Joe Rogan Experience #2328 - Luke Caverns

Narrator 0:00 (drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays)

Joe Rogan 0:12 We're up.

Luke Caverns 0:13 Awesome.

Joe Rogan 0:13 What's up? How are you, man?

Luke Caverns 0:15 How are you, man? How are you? It's great to meet you.

Joe Rogan 0:16 Pleasure to meet you.

Luke Caverns 0:16 It's a pleasure to meet you as well.

Joe Rogan 0:17 I really enjoyed you on the Jesse Michaels podcast, so, uh, I had to have you on.

Luke Caverns 0:21 Yes. Yeah, well, thank you so much, man.

Joe Rogan 0:23 I love it when young people know so much about ancient history. Like, how did you get started in this?

Luke Caverns 0:28 Um, well, it's, it's quite literally in my blood. Um, back in the late, well, I should say the 1890s, um, my family, they were cattle rustlers, uh, right here in the Hill Country, uh, actually, maybe a little bit further... Well, quite a, quite a bit further west of San Antonio.

Joe Rogan 0:46 Damn, you come from a lot of criminals?

Luke Caverns 0:48 Probably.

Joe Rogan 0:48 (laughs)

Luke Caverns 0:48 Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of, there's a lot of dark history in, in here.

Joe Rogan 0:53 (laughs) .

Luke Caverns 0:53 Um, and, uh, so, (laughs) uh, they are... They're cattle rustlers that are out in Dryden, Texas, in Sanderson, Texas. And, uh, I mean, right on the Rio Grande. And they were, uh, that's how they made their money. They were fascinated, kind of like everybody, with, uh, with finding gold, with finding lost Spanish treasure, and, and, uh, you know, Native American artifacts. So, they're living in this area called the Reagan Canyon, and, uh, I, I've seen it all over the place, um. If you look on, I think, like, the Smithsonian did something on the top 10 forgotten places in the United States, it's like the most remote areas o- of our country, and somewhere in there is Reagan Canyon. And, uh, so out there, they developed this fascination for looking for lost Spanish gold. And, you know, there were bandits that would hide up in the hills and they would sack Spanish caravans and drag the gold up into the hills to not get caught, to hopefully come back for it later, and the, the Spanish are out there mining for gold and everything. Uh, so my family gets caught up in one of the biggest mysteries of Texas history. Like, if you were to look up... If you were to go to some bookstore, there's, there's a popular one called The Sons of Coronado, and it's like this legacy of people looking for Spanish gold.

Joe Rogan 1:58 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 1:58 And somewhere in there, my family will, will be in there. And so, this started in the 1890s, and, um, there's this... It's this long saga of, of, uh, the gold being... The treasure being dragged to San Antonio and all these people get killed, and only one of these four Reagan brothers makes it out. He gets involved in, uh, in, um, uh, oil drilling out in East Texas. And then so, my family moved out to East Texas, and then his son was born, which is my grandfather. And then he continues this legacy of, um, of continuing his father's oil company, but then he also begins gold mining in New Mexico. And while he's out in New Mexico, he hears these legends of these seven lost Spanish gold mines. And, uh, because this local... There was a local police officer who was like a treasure hunter, and he knew who my grandfather was and the story behind our family. He sought him out and they went off looking together. A- and I don't know how long it took them to find it, but he found the seven lost Spanish gold mines of New Mexico.

Joe Rogan 2:52 Wow.

Luke Caverns 2:52 And, uh, and he opened up this, uh, company called Three Bells Mining and Milling Company. And that was open for about eight years, and they opened up these, they opened up these mines that go back to probably about the 1530s. I mean, th- so the Spaniards were up all the way in New Mexico in the 1530s, and they were opening up Native American gold mines and expanding them. And so he found these gold mines that go hundreds of feet into the ground as this huge, expansive, uh, gold mining operation. Well, somebody dies after a smelter explodes, and the company goes under. They lose everything. My family falls into poverty. My dad's born during that time, and my dad didn't really get to experience like all of that excitement. He had to spend his life climbing out of poverty. And, uh, but he had this love for history. He had this, uh, he had this love for, for American history, really, and he instilled in me the importance of history growing up. And that fascination of, of exploration an- and, uh, and kind

Luke Caverns 3:52 of ancient American history, hearing those stories carried over into me during my childhood. And, uh, and so I've just... I have always been fascinated by this. And, um, I guess getting to where I am now, I, I was halfway through my marketing degree in college, and I'm, uh, (laughs) I'm sitting on my bed in my dorm room with my girlfriend at the time, who I'm married to now, and we watched the movie The Lost City of Z about Percy Fawcett.

Joe Rogan 4:15 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 4:16 And something about that guy's journey reminded me so much of my family, kind of reminded me of my dad, reminded me of my grandpa, and it changed something in me. Like that day, I could not ignore... I was probably 20 at the time. I could not ignore this love that I always had for ancient history. But, you know, archeologists are poor. You know, their, their... It's a extremely hard life, and it's really hard on, on your family too. Um, and I just knew I had to, I had to create a life for myself where I could do what I loved because I had like a 1.7 GPA in college, and I was not going to, to make it through my classes. And so, I changed, I got a degree in cultural anthropology. Uh, I wrote... Like we had a mock thesis statement, and I wrote it on the Amazon, and, and the lost, uh, the lost civilizations and, you know, how they were wiped out from, uh, from, uh, Spanish influenza. And, um, yeah, so that's where I'm at today.

Joe Rogan 5:05 Wow. I, I think, I think everybody, when you start looking at the history of the human race, and you start looking at the history of civilizations, everyone gets fascinated, because we kind of like woke up i- in this life. You know, we didn't choose to be born during this timeline, we woke up in this timeline, and we're like, "Uh, how did collectively we get here?" And then you have this narrative of how collectively go- we got here.

Luke Caverns 5:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:30 But then you see there's holes in this narrative.

Luke Caverns 5:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 5:33 And it's real weird.

Luke Caverns 5:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:35 And then you find out about asteroid impacts and super volcanoes, and then there's people like Zahi Hawass who are in charge of telling you what they know.

Luke Caverns 5:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:44 And this is the only answer, and you're like, "Well, that guy's not right."

Luke Caverns 5:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:47 And then you start like looking at guys like Graham Hancock, go, "Why is everybody calling him a Nazi? Like what the fuck?"

Luke Caverns 5:51 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:51 And then you start getting deep into the weeds in this stuff, and you're like, wow, there's a lot of resentment from the gatekeepers. There's a lot of people that have been, um-... they've been teaching a narrative and teaching them in school, and they don't want anyone else teaching this stuff.

Luke Caverns 6:08 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 6:08 They want to be the only people that can tell people-

Luke Caverns 6:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:12 ... what the history of the human race is. And unfortunately for them, there's too much other evidence. It's too weird.

Luke Caverns 6:20 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 6:20 The, the whole picture is not settled. It's too strange, and they keep finding new things all the time that throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the timeline of civilization.

Luke Caverns 6:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:33 And so then, you know, you, you find out about Egypt, and once I ... I mean, that was the big one for me. Once I found out about Egypt ... Or not found out about it, but you like really started exploring it, you know, post-

Luke Caverns 6:44 When you discovered every grain of sand in Egypt. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 6:46 I discovered the dull. I was there. I dug the hole, um, when I, uh ... (laughs)

Luke Caverns 6:54 That went about as well as I thought it would when you told me, that we knew I was hoping it was gonna go a little better, honestly. It was- Well, he had a great opportunity to, like, win over the popular-

Joe Rogan 7:03 Yes.

Luke Caverns 7:03 ... audience and come in and make a really good impression.

Joe Rogan 7:05 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 7:05 And he did exactly the opposite of that.

Joe Rogan 7:07 Well, I think there was a bunch of problems there, ego being one of them, but another one being a language barrier, and then-

Luke Caverns 7:12 I th- Yeah, I think so.

Joe Rogan 7:13 Also, years of battle.

Luke Caverns 7:15 (sighs)

Joe Rogan 7:15 Like, if you're in conflict with people about this very thing that we are talking about for years and years and years, and these people that you're in conflict with keep winning-

Luke Caverns 7:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:24 You know, like, I remember there was an old documentary that was narrated by Charlton Heston.

Luke Caverns 7:30 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 7:31 He was the host of it. I don't know if you ever saw this, The Mysteries of the Sphinx?

Luke Caverns 7:35 Yes, I've seen it, I've seen it on YouTube. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:37 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 7:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:37 I believe it was on television at the time.

Luke Caverns 7:39 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 7:40 And, um, one of the, the things in that was they were trying to talk about Robert Schoch's work with the water erosion-

Luke Caverns 7:50 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 7:50 ... around the temple of the Sphinx.

Luke Caverns 7:51 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 7:51 And there was this very arrogant archeologist. I don't remember his name, but I never- I remember he had a smackable face. He was just so arrogant. He's like, "Where (laughs) is the evidence-"

Luke Caverns 8:01 Mm-mm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 8:01 "... of this civilization that existed 10,000 years ago?"

Luke Caverns 8:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 8:07 Well, now we have evidence. No, yo-

Luke Caverns 8:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:10 So, uh, like, Gobekli Tepe-

Luke Caverns 8:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:11 ... threw a giant monkey wrench into-

Luke Caverns 8:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:14 ... the gears-

Luke Caverns 8:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:15 ... of this narrative, and now they're forced to reckon with this. Like, Zahi didn't even know what Gobekli Tepe was-

Luke Caverns 8:22 And what-

Joe Rogan 8:22 ... which was-

Luke Caverns 8:23 Yeah. There was, there was a lot-

Joe Rogan 8:24 Insane.

Luke Caverns 8:24 There was a lot of things that he wasn't familiar with, like Zep Tepe or the, uh-

Joe Rogan 8:29 Yes.

Luke Caverns 8:29 It's, it's either the Turin or the Turid Kings List, which, uh-

Joe Rogan 8:31 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 8:31 ... talks about the predynastic, like, semi-mythological kings going back, you know, tens of thousands of years.

Joe Rogan 8:37 Yes.

Luke Caverns 8:38 How do you ...

Joe Rogan 8:39 Not know that?

Luke Caverns 8:40 You know, how is, uh ... Was he the former Head of the Ministry of Antiquities and Culture?

