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

Summary

American Alchemy: Episode Summary

Title: What's Happening Beneath the Pyramids? (Ft. Luke Caverns)
Host: Jesse Michels
Guest: Luke Caverns
Release Date: May 2, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of American Alchemy, host Jesse Michels delves deep into the mysteries surrounding the Great Pyramids of Giza, exploring recent discoveries and long-standing theories about what lies beneath these ancient structures. Joining him is Luke Caverns, a self-described vigilante archaeologist inspired by figures like Graham Hancock and Ed Barnhart. Their conversation navigates through archeological findings, skepticism within the academic community, and speculative theories about ancient civilizations.

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Recent Discoveries Beneath the Pyramids

Ground-Penetrating Radar Findings
At [00:25], Luke Caverns introduces the topic by referencing a 2024 collaborative study between Egyptian and Japanese researchers. Using ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography, they mapped the western cemetery adjacent to the Great Pyramid, uncovering a shallow L-shaped structure approximately 10 meters long. While the function of this structure remains unknown, its man-made origin has been verified.

Synthetic Aperture Radar Controversy
At [01:40], Jesse Michels highlights a bombshell discovery circulated on the internet in 2025 by Filippo Biondi’s team. Utilizing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Doppler tomography and artificial intelligence, they purportedly mapped what appears to be a small city or energy grid beneath the Giza Plateau. However, Luke expresses skepticism, noting discrepancies between published tomography images and those shared online. He states, “I think there’s a good chance there is something crazy underneath the Giza Plateau and I think it might go very deep” ([04:07]).

Expert Opinions and Skepticism
Luke agrees with prominent figures like Graham Hancock, emphasizing widespread skepticism among respected alternate researchers:

"Every respected person in the alternate space is highly, highly, highly skeptical." ([25:29])

He further critiques the reliability of SAR Doppler tomography claims, mentioning that experts doubt its capability to penetrate deeply underground and questioning the granularity and accuracy of the images being circulated.

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Academic vs. Vigilante Archaeology

Philosophical Divide
At [05:07], Jesse Michels frames the conversation around the tension between mainstream academic archaeology and "vigilante archaeology," represented by Luke Caverns. He praises Luke for embodying the spirit of explorers like Robert Schoch and Graham Hancock who challenge conventional narratives.

Ancestral Influence and Personal Motivation
Luke delves into his personal background, explaining how his family's history of searching for lost treasures and ancient mines inspired him to pursue unconventional archaeological paths. He shares a rich family lineage involved in exploring lost Spanish gold mines in the American Southwest, fostering a deep-seated passion for uncovering the ancient world's mysteries.

"I was always a classical guy. Classical would mean Egypt, Greece, and Rome. More so Egypt and Greece." ([76:02])

Combining Passion with Skepticism
Luke argues that the romance and wonder of the ancient world are often neglected in mainstream archaeology, which he perceives as overly sterilized and detached. He emphasizes that his approach focuses on reigniting public interest and belief in ancient mysteries without resorting to sensationalism.

“If I’m selling anything, I’m just trying to convince people or reignite in people the romance and the wonder of the ancient world.” ([09:00])

He acknowledges the criticism of being accused of “selling the mystery” but differentiates his approach by aiming to inspire genuine curiosity and connection rather than exploiting mysteries for profit.

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Biblical Archaeology and Ancient Texts

Exodus and Archaeological Evidence
At [14:52], Luke discusses the archaeological evidence supporting the Biblical Exodus, noting specific details in the Exodus narrative that suggest authorship by contemporaries of the events rather than centuries later chroniclers. He criticizes the dismissal of religious texts as purely mythological, arguing that many have historical underpinnings that deserve serious consideration.

Flood Myths Across Civilizations
Jesse Michels brings up the prevalence of flood myths in disparate, unconnected civilizations, suggesting a common ancestral memory or a global cataclysmic event. Luke concurs, proposing that these myths could be rooted in real, shared historical events that mainstream archaeology overlooks.

“Maybe Solon really did hear about a lost city while he was in Egypt.” ([21:37])

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The Great Sphinx and Its Mysteries

Erosion and Age Debates
A significant portion of the conversation revolves around the Great Sphinx's erosion patterns, which some suggest indicate an age far older than mainstream archaeology accepts. Luke cites Robert Schoch’s analysis, arguing that the Sphinx’s water erosion implies a construction date that could predate the Old Kingdom.

“I think that the Sphinx is probably the strongest argument in all of Egypt of an exceptionally old artifact or monument.” ([46:08])

Historical Accounts and Structural Anomalies
Luke references Herodotus’s accounts of subterranean chambers beneath the Sphinx and critiques modern scanning techniques, questioning their validity and the motivations behind sensationalizing such findings. He also points out inconsistencies in recent SAR scans compared to known cavities and historical records.

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Theories on Pyramid Construction and Purpose

Architectural Progression
Luke outlines the architectural evolution leading up to the Great Pyramid, highlighting a steady progression of monumentality over centuries before an abrupt leap during the Fourth Dynasty. He speculates that this sudden increase in capability suggests advanced or previously unknown technologies.

“You have a 500-year period where we can see a progression of architecture getting bigger and bigger and more monumental.” ([72:56])

Alternative Purposes for the Pyramids
While acknowledging conventional theories about the pyramids as tombs, Luke explores alternative hypotheses, such as energy generation or celestial portals. He questions the practicality of these structures serving purely as burial sites for individual pharaohs given their immense scale and complexity.

“I just cringe at the idea of that person that it’s being built for.” ([94:53])

Internal Ramps and Construction Techniques
The discussion touches on various theories, including the internal ramp theory proposed by Jean-Pierre Houdin. Luke expresses uncertainty about how certain architectural features, like the king’s chamber, were constructed, suggesting that ancient builders possessed now-lost techniques or an exceptional understanding of stone masonry.

“I think that ramp only gets you so far.” ([75:24])

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Collapse of Ancient Civilizations and Global Cataclysms

Younger Dryas Impact Theory
At [83:03], Jesse Michels introduces the Younger Dryas impact theory, linking it to global events like the end of the Ice Age and subsequent societal collapses. Luke speculates on potential future proofs of such theories and hints at his own bold hypotheses regarding past civilizations and their possible advanced knowledge or technologies.

Extinction Events and Human Impact
Luke discusses the mysterious extinction of megafauna in North America, challenging the conventional theory that humans were solely responsible through overhunting. He posits that there might have been larger environmental or cosmic factors at play, pointing to a lack of supporting archaeological evidence for human-induced extinctions.

“I think there have to be periods where civilization as a whole is flourishing and then everything crashes.” ([81:31])

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Spirituality, Consciousness, and Ancient Practices

Role of Hallucinogens in Ancient Cultures
The conversation explores the possibility that ancient civilizations used hallucinogenic substances to interact with perceived deities or access higher consciousness. Luke draws parallels between modern practices like ayahuasca ceremonies and ancient Egyptian rituals, suggesting that these substances could have influenced religious beliefs and architectural endeavors.

“Do we have certain substances around the world that have similar effects on people? Because we’re all wired the same.” ([110:39])

Shift in Consciousness and Modernity
Luke reflects on Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind, suggesting that a shift towards left-brain thinking might have coincided with the decline of direct divine interaction in ancient times. He muses on how modern civilization's technological advancements might obscure or override innate human connections to spirituality and ancient wisdom.

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Challenges and Future Explorations

Expeditions and Unexplored Sites
Towards the end of the episode, Luke shares his experiences and future plans for exploring uncharted archaeological sites in the Americas, particularly in the Amazon and the Sahara. He emphasizes the vast potential for new discoveries and the logistical challenges inherent in such endeavors.

“But beneath that canopy really is the widest, deepest frontier of studying human history. And it’s kind of like the last frontier.” ([141:11])

Personal Anecdotes and Health Challenges
Luke recounts his strenuous expeditions, including battling severe mosquito-borne illnesses in Guatemala, highlighting the physical demands and dangers of fieldwork in extreme environments.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Jesse Michels and Luke Caverns expressing mutual enthusiasm for future explorations and the continuing quest to uncover the hidden histories beneath some of humanity’s most iconic landmarks. Luke emphasizes the importance of maintaining an open-minded and passionate approach to ancient mysteries, advocating for a balance between skepticism and wonder.

“There needs to be this, like, moderate tone coming in where, hey, this is the evidence that I personally am aware of and that I have studied. This is what I think makes sense.” ([95:49])

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Notable Quotes

• [04:07]
  Luke Caverns: “I think there’s a good chance there is something crazy underneath the Giza Plateau and I think it might go very deep.”

• [09:00]
  Luke Caverns: “If I’m selling anything, I’m just trying to convince people or reignite in people the romance and the wonder of the ancient world.”

• [14:52]
  Luke Caverns: “We have to take that seriously if you’re like a modern archaeologist, not just throw that out.”

• [25:29]
  Luke Caverns: “Every respected person in the alternate space is highly, highly, highly skeptical.”

• [46:08]
  Luke Caverns: “I think that the Sphinx is probably the strongest argument in all of Egypt of an exceptionally old artifact or monument.”

• [75:24]
  Luke Caverns: “I think what I'm getting at here is, with five or six hundred years of expert stonemasons, they developed an understanding of how to move, lift, carve, cut, transport megaliths in a way that even 5,000 years later, we don't understand this.”

• [110:20]
  Luke Caverns: “So, you know, people that go down in the Amazon today and they take ayahuasca and they will meet a goddess down.”

• [141:11]
  Luke Caverns: “But beneath that canopy really is the widest, deepest frontier of studying human history. And it’s kind of like the last frontier.”

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Key Takeaways

• Mysteries Beneath the Pyramids: Recent SAR Doppler tomography claims about a hidden city beneath the Giza Plateau are met with skepticism due to questionable methodologies and unverifiable images.

• Vigilante Archaeology's Role: Luke Caverns represents a growing movement of independent archaeologists challenging mainstream narratives, driven by personal and ancestral motivations.

• Ancient Texts and Archaeology: There is a compelling argument for re-examining religious and mythological texts for historical truths, particularly concerning events like the Exodus and widespread flood myths.

• Great Sphinx's Enigma: Erosion patterns and historical accounts suggest the Great Sphinx may be much older than traditionally believed, pointing to possible lost civilizations or advanced ancient knowledge.

• Pyramid Construction Theories: Conventional theories on pyramid construction are questioned, with alternative hypotheses proposing unknown technologies or purposes beyond mere tombs.

• Civilizational Collapse and Cataclysms: Global events like the Younger Dryas impact may have led to significant societal collapses, challenging the linear progression narrative of human civilization.

• Spirituality and Consciousness: The use of hallucinogens in ancient rituals may have played a crucial role in shaping religious beliefs and cognitive development.

• Future Explorations: The Amazon and Sahara represent vast, unexplored frontiers that could potentially harbor undiscovered archaeological sites and ancient civilizations.

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This episode of American Alchemy provides a thought-provoking exploration into the hidden layers of one of the world's most iconic archaeological sites. Through Luke Caverns' passionate insights and critical perspectives, listeners are invited to question established narratives and consider the profound mysteries that still lie beneath the sands of Giza.

Transcript

[Luke Cabert]

What is dadication?

[Unknown Host]

The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariona. We call him Dae Dae for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge. And there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together. We did a good job. That's Dadication. Find out [e-mail] brought to you by.

[Luke Cabert]

The U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. AmenHotep III dies. Amenhotep IV becomes king. And he says, I'm not worshiping Amen anymore. I'm only going to acknowledge the one true sun God, the Aten, and I'm going to make my name Akhenaten. And so he changes it. And then they start depicting themselves with the elongated skulls. And where does the skull elongation come from? We don't really know.

[Unknown Host]

And many of the historical kings themselves were merged with divinity. The sun God. Even up to Louis xiv, he was the sun God in the French context.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Advertiser]

What is going on underneath the pyramids? First, let me give you a little bit of context. In 2024, a collaborative effort between Egyptian and Japanese researchers using ground penetrating radar and electrical resistivity tomography mapped the western cemetery adjacent to the Great Pyramid. Their non invasive methods revealed a shallow L shaped structure approximately 10 meters long. We still don't know the function of this structure, but we do know that this underground, probably man made artifice is verified and real. Also verified and real. Former Minister of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass, known for being a professional, Debbie Downer and skeptic himself, has acknowledged the existence of three independent tunnels associated with the Sphinx. So that is the context in which an absolute bomb was dropped on the Internet in 2025. Just recently, a team of researchers led by Filippo Biondi used a technique called synthetic aperture radar, Doppler tomography and artificial intelligence to measure construct what looks like a small city or energy grid underneath the Giza Plateau. Technically, this modality SAR Doppler tomography, can map subsurface territory. In fact, this technique is sometimes used to map magma chambers inside of volcanoes. But the image circulating the Internet involves a level of granularity and detail and in my opinion, takes a lot of liberties. It also involves hand wavy claims about perfectly accurate artificial intelligence using. You see, the actual tomography images don't match what's being circulated online. I think there's a good chance there is something crazy underneath the Giza Plateau and I think it might go very deep. But this new discovery is very hard to assess. Are we being conditioned to accept a truth that the Egyptian Ministry of Culture is already aware of? Is this sort of a Rorschach test? Is this purely fake news or just some researchers grasping at straws? To find out, today I'm interviewing an amazing guest, what I'm calling a vigilante archaeologist in his twenties carrying the torch of Robert Schock, Graham Hancock, and his mentor, Ed Barnhart. Without further ado, please welcome this week's American alchemist, Luke Cabert.

