January 5, 2023 • 64 mins
For many people, the word "pyramid" instantly conjures up images of ancient Egypt -- of pharaohs and mummies, treasure and (maybe) curses. But while the pyramids of Egypt may be the most well-known, they are far from the only example of these structures. Join the guys as they explore the stories of pyramids across the globe, including their alleged uses and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, welcome to our classic episode, fellow conspiracy realist.
Everybody knows that Egypt has pyramids, but what you may
not know is that there are other pyramids all around
the world, built by all sorts of civilizations. Why. What
we found is that there are a lot of folks
who will tell you they were part of a global debtwork,
(00:22):
and there are a lot of other folks will just say, hey,
a pyramid is literally one of the most stable things
you can build. It's a good point and also a point.
It's got a good point that potentially points to God
or funnels some sort of magical godlike energy. You know,
a lot of fun conjecturing in this episode. Yeah, Graham
and Hancock has his new show on Netflix right now,
(00:45):
is re record this intro talking about the ancient apocalypse
in the possibility that there was some kind of advanced
civilization before the Great Flood. You know this, This is
really all food for thought in here for this episode. Yeah, yeah,
I'm yeah, And just to say, you know, um, you
will you will find that Graham Hancock's uh Netflix show
(01:07):
has met with no small amount of controversy. So we
we do our best here to try and look at
both the claims that people are making and the conclusions
of archaeologists. Let us know which side you fall on
in this great debate from UFOs to psychic powers and
government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
(01:30):
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name
(01:59):
is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben.
You are you? And that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. We've got our superproducer Trysted there
and the uh let's see ones two. We got a
whole stable of superproducers. I feel like the name is
taken on less of a special meaning. Are you just
mad because I called you a superproducer? First? I am OK?
(02:22):
What am I now? An inferior producer? You're a super
co host? Yeah? So it's true. We have been expanding
and we're hoping to build something that stands the test
of time, which turns out is a fairly tricky endeavor.
The longer the timeline becomes right, I hear the trick
(02:44):
is to stack things on the ground and then stack
another layer that's slightly smaller on top of that one,
and then just keep going. It's the lego rule. Yeah,
or from red solo cups to uh decks of cards.
You know, this is such a side note, but I
had no idea. Apparently, red solo cups or solo cups
(03:07):
in general our US thing, and they've appeared in so
many films that people around the world associated with American culture.
So people travel traveling to the US from outside of
the US often by these cups and bring them back
to their friends and associate them with getting plastered, sort
of like pyramids in Egypt. Am I right, Yes, like
(03:29):
pyramids in Egypt. Uh, that is true, that's what we are.
We sort of circumnavigated the uh, the topic, and so
let's get right to it. Let's jump into the bush
instead of beating around it. Pyramids, Well, you may have
seen one of these things before, perhaps in a history book,
perhaps you've taken a trip to somewhere in the world
where they exist. It's a structure with a triangular outer surface,
(03:53):
like we were talking, uh, smaller layers on top of
bigger ones, and it converges to a single point at
the top. Hold your horses, kids, are about to get
into some serious geometry. The base of a pyramid can
be trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygonal shape. You guys remember
that stuff? Oh yeah, I don't. So let's look at
(04:13):
a square pyramid. A square pyramid has a base for
triangular outer surfaces. This is a common version and the
design is simple but brilliant. Right. Pyramid keeps the majority
of the structure's weight closer to the ground. And uh,
the pyramid ian on top, that's the fancy word for
(04:34):
a capstone, means that less material higher up on the
pyramid will be pushing down from above. So these are
structurally very, very stable. And when early civilizations created these, uh,
they quickly realized, you know, this is way more durable
than just building straight up the way we do with skyscrapers. Yeah,
(04:55):
and we can build these things much larger than any
other building that we've created the far, and they're cool looking. Yeah,
that's true. And let's be honest, when most people hear
the word pyramid, they don't really think of geometry, quadrilaterals,
and polygons. They think of mummies and Egypt. I'm super basic,
(05:17):
that's I mean, you're totally right. They think of they
can go Egypt, pharaohs, mummies, right, and who can blame them.
Egypt has a huge amount of pyramids. The estimates vary,
but sources currently site anywhere from eight to a hundred
and thirty eight identified pyramids, and there could be more
hiding out underneath something which we this will be a
(05:40):
common thing that we find throughout this episode. Yeah, then
most of these right, No, I think you're spot on
to mention mummies because most of the ones in Egypt
were built as tombs. You know, it was the it
was the very last word in luxury, and these were
common during the Old and Middle Kingdom periods. The earliest
(06:00):
known pyramids are found in a place northwest of Memphis,
Memphis in Egypt. The Memphis in Tennessee is named after
the Memphis in Egypt, which I didn't know for a
long time, but it's an a little town called uh Sakara.
The earliest of these pyramids is the Pyramid of jos
(06:21):
Er d j O S E. R. And it was
built during the Third dynasty. In this pyramid and it's
surrounding complex, I guess you could say it's almost like
a kind of compound where everything sort of built around it,
like a mall or something. Um they were designed by
the architect Emma tap and they're generally considered to be
(06:42):
the world's oldest monumental structure. Is constructed of what's called
dressed masonry, so not like not like a earthen mound. Yeah,
I mean, they're more polished and finished stones, right, and
by far the most famous pyramids that exist. When you
close your eyes and you imagine pyramid, you're probably thinking, Okay, yeah,
(07:02):
what are you saying? It's probably the Pyramids of Giza,
the on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. These have been
featured all over the place since you were a baby.
These have these things have been on covers of magazines
and on television and in movies. And there's some of
the largest structures ever built. The largest one Giza. The
(07:23):
largest pyramid is the Pyramid of Cufu. And as remember
the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the hanging gardens,
all that jazz, the Pyramid of Cufu is the only
one still in existence. So pretty serious accomplishment for a structure,
I would I mean, I'm not surprised to beat the garden,
but any any man made structure. You've probably seen this
(07:44):
in various uh non fiction television shows where they talk
about what would happen if humans just disappeared or when
the species goes extinct, start talking about how quickly things
will deteriorate. The US has a couple of durable structures,
but not as many as we think. No, the Hoover
Dam is pretty pretty cool. That thing is still curing.
(08:07):
It's technically not finished. That's an odd thought. But the
pyramids will probably outlast a lot of the architecture that's
currently on the planet, and for thousands and thousands of years,
these were the largest man made structures on Earth. For example,
let's take a closer look at the Pyramid of Cufu,
(08:29):
which is built mainly of limestone in the exterior and
most of the pyramid itself, but then as you get
towards the interior, there are some large red granite blocks
in there. Yeah, and it contains over two million blocks,
and they have a wide range of weight, but they're
they're all gigantic. The large limestone blocks weighs six point
(08:52):
five to ten tons, and the smaller ones would weigh
in at about one point three tons, and so um.
You can see various calculations of this. There's another thing
it's not just the size and the weight of the structure.
The placement is surprisingly precise, right. Uh. It has four
(09:15):
sides that face the four cardinal points, absolutely as you said, precisely,
and it also has an angle of fifty two degrees.
Originally it was four feet high, but today I guess,
through pyramid shrinkage, the well known undocumented phenomenon, it's only
four hundred and fifty five ft. So what happens that
(09:36):
missing thirty three ft Somebody stole it? Right, It wasn't erosion.
Nature didn't steal it. People stole it. There was this
high quality casing limestone, not a thing. Well, I guess,
in the way that retail stores refer to shoplifting, your
shrinkage spoilage, right, I urged shrinkage spoilage might be one too.
(09:57):
But nonetheless, this thing still remains as a massive structure
out there in the desert, or at least on the
outskirts of a city. And yeah, and when we hear
this word again, we we often think of ancient Egypt,
one of the world's most influential situations. Tombs, desert, mystery,
(10:17):
winds in the night, and curses. Right, Uh, Pyramids are
mysterious though for hundreds of years societies around the world
forgot what they were for. I had no idea why
they were built. Would just take tours to stare at
them and then to steal stuff. And to be fair,
there are a lot of human beings out there that
(10:39):
don't believe we've nailed down exactly what these pyramids are for,
even though, yes, even though it's kind of a known thing,
but we're gonna, we're gonna get into it. Yeah, Okay,
So there's a precedent for pyramids. The earliest proven precedents
for pyramids are called zig rats, and they're they're not
(11:01):
in Egypt. Instead, the earliest zigarettes were located in Mesopotamia.
So when you just if you're thinking about what Mesopotamia is,
if you're not going back to those high school classes, uh,
it's a rock syria of a couple other countries right
in the Middle East there that goes through the Tiber
Euphrates River. It's the cradle of civilization, right It's where
(11:23):
mass yes, but it's where massive war is being waged
right now. And that's why it was the cradle of
civilization because it was very supportive of you know, growing
crops and it was you know, within all that desert,
it was a sort of an oasis. It's great soil, absolutely, yeah,
and we see that, we see different civilizations springing up
(11:45):
around uh, fertile deltas, you know, and the convergence of
rivers silt silt. Yeah, it's all about the silt. Uh So.
The earliest cigarettes are towards the end of what's called
the Early Dynastic period, and the latest or most recent
ones date from the sixth century BC. They were all
the rage, and they weren't you know, they used to
(12:08):
look way cooler. They were brightly painted and gold and bronze.