Joe Rogan 8:44 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 8:44 How are you not familiar with this?

Joe Rogan 8:46 Right. Well, he just dismisses it.

Luke Caverns 8:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:48 But aggressively.

Luke Caverns 8:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:50 Which is like, there's no way you know everything.

Luke Caverns 8:53 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 8:53 There's n- There's no way. And then, it was also the, the data from the Italian scientists that were studying this tomography and this ability to look underground-

Luke Caverns 9:04 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 9:04 ... with satellite radar and also dismissing that. But then, I brought up the Temple of Osiris. I'm like, but they looked into that. Like, you could see it.

Luke Caverns 9:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:11 They have, like ... They, they, they showed where the chambers are. They, it, it works.

Luke Caverns 9:15 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 9:16 But this was only 50 feet in the ground. You know, like, okay, well-

Luke Caverns 9:19 Yeah, pretty well.

Joe Rogan 9:20 Well, how do you know how w- how deep that stuff goes? If it works 50 feet-

Luke Caverns 9:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:24 ... who's to say it doesn't work two kilometers-

Luke Caverns 9:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:27 ... like they're saying?

Luke Caverns 9:28 Yeah. Y- I was having a, uh, a conversation with, uh, uh, like, my mentor, Dr. Ed Barnhart. He's a, he's a friend of Graham. He was, he was one of the, uh, Graham's guest experts on, uh, season two of Ancient Apocalypse-

Joe Rogan 9:39 Yes.

Luke Caverns 9:39 ... when he went to the Maya realm. He and I were talking this morning, and he was like, he's like, "You know, it's become a battle of, like, who has this right to talk about these things."

Joe Rogan 9:48 Right. Yes.

Luke Caverns 9:48 You know? Does, does the fact that I have a degree in anthropology, that's what gives me the right to have more of an opinion on somebody else? It ... That's kind of what it, what it's become, and it's like-

Joe Rogan 9:59 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 9:59 And it's like one side is accosting the other over their fascinations and their interests, and the fact that they're able to make a living from the things that they're fascinated about and talking about it.

Joe Rogan 10:09 Right.

Luke Caverns 10:10 And, and, uh, and it feels like academia has become bitter because, you know, being in the academic world, uh, is a very rough and jaded place.

Joe Rogan 10:21 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 10:21 And a lot of young aspiring archeologists who existed, who maybe would've had an approach like me, uh, but existed during this time where you could only have your pursuits if the university signed off on it, right?

Joe Rogan 10:35 Right.

Luke Caverns 10:35 But now, universities are, like, ide- ideologically captured, and every little thing that you do has to be aligned with the university. And so, all of your fascinating ideas that you have in your mid-20s, you know, to your mid-30s when you're young and able to go off into the jungle and find something, they all get shut down by people who had their ideas shut down.

Joe Rogan 10:53 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 10:53 But now, it's like, it's the Wild West where you can have somebody, uh, like me or whoever put together an expedition and, you know, I legally cannot start digging up the ground and excavating things. But I can go and document things and survey things on my own, uh, you know, with local permission, whatever. But, um, yeah, it's like-

Joe Rogan 11:10 Can you legally dig things up in certain countries if you get permission? Or is it-

Luke Caverns 11:16 Oh, well, I mean, yeah. If, if I got, if I got permission, but, I mean, you would be ... It would be next to impossible for me, for somebody like me to do that, probably.

Joe Rogan 11:24 Um, why would that be? What would be the hurdles?

Luke Caverns 11:26 Oh, well, you would have the local universities there who also have their own, you know, high-credentialed people who are gonna ... You know, if I don't come in with a PhD, I'm never gonna go get a PhD. Uh, but if I don't come in with something like that, then I don't have the experience. I don't have, uh, you know, the authority to be able to do something like this, and they would never trust me to carry out, like, a good excavation.

Joe Rogan 11:45 Right, not damage anything.

Luke Caverns 11:46 Yeah, yeah. So, they would never-

Joe Rogan 11:47 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 11:47 They would never trust that.

Joe Rogan 11:48 There's some reasonable re- some reasonable explanations for why.

Luke Caverns 11:53 Yeah. Yeah, uh, kind of.

Joe Rogan 11:55 Because people have looted. I mean-

Luke Caverns 11:57 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:57 ... who knows how much of Ancient E- Egypt is just gone. I mean, who knows-

Luke Caverns 12:02 Oh, man, well-

Joe Rogan 12:03 So many wealthy people actually ate mummies.

Luke Caverns 12:05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:05 You know, we don't know about that. They, they actually ... Like, for people listening, I did, y- you didn't mishear me. They ate mummies.

Luke Caverns 12:12 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 12:12 They would bring them to these ... E- European aristocrats, would bring them to parties.

Luke Caverns 12:18 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:19 And people would consume the mummies.

Luke Caverns 12:23 Yes. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:23 Which is just, like, what were you guys drinking? (laughs) What-

Luke Caverns 12:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's gnarly, man.

Joe Rogan 12:29 What kind of titty party were you guys having over there-

Luke Caverns 12:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:30 ... where that was the idea?

Luke Caverns 12:32 It's, it's gnarly, man. Um, yeah, so much of Egypt is, is gone. And this is why I don't think that, uh ... You know, I, like, I love, I love the, the mystery of the ancient world and why I'm so baffled when people want to immediately shut anything down.

Joe Rogan 12:46 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 12:46 Um, because of the amount of history that is lost to us is completely baffling. You know, Egypt has been getting looted, we know, for the last, uh, let's say, 3,000 years at least. Countries, uh, uh, foreign nations have been coming in and raiding Egypt and taking the artifacts out. And so, you know, so much of the artifact, uh, so much of the artifact record is lost. And I think that the real problem is the confidence with which somebody like Zahi speaks.

Joe Rogan 13:16 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 13:16 It's okay for you to have your, your perspective and the way that you view the ancient world based on the data that's been available to you. It's okay to have your opinions. But when you're so confident about your opinions that you then begin to chastise other people, put them down for it, and then go the next, the next mile and start making accusations of them being a racist and things like that, you know-

Joe Rogan 13:38 The Flint Dibble approach.

Luke Caverns 13:39 That's-

Joe Rogan 13:40 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 13:40 ... really not good.

Joe Rogan 13:41 Right, it's not good, but it's like, that guy embodies what you don't like about academia.

Luke Caverns 13:46 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 13:46 You see him physically, he embodies it, like, it's like that's what it is. It's these weak men.

Luke Caverns 13:51 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 13:52 These weird kind of bitchy weak men-

Luke Caverns 13:55 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 13:55 ... that decide that they're in control of things, and the way they shut people down is by casting the worst pejoratives on them, especially, like, the, the Graham Hancock stuff, calling him a racist. Like, what? Because he ... 'cause he's interested in Atlantis.

Luke Caverns 14:08 I, I, I really did not like the letter that they wrote to Netflix to try to get, uh, season one taken down-

Joe Rogan 14:13 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 14:13 ... of Ancient Apocalypse.

Joe Rogan 14:14 It's disgusting.

Luke Caverns 14:15 And, and, you know, they, uh, sometimes they'll rebuttal and say, "Oh, well, you know, I never blatantly called him a racist." Like, well, okay, even if you didn't blatantly do it, you insinuated it, and you were okay with insinuating it.

Joe Rogan 14:26 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 14:26 And some of these people exist in a realm where, in their little bubbles, where they throw around the word racist-

Joe Rogan 14:32 Yes.

Luke Caverns 14:32 ... all the time, and then when they get to the wider world where the rest of us exist, they find out very quickly that none of ... we don't throw that term around lightly and accuse people of these things. And then, you know, at the end of the podcast, um, when he said, uh ... Well, you, you asked, you know, things, the, kinda, temperature came down, and then I think maybe you asked something like, uh, like, you know, "Well, what can people do to, to help archeology?" And he was like, "Oh, well, you can donate to the SAA."

Joe Rogan 14:56 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 14:56 But the SAA is the one that wrote the letter. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 14:58 Right.

Luke Caverns 14:59 And it's like, "Oh, man."

Joe Rogan 15:00 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 15:00 That's just, uh, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's not a good look.

Joe Rogan 15:03 Well, it's a real problem with human beings, um, and ego when they have, uh, positions of power and authority, um, especially over something that is very esoteric-

Luke Caverns 15:15 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 15:15 ... something that is, like ... and, and also completely complex.

Luke Caverns 15:19 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 15:19 Like, when you're dealing with trying to decipher hieroglyphs and trying to ... And then, you know, the fact that we know that the Library of Alexandria was burned down-

Luke Caverns 15:28 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 15:28 ... so who knows what was lost in that.

Luke Caverns 15:30 Several different times, like, five different times.

Joe Rogan 15:32 God.

Luke Caverns 15:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 15:33 I w- I wonder who, if any of that just got stolen out of there, and then they blamed it on, like-

Luke Caverns 15:38 Well, you know, so the, the first time-

Joe Rogan 15:41 ... how much of that shit is in the Vatican.

Luke Caverns 15:41 ... uh, Caesar is chasing his rival, Pompey, across the Mediterranean, and Pompey flees to Alexandria. And, um, Alexandria was kind of in the basket of Rome. Uh, they, the, the Ptolemies, who were the, the Greek pharaohs in, in Egypt. So the Greeks are controlling Egypt after Alexander comes in 332 BC. So Alexander dies, his best friend Ptolemy becomes pharaoh. So, um, but the Ptolemies were very weak, not very good rulers, and so Rome kind of does, like, what the US does, where they get pulled into conflicts, and then once they're there and they conquer everything, they seize all the power, you know. And so Rome had done this to, uh, had done this to Egypt, and so they controlled Egypt, and they were pulling all of their, um ... They were keeping the Ptolemies in power, uh, the Roman soldiers were, and they were pulling all that grain into Egypt. And so Caesar follows Pompey, uh, chases him to, to Alexandria, and so that Caesar can't f- or so that Pompey can't flee, Caesar says, "We'll burn the docks." Well, when you landed in Alexandria, uh, you would land at this dock that went to, uh, a road called Soma Road. So you had Soma Road and Canopic Way, and it was, like, this street corner. It must have been amazing to see in real life. Like, think about this, you have the Library of Alexandria, you ... All, all ... This is all on one block. You have the Library of Alexandria, you have the Museion, which is right next to it, so both together they make the world's first university. And, I mean, you can just imagine, like, walking through those halls. Across the street from that is, uh, Alexander's mausoleum. So, uh, his mausoleum, we think Ha- the Emperor Hadrian, if you've heard of Hadrian before-

Joe Rogan 17:14 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 17:15 ... um, that he modeled his mausoleum on Alexander's. So we kinda have an idea of, like, what the mausoleum may have looked like. It would have a marble statue of Alexander on top. So people are walking by every day in the middle of this town, and then across the street from that is the palatial district where all the rich people lived, and then off by the bay you would have had Cleopatra's palace. And so it was this beautiful place, but when the boats come into the dock you had to give up all the scrolls that you had, 'cause the Ptolemies are obsessed with obtaining the world's knowledge, and they want the originals, they don't want a copy. So what they would tell people is, "You give us your writings, we'll write down a copy, and we'll give you back your original." But what they would do is give back the copy and keep the original, and this is something called the Library Wars.

