Joe Rogan Experience #2374 - Ben van Kerkwyk

1. 0:00 – 2:54

   A metallic “Tic Tac” deep under Hawara: why Rogan wanted Ben on

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night! All day! (instrumental music plays) Ben, so excited to talk to you, man. I have been so looking forward to this since I saw your video on the Labyrinths in Egypt. Spoiler alert.

   4. BKBen van Kerkwyk0:22

      (laughs)

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:22

      There appears to be a 40-meter-long metallic, Tic Tac-shaped object. How m- how deep into the ground?

   6. BKBen van Kerkwyk0:31

      Uh, it's in that, so ... It's in the central atrium, which we'll get into what that is, but somewhere in the realm of 60, 70 meters, so ... Man, what's that in feet? Like, 200 feet, 150 to 190 feet down. Something like that.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:45

      And ... So, for anybody who's interested, what is the name of that video that you put out?

   8. BKBen van Kerkwyk0:50

      I think it's the Ancient Structure, like, that's said to be Greater than the Pyramids. I try to tease it a little bit-

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:55

      Yes.

   10. BKBen van Kerkwyk0:55

       But, yeah, it's- it's on that, it's on my channel. I mean, it's-

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:57

       Well, it was a good tease. You got me.

   12. BKBen van Kerkwyk0:58

       Thank you. (laughs)

   13. JRJoe Rogan0:59

       I- I dove right in and I- I remember, I was in the gym while I was watching it, and I- I literally stopped working out. And I was like, "Okay, I gotta pause this."

   14. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:05

       (laughs)

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:05

       'Cause this is not something that I can consume while I'm working out. I need to, like, really pay attention to this 'cause it's so wild.

   16. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:12

       Yeah, and I- and I- I honestly, the- the, I'm grateful for how, like, that video took o- like, it, for me, it took off with way bigger than- than ones that I've done in the past. I'd talked about the Labyrinth in the past, and it's- it's a much longer video, and, uh, I was- I was really glad to get the chance to dive into these details 'cause I've been wanting to revisit the Labyrinths for a long time. However, there's just been recently a bunch of new data that came up about things that happened a decade or two ago, all in, you know, inside the last decade that really changed that picture. And that was, it was things like the Merlin Burrows scans that- that correlated other scans and also reported on, yeah, there seems to be a metallic object down there. And this isn't, you know, this isn't sort of crazy emerging science. This is a- a- a legitimate company that ha- is using technology that's been well-established in defense and in- in the UK defense. It came out of the- the UK military as a technology that's been more or less proven, so ... And the guy that- that, Tim Acres, rest in peace, unfortunately, he's since passed. But he, uh, you know, what he said about this object, like, he's- he is a credible guy to- to say this. He- he doesn't draw conclusions about what it might be, but it's definitely ... It's not wood, it's not stone. It's metal. It's not unlike other metal that he's seen, although he, they couldn't classify what exact type of metal it is. But he said, yeah, there is a, in this central atrium ... 'Cause the Labyrinth has multiple levels and it's- it's almost like you're, imagine yourself standing in a shopping mall and- and you have that central atrium where you can see all these levels. And it's like this big central chamber that connects to these multiple levels that's open. It's at least 40 meters long. It's really tall, and in the center of it is what's more than 40, 'cause it contains this single sort of 40-piece, 40-meter-long object that's sitting in there.

2. 2:54 – 4:31

   Ancient sources and the Labyrinth’s location in the Faiyum

   1. JRJoe Rogan2:54

      So, how did you find out about the Labyrinths? Like, thi- this is something that has been talked about for a long time.

   2. BKBen van Kerkwyk3:02

      Thousands of years.

   3. JRJoe Rogan3:03

      Yeah, but n- i- no one, i- i- it's not in any th- like, traditional archeology books. It's not-

   4. BKBen van Kerkwyk3:10

      It is.

   5. JRJoe Rogan3:11

      Is it?

   6. BKBen van Kerkwyk3:11

      Yeah, yeah. No, it is. So the Labyrinths is kind of the, this is the other part that draw, that drew me to it, uh, is that it isn't something that's coming out of left field, right? It's- it's not like there's, "Oh, no one ever heard of this before." It- it's literally a structure that was written about extensively over hundreds of years in antiquity by authors like Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Polonius Melio. Like there's- there's all of these- these writers of antiquity, and you're talking about timeframe from like 500 BC up to the first century AD-

   7. JRJoe Rogan3:41

      Oh.

   8. BKBen van Kerkwyk3:41

      ... had visited it, and they'd- they'd written about it and talked about it, and they gave it this legend. Be, you know, guys like Herodotus said that it surpasses the pyramids in grandeur. And then you have ... Yeah, so this is the, this is from Herodotus's histories in the fifth century BC and he says, uh, "For this I saw myself and I found it greater than words can say, for if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all of the great works produced by the Hellenes, the Greeks, they would prove to be inferior in labor and expense to this labyrinth." So, he's- he's saying that all of the temples of the Greeks, of ancient Greece, you've been there-

   9. JRJoe Rogan4:15

      Yeah.

   10. BKBen van Kerkwyk4:15

       ... you've seen the- the Acropolis and just, if you added them all up, the labor to produce them would be inferior in what it would take to just make this one thing in Egypt, the Labyrinth.

   11. JRJoe Rogan4:24

       That is underground?

   12. BKBen van Kerkwyk4:25

       That's underground, right.

   13. JRJoe Rogan4:26

       D- how do conventional archeologists approach this? Do they discuss this at all?

