#226 - John Anthony West

[0] The Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

[1] The Joe Rogan Experience.

[2] Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

[3] This, ladies and gentlemen, is a very, very special edition of the Joe Rogan experience.

[4] First of all, because it is the first one we've ever done through Skype.

[5] And two, because it is with one of my personal heroes that I'm honored to get to talk to.

[6] A man named John Anthony West.

[7] John is an Egyptologist of, you know, somebody on Twitter.

[8] Twitter had a very great comment about you, said that you're more of a proof reader for history.

[9] You're more than an Egyptologist.

[10] Well, okay.

[11] I sometimes call, depending on my audience, I sometimes call myself a rogue Egyptologist.

[12] A rogue Egyptologist.

[13] And if you've, folks who aren't seeing online, if you're listening to this only on iTunes, John has an office that is exactly what I would hope and pray.

[14] His office would look like, just filled with documents and information and books.

[15] It's crazy, man. Look at all that information behind you.

[16] You look like a mad scientist.

[17] You look like Alex Jones' car.

[18] Yeah, you're a mad scientist, sir.

[19] People have called me that, yes.

[20] I first was turned on to your work by the NBC special on the Sphinx that was hosted by Charlton Heston, which was a very controversial thing that NBC aired, right?

[21] and it was a special on the the mysteries of the dating of the sphinx and became absolutely fascinated by the compelling evidence that you and dr shock presented to all these traditional egyptologists that the rain erosion on the sphinx enclosure had to have come from literally seven or eight thousand years earlier than they were predated than they were dating the sphinx yeah probably more than that joe and we'll get into that we want to discuss it further, but that's the, that was the most conservative date that shock as a, you know, as a bona fide PhD geologist, he's sort of constrained to take the most conservative view, but he even had doubts about it when he was saying it, but now he's, he's loosening up by a lot and is basically on the same card as me, in other words, holding open the possibility that it may be as old as, actually as 36 ,000 BC or even older, and the reason for that is not fantasizing or anything of the sort, it's that the Egyptians themselves, in several, and one in a tablet, a stila, called the Palermo Stone, not because it has anything to do with Palermo, but because that's where it is.

[22] And another papyrus, very fragmentary, called the Turin Papyrus, where the Egyptians themselves, the ancient Egyptians, talk about long periods prior to the beginning of what we call dynastic Egypt, but they just called Egypt, that begins around 3 ,500 BC, where Egypt is ruled for thousands and thousands and thousands of years by the Necheru, which means the gods themselves, which actually means, I take to mean enlightened or divinely enlightened human beings, and then another long, long period where Egypt is, ruled by the Shemsuhor, which means the companions or the followers of Horus.

[23] And the regnal, the names of these kings are given, and the regnal dates of these kings are given, and though both the stone is damaged and the papyrus is somewhat fragmentary, if you compute the years, you end up with something like 36 ,000 BC, which in fact is not a casually chosen date because the Sphinx itself, as you know, And actually, as we go along, somewhere along the long, we'll have to talk about this.

[24] Because I can send you all kinds of interesting picks, you know, illustrations where maybe you can, on your end, intersperse them, intercalate them, into the actual video podcast, I guess you call it, so that viewers can see what we're talking about as we're talking about it.

[25] Anyway, if you can do that great, if we can't.

[26] Yeah, no, we can definitely do that.

[27] But for the audio -only people, this is a fascinating conversation either way, with or without pictures.

[28] How did you get on this path?

[29] How did you...

[30] I'll tell you in two seconds, but first let me just say the reason why the 36 ,000 date is not as outrageous as it might sound, is A, because the Egyptians themselves are talking about that sort of date, and also because the Sphinx with its lion's body and human head, screams out as an astronomical astrological marker.

[31] And it's meant to commemorate the age of Leo.

[32] The last age of Leo is where the Sphinx and the relationship is that the Sphinx is cited so that it looks due east.

[33] And so the last time the Sphinx looked at its own image in the sky before the sun rose.

[34] That's how they talk about the processional ages.

[35] If you want to get into that, we can.

[36] It's not complex astronomy, but it's astronomy.

[37] Anyway, the last time the Sphinx looked at its own image in the sky at sunrise on the spring equinox would have been about 10 ,000, 10 ,500 BC.

[38] But there are good reasons why 10 ,500 BC is not satisfactory.

[39] And the age before that, the age of Leo before that, is another 26 ,000 years earlier, is the cycle.

[40] so -called accession of the equinox cycle, takes roughly 26 ,000 years.

[41] So 36 ,000 years would have been another time when the Sphinx looked at its own image in the sky at the spring equinox.

[42] So there are reasons, I mean, as I said, it's not just fantasizing.

[43] It's backed up.

[44] It's conjectural.

[45] Of course, we can't prove it at the moment.

[46] But there are good reasons why it could be as old as that.

[47] But conventional wisdom is that human civilization in it, you know, in the form of cities and such, that didn't exist before 10 ,000 years ago, right?

[48] Well, it was conventional wisdom until very recently.

[49] It's one of the battles that we've had to fight.

[50] But you see, long story.

[51] Chalk and I are writing a book.

[52] I'll tell you more about this as we go along, telling the story of this whole Sphinx thing.

[53] because we presented this is a geological argument it's about the water weathering to the sphinx or the weathering to the swings with chalk as a geologist and the specialist in these things it took a lot to get him on board mind you this is a long it's a big long funny story but I won't get into necessarily right now here though since we have an open -ended we have an open -ended show and I have plenty of vodka in the freezer we might go on for quite a while but anyway The point is that it's a geological argument.

[54] And when I got Schock on board, it took him a while before he acknowledged that it had to be correct.

[55] I mean, he was putting, see for me, to be a heretic as easy.

[56] I don't give it to him.

[57] I mean, I don't like these people, and I don't respect either their intelligence or their integrity.

[58] And I have nothing to lose.

[59] You know, Shock is a tenured associate professor of geology at Boston University.

[60] So he puts his neck on the line.

[61] That means something.

[62] Eventually, it took a bit of doing, but he did it.

[63] And then we presented this evidence first at the, you might call it the Super Bowl of geology.

[64] It's called the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

[65] This was in 1991.

[66] And we were the stars of the show.

[67] I mean, they recognized the Geological Society, recognized that this was a dynamite.

[68] presentation and so all the press was there, the science press of the world, and so on.

[69] And it was that that actually allowed us to get this thing past secretaries at NBC and put it out in prime time, what do they call it Sweeps Week, and it won me and Emmy, and it was nominated for Best Documentary of that year, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[70] So it was that that brought it to the, then forced the quackademics to pay attention to it, And the battle has been going on ever since.

[71] And actually, funny story, because I can say it here, but normally I can't, on a normal respectable.

[72] I've watched a couple of your shows, so I know I can get away with it here.

[73] And when we gave this presentation initially in 1991, the geologists were unanimously in favor of it.

[74] they came to our presentation and they walked past our display and they said yeah you know i mean how could anybody have missed this well that's another bit of the story but so but the egyptologists and the archaeologists were absolutely incensed by the whole thing and they were calling us all kinds of names and there was one woman who i book no name was here but she'll be coming up in a book somewhere who was an Egyptologist at Boston University with shock teachers and oh yeah and earlier so we were being interviewed Chuck and myself by the world press really and so this is 90 it's 91 yeah and at one point we were being interviewed by the guy who was the science editor of the Boston Globe and shock teachers in Boston so he was a hometown boy and so shot gave his his in of you and shock is we're a good we're a good duo it's not exactly good cop bad cop but you know shock is always civil and always professional and always polite really even when he shouldn't be and I don't have to worry about these things I can say whatever right then please so I forget his name Dave Chandler David Chandler the science editor of the Boston we should explain before we go any further we should explain the argument for people that don't understand it the uh Okay.

[75] The water erosion argument, this is what people are trying to ignore.

[76] There's people that are still arguing that somehow or another that could have been created by sand and wind, and that this erosion, according to most geologists, that's not the case.

[77] Most geologists are stating that it had to be water, correctly?

[78] That's correct, but now they've actually gone off the sand and wind thing, and now it's supposed to be what's called salt.

[79] crystallization in which water soaks through the limestone and creates chemical reactions with the rock and that weatheres off and creates the weathering that we see.

[80] This is actually nonsensical argument which we will be addressing very shortly I'll talk about.

[81] And there's an incredible amount of resistance to this idea even though the geological science are they in agreement on this?

[82] Almost most of them there are a few who aren't And I'll get into this, too, as we go along.

[83] You see, the point, what's at stake here, Joe, is not, this is not, this is not just a scholarly quibble, because for the sphinx to be water weathered, and specifically by rainwater, means that it has to have been there when there was rain in Egypt.

[84] And you see, there's almost no rain there now an inch or so a year.

[85] The Sahara Desert formed around 10 ,000 BC.

[86] Before that, it was fertile savannah, sort of like modern -day Kenya, maybe even wetter than that.

[87] So for the springs to be weathered by rainwater means that it has to have been there before or during the time that lots and lots of rain was falling.

[88] Now, what's at stake there when you were saying before, that civilization according to the standard scenario, civilization begins around 3 ,300 BC, more or less simultaneously in Egypt, in Sumeria, in China, and India.

[89] But all of it is around that date.

[90] But the Sphinx, you see, is really the most spectacular sculpture on Earth.

[91] It's 240 feet long and 66 feet high, and it's a magnificent, absolutely breathtaking sculpture, even in ruins.

[92] And the temples around it, which we'll get into somewhere along the line, but ideally I'll send you pictures of it, The temples around them are powerful, stone, limestone buildings faced with granite.

[93] But what's interesting about them is not the size of the temples themselves.

[94] By Egyptian standards, they're not all that big.

[95] But the stones that comprise them weigh somewhere between 50 and 150 times each.

[96] And they're set up in such a way they're slotted into places like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

[97] we can't do that today.

[98] If you saw the old, the Charlton Heston video, which evidently have seen, we have this guy, Jesse Warren, who is the project manager where they're building a co -generation plant out in Long Island, and he's acknowledging, he's fascinated by this, because he says, yeah, our biggest cranes, our biggest land -based cranes, could lift these rocks, but we wouldn't know how to rig them so that we could get them into place.