But since they're constructed from these sundry mud bricks, over
time they've decayed. Can you imagine rolling up in a
somewhat desert area and seeing like a gold covered giant
building that's just reflecting sun directly back at itself, back
(12:30):
at the sun, and at your face. I would assume
that I was my life was immortal danger, and whomever
built it was going to sacrifice. I'd be like, that's
pretty dope. But yeah, especially if you're talking the what
you said, the latest ones were sixth century. Yeah, and
just imagine the technology available. The understanding of the world
at the time. It's a big thing with pyramids even
(12:52):
today is like people are like, how did they manage
to hoist these blocks? And there's still you know, wild speculation.
That's a different methods that they could have used, and
some of those include help from extraterrestrials. And zigarettes were
also built by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Elamites, the Acadians,
(13:12):
and the Assyrians, typically for local religions, and as as
we mentioned earlier, these didn't exist in a vacuum. Each
one was part of a larger complex. So there would
be a place for storage, there might be a place
where a priest lives, and in various other buildings with
some bureaucratic functions, some support functions, and some official proceedings
(13:36):
and my official, I guess in this case we mean
like religious or governmental proceedings. And when we talk about
how these things are structured, we discussed the pyramid, which is,
you know, more of that traditional structure that you imagine
of a sloping side, even though it's not you know, perfect,
you're still dealing with layers of blocks. When you think
(13:56):
about a zigarette, it's a little more of a tiered system,
So if you're looking at it, you're gonna see some
kind of base, so it's either rectangular, oval, some like
perhaps a square, and then the pyramidal structure is similar,
but it's just divided more as you go up. Well,
that's the thing to The ziggurattes are obviously super cool
to look at as well, but construction and engineering wise,
(14:20):
a little more straightforward, right, almost like building a brick
wall like or a brick staircase, whereas the pyramids are
like smooth and like to actually do the math and
figure out how to get those blocks just the right
size to slide in there, and how to be structurally
sound and also make those amazing sloping, perfectly flat sides.
That's that's where the real mystery kind of comes in.
(14:42):
It's like, man, how did you even conceive this? Yeah,
that's the thing. The where you have the capstone with
the pyramid. With the zigarettes, you have more of a
flat top, so you could do things at the top
of a zigarette, like sacrifice visions. Sure if that's uh,
if that's what your religion dictates, or just sacrifice you
know whomever. Yeah, yeah, a lamb could be just a lamb,
(15:05):
could be a land, It could be a king, it
could be the child of the king, depending on the weather.
It was a different time, it was, it was a
different time. Uh. There's another thing here that I thought
was it was interesting and a practice that you can
see even in the modern day. Kings sometimes had their
names on the bricks. And it makes me think of
(15:28):
various public works and parks where people donate to a cause,
right like in we have a thing in Atlanta called
Centennial Park and there are these huge swaths of of
of cobblestone or brick where people have people during the
Olympics paid some sort of fee to have a brick
(15:48):
with their name on it. Have you seen that episode
of Curb Your Enthusiasm where it's like Anonymous, he's really
upset that he gets his name put on a wing
of a museum, and then the other guy is anonymous
and it turns out it's dead dancing, but he keeps
telling every buddy that it's him and cool and chill
because it's like anonymous for the For me that it
reminds me of presidential libraries or something where it just
(16:09):
has your name across the top emblazon there, I'd make
mine anonymous. Yeah. People and people do a lot of
stuff to just to get their name on something, you know,
maybe a hotel, maybe an I mean, I did this'
podcast is so I can maybe one day end up
like on a T shirt. There you go, so alright,
(16:30):
so we we can see then the most famous examples
also pyramids and zigarettes. The comparison. Always think of you guys.
We talked about legos earlier. We mentioned that, you remember
do plos do plose like the less sophisticated version of legos.
I think their age range is a little younger, okay, right, yeah, yeah,
a little little rabbit rabbit. Yeah. So uh that's that's
(16:55):
what I always think of, because it's like you're building
zigarettes and then you've upgraded to right, I don't know about.
I don't know about, but I'll learn, you'll remember maybe
I don't know. I think I think he got the
concept though, right, I understand they're big legs. It was
(17:15):
an apt metaphor. It really make sense. Over over the centuries,
you know, people have, as we said, speculated endlessly about
the Pyramids. Some theories range from nearly certain widely accepted
in academic circles, and then some get further and further
out there to the fringes and beyond. But today we're
(17:37):
going to ask a question a lot of listeners have
asked us over the years. Yeah, we know a lot
about the Egyptian pyramids. They're literally people called a gyptologist
who spend their lives studying this stuff. But what about
all those other pyramids? Oh yeah, there are in other places,
and we'll get to that right after a quick sponsor break.
(18:10):
Here's where it gets crazy. There are other pyramids. It's
not just ziggarreats in the ancient cradle of civilization. And
it wasn't like an empty tease. No, no, we're going
to deliver it turns out, you see, this might come
as a surprise to some people, but the ancient world
was actually chok full of pyramids, lousy with them on
(18:30):
continents across the planet. And they're not all these tombs
to some god king that you know, sat above all
the rest of the citizen ray and you know, dictated
what to do. Uh. There were temples. A lot of
them were temples, some cases their sites of human sacrifice.
And we know that because we found the evidence. But
we still don't know how many existed or even still
(18:54):
exists today, But in archaeologists actually discovered thirty five aramids
in the Sudanese Necropolis that dated back around two thousand
years when a kingdom named Kush flourished in Sudan. And
that's insane. Yeah, we're still finding pyramids, and these in
(19:17):
particular were pretty pretty darn interesting because they're really closely together,
the way they're you know, they're located, they're concentrated right,
and they're pretty big, larger than an NBA basketball court.
And you know, it's so surprising to me that you
(19:37):
can just discover this just because the sand has moved
so much over such a period of time that they
got covered up and you can't see them anymore. Sometimes
there's growth on top of them that you have to
basically just dig away and then oh, there they are.
You've heard of these. I'm sure the Mayan pyramids that
exist in Mesoamerica technically their ziggarattes and were used for
(19:59):
humans acrifice. I guess when I was conjuring the image
of virgin sacrifices, I was maybe thinking more along the
Mayan lines. You know, it's it's not far it's not
far off because a lot of the in meso America
and Aztec and and Mayan culture there were religious sites,
but there's also documented human sacrifice, and a lot of
(20:22):
times these sacrifices might involve prisoners of war, so az
tech parties at least would send out raiding parties too,
wage war with these really brutal crazy Have you seen
what was sort of the analog of a sword in
that culture. It was like this wooden slap with these
(20:42):
obsidian chips. Yeah, terribly sharp, frightening. Uh. Did you ever
see that movie Apocalypto? Remember that. I still haven't seen that.
I still haven't seen the Passion of the Christ. Oh jeez,
I also have not seen the Passion of the Christ.
That's why I haven't seen the Pocalypto, because it just
struck me as kind of like taking that movie to
(21:03):
meso America. I mean, it's it's got the similar kind
of you know, brutal gurd and violence, and I don't
usually go for You wouldn't think that, but I'm a
little bit sensitive about that kind of stuff. It's a
you know, Apocalypto I thought was a great film. I
can't speak to the Passion of the Christ because I
have I did see part of it, so uh Satan
(21:24):
makes a couple of appearances, and I went on YouTube
and watched those parts. Is he like played by like
an actor? Is he in makeup or something? No, it's
the devil really yeah, it just mean like is it
just like a dude? Like it's the spoil Passion of
the christis it's a it's and ambiguous figure. But it's
(21:46):
not all fire and brimstone, at least from the stuff
I saw. There might be another segment of the film
where they're like wings sprouting and al Pacino comes out
and it's like we are carrying all those bricks for
Kevin God. It's Devil's advocate. I love that one. Well.
There are also pyramids in Nigeria. Now these are ones
that I was not aware of, but upon looking into it,
(22:08):
it turns out that the sud Pyramids at the Nigerian
town of the sud Um in northern Igbo land were
in fact a thing. Uh ten pyramidal structures were built
of clay and mud, much like the early zigarrettes we
talked about um and the first base section was sixty
feet in circumference and three feet in height. The next
(22:31):
stack was forty ft in circumference, and then you had
these circular stacks that continued up um almost like a
chimney stack kind of look at the top, and then
you had those going on until you got to the
very top of the structure. Uh. These were temples for
the god Allah or Uto, who was believed to reside
at the top um and a stick was placed at
(22:54):
the top to represent the god's residence, sort of like
you know, putting an angel on a Christmas tree. Yeah,
that's a really good analogy, a really good comparison. There
were also pyramids in Spain. Yeah, there are some more
recent ones that were that are thought to have come
from the nineteenth century. They look like zigarattes, but they
(23:15):
they appear to be just agricultural techniques. Um. But you
know that's not a sure kind of thing. But then
you go to a gentleman, gentleman named manuel A Brill
that thinks he's discovered something even bigger. Yes, manuel A
Brill is an amateur archaeologists. And you might see armchair
(23:36):
archaeologist if you want to call it turkey a bird
about it. Uh. Other professional archaeologists sort of dismissed him
as an amateur at times. So he believes that he
found this gut reported in twenty sixteen, he believes that
he discovered a huge ancient building buried beneath undergrowth in Spain.
It's on the outskirts of a town called Cannette, and
(23:58):
it's believed to be the first monolithic structure discovered in
the country. Yeah, if you look at it looks like
a hill that maybe has a little more structure to it,
a little more pointed than you'd normally see in a
you know, a naturally forming hill of that sort um.