3. 4:31 – 7:31

   From Petrie’s ‘it’s gone’ to modern geophysics: the Labyrinth reappears

   1. BKBen van Kerkwyk4:31

      Yes, uh, they do. It's- it's been discu- it, bas- what happened was, so you had n- they always, we always kind of knew where it was, so you know, you have the- the classical authors o- of antiquity which coincides with what you might call the Ptolemaic period of ancient Egypt. It's a transition from d- like, dynastic Egypt into becoming essentially a- a Roman province, like an imperial province of Rome. And that runs you up to about, you know, four- 4- or 500 AD. And then sort of, you know, civilization has, we have the Dark Ages, we sort of have Roman Empire collapses. And it's not until again you get to the Renaissance and you- you have, uh, artists and other authors are looking at these historical accounts and they're talking about it, they're drawing it. Some of the depictions you see from the Labyrinth are in that. And then, again, not until the emergence of what I would call modern archeology in the 18th century, so guys like Karl Lepsius in the 1700s started to look at these accounts and go and- and survey the place where they said it was. So, it, you know, Herodotus and these authors, I- I selected the quotes here to just, d- there's a lot more that they say about it. But then, but one of the things they talk about is they kind of give descriptions of where it is. They say it's near what was called Lake Moiris and, um, and it's near the, what, uh, a city that was the- the temple of the crocodiles, Crocodilopolis or- or Ancient Arsinoë is the other name for it. And we know where that is. And Lake Moiris sort of somewhat still exists. It's much smaller now, but it's in this region called the Faiyum of Egypt. So, if you have a look at Egypt on a map, you can imagine, it's desert and you have from north to south, you have this green line of the Nile.... traces it down. But on the left side, you look at it, there's this leaf-shaped depression that's all green. It's called the Faiyum. It's a depression whi- which used to flood with the Nile. Today, they use it for agriculture. And it's right at that neck of the Faiyum, where it connects up to the Nile Valley, and he also described it... Th- they also described the pyramid that's at the site because there is a, the pyramid to Amenemhat III on that site. So they give us all these descriptors and everyone kind of agreed, "Yeah, so it's at this place called Hawara," where I've been to several times. There's still a pyramid there and there's just great fields of sand and, and, and like, open, little open-air libraries with chunks of stone. And what happened was that Karl Lepsius went there and he said, "Well, I've discovered the ruins of like, a Roman town that's built on the surface." There's nothing crazy about it. Flinders Petrie was the guy who kind of got the closest. Now, Petrie went there in the late 1800s and early 1900s and he was excavating. He dug down seven or eight meters. He got down and he found this massive stone slab of, of beton or plaster that was huge, like, a thousand feet long. Like, it was as m- he sort of traced the edges of it, and he's like, "I'm standing on the foundation of the labyrinth." So what he said is like, "It's all gone." Like, it's basically... Petrie said, "It's been quarried. This place has been a source of stone for literally millennia, so it's gone." So it pretty much... Everyone since then in archeology, Egyptology is like... And if you look on Wikipedia, they'll tell you, "Oh, it's, it's gone." It was destroyed. It was quarried away. Petrie says, you know, "I'm standing on the, the foundation of it, the bottom layer,"

4. 7:31 – 13:27

   2008–2009 Matagir Expedition: methods, results, and alleged suppression

   1. BKBen van Kerkwyk7:31

      and that's it. It's, "There's nothing here." And so that's always been kind of the position of orthodox Egyptology look in the textbooks. That's where it is. But that's all changed because there's been a whole bunch of different now scientific expeditions there. This is where it gets into some intrigue because the, the, the Matagir Expedition, the Cairo University Expedition. I mean, these, these happened. Their results have come out since, but they were covered up at the time. They were suppressed. So the first guy to real-

   2. JRJoe Rogan7:57

      What year was this?

   3. BKBen van Kerkwyk7:58

      2008 was the Matagir Expedition.

   4. JRJoe Rogan8:00

      They were covered up?

   5. BKBen van Kerkwyk8:02

      Yes.

   6. JRJoe Rogan8:02

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   7. BKBen van Kerkwyk9:23

      Yeah, so what, what-

   8. JRJoe Rogan9:24

      Is this our boy Zawi?

   9. BKBen van Kerkwyk9:25

      Yeah, (laughs) Zahi it is.

   10. JRJoe Rogan9:27

       Zahi? Sorry if you call him Zawi.

   11. BKBen van Kerkwyk9:28

       It was. And look... And again, not my words. This is the words of Louis de Cordier who was... He's a Belgian artist and entrepreneur who, who funded and drove the Matagir Expedition. He did it in conjunction with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, which at the time was helmed by Zahi Hawass. Also, with the NRIAG, which is the, uh, National Research Institute for like, um, like basically subsurface studies, so that's those guys dragging that box around. So they used a whole bunch of different techniques to look at these areas around that pyramid at the site of Hawara. Things like ground penetrating radar, geomagnetism, very low frequency like seismic tomography, electrical resistivity tomography. There's a, there's a bunch of different techniques that are well-established. Known sciences isn't like the cuff risk scans that was like, you can debate the, the merits of the technology. This is established technology. And they found the labyrinth, so... And what he found was, is that, yes, so what Lepsius said about the ruins of a Roman or Greek or Persian town with mud bricks and stuff, yep, that's there in the first few meters. You go down, then you hit the water table, so that, that's the other issue on this site, is the water table. So the water's at like five meters below the surface, and under that is the slab that Petrie found, so like six, seven meters is, is at that, that huge slab that Petrie found that he thought was the foundation, and then below that... Petrie didn't dig deep enough. Below that we can find essentially a labyrinthian structure of granite and very, very dense rocks, uh, and walls and, and, um, like a maze-like structure that's, that has walls that are meters thick. There's another great slide in there that's, that's the green and it's the actual VLF front. That's it there, so... Yeah, so this is at eight meters with VLF sounding so you can see like this labyrinthian structure of these walls and all of these lines and walls. So these are like granite. And the scale of this, it's a hundred meters vertically by a 150 meters-

   12. JRJoe Rogan11:19

       A hundred meters tall?

   13. BKBen van Kerkwyk11:21

       Well, no, so if-

   14. JRJoe Rogan11:21

       Vertically?

   15. BKBen van Kerkwyk11:22

       No, no, so the, the, the y-axis I guess of this, so we're looking down in the ground here-

   16. JRJoe Rogan11:26

       Oh, I see, I see.

   17. BKBen van Kerkwyk11:26

       ... but you gotta look at the scale, like across the top, that's a 150 meters, right? So I mean what, 450 feet? So these are big walls.

   18. JRJoe Rogan11:34

       So it's-

   19. BKBen van Kerkwyk11:35

       These are big chambers and big walls.

   20. JRJoe Rogan11:36

       For people at home, it's like a football field.

   21. BKBen van Kerkwyk11:38

       Yeah, it's a football field. Well, it's more, I mean a hundred-

   22. JRJoe Rogan11:40

       More. A hundred meters is-

   23. BKBen van Kerkwyk11:42

       I mean, in Austr- in Australia, it's something like a hundred meters is the football field I think. I don't know how big, pretty close to-

   24. JRJoe Rogan11:46

       Yeah, well it's a hundred yards. What is the difference between a hundred yards and a hundred meters?

