#2449 - Raul Bilecky

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience.

Raul Bilecky (0:06)

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

SPEAKER_4 (0:12)

Raul.

Raul Bilecky (0:13)

Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

Very nice to meet you, brother.

Raul Bilecky (0:14)

It's so good to meet you.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

I have enjoyed your content tremendously online. And I really got into a video this morning that I was watching where you found this megalithic site that was undocumented in Peru. It's incredible that they still have these ancient sites that for whatever reason, it seems like the money that they get gets stolen. Like the money that is supposed to be allocated towards documenting these things and registering these things. People just say, fuck it, I'm going to pocket it.

Raul Bilecky (0:49)

It happens a lot more than you think.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

It's just hard to believe, man.

Some of the stuff that you document is very heart breaking. Like one of them was when you flew a drone over these ancient ruins, and you showed the amount of places that have been looted. And it's just all of it. It's just pop, you see these holes. And when I first saw them, I'm like, what is, what is he showing me? And then you're like, these are all spots where someone has dug in and looted. And most of it has been done in this area of Peru over the last 20 years.

Raul Bilecky (1:27)

Over the last 20 years.

Joe Rogan (1:28)

So from 2006 to 2026, more...

Raul Bilecky (1:32)

I would have, the biggest amount of looting happened, it's actually died down some. But the end of the 20s, so 1980s to 2010s, I would say. That's when it really took off. And you can tell from the trash that's left there, like, cigarettes that were only produced in the 80s, or, you know, soda bottles that were only produced in the 90s.

Joe Rogan (1:55)

How nice of them to steal the artifacts and leave trash.

Raul Bilecky (2:01)

They've become landfills of human remains. It's... this place you're talking about is, I mean, it's eight full kilometers of just... it looks like the moon. Every single location has been looted. And I was like, I gotta go up there and see what this looks like.

And so...

Joe Rogan (2:20)

Pull up to the microphone a little bit more. So looting, what are they at that point in time? I mean, these are hundreds, thousands of years old, these sites. So what are they finding?

Raul Bilecky (2:32)

Well, a lot of the mummies that I've... because I found mummies that have been torn apart, literally, like they're... the cotton that they're wrapped in, the textiles that they're wrapped in. I mean, it's just... they've been scavenged.

Joe Rogan (2:44)

Are they looking for jewels?

Raul Bilecky (2:46)

Or for some sort of metallurgy. Like, on the person themselves. The unfortunate thing is, I mean, all you'll see is, you'll just see these bones littered across the landscape with broken pieces of pottery and...

Joe Rogan (2:59)

That was also disturbing. How much bones you see everywhere. So this is... You see a bone right there. These are all human bones that you just find scattered.

Raul Bilecky (3:09)

That's all cotton. And what we're about to see here is an actual mummy that's been torn apart.

Joe Rogan (3:17)

This is... It's so sad that there's no protection.

Raul Bilecky (3:22)

Nobody's going out there, man. Nobody. Except for the looters.

Joe Rogan (3:26)

But I know very little about Peru other than, you know, obviously the Nazca lines, the mummies, all these different things, the mystery of the place. Keep showing that, please. Oh, it's over.

Raul Bilecky (3:38)

But... There's a couple of burial drone shots.

Joe Rogan (3:43)

But it's just...

Raul Bilecky (3:45)

You go to the top.

Joe Rogan (3:46)

How big is Peru? I don't even know geographically how large it is.

Raul Bilecky (3:50)

I mean, Peru is huge. I mean, it takes up... This is another... This is a different looted site. So this is all... All of this is in the Paracas, Nazca ecoregion.

Joe Rogan (4:03)

And these skulls are just sitting there?

Raul Bilecky (4:05)

So the looters will oftentimes leave, I don't know, set them up in this fashion. There isn't a site I've gone to where I haven't seen something like set up like this in the end. But so I pull out to show the scale of it. I mean, every little piece of white you see is some part of a human.

Wow, it's tragic, man.

Joe Rogan (4:34)

Just so much history lost. And so does this stuff wind up in private collections? Do museums ever get it? Like, what happens to that stuff?