Loading summary
Transcript535 lines
- [00:02]
Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
- [00:06]
Luke Reagan
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. What's up? How are you, man?
- [00:15]
Joe Rogan
How are you?
- [00:16]
Luke Reagan
It's pleasure to meet you.
- [00:16]
Joe Rogan
It's a pleasure to meet you as well.
- [00:18]
Luke Reagan
I really enjoyed you on the Jesse Michaels podcast, so I had to have you on.
- [00:22]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, thank you so much, man.
- [00:23]
Luke Reagan
I love it when young people know so much about ancient history. Like, how did you get started in this?
- [00:29]
Joe Rogan
Well, it's quite literally in my blood. Back in the late. Well, I should say the 1890s, my family, they were cattle rustlers right here in the Hill Country. Actually, maybe a little bit further. Quite a bit further west of San Antonio.
- [00:46]
Luke Reagan
Damn. You come from a lot of criminals, probably.
- [00:49]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, there's a lot of dark history in here. And so they are. They're cattle rustlers that are out in Dryden, Texas, in Sanderson, Texas, and, I mean, right on the Rio Grande. And they were. That's how they made their money. They were fascinated, kind of like everybody, with. With finding gold, with finding lost Spanish treasure and, you know, Native American artifacts. So they're living in this area called the Reagan Canyon. And I've seen it all over the place. If you look on, I think, like, the Smithsonian did something on the top 10 forgotten places in the United States. It's like the most remote areas of our country. And somewhere in there is Reagan Canyon. And so out there, they developed this fascination for looking for lost Spanish gold. And, you know, there were bandits that would hide up in the hills and they would sack Spanish caravans and drag the gold up into the hills to not get caught, to hopefully come back for it later. And the Spanish are out there mining for gold and everything. So my family gets caught up in one of the biggest mysteries of Texas history. Like, if you were to look up. If you were to go to some bookstore, there's. There's a popular one called the Sons of Coronado. And it's like this legacy of people looking for Spanish gold somewhere in there. My family will be in there. And so this started in the 1890s, and it's this long saga of the gold being the treasure being dragged to San Antonio and all these people get killed, and only one of these four Reagan brothers makes it out. He gets involved in oil drilling out in East Texas. And then so my family moved out to East Texas, and then his son was born, which is my grandfather. And then he continues this legacy of. Of continuing his father's oil company. But then he also begins Gold mining in New Mexico. And while he's out in New Mexico, he hears these legends of these seven lost Spanish gold mines. And because this local. There was a local police officer who was like a treasure hunter, and he knew who my grandfather was and the story behind our family, he sought him out, and they went off looking together. And I don't know how long it took them to find it, but he found the seven lost Spanish gold mines of New Mexico. And he opened up this company called Three Bells Mining and Milling Company, and that was open for about eight years. And they opened up these. They opened up these mines that go back to probably about the 1530s. So the Spaniards were up all the way in New Mexico in the 1530s, and they were opening up Native American gold mines and expanding them. And so he found these gold mines that go hundreds of feet into the ground as this huge, expansive gold mining operation. Well, somebody dies after a smelter explodes and the company goes under. They lose everything. My family falls into poverty. My dad's born during that time. And my dad didn't really get to experience, like, all of that excitement. He had to spend his life climbing out of poverty. But he had this love for history. He had this love for American history, really. And he instilled in me the importance of history growing up and that fascination of. Of exploration and kind of ancient American history. Hearing those stories carried over into me during my childhood. And so I've just. I have always been fascinated by this. And I guess getting to where I am now. I was halfway through my marketing degree in college, and I'm sitting on my bed in my dorm room with my girlfriend at the time, who I'm married to now. And we watched the movie the Lost City of Z about Percy Fawcett. And something about that guy's journey reminded me so much of my family. Kind of reminded me of my dad, reminded me of my grandpa. And it changed something in me. Like, that day I could not ignore. I was probably 20 at the time. I could not ignore this love that I'd always had for ancient history. But, you know, archeologists are poor. You know, they're. They're. It's an extremely hard life, and it's really hard on. On your family, too. And I just knew I had to. I had to create a life for myself where I could do what I loved. Because I had, like, a 1.7 GPA in college, and I was not going to make it through my classes. And so I change. I got a degree in cultural anthropology. I wrote, like, we had a mock thesis statement, and I wrote it on the Amazon and the lost. The lost civilizations and how they were wiped out from Spanish influenza. And. Yes, that's where I'm at today.
- [05:05]
Luke Reagan
Wow. I think everybody, when you start looking at the history of the human race and you start looking at the history of civilizations, everyone gets fascinated because we kind of, like, woke up in this life. You know, we didn't choose to be born during this timeline. We woke up in this timeline and we're like, how did collectively we get here? And then you have this narrative of how collectively we got here. But then you see there's holes in this narrative and it's real weird. And then you find out about asteroid impacts and super volcanoes, and then there's people like Zahi Hawass who are in charge of telling you what they know, and this is the only answer. And you're like, well, that guy's not right.
- [05:47]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [05:47]
Luke Reagan
And then you start, like, looking guys like Graham Hancock. Why is everybody calling him a Nazi? Like, what the.
- [05:52]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [05:52]
Luke Reagan
And then you start getting deep into the weeds and this stuff, and you're like, wow, there's a lot of resentment from the gatekeepers. There's a lot of people that have been. They've been teaching a narrative and teaching it in school, and they don't want anyone else teaching this stuff. They want to be the only people that can tell people what the history of the human race is. And unfortunately for them, there's too much other evidence. It's too weird.
- [06:20]
Joe Rogan
The.
- [06:21]
Luke Reagan
The whole picture is not settled. It's too strange. And they keep finding new things all the time that throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the timeline of civilization. And so then, you know, you. You find out about Egypt. And once, I mean, that was the big one for me once I found out about Egypt, not found out about it. But you, like, really started exploring it.
- [06:44]
Joe Rogan
When you discovered every grain of sand.
- [06:46]
Luke Reagan
I discovered it all. I was there. I dug the hole when I.
- [06:55]
Joe Rogan
That went about as well as I thought it would when you told me.
- [06:58]
Luke Reagan
I was hoping it was going to go a little better, honestly.
- [07:00]
Joe Rogan
Well, he had a great opportunity to, like, win over the popular audience and come in and make a really good impression. And he did exactly the opposite of that.
- [07:08]
Luke Reagan
Well, I think there was a bunch of problems there. Ego being one of them, but another one being a language barrier.
- [07:12]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I think so.
- [07:13]
Luke Reagan
Also, years of battle. Like, if you're in conflict with people about this very thing that we're talking about for years and years and Years. And these people that you're in conflict with keep winning. You know, like, I remember there was an old documentary that was narrated by Charlton Heston. He was the host of it. I don't know if you ever saw it. It's the Mysteries of the Sphinx.
- [07:35]
Joe Rogan
Yes, I've seen it on YouTube.
- [07:37]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, yeah, I believe it was on television at the time. And one of the things in that was they were trying to talk about Robert Schoch's work with the water erosion around the Temple of the Sphinx. And there was this very arrogant archaeologist. I don't remember his name, but I remember he had a smackable face. He was just so arrogant. He's like, where is the evidence of this civilization that existed 10,000 years ago? Well, now we have evidence. So, like, Gobekli Tepe threw a giant monkey wrench into the gears of this narrative, and now they're forced to reckon with this. Like, Zahi didn't even know what Gobekli Tepe was. Which was.
- [08:23]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, there was.
- [08:24]
Luke Reagan
There was a lot.
- [08:24]
Joe Rogan
There was a lot of things that he wasn't familiar with, like Zep Tepe or the. It's either the Turin or the Turret Kings list, which talks about the pre dynastic, like, semi mythological kings going back, you know, tens of thousands of years.
- [08:38]
Luke Reagan
How do you not know that?
- [08:40]
Joe Rogan
You know, how was he the former head of the Ministry of Antiquities and Culture? How are you not familiar with this?
- [08:47]
Luke Reagan
Right. Well, he just dismisses it, but aggressively, which is like, there's no way. You know everything. There's no way. And then it was also the data from the Italian scientists that were studying this tomography and this ability to look underground with satellite rad. And also dismissing that. But then I brought up the Temple of Osiris. I'm like, but they looked into that. Like, you could see it. Yeah, they have, like, they. They showed where the chambers are. They. It works. But this was only 50ft in the ground, you know, like, okay, pretty well. Well, how do you know how work, how deep that stuff goes? If it works 50ft, who's to say it doesn't work 2 kilometers, like they're saying.
- [09:29]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I was having a conversation with, like, my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart. He's a friend of Graham. He was. He was one of the guest experts on season two of Ancient Apocalypse when he went to the Maya realm. He and I were talking this morning, and he was like, he's like, you know, it's become a battle of, like, who has this right to talk about these things, you know, does, does the fact that I have a degree in anthropology, that's what gives me the right to have more of an opinion on somebody else. That's kind of what it, what it's become. And it's like, and it's like one side is accosting the other over their fascinations and their interests and the fact that they're able to make a living from the things that they're fascinated about and talking about. And it feels like academia has become bitter because being in the academic world is a very rough and jaded place. And a lot of young aspiring archaeologists who existed, who maybe would have had an approach like me, but existed during this time where you could only have your pursuits if the university signed off on it. Right. But now universities are like, ideologically captured and every little thing that you do has to be aligned with the university. And so all of your fascinating ideas that you have in your mid-20s, you know, to your mid-30s, when you're young and able to go off into the jungle and find something, they all get shut down by people who had their ideas shut down. But now it's like it's the Wild west, where you can have somebody like me or whoever put together an expedition and, you know, I legally cannot start digging up the ground and excavating things, but I can go and document things and survey things on my own, you know, with local permission, whatever.
- [11:09]
Luke Reagan
But yeah, legally dig things up in certain countries if you get permission or.
- [11:16]
Joe Rogan
Oh, well, I mean, yeah, if I got, if I got permission. But I mean, you would be. It would be next to impossible for me for somebody like me to do that.
- [11:24]
Luke Reagan
Why would that be? What would be the hurdles?
- [11:26]
Joe Rogan
Oh, well, you would have the local universities there who also have their own, you know, high credentialed people who are going to, you know, fight. Come in with a PhD. I'm never going to go get a PhD, but if I don't come in with something like that, then I don't have the experience. I don't have, you know, the authority to be able to do something like this. And they would never trust me to carry out like a good excavation.
- [11:45]
Luke Reagan
Right. Not damage anything.
- [11:46]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. So they would never, they would never trust us.
- [11:48]
Luke Reagan
There's some reasonable read, some reasonable explanations for why.
- [11:53]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah.
- [11:54]
Luke Reagan
Kind of people have looted. I mean.
- [11:57]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [11:57]
Luke Reagan
Who knows how much of ancient Egypt is just gone? I mean, who knows?
- [12:02]
Joe Rogan
Oh, man.
- [12:03]
Luke Reagan
So many wealthy people actually ate mummies.
- [12:05]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [12:06]
Luke Reagan
You know, they actually like, for people listening, I did. You didn't mishear me. They ate Mummies, they would bring them to. These European aristocrats would bring them to parties and people would consume the mummies.
- [12:23]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [12:23]
Luke Reagan
Which is just like, what were you guys drinking?
- [12:27]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's gnarly, man.
- [12:29]
Luke Reagan
Diddy party were you guys having over there, where. That was the idea.
- [12:32]
Joe Rogan
It's gnarly, man. Yes. So much of Egypt is. Is gone. And this is why I don't think that, you know, like, I love. I love the mystery of the ancient world and why I'm so baffled when people want to immediately shut anything down because of the amount of history that is lost to us is completely baffling. You know, Egypt has been getting looted, we know, for the last, let's say 3,000 years at least. Countries, foreign nations have been coming in and raiding Egypt and taking the artifacts out. And so, you know, so much of the artifact. So much of the artifact record is lost. And I think that the real problem is the confidence with which somebody like Zahi speaks. It's okay for you to have your perspective in the way that you view the ancient world based on the data that's been available to you. It's okay to have your opinions. But when you're so confident about your opinions that you then begin to chastise other people, put them down for it, and then go the next. The next mile and start making accusations of them being a racist and things like that Flint dibble approach. That's really not good, right?
- [13:42]
Luke Reagan
It's not good. But it's like that guy embodies what you don't like about academia. You see him physically, he embodies it. Like, it's like that's what it is. It's these weak men, these weird, kind of bitchy weak men that decide that they're in control of things. And the way they shut people down is by casting the worst pejoratives on them. Especially like the Graham Hancock stuff, calling him a racist. Like, what, because he. Because he's interested in Atlantis.
- [14:08]
Joe Rogan
I really did not like the letter that they wrote to Netflix to try to get season one taken down of Ancient Apocalypse. And, you know, they. Sometimes they'll rebuttal and say, oh, well, you know, I never blatantly called him a racist. Like, well, okay, even if you didn't blatantly do it, you insist insinuated it, and you were okay with insinuating it. And some of these people exist in a realm where in their little bubbles where they throw around the word racist all the time. And then when they get to the wider world where the rest of us exist, they find out very quickly that none of. We don't throw that term around lightly and accuse people of these things. And then, you know, at the end of the podcast, when he said, you asked, you know, things. The kind of temperature came down, and then I think maybe you asked something like, you know, well, what can people do to help archeology? And he was like, oh, you can donate to the saa, but the SAA is the one that wrote the letter. It's like, oh, man, that's just. It's. It's. It's not a good look.
- [15:04]
Luke Reagan
Well, it's a real problem with human beings and ego when they have positions of power and authority, especially over something that is very esoteric, something that is like. And also completely complex. Like when you're dealing with trying to decipher hieroglyphs and trying to. And then, you know, the fact that we know that the Library of Alexandria was burned down, so who knows what was lost in that?
- [15:30]
Joe Rogan
Several different times, like, five different times.
- [15:34]
Luke Reagan
I wonder who, if any of that just got stolen out of there, and then they blamed it.
- [15:38]
Joe Rogan
Like, how much of that, you know, so the Vatican, the first time Caesar is chasing his rival Pompey across the Mediterranean, and Pompey flees to Alexandria, and Alexandria was kind of in the basket of Rome. They. The. The Ptolemies, who are the. The Greek pharaohs in Egypt. So the Greeks are controlling Egypt after Alexander comes in, 332 BC. So Alexander dies, his best friend Ptolemy, becomes Pharaoh. So, but the Ptolemies were very weak, not very good rulers. And so Rome kind of does, like, what the US does, where they get pulled into conflicts. And then once they're there and they conquer everything, they seize all the power, you know, and so Rome had done this to. Had done this to Egypt, and so they controlled Egypt, and they were pulling all of their. They were keeping the Ptolemies in power. The Roman soldiers were. And they were pulling all that grain into Egypt. And so Caesar follows Pompey, chases him to Alexandria, and so that Caesar can't. Or so that Pompey can't flee, Caesar says, we'll burn the docks. Well, when you landed in Alexandria, you would land at this dock that went to a road called Soma Road. So you had Soma Road and Canopic Way, and it was like the street corner. It must have been amazing to see in real life. Like, think about this. You have the Library of Alexandria. This is all in one block. You have the Library of Alexandria. You have the Museion, which is right next to it. So both together that make the world's first university. And I mean, you can just imagine, like, walking through those halls. Across the street from that is Alexander's mausoleum. So his mausoleum, we think the Emperor Hadrian, if you've heard of Hadrian before that he modeled his mausoleum on Alexander's. So we kind of have an idea of, like, what the mausoleum may have looked like. And we have a marble statue of Alexander on top. So people are walking by every day in the middle of this town. And then a. Across the street from that is the palatial district where all the rich people lived. And then off by the bay, you would have had Cleopatra's palace. And so it's this beautiful place. But when the boats come into the dock, you had to give up all the scrolls that you had, because the Ptolemies are obsessed with obtaining the world's knowledge. And they want the originals. They don't want a copy. So what they would tell people is, you give us your writings, we'll write down a copy, and we'll give you back your original. But what they would do is give back the copy and keep the original. And this is something called the library wars. This is a whole thing. So, but this was. It was connected to the docks. And so most of the buildings in Alexandria are made out of stone to prevent fires. But the interior of Alexandria's library would have had all these wooden shelves that would cross where you'd stack all the scrolls in. So everything, just maybe the actual structure of the building doesn't burn down, but the entire interior of it burns up. And so when. When Caesar sets fire to the docks to burn all of Pompey's ships, it crawls up the docks and burns the library down. Well, well, Augustus did the same thing. A decade and a half later, Augustus came and he seized Alexandria. And this is where. This is when Cleopatra and Mark Antony die, he seizes it. And then there are rebellions, because the Alexandrians are very rebellious. They don't want to be ruled by the Romans. And so there's. I think it's Caracalla that he was being made fun of by the Alexandrians. There was a theater in town. It's actually the place where standup comedy was invented in Alexandria. Yeah, so. So really. And the butt of all the jokes was always the Roman Emperor. So. So you'd have people, like, talking shit about the Roman Emperor standing up, you know, in the. In the middle of Alexandria's theater. And so the Roman Emperor was always the butt of the joke. Well, Caracalla, I believe it's Caracalla. He's one of the brothers in Gladiator 2. The. The new gladiator. If you've seen it. I haven't seen it. He's. He's one of the brothers. But the movie doesn't really depict the actual emperors very accurately. But he gets tired of it. So he just comes down to Alexandria on, like, a royal Visit and executes 25,000 people in the city of Alexandria and burns down parts of it. So he burned down the library for the third time. And then there was another emperor named Aurelian when a local Alexandrian declared himself the new Egyptian pharaoh. I think he was a real Egyptian. He declared himself, like the newest pharaoh, and he created this revolt. And then Aurelian had to come and put the revolt down, and he burned down the library again. So this is. We're getting close to like 300 A.D. at this point. Now in 365 A.D. there was a. There was a huge earthquake that was off of the coast of Crete, I think, which is the most southern Greek isle. And it's where the Minoans lived. I believe it's there, or it's off the coast of Cyprus. And so that earthquake, like, just reverberates down to Egypt in this massive tsunami, destroys the entire city of Alexandria. And it said it was so catastrophic that I think it's Pliny the Elder or Pliny the Younger comes down on a rescue mission from Italy, and he comes to Alexandria and He records that 50,000 people in the city are missing because of, you know, the wave that gets pushed in. And that all of the giant boats, these are giant, giant gigantic boats in Alexandria's harbor are sitting on top of all the rooftops in the city. And it's after this point that the location of Alexander body and the location of Alexandria's library just completely go missing. So they're both utterly destroyed. And most likely all of the giant stones that were used to build the city were repurposed for, you know, other things. But in one fatal swoop, Alexandria's library, the museum, and Alexander's mausoleum completely disappear from the historical record.
- [21:17]
Luke Reagan
Fight Night isn't just for fighters. Step into the action with DraftKings sportsbook in your corner as the official sports betting partner of the UFC. DraftKings bring brings the action to your fingertips. Every strike, takedown, knockout, it all hits different. When you've got skin in the game. New to betting, no problem. Start simple. Pick a fighter to win. Place your bet and you're in. Even better. New customers can bet just five bucks and get $300 in bonus bets if your bet wins. It's the easiest way to score big on fight night. Download the DraftKings sportsbook app now and use the Code Rogan. That's Code Rogan for new customers to get $300 in bonus bets. If your bet wins when you bet just five bucks only on DraftKings, the crown is yours. Gambling problem. Call 1-800-GAMBLER in New York. Call 877-8-HOPE and WHY or text HOPE and WHY at 467-369 in Connecticut. Help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org Please play responsibly on behalf of Boot Hill Casino and Resort in Kansas, 21 and over. Age and eligibility varies by jurisdiction. Void in Ontario. Bet must win to receive reward. Expire 168 hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see DKNG co Audio. Wow. It just shows you how vulnerable knowledge is. I really think about that today because obviously we have a lot of books and most things that are like most physics work, most work on archeology, most work on history is available in book form. But how much of what we have is on hard drives? And if there was a power outage, just a global worldwide powder power outage that lasted six months, we're fucked. Like we don't know anything anymore. It's a small amount of time for an enormous cataclysmic disaster to completely erase tens of thousands of years of understanding of everything. Yeah, everything. We would have no knowledge, one generation removed from electronics would have no knowledge of how to recreate it. What steps need to be taken? What? What? You have to build a chip plant. Where are they right now? They're in Taiwan. What the fuck are you talking about? How are we going to do this? Hard drives.