   25. BKBen van Kerkwyk11:48

       It's... A hundred yards is a little less. A little less. So 150 me- and, and this is only a section of the labyrinth. They, they scanned two sections. Uh, the labyrinth itself is said to be much, much larger than this. They, so they found-

   26. JRJoe Rogan12:01

       Much larger than that?

   27. BKBen van Kerkwyk12:02

       Oh, that's huge. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it extends-

   28. JRJoe Rogan12:05

       So what is the overall structure like? What, how-

   29. BKBen van Kerkwyk12:07

       It's like a thousand feet at least.

   30. NANarrator12:10

       Wow.
5. 13:27 – 20:34

   Politics, Zahi Hawass, and the groundwater problem as motive

   1. NANarrator13:27

      And they have dismissed things in the past-

   2. BKBen van Kerkwyk13:29

      Yes.

   3. NANarrator13:30

      ... that they then accepted later.

   4. BKBen van Kerkwyk13:32

      Yeah, a great example is the... honestly, the, the ScanPyramids project. So when... So they got ahead of themselves a little bit. This is the, the muon detection, the cosmic ray detection stuff, they've been running that experiment for years at the, at Giza in the Great Pyramid. They put the... And every time I go in there, there's always different sets of equipment at different places on it. But these muon detectors, they, they have them under the ground and in the Grand Gallery, and it just takes years to collect data. Occasionally these cosmic particles, they'll pick one up and it's... You're able to detect voids or, you know, they have a... They can somehow tell the difference between it, it traveling through solid matter versus a void. Takes years to build up a, a resolute picture, but once they did, they said, "Oh, okay, so we've discovered that big void in the pyramid." But they'd also discovered the small void at the, at the main entrance. If you, if you look up at it today, there's those chevron blocks. Like above... You, you go in down here at the Al-Ma'mun's tunnel, but at the top where the descending passage actually exits the pyramid, the original entrance, there's these big chevron blocks and behind that is that chamber. So you remember a few years ago they made a big fuss, but... And as an example, like when the, when the ScanPyramids guys on their own initiative announced that we've made these discoveries, I mean, they... Zahi basically came out and said, "This is bullshit. This doesn't exist. There's nothing there and if there is something there, we knew about it already," you know? (laughs)

   5. NANarrator14:50

      (laughs)

   6. BKBen van Kerkwyk14:50

      And, and you go on a couple of years and when now it's time to do the press releases and to roll out, um, you know, the footage and he's... Who's standing at the, at the podium making the announcement and showing the foot- Zahi's doing it. Like he's-

   7. NANarrator15:02

      He has to, yeah.

   8. BKBen van Kerkwyk15:04

      Yeah, and I just-

   9. NANarrator15:04

      Fascinating situation over there with him.

   10. BKBen van Kerkwyk15:06

       Uh, yes. I, I-

   11. NANarrator15:07

       You know?

   12. BKBen van Kerkwyk15:08

       I did a video. I just released it a few days ago that got into some even more intrigue about stuff that's happened at Giza in the, in the, in the... at the Giza Plateau in the 1990s, which we can, we can get into that too. But, so yeah, what happened with the Madahar Expedition and the labyrinth was that 2008 and '9 they finished their, um, their on-site work, they were ready to release the data. They, they put on a very small public lecture at Ghent University in Belgium. No one really attended it. And then they got told to start... And again, in the words of Louis de Cordier, 'cause he waited like two or three years and then he put this out there, he said that he was told to cease any and all discussion or release of information from the Madahar project, and him and his team members were threatened with national security sanctions-

   13. NANarrator15:49

       Oi.

   14. BKBen van Kerkwyk15:50

       ... from Egypt. Which means that, you know, I, I think at the low level, like if you come to Egypt we'll arrest you and if not, well, maybe we'll come and get you. I don't know. It's, this is national security sanctions was, was the term.

   15. NANarrator15:58

       Isn't there a way to sort of massage that situation and to talk to Zahi and say, "Listen, you can be the guy who found this"?

   16. BKBen van Kerkwyk16:07

       Oh, I... That would have been the case. I think that was a given if, if it had been released. I actually think in the case... So it's funny, I, I, I kind of don't really blame him so mu- I think this was a political, uh, decision, not a... Not s- And these people say, "Oh, you're hiding the truth," and whatever. Yeah, okay, that, that's happening. There's new data that's an amazing, amazing find that, that could change the world. In my opinion though, honestly, the labyrinth is the biggest archaeological discovery of the millennium. When we get into what that structure is and how big it is and the way it's reported in antiquity, there's nothing bigger than like... Herodotus says it surpasses the pyramids. Like, it's like finding more Giza... like a Giza Plateau somewhere, like-

   17. NANarrator16:45

       Under the ground?

   18. BKBen van Kerkwyk16:46

       Under the ground. Like you can't... I just think it would be the biggest discovery of the millennium, which is part of the problem because I think unfortunately in Egypt - and this is just my, um, intuition and my sort of read of the situation - what's happened is that, that the reality is the groundwater level is rising, right? So it's, it's kind of attacking that part of the site, at least the, the higher levels of the labyrinth for sure are suffering in this salty groundwater, right? It is gonna slowly erode because that groundwater's come way up. We know it's come way up because Flinders Petrie, back in the, you know, late 18th, early 19th century, actually got in to under the pyramid. And you can't... Today, if you go to that pyramid, you... There is a passage you can go down, you go down a few steps and just throw a pebble, it's just water and, and debris and mud and-

   19. NANarrator17:28

       So this water table, it has risen slowly over-

   20. BKBen van Kerkwyk17:32

       No, since the 1960s, since they built the dam.

   21. NANarrator17:35

       Oh.

