← Next Level Soul Podcast with Alex Ferrari
Next Level Soul Podcast with Alex Ferrari
FLASHBACK FRIDAYS: Expert REVEALS Evidence of Super ADVANCED LOST Ancient Technology! with Ben Van Kerkwyk
01:32:05
Ben van Kerkwyk, is a long-time student and fan of history. He spent a lot of time throughout my life travelling to, photographing and filming ancient sites all around the world, and (more recently) interviewing and talking to many of the leading...
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- [00:02]
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- [00:46]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Nothing is everything.
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- [01:31]
Skyrizi Commercial Narrator
This podcast is supported by Trust and Will, an online estate planning service. Visit trustandwill.com for details.
- [01:38]
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- [02:32]
Alex Ferrari
Welcome to Next Level Soul, the place where we deep dive into the mysteries of existence, uncover hidden layers of consciousness, and explore the journey of the soul. I'm your host, Alex Ferrari, and every week we sit down with the world's leading spiritual teachers, mystics, scientists, and truth seekers to illuminate the path towards awakening. Here, we ask questions that truly matter. Why are we here? Where are we going? And how do we elevate our lives, our purpose, and our consciousness to the next level? This is a space for transformation, a space for expansion, a space to remember who you really are. So take a deep breath, open your mind, and prepare to step into your next level soul. Now, if you're ready to take your spiritual journey to the next level, explore Next Level Soul tv, our streaming platform filled with exclusive movies, docs, original shows, transformative series, guided meditations, channeling sessions, audiobooks, and deep spiritual teachings you won't find anywhere else. New content drops every week, helping you expand your consciousness and live from your highest potential. Start your journey today at Next Level Soul tv. The views, opinions and statements expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or positions of Next Level Soul, its host, or any of the companies they represent. Now let's dive into today's episode.
- [04:03]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I'd like to welcome to the show Ben Van Kirkwick. How you doing, Ben?
- [04:07]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Good, good, thanks. Yeah, Alex, it's. It's great to be here, man. Thanks for the invite.
- [04:12]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Thank you so much for coming on the show, man. I'm. I'm so excited to talk to you about one of my favorite conversations, ancient civilizations and lost history and all the stuff that the, the mainstream archaeology community a lot of times says that's a bug of hogwash. But I always like. But I always like to. To really dig into these questions. It's all about asking these questions that, well, really wasn't made. The pyramids made with slaves. But, you know, like, that doesn't make a lot of sense. And did we really start 6,000 years ago? Well, there's this thing called. That just showed up in the 1940s, for God's sakes. And all these kind of things are changing our origins. Not only about our human origins, but also our spiritual origins, where we're coming from, all that kind of stuff. So you are up there in my eyes with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson.
- [05:08]
Ben Van Kirkwick
And thank you.
- [05:09]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Those, those kind of guys who are doing, fighting the good fight, taking the arrows in the back, as they say, as. As you're coming over the hills. So I appreciate the work you're doing, brother.
- [05:20]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Thank you very Much I appreciate that's high press indeed. Yeah. And I look, I look up to those guys greatly as well there. I mean, part of the reason I got into this in the first place, but I think you, I think you described it well in terms of a lot of this is, is really about asking questions. I think the other, the other element to this whole field or this, this journey of, of trying to discover and understand is there, you know, what is our past, what we, what we've always said it was. I think a big part of that is, is really embracing and being open minded to a lot of the new evidence that, you know, particularly in the last 20 years is really shaping and I think having an effect and changing the reality of, of that, of, of our history and particularly the very earliest parts of our history. Like we, we kind of have a pretty good grip on, you know, the last four or five thousand years in terms of what's happened. The problem is kind of what happened before that. Where did those ancient civilizations start? Where did they get their roots? And you know, what has happened in the, potentially in hundreds of thousands of years before that. Because there's been just a tremendous amount of new evidence that comes from adjacent scientific fields as well as within archeology. You mentioned Gobekli Tepe. That's a big one that I think should be having a massive impact on the story of our past. And I mean, as is the case with lots of different established scientific fields, change is slow to come. Right? The very nature of establishment is to resist change and to maintain the status quo. But I do think at this point there's an accumulation of evidence coming from these fields. We know an awful lot more cataclysm, the human timeline, the genetic complexity of the human race. We keep getting older and older, we keep finding older and older stuff. The further back we go, it seems like the more sophisticated the stuff is that we're finding. In a lot of cases this is, this is true for what you see in South America, it's true for what you see in Egypt, things like that. And I, I do think it's, we're at the point where it's, it's time to reevaluate those very earliest parts of, of the history of our civilization and, and of our race on this planet.
- [07:26]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Now I've, I've been talking to so many people on the show about this great shift in human consciousness that we're all becoming more awakened to what is, just to what we truly are. And the information that's coming out and the questions that people are asking are becoming more and more broad and more and more open where they wouldn't have 20, 10, 15, 20 years ago. Why do you believe now that a lot of these questions and it really, I mean Graham really is one of the forefathers of this, of these asking these deep questions. But when Fingerprints of the Gods came out, which was what, the 90s?
- [08:06]
Ben Van Kirkwick
95.
- [08:07]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, yeah, about 95 is when that came out. It started kind of more people started to ask these questions. Why do you think in general people are becoming more and more curious about our origins and secondly, why are we starting to find stuff that just has no explanation? Like the evidence that we're starting to find is just, just, just like you could, you could argue the pyramids even on a losing argument about. But there's certain things you're just like, I'm sorry man, the, the caves in. In China, the, the underwear underground cities in, in Turkey that they're finding good depletely. Tepli. All of these things are being found and really analyzed at such a deep level. Why do you think it's happening at this point?
- [08:50]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Well, there's, it's, there's a couple of questions in there. I mean, one of the reasons I think that this is, this is I, I do and I feel the same way. I feel like there's a groundsweller movement. There are more and more people interested in these topics. One of the, it's. One of the reasons I think is, is that this, this, this type of information is much more readily available to everybody now as you've had the rise of the Internet and particularly like video and new, new media platforms, YouTube, things like this are, are helping to spread that a lot of these topics because prior to the type of content that we're seeing today on those platforms and its popularity, I mean a lot of this information was out there. All these concepts and ideas about like there is a lot of contradictions. There is a lot of new evidence. There is a lot of problems with the established narrative around our history. That type of data was contained in these books, you know, and you have to be really into the field. You got to read these big books and it's guys like, you know, Graham and his predecessors as well that have been talking about these topics. And if you go back further than that, it's kind of like the discussion and any of this data and the nuance that's involved in this discussion was really very much limited to the academic halls. It was the academics, the Egyptologist, it was them. And Their peers that were discussing this. There might have been some societies and organizations that were into Explorers clubs, but these are very select and elite organizations. It's not really a public awareness thing. So we've seen this transition into this new media field. We've seen the rise of some of these alternative ideas and the logic and I think the, the, you know, the, the arguments and the cases that they're making from guys like Graham, you know, Robert Bauval, there's so many John Anthony west, these people that have, have written these books and you know, and then that's translated then into new media and, and we have the, the Internet and these ideas are spreading and I think they make a lot of, obviously they do make a lot of sen. Challenging evidence. And as we've gone forward, particularly in the last 20 years, we've made these new discoveries. We've started to apply our modern technology to some of these discoveries. Often in, you know, this is efforts of people that are well and truly outside of these fields. They're outsiders, they're engineers, they're, you know, they're, they're just, just interested people that typically aren't in these academic fields that are trying to apply, you know, modern techniques to, to uncover the truth about some of these new finds. And it's very, very challenging for that story. I mean, just if you just look at cataclysm alone, I think this is a huge, huge piece of the puzzle. And this, this is not something, this is very much. In the last 20 years we've discovered that the Earth has been through this tremendously catastrophic and cataclysmic period. And fairly recently too, very recently from a geologic or any other timescale outside of, you know, the time, the way that we measure time with our short lives. But in the last 13,000 years, you know, the Earth has been through this cataclysm. That was probably one of the worst things that's happened to it in the last couple million years. And it was a period of time called the Younger Dryas. It marked the boundary between the Pleistocene and the Holocene, which is the era we're in today. It was people, you can think of it as the end of the Ice Age, and It was only 13,000 years ago, but it was, there's a massive megafaunal extinction event. It would have been a civilization ending event. It, during this period of time, sea levels rose 400ft almost in a very short period of time. It was just a catastrophic event that was most likely caused by a series of cosmic impacts and airbursts, particularly over the Northern Hemisphere, and it would have ended civilization. So when you look at events like that that are now being revealed through modern science and new science, not in archeology, but in other disciplines, paleoclimatology, et cetera, ice cores, all these, all these different sciences are contributing to this knowledge.
- [12:49]
Alex Ferrari
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
- [12:51]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [13:22]
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- [14:22]
Skyrizi Commercial Narrator
This podcast is supported by Trust and Will, an online estate planning service. Visit trustandwill.com for details.
- [14:28]
Skyrizi Commercial Warning Voice
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- [15:21]
Ben Van Kirkwick
T.
- [15:25]
Alex Ferrari
And now back to the show.
- [15:28]
Ben Van Kirkwick
It should have this tremendous impact on history because you know, not only was there a megafauna extinction event where megafauna it would have ended any civilization that was around during that time. It actually corresponds with almost every single ancient origin story even our own, even our own modern day religions and our origin stories and these tales that are passed down through generations and generations and often and often are just rehashes and you know, reimaginings of older tales that came from older civilizations like the flood story. The Noah flood story is often people know this comes from the Sumerians and the Epic of Gilgamesh a flood story. But you can't look at any ancient cultural religion and their origin stories and not find it just to be not. You'll always find like a great flood story or a great fire story and this idea that you know, mankind was ended through some giant cataclysm and there was a, you know, there were people that lived before that but we went through this cataclysm and then we were sort of forced to start again. And I think there's a grain of truth in that now that's being revealed by a lot of this modern science. And for, for whatever reason at this point it's not really been not acknowledged to any great degree by modern archeology and you know, the keepers of the tomes of the history books at the universities but I think it's only a matter of time.
- [16:50]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
But also the other thing is that when people think of like oh the comet hit us and oh it's a civilization ender. It wasn't the younger drives again to my rudimentary understanding of did it was a huge event that took out a lot of humanity but not all of humanity.
- [17:11]
Ben Van Kirkwick
No, we survived it.
- [17:13]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, that's the thing. It's not like the dinosaurs. Like the dinosaurs were. That was a much. That's a planet killer. Whatever happened to them at that point, that was what I forgot. How many millions?
