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Ben
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day.
Joe Rogan
Ben, so excited to talk to you, man. I have been so looking forward to this since I saw your video on the labyrinths in Egypt. Spoiler alert. There appears to be a 40 meter long metallic tic Tac shaped object. How. How deep into the ground?
Ben
It's in that. So it's in the central atrium which we'll get into what that is, but somewhere in the realm of 60, 70 meters. So man, what's that in feet? Like 200ft, 150 to 180ft down? Something like that.
Joe Rogan
So for anybody who's interested, what is the name of that video that you put out?
Ben
I think it's the ancient structure. Like it's said to be greater than the pyramids. I try to tease it a little bit, but it's, it's, it's on that, it's on my channel.
Joe Rogan
I mean it was a good tease. You got me.
Ben
Thank you.
Joe Rogan
I dove right in and I remember I was in the gym while I was watch and I literally stopped working out and I was like okay, I gotta pause this. This is not something that I can consume while I'm working out. I need to like really pay attention to this because it's so wild.
Ben
Yeah. And, and I, I honestly that I'm grateful for how like that video took off. Like it for me it took off way bigger than, than ones that I've done in the past. I talk about the labyrinth in the past and it's, it's a much longer video and I was, I was really glad to get the chance to dive into these details because I've been wanting to revisit the labyrinth for a long time. However, there's just been recently a bunch of new data that came up about things that happened a decade or two ago inside the last decade that really changed that picture. And that was. It was things like the Merlin burrow scans that correlated other scans and also reported on. Yeah, there seems to be a metallic object down there. And this isn't, you know, this isn't sort of crazy emerging science. This is a legitimate company that is using technology that's been well established in defense and in, in the UK Defense. It came out of the, the UK military as a technology that's been more or less proven. So. And the guy that, that Tim Akers rest in peace. Unfortunately he's since passed. But he, you know what he said about this object? Like he's, he is a Credible guy to, to say this. He, he doesn't draw conclusions about what it might be. But it's definitely, it's not wood, it's not stone, it's metal. It's not unlike other metal that he's seen, although they couldn't classify what exact type of metal it is. But he said yeah, there is a, in this central atrium because the labyrinth has multiple levels and it's almost like you imagine yourself standing in a shopping mall and you have that central atrium where you can see all these levels and it's like this big central chamber that connects to these multiple levels that's open, it's at least 40 meters long, it's really tall. And in the center of it is what's more than 40 because it contains this single sort of 40 piece, 40 meter long object that's sitting in there.
Joe Rogan
So how did you find out about the labyrinths? This is something that has been talked about for a long time, thousands of years. Yeah. But no one, it's not in any like traditional archaeology books. It's not, is it?
Ben
Yeah, yeah, no, it is. So the labyrinth is kind of, this is the other part that draw that drew me to it is that it isn't something that's coming out of left field. Right. It's not like this, oh, no one ever heard of this before. It's literally a structure that was written about extensively over hundreds of years in antiquity by authors like Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Polonius, Mellor. Like there's all of these, these writers of antiquity and you're talking about time frames from like 500 BC up to the first century AD had visited it and they'd written about it and talked about it and they gave it this legend. Guys like Herodotus said that it surpasses the pyramids in grandeur. And then you have. Yeah, so this is the, this is from Herodotus histories in the 5th century BC and he says, for this I saw myself and I found it greater than words can say for. If one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all of the great works produced by the Hellenes, the Greeks, they would prove to be inferior in labor and expense to this labyrinth. So he's saying that all of the temples of the Greeks of ancient Greece, you've been there, you've seen the Acropolis, and just if you added them all up, the labor to produce them would be inferior in what it would take to just make this one thing in.
Joe Rogan
Egypt, the labyrinth that Is underground.
Ben
That's underground, right.
Joe Rogan
How do conventional archaeologists approach this? Do they discuss this at all?
Ben
Yes, they do. It's been. What happened was so you had, they always, we always kind of knew where it was. So, you know, you have the, the classical authors of antiquity, which coincides with what you might call the Ptolemaic period of ancient Egypt. It's the transition from like dynastic Egypt into becoming essentially a Roman province, like an imperial province of Rome. And that runs you up to about, you know, 4, 500 A.D. and then sort of, you know, civilization has, we have the Dark Ages, sort of have Roman Empire collapses. And it's not until again, you get to the Renaissance and you have artists and other authors are looking at these historical accounts and they're talking about it, they're drawing it. Some of the depictions you see from the labyrinth are in that. And then again, not until the emergence of what I would call modern archaeology in the 18th century. So guys like Carl Lepsius in the 1700s started to look at these accounts and go and survey the place where they said it was. So, you know, Herodotus and these authors, I selected the quotes here to just. There's a lot more that they say about it, but one of the things they talk about is they kind of give descriptions of where it is. They say it's near what was called Lake Moeris and it's near the, what a city that was the temple of the crocodiles. Crocodilopolis or Ancient Arseno is the other name for it. And we know where that is. And Lake Moeris sort of somewhat still exists. It's much smaller now, but it's in this region called the Fayoum of Egypt. So if you ever look at Egypt on a map, you can imagine this desert and you have from north to south you have this green line of the Nile traces it down. But on the left side you look at, there's this leaf shaped depression that's all green. It's called the Fayum. It's a depression which used to flood with the Nile. Today they use it for agriculture. And it's right at that neck of the Fayum where it connects up to the Nile Valley. And he also described it, they also described the pyramid that's at the site because there is the pyramid to Amenemhat III on that site. So they give us all these descriptors and everyone kind of agreed. Yeah. So it's at this place called Hawara where I've been to several times. There's still a pyramid There and there's these great fields of sand and like little open air libraries with chunks of stone. And what happened was. So Carl Lepsius went there and he said, well, I've discovered the ruins of like a Roman town that's built on the surface. There's nothing crazy about it. Flinders Petrie was the guy who kind of got the closest. Now Petrie went there in the late 1800s and early 1900s and he was excavating, he dug down 7 or 8 meters. He got down and he found this massive stone slab of benton or plaster that was huge, like a thousand feet long. Like it was. As he sort of traced the edges of it and he's like, I'm standing on the foundation of the labyrinth. So what he said is like, it's all gone. Like it's basically, Petrie said, it's been quarried. This place has been a source of stone for literally millennia. So it's gone. So pretty much everyone since then in archaeology, Egyptology is like. And if you look on Wikipedia, they'll tell you, oh, it's, it's gone. It was destroyed, was quarried away. Petrie says, you know, I'm standing on the foundation of it, the bottom layer. And that's it, it's, there's nothing here. And so that's always been kind of the position of orthodox Egyptology. Look in the textbooks, that's where it is. But that's all changed because there's been a whole bunch of different now scientific expeditions there. This is where it gets into some intrigue because the, the Matah expedition, the Cora University expedition, I mean these, these happened. Their results have come out since, but they were covered up at the time. They were suppressed. So the first guy to.
Joe Rogan
What year was this?
Ben
2008 was the Matahar expedition.
Joe Rogan
They were covered up.
Ben
Yes.
Joe Rogan
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Ben
Yeah. So what is this?
Joe Rogan
Our boy Zawi.
Ben
Yeah, Zahi.
Joe Rogan
It is Zahi.
Ben
Sorry, it was. And look. And again, not my words. This is the words of Louis de Cordier, who was. He's a Belgian artist and entrepreneur who funded and drove the Matah expedition. He did it in conjunction with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, which at the time was helmed by Zahi Hawass, also with the nrig, which is the national research institute for like, basically subsurface studies. So that's those guys dragging that box around. So they used a whole bunch of different techniques to look at these areas around that pyramid at the site of Huara. Things like ground penetrating radar, geomagnetism, very low frequency, like seismic tomography, electrical resistivity tomography. There's a bunch of different techniques that are well established, known science. This isn't like the cuff risk and stuff where it's like, you can debate the merits of the technology. This is established technology. And they found the labyrinth. So. And what he found was, is that. Yes. So what Lepsius said about the ruins of a Roman or Greek or Persian town with mud bricks and stuff. Yep, that's there in the first few meters, you go down, then you hit the water table. So that's the other issue on this site, is the water table. So the water's at like 5 meters below the surface. And under that is the slab that Petrie found. So like 6, 7 meters is at that. That huge slab that Petrie found that he thought was the foundation. And then below that, Petrie didn't dig deep enough. Below that we can find essentially a labyrinthian structure of granite and very, very dense rocks and walls and like a maze like structure that has walls that are meters thick. There's another great slide in there. That's. That's the green and it's the actual blf. Right, that's it there. So, yeah. So this is at 8 meters with VLF sounding. So you can see like this labyrinthine structure of these walls and all of these lines and walls. These are like granite. And the scale of this, it's a hundred meters vertically by 150 meters.
Joe Rogan
100 meters tall?
Ben
Well, no. So vertically. No, no. So the Y axis, I guess of this. So we're looking down in the ground here. But you got to look at the scale, like across the top, that's 150 meters. Right. So I mean what? 450ft? So these are big walls. So it's big chambers and big walls.
Joe Rogan
For people at home. It's like a football field.
Ben
Yeah, it's a football field. Well, it's more, I mean more 100 meters in Australia. It's my 100 meters is the football field, I think. I don't know how big.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's 100 yards. What is the difference? 100 yards and 100 meters?
Ben
It's 100 yards is a little less. A little less. So 150 meters. And, and this is only a section of the labyrinth. They scan two sections. The labyrinth itself is said to be much, much larger than this. They. So they found much larger than that. Oh, that's huge. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's the overall structure. Like it's like a thousand feet at least.
Joe Rogan
Wow.
Ben
Like, like three, three, four, five times that size. I mean you have to go back to the. We have some better indication with the more modern space based scans now. But when they did those, the geophysical, like the, the ground penetrating radar scan. So they scanned two areas that was the bigger one, like in front of the pyramid. Then they did another one on the other side of the canal that runs through the site today. And they found, they found it on both sides. So that's the difference between like what we say about the lab, like what the textbooks will tell you about the labyrinth, it not being there and it being destroyed to. No, we've actually now there's been. The Madahar expedition confirmed it was there and they. So what happened? This was interesting and I have, I think, reasoning for why this happened, but it was covered up and these are the words, like Louis de Cordier, he eventually got sick of waiting because what happens in Egypt, anything you do, whether it's you're an academic institution or you're an individual or a group that's funding some sort of expedition, you work with the Council of Antiquities. Today it's the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. But they essentially, you know, you gotta it takes years to get access. And then once you do though, they control release of information. So that's always part of the deal. Right. It's that Egypt gets to do the announcing and if and when they choose.
Joe Rogan
And they have dismissed things in the past that they then accepted later.
Ben
Yeah, a great example is the, honestly, the Scanpyramids project. So when. So they got ahead of themselves a little bit. This is the muon detection, the cosmic ray detection stuff. They've been running that experiment for years at Giza in the Great Pyramid they put the. And every time I go in there, there's always different sets of equipment at different places on it. But these muon detectors, they have them under the ground and in the Grand Gallery. And it just takes years to collect data. Occasionally these cosmic particles, they'll pick one up and it's. You're able to detect voids or they have, they can somehow tell the difference between it traveling through solid matter versus a void takes years to build up a resolute picture. But once they did, they said, ah, okay, so we've discovered that big void in the pyramid. But they'd also discovered the small void at the, at the main entrance. If you look up at it today, there's those chevron blocks like above. You go in down here at the Alma Moons tunnel, but at the top where the descending passage actually exits the pyramid, the original entrance, there's this big chevron blocks and behind that's that chamber. So you remember a few years ago they made a big fuss. But as an example, like when the Scanpyramids guys on their own initiative announced that we've made these discoveries, I mean Zahi basically came out and said this is bullshit, this doesn't exist. There's nothing there. And if there is something there, we knew about it already, you know, and, and you go on a couple of years and when now it's time to do the press releases and to roll out, you know, the footage. And he's. Who's standing at the, at the podium making the announcement and showing the. Zahi's doing it like he has to. Yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
Fascinating situation over there with him.
Ben
Yes, I did a video, I just released it a few days ago. That got into some even more intrigue about stuff that's happened at Giza and in the, in the, at the Giza plateau in the 1990s, which we can, we can get into that too. But. So yeah, what happened with the Matah expedition and the labyrinth was that 2008 and 9, they finished their, their on Site work. They're ready to release the data. They, they put on a very small public lecture at Ghent University in Belgium. No one really attended it. And then they got told to start. And again, in the words of Louis de Cordier, because he waited like two or three years and then he put this out there. He said that he was told to cease any and all discussion or release of information from the Matah project. And him and his team members were threatened with national security sanctions from Egypt. Which means that, you know, I think at the low level, like, if you come to Egypt, we'll arrest you, and if not, when, maybe we'll come and get you. I don't know. It's national security sanctions.
Joe Rogan
Isn't there a way to sort of massage that situation and to talk to Zahi and say, listen, you can be the guy who found this.
Ben
Oh, that would have been the case. I think that was a given if, if it had been released. I actually think in the case. So it's funny, I, I, I kind of don't really blame him. So I think this was a political decision, not a not so people say, oh, you're hiding the truth and whatever. Yeah, okay, that, that's happening. There's new data. There's an amazing, amazing find that could change the world, in my opinion. Honestly, the labyrinth is the biggest archaeological discovery of the millennium. When we get into what that structure is and how big it is and the way it's reported in antiquity, there's nothing bigger than Herodotus says it surpasses the pyramids. Like, it's like finding more geese, like a Giza plateau somewhere, like under the ground. Under the ground. Like, you can't. I just think it would be the biggest discovery of the millennium, which is part of the problem, because I think, unfortunately, in Egypt, and this is just my intuition in my sort of read of the situation, what's happened is the reality is the groundwater level is rising, right? So it's kind of attacking that part of the site, at least. The higher levels of the labyrinth for sure, are suffering in this salty groundwater, Right? It is gonna slowly erode because that groundwater's come way up. We know it's come way up because Flinders Petrie back in the, you know, late 18th, early 19th century, actually got in to under the pyramid. And you can't today, if you go to that pyramid, there is a passage you can go down. You go down a few steps and just throw a pebble. It's just water and debris and mud.
Joe Rogan
So this water table has risen so slowly over.
Ben
No, since the 1960s, since they built the dam. So it's the High Dam. So what happened? It's. This is the problem, right? So you've got all these factors. It's where it is. So it's hawar, the neck to the foam. Now Egypt, I love Egypt. I go to Egypt a couple times a year every year, and fantastic place. But they are one of like, they're food poor in terms of, like, they're the net biggest importer of wheat. They need all the agriculture they can get. The foam is a huge agricultural area. There's a huge irrigation canal called the Barwabi Canal that's been cut in there in like the 1840s. Same guy built the Suez Canal, made it, cuts it in there. So you've got this situation of like, all right, we've got all this agriculture happening, we've got farmers, water rights, messing with this. And it's. And it happens to be running through this ancient site that could be the biggest discovery of our time. And it's happening because we built a dam on the Nile. And what happened with the High dam in the 60s, like, there's a low dam the British built in like 1901, 1902. Then, then they actually partnered with the Soviet Union to build this High Dam that's actually still a monument to Egyptian Soviet Union. Friendship at the dam is pretty cool. But when they built that High Dam, it essentially stops that yearly cycle of inundation of the Nile. So everyone, you know, we always talk about the Nile flooding, right? Every year that rains in Africa, in the south, you get this huge flood that comes up the Nile and it floods out and you get this deposit of, you know, black mud and real fertile ground. And they would use that to farm. They built the dam, you get rid of that yearly cycle, right? And what happens this episode is brought.
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Ben
Well, it seems counterintuitive because people like well it's less water in the Nile. No, what the dam did was eliminate the nine month dry season so you had the three month wet season but then you don't have that nine month dry season now. So you have essentially more water for more time in the Nile which is having this effect of rising the water table. So you combine that with the size of Hawara and the project, the scope of the project to try and remediate and save or excavate start working at the labyrinth. I mean you're talking like millions and millions. It's, it's not an easy problem to solve on an area that size to try and get the water out, divert the farmers water, deal with all of those problems, you know and then so what I think the options are he might have been left with here is like well it's either going to cost us an absolute bomb to try and do this for like we don't know what sort of gain. It'll probably be a decade before that place is suitable for tourism. It's, there's not much to see there even now or we basically say we've discovered it but we're not going to do anything about it because it's too expensive and you're going to face a lot of international criticism for that. So I think the decision was likely Made in my opinion complete speculation that it's just easy to brush this under the table. This never happened, we never discovered this. This doesn't exist. Let's just go on selling tickets on the Giza Plateau and pumping water out to the Fayum for agriculture.
Joe Rogan
God, how shortsighted. Now when you were saying millions, were you going to say dollars or are you going to say gallons of water?
Ben
No, dollars. I mean I think the project, the remediation project at Hawara would not be. It's not a simple thing. In fact they did do. There was another expedition after the Matah expedition in like this was 2009. Cora University along with a Polish University went out there to try and figure out what is the deal with the groundwater, where's it coming from, you know, like what direction they were doing. They were doing geological test pits and all these boreholes to figure out the water situation. According to them that that information was also covered up because they also did ground penetrating radar surveys also confirmed the labyrinth. The guy who was in charge of that in Kairo University was actually put in jail by day. Again this is on their report when the information finally came out in 2017 he lost a job obviously as part of it. So they covered that up too. But they had, they had tried to.
Joe Rogan
Put him in jail for what?
Ben
I guess for working on the site. Like I don't know, I don't know the reason it's, it's on their report though. That's what they say is that he was jailed because allegedly halted the project and then put the guy in jail. This is what they say on their, on, on the report from that expedition that, that, that work which came out like a decade after they'd done it and I dig it up on the Internet, I'm like well this is interesting because their results are interesting. But they, even after their work their conclusion was well, the water is a very complicated problem. It's coming from a couple different directions. Northeast is the shallowest, like it's coming in from this way but it's also coming from another direction. They'd have to dig a lot more test holes in a wider area to really figure it out. And I think you'd have to start digging like remediation wells, put in pumps and just try and pump that down, if not canal and trench that whole thing out like a massive site and then you can start to worry about all right, we're going to get some dirt out and start to excavate.
Joe Rogan
Could it be done without interrupting the farmers?
Ben
Probably, yeah. I Mean, I think it's, I think we could do it. I think that you can divert and move the Bar wobby canal out of the way if you had to.
Joe Rogan
I just think someone needs to holler at Jeff Bezos or Elon. Yeah. Someone with some deep pockets.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Don't you want to know?
Ben
You want to know? I want to know. Yeah. Well, the crazy thing is too is, is that according to the. Because the story doesn't end there. Like when you get into the modern space based scans, Merlin, Burroughs and the geoscan stuff. And I know that also I've met the guys from the Cafre project. They are going to scan that site. We talked to them about it recently, the cosmic summit. And then I think you know, the lower. What they're saying so far is that the lower levels like because this thing goes down like I said, to nearly 100 meters. There's, there's reported like levels down to 300ft under the ground and it seems like they might be free of water. So it's just, it's just like shallow groundwater and once you get into the bedrock and it's. And it's like, it's like it's not a porous stone or whatever's underneath, just the, the top level sediment. It seems like it, you know, Tim Aker said it looks like it's free of water. So the very bottom layers seem to be free of it. So.
Joe Rogan
So the actual labyrinth, very bottom layers.
Ben
The labyrinth is multiple levels at least. So we know.
Joe Rogan
Is it possible that they could somehow or another from the side dig a tunnel below everything?
Ben
If you could.
Joe Rogan
Below the water?
Ben
Yeah, you'd have to dig a deep tunnel. You could, I mean that's also an option is to try and if you, if you actually believe and you go with these scans, you know where that atrium is, we could probably try and get down there and just line a tunnel somehow get down. That would be epic. If we did that in our lifetime. I would love to see it like be incredible.
Joe Rogan
It seems like a terrible travesty if they don't.