   22. BKBen van Kerkwyk17:35

       So it's the high dam. So what happened, it's... This is the problem, right? So you've got all these factors. It's where it is. So it's Hawara, the neck to the Faiyum. Now Egypt, I love Egypt. I go to Egypt a couple times a year every year and fantastic place, but they are one of... Like they're food poor in terms of like they're the net biggest importer of wheat, they need all the agriculture they can get. The Faiyum is a huge agricultural area. There's a huge irrigation canal called the Bawabi Canal that's been cut in there in like the 1840s. Same guy who built the Suez Canal made it. Um, cuts it in there. So you've got this situation of like, all right, we've got all of this agriculture happening. We've got farmers' water rights-... messing with this and it's, and it happens to be running through this ancient site that could be the biggest discovery of our time. And it's happening because we built a dam on the Nile. And, and what happened with the High Dam in the '60s, like, there's a low dam the British built in, like, 1901, 1902, then, then they actually partnered with the Soviet Union to build this high dam. There's actually still a monument to Egyptian-Soviet Union friendship at the dam. It's pretty cool. Um, but when they built that High Dam, it essentially stops that yearly cycle of inundation of the Nile. So everyone, you know, we always talk about the Nile flooding, right? Every year that it rains in Africa and the south, you get this huge flood that comes up the Nile and it, it floods out and you get this deposit of, of, you know, black mud and, and real fertile ground and they would use that to farm. They built the dam, it, you get rid of that yearly cycle, right? And what happens, people, it seems counterintuitive because people are like, "Well, it's less water in the Nile." Well, no, what, what the dam did was eliminate the nine-month dry season. So you had the three-month wet season but then you, you don't have that, uh, nine-month dry season now, so you have essentially more water for more time in the Nile, which is, which is having this effect of rising the water table. So, you combine that with the size of Hawara and the project, the scope of the project to try and remediate and save or excavate, start working at the labyrinth, I mean, you're talking, like, millions and millions. It's, it's not an easy problem to solve on an area that size to try and get the water out, divert the farmer's water, deal with all of those problems, you know, and then ... So, what I think the options Zahi might have been left with here is, like, well, it's either gonna cost us an absolute bomb to, to try and do this for, like, we don't know what sort of gain. It'll probably be a decade before that place is suitable for tourism. It's ... There's not much to see there even now. Or we basically say we've discovered it, but we're not gonna do anything about it 'cause it's too expensive and you're gonna face a lot of international criticism for that. So I think the, the, the decision was likely made, in my opinion, complete speculation, that it's just easier to brush this under the table. This never happened, we never discovered this.

   23. JRJoe Rogan20:20

       (laughs)

   24. BKBen van Kerkwyk20:20

       This doesn't exist. Let's just go on selling tickets on the Giza Plateau and pumping water out to the Fayoum for agriculture.

   25. JRJoe Rogan20:27

       God-

   26. BKBen van Kerkwyk20:28

       (laughs)

   27. JRJoe Rogan20:29

       ... how shortsighted. Now, when you say millions, were you just gonna say dollars or were you gonna say gallons of water?

6. 20:34 – 22:23

   Cairo University/Polish follow-up and claims of retaliation

   1. BKBen van Kerkwyk20:34

      No, dollars. I mean, I think the project, the remediation project at Hawara would not be a s- it's not a simple thing. Uh, in fact, they, they did do, there was another expedition after the Madahir Expedition in, like, this was 2009. Uh, Cairo University along with a Polish university went out there to try and figure out what is the deal with the groundwater. Where's it coming from? You know, like, what direction? And what ... They were doing, they were doing geological test pits and all these boreholes to figure out the water situation. Um (laughs) , according to them, that, that information was also covered up because they also did ground penetrating radar surveys, also confirmed the labyrinth. The guy who was in charge of that in Cairo University was actually put in jail by Zahi. Again, this is on their report when the information finally came out in 2017. He lost his job, obviously, as part of it. So they covered that up too, but they had, they had tried to-

   2. JRJoe Rogan21:23

      Put him in jail for what?

   3. BKBen van Kerkwyk21:25

      For, I guess, for working on the site. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know the reason. It's, it's on their report though. That's what they say-

   4. JRJoe Rogan21:32

      Wow.

   5. BKBen van Kerkwyk21:32

      ... is that he was jailed because he, uh, Zahi o- allegedly halted the project and then put the guy in jail. This is what they say on their, on, on the report from that, uh, expeditional, that, that, that work which came out, like, a, a decade after they'd done it.

   6. JRJoe Rogan21:50

      Wow (laughs) .

   7. BKBen van Kerkwyk21:50

      And I dig it up on the internet. I'm like, "Well, this is interesting," because their results are interesting, but they, even after their work, their conclusion was, "Well, the water's a very complicated (laughs) problem." It's coming from a couple different directions. Northeast is the shallows. Like, it's coming in from this way, but it's also coming from another direction. They'd have to dig a lot more test holes, uh, in a wider area to really figure it out. And I think you'd have to start digging, like, remediation wells, put in pumps and just try and pump that down. If not, canal and trench that whole thing out, like a massive site, and then you can start to worry about, all right, we're gonna get some dirt out and start to excavate.

7. 22:23 – 27:56

   Can it be accessed anyway? Deep levels, tunneling ideas, and why it matters

   1. JRJoe Rogan22:23

      Could it be done without interrupting the farmers?

   2. BKBen van Kerkwyk22:25

      Probably. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's, I think we could do it. I, I, I think that you can divert and move the, the Bawabi Canal out of the way if you had to. I just think-

   3. JRJoe Rogan22:35

      Someone needs to, like, holler at Jeff Bezos.

   4. BKBen van Kerkwyk22:36

      Tell him to worry on (laughs) .

   5. JRJoe Rogan22:37

      Someone (laughs) , someone, yeah, someone with some deep pockets.

   6. BKBen van Kerkwyk22:39

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan22:40

      Like, don't you wanna know?

   8. BKBen van Kerkwyk22:41

      Don't you wanna know? I wanna know.

   9. JRJoe Rogan22:42

      I mean, yeah.

   10. BKBen van Kerkwyk22:43

       Well, the crazy thing is too is, is that according to the ... Because the story doesn't end there. Like, when you get into the modern space-based scans, Merlin Burrows and the Geoscan stuff, and I know that also I've met the, the guys from the Khafre Project, they are gonna scan that site. Uh, we talked to them about it, uh, recently in Cosmic Summit. And then, uh, I, I think, you know, the lower ... What they're saying so far is that the lower levels, like, 'cause this thing goes down, like I said, to nearly 100 meters. There's, there's reported, like, levels down to 300 feet under the ground and, and it seems like they might be free of water. So it's just, it's just, like, shallow groundwater-

   11. JRJoe Rogan23:18

       Oh.

   12. BKBen van Kerkwyk23:18

       ... and once you get into the bedrock and it's, and it's like, it's like a, it's not a porous stone or whatever's underneath just the, the top level sediment, it, it seems like it c- y- you know, Tim Aker said it looks like it's free of water. So, the very bottom layers, uh, seem to be free of it, so ...

