The Joe Rogan Experience #2417: Ben van Kerkwyk on Ancient Egypt’s Lost Labyrinth (Transcript)

I don’t think enough people know. A lot of people know that we’re listening to this podcast, but not enough people that would do something, that can do something. You know what I mean? It’s like we reach a lot of knuckleheads with a wide variety of people, but the percentage of people that have the resources to make something happen, they have to work something out with the Egyptian government. Right? So they have to do something with those dams.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. Well, I don’t think it takes the dams. You would have to remediate the water on the site at least, somehow box it out. Right. You got to drain. You’d have to drain this massive area, or at least if you were targeted enough, you might be able to drain a smaller area to then excavate in that area.

JOE ROGAN: We should probably explain to people that didn’t listen to the last podcast, just a real quick synopsis.

The Great Lost Labyrinth of Ancient Egypt

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So the labyrinth we’re talking about is the great lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt, which was described by figures like Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny the Elder, figures from antiquity. These authors described it as being greater in magnificence than the pyramids. They had these just mind-bending descriptions of what this site was like. Multiple levels, 3,000 rooms. You would get lost in it. It had giant courtyards with pillars all made from, I mean, one guy, I think it was Strabo, described the roof as being a single piece of stone, which I don’t think it was, but it’s describing those perfect joins that you see in the real megalithic work from Egypt.

So it’s this giant mystery. We know it’s there and it was kind of lost to time until we found it again. Basically it was discovered. It was always known about because there were clues about its location. It was always theorized to have been at this place called Hawara, which is near the Fayum in Egypt. Petrie went there and dug it up, Flinders Petrie in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and he found massive stone slabs. He thought he was standing on its foundation, like it’s been quarried and taken away.

Rather than that though, it turns out he was most likely standing on the roof of the top layer. It was 10 meters below. The ground is so nuts. He never got quite in. But then the Matahar expedition happened, I think in 2017 or 2015. There was an expedition run by a guy named Louis de Cordier in partnership with the Egyptian government. They used ground penetrating radar, sonic techniques, well-established subsurface techniques. And they found it. They found these massive cyclopean walls that were meters thick. It was a labyrinthian structure. It’s well verified.

It’s below the water table level of what’s on that site now. So you have water table about 5 meters below the surface. The labyrinth starts at 9, 10 meters. There’s some controversy around that report because it was buried. So he found it. They never published the report. It was squashed by Zahi Hawass. This is according to Louis de Cordier. He threatened him and his team with national security sanctions if they talked about it. It just was put away.

He waited a few years. He finally released the report. It’s like, holy s*, we found the labyrinth. And then this spurred some other companies to use some of these new space-based scanning techniques. There’s been at least two that have been done, very different techniques. But they found the same thing. They found that there is in fact a massive underground structure at this place called Hawara. It goes deeper than what you could reach with those ground penetrating radar and those established techniques, 60, 70 meters below the ground. There’s multiple levels, three or four levels, and they correlate.

So one scans a statistical model. Another one uses high-frequency photography along with I think seismic data, very similar to the Doppler tomography work that’s being done by the Italians at places like the Giza plateau now. And they both correlate. Yes, there’s a big structure. But one of the most interesting facts that came out of this scan was it seems in this massive central atrium, this one big giant open room, 40, 50 meters long that connects to all of these levels, there seems to be this unidentified metallic object that’s freestanding in this room. It’s about 40 meters long and it seems to be tic tac shaped, is what this report said.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s a UFO?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: There’s a UFO in Egypt.

JOE ROGAN: Aliens did it? Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, it’s tantalizing.

The Potential Discovery of a Lifetime

JOE ROGAN: Could you imagine? Can you imagine if they get in there and they really do find a recovered spacecraft? What do we do then? Because if this is a public excavation, that’s the question. We’d have to bring in the seals. We need to lock that place down. Maybe we need to occupy Egypt just to figure out how to f*ing get this done.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Occupy Hawara? Let’s just, just Hawara.

JOE ROGAN: You’d have to occupy the whole country. You’d have to bribe them something, give them money, whatever you got to do. If I was a president, that would be my number one priority. I mean, you know.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it has the potential. I think there’s been a little bit more of this from Egypt. I guess the establishment there, they seem a little more willing to engage in some of the mystery. I genuinely do think that discoveries like these can only help and boost tourism. It’s going to. All they want is to bring people in.

JOE ROGAN: It will bring way more. Could you imagine if they actually figured out a way to drain all the water out of the labyrinth? They give you a tour and show you the spaceship. How much you paying to see this spaceship, bro? I’m paying a ton of money to go see that spaceship.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s a special permission. That’s the way we do. They’re very good at that. There’s a lot of places you can now go in Egypt that are these special permissions. It’s thousands of dollars, but, you know, we go.

JOE ROGAN: How much money could they charge? Ten grand. They could charge a lot of money just to go look at the spaceship.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Might be like Mecca.

JOE ROGAN: Like Mecca for UFO dorks.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It would be insane to see. Depends what. Who knows what. Well, the guy did say too, it didn’t seem like any metal that he’d seen before. He couldn’t identify what type of metal it was. It’s alien, right? It’s element 144 for sure. It’s alien.

JOE ROGAN: It’s made out of that same stuff that comet’s made out of, the AI Atlas.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, yeah, the 3i Atlas, the thing that’s off-gassing some nickel, nickel alloy or something.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a giant nickel the size of Manhattan.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s jetting towards the sun. Although didn’t NASA, I think they released their images recently. I can’t remember. They came out and said, oh, the comet’s doing this and doing that.

JOE ROGAN: Doing a lot of weird stuff. But it definitely seems to be a comet.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Unless you ask Avi Loeb and he’s like, anything can be a spaceship. He’s got a point. He’s got a point.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: He does. We don’t know what one would look like. We’ve not seen. Yeah, I mean, it’s a small sample size as it is for interstellar objects. Right? We have three to compare, but two of them have been really f*ing weird.

The Potential to Rewrite History

JOE ROGAN: So I think the point we’re getting at is, and this is the point of all these conversations, is that there’s some stuff that is yet to be discovered that has previously been discovered that might be, it might blow the dam down on all this stuff to the point where, okay, whatever you think happened here, a lot more happened. And it seems way crazier if the stuff underneath the Giza Plateau is correct and if the labyrinth, if they can show you that this not only was Herodotus depicting an actual place, but we can show it to you and it’s preserved and it’s been under the water for 50 years.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it would be amazing. And yes, I think some of these things would knock down everything. It’s a house of cards. Right? I think there are elements that are obvious. I mean, not obvious, but people can explore them and it starts to knock down the house of cards. That’s how people end up with this, just looking at the contradictions in ancient Egypt.

But there are other examples of what I would say, these things like the Matahar expedition that have been discovered but then sort of covered up and kept secret. And a lot of them have to do with, you have the same tie-in with these ancient stories and accounts from history, not just from the Roman and Greek historians, but also the Arab historians like Al-Masudi, for example, the Herodotus of the Arabs they called him.

Ancient Accounts of Hidden Chambers

He talked about tales of these tunnels and chambers beneath the Sphinx, that there were rooms beneath the Sphinx that then led out to three different tunnels. You have a number of other Arab historians from as far back as 600 A.D. that have stories of getting into the pyramids and then getting lost in tunnels and chambers beneath them.

Yeah, I mean there’s a lot of these crazy. You hear these stories of the Hall of Records, right? People like Edgar Cayce, the American psychic in the 1940s, who, have you heard of Edgar Cayce?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So he would fall into these trance-like states and he’d have these visions. He’s called the Sleeping Prophet they would call him, or he’s one of the American psychics. And he wasn’t just about things around Egypt. He did prophesize and talk about locations for three Halls of Records, which were these Atlantean caches of information, like a pre-diluvian civilization. He did call it Atlantis, but he would also have these predictions about the stock market. And a lot of people made a lot of money based on his predictions and that led to the…

JOE ROGAN: He was really good at it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So apparently when, I mean whether he was lucky, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: That’s always the question when it comes to psychics. If you’re a real psychic, why wouldn’t you make all the money in the world from the stock market?

The Edgar Cayce Foundation and the Search for the Hall of Records

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It did happen. There was a lot of people made a lot of money and he did evidently too as well. And so that led to the formation of something called the Edgar Cayce Foundation or the Association for Research and Enlightenment is the name of them. They’re still going strong today and they’ve been looking to try and find his halls of records and they’ve been trying to verify Cayce’s predictions.

One in particular that they have been chasing down is the famous Hall of Records, which he said was beneath the paws of the Sphinx. So the stories of this Hall of Records and these rooms beneath the Sphinx go back thousands of years. I mean, just not just the Arabs, but also Herodotus and these other guys also talked about that whole area, the Sphinx and everything else being vastly more ancient even than the pyramids.

But there was some work done that happened in recent times, like in the 1990s. There’s been a search going on since the early 70s that the ARE has been involved in. And a lot of this is quite secretive. A lot of this has never really come to light until very recently. In fact, there’s been some footage that came up that showed that there are, in fact, tunnels beneath the Sphinx that may well have been explored. We’re not quite sure, but it’s an interesting story. So it does involve Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass, who are the authoritative figures involved in Egypt.

JOE ROGAN: Are they bottlenecking this as well? Do I have to go give them a hug?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Maybe.

JOE ROGAN: Come on, guys, join us.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Allegedly.

JOE ROGAN: We’ll make you so much more popular. We’ll help. We’ll get you more tourism.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And I think the current guys that have been running the Department of Antiquities are embracing a little bit of that idea. But I do think there’s been a little bit of gatekeeping that’s happened.

The Generational Divide in Academia

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think it’s a generational thing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I agree.

JOE ROGAN: And I think when you are an academic or you are a person that’s in a position of power like Zahi is, and you’ve been running things for so long, and this new thing comes along, it’s very threatening. And when there’s a lot of movement and momentum behind it, it’s very threatening. But that thing will just embrace you if you say, “Oh, my goodness, look what we’ve learned. We’ve learned more new, amazing things about, wait for it, Egyptians.”

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s the same people.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just older. It’s just older versions. This is why it’s so dumb. You are only allowing part of the narrative to go through about how magnificent this culture was. It’s already the most magnificent culture in human civilization. And in terms of history, when we look at it, nothing’s anything like Egypt. It’s crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No.

JOE ROGAN: And imagine it’s bigger and crazier and richer.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It would. It’s just richer and a longer history in this place. It’s still, it is.

JOE ROGAN: It is the most magical place in the world.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it is unfortunate. I was just talking about this just yesterday, in fact. The nature of establishment being to resist change, right? It’s unfortunate. Control and to resist change.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s maintain control, not lose control. That was the fear. The fear is if you, I am a self-professed expert with an institution behind me with a nice name. And then all of a sudden some fing ahole with an Australian accent comes along, a tech guy who becomes a YouTuber because he watched some a*holes podcast when he was younger.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yep, pretty much. This is true.

The Rise of Alternative Perspectives

JOE ROGAN: But it’s you and Graham and Jimmy Corsetti and all these other amazing people. And you guys are showing the world that there’s another side to a lot of these stories. And it’s a legitimate side. It’s not just legitimate, it’s an unfathomable side. When you’re looking at some of the stuff like Baalbek, you’re looking at those stones. There’s unfathomable things that no one is saying. They’re unfathomable. No one’s saying we don’t know. Everyone is saying, “Don’t worry about it, we got it all figured out.” That’s crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I agree. I think embracing them, and I think I’ve made this point before, but it’s the nature of the discourse that’s changed, that has forced I think a stronger reaction from the establishment.

JOE ROGAN: The general public views things differently.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, the general public’s involved in the discussion now. If you go back more than 60, 70 years, I mean general public didn’t have access to this information. These discussions only happened in societies and in universities. But with the rise of firstly alternative authors and then the Internet, now everybody’s got a chance to have a platform and a set of ears to hear this information and it becomes more popular. Guys like you have had a huge impact on the popularity of these topics. And that’s I think what is threatening.

JOE ROGAN: It’s always been popular. The problem is they haven’t been legitimized. These ideas have always been popular. It’s just nobody gets. It’s like there’s a food that you want that no one’s serving.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: That’s what it’s like. It’s not like it wasn’t popular. I’m not unique in my interest in ancient Egypt or in ancient civilizations. Everybody, look at when they ask men, “What do you think about ancient Rome?” Thinking about Rome all the time.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just a normal part of being a person that lives in a current civilization wondering what it was like in the past. And then when you see something like Egypt, you’re like, none of this makes sense.

The Evidence for Ancient Lost Civilizations

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, there’s massive contradictions. And I think it seems so old. Well, it does. And I think what’s made this, let’s call it alternative perspective, much more possible, even plausible is all of the adjacent fields of science and work that is basically providing a plausible context for these ideas that there was an ancient lost civilization that is responsible for the roots of some of the things we see in these civilizations, responsible for some of the technological enigmas that we find on these sites.

And that’s, this is all stuff that’s happened in recent years in adjacent fields of science. Things like the extension of the human timeline, the evidence for severe erosion on these sites, our understanding of climate history and cataclysm.

JOE ROGAN: Timeline is huge. That’s huge because, we were just, Jesse Michaels and I were just having a conversation about this. I was like, imagine if you would not lose any cognitive abilities. No decline at all. And modern science figured out a way to let you live a thousand years. Imagine if you’re a person who’s working on material sciences and you’re doing 3D printing. You get to live a thousand years and you’re a researcher and you still show up at work every day for a thousand years or 10,000 years.

That sounds nuts, but it doesn’t. Because if you can extend life, you can extend life for a very prolonged. Especially with gene editing and a lot of the other crazy. Who knows if they already figured that out back then?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I mean, there seems to be some evidence that they might have because—

JOE ROGAN: What about the Sumerian kings list?

The Longevity of Ancient Civilizations

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, this is a big part of it. Yeah. I mean, not just them, but almost every civilization that talks about, even the Bible, it talks about pre-diluvian or pre-flood civilizations, often talks about people living for hundreds of years, if not longer than that, thousands of years. You have an Egyptian king’s list that does the same thing.

But even in the Bible, you know, Noah was 600, right. So you have many examples of these, what they would describe as pre-cataclysm or pre-flood civilizations where people live for a long time. But there’s an extension of individual human timeline, and we also know that there’s an extension of the human timeline, like how long humans have been here. Right. Because that’s going back further and further all the time.

We have skulls and fossil record evidence now where it’s just slightly more than 300,000 years genetic. And studies into teeth morphology make the possibility open to whatever, 7, 800,000 years. There was a skull found. Yeah, I mean I think that was more, I think that’s more of a Homo sapien-related skull. So it’s like it may not be Homo sapien exactly us. It might be a variety.

But that’s a whole other aspect on this too, is that where the last humans left, there were other types of humans that we know lived for, in some cases, a couple million years. Yeah. That had similar, even bigger brain sizes than we did. We don’t really know what their capabilities were. We only can work with ourselves.

And then you combine that lengthening of time of like, okay, you have an intelligent social species that has the ability to build on knowledge of your ancestors. So, you know, one guy spends his life making a spear, the next guy spends his life perfecting how to throw it. We have this unique ability to stand on this knowledge that’s passed down from our direct ancestors and therefore build up our capability and it inevitably leads towards civilization.

And if you stress that way back in time and now you look at things like the climate history and the history of cataclysm on this planet, this possibility that these civilizations may have arisen and then been completely destroyed at some point over the last several hundred thousand years, you can’t just dismiss that. There’s a strong possibility that it’s possible.

And in fact, there seems to be a lot of other contextual evidence to support it in origin tales, in stories, in the echoes of sacred geometry and advanced mathematics and knowledge of the cosmos, and also planetary dimensions and geodetic data. All this stuff that’s encoded into these monuments and into these stories and tales that we can’t explain how these so-called primitive civilizations like the Egyptians or the Sumerians knew this information, yet it’s there and it’s encoded in their monuments and in their data.

But we can’t explain, even the Greeks, you can’t explain the precision of some of the aspects of things like the pyramids. But yeah, I mean, and again, with the cataclysms that we know have happened, the Younger Dryas just being the most recent, but if you go back several hundred thousand years, you have these massive interglacial periods and glacial maximum periods, right, that these cycles that we go through where you have this big glaciation buildup and then you have just these, what must have been catastrophic floods and then interglacial periods.

The Eolian Period and Climate Cycles

In fact, there was a period called the Eolian period, about 120,000 years ago. That was very much like the Holocene that we’re in today. In fact, it lasted longer than the Holocene has currently lasted. We’ve been in the Holocene maybe 10,000 years, 10, 11,000 years. I think the Eolian period was more than 15 to 20,000 years where it was stable weather, sea levels were like 3, 4 meters higher than where they are today.

But it wasn’t like the Pleistocenes, it wasn’t like the height of a glacial maximum where it’s a difficult place to live. It was a calm period. I mean, the only reason our civilization is here today is because of the nice weather of the Holocene. Right. We have warm weather. We haven’t had massive catastrophes that have been extinction level events kind of thing to get in our way and knock us back to the Stone Age.

There was a similar period like that that lasted longer than we’ve been in this nice period, about 120,000 years ago. And if you consider after that the cycles of glaciation and flooding, then particularly the Younger Dryas, there’d been just almost nothing left. It’s just the stone in places that survived what happened afterwards.