Ben
I agree. Which is the reason I made that video in the first place. I wanted to draw attention to the labyrinth because it's just, I think it is like the, the biggest opportunity for us if in terms of massive discoveries in the ancient world. I can't think of anything that's bigger than the. I know the cuff ray scan stuff is super interesting that the claims are wild and it's. But this is like known about, like this has been talked about and then it's been confirmed with multiple scans. You had, you had Madha expedition, you had Cora University and I think it was Walk Row Claw, I'm butchering that. The Polish university or then you had geoscan team which was Klaus Dona, a friend of his who runs this German geoscan space based satellite thing. It's like a mathematical statistical approach. They kind of use it to determine the elemental composition of stars is the best explanation I have. However, they have a track record of being able to find things like water and oil and gold under the ground. So they've been using that as a company for like people to go basically survey and then go dig. And they've done three or four of these and they're okay, this is where you said it was. They scanned the labyrinth. They were the first space based scan to come out and talk about it. Then you had Merlin Burrows which is this ex UK military technology that's very similar in technique to the cuff ray scan guys. Like so they use synthetic aperture radar, Doppler tomography. These guys are using like high frequency orbital imaging with seismic data. So it's very similar in the way they're in that. You're essentially the description I was told is it's like imagine dropping pebbles into a container of water and if you could instantly freeze that container and lift it out and shine a light from underneath it. When you look at it on the top you can, you can see those ripples in three dimensions but you're looking at on a 2D scan kind of thing and you can interpret them to show you the topography of whatever's in that three dimensional space. It's something similar to that technology.
Joe Rogan
Awesome, dude, it is so awesome. It's wild, it's so awesome that they just have the ability to do that. And look at that beyond the cafre stuff, which you know, I, I don't want to get disappointed so I, I look at that like, like it's too great, it's too amazing, it's too spectacular.
Ben
It's a huge claim. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
And if it's true, oh boy, does that change.
Ben
I mean I'm in the camp of want to believe, Trust me. I mean I'm sure you are, but I'm not. But I don't, I mean I was skeptical initially when it came out. I've talked, I've since, I've since certainly come around on the tech, on the promise of the technology. I, my, my skepticism probably still exists in the layer between the scans as I've seen them. And then the interpretations of the results the 3D exactly.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. What their interpretations of it are a little weird because like you don't really have a crystal clear view of what this thing is. Yeah, you're making it look like it's some sort of a Tesla coil or whatever it is.
Ben
Like giant cubes with these four tunnels. Yeah, I look it, we'll see then. And, and I want to get into like the Osiris shaft because that's another thing that I just recently put a video out about. These other scans that have happened in the 90s confirmed, that have since kind of been confirmed by the Kafra scan team work. But yeah, at the labyrinth at least. The interesting thing to me that happened with these two wildly different techniques. Right. So you have, you have the geoscan, which is this statistical mathematical approach, space based still. But then you have. And the Merlin burrows, which is a similar technique to the cuff ray scan group. And it was used, I mean just so this is what Tim Akers would tell you. It was used to detect submarines. They would look at like surface patterns on the water and they were using it to basically track submarines under the water. So that's its origins at least in the military. As far as I know. It's like the non classified part of it is what he said at least reported to have said, I should say.
Joe Rogan
Are there ancient artistic depictions?
Ben
Yeah, I mean not ancient, but certainly Renaissance periods. And it's, it's, it's. I think some of it's symbolic, but we do get a lot of descriptions from those authors. So for example, Herodotus talks about it being, you know, 1500 rooms on one level total of. He said there's two levels. He saw one level. He wasn't allowed to go to the lower level. He said that it's 3,000 rooms in total. And not just rooms, but also courts, massive open courts.
Joe Rogan
These are like Herodotus didn't have access.
Ben
Not to the bottom level, according to him.
Joe Rogan
Interesting.
Ben
But Diodorus Siculus did, like these guys talk about. Siculus said that you needed a guide. You would get lost down there for days if you didn't have a guide who knew his way around. And then you have the same similar accounts from Pliny the Elder. And again these. I think once you get accounts coming from multiple people over the span of centuries that are from different civilizations, both Roman and Greek, and they're correlating. It's like this is pretty reliable data at this point. Certainly in history or in archaeology, that's your measure for like. All right, there's a grain of Truth in this, given that we've got the same thing coming from these different accounts that are essentially different civilizations that visited the same place. And what they say is astonishing. It's all of them talk about there being hundreds, if not thousands of rooms and twisting chambers, and then also giant open courts that might have 40 columns to a side. And all of it being done with just spectacular craftsmanship. Yeah. This is Diodorus Siculus, 1st century BC, talking about that. You know, in respect of carving and other works of craftsmanship, they left no room for their successes to surpass them. He's saying that there is. This is phenomenal work. And in the sacred enclosure, one found a temple surrounded by columns, 40 to each side. And this roof had a. This building had a roof made of a single stone, carved with panels and richly adorned with excellent paintings. So 40 to a side, that's 80.
Joe Rogan
And how was this even lit?
Ben
What? That's always a good question. That's a core question. When you get into any of these subterranean spaces, like the serapement, it's always. There's no soot. Like, we don't know how that. The answer is, we don't know. It wasn't with flame. Like, I don't think it was with flame. And then go back to Strabo's depictions.
Joe Rogan
In addition to these things, there is the edifice of the labyrinth, which is a building quite equal to the pyramids, a great palace made of many palaces, for. Such as the number of. How's that word?
Ben
Peristyle.
Joe Rogan
Peristyle courts, which lie contiguous with one another. Before the entrances, there lie what might be called hidden chambers, which. Which are long and many in number, and have paths running through one another which twist and turn so that no one can enter or leave any court without a guide.
Ben
Yeah. So he. You had Siculus's account of one of those courts being 80 columns, like 42 aside, and there was 12 of them. At least 12 of them in there. Wow. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy. So you have, you know, 3,000 rooms, 12 gigantic courts. Diodorus talks about the roof being made of a single stone. I very much doubt that. But what I think he's describing is the craftsmanship that you see in those real megalithic buildings in Egypt where you can't see the joints.
Joe Rogan
And here, Pliny the Elder, who lived between 23 and 79 CE, which is current time. So he's saying 3,600 years ago, this was constructed according to tradition.
Ben
Isn't that interesting? Yes.
Joe Rogan
So that predates the pyramids.
Ben
Yeah, by a long way. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
He's allegedly.
Ben
Allegedly. Right. Well, if you go with the orthodox date of the pyramid, sure. It's. He says that, you know, so essentially 3600 BC, that it was built according to the tradition at the time, 3,600 years.
Joe Rogan
So with the conventional dating of the pyramids, that's more than a thousand years earlier.
Ben
About a thousand years, yeah. A little. A little less, maybe.
Joe Rogan
And the conventional dating is like, it's questionable.
Ben
I mean, even the carbon dating on the pyramids doesn't quite match the conventional dating. It's a little earlier than that. So it's.
Joe Rogan
What is the carbon dating from pieces?
Ben
And so they got. Yes, exactly. Yes. Mortar in the carbon dating.
Joe Rogan
And what is that?
Ben
The date?
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
So it's, I believe it's like a wide range, but it's like several hundred years, like 200 years prior to what they would say is the time of Khufu of Cheops, the ruler in the fourth dynasty, certainly on the Great Pyramid, at least.
Joe Rogan
And what is the room for error when they do carbon dating?
Ben
Well, it depends on the samples and it's a lot of specifics, but it could be plus, minus 20, 30, 50, 100 years. It depends. I think the margin of error. They did multiple samples. I believe it's less than that. So they're pretty firm that the date is earlier. So it gets. This is. It's kind of a critic. I mean, I think there's a bunch of people that have talked about the fact that the archaeologist Egyptologists don't really reference that date because it kind of messes up their timeline a little bit. It's not thousands of years, it's hundreds of years. So the explanation tends to be, well, it was old wood. It's like the ash that gets mixed into the mortar as the source for the carbon. And they're saying, well, maybe they just burnt really old trees.
Joe Rogan
That's very convenient.
Ben
Right? It becomes convenient.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, well, all of it's convenient. Which is. Which gets really weird because we know that they did some enhancements to the pyramid. Like they refurbished some things.
Ben
Exactly.
Joe Rogan
And so that's the problem is like, would you. Refurbished what. And how long was it there before you refurbished it?
Ben
Indeed. Look, I think. I don't, I'm not. I don't discount the carbon dating. I think what you can say from the carbon dating firmly is that it shows that these pyramids were being worked on. If you can't, I don't think you can make the jump to say this is when they were built. You have to infer and say that. I think this is when they were certainly being worked on in that period. So I think it's possible that dynastic Egyptians could have finished the pyramids. They may not have been entirely pyramids originally. I think there's a strong chance that there were multiple phases of construction over a long time for them to end up being what they are in our time. I think those are all possibilities here because it just, the, this is the whole. When you take a step back and look at the whole picture of ancient Egypt, I mean, just you, you cannot attribute everything that we see in ancient Egypt to our current understanding of those dynastic Egyptians. Their capabilities, their tools, their writings and what we know about them. We know an awful lot like they do. We have tools from the ancient Egyptian toolbox. We found them. We have depictions shown on walls of how they did things that were very good about documenting them. So we have the tools, we have the depictions. We also have lots and lots of artifacts that match those tools and depictions. Right. We've got these, what are clearly handmade artifacts. And this is across all the categories of artifacts from things like stonework, columns, obelisks. Obelisks. Oh, sorry, yeah, obelisks. And vases, boxes, pyramids even. And then you have this other category of artifacts that is. Doesn't match. It can't be explained by these tools and techniques. And there's, there's just no, there's no depictions on walls of how they made the precision artifacts. There's no.
Joe Rogan
Can you give me an example of these precision artifacts?
Ben
Of course, yeah. And any category. I have it in that Tale of Two industries directory. Jamie on there. It's game on.
Joe Rogan
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Ben
The vases are probably the best example. They're a smoking gun. Example of it.
Joe Rogan
3D printed one.
Ben
Yeah. So this is these, these to me, I mean, this is why the vase project was so, I mean to me quite validating when it came up. Yeah. So wheel thing. Yeah. The schistisk.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
So these are the smoking gun because they connect to everything else. And we're learning so much about the precision of these things however. But we could start with statues or boxes or you know, columns. It doesn't really matter there. There are two categories across all of these artifacts and the advanced category, again, so you can't really make them with the tools that the ancient Egyptians were just were we know they were using that we found. They don't show the scene. There's no scenes of building stone pyramids. There's no scenes of them making giant statues like thousand ton statues. This is the type of thing that you see on the wall. And this is in the tomb of the nobles up in the west bank at Luxor. And here they're building mud bricks. So they're firing mud bricks over the fire. You can see them, they're pouring them, they're shaping them, they're carrying them. It's all very relatively primitive. And we know they made mud brick pyramids. They made mud brick ramps. And some of the mud bricks were big and heavy. But we know all about this. But you don't see is the, is the, is the, is the stone pyramid building, the really massive megalith stuff. The next, the next slide with the vases is a good example. This is what I've been calling the tale of two industries. It's a whole theory that I've been putting together for the last few years. Again, you have a primitive industry that is clearly observably handmade. It lacks precision and symmetry. We found the tools the Egyptians Drew the scenes, the artifacts match the tools and techniques. And then you have this advanced industry, visibly sophisticated. Usually very hard stone is the other characteristic. The primitive stuff is usually softer stone, although not always. These artifacts as we're doing analysis on them are showing this depth of precision and complexity that's phenomenal. The vases are just. This is where they become a smoking gun to this whole argument, I think.
Joe Rogan
Can you, for people that don't know about this stuff, can just give them some numbers on what?
Ben
Sure. So yeah, the vases go back to pre dynastic times. It's, it's, it's. There's no debate that these are pre, dynastic. They predate what we would call the dynastic civilization. And over the last few years they've, we've been starting to analyze them. We, the vase scan team, various groups of people now have been scanning these with modern technology. Lidar scanning, like laser scanning, even CT X ray scanning. And basically they're coming back with precision in terms of circularity, flatness, like centering, numbers that very much equate to some of the best industrial processes that we do today in things like aerospace industry. So where it's really important to be within two or three or four thousandths of an inch of perfection for the parts we make for jet engines or rocket engines. Those are the numbers that we're seeing come back on a lot of these vessels. Not all of them. Again, like I don't want to say this is true for all of them. It's not, it's true for a lot of them though. And this is again, these are levels of precision that are not visible to the naked eye. I mean you're talking human hair like a sheet of printer paper is like six or seven thousandths of an inch thick. A human hair is two to three or four thousandths thick. And you're seeing sometimes tolerances even lower than that. So it's not something you can feel or see or touch. But we see it again and again. And the only way we can achieve those sort of tolerances today is with very advanced machines. You know, 3D 5 axis mills, you know, really high precision lathes, CAD, like computer controlled equipment.
Joe Rogan
The problem with the lathe though is the handles on this.
Ben
Right? So yeah, if you get into it. So this is, this is the issue with this. And, and one of the craziest things about. And this is the OG Vaser, the original granite vase. This is the one that started it all. It's one of the more precise ones. And yeah, you could, you can imagine without the handles, you could lathe it if you're spinning it. But if you, if you had the handles, if you wanted these handles, you would have to leave a bullnose that runs all the way around it, then come back with a different process, a different tool to remove that space that this, this basically the space between the handles off the body.
Joe Rogan
And you don't see a lack of symmetry in those spaces.
Ben
Well, precision. So this is, this is the thing. So when we do that today it's called, you basically lose some positional calibration on your tool. So we account for that in the way we do industrial design of these sorts of parts. So we know that we're going to lose a little bit of precision when we change tools and process. Right. So we account for that. But you don't see that on this. When we did, I went back and we did, we did analysis of this area of the vase body in between the handles. And there's no drop in precision relative to the rest of the vessel. So that means one of two things. One option is, okay, they could, they could handle that positional, that lack of, of that loss of positional calibration better than we can. Or it wasn't done on a lathe and it was done in what you would call a single pass with a single tool. And the only way you can do that is on a. Is, is with a tool with five axes of freedom. So now you're talking about a five axis CNC mill, like one of those computer controlled things that can just cut it out in basically one pass, but without changing tools and process with incredibly hard stone. And that's the other challenge with this stuff. And there's some samples of the stone there in front of you from vessels.
Joe Rogan
Actual.
Ben
These are actual pieces from vessels? Yeah. I got a private collector.
Joe Rogan
Just gotta think like who made this and how old is this, how old is this piece?
Ben
At least five, six thousand years, I think. I think it potentially quite old. And we can get into how old, I think. But so that's the other challenge that is rarely talked about is the material. Like we, we. These things are made from granite, diorite rock crystal. That thing's rock crystal. Basically. Quartz.
Joe Rogan
Feels so hard.
Ben
It's insanely hard. Yes. All these different. Oh yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's like I have a granite mortar and pestle at home in this big heavy thing. It's like I don't need to protect it from anything. Right. I have to protect My counters from it, because if I just. It's going to destroy anything it hits.
Joe Rogan
And this is so thin.
Ben
So that's. Yes. So this is, that's the other. It's translucent. You hold a light up to it. Even the rock crystal one's translucent.
Joe Rogan
Wow.
Ben
So that one gets down to about 2 millimeters thickness just under the lip. Oh, wow. Yeah. You put a phone light on it, you see it comes right through it. And I mean, so with granite and with diorite and particularly granite, I mean, it's essentially a conglomerate. Right. So you have it. It's not a material that's homogeneous. So inside a granite you've got silica and hornblende and mica and all these different quartz and, you know, hence the pattern. Hence the pattern. But also almost microscopically, it changes hardness. You know what I mean? So some of that stuff is less hard than other bits. And it's the way granite takes millions of years in heat and pressure to bond those things together atomically. And that's the stone we get when it pops up out on the bedrock and we mine it. But it's, it just means that when you're machining a material like granite, it, you know, your tooltip is going from stuff that's really hard to softer to hard. And it's like you have to account for that. Yet we see this. You feel the surface of it. It's phenomenally well polished and finished. I mean, if you were doing this today with a lot of modern tool tips, you'd be ripping chunks of quartz out rather than cutting them. So something that the actual tool tip that made these things we know is also very refined because this is a very difficult substance to choose to work in. No stone sculptor chooses to work in granite unless that's what the project calls for. There's a reason they use marble is that it's both much softer and it's homogeneous, like it's the same material. It doesn't vary in hardness wildly. So making these sort of precision things and objects out of stuff like granite and getting it down to 2 millimeters thick, like that other piece near the lip.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, it's crazy.
Ben
And it's. There's even examples that get even thinner than that. Flinders Petrie talked about a diorite vessel that was 1/40 of an inch thick about. He called it the thickness of stout playing card. Yeah, this is it here.
Joe Rogan
Wow. Look at the light going through it.
Ben
That's. That's about 2 millimeters thick. That one's one of Matt Bell's vases. It's probably my favorite. It's like typically called the thin walled vase, but it's a phenomenal piece. I'm amazed it's actually survived this long because it is. That's one of the rare few delicate ones. You could break that because it's so thin. Because again with this type of stone it gets really brittle and it's like glass, like a cube of glass. Bang that on anything, right? Thin glass shatters, same as this stone. Yet they did this again and again and again and again.
Joe Rogan
How do we know that this is pre dynastic?
Ben
Well, from where they're found, I mean they're literally found in pre dynastic burials. This is the, this is the real, this is why the vases are so important to me. It's. And why I think they're the smoking gun. It's one of the big reasons is that they're uncontrovertibly or incontrovertibly pre dynastic because they've been found in burials that are 100% pre dynastic. Naqada culture, Naqada II. You can go to any museum that has a reasonable collection of these and find them in the pre dynastic section all over. There's no debate like they're found in these burials and they carbon date the burials or they culture date and the reference date them to periods of thousands of years prior to the dynastic Egyptian civilization. There's, there's good evidence that they may even stretch back as far as 12 to 14,000 BC that they're in burials that go back that far in like the like southern Egypt, northern Sudan area. Yeah, it's crazy. And that's a lot of those burials unfortunately today are underwater because of the dam that created like NASA. But either way I don't. People will debate the how far back they go. It's just not controversial at all to say that they are pre dynastic 100%. And I think the reason is, is that they're this size, right? You can bury this with you. If you have it, then you can be buried with it. You can't do that with a thousand ton statue. It stays on the site and then maybe someone down the road writes his name on it like Ramses II or somebody put carves his name into it. And then we come along thousands of years later and say, oh, Ramses II's name's on that, therefore he must have had it made. I mean that's essentially one of the core principles of Egyptology. They do use the writing primarily as a source, not the only source, but they do. And the vases, what's the problem with even dating them to those pre dynastic settlements is that there is nothing about those cultures that indicates they had this capability. Nakata culture. And even the ones like Toshka, these older ones pretty similar in that you're talking like the burials are often like shallow fetal position graves. You find these precision hard stone objects with fishbone combs, sticks and stones. Very primitive hand thrown pottery. Not even thrown, just hand formed pottery. No other stonework. You know I've seen antique stealers that are selling these vases because there is a huge. There's a lot of these in the private market and in private possession because of their size and their availability and this. How many there were. Because there's hunt like are they illegal to possess? No.
Joe Rogan
So you could get a hold of one of those legally.
Ben
Yeah, I know collectors with like 80, 90 of them, 100 of them.
Joe Rogan
What?
Ben
Oh yeah. Really? Yeah, they're on. They're on. They come up.
Joe Rogan
Is that many of them available?
Ben
There's. I would say today there's easily over a hundred thousand hard stone vessels for sure. I mean they found 50,000 of them in one spot. Like that's the famous discovery at the step pyramid. But yeah, it's crazy. There's a lot. I think there were even more like this was an industry. Like that's the other key. And a lot of these are semi exotic types of stone too. We don't know where the stone came from. It's not local in a lot of cases. No, we like there's lapis, there's lapis lazuli artifacts that are pre dynastic and there's no known quarry for lapis in Egypt. The closest one's Afghanistan.
Joe Rogan
What?
Ben
Right, yeah, well there's.
Joe Rogan
How far is Afghanistan from Egypt?
Ben
I don't mean. Must be. It's right over on the other side of the Middle East I think, isn't it? It's over towards. Yeah, it's up towards Russia and China. It's.
