Joe Rogan Experience #2374 - Ben van Kerkwyk

Narrator 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 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.

Ben van Kerkwyk 0:22 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:22 There appears to be a 40-meter-long metallic, Tic Tac-shaped object. How m- how deep into the ground?

Ben van Kerkwyk 0:31 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.

Joe Rogan 0:45 And ... So, for anybody who's interested, what is the name of that video that you put out?

Ben van Kerkwyk 0:50 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-

Joe Rogan 0:55 Yes.

Ben van Kerkwyk 0:55 But, yeah, it's- it's on that, it's on my channel. I mean, it's-

Joe Rogan 0:57 Well, it was a good tease. You got me.

Ben van Kerkwyk 0:58 Thank you. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:59 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."

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:05 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:05 '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.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:12 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.

Joe Rogan 2:54 So, how did you find out about the Labyrinths? Like, thi- this is something that has been talked about for a long time.

Ben van Kerkwyk 3:02 Thousands of years.

Joe Rogan 3:03 Yeah, but n- i- no one, i- i- it's not in any th- like, traditional archeology books. It's not-

Ben van Kerkwyk 3:10 It is.

Joe Rogan 3:11 Is it?

Ben van Kerkwyk 3:11 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-

Joe Rogan 3:41 Oh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 3:41 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 4:15 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 4:15 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 4:24 That is underground?

Ben van Kerkwyk 4:25 That's underground, right.

Joe Rogan 4:26 D- how do conventional archeologists approach this? Do they discuss this at all?

Ben van Kerkwyk 4:31 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,"

Ben van Kerkwyk 7:31 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-

Joe Rogan 7:57 What year was this?

Ben van Kerkwyk 7:58 2008 was the Matagir Expedition.

Joe Rogan 8:00 They were covered up?

Ben van Kerkwyk 8:02 Yes.

Joe Rogan 8:02 This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. The hiring process can be absurdly time-consuming, like when you're looking for a new doctor, you spend hours searching. When you finally feel like you found the right one, it turns out they're not accepting new patients. The same thing happens when you're hiring. You scan through hundreds of resumes, you find one you like, only to discover they aren't actively looking for a job. Well, good news for all you hiring managers out there. Your search looks a little less frustrating now thanks to Zip Recruiter. And bonus, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogen. Zip Recruiter has added new tools and features to help speed up the hiring process and save you valuable time. They can easily connect you with qualified candidates in minutes. They also have a wide pool of talent to choose from, and it's continuously growing. Over 320,000 resumes are added monthly so you can reach more potential hires. Use Zip Recruiter and save time hiring. Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And if you go to ziprecruiter.com/rogen right now, you can try it for free. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com/rogen. Zip Recruiter, the smartest way to hire.

Ben van Kerkwyk 9:23 Yeah, so what, what-

Joe Rogan 9:24 Is this our boy Zawi?

Ben van Kerkwyk 9:25 Yeah, (laughs) Zahi it is.

Joe Rogan 9:27 Zahi? Sorry if you call him Zawi.

Ben van Kerkwyk 9:28 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-

Joe Rogan 11:19 A hundred meters tall?

Ben van Kerkwyk 11:21 Well, no, so if-

Joe Rogan 11:21 Vertically?

Ben van Kerkwyk 11:22 No, no, so the, the, the y-axis I guess of this, so we're looking down in the ground here-

Joe Rogan 11:26 Oh, I see, I see.

Ben van Kerkwyk 11:26 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 11:34 So it's-

Ben van Kerkwyk 11:35 These are big chambers and big walls.

Joe Rogan 11:36 For people at home, it's like a football field.

Ben van Kerkwyk 11:38 Yeah, it's a football field. Well, it's more, I mean a hundred-

Joe Rogan 11:40 More. A hundred meters is-

Ben van Kerkwyk 11:42 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-

Joe Rogan 11:46 Yeah, well it's a hundred yards. What is the difference between a hundred yards and a hundred meters?

Ben van Kerkwyk 11:48 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-

Joe Rogan 12:01 Much larger than that?

Ben van Kerkwyk 12:02 Oh, that's huge. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it extends-

Joe Rogan 12:05 So what is the overall structure like? What, how-

Ben van Kerkwyk 12:07 It's like a thousand feet at least.

Narrator 12:10 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 12:10 Like, like, 3 to 3, 4, 5 times that size. I mean, you have to go back to the... We, we have some better indication with the more modern space-based scans now, but when they did those, the geophysical, like the, the ground penetrating radar scans. So they scan two areas. That was the bigger one, like in front of the pyramid, then they did another one on the other side of the canal that runs through the site today, and they found, they found it on both sides. So that's the difference between, like, what we say about the laby- like what the textbooks will tell you about the labyrinth, it not being there, and it, it being destroyed too. No, we've actually... Now there's been the Madahar Expedition, confirmed it was there. And they... So what happened wa- this was interesting, and I, I have, I have, I think, reasoning for why this happened, but it was covered up and these are the words. Like, Louis de Cordier, he eventually got sick of waiting, 'cause what happens in Egypt, anything you do, whether it's you're, you're an academic institution or you're an individual or a group that's funding some sort of expedition, you work with the Council of Antiquities today, it's the, um, Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, but they essentially, you know, you gotta... It takes years to get ac- access. And then once you do though, they control release of information. So that's always part of the deal, right? It's that Egypt gets to do the announcing and if and when they choose.