   13. JRJoe Rogan23:35

       So the, the actual labyrinth, very bottom layers?

   14. BKBen van Kerkwyk23:38

       The, the labyrinth has multiple levels, at least. So it'd be ... But we know that-

   15. JRJoe Rogan23:41

       But is it possible that they could somehow or another from the side dig a tunnel-

   16. BKBen van Kerkwyk23:44

       Potentially.

   17. JRJoe Rogan23:45

       ... below everything?

   18. BKBen van Kerkwyk23:46

       If you could-

   19. JRJoe Rogan23:46

       And below the water?

   20. BKBen van Kerkwyk23:47

       Yeah, you'd have to dig a deep tunnel. You could ... I mean, that's also an option is to try and ... If you, if you actually believe and you go with these scans, you know where that atrium is, we could probably try and get down there and just line a tunnel somehow and get down. That would be epic if we did that in our lifetime. I, I would love to see it. Like, be incredible.

   21. JRJoe Rogan24:03

       It seems like a terrible travesty if they don't.

   22. BKBen van Kerkwyk24:06

       I agree, which is the reason I-... made that video in the first pla- I, I wanted to draw attention to the Labyrinth because it's just, uh, I think it is like the, the biggest opportunity for us, like if... in terms of massive (laughs) discoveries in the ancient world, I can't think of anything that's bigger than the... I know the Caffrey Scan stuff is super interesting and the, th- the claims are wild and it's... but this is, like, known about, like this-

   23. NANarrator24:28

       Right.

   24. BKBen van Kerkwyk24:28

       ... has been talked about and then it's been confirmed with multiple scans. You had, you had Madhar Expedition, you had Cairo University, and I think it was, uh, Wrocław, I'm butchering that, the Polish, um, university or then you had Geoscan team which was Klaus Dona, a friend of his who runs this German geoscan, um, space-based satellite thing. It's like a mathematical, statistical ap- they kinda use it to determine the elemental composition of stars is the best ex- explanation I have. However, they have a track record of being able to find things like water and oil and gold under the ground. So they've been using that as a company for, like, people to go s- basically survey and then go dig and they've done three or four of these and they're, "Okay, this is where you said it was." They scanned the Labyrinth. They were the first space-based scan to come out and talk about it. Then you had Merlin Burrows which is this ex-UK military technology that's very similar in technique to the Caffrey Scan guys. Like so they use synthetic aperture radar or doppler tomography. These guys are using, like, high frequency orbital imaging with seismic data so it's, it's very similar in the way they're un- uh, that you're- essentially the description I, I was told is it's like imagine dropping pebbles into a container of water and if you could instantly freeze that container and lift it out and shine a light from underneath it, when you look at it on the top you can en- you can see those ripples in three dimensions but you're looking at it on a 2D scan kind of thing. And you can interpret them to show you the topography of whatever's in that three-dimensional space. It's something similar to that. So-

   25. NANarrator26:02

       Isn't technology fucking awesome? (laughs)

   26. BKBen van Kerkwyk26:04

       (laughs) Dude, it is. Yeah.

   27. NANarrator26:05

       (laughs) It's so awesome. (laughs)

   28. BKBen van Kerkwyk26:05

       It's wild.

   29. NANarrator26:06

       It's so awesome that they just have-

   30. BKBen van Kerkwyk26:08

       (laughs)
8. 27:56 – 31:16

   How big was it supposed to be? Rooms, courts, guides, and the lighting mystery

   1. NANarrator27:56

      Are there ancient artistic depictions?

   2. BKBen van Kerkwyk27:59

      Yeah. Yeah, I mean, not ancient but certainly Renaissance, uh, periods and it, it's, it's, it's... I think some of it's symbolic but s- we do get a lot of descriptions from those authors so, for example, Herodotus talks about it being, you know, 1,500 rooms on one level, a total of... he said there's two levels, he saw one level, he wasn't allowed to go to the lower level. He said that it's 3,000 rooms in total, and not just rooms but also courts, massive open courts. Uh, these are like-

   3. NANarrator28:29

      Herodotus didn't have access?

   4. BKBen van Kerkwyk28:31

      Not to the bottom level according to him.

   5. NANarrator28:33

      Interesting.

   6. BKBen van Kerkwyk28:33

      But Diodorus Siculus did. Like they... these guys talk about, you know, Siculus said that you needed a guide, you would get lost down there for days if you didn't have a guide who knew his way around. And then you have sa- you have the sa- similar accounts from Pliny the Elder and, and again these, these... once you s- I think once you get, um, accounts coming from multiple people over the span of centuries that are from different civilizations both Roman and Greek and they're, they're correlating, it's like this is re- pretty reliable data at this point. In, in certainly in, in history or in archeology y- that's what... that's your measure for, like, all right, there's a grain of truth in this given that we've got the same thing coming from these different accounts that are essentially different civilizations that visited the same place. And what they say is astonishing, it's ev- bu- all of them talk about there being hun- if not hundreds if not thousands of rooms and twisting chambers and then also giant open courts with mi- that might have 40 columns to a side, um, and all of it being done with just spectacular craftsmanship. Yeah, this is the... so Diodorus Siculus, 1st century BC, uh, talking about that, you know, the... in respect of carving and other works of craftsmanship they left no room for their successors to surpass them. He's saying-

   7. NANarrator29:40

      (laughs)

   8. BKBen van Kerkwyk29:40

      ... that there is... this is phenomenal work and in this sacred enclosure one found a temple surrounded by columns 40 to each side and this roof had a... this building had a roof made of a single stone carved with panels and richly adorned with excellent paintings. So 40 to a side, that's 80, and-

   9. NANarrator29:58

      And how was this even lit?

   10. BKBen van Kerkwyk30:00

       Well, that's always a good quest- that's a, that's a core question when you get into any of these subterranean spaces like the Serapeum at Syca- it's always... there's no soot, like-

   11. NANarrator30:08

       Right.

   12. BKBen van Kerkwyk30:08

       We don't know how they were. Uh, the answer is we don't know. It wasn't with flame, like, I don't think it was with flame and then-So you had-

   13. JRJoe Rogan30:15

       Go back to Strabo's depictions. "In addition to these things, there is the edifice of the Labyrinth, which is a building quite equal to the pyramids, a great palace made of many palaces-

   14. BKBen van Kerkwyk30:26

       Yes.

   15. JRJoe Rogan30:26

       ... for such is the number of..." How's that word? What's that word?

