Joe Rogan Experience #2374 - Ben van Kerkwyk

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   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.

   17. 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.

   18. BKBen van Kerkwyk3:02

       Thousands of years.

   19. JRJoe Rogan3:03

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

   20. BKBen van Kerkwyk3:10

       It is.

   21. JRJoe Rogan3:11

       Is it?

   22. 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-

   23. JRJoe Rogan3:41

       Oh.

   24. 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-

   25. JRJoe Rogan4:15

       Yeah.

   26. 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.

   27. JRJoe Rogan4:24

       That is underground?

   28. BKBen van Kerkwyk4:25

       That's underground, right.

   29. JRJoe Rogan4:26

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

   30. 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," 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. 15:00 – 30:00

   He has to, yeah.…

   1. BKBen van Kerkwyk15:00

      the announcement and showing the foot- Zahi's doing it. Like he's-

   2. NANarrator15:02

      He has to, yeah.

   3. BKBen van Kerkwyk15:04

      Yeah, and I just-

   4. NANarrator15:04

      Fascinating situation over there with him.

   5. BKBen van Kerkwyk15:06

      Uh, yes. I, I-

   6. NANarrator15:07

      You know?

   7. 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-

   8. NANarrator15:49

      Oi.

   9. 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.

   10. 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"?

   11. 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-

   12. NANarrator16:45

       Under the ground?

   13. 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-

   14. NANarrator17:28

       So this water table, it has risen slowly over-

   15. BKBen van Kerkwyk17:32

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

   16. NANarrator17:35

       Oh.

   17. 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.

   18. JRJoe Rogan20:20

       (laughs)

   19. 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.

   20. JRJoe Rogan20:27

       God-

   21. BKBen van Kerkwyk20:28

       (laughs)

   22. JRJoe Rogan20:29

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

   23. 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-

   24. JRJoe Rogan21:23

       Put him in jail for what?

   25. 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-

   26. JRJoe Rogan21:32

       Wow.

   27. 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.

   28. JRJoe Rogan21:50

       Wow (laughs) .

   29. 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.

   30. JRJoe Rogan22:23

       Could it be done without interrupting the farmers?
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Well, that's always a…

   1. NANarrator30:00

   2. 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-

   3. NANarrator30:08

      Right.

   4. 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-

   5. 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-

   6. BKBen van Kerkwyk30:26

      Yes.

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:26

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

   8. BKBen van Kerkwyk30:28

      Peri- peristyle.

   9. 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."

   10. 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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan30:58

       Wow.

   12. 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.

   13. JRJoe Rogan31:16

       And here, uh, Pliny the Elder-

   14. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:18

       Yep.

   15. JRJoe Rogan31:18

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

   16. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:23

       Yep.

   17. JRJoe Rogan31:23

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

   18. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:28

       Isn't that interesting? Yeah, so-

   19. JRJoe Rogan31:29

       Right. So that predates the pyramids.

   20. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:31

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

   21. JRJoe Rogan31:32

       Allegedly.

   22. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:33

       Allegedly. Right.

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:34

       Yeah.

   24. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:34

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

   25. JRJoe Rogan31:36

       Right.

   26. 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.

   27. JRJoe Rogan31:46

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

   28. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:50

       About a thousand years, yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan31:51

       Yeah.

   30. BKBen van Kerkwyk31:51

       A little, little less maybe, but...
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Right. …

   1. BKBen van Kerkwyk45:00

      vases, it's one, probably my favorite. It's, like, typically called the thin-walled vase, but (laughs) it's a phenomenal piece. I'm amazed it's actually survived this long 'cause it is, that's one of the rare few delicate ones. Um, it, you could break that because it's so thin because the, again, with this type of stone, it gets really brittle.

   2. NANarrator45:16

      Right.

   3. BKBen van Kerkwyk45:16

      And it's like glass, like a cube of glass, bang that on anything-

   4. NANarrator45:19

      Right.

   5. BKBen van Kerkwyk45:19

      ... th- these thin glass shatters. Same as this stone, yet they did this again and again and again and again.