So my range of possibilities for, okay, when did these artifacts originate? Like, when did some of this architecture originally be built? It’s not, to me, just 15,000 years ago. It could be 100, 200,000 years or even more. And again, more contextual evidence to support that is things like the erosion that we can see on some of these sites. One of my favorite topics in the last couple of years has been looking at the erosion on the Giza Plateau.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I wanted to bring that up.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And of some of the big monuments in particular, like the whole middle pyramid complex on the Giza Plateau.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s show some of the images that you used in some of your videos, because it’s pretty fascinating when you look at it. It’s kind of undeniable.

Limestone Erosion Studies

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is. And what’s fun about this is, too, is that we don’t have to guess. Right. We know how long it takes. Studies have been done about limestone erosion. Turns out there’s almost an endless number of conveniently dated limestone slabs all around the world. They’re tombstones in cemeteries. Right.

So they get dated, they get cut, they get inscribed with the date when it was put up. And then so you can measure it and you can come back over whatever decades and measure erosion. And so how long does it take for this face of this limestone erosion to recede?

JOE ROGAN: This is the nutty stuff.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because we’re assuming that unless something happened to the outside of that, that this was, at one point in time, flat and smooth.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: 100%, because there are still blocks that are protected. A lot of this has been rebuilt. This is tricky to see. So you can actually see that the less eroded sections are actually modern restorations, because this is so eroded that it’s falling apart.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And this isn’t even the exterior of this structure. This is the interior core masonry. All of this was also, for God knows how many thousands of years, encased in granite.

Human Tendency to Renovate Ancient Sites

JOE ROGAN: It also points to a trend, points to a pattern that when human beings find ancient things, they do renovations, try to keep them. Yeah, yeah. Which is one of the things that’s been, you know, over and over and over again, we’ve talked about that. There’s so many structures that seem like there’s multiple timelines working on the same exact ground.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is 100% a human tendency to renovate and restore all of these, to reuse these sites in a gross way.

JOE ROGAN: Like what they do with the Sphinx, like the paws. That’s gross.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is. It, but it’s…

JOE ROGAN: It’s…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We’re renovating it and restoring it to use it as a tourist attraction. Like the Romans renovated and restored it to use as a ceremonial center.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s a very sh*tty version of the original.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I agree.

JOE ROGAN: And there’s a lot of assumptions. You’re assuming you knew the form of it. You’re making your own form.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Over the feet.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I have a problem. Yes. That was one of my problems with they were talking about restoring the middle pyramid, like the third pyramid, like the Menkaure Pyramid. Small one. Yeah, small. It’s monstrous. But it has these granite casing stones. Right. And the last of the top four or five courses are still there, but it was at least 15, 16 courses of granite.

And there’s all this granite, these massive granite blocks and rubble. And Mustafa Waziri, who was at the time the head of the Department of Antiquities, was talking about, “We’re going to rebuild it. We’re going to put it back together.” And I know this. And I’m like, please, no, because what an ahole.

Well, he did something cool, which was he excavated in front of it. He did show that the courses keep going down, but then he’s like, “We’re going to restore it.” I’m like, dude, they would use concrete. It would be a facsimile of what it once was.

JOE ROGAN: He still around?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, he actually, because he said that there was a lot of international outcry for that very reason. And then, in fact, the government formed a tribunal to figure out what to do. The tribunal was headed by Zahi Hawass and he lost his job. So, yeah, he’s not in that yet.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. Nobody wants to see the restored pyramid.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’m all for seeing what’s left.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

Erosion Rates and Timeline Implications

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, we can use our imaginations. They are restoring a lot of, I don’t necessarily agree with this either, things that are actively falling apart. Sure, you need to buttress them. Like a lot of this wall. So this is part of the middle pyramid complex at Giza, and there’s a lot of blocks like this.

There are limestone blocks that are 11, 12 meters long, like 4 meters wide, you know, 2, 300 tons that were stacked up on top of each other, and they eroded so greatly on the inside that they’ve actually fallen over. At some point in antiquity, they’ve fallen off. And so they are trying to buttress and support things that are going to fall. I’m all for that, but I mean, there’s a lot, just the amount of erosion that it takes for that to happen to blocks like this, of this nummulitic limestone, which is a very hard form of limestone, full of fossils.

And you’re talking like two, three feet in some places of erosion of limestone. And if you look at the studies that have been done into limestone erosion rates, and there’s been several, they’ve studied them in coastal wave action environments where it’s getting battered by waves. They put in rivers, you know, they put limestone cubes on the top of one of the governmental buildings in D.C. and left it there and studied it over decades.

And they’re like, okay, it’s tiny amounts, but in a normal weathering environment, right, this is assuming a lot more rainfall than what happens in Egypt, which gets very little rainfall, by the way. But a place like Washington D.C. or somewhere where you get like 40 inches of rain a year, something like that, it would take just normal weathering erosion to do 2 feet of erosion like this more than 100,000 years.

And so, and that’s, I think you can extend that because if, well, the thing is, maybe there was more rainfall here at some point. We know there was since about 4000 B.C. the African humid period was in place. That’s another big, I think, tell for what happened particularly on the Giza Plateau and the sites in Egypt in that, you know, one of the things that always mystified me about the Sphinx is like, it spent so much time buried in sand up to his chest over the last several thousand years, more time than it hasn’t been.

We have to work pretty hard to keep the sand out of it now. In fact, there are multiple attempts to dig it out of the sand in the 1800s that failed. And then they just literally, two or three years later, it’s sort of buried up to its chest again. Seems like a design flaw. Why would you build this thing in a low spot in a windy desert where it’s going to fill with sand? It’s just, I don’t think…

The Sphinx and Its Timeline

JOE ROGAN: Who’s it attributed to again?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Khafre.

JOE ROGAN: That’s right. And then wasn’t there an inscription where Khafre said that if he could uncover the Sphinx, he would be the pharaoh?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: This is right. It’s actually Thutmose IV that’s called the, there’s a stele in front of the, in the chest in there, in the Sphinx. So Thutmose is the fourth, about a thousand years later.

JOE ROGAN: So he was the one that was saying if he uncovered it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So we knew it was buried in sand during the dynastic Egyptian.

JOE ROGAN: That was what I was going to get to.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s, so that during that time, no erosion.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, this is the whole, yes. So there’s a whole other, so it’s protecting. Right. So this is another big issue with the wind and sand erosion. When you talk specifically about the Sphinx enclosure, I mean, this is one of the big, controversial, I mean, here’s the big one.

JOE ROGAN: The face is eroded.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Exactly.

The Sphinx Erosion Mystery

JOE ROGAN: And if it’s wind and sand, that’s the only thing that’s exposed and that’s not as eroded.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s been one of my major points for a long time. It is, to be fair, it is the yardang, the sedimentary layers of limestone. It is a slightly harder form of limestone, but still, you’re talking thousands and thousands of years where the only thing above the sand level was basically the face. And they explain all of this deep erosion on the body of the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure to wind and sand.

I know, obviously, Robert Schoch has a different interpretation, but yes, you would see erosion on that, but you just don’t. I think the most plausible explanation for that Sphinx is that, yes, the face was recarved in the dynastic period. Probably it could have been by Khafre, actually may well have been before that as well, because there’s other evidence that suggests that the Sphinx was already buried in sand at his time.

The attribution to Khafre comes from two main sources. One is its position. So where the Sphinx is, you have the middle pyramid, you have the causeway that runs down, and you have the middle pyramid. You have the pyramid temple, the complex where we were seeing that erosion. You had this massive causeway that runs down to then the Valley Temple, which is this very famous massive megalithic structure. And right next to the Valley Temple is the Sphinx. And in front of that is the Sphinx temple.

So they sort of attribute it and make it, well, it’s part of the middle pyramid complex. The other attribution comes from what’s been written on that dream stele between the legs of the Sphinx at its chest. It does say Khafre on there, but there’s a lot of controversy. It’s a controversial statement to say that that means Khafre built it.

There were several Egyptologists who had different interpretations, and this is back in the early 1900s. They had different interpretations for what that said. What they believe it said was Khafre was trying to do what his ancestors had done before, or that Thutmose was trying to do what his ancestors had done before. And Khafre is mentioned there in terms of dig it out of the sand and become king, excavate it from the sand.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the move that everybody goes through.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, it’s also, I think it’s propaganda. It could be a great explanation for dream stele. It could also just be governmental propaganda. Right. So he could be, you could put that in there and say, see, I’m divinely ordained to be king because I dug this out of the sand.

JOE ROGAN: Just in the interest…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just in the interest of keeping this standalone, please explain to people the whole deal with Dr. Robert Schoch from Boston University and the water erosion. I know, and if you’ve heard this before, I’m sorry, I just want it for people that are like, what, the water erosion? That appears to be thousands of years of rainfall.

Dr. Robert Schoch and the Water Erosion Theory

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s actually good. It’s good background context because it does apply to not only the Sphinx, it’s the most famous example, I think, and well known example of again, an adjacent field of science coming in and challenging some of the doctrine that’s been around Egyptology.

But it was actually Schwaller de Lubicz, who originally, I think, proposed it. His work was followed up by John Anthony West, who then brought Dr. Robert Schoch, who’s a professor of geology at Boston University, to the Sphinx. This was, I believe, late 80s, early 90s. And he went and looked at the erosional patterns.

So the Sphinx sits inside an enclosure. It’s carved from bedrock. So it was originally what you’d call a yardang, which is a limestone outcropping. And so they cut down in this big enclosure and they cut the floor and then they sort of shaped the Sphinx from this natural outcropping of bedrock.

And we know this because the structure next to the Sphinx, in front of it, called the Sphinx temple, is actually, you can line up the sedimentary layers of the blocks that are in there from the Sphinx enclosure. So we know that there were blocks taken from here. So this is all predictably sort of cut walls. And the Sphinx would have been nicely finished when it was.

And he looked at these patterns. If you go there today, I think I have pictures of the walls of the Sphinx enclosure in there, and it’s just these deeply eroded vertical channels. And the Sphinx body is harder to tell because it’s been restored so many times. The ancient Egyptians restored it, the Romans restored it, we restored it a couple different times.

But the nice thing is the walls of the enclosure really haven’t been touched. So you can see the natural erosive patterns. And he looked at that and went, that’s rainfall erosion. But not just some rainfall erosion. Literally the result of thousands of years. The only way you would get these patterns in the stone is thousands of years of rainfall erosion.

Obviously, Giza is a really, really dry place. I mean, Egypt’s a really dry place these days. You have to go back to time periods pre-4000 BC when the Sahara was a savannah. It was grasslands with lake basins and river systems, and it had a lot more rain. You didn’t have this annual flood cycle that you have now. It was much more rainfall. It was much more verdant and green. The Giza Plateau would have been green.

JOE ROGAN: Which makes sense that that’s why they would settle there in the first place.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Exactly, yeah. They didn’t build in a desert. I mean, you wouldn’t, because it would fill up with sand.

JOE ROGAN: It also makes sense why they would flourish because they had so much resources, because it was so green and fertile. Probably had plenty of plants, plenty of animals.

The African Humid Period and Ancient Egypt

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, there’s a really other good point associated with that that I wanted to bring up. But first, just to finish on the Sphinx erosion. So when Schoch came out and said this, he really thought he was moving the story forward. And he took it to an archaeological conference, and they literally laughed him out of the room.

And they said, this is ridiculous. “Where are the potsherds?” was, I think, Mark Lehner’s comment, mocking them. So he got a good taste of the old boy network of the archaeologists on that day. But he’s being very conservative in that dating also of saying, well, 12,000 years, it could well be tens of thousands of years.

And in fact, it seems more likely to me based on the erosional evidence that we see not only in the Sphinx enclosure but elsewhere on the Giza Plateau. There’s many places where you see just a huge amount of erosion that you can’t really explain within the timelines and the climate of dynastic Egypt as we know it from roughly 3000 BC till even now, because it’s still eroding. Right.

But yeah, it could be vastly more ancient. I actually think there’s something else that came out earlier this year. I think it was much earlier this year or maybe late last year. But there was a study done that showed that during the African humid period, so this period of time before the desertification of Egypt, the Sahara becoming a desert when it was green and there was more consistent rainfall, there was obviously a lot more water in the Nile, as we call it, and it had different channels.

One of the things they discovered was that there was a branch of the River Nile then, it’s called the Aramat branch. And it was in places up to a kilometer, most of a mile wide. So it’s quite an extensive branch. But it turns out that all of these valley temples on all of these pyramid sites from Dahshur and Saqqara, Abusir, Abu Ghurab, Giza, all of those valley temples were built on the shores of this extinct branch of the Nile.

So it’s pyramids. When you look at a pyramid, it’s not just a pyramid. There’s a whole complex associated with it. There’s a temple or there’s a structure at the pyramid, there’s a causeway, there’s what they call valley temples down. And these were all built on the shorelines of this branch of the Nile that basically disappeared 4,000, somewhere between 4,000 and 3,500 BC. But it was in place for thousands and thousands of years before that.

And today if you go there and they say, well, the valley temple, yep, they would ship the stones from Aswan and it’d be three months of the year, it would flood enough where you can get a boat. And I mean, I’ve seen pictures. There are pictures of when that flood happened, before they built the dam and stopped that process. And in some years it’s a puddle. There’s not, I mean, you’re talking about boats that were carrying hundreds of tons of granite and only in a three month period of year can you get them in there. There’s many, there would have been many years where there’s nothing even remotely enough water to get it anywhere near the Valley Temple.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they even use boats.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I know, I don’t either.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, sounds crazy to say, but I think they had a technology that we haven’t even begun to mess with yet.

The Massive Statues of Ancient Egypt

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The logistical achievements of ancient Egypt, of what is represented in ancient Egypt is like nothing you can see anywhere. I mean, there’s Baalbek and then there’s, to me, the best example is the statue at Tanis. There’s a statue, I mean there’s several of these thousand plus ton statues, half a dozen of them. You get remnants of them.

But there was one that was at Tanis that was moved a thousand kilometers, and it would have been, it was a single piece granite statue, easily a thousand tons.

JOE ROGAN: Show that image, Jamie, if you would, please.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think it’s giant objects in there or something. I mean, and this is Tanis in the delta, Aswan down here at the quarry. I mean, downstream on the Nile. There’s another example of the one at Karnak. That’s the whole shoulder and arm of a composite quartzite. Again, gigantic size of the Statue of Liberty. Basically a single piece, granite, solid statue. I mean, there’s all these pieces. That’s a small one, which is insane.

JOE ROGAN: Look at the people in the background and say that’s a small one.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Nah, it’s only 200 tons. I mean it’s 250, maybe. It’s not, you have them 10 times almost that size.

JOE ROGAN: The crazy thing is also how beautiful it is, how symmetrical it is.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The workmanship on these is astonishing. And you can still feel, this is one of the signs, I think when you get to the finishing on some of these statues, that’s a giant kneecap. There’s one with an arm and a shoulder sort of poking out. That’s a really good example and that’s Baalbek.

JOE ROGAN: The point is, when you talk about how beautiful that, that one that’s lying down, Jamie. Oh, there’s a back one a couple, that one.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Look at the finishing on that. How incredible. You see his nipple. You see all the, you know what I mean? Thousands of years later, you see the detail on the headdress. You see all. And then you have to realize, this was done with people that didn’t have steel.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Supposedly.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right, definitely. Yeah. Later periods, in the New Kingdom, they had some more iron, not necessarily steel, but you notice something else here. See that cartouche?

JOE ROGAN: Mm.

Ramses II: The Great Usurper

BEN VAN KERKWYK: See how poor that is relative to the finishing of the face and the chest? So this is the other thing that happened. This is why no one’s sort of saying, well, there’s statues, we don’t know who made it. We know who made it because they put their name on this. That is literally Ramses II’s cartouche right there. I recognize it anywhere.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s awesome that you recognize that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: If you come to Egypt, you’ll recognize it too. He, Petrie called Ramses II “the Great Usurper,” because he put his name on everything. And he carved it in deep like this, too. He would have it be him and his father, Seti the First, and his son, Merenptah, they were all in that business of rebadging some of this stuff.

JOE ROGAN: So they would find old things and they would put their name on it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They would claim it for themselves. I think it’s the nature of, I mean, during that period in the New Kingdom, in the 19th Dynasty, you know, it’s all…

JOE ROGAN: I did this, all me.

The Colossi of Memnon and Ancient Craftsmanship

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it was the height of dynastic Egypt’s power and wealth. So they had all of this, I think, hubris and arrogance to make themselves one of the gods. And it’s one of the… I think these statues, there’s a lot to unpack in these because I also happen to think that when you look at these massive statues that you can’t really explain with the capabilities of the dynastic Egyptians, I think it also explains their iconography.

Because if they inherited these giant statues, like, those are the gods. Like, you’re looking at this. Imagine the statue the size of the Statue of Liberty standing out in the desert, and it’s just sitting there looking at you with this face. And the craftsmanship on these are amazing. You can kind of see it here. You see how the eyeballs are tilted down almost, and it looks like a smile on the face from here.

But when you… it’s perspective when you stand beneath them and you look up at them, they’re looking at you. And it’s not so much… it’s not a smile. It’s just like a straight line. It looks straight. They’ve built, they’ve shaped these faces for perspective, as if you’re viewing them from the ground. They’re absolutely incredible. And there’s also been studies done on some of these that show the faces are pretty much perfectly symmetrical.

JOE ROGAN: Again, that’s crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Not something that you can achieve. Not something that’s done in modern artwork. The perfect symmetry. That’s not a… it’s not even a characteristic of a human face. Like, we aren’t like that. Our nostrils are different sizes and whatever. But because we’re hybrids, we could be. We’re just… we’re imperfect. We’re imperfect beings, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: I think they made us.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I mean, they made us.