Joe Rogan 17:55 Oh.

Luke Caverns 17:55 This is a whole thing. So, um, but this wa- it was connected to the docks, and so most of the buildings in Alexandria are made out of stone to prevent fires, um, but the interior of Alexandria's library would have had all these wooden shelves that would cross where you'd stack all the scrolls in. So everything just ... Maybe the actual structure of the building doesn't burn down, but the entire interior of it burns up. And so when, uh, when Caesar sets fire to the docks to burn all of Pompey's ships, it crawls up the docks and burns the library down. Well, uh, um, Augustus did the same thing w-... what? A dec- a decade and a half later, Augustus came and he seized Alexandria. And this is where, this is when Cleopatra and Mark Antony die. He seizes it. And then there are rebellions because the Alexandrians are very rebellious. They don't want to be ruled by, uh, by the Romans. And, um, so there's, uh, I think it's, I think it's Caracalla that, uh, he was being made fun of by the Alexandrians. There was a theater in town. It's actually the place where standup comedy was invented, uh, in Alexandria. Yeah, so, so-

Joe Rogan 18:58 Really?

Luke Caverns 18:58 ... and, and the butt of all the jokes was always the Roman emperor.

Joe Rogan 19:01 (laughs)

Luke Caverns 19:01 So, so you'd have people, like, (laughs) talking shit about the Roman emperor standing up, you know, in the, in the middle of Alexandria's, uh, theater. And so the Roman emperor was always the butt of the joke. Well, Caracalla, I believe it's Caracalla, he's, uh, one of the brothers in Gladiator 2, the, uh, the new Gladiator, if you've seen it.

Joe Rogan 19:18 I haven't seen it.

Luke Caverns 19:18 Um, he's, he's one of the brothers, but the movie doesn't really depict the, the actual emperors very accurately. Um, but he gets tired of it, so he just comes down to Alexandria on, like, a royal visit and executes 25,000 people in the city of Alexandria and burns down parts of it. So he burned down the library for the third time. And then there was another emperor named Aurelian, uh, when a local Alexandrian declared himself the new Egyptian pharaoh. I think he was a real Egyptian. Uh, he Egy- he, he declared himself, like, the newest pharaoh, and he l- he r- r- created this revolt. And then Aurelian had to come and put the revolt down, and he burned down the library again. So this is-

Joe Rogan 19:57 Wow.

Luke Caverns 19:57 We're getting close to, like, 300 AD at this point. Now, in 365 AD, there was a, um, there was a, a huge earthquake, uh, that was off of the coast of Crete, I think, which is the most southern, uh, Greek isle. Uh, it's where the Minoans lived. I, I believe it's there. Or it's off the coast of Cyprus. And so that earthquake, like, like, just, uh, reverberates down to Egypt and this massive tsunami destroys the entire city of Alexandria. And it's said it was so catastrophic that, um, I think it's Pliny the Elder or Pliny the Younger comes down on a rescue mission from, from Italy, and he comes to Alexandria, and he records that 50,000 people in the city are missing because of, you know, the, the wave-

Joe Rogan 20:40 Wow.

Luke Caverns 20:40 ... that gets pushed in and that all of the giant boats, these are giant, giant, gigantic boats in Alexandria's harbor, are sitting on top of all the rooftops in the city. And it's after this point that the location of Alexander's body and the location of Alexandria's library just completely go missing. So, so they're both-

Joe Rogan 21:00 Wow.

Luke Caverns 21:00 ... utterly destroyed, and most likely, all of the giant stones that were used to build the city were repurposed for, you know, other things. But, uh, in one fatal swoop, uh, Alexandria's library, the Museion, and Alexander's mausoleum completely disappear from the historical record.

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Joe Rogan 22:38 Wow. It just shows you how vulnerable knowledge is.

Luke Caverns 22:42 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 22:42 I really think about that today because, um, w- uh, obviously we have a lot of books and most things that are, like, most physics work, most work on archeology, most work on history is, is available in book form, but how much of what we have is on hard drives?

Luke Caverns 23:02 Mm-hmm, yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:02 And if there was a power outage, just a global, worldwide powder- power outage that lasted six months-

Luke Caverns 23:09 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 23:09 ... we're fucked. Like-

Luke Caverns 23:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:11 ... we, we don't know anything anymore.

Luke Caverns 23:12 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:13 It, it's a small amount of time for a, an enormous cataclysmic disaster to completely erase tens of thousands of years-

Luke Caverns 23:20 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 23:20 ... of understanding of everything.

Luke Caverns 23:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:23 Everything. We, we, we would have no knowledge. One generation removed from electronics would have no knowledge of how to recreate it, what steps need to be taken, what, what... You have to build a chip plant?

Luke Caverns 23:36 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 23:36 Where, where are they right now? They're in Taiwan?

Luke Caverns 23:38 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 23:38 Wha- what the fuck are you talking about?

Luke Caverns 23:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:40 How are we gonna do this? Hard drives?

Luke Caverns 23:42 That's a precarious place for them to be.

Joe Rogan 23:43 Yeah. Starting from scratch, starting from scratch today, w- would be very similar, I think, to probably what starting from scratch was post the great flood.

Luke Caverns 23:54 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 23:54 Post the great comet impacts, all the-

Luke Caverns 23:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:59 ... Younger Dryas impacts theory stuff. Civilization, if that stuff is correct, if, if there is, uh, if Graham's p- positioned and Randall Carlson's position is that there was probably a much more advanced civilization than just hunter-gatherers that lived-

Luke Caverns 24:14 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 24:15 ... 10,000-plus years ago, how many thousands of years would it take before we started calming down again? Well, it seems like it took about 5, 4,000 or 5,000 years before civilization emerges.

Luke Caverns 24:27 A really long time.

Joe Rogan 24:28 A really long time.

Luke Caverns 24:29 And I, I think about that with, like-... foraging, you know?

Joe Rogan 24:31 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 24:32 I was reading, uh, yesterday, I was reading, uh, uh, Exploration Fawcett. Have you ever read this before-

Joe Rogan 24:37 No.

Luke Caverns 24:37 ... or listened to the audio book? It, it's hi- it's Percy-

Joe Rogan 24:40 Percy Fawcett's-

Luke Caverns 24:40 ... Percy Fawcett's personal diary. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:42 Oh, wow.

Luke Caverns 24:42 So you have, uh-

Joe Rogan 24:43 You can-

Luke Caverns 24:43 ... you have, uh-

Joe Rogan 24:43 There's an audio book of that?

Luke Caverns 24:44 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:45 Wow.

Luke Caverns 24:45 It's on Audible, yeah. Uh, it, dude, you'll get wrapped up in it. You won't be able to stop listening to it. Um, you know, he just has these amazing experiences and, ah, man, he would be like your best, like your all-time guest-

Joe Rogan 24:57 (laughs)

Luke Caverns 24:57 ... you know, if you could have him on.

Joe Rogan 24:58 Sure.

Luke Caverns 24:58 Um, but I-

Joe Rogan 24:59 Probably had a great accent too. (laughs)

Luke Caverns 25:01 Yeah, yeah for sure. And, uh, and so you listen to his audio book and, uh, the way he talks about meeting the indigenous people that live deep in the Amazon, you know, it would take him weeks to get to these little villages. And while he was out there, he would see, like, the systematic, mathematical structure with which they would set up these giant villages and how they would build these huge, like, thatch wood, uh, homes with foundations that are stones. And these people were, he said that they had, like, beautiful skin, they spoke elegantly, they sang songs. And he was like, he's like, he's like, "This isn't..." He's like, "These people in the Amazon are not primitive savages like my colleagues at the, the, uh, Royal Geographic Society in London believe that they are. These are people who are the fallen, or, or, or the descendants of a fallen great civilization." He was like, he's like, "The way they interact with each other is so sophisticated and the way they speak with each other."

Joe Rogan 25:56 Why does he think it would, they were the descendants of a fallen civilization and not the, the people that were currently, uh, uh, living-

Luke Caverns 26:04 Mm.

Joe Rogan 26:04 ... in, uh, the most modern version of the civilization?

Luke Caverns 26:08 Um, uh, I, I don't quite know. You know, there's some things that are, that are left out. Like, he has, he has some... Before he started writing this, I think he always had these ideas in the back of his mind.

Joe Rogan 26:19 Mm.

Luke Caverns 26:19 And so you don't really get the origin of why he initially started thinking this. But, you know, while he's, uh, exploring South America, he's hearing all these stories of, of, you know, semi-contacted people. Like, you have natives who still live the, the native life, but they can speak Spanish and he could speak a little bit of Spanish and communicate with these people. So he would hear about, oh yeah, you know, there's this, there's this huge city of gold off of, you know, off in the jungle, uh, months travel that way. And it's the same kinda legend that all these Spaniards had heard. So it's this idea of there's, well, there was this civilization that used to be out there. And so Percy thought that maybe it has something to do with Atlantis. And so that was part of his journey looking for it. And then he, um, it's actually his wife, Nina Fawcett, I believe, when she's in a library in England, she finds a Portuguese document, I think it's manuscript 512. Have you ever heard of this?

Joe Rogan 27:14 No.

