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

Summary

Flagrant Podcast #698 SUMMARY: Lost Civilizations of the Amazon, Why They Burned Alexandria, & What Atlantis Really Is

Date: April 1, 2026
Hosts: Andrew Schulz & Akaash Singh
Guest: Luke Caverns (archaeologist, explorer, YouTuber)
Running time (approx.): 0:00–3:39:00

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Overview

This engaging episode features explorer/archaeologist Luke Caverns joining the Flagrant crew for a wide-ranging and comedic deep-dive into ancient civilizations, archaeological mysteries, and the stories behind lost cities and legends. Main topics include the civilizations of the Americas, the origins and fate of Alexandria and its famous library, the reality behind Atlantis, and the enduring mysteries of places like Machu Picchu and the Olmec heartland. Throughout, the hosts blend curiosity, irreverence, and humor with Luke’s scholarly insights and fresh historical storytelling.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Ancient Pyramids Flourished in South/Central America and Not the North

• Geography & Materials: Southern civilizations like the Maya had access to bedrock and stone but also extreme jungle environments and flooding, incentivizing them to build elevated, lasting structures. In contrast, North American cultures (Adena Mounds, Mississippian) built mostly with earth due to material availability and cultural practices, not necessarily inability ([02:00]).
• Environmental Factors: Example of the Maya having to rise above the flood-prone, snake-infested jungle floor, gradually innovating from earthen platforms to immense stone pyramids ([03:28]).

2. Scale and Sophistication of Mesoamerican Cities

• The massive pyramid at El Mirador in Guatemala dwarfs many Egyptian pyramids in scale—with platforms that sprawl beneath the jungle ([04:49]).

• Quote: “I came down the pyramid, and walked for like five or ten minutes...and I had still been on the pyramid that whole time.” — Luke Caverns ([05:51]).

• Mayan Pyramid Architecture: Early Maya built with immense megalithic blocks (8 ft. long), with walls so well-fitted even jungle roots can't pull them apart ([07:47]).

3. City Planning: Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza

• These weren’t just temples but vibrant civic centers with plazas, ball courts, and a sense of lived-in space—a contrast to the more monolithic Egyptian pyramids ([08:58]).
• “The pyramids look functional...like, it actually felt like a proper city.” — Andrew Schulz ([08:58]).

4. Mystery of Buried Cities & Earthworks

• Many pyramid mounds looked like hills until excavated, leading to speculation about how many remain hidden across the Americas ([09:45]).
• “It kind of makes you look at every hill in Mesoamerica and you’re like, what the fuck is underneath that shit?” — Andrew Schulz ([09:07]).

5. Environmental Collapse: Building and the End of Maya Cities

• Maya’s relentless deforestation for materials (especially “stucco” plaster) altered their environment, causing droughts that contributed to societal collapse ([12:16]).
• At Copan, clearing rainforest for construction led to such deforestation that “if you were standing on the principal pyramid, you would not see a single tree”—and eventually it stopped raining ([14:01]).
• Volcanic events and overextension compounded the collapse around 800–900 AD ([15:13]).

6. Technological Achievements and Lost Knowledge

• The farther back you go, the more megalithic and finely constructed the stones; later “builds” are more crude.
• “The farther you go back in time, the more sophisticated the architecture becomes.” — Luke Caverns ([06:42]).
• Possible use of acids (natural or derived from bird stomachs) to help shape stone precisely, particularly in the Andes ([37:35]).

7. Incredible Machu Picchu

• Elevation & Access: Machu Picchu’s majesty isn’t just height but the drama of the surroundings, the journey, and the megalithic precision despite extreme inaccessibility ([22:59]).
• “I've actually never been as impressed with anything in person as I was with Machu Picchu.” — Luke Caverns ([23:53]).
• The Inca used earthquake-resistant stone placement—stacked to flex—showing awareness of their environment ([31:26]).

8. Oral History vs Archaeology – Who Built What?

• The Inca and other later empires often claimed “the gods built this” about older megalithic sites, indicating even they didn't know their full origins ([41:46]).
• Multiple layers in ancient structures (large stones on the bottom, later cruder additions on top) suggest cycles of construction, abandonment, and adaptation ([42:04]).

9. Egypt, Nubia & The Overlooked Pyramids

• Discussion on how Nubians (Kushites) built more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt and how their history—despite black pharaohs—receives little global attention ([46:39]).
• Greek and Roman connections to earlier Egyptian culture, belief that "Egypt is a gift of the Nile" (Herodotus) ([50:27]).

10. The Greatness and Fate of Alexandria

• Alexandria, in Hellenistic Egypt, surpassed even Rome in urban splendor for its time ([75:27]).
• Library of Alexandria: Not a single fire, but multiple; burnings tied to war and gradual neglect ([53:02], [53:40]).
• Quote: "When you landed in Alexandria, your boat would be boarded … they'd look over your documents … bring that into the library, copy it, give you the copy, and then we keep the original.” — Luke Caverns ([55:53]).
• Lighthouse of Alexandria: Built with colossal granite blocks nearly as large as the Great Pyramid, served as a powerful statement both to locals and foreigners ([77:05]).

11. Athens, Democracy & Public Architecture

• The flowering of Greek democracy after the Persian Wars: “That revolutionary thought … that people could be free and rule over themselves was so profound that we still erect our capitol buildings in that style … it's all Athenian.” — Luke Caverns ([113:12], [113:49]).
• Wealth from war taxes allowed for massive public works and a unique sense of civic engagement ([114:46]).
• In Athens “your job was to go up to the Acropolis and participate in politics. And that was your job.” — Luke Caverns ([116:46]).

12. The Aztec "Red Wedding": Mercenaries, Betrayal & Skin-Wearing

• The Aztec rise involved serving as mercenaries to a more settled kingdom, the eventual betrayal and genocide of their benefactors, and (per myth) a prince parading in his bride’s flayed skin to terrify and dominate rivals ([143:03]).
• “They kill the princess, they cut her heart out, sacrifice her … and then the prince slips himself into her skin, puts on her head.” — Luke Caverns ([145:14]).

13. On the Nature of Colonization

• Ancient societies in the Americas were perpetually colonizing and consuming one another—Europeans were just the most recent iteration ([136:34]).
• “Nobody, the Americas, colonized each other over and over and over again … for at least 13,000 years.” — Luke Caverns ([136:43]).

14. Lost Cities & Modern Discovery with LiDAR

• Cutting-edge drone-based LiDAR techniques are revealing massive undiscovered cities and highways in the Amazon. There isn’t a single “El Dorado” but dozens of lost centers ([156:46]).
• “This morning, [my team] sent me a LiDAR scan … with these huge circular geometric earthworks connected to each other ... massive highways.” — Luke Caverns ([157:04]).

15. What Is Atlantis—Really?

• Plato’s original Atlantis is not a literal, technologically-advanced, global civilization. It's an allegory, informed by real catastrophes (the eruption of Santorini/Thera and destruction of the Minoans), Greek mythic memory, and a warning against societal hubris ([178:33]).
• “The moral of the story is ... this civilization was so powerful ... that it essentially spoiled itself and it lost all of the original foundations of what had made it great ... and then the gods destroyed it.” — Luke Caverns ([181:58]).
• **Santorini’s eruption (ca. 1600 BC) generated a “cataclysmic” event possibly affecting Egyptian weather and myth ([185:30]–[188:00]).

16. The Werejaguars of the Olmecs

• The Olmecs venerated people (especially children) with a rare genetic disorder (ectodermal dysplasia) that gave them “fangs,” possibly seeing them as “werejaguars”—a sacred, priestly class ([202:19]).
• “If you were born with ectodermal dysplasia … you were born with some kind of intrinsic power.” — Luke Caverns ([211:26]).
• Ancient carvings depict scenes of shamanic processions, altars, and likely ritual conflict between ruling and priestly classes ([213:57]).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• On Mesoamerican City Size:
  “When you get down the pyramid, the actual base extends out far into the jungle ... people were living on that bottom pyramidal platform.” — Luke ([06:36])

• On Nubian Rule in Egypt:
  “For five generations, you have Nubian black pharaohs really ruling over Egypt. And they're more Egyptian than the Egyptians had been for hundreds of years.” — Luke ([46:20])

• On Colonial Trauma:
  “Most of history is actually way more complicated than that ... you realize two people are pitted against each other and neither had a choice.” — Luke ([135:26])

• On the Value of Oral Storytelling in History:
  "Learning the facts of history is interesting, but ... learning history through story, I don't care if it's, like, real or not." — Andrew Schulz ([172:01])

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Important Timestamps

• Why No Pyramids in California? [00:38]
• El Mirador: Massive Pyramid Hidden in the Jungle [04:49]
• Deforestation & Collapse of Maya Civilization [12:16–15:47]
• Machu Picchu: What Makes It Amazing? [22:53–31:26]
• Construction Techniques in Peru/Earthquake Resistance [31:26]
• Nubian Pyramids and Overlooked Black Pharaohs [46:20–47:15]
• Library & Lighthouse of Alexandria, Knowledge Wars [53:02]
• Public Life in Athens, Invention of Democracy [113:12–114:46]
• Aztec "Red Wedding" Betrayal Legend [143:03–149:08]
• Discovery of Lost Cities Using LiDAR [156:46–157:46]
• What Atlantis Really Was—a Minoan Memory [178:33–198:36]
• Olmec Werejaguars and Deformed Children as Priests [202:19–214:31]

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Style, Tone, and Approach

• The conversation is fast-paced, candid, irreverent, packed with banter and running jokes (“crypto for the conquistadors,” “Scottish pride,” “Caitlyn Jenner in the Yucatan”) but steered by real scholarly knowledge and love for history.
• Luke Caverns brings a storytelling flair: narrative, imagery, and synthesis underlying his explanations.
• The Flagrant hosts punctuate with honest skepticism, pop-culture comparisons, and relatable questions.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a history lesson disguised as a hangout—riffing on world heritage, picking at popular misconceptions, and reminding the audience that history doesn’t sit quietly in textbooks but is an evolving story full of adventure, competition, collapse, and rediscovery. The show embodies the spirit of intellectual curiosity, subverting both academic stuffiness and internet conspiracy in favor of wonder, evidence, and humor.

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Linked Resources

• Luke Caverns: YouTube Channel
• Flagrant Podcast: YouTube

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(Ad reads, sports talk, and unrelated digressions omitted per instructions.)

Transcript

[A]

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

[B]

That is a good question.

[A]

Well, pyramids.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

probably the most northern is going to be about right here at a place called Teotihuacan. Yeah. So you've been there? Okay, yeah. So that's probably your first notable. There may be some pyramids north of that. But that's like your first. That's your northernmost stone pyramid. But that said, you know, about right here in Ohio. If I'm pointing out Ohio, nobody really knows where Ohio is, but if I

[A]

know what you're going to point out here.

[B]

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

[A]

They just didn't have access to stone. That's why we don't see it. Well, there's plenty of stone on the

[B]

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

[A]

Why?

[B]

I don't. I have no idea.

[A]

Well, this is something we need to understand.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, because nobody.

[A]

I mean, I'm sure the people in your position have asked these questions tons of times. It's like, why all of a sudden does this modern technology and modern for the time. Right. Like, pop up in these regions and kind of only in those regions.

[B]

I'll give you an idea why. I think why. So when you're in. When you're in the Maya world, the jungle is straight up hell.

[A]

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

[B]

So the Maya world is going to be the Yucatan Peninsula, about right through here, like that.

[A]

Southern Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador.

[B]

Yes, sir. Yeah, that's right. So the jungle out there sucks. Like, just walking through it is hell. And it floods all the time. There are, you know, the world's. Some of the. Well, definitely the America's most venomous snakes live in the highest concentrations right here of anywhere you're going to find them in America. It's the fer de lance snakes, and you've got eyelash vipers, all kinds of other stuff. And so there's a lot that exists on the forest floor that can kill you and your children, especially, like kids, just like that. And. And it floods all the time.

[A]

So it incentivize you to build structures.

[B]

Yeah. So. So what they want to do is they want to build platforms, and so you want to get up off of the forest floor, and then other people are going to want that. So you make the platform bigger, and then it becomes bigger, and then it becomes bigger. But you. You do it out of earth, but the earth erodes. So then you got to do it with something stronger. You got to do it with stone. So you're trying just to survive in this hellish jungle environment. And they have a lot of stone bedrock, which is why, like, in the Amazon, it's all clay, so they don't have. They don't have anything there. Well, when you get halfway through the Amazon, you got more granite bedrock that's out here. But a lot here it's just clay swamps. And so in the Maya world, that is where we see the first stone pyramids pop up. There's one in a place called Coelho, Belize. I was just in Belize maybe a month ago or so, and it's just a little pyramid, like maybe the size of this room, and that dates beyond 1000 BC. And then it kind of spreads out from there into the Paten jungle in Guatemala. There's a site there called El Mirador in Nakbe. And those sites go back to like. Yeah. So that's Coelho. That's a little bitty site that most people don't know about. If you look up El Mirador pyramid. So these pyramids are absolutely massive. The biggest, I think, is this the

[A]

newest one that they just discover. And they say it's like the biggest.

[B]

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

[A]

Oh, wow, wow, wow.

[B]

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

[A]

Yep. Y.

[B]

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

[C]

They're height maxing in a way.

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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

[A]

And this pyramidal platform is with rock that they place there, or it's existing bedrock that they built.

[B]

No, it's rock that they brought in. All of it. And at El Mirador, specifically. El Mirador is one of the oldest sites in the Maya world. And just like you see in so many other places, the farther you go back in time, the more sophisticated the architecture becomes. The stones, like most of the Maya world, is just rubble that's about this big, and it's packed with this really sophisticated, like, superheated cement that they use to, like, bind the structure together. And they have these really nice. They have this really nice, like, stone framing on the outside to make all the stones look square. This is in later periods, but in the earliest times, 3,000 years ago, at the site of El Mirador, in the middle of the jungle, the most inaccessible place you could possibly be. And they're so protected, right, because no one's traveling far out into the jungle. So they're able to build up the city without being, you know, invaded by raiders and marines, marauders and stuff like that. So they quarry out these stones that are 8ft long, couple feet wide, couple feet tall, and they stack them. Not like Lincoln Logs, but they. They stack them in vertically, so.

[C]

Or.

[B]

Or, I'm sorry, horizontally laying down. So they're, like, slid into the structure, Right? So it makes the structure impenetrable. Like most Maya pyramids, when they're left in ruins, a tree will grow, like the. Its roots will grow into the pyramid and pull the blocks. Pull the blocks apart. Well, at that site, the jungle grows on top of the pyramid, but if you pull a tree down, it actually just pulls the jungle off of the stones like a carpet laying on top of it, because the stones are so big and packed together that. That the foliage cannot possibly penetrate.

[A]

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

[B]

Well, they're. The big one is Teotihuacan.

[A]

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

[B]

Oh, Chichen Itza.

[A]

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

[B]

That's right.

[A]

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

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

This felt like, hey, shit goes down here. We got some shops and, like, this we want to hang. Yeah, we're playing ball over here. Like, it actually felt like a proper city.

[B]

It's public architecture.

[A]

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

[B]

Either one.

[A]

See if you can get Teotihuacan before it was excavated.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah, that's what I saw.

[B]

There's a famous painting of it, too.

[A]

Yes, this is what I saw.

[B]

Yeah. So it's just a massive hill.

[C]

Yeah, it's a mountain, bro.

[A]

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

[B]

The whole.

[A]

Look at that.

[B]

The whole. They're building this now.

[A]

Show it without any of that on it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's really cool, isn't it?

[A]

It's like, bro.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Wait, really?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. So this is what's crazy. So you remember the rebel base on Yavin 4? No, like in the jungle.

[A]

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, with a little. Oh, the little guys are running around.

[B]

No, that's. That's the. That's the rebel. That's the moon of Endor. But the. But the base on Yavin is in. It's in Episode four or A New Hope. And it's basically. We're like. I don't even know before they go blow up the Death Star. That's where they're all at. But anyways, there are Maya pyramids at the site of Tikal. That's what's in those shots. Well, the Maya city of Tikal was the very center of this huge Maya civil war. But the Maya, the key thing about the scientific part of their civilization is that they're all astronomers. So the name, through some way, the name of their civil war becomes the Star Wars. And it's based around the city of Tikal, which the city of Tikal becomes the rebel base in Star Wars. Yeah, it's pretty cool. But I'm sorry, what were you asking me?

[A]

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

[C]

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

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was that. That happened.

[A]

Put them on a little game right here.

[B]

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

[A]

Fines Edelman. Changing weather.

[B]

That's right. That's right.

[A]

We know we're there. Yeah, we got it. Still haven't told us.

[B]

So you could pull up the Maya city called Copan, C O P A N. It's in Honduras. And at this site there is evidence that they were cutting down the trees in the use for their architecture. So what they would do is. I can't quite explain. You have to be like a chemist or scientist, like really break down how they make stucco. But they're cutting down so many trees to make what's called stucco. We use stucco in modern day architecture as well. But it's like plaster that you'll put over that they would put over the stone to give it this smooth white face. Like the Romans would do this. The Greeks would do this sometimes and then they would paint over that. But the stucco had to constantly be repaired, and it requires a lot of wood and timber. And there may also be this psychological aspect of, like, maybe they want to separate themselves from. From that jungle environment. So if you could have your whole area cleared of trees. It was like a. You were elevated on a societal level. Right. Like you were seen as something. It's almost like you conquered the natural world.

[A]

Right. Animals live in the jungle, humans live in cities.

[B]

That's right. That's right. So you're elevated above it. And so there's evidence there that if you were standing on the principal pyramid of Copan and you were looking off into the horizon 360 degrees, you would not see a single tree. That's how massive the city of Copan and it's. And in the surrounding environment really was. And how many millions and millions of people live there. Well, they changed the weather patterns by eliminating all the trees. It stopped raining. And so the entire civilization just has to. Just has to pick up and they all have to leave. Oh, yeah. And there's. There were a lot of things that all came together and it was like the Maya world around 800 AD, 900 AD just completely collapsed and disappears for a couple years or for a couple hundred years and then reappears up in the north, like in the Yucatan, where Chichen Itza is. So they were all originally. So, like, a lot of the tourist stuff is up here in the northern Yucatan. This is some of the best preserved stuff because it's a little arid and hot, but really the Maya world began down here in these lowlands or. Well, I guess some of it's mountainous, some of it's lowlands, but this southern Maya area in those deep jungles, and it all fell apart and they all had to move north and go. All the cities throughout the whole, like the Maya civil war. These hundreds of cities warring against each other, millions of people at war and struggling. All of them have to abandon their cities at the end of these civil wars because just the trade routes are falling apart and they've used up all their natural resources and drought. And this volcano erupts in 800 AD and casts this huge black plume, you know, over the Maya world and completely buries one city in ash. At least one city, kind of like a Pompeii.

[A]

So that's preserved.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, there's several cities like that. There is a Mesoamerican Pompeii, I believe it's called Kakashla. And. Yeah, yeah. It's really, really cool. But, yeah, about 800 AD, that's the collapse of the classical period. And then they all have to kind of rebuild and go north. But right here, you know, when you're. When you're asking about the. The majority of construction and pyramids and stuff, really, actually, the majority of that is just about right here throughout all of the Americas. I mean, we have stone architecture in South America, but most of it Machu Picchu, right? Yeah, but most of it is just in the center of the Inca world. You've got some stuff up here. You got a little bit. There's a little bit that's further south. Some of it is kind of Inca or on the peripheral of the Inca world. And then you've got Tiwanaku in Bolivia. But throughout most of South America, it seems to be a lot like North America, where they're building out of, like they're building structures out of Earth.