JOE ROGAN: I think something came here from somewhere else or something was already here. Intervention Theory did something with lower hominins.

Genetic Engineering and Human Origins

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Have you read Lloyd Pye’s work? I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t read any of it. “Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong” is a fun lecture. Rest in peace, Lloyd. He was… and there’s some interesting genetic evidence that I think suggests that as a possibility. Our chromosomal difference between us and other mammals of our type. Almost like we’ve had these… the telomeres have been attached. We’ve been genetically engineered.

JOE ROGAN: Gregg Braden talks about that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. We have some real strange characteristics for being on this planet. Like, we die from exposure at 80 degrees in the shade. We can’t look at the sun. You ever see dogs? Dogs stare at the sun like this. And you’re like, what are you doing? Like, I’m fine. Why can’t you do that? You can’t even see at night. We have no benefit.

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting also, when they look at all these other versions of humans that they find, almost all of them were more durable.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, broomsticks to axe handles. Like, multiple gaps of…

JOE ROGAN: But isn’t that kind of in the Bible? Doesn’t the Bible say the meek shall inherit the earth?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, we’re the meek when it comes to…

JOE ROGAN: I think we’re the meek.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. We’re just the meanest.

Human Survival and Evolution

JOE ROGAN: Maybe we’re the meanest. We’re the meanest and the trickiest because we had to be. Which is like all animals when, you know, you have to… when you’re small. Like, hyenas are f*ing ruthless.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The reason why they’re ruthless is because lions are bigger and they had to figure it out. You know, they just be f*ing mean and nasty. And I think we probably wiped out or interbred with everything that wasn’t us. Yeah, that’s a wrap. Sorry, sorry. Your big bones don’t work on arrows.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: You dummies didn’t figure out catapults yet.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Guerrilla tactics.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, guerrilla tactics, technology. I mean, I think that’s also probably one of the reasons why we’re so obsessed with making better stuff, including weapons.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I think so. I mean, there is… I don’t rule out the… personally, my opinion, I think there’s either via panspermia or intervention theory like that where we’ve been… there is a huge mystery as to both our species and then how life itself kind of kicked off. Like that’s… even panspermia is like kicking the can down the road problem.

Like, how does DNA… because it’s one of the most interesting things to me is like DNA as a technology has never changed. Right? So from single cell organisms right down through to us, the way life is expressed as a technology, DNA… how it expresses life has changed, but DNA I don’t think has changed. Like, it’s this one way that life expresses itself and how it forms is like the actual origins of life.

JOE ROGAN: It’s DOS.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is. Human Operating System.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Life… Lost Life Operating System. Something like that.

The Tridactyl Mummies

JOE ROGAN: What is your take on those Tridactyl Mummies?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I have… I don’t know. I think there’s…

JOE ROGAN: Did you see Jesse Michaels’ episode on it?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I literally… not all of it. I’ve seen some of it, yes.

JOE ROGAN: You see the scans?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’ve seen the scans, yeah. I saw some of the information.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to get tricked. So I’m like… but Jesse said that seeing them in person… I just talked to him about it. He said it was otherworldly. He said it was incredibly strange. Like very, very surreal seeing them in person because it really does feel like it’s a different species. Like you’re looking at some different species.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: My take on that stuff is honestly it’s… it’s like, sure, it’s… to me the whole alien, other life in the universe was settled. I mean, it’s a mathematical certainty. Like I just… Kepler mission showed it. Like, it’s a mathematical certainty that life has to exist in other places on the planet in some form. And then you multiply that out across the span of space and time.

Is it possible that we’re being visited? Is there something to these phenomena? Yes, I think so. It doesn’t… I’m skeptical that we’ll ever really… I hope maybe my lifetime we’ll know, but I’m… would it change what I’m doing if we had that realization? Not particularly. I don’t think it’s just like… it could be part of the Galactic Federation. I’d be like, oh, that’s cool.

The Labyrinth Discovery and Future Implications

JOE ROGAN: I think it’ll give additional perspective. Like, let’s just, let’s go way out there and put that f*ing tinfoil hat on tight. If they open up the labyrinth, if they figure out a way to drain the water and they do find out that that 40 meter long metallic thing is something from another place. Something from another place or maybe breakaway civilization.

You know, there’s a lot of people that think that there were like, there’s us and then there’s Neanderthals, right? And then there’s… okay, they all coexisted at one point in time. What if this thing coexisted with us as well? And this is a different version of what we will eventually be.

Just like, let’s imagine human beings, we maintain a presence on this Earth for the next 30 million years. Let’s just imagine. That could be crazy. But it’s happened before with crocodiles, right? If we did, what would chimpanzees be like 30 million years from now?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Evolution wouldn’t stop, right?

JOE ROGAN: It’s not going to stop. They’re already using tools. There’s speculation, I mean, there’s various scientists that believe that you can make an argument that many primates are in the Stone Age, that they’ve entered into the Stone Age. So let’s assume that this keeps moving in that general direction without our intervention, which I’m assuming some foreign countries probably would engage in that, and one of them might be America secretly.

Look, if we’re doing this gain of function research on viruses that wind up killing a million people, you don’t think that we’re going to… if there’s some sort of a… look, there was talk during the… I believe it was World War II where Russia was… there was talk of some sort of a hybrid between a human being and a chimpanzee trying to devise that for soldiers.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Real, right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s real, yeah. Yeah. There’s some very strange and interesting experiments that happened.

JOE ROGAN: What if those little fers kept going? What if those little fers are like the… oh, geez, like they’re us like a million years from now. And what we are, you know, the chimps are a million years later. That’s what we are right now. Currently. They are what we’re going to be. Yeah. And then they went f* it, we’re going in the ocean.

Breakaway Civilizations and Ancient Mysteries

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. Well, f*, right, yes. That’s a possibility. In fact, the breakaway civilization concept’s not a new one either. Like there’s… a lot of ancient cultures looked at places like even the moon as a refuge. They would call it a refuge. Like that’s a whole other theory. Like what’s going on with the moon? Is there… are they… is there something happening up there? Was there something that happened with it in the past?

Right, yeah. I mean, this is… it’s all of these things are completely plausible. Like I just… I don’t… I tried… or the… yeah, I mean the UFO phenomena. I mean, this could have been going on for a long, long time. I wouldn’t… I mean, I certainly would include some sort of otherworldly craft as potentially one of the explanations for what that thing is beneath the ground at the labyrinth.

JOE ROGAN: Well, even if it’s not an otherworldly craft, whatever the f* was going on, where someone could make a 40 meter long metallic thing thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. 40 meters is half of a damn football field.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s big.

JOE ROGAN: That’s big.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And stick it underground for some reason.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. In a corridor or in a huge atrium. Okay.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like what? All bets are off. What those Italian scientists are saying is underneath the Giza plateau. Yeah, all bets are off. You’re looking at something that is like as kooky as the pyramids are. That’s the tip of the iceberg.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: True.

Underground Tunnels and Hidden Chambers

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, and that’s why I wanted to. The labyrinth was so interesting because their announcements around what they, these 800 meter shafts and massive cubes kilometers deep under the plateau kind of came out of nowhere. But there are these accounts for these other places like the labyrinth, where there’s some historical legitimacy to them. There’s been accounts of them, although over time what they’re talking about beneath the Giza plateau, maybe not to the full extent of what they’re saying. I’m still having trouble with that, but there’s certainly a lot more. We know there’s a lot more down there that at least the public has never discovered.

We know that there are, beneath the bottom of the Osiris Shaft, for example, further tunnels that go off from there that go underneath it. The Osiris Shaft, for people who don’t know, is one of the, there’s three passages, three rooms and it goes down a little over 100 feet or so beneath the ground beneath the causeway on the middle pyramid complex. You go down this big ladder, you go into one room, you go down another ladder, there’s a bigger room with boxes in it and you go down a further ladder to the bottom room which also has boxes in it. Today the water table’s way up high.

But we know in the past, this is one of the things that has recently come to light, down there in the bottom in the 1990s that was scanned with ground penetrating radar at the bottom level and they found, yep, there are actually 4 meter long, 8 foot high tunnels with dome ceilings below that even further that nobody is, as far as we know, have ever explored.

There are also tunnels leading off from that bottom level that head off towards the Sphinx and they head off towards the pyramid. And in fact they fork because there was a little known exploration done by a team of Japanese scientists in the early 2000s that got a camera on a long pole and they shoved it down through the mud and they stuffed it about 20 meters into one of these tunnels and they found these man made structures, tunnels, and it forks and it actually forks off and one seems to head towards the Great Pyramid and one keeps going up towards Khafre.

So there’s tons of stuff below there. In fact, if you ever go to the Giza Plateau, that causeway, if you’re heading up towards the middle pyramid, you’ve got the Osiris shaft on the left, but on the right you have, I mean, 10 of these massive shafts that we don’t really know how deep they are or whether or not they’ve ever been fully excavated, but they just go way down into the ground. So this could be the very top layer of things that are being claimed by the Italian scientists and their scans.

The Sphinx and Underground Passages

But we know that these tunnels extend down to beneath the Sphinx, for example. There’s long been rumored that there’s a tunnel and entrance at the end at the back of the Sphinx. In fact, if you go there, there’s a little box and a little hole doesn’t go anywhere. I’ve stuck a camera in there and had a look. But this is what happened in the 1990s. So you know John Anthony West. I’m sure you’ve seen Mysteries of the Sphinx, right? Super famous documentary.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I know he has, but you’ve seen his work.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, yeah, yeah. Wonderful documentary. Charlton Heston.

JOE ROGAN: Charlton Heston. Yeah. That’s when that archaeologist is mocking Graham Hancock and John Anthony West.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s right.

John Anthony West’s Research

Yeah, so he did that research, I think in 1991, 1990 to 1991. It came out in John Anti. He actually won an Emmy for best documentary, I think. It was totally warranted. But as part of that work, he had a guy named Tom Dobecki. He was a ground penetrating radar expert and he did work around the Sphinx and he found the existence of large regular chambers beneath the Sphinx.

And then when that documentary came out, allegedly Zahi was incensed by it because it talked about Atlantis and it made the suggestion that there might be a hall of records that talked about Edgar Cayce. And he then denied after that, John Anthony West and Robert Schoch any permits to do any further work.

But what’s weird is that Zahi and Mark Lehner have this long standing connection with the Edgar Cayce foundation which is this weird dichotomy. It’s like on the public facing they decry anything Atlantis based. But then on the private side they seem to be enabling explorations by the ARE and in fact they’ve been enabling the ARE to do drilling experiments and other things at the Sphinx since the late 1970s.

The Shore Expedition

And there was an expedition, notorious one that no one ever knew what happened. It was called the Shore expedition. Dr. Joseph Shaw, Joseph Jehota and then a guy named Boris Said were running this Shore expedition. And Boris Said was a friend of John Anthony West. He was the executive producer for Mysteries of the Sphinx. And this happened in like 1995 through about 1997. And they partnered up with Zahi, gave them a five year unlimited permit to do whatever they wanted up at the Giza Plateau.

And one of the stories that came out of that was a story. So Boris Said, who unfortunately has also passed away since, but he talked about filming Zahi. He said, well, we got to the back of the Sphinx and he said, you know, we want to make another documentary like the Mysteries of the Sphinx. And he said, well, what if we open up a tunnel that no one’s ever opened up before? And he’s like, that’d be great. What sort of tunnel? He said well, a tunnel under the Sphinx. And Boris said that’d be fantastic.

So I actually filmed him going into the rump of the Sphinx, standing down in there and saying, you know, the quote is something like even Indiana Jones wouldn’t believe that he was here. We’re standing inside the body of the Sphinx. Nobody knows where this tunnel goes, but we’re going to open it for the first time. And he’s down in this space with basically a blocked up tunnel beneath the Sphinx. And he filmed all of this.

But then this footage all disappeared. So during the expedition it was kind of shut down and then they got into a legal dispute. Boris Said and Joseph Shaw got into this battle. The footage was never seen, but he went on Art Bell in the late 90s and talked about it and we’re like God d*mn.

So they also talked about stuff at the Osiris Shaft. They did that ground penetrating radar work. They did sonic experiments in the Great Pyramid. There’s a lot that happened at the Shore Expedition run by the, they’re all ARE members. And they did stated goal, Joseph Shaw was always to find the hall of Records. I mean this all continued into the 2000s too with that organization.

The Lost Footage Resurfaces

But there was all this tantalizing mystery of this footage. Where the f* is this footage? Apparently the Department of Justice had a copy of it because there was this lawsuit that was going on and nobody knew. So it’s kind of out there. And then it was only earlier this year, it turns out that, so what happened? So Boris was sick with liver cancer, but he was trying to raise funds to make this documentary. So he put together this tape with some of this footage from this expedition and he was selling VHS copies of it as a way to invest in this documentary. And then a year later he just, that’s when he passed away.

So there’s been a handful of these VHS tapes out there in random homes from the mid to late 90s, just sitting there with this tape. And then eventually someone this year actually digitized it, put it up on YouTube as an unlisted video. I found out about it. And so all of a sudden now we actually have this footage. We have Zahi going into the Sphinx at the back saying these words. Yeah, it’s, if you, Jamie, if you pull up my, I think it’s the latest or the couple latest videos about the rare footage found from the Sphinx. It opens with that footage.

JOE ROGAN: Dude, thank God you’re out there. I’m so excited you do this. It means so much to me that you do this.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I love doing it.

JOE ROGAN: I know you do.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Fascinating when you find, I’ve known about this footage for years and years and I’m like, oh my God, somebody found it. Yeah, this is it here. So there’s Zahi. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So he’s going into this tunnel.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So you can still, this still exists. But then this is, yeah, this where he is now. Doesn’t what happened? Well, that story gets more and more intriguing. So yeah, this is him saying the line saying, we’ve never opened this tunnel before. We’re in the body of the Sphinx and we’re going to figure out where it goes.

So yeah, after that, Boris, they filmed that. This is the early days. So yeah, I’m walking around the back here. I think I poked my camera in there. But I talk about it later on. It’s, Boris Said who had filmed this with Zahi, goes, he talks to them about let’s make a contract. Let’s have Zahi open the tunnel. We’ll make the documentary about him opening this tunnel and we’re going to show it to the world, you know, and they talked about it. He went back to New York and he never heard from them again. They never mentioned this contract, nothing. He never had any further contact with Zahi about it.

Zahi’s Mysterious Announcement

And then funny thing happens in Egypt about, I don’t know, eight, nine months later. And this is as reported by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock in their book Heaven’s Mirror. And also I found it in the Arabic publications. But about, I think it was six to eight months later, Zahi makes an announcement in Al Ahram and these Egyptian publications in Arabic that says, I’ve made this incredible discovery. I’ve discovered tunnels and chambers beneath the Giza Plateau. That’s going to change everything we know about the ancient Egyptians and the pyramids.

And he talked about finding three tunnels, one that was on the north, one on the south, and then one that was yet to be determined where it went. And he made this announcement and then never said another word about it ever again. And this is just in the Arabic papers. And here’s the funny thing is.

JOE ROGAN: But could it be because there’s nothing there?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I suspect something else. I suspect that even if there was nothing there, you’d still stick, he would have stuck a camera in there and looked at it. I suspect, I think it’s more likely that, yeah, they found something that might have upset the apple cart and it doesn’t get imagined of.

JOE ROGAN: They are sitting on information.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, I think.

JOE ROGAN: You think?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. Yeah, I do. I think there’s been plenty of excavations and discoveries that I think were inconvenient for one reason or the other that have probably never seen the light of day.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a crime against humanity a little bit.

The Mystery of Hidden Chambers

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think so. I mean, the funny thing that he said too, when I read that comment, he makes about three tunnels. That’s what Al Adressi and El Masadi said as well. Like these Herodotus of The Arabs, like 6 to 800 A.D. when they went, they described the same thing. The three tunnels, like chambers and rooms. It’s lining up with the system, same as the labyrinth. Like it’s lining up with these historical accounts. And then you just don’t hear another word about it.

And when you go to the Sphinx today and you finally pop that little box off its butt, the whole thing’s been backfilled. Like where you see that camera where Zahi was standing, that steel beam is still there, but where his head level is where he’s standing, this tunnel goes. It’s like the dirt level is here now. It’s all been backfilled.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So why would you do that if there wasn’t something in there? You would only do it if there’s something in there. Unless it caved in.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. To be honest, it’s my concern also with the Great Pyramid and the chamber there, is that I first of all have my suspicions that they may well have already taken a peek with an endoscopic camera into that hidden void. So this is the scan.

JOE ROGAN: Based on anything in particular?

The Problem of Transparency in Archaeology

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, no, just my experience with how they do things. There’s always, I mean, there’s very little transparency when it comes to a lot of these digs and stuff. This isn’t just Egypt. This is, I think, I mean, it’s not a criticism. It’s maybe more characteristic of archaeological digs everywhere.

Sometimes the way this works is you might have to wait 20 or 30 years or a decade for information to come out, because then it has to get perfect. If someone has to publish a paper, they sit on that information until that point. Or maybe it never sees the light of day, I mean, because it’s inconvenient.

Well, I do think that anything that’s going to seriously upset the apple cart, if they came out and found something that was, damn, we found the Hall of Records, we found this evidence that is incontrovertible, that suggests that there was a predecessor culture and a predecessor civilization to the ancient Egyptians. I think there would be some long and hard thinking about whether or not we actually release that, because it’s going to make everybody look bad. It upsets everything.

