Transcript: UnchartedX’s Ben van Kerkwyk on Joe Rogan Experience #2374

Some of the depictions you see from the labyrinth are in that. And then again, not until the emergence of what I would call modern archaeology in the 18th century.

So guys like Carl Lepsius in the 1700s started to look at these accounts and go and survey the place where they said it was. So Herodotus and these authors, I selected the quotes here to just, there’s a lot more that they say about it. But one of the things they talk about is they kind of give descriptions of where it is.

They say it’s near what was called Lake Moeris. And it’s near what a city that was the temple of the crocodiles. Crocodilopolis or Ancient Arseno is the other name for it. And we know where that is. And Lake Moeris sort of somewhat still exists. It’s much smaller now, but it’s in this region called the Fayoum of Egypt.

So if you ever look at Egypt on a map, you can imagine this desert and you have from north to south you have this green line of the Nile traces it down. But on the left side you look at, there’s this leaf shaped depression that’s all green. It’s called the Fayum. It’s a depression which used to flood with the Nile. Today they use it for agriculture. And it’s right at that neck of the Fayum where it connects up to the Nile Valley.

And he also described it. They also described the pyramid that’s at the site because there is the pyramid to Amenemhap III on that site. So they give us all these descriptors and everyone kind of agreed. Yeah. So it’s at this place called Hawara, where I’ve been to several times. There’s still a pyramid there and there’s these great fields of sand and little open air libraries with chunks of stone.

The Petrie Excavation

And what happened was that Carl Lepsius went there and he said, “Well, I’ve discovered the ruins of a Roman town that’s built on the surface. There’s nothing crazy about it.” Flinders Petrie was the guy who kind of got the closest. Now, Petrie went there in the late 1800s and early 1900s and he was excavating. He dug down seven or eight meters. He got down and he found this massive stone slab of benton, or plaster, that was huge, like a thousand feet long.

As he sort of traced the edges of it and he’s like, “I’m standing on the foundation of the labyrinth.” So what he said is it’s all gone. It’s basically, Petrie said, it’s been quarried. This place has been a source of stone for literally millennia. So it’s gone.

So pretty much everyone since then in archaeology, Egyptology is like, and if you look on Wikipedia, they’ll tell you, “Oh, it’s gone. It was destroyed, was quarried away.” Petrie says, “I’m standing on the foundation of it, the bottom layer. And that’s it. There’s nothing here.”

And so that’s always been kind of the position of orthodox Egyptology. Look in the textbooks. That’s where it is. But that’s all changed because there’s been a whole bunch of different now scientific expeditions there. This is where it gets into some intrigue, because the Matah expedition, the Cora University expedition, I mean, these happened. Their results have come out since, but they were covered up at the time. They were suppressed. So the first guy to…

JOE ROGAN: What year was this?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: 2008 was the Matah Expedition.

JOE ROGAN: They were covered up?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So what is this our boy Zahi? Yeah, Zahi it is Zahi.

The Matah Expedition and Cover-Up

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Sorry, it was. And look. And again, not my words. This is the words of Louis de Cordier, who was, he’s a Belgian artist and entrepreneur who funded and drove the Matah expedition. He did it in conjunction with the Supreme Council of Antiquities, which at the time was helmed by Zahi Hawass, also with the NRIG, which is the National Research Institute for basically subsurface studies. So that’s those guys dragging that box around.

So they used a whole bunch of different techniques to look at these areas around that pyramid at the site of Hawara. Things like ground penetrating radar, geomagnetism, very low frequency, seismic tomography, electrical resistivity tomography. There’s a bunch of different techniques that are well established, known science. This isn’t like the cuff risk against the worst. You can debate the merits of the technology. This is established technology.

And they found the labyrinth. So. And what he found was, is that. Yes. So what Lepsius said about the ruins of a Roman or Greek or Persian town with mud bricks and stuff. Yep, that’s there. In the first few meters you go down, then you hit the water table. So that’s the other issue on this site is the water table. So the water’s at 5 meters below the surface.

And under that is the slab that Petrie found. So 6, 7 meters is that huge slab that Petrie found that he thought was the foundation. And then below that, Petrie didn’t dig deep enough. Below that we can find essentially a labyrinthian structure of granite and very, very dense rocks and walls and a maze structure that has walls that are meters thick.

There’s another great slide in there. That’s the green and it’s the actual BLF. Right, that’s it there. So, yeah, so this is at 8 meters with VLF sounding. So you can see this labyrinthine structure of these walls and all of these lines and walls. These are granite. And the scale of this, it’s a hundred meters vertically by 150 meters.

JOE ROGAN: 100 meters tall?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, no. So vertically. No, no. So the Y axis, I guess of this. So we’re looking down in the ground here. But you got to look at the scale, across the top, that’s 150 meters. Right. So I mean what? 450 feet? So these are big walls. So it’s big chambers and big walls.

JOE ROGAN: For people at home. It’s like a football field.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s a football field. Well, it’s more, I mean more 100 meters in Australia. It’s my 100 meters of the football field, I think. I don’t know how big.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s 100 yards. What is the difference? 100 yards and 100 meters?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s 100 yards is a little less. A little less. So 150 meters. And this is only a section of the labyrinth. They scan two sections. The labyrinth itself is said to be much, much larger than this.

JOE ROGAN: So they found much larger than that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, that’s huge. Yeah, no, it’s the overall structure. At least a thousand feet.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

The Labyrinth Discovery and Cover-Up

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Like three, four, five times that size. I mean you have to go back to the… We have some better indication with the more modern space-based scans now. But when they did those geophysical, like the ground penetrating radar scan, so they scanned two areas that was the bigger one, like in front of the pyramid. Then they did another one on the other side of the canal that runs through the site today. And they found it on both sides.

So that’s the difference between what we say about the lab, like what the textbooks will tell you about the labyrinth, it not being there and it being destroyed too. No, we’ve actually now there’s been… The Mataha expedition confirmed it was there and they… So what happened? This was interesting and I have reasoning for why this happened. But it was covered up and these are the words.

Like Louis de Cordier, he eventually got sick of waiting. Because what happens in Egypt, anything you do, whether it’s you’re an academic institution or you’re an individual or a group that’s funding some sort of expedition, you work with the Council of Antiquities. Today it’s the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. But they essentially, you know, you got to… It takes years to get access. And then once you do, though, they control release of information. So that’s always part of the deal. Right? It’s that Egypt gets to do the announcing and if and when they choose.

JOE ROGAN: And they have dismissed things in the past that they then accepted later.

The Scanpyramids Project Example

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. A great example is the, honestly, the Scanpyramids project. So when… So they got ahead of themselves a little bit. This is the muon detection, the cosmic ray detection stuff. They’ve been running that experiment for years. At Giza in the Great Pyramid they put the… And every time I go in there, there’s always different sets of equipment at different places on it.

But these muon detectors, they have them under the ground and in the Grand Gallery and it just takes years to collect data. Occasionally these cosmic particles, they’ll pick one up and it’s… You’re able to detect voids or they have, they can somehow tell the difference between it traveling through solid matter versus the void takes years to build up a resolute picture.

But once they did, they said, “Oh, okay, so we’ve discovered that big void in the pyramid.” But they’d also discovered the small void at the main entrance. If you look up at it today, there’s those chevron blocks above. You go in down here at the Alma Moons tunnel, but at the top where the descending passage actually exits the pyramid, the original entrance, there’s this big chevron blocks and behind that’s that chamber.

So you remember a few years ago they made a big fuss. But as an example, when the Scanpyramids guys on their own initiative announced that “we’ve made these discoveries,” I mean Zahi basically came out and said “this is bullshit, this doesn’t exist, there’s nothing there. And if there is something there, we knew about it already.” And you go on a couple years and when now it’s time to do the press releases and to roll out the footage and he’s who’s standing at the podium making the announcement and showing the… Zahi’s doing it. He has to.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Fascinating situation over there with him.

National Security Sanctions and Threats

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes, I did a video, I just released it a few days ago. That got into some even more intrigue about stuff that’s happened at Giza and at the Giza plateau in the 1990s which we can get into that too.

But so yeah, what happened with the Mataha expedition and the labyrinth was that 2008 and 9, they finished their on-site work, they’re ready to release the data. They put on a very small public lecture at Ghent University in Belgium. No one really attended it. And then they got told to start… And again, in the words of Louis de Cordier, because he waited two or three years and then he put this out there. He said that he was told to cease any and all discussion or release of information from the Mataha project. And him and his team members were threatened with national security sanctions from Egypt. Which means that, you know, I think at the low, if you come to Egypt, we’ll arrest you, and if not, maybe we’ll come and get you. I don’t know. It’s national security sanctions.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t there a way to sort of massage that situation and to talk to Zahi and say, “Listen, you can be the guy who found this.”

The Political Decision Behind the Cover-Up

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, that would have been the case. I think that was a given if it had been released. I actually think in the case… So it’s funny, I kind of don’t really blame him. So I think this was a political decision, not a… People say, “Oh, you’re hiding the truth and whatever.” Yeah, okay, that’s happening. There’s new data. That’s amazing, amazing find that could change the world, in my opinion.

Honestly, the labyrinth is the biggest archaeological discovery of the millennium. When we get into what that structure is and how big it is and the way it’s reported in antiquity, there’s nothing bigger than… Herodotus says it surpasses the pyramids. It’s like finding more Giza. Like a Giza plateau somewhere. Under the ground. Under the ground. You can’t… I just think it would be the biggest discovery of the millennium, which is part of the problem.

Because I think, unfortunately in Egypt, and this is just my intuition and my sort of read of the situation, what’s happened is the reality is the groundwater level is rising, right? So it’s kind of attacking that part of the site at least. The higher levels of the labyrinth for sure are suffering in this salty groundwater. Right? It is going to slowly erode because that groundwater’s come way up. We know it’s come way up because Flinders Petrie back in the late 18th, early 19th century actually got in to under the pyramid. And you can’t today, if you go to that pyramid, there is a passage you can go down. You go down a few steps and just throw a pebble. It’s just water and debris and mud.

JOE ROGAN: So this water table has risen slowly over…

The High Dam and Rising Water Levels

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, since the 1960s, since they built the dam. So it’s the High Dam. So what happened? It’s, this is the problem, right? So you’ve got all these factors. It’s where it is. So it’s Hawara, the Fayoum. Now Egypt… I love Egypt. I go to Egypt a couple times a year. Every year and fantastic place. But they are one of… they’re food poor in terms of they’re the net biggest importer of wheat. They need all the agriculture they can get. The Fayoum is a huge agricultural area.

There’s a huge irrigation canal called the Bahr Yussef Canal that’s been cut in there in the 1840s. Same guy built the Suez Canal, made it, cuts it in there. So you’ve got this situation of all right, we’ve got all this agriculture happening, we’ve got farmers, water rights, messing with this and it’s… and it happens to be running through this ancient site that could be the biggest discovery of our time. And it’s happening because we built a dam on the Nile.

And what happened with the High dam in the 60s… there’s a low dam the British built in 1901, 1902. Then they actually partnered with the Soviet Union to build this High dam that’s actually still a monument to Egyptian Soviet Union friendship at the dam. It’s pretty cool.

But when they built that High Dam, it essentially stops that yearly cycle of inundation of the Nile. So everyone, you know, we always talk about the Nile flooding, right? Every year that rains in Africa, in the south, you get this huge flood that comes up the Nile and it floods out and you get this deposit of black mud and real fertile ground. And they would use that to farm.

They built the dam. You get rid of that yearly cycle, right? And what happens, people, it seems counterintuitive because people are like, “Well, it’s less water in the Nile.” No, what the dam did was eliminate the nine month dry season. So you had the three month wet season, but then you don’t have that nine month dry season now. So you have essentially more water for more time in the Nile which is having this effect of rising the water table.

The Cost and Complexity of Excavation

So you combine that with the size of Hawara and the project, the scope of the project to try and remediate and save or excavate, start working at the labyrinth. I mean you’re talking millions and millions. It’s not an easy problem to solve on an area that size to try and get the water out, divert the farmers water, deal with all of those problems.

And then so what I think the options Zahi might have been left with here is either it’s going to cost us an absolute bomb to try and do this for we don’t know what sort of gain. It’ll probably be a decade before that place is suitable for tourism. There’s not much to see there even now. Or we basically say we’ve discovered it but we’re not going to do anything about it because it’s too expensive and you’re going to face a lot of international criticism for that.

So I think that the decision was likely made, in my opinion, complete speculation that it’s just easy to brush this under the table. This never happened. We never discovered this. This doesn’t exist. Let’s just go on selling tickets on the Giza plateau and pumping water out to the Fayoum for agriculture.

JOE ROGAN: God, how shortsighted. Now when you were saying millions, were you going to say dollars or were you going to say gallons of water?

Further Cover-Ups and Imprisonment

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, dollars. I mean, I think the project, the remediation project at Hawara would not be… It’s not a simple thing. In fact, they did do… There was another expedition after the Mataha expedition in 2009. Cairo University, along with a Polish university, went out there to try and figure out what is the deal with the groundwater, where’s it coming from, what direction they were doing geological test pits and all these boreholes to figure out the water situation.

According to them, that information was also covered up because they also did ground penetrating radar surveys also confirmed the labyrinth. The guy who was in charge of that in Cairo University was actually put in jail by they… Again, this is on their report when the information finally came out in 2017, he lost his job obviously as part of it. So they covered that up too. But they had tried…

JOE ROGAN: Put him in jail for what?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I guess for working on the site. I don’t know the reason it’s… it’s on their report though. That’s what they say is that he was jailed because they allegedly halted the project and then put the guy in jail. This is what they say on their report from that expedition. That work which came out a decade after they’d done it and I dig it up on the Internet, I’m like, “Well this is interesting because their results are interesting.”

But they, even after their work, their conclusion was, “Well, the water’s a very complicated problem. It’s coming from a couple different directions. Northeast is the shallowest, it’s coming in from this way, but it’s also coming from another direction.” They’d have to dig a lot more test holes in a wider area to really figure it out. And I think you’d have to start digging remediation wells put in pumps and just try and pump that down. If not canal and trench that whole thing out a massive site and then you can start to worry about all right, we’re going to get some dirt out and start to excavate.

Potential Solutions and Deep Pockets

JOE ROGAN: Could it be done without interrupting the farmers?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Probably, yeah. I mean I think we could do it. I think that you can divert and move the Bahr Yussef canal out of the way if you had to.

JOE ROGAN: I just think he’s like holler at Jeff Bezos or Elon.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Someone with some deep pockets. Don’t you want to know?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You want to know? I want to know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Modern Scanning and Water-Free Lower Levels

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well the crazy thing is too is that according to the… Because the story doesn’t end there. When you get into the modern space-based scans, Merlin Burrows and the geoscan stuff. And I know that also I’ve met the guys from the Khufu project. They are going to scan that site. We talked to them about it recently at Cosmic Summit and then I think you know what they’re saying so far is that the lower levels… because this thing goes down I said to nearly 100 meters. There’s reported levels down to 300 feet under the ground and it seems like they might be free of water.

So it’s just shallow groundwater and once you get into the bedrock and it’s not a porous stone or whatever’s underneath, just the top level sediment, it seems like it… Tim Aker said it looks like it’s free of water. So the very bottom layers seem to be free of it.

JOE ROGAN: So the actual labyrinth, very bottom layers.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The labyrinth is multiple levels at least so we know.

JOE ROGAN: But is it possible that they could somehow or another from the side dig a tunnel below everything if you could? Below the water?

Advanced Scanning Technologies and the Lost Labyrinth

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

JOE ROGAN: It seems like a terrible travesty if they don’t.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I agree. Which is the reason I made that video in the first place. I wanted to draw attention to the labyrinth because it’s just. I think it is like the biggest opportunity for us in terms of massive discoveries in the ancient world. I can’t think of anything that’s bigger than the. I know the Kufra scan stuff is super interesting that the claims are wild and it’s. But this is like known about, like this has been talked about and then it’s been confirmed with multiple scans.

You had Madha expedition, you had Cora University and I think it was Roclaw, I’m butchering that the Polish university or then you had geoscan team which was Klaus Dona, a friend of his who runs this German geoscan space based satellite thing. It’s like a mathematical statistical approach. They kind of use it to determine the elemental composition of stars is the best explanation I have. However, they have a track record of being able to find things like water and oil and gold under the ground. So they’ve been using that as a company for like people to go basically survey and then go dig. And they’ve done three or four of these and that. Okay, this is where you said it was.

They scanned the labyrinth. They were the first space based scan to come out and talk about it. Then you had Merlin Burrows which is this ex UK military technology that’s very similar in technique to the Kufra scan guys. Like so they use synthetic aperture radar or Doppler tomography. These guys are using like high frequency orbital imaging with seismic data. So it’s very similar in the way they’re in.

Essentially the description I was told is it’s like imagine dropping pebbles into a container of water and if you could instantly freeze that container and lift it out and shine a light from underneath it. When you look at it on the top you can see those ripples in three dimensions but you’re looking at on a 2D scan kind of thing and you can interpret them to show you the topography of whatever’s in that three dimensional space. It’s something similar to that technology.

JOE ROGAN: Fucking awesome, dude.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is, it’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so awesome that they just have the ability to do that. And look at that beyond the Kufra stuff, which you know, I, I don’t want to get disappointed. So I look at that like, like it’s too great, it’s too amazing, it’s too spectacular.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s a huge claim. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if it’s true, oh boy, does that change everything about everything.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I mean I’m in the camp of want to believe, trust me. I mean I’m sure you are, but I’m not, but I don’t. I mean I was skeptical initially when it came out. I’ve talked, I’ve since, I’ve since certainly come around on the techn. On the promise of the technology. My skepticism probably still exists in the layer between the scans as I’ve seen them. And then the interpretations of the results.

JOE ROGAN: The 3D.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Their interpretations of it are a little weird because you don’t really have a crystal clear view of what this thing is. Yeah. You’re making it look like it’s some sort of a Tesla coil or whatever.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is like giant cubes with these four tunnels. Yeah, I look at. We’ll see. And I want to get into the Osiris shaft because that’s another thing that I just recently put a video out about. These other scans that have happened in the 90s confirmed, that have since kind of been confirmed by the Kufra scan team work.

But yeah, at the labyrinth at least. The interesting thing to me that happened with these two wildly different techniques. Right. So you have, you have the geoscan, which is a statistical mathematical approach, space based still. But then you have. And Merlin burrows, which is a similar take technique to the Kufra scan group. And it was used, I mean, just so this is what Tim Acres would tell you. It was used to detect submarines. They would look at surface patterns on the water and they were using it to basically track submarines under the water. So it’s. That’s its origins at least in the military, as far as I know. It’s like the non classified part of it is what he said at least reported to have said, I should say.