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

Yeah, it's gone.

[B]

Oh, gosh.

[A]

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

[B]

He's not fact checking.

[A]

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

[B]

So. But as far as where it goes and even where it comes from, yeah, it's very strange, isn't it?

[A]

What do you think? Like, you study this more than anybody. You're watching these things, you're looking at them, you're walking around them. We don't even know if we could do them today. Of course we could. My buddy says this. He's like my buddy Ben Uyeda, who is a craftsman and in his own regard is like, you have to understand, back in the day, that's all they were doing is really just kind of finding food and then building shit.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And there was a. There was. There was a Steph Curry of Building. Building. Right. So there are people that all of their expertise were. Was. Was pointed in this one direction.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

You know what's sad about where we're kind of at now is if you try to have that conversation with most archaeologists, they're sort of instantly repelled by it.

[A]

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

[B]

Well, let's go to. Across all of the Americas as far as architecture. Obvious. Obvious, like architectural technology that is most impressive to me is definitely centered around Cusco, which is the navel of the Inca realm. That's where the Inca emperors were and everything. You know, it's so mind blowing. And the size of the architecture. Some archaeologists hate this, but like the precision of the stone architecture, you know, it's.

[A]

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

[B]

Well, they hate if you use the word precision. Right. Well, I think we're in kind of like a. I think we're in sort of like an anti.

[A]

I don't know, looks like a guy who runs a daycare's teeth.

[B]

So that's.

[A]

You don't get it.

[C]

Who runs a daycare?

[A]

Yeah, who runs a daycare in Minneapolis?

[B]

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

[A]

Now I got it. It's a racist joke.

[C]

It's a disgusting racial joke.

[B]

So this is the side of Sacsayhuaman. If you want to see the thing that I am impressed by the most, look up the Temple of the sun or Temple of the Moon at Machu Picchu. It should.

[A]

I have a lot of questions about Machu Picchu.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Are we going to get into Machu Picchu?

[B]

I think, I think much. I think the question you're asking, we should go to Machu Picchu to answer it.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

First I saw your breakdown. You do a great breakdown on YouTube and you talk about the story of Bingham, who's this Yale professor. Like nobody's in his class. He's like single digit students in the class. And he's like singularly obsessed with this. And he goes out into the jungle and he keeps on asking questions. And eventually guys like, yo, you got to check out this other thing. And they're trekking, they're going across rivers and there are these like wooden bridges crossing these freezing cold Fast rivers and he's on his hands and knees walking across them. And they eventually come after days and days and days and they find Machu Picchu. And I've seen pictures of Machu Picchu. Maybe we can, there's an example, but I think you can look at like there's this town that's, you know, what, 8,000ft in the sky? Meters?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like maybe 7,700ft.

[A]

Okay, so 7,700ft. It's a four day hike or five day hike if you're going to do it as just a regular person. I think they have other ways now where you can kind of drive.

[B]

You take a bus up?

[A]

Yeah, take a bus. And then even after taking the bus, I don't, I think it's still a hike, right?

[B]

Just a little bit.

[A]

Okay, fine. So here's the thing to me, which I don't get about Machu Picchu. When. And I think the part of the reason why I don't get is because the elevation doesn't do much for me. When I saw the pyramids and when I saw Chichen Itza and Teotihuacan, I'm just looking at these things. I'm seeing heavy blocks stacked on top of each other. I'm looking straight up in the sky and I go, these things get really tall. It's the same thing when I look at a sky. Skyscraper. Right. I, I grew up in New York with skyscrapers. I went to Chicago and I was like, oh, you guys got tall buildings too. This is impressive to look at. These structures don't seem that tall.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So like to me, it's not this like awe inspiring moment that I had when I was in Egypt.

[B]

So you've been to Machu Picchu?

[A]

No, I haven't been to Machu Picchu. And the reason, I think part of the reason why I'm not compelled to go, I'm like, okay, like they got some couple stories or something like that. But the pyramid is the most miraculous thing I've ever seen in my entire life outside of the birth of my children. That is the outside of the birth of my first child. After you saw it once, you know, it's not. Yeah, it's like a rewatch.

[C]

Every life's a miracle.

[A]

No, no, they're miracles. They are miracles. I'm just saying it's, you know, you saw it, you know. No. You know how the movie goes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, do you remember the second time you had sex?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Oh, I was 25.

[A]

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

[B]

You're asking if you're seeing it the wrong way.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Nah.

[B]

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

[A]

You flew from Egypt to Peru.

[B]

From Peru. From Peru to Egypt. Yeah. And so it was. It was a wild time. But I have actually never been as impressed with anything in person as I was Machu Picchu, when I.

[A]

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

[B]

So Machu Picchu is very hard to describe. This view that you're seeing right here, like a lot of, A lot of people's experience when they go to see the Great Pyramids. Some people are actually disappointed when they go to see it because they'll say something. They'll say something like, oh, I didn't realize that it was right next to modern day Cairo and there's trash everywhere and there's people trying to bug you and this, that and the other. And they'll be disappointed. Whatever looking at Machu Picchu is in real life is even. Is better and more imposing than this photo right here. The steepness of the mountains, it's imperceptible. You can be standing on the top of the mountain, you can't see the bottom. It's just like straight blue. It's hard to describe. And it's not an easy journey to get to Machu Picchu. So by the time you arrive there, you feel like you've earned it. If you and I wanted to go see the pyramids right now, you know, we go to JFK, we fly straight to Cairo. Boom, we're there within 30 minutes. We can go see the pyramids. If you and I wanted to go to Machu Picchu, we'd have to fly LaGuardia or JFK to Miami, Miami to Lima, Lima to Cusco. We'd have to get a taxi out to a place that's three hours away called Ollantaytambo. And then we'd have to get on a train from there to go Aguadas Calientes. And then we have to get on a bus to go up the top of the mountain. And then you have to hike over the backside of Machu Picchu, and then you're there.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So it's like you've traveled this long way to get here.

[A]

You're enduring a very privileged version of the journey that these people endure to get there. Yeah, you really have to chew on that to experience it.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's sort of one of those things where it builds up, you know, and as far as the size of the architecture, why it's so imposing. Oh, wow.

[A]

I didn't realize. These walls are built right on the side of this cliff.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's even more so you see that mountain peak in the back y on top of that? The city is still up there. The city still continues all the way up to the top of that mountain and around the sides of it. So those walls go around the sides of it? Oh, I thought it.

[A]

Which mountain peak are you talking about? The one where the. The arrow is right now.

[B]

Both of them. So that's Huayna Picchu. And then there's. There's another structure on top of the little peak to the left of it that was.

[A]

And you can walk from this thing that we're looking at, this plane all the way up to that other.

[B]

Yeah, I've walked the whole thing, like four times.

[A]

Oh, I thought was just this plain here.

[B]

No, no, it's the. It's the entire. So, so where he's standing, he's actually standing on the mountain of Machu Picchu. The city itself sits on the low end. And then that mountain on the back end is called Huayna Picchu. But the actual city itself of Machu Picchu wraps and consumes the entire mountain. Both mountains.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

So. So do you see that? You see that kind of grassy knoll? If you're able to go. You can go back to that frame that we were just on, that there's a. Yeah. So you see that grassy knoll that's kind of back in the middle?

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So if you walk beyond that, it's just jungle, and there's a little, like, muddy trail through there. And you can walk that trail all the way up to the back. To that back peak of Huayna Picchu. And throughout the entire time, there are structures in there just covered up and, like, swallowed up by the jungle. And so you're really, like, walking in the steps of Hiram Bingham when he's there sort of for the first time, and seeing these structures, like, popping out of the forest. The thing for me that captivates me and why Machu Picchu is definitely the most imposing archaeological site that I've ever been to is one. It gives you a sense of the sheer scale of this civilization and how powerful they really were to be centered in Cusco. And you start from Cusco and you take this taxi ride three hours out to Ollantaytambo, and then you take this. You know, this train is moving, you know, like 50, 60 miles an hour through. Through the mountains, and then you reach the Amazon. And then you're just looking around and you're like this. You're like. This whole area was. Was conquered by this one ancient civilization like this. This entire region that I'm in was owned by them. And everywhere you go, you see, like, ruins, ruins on the side of the mountains. And you see these terraces, like, lining the sides of the mountains, and you can see how they were feeding millions and millions of people. You get out into the Andean Amazon, where this is, and you go up to the top of this mountain, and you're standing up there and you're like, okay, so at what point do people. And we gotta remember they had no pack animals. There's not horses, there's not oxen.

[A]

So they're carrying all of this.

[B]

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

[A]

they also had a waterway. Right, right. If you're gonna excavate from miles away, you could potentially, you can put the.

[B]

You can put the stones on the water and transport them there, and then it's only a short way to get them, you know, I mean, it's. It. In ancient times, it was probably right next. Do you remember. You remember the temple that's right next to the Sphinx?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I read about right there.

[B]

So when they got the stones off, off, they just have to take them a few hundred feet to get them to where the pyramid is going to be. And, and how you get the stones up is a logistical, like, nightmare. I don't, I don't actually understand how they could possibly do something like that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But we're looking at much of the equivalent things happening here. They're, they have roads going up the side of the mountain where they're transporting stones up.

[A]

So these stones are not quarried from the mountain itself, they're coming from.

[B]

Well, most of them are.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

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

[A]

It's the sheer scale of the city at this altitude.

[B]

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

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

Some of the architecture there is only rivaled in Egypt in one or two places. Like a lot of the architecture in Peru in the Inca realm is vastly superior to most of ancient Egypt. I mean, there are places like the pyramid itself is amazing, but a lot of it is carved out of soft limestone. Right. But that inner chamber, that's that red rose granite, which is mind blowing, that those lentils that sit up in the ceiling are like 80 ton stones. Yeah, well. And they're made out of red granite. Well, here we have, here we have gray andesite, which is sometimes, depending on where it's quarried from, just as dense. Just as dense. Maybe a little bit more. Wow. And they're using stones that are in equal size and weight to the lintels in the king's chamber of the Great Pyramid. And the way that they fit those stones together.

[A]

Well, look at this.

[B]

It's all done on purpose because they know that Peru has been a seismic area for millions of years probably, and the ancient Peruvians were very keenly aware of this. So there are like, sites out in Lima where they would use these little vertical bricks and they would stack them up. And this site, I believe, is much older than most of the Inca realm.

[A]

So, sorry, seismic, what do you mean by that?

[B]

Seismic is like an earthquake, prone to earthquakes. And so I think it's called Wakahaya Marca in Lima. There's a site there where they use these little bricks and they stack them up vertically and they have little Spacers between the bricks, so that when an earthquake comes, the whole structure will just wiggle back and forth and it won't fall. And so this is. Yeah, that's Wakahaya Marca. So you can see the stones are stacked vertically there. So this is telling us that these people were one very sophisticated, very familiar with their natural environment and how to avoid catastrophe during it. So what it's doing is. It's showing us that this isn't something that you figure out in one lifetime. This isn't something you figure out in three or four or five lifetimes. This is thousands of years of studying your natural environment and trying to figure it out. And so it shows us that, okay, a lot of this technology, this understanding of your natural world goes really far back in time. Now, Machu Picchu is essentially the precipice of all of these things brought together. It's all built up on this huge mountainside. Now, not all of the architecture is that incredibly precise megalithic stone architecture. Some of it is like cruder rubble and mortar put together for. I don't know about. I don't know if anybody's living there who is actually a normal person. But. But maybe not for royalty, but for these sacred places that are almost obviously astronomical observatories where they're studying the night sky and they're studying the sun and the moon. These places all have this huge megalithic architecture. Like one of the stones that's in. I think it might be the Temple of the Moon.

[A]

I think I saw this.

[B]

One of the stones. You could only fit a couple of those stones in the studio.

[A]

Is this the one that has the 36 different.

[B]

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

[A]

Oh, okay. No, no, no. There was two. I remember in your video you were talking about. There's one in Cusco, which is the most famous one that has, like, 16 different.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Okay. And then what's the other one that.

[B]

I'm sorry. Yeah, that is what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's.

[A]

I know your. You do, though.

[B]

You actually do.

[A]

But you said that this was actually more impressive than the one in Cusco. The one in Cusco is the famous one. I think it.

[B]

You.

[A]

You can describe it.

[B]

Yeah. So there's a stone in cusco that's got 12. Maybe it's 12 different angles, sides. It's something like that. And that's the famous one. Because whenever you get to go to. Whenever you go to Cusco, you walk down the marketplace next to it's the temple of. I'll think of it.

[A]

But just put cusco.

[B]

Yeah, cusco, 12 sided stone. And that's the one that's the most famous. Everybody walks.

[A]

Everybody's seen an image of this.

[B]

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

[A]

Look at this.

[B]

People don't realize. Amazing. There you go. And you can get. There's so, yeah, it's that huge stone that's there on the left. So what's interesting about this stone. So this is the 12 angled or 12 sided stone or something like that. So what's interesting is this stone has all of the hallmarks that people are so fascinated with this kind of architecture. One at the bottom left, you've got these nubs that sit on a lot of these stones. Have you ever seen this?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. What is the purpose of the nub?

[B]

My guess is, my guess is pivoting. So you have this, so you've got this big ass stone and if you can, if you can put the whole weight of the stone on one little tiny little thing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Twist it around and move it.

[A]

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

[B]

Wally Wallington, is that his name?

[A]

And he found if you put a pebble underneath them on flat enough earth that you could completely rotate them 360 degrees so you don't need to lift the entire thing. You need to lift them enough where there's a leverage point. I don't know what you would call it.

[B]

Yeah, I just call it a pivot

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, Wally Wallington. So, you know, so a lot of people, a lot of people will look at this and they'll go, yeah, Wally Wallington's work is genius. But it doesn't fully explain how, how, let's say the pyramids were built. You know, sure, he's, he can't really explain, at least on his own, in his lifetime of doing this, he's not able to explain. You know, you can move these stones on a flat plane, but how do you get them up?

[A]

Of course.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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

[A]

Yes, for sure. This is the. What Benu Yedo was saying, my buddy, about it. It's just like. Yeah. When you have the smartest people, have one singular focus. Like right now the smartest people are probably running hedge funds, developing AI, you know, bombing everywhere, and. And instead they're just worried about how do we get this heavy over here. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

[B]

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

[A]

Off? No. Like that little section right there.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where?

[B]

Where? It's almost like. It's almost like a part of it was scraped away or it was brittle and it broke off. You can tell. So what's really interesting is that this is gray andesite. Gray andesite doesn't just chip off. It's not like chert or something like that. It doesn't just chip away. So one of the things that my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart thinks, and there are other people who think this maybe because. Because of him. So south of Peru, in Chile, in the Atacama Desert, there are these Inca and the empire that was before the Inca, called the Wari, they were creating these roads that like go off into the desert and then they just like fade off into the desert and they end there. The roads don't pick up again further south.

[A]

So desert that leads into the ocean. It's this.

[B]

I'm not sure if the Atacama Desert leads into the ocean.

[A]

It's in Chile.

[B]

Right. But it's definitely near the ocean. Yeah, the Atacama Desert might be. Might be. Might be northern Chile a little bit. I've never actually been there. Yeah.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But. But the, the roads lead into the desert and they don't pick up again further south. They just stop in the desert. So they were doing something out there. Well, one of the things that's out there are these acid deposits, these natural acid deposits. And the. The Peruvians had. They had ceramics that you could hold the acid inside of. Like, the ceramic would not be eaten away by the acid. So you could essentially harvest it. This is just the theory. And like at the site of. At the site of Tiwanaco, which is in Bolivia, which is the place. It's this primordial place that existed long before the Inca empire that the Inca were clearly inspired by. There are stories there that the acid from, like birds mouths and the. And acid was used to melt the stone or soft shape it. Yeah, soften the stone. Yeah. And so a lot of people will get this confused with, like, geopolymer, where you're, like, mixing concrete. But that's not what's happening here. What I think it is is that they are. You know, they've got some metal tools. I forget if it's copper, if it's bronze chisels. They've got some metal tools, but they're not that efficient. But you can smash apart the stones, right? You can get a rough shape. Shape. But if you want to get the

[A]

exact precision, you need to soften it.

[B]

You soften the stones. And one of the other things that you can do is you can get this rough shape and you can put. If you soften the top of one stone and the bottom of another, they'll start to. You just place one stone on top of the other, and it'll become. It'll flatten itself and become perfectly flat. And how you do the. The mechanics of that, gosh, I couldn't really begin to how.

[A]

But how old is this?

[B]

Well, nobody really knows. I mean, you know, we estimate. Yeah, we're talking about thousands of years. Well, what's. What's cool is they're actually about to do a core sample beneath the site of Sacsay Woman and Cusco, and we're going to know for sure, without a doubt. Yeah. This is something that's been highly debated forever. You know, a lot of people say, well, this has to be anti. Diluvian. 12,000 years old.

[A]

12,000 years old.

[B]

People say that. My guess is. My guess is at most a couple thousand.

[A]

Okay, so. And you were telling me that there's,

[C]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

I got you.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

So Cusco is the seat of the. Of the Inca world. It sits at, like 12,500ft. Incredibly, like, protected, isolated, natural environment. And so it's a great place to live. The ground's very fertile. There's rolling hills. It's just. It's a nice. Very nice place. The weather's great, and so there's evidence of people living there. It's either 2000 or 4000 BC with some of the earliest evidence that they found of little, like campsites and stuff of people living out there. Now there's this period before the Inca empire called the kingdom of Cusco. And we don't really know exactly when it begins. We know that I think they expand into an Empire around 800 A.D. according to their oral history that they told the Spaniards. Right. But the Spaniards, when they're walking around, gosh, why. I always forget the name of this temple, but there is a. I'm looking at the photo of it right now, actually.

[A]

Which one? Which of us?

[B]

It's the one with the. With the girl standing in front of that corner of the building. Building 12.

[A]

Angle.

[B]

Yeah. For some reason, I am forgetting the name of this building, but it's this building right here that the Spaniards are walking around in the 1500s, talking to the. To the Inca, and they're asking him, how did you guys build these walls? And gosh, I can't believe I can't think of the name of this temple. What does that say? Palace of Inca Roca. Yeah, that's right. So they're walking around this palace, and the Spaniards asked them, how did you guys build these stones? Like, what did you do? And they were told by the Inca, well, this place was built by the gods. This was here.

[A]

Which would imply that the Inca stumbled upon it, maybe tried to continue building it. I'm not sure if it's the Inca, but isn't there some evidence of a lesser masonry done on top of certain structures that existed?

[B]

Well, and that's kind of.

[A]

Maybe you can formulate my sentence a little better.

[B]

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

[A]

The megalithic.

[B]

The megalithic stones. And then on top of it, you'll have this, what people call, like, Inca construction, which is just rubble, you know, like rubble packed together, sometimes with. Sometimes with, like, cement or mortar between the stones to get the stones to, like, stick together. That's not always the case. It's kind of like. That's a. It's a tough argument for people to make because if you go to Machu Picchu and you. If you look at the. The architecture of Machu Picchu and you think like, well, you know, maybe the. The Inca came and found this and they built on top of it. Whatever, whatever. When you go around that entire city, there's only. There's actually only two buildings there that are made out of the megalithic stone. The rest of it is in that. Is in that mortar. And so it's like, okay, well, did this pre civilization come out here and just build these two buildings way, way, way out here up on top of this mountain. Maybe they did. Well then, you know, we have to come up with a theory of, well, why did they, you know, what is the actual purpose of that? Of course there's never actually a theory that's proposed. It's just with some of this stuff it kind of sits in mystery. Nobody. People like to talk about the mystery but don't actually want to come up with a reason to expand on that. Right.