But you know, it's it's pretty compelling, but it's not
(24:20):
as of this point, it hasn't been verified, correct, Right,
So for hundreds of years, locals thought this was just
a natural formation, you know, the eternal question is that
a pyramid or a hill? Right? But this guy's making
claims we were waiting to see how they developed. He's
making claims that this earthwork conceals a gigantic structure, and
(24:44):
it would be uh tremendous deal if it turned out
that Europe had these these megalithic structures, these megalithic pyramids
as well. There are also pyramids in China. Not GEO
did a great, a great exploration of the lost Pyramids
of China. Yeah, that's great. It was a whole show
(25:06):
that they created. It's kind of awesome. Goes back to
I think two hundred and twenty something BC in search
of pyramids from different warring kingdoms in China, and it
appears that perhaps there where pyramid is built kind of
all over the place. I haven't seen the show yet,
but I'm definitely interested. China's first emperor, the guy who
(25:30):
got all of the various tribes and communities to form
a cohesive nation, uh, pretty much bankrupted the country and
oppressed thousands of people to build some of the largest
mortuary complexes. There was something about ancient kings where they thought,
you know, what's really making it is having a big
(25:55):
building that commemorates that I'm dead. Yeah, just you gotta
make sure people remember that you existed after you're gone.
Some people even have, you know, like some of the
aristocrats had kitchens and toilets and these underground complexes. I
just don't get it. I was talking to my mom
the other day about, like, you know, our family burial plot,
and so I'm like that is, Mom, that's depressing. I
(26:17):
don't want to talk about that. I don't want to
think about that. Why do we have to make these arrangements.
Can't they just you know, chuck us in a paper
bag into the highway or something to wrap you up
in newspaper. These things are important, son, and you know
you'll understand. And so they are also pyramids in India,
Indonesia and Peru. Uh. There was for a time, and
(26:40):
people who visit the state of Georgia or people who
live in that state will find us interesting. For a time,
there was a complex of pyramids here in our own state,
in Eatonton, Georgia. They were not ancient, no, and they're
a little more modest in their size, but they were pyramids.
They were built by a religious group. I would hesitate
(27:04):
to use the C word just because I don't you know,
I I it's got a bit of a negative connotation. Yeah, yeah,
trying to look down on anybody for their beliefs. But
they definitely hadn't, let's say, a very particular set of
skills beliefs, police skills. The New Wabians, the New Wabi
(27:24):
impyraments were constructed in the early nineteen nineties on their
compound Toma Ray and that is again in Eatonton, Georgia.
I do want to say one thing is interesting about
the literature of this group is they have a they
have a linguistic practice where they take words and sort
(27:46):
of switched them around into something that rhymes but they
feel is more true to what the thing that the
object they're describing is. Uh. The example I remember most
prominently is they don't say television. They a tell lies
vision that's perfect, and they're like dozens of words they
use this. Unfortunately, these pyramids are no more. Yeah, they
(28:10):
don't exist anymore. It is a shame. Looking up some
aerial shots of the whole compound right now, it's actually
quite beautiful from you know, a helicopter. It's the whole
thing is. The way it's laid out is very purposeful.
And then you've got the pyramid surrounded by these almost
like hedge maze looking pieces, and then all of the
other plots are very kind of colored in such a
(28:31):
way where the whole thing that looks almost like a face.
It's pretty pretty interesting. And then you think that you know,
the government sees it, and then they tore the entire
thing down. I have two thoughts. I wish they would
have left it. What's the story? First something, Well, the
guy was arrested on some pretty heinous charges and you
(28:51):
can only imagine probably what went down, you know, near
there or in some of those structures. Yeah, So, to
be fair to the people who still adhere to Nuabian beliefs,
there are a lot of X members obviously, but they
believe that their leader was force or is kind of
(29:16):
was framed, was a set up. And that's despite the
Nuabian leader as a phone named Dwight York. He was
charged with interstate transportation of miners for sex hundred and
sixteen charges of child molestation, and he was Okay, look,
I'll say it. The Nwabian is a black supremacist sect,
(29:38):
so it subscribes to and subscribes to some beliefs that
you know, are racially tinged and therefore reprehensible. But they
also thought Spaceship would take the group away in two
thousand and three. It is I have not had contact
(30:00):
with any of the New Abian folks, so perhaps some
of them did make it on their ship. You know,
this might even make a good podcast in its own light.
They built again. They built pyramids as religious structures, right.
But that brings us to another question, why have such
(30:21):
similar structures sprang up in unrelated cultures across the planet.
We'll explore some of the answers or some of the
theories after a word from our sponsor. So since the
(30:43):
first missions to Antarctica early in the twentieth century, there
have been tales of a mysterious pyramid discovered on this
icy um continent near the South Pole Um. There were
British explorers in the early nineteen tens who found a
et rock and they named it the pyramid and included
(31:04):
it on their maps. So this formation is most likely
the source of various Antarctic pyramids legends throughout modern history.
But I'd just like to go here and say, oh,
look at this trap. Oh do you see that's pointing
out of the ice there? What does that look like
to you? Oh? I declare that is that's a tad pointing.
(31:27):
Don't you think? Quite pointy? Much more pointy than I
would expect here on this icy continent. And then you
take a big pull from your calabash, I say, mark
that down. Jeffrey's pyramids pretty good. So do you want
to do, want it to be named after you or
perhaps your lovely wife Phone, make it anonymous pyramid, Suffice
(31:53):
and so and so. As we said this, you can imagine, right,
It's understandable. It sounds a little weird today, but you
can easily understand how people return right from Antarctica and
they have these maps, and maybe the maps are reproduced,
and then you get a hold of a map and
you're just a regular person and you were looking at
this map of this serious unknown continent, and then you think,
(32:16):
holy snikey's a pyramid. Do people still say? Yeah? R
I p Chris Farley? Oh, it was Chris Farley speaking
of which apparently I stole skadooche from Kung Fu Panda.
And I'm okay with that because I was a big,
tenacious D fan back in the day, and I'm sure
I heard Jack Black say something scadoochy, you know, back
(32:40):
in the old days when he was on Mr. Show
and t A D. So I did not know that
that was directly from Kung Fu Panda. I stand by it, though,
and it's it's just kind of a fun sound that
sort of means like zippity do die, you know, it's
just kind of that's it. I wasn't trying to rip
off of animated. Has this been on you? It really has.
It's been pressing down on my soul. I remember one
(33:00):
time we were off air. You we were meeting about
something else, and then you stopped matt Night and you say, guys,
I gotta say something, And I didn't know what was
gonna come up. I was worried about you. Do you
feel better? Do you feel lighter? I feel a little unburdened. Yeah,
that's well, right in and let noel how much you're
angry at him for stealing from the beloved Jack Black.
(33:24):
He is quite beloved. And as always, we do have
a special email for any complaints about the show. Your
criticism is very important. Keep us honest and just email
us directly at Jonathan dot Strickland at how stuff works
dot com. Yeah, and really just feel free to open
it open up and ye again, that's Jonathan dots Strickland
(33:48):
at how stuff works dot com. So back to Antarctica.
Back to Antarctica from from two thousand twelve to twenties sixteen,
there was this whole other round of rumors that were
spreading about pyramids and Antarctica because there were photographs they
got put online that showed something apparently sitting down there
(34:08):
with these regular triangular sides. Now I have to say
I saw these, I saw you know, the crystal links
links in the UFO sites links that had these pictures,
and I got super interested. But you know, as we
do on our show, you dig down a little deeper
and then you find the skeptic side, which throws salt
(34:31):
on all my excitement. Uh. And you know they're saying
that this is actually some kind of natural structure that
got photographed at an angle that makes it feel even
more mysterious, which is similar to the old argument about
the uh face on Mars? Right. Is it just the
angle of the photograph that makes a otherwise mundane topographical
(34:54):
formation appear to be you know, man made and purposeful,
or or they're buried pyramids out there? Man? Maybe maybe
that's where that's where civilization started, was in Antarctica before
it all iced over. What do you some kind of hippie.
I'm just saying that's one of my favorite troops, and
a lot of science fiction too, that that moment about
(35:18):
two thirds of the way through a sci fi story
where someone goes, we are the aliens right before they
get sucked out into spaces and you just spoiled every
every single one, shut down the theaters. But for me,
the idea of an Atlantean civilization that existed, you know,
(35:40):
of some kind of intelligent life existing down there in
Antarctica before everything froze over, I don't know. That just
pulls me, pulls my heart. Well, we do know that,
we do know that there's a lot of stuff that
historians got wrong over the years, and we know that
he three is still a continuing conversation. Right, there's no solid,
(36:05):
widely accepted proof of a global ancient civilization yet. But
that just that could just mean although it may it
may be implausible, It could just mean that we haven't
found something yet. Yeah, but technology continues to advance, and
(36:25):
as lidar gets better, Ben, We're gonna find some stuff.
I know it, Yeah, I think so. Oh, before we
go on, these these rumors that Matt just mentioned, they
were linked with a couple of famous visitors to Antarctica
in late as the US presidential campaign was in in hot,
(36:46):
hot heat. Uh. John Kerry went to Antarctica in November
and then just just just to be clear here it
was Forest goll and Bones Reunion. Yes, they were hanging
out and Arctica Pointy Rock Decide dislike men is like
(37:06):
a duel. Yeah, that's where the real election took place,
Pointy Rock, Antarctica in just a short time later in
December of I think this one was interesting. This was
just a rumor, Okay, I haven't confirmed it. This was
just what's what's the word? Uh? Scalia used to use
scuttle button, That's a good one. Or what else do
(37:28):
they do? He the guy Regardless of what you think
about the guy at a gift for obscure words? Was
it the straight poop? Straight poop? We got an email
about that too, uh he said Argyll bargel, which is
a real word? Had Hurley Burley? Is that a real
one too? I don't know it works though. Hurdy gurdy Man,
(37:49):
hurdy gurdy man. Buzz aldren Astronaut rumored again just rumored
to have tweeted we were all in Dane. It is
evil itself, along with a picture of the alleged ice
pyramid Antarctic ice Perramid, and then he rapidly deleted it.