Joe Rogan
Show that image again, Jamie.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
That you just pulled up.
Ben
So well, there's the foam, there's Egypt.
Joe Rogan
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Ben
So Turkey, Afghanistan over here, Uzbekistan over here, like on the other side of Saudi Arabia and Iran. So you've got to go all the way from Iran.
Joe Rogan
Oh my God.
Ben
So that's the nearest lapis quarry. I mean look, there's a. This. This is not a problem restricted to the vases either. There's a box in the Osiris shaft, which is more the box itself. Just they say it's what's fourth dynasty? It's made from a stone called dacite. And again, there's no known quarry in Egypt for dacite. This happens a Lot. So it's almost.
Joe Rogan
Go back to that image, Jamie, please. Yeah. There's one of the things that freaks me out about the map is when you go out, it looks like it was washed over.
Ben
Oh, 100%.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, 100%.
Ben
I've talked a lot with Randall about this.
Joe Rogan
Look at that. Like, go, go back out again. Look at that below it.
Ben
Yeah, the Sahara.
Joe Rogan
That's exactly what it looks like. It looks washed out.
Ben
It is. That's what it is.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, but that's crazy. It is like how much water wash that out? I mean, and how else would you get what looks exactly like a water washout? How else would those features be on the surface?
Ben
It's a. Yeah, yeah. I mean, some, some of those are mountains and mountain ranges, but I can tell you in the desert, not so much that. I mean, there are mountains that just looks like channels.
Joe Rogan
It just looks like an insane amount of water literally washed over the area and smoothed it out.
Ben
Yeah. I mean, there's huge. There's a massive amount of evidence for massive, for giant floods through the Nile Valley as well. Not just across the Sahara, but I mean, Petrie was talking about. He was up on cliffs, you know, and finding water lines and flint points and stuff that were indicative of massive floods. This is Hawara. Yeah, this is the labyrinth.
Joe Rogan
Wow.
Ben
So there's the canal, you see, that's the canal. I've been talking the Bar Wobby Canal.
Joe Rogan
It is so crazy that when you get to like sub Saharan in Africa, like how little of that has been explored and how much of that was like insanely green and fertile not that long ago?
Ben
Well, certainly not. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Thousands of years ago.
Ben
Well, it, it's interesting. I just, you know, I did a. It's. I did this long video on the erosional features of the Giza Plateau. Because last year, 2024, they released a paper that they. I think some geologists, I can't remember the names unfortunately, but they talked about the fact that, that there was all of the valley temples. So these pyramid, you know, on all these pyramids that are on, like what you would call the. I mean, lower Egypt. So Giza, Abu Rawash, Abser, Saqqara, My Doom, they. All the pyramids aren't just a pyramid, it's a pyramid complex. So it's like you have a pyramid, you've got a structure in front of it, you've got this causeway that runs down to what then they would call a valley temple. A structure that's the end of the causeway. So that's the, the well known valley temple that's next to the Sphinx is the valley temple for the middle pyramid. Like it's connected by this causeway. And they figured out that during the African humid period, which ended thousands of years before dynastic Egypt ever started, there was a branch of the River Nile called the Aromat branch that ran exactly where all of these valley temples are. So it's like they were, it's almost, I mean I just look at it and go, this was built, these were built for that water source because I think it's super. I'm very skeptical about the idea of these, all of these valley temples, particularly the one that Giza Plateau being used as harbours for like a couple months a year to transport all these blocks from the quarry In Aswan, again 600 miles away, right. For all the granite. And there's thousands, tens of thousands of tons, hundreds of thousands of tons of granite on that plateau that had to be transported. I don't think there's the depth there. I've seen pictures and photographs. In early times, pre dam when the Nile flooded, there's not that much water there. However, during the African humid period, which ended at the latest 6,000 BC but stretches back thousands and thousands of years before that. That's when the Sahara was a savannah. You had river basins and lakes like, like lakes and rivers. You had, you had much more rainfall and it wasn't like a, it wasn't this flood situation, it wasn't this annual inundation. There was just rainfall and there was enough water in that Nile valley to support this aromat branch of the Nile which is, was said to be like a mile or two miles wide in some places. So really not like an insignificant waterway. But it was high and I was, it was running and, and they've traced the path of this Aromat branch and it turns out all of these valley temples from these pyramid complexes are on its banks. And it wouldn't, it's not like it's flooding, it's like there all the time and, and this end, this period ends and the, you get the desertification of the Sahara starting around 6,6500, 6000 BC. And so you know, it's not like until, you know, if you get 5,000, then 4,000 4,500 BC, 3,000 BC that's when you sort of, that's 3,100 BC is kind of when we say the Egyptian civilization started. So it doesn't make sense to me that if, if they built these valley temples and these, and these, all these structures in like 2800 BC. I mean, what do you. You would. You would build it where the river is? Like, the river was way down there at that point. Yeah. And. And so I.
Joe Rogan
What is their response to this?
Ben
Well, I just put it in my. I mean, does anybody try to debunk it? No, it's a. It's a peer reviewed scientific study. This is what happens in these. With a lot of these. These papers, you'll see this in. It happens in genetics and the DNA studies that have been done too. You don't. These other scientists will not really step on the toes of the archaeologists or the historians. Right. They'll present the data, but stop from inferring what it could mean for the picture of history.
Joe Rogan
Got it.
Ben
So they just seem to be left.
Joe Rogan
Throw the data out there and go. You guys figured out.
Ben
Yeah, pretty much. And they just whoop, hands on.
Joe Rogan
The archaeologists say, we're not gonna touch it.
Ben
Yeah. They ignore it. Usually. They're not gonna care. It's. Yeah. It's left to like, rogue scholars and idiots like me on YouTube, people that write books to really try and put the pieces together.
Joe Rogan
Thank God there's a YouTube dude. Right?
Ben
I know.
Joe Rogan
I mean, thank God there's a place where a video like yours can get millions of views, where so many people all around the world can watch that and go, wait, what's going on down there? Like this. Who really knows? And why do these people, why are they so sure? Like, why are they so arrogant in their ideas? Because it's very clear that it's not. There's not a clear, you know, like, we know civil war ended in 1865. Right. It's like, it's all written down. Everybody knows people were alive. There's like photographs of the soldiers. We're pretty accurate with that.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
You get tough. Fucking 6000 BC, man. You're just guessing.
Ben
Yep. It's. It's a.
Joe Rogan
It's.
Ben
Yes. The further back you go, the much hazy.
Joe Rogan
You can't tell evidence.
Ben
There is way less evidence.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. And it's also it. It scares them because something like that, if you really do find advanced structures that are at 6000 BC, before Gobekli Tepe, we didn't even know that that was even possible. And that's that famous conversation that happened with Robert Schoch and that really arrogant archaeologist, Mach Lena.
Ben
Yes.
Joe Rogan
Which is. He's laughing. Like, why would you laugh about ancient history? First of all, what ancient civilizations are. Is that guy still alive?
Ben
Lena? Yeah. Show me the potsherds.
Joe Rogan
He must feel so Stupid now. Well, yeah, after Gobekli Tepe, like, someone should show him that video and go, why were you laughing? Because this is just human ego. This is human ego on display for the world. You want to be the gatekeepers of this information. You want to be the one person or the person that represents this group of human beings that are the scholars that have published work that have taught at universities, and you're the only ones. You're the only ones that know the ancient history of Earth, despite the fact that there's people like yourself and Graham Hancock and all who've spent a lot of time, and they're very careful about what they say and spent a lot of time investigating this, and they just want to dismiss those people because they don't have the proper credentials or like, what are you talking about?
Ben
I think it's. Yes, that's exactly what's happening, I think. And it is as a result of the fact that the conversations is getting out of their hands. Right. It's one of the things I admire so much about the people who started this, what we would call archaeological or Egyptological space. Guys like Flinders Petrie, you know, they're very open about what they didn't know. Like, one of my, like, Petrie would tell, he talks about the machining marks and you can read between the lines at the wonder at what he's finding. And he's like, I don't get it. Like, I don't. We can't do it. We don't know how they did it. And this is, I think, because the conversations happening in those halls of, you know, the academic halls or the geographical club or whatever, these peers, doesn't get out to the hall. Doesn't get out. And then. And so that slowly changes with the rise of initially, like, alternative authors, you know, which. Best represented by Graham Hancock, good friend of mine as well, and he, you know, his books, and they start to gain in popularity. And now these, I guess the people in the, in the academic halls of residence that are typically considered the authority are seeing this conversation get out of hand. And now you get to YouTube where, you know, it's, to some extent, I think it is possible to do an end run, end run around what they're saying. And I do watch people, and there are guys like Flint that are trying to embrace that, the new media space and try and get on podcasts and, you know, if you read the SAA journals and articles, the Society of American Archaeology, they're literally writing to themselves saying, how can we become more popular in this Space. And how do we start podcasts and get into it?
Joe Rogan
The problem is they're still doing it the same way.
Ben
They are.
Joe Rogan
And it's like when CNN journalists get fired from CNN and start a podcast and everybody like, no, you're doing CNN outside of cnn. That's what they're doing. They're doing academia, which is, like, gatekeeping of information and also, like, pejoratives, mocking really shitty behavior towards anyone who's outside of it, including calling them racist, calling them white supremacists. It's. It's so dumb. It's so dumb because one of the dumbest parts about it is, no matter what, those are the people that lived in Africa. So no matter what. Oh, no matter what happened. Whoever built that.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Is people that lived in Africa.
Ben
They were African.
Joe Rogan
Shut the fuck up. Like, the white supremacy thing makes no sense.
Ben
Yeah, it's cri.
Joe Rogan
I mean, it's Africans.
Ben
It's Africans 100.
Joe Rogan
Look, that's the people that were living there. If. If humans made it. You know, if you're not in the alien camp, which is a bizarre camp, but if you're not in the. I'm in the ancient civilization. Incredibly advanced cataclysmic disaster wipes them out. Civilization takes a long time to rebuild, finds the remnants of these ancient civilizations, and then sort of claims them over generations. After a thousand years, nobody really knows who fucking built it, you know? And then this is. This is where I think we find ourselves. That's. That's where I'm at. But if you're in that camp, you're talking about Africans.
Ben
Yes.
Joe Rogan
So all these shitty things they do just show their hands, just show what they're really all about. What you're really all about is silencing anything that really throws a monkey wrench into everything you've been teaching for decades. Like, you've claimed that you're the expert, you've claimed arrogantly that you have all the information when you clearly are wrong.
Ben
Absolutely. That is what's happening. It's actually. It's a quote that I steal from my friend Christopher Dunn quite happily, which is, you know, you wouldn't trust an archaeologist to design the chair he's sitting on. But if it's an ancient chair, he's gonna claim he's the expert on it. Like this. And this is what happens. I. I had Joseph Wilson on a podcast talk about he. I had this great quote from. He said, oh, you know, if just because some engineer standing there, you know, shining a laser on a vase, don't Let that, don't, let, don't mistake that for him knowing more about the guy who can read hieroglyphs because he can read what they wrote about it and he's the authority on it kind of thing. It's just like you're just dismissing all of these other disciplines that are, that I think are required for a, a true and complete picture of trying to assemble this evidence. Right? Like, as you say, there's, there's very little evident evidence that shows us definitively what happened in the dim, dark, distant past. But it's, you gotta try and make the case for it as best you can. And I think we should try and encompass all of the evidence. And one of the disciplines that's missing from that approach is the engineering stuff. It's the precision stuff. It just gets dismissed out of hand. And yeah, just because we're not the authority figures on that topic, they ignore it, which is what happens.
Joe Rogan
I don't know how you can ignore the vases, how you can ignore the statues, the symmetry and the construction of the faces.
Ben
It's starting to become a problem. Like they're trying. And even in the past, when I would guess the mainstream approaches to try and solve, say some of the machining examples, the tubular drills or the saw cuts, I mean, just when you dig down into them and the, the answers that you get and the explanations that are offered are just, they don't hold any water. It's, they've kind of, they're frankly ridiculous. Like.
Joe Rogan
Well, the issue with the drill bits is the revolutions per minute, right?
Ben
I mean the cores. Yeah, well, it's not the revolutions per minute, it's the penetration rate. We don't know how quickly it does. How. Yes. So how quickly it penetrates into stone. I suspect that it's, that it was, it could have been turning quite slowly, but it's like a 1 in 60 penetration rate is the rate of the spiral groove on the cores that have been analysed, particularly Petrie's core number seven. One in 60, meaning one in. So for like if you unwind that circular motion to a straight line, 60 inches horizontal travel, 1 inch vertical drop, which is 500 times greater than how we do it today with modern diamond tipped saws, hole saws which do turn. So our modern ones bear in mind they, you know, 900 RPM, they'll cut through Grant slowly, but it cuts. I mean, no doubt it grinds more, more so than cutting, but, but yeah, unwinding that spiral and looking at. That's what Petrie Was first of all, like, how is this possible? His numbers got refined a bit by Chris Dunn, but more or less a 1 in 60 penetration rate. So it's very difficult to explain. There are multiple cores like this. And this is the other element that I think the vases are showing is that you have a technological link between the vases and these other precision artifacts, the bigger ones that couldn't be buried in these civilizations. That, to me suggests that they were made with the same technology. You see the same machining marks, the same tubular drill marks on that quartz piece. If you look on the bottom, you can see the. On the inside of it. There's no other side. You see the tool mark. There's a.
Joe Rogan
This right here.
Ben
Yeah. So this is like. That's the tubular drill. So this is. That's a core function of how these vases are made. You would often find. So this is the bottom, the bot. So they've. They've cored that thing out and then they've snapped it off and polished it down. But they didn't eliminate the full tool mark. And you'll see that in a lot of vases. So that these tubular drills were used with the vases as well.
Joe Rogan
And we have no idea the power source, no idea what the material was that cut?
Ben
No. Well, yeah, so, yeah, the vases have. It's become interesting. One of the. Let me talk about the provenance part first, because that's been the one crit, like the pushback on the vases. This is where it's become a problem, is nobody's really been able to push back on the data like the, the scientific and the measurement data that's come out, the precision factor geometry. There's a whole bunch in the geometry space that. That indicates that they are, like, designed. They're not just made, they were designed with mathematical and geometrical, geometric principles in mind. They show PI, they show phi, the golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence. All this sort of stuff is in them. No one's pushing back on that. The major pushback on the vessels and the early days of the vase scan project was these are modern fakes or something like they're not. They're not the real deal because they're not coming from museums. They've been. They're modern forgeries. How can you say they're real? So what's happened in the years since and when I first came on here and talked a little bit about that, that was very much the early days of this project, about two and a half years ago now. Now The. The vase scan and particularly the artifact foundation. Adam Young, who started this whole thing, who owns. He actually, this is his copy of his vase. They've been in now four museums around the world. We've scanned close to 100 vessels from inside of museums with impeccable provenance. Those results are starting to come out. They're matching the results that we've found so far. So the provenance thing is kind of that's going away. The people that I think chose to fight on the hill of Providence have died on it. Now they are legitimate. And to be fair, you can also find vessels in private collection with impeccable provenance. Just as you can find a lot of vessels in museums that have no idea where they came from. It's a. It's a much. It's not as clear as just, well, if it's in a museum, it's. We can trust it. And if it's not, we can't. It's not like that. But what else has happened is that there's other as. So the. The project came out and it gained a lot of interest from really talented people around the world. And there's been several of those. One of the guys that I've been working with a fair bit lately over the last couple of years, a guy named Dan Doc. Dr. Max Zamilov, who's a physicist, I believe he taught for 10 years. He's a nuclear physicist. Taught for 10 years, I think at Penn State. He's a. He runs his own company now. And I first he reached out to me and actually we took these fragments to his house. And I rolled up to his house in Florida and sitting in his living room are two, like scanning electron microscopes. You know, as you do. Who doesn't have two SEMs in their living room? So we started to do things like look at these pieces through a scanning electron microscope to try and find evidence for the materials that we use to cut them. So you should. If these were used with a tool so that the orthodox explanation being, well, it's a copper tube and it's sand or it's some sort of cutting medium and it's. It's. It's spun and ground out, you should find traces of copper or whatever that material was in there. We looked at. We spent days looking at several pieces. 00 copper. Like not. Didn't find any copper. Nothing at all. The nice scanning electron microscope, not only do you get the magnification, but that you can focus a beam of electrons onto a particular spot. And that backscatter of electrons. You can then map out the elemental composition of the material.
Joe Rogan
So pause you for a second here.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Are the oldest tools that they found copper?
Ben
Yeah, copper and stone.
Joe Rogan
And what are the dates of the oldest tools?
Ben
Well, they go back all the way to the Old Kingdom. 26, 27, 2800 BC. Like, yeah, it was, it was early days. They were smelting. I mean, obviously the older tools are stone tools like flint. I mean a lot of carving. You can carve stone with harder types of stone. So there was definitely flint and things being used, but there's no evidence, like, not up until like the very later periods of the Egyptian civilization is there any significant evidence for iron and things like that. Like, it's pretty much copper and bronze alloys, tin, you know, copper and Tina.
Joe Rogan
So when they analyze the traces, there's no copper.
Ben
We didn't find any copper. We didn't find some other stuff which was very interesting. Well, the most interesting thing we did find was titanium.
Joe Rogan
What?
Ben
Titanium and titanium alloys with iron. We found iron, zinc, tin, zirconium alloys. Yeah, titanium. And it's not. We've. Yes. So, yeah. So when you find the term alloy.
Joe Rogan
Doesn'T that refer to something that has melted?
Ben
Right, that's been put together. Exactly. In fact, you. And you don't. Titanium as we know it as a metal doesn't exist naturally. So it's in, in nature, it's titanium dioxide that is found in rocks. This was not titanium dioxide that we were looking at because you see a, again that the SEM gives you the spectrum. Right. So you would see oxygen and titanium together. We didn't see that. And in fact, I did a. I have, I have a video on this and it's. We found a piece actually like a small, maybe 20, 30 micron wide piece embedded in one of those grooves in a tool tip that looked like an embedded piece. It shines up very brightly when you see metals on this in the SEM. It's like a bright spot and you can aim it at it and it's just straight titanium. And it looked like a small piece of a tool that had been wedged in there. And I mean, look in the, in our modern times, I mean, I think titanium was discovered even in the late 1800s. It wasn't used outside of laboratories until the 1930s as a material. But there seems to be evidence that there's some titanium used.
Joe Rogan
Has this been published?
Ben
No, I wouldn't. I know Max is trying to work on that. I would. It was not a systematic. We spent days like A couple of days. And it's. We didn't do like a systematic grid search. Like even in one of those pieces you could spend. It would take you a long time to just map it properly. Right. Like to scan the whole thing.
Joe Rogan
But it's to play with devil's advocate. Would that be evidence of a lack of a chain of custody, that perhaps someone was using titanium to see if they could cut out?
Ben
Yes, it could. It could be contamination. So we looked for signs of contamination. I didn't. This didn't seem like contaminate. In fact, at the end of, at the end of when we'd finished scanning, we actually took. He had some titanium dust like he was. We put some on. On one of the pieces and put it in to see what that would look like. Just these like a tiny, like just like literally a matchstick and just the tiniest end and just tapped it and then looked at that under the microscope to look at what contaminated. This didn't seem to be contamination. You can't rule it out. There's. It's. We found other types of metals as.
Joe Rogan
Well, so it didn't seem to be contamination. What is the reason why it didn't seem to be that?
Ben
Well, because it didn't. It. So we looked at what contamination would look like.
Joe Rogan
What is the difference?
Ben
Well, so it's like smaller specs where you can actually see the material. The one piece that we found, it seemed to be embedded in the stone like it was as if something like this tiniest fragment of the tool of some sort of. Imagine it was a tool tip wedged itself in the stone and then it stayed there. But it was only like 20 or 30 microns wide, which is pretty big under a scanning electron microscope.
Joe Rogan
But that was the only piece of titanium.