JOE ROGAN: Is it crazy though that “make everybody look bad” would be the motivation to keep one of the most important discoveries ever from the human race?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I agree. Yes.

JOE ROGAN: It’s f*ing nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is.

JOE ROGAN: We’re even thinking about this.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And I love your approach. I think you’re absolutely right too. Even if these figures, all they have to do is embrace it. All they’d have to say is, “Look at what we learned.” And everyone would be like, “That’s amazing.”

JOE ROGAN: It’s Egyptians that go back 30,000 years or whatever it is or more. That’s so crazy. But also, wouldn’t that excite more people to be more interested? Wouldn’t that increase the economy? Wouldn’t that increase the tourism? It would increase everything.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes, it would.

JOE ROGAN: It would make everybody more excited about archaeology.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think you’ve got to embrace the mystery. There was a trend towards squishing it for a while.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no way you could know everything. It’s not possible. Especially when you’re finding these new things. It’s clear you don’t know everything.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: If they’re finding new things, you don’t know everything. If there’s a 40 meter long metallic object in a labyrinth that’s in a giant atrium that’s under the f*ing ground, yeah, you don’t know everything.

The Challenge of Excavating the Labyrinth

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. I think it’s worth taking a look. I mean, let’s at least take a look. Let’s drill a hole. We know from the scan kind of where it is, like a borehole down.

JOE ROGAN: And we were talking before, you were saying that there might be a possibility of digging a tunnel under the water through the bottom because the actual area where it is is not in the water.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So the scans seem to indicate it is likely free of water. That is the terminology I heard from the scan interpretations. It’s true to say that the issue with the water at Hawara in the labyrinth is the groundwater. So it’s this seepage that’s coming in from the north.

Presumably at some point you do get to a form of bedrock that may well be impermeable. And if it’s sealed and you’re cut into that structure, then yeah, you may well be free of water. Or it might be groundwater up and let the water through the hole and try to dig a tunnel.

For sure some of it’s in the upper levels of the labyrinth. So from the ground penetrating radar scans at the Matah expedition, I mean you had these granite blocks that are 3, 4 meters wide and this huge labyrinthine structure that’s sitting in, I mean I’m sure it’s full of sediment too. It’s not like there may be some cavities and open. Everyone’s like, “Can we dive on them?” It’s literally mud and sediment, a lot of it.

And that’s sitting in this sort of salty, brackish groundwater that I suspect is not going to do great things to that granite if it’s left for another 50, 100 years or more. So there is a pressure to remediate this problem and I think to save what’s down there. The deeper layers, however, seem like there’s a possibility that they’re free of water.

JOE ROGAN: Has there been any proposal to do that? Is there any proposal to figure out a way to reroute the water?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So this is what I talked about in the video. There were some studies that started to happen to try and do that, and then the guy who was running the study got thrown in jail for talking about it. And then nothing since then. Nothing since, as far as I know.

JOE ROGAN: Tell Zahi you can come on again. If he does it, I’ll have him back.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’ll mention it. I would love to. I mean, I think it’s a solvable problem, though. That’s the thing.

JOE ROGAN: We need to get Zahi to do mushrooms. That’s what we have to do. Yeah, we have to get him to just drop it off.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Cut the…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Become the sun God. Yeah. No, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, just let everybody love you for doing that. Because they would if we just changed, turned a new page.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Just said, “All right, let’s just…”

JOE ROGAN: Let’s go crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think, yes. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he wants to be loved. He wants to be respected. Everybody does. So open it up, baby. Let’s go. Give me a hug. Open it up. Start digging. Yeah, let’s go.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Let’s sink some boreholes and get some pumps in there and get this water out of here.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, these are those moments where I wish I was Elon Musk. Because you want an engineer to get involved as well.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You want all of that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you need the Army Corps of Engineers, someone who’s going to be able to figure out how to move water.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Take a real big French drain.

JOE ROGAN: Just figure it out. It might take decades, but it can be done.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think it can be done.

JOE ROGAN: The result would be insane.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think you could do it, too, in a targeted search. I think you could start in a small area where, you know, you do some more surveys. I mean, more GPR, more surveys, more scans, and really narrow in on a section. And then let’s see if what we’re seeing on these scans is there, then maybe do the site.

The Possibility of More Hidden Structures

JOE ROGAN: I have a feeling it’s one of many. I really do. I have a feeling that whole area, that whole complex, you’re going to go, if they can really prove that there have been civilizations that have been there for 10, 20, 30,000 years, I think it’s going to reveal itself one layer of the onion at a time.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. And today, it’s like it is a symptom of the climate that we only really look in the Nile Valley, right? Because the density. Egyptians settled in the Nile Valley because when they started it was a desert. That was the habitable part.

But if you open up the possibility that there’s a precursor civilization that was existing in the millennia prior to that, now you’ve got the Sahara, you’ve got to figure out where the lakes, the river systems, the lake basins were. And there’s very little of the Sahara that’s fully, we’re not looking under the sand there. We’re developing new scanning techniques. Let’s start looking there because I think there’s a, you know, the Osireion, this crazy place at the back of Temple of Seti I in Abydos, and it’s sitting on top of this aquifer. It’s like this big subterranean granite structure.

And I’m like, I bet this was, I think clearly some sort of functional thing. And I bet there’s a bunch more of these, but we just don’t know where they are because they’re under the ground. We just found this one. Well, Seti found it when he built his temple and he’s like, “Holy s*, we found this giant granite subterranean structure. Well, let’s turn the temple this way.”

But yeah, I think there’s a strong possibility as well that there’s a lot more of that stuff. And even to their credit, archaeologists suggest the same. The scope and scale of what is under the sand in Egypt, I mean, I think even most mainstream archaeologists will tell you like 70% of it’s still as yet undiscovered at least.

JOE ROGAN: That is so crazy. That’s such a crazy thing to say when you look at what has been discovered.

The Treasures of Luxor and Beyond

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, it’s nothing quite like it. I mean, Luxor, what do they say? The stats around Luxor is like one third of the world’s antiquity in this one area just at Luxor. And it’s not even the Giza Plateau. That’s just, that’s upper Egypt down at Luxor with the west bank and the Valley of the Kings and Karnak temple and it’s astonishing. And they’re still digging stuff up.

There’s the temple of Amenhotep, the second or third, the Colossi of Memnon. These giant 6, 700 ton statues are like the front door to it. And they’re slowly excavating this monstrous temple behind it. And they keep finding these remnants of these colossal statues.

I’ve heard rumors, just rumors. I’m going to Egypt next week. Hopefully we can, I want to get a look at this. And I’ve heard rumors that they found a hand from a statue that’s even bigger than the biggest ones we’ve found so far. So they might have found a segment of a statue that was one of the largest ever, which would be astonishing because who knows.

I mean there’s some evidence that they made stuff like that. I mean we talk about a thousand tons and that’s mind boggling enough. But there’s actually a quarry in Egypt called Minya. It’s like the unfinished obelisk, right? It’s like the unfinished obelisk still attached. They never pulled it out. And it’s 1,200 tons.

But at Minya, there’s these, it’s like limestone and these, they cut these blocks out. They’re still attached. They made these blocks. And there’s even an inscription, like a rough inscription of a seated pharaoh, like a seated figure on a throne sort of drawn on this.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what they were…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: As if that’s what they were going for. But if you take the density of the limestone in the Minya region and you calculate its volume, it’s in the realm of 5,000 tons. Oh my God. Yeah, it’s, who knows what was there originally?

I mean I just, I think it’s baffling enough that we have these logistical achievements in that anything above really 3, 400 tons. Christ, above 100 tons over any distance is a massive challenge for anyone, I mean us, to move that sort of a load over the roads and things we have now. I mean, even in Peru you find similar logistical achievements. I was just, I just came back from five weeks in Peru.

The Sphinx as a Processional Marker

JOE ROGAN: I want to talk about that. I have to pee so bad. Okay, so let’s pause real quick.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And we’ll be right back. Sorry, sorry about that folks. And we’re back. Have you speculated like why they wanted things so big? Like, or was it just that they had the ability all of a sudden at one point in time in their development?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I mean, you can’t make to me any argument that these giant statues are functional. They’re clearly symbolic. It’s almost like a challenge to history. It’s a monument through history. I mean, there’s some indication that things like the Pyramid, the Great Pyramid are markers and they’re demonstrations of their knowledge and capability. We can talk about that in a minute.

But there’s, with the statues, it’s no, it’s, to me, it’s just like, look at us, look how mighty we’re like. It’s like the same reason we, why do we make Mount Rushmore or we make some big money? It’s like to leave a monument or it’s some sort of marker behind. I mean, the Sphinx, for example, could be a marker in time. When you look at it in terms of the great cycle and the fact that it was likely a lion and, you know, it’s facing due east. So it could well be a marker for a particular moment during the processional cycle.

JOE ROGAN: Which could be either like 10,500 BC or 35,000, right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Or plus 25,920 years. So each cycle of that. So this is the thing. I mean, the Sphinx, I mean, it was, it’s been talked about even like again, go back to Diodorus Siculus and Strabo and Herodotus, they talked about the Sphinx being vastly older. They’re hearing things about it being older.

Gaston Maspero and a lot of the archaeologists, the early explorers for that region also mentioned it being 12 plus thousand years old, it being this ancient monument. And there’s strong evidence to support that in that. I mean, you have statues of sphinxes that predate Khafre, for example, like, so when he apparently built it, like there’s already we see statues and imitations of Sphinxes, also lions. Before that time.

You have the, what’s called the inventory stele or the stele of Khufu’s daughter, which was a statue that Khufu being Khafre’s father. So Khufu, Great Pyramid, Khafre, Middle, Middle Pyramid. This is rarely acknowledged, but it tells the story of that Khufu was trying to repair the Sphinx and dig it out of the sand. He’s Khafre’s father. So this could be older.

But also the name, like the oldest name for the Sphinx is Ruti and it’s the two lions, it’s Sekhmet and What’s the name of the other line?

JOE ROGAN: I can’t.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I have it here.

JOE ROGAN: What is it?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I can’t remember the name of the other line. God. But it’s, it literally means two lions and gate. So it’s like this lion’s gate. It’s, it’s guarding a gate. But this is one of the oldest names for it.

So if it, if it was indeed a lion and it’s facing due east. And we know that things like processional cycles, precessional numerology is deeply embedded in many, many cultures all around the world. This is one of the other key bits of context that seems to point to a consolidated origin point for knowledge and data of the cosmos and of geodetic data.

The Precession of the Equinoxes

But knowledge of the procession of the equinoxes is one of those. Which is the, you know, basically you mark this by what constellation is behind the rising sun on the vernal equinox facing east. So as we look east today, it’s somewhere between the constellation of Pisces and Aquarius.

It’s a cycle that denotes or is due to the Earth’s wobble. So we have at least three motions of the planet. We have the rotation of the earth. So 24 hour cycle. We have the orbit of the Earth around the sun 365 and a quarter days. And then you have the precessional wobble. There’s a couple more actually.

And that is, and that is basically that the Earth as it spins does this. It describes this little like its axis. It describes a circle in space which changes the constellation. It’s a cycle that takes around 26,000 years. 25,920 is the typical description for it.

And what that means is the backdrop of stars, you know, as we’re looking at any, at any time is slowly changing. It changes only 1 degree every 72 years. So if you’re looking at the horizon like the width of your thumb over 72 years, basically the relative to the sun, the constellations behind the sun shift.

So today it’s Pisces and we’re moving into the age of Aquarius. And before Pisces was the age of Aries and before Aries was the age of Taurus. And you go back for another to get to Leo the lion, which is another. I mean this, the symbology and certainly the dynastic Egyptians as well as many others had, had very similar constellations and names for all of these constellations that we do.

So I think there’s a good indication that Sphinx could be a essentially a processional marker talking about a specific time, which in our current cycle would have been, I think, yeah, around, around 10,000 something BC. But you could potentially add a whole cycle onto that to go back another nearly 26,000 years, which is, which is an interesting possibility.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s interesting, but it’s also nuts. It’s nuts comparative to our conventional timeline. What is the conventional timeline for the acceptance of astrological signs, constellations?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I mean, there’s no doubt about the, I mean the processional cycle is an observable right thing. It’s, it’s.

JOE ROGAN: But naming them like Cancer, Leo.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I don’t, I don’t actually know. It goes back. It’s, it’s, it’s very common across multiple cultures. One of the craziest things actually depicted on the, the ceiling of the temple of Dendera in ancient Egypt. The same constellations that we have, Pisces the fish, Aries the Ram. You know, the line.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what do you think is the oldest accepted? Like, if we put it into perplexity, what do you think is the oldest accepted?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I would suspect it’s either the Egyptians or the Sumerians because that’s about as far back as written knowledge goes. I mean, it was the Sumerians followed by the Egyptians. I don’t know if the Sumerians had a zodiacal acknowledgement, but certainly the dynastic Egyptians did. And that seems to have progressed from there down everyone. And the interesting thing, we have a.

Ancient Constellation Names

JOE ROGAN: Sponsor, Perplexity AI sponsor. So Clay Tabitha from Mesopotamia, Sumerian, later Babylonian in the late second millennium BC Give the oldest secure written constellation names, including the figures like the lion, the bull and the scorpion.

These early star lists such as Babylonian, three stars each catalogs and later the Mul Apin tablets. What is that? You know what that is?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No.

JOE ROGAN: Systematically record stars and constellations and were compiled roughly between 1200 and 1000 BCE drawing on an even old, on even older tradition. So it’s at least a thousand BCE.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. It says here that the icon, the iconography of star animals similar to these constellations appear on prehistoric seals, vases and gaming boards from Mesopotamia may go back as far as 4000 BC.

I think, I think if you go to like Gobekli Tepe and Martin Sweatman’s theories that a lot of the animal depictions on there may be showing constellations. I don’t believe they’re the typical zodiacal constellations, but it’s. I mean, what’s interesting is.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s see, are they following Gobekli Tepe? Let’s see what perplexity thinks. No clear, universally accepted constellation names have been identified at Gobekli Tepe, but some carvings appear to depict animals in positions that may correspond to parts of later constellations, such as Scorpius, Sagittarius or Cygnus.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Cygnus.

JOE ROGAN: Cygnus. According to a minority of researchers, most archaeologists, archaeologists remain cautious.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, minority being Martin Sweatman, probably seeing.

JOE ROGAN: These are powerful symbolic animal figures like a scorpion, vulture and other birds of prey. And arguing that firm links to a true zodiac or named constellations are speculative but interesting.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah, it’s remarkable. I mean, and more so even just in those markers is one of the, I mean, for me, it’s sacred geometry and processional numerology that’s encoded. I mean, this is Hamlet’s Mill. What’s in the book Hamlet’s Mill that essentially shows you that a lot of the sacred geometry, which is, it’s like a numeral system or these sacred numbers that are repeated through geometry, time distance, even cosmic cycles as we measure them, and then they appear again and again through ancient cultures and in their origin stories and even in their architecture.

The Great Pyramid as a Scale Model

I mean, the, you know, the Great Pyramid is probably the best example, it being the, I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard that it’s like a scale model of the Northern Hemisphere at a ratio of 43,200 to 1. It’s absolutely insane. And it encodes so much more knowledge when you consider it from that perspective. Knowledge that we can’t explain through the dynastic Egyptians or by any capabilities that they had. It encodes geodetic data in terms of this very specific shape of the Earth, it being an oblate spheroid, like it encodes that information in it.

JOE ROGAN: How so?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, so 43,200 is an interesting number to start with just because the number of seconds in a day is 86,400. So in 12 hours of the day in like a, it’s the amount of sun. Like basically the amount of time on a hemisphere in half of a day in exactly 12 hours is 43,200. It’s 432 is one of those numbers that shows up again and again and again and again.

So the Great Pyramid at a ratio of 43,200 to 1, is essentially a scale model of the Northern Hemisphere. If you take the height of the Great Pyramid, and this includes the soccer that it sits on, but you take that height, you multiply it by 43,200, you get the polar radius of the Earth. So from the center of the Earth to the North Pole, almost exactly within a couple hundred feet.

Even more impressive is when you take the perimeter length of the Great Pyramid and you multiply that by 43,200, you get the equatorial circumference of the earth within about 300 feet, which is super interesting because it’s flexible. It changes.

So as we’ve always known, there’s been multiple surveys since the 1800s of the Great Pyramid. And it’s, once its base was cleared off and we got its perimeter length, and we’ve also had surveys looking at, you know, how big’s the Earth? Aristotle is in like, 5, 600 AD in Greece. He was the first one to give it a go by measuring sort of the angle of, you know, the shadow in two different places over a few years. And he got the circumference of the Earth to within about 500 miles.

That was as close as we got until, you know, the 1800s and then the advent of modern satellite surveys in the 1970s and 1980s. And the funny thing is that the more advanced we got as we step closer and closer and right up to the modern satellite surveys, the closer the number came to what the Great Pyramid represents at this ratio of 42,200, right up to the point where it’s like the most modern.

I think the surveys done in the 80s are still the ones we use today. Looking at the actual circumference of the Earth is within about 300 feet of the measure of the Great Pyramid, which is, which makes, I mean, that’s within the margin of error. It’s within the variability of the margin of the Earth because of the circumference of the Earth because you have like the Moon and the sun on one side.

It literally, you measure it every day. It’s going to change about 2 or 300 feet just because gravitational forces are pushing on the Earth. So that also means that what’s interesting is if in two seconds of time, if you were standing on the equator, then the Earth rotates precisely the length of the perimeter of the Great Pyramid.

