The Why Files: Operation Podcast

00:00 Today we're talking with Cassie Coppersmith. She grew up on a Nebraska corn farm, 12 kids in her graduating class, and spent 12 years buying and selling gold mines for the biggest gold miner on Earth. Then she quit with no plan, spent four days alone on a mountain with no food, and came out looking at rocks. 00:17 Four days alone, no food, hearing voices. It sounds like someone got here holding a good bloppus. 00:24 Today we're covering the LiDAR scans of Anchor, the water system she thinks the Khmer inherited rather than built, the stone spindle she says came off a lathe, and why she's at 75% on Bigfoot. 00:35 75%? I'm 100%. That hairy bastard owes me 40 bucks. 00:40 And the three nights in the largest cave on the planet? Before it lights out, the guide told her, if you hear a baby crying, don't worry about it. 00:47 Don't worry about it. The same thing the Air Force said about Roswell. 00:52 After our conversation, I'll come back and break down the talk. Let's go down to the basement. 01:03 Cassie's here. 01:05 So, you worked on mining and now you study rocks for a living. Is Coppersmith the stage name like Luke Caverns? 01:11 Coppersmith is my maiden name. 01:13 But it's real? 01:13 It's real. It's real. 01:15 Okay. 01:16 And what's interesting is my grandfather, so Coppersmith's on my dad's side, obviously. My grandfather on my mother's side worked in the Copper Queen mine in Bisbee, Arizona his whole life. 01:27 So it's a very strange coincidence, but yes, I was a Coppersmith until I got married. 01:33 That's funny. 01:34 Yep. 01:35 So we have to do the Wallace to Wall Street tour. 01:38 Hmm. 01:39 So did you say that there were 12 people? I'm lisping because I'm missing a crown right now. I apologize. So I'm going to lisp through this whole thing and wince when I drink coffee. You had 12 kids in your class? 01:51 12, K through 12. It was the same class of 12 kids. 01:55 How do you field a basketball team? 01:58 And what position did you play? 02:00 I was a post. So we only had three sports, volleyball, basketball, and track. The only three options. So we did all of them. Everybody did everything. 02:09 And you, you know, I was a starter my freshman year. So you just get all four grades to play and you can, you know, it's eight man football. 02:19 Oh, wow. 02:20 Yeah. 02:20 Okay. 02:21 So it's like a track meet. 02:22 Yes. 02:23 Is everyone in the school plays too? Yeah. 02:25 Yes. Oh, school plays, speech and drama. 02:29 You know, you name it. We were in everything. I was almost never actually in school. I was off doing events all the time. 02:36 What was your favorite extracurricular thing to do? 02:38 I think it was sports. We were very good at speech and drama. So we were state champions in high school. And you'd go and you'd perform any number of things. Sometimes you were just teaching people things. Sometimes you were performing a play or whatever. But we went and competed at the state level and won multiple times when I was in high school. So it was just this funny little small town where you were prepped for anything in life because you were one of the only kids that could participate. 03:09 Did they give you like a parade when you came home? 03:12 No. 03:13 No. You know, it's funny. With the 12 kids in my class, I think maybe half of us ended up going to college and the other half just went straight into the trades, you know, whether it was diesel mechanics or you name it. So it was not an environment where you're constantly thinking about college prep or my career or what's life going to look like outside of this small town. It was very, very tiny. I grew up on a dirt road. Yeah. 03:41 Everybody knew everything that was going on in your life all the time, and for better or worse. 03:45 Right. 03:46 They know when you go out too late on a Friday night with your friends in the cornfields, but they're also there for you if something goes down that you need help. So that's just the nature of growing up in a very tiny town. 03:57 What do they think of you now? 03:59 I don't know. I don't know that they do think of me now. 04:01 They do. 04:03 I think I'm friends with a couple of them on Facebook, in touch with a couple of them today. I think... 04:09 Most people are just surprised that I decided to leave corporate America and pursue this weird YouTube thing. 04:15 It's definitely weird. 04:18 On Joe's show, you brought out a point that your grandfather found. Yes. Why did he have rocks delivered? What was going on that day? 04:28 We grew up... 04:32 My family emigrated from Germany six generations ago, and they were on their way across America, and they stopped in Wallace, Nebraska. I don't know why they didn't continue going to, like, Fort Collins, Colorado. That's much prettier. They stopped in Nebraska. And we've been there ever since. You know, my grandfather was born in the house that he died in, that my father was born in. I was raised... 04:55 You know, two miles away from that house. My brother lives three miles away from that house today. So just a very tight little family unit. 05:02 And back in the day, farmers were not nearly as good as they are today. So there used to be, you know, or efficient and effective. So you would get these situations where wind would blow the tops of your the topsoil of your fields away. 05:16 um that doesn't happen today but it did back in the day and so when i was growing up um the whole family are pilots and there was a grass runway at my grandfather's house and we would my dad would literally fly over fields and look for blowouts in like the neighbor's fields and our fields and things like that and we would go out on sunday afternoons after church and go arrowhead hunting i was going to ask you about the um the airstrip because that's that's still registered with the faa is it really yeah did you see your your farm from the sky who's the pilot I don't know. 05:47 Who took the photo you mean? 05:49 No, I mean, did you ever see... Did you ever go up in a plane? 05:53 Oh, yeah. Many times. 05:54 So who was flying? 05:56 Either my grandfather or my father. My brother also has a pilot's license. So my grandfather used... He had a little AirCoop airplane, and he loved to take you out and fly around. And if my dad needed a part from the field, he would call my grandpa. My grandpa would jump in the AirCoop and fly to town and get the part and fly home. And even some of my... 06:17 my birthday parties when i was a little girl we would all be playing outside and then we'd hear the plane coming oh wow and it would be my grandpa and his air coupe and he would fly over our birthday party and he'd drop candy bars with parachutes wow because in the air coupe you can just pull the the window down on top and he would just throw them out and so these this candy would fall from the sky and everybody would cheer um so it was it was really special it was a very small town very special life 06:44 I thought it was cool getting picked up on a Harley, but that's way cooler. 06:47 Yeah. I mean, I used to get flown to track meets because, you know, going from a speech and drama competition in the daytime or a track meet and then a speech and drama competition or a track meet and then prom, my dad, it's too far out there. So he would just fly me from one place to another in our little airplane. 07:03 Your dad and grandpa sound very cool. 07:05 Very cool. 07:06 How did he know your grandfather? How do you know that was an arrowhead or a spear point? 07:11 I mean, I think everybody knew that. I think, you know, his father picked him up. If you walk across an open landscape and you look down and you see a Native American point, you recognize it immediately. You just know. 07:26 In that instance, the point that I brought on Rogan was... 07:32 it's a very sandy area where I grew up. And so in your yard, you wanted it to be gravel because then you don't get puddles and mud and things like that. And so he would, they would take gravel from the Platte river and they would bring it to the yard and they would just dump it. And of course my grandpa was just walking out in his yard because there's all sorts of stuff that comes out of the Platte river. You can find fossilized teeth and you can, you can knit, you can walk the Platte river today. 07:55 In the spring it'll flood. And then once it floods and comes down, you can walk in the river and look for things. And so he kind of knew, I think he probably, I don't know this for a fact, but I would guess every time he got a load of gravel delivered, he went out and looked. 08:08 And looked. 08:09 But he did find that Jimmy Allen point out just right in his front yard. 08:12 Did he give it to you that day or did you inherit that? 08:15 I inherited it after he passed away. 08:17 So Joe pulled out his own point and you dated it. 08:20 It was an archaic point. So you can tell the date of the stone of the point by the width of the base. And that would have been indicative of the type of shaft it was attached to. So if it's very small, like a bird point, then it's going to be a bow and arrow situation. His point had a wider base, which means it would have been like a mid archaic kind of point. So potentially at a lateral point. Okay. So they would have thrown it in a different way, and you can just kind of tell it's older. 08:51 I'm not super familiar. I think that was a Texas point, so a little out of my wheelhouse, but that's what it looked like to me. 08:57 It's still impressive. You have that baby bird point that you talk about. Is that an arrowhead? 09:02 Yeah. 09:03 That little one? 09:03 Very tiny. Yeah. 09:05 So your channel is Secrets in Stone. Okay. There's a plug. Everyone go watch it. Super fun. 09:14 Did you get part two up yet? You just got back from India, right? I don't think you posted that yet. So here's a case file almost nobody opens. August 15th, 1971, Sunday night. The president goes on TV and without a vote from Congress, cuts the last link between the dollar and gold. He called it temporary. That was more than 50 years ago. Since then, the dollar has lost over 85% of its buying power. Pretty much every paper currency in history ends up the same way. Gold? Gold has been money for thousands of years. 09:46 Pharaohs, Romans, pirates, all of them new. And here's the strange part. Central banks, the people who print the money, have been buying gold by the ton for years. That's why I trust Golden Crest Metals, real gold and silver you hold in your hand. Can't be hacked, can't be printed, can't be switched off. Buy with cash or move an old IRA or 401k into physical metals. Golden Crest walks you through every step. Honest pricing, no pressure. Take my word for it. Do your own research and start with the free info kit. 10:16 Go to whyfileslovesgold.com or take your phone and text the word files to 638257. That's whyfileslovesgold.com or text files to 638257. 10:28 Some files stay open forever. Your savings shouldn't be one of them. Claim your free info kit today. Visit whyfileslovesgold.com or take out your phone and text the word files to 638-257. 10:38 I haven't done my India videos yet. What's going on? I'm a little behind. Okay. I had a very busy summer, lots of travel and things. I'm Joe Rogan. 10:50 And so I wanted to get my Easter Island videos out. I just released my second Easter Island video, I think, last week. And so when I get home, I'm going to get started on India. And it's going to blow people's minds. 11:03 Is it? 11:04 Yes. Okay. 11:05 The things in India are fully unexplainable. And these sites are, you know, I didn't see any American or European tourists anywhere at any of these sites. It was all, you know, locals, local families walking around and things like that. And so they're not heavily trafficked and they're not heavily researched. There's not, if you think about, researching Easter Island or even Cambodia there's going to be just a wealth of archaeological reports and historical accounts you can read these sites that I went to in southern India there's almost nothing so it's really interesting how few people have focused on them and so I'm gonna put a couple episodes probably out on Hampi and then one on the giant Baobali statue so I'll get at least three episodes out of my India trip maybe four 11:54 I think the ancient Indian civilization should get more credit for... I think they're part of Cambodia. I think they're part of all of that. 12:03 And I think they're as old as Egypt. 12:05 Yes. 12:06 I think you're right. Maybe older. 12:08 And if you think about... You know, if I think about... If you asked me what were the three oldest places in the world, I'd have to say Peru, India, and Egypt. Mm-hmm. It's just... 12:20 And those were landmasses that would not have suffered the way that North America did, you know, during a Younger Dryas kind of event. 12:28 That's true. 12:28 So, you know, India used to be connected to Sri Lanka. It was actually a bigger landmass than it is today. 12:35 So, yeah, it's preserved. Who knows how old the things are in India? And there's just, you can plan. I probably have 10 trips that I could do to India and still not even come close to scratching the surface. 12:47 Of course. Yeah. 12:49 Okay, so you go to school for finance? 12:52 Finance. 12:52 Why? 12:53 I don't know. I went there thinking – I went to Creighton University in Omaha – Thinking I was like, no, I'll be a doctor. That's what everybody thinks when they go to school. And I took chemistry and I was like, this is terrible. I hate this. And so I took a finance class and I got a straight A. And I was like, oh, this is my thing. So I graduated because I grew up in a very tiny town. 13:14 I had 23 college credits when I graduated from high school. And so I went to Creighton and I said, I'm going to graduate in three years. And they were like, that's going to be too hard. And I was like, no, I'm going to do that. And I did. I graduated Creighton in three years in finance. 13:27 I got to work for a private equity firm in Omaha that was connected loosely. It was like the relatives of Warren Buffett. 13:39 And being in Omaha was neat with a finance degree because our finance classes got to go volunteer at his annual meetings. Yeah. 13:46 Wow. 13:47 So I got to attend a Warren Buffett, you know, giant annual meeting in Omaha. And we got to help set up chairs and, you know, watch Charlie Munger sit up there and drink Coke. 13:56 That's kind of awesome, though. It was so cool. 13:59 So yeah, I grew up, you know, it's still Nebraska, but it was a really neat finance experience before I even went out into the world. 14:07 So how did you end up in New York? And why are you hating on my town everywhere you go? 14:12 New York was very difficult on me. 14:15 Why? 14:16 Where'd you live? 14:17 I lived on the Upper West Side. 14:19 Sure. 14:20 And worked on kind of Fifth Avenue-ish. So I hated the subways. I walked across Central Park every day to go to work. 14:31 Why was... 14:32 It was... 14:33 New York was not great when you were there. 14:35 Well, I think it was, I think New York itself was fine and the people were fine, all of that. It was a very difficult transition for me being a very small town girl. Even Creighton's a small school. It's, you know, a Jesuit school. And then suddenly I was living in a city of, how big is it? Eight million people in New York City. And it was the most alone I had ever felt in my life. 15:00 Really? Mm-hmm. 15:02 And, you know, I was working 12, 14 hours a day, seven days a week. It was a very intense work experience. So I never had a chance to make friends. I never really had a chance to rest or really experience the town or anything. And so it was one of those life experiences that I'm very grateful for. I learned so much about myself and what I did and didn't want in this life. But it was, you know, when you're a finance kid, you want to be an investment banker. 15:32 Sure. 15:32 You know, that's what you're told. You know, it's like the pinnacle of if you're going to be in finance, you got to go do that sexy investment banking job in New York City. And that's what I did. 15:41 So what was a Tuesday like? A bad Tuesday. 15:43 A bad Tuesday was wake up. 15:48 You probably slept six hours. You go in. You're already behind. You've got a pitch that you need to do to a potential client. You're creating the pitch book. 15:59 You get 15 rounds of edits on said pitch book. Every time they find an issue with your spreadsheet or your comps or whatever, you're getting... 16:09 You're getting told how you need to be so much better. 16:12 You process edits all day long for this pitch book. You order dinner at the office because there's no way you're going to be done before 10 p.m. You eat dinner at the office, something very fattening and unhealthy. You haven't seen the sun in 10 hours. And then because you're the lowest on the totem pole, it's your job. 16:33 What's that movie with Meryl Streep, the fashion one in New York City? 16:39 Devil Wears Prada. Devil Wears Prada. 16:41 I was the one that took the pitch books to my boss's house at 10 o'clock at night once they were all. And we printed them and bound them and put the spiral in it. And I would take a cab to her house at 10 p.m. and I'd have a stack of pitch books. I'd put it on her porch and then I'd go home and I'd just cry. 17:00 Cry myself to sleep and then start over the next day. 17:04 Is she still in business? 17:06 I don't know if she is. 17:07 Did you hate her? 17:10 I didn't hate her. She was tough. She was one of the first female managing directors at Lehman Brothers. 17:18 So she was hardcore, and she was wicked smart. But she was extremely tough. 17:25 Like, not in a, I'm going to make you feel okay about your mistake. Like, if you made a mistake, and certainly if that mistake made me look like I didn't know what was happening in the meeting, you were berated. Yeah. 17:36 Well, she came out of the bailout culture. 17:38 Totally. And she was a woman that was forging a new path on Wall Street. So I still have a lot of respect for what she was able to build for herself. Sure. She started at a major investment bank. She went and started her own firm. 17:53 And I went and worked for that small firm. And she was out there eating what she killed. 17:59 She had to be tough. 18:00 She was extremely tough. But it taught me a lot also about the type of boss I never wanted to be. 18:06 When I was in higher up levels in my organization. So, you know, you learn like everything in life. I feel like you learn way more from the difficult experiences. 18:16 You do the good ones from the bad bosses. You definitely do. Totally. You were in New York. How long? 18:21 Just like a year and a half. 18:25 When you're an analyst, you're supposed to be there two years, then you get promoted. I couldn't make it to two years. I was just... Wow. 18:32 So is New York on the front end of your career or the end? 18:35 It was the very first job I had out of college. 18:37 Okay. 18:38 Yeah. 18:39 So you left New York, but you stayed in corporate in gold mining? Yeah. 18:43 I didn't go into gold mining directly. I went into like real estate finance in Denver. So I moved to Denver after New York City, did real estate finance for maybe three or four years, real estate development for a year, and then I went to grad school. And at grad school, then I got the internship at the gold mining company. 19:02 Buying and selling gold mines. Yes. How does that work? 19:05 Well, Newmont Mining is the world's largest gold mining company based in Denver. 19:11 And I never set out to be a gold miner. My goal was to get paid to travel the world. That was it. 19:18 And I knew that that's all I wanted. And so I interviewed oil companies and gold mining companies and things like that. And this company was based in Denver. I wanted to be in Colorado. And I thought, well, that's perfect. I've got a little investment banking experience. It was a corporate development internship. 19:35 So I got in on the finance side of this company. And if you're mining, you know, 6 million ounces of gold a year, you have this natural problem you're facing where you need to either be discovering or purchasing ounces to replace what you mine. And so the exploration team and the geologist did an awesome job of discovering. My job was if we have a mine that's been depleted or... 20:02 economically, the gold price is too low, so you can't make money. So is that a candidate for divestment? So you were divesting used up mines and you were out there looking for and competing for the new property that needed to be part of your portfolio. And so that was basically my job. 20:20 This sounds like high pressure again. 20:22 Yeah, it was very high pressure. It wasn't high pressure in the way that New York was because it's a corporate environment where people at Newmont were there for their entire careers, 25 years. 20:34 How much money is moving in a goldmine deal? 20:38 Oh, billions. 20:39 Billions? 20:40 Yeah. Yeah. So a couple hundred million will buy you a medium-sized mine. 20:46 But we did mega mergers while I was there. So we bought a company called Goldcorp up in Canada, and that was a multi-billion dollar deal. And I was actually on the integration team for that deal, which was really interesting. So you purchase this huge company and you have to try to merge the portfolios and figure out Who do you let go? And what do you need? And how do you find these efficiencies that you promised the market you were going to find? And so that was one of the really interesting times in my career was integrating those two companies. 21:16 I guess it's a low margin business, right? 21:18 Very. 21:18 Yeah. 21:19 I mean, maybe not right now. It's probably, you know, fuel prices are high. I haven't been reading their reports, but I can imagine at $4,000 gold, they're making pretty good bank. 21:29 Is it going to six? Yeah. 21:31 Maybe. I don't know. I've never been good at predicting good price. 