, Oh, you know, if just because some engineer's standing there sh you know, shining a laser on a vase, don't let that don't let don't mistake that for him knowing more about the guy who can read hieroglyphs because he can read what they wrote about it and he's the authority on it kind of thing.
		It's just like you're just dismissing all of these other disciplines that are that I think are required for a true and complete picture of trying to assemble this evidence, right?
		Like as you say, there's there's very little evident evidence that shows us definitively what happened in the dim dark distant past, but it's you've got to try and make the case for it as best you can, and I think we should try and encompass all of the evidence.
		And one of the disciplines that's missing from that approach is the engineering stuff, it's the precision stuff, it just gets dismissed out of hand.
		And yeah, we just because we're not the authority figures on that on that topic, it it just yeah, they ignore it, which is what happens.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know how you can ignore the vases, how you can ignore the statues, the symmetry and the construction of the faces.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
		It's it's starting to become a problem.
		Like they they're trying.
		And and and even in the past, when when I would guess the mainstream approaches to try and solve, say, some of the machining uh examples, the tubular drills or the saw cuts, I mean, just when you when you dig down into them and the the answers that you get and the explanations that are offered are just they don't hold any water.
		It's uh they're kind of they're frankly ridiculous.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, well, the issue with the the drill bits is the revolutions per minute, right?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh I mean the core.
		Yeah, well, it's not the revolutions per minute, it's the penetration rate.
		We don't know how quickly it does.
		How yes, so how quickly it penetrates into stone.
		And it it I suspect that it's uh that it was it could have been turning quite slowly, but it's like a one in sixty penetration rate is the rate of the spiral groove on the cores that have been analyzed, particularly Petrie's Court number seven.
		One in sixty meaning one and so for like if you unwind that circular motion to a straight line, sixty inches horizontal travel, one inch vertical drop.
		Which is five hundred times greater than how we do it today with modern diamond tipped source wholesals.
		Which do turn So our modern ones bear in mind they you know, 900 RPM, they'll they'll cut through grant slowly, but it cuts.
		I mean, no doubt.
		It grinds more more so than cutting.
		But yeah, unwinding that spiral and looking at that's what Petrie was first of all, like, how is this possible?
		His numbers got refined a bit by Chris Dunn, but more or less or one in sixty penetration rate, so it's very difficult to explain.
		There are multiple cores like this.
		And this is the This is the other element that I think the vases uh are showing is is that you have a technological link between the vases and these other precision artifacts, the bigger ones that couldn't be buried in these civilizations that to me suggest that they were made with the same technology.
		Um You see the same machining marks, the same tubular drill marks.
		So on that quartz piece, if you look on the bottom, you can see the on the inside of it, there's no other side.
		You see the tool mark?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This right here?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So this is like that's the tubular drill.
		So this is that's a a core function of how these vases were made.
		You would often find So this is the bottom.
		So they've they've corded that thing out and then they've snapped it off and polished it down, but they didn't eliminate the full tool mark.
		And you'll see that in a lot of vases.
		So we know that these tubular drills were used with the vases as well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you have no idea the power source, no idea what the material was that cut.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		No.
		Well, Yeah?
		So yeah, the vases have big it's become interesting.
		Uh one of the let me talk about the provenance part first, because that's been the one crit like the the pushback on the vases, this is where it's become a problem is is nobody's really been able to push back on the data.
		Like the uh the the scientific and the measurement data that's come out, the precision fact, the geometry, there's a whole bunch in the geometry space that that indicates that they are um like designed, they're not just made, they were designed with mathematical and geometrical uh geometric principles in mind.
		Um they show pi, they show fire, the golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence, all this sort of stuff is in them.
		Uh no one's pushing back on that.
		The major uh pushback on the vessels and the the early days of the vase scan project was that oh, these are modern fakes or something, like they're not they're not the real deal because they're not coming from museums, they've been they're modern forgeries, you how can you say they're real.
		So what's happened in the years since and when I first came on here and talked a little bit about that, that was very much the early days of this project, about two and a half years ago now.
		Now the the vase scan, and particularly the Artifact Foundation, Adam Young, uh who started this whole thing who owns he actually this is his a copy of his vase.
		Uh they've been in now four museums around the world.
		We've scanned pfft close to a hundred vessels from inside of museums with impeccable provenance.
		Um those results are starting to come out, they're matching the results that we found so far.
		So the provenance thing is kind of it's that's going away.
		The people that I think chose to fight on the Hill of Providence have have died on it now.
		It's they're hundred they are legitimate.
		And to be fair, you can also find uh vi vessels in private collection with impeccable provenance, just as you can find a lot of vessels in museums that we have no idea where they came from.
		Um it it's a it's a much it's not as clear as just, well, if it's in a museum, it's we can trust it, and if it's not we can't, it's not like that.
		But um what else has happened is that there's other as so the the project came out and it gained a lot of interest from really talented people around the world.
		Um there's been several of those.
		One of the guys that I've been working with a fair bit lately over the last couple of years, a guy named Doc Dr. Max Zamilov, who's a physicist.
		I believe he taught for ten years.
		He's a nuclear physicist, taught for ten years, I think, at Penn State.
		He's uh he runs his own company now.
		And I first he reached out to me and actually we took these fragments to his house and I rolled up to his house in Florida and sitting in his living room with two like elect scanning electron microscopes, you know, as you do who who doesn't have two SEMs in their living room.
		Uh so we we started to do things like look at these pieces through a scanning electron microscope to try and find evidence for the materials that we use to cut them.
		So you should if these were used with a tool, so that the orthodox explanation being, well, it's a copper tube and it's sand or it's some sort of cutting medium and it's it's it's spun and ground out.
		You should find traces of copper or whatever that material was in there.
		We looked at we spent days looking at several pieces, zero, zero copper, like not didn't find any copper.
		Nothing at all.
		The nice scanning electron microscope, not only do you get the magnification, but you can focus a beam of electrons onto a particular spot and that backscatter of electrons you can then map out the elemental composition of the material.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can you pause you for a second here?
		Yeah.
		Uh are the oldest tools that they found copper?
		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Copper and stone.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So what are the dates of the oldest tools?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, they go back all the way to to the old kingdom, 26, 27, 2800 BC.
		Like, yeah, it was it was early days, they were smelting.
		I mean, obviously the older tools are stone tools, like flint.
		I mean, a lot of carving.
		You can carve stone with harder types of stone.
		So there was definitely flint and things being used.
		But there's no evidence, like not up until like the very later periods of the Egyptian civilization, is there any significant evidence for iron and things like that.
		Like it it's pretty much copper and bronze alloys, tin, you know, copper and tin is bronze.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Um when they analyze the the traces, there's no copper.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		We didn't find any copper, but we did find some other stuff, which is very interesting.
		Well, the most interesting thing we did find was titanium.
		What?
		Titanium and titanium alloys with iron.
		We found iron, zinc, tin, alloys.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Titanium, and it's not we've yes.
		So when you find the term alloy, doesn't that refer to something that's smelted.
		Right.
		That's been put together.
		Exactly.
		In fact, you and you know titanium as we know it as a metal doesn't exist naturally.
		So it's in in nature it's titanium dioxide that is found in rocks.
		This was not titanium dioxide that we were looking at because you see a again that the SEM gives you the spectrum, right?
		So you would see oxygen and titanium together.
		We didn't see that.
		And in fact, I did a I have it I have a video on this and it's we found a piece actually, like a small, maybe twenty, thirty micron wide piece embedded in one of those grooves uh in a tool tip that looked like an embedded piece, it shines up very brightly.
		When you see metals and on this in the SEM, it's like a bright spot and you can aim it at it and it was just straight titanium.
		And it looked like a small piece of a tool that had been wedged in there.
		And I mean, look, in the in our modern times, I mean I think titanium was discovered even in the late 1800s.
		It wasn't used outside of laboratories until the nineteen thirties as a material.
		But it there seems to be evidence that there's some titanium use back here.
		No, it I wouldn't w I know Max is trying to work on that.
		I would it was not a systematic search.
		We spent days, like a couple of days, and it's we didn't do like a systematic grid search, like even in one of those pieces you could spend it would take you a long time to just map it properly.
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like to scan the whole thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But uh it's a play with devil's advocate, would that be evidence of a lack of a chain of custody that perhaps someone was using titanium to see if they could cut it?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh yes, it could it could be uh contamination.
		So we looked for signs of contamination.
		Um I didn't this didn't seem like contamination.
		In fact, at the end of at the end of when we'd finished scanning, we actually took he had some titanium darts, like he was we we put some on one of the pieces and put it in to see what that would look like.
		Just these like a tiny like just like literally a uh a matchstick and just the tiniest and just tapped it and then looked at that under the microscope to look at what contaminated it this didn't seem to be contamination.
		You can't rule it out.
		Uh there's it's we found other types of metals as well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it didn't seem to be contamination.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is the reason why it didn't seem to be that?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, because it didn't it so we looked at what contamination would look like?
		Well, so it's like smaller specs where you can actually see the material.
		The one piece that we found it seemed to be embedded in the stone.
		Like it was as if something like this tiniest fragment of the tool of some sort of if imagine it was a tool tip, wedged itself in the stone and then it stayed there, but it's it was only like twenty or thirty microns wide, which is pretty big under a scanning electron microscope.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Um but that was the only piece of titanium you didn't.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		We found other other specs of it, and then occasionally it'd be titanium and iron mixed together.
		And then we we also found specks of like zinc, um zircon and tin.
		And then various combinations.
		I honestly I I think it's it's grounds for more investigation.
		I I think the most significant thing was the no copper thing.
		Like it's that's like alright, no copper.
		Like that that to me was the biggest takeaway.
		The fact that we found some other elements and pieces of what let's say questionable provenance.
		I know these are legitimate pieces from these vessels.
		Ideally the best thing if we could this would I'd love to work with the Egyptians to do something like this because I know there are fragments of vessels in the steppe pyramid, and it's there's hundred thousands of them down there still.
		In fact, like the last time we got down to the very bottom level, which is you're a special permission required to get into the Steppe Pyramid, and then even then they generally won't let you down to the bottom level, there's another ladder and thirty feet down to the big bottom level.
		It goes down further, but it hits the water table again.
		Um but in one of these corners in this very bottom level, you're like 150, 200 feet under the Steppe Pyramid.
		We found a a wall, and it was a collapsed it must have been a collapsed magazine of these vessels, and this is the place where they found fifty thousand of them originally, like um Jean-Philippe Loyer in the nineteen thirties found this huge cache of these vessels there.
		And in this wall, it's an incredible little video.
		I've not published it.
		I mean, I do want to talk about it, but you could you literally see that it's like a wall of dirt of of not rock but but dirt, and in the wall there's like fragments of vessels because it it had been a a a cache of them that there's something, a tunnel had collapsed and it did crush them.
		So you've got these like pieces of worked granite or diorite or whatever just in the wall.
		So I'd that would be interesting if you could go down there and like get their permission to say, well, let's sample.
		You because you have then, you know, you've you've basically got it in its original environment from dynastic Egypt and put it in a ziploc or whatever, just keep it, don't mess with it.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Clear chain of evidence.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Clear chain of evidence and then scan it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So I think it's an interesting observation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They found on that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Holy shit.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I think the Russian there's a Russian group that did something similar, and they also found a metals like I think they found titanium as well, L.A. H the laboratory of alternative history is the same as the colour.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How is titanium made?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh it's a smelting process from titanium dioxide.
		I don't know the the specifics of it.
		But it you have to take that titanium dioxide and I assume smelt it down or do something like it.
		Again, it took us up until you know 1930s to use it at just anywhere outside of labs.
		So it's super interesting.
		But that's I wouldn't even say that's the most interesting thing Max found.
		So he's a crazy dude's an interesting guy.
		He's, you know, he's he's doing fusion experiments in his spare bedroom.
		It's got like this exp apparatus surrounded by boxes of borax and bore on the stomach.
		Ten foot Tesla.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So he took So get then this this is this sort of ties back to the tool marks.
		It ties back to a question you asked me when I was here last, which is what's my wildest speculation.
		I actually have some now, which is based on some evidence in its early days.
		He has published on this on his website, but he took precision vases, he took base rock samples of the rock that these were made from from the place.
		I actually got him a piece of basalt.
		Uh he took non-precision vases and he put them in a germanium detector basically to look at the radioactive and the the isotope sort of baseline radiation of these pieces, and it turns out the precision vases are radioactive.
		They're they're two to three times he he's tested several.
		Relative to the base rock samples and the non-precision vases, they have two to three times the thorium decay products in them.
		All of them so far.
		And in fact, that piece right there has a he said has a the the quartz piece or the crystal piece has a notable cesium-137 signature in it as well.
		Um that's an interesting nuclear titanium.
unidentified		Could be.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I don't know about that.
		But it's so he's look, it's again early days.
		But he's he has published it on his website, the findings, and he is he's obtaining more equipment to do more testing, some more in-depth testing that he will be much more definitive about.
		He did say take some recently to the Petrie Museum in London to test some of their artifacts.
		But it's a very interesting result.
		This th this has to have been something that irradiated these vessels that give them that signature even after however many thousands of years with the half-life.