Narrator 13:27 And they have dismissed things in the past-

Ben van Kerkwyk 13:29 Yes.

Narrator 13:30 ... that they then accepted later.

Ben van Kerkwyk 13:32 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)

Narrator 14:50 (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 14:50 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-

Narrator 15:02 He has to, yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 15:04 Yeah, and I just-

Narrator 15:04 Fascinating situation over there with him.

Ben van Kerkwyk 15:06 Uh, yes. I, I-

Narrator 15:07 You know?

Ben van Kerkwyk 15:08 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-

Narrator 15:49 Oi.

Ben van Kerkwyk 15:50 ... 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.

Narrator 15:58 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"?

Ben van Kerkwyk 16:07 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-

Narrator 16:45 Under the ground?

Ben van Kerkwyk 16:46 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-

Narrator 17:28 So this water table, it has risen slowly over-

Ben van Kerkwyk 17:32 No, since the 1960s, since they built the dam.

Narrator 17:35 Oh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 17:35 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.

Joe Rogan 20:20 (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 20:20 This doesn't exist. Let's just go on selling tickets on the Giza Plateau and pumping water out to the Fayoum for agriculture.

Joe Rogan 20:27 God-

Ben van Kerkwyk 20:28 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 20:29 ... how shortsighted. Now, when you say millions, were you just gonna say dollars or were you gonna say gallons of water?

Ben van Kerkwyk 20:34 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-

Joe Rogan 21:23 Put him in jail for what?

Ben van Kerkwyk 21:25 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-

Joe Rogan 21:32 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 21:32 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 21:50 Wow (laughs) .

Ben van Kerkwyk 21:50 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.

Joe Rogan 22:23 Could it be done without interrupting the farmers?

Ben van Kerkwyk 22:25 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-

Joe Rogan 22:35 Someone needs to, like, holler at Jeff Bezos.

Ben van Kerkwyk 22:36 Tell him to worry on (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 22:37 Someone (laughs) , someone, yeah, someone with some deep pockets.

Ben van Kerkwyk 22:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:40 Like, don't you wanna know?

Ben van Kerkwyk 22:41 Don't you wanna know? I wanna know.

Joe Rogan 22:42 I mean, yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 22:43 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-

Joe Rogan 23:18 Oh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 23:18 ... 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 ...

Joe Rogan 23:35 So the, the actual labyrinth, very bottom layers?

Ben van Kerkwyk 23:38 The, the labyrinth has multiple levels, at least. So it'd be ... But we know that-

Joe Rogan 23:41 But is it possible that they could somehow or another from the side dig a tunnel-

Ben van Kerkwyk 23:44 Potentially.

Joe Rogan 23:45 ... below everything?

Ben van Kerkwyk 23:46 If you could-

Joe Rogan 23:46 And below the water?

Ben van Kerkwyk 23:47 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.

Joe Rogan 24:03 It seems like a terrible travesty if they don't.

Ben van Kerkwyk 24:06 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-

Narrator 24:28 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 24:28 ... 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-

Narrator 26:02 Isn't technology fucking awesome? (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 26:04 (laughs) Dude, it is. Yeah.

Narrator 26:05 (laughs) It's so awesome. (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 26:05 It's wild.

Narrator 26:06 It's so awesome that they just have-

Ben van Kerkwyk 26:08 (laughs)

Narrator 26:08 ... the ability to do that and look at that. Be- beyond the Caffrey stuff-

Ben van Kerkwyk 26:11 Yeah.

Narrator 26:11 ... which, you know, I, I don't want to get disappointed so I-

Ben van Kerkwyk 26:15 Mm-hmm.

Narrator 26:16 ... I, I look at that like, hmm, like, it's too great.

Ben van Kerkwyk 26:19 What-

Narrator 26:19 It's too amazing, it's too spectacular.

Ben van Kerkwyk 26:22 (laughs) Giant cubes with these four tunnels.

Narrator 27:05 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 27:05 And I... look, it... we'll see. And, and, and I wanna get into, like, the Osiris shaft b- because that's another thing that they'll... I've just recently put a video out about these other scans that have happened in the '90s confirm that... that... have since kind of been confirmed by the Caffrey Scan team work but, yeah, at the Labyrinth at least, the interesting thing to me that happened with these two wildly different techniques, right? So you have, you have the Geoscan which is the statistical mathematical approach, space-based still, but then you have... and the Merlin Burrows which is a similar te- technique to the Caffrey Scan group and it was used... I mean, just... so this is what Tim Akers would tell you, it was used to detect submarines. They would look at, like, surface patterns on the water and they were using it to basically track submarines under the water so it's, it's... that's its origins, at least in the military as far as I know.

Narrator 27:52 Mm.

Ben van Kerkwyk 27:52 It's like the non-classified part of it is what he said, uh, at least reported to have said I should say. Uh-

Narrator 27:56 Are there ancient artistic depictions?

Ben van Kerkwyk 27:59 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-

Narrator 28:29 Herodotus didn't have access?

Ben van Kerkwyk 28:31 Not to the bottom level according to him.

Narrator 28:33 Interesting.

Ben van Kerkwyk 28:33 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-

Narrator 29:40 (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 29:40 ... 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-

Narrator 29:58 And how was this even lit?

Ben van Kerkwyk 30:00 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-

Narrator 30:08 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 30:08 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-

Joe Rogan 30:15 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-

Ben van Kerkwyk 30:26 Yes.