(38:10):
Let's let's take a note here, Buzz Aldrin is notorious
for his distaste for what he considers conspiracy theorists and
for his sense of humor. It's also not obvious why
somebody would fly buzz out to Antarctica to investigate a pyramid.
(38:30):
And one last thing here. According to Snopes, that website
that is loved and loathed by so many, it's it
says this is false. Yeah, so okay, that's not that's
just what it doesn't mean. It does. Well that that
just means if you believe Snopes, then it's scuttle. But
so apparently there are not astronauts trape scene about Antarctica,
(38:57):
although the US military did have some excursions there in
the World War two days. And if you are feeling
like a lovely trip down a rabbit hole, uh, go
ahead and hop on your preferred Internet search engine and
type in operation high Jump. Definitely, And just to stay
(39:19):
on Aldrin for a moment, do you guys remember when
he was on c SPAN and he had that little
he mentioned that aside about the monolith on one of
the moons of Jupiter. Do you guys remember this? He
actually says his statement, I don't have an exact quotes
in in front of you. But a statement is like
when people see that monolith monolith on one of the
(39:41):
moons of Jupiter, they're gonna say, where did that come from?
Who built that? And then he just goes on with
this conversation. It's pretty incredible and it's real, It's absolutely real.
And so there are other theories. I think we should
just jump to this theory. Some people. Okay, so we
(40:03):
can divide theories about pyramids into three rough buckets. There's
the bucket of how are they built? Right, and there's
the bucket of what were they for? And then there's
the other one, which is what do they do? Because
some people, you know, people who believe in uh sacred geometry,
(40:23):
for example, people there are people who believe that these
shapes or the placement of these structures has some sort
of significance in a in a larger sense, right, you
can find people who believe that the pyramids are built
along lay lines L. E. Y. Right, which is sort
of the belief in lay lines is the belief that
(40:48):
the planet has something like its own nervous system and
that these lines aggregate some sort of energy or power.
People who have tested this feel that that is not
scientifically valid. Right, they say, Okay, there's a secretion of energy,
(41:10):
or you stand in Stonehenge on the right time of
the lunar year or the solar year, and you you
feel like there's some great thing happening, but there's no
measurement of it. Right, there's no there's no heat differential all.
There's not massive geothermal vent or anything. We're definitely not
(41:30):
fully discounting that, but we are saying there is no
scientific evidence to prove its existence. So let's bounce around
these theories a little bit. No, I know you've been
dying to talk about this. Yeah, green, you know, where
where does green come into all this? That I mentioned
that a couple couple of times. I wasn't tried to poke, fine,
(41:53):
but just a friend of the show, Ben Carson, who
I believe currently serves as our secretary Um. He came
out during the campaign for president with an interesting theory
that that the Pyramids were created by Joseph Um and
his amazing technicolor dreamcoat to store grain. Yeah, there were granaries.
(42:18):
This in this belief surprised a lot of people when
when Ben Carson said this. When Secretary Carson said this,
because he uh, he was espousing a belief that a
lot of people had never heard before. It turns out
medieval Europeans believed the pyramids were these granaries that were
(42:39):
described in the Old Testament, and that's where the description
of the pyramids is Joseph's Granaries come from. It. It
goes back to like the sixth century. So he wasn't
just you know, off the dome making a guess um.
This uh. This was in a book called History of
the Franks by Gregory of Tours, and then it got
(43:00):
popularized by a book called the Book of John Mandeville.
That was back when there were way fewer books, so
you could just call the thing you wrote the book
the book by me. Yeah, what his His main argument
was that the pyramids were hermetically sealed um, and that
you wouldn't need to hermetically seal a crypt um, but
(43:23):
that would be something that would come in handy if
you were trying to preserve grain. I've got a quote
here from a BBC article from an egyptologist. Remember those
guys we talked about them, they exist, They're real. One
of them his name James Allen of Brown University, and
he says, quote, there's no way in the world. An
ounce of grain would be stored in a structure like that,
(43:45):
it would be totally impractical. It's like saying the Tower
of London was built as a granary store you could
put grain in it. I mean, so is it granary?
Just any structure that contains grain essentially, that's used specifically,
that's built for it. So we could fill this studio
with grain, and that way, it wouldn't make it a
(44:07):
granary because we didn't build it specifically for that purpose,
I guess. But you also have to think about how
does the grain get in, how do you get it out?
Does it make sense? That's true with the pyramid, it
just doesn't make any sense. And there's another there's another
idea here. In eighteen fifty nine, a British publisher named
(44:28):
John Taylor wrote a book called The Great Pyramid, Why
It Was Built and Who built it? Uh. He said
that Noah, not the Egyptians, the biblical Noah built the
pyramid because he built the arc and then he was
therefore the most competent to direct the building of the pyramid.
(44:49):
He also believes that the purpose of the pyramid, if
we're going to a different theory, is to be a
repository for the divine system of all mathematical truths. WHOA, right,
that's fun. What is that? Is that like a like
a like a real fancy slide rule or something. Yeah,
it's it's an enormous slide rule because they couldn't get
(45:10):
the moving parts for an abbocus. Got it, and we're
going to build a huge advocus. There are other people
who believe that the Great Pyramid is predictive. There's a
book called Our Inheritance of the Great Pyramid, also published
in the eighteen hundreds, revealed to use to use our
patented air quote revealed the date of the apocalypse. I
(45:37):
mean that's cool, is it? Yeah? I mean why not
if you could? You want to know, if you could
glean the date, then maybe you can prevent it. What
are you gonna do about it? Drink more water and
less soda? Where more sunscreen? So we can see that.
A lot of the more m out there theories about
(46:01):
pyramids come from the pyramid craze in the eighteen hundreds, right,
and a lot of them are religiously based. There. Of course,
people who will say that pyramids were built by some
diabolical force. Right, an ancient evil or a demon. Uh.
There is of course no proof of that. Back in
(46:25):
the time when a lot of these theories were propagated,
people were sort of feeling around in the dark. Um.
One of the interesting things probably interested a lot of
people here is that for a long time there was
a fairly popular conspiracy theory of sorts that, uh, you know,
(46:45):
a global civilization built all of these things, to to
with the Atlantis fabled lost civilization of Atlantis built the pyramids.
So let's look at the argument. To a fellow named
Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, how's that for a name that sounds great?
Congressman from Minnesota in the late eighteen hundreds, he argued
(47:10):
this very point, he said, and that there once existed
in the Atlantic Ocean opposite the mouth of the mediterrane
see a large island was a remnant of another Atlantic
continent known as Atlantis. Uh. He said that Plato's description,
which Soften taken to be a fable, was the straight poop,
(47:32):
that it was actual history, and that modern man first
rose from barbarism to civilization in Atlantis. And then he
said that the Atlanteans stablished colonies around the world. I
mean we've we've heard all of this, right, Uh, And
at this point we know that there have been ancient
low civilizations, but again there's never been one big you know,
(47:55):
like one people to rule them all found. You know,
still people love this theory. What do you guys think
about the cargo cult theory of pyramids? Oh, that's interesting.
So cargo cults, which do exist. Cargo cults came from
(48:18):
Polynesian islands out in the Pacific Ocean, where in pretty
fairly isolated communities saw for the first time technology that
they had never seen before, radio towers, right, airplanes, weapons
of war, even clothing, even clothing of type yeah, that
(48:38):
they had never seen before. And so they also would
see these cargo drops which would contain food and clothing,
survival materials, stuff like that humanitarian aid for example. And
so these cargo cults began, uh instituting religious practices, spiritual
(49:00):
practices wherein they would build uh, radio towers or an airplane,
but it would be out of stuff available materials. Yeah,
it wouldn't be a flying it would be a symbolic
radio tower, symbolic airplane. And they would reproduce or enact
various ritualistic behaviors in hopes of uh in the hopes
(49:24):
of the cargo returning. One of these groups warshiped Prince
Philip as a god as it like, not as a
cool guy, not as just a regular dude as it
should bear. Have you seen as jawline? I mean you
can break stunning break walnuts and hearts on that jo line.
(49:45):
So the thing with this would be that the pyramids
sprung up throughout the world in all these different developing
civilizations because of some in the ancient alien theory. Some
either ship that resembled a pyramid and then they were
built like in Memoriam in a way or to try
and get them back down. You're doing a stargate thing here.
(50:07):
It's essentially little kind of like a star gate, but
just you know, a signal, a large enough signal that says, hey,
wherever you are up in the heavens, come visit again
or come back to us. It's fascinating. So then it
would be oh side note, the religious sect that we
mentioned is referred to as the Prince Philip Movement. They're
(50:30):
in an island in Vanuatu called Tana Nice. So if
you are searching spiritually for something and you think you
want to just try out a religion you have not
heard of, then go ahead and uh give the Prince
Philip movement ago and let us know how it works
out for you. So, ancient aliens, We've mentioned this on
(50:54):
the show before, and I feel like we'd be remiss
if we didn't explore this a little bit because this
ties in too one of the conspiracies, not a theory,
but one of the conspiracies that happened when Europeans began
exploring possibilities of the origin for pyramids. Right, So there
(51:17):
are a couple of things we should address here. First,
A lot of the ancient alien theory stuff that exists
now is descended from earlier, earlier, very racially based theories,
wherein uh, Europeans, maybe not the same guys who found
the Pointy Rock and Antarctica, but as someone who, for
(51:40):
the sake of argument, sounded very much like them, would
see a pyramid and say, you know, this is remarkable,
this is remarkable. Where where is the lost civilization of
clearly white people who built this? And so that just
the same way that um, a lot of my aren
urban legends descend from earlier what we would call fairy tales. Right, Um,
(52:07):
there's still that that folklore progression or storytelling progression, because history,
as we know, is just one long game of telephone,
and we have to we have to consider that because
the real, the real cover up, at least one provable
cover up, is that a lot of early explorers we're
(52:28):
searching for something that confirmed the belief they already had.