		Again, we're comparing it to the base rock samples and the non-precision vases, which hap- they're just like that's nothing.
		And they're not dangerous or anything, it's just the it's just above a baseline.
		But two to three times.
		So something happened to them.
		And one of his hypotheses, which is very interesting, is a concept called nuclear machining.
		So he's he actually this is not a new idea, it's not something we've figured out how to do as a civilization yet.
		We're on that path, but you you can if you take his theory is something like palladium or another like radioactive material that is a strong alpha or beta particle admitter that you could put on a tool.
		It would ablate either in neutrons or it's blasting electrons or something.
		It would ablate the stone surface away in such a way that would you could carve this stone with ease.
		Kind of like a lightsaber, basically.
		And and it would also leave a signature in the stone.
		And you fuck, yeah.
		And you take it back to that to that penetration rate of that spiral tube drill.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's not all we can say about things like that spiral tube drill and the other thing the other uh striations and tool marks is look, it's not it doesn't seem to be the same thing we do to the stone, and it's certainly not primitive.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's not something you can do just by hand.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So is anybody the cores has anybody tested the radioactive levels of the core?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I think he he I don't know.
		He might have tested the cores when he was there recently.
		I'll have I'll talk to him, I was talking to him to this morning.
		Um I can ask him about the core, that's a great question.
		Because that would it's this if it was the process, it should show something similar, if that's indeed the process.
		The look, the other possibility is okay, they weren't machined with this method, but these were used in some method.
		The other the other theory he has that these may have been part of a process for enriching material for some other nuclear use, or they were part of a system that that used nuclear material.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Somehow or another.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's I mean it's not too much, but it's too much, like it's too crazy.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so crazy.
		But also, like when you do see some of the sculptures that look 3D printed and you go, uh well, okay.
		Now it kind of at least makes a little sense.
		See, if we knew for sure that there was a cataclysm and a lost civilization, that civilization had achieved some immense heights of technological sophistication in a completely different pathway than we've done in modern times.
		If we knew that for sure, then everything would be so easy.
		You'd go, okay, well, clearly they were doing something.
		What were they doing?
		But instead, we deny that possibility.
		So by closing off that door, now you're left with nonsense.
		You're left with s sand and copper and it's dumb.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I yeah, I agree.
unidentified		I think it's something fucking crazy happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		I I's I think there is that this is I try to follow the evidence where it leads.
		That's all we're doing here with I mean, I'm quoting what Max has said about it with this nuclear machining hypothesis.
		A lot more study needs to happen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The nuclear machining hypothesis, if sorry to interrupt you, but if you go a thousand years from now, for sure we're gonna have that.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, that's that's yes.
		You ha I'd like to put that the same context in these arguments forward as well.
		It's like we just don't to me the answer is you know, we we tend to look at the past and and it it always has to be this subset of what we know, right?
		But it's like if you look at the history of knowledge and technology, give us fifty thousand, fifty years, a thousand years, fifty thousand years, you know that there's more out here to the sides that we're gonna learn.
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So that means there are realms of science and technology that we don't know anything about.
		I think I think if we were a bit more open-minded about investigating some of these mysteries of the past with some of these inexplicable characteristics, the precision or the machining, the engineering things, how we s how the stone was cut.
		I think some of those answers could lay in those realms of the unknown.
		And by being open-minded about them and by investigating them with all of our capability, we might even end up learning something about them, which is what we're doing.
		Like the vase scan project, we are learning the depths of precision in some of the machining aspects of it.
		And and Max is starting to learn, like, okay, there's some weird like radioactive characteristics of these things.
		Let's let's let's try and look at more and figure out some more.
		I mean, we can speculate a bit now, and I want to be clear, this is all very speculative at this point.
		Lots more testing and data is required to to even shore up some of these theories about these possibilities.
		But the fact remains they could be they are possibilities.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And it's also this assumption that there's been a lineal path, a linear path of progression.
		Always.
		But that's not that's not even the case today, right?
		You can go to uh ancient sites, whether it is in Mexico or even in Greece, and you see really shitty construction right next to the Parthenon.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		I mean the Acropolis and the Parthenon is right next to crappy apartment buildings.
		They're really close, right?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a decay.
		You can't do that why didn't you do that?
		Do that again.
		Like this.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's huge.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's it's something there's something weird.
		There's something weird going on.
		And this is like two thousand years ago, where we knew who they were.
		We know the people we know they did it.
		Like amazing precision, amazing construction methods, incredible art, incredible engineering and architecture, right?
		Yes.
		And all understandable, but yet more advanced than the techniques utilized in 2025 in the exact same area.
		Which is weird.
unidentified		Right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So that just that's without a cataclysm.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Aaron Ross Powell Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, it's it's also it's a nice criticism of modern architecture to be to be fair.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I mean you could don't even go back two thousand years, just go back to like the Gothic era with the churches and the cathedrals.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I mean, Jesus, why don't we build like that anymore?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
		Right, right.
		Good point.
		So you see a decline, at least in craftsmanship that can be attributed to a changing of cultures and but this assumption that there's always this linear path of progression, and if you go back, they were dumb.
		You go back far enough, they were dumber.
		But that doesn't seem to be the case here.
		And Egypt is the best example.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like explain that.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Dude, exactly.
		And it's one of the biggest it's if if anyone it's one of the biggest contradictions about Egypt is exactly it's a technological progression.
		I mean, you're talking about a dynastic Egypt civil Egyptian civilization at least three thousand years, right?
		So three thousand years.
		But if you look at it from a technological progression perspective, it's almost like they went backwards the whole time.
		I mean, you have you have the emergence all of a sudden of this culture and language, like they're gods that one of the craziest things about ancient Egypt is this emergence of hieroglyphs, just boom, here it is.
		Here's this like it's this complex, extremely complicated language, cultural system, gods and everything pops out of nowhere.
		It's pretty consistent.
		It evolves over time.
		It doesn't really it doesn't change that much.
		I mean, cuneiform in um Sumaria, there's there's a clear progressive path where we can see it being developed.
		We don't have that that's not the case for ancient Egypt.
		And then it's all of the best stuff is the oldest.
		It's the biggest stonework, the valley temple, the 2,500 tons of granite in the king's chamber structure that's that's in the Great Pyramid.
		The Great Pyramid itself, these things are amongst the very first pyramids ever said to have been built.
		Yet progressively as you go forward in time, I mean they just they they get to mud brick pyramids.
		It's almost like it's you're going backwards.
		And there's just you know, they technologically speaking, it doesn't seem like they progress very far.
		So I think there's another interpretation for that data, one that fits the evidence a little better, which is that I yeah, I think they got a kick start, they got a head start, they inherited an awful lot of objects.
		We know for sure these precision objects were around before the ancient Egyptians.
		They don't match even the cultures that predated them.
		We have no idea where they got them from.
		They I don't think they made them.
		We don't know how old they really are.
		And I think there's a lot of other artifacts and architecture on these sites that they match these, like technologically speaking, there's a link, the same tools, the same precision, we're seeing that.
		Yet these are massive artifacts, sometimes like a thousand-ton statue that you can't bury with you, it stays on this site, it gets inherited, it gets renovated, it gets reused, eventually you get kings with hubris and arrogance, guys like Ramses II that says, you know, carve my name three inches deep onto that sucker.
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's gonna be me.
		I want to be part of the gods.
		These are the, you know, I want to tie myself to the ancients.
		And the really crazy thing is that doesn't often get admitted is that this is literally what the ancient Egyptians themselves said.
		They called themselves a legacy culture.
		They trace their own history back 40,000 years.
		They have a list of kings.
		They have a they they talk about these different eras of time.
		The Shem Suha, the followers of Horus was this 12,000 year period where these mythical semi-divine beings walk the earth.
		You can talk about kings and rulers and that, and then before that you have Zeptepi when the gods themselves walk the earth, and they trace their own history way back uh into those eras.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's some stuff that I brought up with Zahi.
unidentified		And he was like, what is this?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He just he got very mad.
		It's funny.
		I'm uh reading where I'm listening uh to the book of Enoch right now.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Yeah, that's some wild shit too.
		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so wild.
		What are you saying?
		Like gods, the watchers came down and and mated with women of Earth and created uh Nephilim or the naphilim, like what are you saying?
		Like what what were you trying to say?
		Thousands of years ago when they wrote this down, in you know, and the version I think that we're getting this from is uh from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is uh from Qumran.
		So how how long did they write it down before that?
		Like how how long did they discuss this?
		How long ago did this happen?
		And what are you saying?
		Like what what were they trying to record?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And why does it match up with what they're saying in Egypt?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The gods walking amongst us?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's it's it goes to some wild places.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It gets so squirrely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's where you get into the alien camp.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, that forty forty meter tic-tac shaped metallic objects.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		What is that thing?
		Well.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		We don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Imagine if it's titanium.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Could be.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		He said it didn't match any signature that he'd seen before.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's crazy in and of itself.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's one of the things I'll remember always about when you were sitting here talking to Bob Lazar and he said that some of those craft came from archaeological digs.
		I mean part of his story.
		There's long been rumors of that type of stuff in you know, in uh Under the ground in Egypt.
		I don't I'm not saying that's what it is, but this is what yeah, this is what Tim said it be.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Amazing.
		It would be.
		All layers converge at a central corridor avenue, like the atrium of shopping mall where you can see all floors from one bandage point.
		My personal interpretation is that this entire hall was constructed to house a centrally positioned freestanding object about 40 meters long.
		The central object is hard to classify.
		It appears metallic, not stone or wood.
		I named it Dippy after the giant diplotica skeleton in the Hintsey Hall of London's is that I say that right?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, hints, I think.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hintz.
		Hall of London's natural history musician uh museum.
		It could be anything, its shape resembles those tic-tac hard mints.
		It might also be an upright disc or even a colossal Shen ring.
		And what is a Shen ring?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's like the cartouche.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You know that the thing around a cartoon.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh wow.
		Big object alone raises profound questions.
		How did it get there?
		Why is it there?
		A more speculative theory is that it's some kind of portal.
		Oh boy.
		Now we're going we're going full tinfoil.
		Either interdimensional or interstellar.
		A stargate.
		Its material signature is like unlike anything I've seen in my entire career, but it's there undeniably there.
		I'll let the future find out what Dippy is, Tim Acres.
		Well that's he went full art bell right there.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		He did.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Interdimensional or interstellar.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Hey.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Look, the Egyptians talk about Stargates.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do they?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Dude, go to uh where is it?
		Um Dendera.
		There's actually a couple places.
		The literal translation.
		You can read it on the walls.
		I always show people when we go there.
		Uh it is there are two or three depictions of Stargates.
		That is the literal translation for it, showing a constellation with a gate and it's a specific constellation a couple of different types.
		They're all on different constellations.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Where can I find that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Where can I see this?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh it's there's pictures of Stargates from Den and Dendera Temple.
		I think it's in the upper rooms.
		Um the zodiac.
		So that's actually that the Dendera is incredible.
		Like it it is a it is a star-oriented temple.
		There's massive depictions of the zodiac.
		And this is all you know, redone from older versions of the same temple, but that is the translation of that what's on the wall with the constellation and the gate, and it it literally translates as Stargate.
		Uh that is part of it.
		So well that that's I mean the ceiling is the zodiac.
		Well, you you even have depictions of like solar boats going up to the moon at Dendera.
		Randall loves that temple.
		He I have sent him a lot of footage from that temple.
		No, it's it's uh it's actually I don't know.
		There's a you'd have to look up the Den yeah, just Stargate Glyph, maybe at Dendera.
		Yeah, glyph, you I'll tell you if you see it.
unidentified		No.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I don't see the exact one.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		But it's not I mean it it's literally a cluster of stars that represents a constellation behind it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is killing me.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I know I I probably have it on my hard drive uh Do you have it with you?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's in my on my laptop if you want to see it after yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, your laptop's out there.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All right, go grab it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We'll pause.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You sure?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Not on what you gave me.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Not on what you did.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you got it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I'm gonna try and find it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I'll try and find it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		All right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All right, we'll be right back, folks.
		Okay, so we found it from a video from uh Trevor Grassi on YouTube.
		Uh the video is titled Hieroglyphic Proof of Stargate Technology with uh Mohammed Ibrahim Mike Rick.
		Rick Secker, Rick Secker, and Trevor Grassi.
		So this is what we're looking at.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		See, it's like there's a glyph.
		You can see the star and there's a gate.
		Actually, try and find one of the other pictures maybe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The stars, the circle, that's what the star is supposed to be?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's the the star on the right.
		No no on the far right.
		Yeah, there's a hieroglyph.
		Um again, yeah, stargate.
		It's the you see the gate and then the star, and then I assume that that crooked uh hook or whatever is part of this as well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I see.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it's what how the way you translate the hieroglyph.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Yes.
		Mohammed Ibrahim, who I know quite well as well, he's he's very good at translating these um these glyphs.
		We we when I travel in Egypt, we usually go with uh Professor Mohammed Jabra, who's one of I would say top four or five in the world for reading hieroglyphs.
		You can just read whatever's on the wall and tell you about it.
		He travels with us on these tours, it's phenomenal.
		He just shows us this.