[99] So what this means is that not just that the Sphinx, this fabulous statue, is much, much older, it is built before they're supposed to be any civilization at all, but it means that there's a technology in place that we, with our brilliant science that, you know, produce hydrogen bombs and bubblehead dolls and nerve gas and all of these wonderful new developments, we couldn't build the temples around the Sphinx.

[100] So that's why they're all so incensed, absolutely the whole idea is that we, if this is finally acknowledged it means that everything, but everything that these people have believed about ancient, about the onset of human civilization is completely dead wrong.

[101] So that's why they're as angry as they are.

[102] An Air Force friend of mine said, good line that the flack is.

[103] is always heaviest when you're right over the target.

[104] You know, one of the things I learned from watching your documentary is I really thought that scientists and people that were studying the history of something as important as Egypt, that they would be, we should just leave that sound on, Brian.

[105] I guess, John, you have a suff fan going on in the background.

[106] Is that your computer fan?

[107] Yeah, that's the computer fan.

[108] No about that.

[109] Anyway, you would think that these people would be scientific in their approach to evidence.

[110] When you guys presented this evidence that there was mass, of amounts of water erosion.

[111] One of the things the guy said that really disturbed me is like you're talking about a civilization from 10 ,500 years.

[112] He was mocking.

[113] He was saying, where's the evidence of this civilization?

[114] What other evidence do you have of this civilization?

[115] And it's the way he's saying it is so ridiculous and arrogant and it was so soaked in ego because the reality is we don't really know how much evidence there would be left from 10 ,500 BC.

[116] That is a long, long, long time ago.

[117] And it might very well be that the only things that remain are things like the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure.

[118] Well, there's a good reason for that, too.

[119] Actually, Schalk and I are about to set off on a new book between us called Dancing Down the Bridge of Sirah.

[120] And then the subtitle is, a scholar and the scientist fend off the unicorns and take on the paradigm, please.

[121] Because the bridge of Seraa is a Sufi image, you know Sufism, right?

[122] It's the mystical aspect of Islam.

[123] And there's a metaphor in Sufi doctrine.

[124] And in order to get to the truth, in order to get to enlightenment, let's say the seeker must cross the bridge of Surah, which is described as narrow as a razor's edge.

[125] And on one side is the chasm of credulity.

[126] And on the other side is the abyss of skepticism.

[127] So to do this stuff, you really have to have, I mean, it's very difficult.

[128] It's easy to say you have an open mind, but you'd be surprised how few people have an open mind.

[129] We've had some experience with this ourselves.

[130] And when you say, yeah, you expect that from science.

[131] They should be open to evidence.

[132] But in fact, they're not.

[133] And it's a...

[134] So what is their issue?

[135] They don't want to admit that they're wrong and that everything they've been teaching for decades was incorrect and has proven so.

[136] So they hold on to the old truth?

[137] Well, exactly, but I mean, in the way I have a little bit of sympathy for them even because they put in all of these years and here's somebody who comes from absolutely out of left field, me. And Shock, who doesn't come out of left field, who's one of them, a PhD geologist and highly respected and a number of geological solid scientific books published who say, you've got to have it all wrong and well explain to folks what your background is and why you're uh such a rebel in this field oh well i'll tell you that but in one's that let me i don't i don't want to lose the thread okay i'm sorry because i have no it's okay but when i'm on my when i do when i'm on my trips people always ask we're going through the evidence and instead of taking half an hour the way we are now we've spent hours down by the shrinks studying every aspect of the geology and so on and And they always say, well, how, basically what you said, there's the evidence.

[138] How can they deny it?

[139] And I always recount an anecdote that, you know, funny, when I was a kid, I read this long before I was even interested in this stuff, but it was a teaching tale, supposedly a true one, that this was the 1940s, read his digest, and there was an anecdote in there that when And Yasha Haifitz, the great violinist, gave his debut at Carnegie Hall at the age of 11.

[140] I think this must have been 44 or 43, something like that.

[141] I was a kid.

[142] And at the concert was the then -reigning violin virtuoso, I named Misha Elman.

[143] We don't hear much of these days.

[144] But he was sort of the pink of Zuckerman of today.

[145] and with him was Artur Rubenstein, the great pianist.

[146] And about halfway through the concert, Elman turned to Rubinstein, and he said, hot in here, isn't it?

[147] And Rubenstein said, not for pianists.

[148] So with our science, the geologists have no problem with it, or the microbiologists, or the astrophysicist.

[149] But for the Egyptologists and the archaeologist, it's hot so what can what can be done i mean what you guys have presented this evidence they've tried to ignore it but more things pop up that show that we might be wrong about the history of humanity like go beckley teppy exactly exactly we now have the smoking guns that are at our disposal we have we have an arsenal of smoking guns and you see we have even more evidence than was in that video we presented there's a lot more evidence just from egypt that we presented in another GSA conference in 2000, again, with the almost unanimous assent of the attending geologists.

[150] But that one, unfortunately, didn't have much press there.

[151] So it didn't get a lot of press.

[152] The geologists were impressed, but it didn't go anywhere.

[153] But we now have, and we've had for a while, all of the evidence at our disposal, but Gobeckley -Tepe, which you mentioned, and I don't know how many of your audience, will know about that.

[154] That's serious.

[155] That's the smoking gun because here's this incredible site in Turkey.

[156] And Chalk and I have visited there and spent about a week there that was discovered in 1994.

[157] And I hope we'll get the pictures of this up there.

[158] But it was discovered in 1994 absolutely by accident.

[159] It looks like a big hill.

[160] I mean, it is a big hill.

[161] And you'd never know that there was anything there.

[162] And in 94, the farmer was plowing the top of the field.

[163] It was his hill.

[164] and he hit what he thought was a boulder.

[165] And the plow hit the boulder, and he ran the plow back over the boulder to try to dislodge it, and it wouldn't dislodge, and they tried a couple of times.

[166] Nothing happened, except they bent their plow.

[167] And so they dug around it, and they discovered that it wasn't a boulder, after all.

[168] It was the top of a stone column.

[169] So they started digging some ore, and then finally they called in the archaeologists, which now they're sorry about because the archaeologists, commandeered the site and these guys 20 years, 15 years later, fighting the Turkish government, this gets some kind of financial redress from stealing their hill.

[170] Anyway, once they got excavating, they discovered that this is one of the greatest archaeological discoveries probably of all time.

[171] I mean, from a historical point of view, it's even more significant than, let's say, to common's treasure because once they stuck they dug up the first of these and they found and they did ground penetrating radar and maybe seismographs i'm not sure but certainly radar and this huge hill has at least 22 closely packed stone circles like many stone hinges but not so many the central columns there are central columns two central columns in each of these stone circles and then ringed around with other stones.

[172] I mean, everybody listening to this or watching this will have an image of stonehenge in their heads.

[173] So it's like that except not as massive, but then further as they were digging, they realized that this entire hill, which had been at one point or another exposed to the elements, of course, had been deliberately filled in, to what reason nobody knows.

[174] I mean, this is acres of land, and the thing had been completely covered, and they were able to date the fill, because the fill has all kinds of organic material in it.

[175] And so the fill, they dated to 8 ,000 BC.

[176] And that means that the Gobeckley -Tepi itself, this incredible site, nobody knows what it's there for, or who did it, or anything, is at least 10 ,000 BC.

[177] and those central columns that I was talking about are 10 to 15 tons they know that I think they're limestone but the stones come from a quarry about three quarters of a mile downhill so they have to drag these up now we're talking 10 ,000 BC there's not supposed to be any civilization much less tools or anything of that sort so here are these and there are 22 of these stone circles only four have been partially excavated and not only only four out of 22 pardon i said only four out of 22 have been excavated all this time archaeology is unbelievably if it's done if it's done meticulously and nowadays it tends to be not so long ago it's just grave robbery but now it's really meticulous they're going at this stuff with teaspoons so it takes them years and years and years to do it and i guess there isn't a gigantic amount of funding available i don't know who's funding it it's a german team that's doing it with a really nice really good guy named klaus schmidt german archaeologist who's in charge there who's you know he's not into the esoteric side of things as shock and i are but he's a solid guy as archaeologists go he's pretty good and uh nice man too anyway the apart from the size of these stones and the finesse that they're that they're that goes into creating them they're also elaborately decorated and they're high relief.

[178] It's called high relief.

[179] In other words, let's say you want to do a, you want to carve in a wild boar or a bird, or in one case, a lion, or some sort of a feline, you cut the back, you cut the stone away so that the image springs out of the stone.

[180] This is ten times more work than carving something into the stone.

[181] And this is all without any tools as far as anyone knows, certainly any metal tools.

[182] with flint somehow or another and you've got acres of these things and they the archaeologists do not dispute the dating of 10 ,000 bc or earlier so that's our smoking gun i mean we've been looking for a long time shock and we found all kinds of evidence and some of it a lot of the evidence is really commanding but it's not spectacular looking now it's spectacular looking what i found sorry what i found amazing about it was that they were trying to attribute these constructions to hunter and gatherers well maybe they are hunter and gatherers I mean you have to be a fool if there's plenty of animals and stuff around there are plenty of things around to eat why should you go to the backbreaking job of farming the food is plentiful actually I have in my first non -fiction book I don't know if you know this I started out as a novelist playwright screenwriter and you know I had a lot of things done never made me money was probably a good thing for egyptology but um there's a know if you ever heard of him but the first book was called the case for astrology which is out of print now but which put together all of the scientific evidence that says there's actually something behind it it's not just what's a good day to buy a poodle so the in this in that book i said my first non -fiction book, but I quote a, there's a wonderful ethnologist, Conrad Lawrence, who was brought up in South Africa, and he wrote a wonderful book, Bushman, probably still around, Bushmen of the Kalahari about his own experience, and he relates how the Bushmen of South Africa, the missionaries are trying to teach them how to farm, and the Bushman looks at them, and he says, why should we farm when there were so many Mongo Mongo nuts in the world, whatever that is.

[183] why would anybody in their right minds bother the plow the land and cut everything down when you can go outside your door and fish and hunt all that?

[184] So just because they were hunter -gatherers doesn't mean they hadn't figured out amazing constructions, the ability to make these huge cities and these just...

[185] You bet.

[186] And in this last, in the couple of decades, I mean, I've been on this quest for what?

[187] And I discover all the Shwala Dilubic in the late 60s.

[188] So that's, I said, I've been at this for 50 years, yes, something like that, close to it.