So in two seconds it goes, basically the Earth turns the same length as the perimeter length of the Great Pyramid. What’s even crazier? And so you have, you have this measure expressed in distance and in time. Given that it’s this significant number that measures the amount of seconds in 12 hours.

It also encodes geodetic data. So the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere. Right? We deviate from being a perfect sphere because, and this is, thank Christ, because it’s, it’s like that rotation that, the, the oblate spheroid nature of the Earth that the, the. What’s it called? The, the spin. The. S*, I won’t die. These, the, the spin motion of the Earth essentially like these, the, like a dryer. Some reason I can’t think of the word. It’s, it’s flattening our tops a little bit and we bulge a little bit at the center around the equator.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

The Earth’s Shape and Ancient Knowledge

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So it’s like that spin force is making us bulge a bit. So what it means is that if you measure the Earth this way, like north to south around and then east to west, it’s going to be slightly longer east to west.

How slight? I think it’s something like 70 or 80… No, 40 miles I think is the difference. Something like that. Maybe that’s the radius difference, but I think, yeah, radius or diameter might be 30 or 40 miles difference. It’s just this slight equatorial bulge.

And what it means is that when you draw latitude and longitude lines on the planet, latitude being north, south and longitude being east, west. If you get down to the equator, now obviously the shapes of them change as you go up towards the poles, but the latitude lines are straight. I saw this recently. I don’t know how accurate it is. It says it’s accurate.

JOE ROGAN: That’s Earth without water.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Without water.

JOE ROGAN: That’s nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Rocky little ball in it, bro.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Some of those oceans are deep.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you think?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s cool. That’s bananas.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That almost looks exaggerated to me, a little bit.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. The most accurate model of Earth shape, accounting not only for its rotation but also for the distribution of the masses inside the planet, making the surface slightly uneven and deviating from a perfect sphere.

Unlike a school globe which depicts Earth as an ideal ball, the geoid resembles a slightly flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator potato, with the height variations of to 100 meters due to the gravitational anomalies. This shape arises from the center…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Centrifugal. That’s the word I was looking for. There it is.

JOE ROGAN: Force of the Earth rotation, which inflates the equator by an additional 21 kilometers compared to the polar diameter. Interestingly, the geoid is used in GPS navigation and geodesy…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Geodesy.

JOE ROGAN: Geodesy. To precisely measure elevations above sea levels as oceans follow this uneven surface. Imagine if you shrank the Earth to the size of a basketball, the geoid’s irregularities would be smaller than the roughness of the orange skin, of an orange skin, yet still impact our daily lives. Wow.

The Great Pyramid’s Geodetic Encoding

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So it must be a little exaggerated because I think that’s clearly rougher than an orange, than the roughness of an orange skin. But yes, that gives us an example.

So we’re a little bulgy around the middle, a little flatter on top. So when you get down to latitude and longitude at the equator, if you draw that cube, one degree of latitude, one degree of longitude, it’s not a perfect cube. So it’s a little bit further east to west than it is north to south.

So if you cut that down into like 60 seconds of latitude and longitude, it’s a smaller little square, but same proportions. You have the same ratio.

And if you actually take the Great Pyramid… So there’s the thing to understand about the Great Pyramid is that it sits on a sockle. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before, but we know because we have casing stones. We have that 51 degrees, 51 minutes angle of these casing stones. So we were able to really accurately… And we have a few of those still around the base from where they fell off.

So from that we can determine the height. And we also have this perimeter length using the casing stones pretty very accurately. And now those casing stones, it doesn’t sit direct on the bedrock. The pyramid actually sits on top of a 55 centimeter sockle.

So it’s this little platform that sticks out about this much and it’s 55 centimeters high and it sticks out. So you have the casing stones, you have this little sockle that it sits on. So you have these two methods of measuring the pyramid. You can measure the perimeter length around the casing stones or you can measure the perimeter length around the sockle. Sockle is slightly larger.

And here’s a funny thing: if you get down to one quarter of one half of latitude and longitude at the equator, the longitude is exactly within an inch or two the perimeter length of the sockle, and the latitude, the north, south is the perimeter length of the pyramid.

So it’s encoding the geodetic shape of the Earth. The ratio of latitude to longitude is encoded incredibly accurately in these perimeter links on the pyramid. And it’s just kind of mind boggling.

Well, so this would be the skeptic reductionist answer to this stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Is that right?

Sacred Numbers and Cosmic Ratios

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You say, well, you’re just playing with numbers. It’s like, well, the numbers are there. None of those things, none of that… You can, anyone can check that data for themselves.

Like the 43,200 to 1 ratio of the pyramid, the fact that that’s the number of seconds in 12 hours of the day, there’s so many… I mean, this, by the way, 432 turns up all over the place.

The Kali Yuga is said to be 43,200 years old. The radius of the sun is 432,000 miles. The king’s list from the Sumerians is a total of 432,000 years with one king reigning for 43,200 years. So this 432 is one of those sacred geometry numbers that keeps turning up again and again.

But what’s always been fascinating to me in the geodetic information encoded in the Great Pyramid is like you have to understand the shape and size of the Earth to get that ratio so accurately embedded in that monument.

And we weren’t able to do that basically until really recently with satellite surveys. But we certainly weren’t able to measure longitude even until like the turn of the 18th century, like James Cook’s second voyage of discovery. We couldn’t accurately figure out where we were on those east to west traverses, like accurately reflecting longitude in the pyramid. It’s astonishing.

It’s one of those things that also relates to ancient maps having accurate coastlines with longitude on them. But what seems clear is that somebody at some point in the past had very accurate knowledge, not only of cosmic cycles, but also of the shape and size of the Earth itself.

Like in terms of, they surveyed it, they understood its shape, they understood the ratio of latitude to longitude on the planet. And it’s all encoded in this monument. And it’s just kind of scratching the surface on what’s encoded in the Great Pyramid. But I mean, the numbers are all there. You can add these up.

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever had a debate with anybody that thinks that this is all coincidence and that you could take these numbers and just kind of monkey around with them and make any kind of equation you want if you just draw arbitrary distances between certain things?

The Debate Over Numbers and Ratios

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, not… because some people do believe that, right? Yeah, I mean, so I think there’s a difference between when you talk about numbers versus ratios. Like once you get to ratios, then it doesn’t matter how you measure them. Like that’s, it’s like the ratio. It doesn’t matter. You measure them in mosquito d*cks or inches or whatever, centimeters.

So ratios are one thing. Numbers, there is a lot… I mean the whole system of measurement, how we measure time, the imperial system of measurement, where the mile comes from, all of that stuff does have these deep roots in sacred geometry and basically cosmic. And that’s again I think all pointing towards a common system or a common set of knowledge that came from…

But I’ve not debated somebody about this. I don’t know that you… I mean you can’t really question the numbers. But there’s some incredible just I guess coincidences that are in this whole system that do point towards…

I mean, they get really crazy. So here’s another one which I just… This one just pickles my noodle. It’s so… you know, we know that I’ve said this before, I think that the sun is… you know, the moon’s 400 times smaller than the sun and the sun’s 400 times further away. So you get this. That’s how we get total solar eclipses. That’s really nice.

The 108 Connection

But there’s also another sacred number encoded in their ratios relative to their diameters and the distance from Earth that’s the same between the Moon and the sun, and that’s 108.

So if you take the diameter of the Moon at whatever it is, 2,160 miles… by the way, 2,160 is also the length of a great month in the processional cycle. That’s one twelfth of 25,920. But 2,160 miles times 108, that gives you the more or less the distance between of the Moon to the Earth. So moons.

Yeah. So the moon’s diameter times 108 gives you the distance to the Earth. The Sun’s diameter, which is 86,400 miles, which is the number of seconds in a 24 hour period, times that by 108, and you get… that’s the distance of the sun from the Earth.

So it’s like that relationship between their diameter and their distance from the Earth is exactly the same between the sun and the moon. And it’s 108, that ratio. So it’s the lunar diameter over lunar distance equals solar diameter over solar distance. And I mean, what a coincidence. What a coincidence. Yeah. And it’s 108.

And by the way, there are temples in places like Cambodia that have 108 pillars. Like, 108 is another one of these sacred numbers that have been encoded into the way we measure stuff, the way we account for time.

So this is huge. There’s a huge sort of rabbit hole of sacred geometry and processional numerology that seems to point to some point in the past, someone having all of this understanding to create these systems and to measure things and to do so accurately to the point where the more accurate we get now measurements, the closer we get to these ratios and data reflected in these ancient structures.

It’s just… And you can’t attribute that to these cultures that were on those, like the ancient Egyptians or the Greeks. It’s like, where did this information come from? And how come it’s represented in cultures from, you know, the Norse mythology through South American, Native Indian myths to… you know, these numbers show up again and again, as was shown by Hamlet’s Mill, this book that basically, this tome that put that information together and said, well, all of it seems to point to this origin point of someone with this information.

And it’s just one more of these contextual points, when you combine it with the human timeline and climate and cataclysm and all the endless other contradictions in the megalithic architecture on these sites and stuff like that, that makes this concept that we’ve been advanced, significantly advanced us, or someone has, and they’ve left all these signs and signals and breadcrumbs for us to try and follow, to figure out.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. The pyramid is cool. It’s just… Whoa.

The Lost Civilization Mystery

JOE ROGAN: It is my favorite subject of all time. The lost civilization subject, I think, is my favorite subject because it ties all of them together, you know, and the mystery of the human origins. Yeah, all of it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think it’s plausible. I think it’s probable even that we’ve risen and have been wiped out. I mean, I think I was just saying I just spent five weeks in Peru again. I just came back, like, 10 days ago. And I mean, that place more than anywhere else is both more mysterious and more obvious that there was something else going on long time ago.

JOE ROGAN: More obvious?

The Distinct Layers of South American Architecture

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, more of the delta between these technological levels. In Egypt, you know, I don’t want to underestimate what the dynastic Egyptians were capable of. They had this long civilization of 3,000 years and they did some incredible work. So they’re really good stonework. The lines can get a little blurred. I mean, you still see the difference, but in Peru, it’s different, particularly in the Sacred Valley, places like Tiwanaku in Bolivia.

There you have these very distinct lines in terms of technology and the stonework and the layering of the stonework in that place, typically mostly all attributed to the Inca. But the Inca were really only around for maybe 300 years maximum. The Inca empire was barely 100 years before the Spanish wiped them out in 1533. So it’s relatively young, right? 1200 A.D. roughly to 1533. And they attribute most everything to the Inca. And it’s just not. You just look at it and go, this is not remotely possible.

There’s a huge difference. You see these three different layers of architecture. There’s a guy in Peru that has been researching this stuff for 50 plus years, him and his father, Jesus Gamara, who has his classification system for the architecture in Peru. So you have, he calls them Hanan pacha, Uranpacha, Ukunpacha, the three levels. These words have many meanings in Quechua, but it starts with the oldest stuff seems to be this monolithic carved, really bizarrely carved mountains, like rock, bedrock. It’s not blocks. They’re not blocks. It seems vastly ancient.

There’s all these channels and massive structures and shapes carved into the living rock of the mountain. And this is the lowest level, usually shows the most erosion. Then you have the megalithic stuff, like using Sacsayhuaman. You’ve seen pictures of that, Sacsayhuaman and the core of Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo, these giant streets of Cusco, these huge megalithic blocks that are all got these perfect joins between them. You can’t fit a razor blade in between them. They’re flowing, they’re mortarless walls. They’re incredible.

It’s one of the best, most amazing parts of the Sacred Valley is the proliferation of this sort of megalithic work. But then on top of that, you have the Inca work, the Ukunpacha. It’s literally cobblestones that are put together with mud mortar. It’s like local rock and they’ve stuck it together. And so you have this very distinct layers. I have pictures of this stuff, Jamie, in the South America directory on there, but it’s super clear. There’s no blending. It’s like boom. Okay, here’s the oldest layer, here’s the next layer, here’s the Inca layer.

And it’s always in that order. It’s always Hanan pacha on the bottom, then the megalithic stuff on top, and then the Inka work on top of that because they were repairing stuff. So even the Inka never talked about them making sites like Sacsayhuaman. They have all these other stories for it. The giants built it is one of the explanations. Yeah, these are great examples. So this is the Intipunku, the Sun Gate. So you see the difference. You see that clear distinction in the architecture. You have the megalithic stuff and then you have the repair work on top, the cobblestone work.

And there’s just, this is all, once you see this, you can’t really unsee it as you go all over the Sacred Valley. And some of these, this is small compared to the type of stuff you see in Sacsayhuaman, where some of the blocks get up towards 200 tons, 150 plus tons, and all of the same type of stone. Yeah, this is Tiwanaku.

The Mystery of South American Origins

And so there’s this long history of unknown. In Egypt, you have this connection, a cultural connection. They have their kings list, they have, they talk about Zep Tepi. They clearly have this connection to whatever builder culture was there. They talk about it. I mean, it’s part of their origin stories. But in South America, you have something else happen. There’s a big gap. You don’t have, the Inca don’t have that precursor culture. They came from the south. They talk of their origin story comes from Lake Titicaca up into the Sacred Valley. And then they took over.

There are a couple of precursor cultures to the Inca, but there’s this huge, it’s like we just don’t know what happened. There are other sites in Peru, Graham Hancock’s been out there recently. I was out there just recently too. There are pyramid sites in Peru that are 5,000 years old. Places like Caral, they’re not sophisticated. It’s incredible work in terms of the amount of stone that’s been used, but it’s not megalithic or precise. But there are pyramid cultures that stretch back at least 5,000 years.

But in terms of the real megalithic precision work in South America, we have no clue who did that. In fact, there’s probably the strangest site, one of my favorites is Tiwanaku, Puma Punku. Tiwanaku. You heard of this place in Bolivia? Tough to get to. It’s amazing. It’s up at, up in the, up on the high altiplano, like 12 and a half thousand feet above sea level. It’s like nothing else on the planet.

The stonework there is massive. It’s precise, it’s playful. There are just endless 90 degree turns, perfectly polished surfaces, like saw marks, cut marks.

JOE ROGAN: You have some images of this?

Puma Punku: The Enigmatic Site

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I have a Tiwanaku directory there, Jamie. And it’s quite well preserved because it was buried in mud. It’s slowly been excavated and there is a lot of evidence that suggests this place is at least 10 to 12,000 years old. Again, using endless like this sort of andesite work. See, this is a left turn arrow for some reason. But it’s this playful nature, if you like. The H blocks are famous at this place. But they just have these endless little insets and stuff like this.

This is one of my favorite blocks to show people. That is, you’re looking down on top, so the ground’s down. So I’m looking down this thin channel that’s been cut into this block and it has all of these little drill holes in it. And these are tiny little drill holes. And this channel’s about this wide and it’s cut into this block. You have several blocks with features like this. It’s clearly something’s been attached to this. How do you cut this in stone? And this is thousands of years old, but it’s a remarkable site full of these sort of examples.

And it’s attributed in general to a culture that lived there around 1100 A.D. They’re still digging stuff out of the ground. It was destroyed in a cataclysm or just some sort of massive mud flood. I think was the end of this civilization. However, that’s me.

JOE ROGAN: And this is at 12,000 feet or 12 and a half?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So what would be the reason for establishing a civilization at 12,000 feet?

The Dating Controversy of Tiwanaku

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It gets strange because the modern, first, the modern dating for it comes from a handful of carbon dates. Right. They found some carbon dates and they go, okay, 1100 A.D. But they’ve also found carbon dates that go back to 1500 BC and they just dismiss them as being unreliable. I literally think the only, these carbon dates could literally be the last person someone lit a campfire there or was buried there.

There’s a guy named Arthur Posnansky who’s a Polish professor that lived, he spent 50 years on this site, died in La Paz, published his works 1945. I have a copy of his books. “The Cradle of American Man,” it’s called. He spent 50 years investigating this site. He dated it at 15,000 BC based on a whole range of other sites, like geological data, astro-archaeological dating, which has these alignment properties. We can talk about it.

He found the skull of a Toxodon there. Toxodon is an extinct Pleistocene era mammal that went out with the Younger Dryas, 13,000 BC. There seems to be depictions of saber-toothed tigers and smilodons in some of the artwork there. So you have some, they say they’re all pumas, but some of them have small canines, some of them have really big canines. I mean, why is there a difference here?

He dates it culturally in terms of it being the origin point for not only other cultures in South America, but also Central and North America through the symbology, the Chakana, the Incan cross, there’s all these other feats. So he used a whole raft of scientific techniques to date that site and to support his conclusion that it was vastly ancient. And then that’s kind of all been thrown aside because they found a few carbon remains that were at the 1100 A.D. mark.

Why would you build a civilization there at that altitude? You wouldn’t. You just wouldn’t. It’s too hard. It’s above the tree line. There’s no natural trees. And this gets wacky because today Tiwanaku was a port. Even the archaeologists, they talk about Puma Punku, it’s like a port. There was something industrial happening there. The stone, if you look at Posnansky’s original images, there’s all sorts of interlocking bits of stone and sluice gates and hydrodynamic features. This place is a giant step pyramid that had this reservoir in the center. It’s crazy, but they tell you it’s a port.

The Mysterious Strand Line

And it was a port on Lake Titicaca, which today is about 10 miles away. The shoreline is about 10 miles away. H.S. Bellamy, in the 1800s discovered a strand line that runs basically through where Tiwanaku was. So strand line is basically the shoreline of an ancient body of water. And it can be formed through just gentle wave action over a long period of time. It can be formed from a high intensity period of waves, something hammering a shoreline.