Joe Rogan 30:26 ... for such is the number of..." How's that word? What's that word?

Ben van Kerkwyk 30:28 Peri- peristyle.

Joe Rogan 30:29 "... 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."

Ben van Kerkwyk 30:47 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.

Joe Rogan 30:58 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 30:59 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.

Joe Rogan 31:16 And here, uh, Pliny the Elder-

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:18 Yep.

Joe Rogan 31:18 ... who lived, uh, between 23 and 79 CE, which is current time-

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:23 Yep.

Joe Rogan 31:23 So he's saying 3,600 years ago, this was constructed according to tradition.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:28 Isn't that interesting? Yeah, so-

Joe Rogan 31:29 Right. So that predates the pyramids.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:31 Yeah, by a long way. Yeah. He, he's-

Joe Rogan 31:32 Allegedly.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:33 Allegedly. Right.

Joe Rogan 31:34 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:34 Well, if you go with the orthodox date of the pyramids, sure.

Joe Rogan 31:36 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:36 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.

Joe Rogan 31:46 So with the conventional dating of the pyramids, that's more than a thousand years earlier.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:50 About a thousand years, yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:51 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:51 A little, little less maybe, but...

Joe Rogan 31:52 And the conventional dating is like, eh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:54 Eh, it's questionable.

Joe Rogan 31:55 No.

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:55 I mean...

Joe Rogan 31:56 (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 31:56 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-

Joe Rogan 32:01 What is the carbon dating? From pieces in, in-

Ben van Kerkwyk 32:04 So they got-

Joe Rogan 32:04 ... between the stones?

Ben van Kerkwyk 32:05 Yeah. Some m- exactly, yeah, some mortar, um, in the carbon dating of the pyramids.

Joe Rogan 32:08 And what is that?

Ben van Kerkwyk 32:09 What? The date?

Joe Rogan 32:10 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 32:10 So it's... I believe it's, it's like a wide range, but it's, it's, it's like several hundred years, like 200 years prior to what they would, uh, say is the, the time of, of Khufu, of Cheops, the, the, the ruler in the fourth dynasty. Certainly on the Great Pyramid, at least.

Joe Rogan 32:24 And what is the room for error when they do radi-

Ben van Kerkwyk 32:26 It de-

Joe Rogan 32:27 ... carbon dating?

Ben van Kerkwyk 32:27 Well, it's... It depends on the samples, and there's, there's a lot of specifics, but it could be plus minus 20, 30, 50, a hundred year- it depends. I think this, the, the roo- the margin of error, they did multiple samples. I believe it's, it's less than that, so th- they're pretty firm that the date is earlier. So it gets... This is, um... It's kind of a criti- I mean, I think there's a bunch of people that have talked about the fact that the archeolo- the Egyptologists don't really reference that date because it kinda messes up their timeline a little bit.

Joe Rogan 32:52 Of course.

Ben van Kerkwyk 32:53 I mean, it's not thousands of years. It's hundreds of years. So the, the explanation tends to be, "Well, it was old wood."

Joe Rogan 32:58 Whoa.

Ben van Kerkwyk 32:58 It's like, 'cause the ash that gets mixed into the mortar is the source for the carbon, and they say, "Well, maybe they just burnt really old trees."

Joe Rogan 33:04 That's very convenient.

Ben van Kerkwyk 33:05 Right. It becomes convenient. Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 33:07 Well, all of it's convenient.

Ben van Kerkwyk 33:08 Yes.

Joe Rogan 33:08 Which is... Which gets really weird, because we know that they did some enhancements to the pyramids. Like, they refurbished some things.

Ben van Kerkwyk 33:16 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 33:16 And so that's the problem, is like, well, you refurbished what and how long was it there before you refurbished it?

Ben van Kerkwyk 33:24 Indeed. I, I... Look, I think... I don't... I'm not... I don't discount the carbon dating. I, I think what you can say from the carbon dating firmly is that the... that it, it shows that these pyramids were being worked on. If... You can't... I don't think you can make the jump to say this is when they were built. You have to, you have to infer and say that I think this is when they were, they were w- were certainly being worked on in that period. So I think it's possible the dynastic Egyptians could have finished the pyramids. They may not have been entirely pyramids originally.

Ben van Kerkwyk 33:54 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-

Joe Rogan 35:10 Can you give me an example of these pre- precision artifacts?

Ben van Kerkwyk 35:12 Of course, yeah, in any category. Um, I have it in that Tale of Two Industries, the director Jamie on there, it's, um...

Joe Rogan 35:18 Game on. Week one starts now, and every touchdown brings you closer to a payout with DraftKings Sportsbook, an official sports betting partner of the NFL. Every touchdown could hit big. Don't just watch the game when you can win with it. DraftKings Sportsbook brings the unmatched intensity of the NFL straight to your fingertips. Whether you're backing the first touchdown scorer, hitting any time TD props, or riding the thrills of live in-game betting, every play is packed with possibility. New customers, this one's for you. Bet just $5 and get $300 in bonus bets instantly. Plus, grab over $200 off NFL Sunday Ticket from your YouTube and YouTube TV. Your season starts now. Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use the code ROGAN. That's code ROGAN to get $300 in bonus bets instantly when you place your first bet of $5 or more, plus over $200 off NFL Sunday Ticket from YouTube and YouTube TV. In partnership with DraftKings, the crown is yours.