- [23:42]
Joe Rogan
That's a precarious place for them to.
- [23:43]
Luke Reagan
Be starting from scratch. Starting from scratch today would be very similar, I think, to probably what starting from scratch was post the Great Flood, post the great comet impacts, all the younger Dryas impact series stuff. Civilization, if that stuff is correct, if there is Graham's position and Randall Carlson's position is that there was probably a much more advanced civilization than just hunter gatherers that lived 10,000 plus years ago. How many thousands of years would it take before we started calming down again? Well, it seems like it took about 5, 4 or 5,000 years before civilization emerges.
- [24:27]
Joe Rogan
A really long time A really long time. Think about that with like foraging, you know, I was reading yesterday, I was reading Exploration Fawcett. Have you read this before? Listen to the audiobook. It's his Percy Fawcett personal diary. Yeah, so you have, you have.
- [24:44]
Luke Reagan
There's an audiobook of that?
- [24:45]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. It's on audible. Dude. You'll get wrapped up in it. You won't be able to stop listening to it. You know, he just has these amazing experiences and ah, man, he would be like your best, like your all time guest, you know, if you could have him on.
- [24:58]
Luke Reagan
Sure. But I probably had a great accent too.
- [25:01]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, and so you listen to his audiobook and the way he talks about meeting the indigenous people that live deep in the Amazon. You know, it would take him weeks to get to these little villages. And while he was out there, he would see like the systematic mathematical structure with which they would set up these giant villages and how they would build these huge like thatch wood homes with foundations that are stones. And these people were. He said that they had like beautiful skin, they spoke elegantly, they sang songs. And he was like, he's like, he's like, this isn't. He's like, these people in the Amazon are not primitive savages like my colleagues at the Royal Geographic Society in London believe that they are. These are people who are the fallen or are the descendants of a fallen great civilization. He was like, the way they interact with each other is so sophisticated and.
- [25:56]
Luke Reagan
The way they think they were the descendants of a fallen civilization and not the, the people that were currently living in the most modern version of this civilization.
- [26:10]
Joe Rogan
I don't quite know. You know, there's some things that are, that are left out. Like he has, he has some. Before he started writing this, I think he always had these ideas in the back of his mind. And so you don't really get the origin of why he initially started thinking this. But, you know, while he's exploring South America, he's hearing all these stories of, you know, semi contacted people. Like you have natives who still live the native life, but they can speak Spanish. And he could speak a little bit Spanish and communicate with these people. So he would hear about, oh yeah, you know, there's this huge city of gold off, you know, off in the jungle. Months traveled that way. And it's the same kind of legend that all these Spaniards had heard. So it's this idea of there's. Well, there was this civilization that used to be out there. And so Percy thought that maybe it has Something to do with Atlantis. And so that was part of his journey looking for it. And then he. It's actually his wife, Nina Fawcett, I believe when she's in a library in England, she finds a Portuguese document. I think it's manuscript 512. Have you ever heard of this? I could have the name of it wrong, but I think it's manuscript 512. And in that, it's these guys who are kind of like semi professional Portuguese explorers in the mid-1700s that are going around Brazil and they find this huge stone city with statues that they thought looked like Greek gods in the middle of the Amazon. And so, you know, the perception, like, my perception looking back through it is like, well, I mean, yeah, these are portraits. Portuguese guys who come from Europe. So when they see something that's native, their only lens to see it through is what they've grown up knowing, which is the Greek and Roman world. So that's how they communicate this idea. But they found this big stone city in the. In the middle of. I think it's. I'm pretty sure it's Brazil's jungle. And so this was completely forgotten until Percy's wife found this. So, you know, when he first went down to the Amazon, he was only there on a mapping expedition on behalf of. On behalf of. Of Great Britain, which he was probably a spy. I'm guessing that that's what was actually happening there, because he was a spy when he was in the military. And I think what he was doing is on an official basis, he's charting the border around Brazil with the Amazon River. But really what he's doing is collecting information so that maybe Great Britain can have a colony there someday. But then the war disrupts all of that and he has to go fight in World War I. Which is funny because it's the same thing the Nazis were doing in the 1930s. But anyways, so while he's there on his first. While he's there on his first expedition, he doesn't. Initially, I think he's interested in these ideas of ancient history. But it's. When he's there and he's off in the jungle, he's finding all these artifacts on the ground. And he was like. He's like, you know, the way that the pottery. There's clay pottery and then there's, you know, stone vessels and, like, eating utensils that he was finding really elegant little statues and things. He found one that was made out of this, like, solid black stone that he could never. And it had this glow to it. And he could never. Maybe not a glow, but like, like if you shine the light on it, you can tell that it's translucent in a way. I've seen stones like this in the Aztec realm. They have these scepters that have these orb things on the top. And if you shine a light on it, it's like this otherworldly looking thing. I can only imagine if you're on like peyote stone, I don't know. And it's missing now. It's lost. It went missing with him or somewhere in his expeditions that doesn't exist anymore. But there's an illustration of it in exploration f. That you could find. And so he thought, like when he was seeing all this on his first expedition, he's like, wait, these aren't these primitive savages that all my colleagues that I don't even like back home think that these people are. This is a, this is an advanced culture. There's something that's lost here. And so Percy didn't know if it was a fallen civilization that lived in the Amazon or whether it was still out there somewhere. And he was trying to find either the ruins of it or the living city. Right. So he didn't really know if it was fallen or not. So that's.
- [30:09]
Luke Reagan
It's still interesting that he would think that way instead of, this is the pinnacle of civilization in the Amazon, which is why they're so advanced. Is that like a preconceived notion that he had that there was an advanced civilization and it had fallen? Yeah, if you're looking at the way the people were living, the way he's describing it sounds pretty advanced.
- [30:28]
Joe Rogan
Sure, sure.
- [30:28]
Luke Reagan
Why wouldn't you assume that these people had lived for thousands of years and eventually risen to this current level?
- [30:35]
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, ye. I don't know. I don't know.
- [30:37]
Luke Reagan
That's the problem with preconceived notions too.
- [30:40]
Joe Rogan
But I do know that he had the utmost admiration and respect for these people. Like he was completely infatuated with their way of life and trying to, you know what his goal was, was to prove that like the narrow minded perspective of the English aristocrats who thought that they were the pinnacle of civilization. He was determined to prove them wrong. And so he had a great admiration for these people and he wanted to try to find like a, like a big, big civilization, something with enough people that could rival, that could rival Europe. And where he went missing was in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. And the last place that they know that he was at was on May 29, 1925, and he wrote a letter to his wife from Deadhorse Camp. And he was like, it may be a while before you hear from me. It could be up to a year or two before you hear from me. I'm about to head into a very dense area, and my trail runners who would, you know, go back and forth with his notes, they weren't going to follow him out there because it's too dangerous. And that was the last letter that he had written. And he was going. He was heading off into what's called the Xingu region, which is like the Xingu river, and it's one of the most hostile regions in the Amazon, maybe even today. Teddy Roosevelt had trouble when he went there, but the Xingu region is where all of the major lidar came out within the last 10 years of. They found all the ruins of these giant cities. And there's a city called Kiriguyu, I think, and it had an estimated population of about a million people, which is the size of Rome. And, you know, when you look at the LIDAR images, you can't get a perspective of how big they are. I have access to a LIDAR database of the entire United States, and I've mapped all kinds of huge, uncharted mound sites. Florida, all of the southeast. I have hundreds of sites marked. And when you first look at them on a map, you're like, oh, okay, like maybe that looks like it's 50ft long or something. No, they'll be like 300 yards long. Like these giant raised platforms in the. In the middle of the forest here in the US and if I had access to LIDAR data like that, where I could measure it down in the Amazon. Some of these things are miles long. Like, raised platforms are a mile long. And they have. And they have highways. Like, you know, maybe we should pull up a. Just an image of a lidar scan from the Amazon. But you'll see this central city area. You'll see step pyramids and raised platforms. Maybe this is where people lived, or maybe this is where the market was. And there will be a road that cuts straight through it. And you can see the road just goes off in the distance for miles and miles and miles. And so what they would do. Here we go. Yeah, this is. So this is one of these sites in. This is one of these sites. I believe this is in Brazil or maybe it's in northeast Bolivia.
- [33:31]
Luke Reagan
And is all that area covered completely with jungle right now?
- [33:33]
Joe Rogan
Completely covered in jungle, yeah. So if you went out there, you.
- [33:36]
Luke Reagan
Wouldn'T see any of this.
- [33:37]
Joe Rogan
You may not realize that you were standing on a mound. Like, you really got to train your eyes. You know, I put out this, I filmed this little series about a year and a half ago called Jungle of Stone, where I was going through the jungles in Central America and we charted this city that had 16 pyramids in it. You know, we were there all day long and we charted 16 pyramids. And when I put it out, I got all these comments like, you're not doing anything but walking on a bunch of hills because it's so hard to see it. The jungle just claims everything back. So it takes, you really have to sit with seeing these things in person for a while before you start recognizing, oh, that is a mound or that is a pyramid, that is a structure under the jungle. And so Percy Fawcett, where that lidar came out is one of the places that he told his wife, he didn't share this publicly, where, where he thought that the city was, but it's, it's like bang on, he was exactly correct about where he thought a city would be. And we don't know if he reached it or not.
- [34:32]
Luke Reagan
Wow, it's so interesting because how long has lidar been around for?
- [34:38]
Joe Rogan
I don't know.
- [34:39]
Luke Reagan
And how long has it been used? I mean, think about for how long. People had no idea that this existed because it was completely covered with jungle. They just assumed that there was evidence of a civilization. It would be pretty obvious.
- [34:51]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:51]
Luke Reagan
It's not. And it makes me wonder, like as technology increases in its potential, like, what other new technologies will be discovered that will allow you to, instead of like having this ambiguous view of under the pyramids, have like a crystal clear, like accurate dimension by dimension, almost like a 3D map.
- [35:12]
Joe Rogan
This, this century for sure. This century is going to be insane. It's going to be insane. Like you're going to have everyone scanning everything. All of the Amazon will be mapped with lidar by the end of the century. All of the Sahara is going to be mapped with lidar by the end of the century.
- [35:27]
Luke Reagan
The Sahara is a big one.
- [35:28]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. Well, those are my two, those are my two big things. Like when we talk about Atlantis and we talk about lost civilizations, I mean my thing is the Sahara and the Sahara and the Amazon. You know, both of these things existed pre ice age. Especially if we're talking about pre ice age civilization. The Sahara is an oasis, you know, 10,000 plus years ago, it's an oasis. You have what, two or three of the world's largest lake system on there. You have rivers everywhere. You know, it would have been like, a beautiful place to live.
- [36:00]
Luke Reagan
Abundant resources, so there's no worry about food and shelter. You have plenty of time to figure things out. Which is the thing that has always made sense to me. If you know the history of the Nile Valley and where Egypt was, like, that was a wonderful place to live, to try to figure things out, right? Because you have so much food, and once you have so much food and you're kind of separated from everybody, it's really tough to get to you. So, like, they lived unchallenged in that civilization for thousands of years.
- [36:29]
Joe Rogan
Well, yeah, that. That's amazing. And, you know, whenever I, you know, so, so growing up, I mean, gosh, I read Fingerprints of the Gods when I was 16. I remember, like, sitting on the couch after school and reading it. And my dad, like, comes up to me, he's like, that's a big book. And I go, I know. It's like I'm reading a textbook for fun, you know, and it was a. It was, it was dense reading for me as a 16 year old. And so, you know, I was so inspired by. By grah. Of went off and like, got traditionally educated. And so I kind of have both of these perspectives. And I'm often shocked and disappointed at how other professional archaeologists and anthropologists explain popular mysteries. You know, like, there was an Egyptologist on another popular podcast, and the podcast host asked him to properly explain, like, you know, the mystery around the pyramid. And it was just, just so subpar. I was shocked. And I was like, I'm not even Egyptologist. I know how to explain these things. And I felt the same way about Zahi. Maybe there's some kind of language barrier there. But it was also like, he didn't want to explain these things on a basic level. But one of the things that I never see talked about is the concentration of energy along the Nile Valley. Like, okay, so, you know, if I had to. If I had to put a. Drop a pin anywhere on the earth where I think Atlantis would be, I would probably put it like in the Sahara somewhere, you know, along one of these major lakes where there's a lot of people living at one time. And then later on, as the Sahara dries up, you know, say beginning around like 800, I'm sorry, 8,000 BC, it starts rapidly drying up. It's probably a little bit before that. And then by about 4000 BC, it's completely dry. So your Saharans only Have a few places that they can go. They can go to the Mediterranean coast, they can go to the Atlantic coast, they can go down kind of into the Congo and in the savannas, or they can go to this fertile valley oasis where it's like 500 yards on each side where it's just completely lush tropical oasis. And so some people went there. And so you have this hyper concentration of energy and all these people living somewhere together for what we know is the first time in history, like we can verify it I guess if that makes sense. And so rather than being able to have the, these huge pieces of property where they can all live separated from each other kind of like in the Sahara, you have all this space and so luxurious now you have to live on top of each other and you have to build up these cities. You know, you're like building cities. And so all that energy compacted into one place in this fertile oasis is either destined to completely crumble and fall apart or it's New York City. It's this thin strip of highly concentrated genius hard working people figuring out how to extrapolate the most out of their natural world and create some of the greatest things the world has ever seen. Just like New York City. We did it. You know. And I've never seen any Egyptologist explain things that way. I think that's a good explanation at least. And I'm open to things in Egypt being much older. Like the Sphinx is definitely older than the pyramids. But I'm just always disappointed. At least like the very low level with which archaeologists and anthropologists will come in and try to explain things to a popular audience. And it's kind of like you were asking, okay, but how do you know that? Like explain that to me in a way that I can understand. How do you know this? And there's never a proper explanation and I don't know what that is. It's like they strongly dislike the fact that there's mystery out there and that there are other people who are attempting to answer the mystery that are not part of the good boys club. You know. So they have this.
- [40:10]
Luke Reagan
That's exactly it.
- [40:11]
Joe Rogan
So they have this knee jerk reaction to it all. They hate all of it. They don't want to be a part of all of it. And that's not going to work going forward. Like, you know, not to be political, but this, but this recent election showed that you're going to have to appeal to the popular audience in the future. Everyone is, you know.
- [40:28]
Luke Reagan
Yeah. And especially when there's these forums now like YouTube, where someone like you can put up videos explaining things, or Jimmy Corsetti or Graham Hancock. Like the access to people to share fascinating ideas. It's not limited to universities anymore. And I think that drives them crazy because they spent so much time being in control. And then all sudden it's just like. And then through a lot of these appearances like Flint Dibble and Zahi, their credibility erodes publicly in front of everyone's eyes. And then, you know, there's people that are going to support both of them on either side. And who knows how much of it is even real? Because now we have AI bots and that get turned loose by whether it's universities like the University of Zurich that just got in trouble for running that experiment with social media, which is really wild.
- [41:19]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [41:20]
Luke Reagan
So we don't even know, like, how much of it is organic until you see some. Something like voting, and then you go, oh, this is how people really feel. But how much of that has even been influenced by all these. These AI campaigns? But we do know is that human arrogance has always been a real problem. And the same thing that Percy Foster was probably dealing with, Percy Fossett rather, was probably dealing with when he was, you know, the, the people back home that thought these people were primitive.
- [41:45]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [41:46]
Luke Reagan
It's like this arrogance that human beings.
- [41:47]
Joe Rogan
Looking down their nose at everybody.
- [41:49]
Luke Reagan
People love to be experts. They love to be experts. And they love to. And they also equate their own self worth with being accurate about information that you really can't be accurate about.
- [42:00]
Joe Rogan
Exactly.
- [42:01]
Luke Reagan
Instead of just being humble, but yet knowledgeable.
- [42:04]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [42:05]
Luke Reagan
Which is a great position. You know, and when you talk to someone and they're humble and knowledgeable, that's a. Those are my favorite conversations because they. They'll tell you what they know and what they don't know. And this is why.
- [42:15]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [42:15]
Luke Reagan
Archaeologists are not doing that, which is why they're rejecting people like Graham Hancock. What they should be doing is embracing the work that he's doing. Because. Because he's self funded.
- [42:26]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [42:26]
Luke Reagan
And because he's just selling books and, you know, and doing his thing and appearing on podcasts and developing this audience. He's allowed to do all these fantastic voyages. Like he's in Iraq right now, like, studying the ancient Sumerian civilization, like, with the remnants of it.
- [42:45]
Joe Rogan
Well, there's. There's two things that I'll say there. You know, kind of like. I guess a running theme of this is we're about to enter into like archaeological wild west in a way. You know, I Think that, you know, Jimmy getting involved with Gobekli Tepe and the trees that were there, having the trees, the orchards planted over the sites.
- [43:07]
Luke Reagan
And they're removing them now.
- [43:08]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's just proof that a guy like I started watching Jimmy 2018, I mean, gosh, was, I just graduated from high school and so he was kind of like inspired me to be like, you know, he was this young, charismatic guy that could go online and research topics and enthusiastically present these topics and he was effective at doing it and inspired me for a long time. And lo and behold, I guess what, six, seven years later, he's still at it and he's actually not just inspired people to be interested in the ancient world, but, but had an actual effect on something on the opposite side of the planet. Like when all this happened, I was like, I was like, I was like, yeah, I mean, I get the concern, but I don't think the Turkish government cares what any of us over here in the US think. Sure enough, they removed the trees and then there's kind of like the backpedaling of, oh well, it was always in the plan to remove the trees. But I think it's, I think, you know, people might disagree with Jimmy's approach, whatever, but it's, you can't deny the fact that he himself, an independent guy, was able to make so much noise that he affected a government on the opposite side of the planet. You know, and it, and in a way it's like, it shows me like, oh, you know, these expeditions that I'm planning and things that I'm going to go out and survey and document for myself, like these can make real changes and these are things I have planned in Florida, here in the southeast, in the states, in Central America and in the Amazon. And it's like encouraging, like, wow. I mean, we're really approaching a time when independent people are going to start making real noticeable differences. And not just in the digital space that where people are interested in.
- [44:47]
Luke Reagan
Right. But in the physical archaeology.
- [44:49]
Joe Rogan
Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
- [44:50]
Luke Reagan
Jimmy's so meticulous too. He's such a good representative because he's really intelligent, really thought provoking, but also really honest about what he knows and what he doesn't know. And he has counter arguments to his own points, points he'll taste, tell you something and then, but also it could be this and this is what we know. And because he's been really careful in the way he expresses himself, he's established this community that understands what he does and they trust him and they go, no, no, he's going to tell you the truth. He's going to tell you what we know and why we know it. He's not going to make any weird ideological leaps. He's not going to make any weird judgments. He's just going to lay out what is fascinating about these things. And because of that, whether he has a degree or not. Agree. Degree. That guy's having a massive impact. I mean, I don't know how many. What is.
- [45:43]
Joe Rogan
Nobody can deny that.
- [45:44]
Luke Reagan
What does Bright Insights YouTube channel have for subscribers? And it's by the way, if you haven't watched any of his videos, can't recommend them enough. Love the guy, love the stuff. 1.7, by the way. Way he's been called a Nazi, which is, that's just, that's what they use. That's the, these are the terms. You know, he's been called all sorts of terrible things. None of them are true. He's a wonderful guy and he's just a man who's deeply fascinated with these mysteries. And when he's pointing out the things that we cannot. It's Baalbek in Lebanon, the trillion, what.