Ben
We found other, other specs of it and then occasionally be titanium and iron mixed together. And then we, we also found specs of like zinc zircon and tin and then various combinations. I honestly, I, I think it's, it's grounds for more investigation. I, I think the most significant thing was the no copper thing. Like that's like all right, no copper like that. That to me was the biggest takeaway. The fact that we found some other elements in pieces of what, let's say questionable provenance. I know these are legitimate pieces from these vessels. Ideally the best thing. If we could. This would. I'd love to work with the Egyptians to do something like this because I know there are fragments of vessels in the step pyramid. There's hundred thousands of them down There still in fact, like the last time we got down to the very bottom level, which is there's a special permission required to get into the step pyramid. And then even then they generally won't let you down to the bottom level. There's another ladder and 30ft down to the big bottom level. It goes down further, but it hits the water table again. But in one of these corners, in this very bottom level, you're like 150, 200ft under the step pyramid. We found a wall and it was a collapsed. It must have been a collapsed magazine of these vessels. And this is the place where they found 50,000 of them originally. Like, like Jean Philippe loye in the 1930s found this huge cache of these vessels there. And in this wall. It's an incredible little video. I've not published it. I mean I do want to talk about it, but you could. You literally see like, it's like a wall of dirt of not rock, but dirt. And in the wall is like fragments of vessels because it had been a cache of them, that there was something. A tunnel had collapsed and it had crushed them. So you've got these like pieces of worked granite or diorite or whatever just in the wall. So I. That would be interesting if you could go down there and like get their permission to say, well let's sample. Because you have. Then, you know, you've basically got it in its original environment from dynastic Egypt and put it in a Ziploc or whatever. Just keep it, don't mess with it. Right?
Joe Rogan
Clear chain of evidence.
Ben
Clear chain of evidence. And then scan it. So I think it's an interesting observation.
Joe Rogan
I wonder if they found titanium on that. Holy shit.
Ben
I think the Russian. There's a Russian group that did something similar and they also found metals. I think they found titanium as well. Lah. The laboratory of alternative history.
Joe Rogan
How is titanium made?
Ben
It's a smelting process from titanium dioxide. I don't know the specifics of it, but you have to take that titanium dioxide and I assume smelt it down or do something like it. Again, it took us up until 1930s to use it just anywhere outside of labs. So it's super interesting. But again, this, I wouldn't even say that's the most interesting thing Max found. So he's a crazy dude, an interesting guy. He's, you know, he's doing fusion experiments in his spare bedroom. He's got like this apparatus surrounded by boxes of borax and Borax, 10 foot Tesla blow. So he took. So get Then this, this is, this sort of ties back to the tool marks. It ties back to a question you asked me when I was here last, which is what's my wildest speculation. I actually have some now which is based on some evidence in its early days. He has published on this on his website. But he took precision vases, he took base rock samples of the rock that these were made from from the place. I actually got him a piece of basil. He took non precision vases and he put them in a germanium detector basically to look at the radioactive and the isotope sort of baseline radiation of these pieces. And it turns out the precision vases are radioactive. They're, they're two to three. He's tested several relative to the base rock samples and the non precision vases, they have two to three times the thorium decay products in them. Them all of them so far. And in fact that piece right there has, he said has a, the quartz piece or the crystal piece has a notable Cesium 137 signature in it as well. So that's an interesting.
Joe Rogan
Nuclear titanium.
Ben
Could be. I don't know about that but it's. So he's look, it's again early days but he's, he has published it on his website, the findings and he is, he's obtaining more equipment to do more testing, some more in depth testing that he will be much more definitive about. He did take some recently to the Petrie Museum in London to test some of their artifacts. But it's a very interesting result. This has to have been something that irradiated these vessels that give them that signature even after however many thousands of years with the half life. Again we're comparing it to the base rock samples and the non precision vases which have, they're just like that's nothing, they're not dangerous or anything. It's just the, it's just above a baseline but two to three times. So something happened to them. And one of his hypotheses which is very interesting is a concept called nuclear machining. So he's, he actually this is not a new idea. It's not something we figured out how to do as a civilization yet. We're on that path. But you can, if you take his theory is something like palladium or another like radioactive material that is a strong alpha or beta particle emitter that you could put on a tool. It would ablate either in neutrons or it's blasting electrons or something. It would ablate the stone surface away in such a way that would you could carve this stone with ease. Kind of like a lightsaber, basically. And, and it would also leave a signature in the stone. And you.
Joe Rogan
Fuck, yeah.
Ben
And you take it back to that, to that penetration rate of that spiral tube drill.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
It's not all we can say about things like that spiral tube drill and the other, the other striations and tool marks is, look, it's not, it doesn't seem to be the same thing we do to the stone. And it's certainly not primitive. It's not something you can do just by hand.
Joe Rogan
So is anybody. The cores. Has anybody tested the radioactive levels of the cores?
Ben
I think he, I don't know. He might have tested the cores when he was there recently. I'll have, I'll talk to him. I was talking to him this morning. I can ask him about the core. That's a great question, because that would. It's this. If it was the process, it should show something similar. If that's indeed the process, the. Look, the other possibility is, okay, they weren't machined with this method, but these were used in some method. The other, the other theory he has, that these may have been part of a process for enriching material for some other nuclear use, or they were part of a system that, that used nuclear material.
Joe Rogan
They had advanced nuclear science. Somehow or another, that. That's just too much.
Ben
It's.
Joe Rogan
I mean, it's not too much, but it's too much. Like, it's too crazy. Yeah, it's so crazy. But also, like, when you do see some of the sculptures that look 3D printed and you go, whoa. Okay, now it kind of at least makes a little sense.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
See, if we knew for sure that there was a cataclysm and a lost civilization, that civilization had achieved some immense heights of technological sophistication in a completely different pathway than we've done in modern times.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
If we knew that for sure, then everything would be so easy, you'd go, okay, well, clearly they were doing something. What were they doing? But instead, we deny that possibility. So by closing off that door now, you're left with nonsense. You're left with sand and copper and. Yeah, it's dumb.
Ben
I agree. I, Yeah, I agree. I think it's.
Joe Rogan
Something fucking crazy happened.
Ben
Yes, I, I, yes, there's, I think there is that. This is. I try to follow the evidence where it leads. That's all we're doing here with, I mean, I'm quoting what Max has said about it with this nuclear machining hypothesis and Houston study Needs to happen.
Joe Rogan
The nuclear machining hypothesis. If. Sorry to interrupt you, but if you go a thousand years from now, for sure we're going to have that.
Ben
Yeah, that's, that's. Yes, you ha. I'd like to put that the same context in these arguments forward as well. It's like we just don't. To me, the answer is, you know, we, we tend to look at the past and it always has to be this subset of what we know. Right. But it's like if you look at the history of knowledge and technology, give us 50,000, 50 years. A thousand years. 50,000 years. You know that there's more out here to the sides that we're going to learn, right? So that means there are realms of science and technology that we don't know anything about. I think, I think if we were a bit more open minded about investigating some of these mysteries of the past with some of these inexplicable characteristics, the precision or the machining, the engineering things, how we, how the stone was cut, I think some of those answers could lay in those realms of the unknown. And by being open minded about them and by investigating them with all of our capability, we might even end up learning something about them, which is what we're doing. Like the Vase scan project, we are learning the depths of precision in some of the machining aspects of it. And Max is starting to learn like, okay, there's some weird, like radioactive characteristics of these things. Let's, let's, let's try and look at more and figure out some more. I mean, we can speculate a bit now. And I want to be clear, this is all very speculative at this point. Lots more testing and data is required to even shore up some of these theories about these possibilities. But the fact remains they could be, they are possibilities. Right.
Joe Rogan
And it's also this assumption that there's been a lineal path, a linear path of progression always. But that's not even the case today, right. You can go to ancient sites, whether it is in Mexico or even in Greece, and you see really shitty construction right next to the Parthenon.
Ben
Yep.
Joe Rogan
Right. I mean the Acropolis and the Parthenon is right next to crappy apartment buildings. They're really close, right?
Ben
Yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
That's a decay. You've obviously you can't do it. Do you not? Why didn't you do that? Do that again like this?
Ben
Yeah, it's huge.
Joe Rogan
It's, it's something, there's something weird. There's something weird going on. And this is like 2000 years ago, where we knew who they were, we know the people, we know they did it. Like amazing precision, amazing construction methods, incredible art, incredible engineering and architecture. Right. And all understandable, but yet more advanced than the techniques utilized in 2025 in the exact same area. Which is weird. Right? So that just, that's without a cataclysm, right?
Ben
Well, yeah, it's also, it's a nice criticism of modern architecture to be, to be fair. I mean, you can don't even go back 2000 years. Just go back to like the Gothic era with the churches and the cathedrals. I mean, Jesus, why don't we build like that anymore?
Joe Rogan
Right, right, good point. But so you see a decline, at least in craftsmanship that can be attributed to a changing of cultures and, but this assumption that there's always this linear path of progression. And if you go back, they were dumb, you go back far enough, they were dumber. But that doesn't seem to be the case here. And Egypt is the best example. It is like. Explain that.
Ben
Yeah, dude, exactly. And it's one of the biggest, if anyone, it's one of the biggest contradictions about Egypt is. Exactly, it's the technological progression. I mean, you're talking about a dynastic Egyptian civilization at least 3,000 years, right? So 3,000 years. But if you look at it from a technological progression perspective, it's almost like they went backwards the whole time. I mean, you have, you have the emergence all of a sudden of this culture and language like they're gods. One of the craziest things about ancient Egypt is this emergence of hieroglyphs. Just boom, here it is, here's this complex, extremely complicated language, cultural system, Gods and everything pops out of nowhere. It's pretty consistent. It evolves over time. It doesn't really, it doesn't change that much. I mean, cuneiform in Samaria, there's, there's a clear progressive path where we can see it being developed. We don't have that. That's not the case for ancient Egypt. And then it's all of the best stuff is the oldest, it's the biggest stonework, the valley temple, the 2,500 tons of granite. It in the king's chamber structure, that's, that's in the Great Pyramid, the Great Pyramid itself. These things are amongst the very first pyramids ever said to have been built. Yet progressively as you go forward in time, I mean they just, they get to mud brick pyramids. It's almost like it's, you're going backwards and there's just, you know, they, technologically speaking, it doesn't seem like they progress very far. So I think there's another interpretation for that data, one that fits the evidence a little better, which is that I, yeah, I think they got a kickstart, they got a head start. They inherited an awful lot of objects. We know for sure these precision objects were around before the ancient Egyptians. They don't match even the cultures that predated them. We have no idea where they got them from. I don't think they made them. We don't know how old they really are. And I think there's a lot of other artifacts and architecture on these sites that they match these like technologically speaking there's a link, the same tools, the same precision. We're seeing that, that yet these are massive artifacts. Sometimes like a thousand ton statue that you can't bury with you. It stays on this side. It gets inherited, it gets renovated, it gets reused. Eventually you get kings with hubris and arrogance. Guys like Ramses II that says, you know, carve my name 3 inches deep under that sucker, it's going to be me. I want to be part of the gods. These are the, you know, I want to tie myself to the ancients. And the really crazy thing is that doesn't often get admitted is that this is literally what the ancient Egyptians themselves said. They called themselves a legacy culture. They trace their own history back 40,000 years. They have a list of kings. They talk about these different eras of time. The Shemsuhor, the followers of horus was this 12,000 year period where these mythical semi divine beings walked the earth. You can talk about kings and rulers and that and then before that you have Zep Tepe when the gods themselves walk the earth and they trace their own history way back into those eras.
Joe Rogan
That's some stuff that I brought up with Zahi and he was like, what is this? He just, he got very mad. It's funny. Yeah, I'm reading where I'm listening to the book of Enoch right now.
Ben
Okay. Yeah, that's some wall too. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
It's so wild. You're, you're going, what are you, what are you saying? Like gods? The watchers came down and mated with women of earth and created Nephilim or yeah, the Nephilim. Like what are you saying? Like what, what, what, what were you trying to say thousands of years ago when they wrote this down?
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
And you know, and the version I think that we're getting this from is from the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran. So how long did they write it down before that? Like, how long did they discuss this? How long ago did this happen? And what are you saying? Like what. What were they trying to record?
Ben
Yeah, it's.
Joe Rogan
I mean, why does it match up with what they're saying in Egypt? The gods walking amongst us.
Ben
Right? Yeah, it's. It's. It goes to some wild places. I know.
Joe Rogan
It gets so squirrely. And that's where you get into the alien camp.
Ben
Well, that 40. 40 meter tic tac shaped metallic objects.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. What is that thing? Well, what kind of metal?
Ben
We don't know.
Joe Rogan
Imagine if it's titanium.
Ben
Could be. He said it didn't match any signature that he'd seen before.
Joe Rogan
That's crazy. In and of itself.
Ben
It's one of the things I'll remember always about when you were sitting here talking to Bob Lazar and he said that some of those craft came from archaeological digs. I mean, part of his story. There's long been rumors of that type of stuff in, you know, in. Under the ground in Egypt. I don't. I'm not saying that's what it is, but this is what. Yeah, this is what Tim said about it.
Joe Rogan
That would be amazing. It would be if there's a UFO down there. All layers converge at a central corridor avenue like the atrium of shopping mall where you can see all floors from one vantage point. My personal interpretation is that this entire hall was constructed to house a centrally positioned freestanding object about 40 meters long. Wrong. The central object is hard to classify. It appears metallic, not stone or wood. I named it Dippy after the giant Diplodoca skeleton in the hintsy hall of London's. Is that. Did I say that right?
Ben
Yeah, hints, I think.
Joe Rogan
Hints. Hall of London's Natural History Museum. It could be anything. Its shape resembles those Tic Tac hard mints. It might also be an upright disc or even a colossal Shen ring. And what is a Shen ring?
Ben
It's like the cartouche. You know the thing around a cartouche.
Joe Rogan
Oh, wow. Big object alone raises profound questions. How did it get there? Why is it there? A more speculative theory is that it's some kind of portal. Oh boy. Now we're going. We're going full tinfoil. Either interdimensional or interstellar. A stargate. Its material signature is like unlike anything I've seen in my entire career. But it's there, undeniably there. I'll let the future find out.
Ben
What? What?
Joe Rogan
Dippy is Tim Akers. Well, that's. He went full art Bell right there. He did interdimensional or interstellar? A stargate.
Ben
Hey, look, the Egyptians talk about stargates.
Joe Rogan
Do they?
Ben
Dude, go to. Where is it? Dendera. There's actually a couple places. The literal translation, you can read it on the walls. I always show people when we go. There it is. There are two or three depictions of stargates. That is the literal translation for it, showing a constellation with a gate. And it's a specific constellation. A couple of different times. They're all on different constellations.
Joe Rogan
Where can I find that? Where can I see this?
Ben
It says pictures of stargates from Dendera Temple. I think it's in the upper rooms. Yeah, it's up where the zodiac. So that's actually. The Dendera is incredible. Like, it is a. It is a start oriented temple. There's massive depictions of the zodiac. And this is all, you know, redone from older versions of the same temple. But that is the translation of what's on the wall with the constellation and the gate. And it literally translates as stargate. That is part of it. So that's. I mean, the ceiling is the zodiac. You even have depictions of like solar boats going up to the moon Tandera. Randall loves that temple. I have sent him a lot of footage from that temple. No, it's. It's. It's actually. I don't know, there's a. You'd have to look up the. Yeah, just Stargate glyph. Maybe at Dendera. Yeah, glyph. I'll tell you if you see it. No, I don't see the exact one, but it's not. I mean, it's literally a cluster of stars that represents a constellation. We're going to get behind it.
Joe Rogan
This is killing me.
Ben
I know. I probably have it on my hard drive.
Joe Rogan
Do you have it with you?
Ben
It's on my laptop if you want to see it after. Yes.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Your laptop's out there?
Ben
Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
All right, go grab it. We'll pause.
Ben
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Not on what you gave me. Huh? Not on what you. It's not on that one. I didn't think we'd get into the stargate.
Joe Rogan
Oh, you got it.
Ben
I'm going to try and find it. I'll try and find it.
Joe Rogan
Okay.
Ben
All right.
Joe Rogan
We'll be right back, folks. Okay, so we found it from a video from trevor grassi on YouTube. The video is titled Hieroglyphic Proof of Stargate Technology with Muhammad Ibrahim, Mike, Rick Ricker, Ricksecker and Trevor Grassi. So this is what we're looking at.
Ben
Yeah. You see, it's like there's a glyph. There's. You can see the star and there's a gate. Actually, try and find one of the other pictures. Maybe there's the stars, the circle.
Joe Rogan
That's what the star's supposed to be.
Ben
Yeah, the star on the right. No, no, on the far right. Yeah, there's the hieroglyph. So, again, yes, Stargate. It's the. You see the gate and then the star, and then. I assume that Crooked Hook or whatever is part of this as well.
Joe Rogan
Oh, I see. So. So it's how. The way you translate the hieroglyph.
Ben
Yes, yes. And Muhammad Ibrahim, who I know quite well as well, he's very good at translating these glyphs. When I travel in Egypt, we usually go with Professor Muhammad Jabra, who's one of, I would say, top four or five in the world for reading hieroglyphs. He can just read whatever's on the wall and tell you about it. He travels with us on these tours. It's phenomenal. He just shows us this. There's probably some better pictures of ones with the actual constellations up at Dendera, if they get into. Yeah, but that one where they were standing next to each other. Go back a little. Where was it? No, back a little. There. Yeah. So, see, this is the one I'm talking about. You see the stars. The stars above the gates? So there's literally different. And with the words, they relate to specific constellations. This is in the top. The. What's the zodiac room at Dendera where they have a replica of the circular zodiac on the ceiling. The French have the original. But this. This is original hieroglyphs. And it is the translation of. This is literally stargate for these constellations that Say what it is.
Joe Rogan
Bananas. And what are these constellations supposed to be?
Ben
I don't know. Off the top of my head, we do tell people when we. When we get into it. There is. Yeah, I could find out, but I don't know off the top of my head. I'm sorry.
Joe Rogan
Click that with that one that you just had there, Jamie. No, no, no, no. Where you just had all. Yeah, right there, there.
Ben
So, yeah, more gates. They seem similar. Again, the gate with the crooked hook and the star. Stargate.
Joe Rogan
That's bananas.
Ben
Yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
So when they're referring to a stargate, are they saying in any way what. What that means?
Ben
No, no, it's. It's. I mean, they would. I mean, most of the the interpretations these days would tell you that it's always symbolic. I mean, they do look at like, the. The Osiris and the, the, you know, the constellations in the sky as being connected to the Duat or to Nut, like the Duat being this space and Nut, the goddess who is the sky. And, you know, it's all part of that passage from the. Of the soul going into the realms of immortal. Of the immortal that happens after death. So this is the, you know, this symbolic interpretation that we, that we. That we give it all. We say, oh, this is none of this. It's. It sort of falls into this category a little bit of like, everything is symbolic, everything is ceremonial. Nothing is functional. I, you know, I, I'm fascinated by these temples because it goes back to something you were saying earlier. And I use this analogy to kind of set the stage for it. Imagine again, imagine if younger Dryas happened to us tomorrow. Whatever, right? Hope touch wood doesn't but say it wipes out civilization. But we survive as humans within, what, two, three generations. We're sitting around campfires telling stories about these. These things that were like a black rock. And it's just. And you, you, you know, it's like. Or plasma TVs. But you say, look, if you get this shiny black rock, you know, you can get answers from the ancestors. You will know everything. You can talk to anything. You can see anything.
Joe Rogan
You can ask it questions.
Ben
You can ask it questions. And maybe you go and you start getting black rocks and making them like this, and you start dancing around the fire. You start ritualizing this memory of technology. Now if you take that concept, like, say there's a cataclysm, and now there's people that remember and they tell these stories. The stories get passed down. Now imagine there's a civilization that comes up and it goes through thousands of years of structuring those legends and stories of technology. They go through just. Just distortions and representations and symbolism. But it's just twisting all of these stories into this iconography and this complex symbolism that we. Then I think we go to a temple in Egypt that was made in the Ptolemaic era or whatever, and you see things on the wall. I think there's a great way to interpret some of those symbols and some of the paintings to say that, well, is this actually an echo of something that was functional or is an echo of technology? Like, every staff that you see has a tuning fork on the bottom of it. Every single one on these walls, it's always got a tuning fork. On it. What's that all about?