- [17:23]
Ben Van Kirkwick
65 million years ago.
- [17:25]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
65 million. That was a whole other conversation where it really just took over the planet and almost, almost everything died.
- [17:31]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yes. Yeah. So you, you have varying degrees of, of extinction level events. You know the KT boundary is the one that is often associated with the dinosaurs and it is six that people Think of that when they think of extinction level events. And no doubt that was a much bigger event than the younger Dryas. And, and you have even bigger ones that go back in the past where you're talking about like 99 of all life basically being exterminated on the planet. That's crazy. I mean you end up with just a few microbes and bacteria and then it, everything has to start again. From that perspective that's happening.
- [18:01]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And New York roaches. And New York roaches.
- [18:03]
Ben Van Kirkwick
And roaches, of course. Yeah, yep. Yes. New York roaches specifically, specifically those things probably were fine. They might have thrived in that environment. But yeah, I mean the younger drugs. Look, it was as I said, probably the worst thing to happen to the planet in the last sort of 2 to 5 million years. It was a big event and if you look at what happened, I mean it wiped out essentially half of the megafauna that was here at the time. So people, people, I think a lot of people aren't aware of these extinction events, but people are generally aware of things like, you know, mammoths and saber tooth tigers and you know, the American giant bear. Yeah, the giant bear, yeah, yep. The short faced bear. There was the American cave bear, the American lion, there were armadillos the size of Volkswagens, there was the giant ground sloth that was almost the size of an elephant. These are all animals that existed in North America from the, you know, basically from two and a half million years ago up until about 13,000, 12,000 years ago and they all went away. And if you look at the, the, the total of extinction of species that went extinct in this short period of time, it's, it's a, roughly half of the megafauna. Megafauna being anything that's I think over about 40 kg of body weight, including us, I guess certainly me, that's, that's described as megafauna. So half of those species that were around went extinct in this pretty short period of time right down to and including a couple of species of birds. And of course the, the mainstream explanation for this is kind of this nonsensical thing that has to do with over hunting with, you know, by humans. And it's, it's, it really is nonsense. If you go, if you look at South America, for example, they lost something like 85% of their megafauna. North America is a similar number. Like it's huge numbers of species went extinct in this real short period of time. So it was a catastrophic event. It was, it was, it was in various places, you had you had just incredible flooding and also incredible fire. There's been tons of different levels of analysis, more than, there's now more than like 150 peer reviewed scientific papers that really deal with the nuance and the detail of what is all of the evidence for this period of time. It has a lot to do with analysis of things like ice core samples where we can drill down into the ice in places like Antarctica and Greenland and in Russia in places. Because every year as the snow falls, it gets compressed into ice and it contains data about things like oxygen isotopes. We can look at temperatures and particulate matter and we're getting very good at drilling down, taking these cores out that go back in some cases hundreds of thousands of years. And we can look at almost like a year by year layer of what were the conditions, what happened.
- [20:43]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Tree rings.
- [20:44]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Like tree rings, exactly, yeah. In fact, tree rings are another. We don't really have tree rings that go back 13,000 years, but tree rings have told us some interesting things about the climate in the history, in history as well, CO2, stuff like that. But, but if you, if you go back down. So one of the interesting things that happened, it's not just, you know, you don't just get these massive floods because what likely happened you have during this period of time, sea levels rose 3 to 400ft, like 100 meters, 130 meters in a short period of time. And it's associated with these massive pulses, these meltwater pulses. And of course that's all of the ice that was on top of particularly the Northern Hemisphere being melted quite rapidly and then finding its way into the ocean and that's the trigger for it. So you have these impacts and these air bursts that are probably going into the ice, these ice caps, the Laurentide and Caldarian glacier systems that were pretty much over most of North America, also the European glacier as well. And these things are melting rapidly, tremendous flooding. You also have, you know, just these airbursts and impacts are like, they're even, they're much stronger events than even giant volcanoes going off. Like it would cause almost like a nuclear winter environment on the planet. And in fact we see this with temperature analysis. There's like an 8, 900 year period from 12,800 years to about 11,600 years ago where the temperature just drops to the, it drops dramatically and quickly to like this, the depth of the coldest parts of an ice age. And it stays there for about this 800 year period and then it just gets jolted back out again. So the modern thinking is that there were two events. There was an event that precipitated this at the start at 11,800 or 900 years ago, and then something at around 11,600 years ago, which is particularly interesting because that's the date that coincides exactly with Plato's account of the sinking of Atlantis. That's a really interesting correlation with that date. But look, it's not just flooding. I mean, part of that ice core analysis also shows that at one point around 9% of the world's biomass was on fire, which is just an astronomical.
- [22:59]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Number of CO2 as well.
- [23:02]
Alex Ferrari
Coming up.
- [23:02]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Well, just pouring it. Yeah, I mean that's, that's just, that's a huge, I mean look, this, this, these are, this is what you would call real climate change. Like this stuff that happened 13, 14000 years ago. This is real climate. So this is catastrophic and rapid climate change. It's not a runaway event like it, the Earth is very resilient to these, these shifts, but it's pretty rough on the life like in what happens. So either, either you don't get like life doesn't go extinct immediately because it's like under the blast like that. There's evidence for that too. It's really interesting actually. There's these different places where mammoths and saber tooth tigers and trees and everything just like mashed up together where you've got like mammoth hip bones up near their head. I mean, it's just, you can tell these things were hit by a shockwave. But what happens ultimately is that you have this dramatic and rapid climate change that, that affects the environment the megafauna lives in. And of course that's, that's what causes that extinction. It's this rapid change to their environment and their food sources that all goes away and they go extinct in short, in short order. And we've seen the result of that. Like Siberia for example, was during this, what you call in the Pleistocene was, was much warmer than it is now. Like Siberia is this tundra of cold wasteland. Like you know, this, almost this, this, this frozen landscape. And, and, but we have examples of, of megafauna and the mammoths and mastodons that live there that, that show that their diets were like, it was huge plants and green, green, a green place like the, well, the climate was very different during the Pleistocene, generally colder overall. But the climate zones on the, on the planet were very different and those shifted rapidly as a result of the younger drives.
- [24:42]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And aren't they finding now bones and Animals who like, were frozen and now they're being defrosted because of the, the climate change that's happening currently. And they're finding them like with food in their mouth and like food in their, in their stomach. So it was like a quick scenario was they froze like in, I mean, in almost instant. Almost flash freezing in some places.
- [25:10]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Sure. Yeah. In some places. Really interesting. Like there's the guys up in Alaska. If there was a really interesting. I forget his name. John someone or other went on, on Rogan's show. In fact, I've kind of had some halfway contact with. He, he's. He knows Randall Carlson. I know Randall Carlson. There's been some talk about getting up to this Alaskan boneyard. I mean, he's got. They're literally finding just, just everywhere these, these, these mammoth remains and skeletons and flash frozen where you literally have meat. I think the guy's actually eaten some mammoth meat like this, this. It's like been frozen for 12 or 13, 000 years and they've cooked it up and ate it. At one point I'm like, holy crap.
- [25:47]
Alex Ferrari
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
- [25:50]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's cough, cold and flu season. Do not get caught feeling under the weather. Get back to feeling good with savings on all your cold and flu Essentials now through February 24th. Shop in store or online to stock up and save on items like Mucinex, Fast Max liquid gels, Vicks Dayquil and nyquil combo packs, Hall's cough drops and Tylenol Children's liquid. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [26:20]
Skyrizi Commercial Narrator
This podcast is supported by Trust and Will, an online estate planning service. Visit trustandwill.com for details.
- [26:26]
Skyrizi Commercial Warning Voice
If you're like me, you know you should probably create a will. But it feels intimidating and expensive. That's how I felt until I discovered trust and will. Trust and will makes estate planning doable and less scary. With trust and Will, you can create a trust or a will online in just a few simple steps for as little as $199. With trust and Will, estate planning doesn't have to be intimidating or expensive. It can be straightforward, affordable, and take as little as 30 minutes. For my family, trust and will is all about protecting our future while we chase those big dreams today. Trust and will get 20% off when you visit trustandwill.com support at checkout. That's trustandwill.com support to get 20% off. Trustandwill.com S U P P O R.
- [27:19]
Ben Van Kirkwick
T.
- [27:23]
Alex Ferrari
And now back to the show.
- [27:26]
Ben Van Kirkwick
That's brave move.
- [27:28]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
But I was gonna say that that's the smartest situation.
- [27:30]
Ben Van Kirkwick
No, just what you do, I guess in Alaska. Right, In Alaska. But yeah, there's, there are examples where you have like flesh, you have, you have these animals that are almost intact, like baby mammoths with food in their stomach, I mean, and food in their mouth even. So they part. You know, they, they were killed very quickly and then frozen very quickly as well. So I imagine there are some scenarios and, and results of this just catastrophic events where you have this kind of massive polar vortex that can happen. I'm not that familiar with that. Not. It's obviously it's not everywhere, but certainly in some places as a result of this just. I mean we, we have nothing in our. Even the movies that try to simulate this stuff don't really do it justice. It's. I mean, and you can get a sense for that when you look at things like the floods and what happened. If you ever go out to eastern Washington State, there's a, there's an area of eastern Washington state called the channeled Scablands. And it's, it's, it's probably one of the most spectacular environments you'll ever see because it is literally where the ground and the, this, this, the Earth was just tore up because that was the path that these flood waters took. And you're talking about volumes of water, like 9 cubic miles of water per minute flowing through some of these environments. That's like, to put it this way, it's about 100 times the volume of all the rivers on Earth flowing right now. Like all of the flowing water on Earth right now, you're talking about 100 times the volume of that was at the peak discharge rates of some of these floods. And so in a couple of weeks, essentially some of these events have carved these coolies that are miles and miles wide and they're like thousand foot deep and they just rip up this basalt and they just form these huge scars that are on the landscape. And you, we today, we drive through them. They've got these little lakes and stuff. It's all a recreation area, golf courses, super spectacular environment. But when you look at it through the context of how did this form and when did it form and how quickly did this happen? You just stand back like, this is, this is something else. Like this is. Yeah, I mean, it was cat. It was catastrophic and we have, we've never experienced anything like it, certainly not in our modern memory.
- [29:38]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So with, with the sites that are being discovered now, in your opinion, were there any archaeological sites that we currently are, that have, have excavated that were around prior to the Younger Dryas?
- [29:54]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Sure, yeah. I mean, I think the stuff in Turkey right now, Gobekli Tepe is probably the best example.
- [29:59]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Right.