[A]

The mystery is really fun and yeah,

[B]

the mystery is fun and it sells, right?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Trying to explain the mystery doesn't always sell, which is sort of a big thing in my space.

[C]

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[B]

the road throughout the year.

[C]

Specifically at the end of the year. Plano, Texas, Chandler, Arizona, Pasadena, California. San Diego and Detroit. I can't wait to see you guys there. Come out, shake my hand, take a pic and come enjoy some stand up comedy.

[B]

Quick reset, something practical.

[A]

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[B]

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

[A]

I love this stuff.

[B]

Oh, the evidence. I love it all.

[A]

I love it all. I love it all.

[B]

Good, keep going.

[A]

This is great.

[B]

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

[A]

The dynastic Egyptians themselves. Yeah, these are the people who existed in Egypt at the time.

[B]

Yeah. So let's. The dynastic Egyptians would be 3100 BC to the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. That's the dynastic period.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

Huge exchange. The, the they were influencing one another, were getting beat up so much by the Egyptians for thousands of years. The. There's no gold in Egypt. All of the. All the gold comes from the kushite mines, like. Like down in the Nubian, where. So all the pharaohs would ride down there in these, like, yearly or annual raids. They'd take all the gold. Of course, they would do this in the Levant, too, like out in Mesopotamia. And then they would do these raids where they gather up all the gold and the loot and bring it back to Egypt. So I think it's like maybe in the 900s or 800s B.C. maybe the 700s B.C. the Nubians, while Egypt is, like, falling apart, the Nubians, who are so familiar with Egyptian culture, which have basically, they've been colonized by it for thousands of years. They actually march forward, take over Egypt, and then for five generations, you have Nubian black pharaohs really ruling over Egypt. And they're more Egyptian than the Egyptians had been for hundreds of years.

[A]

Why are they more Egyptian?

[B]

They just go back to the old ways, the ways.

[C]

Egypt great again.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they made Egypt great again. Yeah, yeah. So what a story. And then eventually they're. They're overthrown again.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[C]

It's also probably British archaeology plus Indiana Jones.

[A]

Yes, sure.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then the biggest ones are in Egypt, so naturally they're going to get the crypto for it. And when you say completely quarried, meaning there was a pyramid structure that was there, and then the stones were removed to build whatever. Oh, wow. But it's interesting. Kind of like lost in history. You never hear much conversation about it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And whenever I talk to somebody Sudanese and I bring up the pyramids. Yeah. Why don't we hear about the pyramids? There's always this reaction. It's like, thank you. Can you talk about this, please? It'd be really nice.

[B]

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

[A]

You can't evoke your history. You can't evoke your past. If you don't have enough stability to Maintain.

[C]

I didn't go see it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's awesome. They really should do, they really should do something because it shouldn't be that hard. Like if you're down in South Egypt. I was down in Abu Simbel, which is the place where you have the four giant statues of Pharaoh Ramses carved into the mountainside.

[A]

Unbelievable.

[B]

Did you go see that?

[A]

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

[C]

The Kings. Valley of the Kings.

[A]

Yeah, Valley of the Kings, which is in Luxor. Luxor. I didn't make it down to Luxor.

[B]

Yeah. Really?

[A]

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

[B]

Have you ever been to Egypt?

[A]

No. My mom went.

[B]

We should do an Egypt trip, dude.

[A]

That would be it. I love.

[B]

Yeah, Luxor is the place.

[A]

No, I, I, I believe it, but like, yeah, what I would love to see is Alexandria too. But that's just for like, you know, ancient European remnants and, like. Cool. Wait, why your eyes lit up Alexandria?

[B]

That's my expertise in ancient Egypt.

[A]

Really?

[B]

I know more about Alexandria than I do.

[A]

Oh, Luke. We're just getting Cooking.

[B]

Yeah, Yeah.

[A]

I love this stuff. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But. Okay. Just wrapping up the thing about the pyramids. Yeah. The evidence is so overwhelming of when the pyramids were built, and we don't. I know you talked about pyramids a lot on this, that even Graham Hancock has come around and said that he knows it's a product of the reign of Khufu in the old kingdom. So, I mean, people can go look into that. And it's disappointing, but it does not, it does nothing. Not at all. It does not minimize the insane achievement of the pure pyramids.

[A]

Right.

[B]

How they were constructed still, nobody knows.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's way easier to date something than it is to figure out, explain how it was created, why it was created, and what it was used for. And those are the real juicy bits there.

[A]

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

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

4,500 4,000 years could have done this.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Why'd your eyes light up at Alexandria? Why do you marvel at Alexandria?

[B]

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

[A]

in Egypt to the people.

[B]

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

[A]

When the Nile something.

[B]

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

[A]

all that like every time it would overflow or whatever that's called with a river. Like the fertility of the grounds was just something. You could grow anything there. So there are plentiful things with food. It was very hard to attack.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Also, if you want to know like how difficult it is to really pass through the jungle without doing it in a trip to the Amazon. Go to Costa Rica and just drive from one town to the next and you will. We're talking about 20, 26 Costa Rica, the Dent. I don't even think they have an army because they're just like, who's invading? Yeah, it's one road. It's so dense and like the jungle almost overtakes the. It almost goes from. From there's barely beach is what I'm trying to say. Like you could see the trees almost like creeping out towards the water.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like that's how powerful and potent the jungle is when it's just not like held back. There's that. There's those cool like Eliza. Elizabethan mansions that were constructed. I believe it was like in the Congo During Belgium rule. Was it in the Congo? I don't know. And, like, they made these, like, these beautiful mansions during this, like, horrible colonial time. And. And the jungle has just consumed them, really, like trees growing through them, and it's just relentless if you don't keep it back.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Can I ask you about Alexandria?

[B]

Yeah, absolutely.

[C]

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

[A]

Here we go. Here we go. So much of the ancient.

[C]

Look, he was saying that perhaps it never burned down and that it actually just eroded from the elements. Intellectual decay, invasion, you know, he's saying

[B]

that it never burned down. Like, he. He really said that, that there's a

[C]

part of it that burned down. But perhaps the burning was more of a metaphorical burning.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Well, see, that's kind of the thing is, is, you know, you. You could talk to an Egyptologist who specializes in the 18th Dynasty, like, as a lot of them do, that's. That's like the golden age of. Of ancient Egypt where you have. Have all your iconic pharaohs that you know the names of other than Ramses. He's 19th dynasty, but. And he may be like, speaking off the cuff about Alexandria and just kind of posing an idea that's popular among scholars. But it's surprising that any scholars say that it didn't burn down, because it's in the primary sources that it burned down like three or four times. So.

[C]

So who burned it down?

[B]

Well, it starts with. So we're getting to some Roman stuff here. When it comes to the Mediterranean world, Egypt and Greece is my thing. When we get into the Roman world, that's a whole other realm. But I believe that it first starts with Julius Caesar is chasing his rival Pompey across the Mediterranean into. Pompey is fleeing from Rome to Alexandria. And Pompey, you know, in Rome, basically the armies were made up by, like, really rich guys who would take up, like, a portion of the Roman Empire. Right. So you have like these unofficial mini emperors or like nomarchs that sort of run shit. And so these two rivals, as they do chasing each other, they're at war with each other. Julius Caesar's chasing Pompey down into the Mediterranean. And I believe that when Pompey is trying to flee the city of Alexandria, his military boats were brought up to the port that was connected to the library. And so Caesar ordered for the docks to be burned. To burn the boat so that Pompey's guys couldn't flee and that. So essentially, when you landed in Alexandria, your boat would be boarded by city officials, Ptolemaic soldiers. Or sometimes at certain points, they were Roman soldiers because. Because this was like the beginning of the fall of Ancient Egypt. But eventually Ptolemaic rule, which is the Greek dynasty that's ruling over Egypt after Alexander conquers, Alexander dies. His best friend Ptolemy, becomes pharaoh of Egypt, and then his line all the way down to Cleopatra for the next 300 years, rules over Egypt from the city of Alexandria. So the Ptolemaic power starts dwindling. So they reach out to Rome and start hiring essentially, like, Roman military backing. And that's kind of the foot into the door for the Romans to start conquering Egypt from the inside. That's the beginning of the end for Egypt. But essentially, your boat would be boarded by city officials, and they would essentially scour your boat or just ask you, be like, okay, what writing do you have with you? What documents did you bring? They'd look over your documents. If it was something valuable that they didn't have, they would bring that into the library. They would copy it down. They would give you the copy, and

[A]

then we keep the original. Wow.

[B]

Yeah. And so you have the original source

[A]

material of everybody that passes through that city.

[B]

And so this is something that I'd love to see Wes Huff talk about this, but there's something that's here that's called. I've heard it informally referred to as the Library Wars. But you had, like, the Library of Alexandria, the Library of Babylon, the Library of Pergamum, I believe, up on the Turkish coast. I believe that's where that city is. And so you had all these cities essentially warring against. Yeah, exactly. Warring against each other, trying to get original source material and the oldest documents. And so in the city of Alexandria, you had so much knowledge of the ancient world all in one place. I mean, when I was chatting with. When I was on Joe's show, yeah, we were going through something that was written by. I believe it was written by one of the Ptolemies. It was a second century BC Document that was being referenced by, like, a first century AD Document. But we found out on the show, I start. I, like, called out the date. I was like, look at that. So we looked into it, and essentially we on the show, even though this is probably known by some scholars, but we found another document that was being referenced that doesn't exist anymore, that was. Was definitely destroyed. Or existed in Alexandria.

[A]

Proof of destruction.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

So anywhere he goes.

[B]

And so anywhere he goes, he builds a lot of Alexandrias, but the one that stuck was Egypt. And so Alexander, there's this great story of when he comes to, when he's conquering the Persian realm, okay, so he's 23 years older, 25 years old. He leaves Macedonia right here, Persia's beating up on the Greeks for, let me see, he's, you know, I guess the, around like 325 BC or 323 BC he sets out, it's somewhere around there or maybe. No, it's earlier than that. 331 is when he arrives in Egypt. It's something like that. Anyway, so this crazy 23 year old, 25 year old kid takes on the Persian empire, marches through in these three very important battles, pushes the Persians back. Eventually he wants to march to Babylon, but he shouldn't do that until he turns west and goes and captures Egypt. Because Egypt is known as the breadbasket of the Mediterranean because all the grain and the food to feed, at many points to feed most of the eastern Mediterranean came out of Egypt.

[A]

So if you secure the food and the grain, then you can actually, then

[B]

you can turn around and go and go stomp Babylon. Babylon. And so he goes and captures Egypt and he eventually goes to Memphis. He must have seen the pyramids, although maybe that was in Ptolemy's account. What Alexander walking around the pyramids and looking at him, maybe that was in Ptolemy's account. But eventually Alexander wants to go to the northern port. Because the book that exists in the back of the Greek mind, all Greeks, their sacred biblical text essentially is Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey, the story of Troy, right? And so in that book, in the Odyssey, which maybe we'll even see a scene of this in this new movie, when Odysseus is essentially being like kicked around the eastern Mediterranean, he lands on an island or a little port town on the northern coast of Egypt. And I think as the story goes, I forget exactly how it goes in the Odyssey. But he asked the people, you know, where am I? And they say, you're on Pharos. And so maybe that means you're in. Maybe that means this is Pharaoh's land, maybe that means this is the pharaoh's island, but it's called Pharos. So Alexander being this huge fan of that great story and just a kid, he's 23 or 25, and he's like, he's like, he's like, I'm here and he's still here. He's like, I'm going to go find Pharos. So he goes, so he goes to northern, to northern Egypt. Now the Egyptians, they don't like the water. There are not really that many Egyptian cities that are on this northern coast of the Mediterranean. They like to be pushed further back. This is another thing about, we think of the Egyptians as like riding these camels through the desert or whatever. The Egyptians did not want anything to do with hanging around in the Mediterranean or being in the desert. This isn't even ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt is just the river and like a mile on each side of the river where it's, where it's green and tropical. That's where the Egyptians lived. They didn't like the desert because that's where the roaming barbarians hung out. You know, if you, if you wander out in the desert, you were going to get killed. So you needed to live literally on the Nile, on the Nile. That was your whole world.

[A]

And this is most civilizations.

[B]

This is. Yes.

[A]

Very few civilizations choose to develop and

[C]

like you're going to be in near your life.

[A]

Exactly, exactly. Okay, yeah. And so, but it is, the perception is kind of odd. This. There's like a.

[C]

They had rigid borders ye control agency.

[B]

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

[A]

Right.

[B]

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

[A]

to be because you can now have a natural border.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And so he hops off of his horse and he's looking for, like, chalk or something, but he doesn't have any chalk to lay it to make a city layout. So he goes and grabs some grain out of a saddlebag, throws the grain in the dirt. And then Alexander himself, by his own hand, laid out the initial, like, core city plan. And he had an architect. I forget that they get the architect's name, but he had an architect, like, jump down with him and they lay it out so that the breeze will sweep through the city. And he says, I want the roads to be 100ft wide or something equivalent to that. He wants this to be a grand city city. So he lays it all out. And then as soon as he. As soon as he lays it all out, this flock of seabirds, like, swoop down and they eat all the. They devour all the grain in front of him. And, you know, ancient people are very superstitious. And so he thought that that was a bad omen. And he was like, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I shouldn't build this city here or whatever. And one of his guys, like, reassured him, no, no, no, this means that this city is going to feed many nations or it's going to feed many people. So Alexander gets back on his horse, leaves his architect and a group of people behind. They start construction on the side.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, exactly. What a story, right? Yeah, exactly. So Alexander, he has to leave. He's got to go to a place in the western desert called Siwa, where he's going to be essentially, like, proclaimed the son of Amun Ra, and he's going to be proclaimed Pharaoh. He never goes back to Alexandria. He goes and conquers Babylon. Then he tries to push into India, and he eventually dies in Babylon at like, 32 or 33. But Alexandria lives on without him. Ptolemy, his best friend, they divide up Alexander's massive empire. Like, think about this dude.

[A]

Did they bring his body back to Alexandria?

[B]

Ptolemy went and stole it. So I think that his body was going to go back to Macedonia. So they were going to take his body from wherever Babylon is, if it's in Iraq or Iran. Iraq. So they're going to take his body back. They got to go up through, you know, Anatolia, modern day Turkey. And so Ptolemy sends out an expedition and they go capture his body and then they bring his body back.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Like a political move, you're saying, kind of.

[B]

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

[C]

They're getting bullied their whole lives.

[B]

Yeah, they're getting bullied by them.

[A]

Nothing's changed. So you're this shout out to Macedonians.

[B]

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

[C]

Philip ii.

[B]

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

[A]

This is what Steve Witkoff is hoping for right now.

[B]

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

[A]

Kind of crazy.

[B]

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

[A]

You need the body.

[B]

That's why you need the body.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[C]

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

[A]

What do you mean by that mark?

[C]

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

[B]

Right?

[C]

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

[B]

Greece is very diverse. Like, as far as, as far as the way that their politics go. You know, in Athens, the idea of people governing themselves was born in. I don't know, it was when they got the tyrants out. I think it was in the 600 B.C. or the 500 B.C. so they had like, they had kings and then they had tyrants, which is like a political king, but not like a, you know, not the same thing. And then, and then they formed the Athenian democracy. And then some other places follow suit with this idea of democracy and people ruling over themselves. But the Macedonians held onto this traditional sort of medieval, you know, I guess this is pre medieval. Right. But, you know, they sort of held onto this royal bloodline, secession, succession. And then Sparta had kings. Even though it's different, they would have like two kings. So the Greek world is like super divided. This is why there was never really much of a Greek empire, because the Greeks could never like fully come together.

[A]

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

[B]

Turkey, yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Like cultures permeating across.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

That's much later.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This is.

[B]

What is it?

[A]

15? No, no, the fall. When is the Ottoman Empire takeover? 1500.

[B]

I can't say. I don't know either.

[C]

But we diverted you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[A]

citizens hate you and you're an outsider.

[B]

Yeah. You're gonna, you're gonna get. You're gonna have a revolution. There's gonna be a revolt of some of Kind. Kind. And you don't want to do that. It's not like you can. You can't really just rule people with an iron fist forever. They will rise up and cut your head off. So Ptolemy, and Ptolemy was actually inspired by Alexander. He actually wanted to be a good ruler. So he had this, you know, this genuine. He had this, like, genuine nature about him as a ruler. Now, certainly still a ruler did bad things, whatever all the ancient rulers did, but so he has to create these public projects in Alexandria, which is now the new capital. The capital has moved from. You know, the religious capital was Luxor. The economic capital was Cairo or Memphis. Well, he's moved all of it now to Alexandria. All of it is out there. There's still a lot of stuff going on down in the south. Ptolemies are still building temples down there, but mainly the heart of Egypt is at Alexandria. And Alexandria is really, really advantageous place because when Alexander took over so much of this world, a lot of those ports became connected to Alexandria and Alexandria became the center of trading across the Mediterranean and out into the Indian Ocean. So they're filthy, filthy rich. So essentially the Ptolemies take all this money and they start these two primary projects. One, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, if you guys are familiar with this. The second one, the Library of Alexandria, gonna be the center of knowled of all of the ancient world. And there were other projects that they started, but those are the two primary ones. I feel like there's one right now that I'm just blanking out on. Now, what's really interesting here is Ptolemy gathers his architects, probably native Egyptian architects, and we have a lot of evidence that scholars in the Library of Alexandria were going and studying the pyramids and studying the obelisk. They were studying ancient Egypt. During Ancient Egypt. Right. And so the Greek Alexandrian scholars are very fascinated by these marvels that are just sitting quietly out in the deserts for thousands of years. Right. Like, they want to go study the geometry and how they were created and things like that. You know, the idea that the Earth is a sphere was discovered in Alexandria by Eratosthenes, I believe. Believe. And so what's really interesting is for the first time perhaps since the pyramids were built, I can't think of other examples. For the first time since the pyramids were built, megalithic architecture using red Aswan granite down from Aswan, same granite that's used in the. In the Valley Temple next to the Sphinx. The same granite that's used in the king's chamber. Chamber is employed again in architecture on the same scale. So the ancient sources tell us. And the library of Alex, or I'm sorry, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, was built so well that it fell the year Before Columbus arrived in the Americas. I'm pretty sure it's very, very, very close. So how long is that it's set for? It must have stood for 1600 years or so, or 1700 years or something like that. But there were travelers throughout antiquity, like let's say the late ancient times, medieval Dark ages are traveling to Egypt and seeing it and they see it like slowly decay. But they describe the materials that were used to build it and they say that they were 65 ton red granite stones that were used to build the lighthouse. And we have some dimensions of it and the blocks are just sitting in the water today. If you go to Alexandria, like another, another, his friend, who's a historian, who's a Roman historian, he and I went and looked and there's these massive stones sitting out there and they say that the library was made out. It was this huge stone building made out of like, you know, the, the greatest marble and granite that, that could be quarried or that could be, you know, gathered. And, and the lighthouse itself was within just a few feet of being the same height of the Great Pyramid. So it's the Ptolemy showing the people of Egypt. We're going back.

[C]

Oh, wow.

[A]

And that's how you get the people hyped.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's like this is going to be the heyday and we'll run it right back and the entire world is going to come here the same way they came a thousand years ago.