21:35 Nobody has. Yeah. 21:36 Yeah, I don't know. 21:38 I kind of bought at the top. 21:41 I sold my Newmont shares at the bottom. I sold them. I think they're at like $100 right now, and I sold them at $60. Yeah. So I left a lot of money on the table, which is okay. 21:51 You don't know. 21:51 Yeah. 21:53 You said that if you went back, you would probably be a geologist. 21:57 Yes. 21:57 Because you mentioned geologists. It reminded me of that. What can they see in a rock or a stone that you can't see? 22:03 First of all, what you may not know about geologists is they are the most optimistic human beings on Earth. 22:10 Just broad brush? Yes. 22:11 The happiest people, every small test result is going to be the next multi-billion dollar mine. 22:21 They are so optimistic about what's in the ground. We would put these big due diligence teams together. So I never had to specialize in engineering or geology or anything like that. My job was to analyze the math and negotiate the deal. Yeah. The geologists were always my favorite people on our due diligence teams because they were super happy. They'd come in in jeans and T-shirts. They didn't dress up. You couldn't make them. You know, if they were presenting to the board, maybe they would. 22:52 But other than that, there's no chance you're going to see them in a suit. 22:56 And when we would go out and do due diligence on the ground, I would always choose to go with the geologists because, you know, some people are going to be standing in the mill talking about the equipment there. And the geologists are up on the hill overlooking the site and saying, you know, I think the big one is over there. We've got to get drilling over there. So, and their knowledge was so deep. I mean, they fundamentally understood the cycles that the earth has gone through. So they know why the earth folded over itself and a certain mineral and a certain deposit was created here or there. 23:30 So it was really cool to see them look at like a cliffside and they just know what's there and they know what happened. And I thought that was just a really amazing skill set that I would love to have. 23:42 And you'd find them being right a lot? Yeah. 23:43 Yeah. They're right a lot. They're wrong a lot too. I mean, it's kind of a, it's like gambling, you know, especially if you're, you know, it's expensive to drill. So you have this constant trade-off intention between how much money do you put in the ground to prove out the resource and when do you just go mine it? And the geologists would drill all day long if they could because they love getting those results and saying, oh, the high grade's over there or whatever. 24:12 And you've got – it's just an economic tradeoff. But, yeah, they ride a lot. 24:16 Did you ever find a geologist who could just snip the gold, who just could find the color? 24:22 I'm using deadwood lingo. I don't know if it still applies. 24:24 There were very talented geologists. And Newmont had a bunch of very big discoveries on their own. 24:31 Nowadays, most of the big discoveries are made by exploration companies. So it's their only job. And they're the true wildcatters, right? They're out there. They're like, you know, in northern Canada, under that glacier, I bet you there's a huge gold mine. So they'll go up, they'll raise the funds, they'll drill it out, and then they'll try to sell their gold mine to us. Right? So... 24:53 So you're looking at samples and all kinds of stuff. Totally. 24:56 And yeah, so if you're doing these five-year plans in Newmont, in my mining company, you're doing a lot of trade-off between how much money are we going to put into the ground exploring and how much are we just going to set aside to buy. 25:11 So yeah, there were some geologists that were very, very good at finding things. But as the company gets bigger, it feels like more of the big discoveries are made by the smaller companies and the bigger ones just... purchase them it's like less risky sure you know let someone else do dig in the dirt let them do what they're good at how was that different than new york just day to day i had a real problem so i grew up on a corn farm where the money you make is because you grew something you produced something In investment banking, it's all transactional. 25:48 It's like being a lawyer. You don't make anything. A banker. You don't make anything. You literally just skim money off the top of deals from other people who actually make money. Yeah. And I didn't like that. I wanted to make something. I wanted to be involved in... 26:02 A company that didn't have to go to meetings and pitch why they should get paid 3% of a deal. I wanted to be the one with the money making the product and making the decisions. And gold mining is 100% that. You know, they've got the money. And they're a publicly traded company and I was working for the biggest one. So I appreciated that every day I went to work and, you know, you go out to those mines and the guys are in the bottom of those pits digging out the gold and they're producing the gold and they're selling the gold and they're making the money. 26:34 And I liked that much more than banking. Yeah. 26:38 Well, you got a finance degree. Didn't you get your master's in finance? Yeah. Like international business? 26:42 Yeah. It's a mouthful. Yes. Global finance, trade, and economics. Yes. That's what it was. 26:48 Yeah. At what point were you like, I made a terrible mistake? 26:53 In my career? 26:54 Yeah. 26:55 I never thought that. 26:56 You didn't? 26:57 Mm-mm. 26:57 What burned you out then? 27:01 I had a... 27:03 Well, I would say the big thing that changed my mind about my life path was when my mother passed away. She passed away when I was 33 or 34. 27:16 And, you know, before then I was like Miss Career Woman. Like no question about what I was going to be doing with my life. I was going to work my way. I was going to get my master's degree because you have to, it's like a ticket punch. You have to get that to get that corporate job. Then I was going to work my way up from intern to the big boss. 27:36 And nothing was going to stop me. 27:39 And in my early 30s, I had this life event happen that just fundamentally, it just knocked me on my ass. 27:48 And it fundamentally changed the way that I looked at life. 27:53 And it took me a while to digest it. I was like, do I really not want to do this anymore? Do I really want something different with my life? 28:01 And I stayed for a couple years after that. 28:03 What did your mom think? 28:05 About gold mining? 28:06 About your happiness. 28:09 Did you ever call her and you're like, mom, it's not... 28:12 Both my mom and my dad have always been very proud of me. I don't think they necessarily... I remember my grandpa came and visited me in New York City and he's like, so what do you do here? I think he thought I was like a bank teller. 28:24 Right. 28:25 So I'm not sure that they necessarily understood why I did what I did or made the choices I made, but they were always really proud of what I was doing. 28:34 Well, who did you call when you were feeling... 28:38 I don't know, blue or burnt or whatever it was. 28:40 I've got a great friend network. And my dad and I are extremely close. My brother and I are best friends, best friends in the whole world. I would do anything for my brother. I give him both of my kidneys, for sure. 28:51 Yeah, I mean, he's all over your channel. 28:53 Yeah, he's great. 28:54 And his wife. 28:54 Yeah, they're wonderful. 28:56 She's Stacy, right? Stacy, yeah. She's super fun to watch. Yeah. 29:00 She's the best. 29:01 And my, you know, of course, eventually my husband was the one person I always went to and, you know, all of them very, very proud. 29:08 But yeah, it took me three, probably three years after my mom's death to be like, I just, my, my passion for it just died. So I wasn't, I didn't regret it. I wasn't mad about it. I just, it all felt like a bunch of energy that I didn't want to expend anymore on. 29:26 It felt meaningless. Yeah. And so I told myself every year you get a big bonus, right? So you work toward that big bonus. 29:34 And I told myself it was a year before the big bonus. So like right after my bonus. And I was like, I'm going to say one more year, which I would recommend to never give yourself a one-year timeline or anything. It's way too long. So it was literally a year-long countdown before I was ready to actually submit my resignation. 29:52 So you committed to that? 29:54 I committed to it with myself. 29:56 And weren't you like six more months, five more months? 29:59 Like four months and 15 days, four months and 12 days. I mean, it was that kind of a countdown for me. A lot of journaling. You can make it. It's okay. It's worth it. Like you're going to have that big bonus at the end of it. And then you're free to do whatever you want. 30:14 What's in your journal the day you gave your notice? 30:16 Oh, Just elation. 30:18 I bet. 30:19 Elation. 30:20 And there were some interesting questions that came out of my resignation. And in a company like that, women are a major minority. I think like 11% of the global workforce at this company are women. And so they're very protective of their female executives. And so when one leaves, you naturally ask a lot of questions and you do your best to try to retain them. And so when I resigned, the question was, oh, no, that's terrible. 30:52 I'm so sad. Where are you going? 30:54 And when I said nowhere, that was like the biggest shock. I was 39 years old. 31:03 Like, what do you mean nowhere? 31:04 What do you mean nowhere? What are you going to do? I don't know what I'm going to do. Just not this. You know, I'm going to, I'm just done. 31:11 So it was. 31:12 And you really didn't know? 31:14 No. I didn't know I was going to be doing this. 31:16 No, you didn't. 31:17 And I didn't have any intention really to go back to work. I knew that I wanted to find something I was passionate about. I don't necessarily, it wasn't necessarily for me about money. It was about if I'm going to spend my day doing something, I want it to be something that's meaningful for me. And so I took a full year off where I didn't do anything. I read books and I backpacked and I did yoga. I did things like that. 31:43 Well, hang on. You planned out your whole career. 31:46 You planned out your whole career and suddenly you just throw it away. 31:48 I did. 31:50 I did. 31:52 And I never looked back. There was not one moment. That's when you know you've made the right decision in your life. And I knew it intuitively. I knew it as deep as you can get that internal feeling that it was the right decision for me. 32:04 After that good breakup, that feeling. Like, oh, so good. What did I take so long for? 32:10 Exactly. Exactly. 32:11 Colors are brighter. 32:12 Yes. And that's exactly what it was for me. And what's interesting is you can spend 12 years somewhere – In a place that is all-consuming for you. All of your hobbies go out the window. You're not playing volleyball in the park at night anymore because you're too busy and you're too big of a deal. You're traveling all over the world. I was doing a ton of traveling. 32:32 And so all of my personal hobbies went away when I was working in corporate America. And my social group and my friend group were coworkers. 32:40 Yep. 32:40 And it's amazing when you leave how few people... 32:44 come along with you. 32:45 That's true. 32:46 I am maybe in touch with three people from Newmont still today. 32:54 So you end up on the side of a mountain for three or four days with no food? 32:59 Yes. 33:00 So you said that after a while the voices get quieter? 33:03 Yeah. 33:03 What are they saying before they go quiet? Yeah. 33:06 All the things that happen in your brain. So just to provide context, if people don't know what we're talking about. They do. This is something I mentioned on my Rogan interview. But if you didn't watch that interview, it's basically a company called Rites of Passage. And they basically create, it's kind of like a Native American vision quest. And the idea is that you're allocating 10 days of your life. The first three days, you're with the group of people that have also signed up. I think there were like eight of us total. And the people that are kind of hosting you. 33:39 And you're going through all these different tools that you can use when you're out in the wilderness by yourself. So if I want to process... 33:48 Grief. 33:49 What are some of the things you can think about? If you want to try to quiet your mind, if you, you know, there are different tools and methodologies that they kind of give you some insight. They also teach you like, if it's going to start pouring rain, here's how you put up a tarp. 34:03 Sure. I didn't think of that. Yeah, that's true. You're not in a tent. 34:06 Right. 34:07 What were you processing? 34:09 Sorry? 34:09 What were you processing? 34:10 I was processing, I would say probably first and foremost, my mom's death. 34:14 Mm-hmm. 34:15 Um, she was young. She didn't die well. It was a very traumatizing experience for me. Sorry to hear that. So it was a lot of that. It was a lot of, okay, that was a big career with a lot of energy expended. I was Newmont. What am I now? Who am I now? 34:34 And if I'm going to be deliberate about, I called it my first half and second half of life. So if I'm going to be deliberate about the second half of life, How do I want to live it? Who do I want to be? How do I want to spend my time? 34:50 And that was my intention going into that. 34:53 So you spend three days preparing, and then you go out into the wilderness. You pick your spot, which was I picked the farthest spot away you could possibly pick on top of a mountain. 35:04 Other people stayed closer to camp, but I was like, I'm going. 35:07 Alone? 35:07 Way out. You go out with a partner. 35:10 So my partner was actually a Native American guy from California. His tribe sends his people to this group for their vision quests. 35:18 Hardcore. 35:19 So he was amazing. And so he and I went out together. He was on the other side of the peak. And the way the safety protocols are in the morning, I would, we had like a circle that we had drawn in the ground. And in the morning I would go put a pebble in the circle and then I'd go back. And in the evening he'd put a pebble in the circle. And then the next day, if I didn't see a pebble in that circle, I'm going to go look for him and see if something happened. 35:41 I kind of love that. 35:42 It's great. And he, you know, we would leave each other little presents. So I would like, I would take like my colored pencils and I would draw on a rock, like a hummingbird on a rock. And then I would leave it in the circle. And then he would leave like a rock with like a, like stick carving that he had done or something. And so it was kind of fun. Like it was your only connection with humans for, it was three, four, well, almost four days. So you went in one day, you spent three nights and then you came out on the fourth day. 36:09 And so you're by yourself on the side of this mountain. It was in the Inyo mountains in Southern California, like basically Death Valley in the spring. And it was just freak weather. It was freezing cold. 36:22 So like my water was frozen when I woke up in the morning. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So it was, you know. 36:28 So what's your shelter? What did you build? 36:30 I didn't build a shelter. I just slept in a sleeping bag. 36:34 So no, because I wanted to see the stars. I mean, you could, you didn't, they didn't want you to have tents, but if there was torrential rain or something, then they would teach you how to put up a tarp so that you could kind of tuck yourself under it and not get rained on. But it didn't rain, so I was just out in a sleeping bag just staring at the sky. And what I brought with me was colored pencils, a journal, and a book of poetry. 37:01 It's cowboy poetry because cowboy poetry reminded me of my grandpa. 37:05 And that was what I brought. And so you end up spending, you know, you eat your last meal. You hike up there. You have, you know, a gallon of water a day. 37:16 And then you just sit. 37:19 So back to your original question, the voices are all of the voices you have every single day. What am I going to wear today? I wonder what that person thought about the way I ate breakfast this morning. Gosh, I wonder what that person's background is. It's just the chatter that happens in your head. 37:34 You can get rid of that? You can get rid of that. 37:36 The monkey mind. You can get rid of the monkey mind. Okay. It helps when you're really hungry. Okay. 37:46 If you're carrying a balance on a credit card right now, it's costing you money today, and it's also costing you money tomorrow. The interest doesn't just clock out. 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Get your free 30-second personalized assessment today at pdsdebt.com slash basement. That's pdsdebt.com slash basement. pdsdebt.com slash basement. 38:58 You know, so day one is the hardest because by that night your stomach's growling and you're like, I'm not going to make it three days without food. This is crazy. You wake up the next morning and suddenly everything just starts getting really quiet. 39:13 And it's like so it's so peaceful. 39:15 And the silence is welcome. 39:19 But then through that silence, at least for me, my experience is You start to hear God. You start to hear your higher self, whatever you want to call it. 39:31 And I got such important, beautiful, direct messages from the divine up on that hillside. 39:37 Like what? 39:40 I did a lot of healing with my mom. I felt like she was there with me. Like I could feel her presence. And I told her how angry I was at her. And I told her how sad I was about the way she went down. And I spent so much time writing about and thinking about the way that she raised me and our life together. And, you know, it was just this It was a beautiful, quiet place to just assess my relationship with my mother and to forgive her and to start a new relationship with her even now that she's on the other side, which I believe you can do that with anybody who's passed away. 40:19 I think you can put aside the human experience you have and you can have a totally different relationship with them after the fact while they're on the other side, which I have with my mom now. 40:30 I spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of person I wanted to be, the kind of wife I wanted to be, the kind of friend I wanted to be. 40:37 And I would say the biggest – so those start coming in on day two. 40:44 And then on the last night that you're there, you're supposed to spend – you're supposed to do an all-night vigil. So I created like this circle of rocks – And at sunset, you watch the sun go down. And I stepped into the circle. And the idea is you spend all night just sitting and waiting. 41:04 And the next morning, you stay in there all night. You try to stay awake. 41:07 The next morning, when the sun comes up, you can step out of the circle and you're reborn. So it's a full transformative experience. And there's no psychedelics or anything happening here. This is just dead sober. You know, the food is, you're in a fully fasted state, everything's quiet, and you're just having these profound revelations. 41:28 Yeah, you don't need mushrooms for this. 41:31 Not at all. Nature is the most healing medicine that you can possibly get. I believe that with my whole heart. 41:40 the biggest the coolest experience on that hillside was I was sitting there literally this is how I looked I was like so weak I couldn't even sit up. And my hat was on because the sun was shining in my face. And I was like snuggled up in my sleeping bag just sitting there. And then I hear, and the wind is like gale force. 42:04 And I was like, what is that? 42:07 And I pick my head up and the brim of my hat comes up. And there's a hummingbird right in front of me. Like literally this far from my face. 42:17 And it's just, and I was just like. 42:21 Just start sobbing. Of course. Because think of the energy that little bird... 42:27 expended to sit in front of me on a freezing cold day in gale force winds to come see me at the top of that mountain. And it just felt so profound. It felt like God was just right there, you know? And I was, I just, I cried for way too long after, after that little humming. And I, to this day, like hummingbirds are like my spirit animals. I love them so much. 42:49 I was just going to say that like native tribes would be like, well, of course you had that experience. That's what you went there for. 42:54 Yeah. And it, it was beautiful. 42:57 You know, that was mom speaking through the bird and all of that. 43:00 It just felt like, it felt extremely profound. 43:04 And to this day, every time I see a hummingbird, I think of that experience. They're amazing. 43:08 Yeah. And I have so many hummingbird feeders. I bring them to me. 43:13 So that was the coolest experience. The most profound experience for me, which I didn't understand when I was there, was I got clear as day the words, you will save the children. 43:25 Which is a weird thing to hear because I don't have children of my own. 43:29 So I immediately thought, is my brother going to die and I'm going to be like the stepmom or the whatever adoptive parent of his kids? Like, I don't understand what that means. 43:40 Do you hear this as words? Words. Okay. 43:42 Clear as day. You will save the children. 43:46 And I had no clue. I sat with it for months, months and months. 