- [30:00]
Ben Van Kirkwick
In fact, some of that, some of that goes back to during the younger Dries. Like that, literally the carbon dating puts, that puts those sites in, in place during the, the period of, of, of the younger Dries. Wow. And in for, and in fact Karahan Tepe and some of the other sites they're discovering Turkey are actually older than, than Gobekli Tepe. What's interesting about Gobekli Tepe too is, and in fact I can, I can give a plug to like the Brothers of the Serpent podcast, good friends of mine, they just put out an excellent video on YouTube about Gobekli Tepe that gets into the details of how they've done the dating there. Because people kind of know that, oh yeah, Gobekli Tepe is carbon dated and pretty much established around that 11,000 years, you know, 11,000 years ago, 9,000 to 10,000 BC. What's interesting about the dating there is that that dating comes from material that are in these, these rough walls that are around those classic sort of T pillared shapes, these big megaliths. And, and if you look at the site, what's, what seems to have happened there is that those walls were built to repair that site. Those walls were made because they encompass some of these T pillars. They actually cover up features of the T pillars. It's almost like they were restoring and protecting something that was there beforehand. And, and all of the dating material and the dates come from this very rough and primitive, you know, cobblestone wall that is built around these enclosures. And it's an entirely different style to the T pillars and the megalithic work. And I think that's a good indicator that this was probably a later period of occupation and building that happened there. Which tells you that these T pillars and these original enclosures and the more sophisticated work, the stuff that is like the 20 foot high megaliths and some of them weighing 20 or 30 tons, was done at some unknown time before that and probably fell into disrepair and had fallen over. And then, and then during the younger drives you had a primitive set of people, Neolithic people, or I guess at that point it was, it was Paleolithic or, or even Mesolithic that, that, that came there and restored those sites and, and worked on them and, and did something to them. And that's where the dating comes from. And in fact this, this evidence is, is, is backed up by the fact that in some of these walls that are built around these T pillars, you actually have broken pieces of T pillars being used as blocks in the wall. So it's as if those T pillars were already broken, they'd fallen over and you know, degraded. And then because they couldn't put it back together, they took that lump of stone and they put it in the wall when they built the wall. So it's like it's. Yeah, people think it's, it's, it's. And it is an old site, but it, it seems like it could be far older than that. We really don't know. I think it's a similar case for places like Egypt. I do think that some of those places which we attribute to the dynastic Egyptian civilization today, places like Giza, Saqqara, Abusir, Dahshur, I think there's a very good chance that elements of that infrastructure existed during the younger Dryas, if not before, and then it was later occupied and reused and integrated into the dynastic Egyptian culture as we know it.
- [33:10]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Do you think that, that the pyramids themselves, it seems like, look, that, that there was a kind of a pillaging of like let's say the great pyramids of all three of them of, of, of elements to build other things throughout history. But to be honest, in if you just come across that thing and you're primitive, like there's only so much you can do. Like you can't move those things, lift those things, work those things. So that's, I think one of the reasons why they're still in the shape that they're in because it was just such a massive, I mean these blocks are how big each?
- [33:48]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Well, I mean, of them, I mean there's, it's, they're not, I mean there's certainly bigger blocks of material. If you take the Great Pyramid for example, it's something like 6 million tons of limestone in that and, and, and 2 to, you know, 2 and a half to 3 million blocks. So the average block size is around 2 to 3 tons, something like that. Which is a lot. Yeah, I mean it's a lot. But you have much bigger stones of obviously you have like 70, 80 ton single piece granite stones and, and like dozens and dozens of them that make up the central granite structure inside the pyramid. Unless you've got to manage. This is also like 150ft above ground level. Like these are, there's dozens of these massive granite ashlars and, and beams, 70, 80 tons of pop. I mean you've got foundation tiles around people often. I love taking people to Gizik because people go there and look up at the pyramid. But, but one of the more interesting elements of it is actually looking down at what you're standing on because it's not just bedrock. There was preparation work done into the bedrock and there's actually foundation tiles locked together and locked into the bedrock in this like this 3D geometric puzzle almost that is just perfectly fit together. And some of those stones, you're talking 200 plus tons single piece stones that were put in there and shaped and placed extremely precisely. In fact, I'm working on a video right now about probably what I think is the largest single piece stone that I've. That, that, that is at Giza that we found only recently. That's around 450 tons. It's kind of insane to think of somebody moving those things around. But yeah, there's, there's, it's, the, the pyramids have been pillaged and used as quarries for stone for literally thousands of years. This, this is an activity that began as far as we know, you know, in the middle a new kingdom of the ancient Egyptian civilization itself. So you're Talking about like 20, 1500 BC they were already taking stone from these monuments. And that has been an activity that has continued right up until about probably only 60, 70 years ago, not even that long ago. I mean it's, you know, it's been well reported by, you know, guys like Flinders Petrie who visited these sites in the late 1800s, early 1900s, that, you know, there's just camel trains of stone leaving these sites every day, which should tell you something like this because that's how massive and how giant they are, is, is that people have been taking stone and using these things as quarries for literally thousands of years. Yet the, and that's, and taking something away and destroying it's much easier than building it. But the claim is that you could build the Great pyramid inside of 25 years with nothing more than Bronze Age technology, human horsepower, ropes and sleds. And it's, it's absolutely nonsense from a logistical perspective. It's one of the biggest problems I have with, I guess the orthodox story of particularly dynastic Egyptian history is that not only are they saying you could build this thing in this short amount of time, which if you take 25 years as an example.
- [36:44]
Alex Ferrari
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
- [36:47]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you feeling those winter blues? Well, do not worry. They've got you covered. With ways to boost your mood. Add a little sweetness to your day with big savings on all your favorite sweets. Shop in store or online and save on items like Gummy Savers five Flavors, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Sour Patch, watermelon, M&M's party size stand Up Bags and Ferrero Rocher Mixed Variety squares. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [37:21]
Alex Ferrari
And now back to the show.
- [37:25]
Ben Van Kirkwick
And the number of stones that are in the Great Pyramid. That equates to one stone being quarried, shipped, finished, take, taken to the site, put in place and perfectly set every five minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 25 years. That's what it would take to finish.
- [37:41]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Perfect and perfect precision. Like almost.
- [37:44]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Oh, yeah. I mean, yes and no. There is mortar. I mean, the superstructure of the pyramid isn't as, isn't as precise as, say, the foundation. It's certainly not as precise as the internal work. But that figure of five minutes doesn't account for the planning. It doesn't account for the foundation work. It doesn't account for all of the leveling and the tiles that go into it, doesn't account for the sophistication of the interior spaces, the digging of the tunnels. Like, it's just, it's real nonsense. It's complete nonsense. And not only that, you have to also remember that these are supposedly amongst the very first pyramids ever built. It's, it's like there's no, there's no, it's like we started with the space shuttle and we went backwards to like, you know, the horse and cart, because you don't start with the, the perfect sort of massive, sort of technologically, technologically sophisticated product and then go backwards, which is what seems to have happened in the orthodox timeline of pyramid building. Because the Egyptians, we all know about the Giza and the Great Pyramid and the two or three other pyramids that are there. But as you go forward in time, like, you know, the Middle Kingdom, they kept building pyramids, but they got much less sophisticated. They were made from mud brick and they were much smaller. And there's still, some of, you can see today, but they're slowly eroding because, you know, mud brick erodes. But yet these giant stone monuments are eternal but they're supposedly the first ones we made. And of course there's endless precision when it comes, there's precision when it, when you look at like how these things are aligned to true north. So it's, it's one of the most accurately aligned and set out buildings that we've ever made. In fact, we didn't, you know, we, we didn't even match it, I think until the late 1800s we, we built, we actually could build it. Something that was actually almost as accurate as the pyramid. It encodes all this data it encodes, it's basically a scale model of the northern hemisphere of the planet to a ratio of. I think it's, I'm going to get this wrong. It's 43,200. So if you take the height of the pyramid and you multiply it by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the Earth. So from the center of the Earth to the North Pole, if you take the perimeter length of the Great Pyramid and you multiply it by 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the planet. It encodes the shape of the planet. The fact that it's an oblate spheroid. So by that I mean that the planet Earth's not a sphere. Right. It's, it's like a little, it's a little, it's a little further east west than it is north south. Right. Because of the spinning. So it's slightly eggy.
- [40:10]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Slightly eggy?
- [40:11]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Well, it's just slightly flat on top, a little fatter around the middle.
- [40:14]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah.
- [40:15]
Ben Van Kirkwick
And that, that, that difference, like that translates into a ratio of difference between latitude and longitude. So if you draw that grid line across the map and you, you go down and you look at like, okay, at the equator, I've got one grid square of whatever, one degree or one minute of latitude and longitude. It's slightly longer east west than it is north south. It's not a square, it's a rectangle. So that ratio between latitude and longitude is also exactly replicated or very precisely replicated. In the Great Pyramid. It sits on something called a sockle, which is this one cubit pyramid, wide and high platform almost. So it's like this little ledge that sits on and sticks out and it gives you two ways of measuring the perimeter length. Right. You can measure the perimeter length of the actual pyramid or the perimeter length of the SoCal. And if you compare the ratio of those two lengths between the SOCAL and the pyramid, the pyramidal links, it's exactly the same ratio as latitude to longitude on the planet. It's bananas.
- [41:16]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And so then why. So then how? So when mainstream archaeology is confronted with these facts, what do they say?