Narrator 36:25 Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. In New York, call 877-8HOPEINY- or text HOPEINY to 467369. In Connecticut, help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org. Please play responsibly. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino and Resort in Kansas. 21 and over. Age and eligibility varies by jurisdiction. Void in Ontario. New customers only. Bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng.co/audio.

Ben van Kerkwyk 36:56 ... the vases are probably the best example, they're a smoking gun example of it.

Joe Rogan 36:59 Here's a 3D printed one.

Ben van Kerkwyk 37:01 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.

Joe Rogan 37:12 And then there's that wheel thing.

Ben van Kerkwyk 37:13 Yeah, the schist disk. Um-

Joe Rogan 37:14 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 37:16 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.

Joe Rogan 38:55 Can you ... For people that don't know about this stuff, can you just give them some numbers on what-

Ben van Kerkwyk 38:58 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.

Joe Rogan 40:30 The problem with the lathe though is the handles on this, right?

Ben van Kerkwyk 40:32 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.

Joe Rogan 41:02 And you don't see a lack of symmetry in those spaces?

Ben van Kerkwyk 41:04 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-

Joe Rogan 41:22 Mm-hmm.

Ben van Kerkwyk 41:22 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 42:01 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:01 ... computer controlled things that can just cut it out in basically one pass but without changing tools and process.

Joe Rogan 42:06 With incredibly hard stone.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:08 And that's the other challenge with this stuff and there's some samples of the stone there in front of you.

Joe Rogan 42:13 So this is the-

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:13 From vessels.

Joe Rogan 42:13 ... actual stone?

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:14 It's ... Uh, these are actual pieces from vessels. Yeah, I got 'em-

Joe Rogan 42:18 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:18 ... from a private collector. Um-

Joe Rogan 42:19 I just gotta think like who made this and how old is this? How old is this whole thing?

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:23 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-

Joe Rogan 42:42 It feels so hard.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:43 It's insanely hard. Yeah. All these different ... Oh yeah, it's, it's-

Joe Rogan 42:47 Ooh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:48 Yeah, it's ... It's like I have a granite, um, mortar and pestle at home.

Joe Rogan 42:52 Mm-hmm.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:52 You know, this big heavy thing?

Joe Rogan 42:53 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:53 It's like I don't need to protect it from anything.

Joe Rogan 42:55 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:55 I have to protect my counters from it 'cause if I-

Joe Rogan 42:57 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 42:57 ... just ... It's gonna destroy anything it hits.

Narrator 43:00 And this is so thin.

Ben van Kerkwyk 43:01 So that's, yes, so this is, that's the other, it's translucent. You hold a light up to it.

Narrator 43:05 Yeah, I can see.

Ben van Kerkwyk 43:05 Even the rock crystal one's translucent.

Narrator 43:07 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 43:08 So that one gets down to about two millimeters thickness, just under the lip.

Narrator 43:13 Oh, wow. This-

Ben van Kerkwyk 43:13 Yeah, you put a phone light on it, it's, you'll see it comes right through it.

Narrator 43:17 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 43:17 And, uh, I mean, so with granite and with diorite, and particularly granite, I mean, it's essentially a conglomerate, right? So it's, you have, it's, it's not a material that's homogeneous. So inside of granite, you've got silica and hornblende and mica and all these different quartz and, you know-

Narrator 43:32 Hence the pattern.

Ben van Kerkwyk 43:33 Hence the pattern, but also almost microscopically it changes hardness. You know what I mean?

Narrator 43:38 Oh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 43:38 So it's, so some of that stuff is less hard than other bits. And it's, the way, granite takes millions of years and heat and pressure to bond those things together atomically. And that's the stone we get when it pops up out on the bedrock and we, we mine it. But it's, it just means that when you're machining a material like granite, it, you know, your tool tip is going from stuff that's really hard to softer to hard. And it's like you have to account for that, yet we see this, you feel the surface of it, it's phenomenally well polished and finished. I mean, if you were doing this today with a lot of modern tool tips, you'd be ripping chunks of quartz out rather than machi- than cutting them. So something that the actual tool tip that made these things we know is also very refined because this is a very difficult substance to choose to work in. No stone sculptor chooses to work in granite unless that's what the project calls for. There's a reason they use marble is that it's, it's both much softer and it's homogeneous. Like, it's the same material. It doesn't vary-

Narrator 44:30 Hmm.

Ben van Kerkwyk 44:30 ... in hardness wildly. So making these sort of precision things tha- and, and objects out of stuff like granite and getting it down to two millimeters thick, like that other piece near the lip.

Narrator 44:40 Yeah, this is crazy.

Ben van Kerkwyk 44:42 Uh, and it's, there's even examples that get even thinner than that. Flinders Petrie talked about, um, a diorite vessel that was 1/40 of an inch thick, about, uh, the, he c- he called it the thickness of stout playing card.

Narrator 44:54 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 44:54 Yeah, this is it here.

Narrator 44:55 Wow, look at the light going through it.

Ben van Kerkwyk 44:57 That's, that's about two millimeters thick. That one's one of Matt Bell's 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.

Narrator 45:16 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 45:16 And it's like glass, like a cube of glass, bang that on anything-

Narrator 45:19 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 45:19 ... th- these thin glass shatters. Same as this stone, yet they did this again and again and again and again.