Ancient Accounts of the Labyrinth

JOE ROGAN: Are there ancient artistic depictions?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I mean not ancient, but certainly Renaissance. And I think some of it’s symbolic, but we do get a lot of descriptions from those authors. So for example, Herodotus talks about it being 1500 rooms on one level. He said there’s two levels. He saw one level. He wasn’t allowed to go to the lower level. He said that it’s 3,000 rooms in total. And not just rooms, but also courts, massive open courts.

JOE ROGAN: These are like Herodotus didn’t have access.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Not to the bottom level, according to him. Interesting. But Diodorus Siculus did, like these guys talk about. Siculus said that you needed a guide. You would get lost down there for days if you didn’t have a guide who knew his way around. And then you have the same similar accounts from Pliny the Elder. And again these. I think once you get accounts coming from multiple people over the span of centuries that are from different civilizations, both Roman and Greek, and they’re correlating, it’s like this is pretty reliable data at this point.

And certainly in, in history or in archaeology, that’s your measure for like. All right, there’s a grain of truth in this, given that we’ve got the same thing coming from these different accounts that are essentially different civilizations that visited the same place. And what they say is astonishing. All of them talk about there being hundreds, if not thousands of rooms and twisting chambers, and then also giant open courts that might have 40 columns to a side. And all of it being done with just spectacular craftsmanship.

Yeah. This is a Diodorus Siculus, 1st century BC, talking about that, you know, “in respect of carving and other works of craftsmanship, they left no room for their successes to surpass them.” He’s saying that there is. This is phenomenal work. “And in the sacred enclosure, one found a temple surrounded by columns, 40 to each side. And this roof had a. This building had a roof made of a single stone, carved with panels and richly adorned with excellent paintings.” So 40 to a side, that’s 80.

JOE ROGAN: And how was this even lit?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: What? That’s always a good question. That’s a. That’s a core question. When you get into any of these subterranean spaces like the Serapeum, it’s the. It’s always. There’s no soot. Like.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We don’t know how that. The answer is. I don’t know. It wasn’t with flame. Like, I don’t think it was with flame.

JOE ROGAN: And then go back to Strabo’s depictions. “In addition to these things, there is the edifice of the labyrinth, which is a building quite equal to the pyramids, a great palace made of many palaces for. Such as the number of. How’s that word?”

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Peristyle.

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

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So he. You had Siculus account of one of those courts being 80 columns, like 42 aside, and there was 12 of them. At least 12 of them in there.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So it’s absolutely correct. So you have, you know, 3,000 rooms, 12 gigantic courts. Diodorus talks about the. The roof being made of a single stone. I very much doubt that. But what I think he’s describing is the craftsmanship that you see in those real megalithic buildings in Egypt, where you can’t see the joints.

Dating Controversies and Construction Phases

JOE ROGAN: And here, Pliny the Elder, who live between 23 and 79 CE, which is current time. So he’s saying 3,600 years ago, this was constructed according to tradition, isn’t that interesting.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: So that predates the pyramids.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, by a long way. Yeah. He’s allegedly. Allegedly. Right. Well, if you go with the orthodox date of the pyramid.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: He says that, you know, so essentially 3600 BC, that it was built according to the tradition at the time. 3,600 years.

JOE ROGAN: So with the conventional dating of the pyramids, that’s more than a thousand years earlier.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: About a thousand years, Yeah. A little less, maybe.

JOE ROGAN: And the conventional dating is questionable.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I mean, even the carbon dating on the pyramids doesn’t quite match the conventional dating. It’s a little earlier than that. So it’s.

JOE ROGAN: What is the carbon dating from pieces in.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So they got. Yes, exactly. Yes. Some mortar in the carbon dating.

JOE ROGAN: And what is that?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The date?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So it’s. I believe it’s like a wide range, but it’s like several hundred years, like 200 years prior to what they would say is the time of Khufu of Cheops, the ruler in the fourth Dynasty, certainly on the Great Pyramid, at least.

JOE ROGAN: And what is the room for error when they do carbon dating?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, it depends on the samples, and there’s a lot of specifics, but it could be plus, minus 20, 30, 50, 100 years. It depends. I think the margin of error. They did multiple samples. I believe it’s less than that. So they’re pretty firm that the date is earlier. So it gets. This is. It’s kind of a critic. I mean, I think there’s a bunch of people that have talked about the fact that the archaeologists, Egyptologists, don’t really reference that date because it kind of messes up their timeline a little bit.

It’s not thousands of years, it’s hundreds of years. So the explanation tends to be, well, it was old wood. It’s like the ash that gets mixed into the mortar as the source for the carbon. And they’re saying, well, maybe they just burnt really old trees. That’s very convenient, right? It becomes convenient. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, all of it’s convenient. Which is. Which gets really weird because we know that they did some enhancements to the pyramid. Like they refurbished some things.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And so that’s the problems. Like, you refurbished what? And how long was it there before you refurbished it?

Two Categories of Ancient Egyptian Artifacts

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Indeed. Look, I think. I don’t. I’m not. I don’t discount the carbon dating. I think what you can say from the carbon dating firmly is that it shows that these pyramids were being worked on. If you can’t, I don’t think you can make the jump to say this is when they were built. You have to infer and say that. I think this is when they were certainly being worked on in that period.

So I think it’s possible the dynastic Egyptians could have finished the pyramids. They may not have been entirely pyramids originally. I think there’s a strong chance that there were multiple phases of construction over a long time for them to end up being what they are in our time. I think those are all possibilities here because it just, the, this is the whole. When you take a step back and look at the whole picture of ancient Egypt, I mean, just you, you cannot attribute everything that we see in ancient Egypt to our current understanding of those dynastic Egyptians.

Their capabilities, their tools, their writings and what we know about them. We know an awful lot like they do. We, we have tools from the ancient Egyptian toolbox. We found them. We have depictions shown on walls of how they did things. They were very good about documenting them. So we have the tools, we have the depictions. We also have lots and lots of artifacts that match those tools and depictions. Right. We’ve got these, what are clearly handmade artifacts. And this is across all the categories of artifacts from things like stonework, columns, obelisks. Obelisks. Oh, sorry, yeah, obelisk. And vases, boxes, pyramids even.

And then you have this other category of artifacts that is. Doesn’t match. It can’t be explained by these tools and techniques. And there’s just no, there’s no depictions on walls of how they made the precision artifacts. There’s no.

JOE ROGAN: Can you give me an example of these precision artifacts?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Of course, yeah. And any category. I have it in that Tale of Two Industries directory. Jamie on there.

The Vases: A Smoking Gun

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The vases are probably the best example. They’re a smoking gun example of it.

JOE ROGAN: 3D printed one.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So these to me, I mean this is why the vase project was so, I mean to me, quite validating when it came up. Yeah. So the wheel thing. Yeah. The schist disk. Yeah. So these are the smoking gun because they connect to everything else. And we’re learning so much about the precision of these things however.

But we could start with statues or boxes or you know, columns. It doesn’t really matter there. There are two categories across all of these artifacts and the advanced category, again, so you can’t really make them with the tools that the ancient Egyptians were just were we know they were using that we found.

They don’t show the. There’s no scenes of building stone pyramids. There’s no scenes of them making giant statues like thousand ton statues. This is the type of thing that you see on the wall. And this is in the tomb of the nobles up in the west bank at Luxor. And here they’re building mud bricks.

So they firing mud bricks over the fire. You can see them, they’re pouring them, they’re shaping them, they’re carrying them. It’s all very relatively primitive. And we know they made mud brick pyramids. They made mud brick ramps. And some of the mud bricks were big and heavy. But we know all about this.

But you don’t see is the stone pyramid building, the really massive megalith stuff. The next slide with the vases is a good example. This is what I’ve been calling the tale of two industries. It’s a whole theory that I’ve been putting together for the last few years.

The Tale of Two Industries

Again, you have a primitive industry that is clearly observably handmade. It lacks precision and symmetry. We found the tools. The Egyptians drew the scenes. The artifacts match the tools and techniques.

And then you have this advanced industry, visibly sophisticated. Usually very hard stone is the other characteristic. The primitive stuff is usually softer stone, although not always. These artifacts as we’re doing analysis on them are showing this depth of precision and complexity that’s phenomenal. The vases are just. This is where they become a smoking gun to this whole argument for people.

JOE ROGAN: That don’t know about this stuff. Can you just give them some numbers on what?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Sure. So yeah, the vases go back to pre dynastic times. There’s no debate that these are pre dynastic. They predate what we would call the dynastic civilization. And over the last few years we’ve been starting to analyze them. We, the vase scan team, various groups of people now have been scanning these with modern technology. Lidar scanning, like laser scanning, even CT X ray scanning.

And basically they’re coming back with precision in terms of circularity, flatness, like centering, numbers that very much equate to some of the best industrial processes that we do today in things like aerospace industry. So where it’s really important to be within two or three or four thousandths of an inch of perfection for the parts we make for jet engines or rocket engines, those are the numbers that we’re seeing come back on a lot of these vessels, not all of them.

Again, I don’t want to say this is true for all of them. It’s not. It’s true for a lot of them though. And this is again, these are levels of precision that are not visible to the naked eye. I mean, you’re talking human hair, like a sheet of printer paper is like six or seven thousandths of an inch thick. A human hair is two to three or four thousandths thick. And you’re seeing sometimes tolerances even lower than that.

So it’s not something you can feel or see or touch. But we see it again and again. And the only way we can achieve those sort of tolerances today is with very advanced machines. You know, 3D 5 axis mills, you know, really high precision lathes, CAD, like computer controlled equipment.

The Handle Problem

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

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So yeah, if you get into it. So this is the issue with this. And one of the craziest things about. And this is the OG vase, the original granite vase. This is the one that started it all. It’s one of the more precise ones.

And yeah, you could, you can imagine without the handles. You could lathe it if you’re spinning it. But if you, if you had the handles, if you wanted these handles, you would have to leave a bullnose that runs all the way around it and then come back with a different process, a different tool to remove that space that this basically the space between the handles off the body.

JOE ROGAN: And you don’t see a lack of symmetry in those spaces.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, precision. So this is, this is the thing. So when we do that today it’s called, you basically lose some positional calibration on your tool. So we account for that in the way we do industrial design of these sorts of parts. So we know that we’re going to lose a little bit of precision when we change tools and process. Right. So we account for that.

But you don’t see that on this. When we did, I went back and we did, we did analysis of this area of the vase body in between the handles and there’s no drop in precision relative to the rest of the vessel. So that means one of two things.

One option is, okay, they could, they could handle that positional, that lack of that loss of positional calibration better than we can. Or it wasn’t done on a lathe and it was done in what you would call a single pass with a single tool. And the only way you can do that is on a, is with a tool with five axes of freedom.

So now you’re talking about a five axis CNC mill, like one of those computer controlled things that can just cut it out in basically one pass but without changing tools and process with incredibly hard stone. And that’s the other challenge with this stuff. And there’s some samples of the stone there in front of you from vessels.

The Material Challenge

JOE ROGAN: Actual stone.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: These are actual pieces from vessels. Yeah. I got a private collector.

JOE ROGAN: Just got to think like who made this and how old is this, how old is this piece?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: At least five, six thousand years, I think. I think it potentially quite old. And we can get into how old I think. But so that’s the other challenge that is rarely talked about is the material.

We. These things are made from granite diorites. But rock crystal, that thing’s rock crystal. Basically. Quartz feels so hard. It’s insanely hard. Yes. All these different. Oh yeah, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s. It’s like I have a granite mortar and pestle at home use big heavy thing. It’s like I don’t need to protect it from anything. Right. I have to protect my counters from it because if I just. It’s going to destroy anything it hits.

JOE ROGAN: And this is so thin.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So that’s. Yes. So this is that’s the other. It’s translucent. You hold a light up to it. Even the rock crystal one’s translucent. So that one gets down to about 2 millimeters thickness. Just under the lip. Yeah, you put a phone light on it, you see, it comes right through it.

And I mean, so with granite and with diorite and particularly granite, I mean, it’s essentially a conglomerate. Right. So it’s not a material that’s homogeneous. So inside a granite you’ve got silica and hornblende and mica and all these different quartz and, you know, hence the pattern. Hence the pattern.

But also almost microscopically, it changes hardness, you know what I mean? So some of that stuff is less hard than other bits. And it. The way granite takes millions of years in heat and pressure to bond those things together atomically. And that’s the stone we get when it pops up out on the bedrock and we mine it.

But it just means that when you’re machining a material like granite, your tooltip is going from stuff that’s really hard to softer to hard. And it’s like you have to account for that. Yet we see this. You feel the surface of it. It’s phenomenally well polished and finished.

I mean, if you were doing this today with a lot of modern tool tips, you’d be ripping chunks of quartz out rather than cutting them. So something that the actual tool tip that made these things we know is also very refined because this is a very difficult substance to choose to work in.

No stone sculptor chooses to work in granite unless that’s what the project calls for. There’s a reason they use marble, is that it’s both much softer and it’s homogeneous, like it’s the same material. It doesn’t vary in hardness wildly. So making these sort of precision things and objects out of stuff like granite and getting it down to 2 millimeters thick. Like that other piece near the lip.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And there’s even examples that get even thinner than that. Flinders Petrie talked about a diorite vessel that was 1/40 of an inch thick. About. He called it “the thickness of stout. Playing card.” Yeah, this is it here.

JOE ROGAN: Wow, look at the light going through it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s about 2 millimeters thick. That one’s one of Matt Bell’s vases. It’s probably my favorite. It’s like typically called the thin walled vase, but it’s a phenomenal piece. I’m amazed it’s actually survived this long, because it is. That’s one of the rare few delicate ones you could break that because it’s so thin.

Because again, with this type of stone it gets really brittle and it’s like glass, like a cube of glass bang down on anything thin. Glass shatters, same as the stone. Yet they did this again and again and again and again.

JOE ROGAN: How do we know that this is pre dynastic?

The Pre-Dynastic Evidence

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, from where they’re found, I mean they’re literally found in pre-dynastic burials. This is why the vases are so important to me and why I think they’re the smoking gun. It’s one of the big reasons is that they’re uncontrovertibly pre-dynastic because they’ve been found in burials that are 100% pre-dynastic.

Naqadah culture, Naqada II, you can go to any museum that has a reasonable collection of these and find them in the pre-dynastic section all over. There’s no debate – they’re found in these burials and they carbon date the burials or they culture date them. The reference date them to periods of thousands of years prior to the dynastic Egyptian civilization.

There’s good evidence that they may even stretch back as far as 12 to 14,000 BC that they’re in burials that go back that far in the southern Egypt, northern Sudan area. Yeah, it’s crazy. A lot of those burials unfortunately today are underwater because of the dam that created Lake Nasser.

But either way, people will debate how far back they go. It’s just not controversial at all to say that they are pre-dynastic 100%. And I think the reason is that they’re this size, right? You can bury this with you. If you have it, then you can be buried with it. You can’t do that with a thousand ton statue. It stays on the site and then maybe someone down the road writes his name on it like Ramses II or somebody carves his name into it.

And then we come along thousands of years later and say, “Oh, Ramses II’s name’s on that, therefore he must have had it made.” I mean, that’s essentially one of the core principles of Egyptology. They do use the writing primarily as a source, not the only source, but they do.

The Cultural Contradiction

And the vases, the problem with even dating them to those pre-dynastic settlements is that there is nothing about those cultures that indicates they had this capability. Nakata culture and even the ones like Toshka, these older ones pretty similar in that you’re talking like the burials are often like shallow fetal position graves.

You find these precision hard stone objects with fishbone combs, sticks and stones. Very primitive hand thrown pottery. Not even thrown, just hand formed pottery. No other stonework. I’ve seen antiques dealers that are selling these vases because there is a huge – there’s a lot of these in the private market and in private possession because of their size and their availability. And how many there were. Because there’s hundreds of thousands.

JOE ROGAN: Are they illegal to possess?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No. So you could get a hold of one of those legally.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I know collectors with like 80, 90 of them, 100 of them.

JOE ROGAN: What?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, they come up.

JOE ROGAN: How many of them available?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: There’s – I would say today there’s easily over a hundred thousand hard stone vessels for sure. I mean they found 50,000 of them in one spot. That’s the famous discovery at the step pyramid. But yeah, it’s crazy. There’s a lot. I think there are even more – this was an industry.

That’s the other key. And a lot of these are semi-exotic types of stone too. We don’t know where the stone came from. It’s not local in a lot of cases. This lapis – there’s lapis lazuli artifacts that are pre-dynastic. And there’s no known quarry for lapis in Egypt. The closest one’s Afghanistan.

JOE ROGAN: What?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How far is Afghanistan from Egypt?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It must be – it’s right over on the other side of the Middle East, I think, isn’t it? It’s over towards – yeah, it’s up towards Russia and China.

JOE ROGAN: Show that image again, Jamie. Yeah, that you just pulled up.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So there’s Egypt. So Turkey, Afghanistan over here, Uzbekistan over here, on the other side of Saudi Arabia and Iran. So you’ve got to go all the way from Iran.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So that’s the nearest lapis quarry. I mean look, this is not a problem restricted to the vases either. There’s a box in the Osiris shaft, which is – the box itself, they say it’s fourth dynasty. It’s made from a stone called dacite. And again, there’s no known quarry in Egypt for dacite. This happens a lot.

Evidence of Ancient Flooding

JOE ROGAN: Go back to that image, Jamie, please. Yeah, there’s one of the things that freaks me out about the map is when you go out, it looks like it was washed over.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, 100%.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, 100%.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’ve talked a lot with Randall about this. Look at that.

JOE ROGAN: Go back out again. Look at that below it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, the Sahara.

JOE ROGAN: That’s exactly what it looks like. It looks washed out.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is, that’s what it is. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s crazy. How much water washed that out? I mean, and how else would you get what looks exactly like a water washout? How else would those features be on the surface?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I mean some of those are mountains and mountain ranges, but I can tell you in the desert, not so much that – I mean, there are mountains.

JOE ROGAN: That just looks like channels. It just looks like an insane amount of water literally washed over the area and smoothed it out.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I mean there’s huge – there’s a massive amount of evidence for massive, giant floods through the Nile Valley as well. Not just across the Sahara, but I mean, Petrie was talking about – he was up on cliffs and finding water lines and flint points and stuff that were indicative of massive floods. This is Hawara. Yeah, this is the labyrinth. So there’s the canal. You see, that’s the canal I’ve been talking about – the Bahr Yusuf Canal.

JOE ROGAN: It is so crazy that when you get to sub-Saharan Africa, how little of that has been explored and how much of that was insanely green and fertile not that long ago?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, certainly not. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Thousands of years ago.

The African Humid Period and Valley Temples

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, it’s interesting. I just did this long video on the erosional features of the Giza Plateau. Because last year, 2024, they released a paper – I think some geologists, I can’t remember the names unfortunately, but they talked about the fact that there was all of the valley temples.