They had confirmation bias, because not only did they not
believe that native people could accomplish such tremendous works, but
they didn't want to believe that. And if they were
(52:49):
presented would proof, they probably would have just if we
know how confirmation bias works, they probably would have just
doubled down on their idea. Exactly. That's what I always
do that, No, I mean, really that is what we
do psychologically, unfortunately. I So these are these are some
of the ideas we do know that one provable cover
(53:12):
up was was either through negligence or malevolence. Where does
this all lead us? You know, we've learned that anything
can arguably be a granary if you fill it with grain. Um,
but that's kind of like saying that any any bag
(53:35):
you put a sandwich in automatically becomes a sandwich bag. Yeah,
you know. So we do know that there was one
provable cover up situation, and that occurred when earlier explorers
from different parts of the world said, clearly they didn't
(53:56):
build this their line, you see. And I know that
can be an ugly thing, but it happened. As for
the state of pyramids, now, the craziest thing to me
is we still don't know how many are out there.
We found the big ones, we found the big ones,
and well there are also pyramids that appear to be
(54:17):
in protected areas where perhaps an insular government doesn't want
any third party or NGO, you know, looking around to
find new ones that perhaps might be there or just
covered up in jungle that we can't see unless we
have highly sophisticated lighter just going through the jungle acre
(54:38):
by acre, which is a task that I wouldn't want
to do. Well. I guess that wraps up the topic.
But should we do some some shouting outing cornering absolutely
Tally Hope shout at corners. Our first shoutout today comes
from Sean. Sean says, guys, I've loved this show up
(54:59):
to most recent episode. You're moving to Mars episode I
felt like it turned into a reading of get this
guy's the communist Manifesto. Listen, I get that political opinions
of people sink into their work, intentional or unintentional. You're
usually very good about presenting counter opinions, even if one
of you is just playing devil's advocate. It was pretty
(55:20):
sad to hear a conspiracy podcast advocating from more governments. Wow, well,
I I can see what Shaan is saying where there
were definitely definitely some ideas that could be considered communists,
and we pointed that out in the episode. There's definitely
a centralization of government, which is not necessarily communism. But
(55:44):
I don't think he's talking about just that because there
were other aspects there too. Yeah, spreading out everything where
everybody gets an equal share. Um, there's no real trading
of goods for profit in this way. They're just our
goods and you get them. You know, well, the whole
ide you have like some greater power authority assessing your
worth and giving you work assignment based on a series
(56:08):
of algorithms that I guess look through your past work
history and you know, kind of tell you what you
are and what you need to be doing. Yeah, but
we we we talked about this even before we did
the interview, and and maybe it didn't come across as
much as we would have liked, but these were things
that we discussed when kind of like preparing for this interview. Yeah.
I think one of the things is when we're hanging
(56:30):
out off air, we just for a peek behind the curtain.
These episodes don't usually end for us when the episode
ends on, you know, the the official episode stream that
you're hearing. Yeah, because we'll we'll sit, we'll sit somewhere,
we'll go somewhere after work, and we'll still be talking
about the thing. And one of one of the things
(56:53):
that we would say would be a difference between straight
up orthodox community and what was being advocated here is that, uh,
what Marshall Brain was advocating was that this would be
a technocracy. So instead of a Stalin or another strong
man at the top who was still human, Uh, there
(57:13):
would be an artificial intelligence, which is almost scarier to me.
It's definitely unknown. Well, it's like who programs the artificial intelligence,
you know, like where does that? It's like a chicken
or the egg kind of question. But we also should
point out that the Heat said from the start, this
whole thing was a thought experiment. It wasn't necessarily advocating
(57:33):
for any of this, because he totally was like, very
adamant about the fact that this is pretty much impossible.
Do you even get there to even have the environment
that would allow us to start such a society? And
that's why it was a lot of fun for us
to talk about, because that's kind of what we like
to do, is you know, get hypothetical with stuff and
sort of play devil's advocate for big questions and that
(57:54):
sort of this gave us that opportunity a big time
and I would say, um, Sean Marshall. At the end
of that episode, he gave his email address and he
asked for people to write to him to die so
if and actually I have forwarded him everything that's been
written to us, specifically to conspiracy and how stuff works,
(58:14):
because he wants feedback. He wants to know what people
think about some of this stuff. So sure, it's very
much work in progress, as he said, and I think
that's I'm glad you did that, Matt Well. One of
the things that I would like to explore in in
a future episode would be the actual technology nuts and bolts,
because we didn't really talk about that, right and we have, uh,
(58:39):
we have received a lot of great questions about this.
I'm laughing because one of them comes up in a
later episode and I don't want to spoil it for anybody.
But it was a great question and I'm still thinking
about it. So thank you, Sean everyone else who wrote
in regarding this topic. Marshall Brain is quite prolific, uh,
and he does read every email he receives, and as
(59:00):
he said, he sincerely welcomes feedback. Our next shout out
comes from Justin. Send us an email. Justin says, good morning.
I recently started listening to stuff they don't want you
to know, and I'm enjoying it very much. Awesome, Justin,
thank you for listening and hanging out with us. I
think you guys should do a cast on cryptocurrency. You
could begin with discussions on bitcoin the leader, and then
(59:22):
move on to companies that use the blockchain to solve
problems in our everyday world. Take care of Justin. That's
a that's a great topic. There's a lot to discover
there on On my part, at least, I need to
do a lot of research just to really wrap my
head around how it all functions. I recently got a
coin base, which is like this app that allows you
(59:42):
to buy different cryptocurrencies. Um, the whole thing is fascinating
to me. And we have actually some colleagues at work
who bought into bitcoin back in the day where it
kind of boomed and actually I want name names, but
sold it before it boomed. Hard would have been a
minor millionaire he or she at the very least a
(01:00:04):
hundred thousand are the point being the history of cryptocurrency
and in itself is really cool, and the whole Mount
Cox thing and you know, all of that is its
own stuff, and then like how it's being used now
and the black market aspects of it and the deep Web.
Totally great episode, and some mysterious inventors stuff is in
there still in the future cash lest society that we're
running up on future I don't know. We're getting so
(01:00:27):
close and you'll just have to buy credits and have
them put on your wrist bands so that you can
scan them. Val they're gonna alter your d n A
so that every cell you every cell in your body
reflects how much worth you have that sounds like a
personal hell, like the world is just one big music festival. Yeah, yeah,
(01:00:48):
well if it was Bonnaroo, then for sure that is everywhere.
I mean, developing countries are increasingly cashless, and that our
previous episode on whether money is a religion I really
had us thinking about that too, like it's it doesn't.
It's not attached to a commodity directly now, so it's
(01:01:09):
an idea. It's out in the ether. It requires faith,
It requires a massive amount of faith. And we got
some cool emails about that one too. We should bring
up another time. Absolutely, you're so right. Just I just
want to say you're so right about the music festival
thing being a test run essentially of how it would
function when it's getting like a little village, like like
a society, you know, where we're all just living in
(01:01:31):
love and listening to string cheese incident and hemorrhaging money,
hemoraging money on fifteen red Bull and Vodkas. It doesn't
you know, it doesn't even have to have alcohol. It's
anything is at least ten dollars a hot dog, five
dollar waters plus four four dollars for bund service. That's
where they give you a hot dog bun charging for
(01:01:53):
the mud before you know it. Yeah, but but it
is true. It is a microcosm of society. So this fascinating.
All right, We got one last one from Anthony. Just
finished watching your latest video on Alisa Lamb's mysterious disappearance.
Staying on the topic of disappearances, have you guys looked
into the thousands of cases of National park disappearances? Say
(01:02:17):
that Anthony most notable David Pilots in his book series.
He also recently released a short documentary about it that
would make for an interesting topic to play. It's all,
this is a very prescient email, you guys got leave
it at that, but just yes and yes, and and
to quote our boss Jason Hope, stay tuned. And the
(01:02:38):
book series, the book series Anthony's referring to is missing
for one one as well as the documentary that is
now available. So yes, as as the colleague here said,
stay tuned. And that concludes our gosh but not our
(01:03:00):
or show. That is right, Matt Noel and I will
be returning next week with something probably completely different then pyramids. Yes,
ye okay, and we're gonna talk about a different shape. Yes, yep,
it's gonna be a trapezoid, perhaps decahedrons. What if there
(01:03:20):
are no angles? What if it's just a formless mass
of jelly? What if it's non euclidean alien love crafty
and geometry right, and just looking at it drives you bad?
Isn't that sort of what spawned you? I mean, you know,
I don't talk about my personal life the show. It
could be any number of things. It might even be
(01:03:42):
government continuity. Who knows, it may well be uh, but
either way, we hope that you do tune in, and
we hope that you find it interesting. In the meantime,
if you were like, this was not enough strange weird
stuff for this week? Where do I find more? Before
next Friday? We have just the place for you. If
you'd like to learn more about ancient technology, low civilizations,
(01:04:05):
mysterious structures, visit our website Stuff they Don't Want you
know dot Com, where you can find every audio podcast
we have ever done. And that's the end of this
classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about
this episode, you can get into contact with us in
a number of different ways. One of the best is
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(01:04:27):
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All right, welcome to our classic episode, fellow conspiracy realist.