[B]

And it was the single greatest city ever built in the ancient world. Arguably Rome. At no point would have ever, at no point would have ever had the kind of magnificence that Alexandria really had. No, no. I mean Rome, Rome had a lot of great public monuments, but if you walk outside of your apartment building, you immediately step in horseshit. You're walking around in the mud. And Rome was extremely dirty, like busy place. It honestly would have been magnificent to like most people.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

But if you were an Alexandrian and you went and visited Rome, you'd be like, man, this place is a fricking dump.

[A]

And what happened to the lighthouse?

[B]

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

[C]

Can we see the stones in the water?

[B]

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

[A]

Oh, it was built on an island.

[B]

Yeah. So it's built on the island of Pharos. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, it's about 700 something miles away.

[A]

Bringing it up the Nile, bringing it across the water. Right. Because there's a. What is the distance, a kilometer of someplace?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, you have to bring it. Yeah, yeah. You would have to bring it all the way up the Nile, up into the delta, following the river out of the delta into the Mediterranean, into the Mediterranean and kind of sail around the city, pull up to the island and then unload the blocks.

[A]

And the idea was the first thing a ship is going to see as they approach the greatest city in modern civilization at the time is this massive megalithic structure on an island. It's awe inspiring. How could you do that?

[B]

It's the world's first lighthouse. Right. It's just this beacon that you could see that showed you where this calm water port was. And I believe it was a giant bronze mirror with like a statue, a Poseidon in it. And I think it would, I think it would spin, but it would constantly, it would stay constantly burning. And. And so, yeah, at night you would see this. You'd see this torch off in the distance. So you pull up. Yeah. And then. So once you land, once you, once you made port, then you would make port on the backside of Alexandria's library. So you'd see this huge public library in front of. In front of you. Yeah. And then they would come in and they take all of your valuable knowledge. Right. Like, they're probably not like petty documents, but they're taking all your important documents and copying them down. And then you would walk into the city. I think you had. It was called Soma Road and Canopic Way. And so when you entered into the city, if you didn't come in from a side gate or whatever, whatever. But if you entered in the primary way that the city was designed especially for, like political figures. Like the first time, you know, some king or something is brought in from, from say, Cyprus, like a siprecut, say a Cyprus king is brought into Alexandria on a royal visit. He's going to be given the royal tour. He's going to go underneath the lighthouse and he's going to look at this massive tower that doesn't look like anything else. That's the other thing you got to think there isn't anything else like that in their world. I mean there is amazing architecture, but that is something completely different. This massive tower with this burning flame on of the top. Top of it. Exactly. So he's going to come in this port a little bit, let's say up to the. Where you see that, that, that dock kind of coming down the middle that might of course they draw these in

[A]

all different types of ways. The dock that he's on right now

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

So that might be the main dock that it. And diagrams of Alexandria are drawn in so many different ways. But you would pull up to that dock, you'd walk down it. You may or may not enter the library, but you might walk around it. And then you would be on Soma Road or Canopic Way. But it's the main two streets that go down the center of the city. Now on your right side you would have, let's say theoretically on your right side you would have the Library of Alexandria. Right next to that would be a place called the Museion which was. So the library is a library, but the Museion is a university. So that's where all of your scholars would be getting other people who want to study. They get together, they run experiments, they're teaching things. And then connected to that would be like lecture hall after lecture hall after lecture hall. There's a place in modern day, if you go to Egypt, you can go to Alexandria and see a portion of the library still there. It's called Kom el Dika.

[A]

How do you spell it?

[B]

K O M E L D I K K A. And you can see some of the lecture halls from these are from later periods. But these would have connected to the overall campus of Alexandria. So you'd walk down, you'd walk down these, these alleyways that are covered up. So you see these little pillars that are standing. There were huge sort of half or like half circular awnings that, that would stone awnings and wood awnings that would sit over that. So everywhere you would go would be fully shaded. This was not out in the open. There was a whole roof over this that would allow natural light in. So you can walk around the whole city. And the campus itself kind of spread across a large part of the central city. But in Alexandria itself, you'd see scholars coming and going and people learning.

[A]

Why was there such a priority Put on the scholarly activities. Why was education and so sought after or rewarded? Did this exist in other parts of or other major cities during antiquity?

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is just the culmination of centuries of this beginning. It really begins with the pre Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece. So like Athens. So pre Socratic means all the scholars before Socrates. Socrates wasn't really a scholar. He was more like a host hobo. That was super, you know, really smart and thoughtful guy. But it's this idea of pondering your own existence and pondering reality and thinking about like, how does a man master himself? And what is the purpose of my existence? And what is the reality of nature itself? What is nature? What is my nature? This all started in Athens pretty much and really explodes during about 450 BC. There's this classical Athenian period that's framed by two wars. You've got the Persian wars and then you've got the Peloponnesian wars. The Persian wars is actually the first Persian wars where Leonidas is standing.

[A]

This is the Sparta.

[B]

Thermopylae. Yeah, yeah, this is at Thermopylae. Yeah, the stand of Thermopylae. That's the Persian War 300 where the Greeks. Yeah, where the Greeks were. Hell, the Persians. And then that causes this explosion of Greek identity and thought and imagination and philosophy. There's so much. It's the birth of comedy itself. Happens right after that. The first standup comics in the world are in Athens in the theater of Athens in Greece. And it was such a separation from the ancient world that existed before that it was the only time where you had these people who were not ruled over by a kid king. They're ruled over by politicians who are elected. Or maybe they assassinate all their political rivals and they become elected. But they could. Everyone. You would announce when there would be a show, there'd be some, you know, you'd go watch plays like all day long. Some of them would be an actual theatrical play. Some of them would be like a comedy standup thing. This was big in Alexandria. They would have. They would have comics like stand up and just rip on the emperor of Rome. Rome, like all day long. And people get together and just say the most heinous jokes about the emperor of Rome and the word would get back to the emperor and he'd come down and just slaughter like 20,000 people. Yeah, because of, because of, you know, so, so in.

[C]

But cancel culture, bro.

[B]

We're doing all right in Athens. You could stand out in the theater and you could wear them. You'd like everybody would wear a mask and a robe so you wouldn't like quite know who is saying what. And, and so you could stand out there and you could make jokes criticizing politicians to their face as they're sitting in the crowd and have the whole crowd erupt. And it was like, it was just a, it's just this revolutionary way of thought in the ancient world that happens in Greece and it spreads through there. So Alexandria is like the most powerful, wealthy culmination of all of that, where you have, you know, it's gone from just like naturalistic philosophy of what is nature itself, to categorizing philosophy, to coming up with different genres of study and that are organized. And then, you know, it becomes like similar to a modern day university. And so Alexandria is like if, if you can have a university on this scale where this many people are literate and this intelligent, the separation between your power and even like the intellectual and psychological effect that it has on your contemporary neighbors, like people who are outside of East Egypt, the effect that it has on their perception of you is immense. Right? Like they see you as an intellectual giant compared to them.

[A]

So there's an intimidation factor that comes with it.

[B]

It's everything all in one, right. And so Alexandria is kind of the culmination of all of the great things of the ancient world all arriving in one place. And one of the biggest things was that nearly the entire city was built out of stone. It's itself that was not a thing. Like if you go and you look at the, all the great temples that are in Egypt, if you go and look at all the great temples that are in Egypt, according to the ancient sources, like when Herodotus is visiting Egypt, whatever the town, the city that exists around, and all the thousands of people who live in the cities, it's really no more grand than just a poor village. Like all the normal people are building houses leaning up against these solid walls of the temple. But in Alexandria, the average quality of life is so much higher and everyone's apartment buildings are all made out of stone. There's this famous saying that in Rome there's no single time in Roman history where a part of the city wasn't burning down. Because all of the apartment buildings, even during the height, let's say during the period of the five good emperors, ends with Marcus Aurelius Gladiator. That's the height of ancient Rome. A lot of people say, and it began with the Emperor Trajan, a lot of people say that the period of those five emperors is the Happiest time in all of humanity. It's when the Roman empire was the most stable. Okay? Even then, the vast majority of the architecture in Rome was made out of wood and the buildings were constantly just burned down. It was so common that Augustus, Rome's first emperor, had to create the world's first fire brigade to be watching out for fires to go put the them out. Alexandria didn't have to deal with this because the whole city was made out of stone.

[A]

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[C]

Ass.

[A]

All right, before we get back with Luke, are y' all watching the March Madness at all?

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

Yep. Who do you got?

[C]

I guessed it last year.

[A]

Let the record show you did not guess.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

No, you didn't.

[C]

I said who? I. I said who would win. I said Florida.

[A]

Yeah. You know it's a sin to lie, right?

[C]

We could pull up the tapes. If only I said this on a recorded platform. If only.

[A]

There's no way you guessed. You did not guess it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

No, you didn't.

[C]

It was the championship game and I.

[A]

You guessed it at the end.

[C]

Who can't. Why does it matter when you guess it?

[A]

Cuz that's a 50% chance.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[C]

Heaven forbid I have a little bit of sauce going on my side. You guys don't got to win any money or to see in any way.

[A]

Get out.

[C]

Ucf. Where's UCF at, Miles? Central Florida. Go Knights.

[B]

No, they're not in that sh.

[A]

They were Kansas.

[C]

They.

[A]

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

[C]

If you just say Arizona, I'm going to grab that chopstick out.

[A]

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

[C]

And what makes you think Think that?

[A]

I don't know. It's more of a gut. Like, I just have a gut instinct that's telling me Arizona got it. What do you think? Yep. Kansas. You think Kansas has got it? Okay, can we scroll down a little bit? Draw.

[C]

It looks like C saying Arizona, Michigan, Duke, Houston, Purdue, Illinois, yukon.

[A]

Okay, so St. John's isn't that a New York team? Yeah, St. John's is in there. Well, I mean, you're not going to

[C]

show them any love at all.

[A]

Well, no, I think Arizona got it. No, that's what I meant. By Kansas, I meant St. John's you meant our Kansas?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Got it. Okay. What does cow. Hold on. What does Cal of St. John's at 3%. All right, let me. I mean, I kind of got delusional New Yorkers.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I gotta rock.

[C]

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

[A]

No, I gotta rock with St. Johnson. Where's Florida?

[C]

So let's go down. It's somewhere in there.

[A]

I don't even know if you guys. Florida is the whole state.

[C]

Where's Florida?

[B]

Florida lost Iowa by one point.

[C]

By a point.

[B]

Sucker.

[C]

Where's Iowa at?

[A]

Sucker. Sucker.

[C]

I hit my ball that bo.

[A]

Less than 1% chance.

[B]

N. I mean, they were the favorites

[C]

when they played ucf, right? Is that what you meant? Where's UCF at?

[A]

Mark. Mark don't know about basketball. I do. I know stuff.

[C]

Bam. Out of bio, 83 points.

[A]

Oh, you should go for St. John. You can Catholic.

[C]

Is that a Catholic school?

[A]

Yeah. Saint. Do you know who St. John was?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Who?

[C]

St. John. He's an apostle. He wrote one of the gospels.

[A]

That's a different one. No, the saint of. You don't even know. I don't know what I was talking about. Look, St. John's pulling it off. I don't care if C has him at 3%. New York. Oh, it's down to 2%.

[C]

You need Luke Cavern.

[A]

The second we started talking about it went down. Percent.

[C]

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

[A]

You bailed, Alex. I know. Thank you. Alex. Out. No good deed, bro. No good deed, my guy.

[C]

You just.

[A]

Are we being silly? Yo, Are we being silly?

[B]

Oh, man.

[C]

Joke.

[A]

St. John's got it. Okay, man, just so hard to think of jokes. St. John's got it.

[B]

All right.

[A]

Can we get back with Luke, bro? We got. We got more.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

All right. Let's get back with Luke. So what was the demise of this, like, amazing city?

[B]

So. Well, one. It begins with. With Egypt losing their independence to the Roman Empire.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, well, it kind of. The later Ptolemies, like, let's say Ptolemy 4. So you've got Ptolemy 1, 2, and 3. Those are the 3.

[A]

This is the Game of Thrones.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. And so. So Game of Thrones starts to begin and these Ptolemies do not care about learning the ways of the old gods of Egypt. They only care about being rich Greek kings and princes. Yeah, extrapolating the resources or extracting the resources from the local poor, indigenous people. You know, it's like the British Africa. It's the same sort of thing.

[A]

Yeah, they're just plundering the spoils.

[B]

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

[A]

And how is she so aware of it?

[B]

Well, it's probably just an intrinsic curiosity we have there. There is a surviving record of her family going on, like, a family vacation through Egypt when she's just a little girl. And we know that one of the places that she would have been taken to was the Serapium, where the giant, like, bull box sarcophagi are underground. You may have seen them. They're like, only one of them could fit in this room. It's crazy. So they had these APIs bulls that they would worship, and they would supposedly bury them in these giant Diorite granite boxes. Whatever. It's just a marvel. And so her family would have been taken there, would have been taken to seeing the pyramids, and she definitely would have heard the indigenous Egyptian language being said spoken. And, you know, it's kind of like one of those people who grow up in a disaffected household where they just innately know this isn't the way it has to be, and they change all of that.

[A]

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

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

What do you mean get rid? She kills. Kills them all. Give us the Cleopatra. Are you guys familiar with the Cleopatra lore? Like, I know this is a baddie.

[B]

She's a seductor.

[A]

All right, give us the whole.

[C]

But even that's contested.

[B]

Yeah, well, you know, I'm no Cleopatra expert, because usually a Roman historian would be more of a Cleopatra expert because she's such a core figure of the Roman world. She's not really a core figure of the Egyptian world. Not in the same way that, like, a pure Egyptian pharaoh would have been 1800 years before she was alive. Right. But essentially she's born into this long lineage, this 300 year long dynasty of Greek rulers ruling over the Egyptian people from Alexandria. So Alexandria has really greatly expanded. It's extremely wealthy.

[A]

What's the makeup? Is it mainly Greeks or. It's mainly. That's a great question. What does it look like?

[B]

The city of Alexandria was broken up into to ethnic neighborhoods. So you had, you had Greek people, you had Egyptians, Spanish Harlem, you had a Jewish neighborhood.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And you may have had a neighborhood for, you may have had a neighborhood for like sub Saharan Africans. But like small one, I forget exactly, but I know those are the big three. Greek, Egyptian and like Semitic people are living there. And so Cleopatra is born at the very end of this dynasty, although nobody knows this at the time, that this will be the end. But through hooker by crook, she essentially rises her way to power. She's in this situation where she has to like, she can't actually be Pharaoh herself. She's got to politically like dynastically marry her 13 year old brother. Brother, you know, and it's probably just like they're probably not actually having sex, whatever. But you know, he's like 13 years old. He ends up suspiciously being drowned in this. I think it's an attack on this boat. It's something like that. But anyways, she becomes, she becomes her

[A]

brother so she can be in charge.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. So, okay, so she becomes, she becomes pharaoh of Egypt. And. But Egypt is in this very precarious situation now where all of these incompetent, all of her incompetent grandfathers who let power slip and slip and slip away. Actually one of the things that is the worst travesty of the slip of Alexandrian Ptolemaic rule was Ptolemy X. He had bankrupted Egypt's economy by wasting all of the money. And so he had to go down into Alexander's mausoleum. Alexander had this huge monument that set across the street from the library of Alexandria. And he had this huge monument and you know, you'd see this statue of Alexander and then it was under the ground that Alexander is buried in, this solid gold sarcophagus surrounded by the burials of all of the other Ptolemaic kings that are around him. And Ptolemy the 10th goes in and pulls Alexander out of his coffin, puts him in a crystal or alabaster sarcophagus, gets the gold, melts down the gold and he has to use that to pay off off debt.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And so, yeah, nasty work. Yeah, it's tragedy.

[C]

It is symbolic though that like Alexandria, by the very end, is getting destroyed. And the way that they're trying to pay for it is by destroying the founder. You know what I mean? There's like a poetry to it.

[B]

It's crazy. So, so they put him in an alabaster sarcophagus. And then a few generations later, or a couple generations later, Ptolemy xii, who I believe is Cleopatra's father, is born. He dies away. Ptolemy the 13th is Cleopatra's brother. They have to get married. He suspicious by drowning in the river. All of a sudden, Cleopatra is alone in the palace and she is the ruler. And so her political move from here to allow Egypt to not become swallowed up by the Mediterranean growing in wealth and rising up around Egypt, she really only has one move because all of her incompetent grandfathers have. There is no Egyptian military anymore, not like a unified, strong military. There's, you know, Ptolemaic military made out of, like, Greeks living in Egypt. Now they're contracting soldiers from Rome, so they're paying soldiers from Rome. So all of a sudden, who really runs Egypt, right? So Cleopatra, she sees that there's a civil war that's going on in. That's going on in Rome. And one of the things that she can do, this is like a highly simplistic explanation. Roman historians don't attack me over this. But one of the things that she can do is pull Julius Caesar into. Into Egypt. And so there's this fight over who is going to essentially have the most control in Rome. And Julius Caesar is so popular and has such a great following that he's almost able to sway the Roman people to move the capital of Rome itself from Rome down to Alexandria if he marries Cleopatra. And so essentially, Julius Caesar has this personality complex where he's conquered so much land, he's acquired such a vast amount of wealth. He goes on a vacation down the Nile with Cleopatra. And this is probably the first time in his life he's always been treated like a king. He's never been treated like a God. The only God that Julius Caesar knows is Cleopatra, because Cleopatra is God to the Egyptian people, right?

[A]

Oh.

[B]

So all of a sudden, all of

[A]

a sudden he's like, I like that.

[B]

Yeah. All of a sudden he's being worshiped as it. Not only am I this super rich warlord, I kind of like this idea of me being a God, you know? And so, so think about what that does to his personality. So he starts going back to Rome and he's like, you know, if. If we had our. If we had this capital down in Egypt. We could rebuild the economy of Egypt and we'd have the. All of our food that all the Roman people already eat that comes from Egypt is ours. Why do we need to take it across the Mediterranean? Let's just move to down there. So all the politicians in Rome are like, oh, we can't let this happen. Obviously, you know, we can't let this happen. So they stabbed Julius Caesar to death and over that. Yeah, well, that, of course, this is over.

[A]

Simplistic version.

[B]

A lifetime of huge move, though.

[A]

You don't want to move the whole capital down to Alexandria.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So anyways, that kind of.

[A]

What does Cleopatra do when that.

[B]

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

[C]

Doesn't she link with Mark Anthony after that?

[B]

I think Mark Anthony. I don't know if he got to taste it. No, no, no, Mark Anthony, I think he's got it. I think he hangs around in. So he and Cleopatra would have made eyes at each other. They would have known each other. And there's this huge idea that maybe Julius Caesar and Cleopatra never actually loved each other. But this is a dynastic. Like, this is a money move here. But if you can imagine, Julius Caesar is much older, Cleopatra is much younger. Mark Anthony is much younger. They're all hanging out in the same room. Rooms. Mark Antony and Cleopatra making eyes at each other. And they're like, well, you know, if this guy wasn't here, maybe we, you know, you can tell the attraction may have been there. And by their behavior later on in life, you can tell that they actually loved each other. It was a real romance. But Mark Anthony's got to stay behind in Rome. He and Augustus, long story short, they get together, they take out all the guys who. Who stabbed Julius Caesar in the back, literally. And then Mark Antony and Augustus, they start feuding with each other over, okay, well, now it's this. It's this reverse of Julius Caesar versus Pompey. Well, Pompey dies, Julius Caesar takes hold. Julius Caesar's gone. These two guys come up, they take everyone out. Now it's them butting heads. So Mark Antony eventually has to go to Alexandria. He's got this marriage, and he has two kids with Cleopatra. But eventually, eventually this dog Augustus is going to come down and this guy's going to be Rome's first emperor. Augustus is just a crazy, amazing story, but I'm not. Well, I'm not really a Roman historian, but it's this. Just think about, like, we're not Really? A history podcast. Yeah, I know, I know.