- [41:25]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Oops? Well, the answer is it's coincidence. I mean, that's generally, generally the response you get is it's coming. And I think, you know, these things pile up and up and up. There's many more things you could talk about when it comes to precision and, and aspects of the great Pyramid. And I think all of them, I mean, it doesn't take very many of them to go, okay, that's not coincidence. There's obviously some more data going on here. I think it's one of the giant contradictions. It doesn't really get addressed, unfortunately. I, you know, I, I think I, I think there's another explanation for this. I think I, I genuinely as, and I respect the dynastic Egyptians. They did tremendous work. I mean, they were extremely capable civilization that lasted for 3, 000 years. It was an incredible, probably one of the most, the greatest civilizations to have ever been on the planet. But they simply weren't capable and didn't have the knowledge set of achieving some of the things that we attribute to them for all of their capability. We know that particularly the Old Kingdom period, the early periods, I mean, they were very relatively primitive Bronze Age culture. No use of the wheel, no metals other than bronze, literally bronze and copper, no steel, no iron, no lepsone with no use of the wheel. There's no pulleys, there's no force multipliers, there's no advanced tools, there's no pottery wheel, there's no lathe, there's no nothing. But we have these incredible artifacts and architecture that comes from that period that show all of this sophistication and all of this encoded data. And nobody's ever demonstrated that you can actually replicate that stuff with these very primitive methods of construction. Nor do we have any evidence that the Egyptians actually had the data that it seems like are encoded in these artifacts. So you're left, I think, with two options. And this is, you could spend hours talking about this stuff, the weight of evidence that suggests this. But I think you're ultimately left with two options. One is we have to drastically reevaluate what we think that the dynastic Egyptians were capable of. I think that's by far the least likely option. There's no evidence to suggest that they had advanced tools, that they had advanced knowledge. We know what they knew. They wrote down what they did. They drew scenes on the Walls showing how they did things. And they, you know, we found their tools that are very primitive. The other option, I think the one that the evidence supports best, and I think all of the adjacent evidence, cataclysm, genetics, timeline, is that our. Is that the. The path of civilization is much longer. There's just more ups and downs, more cataclysm. And that's. At some point in the past, there was a much more advanced civilization that existed that is probably responsible for this knowledge that probably started these projects, even if they didn't finish them. And that probably manufactured a lot of the things that the Egyptians then later inherited and integrated into their own culture over a period of thousands of years. And this originating civilization, this progenitor civilization, was probably one that spanned the globe, that was highly capable because we see evidence for it in Turkey, in Lebanon, in South America, in Easter island, potentially in China. All around the world, you have these similar styles of megalithic building. You have a pyramid building culture. You have the works of people like Georgia von Deschund and de Santilla, who wrote Hamlet's Mill, that show that there's astronomical knowledge encoded in all of these cultures all around the world, that. That reflects a knowledge set that those cultures didn't have. But it does show you things like procession of the equinoxes, these sophisticated movements of the heavens. And it all points to this idea that maybe there was a precursor culture that might have been responsible for that initial set of knowledge that is then spanned out through time and distance and ends up in all these other cultures. There's so much evidence for this, I think, and of course, the Atlantis story with Plato, stuff like that. So I think that's the far more likely scenario. I think that's the one that the evidence best supports. And it's just, you know, it's a battle to kind of get the mainstream academic community to kind of look at the past with a bit more of an open mind. Because I think if, if we did that and we looked at these sites and we analyzed these artifacts and we used our own technology, we could probably learn something. We'd probably open up these doors, we'd learn a lot more about the. Our origins and the history of civilization.
- [45:44]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Do you think that that when we say the when. When you start hearing the word, oh, there was an advanced civilization in the past, it's first of all, the ego of the current man or the current human doesn't allow that, because. And this is the one thing I think you would agree with me on. At every moment in time, man has always thought that they had everything figured out. Every year that goes by, they're just like, nope, it's Zeus. That's the way it goes. Nope, it's, it's the, it's the God Ra, all these kind of things. So I, is, I think that's probably one of the reasons why we can't comprehend it. But also I think we're looking at the past through the lens of our technology today, which is. But the ancient civilizations that you're talking about that might be more advanced, they could have been advanced in ways that we can't really comprehend because it's a different kind of technology than we are currently using.
- [46:39]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah, 100%. In fact, I talk about this quite a bit. I think this is, it's a difficult concept to grasp if you haven't thought much about it before. But I think that's exactly right. I think all you have to do is look at the last 30, 40 years of our own technological progression. The rise of the Internet, the rise of devices.
- [46:59]
Alex Ferrari
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
- [47:02]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you feeling those winter blues? Well, do not worry. They've got you covered with ways to boost your mood, Add a little sweetness to your day. With big savings on all your favorite sweets. Shop in store or online and save on items like Gummy Savers, five flavors, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Sour Patch watermelon, M&M's party size stand up Bags and Ferrero Rocher Mixed Variety squares. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [47:36]
Alex Ferrari
And now back to the show.
- [47:40]
Ryan Seacrest
And.
- [47:40]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Think, okay, so, you know, we, we didn't, you know, if you go back in time, you could only have to go back 30 or 40 years to, to our lifetime, in our lifetime, in our lifetime to, for people not to have a clue what, what a cell phone is like, a modern smart Internet, touch screen, Internet, all that stuff. These are new concepts. You know, I often, I like to illustrate it by saying, yeah, if you, you could, you don't have to go back to ca, but say you took this back to neolithic times, a caveman, let alone Victorian era or even 100 years ago. And you show this to like a phone to someone, they're gonna, they're gonna look at and go, well, it's a, it's like a shiny piece of glass or something that, that's, that breaks if you smash it, it's powered off like it doesn't do anything. You just, you have no context to understand what it is. But you and I, you and I couldn't build one. But we, but we know how it works.
- [48:25]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, we know how it works.
- [48:26]
Ben Van Kirkwick
We know what it is like because we have context. We know what a wireless, what wireless networking is, we know what a touchscreen is, we know what the cameras and the Internet and all these things that you need to put this thing into context and understand what it is. And in a lot of ways I think when we look at some, the potential sophistication of some of these sites, I think we're in that same position as someone from Victorian era looking at a cell phone. We don't have the context to fully understand it because there may well be parts of science or technologies that were involved in what these sites, how they were made or what they were doing that we don't understand yet. And as you said, even though we think we've got it all figured out, we know that we're going to know more in 10 years. We're going to explore the boundaries of science and learn more about the fundamental nature of reality and technology and principles of the universe in 20 years, 100 years, a thousand years. So that means that there are probably huge domains of technology and science that are currently outside of our own perspective. And it, it's very tempting. And a lot of people do when they usually they look back at the past, as you said, they look at it through the lens of our current understanding of technology. So it's as if everything in the past where the, we're the, we're the most superior man that has ever version of man that's ever existed. Right? So therefore everything in the past must be just a subset of what we know. And it's all explainable and it can only be explainable within the context of what we know. And I, I just, I just don't think that's the best way to look at it. I think we need to be a lot more open minded about the possibilities of what was going on in the past and consider, and consider the possibility that some of those answers might lay outside of our current perspective and our current knowledge set. And that's why I think also if we actually investigate them with that possibility in mind and we apply ourselves and apply our technology, we might actually learn something. And we're starting to see that with some of the work that's been happening this year that I've been involved in, is this in depth analysis of these pre dynastic Granite vases and they're just showing these degrees of sophistication and machining and precision that it's completely blowing people's minds all around the world. It's certainly not possible to have been done by hand and it's revealing all of these interesting possibilities about their function or how they were made. And we're learning stuff because we're being open minded about how, you know, investigating these things and, and, and what the possibilities could be.
- [50:56]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And, and it's stuff I've seen in Egypt too where there's these quarries where there were obelisks left behind unfinished and unfinished if you will. They were like started to be carved out and even, even like hieroglyphs were on them. But they were, but they're being almost scooped out of the ground with your scoop marks and people are like how do you, how do you, how do they do. And there's, even if there's even cuts, like a laser cut or a saw of some sort was cutting through it and stopped and then like oops, made a bad cut, went back and you could see that they're like how do you work with some of the toughest, you know, the, the densest materials on the planet?
- [51:42]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah, I mean hardness.
- [51:45]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, exactly. So hard. That's harder than, not harder than diamonds, but it's up there with diamonds. It's insane.
- [51:51]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah, so that's one of the interesting things about a lot of the artifacts, particularly in Egypt, although this also applies to South America is that yeah, they use some of the most difficult stones intract, the most intractable mediums, if you like, that are available. I mean on the most scale of hardness, you know, your fingernails like a two and a half and you know, copper is like a three and a half, irons four and a half, steel's five, five and a half. You, you have stones that are in the six, seven, eight, nine range, you know, that are being used and, and just seem to be no problem in terms of how they're machining. Diamonds are 10 diamond being sort of the toughest stuff out there. Although I think that's all that, you know, they might have synthesized something these days that could be harder than diamond. I don't know. But yeah, you have, you know, you have all sorts of evidence. Okay, there's, there's machining evidence like you said, there's saw cuts, there's tubular drills. There's evidence for very sophisticated forms of machining that isn't rep. Can't replica has never been replicated by any hand method which is what they say did all of this stuff, you have the scoop marks in the quarries, which is really interesting. And I have a long investigation, a few videos looking at it on my channel. That stuff is. The conventional explanation for it is. Well, it's pounding stones is that they took these diorite or dolerite balls and they just pounded away at the granite and it's what leaves these scoop marks. And there's all sorts of problems with that theory, not the least of which is that I think it's a. And this is like a logical conundrum that you see all over the place in the orthodox story of ancient Egypt. But it's like, well, okay, this is the most primitive method yet. This is the method you see on the most sophisticated and largest artifacts. It's like how, how can you correlate these two things? Like it's. If this is the most primitive method of quarrying, literally pounding on granite with, with another rock. And of course, you do progress over time to. While we do the wedge and chisel approach, where we chisel out divots in a line and we put wood in and water it and then hammer in these chisel, try to split the stone and then you develop stronger materials like steel and other chisels where you can actually chisel in to the stone. And there's evidence for that sort of work too in that quarry. But they're typically using, they're getting off little small pieces off these giant, giant, giant artifacts like the unfinished obelisk, which is a 1200 tons, a thousand 200 tons is the estimate for its mass. You know, but it's, it's also, they try to explain that with the most primitive quarrying method. It's nonsense. Plus there's all sorts of other inconsistencies with how those scoop marks are formed. The fact that they run all the way down walls in a straight line, then underneath and then up under the underside of these artifacts. And you wouldn't have these ridge lines in between the scoop marks. I mean, if you, you have a shift change and the next guy comes along after 10 hours of pounding and he picks up the ball and he starts pounding, he's going to pound down those ridges that are on the, in between these scoop marks. I mean, that's where you're going to get the most traction and remove the most material. But that's not what we see. We see everything in these straight lines as if there was a tool that came down and did this in a straight line. We see evidence for articulation like like, they start straight in places and they just, they. They angle over. So you can imagine using, like a backhoe arm. Everyone who's used a backhoe will see this. You cut. When you cut out straight, it's straight, but as you. As you rotate from that fixed point of reference, the angle shifts on. On the line that you're cutting.
- [55:12]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Right?
- [55:12]
Ben Van Kirkwick
And we see evidence for exactly that same sort of thing in these scoop marks that the angle changes as if. As if that tool was. Was fixed in a certain spot and then it was operating from there and was articulated, and then it was moved later. There's all these very interesting.