So these pyramid – all these pyramids that are on Lower Egypt, Giza, Abu Rawash, Abusir, Saqqara, Meidum – all the pyramids aren’t just a pyramid, it’s a pyramid complex. So you have a pyramid, you’ve got a structure in front of it, you’ve got this causeway that runs down. Then they would call a valley temple – a structure that’s the end of the causeway.

So that’s the well-known valley temple that’s next to the Sphinx is the valley temple for the middle pyramid. It’s connected by this causeway. And they figured out that during the African humid period, which ended thousands of years before dynastic Egypt ever started, there was a branch of the River Nile called the Ahramat branch that ran exactly where all of these valley temples are.

So it’s almost – I mean, I just look at it and go, this was built, these were built for that water source because I think it’s super – I’m very skeptical about the idea of these, all of these valley temples, particularly the one at Giza Plateau being used as harbors for a couple months a year to transport all these blocks from the quarry in Aswan, again 600 miles away. Right. For all the granite.

And there’s thousands, tens of thousands of tons, hundreds of thousands of tons of granite on that plateau that had to be transported. I don’t think there’s the depth there. I’ve seen pictures and photographs in early times, pre-dam when the Nile flooded, there’s not that much water there.

However, during the African humid period, which ended at the latest 6000 BC, but stretches back thousands and thousands of years before that – that’s when the Sahara was a savannah. You had river basins and lakes and rivers. You had much more rainfall. And it wasn’t this flood situation. It wasn’t this annual inundation. There was just rainfall and there was enough water in that Nile valley to support this Ahramat branch of the Nile, which was said to be a mile or two miles wide in some places.

So really not an insignificant waterway, but it was high and it was running. And they’ve traced the path of this Ahramat branch. And it turns out all of these valley temples from these pyramid complexes are on its banks. And it wouldn’t – it’s not flooding. It’s there all the time.

And this period ends and you get the desertification of the Sahara starting around 6,500, 6000 BC. And so it’s not until 5,000, then 4,000, 4,500 BC, 3,000 BC that’s when you sort of – that’s 3,100 BC is kind of when we say the Egyptian civilization started.

So it doesn’t make sense to me that if they built these valley temples and all these structures in 2800 BC – I mean, what do you – you would build it where the river is. The river was way down there at that point. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What is the response to this?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, I just put it in my – I mean, does anybody try to debunk it? No, it’s a peer-reviewed scientific study. This is what happens in these, with a lot of these papers. And you’ll see this in – it happens in genetics and the DNA studies that have been done too.

These other scientists will not really step on the toes of the archaeologists or the historians. Right. They’ll present the data, but stop from inferring what it could mean for the picture of history. Got it. So they seem to be left off.

JOE ROGAN: They throw the data out there and go, “You guys figure it out.”

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, pretty much. And they just – hands off.

JOE ROGAN: And the archaeologists say, “We’re not going to touch it.”

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. They ignore it. Usually. They’re not going to care. Yeah. It’s left to rogue scholars and idiots like me on YouTube or people that write books to really try and put the pieces together.

JOE ROGAN: Thank God there’s a YouTube dude.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right? I know.

The Power of Independent Research

JOE ROGAN: I mean, thank God there’s a place where a video like yours can get millions of views, where so many people all around the world can watch that and go, “Wait, what’s going on down there? Who really knows? And why do these people – why are they so sure? Why are they so arrogant in their ideas?” Because it’s very clear that it’s –

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And –

JOE ROGAN: There’s not a – we know the Civil War ended in 1865. Right. It’s all written down. Everybody knows people were alive. There’s photographs of the soldiers. We’re pretty accurate with that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You get to 6000 BC, man, you’re just guessing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s – yes. The further back you go, the much hazier –

JOE ROGAN: You can’t tell evidence.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: There is way less evidence.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And it’s also – it scares them because something like that, if you really do find advanced structures that are at 6,000 BC – before Göbekli Tepe, we didn’t even know that that was even possible.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s that famous conversation that happened with Robert Schoch and that really arrogant archaeologist, Mark Lehner.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Which is – he’s laughing. Why would you laugh about ancient history? First of all, what ancient civilizations? Is that guy still alive?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. “Show me the potsherds.”

JOE ROGAN: He must feel so stupid now.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, yeah.

The Academic Gatekeeping Problem

JOE ROGAN: Have to go. Beckley tapping. Someone should show him that video and go, why are you laughing? Because this is just human ego. This is human ego on display for the world. You want to be the gatekeepers of this information. You want to be the one person or the person that represents this group of human beings that are the scholars that have published work, that have taught at universities, and you’re the only one.

So they’re the only ones that know the ancient history of Earth, despite the fact that there’s people like yourself and Graham Hancock and all who’ve spent a lot of time, and they’re very careful about what they say and spent a lot of time investigating this, and they just want to dismiss those people because they don’t have the proper credentials or. What are you talking about?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think it’s. Yes, that’s exactly what’s happening, I think. And it is as a result of the fact that the conversation is getting out of their hands. Right. It’s one of the things I admire so much about the people who started this, what we would call archaeological or Egyptological space.

Guys like Flinders Petrie, they’re very open about what they didn’t know. Like one of my Petrie would tell, he talks about the machining marks and you can read between the lines at the wonder at what he’s finding. He’s like, “I don’t get it. We can’t do it. We don’t know how they did it.” And this is, I think, because the conversations happening in those halls of, you know, the academic halls or the geographical club or whatever, these people get out to the hall doesn’t get out.

And then. And so that slowly changes with the rise of initially, like alternative authors, you know, which best represented by Graham Hancock, good friend of mine as well, and he, you know, his books, and they start to gain in popularity. And now these, I guess the people in the, in the academic halls of residence that are typically considered the authority are seeing this, this conversation get out of hand.

And now you get to YouTube where, you know, it’s to some extent, I think it is possible to do an end run, end run around what they’re saying. And I do watch people and there are guys like Flint that are trying to embrace that, the new media space and try and get on podcasts and, you know, if you read the SAA journals and articles, the Society of American Archaeology, they’re literally writing to themselves saying, “How can we become more popular in this space? And how do we start podcasts and get into it?”

The Problem with Academic Approach to New Media

JOE ROGAN: The problem is they’re still doing it the same way. It’s like when CNN journalists get fired from CNN and start a podcast and everybody like, no, you’re doing CNN outside of CNN. That’s what they’re doing. They’re in academia, which is like, gatekeeping of information and also like pejoratives, mocking really shitty behavior towards anyone who’s outside of it, including calling them racist, calling them white supremacists.

It’s so dumb. It’s so dumb because one of the dumbest parts about it is, no matter what, those are the people that lived in Africa. So no matter what. No matter what, whoever built that is people that lived in Africa.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They were African.

JOE ROGAN: Shut the fuck up. Like, the white supremacy thing makes no sense.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s Africans.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s Africans 100%.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the people that were living there.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: If.

JOE ROGAN: If humans made it. You know, if you’re not in the alien camp, which is a bizarre camp, but if you’re not in the. I’m in the ancient civilization. Incredibly advanced cataclysmic disaster wipes them out. Civilization takes a long time to rebuild, finds the remnants of these ancient civilizations and then sort of claims them over generations. After a thousand years, nobody really knows who fucking built it, you know?

And then this is. This is where I think we find ourselves. That’s. That’s where I’m at. But if you’re in that camp, you’re talking about Africans. So all these shitty things they do just show their hand. Just show what they’re really all about. What you’re really all about is silencing anything that really throws a monkey wrench into everything you’ve been teaching for decades. Like, you’ve claimed that you’re the expert, you’ve claimed arrogantly that you have all the information when you clearly are wrong.

The Need for Interdisciplinary Approach

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Absolutely. That is what’s happening. It’s actually. It’s a quote that I steal from my friend Christopher Dunn quite happily, which is, you know, “You wouldn’t trust an archaeologist to design the chair he’s sitting on, but if it’s an ancient chair, he’s going to claim he’s the expert on it.” Like this. And this is what happens.

I had Joseph Wilson on a podcast talk about. I had this great quote from him. He said, “Oh, you know, just because some engineer standing there, you know, shining a laser on a vase, don’t let that. Don’t let. Don’t mistake that for him knowing more about the guy who can read hieroglyphs because he can read what they wrote about it and he’s the authority on it” kind of thing.

It’s just like you’re just dismissing all of these other disciplines that are. That I think are required for a, a true and complete picture of trying to assemble this evidence. Right. Like as you said, there’s very little evident evidence that shows us definitively what happened in the dim, dark, distant past. But it’s, you’ve got to try and make the case for it as best you can. And I think we should try and encompass all of the evidence.

And one of the disciplines that’s missing from that approach is the engineering stuff, it’s the precision stuff. It just gets dismissed out of hand. And yeah, we just, because we’re not the authority figures on that, on that topic, it just, yeah, they ignore it, which is what happens.

The Undeniable Evidence of Advanced Technology

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know how you can ignore the vases, how you can ignore the statues, the symmetry, the construction of the.

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

JOE ROGAN: Well, the issue with the drill bits is the revolutions per minute, right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I mean the cores. Yeah, well it’s not the revolutions per minute, it’s the penetration rate.

JOE ROGAN: We don’t know how quickly it does.

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

JOE ROGAN: One in 60, meaning one in.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So for like if you unwind that circular motion to a straight line, 60 inches horizontal travel, 1 inch vertical drop, which is 500 times greater than how we do it today with modern diamond tipped saws, hole saws which do turn. So our modern ones bear in mind, you know, 900 RPM, they’ll cut through Grant slowly but it cuts. I mean no doubt it grinds more so than cutting, but yeah, unwinding that spiral and looking at that’s what Petrie was first of all, like, “How is this possible?”

His numbers got refined a bit by Chris Dunn, but more or less a 1 in 60 penetration rate. So it’s very difficult to explain. There are multiple cores like this and this is the other element that I think the vases are showing is that you have a technological link between the vases and these other precision artifacts, the bigger ones that couldn’t be buried in these civilizations, that, to me suggests that they were made with the same technology.

You see the same machining marks, the same tubular drill marks on that quartz piece. If you look on the bottom, you can see the. On the inside of it. There’s no other side. You see the tool mark. There’s a.

JOE ROGAN: This right here.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So this is like. That’s the tubular drill. So this is. That’s a core function of how these vases were made. You would often find.

JOE ROGAN: So this is the bottom.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The bottom. So they’ve. They’ve cored that thing out and then they’ve cut it off and polished it down, but they didn’t eliminate the full tool mark. And you’ll see that in a lot of vases. So we know that these tubular drills were used with the vases as well.

JOE ROGAN: And we have no idea the power source, no idea what the material was that cut.

The Vase Scan Project and Museum Validation

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No. Well, yeah. So, yeah, the vases have. It’s become interesting. One of the. Let me talk about the provenance part first, because that’s been the one crit, like the pushback on the vases. This is where it’s become a problem, is nobody’s really been able to push back on the data like the scientific and the measurement data that’s come out, the precision factor, geometry.

There’s a whole bunch in the geometry space that indicates that they are designed. They’re not just made. They were designed with mathematical and geometric principles in mind. They show PI, they show phi, the golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence. All this sort of stuff is in them. No one’s pushing back on that.

The major pushback on the vessels and the early days of the vase scan project was that, “Oh, these are modern fakes or something like. They’re not. They’re not the real deal because they’re not coming from museums. They’ve been. They’re modern forgeries. How can you say they’re real?”

So what’s happened in the years since when I first came on here and talked a little bit about that, that was very much the early days of this project, about two and a half years ago now. Now, the vase scan, and particularly the artifact foundation. Adam Young, who started this whole thing, who owns. Actually, this is a copy of his vase. They’ve been in now four museums around the world. We’ve scanned close to 100 vessels from inside of museums with impeccable provenance.

Those results are starting to come out. They’re matching the results that we found so far. So the provenance thing is kind of that’s going away. The people that I think chose to fight on the hill of Providence for have died on it. Now they are legitimate.

And to be fair, you can also find vessels in private collection with impeccable provenance, just as you can find a lot of vessels in museums that have no idea where they came from. It’s a much. It’s not as clear as just, well, if it’s in a museum, we can trust it, and if it’s not, we can’t. It’s not like that.

But what else has happened is that there’s other as. So the project came out and it gained a lot of interest from really talented people around the world. And there’s been several of those. One of the guys that I’ve been working with a fair bit lately over the last couple of years, a guy named Dr. Max Zamilov, who’s a physicist, I believe he taught for 10 years. He’s a nuclear physicist. Taught for 10 years, I think, at Penn State. He’s a. He runs his own company now.

And I first he reached out to me and actually we took these fragments to his house. And I rolled up to his house in Florida and. And sitting in his living room are two, like scanning electron microscopes. You know, as you do. Who doesn’t have two SEMs in their living room?

So we started to do things like look at these pieces through a scanning electron microscope to try and find evidence for the materials that we use to cut them. So you should. If these were used with a tool. So the orthodox explanation being, well, it’s a copper tube and it’s sand or it’s some sort of cutting medium and it’s spun and ground out. You should find traces of copper or whatever that material was in there.

We looked it at. We spent days looking at several pieces. Zero copper. Like, didn’t find any copper. Nothing at all. Then I. Scanning electron microscope. Not only do you get the magnification, but you can focus a beam of electrons onto a particular spot. And that backscatter of electrons, you can then map out the elemental composition of the material.

The Mystery of Ancient Tool Materials

JOE ROGAN: Can I pause you for a second here?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Are the oldest tools that they found copper?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, copper and stone.

JOE ROGAN: And what are the dates of the oldest tools?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, they go back all the way to the Old Kingdom. 26, 27, 2800 B.C. like, yeah, it was. It was early days. They were smelting. I mean, obviously the older tools are stone tools like flint. I mean, a lot of carving. You can carve stone with harder types of stone. So there was definitely flint and things being used, but there’s no evidence, like, not up until like the very later periods of the Egyptian civilization is there any significant evidence for iron and things like that. Like, it’s pretty much copper and bronze alloys. Ten, you know, copper, copper and tin.

JOE ROGAN: So when they analyze the. The traces, there’s no copper.

Titanium Discovery in Ancient Vessels

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We didn’t find any copper. We didn’t find some other stuff which was very interesting. Well, the most interesting thing we did find was titanium.

JOE ROGAN: What?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Titanium and titanium alloys with iron. We found iron, zinc, tin.

JOE ROGAN: Titanium alloys.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. So titanium. And it’s not that we’ve. Yes. So, yeah. So when you find the term alloy.

JOE ROGAN: Doesn’t that refer to something that has melted?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right, that’s been put together. Exactly. In fact, titanium as we know it as a metal doesn’t exist naturally. So in nature it’s titanium dioxide that is found in rocks. This was not titanium dioxide that we were looking at. Because you see a. Again, that the SEM gives you the spectrum, right? So you would see oxygen and titanium together. We didn’t see that.

And in fact, I did a. I have it. I have a video on this and it’s. We found a piece, actually like a small, maybe 20, 30 micron wide piece embedded in one of those grooves in a tool tip that looked like an embedded piece. It shines up very brightly when you see metals on this in the SEM. It’s like a bright spot and you can aim it at it and it’s just straight titanium. And it looked like a small piece of a tool that had been wedged in there.

And I mean, look, in our modern times, I mean, I think titanium was discovered even in the late 1800s. It wasn’t used outside of laboratories until the 1930s as a material. But there seems to be evidence that there’s some titanium used. No, I wouldn’t. I know Max is trying to work on that. I would. It was not a systematic. We spent days, like a couple of days, and it’s. We didn’t do like a systematic grid search. Like, even in one of those pieces, you could spend. It would take you a long time to just map it properly, like to scan the whole thing.

Contamination Concerns

JOE ROGAN: But it’s a play with devil’s advocate. Would that be evidence of a lack of a chain of custody, that perhaps someone was using titanium to see if they could cut it?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes, it could be contamination. So we looked for signs of contamination. This didn’t seem like contamination. In fact, at the end of when we’d finished scanning, we actually took. He had some titanium dust like he was. We put some on, on one of the pieces and put it in to see what that would look like. Just these like a tiny, like, just like literally a matchstick and just the tiniest end and just tapped it and then looked at that under the microscope to look at what contamination. This didn’t seem to be contamination. You can’t rule it out. There’s. It’s. We found other types of metals as well.

JOE ROGAN: So it didn’t seem to be contamination. What is the reason why it didn’t seem to be that?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, because it didn’t. So we looked at what contamination would look like. What is the difference? Well, so it’s like smaller specs where you can actually see the material. The one piece that we found, it seemed to be embedded in the stone. Like it was as if something like this tiniest fragment of the tool of some sort. If imagine it was a tool tip wedged itself in the stone and then it stayed there. But it was only like 20 or 30 microns wide, which is pretty big under a scanning electron microscope.

JOE ROGAN: But that was the only piece of titanium.

Additional Metal Discoveries

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We found other specks of it and then occasionally it’d be titanium and iron mixed together. And then we also found specs of like zinc zircon and tin and then various combinations. I honestly, I think it’s, it’s grounds for more investigation. I think the most significant thing was the no copper thing. Like, that’s like, all right, no copper like that. That to me was the biggest takeaway, the fact that we found some other elements in pieces of what, let’s say, questionable provenance.

I know these are legitimate pieces from these vessels. Ideally, the best thing, if we could. I’d love to work with the Egyptians to do something like this because I know there are fragments of vessels in the step pyramid. There’s hundreds, thousands of them down there still. In fact, like the last time, we got down to the very bottom level, which is a special permission required to get into the step pyramid. And then even then, they generally won’t let you down to the bottom level. There’s another ladder and 30ft down to the big bottom level, it goes down further but hits the water table again.

But in one of these corners, in this very bottom level, like 150, 200ft under the step pyramid, we found a wall and it was a collapsed. It must have been a collapsed magazine of these vessels. And this is the place where they found 50,000 of them originally, like Jean Philippe Laur in the 1930s found this huge cache of these vessels there. And in this wall. It’s an incredible little video. I’ve not published it. I mean I do want to talk about it, but that you could. You literally see it’s like a wall of dirt of not rock, but dirt. And in the wall there’s like fragments of vessels because it had been a cache of them that something, a tunnel had collapsed and it had crushed them. So you’ve got these like pieces of worked granite or diorite or whatever just in the wall.

So that would be interesting if you could go down there and like get their permission to say well let’s sample. Because you have. Then, you know, you’ve basically got it in its original environment from dynastic Egypt and put it in a Ziploc or whatever. Just keep it, don’t mess with it. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Clear chain of evidence.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Clear chain. And then scan it. So I think it’s an interesting observation.

JOE ROGAN: They found titanium on that. Holy shit.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think the Russian. There’s a Russian group that did something similar and they also found metals. I think they found titanium as well. Lah. The laboratory of alternative history.