[Luke Cabert]

Different parts of the brain have different activities.

[Unknown Host]

You know that, don't you?

[Luke Cabert]

Maybe you should interview me.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

You know what's funny? I don't think I've, I've blatantly said this. Caverns is just a second middle name. My last name is actually Reagan. And, and so the reason I did not go with my last name when I was, you know, creating a public Persona or presenting myself in public was one just for privacy originally. Not that I, I guess I don't care about that too much now, but. And also when people would search up Luke Reagan, all you would ever find was, was Ronald Reagan. And, and so it's the same family. He's like a distant, distant cousin of mine.

[Unknown Host]

Really?

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, really. But the, but the determinism actually comes from my, my dad's side of the family. Back in the 1890s there were you. People can look it up. If you pick up any book, if you go to like to half price books down here, down this road and you're able to find a book about the American west, like the Wild west, people searching for lost Spanish gold in the United States. This is a big thing. The Spanish were here in the mid to late 1500s searching for, you know, ancient Native American treasure as well as gold mines to send back to Spain. There's all these great stories about them. And if you find these books about it, you'll find my family in those books. And that's kind of where my family name begins, is searching for lost Spanish gold mine and treasure in the American Southwest. So in Big Bend there's, you can look it up. There's a place called Reagan Canyon and there's this huge epic tale of like lost gold and mystery and mysterious deaths of people from West Texas all the way out to San Antonio, Texas. And it's my family like battling all these people for this lost Spanish gold. It's fascinating story. One of those brothers makes it out, gets involved in the oil field and in gold mining. Then his son picks it up after him and goes looking in New Mexico for the seven lost Spanish gold mines of southern New Mexico. And within a year he discovered them and he opened up these 450-year-old gold mines and had this company going for about eight years. And eventually there was a tragedy that befell the company and the whole company fell apart and they fell into poverty. And my dad was accidentally born during that time and so my dad didn't experience any of that, didn't really inherit, inherit that Adventurous spirit. And somehow I did, like, somehow it carried over to me. And. Yeah, so I just kind of come from this lineage of people who have been interested in the ancient world. And while he was a gold miner and an explorer, he was also what we call today an antiquarian. So it's a guy. Antiquarians were usually like, guys who were pretty wealthy that had the money to be able to carry out pretty unorganized archaeological expeditions and or excavations. And he would just collect the artifacts. And so, you know, they're sitting in boxes today and we still have them. So. Yeah, that would be the determinism.

[Unknown Host]

That's fascinating. It's almost like you have some unfinished business on behalf of your family that you are now pursuing. And we were talking about this earlier on the phone, but it's like, I think a lot of people in the kind of academic world of archeology need to fully separate out, you know, their pursuits with anything autobiographical. So they can't say that they're, you know, inspired by anything seemingly irrational or seemingly like, you know, some hermetic lineage or, you know, whatever. It has to be like. I am engaging in perfect deductive and inductive logic, you know, and I just get, you know, figuring it out. And that's so not how humans in general interact with any subject matter. And so, you know, we were talking about Heinrich von Schleimann, the guy he found TROY in the 1870s, this German businessman who was like, he was really interested in, like, you know, Homer and Thucydides. And so he was like, you know, I think the Peloponnesian War happened. And then that, like, you know, led him to. Or Sir James Bruce, who, you know, we have the Book of Enoch because he discovered it and he was like a Scottish Freemason and he went looking for the Ark of the Covenant and he came back with the Book of Enoch. So you have all these, like, fascinating. So you are, you know, maybe part and parcel of that, of that sort of, you know, lineage, which is awesome.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, I think I still, I hold on to that, that romance of the ancient world that inspired so many of the great stories that we still talk about today. That really inspired the only stories that are worth talking about. Right. You know, people don't talk about centuries later, the highly logistical and ultra sterilized, you know, deductions of such and such, such and such. It's always some kind of human passion that lives on, you know, and I totally agree with you. And, and it's that it's sort of that, that Ancestral calling drive to dive into the ancient world and. And I don't know, like explorer, really distant places. Yeah. I still feel the romance of the ancient world when there's such a drive to sterilize everything. You know, I think that that is the problem with modern mainstream archeology is that it is so sterilized and so against anything being. And of course they would never admit this, and I don't know if passion is the right word, but. But they don't like romance. I was a conversation about this thing specifically with an archaeologist or maybe he's like a geoarchaeologist. And I was talking to him, he was accusing me of being somebody who's wanting to sell the mystery, which. That's a big thing that goes on as people sell the mystery and they kind of just. They kind of inflate things where there's not really a mystery and they turn it into something and there's a lot of mystery out there. But I think if I'm selling anything, I'm just trying to convince people or reignite in people the romance and the wonder of the ancient world. And like the magic that that has, that, that. That that carries with it. It's like an escape from our modern day. And of course, that wasn't good either there's no. Human nature is not allowed to prevail anymore or. Or to. To shine. It's. Everything has to be so sterilized and so un. Just thoroughly uninteresting. And then they wonder why they're losing, you know, the popular audience and why they've never been able to connect with them.

[Unknown Host]

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

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[Luke Cabert]

Oh well, I mean there's so much I think. Yeah, I mean if we're in the conversation of looking for historical evidence of the Bible, you would need to go back to, you know, the Old Testament because there aren't really any historians that debate whether or not Jesus Christ was a real person. But as far as something that I, that I have been interested, that I've spoken about before is the, the archaeological evidence of the Exodus. And I don't know, I mean this is such a nuanced topic. I don't know how deeply we could go into this but you know, you, you read, you read the Exodus and it's, it's fascinating as to, it's fascinating like the specific details that they get into, you know, common, common phrases that were said during that time. The, the details that are in the Exodus story when you're looking back could have only been written by somebody who was alive in Egypt during the time of the Exodus, which would be sometime during like the mid New Kingdom period. So let's. Let's call it very roughly somewhere between 15, 1000 BC and so some of the details in there as to, like, how the women squat on these blocks and give and give birth to children was something that you would have only known if you were living there and not living in Israel a thousand years later. Right. And so it's just fascinating, like, getting to your point. It's just fascinating. Yeah, that. That. And I have. I have some problems with this, too, as to how we. We take a religious text like that and we just completely cast it to the side. They do the same thing. They do the same thing with the Iliad and the Odyssey. You know, they do the same thing with Homer's works. I completely cast that out. And I. Yeah, I think it just kind of. I don't know. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, well, you. It's like. Yeah. I think a good example is the Heinrich von Schleiman, you know, Peloponnesian War. Well, the. Troy was never real. Well, actually, he found Troy. Another good example is the myth of Atlantis, where you have Plato and Solon saying that there was a great flood here 9,000 years ago. He's saying this in 600 BC that dates back to 9,600 BC, which is the year that, according to people like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, there's all this archeological. Interesting evidence that the Younger Dryas period ended, and it was this great flood, this meltwater pulse, 1b. And so that pattern matches as well. So I think it's really easy to relegate things as religion or myth, when, in fact, the flood myths. There are hundreds and hundreds of these flood myths, and they're across completely uncorrelated, disparate civilizations that didn't really have a ton of contact with each other. And so one would, I think, be wise to take that seriously if you're like a modern archeologist, not just throw that out.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah. I think the. There's a. There's like, a conservative argument there that, you know, the reason we have so many flood myths from around the world is because, well, you know, people live next to large bodies of water, and large bodies of water are bound to have some kind of horrific flooding someday that people just continue to tell. But I've talked to Dr. Barnhart about this, and even Dr. Barnhart said this on a podcast that he and I were on together, was that even he feels that to some degree, this really might be some kind of leftover ancestral memory that is passed down of this, you know, horrific event that just eviscerated so much of humanity. And people have, have held onto that. But at a certain point I had the realization that, you know, this modern fascination that, you know, millions of people are wrapped up in this, this search for, you know, a lost civilization, this Atlantean civilization, and that kind of, that can kind of get muddy because the term Atlantis has now kind of become an umbrella term just for this concept of a lost civilization or lost civilizations that could have existed long before. You know, it's this whole alternate space has become this huge range of beliefs.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah, well, and there's that quote that's gone crazy viral in his debate against Flint where I think Joe asks him, he says, so would you say in what has been studied, there's no evidence for a lost civilization? He's like, well, yes, in what has been studied, there's no evidence for it. I get what he's saying, but it, but I mean, that's a serious point, is that we don't. I try to tell people this is. I'm very open minded to everything. Very open minded to the. Extremely open minded to the fact that Ancient people are achieving a lot of things that we can't really explain by conventional means. They're incredibly intelligent, far more intelligent than I think that they've been given credit for. But I mean, we still don't have like hard evidence of the fact that this civilization existed or that there were any of them. But you can see these holes in the historical timeline that need an answer. It needs to be filled. I don't know what the answer is. And so that's the approach that I've always taken. And the more I've learned, the more I've realized that, yes, Plato is using Atlantis as a tool in his works to essentially, you know, he builds up the story that Athens was, you know, 9,000 years ago was at war. Or he's. He's either building up the story or he's recounting the story, but he's saying that Athens was once at war with this long lost city named Atlantis. Atlantis was overly arrogant and, you know, and disrespected the gods, and they were impious, and so they fell. Well, he's obviously telling a story there because Athens did not exist 9,000 years before that.

[Unknown Host]

Right.

[Luke Cabert]

I mean, as far as we have evidence for, they did not. And Athens has been thoroughly excavated. But that part could just be an allegory. Sure, Athens did not exist 9,000 years ago, but maybe he's recalling on some kind of mythical city that people back then knew about or had heard about or that you hear in a children's story. Or maybe Solon really did hear about a lost city while he was in. While he was in Egypt. But the reality there is that we just don't really know exactly what the reality is there. And there's, you know, I guess mainstream archaeologists are very quick to say that they know exactly what Plato's intentions were and that the fact that he just pulls it out of thin air and made it up, I don't think that that can be. I don't think that that can concretely be said. But there's no doubt that he's using it as an allegory in his story because he's making Atlantis as a mirror for Athens. He's warning people that Athens is falling. You know, so there's. There's some nuance there. And, you know, the more I. The more I have studied the ancient world, the more I've realized just how unsure we are about the ancient world.

[Unknown Host]

Absolutely. Well, Plato's extremely hard to decipher because he and Socrates had a bias against writing. And so it's all through this sort of peripatetic dialogue or whatever, is how you have to interpret everything. Timaeus and Critaeus, the discussion of Atlantis, the whole thing is occurring at a mythos festival. And so it's like. And then even if you read Plato's Republic, he says at the very beginning, like, a lot of what I'm about to say is a lie. But then he goes on to describe things that I think probably speak closer to, like, true ontological truth. Again, this is not something anybody can lay claim on, I think, in our earthly world or whatever. But in my assessment, closer to ontological truth than, like, anybody. But he says that up top. And a lot of this was due to the persecution of his mentor Socrates, who, you know, the state ended up killing. And so you never know with him.

[Luke Cabert]

It's always, I love how much you know about this.

[Unknown Host]

I don't know, man. I'm very passionate about it. But, you know, it's, it's. It's always hard to. It's always hard to say, okay, this is a perfect segue. Very hot in the news right now. And it goes hand in hand with what you're talking about, which is basically that maybe some of these civilizations could have been more advanced. But there is this whole grifting, you know, playing up the mystery, you know, industry around us that we have to be honest about. There are these researchers, this Italian guy, Filippo BIONDI, and in 2022, I guess you have this peer reviewed paper and it's just coming out now that through these synthetic aperture radar imagery, we have found these vast structures below the pyramids. The verdict seems like it's still out. I texted Graham Hancock about it. He said, I have no reason to believe that the source here is being honest. So, yeah, I don't know. What do you think?

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

I agree, it is insane. And it's also just think about the way AI works, right? It's like pattern matching based on other things. So it's like when you get an answer on ChatGPT, it's just like their best averaging and to their assessment, like the highest quality stuff that they're sifting through online. But it's just token prediction. It's just pattern matching on steroids and it's gotten very good. So it's like Turing passable pattern matching or whatever. If you think about the pattern matching necessary to craft together an energy generator machine underground, that is n of 1. That's not like you don't have a large sample size to do pattern matching on that. So yeah, it's just literally impossible given the way we know AI works.

[Luke Cabert]

And the other thing is, before they are even going deep underground, they're scanning into the pyramid and supposedly they, they, they create this, this 3D model. I'm sure that you've seen where they took a, they took a visual 3D model of the king's chamber and the relieving chambers and they, they, they duplicated it five times inside the Khafre pyramid. And they said this is what they're detecting. There's no serious team that would do that. You would not take a 3D model of a chamber inside a different pyramid and then superimpose it on top of this pyramid. You're scanning and say this is like that, that's crazy that you wouldn't do that. It just, that's a unique structure to the Great Pyramid and it's very unserious to do that right now. On top of that, even with that 3D model that they created, they did not include and in their scans you cannot see represented the chambers that we know are inside Khafre's pyramid, the ones that you can pay the ticket at the Giza Plateau and walk into today. Those chambers aren't included as well as There are these two cavities. One's at 69ft below the surface, and the other one's like 112ft below the surface. And they're big cavities that are bigger than the burial chamber inside Khafre's pyramid. Those aren't represented in the scans either. So you have nothing of what we know is there the way that we know that those are there. I think we talked about this on the phone. Is Luis Alvarez, the scientist that worked on the Manhattan Project. He takes a team there in the 60s, and they do a scan in the Khafre pyramid. And I think that they just. They're standing inside the burial chamber and they're scanning up towards the, you know, towards the point of the pyramid. And they, they checked and tested the equipment, and they were able to detect all four sides or all four corners as well as the sides and the. And the, the pinnacle of the pyramid. So they knew that their scans were that, that these muon scans were accurate. And in everything that they scanned, they didn't see any more chambers above, above the chamber that they were standing in. And then in the 70s, another team from Stanford came in and did another scan and they confirmed this. They had the same results scanning up, but they also scanned the shallow bedrock around, and that's where they found these two cavities in the ground below the Copher pyramid. And also we know that these are accurate because they confirmed it and tested everything. Well, this new copper scan hasn't. It's not even tested. They just pointed it at the pyramid. And then, you know, now we have this huge press release over something that wasn't tested. You know, it's just crazy.