[189] And but in the last 10 or 12, a whole lot of really interesting work has come to the fore, proving that not only in these so -called primitive societies that maybe were not intellectually sophisticated, they nevertheless had, they had a precise cosmological science.

[190] And actually, some of my pals involved in this.

[191] You may know some of them, but you may not know some of them.

[192] They might be interesting guests for you in upcoming shows.

[193] If people really get tuned into this sort of thing.

[194] So it's becoming quite clear that the knowledge was all there.

[195] I mean, the knowledge was there, the groundbreaking book was, you may know about it.

[196] It's called Hamlet's Mill.

[197] I've heard you discuss it.

[198] Do you know that?

[199] Have we discussed that one?

[200] Yeah, I've heard you discuss it.

[201] You're right.

[202] Giorgio, I mean, these are two impeccable historians of science at MIT, Giorgio de Santiana and Herzegovand, and the book is, I think, published in 68.

[203] But again, this is the thing you have to go through when you're dealing with these heretical things.

[204] I mean, these were guys with all of the right credentials, not like me. I mean, I come from out of left field, and they manage to stonewall them and try to ignore their evidence that underlying the world's mythology, all of these strange stories of, you know, incestuous gods and all of this kind of thing, was astronomy.

[205] And astronomy presupposes the Santayana and Von Deccan didn't go into that much because they were in enough hot water as it was.

[206] But there is absolutely no point to a sophisticated astronomy unless there's an astrology behind it, at least in the old days.

[207] nowadays they're busy looking for quasars and black holes and all of that sort of thing which have no meaning at least let's say at least in the emotional or philosophical sense but in the old days whole civilizations egypt included were attuned to the motions of the stars in other words there's a lot of literature on this why do you think that this why do you think that this culture that we live in right now is so reluctant to accept anything like astrology.

[208] Why do you think they would like to dismiss it so quickly?

[209] Well, because, because this is a materialistic, this is a materialist culture that denies anything that has any meaning.

[210] I mean, materialism, materialism, which is the reigning philosophy.

[211] This is what everybody learns in school.

[212] I mean, you certainly get nothing esoteric out at school, nothing mystical and unfortunately the the skeptics are basically rationalism materialism atheism basically is it's it's it's basically the religion of the emotionally defective and spiritually dyslexic and and in contemporary materialistic science value does not exist in other words it's it's it's it's it's it's value is by definition subjected.

[213] So these people are determined because they can't find any meaning in their own lives and their own existence to to foist that emptiness, that nihilism, upon everyone else, but they call it rationalism or reason.

[214] It's nothing of the sort.

[215] It is nothing but, nothing.

[216] It just seems to reason that our bodies are affected by the moons and the tides and women's periods are, you know, people behave differently during different moon cycles, the oceans, they're affected by the tides.

[217] I mean, that's affected by the, the fact that the moon can affect the oceans, and we're mostly water.

[218] Wouldn't we just assume that planets are having some sort of an effect on people?

[219] That's right.

[220] Where did it all come from?

[221] Where did astrology originate from?

[222] Like, what is the bottom, what is at the end of it?

[223] Like, who invented it?

[224] We don't know, but what we can say is that if, if going back into the Paleolithic, now we're talking, I mean, we think actually those figures, Choc and I think, that the figures in the Paleolithic in the, in Gobeckley -Tepe are probably cosmological and astronomical.

[225] You can't prove it yet.

[226] However, De Santayana and Van DeKan can do a very good job of showing that astronomy underpins the most ancient mythologies that we have and since these guys since the ancients are not just interested in quasars and pulsars and all of these sorts of things it presupposes in astrology and in fact in Egypt in Egypt is the one society that they know the most about but the same I'm sure applies to ancient China and India and Mayans and so on that the entire society is orchestrated in such a way that that it is attuned to these cosmic cycles.

[227] And we still have, you know, there's a reason why Christmas is the day that it is, and there's a reason why Easter is the day that it is.

[228] It's supposed to commemorate historically in certain elements in the life of Jesus Christ.

[229] But actually, it's much older than that, and the ancient societies knew what they were doing.

[230] I mean, when you get deep into Egypt, you see that life itself is a kind of a magical, it's like a magical recreation of the genesis of the universe in which by celebrating it in certain ways and certain kinds of ceremonies and so on, human beings are reliving the cosmic process and thereby accessing the divinity that is responsible for us.

[231] us being here, which is not creationism.

[232] You see, any time we tried to say to a rationalist scientist that, hey, there really is a meaningful life.

[233] There's, oh, you're a creationist.

[234] Do you think the world was created in seven days?

[235] No, it doesn't mean that, you know, God with a big white beard was up there in the sky saying, well, today I think I'll create mosquitoes.

[236] There's nothing to do with that.

[237] It's a much more profound philosophy, but it is not amenable to study by a materialist science.

[238] But who said materialist science is the be -all and end -all and the answer to everything.

[239] Only the materialists say that, but they've got everybody, including the people who put the educational system together, conned into believing that their science is the only science.

[240] The ancients knew much better, and they did much better.

[241] I mean, all you have to do is go to Egypt to experience these unbelievable temples in this fabulous art. to understand that something is going on that isn't going on now.

[242] This is a big subject.

[243] We won't even get into it in an open -ended talk like this.

[244] But this is what Chak and I will be talking about in the book that we're planning, dancing down the bridge of Sirrah.

[245] And in the video, the big follow -up to the mystery of the things that we're hoping to put together the funding for, which we hope to do as a theatrical release, not just on television and someone, but you get it out in the theaters first and then on to the videos and theaters and TV and all that sort of stuff.

[246] You have to have like an animated dog or something to go with you to Egypt.

[247] If you want to get it in the theaters, to get people to really get interested in the history of the Sphinx and all that stuff, that's going to be difficult to get in a theater.

[248] Silly people we have in this world?

[249] The, I mean, we had our show The Mystery of the Sphinx was a huge success.

[250] Unfortunately, my ex -partner now deceased, stole a whole lot 250 grand from the till, so he never made me money out of it.

[251] Oh, that dirty bastard.

[252] But he was an interesting guy, and without him, without him, it never would have happened because he had the energy, and, I mean, me, I can think, but I don't, I'm not a manifester, and he got the whole thing going, so I don't begrudging.

[253] Maybe if you had a penguin that travels to Egypt and you get Morgan Freeman to narrate it.

[254] No, Joe, we don't need it, actually.

[255] That video was on Sweep's Week.

[256] It had a huge audience over the course of its lifetime.

[257] It still gets shown every once in a while.

[258] It was amazing.

[259] It was probably seen by, I tried to figure it out one day, it was probably seen by at least 250 million people over the number of years that it was.

[260] being shown internationally and so on.

[261] People are really interested in this stuff.

[262] Oh, absolutely.

[263] We don't get the chance to express it.

[264] We don't need any penguins.

[265] We just need, in this case, we just need the science because, and the, you see, the material is glamorous in its own right.

[266] And now we have all of this other stuff.

[267] It's not just Egypt.

[268] We have Turkey.

[269] There are these, I don't know if you've seen this.

[270] The Shrock, Chach, is very fascinated by Easter Island, which may be connected with these things.

[271] you know the moai of easter island right yes yes no did you know that up until quite recently it looks like they're just kind of these big figures that are their heads basically heads and torsos right yeah well i can't imagine why i took them 100 years to 200 years to figure it out they started excavating these things and they're finding that they're full full length statue so in other words they have built up around them maybe 25 feet 30 feet of silt.

[272] And now the question is, and this should be relatively easy to determine, this is part of our big project that we're calling it Zeptepe in the dawn of civilization to follow up the mystery of the sphinx because it should be possible to carbon date the lower layers of the fill.

[273] And our conviction is that these things may date back again, thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

[274] Have they done this?

[275] I mean, I've seen the excavations.

[276] No, well, they're excavating, but we don't know if they've done any carbon dating.

[277] Oh, they have to, though, right?

[278] Shock has a buddy, a Chilean, who is the ambassador somewhere or another anyway.

[279] He's connected to Easter Island.

[280] He should be able to find out for us.

[281] And then not only is, you see, we've got all this new stuff now, it's really exciting.

[282] Not only Gobeckley -Tepi, but have you heard about the bracelet that was found fairly recently in Turkey?

[283] are you on i know i know grahamcock's been on your show are you on his on that mailing list that he has um i'm i believe so not sure i get some mail he sends you he sends out i mean that's his whole job that's what he does and and he sends out this enormously comprehensive list of everything that's interesting happening in science that either directly or tangentially affects this whole lost civilization hypothesis.

[284] Anyway...

[285] Are you familiar with the object that they found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea?

[286] Recently.

[287] Yeah, very recently.

[288] Yeah, big...

[289] It looks like a Millennium Falcon.

[290] It looks like, you know, if you took the Star Wars spaceship, Millennium Falcon, and put it in the bottom of the ocean, that's what it looks like.

[291] They don't know what it is.

[292] But they're sending divers down, like, I believe it's this week.

[293] Oh, yeah, I heard about that.

[294] Yeah, and it's...

[295] Somebody's saying, well, it's not that.

[296] We'll see.

[297] We'll see when they figure it out because you have to be seriously careful about that stuff.

[298] You know about shocking myself, diving.

[299] Yes.

[300] You know about that.

[301] We are convinced, Graham thinks otherwise, but we are shocking myself convinced that this is amazing looking place.

[302] Is, in fact, perfectly natural.

[303] Wow, really?

[304] Explain, yeah, we can pretty well explain how it's done.

[305] And we didn't want to think that.

[306] That would have been our smoking gun.

[307] But we're convinced that it's natural.

[308] You saw those two giant pizza box looking pieces of rock that were stacked next to each other side by side?

[309] And did that look natural to me?

[310] It's a hard, listen, it's, you know, it's hard to describe just without having the pictures there.

[311] But we had more time and I had the pictures with me. We could show you why we're convinced that it is indeed completely natural.

[312] You've seen all the images on Graham Hancock's side, I'm assuming.

[313] Yes, well there.

[314] Did you do any diving yourself at Yanaguni?

[315] Yeah, yeah, we were there for a week, and Schock's been there a couple of times.

[316] And he's, as I said, it's in our own interest.

[317] To see this as, to see this is the evidence we're looking for, but we don't think it is, and we think Graham is making a big mistake.