		There's probably some better uh pictures of ones with the actual constellations up at Dendera if they get into that one where they were standing next to each other, go back a little.
		Where is it?
		No, back a little.
		Yeah, there they're talking about.
		You see the stars, the the stars above the gates.
		So it's there's literally different the these these and with the words they do they relate to specific uh constellations.
		This is in the the top, the um what's the zodiac room at uh at Dendera where they they have a replica of the circular zodiac on the ceiling.
		The the French have the original, but this is original hieroglyphs and it is the translation of this is literally Stargate for these constellations.
		That say what it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Bananas.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what are these constellations supposed to be?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I don't know off the top of my head.
		We do tell people when we when we uh get into it.
		I there is Yeah, I I could find out, but I don't know off the top of my head, I'm sorry.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Click that with that one that you just had there, Jeremy.
		No, no, no, no.
		Well you just at all Yeah, right there.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So gates.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		They same similar again, the gate with the crooked hook and the star.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's bananas.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So when they're referring to a stargate, are they saying in any way what it what that means?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		No.
		No, it's it's I mean, they would I mean most of the the interpretations these days would tell you that it's always symbolic.
		I mean, they do look at like the the Osiris and the the you know the the constellations in the sky as being connected to the duat or uh to Nut, like this this the dua being the this space and Nut the goddess who is the sky, and you you know it's all part of that passage from the of the soul going into the realms of immortal of the immortal that happens after death.
		So this is the you know, this symbolic interpretation that we that we that we give it all.
		We say, Oh, this is none of this.
		It's it sort of falls into this category, a little bit of like everything is symbolic, everything is ceremonial, nothing is functional.
		I you know, I I I'm fascinated by these temples because it goes back to something you were saying earlier.
		Uh and I I use this analogy to kind of set the stage for it.
		Imagine again, imagine if younger drives happened to us tomorrow or whatever, right?
		Hope Touchwood doesn't.
		But say it wipes out civilization, but we survive as humans.
		Within what, two, three generations, we're sitting around campfires telling stories about fucking these things that were like a black rock, and it's just and you you you know, it's like or plasma TVs, but you say, look, if you get this shiny black rock, you know, you can get answers from the ancestors.
		You you will know everything.
		You can talk to anything, you can see anything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You can ask a question.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You can ask it questions.
		And maybe you go and you start getting black rocks and making them like this, and you start dancing around the fire, you start ritualizing this memory of technology.
		Now if you take that concept, like say there's a cataclysm and now there's people that remember and they tell these stories, the stories get passed down.
		Now imagine there's a civilization that comes up and in and it goes through thousands of years of uh structuring those legends and stories of technology.
		That goes through just distortions and representations and symbolism, but it's it's just twisting all of these stories into this iconography and this complex symbolism that we then I think we go to a temple in Egypt that was made in the Ptolemaic era or whatever, and it's you see things on the wall.
		And I I I think there's a great way to interpret some of those symbols and some of the paintings to say that well, is this actually an echo of something that was functional or is an echo of of technology.
		Like i every staff that you see has a tuning fork on the bottom of it.
		Every single one on these walls, it's always got a tuning fork on it.
		What's that what's that all about?
		Tuning fork, like a little little like a tuning fork.
		Yeah, all of the staffs with the was head that means power.
		Like it literally the interpretation of this symbol is power on top of the staff, and that every single one of them has a tuning fork on the colour.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can we see an image of that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And you can look up um any of the temples in Egypt and and like the depictions of gods with staffs that and they're and they're touching or they're giving like the the uh the Jed pillar or the you know the the unk, which is Jed pillar is stability.
		Uh the unk is life, the was is power.
		So in a lot of cases these gods are granting kings, you know, life, stability, and power, or sometimes just life and power.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But um what are those depictions of these enormous cynical cylindrical things that they're holding that look almost like one of those being clubs, yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like that one there, that's the that's uh like the Jed pillar here.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what the hell is that?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That's a great uh image.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That literally is uh the symbol for um stability.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That thing down is what I was talking about there.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh the uh the the the quote unquote light bulbs, yes at Dendera Temple.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And see, there's a Jed pillar there too with the hand, so the Jed pillar is is stabilizing it with its hands.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And you're on a boat, you're actually part of this is on a boat.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It looks like some kind of technology.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So you know what's crazy about this?
		So again, we get down into this.
		This is in a um in a crypt at Dendera.
		You have to like crawl through a hole and get it's like in the inside wall, it's amazing because the Christians and the they couldn't they didn't get into the crypt, so they couldn't deface the glyphs like a lot of the glyphs are defaced.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look at that guy, he looks like an air traffic controller.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well he's like a reptilian too.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		He's that frog dude with um knives.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what is that, dude?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		With a tail.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Does he have a fucking tail?
unidentified		Yeah, he does.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He does look like a rap he was like a giant frog mount.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So what's crazy about there is a whole story about this that is written on the walls.
		And again, this is thanks to my friend Yusuf uh Awan, who I who I guide with and then um, you know, Professor Jabra who can interpret this.
		And we I actually I'm gonna do a video about this soon.
		Because what he is saying about this crypt is that there was it it tells you on the wall that there was a physical version of that thing in that crypt.
		That was he said it was made from mostly gold and it was the span of like a dude with his arms out, like a the span of a human wingspan, basically.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I found I was stumbling across something there called it Electrum.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		There was these two uh there's a still these three point three ton uh obelisk that were made out of a metal called electronic gold and gold and silver.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, electrons golden.
		So they definitely used gold and silver.
		A lot of the obelisks had electrum uh tips, they think great for conductivity.
		Oh, it's fantastic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, it's really the only good reason to have it other than looking good.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right, yeah.
unidentified		Other than ball and that yeah, other than ballin, which they were balling, which trust me.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		A little bit of a sidetrack, but when you're talking about the nuclear stuff, I found these stories of uh the ocla mine and gabon, which is uh nuclear natural nuclear reactor.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Reactor.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whoa.
		That is very four billion years old and a hundred thousand working.
		Oldest nuclear reactor in history.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Uh uranium from it.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's in ri it's enriching uranium.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, imagine if it's it's in Africa, so I don't know if that was the only place they've ever found.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That makes sense.
		Right?
		And then Africa.
		Is there something like that in um Afghanistan where this stone came from?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh the the lapis lazuli and everything else.
		I I don't know.
		I mean, I s I assume that I I would be I wouldn't be surprised if that sort of thing is happening somewhere in the in the mass of uranium in Australia either, because that's like one of the world's biggest um uranium deposits.
		I imagine if it's enough mass of you I think it's uranium-238 and they're trying to get no two three five to get to two three eight or the other way around.
		But if there's enough mass and neutrons hitting each other, it might be enriching it somehow.
		I think that's probably what's happening there.
		I'm no nuclear scientist, so let's go back to those uh hieroglyphs, Jamie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Um the lizard guy, the frog guy or whatever that reptilian thing is.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Mm-hmm.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That freaks me out.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah, it's the stuff of nightmares at times.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's it's kinda weird.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because that's you know, w one of the things that th the weirdest when the when they the weirdest stories when they start talking about aliens is the the different types that visit.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that one of them is a reptilian species that are the most creepy to deal with.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which makes sense.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I heard the same thing.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It would be.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean that reptilian brain.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like chickens are assholes, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, they are.
		And Sorakomoto dragons.
		And the idea that somehow or another they could eventually reach incredible levels of technological sophistication and intelligence.
		We kind of rule that out.
		But look, there's there's clearly primates that are way dumber than us, right?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh, for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So why do we assume that it's only primates that reach an incredible high level of sophistication when we know that crows, which are really fucking close to dinosaurs.
		Crows super smart.
		Like smarter than most kids.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, problem-solving smart.
		Yeah.
		Yeah, it's I you can't think you can you can't put a a uh a restrictor on what evolution might produce in any of these.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Especially when intelligence is being exhibited by things that are really close evolutionarily to reptiles.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and that would just be, yeah, you get to that like just lack of empathy, just that reptilian brain, it's just aggression and like everything that's not us is the enemy kind of.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's the mindfuck is smart dinosaurs.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that was in Jurassic Park, right?
		The raptors, there was a girl smart.
		Yeah.
		Smart.
		Which, you know, makes sense.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's that whole pack, yeah, the instinct.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But the idea that there's that we were visited by intelligent reptiles is fucking bananas.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I put look yet with the aliens, I don't often address it.
		I I I but I put it firmly in the realm of of like possible.
		Like it's just I don't I think when you you look at the vastness of space and the length of time, the fact that we've you know, we're just we're just this crazy you could there could have massive civilizations galactically could have risen and fallen a million years ago and we just weren't part of it, and that's uh literally a blink of the eye in these in those sort of time frames.
		We just it's it's not surprising just the Fermi paradox, right?
		Like how come we haven't got like firm proof or anything, even though people will say we have, but it's like yes.
		There's it's it's the length of time.
		Like we can rise and fall that span of a million years is just nothing on those timescales.
		And you know, you can civil whole species can rise to massive prominence and then just be nothing but dust at the end of that period of time.
		And you gotta try and do that across what, fourteen billion years, and even that's in question now, because the James Webb telescope seeing stuff that's supposedly way older than that now.
		Right.
		I mean we'll see.
		We're gonna find out.
		Like this three-eye atlas thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what is that?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Super weird, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, Harvey Loeb is convinced that it's a UFO.
		But that's what he does.
		He did with that that other one, Omanuma or Muamur.
		A muamua.
		So that one was a little off.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That was weird.
		So not it wasn't the weirdest thing about a muamura seems to be it's it's its path when it took after it turned around the sun and accelerated.
		Like that was the you know, m standard model of physics said it shouldn't have done that, and it seems to have exhibited sort of motion that was not what we predicted it would do.
		That's significantly as much as we can.
		It accelerated.
		It was outside.
		Yeah, it's accelerated.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But like to a factor of what?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, not that I think it was only a few percent, but it was not what should have happened according to the calculations that astronomers and the I guess the orbital dynamics people had done.
		That's what I understand was the most obviously its shape and size.
		Well, it's yeah, I mean, just because it was so long and narrow and it was tumbling, that's what caused it to we would catch like the long side of it, which the brightness would increase so we had this oscillating brightness on it.
		And then it just it passed through the system and it's you know, it's going whatever, eighty-seven kilometers per second or whatever it was, huge velocity, enough to escape the you know, the gravity of the sun, but it it accelerated where it's what I understand it did.
		It accelerated where it shouldn't have.
		Then there was another interstellar artifact that came in that was pretty much a comet, it behaved like a comet, it had a tail, it was off-gassing water, it's just an interstellar ball of rock and ice is what they say that was that didn't get a lot of attention.
		Now this three eye atlas thing is much larger, it's traveling much faster apparently than the previous two, but it's also not behaving like a comet.
		It has this aura of light that it's emitting around it for some reason.
		It I saw a report that said it it they're almost seeing a metallic like smelting signatures off it.
		I I don't know how much credence I can give it, but we'll find out.
		Like it has a it it has a it's going too fast to stop in our system unless it dramatically uh alters its velocity, but it's it's I mean it'll come it'll pop out.
		We'll we'll lose it on the other side of the sun, but then we should see it again on the way out.
		So we'll know one way or the other if it actually is gonna if it if it changes behavior.
		I mean what's he put it, I've even I've put it like forty sixty or something artificial to natural, but really I'm it's so funny.
		I'm I'm into Warhammer 40k in a big way, and it's just like I'm like, okay, we're gonna be joining the Imperium here soon, boys.
		Or Halley Omnisire.
		That thing might be a Mechanicus vessel.
		I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If that's how they travel, I'd be very disappointed.
		They just shoot through the sky.
		It takes months.
		Well if it slows down, I know, but I'm I'm looking for portals.
		I'm looking for I mean advanced civilization that visits us.
		I don't want the advanced Vikings.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I want the advanced scientists from the twenty first century.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I just I I you know what I'm saying?
		I mean the ones who come fast on a a burning spaceship, they're the dangerous ones.
		Yeah, they're probably the warlike conquerors, the ones who are gonna rob us of our minerals and force us into slavery.
		You know what I mean?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That seems like if that's how you're rocking it, you're still doing it the way we do it, where you have something thrusting you insanely fast through the the cosmos.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I get it.
		Yeah.
		Are you uh do you know that like the whole dark forest uh thing?
		Like the the the dark forest theory about so it's this came out of uh it was the three body problem.
		Uh great series of books by Chinese author that to got turned into amazing Netflix show.
		Great show.
		The books are phenomenal too.
		And it's just But it's it's this idea that look, we shouldn't be making no it's it's like imagine you're a hunter in a dark forest.
		So it's just you're out there, you know there might be other things out there, and it's it's this it's this like a philosophical engagement of like what do you what should you do?
		Should you start light of fire and make a whole bunch of noise in the dark forest that's full of pre you know it's full of predators.
		You don't know where they are, they don't know where you are.
		What's your behavior?
		What should you do should you see another predator?
		Uh what should you ha should you be friendly?
		What's the risk to you to do it?
		And these could be like you could be there with a with a bar and arrow, this guy could have a tank, this other guy could have a like a mass some other energy weapon, whatever.