But he measured this, he found this shoreline that runs about 400 miles. So it’s across the altiplano from Sillustani in the north, way down south towards La Paz. But he documented this strand line. What’s really weird, and at that strand line, Tiwanaku would have been at the shores of Lake Titicaca. It would have been a small island or a peninsula. The lake level would have been right there when it was. And it would, that fits, it being a port.

However, the strand line is today, it’s tilted. The strand line is tilted. So obviously water, when it makes a body of water, when it makes a strand line, it’s flat. It finds its level. But only geological processes and I assume over a fair amount of time can give it this tilt of a couple degrees, which is what they measured. There’s no doubt there is a strand line, but it’s tilted.

So I question whether in the period that they say Tiwanaku was built, 1100 AD, less than a thousand years between then and now, that there’s been enough geological upheaval in the Andes to tilt this strand line a couple of degrees. I don’t think it can happen anything like that fast. I think this strand line and the evidence that it was a port shows us that this city was in fact vastly more ancient than that, and that it was destroyed by cataclysm, by flooding from the melting of the glaciers in the Andes.

There’s been, there’s strong evidence there that it’s seen several, it may have seen multiple cycles of glaciers and the climate would have been different during this period. The climate changed to make it this arid sort of inhospitable place that it is today. Where it’s just tough to exist at 12 and a half thousand feet above the tree line, where hardly anything except fruit varieties of potato grow. They must have had better climate or, I don’t know, lower altitude, but a better climate, at least. Lower altitude’s possible, I don’t think.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, how much does that change?

Geological Time and Lake Titicaca

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You’re talking millions of years for that. Because Lake Titicaca, I mean, that was sea. It is seawater, it’s not today. It has unique species in it. There’s a native seahorse, it’s the only, it’s brackish water. So it was originally part of the ocean that was uplifted, and it’s been uplifted 12 and a half thousand feet. But this is millions and millions of years and it’s today fed by these glaciers. So it’s slightly, it’s brackish. It’s a combination of salt and freshwater.

But it has these species that can only have come from the ocean. But this is long geological processes. So I think it’s more likely that there was just a different sub-climate or a mini climate zone in that area that must have supported that life because the place is massive. Massive. It’s the site where you go is only the barest fraction of what is actually there under the ground.

They’ve done scans, they’ve found entire buried step pyramids at this site. The farmers in all the fields around it, they ran into these big blocks occasionally and like, “God d* it. Ruined the tractor again.” And it’s a big andesite block from Tiwanaku.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So it’s a super mystery.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s also the place where those tridactyl mummies are, right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So Nazca. Right. A lot of that comes from south of America. That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: That gets real weird.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It does.

JOE ROGAN: When you take all those things into consideration. Yeah, things get real weird.

The Kalasasaya Solar Observatory

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, you know, there’s also evidence for technology and alignments there. I mean, this is one of the things Posnansky based his dating on was this structure there called the Kalasasaya. There’s a big step pyramid there called the Akapana. Then there’s this Kalasasaya, which is big rectangular mass. They called it the Stonehenge of the Americas originally because it was just these giant stones that formed this big rectangular structure.

Today it’s been rebuilt. They’ve left the big stones there, but they’ve kind of filled in the gaps and they’ve built the walls and stuff again. And what Posnansky found was that it is an extremely accurate solar observatory, kind of similar to Stonehenge in some ways. But if you stood in the center of the west wall and you looked east, so this big rectangle.

JOE ROGAN: Do we have an image of this? So I can look at.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. If you go to Tiwanaku, it’s kind of an overlook. If you bring them all up, I can show you. Or you can type in Tiwanaku, probably find pictures of it. Kalasasaya. K-A-L-A-S-A-Y-S-A. Something like that. But it’s, there’s, imagine a big rectangular. Huge rectangular. That’s it there. So actually it’s there’s an inner structure there, but this is, see all those standing stones? Those are the original stones. So it actually goes all the way around and all that far side. So it has an internal structure as well.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. So the larger stones, the original. Okay. And then they built the smaller wall later.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s all modern as far as the last 50s.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

Tiwanaku as a Quarry

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They reconstructed. If you go back to Posnansky’s original excavations from the early 1900s, all you see is the big standing stones. It’s been quarried. This is another one of those places where literally the core of La Paz is made from stones from Tiwanaku. The whole town that’s here. There’s a massive church that’s been built. They made mines and sewer systems. It was just the most convenient source of stuff.

And in Tiwanaku in particular, they’re very square. It’s really linear. Beautiful blocks of andesite. Perfect building material. Why wouldn’t you just take it and build cities? So they were, right up until the 30s, they were just wagon loads and wagon loads and wagon loads of stone every day. Every day. So that place has been used as a quarry for, you have to, similar to a lot of places in Egypt, for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

But what you’re looking at is you got to use your imagination or look at the older pictures. And even then, it’s barely a fragment, I think, of what’s actually there under the ground. But what’s interesting is Posnansky figured out that if you stand in the middle of that of the west wall, looking this way, and if you looked at the corner pillars on the east wall, it showed you the sun on the solstices would rise exactly on the outside corners of these pillars.

Now, this is, it looks like that to the eye, but if you measure it with precision instruments, you find it’s about 18 minutes off now. And so when it was aligned, it’s similar to the Sphinx. When was it lined up with Leo? So when was this structure lined up exactly on the solstices?

The Obliquity of the Ecliptic

And so that the motion of the earth that would affect that is called the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic. It’s another one of the Milankovitch cycles. So you have, we talked about precession of the equinoxes which is the wobble. So then you also have this tilt, this change in the tilt of the Earth. So the actual tilt goes back and forth, I think between 22 and 25 degrees, something like that. But it’s a 41,000 year cycle and it’s basically the change in the axis of the Earth relative to the equator of the sun or the ecliptic plane.

So this, you know, if you project out the equator of the sun where all the planets are orbiting, it’s the change in the Earth’s tilt relative to that plane, the obliquity of the ecliptic. And so on that cycle, it’s a 41,000 year cycle. Turns out that he dated it using the star charts of the time at around 15,000 BC.

Now his work was validated in the early 2000s by the Bolivian, this is a funny story, Bolivian head of archaeology in Bolivia and these astronomers that went there and said, let’s check Posnansky’s work using the Astronomical Almanac, more up to date information. And they said, yes, indeed, he was correct. If you assume this was an alignment thing, this would have lined up right on basically 12,000 years ago, 13,000 years ago, 10,000 BC or plus 41,000 years, I guess, for the cycle.

And the guy, Gustavo, forgotten his name. Damn it. But the guy who was in charge of the Bolivian Department of Archaeology at the time, once he made that announcement, lost his job and I don’t think it’s ever been talked of since. The official dates for Tiwanaku haven’t changed.

However, these guys also figured out that if you spun it around and you looked from, it’s also aligned to the sun sets on those solstices. So if you go on the west wall and, sorry, you go on the east wall and look west, it also perfectly aligns with the sunsets. You also get the solstices in the center. So, you know, solstices being, sorry, equinox is in the center, solstice is being the shortest and longest day of the year, where the sun’s furthest north and further south and then equinox is in the middle.

So it’s perfectly aligned with that, but just off kilter a little bit because of that motion of the Earth, the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic. So it’s not an accident, put it that way. It’s not just a coincidence that it’s aligned this way. It was set up that way to be a solar observatory.

JOE ROGAN: And if you look at it with an open mind, it’s an insane date.

The Younger Dryas Impact

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it is. I mean it’s, even within this cycle of 10,000 BC. I mean that’s the Younger Dryas period. This is, you know, and it’s a significant marker for South America because I can tell you the Younger Dryas had a tremendous impact on South America. Something like 75% of the megafauna species in South America went extinct. Although you are up in the Andes, they may have been more protected from that the full extent. Who knows though, fires and smoke, they would have had the, you know, the blackening of the skies and all the rest of it that would have happened during that Younger Dryas extinction event.

But yeah, something happened. I mean they, again there’s been, I think there’s been a cycle of glaciation and deglaciation in the Andes that’s affected the lake and a lot of the stuff up there in particular just because we know that there are structures, get this, there are structures beneath the waters of Lake Titicaca today made from red sandstone that match kind of the oldest layers at Tiwanaku. So they might have been made beneath the water. Beneath the water. So the lake level must have been lower and then the lake, and then something happened where a lot of water got added and then temple found.

JOE ROGAN: And this is in 2000. Stone anchor. What is that word?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: 660 foot long animal and animal.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, stone anchor and animal bones were found amongst our artifact scientists Wednesday others Wednesday said it’s connected to. Wednesday said they had found beneath South America’s Lake Titicaca in what? There’s something wrong with this translation because all these words are jammed together even when it says Titicaca and then signs there’s no space.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: My five year old website.

Underwater Discoveries at Lake Titicaca

JOE ROGAN: Yeah but it seems weird, it’s recoded or something. Right. After 18 days of diving below the clear waters of Titicaca, scientists said Tuesday they have discovered a 660 foot long, 160 foot wide temple terrace for crops, pre-Incan road and a 2,600 foot containing wall. Holy s*. Yeah, I strongly support the hypothesis that was found by the. What is that word?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Atahuallpa, something like that. It’s clearly a Peruvian word.

JOE ROGAN: Atahuallpa 2000 expedition are the ruins of a submerged pre-Columbian temple said Eduardo Parea, Bolivian scientist who was among those explored the site around 90 miles northeast of the Bolivian capital of La Paz.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, so there’s stuff underneath the water says it’s filmed.

JOE ROGAN: They have film of that. Can we see what that looks like? Try to find it?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I was. I just thought this was easier because I couldn’t find a good video.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s got to be.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I’m sure it exists somewhere, but.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So it said it’s made over 200 dives in a water 65 to 100 feet deep. I’d love to know exactly how deep. Does it say how deep it was? Because, I mean, that’s a significant change in the level of the lake. So. Yeah, Lake Titicaca is 12,464 feet above sea level.

JOE ROGAN: That is bananas.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We went and stayed out on an island on the lake with no electricity. The sky at night was absolutely phenomenal.

JOE ROGAN: If you were a gambler, how old do you think that is?

Dating Tiwanaku

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I would put it at least, I’d say at least in that 12 to 15,000 years, if not significantly older. I think, I don’t know that there were periods of time in that lake where that level was that low. It’s, what’s crazy is that there’s been a variance. There’s structures beneath the current lake level. So the water was lower. And then we know from the strand line that the water was, God, what is it? I think 40 meters, almost higher than what it is now when it would have been at the shores of Tiwanaku.

JOE ROGAN: This is indicating a long time period of change.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. And the tilted strand line. So if you were talking about Tiwanaku, if I was a gambler, I would put it at tens of thousands of years. I don’t think, I don’t even, my, as in getting, this is speculation. I don’t think it fits even within the 10 to 12,000 year cycle. I think it’s got to be tens, multiple tens of thousands of years for that to be, to be where it is.

And in fact, when I was there, literally two weeks ago, we made some observations that I hadn’t made there. But I spent a bunch of time at Tiwanaku over the years. But we figured out that those big pillars of that Kalasasaya, we thought they were andesite, they’re granite. The ones on one side, they’re actually granite and they’re very heavily eroded. Again, you have that big scoop out of it. You can see at the bottom where they were buried.

But there’s this huge amount of erosion and I just, and granite erodes way more slowly than things like limestone. So it’s just, I think the erosional data there needs to be studied, because I don’t know how long it would take. Even in that environment, which gets more rainfall than places, it can rain quite a bit. You get these storms. But I think it takes a long time to erode granite that far.

And the stuff that’s been exposed and above the mud, and when there was clearly some sort of big mud flood that came in that knocked this stuff down, the stuff that was been face down or buried in the mud has been quite well preserved and protected.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, is this the first film?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: There’s one minute of underwater. That’s Inca, whatever that is. It looks Inca, Titicaca.

JOE ROGAN: Underwater archaeology.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Gold, Inca figurine. Well, the Inca were definitely there at the lake. There’s the island of the sun, island of the Moon. That’s Inca.

JOE ROGAN: Was big old d*.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, you should see. Reminds me of the, you should have seen some of the pottery they make. Right. They was, we were, I was making Photoshops of my friends with it.

JOE ROGAN: There’s.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s literally d* and ball and all this pottery. They have this whole erotic section of the Larco Museum, and it’s always good for a little giggle.

Limited Exploration and Academic Resistance

JOE ROGAN: So is it safe to say that less exploration has been done at this site?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes, for sure. It’s still being slowly excavated, but, yeah, this isn’t, I mean, the wheels are grinding slowly. They’re slowly trying to renovate, they’re trying to encourage tourism, but there’s not, there’s so much of that site that needs to be dug up. It’s not, it hasn’t had anything like the attention.

JOE ROGAN: Egypt is there the same sort of pushback against dating that one guy, but it’s the same everywhere.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s a, like a human characteristic of people that are in control of the narrative.

The Mystery of Dating Ancient Sites

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, it’s tough to explain. It’s just that they don’t want to deal with this possibility of a culture down there that’s that old. I think it upsets too many other apple carts. So I feel like it’s been kind of, well, we found these carbon dates. This fits kind of the timeline of what the Inca said too, because the Inca talk about emerging from Lake Titicaca and going north, being pushed out by the Amara people.

And if you think, okay, the Inca arrived in the Sacred Valley from the south around 1200, between 1100 and 1200 AD, so therefore they might have been at Tiwanaku at 1100 AD. So that kind of fits that timeline, but it doesn’t mean anything. Like, the Inca could have been down, the Tiwanaku could have been there forever. I think the Inca, sure, that’s the timeline for that civilization.

JOE ROGAN: And as we’ve established everywhere you see people put a civilization on top of an old…

The Inca’s Respectful Rebuilding

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, that’s, yeah, 100%. The Inca were very respectful. This is the other thing about the architecture in that part of the world. The layers are very respectful, other than the Spanish, they smashed it all up. But the Inca were very respectful and trying. They tried to rebuild. Even where they could rebuild megalithic structures, they would.

Here’s a great example and I also think a great example of why it’s not possible that the Inca did all of this, because in such a short period of time, again, their civilization lasted barely a couple hundred years. And there’s so much of it of this stonework, and it’s just complete night and day difference.

So in Cusco, there were like 13 high Incas, these kings of the Inca empire, like the high Inca, the big dude, and he had his court with his advisors. They called him a Panaka. And it was a hereditary thing. So the son would inherit and he’d make his own Panaka, his own people. He’d also have his own palace. You couldn’t live like the son couldn’t live in the house of the father.

So they would build another spot in Cusco in this city. Cusco’s crazy city. It’s like megalithic Inca, colonial, Spanish, modern, all piled up on each other. It’s an amazing city. But if you actually look at where these courts were, starting with Manco Capac, the first sort of high Inca, around 1200 AD, you have the first seven or eight of these high Inca, when they would build their structures and their palace, they would rebuild like a megalithic courtyard. It’d be these big, massive stones or they’d inhabit and they’d repair it. They’d have these huge, big megalithic courtyards.

But as soon as they switch from, I think the 8th to the 9th or the 7th to the 8th, it’s all small cobblestones. It’s just all of their courtyards, their palaces were made from small local stones stuck together with mud mortar. It’s like, well, hang on, are you saying that if you say that the Inca built all of this stone, then all of a sudden you’re saying, well, between one generation and the next, you lost all of this capability to do the fancy stuff, the big stuff, which doesn’t make any sense.

It’s much more likely what they did was they found an abandoned ruined megalithic city, they rebuilt it, and they ran out of megalithic courtyards to renovate for their next king. That’s what happened. So the first bunch of these high Incas have these megalithic courtyards, and then the next, right up to the end, they’re just made from small local cobblestones.

It’s like, were they just not special enough for the big, special stonework or it’s just, you can’t imagine within such a small couple hundred, couple centuries that they lose all that capability. It’s just not. None of it makes sense. The only thing that makes sense when you look at that architecture down there is, yeah, they were rebuilding older stonework, they were repairing it, they were putting their stuff back on top of it.

I mean, there’s so many amazing… Ollantaytambo is one of my favorite sites down there, just because it’s so obvious. There’s these giant 80, 90 ton granite blocks that make up this structure and it’s fallen apart. And then they’ve tried to move these things and in between them, they’ve just stacked all these little local crappy little stones in between.

JOE ROGAN: Did you have any images of that?

Ollantaytambo: Evidence of Sudden Abandonment

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I have the Ollante directory. Tons of pictures. And in fact, that’s a whole other interesting story because that place is another example of what you see a lot of in Egypt, which is this phenomenon of just something happening. And they went, tools down, we’re not finished. When, we’re in the process of doing stuff and just drop work, leave whatever happens. Cataclysm, social collapse. Something happened because we know a lot about Ollantaytambo.

It’s at the top of a mountain in the sacred valley. Yes, this is a great example of the rocks on top of this stuff. Yeah. But up there’s a great little drone video. Actually, one of those videos in there is a drone shot from the top of this. It’s at the top of this steep mountain. They built this structure. No, go back. One that’s at the quarry. So I’m standing on one of the stones. So, yeah, that’s it there.

And at the top of this are these giant 80 ton granite blocks that make up this central, where they call it a sun temple. And we know where those come from. It’s like if you imagine this giant mountain, there’s a big old valley to the left of it and then another giant mountain. And at the top of that other giant mountain is the quarry for this granite. It’s a big five, six miles as the crow flies. But it’s probably like 10 or 12 to walk it.