- [46:22]
Joe Rogan
They call the trillion stars, Trilithon, star.
- [46:25]
Luke Reagan
Whatever. There's certain things that you can point out that people go, okay, what the, like he gets to the what the stuff where everybody's like, okay, what else you got? You know, like, how come I didn't know this? How come this isn't like something like when you're talking about ancient history, the history of whether it's Lebanon or Egypt. And when they start talking about these things and they lay out the, the histories of the pharaohs and why aren't you, you talking about the distance they carried these enormous 80 ton rocks through the mountains and how they cut them? Like why. That's the mystery.
- [47:01]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [47:02]
Luke Reagan
This is the big piece of evidence that these guys just want to dismiss. Oh, it was the national project, you know, like. Okay, yeah. But that doesn't say how you did that.
- [47:13]
Joe Rogan
No.
- [47:13]
Luke Reagan
5,000 years ago. You need to help me out here. And when these openings exist and guys like Jimmy run through them, but meticulously document things and talk about them with humility and talk about them with a general understanding of the absolute undeniable facts. And then it creates this enormous audience. And then because of that enormous audience, he has a huge impact.
- [47:36]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [47:37]
Luke Reagan
On actual archaeology. And that's why they hate him. It's just because he's doing their job better than they're doing their job. Because he's not trapped, he's not stuck in this compartmentalized ideological position of working for a university. And he doesn't have to worry about funding, and he doesn't have to worry about, you know, being chastised by his peers because they're all a bunch of bitches. He doesn't have to worry about that. So he's free. And there's a bunch of those guys that are emerging now, and guys like yourself. And I. I think that's really important because the gatekeepers have been wrong every step of the way with almost everything, whether it's medical science, whether it's health and nutrition, whatever it is. Like we. They've been wrong every damn step of the way. So maybe open it up. Just like the Internet opened up information to everybody, we need to open up the exploration of information to everybody and not have it contained. With a few people that have degrees from places that we know are ideologically captured, we can see how they behave. We can see the things they say and the way they do things and the way they act and the way. Even the way they affect enrollment based on race and gender and sexual preference. Like, you guys are fucking crazy. This is not how you're supposed to handle knowledge and information. This is a dumb approach. And we see that through basically every place where there's a few group of people, this isolated, insulated group of people that has the ultimate influence over whatever particular field of study is their specialty. It's just a danger that the human ego and the human mind fall prey to almost every single time. The Internet, what it's done is it's like this great equalizer, and it's just. It has allowed people to have these discussions, and you hear a lot of people saying, you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't be doing this. Don't do your own research. Don't. Like, those are stupid sayings. Like, you can't think like that. You. There's going to be people that say things that are absolutely ludicrous, and you have to be able to listen to them and then listen to people that are more intelligent and more rational and also objective and go, that guy is. That's what I'm interested in. I'm interested in this guy. I know he's not going to lie. You know, and there's too many instances of archaeologists just lying, lying and attacking each other. When one of them. Like, clothes first. Like that.
- [50:06]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, well, attacking each other. I mean, I. I just experienced this the other day, you know, so I had a. I guess being early on in my career, I'm Passionate about so many different things. And I'm the kind of person that's like, oh, I'm passionate about this. This is what I'm gonna do. And so I, I applied to the University of Athens in Greece and I was really into the classics and I was gonna go for that. And then I just had this just say I was in the jungle and I had a mind opening experience. And I was reminded of the fact that my purpose here, the reason I started doing all this, was continuing kind of like my family's legacy. And I'm interested in a lot of different things and I'm not going to specialize, I'm not going to like hunker down in this academic path or whatever. And so I just decided I'm not going to go through with this. So I start publishing content in my research on the Americas again. And in the Americas are very mysterious. It's, I mean, very comparable to Egypt. It was just in the amount of questions that haven't been answered is insane. And the Olmec world is fascinating. And so, you know, there's, you know, Graham in Fingerprints of the Gods, he talks about how the Olmecs, he thought that they may have like African features. And of course that was 1994 and so, I don't know, 2015, you guys are talking and he's like, he's like, well, you know, I published that then. But DNA research has come out that says that, you know, these people don't have African DNA in them and that maybe this is Polynesian, maybe this is Australasian people intermixing. And that's why they have this unique look, whatever. But in the Olmec world there's this monument that is actually called El Negro. And you look at it and it's not an Olmec, it is an African man. And so I post about this on my X account and I just kind of like list everything I've seen in the Olmec world. And I'm like, you know, this is really fascinating. Maybe this is evidence of Africans who were in, who were in the Olmec world. And I hadn't seen this monument before I saw it in person. Because you go in the Olmec, in the Olmec realm or the region in Mexico and you go to these museums and you look at the log or the ledger that people have been on and nobody has visited this museum in the last four months. And before that, it was six months before that. And these monuments just kind of sit underneath these metal roofs, you know, to protect him from the rain. And it's like this, just this completely lost civilization.
- [52:29]
Luke Reagan
Is there an image of this that's available online?
- [52:31]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah, There we go. There we go. So if you pull up an Olmec head, you'll see that these guys are very different looking. And especially if you can get. Yeah, yeah, there we go. Look at. Okay, so that's. Yeah, okay. So that's a regular Olmec head. So you can see that these are two different races of people. You know, the, the Olmecs have very soft features, round faces, big eyes, big lips, kind of big noses. They have very soft features. And this El Negro monument has these high cheekbones, this defined jawline, this intense.
- [53:04]
Luke Reagan
Isn't there a lot of variety just in like, let's just say Italians, There's.
- [53:09]
Joe Rogan
A lot of variety.
- [53:10]
Luke Reagan
So couldn't this just be someone who's on a. A spectrum of features that. I mean, I don't think it's that much different than.
- [53:18]
Joe Rogan
You don't think so?
- [53:19]
Luke Reagan
Well, no, when I'm looking at it, I could. I mean, I could imagine, like there's, like I said, just, you know, my nationality Italian. So there's Italians with very thin faces and there's these big thick ones. And like, people vary quite a bit. There's enough similarities that I could say, oh, those could be the same people.
- [53:35]
Joe Rogan
Well, the, the only counter I give to that is when you, when you visit the Olmec realm, you see a lot more than just the heads. You see a lot of Olmec faces. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Maybe well over a hundred. And when you've seen them all and you kind of get a gist of like, like the way they generally look, this guy will really stand out. Like, I took like a group of students there and we all, as soon as we all came in and saw it, based on everything we'd been seeing for the past week, it immediately stood out to us.
- [54:02]
Luke Reagan
Well, certainly the thick brow is unique. Well, the.
- [54:06]
Joe Rogan
Are wearing helmets and that hair as well. It's kind of that. It's kind of that curly hair, or at least it looks like it to me. And so, so anyways, you know, he, he could be Olmec. I, I don't. You know, my identity is not tied up in what I think this is.
- [54:22]
Luke Reagan
Or is also Olmec could be African, like very, very clearly. Like that one on the left easily could be an African man.
- [54:30]
Joe Rogan
Which one? This guy right here.
- [54:31]
Luke Reagan
This one. The one next to the white one. To the left of that, to the Left. Yeah, right there. It easily could be an African man.
- [54:36]
Joe Rogan
It certainly does look that way. But I was on a. I was on a plane to Mexico a couple months ago, and I was going into the Olmec realm. And I look, I was like, I wanted to take a picture of this guy I'm left of me. And he was an Olmec man sitting next to me. And he was. He was. You know, he looked like. He didn't look like any Mexican I've ever seen. There's something there with the DNA of the Olmec people that is definitely connected with something else that. That you don't see if you go to the Maya realm, that you don't see if you go to, like, Mexico City. They have something in their DNA. They have this very specific look about them. And I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm like, looking, and I'm like this Olmec guy next to me.
- [55:15]
Luke Reagan
So fascinating, because it clearly could have been African explorers what made it.
- [55:20]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. Could we look up. Gosh, look up the Traveler Olmec Monument, if you would, please, Jamie. It's the Traveler. I want to call him. I think he's Monument 13. There's another one called Monument 19 that we should look at, but he's this man that's very clearly not. There we go. Top left, the one that's on Reddit. In fact, this might be my post on Reddit. Yes. Yes, sir. So this guy right here. All right, so this is really, really fascinating. So let's diagnose this. All right, so flags. Flags are invented is very unknown fact. Flags are invented. Or the first place that we have evidence for it is along the Nile Valley on these pre dynastic pots, which they're not the. Not the stone vases, but just like clay pottery. They would make little paintings on them, and people had these riverboats that had these flags on them, and the flags would say what city you had come from or what village you had come from, and so that. So flags are an Old World thing. We don't have any evidence of flags in the New World. All right, he's also wearing a turban. He's got this big turban that's draping off the back of his head, and he very clearly has this distinct beard that's popping out. Now, Native Americans, sometimes they can. You know, they are. They're Asiatic. They have. They have Asian DNA. And Asians don't really grow typically. Sometimes they'll grow the little, like, stash and a little bit of a beard here, but they don't have that big, thick beard that you would see, you know, like, in Europe or along the Mediterranean in the Middle East. And so this guy has this big, thick beard, and then he's got boots on his feet as well. And we think that these are these glyphs that you see to his left and right. And these are really, really early Olmec glyphs. And they interpret that foot to the left as saying that he came from somewhere, he was a traveler. And so the thought here is, so this is. This is around 900bc give or take a little bit. They don't really. They really have no idea when these. When these are made. Like, you go to all the monuments, and it says made somewhere between 1500 BC and 400 BC they'll say 1500 BC and 400 BC and so they really are uncertain about how old a lot of these monuments are.
- [57:35]
Luke Reagan
Make it big again, Jamie, please.
- [57:37]
Joe Rogan
But if we shoot for dead center. 900 B.C. the Phoenicians out of the Mediterranean are launching these sailing expeditions around the coast of Africa. These are the ancient world's greatest sailors that we know of. And so there were, like, experimental archaeological or scientific, I don't know, expeditions done that show. If you would send one of these early Iron Age boats or if you send any ship out of the. Out of the gates of Hercules or the Strait of Gibraltar, and you send it out into the Atlantic and it drifts just a little bit too far without turning south along the African coast, it will be carried by a current across the Atlantic Ocean, down into the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and straight into the Gulf of Mexico. And if that had happened, if people who had looked like it, they're in the Old World, like this guy, if that had happened, somebody from the Old World, the largest civilization at the time, the empire in this area would have been the Olmecs. And the reason I feel so strongly about that is because we do not have flags, turbans, or boots in the. In the ancient Americas. This guy looks nothing like a Native American. And the flag, turban, and boots are all Old World features.
- [58:53]
Luke Reagan
You know what's fascinating to me, too? The image on the lower right of the bird's head looks very similar to the carvings on Gobekli Tepe, doesn't it? Yes, very. The curve of the beak. That's not how birds beaks look like. That's a very distinct style of artwork.
- [59:11]
Joe Rogan
Well, and it's.
- [59:11]
Luke Reagan
If you can find the images of the birds from Gobekli Tepe.
- [59:15]
Joe Rogan
It's this. It's this raised relief art style. So people talk about it a lot with Gobekli Tepe. I mean, think about this. This is 11,600 years ago, and you have artisans and stonemasons who have been practicing for so long that now they're able to take a blank piece of stone and carve the face off to reveal the artwork from underneath it. Not carve the artwork into the stone, but carve the stone away and reveal this sculpture from underneath. How similar does that look? It's bizarre, right?
- [59:46]
Luke Reagan
Real similar. More.
- [59:47]
Joe Rogan
And so it's the. It's the exact same kind of art style that you see in the Olmec realm.
- [59:53]
Luke Reagan
Exactly. The 3D stone carvings. Instead of carving it directly into the stone, carve the stone around it. They're both doing the same thing. That takes a lot of time.
- [60:02]
Joe Rogan
I mean, how.
- [60:03]
Luke Reagan
A lot more weird, weird stuff. It's also, like, the idea that this is documenting time. You know, the. The handbags or whatever those things are. What it actually is is the sun going over the earth.
- [60:21]
Joe Rogan
You know, I'm writing a paper about this, but this might be a good place to talk about it. So, you know, the handbag mystery is very fascinating. We have them in Assyria. We have them Mesopotamia, as far as I know. I don't think one's been found in Egypt. You can see them on the top of those T pillars in Gobekli, Texas. Tepe. And there's one in the Olmec realm. Are you familiar with this?
- [60:45]
Luke Reagan
No.
- [60:46]
Joe Rogan
Monument 19. If we could look that up. I mean, dude, I think it's the coolest handbag. And when I saw it in person, I, like, jumped. I'd been waiting years to see the same thing. Olmec monument 19. So this guy, he's wrapped in. He's sitting in Quetzal. He's sitting in Quetzalcoat. Could you do the one at the top left where we get the full picture? There we go. So this stone is probably about this. This big. It's probably about this big. And it sits on a table like this. So he's sitting inside the feathered serpent. Quetzalcoat. And so he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, and he's holding this handbag, and I'm not sure. So he has this. And if you can. If you see he has a feathered serpent mask around his head as well. I'm not sure what exactly is above him there. Well, they're actually two. It's really hard to make it out. But what's above him, that little box looking thing is some kind of box that's being held up by two birds on each end. But the important thing here is the fact that this is the first depiction of the feathered serpent in all of Mesoamerica that we know of. And it's, it might be the oldest handbag known as far as like what we have official dates for. And so the idea here is that he's some kind of sacred shaman, bringer of enlightenment, bringer of knowledge, something like that. And so I had been on the hunt for another handbag. Everywhere I go I'm always looking for handbag. I was in Cambodia a couple weeks ago. I'm going around the temples of Angkor Wat and there's hieroglyphs and carvings all over the walls. I'm looking for a handbag. I can't find one. But when I was in central Mexico I was at a site called Kakashla and I found another handbag person. I've never officially published it. It's on my X if you'd want to look it up.
- [62:31]
Luke Reagan
What is the timeline for that one?
- [62:33]
Joe Rogan
They don't really know. When you look at the monument, it says anywhere from 1400 BC to 400 BC. That's just what they think. I mean the Omega, the Olmec realm is so uncertain and, and we don't have hard dates for almost, for almost anything. They appear on the historical line, on this historical timeline as a fully fledged civilization capable of creating what you're seeing from the very beginning. Just like so many civilizations. It's like as soon as they arrive on, you know, as soon as they arrive in the world, they're doing everything to the fullest capacity. And we don't have any evidence in the Olmec realm of them working their way towards being able to do things like this. It's just from the very beginning they're able to make monuments like this, move these 50 ton Olmec heads. The largest head is, you'll find this interesting. So there was a nautical engineer that mec, which is an organization I'm with, it's the Maya Exploration center, It's run by Dr. Ed Barnhart. I'm, I'm a member of it and one of the guys that worked with us traveled into the Olmec realm. He's a nautical engineer. He's fascinated with how were the Olmecs moving these huge heads up and down these rivers. So they live in like the rivers, swamps they have to cross some mountain ranges. How are you getting these heads 90 miles away from the Sierra de la Tushla volcanic belt? That's where they're pulling the basalt from. Because we found unfinished heads, like at the base of these big basalt quarries. And they're transporting them 90 kilometers away through, you know, like I was saying, rivers.
- [64:06]
Luke Reagan
And 90 miles or kilometers?
- [64:08]
Joe Rogan
I think it's kilometers. It's kilometers as the crow flies, I'm pretty sure. And so much further when you're actually dealing with the complications of the terrain. And, and so he was fascinated, like, okay, how do they get them to the river? And then when, how do they get them on the boat? And when it's on the boat, how does, how exactly does this work if they're transporting it by boat? And kind of the same mystery in Egypt, right? Like, how do the nuances of these things work? So he devised this algorithm or whatever, where you could put in the hypothetical size of your Olmec raft and put in the hypothetical size of an Olmec head into this database or whatever. And when you made a raft that was too big to go down the narrow stretches of the Coetzkalcos river, which is like the Olmec Nile river, when the raft was too big and too wide to actually go down the road river and you put a 5 ton Olmec head on it, it would sink that raft. But the smallest olmec head is 6 tons, and the largest one is 52 tons. So how are they, how are they doing it? And this is something that, like all archaeologists have quietly known. This idea of they're just being transported on these simple balsa rafts must be wrong. It's, you know, it's, it's unexplained. How are these things being done? And I just find this realm really fascinating. Fascinating.
- [65:26]
Luke Reagan
Wow. It is. And then when. Do they even know what language they spoke?
- [65:31]
Joe Rogan
No, we don't know what language they spoke. We don't even know what they called themselves. The only reason we call them the Olmecs is because Cortez, 1519-1521, he's moving through Mexico to conquer Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. During this time, you have these Spanish chroniclers that are taking in information. You know, taking in information, but not at the rate that everything's being destroyed. You know, all these people are dying from this disease and influenza. And there's a record of what the people who lived in the Olmec region are called at that time in 1520, let's say, and the Aztecs called them the Olmecs in their language, Nahuatl. And those Olmec people, the name means the rubber people or the people of the land of rubber. They produced rubber, and that's how the Olmecs were so rich so early on in time. Time. But these are not. The people living in 1519 are not the Olmecs. There has already. The Olmecs have fallen, and there are other cultures that have arisen and fallen in this same region as well. The Olmecs are far, far, far, far into the distant past. The Aztecs maybe didn't even know who the Olmecs were, you know. So are you familiar with Teotihuacan? The, you know, the mat, the three massive. We have the Temple of the sun, the Temple of the Mountain Moon, and then the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. And they form this kind of like Orion's Belt alignment similar to Giza. Well, you know, when the Aztecs arrived in Mexico, Teotihuacan had been abandoned for almost a thousand years, we think. So when they arrived, Teotihuacan is already gone. We don't even know the name of Teotihuacan. We don't know the name of the people. We don't know the name of the city. We know their relationship with other people around them. Like the Maya were at war with Teotihuacan, but the civilization had already fallen. So when the Aztecs arrived, the Olmecs had been gone for almost 2,000 years. At least. The Olmec story had been gone. Teotihuacan had been gone for a thousand years. The Maya had already collapsed. The Maya collapsed long before the Spanish got there. And so, you know, it's just again, like the Americas are just so mysterious and there's so much to know there. And so kind of getting back to what I was saying is when I, when I talk about the mysteries of the Americas, I immediately get accosted by other of my quote, unquote colleagues. I don't have any colleagues in the academic realm, but, you know, other academics who will like immediately jump in my comment section on X or whatever and they'll reprimand me and they'll be like, oh, so back to the pseudoarchaeology, is it? And I'm like, so I can't talk about anything that's fascinating. I need to talk about things that are boring so you don't get upset with me. And now it's just like the, the, the popular audience has completely had enough of it and I'll have, like, 15 people jump in and, you know, defend me and. And be fun to watch. Yeah. And they'll be like. And they'll be like. Like, they'll be like, you know, okay, this is a perfect representation of what you guys do. I step just slightly out of this line, or what you think is appropriate for me. And I'm talking about things that are interesting, that inspire people to be interested in the ancient world, to go see these sites. Like, these people, they don't like you. They don't like the people that you have on. But how many people do you think you've sent to Egypt? You know, like, you had a significant impact. This show had a significant impact on me being interested in the ancient world. And I have traveled all over the world, you know, because largely, you know, some of this show inspired me to do that. And I'm probably one of the few people that found you because of Graham Hancock. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. Rather than the other one around. And so, you know, I've traveled all over the world, and then what I have done is inspired other people to travel around the world. So, you know, how many of these archaeologists that are keyboard warriors hiding behind, you know, a desk or whatever, how many of these people are inspiring people to travel around the world? And, you know, it's just. It's just, again, we're about to reach this, like, archaeological wild west where I don't really know what's going to happen in the future.
- [69:31]
Luke Reagan
You're always going to have people that are threatened by an emerging new thing, and they're going to attack it. Like, you know, famously in this world, Howard Stern used to attack podcasts as being useless.