		You do you you don't there's massive differences in capability and scale and pretty much every scenario works out to like the what you should do is just be quiet and if you see something you should eliminate the threat.
		That's kind of the the way it goes in in the dark dark forest.
		It's like it's too risky to reveal yourself uh you should just uh you should basically eliminate that threat if you can do so safely.
		And you apply that to kind of the galaxy and where the I mean in to some extent a f I feel like we're the equivalent of like a baby in a cot that's screaming around a roaring fire because we put and there's you know leopards out there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And you know, because we're just like sending these signals out into space for a hundred something years now.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well it's and we just hope hey, we're friendly, please.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well you have to hope that something is so evolved that it's gotten past war.
		It's gotten past the way we behave.
		And we so we're hoping and assuming that Space Daddy Space Brothers.
		Yeah, that Space Daddy, Space Brothers will be benevolent and wise beyond our imagination, and that they will come here and want to take care of us and give us information and hook us up.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I I I I that's my respon I had this discussion I I've had the discussion a few times.
		And my response to a lot of that is, well, we can take nature.
		What happens when we take nat let's look at the apex predator, whether it's in the sea, in the air, or on the land.
		Apex predators don't tolerate competition.
		They they don't suffer any attacks, they don't I mean we don't treat we don't we just we just dominate.
		Like you just you if it's in your way it's inconvenient, you kill it.
		If it has if it has something you want, we take it.
		If those bees have honey, we take it.
		Like it's just there's no we're not like helping them.
		You know, we're not we're not like trying to teach the dolphins how to talk, like there's still parts of the world where we're just eating them.
		You know?
		Like there's I don't know, it's it's it nature suggests that that that apex predator, but maybe, maybe we're just I think this is the other element that you're saying is maybe we you uh uh evolution leads you past those primal nature at some point.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The territorial primate instincts that we exhibit like hopefully one day.
		Because clearly we're on a pathway to that, right?
		We're clearly much kinder now.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		At least locally.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, if you don't live in Gaza.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You know what I'm saying?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know what I'm saying?
		Like if you're in the middle of a war zone, you're like, what are you talking about?
		This is as bad as it's ever been all throughout human history.
		It's the same behavior exhibited over and over and over again.
		Yeah.
		What we want is aliens that are a million years more advanced.
		We don't want aliens that are a thousand years more advanced.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because they might be just like us, but way better.
		That's what we don't as soon as we start going into the co if we venture into the cosmos in twenty years.
		We're going to be the same animal.
unidentified		Right?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We're not going to be significantly different unless we integrate with technology and remove the ego and emotions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, mushrooms.
unidentified		Well, no, emotions and stuff that maybe mushrooms helps us get to sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Trevor Burrus, Jr.: emotions.
		The human reward systems that exist that we, you know, that we currently struggle with.
		We would we would be the same way.
		If we um just think of what we justify on earth in terms of destruction of habitat of native species, animals that we kill, all the different things that we do on Earth, factory farming.
		Now imagine why would we care about these lizard people that live, you know, in caves on some fucking stupid planet.
		You know, we would probably kidnap them, we'd kill them, we'd pickle them, we'd bring them back home, we'd freeze them.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Got gold in them caves.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look at what Columbus did when they arrived and took the natives and had them get gold, and if they didn't, they cut their arms off.
		Horrific, terrifying things.
		So imagine there's no evidence that aliens are currently doing that, which is the promising thing.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		The even the abductions, although I'm sure they're terrifying if they're true, they seem rather benign.
		Like in fact, in the Travis Walton case, do you know that that one?
		It's one of the most famous ones.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Not off the top of my head.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Real simple.
		1970s, he's a logger.
		He's working with a group of guys, they see a s a ship, he runs toward it, he gets hit with a beam of energy, gets knocked back, unconscious, his friends flee, they come back, they they're they're yelling at each other, we gotta go back, we've got to get them.
		They go back, he's gone.
		Um all four of them get investigated for murder.
		They tell the story, no one believes them.
		They all pass polygraph tests.
		Five days later, he shows up, he finds a payphone, makes a phone call, and has this fucking insane story.
		But the in story the story was that they took him aboard the craft and healed him and communicated with him and that there was a bunch of different types of these beings, and then um he has been telling the exact same story ever since the 1970s.
		So but relatively benign compared to what we would do.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		For sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, like we fucking you know, we shoot elephants.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It tends an avatar.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Think about the the horrible things that we do right now on Earth.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		No, I agree.
		Yeah, and it's it's something that I always say it's a great quoted from Christopher Hitchens, which is, you know, we're just not the end of that evolutionary chain.
		You know, we're just our our current our current the current version of humanity, the f our frontal lobes are too big, our adrenaline oh sorry, our frontal lobes are too small, our adrenaline glands are too big, our thumb four finger opposition is a isn't all it's cracked up to be.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And we love violence.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		We love violence.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We love violence.
		Our national sport is dudes who are enormous running at each other at full speed.
		And the other one is guys punching and kicking each other.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean it's kind of strangling.
		Yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy.
		We're we're so high and then we're also involved in multiple wars simultaneously.
		At least proxy.
unidentified		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, proxy wars, it's at least human beings are involved in a significant amount of war always.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's never it's this is literally the status quo throughout history.
		I mean, it's just we've always been at war with each other.
		Uh I mean I will I w I still do.
		I may personally maintain the the idea that it is that's still the best time to be alive.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A hundred percent.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Technologically speaking.
		But also, I mean, obviously we we're much more aware of conflict around the world, but on a percentage scale of what it's been like in the past, i it's actually far less than it has been.
		Like even though it's terrible when it happens, but we're in an era where there's actually less of that going on and hopefully that can continue.
		I actually genuinely think that it's one of the reasons why this whole investigation into the past is important to me.
		Like I don't it's not I haven't really talked about it in videos or put it down.
		It's gonna be it's part of the book I'm writing for sure, it's a big part because I it's it's not just some benign investigation into the past.
		I genuinely think it could have a significant impact on our future because it it that I that concept you talked about it of of like this linear progression, right?
		I mean, in general, we get taught in school that okay, we were stone age dudes, we were in caves, civilization happened, and we have many thousands of years later, here we are.
		This is the only it's like this is the only way that uh an advanced civilization can happen.
		Is is on this path, don't worry about it.
		It's almost like it's preordained, just worry about next election cycle, next quarterly result, whatever, right.
		And we just don't think about it.
		I do this is this concept call, it's I think it's a fundamental pillar of what it means to be a human being today.
		It's it's in everybody's mind to some degree, like all right, Stone Age us, we're advanced, this is the only way it happens.
		I do think that if you can change that at that fundamental level to this cyclical version that is an oscillation between civilization and cataclysm.
		And this idea that okay, we've actually risen in the past.
		We've become relatively high technology, we become civilized.
		And and it it happened, it would have been different to us, but it it we fell.
		We fell again.
		And we're on we're somewhere on this oscillation and this circular motion between civilization and cataclysm, and on a long enough timescale.
		We know it's gonna happen again.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And if you can change that, if you could change that fundamental concept in people.
		Like that's what we teach people in schools.
		Okay, so we we're we're rising again, we're we're at this crazy point in time where technology is super advanced.
		We can solve some of these problems, but we know on this timescale, if we don't do something about it, we might end up like our ancestors did.
		I genuinely think that stands a chance of like changing some of our behavior and and some of our like a little less money on tanks and guns, a little bit more money on space exploration.
		Make solving the longer term problems a bit more of a priority.
		And I it's altruistic and it's amb it's like a crazy goal.
		It's it's I it's I know it's altruistic as all hell, but it's just I think there's precedent for it too, though.
		I mean, whether you agree with it or not, uh d politic I mean it doesn't matter, it's but the fact is that the term climate change has changed our behavior over the last twenty-five years, right?
		It's changed if you think about what's happened with that concept and that movement, it changes investment decisions, it changes our interactions with each other with the planet.
		You know, it it's changed our behavior in the way we think about stuff.
		It's this it's like this this has crept into our zeitgeist as a species and it's changed our behavior.
		So I look at some of this stuff in the past as it's not just being some harmless investigation into things.
		I think it it actually getting to the the root cause of what's happened in the past actually could help us in our future.
		I think it's an important it's what drives I think a my interest in it in a lot of ways, too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's another piece of an example, uh another example rather of how primitive we are that we still we're the actual climate is political.
		That's bananas.
		Like pollution is political.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, if you disagree I mean I always find it crazy that if you even question any of some of the like official narrative about this stuff, the first thing you've got to do is make sure you decry and say, No, no, no, pollution bad, pollution bad.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Just because I think that some of the science might be off.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I'm not saying like I'm let's pollute the oceans, like no no, let's be stewards.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well it's also the amount of time that we've polluted the oceans in is spectacular.
		What we've done just in terms of the depopulation of the ocean.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's nuts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like ninety plus percent of all big fish are gone.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In a short amount of time.
		Like a couple hundred years of like hardcore fishing.
		And we we fished out the ocean, man.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Just about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's nuts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not only that, we polluted the fuck out of it to the point where you're not even supposed to eat it every day.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is that's a pity.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I agree.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you eat sushi every day, people don't recommend it.
unidentified		From a beer bottle on the bottom of a Mariana trench.
unidentified		What?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's crazy.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		That's how gross we are.
		Somebody was over there and they chucked one overboard.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it looks like Honikan.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It looks pretty recent, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's got the fucking label on it.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The label hasn't even eroded.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		The challenger deep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If it's that recent, like why isn't it covered in sediment?
		You know what I mean?
		Yeah.
		The surface covers things up and moves over time.
		It probably won't be there forever.
		It'll probably won't be sitting on the surface like that.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I don't think it's a good thing.
unidentified		Oh wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, maybe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, right, right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Somehow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's sink, I'd imagine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Unless there's some sort of a downward or upward current.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Scientists find beer bottle the deepest point of the ocean.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Six point seven miles, thirty-five thousand feet below the surface.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is how is it not?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, no air.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, there you go.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Wouldn't last long if there's a cap on it, that's for sure.
		But yeah.
		Yeah, I don't want to go down there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fuck all that.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I'd rather watch a video.
		Not only that, they were watching a video.
		That's what's even crazier.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You go all the way down and you're watching a screen.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not like there's a window.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You can't have a fucking window.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		No, exactly.
		Yeah.
		Yeah.
		Like one little or just if there's one just giant thick thing at the front and you kind of like Imagine the freak out of being at the bottom.
		James Cameron knows.
		I mean he went down that.
		Not for me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He went there by himself.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I know he did.
		It's crazy.
		In that Yeah.
		He did it right, but I guess.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you're gonna do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why is he doing that?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I want four feet of titanium around me.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like in a sphere.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we need you to make movies.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Maybe not a carbon fiber tube.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, especially not one that the engineer said wasn't really designed for those depths.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that cracked.
		Did you ever watch that documentary?
		It's dude, they're putting that thing out, they do the scale model and they're testing it under pressure, and they're all standing around in a room and just goes bang!
		Like it's just it's in and every test they did, it went bang.
		And blue.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And they're like, 20 successful trips with that.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh, they did a bunch.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And it was and it well, even the scariest part is like when you're in the footage with it and you can hear it popping.
		Like it's it's it's literally the carbon fiber strands snapping.
		Oh, it's terrible.
		It's terrifying.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Imagine being one of those people that successfully made that journey and and then the nightmares that you have every day.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like the one right before.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Barely missed it.
		You bar yeah, the one right before.
		Barely missed getting instantaneously destroyed.
		I'm sure you've seen the animation, the the computer recreation of what it would look like.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you turned to blood cells.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just splatter.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you wouldn't even it said that's it happens faster than the time it would take for you to even register that it happened.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like for your senses to register in your brain that it happened.
unidentified		It's over.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The pressure.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just the fact that we're that weird that we choose to do that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That we have technology like, let's see.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Let's go.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		The way they skirted the I mean you he he signed everyone up as like basically expedition team members.
		They were that's how they got around I'm not selling seats for this.
		Like they're invest they they're coming on, they all had a technical role, supposedly, and it was like I'm not it's getting around the regulations and the safety regulations.
		But yeah.
		No interest in that sort of pressure.
		I mean I dive, but not like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, diving is swimming.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Pretty much.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just like hardcore swimming.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I haven't seen this.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It said that it would have happened in twenty milliseconds, and it takes like 150 milliseconds for your brain to feel pain.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That's yeah, that's Yeah, no, thank you.
unidentified		I God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh my god.
		This why does this freak me out so much?
		It's because a guy went on with his son.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's terri it's a terrible story.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's just why.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I wish I was friends with that guy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'd be like, dude.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's not the place I'd want to explore.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like there is some stuff off Cuba, they say that's they reckon pyramids it's kilometers deep in the ocean.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But I've seen that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've seen well, I've seen internet videos.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		But I did die, we were in Alexandria.
		I dived on the the lighthouse.
		So there's um and there actually there was a news article just the other day about the the the Egyptians were pulling like more stuff out of the water there at Heracleon and at the lighthouse of Alexandria.
		Quite an interesting story.
		And we were in Alexandria dive in the Mediterranean on the Egyptian side, and um I mean it's it's amazing.
		There's megalith massive columns and massive megalithic blocks in the water from when that uh the lighthouse it fell down or it collapsed, there was there was uh an earthquake.