Titanium Production Process

JOE ROGAN: How is titanium made?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s a smelting process from titanium dioxide. I don’t know the specifics of it, but you have to take that titanium dioxide and I assume smelt it down or do something like it. Again, it took us up until right, you know, 1930s to use it at just anywhere outside of labs. So it’s super interesting.

But again, this, I wouldn’t even say that’s the most interesting thing Max found. So he’s a crazy dude, an interesting guy. He’s, you know, he’s doing fusion experiments in his spare bedroom. Got like this apparatus surrounded by boxes of borax and Bora’s neighborhood 10 foot Tesla blow.

Radioactive Discoveries

Yeah, so he took. So get. Then this, this is. This sort of ties back to the tool marks. It ties back to a question you asked me when I was here last, which is what’s my wildest speculation. I actually have some now which is based on some evidence in its early days. He has published on this on his website.

But he took precision vases. He took base rock samples of the rock that these were made from from the place. I actually got him a piece of basalt. He took non precision vases and he put them in a germanium detector basically to look at the radioactive and the isotope sort of baseline radiation of these pieces. And it turns out the precision vases are radioactive they’re two to three. He’s tested several relative to the base rock samples and the non precision vases. They have two to three times the thorium decay products in them. Them all of them so far.

And in fact that piece right there has, he said has the quartz piece or the crystal piece has a notable Cesium 137 signature in it as well. So that’s an interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Nuclear titanium.

Nuclear Machining Hypothesis

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Could be. I don’t know about that but. So he’s look, it’s again early days but he has published it on his website the findings and he’s obtaining more equipment to do more testing some more in depth testing that he will be much more deficient about. He did take some recently to the Petrie Museum in London to test some of their artifacts. But it’s a very interesting result. This has to have been something that irradiated these vessels that give them that signature even after however many thousands of years with the half life. Again we’re comparing it to the base rock samples and the non precision bases which have. They’re just like that’s nothing. They’re not dangerous or anything. It’s just the, it’s just above a baseline but two to three times. So something happened to them.

And one of his hypotheses which is very interesting is a concept called nuclear machining. So he’s, he actually this is not a new idea. It’s not something we figured out how to do as a civilization yet we’re on that path. But you can, if you take his theory is something like palladium or another like radioactive material that is a strong alpha or beta particle emitter that you could put on a tool. It would ablate either in neutrons or it’s blasting electrons or something. It would ablate the stone surface away in such a way that would. You could carve this stone with ease, kind of like a lightsaber basically. And, and it would also leave a signature in the stone and you.

JOE ROGAN: Fuck yeah.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And you take it back to that, to that penetration rate of that spiral tube drill. Yeah. It’s not all we can say about things like that spiral tube drill and the other, the other striations and tool marks is look, it’s not, it doesn’t seem to be the same thing we do to the stone. And it’s certainly not primitive. It’s not something you can do just by hand.

Testing the Cores

JOE ROGAN: Is anybody. The cores. Has anybody tested the radioactive levels of the cores?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think he, I don’t know. He might have tested the cores when he was There recently. I’ll have, I’ll talk to him. I was talking to him this morning. I can ask him about the core. That’s a great question, because that would. It’s this. If it was the process, it should show something similar, if that’s indeed the process. Look, the other possibility is, okay, they weren’t machined with this method, but these were used in some method. The other, the other theory he has, that these may have been part of a process for enriching material for some other nuclear use, or they were part of a system that, that used nuclear material.

The Implications of Advanced Technology

JOE ROGAN: They had advanced nuclear science. Somehow or another, that. That’s just too much. I mean, it’s not too much, but it’s too much. Like too crazy. It’s so crazy. But also when you do see some of the sculptures that look 3D printed and you go, whoa, okay, now it kind of at least makes a little sense.

See, if we knew for sure that there was a cataclysm and a lost civilization, that civilization had achieved some immense heights of technological sophistication in a completely different pathway than we’ve done in modern times. If we knew that for sure, then everything would be so easy. You’d go, okay, well, clearly they were doing something. What were they doing? But instead, we deny that possibility. So by closing off that door now, you’re left with nonsense. You’re left with sand and copper, and it’s dumb.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I agree. I, Yeah, I agree. I think it’s.

JOE ROGAN: Something fucking crazy happened.

Following the Evidence

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes, I, I, yes, there’s, I think there is that. This is. I try to follow the evidence where it leads. That’s all we’re doing here with, I mean, I’m quoting what Max has said about it with this nuclear machining hypothesis. And here’s the long study needs to.

JOE ROGAN: Happen, the nuclear machining hypothesis. If. Sorry to interrupt you, but if you go a thousand years from now, for sure we’re going to have that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, that’s, that’s. Yes. I’d like to put that the same context in these arguments forward as well. It’s like we just don’t. To me, the answer is, you know, we tend to look at the past and it always has to be this subset of what we know. Right? But it’s like if you look at the history of knowledge and technology, give us 50,000. 50 years. A thousand years. 50,000 years. You know that there’s more out here to the sides that we’re going to learn, right? So that means there are realms of science and technology that we don’t know anything about.

I think, I think if we were a bit more open minded about investigating some of these mysteries of the past with some of these inexplicable characteristics, the precision or the machining, the engineering things, how the stone was cut, I think some of those answers could lay in those realms of the unknown. And by being open minded about them and by investigating them with all of our capability, we might even end up learning something about them, which is what we’re doing.

Like the vase scan project, we are learning the depths of precision in some of the machining aspects of it. And Max is starting to learn like, okay, there’s some weird, like radioactive characteristics of these things. Let’s try and look at more and figure out some more. I mean, we can speculate a bit now. And I want to be clear, this is all very speculative at this point. Lots more testing and data is required to even shore up some of these theories about these possibilities. But the fact remains there could be, they are possibilities. Right.

Ancient Technological Decline

JOE ROGAN: And it’s also this assumption that there’s been a linear path of progression always. But that’s not even the case today.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You can go to ancient sites, whether it is in Mexico or even in Greece, and you see really shitty construction right next to the Parthenon.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Right. I mean the Acropolis and the Parthenon is right next to crappy apartment buildings. They’re really close, right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a decay you’ve obviously you can’t do. Why didn’t you do that, do that again like this?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s huge.

JOE ROGAN: There’s something weird. There’s something weird going on. And this is 2000 years ago where we knew who they were, we know the people, we know they did it. Amazing precision, amazing construction methods, incredible art, incredible engineering and architecture. Right. And all understandable, but yet more advanced than the techniques utilized in 2025 in the exact same. Which is weird.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right?

JOE ROGAN: So that just, that’s without a cataclysm, right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, yeah, it’s also, it’s a nice criticism of modern architecture, to be fair. I mean, you could, don’t even go back 2000 years. Just go back to the Gothic era with the churches and the cathedrals. I mean, Jesus, why don’t we build like that anymore?

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, good point. But so you see a decline at least in craftsmanship that can be attributed to a changing of cultures and. But this assumption that there’s always this linear path of progression and if you go back, they were dependent, dumb you go back far enough, they were dumber. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. And Egypt is the best example. It is like, explain that.

Egypt’s Technological Regression

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, dude, exactly. And it’s one of the biggest, if anyone, it’s one of the biggest contradictions about Egypt is. Exactly, it’s the technological progression. I mean you’re talking about a dynastic Egypt, Egyptian civilization, at least 3,000 years, right? So 3,000 years. But if you look at, at it from a technological progression perspective, it’s almost like they went backwards the whole time.

I mean you have, you have the emergence all of a sudden of this culture and language like they’re gods. One of the craziest things about ancient Egypt is this emergence of hieroglyphs. Just boom, here it is, here’s this complex, extremely complicated language, cultural system, gods and everything pops out of nowhere. It’s pretty consistent. It evolves over time. It doesn’t really, it doesn’t change that much. I mean cuneiform in Samaria, there’s a clear progressive path where we can see it being developed. We don’t have that. That’s not the case for ancient Egypt.

And then it’s all of the best stuff is the oldest, it’s the biggest stonework, the valley temple, the 2,500 tons of granite in the king’s chamber structure. That’s, that’s in the Great Pyramid, the Great Pyramid itself. These things are amongst the very first pyramids ever said to have been built. Yet progressively as you go forward in time, I mean they just get to mud brick pyramids. It’s almost like you’re going backwards and there’s just, you know, technologically speaking, it doesn’t seem like they progress very far.

So I think there’s another interpretation for that data, one that fits the evidence a little better, which is that, yeah, I think they got a kickstart. They got a head start. They inherited an awful lot of objects. We know for sure these precision objects were around before the ancient Egyptians. They don’t match even the cultures that predated them. We have no idea where they got them from. They, I don’t think they made them. We don’t know how old they really are.

And I think there’s a lot of other artifacts and architecture on these sites that they match. These like, technologically speaking there’s a link, the same tools, the same precision. We’re seeing that. Yet these are massive artifacts. Sometimes like a thousand ton statue that you can’t bury with you. It stays on this site, it gets inherited it gets renovated, it gets reused. Eventually you get kings with hubris and arrogance. Guys like Ramses II that says, you know, carve my name 3 inches deep under that sucker, it’s going to be me. I want to be part of the gods. These are the, you know, I want to tie myself to the ancients.

And the really crazy thing is that doesn’t often get admitted is that this is literally what the ancient Egyptians themselves said. They called themselves a legacy culture. They trace their own history back 40,000 years. They have a list of kings. They talk about these different eras of time. The Shemsuhor, the followers of horus was this 12,000 year period where these mythical semi divine beings walked the earth. You can talk about kings and rulers and that. And then before that you have Zep Tepe. When the gods themselves walk the earth and they trace their own history way back into those eras.

Ancient Texts and Divine Beings

JOE ROGAN: That’s the stuff that I brought up with Zahi and he was like, “what is this?” He got very mad. It’s funny, I’m reading where I’m listening to the book of Enoch right now.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Okay. Yeah, that’s some old shit too.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so wild. You’re going, what do you, what are you saying? Like gods, the watchers came down and mated with women of Earth and created Nephilim or yeah, the Nephilim. What are you saying? What were you trying to say thousands of years ago when they wrote this down? And the version I think that we’re getting this from is from the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran. So how long did they write it down before that? How long did they discuss this? How long ago did this happen? And what are you saying? What were they trying to record? Yeah, it’s, I mean, why does it match up with what they’re saying in Egypt? The gods walking amongst us.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it goes to some wild places. I know, it gets so squirrely.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s where you get into the alien camp.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, that 40, 40 meter Tic Tac shaped metallic object.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. What is that thing? Well, and what kind of metal?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Imagine if it’s titanium.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Could be. He said it didn’t match any signature that he’d seen before.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy in of itself.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s one of the things I’ll remember always about when you were sitting here talking to Bob Lazar and he said that some of those craft came from archaeological digs. I mean, part of his story. There’s long been rumors of that type of stuff in, you know, in. Under the ground in Egypt. I don’t. I’m not saying that’s what it is, but this is what. Yeah, this is what Tim said about it.

JOE ROGAN: That would be amazing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It would be.

The Mysterious “Dippy” Object

JOE ROGAN: “There’s a UFO down there. All layers converge at a central corridor avenue like the atrium of shopping mall where you can see all floors from one vantage point. My personal interpretation is that this entire hall was constructed to house a centrally positioned freestanding object about 40 meters long. The central object is hard to classify. It appears metallic, not stone or wood. I named it Dippy after the giant diplodocus skeleton in the Hintze hall of London’s…” Did I say that right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, Hintze. I think.

JOE ROGAN: “Hintze. Hall of London’s Natural History Museum. It could be anything. Its shape resembles those Tic Tac hard mints. It might also be an upright disc or even a colossal shen ring.” And what is a Shen ring?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s like a cartouche. You know the thing around the cartouche.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow. “Big object alone raises profound questions. How did it get there? Why is it there? A more speculative theory is that it’s some kind of portal. Oh boy. Now we’re going. We’re going full tinfoil. Either interdimensional or interstellar. A stargate. Its material signature is like unlike anything I’ve seen in my entire career. But it’s there, undeniably there. I’ll let the future find out what Dippy is.” Tim Akers. Well, that. He went full art bell right there.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: He did.

JOE ROGAN: Interdimensional or interstellar?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: A stargate. Stargate. Hey look, the Egyptians talk about stargates.

JOE ROGAN: Do they?

Egyptian Stargate Hieroglyphs

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Dude, go to. Where is it? Dendera. There’s actually a couple places. The literal translation, you can read it on the walls. I always show people when we go. There it is. There are two or three depictions of stargates. That is the literal translation for it showing a constellation with a gate. And it’s a specific constellation. A couple of different. They’re all on different constellations.

JOE ROGAN: Where can I find that? Where can I see this?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It says pictures of stargates from Dendera Temple. I think it’s in the upper rooms. Yeah, it’s up where the zodiac. So that’s actually the Dendera is incredible. It is a star oriented temple. There’s massive depictions of the zodiac. And this is all, you know, redone from older versions of the same temple. But that is the translation of what’s on the wall with the constellation and the gate. And it literally translates as stargate. That is part of it.

So that’s. I mean, the ceiling is the zodiac. You even have depictions of, like, solar boats going up to the moon at Dendera. Randall loves that temple. I have sent him a lot of footage from that temple. No, it’s. It’s. It’s actually. There’s a. You’d have to look up the den. Yeah, just. Stargate glyph, maybe At Dendera. Yeah, glyph. I’ll tell you if you see it. No, I don’t see the exact one, but it’s not. I mean, it’s literally a cluster of stars that represents a constellation.

JOE ROGAN: This is killing me.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I know. I probably have it on my hard drive.

JOE ROGAN: Do you have it with you?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s on my laptop if you want to see it up. Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Your laptop’s out there.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: All right, go grab it. We’ll pause.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You sure?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Not on what you gave me. Huh? Not on what you gave me. It’s not on that one. I didn’t think we’d get into the Stargate. Oh, you got it. I’m going to try and find it. I’ll try and find it.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: All right.

JOE ROGAN: We’ll be right back, folks. Okay, so we found it from a video from trevor grassi on YouTube. The video is titled “Hieroglyphic Proof of Stargate Technology” with Muhammad Ibrahim, Mike, Rick Ricker, Rick Secker, and Trevor Grassi. So this is what we’re looking at.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, you see, it’s like there’s a glyph. There’s. You can see the star and there’s a gate. Actually, try and find one of the other pictures. Maybe there’s the stars, the circle.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what the star is supposed to be.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, the star on the right. No, no, on the far right. Yeah, there’s the hieroglyph. So, again, yes, Stargate. It’s the. You see the gate and then the star, and then I assume that crooked hook or whatever is part of this as well.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I see. So it’s how. The way you translate the hieroglyph.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes, yes. And Muhammad Ibrahim, who I know quite well as well, he’s very good at translating these glyphs. When I travel in Egypt, we usually go with Professor Mohammad Jabra, who’s one of, I would say, top four or five in the world for reading hieroglyphs. He can just read whatever’s on the wall and tell you about it. He travels with us on these tour. Phenomenal. He just Shows us this. There’s probably some better pictures of ones with the actual constellations up at Dendera, if they get into. Yeah, but that one where they were standing next to each other. Go back a little. Back a little. There. Yeah.

So see, this is the one I’m talking about. You see the stars. The stars above the gates. So it’s. There’s literally different these. These. And with the words they. They relate to specific constellations. This is in the top the. What’s the zodiac room at Dendera, where they have a replica of the circular zodiac on the ceiling. The French have the original. But this is original hieroglyphs. And the translation of this is literally stargate for these constellations that say what it is, bananas.

JOE ROGAN: And what are these constellations supposed to be?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I don’t know off the top of my head. We do tell people when we get into it, there is. Yeah, I could find out, but I don’t know off the top of my head. I’m sorry.

JOE ROGAN: Click that with that one that you just had there, Jamie. No, no, no. Where you just had all. Yeah, right there.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So, yeah, more gates. They. Same. Similar again. The gate with the crooked hook and the stargate.

JOE ROGAN: That’s bananas.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah.

The Stargate Symbolism and Ancient Technology

JOE ROGAN: So when they’re referring to a stargate, are they saying in any way what that means?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, it’s… I mean, most of the interpretations these days would tell you that it’s always symbolic. I mean, they do look at like the Osiris and the constellations in the sky as being connected to the Duat or to Nut. The Duat being this space and Nut the goddess who is the sky. And it’s all part of that passage of the soul going into the realms of the immortal that happens after death.

So this is the symbolic interpretation that we give it all. We say, “Oh, this is none of this.” It sort of falls into this category a little bit of like, everything is symbolic, everything is ceremonial. Nothing is functional.

I’m fascinated by these temples because it goes back to something you were saying earlier. And I use this analogy to kind of set the stage for it. Imagine again, imagine if Younger Dryas happened to us tomorrow. Whatever. Right? Hope touch wood doesn’t but say it wipes out civilization. But we survive as humans within what, two, three generations, we’re sitting around campfires telling stories about these things that were like a black rock and it’s just… Or plasma TVs. But you say, “Look, if you get this shiny black rock, you can get answers from the ancestors. You will know everything. You can talk to anything. You can see anything.”

JOE ROGAN: You can ask it questions.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You can ask it questions. And maybe you go and you start getting black rocks and making them like this, and you start dancing around the fire. You start ritualizing this memory of technology.

Now, if you take that concept, like, say there’s a cataclysm, and now there’s people that remember and they tell these stories. The stories get passed down. Now imagine there’s a civilization that comes up and it goes through thousands of years of structuring those legends and stories of technology. That goes through just distortions and representations and symbolism, but it’s just twisting all of these stories into this iconography and this complex symbolism.

Then I think we go to a temple in Egypt that was made in the Ptolemaic era or whatever, and you see things on the wall. I think there’s a great way to interpret some of those symbols and some of the paintings to say, “Well, is this actually an echo of something that was functional or is an echo of technology?” Like, every staff that you see has a tuning fork on the bottom of it. Every single one on these walls, it’s always got a tuning fork on it. What’s that? What’s that all about?

JOE ROGAN: Tuning fork.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Tuning fork. Like a little tuning fork? Yeah. All of the staffs with the was head, that means power. Like, literally the interpretation of this symbol is power on top of the staff, and every single one of them has a tuning fork on top.

JOE ROGAN: Can we see an image of them?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, and you can look up any of the temples in Egypt and like the depictions of gods with staffs and they’re touching or they’re giving, like the Djed Pillar or the ankh, which is… Djed Pillar is stability. The ankh is life. The was is power. So in a lot of cases, these gods are granting kings life, stability and power. Sometimes just life and power.

JOE ROGAN: What are those depictions of these enormous cylindrical things that they’re holding that look almost like one of those transformer clubs?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Like that one there. That’s the Djed Pillar here.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. What the hell is that?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s a great image. That literally is the symbol for stability.