43:52 I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means. But I knew I heard it. I knew it was a message for me. 43:57 And eventually, so this is in April, and by like August of that year, so I sat with it for that long, I started getting all of these messages Interesting little messages and tidbits, and it just became super clear to me that I needed to get involved in anti-human trafficking with the intention of really focusing on, look, there's these kids out there. 44:26 I didn't know if you were going to talk about this. I'm glad you are. 44:27 That are being trafficked. And so I was like, well, I don't know what to do about this. I don't know anything about human trafficking. I have no background in this whatsoever. I had not deeply gotten involved in really any nonprofits, but it felt like the right time after my retirement. And so I just emailed, just cold email, the CEO of a nonprofit called The Exodus Road. 44:50 And it took maybe a week. I just attached my resume and I said, would you be interested in me helping you? I'm not sure how I could be helpful. But if you think there's any way I can help you, here's my background. I'm very interested. I'd love to volunteer. And a week later, I got an email from the CEO and she's like, oh my God, yes. 45:10 When can we meet? I would love that so much. 45:12 And it just felt... 45:14 It just felt like the full circle experience for me. And so, yeah, that was three years ago. And so I've been on the board of directors of Exodus. I volunteered for six months and then joined the board. And I've been on the board of that organization for six months. And it's been super profound for me. What do they do? 45:31 They are an anti-human trafficking organization who was founded by Matt and Laura Parker who lived in Thailand. And when they were living in Thailand 12 or 13 years ago, Matt started seeing, you know, in Thailand it's obviously very prevalent. 45:47 And he started seeing the issue and he got involved helping with investigations just on a volunteer basis. And investigations to help take down traffickers and free victims and things like that. 46:00 They came back to America and they looked at each other and they said, we've got to just start a nonprofit. We've got to do this. This is our passion. And here we are today. And it's an amazing organization. They've got six regional offices. They work in 25 different countries. It's a very small, super talented team. And they help with... 46:23 They do a bunch of prevention education. They, you know, because especially with the online situation today, to help kids understand when they're in a dangerous situation online. Right. If you can keep them from getting into a situation where they get trafficked, that's the best outcome. So they do prevention education. 46:44 They do intervention, not in a sound of freedom kind of way, but in a private citizens helping... 46:53 collect data, collect research, build a case file, hand it over to the police, and the police go and make the arrests. 47:01 And then rehabilitation. So they, like in Thailand, we have these things called freedom homes, and it's homes we own where we bring underage children in that have been rescued, and we give them a safe place to grow up. We help them get educated. 47:20 It's incredible. I think since they started, they've rescued 6,300 people. 47:25 Wow. They take donations? Yes. 47:28 They take donations. Okay. 47:29 I'm going to support. I'm going to support. 47:31 Oh, thank you, AJ. That's so nice of you. 47:33 No, it's important work. 47:34 It's critical work. 47:37 When were you married during all this? Were you married when you went to the mountain? 47:42 Yes. 47:43 Was he? 47:44 Oh, he was hilarious. 47:45 Can we introduce him? Were we allowed? 47:47 Yes. My husband's name is Blake. Hi, Blake. We had been married for a couple of years. You know, Blake married a big career woman. 47:54 Mm-hmm. Yeah. 47:55 With a nice paycheck. 47:57 And I duped him. I was like, I'm not going to do that anymore. And he's very supportive of everything that I do and extremely open to it. He's not necessarily going to do what I do right away. He's more critical. He's like, I'm going to see how that works out for you. And then if it works out for you, then maybe I'll think about doing it. 48:18 Well, because he was thinking about doing it. 48:21 I don't know if he would – he might do it after he retires, you know, kind of as a post-career pre-retirement thing. But, yeah, just everything I get into, he's suspicious at first. You know, I'm not eating seed oils anymore. And he's like, what's the big deal with seed oils? Come on. And then I'm just throwing away all the seed oils in our kitchen and he kind of rolls his eyes. But when I did do this retreat, I remember plain as day I came home and he looks at me and he goes – So do you still love me? And I was like, so much more than I did before. 48:51 And he's like, oh, thank God. You know, because he just, he didn't know what to expect. 48:54 Well, you said you came down a different person. 48:57 I came down a different person. 48:58 So yeah, I would also be worried. 48:59 Yeah. Yeah. You know, you've got this, this very straight-laced finance wife and, and then she becomes just this crazy hippie. 49:09 Like I feel for him sometimes, but he's a great, he's, he's wonderful. 49:15 I've heard you say that you'll be just watching TV while you're reading archaeology papers. 49:24 What's on TV? What do you guys watch together? 49:27 He watches a lot of metal detecting. 49:29 Metal detecting? 49:30 YouTube, which is really annoying because... 49:33 It's like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And it's like, he's as big of a nerd as I am. It's just different hobbies. So he took up metal detecting recently. So he watches a lot of that. He's a great hunter. 49:44 So he watches a lot of hunting videos. We watch a lot of ancient history stuff. All the people in the same field that I'm in, we watch all their stuff. 49:51 We watch your show. No, you don't. What do we do? What do you guys hunt? 49:56 Um, elk and deer. Okay. And he went and got a caribou last year. Wow. Yeah. We had an employee that hit 20 years and so he took him up to Alaska and did a caribou hunt. 50:05 So there's always meat around the house. There's a fresh, amazing, organic, beautiful meat is what we eat. 50:13 Yeah. So he actually just got an elk two days ago. I helped him pack it out. Wow. 50:18 What is he hunting with? 50:21 Hmm. 50:22 A giant rifle. Okay. And I do not know. 50:24 I was just, I didn't know if it was bow hunting or. 50:27 Oh no. Yeah. Right. Rifle. Yeah. 50:30 Metal detecting YouTube. I guess there's a YouTube for everything. 50:33 There is. And metal detecting is one of those kind of addictive hobbies. He's much more addicted than I am. He bought me one because he wants us to do it together. And I'm less enthusiastic about it than him. But it's fun. You know, in Colorado, you can find, you know, I have found dimes, silver dimes from the 1880s. 50:52 um you know so you the fun part about it is researching where are you going to go so you try to find old mining camps or lumber camps or um you know train stations or things where the the people in the late 1800s hung around and then you go metal detect it and see what you can find so it's it's a fun hobby 51:10 We did it as kids. Did you? We found a lot of just pop tops, nothing cool. 51:14 Because there's great stuff on the East Coast. Yes. Old coins, stuff from Europe and the Spanish and things like that that you can find out there. And I know this because these silly videos are playing in the background when I'm doing research. 51:26 And you're absorbing it. 51:27 Yeah. 51:29 Exactly. 51:29 Wow, so you guys watched the same stuff ancient history-wise? 51:34 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he's, you know, he likes that stuff. My brother and sister-in-law have started really liking it. So yeah, he did make a comment to me that it's okay for us to go on a vacation that doesn't involve megaliths. Yes. 51:48 And I conceded that that's probably true, but yeah. So, but that's been the bulk of our travel for the last couple of years. 51:56 I know, I want to go see Megalithson. The wife wants to go see shopping. 51:59 Totally. Yeah, I mean, or go for a hike or sit on a beach. 52:05 That's allowed. It's not easy travel to go see these places, for sure. 52:10 But it's worth it. 52:11 So when did you go on Hughes' tour? 52:16 What made you just... Well, so I had already... 52:21 I had been to Egypt and I had been to Peru and Bolivia. 52:27 For work or for? 52:28 For megalith hunting. 52:29 Wow. 52:30 So this was at the beginning of my... You were getting into it. Getting into it, going down the rabbit hole. And Hugh, I loved Derek Olsen and Megalithic Marvels. And I loved Hugh Newman. And I saw that they were co-hosting a tour in England. And I was like, we've got to go. We've got to go see Stonehenge. And we've got to go to the British Museum. And so we just booked the tour. 52:51 And it was great. Hugh's a great storyteller. He is. He knows, he found us a crop circle when we were there. Really? Yes. Yes. 52:59 which was awesome. You got to go walk around in it. 53:01 And, um, so all around Wilshire, Avesbury, correct. 53:05 Avesbury. 53:06 He knows where the good pubs are too. 53:07 Oh yeah. Yeah. It was a great trip and the people on it were so fun. And, and, you know, I got to meet Derek and Derek changed everything for me. He, he and I were just like walking around chit chatting about different ancient history things. And, And he said, you know, you know a lot about this. Maybe you should start a podcast. And I was like, absolutely not. There's no chance I'm going to do that. No chance at all. And I just wrote it off. And he sent me a note after the trip and said, I'd like to have you on my show. 53:39 Would you be interested? And I kind of hemmed in. 53:43 I'm an introvert, believe it or not. 53:46 No, I believe it. 53:47 I really enjoy being at home. My favorite person to hang out with is me. 53:52 If I get to be home for three or four days, not see anybody, that's great. 53:56 I know you. 53:57 You recognize it? 53:58 Yes. What did you know that impressed Derek so much? 54:02 I think I was talking about, I don't know. I was just talking about Bolivia. I was talking about like some of the trips we had done and the things we had seen. And of course, you know, before we went to England, I had done a bunch of research on all the stuff that we were about to see. And we talked about the, you know, I was giving him advice for where to go in the British Museum because we had already been there twice on that trip. 54:22 um and so it was just you know so blake was with you yeah was he just rolling his eyes he didn't know what he was in for yet no he didn't yeah he was like i mean she likes this stuff that's kind of cool and it's really interesting but he had you know none of us had any idea it was going to turn into this and 15 months later you're sitting across from joe rogan which is crazy so what was that experience like for you 54:46 Every good toolbox has more than one tool. Hammer for nails, screwdriver for screws. Nobody argues about which one's better, they just do different jobs. Money's starting to work the same way. 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Auto-invest, roundups, and paid in Bitcoin all run on zero fees and zero spread. stack a little at a time no charts open at midnight no second monitor bitcoin can be part investment part payment rail part savings you pick the job that's the whole idea for a limited time new customers can get ten dollars added to their balance use code bitcoin 10 when you sign up and send at least five dollars to a friend in the first two weeks terms apply download cash app today visit our link in bio 56:02 You know, he he I don't know how he contacted you. But for me, I just got like a notification on Instagram that said Joe Rogan has followed you. 56:14 And I was like, no, that's a real Joe Rogan. 56:16 I click on it. It's like 200 million followers. What? 56:19 So I was freaking out. It was like 10 o'clock at night on a Saturday night, losing my mind because he was following me. 56:27 How far along in your channel was that? 56:29 I started it in May of last year and this was, I think it was beginning of June of this year. So it was basically right out of here. 56:37 I have a cheat code. My brother Gino and Joe go back a long, long time. My cheat code, yeah. So I just get the text. Yo, dude. 56:46 He didn't have to find you on social media. 56:49 It was just a little message and a direct message on Instagram that said, hey, I saw your video with Derek on the ancient Chinese artifact. Super interesting. Would you want to be on the show? 56:59 And of course, I didn't sleep a wink at night. It just changed everything. 57:03 Did you ever consider saying no? 57:05 No. 57:06 You did not? 57:06 Mm-mm. I mean, I knew. Big move. I knew that it was, I think I would have liked for it to have been like a year from now. 57:16 Yep. 57:17 Just so I could have more experiences like this or Matt Bell, you know, just kind of less lower pressure kind of. Not that this is low pressure, but. Have you seen the numbers that we do here? Oh, no, I have. 57:30 For sure. Yeah. Yeah, so this is my third live interview, me and you right now. Third. The first one was Matt Bell. The second one was Joe Rogan. So I think I would have liked to have had a little more experience in it before. 57:44 You will always just put it off then. Totally. You're never going to be ready. Nope. Just go for it. 57:49 It's like having a family. You got to just dive in. So yeah, I said yes, for sure. And I told him, I'm about to go to India now. 57:58 I would love it if we could do it after India so I can tell you about all the stuff I saw there. And he said, sounds great. So we did it in early July. 58:05 He invite you back yet? 58:06 No. 58:07 No. Don't laugh. He's going to. 58:09 Maybe. 58:10 I mean, it performed really well. 58:12 Yeah. 58:13 It was a good. 58:13 It was fun. 58:14 You did great. 58:15 No, thank you. 58:16 You didn't choke. 58:20 It was the most nervous I've ever been. Really? Or anything in my life. 58:26 When you got to his studio, let me tell my story real quick. So Joe and my brother go back a long time. I did his show a million years ago. 58:38 Then when I went back to Austin, I was on a show in LA. Go back to Austin, find out he's a fan. And the first thing he does is give me a hug and say, it's nice to meet you. I'm like, dude, I've been on your, that's fine. It's fine. He doesn't remember. And then I give him a hecklefish doll and some merch. And he goes, let me grab this. 59:02 He goes, what the hell is this? I said, it's just, you know, it's merch from the show. Maybe you give it to your daughters. He's like, my daughters are teenagers. I'll give it to the dog to play with. Come on. You ready? I was like, whoa, he hates me already. 59:15 And we get in there. We had a great time. So I don't know if it was a move to like throw me off. But if you watch my first 10 minutes, I'm just like stuttering and stammering. So you walk into the studio. I had a similar experience. What was it like? 59:27 He, I think his car had broken down on the interstate. So he was late and flustered. 59:33 And flustered. Yeah. 59:35 It was, you know, it's Austin in the middle of the summer. It's hot. Yes. Car broke down. He had to go home and get a different car. He was late. So he walked in. He's like, Hey, Joe Rogan. Nice to meet you. 59:44 Took him an hour to pick which car to take. Exactly. 59:48 Nice to meet you. And I was like, Oh, it's great to meet you too. Where are you from? Colorado. Cool. Let's head in. 59:53 He's a Colorado kid. 59:55 Is he? Yeah. 59:57 We never even talked about it. 59:58 Nope. 59:59 And it was the same situation. I was like, I don't know if he likes me. This is weird. And we sat down and he hands me the headphones and I put them on. I don't even get to look and see, do I have a hair sticking straight out? How does it look? He's like, you ready? He's like, let's go. And then it was just, and it just felt so abrupt. 60:19 Yes. 60:20 Yeah. 60:21 Yeah, you went to slides real fast. 60:23 I was nervous for longer than you were. I felt out of sorts for like the first half. 60:30 And then in the second half, I felt like we had finally become comfortable enough that it felt comfortable for me. And we were talking about the things I really wanted to talk about. And so for me, my experience was super, super stressful the first half and beautiful the second half. And then the goodbye was just as abrupt as the hello. You know, he just like sat down to record some commercials and was like, see you later. 60:53 He didn't walk me out. 60:55 And I was absolutely convinced it was so bad that he wasn't even going to air it. What? I just, I was like, that didn't feel good. 61:05 I don't think he liked it. 61:08 Maybe he's just, and then of course, JD Vance was recorded right after me. And then I think Mr. Beast. And so my interview actually didn't get posted for a while. So I just sat with it for weeks. 61:19 Oh my God. 61:20 We went on like a rafting trip in Idaho. Yeah. And we were out of cell phone service for a full week. And my friend had Starlink. And every day I would log in to see if it got posted. And then I'd log back out. Like, okay, not today. Log in, log out. And it got posted on my drive home from Idaho. 61:38 This is the life of this business, man. 61:40 It was incredible. Like, if he asked me, of course I would go back. And I would be just as nervous and flustered the second time as I was the first, I'm sure of it. 61:51 I keep putting it off. I keep putting it off. I'm like, yeah. 61:56 It's a taxing experience. 61:57 You got to. 61:58 Totally. 61:58 Yep. 61:59 Totally. 62:01 And you can't really prep for him because I went in there prep for all a bunch of stuff and we did crop circles for an hour and a half. It's like, I guess we're doing this today. 62:09 Yep. 62:09 Because it's just going to go where he wants. 62:11 Yeah. And you got to just roll with it. Just roll with it. Yep. Try to be amenable. 62:17 Well, I mean, as soon as you got to the slides, you were definitely fine. 62:20 Yeah, I mean, that's the stuff I love. 62:24 I really want the world to know about these places. And I think the world really wants to know about these places. So there's, I think, a reason that my channel and other people's channels are doing well, because people are really curious about our ancient past. 62:37 Before we get to PowerPoint, I would like to hear the click clack story. 62:43 I think it was water. They said it was water dripping down, but that is probably not true. 62:49 Are you talking about Vietnam? 62:51 Yeah. 62:54 This is a Bigfoot story, right? 62:55 Potentially. 62:56 I think it could be. 62:57 It could be. Absolutely. 62:59 This audience loves Bigfoot. I do not. 63:01 You don't? 63:01 I don't. I want to. I want to believe. 63:04 I watched Harry and the Hendersons when I was a little girl. 63:07 Okay. 63:08 And it just planted a seed in me where I always thought, and of course, because of that movie, you just think Bigfoot's the coolest. Yes. You kind of wish that your family would run into him with your Suburban and you'd put him on the roof and take him home and befriend him. Yeah. And so, you know, that movie planted a seed in me very early on. And it's just one of those amazing mysteries. 63:30 You know, so it's fun to think about. 63:33 And I understand why people like thinking about Bigfoot. I certainly do. I've never seen him with my own eyes. I don't know for a fact that he exists, but he's just so fun to contemplate. 63:43 He is. 63:45 He's all over the studio if you look around. 63:47 I saw the one out in the hallway. 63:48 He's always watching. 63:49 Yeah. 63:50 So tell us your story. What happened that night? 63:53 So we were touring. It's the largest cave in the world. It's called Sundong Cave in Vietnam. 64:00 And it's a tour you have to sign up for years in advance. 64:04 Years? Years. Okay. 64:06 Because the season is on, you know, the cave is flooded most of the year. So there's a certain season where the waters are low enough that you can actually go through the cave. 64:16 So you sign up, you train. I had actually... 64:20 We did this trip in February, and in September of the year before, I had broken my pelvis in a bike accident in Mallorca. 64:28 Oh. 64:30 And to even get approved to go on this tour, you have to send photos of yourself backpacking. You have to tell them the routes you've done in the course of your life. Because if you're not actually ready to do this, if you've never been repelled with ropes and you've never actually done anything hard, you could get into real trouble down there. 64:49 So this isn't tourists with little maps walking around. Not at all. 64:52 So you have to apply to become part of the tour and... 64:56 And so I had done all of the, you know, proving that I'm tough enough to do it or whatever. And then I broke my pelvis. And so I was completely out of commission for two full months. And then had, you know, I was on crutches still in November. And in December, they sent a note and they said, has anything with your health changed since you originally applied? 65:15 You lied. 65:16 And I was like, I'm good. 65:18 I'm good. 65:20 And so I worked very hard in PT for the two months later. 65:23 I bet. 65:24 December and January before going on this tour. And I still probably wasn't ready enough. Like, I probably shouldn't have done it. I was fine. But there were moments where I was like, if I fall and this thing cracks again, this is not going to be good. 65:38 So we went on this tour. It's four days. 65:45 And you kind of hike across the jungle. And then you enter the cave. And you spend three nights in the cave. And then you come out on the fourth day. 65:53 And it's an amazing tour. If anybody is even thinking about doing it, they need to pull the trigger because it's one of the most amazing places on planet Earth. 