		And so you're actually you're in the water, but you're diving over like megalithic blocks like these and huge columns and it and it's it has a history that stretches back to, right?
		It's uh th the megalithic stuff is what's associated with the very earliest periods of building.
		Um all the stuff that happened later is typically not that big.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But yeah, this is actually that's what's nuts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what's nuts is that the st the older you go, the bigger the stones are.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, and it's what's funny is when we looked into the erosion at places like the Giza Plateau, you it's it you have two or three feet, it's not on a sphinx everybody knows about the Sphinx enclosure erosion.
		But you look at places like the the the pyramid temple uh of the middle pyramid, the some of the blocks on the Great Pyramid, the casing stones that are there that we can see now that they've taken the boat museum away.
		Uh and up and down the causeway, there is there is limestone blocks with up to two feet of erosion.
		Like it's these waves.
		I think I have a uh have a directory on that on that um drive with um the erosion on it.
		And it's you have you have to juxtapose that against all the other stuff they say is fourth dynasty, right?
		So right next to the Valley Temple, there is another structure that's built from small limestone blocks.
		Doesn't have any uh uh uh erosion, not like the Valley Temple does.
		Uh the Western cemetery that's behind the Great Pyramid is beautifully made, it's smaller limestone blocks.
		It's apparently older.
		So yeah, here's a good example.
		This is the mortuary or the pyramid temple.
		So these were you can see where the face of that block originally was, but it's uh been eroded in like up to two feet in places.
		There's huge amounts of erosion uh that you can find in a lot of places at the Giza Plateau.
		Yet at the same time you have what are said to be contemporary structures, said to build have been built roughly in the same time.
		Sometimes they say they're even older, that have just no erosion at all, made from the same stone, made by this allegedly by the same people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Uh and what force did they attribute that erosion to?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's got it it's wind and sand, right?
		It's that's what they will say.
		Look, this is just regular weathering.
		And here's the crazy thing about these structures, like this was also cased in granite.
		These are the inside blocks.
		So this this structure was fully cased in like four feet thick granite blocks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that was still stolen and quite.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That were taken, but it would have protected this stone from erosion for however many thousands of years.
		You find an there's another picture in here of like the um that's that's so there.
		Like, see this is this is said to like that picture I just showed with the heavy erosion, that's where the arrow is at the pyramid temple.
		No, no, back to the back to that one, yep.
		So that deep erosions at that pyramid temple, this one wall to the right, they say this is older than that.
		And that this has never been cased in granite.
		That other stuff was cased in granite.
		It's megalithic.
		There's a block in that complex that's 450 tons.
		Um it was cased in granite.
		Now, there's been studies, right?
		So we know how long it takes to weather limestone.
		There's been a bunch of studies.
		The US, the the government departments have studied it.
		They put limestone blocks on the top of the a building in Washington, D.C. in a government department and studied it over eleven years.
		There's endless uh cemeteries with conveniently carved and dated limestone pieces in the form of headstones that you can measure.
		So you can go, okay, this was carved in whatever year this guy died, and as you can measure it and over time get a sense for like what's it take with rain, with wind.
		We've done studies of like, all right, we put these blocks in a river and we and we let it wash over like a very highly erosive environment where we've got running water running over the stone and how how long it takes to erode.
		For some of the erosion that you can if you reference those studies for this type of hard limestone, to get two feet of erosive wear on those blocks just with regular wind weathering, and this is this is in places that have a lot more rainfall than Giza, you're talking dates from like sixty to a hundred and twenty-two thousand years to get that much erosion on it.
		I mean And that's and I think that's in a more erosive environment than what the the desert is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So yeah.
		That's that's the neck that's it side by side.
		So you have literally they'll tell you that thing on the right is older.
		This was built by Kufu, this is supposedly Kafra, his son.
unidentified		Wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		But it's it's completely different.
		So this is that Taylor to Industries thing as well, but they attribute all this to the same people.
		But you can baseline this because it's the same stone, it's at the same elevation level.
		It's supposedly the same age.
		The differences is are in the construction.
		Like it's megalithic, and a lot of this stuff was encased in granite.
		This is the uh Sphinx Temple down at the other end of the causeway.
		Same thing.
		So all the megalithic stuff that was cased in granite has severe erosion.
		Yet there's buildings all around it and up and down the plateau, they say are built at the same time, yet it's smaller blocks, it's not as nice work, and it's not eroded like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, what's the conventional explanation from that discrepancy?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		They just don't address it.
		Like I've not seen anyone well, I mean, because the argument's always been the sphinc like the Sphinx temple, like the Sphinx enclosure, right?
		Robert Schock, John Anthony West, they can't he talked about the fact that you needed thousands of years of rainfall erosion to get those patterns on the walls.
		That's where the discussion's been focused.
		It's not there was no comparison made.
		It was always like, well, this is this you know, the geologist and the experts say it's wind and sand it it's water erosion, but then you have the archaeologist and the Mark Landers saying no it's wind and sand.
		Wind and sand.
		But I think there's a better argument to be made when you start to do comparative work like this.
		You go, alright, hang on, let's take the Western Cemetery behind the Great Pyramid, supposedly built by Khufu, Fourth Dynasty.
		It's at the same elevation level, it's the same stone type as the mortuary or the pyramid temple of the middle pyramid complex.
		So after Khufu.
		So if he built that, then his son Kafra built this one.
		How come this one, which was also cased in granite and this wasn't, how come this is so much more eroded than this?
		There's no it's at the same elevation level.
		It's the same stone.
		It's so you would assume that it's been subjected to the same weathering.
		Why is this so weathered and that is not?
		It's that you can't explain any other way.
		Yeah, I've not seen anyone respond to that to that argument with anything that makes any remote sense.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like it's Remote Sense would dictate one's older.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I mean I we show literally I like to show people like which one which one looks older.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like same stone.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Same stone.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Same elevation level, same everything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It has to be.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I mean it's and again, we know That's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's crazy.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And it's not like this.
		This is very hard pneumolitic limestone.
		Like it's full of fossils.
		It's not a soft limestone.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The idea that there was a civilization that built monolithic construction a hundred thousand years ago is crazy.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's so crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But have you uh seen any of Michael Button's work?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I saw the episode, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is a very interesting episode when we're talking about how far back.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Human beings in this exact same form have been around at least three hundred thousand years.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		At least.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		At least.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So that's the fossil record.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's all we found.
		There might be human beings that were five hundred thousand years ago.
		There's six.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Good evidence for it, actually.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		There's stu so yeah, so the Morocco find, I've talked about this for years as well.
		It's that the fossil record.
		So we used to be what, a hundred and ninety fifty thousand, then it's a hundred and ninety-five thousand with the Ethiopian bones, and it's three hundred and fifteen or nineteen with the Morocco find, that's the latest in the fossil record.
		Anatomically modern humans.
		However, there are studies, uh I think this is in the other vectors director, I've got those studies.
		Um there's two studies that I reference usually.
		One is a DNA study that suggests like ne from a genetic perspective, Neanderthals are our cousin.
		Like we didn't evolve from them.
		We both evolved from a common ancestor.
		And they then based on but just looking at the genome and trying to trace it back, they the the paper suggests that we split with a common ancestor somewhere in the realm of 800,000 years ago.
		Us and Neanderthals split from a common ancestor.
unidentified		Like that's when we carved off 100,000 years ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And there's another study on teeth morphology, which is which was it it actually got set up to try and prove that we're only, you know, two, three hundred thousand years old.
		And they were looking at, all right, some our nearest common ancestor, how quickly does our dental, our teeth have to evolve and morph like this teeth more like teeth morphology, how quickly does that have to happen for us to basically have the teeth that we have today relative to our ancestors.
		And they thought, well, it's gonna have to be this rate to make these numbers work, and then they did this big statistical study on a lot of different people from all around the world and they figured out the teeth, the the rate of dental evolution is much slower.
		So that's then they they've they basically work backwards from there and said, okay, so if if that's how quickly our teeth evolve, then we may have been around as many as eight or nine hundred thousand years.
		So you have so you you have two different studies.
		I mean, again, fossil record three hundred thousand, but other studies do suggest the possibility could be any up to towards a million years old for a human uh human beings.
		It gets real interesting, even within the three hundred thousand years, but certainly if you stretch it back further, I mean you can find uh graphs of the temperature and the global temperature in ice cool record ice core data from Antarctica that goes back four hundred thousand years.
		So you have these peaks and valleys.
		Like we're in that peak right now in the Holocene, the nice warm period where civilization flourishes.
		But we've been through a bunch of those peaks before.
		And some of those valleys are we know as a result of cataclysm, like massive changes to the Surface of the earth where nothing would be left.
		So I look, I honestly put the p realm of possibility for advanced civilization, not just the last ice age, but within any you know, up to a million years potentially.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's fucking crazy.
unidentified		Could be I Well it's not it'd be dust for a lot of it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It would be dust what we would find now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it it's not but that's what Michael Button's argument when you're dealing with anatomically similar human beings or amatonically exactly the same creature.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Give us give us warm weather and you know enough food to eat and we start fucking solving problems.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is one of the reasons why Egypt itself was so spectacular was that it was very fertile.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It was in the African humid period.
		This is one of my arguments is I I think if you so if we just assume for a moment that there was a s a civilization that flourished during what you know, the African humid period and before it, when the Sahara was a savannah.
		And I that's why I think the Sahara is such an appealing target, is because what happened, right?
		So if that civilization ends, we're knocked back to a stone to a to a relative stone age.
		The people that were populating the Nile, and people have been in the Nile f we know for like hundreds of thousands of years, like people live.
		And and they if they're gonna start that civilization, they're gonna do it in the only part of that country that was habitable.
		It's the Nile Valley.
		And that's where all the sites of ancient Egypt are that we know about, but they've all been let's assume they kick started with stuff and they built been inherited and renovated and reused and the dynastic Egyptians made them their own, if assuming there's something there before.
		So it what's fascinating to me is the possibility that out there in the Sahara, maybe near an ancient water source or an ancient aqueduct or something or or an ancient aquifer, we might be another Assyrian out there, like this subterranean things.
		There might be another Serapian, there might be another labyrinth buried beneath the sand somewhere that's not been touched.
		And it hasn't been inherited and reused.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's where the Rochard structure gets weird.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And that's that's on a timeline that could be very ancient because it's very eroded.
		It's then it's hard to see anything.
		Like this interpretive almost at this point to to figure out that there's if there was a structure there or anything.
		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's also that's another one when you go above and you look at the satellite imagery, you go, oh boy, that place got washed.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it did.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It got I mean, that was one that place is one of the clearest examples of a place that looks like it got washed.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because there's literal salt deposits everywhere.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I mean it's which is nuts.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It is nuts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's the whole thing is nuts.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't know what happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, Jimmy Cortetti has some amazing videos on that.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Jimmy does.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you do as well.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Jimmy's awesome.
		Yeah, he's Yeah, that's that's that seems like it could be one of the places to look.
		I mean, actually, so Michael Donald's there's an interesting talk about Melon Burroughs and that same satellite scan company.
		There's a guy named Michael Donolin who's been working, he was working with them, still is.
		He's putting out a documentary pretty soon called Atlantica, and he thinks he's found, at least if not Atlantis, a part of Atlantis off the coast of Spain.
		And they've a hundred percent found some shit in the waters and have been diving on it for a couple of years now and building a documentary, but he it's pretty convincing he's found again another like underwater, if nothing else, megalithic city.
		He thinks it could be Atlantis as well off the coast of Spain.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, I saw that that documentary was coming out.
		I didn't know exactly what they had discovered.
		Is there images that we could see right now or what they did?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's no, he's he we saw like an advanced preview of it.
		Until it comes out.
		But it's but it's they discovered it with that Merlin Burroughs scanning tech.
		The same satellite-based tech, and then they went and dived on it, and I've we saw like a cut down version of three episodes at this conference I went to and met him.
		I've since talked talked to him a bit.
		Uh fascinating.
		100% found something.
		Like it is man-made, like whatever it is is Yeah.
		So this is like the preview little teaser thing.
		I'm not sure when it's when the streaming I feel like it's got to be this year, I I hope.
		He's mostly done with it.
		Um then Or at least the trailer is talking about.
		That was Tim Acres for a second, the old guy with the beard when he was still alive.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When did he die?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I think it was just last year or the year before.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Damn.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it sucks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's I'm very happy I got John Anthony West on a couple of times before he passed.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I spawned on my big regrets is never actually having the chance to meet the man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, he was great.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		He's phenomenal.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You know, there's a clip I use in my videos of him back in the nineties.
unidentified		No.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Not really.
		Back in the nines, John Anthony West, I used it in some of my videos, and he's standing at this cabinet, the same cabinet I stand in front of, uh, take people there to the Cairo Museum, and he's looking at this beautiful diary vase with a super thin neck, and it's just it's like this beautiful but tiny little thin neck on it and flared, and he's just saying, you know, how much of these vases are an anomaly, they're pre-dynastic.
		We don't know how they made them.
		You know, how do you machine out the inside of this vase through this tiny little neck?
		Someone did it, and he said, I can only hope that at some point in the future we'll people will start to like apply modern technology and study these things and try to learn some more about it.