Joe Rogan
A tuning fork.
Ben
Tuning fork. Like a little like a tuning fork? Yeah. All of the staffs with the was head, that means power. Like it literally the interpretation of this symbol is power on top of the staff, and every single one of them has a tuning fork on.
Joe Rogan
Can we see an image of that?
Ben
Yeah. And you can look up any of the temples in Egypt and like the depictions of gods with staffs and they're touching or they're giving, like the Jed Pillar or the, you know, the ankh, which is Jed pillar is stability. The ankh is life. The was is power. So in a lot of cases, these gods are granting kings, you know, life, stability and power. Sometimes just life and power.
Joe Rogan
But what are those depictions of these enormous cylindrical things that they're holding that look almost like one of those transformer clubs?
Ben
Yeah, like that one there. That's the. That's like the Jed Pillar here. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
What the hell is that?
Ben
That's a great image. That literally is the symbol for stability.
Joe Rogan
And that thing down is what I was talking about.
Ben
Oh, the quote, unquote, light bulbs. Yes. At Dendera Temple. And see, there's a jet pillar there too, with the hands. So the Jed Pillar is stabilizing it with its hands.
Joe Rogan
Right.
Ben
And you're on a boat. You're actually part of. This is on a boat.
Joe Rogan
It looks like some kind of technology.
Ben
So you know what's crazy about this? So again, we down into this. This is in a. In a crypt at Dendera. You have to like crawl through a hole and get. It's like in the inside wall. It's amazing because the Christians and the. They couldn't. They didn't get into the crypt, so they couldn't deface the glyphs. Like, a lot of the glyphs are defaced.
Joe Rogan
Look at that guy. He looks like an air traffic controller.
Ben
Well, he's like a reptilian too. He's a frog dude with knives.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
What is that dude with a tail?
Joe Rogan
Does he have a fucking tail?
Ben
Yeah, he does.
Joe Rogan
He does look like a. He looks like a giant frogman.
Ben
Yeah. Wow. So what's crazy about there is a whole story about this and it's written on the wall. And again, this is thanks to my friend Yusuf Awan, who I. Who I guide with, and then, you know, Professor Jabra, who can interpret this, and we actually, I'm going to do a video about this soon because what he is saying about this crypt is that there was. It tells you on the wall that there was a physical version of that thing in that crypt that was. He said it was made from mostly gold and it was the span of like a dude with his arms out, like the span of a human wingspan, basically. I found I was stumbling across something. They called it electrum. There was these two. There's a. The metal. All these 3.3 ton obelisk that were made out of a metal called electron. Electronic golden gold and silver. Yeah, yeah, Electrum's golden. So they definitely used gold and silver. A lot of the obelisks had electrum.
Joe Rogan
Which is, they think, great for conductivity.
Ben
Oh, it's fantastic. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
I mean, really the only good reason to have it, other than looking good, right?
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Other than Ballin.
Ben
Yeah, other than Ballin, which they were Ballin. A little bit of a sidetrack, but when you're talking about the nuclear stuff, I found these stories of the Oclo mine and Gabon, which is a nuclear. Natural nuclear reactor. Reactor.
Joe Rogan
Whoa. That is very 4 billion years old and a hundred thousand working. Oldest nuclear reactor in history.
Ben
Uranium from it. Oh, okay. It's enriching uranium.
Joe Rogan
Troll you enriched uranium.
Ben
Yeah. Imagine if it's in Africa. So I don't know if that was.
Joe Rogan
The only place they've ever found that makes sense, right? Is there something like that in Afghanistan where this stone came from?
Ben
Oh, the lapis lazuli and everything else. I don't know. I mean, I assume that I would be. I wouldn't be surprised if that sort of thing is happening somewhere in the. In the massive uranium in Australia either, because that's like one of the world's biggest uranium deposits. I imagine if it's enough mass of you. I think it's uranium 238. And they're trying to get. No, 235 to get to 238 or the other way around. Around. But if there's enough mass and neutrons hitting each other, it might be enriching it somehow. I think that's probably what's happening there. I'm no nuclear scientist, so.
Joe Rogan
Let'S go back to those hieroglyphs, Jamie, the. The lizard guy, the frog guy, or whatever that reptilian thing is that freaks me out.
Ben
Oh, yeah. It's the stuff of nightmares at times. It's.
Joe Rogan
It's kind of weird because that's, you know, one of the things that. The weirdest when the weirdest stories when they start talking about aliens is the. The different types that visit, right. And that one of them is a reptilian species that are the, the most creepy to deal with. Which makes sense.
Ben
Heard the same thing. It would be. Yeah. I mean, that reptilian brain. Reptiles on Earth, like chickens are assholes, you know. Right?
Joe Rogan
They are. And so are Komodo dragons. And the idea that somehow or another they could eventually reach incredible levels of technological sophistication and intelligence. Intelligence, we kind of rule that out. But look, there's, there's clearly primates that are way dumber than us, right?
Ben
Oh for sure.
Joe Rogan
So why do we assume that it's only primates that reach an incredible high level of sophistication when we know that crows, which are really close to dinosaurs. Crows. Super smart. Like, like smarter than most kids.
Ben
Yeah. Problem solving smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. I, you can't. Yeah, I don't think you can. You can't put a, A restrictor on what evolution might produce.
Joe Rogan
Not in any of these. Especially when intelligence is being exhibited by things that are really close evolutionarily to reptiles.
Ben
Yes. Yeah. And that would just be. Yeah, you get to that. Like just lack of empathy. Just that reptilian brain. It's just aggression. And like everything that's not us is the enemy.
Joe Rogan
That's the mind is smart. Dinosaurs. Oh yeah, that was in Jurassic park. Right, the raptors.
Ben
There was a girl.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, they were smart. Which, you know, makes sense.
Ben
Yeah, it's that whole pack. Yeah. The instinct.
Joe Rogan
But the idea that there's. That we were visited by intelligent reptiles is bananas.
Ben
I put, look, with the alien. I don't often address it, but I put it firmly in the realm of like possible. Like it's just, I don't, I think when you, you look at the vastness of space and the length of time, the fact that we've, you know, we're just, we're just this crazy. You could, there could have massive civilizations galactically could have risen and fallen a million years ago and we just weren't part of it. And that's literally a blink of the eye in these, in those sort of time frames. We just, it's, it's not surprising this, the Fermi paradox, right. Like how come we haven't got like firm proof or anything? Even though people will say we have. But it's like, yes, there's, it's, it's the length of time. Like we can rise and fall. That span of a million years is just nothing on those timescales. And you know, you, you can. Several whole species can rise to massive prominence and then just be nothing but dust at the end of that period of Time. And you got to try and do that across what, 14 billion years. And even that's in question now because the James Webb telescope, seeing stuff that's supposedly way older than that now.
Joe Rogan
Right.
Ben
I mean, we'll see. We're going to find out. Like this Three Eye Atlas thing.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
What is that super weird, right?
Joe Rogan
Well, Avi Loeb is convinced that it's a ufo, but that's what he does. Yeah, right. He did with that other one, Omnuma.
Ben
So.
Joe Rogan
So that one was a little odd.
Ben
That was weird. So not. It wasn't. The weirdest thing about Oumuamua seems to be it's. It's its path. When it took after it turned around the sun and accelerated like that was the standard model of physics said it shouldn't have done that. And it seems to have exhibited sort of motion. That was not what we predicted it would do. That's as much as we can.
Joe Rogan
Acceleration.
Ben
It accelerated. It was outside noticeable. Yeah, it's accelerated.
Joe Rogan
But like to a factor of what?
Ben
Well, not that I think it was only a few percent, but it was not what should have happened according to the calculations that astronomers and the, I guess the orbital dynamics people had done. That's what I understand was the most obviously its shape and size.
Joe Rogan
There's something about its reflective properties as well, right?
Ben
Well, it's. Yeah. I mean, just because it was so long and narrow and it was tumbling, that's what caused it to. We would catch like the long side of it, which the brightness would increase. So we had this oscillating brightness on it. And then it just, it passed through the system and it's, you know, it's going whatever, 87 kilometers per second or whatever. It was huge velocity enough to escape the, you know, the gravity of the sun. But it, it accelerated where. That's what I understand it did. It accelerated where it shouldn't have. Then there was another interstellar artifact that came in that was pretty much a comet, behaved like a comet. It had a tail. It was off gassing water. It's just an interstellar ball of rock and ice is what they say that was. It didn't get a lot of attention. Now this Three Eye Atlas thing is much larger, it's traveling much faster apparently than the previous two. But it's also not behaving like a comet. It has this aura of light that it's emitting around it for some reason. It. I saw a report that said it almost seeing a metallic like smelting signatures off it. I don't know how Much credence I can give it, but we'll find out. Like, it has a. It has a. It's going too fast to stop in our system unless it dramatically alters its velocity. But it's. It's. I mean, it'll come. It'll pop out. We'll lose it on the other side of the sun. But then we should see it again on the way out. So we'll know one way or the other if it actually is gonna. If it. If it changes behavior. I mean, what's he put it? Avi. Even Avi Lo put it like 4060 or something artificial to natural. But really, dude, it's so funny. I'm into Warhammer 40k in a big way. And it's just like. I'm like, okay, we're gonna be joining the Imperium here soon, boys, so. All hailie Omnicire. That thing might be a Mechanicus vessel.
Joe Rogan
I don't know if that's how they travel, I'd be very disappointed. They just shoot through the sky. It takes months.
Ben
Well, if it slows down.
Joe Rogan
I know, but I'm looking for portals. I'm looking for. I mean, advanced civilization that visits us. I don't want the advanced Vikings.
Ben
Right, right.
Joe Rogan
I want the advanced scientists from the 21st century. Yeah, I just. You know what I'm saying? I mean, the ones who come fast on a burning spaceship, they're the dangerous ones because they're probably.
Ben
Right.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. They're probably the warlike conquerors, the ones who are gonna rob us of our minerals and force us into slavery. You know what I mean?
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
That seems like if that's how you're rocking it, you're still doing it the way we do it. We have something thrusting you insanely fast through the. The cosmos.
Ben
Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Do you know that like the whole Dark Forest thing, like the. The Dark Forest theory. No, it's about. So it's. This came out of. It was the three body problem. Great series of books by Chinese author got turned into amazing Netflix show. A great show. The books are phenomenal too. And it's just. But it's this idea that, look, we shouldn't be making noise. It's like, imagine you're a hunter in a Dark Forest. So it's just. You're out there, you know, there might be other things out there. And it's this like a philosophical engagement of like, what do you. What should you do? Should you start. Light a fire and make a whole bunch of noise in the Dark Forest? That's of full. You know, it's full of predators. You don't know where they are. They don't know where you are. What's your behavior? What should you do? Should you see another predator? What should. Should you be friendly? What's the risk to you to do it? And these could be like, you could be there with a bar and arrow. This guy could have a tank. This other guy could have a. Like a mass, some other energy weapon, whatever. You. You don't. There's massive differences in capability and scale. And pretty much every scenario works out to, like, the. What you should do is just be quiet. And if you see something, you should eliminate the threat. That's kind of the way it goes in the dark, dark forest. It's like it's too risky to reveal yourself. You should just. You should basically eliminate that threat if you can do so safely. And you apply that to kind of the galaxy and where. I mean, to some extent, I feel like we're the equivalent of like a baby in a cot that's screaming around a roaring fire because we. And there's, you know, know leopards out there, right? And, you know, because we're just like sending these signals out into space for 100 something years now. And we just hope, hey, we're friendly, please.
Joe Rogan
Well, you have to hope that something is so evolved that it's gotten past war and it's gotten past the way we behave. And so we're hoping and assuming that space daddy space brothers. Yeah, that space daddy space brothers would be benevolent and wise beyond our imagination and that they will come here and want to take care of us and give us information and hook us up.
Ben
That's my response. I had this discussion. I've had this discussion a few times. And my response to a lot of that is, well, we can take nature. What happens when we take Nate? Let's look at the apex predator, whether it's in the sea, in the air, on the land. Apex predators don't tolerate competition. They don't suffer any attacks. They don't. I mean, we don't treat. We don't. We just. We just dominate. Like, you just. If it's in your way, it's inconvenient, you kill it. If it has. If it has something you want, we take it. If those bees have honey, we take it. Like, it's just. Yeah, there's no. We're not, like, helping them. You know, we're not, like, trying to teach the dolphins how to talk. Like, there's still parts of the world where we're just eating them, you know, like there's, I don't know, it's, it's nature suggests that that apex predator. But maybe, maybe we're just. I think this is the other element that you're saying is maybe you evolution leads you past those primal nature at some point.
Joe Rogan
The territorial primate instincts that we exhibit, like hopefully one day because clearly we're on a pathway to that. Right. We're clearly much kinder now.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
At least locally. You know, if you don't live in Gaza, you know what I'm saying? Like if you're in the middle of war zone, you're like what are you talking about? This is as bad as it's ever been. All throughout human history it's the same behavior exhibited over and over and over again. What we want is aliens that are a million years more advanced. We don't want aliens that are a thousand years more advanced.
Ben
Got it.
Joe Rogan
Because they might be just like us, but way better.
Ben
Just, just.
Joe Rogan
That's what we don't. Right. Because as soon as we start going into the cause, we venture into the cosmos. In 20 years we're going to be the same animal, right? We're not going to be significantly different unless we integrate with technology and remove the ego and emotions. Yeah, mushrooms.
Ben
Well, no emotions and stuff. It may be mushrooms.
Joe Rogan
Helps us get there Emotions, the, all the things, the human reward systems that exist that we, we, you know, that we currently struggle with. We would, we would be the same way if we just think of what we justify on Earth in terms of destruction of habitat of native species animals that we kill. All the different things that we do on Earth. Factory farming. Now imagine why would we care about these lizard people that live, you know, in caves on some stupid planet. You know, we would probably kidnap them, we'd kill them, we'd pickle them, we'd bring them back home, we'd freeze them.
Ben
Got golden them caves.
Joe Rogan
Right. Look at what Columbus did when they, you know, arrived.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
And took the natives and had them get gold. And if they didn't, they cut their arms off. Horrific, terrifying things. So imagine there's no evidence that aliens are currently doing that, which is the promising thing.
Ben
Right?
Joe Rogan
Right. The, even the abductions, although I'm sure they're terrifying if they're true. They seem rather benign. Like in fact in the Travis Walton case, do you know that that one of the most famous ones, not off the top, real simple, 1970s, he's a logger. He's working with a group of guys. They see a ship, he Runs toward it. He gets hit with a beam of energy, gets knocked back unconscious. His friends flee. They come back. They're. They're yelling at each other, we got to go back. We got to get him. They go back, he's gone. All four of them get investigated for murder. They tell the story. No one believes them. They all pass polygraph tests. Five days later, he shows up. He finds a payphone, makes a phone call, and has this insane story. Yeah, but the story. The story was that they took him aboard the craft and healed him and communicated with him, and that there was a bunch of different types of these beings, and then he has been telling the exact same story ever since the 1970s, so. But, yeah, relatively benign compared to what we would do, for sure. You know, like, we fucking. You know, we shoot elephants.
Ben
It turns into Avatar.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Think about the. The horrible things that we do right now on Earth.
Ben
No, I agree. Yeah. And it's. It's something that I always say. It's great. Quoted from Christopher Hitchens, which is, you know, we're just not the end of that evolutionary chain. You know, we're just the current version of humanity. Our frontal lobes are too big. Our adrenaline. Sorry. Our frontal lobes are too small. Our adrenaline glands are too big. Our thumb forefinger opposition isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Joe Rogan
And we love violence.
Ben
We love violence.
Joe Rogan
We love violence. Our national sport is Dudes who are Enormous Running at each other full speed. And the other one is guys punching and kicking each other.
Ben
Yep.
Joe Rogan
I mean, it's kind of strangling. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of crazy. We're so high, and then. And we're also involved in multiple wars simultaneously, at least. Proxy.
Ben
Yeah, Proxy wars.
Joe Rogan
It's at least human beings are involved in a significant amount of war. Always.
Ben
Yeah. It's never. It's. This is literally the status quo throughout history. I mean, it's just. We've always been at war with each other. I mean, I will. I still do. I personally maintain the idea that it is still the best time to be alive, 100%, technologically speaking. But also, I mean, obviously, we're much more aware of conflict around the world, but on a percentage scale of what it's been like in the past, it's actually far less than it has been. Like, even though it's terrible when it happens, but, you know, we're in an era where there's actually less of that going on, and hopefully that can continue. I actually genuinely think that it's one of the reasons why this whole investigation into the past is important to me. Like, I don't, it's not, I haven't really talked about in videos or put it down. It's going to be, it's part of the book I'm writing for sure. It's a big part because I have, I, it's, it's not just some benign investigation into the past. I genuinely think it could have a significant impact on our future because it, it, that, that concept, you talked about it of, of like this linear progression, right? I mean in general, we get taught in school that, okay, we were Stone Age dudes, we were in caves, civilization happened. I mean, how many thousands of years later, here we are. This is the only, it's like this is the only way that an advanced civilization can happen. Happen is on this path. Don't worry about it. It's almost like it's preordained. Just worry about next election cycle, next quarterly result, whatever, right? And we just don't think about it. I do. This is this concept, I call it. I think it's a fundamental pillar of what it means to be a human being today. It's in everybody's mind to some degree, like, all right, Stone Age to us, we're advanced. This is the only way it happens. I do think that if you can change that at that fundamental level to this cyclical version that is an oscillation between civilization and cataclysm and this idea that, okay, we've actually risen in the past, we've become relatively high technology, we've become civilized and it happened, it would have been different to us, but we fell, we fell again and we're somewhere on this oscillation and this circular motion between civilization and cataclysm. And on a long enough timescale, we know it's going to happen again. Yes, right. And if you can change that, if you could change that, that fundamental concept in people, like that's what we teach people in schools, okay, so we're rising again. We're at this crazy point in time when our technology is super advanced. We can solve some of these problems, but we know on this timescale, if we don't do something about it, we might end up like our ancestors did. I genuinely think that stands a chance of changing some of our behavior and some of our. A little less money on tanks and guns, a little bit more money on space exploration. Make solving the longer term problems a bit more of a priority. And it's altruistic and it's ambitious, like a crazy goal. I Know, it's altruistic as all hell, but it's just. I think there's precedent for it too though. I mean, whether you agree with it or not, I mean, it doesn't matter. But the fact is that the term climate change has changed our behavior over the last 25 years. Right. It's changed. If you think about what's happened with that concept and that movement, it changes investment decisions, it changes our interactions with each other, with the planet. You know, it's changed our behaviour in the way we think about stuff. It's like this has crept into our zeitgeist as a species and it's changed our behavior. So I look at some of this stuff in the past as it not just being some harmless investigation into things. I think it actually getting to the root cause of what's happened in the past actually could help us in our future. I think it's an important. It's what drives, I think my interest in it in a lot of ways too.
Joe Rogan
It's another piece of an example, another example rather of how primitive we are, that we still, we're. The actual climate is political. That's bananas. Pollution is political.
Ben
Yes. Well, I mean, if you disagree, I mean, I always find it crazy that if you even question any of some of the like, official narrative about this stuff, the first thing you've got to do is make sure you decry and say, no, no, no. Pollution bad. Pollution bad.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
Just because I think that some of the science might be off. I'm not saying like I'm. Let's pollute the oceans, like. No, no. Let's be stewards.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Well, it's also the amount of time that we've polluted the oceans in is spectacular. What we've done just in terms of the depopulation of the ocean.
Ben
Oh yeah, that's nuts.
Joe Rogan
Like 90 plus percent of all big fish are gone.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
In a short amount of time, like a couple hundred years of like hardcore fishing and we, we fished out the ocean, man.
Ben
Just about.
Joe Rogan
That's nuts. Not only that, we polluted the out of it to the point where you're not even supposed to eat it every day.