- [55:29]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
It goes on and on and on. Yeah, there is. There's a question I want to ask you, because I've been down in South America, I've been to Machu Picchu. I've been to Machu Picchu, Tulum Koba, and you start looking at those structures, and they have. They have echoes of ancient Egypt, no question. And which also. That's another question. How. Why are there so many pyramids around the world where these civilizations should have never, ever had a. Ever had some sort of communication? So there's that one big giant question. But there's some of these South American, I think, in Machu Picchu, and I would say Chichen Itza and Machu Picchu, where the stones almost look like they're out of molds, because they are. So there's. It's not like one block on one block. Like in. In Egypt, you have a, you know, granite stone, granite stone, granite stone. And they're all similar shapes, if not almost exactly the same, give or take. Give or take. But this is like apple, orange, banana. And they all seem to fit perfectly, so perfectly together, like they're puzzle pieces that you can't even stick a piece of paper in between it. How in God's green Earth did they do that back then?
- [56:50]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Man, that is a very good question, and it's one I don't have an answer for, because I'm as mystified by this as you are. I. Yeah, you see. So you see, with the megalithic work, I think this is one of the indicators of. Of this sophistication. And you see a similar thing between Egypt and places like Peru in the. In the precision of the work. So in Egypt, you have a lot more straight lines and this almost linear megalithic work, like you say, these are square. A lot of stuff is. Is pretty square and certainly straight in the joinery, but very precise. You can't even. Sometimes you can't see it, you certainly can't fit a razor blade in between it. You see the same type of precision in Peru and this, this work, you know, in the Sacred Valley and at Machu Picchu. But there's no straight lines there. Like, it's literally these curved features. And it's one of the mystifying things to me is like how, you know, you've got these giant stones. It's a place called Sacsayhuaman just above Cusco. And you have some of these stones that are 150, 200 tons each, these giant hard forms of limestone. You have, you know, granite stones that are in the streets of Cusco that are, that are multi ton stones as well. And they just adjoin together perfectly. But they have these flowing joins where.
- [58:00]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
It'S just this Dr. Seuss almost Dr. Seuss style.
- [58:03]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah, it's crazy. And, and it's not. And I've seen in some places, I actually documented this a few times where through earthquakes or other processes, the stones have separated.
- [58:13]
Alex Ferrari
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
- [58:16]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you feeling those winter blues? Well, do not worry. They've got you covered. With ways to boost your mood, add a little sweetness to your day. With big savings on all your favorite sweets, Shop in store or online and save on items like Gummy Savers five Flavors, Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Sour Patch, Watermelon, M M's Party Size Stand Up Bags, and Ferrero Rocher Mixed Variety squares. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [58:50]
Alex Ferrari
And now back to the show.
- [58:54]
Ben Van Kirkwick
And you can tell, okay, they didn't just like make them look good on the surface, like as if they were touching on the surface. That consistent joined surface actually goes the full depth of the stone. Like it goes all the way through that depth, which is incredibly difficult to make those mating surfaces match like that. So a lot of people speculate, okay, with these, these stones come out of a mold. Are they, are they somehow like a play doh or a toffee like substance that is put in place and then it sets. We don't really have any evidence for that. We don't have any process that can explain that. I intuition tells you that, like you look at it and go, man. Because the only other idea is, well, you know, there's somehow they're lifting the stone, like they're looking at it and they're shaving a bit off it and they're working on it and then they put it back. Okay. And then you're just back and forth and you have to put it in and out a thousand times to get it even close.
- [59:42]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And how heavy are these stones?
- [59:43]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Well, some of these stones are like a couple hundred tons. I mean it's actually one. They are, they're massive. And certainly multi ton tones isn't. None of this is easy. Like this is. It's really funny actually. You go to Egypt in South America and they're restoring a lot of these sites like Karnak and there's literally like a two or three ton piece of a statue that, that they will lift it. They had to move at Egypt and you just, you can see how difficult that is, how much they had to wrap it in these massive big, you know, strong cables and then the winch and the machine they needed to lift it and stuff. It's just, it tells, it gives you an idea that this, this is, it's difficult for us to do today a lot of this work. But it seems to have been just much easier for people in the park because they did it endlessly. South America, Egypt, whatever. It's just, yeah, we people had very little appreciation for just how difficult some of these tasks are because they haven't done it themselves or they haven't seen how difficult it is for us to do and move things around like that that are, you know, multi ton objects. It's. And funny shapes and stuff. It's crazy. But yeah, look, I don't know. The South American stuff is, is fantastic. There are, it's, there is a crossover there. So you do get, you do in some places in Egypt you have some of these flowing lines in some places. And in some places in South America you have straight lines and more linear lines.
- [61:01]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, Chichen Itza is pretty, to my recollection of it. It's pretty. All the blocks are similar sides.
- [61:08]
Ben Van Kirkwick
They're not like all crazy, not flowing. Yeah, well, I mean the Coricancha in Peru, the Cusco is this giant megalithic structure that's a, of course it's a Catholic church today, but it's in, it's in the center of Cusco. And its origins are megalithic 100, but it's much more straight. There's a lot of straight lines in there. In terms, it's very, very similar to Egypt. But then you go out into the streets of Cusco and they have this megalithic buildings and there's these flowing lines, these green granite walls, just insane. It's Just beautiful. Cusco is such an amazing place. If people haven't been, you should go because it's super unique. Like there's literally nowhere else in the world that I know of where you have these architectural styles stacked up on each other like this. You have megalithic, which we got. We don't know how old this is. I, I think it's, it all gets attributed to the Inca in the mainstream story. I think this is far older than that because you have the megalithic style. Then you have Inca building which is very rough and very primitive. Like local small cobbles and, you know, mud mortar and things. Then you have colonial Spanish on top of that. Then you have modern. And this is, you just walk around the streets in the center of Cusco and it's just all stacked up on top of each other everywhere you look. It's, it's actually, it's, it's unique and it's amazing.
- [62:25]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Have you ever heard of Coral Castle?
- [62:28]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yes, I have.
- [62:29]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Have you been to Coral Castle?
- [62:30]
Ben Van Kirkwick
I have not.
- [62:32]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So I'm from South Florida, so I've been there multiple times. And for everyone who, who doesn't know about Coral Castle, please Google Coral Castle in, in South Florida because it is megalithic construction in the 50s.
- [62:48]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah. Edward Leedskalin is the name.
- [62:51]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
That's right. Yeah. That was his name. Yes. And he was moving around coral rocks.
- [62:57]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah, It's a limestone, it's, it's a form of limestone, I believe.
- [63:01]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah. And it's everywhere down itself. I mean that's why Coral Gables is called. Coral Gables is because it was built on, on the, on the foundation of this, these rocks box. But, but he built an entire like town, like a little town and giant table. Two story buildings and a five ton door that was perfectly aligned.
- [63:21]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah.
- [63:22]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So he could. All you have to do with one finger. You can move it.
- [63:25]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah.
- [63:26]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And he said when people. And he did it by himself.
- [63:30]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Very secretive guy. Yeah.
- [63:31]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And he said, how do you do? He goes, I learned the secrets of the. How they built the pyramids. That's all he would say.
- [63:37]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah, well, I have a different opinion on Cor. So it is. Look. And I look. That was, that was one thing I would say about this. It's. It is. Leith Scarlin was, I mean, a savant in this space. Like he spent. And it was his life's work, like obviously his passion. He's. And it's a tremendous achievement any way you cut it. However, there is footage that's emerged, I think in the last few years that I've seen of him using. Yeah. Block and tackles and massive A frames which can totally. Which have no problem lifting the sort of weights that we're talking about. I don't think it's as mysterious as some people put it. That's all I'd say about. I, I don't want to take away from the achievement. It's an incredible achievement.
- [64:16]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Right.
- [64:16]
Ben Van Kirkwick
But I don't, I don't think it's like people show pictures of his workshop and think he was using some sort of magical Tesla energy and all this other stuff. I just, I don't think that's what's going on. I think he was, he was very dedicated, very hard working, very secretive and enigmatic in his answers and how he did stuff. But there is some footage you can see him using kind of modern materials and tools to do it. But, and, but you know, it's a life of lifetime of work and he's very skilled and I mean it's. I, I do want to go see it at some point. I've not had the chance.
- [64:50]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
It's pretty remark.
- [64:51]
Ben Van Kirkwick
It's a pretty remarkable opinion on it. Yeah, yeah, it's remarkable but I don't think it's like, I don't think it's as serious as some people make it out to be.
- [64:59]
Alex Ferrari
Right.
- [64:59]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And I'd have to agree with you on it. I think when you're there and you start looking at. And maybe your trained eye would look at it a little bit differently than mine, but I was there. I've been there probably half a dozen times in my life and I've really just been fat. I mean you're fascinated with it when you're there but when you see the construction of some stuff that he was able to do, I mean, I mean there's a castle like there's like a two story castle that he carved out or did something with every hurricane that's hit Florida.
- [65:27]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Oh, this one down anyway. Yeah.
- [65:28]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
It does nothing like it. Every category six characters doesn't matter. It just sits there and I mean it doesn't even think about it.
- [65:36]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Well that, that's the reason. That's. Sorry. That's the reason why. I mean that people say why didn't they pyramids on and build stuff out of other materials. I'm like, well if you want something to last, make it out of stone.
- [65:45]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Hard stone on top of that. A hard stone that's going to, that's not going to wear down in five years. Yeah, that's the other thing. Like a lot of the stuff that we have built today. I mean, if we left the Earth today, if we just. For whatever reason, humans just left the earth today, what do we got, a thousand years maybe before everything starts turning to dust?
- [66:04]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Couple thousand. Give it a couple thousand years. It's nothing.
- [66:07]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah, like, I mean, the, the, the, the nature will take it over. There was a show. I don't know if you ever saw this show on History Channel. You know what I'm talking about?
- [66:14]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Like, yeah, left.
- [66:16]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And they would just con every. They would just take a new city around the world in the episode and just say after 500 years. After a thousand years. The one that really got me the best. The, the structure that we have built, humans have built, that will last the longest with. Before it goes is the Hoover Dam.
- [66:33]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah.
- [66:33]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Which I thought. Which. And I was just at the Hoover Dam like, like a few weeks ago on the. And, and you sit there and going, oh, wow. They're like the last place to lose.
- [66:43]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Power will be Vegas because of the hydro Hydraulic, hydroelectric.
- [66:47]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Until they finally, they finally crack them. So, yeah, without maintenance, they'll eventually pop up.
- [66:51]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah.
- [66:51]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
But the machine itself, they said it would take, oh, hundreds, if not a long time before it actually. Before it actually breaks.