[318] I insisting that it is.

[319] Well, Dr. Schock is the geologist.

[320] What was his explanation for how it was created?

[321] How all those...

[322] Well, you see, if you go, because, the people who are taking the pictures initially, and they're not trying to fool anyone, they're just taking the cool, exciting looking pictures.

[323] But if you follow some of those ridges that look so perfectly vertical and so perfectly horizontal, you see them just kind of taper in to disappear into the living rock face.

[324] And when you get really down there and your nose to the rock, you see that the corners aren't finished.

[325] You see that the rocks have been wrenched out of their place.

[326] It's a place that's dangerous diving there.

[327] and I'm not a diver, very, very strong currents, and, I mean, I had a master diver glued to me. So, you know, nice right and down.

[328] But when you go down the shore, I mean, Schock and I went there on this very nice Japanese billionaire, finance, the whole thing, who was really interested in it, and it was, we hated to do it to be wet blankets.

[329] But on the last day that we were there, we went looking around the island and looking at other stuff.

[330] And we went to a place about a couple of miles from the actual Yonaguni site.

[331] And there, at the water's edge.

[332] And you see, it's a certain kind of shale.

[333] It's a very hard shale formation that is laid down in very regular horizontals, but that is cross -cut by, you know, full.

[334] lines and it's like if you imagine a gigantic stone layer cake that's already cut into pieces but the pieces haven't been served and so what happens is that by the action of the wind and the waves because this other formation the similar formation was right at the water's edge and you can watch the waves pounding up against it and the current running and what would happen is that eventually the water the running water and the waves and tides and who knows typhoons and all the rest, sort of work into the fault lines, which are softer rock, and eventually they get it to the point that the action of the waves pulls away a big chunk of rock, which is all set down in layers, so that falls into the water, and again, we're talking about thousands and thousands of years.

[335] Gradually, the whole piece of rock disappears because it's all laid down in these kind of layer cake, layer cake levels.

[336] And so we, when we saw this, because we had our own misgivings over the course of the week.

[337] It was the last thing in the world we wanted to.

[338] Right, you would be happier if you believed that it was an ancient civilization.

[339] Well, we had it all planned.

[340] I was going to write it up to the National Geographic or to Sony or something like that, and Chalk was going to write it up for the geological, for the geological, for the geological, journals and all of that sort of stuff.

[341] And, you know, and we had to say, well, no. Did you see the stone circle?

[342] It's like there's like pillars arranged in a circle.

[343] Did you see that?

[344] Again, see, we're convinced that there's no context for anything there.

[345] And things that are not, things that are man -made have a context.

[346] And as I said, when we saw, we would still, we would still, be uncertain about it if we did not go a couple of miles down and watch a similar sort of thing being formed right in front of our eyes.

[347] And when we go back there when we do this our next film, Zeptebi, Yonaguni will be one of our sites that, you know, it's assuming we can get the funding together that we will be, you know, we'll be concentrating upon because it's an object lesson both in how careful you have to be when you're looking, you know, I mean, we have a stake in this too.

[348] And as I said, well, we had to give up on this.

[349] I had a moment, a slight pang, not much, because I really like the quacketemics, but we had a slight pang of compassion for them when somebody comes along and destroys their paradigm, which is us.

[350] So anyway, so that's Yonaguni.

[351] But anyway, oh, back to this incredible bracelet.

[352] This was just a couple of months ago.

[353] They found a bracelet somewhere in Turkey.

[354] Turkey's turning out to be more and more interesting.

[355] There are all kinds of great places in Turkey.

[356] And the, it's a round bracelet made of obsidian.

[357] Obsidian is an incredibly hard stone and very difficult to work.

[358] And they dated, I'm not exactly sure, how they dated it maybe in the, where it was found, you know, the strata where it was found.

[359] They dated it to around 8 ,000 BC, but the, it's a very elegant little, I mean, didn't look like that much, it's just elegant and beautiful, and the archaeologists realized when they studied it that the finish on it was something that nowadays you could only do with the most sophisticated instruments, lasers or something.

[360] of the sort and moreover that it had a very complex and subtle geometrical shape so in other words you can't do a thing like that or it's very hard to imagine doing something of that nature that's really rigorously geometrical without having the geometry at your fingertips so you'd have to have some sort of a computer a machine something has to you have to have something that you're built to construct this right is that what you're saying?

[361] We don't know.

[362] This is the contention of Christopher Dunn.

[363] Do you know Chris?

[364] No. No. He's a high -tech guy.

[365] I mean, he designs an engineer he is.

[366] But he's the guy who designs the instruments, sort of the really precise instruments that do things like make pieces for the space shuttle and stuff.

[367] They're instruments that, you know, calibrated to 10 ,000ths or 100 ,000ths of an inch.

[368] and he's done studies in Egypt and finds that that's what you see all over the place, that there are, you know, monstrous pieces of granite.

[369] And he's been on a couple of trips with me. He's a good guy.

[370] And he has his fine special instruments that, you know, are calibrated to a 10 ,000s of an inch.

[371] And he places this on a piece of granite, old kingdom granite.

[372] And the granite is 100 % completely true.

[373] And Chris is, you know, is fairly adamant that in order to do this, they had to have had some sort of technology that it allowed them to do that.

[374] Shock and I are not so sure because technology is technology, unless they have some miraculous form of technology that we can't even imagine because you would have expected, particularly in a place like Egypt where you have so much from the past.

[375] that somewhere along the line you'd have some evidence of this kind of technology and you don't.

[376] You mean by saying technology you mean something that cuts the like a machine, something that can cut the marble and polish it down to be 100 % flat?

[377] Yes, exactly.

[378] What is the conventional, what is the conventional Egyptologists, how do they say they built it?

[379] They don't even, they don't address the question.

[380] of being since there is no, since there is no evidence for that technology, they just assume that they did it by hand somehow or another, and maybe they did, but when you realize the level of perfection of these things and how impossible it would be today to do them by hand, I mean, they just say, oh well, in those days everybody had lots of time and time was no, was not have any concerns or they could work on it until they got it right.

[381] Well, that's a sort of a fudge.

[382] And on the other hand, you can't legitimately postulate an advanced technology when you don't have any evidence for it.

[383] Right.

[384] There was another issue with the vases, correct?

[385] The stone vases that were made that we can't duplicate today.

[386] No. Or maybe we could, but we'd have to go, we'd have to use a lot of very special machinery to do it.

[387] And since there's no evidence that I had this kind of machinery.

[388] You know, there are these round, you know, bozzas that are, you know, they're shaped like this, and they have a narrow neck and they're hollow on the inside.

[389] And they're perfect.

[390] I mean, they can look into the inside and see that the inside is hollowed out perfectly.

[391] And we can't, we don't know how they could possibly have had what kind of a drill or anything they could have had to do this.

[392] and a very hard stone vase and they date from a very early pre -denastic Egypt not you know not a later period they lost the ability this is one of the strange things some of the most spectacular stuff comes from the earliest periods in fact right now there's a terrific there's a terrific show in the Metropolitan Museum of Art called I think the dawn of Egyptian art and it's all the pre -denastic work, 4 ,000, 5 ,000, 3, 4, 5 ,000 BC, and they're collected, it's not, you know, it's not, as they do, a retrospective, they get bits from here and bits from there and so on, so they put together this really fabulous show, because normally you don't see much pre -denastic art together in one place, and when you look carefully and you see what's going on, and you know what you're looking at, I mean, if it was somebody who's not spent 30 years studying Egypt, you know, they'd be really impressive bits and pieces.

[393] They're mostly quite small.

[394] But if you have an eye for this and you've done a lot of study and asked a lot of questions, you see how spectacularly beautiful these things are.

[395] So it shows on until August.

[396] So anybody in the neighborhood, make sure you get to the Met.

[397] It hasn't had an awful lot of press, but it's a terrific show.

[398] So you guys want to put a date of the civilization of Egypt to somewhere around 30 ,000 BC.

[399] That's your idea, right?

[400] Yeah, probably.

[401] It could even be earlier.

[402] We don't know.

[403] Actually, we're, let me backtrack a little bit.

[404] My question is, how did one civilization like Egypt, how did that one thing rise up, and it seems so much more advanced than any civilization anywhere around it?

[405] Like, how did that take place so long ago.

[406] It might have been that much different you see.

[407] The physical situation of Egypt is such because it's bone dry.

[408] So there's, you know, nowadays I mean, since 4 ,000...

[409] But your theory I'm sorry, your theory puts it in a time where it wasn't, though.

[410] Your theory puts the creation of Egypt in the time where it was lush and rained all the time.

[411] It was essentially a rainforest.

[412] Well, that takes it way back further.

[413] But then we've got Gaubeckley Tepe.

[414] Now we're talking 10 ,000 bese.

[415] see, and who's to say what they haven't discovered yet.

[416] What was the climate in...

[417] This is an accidental find.

[418] So, and the other civilizations, you see, Egypt has this physically, physically unique situation where things don't weather away.

[419] I mean, once they get covered up with sand, they're just there.

[420] And plus the fact that, you know, in the old days, this was a kind of blessed civilization in which you hardly had to do any work to get fed. The Nile would flood and you planted some seas.

[421] and they grew up.

[422] When the flood season came again, we had a fairly populous, there was a substantial population there with nothing to do.

[423] No television, no American Idol, nothing to do all day long, or all night long.

[424] And so they, they, you know, they, the whole, the entire society was put to work building these fabulous, these fabulous temples and monuments and doing the artwork and so on.

[425] So the other places, I mean, I'm pretty well convinced because the doctrine, all of this work in the last decade or so, proving that the cosmology, in other words, the sophisticated understanding of life and significance of life and the geometry and the astronomy and so on was all there universally.

[426] India and China and the other places just didn't have the physical capacity to build on that.

[427] scale or maybe they just plain didn't do it anyway they had other ways of manifesting this kind of let's say this kind of understanding and this is another thing that's just not even taken into consideration by the academics you don't need sacred architecture you know magnificent sacred architecture to express spirituality you could have a society and there probably are some that express their, let's say, their spiritual longings.

[428] It's only in dance.

[429] And at the end, you would have no evidence even of the society.

[430] Right, that's a very good point.

[431] For example, there are sacred dances.

[432] In the Gurdjaf work that I do, they have what they call the movements.