- [69:46]
Joe Rogan
Oh, really?
- [69:47]
Luke Reagan
Why are you wasting your time? Get a radio show. Figure out how to do it. This is the beginning, the early days. Obviously, you can't do that anymore. But I think the same thing is happening with archaeologists, because Flint Dibble's own university that has the archeology program, they're cutting the archeology program. Yeah. Which is. This is why, like, you're in this, like, survival mode, this famine mode, and fam. It's terrible. But famine thinking is always very dangerous. You. You see it with people that don't want other people to be successful. It exists in the comedy world. There's famine thinking. When other people start doing better, they start attacking those people. They never attack people that aren't doing as well. It's just a natural human instinct, unfortunately. And it's a natural human instinct from people with poor character. Character. And I think that these academic institutes, they reinforce poor character and they, they actually encourage it. Poor character. And the, this like labeling people in the worst possible light in order to make your point, which is like ad hominem attacks are always a sign that your argument sucks. Everybody knows that if you really understand debating and you really understand like the actual impact that these kind of conversations have on people, the objective person on the outside looking at it, they see someone attacking someone, calling them all these names unfathom, and you go, oh, that guy's argument probably sucks like instantaneously. So they're destroying themselves while they're doing this. But this is. You'll see this in every walk of life. You'll see this in everything. It's just a human thing. When they don't want to work as hard as other people or they don't have the young fire like you have. Like, there's a thing that people have when they're very curious and young and they don't have maybe a lot of responsibilities or bills or problems, and they can just, they can devote their energy to this pursuit that terrifies people that have been kind of like half assing it for a long time. Half assing it and hiding behind these, these, you know, certificates on their wall that show that they're the, these are the gatekeepers of information. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's not going to work anymore. It doesn't work anymore with podcasts. It's not going to work anymore with your kind of work in archeology. It's not going to work anymore with UFO disclosure. It's not going to work anymore with any of this stuff. Like, people are way more interested in getting to the bottom of things and they don't trust institutions anymore.
- [72:14]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. And, and the institutions are feeling the pressure of independent media. You know, like going back to the Gobekli Tepe tree situation. It'll be really interesting to see, you know, like Jimmy's in an interesting position where maybe there's a way that the relationship between independent people and the popular, enthusiastic audience and the archaeological departments in Turkey can have a better relationship because of these things in the future.
- [72:45]
Luke Reagan
You know how that would work. People like you become the head of an archeology department. This is really the only way it's going to work. It's almost like these institutions have to feel so much pressure, pressure and so much disgust from the general public that they start incorporating new people into it. You know, sort of like CNN is trying to hire objective journalists now. Like, we Gotta get rid of Don Lemon and Brian Stelter. Oh, actually, he's back. But they. So they. They try to course correct because that's the only way to survive. Because it's not working. What you're doing is not working from.
- [73:19]
Joe Rogan
From what I can see in the limited amount that I see. And this. This is the hard part is, is sort of we get a skewed view into the archaeological world or the academic world, and sometimes I don't even know what's what, because the archaeologists that make their opinions known are usually the ones with really bad opinions, you know, and then all the other people that are pretty agreeable, they just kind of sit on the sideline, right? And it's hard to know, like, what are most people. What are most of these future archaeologists where they think, where's their mind at? And some of the young people I about talk talk to, they are fascinated by Graham Hancock. They may not agree with. You know, like, they. I guess in a way I could say is they may love the first nine episodes of Ancient Apocalypse, but in the 10th episode where Graham gives his. The end of his thesis, they'll be like, okay, I see the evidence differently, but this is really fascinating. And some of the mysteries you pointed out along the way are valid. Like, you know, the idea of, well, you know, the artifact record of the tools that we have that the Egyptians in the old kingdom were using does not fit the megalithic architecture that they then produced. Okay, what's the answer to this mystery? Could it have been that we're missing a chapter of history that's before that where a different civilization did it? Or is there for some reason there's an artifact record that's lost to us today? And so you have, you know, guys like Graham who will come in and posit, well, there could have been a lost civilization that did this? And. And then an archaeologist, a young archaeologist may disagree with a lost civilization, but they say, but Graham, you really pointed out the fact and made it well known that, you know, the artifact record that we have of how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery. And how they built the pyramids, that's a big mystery. This is worth considering. And they like Graham, you know, so a lot of young archaeologists, at least I say a lot, it's really just the ones I talk to in my spare time that are my age, they're fascinated by these ideas. And my hope is maybe these people become leaders someday, but at the same time, like, I don't know, to get ahead in that world. Man, yeah, you got to be a dog.
- [75:21]
Luke Reagan
The world's poisoned and the, the people at the top are not going to let go. They're going to stay in there till they, you know, Noam Chomsky's age. You know, this, this is. I just think it's never going to end in that way. I think it's got to become some sort of an independent branch, like, you know, a breakoff.
- [75:37]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. You know, Zahi is a. Zahi is a really good example of what I think goes on in archaeology in Egypt. You know, you have a lot of different missions from different countries working in Egypt. You have like a German mission, you have the American mission, you know, different people working at different sites. And I can't speak to every country that's working there. You have Australian missions that are working in Egypt digging at certain sites. But you know, when I watch Zahi, I'm like, I'm like, yeah, this is the, what you're seeing. This is the attitude that has been at the spear point of Egyptology for the last lifetime. And you can just imagine what goes on. Like, I mean, think about being on a dig site with him. Think about working in his industry, underneath him. Think about all the people that were a part of the discoveries that he made that feel so disrespected and so overlooked. You know, not once during that podcast did he ever acknowledge all the hard working archaeologists that were actually there in the dirt doing all this hard work. He just took all this limelight. And so, you know, clearly his identity is tied into what's in his coffee table book. And, you know, for him to act like that's the Bible of Giza is insane. I own the book and I've read it and it has half of a page about the subterranean chamber in Khufu's pyramid. So you can write a whole book about that.
- [77:00]
Luke Reagan
What is your. I don't mean to interrupt. Keep going.
- [77:03]
Joe Rogan
I was just gonna say. I was just gonna say, man, when you go to Egypt, there are some things that you're gonna be appalled by by like the modern Egyptian world. I do this series on YouTube called Megaliths yous've Never Seen before. And I'm always trying to like, find these weird, obscure blocks that you never see on Google. And I'm walking around this side of the Pyramid of Unas and there's a turd on the side of the pyramid.
- [77:32]
Luke Reagan
A human turd.
- [77:33]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, and it's from the guard that's like sitting up on top of the hill, the Egyptian guard looking down at me. And I go around to. To land of Kim, who I'm traveling with. Have you heard of him before?
- [77:43]
Luke Reagan
No.
- [77:44]
Joe Rogan
He's. He's an American that lives in Egypt and he's got his theories on. On the pyramids. And I'm traveling with him, and I was like, I was like, there's a turd on the pyramid over there. And he's like, he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and I was like a tourist. And he goes, no, not, not tourists. And so, you know, that, that the poop on the pyramid is pretty much like. That's kind of my. That's kind of my mental. That's burned into my brain. My image of. Of Egyptology in some aspects, like when it's isolated to Egypt. I can't speak for all the other missions that operate in Egypt, but what were you about to say?
- [78:13]
Luke Reagan
I don't remember. Where were we at when I was going to interrupt? Oh, this is what I remember. What is your opinion about Christopher Dunn's ideas?
- [78:24]
Joe Rogan
I don't know. I really don't know, man. I.
- [78:27]
Luke Reagan
So for people that don't know, Christopher Dunn has a theory that the Great Pyramid was actually some sort of a power generator, that it produced hydrogen gas.
- [78:40]
Joe Rogan
I don't know. I mean, you know, I know that. That the Egyptians, it's obvious that they have technology that it. That is lost to us today.
- [78:48]
Luke Reagan
The drill holes.
- [78:49]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah.
- [78:50]
Luke Reagan
The way they cut the concrete or the. Excuse me. The granite.
- [78:53]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. But I, you know, I, I really don't know as far as the, you know, like the, the manufacturing aspects, the, the engine, I guess, the engineering, the potential usages of these artifacts. It's not really like my specialty. Like, I, you know, like these, these vases are. Are. Oh, this is a heavy one. These vases are fascinating. But, you know, I guess my interest would be studying, like, what can I. What can we learn about the context around these things and how they existed in their world and how people interacted with them more so than, you know, what did these things? What were they actually used for, I guess, and how exactly were they made? And so I just don't know about Chris Dunn's theory. You know, I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is like, well, you know, most of the pyramid is limestone and the interior is granite. I, I hear people talk about how, like, the makeup of the granite could be conductive in some way, but, man, it's just. It's like the farthest thing from my set of. Of knowledge.
- [79:49]
Luke Reagan
Right. It is absolutely fascinating, though, because if he's accurate, if he, if he's on to it, like, boy, does that change everything. And if those Italian scientists that believe that there's literally a two kilometer deep structure underneath the pyramid, if they're correct, correct, like, boy, yeah. The whole thing is like, what are we even talking about now?
- [80:11]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I find that fascinating. I, I think that the, the main drama around those scans was, you know, when the scans came out, I don't think anybody was denying what was seen on the scans. I think it was like they, they had the, they had the artistic interpretations of the art concepts that they produced of what they thought was in there. And I think a lot of people were like, whoa.
- [80:32]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, that was a little weird because.
- [80:33]
Joe Rogan
Because even me, I was a little bit like, huh. When, when they, they made a. They made an art concept of it and they took the king's chamber and the relieving chambers in the Great Pyramid and superimposed it onto the middle pyramid and they, they, I guess, quintupled it like they made five of them. And I was thinking, like, why, why, why do that? Like, you're kind of, you're kind of undermining what your skin is when you're creating like a fantasy image. Because you're getting ahead of your scans. Yeah, you're getting ahead of yourself because, you know, we need to do the whole scan again, but you need to have tests. So like Luis Alvarez, are you familiar with him? He worked on the, on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer. And after the war, in the 50s or in the 60s, he got to go to Egypt and he scanned in the Khafre pyramid. He did the muon scans. And when he was in there, they tested, they tested it all before. So he was able to scan up through the pyramid and he got the pinnacle of. Of the piece pyramid, and he got all four corners. And so they tested it and they did it several times just to confirm that what they were getting was right. And I think the muon scan only scanned like 19% of the pyramid. This is the 60s, so. But they didn't find anything. But the Stanford project came the next decade, and they found subterranean chambers under Khafre's pyramid. There's one like 69ft down and another 120ft down. Huge chambers. Bigger than the chambers inside the pyramids. And so, yeah, I mean, I guess we just have to wait and see what's going to happen. And I know that the scan pyramids, guys, the ones who found the, the void above the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid. I know they're interested in this now and they're going to verify if this is true or not. And yeah, I'm interested in seeing how this goes. This could be a big year, man. If, if they actually drill into to that void above the Grand Gallery, that's going to be a big deal.
- [82:24]
Luke Reagan
What do you think's in that void?
- [82:28]
Joe Rogan
I have no idea. You know, it's pretty big, right?
- [82:31]
Luke Reagan
It's the size of two semi trucks.
- [82:34]
Joe Rogan
It's the same size or bigger than the Grand Gallery itself. And the Grand Gallery, when you go in, it's a huge building or you know, you're inside a building inside of the pyramid and it's as big or bigger than that. And you know, the most conservative explanation is that, that it's an open interior that served as a ramp where they were pulling the blocks up higher up to the top. Nobody really knows exactly how they were built in the, in the, the angle of that Grand Gallery is really, really steep. I don't know that you could pull an 80 ton granite block up an angle that steep. It seems like everyone who's an expert in, in that, you know, who studies independently is like, no, you're never going to pull, never going to pull weight up to. Honest, I have no idea. You know, I'm, I was fascinated when I heard an Egyptologist when I was in Egypt in January and I was asking him, what do you think that they're going to find in that void? And he was like, he was telling me I think that that's where Khufu is buried. And I was like, oh, okay, really? So you actually think that he's still in the pyramid? And he was like, yeah, I think all the rest of it was a decoy. And I think that his son, who's able to continue his legacy like permanently sealed him in that, in that tomb. And I was like, that's, that's fascinating. And, and I said, I said, you know, there's other voids that they found too. What do you think of those? And so we're standing on this felucca at 1am on the Nile and we're just, you know, shooting the shit. And he was like, he's like, I have something to show you. And he pulls out his phone. He was like, he's like, I cannot send to you, but I will show you for one second. He showed me a photo of the inside of a chamber that I've never, I hadn't seen before. And it hasn't Been published yet. I'll let you know when it comes out. But it's burned into my mind. It's from the floor shooting across the room. All you can see is two walls meeting each other in a roof. And I said, I said, that's in a. That's in. That's in the Great Pyramid. He goes. And he was like. And he wouldn't share it. He wouldn't share with me. I didn't want to press him too much, but stole his phone.
- [84:29]
Luke Reagan
Give me that phone. Shut up. You can't keep this.
- [84:35]
Joe Rogan
Well, you know. No, man, that's happening all over the world. Like this delay of information is all over the world. Do you remember the tunnels that came out? Or maybe it's in November. The headlines that. No, yeah, it was in November. The headlines that came out about the tunnels that were found under Cusco in Peru that connect to Sacsayhuaman and they go underneath the coracancha.
- [84:56]
Luke Reagan
They knew about that a long time ago.
- [84:58]
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [84:59]
Luke Reagan
It's documented.
- [85:01]
Joe Rogan
In fall of last year, year, I made friends with the head archaeologist at that site. And one early morning at like 4am, he took me down inside part of the tunnels. And yeah, I was, I was in there before it all came out. And he took me into. So all these archaeologists, they like live on site. And these are all, these are all Inca people. So they believe that they're studying their ancestral heritage. These are, these are really good people. And I'm in there, you know, know shoddy little home that's on the archaeological site. I mean, they probably make no money, but they're just, they're just so passionate about this and they feel like they're doing something that's like one of the most important things anybody in the world is doing. And have you been to Peru?
- [85:41]
Luke Reagan
No.
- [85:42]
Joe Rogan
When you go to Cusco, man, the Sacred Valley, it has something there that not even Egypt has. I don't know how to explain it, really. It's. It's. It's a sacred place. It's like the Sacred valley is exactly right. It's a magical kind of place. Machu Picchu. You should book two days when you go because you're gonna get rained on on one of the days. But you're out there on this, you know, 7,800 foot mountaintop, and it's so steep you cannot see the bottom. When you're looking over the side of the city and you're just in this sacred place in the middle of the Amazon up in the mountains, and it's just A different place, man. It has a type of charm that like, not even Egypt has. Egypt. You're gonna be blown away by the structures. You're gonna be blown away by the. By the pyramids and the T temples. But this is something else. It has a. It has an otherworldly like you feel like you're on some kind of like Star wars planet when you're there. It's fascinating.
- [86:32]
Luke Reagan
Because of the environment.
- [86:34]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's like the environment. You know, I. I wondered if it was when you're in cusco, you're at 11,500 foot elevation. And I wondered if I was like missing oxygen to my brain and I was like, whoa, this place is hilarious. Awesome. You know, but no, it really is amazing. And the people are so nice. Nice. And so anyways.
- [86:55]
Luke Reagan
What was that?
- [86:58]
Joe Rogan
I think it was very similar to Alexandria's library. I think it was a place of study, where people are studying the stars. Archaeoastronomy is like the next frontier of archaeology. It's the way that ancient people are interacting with the night sky and what they know about the cosmos. You know, the Maya were calculating like millions of years into the future and millions of years into the past, and they had this numerology system that's just amazing. But anyway, so I met Saqsay woman and they take me into this back room and they show me all these bodies that they pull. I probably should be saying this, but whatever. They show me all these bodies that they pulled out of the tunnels and it was these. They thought that they were like sacred guardians of whatever is inside of this tunnel. And these are all buried at sacsable mont. So there's like skulls everywhere, there's boxes and all these bones. There was a. There was like an obsidian mirror with like a little stick on it, a bunch of gold artifacts in this room. It was just boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes. And I haven't seen any of this stuff published yet. So this is how much of a delay there is on archaeology.
- [88:06]
Luke Reagan
What is the delay in that stuff? Because it would seem like such an enormous discovery.
- [88:11]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, what I think it is is. Well, you kind of have. I would, I would say it's a mix of a lot of different things. Let's say, let's say the most non malicious side is that these countries are totally dependent upon tourism. And they want to prepare like a media, you know, like a big media buzz to drive tourism. So they want to do it at the right time of the year and then it'll inspire people to book their Trip down, down to the Sacred Valley. You know, it's all it's about. It's a money making machine. Right. It's their biggest draw to come and see this part of the world.
- [88:47]
Luke Reagan
It seems so counterintuitive because new discoveries would make people want to visit.
- [88:52]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. They just want to hold it off to like the right part of the year. This is something I've heard in Peru. This is something I've heard in Egypt. Do you remember the tomb of Thutmose II that was just discovered recently? I heard about that. So let me think that that came out two or three months ago. And when I was there in October, I had heard that it was. That it was found. So. So these things are happening way, way in advance now. The other side is there's sort of this Zahi was effect like, like Ed Barnhart, my professor mentor, he wanted to study in Peru. Whether or not the Inca or ancient Peruvians are like fusing these andesite stones together. So you've seen how, how the stones like fit together in the same way that they do at the Valley Temple in Egypt, the red granite. So they're using this gray andesite which is. Sometimes the andesite is harder than the granite in Egypt and they're like morphing these stones together at impossible angles. I'm sure you've seen the 12 sided stone and maybe you've seen the scoop marks on the side of the stone where it looks like the outside of the stone was softened at one point and you could scrape a piece off. And. And so it's Dr. Barnhart's idea that somehow. Well, and it's not without evidence. So in the Chilean desert the Inca are building upon. The Inca empire were building upon roads that went all across South America. And these roads weren't initially. The foundations weren't laid by the Inca. They may have been improved by the Inca, but they go back to the Wari Empire which predates the Inca. And it almost certainly goes back further than this. The southernmost point of these high. It goes off into the Chilean desert, into the Atacama Desert and they just kind of disappear into the desert. And for a long time it's been a mystery of what the hecker are these Peruvians doing down in the Chilean desert. What is it down there? What's a resource that they need. But there are these, there are these acid deposits that are down in that desert. And somehow they invented, somehow they invented this clay pottery that whatever they used to make it, the acid wouldn't melt through the pot Pottery, so you could carry it. There's evidence of this at Tiwanaku as well, which I'm sure you've heard of. Tiwanaku. There's evidence of this, of this acid at Tiwanaku. And people would talk about how the acid could, like, melt the stones. And sometimes you talk about how, like, bird poop or bird, I don't even know, like, throw up or whatever could. Could melt the stone. And so there's all these, you know, ideas that are these myth, myths about the stones melting. Anyways, Dr. Barnhart's idea was that, was that those roads go down, down there because they are mining and collecting the acids and they're bringing them back and they're softening the outside of the stone. And rather than carving the stones to fit together, they're setting the stones on top of each other and it's creating its own morph, if that makes sense. The stones are morphing together. And so he. There's two reasons, but you see them a lot as to why he thinks this. There was an earthquake in 1650 that destroyed the Spanish city that was sitting on top of the Inca city of Cusco. So you have this ancient city that's there, and the stones are so massive, this Spanish couldn't tear them all down. So they just gave up and they built new buildings over it. In 1650, this horrific earthquake knocked down the Spanish city and ancient buildings were still there, hadn't moved at all. In 1950, another earthquake happened, knocked down the Spanish city and the ancient city is still standing. So now these are preserved as cultural heritage monuments. And they don't build over them, but they, like a Starbucks or a KFC or a McDonald's will be built inside of an ancient Inca building. You'll walk in and it's like megalithic stonework ins of kfc. It's amazing.
- [92:33]
Luke Reagan
Wow.