[Unknown Host]

It's crazy. Well, it's funny. Like, I'm very pro podcasting and indie journalism and, you know, I never thought the pendulum would maybe swing this far where it's like, I look at the incentives on Twitter and it's like some of the tweets where I'll caveat them and I'll say, look, I don't know if I believe this. This is speculation or whatever. Like, let's, let's. Let's speculate and see what's up. Those, like, do really well, you know, and then the ones where I'm like, you know, it's very, you know, more nuanced or skeptical or whatever like that. You know, those don't do well. And like, I tweeted a thing. It was like, you know, this little picture of like a UFO on Mars or whatever. I'm like, you know, maybe this is a ufo. Do we have any good debunks or whatever. And, you know, that went crazy. And then I came back and I was like, I've come to the conclusion this is a rock protrusion. It's not a ufo, and it just didn't do as well. So the incentives lead you towards sensationalism.

[Luke Cabert]

Oh, and that, that's the thing, right, is. Is you can be so brainwashed is a hard term to use, but people get so taken advantage of. You know, there are so many people that are in their nine to five going to work every day looking for, whether they realize it or not. Like, you're just looking for more. Yeah, you're just looking for more in your, in your life, things that are interesting. And we're so consistently lied to in the media when it comes to politics and when it comes to, you know, socioeconomics, world economics, foreign affairs, we get lied to all the time and have been for decades. And people don't trust anything anymore.

[Unknown Host]

They don't.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Totally. And I think the distinction you have to make is, are, Are you peddling a known lie? Because if you are, then you should, you know, take yourself off air, do some introspection, you know, and, and, and figure your life out. If you're not, and you're explicitly saying, I don't know, but we're like, exploring this together. This is not some official expert view, but, like, this is possible. That's fine. You know, And I think the breakdown of trust leads to another criteria, which is like, do we trust the person's thought process or the person like, you know, they're, they're, they're just being an honest actor. Yeah. Where if they don't know about something, you know, they'll, they can change their mind or like, say, like, this is probabilistic thinking or maintain some epistemic humility. So yeah, well, that's interesting on Luis Walter Alvarez. So it sounds like we already have deeper knowledge on pyramid structures than what these guys are even coming out with. Do we have any evidence that there's anything underground? Because you've talked about this and I think the Ministry of Culture. What's his name? Hawaz. Yeah, Zayawaz. He's talked about maybe structures under the Sphinx.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah.

[Unknown Host]

So is there something there?

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[Unknown Host]

That would go a long way under the Sphinx.

[Luke Cabert]

Specifically under the Giza Plateau.

[Unknown Host]

The Giza Plateau or the Pyramids.

[Luke Cabert]

Okay, so the Sphinx thing goes back to Edgar Cayce. And there's probably a lot of people who know a lot more about, you know, this guy. Supposedly he was a psychic and another Atlantis guy. Yeah, yeah. And so he. I could be getting this wrong, but I think he was on like a psychedelic trip or something. And he essentially had some kind of vision that there's this chamber beneath the Sphinx that holds this hall of records that tells the story of Atlantis. And so this has been. That's the 1940s. So this has been around for 80 years or so, been very popular. And the drilling that they did in the 90s to see if there was a chamber there that was overseen by Zahi Hawas. And you can see, see in the video, when they drill, they drill away from the Sphinx, you know, I don't know, just to, to a semi shallow depth, and they go, oh, there's nothing there. We're not going to drill anymore. That's a little weird to me.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

But I would say, as I say with my audience all the time with these really grand ideas that are out there, my def. My default position is always probably not, but maybe, you know, that's just like if we're being real with ourselves, that's the, that's the reality. Now, as far as things under the Giza Plateau, Absolutely. The Giza Plateau is like a honeycomb. It's as much empty space under the ground as it is solid bedrock. And this comes from a whole host of factors. So on the northern cliff, on the northern cliff face, to the west of the Great Pyramid, there's this tomb called the Tombs of the Birds. And they call that, they call it that because in the 1940s when it was being excavated, so, so Egypt declared war on Germany, I think, in 45, and they were nervous of the, of being under attack of an air raid. You know, they thought that the Luftwaffe was going to come in and bomb the pyramids or something. But there's still excavations going on. You know, they never stopped excavations during the war. So they're trying to identify, like, where can we go, you know, to use this bomb shelter. So they find these tombs on the, on the northern cliff. And while they're in there excavating it, they find this little wooden bird. And so it's been popularly thought that, or it's been speculated that this could be evidence of aerodynamics, like thousands of years before, you know, it was discovered. And of course, Egyptologists quickly brush it off. But I've always wondered if it's been tested. And apparently MythBusters did a little thing on it and could determine that it actually could fly if you added like one thing to it.

[Unknown Host]

But anyways, interesting.

[Luke Cabert]

At the back of that tomb, there was something that wasn't recorded by the original explorers in that the tomb builders as they're chipping away everything. And it's amazing. Have you ever been to Egypt?

[Unknown Host]

Yep.

[Luke Cabert]

Okay, so, so you probably went to the Valley of Kings.

[Unknown Host]

I did.

[Luke Cabert]

And so you think about how big of a project that is when you go all the way down to the back of those tombs.

[Unknown Host]

It's insane.

[Luke Cabert]

Every square inch of that tomb is quarried away and carried out. It's a, a big project, you know, to do that. And so while they're doing that, they hit a cavern and you go through like one of these cracks in the walls and there's these caves that go under the Giza Plateau, the whole plateau. And the further they go back in these caves, the more little artifacts and stuff that they find. And as they, the more they've explored the Giza Plateau, the more they have found examples of these tombs going, you know, these shaft tombs that they're building, going deep underground. And then they hit a cave. And so the Egyptians obviously explore it. We don't really know what the Egyptians thought of these caves or what they believed by them. That's like invisible in the historical record. What else is under the Great Pyramid is, you probably know, is, you know, the, the Giza Plateau. The limelight is taken, is completely taken up by the pyramids and rightfully so. But when you visit the pyramids and you're trying not to stumble over all the stones, you will notice how many holes just, just descend down in the ground into nowhere, right? And 5,000 years of sand has been blowing in these things and it's never filled up, you know, these holes and shafts and labyrinths underneath the plateau. And truth be told, I mean, we know that some of them were either vertical shaft tombs or they're 45 degree shaft tombs. And they'll go down into this labyrinth where we'll find tombs there. Many of these are later periods, so let's call it a thousand B.C. to well into the Roman period, 300 A.D. you know, up until Constantine becomes Christian and all the temples are closed and everything. You know, you have Roman, you have Romans who want to be buried at the foot of the Great Pyramid. So they go in, they take out the old Greek, Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian bodies and replace them with themselves. So, you know, you have, you just have an incredible density under the Great Pyramids. Further than that would be the Osiris Shaft, which I'm sure you've heard of. You know, as, as, as famous as the Osiris shaft is. There's such little amount of literature about it and what exactly it was used for. It's if you're walking on the causeway. So from the middle pyramid, Coffer's pyramid, the. The thing that's the center point of this whole SARS scan, you have that causeway that goes down to the Sphinx. You may remember this. Just a big stone road. Well, the Osiris Shaft is totally inconspicuous. You wouldn't even know where it was if somebody didn't show you. You. I was with Land of Kim, and he showed me, if you're familiar with him. And so you go down in the Osiris Shaft, and it drops down. You have this initial chamber that's got seven. Seven chamber extensions. What those were used for, we don't really know exactly. We don't know. Then there's another descending chamber that goes down. You go down this huge ladder, and there's this room that's filled with water. And they don't know to what extent it was filled with water in ancient times. But in the center, there's this elevated platform that has this huge sarcophagus in it. And. And what's really interesting is that in the 5th century, Herodotus is exploring in Egypt, and he's told about this huge shaft that goes underneath the Great Pyramids. And he would. And we don't think that he actually went down there. Maybe he didn't know where the entrance was, or maybe the entrance was lost, or maybe this was just even a legend in his time. We don't really exactly know. But he records that down in the Osiris Shaft, there was the tomb of a great king on an island surrounded by a lake of water.

[Unknown Host]

Whoa.

[Luke Cabert]

What is that? You know what? On an island under the Giza Plateau surrounded by a lake of water. Well, sure enough, they. I think it's in the 80s or the 90s that this expedition is carried out. Of course, all the credit is taken by Zahi Awas. Yeah, I read his paper recently on, I think it's called Giza in the Osiris Shaft. And at the very beginning, he takes sole credit for it. He's like, this is my single greatest discovery. And, you know, in my Egyptological career or whatever.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

And it's underground.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

That's fascinating.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Not that I know of.

[Unknown Host]

That is fascinating. That's so interesting. Wow. Do you? Yeah. Go for it.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

No.

[Luke Cabert]

Okay. So the Assyrian is probably one of the most mysterious places in all of Egypt. It was constructed at a site in Abydos, which is Abydos. According to the traditional Egyptological timeline, Abydos is even older than Giza was, around long before the pyramids. And so the traditional Egyptological explanation is that in the 19th Dynasty, Seti the first builds this temple. And it's this oddly shaped L temple. And behind that, he created, and I should say this temple is made out of, like, modestly sized limestone blocks. So the blocks are maybe this big big, but not something that a few men couldn't carry and stack. And it's a beautifully made dynastic temple. You know, just. You recognize it as that iconic Egyptian style. But then behind it and lower into the ground, maybe another 30ft into the ground before you get to the roof, is something called the Osirion. And it is made out of the biggest stones in all of Egypt that are in these temples. This is in southern Egypt, and it's the biggest stones in all of Egypt. And rather than how the rest of the temple was made out of modestly sized limestone blocks, this is made out of gigantic red Aswan granite stones. Only two of those stones could fit in this room. This huge square pillars. None of it has hieroglyphics on it or anything like that. Just utterly, completely different construction style. So this is a really fascinating topic in this space. And people who are interested in ancient Egypt will know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't believe that the Osirion was created by Seti. I think it was far older than Seti. When people say that, they think it's 12,000 years old. It's more so just a popular belief. It isn't actually based on, you know, anything. I think that whoever built that also built the Sphinx temple. You may remember this. It's that huge red granite temple next to, next to the Sphinx. I'm sorry, the Valley Temple. Gigantic stones. I mean, some of them couldn't even fit in this room. Those two architects must be the same. And I think that they're much older than the 19th dynasty, more than 2,000 years old.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

What, what dates are the fourth dynasty?

[Luke Cabert]

20. Well, so the fourth dynasty is. Well, I mean it's very rough, but let's call it 2600 to like, let's call it like 2650 to 2450, 200 year period bc a lot of people don't like that because, you know, this idea of like the 12,000 year Egypt being 12,000 years old is so popular, but unfortunately that actually isn't based in anything. The only evidence for Egypt being considerably older is the Sphinx.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

That the other two. It's more speculative. More speculative, but clearly there's some conflation going on between these structures that we can't date that seem presumably older and then these, you know, traditional Egyptian structures. Is that right?

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

He's, he does stuff with Randall Carlson.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah. So he was on a podcast called Lost Ancient Technology or something, and they were in front of the pyramids and, and they talk about how Graham has come around to believing that the pyramids are a fourth dynasty. And I think that that's where the, I think that's where the evidence points. Now, talking about the, talking about the Sphinx, that erosion on the Sphinx is just. If the Sphinx was really constructed under the reign of Khafre. Because what they, what they say that they think happened is that you had this huge limestone outcropping in the, in a, A, a canal from, from the, from the Nile river used to come right out to the base of the pyramids. You know, when you're out, the Sphinx was. If you're standing at the base of the Sphinx without any effort, you could throw a stone into the Nile river without any effort at all. That's how close the Nile was coming up to the Giza Plateau. And so as people are sailing by, they almost certainly would have noticed this huge limestone outcropping the top of the Sphinx head. Think about if that's how, how high up that limestone used to go. It was no surprise that it was there. Which contradicts what they, what they, what the traditional idea is about the construction of Khafre's pyramid complex in that they accidentally hit this huge limestone outcropping and then decided to turn it into a sphinx or something like that. There's a big hole there. There's something there that doesn't quite make sense. It's not like they accidentally ran into this. If anybody here, you could go on Google Earth and do this, it's much more obvious when you're there in person. If you look at the height of the Sphinx's head and you look around you, you're like, like there's no way they accidentally hit this thing. This is a huge limestone outcropping that they always had to have known was there. Especially if you're sailing by, you would see that limestone goes, yeah, you know, so I think that it's not unlikely that this could have been a venerated monument in pre dynastic times. It's obvious that it would have been there. And there's another spot on the Giza Plateau down on the southeastern side near what's called the Workers Tombs. It's this. I think it's near Kent Cowes pyramid. And it's really not much of a pyramid anymore. All the stones were taken away. I mean, it's not even. You can't even see it as a pyramid anymore. It's completely unrecognizable. But down in there, there's this little piece of the limestone that's eroded in this really strange way where when you walk up to it, it looks like the back of another sphinx head. It's still there today. And you can tell if that' that formation with the sphinx head used to look like it used to. It was some weird rock formation.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

You can see how someone would turn it into something. You could mistake it for a head. Anyways, I don't know what the Sphinx originally looked like. It sure as hell looks like it used to be a lion and that the lion's head was shaved down and turned into something else.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Well, and I don't think that that's a completely crazy idea. The best thing that would substantiate that is if we could figure out a means by which the labeling of constellations is preserved over the course of 10,000 years. You know, how far back does astrology go? Yeah, you know, I would love to. I would love to find some kind of evidence of people really far back in history recognizing the same constellations.