Narrator 45:24 How do we know that this is pre-dynastic?

Ben van Kerkwyk 45:27 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-

Narrator 46:13 Whoa.

Ben van Kerkwyk 46:13 ... 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.

Narrator 46:23 Oh, yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 46:24 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.

Narrator 46:39 Mm-hmm.

Ben van Kerkwyk 46:39 If you have it, then you can be buried with it. You can't do that with 1000-ton statue.

Narrator 46:44 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 46:44 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."

Narrator 46:59 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 46:59 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-

Narrator 47:07 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 47:07 ... 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.

Narrator 47:42 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 47:42 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-

Narrator 47:55 Are they illegal to possess?

Ben van Kerkwyk 47:57 No. No, no.

Narrator 47:58 So you could get a hold of one of those legally?

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:00 Yeah. Yeah, there's, I know collectors with like 80, 90 of them, 100 of them.

Narrator 48:03 What?

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:04 Oh, yeah.

Narrator 48:05 Really?

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:05 Yeah, yeah. They're on, they're on, they come up for sale.

Narrator 48:07 There's that many of them available?

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:08 There's, I would say today there's, um, easily over 100,000-

Narrator 48:12 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:13 ... hard stone vessels for sure. I mean, they found 50,000 of them in one spot, like that's the famous discovery at the Step Pyramid but, yeah, it's crazy. There's a lot. I think there are even more, like it, this was an indus- industry like that's the other key and th- and a lot of these are semi-exotic types of stone too. We don't know where the stone came from. It's-

Narrator 48:29 It's not local?

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:30 In a lot of cases, no we, like, like there's lapis, uh, there's lapis lazuli artifacts that are pre-dynastic and there's no known quarry for lapis in Egypt. The closest one is Afghanistan.

Narrator 48:41 What?

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:42 Right. Yeah, well, it is, do-

Narrator 48:43 How far is Afghanistan from Egypt?

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:45 Oh, I don't, I mean, must be... It's right over on the other side of the Middle East I think, isn't it? It's over towards... Yeah, it's up towards Russia and China. It's, um-

Narrator 48:54 Show that image again, Jamie. Uh-oh. That you just pulled up. Oh well, there's the map.

Ben van Kerkwyk 48:58 So they, well, there's the Fayum, there's Egypt.So Turkey, Afghanistan over here, Uzbekistan-

Joe Rogan 49:03 How? (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 49:03 ... Afghan- over here, like on the other side of Saudi Arabia and Iran. So you've gotta go all the way from Iran.

Joe Rogan 49:08 Oh my God.

Ben van Kerkwyk 49:09 So that's the nearest lapis quarry. I mean look, there's a, this, this is not a problem, uh, restricted to the vases either. There's a box in the Osiris shaft which is, uh, more, the box itself just, they say it's, well, it's 4th Dynasty. It's made from a stone called dasite, and again, there's no known quarry in Egypt for dasite. It, this happens a lot. So it's almost-

Joe Rogan 49:27 Go back to that image, Jamie, please.

Narrator 49:28 Which one, the map?

Joe Rogan 49:29 Yeah. Th- there's... One of the things that freaks me out about the map is when you go out, it looks like it was washed over.

Ben van Kerkwyk 49:36 Oh, 100%. Yeah, I mean-

Joe Rogan 49:37 100%.

Ben van Kerkwyk 49:38 I've talked a lot with Randall about this.

Joe Rogan 49:39 Like, look at that. Like go, go back out again. Look at that below it. I mean-

Ben van Kerkwyk 49:43 Yeah, the Sahara?

Joe Rogan 49:44 That's exactly what it looks like. It looks washed out.

Ben van Kerkwyk 49:47 It is. That's what it is.

Joe Rogan 49:48 Yeah, but that's crazy.

Ben van Kerkwyk 49:50 (laughs) It is.

Joe Rogan 49:50 Like how much water washed that out? I mean, and how else would you get what looks exactly like a water washout? How else would those features be-

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:00 ... be on the surface?

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:01 It's a...

Narrator 50:03 It's weird.

Joe Rogan 50:03 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:04 Yeah.

Narrator 50:04 It bounces.

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:04 Yeah, I mean, some, some of those are mountains and, and mountain ranges, but I can tell you in the desert, not so much that... I mean, there are mountains but-

Joe Rogan 50:09 But that just looks like channels of... It just looks like an insane amount of water literally washed over the area and smoothed it out.

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:16 Yeah, I mean there's huge... There's, there's a massive amount of evidence for massive, uh, for, for giant floods through the Nile Valley as well, not, not just across the Sahara but... I mean Petrie was talking about, he was up on cliffs, you know, and finding water lines and, and, and flint points and stuff that, that were indicative of massive floods. This is Hawara. Yeah, this is the labyrinth.

Joe Rogan 50:34 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:36 So there's the canal. You see, that's the canal I've been talking, the Bawabi Canal.

Joe Rogan 50:39 It is, it's so crazy that when you get to like sub-Saharan Africa, like how little of that has been explored, and how much of that was like insanely green and fertile.

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:49 Not that long ago.

Joe Rogan 50:50 Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:50 Well, certainly not... Yeah, I mean-

Joe Rogan 50:51 Thousands of years ago.