   16. BKBen van Kerkwyk30:28

       Peri- peristyle.

   17. JRJoe Rogan30:29

       "... peristyle courts which lie contiguous with one another. Before the entrances, there lie what might be called hidden chambers, which are long and many in number and have paths running through one another which twist and turn so that no one can enter or leave any court without a guide."

   18. BKBen van Kerkwyk30:47

       Yeah. So he... You, you had Siculus' account of one of those courts being 80 columns, like 42 a side, and there was 12 of them, at least 12 of them in there.

   19. JRJoe Rogan30:58

       Wow.

   20. BKBen van Kerkwyk30:59

       Yeah. So it's absolutely crazy. So you have, you know, 3,000 rooms, 12 gigantic courts. Diodorus talks about the, the roof being made of a single stone. I very much doubt that, but what I think he's describing is the craftsmanship that you see in those real megalithic buildings in Egypt where you can't see the joins.

9. 31:16 – 33:54

   Dating debates: Pliny’s timeline and pyramid radiocarbon controversies

   1. JRJoe Rogan31:16

      And here, uh, Pliny the Elder-

   2. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:18

      Yep.

   3. JRJoe Rogan31:18

      ... who lived, uh, between 23 and 79 CE, which is current time-

   4. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:23

      Yep.

   5. JRJoe Rogan31:23

      So he's saying 3,600 years ago, this was constructed according to tradition.

   6. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:28

      Isn't that interesting? Yeah, so-

   7. JRJoe Rogan31:29

      Right. So that predates the pyramids.

   8. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:31

      Yeah, by a long way. Yeah. He, he's-

   9. JRJoe Rogan31:32

      Allegedly.

   10. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:33

       Allegedly. Right.

   11. JRJoe Rogan31:34

       Yeah.

   12. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:34

       Well, if you go with the orthodox date of the pyramids, sure.

   13. JRJoe Rogan31:36

       Right.

   14. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:36

       It's... He says that, you know, so essentially 3600 BC, uh, that it was built according to the tradition at the time, 3600 years ago.

   15. JRJoe Rogan31:46

       So with the conventional dating of the pyramids, that's more than a thousand years earlier.

   16. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:50

       About a thousand years, yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan31:51

       Yeah.

   18. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:51

       A little, little less maybe, but...

   19. JRJoe Rogan31:52

       And the conventional dating is like, eh.

   20. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:54

       Eh, it's questionable.

   21. JRJoe Rogan31:55

       No.

   22. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:55

       I mean...

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:56

       (laughs)

   24. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:56

       Well, even the carbon dating on the pyramids (laughs) doesn't quite match the conventional dating. It's a little earlier than that, so it's... They-

   25. JRJoe Rogan32:01

       What is the carbon dating? From pieces in, in-

   26. BKBen van Kerkwyk32:04

       So they got-

   27. JRJoe Rogan32:04

       ... between the stones?

   28. BKBen van Kerkwyk32:05

       Yeah. Some m- exactly, yeah, some mortar, um, in the carbon dating of the pyramids.

   29. JRJoe Rogan32:08

       And what is that?

   30. BKBen van Kerkwyk32:09

       What? The date?
10. 33:54 – 38:55

    The ‘Tale of Two Industries’: ordinary craftsmanship vs precision artifacts

    1. BKBen van Kerkwyk33:54

       I think there's... I think there's a strong chance that there were multiple phases of construction over a long time to, to, for them to end up being what they are in our time. Uh, I think those are all possibilities here, because it just... The... This is the whole... When you, you take a, a step back and look at the whole picture of ancient Egypt, I mean, just, you, you cannot attribute everything that we see in ancient Egypt to our current understanding of those dynastic Egyptians, their capabilities, their tools, their writings, and what we know about them. We know an awful lot. Like, they do... We, we have tools from the ancient Egyptian toolbox. We found them. We have depictions shown on walls of how they did things. They were very good about documenting them. So we, we have the tools. We have the depictions. We also have lots and lots of artifacts that match those tools and depictions, right? We've got these what are clearly handmade artifacts, and, and this is across all the categories of artifacts, from things like stonework, columns, obeliks... ob- obelisks. Um, oh, sorry. Yeah. Obelisks and vases, boxes, pyramids even. And then you have this other category of artifacts that is... doesn't match and can't be explained by these tools and techniques, and there's, there's just no... there's no depictions on walls of how they made the precision artifacts. There's no-

    2. JRJoe Rogan35:10

       Can you give me an example of these pre- precision artifacts?

    3. BKBen van Kerkwyk35:12

       Of course, yeah, in any category. Um, I have it in that Tale of Two Industries, the director Jamie on there, it's, um...

    4. JRJoe Rogan35:18

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    6. BKBen van Kerkwyk36:56

       ... the vases are probably the best example, they're a smoking gun example of it.

    7. JRJoe Rogan36:59

       Here's a 3D printed one.

    8. BKBen van Kerkwyk37:01

       Yeah. So this is... These, these to me, I mean, this is why the, the vase, um, project was so ... I mean, to me, quite validating when it came up. Yeah.

    9. JRJoe Rogan37:12

       And then there's that wheel thing.

    10. BKBen van Kerkwyk37:13

        Yeah, the schist disk. Um-

    11. JRJoe Rogan37:14

        Yeah.

    12. BKBen van Kerkwyk37:16

        So, these are the smoking gun because they connect to everything else and we're learning so much about the precision of these things. However, but we could start with statues or boxes or, you know, columns. It doesn't really matter. There, there are two categories across all of these artifacts and the advanced category ... Again, so you can't really make 'em with the tools that the ancient Egyptians were dis- were ... We know they were using, that we found. They don't show the sc- there's no scenes of building stone pyramids. There's no scenes of them making giant statues, like thousand ton statues. This is the type of thing that you see on the wall, and this is in the Tomb of the Nobles up in, um, the West Bank at Luxor and here they're building mud bricks. So they're firing mud bricks over the fire. They're, they're ... You can see 'em, they're pouring them, they're shaping them, they're carrying them. It's all very relatively primitive. And we know they made mud brick pyramids, they made mud brick ramps and some of the mud bricks were big and heavy. W- we know all about this. What you don't see is the, is the, uh, is the, is the stone pyramid building, the really massive megalith stuff. The next, the next slide with the vases is a good example. This is what I've been calling the tale of two industries. It's a whole theory that I've been putting together for the last few years. Again, you have a primitive industry that is clearly observably handmade. It lacks precision and symmetry. We found the tools the Egyptians drew the scenes, the artifacts match the tools and techniques and then you have this advanced industry, visibly sophisticated, usually very hard stone is the other characteristic. The, the primitive stuff is usually softer stone, although not always. It ... The, these artifacts as we're doing analysis on them are showing this depth of precision and complexity that's phenomenal. The vases are, are just ... This is where they become a smoking gun to this whole argument, I think.