Luke Caverns 27:14 Um, I could have the name of it wrong, but I think it's manuscript 512, and in that, it's these guys who are kind of like semi-professional ex- uh, Portuguese explorers in the mid-1700s that are going around Brazil. And they find this huge stone city with statues that they thought looked like Greek gods in the middle of the Amazon.

Joe Rogan 27:36 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 27:36 And so, you know, the perception, like, my perception looking back through it is like, well, I mean, yeah, these are Portuguese guys who come from Europe so when they see something that's native, their only lens to see it through is what they've grown up knowing, which is the Greek and Roman world. So that's how they communicate this idea. But they found this big stone city in the, in the middle of, uh, I think it's, I'm pretty sure it's Brazil's jungle. And so, uh, this was completely forgotten until Percy's wife found this. So, um, you know, when he first went down to the Amazon, he was only there on a mapping expedition on behalf of, uh, on behalf of, uh, Great Britain, which was, he was probably a spy. I'm, I'm guessing that that's what was actually happening there 'cause he was a spy when he was in the military. And I think what he was doing is on an official basis, he's charting, uh, the border around Brazil, uh, uh, with the Amazon River, but really what he's doing is collecting information so that maybe Great Britain can have a colony there someday. But then the war-

Joe Rogan 28:28 Mm.

Luke Caverns 28:29 But then the war, uh, disrupts all of that and he has to go fight in World War I. Um, which is funny 'cause it's the same thing the Nazis were doing in the 1930s.

Joe Rogan 28:38 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 28:38 But, um, anyways, so while he's there on his first, um, while he's there on his first expedition, he doesn't initially, I think, he's interested in these ideas of ancient history, but it's when he's there and he's off in the jungle, he's finding all these artifacts on the ground and he was like, he's like, uh, you know, the way that the pottery, hey, there's clay pottery and then there's, uh, you know, stone vessels and, and, like, uh, you're eating utensils that he was finding, really ele- elegant little statues and things. Uh, he found one that was made out of this, like, solid black stone that he could never f- and it had this glow to it. And he could never... Or, uh, maybe not a glow, but like a, like if you shine the light on it, you can tell that it's translucent in a way.

Joe Rogan 29:18 Mm.

Luke Caverns 29:18 Uh, I've seen stones like this in the Aztec realm. They have these scepters that have these orb things on the top and if you shine a light on it, it's like this otherworldly looking thing. I can only imagine if you're on like peyote-

Joe Rogan 29:28 What is the stone?

Luke Caverns 29:30 I, I don't know and it's missing now. It's lost. Uh, it, it, it went missing with him or somewhere in, uh, in his expeditions that doesn't exist anymore. But there's an illustration of it in Exploration Fawcett that you could find. Um, and so he thought, like, when he was seeing all this on his first expedition, he's like, "Wait, wait, these aren't these primitive savages that all my colleagues that I don't even like back home think these people are. This is a, this is an advanced culture. There, there's something that's lost here." And so Percy didn't know if it was a fallen civilization that lived in the Amazon or whether it was still out there somewhere and he was trying to find either the ruins of it or the living city, right? So he didn't really know if it was fallen or not, so that's-

Joe Rogan 30:08 It's still interesting that he would think that way instead of this is the pinnacle of civilization-

Luke Caverns 30:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 30:14 ... in the Amazon, which is why they're so advanced.

Luke Caverns 30:17 Mm-hmm.... I'm not sure-

Joe Rogan 30:18 Is that, like, a preconceived notion that he had that there was an advanced civilization and that it had fallen?

Luke Caverns 30:23 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:23 Because if you're looking at the way the people were living, the way he's describing it-

Luke Caverns 30:26 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 30:26 ... it sounds pretty advanced.

Luke Caverns 30:27 Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:28 Like, why wouldn't you assume that these people had lived for thousands of years and eventually-

Luke Caverns 30:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 30:33 ... risen to this current level?

Luke Caverns 30:35 Oh, yeah, yeah. I, I don't know. I, I don't know. I don't know.

Joe Rogan 30:37 Yeah. That's the problem with preconceived notions too.

Luke Caverns 30:39 Yeah, yeah. But I do know that, that he had, uh, he had the utmost admiration and respect for these people. Like, he, he was completely infatuated with their way of life and trying to... You know, what his goal was, was to prove that the, um, that the, like, the narrow-minded perspective of the English aristocrats who thought that they were the pinnacle of civilization, he was determined to prove them wrong.

Joe Rogan 31:03 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 31:03 And so he had a great admiration for these people. Um, and, and he wanted to try to find, like, a, like, a big, big civilization, something with enough people that could rival, um, that could rival Europe. And where he went missing, um, was in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil and, uh, and the last place that they know that he was at was on May 29th, 1925, and he wrote a letter to his wife from Dead Horse Camp, and he was like, "It may be a while before you hear from me. It could be up to a year or two before you hear from me. I'm about to head into a very dense area and my trail runners..." who would, you know, go back and forth with his notes, they weren't gonna follow him out there because it's too dangerous. And, um, that was the last letter that he had written. And he was going, he was heading off into what's called the Xingu region, uh, which is, uh, like, the Xingu River and it's one of the most hostile regions in the Amazon, uh, maybe even, maybe even today. Uh, Teddy Roosevelt had trouble when, when he went there. Um, but the Xingu region is where all of the major LiDAR came out within the last 10 years of, of-

Joe Rogan 32:05 Hmm.

Luke Caverns 32:05 ... they found all the ruins of these giant cities and there's a city called Cariguau, I think, and, uh, it had an estimated, um, population of about a million people, which is the size of Rome.

Joe Rogan 32:17 Whoa.

Luke Caverns 32:18 And, um, you know, when you look at the LiDAR images, you can't get a perspective of how big they are. Uh, I, I have access to a LiDAR database of the entire United States and I've mapped all kinds of, uh, huge uncharted mound sites in Florida, uh, pfft, all of the Southeast. I, I have hundreds of sites marked and, um, when you first look at them on a map, you're like, like, "Oh, okay, like, maybe that looks like it's 50 feet long or something." No. They'll be, like, 300 yards long, like, these giant raised platforms in the, in the middle of the forest here in the US. And if I had access to LiDAR data like that where I could measure it down in the Amazon, some of these things are miles long. Like, raised platforms are a mile long-

Joe Rogan 32:58 Whoa.

Luke Caverns 32:58 ... and they have, and they have highways, like, um... You know, maybe we should pull up a, uh, a, just an image of a LiDAR scan from the Amazon. Um, but you'll, you'll see this, uh, central, um, city area. You'll see step pyramids and raised platforms. Maybe this is where people lived or maybe this is where the market was, and there will be a road that cuts straight through it and you can see the road just goes off in the distance for miles and miles and miles. And so what they would-

Joe Rogan 33:21 Wow.

Luke Caverns 33:21 ... do... Here we go. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:23 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 33:23 This is, um... So this is one of these sites in, um, this is one of these sites, I believe this is in Brazil or maybe it's in Northeast Bolivia.

Joe Rogan 33:30 And is all that area covered completely with jungle right now?

Luke Caverns 33:33 Completely covered in jungle. Yeah. So if you went out there-

Joe Rogan 33:36 You wouldn't see any of this.

Luke Caverns 33:37 ... you may not realize that you were standing on a mound. Like, you really gotta train your eyes. Um, you know, I put out this, uh, I filmed this little series about a year and a half ago called Jungle of Stone where I was going through the jungles in Central America and we charted, uh, this city that had 16 pyramids in it. Uh, you know, we were there all day long and we, uh, we charted 16 pyramids. And when I put it out, I got all these comments that were like, "You're not doing anything but walking on a bunch of hills," because it's so hard to see it. The jungle just claims everything back so it takes... You really have to sit with seeing these things in person for a while before you start recognizing, oh, that is a mound or that is a pyramid-

Joe Rogan 34:14 Hmm.

Luke Caverns 34:14 ... that is a structure under the jungle. And so Percy Fawcett, he... Where, where that LiDAR came out is one of the places that he told his wife. He didn't share this publicly where, where he thought that the city was, but it's, it's, like, bang on. He was, he was exactly correct-

Joe Rogan 34:28 Wow.

Luke Caverns 34:28 ... about where he thought a city would be, and we don't know if he reached it or not.

Joe Rogan 34:32 Wow. It's so interesting because how long has LiDAR been around for?

Luke Caverns 34:38 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 34:38 And how long has it been used? I mean, think about for how long people had no idea that this existed because it was completely covered with jungle. They just assumed if there was evidence of a civilization, it'd be pretty obvious.

Luke Caverns 34:50 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:51 But it's not.

Luke Caverns 34:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:52 And it makes me wonder, like, as technology increases in its potential, like, what other new technologies will be discovered that will allow you to, instead of, like, having this ambiguous view of under the pyramids-

Luke Caverns 35:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:04 ... have, like, a crystal clear-

Luke Caverns 35:06 Oh, man, yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:07 ... like, accurate dimension by dimension, almost like a 3D map.

Luke Caverns 35:12 This, this century for sure. This century is gonna be insane.

Joe Rogan 35:15 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 35:15 It's gonna be insane.

Joe Rogan 35:16 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 35:16 Like, you're gonna have everyone scanning everything.

Joe Rogan 35:19 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 35:19 Uh, all of the Amazon will be mapped with LiDAR bef- by the end of the century. All of the Sahara is going to be mapped with LiDAR by the end of the century.

Joe Rogan 35:27 The Sahara's a big one, right?

Luke Caverns 35:28 Yeah, yeah. Well, those are my two, those are my two big things. Like, when we talk about Atlantis and we talk about lost civilizations, um, I mean, my thing is-

Joe Rogan 35:35 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 35:36 ... the Sahara and, uh, the Sahara and the Amazon, you know?

Joe Rogan 35:40 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 35:40 Both of these things existed pre-Ice Age, especially if we're talking about pre-Ice Age civilization. The Sahara is a, is an oasis, you know, uh, uh, 10,000 plus years ago. It, it's an oasis. You have, what, two or three of the world's largest, uh, lake systems on there. You have rivers everywhere. Uh, you know, it would've been, like, a, a beautiful place to live and-

Joe Rogan 36:00 Abundant resources so there's no worry about food-

Luke Caverns 36:03 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 36:03 ... and shelter.