Ben van Kerkwyk 50:53 Well, it's interesting. I just, you know, I did a, I did this long video on the erosional features of the Giza Plateau because last year, 2024, they released a paper that, um, they, I think some geologists, um, I can't remember their names unfortunately, but they talked about the fact that there was... All of the, all of the valley temples, so these pyramid, you know, on, on... all these pyramids that are on like what you would call the, I mean lower Egypt, so Giza, Aburawash, Abusir, Saqqara, uh, Meidum, they all... The pyramids aren't just a pyramid, it's a pyramid complex. So it's like you have a pyramid, you've got a structure in front of it, you've got this causeway that runs down to what then they would call a valley temple, a structure that's the end of the causeway. So that's the, the, the, the well-known valley temple that's next to the Sphinx is the valley temple for the middle pyramid, like it's connected by this causeway. Then they figured out that during the African humid period, which ended thousands of years before dynastic Egypt ever started, there was a branch of the river Nile called the Aramat branch that ran exactly where all of these valley temples are. So it's, it's like they were... It's almost... I mean I just look at it and go, "This was built, these were built for that water source." Because I think it's super... I'm very skeptical about the idea of these, all of these valley temples, particularly the one, the Giza Plateau, being used as harbors for like a couple months a year to, to transport all these blocks from the quarry in Aswan. Again, 600 miles away, right? For all the granite. And there's thousand- tens of thousands of tons, hundreds of thousands of tons of granite on, on that plateau that had to be transported. I don't think there's the depth there. I've seen pictures and photographs in early times, pre-dam when the Nile flooded, there's h- there's not that much water there. However, during the African humid period, which ended, at the latest, 6,000 BC, but stretches back thousands and thousands of years before that, that's when the Sahara was a savanna. You had river basins and lakeses, like, like lakes and rivers. You had, you had a m- much more rainfall and it wasn't like a, it wasn't this flood situation. It wasn't this annual inundation. There was just rainfall and there was enough water in that Nile Valley to support this Aramat branch of the Nile, which is, was said to be like a mile or two miles wide in some places. So really not like an insignificant-

Joe Rogan 53:13 Whoa.

Ben van Kerkwyk 53:14 ... waterway. But it was high and it was, it was running and, and they've traced the path of this Aramat branch and it turns out all of these valley temples from these pyramid complexes are on its banks. And it wouldn't... It's not like it's flooding, it's like there all the time. And, and this en- this period ends and the, you get the desertification of the Sahara starting around 6- 6500, 6000, uh, BC. And so, you know, it's not like until, you know, if you get 5,000 then 4,000, 4500 BC, 3000 BC, that's when you sort of, that's 3100 BC is kind of when we say the Egyptian civilization started. So it doesn't make sense to me that if, if they built these valley temples and these, and these, all these structures in like 2800 BC, I mean, what do you... You would, you would build it where the river is. Like the river-

Joe Rogan 54:00 (laughs) Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:00 ... was way down there at that point. (laughs) Yeah, and so I, I-

Joe Rogan 54:03 What is the response to this?

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:04 Well, I, I just put it in my... I mean it-

Joe Rogan 54:06 Does anybody try to debunk it?

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:08 No, it's a, it's a peer-reviewed scientific study. This is what happens in these, with a lot of these, um, these papers. You'll, you'll see this in, it happens in genetics and the DNA studies that have been done too. You don't... These other scientists will not really step on the toes of the archeologists or the, the historians, right? They'll, they'll present the data but s- stop from inferring what it could mean for the picture of history.

Joe Rogan 54:32 Got it. So they just-

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:33 So it seems to be left out there-

Joe Rogan 54:34 ... throw the data out there and go, "You guys figure it out."

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:37 Yeah, pretty much. And they just whoop hands off like-

Joe Rogan 54:38 And the archeologists say, "We're not gonna touch it."

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:40 Yeah, they ignore it usually. They're not-

Joe Rogan 54:42 It's like-

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:42 They don't care. It's... Yeah, it's left to like rogue scholars and idiots like me on YouTube-

Joe Rogan 54:46 (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:46 (laughs) ... or people that write books to, to really try and put the pieces together.

Joe Rogan 54:48 Thank God there's a YouTube, right?

Ben van Kerkwyk 54:50 (laughs) Dude. I, I know. It's-

Joe Rogan 54:51 I mean, thank God there's a place where a video like yours can get millions of views, where so many people all around the world can watch that and go, "Wait, what's going on down there?"

Ben van Kerkwyk 55:02 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:02 Like this... Who really knows? And why do these people... why are they so-... sure. Like, why are they so arrogant in their ideas? Because-

Ben van Kerkwyk 55:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:13 ... it's v- very clear that it, it's n- ... It's not ... It's ... There's not a cl- ... You know, like we know Civil War ended in 1865, right?

Ben van Kerkwyk 55:23 Yeah. Right.

Joe Rogan 55:23 It's like, it's all written down. Everybody knows. People were alive. There's like photographs of the soldiers. We're pretty accurate with that.

Ben van Kerkwyk 55:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:31 You get to f- fucking 6000 BC, man, you're just guessing.

Ben van Kerkwyk 55:35 Ah, yep. It's, it's a, it's ... Yes, the further back you go, the much hazy-

Joe Rogan 55:41 You deal with less evidence.

Ben van Kerkwyk 55:42 ... you can't tell.

Joe Rogan 55:42 There's-

Ben van Kerkwyk 55:42 There is way less evidence.