11. 38:55 – 42:06

    Pre-dynastic vase scanning: aerospace-level tolerances and the ‘handles’ problem

    1. JRJoe Rogan38:55

       Can you ... For people that don't know about this stuff, can you just give them some numbers on what-

    2. BKBen van Kerkwyk38:58

       Sure. So yeah, the vases go back to pre-dynastic times. It's, it's, it's ... There's no debate that these are pre-dynastic, they pre-date what we would call the dynastic civilization. And over the last few years, they've ... We've been starting to analyze them. We, the Vase Scan Team, various groups of people now, have been scanning these with modern technology, LiDAR scanning, um, like laser scanning, even CT X-ray scanning and basically they're coming back with precision in terms of circularity, flatness, like centering, um, numbers that are, are very much equate to some of the best industrial processes that we do today in things like aerospace industry. So where it's really important to be within two or three or four thousandth, thousandths of an inch of perfection for the, like the parts we make for jet engines or rocket engines. Those are the numbers that we're seeing come back on a lot of these vessels. Not all of them, again. Like th- I don't want to say this is, uh, true for all of them. It's not. It's true for a lot of them though and this is ... Again, this is, these are levels of precision that are not visible to the naked eye. I mean, you're talking human hair ... Like, a sheet of printer paper's like six or seven thousandths of an inch thick. A human hair is two to three or four thousandths thick and you're seeing sometimes tolerances even lower than that. So you, you ... It's not something you can feel or see or touch but we see it again and again and the only way we can achieve those sort of tolerances today is with very advanced machines. Uh, you know, 3D five-axis mills, um, you know, really high precision lathes, CAD, like computer controlled equipment.

    3. JRJoe Rogan40:30

       The problem with the lathe though is the handles on this, right?

    4. BKBen van Kerkwyk40:32

       Right. So yeah, if you get into it ... So this is, this is the issue with this and, and one of the craziest things about th- And this is the OG vase, the original granite vase. Um, this is the one that started it all. It's one of the more precise ones. And yeah, you could, you can imagine without the handles you could lathe it if you're spinning it, but if you, if you had the handles, if you wanted these handles, you would have to leave a bullnose that runs all the way around it and then come back with a different process, a different tool to remove that space, that, this, this ... basically the space between the handles off the body.

    5. JRJoe Rogan41:02

       And you don't see a lack of symmetry in those spaces?

    6. BKBen van Kerkwyk41:04

       Well, precision. So this is, this is the thing. So when we do that today, it's called y- you basically lose some positional calibration on your tool. So we account for that in the way we do industrial design of these sorts of parts. So we know that we're gonna lose a little bit of precision when we change tools and process-

    7. JRJoe Rogan41:22

       Mm-hmm.

    8. BKBen van Kerkwyk41:22

       ... right? So we account for that but you don't see that on this. When we did ... I went back and we, we d- they, we did analysis of this area of the vase body in between the handles and there's no drop in precision relative to the rest of the vessel. So that means one of two things. Uh, one option is, okay, they could, they could handle that positional, that lack of, that loss of positional calibration better than we can or it wasn't done on a lathe and it was done in what you would call a single pass with a single tool and the only way you can do that is on a f- is, is with a tool with five axes of freedom. So now you're talking about a five-axis CNC mill. (laughs) Like one of those-

    9. JRJoe Rogan42:01

       Yeah.

    10. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:01

        ... computer controlled things that can just cut it out in basically one pass but without changing tools and process.

12. 42:06 – 1:03:59

    Materials and thin walls: granite, diorite, quartz crystal, and drill marks

    1. JRJoe Rogan42:06

       With incredibly hard stone.

    2. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:08

       And that's the other challenge with this stuff and there's some samples of the stone there in front of you.

    3. JRJoe Rogan42:13

       So this is the-

    4. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:13

       From vessels.

    5. JRJoe Rogan42:13

       ... actual stone?

    6. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:14

       It's ... Uh, these are actual pieces from vessels. Yeah, I got 'em-

    7. JRJoe Rogan42:18

       Wow.

    8. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:18

       ... from a private collector. Um-

    9. JRJoe Rogan42:19

       I just gotta think like who made this and how old is this? How old is this whole thing?

    10. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:23

        This piece, i- i- at least 5,000, 6,000 years. I think, I think it potentially quite older and we can get into how old I think but ... So that's the other challenge that is rarely talked about is the material. Like we, we ... These things are made from granite diorite, rock crystal. That thing's rock crystal, basically quartz. Um-

    11. JRJoe Rogan42:42

        It feels so hard.

    12. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:43

        It's insanely hard. Yeah. All these different ... Oh yeah, it's, it's-

    13. JRJoe Rogan42:47

        Ooh.

    14. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:48

        Yeah, it's ... It's like I have a granite, um, mortar and pestle at home.

    15. JRJoe Rogan42:52

        Mm-hmm.

    16. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:52

        You know, this big heavy thing?

    17. JRJoe Rogan42:53

        Yeah.

    18. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:53

        It's like I don't need to protect it from anything.

    19. JRJoe Rogan42:55

        Right.

    20. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:55

        I have to protect my counters from it 'cause if I-

    21. JRJoe Rogan42:57

        Right.

    22. BKBen van Kerkwyk42:57

        ... just ... It's gonna destroy anything it hits.

    23. NANarrator43:00

        And this is so thin.

    24. BKBen van Kerkwyk43:01

        So that's, yes, so this is, that's the other, it's translucent. You hold a light up to it.

    25. NANarrator43:05

        Yeah, I can see.

    26. BKBen van Kerkwyk43:05

        Even the rock crystal one's translucent.

    27. NANarrator43:07

        Wow.

    28. BKBen van Kerkwyk43:08

        So that one gets down to about two millimeters thickness, just under the lip.