66:03 And so we did it. And the first night I woke up to use the restroom and I saw one of the guides, one of the porters, just scanning a flashlight across the cave wall. 66:18 And I was like, what? Because we had come across water. 66:23 to get to our first campsite. So you're camping on the other side of a body of water. So there's no animals that are going to be crossing that to get into camp to bug us. And so I had no idea what he was looking for. 66:37 And we also kept hearing this lake. It sounded like rocks falling in the middle of the night, which is a very disconcerting sound when you're in a cave. You don't want rocks to be falling. And this room is big enough that you can fit a 747 in there. It's huge. 66:53 And so the next morning I asked, what was the porter looking for? And they said, oh, he was scanning for water buffalo. 67:00 What? I was like, I don't think so. I don't think they would come down into the cave, swim across the lake, and come bother a bunch of campers. No. So that didn't, I was like, that doesn't make any sense. But I still wasn't suspicious at this point. And then I asked about the sound. And they said it was a porter slamming his mat down on the ground. 67:17 And it was clearly rocks. It was like clearly some loud clacking sound. 67:22 So anyway, fast forward, you kind of continue through this cave. And on the third night, you end up in this beautiful where the limestone ceiling has collapsed. It creates these amazing gardens inside the cave. And this one is called Garden of Edom, E-D-O-M. And it's 67:42 We've all seen these famous pictures. 67:43 The famous photos, the wedding cake and all of the cool things. You know, I think that Nat Geo has like gone down in there in 60 minutes and people like that have done documentaries on it. 67:55 So we're in this area and you come out of one path and you go down into another. But to the right, there's another path. 68:05 And so I asked about it, still not suspicious, just curious. And they said, no, we don't go over there. And one guy told me that they'd never explored it. Another guy said, you can't go in there because there's too much mud. So the stories are just a little inconsistent. But you don't go over there. You go this way. 68:22 And then in the Garden of Edom, on the ground, there are bones. 68:26 Bones. 68:27 Which could be because something lives in there and is killing things. It could be because something's living above and throwing bones in. 68:35 Big bones? Big bones. Big bones. 68:37 Yeah, there's like, was it goats or sheep? I can't remember which one. They found like skeletons of those in there and things like that. I think for the most part it's pigs or birds or things falling in and dying. 68:54 dying in there yep but the bones are suspicious they're a little suspicious and then we went to bed that night and right before bed the main safety guy says if you hear a baby crying in the middle of the night don't worry about it don't worry about it it's just the giant flying squirrel And immediately I was like, I know exactly what causes baby crying in the middle of the night sounds. And it's all over Bigfoot lore. 69:25 Yep. 69:26 Which I'm sure you've heard. Yeah. If you've done any research on Bigfoot. Bigfoot's apparently, supposedly a mimic. So to the point that in some stories, women have talked about... 69:37 They're like breastfeeding and the mimic sound is so accurate that their body reacts when they hear this baby crying sound. So it's very realistic according to the stories. So immediately I knew that I was like, there's something happening down here that's very suspicious. 69:56 What's Blake saying for all this? 69:57 Oh, he's like half rolling his eyes. 70:00 Right, right. 70:02 Because I talk about Bigfoot a lot. I think it's fascinating and he does not believe he is a full skeptic. 70:07 You know, I asked him the other day, after everything you know, what do you think the odds are that Bigfoot exists? And he's like, well, 3%. Like, after all the stories I've told him on the hours that we've hunted together, because that's what I do when we're hunting, is I'm like, oh, and then I heard this one story and this happened. And he's like, stop with the stories. Okay, here she goes. 70:23 Save it for the channel. 70:24 Exactly. So anyway, so I go to bed and I'm super suspicious. And that night, all of the porters had set up their tents around us. 70:34 And the other two nights, they were far, far away because it's loud and echoey and you want to sleep well and they want to stay up later. And so this night, the porters were, their camps were all around us. We were like in the middle, which was suspicious. 70:47 Mm-hmm. 70:48 So we go to sleep, and I'm super, super excited. Can't sleep. I'm like, there's Bigfoot up there. There's got to be. There's got to be. 70:54 You want it to be. 70:54 Because the Vietnam rock apes stories from the Vietnam War are prolific. And they're super interesting. And so I knew that those stories existed. I never thought that there would be potentially one near this cave or in this cave. 71:10 Every vet comes home hating monkeys. 71:12 Totally. I mean, my husband's father had an experience when he was in the Vietnam War, when he was in Vietnam. 71:19 You can tell that story too. That's a good one. 71:21 Yeah. So at 11 p.m., we're just lying in bed and I'm wide awake, just staring, listening. And then we hear, clack, clack. 71:32 Like, it's like, what? And I was like, listen, clack, clack. Did you hear that? And he's like, I heard that. 71:39 It's like, what is that? 71:40 And, you know, there's tree knocks and things that Bigfoot are known to do as well. So these sounds went on for a very long time. Eventually I fell asleep and they were still going on when I fell asleep. 71:51 Um, and we woke up the next morning and I said, well, did you, I asked the safety guy and now I'm in like interrogation mode, you know? So I asked him, did you hear the baby crying? And he goes, and that's what I asked him. And his response was, no, I woke up at 3am to listen and I didn't hear it. I was like, that's suspicious. Yeah. And one of them told us that it was a bird, not a squirrel that makes that noise. And then I asked about the rock clacking and he said it was water dripping on a stool, a metal stool. 72:24 And that is not how water sounds when it drips on a metal stool. 72:29 Nope. 72:30 And so I just peppered him with questions the entire hike out the whole day. I was just right on his heels, just peppering him with questions. Yeah. And, you know, we did hear a story about when they initially explored the cave, the exploration team was getting hit by rocks. 72:45 No, sticks. They were getting hit by sticks. 72:48 And he got mad at his crew and he's like, stop throwing sticks at me. And the crew said, it's not us, it's the monkey. 72:54 The monkey's throwing sticks at you. 72:56 Which is interesting. 72:58 So I think it's absolutely possible that we encountered something in that cave. And like I said, that cave is flooded most of the year, but that area isn't. It stays dry. So... 73:10 Logically, if you live in that third tunnel and you climb up and down these steep limestone walls and you go hunt up on top, it would be a beautiful place to live 90% of the year. And then you have to deal with the tourists. And you're like a little angry, so you clack some rocks and stuff when they're in there making noise. So it was a really interesting experience. And just to close on what happened with my father-in-law, when he was there in the he was out in the jungle and they were camping in tents. 73:44 And he said, one of his, one of the other soldiers had his feet sticking out of the tent and something grabbed his foot, shook it. 73:52 It's like, knock it off. You know, he thought it was like his friends or whatever. And he like tries to go back to sleep and then it grabs his foot and shakes it again. And he sits up to yell at him. This thing just reaches through and just punches him straight in the face and flattens his nose. 74:05 And he ends up getting medevaced out straight to the hospital, purple heart, straight back to America. And he told people that a monkey punched him. A big monkey punched him in the face and flattened his nose. 74:18 A big monkey? 74:19 A big monkey. 74:20 There aren't big monkeys there. 74:22 No. 74:23 There aren't orangutans and things in Vietnam. 74:27 Is this the first Bigfoot purple heart? 74:29 Maybe. Oh my gosh. Right? That would be a great book. Bigfoot, Purple Heart. 74:35 Or a t-shirt or something. 74:36 So Blake's at 3%. Where are you? 74:39 I mean, I am a much more optimistic. I think there's too many stories. There's too much anecdotal evidence for it to not be some sort of something. So I'm probably at like 75%. 74:56 Wow. 74:57 I need to get eyes on, but... yeah i just think there's something going on out there and i don't know what it is and i've watched the david politis episode and you know i i've read his books and i've read lots of books and watched lots of documentaries and so i'll wait you know we spend enough time in the wilderness i think it's going to happen it might and when it does i'll report back i'll let you know i'll be watching your channel then i'll be at 100 so you said there's too many witness accounts 75:24 So you tend to believe those. But with some of the megalithic sites, there's a lot of expert accounts, and you are suspicious of those. 75:32 Yeah. 75:33 I think there's something to that. 75:36 Yeah. 75:37 Yep. 75:39 I am suspicious of those. I mean, no, I'm not suspicious of those in the sense that were the Incas in Cusco? Yes. Yes. Did the Khmer live all over Siem Reap? Yes. And build the Bayon Temple into prom? Yes. I absolutely believe that happened. 75:57 What I question is, can you date these sites... From the ground all the way to the newest construction from the same era. And that's what I'm suspicious of. I don't think that they're being analyzed in the way that they should be. 76:12 Mainstream is just shaking their head at another independent investigator getting on the scene. 76:17 Yeah. 76:18 Another Graham Hancock. 76:19 I know. 76:20 Here she goes. 76:21 Yep. Just there for the clicks. 76:23 No, I don't think you're there for the clicks. 76:25 Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I understand why they're frustrated. This is their, they spent years and years getting PhDs in archaeology and they specialize on certain sites and somebody like me comes in and says, gosh, that just looks so different, doesn't it? 76:40 I wonder, I wonder if maybe there's more to this story. 76:44 Now, when you steel man them like that, which I believe you're sincere when you do that, you see it also as armor that you're putting up to protect yourself from them? 76:54 Because you're giving them credit. 76:56 Oh, I see what you're saying. I'm not interested in having fights with archaeologists. I think they're out there doing very good work. 77:04 Most of them are? 77:07 Just like anything, if you are... You know, I saw it in corporate America all the time. You build up your little function, and you have your budget, and you don't want anybody messing with that. That's right. And I think that's what's happening, and I think... You know, maybe I just have I have a very hard time believing that they all are looking at the same stones I am. And there's no questions at all in their minds on why are they so different? I wonder how on earth did they make that? It's like I feel like maybe they think that and they just don't say it because they know it's not going to be well accepted. 77:41 Just like I thought things all the time in corporate America that I never said because I knew it wasn't going to be well accepted. 77:47 Like what? 77:48 You've got to be politically correct in any career, right? If you're going to survive and thrive. You're not going to say all the things you think. 77:57 And what's funny is everybody thinks them. Yeah. Everybody's thinking the same stuff. 78:01 Yeah. And I don't say that I appreciate the work they do because I'm trying to make them kind to me or less aggressive toward me. I genuinely do appreciate the work that they do because I spend countless hours reading their reports. Yeah. Now, do I find issue with some of those reports? Sure. I have questions. But that doesn't mean that they're not out there doing the work that they're paid to do. 78:26 But I mean, if some of your theories are correct, they're going to lose grant money. 78:30 Well, they should just apply for a different grant. 78:33 Okay. 78:33 You know? 78:34 I mean, I agree, but the more fans you get, the more they're going to come after you. 78:40 Yeah, for sure. 78:42 And it's a different kind of come after, too. It's... 78:46 It's not like the politically correct, I'm going to try to take you down quietly the way they do in corporate America. 78:51 No. 78:52 It's an in-your-face, very aggressive. 78:55 And the ones who are the most aggressive aren't even archaeologists. 78:59 You know, they just feel like they're defending some ideal, you know, and they're like, well, if I can call her a racist and get her to shut up, maybe she'll stop doing some videos. 79:09 That's super effective, but that doesn't work anymore. 79:13 And it's not, yeah, it doesn't. It's not true. 79:16 It's not true. And we talked a little bit about this before we came on, which I think it's okay to talk about, is... 79:22 I get criticized all the time by some pretty well-known people. I don't acknowledge it at all. I don't even tell the team, like, you know, this reporter's gone after me or there's this article about all the things I got wrong. It's like I'm working on the next episode. 79:36 Yeah. Does it bother you? You just don't acknowledge it? Or have you gotten to a place now after this long where you just kind of let it slide off of you? 79:45 It took like five years to stop reading about it. 79:47 Yeah. 79:49 The awareness bothers me. Like, you just kind of want to read. Like, what did he say? 79:52 Yeah. 79:52 Like, what did I get wrong? But then after a while, it's like, I know what he's going to say. 79:56 Yeah. 79:58 Yeah. Yeah. 79:59 I can always fall back on, look, I'm an entertainer. I'm not a journalist. I'm here to make people happy, and I get things wrong. 80:06 Yeah. 80:07 I think you're in a trickier spot. 80:09 Well, and I will gladly admit when I get something wrong. You know, you can't catch up on an entire region's worth of history, hundreds of years of reports, put together your case for the questions you have for a place, and not get a fact or two wrong. And if I do, I will admit it. 80:29 Um, so that, but yeah, I think it's a, it's a harder when you, I haven't yet gotten to a place where I'm, I'm still in the process of developing my theories about what some of these places actually were. 80:42 So right now I'm still new at all of this. I'm gathering the evidence. 80:47 And at this point, I'm mostly just asking questions and pointing out things, irregularities. 80:54 But at some point, I do expect I'm going to have a theory or two that I want to actually put out there. And you're right. That's a difficult position to be in. 81:04 Because I've heard you talk about some sites as being power generators and stuff, like Chris Dunn's theories, which I kind of believe a lot of that stuff. 81:14 Boy, mainstream doesn't like us talking about it. 81:16 No, it doesn't fit. 81:18 It doesn't fit. It doesn't fit into the story that all of us were taught in history class growing up. 81:25 But that doesn't mean the story can't be rewritten. What kind of evidence would it take to do that? It would take either... 81:36 An amazing discovery that there's no other explanation except for there was something about our past we didn't know and we didn't understand. So say it's that metal object supposedly in Hawara. Say that gets unearthed. It's something like that. Nobody would ever be able to argue with that. 81:56 I suspect that that huge aha moment is not going to happen. Maybe it would, but we shouldn't plan on that. 82:05 The other scenario is you just start chipping away at it. And what I like to do is go to places that other people don't go to. 82:16 And then you create this portfolio of evidence. 82:20 And you start to really gather enough similarities between sites around the world, enough examples of how the technology of the time most likely could not have created what you're looking at with your own eyes. 82:35 And you convince enough people, or at least encourage enough people to question the official story, that suddenly there's just this wave of, okay, enough people believe. And then I do think that the research would follow that. 82:52 That's a much slower, longer process to get through. I would love it if something beautiful and shiny was discovered. I don't think that's going to happen. So I'm going to keep working over here, asking questions, going to the different places, documenting the different sites, showing what doesn't make sense, and making a case for we need to think about this in a little bit of a different way. 83:15 And who knows, maybe in my lifetime people will fundamentally change their minds, maybe not. 83:22 I think a lot more people are interested in alternate theories now, mostly because of Graham. 83:27 Yeah. 83:28 I read his books in the 90s. 83:30 Got me thinking. And Chris Dunn also kind of changed my whole thinking about stuff. 83:33 Yeah. 83:34 We were chatting about the Serapium earlier, which is an episode I have coming up, and it's a place that doesn't make sense, man. No. 83:40 And there's so many places that don't make sense. And kudos to Graham and Chris Dunn and people like that. They're not tiptoeing. No. You know, they came out with their theories. Or, you know, Land of Chem, like, he's out there saying, here's what I think this was. 83:54 And I think there's a lot to that. I'm not ready to do that yet because I don't have that kind of a background. I'm not a chemical engineer. I'm not a water expert. I'm used to gathering teams of experts together to do diligence something, and I'm right now just doing it on my own. And so I'll analyze. I'll travel the world. I'll get the actual footage. 84:14 I'll make a case. I'll read the reports. I'll show the evidence. And in some of my videos, I say, here's what I saw at, like, Koh Kerr in Cambodia. 84:24 If anybody is a chemical engineer or a water expert or a geologist and you have thoughts about what I, if there's something you saw where you're like, oh my gosh, I know exactly what that is. I'd love to hear it. 84:34 Have you? Have they reached out? 84:36 Some people have. Some people have, you know, there's a lot of people that have theories. 84:41 Yeah, a lot of theories. 84:42 A lot of theories, which, you know, that's all you can do unless you're on the ground doing the tests and things like that. But in these big systems, like the one you see in Angkor, where you can look at the scans from space and you can see there's clearly something much bigger going on here. Do you want to show us some pictures? Than the official story. 85:03 I think you can start to put together some theories about that, you know, without being on the ground digging. 85:09 I was shocked at the anchor LIDAR images, which I know you have. 85:16 This is insane right here. 85:17 I'm going to start with this one. 85:19 Where is Watt? 85:20 Angkor Wat is right in the middle of that big square. And Angkor Wat faces west. So the LIDAR scans that happened in Cambodia happened in 2012 and 2014. There was an amazing archaeologist who has since passed away named Damian Evans who put together these LIDAR scans. He was with a university in Australia, but he was amazing. And reading his reports are really interesting because you can tell... 85:49 He's kind of doing a little poking. He's like, these are unexplainable. And he points out things. So in just this one photo, they scanned how many? 2,500 square kilometers of land, I think, as part of this effort. So it's Angkor proper and then a bunch of different sites outside of Angkor. 86:11 Like, we all know what Angkor Wat looks like, and this is insane how big this is. 86:16 Yeah. 86:16 And these parallel lines. 86:18 Yeah, so the two major things they discovered at Angkor itself is this pattern of mounds. And I think they were aware that the land was undulating, but they didn't understand how geometric these mound shapes were. I mean, they're like four mounds in a square, four mounds in a square. They're very mechanical. Yeah. There's mounds within the Angkor Wat moat. There's mounds outside to the east, so you can see the ones to the right of the moat. 86:47 And then across the south of the moat, there are these mile-long earthen spiral embankments. 86:56 And if you look at that, Damian Evans says, we don't know what they were. 87:04 Some people have speculated they were royal gardens. Some people have said it was a staging area for construction. 87:11 The most compelling part of those spirals for me is that Angkor Wat was supposedly built in the 12th century. 87:23 There was a trench dug through these spirals. 87:30 Here's a great picture of it. 87:33 See, the trench dug through that? Yeah, this is wild. That was supposedly dug within 100 years of Angkor Wat being built. 87:43 So you're telling me that the builders of Angkor Wat built those spiral embankments south of Angkor Wat for whatever reason, and within 100 years, whatever reason they had for building those was no longer relevant, and the new king built an entire trench through it as if Possibly the new king didn't even know they were there. 88:06 That makes sense to me. 88:07 That makes sense to me, too. 88:09 The two options are it was there for not very long, or nobody ever knew they were there in the modern Khmer Empire. And they just built, you know, these are huge. You can't really see them when you're on the ground. You can only see them from space. 