[A]

So you're in the perfect place.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. But essentially, think about this. Think about this young kid who. Who is kind of growing up in the shadow of Julius Caesar, who sees this wild game of thrones being played in Rome where politics is literally life and death. Like, if you're on the wrong side of the political spectrum, you will be assassinated. And you're so smart and you're so cunning and the right things happen in your life and you make the right choices, places, and you don't have this like, arrogant bravado that Julius Caesar has. And you're able to. You're like calculating every move of all your political rivals. And then you win and you win big. And you're the greatest emperor that Rome ever had. When Alexander came down to Egypt, he was going to bring Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Yeah, he's going to bring Cleopatra and Mark Antony back to essentially show them off in a parade in Rome. And the idea is that he presented it in such a way where it's like, oh, we're going to show the unification of our two lands. But really he was going to have them assassinated and he was going to parade them around Rome and show. You mean Augustus or Augustus was going to have Cleopatra and Mark Antony assassinated.

[A]

Gotcha.

[B]

Gotcha. And at least that's what Cleopatra, Mark Antony suspected. And so ultimately Cleopatra and Martin Anthony, they commit suicide because they know what's, What's. What's going to happen to them. And so they have this Romeo Juliet story.

[A]

The out. Yeah, great.

[B]

So all of a sudden.

[C]

And the way they kill themselves is crazy how. Yeah, it's contested whether or not.

[A]

Give me the fun version.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So the romantic story is that Assass Mark, is that. Is that Mark Antony. Anthony is told. I believe he's told that Cleopatra has committed suicide. And he's so heartbroken by that that he runs a sword through his stomach. But then his messengers go tell Cleopatra that he stabbed himself. So Cleopatra sends her messengers to drag him to her quarters. And so she's like sitting on. He gets pulled up onto her bed and she's like basically holding him as he's dying in her arms, like bleeding all over her bed. You know, you just imagine, Imagine this and she's so distraught and she knows what's going to happen. Like, she doesn't have. She can't run. She has no. You know, she can't do anywhere to go. And so the story is she has an asp, which is like a. A Very venomous Egyptian snake brought and bites her on the wrist and then she dies. Probably not how she actually killed herself, but they killed themselves in the presence of each other and died together like, like Romeo and Julia by a viper,

[C]

like chewing on your neck.

[A]

And Augustus and this, when is Romeo and Juliet?

[B]

This is like Romeo and Juliet's like, like 1500 years ago.

[A]

15 years ago, right.

[B]

So Romeo and Juliet's like Renaissance era.

[A]

But is this kind of. Maybe it is the inspiration for that love story?

[C]

Yeah, that's why Cleopatra's really depicted like with snakes and stuff, like statues of her. It's like early Shakespeare's a hat.

[B]

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

[A]

When you are strong, appear weak. When you are weak, appear strong.

[B]

Yeah. He allowed Cleopatra and Mark Antony to be buried in Egypt and honored. And he gave the Egyptian people, I believe, a year or two to mourn the dead pharaoh. And then a year later he becomes crowned Pharaoh of Egypt. But really he's like the Emperor of Rome now. And so he returns back and essentially for the rest of his life he plays his cards. You know, one of the deadliest careers throughout all of history is to be the emperor of Rome. Of course, I think it's. What is it? It's like a 40 something percent fatality rate or.

[A]

Did he die of old age?

[C]

Whoa.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So he is Caesar Augustus.

[B]

Caesar Augustus, yeah. But Octavian Octavian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's a crazy story. And, and so that's, that's kind of the thing that's amazing about Alexandria is just so when he's in Alexandria, politician,

[A]

that's some fucking next level stuff where every single move could get you killed. And you're plotting that for the entirety of your life.

[B]

So he's, he's got this, he's got this stella that's erected and I think it's called. Does that mean a Stella Is like a billboard? Sort of. Maybe it's the size of this wall right here. It's written in stone, it's meant to be read for all of eternity. And he's got this Stella that basically says something along the lines of like. Of, like, things I did. And that. That's sort of what it translates to in Latin, and it lists out all of his accomplishments. And. And he essentially says that. That when I came to Rome. He's saying it in an elegant way, but he's saying, when I. When I was born here as a Roman citizen, I founded a city of. I founded a city of mud brick. I leave it a city of marble. And so he is the one that started erecting Rome's, because before that was made out of red brick and timber, and it was like a really janky, muddy, just trashy town. It was a big town. He started erecting the white marble stone monuments that you see in Rome. He was inspired to do that by Alexandria. Yeah. Because when he arrived in Alexandria, Alexandria, you have to imagine his thought process

[A]

was like, how can there be a city greater than ours?

[B]

Yeah, how can there be? So Alexandria inspires.

[A]

What is it called? The Palladium, the Roman Palladium. What is that area when you go visit Rome right now where you see all of the. Basically the remnants of these old marble

[B]

structures that are there.

[A]

The Roman.

[B]

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

[A]

Look that up for us, Joey.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like all this existed, but Roman Forum. Sorry, the Roman Forum. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. But to that extent, Rome was really.

[A]

You just have to look at Alexandria and be like, oh, shit.

[B]

Well, and Alexandria was a knockoff of Athens.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, yeah, if each one is their

[A]

own little nation state. But is this like the elites of the elites? Is that kind of how they see themselves?

[B]

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

[A]

At what time in history is this?

[B]

450 BC just like approximately. Wow. And so one of the reasons for that is the Athenians and the Greeks in general have a very young memory. There's an Egyptian saying that there are no old Greeks because the Greeks can't remember their ancient past. Whereas the Egyptians have this continuous legacy going all the way back to 3000 BC. But the Greeks fall apart at the end of the Bronze Age, which would be what time? Like let's say 1150 BC. So there's this huge Bronze Age collapse. The Greeks are hit the hardest. You have these massive civilizations, like, okay, Agamemnon in the movie Troy waging the war. So those are the Mycenaeans, that's this massive Greek Bronze Age empire and it all collapses and falls apart. The Greeks fall into this Bronze Age, they hardly remember their ancient past anymore. And so throughout Greece, as it rises again, each little place has their own new philosophy. And the Athenians rise. I think that they have kings at first and then they have like political tyrants, but then the people overthrow the political tyrants and they create a new form of government, a democracy.

[A]

Democracy, yeah.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

Okay, so this is, yeah, so this

[A]

is the, this is what we're learning, right? Throughout history, everything, every single civilization that you touch on, they have security, they have borders and they have food. So this is for a long time,

[B]

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

[A]

But were you the Athenians warmongers, like where was their muscle? Were they.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So they, they, they participated in a lot of wars. They made a, if I remember correctly, they made an incredible amount of money repelling the Persians during the Persian war of the early 400s BC they were able to recruit. They were finally able to convince the Spartans to go all in against, against the, against the perspective Persians. And long story short, as a result of the success of that war, Athens accumulated so much of the power and the wealth of Greece by taking just taxes. That's what it was. So they took a huge amount of taxes because of how much money Athens spent to be able to repel the Persians. And so as a result of that, all the money, just this gravitational pull, all the money just got sucked into Athens. So they put up these massive walls, they build this huge port. I think the port's called the port of prison. And then they have all these slaves or people they brought in from around, from around the way. Now these aren't slaves that are like what we may imagine like colonial America to be like. This is more like the working class that exists subservient to the political class. So a regular free Athenian male would wake up and would tell his slaves and maybe the word slave didn't actually exist. It's a different, it's a different, it's a Greek word. But essentially you just had your workmen, but they were obligated. By the very institution itself to work for you, right? And maybe they can be punished or killed if they didn't, or they tried to escape, but. But they would work for you. They tend your. To your fields. They would harvest your crops, like on the outside of the city walls, or they may take care of, like, official business that your family has been involved in. Your job was to go up to the Acropolis and participate in politics. And that was. That was literally your job was to be a politician. Politician and to be actively involved in the way that the city itself is being run and give your opinion and give your thoughts and go to war when the time came. So you would. You would need to buy your own armor. You need to have it smithed out. You need to make your, you know, make your own swords and shields and everything. And so you were obligated. I don't believe that the slaves were ever obligated to actually bear arms and go to war. You were a political man. It was your job to be invested, invested in what was actually good for the city itself and then defend the city.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That gets a little bit more complicated. I mean, we don't. We only catch glimpses of that from, like, primary sources. We know that all that existed, but it was probably a mixture of, like, free men and slaves providing those services. Like, you may have a free man who owns a restaurant. There were restaurants. There was fast food in Rome, for sure. But in Athens itself, you would have what was called the agora, which was the marketplace that existed in the center, and you'd have people at their little markets selling stuff. So now are those free men or women that are selling everything?

[A]

Probably not.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

God, I don't know.

[C]

Just get like indentured servants type vibe.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

They would pay people, they would pay

[B]

you to go watch sports, pay you to be. Because they wanted you to be a part of the community. Like the city itself knew that. Okay, so, so this is the, this is one of the different, like we are very Roman in the way that we like to decorate our homes and fill our homes with a lot of like, you know, gorgeous decor, this, that and the other. We want the inside of our house to be pretty. We want the outside of our house to be pretty. But Athenians and most Greeks were not that way. You would go through a Greek town and you may not be impressed by any of the, of the, of the homes that are there because the Athenians didn't really like, care about that. It was more so about. When you went downtown, what are the public spaces? Yeah, you went to the Agora. There was a big, there was a big long building that was like a colonnaded sort of that typical Greek column style building, two stories deep. It had this open space at the bottom, open space at the top, and then like cubbies, almost rooms in the back where little markets would be and people would hang out underneath that colonnaded area. And it's funny, there was a group of philosophers there that would always gather in one of the corners and like that, that little gang of philosophers grew so big and people didn't really want to be around them. And that building's called the Stoa. So those people hung out there so much that the Athenians started calling them the Stoics. And that's where the term Stoic philosophy came from. Not because they named themselves that or that's the name of their philosophy, but the philosophers who believed what we call Stoic philosophy hung out in the Stoa.

[A]

So Marcus Aurelius was just ripping off the Stoics.

[B]

Oh, he was obsessed with Ancient Greece. Yeah. So much of it goes back to Greece. And so the Greeks knew. Knew that the. So, like Pericles, he's one of the greatest political leaders of all time. He's basically known as like the greatest Athenian. And he is going to use. I believe he's going to. He wants to build a new temple on the Acropolis of Athens, which is the Parthenon. If you guys have ever been to Athens or. I'm sure you've seen photos of Parthenon. And he wants to build this. And he's essentially giving this speech and he's like. He's like, all right, guys, I got this new project that I want to build. I want to build this huge temple. It's going to be the glory of Athens and the fact that we, you know, we kicked Persia's ass and, you know, we basically saved Ancient Greece, you know, along with the Spartans, but basically it was us. Yeah, I want this temple to be built and I'm going to raise some of the taxes to be able to do this for the city. Do you guys want to do this? And the Athenians are like, are like, I don't know if we want to spend the money. Really? You're going to raise our taxes? I don't know if I should do that. And then. And then Pericles goes, all right, well, I'm going to do it. And then I'm going to put a plaque on there that says built and paid for by Pericles. And then all the Athenians go, no, fuck, no. We're going to, you know, and then. So they like hand over their money. So they're all invested in the public architecture. It was all about the community. You would wake up as an Athenian high trust society, you'd get right out of your house to go into town immediately. The first thing you do in the morning is go to the agora. And you hung out in town all day long and you basically just slept at home. And so it wasn't about your personal. It was about your personal glory in what other people thought about you in the acts that you did, but not the things that you own. So I don't know that we can have a society quite like that again.

[A]

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

[B]

The Spartans?

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah. So this is a period called the Peloponnesian War. And this is sort of that. This is sort of the backslide of the classical period, this height of ancient Greece. And actually the Athenians didn't keep the Spartans at bay. The Peloponnesian War was between Sparta and Athens, and Sparta won. And there was a. I believe there was a Greek trial that traveler named Maven Polybius in the second century A.D. or maybe it's. Maybe it's before that, but he essentially has something where he writes, maybe it was Thucydides that wrote this. I think it was Thucydides. He was an Athenian that was living during the Peloponnesian War and writing about it while he was alive. And he said that if you visited the city of Athens, you would think that it was twice as powerful as it was. If you visited Sparta, you would think it was half as powerful as. As it was. And so Sparta, what's interesting is they had no stone public architecture. It was all wood and all wood and perishable materials. They didn't care about the big grand public architecture, but their philosophy and their way of waging war. I actually basically know nothing about the Peloponnesian War, but I know that ultimately the Athenian, basically, their empire was stretched way too thick. They tried to send an expedition off to conquer some cities on the island of Syracuse, which a lot of southern Italy was occupied by Greeks at the time. And there were a lot of Greeks living on Syracuse. And so Athens sends out an expedition to Syracuse. It goes horribly, because Sparta is somewhere right in here. Sparta, basically, I think there's a massive military defeat where they just destroy this entire Athenian fleet. Send their economy even. Send Athens economy even further down. And then Athens, the Spartans don't go into Athens and raid it, but they essentially tell the Athenians to like, back off. You know, like, you're not going to take over all of Greece. And then. So that's not the downfall of Athens, but it certainly is the frame to like, this height of Athenian power that had never been seen before in the world. It never would be seen again until the founding of the United States. There would not be anything similar to it until the United States was created.

[A]

What do you mean? Not the Roman Empire?

[B]

No, no, it's just. Yeah, the Roman Empire is just not similar to ancient Greece in any way, other than the way it looks like you did not have the political freedom. Like, one of the big things was.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah, but this idea of self determination.

[B]

Yeah, and it was born there.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Well, I think the Founding fathers are heavily influenced by the French.

[A]

Right, because that's what I'm saying.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

But do these ideas really emanate through Athens, then to the French and then to.

[B]

Yeah, that's a. That's a good question. I mean, there is the. There is neoclassical France, which I don't know too, too, too much about, but I think that perhaps, maybe, gosh, maybe my American bias is totally showing.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

it's like, big fan of France.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

And by. By aligning yourself with those things, you are aspiring to be something that is higher and older than you are. Right. Like, you're aspiring to almost like it, like an unachievable, you know, goal. But by doing that, you might get close. Yeah, you might get close. And so that. And So I think a lot of the Founding Fathers were really inspired by antiquity. Obviously, they're culturally inspired by the contemporary French.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But am I wrong in saying that the United States might be, like, a much more successful attempt at this absolute freedom? And maybe I'm wrong. I don't know much about the French Revolution.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now, we didn't get it right for a long time.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, for sure.

[C]

Can I ask you another great story?

[B]

Yes, sir.

[C]

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

[B]

Okay.

[C]

And this is the. As Aztecs going back to Mexico.

[B]

Oh, my gosh. Okay.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. Wandering through as warriors, and they stumble across a land, and then they ultimately take over the land through potentially a betrayal.

[B]

Can you tell me that story? If we still have time. I gotta tell you what I think about Atlantis also.

[A]

Yes, we have time.

[B]

So I want to make sure you

[A]

have time because you have a flight. But we're.

[B]

We're good. Yeah, we're good right now. Yeah, we're good. Yeah. So. The Red Wedding. All right. So I'm trying to think of, like, how I can. How I can start this.

[C]

What year, roughly, are we looking at?

[B]

Yeah. So Cortez invades Mexico in 1519 without the permission of the Spanish crown. And he marches his way over the course of several months to. When he lands. He lands among the Maya people. And he writes that the Maya people are, like, short. Short and sickly, and they're kind of ill. Well, they're being affected by Spanish or European influenza from in the decades prior when the Spaniards were out in, like, the Bahamas and Jamaica and the Caribbean Islands. Well, some of the traders and people who are naturally curious are poking around on the shorelines of Mexico, interacting with the native people. But they don't realize they're getting them all sick. And so that disease is starting to move into the Maya world. Well, from. Let's call it 1492 into ish. Maybe the year 1500. More accurately, over the next 19 years of 1519, a lot of people are getting sick in Mexico. So Cortez arrives and he starts noticing these sickly people. And he's essentially saying, what all aliens would say. He's saying, like, take me to your leader. You know, he wants to know, like, where is the head honcho of all this world? So he finds his way to Nostitlan, and while the Spaniards are there, there.

[A]

This is modern day Mexico City, right?

[B]

This is modern day Mexico City. Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Oh, yeah. Hey, could we look up Tenoche tlan Aztec city reconstruction, and you'll see it. It's.

[A]

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

[B]

So amazing that the Spaniards, the soldiers, who are, say, walking alongside Cortez as he's riding his horse, you know, and they're looking up at them, at him. And when once they've left, you know, Shiloh for the first time. Yeah. If you zoom in on that, they look up at Cortez and they're like. They're like. They're like, can you believe what we've seen? I feel like this was all a dream. I can't actually believe that we found this. They are 400 hundred Europe. There are. There are 400 Europeans in all of the Americas at this point. And they're all together.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

In this city.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Right. They went and found some alien planet.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's just. It's.

[C]

How many millions of people here, you think?

[B]

Millions. I mean, we don't. There's not really much of an estimate, but, I mean, it's rare. I think that they say that the. There were. There were. There were 10 million Aztecs or something like that, but Maybe that was 10 million people that were under Aztec control. Right.

[C]

400 Europeans.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

What they did was wrong, but it's kind of cool.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, it's b. It's ballsy. Right?

[A]

So a million first 400 millions of them. 400. This is 300, right? This is. Yeah.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

But it was bad, what they did.

[A]

It was horrible.

[B]

This is reverse 300.

[A]

It is. Yes. It worked. Okay.

[B]

This is 300. This is. Is like 300 is 300 men stopping a million people from invading their land. But this is 300 people invading a million people.

[A]

And again, I don't know technologically where things are at. Spain in 1492. But are they reaching the shores.

[B]

Height of the world? Spain, 1492.

[A]

Yes. But are they reaching a more sophisticated civilization? Do they feel intellectually intimidated when they're looking upon this city, or are they to going, going. These are still people that will be subservient to us at the end of the day. We found them.

[B]

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

[A]

So they're marveling at what they're seeing, but they're not intellectually intimidated. They're like, we got guns. Like, they don't even have that.

[B]

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

[A]

This is crypto.

[B]

Yeah. This is people who grew up in the slums that don't really have any opportunity.

[A]

This is my way out.

[B]

This is my way to have some wealth. And they didn't realize when they set out that they were starting. You can't change the course of what you're about to do. You can't turn around. You're going to be militarily obligated to do this. This is apparent in the whole burn the ships philosophy. They burned the ships so that they couldn't retire. Retreat, right? This is what you're gonna do. And if that meant killing thousands of people and slaughtering a whole civilization to take everything that they had and take it back home to enrich yourself, you didn't have a choice.

[A]

Right?

[B]

You didn't have. And you probably didn't even know that that was going to happen when you set out to do this. So colonization is something like this establishment of the global market was something that was always going to happen and it was always going to be indescribably horrific.

[A]

Yeah. Still wrong.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

We're not justifying.