And I’ve walked it. We’ve climbed up to that quarry and all the way along this path they, what are called these tired stones, which are giant blocks of granite that they dropped. They just left them there.

JOE ROGAN: Tired stones.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They’re called the tired stones. Yeah. And in fact there’s a, if you see in the very bottom left here, there’s a road that they built. And if you look at some of these other images, I’m standing on some of these roads, rocks. This one, this is one of the examples. They had to build the road around it, the modern road around it.

And this block, when you pace it out and measure it, it’s probably not less than 90 tons of granite. And I mean we couldn’t, I mean, the equipment to try and move this on this would destroy this road to try and lift this. But these, there’s dozens, there’s like a dozen or more of these things all the way up to the quarry at Ollantaytambo.

But it’s just again, it’s very obvious that the Inca rebuilt this. But something happened here where they went, tools. Yeah. These are the big 80 ton blocks in the center of it. Yeah. This is one of the examples I love to show people. It’s like, okay, you’re telling me the same people did all of this stonework, the stuff in the middle and this little filler work in here?

JOE ROGAN: If we weren’t attached to a timeline, it would be way more likely that what you’re saying is correct. Especially when you’re looking at it like this.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Look at the massive stones and the way they’re cut and then what’s above them.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wild stuff, man. It really is what happened. And the evidence of the mud, that’s…

Evidence of Cataclysm at Tiwanaku

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The other thing for sure. Yeah. At Tiwanaku, yes, there was a huge, and something happened like a cataclysm happening. Look at these blocks. These big blocks are scattered around. Something knocked this structure over and these are huge blocks of stone.

JOE ROGAN: What had to happen to cause that?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s a good example of the Hunan Pacha, the carved bedrock. You see a lot of this crazy stuff. In fact, there’s also tool marks here. Like in one of the big Hunan Pacha. If you look there’s like a cross. There’s like a grid of cuts in one of these pictures here.

JOE ROGAN: Jamie, that one’s nuts because, go back, look at that. That one’s nuts because it was removed.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. So people often say, well, this Hunan Pacha is a quarry. I’m like, really? You take, that’s not a, I usually, I like this. As many examples like this, where this isn’t a quarry. How do you make the back. If that, if you’re trying to take a block of stone out, right.

JOE ROGAN: How are you…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: How you make it back cut? You can’t. You have to. It’s like a box. You have to cut it out.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Deliberately shaped.

JOE ROGAN: And that, that block is not…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We don’t know. I think it was. I think, we think we were talking a lot about this. Most likely it was meant to house something. Either other stone or something else was going on here. This is stuff that’s since been removed. And in fact, in one of these pictures, there’s like a semicircle with all these cut grid lines in them. These are more lazy, tired stones out in the fields. You go marching around in these corn fields and you find them all over the place down here. It’s great.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so strange.

Mysterious Grid Patterns and Tool Marks

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s a very, this is the thing. Here we go. So if you zoom in on that. So this is up the hill and it’s, these are cut marks. It’s like a grid pattern that’s been cut into the stone. I don’t know how or with what, but you actually, you can’t see this from the ground. And we were super lucky in that there was a huge festival going on in the town and all the guards were at the festival, so they’d never let you get up here otherwise.

We climbed up this, halfway up this mountain to get a picture of those cut lines, which is, again, not attributable to the very basic tools that the Inca had. Right. Barely in the Bronze Age.

JOE ROGAN: This is nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So this is that drone footage also because the guards weren’t there. They would have gone nuts if they caught us droning.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, really? They don’t like you droning?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, no. Can’t do this.

JOE ROGAN: Why so many restrictions? I mean, wouldn’t this, all this, especially from someone like you, wouldn’t all this encourage tourism?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think you’d think so, but it’s not the case. In fact, they’re getting worse, unfortunately, in parts of Peru, just in terms of the ropes and the restricted areas, you can’t go to Machu Picchu. Unfortunately, you can’t get to the famous hitching post of the sun or the central, central megalithic area.

JOE ROGAN: Just looking at this drone footage, there’s such a clear difference between the original stone that’s below and then the stuff that the more modern people built above it. There’s such a difference in the way the stone is constructed. Wild stuff, man.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s night and day. So this is what I like about, once you see it in South America, it’s very clear because you just, again, in Egypt, you just had a longer ancient civilization that were able to develop higher capabilities than, say, the Inca did.

In fact, the quarry for this stone is way on that other mountain across the valley at the top. You can’t quite see it, but they hauled these big blocks over very difficult terrain. At height, this is still 10,000 feet.

JOE ROGAN: What is the largest of these stones?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’d be 100 tons at least. I mean, it’s Sacsayhuaman. You’re closer to 200 tons. I think at Tiwanaku, the biggest sandstone block, I might be rising something like almost 300, 400, something like that. 300 maybe.

JOE ROGAN: And the big red sandstone block, those cross marks, the etchings into the stone, is that the only evidence of tool marks?

Megalithic Tool Marks and Construction Techniques

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, we’ve seen others, particularly in Tiwanaku. I mean, this is actually up at the quarry. So this is up at the other mountain we hiked up. And I can’t imagine trying to carry a ton of rocks up here. This was hard enough.

So in Tiwanaku, you certainly see a lot more evidence for tool marks. In South America, you have tubular drills, you have all sorts of crazy what look like tool marks and functional aspects of stone in particularly places like the Coricancha, which is the big central structure. In Cusco, it was this. Today it’s a Catholic church, but it’s megalithic. And the inside walls have all, some of the blocks have been put out and are on display. And there’s a lot of the inside structures that are still there.

Yeah, there are similar sort of tube drills that have been cut. There is a lot of similarities to some of the tools that you see in megalithic Egypt. So I think it’s an offshoot. I mean, if I was to bet, I would say it’s either the same or an offshoot of the same civilization that did the megalithic stuff in the other parts of the world, for sure. Like, it’s just the megalithic work itself.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just like there’s skyscrapers in Tokyo.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Boom. That’s it. Yeah, yeah, it’s like, you know, the reductionist and the skeptics will say, well it’s, they’re solving this. You know, it’s like trying a guy that you want to kill an animal, you make a flint arrowhead or whatever, right? And I can understand that process where you are solving a problem and maybe getting at it the same way.

However, when it comes to walls, like stone walls, I’m very skeptical that two completely separate cultures found the most difficult, the most complex, the hardest way to make a stone wall, and chose that because that’s what megalithic walls are like. These giant blocks that are perfectly shaped together.

That’s the thing, man. In Cusco and in these streets, when you look at some of them have been shaken apart from earthquakes. So you can see they’re complex, like they’re curved. Not only is the line not straight, so the lines curve where they join, the face angles change, so it changes this way. But also the face angle changes and they perfectly match. Just, it’s mind boggling to understand how they might have actually put those stones together.

This is why it does lead people to the geopolymer ideas or stone softening. My buddy Kyle Brothers of the Serpent podcast, who travels with us, he has a great idea that it might have been a resonance thing where you’re actually resonating and grinding stones together slowly so that once, you know, you basically they’ll match eventually if you’re just like grinding.

There are jewelers’ tools like that do similar things. You can cut through, you know, they do it on real small stones, but you can cut through granite with a star shape or whatever with these jewelers’ tools that get to the right resonant frequency and they just sort of grind through like an ultrasonic drill or something that cuts and just vibrates its way through. If you turn it off while it’s in there, it’s like Excalibur, right? It’s stuck in the stone real tight.

But you know, obviously you’re talking some advanced technological capability to be able to vibrate a 50 ton stone to make it grind into its neighbor, but it’s about the most plausible thing I’ve heard because I can’t imagine that this was done by, we lift it up, we measure it, we mark the high spots, we rub it down, we take, you know, we put it back up and saying this for stones that are 150 tons is not, it’s not happening like that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Let’s pull up some images of what you’re talking about. These very bizarre shapes that they’re perfectly matched to fit into each other like a jigsaw puzzle.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think in the South America director there, Jamie, there’ll be some walls, some of the walls in the streets across the country.

JOE ROGAN: The speculation is that they did it in these shapes to protect against earthquakes.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: One of them, that’s the Coricancha. Keep going. There’s the wavy lines. Yeah, this stuff, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, this stuff.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: This is like the Inca Roca wall. And there’s probably some pictures of the broken sections where you can see these inside joins. That’s Sacsayhuaman. So it’s the same thing, just a much bigger scale. Yes. Some weird, bizarre stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Weird stuff. Go back to the curvy, what’s that? The curvy ones back the way?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, that one, yeah. This green one? That one, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s nuts, man. What are the nubs? No one knows, right?

The Mystery of the Nubs

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We talked about the nubs endlessly. Yeah. People, all sorts of speculation. Like people have geopolymer explanations for them. People have, you know, a lot of people try to say they’re lifting bosses and that’s not how that, this, they would flip over. They’re not in the right place.

One thing’s for certain, I think, with the nubs, that is an observation a friend of ours, Chuck, a geologist, made, which is that if you look at how stone is quarried, right? So one of the common methods still used to some extent today, but certainly these are attributed to cultures like this and the Egyptians is the what they call a wedge and feather quarrying, right. You cut these little wedges out and then you hammer in either, you know, wood and wet it and tries to, you’re trying to split stone, basically. You’re trying, and they still do it today.

One thing you’ll never be left with in a splitting or a wedge and feather approach is a nub. Like you can imagine, you can’t imagine these stone faces splitting and leaving these bloody nubs that are on all of these walls, right? So they’re formed. They’re formed. Either deliberately formed or they’re a result of some other process, we don’t know. But they’re not the result of this sort of primitive quarrying movement method. They, I don’t know where they are, but they’re on everything. And that’s another.

JOE ROGAN: It’s another that they leave them there as well.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. They’re in Egypt too. Like they’re on the men, like, if you compare that wall to like the third pyramid, the Menkaure pyramid, it’s exactly the same. I mean, it looks exactly the same. The pillowy appearance on the out, not like unfinished.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s find an image of that Menkaure pyramid.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, the granite.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just, it’s so weird because they’re, they’re not in a uniform position either.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No. And you know, you find examples. There’s been surface wear on a lot of this stone. There’s plenty of examples where it was very finely like reflective and polished originally. So there’s been spalling on the surface. It feels rough today. But there are sections. Yeah. So this is Menkaure Pyramid. Looks the same.

JOE ROGAN: It’s same kind of thing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Nubs a little larger in some places. Those are big ones, but there’s other ones that are smaller. Very much like that. Yeah. That Facebook picture there, I guess, is a good nub picture.

But even in Menkaure, there’s some evidence that they were flattening some surfaces of the pyramid. Whether or not they intended to flatten the whole thing, we don’t know. Funnily enough, they have actually found that there’s probably another hidden entrance to this behind that blank, flattened wall there. On the Turkey today, airfield anomalies under Menkaure Pyramid.

Yeah, so there’s a, this is on the, will that be eastern side, I guess, of the pyramid? The, yeah, the eastern side where the pyramid temple is. The entrance is in the north, but there’s a flattened part of this wall on the eastern side. And they’ve been hitting that with like a ground like a radar thing. And they found that there are some anomalies behind there. So there might well be an entrance behind this wall.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That looks a little odd. Like that wall looks a little different than the surrounding stuff.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, for sure. Then there’s some evidence that they had a patch like that. We, one of the hypotheses again, I got a credit Kyle and Russ from brothers, construction guys. So they look at this stuff and they have a great theory about this because on all, there’s a lot of the casing stones are missing on the back. But we found blocks that were smooth like that with the angle for the other side.

So what I think there were probably four patches like that. Now what you could be, one possible explanation for this is like, well, you very carefully grind and finish a section on each side, because that sets your angle. Once you set your angle, you can use that patch as a reference point to then basically try to finish the whole rest of the pyramid at that exact angle. So you’ve got to start somewhere. You very carefully set your angle correctly on that patch and then you can use that as a reference to then smooth out the rest of the surface.

Which you say smooth out. In places, there’s this much granite you’ve got to remove. Like a foot of granite’s got to come off these stones to get down to that level. Like, they’re so pillowy. Pillowy. It’s granite. I mean, I just, it boggles the mind. It’s like there was scoop. It’s like this. They were using that scooping tool or whatever to do it.

Theories About the Nubs

JOE ROGAN: Are there competing theories as to what the nubs are for? Other than, like, using it to lift the stones, something?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, you know, some people suggest some of them may have been, like, little, meaning the, really. There are different types of nubs, the subtle ones. Not all work is lifting nubs. Some people say in the geopolymer world, where they say, well, stones were formed or cast, they’ll say, well, these are like heat expansion points.

I’ve heard good theories from certain people that suggest it had something to do with the mass of the stone. Like a resonant free, like as you change the mass of a stone, it’s whatever resonant frequency it has might alter. Because you also have scoops. You have nubs and you have scoops. So you seem to have this reduction of mass and then there’s more mass in another place. So maybe it had something to do. These are different theories I’ve heard. I don’t have a good explanation for them.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so weird how it never comes up again in human history.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, we don’t, we don’t make stuff with knobs. It’s weird. Really weird. Well, it’s a common answer. It’s one of those other indicators. It’s like, hey, this is the same. But how come this is the same?

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t it in Japan as well?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, there’s places in Japan. I mean, there’s a place I want to, I’ve been there. I’ve just not explored all those sites. Yes, there’s some really megalithic stonework in Japan that actually matches a lot of the stuff in Peru.

JOE ROGAN: See if you can find some of that, Jeremy, please.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What’s that, bro?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’m looking on different ones.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow. Where’s that?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That looks like Turkey.

JOE ROGAN: Turkey. Turkey’s another one.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Theater. Those are more consistent nubs, I would say. They’re really right. More.

JOE ROGAN: A little more.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Bit more deliberate. There’s also a lip on that. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Still weird.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like, what are you doing? Are you copying that? Could be other people did.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s a possibility for sure, because we’re very good at that too. You do see a lot of imitation, right?

JOE ROGAN: Who taught you how to do it?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, there’s a few people really obsessed with the stone nubs, and I can see why. Like, it is a real mystery. See those, those one. That’s a Ollantaytambo. That’s, those are bedrock nubs, too. Those aren’t even in blocks. That’s in bedrock. And those are a bit more deliberate, I would say. Like, they’re more like, maybe they’re shadow and, and, you know, markers for, like, some sort of calendar.

These, this is part of the Coricancha. They’re my big square ones. I don’t know what that’s for. That they’re different. Again.

The Sage Wall and Other Megalithic Sites

JOE ROGAN: What is your take on that sage wall in Montana?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I haven’t been there and seen it. I’ve been wanting to. Weird. I’ve heard differing opinions on that. Like, it’s, it’s possibly. I’d like to see it for myself, to be honest. I’ve seen some footage of it.

JOE ROGAN: China.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: China. That looks like Yangshan. Yeah, that’s Yangshan quarry. And they’re giant. That’s giant too, by the way. The Yangshan quarry is thousands of tons. Like, if they’d ever cut that block off, it’s something like, I don’t, some astronomical.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. I watched a piece on this YouTube thing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, you see it there? It’s monstrous.

JOE ROGAN: What is the timeline of this stuff?

The Yangshan Quarry Block and Global Megalithic Mysteries

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I believe. I don’t. Off the top of my head. Maybe, Jamie, you can find out. Ask your AI. Ming Dynasty, right? Yeah. They say the story on that is like some ruler said, like, carve me a dragon. They’re like, sure, boss. And they started trying to get this block out. Then eventually some foreman went, yeah, maybe we can’t deal with this stone anymore. And they left. It doesn’t seem real plausible to me. That’s the size of the Yangshan quarry block, right?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Thousands of tons. That and what they were doing there, I do not know. And I do not know when they did it.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s the weird things. There’s so many sites.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Those nubs would be. They’re huge. Huge numbers.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they’re different, but it’s like, what do they represent?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, so one. Another option. I mean, something else I’ve heard is that in some places, they could have been mounting points for something that was grabbing them or hanging onto them. Some tool to finish the wall. That was another theory.

JOE ROGAN: Or a structure around them.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. A structure from base.

JOE ROGAN: And now the Japan ones. Jamie, did you find anything?

Japanese Megaliths and the Asuka Connection

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Do you get Japan megaliths? Maybe. But, I mean, India. The Barabar Caves is another one of these mysteries that fits this box. Do you ever heard of the Barabar Caves in India?

JOE ROGAN: No.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, my Lord. That’s a whole lot.

JOE ROGAN: These are in Japan.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: This is Japan. Yeah. This one in particular, the.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. Click on that one that you just had your cursor on. That’s nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think that’s AI. Is it that thing looks AI.

JOE ROGAN: The one powered transcription, the one on.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The left just next to it, the medium one. That’s definitely. That’s. And then below it actually is a better picture. The Asuka megaliths. Yeah. So this matches a lot of the stuff in Peru to me. And even the Imperial palace. The cornerstones and corner blocks of the imperial palace there. The wall is very megalithic.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: In fact, it’s funny, they’ve actually been digging up the foundations. My wife was there recently, and they’ve gone underground and they’ve found original foundations and big walls. And they’ve just opened some of that up to the public. Yeah. Some of this is very. I mean, this is totally Peru. Hun and Pacha, if this is legit, matches. Right? It’s the same.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The same kind of stuff.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s what’s weird. It’s like, is this a traveling civilization? Is civilization uniform all around the world at a certain point in time?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It was global. Yeah, I think it was global. We’re looking at the remnants of it either.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that. Oh, my God.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Offshoots of it, too, potentially.