Luke Caverns 36:03 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:04 You have plenty of time to figure things out, which is-

Luke Caverns 36:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:06 ... the thing that has always made sense to me if you know the history of the Nile Valley and where Egypt was, like, that was a wonderful place-

Luke Caverns 36:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 36:14 ... to live to try to figure things out, right? Because you have so much food.

Luke Caverns 36:18 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:19 And once you have so much food and you're kinda separated from everybody, it's really tough to get to you, so, like-They lived un- unchallenged-

Luke Caverns 36:26 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 36:26 ... in that civilization for thousands of years.

Luke Caverns 36:28 Well, yeah. Yeah. That's, that's amazing. And you know, whenever I, um... You know, so, so growing up, I mean, gosh, I read Fingerprints of the Gods when I was 16. I remember, like, sitting on the couch after school and reading it. And my dad's, like, comes up to me. He's like, "That's a big book." And I go, "I know." It's like I'm reading a textbook for fun, you know? And, and it was, uh, it was, it was dense reading for me a- as a 16-year-old. And so, you know, I, I would... So inspired by, by Graham, and then I went off and, like, got traditionally educated. And, um, so I kinda have both of these perspectives. And I'm of- I'm often shocked and disappointed at how other professional archaeologists and anthropologists explain popular mysteries, you know? Um, like, uh, there was an Egyptologist on, on another pop- popular podcast. And, and, uh... And the podcast host asked him to, uh, properly explain, like, w- you know, the mystery around the pyramid. And it was just so subpar, I was shocked. And I was like, "I'm not even an Egyptologist and I know how to explain these things." And I felt the same way about Zahi. Maybe there's some kind of language barrier there, but it was also like he didn't want to explain these things-

Joe Rogan 37:32 Exactly.

Luke Caverns 37:32 ... on a basic level. But one of the things that I never see talked about is the concentration of energy along the, the, the Nile Valley. Like, okay, so, you know, i- if I had to, if I did put a, drop a pin anywhere on the Earth where I think Atlantis would be, um, I would probably put it, like, in the Sahara somewhere, you know, along one of these major lakes where there's a lot of people living at one time. And then later on, as the Sahara dries up, you know, let's say beginning around, like, 800, or I'm sorry, 8000 BC, it starts rapidly drying up. It's probably a little bit before that. And then by about 4000 BC, it's completely dry. So, your Saharans only have a few places that they can go. They can go to the Mediterranean Coast, they can go to the Atlantic Coast, they can go down, kind of, into the Congo and in the, in the savannas, or they can go to this fertile valley oasis, where it's, like, 500 yards on each side, where it's just completely lush, tropical oasis. And so some people went there. And so you have this hyperconcentration of energy and all these people living somewhere together for what we know is the first time in history. Like, w- we can verify it, I guess, if that makes sense. And, um... And so rather than being able to have these huge pieces of property where they can all live separated from each other, kind of like in the Sahara, you have all this space and it's so luxurious, now you have to live on top of each other. And you have to build up these cities. Uh, you know, you're, you're like building cities. And so all that energy compacted into one place w- in this fertile oasis is either destined to completely crumble and fall apart or it's New York City. It's this-

Joe Rogan 39:07 Mm.

Luke Caverns 39:08 ... thin strip of highly concentrated, genius, hardworking people f- figuring out how to extrapolate the most out of their natural world and create some of the greatest things the world has ever seen. Just like New York City. We did it. You know?

Joe Rogan 39:22 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 39:22 And, um, I've never seen any Egyptologist explain things that way. Like, I think that's a, I think that's a good explanation, at least. And I'm open to things in Egypt being much older, like the Sphinx is definitely older than the pyramids. Um, but, uh, I- I'm just always disappointed at, like, the very low level with which, um, archaeologists and anthropologists will come in and try to explain things to a popular audience. And it's kinda like you were asking, "Okay, but how do you know that?" Like, explain that to me-

Joe Rogan 39:50 Right.

Luke Caverns 39:50 ... in a way that I can understand. How do you know this? And there's never a proper explanation. And I- I don't know what that is. It's like, it's like they strongly dislike the fact that there's mystery out there, and that there are other people who are attempting to answer the mystery that are not part of the good boys club.

Joe Rogan 40:08 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 40:08 You know? So they have this-

Joe Rogan 40:09 That's exactly it.

Luke Caverns 40:10 So they have this knee-jerk reaction to it all. They hate all of it. They don't want to be a part of all of it.

Joe Rogan 40:14 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 40:14 And, um, that's not gonna work going forward. Like, um, you know, not to be political, but this, uh, but this recent election showed that, uh, you're gonna have to appeal to the popular audience in the future. Everyone is, you know?

Joe Rogan 40:27 Yeah. And especially when there's these forums now, like YouTube, where someone like you can put up videos explaining things, or Jimmy Corsetti-

Luke Caverns 40:36 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 40:36 ... or Graham Hancock. Like, the, the access to people to share fascinating ideas-

Luke Caverns 40:43 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 40:43 ... it's not limited to universities anymore.

Luke Caverns 40:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:45 And I think that drives them crazy-

Luke Caverns 40:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:47 ... because they spent so much time being in control.

Luke Caverns 40:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:50 And then all of a sudden, it's just like... And then through a lot of these appearances, like Flint Dibble and Zahi, their credibility erodes-

Luke Caverns 40:59 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 40:59 ... publicly, l- in front of everyone's eyes. And then, you know, there's people that are gonna support both of them on either side.

Luke Caverns 41:05 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 41:06 And who knows how much of it is even real-

Luke Caverns 41:08 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 41:08 ... 'cause now we have AI bots and that they could turn loose by... Whether it's, uh, universities, like the University of Zurich that just got in trouble-

Luke Caverns 41:16 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 41:16 ... for running that experiment with social media, which is really wild.

Luke Caverns 41:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:19 So we don't even know, like, wh- how much of it is organic until you see som- something like voting. And then you go, "Oh, well, this is how people really feel." But how much of that has even been influenced by all these-

Luke Caverns 41:30 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 41:31 ... AI campaigns? What we do know is that human arrogance has always been a real problem. And the same thing that Percy Foster was probably dealing with-

Luke Caverns 41:39 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 41:39 Or was it Foss rather?

Luke Caverns 41:40 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 41:40 Was probably dealing with when he was... You know, the, the people back home that thought these people were primitive.

Luke Caverns 41:45 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:45 It's like this arrogance that human beings-

Luke Caverns 41:47 Looking down their nose at everybody else.

Joe Rogan 41:48 People love to be experts. They love to be experts and they love to d-... And they also equate their own self-worth with being accurate-

Luke Caverns 41:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:58 ... about information that you really can't be accurate about.

Luke Caverns 42:00 Exactly, exactly.

Joe Rogan 42:01 Instead of just being humble, but yet knowledgeable-

Luke Caverns 42:04 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:04 ... which is a great position, you know. And when you talk to someone and they're humble and knowledgeable, that's a w- I... Those are my favorite conversations.

Luke Caverns 42:11 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:11 Because they, they'll tell you what they know and what they don't know and this is why.

Luke Caverns 42:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:15 Archeologists are not doing that, which is why they're rejecting people like Graham Hancock. What they should be doing is embracing the work that he's doing because...... because he's self-funded-

Luke Caverns 42:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:26 ... and because he's just selling books and, you know, and doing his thing and appearing on podcasts and d- d- developing this audience, he's allowed to do all these fantastic v- voyages.

Luke Caverns 42:38 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:38 Like, he's in Iraq right now. Like, studying the ancient Sumerian civilization, like, with the remnants of it.

Luke Caverns 42:44 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:45 And-

Luke Caverns 42:45 Well, there's, uh, there's two things that I'll say there. Um, you know, kinda like, I guess, a running theme of this is, is we're about to enter into, like, archeological Wild West in a way. You know, um, I think that, you know, uh, Jimmy getting involved with, uh, with Gobekli Tepe and the, and the trees that were there-

Joe Rogan 43:04 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 43:04 ... having the trees, the orchards planted over the sites, I mean-

Joe Rogan 43:07 And they're removing 'em now.

Luke Caverns 43:08 Yeah, and, and it, it-

Joe Rogan 43:09 Because of him.

Luke Caverns 43:09 ... it's just, it's just proof that a guy... Like, I, I started watching Jimmy 2018? I mean, gosh, was I? I had just graduated from high school and, um, and so he was kind of, uh, like inspired me to be, like... You know, he was this young charismatic guy that could go online and, and research topics and, and enthusiastically present these topics and, and, uh, and he was effective at doing it and it, it inspired me for a long time. And, uh, and, you know, lo and behold, I guess, what? Six, seven years later he's still at it and he's actually not just inspired people to be interested in the ancient world, but, but had an actual effect on something on the opposite side of the planet. Like, when all this happened, I was like, I was like, I was like, "Yeah, I mean, I get the concern, but I don't think the Turkish government cares what any of us over here in the US think." Sure enough, they removed the trees. And then there's kinda like the backpedaling of, of, "Oh, well it was always in the plan to remove the trees." But I, I think it's... I think, you know, people might disagree with Jimmy's approach, whatever-

Joe Rogan 44:04 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 44:04 ... but, um, but it's... You can't deny the fact that he himself, an independent guy, uh, was able to make so much noise that he affected a government on the opposite side of the planet.

Joe Rogan 44:15 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 44:15 You know? And it, uh... And, and in a way it's like, uh, it shows me, like, "Oh, you know, these expeditions that, that I'm planning and things that I'm gonna go out and survey and document for myself, like, these can make, these can make real changes and these are things I have planned in Florida, here in the, here in the Southeast, in the States, um, in Central America and in the Amazon." And it's, like, encouraging. Like, wow. I mean, we're really approaching a time when independent people are gonna start making real noticeable differences and not just in the digital space that, where people are interested in.

Joe Rogan 44:47 Right, but in the physical archeology world.

Luke Caverns 44:49 Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:50 Yeah. Jimmy's so meticulous too.

Luke Caverns 44:51 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 44:51 Like, he's such a good representative because he's really intelligent, really p- thought-provoking, but also really honest about what he knows and what he doesn't know and he has counterarguments to his own points. He'll tell you s- tell you something and then, "But also it could be this."