[Unknown Host]

Well, it's funny. That's always the most fantastical thing that I think people like Robert Shock or Graham Hancock say that to me, it's either not real, or if it's real, then you have to get into ontologically trippy territory vis a vis people from the stars or something, because they're talking about monuments being made over cosmic timescales based on processions and stuff, paying homage to, you know, star alignments. And so, I mean, maybe the Occam's Razor explanation for that is, like, you have a lot of time to, like, stare at the sky or something. So like, that becomes, like, a way more part and par and parcel of any ancient culture. But there might be. I don't know, it's still crazy. It's still really fascinating.

[Luke Cabert]

I was having the same conversation. So I was telling you yesterday I was out in Big Bend, Texas. For anybody watching, Big Bend is just this huge national or state park in West Texas where you have 100% visibility of the night sky. And you go out there and it's just daunting. It reminds you of how small and insignificant and of a speck you are in all reality. And I was talking to my buddies while I'm out there and they probably get tired of hearing me talk about ancient history and the cosmic scale of everything and. But I find it fascinating. And I was telling them, imagine this is at least 30% of human reality until we create lights that just have an insane amount of light pollution and we can't see the stars anymore. At least 30% of our lives was supposed to be sitting underneath the night sky, looking up at the night sky. What kind of psychological effect does that have on us? Negatively? That removes us from the way that we were intended to experience the world, you know, and so I, I think that a caveat to saying that. I'd love a caveat to saying that I would love to see evidence of, of the recognition of constellations be preserved throughout, you know, thousands of years. A caveat to that is that maybe human beings are just all wired the same, you know, and that can get into a whole other thing. Where I was in Mexico, I was, I was at this Olmec site called La Venta. I'm standing at the base of the Great Pyramid of Lamenta. And I've been down and I'm looking at this, these ant hills. And, and I, I realized, like, these ant hills have streets in the middle of them. These are leaf cutter ants. They have these, I think they're leaf cutter ants. They have these streets in the middle of them. And, and these highways, like, go off into the jungle and across, like, the, the flat ground, and they've got these big ant mound pyramids. I was like, oh, this looks exactly like a Mesoamerican city. I mean, exactly like it. And it just dawned on me, well, what if human beings witnessed this and saw that this is like a, a civilization grid layout, and then they model themselves after ants. But then it also thought about the fact that it doesn't matter where you put ants on the planet. They will do that because that makes the most sense. And so is it like, because they're all wired the same, they're the same organism, right? And they, they do the same things in the same way that. That the other day I was in my kitchen and I make these chick fil a grilled or chick fil a chicken sandwiches. And I'll make the breading by hand. And so I'll get, like, corn flakes and I'll crush them up in my hand. Well, after a while, your hands get rubbed sore from crushing these kernels. And so I have it in this bowl and I look around, I'm like, what's something hard I can just use to crush this instead? And so I grab like a seasoning thing and I start. Start grinding it down. And it just realized I invented a mortar and pestle in my own kitchen without thinking about it. Why? Because I'm wired that way. I'm wired to do that, you know, and people all over the world invented mortar and pestle independently, right?

[Unknown Host]

Yes. So often at the same time.

[Luke Cabert]

Often at the same time with a wheel.

[Unknown Host]

And, you know, all these sort of inventions seem to pop up in disparate cultures that don't have contact at the same time. It's fascinating.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Well, didn't Tesla, he, like, directly says that, Right. He thought his brain was an antenna.

[Unknown Host]

For ideas that would make sense. If you read his book My Inventions or whatever, it's like he just visualizes these experiences. He'll like. Like he'll work through an entire experiment in his head before doing a thing. So I believe he said that. Yeah, it's fascinating. I think you'd need a new model of electrodynamics because these things kind of signal would attenuate too quickly or something. You put somebody inside a Faraday chamber, they can still think. Right. But I mean, it's probably the ultimate hubris to say that we have now we're at the end of history as far as our physical models of how these things work. And I think, yeah, there's a lot to lead one to believe that there's sort of a client server relationship. There's, you know, where the clients, that's server or something. We're sort of, we're downloading, even look at base pairs of DNA or you know, agct and it's always, they're called base pairs because it's always the same combination. So it's like ones and zeros on, you know, semiconductor.

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[Unknown Host]

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[Unknown Host]

It's fascinating.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah. I think just capping off the Sphinx thing. You know, there were. There were cultures that existed prior to the unification of Egypt.

[Unknown Host]

Egypt.

[Luke Cabert]

And really all that was, in a simple way is you have a bunch of people who migrate to Egypt. When the Sahara dries up, you only have a few places to go. You have this huge green Sahara 10,000 years ago or 12,000 years ago, and it starts drying up over the course of about 5,000 years. And these Saharans only have a few choices to make. They can go to the Mediterranean coast, they can go to the Atlantic coast, they can go down towards the Congo and the savannahs, or they can go to this huge river to the east. And the people who go to this river to the east, this fertile oasis, which is the Nile river, they are packed into this. You know, on. On the east side, there's a mile wide of really lush, fertile terrain. On the west side, there's a mile wide as well. And you have this really compacted area. And they're all living on. They're all living on top of each other. And so they are not able to have this roaming nomadic lifestyle that they used to, where you could have your herds of cattle and you could have them graze on this grass and graze on this grass, and you just go up and down the Sahara, you know, or back and forth on the Sahara. Now you have to invent sedentary lifestyle, and that blossoms into civilization because people are living on top of each other. But it doesn't just start that there's like one guy who can rule over the whole Nile. It's the strongest. I mean, literally the strongest guy in each little compacted area. So we call them chieftains and we. A little bit of evidence for them. But we. We kind of just assume, well, this probably did happen. But you have these chieftains that rule in these little areas, and then those chieftains war against each other and the territories. You know, one guy conquers, the other, his territory doubles. Well, eventually you end up in this period called the two lands, which is Lower Egypt, which is. Which is in the north, because the Nile runs north. So the lower end of the Nile river is in the north, North, Upper Egypt is in the south. And all the unification of Egypt was, was when both areas had completely unified into their own kingdom. This, the king of the southern kingdom marched his army north and smited the king of the northern kingdom. And I'm sure you've seen this pose before where it's this pharaoh grabbing the hair of a man and he's got his scepter in the air and he's about to crush his head in. Well, that's a pose that every pharaoh did for the next 3,000 years. That's the unification of it. Inside both lands you have all these different subcultures of people. Like you have the Badarian culture, the Mahdi culture, the Nakata culture. It goes on and on and on. Well, you have the Mahdi culture that lived in the area of Giza. And I've always thought that it was perfectly possible that the Sphinx could have been their God or some kind of representation of some divine celestial deity. Maybe Leo, you know, something along those lines. That was a carved out and venerated lion monument that had been venerated long before the pyramids were ever there, before anything else was ever there. That this could have been a venerated monument. And I've like often said in jest like, yeah, there could have been some kind of Sphinx cult, some kind of lion cult that existed there long before the pyramids were ever there. That's more of my belief. When exactly that is. Robert Schoch's first estimate was anywhere between 5 and 7,000 BC, I believe. And then he pushed it back further because he had some other evidence that that seemed to align better. I would be, I wouldn't really feel crazy about saying that, that the Sphinx could be 5 to 7,000 B.C. going beyond that, I don't know. But it certainly seems like something that is incredibly old. The water erosion around the enclosure just doesn't make a lot of sense. I've seen so many people attempt to debunk it and I've openly listened to it, but I just don't see a convincing argument for the Sphinx being 2450 BC.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

Oh, here's another thing. Is the pharaoh Thutmose IV from the New Kingdom, let's call this Thutmose IV is probably born around 1350 B.C. and when he's there, well, during his reign he erected something called the Dream Stela. And it was him talking about how when he was a young kid, before he became pharaoh, he went and slept under the shade of the Sphinx and the Sphinx visited him in a dream and said, the Sphinx essentially tells him through what we can translate. I used to rule over the desert, and now the desert disrespects me and rules over me. And it's covered my, you know, enclosure. Free me from this and I will make you the pharaoh of Egypt. So Thutmose does this in about 1350 BC. So what this says is that around a thousand years after the youngest date of the Sphinx being cut out, it was already covered up and buried. So in that thousand years, really less than that, all that water erosion had to have occurred. It's not possible.

[Unknown Host]

Possible.

[Luke Cabert]

It's just not possible for that kind of water erosion to occur. Because what they'll say, what scientists will say is, well, you know, it's been 4400, 4500 years since the Sphinx was cut out. That kind of erosion can certainly happen in that period. No, that's totally ignoring the fact that a thousand years later, Thutmose IV says it was covered, says it had filled in. And he had to excavate all of it and clean out the Sphinx enclosure to become the pharaoh. So really it's in like, let's call it five to 800, 900 years. All that had to be filled in. It's just not. The logic just doesn't work. And so I think, I think it's perfectly plausible that the Sphinx goes back further.

[Unknown Host]

Fascinating.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

Two crazy questions that I know are on everybody's mind. One is how were the pyramids built? Maybe impossible to answer, but you have, you know, Houdin in France saying that it was built from the inside out. You have other theories that water was used. The big question is how are these sort of 20, 30, 40 ton granite blocks moved from the Aswan River Valley 500 miles away? And then the second question is, you talk to Graham Hancock and he says adamantly, he's like, the pyramids were not just a tomb, they were something else. And maybe some sort of celestial ascent chamber, portal thing. You have Christopher Dunn saying that they were an energy generation machine. Mean, so how are they built and what were they used for? Impossible to answer.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

But as far as the how. I've looked into this, the water theory, I've heard about the blocks being floated up, but I don't know how that's feasible.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, I don't either, because you would have to.

[Luke Cabert]

You would have to drown all of Egypt to get water that high. Blocks may have been. Well, I mean, they definitely were floated on boats along the Nile. But, you know, I. When I really think about it, practically, I think that some kind of. Some kind of. There's this idea of the internal ramp theory. Have you heard of this?

[Unknown Host]

Yes.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

This is Houdin, this French guy.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When I really try to think about it practically, I can't think of anything better than that. But then you get to a point where you're getting so high up on the pyramid, you know, when you get to the king's chamber, which is a made, which is made entirely out of the Aswan granite stones. You know, the vast majority of the stones in the pyramid are limestone, and they're sourced from right next to the pyramid. You can see the quarries next to the pyramid. Then the casing stones are tura limestone, which are, I think, are 15 miles south, found on the opposite side of the river. And we have a ledger of those being brought up to Giza. It's called the Diary of Morer. And he says that he's bringing these tura limestone blocks up to the horizon of Khufu. Now, granted, we don't really know what the horizon of Khufu is. Maybe it's the Giza plateau. But I've also heard a proposal. It could just as easily be like. Like Khufu's palace, which is lost. We don't know where Kuvu's palace was. Anywho, we do know that there are tur limestone that come from south of Giza. So those are the three types of stones. Now, it's not really infeasible as to how they move. Giant limestone blocks. I mean, even as big as it is, it's only like two And a half tons, you can move that. But it's the 80 ton red granite stones that have to be hoisted up 140ft into the, you know, know up from the ground and placed into the ceiling of the king's chamber. Yes. I mean I can sort of see how you could build half of a pyramid with an internal ramp. But when you go, when you get to the second half and everything is so steep and tightly compacted, I don't know how you finish that job, you know, but, but granted. Have you ever heard of the guy named Wally Wallington before?

[Unknown Host]

No, but I love that name.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Cool.

[Luke Cabert]

So he's moving these 100 ton stones like on a single pivot point by himself. Now this will get thrown out there by, you know, you know, there's people who are like professional debunkers, like archaeologists that their whole YouTube channel is just debunking.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Sure.

[Luke Cabert]

And so I think what I'm getting.

[Unknown Host]

At here is, but is in the fourth dynasty, 200 years.

[Luke Cabert]

Well, so here's the thing, is that the fourth dynasty, you know, there's, there's this idea that the, that the pyramids like spring out of nowhere. It just boom, they arrive and well, it's kind of true. But at the same time, you know, the fourth dynasty is this 200 year period, let's say roughly 2650 to 2450, but they were arriving. If we go from the end of the third dynasty to dynasty zero, well that's 2650 all the way back to 3100 BC. So now we have 500, 600 years of history and stone masonry leading up to this explosion of, of architecture. So you have a 500 year period where we can see a progression of architecture getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more monumental. But then there is a jump in the fourth dynasty where it's like they just, it's like they figured out flight or something. You know how, you know, how we like we figured out, you know, in 1911, we figure out flight or 1910. And then boom. You know, everything explodes. It's like that. There's this progression and then boom. It just exploded.