88:26 Yeah, how wide is that yellow rectangle? 88:28 It's a mile long. 88:29 Wow. 88:31 So the, yeah, it's a, it's a mile across and it's like half a mile or a little bit more, um, north to south. 88:40 And it would have been, you know, those spirals would have been all the way, all inside that great yellow square, except for that trench that was dug through it later. 88:49 These are perfectly straight lines, perfect right angles. This is the Serapium is the same, same thing. It's like down to a thousandth of an inch. It's like they polished it with stones. Yeah. 88:59 And why build that? 89:01 Why is that? Like, look at all the resources that would be deployed just to make those gardens? 89:07 So Angkor Wat itself is 400 acres. 89:10 Uh-huh. 89:10 And so look at the size of Angkor Wat compared to the square below it. This is a huge amount of land that they're terracing with these incredible earthen embankments. They tested them. There are not cultural layers within these. 89:24 There's not? 89:24 No. No. 89:27 What's in there? 89:28 It's just built of sand. It's just earth. 89:31 You know, it's just earth and embankments. 89:36 They tested the cultural layers, of course, on the inside of the moat. 89:41 And people were living in the inside of the moat forever. And so, yes, there's pottery, there's household items, there's things in these mounds. But in other places in Cambodia, they discovered a massive amount of mounds. Like on the top of the Phnom Kulin... 89:59 uh plateau which are the mountains that they quarried all of the limestone or the sandstone on top of there there were 300 mounds 300 yeah that and he in in damien evans reports he describes those as culturally sterile so they were not living on those mounds They also discovered this. 90:23 So this is a mound field to the east of one of the large water reservoirs. There's a hundred mounds in there. 90:30 To me, that doesn't look like habitation. That looks like something else. 90:34 It looks like industrial engineering. 90:36 Yes. Yes. 90:38 And this is a mile wide, right? So these are three, 200-foot mounds? 90:43 They're big. I saw them with my own eyes. I parked in the northwest corner of this mound field and looked over it. It's like an orchard now. But you can see the mounds with the trees on them and around them. So they're still there. You can still see them if you look at them. 91:01 Do the locals have any legends, ancient stories? No. 91:05 I haven't heard any about the mounds from them. 91:08 I don't know. 91:11 You can't date them, right? 91:13 The only thing you can date is any cultural deposits that you find on or in them. 91:19 It's not enough. 91:20 It's not enough. 91:22 Because you would just show up and say, oh, someone already flattened this. Let's move in here. 91:28 I mean, if you live in a place that's wet and you want to live in a dry place, you live on top of that hill. Sure. People do it all the time. Of course. It's a great place to live. I live on a hill. 91:40 You find a pyramid, the king says, that's mine. I made that. You found that. 91:45 Yes. 91:46 And it's interesting with Cambodia because these scans, they really blew my mind. 91:54 And I started doing a lot of thinking about what could this be. Like I'll show you. So here's, this is an interesting photo. 92:11 This is a heat map of the anchor complex. So you've got anchor watt down in the bottom. 92:18 with that moat through the spiral embankments that you see. 92:22 The two giant water features are called berets. 92:26 The one on the left still has water in it today. 92:29 Eight kilometers long, two kilometers wide. 92:32 What is that in English? 92:34 Eight kilometers would be, what, six miles? 92:39 Is that right? 92:40 Five. 92:42 Long. 92:43 Long. 92:44 Real big. The one on the east beret, the one on the right is almost as big as the west one. 92:49 You couldn't cut these lines in a jungle. 92:53 The hundred mound on the right side of the eastern beret, that's where you see that mound field with the hundred mounds. 93:02 And you see this gentle slope. 93:06 So red is high, green is low. 93:07 Okay. 93:08 So this was engineered to go, and the water comes from the east, engineered to go from the right to the left of this screen. And it was when I started seeing images like this that I started thinking the story we're being told about Cambodia just doesn't make any sense. 93:30 Well, a Nebraska farm girl would know how to get water to places. Yeah. 93:35 And some of this doesn't make sense. Like the dog leg coming down. 93:40 And that was a much later, like very late Khmer. 93:45 I think what was happening is I think that, you know, this is the one, one of the only places that I've done research where I've put out some of my opinions on what this is. 93:57 And in my opinion, these features were already here. 94:01 And I think the Khmer worked with them. What a great gift to have this massive reservoir that you can pull water out of and you never have to worry about it. In the dry season, you have water. 94:13 That still works. It still works. 94:15 But toward the end of the Khmer Empire, you start to see them making changes to this system. 94:23 In the dry season, they're cutting trenches straight down from the river. They're not dog-legging it to slow it down because they're trying to feed water directly and because their berets are drying up. And then suddenly they would experience a wet time of year or a wet season, a couple years that were wetter than normal. And you see these examples of the banks of these berets starting to blow out. And so they're trying to reinforce them. And so I think it was a system... that they inherited and they were trying really hard to get going again and making it to try to make it useful for themselves but they couldn't quite get it to work from whoever built it originally don't we see that everywhere this advanced engineering that can't be replicated for thousands of years somehow Yes. 95:09 And you see advanced engineering at the lowest levels. 95:13 Take Sacsaywaman. Take any site. In India, the sites I went to, you see this amazing, beautiful stonework that is almost unexplainably perfect. And then above it, you see stonework that looks like it. 95:29 It's like they tried to match it or mimic it, and it's just not the same. It's not even close. 95:35 So you start to see these layers of attempting to build on these sites and replicate them, and it's just off. 95:43 Yeah, and there's a valid argument that says, well, they didn't have the resources. They were just trying to repair the sites. But then you've shown, like, statues that are worse years later. So those are – that's artwork. That's not engineering. 96:00 Yeah. 96:01 That they're trying to replicate. 96:03 And, you know, I think if you see something beautiful – And you it becomes so say you do stumble across one of these absolutely incredible statues from the ancient world. 96:19 And it becomes the central statue in your pyramid temple or whatever. If you're an artisan of the day and that is the recognized form of art, you're going to try to replicate it so that you can have statues like that in other places in your empire because it's beautiful. When you look at it, it blows your mind. And so of course you want to replicate it. I think that's exactly what was happening with the stonework. 96:42 So yeah, I think it's a natural human inclination to try to recreate beautiful things. 96:47 Do you have any pictures of the spindles that they're perfect and then years later they're just kind of carved into the wall? 96:58 So what you were talking about with the spindles, these are... Is that what they're called? That's what I call them. I think in a lot of the research reports they're called window dressings. 97:07 Or air conditioning units? 97:08 Or air conditioning units. That's what I was told in Laos was the air blows in and moves around the window dressings and creates an air conditioning effect, makes the air move and cools you down, which maybe it does. 97:22 So on the left is a site called Bantie Srei, which is the red sandstone temple in Cambodia. It's absolutely, it's my favorite site. 97:30 Who cares my favorite site? Bantie Srei is my second favorite. And these spindles, as I call them, are, in my opinion, clearly lathe turned. They have to be. They are incredible. And you can see where the machine went in and out. And you can see them replicated across. You can see how all those are the same. Well, you just said machine. 97:53 That's where it gets controversial. 97:55 True. True. It could be a lathe that was turned very quickly with some sort of mechanism powered by an animal. You're right. It doesn't need to be machined. 98:05 I don't know how you build the pillars in India that way because they're so big and they're so heavy. 98:17 But I totally concede that point. It definitely didn't need to be machines. Yeah. 98:22 But it makes more sense to me that it is. How are the spindles attached to the posts? 98:26 There's a peg on the top and the bottom, and they're just inserted in. And you can see they're laying all over the place in Cambodia, so you can see how they were inserted. The case I'm making in this slide is I believe that the oldest sites in Cambodia have these very interesting standalone precise spindles. 98:50 And I believe that later they wanted to have spindle decorations in their temples, but they didn't remember how to do it. And so the temple on the right is T'Prom, the famous Lara Croft temple with the trees. It's such a cool place. 99:11 I think that Teprom was genuinely built by the Khmer Empire, and I think that they wanted to honor the spindles that they found at the other places, and so they replicated them. The question I would have is, if you have the ability to make the spindles, why don't you do it? 99:29 Why do you create just an impression of spindles? 99:33 And you see it with brickwork, too. There's impressions of spindles on the sides of the structures that are created with brick. 99:41 Well, what I noticed about the before, and I guess before and after as well, is the frescoes around the spindles. You can see how the characters are all a little bit different, which makes sense to me if you're kind of drawing it. But in the earlier ones, they're perfect as if a template was used. Yes, exactly. 99:57 And it's the same images across all of the sites that I think are the oldest. 100:00 Right. 100:01 Very similar. 100:03 And it's beautiful 3D stonework, almost unexplainably perfect. It is. 100:11 And here it's just, it's fine. 100:13 It's fine. 100:15 But it's clearly 2D. They're a little janky. I mean, I couldn't do it. But the other ones are perfect. Yes. And they're perfectly relieved. 100:25 Yeah. And there's a lot of examples of this in Cambodia. There's the statues. There's the spindles. There's the construction techniques you see in the older structures. And when I say older, I mean what I believe were the oldest ones in Cambodia, like the pyramids. 100:43 Huge stonework. Perfect. You know, these amazing lions. And then you go to the later sites and it's really tiny stonework that's all stacked on top of each other and kind of falling apart. 100:55 You know, when you look at 1930s excavation photos of these pyramids, they were in amazing shape. Cocare looked just as cool in the 1930s before it had been excavated and repaired as it does today. So it just stood the test of time. It was a perfect kind of construction that could withstand that jungle. Taprom is being torn down every single day by trees. And it's just, it doesn't have the same kind of structure that allows it to hold itself up. 101:27 So... 101:28 Yeah. We see the same thing with the pyramids. The mud brick later ones are falling apart, but the big pyramids, they're just there forever. 101:38 Yeah. And in Cambodia, the general theory is that they started building with brick. 101:44 then they eventually moved to stone. 101:47 But you see this weird dynamic where the brick is always above the stone. 101:52 And it's not just a, you know, you can make an argument that, well, they needed the bases of these buildings to be stone, and then the rest they built with brick. 102:01 Sure. 102:01 But you see at some of the pyramids, like Prairup Pyramid, In the excavation photos, the stone goes down feet and feet and feet and feet into the depths of the site. And then there's these brick towers on the very top of the pyramid. It just, that timeline doesn't make any sense to me. You don't start with brick and then move to stone, but somehow the stone ends up underneath the brick. 102:28 Well, let's get into some trouble and speculate. How old do you think they are? 102:32 That is a way to get into trouble. 102:35 Are we talking younger dryers? 102:38 There's a site in Cambodia called Kokair. 102:43 Is that how you say it? I can't ever pronounce. My Khmer is terrible. 102:47 In like the 60 Minutes episode that they did on Kokair, they called it Kokay. 102:52 Kokay. Okay. 102:54 And I think if you want to be completely correct, that's probably how you pronounce it. But everybody calls it co-care, including our tour guides. 103:03 Right. If Barnard calls it co-care, that's what I'm going with. Barnard called it co-care. 103:06 That means that I can call it co-care. 103:08 Yes, agreed. 103:09 He's the expert. So yeah, that side, I think, in my opinion, is the oldest. And it's interesting because it's outside of the core of the anchor complex. It's miles to the northeast. Yeah. 103:22 How old is that? I don't know. I know. 103:28 It's oriented north of east, 12 degrees. So it's got this strange orientation... 103:35 It has the most extraordinary versions of everything you see in Cambodia. It's got the biggest pyramid, the only one that's solid stone. It has the largest statues, you know, some of which were these monumental statues in the entrance pavilions. 103:53 It has these amazingly huge lingas. 103:56 Yep. 103:57 that are, you know, bigger than me, if I go just down one slide, that linga photo in the middle there is way taller than I am. And you don't see lingas of that size anywhere. There's the Kokar pyramid on the left. 104:10 At Kokar, there's a seven kilometer long dam north of Kokar that was found using LiDAR very recently. So it had the largest man-made body of water in Cambodia at this site. 104:23 What would a linga be used for? 104:27 Um, you know, traditionally the Linga is a, it's meant to represent Shiva. It's a merging of the masculine and the feminine. Um, the linga is the pointy part at the top. The yoni is the base. 104:46 So, you know, you could make an argument that it's a spiritual tool. 104:52 These giant ones, I've, you know, there's seven of them. There were seven of them at cook hair. I saw a huge one in camp in India that was 15 feet tall. It's like the size, size of a car. 105:07 Um, and in the ancient traditions, um, So in like the Shiva Purana, they describe it as an infinite pillar of fire and light. 105:16 They do. 105:18 So what was that implying about potentially the use of these? They're all housed in roofless shrines. 105:26 The spout of them always faces north, and they're always adjacent to a massive body of water. 105:31 Well, the mainstream view is that just represents Shiva and Vishnu. Totally. 105:34 Totally. 105:35 But it sounds like technology in the Mahabharata. 105:37 And it looks like technology. It does. And they talk about it like technology in the ancient texts. 105:43 They do. 105:44 So is it technology today and these little ones you see in the temples? No, those are spiritual tools. 105:50 Yeah. 105:50 These are different. They're fundamentally different. The one at Hampi is sitting in its own body of water. I have a video of it on my Instagram page. And you can, it's in a cage now, like they won't let you go in, but it's standing in the middle of this body of water. It's huge. 106:11 I'll find it right here. There it is. 106:15 So. 106:16 Wow. 106:16 The one on the left is cocare. 106:21 That's the one that you visit in Cambodia. The top right one is at Hampi, India. That's the site that I visited in June. So you see it compared to the size of this man. And look at it. It's sitting in water in a roofless shrine, and the spout is facing north. 106:39 And this one is locked off. The one in the bottom right is one in northern India, and it's 40 feet tall. 106:47 Also in a formerly roofless shrine. They have since covered it. 106:52 That looks like technology. 106:53 Also facing north and also next to a giant man-made reservoir. 106:57 Yeah. 106:59 I don't think that's a coincidence. 107:03 They're doing something specific with these. And even if you look at the one in India and the one in Cambodia, the designs they have on the front of them. 107:10 I don't know what those designs mean, but you see those all over. And, you know, I saw a Linga in Thailand that had that same design on it. 107:19 So there's something going on. Nobody talks about these huge ones. They only talk about the little ones that you see at Angkor Wat or whatever. Right. So to get back, this was a very long answer to your very short question. To get back to your question. I forgot what I asked. Any site, how old are the sites in Cambodia? If you want to get in trouble. 107:37 Yes. 107:37 If there's any site that you can make a case for, it's probably the oldest. My argument would be Koker is the oldest. It has the most monumental, the most standout properties of any of the sites in Cambodia. Yeah. 107:53 So that would be the one I would say is the oldest. Do I want to speculate? Could it be older than Younger Dryas? Yes, it could be. 108:00 Sure. 108:01 For sure. 108:02 Is it? I don't know. I don't know. 108:05 As I understand it, Cambodia was part of a much larger landmass called Sundaland a long time ago. So it was, again, not a landmass that was destroyed the way that North America was. It could preserve things for a very long time. 108:21 You know, back before the Younger Dryas, it was a grassland. It was a different kind of paleo environment than it is now. It's much wetter, much more jungle now. So would there have been some incentive to try to preserve water in a different kind of way in a different environment? Maybe. 108:39 Well, that was what I was kind of implying earlier was at Anchor, that kind of engineering would be much easier to do if it was just kind of a grassland or a plain. 108:48 Yeah. 108:49 In the jungle, it's hard to do. 108:51 Very hard to do. And to maintain. The jungle's constantly trying to rip down what you put up. 108:55 In a season. Yeah. 108:59 What's super interesting about Siem Reap is there's a very large lake, I think the largest lake in Asia, it's called the Tonle Sap, and it's south of Siem Reap. 109:11 And the Mekong River comes down from Laos on the east side of Siem Reap. And then south, it's one of the only lakes in the world where the river into the lake changes direction. 109:24 Throughout the course of the year. 109:26 Wow. 109:26 Normally water flows from the Kulin Mountains through the anchor complex south into the lake and then it goes south into the Mekong River. But when the Mekong River swells, it reverses course. The water goes back up into the inlet of the lake and it expands the lake massively. So it's this very weird water dynamic in Siem Reap. 109:50 I don't know of any other rivers that just reverse course. 109:53 No. I mean, the Nile floods. 109:56 But it doesn't change directions. No, it doesn't. 109:59 So it's interesting. 110:00 It's interesting. Yeah. I don't know what that means, but that's interesting to me. 110:06 I don't know what it means either, except that they had substantial water resources as part of this landscape. They were dependable. 110:16 And they engineered it, fully understanding how it all, you know, so they engineered it from the Kulin Mountains down into the plains. They diverted rivers 12 kilometers. I'll show you a photo here. So here's a, landscape photo of cm reap you've got the west beret the water feature you can see from space the old international airport is south of that beret you can see the runway there that's the scale of this thing So what they did is they took the water from the Kulin Mountains down the Puk River. 110:48 They created a 16-kilometer diversion channel, which they call the Siem Reap Channel. 110:53 They diverted it then to the east instead of taking it straight down to the Eastern Beret. 110:58 Passed Phnom Bakh Mountain, which had a giant linga on top of it. 111:02 Passed the 100-mound field into the Eastern Beret. 111:09 Every one of these berets has a temple in the middle of it, an island temple. 111:14 This particular beret has two pyramids connected to it, one on the west and one on the south. 111:20 Then the water exits the east side of that beret. It goes down the Rulis River and into a beret in the south that also has its own island temple and is also connected to a pyramid. 111:34 Let's say there's a bunch of people living here. Do you need that much water? 111:39 Not for agricultural purposes. And I can say that because I grew up as a farmer. 111:43 That's why I asked. Because that's a lot of water. 111:47 And it's a lot of land to use up for storing water. I mean, all of those could have been rice fields without creating eight kilometer long reservoirs. So you definitely don't need that for agricultural purposes. If you look at Wikipedia's definition of these berets, they say they were used for agriculture and spiritual purposes. 112:09 I don't go by Wikipedia. 112:12 Nor do I. Right. 112:13 Nor do I. But that's what they say. 112:15 So what was that for? 112:17 What was it for? Why go through that kind of an effort? And why are there all these weird pyramids? Like the Western Beret, the one I don't have highlighted on this map that still has water in it, also has its own island temple. Just next to it is Phnom Bacang Pyramid. Baxay Chomkron Pyramid is next to it. Like Bapuan Pyramid is next to it. It just goes up the line. They're all... 112:42 It's all part of this crazy network. Here's another kind of high-level photo of the different waterways that were happening there. It looks like a giant industrial process. 