JOE ROGAN: And that thing down is what I was talking about.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, the quote unquote “light bulbs.” Yes. At Dendera Temple. And see, there’s a Djed pillar there too, with the hand. So the Djed pillar is stabilizing it with its hands.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And you’re on a boat. You’re actually part of… This is on a boat.

JOE ROGAN: It looks like some kind of technology.

The Dendera Temple Crypts

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So you know what’s crazy about this? So again, we get down into this. This is in a crypt at Dendera. You have to crawl through a hole and get… It’s like an inside wall. It’s amazing because the Christians couldn’t get into the crypt, so they couldn’t deface the glyphs. Like a lot of the glyphs are defaced.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that guy. He looks like an air traffic controller.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, he’s like a reptilian too. He’s a frog dude with knives.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: What is that dude with a tail?

JOE ROGAN: Does he have a tail?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, he does.

JOE ROGAN: He does look like a… He’s like a giant frogman.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So what’s crazy about there is a whole story about this. It’s written on the walls. And again, this is thanks to my friend Yusuf Awan, who I guide with and then Professor Jabra, who can interpret this. And we actually, I’m going to do a video about this soon because what he is saying about this crypt is that there was… It tells you on the wall that there was a physical version of that thing in that crypt that was… He said it was made from mostly gold and it was the span of like a dude with his arms out, like the span of a human wingspan. Basically.

I found… I was stumbling across something. They called it electrum. There was these two… there was a… the metal. These 3.3 ton obelisk that were made out of a metal called electrum. Gold and silver. Yeah, yeah. Electrum’s gold and silver. So they definitely used gold and silver. A lot of the obelisks had electrum.

JOE ROGAN: Which I think great for conductivity.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, it’s fantastic. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, really the only good reason to have it, other than looking good.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Other than ballin’.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, other than ballin’, which they were ballin’, which is going to be a little bit of a sidetrack. But when you’re talking about the nuclear stuff, I found these stories of the Oklo mine in Gabon, which is a natural nuclear reactor.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. 4 billion years old and a hundred thousand working. Oldest nuclear reactor in history.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Uranium from it. Oh, okay. It’s enriching uranium.

JOE ROGAN: Probably troll enriched uranium.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Imagine if it’s in Africa. So I don’t know if that was…

JOE ROGAN: The only place they’ve ever found that makes sense, right? Is there something like that in Afghanistan, where this stone came from?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, the lapis lazuli and everything else. I don’t know. I mean, I assume that… I wouldn’t be surprised if that sort of thing is happening somewhere in the mass of uranium in Australia either, because that’s like one of the world’s biggest uranium deposits. I imagine if it’s enough mass of uranium… I think it’s uranium 238. And they’re trying to get… No, 235 to get to 238 or the other way around. But if there’s enough mass and neutrons hitting each other, it might be enriching it somehow. I think that’s probably what’s happening there. I’m no nuclear scientist. So…

Reptilian Beings and Ancient Depictions

JOE ROGAN: Let’s go back to those hieroglyphs. Jamie, the lizard guy, the frog guy, or whatever that reptilian thing is that freaks me out.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh yeah. It’s the stuff of nightmares at times. It’s kind of weird because that’s…

JOE ROGAN: You know, one of the things that… The weirdest… When the weirdest stories when they start talking about aliens is the different types that visit.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And that one of them is a reptilian species that are the most creepy to deal with. Which makes sense.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Heard the same thing. It would be… Yeah. I mean, that reptilian reptiles on Earth, like chickens, are assholes, you know? Right.

JOE ROGAN: They are. And so are Komodo dragons. And the idea that somehow or another they could eventually reach incredible levels of technological sophistication and intelligence, we kind of rule that out. But look, there’s clearly primates that are way dumber than us, right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, for sure.

JOE ROGAN: So why do we assume that it’s only primates that reach an incredible high level of sophistication when we know that crows, which are really close to dinosaurs. Crows. Super smart. Like smarter than most kids.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Problem solving smart. Yeah, yeah. It’s… I… You can’t… Yeah, I don’t think you can put a restrictor on what evolution might produce.

JOE ROGAN: Not in any of these. Especially when intelligence is being exhibited by things that are really close evolutionarily to reptiles.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. Yeah. And that would just be… Yeah, you get to that… Like just lack of empathy. Just that reptilian brain. It’s just aggression. And like everything that’s not us is the enemy. That’s the mind.

JOE ROGAN: A smart dinosaur. Oh, Yeah, I mean that was in Jurassic Park, right? The raptors.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: “Clever girl.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they were smart. Which you know, makes sense.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s that whole pack… Yeah. The instinct.

JOE ROGAN: But the idea that there’s… that we were visited by intelligent reptiles is bananas.

The Possibility of Ancient Visitation

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I put, look, with the alien, I don’t often address it, but I put it firmly in the realm of like possible. Like, it’s just, I don’t, I think when you look at the vastness of space and the length of time, the fact that we’ve… we’re just this crazy…

JOE ROGAN: You could, they could have…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Massive civilizations galactically could have risen and fallen a million years ago and we just weren’t part of it. And that’s literally a blink of the eye in these timeframes. We just, it’s not surprising this, the Fermi paradox, right. Like how come we haven’t got firm proof or anything? Even though people will say we have.

But it’s like yes, there’s… it’s the length of time like we can rise and fall that span of a million years. It’s just nothing on those timescales. And you know, you can, several whole species can rise to massive prominence and then just be nothing but dust at the end of that period of time. And you got to try and do that across what, 14 billion years. And even that’s in question now because the James Webb telescope, seeing stuff that’s supposedly way older than that now. Right. I mean we’ll see. We’re going to find out. Like this Three Eye Atlas thing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: What is that super weird, right?

JOE ROGAN: Well, Avi Loeb is convinced that it’s a UFO, but that’s what he does, right. He did with that other one, Oumuamua or so. That one was a little odd.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That was weird. So not… It wasn’t… The weirdest thing about Oumuamua seems to be its path when it took after it turned around the sun and accelerated like that was the standard model of physics said it shouldn’t have done that. And it seems to have exhibited sort of motion. That was not what we predicted it would do. That’s as much as we can…

JOE ROGAN: Acceleration.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It accelerated. It was outside noticeable.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it accelerated, but like to a factor of what?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, not that I think it was only a few percent, but it was not what should have happened according to the calculations that astronomers and I guess the orbital dynamics people had done. That’s what I understand was the most… Obviously its shape and size.

JOE ROGAN: There’s something about its reflective properties as well, right?

Interstellar Objects and Anomalous Behavior

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, it’s… yeah. I mean, just because it was so long and narrow and it was tumbling, that’s what caused it to… We would catch like the long side of it, which the brightness would increase. So we had this oscillating brightness on it. And then it just passed through the system and it’s going whatever, 87 kilometers per second or whatever. It was huge velocity enough to escape the gravity of the sun.

But it accelerated where… That’s what I understand it did. It accelerated where it shouldn’t have. Then there was another interstellar artifact that came in that was pretty much a comet. Behaved like a comet, it had a tail. It was off gassing water. It’s just an interstellar ball of rock and ice is what they say that was. It didn’t get a lot of attention.

Now this Three Eye Atlas thing is much larger. It’s traveling much faster apparently than the previous two. But it’s also not behaving like a comet. It has this aura of light that it’s emitting around it for some reason. I saw a report that said it normally seeing a metallic like smelting signatures off it. I don’t know how much credence I can give it, but we’ll find out.

Like, it has a… It’s going too fast to stop in our system unless it dramatically alters its velocity. But it’s… I mean, it’ll cut… It’ll pop out. We’ll lose it on the other side of the sun. But then we should see it again on the way out. So we’ll know one way or the other if it actually is going to… If it changes behavior.

I mean, what’s he put it… I’ve even Avi Loeb put it like 40, 60 or something artificial to natural. But really, dude, it’s so funny. I’m into Warhammer 40k in a big way. And it’s just like… I’m like, okay, we’re going to be joining the Imperium here soon, boys. All hail the Omnissiah. That thing might be a Mechanicus vessel.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know if that’s how they travel. I’d be very disappointed. They just shoot through the sky. It takes months.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, if it slows down, I know.

JOE ROGAN: But I’m looking for portals.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’m looking for…

JOE ROGAN: I mean, advanced civilization that visits us. I don’t want the advanced Vikings.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: I want the advanced scientists from the 21st century portal. Yeah, I just… You know what I’m saying? I mean, the ones who come fast on a burning spaceship, they’re the dangerous ones because they’re probably…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They’re probably the warlike conquerors, the ones who are going to rob us of our minerals and force us into slavery. You know what I mean?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That seems like if that’s how you’re rocking it, you’re still doing it the way we do it. We have something thrusting you insanely fast through the cosmos.

The Dark Forest Theory

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Do you know that like the whole dark forest thing, like the dark forest theory about… So it’s… This came out of… It was the three body problem. Great series of books by Chinese author got turned into amazing Netflix show. A great show. The books are phenomenal too.

And it’s just… But it’s… It’s this idea that, look, we shouldn’t be making noise. It’s like imagine you’re a hunter in a dark forest. So it’s just, you’re out there, you know, there might be other things out there. And it’s… It’s this, it’s this like a philosophical engagement of like, what do you… What should you do? Should you start… Light a fire and make a whole bunch of noise in the dark forest that’s full of, you know, it’s full of predators. You don’t know where they are. They don’t know where you are. What’s your behavior? What should you do? Should you see another predator? What should… Should you be friendly? What’s the risk to you to do it?

And these could be like, you could be there with a bow and arrow. This guy could have a tank. So the guy could have a, like a mass, some other energy weapon, whatever. You, you don’t… There’s massive differences in capability and scale. And pretty much every scenario works out to like the… What you should do is just be quiet. And if you see something, you should eliminate the threat. That’s kind of the way it goes in the dark forest. It’s like, it’s too risky to reveal yourself. You should just… You should basically eliminate that threat if you can do so safely.

And you apply that to kind of the galaxy and where… I mean, to some extent I feel like we’re the equivalent of like a baby in a cot that’s screaming around a roaring fire because we… And there’s, you know, leopards out there.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And you know, because we’re just like sending these signals out into space for a hundred something years now. And we just hope, “Hey, we’re friendly, please.”

The Nature of Advanced Civilizations

JOE ROGAN: Well, you have to hope that something is so evolved that it’s gotten past war and it’s gotten past the way we behave. And so we’re hoping and assuming that space daddy space brothers… Yeah. That space daddy space brothers would be benevolent and wise beyond our imagination and that they will come here and want to take care of us and give us information and hook us up.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s my response. I had this discussion. I’ve had this discussion a few times. And my response to a lot of that is, well, we can take nature. What happens when we take… Let’s look at the apex predator, whether it’s in the sea, in the air, on the land. Apex predators don’t tolerate competition. They don’t suffer any attacks. They don’t… I mean, we don’t treat… We don’t… We just dominate.

Like you just… If it’s in your way, it’s inconvenient, you kill it. If it has, if it has something you want, we take it. If those bees have honey, we take it. Like, it’s just… Yeah, there’s no… We’re not like helping them, you know, we’re not like trying to teach the dolphins how to talk. Like there’s still parts of the world where we’re just eating them, you know, like there’s… I don’t know, it’s, it’s nature suggests that that apex predator… But maybe, maybe we’re just… I think this is the other element that you’re saying is maybe you evolution leads you past those primal nature at some point.

JOE ROGAN: The territorial primate instincts that we exhibit, like hopefully one day, because clearly we’re on a pathway to that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right?

JOE ROGAN: We’re clearly much kinder now, at least locally. You know, if you don’t live in Gaza, you know what I’m saying? Like, if you’re in the middle of war zone, you’re like, “What are you talking about? This is as bad as it’s ever been.” All throughout human history, it’s the same behavior exhibited over and over and over again. What we want is aliens that are a million years more advanced. We don’t want aliens that are a thousand years more advanced.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Got it?

JOE ROGAN: Because they might be just like us, but way better. That’s what we don’t… Right? Because as soon as we start going into the cosmos, we venture into the cosmos, in 20 years, we’re going to be the same animal, right? We’re not going to be significantly different unless we integrate with technology and remove the ego and… Yeah, mushrooms.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, no emotions and stuff. It may be mushrooms help us get to emotions.

JOE ROGAN: Oceans, all the things, the human reward systems that exist that we, you know, that we currently struggle with. We would be the same way if we just think of what we justify on Earth in terms of destruction of habitat of native species, animals that we kill, all the different things that we do on Earth. Factory farming. Now imagine why would we care about these lizard people that live, you know, in caves on some fucking stupid planet. You know, we would probably kidnap them, we’d kill them, we’d pickle them, we’d bring them back home, we’d freeze them.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Got gold in them caves. What have they got?

JOE ROGAN: Right? Look at what Columbus did when they arrived and took the natives and had them get gold. And if they didn’t, they cut their arms off. Horrific, terrifying things. So imagine there’s no evidence that aliens are currently doing that. Which is promising thing, right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right.

The Travis Walton Case and Benevolent Contact

JOE ROGAN: Even the abductions. Although I’m sure they’re terrifying if they’re true. They seem rather benign. Like in fact, in the Travis Walton case, do you know that that one, the most famous ones, not off the top, real simple, 1970s, he’s a logger. He’s working with a group of guys. They see a ship, he runs toward it. He gets hit with a beam of energy, gets knocked back unconscious. His friends flee, they come back, they’re yelling at each other, “We got to go back. We got to get him.” They go back, he’s gone.

All four of them get investigated for murder. They tell the story, no one believes them. They all pass polygraph tests. Five days later he shows up, he finds a payphone, makes a phone call, and has this fucking insane story. But the story was that they took him aboard the craft and healed him and communicated with them. And that there was… Was a bunch of different types of these beings. And then he has been telling the exact same story ever since the 1970s, so… But relatively benign compared to what we…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Would do for sure.

JOE ROGAN: You know, like we fucking, you know.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We shoot elephants, it turns into Avatar.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Think about the horrible things that we do right now on Earth.

Human Nature and Evolution

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, I agree. Yeah. And it’s… It’s something that I always say, it’s a great quote from Christopher Hitchens, which is, you know, “We’re just not the end of that evolutionary chain.” You know, we’re just the current version of humanity. Our frontal lobes are too big. Our adrenaline… Sorry. Our frontal lobes are too small. Our adrenaline glands are too big. Our thumb four finger opposition isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

JOE ROGAN: And we love violence.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We love violence.

JOE ROGAN: We love violence. Our national sport is dudes who are enormous running at each other full speed. And the other one is guys punching and kicking each other.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s kind of…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s kind of crazy. We’re so high and then… And we’re also involved in multiple wars simultaneously. At least proxy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, proxy wars.

JOE ROGAN: At least human beings are involved in a significant amount of war.

The Cyclical Nature of Civilization

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Always. Yeah. It’s never. This is literally the status quo throughout history. I mean, it’s just. We’ve always been at war with each other. I mean, I will. I still do. I personally maintain the idea that it is still the best time to be alive, 100%, technologically speaking. But also, I mean, obviously, we’re much more aware of conflict around the world, but on a percentage scale of what it’s been like in the past, it’s actually far less than it has been. Like, even though it’s terrible when it happens, but, you know, we’re in an era where there’s actually less of that going on, and hopefully that can continue.

I actually genuinely think that it’s one of the reasons why this whole investigation into the past is important to me. Like, I don’t. It’s not. I haven’t really talked about it in videos. Or put it down. It’s going to be. It’s part of the book I’m writing, for sure. It’s a big part. Because it’s not just some benign investigation into the past. I genuinely think it could have a significant impact on our future.

Because that concept you talked about of, like, this linear progression. Right. I mean, in general, we get taught in school that, okay, we were Stone Age dudes, we were in caves, civilization happened. How many thousands of years later, here we are. This is the only. It’s like, this is the only way that. That an advanced civilization can happen, is on this path. Don’t worry about it. It’s almost like it’s preordained. Just worry about next election cycle, next quarterly result, whatever. Right. And we just don’t think about it.

I do. This is this concept, I call it. I think it’s a fundamental pillar of what it means to be a human being today. It’s in everybody’s mind to some degree. Like, all right, Stone Age us, we’re advanced. This is the only way it happens. I do think that if you can change that at that fundamental level to this cyclical version that is an oscillation between civilization and cataclysm and this idea that, okay, we’ve actually risen in the past, we’ve become relatively high technology, we’ve become civilized and it happened, it would have been different to us, but we fell, we fell again and we’re somewhere on this oscillation and this circular motion between civilization and cataclysm. And on a long enough timescale, we know it’s going to happen again. Yes, right.

And if you can change that, if you could change that fundamental concept in people, like that’s what we teach people in schools. Okay, so we’re rising again. We’re at this crazy point in time when our technology is super advanced, we can solve some of these problems, but we know on this timescale if we don’t do something about it, we might end up like our ancestors did. I genuinely think that stands a chance of like changing some of our behavior and some of our, like a little less money on tanks and guns, a little bit more money on space exploration, make solving the longer term problems a bit more of a priority.

And it’s altruistic and it’s like a crazy goal. I know it’s altruistic as all hell, but it’s just, I think there’s precedent for it too though. I mean, whether you agree with it or not, I mean, it doesn’t matter. But the fact is that the term climate change has changed our behavior over the last 25 years. Right? It’s changed. If you think about what’s happened with that concept and that movement, it changes investment decisions, it changes our interactions with each other, with the planet. You know, it’s changed our behavior in the way we think about stuff. It’s like this has crept into our zeitgeist as a species and it’s changed our behavior.

So I look at some of this stuff in the past as it not just being some harmless investigation into things, I think it actually getting to the root cause of what’s happened in the past actually could help us in our future. I think it’s an important, it’s what drives, I think my interest in it in a lot of ways too.

The Politics of Environmental Issues

JOE ROGAN: It’s another piece of an example, another example rather of how primitive we are, that we still, the actual climate is political. That’s bananas. Pollution is political.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. Well, I mean if you disagree, I mean I always find it crazy that if you even question any of some of the like official narrative about this stuff, the first thing you’ve got to do is make sure you decry and say no, no, no. Pollution bad. Pollution bad. Just because that’s. Think that some of the science might be off. I’m not saying like let’s pollute the oceans, like. No, no. Let’s be stewards. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also the amount of time that we’ve polluted the oceans in is spectacular. What we’ve done just in terms of the depopulation of the ocean. Oh, yeah, that’s nuts. Like 90 plus percent of all big fish are gone.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: In a short amount of time. Like a couple hundred a year of like hardcore fishing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And we.

JOE ROGAN: We fished out the ocean, man.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Just about.

JOE ROGAN: That’s nuts. Not only that, we polluted the hell out of it to the point where you’re not even supposed to eat it every day.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. Which is.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I agree.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. If you eat sushi every day, people don’t recommend it on a beer bottle.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: On the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

JOE ROGAN: What?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy, man.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, that’s how.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how gross we are. Somebody was over there and they chucked one overboard.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it looks like.