- [67:00]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah. I mean, that's, it's interesting, right? I, I love that theory. Like, so say we have a civilization ended. We go away. Like you said, it's. Yeah. I mean, metal and cities. That's all gone. With a thousand, two thousand, no problem. Like, nothing remains without a catalyst.
- [67:13]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Without. And without a cataclysm.
- [67:14]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Without a cataclysm. Just assuming we just leave. Yeah. And all the people are gone. Yeah. It's done. And then. Yeah, you have the Hoover Dam. I mean, you've got Mount Rushmore. That would erode eventually, but you might. People might see that thousands of years in the future and go. Because I think it's granite. You know, they're looking at it and going, oh, man, these are the gods or whatever the gods on this carved into this mountain. You know, you've got. I love this idea. Like, yeah, the Hoover Dam. And then you'd have. You'd have some trace of places like the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal.
- [67:43]
Ryan Seacrest
Yeah.
- [67:43]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
There'd be, There'll be little things left. Yeah.
- [67:45]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Well, I just. Those are huge construction project. I think I can imagine an argument in the future. Like, imagine. So, okay, we go thousands of years past some other civilization, they arise and they have their archaeologists and they're digging up the, the bones of our civilization.
- [68:00]
Alex Ferrari
We'll be right back after a word from Our sponsor.
- [68:03]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's cough cold and flu season. Do not get caught feeling under the weather. Get back to feeling good with savings on all your cold and flu Essentials now through February 24th. Shop in store or online to stock up and save on items like. Like Mucinex Fast Max liquid gels, Vicks dayquil and nyquil Combo packs. Hall's cough drops and Tylenol Children's liquid. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [68:36]
Alex Ferrari
And now back to the show.
- [68:40]
Ben Van Kirkwick
There's probably a bunch of people on whatever the version of the Internet is the future, making this case of like, these people were advancing. They. They.
- [68:46]
Ryan Seacrest
Damn.
- [68:46]
Ben Van Kirkwick
They dug a trench between the oceans. And then you've got all the mainstream archaeology going. That's. No, this is just natural. This is nothing. And then people. And then. No, the evidence is there. Look at it like, this is a straight line between these two.
- [69:01]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And then they look at Mount Rushmore, and it really.
- [69:03]
Ryan Seacrest
It's.
- [69:03]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
You barely can see the features, but there's something there that looks like a human face. Like, obviously, that's not natural. No, that's natural.
- [69:12]
Ben Van Kirkwick
The Hoover Dam is just like a ceremonial space. It was. Oh, they built this, but it was just so they could worship their gods and they could stand on it and see the stars. Like, that's why they made that. It wasn't technological at all. No, it had no function because they were just basic, simple people.
- [69:25]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Simple. You know, but what's really fascinating about that, this conversation right now, is if you start looking at the lens of how another civilization will look at our civilization and argue about things that, for you and I are just like, no, that's obviously the Hoover Dam. Obviously, this is a phone, obviously, because we. We have context.
- [69:43]
Ben Van Kirkwick
That's right.
- [69:44]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
But you.
- [69:45]
Ben Van Kirkwick
You.
- [69:45]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I mean, you bring up, you know, a native from a. From the Amazon who's never seen, you know, a white man before, and you throw them into Vegas, they're gonna be like, yeah, what? Like, it's a. It's essentially another planet. So it's all about. It's all about context.
- [70:04]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah. I mean, even if we look, Even if we survive, like you say, we have a cataclysm, but it's a civilization ending cataclysm. We are blasted back to the Stone Age, which is what I think happened to us in the past. Grant Hancock calls us a species with amnesia. And it's a great. It's a Great term because, you know, we have this echoes of the past that come down through these origin stories and these tales and these myths and legends. But say we do survive this, but we're knocked back into a basically hunter gatherer lifestyle. Within a couple generations, Things like plasma TVs and cell phones are going to be these campfire stories. They're going to, you know, you might find that people have this memory of it. So they, so they find black rocks, maybe they get some themselves, some obsidian, they polish it up and they shape it up to look kind of like this. And they dance around the fire with it and try to activate it through ceremony and, you know, and ritual. And I genuinely think that's a lot of what's happened in. When we look at Dynastic Egypt, they, I think they inherited stuff like that. They probably had a cultural connection to the precursor civilization. They got a lot from them. They got knowledge and information, but they just didn't have any capability to use it or the context to understand it. So it all became ceremonial. Like these sites became ceremonial sites. You know, in the same way that we might go into the cities if we were hunter gatherers, all the Hoover Dam, places like that, and start to worship them. And then, oh, if we, as we grow and the kings and our warlords and our people emerge, like, I'm going to write my name on this. This is mine now. Like, this is, this is, this is my site. And, and my name's on this now. And so therefore I made it. And thousands of years later, that's. That's how it. We'd look at it and say, well, that guy's name's on it. He must have built it. He must, it must be made for him. And that's exactly what we do. That's exact. Because we look at the ruins and the megaliths of the past and these statues and stuff. Stuff. I mean, if this is, if there's a dude's name on it, like then, oh, he had it built. For sure. He had it built. That's, that's how Egyptology works. That's the, the name. And there's lots of contradictions there too. Like some, some artifacts have three or four or five different names on them.
- [72:03]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Because every time a new guy, a new guy came up, he's like, oh, that's mine. I did that.
- [72:07]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah. Ramsey's the second is notorious for this. Like, you know, Petrie called him the Great Usurper. He would literally erase people's names and dig his own name in really deeply and you know, you can think about it with these artifacts. I, I like the idea that, you know, these vases, these little, these precision vases that come from pre dynastic times. Like a lot of them are in private collection. Imagine there's some rich private collector that, that builds himself a mausoleum and he wants to be buried with his vases today, in today's time.
- [72:34]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah.
- [72:34]
Ben Van Kirkwick
But then we dig him up in the future a thousand, four thousand years later, five thousand years later, and he's, he's found with these artifacts. Like, well, he, obviously, he had these made. That's, that's what we do. That's how we, we look at that. And it's, we have no idea whether he had them made or not. And in this case, no, no, those things are probably 10 or 15,000 or 5,000 years old already when they were buried with them. I think that's entirely the case. We should be considering that possibility when we look at the bones of some of these ancient civilizations like Egypt, that have all these contradictions in them.
- [73:05]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And you know, you were saying something about knowledge that, that, you know, they, you know, like the Incas and the Maya and the, the Egyptians, they were gifted with some knowledge and then kind of try to build upon that. But just in our short, let's just say 2000 years. Okay, let's say in the last 2000 years or so, how much knowledge has been lost along the way? I mean, the farther back you go, it gets thinner and thinner, you know, but like, look how much information we have right now.
- [73:34]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Now.
- [73:34]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I mean, we have a lot of knowledge and information about the way the world works to understand our understanding to this point, at least the way the world works. But things like the Vedic text, things like, oh, God, the, the Alexandria. And then let's not even go into what we lost with the Mayans when the Spanish came, burned everything. I mean, terrible. Yeah, exactly. So there's so much knowledge that has been. But if everything goes away, all this knowledge goes away. And if a new human is born without another human to teach them, imagine it was you and I, we're the last two dudes. And there's like a new, a new group of, of people who've never heard. We're the only ones that know anything about anything.
- [74:14]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Right.
- [74:14]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And people are like. And we're trying to explain to them the Internet. We're trying to explain to them basic knowledge through story. Through story. We would be, we would be gods, essentially.
- [74:26]
Ben Van Kirkwick
You would be. And you would probably. And that's exactly kind of, I mean, this is a good description of how knowledge is actually passed down before we had like writing and ways of storing it through oral tales and legends. And it's, you know, we, that's, that's what ends up as the origin stories. It ends up being put in books. It's these stories that are, and it's an interesting analysis. Like when you look at von Descher, like books like Hamlet's Mill that show you that there's this astronomical data encoded in these legends, myths from Norse to like, you know, Inuit traditions, South American traditions, like the, the, even our stuff, the, the Middle Eastern religions. There's all this data that, that is similar across them, but they're, they're tied up in these stories and these missing legends. The same thing I think with, with recollections of events. It's not, you don't just tell people, here's the data like oh, in this year this hap. Like, like the sky fell or, or like you know, the, the planets move like this. That data gets wrapped up in these interesting stories and there's date, you know, there's figures are created and stories and you know, it's deified and there's all this information to make it entertaining and make it memorable. And then that's passed down generation to generation through time. That's how that knowledge is, is kind of preserved. So when we, we look at origin stories and some of the myths and legends from the past, you have to understand, okay, you got to sift through the, the, the, the embellishment of this and try to get to the core of it. What is the seed or the truth or the, you know, the, the part of this that is probably true at its core. And there's a lot of that going on. Like we, you know, science more than we'd like to think, I think in science had a bit of an overcorrection with the Age of reason, right? Because if you go back before the Age of reason and the rise of science, the literally the explanation for our past and our history and our place on the planet was biblical. Like it was the religions. Like it's this, it's a 6,000 year story, you know, it's the giant floods, it's this cataclysmic story and that's, you know, let's just take Christianity for, for the purpose of this. And then science comes in and says, okay, no, we actually want to get away from the cataclysm, like the, the Catastrophis and the cataclysmic nature of religious stories and Things like that. And they, they kind of overcorrected and shifted and they just, just wrote off everything that's included in those, in those origins and religions and the truth somewhere in the middle. Now I think we're starting to swing back the other way where it's like, okay, there might, you know, does erosion and gradualism and can we explain stuff through and the world as it is through these, you know, through these gentle sort of processes we see acting on the ground today in terms of geology. Yeah, a lot of it we can. But there's also other features that are showing us the truth of some of the cataclysm that was maybe contained in these origin stories and religions. And we're coming back a little bit, but there was a huge overcorrection for a long period of time that, where we just dismissed this, this history that we was contained in these origin stories. When I think in reality there's some grains of truth that are there that if we pay attention to it, we can find them. But yeah, I mean, no doubt endless amounts of knowledge has been lost. I mean that's, people know about the fire of the Library of Alexandria, but there was literally dozens and dozens of events like that where we had other repositories of knowledge that went flames. That was just one.
- [77:45]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I mean and there's of. And of course the archives of the Vatican right now, who has a couple things.
- [77:51]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Hidden knowledges is another thing. Yes. 100. Yeah. What I wouldn't give to be able to go in there and read everything. Well, you mean, it's probably all in Latin, but a lot of it's probably in other languages and Aramaic and things. But it'd be interesting to, to know what's in there for sure.