112:53 It does. 112:54 And they had ways to divert water, like from the Angkor moat, they could take it down to the Southern Beret, or they could drop it straight into the river, the lake down south of Siem Reap. 113:10 So they had ways to recycle water and move it back in or dump it. 113:16 You know, in the West Beret, you could dump it and go straight southwest, or you could divert it slowly along the plain all the way to the south. 113:25 That's different water speeds. That's different... Who knows what they were doing? I'd love to hear some sort of an expert in this give me some ideas. I'm extremely open to them, but... 113:37 Well, in your career, with companies that moved mountains to get that gold, so if this is a machine, what's the product and who's the customer? 113:47 I don't know. 113:49 Crap. 113:49 I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. 113:52 I want it to be an energy network for obelisks or something cool like that. 113:56 You know, was it, were they treating the water? Were they mining minerals? There were lots of minerals in this area. Because we can't tell. Were they generating energy? 114:10 Were they generating chemicals? I mean, the way Land of Chem thinks about these things, Jeffrey talks about a lot of these things as chemical industrial processes. 114:21 Here's what I think about. 114:23 I think that these sites were multi-use. So were they smart enough? Yeah. to create a system that not only creates the minerals or chemicals or energy that you need, but maybe also helped humans be healthier and created structured water so that crops grew well. And you have the pyramids that are changing the energy. And so it's a multi-purpose system and not just one thing. It's not just creating chemicals. It's also treating water, and it's giving it special properties, and it's all working together to create this beautiful, lush, vibrant, productive landscape and maybe healthy people. 115:05 Any chance there's hydrofluoric acid around? 115:07 I don't know the answer to that. 115:10 That would be interesting to know. 115:11 It would be. 115:15 So this is the landscape that I dream about. This is the landscape that I read all of the research reports for. 115:25 the pyramids are extraordinary you know there's eight of them in Cambodia and I don't think a lot of people know that so I didn't know that and they go all across the official Khmer timeline so they the very first thing that was built in Cambodia was supposedly the pyramid you know Right out of the gates in 880 AD, they made Bacong Pyramid, which is one of the most impressive pyramids in that landscape. 115:52 I don't think there's any way. 115:54 Doesn't make any sense. 115:54 No. 115:56 Did the temples come before the water? 116:00 So the same king that built the Bacong Pyramid in 880 AD is credited with, and that's the pyramid down south, is credited with, so the Bacong Pyramid you see on this map here, he's credited with building Bacong, the Priyako, which is a temple just north of Bacong, and the Beret. 116:21 And in some of the inscriptions, he says, he dedicates the pyramid. It doesn't say he constructs it, but he dedicates it. That's in Sanskrit, right? And then he says the words, something like, and tomorrow I will begin to dig. 116:43 And so that's how they've used that language to say, well, he must have dug the beret. Tomorrow I will begin to dig. 116:51 Now, this is the Sanskrit inscriptions that were translated. Bound at the site. Bound at the site. 116:56 Yes. 116:57 And the translations are very honest. 117:00 about, I forget who translated them, but he says, I think this word means this, but it could mean this, this, or this. 117:05 Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's Sanskrit. The French did all of the initial translations. So if you want to find these translations, you have to look deeply in these French documents. 117:19 But my general impression of the inscriptions are that the conclusions that have been The conclusions that the archaeologists have come to around this landscape are a bit of a jump from what the inscriptions actually say. 117:38 And I've made this case in multiple videos. 117:41 And we know, in these instances, they don't even claim to have built them. They just are dedicating, you know, a Shibalinga at the summit of this pyramid or something like that. But we know in Egypt, they also stamped their cartouches on the shoulders of statues. And to your point earlier, they look different than the underlying statue. So... 118:03 Even if they would have gone all the way to say, I built this, which in many instances they don't say that, it still doesn't necessarily mean they built it. 118:13 The beret, I think it's possible that you could translate that inscription to say, I'm going to re-dig the beret. I'm going to clear it out because it's full of silt and I want it to have water again for my people. 118:25 Mm-hmm. 118:27 So did that king that came right out of the gates, you know, the Inderbarman I, one of the first kings in the Khmer Empire, did he settle there because there was an incredible state temple, the pyramid, pre-eco north of it, which is a beautiful nether temple, and then a beret with the temple in the middle of it. And did he fix it up? 118:50 Because at Bacong Pyramid, there are six towers around the outside of it that are all made of brick. 118:59 And here's an interesting thing. 119:02 They did some carbon dating of, so in these brick structures outside of the pyramid, still within the moat, but outside of the pyramid proper. 119:10 Made of brick, there's wooden doorways, like reinforcements at the top, which you can date that. 119:17 Yep. 119:17 And they did. 119:19 They did date that wood. 119:20 And? 119:21 The wood came back at 680 AD. 119:25 200 years, so that's the low end of the range. Right. 200 years before the supposed construction of the entire site. 119:33 That's a lot of years. 119:34 It's a lot of years. Did they use a 200-year-old tree? 119:38 Right. 119:38 Maybe. Maybe. You know, and that's what people would say. And in the archaeological report that talks about those carbon results, they say they don't even make a comment about the fact that the wood is 200 years older than the site itself. They just say it's in line with the results. 119:53 And so in this hypothetical scenario where he's finding this site – Is the pyramid itself the oldest? Did they come in and did they repair the site and rebuild the towers around it with brick? 120:11 Even if they did all of that, it still shows that the repair work is 200 years older than the inscriptions at the top of the pyramid, say, of when it was built. 120:23 It's a lot of years. Have you heard of luminance testing? 120:26 I have. 120:27 Have they done that on this site yet? 120:28 No, they did it in a site, Phnom Da, on the brick at Phnom Da down in southern Cambodia. 120:35 What is luminance testing now that you mention it? 120:38 I'm no expert. As I understand it, it's a way to measure light exposure on the brick or stone itself. So like quartz, high quartz or quartz. 120:52 Natural things like bricks will absorb light and you can test the last time they were exposed to light and it changes. I might be doing a terrible job of explaining this. 121:01 That's how it works. 121:02 As I understand it. That's how it works. And there were anomalous results at Phnom Da too. The bricks themselves were much older than the site was supposed to have been. And that was one of the oldest sites in Cambodia. 121:14 So it's a real problem and it goes completely unacknowledged. 121:21 And that's the science themselves. There's another really interesting carbon date that came out of Cocare where they drilled seven feet into the moat on the moat that's in front of the Cocare pyramid. 121:39 Drilled seven feet down, and that was as far as their drill would go. That's it? 121:45 Yes, because in the report they describe why that was their limitation. It had something to do with where they had to mount the drill above the water, and it was a whole thing. But that's as far as they were able to go down. 121:58 And, you know, Cocare was built in, give or take, about 920 A.D., according to the mainstream narrative. 122:08 The bottom of the drill results into the sediment inside the moat came back 200 years before O'Care was supposedly built. 122:19 And that, if you think about that scenario... That matches the date of the wood, yes? 122:25 They're drilling into a moat that was already being refilled with silt. Right. 122:30 Right. 122:31 And yes, there are cultural layers in there and things you can test. 122:36 But in that scenario, did the moat and the site already exist? Was it already out of commission? Had the moat already been filled and maybe partially re-excavated from the king that lived there? And when they're dating seven feet down into this moat, are they dating the silt that filled it up later? And had they gone all the way to the bottom... 123:01 Yeah, seven feet doesn't seem like enough. 123:02 Who knows how old that would have been. 123:04 What if you go 40 feet down? 123:06 Yeah. 123:07 And theoretically... No one knew Pompeii was there for hundreds of years. 123:11 Theoretically, the bottom... They would have... If you went to that much trouble to build a moat like that, would you not keep it fully cleared of debris and waters all the way down to the original level at which you excavated it? 123:24 So they're just testing things that seem to be the wrong kinds of things to be testing. Yeah. 123:30 So for unlimited budget, what would you do? What's the task that proves this? 123:37 Well, oh man, that is an excellent question. And I, I mean, I would continue to do scans for sure, or I would release all of the data of the scans that already got done. 123:53 Oh, they're holding data? Yeah. 123:56 Yeah. I mean, they scanned a massive amount of land, and the only publicly available data is what was released as part of research reports. So that's not a public database. And there's reasons for that. You know, you don't want people looking in the database, finding a bunch of sites that haven't been... 124:14 acknowledged by archaeology yet and going out and digging it themselves you know you need to protect these places but that that data is not publicly available so i have an entire powerpoint of cambodia lidar and that's just images that i've hunt and pecked off of all of the reports that were written after those scans happened so i would definitely put together all of the lidar results that would be step number one for me And then I would hire a multifunctional team to go in and actually look at these different systems and see is there an explanation for what was happening here. 124:49 How cooperative is the government? 124:52 I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I think that they're definitely the Aspara National Authority does a great job preserving. So there's a lot of incentive to preserve these sites. Because in Cambodia, one of the biggest industries is tourism. So you want these sites to be built back up, maintained, and you want tourists to be paying their money to go look at them as often as possible. So I think that that's the number one priority. If you have a finite amount of money to spend, you want to make sure to prom stays in an upright position so that people can go take pictures where Lara Croft was, right? 125:29 Of course. 125:30 So I don't know if they're... 125:33 You know, it seems like they're very cooperative with other archaeological groups doing digs there. And the Japanese have been in there doing some interesting stuff. The Australians have. The French, obviously. So I think that they're cooperative. I haven't heard anything directly from them, you know, to me. 125:50 So... 125:52 I just wanted to see how it compared to Egypt, where it's, you can't dig. No, now you can, now you can't dig. 125:56 It doesn't seem like, you know, I think it's more of, like, how much money do you have? And it's such a giant complex. It's got 4,000 temples, like... 126:06 You've got to maintain that stuff, and you don't have a lot of money. So I think it's more how much work can you do on these sites to keep them up. They don't seem to be like Hawass in Egypt. 126:20 No. 126:21 But just to clear this would be insane. 126:25 I mean, if you look at this with all the things you know, what comes to mind for you? 126:32 When I look at this? 126:32 Yeah. 126:34 I want to say there's a machine. 126:39 Because it reminds me of what we see in Peru and in Egypt as well. 126:43 Yeah. 126:45 It's always the same stuff. It's the stone and the water. I don't know, but this is mostly sandstone, right? There's no granite here. 126:52 No. 126:53 It's sandstone. It's different levels of sandstone hardness. So I did an episode on the Takao Pyramid, and the towers of the Takao Pyramid are made of something called greenish graywack sandstone, which is what they carved all of those beautiful sculptures out of that almost look like granite. That is a much harder form of sandstone that was quarried very far away, and they built all of the towers of that pyramid with greenish graywack, which is much higher in quartz. 127:22 I was just going to ask how the quartz content is in that rock. 127:24 I mean, the quartz content is higher in the cocare pyramid than than it is in the other ones as well. This Japanese team, the researcher is named Uchida, is his last name, U-C-H-I-D-A. He's done a lot of work on the different stonework, the different types of sandstone and their properties. And the greenish greywack and the red sandstone is much harder, which is why it's able to preserve the carvings the way that you see. 127:53 But they have different qualities, including like Kokere Pyramid is much higher in quartz. 127:59 the sandstone and laterite both have different properties than the general sandstone used more broadly in Angkor and in the newer temples. 128:09 Like, I want to ask what could exert pressure on those, and I don't see anything that would, but the spindles come to mind. 128:18 Where I think about the gallery leading up to the King's Chamber and the reeds that were there, and it's kind of a wave guide, where what if you pushed... 128:28 If we pushed a lot of hot hair through the spindles, what would happen? 128:33 Because who knows what they were really used for? 128:35 I know. 128:37 Who knows if they even were in those windows in the first place? 128:40 Well, and there's much bigger versions of those all over India. 128:43 There are? Yeah. 128:44 huge, huge lathe pillars in India. Sorry, lathe-turned pillars. If you say lathe, then people get angry. 128:53 But yeah, there's a lot of lathe-turned pillars in India that are almost indescribably huge. 129:00 I saw those on my recent trip there. 129:03 So we're still waiting for that episode, yes? 129:05 Yes. Those are going to be the next ones I produce. 129:09 So here's a great example of 129:13 Wow. Oh, come on. 129:14 These are the ones in Cambodia on the left. That's a close-up of the red sandstone is Bantie Estre, so you can see how detailed those are. 129:26 The right one is one of the pyramids. I believe it's Takao. The one on the right is in these Hoisala temples in southern India, and these things are this big around. 129:37 What kind of stone is that? 129:39 That is a soapstone. Soapstone. Which is not, you know, it's soft when it's quarried and then it hardens after it leaves the quarry. 129:48 But it's incredible to see those. I mean, you stand in front of those and you can see your reflection. They're wider than you are. And you can see at the bottom exactly where whatever was creating this, when it started and when it stopped. Like you can just see them, like the shape of the lathe. Right. You can just see it stop. 130:07 Yeah, that tells a story. 130:08 And there's nubs at the bottoms of a lot of these pillars in India. 130:13 This very famous stone protrusion that you see all over the world. Yes. In Peru and Egypt and all over. Yeah. In the bottoms of a lot of these pillars in India, there's nubs on all four sides. 130:28 Has anyone done any AI math analysis on the spindles? 130:32 I don't know. I don't think so. I haven't seen anything like that. 130:35 I wonder what the ratios are. 130:37 Because there's intent to the design. 130:41 I agree. And they're different. They're usually the same within the same line. Then if you go to the next line, they're different from the ones before. 130:50 Why? 130:50 So producing different harmonics or who knows. 130:53 Right. 130:55 Different harmonics. 130:56 It's not decorative. 130:57 No. No. 130:59 I mean, it's pretty. I would put it in my windows, but I don't think that that was the purpose of these. 131:05 No, I think the builders would say, you're doing what with those? 131:08 Yeah. 131:09 That's not what those are for. We were heating water with those. 131:13 Oh. 131:14 Well, we put them up. 131:16 And then in Hampi, you see a lot of examples. 131:22 Hampi's an amazing site. Anybody who has a little travel money should go there. 131:27 You see things like this. 131:30 So here we are at the Hampi Museum out in the back. 131:33 If you have a little travel money, I think I'd still go Italy, over India. That looks machined to me. 131:42 Something was turning on that stone. That's where it was connected. 131:46 Clearly was. 131:48 You could see the anchor in the rock. 131:50 And these are just sitting out behind the museum at Hampi. You know, it's like their little stone cemetery. 131:57 The lathing lines go all the way down here. 132:00 You can see the lines in it. 132:02 Yeah, so if you're just listening, the lines basically look like the grooves on a record. They're perfect. So that's obviously, it's turned. 132:09 This is granite. At Hampi, it's granite. Everything at Hampi is granite. 132:15 So is that stone the base that was used to turn the others? 132:20 I think so. I think it was what was left over from creating it. 132:27 Here's another picture of one. 132:30 Wow. 132:32 And they don't hide it. It's just sitting out there. It's right in the back. And if you look at it, you don't think, oh, somebody must have taken a chisel and carved that out. 132:40 There's no way. 132:41 Yeah. 132:42 What do they say that is? 132:45 I think that they believe that that's part of the, it has to do with the lathe turned spindles. In India, they admit that they were lathe turned, but that was animal powered or human powered lathes. 132:58 Which, that's feasible. Totally. I acknowledge it. 133:00 Yeah. 133:02 Personally, I think it's more likely it was some sort of a machine of some sort and not an animal, but who knows. 133:10 Well, that's why everyone's accusing you that aliens built everything. 133:14 I have never said that, not once. 133:15 You've never said it, but that's on the internet now. 133:17 I actually believe that... Oh, is she the alien lady? I believe that humans built all of it. I think that humans are extraordinary. 133:25 In Hampi, there's this 40-foot stone horse trough. 133:30 Right. 133:30 So that was made for watering horses. 133:33 Nope. 133:35 And I found interesting the steps of what was that temple that you basically had to crawl up Like everyone was just crawling up the steps because the steps are huge. 133:45 That was the Takao pyramid in Cambodia with the greenish gray rock towers. 133:50 Why build steps that are like that? 133:51 And they're, you know, on most sides you can't even, they have most of the steps closed off because they're, they're this wide. You can barely step your foot on it. And so tourists started falling down and it's not safe. So yeah, that's not, that's not, unless you had very small feet. 134:07 Or very big. 134:08 Very small feet and very long legs. 134:10 Or very big builders. 134:12 Or very big builders. 134:13 I've got a hardcore segment of the audience that says giants built those. 134:18 I mean, we know giants existed. 134:20 Do we know that? 134:21 Well, I think we've seen large skeletons. 134:23 Do we know that? 134:25 We've heard of, yes, that's a proper challenge. 134:28 Okay, hang on. Hang on, hang on. This is getting too exciting now. We've got to take a break. We'll come back. We're going to talk giants. 134:35 Let's generate some hate articles and hate videos now. 134:38 I love it. 134:39 You've got to learn to love it. You've got to laugh at it. 134:41 You've got to embrace it. 134:44 You said that we know that there was giant skeletons, just as if that was a fact. 134:48 Well, there are a lot of news articles about the mounds in America that describe large skeletons being found in these mounds. 134:58 When you say a lot, you mean like 10? 135:00 No, I think there are books that are written that gathered all of these old articles. 135:06 So I think that, not unlike Bigfoot, there's a lot of evidence. 135:10 There's about over a thousand articles. 135:11 Yes. Okay, you know the answer. 135:13 I do. I'm playing coy. 135:15 Yeah, a lot of articles about this. Now, do we have them today? No. So, of course... 135:20 Now, the Smithsonian has receipts that they received bones, large bones. 135:25 Do they? 135:26 Yeah. But then they disappeared. They lost them. 135:28 Yeah. 135:29 It was like a famous coffin that was found with eight, like eight and a half foot skeletons. And they said, the Smithsonian, they said, we received it. And then years later, someone did like a boy request. They're like, no, we don't. 135:41 Yeah. 135:41 We don't have that. It's, you know, it's down here somewhere. 135:44 It's in the Bible. Talk about giants in the Bible. 135:46 The Nephilim. 135:47 They talk about the Nephilim, but they talk about, you know, Goliath. 