Ben
Right. Which is.
Joe Rogan
That's more crazy.
Ben
Oh, I agree.
Joe Rogan
That's crazy. If you eat sushi every day, people don't recommend it on a beer bottle.
Ben
On the Mariana Trench.
Joe Rogan
What?
Ben
Yeah. That's crazy, man.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that's how gross we are. Somebody was over there and they chucked one overboard.
Ben
Yeah, it looks like it looks pretty recent.
Joe Rogan
Right. He's got the label on it. Right. The label hasn't even eroded.
Ben
Challenge it deep.
Joe Rogan
If it's that recent, like, why isn't it covered in sediment? You know, I mean. Yeah, the surface covers things up and moves over time. It probably won't be there forever. It probably won't be sitting on the.
Ben
Surface like that still floating around. I don't think it's.
Joe Rogan
Oh, wow.
Ben
Yeah. Maybe.
Joe Rogan
Oh, right, right, right. It's. Wow.
Ben
It should sink. I'd been imagining.
Joe Rogan
Unless there's some sort of a downward or upward current. Current.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Scientists find beer bottle the deepest point.
Ben
Of the ocean 6.7 miles. 35, 000ft below the surf, that is.
Joe Rogan
How does it not implode? But that sub does.
Ben
Oh, yeah. No air. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Okay. There you go.
Ben
Right? Yeah. Wouldn't last long if there's a cap on it, that's for sure. But. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to go down there. Thanks.
Joe Rogan
All that.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. I'd rather watch a video. Not only that, they were watching a video. That's what's even crazier.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
You go all the way down and you're watching a screen.
Ben
Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
It's not like it's a window. You can't have a window.
Ben
No, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like one little. Or just if there's one giant thick thing at the front.
Joe Rogan
You kind of like imagine the freak out of being at the bottom.
Ben
James Cameron knows. I mean, he worked down that. Yeah. Not for me.
Joe Rogan
He went there by himself.
Ben
I know he did. It's crazy. In that. Yeah. In that he did it. Right.
Joe Rogan
But I guess if you're gonna do it, why is he doing that?
Ben
I want four feet of titanium around me, like in a sphere.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. We need you to make movies.
Ben
Maybe. Not a carbon fiber tube. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Well, especially not one that the engineer said wasn't really designed for those depths.
Ben
Yeah. That cracked. Do you ever watch that documentary? It's. Dude, they're putting that thing and they do the scale model and they're testing it under pressure and they're all standing around in a room and just goes bang. Like, it's just. It's ins. And every test they did, it went bang and blue.
Joe Rogan
And they're like 20 successful trips with that.
Ben
Oh, they did a bunch. Yeah. And it was. And it. Well, even the scariest part is, like when you're in the footage with it and you can hear. Hear it popping like it's. It's. It's literally the carbon fiber strands snapping. Oh, it's terrible. It's terrifying.
Joe Rogan
Imagine Being one of those people that successfully made that journey. And. And then the nightmares that you have every day.
Ben
Like the one right before.
Joe Rogan
Missed it. You bare. Yeah. The one right before. Barely missed getting instantaneously destroyed.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
I'm sure you've seen the animation.
Ben
The.
Joe Rogan
The computer recreation of what it would look like.
Ben
Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
You turn to blood cells.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Just splatter.
Ben
Yeah. You wouldn't even say that. It happens faster than the time it would take for you to even register that it happened. Like, for your senses to register in your brain that it happened. It's over.
Joe Rogan
The pressure.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Just the fact that we're that weird that we choose to do that, that we have technology. Like, let's see. Let's go.
Ben
Yeah. It's so funny the way they skirted the. The. I mean, he signed everyone up as like, basically expedition team members. They were. That's how they got around. I'm not selling seats for this. Like, they're invest. They're coming on. They all had a technical role, supposedly. And it was like, I'm not. He was getting around the regulations and the safety regulations, but. Yeah. No interest in that sort of pressure. I mean, I dive, but that. Not like that.
Joe Rogan
Diving is swimming, pretty much. It's just like hardcore swimming simulation of.
Ben
The employee explosion is crazy.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
I haven't seen this. It said that it would have happened in 20 milliseconds. And it takes like 150 milliseconds for your brain to feel pain. That's. Yeah, that's. Yeah. No, thank you. I.
Joe Rogan
God. Oh, my God. This. Why does this freak me out so much? Because a guy went on with his son.
Ben
Yeah. It's a terrible story. I mean, it's just why I wish.
Joe Rogan
I was friends with that guy.
Ben
I'd be like, dude, yeah. No, it's not the place I'd want to explore. Like, there is some stuff off Cuba. They say that's. They reckon pyramids. It's kilometers deep in the ocean.
Joe Rogan
But I've seen that. I've seen. Well, I've seen Internet videos, imaging. Yeah.
Ben
But I did die. We were in Alexandria. I dived on the lighthouse. So there's. And there. Actually, there was a news article just the other day about the Egyptians were pulling, like, more stuff out of the water there. There at Heraklion and at the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Quite an interesting story. And we were in Alexandria. Dive in the Mediterranean on the Egyptian side. And I mean, it's amazing. There's massive columns and massive megalithic blocks in the water from when the lighthouse it fell down or it collapsed, there was an earthquake. And so you're in the water, but you're diving over, like megalithic blocks like these and huge columns. And. And it has a history that stretches back too. Right. It's the megalithic stuff is what's associated with the very earliest periods of building. All the stuff that happened later is typically not that big. But yeah, this is actually what's nuts.
Joe Rogan
That's what's nuts is that the older you go, the bigger the stones are.
Ben
Well, and what's funny is when we looked into the erosion at places like the Giza Plateau is you have two or three feet. It's not on the Sphinx. Everybody knows about the Sphinx enclosure erosion, but you look at places like the Pyramid temple of the Middle Pyramid, there's some of the blocks on the Great Pyramid, the casing stones that are there that we can see now that they've taken the Boat Museum away, and up and down the causeway, there is limestone blocks with up to two feet of erosion. Like it's these waves. I think I have a directory on, on that drive with the erosion on it. And you have to juxtapose that against all the other stuff they say is fourth dynasty. Right. So right next to the Valley Temple there is another structure that's built from small limestone blocks. Doesn't have any erosion, not like the Valley Temple does. The Western Cemetery that's behind the Great Pyramid is beautifully made. It's smaller limestone blocks. It's apparently older. So, yeah, here's a good example. This is the mortuary or the Pyramid Temple. Temple. So these were. You can see where the face of that block originally was, but it's been eroded in like up to two feet in places. There's huge amounts of erosion that you can find in a lot of places at the Giza Plateau. Yet at the same time, you have what are said to be contemporary structures said to built, have been built roughly in the same time. Sometimes they say they're even older that have just no erosion at all. Made from the same stone, made by this, allegedly by the same people.
Joe Rogan
And, and what force did they attribute that erosion to?
Ben
Well, it's got. It's wind and sand, right? It's. That's what they will say. Look, this is just regular weathering. And here's the crazy thing about these structures. Like this was also cased in granite. These are the inside blocks. So this, this structure was fully cased in like 4ft thick granite blocks.
Joe Rogan
And that was. Excuse me, that was stolen and they were taken.
Ben
But it would have protected this stone from erosion for however many thousands of years you find. There's another picture in here of, like, the. The. That's. That's. So there. Like, see, this is. This is said to like, that picture I just showed with the heavy erosion. That's where the arrow is at the pyramid temple. No, no, back to the. Back to that one. Yep. So that deep erosions at that pyramid temple, this one wall to the right, they say this is older than that and that this has never been cased in granite. That other stuff was cased in granite. It's megalithic. There's a block in that complex. It's 450 tons, and it was cased in granite. Now, there's been studies, right? So we know how long it takes to weather limestone. There's been a bunch of studies. The US, the government departments have studied it. They put limestone blocks on the top of the A building in Washington, D.C. in a government department and studied it over 11 years. There's endless cemeteries with conveniently carved and dated limestone pieces in the form of headstones that you can measure and go, okay, this was carved, and whatever year this guy died. And as you can measure it and over time, get a sense for, like, what's it take with rain, with wind. We've done studies of, like, all right, we put these blocks in a river and we. And we let it wash over, like, a very highly erosive environment where we've got running water running over the stone and how. How long it takes to erode for some of the erosion that you can. If you reference those studies for this type of hard limestone, to get 2ft of erosive wear on those blocks, just with regular wind weathering. And this is. This is in places that have a lot more rainfall than Giza. You're talking dates from, like, 60 to 122,000 years to get that much erosion on it. I mean, and that's. And I think that's in a more erosive environment than what the desert is.
Joe Rogan
What.
Ben
So, yeah, that's. That's the neck. That's it side by side. So you have. Literally, they'll tell you that thing on the right is older. This was built by Khufu. This is supposedly Khafra, his son, but it's completely different. So this is that tailored to industries thing as well. But they attribute all this to the same people. But you can baseline this because it's the same stone. It's at the same elevation level. It's supposedly the same age. The differences are in the construction. Like, it's megalithic. And a lot of this stuff was encased in granite. This is the Sphinx temple down at the other end of the causeway. Same thing. So all the megalithic stuff that was cased in granite has severe erosion. Yet there's buildings all around it and up and down the plateau they say are built at the same time. Yet it's smaller blocks, it's not as nice work, and it's not eroded like that.
Joe Rogan
What's the conventional explanation from that discrepancy?
Ben
They just don't address it. Like, I've not seen anyone. Well, I mean, because the argument's always been like, the Sphinx temple, like the Sphinx enclosure. Right. Robert Schoch, John Anthony west, he talked about the fact that you needed thousands of years of rainfall, erosion to get those patterns on the walls. That's where the discussion's been focused. It's not. There was no comparison, mate. It was always like, well, this is this. You know, the geologist and the experts say it's wind and sand, it's water erosion. But then you have the archaeologist and the mark land is saying, no, it's wind and sand. Wind and sand. But I think there's a better argument to be made. When you start to do comparative work like this. You go, all right, hang on, let's take the western cemetery behind the Great Pyramid, supposedly built by Khufu. Fourth and a stand. It's at the same elevation level. It's the same stone type as the mortuary or the pyramid temple of the Middle Pyramid complex. So after Khufu. So if he built that, then his son Khafre built this one. How come this one, which was also cased in granite and this wasn't. How come this is so much more eroded than this? There's no. It's at the same elevation level. It's the same stone. It's. You would assume that it's been subjected to the same weathering. Why is this so weathered? And that is not. It's that you can't explain it any other way. Yeah, I've not seen anyone respond to that, to that argument with anything that makes any remote sense.
Joe Rogan
Like, remote sense would dictate one's older.
Ben
Yeah, I mean, we show. Literally, I like to show people, like, which one? Which one looks older? Like, same stone, same stone, same elevation level, same. Everything seems to be. Yeah, I mean, it's. And again, we know that's crazy.
Joe Rogan
That's crazy.
Ben
And it's not like this. This is very hard numolitic limestone. Like it's full of fossils. It's not a soft limestone.
Joe Rogan
The idea that there was a civilization that built monolithic construction a hundred thousand years ago is crazy.
Ben
It is.
Joe Rogan
That's so crazy. But have you seen any of Michael Button's work?
Ben
Yeah, yeah, I saw the episode.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that is a very interesting episode when he's talking about how. How far back human beings in this exact same form have been around at least 300,000 years.
Ben
At least.
Joe Rogan
At least.
Ben
So that's the fossil record.
Joe Rogan
Right. That's all we found. There might be human beings that were 500,000 years ago.
Ben
There's six. Good evidence for, actually.
Joe Rogan
Really?
Ben
Yeah, there's. So, yeah, so the Morocco find, I've talked about this for years as well. It's that the fossil record. So we used to be what, 190, 50,000, then it's 195,000 with the Ethiopian bones, and it's 320, 15 or 19 with the Morocco find. That's the latest in the fossil record. Anatomically modern humans. However, there are studies, I think this is in the other vectors director. I've got those studies. There's two studies that I reference usually. One is a DNA study that suggests from a genetic perspective, Neanderthals are our cousin. We didn't evolve from them. We both evolved from a common ancestor. And they. Based on just looking at the genome and trying to trace it back, the paper suggests that we split with a common ancestor. Somewhere in the realm of 800,000 years ago, U.S. and Neanderthals split from a common ancestor. Like that's when we carved off a.
Joe Rogan
Hundred thousand years ago.
Ben
Yep. And there's another study on teeth morphology, which is. Which was. It actually got set up to try and prove that we're only, you know, 2, 300,000 years old, and they were looking at, all right, some of our nearest common ancestor. How quickly does our dental, our teeth have to evolve and morph like this teeth morphology? How quickly does that have to happen for us to basically have the teeth that we have today relative to our ancestors? And they thought, well, it's going to have to be this rate to make these numbers work. And then they did this big statistical study on a lot of different people from all around the world, and they figured out the teeth, the rate of dental evolution is much slower. So they basically worked backwards from there and said, okay, so if, if that's how quickly our teeth evolve, then we may have been around as many as eight or 900,000 years. So you have, so you, you have two different studies. I mean again, fossil record 300,000. But other studies do suggest the possibility could be any, up to towards a million years old for human, human beings. It gets real interesting even within the 300,000 years. But certainly if you stretch it back further, I mean you can find graphs of the temperature and the global temperature in ice core record ice core data from Antarctica, it goes back 400,000 years. So you have these peaks and valleys like we're in that peak right now in the Holocene, the nice warm period where civilization flourishes. But we've been through a bunch of those peaks before and some of those valleys are, we know, as a result of cataclysm, like massive changes to the surface of the earth when nothing would be left. So I, look, I honestly put the realm of possibility for advanced civilization, not just the last ice age, but within, you know, up to a million years, potentially.
Joe Rogan
That's crazy.
Ben
Could be.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's not.
Ben
It'd be dust for a lot of.
Joe Rogan
It, but it would be dust what we would find now. But it's not. But that's what Michael Button's argument when you're dealing with anatomically similar human beings or anatomically exactly the same.
Ben
Yeah. Creature give us, give us warm weather and you know, enough food to eat and we start solving problems.
Joe Rogan
Which is one of the reasons why Egypt itself was so spectacular was that it was very fertile.
Ben
It was in the African humid period. This is one of my arguments is I think if you, so if we just assume for a moment that there was a civilization that flourished during the African humid period and before it when the Sahara was a savannah. And that's why I think the Sahara is such an appealing target is because what happened, right. So if that civilization ends, we're knocked back to a stone, to a relative stone age. The people that were populating, the northern people have been in the north, we know for like hundreds of thousands of years. Like people live and they, if they're going to start that civilization, they're going to do it in the only part of that country that was habitable. It's the Nile Valley. And that's where all the sites of ancient Egypt are that we know about. But they've all been, let's assume they kick started with stuff and they built, been inherited and renovated and reused and the dynastic Egyptians made them their own, assuming there's something there before. So what's fascinating to me is the possibility that out there in the Sahara, maybe near an ancient water source or an ancient aqueduct or something or an ancient aquifer. We might be another Assyrian out there like this. Subterranean things. There might be another serapeum. There might be another labyrinth buried beneath the sand somewhere that's not been touched and it hasn't been inherited and reused.
Joe Rogan
Well, that's where the Reichardt structure gets work.
Ben
Weird, right? And that's. That's on a timeline that could be very ancient because it's very eroded. It's. Then it's hard to see anything like this. You know, it's interpretive almost at this point to figure out that there's. If there was a structure there or anything.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, right.
Ben
Yeah, it's interesting.
Joe Rogan
But it's also. That's another one. When you go above and you look at the satellite imagery, you go, oh boy, that place got washed.
Ben
Yeah, it did.
Joe Rogan
I mean that was one. That place is one of the clearest examples of a place that looks like it got washed. Washed because there's literal salt deposits everywhere.
Ben
Right? Yeah. I mean it's.
Joe Rogan
Which is nuts.
Ben
It is nuts. It's.
Joe Rogan
The whole thing is nuts.
Ben
Yeah. I don't know what happened.
Joe Rogan
Like Jimmy Corsetti has some amazing videos on that.
Ben
Well, yeah, everybody's interested. Jimmy does and you do as well. Jimmy's awesome. Yeah, he's. Yeah, that's. That's. That seems like it could be one of the places to look. I mean actually. So Michael Donnellins is an interesting talk about Melon Burrows. In that same satellite scan company, there's a guy named Michael Donnellan who's been working with. He was working with them, still is. He's putting out a documentary pretty soon called Atlantica and he thinks he's found at least if not Atlantis, a part of Atlantis off the coast of Spain. And they for 100% found some shit in the waters and they've been diving on it for a couple of years now. I'm building a documentary. But he. It's pretty convincing. He's found again another like underwater, if nothing else, megalithic city. He thinks it could be Atlantis as well. Off the coast of Spain.
Joe Rogan
Wow. I saw that that documentary was coming out out. I didn't know exactly what they had discovered. Is there images that we could see right now?
Ben
It's not. He's. He. We saw like an advanced view of it until it comes out. But it's. But it's. They discovered it with that Merlin Burrows scanning tech, the same satellite based tech. And then they went and dived on it and I've. We saw like a cut down version of three episodes at this conference I went to and met him. I've since talked. Talked to him a bit. Fascinating. 100 found something like it is man made. Like whatever it is is. Yeah. So this is like the preview, little teaser thing. Who.
Joe Rogan
When does this come out?
Ben
I'm not sure when. It's when the streaming. I feel like it's got to be this year. I hope he's mostly done with it.
Joe Rogan
Says 2025.
Ben
Okay, so then.
Joe Rogan
Or at least the trailers.
Ben
That was Tim Acres for a second. The old guy with the beard when he was still alive.
Joe Rogan
When did he die?
Ben
I think it was just last year or the year before. Damn. Yeah, it sucks. It's.
Joe Rogan
I'm very happy. I got John Anthony west on a couple of times before he passed.
Ben
Oh. One of my big regrets is never actually having the chance to meet the man.
Joe Rogan
He was great.
Ben
He's phenomenal. You know, there's a clip I use in my videos of him back in the 90s.
Joe Rogan
Show any images, Jamie?
Ben
No, not really. Back in the night, John Anthony West. I use it in some of my videos. And he's standing at this cabinet, the same cabinet I stand in front of. Take people there to the Cairo Museum. And he's looking at this beautiful diorite vase with a super thin neck. And it's just. It's like this beautiful but tiny little thin neck on it and fled. And he's just saying, you know how much these vases are an anomaly. They're pre dynastic. We don't know how they made them. You know, how do you machine out the inside of this vase through this tiny little neck? Someone did. And he said, I can only hope that at some point in the future people will start to like, apply modern technology and. And study these things and try to learn some more about it. So it's fantastic that that vase scan project is basically doing what he thinks we should be doing. And we're learning a ton about it.
Joe Rogan
His DVD series Magical Aegis is what got me hooked.
Ben
Yeah, I know. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
That series is insane.
Ben
I think it's so good. He was great a symbologist and I think that symbologist's view of ancient Egypt is fantastic. Occasionally he would touch on that. The engineering side of things that I'm deep on. Sometimes he'd ignore it too. It's pretty funny. I have a copy of his guidebook, which is hard to get these days, his guidebook to ancient Egypt. And it literally has about this much on the serapeum because there's just no real writing down in the serape him. That's the place with the 25 giant like 100 ton stone boxes. It's one of the most remarkable logistical feats that come from ancient Egypt. But he just wasn't, there wasn't a lot to like for a symbologist to interpret in that place. So it's like, hey, it's pretty cool. Go check it out. Some boxes, four hours down there.
Joe Rogan
It's interesting if you think of him like being, concentrating on the symbolism and how much work he did. Oh and just, just you need one of those two, right?
Ben
For sure.
Joe Rogan
A bunch of different people looking at all the different aspects of it.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
And he was another one that had. His interpretation was this is a lot older.
Ben
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Rogan
It seems no one seems to like do a deep dive on it and go oh no, no. They figured this out.
Ben
No. Right.
Joe Rogan
Zahi's example was so crazy. His explanation was this was the national project.