[433] And boy, you get into these things.

[434] I mean, they're pretty amazing.

[435] and yet we do them today because the sacred dance exists in lots of different societies but you don't need to build temples in order to express it the Egyptians did it that way and the Chinese and the Indians did it too but not that early and there isn't that much left of it but how did this civilization just spring up like this though they created such incredible works of art and incredible work you know the architectural designs of these buildings.

[436] We don't know.

[437] We don't know.

[438] We don't know.

[439] But when you see, that's one of the eye -openeres of this very interesting dawn of civilization exhibit at the Met because, I mean, you don't have temples and you don't have big buildings, but you have very, many instances of very sophisticated sculpture done with very hard stones.

[440] I mean, beautifully finished.

[441] So they had it.

[442] They could do it.

[443] And as they said earlier, you've got Gobeckley Tepe.

[444] There's no argument about Gobeckley Tepe.

[445] If the Moai of Easter Island turn out to be ancient, well, then they are.

[446] I mean, if you can date, and it's sort of amazing that they haven't done it.

[447] Maybe they haven't, I don't know about it.

[448] But if you can show that the earliest level, of Phil that have buried them up to their chests goes back to, let's say, go back at the time, well, when you've got another instance of spectacular artwork at a time when there's not supposed to be such a thing.

[449] I mean, the whole thing is in the process of being turned upside down, ideally by us.

[450] It's an incredibly fascinating subject and one that it drives me crazy.

[451] The timeline is essentially, a fascinating thing like where did civilization emerge from when how did it get so incredibly sophisticated at one point in time ancient Egypt and then somehow another all that stuff was lost you know somehow or another through the burning of the library of Alexandria and the Romans and the Greeks and everything throughout history up until today so much information has been lost is is there a natural disaster in the middle of there somewhere did something happen to the human race where it wiped out a significant number of us and then we had to re -figure things out?

[452] Is that what happened?

[453] Well, could be, or it stayed there in sort of an dormant state until it was time to reinvent it.

[454] And actually, it does go further back than that.

[455] For example, you see, when you're dealing with crackademia, they're very resistant to interpreting their own data in any way that disagrees with their preconceptions.

[456] But you're familiar for sure.

[457] with the Paleolithic Caves, right?

[458] The Grants of Lasco.

[459] Do you know the one, the most recent one, discovered in the early 90s called Chauvet, also in the same area?

[460] Do you know that one?

[461] No, I don't know that one.

[462] C -H -A -U -E -T, I think, unless it's C -H -A -U -E -T.

[463] And this was discovered, it's named after the guy who discovered it.

[464] And this is, I mean, up until now, the most spectacular of the caves was the one at Lasco with the famous Hall of Bulls and the other one at a place called Altamira, which again is a very high level of artwork.

[465] And both of those caves are dated to around 17 ,18 ,000 BC in the basis of evidence in the caves.

[466] Well, Chauvet has the most spectacular art of all.

[467] I mean, it's as though we're designed by a, you know, drawn by a whole bunch of paleo Picasso's.

[468] I mean, it's spectacular stuff.

[469] When you pull it up online, you'll see it.

[470] Spell it again, please.

[471] C -H -A -U -V -E -T or V -E -Z, I think.

[472] Oh, you were right in the first time.

[473] It's V -E -T, yes, it is.

[474] Wow, this is amazing stuff.

[475] You got it up, right?

[476] Yeah, I'm looking at some of them.

[477] Now this, now you see, this, they date to 31 ,000 BC.

[478] Wow.

[479] 31 ,000 BC.

[480] But they don't, see, they don't put two and two together.

[481] They can't do higher mathematics in academia.

[482] Because two and two tells you that artwork at this level, and I mean, where are they getting the paint from?

[483] What are they doing with their fingers, presumably?

[484] They can't go into the local art supply shop and get, you know, get acrylic paints.

[485] They're painting this on the inside of the.

[486] cave it's got to be pitch black and when you look at the level of artwork you realize that this is not done by primitives in order to do art of that at that level you have to have your act together even if you're wearing bearskins you know yeah it really does look like the animals they're chasing and it's all done from memory that's very impressive well we we shock and i think that because He's been a very good guy.

[487] I haven't been in touch of him forever for a long time.

[488] He was at a conference that we did named Frank Edge, who interpreted the Hall of Bulls at Lasco, as an astronomical, basically, that having astronomical significance of dots and daubs on the wall that represented the Pleiades and other constellations.

[489] And I think he's probably correct, and it wouldn't surprise me. See, the usual explanation is, oh, well, that's magic because if they paint, the wall, these animals on the wall, they'll be able to hunt them.

[490] I'm not so sure.

[491] I'm more inclined to think that it may be in some, in some way or another, a star map or have some sort of cosmological significance.

[492] I mean, there's a book, for example, by a French member of the academy, actually, called Jean -Lichet, called the Sacred Geography of Ancient Greece.

[493] No, it's another one.

[494] it's a different one than that's one book there's another one by amateurs in other words not not credentialed whatever not that means anything called plato's secret iliad in which they show that the iliad which is the most boring book ever written is actually a gigantic it's like a planetarium and all of these you know so -and -so is being killed and the you know the the heroes the here and the armies are doing all of this sort of stuff.

[495] It's a terrible board to read.

[496] But if it's decoded as a star map, like a planetarium in action from about 9 ,000 BC on, the whole thing makes all of a sudden vivid sense.

[497] This is where they're going to all of that trouble to do all of this work.

[498] Decoded as a sky map, how?

[499] How do you decode it as a sky map?

[500] You have to read the book.

[501] It's complicated because.

[502] the stars, let me see if I remember correctly, the armies represent constellations, the heroes of the particular bright stars in the particular constellation, and the Iliad is all about this army is going here, and that army is going here, and this one is overpowering this one, and if you decoded astronomically, it's tracking the constellations across the sky, because the relationships of the stars and the constellations to each other change over time.

[503] So, as everybody knows, why should they do that?

[504] Yeah.

[505] I don't know.

[506] But what I said, the astronomy, and this is now even getting, even the academics are realizing that that astronomy plays this huge role in very ancient civilizations.

[507] And the only reason, as far as I'm concerned, but I can't prove it, the only reason has to be that it is astrologically significant because otherwise who would care.

[508] I mean, for example, Hamlet's Mill, De Santayana and Bundek can go to a lot of trouble to show that very ancient myths as far back as you go know about the procession of the equinoxes.

[509] I was just about to ask you about that.

[510] I said I was just about to ask you about that.

[511] That's amazing.

[512] Explain that to people.

[513] Okay.

[514] The possession of the equinoxes is because, supposedly because of the wobble of the earth, but there are other explanations that I like better, of the whole solar system that's turning around a binary star.

[515] Anyway, it doesn't matter.

[516] The fact is that, let's say, if you look the way that this, now we're still in the age, let's say we're in the age of Pisces, which means that if you look at the spring equinox, if you watch, wait for the sun to rise, it's rise.

[517] an hour before the sun rises, you'll see the sun coming up, and the constellation behind the sunrise is the very last degrees of Pisces.

[518] And pretty soon, you can't get up to the site, say pretty soon, it will be Aquarius, so the age of Aquarius, you know, what was it, air, or whatever the musical was.

[519] Now, very gradually, it's called the pre -session, the entire, zodiac precesses against the the sun so in other words it doesn't go when you look at astrology aries is you know is whatever it is April March 22nd and then it goes it goes Aries Taurus Gemini cancer and so on precesses means it goes backwards so it's in Pisces now and it'll soon be in Aquarius now that the rate at which that cycle takes canonically it's actually not exactly that 25 ,920 years.

[520] So what this means is that for the sun to precess one degree takes 72 years.

[521] Now, how do they figure that out?

[522] And why should it be important?

[523] Can you imagine looking at the sky?

[524] How many people have to be looking at the sky?

[525] For some reason or another, and realize that the sun takes 72 years to go one degree?

[526] There was a book that Graham Hancock had.

[527] had discussed once on an interview, I wish I could remember the name of it, but it was discussing this number, 72, and that this knowledge of the procession of the equinoxes has been installed in many, many ancient cultures and religions.

[528] So exactly it has, and that gets you into number symbolism, and that gets you into sacred geometry.

[529] So it lets us know that they knew a lot more than we thought they knew just about the universe itself, the constellations themselves, the wobble of the Earth's axis, a 26th.

[530] thousand -year cycle.

[531] They knew about this somehow or another 10, 15 ,000 years ago.

[532] Right.

[533] That's right.

[534] That's incredible.

[535] It is.

[536] And you see, it's this kind of thing that is rigorously excluded from any kind of academic discussions until it's stuffed down their throats.

[537] This is exactly what we plan to do.

[538] The current, the conventional Egyptologists date the construction of the pyramids to 2 ,500 B .C. right is it correct yes what's that what's that based on well it's based on the it's based on the rains of kufu kiyops khafra kephran and so on and this again this is very complicated because we're chunk and myself and my colleagues think that in all likelihood the the pyramids that the pyramids that we today are do indeed date from that period.

[539] However, and this is, again, formally, easily provable, they are built, they are either superimposed or replaced structures that were there earlier.

[540] And even the academics acknowledge that the Giza Plateau was a single template.

[541] There's some very interesting work coming up soon, proving that that's the case.

[542] So whenever the Sphinx was built, there were also structures there.

[543] We don't know if there were pyramids or not.

[544] But in the pyramids, particularly the second pyramid, the Kauphra pyramid that's associated with the Sphinx, you can see that there are two different styles, two radically different styles of masonry in it.

[545] The lower, the lower courses are built of these gigantic blocks, the size of practically the size of this room.

[546] Well, not quite, but anyway, massive, maybe.

[547] 80, 100 ton blocks, and then piled on top of them, are the much, and very finely finished, are the much lesser, smaller, cruder masonry that's rather typical of the old kingdom.

[548] Now, whenever in architectural history, no architectural historian would, an architectural historian knows instantly that when you see two different styles of architecture in the same building, you know you're looking at two different periods of building.

[549] I mean, just as a rough example, suppose you have a Victorian house, but you've got a modern kitchen in it.

[550] 100 years from now, the 500 years from now, if the archaeologists come and discover that house, they will know in two seconds that the house is built in the 1900s, or the 1800s, rather, and the kitchen is built in 2005 or something of that sort.