- [78:05]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Well, I mean, look, when I went into the Vatican Museum and you're just walking around like, how much did they steal Deal? I mean they stole so much it's obscene how much stuff is in the Vatican Museum. It's one of the greatest museums I've ever walked into.
- [78:18]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Yeah.
- [78:19]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
In the sense of just the scope of the collection. But as I'm walking through it, I'm like, this is literally 2000 years of raping and pillaging of, of all of these artifacts and knowledge and books and, and stories that they're like, no, no, we can't, this can't get out. Let's just put that. And it's very Indiana Jones esque.
- [78:38]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Oh, for sure. No, I think there's a lot of truth to that. I, you know, it's, it's Funny. You know, there is if you get approved. That's a weird thing about the Vatican archives that I've heard, like, assuming you even get approved to be on the list to even request access to it.
- [78:53]
Alex Ferrari
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
- [78:56]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's cough cold and flu season. Do not get caught feeling under the weather. Get back to feeling good with savings on all your cold and flu Essentials now through February 24th. Shop in store or online to stock up and save on items like Mucinex Fast Max liquid gels, Vicks Dayquil and nyquil combo packs, Hall's cough drops and Tylenol Children's liquid. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [79:29]
Alex Ferrari
And now back to the show.
- [79:33]
Ben Van Kirkwick
You kind of have to be specific about what you. You want, so you almost need to kind of have an idea about what's in there before you can even get right. Like, there's no one.
- [79:42]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I don't know.
- [79:43]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Well, that's the thing. Yeah. You got to have an understanding of a historical document that might be in there and then get approved to say, oh, I'm interested in this if. If you've got it kind of thing. But no one ever gets approved to just. I just want to see what's in there. No, no, no, no, no. That's not. That's not happening. Yeah. I don't know, man. This. There's definitely, I think, a case to be made for a lot of, like, hidden knowledge and stuff that is. Yeah, it's in very select hands, and that comes to us from the dim, dark, distant past. I mean, a few bits and pieces get out here and there that are really interesting to me. I'm fascinated by ancient maps. I mean, I think there's a lot of data encoded in ancient maps that are typically. The ancient maps that we have were drawn from even more ancient source maps that are all lost, but they show massive sophistication in the fact that we knew where Antarctica was and Australia was well before these were supposedly discovered. In our time, they were able to do things like map longitude very accurately, which is not something we were able to do until, like, the turn of the 19th century. James Cook's second voyage of discovery. Yet we've got longer. I mean, it requires sophisticated timepieces to measure longitude and navigate with longitude, which we weren't able to do until around 1800. But you go back thousands of years before that, and there's, there's evidence that they were very capable of doing longitude accurately. You know, you've got the coastline of Antarctica. What's beneath the ice today is very accurately represented on some of these maps. Stuff like this. This is crazy. Very, very interesting data sets that can be found with analysis of ancient maps.
- [81:20]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
When do you think Antarctica was not under ice?
- [81:23]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Depends on what part of it you're talking about. There's, and I'm not, this is not an area that I'm particularly knowledgeable on for sure. I mean we, we have, we do have glacial records of ice where we can, we can drill down to bedrock to go back like 3, 400,000 years. Some of the, I think the ice core records, off the top of my head, I might be wrong, but I think some of the, the ice core samples do go back back around 400,000 years. So we know there's been ice being laid down for at least that long.
- [81:54]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
In some areas, but not at all.
- [81:56]
Ben Van Kirkwick
But in some areas, right? In some, not in all. I mean that's the thing you see on, on some of these maps that, that, you know, John Hapgood was, was the guy who exposed the fact that the, the Piri Reyes map depicts, accurately depicts the coastline of Queen Maud's land on Antarctica. But not only that, it shows rivers and mountains and, you know, territory like this. And then that was, that was actually confirmed by, you know, an Air Force reconnaissance, reconnaissance squadron and these literary guys that spend their lifetime looking at maps and analyzing maps and, and they, they did the comparison. They're like, the only conclusion is that yes, this is the coast of Antarctica, but it shows, you know, what's beneath the ice. And this was confirmed by like sonar readings because today there's ice on top of it. And they use these sonar and I guess radar techniques or whatever to actually look at the, the land. And they go, yep, this actually matches what's on this map and the Piri Reyes maps made by Admiral Piri Reyes, I think in the 1500s. But he actually says and writes on there that no, no, he, most of it he built from more ancient source maps that are all gone now. We don't know how old they are, where they came from. They're probably copies of copies of older stuff too. But yeah, I mean, it's so, I don't know. I mean, I, I, you know, It's, I, I, that 400, 000 years is actually not out of the, the realm of possibility to me because one of the other things that's happened in the last 20 years is that we know that the human race has gotten older and older. I mean you go back, yeah, I mean obviously the biblical version is about 6,000 years old then. Obviously, yeah, and obviously and then it was for a long time was like it was suspected to be around 50,000 years. And then it was, we found some after the advent of like C14 radiocarbon dating. I think there were some remains found in Ethiopia that put us at around 190,000 years. That was the oldest thing in the fossil record. Then not that long ago they found some remains in Morocco that put us back to around 300,000 years. That was the oldest of jawbone. That put, that was the oldest thing in the fossil record. That still is, I think the oldest thing in the fossil record. But now we've got DNA evidence and statistical studies into things like teeth morphology. And we can look at like when we split from a common ancestor, like Neanderthals and us being cousins, we, we split from a common ancestor and we can look at, at kind of our genetic past and DNA and both the teeth morphology studies and the DNA studies put us in the 8 to 900,000 year range. So I, I think let's set it up a round number and upper limit of around a million years old as a species. So all of a sudden, you know, Antarctica being free of ice 400,000 years ago isn't out of the realm of possibility for humans. Not only humans, but you know, where the last humans left. Like there's other Neanderthals, Denisovans, all these other versions of essentially Homo sapiens that we don't know much about. Neanderthals, bigger brains than we had. Who knows how civilized they might have gotten given time and place and, and energy and enough food to eat in nice weather. We used to think they couldn't speak. And of course speech is vital for civilization and for developing abstract concepts and communication. I think the nomenclature, and that's changed now. We do think that they could speak. So maybe they had language, maybe they had communication. We just don't know. And I think these are all possibilities. And some of those species go back millions of years.
- [85:22]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Do you think that, that our, our civilizations have been built and wipe out, Built and wiped out, built and wiped out and started from scratch. This kind of cycling system has been around for much longer than we even can even can conceive. Maybe even a hundred or 200 or possibly even longer. I'm not saying that 500,000 years ago that we were advanced civilizations. Hey, as we've been discussing, maybe we were. And all the information was lost because there's no way that any of that stuff would have made it this long. So it's a fascinating intellectual exercise in your head. But it seems to me that there's definitely a lot that we still don't know for sure.
- [86:12]
Ben Van Kirkwick
A hundred percent. That's, we, we, that's. And that's, I think the, I, I try to say that, I mean, I don't speculate a lot and I'd like to say I don't know when I don't know. And I, I, and I think that's what's missing a lot from, let's just say that the, the mainstream version of history. And I, I think to some extent that's, that's a, that's a product of the rise of the alternative authors and, and theories that are coming from guys like Graham Hancock and Bal and you know, John Anthony west, these guys. I think that the response and the popularity of that and has led to a much more authoritarian response from the academics who see, who see themselves as owning the field. Like they think, well, I'm the gatekeeper of history. I tell you what the history is and what history of civilization is, you know, because back in the day, in the Victorian times when this discussion was contained to these academic halls of residence, I mean they were, and you can read it when you read the works of those people and I have, and it's, you know, they knew when they, there was something they didn't know, they were open about like, well, we don't know, like Flinders Pieter was like, he couldn't explain some of the things he was finding from an engineering perspective. He's like, I don't know. But today I think because you've got, there's a popularity of these, of, of and you know, and the rise of this, I guess the, the alternate history field, you have a much more authoritarian response from the academics and they're much more likely to say no, we know the answer and they're not going to say I don't know when. I think the reality is that they don't know. And I think that would be better if we all came to a middle ground of we don't know, let's investigate it with an open mind in terms of the cycles of civilization. And this is an interesting point because I think this is one of the most, one of the reasons why this is a very important field and a very important discussion and investigation is. Yeah, I mean, I would say I think we've Been through at least one cycle. You know, I think at least there's evidence for at least one and there may be more. We could have been through a cycle of civilization to cataclysm and then back again more than once. But for sure, I think there's evidence for at least once, one decent one where it's like, okay, we were pretty advanced. We got knocked back down to stone Age, essentially hunter gatherer lifestyles. And now we've what we term modern history, our own history the last six, 7,000 years. That's our rise from that, from that event. Now they might have been precipitated by 10 or 15 or 20 or however many 10,000 tens of thousands of years of just survival mode for humanity where it's very primitive. I don't know when that fall took place. It could have been the younger drives, but it could have also been events that preceded it. And there were many, there were, we know there were events preceding that, the bowling allerod. There's all sorts of climate upheavals if you go back further in time.
- [89:07]
Alex Ferrari
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
- [89:09]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's cough, cold and flu season. Do not get caught feeling under the weather. Get back to feeling good with savings on all your cold and flu Essentials now through February 24th. Shop in store or online to stock up and save on items like Mucinex, Fast Max Liquid gels, Vicks Dayquil and nyquil Combo packs, holes, cough drops and Tylenol Children's liquid. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [89:43]
Alex Ferrari
And now back to the show.