[B]

Yeah. But had it not been Europeans, it would have been somebody else. Right. 100%, without a doubt. It all would have happened. And so when you become a historian, you really start studying it. You eventually you stop seeing. Now there, there are cases where there are legitimately bad guys like this. This is the bad guy in the story. But most of history is actually way more complicated than that where you Realize the two people are pitted against each other and they neither had a choice.

[A]

Right. So they're there.

[B]

So they conquer the city of Tenochtitlan over the course of a couple of years. And then you have Spanish chroniclers going through the city and they are taking an account of, you know, how the Aztecs came to be. And they hear this story that is essentially this red wedding. And so it paints this picture of how the Aztecs came to power. So the Aztecs were not from Mezow America, Mesoamerica class. Mesoamerica is this El Salvador, Honduras up to here somewhere in north Mexico, maybe even south southern New Mexico. Like just where, where I was on that expedition a little bit a couple weeks ago, that may have been the northern tip of Mesoamerica. But it's just this, it's just this way of life. It's kind of like the eastern Mediterranean. They're all inspired by each other and they all share the same trade routes and everything. Like you can kind of look at it all as one civilization broken up by many different cultures and kingdoms and stuff. So that's sort of what Mesoamerica is. And. But the Aztecs probably came from somewhere in the American Southwest.

[A]

They're colonizers too.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

Yeah, I understand your framing. Now you're like, they have done this, somebody else is going to do this. And this is the history of the world. And it doesn't mean it's okay. It just is what it is.

[B]

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

[A]

Now I understand why white people love history. Right? Because you're like, yeah, we're not that bad.

[B]

We're just the latest. I still got to answer your question. So. Well, as a very side note, the reason that Europeans are conquerors and explorers and raiders and everything is because this is a very inhospitable place and it's really, really hard to swim Survive in Africa. This is where people sprouted out of the damn ground. You don't have to do anything to live here. You can just live. Live. This is where we're. Right here is where we're supposed to live. No, I'm sorry. Right here is where we're supposed to.

[A]

Tanzania.

[B]

Tanzania. And Kenya. Kenya, yeah, the Serengeti. This is where humans are supposed to be. But they left. They went all the way up here. Up here is a very inhospitable place. Place to be. And. And so it really benefits you if you start becoming a marauder and a raider and you start stealing from other people and going on these huge raiding expeditions and stealing shit. And so that's how Europeans survive for a long time. So it breeds this kind of idea and way of life of like we're going to set off on this thing and go on this huge adventure and slaughter all these people and take all their stuff and bring it back for our glory. Like that's the way of life. Life there. It was the way of life for a lot of other people too, but really particularly Europe and many different. Many similar situations.

[A]

No choice but being white devils. I get was put upon us. It was cold out. It is so cold. It's so cold. Yeah.

[B]

And so in the Americas, most dangerous

[A]

thing in the world is a white man. That's cold. You not want it? Yo, turn the heat up.

[B]

Turn

[A]

so the chair looks com. So.

[B]

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

[A]

So basically southern United States, northern Mexico.

[B]

Yes, sir. Yeah. So then they get pushed out and they come down and they find this really nice area in the Valley of Mexico and they start almost like. Almost like vultures. They're like circling around, around the Valley of Mexico and they're trying to find a place that they're going to settle down. But all the. All of the cultures of the Valley of Mexico are, you can never say they're peaceful, right? But more, way more peaceful. Like they're all up for war but

[A]

not, is that their main prerogative?

[B]

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

[C]

Go back to America.

[B]

Yeah, exactly, go back to America. And so, so one of the kingdoms here decides, well, you know what, we can use these guys, they're kind of like savage barbaric people, but I think we can find a use for them. So they call the Aztecs in and this is the kingdom of Cahuacan. And so they're living in the Mexican valley amongst all these other pre Aztec cultures. And they eventually tell the Aztecs, okay, we're going to give you a place to live, live that you can settle on. And in return you're going to unite as an army and you'll come whenever we call on you. Right? So they're going to be mercenaries for the kingdom of California.

[A]

That's the Egyptians paying for the Roman fighters. Yep.

[B]

Yeah. You know what, I'm going to tell you something crazy that's very, very observant. So they tell they event, they, they give the Aztecs a little plot of land that they can live on. And it's this little rocky outcropping out in the middle of Lake Tenochtitlan, which is, you know, when we were looking at the city of Tenochtitlan, it's surrounded by water. Originally that was just a tiny little rock outcropping, just like a piece of crap land that they couldn't imagine. Anybody could, could live on it. So they send the astronauts, Aztecs there. Well, the Aztecs are looking for this prophecy. And the prophecy says that they'll know where their promised land is proverbially when they see a serpent and then an eagle come down and clutch the serpent and fly away with it. That's why we have that imagery of the serpent and the eagle. So when they get out there, there's this snake on the rocks, Eagle comes down, picks up the snake and flies off. And so the Aztecs go, okay, this is it, you know, like this is what the God's telling us, that we have to make it work here. So over the course of the next couple hundred, maybe 150, 200 years, they're working as mercenaries for the Kingdom of cause and cawn lives on the coastline while the Aztecs are in this crappy land in the center. And so they're acting as mercenaries for Catalan. And Catalan is marking off all these other kingdoms around the lake of Tenochtitlan. They're sacking them and pulling them into the kingdom of sacking them, killing all their lords, installing your own lords, pulling them in. So the Aztecs help Caan do all of this. And during this time, the Aztecs are being paid very well. They're now building their town, and so it's now sprawling out into this metropolis. That's a lesser version of the photos that we've seen. And then how are they getting rid

[A]

of the water or how are they elevating the.

[B]

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

[A]

it because it's below sea level, right?

[B]

Yeah. What's below the level of the lake? Yeah.

[C]

In a lake bed.

[A]

Yeah, lake bed.

[B]

In a lake bed. So. So they're bringing in stone. So you got to say when you

[A]

go to Mexico City, you see a lot of the buildings are actually like tilting.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You see that?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah. And they're all. They're all like sinking.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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

[A]

It's like a Venice, if you will.

[B]

Similar. And so you can imagine they're being paid royally for their mercenary work more and more and more and more and more. And eventually, I don't know about what year this would be. Maybe about the year 1350, so maybe 200 years. Supposedly after the Aztecs arrive, the Aztec priest goes into his inner sanctum and, you know, takes like an absurd amount of peyote or whatever and he goes to meet the God Huitz dipotli, which is the war. And the war God tells him it's now time to have our prince marry the princess of Catalan and form the dynasties into one. And so that's the Aztecs. Now they've helped Catuacan conquer everybody. It's the Aztecs going to them and saying, we want to marry our princess to you and become one kingdom. So it kind of brings them up. So they go give the proposition to the kingdom of California. And you can just imagine the king there is like, well, if they're proposing this, that means they're probably willing to go to war with us if we say no.

[A]

And we don't want to fight with these guys because.

[B]

Yeah, we don't want to fight with them because we just built them up and they. They are our army now. So the. So the king of Cal, and they're proposing a possibility where I remain king.

[A]

Sounds great.

[B]

So I guess, like, I don't have a choice. You know, you can just imagine, like, that that's what was going through his

[A]

very reasonable offering, by the way.

[B]

Yeah. And so. And so the king of Cahan accepts, and they plan out this wedding where the pr. They're going to have the wedding in the sitter. No, I'm sorry. They have the wedding in Caan. So the prince and the king of the Aztecs come into Cal. They do this huge wedding, and then they bring the princess back, and they're. Now they're going to have this celebration over. Over the. So they've had the wedding in Cal. Now they're going to do a celebration of the. Of the merging of the two families. So then there's going to be a parade that comes. You can just imagine it would come down this bridge that crossed from the mainland from the city of Kabukan to Tenochtitlan. So there's going to be this big royal parade coming into Tenochtitlan. The priest goes back into the sanctum to make meet with Huizpoli. And Huiz Tapoli says, we're going to ambush the kingdom of Caan when they come into the city gates. You are going. The prince is going to flay, which is to skin the princess, Take all of her skin off, is going to kill her, like, rip her heart out, sacrifice her to Huits to poly flay her, which is, you know, you would flay her, and by doing that, you would bring honor to the flayed God. I forget his name, but there was a God of flaying people, of cutting their skin off and so they kill the princess, they cut her heart out, sacrifice her. I say cut her heart out, but however, they really sacrifice people, whether Mel Gibson was right or not. But they sacrifice her, they flay her, cut all of her skin off, and then the prince slips himself into her skin, puts on her skin, puts on her head. Head. And then when they bring in the royal procession of. Of Cal, they are going to bring the princess out, and the prince comes out wearing holy and essentially just causes mass hysteria.

[A]

And then Caitlyn Jenner takes over. And then Yucatan Peninsula.

[B]

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

[A]

people that don't know that's going to happen. What are they thinking? Are they like, damn, you want to marry this ugly? They're like, don't do it, prince. You deserve better. Like, that's crazy. Okay, go, go.

[B]

And so, so they, after, they basically horrify. You know, I think that there was an element of shock, right? Well, of course, of course, of course. But I think that shock and fear made the sacrifice more fervent. Exactly. Right. So that fear, if you could cause like a mass amount of chaos and really scare somebody and just petrify them and then you sacrifice them, well, that means more to the gods, right? And so all these Aztec warriors come in and they just ambush the cavalry army, slaughter all of them. They capture the king and the whole royal procession. And then it doesn't say, but you can imagine they march them to the top of the pyramid and sacrifice them to Huitz Dipoli and then move the army across the bridge and invade the city of Cawn, basically burn the whole thing to the ground, capture everyone, sacrifice a lot of them, I'm sure. And then all of a sudden, the Aztecs are sitting out, fortified in this massive city in the middle of this lake with this huge moat around it, and they just conquered the whole Mexican valley.

[A]

Holy.

[B]

Over the course of like 200 years or so.

[C]

How crazy is that?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

And they all sit around at dinner after the wedding. They're just like, yeah, they're dapping each other up. He's taking the skin off.

[A]

Like, bro, you killed it. There's some guy who's probably like, dude, I made that up about the eagle and the snake. Guys, just take a break for a second. You wouldn't hire a barber to fly your plane. You wouldn't hire your electrician to do your taxes, because when something serious happens, you want the experts. And that's where Morgan and Morgan comes in. If you ever injured by the negligence of another. Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. They have over 100 offices nationwide and more than 1000 lawyers. With over $30 billion recovered for over 500,000 clients. Morgan and Morgan has a proven track record of fighting to get you full and fair compensation. And listen to this. Their fee is free unless they win. You don't pay unless they win. That's right. Free unless they win. So for more information, go to for the people.com flagrant that's f o r the people.com flagrant or dial pound law again, that is f o r the people.com Flagrant or dial pound 529 and let them know that we sent you. This is a paid advertisement. All right, guys, take a break for a second. Did you know that the average employer has to sort through roughly 250 resumes per job opening? It's time consuming, guys. Well, if you're hiring, here's good news. You can now review all of these resumes and applications faster, thanks to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested qualified candidates first. And today you can try try it for [e-mail] Flagrant ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates quickly. And with ZipRecruiter's new feature, qualified candidates who are very interested in your job show up at the top of your list. You also get a feel for their personality. Candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. So cut through the standard. Get to the standouts. With ZipRecruiter, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for [e-mail] flagrant that's ZipRecruiter.com flagrant. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Now, let's get back to the show.

[B]

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

[A]

killing you without a sacrifice. Yeah, yeah. For no reason at all.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[C]

Imagine finding someone taking money than three throwing it away. You'd be like, you just rob for no reason.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

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

[B]

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

[C]

Right.

[B]

And wasting that is really just like taking somebody's. Like you kill somebody for their money, and then you throw their money on the street, and then it's like that guy's. It's totally antithetical to your whole existence. So the Aztecs are actually horrified by how mercilessly the Spaniards could just, you know, like, march through thousands of people and slaughter them without a second thought.

[C]

And then the Spaniards betray the Aztecs, right? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Montezuma, right?

[B]

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

[C]

Alone.

[B]

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

[C]

Right.

[B]

Often Montezuma is who he. He was the emperor of the Aztec world.

[A]

And that's the Montezuma's revenge. When, like, you drink the water in Mexico and you get sick. That's what they call it Montism, but it's actually.

[C]

What's the name of the people that the Aztecs conquered?

[B]

The.

[C]

The ones you just said It's Kawakan's revenge.

[A]

Facts.

[B]

It is Cal's revenge.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Like, that's right.

[C]

The Aztecs take out ca and then all of a sudden, the Spaniards come in and take out the a. In a betrayal.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It's not the same thing. It's not as dramatic, but it's like, yeah, come to the temple. We'll talk. And then.

[A]

Was it a freshwater lake?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so they had access to water.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. All the sites across Mesoamerica are built on, you know, it's all built right next to water. I mean, when we were on that expedition in the Gila, man, it was just so obvious. It's that. It's that southern tip of New Mexico that I was talking about might be the northern end of Mesoamerica. Of ancient Mesoamerica. Yeah. And so when we were there, man, it was just so obvious, like, how crucial not only being near water, but being right on it was. Because think about how much water you drink all the time. You know? I mean, you got to be right there on it. And so those waterways kind of determine if you go to REI and you're checking out, usually on the. On, like behind the counter, there will be an inverted map of the. Of the United States, and it'll. The country will be blue, but the only thing that's actually highlighted in white are the rivers, and that's the ancient map. Isn't that weird?

[A]

Meaning that's where all the civilization popped

[B]

up in the Mississippian world, which we know. There's so many mound builders from the Ohio mound builders all the way down to Louisiana. That river is massive. It's just so dense, and it just. Surprise.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. It's our Nile. It's exactly right. That's exactly right. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

[C]

I had another question. Oh. How many lost cities of gold are there still today undiscovered?

[B]

Well, the. The lidar team I'm working with, they may have. May have found one this morning.

[A]

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

[B]

So. So I'm working with. I'm working with a team run by Daniel Windham out of Georgia. It's a company called Basemap, and we're doing several LiDAR projects in the Southeast U.S. and then we're going to be doing one later this year, maybe in August or September down in the Amazon.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But this morning, he sent me a New image of a LIDAR scan that they had done down in the Amazon. Just like running the drone straight over this huge piece of land, and there are these huge circular geometric earthworks connected to each other.

[A]

But as far as it looked like roads, dude, it looked like roadways.

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

Absolutely, yeah.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Yeah, they find them all the time.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[C]

to do it with A university. And you have to turn stuff over with the institution.

[A]

That's whack.

[B]

That. That happens a lot.

[A]

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

[C]

Yeah, but how much raw gold are you finding if you're going to go into someone's tomb? It's all going to be decorative gold.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's all going to be decorative gold or like blocks of gold or ink blocks. That kind of. That kind of thing.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, but Boolean, what are we talking about?

[A]

I don't know. Just gold.

[B]

Like gold ore almost.

[A]

If you got ore. Or I could be. If you got a satchel. If you got that, that's gold bullion. That right there. Bullion, that's free game. But if you got a satchel of gold, that's. If you got. Even coins aren't art. Excuse me? If it's art, you got to give it to the museum. If it's any other form.

[B]

If it's just like. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Cuz they got it from somewhere.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Finders keepers.

[C]

N. What if you're related to. If I'm related to you, then I'm pissed.

[A]

Talk to me.

[C]

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

[A]

And I go to don't count.

[C]

Well, who gets the tomb?

[A]

So if it's another race, it's fine. Tombs don't count. Take the gold. No, tombs don't count.

[C]

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

[A]

I'm kind of like even a little bit N on that, you guys. I'm kind of even a little n. That art is different. If you make art that should be preserved, there's a story to be told, we can understand these cultures, et cetera, but just raw gold. Bully. Bullying, bro.

[B]

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

[A]

I'm going to solve it for you right now. Go.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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

[A]

You should give that back. You should give that to the museum. Everything you should give back. Yeah, everything. You should give that back. Now, I will say there's nothing.

[C]

We have land.

[A]

But we don't have to study that, Right? Like, we don't have to, like, because obviously those arrowheads weren't really effective. So there's nothing we're going to learn. We could study about what not to do. Right. That'd be helpful. We'd be like, let's never make arrowheads like that when people have bullet heads. Right. That's something we could learn. But in terms of giving it to a museum, I believe that. I support that. But if right next to the arrowhead there is a little patch of Booleans, what are we gonna do for that? Like, am I gonna give that to the museum? Oh, here's Boolean. Like, get out of here. You give it to the people. What people? The natives.

[C]

Which natives, bro?

[A]

Which natives? They got it from someone else. I got to find some qua cons.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There's no more quak. There's a few of them. The Aztecs took them out. There's a few of them. If there was a few, then they get it. If you can prove Quaka khan. If you can 23andMe and prove quaka Khan. You get it. Anything the Aztecs got, that's fair game.

[B]

Still alive. I mean, there are probably people who have their blood. Yeah, probably.

[A]

I don't even think leprechauns get to keep their gold if we're really going to go that far back.

[B]

Like, are leprechauns Irish?

[A]

They are.

[C]

How much gold is in Ireland?

[A]

That's what I'm saying.

[C]

Where the hell they get all this bullion?

[A]

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

[B]

Not much colonized. I don't think there's much other people they had to get it from. Like, gosh. I think all. I think all that gold comes from Africa.

[A]

I'm pretty sure that's not good. Black Irish. Finally somebody said, I think it comes from.

[B]

Or maybe like Iran, Iraq area.

[A]

Why they have no gold up here? I don't know.

[B]

Well, I mean, I'm sure there is in the modern day. I don't know if ancient people were mining it, were even looking for it. Yeah, I know that there are silver mines in Greece, but I'm really not 100% sure. Now we're talking about this. I'll answer your yes.

[A]

What are you white?

[C]

Are you?

[B]

So I had thought for a long time, just listening to, like, family legends and stuff, that I would be, like, Italian or that I would have a little bit of Native American in me, which I do, but it doesn't actually come up. It doesn't actually come up on a DNA test. So I went and got a DNA test done and my family got them too. So we really know. I am 40% Scottish, 38% English, 4% Welsh, Welsh, 4% French, and then something. Something else in there.

[C]

That's it.

[A]

But what's really. But what's really interesting, which is crazy,

[C]

because people say that you look like someone else who's also Scottish.

[A]

Oh, you think people say we look similar?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Honestly, sitting here during this whole podcast, it's been delightful. You guys are lucky, bro. You guys, every week. This is crazy.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

This is insane.

[A]

But so people have said we look similar.

[B]

Oh, hell yeah. No way.

[A]

It's hard not to, right?

[B]

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

[C]

You study Latinos, you make fun of Latinos.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

We're both observing the cultures.

[B]

That's right. Yeah. But no, no. So like, when I was on. When I was on camp, when I was on Rogan, people are all always like. People are always like. Like, they'd be like. Like, I really enjoy listening to Andrew Scholl's little brother talk about Tim, why

[A]

they gotta age, Max. Me. You know what I mean? Little brother, how old are you?

[B]

28.

[A]

Oh, you're young indeed. Yeah.

[B]

So finishing what I was saying. So you can also. You. It's really cool. You can see the DNA that you would have during the Middle Ages, like the Medieval period. And you can see what you would have during the Roman period and then like ancient, you know, like hunter gatherer DNA. So really interesting was like, my skin tans so easily. I don't tan like a. Like a. Technically I'm a Scottish Highlander, but I don't tan like a Scottish Highlander, so.

[A]

So I teach somewhere. Somewhere in me, I'm so. Yeah, go on. You know what I'm saying?

[B]

Yeah, talk your.

[A]

Or our.

[B]

So what I found out.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The city of London, founded by the Romans in my londinium 2,000 years ago. Londinium. That's exactly right.