[Unknown Host]

Stealth aircraft, that.

[Luke Cabert]

Exactly. And, and so take, take our evolution of technology, how we go, let's call it the 1500s, technology goes like this and then boom. 1900. It just explodes. Yeah, it was just ready. Well, think about stone masonry in Egypt. It was progressing for so long, and then all of a sudden Egypt has this incredible amount of power and they just explode in capability. It's like this endless capacity of, of monumental architecture. And we can get into that. And the more I've studied it, the more I have explained to myself the rationale of how these things happen. But it isn't in line with stuff I learned from academics, which I constantly get accused of drinking through the straw of academia. I hardly have any connections in academia. I'm friends with approximately one academic who. Dr. Ed Barnhart. I just study this a lot and make, and I look at the evidence and make it make sense in my head. Now, getting to building the pyramids. Yes. I think that with five or six hundred years of expert stonemasons, they developed an understanding of how to move, lift, carve, cut, transport megaliths in a way that even 5,000 years later, we, we don't understand this. It gets to a certain point where it's like we, it's, it seems infeasible to us, but they probably had all kinds of tricks and like genius nuances. I mean, I think the best way I can describe this is they knew they had a, they had a perfect, natural, non upgradable technology and use of techniques. Right. Like perfect, natural and non upgradable. And when it's done, there's no evidence of how they did it because it was so clean. Right, right. Like the finished product is there, but the evidence of how they did it is gone because they were that good at it. Right. That's kind of the way that, that, that I explained it to myself. So I think that a ramp only gets you so far. I don't know what the next steps are. I don't know how you finish it. I don't know how you get the casing stones that slide perfectly in place up at the top of the pyramid with a capstone sitting up on top of it. That's another thing is a lot of people don't know. A lot of people think that they're Egyptologists, think there never was a capstone. I think there almost certainly was. But I think the ramp theory only gets you so far beyond that. I don't know.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Wally. Wally.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

No, actually.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Well, you know, there were periods where. Where. Yes, that was my expertise at that time. The way it started was. So my grandfather was a missionary, but he was also like a historian of the ancient world. And this is my grandfather on my mom's side. So I had this influence of this explorer on my dad's side. But then I had a missionary and a biblical historian on my mother's side. Both of those influences me, I was always a classical guy. Classical would mean Egypt, Greece and Rome. More so Egypt and Greece. That was always my interest. And a little bit of the Holy Land of the biblical world. As far as my future career in the Americas, I will still do expeditions in the Americas and carrying out exploration here, but I think it's going to be in North America. I think it's going to be in the U.S. there's a lot left in the U.S. or like where? I can't say specifically.

[Unknown Host]

Interesting.

[Luke Cabert]

But Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, West Texas, Mexico, I can't tell exactly where, but yeah, yeah, there's. There's a lot left. I mean, there are, there are entire. I call them cities, but they're like small ancient cities that have never been discovered that are really in the United States. Absolutely. Absolutely crazy. 100%.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

How old are we talking?

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Wow.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah. There's an ancient city in Texas that was discovered that's 10,000 years old.

[Unknown Host]

That's next to this River.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah.

[Unknown Host]

Do you think, you know, we have this narrative that's been popularized in anthropology that's like sort of primitive to progress. Do you think that some of these ancient civilizations, outside of the, you know, evidence we have in Egypt and other places like that, and outside of the woo woo thinking a lot of people like to kind of engage in, do you think that there are civilizations that were just way more advanced than meets the eye? Like, for example, you look at the Amazon and it's so undiscovered still. And what if we was talking to Graham Hancock about lidar ing over the treetops of the Amazon forest and you can see the topology and then you see a little geoglyphs kind of popping out and then you go down and we're doing this all the time and finding all sorts of crazy stuff. And so if archeology as a field is only a little under 200 years old, where we found Assyria, Babylonia 200 years ago, isn't there sort of a law in archaeology that the farther you go, the longer you go the older civilization actually gets? And Gobekli Tepe is just the tip of the iceberg and you have a lot more advanced stuff that we're going to uncover that's way older. And maybe civilization's more like an S curve and not like this hockey stick thing then.

[Luke Cabert]

Well, yeah, I would, I would absolutely say it's an S curve. I mean, ancient Greece is a perfect example of that. You have the height of the Bronze Age, then you have the Trojan, you know, you have the Trojan War, and then the Trojans War seems to coincide with the fall of the Bronze Age. Greece falls into the dark, you know, the dark period, and then it comes out of the Archaic period. So you have this huge dip in, you know, in their technological capabilities. There's no more writing anymore during, for some of that period. That's just one perfect example. That same thing also happened in Egypt where you have these long periods of centuries where nothing is happening. It's like this. It's like this invisible dark period where we don't have any more literature or anything. Now those are on micro scales, but like a macro scale. Yeah, I mean, definitely there have to be periods where civilization as a whole is flourishing and then everything crashes. A macro scale would also be like the collapse of the Bronze Age. I mean, all around the Eastern Mediterranean, every ancient civilization was heavily impacted or their, their infrastructure collapsed and had to recover. And that's on a macro scale, like an ultra macro scale. We're looking at civilization all across the world. Yeah, yeah, there, there definitely had to be periods where things happen that impact society, like stun it or you know, like stuns progression or, you know, completely eliminates humanity. Nobody knows exactly what was going on during the Ice Age, but I guarantee you that the North Atlantic ice cap and this dramatic event, that instant, I say instantly, but rapidly ended the Ice age. I mean, and it eviscerated North America. The reason that we don't go to, you know, when you go to a zoo, there's never a North America section. You know, what do we have in North America? We have bears, deer, foxes, rabbits. Not a whole lot else.

[Unknown Host]

Snakes.

[Luke Cabert]

Snakes, sure, yeah. You have that like in, in the aquariums or whatever. Not the aquarium, whatever. But you don't have a North American section because we lost so much of our megafauna at the end of the Ice age. But man, we used to have giant sloths, we had woolly mammoths and elephants, we had large saber toothed cats, we had the short faced bear, we had the American lion, which was twice the size of the African lion. I mean, we had so much wildlife here. And it was all destroyed. It just disappeared at the end of the Ice age. Now sometimes they say that they were all hunted to extinction by, by nomadic people. I just spoke to an evolutionary biologist last week and he and I were both like. I mean, humanity had been around for over a hundred thousand years before that. You don't think during that hundred thousand year period humanity was able to realize if we kill off our food source, the food source doesn't exist anymore?

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me. And it's like, what do you have like spears at the time? Are you really extinct?

[Luke Cabert]

Spears and bow and arrows.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

I don't think you're eviscerating entire populations of it. It just doesn't seem feasible to me. And human beings, they were ignorant to the things that we know today, but they weren't ignorant to their natural world. And what is the pillar of their world is their food source? It's the pillar. As far as we know, agriculture doesn't exist at this point. They are hunting animals and living side by side.

[Unknown Host]

You think there was an extension event, like some, some larger?

[Luke Cabert]

Absolutely.

[Unknown Host]

So yeah, I mean, this brings up a question which is, you know, you brought up Luis Walter Alvarez. You know, he had this theory that an asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago and that caused you know, dinosaurs to go extinct. You now have Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock talking about the younger Dryas, you know, impact theory that you know, comet impact from the, it was an air burst I guess in their opinion from the torrid meteor stream, you know, hit the Earth's atmosphere and then caused the ice age and then also brought us out of the ice Age. Is there something that you Luke Caverns believe will get proved down the line? Do you have a big bold hypothesis? It could be on anything. It doesn't have to be on an extinction event. But I always think it's a very interesting. My former employer Peter Thiel has a question which is what's the thing that you believe that very else very few other people agree with you on? So what's something your high conviction on that no one else agrees with you on? And you know, you're at the tender age of 27 so maybe you don't need a great answer to this question. But.

[Luke Cabert]

You know, about five years ago, no, it's been longer than I know it's been, it's been like, it's been like 10 years ago. I started, I started asking myself really hard questions about Christianity. I was raised Christian, still am, but I'm writing a video right now titled why I'm no Longer a Modern Christian. Quotations and in studying the ancient world and really in studying the Americas, it changed my perspective on so much Modern Day Christians, 21st century First World Christians are so ignorant of the grand scale or large scale humanity and they almost never juxtapose that or try to compare it or rationalize it with their religious beliefs. This can go in so many different directions, even as simply as a direction of okay, why did God only present himself to a small minority of people living on the eastern Mediterranean 2,000 years ago when civilization was already blossoming all across the Americas. What about people in the Americas? What happens to them? Well you really never get an explanation from that from your average Christian or even like your exceptionally educated Christian. These are just hard questions that most never ask themselves. Another thing is because you always hear a Christian say there's only one God, there's only one God. But they never go beyond that because the Bible clearly states that there's more than one God. Clearly states that. I mean even God himself, the Hebrew God Yahweh recognizes and acknowledges the existence of the gods of Egypt. In Exodus he tells Moses that he's going to, to execute his. I think it's Exodus 12. He tells him that he's going to execute his wrath on the gods of Egypt and even during the Genesis story. You know, there's an interesting thing that happens here where it seems like I say it seems like. I'm not saying this is what it is, but it seems like God doesn't tell the truth to Adam and Eve because he tells Adam, you know, don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for you will surely die. And then the serpent, you know, comes to Eve and, and essentially tells her, like, what do you mean? That you'll surely die? You're not going to die. He's afraid that if you eat this tree, you'll become like him, which is odd. And then Adam and Eve eat from the tree, which I have my own idea of what I think that that tree is. And then God's immediate reaction to that is he turns to this divine council, this mysterious council full of other beings in heaven. Heaven that's way very much often overlooked. And he says, behold, man has become like us. So they didn't die. They became like God. So it's like weird that God didn't. It's like God didn't tell them the truth. Or is it that they died, that their innocence died? That can be a whole other. That can be a whole other thing. And I don't have a hard opinion about that, but these were hard questions I was asking myself. And then I came to the realization during this period, I was like. I was like, if I'm going to be a Christian, I have to rationalize and accept some of these beliefs. And when God in the Old Testament acknowledges the existence of the gods of Egypt and says he's going to cast his judgment on them, does that mean that the gods of Egypt are real? Does that mean that these experiences that the Egyptian priests and, and that the pharaoh are having, that they so commonly talk about these gods coming and speaking to them and, and they are. They're convicted with this purpose of this thing that they have to do, which seems so bizarre to us. Like, you know, people who are fans of the Atlantis hunt, if you try to talk to them about ancient religion and say, well, you know, these are spiritual people, these are very religious people that are convicted. They go, oh, come on, man, nobody would do that. They might do it if it's really happening. And, and that is. That's something I almost never talk about because I. I don't know quite how to explain it, but I. I certainly think that when you look at all of these temples in Egypt, you look at the obelisk of Hatshepsut where at the top of the obelisk and at the bottom of the obelisk, like right at eye level. You can go up to it and read it. And I've read the translated hieroglyphs and she said, said, she said, as for this obelisk, it's something I'm paraphrasing, but it's like as for this obelisk, I erected this from, from electrum, which was just like gold and, and, and your wealth. So she paid to have these two obelisk erected, she said, like any good king would for their father Amun, which is this God. And she goes on to talk about how she did this for the God and everything. And then at the temple of Luxor, the back chamber was a chamber, you've been to it. So this huge chamber and you go to it at night, it's the one that's always lit up at night. That huge chamber in the back, as far as we know, was reserved only for Amenhotep to connect to his father Amun Ra, the God. And I'm sitting, I'm standing there in the middle of this back chamber that not even the priests are allowed in, only the pharaoh. And I'm thinking, was this whole temple built, built for Amenhotep to enter it and not come face to face with Amun Ra? It wasn't actually happening. This is all made up.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. Why would you spend so much effort.

[Luke Cabert]

And this whole temple is here for nothing?

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

No it's not. Look at, I mean everything that just the Egyptians achieved. Then let's jump over to ancient Greece. Look at all the temples that they erected, the Parthenon. Look at everything that they did on behalf of their gods. I mean so significant to the point, point that Leonidas goes to visit the Oracle of Delphi to determine as to whether or not they should fight against the Persians. I mean they really believed in the gods. They actually believed in them. And I've heard Greek professors say that, you know, these women who would become like as the vapors came up under the ground of Delphi and the woman would become possessed with the spirit of Zeus. And I've heard of a Greek historian, college professor say I don't mean this in any symbolic or spiritual sense. I'm telling you that this literally happened, that the woman was literally possessed with the spirit of Zeus. And that was absolutely jarring for me to hear that from a professor. He wasn't kidding at all. He's like, it's not spiritual, it's not metaphysical, it's not, or it's not metaphorical, it is actually happening. And he talks about these other women that would become possessed by the gods and they'd run around naked on these mountainsides and everything. And he was like, they'd wake up the next day and not remember anything. He's like, it's not an exaggeration. It was actually happening. And you look at the Americas, man, all these ancient temples and sites that were erected on behalf of these God beings. It's every ancient culture recognizes these gods that exist on our planet. And I think that my hill that I die, that I would die on, if there is one, is that ancient people were not making it up. Yeah, I love that they weren't making it up.

[Unknown Host]

Well, it's an assertion of modernity to say that they were. It's just as much an assertion to say that they were than like, we don't know. It's really impossible to say. And then if you were to put yourselves in their shoes, like, it seems like they actually weren't making it. Like they weren't talking about it in mythological terms. There's a guy named Julian Jaynes, I don't know if you've heard of him. He was a Yale professor. He wrote a book called on the Origins of Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind. And he used to say that.