JOE ROGAN: It looks pretty recent, right? He’s got the label on it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, right.

JOE ROGAN: The label hasn’t even eroded.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Challenge it deep.

JOE ROGAN: If it’s that recent, like, why isn’t it covered in sediment? You know? I mean. Yeah, the surface covers things up and moves over time. It probably won’t be there forever. It probably won’t be sitting on the.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Surface like that, still floating around. I don’t think it’s.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Maybe.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, right, right, right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Moving around down there somehow.

JOE ROGAN: It’s. Wow.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It should sink. I’d been imagining.

JOE ROGAN: Unless there’s some sort of a downward or upward current.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Scientists find beer bottle the deepest point of the ocean.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: 6.7 miles, 35,000 feet below the surf. That is.

Deep Sea Exploration and the Titan Tragedy

JOE ROGAN: How does it not implode? But that sub does.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, yeah. No air. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: There you go. Right? Yeah. Wouldn’t last long if there’s a cap on it, that’s for sure. But. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t want to go down there.

JOE ROGAN: Hell no.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I’d rather watch a video. Not only that, they were watching a video. That’s what’s even crazier.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You go all the way down and you’re watching a screen.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not like it’s a window. You can’t have a window.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like one little. Or just. If there’s one just giant thick thing at the front.

JOE ROGAN: You kind of like, imagine the freak out of being at the bottom.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: James Cameron knows. I mean, he went down that. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Not for me there by himself.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I know he did. It’s crazy. In that. Yeah. In that he did it. Right.

JOE ROGAN: But I guess if you’re going to do it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Why is he doing that?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I want four feet of titanium around me, like in a sphere.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. We need you to make movies.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Maybe not a carbon fiber tube.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, especially not one that the engineer said wasn’t really designed for those depths.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. That cracked. Do you ever watch that documentary? It’s. Dude, they’re putting that thing and they do the scale model and they’re testing it under pressure and they’re all standing around in a room and just goes bang. Like, it’s just. It’s insane. Every test they did, it went bang and blue.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re like 20 successful trips with that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, they did a bunch. Yeah. And it was. And it. Well, even the scariest part is like when you’re in the footage with it and you can hear it popping. Like it’s literally the carbon fiber strands snapping. Oh, it’s terrible. It’s terrifying.

JOE ROGAN: Imagine one of those people that successfully made that journey. And then the nightmares that you have every day.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Like the one right before we missed it.

JOE ROGAN: You bare.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The one right before. Barely missed getting instantaneously destroyed.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I’m sure you’ve seen the animation, the computer recreation of what it would look like.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Explosion. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You turn to blood cells.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Just splatter. Yeah. You wouldn’t even said that. It happens faster than the time it would take for you to even register that it happened. Like for your senses to register in your brain that it happened. It’s over.

JOE ROGAN: Pressure. The pressure.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just the fact that we’re that weird that we choose to do that, that we have technology.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Like, let’s see. Yeah, let’s go. Yeah. It’s so funny the way they skirted the. I mean, he signed everyone up as like basically expedition team members. They were. That’s how they got around. I’m not selling seats for this. Like, they’re invest there. They’re coming on. They all had a technical role, supposedly. And it was like, I’m not getting around the regulations and the safety regulations, but yeah. No interest in that sort of pressure. I mean, I dive, but that.

JOE ROGAN: Not like that diving is swimming pretty much. It’s just like hardcore swimming of the implosion is crazy. Yeah.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I haven’t seen this. It said that it would have happened in 20 milliseconds and it takes, like 150 milliseconds for your brain to feel.

JOE ROGAN: That’s.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, that’s. Yeah. No, thank you. I.

JOE ROGAN: God. Oh, my God. This. Why does this freak me out so much? Because a guy went on with his son.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s. It’s a terrible story.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s just why I wish I was friends with that guy.

Underwater Archaeological Discoveries

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’d be like, dude, yeah. No, it’s not the place I’d want to explore. Like, there is some stuff off Cuba. They say that they reckon pyramids, it’s kilometers deep in the ocean.

JOE ROGAN: But I’ve seen that. I’ve seen. Well, I’ve seen Internet videos.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Imaging. Yeah. But I did die. We were in Alexandria. I dived on the lighthouse. So there’s. And actually there was a news article just the other day about the. The Egyptians were pulling, like, more stuff out of the water there at Heraklion and at the lighthouse of Alexandria. Quite an interesting story.

And we were in Alexandria. Dive in the Mediterranean on the Egyptian side. And I mean, it’s amazing. There’s megalith, massive columns and massive megalithic blocks in the wall from when that. The lighthouse, it fell down or it collapsed. There was. There was an earthquake. And so you’re actually. You’re in the water, but you’re diving over, like, megalithic blocks like these and huge columns. And it. And it’s. It has a history that stretches back too. Right. It’s. The megalithic stuff is what’s associated with the very earliest periods of building. All the stuff that happened later is typically not that big, but.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, this is actually what’s not. That’s what’s nuts is that the older you go, the bigger the stones are.

Erosion Evidence at Giza

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, and it’s what’s funny is when we looked into the erosion at places like the Giza Plateau, you have two or three feet. It’s not on the Sphinx. Everybody knows about the Sphinx enclosure erosion, but you look at places like the pyramid temple of the Middle Pyramid, some of the blocks on the Great Pyramid, the casing stones that are there that we can see now that they’ve taken the Boat Museum away, and up and down the causeway, there is limestone blocks with up to two feet of erosion. Like, it’s these waves.

I think I have a directory on that drive with the erosion on it. And you have to juxtapose that against all the other stuff they say is fourth dynasty. Right. So right next to the Valley Temple, there is another structure that’s built from small limestone blocks, doesn’t have any erosion, not like the Valley Temple does. The Western Cemetery that’s behind the Great Pyramid is beautifully made. It’s smaller limestone blocks. It’s apparently older.

So, yeah, here’s a good example. This is the mortuary or the Pyramid Temple. So these, you can see where the face of that block originally was, but it’s been eroded in, like, up to two feet in places. There’s huge amounts of erosion that you can find in a lot of places at the Giza Plateau. Yet at the same time, you have what are said to be contemporary structures said to have been built roughly in the same time. Sometimes they say they’re even older that have just no erosion at all. Made from the same stone, made by allegedly by the same people.

JOE ROGAN: And what force do they attribute that erosion to?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, it’s wind and sand, right? That’s what they will say. Look, this is just regular weathering. And here’s the crazy thing about these structures. This was also cased in granite. These are the inside blocks. So this structure was fully cased in, like, four feet thick granite blocks.

JOE ROGAN: And that was stolen and taken.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: But it would have protected this stone from erosion for however many thousands of years you find it. There’s another picture in here of the… That’s so there. Like, see, this is said to… That picture I just showed with the heavy erosion. That’s where the arrow is at the Pyramid temple. No, no, back to that one. Yep.

So that deep erosion’s at that pyramid temple, this one wall to the right, they say this is older than that and that this has never been cased in granite. That other stuff was cased in granite. It’s megalithic. There’s a block in that complex that’s 450 tons, and it was cased in granite.

Scientific Studies on Limestone Erosion

Now, there’s been studies, right? So we know how long it takes to weather limestone. There’s been a bunch of studies. The U.S. government departments have studied it. They put limestone blocks on the top of a building in Washington D.C. in a government department and studied it over 11 years. There’s endless cemeteries with conveniently carved and dated limestone pieces in the form of headstones that you can measure.

So you can go, “Okay, this was carved in whatever year this guy died,” and you can measure it and over time, get a sense for what it takes with rain, with wind. We’ve done studies of putting these blocks in a river and letting it wash over, like, a very highly erosive environment where we’ve got running water running over the stone and how long it takes to erode.

For some of the erosion that you can, if you reference those studies for this type of hard limestone, to get two feet of erosive wear on those blocks, just with regular wind weathering. And this is in places that have a lot more rainfall than Giza. You’re talking dates from like 60 to 122,000 years to get that much erosion on it. I mean, and that’s in a more erosive environment than what the desert is.

JOE ROGAN: What.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So, yeah, that’s it side by side. So you have literally, they’ll tell you that thing on the right is older. This was built by Khufu. This is supposedly Khafre, his son, but it’s completely different. So this is that tailored thing as well. But they attribute all this to the same people.

But you can baseline this because it’s the same stone, it’s at the same elevation level, it’s supposedly the same age. The differences are in the construction. Like, it’s megalithic. And a lot of this stuff was encased in granite. This is the Sphinx temple down at the other end of the causeway. Same thing.

So all the megalithic stuff that was cased in granite has severe erosion, yet there’s buildings all around it and up and down the plateau they say are built at the same time. Yet it’s smaller blocks, it’s not as nice work, and it’s not eroded like that.

JOE ROGAN: What’s the conventional explanation from that discrepancy?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They just don’t address it. Like, I’ve not seen anyone… Well, I mean, because the argument’s always been the Sphinx, like the Sphinx temple, like the Sphinx enclosure. Right. Robert Schoch, John Anthony West, they talked about the fact that you needed thousands of years of rainfall, erosion to get those patterns on the walls. That’s where the discussion’s been focused.

It’s not… There was no comparison, mate. It was always like, “Well, this is this.” You know, the geologists and the experts say it’s wind and sand, it’s water erosion. But then you have the archaeologist and the Mark Lander saying, “Oh, it’s wind and sand. Wind and sand.”

But I think there’s a better argument to be made when you start to do comparative work like this, you go, “All right, hang on. Let’s take the western cemetery behind the Great Pyramid, supposedly built by Khufu, 4th dynasty. It’s at the same elevation level. It’s the same stone type as the mortuary or the pyramid temple of the Middle Pyramid complex.” So after Khufu. So if he built that, then his son Khafre built this one.

How come this one, which was also cased in granite and this wasn’t. How come this is so much more eroded than this? There’s no… It’s at the same elevation level. It’s the same stone. It’s… You would assume that it’s been subjected to the same weathering. Why is this so weathered? And that is not. It’s that you can’t explain it any other way? Yeah, I’ve not seen anyone respond to that argument with anything that makes any remote sense.

JOE ROGAN: Like remote sense would dictate one’s older?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I mean, we show literally, I like to show people, “Which one looks older?” Same stone, same stone, same elevation, level, same. Everything seems to be… Yeah, I mean, it’s… And again, we know that’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And it’s not like this is very hard numolitic limestone. Like, it’s full of fossils. It’s not a soft limestone.

Ancient Human Civilizations

JOE ROGAN: The idea that there was a civilization that built monolithic construction a hundred thousand years ago is crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy. But have you seen any of Michael Button’s work?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah, I saw the episode.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that is a very interesting episode when he’s talking about how human beings in this exact same form have been around at least 300,000 years.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: At least.

JOE ROGAN: At least.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So that’s the fossil record.

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s all we found. There might be human beings that were five hundred thousand years ago.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: There’s good evidence for, actually.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, there’s… So, yeah. So the Morocco find. I’ve talked about this for years as well. It’s that the fossil record. So we used to be what, 190, 50,000, and it’s 195,000 with the Ethiopian bones, and it’s 315 or 19 with the Morocco find. That’s the latest in the fossil record, anatomically modern humans.

However, there are studies. I think this is in the other vectors directory. I’ve got those studies. There’s two studies that I reference usually. One is a DNA study that suggests from a genetic perspective, Neanderthals are our cousin. We didn’t evolve from them. We both evolved from a common ancestor. And they then, based on just looking at the genome and trying to trace it back, the paper suggests that we split with a common ancestor somewhere in the realm of 800,000 years ago. US and Neanderthals split from a common ancestor.

JOE ROGAN: Like that’s when we carved off eight hundred thousand years ago.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yep. And there’s another study on teeth morphology, which was… it actually got set up to try and prove that we’re only, you know, two, 300,000 years old, and now we’re looking at, “All right, some of our nearest common ancestor. How quickly does our dental teeth have to evolve and morph like this?” Teeth morphology, how quickly does that have to happen for us to basically have the teeth that we have today relative to our ancestors?

And they thought, “Well, it’s going to have to be this rate to make these numbers work.” And then they did this big statistical study on a lot of different people from all around the world, and they figured out the teeth, the rate of dental evolution is much slower. So they basically worked backwards from there and said, “Okay, so if that’s how quickly our teeth evolved, then we may have been around as many as eight or 900,000 years.”

So you have two different studies. I mean, again, fossil record 300,000. But other studies do suggest the possibility could be any up towards a million years old for human beings. It gets real interesting even within the 300,000 years. But certainly if you stretch it back further, I mean, you can find graphs of the temperature and the global temperature in ice core data from Antarctica goes back 400,000 years.

So you have these peaks and valleys like we’re in that peak right now in the Holocene, the nice warm period where civilization flourishes. But we’ve been through a bunch of those peaks before. And some of those valleys are, we know, as a result of cataclysm, like massive changes to the surface of the earth when nothing would be left.

So I, look, I honestly put the realm of possibility for advanced civilization, not just the last ice age, but within and, you know, up to a million years, potentially.

JOE ROGAN: That’s fucking crazy.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Could be.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s not.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’d be dust for a lot of it.

JOE ROGAN: But it would be dust what we would find now, but it’s not. But that’s what Michael Button’s argument, when you’re dealing with anatomically similar human beings or anatomically exactly the same creature.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Give us warm weather and, you know, enough food to eat and we start fucking solving problems.

JOE ROGAN: Which is one of the reasons why Egypt itself was so spectacular was that it was very fertile.

The African Humid Period and Lost Civilizations

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It was in the African humid period. This is one of my arguments is I think if we just assume for a moment that there was a civilization that flourished during the African humid period and before it when the Sahara was a savanna. And that’s why I think the Sahara is such an appealing target, is because what happened, right.

So if that civilization ends, we’re knocked back to a relative Stone Age. The people that were populating the north, people have been in the north, we know, for like hundreds of thousands of years, like people live. And if they’re going to start that civilization, they’re going to do it in the only part of that country that was habitable. It’s the Nile Valley. And that’s where all the sites of ancient Egypt are that we know about.

But they’ve all been, let’s assume they kick started with stuff and they built, been inherited and renovated and reused and the dynastic Egyptians made them their own, assuming there’s something there before. So what’s fascinating to me is the possibility that out there in the Sahara, maybe near an ancient water source or an ancient aqueduct or something, or an ancient aquifer, we might be another Serapeum out there, like this, subterranean things. There might be another serapeum, there might be another labyrinth buried beneath the sand somewhere that’s not been touched and it hasn’t been inherited and reused.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s where the Richat structure gets weird.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. And that’s on a timeline that could be very ancient because it’s very eroded and it’s hard to see anything like this. You know, it’s interpretive almost at this point to figure out that there’s… If there was a structure there or anything.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, right.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it’s interesting.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s also… That’s another one. When you go above and you look at the satellite imagery, you go, “Oh boy, that place got washed.”

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it did.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, that was what… That place is one of the clearest examples of a place that looks like it got washed because there’s literal salt deposits everywhere.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right? Yeah. I mean, it’s…

JOE ROGAN: Which is nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It is nuts.

JOE ROGAN: The whole thing is nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. I don’t know what happened.

JOE ROGAN: Jimmy Corsetti has some amazing videos on that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, yeah, everybody’s interested. Jimmy does and you do as well. Jimmy’s awesome. Yeah, that seems like it could be one of the places to look. I mean, actually, so Michael Donnellan is an interesting talk about Merlin Burrows. In that same satellite scan company there’s a guy named Michael Donnellan who’s been working. He was working with them, still is.

He’s putting out a documentary pretty soon called “Atlantica” and he thinks he’s found at least if not Atlantis, a part of Atlantis off the coast of Spain. And they for 100% found some shit in the waters and they’ve been diving on it for a couple years now and building a documentary. But it’s pretty convincing. He’s found again another underwater, if nothing else, megalithic city. He thinks it could be Atlantis as well. Off the coast of Spain.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. I saw that that documentary was coming out. I didn’t know exactly what they had discovered. Is there images that we could see right now?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We saw an advanced view of it until it comes out, but they discovered it with that Merlin Burrows scanning tech, the same satellite based tech. And then they went and dived on it and I’ve. We saw a cut down version of three episodes at this conference I went to and met him. I’ve since talked to him a bit. Fascinating. 100% found something. It is man made. Whatever it is. Yeah. So this is the preview little teaser thing.

JOE ROGAN: Ooh, when does this come out?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’m not sure when. It’s when the streaming. I feel like it’s got to be this year. I hope he’s mostly done with it says 2025. Okay, so then.

JOE ROGAN: Or at least the trailer.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That was Tim Alberino for a second. The old guy with the beard, when he was still alive.

JOE ROGAN: When did he die?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think it was just last year or the year before. Damn. Yeah, it sucks.

JOE ROGAN: I’m very happy I got John Anthony West on a couple of times before he passed.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s one of my big regrets is never actually having the chance to meet the man.

JOE ROGAN: He was great.

John Anthony West’s Legacy

BEN VAN KERKWYK: He’s phenomenal. You know, there’s a clip I use in my videos of him back in the 90s.

JOE ROGAN: Did you show any images, Jamie?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No, not really. Back in the night. John Anthony West. I use it in some of my videos. And he’s standing at this cabinet, the same cabinet I stand in front of. Take people there to the Cairo Museum. And he’s looking at this beautiful diorite vase with a super thin neck and it’s just, it’s this beautiful but tiny little thin neck on it and flared.

And he’s just saying, “You know how much these vases are an anomaly. They’re pre dynastic. We don’t know how they made them. You know, how do you machine out the inside of this vase through this tiny little neck? Someone did.” And he said, “I can only hope that at some point in the future people will start to apply modern technology and study these things and try to learn some more about it.” So it’s fantastic that that vase scan project is basically doing what he thinks we should be doing a ton about it.

JOE ROGAN: His DVD series “Magical Egypt” is what got me hooked.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I know. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That series is insane.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think it’s so good. He was great. A symbologist and that’s. And I think that’s symbologist’s view of ancient Egypt is fantastic. Occasionally he would touch on that. The engineering side of things that I’m quite deep on. Sometimes he’d ignore it too. It’s pretty funny.

I have a copy of his guidebook, which is hard to get these days, his guidebook to ancient Egypt. And it literally has about this much on the Serapeum because there’s just no real writing down in the Serapeum. That’s the place with the 25 giant hundred ton stone boxes. It’s one of the most remarkable logistical feats that come from ancient Egypt. But he just wasn’t. There wasn’t a lot for a symbologist to interpret in that place. So it’s “Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Go check it out.” Four hours down there.

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting if you think of him being concentrating on the symbolism and how much work he did and just. You need one of those two, right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: For sure.

JOE ROGAN: You need a bunch of different people looking at all the different aspects of it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It.