- [92:34]
Joe Rogan
But it's everywhere. It's the whole city. It's the whole modern city. When you go one day, you just walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. One of the projects we're going to do for the Maya Exploration center is I'm going to go down to Cusco for a month and I'm going to make the world's first map of where all the stones actually are. There there is a map that tourists get, but it's a shitty map. It's not even accurate. So that's one of my projects, is I'm going to map all of these stones and where they are around Cusco. And it'll be like on an app or a Website or something where you can find it. But yeah, it's incredible. So they preserve the stones. And so when you're walking around, getting back to why, can we see some.
- [93:10]
Luke Reagan
Images of the stones that would indicate that they possibly were melted? Like what's like the best?
- [93:17]
Joe Rogan
Oh man. How could you search this up? Maybe just look up Cusco cyclopean stones. We may be able to find an image and I could show you something on my phone. I know I've got it on my phone. Okay, maybe I could send it to you. But I'll actually send you the photo. And so some of these are from Sacsay woman. Okay, so to the top left here. So that's the 12 sided stone. It's on this building. When you walk around this building, the name is escaping me right now. It's the palace of. It's the palace of something. When you walk around this, when you walk around this building, you're going to see some of the stones where an earthquake has separated. So you have two stones, stones that sit perfectly on top of each other. Well, when an earthquake happens, one of these stones will slide back and when it does, you'll see an angle that ramps up like this up to the exterior. And so what it looks like is the stone is placed on top and it smushed the stone down. Does that make sense? Whoa, man. If we searched hard enough, we could find it here. I will send you this photo. I've got it on my phone.
- [94:19]
Luke Reagan
Wow.
- [94:20]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [94:21]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, just that idea.
- [94:25]
Joe Rogan
And so it melted into place. Yeah. Oh, okay.
- [94:32]
Luke Reagan
So they cut these stones used ass. This is the theory. Is that it right there?
- [94:36]
Joe Rogan
No, no.
- [94:37]
Luke Reagan
So they cut these stones, use the acid and set them in to seal so that there's no gap in between the stones. So it's not that they have to carve it perfectly, but rather that the weight of the other stone, they get.
- [94:51]
Joe Rogan
It roughly the right, right shape and then. And then lay them down on top of each other. It's on, it's on one of these walls. So that one you have your cursor on, that's fake. I walked up to it and it's like hollow. I was like tapping on it. It's just a fake wall. Some, I don't know why. In Cusco they have some. They, they. Some people will decorate their walls to make them look like they're cyclopean walls. You go knock on it and it's like plastic. But there's tons and tons and tons and tons. The majority of the city is just the Ancient city. What is this?
- [95:18]
Luke Reagan
Inca stone monument. Irreparably. It's like someone cut out a piece of it.
- [95:21]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, Somebody went up to it in the middle of night like a drunk tourist and started hitting it with a hammer. The 12 sided stone, which is like the most sacred stone in Cusco. Yeah.
- [95:32]
Luke Reagan
Gross.
- [95:33]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Okay, so. So you see this long, the stone of the 12 angles, that one right there in the middle. That stone is in that alley right there, if you could find it. But I, you know, it's so crazy.
- [95:43]
Luke Reagan
There's a building on top of that.
- [95:46]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [95:48]
Luke Reagan
That's what's so weird about it. Like, look at this stupid house that's falling apart. That's on top of these ancient stones.
- [95:55]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's. It's crazy, man. It's. It's an amazing place. You'll walk around and just be consistently stunned by the amount of stonework that's there and what they are able to achieve. And this kind of cyclopean stonework where the stones all have these, you know, no two stones are exactly alike. You see that stone work in one place in Egypt, which is at the Valley Temple next to the Sphinx. And you don't see that, as far as I know, recreated anywhere else, but in Peru, it's everywhere.
- [96:31]
Luke Reagan
Wow.
- [96:31]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. So that's kind of a repaired wall. You can see that it fell apart and they put it back up. But these are, these are mortarless buildings. Oh, hey, go, go. If you go just one below the one that you're at right now. So this is the temple of at Machu Picchu. Look at the size of the stone wall. That's one stone on the lower part of it. And you can see that the size of the stones that are together. As earthquakes have rattled the city, the wall still kind of holds together. It bends and holds together completely mortarless. It's just fascinating. And on top of that, machu Picchu itself. 60% of the megalithic construction work is in the foundation of Machu Picchu. So it's underneath what you're seeing. And, and there are areas that are roped off where you can go down, like underneath the city, but it's all roped off. And I, I don't know a lot about it. I got, I got a little bit of a photo of where you can go down into these. I don't think. I think they're like man made labyrinths that are underneath the city, but there's a lot more there. And so when you're there, you just get this, like, Intrigue. And. And I was curious how Egypt would stack up, because I did. Did. I did Peru last year. And then the day I landed from Peru, I headed off to Egypt for a month. And then.
- [97:45]
Luke Reagan
Damn, what a life. You got a great life, dude. That's cool.
- [97:49]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, thank you.
- [97:50]
Luke Reagan
That's really cool.
- [97:51]
Joe Rogan
It's just.
- [97:52]
Luke Reagan
How far is this from Nazca?
- [97:54]
Joe Rogan
Very far. Peru is deceivingly big. Peru is like half the size of the United States.
- [98:00]
Luke Reagan
Really?
- [98:00]
Joe Rogan
It's really, really big.
- [98:02]
Luke Reagan
Wow.
- [98:02]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah.
- [98:03]
Luke Reagan
I had no idea.
- [98:03]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. The Nazca lines are really, really, really, really far away. It's very hard to do a. You can't do a tour of, like, all of Peru. It's too big. It would be like. It would be like, if you were going to go on a United States tour, you'd have to pick a place to go because it's just so massive. Usually when people, like, do a tour of Peru, they'll pick, like, Paracas, Nazca. You know, you pick these desert coastline areas and you go see that. Because to get from there to the sacred village valley is quite a journey. Yeah, yeah. It would take. Takes like a day and a half of consistently traveling to actually get there.
- [98:42]
Luke Reagan
Have you seen the new scans of the Nazca lines where they. They found new petroglyphs?
- [98:47]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The man, there's gonna be so much like that that's going to be found. People are gonna be able to.
- [98:52]
Luke Reagan
What is all that stuff?
- [98:53]
Joe Rogan
Fly these. Well, you know, it's. It's amazing, like, how exactly 1. What's the inspiration from making these giant. You know, the sophistication is in the planning and the math behind how exactly you make these. How exactly you make these images in the ground that are miles wide and very intricate. Like, if you look at the spider. The spider. There's a spider there that's anatomically correct for a local spider that's there. And there's some aspect about the spider, a detail that they incorporate that you would only know if you were, like, really studying these little creatures and wanted to recreate it on a massive scale. But the legs, man, they're. They're mapping. I mean, look at this is. This is an enormous thing in the ground that if you don't have flight, you're never going to be able to know that you did it, that you did it precisely right or unless you had very meticulous planning and everything.
- [99:44]
Luke Reagan
But again, what's the inspiration for this?
- [99:46]
Joe Rogan
What's the inspiration. Why would you be doing this. What is this for?
- [99:49]
Luke Reagan
Why does it have that one leg that hooks off to the left?
- [99:52]
Joe Rogan
I don't know.
- [99:53]
Luke Reagan
See that? That one. Lengthened peace. Very strange.
- [99:57]
Joe Rogan
Well, you know, the Nazca, they. The. The exact timeline of. Of their civilization is a little bit blurry. But I mean, they had. They had disappeared more than a thousand years before the Spanish arrived.
- [100:10]
Luke Reagan
Jamie, can I ask you what. What is that all about? Why does it have all those additional lines? I don't. Someone's doing different.
- [100:16]
Joe Rogan
I don't know.
- [100:17]
Luke Reagan
Is that just art? Yeah, I think they're making it on maybe one of those sand tables or something like that T shirt. There's other weird ones. Like the one that looks like an astronaut.
- [100:28]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, he does. I actually think that that's a. I actually think that's a palpa line, which is. It's a different culture that does the same thing. If you. If you look up palpa lines, you.
- [100:37]
Luke Reagan
May be able to see there's quite a few of them. Look at that one, the jester one, the one with the antenna, the upper left.
- [100:42]
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, look at him.
- [100:43]
Luke Reagan
No, no, that. Yeah, there it is. Like that one.
- [100:46]
Joe Rogan
Where does that come from?
- [100:47]
Luke Reagan
Can't make it that big. Make it a little smaller. There you go. What is that?
- [100:51]
Joe Rogan
And why does it.
- [100:53]
Luke Reagan
What's that? It says A.I. on covers.
- [100:55]
Joe Rogan
Oh, are they A.I.
- [100:55]
Luke Reagan
But this is.
- [100:56]
Joe Rogan
Okay, I'm sorry.
- [100:57]
Luke Reagan
This is the A.I. oh, hey, look at.
- [100:59]
Joe Rogan
Look at the shark. Look at the shark on there. Isn't that cool? So you have seafaring dude. Okay. Do you know of Vinapu in. In Easter Island? It's. I think it's called Vinapu. It's this platform building that on Easter island with all the big heads. That is the exact same architecture as what we're seeing in. In Peru. These people are traveling out into the Pacific Ocean and back. You know, it just, It's. It's fascinating, man. Thor Heyerdahl with Kon Tiki. He proved it. Yeah, there we go. Yeah. So, you know, it's falling apart. It's not the same stone. It's. It's a local volcanic sandstone, I think. I don't think that this is basalt. It might be basalt, but it's a volcanic. It's a volcanic stone. I'm actually pretty sure it's basalt. It's made out of the same thing of. Of the Easter island heads. So you have this vinapu. But another project that Maya Exploration center is working on later this year is we're going down to make a New updated map, archeological map of Easter Island, Rapa Nui. And I'm not going, but this is Dr. Barnhart doing it. And there's another site down on the remote end of the island where there's another structure like this that you never see mentioned. And so that we're going to document that and put that out. So there's no doubt that. I mean, these people are incredibly advanced, incredibly connected, incredibly intelligent, and it's just so mysterious. Okay. Do you know of the Blythe lines? Have you heard of this?
- [102:27]
Luke Reagan
No.
- [102:28]
Joe Rogan
Blythe, California. There are. There are Nazca lines up there.
- [102:31]
Luke Reagan
Really?
- [102:31]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah, we should look this up. Yeah. So where's Blythe? I think it's right before you get to Nevada. You're, like driving, so if you. If you. You'll pass right by. If you're driving from Las Vegas into California. California, I think so Blythe lines. Yeah, we should. Yeah, we should zoom in from Google Earth. This would be cool.
- [102:51]
Luke Reagan
Where is it, Jamie? It's on the 10. I was trying. It's like right where my cursor is, so.
- [102:57]
Joe Rogan
Oh, so that's Blythe, California. You might be able to look up Blythe line.
- [103:00]
Luke Reagan
I did, but I was trying to look where it was, so I was trying to show you where it was. Oh, right. So these are the. Oh, whoa.
- [103:06]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they're huge.
- [103:08]
Luke Reagan
Whoa.
- [103:10]
Joe Rogan
So, dude, this is not.
- [103:12]
Luke Reagan
What the fuck is that?
- [103:14]
Joe Rogan
This. This is. I mean, to me it's pretty obvious that there are people who are. And this is. They think that this is younger than the Nazca lines. But even if it is, it's pretty obvious to me that you have traders and you have people who are very capable of traveling all up and down the Americas. It's all interconnected, connected.
- [103:36]
Luke Reagan
How many of these lines exist?
- [103:39]
Joe Rogan
It's not really majorly studied, but I think that there's a few of these images that are out there and more that are further off into the desert that some people have.
- [103:48]
Luke Reagan
One of them was a monkey. How do they even know what monkeys are?
- [103:53]
Joe Rogan
Well, okay, that's a great question.
- [103:57]
Luke Reagan
Were there monkeys in California?
- [103:59]
Joe Rogan
No, I doubt it. But there were. An idea of how this could happen is. So at Teotihuacan, like I was talking to you, this is an hour north of Mexico City. There were monkeys that we have found that were in zoos in Teotihuacan, like dead monkeys that are buried. And this species of monkey is only found in the Southern Amazon. So it's all the way up in northern Mexico. So all of these things are connected. Okay, another. Jamie, could we look up, please, just for clarity?
- [104:29]
Luke Reagan
That one was a NASCAR line. The monkey was not in the California.
- [104:32]
Joe Rogan
Oh, okay.
- [104:33]
Luke Reagan
Okay, that makes sense. Came up. Okay, so, yeah, those monkeys are in Peru.
- [104:37]
Joe Rogan
Well, even so, there are. There are Amazonian monkeys that are coming.
- [104:40]
Luke Reagan
See what the other Blythe lines are. The article started showing different stuff because I was explaining what they were. So comparisons to NASA. They're found in 1932 by a pilot. That's what I was trying to figure out. Okay, so that's one of them. It looks like a giraffe. Could be a deer.
- [104:57]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it could be a deer. But are deer. Are deer out there?
- [105:01]
Luke Reagan
Quadruped, it says. Well, there's deer in California for sure. There's probably mule deer in that part of the country. There certainly is in Nevada. Nevada has a big population of deer. California figure represents horses reintroduced historical date sometime after the 1500s. So maybe some they don't know.
- [105:20]
Joe Rogan
When these scroll back up again, they have no idea.
- [105:24]
Luke Reagan
I don't know if that's a horse.
- [105:25]
Joe Rogan
Doesn't look like a horse to me. I think you're right.
- [105:27]
Luke Reagan
The tail, though, is a lot longer than it.
- [105:29]
Joe Rogan
Oh, yeah, A little. A deer. They've got the little tail.
- [105:32]
Luke Reagan
It's like a shitty artist. I was stumbling down something with the Olmec stuff. I think it was the Olmec that. There's a bunch. I see a zoomorphs here, there a bunch of other weird rocks that had, like, anthropomorphized animals playing on top of humans.
- [105:48]
Joe Rogan
Do you know about. Have you ever heard of werejack jaguars?
- [105:52]
Luke Reagan
No.
- [105:52]
Joe Rogan
Oh, dude, this is like, this is my shit. Okay, so where jaguars it is another piece of evidence of at least, well, the lower part of North America connecting with the Amazon. Oh, dude, this is. This is badass. All right, so. So the very first. Some of the first evidence that we have of people in the Americas. So you think of, like, where do you. Where do you imagine that people migrate into the Americas? Like, where do you think we would find the first evidence at?
- [106:22]
Luke Reagan
Oh, boy. Well, I would imagine it'd be somewhere where the Olmecs were.
- [106:31]
Joe Rogan
Mm, yeah, maybe so. Yeah. Or, you know, traditionally. Sure, sure. Traditionally, people think that maybe you would find it, you know, in Alaska, coming in, you know, people migrating over during or before. After the Ice Age.
- [106:47]
Luke Reagan
Sure.
- [106:48]
Joe Rogan
Or. I'm sorry, during and before the Ice Age. And then some people might think that, you know, you have Polynesians that are skipping across the Pacific that are coming into. But most of the time it's west coast. You'd find. People think you'd find something out there. Some of the oldest evidence that we have are 30,000 year old caves on the east side of the Amazon. On the east side, the opposite side of the Americas, as far away as you can possibly get from, you know, where people would have traditionally arrived in the Americas. Now that evidence is constantly changing. There's constantly new things that are being found, like white sands and there's what, 150,000 year old, like bone tools or chisels that are being found where people were cutting into woolly mammoth bones. You know, crazy stuff. But one of these old evidences is people in the Amazon 20 to 30,000 years ago on the east coast in Brazil, on the Atlantic coast, and they have these. I think it may have been Teddy Roosevelt's granddaughter that found this. She was, she was a South American archaeologist. She was inspired to go to the Amazon. And so it's really interesting. In the Olmec realm, there's what's called a werejaguar. It's just like a. It's like a werewolf spelled, you know, sort of the same. But you have this. You have these two different dichotomies in the Olmec world. You have the Olmec heads, which, by the way, I brought you a head.
- [108:11]
Luke Reagan
Oh, nice, nice. More stuff for this table. Sit right next to hecklefish.
- [108:19]
Joe Rogan
So this is made. So this is made from basalt by the modern Olmec people.
- [108:25]
Luke Reagan
Whoa, that's cool.
- [108:28]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, super cool. So these guys.
- [108:30]
Luke Reagan
Thank you.
- [108:32]
Joe Rogan
These guys, we don't know who they are. We don't know exactly what they represent because they're, they're just guys with normal faces. You know, they're, they have Olmec faces, but they're all wearing these. This helmet. What the hell does the helmet mean? It could be two different things. It's a signature of their divine, like, rulership. Like, like, we think they might be kings. Somebody who can, you know, somebody who can commission a monument this big. This is a testament to his power. Or these are revered ball game players. The Mesoamerican ball game. I'm sure you've dove into this a little bit. Or it's both. That the, you know, the most masculine thing that you can be is a great Mesoamerican ball game player. And that's the king. He wants to see himself out of it. It's the same thing as Marcus Aurelius son. Why am I forgetting his name? The really bad emperor. God. I can't remember his name. But anyways, he wanted to be seen, like, Hercules fighting in the coliseum. And so we think this might be a kind of similar thing. There's a whole different type of people that are existing in the Olmec realm. We can look up Olmec wear jaguar, please, Jamie. Thank you. And. And there's a whole different type of person. So here's one image. If you keep scrolling, you'll see images that are carved into. So this is a little bit of a better image right here. But sometimes when they're carved into jade and you can see the light reflecting off of it, you get a better. You get a better image of what these things really look like. So were jaguar, Olmec, and maybe do jade. Oh, yeah, there we go. Top, top right. Yeah, check that guy out. So that's a. So that's a human. That's not an animal. It is a human who has turned into the essence of a jaguar. And we see this everywhere, all over the Olmec world. But they're never the colossal heads. They're always in jade or they're smaller Olmec monuments. And sometimes the heads are. Sometimes the heads are maimed. Like, the head is just completely destroyed. And. And there's these jaguar claws that are carved into an Olmec face, like, tearing apart its face, tearing apart the symbol that's on the top of their head. And so a lot of people have wondered, like, why are these scratch marks in all of these Olmec monuments? But all the scratch marks only appear in Olmec monuments that are not the. Were jaguar. And so what I think this is a little bit of research that I'm doing, and I'm writing a book on the Olmecs right now, is what I think is there's a feud between the rulers and the shamanic class. And I think that these were jaguar people. People. These people who are taking some kind of hallucinogen, taking a psychedelic, and basically imbuing the essence of a jaguar in some strange, crazy way that we can't explain. These are feuding with each other. And when I'm in Mexico and I'm in these museums where you have these mushroom stone effigies that are all lined up, I'll ask a local archaeologist there. I'll be like, so these mushrooms, do you think that these depict hallucinogens that they may have been taking to get high? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, really? You don't like. You look at all the crazy shit that ancient Americans are making. If you look at ancient American artwork anywhere, you can tell it's all like mind bending stuff to look at. They're clearly, I think they're being influenced by plants. Now this were jaguar isn't just isolated to the Olmec world. It also pops up at a place called Chavin Dewantar. Have you ever heard of this?
- [111:59]
Luke Reagan
No.