JOE ROGAN: What’s that, Jim?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Looks like the giant boulder in LA at the museum. You know, it’s like sitting over the tunnel, you know, I’m talking about at LACMA.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, no, I don’t remember it. I tried to block LACMA out. Look. Oh, wow. Kind of.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: What is this, like a LA Sculpture.

JOE ROGAN: Museum of Modern Art? It’s.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Blech. You go there. It’s like.

JOE ROGAN: This is a Plexiglas box. It’s amazing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. With a banana peel in it. That kind of shit. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not a fan of what not.

JOE ROGAN: It’s for dorks. Similar yeah, kind of.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You’re right. Yeah, it’s.

JOE ROGAN: But not as cool. Yeah, that one’s cooler and obviously way f*ing older.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Mm.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just so weird how these megalithic structures are so consistent. Whoa, look at that one. That’s nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That there’s something like. Looks like Cambodia. Potentially Thailand.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that was the other thing that we pulled up the other day. The temple in India.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: India.

JOE ROGAN: The one that’s cut entirely out of the mountain.

The Barabar Caves: Mirror-Finished Granite Mysteries

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Starts with a K. Yeah, yeah, that’s one. Yeah. There’s a lot in India. It’s another place. But that’s very. That’s made from granite. Like it is cut out of granite. What if you look up Barabar caves, that’s also in India. These are. My friend Patrice Poyad, who runs a filmmaking company in France, has done an amazing documentary on Barabar and they’ve scanned them and these are. These are caves cut into big granite outcroppings that are just massive. Perfect on the inside. Like it’s mirror finished granite within like a thousandth of an inch flatness on the insides.

And they have these crazy shapes to. Some of them have these circles, but then have a whole other room in the back that’s circular and he. That’s an unfinished one. That’s a.

JOE ROGAN: That’s like that doorway. Please, Jamie. The upper left. Yeah, right there. Like that’s nuts, man.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s a lot of that. The decoration there is added. That’s probably later. Again, it’s. The writing came later. The original doorway is probably that one.

JOE ROGAN: So the elephants over the top. That’s later.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, for sure. There’s an attribution of these is to. That was supposedly owned by a particular king who gave them to a religious cult to get out of the. Right. But it doesn’t say anything about him making them. They just. Oh, wow. If you go to the insides is what’s impressive in here. It’s the finishing of the granite. They’re mirror finished.

And it turns out with the scans what they found is they’re also almost perfectly symmetrical. Like they’re not straight. They tilt in at a degree and a half exactly on both sides. It’s some of the most precise work in granite in single piece. Again, it’s one of those things where you can’t make a single mistake. And I mean this. This is not. This is an imitation. Like, this is a later attempt to replicate it.

Yeah, look at that. The cow patty hammer, whatever. The one. The two in the middle there. So this is and you literally. It’s reflects. I mean, the acoustics in there are incredible. But this is granite and it’s been polished to this mirror finish. And then it’s also been measured for flatness and geometry. And it’s insanely accurate.

There’s been a whole series of documentaries done. You can see the mirror finish in it. Wow. And nobody knows. There’s nothing else quite like this anywhere. It’s like giant stone boxes. Look at the size of that one. The.

JOE ROGAN: Carved into a mountain.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Carved into a granite outcrop in a mountain. Exactly. Yeah. There’s seven or eight of them all in the same area. Really hard to get to. It’s like you got to rough it and camp and stuff to get out there. But it’s on my list.

JOE ROGAN: What’s the conventional explanation of how they did this?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They don’t. I mean, it’s. There are literally other examples of people hammering on them with trying to make replicas with the tools of the time. And then it just jumps to this and it’s just. There’s no explanation for it other than they will. They did it in order to let this religious sect out of the rain. That’s. And because it’s literally some of the really poorly inscribed. The right. You know, like the Egyptian stuff. It’s like somebody hammered this text, right? Sanskrit or whatever it is. And it says, you know, this was. This king gave this to these guys to get out of the monsoon.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the ancient version of Kilroy was here.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Kilroy built this.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah. Yep. Wild little Timmy on the skyscraper.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve never seen that before.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s. Yeah, I have.

JOE ROGAN: Completely insane.

Underground Quarries and Ancient Engineering

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I. Patrice. I actually have his full documentary on my channel if people want it. Can I go with the giant statue outside is the Oya. Corey and Japan in Japan.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Abandoned quarry. Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: This is. Like I said, we were in a quarry like this in Turkey. Was absolutely incredible.

JOE ROGAN: Look at the. In relationship to the size of the people that were walking.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Is this a salt quarry or is it limestone? I can’t tell. A lot of them are salt cabins, but we were inside. So you have big cabin. You have big quarries like this. Underground quarries in China. We were in Turkey in this. I have these amazing footage from this massive underground quarry. These caves that were carved in. In Turkey when we were there.

JOE ROGAN: Look at this title. Scientists discover this structure in Japan. They claim humans could never have built medium. How’s that? How could humans have never built a quarry. Yeah, yeah, you’re just getting clicks, you sons of bes.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s the game.

JOE ROGAN: Someone. No one’s saying. It’s not humans just saying something was going on back then where they were way more advanced than we want to give them credit for. And when you take into account the Younger Dryas impact theory and the natural catastrophes that undoubtedly have befallen many a civilization in the past, it all kind of makes sense.

It’s weird how many people resist it. That’s the weird part. It’s like they want to cling so tightly to their preconceived notions of the history of the human race.

The Resistance to New Ideas in Academia

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s a weird thing, isn’t it? Like the history of civilization is one of those things that hasn’t changed a whole lot in about 100 years. Like the idea that civilization started with the Sumerians, the Mesopotamians, 6,000 years ago and now we’re here. That idea has been around for a long time and it’s just everything else around it has shifted such that I hope, I really do hope that it’s just that there’s. That the context, the next generation of academics can take some of this context into account.

JOE ROGAN: I think that will. I think a lot of them are growing up listening to stuff like your show. I think that’s going to help because there’s a lot of people that are getting into archaeology now. A lot of young people that are a little bit more open minded and then they also encounter some of these very arrogant professors and people that have these ridiculous ideas and think that they should be the absolute gatekeeper of information, which is so crazy because universities are a fairly new concept.

The idea that these people that are running these universities, they should be in charge of something. This is a new thing. They should be in charge. They’re the only ones that could figure it out. They have the paper. It’s written, their name is written, it’s framed on the wall. You shut the f* up.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They got the letters.

JOE ROGAN: That is literally insane. Because you’re dealing with something that it is not possible for everyone to know. And you’re not as into it as they are. The thing is about. Like they are not as into these ideas as you are. You know what I’m saying? Like you are chasing this shit down. There’s not a lot you are.

And so is Jimmy Corsetti, and so is Graham Hancock, and so are many, many other people. And Randall Carlson and John Anthony West in peace when he was alive. He was awesome. Those people chasing down these ideas are way more into it than the people that are gatekeeping the information. And they don’t want to accept anything other than what they’ve been teaching and what they’ve been writing about.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, you’re right. There’s a lot of, I mean it’s amazing that the medium has shifted to give people a voice, I guess, that are into it. And my friend George Howard has a great way of explaining this in terms of a potential talent pool.

If you consider like, okay, so current academics, at least the ones that are the old guard now are kind of been selected from the people that chose to go to university, that got into universities and you have this pool. But now with the kind of the Internet, it’s like you’re exposing these ideas to such a wider variety of people that you can, then there’s going to be people out there that think about these things a certain way. Assessed polymaths that are going to be able to come forward and give those ideas.

And you know, I think the vast majority of significant breakthroughs in pretty much any scientific field have usually come from somewhere that’s not within the box thinking. It’s usually anti-establishment or it’s outside the box thinking. Not always, but a lot of those ideas came from like this has come complete from left field, like germ theory, all that sort of stuff. It’s like, what are you, you’re crazy. You got this dumb idea and then turns out, ah, you know, thirty, forty years later it’s like that was the right idea and we go from there.

I mean, I’m hopeful as well that yeah, the next generation of academics will be able to embrace a lot of these, the context for some of these and then try to explore them. Because I think ultimately that’s what’s needed is some take some of these ideas seriously and bend some of our resources to try and explore them on the ground and in full. Because there’s only, you know, ultimately the people that have the control and are able to do the real on the ground research are the ones that will be able to confirm or change. It takes real science in a lot of cases.

JOE ROGAN: And also we’re currently obsessed with our impact on the environment, which is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing to be conscious and aware of our pollution and our emissions and all that good stuff. But if we were absolutely certain that civilization has been utterly destroyed by something that is outside of our capacity to control, probably a good idea to know that that’s happened.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes, 100%.

JOE ROGAN: And to deny the possibility of even exploring that concept because people are going to get their feelings hurt because, you know they were. Because they’re so bitchy to each other. That’s the craziest thing you find out about these academics. They are so bitchy to each other. When anybody has any sort of an idea that’s heterodox, any sort of an idea that’s outside of the narrative that they’ve been teaching forever, they attack each other’s reputation. They’re little sociopaths.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is vicious. Well, that’s their version of the fight, I guess. It’s the mean letters. Yeah, it’s, you know what I mean? It is kind of weird.

JOE ROGAN: But they’re also, in today’s day and age of these shows where, like, your show and all these other ones that we mentioned, there’s a much more attractive approach to these ideas. You know, where people are not like bitchy authoritarians, but they’re rather people that are absolutely fascinated by something that is undeniable.

The size of these stones, the similarity to them all over the world, all these different mysteries, the fact that many of them are covered in mud, the fact that enormous stones, look, they’ve been knocked off by some immense force. Stuff that was left. Just left there in the middle of construction. Nobody ever picked it up. Nobody ever finished it. Like, what happened.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, and it’s really only not that long since we’ve had the ability to apply some of these disciplines to these problems, like engineering. It’s since the Industrial Revolution that we’ve even had enough background knowledge to kind of understand these problems because we have to solve them ourselves.

JOE ROGAN: Or like, think about how Christopher Dunn approaches the idea of the Great Pyramid itself. No one would have ever been able to do that 200 years ago.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s what I’m saying. Yeah, 100%. That’s, it’s these other disciplines that have a whole different take on it. And it’s again, not a criticism of archaeologists to say they’re not engineers, they’re not engineers. It’s just, they just, yeah, it’s fact. They don’t. It’s like, I’m not a dentist. I don’t know much. You know what I mean? I can’t solve those problems.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. No one could solve all problems.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. But, hey, dentists might have some input on some of these. You know what I mean? Like, sure you could. I think a lot of these problems are multidisciplinary is what I’m saying. Like there’s a lot of different approaches and angles to them that lead to some pretty interesting places.

JOE ROGAN: Funny that because my dentist is obsessed with UFOs.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh really?

JOE ROGAN: Super smart guy obsessed with UFOs.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Wants to talk about.

JOE ROGAN: Every time he’s like doing my, what do you think? What do you think that is?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s fun.

JOE ROGAN: It’s fun to talk to him.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’ll bet. Yeah, yeah. What else are you going to think about while you’re filling on someone?

JOE ROGAN: But it is a subject that is so important for us. I mean I’m watching the Ken Burns documentary right now, the Revolutionary War. It’s really great, awesome, amazing. Fascinating. To look back at this very recent history, relatively speaking to terms of the timeline of the Earth and then just realize like that ain’t shit.

The Importance of Understanding Cyclical History

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. And that’s one of the reasons I did drives me too is why it’s, I think that’s a big factor in why this is important is that it’s altruistic. But I do believe that having, if we could change that pillar of humanity from like well we were stone age and now we’re space age to this cyclical nature of we’ve been here, we’ve not been knocked down. Be aware of the dangers like solve the longer term.

I do genuinely think that a whole generation that’s exposed to that, that has that inbuilt as they’re like hey, background knowledge of what it means to be human, then maybe we would solve those problems.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, maybe that’s a constant test every 12,000 plus years.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Seems like it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it does seem like it and it seems like no one’s really solved it yet, you know and we probably get a little smarter every time we do it, but it takes forever and it probably sucks for a long time.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well it seems like it’s not every 12,000 years or so is like there’s definitely been events that are orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve experienced in our the last several millennia. You know, like a thousand Katrina’s or whatever at a time kind of thing.

JOE ROGAN: And then there’s evidence of like things like the Tunguska event where like something a little bit more, little more than we’ve experienced before happens but nothing compared to what has experienced we’ve experienced or the Earth has experienced in the past.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, for sure we’ve not. We’ve, yeah, we’ve had. We’ve had nothing. But it does if you go back the last couple hundred thousand years. It is, has this periodicity, it seems like that does for some reason align with some of those, those 12,000 years and 26,000 years kind of cycles. It’s weird how that happens.

JOE ROGAN: Including the depictions of Atlantis and the fall of Atlantis.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s all that exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Lines on with the timelines. Up with the timelines.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It does.

JOE ROGAN: Dude, your show is f*ing awesome. I love it. I look forward to it every time you put a new episode out. I really love it. And I love every time you come in here and let’s make this a regular thing, man.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I love that.

JOE ROGAN: It’s my favorite show. I f*ing love this subject so much. It’s so engaging. It’s so exciting. You know, for whatever reason, there’s just part of the human fascination with the past that gets ignited in me and it’s so, I think the audience feels the same way. It’s so intriguing.

And I think you’re right. And I think Jimmy Corsetti’s right and Graham Hancock’s right. I think all these people are right. I think there’s more to this story than we’re being spoon fed.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Thank you very much, Sir. I agree.

JOE ROGAN: UnchartedX. It’s on YouTube. Subscribe, like and subscribe. It’s f*ing amazing. And then you, what is your Instagram?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s UnchartedX1 on Twitter and UnchartedX7 on Instagram. I should probably fix that. But it is what it is.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: As long as it’s not six, seven. That’s the new thing with the kids these days.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, no. Yeah. I haven’t done that.

JOE ROGAN: All that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I’ve heard about it. Yeah. Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Appreciate you very much. Bye, everybody.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Thank you, bro. Yeah, I didn’t want to force them.

JOE ROGAN: But I wanted to ask them about that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, it’s Jimmy. Yeah, we can throw it back in.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I can talk about it real quick.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. You want to talk about the Shamir? I can unend it.

The Mystery of Solomon’s Shamir

JOE ROGAN: Sorry, folks, we unended it. We unended it because Jamie had sent me this earlier today. Solomon Shamir.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, the Shamir. So you are familiar with it? I am. Okay. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So this is an ancient idea that there was a worm or a substance that had the power to cut through and disintegrate stone, iron and dust. And Solomon is said to have used it in the building of the first temple in Jerusalem in place of cutting tools for the construction of Solomon’s temple, which promoted peace. It was inappropriate to use tools that could also cause war and bloodshed.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yep. There’s also, I found, since we’ve been, since I sent that to you, there is a actual thing called a lethordio or something that they found in the Philippines that does. Yeah, it’s some sort of a rock eating worm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Shamir is like Solomon’s lightsaber, I like to call it. Yeah, it’s, it is described, the Shamir is described as a stone cutting implementation.

JOE ROGAN: Ate through that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So the guy who found it said he had never heard of the Shamir. And some scientists don’t know if they’re even the same thing, but they do. They’re described very similarly.

JOE ROGAN: What a creepy looking motherf*er. That thing is a rock eating little.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Worm like grinding stone.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s, there are a number of different depictions and descriptions for the Shamir. And one of the, one of the problems with it being like this, this thing that slowly grinds through. Yeah. See, this is the weird part. Shamir was meant to always been wrapped in wool and stored in a container made of lead. The container would burst and disintegrate.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s like under the Shamir’s gaze.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: All I had to do was look at it. So.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I don’t think it had eyes. Are we describing, are we describing rapid radiation or something like that?

JOE ROGAN: Right. What are we describing?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, it gets into the realm of the Ark of the Covenant and everything else too. Right.

JOE ROGAN: And stored in lead. That’s nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And then it lost its potency. Yes. Right. After which I don’t, the dripping of the honeycomb. I don’t know what that is.

JOE ROGAN: By the time of the destruction of the First Temple during the siege of Jerusalem in 600 BC.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. But again, it still exists. They found it today, like 2019, I think is what. Well, they found a worm that does something similar. Very similar worm that, that’s, he was the evolution of it.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe they had a giant one that they just like f*ing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Maybe they could have trained them like train pigeons. Eat the wall.

JOE ROGAN: Eat the wall.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: He had to do it fast. One of the things too, he was, they had to build that temple, Solomon, quickly. So that he was like, we need this. We can’t use the regular methods, but we also need to be able to cut stone quickly. So one of the things that Shamir was described as doing is being able to cut these sort of hard stones like I think it described, like diamond even.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The Legend of the Shamir

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Cutting it quickly. The blood of the Shamir was used for diamonds. But this also said he was not. He didn’t find it given to him. A bird found it.

JOE ROGAN: A bird.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Someone noticed a bird was using it to make nests and rock. And they’re like, let’s take, let’s get ahold of that. So, yeah. Some people also speculate that there’s a bird that vomits this thing or poops this thing that rock which can melt rock or something.

JOE ROGAN: The angel of the Sea had then given the shamir to a bird identified by the Talmud as a hoopi.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, but it’s the oldest bird, isn’t this. I believe this is like the, we had to go to several birds which were also of these spirits he talked to.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And I think he had to get to the very late, the very last one.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a lightsaber they got from aliens. It’s a worm from a bird. It’s a lightsaber from aliens.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Radioactive alien lightsaber. All right. And done.

JOE ROGAN: Goodbye, everybody.

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