   6. NANarrator45:24

      How do we know that this is pre-dynastic?

   7. BKBen van Kerkwyk45:27

      Well, from where they're found. I mean, they, they're literally found in pre-dynastic burials. This is the, this is the real, this is why the vases are so important to me. It, it's, and why I think they're the smoking guns, one of the big reasons, is that they, they, they're uncontrovertibly or incontrovertibly pre-dynastic because they've been found in burials that are 100% pre-dynastic. Naqada culture, Naqada II, you can go to any museum that has a reasonable collection of these and find them in the pre-dynastic section all over the... There's no debate. Like, they're found in these burials and they carbon date the burials or their culture datum, the reference datum to periods of thousands of years prior to the dynastic Egyptian civilization. There's, there's good evidence that they may even stretch back as far as 12 to 14,000 BC that they're in burials that go back that far in like the-

   8. NANarrator46:13

      Whoa.

   9. BKBen van Kerkwyk46:13

      ... like southern Egypt, northern Sudan area. Yeah, it's crazy. And that's, um, a lot of those burials unfortunately today are underwater because of the dam they created, like NASA.

   10. NANarrator46:23

       Oh, yeah.

   11. BKBen van Kerkwyk46:24

       But e- either way it, I don't, people will debate the how far back they go. It's just not controversial at all to say that they are pre-dynastic, 100%. And I think the reason is, is that they're this size, right? You can bury this with you.

   12. NANarrator46:39

       Mm-hmm.

   13. BKBen van Kerkwyk46:39

       If you have it, then you can be buried with it. You can't do that with 1000-ton statue.

   14. NANarrator46:44

       Right.

   15. BKBen van Kerkwyk46:44

       It stays on the site and then maybe someone down the road writes his name on it, like Ramses II, or somebody put, carves his name into it and then we come along thousands of year later and say, "Oh, Ramses II's name is on that. Therefore, he must have had it made."

   16. NANarrator46:59

       Right.

   17. BKBen van Kerkwyk46:59

       I mean, that's essentially like the, one of the core principles of Egyptology, they, they do use the writing primarily as a source, not the only source-

   18. NANarrator47:07

       Wow.

   19. BKBen van Kerkwyk47:07

       ... but they do and the vases what's... The problem with even dating them to those pre-dynastic settlements is that there is nothing about those cultures that indicates they had this capability. Naqada culture and even the ones like Toshka, these older ones, pretty similar in that you're talking, like the burials are often like shallow fetal position graves, that you find these precision hard stone objects with fishbone combs, sticks and stones, very primitive hand thrown pottery, not even thrown, just hand formed pottery, no other stonework.

   20. NANarrator47:42

       Wow.

   21. BKBen van Kerkwyk47:42

       Um, you know, I've seen antiques dealers that, that are, that are selling these vases 'cause there is a, a huge, there's a lot of these in the, in the private market and in, uh, in private possession because of their size and their availability and there's how many there were 'cause there's hun-

   22. NANarrator47:55

       Are they illegal to possess?

   23. BKBen van Kerkwyk47:57

       No. No, no.

   24. NANarrator47:58

       So you could get a hold of one of those legally?

   25. BKBen van Kerkwyk48:00

       Yeah. Yeah, there's, I know collectors with like 80, 90 of them, 100 of them.

   26. NANarrator48:03

       What?

   27. BKBen van Kerkwyk48:04

       Oh, yeah.

   28. NANarrator48:05

       Really?

   29. BKBen van Kerkwyk48:05

       Yeah, yeah. They're on, they're on, they come up for sale.

   30. NANarrator48:07

       There's that many of them available?
5. 1:00:00 – 1:10:54

   Yeah. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      just show what they're really all about. What you're really all about is silencing anything that really throws a monkey wrench into everything you've been teaching-

   2. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:00:10

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:10

      ... for decades. Like you've claimed that you're the expert. You've claimed arrogantly that you have all the information when you clearly are wrong.