[551] So this is a given.

[552] So when you see two different, radically different styles of architecture, you know you're dealing with two different periods, two different periods of construction.

[553] And then there are other factors in this, there's a so -called red pyramid, and Dasher, which is about 20 miles away, where the whole pyramid is built in the interior chambers are in perfect condition, a built over a ruinous, megalistic chamber that they call a plundered tomb chamber.

[554] but it's not a plumb tomb chamber because the stones in it have been exposed to the weather for a long, long time.

[555] It's an earlier megalistic construction.

[556] We don't know what the dating is.

[557] But all of this, you see, is evidence that we will be using in our Zeptepe if we managed to put the budget together and do it.

[558] And there's a great history of people building on top of ancient structures, the Parthenon and the Acropolis, which doesn't get explained.

[559] Nobody explains where those gigantic stones came from and how they got into place.

[560] Massive, monstrous stones.

[561] And so the other thing that you guys had shown that I thought was really fascinating was that below ground when you showed the really ancient constructions, a lot of them were uncovered.

[562] A lot of them had to be dug out.

[563] They were actually the ones that were under the ground, under the sand, were the ones that showed the earlier construction methods, which is pretty obvious.

[564] obvious that much like the sphinx when they first discovered it it had been taken over by sand this is you're talking about really really ancient stuff yeah yeah well the sphinx is a bit different because it's cut into a hollow in order to produce the sphinx they have to carve quarry the stone around from it so once it why they did that in the first place nobody really knows but once they did it once egypt turned to turn to desert you leave it for 20 25 years without sweeping it out because buried right up to the neck again.

[565] Who was responsible for cutting the face into the sphinx?

[566] Oh, we don't know.

[567] We're convinced that it was recarved because it's much too small for the body.

[568] It's disproportionate to the body.

[569] It's in better shape.

[570] Well, it looks in better shape for two reasons.

[571] One, it's a much harder outcrop of stone, and B, it's been restored, the headdress, and all of that.

[572] If you look at old photos of the sphinx, say, taken around 1900 or so you see that it's really much more weather than it's looked but they've repaired the the face and so on but I mean this has all kinds of repercussions for example no you know the story the we were doing the video Mark Lainer was the the loyal opposition as it were in the in the 80s because the Sphinx is supposed to look like the Pharaoh Koffra he doesn't look least bit like the Pharaoh Koffra, but Lainer did an early computer study, back in the 80s when computers were still pretty primitive, in which he fed Koffra data into the pyramid, sorry, into the computer, and then superimposed the results upon the head of the Sphinx and said, voila, the Sphinx's Kau.

[573] Well, to us, this was sort of silly, but it got a lot of press.

[574] It was in the New York Times, and I think the Smithsonian, all over the place.

[575] So when we finally got the funding together, to do our mystery of the swings.

[576] We really had to address that because it was, it was, um, it was well known.

[577] And you know, people say, well, you know, it's been proved that the swings is the face of Cobra.

[578] So how do you disprove it?

[579] Well, I wanted to, I wanted to actually use exactly the same method that Lainer used, but feed Elvis data into the computer and prove that the Sphinx was really meant to be Elvis, but the, we thought that was a cool idea.

[580] But what happened was that the Elvis Foundation wouldn't let us use the King's image in that context.

[581] And I think Elvis would have been furious.

[582] He would have loved to have been the Sphinx.

[583] But what happened then was my criminal partner, Boris, who was an interesting guy.

[584] He was an ex -race driver.

[585] He drove for Ferrari for years and a year for Porsche.

[586] It was an interesting character.

[587] Anyway, he came up with the idea, well, let's get a forensic detective to go with us to Egypt to, you know, do a study of these faces and see if they really could be the same, modeled upon the same human being.

[588] And so a couple phone calls, and we got in touch with a guy named Frank Domingo, who was the senior forensic detective from the NYPD.

[589] And he came to Egypt with us, and this is more a long story about how we got Frank to agree to go.

[590] and he did his study and showed unquestionably that the two faces could not possibly have been the same.

[591] And then the question came up because when you look at the profile of the Sphinx, even though it's pretty ruinous because it's been severely damaged, even though it was damaged, it's quite clear that not only is a different face than that of Kavra, but it's probably a different race.

[592] In other words, it really looks like a sub -Saharan African face, not even like an Egyptian face.

[593] Which would mean it was done by the Nubians who took over Egypt to...

[594] Not even the Nubians.

[595] Earlier, you know, further south.

[596] Because the Nubians don't look like...

[597] Don't look the same quite as the sub -Saharan Africans.

[598] So, and in fact, the Egyptian Egyptologists are as prejudiced as everyone else.

[599] The last thing they want to know is that, You know, is that the Sphinx is an African -African.

[600] But earlier in the 19th century, lots of people just, you know, there was no Egyptology then.

[601] Lots of travelers, Gustav LeBarre and Florence Nightingale and all kinds of people who wrote very beautifully about Egypt, traveling in Egypt in the 19th century, said, well, you know, this is a negroid face.

[602] And the Egyptologist simply ignored that.

[603] Well, anyway, with Frank, so he did this careful forensic study.

[604] I think it's on my website.

[605] I'm not sure.

[606] Actually, I should tell some people my website's j .a .west .com or dot net.

[607] And anyway, it's in there somewhere.

[608] And so we asked him about it that, you know, what do you think?

[609] Can this be an African face?

[610] And Domingo is cautious, but he said, well, he said, you can't prove that it is, but it is consistent with sub -Saharan physiognomy.

[611] And so actually, that was actually my friend Boris, my partner, was very funny when he said that.

[612] He said, boy, this is bad news for the academics.

[613] He said, not only, first of all, it means that, you know, there is an Atlantis.

[614] If it wasn't Atlantis, and second of all, they were black.

[615] We thought that was pretty funny.

[616] But anyway, subsequently, I did an op -ed piece for the New York Times, and I carefully left out this whole, because this is, you know, we wanted to go back there and do some more work, and I was in enough hot water with the academics to begin with.

[617] So I didn't mention anything about this sub -Saharan African Swinks, but a few weeks later, the New York Times published a letter from an orthodontist, a Massachusetts orthodontist, and an orthodontist is another expert in facial, you know, in faces.

[618] And he came up with it, not us, he came up with it and said, yeah, this is an African face.

[619] So that was very interesting.

[620] And now when we write our book, when we write the, Shaq and I get cracking on the Brids of Surah, we will go into that and actually interview.

[621] track him down, I lives in Newton, Massachusetts, the orthodontist who wrote that letter and see what he has to say about it.

[622] But anyway, that was an interesting thing about the head of the Sphinx, that it's not original to the Sphinx, because it's much too small, proportionately to the body, and it seems to be a sub -Saharan African face.

[623] We don't know when it was recarved, but maybe, especially.

[624] Sphinx is as we think over 30 ,000 years old and it has to be re -carved at some period of time in between.

[625] Well, it may be that, you know, that's who was living in Egypt at the time.

[626] That was the civilization of Egypt.

[627] You see, when you get back far enough, there's not much left.

[628] This is why, for example, the Paleolithic caves.

[629] You know, there were a bunch of caves, but nothing else.

[630] We don't know what anybody else was doing.

[631] along comes go Beckley Tepe and suddenly the whole everything changes because you've got this extraordinary structure that they date to 10 ,000 BC so this comes up and it's very difficult to create a detailed picture of what was going on then why are they doing work on the sphinx why are they like fixing the paws and fixing the ears and fixing the headdress and all the the different things that they've done to the sphinx that seems to me to be very confusing I mean, you have this amazing ancient structure, and they're building on it to, like, recreate the toes of the lion, and it just seems very odd to me. Well, it is actually very odd.

[632] I mean, it really is.

[633] When you get up next to it, it's pretty crumbly.

[634] And so, but there's, the jury's still out if they're repairing, if the repairs are not actually doing more damage than would be done if they just left it to the elements.

[635] We don't know.

[636] But they are doing it, and very often they're doing it.

[637] and it's a pretty botched -up job.

[638] It looks terrible.

[639] Yeah, it does mostly look pretty terrible.

[640] There's like little bricks on the toes.

[641] Yeah, yeah.

[642] It's really quite horrible.

[643] But you see, it's been repaired.

[644] The repair campaigns, it's not just modern.

[645] The earliest repair campaigns, this is another piece to the big puzzle, the earliest repair campaigns are Old Kingdom.

[646] In other words, the time that the Swinks was the time that the Swinks was supposedly built it was already weathered.

[647] Well, isn't that part of the hieroglyphs involved in attributable to one particular Pharaoh's name that he fell asleep and he had a dream that if he uncovered the sphinx he would control Egypt?

[648] Tutmosis, the third, the fourth?

[649] And in that tablet, that Steeler, there was, it subsequently flaked off, the first syllable of Kauffra's name, Koff.

[650] And from that, they deduced, they extrapolated rather, and said, oh, well, Kaffra must have been the builder of the Sphinx.

[651] But there's nothing that says that, well, we think, is that Kaffra was the repairer of the Sphinx because even, I mean, Mark Lainer, the loyal opposition, notes that when the Sphinx was first repaired, it was already weathered to its present condition.

[652] and he nevertheless says that, oh, well, the old kingdom blocks that were repaired that were cannibalized from somewhere else.

[653] It's really a cockamamie explanation, but, you know, when you're playing in their arena and they don't like what the evidence is, they move the goalposts, and if that doesn't work, well, then they change the rules of the game.

[654] Is it their contention?

[655] is the conventional contention that the Sphinx was carved with that face originally?

[656] Yeah, even though it's way out of, even though it's way out, even though it's much too small proportionately, and the rest of the Sphinx is spectacularly accurate proportionally.

[657] Well, not only that.

[658] Masters of proportion, they stick with that because it's too inconvenient.

[659] You know, you don't, until you've done, dealt with these guys and other fields of science, a scholarship, but not much different.

[660] People are particularly men.

[661] Very stubbornness.

[662] You know, we're, we're upsetting the apple cart, and they make a living selling apples.

[663] Well, what doesn't make any sense to me is that they're completely discounting the actual hard evidence of erosion.

[664] There's a very different level of erosion on the face than there is on the rest of the body.

[665] That's okay, because that's a much harder, that's a much harder outcry.

[666] crop of limestone.

[667] So that's been fully exposed.