Luke Caverns 45:07 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 45:08 "And this is what we know." And because he's been really careful in the way he expresses himself, he's established this community that understands what he does and they trust him.

Luke Caverns 45:20 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 45:20 And they go, "No, no, no. He's gonna tell you the truth. He's gonna tell you what we know and why we know it. He's not gonna make any weird ideological leaps. He's not gonna make any weird judgments. He's just gonna lay out what is fascinating about these things." And because of that, w- whether he has a degree or not a degree, that guy's having a massive impact.

Luke Caverns 45:41 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 45:41 I mean, I don't know how many-

Luke Caverns 45:42 Yeah, nobody can deny that.

Joe Rogan 45:44 What does Bright, what does Bright Insights YouTube channel have for subscribers? And it... By the way, if you haven't watched any of his videos, can't recommend them enough. Love the guy, love the stuff.

Narrator 45:53 1.7.

Joe Rogan 45:54 1.7. By the way, he's been called a Nazi (laughs) .

Luke Caverns 45:58 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:59 Which is, that's just, that's what they use. That's, the, these are the terms. You know, he's been called all, all sorts of terrible things. None of them are true. He's a wonderful guy and he's just a, a man who's deeply fascinated with these mysteries. And when he's pointing out the things that we cannot... Whether it's Baalbeck in Lebanon-

Luke Caverns 46:20 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 46:20 ... the, the trillion... What do they call it? The trillion stones?

Luke Caverns 46:22 Trilithon stones, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:24 Trilithon stones? What, what are the... Whatever. There's certain things that you can point out that people go, "Okay, what the fuck?" Like, he gets to the what the fuck stuff where everybody's like, "Okay, what else you got?"

Luke Caverns 46:34 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 46:34 You know, like, uh, "How come I didn't know this? How come this isn't like something..." Like, when you're talking about ancient history, the history of, um, whether it's Lebanon or Egypt, and when they start talking about these things and they lay out the, the histories of the pharaohs and-

Luke Caverns 46:47 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 46:48 Why aren't you talking about the distance-

Luke Caverns 46:52 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 46:52 ... they carry these fucking enormous 80-ton rocks through the mountains?

Luke Caverns 46:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:57 And how they cut them? Like, why... That's the mystery.

Luke Caverns 47:01 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:01 This is the big piece of evidence that these guys just want to dismiss, "Oh, so it was the national project."

Luke Caverns 47:09 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:09 You know, like, "Okay, yeah, but that doesn't say how you did that-

Luke Caverns 47:12 No, it doesn't.

Joe Rogan 47:13 ... 5,000 years ago. You need to help me out here."

Luke Caverns 47:15 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:16 And when these openings exist and guys like Jimmy run through them, but meticulously document things-

Luke Caverns 47:22 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:22 ... and talk about them with humility and talk about them with a, a general understanding of the absolute undeniable facts and then it creates this enormous audience-

Luke Caverns 47:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:33 ... and then because of that enormous audience, he has a huge impact-

Luke Caverns 47:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:36 ... on actual archeology and that's why they hate him. It's just 'cause he's doing their job better than they're doing their job-

Luke Caverns 47:44 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:44 ... because he's not trapped. He's not stuck in this compartmentalized, ideological position of working for a university.

Luke Caverns 47:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:55 And he doesn't have to worry about funding and he doesn't have to worry about, you know, being chastised by his peers 'cause they're all a bunch of bitches. He doesn't have to worry about that, so he's free and there's a bunch of those guys that are emerging now and guys like yourself and I think that's really important because the gatekeepers have been wrong every step of the way with almost everything. Whether it's medical science-

Luke Caverns 48:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:17 ... whether it's health and nutrition. Whatever it is. Like, we... They've been wrong every damn step of the way.

Luke Caverns 48:23 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 48:23 So, maybe open it up.

Luke Caverns 48:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:25 Just like the internet opened up information to everybody, we need to open up the exploration of information to everybody and not have it contained with a few people that have degrees from places that we know are ideologically captured.

Luke Caverns 48:38 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 48:38 We can see how they behave. We can see the things they say and the way they do things and the way they act and the way... Even the way they affect enrollment.... based on race and gender and sexual preference.

Luke Caverns 48:50 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 48:50 Like, you guys are fucking crazy. This is not how you're supposed to handle knowledge and information.

Luke Caverns 48:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:56 This is a dumb approach, and we see that through basically every place where there's a few group of people, this isolated, insulated group of people, that has the ultimate influence over whatever particular field of study is their specialty.

Luke Caverns 49:13 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 49:13 It's just a danger that the human ego and the human mind fall prey to almost every single time. The internet, what it's done is it's like this great equalizer, and it's just-

Luke Caverns 49:27 It is.

Joe Rogan 49:28 ... it, it has allowed people to have these discu- And you hear a lot of people saying, "You shouldn't do this. You shouldn't be doing this. Don't do your own research. Don't," Like, uh, those are stupid sayings. Like, you can't think like that. You, you, there's gonna be people that say things that are absolutely ludicrous, and you have to be able to, uh, listen to them and then listen to people that are more intelligent and, and, and more rational, and also objective, and go, "That, that guy is ... That's what I'm interested in." I mean, "I'm interested in this guy."

Luke Caverns 49:54 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 49:54 "I know he's not gonna lie."

Luke Caverns 49:56 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 49:56 You know? And there's too many instances of archeologists just lying.

Luke Caverns 50:01 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 50:01 Lying and attacking each other when one of 'em ... Like, clothes first, like that.

Luke Caverns 50:05 Yeah, yeah. Well, attacking each other, I mean, I, I just experienced this the other day. Um, you know, so I had a, a ... And I guess being early on in my career, I, I, I'm passionate about so many different things and, and I'm g- the kind of person that's like, "Oh, I'm passionate about this. This is what I'm gonna do." And so I, uh, I applied to the University of Athens in Greece and I, I, I f- I was really into the classics and, and, uh, I was gonna go for that. And then I, I just had this, uh, let's just say I was in the jungle and I had a, a, a mind-opening experience. And I was reminded of the fact that, uh, uh, my purpose here, the reason I started doing all this was continuing kinda like my family's legacy. And I'm interested in a lot of different things, and I, I'm n- I'm not gonna specialize, I'm not gonna, like, hunker down in this academic path or whatever. And so I, uh, I just decided I'm, I'm not gonna go th- go through with this. So I start, um, you know, publishing, uh, you know, content in my research o- on the Americas again. And, uh, and the Americas are very mysterious. It, it's, uh, I mean, very comparable to Egypt with just in the amount of questions that haven't been answered is insane, and, uh, the Olmec world is fascinating.

Joe Rogan 51:11 Mm.

Luke Caverns 51:11 And so, you know, there's, um, uh, you know, Graham, in, uh, in Fingerprints of the Gods, he talks about how the, the, um, the Olmecs, he thought that they may have like, like, uh, like African features.

Joe Rogan 51:23 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 51:23 And, of course, that was 1995. And so, uh, I don't know, 2015 you guys are talking and, and he's like, he's like, "Well, you know, I published that then, but DNA research has come out that says that, you know, these people don't have African DNA in them, and that maybe this is Polynesian, maybe this is Australasian people intermixing and that's why they have this unique look," whatever. But in the Olmec world, there's this monument that is actually called El Negro, and you look at it and it's not an Olmec. It is an African man. And, um, and so I post about this on my, on my X account and I just kind of, like, list everything I've seen in the Olmec world, and I'm li- I'm like, "You know, this is really fascinating." Maybe this is evidence of Africans who were in, um, who were in the Olmec world. And I hadn't seen this monument before I saw it in person. 'Cause you go in the Olmec ... I- in the Olmec realm in, uh, or the region in Mexico, and you go to these museums and you look at the, the, the log or the ledger that people have been on, and nobody, nobody has visited this museum in the last four months. And before that it was s- you know, six months before that. And these monuments just kinda sit underneath these, uh, metal roofs, uh, you know, to protect 'em from the rain, and it's like this, just l- this completely lost civilization.

Joe Rogan 52:28 Is there an image of this that's available online?

Luke Caverns 52:30 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Y- Um.

Joe Rogan 52:32 Can we see it?

Luke Caverns 52:32 There we go. There we go. So if you pull up an Olmec head, you'll see that these guys are very different looking. And especially if you can get... Yeah, yeah, there we go. Um, look at, uh ... Okay, so that's, uh, yeah, n- Okay, so that's a regular Olmec head. So you can see that these are two different races of people. Um, you know, the, the Olmecs have very soft features, round faces, big eyes, big lips, kinda big noses. They have very soft features. And this El Negro monument has these high cheekbones, this defined jawline, uh, this intense kind of-

Joe Rogan 53:04 But isn't there a lot of variety just in, like, let's just say Italians?

Luke Caverns 53:09 Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 53:09 There's a lot of variety.

Luke Caverns 53:10 Absolutely, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 53:10 So couldn't this just be someone who's on a, a spectrum of features that ... I mean, I don't think it's that much different than the Olmecs.

Luke Caverns 53:17 You don't think so? Well-

Joe Rogan 53:18 No, when I'm looking at it, I could ... I mean, I could imagine. Like, there's, like I said, uh, just, you know, my nationality-

Luke Caverns 53:24 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 53:24 ... Italians. So you hear-

Luke Caverns 53:25 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 53:25 ... there's Italians with very thin faces and there's, uh, these big thick ones.

Luke Caverns 53:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:29 And, like-

Luke Caverns 53:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:30 ... people vary quite a bit.

Luke Caverns 53:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:32 There's, uh, enough similarities that I could say, "Oh, those could be the same people."

Luke Caverns 53:35 Well, the, the only counter I give to that is when you, when you visit the Olmec realm, you see a lot more than just the heads. You see a lot of Olmec faces, dozens and dozens and dozens of them. Maybe well over 100. And when you've seen them all and you kinda get a gist of, like, the way they generally look, this guy will really stand out.

Joe Rogan 53:52 Hm.

Luke Caverns 53:52 Like, I, I took a, a, like, a group of students there, and, and we all ... As soon as we all came in and saw it, based on everything we'd been seeing for the past week, it immediately stood out to us.