- [111:59]
Joe Rogan
This is in the Andes. It's one of the oldest cities in the Andes. So before she Shavim we can follow the DNA evidence of burials. Like you can tell like okay these, these people are younger if we carbon date their bodies that are buried underneath these temples and they're related to these people that are older. So you're trying to piece together this DNA web but it's very, very loose. So there's a place called, there's a culture called Kural Supe culture and they are building pyramids before the old kingdom of Egypt ever even existed. This is, this is 5,500 years ago at least on the coast of Peru, like right on the beach. And there's like 15 huge pyramids out there. But this is a non pottery, non artistic culture. So we don't have pottery and we don't have art from them and we don't have stone statues or anything like that. Just these structures. And from what we can tell they keep getting hit by these like apocalyptic storms, these tropical El Ninos and La Ninas that are just destroying their civilization and they're trying to, to rebuild it again. And eventually they say you know what, forget this, we're moving up into the Andes. Well when they move up into the Andes on Chavin de Onetar, they then come in contact with Amazonians. They meet Amazonians for the first time and all of a sudden these people, they have pottery, they have art, they have gods, they have a pantheon, they have stone statues and they are, were jaguars, they are these Shimano people. Oh this is from, oh this is this on my ex. Oh cool. So, so I posted about this today. So these faces right here, these are on the side of the temple of Chevin that faces east off into the Amazon. And when you look at Chavin pottery, it's the same as Amazonian pottery in the region. So the people of the Andes, as soon as they interact with the Amazon, they take, they, they acquire this religion, this culture, this icon, iconography, they completely change as a people and they start building the first structures that we know of that have interiors. Because before this, these pyramids that were out on the coastline, you're, like walking on top of this big stone mound. But at Chevin, it's a, it's a huge square style building that you can, that has open doors that you can walk in through. And all of this happens as soon as they interact with Amazonians. And so, yeah, so this is, it's a huge structure. And the, the stones that make up the staircases. Oh, my God. Okay, have you seen the name is escaping me right now. But, but Wandering Wolf went out there, Michael Collins, and he found that the. He saw these big trilithon stones that are sitting on the side of the mountain in Peru. Do you remember this Giant stones. That white stone is the same white stone that's used in the staircases and on the door jambs and the lintels here at Chev. So you see that the, the open door right there at the bottom? Yeah. So those white stones on the side, those stones may have come from that quarry that he went and visited where those gigantic, you know, trilithon, Balbeck sized stones.
- [115:01]
Luke Reagan
How far is that?
- [115:02]
Joe Rogan
It's really, really far from here. I don't, I don't know. That would be something good that I should know. So some of it's megalithic, some of it's decent size. It's really that front wall right there with that entrance, the steps going up to it. And then on the inside of the temple, you have the megalithic stonework. And then you have this, then you have this monolith on the inside. So you see this guy? Look at that. That's a human with jaguar fangs coming out of his mouth and all of these tenon heads that are on the side of the temple, they're facing out towards the Amazon. It's telling us that this religion, this idea of these people who are somehow doing these shamanic practices, which I think are so clearly so obvious, obviously, is plants like ayahuasca or whatever it is, inducing these people into a state of consciousness where somehow they're taking on the effects of the jaguar. Like you and Paul. Rosalie talked about this, and when he was talking about his experience with ayahuasca, I believe he said maybe it was on this show that for a moment, like, he shrunk down to the size of an atom and he's floating through the Amazon and then all of a sudden he was looking through, like the eyes of a jaguar for a moment. And this is something that constant theme.
- [116:11]
Luke Reagan
Amongst people who've done ayahuasca.
- [116:12]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. So this is something that I think, I think it's I think it's evidence. I mean, we can go, we can talk about this forever, but I think there's so much evidence. Oh, isn't this cool? Yeah.
- [116:22]
Luke Reagan
Well, there's also evidence that jaguars eat the same plants.
- [116:26]
Joe Rogan
Yes. Yeah. Have you seen this on. What is it? Weird Nature. There's a documentary out there called Weird Nature Jaguars Tripping. Yeah. And it makes it akin to like catnip. And it's like the jaguar also has its own.
- [116:41]
Luke Reagan
This is why I brought this up. Terence Vegeta had a very fascinating theory about why ketamine in particular feels like an empty office building. And his, his theory, it's like ketamine is like you enter a realm, but there's no one there. And this is, by the way, he's talking about ketamine in like the 80s and 90s. Whereas his theory is that when you imbibe, when you take a psychedelic medicine, when you take any sort of psychedelic plant, mushroom, whatever it is, you're not just having an experience, you are also interacting with all of the experiences that have ever been had with these things. Which is one of the reasons why when people take certain psychedelics, they have very clear Egyptian iconography appears in their. In their trip. And his belief, or his theory, theory was that it's far more complex than you're taking a psychedelic drug. You're taking this psychedelic. That allows you to interact with all the experiences anyone has ever had with those.
- [117:48]
Joe Rogan
Oh, wow.
- [117:49]
Luke Reagan
Including jaguars. Now also, there's always been this conflict between the ruling class and this shamanic rituals. This is the Elusinian Mysteries. They shot all that stuff down. Wouldn't it make sense that the claw marks would represent the battle between the shamans and these ruling class, who of course don't want people tripping and opening their mind and questioning authority and trying to restructure everything. And, like, it'd be a huge problem if you were like a Zahi Hawass guy trying to keep the lid on everything and just keep control and power and. And then you got all these people that are tripping balls that like have completely different ideas that, that you, you have to silence that. Well, what's the, what's the issue here? The issue is these guys, they get together in a circle and they drink this stuff and then they start having these wacky ideas. Let's put a stop to that. Let's put it the same way they did with the Eleni and mysteries, the same way they've done countless times. Shamans that were like the whole Santa Claus Things where he's coming down the chimney. Why was that? Was because Siberian shamans were ostracized. They were, they were forced to actually not go through the door doorways because they had to sneak into people's homes. So they came down chimneys. This is the theory.
- [119:04]
Joe Rogan
Oh, that's fascinating.
- [119:05]
Luke Reagan
Which is like why the would Santa come down the chimney? It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, yeah, well that was the idea. Like Santa's a shaman also. Santa, at least in modern depictions, has the exact same coloration as the Amanita mascaria mushroom.
- [119:18]
Joe Rogan
Oh wow.
- [119:19]
Luke Reagan
You've never seen the, the comparison. She's Santa and the mushroom. No, no, the fascinating comparison. And this is also hotly debated. You know, they say no know. Well, you. Coca Cola was the ones that made them red and white. The Santa Clauses maybe. But there's old pictures of Christmas images that always include elves and Amanita muscaria mushrooms. There's old Christmas cards from like the turn of the century. There's old like Merry Christmas. It's fucking mushrooms. There's mushrooms everywhere. So mushrooms have a micro rise relationship with coniferous trees, particularly Amanita muscarias. You would find them underneath pine trees the same way you find brightly colored presents under Christmas trees. In order to dry them, they would pick these mushrooms and hang them in the trees so they would air dry just like ornaments on a tree. Wow, there's so many parallels. It's really weird. The Santa was a mushroom one is a weird one. It's a really weird one because there's a ton of the. Like, why are we so interested in pine trees? Why is it? Well, those trees had this very connected relationship which. With those mushrooms.
- [120:34]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, well, you know, I find that.
- [120:36]
Luke Reagan
See if you can find some of them. Ancient pictures of Christmas. Ancient Merry Christmas images. But this is like. Yeah, look that, look, look at that shaman, that shaman to the left. Go back to scroll back. Look out. Look at that site. Siberian shaman looks exactly like the coloration of an Amanita muscaria. Now go to that Merry Christmas image that you have there right next to your cursor. Look at that. Amanita mascaria. A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Amanita muscaria image these women with Good Times Christmas. Or these children rather, with Good times Christmas.
- [121:10]
Joe Rogan
Have you ever tried these mushrooms?
- [121:11]
Luke Reagan
Yes. Didn't work.
- [121:13]
Joe Rogan
Really?
- [121:13]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, I think there's. Well McKenna didn't have a good experience with them either. And there's, there's a lot of thoughts that he had about whether or not they were genetically variable, whether or not they're geographically and even seasonally variable, that you're not dealing with the same mushrooms. Sort of like, you know, there's different versions, like, obviously manipulated, but there's a very different version of banana that we're enjoying today.
- [121:41]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [121:41]
Luke Reagan
Versus the wild banana.
- [121:43]
Joe Rogan
Oh, corn too.
- [121:44]
Luke Reagan
Yes.
- [121:44]
Joe Rogan
Maze.
- [121:45]
Luke Reagan
Oh my gosh.
- [121:45]
Joe Rogan
So different.
- [121:46]
Luke Reagan
A lot of different plants have like similar history. It's what mean fungus is a very different thing. Right. Because fungus actually breathe air. They're not plants. They're much, much closer to animals than they are to plants.
- [121:59]
Joe Rogan
Fascinating.
- [122:00]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, they're real weird. And they're also really weird that they seem to be like the Internet for plants, like the mycorrhizal relationship and the fact that they have this very bizarre network of mycelium that's under the ground. Like the largest living organization organism is a mushroom colony that exists, I believe, in the Pacific Northwest.
- [122:20]
Joe Rogan
Oh, really?
- [122:21]
Luke Reagan
Yeah. Let's see if we can find that. Yeah. So instead of like saying, oh, there's a mushroom that pops out of the ground. No, that's like the fruiting body of the entire thing. And the entire thing is enormous. And it's communicating with plants. It's helping the plants distribute and share resources. It's helping them get in information. It's very strange. You know, Paul Stamets is like the, the best guy to talk to about this stuff. He's a mycologist and that he actually gave me that big ass mushroom at the end of the table. That's a mushroom. Yeah. It's weird. They're weird.
- [122:57]
Joe Rogan
You know, this, this whole conversation here.
- [123:00]
Luke Reagan
It is, the largest organism on Earth is a fungus. The blue whale is big, but nowhere near as huge as a sprawling fungus, really. Eastern Oregon. Yeah.
- [123:08]
Joe Rogan
Holy crap.
- [123:09]
Luke Reagan
Yeah. And again, it fucking breathes air.
- [123:13]
Joe Rogan
Could be as ancient as 800, as 8650 years.
- [123:18]
Luke Reagan
Yeah.
- [123:19]
Joe Rogan
Good night.
- [123:19]
Luke Reagan
Good night. Wild, wild stuff. And you know, this is what we know about, right? Like what about what the fuck is in the Amazon?
- [123:28]
Joe Rogan
Oh my God, man. Well, okay, okay, so two things there as far as what's in the Amazon. First, think about how. Let's just talk about North America above Mesoamerica. So, so like, let's just, let's just include like the modern day United States. Think about all the tribes that existed here. How complicated these histories are, you know, Squanto is born in the early 1600s among these tribes in Massachusetts. And when he comes back, he forms this thing called the Wampanoag Confederation. Whatever, whatever. Just in that little area, there's all these different cultures with their own history, their own knowledge and everything that's one little part of Massachusetts. Now think about the rest of the country and how vast and sprawling and intricate and how deep that history really goes. And you can just, you could place the United States inside the Amazon. That's how big the Amazon is.
- [124:18]
Luke Reagan
Yeah.
- [124:18]
Joe Rogan
And we just refer to natives tribes who lived in the Amazon as Amazonians. But it's got, it's so much more complicated than just that. Now the next thing is this whole conversation about talking about the were jaguar. You know, I of kind, I get a lot of flack for this, for this topic because, you know, you have, let's just call it like boomer archaeologists who have this knee jerk reaction to psychedelics and hallucinogens because it's so ingrained in them that like, all drugs are bad, as if all drugs are the same. You know what I mean? And I'm talking to this. I was in Mexico last year and we were in the Yucatan and I was there with an archaeological archaeologist from the Midwest. And he was an archaeoastronomer, which is like I was saying earlier, it's a guy who studies the way that I think it's like Pueblo ancestral tribes would have interacted with the night sky and studied the night sky. And I was like, I asked him, I said, okay, so what kind of hallucinogens do you think they would have had? And I think he told me like peyote and cannabis and stuff like that. And I was like, okay, so have you ever. We were like every night we'd get together and we'd all smoke and just talk about ancient history and stuff. You know, you come up with so many interesting ideas and perspectives and points of view. You know, when you smoke with like it, like an actual purpose and you're trying to, you know, think. I'm sure you know very well I'm talking about. And I'm. And so he's sitting around with all of us and he doesn't want, you know, he's not interested. And I'm like, I'm like, so you've been studying archaeoastronomy for this long. Have you ever tried cannabis or peyote or anything that's up there? I think there's a, another one called Detura. Have you ever heard of this?
- [125:53]
Luke Reagan
That one's supposed to be very weird.
- [125:54]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [125:55]
Luke Reagan
Terrible experiences with that.
- [125:57]
Joe Rogan
Oh really?
- [125:58]
Luke Reagan
Well, maybe it completely disassociates you. He was having a conversation with a guy in a market, and he realized in the middle of the conversation, the guy thought that they were in his apartment. Oh, yeah. Like, it does weird things.
- [126:10]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, it might explain why Teotihuacan civilization and all their iconography is so terrifying. Like, if you look up the great goddess of Teotihuacan, it's these guys with handbags picking, picking this detura and like, putting them in their handbags. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah.
- [126:26]
Luke Reagan
Oh, see, that's a weird one.
- [126:28]
Joe Rogan
And so their, their whole, their whole civilization is like, very dark and scary. But I asked this archaeologist, I said, okay, have you ever gone out and studied the stars, you know, from the Native American point of view, while you're smoking cannabis or you take peyote? And he's like, oh, no, I wouldn't do that. And I like, you have committed your entire life to studying this ancient culture that you know very well was studying the stars and taking hallucinogens. And you, as someone who's supposed to be an expert in this field, you don't want to put yourself in the shoes of these people. I was like, dude, if you laid out at night with everything you know about the Pueblo ancestral people and you smoked weed for the first time, or you did peyote or something, you stayed up and looking at the stars, you might have an epiphany about something that you've never realized because your brain's just awkward operating in a different way than it normally does. And he was very slow to, like, you know, to be open to this idea. And, you know, the Zahi thing kind of reminded me of this is like, you know, he has preconceived ideas about his world and his personal beliefs that interact with the archaeology, you know, and so it's really hard for us to study the ancient world from a completely unbiased point of view because you have so many preconceived ideas about your modern world that instead of influence your archaeology. And that's why the widely. That's why there's no widely accepted or it's not widely accepted among archaeologists that Native Americans were heavily influenced by hallucinogens. I really think it's because so many of these people are, you know, older archaeologists that have a knee jerk reaction to drugs of any kind. And they couldn't possibly fathom the reality that the culture they spent their life studying are all doing hallucinogens all the time. And that's.
- [128:12]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, unquestionably, unquestionably.
- [128:13]
Joe Rogan
It's totally obvious. It's completely obvious. But yeah, what's.
- [128:18]
Luke Reagan
Also these people that haven't had these experiences, so they don't know what the effects would be.
- [128:22]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah.
- [128:22]
Luke Reagan
So they're basically just guessing. And a lot of is based on just say no propaganda from the fucking 80s.
- [128:28]
Joe Rogan
It really is, man. I was telling my. I saw my wife this. Like, I didn't. You know, I don't smoke a lot. When I do, I'm like, out in Big Bend, you know, out looking at the stars and stuff. And every time I smoke, think it's like some kind of purpose. Like, you know, I'm in, like, some kind of sacred place. And I don't do anything harder than just smoke cannabis. But whenever I do, I have some kind of realization about myself personally, you know, like, the first time, I don't know, six or seven years ago, when I first smoked, I was laying up, looking at the night sky, and we had taken some photos out in the desert, and I was looking at myself and I put on a little bit of weight, and as I was looking at myself, I had disassociated. And I was like, this person does not represent the brain that's in my mind. I need to lose some damn weight. You know, I had this realization about myself the last time I was out. I was out in Big Bend, laying under the stars in the middle of the desert. And I had this, like, realization that, you know, all the time I spend traveling and I get to see so many amazing ancient sites and meet so many cool people, and I'm just constantly go, go, go, go, go, go. Like, I'm trying to just make this life work. And I had this realization that the most important thing I do is, is make dinner for my wife and take my dog on walks. And I had. I would have never had that, like, epiphany. Like, dude, all this stuff is really cool, but it's for fun. And this is the stuff that you love. Your purpose is to take your dog on walks and spend time with your wife, and one day it's going to be to spend time with your kids. And every time I go into it with this idea that I hope that I have some kind of realization. I always do. And. And it's just like, I have this. It's like, I know that ancient plant medicine is, like, the key to unlocking so much of the ancient world. And.
- [130:08]
Luke Reagan
And so to ignore that, knowing that they imbibed, to ignore that, knowing that it was a part of these sacred rituals is kind of silly. Especially when you deal with the Amazon and ayahuasca oh, yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to be in a place where you want to completely convene with nature, like, that's the place. Like that. That's the place. And if you. There's this insanely profound hallucinogen, you know, that the brain produces endogenously, that can be extracted from plants through this really weird method where you're taking one plant that has the drug in it, another plant, which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and you're coming, combining them together, and in the perfect amount, boiling tastes like. Like, why are you doing this? Like, how'd you learn? And then when they've. You ask them how they learned how to do this, they're like, the plants taught us.
- [131:01]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I know, right? You know, and then you. They can take that. You can take that same chemical and they'll pour it in the water. And rather than fishing or, you know, spearing fish in the water or hooking them, they pour it into the water in these little. You know, they create these little canals off of the Amazon and. And fish, piranha, whatever will swim, swim up in it. And they pour that. They pour that, that liquid wherever that hallucinogen isn't, and it stuns the fish, and they all come to the top, and they only take what they need and they send the rest back. Which is another reason why I don't think that Native Americans are responsible for the extinction of all the megafauna in the Americas. Because, you know, okay, so I'm. So I'm out in the woods in East Texas a couple weeks ago, and we're just walking around, we're talking about the Caddo people. Have you heard of the Caddo Indians before? And I was trying to talk to my friend who doesn't know a lot about Native Americans, trying to, like, tell him. Trying to give him the essence of the people. And the words came to me, and I was like. I was like, if nature itself took an anthropomorphic form, that's the Native American. These are people that lived perfectly with their environment, or tried to, at least most of them did. And, yeah, it's just. It's just. It's amazing, man. So much can be learned from that.
- [132:07]
Luke Reagan
They did some wasteful things.
- [132:09]
Joe Rogan
I know, I know. Like the buffalo.
- [132:10]
Luke Reagan
Buffalo jumps.
- [132:11]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, that's. That's true. And. And I'm really speaking in generalities, like. Like, I could go on and on about all the horrific things that the Aztecs did. This is just a General or the Comanche. Or the Comanches. You know, it's not like this was a, it's not at all like this was a utopia at all. It was complete and utter war.
- [132:31]
Luke Reagan
But then again, you're saying embodiment of nature.
- [132:33]
Joe Rogan
Well, nature's not utopia exactly.
- [132:35]
Luke Reagan
Jaguars are utopia. An antelope.
- [132:38]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, very much so. So, you know, there's some nuance there and. But yeah, just, I don't know, it's just fascinating. You had a, you had a good point in a podcast, I think you were talking about Orianna, his expedition down the Amazon, and you were talking about how he was able to use the stars to navigate back to Spain. And you were like, you're like, well, you know, that's what, that's what are not ancient people. But, you know, that's what people, people used to do. Everybody was an astronomer. How much of this experience has gone to us today? We don't sit around and look at the stars anymore. And that's one aspect we don't, we don't interact with, you know, natural plant based, you know, hallucinogens anymore. There's so many things about the natural world that we don't interact with.
- [133:22]
Luke Reagan
Those two are huge. And particularly the one, the first one, the stars. Because people don't even consider how much light pollution. If you ask the average person with the night sky, an average person who lives in New York City or Boston or wherever the night sky is polluted, you just don't think it's polluted, but it's polluted by light. And you're, you're missing this incredible majestic image of the cosmos that's so humbling that it puts you in check. Yeah, for sure it puts you in check. It really does. Like anybody that has a deluded ego that's gonna go away if you're confronted with the Milky Way. Yeah, you have some delusions of grandeur and your place and like one. Well, it's not possible. Like, just look at this. It's like I am nothing. I am nothing and I'm everything. I'm a part of everything, but I am nothing.
- [134:08]
Joe Rogan
And so many of these people who ex still today exist in the, in the, the natural world. Like the wild, you know, Percy Fawcett interacting with these Amazonian tribes that still live like this today. These people are still around. They're, they're still existing.
- [134:21]
Luke Reagan
Paul, Rosalie sent me a video a month ago.