[Unknown Advertiser]

Basically.

[Unknown Host]

We shifted towards left brain thinking and we have this modern divided brain. But that really occurred post 1000 BC and it's this very kind of gestalt, big history view. It might be very imperfect. Post 1000 BC 1000 BC and he was kind of laughed out of the room, but there are people who definitely take him pretty seriously today.

[Luke Cabert]

Do you remember why exactly he says post 1000 BC?

[Unknown Advertiser]

I don't.

[Unknown Host]

I have to go back and read the book. But even if you look at the New, the Old Testament Testament, that God speaks directly through signs and through great signs, or Sodom and Gomorrah destruction in many cases, and then he speaks through prophets and then he sort of goes away. And so there is something about the Ark of God even in the Bible himself. And then he has to sort of anthropomorphize himself in the form of Jesus in the New Testament. So there is this arc of direct intervention to leaving. And that begs all sorts of really interesting questions. So I'm with you. Also, it's like we were talking about the why on a lot of these really crazy megastructures. And it's like, maybe you'd be way more motivated if These gods were actually real to you?

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that's the thing about the pyramids is even I cringe at the idea of a structure that massive being erected and prepared for the burial of a single man. I cringe at that idea because it's hard for me to fathom somebody. I inherently have a negative perception of that person that it's being built for. If there was some guy today, let's say Jeff Bezos, wanted a pyramid for his own burial, I just think, like, it's gross, right? But at the same time, for someone in the modern day to immediately dismiss that as a possibility, it's like an arrogance of modernity. Right? Because. Okay, I would ask that person. I see this all the time in my comment section, in the comment section of every video. You know, nobody would do this for, you know, whatever. Okay? I would. I would tell that person, okay, please dive into the mindset of somebody living in the early 1900s for me.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, it'd be really hard.

[Luke Cabert]

Okay, please dive into the mindset of somebody living in the early 1800s for me, and let's go back every single century and go. Let's go back 47 centuries. And please dive in and tell me logically how their world is. You read nothing.

[Unknown Host]

You read Pride and Prejudice, and you're like, this is the weird Victorian, you know, is like you're looking across the room and you have Darcy and all these characters. Like, you read that, and that's like, oh, that's like another planet. You go to Tokyo now and you're on, like, another planet or something. You know, it's, like, so different from American culture, and so. Yeah, completely. Yeah. 2,000 years, 3,000 years.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Same. Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

Because we're that disconnected from them. It doesn't make much of a difference. And that's the thing is, trying to come up with a rationale behind why they did it is fascinating, but to have such a strong opinion over it is ridiculous and foolish. And it doesn't matter if you think that they were tombs or not. Being so tied to your opinion that you can so quickly dismiss someone else's opinion or say that anything is ridiculous is foolish because. Because you can't even tell me the rationale behind people living a hundred years ago. You know, it's like you think you're an expert. You think you can possibly know something 4700 years ago. You can't, you know, so that's why there has to be. There needs to be this, like, moderate tone coming in where, hey, this is the evidence that I personally am aware of and that I have studied. This is what I think makes sense. But there's so much else out there.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. And many of the historical kings themselves were merged with divinity. Aunt Gotten is a good example. Or it's like the sun God, you know, and, or even up to, you know, Louis xiv, he was the sun God in the French context, but was literally ruling under divine right. And that was not like some metaphor. It wasn't some joke. That was, you know, he was seen as sort of godlike.

[Luke Cabert]

Well, Henry V, he believed that he was the conduit of God himself, that he was performing. He was performing the will of God to expand England's kingdom. I mean. Yeah, yeah, this, this idea of, of, you know, your king being the direct conduit of God himself can have a tremendous impact on a, on a civilization. This was happening in the fourth dynasty too. You know, prior to that, there was an element of piousness that the, you know, pious means. That means just being, having a reverence for, like, a certain deity, having a respect for a deity, submitting to a deity, to a certain deity in a way or a religion in a way. There's this element of piousness, but then in the fourth dynasty, that is still there, but there's an elevation of the, of the king or the pharaoh status where he is now becoming merged with the God. And I've often wondered, and I, I don't really see this proposed by any Egyptologist, but I often wonder, you know, prior to the Great Pyramids, people don't realize this tomb building is this, is this. It's either a vertical shaft going straight into the ground or it's a shaft that goes about 45 degrees into the ground. The exact opposite is true with the pyramids. If we're to assume that Those are, that, those are tombs. And I mean, here's like a simple thing. I know people don't like the tomb idea. Sometimes I cringe at it as well. Well, there are sarcophagus, sarcophagi in the chamber. Like if you're getting, if you're going to now explain to me why that's not a sarcophagus, you're really getting out there now, you know, I'm not opposed to that, but I'm just saying that's the reality of it. And the sarcophagi are too big for the entrance way, so they're not brought in later. They were placed in the room while the room was created. And that's why, you know, that is such a hard thing to get around that even, you know, Graham Hancock gets to a point where he's now saying on the Joe Rogan thing, well, perhaps it's not a sarcophagus, perhaps it's a place where you lay down, down inside of. So now we're laying a person in it. It's very akin to a sarcophagus. But he's saying this may be a place where your consciousness is being elevated and you're gaining some kind of cosmic wisdom. Okay, that's interesting, but we're still laying people in it. That's how compelling just a simple human sized box is in that room that had to be laid there when it's made. But these chambers are now above ground. They're, let's call it roughly 45 degrees above ground. I've tried to get into the psychological aspect of this and I have wondered if now that we're seeing the pharaoh being merged with the God Ra, perhaps he is now a divine being that needs to be buried above ground. He's not supposed to be buried below ground. Or let's go another step further. Here's another one of my theories that no Egyptologist and no alternate person agrees with is the inside of the pyramids. It's very odd that there's no hieroglyphs on the inside of it. I hear a lot of Egyptologists will brush this off as like, well, you know, there's no hieroglyphs inside of it because tomb decoration just hadn't got to that point yet. But that's not accurate because we see older tombs that have tomb decorations in them. Okay, so you have the chronology of the pyramids is you have the step pyramid, then you have the pyramid of Maidum, then you have the bent pyramid, then you have the red pyramid, then you have the great Pyramid, okay, The Saqqara step pyramid. Down in those labyrinths below that, there are depictions of the Pharaoh Djoser up on the wall in his iconic, like, striding forward in the Heb Sed festival imagery. And he's visiting these divine sanctuaries and casting these spells in the afterlife, all in hieroglyphs depicting the pharaoh himself. Immediately after that, there's no more interior tomb decoration. Why is that? I don't know. Because on the outside of the temples, in the funerary temples, on the outside there are depictions of, there are hieroglyphs, there is artwork. Why is it now disappearing from the inside? Well, the only crazy explanation I can come up with in my mind that nobody agrees with with is I think that there maybe is some kind of elevation where the pharaoh himself is no longer the pious king serving the God, but now he is the God. And that the pyramids themselves, this is actually something that the archeologist, his name starts with a P, that excavated the pyramid of Amenemhat iii. He asserted that this was never a tomb and that this was a symbolic tomb doom for this, for the pharaoh's ka. So you have the ka, which is the divine essence. So you have the ka and the ba. You have these two separate parts of your soul that have to coexist in your life and then they have to meet later on in life. So that's why the body is preserved, so that the body can last longer with the ka or with the ba, and that the ka, the divine part of the spirit, can find the body in the next world. When we have hieroglyphs that depict that this is what they think, that the Egyptians believed this is what was happening. And so I've heard this thrown out there before by one Egyptologist back in the, in the late 1800s. He asserted this, and I believe it too. And I think that it's true for the fourth dynasty. Now, Amenhotep or Amenemhat III, he's Middle Kingdom, this is, call it 1900 BC. So I am kind of graphing that onto the fourth dynasty, which is five to seven hundred years earlier. I think that these pharaohs were ascending to the status of a God and that the pyramid was not for the body of the pharaoh, but for the divine essence of the pharaoh that belonged to the God. And that's why there's nothing inside of it, because you don't need to write hieroglyphs inside of a, inside of a pyramid for the divine essence of a God, you need an impenetrable. Building that the divine soul of the God is buried in, and that pharaoh himself is buried somewhere in the south. The reason I think that is because Amenemh iii, his pyramid is a model of the old kingdom pyramids. And he was like, hearkening back to this lost. Or I should say he's hearkening back to this older kingdom. And his body was buried in the south, down in a place called Abydos. Abydos is where the earlier pharaohs were buried. So he gave himself two burial sites. And because his pyramid complex is a model for the old king kingdom, I think he knew something that's invisible to us today, that the pharaohs of the old kingdom were never buried in their pyramids and their tombs are down south.

[Unknown Host]

Whoa.

[Luke Cabert]

Because the south is the religious capital of Egypt, that's where you're supposed to be buried. But the pyramids up north, that's the economic capital of Egypt. And the pyramid is like, symbolic. It's symbolic of Egypt's power. It's symbolic of the divine power of the God, and it's symbolic of the divine power of the king. King. So there was never a pharaoh buried in those pyramids. It's the burial of the divine essence of the pharaoh's spirit. That's a crazy explanation, but we're talking about people who were basically aliens. We don't know. We don't relate to these people in any way. Life is nothing like ours. And so it's just. You get to this point of crazy speculation, and my explanation there has only slightly more evidence to it than the pyramid power plant idea. You know what I mean?

[Unknown Host]

Sure.

[Luke Cabert]

We're just getting so far out, it's hard to explain.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. As long as you demarcate the thing as speculation, I think it's totally fine and great. And it creates. In science, you need a hypothesis. Right. So you need to get crazy in the hypothetical stage. And then, you know, you got to corroborate it or whatever. But even if you go to the, you know, national museum in Cairo and you see some of these mummified, you know, pharaohs, they look very short. Clearly they've engaged in some sort of cranial deformation to mimic the gods. And they look like gray aliens. They look so strange.

[Luke Cabert]

Especially during the Amarna period, which is what you were talking about with Akhenaten, man. That's a fascinating time period where Akhenaten, like, flips Egypt on its head. And what I think was happening here, I'm going to dive into this at some point, like do a Big video essay on it. You have the priests and you have the temples that are becoming really, really powerful. And I wonder, this is why I said the author of the book, you were saying that this impiety, this not respecting of the gods, this losing our religion begins around 1,000 B.C. because that's about, that's about the collapse of the Bronze Age. And really that's the fall of Egypt is where it takes this downturn and it's the end of the chapter of the corruption of the temples, I should say. Or it's where the corruption of the temples had permanently solidified its negative impact on Egypt. And Egypt would just collapse forever. At the beginning of ancient Egypt, the pharaoh and his family were the sole rulers of Egypt. And as long as you had an unquestionably powerful ruler, Egypt prospered greatly. But think about the logistics of this. You become pharaoh, your wife is like the divine mother, the king, and then you give all of your brothers and sisters, which you probably had a lot, and you gave all of your cousins and their spouses jobs. Everybody has your best interest at heart. But your brother dies and you don't have a great replacement for him. But you have your friend that you're really close to. He's not part of your divine family, but you're going to make an exception for him. Fast forward 600 years. Only 20% of the government is now part of the Pharaoh's family. And everybody else is competing for power against the pharaoh through one way or another. This is what happened with the temples. And what I think you have is you see this feud, starting with the Pharaoh Amenhotep iii, who is the father of Ak. Akhenaten. And what I can just imagine happening is Amenhotep III is absolutely fed up with the temples competing with him for economic power. You have so many people bringing money and incredible amounts of like meat. You know, meat is extremely expensive in the ancient world to bless their ancestors in the afterlife. So you leave these offerings at your, you know, at the temple, or you leave the offering at your ancestors tombs to feed their, to feed them in the afterlife life. And do you think the priests are just going to let that food rot there? No, the symbolic gesture is now over. Now all the priests take the food, they take the offering and consume it themselves. That's why you have all these statues of these fat priests, because they're so wealthy. And clearly they're wealthy in food, they're wealthy in resources, and they're wealthy in money, and they own the land around Egypt. So they're butting heads with the pharaoh. And what I just imagine is the 18th dynasty is the most powerful part of Egypt. It's the, the, it's the juiciest, most dramatic chapter in ancient Egyptian history, unless you want to count Alexander to Cleopatra, which is at the very end. But anyway, you have this dramatic increase in power, and it basically reaches its pinnacle under the reign of Amenhotep iii, who is also competing with the priesthood. And I can just imagine him in the palace, like, pacing back and forth with his little son, Amenhotep iv, listening to him and he's saying he, you know, Egypt should be like the way it was in the old days, where the pharaoh himself was the king, was the divine ruler, and he was the high priest, not some other high priest that now competes with the pharaoh. If I had it, you know, if I could really have it my way, I would erase all of them. I would destroy the temples, I would eliminate all the priests, I would declare myself the high pharaoh. Egypt just isn't what it used to be. And the pharaoh's power is diminished. And you have this little boy who's growing up like, yeah, you know those guys. And, and Amenhotep the Third dies. Amenhotep IV becomes king, and he says, I'm not worshiping Amen anymore. This God that Karnak Temple was built to worship, it's done. Karnak Temple. I'm closing the doors. I'm closing the doors of all the temples. I'm only going to acknowledge the one true sun God, the Aten. And I'm going to make my name Akhenaten. And so he changes it and he moves the capital somewhere else. It's just a fascinating era. And then they start depicting themselves with the elongated skulls, which is really fascinating. The art just completely changes. And where does the, the skull elongation come from? We don't really know. We don't know why it arrived right then. And then the Yamarna period ends within that same generation and the elongated skull thing goes away.