    29. NANarrator43:13

        Oh, wow. This-

    30. BKBen van Kerkwyk43:13

        Yeah, you put a phone light on it, it's, you'll see it comes right through it.
13. 1:03:59 – 1:06:00

    Provenance pushback and museum validation of the vase data

    1. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:03:59

       So yeah, the vases have, it's become interesting. Uh, one of the ... Let me talk about the provenance part first, because that's been the one crit ... Like, the, the pushback on the vases, this is where it's become a problem, is, is nobody's really been able to push back on the data. Like the, uh, the, the scientific and the measurement data that's come out, the precision fact, the geometry. There's a whole bunch in the geometry space that, that, that indicates that they are, um, like designed, they're not just made, they were designed with mathematical and geometrical, um, um, geometric principles in mind. Um, they show pi, they show phi, the golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence, all this sort of stuff is in them. Uh, no one's pushing back on that. The major, uh, pushback on the vessels and the, the early days of the Vase Scan Project was that, oh, these are modern fakes or something. Like, they're not, they're not the real deal because they're not coming from museums. They've been, they're modern forgeries. How can you say they're real? So what's happened in the years since, and when I first came on here and talked a little bit about that, that was very much the early days of this project, about two and a half years ago now. Now, uh, the, the Vase Scan and particularly the Artifact Foundation, Adam Young, uh, who started this whole thing, who owns ... He actually, this is his, a copy of his vase. Uh, they've been in now four museums around the world. We've scanned close to 100 vessels from inside of museums with impeccable provenance. Um, those results are starting to come out. They're matching the results that we found so far. So the provenance thing is, is kind of, it's, that's going away. The people that I think chose to fight on the Hill of Providence have, have died on it now.

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:05:30

       Mm.

    3. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:05:30

       It's, they're 100 ... They are legitimate. And to be fair, you can also find, uh, vi- vessels in private collection with impeccable provenance. Just as you can find a lot of vessels in museums that we have no idea where they came from. Um, it's a, it's a much, it's not as clear as just, well, if it's in a museum, it's, we can trust it, and if it's not, we can't. It's not like that. But, um, what else has happened is that there's other ... As so the, the project came out and it gained a lot of interest from really talented people around the world. Um,

14. 1:06:00 – 1:13:47

    SEM results: no copper traces, but titanium and other metals?

    1. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:06:00

       and there's been several of those. One of the guys that I've been working with a fair bit lately over the last couple of years, a guy named Doc- Dr. Max Zamilov who's a physicist. I believe he taught for 10 years. He's a nuclear physicist, taught for 10 years, I think at Penn State. He's a ... He runs his own company now. And I first ... He reached out to me and actually we took these fragments to his house and I rolled up to his house in Florida and sitting in his living room are two like electro, scanning electron microscopes, you know, as you do. Who, who doesn't have-

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:06:27

       (laughs)

    3. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:06:27

       ... two SEMs in their living room? Uh, so we, we started to do things like, like look at these pieces through a scanning electron microscope to try and find evidence for the materials that we use to cut them. So you should-

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:06:39

       Mm.

    5. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:06:39

       If these were used with a tool, so the, the orthodox explanation being, well, it's a copper tube and it's sand or it's some sort of cutting medium and it's, it's, it's spun and ground out. You should find traces of copper or whatever that material was in there. We looked at ... We spent days looking at several pieces. Zero, zero copper. Like, not ... Didn't find any copper. Nothing at all. The nice, uh, scanning electron microscope, not only do you get the magnification, but you can focus a beam of electrons onto a particular spot. And that back scatter of electrons, you can then map out the elemental composition of the material. So you-

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:07:12

       Can I pause you for a second here?

    7. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:07:13

       Yeah.

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:07:14

       Uh, are the oldest tools they found copper?

    9. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:07:16

       Yeah, yeah, copper and stone.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:07:18

        And what is the... And what are the dates of the oldest tools that they found?

    11. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:07:20

        Well, they go back all the way to, to, to the Old Kingdom, 2600, 2700, 2800 BC. Like, yeah, it was, it was early days, they were smelting. I mean, obviously the older tools are stone tools, like flint.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:07:31

        Right.

    13. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:07:31

        I mean, a lot of carving, you can carve stone with harder types of stone. So there, there was-

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:07:35

        Okay.

    15. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:07:35

        ... definitely flint and things being used. But there's no evidence, like not up until, like the very later periods of the Egyptian civilization is there any significant evidence for iron and things like that. Like it, it's pretty much copper and bronze alloys, tin, you know, copper and tin response.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:07:50

        Right.

    17. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:07:50

        Um ...

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:07:51

        So when they analyzed the, the traces, there's no copper?

    19. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:07:55

        We didn't find any copper. We did find some other stuff, which was-

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:07:57

        Which was found?

    21. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:07:57

        ... very interesting. Well, the most interesting thing we did find was titanium.

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:08:01

        What?

    23. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:08:02

        Yeah, titanium and titanium alloys with iron. We found iron, zinc, tin, zircon-

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:08:10

        Titanium alloys?

    25. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:08:11

        Yeah. So titanium, and it's not ... We've ... Yes, so yeah, so when you find-

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:08:16

        The term alloy, doesn't that refer to something that has-

    27. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:08:19

        Smelted, right, that's been put together. Exactly. In fact, you, and you don't... Titanium as we know it as a metal doesn't exist naturally. So it's, uh, in, in nature, it's titanium dioxide that is found in rocks. This was not titanium dioxide that we were looking at because you see a, again that the SEM gives you the spectrum, right? So you would see oxygen and titanium together. We didn't see that. And in fact, I did a, I have a, I have a video on this a-and it's... We found a piece actually, like a small, maybe 20, 30 micron wide piece embedded in one of those grooves, uh, in a tool tip that looked like an embedded piece. It shines up very brightly. When you see metals in, on this, in the SEM, it's like a bright spot and you can aim it at it, and it was just straight titanium. And it looked like a small piece of a tool that had been wedged in there. And I mean, look in the, in our modern times, I mean, I think titanium was discovered even in the late 1800s. It wasn't used outside of laboratories until the 1930s as a material. But there seems to be evidence that there's some titanium used back here.

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:09:20

        Has this been published?

    29. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:09:22

        No, uh, it, I wouldn't ... I know Max is trying to work on that. I would, uh, it was not a systematic se- We spent days, like a couple of days and it's, we didn't do like a systematic grid search. Like even in one of those pieces you could spend, it would take you a long time to just map it properly.

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:09:38

        Right.

Episode duration: 2:59:41