JOE ROGAN: And he was another one that had. His interpretation was this is a lot older.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It seems, no one seems to do a deep dive on it and go, “Oh no, no. They figured this out.”

BEN VAN KERKWYK: No. Right.

The “National Project” Explanation

JOE ROGAN: Zahi’s example was so crazy. His explanation was this was the national project.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Dude, I’ve, it’s so. I tried to watch that podcast.

JOE ROGAN: Imagine if we’re all going to fly without wings. This is the national project. You’re just going to use your mind to fly without wings. We’re all just going to work on that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I have heard him say that for 10 years. 11 years. 10 years, national project. Yes, I asked him that question. 2015, I was in the room with Graham Hancock and him having this debate which wasn’t a debate. And they were yelling. Zahi flipped out earlier in the day.

But you know, we asked him that question. I’ve heard him give him that answer so many times. You ask him about the anything precision or logistics, you know, all these difficult to explain topics. That’s the response it is. It’s basically they tried really hard, therefore they did. And it drives me nutty. He’s not the only one who gives that response, by the way. That’s a pretty stock standard answer to anything we say.

“Well, how did they move a thousand ton statue a thousand miles,” which is what they did at one point. “Or how did they build the pyramid so precisely or whatever. Or how did they do it in the time frame?” “No, no national project. They just really wanted to.”

And the response are good examples like the Apollo program, right? Going to the moon. That wasn’t, that was a national project at the time. There was a huge amount of resources put towards it from a relative to what NASA is today. But we didn’t just fucking all come together with a big piece of fabric and fling some people at the moon. There’s technology involved, right? You can’t do it without the technology.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s the aspect of that answer that annoys me. It’s “No, I don’t care how hard you try, try does not get you precise down to within a thousandth of an inch.” Or in the case of one of these vases, 4/10 of a micron or 6/10 of a micron. That’s the most extreme precision I’ve seen on one of them.

The Vases as Evidence

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s interesting too that these vases, these small things that you can hold in your hand are evidence of this incredible technology. When these enormous statues also exist. But you don’t think of the vases as being the thing that’s the smoking gun, but it kind of is.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They are. It’s because they predate the dynastic Egyptians because they were buried with those people. We know they existed in those times. You can’t do that with the big statues. But I have a whole long two hour talk about how these things connect to those things. The tube drills and the precision and the machining. It’s the same technique. It’s the stone types.

I mean, God, there are a bunch of tubular drills on the Great Pyramid, a whole bunch of them. People don’t know about them or where they are. But I’ve got pictures and I can show people. The statues show the same machining marks. The statues reflect the same precision. The boxes, the obelisks, a lot of the stonework reflect the same thing as well. The same tools were used. The same precision shows up.

And in pretty much all of those cases, the oldest and the best examples of all of those things are typically also the oldest. The best examples of the oldest. Yeah, the single piece columns are absolutely incredible. The Romans didn’t make columns like that.

The fact that these columns of granite in Egypt, I mean, they start off wide and they get narrower and narrow and narrow, and then they flare out at the top and it’s all a single piece. And that means that the entire piece that was quarried had to be as wide as the widest part at the top and then machined down. These columns have freaking vertical. They have lathe centering points on them. There’s a hundred. Imagine it’s 150 tons turning on a vertical lathe or something that they did to create some of these.

Evidence of Advanced Machining

JOE ROGAN: So there’s points that show that it was on.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, it was definitely centering points. Yeah, on these columns. There’s a forest of them laying out at Tanis, and you can see it on the end points. And can we show that?

JOE ROGAN: That’s nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And what is the weight of these things up to? I mean, I imagine the bigger ones are maybe 100, 150 tons, 200 tons. And you have these existing on Old Kingdom sites like Saqqara, Giza, Abusir, the single piece columns, they are also on sites later on that are attributed to the New Kingdom places like the Luxor Temple or Karnak.

However, I think that those places had a granite core and an infrastructure there already. And then those kings of the New Kingdom, Seti I, Merenptah, Ramses II built around them. And you can see the difference in technology of what’s in the granite core with the giant obelisks and the columns and the granite buildings that look like the Valley Temple and the old structure.

Then outside of that, it’s all sandstone and it’s blocks. And they made giant columns, too, but they’re made from blocks of sandstone. They would stack them up and shave them down. It’s a much softer stone. And making blocks out of rounds and just making columns out of rounds is way easier than trying to build a single flared granite column.

And even the Romans, I mean, it has to have been something like that. It can’t have been that all the way. Because you have actually, Jamie, in that precision large directory, there’s a picture of a column end, as I’m standing next to this amazing end piece. But some of them are faceted, so it can’t have all been lathe work. They have little buttresses and features. But certainly the column of the lathe, the circular part could have been done, or the column. The center of the column could have been done on a lathe. I’m sorry. Yeah. It’s fascinating how.

JOE ROGAN: Biggest length.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Huge. I mean, that’s what Chris Dunn thinks. Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the columns I’m standing next to. That’s at Tanis. And if you flip through, there’s a column end point. That’s. Yeah, there’s an end there. So see this? There’s a hole in the tip. So you have. You have a lot. This is a place called Temple of Bastet. And there were forests of these things. Look at that thing. That thing is one of the most.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s one of my favorite artifacts in all of Egypt. It is immaculate. That. That. The faceting. Look at that. That bullnose that runs up the center of that frond of the palm. Because these are palm shaped pillars. I mean, it tapers, it’s thick on one end and it thins right down to the end. And it’s exactly the same on either side on each of these fronds.

I would love to get there and scan this thing. One of my favorite pieces. And you just had probably hundreds of these things on these sites. I mean, even. And it goes back in time. Again, this is from. This is. These are pictures of columns from Saqqara and Abusir, which are all Old Kingdom sites. So again, these are existing in the early times. They didn’t build columns like this later in the civilization. They build them with sandstone pieces.

JOE ROGAN: Go back to those images again, please. Look how crazy that looks.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: One solid piece of granite.

Roman Engineering vs Egyptian Precision

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Even the Romans, who by all accounts had far superior technology to the Egyptians. They had force multipliers, they had iron. They had all sorts of mathematical skill. They got from the Greeks. They built single piece granite pillars. But they would taper it the whole way and they weren’t anything as precise. They’re quite rough. If you go to the Pantheon. This one’s one of my favorites. This is called Pompey’s Pillar. You can see the dude standing at the bottom. I’ve actually got a picture of me there as well.

JOE ROGAN: You see that dude at the bottom?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Zoom out so we can see the whole thing with him. It’s not working.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: There it is.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So I think that’s been reworked. That’s a reworked column that the Romans reworked, and they either carved that head top or it’s a separate stone. I’m not actually sure. But this is in Alexandria in Egypt. Huge.

JOE ROGAN: And where did that come from?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: And so this is how they do it. I don’t know. I mean, it’s Aswanian granite, but it’s like a thousand kilometers away.

New Kingdom Construction Methods

JOE ROGAN: So then when you get to New Kingdom.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So that’s what they did. This is the stacked rounds of sandstone. And this is – I always like to show people this corner of Karnak, because it’s an unfinished column on the end there. You can see how they did it. They’d stack up those blocks and they basically shave it down. And they would end up – and this is imitation too. Right? This is the other key thing.

You see, even with the vases, they would – I mean, people knew what was sophisticated. Anyone who works with stone, whether you’re primitive or not, you see an artifact like that or one of those statues or a column out of stone, you’re like, “Holy shit. How did they do that?” So you – it’s from the gods. Right? I’m going to imitate it and I’m going to try and replicate it.

And so they were doing their best to replicate and imitate, but with sandstone. With sandstone. And a technological method that they were capable of, which is to put blocks of sandstone up, shave it down and make it look like one of these columns. And they did great work. Right. Don’t get me wrong. Karnak is – this is the great hypostyle hall at Karnak. It’s phenomenal and it is the work of the New Kingdom. But it still pales in technological significance to the older stuff, the single piece stuff. But it’s fabulous.

I love Karnak’s one of my favorite places because you have all those examples right in front of you of high tech and then low tech.

JOE ROGAN: And so by New Kingdom, what year?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So like 1400, 1500 BC-ish.

JOE ROGAN: So even then, they’re still doing spectacular stuff. It’s just not as sophisticated.

The Height of Egyptian Civilization

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It was violence. Right. By all accounts, the Old Kingdom and the New Kingdom – that was Egypt’s height, the height of the dynastic Egyptian civilization. Ramses II in particular – I always call him the greatest of the Egyptian kings. Egypt had the most power, the most wealth, the most ability to do that sort of work. So they built these great temples and it’s very, very clear.

Yeah, this is that Pompey’s pillar that they call it. It’s very clear that they built them around and on top of existing infrastructure. In fact at Karnak, which is attributed to Ramses II – again, the devil’s in the details. You have the names of kings that go back all the way to the Old Kingdom on various structures.

You also, at one point in that hall where they pulled up a massive floor tile underneath the ground at the bottom there is a column base. It’s another older white calcite column base that is the same sort of column base that you see on the very oldest of sites. Which tells you there was a columned hall here before and either got destroyed or knocked down, but the whole place was rebuilt.

You see this evidence for these layers of infrastructure on these sites that tells you – it’s like looking at these ancient sites, you always have to keep that in the back of your head. There’s been thousands of years of not only inheritance, but renovation and reuse and claiming.

People have asked me if I think the statues are so old, how come they look like dynastic Egyptians? I think the answer is it’s the other way around. I think the dynastic Egyptians look like the statues. So if you imagine there’s evidence for five or six of these giant thousand ton statues, which are typical of stuff you see at Luxor with the headjet and the Nemes crown or the big bowling pin thing on the head. And they’re always in that iconic symbolic style of ancient Egypt.

Ancient Statuary and Iconography

JOE ROGAN: Can you go to some of those?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I have the precision. Large has probably got the statues. And imagine that you are a tribal culture that’s emerging from the dark, from the stone age. But you have this history and these legends of these stories and you come across – yeah, so this iconic look. And again this stretches back. This is an Old Kingdom statue attributed to – this is made of diorite by the way. This is called Khafre Enthroned. One of my favorite statues with the columns from Saqqara in the background.

JOE ROGAN: This is made out of that same hard stone?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. It’s like a 6.5 to a 7 on the Mohs scale. And it’s phenomenal. This is an incredible statue.

JOE ROGAN: And this exhibits that facial symmetry as well.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It looks like it. I’ve not seen the actual scans from this, but this thing actually has tubular drill marks and saw cuts in it too. So it’s got – between his heels is a – you see the remnants of a tubular drill.

JOE ROGAN: Keep that there, please.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’ve probably got a picture of that in my machining directory of the actual tube drill between the heels and then in the legs on the inside you can actually see overcuts, saw cuts from where they cut too deeply into this insanely hard stone and it’s overrun. Which is – if you were doing this by hand, that’s a mistake you’d have to be making for about four hours to actually get the depth of the cut. But if you had some sort of power tool that was moving, removing material quickly, you can overcut in there and there’s little mistakes.

JOE ROGAN: Go to the full of his, please.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So your thoughts are that the Egyptians were imitating these ancient looks.

The Inheritance of Divine Iconography

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes. I think they inherited their iconography from the things, the artifacts that they gained in statues like this and also the thousand ton versions of statues like this. And I mean, if you look at their art style, this is one of the things that blows my mind. It’s like across that 3,000 year civilization, that iconography didn’t change very much. It’s the same look.

And how do the kings draw themselves on the walls? They’re always trying to position themselves as being one of the gods. Right? They would talk about – eventually they got this aura of divinity. You became a God. The pharaohs became divine. That wasn’t always the case, but they grew into that over time as that civilization progressed. And they always match themselves and they try to make themselves look like the gods.

And again, eventually, once you get hubris and ego involved in some of these really big, really rich kings, you’re like, “Damn it, I am one of the gods. Put my name on his statue. That’s how I want to be remembered.” And that’s – there were multiple gods. Seti the First did it. His son Ramses II. His son Merinpatar, particularly in the New Kingdom. Petrie called Ramses “the great usurper.” That was his name for him because he was putting his name on everything, trying to label himself as one of the kings.

And I think if you look at that from the Old Kingdom through to the Ptolemaic era, it’s the same. They’re depicting themselves as one of these gods who are always depicted in the same way. And that’s part of it from day one, it feels like. And I think – where do you get that picture from?

It’s like that – what’s the poem from Percy Shelley? Ozymandias. “Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.” It’s literally a poem by Percy Shelley that talks about it. He actually gets it from, I think, Diodorus, an account of Diodorus Siculus coming across one of these statues in the desert. That’s a thousand tons.

It’s like a weary traveler in a desert in an unknown land comes along “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.” Nearby a shattered visage lies still full of sneer and arrogance. And it’s basically written upon this stone of the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my work, ye mighty and despair.” And the endless sand stretch far away. I mean, I’m paraphrasing.

JOE ROGAN: People are dead.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Especially when they become kings. There it is. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

BEN VAN KERKWYK: “Nothing beside remains round and round. Okay. That colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch.”

So it’s like if you imagine you come across in the sand in the desert and you find the remnants of a thousand tons – I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of the Ramesseum and the thousand ton statues. There’s four or five of them at least that happened. But they’re incredible single piece stone statues that were moved in some cases up to a thousand, six, seven hundred miles away. I have them in the colossal directory.

The Fall of Giants

JOE ROGAN: And did they fall from earthquakes? Is that the speculation?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I suspect either that or the hands of men. I think it was – I think with enough dudes, with enough leverage, you can probably tip that thing over and it’ll crack when it falls. And I think they were definitely – there was a long period of them destroying all the gods and all the icons and all the false idols of the past, of course.

At a place called Tanis, there’s a foot, there’s a giant foot that I can’t – I mean my whole hand wouldn’t fit in the toenail. And it’s a repurposed block of granite and Petrie found it. And there’s other pieces of this statue. So we know it was a statue that had it been standing, it’s about the same size as the Statue of Liberty without the pedestal. The foot’s about the same size. Just give it a frame of reference.

And that thing’s made from Aswanian granite. Now, Tanis is in the north and Aswan’s – and it’s north of Cairo. Tanis is up in the delta towards the Mediterranean, and Cairo is down here. It’s like a thousand kilometers. So someone at some point took at least a thousand ton, probably more like 1500 ton block of stone. Because they didn’t finish them. They didn’t ship them finished. We know they finished stuff on site. A thousand kilometers north is an even better example. Jamie, I think in the…

JOE ROGAN: In the foot.

The Massive Statues of Karnak

BEN VAN KERKWYK: The foot at Tanis. No, that’s it there, the first one. Yeah, in my. In the massive. Yeah. There’s actually my video thumbnail down there. Ancient tennis. Largest stone statue ever made. Huge objects. Huge objects. There you go. So there’s. Go up one. That’s the foot there. So you see, that’s the. It’s actually. It’s funny because this block’s been repurposed. It’s been cut off on both sides and used as a block in a wall. They cut the front off it and the back off it and stuck it in and rebuilt it.

This thing, this. There’s a picture of the whole arm when it was put together in that directory. So that’s a joint thumb holding a scroll and they put the whole arm together. I got one picture of it one time, I was there. They put the whole arm together. And that is probably the most impressive example. It’s in there, I’m sure. Let’s see. It’s down there. Yep. Up. Up one. There you go.

Yeah. So this, this is. It’s made from composite quartzite. So this is at Carnac. This is one of several of statues of this size at Karnak. And what’s impressive about this, they actually put this together for one year, then they took it apart because. And I got told that it was. Because they didn’t. People were freaking out about how big this must have been. They didn’t kind of. It gives a sense of scale. And then people are like, “What the fuck? How are they doing this?” So they took it apart again. But you can still see the thumb there today. So it’s turned on its side.

Now, what’s cool about this is, is that it’s a straight up. So a lot of those statues, like the One at the Ramessium. They’re seated, so they always have their elbows bent at their knees. This thing was standing, so it was a standing statue. Thousand tons made from composite quartzite, which is in a lot of ways more difficult to work than granite. It’s a very hard, compressed form of sandstone. It’s like 6.5 to 7, but it’s full of flint. It’s a stone carver’s nightmare. It’s like you can see the chunks of flint in the stone, but they somehow work that surface just with no problem going over flint, which is seven, seven and a half on the Mohs scale.

The Transportation Mystery

The trick with this statue is where that stone came from. That’s a Karnak in the south, Aswan for granite. Bit further south. Composite quartzite doesn’t come from Aswan. It comes from the Red Mountains, north of Cairo. And the tricky part here is that the Nile river flows north, right? So it’s like people. It’s because it’s north that people are like, “Oh, it’s flowing up,” but it flows to the north. So they had to take the block for that thing. I’d say 1500 tons easy. They had to bring that up river upriver, 600 miles or something. 500 miles.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I don’t know how you explain that. And there’s certainly no depictions of them doing that. That is a logistical feat. I mean, it’s. I don’t know how you can rival it.

JOE ROGAN: It was a national project. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Just a national project. They really wanted to. Dude.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s one of those really amazing mysteries because the actual facts of it are so spectacular that it defies any conventional explanation to the point where it opens up people to the possibility that maybe, maybe we don’t know. Almost every. Anyone listening to this, it’s even remotely reasonable. That sees that goes, “Okay, I think this picture is a lot bigger than we thought it was.”

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, that’s. Honestly my response to it too, is. I don’t know how they did this. You can’t do it primitive fashion. We literally tried. We’ve had the Thunderstone is the.

JOE ROGAN: How would they even do it today?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Hydraulics and diesel power, like, huge bar. I mean, I didn’t even know you try to move. I mean, it’s like. Makes newspaper headlines when they shift a load of like 150 tonnes on a. On a truck somewhere. A thousand tonnes these days. 1500 tons. I mean, we have cranes, we have the capability, but it’s usually by water and Giant. I don’t know if we could how we transport a load like that over anything other than water.

JOE ROGAN: Imagine the wooden boat and how hard.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Those dudes are rowing up river too.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, how deep is the water? And when you’re dealing with 150 tons, how far does it sink?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You know displacement? Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How much of a boat do you need? And can you fit a boat that wide?

The Aswan Quarry Evidence

BEN VAN KERKWYK: In the, in parts of the Nile you can. But I’ll tell you this, and I’ve looked at this, that you sure shit can’t do it at the quarry? Because this is what they say. You go to the quarry and this is an example I like to give people all the time. The unfinished obelisk, you know, at the Aswan Quarry, 1200 tons more or less. Like 10 tons off or something. They will tell you that. “Oh yeah. So there’s this low area in the quarry, that’s the harbor where they park the boat to take the, to take the stone.”

I mean you just. There is no chance that you could put that thing on a boat that even would. It’s like this is not in the realms of possibility for a boat to displace enough water to take a load like that obelisk. It would literally just be this giant clunk. It was just. It just can’t happen. And what’s more, that quarry or that, that harbor in the quarry, it’s. That isn’t a harbor. They, that’s an extraction. They pulled a fucking block out of there, the same size as the obelisk. It’s. And it’s gone. You can see it. I showed it’s an off limits area to the quarry, but we kind of get in there every time.