[668] Whenever it was carved, fully exposed, and it's not really weathered that much, but more than it looks, because if you look at the old photographs, you see the back of the head have been fairly severely weathered, but nothing like the body.

[669] Yeah, that seems crazy, right?

[670] Actually, what you have to do, Joe, is you've got to come to Egypt with us.

[671] I would love to.

[672] I'm scared, though.

[673] Isn't Egypt scary right now?

[674] Isn't it dangerous?

[675] No. No?

[676] Well, not really.

[677] Only if you're like trying to run it.

[678] No, this is the These are the prostitutes It's not that they're lying But only unrest is news So even under the worst of circumstances When the revolution was going on I was there for the entire revolution And I refused to leave With the group that I was with I lead to it to Egypt You know that And Why did you refuse to leave?

[679] What?

[680] Why did you refuse to leave?

[681] Because the government said We were supposed to leave, and we said, the hell with this.

[682] They're not after us, so let's see what happens.

[683] So we waited a few days, and the tanks were in the streets, and all of that sort of stuff, and you could spell the tear gas, but nobody was after us.

[684] So there were a few places we didn't get to, but for the rest, we had the time of our lives, because here we were the only gringoes in Egypt, and it was quite an experience when you used the crowds like the Super Bowl to be there when the place was empty, and we didn't miss a couple places but we had this fantastic time so in the middle of the revolution you're taking tours on and and through the the sphinx and the temple and man and all that yeah they're not after us happy to have us there and and wow that's a dude who's dedicated to egyptology when you see no and and again see at the at the worst in the revolution they were talking about this there were a million people protesting in a couple of different cities but if there are million people protesting it means that there are 82 million who aren't so all you have to do is not be ontario square or the protests are going on which nowadays with cell phones is very easy to avoid oh my god that's hilarious and they're not after us they like having us there we're a source of income to them so i'm still doing my trips actually and and you know it's not as easy to get them together because i have to go through this explanation all the time But this is the time to go.

[685] Tourism is running at about 20%.

[686] So you hope to have everything for business.

[687] Well, no, it's terrible for business.

[688] It's terrible for business, but it's okay for us.

[689] Good for the experience.

[690] Yeah, and actually, in fact, I said the next trip is in October.

[691] And I have a, I mean, with your interest, you owe it to yourself to get to Egypt.

[692] I do.

[693] I have a friend who's been, the only ancient.

[694] ruins I've ever seen were Mayan ruins in Chichen Itza.

[695] That's about as far as I've seen.

[696] They're pretty impressive, but Egypt is a different kettle of civilization because we know so much about it.

[697] Yeah, well, you know so much.

[698] If I did go, I would unquestionably go with you.

[699] Magical Egypt, that DVD series that you have, is one of my all -time.

[700] My wife would come into the room and look at me and go, fucking Egypt again, because I'd be sitting there watching this DVD series.

[701] She's like, how many of these are?

[702] There's like eight DVDs so I'm how many DVDs is the magical Egypt set eight eight it's amazing I've watched it 30 times I just go back and watch it over again but you know I got to she got a little pissed off in me she was like enough stupid because I was watching it in the bedroom you know and she would come in and have to see sphinxes and shit she not is she not interested in oh no she is a little bit but not not to the extent I'm a very obsessive person and when I first watched your this the documentary you did with Charlton Heston narrating.

[703] I became obsessed with the whole idea of, and then I bought Graham Hancock's book, and then it was all downhill.

[704] Oh, it's a huge, and it's really going exponentially now, but actually, I have on my list here, I wanted to mention it to you, because you have a pretty big audience, and I have a standing incentive offer that anybody who gets 10 people together to go on Egypt trip gets the freebie.

[705] Well, minus the airfare and the Bakshish, the tips.

[706] What we might do, sir, is we might buy out the whole thing.

[707] Buy out your whole tour.

[708] And then, Brian, are you down?

[709] You down to go to Egypt?

[710] I'm talking to my co -host.

[711] My co -host says, fuck yeah, he's down to go.

[712] And we'll get all our friends together, except Joey, because Joey can't leave the country.

[713] And we'll take a Desquad tour to Egypt.

[714] That might be the shit.

[715] That would be amazing.

[716] with that.

[717] Would it be safe to take children?

[718] Yeah, normally, but how old are the kids?

[719] Really young.

[720] Two and four.

[721] You know, they're portable at that age, but it can be done.

[722] It can be done.

[723] That's not what I want to hear.

[724] Yeah, it's like Disneyland.

[725] Yeah, no, I mean, see, it depends on the kids, but that's, they're not going to get anything out of it.

[726] At 10, 12, 14, they do get something out of it.

[727] But what you can do is, you know that the Egyptians love kids so you're just wherever your hotel is you know you hire a nanny who plays with the kids while we go out and look at that's not going to happen that'll never happen but um let's talk about the temple in man because that was one of the most fascinating things of that magical Egypt series was how the Egyptians their construction wasn't just beautiful wasn't just functional art there there was there was a methodology to what they were making where they were literally in that one temple they mirrored the human body explain that because it's really a fascinating it's like a tribute to the human anatomy well it's not only is it a tribute to the human anatomy but it's Schaller de Lubits the great genius with the unpronounceable name I mean names mean a lot for example Einstein is a great for a genius.

[728] His name was Manny Plotnik.

[729] No one never would have heard of him.

[730] Right.

[731] But Schwer and Schvaller de Lugich was a genius scholar.

[732] I mean, he really was brilliant.

[733] And he realized it's, again, more long story.

[734] Have you read Serpent in the sky?

[735] You read my book?

[736] No, I have not.

[737] Ah, okay.

[738] Well.

[739] Serpent in the sky?

[740] It's called.

[741] Serpent in the sky.

[742] It's called Serpent in the sky, the high wisdom of ancient Egypt.

[743] I'll have to send you copy.

[744] Anyway, he realized that.

[745] he was doing the work on this on on on Egypt on on the temple of Luxor he had actually he went to Egypt he was a very interesting man died in the early 60s and never met him and he was a practicing alchemist there were not many of those floating around these days but he went to Egypt because according to the and I only realized this quite recently I thought the opposite until quite recently but you see the the Egyptian tradition percolated down through the west in what it called the hermetic tradition, which is astrology and magic and number symbolism and neoplatonism and all bunch of these other disciplines never coherent as in Egypt.

[746] And Schaller went to Egypt in 37 in order to to see if, because the Renaissance scholars, people like Giadano Bruno and Kepler and all of them were convinced, I mean, they took it on trust that Egypt was the fount of wisdom.

[747] The Greeks agreed with that, but nowadays, it's not supposed to be a civilization is supposed to have started with the Greeks, but it didn't.

[748] The Greeks got most of what was consequential or accurate in their own civilization from the Egyptians, and they're very open about it.

[749] It's the modern -day quackademics that don't want to understand that, because a very interesting book called black Athena, the Afroasiatic roots of Greek civilization by a very fine Cornell scholar called Martin Bernal.

[750] And basically he proves that what we call history is really a white supremacist Eurocentric invention, you know, put together by the, by the, mainly by the 19th and early 20th century historians because they were determined to prove that real civilization began with the Greeks because the Greeks were, you know, swarthy little guys, but white enough, they weren't Egyptian or, you know, Semitic or black or anything like that.

[751] Or sub -Saharan African like the Sphinx?

[752] Certainly not.

[753] So, so really history as it's taught, even to this day, is really a white supremacist calm job.

[754] So it really is possible that sub -Saharan Africans might have built all that stuff.

[755] Well, maybe.

[756] Yeah, it could be.

[757] They obviously built that face, or likely built that face.

[758] Well, it's very likely.

[759] Hey, can I take a break?

[760] Sure.

[761] Yeah, get yourself some vodka.

[762] Okay.

[763] I wish I had some over here.

[764] Well, why don't you?

[765] I'll fly you out, fella.

[766] Okay.

[767] Anytime you want to come to L .A. Do this in person.

[768] Let me know.

[769] Right back.

[770] All right.

[771] We'll be right back with John Anthony West as John goes and get some more vodka.

[772] Fucking love it.

[773] the computer fan i love all of it i love his computer fan going off is every time he gets an email it's a beep every time you get a a fucking text message or a message from sky that shit comes out yeah can you turn that off yeah let's see if i can try to do that is but uh everybody who's listening to this thank you uh very much for uh for being patient and and and if you're not familiar with this um particular subject it's one of my my personal favorites and And John's DVD series, which is called Magical Egypt, which you can still purchase online.

[774] I think it's magicalegyip .com.

[775] I believe you can also get it on Amazon in a bunch of different places, but it is just fantastic.

[776] And it's really, really entertaining stuff, and it has to do with so much of why Egypt is such a fascinating and mysterious culture.

[777] It's really one of the most amazing DVD series you can get.

[778] And it's, no one, but it would take a guy like John who's spent his whole life being obsessed with Egypt to produce something like this.

[779] It's a real work of passion and interest.

[780] And I've, like I told him, I've watched it like a hundred times.

[781] It's incredible.

[782] It's great stuff.

[783] Is he still gone?

[784] Do we have an image of him?

[785] I'm back.

[786] Oh, okay.

[787] No, I don't think you can get it on Amazon.

[788] You can?

[789] I don't think you can, but you can get it direct through me or through that website.

[790] So you can go to my website and get it as well.

[791] I thought someone was selling it on Amazon.

[792] Sometimes they do that, like they'll have a...

[793] Yeah, I don't think it's on Amazon.

[794] And actually, it's really, it's not me. It's my, let's say it's my work that sets it off, but it's really my genius partner, who's called him Chance Gardner, who's responsible for that.

[795] I mean, he was a guy making a lot of money in L .A. as a 3D animator, and he got fascinated with this whole subject.

[796] Sort of like you.

[797] John, John, just to let you know, just to let people know and let you know, because you might not know this, it is available on Amazon .com.

[798] Not only is it available on Amazon .com, it's also available on Amazon instant video.

[799] People can watch it instantly.

[800] Is Amazon jacking you?

[801] Are they paying you for this, John?

[802] God, I don't know.

[803] It's my partner who handles the, it's Amazon, it's my partner who handles the business side of things.

[804] But I know, really.

[805] Well, you've been ripped off before, right?

[806] You told us you got ripped off for the other one.

[807] I get ripped off.