135:50 Yeah. 135:51 Yeah. Extraordinary size. 135:53 How about the Vedic texts? 135:56 Well, in... So the Bhagavali statue that I saw in India, that was created by the Jains, J-A-I-N-S. 136:06 The Jains believe... So they have these... 136:11 these spiritual beings called the Tirthankaras. And the first Tirthankara was so big, he was miles tall. Wow. 136:19 And over time, In these, they call them half cycles. Over the time of the Turth and Karas, I think there's been 24 of them in a half cycle. They've progressively gotten smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And now they're about human size. 136:33 Okay. 136:34 So that is a very long tradition. And they talk in scopes of millions of years and miles tall. But, you know, they're talking about massive beings. 136:43 Do you know the Rapa Nui creation story? 136:46 I do. 136:47 How does that go? 136:50 Well, creation story of when it was settled or how Earth started. 136:54 How Easter Island became to be. 136:56 Yeah. 136:57 That's not a trick question. I'm curious because I know they have a cool creation story. 137:01 Yeah. You know, there was an island... 137:07 homeland, Hiva, that was sinking into the ocean. 137:11 So that implies some sort of cataclysm or catastrophe. 137:16 And their king had a dream about an island that looked a whole lot like Easter Island that had a crater at the south end. 137:25 And he sent out his seven explorers in a boat to go find said island and And they found it, reported back, and he and his, Hota Matua was his name, he and his family and his people settled Easter Island after he found it in his dream after his homeland sunk into the ocean. 137:48 So Secrets in Stone has very good coverage of Easter Island recently. Yeah. 137:52 It was an amazing trip. Easter Island is so special. 137:55 It's very weird because if you look at it, good luck finding it on a map, by the way. 137:59 I know. 138:00 Good luck. So they just found it, I guess. 138:02 Yep. 138:03 Do you know the legends that it was part of the island of Mu or Mew? 138:08 I've heard that. 138:10 It's my favorite. That Easter Island was sort of the bottom part of the continent out to the Hawaiian Islands. 138:15 Yeah, and it would have been a much larger connected or mostly connected landmass, or at least one that's easy to get from place to place. 138:22 It would explain why there's Greek words in Polynesian languages. 138:27 Yeah. That's odd. 138:28 Yeah. 138:28 And same with the East and Rapa Nui, they have some Egyptian words. Oh, do they? I think their sun god is Ra'a. 138:37 It's pretty close. 138:38 I didn't know that. That's interesting. 138:39 It's pretty weird. 138:40 Yeah. 138:42 Any theories about what the Moai statues really are? 138:46 I don't have theories about what they are. I don't think they were anything industrial or anything like that. I think that they were statues. 138:56 I mean, Barnard says that those are actually people. 138:59 Yeah. That's what the Rapa Nui say is that they represent actual people and that they come to life or become real once the eyes are set in. 139:11 Yes. 139:12 It's interesting because, and I talk about this in my videos, There's a lot of different sizes and a lot of different shapes of these moai. The very, very large ones are at the crater. 139:26 And they are, like you said, whole bodies. 139:29 You know, and they're huge and they're buried up to here or here. So it looks like just a graveyard of moai as you're traveling there. 139:37 I have a pet theory that the largest ones were meant to be part of a sacred landscape. 139:47 In my research, I found there's a road. Catherine Ruthledge, who was a British archaeologist in the 1930s, traveled to Easter Island and lived there for like six months. 140:00 And she did a lot of work with the locals. She heard all the stories. She attempted to translate the Rongo Rongo text. She did all of it. And she was there on the ground hearing the stories from the people there. But she describes this ancient road that went around the top of the island. I talk about this in my video. And the way she described it, it was called Mara. No, Mara. 140:24 Mahiva. 140:26 The word heva was in the name of the road. But she describes it as just going around this crater. 140:34 And she said where the cliff, where the land had dropped down, the road just stopped. And then it started on the other side of the cliff. 140:44 Almost like it was there before the land had washed away or changed. And she described it as it must be incredibly ancient. 140:53 And this road, which you can't, I've looked on Google Earth, I can't see it anymore. Nobody really talks about it. They talk about it because she talked about it. But below this road is, you know, there are megalithic walls. If you do the West Coast hike, you can see these megalithic walls, very beautiful ones that look almost like Ahuvenapu, just below this ancient road. And all along the craters on the north side of the island are these huge moai. 141:22 And the way they describe the crater is it was the quarry. And they necessarily moved the moai from the quarry down the transport roads to the Ahus on the coast. 141:37 But I don't think that... 141:40 That is necessarily the case. 142:02 Not heads. 142:03 Not heads. Giants. All along this road. 142:07 And along these road systems, you'll see them on their faces. And there's a lot of evidence that there was a lot of water erosion in going down these stones so down the back like they stood for a very very long time and then they toppled over and Catherine talks about that in her book she said the erosion patterns patterns don't indicate that that they spent their whole lifetime on their faces they were standing up for a very very long time So I think it's possible that there were different phases of these Moai. 142:42 The actual way that the Moai are built are different. The ones on the Ahus are built differently than the ones at the crater. 142:51 They changed the center of balance, the center of gravity on them. So the ones at the crater and some of them along the road have a very forward center of gravity. And the people who did that famous Moai experiment where they walked the Moai, they said they were built like that because it helped them to walk them. It leaned them forward. So when they pulled on the ropes, they took steps. 143:16 But then they make an observation that in order to finish them, they must have completely, because they won't stand up. 143:24 They will not. No, they take it forward. 143:26 So if you want something to stand on an AHU platform, it needs to have a different center of gravity. So they describe it being carved down, and the front is kind of taken off a bit, and the bottom is changed so that it can stand up. And then the eyes, they put in the eyes. And so that's the... 143:47 That's kind of the evolution or progression that made sense to them when they did that experiment. But to me, those look like two different moai. 143:57 I don't think necessarily one turned into the other, and I actually don't know how you do that. 144:02 I think that there were the moai that were around the crater and along the roads, and then I think there were... 144:08 Moai from a different time period that were put on the Ahus, even their facial structure is very different. The ones at the crater look totally different. They have this straight brow line. Yep. The ones on the Ahu have set in eyes where they put the top hats on and the eyes. So if you compare them side by side, which I do in the video, they look totally different. 144:28 They do. 144:29 They're like cousins from different families. They're not siblings, you know? So it's just a pet theory, obviously. I can't prove it. It's just the questions that I ask and the little bit of poking that I do. But when I was there, you know, the boathouses were really interesting. These structures that they say were houses. 144:49 You can see small ones along the coast that... are much inferior stonework and then you hike the west coast and there's their houses are huge and the stonework is very uh sophisticated and it it just doesn't look like a house to me it looks like something else right you know so i think that the mysteries of easter island are much deeper than people think what kind of stone were they using on all that stuff it's a volcanic tuff and then there's you know there's some basalt there yeah So, you know, the famous moai in the British Museum is made of basalt. 145:24 There was a basalt moai that was placed into one of the walls on our hike. There's another basalt moai kind of by the crater that's like buried in some grass. And so there's examples of that on the island, too. 145:37 That's why I asked, because if it's tough, that's pretty easy to erode. But igneous rock takes a long time. 145:42 Yeah. 145:44 But, you know, the really huge ones were all volcanic tough. And you can see there's a scan project. The name of it is Escaping Me, Easter Island Scan Project. But they actually scanned the whole crater and that's available publicly. So you can't walk up to the crater anymore. They close it off after COVID. 146:01 So you can't, you know, you can just walk the little pathways. It's very restrictive there now. You know, there's fences. That's why the West Coast hike is so special, because you can walk right up to the moai, right up to the walls, and there's no limitations. 146:15 You could touch the walls. 146:17 You could if you wanted to, for sure. 146:19 Yeah, so you can't go up into the crater now, but you can go online and you can look at the scans and you can, you know, run your cursor around and go inside the crater and flip it around and look. And it gives you a sense of the scale of the work that was being done there. I mean, they were producing hundreds of these things. And there were so many of them that were still in the crater, still in the quarry. And then the work just stopped. 146:41 Yeah. The whole island had to be working on it. I mean, how—Easter Island at its height was, what, 30,000 people? 146:49 I don't even know if it was that many. 146:50 So this is the entire population working on this project. 146:54 Yeah, and then who's growing all the crops? 146:57 I don't know. 146:58 Who's making the clothes? Who's building the houses? Who's going fishing? 147:01 The PhDs will tell us. 147:02 Yeah. It's a real mystery. 147:06 The people on the island are... I have to shout out the people on Easter Island because they are super special. 147:12 Go ahead. 147:12 And if you ask them questions about... They're the kinds of people... 147:18 That are very upfront and open about talking about the mysteries. So I had a dream. I, you know, I saw this being like there's stories that I share in my video where I interviewed some of our tour guides and they they love to talk about, you know, she talked about reptile reptilians, lizard people, the words that she used. 147:38 On Easter Island? That supposedly lived in the water of the crater. 147:43 Wow. 147:43 And she talks about that in her video that she recorded with me. You know, she said lizard people. And I was like, oh my gosh, it's lizard people. You know, so they're very, they're not embarrassed to talk about things like that the way that we are. Like when we talk about Bigfoot, I'm like, oh, you know. Yeah. I guess I kind of believe, but they're just, they're like, yeah, I had a dream and I encountered one of these beings. And, you know, there's lizard people in, they're very open about their beliefs and their myths and their legends. And I just think it's refreshing to be in that kind of an environment. 148:13 Is Alejandro one of the guides there? Yes. What was his story? He was pretty interesting. 148:17 He's a Pacarotti. So he's one of the original, you know, his family goes all the way back. And when I was, when I, we were booking our trip on this recent trip, I emailed Brian Forrester and I said, Brian, will you please show us around Peru? And by the way, I'm going to Easter Island. Do you have anybody you recommend? And Brian said, you have to go with Alejandro. And so it was a personal recommendation. Brian connected us and it was, I mean, he could have charged me four times what he did and I would have paid it because it was such a beautiful experience with him. 148:50 And he, I was like, we want to do the West Coast hike. And he's like, well, I don't want to do that, but my mom will take you. And she was amazing. 148:57 And she cooked for you guys. 148:58 Yeah. Well, it was just a day hike. It was like six hours. But she, you know, just she's like, look at this and look at that and look at that. OK, now on to the next. And here's the mango tree. And so it was a beautiful, very special experience being on Easter Island with the Paccaratis. 149:13 Does his family have any theories, stories about 149:18 No, not really. I mean, he's very well versed in the myths. One of the stories he shared with me that I have in my video is that his great grandfather was the first person that was at one of the Ahus after a tsunami hit it. And the tsunami had totally wiped out this Ahu. And his great grandfather was the first person on the scene with his horse. And he found in all the rubble, he found Rongo Rongo tablets. 149:47 He found skulls that appeared to be, as he said in the video, slightly elongated. 149:52 Uh-oh. 149:53 He said they're not like the skulls you find in Paracas, but he said they definitely were longer than normal skulls. 150:03 What happened to those? 150:04 They're in museums. 150:06 So both the Rongo Rongo tablets and the skulls that his grandfather found, there's apparently a picture of his grandfather on his horse on that day with the tablets sticking out of his saddlebag. 150:19 But apparently, I think one of the tablets is in Chile. I think the other one is in the Vatican. So they ended up in museums all over the world or locked away in the case of the Vatican. 150:31 Yeah, we can't see that. 150:32 You just can't see it. But... 150:34 Wouldn't you like to get down there in those archives for an afternoon? 150:36 I would give almost anything. 150:37 Yeah. 150:39 I would give almost anything to snoop around the Vatican archives. Imagine what they have in there. 150:44 So much good stuff. 150:47 Diana Pasolko's been down there. She talks about it. It's pretty wild. 150:51 But they're pretty, even if you're allowed to go down there, they're pretty controlling of what you're able to see. 150:57 They stand right over you. 150:58 Yeah, it's not like you're wandering around going, ooh, that's cool. 151:00 No, you have to tell them in advance what you want to see. 151:03 Show your credentials. Yes. 151:05 It's like, no, I just want to wander the 50 miles of shelves. Please. 151:09 You know what I'm going to do when I die is I'm going to come back as a ghost and I'm going to let myself into the archives. And, you know, at that point I'll have perfect knowledge anyway, but I'm still going to do it. Do it. I'm still going to go look. 151:20 Of course. That's a great idea to do when I die. 151:23 It's going to be my first haunting. 151:26 Speaking of one of your videos, a dog walked by. I think it might have been you talking to Kay and Mike. Was that Ghost? 151:33 Ghost, my Border Collie. 151:34 Okay. 151:34 He's the best. 151:36 Yeah, he's... We volunteer for an organization called Western Border Collie Rescue. And they... 151:42 Border Collies are like this extremely intelligent but kind of persnickety dog. Can't confirm. And they don't do well in shelters. Like if you go into a shelter and you want to adopt a dog, the Border Collie is in the back corner saying, don't you dare come near me. So they're not going to get adopted. They don't do well. Their nervous systems don't do well. So this organization pulls them out of the shelters in like a five-state area and puts them into foster homes. We're one of the fosters. And so like a couple times a year, we'll have a sweet little dog that's from, you know, Vernal, Utah or something. 152:14 And we'll watch over her and train her and get her to stop pooping in the house and give her a couple tricks to put up her sleeve. And then she gets adopted. And it's just a beautiful way to save these little border collies. And so that's how we got ghosted. He was one of the little adopted dogs. 152:30 How do you not end up with a house full of border collage? 152:32 If I were allowed to make the decisions, we would have many, many, many. 152:37 You get to make plenty of decisions. 152:38 My husband vetoes me on that one. He said, we're a one-dog family. 152:43 I pulled that same veto. 152:45 Oh, yeah. Your family would have many more dogs if... 152:49 If she said yes, yes. But no, I pulled the veto card on that. 152:52 They're so sweet. You know, the argument for not keeping them is you get to be a foster many more times if you don't have a house full of dogs. That's true. I guess. But they're just the most beautiful. Do you have a dog? 153:03 No. Cats. Cats. 153:05 Can't do dog. It's too much commitment. They're high, especially border collies. Yes. 153:09 They're like a kid. 153:11 And, you know, they just stare at you constantly. Yeah. I had a Border Collie before Ghost, and when I was in grad school, I'd be writing a paper, and I would look down, and I'd have like eight tennis balls in my lap. 153:22 Right. 153:22 Because he would go all over the house and find him and put him in my lap and just stare at me until I kind of threw him, and then he'd run around and have fun. So yeah, they're a high-maintenance dog. 153:31 Yeah. We had a Collie mix. She was like that. 153:33 You're so sweet, though. 153:34 Yeah. 153:36 Let's go back to giants for a quick second. Okay. Let's get them angry. 153:40 So we covered, I think we have giants in every continent, don't we? 153:44 I believe so. 153:46 I've covered the Censuna story on Malta. 153:50 And the hypogeum there is supposedly built by giants. 153:54 You come across any of those? 153:55 There's elongated skulls at the hypogeum as well. 153:58 I went to the hypogeum the week before I broke my pelvis in Mallorca. 154:03 And it was extraordinary. And they don't let you take pictures in the Hypogeum. Nope. So you go down into it and it's all, you know, rock cut. 154:14 It's very limited on the places within the Hypogeum that you can go. But the things you are able to see, they did a great job lighting it up. But the stories at the Hypogeum are incredible. And there was apparently school kids that went in there and never came out. That's right. And elongated skulls. 154:33 Yep, the giants. 154:34 Giant lore. Malta is a fascinating place. 154:37 Yep. 154:38 The cart ruts in Malta are incredible. 154:40 It's on my short list to go there. 154:42 You know what's interesting about Malta? I would wonder if anybody feels the same way as me. 154:49 There are places you go in the world that have this extraordinary healing energy. So like Cusco and Easter Island, there are places where you go and you like feel like you're aging backwards. You have beautiful dreams. Malta was, for me, a much darker energy. 155:04 It felt very like human sacrifice-y. It had a different energy for me. I didn't I didn't enjoy being at the actual ancient sites the way I do in some other places in the world. I never had any desire to go sit in the corner of one of these temples and meditate. 155:22 That's interesting. 155:23 Yeah. So it felt different to me than the other places in the world. And I don't know why, and I can't put my finger on it, but it just felt a little bit like an affront. The energy was different. 155:34 I kind of believe it. I had a certain feeling when I touched the Pantheon and I had another very strange experience in Naples that I eventually learned. I had an experience that was like two blocks from my great-great-grandfather where he was. 155:50 Did you know he was there? 155:51 No. I found this out six months ago because my aunt's like, here's where he lived. I'm like, oh my God. That's where I had like an experience. 155:59 Oof. 156:00 So I believe that there's energy in the earth and the rock. And you had a very interesting experience about the stones being sad. Do you remember that story? 156:09 Sad? 156:10 Because they dynamited the top? 156:12 Oh, yes. In Peru. 156:15 Yeah, it was a feeling of... Yeah, it... 156:22 This is a little woo, but every time I'm at an ancient site, except for Malta, I try to go find a quiet place to meditate. And we were actually there with Brian Forrester. And he's an amazing human. 156:38 Um, and he asked, you know, he said, this is a great place to sit down and just, just be, just sit and meditate. And we did that and we sat for a while and, um, and you get this, I had a very interesting sensation of all this energy coming from above down to me. 156:57 And then this feeling of being sad, like there was a time that I was, um, And I was operating in a different way. And now I'm kind of a shell of myself where I've been injured. And what's interesting is that's the same feeling I got on top of the co-care pyramid. 157:16 It felt like you could still feel the energy of that place, like it's beating heart. But there was like this little bit of sadness that it's not operating anymore. Because Kokair, according to the stories, had a giant linga mounted at the top of it. 157:35 And the linga is no longer there. It's gone. So when it was operating, it had one at its peak and imagine what it was doing and the energy that was there when it was in full swing. And now, you know, the top is all collapsed and you can see these really old like Atlantean lions. 157:52 Yeah. 157:53 They're holding up the platform, and some of them are just cracked on their side. And so you get this sense like it's still an energetic being, but it's not what it was at its prime. 158:07 When you see the LIDAR, you can kind of imagine what this place looked like when it was clear and everything was intact. 