Joe Rogan 55:43 Yeah. And it's also, it, it scares them, because something like that, if y- if you really do find advanced structures that are at 6000 BC ... Well, you know, before Gobekli Tepe, we didn't even know that that was even possible.

Ben van Kerkwyk 55:56 Right.

Joe Rogan 55:57 And that's that famous, uh, conversation that, uh, happened with Robert Schoch and that really arrogant, uh, archeologist.

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:04 Mark Lehner? Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:05 Yes, which is he's laughing. Like why would you laugh about ancient history, first of all? What-

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:11 What? (laughs) What ancient civilizations are ... Is that guy still alive?

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:15 Lehner? Yeah, show me the potsherds, which is quite-

Joe Rogan 56:17 He must feel so stupid now-

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:19 Well, yeah, I-

Joe Rogan 56:19 ... after Gobekli Tepe. Like someone should show him that video and go, "Why were you laughing?"

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:24 (laughs) Lehner.

Joe Rogan 56:24 Like, like because this is just human ego.

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:26 This is human ego-

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:28 It is.

Joe Rogan 56:28 ... on display for the world. You wanna be the gatekeepers of this information, you wanna be the one person or the person that represents this group of human beings that are the scholars, that have published work, that have taught at universities, and you're the only ones.

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:41 You're the only ones that know the, the ancient history of Earth, despite the fact that there's people like yourself and Graham Hancock and all th- who have spent a lot of time, and they're very careful about what they say, and spent a lot of time investigating this. And they just wanna dismiss those people-

Ben van Kerkwyk 56:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:58 ... because they don't have the proper credentials or like they ... What are you talking about?

Ben van Kerkwyk 57:03 Well, it's ... I think i- it's ... Yes, that's, that's, that's exactly what's happening, I think it ... And it is a, as a result of the, the fact that the conversations is getting out of their hands, right? If you-

Joe Rogan 57:15 Yes.

Ben van Kerkwyk 57:15 It's one of the things I admire so much about the, the f- the, the people who started this, what we would call archeological Egyptol- egyptological space, guys like Flinders Petrie, you know, they're very open about what they didn't know. Like one of my f- ... Like Petrie would tell ... He talks about the machining marks and you can read between the lines at the wonder at what he's finding, and he's like, "I don't get it." Like, "I don't ... We can't do it. We don't know how they did it." And this is, I think, because the conversation's happening in those halls of, you know, the academic halls or the geographical club or whatever, these peers-

Joe Rogan 57:45 It doesn't get out to the whole world.

Ben van Kerkwyk 57:46 Doesn't get out. And then-

Joe Rogan 57:47 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 57:47 And so that slowly changes with the rise of initially, like alternative authors, you know, u- u- uh, which best represented by Graham Hancock, good friend of mine as well. And he, uh, you know, his books and they start to gain in popularity and now these, I guess, the people in the, in the academic halls of residence that-

Joe Rogan 58:03 Mm-hmm.

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:03 ... are typically considered the authority are seeing this conversation get out of hand, and now you get to YouTube where, you know, it's, it to some extents s- ... Uh, I think it is possible to do an end run dar- ... An end, end run around what they're saying, and I do watch people and they're guys like Flint that are trying to embrace that, the new media space and try and get on podcasts and t- ... Uh, you know, if you read the SAA journals and articles, the Society of American Archeology, they're literally writing to themselves saying, "How can we become more popular in this space and how do we start podcasts and get into it?"

Joe Rogan 58:32 The problem is they're still doing it the same way.

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:34 They are. And it's, they're still-

Joe Rogan 58:35 It's like when CNN journalists-

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:37 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 58:37 ... get, get fired from CNN and start a podcast and everybody are like, "No."

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:40 Yeah, it's the same.

Joe Rogan 58:40 "You're doing CNN outside of CNN."

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:42 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:43 That's what they're doing.

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:43 They're doing academia which is like gatekeeping of information.

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:47 And also, like pejoratives, mocking-

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:50 Right.

Joe Rogan 58:50 ... really shitty behavior towards anyone who's outside of it, including calling them racist, calling them white supremacists.

Ben van Kerkwyk 58:58 White supremacists.

Joe Rogan 58:58 It's, it's so dumb. It's so dumb because one of the dumbest parts about it is no matter what, those are the s- the people that lived in Africa. So no matter-

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:08 ... what-

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:08 Oh.

Joe Rogan 59:08 ... no matter what ha- ... No ma- ... Uh, w- whoever built that-

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:12 ... is people that lived in Africa.

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:13 That lived in Africa. They were Africans.

Joe Rogan 59:14 So shut the fuck up.

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:15 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:15 Like the white supremacy thing makes no sense.

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:18 Yeah. It's cra- ... I mean-

Joe Rogan 59:19 It's Africans.

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:20 It's Africans.

Joe Rogan 59:21 100 ... Look, that's the people that were living there. If, if humans made it, you know, if you're not in the alien camp, which is a bizarre camp-

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:27 ... but if you're not in the ... I'm in the ancient civilization, incredibly advanced, cataclysmic disaster-

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:34 Yep.

Joe Rogan 59:34 ... wipes them out. Civilization takes a long time to rebuild, finds the remnants of these ancient civilizations, and then sort of claims them over generations.

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:43 Right.

Joe Rogan 59:43 After a thousand years, nobody really knows-

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:44 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 59:44 ... who fucking built it.