[808] But in this case, I think I'll have to check with chance.

[809] Check in on that guy.

[810] I know that it's, you know, the whole thing just brings in no money.

[811] He's sacrificed four or five years of his life, putting this extraordinary thing together.

[812] And then people pirate it all the time.

[813] Yeah.

[814] And there's a thing you can do about it.

[815] I mean, it's really criminal.

[816] Yeah, people, if you want to watch the Magical Egypt series, don't watch it.

[817] on YouTube or watching on any of those places where it is pirated, please go and support it.

[818] Because like I was saying, John, when you went to get your vodka, it's one of my favorite all -time DVD series.

[819] And it would take a guy like you to put something like that together.

[820] It was such a work of passion.

[821] Like, no, very few people are going to put together eight DVDs, you know.

[822] Well, that's a chance who did that, really.

[823] See, I mean, he got it going.

[824] And I supplied, obviously, I supplied the Egyptology, and we conferred on how to do it.

[825] but he single -handedly produced it, shot it.

[826] It's really brilliant.

[827] And, you know, as I said, it's done on a shoestring, so it doesn't look like a glossy NBC production.

[828] It's beautiful.

[829] It doesn't really, I'm proud to have been a part of that.

[830] But it's, you know, I mean, we're partners, but credit where creditors do, I mean, left to my own devices.

[831] You know, I can write the script, but I couldn't do the production.

[832] Yeah, it's really an amazing piece of work.

[833] This is well worth getting hold of, and actually on the subject of putting stuff together, I've been talking on any number of occasions about us doing the next video, the Zeptapi, the Dawn of Civilization.

[834] And actually, I should mention this, because I have a nonprofit foundation that we set up about 10 years ago, but called the Ancient Wisdom Foundation, but it's been quiescent most of this time.

[835] You know, people would contribute now and again, we'd use it for travel and research and that sort of thing.

[836] But now I've got a really bright guy who contacted me, a fan of the whole work and fascinated by the whole thing.

[837] And he's really, he's got the smarts and the drive to put it all together and revivify it.

[838] So it's now, it's now, the website is under construction.

[839] But we're now looking to both microfinance and macrofinance this show.

[840] And it's funny because it's been an idea of mine for decades.

[841] And now it's become a possibility.

[842] I mean, years ago, see, I haven't devoted my entire life to Egypt in these things because I started out as a novelist and playwright and screenwriter and had a lot of things done.

[843] And actually, I think you asked me this earlier, and I wandered off from the subject.

[844] But as a young kid, how did I get into this?

[845] I started out, I mean, I realized about the age of 12 to 13 that I was living in a lunatic asylum.

[846] Everyone else called it progress.

[847] But, I mean, I knew it was madness.

[848] But, you know, I couldn't put it together.

[849] But by the time I was 19 or 20, I knew what I wanted to do.

[850] I knew I was in a lunatic asylum.

[851] And what I wanted to be was I wanted to be the little boy who said the emperor has no clothes.

[852] And that's when I started out writing satires, brutal satires, plays and things that were done.

[853] This never made me money.

[854] I'm trying to resuscitate some of that stuff now.

[855] But anyway, and then gradually, gradually, gradually, I understood that there was another, that human beings were not always insane.

[856] And one music, the classical music, Beethoven's late quartets and Montever's.

[857] very these vestments of 1610 and then when I was in the army in Germany, needless to say, I didn't list drafted me, but I had a great time.

[858] I was in Germany, my one and only Porsche that I bought the $2 ,400 from the factory, 55, talking about, yeah, well, that's what it was in those days.

[859] And I remember driving as I was driving to France and early, it was in November, all by myself early in the morning and went to the Cathedral of Chattre, it was absolutely empty.

[860] I mean, this is before there was any travel to Europe.

[861] And I realized it was an epiphany that, you know, however monstrous the church was and is, somebody, geniuses built this incredible structure.

[862] And then it took another few.

[863] I still didn't put it all together.

[864] It took another few years before, and by this time I had my first short story published and I was living in Spain on the island of Ibiza.

[865] And gradually gradually, I understood, you know, there was another side to this.

[866] And then all of a sudden, again, more complicated story, but I got interested in the Gurdjaf work, and the Bisa would become all touristed up and connected with my first wife, and we moved to England.

[867] She was an actress.

[868] I wanted to get into the Gurdjaf work, and there the first the first non -fiction book the case from astrology showed up and that's how i got into schaller so that's about the late 60s when i got interested in you know when i really when i really got interested in all of this stuff anyway anyway the the um but i always had this idea because i i had brief enough experiences with you know with hollywood um and you know the film the film industry and even theatrical side of things that the producers own you and to get anything that's really original done the way that you want it done is next to impossible and I had this idea of somehow or another microfinancing projects but of course you couldn't do it in those days I mean how are you going to send out a billion mailings or anything like that but now with the with the internet you can get to these huge databases and so and so now we've got we're putting in place a a micro financing aspect of it and and actually I have I've always been good at thinking up good marketing ideas I just never do them well John just get on Twitter you need to get on Twitter and then get a Kickstarter account but what we're doing and when I talk about it now it's not yet a promise because we have to make sure through the lawyers that it's legal but we think it's legal we think we pretty sure it can be legal but we have a a cool I came up with a really cool incentive offer which is that if you put in if you get if you have a fit on for a $50 donation and you can split it you know you 10 guys can put in five each and one of them is going to win that but you put in 50 bucks and that buys you a ticket to effectively a raffle.

[869] And when we get up to $50 ,000, we get up to $50 ,000, we have a drawing and somebody wins a free trip to Egypt with me. So we think that that's, because I'm very interested in getting to young people, actually.

[870] You know, people my age, well, most of the people my age are dead anyway, but, but I'm particularly interested in getting this message to young people.

[871] And, you know, 50 bucks for some young people is is a lot, but it isn't really a lot if you figure it out.

[872] I mean, what's 50 bucks?

[873] It's 10 beers at a not very good bar or a meal for two at a not very good restaurants.

[874] Anybody can figure it out, can afford 50 bucks.

[875] So we're putting this into place and if you go online, I think the website is up already.

[876] It's ancient wisdom.

[877] I think it's ancient wisdom.

[878] Ancient wisdom foundation .org.

[879] Now, when you go on these Egyptian trips how long do they take um the standard trip is now i think it's 15 or 16 days door to door whoa and they're really intense i mean i'm i'm talking what's going on now goes on all day long so it's all day you talking for 15 16 days yeah that's got to be exhausting yes but it must keep you pretty pretty sharp on egyptian history well it gives me Not only that, actually, it's that, you see, see, Egypt, nobody in America has ever experienced the real civilization.

[880] What we have progress, what we call progress, is the antithesis of civilization.

[881] This is shiny barbarism.

[882] And so Egypt is an eye -opener.

[883] And as I said, I came to it, you know, through art, through great sacred music, and through the Cathedral of Shathe.

[884] And then suddenly I realized how important.

[885] this was and along came Schaller and all of this study.

[886] But what Egypt does is that it introduced it and through this symbolist, this symbolist interpretation, which was what Shwala de Lubits put together.

[887] Otherwise, it was just quackademic Egyptology.

[888] You come away angry actually because you've experienced this fabulous art. And you listen to all this bullshit that they're telling you that has no connection with what you've actually experienced.

[889] So, so Egypt is, I often start lectures off by saying Egypt is like sex, and that gets everybody's attention.

[890] Why is Egypt like sex?

[891] Well, you can read all about it, and that's kind of interesting, and you can look at pictures, and that's kind of interesting too.

[892] But until you've actually experienced that you don't understand anything about it, so Egypt is like that.

[893] Once you're there, it hits.

[894] I mean, there's no mistaking about it.

[895] And so it's, to me, it's very gratifying to be able to be the agency for allowing people to have that experience.

[896] And unfortunately, I originally hoped to have a little business where there are a handful of people who understand Symbolist Egypt well enough to retransmit it.

[897] But actually, I'm the only one who does these trips.

[898] Well, one other person, a very brilliant lady called Normandy Ellis, but even that doesn't have the intellectual rigor that mine, my stuff does.

[899] So I'm almost the only show in town, but it's very satisfying to me to be able to open this experience to people.

[900] And also, invariably, the trips have very interesting people on them with expertise in a number of disciplines.

[901] that are relevant to Egypt so no trip goes goes by without me without me learning a lot myself i mean i send sometimes very important things so it doesn't get tiring and yeah it's a lot of it's physically it's a lot of work but you know i'm in pretty good shape of my age so john i wanted to ask you a question about the more recent idea that perhaps the blocks and the pyramid were not cut from stone but rather made out of a limestone concrete.

[902] Are you familiar with these theories?

[903] Very.

[904] Yeah, that's Davidovitz.

[905] And shock that's been looked into by geologists, and it's completely untenable.

[906] And David's should know better.

[907] He's a polymer scientist or something of the sort.

[908] Shock has looked at this very carefully.

[909] It would be as much work to pound the stone into powder, and then put it into molds.

[910] And you see, the stones are all different sizes.

[911] So you can't do it that way.

[912] And when you look at the stones, you see at the blocks, there's what's called a pneumolitic limestone, which has lots of little seashells in it, looking like the shells on, you know, like cockle shells.

[913] And they're all intact.

[914] So it's a silly theory.

[915] But on the surface, it doesn't sound, And on the surface, it sounds as though it might be convincing.

[916] It was convincing enough so that somebody, a friend of mine, put together a panel of geologists who don't have an axe to grind.

[917] It's not as though they're Egyptologists or archaeologists who have a stake in the thing.

[918] They go there with an open mind to look into it, and shock certainly does.

[919] And no, it's not.

[920] They're not.

[921] And it would be just as much work to do it.

[922] And Davidowitz himself says it would take a month to produce a limestone block and cure it well enough so that you could actually use it.

[923] So, no, it's not.

[924] So it's just silliness?

[925] Well, it's incorrect.

[926] It's incorrect.

[927] Yeah, some things are silly.

[928] And then, see, the alternative side of the argument is as irresponsible as the academic side, because people, People get notions in their head that it's built by alien, well, it could be built by aliens.

[929] I can't disprove that.

[930] But there is unwilling to let go of their fantasies as the academics are unwilling to let go of what are not fantasies, but...

[931] Their timeline, they're incorrect timeline.