Everybody knows that Egypt has pyramids, but what you may
not know is that there are other pyramids all around
the world, built by all sorts of civilizations. Why. What
we found is that there are a lot of folks
who will tell you they were part of a global debtwork,
(00:22):
and there are a lot of other folks will just say, hey,
a pyramid is literally one of the most stable things
you can build. It's a good point and also a point.
It's got a good point that potentially points to God
or funnels some sort of magical godlike energy. You know,
a lot of fun conjecturing in this episode. Yeah, Graham
and Hancock has his new show on Netflix right now,
(00:45):
is re record this intro talking about the ancient apocalypse
in the possibility that there was some kind of advanced
civilization before the Great Flood. You know this, This is
really all food for thought in here for this episode. Yeah, yeah,
I'm yeah, And just to say, you know, um, you
will you will find that Graham Hancock's uh Netflix show
(01:07):
has met with no small amount of controversy. So we
we do our best here to try and look at
both the claims that people are making and the conclusions
of archaeologists. Let us know which side you fall on
in this great debate from UFOs to psychic powers and
government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can
(01:30):
turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want
you to know. Welcome back to the show. My name
(01:59):
is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben.
You are you? And that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. We've got our superproducer Trysted there
and the uh let's see ones two. We got a
whole stable of superproducers. I feel like the name is
taken on less of a special meaning. Are you just
mad because I called you a superproducer? First? I am OK?
(02:22):
What am I now? An inferior producer? You're a super
co host? Yeah? So it's true. We have been expanding
and we're hoping to build something that stands the test
of time, which turns out is a fairly tricky endeavor.
The longer the timeline becomes right, I hear the trick
(02:44):
is to stack things on the ground and then stack
another layer that's slightly smaller on top of that one,
and then just keep going. It's the lego rule. Yeah,
or from red solo cups to uh decks of cards.
You know, this is such a side note, but I
had no idea. Apparently, red solo cups or solo cups
(03:07):
in general our US thing, and they've appeared in so
many films that people around the world associated with American culture.
So people travel traveling to the US from outside of
the US often by these cups and bring them back
to their friends and associate them with getting plastered, sort
of like pyramids in Egypt. Am I right, Yes, like
(03:29):
pyramids in Egypt. Uh, that is true, that's what we are.
We sort of circumnavigated the uh, the topic, and so
let's get right to it. Let's jump into the bush
instead of beating around it. Pyramids, Well, you may have
seen one of these things before, perhaps in a history book,
perhaps you've taken a trip to somewhere in the world
where they exist. It's a structure with a triangular outer surface,
(03:53):
like we were talking, uh, smaller layers on top of
bigger ones, and it converges to a single point at
the top. Hold your horses, kids, are about to get
into some serious geometry. The base of a pyramid can
be trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygonal shape. You guys remember
that stuff? Oh yeah, I don't. So let's look at
(04:13):
a square pyramid. A square pyramid has a base for
triangular outer surfaces. This is a common version and the
design is simple but brilliant. Right. Pyramid keeps the majority
of the structure's weight closer to the ground. And uh,
the pyramid ian on top, that's the fancy word for
(04:34):
a capstone, means that less material higher up on the
pyramid will be pushing down from above. So these are
structurally very, very stable. And when early civilizations created these, uh,
they quickly realized, you know, this is way more durable
than just building straight up the way we do with skyscrapers. Yeah,
(04:55):
and we can build these things much larger than any
other building that we've created the far, and they're cool looking. Yeah,
that's true. And let's be honest, when most people hear
the word pyramid, they don't really think of geometry, quadrilaterals,
and polygons. They think of mummies and Egypt. I'm super basic,
(05:17):
that's I mean, you're totally right. They think of they
can go Egypt, pharaohs, mummies, right, and who can blame them.
Egypt has a huge amount of pyramids. The estimates vary,
but sources currently site anywhere from eight to a hundred
and thirty eight identified pyramids, and there could be more
hiding out underneath something which we this will be a
(05:40):
common thing that we find throughout this episode. Yeah, then
most of these right, No, I think you're spot on
to mention mummies because most of the ones in Egypt
were built as tombs. You know, it was the it
was the very last word in luxury, and these were
common during the Old and Middle Kingdom periods. The earliest
(06:00):
known pyramids are found in a place northwest of Memphis,
Memphis in Egypt. The Memphis in Tennessee is named after
the Memphis in Egypt, which I didn't know for a
long time, but it's an a little town called uh Sakara.
The earliest of these pyramids is the Pyramid of jos
(06:21):
Er d j O S E. R. And it was
built during the Third dynasty. In this pyramid and it's
surrounding complex, I guess you could say it's almost like
a kind of compound where everything sort of built around it,
like a mall or something. Um they were designed by
the architect Emma tap and they're generally considered to be
(06:42):
the world's oldest monumental structure. Is constructed of what's called
dressed masonry, so not like not like a earthen mound. Yeah,
I mean, they're more polished and finished stones, right, and
by far the most famous pyramids that exist. When you
close your eyes and you imagine pyramid, you're probably thinking, Okay, yeah,
(07:02):
what are you saying? It's probably the Pyramids of Giza,
the on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. These have been
featured all over the place since you were a baby.
These have these things have been on covers of magazines
and on television and in movies. And there's some of
the largest structures ever built. The largest one Giza. The
(07:23):
largest pyramid is the Pyramid of Cufu. And as remember
the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the hanging gardens,
all that jazz, the Pyramid of Cufu is the only
one still in existence. So pretty serious accomplishment for a structure,
I would I mean, I'm not surprised to beat the garden,
but any any man made structure. You've probably seen this
(07:44):
in various uh non fiction television shows where they talk
about what would happen if humans just disappeared or when
the species goes extinct, start talking about how quickly things
will deteriorate. The US has a couple of durable structures,
but not as many as we think. No, the Hoover
Dam is pretty pretty cool. That thing is still curing.
(08:07):
It's technically not finished. That's an odd thought. But the
pyramids will probably outlast a lot of the architecture that's
currently on the planet, and for thousands and thousands of years,
these were the largest man made structures on Earth. For example,
let's take a closer look at the Pyramid of Cufu,
(08:29):
which is built mainly of limestone in the exterior and
most of the pyramid itself, but then as you get
towards the interior, there are some large red granite blocks
in there. Yeah, and it contains over two million blocks,
and they have a wide range of weight, but they're
they're all gigantic. The large limestone blocks weighs six point
(08:52):
five to ten tons, and the smaller ones would weigh
in at about one point three tons, and so um.
You can see various calculations of this. There's another thing
it's not just the size and the weight of the structure.
The placement is surprisingly precise, right. Uh. It has four
(09:15):
sides that face the four cardinal points, absolutely as you said, precisely,
and it also has an angle of fifty two degrees.
Originally it was four feet high, but today I guess,
through pyramid shrinkage, the well known undocumented phenomenon, it's only
four hundred and fifty five ft. So what happens that
(09:36):
missing thirty three ft Somebody stole it? Right, It wasn't erosion.
Nature didn't steal it. People stole it. There was this
high quality casing limestone, not a thing. Well, I guess,
in the way that retail stores refer to shoplifting, your
shrinkage spoilage, right, I urged shrinkage spoilage might be one too.
(09:57):
But nonetheless, this thing still remains as a massive structure
out there in the desert, or at least on the
outskirts of a city. And yeah, and when we hear
this word again, we we often think of ancient Egypt,
one of the world's most influential situations. Tombs, desert, mystery,
(10:17):
winds in the night, and curses. Right, Uh, Pyramids are
mysterious though for hundreds of years societies around the world
forgot what they were for. I had no idea why
they were built. Would just take tours to stare at
them and then to steal stuff. And to be fair,
there are a lot of human beings out there that
(10:39):
don't believe we've nailed down exactly what these pyramids are for,
even though, yes, even though it's kind of a known thing,
but we're gonna, we're gonna get into it. Yeah, Okay,
So there's a precedent for pyramids. The earliest proven precedents
for pyramids are called zig rats, and they're they're not
(11:01):
in Egypt. Instead, the earliest zigarettes were located in Mesopotamia.
So when you just if you're thinking about what Mesopotamia is,
if you're not going back to those high school classes, uh,
it's a rock syria of a couple other countries right
in the Middle East there that goes through the Tiber
Euphrates River. It's the cradle of civilization, right It's where
(11:23):
mass yes, but it's where massive war is being waged
right now. And that's why it was the cradle of
civilization because it was very supportive of you know, growing
crops and it was you know, within all that desert,
it was a sort of an oasis. It's great soil, absolutely, yeah,
and we see that, we see different civilizations springing up
(11:45):
around uh, fertile deltas, you know, and the convergence of
rivers silt silt. Yeah, it's all about the silt. Uh So.
The earliest cigarettes are towards the end of what's called
the Early Dynastic period, and the latest or most recent
ones date from the sixth century BC. They were all
the rage, and they weren't you know, they used to
(12:08):
look way cooler. They were brightly painted and gold and bronze.