Ben
Dude. I, I've, I, it's so I tried to watch that podcast.
Joe Rogan
Imagine if we're all going to fly without wings. This is the national project. This exactly going to use your mind and fly without wings. We're all just going to work on that.
Ben
I have heard him say that for 10 years. 11 years. 10 years project. Yes. I asked him that question 2015. I was in the room with Graham Hancock and him having this debate which wasn't a debate and they were yelling like Zahi flipped out earlier in the day. But you know, we asked him that question. I've heard him give him that answer so many times. You ask him about the, anything precision or logistics, you know, or these, these difficult to explain topics. That's the response. It is, it's basically they tried really hard, therefore they did. And it's, it's, it drives me nutty. He's not the only one who gives that response by the way. That's, that's, that's a pretty stock standard answer to anything where you say well how did they move a thousand ton statue a thousand miles? Which is what they did at one point. Point. Or how did they build the pyramid so precisely or whatever. Or how did they do it in the time frame? No, no national project. They just really wanted to. And it's the, the response are good examples like the Apollo. Let's assume, I mean the Apollo 11 protect the Apollo program. Right. Going to the moon. That wasn't, that was a national project at the time. There was a huge amount of resources put towards it from a relative to what NASA is today. But we didn't just all come together with a big, you know, piece of fabric and fling some people at the moon. There's, there's technology involved, right? You can't do it without the technology. That's, that's the aspect of that answer that annoys me. It's like, no, you.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
I don't care how hard you try. Try does not get you like precise down to within a thousandth of an inch. Or in, in the case of one of these vases, 4/10 of a micron or 6/10 of a micron. It's, that's the most extreme precision I've seen on one of them.
Joe Rogan
What's interesting too, though, that these vases, these small things that you can hold in your hand, are evidence of this incredible technology when these enormous statues also exist. But you don't think of the vases as being the thing that's the smoking gun, but it kind of is.
Ben
They are. It's because they predate the dynastic Egyptians because they were buried with those people. We know they existed in those times. You can't do that with the big statues. But it's. I have a whole long two hour talk about how these things connect to those things. Like the tube drills and the precision and the machining. It's the same technique. It's the stone types. I mean, God, there are, there are a bunch of like tubular drills on the Great Pyramid. A whole bunch of them. People don't know about them or where they are, but I've got pictures and I can show people. The statues show the same machining marks. The statues reflect the same precision. The boxes, the obelisks, a lot of the stonework reflect the same thing as well. The same tools were used. The same precision shows up. And in pretty much all of those cases, the oldest and the best examples of all of those things are typically also the oldest. Like it's like the, the best examples of the oldest. Yeah, the single piece columns are absolutely incredible. Like those, the Romans didn't make columns like that. Like the fact that these columns of granite in Egypt, I mean, they start off wide and they get narrower and narrower and narrow and then they flare out at the top and it's all a single piece. And that means that the entire piece that was quarried had to be as wide as the widest part at the top and then machined down. These columns have freaking vertical. They have lathe centering points on them. Like there's like a hunt. Like, imagine it's like 150 tons turning on a vertical lathe or something that they did to create some of these things.
Joe Rogan
So there's points that show that it was on.
Ben
Oh, it was definitely centering points. Yeah. On these columns. There's a forest of them laying out at Tanis, and you can see it on the end points. And can we show that?
Joe Rogan
That's nuts. And what's the weight of these things?
Ben
Oh, up to. I mean, I imagine the bigger ones are maybe 100, 150 tons, 200 tons. They. And you have these existing on Old Kingdom sites like Saqqara, Giza, Abusiya, the single piece columns. They are also on sites later on that are attributed to the New Kingdom, places like the Luxor Temple or Karnak. However, I think that those places had a granite core and an infrastructure there already. And then those kings of the New Kingdom kingdom, Seti, the first Marin, Patah, Ramses ii, built around them. And you can see the difference in technology of what's in the granite core with the giant obelisks and the columns and the granite buildings that look like the Valley Temple and the old structures. Then outside of that, it's all sandstone and it's blocks. And they made giant columns too, but they're made from blocks of sandstone. They would stack them up and shave them down. It's a much softer stone. And making blocks out of rounds and just, you know, making columns out of rounds is way easier than trying to build a single flared, you know, granite column. And even the Romans, I mean, it has to have been something like that. It can't have been that all the way because you have. Actually, Jamie, in that precision large directory, there's a picture of a column end, like, as I'm standing next to this amazing end piece. But some of them are faceted. So it can't have all been lathe work. They have little. They have little buttresses and features. But certainly the column of the lathe, the circular part could have been done, or the column, the. The center of the column could have been done on a lathe. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's. It's fascinating. I mean, how big is this lathe? Huge. I mean, this is. Chris Dunn thinks. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the columns I'm standing next to. That's at Tanis. And if you flip through this, there's like a column end point. That's. Yeah, there's an. And so see this? There's a hole in the. In the tip. So you have. You have lot. This is a place called Temple of Bastet. And there were forests of these things. Like, look at that. That thing is one of the most.
Joe Rogan
Look at that.
Ben
That's one of my favorite artifacts in all of Egypt. It is immaculate. That. That. The faceting. Look at that. That bullnose that runs up the center of that frond of the palm. Because these are like palm shaped pillars. I mean, it tapers, it's thick on one end and it thins right down to the end. And it's exactly the same on either side on each of these fronds. I would love to get there and scan this thing. One of my favorite pieces. And you just had like, I mean, probably hundreds of these things on these sites. I mean, even. And it goes back in time. Again, this is from. This is. These are picked. These are columns from Saqqara and Abusir, which are all Old Kingdom sites. So again, these are existing in the early times. They didn't build columns like this later in the civilization. They built them with sandstone pieces.
Joe Rogan
Go back to those images again, please. Look how crazy that looks.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
One solid piece of granite.
Ben
Yeah. And flared.
Joe Rogan
Even.
Ben
Even the Romans, who by all accounts had far superior technology to the Egyptians. They had force multipliers, they had iron. They had all sorts of mathematical skill they got from the Greeks. They've built. They built single piece granite pillars, but they were tapered the whole way like they. And they weren't anything as precise. They're quite rough. If you go. You've been to the Pantheon. This one's one of my favorites. This is called Pompey's Pillar. You can see the dude standing at the bottom. Like, this is like. I've actually got a picture of me there as well. But it's. Yeah.
Joe Rogan
You see that dude at the bottom?
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Zoom out so we can see the whole thing with him. It's not working.
Ben
There it is.
Joe Rogan
Look at that.
Ben
So I think that's been a re. That's a reworked column that the Romans reworked. And they either they carved that head top or it's a separate stone. I'm not actually sure. But this is. This is in Alexandria in Egypt, but huge.
Joe Rogan
And where did that come from?
Ben
And so this is how they do it. That's. I don't. I mean, it's aswani in grass. It's. But it's. It's like a thousand kilometers away.
Joe Rogan
So then when you get to New Kingdom.
Ben
So that's what. This is what they. Yes. So this is the stacked rounds of sandstone. And this is. I always like to show people this corner of Karnak, because it's an unfinished column on the end there. You can see how they did it. They'd stack up those blocks and they basically shave it down. And they would end up. And this is imitation too, right? This is the other key thing. You see, even with the vases, they would. I mean, people knew what was sophisticated. Like anyone who works with stone, whether you're primitive or not, you see an artifact like that or one of those statues or a column out of stone, you're like, holy shit, how did they do that? So you. It's from the gods. Right? I'm going to imitate it and I'm going to try and replicate it. And so they were doing their best to replicate and imitate, but with sandstone. With sandstone. And in a technological method that they were capable of, which is to put blocks of sandstone up, shave it down and make it. Make it look like one of these columns. And they did great work. Right. Don't get me wrong, Karnak is. This is the great sort of hyperstyle hall at Karnak. It's phenomenal and it is the work of the New Kingdom. But it still pales in technological significance to, like, the older stuff, the single piece stuff. But it's fabulous. Like, this is. I love the Carnac's, one of my favorite places because you have all those examples right in front of you of, like, high tech and then low tech.
Joe Rogan
And so by New Kingdom, what year?
Ben
So like 14, 1500 BC. Ish.
Joe Rogan
So even then, they're still doing spectacular stuff. It's just not as sophisticated.
Ben
It was by all. It's right. By all accounts, the Old Kingdom, or in the New Kingdom, that was Egypt's height, like the height of the dynastic Egyptian civilization. Like Ramses II in particular, like, always call him the, you know, the greatest of the Egyptian kings. They would. Egypt had the most power, the most wealth, the most ability to do that sort of work. So they built these great temples and it just. It's very, very clear. Yeah, this is that Pompey's pillar that they call it. It's very clear that they built them around and on top of existing infrastructure. In fact, at Karnak, which is attributed to Ramses ii, I mean, you again, the devil's in the details. You have the names of kings that go back all the way to the Old Kingdom on various structures. You also, at one point, at that, in that hall where they've pulled up a massive floor tile underneath the ground at the bottom, there is a column base. It's another like an older and white calcite column base that is the same sort of column base that you see on the very oldest of sites, which tells you there was a columned hall here before and either got destroyed or knocked down, but the whole place was rebuilt. You see this evidence for these layers of infrastructure on these sites that tells you, okay, this is, it's like looking at these ancient sites, you always have to keep that in the back of your head. Like, all right, there's been thousands of years of not only inheritance, but renovation and reuse and claiming. Like it's, it's. You know, people have asked me if I think the statues are so old, how come they look like dynastic Egyptians? I think the answer is it's the other way around. I think the dynastic Egyptians look like the statues. So if you imagine that and there's evidence for like five or six of these giant thousand ton statues, which are the typical stuff you see at Luxor with the, you know, the head jet and the Nemes crown or the big, the bowling pin thing on the head and they're always in that iconic symbolic style of ancient Egypt.
Joe Rogan
Can you go to some of those?
Ben
Yeah, I have the precision large has probably got the statues. And imagine that you are a tribal culture that's emerging from the dark from this Stone age. But you have this history and these legends of these stories and you come across. Yeah, so this iconic, this iconic look. And again, this stretches back. This is an Old Kingdom statue is attributed to. This is made of diorite, by the way. This is called Khafre Enthroned. One of my favorite statues with the columns from Saqqara in the background.
Joe Rogan
This is made out of that same impossibly hard stone.
Ben
Yes, it's like a 6.5 to a 7 on the Mohs scale. And it's, it's phenome. This is an incredible statue.
Joe Rogan
And this exhibits that facial symmetry as well.
Ben
It looks like it. I've not seen the actual scans from this, but this thing actually has tub drill marks and saw cuts in it too. So it's got. Between his heels is a. You see the remnants of a tube drill.
Joe Rogan
Keep that there, please.
Ben
I've probably got a picture of that in my machining directory of the actual. The tube drill between the heels and then in the legs on the inside you can actually see overcuts like saw cuts from where there was. They cut too deeply into this insanely hard stone and it's overrun. Which is, if you were doing this by hand. That's a mistake you'd have to be making for about four hours, you know, to actually get the depth of the cut. But if you had some sort of power tool that was moving, removing material quickly, it's, you can overcut in there and there's like little mistakes.
Joe Rogan
Go to the full of his, please.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
So your thoughts are that the Egyptians were imitating these ancient looks?
Ben
Yes, I think they, I think they inherited their iconography from the things, the artifacts that they, that they gained in like statues like this and also the thousand ton versions of statues like this. And I mean, if you look at their art style, this is one of the things that blows my mind. It's, it's, it's like across that 3,000 year civilization, that iconography didn't change very much. Like it's the same look. And you, and how do the kings draw themselves on the walls? They're always trying to position themselves as being one of the gods. Right. They always talk about, eventually they got this, this aura of divinity. You became a God, like the pharaohs became divine. That wasn't always the case, but they grew into that over time as that civilization progressed. And they always match themselves and they try to make themselves look like the gods. And again, eventually, once you get hubris and ego involved in some of these really big, really rich kings, you're like, damn it, I am one of the gods. Put my name on his statue. That's how I want to be remembered. And that's. There were multiple gods. Seti the first did it, his son Ramses ii, his son Merin Ptah, particularly in the New Kingdom. I mean, Petrie called Ramses the great usurper. That was his name for him because he was putting his name on everything, trying to label himself as one of the kings. And I think if you look at that from the Old Kingdom through to the Ptolemaic era, it's the same. Like they're depicting themselves as one of these gods who are always depicted in the same way. And that's like, that's part of it from day one. Like it feels like so. And I think. Where do you get that picture from? It's like that, the, what's the, what's the poem from Percy Shelley, Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye mighty in despair. Like it's literally a poem by Percy Shelley that talks about it. He actually gets it from, I think, Diodora Sick, an account of Diodorus Siculus coming across one of these statues in the desert. That's a thousand tons. It's like a weary traveler in a desert of, in an unknown land comes along two vast and trunkless legs of stone. Like nearby a shattered visage lies still, like, sort of full of sneer and arrogance. And it's basically written upon this stone are the words, my name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my work, ye mighty, in despair. And the endless sands stretch far away. I mean, I'm paraphrasing.
Joe Rogan
People are dicks.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
Especially when they become kings. There it is. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Ben
Nothing beside remains round and round, okay. That colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sandstorm. So it's like if you imagine you come across in the, in the sand, in the desert and you find the remnants of a thousand tons. Have you, have you? Probably. I'm sure you've seen pictures of the Ramesseum and the thousand ton statues. Like there's four or five of them at least that happened. But they're incredible single piece stone statues that were moved in some cases up to a thousand, like six, seven hundred miles away. I have them in, I have them in a colossal directory.
Joe Rogan
And did they fall from earthquakes? Is that the speculation?
Ben
I suspect either that or the hands of men. I think it was like, I think with enough dudes, with enough leverage, you can probably eat that thing over and it'll crack when it falls. And I think it's, they were definitely. There was a long period of them destroying all the gods and all the icon and all the, you know, the false idols of the past. Of course there's at a place called Tanis, there's a foot, there's a giant foot that I can't, I mean my whole asterisk hand wouldn't fit in the toenail. And it's a repurposed block of granite and Petrie found it and there's other pieces of this statue. So we know it was a statue that had it been standing, it's about the same size as the Statue of Liberty without the pedestal. The foot's about the same size. Just give it a frame of reference. And that thing's made from Aswanian granite. Now Tanis is in the north and that's one's, and it's, it's north of Cairo. Like it's up in the delta towards the Mediterranean and, and Cairo is down here. It's like a thousand kilometers. So someone at some point took a, at least a thousand ton, probably more like 1500 ton block of stone because they didn't finish them. They didn't ship them finished. We know they finished stuff on site. Site like a thousand kilometers north is an even better example. Jamie, I think in the.
Joe Rogan
In the foot.
Ben
The foot at Tanis. No, that's it there. The first one. Yeah. In my. In the massive. Yeah. There's actually my. My video thumbnail down. The ancient tennis. Largest stone statue ever made. Giant, huge objects. Huge objects, yeah. There you go. So there's. Go up one. That's the foot there. So you see, that's the. It's actually. It's funny because this box block's been repurposed. It's been cut off on both sides and used as a block in a wall. They cut the front off it and the back off it and stuck it in and rebuilt it. This thing, this. There's a picture of the whole arm when it was put together in that directory. So that's a giant thumb holding a scroll and they put the whole arm together. There's. I got one picture of it one time, I was there. They put the whole arm together. And that is probably the most impressive example. It's in there, I'm sure. Let's see. It's that. Down, down, down. Yep. Up, up one. There you go. Yeah. So this. This is. It's made from composite quartzite. So this is a carnot. This is one of several of statues of this size at Karnak. And what's impressive about this, they actually put this together for one year, then they took it apart because. And I got told that it was. Because they didn't. People were freaking out about how big this must have been. They didn't kind of. It gives a sense of scale. And then people like, what the fuck? How are they doing this? So they took it apart again. But you can still see the thumb there today. So it's turned on its side. Now, what's cool about this is that it's a straight arm. So a lot of those statues, like the one at the Ramesseum, they're seated, so they always have their elbows bent at their knees. This thing was standing, so it was a standing statue. Thousand tons, made from composite quartzite, which is in a lot of ways more difficult to work than granite. It's a very hard, compressed form of sandstone. It's like 6.5 to 7, but it's full of flint. It's a stone carver's nightmare. It's like you can see the chunks of flint in the stone, but they somehow worked that surface just with no problem going over flint, which Is seven. Seven and a half on the most scale. Scale. The trick with this statue is where that stone came from. That's a Karnak in the south. Aswan for granite. Bit further south. Composite quartzite doesn't come from Aswan. It comes from the Red Mountains north of Cairo. And the tricky part here is that the Nile river flows north. Right. So it's like people. It's because it's north that people are like, oh, it's flowing up, but it flows to the north. So they had to take the block for that thing. Thing, I'd say. Fun. 1500 tons, easy. They had to bring that up river. Up river 600 miles or something. 500 miles.
Joe Rogan
Wow.
Ben
I don't know how you explain that. And there's certainly no depictions of them doing that. That's. That is. That is a logistical feat. I mean, it's. I don't know how you can rival it.
Joe Rogan
It was a national project. Don't you get it? Don't you get it?
Ben
Just a national project. They really wanted to. Dude.
Joe Rogan
Well, it's one of those really amazing mysteries because the actual facts of it are so spectacular that it defies any conventional explanation to the point where it opens up people to the possibility that maybe we don't know. Almost every. Anyone listening to this, it's even remotely reasonable. That sees that goes. Okay, I think. I think this picture is a lot bigger than we thought it was.
Ben
Yeah, that's. Honestly my response to it too, is. I don't know how they did this. You can't do it primitive fashion. Like, we literally tried. Like, we've had the Thunderstone is the other. Is the.
Joe Rogan
How would they even do it today?
Ben
Hydraulics and diesel power, like, huge bar. I mean, I. I didn't even know you try to move. I mean, it's like. Makes newspaper headlines when they shift a load of like 150 tons on. On a. On a truck somewhere. A thousand tons these days. 1500 tons. I mean, we have cranes. We have the capability, but it's usually by water and giant. I don't know if we could. How we transport a load like that over anything other than water.
Joe Rogan
Imagine the wooden boat and how hard.
Ben
Those dudes are rowing up river, too.
Joe Rogan
Not only that, how deep is the water? And when you're dealing with 150 tons, how far does it sink?
Ben
You know, displacement.
Joe Rogan
Yeah.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
How much of a boat do you need? And can you fit a boat that wide in the.
Ben
In parts of the Nile? You can, but I'll tell you this. And I've looked at this that you sure shit can't do it at the quarry. Because this is what they say. You go to the quarry and this is an example I like to give people all the time. The unfinished obelisk. You know, 1200 tons more or less. Like 10 tons off. They will tell you that. Oh yeah. So there's this low area in the quarry. That's the harbor where they park the boat to take the. To take the stone. I mean you just. Is. There is no chance that you could put that thing on a boat that even would. It's. It's like this is not in the realms of possibility for a boat to displace enough water to take a load like that obelisk. It would literally just be this giant clunk. It was just. It just can't happen. And what's more that quarry or that, that harbor in the quarry, it's. That isn't a harbor. They. That's an extraction. They pulled a fucking block out of there. The same size as the obelisk. It's. And it's gone. You can see it. I showed it's an off limits area to the quarry. But we kind of get in there every time.
Joe Rogan
So someone somehow pulled that off.
Ben
It's already been done 100%. We know it has because we've got the statues. The blocks of that sort of. And tonnage have been. Have been successfully transported and shaped. However in that place they call the quarry in the harbour.
Joe Rogan
It is.