JOE ROGAN: So someone somehow pulled that off.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s already been done 100%. We know it has because we’ve got the statues. The blocks of that size and, and tonnage have been successfully transported and shaped. However, in that place they call the quarry in the harbour. It is, it’s all scoop marks. It’s the same technology.

And here’s where it gets wild, is that you can see the extraction that’s come out. It’s massive. Like basically like the Obelisk, the unfinished obelisk. So something like an order of 12 to 1300 tonnes in a piece got pulled out of there and on in the corner, right up at the end where you see the boxy end of whatever this was was taken out on the wall or there’s red ochre painting. It’s paintings of like emus or Flamingos and some other dolphins and other stuff.

Pre-Dynastic Artwork Discovery

And it, it’s an identical match for the art style and paintings that you find on pre dynastic pottery that comes from Nakata culture and before. It’s exactly the same. It’s not. It’s not dynastic Egyptian. It’s pre dynastic artwork that’s been put on the wall. I hope I have pictures of that. I know I do on here. It’s actually. I have a video called. I have a video where I look at all this on my channel.

But it is, it’s the exact same artwork that you see on the vessel. So it’s. To me, it’s an indication of there was a primitive. These people that were there are living there in the thousands of years before the dynastic Egyptian civilization rose were obviously in that quarry and they found this convenient wall to put some artwork on and they painted on it. Which tells you that, well, this extraction had to happen before that. Right. Had to have been taken out before that. And how far before, we don’t know. Can’t date the stone. So. But somebody took a piece like that out of there 100% with the same technology, the scoop marks and stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Have you found anything on that, Jamie? Once you get that, let’s look at the unknown obelisk too.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So to give people the unfinished obelisk.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the unfinished obelisk is how many feet?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That is definitely in that other directory. That’s. Yeah, that’s the. That’s the, the video about the obelisk.

JOE ROGAN: The unfinished obelisk is how long?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, God, it’s. It’s got to be 100ft long or something like that. It’s a.90, 80, 90ft long. I’m thinking you’ll see it in the picture. It’s. I mean, it’s a giant, giant block. I mean, so it’s not extracted either. That’s what I should say. It is still attached to the bedrock. So they were cutting it out and then for whatever reason, they stopped. But if you assume that the obelisk would have a square section, which means, you know, same width as, you know, like this, a square section. It would have its mass with the granite there at like 2.7 tons per cubic meter, is roughly 1200 tons.

JOE ROGAN: Did they stop because it was cracked or did they not?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s what they say. That’s what they say. I don’t think so. I don’t think that it doesn’t. To me, that’s hard to say whether it was cracked or not. It was people tried to quarry it after. There wasn’t much attempt made to quarry. I don’t know why you would. Even if it cracked, why not use it if it’s actually part. If it was done during dynastic Egypt, I mean, you’ve done all that work, you’ve cut out the trenches on all of it around. You could cut pieces out of that, it’d take way less work. You want to get a smaller piece of stone for something else, just cut it. Like you should use it. But that’s not what happened.

JOE ROGAN: Unless their technology was so sophisticated that what they wanted was very specific and they could just do it again.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. And maybe it didn’t crack. I think that’s an example, like you do see on a lot of these sites, like the Serapeum, like the Assyrian at the quarry, that something happened that meant tools down. Yeah. So here’s the painting, this is the pictographs, Those are the paintings. And if you compare that to what’s on like the pre dynastic vases, you’ll see exactly the same thing.

JOE ROGAN: Now, so these depictions of flamingos, was it possible to date the paint that they used?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I think you probably could. I don’t know if anybody ever has. I’d love to see that done. Yeah, I would love for that to happen. That’s. That’s a very good point because it’s. It just. There’s a few things in Egypt where I’m like, “Why don’t we date that?”

The Scoop Mark Mystery

JOE ROGAN: Sorry, Jamie, scroll down a little bit. That scoopy thing. No, below that. Yeah, they’re right there. What’s that?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So that’s another piece near. In the quarry. And this is. Puts the light of the stupid pounding stone theory of, of. Of how they explain this in the mainstream. Because these scoop marks, they tell you are pounding stones. This is another big piece. This is probably. We guessed this piece. It was probably going to be like a smaller seated statue, but still something’s maybe 150 tons. And they were cutting this out. So this, you can see this is the process of like carving out underneath it.

And so you can get in these trenches. And the scoop marks are crazy though, because they extend basically from the top of the wall like 15ft straight down these ridges. They go along the ground under and then up on the roof side. So if you’re pounding, you would have been doing this pounding up to pound that out. And it also, it’s a very sharp turn on the inside. There’s some. It’s the result of some tool.

JOE ROGAN: Also someone’s Got to be underneath it when it finally cracks loose.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yep. That would not. Yep. Don’t want the draw that short straw. Thank you very much. Yeah, we take people down into that area around this block every time. It’s great. And there’s very bizarre looking and you can grab that stone and whack at it and just see how. How little effect you’ll have with the meat, you know.

JOE ROGAN: But those stones were. Is that an example of what they are trying to claim was used?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: How long would that take? So is that the unfinished obelisk?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That is the unfinished obelisk.

JOE ROGAN: And so where is that sucker cracked?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: So there’s a couple cracks. Right. So this is the thing that there’s attempts at quarrying that have been made. I think it’s that crack up towards the top is what they say how it cracked, but we don’t know how it cracked.

JOE ROGAN: We don’t know if it cracked after the fact either.

The Unfinished Obelisk: A Tools Down Situation

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It’s possible that, I mean, like a lot of these places that it was a “tools down” situation. Just something happened to stop whether it was civil unrest, cataclysm, and this thing was buried too. Like that’s the thing. There was a lot of quarrying that happened after this at higher levels.

So this is… you got to imagine when you go to this quarry, it’s like they’ve cut the top off a granite mountain. I’ve taken so much granite out of there, huge granite mountain to get down to, you know, this sort of high quality granite, which is not surface level granite. You have to go 10, 12, 15 meters into granite to get blocks that are even possible to be this size or this, you know, one single piece.

And in fact, even now that you can see that like all of this has changed. This is not… there’s no staircase. All of that gravel up to the north of that has all been moved. We’re still clearing the site out, or they are. But when this was first discovered, it was buried in like 7, 8 meters of quarry rubble from all of the quarrying that had happened above it and around it like for thousands of years. The Egyptians, the Romans. Yeah, this was buried.

JOE ROGAN: How’d they know it was there?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, so there was… there was like an edge, one little edge piece poking out, like, “what the hell is this?” And then it was Howard, it was… it was Flinders Petrie’s assistant who actually excavated that site. And he had to like split a bunch of big blocks to even get it out of the way. It took them forever, but they eventually uncovered it all. Yeah. Wow. But it was the back end of this, like, seven, eight meters of rubble that they had to clear out.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s nuts.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, it is. And to me, it’s like, it’s quite plausible. It’s a possibility that that was there. It was done.

JOE ROGAN: Quite possible. There’s more of that stuff out there.

The Mystery of the Pounding Stones

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Oh, for sure. I mean, there’s many more quarries. This is just… because that’s in the quarry. That’s the quarry that’s sort of been cleared and made available for tourists. But just tons of quarries. Yeah, these are great pictures. That’s the dual image. This is when it first popped out. Yeah. So they had this section of… and they’re like, “wow, this is something else.”

But… and so what happened with the pounding stones are really interesting because there were thousands of them on the site. These round stones, however, the vast majority of them were broken. They were split. And… God, I’m blanking on the name of the guy who excavated the site, however… he was like, “huh? How come these are all broken?” And he tried to break him.

So he stood up on, like a, you know, 15 feet up, and he’s hurling these stones down onto the granite. Bang, bang. He had to do it like, 10 times. And eventually he cracks a chip off on them because they’re… they’re dolerite. They’re hard. They are harder stone. And look, you will eventually create enough dust. Eventually. I mean, it’s… it’s like the… there actually have been studies done. Dennis Stocks did a study. And it’s the volume. It’s basically you remove a bed. I think it was two thirds the volume of a golf ball in an hour of pounding. So not a lot. Not a lot. Yeah.

And if you can imagine, I like to tell people, it’s like you can only fit, like, you know, these… these trenches around this column. It’s not like you put a thousand dudes in there. They got to sit in there, like one person in one spot. And dudes. And so all you have to do is imagine all of that space being filled up with golf balls. Add another third for the… you know, because it’s two thirds of golf ball. And then maybe add another half again to that to account for the negative space between the balls. That’s how many hours it would take, which is… I mean, decades of effort. Like, it’s not… it’s not remotely possible to do it in any reasonable timeframe. People can’t. And also, pounding stones is like, come…

JOE ROGAN: On, how do you break it free? Well, that’s the issue, who’s underneath it when they’re pounding. Like, how does…

Ball Bearings Theory

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That’s what I think these balls were. So I think they’re very difficult to break. They’ve taken away all the broken ones, the only ones on site now these, like, little nice rounded ones. And even then you can’t do it from all the couple. You have to kind of let it go and catch it and you would… your arms would burn out in no time.

But I think the reason so many were broken, I actually, I think… and you can actually see this in the… in the harbor area. There are these channels that I think they cut under them. You can see the remnants of them where they took the big extraction out. And I suspect what they did was they would shove these balls of dolerite in there and it would provide them enough movement or just enough support where they could… they could cut the rest of the… of the… whatever scoop out or remove the other attachment points.

And then you’re also, once you get out of that trench, you can now shift this thing ever so slightly to get whatever you would need to get under it to lift it up out of there. Because that’s the other problem with the obelisk is, like, it’s on an angle and I mean, the trench is going to be when it’s completed. They had only dug down two thirds as deep as they needed to go, so that trench at its thickest point would have been like 12, 15 feet deep down there. And you got to get under it.

So you still… it’s on an angle. You have to lift that thing up 15, 20 feet up in the air to get it out of the trench and then somehow move it to get into this rocky, crazy environment, to move it, to get it somewhere, to then take it wherever else you’re taking it. But you’d have to be able to maneuver.

So I think… I honestly think those dolerite balls could have been used as primitive ball bearings. That would just… that’s all they were used for, was to support it while you cut it free. And then… and then it would… a lot of them would have snapped in half under the mass of something like that, which explains why so many of them were broken, because you ain’t broken those things by pounding on them like it’s just not going to break.

JOE ROGAN: That actually makes sense that they were used as some sort of a ball bearing.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But even so, even if that’s the case, like, how, what…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Well, how you lifting it and what are you doing to lift that obelisk out of…

JOE ROGAN: How many people are involved. If it’s just manual labor, you cannot…

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Fit enough people around that obelisk to even come close. Like not you probably not even to get 10% of the amount of people. Like it’s so… it’s such a rocky weirdness. You can’t fit that many people around it today. I have no idea how they, I mean, I don’t think they were doing this without the expectation that they could get it done. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: But what kind of conventional explanation is this?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: There’s nothing there for this. There’s nothing, it’s nothing, there’s nothing.

JOE ROGAN: They just gloss over it. We don’t know. They say we don’t know.

The Logistics Problem

BEN VAN KERKWYK: They don’t address the realities of the thousand tons. I’ve not seen anyone address those realities. Well, okay, so they do. And there’s, and it’s like with logistics, they will show you pictures where the Egyptians are moving something that is 100 tons or 150 tons and say now that’s not how logistics works.

So for example, with the statues we know they scale right up to, you know, thousand tons or more. There is a picture on a tomb of a guy named Djehutihotep and I’ve got this in the statues directory. I think it’s a painting on a wall and it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a sled with this statue and there is like, you know, rows of guys. They’ve got the, you know, the imprint of dudes behind dudes and they’re all pulling on a rock rope, no pulleys. Again, they didn’t have force multipliers. They were just straight pulling wooden levers. A wooden sled. They’re dragging this statue.

In the case of this statue, we know about this statue, there’s pieces of it left. It was made from alabaster. Calcite’s not as heavy as granite. But it probably weighed… the estimate of how much it weighed was 57 tonnes, which is quite a lot. It’s respectable, right? And you can imagine. But with enough labor and on a sled, this is it. This is a 57 ton statue. There’s a guy pouring something on the sand or in front of them.

So you can count all these dudes in the shadows of the dudes behind them on these ropes. And so there’s a figure about it and there’s been papers written about this. There’s literally, I think a Japanese team wrote a paper about what would it take to do this. And okay, this is possible for 57 tons. With enough people, enough horsepower, you can do it.

Now it’s not like that scales up on like a linear increase in difficulty to something that’s a thousand tons. It’s more of a logarithmic exponential curve. You can’t, you cannot take this explanation and apply it to something that’s a thousand tons. It’s 20 times as heavy. The friction coefficient goes through the roof. Those sleds would literally just drive into the ground. You can’t, you get to… you’re in realms of mass where it’s like material failure becomes a problem. Wood is no longer sufficient to support that. You cannot, you certainly can’t move it up any slopes. You have to do all this ground preparation work to even attempt it. And they move these things like a thousand kilometers.

JOE ROGAN: If there’s a place that you could go back in time and see that is it. That is it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah. Quarry would be a good one. God.

JOE ROGAN: If you could go back in time just to see construction, just I guess quarry. But I mean, I mean pyramids. How are you lifting things? What are you doing? What does your machinery look like? You must have some kind of technology that is just dust in the wind.

The Thunderstone: A Modern Comparison

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Now it has be to, to be because we’ve tried this. Like there’s an exact… do you know about the Thunderstone? You heard of this thing?

JOE ROGAN: No.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: So no, I did hear about this.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: In like the 1700s. I think it was pre industrial age. Well at the early days. But no diesel power, no hydraulics. And this is the Thunderstone. So we did like in Russia, they moved this thing from Finland to Russia. It’s at St. Petersburg. They carved it as they went. It’s the, it’s the base now for I think a bronze statue of Peter the Great.

JOE ROGAN: Great.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: But this is how they did it. And so basically you can see the cap stands, the twist things these dudes are working on. They’re rotating. They would dig these giant holes to anchor these big logs in the ground to then use pulleys and force multipliers with dudes on giant rails. And then they would have these huge big iron rails that they would put on the ground and carry back and forth. And the whole thing was moving on these bronze spheres, these big giant bowling ball sized spheres of bronze. And on a good day they’d move this thing 150 meters. What’s that? 450 feet.

JOE ROGAN: Still pretty impressive.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, but it took them years and years and then… and this thing weighed around 1500 tons.

JOE ROGAN: It’s interesting that using bronze spheres you know, brass spheres. I’m sorry, whatever. Metal spheres, which is very similar to what you’re describing with the obelisk.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. But there’s again, when you compare the level of technology here to ancient Egypt, Egypt ain’t… there’s nothing. There’s that they have. They show you what they did with that Djehutihotep image. It’s a wooden sled, no force multipliers, no cap stands, no pulleys. No, none of that. Just dudes yanking on a rope. There’s no evidence they use pulleys.

JOE ROGAN: Pouring water on the sand, milk or whatever.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Right. Oil, who knows? It’s… it’s just stupid. You can’t take… you cannot explain it. When it took us everything they had for years and years to… to move that. And by the way, they did… they took that across the Gulf of Finland. And it wasn’t on some little river barge either. They built a giant platform. Took them a year to build it. And then they had to put warships on either side of it to keep it balanced. It’s massive. To even plop this thing in the center and hope that they got this thing and go over to Russia to then move it the rest of the way.

So it ain’t no barge carrying a thousand tonnes down the Nile. No, it’s nuts. Something happened.

JOE ROGAN: It’s all so fascinating. And “something happened” is actually the only answer we have.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, yeah, I would agree. Yeah.

Wrapping Up the Conversation

JOE ROGAN: Ben, you’re awesome, man. I really, really appreciate you coming on here. Your channel, UnchartedX. Fantastic channel. So much good content. How long have you been doing it now?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I’ve been doing it. I mean, I quit my job 10 years ago, but not, I mean. UnchartedX.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God. You had the courage to do that.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: It was a big old step. The wife was like, “What are you doing?”

JOE ROGAN: I know, but look, you were right. It worked out.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I am super grateful that it’s worked out. In fact, I want to, I mean, obviously thank you for the hospitality and the invite. And I genuinely also think, dude, I’ve come full circle with this a little bit.

What got me into it in the first place. Genuine. I mean, I was always interested, but it wasn’t until Graham’s first, who I’ve gotten to know very well over the years. I love that man. It wasn’t until his first appearance on your podcast back in the old days, was it 2011, 2012, something like that.

JOE ROGAN: He was my first real guests. Yeah, that was just me and Duncan, that one.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: You and Duncan, right at your house.

JOE ROGAN: At my house. That was what I was doing at my house.

Full Circle Moment

BEN VAN KERKWYK: That one was what really. I mean, after that, I followed him really closely. I went to Peru and Bolivia with him in 2013, and then 2015, I went with him to Egypt.

So it’s the fact that I’m here talking to you now, you started me on this and it’s come full circle. So thank you for that. And the fact that you are interested in this topic, I think is such a boon to everyone else out there that you get to spread the word and it’s just such a benefit to the whole space.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m so happy that guys like you took that fucking baton and ran with it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: But, I mean, wild ride. I love it.

JOE ROGAN: My answer to all this is, who’s not? I don’t understand you. If you’re not interested in this, how is this not unbelievably fascinating?

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, 100%. I agree. That’s what happened to me. I fell down this pyramid shaped hole and I was doing. I mean, I had quite a career before this in the tech world, but I mean, I’d go to conferences and tech events.

And the second that we’re out in the break room, I’m talking about the Younger Dryas and pyramids and massive statues, Graham Hancock, and they’re like, “This is really interesting.” I’m like, “I know.”

The Most Fascinating Time in History

JOE ROGAN: It’s literally the most interesting thing about civilization, that time period and the mysteries that are involved in trying to just decipher what happened.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It is the most fascinating time in history, I think.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Again, thank you so much.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: We’ll definitely do this again.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I would love to.

JOE ROGAN: Especially if some more information comes out about the labyrinth and hopefully more people. You know, we’re also picking up the baton and people get involved.

Looking Forward

BEN VAN KERKWYK: I see that happening. I’m very glad that it is. I’m absolutely. I’m thrilled to see other people getting into the field. I’m not a. I don’t see any of this as. It’s not competition. It’s all. It’s a rising. Found it.

JOE ROGAN: Come on, jump on board. You could definitely say you found it. You could. Everybody will agree that you found it.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: We didn’t talk about the Sphinx and the stuff in the star shop, but save that for next time.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s do it again then.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: Definitely do it. I would love to.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you so much.

BEN VAN KERKWYK: This was awesome.

JOE ROGAN: All right, bye, everybody.

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