   4. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:00:18

      Absolutely. That, that is what's happening. It's actually ... I's ... It's a quote that I, I steal from my friend, Christopher Dunn, uh, quite happily, which is, you know, you wouldn't trust an archeologist to design the chair he's sitting on, but if it's an ancient chair-

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:00:29

      (laughs)

   6. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:00:29

      ... he's gonna claim he's the expert on it. Like this ... And this is what happens. I ... I had Joseph Wilson on our podcast talk about he'd ... I had this great quote for him and he said, "Oh, you know, if ... Just because some engineer's standing there sh- ... You know, shining a laser on a vase, don't let that, don't let ... Don't mistake that for him knowing more about the guy who can read hieroglyphs because he can read what they wrote about it and he's the authority on it," kind of thing. It's just like-

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:00:50

      Right.

   8. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:00:50

      ... you're just dismissing all of these other disciplines that are, that I think are required for a, a true and complete picture of trying to assemble this evidence, right? Like as you say, there's, there's very little evolent- evidence that shows us definitively what happened in the dim, dark, distant past. But it's ... You gotta try and make the case for it as best you can, and I think we should try and encompass all of the evidence. And one of the disciplines that's missing from that approach is the engineering stuff, it's the precision stuff. It just gets dismissed out of hand. And yeah, we ... Just because we're not-... the authority figures on that, on that topic. It, it just, yeah, they ignore it, which is what happens. And then when they-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:01:26

      Well, how ... I don't know how you can ignore the vases, how you can ignore the statues, the symmetry-

   10. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:01:31

       Yeah.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:01:31

       ... and the construction of the faces.

   12. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:01:33

       It's, it's starting to become a problem. Like, they're, they're trying. And, and, and even in the past when, when I would guess the mainstream approaches to try and solve, say, some of the machining, uh, examples, the tubular drills or the saw cuts. I mean, just when you, when you dig down into them and the, the answers that you get and the explanations that are offered are just, they don't hold any water. It's, they're kind of, they're frankly ridiculous. Like-

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:01:56

       Well, the issue with the, the drill bits is the revolutions per minute, right?

   14. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:02:00

       Uh, I mean, the cores?

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:02:01

       Like, the cores. Yeah.

   16. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:02:02

       Yeah. Well, it's not the revolutions per minute, it's the penetration rate. We don't know-

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:02:06

       How quickly it does.

   18. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:02:07

       How ... Yes. So how quickly it penetrates into stone. And it, I suspect that it's, uh, that it was, it could have been turning quite slowly, but it's like a 1 in 60 penetration rate is the rate of the spiral groove on the cores that have been analyzed, particularly Petrie's core number seven.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:02:22

       1 in 60 meaning?

   20. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:02:23

       1 in, so for like, if you unwind that circular motion to a straight line, 60 inches horizontal travel, one inch vertical-

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:02:31

       Oh.

   22. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:02:31

       ... drop, which is 500 times greater than how we do it today with modern-

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:02:36

       (laughs)

   24. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:02:36

       ... diamond tipped saws, hole saws, which do turn-

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:02:40

       Wow.

   26. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:02:41

       So our modern ones, bear in mind, they, you know, 900 RPM.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:02:43

       Right.

   28. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:02:43

       They'll, they'll cut through grant slowly, but it cuts. I mean, no doubt. It grinds more, more so than cutting. But yeah, unwinding that spiral and looking at, that's what Petrie was first of all, like, "How is this possible?" His numbers got refined a bit by Chris Dunn, but more or less were 1 in 60 penetration rate. So it's very difficult to explain. There are multiple cores like this, and this is the, this is the other element that I think the vases are, are showing us, is that you have a technological link between the vases and these other precision artifacts, the bigger ones that couldn't be buried in these civilizations, that to me suggests that they were made with the same technology. Um, you see the same machining marks, the same tubular drill marks. On that quartz piece, if you look on the bottom, you can see the, on the inside of it, there's no other side. You see the tool mark? There's a ... This-

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:03:29

       This right here?

   30. BKBen van Kerkwyk1:03:30

       Yeah. So this is like, that's the tubular drill. So this is-

Episode duration: 2:59:41