- [134:23]
Joe Rogan
Oh, really? Yeah.
- [134:24]
Luke Reagan
You want to see it?
- [134:25]
Joe Rogan
Sure. Yeah, absolutely.
- [134:26]
Luke Reagan
Check this out. Show the video. I can't Share it with the world. So.
- [134:28]
Joe Rogan
Haha.
- [134:29]
Luke Reagan
Sorry, I'm a gatekeeper. Like everybody's a gatekeeper, I guess.
- [134:34]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [134:35]
Luke Reagan
But Paul doesn't want people to know where these people are trying to hide this stuff. But he took this video while he was out in the Amazon, like helping these people. So this is like video from his phone. God. Where is it, Paul? Oh, here it is. Joe, you can't share this with anybody. Can't share with anybody. I'm sure with you. Just make sure the camera's not on it.
- [135:10]
Joe Rogan
Wow, man, that is crazy wild.
- [135:16]
Luke Reagan
I mean, you're so those people looking.
- [135:18]
Joe Rogan
You're looking into the past.
- [135:19]
Luke Reagan
You're looking way into the past. I mean, way into the past.
- [135:23]
Joe Rogan
Just. Just in your frame right there. What you were looking at has existed since the beginning of time.
- [135:28]
Luke Reagan
Yes. And that's what's interesting is that exists at the same time as you and I talking on a podcast where millions of people are going to hear it. And it's all electronic recording of our voice and images and then distributed wirelessly into your phone instantaneously. The moment this episode gets uploaded on Spotify. Spotify. People will click it and watch it on their phone instantly.
- [135:53]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [135:53]
Luke Reagan
Like all at the same time. Where these people are living in a homemade.
- [135:56]
Joe Rogan
They're in. They're in the same time zone. Same time zone. Whatever it is right now, it's the same time.
- [136:01]
Luke Reagan
That's crazy.
- [136:02]
Joe Rogan
You know, and when our civilization, when we all destroy ourselves and thousands of years go by and everything in the studio is gone, it all turns to dust. Those people will continue the legacy of humanity.
- [136:13]
Luke Reagan
Well, I wonder if those people are the preppers of the Amazonian world. Do you know what I mean? Like. Like if everything did go sideways because the Europeans came over and brought all the diseases and civilization collapsed, who's gonna live?
- [136:26]
Joe Rogan
No, you. You are exactly right.
- [136:29]
Luke Reagan
So when the country boy can survive, that's like the Hank Williams Jr. Song in reality.
- [136:35]
Joe Rogan
Dude, you are exactly correct. I mean, you're exactly correct. So when the Spaniards arrive, they obviously they land in the bahamas with Columbus 14, but they come down to like, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and In the early 1500s, they start poking around on the shores of the Yucatan, and they're kind of trading and interacting with these people. You know, these are explorers, they're all curious, but they didn't realize that they were giving these Native Americans disease, and that disease was spreading through the Maya world. And maybe more than a decade later, when Cortez arrives in the Maya world, he documents how all The Maya people are very scrawny and small and sickly and weak. He didn't realize they were all dying off. So eventually Cortez conquers Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in 1521, and he sends, he sends Pizarro down to find the gold that the Aztecs were getting from South America or from this distant land. They didn't 100% know exactly what South America was yet. He goes down to South America and he conquers the Inca empire. And then after that, or descends down the Amazon. And when he descends down the Amazon, he sees these cities that would go on for 15 miles long. I mean, these 15 mile long cities full of millions and millions of people, these giant circular stone buildings, these huge bustling civilizations. And then later on in the 1700s, 1800s, and then really densely in the early 1900s, like with Percy Fawcett, Theodore Roosevelt, everyone around them, they were looking for these big cities that the Spaniards had seen, but they didn't exist and they didn't find any evidence of it at all. And a lot of people like the British and the Royal Geographic Society, they brushed it off as, oh, the Spaniards were lying so that they could secure funding for further expeditions and this was like their livelihood, the way that they could stay rich. Of course, then the lidar proves that these civilizations were there. Now the stuff that's been excavated in the Amazon, we haven't excavated anything in the center of the Amazon. It's really expensive, it's hard to do. Archaeologists don't want to live out there. Whatever, whatever. There's a million reasons why it doesn't happen. But on the peripheral of the Amazon, there are areas that get cut flat for logging. Like, you know, as civilization slowly encroaches on the Amazon, they are finding these villages that are these, they're basically cities that are these huge geoglyphs that are cut in the ground. Have you seen these in the Amazon? They're huge.
- [139:00]
Luke Reagan
I believe so. I believe this is some stuff that Graham was showing.
- [139:04]
Joe Rogan
Maybe so see if you can show. I think Graham has talked about this before. Maybe he was in America before.
- [139:08]
Luke Reagan
What should he look if he's looking for images?
- [139:10]
Joe Rogan
Just Amazon geoglyphs. They'll come up. They're these huge squares. Yeah, perfect. So these things are.
- [139:16]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, we definitely talked about that.
- [139:17]
Joe Rogan
These things are gigantic and they're all over the peripherals of the Amazon. But this, this was, these were the preppers living on the outside. They weren't living in the hustle and bustle of the, you know, million plus population. City in the middle of the Amazon. These are the guys living on the outside and they all survived this apocalyptic disease that went through.
- [139:36]
Luke Reagan
They're the people living in Appalachia.
- [139:39]
Joe Rogan
Exactly. Yeah. Actually, I'm moving there tomorrow.
- [139:43]
Luke Reagan
Are you really?
- [139:44]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, I'm in the middle of moving right now.
- [139:46]
Luke Reagan
What a cool place to live.
- [139:47]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's beautiful up there, man. Dude, it's an ancient place. Have you heard of the Nantehan, Nantahala rainforest?
- [139:52]
Luke Reagan
No.
- [139:53]
Joe Rogan
Oh, you gotta go there tomorrow. It's in western North Carolina, in Appalachia. I grew up going to Nantahala every year. My parents live in Nantehala now. And it's a beautiful, completely magical place. And it was part of what inspired this like, explorer kind of thing in me when you're there. Even as a kid, I knew that this was an ancient place. And turns out as an adult, when I start reading, researching it, it's this pocket of green, I mean, solid, dark green rainforest in the US we have three rainforests, we have Hawaii, we have Oregon, and we have the Nantahala rainforest that most people don't know about. It's this pocket in the middle of these mountains that has looked exactly the same since before the Ice Age. It's one of the oldest places in North America. And it's just, it's just an incredibly magical old, ancient, ancient place. And I'm just like, drawn back there. But anyways, yeah, you should go, you should go check that out.
- [140:53]
Luke Reagan
That sounds incredible. Yeah, yeah. You're gonna live out in that area in the Appalachians?
- [140:59]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, so my, my wife is, so, she's like from South Carolina and she came to, she came to Texas when she was younger and then we met in college and my, my family, when we first moved to the States, like my family moved to North Carolina in like 1694 or something crazy like that. And, and so we have some roots up there. Like, have you ever been to Gatlinburg, Tennessee?
- [141:22]
Luke Reagan
No.
- [141:23]
Joe Rogan
So the, the first name of Gatlinburg was Reagan Town. And so that was where my, my, my family were. One of the founders of that town, there's an old hotel there called Reagan Motel. So my family's originally from there. And then they moved down to Texas and started cattle rustling in the, in the late 1890s. But I don't know, just drawn back up there. Always love vacationing there. And so my wife and I are like in the middle of moving right now. And so two days ago we packed up these two U Hauls, drove them to East Texas to my in laws. And then we drove to Austin last night, got a hotel doing this. Tonight we drive back to East Texas, and then tomorrow we drive to North Carolina.
- [141:56]
Luke Reagan
Wow.
- [141:56]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [141:57]
Luke Reagan
So what is the history in terms of, like, human occupation in that area?
- [142:02]
Joe Rogan
Man, the people sprouted out of the ground. Yeah, it's. It's that old man. There are. That's something I'm really looking forward to getting into. And I'm kind of excited in a way to get out of Texas because it's hard to study Native American history in Texas because you got to travel so far and everything's so arid. Like, you know, Austin, this was an ancient Native American settlement here that we have built. This city on top of. The Alamo in San Antonio was built on top of a Native American settlement. And, you know, all of our major cities are just a reskin of any ancient city. And in Texas, it's really hard. Like, we have the Galt site that's here in. That's here in Austin. That proves that Clovis first was wrong. Maybe you're familiar with this, but up there you're closer to mound country and you know where all the mound builders are. I'm a little bit north of that. But in North Carolina, it's one of the places that the Spaniards had a really hard time infiltrating because of the mountain ranges and because of how fierce the Native American. And so the archaeological projects up there are headed up by like, two hillbillies that live in the country. And they're the coolest guys. They own this little department store called the Tiger Store in Hayesville, North Carolina. And they have dug up, like, Spanish armor under the ground and Spanish swords and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I've gone hiking out there and. Oh, we gotta look this up. Jamie, can we please look up Judah Kula Rock? It's one of the only megaliths in North America. And it's this gigantic megalithic stone that has the same sort of art style as all the Native American stuff that we've seen. And it's some kind of primordial map of western North Carolina. It's. It's massive. Dude, you couldn't fit it in this room. It's called Judah Kula. If you just try to spell it in some way, you might find it. There you go. And there's an old photo of an archaeologist laying behind it. There you go to the top left. That one. Or maybe the one that's colorized there. That's. That one's really, really Pretty. So nobody knows what this is. And the Native Americans who were asked some of the stories about the early Native Americans who were asked how this got here, who moved it there. Their stories are that giants placed this and that giants used to live in this land and that they created these stones. And I have gone around, when I was a little bit younger, I would go through the rainforest and, like, wandering up these hillsides, and you'd find these huge, huge stones laying there with all of these images carved into them. And of course, you know, there's no funding that's out there. There's not even a. There's not even a police department out there. So it's, it's, it. Nothing, no research is being done out there. But it's a fascinating place, as old as time itself. And all of these people are from like a chapter before contact period.
- [144:45]
Luke Reagan
Whoa.
- [144:46]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's fascinating, man. And it's just a. It's a very ancient, mysterious, mystical place. It's one of those places that kind of gives me the feeling that Peru gives me when I'm out there, that I'm in a very, very, very old place. And of course, you know, the Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world.
- [145:02]
Luke Reagan
Is there any theory as to the age of that?
- [145:05]
Joe Rogan
Well, I think when you go there, they attribute it to. They attribute it to a culture that lived in the area between 100 A.D. and 1,000, but, you know, that's just totally guesswork. Judah Coola and the Cherokee Indians. Yeah. Now, the, you know, the hard part about. The hard part about studying some stuff with Native Americans in the US is that there's a lot of, like, you know, modern Native Americans, they're very prideful about their culture. And, you know, a little bit of mythology gets. Gets mixed in. Like when you go, When I go visit the. I forget what it, what exactly it's called, but there's a. There's a Native American village that still exists in this area of the country, and it's like, operated, and it's kind of a tour place where they take people through what the cities would have looked like or what the towns would have looked like in the middle of the rainforest. But the hard part is when I talk to the representatives there, which are Native American, you know, Cherokee people, they'll tell me, oh, yeah, you know, the ancient people that were here, they used to be 6 foot 5, they were very tall people or whatever. And there's no evidence behind that at all. And so it's hard to like, okay, we have Cherokee Bodies. So are these, are these oral memories that are being passed down through time that come down to the Cherokee and you know, as a, as like a, you know, a modern day American anthropologist, do I brush off what they say and just be like, well, you know, they're, they're, they're carrying on these myths about their people. They want to build it up or are they really holding on to something that's true? Because, man, I would love to talk to Graham about this. Okay, so, you know, one of the biggest things that refutes. I know it sounds like I'm bouncing all over the place, but one of the biggest things that they tried to use to refute the Sphinx's age, you know about the Sphinx that could date back to the time of Leo, 10,500 years ago, or 10,500 B.C. 10,500 B.C. is they say, well, there's no evidence that you could carry down the knowledge of consequences constellations that far. You've heard this before, right? Like, how do we know that people in 10,500 B.C. even recognize the constellation of Leo? And, and how is that knowledge carried down? Dude, there is evidence of this. Okay. The squared spiral. Have you seen this motif anywhere? It's. We could, we could look it up. Greek meander pattern. But you'll also see it in, you'll see it in the American Southwest. You'll see it out in the Mississippian cultures, you'll see it in Mexico, you'll see it in South America, Peru, you'll see it in Greece. You'll see it in Egypt, Rome. This. Yeah, this pattern. So, you know, a lot of times this, they say that this is like. Well, when people use the term swastika, the swastika is just two meandering patterns or squared spirals that are laid on top of each other. That's. That's what it is. Yeah. So it's a squared spiral, but when you take two of those and lay them on top of each other, it becomes a spiral swastika. And you and I recognize where these meanders connect because of a certain recent culture that perverted this symbol and turned it into something evil. But this is an ancient symbol and it's found all over the world and it even dates back to Ukraine. You may be able to find this. There's an ivory bone handle in Ukraine from like 11,000 years ago that has this squared spiral that, that's on it. So this is 11,000 years old, found on every continent on the planet. Oh, yeah. So it's even found in Pottery. You can see it in pottery in ancient China, ancient Japan, it's in Cambodia. It's all across the ancient world. And I was asking. Oh, oh, I know one that we could look up. Could you look up the Temple of Mitla in Mexico? So, Temple of Mitla. And if we look there, you'll see it all up and down. Now, Temple of Mitla is a shamanic temple. They think it was like a Mecca site that people would go to. It was built to last for all of eternity. And of all the megaliths in all of Mesoamerica or ancient Mexico and Central America, this site uses the largest stones. So each one of these lentils that you see, this is like one solid piece of volcanic stone. Very, very hard stones. Okay, so you can see the squared spiral. Right. Can you see the step pattern that leads up to them? And you could probably find another photo where you see the step pattern leading up to the spiral. So it's like. It's like you're walking up steps into a spiral, and it's this loop that continues on forever. I have a ton of these photos on my phone. They're found all over Peru. There we go. Now, this is not quite exactly it, but okay, so what this really is, this step pattern in this motif of this spiral here is it's the Big Dipper in the night sky. You can go look at the Big Dipper. And the Big Dipper changes over the course of the year. So if you look at it as though it's not a Big Dipper, and you look at it as though it's a staircase to a spiral, that's exactly what ancient people are seeing the Big Dipper as. And the Big Dipper is spinning in the night sky throughout the year. So this ancient symbol is them documenting a constellation from. For over 11,000 years, human beings have been documenting, documenting a constellation. So if you're looking for the proof as to whether or not people 11,000 years ago were recognizing a lion in the night sky, boom, there you go. This is 11,000 years old. Yeah. Okay, so looking here. So it's a step up to a spiral. A step up to a spiral, and, dude, it's the Big Dipper. Just look at the Big Dipper in the future as though it's this constellation and it's the same thing.
- [150:32]
Luke Reagan
Is this a theory that it's a Big Dipper? Is this being corroborated?
- [150:35]
Joe Rogan
This is my theory.
- [150:36]
Luke Reagan
Your theory?
- [150:37]
Joe Rogan
This is my theory. And like something I've been studying for a long time, long time. But There are other archaeologists who, they're kind of have a passive interest in this and they have said, oh, maybe it's the Big Dipper or something. But these aren't these then people. If I were to go to them and be like, okay, well, you know, this ivory bone handle in Ukraine goes back 11,000 years. So it's proof. They'd be like, okay, stop. You know what I mean? So this is my theory that I have been studying for a long time. And everywhere I go in the Americas, I find that. I find that spiral pattern everywhere. And I always ask people, what does it, does this mean? When I'm in the Mediterranean, I'll ask people, what does this mean? I'm gonna go to. I'm gonna go to Greece at the end of the year and I'm gonna ask because it's all over Greek temples, you know, and all I ever get from Greek archaeologists is that it's a river. Bullshit, it's not a river. And then in Latin America, I get a bit better of an explanation. And maybe this is, maybe this is really it. They think that it's like the. They think that it's like the step. The steps through life and the rejuvenation of life, right? So it's like the Big Dipper has some kind of esoteric meaning with it. But I have been thinking about this and I think that this, the reason that throughout all these ancient cultures you see this meander pattern in so many different orientations is it's documenting, it's documenting the flipping of the Big Dipper through the night sky throughout the day. And that's all you know. I'm trying to explain something that's 11,000 years old.
- [152:01]
Luke Reagan
What is the earliest evidence of the understanding of the procession of the equinoxes?
- [152:08]
Joe Rogan
Oh, God, I don't know. I don't know. That's. That's getting like beyond my level of knowledge. With archaeoastronomy.
- [152:16]
Luke Reagan
Some people, Graham's, theorized that, yeah, Egyptians were aware of it.
- [152:20]
Joe Rogan
I mean, I don't doubt that they're. That they were aware of it.
- [152:23]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, Bval, I think, believed that, or I know for sure, John Anthony west believed that.
- [152:28]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. I, I don't know, man. I mean, the procession of the equinoxes, it takes at least what, 12 to 24. It's either 12 or it's 24,000 years.
- [152:37]
Luke Reagan
To be able to full cycle.
- [152:40]
Joe Rogan
If, if we wanted to investigate an ancient culture that's possible of being able to document this, it'd be worth looking into if the Maya were aware.
- [152:51]
Luke Reagan
Let's explain to people what it means. So what it means is that the earth as it spins, it doesn't spin perfectly like there's a pin in the top and the pin in the bottom and it spins like a globe. It spins in a wobble and that wobbles. A 24,000 year cycle. The earliest understanding of the procession of the equinox is typically credited to Greek astronomer. How do you say his name? Hipparchus.
- [153:12]
Joe Rogan
Oh yeah, Hipparchus.
- [153:13]
Luke Reagan
In the 2nd century BCE, around 130 BCE.
- [153:17]
Joe Rogan
I bet you he did it in Alexandria too.
- [153:20]
Luke Reagan
Hipparchus noticed the position of the equinoxes. The points where the celestial equator intersects with the elliptic were shifting westward over time relative to the fixed stars. He calculated this slow movement known as precession by comparing his own observations of star positions with earlier Babylonian and Greek records, particularly those of Tamarcus and Aristotelis. Aristoteles. From the 3rd century BCE, Hipparchus estimated the rate of procession to be about 1 degree every 100 hundred years, which is remarkably close to the modern value. Approximately 1 degree every 71.6 years. There's no definitive evidence of earlier cultures fully understanding the procession as a systematic astronomical phenomenon. But some scholars speculate the ancient civilizations like the Babylonians, Egyptians or Indians might have noticed relating patterns and star positions over long periods.
- [154:15]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, well and then check this out. Hipparchus discovery detailed in his lost work, but referenced by Ptolemy, the pharaoh over Alexandria in the Almagest 2nd century CE. So this is happening in the city of Alexandria. This all this is being studied in Alexandria's library marks the earliest confirmed understanding of procession in scientific sense. Dude, that was lost in the burning of Alexandria's library. Yeah, Alcala. Crazy is that.
- [154:41]
Luke Reagan
It's all crazy. It's so fascinating because it makes sense that that would be something that everyone would be studying because it's the most spectacular thing you could ever see. Why would you just say oh it's just stars, of course you would.
- [154:57]
Joe Rogan
It's so silly.
- [154:57]
Luke Reagan
Of course. They're so majestic. You would have to be transfixed.