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:46 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 59:46 You know, the ... And then this is, this is where I think we find ourselves. That's, that's where I'm at. But if you're in that camp, you're talking about Africans.

Ben van Kerkwyk 59:55 Yes.

Joe Rogan 59:55 So all these shitty things they do just show their hand, 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-

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:00:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:10 ... 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.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:00:18 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-

Joe Rogan 1:00:29 (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:00:29 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 1:00:50 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:00:50 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 1:01:26 Well, how ... I don't know how you can ignore the vases, how you can ignore the statues, the symmetry-

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:01:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:31 ... and the construction of the faces.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:01:33 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-

Joe Rogan 1:01:56 Well, the issue with the, the drill bits is the revolutions per minute, right?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:02:00 Uh, I mean, the cores?

Joe Rogan 1:02:01 Like, the cores. Yeah.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:02:02 Yeah. Well, it's not the revolutions per minute, it's the penetration rate. We don't know-

Joe Rogan 1:02:06 How quickly it does.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:02:07 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:22 1 in 60 meaning?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:02:23 1 in, so for like, if you unwind that circular motion to a straight line, 60 inches horizontal travel, one inch vertical-

Joe Rogan 1:02:31 Oh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:02:31 ... drop, which is 500 times greater than how we do it today with modern-

Joe Rogan 1:02:36 (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:02:36 ... diamond tipped saws, hole saws, which do turn-

Joe Rogan 1:02:40 Wow.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:02:41 So our modern ones, bear in mind, they, you know, 900 RPM.

Joe Rogan 1:02:43 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:02:43 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-

Joe Rogan 1:03:29 This right here?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:03:30 Yeah. So this is like, that's the tubular drill. So this is-

Joe Rogan 1:03:33 Oh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:03:33 That's a, a core function of how these vases are made. You would often find-

Joe Rogan 1:03:37 So this is the bottom?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:03:38 The bo- so they've, they've cored that thing out and then they've snapped it off and polished it down, but they didn't eliminate the full tool mark. And you'll see that in a lot of vases.

Joe Rogan 1:03:46 Oh.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:03:46 So we know that these tubular drills were used, uh, with the vases as well. And we've-

Joe Rogan 1:03:52 But you have no idea the power source, no idea what the material was, the cut?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:03:56 No. Well ... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:03:59 Yeah?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:03:59 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.

Joe Rogan 1:05:30 Mm.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:05:30 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,

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:06:00 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-

Joe Rogan 1:06:27 (laughs)

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:06:27 ... 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-

Joe Rogan 1:06:39 Mm.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:06:39 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-

Joe Rogan 1:07:12 Can I pause you for a second here?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:07:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:07:14 Uh, are the oldest tools they found copper?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:07:16 Yeah, yeah, copper and stone.

Joe Rogan 1:07:18 And what is the... And what are the dates of the oldest tools that they found?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:07:20 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.

Joe Rogan 1:07:31 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:07:31 I mean, a lot of carving, you can carve stone with harder types of stone. So there, there was-

Joe Rogan 1:07:35 Okay.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:07:35 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 1:07:50 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:07:50 Um ...

Joe Rogan 1:07:51 So when they analyzed the, the traces, there's no copper?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:07:55 We didn't find any copper. We did find some other stuff, which was-

Joe Rogan 1:07:57 Which was found?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:07:57 ... very interesting. Well, the most interesting thing we did find was titanium.

Joe Rogan 1:08:01 What?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:08:02 Yeah, titanium and titanium alloys with iron. We found iron, zinc, tin, zircon-

Joe Rogan 1:08:10 Titanium alloys?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:08:11 Yeah. So titanium, and it's not ... We've ... Yes, so yeah, so when you find-

Joe Rogan 1:08:16 The term alloy, doesn't that refer to something that has-

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:08:19 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.

Joe Rogan 1:09:20 Has this been published?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:09:22 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.

Joe Rogan 1:09:38 Right.

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:09:38 Like to scan the whole thing, but uh-

Joe Rogan 1:09:41 To play with devil's advocate, would that be evidence of a lack of a chain of custody that perhaps someone was-

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:09:48 Uh, potentially.

Joe Rogan 1:09:48 ... using titanium to see if they could cut it?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:09:51 Uh, yes, it could, it could be, uh, contamination. So we looked for signs of contamination. Um, I didn't, this didn't seem like contaminate- In fact, at the end of, at the end of when we'd finished scanning, we actually took... He had some titanium dust, like he was... We, we put some on, on one of the pieces and put it in to see what that would look like, just these, like a tiny, like just like literally a, a matchstick and just the tiniest end and just tapped it and then looked at that under the microscope to look at what contaminant. It just didn't seem to be contamination. You can't rule it out. Uh, there's, it's... We found other types of metals as well.

Joe Rogan 1:10:26 So it didn't seem to be contamination. What is the reason why it didn't seem to be that?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:10:29 Well, because it didn't...

Joe Rogan 1:10:30 What-

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:10:30 So we looked at what contamination would look like, like if-

Joe Rogan 1:10:33 And what is the difference?

Ben van Kerkwyk 1:10:33 Well, so it's like smaller specs where you can actually see the material. The one piece that we found, it seemed to be embedded in the stone, like it was as if something, like this tiniest fragment of the tool or some sort of, imagine it was a tool tip wedged itself in the stone and then it stayed there. But it's, it was only like 20 or 30 microns wide, which is pretty big under a scanning electron