		So it's like fantastic that that vase scan project is basically doing what he thinks we should be doing, and we're learning a ton about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		His uh DVD series, Magical Egypt is what got me hooked.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what you've said.
		That series is insane.
		It's so good.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		He's he was great.
		It's symbolist, and that's and that I think that sym that symbolist's view of ancient Egypt is fantastic.
		Occasionally he would touch on that the engineering side of things that I'm caught deep on.
		Sometimes he'd ignore it too.
		I it's pretty funny.
		I have a copy of his guidebook, which is hard to get these days, his guidebook to ancient Egypt.
		And it literally has about this much on the Serapium because there's just no real writing down in the Serapium.
		That's the place with the twenty-five giant, like hundred ton stone boxes.
		It's one of the most remarkable logistical feats that come from ancient Egypt.
		But he just wasn't there wasn't a lot to like for a symbologist to interpret in that place.
		So it's like, yeah, it's pretty cool, go check it out.
		Some boxes.
		And we spent like four hours down there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's interesting if you think of him like being concentrating on the symbolism and how much work he did.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And just you need one of those two, right?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		For sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A bunch of different people looking at all the different aspects of it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And he was another one that had his interpretation was this is a lot older.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It seems no one seems to like do a deep dive on it and go, oh no, no, they figured this out.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		No, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a example was so crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		His explanation was this was the national project.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Dude, I've I it's so.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I tried to watch that podcast.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Imagine if we're all going to uh fly without wings.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is the national project.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		This exactly.
		I have heard him say that for ten years.
		Yes.
		I asked him that question 2015.
		I was in the room with Graham Hancock and him having this debate, which wasn't a debate, and they were yelling at you like Zahi flipped out uh earlier in the day.
		But you know, we asked him that question.
		I've heard him given that answer so many times.
		You ask him about the anything precision or logistics, you know, or these these difficult to explain topics, that's the response.
		It is it's basically they tried really hard, therefore they did.
		And it's it's I it drives me nutty.
		He's not the only one who gives that response, by the way.
		That's that's that's a pretty stock standard answer to anything where you say, well, how did they move a thousand ton statue a thousand miles, which is what they did at one point.
		Um how did they build the pyramid so precisely or whatever, or how did they do it in the time frame.
		Oh no, a national project, they just really wanted to.
		And it's the the response, a good example is like the Apollo like let's assume I mean the Apollo 11 project the Apollo program, right?
		Going to the moon.
		That wasn't that was a national project at the time.
		There was a huge amount of resources put towards it from a relative to what NASA is today.
		But we didn't just fucking all come together with a big, you know, f piece of fabric and fling some people at the moon.
		There's tech there's technology involved, right?
		You can't do it without the technology.
		That's that's the aspect of that answer that annoys me.
		It's like no, you know.
		I don't care how hard you try.
		Try does not get you like precise down to within a thousandth of a of an inch, or in in the case of one of these vases, four-tenths of a micron, or six-tenths of a micron.
		It's that's the most extreme precision I've seen on one of them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a well it's interesting too that these vases, these small things that you can hold in your hand are evidence of this incredible technology.
		When these enormous statues also exist.
		But you don't think of the vases as being the thing that's the smoking gun, but it kinda is.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		They are.
		It's it because they it's because they predate the dynastic Egyptians, because they were buried with those people.
		They exist we know they existed in those times.
		You can't do that with the big statues, but it's I have a whole long two-hour talk about how these things connect to those things, like the tube drills and the precision and the machining.
		It's the same technique, it's the stone types.
		I mean, there God, there are there are a bunch of like tubular drills on the Great Pyramid, a whole bunch of them.
		People don't know about them or where they are, but I've got pictures and I can show people.
		The statues show the same machining marks.
		The statues reflect the same precision.
		The boxes, the the the obelisks, a lot of the stonework reflect the same thing as well.
		The same tools were used, the same precision shows up.
		And in pretty much all of those cases, the oldest and the best examples of all of those things are typically also the oldest.
		Like it's like the the best examples of the oldest.
		Yeah, the single piece columns are absolutely incredible.
		Like those the Romans didn't make columns like that.
		Like the fact that these columns of granite in Egypt, I mean they start off white and they get narrower and narrow and narrow, and then they flare out at the top, and it's all a single piece.
		And that means that the entire piece that was quarried had to be as wide as the widest part at the top and then machined down.
		These columns have friggin' vertical, they have lathe centering points on them.
		Like there's like a hundred like imagine it's like a hundred and fifty tons r turning on a vertical lathe or something that they did to create some of these things.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So there's points that show that it was on a list.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it was definitely centering points at uh yeah, on these columns.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		There's a forest of them laying out at Tannis, and you can see it on the endpoints.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it's can we show that?
		That's nuts.
		And what is the weight of these things?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh, up to I mean, I imagine the bigger ones are maybe hundred, hundred and fifty tons, two hundred tons.
		They and you have these existing on old kingdom sites.
		They Sicara, Giza, Abu Sea, the single piece columns.
		They are also on sites later on that are attributed to the New Kingdom, places like the Luxort Temple or Karnak.
		However, I think that those places or had a granite core and an infrastructure there already, and then those kings of the New Kingdom, Seti I, Maranpatar, Ramses II, built around them, and you can see the difference in technology but of what's in the granite core with the giant obelisks and the columns and the granite buildings that look like the valley temple and the old structures.
		Then outside of that it's all sandstone and it's blocks.
		And they made giant columns too, but they're made from blocks of sandstone.
		They would stack them up and shave them down.
		It's a much softer stone, and making blocks out of rounds and just you know, making columns out of rounds is way easier than trying to build a single flared, you know, um granite column.
		And even the Romans.
		I mean, it has to have been something like that.
		I it can't have been that all the way, because you have uh actually, Jamie, in that precision large um directory, there's a picture of a column end.
		Like it's I'm standing next to this amazing end piece, but some of them are faceted, so it can't have all been lathe work.
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		They have little they have little buttresses and features, but certainly the column of the lathe, the circular part could have been done.
		Or the the column.
		The uh the center of the column could have been done on a lathe, I'm sorry.
		Uh yeah, it's it's fascinating.
		I mean how big is this leaf.
		Huge.
		I mean, this is Chris Dunn thinks Yeah, I mean that's one of the columns I'm standing next to.
		Uh that's at Tanis.
		And if you flip through there's there's like a column endpoint that's yeah, there's an end there.
		So see the s there's a hole in the in the tip.
		So you have you have lot this is a place called Temple of Bastet, and there were forests of these things.
		Like look at that part.
		That thing is one of the most favorite artifacts in all of Egypt.
		It is immaculate.
		That that the faceting.
		Look at that that bull nose that runs up the center of that frond of the palm, because these are like palm-shaped pillars.
		I mean, it tapers.
		It's thick on one end and it thins right down to the end, and it's exactly the same on either side.
		I on each of these fronds.
		I I would love to get there and and scan this thing.
		Uh one of my favorite pieces, and you just had like I mean, probably hundreds of these things on these sites.
		I mean, even it goes back in time.
		Again, this is from this is these are pick these are columns from Sicara and um Abusia, which are all old kingdom sites.
		So again, these are existing in the early times.
		They didn't build columns like this later in the civilization, they build them with um sandstone pieces.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Go back to those images again, please.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look how crazy that looks.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One solid piece of granite.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and flared.
		Even the Romans who who by all accounts had far superior technology to the Egyptians.
		They had force multipliers, they had iron, they had all sorts of mathematical skill they got from the Greeks.
		They've built they built single piece granite um uh pillars, but they but they were they were tapered the whole way.
		Like they w and they weren't anything as precise.
		They're quite rough.
		If you go you've been to the Pantheon, this one's one of my favorites.
		Um this is called Pompeii's Pillar, you can see the dude standing at the bottom.
		Like this is like I've actually got a picture of me there as well, but it's Yeah, you see that dude at the bottom.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Zoom out so we can see the whole thing with him.
		It's not working.
		There it is.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		There it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Look at that.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So I think that's been a re that's a reworked column that the Romans reworked, and they either they carved that head top uh or it's a separate stone.
		I'm not actually sure.
		But this is um this is in Alexandria in Egypt.
		But huge.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And where did that come from?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And so this is how they do it.
		Uh that's I don't I mean it it's Aswanian granite.
		It's but it's it's like a thousand kilometers away.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So then when you get to New Kingdom.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So that's what this is what they yes, so this is the stacked rounds of sandstone, and this is I always like to show people this corner of Karnak because it's an unfinished column on the end there.
		You can see how they did it.
		They'd stack up those blocks and they basically shave it down.
unidentified		Uh-huh.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And they would end up and this is imitation too, right?
		This is the other a key thing you see, even with the vases, they would I mean, people knew what was sophisticated.
		Like anyone who works with stone, whether you're primitive or not, you see you see an artifact like that or one of those statues or a column out of stone, you're like, holy shit, how did they do that?
		So you it's from the gods, right?
		I'm going to imitate it and I'm going to try and replicate it.
		And so they were doing their best to replicate and imitate um But with sandstone.
		With sandstone and in it and a technological method that they were capable of, which is to put blocks of sandstone up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Shave it down and make it make it look like one of these columns.
		And they did great work, right?
		Don't get me wrong.
		Karnak is this is the great sort of hyperstyle hall at Karnak.
		It's phenomenal.
		And it is the work of the New Kingdom.
		Um but it still pales in technological significance to like the older stuff, the single piece stuff.
		But it's fabulous.
		Like it this is I love the Karnak's one of my favorite places because you have all those examples right in front of you of like high tech and then low tech.
unidentified		And so by New Kingdom, what year Uh so like uh 40 and 1500 BC.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So even then, they're still doing spectacular stuff.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just not as sophisticated.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It was by all right.
		It by all the Kentucky Old Kingdom or in the New Kingdom, that was Egypt's height, like the height of the dynastic Egyptian civilization, like Ramses II in particular, who like always call him the you know, the the greatest of the Egyptian kings.
		They would just Egypt had the most power, the most wealth, the most ability to do that sort of work, so they built these great temples.
		And it just it's very, very clear.
		Yeah, this is that Pompeii's pillar that they call it.
		It's very clear that um they built them around and on top of existing infrastructure.
		In fact, at Karnak, which is attributed to Ramses II, I mean you again the devils and the details.
		You have the names of kings that go back all the way to the old kingdom on various structures.
		You also at one point at that in that hall where they've pulled up a massive floor tile.
		Underneath the ground at the bottom there is a is a column base.
		It's another like an older and white calcite column base that is the same sort of column base that you see on the very oldest of sites.
		Which tells you there was a columned hall here before and either got destroyed or knocked down, but the whole place was rebuilt.
		You you you see this evidence for these layers of infrastructure on these sites that tells you, okay, this is you it's like looking at these ancient sites, you always have to keep that that in the back of your head, like alright, there's been thousands of years of not only inheritance, but renovation and reuse and claiming.
		Like it's it's you know, people have asked me if I think the statues are so old, how come they look like dynastic Egyptians?
		I think the answer is it's the other way around.
		I think the dynastic Egyptians look like the statues.
		So if you imagine there's there's evidence for like five or six of these giant thousand ton statues.
		Like which are the typical uh stuff you see at Luxor with the you know, the head jet and the the Nemes crown or the big the bowling pin thing on the head, and they're always in that iconic symbolic style of ancient Egypt.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can you go to some of those?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I have the precision large has probably got the statues.
		Um imagine that you are a a a tribal culture that's emerging from the dark from this the stone age, but you have this history and these legends of these stories and you come across Yes, of this iconic this iconic look.
		And again, this stretches back.
		This is an old kingdom status, it's attributed to this is made of diorite, by the way.
		This is called Cuffray enthroned, one of my favourite statues.
		With the columns from Sak from Sakar in the background.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So this is made out of that same possibly hard stone.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it's like a six point five to a seven on the most scale.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And it's it's phenom this is an incredible statue.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And this is has exhibits that facial symmetry as well.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It looks like it.
		I've not seen the actual scans from this, but this thing actually has two bladill marks and and saw cuts in it too.
		So it's it's got between his heels is a you see the remnants of a tube drill.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Keep that there, please.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I've probably got a picture of that in my machining directory of the actual the tube drill between the heels.
		And then in the legs on the inside, you can actually see overcuts, like a saw cuts from where there was they they cut too deeply into this insanely hard stone, and it's it's overrun.
		Which is if you were doing this by hand, that's a mistake you'd have to be making for about four hours, you know, to actually get the depth of the cut.
		But if you had some sort of power tool that was moving removing material quickly, it's you can overcut in there.
		And there's like little mistakes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Go to the full of of this, please.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So your thoughts are that the Egyptians were imitating these ancient looks.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		I think they I think they inherited their iconography from the things the artifacts that they that they gained in in like statues like this, uh fr and also the thousand ton versions of statues like this.
		And I mean, if you look at their art style, this is one of the things that blows my mind.
		It's it's it's like across that three thousand year civilization, that iconography didn't change very much.
		Like it's the same look.
		And you and and how do the kings draw themselves on the walls?
		They're always trying to position themselves as being one of the gods, right?