[A]

Come on.

[B]

On 2,000 years ago.

[A]

Come on, bro.

[B]

My DNA was 53 or 57% insular celt, which would be like King Arthur's, like, the Knights of the Round Table.

[A]

Immigration.

[B]

The Italians come in, they build the city of London, and today, 20, like, 20% of the people living in the UK have upwards of 40% Pakistan Roman.

[A]

And

[B]

40, 40 Roman.

[A]

Oh, Roman.

[B]

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

[A]

I've always felt that way too.

[B]

Yeah. So that's you.

[A]

I've always. Have I not told you guys this?

[C]

You've never said you're an alien. You talk kind of Italian.

[B]

We're like. Like the original colonizers.

[A]

We are the. The OGs.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

But we did. We did, like, create a little bit of civilization.

[C]

Who, the Scots or the Italians?

[A]

Yo, how badass.

[B]

The Romans.

[A]

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

[B]

So I live in. So I live in North Carolina. North Carolina. This is.

[A]

This was really cool that.

[B]

So North Carolina.

[A]

Know exactly where you're going.

[B]

The Scots, Irish people leave during the 1700s, coming to Carolina, and they. They find, like, in the Piedmont where it leads up to the Appalachian Mountains. Looks so similar to the Highlands, to the Scottish Highlands. I know. Turns out it's the same damn mountain range.

[A]

Of course it is.

[B]

The Appalachian Mountains and the Scottish Highlands same. Are the same mountains.

[A]

You didn't know that?

[B]

And.

[A]

And, and.

[B]

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

[A]

Wow. Yeah. Just shocking to me that you guys don't know our history.

[C]

When they film Scottish TV shows, they film them in.

[B]

Yeah. Why don't you Scottish.

[A]

Why don't you know more?

[C]

What food did the Scottish invent that's very popular in North Carolina?

[A]

Do you know this one?

[B]

I don't.

[A]

Do you know this one?

[C]

Nope.

[A]

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

[B]

Is it really? Yeah.

[C]

I was gonna say fried chicken.

[A]

We also did invent that. No, you didn't. We did invent fried chicken. Technically, we did invent fried chicken.

[B]

How good is Braveheart?

[C]

That's not what I thought you were gonna say.

[A]

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

[C]

Wow.

[A]

Swear to God.

[C]

Why not? What's your family have to do?

[A]

I know. She was going through it, bro. She was going through it. That movie. That was some serious. My family doesn't like the English to This day.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

They ride for the Bonnie Prince Charles.

[B]

They're like.

[A]

They're.

[B]

You know what?

[A]

You know what's crazy is talking that my boy.

[B]

You know what's crazy is probably the most. Most of our English DNA is from Scots who. Like when the English are moving forward and then what we did exact. Exactly.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So today it's categoriz English DNA, but there's a significant amount of that. Anglo, Scottish.

[A]

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

[B]

That's right.

[A]

They tried to build two.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Didn't stop it.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

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

[B]

That's right.

[A]

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

[B]

We need to go back.

[A]

You can't get us out of here.

[B]

We need to go back to the Red lion on the. On the yellow banner. Like Robert. Robert the Bruce. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

[C]

What do you got for. Because where's your ancestry from? West Africa?

[A]

Who's a Puerto Rican Braveheart? Bad boy. Who's a Puerto Rican Braveheart? Bad buddy. Bad. Mansa Musa. You might be related to him from

[C]

Molly from the Malan Empire.

[A]

Definitely am.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Why is nobody looking for Mansa Musa's gold if he had all the gold and he's traveling all over Africa? There's got to be some. Y' all probably stole that.

[C]

Really?

[A]

Come on now. We were in a. We were in Scotland.

[C]

How are you going to steal a guy's grill?

[B]

Barbarians.

[A]

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

[C]

Found Mansa Musa. They're like, where's his gold? He's like,

[A]

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

[C]

We know about Mansa Musa.

[A]

Why do we know more?

[C]

He was smart.

[A]

Clearly. The guy was the richest guy in history.

[C]

He developed a big, like, intellectual Capital Alexandra type beat.

[A]

Really?

[C]

Timbuk 2?

[A]

Yeah, it's Timbuk 2. Mansa Musa. I thought Timbuk 2 was Nepal. Huh?

[C]

I thought Timbuktu Cathman do Catman.

[A]

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

[C]

I'm g. To think you got. You got to go.

[B]

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

[A]

Okay.

[C]

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

[B]

We need.

[A]

You got to go to Africa next. Yeah. What do you mean, Africa? He's bit with. Let me show you the map. Let me show you the map. Let me show you real Africa. That's Africa. No, that. That's where civilization started.

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah, I have Nigerian, Congo, and then a few other things. I got a little white in me. Like, it's like 8%.

[C]

You want a little more one.

[A]

8% white?

[B]

That's a lot.

[A]

That's a way.

[B]

Relax, relax.

[A]

That's a lot.

[B]

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

[A]

No, it's probably slave ass to one of my.

[C]

Whoa, whoa, dude, Come on. Why are you gonna bring that up?

[A]

Dude, what the hell? Probably you. Why you gotta do this to the mood? We're having fun talking about colonization and the eradication. Bring that up. That's insane. Think about the Quaka Khons, what they went through.

[B]

Have you guys ever talked about death this much on a. Oh, this is

[A]

our favorite thing, dude.

[C]

Last patron.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that is. That is very true. Okay, okay, okay, okay. We need to know about Atlantis, bro.

[B]

All right, let's do it.

[A]

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

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, right?

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, I totally agree, man. I totally.

[A]

Oh, this is so lovely.

[B]

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

[A]

not saying we shouldn't learn history, but, like, you can learn history through the oldest. Through the oldest medium of digesting and retaining information, which is story. Like, our brains are, like, hard. The game of telephone. And then by the time you get. History is. Yeah, but if you put. Put it down on books, then you think FDR was really paralyzed. Come on, bro, like you going to believe that. I do think he was. Nah, yeah, nah. You're just buying the propaganda. Yeah.

[C]

Mark, you had a boner who couldn't stand up.

[A]

Definitely, definitely. Come on. There's different things in history that we just accept. We just accept as reality. And that's not the case. Give me any time in history and then Mark will tell you how. It's not. Atlantis. Atlantis. They're gonna go off King Kong after Atlantis.

[C]

I have one other crazy one about the were. Jaguar.

[A]

Tell me about the werejaguar.

[C]

But after Atlantis.

[B]

Okay, After Atlantis. All right, all right.

[A]

So before you start, I need you to give us what the idea of Atlantis is. Let's not, you know.

[B]

Oh, God.

[A]

Just give us the idea of Atlantis in most people's heads. There's a hotel in the Bahamas. That's the Atlantis. Please take my war.

[B]

In most people's minds, there was an island chain. Some people think it was the Azores that this ancient lost empire civilization existed on. And it was like a city of concentric circles. You guys have probably seen this. Yes.

[A]

Like three or six. Plato.

[B]

Plato, he was an Athenian.

[A]

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

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we're definitely.

[A]

And you want word of mouth. Word of mouth is. The entirety of our friendship is word of mouth.

[B]

Where else do words? That's a very Scottish idea. The. The Scottish Celts didn't believe in writing down their custom.

[A]

They believed in, well, you know, write that i3 sheep. Like, you don't want that.

[B]

Right?

[A]

You just be like a girl from Wales came.

[B]

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

[A]

That's what I tell people.

[B]

And they could read and write in all of them. They chose not to write in their own language.

[A]

It was our choice.

[B]

Choice. That's right. Yeah.

[A]

Doesn't that seem like it? We knew every single language.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

All the languages.

[C]

That's not true.

[A]

How is it not true?

[C]

That's like him being like, I speak Chinese. I'm like, I just choose not to speak.

[A]

Yeah, bro, I do speak it. And you know. And you've heard me speak it. You heard me speak it. Well, I don't know Chinese either, so

[C]

I don't know if what you're saying is Chinese.

[A]

One of my favorite accounts right now. I can't believe I haven't sent you this. And then we're going to get to at least Atlantis, but there's a guy, and he's got to be a polygon or something because he's so good at. But what he does is. And I wish I had his name, maybe Joe, you can look at, look it up for me because I would love to credit him. He goes up to people in the street. I think he's in Paris or something like that. He goes up to different tourists.

[C]

This the Asian dude?

[A]

No, he's a white guy. But he goes up to the street and he speaks fake their language. And he goes, where are you guys from? Where are you guys from? And they're like, oh, we're friends from Japan. And he goes, okay, okay, okay, tell me this, tell me what I'm saying. And then he speaks the most perfect fake Japanese you've ever seen in your life. He'll do it with Chinese, but he's just gibberish. It's gibberish, but it's so close that they think his accent's bad. So they're like really trying to figure it out, you know, like. And they're going, oh, you know, but. But it sounds so good. He's this like skinny white guy. He almost kind of looks Russian. Y. Oh, you gotta see it. I can't believe I haven't sent you this. I just die laughing at this guy. Anyway, Atlantis, okay?

[B]

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

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So most people think it was. Maybe it was out here or maybe it was. It was some somewhere here in Africa and that, you know, it, it. And that the Atlanteans built all of the major ancient structures you see around the world. Like the stuff down in Cusco and some stuff that you see out in Asia. Whatever, whatever. Now what Atlantis really was. It was. I was going to make a joke. Do it, do it, do it.

[A]

So what Atlantis make it.

[B]

No, no, no, we can cut it. Oh, I was just going to say nothing.

[A]

This is great. No, I'm just piss a lot of people off.

[B]

No, it just sounded funny. But yeah, I didn't want to like insult conspiracy theorists. So anyways, no, it wasn't actually nothing. I mean, you know, so Plato, his writings, you have to. You really kind of need to Be a historian to sort of interpret what Plato is saying or the context with which he's saying it is so important. So Plato is an Athenian that lives in the late 400-early-3007 B.C. i believe. That's right. He was one of these young kids that was influenced by or younger people that was influenced by the teachings of Socrates. But Socrates did not write down his teachings, he just spoke to people in the marketplace. One of his closest students was Plato. Well, Socrates was eventually put, put to death. I forget the year, maybe it was like 401 BC or something like that. But he. Or maybe it's 399 BC he's put to death by the court of Athens for corrupting the youth and essentially suggesting that perhaps the Greek gods don't exist because he's so deep down the rabbit hole of intellectual thought that he's thought himself into being an agnostic. Right, so Jordan Peterson sort of.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And so he is, he's put to death and Plato spends the rest of his academic career and writing his philosophies down and teaching people, essentially telling people the stories and the points, the philosophical points that Socrates was making throughout Socrates life. So all of Plato's written philosophy is not like Aristotle where if you were to read the Nicomach Ethics it is, which that's just like Aristotle's writings of how to be a good person, right, how to treat other people. It's Aristotle speaking directly to you. It's just you and Aristotle. But Plato creates these plays almost, almost like a scene where you've got Socrates and you've got these other characters and they're interacting with Socrates and the characters ask Socrates questions and Socrates answers, answers them. Well, some of those lessons are Plato's ideas, his own, putting them in Socrates mouth and some of them are ideas that Socrates gave Plato and Plato puts it back in Socrates mouth. Right. So in Plato's writings they talk about this lost city of Atlantis at various different times. And so essentially the, the chain of custody of the, of the story is that Solon, an Athenian lawmaker in the 600 B.C. or early 500s B.C. b.C. He's an Athenian lawmaker that basically goes on this vacation for I think a decade. And he eventually goes to Egypt and when he's in Egypt he's taken to the, I think that Seis was the capital at the time because it was the say, empire or the Sayite kingdom. And so he's taken to the city of Sais where he meets a priest and the priest essentially tells him about this, about when Athens was at work, war with this ancient civilization called Atlantis. At one point in time, the whole story is told to Solon supposedly in the 600s in Egypt. Solon goes back from Egypt, he goes back up to Athens, he lives the rest of his life. He tells that story to some people. And over the course of much more than 100 years, almost 200 years, the story supposedly comes all the way down to Plato. And then Plato is the first one to write that, that down inside a philosophical story that's, that's telling like a bigger, you know, a bigger tale that's more relevant to the Athenians. And so people take that story and basically what the story is is there was this ancient civilization that existed in a certain place. Just insert all the descriptions that he adds of Athens or of Atlantis and that Atlantis rises and that it's at war with Athens and that Athens is eventually defeated. Atlantis, you know, some, some 9,000 years ago, according to what Solon says that the Egyptians told him 9,000 years before, which would be 9,600 BC. And then, and then this massive like cataclysmic wave washed over the city of Atlantis and sunk it into the depths of the sea. Right? And so the, the moral of the story is that this civilization was so powerful and so wealthy and so successful. Successful that it essentially spoiled itself and it lost all of the original foundations of what had made it great, which allowed Athens to conquer the city and then eventually the gods destroyed.

[C]

It's about greed, really.

[B]

It's about greed. Yeah. And so, and so he is telling. The reason that Plato is telling that story is to be a reminder to the Athenian people who you should strive, who you should strive to be right now. People have, people sort of, most people sort of ignore why Plato is telling the story and then they just focus on Atlantis. And so that has led us on this huge rabbit hole hunt. Now here's the thing is I. Some people, just because they're so caught up in the story of Atlantis, they sort of take Plato as like a, some kind of biblical figure, right? Where, where you have to hang on every word and every precise description of what he's saying about this place or the story that he is relaying, right? But in reality, no classical Greek author would ever do that because Greeks are notoriously the worst historians in the entire ancient world because there are no old Greeks. The Greeks lost their memory. The Egyptians know that the Greeks don't know anything about their ancient past. So whenever the Greeks and classical periods are writing down about their about their past. They never are. That's why there's so much Greek mythology. So they're always. They're always making up.

[A]

Everything is lore.

[B]

Yeah. And so even by.

[A]

That's what you want, and that's why we love them.

[B]

And so even 450 BC, where all that power is kind of culminating and they're really coming together, they're really riding a lot. They have modern historians like Thucydides, that's riding down the Peloponnesian War. And he tells it in a. In a. Like, as. As honest as he can be. The best historian of his contemporary time, and he was a good historian of his contemporary time. But it was really difficult for the Greeks to reach back in time because it was such a hazy. Like they don't really understand their distant past. So Plato's existing here in 450 BC, and he's relaying a message from Solon, who lived in the 600s. Even people who lived in the 600s are semi mythical, legendary people to people in the 400s. Because the Greeks don't really have a historical chronology that they can follow very well. It's all kind of oral tradition, and not so much of it was written down. So you wouldn't even take a Greek who's writing about his world just 150 or 200 years earlier seriously, because everything else that they write about that was happening in the 600s is wildly inaccurate, according to what we found in the archeological data. Now, does that mean that. Does that mean that the entire story of Atlantis is. Well, no. I think that there are kernels of reality that are things that actually happened in the Greek world that exist in legend and they still remember and kind of know about. But maybe, you know, these are stories you grow up hearing about, but things that really did happen. Like, for centuries, archaeologists questioned whether or not the city of Troy that was in Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey was even a real city, let alone did the Trojan War even happened. Well, then I think it's. I think it's Schliemann or Schliemann finds the city of Troy right here near the gates to the Black Sea. And then they find the city of Troy and they realize that it was real. And this whole time the Greeks were able to, like, hold on to the story of the end of the Bronze Age. That, that, that war was probably about 1150. And then shortly after that, Bronze Age collapses. That's a cataclysmic collapse. Every. All the civilizations fall apart. They abandon the cities, and everyone goes back to being Nomadic, like farmers, right. So they lose their whole cultural memory. But maybe some of those grand stories survive. Clearly the Trojan War, that this there was a grand event that survived and eventually was written down by Homer or whoever Homer really was. Now the first thing that I think that Plato was drawing on when he wrote about Atlantis was there was a city called Heliki that was on the coast of, that was on the Greek coast, just a bit north of Athens, I believe. And in 373 B.C. there was an earthquake somewhere in the Aegean. And it cast this huge wave over the city and sunk the entire city. And so just like, you know, in one day all these people, all these people are drowned. That had happened about 13 years approximately before the story of Atlantis appears in Athens. And Plato was talking about it. So there's this, there's this story of this flood that's sitting in the back of his mind. But even more so than that, the Greeks definitely would have remembered a much, much, much, much more dramatic cataclysmic event that happened further back in, in time for them. And it was the first civilization of ancient Greece. So right here in the mainland and across these islands, this is, this is classical ancient Greece. But really it started here on this little island called Crete. And there was a civilization there called the, the Minoans. We don't know much about the Minoans. They existed before the time of the Trojan War, long before that. But on this island right here, this island is called the island of 100 cities. And there's all these big super rich like palisade cities that dot the entire island. And the cities will be like three to four stories tall, these huge labyrinth, Corinthian palaces. It's the kind of architecture that you did not see in ancient Egypt. You didn't see it anywhere. It's a kind of public architecture that was possibly never recreated until Roman public architecture like the Roman forums, you know, these big multi level buildings for people to be walking around in. They had marble private toilets up on their fourth floors. They had like indoor plumbing. They had, they had aqueducts that ran throughout the cities and brought fresh water, water into the cities. I mean the most sophisticated ancient culture of the Bronze Age by far. If one of those, if an average person living on Crete traveled to Egypt, he'd be walking around Egypt thinking this place was a fucking dump. And this place right here at the center of the Mediterranean, obviously the center of all the trade routes, they were a seafaring empire and they were filthy, filthy, filthy rich from about the years. Let's say 2000 BC maybe. Well, definitely before that because they were interacting with the Egyptians during the time that the Egyptians were building the pyramids. These guys are here. But let's, let's say from the earliest times, maybe like 2500 B.C. at the very, very, very earliest times, all the way to let's say like 1450 B.C. 1400 B.C. so they've got this maybe a 600, 800 year period where they're just the kings of the Eastern Mediterranean. Well, they had this little island north of that and in ancient times the island is called Thera. In modern day times it's called Santorini. I don't know if you guys have ever been. So there are ruins on Santorini and it's a city called Akrotiri. And Akrotiri was one of the most elaborate and wealthy cities throughout all of the Minoan world. It was where it was kind of like Pompeii. Like Pompeii was a, was a vacation retreat for the rich people of Rome to go and gamble and have sex and party. And if you lived in Pompeii, you were super wealthy, right? Well, Akrotiri was very, very similar to that. It was the, the wealthiest people of Minoan society are living there. Well, about the year 1600 BC the fourth largest volcanic eruption in the history of the entire planet erupted out of the island of Santorini and blackened the skies of the, of the Aegean Sea and the nearby Mediterranean for days at a time. What expelled out of the volcano was so significant that there might even be records from the same time in Egypt of phenomena happening in Egypt that was affecting their weather. And a lot of, some people even theorize that the effects. Because we found the pumice from the volcano in Egypt. And some people, people wonder if the, if the plagues of exodus were not caused by the eruption of Santorini. And so it was such a cataclysmic eruption. It instantly buried the city of Akrotiri in like dozens of feet of volcanic, volcanic material and ash that hardened over time. And then it blackened the sky over the main island of Crete for days at a time. Now a lot of people thought that the whole city of Crete, when they first found the first palace at Knossos, and then they started excavating all, you know, these dozens of other palaces, they would find this thin burn layer that came from 1600 B.C. about, about when the volcano erupted. And it was, it was kind of an anomaly because nobody understood like, why is it such a thin burnt layer? Why is it not just Cataclysmic, like raining down on, on the island because all 100 cities burned down at the exact same time across the entire island. The whole island and like fell apart. Well, nobody really understood why, but there's a theory that's, that's proposed that I think is kind of interesting that when it blackened the sky, every single person on the island had to pull out their torches and their candles. And so while it's absolute chaos, it's hard to get food, you can't go to the market, you don't know what's happening. I mean, the sun isn't even coming back up anymore. The smoke is like coming down over the cities and everything. It's absolutely absolute chaos. People burn down their own cities because just the chaos. So there's this thin burn layer over the entire island. So all the cities burn down at exactly the same time. In the midst of all this chaos. Then it's not like Minoan culture disappears, but over the next hundred years it slips into control of the Mycenaeans, which is like Agamemnon, the guys who waged war on Troy. They came in and wiped out the people. The Minoans who were living in the army islands, who were living in the islands and that were living on the main island, just wiped them out, basically consume their whole culture. They rebuilt the palace of Knossos, but that's it. All other 99, some odd buildings or some odd cities stayed burned down and the Mycenaeans built up new ones. Now these guys had ruled over the whole Greek world for the last 800 years. Okay, their, their principal, I don't want to call it a deity, but like their cultural monster, the thing that you would use to identify them. Whereas like some later Greek cultures that might be, it might be like Medusa or something like that, for them it was the Minotaur, the bull headed man, or just a bull's head. So what's really interesting is when Plato is talking about, about the city of Athens crushing Atlantis and then Atlantis gets destroyed in this huge cataclysm, this big wave, whatever, whatever. One of the things that's analogous to that and that, and that is kind of in the back of the Athenian mind. Their mythology is this myth of Theseus or Theseus and the Minotaur, but they don't, but the Athenians may not even know who the Minoans ever were because this is such an ancient civilization that's been buried for so long, long and, and, and in ruins. But one of their core mythologies is Theseus, this Athenian rising up and going off to this distant land and killing, killing the Minotaur, right? But then along with that, you have Athens rising up and going and killing Atlantis. Okay? Athens was controlled by the Mycenaeans, who then swept into the Minoan area. So Athens during the Bronze Age was a Mycenaean city who went into the land of the Minotaur and conquered and conquered them. And one of the modern comparisons that you get for Atlantis that a lot of people will make is some people go, well, you know, I don't think that Atlantis had like space age technology that's more advanced than us, but I think that they were probably maybe like on par with the Roman Empire. That's what you know. But it was like a global Roman Empire. Well, after the Minoans fell, the only civilization that would ever reach the illustrious level of the Minoans again was the Roman Empire some thousand or fifteen, sixteen hundred years later. And so what I think that Plato is drawing on is this story that sits somewhere deep in the subconsciousness of the Greek world, of the greatest, richest empire that the ancient world ever saw. Far more like the average person, far more wealthy than an Egyptian. They didn't have the same kind of huge temples, whatever, whatever. But the, but the way of life far superior to, to an Egyptian or anybody else. These guys controlled all the trade routes of the Mediterranean, especially of the Greek world. And then, and then the fourth largest volcanic eruption in world history basically brought down the end of their civilization. In fact, I ran the numbers on it. I might get this. The categorization of the energy expelled. But the bombs that we dropped on Japan were 50, can be measured as 15 kilo tons of energy that was expelled from the bomb. This volcano was 30 million kilotons of energy. That's how, that's how. Oh yeah, that's how cataclysmic something like this, something like this was. So you can imagine that something like that sits permanently in the back of the minds of a Greek, Greek person. And so I think in Plato's Atlantis you have these kernels of truth. You have. This was actually Europe's first ancient civilization, Crete. So the Minoans of Crete. So the Greeks definitely remember it. They definitely remember the dramatic events that led to them being destroyed. They remember the Mycenaeans which had colonized Athens, the Athenians like core principal mythological figures. Theseus, who was an Athenian, but also also a Mycenaean as well, who went into the land of the Minotaur and killed the Minotaur basically. And so, yeah, I think, I think that that is what Plato was drawing on. And that's a, that's a, like, you know, it's a, it's an actual, like, robust archaeological idea rather than like, you know, sometimes, sometimes I get tired of like, talking about the mystery with no actual theories. You know what I mean? And so that's sort of, if I have to put a theory as to what I think it is.