- [155:04]
Joe Rogan
You know something interesting that I was just reminded of is this meander pattern. It continues in the ancient Mediterranean world, so Greece, Mesopotamia and Egypt until Alexandria's library is burned and stops after that. You see it on the, you see it on the monument of Augustus which is dates to about 9 B.C. but that's for his death. But Augustus would have seen Alexandria. He would have been familiar with these motifs. I believe after that in Rome we don't see them this motif anymore of the squared spiral in Mesoamerica, in Mexico and Central America, this squared spiral motif stops with the burning of the Maya codices from Diego de landa in, like, 1574. He gathered all of the writing in the Maya world together in the city of what is modern day Merida, and he burned it all up. And it was called multiple pyres. So imagine, let's say a pyre is at least from the floor to the ceiling stack, stacked with codexes. Like, have you ever seen the sticky notes that are connected on each side? That's how the Maya books looked. And he burned all that history. Today we only have three or four that exist, and one of them is controversial as to whether or not it's a forgery. So he destroyed all of the written history of the Mesoamerican world in, like, one fell swoop. And to give you an idea of just how much it was when the Spaniards arrived in the Aztec world. So the Aztec were standing on the. Were standing on the shoulders of giants. Being the Maya and all the other cultures, the Aztecs were producing 250,000 pieces of paper a year. It's something like that. It's an incredible amount of written knowledge. And all of that knowledge is burned and gone. And so. And so, you know, it just again, when archaeologists stand behind their opinions so strongly as to chastise other people for speculating about, oh, well, you know, this could be this. It's so silly because we're disconnected from the ancient world by a considerable margin. I mean, none of us really understand what's going on. I was having a conversation with Dr. Barnhart. We were at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and we're looking at all these Maya gods up on this mural and everything in Mesoamerica, whether it's the Maya, the Olmecs, the Aztecs, Teotihuacano, Zapotecs, whatever. It's all very fierce and dark and scary, kind of scary to us. And we're looking up at it, and he's like. He's like, you know, I've always wondered, like, where's the love in their religion? Like, you know, where. Where are all the doves that you see, like, in Christian churches and stuff? And he was like. He's like, but, you know, in reality, if we could speak to them, we would probably be so embarrassed and shocked at how wrong our ideas are about who these people were. And, you know, his. His attitude and his approach to the ancient world. I just love it. Because, you know, he just persisted. Presents like the evidence that's available, gives his idea of what he thinks the evidence means while also saying, you know, this is just, this is just my idea. From this we could be completely wrong, and we probably are completely wrong. You know, think about like, if you died and 5,000 years from now people started going through your belongings, what would they think of you? It probably wouldn't be a very good representation of you.
- [158:16]
Luke Reagan
It depends on who's writing the story. Right. If CNN wrote it, it'd be terrible.
- [158:20]
Joe Rogan
You know, it'd be pretty bad.
- [158:21]
Luke Reagan
It's really dependent upon who again is the gate. Gatekeeper of information.
- [158:25]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [158:26]
Luke Reagan
If you had a time machine and you can go and observe undiscovered any point in history, like you could put, put you in some time bubble where you could just like be in this invisible bubble where you could view it where you're not interacting. You're not, you just watch.
- [158:43]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [158:44]
Luke Reagan
What time period and where?
- [158:46]
Joe Rogan
Oh God, I'm not going to say Egypt. I feel like Egypt is such a, like everyone says Egypt.
- [158:54]
Luke Reagan
I would say Egypt.
- [158:55]
Joe Rogan
I know, I know. If Egypt wasn't an option, but why.
- [159:00]
Luke Reagan
Would you want that to not be an option if I gave you a legit choice? If it was a real thing, if there was real technology, if they had developed some sort of a time warp technology that allowed you to, in this controlled sphere, exist for a particular amount of time. Like you have three, three days in this area. You bring food and water and you just.
- [159:21]
Joe Rogan
No one can hurt me. No one can scout me.
- [159:23]
Luke Reagan
No one can see you. You exist in a time warp inside there, but you can observe all of it. It's got to be Egypt.
- [159:29]
Joe Rogan
Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, you'd have to figure out.
- [159:32]
Luke Reagan
What time because if you got there and they had already built it, you're.
- [159:34]
Joe Rogan
Like, God damn it.
- [159:36]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, yeah. Like maybe like you say, let me go 10,000bc and you go there and it's already there.
- [159:40]
Joe Rogan
Like you go back 20,000 BC.
- [159:44]
Luke Reagan
Yeah, you can only do it once. Like, but if you go back 30,000.
- [159:47]
Joe Rogan
BC, maybe there's nothing like, man, Egypt is a creme de la creme, man. It's, it's the, it's the most monumental, beautiful. Like, you know, when you try to imagine what it would have looked like, you know, if you've seen visual recreations of the Giza Plateau, you know, the, the Valley Temple must have been absolutely stunning. Okay, so one day when you go to Egypt, hopefully ago this year, when you go to the Valley Temple. That's the, that for me, it's the best thing in all of Egypt. I think it's more stunning, what it must have looked like, than even the pyramids themselves. The blocks are absolutely gigantic. Like, one block is bigger than this whole wall and brought from 500 miles south in Aswan. These are the ones with the cyclopean strangely angled stones like you see in Peru. And when you walk in, most people ignore it, but that floor is a calcite white crystal floor. And so imagine when it was polished and when it was finished off, it must have been gleaming. And at some point in time, there were these diorite khafre statues. Maybe you've seen them before. They're like impossibly well made out of the hardest stone in Egypt. The hardest stone in Egypt. And it's this black diorite, gleaming, polished statues. And the lintels that go above would have allowed. When the sun, you know, reaches its, like, zenith in the sky in the day, in the middle of the day, it would have shot through these holes in the ceiling. And so it would have illuminated the white floor and you would have had the solid black statues that are, that are shining in this, in the sun's light. And so you're walking in and it's like glowing inside of the temple. And, and when you walk outside the front door of the temple, there's a dock. And you can see the dock, like, slopes into the ground, so the water isn't there anymore. The Nile is much further to the east now, but it would have. But the Nile came straight up to the front step of the, of the Valley Temple. So you, so imagine you're like, you're going, you know, you have someone pushing your little boat along on a pike in, you know, in Egypt. And you're, you know, you're taking in, like, you know, you're taking in the nature around you and like the seabirds that are flying over you and the palm trees that are everywhere. And like, imagine the sound of the water as you're coming up to, to the temple. And it's this huge temple. It's the largest building on the planet at the time. You know, probably other, other than the pyramids themselves. But. And then you step into it and it's, it is the most sacred, most impressive thing that exists on the Earth at that time. No matter if it was made in 2500 B.C. or if it was made in 10,000 B.C, it's the most impressive building that exist in the world at that time. And what exactly was going on in these buildings. I don't know. This is, this is kind of another, you know, hot take of mine is, man. I don't believe that, you know, when you see all these pantheons of these gods in the ancient world, I do not believe that ancient people are making all this shit up and building all these temples for these gods that never existed just to control the masses, whatever. I mean, it's extensive amount of work all across the entire world. World. You know, the, the Maya are building temples for these gods, these beings that they're, that they're meeting. The temple of Luxor that you'll, that you'll go to see. You know, the, the story goes that Amenhotep built this last chamber, which is made out of these huge. Amenhotep III builds this last chamber, huge megalithic granite blocks to meet the God Amun Ra. And I'm standing there inside the chamber, looking around. He's the only person supposedly that's allowed in. That's a story that we know. How true that is, I don't know. But, you know, and I'm just thinking, man, either is it more likely that all this is made up, or is it more likely that they went to the extent to do all this because it was all real and they're really interacting with these beings. And the most, the most realistic way I can think of is by. Is by being involved in, like, shamanic practices and hallucinogens and like, you know, interacting with things that do not exist in our three 3D plane. And, and that adds to the allure of, like, when I'm standing in the Valley Temple, I'm like, what the hell is actually going on in here at this time? So after going through all that, I have to say Egypt, you have to. Yeah, yeah. Cliche as it might be, my second one would be like, if I could be like, okay, take me to the height of Amazonian culture. Just let me see just how amazing it is. Because, you know, it really seems like stone architecture comes out of the Amazon. Now where Paul lives, it's all clay on the ground, but when you get halfway through the Amazon, you start reaching, like, granite and limestone bedrock. And that's on the eastern side. So you're in, like, Guyana, French Guyana, Brazil. And it's treacherous places to go through in the middle of the Amazon. But I think that that's where cities in the Amazon are going to be found one day. And it was towards the end of Orianna's expedition, so that's about where he would have been. And man, I bet you there's stuff out there that would just amaze us. I think the Amazon is the origin. Just me personally, I think the Amazon is the origin of American, you know, pre Columbian American, the height of their civilization. I think it's the origin of their religion and shamanic practices. I think it spread out all the way up to Mexico. And you know, later on the ancient Americans have a corn God which they call it the maze God. But I think before that they had this were jaguar religion where people are taking hallucinogens and psychedelics. And so I, I think that all the evidence points towards that. The origin of civilization in the Americas begins in the Amazon and spreads out from there. And I would love if a time machine could pull back that canopy and show me what the actual height of that was like.
- [165:31]
Luke Reagan
It's just so interesting. It never stops being interesting. And it's one of those things, it's a mystery that will never truly be totally solved because it's not possible to go back in time. So we're always going to have this thing in our mind. Like I wonder, and it's such a fascinating inclination to sit and just wonder about the past and to look where we are now and how ridiculous life today is. This was undeniable. Like humans are fools, particularly today for sure. And I think one of the reasons why we're fools is we're denied these experiences that these people probably had. We've out outlawed them.
- [166:04]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [166:05]
Luke Reagan
Just like they did in ancient Greece. Just like they did, I'm sure throughout history and all these different cultures, you.
- [166:11]
Joe Rogan
Know, have you ever heard the, have you ever heard the, the natives in Papua New guinea and the songs that they sing that like emanate through the jungle. Have you ever heard this before? When I, when I study, I don't study. I only study native people in the Americas. I got my hands full with that. I can't really start studying, you know, like I'm fascinated by the people that live on Sentinel island. And akin to that are the people, the semi contacted people of Papua New Guinea. And when you listen to the songs that they sing, it reminds me so much of what I heard yesterday and what I've known. But when Percy Fawcett says he hears the songs they sing and it reminds them like, oh, this is an advanced culture. This is something that's being handed down through time. It's beautiful, it's timeless. And when you hear the, the sound of the Papua New guinea people singing and the way they harmonize with Each other. These people are so connected to the Earth that it's the Earth singing to you through them. Does that make sense?
- [167:07]
Luke Reagan
Whoa. Can we hear that?
- [167:09]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. This may not be the one I'm talking about. It's beautiful, though. There's one of. There's one of a man. He's right next to the camera and he's singing, and you have all these people around him, and it's just like, stunningly beautiful. Here it is. Here it is.
- [168:05]
Luke Reagan
Wow. It's got some extra love on it.
- [168:08]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I think it's just on loop.
- [168:14]
Luke Reagan
10 hours. It's a 10 hour.
- [168:16]
Joe Rogan
But, you know, hearing that makes me, like, emotional. Hearing it.
- [168:19]
Luke Reagan
Five grams. And you listen to that.
- [168:20]
Joe Rogan
It's beautiful, you know? Oh, my God, it's beautiful. And you look in it. You look in his eyes and it's like he has very innocent eyes.
- [168:27]
Luke Reagan
Yeah.
- [168:27]
Joe Rogan
You know, it's. It's. It is the. It's the. It's the human embodiment of the planet itself. Is that guy that you're looking at and what you're hearing and was really.
- [168:37]
Luke Reagan
Fascinated by human cultures. Is the most satisfied, least anxious people are subsistence livers, People that live off the land.
- [168:45]
Joe Rogan
It's so true.
- [168:46]
Luke Reagan
Have you ever seen the Vice piece about this guy named Hindmo, Hindmo's Arctic Adventure?
- [168:54]
Joe Rogan
No.
- [168:55]
Luke Reagan
There's a great bit, a great video piece from Vice from back in the day, Vice Guide to Travel, where this journalist goes and lives with this guy who lives in the Arctic, and he's one of the last people that's allowed to live off the land. And he's a very intelligent guy who explains through the course of this, like, this is how people are supposed to be living. And he's essentially just hunting caribou and fishing, and he lives, like, in peace and harmony. And he never. He never wants to live in a city. Like, this is a natural way for us.
- [169:28]
Joe Rogan
Does he have a little daughter with him or a little girl? And he, like, cuts up the fish and he hands it to her and they give each other, like, an elephant Eskimo kiss. Have you seen?
- [169:35]
Luke Reagan
I don't believe it's that. His daughter's full grown at the time. But I'm sure there's many people living like this. But the point is that I think that if you look at modern society, we're so anxious and weird and depressed and all these things wrong with us. I think a lot of that is because, a, we're disconnected from nature, especially if you're living in a city. I mean, there's no more insulation from nature than a skyscraper scraper. I mean, you're completely removed from. You've covered the ground, concrete. You're not interacting with nature at all. Like, that's why everybody goes to Central Park. They're like a little piece. Yeah, give me a little bit of nature. Right, so you're disconnected from nature, which I think is a vitamin. I genuinely believe. It's just like the sun gives you vitamin D. I think nature gives you some unmeasured vitamin that we just haven't figured out yet. And then we're removed from these ancient experiences that connected people to the spiritual world.
- [170:29]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so true. I've been having these conversations with my wife recently. You know, like, all of our friends are sort of, you know, we're all kind of newlyweds. Like, my wife and I are about to approach our two year. And our relationship is interesting because it kind of mimics like ancient people where, you know, a man has got to, you know, in ancient times, the man would go off at a certain point periodically, he and all of his. He and all the other men of the village or the younger men would go off until they killed a big animal and they drag it back. And they'd be rewarded by the gratification of the women that they're there. And then they would play their part in helping to feed everybody. And you have this. Like, the. The woman, like, admires the man. The man's helping take care of her. You have this. And then the men also get their time away to be manly and be masculine and brave. And now we exist in this world where before I was able to, you know, quit my job and pursue this full time, I was doing, like, marketing, you know, just to make ends meet. And I'm like, existing in this digital world that doesn't even exist. I produce ads for companies that don't even have a physical brick and mortar store. It's like, all completely made up. And I come home. I would come home every single day, and I had no, like, male role in my little family. Like, my wife is in the middle of dental school. And so we're both going off and coming back and doing the same thing every day. And it's like this unnatural cycle. And you wonder why, like, people are so unhappy. And now that I've been traveling quite a lot, you know, I go off, you know, I go off, I travel. I'm able to, you know, help provide for us. I'm gone, I come back and our relationship is strong and it's intimate and romantic. And she, like, you know, admires that kind of aspect about me. And I'm like, like, oh, this is kind of. This is kind of how. This is a healthy. This is actually a healthy thing for our relationship. And it's just reminding me more and more of how this modern world is so dystopian and so sick and poisonous to our minds. We're operating in a made up realm. This, you know, it's just so much of what we do is completely made up and unnatural. We should be living by a fresh body of water and you and I should be running off into the forest and killing something with our hands or with a bow and dragging it back. And all the women are, yay. You know, that's what it should. That's what life should be like. But it's unfortunately science fiction.
- [172:55]
Luke Reagan
I think you can live in this world and dabble in that world.
- [172:59]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, for sure.
- [172:59]
Luke Reagan
That's what I do.
- [173:00]
Joe Rogan
For sure. Yeah. Well, I've seen that. I mean, you go off on your hunting expeditions.
- [173:04]
Luke Reagan
Those are like, to me, spiritual, Spiritual journeys. It sounds ridiculous. Totally. But when I'm in the woods, like the real woods, when you're in the mountains in particular, because it's so unforgiving and so majestic, every part of me just goes like, wow, here we are.
- [173:20]
Joe Rogan
Where are you at when you do that?
- [173:21]
Luke Reagan
Well, I really love Utah. I really love, like the. The Wasatch Mountains. I love that area.
- [173:27]
Joe Rogan
I'm scared of the Northwest. My wife wants to take me to Montana and go hiking. I'm like, I don't not going hiking out Northwest. There's grizz. I don't belong out there. There's grizzly bears. I mean, those things. There's nothing you can do, man.
- [173:39]
Luke Reagan
Nothing you can do.
- [173:40]
Joe Rogan
I'm okay. On the east coast, which is just black bears, they're like, you know, rabbits. But dude, a grizzly bear.
- [173:46]
Luke Reagan
Yeah.
- [173:46]
Joe Rogan
Have you seen the video of the guy who's up on top of this granite facing and he goes, he's like filming and he goes, he goes, there's a young grizzly bear down at the river below me. And he's up on this granite face and. And he was like. He's like, I'm gonna scare him off. And he goes, hey, bear. Hey, bear. And the bear goes and charges directly to him and knocks down all the little trees. And it comes up to the granite face and it can't reach him. But I'm like, yeah, dude, I would never want to go up there.
- [174:10]
Luke Reagan
You're food.
- [174:11]
Joe Rogan
You're food.
- [174:12]
Luke Reagan
You're a part of the chain and not the good part.
- [174:14]
Joe Rogan
No.
- [174:15]
Luke Reagan
You're not the hunter with the deer.
- [174:17]
Joe Rogan
No.
- [174:17]
Luke Reagan
There's an 800 pound super predator that can run 40 miles an hour and he's headed right towards.
- [174:23]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And if you're a good shot with a high powered gun, you might be able to kill it, but you'll be mauled to death.
- [174:28]
Luke Reagan
Yeah.
- [174:28]
Joe Rogan
By the time it wanders off into the forest and you might be able to kill it.
- [174:32]
Luke Reagan
I mean you really, you need like a large caliber rifle and shoot it in the head.
- [174:37]
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
- [174:37]
Luke Reagan
You know, and a pistol. That's the other thing. If you have a 9 millimeter pistol and you shoot a grizzly bear in the head, it's very likely it's going to bounce off of his skull, which is so scary.
- [174:47]
Joe Rogan
Oh, it's terrifying. Could you imagine the, could you imagine people trying to navigate into or migrate into the Americas and they have to deal with the short faced bear and polar bear.
- [174:57]
Luke Reagan
Right. The short faced bear, which makes a grizzly bear look like a poodle.
- [175:00]
Joe Rogan
It's, it's utterly insane, man. People lived in a gnarly place in the US like we had, we had American lions.
- [175:08]
Luke Reagan
Bigger than the African lion.
- [175:09]
Joe Rogan
Exactly. We had elephants, we had woolly mammoths, we had camels here. We had gigantic horses, we had huge dire wolves. We had giants. Giants. Giant. Oh, there's a giant sloth caves in Nantahala and you can see them and they're like carved out. And it's cool because there's multiple layers of history there. So you have this, you have this megafauna Ice age history of these huge giant sloth caves carved out in, you know, these prehistoric mountainsides. But the Cherokee used those caves to hide in to escape the Trail of Tears.
- [175:43]
Luke Reagan
Wow.
- [175:43]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. That's fascinating stuff up there, man. So you have like levels of history just in that one area of the country. If you go out there, you'll find feel like you're in a primordial place that's kind of spiritual.
- [175:54]
Luke Reagan
I'm down. I'll check it out.
- [175:56]
Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah. You definitely have to listen.
- [175:58]
Luke Reagan
Thank you so much for being here. I really, really enjoyed this conversation and I think we could do a bunch more. So let's do it again.
- [176:04]
Joe Rogan
I feel like I could have talked to you for 10 more hours.
- [176:05]
Luke Reagan
I feel like we could too. Yeah. So tell everybody they want to get into more of your work. Where should they go?
- [176:12]
Joe Rogan
Yeah. So everything I do is just under my name, Luke Caverns. You know Caverns was just a name that like my wife and I came came up with to use like a gnomer because of privacy but my, my real last name is Reagan and you know I like I shared I have this family history and loosely connected to the presidential family that's like a different branch of our family oh wow. From Tennessee yeah and and so I kind of want to do it for privacy but like that's impossible so I just, I've just run with it and but yeah Luke Caverns you can find you can find everything I do under that and you know I for a long time I thought maybe I'd specialize in one area but man I'm interested in in, in the ancient history of of the entire world and and I'm just always going to embrace that and explore the explore the ancient world on foot and yeah I'm glad you're out.
- [177:01]
Luke Reagan
There man really appreciate it yeah thank you for being here it's really fun thank you all right bye everybody.
- [177:10]
Joe Rogan
Sa.