Joe Rogan 54:01 Well, certainly the thick brow-

Luke Caverns 54:03 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 54:03 ... is unique-

Luke Caverns 54:04 Well, in the, in the, uh-

Joe Rogan 54:04 ... to the Olde- Olmec are wearing helmets.

Luke Caverns 54:06 And, and that ha- that, that hair as well.

Joe Rogan 54:08 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 54:09 It's, it's kinda that-

Joe Rogan 54:09 Yes.

Luke Caverns 54:09 It's kinda that, uh, that curly hair, and, uh ... Or at least it, it looks like it to me. And so, um ... So anyways, you know, he c- he could be Olmec. Uh, I, I don't ... You know, my identity is not tied up in what I think this is or is not.

Joe Rogan 54:22 But also Olmec could be African, like very, very clearly. Like, that one on the left easily could be an African man.

Luke Caverns 54:29 Which one? This guy right here?

Joe Rogan 54:30 Th- This one, the one next to the white one. To the left of that. To the l- Yeah, right there.

Luke Caverns 54:34 It, it's-

Joe Rogan 54:35 Easily could be an African man.

Luke Caverns 54:36 It certainly does look that way, but, uh, I was on a p- I was on a plane to Mexico a couple months ago, and I was going into the Olmec realm, and I loo- I was like, "I want to take a picture of this guy," and looked to the left of me-And he was an Olmec man sitting next to me.

Joe Rogan 54:50 Wow.

Luke Caverns 54:50 And he was, he was, you know, he looked like, he didn't look like any Mexican I've ever seen. There's something there with the DNA of the Olmec people that is definitely connected with something else that, that you don't see if you go to the Maya realm, that you don't see if you go to, like, Mexico City. They have something in their DNA.

Joe Rogan 55:07 Hmm.

Luke Caverns 55:07 They have this very specific look about them and I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm like, looking and I'm like, "This is an Olmec guy next to me."

Joe Rogan 55:14 So fascinating because it clearly could have been African explorers that-

Luke Caverns 55:18 Well-

Joe Rogan 55:19 ... made it.

Luke Caverns 55:20 Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what. Um, could we look up, um, uh, oh gosh. Look up The Traveler Olmec Monument, if you would please, Jamie. Um, h- it's The Traveler, I, I want to call him, I think he's Monument 13. There's another one called Monument 19 that we should look at, but he's this man that's cl- very clearly not, uh... There we go. Uh, top left, the one that's on Reddit. In fact, this might be my post on Reddit.

Joe Rogan 55:45 This one?

Luke Caverns 55:45 Yes. Yes, sir. So, this guy right here. All right, so this is really, really fascinating. So let's diagnose this. All right, so flags. Flags are invented, this is very unknown fact, flags are invented or the first place that we have evidence for it is along the Nile Valley, um, on these pre-dynastic pots. Uh, which they're not the, not the stone vases, um, but just like clay pottery. They would make little paintings on them and people had these riverboats that had these flags on them and the flags would say what city you had come from or what village you-

Joe Rogan 56:17 Hmm.

Luke Caverns 56:17 ... you had come from. And so that's, so flags are an old world thing. We don't have any evidence of flags in the new world. All right, he's also wearing a turban. He's got this big turban that's draping off the back of his head, and he very clearly has this distinct beard that's popping out. Now, Native Americans, sometimes they can, you know, they are, uh, they're Asiatic. They have, they have Asian DNA and, um, and Asians don't really grow typically, sometimes they'll grow the little like, uh, mustache and little bit of a beard here, but they don't have that big thick beard that you would see, you know, like in Europe or along the Mediterranean, in the Middle East. And so this guy has this big thick beard, and then he's got boots on his feet as well. And we think that these are re- these, uh, glyphs that you see to his left and right, these are really, really early Olmec, uh, glyphs-

Joe Rogan 57:05 Hmm.

Luke Caverns 57:05 ... and they interpret that foot to the left as saying that he came from somewhere, he was a traveler. And so, um, the thought here is, so this is a- this is around 900 BC give or take a little bit. They don't really, they really have no idea when these, when these are made. Like you go to all the monuments and it says, "Made somewhere between 1500 BC and 400 BC."

Joe Rogan 57:28 Keep that up.

Luke Caverns 57:28 And they, they'll say, "1500 BC and 400 BC." And so they, they really are uncertain about how old a lot of these monuments are.

Joe Rogan 57:35 Make it big again, Jamie, please.

Luke Caverns 57:36 But if we, if we shoot for dead center 900 BC, the, uh, the Phoenicians, uh, out of the Mediterranean are launching these sailing expeditions around the coast of Africa. These are the ancient world's greatest sailors that we know of and, um, and so there are, there were like experimental, uh, archeological or scientific, I don't know, uh, expeditions done that show if you would send one of these, uh, early Iron Age boats, or if you send any ship out of the, uh, out of the, uh, the Gates of Hercules or the Strait of Gibraltar, and you send it out into the Atlantic just and it, it drifts just a little bit too far without turning south along the African coast, it will be carried by a current across the Atlantic Ocean down into the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and straight into the Gulf of Mexico. And if that had happened, if people who had looked like it there in the old world, like this guy, if that had happened, somebody from the old world, the, the largest civilization at the time, the empire in this area would've been the Olmecs. And the, the reason I feel so strongly about that is because we do not have flags, turbans or boots in the a- in the ancient Americas. This guy looks nothing like a Native American and the flag, turban and boots are all old world, uh, features.

Joe Rogan 58:53 You know what's fascinating to me too? The image on the lower right of the bird's head looks very similar to the carvings on Göbekli Tepe.

Luke Caverns 59:01 Doesn't it? Doesn't it?

Joe Rogan 59:02 Yes, very.

Luke Caverns 59:03 You know-

Joe Rogan 59:03 The curve of the beak.

Luke Caverns 59:04 Yes.

Joe Rogan 59:04 That's not how birds beaks look. Like that's, that's a very distinct style of artwork.

Luke Caverns 59:10 Well, and it's this-

Joe Rogan 59:11 See if you can find the images of the birds from Göbekli Tepe.

Luke Caverns 59:14 It's this, uh, it's this raised relief art style. So people talk about it-

Joe Rogan 59:18 Yes.

Luke Caverns 59:18 ... a lot with, with Göbekli Tepe. I mean, think about this. This is, this is 11,600 years ago and you have, you have artisans and stonemasons who have been practicing for so long that now they're able to take a blank piece of stone and carve the face off to reveal the artwork from underneath it. Not carve the artwork into the stone-

Joe Rogan 59:39 Right.

Luke Caverns 59:39 ... but carve the stone away and reveal this sculpture from underneath.

Joe Rogan 59:43 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 59:43 Uh, how similar does that look? It's bizarre, right?

Joe Rogan 59:45 Real similar.

Luke Caverns 59:46 And so it's the, it's the exact same kind of art style that you see in the-

Joe Rogan 59:52 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 59:52 ... Olmec realm.

Joe Rogan 59:53 Exactly. The 3D, uh, stone carvings. Instead of carving it directly into the stone, carve the stone around it. They're both doing the same thing.

Luke Caverns 1:00:00 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:00:00 It takes a lot of time.

Luke Caverns 1:00:02 I mean, how-

Joe Rogan 1:00:03 A lot more effort.

Luke Caverns 1:00:03 Could you imagine?

Joe Rogan 1:00:05 Weird, weird stuff. It's also like the idea that this is documenting time.

Luke Caverns 1:00:11 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:00:12 The, you know, the, the, the, the handbags or whatever those things are, what it, what it actually is, is the sun going over the earth.

Luke Caverns 1:00:19 Mm. You know, uh, I have, I'm, I'm writing a paper about this, um, but this might be a good place to talk about it. Um, so you know the, the handbag mystery is, is-

Joe Rogan 1:00:29 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 1:00:29 ... very fascinating. We have them in Assyria, we have them, um, uh, Mesopotamia, um, I, as far as I know, I don't think one's been found in Egypt. You can, you can see them on the top of those T pillars in Göbekli Tepe and there's one in the Olmec realm. Are you familiar with this?

Joe Rogan 1:00:45 No.

Luke Caverns 1:00:45 Uh, Monument 19, if, if we could look that up. It, I mean, dude, it, it, it, I think it's the coolest handbag. And when I saw it in person, I like jumped. Uh, I- I'd been waiting years to see it.

Joe Rogan 1:00:55 That's crazy. It's the same thing?

Luke Caverns 1:00:56 Mo- uh, Olmec Monument 19. The, so this guy, he's wrapped in, uh, he's, he's sitting in Quetzal-

Joe Rogan 1:01:03 Whoa.

Luke Caverns 1:01:03 He's sitting in Quetzalcoatl. If you-

Joe Rogan 1:01:05 Whoa.

Luke Caverns 1:01:05 Could you do the one at the top left where we get the full picture? There we go. So this stone is probably about this big.It's probably about this big and it sits on a table like this. Um, so he's sitting inside the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl-

Narrator 1:01:17 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 1:01:17 Um, and so he's sitting inside the feathered serpent and he's holding this handbag. And I'm not sure... So he has this, uh... And if you can- if you see, he has a feathered serpent mask around his head as well. I'm not sure what exactly is above him. There- well, there are actually two, um... It's really hard to- to make it out, but what's above him, that little box-looking thing-

Narrator 1:01:36 Mm-hmm.

Luke Caverns 1:01:36 ... is some kind of box that's being held up by two birds on each end. But the im- the important thing here is the fact that this is the first depiction of the feathered serpent in all of Mesoamerica that we know of, and it's, uh... It might be the oldest handbag known as far as, like, what we have official dates for. And so the idea here is that he's some kind of sacred shaman, bringer of enlightenment, bringer of knowledge, something like that. And so I had been on the hunt for another

Luke Caverns 1:02:06 handbag. Everywhere I go, I'm always looking for a handbag. I was in Cambodia a couple weeks ago. I'm going around the temples of Angkor Wat, and there's hieroglyphs and- and, uh, and, uh, carvings all over the walls. I'm looking for a handbag, I can't find one. But when I was in, um, when I was in Central Mexico, I was at a site called Cacaxtla, and I found another handbag person. I've never m- uh, like, officially published it. It's on my X, if you'd wanna look it up.

Narrator 1:02:31 What is the timeline for that one?

