#2417 - Ben van Kerkwyk

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Jamie (0:06)

Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Ben? You can see, so the last time you were on, we barely scratched the surface of all the things that we wanted to talk about, so immediately we were like, we gotta do another one quick, because you wanted to talk to them about the Sphinx.

Ben van Kerkwyk (0:22)

The Sphinx, yes, yeah, we were on, we got into the, well, the labyrinth was kind of the big...

Joe Rogan (0:26)

Labyrinth is nuts. I still haven't been able to get over it. The 40-meter metallic-shaped, tic-tac-shaped thing that's in the ground, like, what is that?

Ben van Kerkwyk (0:35)

Well, I hope we'll find out. I mean, I don't know. It's, the wheels do turn a little slowly, but the point of that was to try and drive some awareness. Maybe we'll get some sort of angel investor in there to go and look at it and solve the problem, do something.

Joe Rogan (0:49)

Someone needs to talk to Elon.

Ben van Kerkwyk (0:50)

Yeah, maybe.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

I'm not the guy. I talk to him too much as it is. He's too busy. But someone who can annoy him. Or maybe Bezos would like to be the first guy to get in there. Someone has to get in there. You have to figure out what that thing is. That's crazy. This might be one of the biggest mysteries in the entire human civilization record.

Ben van Kerkwyk (1:10)

Who's the director that went to the bottom of the earth? Cameron. He likes going places that nobody's gone before. They tell the whole get there.

Joe Rogan (1:16)

Maybe he can develop a thing. I don't think enough people know. A lot of people know that we're listening to this podcast, but not enough people that would do something, that can do something. We reach a lot of knuckleheads.

We reach a lot with some wide variety of people, but the percentage of people that have the resources to make something happen. They have to work something out with the Egyptian government, right? So they have to do something with those dams.

Ben van Kerkwyk (1:42)

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

Joe Rogan (1:57)

We should probably explain to people that didn't listen to the last podcast, just a real quick synopsis of what this is.

Ben van Kerkwyk (2:02)

So the labyrinth, we're talking about the great lost labyrinth of ancient Egypt, which was described by figures like Herodotus, Theodorus, Siculus, Pliny the Elder. Figures from antiquity, these authors, and they've described it as being greater in magnificence than the pyramids, they had these just mind-bending descriptions of what this site was, like multiple levels, 3,000 rooms, you would get lost in it, it had giant courtyards with pillars all made from, I mean one guy, I think it was Strabo, described the roof as being a single piece of stone, which I don't think it was, but it's describing those perfect joins that you see in the real megalithic work from Egypt. So it's this giant mystery, we know it's there, and it was kind of lost to time, until we found it again, basically, it was discovered, it was always known about because there were clues about its location, it was always theorized to have been at this place called Hawara, which is near the Foyoum in Egypt. And Petrie went there and dug it up, the Flinders Petrie in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and he found massive stone slabs, and he thought he was standing on its foundation, like it had been quarried and taken away. And rather than that, it turns out he was most likely standing on the roof of the top layer, it was like 10 meters below the ground.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

That is so nuts.

Ben van Kerkwyk (3:16)

He never got quite in. But then in the Madaher expedition happened, I think in the mid 2017 or 2015, there was an expedition run by a guy named Louis de Cordia in partnership with the Egyptian government. They used ground penetrating radar, sonic techniques, like well established subsurface techniques, and they found it. They found these massive cyclopean walls that were meters thick. It was a labyrinthine structure. It's well verified, it's below the water table level of what's on that site now. So you have water table sort of five meters below the surface. The labyrinth starts at nine, ten meters. And that was, there's some controversy around that report because it was buried. Like so he found it. They never published the report. It was squashed by Zahi Huas. This is according to Louis de Cotier. He threatened him and his team with national security sanctions if they talked about it.