[Unknown Host]

Whoa.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah. So it's like this little period that's really trippy where the skull elongation shows up. Up. Why does it show up?

[Unknown Host]

What period of time was the skull elongation happening?

[Luke Cabert]

I'm going to say that this is like 13th century B.C. 1250 B.C.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

Somewhere that's really, really rough.

[Unknown Host]

Fascinating.

[Luke Cabert]

Maybe even a little bit. Maybe even another century before that.

[Unknown Host]

Okay.

[Luke Cabert]

You know, the numbers get real messed up. Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, so.

[Luke Cabert]

So, you know, you have people that go down in the Amazon today and they take ayahuasca and they will meet a goddess down. And you have thousands of reports of people meeting this similar goddess being woman, that automatically knows everything that's wrong with you and can have such profound effects on you psychologically that it can cure your addictions and things like that. And I wonder. It's one of two things. It's our brains are all wired to receive this image of this goddess woman that has this crazy effect on us because we're all wired the same, so we're all bound to have the same effect. Effect of this plant. Well, in Egypt, you have your own. You have your own hallucinogens. You know, you have the lotus flower, which is this huge mystery. You have opium, acacia trees. Exactly. And so you wonder if these people are taking these hallucinogens and these gods are like. It. Are like the anthropomorphic manifestations of what they're experiencing. Right?

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

Or whether or not.

[Unknown Host]

Well, it's fascinating. Like, even the cre. Like the. The idea of combining this, you know, DMT with this MAO inhibitor or whatever, which is us putting that in the kind of modern pharmacological context. But it's combining this, you know, substance with this vine in the Amazon is such a. An improbable, you know, thing to find in the first place. Which begs the question of, like, you know, was that just trial and error mirror? Or what sort of divine inspiration or what inspiration led them to sort of find this stuff in the first place? And then you have. Yeah, you have. In Athens as well. You have the Eleusinian mystery rituals, Eleusis being 13 miles northwest of Athens, it's the spiritual capital. And you have all the guys who we consider the fathers of Western thought and civilization today. Plato, Socrates, Alcibiades, all These guys taking this kekion drink and seeing all sorts of crazy things and experiencing noesis, knowledge of their primordial soul. But, you know, it's sort of under. Under death that they can't actually talk about the mystery schools. And clearly it had this profound effect on their. On their thought process.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

It's fascinating. Yeah, Alcibiades is a good example. He talked about the.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Thanks, man. Well, he was. He got in trouble for talking about the mysteries because you're, you know, you're not supposed to talk about fight club or whatever. So that's. I didn't know that about Eratu. That's. That's so interesting. Yeah, it's. I mean, the other. The other interesting cut at this is, like, you look at all these gaps in civilization generally. So it's like. Like the Terence McKenna stone dape theory or whatever. Like, you could explain the doubling in cranial size from Homo habilis to homo sapiens. So 2 million years ago to 300,000 years ago with, you know, human hunter gatherers were following scat, basically. Shit. Because they were trying to hunt for prey or whatever. And you had, you know, Psilocybis cubensis, you know, mushrooms. Magic mushrooms growing in the shit in, like, you know, Africa.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

And so that. It's a. It's a reasonable explanation because you get all these, you know, new neural pathways, neurogenesis, you know, epigenetic changes, and you get this kind of stepwise leap in cranial size and functioning. And then you think about, like, what's the next big leap? You know, that's a physiological leap. What about a cultural leap? It's like the agrarian revolution, and it was wheat, barley and rye that we were growing. And I think the. The kind of conventional narrative is like, you have more time for specialization, for urbanization because you have, you know, agriculture takes care of. You don't have to, you know, hunt and gather constantly 24 7. But what grows on wheat, barley and rye. It's ergot. And ergot is the substance that is probably in the. In, you know, the kekion in this drink, in the mystery rituals. And if you talk to people like Brian Murescu, who wrote the Immortality Key about The Mystery ritual, he'll say. They go, like, you're saying, way back to Egypt and, you know, even to, you know, Mycenae, to, like, you know, really, you know, pre 1000 BC and even before that. Yeah. And so that begs this question. Is modern civilization actually a function of visionary experiences? You know, it's. Maybe it's not just this, like, Occam's razor, like, oh, they had more time, so they sort of, like, built all these things. Maybe they were engaging in these sort of mystery rituals well before the Eleusinian Mystery ritual.

[Luke Cabert]

I don't agree with the they had more time thing. It doesn't seem. I don't know, man. That just seems so outside of human nature.

[Unknown Host]

I agree.

[Luke Cabert]

When have you ever felt like, oh, I just had this abundance of time. I'm gonna go erect a megalithic temple.

[Unknown Host]

Totally.

[Luke Cabert]

It just doesn't. That's just not how reality works out, you know, and it's.

[Unknown Host]

We've been physiologically the same for 200, 300,000 years. Why in the. The last few percent, you know, 3 to 5% of our existence, do we create all this stuff? You need some inspiration for?

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yes.

[Luke Cabert]

And what were those people doing? Yeah, they were definitely doing something.

[Unknown Host]

They were doing something.

[Luke Cabert]

And is it, you know, at least my opinion is that one. We haven't found the archeological evidence of it yet, or what they were doing just didn't preserve. It just disappears, you know, I mean, buildings will go away and. Oh, gosh, what is it that I read something that was like, if you let New York City sit where it is, that, you know, more than 90% of New York City wouldn't be around in like, 40,000 years or 50,000 years or something like that. So 150,000 years ago, what are people building that would possibly be preserved later on? Yeah, you know, the likelihood. The likelihood that they're producing toxic materials that are going to. That are impossible to be destroyed, like what we're doing to the planet right now is low, I think.

[Unknown Host]

Yep. I agree.

[Luke Cabert]

I don't. I just say my hunch, which I. I guess it's not based on anything, but just my hunch of what I deem to be realistic is I don't think that there was another civilization that existed before us or a period in time where people were ever pursuing technology. That's like what we have today with, you know, plastics and electronics and stuff like that. Whatever they have, I think it probably falls in line with something being like simple, natural, non upgradable. It is the perfect extrapolation of their natural resources. That's what I would say. If there's a high civilization that existed before this chapter, it was something similar to that. Of course it's not preserved because these are people who know how to extrapolate to the absolute maximum the resources from their natural world.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, well, it's, it's, maybe we see a renaissance of thought around that sort of thing. You look at like, you know, biosphere technology from like New Mexico or like, I don't watch the movie Avatar, and it's like they're, they're in these like, you know, perfectly ecologically consistent sort of habitats or whatever. And a lot of what we're doing now, I mean, we brought up SpaceX earlier. It's like, with, you know, starship, like they have like 36 raptor engines and it's like an enormous amount of mass ejection. And I'm probably marginally, you know, way more pro SpaceX than I am the FAA and you know, EPA trying to like stop them or whatever. But it's still brute force, it's super brutish. And like, I think a lot of our tech is. And so, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe a lot of that stuff was more advanced. Okay. Going back to ancient Egypt, the curse of King Tut's tomb.

[Luke Cabert]

Oh my gosh.

[Unknown Host]

Do you think there's a there, there?

[Luke Cabert]

You know, I, I've thought about this.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I, I really read about this about four years ago, but King Tut is the final king of. He's a young boy, he's the son of Akhenaten, and he's the final king of the eighteenth dynasty of the Amarna period. And this is what we were talking about earlier, where Egypt just flipped on his head and everyone's forced to worship the Aten, the one single monotheistic God. It's actually the first example of monotheism in all of the ancient world. This predates the exodus in Moses by probably a century or more. So King Tutank Amun is born King Tutank Aten. And when Nefertiti dies, who is the wife of Akhenaten when she Passes away. The crown is handed to Tutank Aten and his advisor, a guy named Ay, who's one of the high ranking nobles in that government, basically advises to Tutank Aten, the entire country is very displeased with your father and the fact that all of Egypt has been thrown on its head. We should probably go back to the way things were. There may be some truth to that. The whole revolution of the Aten may not have been very good for Egypt's economy and pretty much all the documentation we have of that time supports that. However, all that documentation comes from the people that wanted them dead. So there's that. So one way or another, they convinced Tutank Aten to return everything back to the way, to the way it was. And he changes his name to Tutank Amun, which may or may not have been his own choice. But he is pharaoh at this time and he's only pharaoh for a very short period of time. And then something happens to him. Don't really know how he died. It looks like from the way that the blood pooled on the back of his head, you've probably seen his body in person.

[Unknown Host]

I have, yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

So. So Dr. Bob Breyer did, did an investigation on him maybe back in the 90s and examined his body. And the way that the pool, the way that the blood pools in the back of his skull looks like he was hit in the back of the head, his brain, you know, he had a brain bleed or he was bleeding inside of his skull and he was laying, he was laying on his back for an extended period of time. And so all that blood pulled. So they think, think that he may have died to a blunt force injury on the back of his head. That's just a, that's just a theory, but one way or another he's buried with an incredible amount of treasure in this rushed tomb. Though it's a shallow rock cut tomb, but he's buried with an incredible amount of treasure. And then I think it's Amenhotep II or maybe it's Amenhotep III his tomb. No, I don't think it was them because they came. Nevermind. Amen. Hezeb I and Third came, came before Tutankhamun. But somebody's tomb was, was cut into the ground above his and all the rubble covered up King Tut's tomb. So his stayed preserved and overlooked until I think 1923 when, when Howard Carter discovered it. Now if my memory serves me correctly, there's a lot of legend about this but as they're trying to open the tomb, there's some kind of hieroglyph on the outside that apparently said something along the lines of cursing anybody. It's a rough translation, but it basically curses anyone who should violate or open. Violate or open this tomb. Well, of course they're going to open it. And Howard Carter, in the vault opening, he shines a light through there, and somebody asks him, do you see anything? And he says, yes, wonderful thing, things. And that's like a very iconic Egyptological quote. And so they open it up, and of course, they find the richest tomb that's ever been found in. In the history of archaeology. It's the biggest discovery ever of this very minor, unimportant young kid who was pharaoh. Now, if you asked me three years ago, I could go through the whole chronology of, like, how every single person died, but almost every person that was in this excavation had something tragic happen to them. And several of them died from poisoning from being exposed to the air inside the chamber. And so you had this paint that's up on the walls. And that paint ruminates in the air, and it makes the air toxic, so.

[Unknown Host]

It'S like radiation or something or.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

There's something like that, too. And then I forget how Howard Carter died, but he died in some strange way. But he was the last person.

[Unknown Host]

Okay.

[Luke Cabert]

Everybody before him died leading up to him. I've thought about this before. You know, is it all coincidence or was there really a mummy's curse? And sometimes I wonder if it's not both. If it's. If it's. You know, how I've talked to some of my friends about this, about this before, how some people. People seem to just have a will that is so strong that the world moves out of their way.

[Unknown Host]

Yes.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. Their will, like Trump or Elon Musk.

[Luke Cabert]

That'S what I was thinking is it's.

[Unknown Host]

Like they shift timelines according to their will or something.

[Luke Cabert]

And Steve Jobs thought about this. He called it magical thinking that, that you could ignore things and they would go away. That you could believe things so strongly that the Earth, Earth would morph itself around your will. And I've always wondered if with something like that, if it's. Yes, the paint inside of the chamber did poison these people and kill them, but that was what Tutankhamen would have wanted. You know what I mean? But then you have this like, cosmic element that goes beyond that. Like, did these people violating Tutankhamun's tomb doom really results in this lady's house burning down with her and her family in it. It's certainly ominous and it's certainly fascinating to us, you know, observing it from the outside. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. You know, I think that there's definitely elements of science in our natural world and the way that our brains connect to the world around us, that isn't measurable.

[Unknown Host]

Yes.

[Luke Cabert]

At least to us yet, you know, for sure.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I think belief is incredibly, like a good example of our modern paradigm. Writing that off is like, in medicine you have like the placebo effect, which often is way more effective than the pharmacological thing that you're taking or whatever. And then you just write that off. You go, oh, it's placebo. And then it's like, well, wait, belief is extremely powerful and like, you can take a sugar pill and believe a thing, and it's more effective in certain cases than biochemistry. Like, that's like a big deal. But it's sort of. We live in this age where like, you're not supposed to trust your eyes and your mind is irrational. And, you know, I think, I think we're, we're probably on the verge of sort of a quote unquote re enchantment of reality. I think that's, that's ending for better and for worse. Like you have, you know, Gen Z astral projecting on TikTok and it's, it's like weird, right? Like, you have this, what we're talking about the opening of the floodgates of the relativization of like, all information. That the death of expertise is like, it's like there's some bad that comes with that. But.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yes.

[Luke Cabert]

You know, I don't want to get overtly political but it is, well, I mean it's, it's so, so obvious as to how we've been, you know, normal people have been manipulated and lied to by, by the media, by our government, by everything.

[Unknown Host]

And I think the pandemic woke a lot of people up.

[Luke Cabert]

It definitely did. I mean it is absolutely ridiculous the things that we were being told and you know, from 2020 even up until now, you know, it just, the things that we're made to believe is absolutely insane. Um, and, and you know, people like, we just don't, we have no reason to trust the authority anymore. And a really sad side effect of that is that anti intellectualism.

[Unknown Host]

Yep.