But since they're constructed from these sundry mud bricks, over
time they've decayed. Can you imagine rolling up in a
somewhat desert area and seeing like a gold covered giant
building that's just reflecting sun directly back at itself, back
(12:30):
at the sun, and at your face. I would assume
that I was my life was immortal danger, and whomever
built it was going to sacrifice. I'd be like, that's
pretty dope. But yeah, especially if you're talking the what
you said, the latest ones were sixth century. Yeah, and
just imagine the technology available. The understanding of the world
at the time. It's a big thing with pyramids even
(12:52):
today is like people are like, how did they manage
to hoist these blocks? And there's still you know, wild speculation.
That's a different methods that they could have used, and
some of those include help from extraterrestrials. And zigarettes were
also built by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Elamites, the Acadians,
(13:12):
and the Assyrians, typically for local religions, and as as
we mentioned earlier, these didn't exist in a vacuum. Each
one was part of a larger complex. So there would
be a place for storage, there might be a place
where a priest lives, and in various other buildings with
some bureaucratic functions, some support functions, and some official proceedings
(13:36):
and my official, I guess in this case we mean
like religious or governmental proceedings. And when we talk about
how these things are structured, we discussed the pyramid, which is,
you know, more of that traditional structure that you imagine
of a sloping side, even though it's not you know, perfect,
you're still dealing with layers of blocks. When you think
(13:56):
about a zigarette, it's a little more of a tiered system,
So if you're looking at it, you're gonna see some
kind of base, so it's either rectangular, oval, some like
perhaps a square, and then the pyramidal structure is similar,
but it's just divided more as you go up. Well,
that's the thing to The ziggurattes are obviously super cool
to look at as well, but construction and engineering wise,
(14:20):
a little more straightforward, right, almost like building a brick
wall like or a brick staircase, whereas the pyramids are
like smooth and like to actually do the math and
figure out how to get those blocks just the right
size to slide in there, and how to be structurally
sound and also make those amazing sloping, perfectly flat sides.
That's that's where the real mystery kind of comes in.
(14:42):
It's like, man, how did you even conceive this? Yeah,
that's the thing. The where you have the capstone with
the pyramid. With the zigarettes, you have more of a
flat top, so you could do things at the top
of a zigarette, like sacrifice visions. Sure if that's uh,
if that's what your religion dictates, or just sacrifice you
know whomever. Yeah, yeah, a lamb could be just a lamb,
(15:05):
could be a land, It could be a king, it
could be the child of the king, depending on the weather.
It was a different time, it was, it was a
different time. Uh. There's another thing here that I thought
was it was interesting and a practice that you can
see even in the modern day. Kings sometimes had their
names on the bricks. And it makes me think of
(15:28):
various public works and parks where people donate to a cause,
right like in we have a thing in Atlanta called
Centennial Park and there are these huge swaths of of
of cobblestone or brick where people have people during the
Olympics paid some sort of fee to have a brick
(15:48):
with their name on it. Have you seen that episode
of Curb Your Enthusiasm where it's like Anonymous, he's really
upset that he gets his name put on a wing
of a museum, and then the other guy is anonymous
and it turns out it's dead dancing, but he keeps
telling every buddy that it's him and cool and chill
because it's like anonymous for the For me that it
reminds me of presidential libraries or something where it just
(16:09):
has your name across the top emblazon there, I'd make
mine anonymous. Yeah. People and people do a lot of
stuff to just to get their name on something, you know,
maybe a hotel, maybe an I mean, I did this'
podcast is so I can maybe one day end up
like on a T shirt. There you go, so alright,
(16:30):
so we we can see then the most famous examples
also pyramids and zigarettes. The comparison. Always think of you guys.
We talked about legos earlier. We mentioned that, you remember
do plos do plose like the less sophisticated version of legos.
I think their age range is a little younger, okay, right, yeah, yeah,
a little little rabbit rabbit. Yeah. So uh that's that's
(16:55):
what I always think of, because it's like you're building
zigarettes and then you've upgraded to right, I don't know about.
I don't know about, but I'll learn, you'll remember maybe
I don't know. I think I think he got the
concept though, right, I understand they're big legs. It was
(17:15):
an apt metaphor. It really make sense. Over over the centuries,
you know, people have, as we said, speculated endlessly about
the Pyramids. Some theories range from nearly certain widely accepted
in academic circles, and then some get further and further
out there to the fringes and beyond. But today we're
(17:37):
going to ask a question a lot of listeners have
asked us over the years. Yeah, we know a lot
about the Egyptian pyramids. They're literally people called a gyptologist
who spend their lives studying this stuff. But what about
all those other pyramids? Oh yeah, there are in other places,
and we'll get to that right after a quick sponsor break.
(18:10):
Here's where it gets crazy. There are other pyramids. It's
not just ziggarreats in the ancient cradle of civilization. And
it wasn't like an empty tease. No, no, we're going
to deliver it turns out, you see, this might come
as a surprise to some people, but the ancient world
was actually chok full of pyramids, lousy with them on
(18:30):
continents across the planet. And they're not all these tombs
to some god king that you know, sat above all
the rest of the citizen ray and you know, dictated
what to do. Uh. There were temples. A lot of
them were temples, some cases their sites of human sacrifice.
And we know that because we found the evidence. But
we still don't know how many existed or even still
(18:54):
exists today, But in archaeologists actually discovered thirty five aramids
in the Sudanese Necropolis that dated back around two thousand
years when a kingdom named Kush flourished in Sudan. And
that's insane. Yeah, we're still finding pyramids, and these in
(19:17):
particular were pretty pretty darn interesting because they're really closely together,
the way they're you know, they're located, they're concentrated right,
and they're pretty big, larger than an NBA basketball court.
And you know, it's so surprising to me that you
(19:37):
can just discover this just because the sand has moved
so much over such a period of time that they
got covered up and you can't see them anymore. Sometimes
there's growth on top of them that you have to
basically just dig away and then oh, there they are.
You've heard of these. I'm sure the Mayan pyramids that
exist in Mesoamerica technically their ziggarattes and were used for
(19:59):
humans acrifice. I guess when I was conjuring the image
of virgin sacrifices, I was maybe thinking more along the
Mayan lines. You know, it's it's not far it's not
far off because a lot of the in meso America
and Aztec and and Mayan culture there were religious sites,
but there's also documented human sacrifice, and a lot of
(20:22):
times these sacrifices might involve prisoners of war, so az
tech parties at least would send out raiding parties too,
wage war with these really brutal crazy Have you seen
what was sort of the analog of a sword in
that culture. It was like this wooden slap with these
(20:42):
obsidian chips. Yeah, terribly sharp, frightening. Uh. Did you ever
see that movie Apocalypto? Remember that. I still haven't seen that.
I still haven't seen the Passion of the Christ. Oh jeez,
I also have not seen the Passion of the Christ.
That's why I haven't seen the Pocalypto, because it just
struck me as kind of like taking that movie to
(21:03):
meso America. I mean, it's it's got the similar kind
of you know, brutal gurd and violence, and I don't
usually go for You wouldn't think that, but I'm a
little bit sensitive about that kind of stuff. It's a
you know, Apocalypto I thought was a great film. I
can't speak to the Passion of the Christ because I
have I did see part of it, so uh Satan
(21:24):
makes a couple of appearances, and I went on YouTube
and watched those parts. Is he like played by like
an actor? Is he in makeup or something? No, it's
the devil really yeah, it just mean like is it
just like a dude? Like it's the spoil Passion of
the christis it's a it's and ambiguous figure. But it's
(21:46):
not all fire and brimstone, at least from the stuff
I saw. There might be another segment of the film
where they're like wings sprouting and al Pacino comes out
and it's like we are carrying all those bricks for
Kevin God. It's Devil's advocate. I love that one. Well.
There are also pyramids in Nigeria. Now these are ones
that I was not aware of, but upon looking into it,
(22:08):
it turns out that the sud Pyramids at the Nigerian
town of the sud Um in northern Igbo land were
in fact a thing. Uh ten pyramidal structures were built
of clay and mud, much like the early zigarrettes we
talked about um and the first base section was sixty
feet in circumference and three feet in height. The next
(22:31):
stack was forty ft in circumference, and then you had
these circular stacks that continued up um almost like a
chimney stack kind of look at the top, and then
you had those going on until you got to the
very top of the structure. Uh. These were temples for
the god Allah or Uto, who was believed to reside
at the top um and a stick was placed at
(22:54):
the top to represent the god's residence, sort of like
you know, putting an angel on a Christmas tree. Yeah,
that's a really good analogy, a really good comparison. There
were also pyramids in Spain. Yeah, there are some more
recent ones that were that are thought to have come
from the nineteenth century. They look like zigarattes, but they
(23:15):
they appear to be just agricultural techniques. Um. But you
know that's not a sure kind of thing. But then
you go to a gentleman, gentleman named manuel A Brill
that thinks he's discovered something even bigger. Yes, manuel A
Brill is an amateur archaeologists. And you might see armchair
(23:36):
archaeologist if you want to call it turkey a bird
about it. Uh. Other professional archaeologists sort of dismissed him
as an amateur at times. So he believes that he
found this gut reported in twenty sixteen, he believes that
he discovered a huge ancient building buried beneath undergrowth in Spain.
It's on the outskirts of a town called Cannette, and
(23:58):
it's believed to be the first monolithic structure discovered in
the country. Yeah, if you look at it looks like
a hill that maybe has a little more structure to it,
a little more pointed than you'd normally see in a
you know, a naturally forming hill of that sort um.