Luke Caverns 1:02:33 They don't really know. Uh, when you look at the monument, it says, uh, it says anywhere from 1400 BC to 400 BC. That's just what they think. I mean, the Olmec-

Narrator 1:02:41 Just a guess.

Luke Caverns 1:02:41 The Olmec realm is so uncertain and, um, and we don't have hard dates for almost- for almost anything. They appear on the historical li- on this historical timeline as a fully-fledged civilization capable of creating what you're seeing from the (snaps fingers) very beginning, just like so many civilizations. It's like as soon as they arrive on, you know, as soon as they arrive in the world, they're doing everything to the fullest capacity and, uh, we don't have any evidence in the Olmec realm of them working their way towards being able to do things like this. It's just from the very beginning, they're able to make monuments like this, move these 50-ton Olmec heads. Uh, the largest head is, uh... This- you'll find this interesting. Um, so there was a nautical engineer that, uh, MEK, which is an organization I'm- I'm with. It's the Maya Exploration Center. It's- it's run by Dr. Ed Barnhart, and I'm- I'm a- a member of it. And, um, and one of the guys that worked with us, uh, traveled into the Olmec realm, and he- he's a nautical engineer and he's fascinated with, um... He's fascinated with how were the Olmecs moving these huge heads up and down these rivers. So they live in, like, the rivers, swamps, they have to cross some mountain ranges. How are you getting these heads 90 miles away, uh, from the Sierra de Tuxtla volcanic belt? That's where they're pulling the basalt from, 'cause we found unfinished heads, like, at the base of these big basalt quarries, and they're transporting them 90 kilometers away through, you know, like I was saying, rivers and valleys.

Narrator 1:04:06 90 miles or kilometers?

Luke Caverns 1:04:07 I think it's kilometers.

Narrator 1:04:09 Okay.

Luke Caverns 1:04:09 It's kilometers as the crow flies-

Narrator 1:04:10 Oh, okay. Okay.

Luke Caverns 1:04:10 ... I'm- I'm pretty sure. And, uh... So much further when you're actually dealing-

Narrator 1:04:15 Right.

Luke Caverns 1:04:15 ... with the complications of the terrain. And, um, and so, um, he was fascinated, like, okay, how do they get them to the river? And- and- and then when... How do they get them on the boat? And when it's on the boat, how does- how exactly does this work if they're transporting it by boat? And kind of the same mystery in Egypt too, right? Like, how- how do the nuances of these things work? So he devised this algorithm or whatever where you could put in the hypothetical size of your Olmec raft and put in the hypothetical size of an Olmec head into this, uh, database or whatever, and when you made a raft that was too big to go down the narrow stretches of the Coatzcalcos River, which is like the Olmecs' Nile River, when the raft was too big and too wide to actually go down the river and you put a five-ton Olmec head on it, it would sink that raft. But the smallest Olmec head is six tons and the largest one is 52 tons. So how are they... how are they doing it? And this is something that, like, all archeologists have quietly known, this idea of they're just being transported on these simple balsa rafts must be wrong. It's, you know, it's- it's unexplained. How- how are these things being done? And I- I just find this realm really fascinating.

Narrator 1:05:25 Wow. It is f- And then when... Do they even know what language they spoke, the Olmecs?

Luke Caverns 1:05:31 No, we- we don't know what language they spoke. We don't even know what they called themselves. The only reason we call them the Olmecs is because Cortes, 1519 to 1521, he's moving through Mexico to conquer Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. Uh, during this time, you have these, uh, Spanish chroniclers that are taking in information, you know, uh, taking in information, but not at the rate that everything's being destroyed. You know, all these people are dying from this, uh, disease and influenza. And there's a record of what the people who lived in the Olmec region are called at that time in 15, uh, 1520, let's say, and the Aztecs called them the Olmecs in their language, Nahuatl, and those Olmec pe- the- the- the name means the rubber people or the people of the land of rubber. They produced rubber, and that's how the Olmecs were so rich so early on in time. But these were not... The people living in 1519 are not the Olmecs. There has already... The Olmecs have fallen and there are other cu- cultures that have risen and fallen in this same region as well. The Olmecs are far, far, far, far into the distant past. Uh, the Aztecs maybe didn't even know who the Olmecs were.

Narrator 1:06:38 Whoa.

Luke Caverns 1:06:39 You know- you know, uh, so are you familiar with Teotihuacan?

Narrator 1:06:41 Yeah.

Luke Caverns 1:06:42 The, you know, the- the ma- the three massive... Well, you have the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of the Moon, and then the Temple of, uh, Quetzalcoatl, and they form this kind of, like, uh, Orion's Belt alignment similar to Giza. Well, you know, when the Aztecs arrived in Mexico, Teotihuacan had been abandoned for almost a th- a thousand years, uh, we think. So when they arrived, Teotihuacan was already gone. We don't even know the name of Teotihuacan. We don't know the name of the people.

Narrator 1:07:09 Wow.

Luke Caverns 1:07:09 We don't know the name of the city. Um-... no, we know their relationship with other people around them, like the Maya were at war with Teotihuacan, but the civilization had already fallen. So, when the Aztecs arrived, the Olmecs had been gone for almost 2,000 years, at least.

Joe Rogan 1:07:26 Wow.

Luke Caverns 1:07:26 The Olmecs had already been gone. Teotihuacan had been gone for a thousand years. Uh, the Maya had already collapsed. The, the, the Maya collapsed long before the Spanish got there. Um, and so, you know, it's just, again, like, like, the, the Americas are just so mysterious and there's so much to know there. And so, kind of getting back to what I was saying is when I, um, when I talk about the mysteries of the Americas, I immediately get accosted by other of my "colleagues." I don't have any colleagues in the academic realm, but, uh, you know, other academics who will, like, immediately jump in my comment section on X or whatever, and they'll reprimand me. And they'll be like, "Oh, so back to the pseudoarchaeology, is it?" And I'm like, "So, so I can't talk about anything that's fascinating. I need to talk about things that are boring so you don't get upset with me." And now, it's just like, uh, the, the, the popular audience has completely had enough of it, and I'll have, like, 15 people jump in and de- (laughs) -

Joe Rogan 1:08:19 Yeah, I've seen that.

Luke Caverns 1:08:20 ... you know, defend me. And, and be like-

Joe Rogan 1:08:21 It's fun to watch. (laughs)

Luke Caverns 1:08:22 Yeah, and they'll be like, and they'll be like, be like, they'll be like, you know, "Okay, this is a perfect representation of what you guys do." I step just slightly out of this line of what you think is appropriate for me, and I'm talking about things that are interesting, that inspire people to be interested in the ancient world, to go see these sites. Like, these people, they don't like you, they don't like the people that you have on, but how many people do you think you've sent to Egypt? You know, like-

Joe Rogan 1:08:46 Oh, quite a few.

Luke Caverns 1:08:46 You had a significant impact. This show had a significant impact on me being interested in the ancient world, and I have traveled all over the world, you know, uh, because largely, you know, some of this show inspired me to do that. And, um, and, uh, I'm probably one of the few people that found you because of Graham Hancock. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:09:05 (laughs) That's awesome.

Luke Caverns 1:09:05 Yeah, yeah, rather than the other way around. And, um, and so, you know, I've traveled all over the world, and then what I have done is inspired other people to travel around the world. So, you know, how many of these archaeologists that are keyboard warriors hiding, hiding behind, you know, a, a, a desk or whatever, how many of these people are inspiring people to travel around the world? And, and, you know, it's just, it's just, again, we're about to reach this, like, archeological Wild West where I don't really know what's gonna happen in the future. It's-

Joe Rogan 1:09:31 You're always gonna have people that are threatened by an emerging new thing.

Luke Caverns 1:09:36 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:09:37 And they're, they're going to attack it. Like, you know, famously in this world, Howard Stern used to attack podcasts as being useless.

Luke Caverns 1:09:46 Oh, really?

Joe Rogan 1:09:46 Like, "Why are you wasting your time?"

Luke Caverns 1:09:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:48 You know, get a radio show. Figure out how to do it. This is the beginning, the early days. You know, obviously you can't do that anymore. But I think the same thing is happening with ar- with archaeologists because Flint Dibble's own university that has an archaeology program, they're cutting the archaeology program.

Luke Caverns 1:10:06 I saw that. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:07 Yeah. Which is, this is why. Like, you're in this, like, survival mode, this famine mode.

Luke Caverns 1:10:12 Yeah, it's too bad.

Joe Rogan 1:10:12 And fa- it's terrible. But famine thinking is always very dangerous. Um, you, you see it with people that don't want other people to be successful. It, it exists in the comedy world.

Luke Caverns 1:10:24 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:24 There's famine thinking. When other people start doing better, they start attacking those people. They never attack people that are- aren't doing as well as them.

Luke Caverns 1:10:29 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:30 It's just a natural human instinct, unfortunately. And it's a natural human instinct for people with poor character. And I think that these academic institutes, they reinforce poor character, and they, they actually encourage it. Poor character and the, this, like, labeling people in the worst possible light in order to make your point.

Luke Caverns 1:10:50 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:50 Which is, like, ad hominem attacks are always a sign that your argument sucks.

Luke Caverns 1:10:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:53 Everybody knows that. If you really understand debating and you really s- understand, like, the actual impact that these kind of conversations have on people, the objective person on the outside looking at it, they see someone attacking someone, calling them all these name- unfounded.

Luke Caverns 1:11:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:11:07 And they go, "Oh, that guy's argument probably sucks." Like, instantaneously.

Luke Caverns 1:11:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:10 So, they're destroying themselves while they're doing this.

Luke Caverns 1:11:13 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:13 But this is, you'll see this in every walk of life.

Luke Caverns 1:11:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:11:17 You'll see this in everything. It's just a human thing when they don't want to work as hard as other people, or they don't have the young fire like you have.

Luke Caverns 1:11:24 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:11:25 Like, there's a thing that people have when they're very curious and young and they don't have maybe a lot of responsibilities or bills or problems, and they can just, they can devote their energy to this pursuit.

Luke Caverns 1:11:36 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:11:36 That terrifies people.

Luke Caverns 1:11:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:37 That have been kind of, like, half-assing it for a long time. Half-assing it and hiding behind these, these, you know, certificates on their