[A]

Does anybody have the, does anybody else share this viewpoint on it?

[B]

There are archaeologists who agree and then there are archaeologists who like, out and out completely disagree because they say, well, oh, and you know what's really interesting is, well, they say how Atlantis was like a circular sort of island or whatever. Well, Santorini, even before it erupted, was a circular island. Like, it was a circular island with water in the middle. You can look up the weight like it's geologic or geographic formation, but it was a circular island. But there's all kinds of different discrepancies. Right. Like where it says that Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Well, this is supposed to be the Pillar of Hercules, the Strait of Gibraltar. It's supposed to be out here. And the geology that they describe there isn't the same as what it would be on Crete. And then they say that Atlantis had elephants or whatever. Now, one of the things that really interesting is that there is a miniature African elephant that used to exist on. On Crete.

[A]

Pygmy elephant or something like that.

[B]

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

[A]

Oh, this is the same.

[B]

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

[C]

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

[B]

Culture. Yeah.

[C]

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

[A]

Well, well.

[B]

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

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

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

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Purely for the.

[C]

Purely for money.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Oh.

[B]

Tanking their whole career. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So, yeah, that's. I'm. I'm. Later this year, I'm doing an expedition to Crete. I'm gonna write a. I'm gonna write a book called, called Lost Cities of the. The Minotaur. And it's going to be. It's going to be the theory, like kind of getting into it and explaining, like if we're going to come up with an actual archaeological explanation, this could be it. Yeah.

[A]

Mark has been to Crete. Yeah.

[B]

Have you really? Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Went to Hanya.

[B]

Really?

[C]

Yeah. It was amazing. It's unbelievable.

[B]

Did you go see Kenosis, like the palace or anything? No.

[C]

It's one of the most interesting places of all time because like, even within semi modern history, it was controlled by everyone. It was like the Greek, Greeks had it, the North Africans had it, the Nazis had it, Jews had it.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

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

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

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

[B]

It makes no sense, really.

[C]

They were so proud. They're almost like Texans. It's also the highest good gun ownership and maybe like all of Southern.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

They all have, like, shotguns and I

[A]

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

[C]

People call them like the Texas of Southern Europe.

[B]

I did not know this.

[C]

That's what people say.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's good for your book, my boy.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll write the forward as a. As a resource.

[A]

Exactly, brother. I don't want you to miss your flight. We could talk for hours. We will do it again sometimes. So fun. This is so awesome. Thank you so much.

[B]

I still got plenty of time.

[A]

You do?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Is there anything else you want to go over before we get out of here?

[B]

I don't know.

[C]

I mean, the. We Jaguar thing.

[A]

Oh, yeah. Finish on this.

[C]

The fun way to set this up is that at a certain point in Central American history, there were people that were born with a very specific disability or a birth malformation, you could could say. And they were deified because of it and raised to a high status within the culture because of this disability. Because it looked like something else.

[A]

Oh, no way.

[C]

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

[B]

No, no, it's right. That's right. Yeah. So the first time that Europeans.

[A]

Is this going where I think it's going?

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

Is it the captain of the ship? Is it going that way?

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

Is it going that way? No. Okay.

[B]

So. So.

[A]

Phew. Dastardly dog.

[B]

No, no, no, no. So. So let's say there, I'm. I'm going to give this example. And then we'll go back in ancient Greece, if a kid was born with. With a birth defect, you would walk them to the top of a mountain and you'd lay them on the mountain. People will say that, like, threw them off the mountain. No, they just. They would just lay the child on top of the mountain. And it's called exposure. You would expose the kid to the elements, give him back to the gods, because you can't afford to take care of someone who's lame, right? Like someone who has a birth defect that's not going to be able to be like a participating part of society that's going to hold you back. Can't do that. Also the Greeks and which permeates into the rest of the European world, we care about aesthetics. You, you know, like, you, you would like your to be born fully anatomically normal and healthy. And so they really prioritize that. But when the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec capital, Moctezuma's palace, when they got up into his palace, they saw that his palace was filled with people of all different kinds of deformities and strange people who were so deformed that they were almost like creatures, almost like they had been bred to be that way. Like they were really, really strange people. And this surprised the Spaniards that these were like venerated people that Moctezuma wanted to hang out with. He saw them as being blessed by the gods, that there was something unique and important about them. They saw this with like, dwarves. Like dwarves would have high status because they would look as people who were touched by the gods, that maybe they were clairvoyant of some kind or, you know, there's something special and different about them. So the Native Americans had this inverted view of deformity. So. And things like that. Well, in the Olmec world, this is my personal theory. I don't know that there's a single other scholar on the planet of like the 12 of us that there are for the Olmec world that would agree with this. But in the Olmec world, you see, there are no gods. There's no pantheon of gods. All we see is ancestor worship. And then we see some people who have the anatomical features of a jaguar. Sometimes it's only their teeth. Sometimes they're like fully a jaguar. Like they, they're. They're a person with jaguar claws and they've got fangs and their nose has changed into a jaguar and they've got like cat eyes and everything. And so throughout the Olmec world, you can see this thing that has been dubbed like a werewolf. The were jaguar. And it's these what I think it is when I interpret it. So like, you look at the Olmec heads. We could pull up an Olmec head if we get, if we're here. So you look at the Olmec heads. They interpret these as being kings or rulers. You never, ever, ever see an Olmec head who is also a were jaguar. So. And there's. There's about 17 of these basalt heads, but there's thousands of examples of. If we could look up were jaguar. It's we r e in the jaguar. You'd put in Almax or something. So there are thousands. Oh, wow. There's a lot of drawings here. Let's do. If you put the word jade behind it. So this will bring up the. There we go. So any one of these will do. So there are thousands and thousands and thousands of these examples of these artifacts of people who are. Were jaguars. And you can tell that there are people with the anatomical features of large cat.

[A]

Is this, Is this Asians reaching Mesoamerica?

[B]

Well, well, Meso wrong to Meso Americans. Mesoamericans. They are. They are Asian. They're. They're Asiatic in general.

[C]

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

[B]

Like, actually, all of. All of the Olmec gold actually came from that Maya city I was telling you about with those giant pyramids that, that began at the beginning of their time at El Mirador in the middle of the jungle. That was how Elor got so rich was the jade quarries that were nearby, and they were selling them to the Olmecs. And so they were using that money, the Maya were using that money to build up their civilization. Now, what's really interesting about the Olmec realm and what got me thinking about this idea of people being born with deformities and this maybe having something to do with that. Could we look up Olmec baby statues? So there are all these statues of Olmec babies that you can tell are not anatomically normal children. There are children that are. I don't know if they're. Yeah, the one that's on the right at the bottom. Yeah, with the blue background. If we could zoom into that one. So a lot of these babies are born with, like, little cleft lips and they're real fat and chubby. They look like babies that have, like, downs or they have something. You know, there's something wrong with them or as Western people would say. And so. But you see thousands of these baby statues. Like, these babies are being revered. Why would we have baby statues? Well, just my theory and one of the only. Actually, one of the only skeletons that we have ever found of the Olmec world is a baby. We hardly ever find adult skeletons. But what I wonder is if when Children were born with different deformities. They were revered and they were seen as being touched by the gods. And they were honored with these little statues. Like maybe their parents would have them commissioned when they would die. And maybe a lot of children. Well, we know in general that a lot of children died in ancient times. Infant mortality was extremely high. 5 out of 7 of Marcus Aurelius children died, I'm pretty sure in childhood. But all of these babies look like they may have smaller. Some kind of. That look like they may have some kind of condition. Now what I wonder is when you look at Olmec artifacts, can we look up maybe look up Laventa L A and then L A V E N T A. But there's this scene here of like maybe a couple dozen people who all have were jaguar features about them. And you'll see in lots of other scenes where you just see these massive groups of, of people who have these. Yeah, so you see that? Yeah, that right there, that gathering of people. So this is like a. This is really, really cool. These are statuettes that are screenshot in time. So those big pillars standing next to them, those are known as stelae. And they had carvings on them. Well, we found those stelae in the, in the jungles or like in the ruins of the city of La Venta. And then they found this cache here. And what this cache is showing is these werejag people walking in front of a stele in like a, in a, in a procession, some kind of ancient ritual. It's like a screenshot of their world. But we don't, obviously we don't know the context or understand what's going on here. But the point I'm getting across is that the Olmec heads themselves, which always depict normal looking men, are vastly, vastly outnumbered by the amount of artifacts that depict people with were jaguar features, creatures. And so what I start wondering here is. Well, my first thought was, okay, this is a whole different class of people. You clearly have kings that never look like were jaguars. And you have all of these were jaguar people who are. They're like priests or something. They're like involved in the shamanic realm. And so I started wondering, are there people being born with deformities? And in their world is this some kind of deformity that they like revered and that gave you the right to be a part of the priestly class? So I started looking into to mid-1900s, Veracruz, Mexico, which is the heart of the Olmec world. And in the 1970s there was one medical survey done that showed that a disproportionate amount of indigenous kids had what's known as ectodermal disorders. Dysplasia. Compared to these were kids that were in small villages in Veracruz, not living actually in the city of Veracruz. And what ectodermal dysplasia is, it is a disability that does not come with. With a learning disability. So you're still fully there, but it's. It's a. It's a complete dental disability where you don't grow any teeth in your gums other than two fangs. Right here. Look up ectodermal dysplasia. Fangs do that. So look at that. So kids would be born like this and without a learning disability, and it would look like they had the teeth of a jaguar of some kind. And so what I wonder is, were the Olmecs not trying to genetically, like, breed people who looked like this? And if you were born with ectodermal

[A]

dysplasia, that gave you higher status.

[B]

It gave you higher status, and you were born with some kind of intrinsic power.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

The thing on top of this is there are all these things called were jaguar alters. If we could look at up altar for Olmec, we have all these were jaguar altars that we know that were jaguar priests would, like, sit on top of it. But the depiction, so you could go to. So that one right there, if you could possibly zoom in on that. So that is a were jaguar priest with an elongated skull underneath that hat. He's carrying a baby. And he's emerging from a portal, which is actually a cave. These caves are in Guerrero, Mexico. That baby, when you stand over him, I've been to this site many, many times. That baby, when you stand over him, he's got these downturned lips like a cat. He's got fangs coming out of his mouth, and so does the man carrying him. And what I think this depicts is a sacred procession that is symbolizing the priest who would actually be sitting on top of this monument, like this powerful priest. The image below him is a screen screenshot of his sacred procession that he went through as a child being carried in and out of the caves of Guerrero, Mexico. And it's like the procession that when he was born as a were jaguar, he was taken on and essentially imbued with the power of the were jaguar and came and came back out. And so from this is. This is all just my theory. And I think that we see examples of, like, in ancient Egypt, how we see that the pharaohs were warring against the priests because the priests would become superior, super powerful. You see the same thing in the Olmec realm. You'll see Olmec heads. Lots of archaeologists can determine the way that something is buried if it's buried immediately because the stratigraphic layers are all messed up. They don't form naturally. They form like immediately. And geologists can tell that. Archaeologists can tell that. And so a lot of the Olmec heads were buried instantly in the tops of some of the heads and the backs of them. And sometimes the faces have claw marks on them, like intentional claw marks that are tight, chiseled in. But each claw mark is a space of your hand away from each other. So it's like an aesthetic figure of a jaguar slicing this Olmec king's face open, or the top of his head, or the emblem that's in the top of his helmet open. And what I think was, is there were periods where the Were Jaguar priestly class would probably overcome and assassinate and kill the kings, bury their heads under the ground, cut it up as a statement to everybody that the were jaguar is predominant. And then there's the. There's these warring classes back and forth with each other.

[A]

How long ago would this be?

[B]

This is. This is over 3,000 years ago. And this is. This is. This is America's first civilization, the Olmecs. Yeah. And so the Olmecs rise and fall before anything else is really going on. So they rise and they fall, and then about the time they fall is when the Maya start taking off and then the Zapotech start taking off. So. Oh, yeah. So that's. That's Matthew Sterling next to. Next to the main head at Laventa. You see all those markings on the top of his head?

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

So my thought is they. They would push that head down into the ground and carve up the top of it and maybe leave it exposed as a statement that the Were jaguars had taken over. Wow. But later on in Olmec civilization, like their last capital city of Tresipotes, the Were jaguar is gone. So the Olmec heads the. The kingdom or whatever it is, the non Were Jaguar class wins out. They expel the Were Jaguar people. They ultimately win. And then. So what's crazy about the Olmecs is they're. They are just like the Minoans, which is probably why I'm interested in the Minoans. They are the most powerful civilization of their region. They rise and fall before really anything else is going on. And we don't know Their name, the reason that we call the Minoans. The Minoans. I'll tell you, the origins of. Of both their names is because we name them after maybe at least what Greek mythology tells us about the ancient lost kings of Crete, or one of them. His name was Minos, which may have just been the title of what it meant to be a king on Crete. So when Sir Arthur Evans finds the city, finds the palace of Knossos, he just calls him rather than after Minos, he calls him the Minoans. Yeah, the Olmecs are people who live right here. But when the Spaniards were going through Mexico, thousand, three thousand years after the Olmecs were around, they're probably what? The Olmecs are so old that the Aztecs probably never even knew the Olmecs had existed. But the Spaniards are asking, they're learning everything about Mexico. And the Aztecs tell them that the people who live in this land that farm rubber, are the rubber people. But that translates to Nahuatl, to Olmecus. So they just name the ancient people after the name of the modern people. But the Olmecs had risen and fallen before the Maya had really, really gotten started. And so we don't know the name of the Olmecs. We don't know what language they spoke. We don't know what they call themselves. We don't know their history. All we can do is look at the artifact record and try to put puzzle pieces together. Fuck, yeah.

[C]

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

[B]

And you're just like, what the imagine, man?

[C]

Like, what an insane thing to go back into.

[B]

No, no less, no less complicated, dramatic, nuanced, or intelligent than any of the other ancient civilizations that we've known about. This is. You know. You know, when you. When you imagine all those conversations that Greek and Roman politicians must have been having with each other when both their life lives are on the line politically, same thing's happening in the Olmec world. It's just. We don't have a. We don't have a record of it, but must have been. You know, these aren't primitive people to be able to erect. So those megalithic heads come from 100 km as the bird flies or as the crow flies away. And they have to be transported, they think, possibly through the Gulf Coast, a little bit down into the Coetzkaucos river, over swamps and down through valleys and stuff. And they've never been able to figure out how big the boats had to be to transport them. There was this nautical engineer that worked with Maya exploration Center, which is the center that I'm a part of, and he created this like algorithm thing where you could put in the hypothetical size of your Olmec head and the hypothetical size of the raft that it would be sitting on. And if you put in the hypothetical, hypothetical size of, say, if you created a raft that was too long to be able to go down the narrow stretches of the river that they would be moving these heads down, and you put a five ton head on that raft, it would flip the raft and sink it. But the smallest head is 6 tons and the largest head is 50 tons.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

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

[C]

You never hear anything about the old crafted stone sculpture. That's 50 tons. Yeah. Made 3,000 years ago.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It's really remarkable.

[B]

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

[A]

Luke.

[B]

Really, really crazy.

[A]

This is mind blowing. Thank you so much for being here and just doing this. This was awesome.

[B]

Yeah, man.

[A]

We got to do it again sometime.

[B]

We definitely will.

[A]

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

[B]

I'll come back then. We'll do.

[A]

Love it.

[B]

Hell yeah.

[A]

Peace.