		They always talk about eventually they got this aura of divinity, you became a god like the pharaohs became divine.
		That wasn't always the case.
		But they grew into that over time as that civilization progressed, and they always match themselves and they try to make themselves look like the gods, and again, eventually once you get hubris and ego involved in some of these really big, really rich kings, you're like, damn it, I am one of the gods.
		Put my name on your statue, that's how I want to be remembered.
		And that's there were multiple gods.
		Seti I did it, m his son Ramses II, his son Maren Patar, particularly in the New Kingdom.
		I mean, Petrie called Ramses the Great Usurper.
		That's what his name for him, because he was putting his name on everything trying to label himself as one of the kings.
		And I think if you you look at that I can from old from the old kingdom through to the Ptolemaic era, it's the same.
		Like they're they're depicting themselves as one of these gods who are always depicted in the same way, and that's that's like that's part of it from day one, like it feels like.
		So and I think where do you get that picture from?
		It's like that uh the uh what's the the what's the the poem from Percy Shelley?
		Uh Ozimandius, look on my works, ye mighty in despair.
		Like it's literally a poem by Percy Shelley that talks about it.
		He actually gets it from I think Diodora Sic, an account of Diodorus Siculus coming across at one of these statues in the desert that's a thousand tons.
		It's like a weary traveller in a desert of in an unknown land comes along two to vast and trunkless legs of stone over like nearby a shattered visage lies, still like sort of sneer full of sneer and arrogance, and it's it's basically written upon this uh stone of the words my name is Ozzy Mandius, King of Kings, look on my work, ye mighty in despair.
		And there the and the endless sand stretch far away.
		It's I mean I'm paraphrasing.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Especially when they become kings.
		There it is.
		Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Nothing beside remains round and round the case, that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone level sandstretch.
		So it's like if you imagine you come across in the s in the sand in the desert and you find the remnants of a thousand ton statu.
		Have you have you probably I'm sure you've seen pictures of the Ramesseum and the thousand ton statues.
		Like there's four or five of them at least that happened, but they're incredible.
		Single piece stone statues that were moved in some cases up to a thousand, like six, seven hundred miles away.
		I've I have them in a collo I have them in like colossal directory.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And did they fall from earthquakes?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that the speculation?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I suspect either that or uh the hands of men.
		I think it was like I think with enough dudes with enough leverage you can probably yeet that thing over and and it'll crack when it falls.
		And I think it's they were definitely there was a long period of them destroying all the gods and all the icon and all the you know the the false idols of the past.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		There's at a place called Tannis, there's a foot, there's a giant foot that I can't I mean, my whole outstretched hand wouldn't fit in the toenail.
		And it's a repurposed block of granite, and Petrie found it, and there's other pieces of this statue.
		So we know it was a s a statue that had it been standing, it's about the same size as the Statue of Liberty without the pedestal.
		Um the foot's about the same size, just give it a a frame of reference.
		And that thing's made from Aswanian granite.
		Now Tannis is in the north, and that's one's and it's it's north of Cairo, like it's up in the delta towards the Mediterranean, and and Cairo's down here.
		It's like a thousand kilometers.
		So someone at some point took a at least a thousand ton, probably f more like fifteen hundred ton block of stone, because they didn't finish them, they didn't ship them finished.
		We know they finished stuff on site.
		Like a thousand kilometers north.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that the the foot?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh the foot at Tannis.
		No, that's it there, the first one.
		Yeah.
		I in my um I was looking, I didn't see it.
		In the massive uh just actually my uh my my video thumbnail there on the ancient tennis, largest stone statue ever made.
unidentified		Which one?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh pr uh uh giant huge objects.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Huge objects.
unidentified		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
		So there's go up one, that's the foot there.
		So you see that's the it's actually it's funny because this box block's been repurposed.
		It's been cut off on both sides and used as a block in a wall.
		They cut the front off it and the back off it and stuck it in and rebuilt it with it.
		This thing this uh there's a picture of the whole arm when it was put together in that directory.
		So that's a giant thumb.
		Wow holding a scroll and they put the whole arm together.
		There's I got one picture of it.
		One time I was there, they put the whole arm together, and that is probably the most impressive example uh.
		It's in there, I'm sure.
		Let's see.
		It's that um down, down, down.
		Yep, up, up one.
		There you go.
		Yeah, so this this is uh it's made from composite quartzite.
		So this is at Karnak.
		This is one of several of statues of this size at Karnak.
		And what's impressive about this, they actually they put this together for one year and then they took it apart because and I got told that it was because they didn't people were freaking out about how big this must have been.
		They didn't kind of it gives a sense of scale, and then people are like, what the fuck?
		How are they doing this?
		So they took it apart again.
		But you can still see the thumb there today, so it's turned on its side.
		Now what's cool about this is is that it's a straight arm.
		So a lot of those statues, like the one at the Ramesseum, they're seated, so they always have their elbows bent at their knees.
unidentified		Mm-hmm.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		This thing was standing.
		So it was a standing statue, thousand tons made from composite quartzite, which is in a lot of ways more difficult to work than granite.
		It's a very hard compressed form of sandstone.
		It's like six point five to seven, but it's full of flint.
		It's a stone carver's nightmare.
		It's it's like you can see the chunks of flint in the stone, but they somehow work that surface just with no problem going over flint, which is seven, seven and a half on the most scale.
		The trick with this statue is where that stone came from.
		That's it's a Karnak in the south.
		Aswan for granite, bit further south.
		Composite quartzite doesn't come from Aswan.
		It comes from the Red Mountains north of Cairo.
		And the tricky part here is that that the Nile River flows north, right?
		So it's it's like it people it's because it's north of people like, oh, it's flying up, but it flows to the north.
		So they had to take the block for that thing.
		I'd say fun fifteen hundred tons easy.
		They had to bring that up river, up river.
		Six hundred miles or something.
		Five hundred miles.
unidentified		Wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I don't know how you explain that.
		And there's certainly no depictions of them doing that.
		That's I that is that is a a logistical feat.
		I mean, it's I don't know how you can rival it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was a national project.
		Don't you get it?
		Don't you get it?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Just a national project.
		They really wanted to.
		Dude.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's well, it's one of those really amazing mysteries because the actual facts of it are so spectacular that it defies any conventional explanation.
		To the point where it it opens up people to the possibility that maybe we don't know.
		It um almost every anyone listening to this, it's even remotely reasonable that sees that goes, oh okay.
		I think I think this picture's a lot bigger than we thought it was.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		That's honestly my response to it too, is I don't know how they did this.
		I uh you can't do it primitive fashion.
		Like w we literally tried.
		Like we've had the Thunderstone is the other is the How would they even do it today.
		Hydraulics and diesel power, like huge bar.
		I mean, I I didn't even know.
		You try to move I mean it's like makes newspaper headlines when they shift a load of like a hundred and fifty tons on a on a truck somewhere.
		I a thousand tons these days?
		1500 tons.
		I mean we have cranes, we we have the capability, but it's usually by water on giant I don't know if we could how we transport a load like that over anything other than water.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Imagine the wooden boat and how hard those dudes are rowing.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Up river too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not only that, how deep is the water and when you're dealing with a hundred and fifty tons, how far does it sink?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Displacement.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How much of a boat do you need?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And can you fit a boat that wide?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		In the in parts of the nile you can, but I'll tell you this, and I've looked at this.
		That you sure as shit can't do it at the quarry because this is what they say.
		You go to the quarry, and this is a example I like to give people all the time.
		The unfinished obelisk.
		You know, at the Aswan quarry, one thousand two hundred tons, more or less.
		Like ten tons off or something.
		They will tell you that, oh yeah, so this this low area in the quarry, that's the harbor where they parked the boat to take the to take the stone.
		I mean, you just it's there is no chance that you could put that thing on a boat that even would it's it's like this this is not in the realms of possibility for a boat to displace enough water to take a load like at that obelisk.
		It would literally just be this giant ka clunk.
		It would just it it just can't happen.
		And what's more, that quarry or that that harbour in the quarry, it's that isn't a harbour.
		They that's an extraction.
		They pulled a fucking block out of there the same size as the obelisk.
		It's and it's gone.
		You can see it.
		I showed we it's an off limits area to the quarry, but uh we kind of get in there every time.
unidentified		So someone somehow pulled that off.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's already been done a hundred percent.
		We know it has because we've got the statues of blocks of that size and and tonnage have been have been successfully transported and shaped.
		However, in that place they call the quarry in the harbour, it is it's all scoop marks, it's the same technology, and it w here's where it gets wild.
		Is that that there's you can see the extraction that's come out.
		It's massive, like it basically like the obelisk, the unfinished obelisk.
		So something like an order of twelve to thirteen hundred tons in a piece got pulled out of there.
		And on in the corner, right up at the end where you see the boxy end of whatever this was was taken out on the wall, there's red ochre painting.
		It's paintings of like emus or flamingos and some other dolphins and other stuff.
		And it it's an identical match for the art style and paintings that you find on pre-dynastic pottery that comes from Nicaragua and before.
		It's exactly the same.
		It's not it's not dynastic Egyptian it's predynastic artwork.
		That's been put on the wall.
		I hope I have pictures of that.
		I know I do on here.
		Um It's actually I have a video called um it's it's on my I have a video where we look at all this on my channel.
		But it is it's the exact same artwork that you see on the the vessel.
		So it's to me it's an indication of there was a primitive these people that were there are living there in the thousands of years before the dynastic Egyptian civilization rose were obviously in that quarry and they found this convenient wall to put some artwork on and they painted on it.
		Which tells you that well, this extraction had to happen before that, right?
		It had to have been taken out before that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And how far before?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		We don't know.
		Can't date the stone.
		So But somebody took a piece like that out of there.
		100%.
		With the same technology, the scoop marks and stuff.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Um could have you found anything on that, Jamie?
		So to give people a reference.
		Yeah, the unfinished obelisk is uh how many feet.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I have that up on now.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh that is definitely in that uh other directory.
unidentified		Okay, hold on.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Uh that's yeah, that's the that's the the video about the obelisk.
unidentified		Um finished obelisk is how long?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Oh God, it's it's gotta be um I don't know, a hundred feet long or something like that.
unidentified		It's a ninety, eighty ninety feet long, I'm thinking.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You'll see it in the picture.
		It's I mean it's a giant, giant block.
		I mean, so it's not extracted either, that's what I should say.
		It's it is it is still attached to the bedrock.
		So they were cutting it out.
		And then for whatever reason they stopped.
		But if if you assume that the uh obelisk would have a square section, which means you know, same width as you know, like this, a square section, it would have it it's mass with the granite there at like two point seven tons per cubic meter is is roughly one thousand two hundred tons.
		That's what they say.
		That's what they say.
		I don't think so.
		I don't think that it doesn't to me that's hard to say whether it was cracked or not.
		It was people tried to quarry it after.
		There wasn't much attempt made to quarry.
		I don't know why you would even if it cracked, why not use it?
		If it's actually part if it was done during dynastic Egypt, I mean you've done all that work.
		You've cut out the trenches on all of it around.
		You could cut pieces out of that.
		It'd take way less work.
		You want to get a smaller piece of stone for something else?
		Just cut it.
		Like you you should use it, but it that's not that's not what happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Unless their technology was so sophisticated that what they wanted was very specific and they could just do it again.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and maybe it didn't crack.
		I think that's an example, like you do see on a lot of these sites like the Serapium, like the Assyrian at the quarry that something happened that meant tools down.
		Yeah, so here's the painting.
		This is this is the pictographs.
		Um if you compare that to what's on like the pre dynastic vases, you'll see exactly the same thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now so these depictions of flamingos.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Um was it possible to date the paint that they used?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I think you probably could.
		I don't know if anybody ever has.
		I'd love to ha see that done.
		Um for that to happen.
		That's that's a very good point.
		Because it's it just there's a few things in Egypt where I'm like, why don't we date that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sorry, Jamie, scroll down a little bit.
		Sorry, the side that scoopy thing the uh no uh below that yeah, they're right there.
		Well what's that?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So that's another piece near um in the quarry.
		And this is puts the light of the stupid uh pounding stone theory of um of uh of what how they explain this in the mainstream because these scoop marks they tell you are are pounding stones.
		This is another big piece.
		This is probably we guess this piece it was probably gonna be like a smaller seated statue, but still something's maybe 150 tons.
		And they were they were cutting this out.
		So this you can see this is the process of like carving out underneath it.
unidentified		Mm-hmm.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And so you can get in these trenches and and it and the scoop marks are crazy though, because they they extend basically from the top of the wall, like fifteen feet straight down these l these ridges, they go all along the ground under and then up on the roof side.
		So if you're pan you're pounding you would have been doing this, pounding up to pound that out.
		And it also it's a very sharp turn on the inside.
		There's some it's the result of some tool.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Also, someone's gonna be underneath it when it finally cracks loose.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
		That would not yep, not a don't want to draw that short straw, thank you very much.
		Yeah, we take people down into that area around this uh block every time, it's great and there's very bizarre looking.
		And you can grab that stone and whack at it and just see how how little effect you'll have with the me, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But those stones were is that an example of what they are trying to claim was used?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How long would that take?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So is that the unfinished obelisk?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That is the unfinished obelisk.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And so where is that sucker cracked?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So there's couple cracks, right?