- [89:46]
Ben Van Kirkwick
But it's an important discussion because I think, I think if we, if, if more people understood that, that this was the cycle, that this, that where, you know, our civilization as advanced as we are, isn't the only way of doing it. I think a lot of people, we, at some level you get taught in school, this is civilization like this is what it means to be a modern human. Like we went from the Stone Age to the space shuttle in this 6,000 year period. It's almost linear, straight path. I mean it's not obviously not linear, but you know, we've gone from Stone age to space shuttle in 6,000 years. This is what it means to be an advanced civilization. This is the only way that civilization is done, is the way that we've done it. Then you can just put out of your mind that there are Other alternatives or other possibilities. And so we just go on with our daily lives. And that's just a fundamental tenet of what it means to be a modern human. Now I think if you, if you taught a different message in schools, if we understood that, no, in fact, rather than this linear path, we're on this, we're on this cycle between civilization and cataclysm and there are other ways of doing civilization, there are other technologies, there's other ways of living, there's other, you know, there's other possibilities. And on a long enough timescale, we're coming back around to this, to this cataclysm part and that it will end like there is a definite risk of it ending. I think it could help to change our priorities as a species. Like, because you know, people don't think about that sort of long term future. It's just like what's the next quarterly, quarterly results in the next political or election cycle or whatever? We're not thinking long term. I'd like to think if you could have this change in the zeitgeist about what it means to be a modern human and our place on this cycle, it might help us in the long term to change our priorities and spend a little less money on tanks and a little bit more money on space exploration and solving some of the longer term problems that face us as a species. I actually think there's precedent for this too, for this type of ground shift in awareness and a new topic and a new awareness changing our behavior. And the example I'd like to use is climate change. Now, whether you agree with it or not, I mean, it's no doubt politicized and it's a controversial topic for a lot of people. But my point is that in the last 20 or 30 years that, that, that word, that's what, that, what the word climate change means has, has, has shifted and changed. And it, and, and it's undeniable that it's changing our behavior. It changes our investment decision, it changes our interactions with each other, it changes how we interact with the planet. It changes our behavior. And that's all because there's this, there's a, it's a, it's been the shift in awareness that's happening in the zeitgeist of humanity. It's a new idea that's come in and it's altered our behavior in fundamental ways similar to the Internet and things like that. And I, just as altruistic as it is, I do think that if we understood our past and we taught this at a fundamental level that we're on this cycle, that it could actually have a similar effect. It could alter our behavior. And I think that's why I think this whole discussion is an important one. And finding out the truth about our history is not just an academic exercise. It's actually important for our future.
- [93:01]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
What is your opinion of the impact of these kind of conversations to our understanding of spirit, our spiritual side, our spiritual understanding of the grand scheme of why we're even here, where we have been, where we're going? What is the purpose of this giant video game that we're all playing? You know, you and I are both Mario and Luigi just trying to save a princess from Donkey Kong, essentially. Yeah.
- [93:29]
Ben Van Kirkwick
You know what I mean?
- [93:30]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So what is it? All these conversations are fascinating and intriguing intellectually. But on a spiritual standpoint, what can this do and what is this doing, these conversations doing for our spirituality?
- [93:41]
Ben Van Kirkwick
I, well, I, I think it's, it's, it's helping to connect us to it. I, I would suspect. I, I think that this is a huge, a huge part in that, in that, I mean there's no doubt been a, been a disconnection from spirit and from spirituality in our modern civilization. Like we, we've gotten further and further from that time type of thing. Although there is, does seem to be a renaissance in those concepts and modern shamanism, if you will. And I, and I think this exposure to this discussion and certainly the deeper you get into it, I think the more those elements of it come out. Like there's a huge spiritual connection you find in these ancient cultures and in the civilizations, the way they operated. Like we're the only, we're a little different in our civilization in that we seem to be deliberately shifting away from that and only valuing this kind of alert, problem solving states of consciousness. And there's other benefits that come from other states of consciousness that almost every other culture and civilization seems to have recognized and spent some effort developing and looking into. We're a bit different from that. I also think that, just personally speaking, that the, I think these types of investigations and this path to trying to find the answer. I think that is part of a spiritual journey as well. Like, you know, being on the path kind of thing. Like finding meaning in, in your life and finding meaning in your pursuits and in your interests. I think that for a lot of people this type of a discussion and, and these topics help to serve, to fill that role. Because we as, I mean I, I like, I believe we're spiritual beings as well. We're not just meat, meat and, and bone and flesh. And you know, we, we, we need to find purpose. Human beings need something to do. They need to find purpose. If you, if you are purposeless, you know, you're not generally very happy. It's not a, it's not a great place to be and it's hard to find purpose in some of the modern, in, in the modern world. It's, it can be a real challenge for a lot of people. And, and I think a lot of the distractions and this might, me personally speaking with this, I think the distractions and the entertainment and the things that are thrown at you as, just to fill that void in the modern world, celebrity culture and consumerism and things like this, they don't really give you purpose. And I think a lot of the purpose that we're fed when we go through the education system that sets us up to be this cog in a machine and, and teaches us consumerism and to get the next thing and to make more money and to just climb the corporate ladder and be a good worker, be all these sort of things, you know, ultimately don't really tick that box when it comes to purpose. And in fact can be a little destructive. I mean there's lots of, just obviously lots of destructive elements about our society. As nice as it is in the west, at least in the first world countries to have, you know, the, the, I mean, it. I do believe that it is the best time to be alive still. I hold that opinion like I'm not naive enough to think that hot water and, you know, plumbing and the Internet's not a good thing. It makes life convenient, but it's, it's in a lot of ways antithetical to finding purpose and achieving something. I mean, that's just, I think that's part of that spiritual journey. And for me at least, and I think for a lot of people, these conversations and this topic help to fill that because I really do think there's something to being on the path and trying to get to these answers, whether we ever get to them or not. That's not the important part. It's about being on that, on that path stuff and trying to seek that knowledge and, and to understand it.
- [97:11]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Now I'm going to ask you a few questions, ask all my guests, because I can't talk to you for another four or five hours. And you will definitely come back on the show because I have, we haven't even touched ancient India or Japan or China or all these other sites that I would love to talk to you about calluses.
- [97:27]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Check them out.
- [97:28]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I mean they're insane.
- [97:29]
Ben Van Kirkwick
It's just so much stuff as well.
- [97:32]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
So there's, there's tons and tons. So we'll have you back without question. But these are questions ask all my guests. How do you define. What is your definition of living a fulfilled life?
- [97:43]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Definition of living a fulfilled life. I, what we just kind of touched on, I think it's finding purpose. I think finding purpose is about the most you can hope for. I mean you. And this is beyond. I mean we all know that. Look, you have to tick the basic boxes of like, like food, shelter, you know, the physio, physiological needs of, of what it means to be human. But beyond that as a, as complex sort of thinking animals, what we are finding purpose I think is, is about all you can ask in terms of fulfillment and finding life. And at least for me, that's how, that's how, that's how I see it.
- [98:19]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
If you could go back in time and speak to little Ben, what advice would you give him?
- [98:24]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Like, cheer up, it'll be okay. Depends how little we're talking. But then five year old Ben.
- [98:28]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Five years old.
- [98:29]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Five year old Ben. Oh man, I barely remember that. That guy. Yeah, yeah. Don't take, don't take things too seriously. Would probably be a good one. That would probably be about it.
- [98:40]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
How do you define God or source?
- [98:43]
Ben Van Kirkwick
The universe? Nature? I think, I mean that would be about it. I'd. Look, I, I do. Yeah. It's hard to, to think that this. Everything is a giant cosmic accident. I'd say that, right?
- [98:55]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Yeah. But regardless, if you believe or don't.
- [98:57]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Believe sources, I think, Yeah, I think that's the universe, like we're expressions of it in a lot of ways.
- [99:04]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And what is the ultimate purpose of life?
- [99:07]
Ben Van Kirkwick
You don't. You ask the easy questions. The ultimate purpose of life to be lived is what I'd say. That's what it's for, to be appreciated, to be lived. It's a gift. I, I do, I genuinely believe that like to be born into a human body and to, and to have the, the privilege and experience of life and it look, you know, and for it, you know, it can be miserable for a lot of people and short and nasty. But if, if you, if that's not your experience, it's, it's a real privilege and it should be lived and not wasted.
- [99:42]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing?
- [99:45]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Thank you. Yeah. UnchartedX.com is the main place I publish all my videos are there obviously on YouTube. It's YouTube.comC/ Unchart X. I also stream live on Twitch a couple times a week and you can find all those details generally below my videos as well as my social medias, Twitters and Instagrams and things like that.
- [100:02]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And do you have any parting messages for the audience? Sir?
- [100:06]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Keep an open mind. Dig into this stuff. Keep an open mind and yeah, that would be, that would be the main thing is just like just keep an open mind about this stuff as I try to and not be fixed in your ideas like I, I'm, I've, you know, opinions change data, new data can always change can change what we know. The next, the next, the next spade full of dirt from the archaeologists might completely change our perspective on history. We don't know. So I'll try to keep try to keep an open mind.
- [100:33]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Stay curious as they say. Stay curious indeed. It has been a pleasure talking to you, man. I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you for the fighting, the good fight.
- [100:41]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Thanks Alex. Good to talk to you man.
- [100:46]
Alex Ferrari
Thank you for spending this sacred time with us today. If you feel called to explore this conversation further, you'll find the show notes for this episode@nextlevelsoul.com 374 and if your soul is craving an even deeper journey, step into Next Level Soul tv, our streaming sanctuary for spiritual films, documentaries, original shows, guided meditations, channeling sessions, audiobooks and transition transformative teachings. It's a space created to support your awakening, your healing and your return to the truth of who you really are. Begin your journey at Next Level Soul tv. Until next time. Keep expanding, keep seeking and keep walking your path towards the next level of your soul.
- [101:39]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. It's cough cold and flu season. Do not get caught feeling under the weather. Get back to feeling good with savings on all your cold and flu Essentials now through February 24th. Shop in store or online to stock up and save on items like Mucinex Fast Max Liquid Gels, Vicks dayquil and nyquil combo packs, Hall's Cough Drops and Tylenol Children's liquid. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you feeling those winter blues? Well, do not worry, they've got you covered with ways to boost your mood, add a little sweetness to your day with big savings on all your favorite sweets Shop in store or online and save on items like Gummy Savers. Five flavors Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Sour Patch watermelon, M&M's party size stand Up Bags and Ferrero Rocher Mixed Variety squares. Offer ends February 24th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [102:40]
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- [103:11]
Ben Van Kirkwick
This is Julian Edelman from Dudes on Dudes with Gronk and Jewels. Sunday mornings I've got my game day.
- [103:17]
Ryan Seacrest
Ritual, coffee, Lucky socks and now New Morning Uncrustable Sandwiches.
- [103:24]
Ben Van Kirkwick
It's all about that 12 gram protein boost with the new Uncrustables Bright Eyed Berry or Up and Apple flavors.
- [103:33]
Ryan Seacrest
Bright Eye Berries got a feisty receiver.
- [103:37]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Energy up an apple. Your classic Do it all tight end.
- [103:42]
Ryan Seacrest
Soft, pillowy, packed with protein and easy enough for Gronk to grab from the freezer.
- [103:49]
Ben Van Kirkwick
Whether you're on the couch, driving to the tailgate or heading to the locker room, New Morning Uncrustable Sandwiches are the MVP of snacks.
- [104:01]
Ryan Seacrest
Your new Sunday kickoff ritual starts here with New Morning Uncrustable sandwiches packed with.
- [104:10]
Ben Van Kirkwick
12 grams of protein.