Ben
It's all scoop marks. It's the same technology. And here's where it gets wild is that there's. You can see the extraction that's come out. It's massive. Like basically like the obelisk, the unfinished obelisk. So something like an order of 12 to 1300 tons in a piece got pulled out of there and on in the corner right up at the end where you see the boxy end of whatever this was was taken out on the wall. There's red ochre painting. It's paintings of like emus or flamingos and some other dolphins and other stuff. And it. It's an identical match for the art style and paintings that you find on pre dynastic pottery that comes from the Carta culture and before. It's exactly the same. It's not. It's not dynastic Egyptian. It's pre dynastic artwork that's been put on the wall. I hope I have pictures of that. I know I do on here. It's actually. I have a video called I have A video where I look at all this on my channel. But it is. It's the exact same artwork that you see on the vessel. So it's. To me, it's an indication of there was a primitive. These people that were living there in the thousands of years before the dynastic Egyptian civilization rose were obviously in that quarry and they found this convenient wall to put some artwork on, and they painted on it. Which tells you that, well, this extraction had to happen before that. Right. Had to have been taken out before that.
Joe Rogan
And how far before?
Ben
We don't know. Can't date the stone. So. But somebody took a piece like that out of there 100% with the same technology. The scoop marks and stuff.
Joe Rogan
Have you found anything on that, Jamie? Once you get that, let's look at the unknown obelisk too. So to give people a real unfinished obelisk. Yeah, the unfinished obelisk is how many feet.
Ben
That is definitely in that other directory. That's. Yeah, that's the. That's the. The video about the obelisk.
Joe Rogan
The finished obelisk is how long?
Ben
Oh, God, it's. It's got to be, I don't know, 100ft long or something like that. It's a.90, 80, 90ft long. I'm thinking. You'll see it in the picture. It's. I mean, it's a giant. Giant block. I mean, so it's not extracted either. That's what I should say. It's. It is. It is still attached to the bedrock. So they were cutting it out and then for whatever reason, they stopped. But if. If you assume that the obelisk would have a square section, which means, you know, same width as, you know, like this, a square section. It would have its mass with the granite there at like 2.7 tons per cubic meter. Is. Is roughly 1200 tons.
Joe Rogan
And did they stop because it was cracked or did they stop?
Ben
That's what they say. That's what they say. I don't think so. I don't think that it doesn't. To me, that's hard to say whether it was cracked or not. It was. People tried to quarry it after. There wasn't much attempt made to quarry. I don't know why you would. Even if it cracked, why not use it if it's actually part. If it was done during dynastic Egypt, I mean, you've done all that work. You've cut out the trenches on all of it around. You could cut pieces out of that. It'd take way less work. You want to get A smaller piece of stone for something else else. Just cut it. Like you should use it. But that's not what happened.
Joe Rogan
Unless their technology was so sophisticated that what they wanted was very specific and they could just do it again.
Ben
Yeah. And maybe it didn't crack. I think that's an example, like you do see on a lot of these sites, like the Serapeum, like the Assyrian at the quarry, that something happened that meant tools down. Yeah. So here's the painting, this is the pictographs, Those are the paintings. And if you compare that to what's on like the pre dynastic vases, you'll see exactly the same thing.
Joe Rogan
Now, so these depictions of flamingos, was it possible to date the paint that they used?
Ben
I think you probably could. I don't know if anybody ever has. I'd love to see that done. Yeah, I would love for that to happen. That's, that's a very good point because it's, it just. There's a few things in Egypt where I'm like, why don't we date that?
Joe Rogan
Sorry, Jamie, scroll down a little bit. That scoopy thing. No, below that. Yeah, they're right there. What's that?
Ben
So that's another piece near, in the quarry. And this is. Puts the light of the stupid pounding stone theory of, of, of how they explain this in the mainstream. Because these scoop marks they tell you are pounding stones. This is another big piece. This is probably, we guessed this piece. It was probably going to be like a smaller seated statue, but still something's maybe 150 tons. And they were, they were cutting this out. So this, you can see this is the process of like carving out underneath it. And so you can get in these trenches. And the scoop marks are crazy though, because they extend basically from the top of the wall like 15ft straight down these, these ridges. They go along the ground under and then up on the roof side. So if you're, you're pounding, you would have been doing this pounding up to pound that out. And it also, it's a very sharp turn on the inside. There's some. It's the result of some tool like.
Joe Rogan
Also someone's got to be underneath it when it's finally cracks loose.
Ben
Yep. That would not. Yep. Don't want to draw that short straw. Thank you very much. Yeah, we take people down into that area around this block every time. It's great. And there's very bizarre looking and you can grab that stone and whack at it and just see how, how little effect you'll have with the me, you.
Joe Rogan
Know, but those stones were. Is that an example of what they are trying to claim was used?
Ben
Yes.
Joe Rogan
How long would that take? So is that the unfinished obelisk?
Ben
That is the unfinished obelisk.
Joe Rogan
And so where is that sucker cracked?
Ben
So there's a couple cracks. Right. So this is the thing that there's, there's attempts at quarrying that have been made. It's, it's, I think it's that crack up the, towards the top is what they say how it cracked, but we don't know how it cracked.
Joe Rogan
We don't know if it cracked after the fact either.
Ben
It's possible that, I mean like a lot of these places that it was a tools down situation, just something happened to stop whether it's civil unrest, cataclysm them.
Joe Rogan
Right.
Ben
And this thing was buried too. Like that's, that's the thing. There was a lot of quarrying that happened after this at higher levels. Like. So this is, you got to imagine when you go to this quarry, it's like they've cut the top off a granite mountain. I've taken so much granite out of there, huge granite mountain. So to get down to, you know, this sort of high quality granite, which is not surface level granite, you have to go 10, 12, 15 meters into granite to get blocks that are even possible to be. That's this size or this, you know, one single piece. And in fact, even now that you can see the, like, all of this has changed. This is not. There's no staircase. All of that, that gravel up to the north of that has all been moved. We're still clearing the site out, or they are, but when this was first discovered, it was buried in like 7, 8 meters of quarry rubble from all of the quarrying that had happened above it and around it like for thousands of years. The Egyptians, the Romans. Yeah, this was buried.
Joe Rogan
How'd they know it was there?
Ben
Well, so there was, there was like an edge, one little edge piece poking out, like, what the hell is this? And then it was Howard, it was, it was Flinders Petrie's assistant who actually excavated that site. And he had to like split a bunch of big blocks to even get it out of the way. It took them forever, but they eventually uncovered it all. Yeah. Wow. But it was the back end of this, like 7, 8 meters of rubble that they had to clear out. I mean.
Joe Rogan
Yeah, that's nuts.
Ben
Yeah, it is, it's. And to me it's like it's quite plausible. It's a possibility that that was there. It was Done. Quite plausible.
Joe Rogan
There's more of that stuff out there.
Ben
Oh, for sure. I mean, there's many more quarries. That's. This is just. Because that's in the quarry. That's the quarry that's sort of been cleared and made available for tourists. But just tons of quarries. Like, there's. Yeah, these are great pictures. That's the dual image. This is when it first popped out. Yeah. So they had this section of. And they're like, wow, this is something else. But. And so what happened with the pounding stones are really interesting because there were thousands of them on the site. These round stones, however, the vast majority of them were broken. They were split and. God, I'm blanking on the name of the guy who excavated the site, however, he was like, huh? How come these are all broken? Broken? And he tried to break him. So he stood up on, like a, you know, 15ft up, and he's hurling these stones down onto the granite. Bang, bang. You do it like 10 times, and eventually he cracks a chip off on them because they're. They're dollarite. They're hard. They are harder stone. And look, you will eventually create enough dust. Eventually. I mean, it's. It's like the. There actually have been studies done. Dennis Stocks did a study. And it's the volume. It's basically you remove a base about. I think it was two thirds the volume of a golf ball in an hour of pounding. Yo. So not a lot. Not a lot. Yeah. And if you can imagine, I like to tell people, it's like you can only fit, like, you know, these. These trenches around this column. It's not like you can put a thousand dudes in there. They've got to sit in. There's like one person in one spot, then, dudes. And so all you have to do is imagine all of that space being filled up with golf balls. Balls. Add another third for the, you know, because it's two thirds of golf ball. And then maybe add another half again to that to account for the negative space between the balls. That's how many hours it would take, which is. I mean, decades of effort. Like, it's not. It's not remotely possible to do it in any reasonable time frame. People can't. And pounding stones is like, come on.
Joe Rogan
How do you break it free?
Ben
Well, that's the issue.
Joe Rogan
Who's underneath it when they're pounding? Like, how does.
Ben
That's what I think these balls are. Were. So I think they're very difficult to break. They've taken away all the broken ones. The Only ones on site now are these like little nice rounded ones. And even then you can't do it from all a couple. You have to kind of let it go and catch it and you would. Your arms would burn out in no time. But I think the reason so many were broken, I actually, I think. And you can actually see this in the. In the harbour area. There are these channels that I think they cut under them. You can see the remnants of them where they took the big extraction out. And I suspect what they did was they would shove these balls of dollarite in there and it would provide them enough movement or just enough support where they could. They could cut the rest of the, of the, whatever, scoop out or remove the other attachment points. And then you're also. Once you get out of that trench, you can now shift this thing ever so slightly to get whatever you would need to get under it to lift it up out of there. Because that's the other problem with the obelisk is like it's on an angle and I mean, the trench is going to be when it's completed. I didn't. They had only dug down two, two thirds as deep as they needed to go. So that trench at its, its thickest point would have been like 12, 15ft deep down there. And you got to get under it so you still. It's on an angle. You have to lift that thing up 15, 20ft up in the air to get it out of the trench and then somehow move it to get into this rocky, crazy environment to move it to get it somewhere, to then take it wherever else you're taking it. But you'd have to be able to maneuver. So I think, I honestly think those dollarite balls could have been used as primitive ball bearings. That would just. That's all they were used for, was to support it while you cut it free. And then. And then it would. A lot of them would have snapped in half under the mass of something like that, which explains why so many of them were broken, because you ain't broken those things by pounding on them like it's just not going to break.
Joe Rogan
That actually makes sense that they were used as some sort of a ball bearing.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
But even so, even if that's the case, like, how. What.
Ben
Well, how you lifting it? What are you doing to lift that obelisk out?
Joe Rogan
How many people are involved if it's just manual labor?
Ben
You cannot fit enough people around that obelisk to even come close. Like, not. You're probably not even to get 10% of the amount of people. Like, it's such a rocky weirdness. You can't fit that many people around it today. I have no idea how they, I mean, I don't think they were doing this without the expectation that they could get it done. You know what I mean?
Joe Rogan
But what kind of conventional explanation is this?
Ben
There's nothing for this. There's not, it's nothing. There's nothing.
Joe Rogan
They just gloss over it. We don't know. They say, we don't know.
Ben
They don't address the realities of the thousand tons. I've not seen anyone address those realities. Well, okay, so they do. And there's, and it's like with logistics, they will show you pictures where the Egyptians are moving something that is 100 tons or 150 tons and say, now that's not how logistics works. So for example, with the statues, we know they scale right up to, you know, a thousand tons or more. There is a picture on a tomb of a guy named Dajuti Hotep. And I've got this in the statues directory. I think it's a, it's a painting on a wall and it's, it's, it's a, it's a sled with this statue and there is like, you know, rows of guys. They've got the, you know, the imprint of dudes behind dudes. And they're all pulling on a rock rope, no pulleys. Again, they didn't have force multipliers. They were just straight pulling wooden levers, a wooden sled. They're dragging this statue. In the case of this statue, we know about this statue, there's pieces of it left. It was made from alabaster. Calcite's not as heavy as granite, but it probably weighed. The estimate of how much it weighed was 57 tons, which is quite a lot. It's respectable, right? And you can imagine, but with enough labor and on a sled, this is it. This is a 57 ton statue. There's a guy pouring something on the sand or in front of them. So you can count all these dudes in the shadows of the dudes behind them on these ropes. And so there's a figure about it. And there's been papers written about this. There's literally, I think a Japanese team wrote a paper about what would it take to do this. And okay, this is possible for 57 tons with enough people, enough horsepower, you can do it. Now it's not like that scales up on like a linear increase in difficulty to something that's a thousand tons. It's more of a logarithmic exponential curve. You can't, cannot, you cannot take this explanation and apply it to something that's a thousand tons, it's 20 times as heavy. The co. The friction coefficient goes through the roof that those sleds would literally just drive into the ground. You can't, you get to, you're in, you're in realms of mass where it's like material failure becomes a problem. Wood is no longer sufficient to support that. You cannot, you certainly can't move it up any slopes. You have to do all this ground preparation work to even attempt it. And they move these things like a thousand kilometers.
Joe Rogan
If there's a place that you could go back in time and see that is it. That is it.
Ben
Yeah. Quarry would be a good one.
Joe Rogan
God. If you could go back in time just to see construction, just I guess quarry. But I mean, I mean pyramids. How are you lifting things? What are you doing? What, what do you, what does your machinery look like? You must have some, some kind of technology that is just dust in the wind now.
Ben
It has to, to be because we've tried this. Like there's an exact. Do you know about the Thunderstone? You heard of this thing?
Joe Rogan
No.
Ben
Okay, so no, I did hear about this. So in like the 1700s, I think it was pre industrial age. Well at the early days. But no diesel power, no hydraulics. And this is the Thunderstone. So we did like in Russia, they moved this thing from Finland to Russia. It's at St. Petersburg. They carved it as they went. It's the, it's the base now for I think a bronze statue of Peter the Great. Great. But this is how they did it. And, and so basically you can see the cap stands, the twist things these dudes are working on. They're rotating. They would dig these giant holes to anchor these big logs in the ground to then use pulleys and force multipliers with dudes on giant rails. And then they would have these huge big iron rails that they would put on the ground and carry back and forth. And the whole thing was, was moving on these bronze spheres. These big giant bowling ball sized spheres of bronze. And on a good day they'd move this thing 150 meters. 3. What's that? 450ft.
Joe Rogan
Still pretty impressive.
Ben
Yeah, but it took them years and years and then. And this thing weighed around 1500 tons.
Joe Rogan
It's interesting that using bronze spheres, you know, brass spheres, I'm sorry, whatever, metal spheres, which is very similar to what you're describing with the Obelisk.
Ben
Right. But there's again, when you compare the level of technology here to ancient history, Egypt ain't. There's nothing. They have. They show you what they did with that Dajuti Hotep image. It's a wooden sled. No force multipliers, no cap stands, no pulleys. No, none of that. Just dudes yanking on a rope. There's no evidence they use pulleys.
Joe Rogan
Pouring water on the sand.
Ben
Milk or whatever. Right. Oil, who knows? It's. It's just stupid. You can't take. You cannot explain it. When it took us everything they had for years and years to. To move that. And by the way, they did. They took that across the Gulf of Finland. And it wasn't on some little river barge either. They built a giant platform. Took them a year to build it. And then they had to put warships on either side of it to keep it balanced. It's massive to even plop this thing in the center and hope that they got this thing over to Russia to then move it the rest of the way. So it ain't no barge carrying a thousand tons down the Nile. No, it's nuts. Something happened.
Joe Rogan
So it's all so fascinating, and something happened is actually the only answer we have.
Ben
Yeah. Yeah, I would agree.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Ben, you're awesome, man. I really, really appreciate you coming on here. Your channel, unchartedx. Fantastic channel. So much good content. How long have you been doing it now?
Ben
I've been doing it. I mean, I quit my job 10 years ago, but not. I mean. UnchartedX.
Joe Rogan
Oh, God. You had the courage to do that.
Ben
It was a big old step. The wife was like, what are you doing?
Joe Rogan
I know, but look, you were right. It worked out.
Ben
I am super grateful. That's worked out. In fact, I mean, obviously, thank you for the hospitality and the invite. And I genuinely also think, dude, I've come full circle with this a little bit. Like, I. What got me into it in the first place, genuinely. I mean, I was always interested, but it wasn't until Graham's first, who I've gotten to know very well over the years. I love that man. It wasn't until his first appearance on your podcast back in the old days. Like, was it 2011, 2012, something like that.
Joe Rogan
He was one of the first real guests. Yeah, that was just me and Duncan, that one.
Ben
You and Duncan, right at your. It was at your house.
Joe Rogan
That was what I was doing at my house.
Ben
That one was what really. I mean, after that, I followed him really closely. I went to Peru and Bolivia with him in 2013. And then 2015, I went with him to Egypt. So it's like the fact that I'm here talking to you now, you started me on this and it's come full circle. So thank you for that. And the fact that you are interested in this topic, I think is such a boon to everyone else out there that you get to spread the word. And, and it's, it's just such a benefit to the whole, the whole space.
Joe Rogan
Well, I'm so happy that guys like you took that baton and ran with it.
Ben
But I mean, wild ride. I love it.
Joe Rogan
How I, my, my answer to all this is, who's not? I don't understand you. If you're not interested in this. How, how is this not unbelievably Fascinating?
Ben
Yeah. Right. 100%. I agree. I, that's, that's what happened to me. I fell down this pyramid shaped hole and I was doing. I mean, I had a, I had quite a career before this in the tech world, but I mean, I'd go to conferences and tech events. And the second that we're out in the break room, I'm talking about the younger dryas and pyramids and massive statues and all this shit. Graham Hancock and they're like, this is really interesting. I'm like, I know.
Joe Rogan
It's literally the most interesting thing about civilization, that time period and the mysteries that are involved in trying to just decipher what happened, happened.
Ben
Yeah.
Joe Rogan
It is the most fascinating time in history, I think.
Ben
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Joe Rogan
Yeah. Again, thank you so much.
Ben
Thank you.
Joe Rogan
We'll definitely do this again.
Ben
I would love to.
Joe Rogan
Especially if some more information comes out about the labyrinth and hopefully more people. You know, we're also picking up the baton and people get involved.
Ben
I see that happening. I'm very glad that it is. I, I'm, I'm absolutely, I'm thrilled to see other people getting into the film. I'm not, not a. I don't see any of this as. It's not competition. It's like all. It's a rising time.
Joe Rogan
Come on, jump on board. You could definitely say you found it. You could. Everybody will agree that you found it.
Ben
We didn't talk about the Sphinx and the stuff in the star shop, but save that for next.
Joe Rogan
Do it again, then definitely do it again.
Ben
I would love to.
Joe Rogan
Thank you so much. This was awesome. All right, bye, everybody.
Ben
Sa.
Date: September 3, 2025
Host: Joe Rogan
Guest: Ben van Kerkwyk (UnchartedX, researcher of ancient mysteries)
Joe Rogan talks with Ben van Kerkwyk about the mysteries of Egypt, focusing on the recently confirmed existence of the ancient Egyptian Labyrinth, alleged advanced ancient technologies, the enigmatic hard stone vases, and evidence suggesting lost chapters in human civilization. The conversation weaves through new archeological data, controversial suppression of findings, speculation about ancient capabilities, and the challenge these present to mainstream archeology.
Labyrinth Location & Structure:
New Scientific Evidence:
Barriers to Excavation:
Mainstream Archaeology's Position:
Potential Impact:
Quote:
“Honestly, the labyrinth is the biggest archaeological discovery of the millennium… it’s like finding another Giza Plateau, but underground.” – Ben (16:10)
Precision Stone Vases
Evidence of Advanced Tools
Nuclear Machining Hypothesis
Quote:
“Precision in these [vases]… equates to some of the best industrial processes we do today in the aerospace industry.” – Ben (41:02)
“The most interesting thing was… the no copper thing… but, more interestingly, we found titanium.” – Ben (72:21)
Oldest = Most Sophisticated
Discrepancies in Erosion & Dating
Human Antiquity
Quote:
“If you look at it from a technological progression perspective, it’s almost like [Egypt] went backwards the whole time.” – Ben (86:18)
Academic Gatekeeping & Suppression
New Media’s Role
Quote:
“Thank god there’s YouTube… where a video like yours can get millions of views and people can go, ‘Wait, what’s going on down there?’” – Joe Rogan (59:17)
Mystery of the 40m ‘Dippy’ Object
Myth and Symbolism as Lost Technology
This episode passionately argues that new evidence, both technological and archaeological, is rewriting what we know about ancient civilizations, particularly in Egypt. The discovery and suppression of the labyrinth, the unexplained precision of ancient artifacts, and geology suggesting advanced ancient knowledge point to the possibility of lost high cultures. While mainstream archaeology hesitates, independent researchers and new media are rapidly shifting the public understanding, inspiring further investigation into humanity’s deep past.
Summary by: The Podcast Summarizer