		So this is the thing that there's there's attempts at quarrying that have been made.
		It's it's I think it's that crack up the towards the top.
unidentified		Mm-hmm.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Um is what they say uh how it cracked, but we don't know how it's we don't know if it cracked after the fact either.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It's possible that I mean, like a lot of these places that it was a tools down situation, just something happened to stop, whether it's civil unrest, cataclysm.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		And this thing was buried too.
		Like that it's that's the thing.
		There was a lot of quarrying that happened after this at higher levels.
		Like so this is you've got to imagine when you go to this quarry, it's like they've cut the top off a granite mountain.
		They've taken so much granite out of there.
		Huge granite mountain, so to get down to you know, this sort of high quality granite, which is not surface level granite, you have to go ten, twelve, fifteen meters into granite to get blocks that are even possible to be this size.
		Or this, you know, one single piece.
		And in fact, even now the you can see the like all of this has changed.
		This is not ha there's no staircase, all of that gravel up to the north of that has all been moved.
		We're still clearing the site out, or they are.
		But when this was first discovered, it was buried in like seven, eight meters of quarry rubble from all of the quarrying that had happened above it and around it, like for thousands of years.
		Yeah, this was buried.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How'd they know it was there?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, so there was a there was a like an edge, one little edge piece poking out.
		Like, what the hell is this?
		And then it was uh how would it was It was Flinders Petrie's assistant who actually excavated that site and he had to like split a bunch of big blocks to even get it out of the way.
		Took them forever, but they eventually uncovered it all.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Wow.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		But it was the back end of it's like seven, eight meters of rubble that they had to clear out.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I mean Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's nuts.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it is.
		It's and to me it's like it's quite plausible, it's a possibility that that was there.
		It was done.
		Oh, for sure.
		They mean there's many more quarries.
		That's just this is just because that's in the quarry, that's the quarry that's sort of been cleared and made available for tourists, but just tons of quarries.
		Like there's yeah, these are great pictures.
		Um that's the the dual image.
		This is uh when it first popped out.
		Yeah, so they had this section of it and they're like, wow, this is something else, but what happened with the pounding stones are really interesting because there were thousands of them uh on the site, these round stones.
		However, the vast majority of them were broken.
		They were split.
		And God, I I I'm blanking on the name of the guy who excavated the site.
		Um However, he was like, Huh, how come these are all broken?
		And he tried to break them.
		So he stood up on like a you know, fifteen feet up and he's hurling these stones down onto the granite and like bang, bang, you had to do it like ten times and eventually he cracks a chip off on them because they're they're dollarite, they're hard, they are harder stone.
		And look, you will eventually create enough dust, eventually.
		I mean it's it's like the there actually have been studies done, uh Dennis Stocks did a study and it's the volume, it's basically you remove about I think it was two thirds the volume of a golf ball in an hour of pounding.
unidentified		Yo.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		So not a lot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not a lot.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And if you can imagine I like to tell people it's like you can only fit like, you know, these these trenches around this col it's not like you can put a thousand dudes in here, they've got to sit in there's like one person in one spot and dudes.
		And so all you have to do is imagine all of that space being filled up with golf balls, add another third for the you know, because it's two thirds a golf ball, and then maybe add another half again to that to account for the negative space between the balls, that's how many hours it would take, which is y I mean, decades of effort.
		Like it's not it's not remotely possible to do it in any reasonable time frame.
		People can't pounding stones is like come on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How do you break it free?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's the issue.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Who's underneath it when they're pounding?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Like how does it think these balls were.
		So I think the ri they're very difficult to break.
		They've taken away all the broken ones.
		The only ones on site now are these like little nice rounded ones.
		And even then you you can't do it from all a couple you have to kind of let it go and catch it and you would your arms would burn out in no time.
		But I think the reason so many were broken, I actually I think and you can actually see this in the in the harbour area, there are these channels that I think they cut under them.
		You can see the remnants of them where they took the big extraction out.
		And I suspect what they did was they would shove these balls of dolerite in there and it would provide them enough movement or just enough support where they could cu they could cut the rest of the of the whatever scoop out or remove the the other attachment points.
		And then you're also once you get out of that trench, you can now shift this thing ever so slightly to get whatever you would need to get under it to lift it up out of there.
		Because that's the other problem with the obelisk is like it's on an angle, and I mean the trench is gonna be when it's complete, they didn't they had only dug down two two thirds as deep as they needed to go.
		So that trench at its its thickest point would have been like twelve, fifteen feet deep down there and you got to get under it.
		So you still you it's on an angle, you have to lift that thing up fifteen, twenty feet up in the air to get it out of the trench.
		And then somehow move it to get into this rocky crazy environment to move it to get it somewhere to then take it wherever else you're taking it.
		But you'd have to be able to maneuver.
		So I think I honestly think those dollarite balls could have been used as primitive ball bearings that were just that's all they were used for was to support it while you cut it free and then it would a lot of them would have snapped in half under the mass of something like that, which explains why so many of them were broken.
		Because you ain't broken those things by pounding on them.
		Like it's just not gonna break.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well that actually makes sense that they were used as some sort of a ball bearing.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But even so, even if that's the case, like how what?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Well, how you lifting it?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		What are you doing to lift that obelisk out?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How many people are involved if it's just manually broken?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You cannot fit enough people around that obelisk to even come close.
		Like not you're probably not even to get ten percent of the amount of pe like it's so it's such a rock rocky weird there's you can't fit that many people around it today.
		I have no idea how they I mean I don't think they were doing this without the expectation that they could get it done.
		You know what I mean?
		Trevor Burrus, Jr.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But what kind of conventional explanation is this?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		There's nothing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's nothing.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		There's nothing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They just gloss over it.
		We don't know.
		They say we don't know.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		They don't address the realities of the thousand tons stuff.
		I've not seen anyone address those realities.
		Well okay.
		So they do.
		And there's and it's like with logistics, they will show you pictures where the Egyptians are moving something that is a hundred tons or a hundred and fifty tons and say, see.
		Now that's not how logistics works.
		So for example, with the statues, we know they scale right up to you know, thousand tons or more.
		There is a picture on a tomb of a guy named Dejuti Hotep.
		And I've got this in the statues directory, I think.
		It's a c it's a painting on a wall.
		And it's it's it's a it's a sled with this statue, and there is like, you know, rows of guys, they've got the you know, the imprint of dudes behind dudes, and they're all pulling on a rope.
		No pulleys, again, they didn't have force multipliers, they were just straight pulling, wooden levers, a wooden sled, they're dragging this statue.
		In the case of this statue, we know about this statue, there's pieces of it left, it was made from alabaster, calcite's not as heavy as granite.
		But it probably weighed the the the estimate of how much it weighed was fifty-seven tons.
		Which is quite a lot, it's respectable, right?
		And you can imagine, but with enough labor and on a sled, this is it.
		This is a fifty-seven-ton statue, there's a guy pouring something on the sand or in front of them, so you can count all these dudes and the shadows of the dudes behind them on these ropes.
		And so there's a figure about it, and there's been papers written about this.
		There's literally, I think um a Japanese team wrote a paper about what would it take to do this.
		And okay, this is possible.
		For fifty-seven tons with enough people, enough horsepower, you can do it.
		Now it's not like that scales up on like a linear increase in difficulty to something that's a thousand tons.
		It's more of a logarithmic exp exponential curve.
		You cannot you cannot take this explanation and apply it to something that's a thousand tons.
		It's twenty times as heavy.
		The coeff the friction coefficient goes through the roof.
		That those sleds would literally just drive into the ground.
		You can't you you get to m you're in you're in realms of mass where it's like material failure becomes a problem.
		Wood is no longer sufficient to support that.
		You cannot you certainly can't move it up any slopes.
		You have to do all this ground preparation work to even attempt it.
		And they move these things like a thousand kilometers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If there's a place that you could go back in time and see that is it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, quarry would be a good one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Aaron Powell, God, if you could go back in time just to see construction.
		I guess quarry.
		But I mean I mean pyramids and how are you lifting things?
		What are you doing?
		What what do you what is your machinery look like?
		You must have some kind of technology that is just dust in the wind now.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		It has to be.
		Because we've tried this.
		Like there's an ex- Do you know about the Thunderstone?
		You heard of this thing?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
unidentified		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So no, I did hear about this.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so in like the 1700s, I think it was pre-industrial age.
		Well, the early days.
		But no diesel power, no hydraulics.
		And this is the thunderstone.
		So we did like in Russia, they moved this thing from Finland to Russia.
		It's at St. Petersburg, they carved it as they went.
		It's the it's the base now for a I think a bronze statue of of s of p of Peter the Great.
		But this is how they did it.
		And and so basically you can see the capstands, the the twist things these dudes are working on, that they're rotating.
		They would dig these giant holes to anchor these big logs in the ground to then use pulleys and force multipliers with dudes on giant rails, and then they would have these huge big iron rails that they would put on the ground and carry back and forth, and the whole thing was was moving on these bronze spheres, these big giant bowling ball-sized spheres of bronze.
		And on a good day they'd move this thing a hundred and fifty meters.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Still pretty impressive.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		But it took them years and years.
		And then it's it this thing weighed around fifteen hundred tons.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's interesting that using bronze spheres, you know, brass spheres, I'm sorry.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is very similar to what you're describing with the obelisk.
unidentified		Right.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		But there's again, you when you compare the level of technology here to ancient Egypt.
		Ain't there's nothing.
		There's that they have they show you what they did with that Dizuti Hotope image.
		It's a wooden sled, no force multipliers, no capstands, no pulleys, no none of that.
		Just dudes yanking on a rope.
		There's no evidence they use pulleys.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Pouring water on the sand, yeah, slippery.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Milk or whatever, right?
unidentified		Oil.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Who knows?
		It's it's just stupid.
		You can't take you cannot explain it when it took us everything they had for years and years to move that.
		And by the way, they did they took that across the Gulf of Finland.
		And it wasn't on some little river barge either.
		They built a giant platform, took them a year to build it, and then they had to put warships on either side of it to keep it balanced.
		It's massive to even plop this thing in the center and hope that they got this thing over to Russia to then move it the rest of the way.
		So it ain't no barge carrying a thousand tons down the Nile.
		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's nuts.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Something happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it's all so fascinating.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And something happened is actually the only answer we have.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I would agree.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Ben, you're awesome, man.
		I really, really appreciate you coming on here.
		Your channel, Uncharted X, fantastic channel.
		So much good content.
		How long have you been doing it now?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I've been doing this.
		I mean, I quit my job 10 years ago, but not, I mean, Uncharted X. Thank God you had the courage to do that.
		It was a big old step.
		The wife was like, what are you doing?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I know, but look, you were right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It worked out.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I am super grateful that it's worked out.
		And in fact, I I want to I mean obviously thank you for the hospitality and the invite.
		And I genuinely also think dude, I I've come full circle with this a little bit.
		Like I what got me into it in the first place, genu I mean, I was always interested, but it wasn't until Graham's first who I've gotten to know very well over the years.
		I love that man.
		It wasn't until his first appearance on your podcast back in the old days, like was it 2011, 2012?
		Something like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That was just me and Duncan, that one.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		You and Duncan?
		Right.
		At your house, it's your house.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That was what I was doing at my house.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		That one was what really I mean, after that I followed him really closely.
		I went to Peru and Bolivia with him in 2013 and then 2015 and went with him to Egypt.
		So it's like the fact that I'm here talking to you now.
		You you started me on this and it's it's come full circle.
		So thank you for that.
		And and the fact that you are interested in this topic, I think is such a boon to everyone else out there that you know you get to spread the word and and it's it's just such a benefit to the whole the whole space.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm so happy that guys like you took that fucking baton and ran with it.
		But I mean wild ride, I love it.
		How I my my answer to all this is who's not?
		I don't understand you if you're not interested in this.
		How how is this not unbelievably fascinating?
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		100% I agree.
		I that's that's what happened to me.
		I fell down this pyramid-shaped hole and I was doing real I mean I had a I had quite a career before this in the tech world, but I mean I'd go to conferences and tech events, and the second that we're out in the break room, I'm talking about the younger drives and pyramids and massive statues and all this shit, Graham Hancock, and they're like, this is really interesting.
		I'm like, oh no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's literally the most interesting thing about civilization.
		That time period and the mysteries that are involved in trying to just decipher what happened.
		Yeah.
		It is the most fascinating time in history.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I think I'd agree.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I'd agree.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Phenomenal.
		Again, thank you so much.
		Thank you.
		We'll definitely do this again.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I would love to.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Especially if some more information comes out about the Labyrinth, and hopefully more people you know are also picking up the baton and more people get involved.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I see that happening.
		I'm very glad that that it is.
		I I'm I'm absolutely I'm thrilled to see other people getting into the field.
		I'm not a I don't see any of this as it's not competition.
		It's like all the right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a rising tide.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, come on, jump on board.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You could definitely say you found it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You could well everybody will agree that you found it.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		We didn't talk about the Sphinx and the stuff in the starshow, but save that for the next slide.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Let's do it again then.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Definitely do it again.
ben van kerkwyk ▲ ● ▼		I would love to.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This was awesome.

▲