[Luke Cabert]

Is on the rise now because I mean there really is, there really are amazingly intelligent people who are devoted to their area of expertise in their field of, of science, whether it's biology, archaeology, whatever, medicine that are really, really devoted to that. And that you need these people who are wildly intelligent that study these really strange fields to be able to tell you information. But now we just don't trust any of that at all. And that's sad but it's the fault of, it's the fault of those institutions for allowing themselves to be weaponized for modern politics. My opinion is, I think it's really all about modern politics. It's all about modern politics and money. Personally, I do not think that there was, that There have been archaeological discoveries that change all of known humanity that are so impactful that like a secret cabal came in and covered it all up and hid it from humanity. Those people don't give, they did not care about that. What they care about is geopolitics and making money.

[Unknown Host]

Totally.

[Luke Cabert]

And manipulating the modern world. Yeah, it's all, all the corruption is based on the modern world. I don't think they're trying to cover up the past because what would it do like, like if, if all of a sudden we knew that Atlantis really existed 12000 years ago and now its ruins under the ground.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

What's going to happen?

[Unknown Host]

No, totally.

[Luke Cabert]

It's incredibly fascinating.

[Unknown Host]

Yep.

[Luke Cabert]

But why would somebody cover, cover that up?

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Another thing is Egypt doesn't have a lot of interest. Let's just highlight on Egypt. They don't have a lot of interest in another Howard Carter, another white guy making a huge discovery. They want it to be an Egyptian and really Zahi Oas wants it to be himself. And I've spoken to lots of Egyptologists and this even happened in Peru. You know those big tunnels that were discovered under the ground in Peru recently. Have you heard about this? No, actually in Cuscoman.

[Unknown Host]

Interesting.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

So interesting.

[Luke Cabert]

It's all a marketing campaign.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

It's the same thing in Egypt, man. They just discovered the tomb of. Was it Thutmose? Thutmose ii I believe is a tomb that they just discovered in Egypt. And it's kind of unremarkable on the inside. It's crumbled away a lot. It looks like it was never even completed. I heard about that tomb in October and the publication just came out, I don't know, within the last couple months or so. When I was there in October, I heard about that tomb having been discovered earlier in 2024. So over a year later they released the publication. So this is all on a. This is all on a timeline. Because they're constantly discovering things in Egypt but they don't want to. If they dropped 10 new discoveries, nine of them would get overshadowed and not get the kind of press that they want. Want. Which may cause a burst in tourism and then it slows back down. So it's all in this timeline. Archeology is. It is. Tourism keeps archeology alive, right?

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. It's almost like planned obsolescence or something. Like people have conspiracies about Apple products or something. It's really fascinating. I mean, think about this Filippo Biondi paper around these structures below the pyramids. If that was 2022, why is it coming out now? You know that that's an interesting question. Or I remember, you know, doing this piece with David Grush, this UFO whistleblower who testified before Congress, you know, in end of summer of 2023. And it was this big deal. It's like all these people started across the Rubicon of maybe this UFO stuff is actually real. And then the day after we put our like documentary out, which I thought was, you know, it's pretty, pretty comprehensive and kind of good, if I do say so myself. The next day there's this like Mexico City Congress thing about these Peruvian, you know, alien mummies or whatever. And I'm out. I'm now actually looking into that case and I think there's some interesting stuff there. But like, the way it was presented was such a jokey, weird, you know, way. And it was, you know, a lot of what was ended up being popularized were these knockoffs, you know, kind of. It was like chicken bones and rooster head or whatever. It was like, clearly fake stuff is presented in this weird way. And I wonder some of this might be this emergent, you know, the wheel gets, you know, created in South America at the same time as Africa. And then some of it might be this sort of political me too syndrome where it's like, oh, you discovered that. Well, I've been sitting on this. Me too. You know, and then you have to put out your thing and it's more political than it is treason speaking. And that's not to say that again, there's nothing there on the mummy thing. I think there probably actually is some interesting stuff going on there, but that's for a later date. I have an excursion to pitch you on.

[Luke Cabert]

Okay.

[Unknown Host]

Okay. So I, six or seven years ago, met a guy named Luis Felipe San Salvador. And he's a super eccentric guy. He's directed a couple of movies under the name Jamaica. No problem. He's like larger than life guy. Anyways, I became friends with him and I realized that he was not lying about the fact that he came from a long line of conquistadors from the 16th century. He's Ecuadorian, and he lives on this massive compound in Ecuador. And he even came out with a movie called the Son of Man because he has maps in his family that go back to that time around Atahualpa's Ransom, El Dorado, and he goes searching, literally with a team of 10 people or whatever, into the Amazon every single year. To find El Dorado. So he has maps to El Dorado and then he also has maps to something called the Teos Cave or the Teos Library. Neil Armstrong in 1969 went to the moon of course, and came back and his second expedition was in the Amazon to find this Teos Cave, this Teos Library. And a BBC film crew followed him around trying to find this thing and he couldn't find it. And my friend Luis Felipe San Salvador says that his father sent Neil Armstrong in the wrong direction and that he has the real location of this thing. And it's this, if you talk to people in the local area, it's this well known myth that there are these caves that exist with this kind of ancient alien looking metallic artifacts, like, like metallic artifacts that seem so anachronistic and like, you know, beyond human capabilities even now. And so I think we should go and try to find these things.

[Luke Cabert]

I would be down. So this is in Ecuador.

[Unknown Host]

Yes. Let's get, we have, let's get on a zoom with Luis and I would be down. I'm so down. Let's do it.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Okay.

[Luke Cabert]

Quite a lot. Have you seen where they just found like 11,000 structures in the Ecuadorian jungle recently?

[Unknown Host]

No. 11,000?

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah. They found a city, I think with 11,000 structures. And the city layout is on like the top of these mountain ridges and all of the city layouts are these four long structures with this huge, you know, maybe 200 foot by 200 foot wide square plaza in the center of them. And it's thousands of these plazas that are made and it's the exact same layout as what we see in Central America and in Mexico with the Maya world, Mesoamerica and man, there's no, there's no doubt that, that civilization. I mean, think about this, man. Think about how many different just off the top of your head and you know, neither one of us are an expert in this, but I can name a lot of different North American in the borders of the United States. Native American cultures, whether it's like the Creek Indians, the Apaches, the Comanches, the Cherokee, the Sioux. I can go on and on and on and on and on. Okay. The Amazon is the same size as the United States. So crazy. Imagine how many different civilizations exist, existed beneath the canopy of the Amazon and how expansive and in depth that history is. I mean, North American native history is so complicated. You even have this. There's a federation of tribes that were united under. Oh my goodness, who's the Native American? Squanto. Squanto unites, creates this federation of these three tribes that were all rivals against each other during his childhood. But he gets captured, captured and enslaved in London and then comes back and then he unites these tribes. I mean that's just one little place where you have a confederation of three different tribes that come together and form their own government in one little area of Massachusetts. Imagine the rest of the continent and then project that onto the Amazon. Of how expansive and complicated and nuanced that is. I mean that the Amazon is incredibly dangerous, whether you're dealing with humans or the natural world. And almost impenetrable. But beneath that canopy really is the widest, deepest frontier of studying human history. And it's kind of like the last frontier. I think another frontier is the Sahara, which is equally as large and equally as dangerous and infeasible to, to explore. Not that it's not feasible, but it is very difficult. I mean I did, I did a, I did a six hour excursion in West Texas a few days ago. And every time I do that in the desert, I'm reminded of the fact that you wouldn't make it very long.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

You know, just in those six hours I was like, I was like, you know, if I go another two hours, hours, I would probably die if I didn't get water in the jungle. It's exactly the same, except it's worse because you sweat more. The sun might not be right on you, but man, you will sweat an insane amount. All of your hydration is gone. You'll be dehydrated in one afternoon. Going through Guatemala is brutal. And you have all these different, different plants that have effects on you that even modern medicine hasn't journeyed out there to study.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Unbelievable.

[Luke Cabert]

And I was only home for one day during that whole period. And in Peru, when we went out to Machu Picchu, we were there for two full days. And the mosquitoes that bit me out there Were so strong that they left scars on my arms. Like, if you look close, you'll see all these little dots all over my arms from where I got bit. And what they infect you with is so potent that when you scratch it, it will. It will stay in your fingernails and it'll spread around your body. And. And two weeks later, I. When I was in Egypt, I was still having dots pop up on my arms from these mosquitoes that bit me in the Amazon. And then in Egypt, I'm mostly fine. Egypt's real easy to get around. Then I go to the jungles in Guatemala, which is essentially the Amazon. You know, not the same geographically, but, like, the environment is very similar. And. And something happened to me while. While I was in the jungle, and I got really sick. Not food poisoning sick, not a cold sick. And even the local guys could tell that. The local Guatemalans, they were like. They were like. They were like, oh, you have. What do they say? Jungle fever. You have jungle sickness. Because they could tell how tired and, like, drained I was. And they thought it was the mosquitoes biting me, that it was giving me something. And I was 75% deaf in each ear, by the way. I couldn't hear anything.

[Unknown Host]

Oh, Jesus. We freaking out.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Whoa.

[Luke Cabert]

It was so bizarre, man.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Okay.

[Luke Cabert]

So. I don't know. Something. Something happened to me. I don't know what it was. You were initiated now only in Guatemala. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Oh, really?

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

It's like, maybe. Maybe. Have you gone to t call?

[Unknown Host]

I have.

[Luke Cabert]

Okay.

[Unknown Host]

It's amazing.

[Luke Cabert]

That's. That's where I was at. That's. That's where I got sick was in Tikal.

[Unknown Host]

Okay?

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

I've never heard of El Mirado.

[Luke Cabert]

It's a, it's a two hour helicopter ride into the north. And so you drop down and it's this giant pyramid that is supposedly similar to the size of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. But you can't really tell because it's just this big hump in the middle of this flat jungle. And the pyramid was so large, man, that when I was coming back down from it, I walked down the pyramid and then I walked along this trail for about five minutes and then arrived on a staircase that went down and I was like, for the last five minutes, I was walking on the pyramid straight. That's how big it was. So I came down from a certain portion and I reached this flat platform and I walked for five minutes before reaching the next slope of the pyramid. That's how large it is. And to your point that you were saying earlier is the farther they go back in time, with so many cultures, the bigger the structures get.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

That is the first known pyramid in. It's called La Danta. La Danta and El Tigre. They're these two giant pyramids that face each other. They're about equal in size. Those are the oldest pyramids known in the Maya world. Made out of the largest stones ever used in the Maya world. Unbelievable. But instead of these huge rectangular stones that you see in Egypt, they're like these Lincoln Logs. But the Lincoln Logs aren't stacked on top of one another in the way that we would think that they would be used. Imagine a Lincoln Log laid this way, and they're stacked on top of each other like this. So in the least, in the least easy way possible, the least efficient way possible, is the way that it was done and it was built. It is so massive, like the actual mass, the structural mass inside of them is so impressive that the jungle, unlike most Maya pyramids, where you have blocks that are about this big in most Maya pyramids. And the roots of the trees wrap around those little blocks and dig into the pyramid. And then a tree will grow out of the pyramid and rip all the blocks apart from each other. So you see, like the jungle growing out of these huge pyramids. This pyramid, no, the jungle is growing on it. But all the roots grow flat against the stone because the stones are impenetrable. So you can grab a piece of jungle and peel it off the side of the, and peel it off the side of the pyramid and the pyramid's still there. The roots never penetrated between the stones. That was at the beginning of time in the Maya world, and it was never surpassed since then. Kind of the same way in ancient Egypt.

[Unknown Host]

Wow.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

Fascinating, man. Well, I'm going to follow up with you if you're serious.

[Luke Cabert]

We'll do it. We'll seriously do it.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, that's. I. I would love to return to South America. America.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Cool.

[Luke Cabert]

Have you ever been to Peru?

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Are you really? Where are you going to Peru?

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, well, the Sacred Valley, man. I mean, that's Cusco. So what you would probably do is you would land in Lima. Lima. I'm sure you'll go see. I'm sure you'll go see the archaeological site of Lima, but then you'll probably go to the. There's a famous museum there with all the pottery. I forget what it's called. And you'll go there, but then you'll probably fly from Lima into Cusco, I'm guessing. And Cusco is like one of the. Maybe the best city I've ever been to in my travels. Cool. The nice, nicest, cleanest, most beautiful city I've ever been to. You can walk down any. Any alleyway, any part of the city, and it's perfectly safe.

[Unknown Host]

Really?

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

You hit the tunnels there, or is that, like, blocked off?

[Luke Cabert]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, you got the hookups.

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah. And so they. They. Somebody on their team watches my channel.

[Unknown Host]

Okay.

[Luke Cabert]

And has seen some podcasts I've been on. And so I was able to get in and. And check out the. Check out the tunnels. But you would go there, see Sacsay woman. Go see. Go see the. The coraconcha, which is in the center of the city of Cusco, which is like the most. The most impressive stonework in all of the ancient world. The most precise, I mean, just razor sharp, like the sides of the Egyptian architecture of actual buildings that people walked inside. It has nothing on the core concert. Whoa. Nothing crazy. It's made from gray andesite, and the blocks, like, lean in on each other. So the walls are like trapezoidal. And so you can just imagine the. Sophistication of taking gray andesite, which is as hard as granite and just. It has these razor sharp edges on the architecture, just absolutely stunning. And then from there you would take a bus to Ollantaytambo or a taxi or something like that to Ollantaytambo, where is another megalithic site. And then from there you take the train to Machu Picchu.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Luke Cabert]

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