158:13 I can't even imagine how glorious it was. It had to have been one of those places to just fundamentally change you when you were there. 158:20 Because the energy today is still really good there. Yeah. So imagine when it was all operating, what it was like. 158:28 It's like being in a specialty ancient spa. Yes. Just there to make your cells just hum. 158:36 And you felt it. Didn't Stacey also have the experience in similar places? Yes. 158:41 Stacy is a mystic. Is she? She drops in much faster than me. She has much more access to the other side. And she and I love sneaking off together. And when we're together, it's always much more profound. So that's why I like to take her on every single trip that I go on. 158:57 You guys are a lot of fun. One of my favorite videos of yours is with you and Stacey just eating like dwarf themed popsicles. Dwarf ice cream. Ice cream on a dwarf bench. 159:06 Yes. 159:07 I'm like, I love this channel. 159:08 Bless her heart. She just is down for whatever adventure I'm dragging her on. And she, you know, that day was like 100 degrees. It was so hot. And there are these trolleys that take you around. This is CTEP in Thailand. Yeah. 159:25 trolleys that take you around the site and i was like no i don't want to ride those trolleys i want to walk it you know so we're out there just bushwhacking and it is hot isn't she like really can't wait just the best attitude she's so happy about it but yeah the at this at this site when you're just at the peak of your heat they have dwarf themed popsicles and iced coffee and in thailand they have orange coffee so it's like orange juice and coffee and it's delicious thai coffee is the best it's so good Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of special memories and experiences at these places. 159:58 They bring out the best in me. 160:01 I get angry at an all-inclusive beach, but I am very, very happy at Easter Island. 160:06 Kind of the same way. 160:07 Yeah. 160:08 It might have been your first video where you talked about your favorite mythologist, Martin Shaw. How did you come across his work? 160:16 One of my really good friends told me about him. And it was actually, so he's a mythologist. He lives in England. Are you familiar with him? 160:24 A little bit. 160:25 The way he writes about myths and relates them to your life today, he's just a very profound human being. I just love him. Never met him in real life. I just love him from afar. But he actually leads wilderness quests in England. That's one thing he does. And I learned about that concept of the wilderness quest from Martin Shaw. Tried to book his quest. It was like a two-year wait. I was like, I don't want to wait that long. So I found a quest in America. So he's actually responsible for the one that I ended up doing. 160:59 Wow. Did you ever try to get back into his quest? 161:02 No, I've considered flying over. He does these like five day kind of retreats where he just sits around the campfire and reads you these ancient stories. And I mean, it's just like imagine the experience. And so at some point I will pay to go to England. Go, you know, check out the British Museum again and then go hang out with Martin. He's a special human. 161:22 Yes, he is. Are you doing tours? Is that part of your thing? 161:26 I'm doing my first tour in Cambodia and Laos in January. 161:32 And I'm doing it with Derek Olson, so he and I are co-hosting it. 161:36 So we'll see how it goes. I had a lot of fun on my tour with Derek last year and I just piggybacked on his. That wasn't my tour. But I went over and hung out and gave a presentation and things. But we're doing it together and it's the only one I've planned. And I'm currently in a place where like this all came at me very fast. Like started my channel and then it just kind of it just went very fast. So I'm in a place now where I'm trying to take a step back and figure out how do I want to progress in the next couple of years? 162:08 What do I want to focus on? 162:10 Who do I want to be? You know, if I'm going to do a career planning session for podcasting, I've got to figure out where I want to put my energy. If I want to keep, you know, if I, if I want to go, if I could pick my next four vacations, right? It's Ethiopia, it's Indonesia, and it's probably two trips to India. 162:33 And yeah, do I want to keep doing that kind of travel or do I want to really dive deep into one region? Like Cambodia just keeps calling me back, keeps calling me back. 162:44 I don't think I want to get into like the conference circuit. I don't know that I want to do four tours a year. It's just, I'm just trying to figure out what I want to do next. 162:53 So how much will the audience have to say in that? 162:57 Um, I don't know. 162:59 Like, remember how excited you were when that first video kind of took off? 163:03 Yes. Yes. I lost my mind. I didn't know how, that was such an amazing feeling. And it was fully unexpected. And I, my, the people that I engage with are amazing. Like they send me emails and they're like, hey, I went to the Siem Reap Museum and I took all these photos. And do you have a shared drive? I'd love to upload them and you can use them however you want. Or, hey, there's these petroglyphs in Thailand and I took videos of it. So the people that I have engaged with, of course, there's been some negative people for sure sure but most the majority of the people that i engage with are super thoughtful very interesting really kind very curious and so yeah i mean i i guess if there's like popular demand maybe and i know that the tours i've been on have changed my life you know my time with you that the spending a week with brian forrester in peru forget about it like you can't meet that experience absolutely not so i'm not saying no i'm just trying to figure out 164:00 I mean, that's why I asked about, because I'm someone who understands, you know, the feeling of that first one going bananas. And it's like, I'd like to feel that one more time. 164:11 Yeah. 164:11 And then again and again. And next thing you know, you're writing for the audience, not really for your passion. 164:16 Totally. 164:16 It's like, they want a Bigfoot story, I'll do a Bigfoot story. 164:19 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So is that a compromise? And it gets its own legs, you know, its own energy. Yeah. What I don't want it to become is another job. Like I already did that. I already gave up my hobbies and was chained to my desk. I already did that. And I don't want another J-O-B. Right now, this is an extreme passion. I can earn zero dollars for the next 10 years and I don't care because this is the stuff that I dream about. This is what I think about. This is what I love. And I love... 164:51 getting at these sites, figuring out the mysteries, looking at these stones, and then producing a video where I ask questions. I show everybody the footage. 165:02 And, you know, either it inspires people to travel there or people that are never going to travel there get to experience it. And in my mind, it's a way to start to piece together that portfolio of sites that have all these consistent... 165:17 questions, right? The lower level of stonework and the nubs and the stones that turn around corners. And I mean, they're all over the world. So if you can go to places like China and Indonesia and Ethiopia, and you can start to say, look, nobody else is doing episodes on Ethiopia. As soon as it's safe enough, I'm going there. I've got the whole trip planned. 165:38 It just adds to that list of, gosh, it's pretty hard to refute. 165:43 The evidence is compelling. 165:45 In Ethiopia as well? 165:47 Ethiopia is my number one travel goal. 165:50 No one's really covering that. 165:52 It's got this obelisk, this Stella Park. There's a 500-ton obelisk that was stood up. 166:00 Wow. I need to look into Ethiopia. 166:03 It was incredible. And it's extremely megalithic. All of these, the most interesting stuff is in Aksum. 166:11 Oh, yeah. There's a lot of stuff there. 166:12 And then, of course, you have the churches of Lalabella that are the rock-cut churches. So that's like Kailasa Temple in India where the oldest levels are at the top. 166:21 Yep. 166:22 And then you dig down and you see it get younger and crappier. 166:25 Do you think the Ark of the Covenant is an axiom? 166:27 I mean, I read Graham's book. Of course. That was really, really interesting. 166:31 It was compelling. 166:32 It was compelling. 166:33 There's a lot of video of that. I mean, I've covered that story. There's video of those priests coming out with cataracts. 166:38 Cataracts, and they die early, too, don't they? 166:40 Mm-hmm, like three years, they're out. 166:42 Yeah. 166:44 I don't think it's there, though. I think it's fake. 166:47 Yeah, maybe. I mean, it is the oldest Christians in the world. 166:52 I mean, that's why I've covered it, because the Ethiopian Jews go back a thousand years. 166:57 Yeah. 166:57 It's a pretty crazy place. 166:58 No, I had the plan all ready. We were just getting ready to pull the trigger and buy plane tickets in June, my brother and I. 167:07 Because I just asked him if he wanted to go and he said yes. And right before we bought our plane tickets, the security situation went south. And so we backed off and went to India instead. But it's very top of my list. 167:21 I'd like to see you cover it. Yeah, you've got the Cabernagast and all kinds of interesting literature there. 167:26 Mm-hmm. 167:28 That could maybe line up with some of the landscape. Now that you mention it, there are places there that don't make a lot of sense. 167:33 There's fields of standing stones from like 50 BC. The 500 ton obelisk was quarried like eight miles away. 167:45 That's in Axum as well? 167:47 In Axum. 167:48 It was stood up and then it, I've got pictures. It was stood up and then it fell down. 167:55 Here it is. 167:57 So where was it quarried? Because Axum is one of the highest elevation cities in the world. 168:03 Well, they say that the quarry was like six or eight miles away. 168:07 And there's... Down the mountain. 168:08 Legends that it was transported using mammoths. 168:12 Whoa, I love that story. See, this is incredible work. 168:15 The churches in Lalibella... were supposedly carved by angels at night and humans by day. So there's all of these amazing legends. So, yeah, this was a 500-ton obelisk that at one point was standing. Now it's since fallen. The other obelisk in the background that's supported by a crane was taken by Mussolini in World War II back to Italy. 168:37 Mm-hmm. 168:39 And stood up in Rome. 168:41 And eventually Ethiopia petitioned for years and years and years, finally got it back. In order to get it back, they had to split it up into three pieces, extend the runway, put it in a Eastern European, I keep saying Russian, and then I get pushed back that it wasn't Russian, cargo plane. 168:58 And flown from Italy to Ethiopia, landed on the extended runway. All of the bridges were reinforced so that they could drive it back here and stand it back up where the ancients had no problem putting it up. 169:13 I have never heard of this obelisk and the craftsmanship on it. There's no animals. There's no people. It's geometry. 169:21 Very stark, just like all of the other ancient. 169:24 So it looks functional. 169:26 Yeah. 169:28 That looks like sci-fi, that obo. 169:30 So here's another. These are like the underground structures in Axum. This is the Tomb of the False Door. And it has nubs. 169:39 Right. 169:40 On the wall. It looks very Egyptian as far as these very large stones. 169:47 There were boxes in there that were, you know, this whole place was pillaged. So the boxes were all chiseled out looking for treasure and stuff. But they had these stone boxes in these underground chambers right in Exum. 170:02 I didn't know this. 170:06 What are the nubs for, do you think? 170:08 Because we see those all over the place. 170:10 I've heard a lot of theories. I mean, archaeologists say it's for propping up the stones. So they used it as a leverage point to lift stones into the air. 170:18 You think concave would be easier. 170:19 It doesn't make any sense. No. You know, you hear about geopolymer. I think there's, in some cases, especially the stuff in Peru, I can see that as plausible. 170:34 You know, as it was, as the geopolymer chains were forming and the water was draining out, it leached out of the bottom. And if they didn't get the recipe quite right... 170:44 Then there was too much water in this mixture and it needed to drain out. If they got the recipe right, then you don't need a nub because nothing needs to drain out. But this isn't a hallway. If it did drain out... 170:56 and not they're they're not on all the stones right they're not always at the bottom like this one's right in the middle of the stone and you see them also in quarries and you don't need your quarries are not geopolymer that's earth right and you haven't moved that stone so you don't need it for leveraging it so there's i think that the nubs are a true mystery were they an ancient signature you know like a maker's mark yeah there's no mortar here is is there No, no. 171:28 It's, yeah, Ethiopia is my number one. You know, here's the Church of St. George and Lalabella. 171:37 Yep. 171:38 carved from the top down they did a bunch of the zamani project did a bunch of scans of these so you can like get on their website and go on inside and outside and start looking around the way the churches were built and to me there's a signature of several of them being very old very and they had the same designs as that obelisk 171:59 They do, huh? 171:59 But supposedly they're a thousand years apart and the builders had nothing to do with each other. But if you look at the ones that are the most precise, which is only like three or four of the 12 churches, you can see the signature of it being extremely old. And then you see some of them that seem much newer to me and in many cases are deeper. So there is an argument that they're newer. Deconstruction's just shoddy. You know, it just looks nothing like the other churches. 172:23 So it's once again, it's the same old story. 172:26 It's an incredible site that was found and lived at. Archaeologists can't even really work here because it's a religious site. 172:36 The Ethiopians revere this site. They have pilgrimages there every year. So they're not going to let people dig around. And even if you do, it's all stone. So I don't know what you're going to find. 172:48 And we know from Cappadocia, like Derinkuyu, Muslims, Christians, they're very happy to just move in. 172:54 And just carve out a temple. Heck yeah. Like, oh, someone already dug this. We just got to put a nave in here. We're good to go. 173:00 I mean, all of us like living in cool places. 173:02 Yes. 173:03 We all seek that out. So it's a natural human instinct. If you see this and you're like, this is really cool. I'm going to live here. 173:10 You had a cool quote, which was something like, if I move into a house and put my name on the mailbox. 173:15 I didn't build the house. 173:15 I didn't build the house. 173:17 So it's probably a pharaoh's name on a lot of mailboxes. 173:20 And a lot of inscriptions in Cambodia and India, and that's used to date a whole lot of sites. And if there isn't an inscription, then if there is an inscription and another site looks a lot like it, then they're the same. And they must be the same time period because the buildings look the same. So it's just this effect, this downstream effect of things just getting grouped together in different age groups without really a whole lot of actual evidence. 173:49 You definitely see that in Egypt with all the different sites. 173:52 Yeah. 173:55 This world is full of amazing mysteries, and I will endeavor to go see all of them. 174:02 You're going to cause a lot of trouble out there. 174:04 Yeah, I know. 174:07 Okay, last question for you. 174:11 Did you see me turning these pages for this whole thing? 174:14 I really want to read those questions. 174:15 You can if you want to. There's no secrets. 174:19 What was cool is I just kind of let you talk and you just walked through. You walked through my whole script anyway. It was very nice. You made it very easy. 174:26 Look at that. There's media training right there. 174:29 You're born to do it. 174:32 Look, you can become a YouTuber in your 40s. 174:34 You can. You did it. It's been done. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just following in your footsteps. 174:40 My idol AJ. Yeah, right. When you walk around here, are you like, oh, no, I never want to do any of this? 174:45 This seems very... I don't know that I could handle like... 174:50 a big production, a consistent schedule, a staff at this point in my life. I kind of just want to just kind of quietly research. But are you secretly managing a business? 175:00 Well, we have an electrical company. So yes, we're managing. My husband does most of the managing, but... 175:06 So you're doing the books and payroll and all that. 175:08 I am, unfortunately. 175:09 So you just have to shift into media. 175:12 In college, all of my professors wanted me to be an accountant. And I said, absolutely not over my dead body. And now I'm an accountant. 175:19 That's what you said about doing YouTube, right? Absolutely not. 175:21 Exactly. I need to stop saying that. 175:24 I think it was Matt that you were talking to. 175:28 You said that when you're 90, you hope you can still crawl around these sites. 175:32 Yes. 175:33 So what do you think... 175:36 90-year-old Cassie would know that you don't know yet. 175:40 I think technology is going to change so much in our lifetime. I have this dream of being able to come in with, and I don't think it exists today, being able to come in with a scan and scan these buildings from the bottom up And to be able to place the different portions of these buildings into different time periods. To really look at the structure of it, the way it's constructed, and start to break down these sites and say, this is definitely the oldest and we need to be researching this and comparing this to structures in all these other places that we've scanned. 176:17 And I think with technology, you might be able to get there in my lifetime. You might be able to scan the ocean floor in my lifetime and uncover some really incredible things. 176:27 I think that people are hungry to understand our distant past. I think right now this conflict we feel between the accepted story and all of these crazies out here, these pseudo-archaeologists out here spouting their theories, I think that's going to die down and I think... 176:46 I what I hope is by the time I'm 90, I'll talk fondly about the days when nobody believed. 176:53 And by the time I'm 90, everybody will generally accept that we've got a much more mysterious past than we believe. 177:00 And people will be excited about it and will have discovered so many more sites than than we know of even now. I mean, every year they're getting discovered. 177:10 And I think it's, you know, I hope to look back and be like, that was freaking awesome. That was so fun. 177:16 That's how to land the plane. Bye, everybody. 177:18 Thanks, everyone. 177:19 That was Cassie Coppersmith. She ended on what she hopes to know at 90, so I'll start with them out. Four days, no food, no mushrooms, and she came down with one sentence. You will save the children. She cold emailed an anti-trafficking group, and I checked the board list. She's on it. 177:36 The rest I dug a little deeper. In 2015, Damien Evans' team published the Ankerwatt LIDAR in the journal Antiquity, my-long coils of sand south of the moat with nothing in them, and later a canal cut through. Their words, quite how the spirals functioned, is not at all clear. That's the people who found them, in a peer-reviewed journal. Shrugging. I love that. Now, the Kokair moat they drilled seven feet into. I read that paper. The archaeologists' conclusion is that Kokair was not an ephemeral city established in a virgin forest. 178:07 They'd think there was an earlier temple. She thinks it's older than that. Look, Cassie spent a career doing due diligence on billion-dollar holes in the ground. And when asked what the anchor machine makes, she said she did no. Three times. I trust people who can say that. Her channel is Secrets in Stone, and she's leading a Cambodia and Laos tour in January. The Exodus Road and everything I mentioned are linked below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. 178:50 I play for Libya, scenario 51, a secret code inside the Bible said I would. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun, as well as music and songs singing like I should. 179:09 But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth with my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends. 179:28 I fear the crab cat and I got stuck inside Mel's hole with MK Ultra being only two aware. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadow people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man, I'm told. And his name was cold. And I can't believe. 179:59 We'll be right back. 180:34 The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come. To have got the secret city underground. 180:43 Mysterious number stations, planets are both too. Project Stargate and where the Dark Watchers found. 180:53 In a simulation, don't you worry though. 180:57 The Black Knight satellite told me so. I can't believe. 181:04 Head for fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And wild bombs on repeat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So wild bombs on repeat all through the night Head for fish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And wild bombs on repeat all through the night What did you hear the truth? 181:36 So the world falls off and beats all through the We'll be right back.