But you know, it's it's pretty compelling, but it's not
(24:20):
as of this point, it hasn't been verified, correct, Right,
So for hundreds of years, locals thought this was just
a natural formation, you know, the eternal question is that
a pyramid or a hill? Right? But this guy's making
claims we were waiting to see how they developed. He's
making claims that this earthwork conceals a gigantic structure, and
(24:44):
it would be uh tremendous deal if it turned out
that Europe had these these megalithic structures, these megalithic pyramids
as well. There are also pyramids in China. Not GEO
did a great, a great exploration of the lost Pyramids
of China. Yeah, that's great. It was a whole show
(25:06):
that they created. It's kind of awesome. Goes back to
I think two hundred and twenty something BC in search
of pyramids from different warring kingdoms in China, and it
appears that perhaps there where pyramid is built kind of
all over the place. I haven't seen the show yet,
but I'm definitely interested. China's first emperor, the guy who
(25:30):
got all of the various tribes and communities to form
a cohesive nation, uh, pretty much bankrupted the country and
oppressed thousands of people to build some of the largest
mortuary complexes. There was something about ancient kings where they thought,
you know, what's really making it is having a big
(25:55):
building that commemorates that I'm dead. Yeah, just you gotta
make sure people remember that you existed after you're gone.
Some people even have, you know, like some of the
aristocrats had kitchens and toilets and these underground complexes. I
just don't get it. I was talking to my mom
the other day about, like, you know, our family burial plot,
and so I'm like that is, Mom, that's depressing. I
(26:17):
don't want to talk about that. I don't want to
think about that. Why do we have to make these arrangements.
Can't they just you know, chuck us in a paper
bag into the highway or something to wrap you up
in newspaper. These things are important, son, and you know
you'll understand. And so they are also pyramids in India,
Indonesia and Peru. Uh. There was for a time, and
(26:40):
people who visit the state of Georgia or people who
live in that state will find us interesting. For a time,
there was a complex of pyramids here in our own state,
in Eatonton, Georgia. They were not ancient, no, and they're
a little more modest in their size, but they were pyramids.
They were built by a religious group. I would hesitate
(27:04):
to use the C word just because I don't you know,
I I it's got a bit of a negative connotation. Yeah, yeah,
trying to look down on anybody for their beliefs. But
they definitely hadn't, let's say, a very particular set of
skills beliefs, police skills. The New Wabians, the New Wabi
(27:24):
impyraments were constructed in the early nineteen nineties on their
compound Toma Ray and that is again in Eatonton, Georgia.
I do want to say one thing is interesting about
the literature of this group is they have a they
have a linguistic practice where they take words and sort
(27:46):
of switched them around into something that rhymes but they
feel is more true to what the thing that the
object they're describing is. Uh. The example I remember most
prominently is they don't say television. They a tell lies
vision that's perfect, and they're like dozens of words they
use this. Unfortunately, these pyramids are no more. Yeah, they
(28:10):
don't exist anymore. It is a shame. Looking up some
aerial shots of the whole compound right now, it's actually
quite beautiful from you know, a helicopter. It's the whole
thing is. The way it's laid out is very purposeful.
And then you've got the pyramid surrounded by these almost
like hedge maze looking pieces, and then all of the
other plots are very kind of colored in such a
(28:31):
way where the whole thing that looks almost like a face.
It's pretty pretty interesting. And then you think that you know,
the government sees it, and then they tore the entire
thing down. I have two thoughts. I wish they would
have left it. What's the story? First something, Well, the
guy was arrested on some pretty heinous charges and you
(28:51):
can only imagine probably what went down, you know, near
there or in some of those structures. Yeah, So, to
be fair to the people who still adhere to Nuabian beliefs,
there are a lot of X members obviously, but they
believe that their leader was force or is kind of
(29:16):
was framed, was a set up. And that's despite the
Nuabian leader as a phone named Dwight York. He was
charged with interstate transportation of miners for sex hundred and
sixteen charges of child molestation, and he was Okay, look,
I'll say it. The Nwabian is a black supremacist sect,
(29:38):
so it subscribes to and subscribes to some beliefs that
you know, are racially tinged and therefore reprehensible. But they
also thought Spaceship would take the group away in two
thousand and three. It is I have not had contact
(30:00):
with any of the New Abian folks, so perhaps some
of them did make it on their ship. You know,
this might even make a good podcast in its own light.
They built again. They built pyramids as religious structures, right.
But that brings us to another question, why have such
(30:21):
similar structures sprang up in unrelated cultures across the planet.
We'll explore some of the answers or some of the
theories after a word from our sponsor. So since the
(30:43):
first missions to Antarctica early in the twentieth century, there
have been tales of a mysterious pyramid discovered on this
icy um continent near the South Pole Um. There were
British explorers in the early nineteen tens who found a
et rock and they named it the pyramid and included
(31:04):
it on their maps. So this formation is most likely
the source of various Antarctic pyramids legends throughout modern history.
But I'd just like to go here and say, oh,
look at this trap. Oh do you see that's pointing
out of the ice there? What does that look like
to you? Oh? I declare that is that's a tad pointing.
(31:27):
Don't you think? Quite pointy? Much more pointy than I
would expect here on this icy continent. And then you
take a big pull from your calabash, I say, mark
that down. Jeffrey's pyramids pretty good. So do you want
to do, want it to be named after you or
perhaps your lovely wife Phone, make it anonymous pyramid, Suffice
(31:53):
and so and so. As we said this, you can imagine, right,
It's understandable. It sounds a little weird today, but you
can easily understand how people return right from Antarctica and
they have these maps, and maybe the maps are reproduced,
and then you get a hold of a map and
you're just a regular person and you were looking at
this map of this serious unknown continent, and then you think,
(32:16):
holy snikey's a pyramid. Do people still say? Yeah? R
I p Chris Farley? Oh, it was Chris Farley speaking
of which apparently I stole skadooche from Kung Fu Panda.
And I'm okay with that because I was a big,
tenacious D fan back in the day, and I'm sure
I heard Jack Black say something scadoochy, you know, back
(32:40):
in the old days when he was on Mr. Show
and t A D. So I did not know that
that was directly from Kung Fu Panda. I stand by it, though,
and it's it's just kind of a fun sound that
sort of means like zippity do die, you know, it's
just kind of that's it. I wasn't trying to rip
off of animated. Has this been on you? It really has.
It's been pressing down on my soul. I remember one
(33:00):
time we were off air. You we were meeting about
something else, and then you stopped matt Night and you say, guys,
I gotta say something, And I didn't know what was
gonna come up. I was worried about you. Do you
feel better? Do you feel lighter? I feel a little unburdened. Yeah,
that's well, right in and let noel how much you're
angry at him for stealing from the beloved Jack Black.
(33:24):
He is quite beloved. And as always, we do have
a special email for any complaints about the show. Your
criticism is very important. Keep us honest and just email
us directly at Jonathan dot Strickland at how stuff works
dot com. Yeah, and really just feel free to open
it open up and ye again, that's Jonathan dots Strickland
(33:48):
at how stuff works dot com. So back to Antarctica.
Back to Antarctica from from two thousand twelve to twenties sixteen,
there was this whole other round of rumors that were
spreading about pyramids and Antarctica because there were photographs they
got put online that showed something apparently sitting down there
(34:08):
with these regular triangular sides. Now I have to say
I saw these, I saw you know, the crystal links
links in the UFO sites links that had these pictures,
and I got super interested. But you know, as we
do on our show, you dig down a little deeper
and then you find the skeptic side, which throws salt
(34:31):
on all my excitement. Uh. And you know they're saying
that this is actually some kind of natural structure that
got photographed at an angle that makes it feel even
more mysterious, which is similar to the old argument about
the uh face on Mars? Right. Is it just the
angle of the photograph that makes a otherwise mundane topographical
(34:54):
formation appear to be you know, man made and purposeful,
or or they're buried pyramids out there? Man? Maybe maybe
that's where that's where civilization started, was in Antarctica before
it all iced over. What do you some kind of hippie.
I'm just saying that's one of my favorite troops, and
a lot of science fiction too, that that moment about
(35:18):
two thirds of the way through a sci fi story
where someone goes, we are the aliens right before they
get sucked out into spaces and you just spoiled every
every single one, shut down the theaters. But for me,
the idea of an Atlantean civilization that existed, you know,
(35:40):
of some kind of intelligent life existing down there in
Antarctica before everything froze over, I don't know. That just
pulls me, pulls my heart. Well, we do know that,
we do know that there's a lot of stuff that
historians got wrong over the years, and we know that
he three is still a continuing conversation. Right, there's no solid,
(36:05):
widely accepted proof of a global ancient civilization yet. But
that just that could just mean although it may it
may be implausible, It could just mean that we haven't
found something yet. Yeah, but technology continues to advance, and
(36:25):
as lidar gets better, Ben, We're gonna find some stuff.
I know it, Yeah, I think so. Oh, before we
go on, these these rumors that Matt just mentioned, they
were linked with a couple of famous visitors to Antarctica
in late as the US presidential campaign was in in hot,
(36:46):
hot heat. Uh. John Kerry went to Antarctica in November
and then just just just to be clear here it
was Forest goll and Bones Reunion. Yes, they were hanging
out and Arctica Pointy Rock Decide dislike men is like
(37:06):
a duel. Yeah, that's where the real election took place,
Pointy Rock, Antarctica in just a short time later in
December of I think this one was interesting. This was
just a rumor, Okay, I haven't confirmed it. This was
just what's what's the word? Uh? Scalia used to use
scuttle button, That's a good one. Or what else do
(37:28):
they do? He the guy Regardless of what you think
about the guy at a gift for obscure words? Was
it the straight poop? Straight poop? We got an email
about that too, uh he said Argyll bargel, which is
a real word? Had Hurley Burley? Is that a real
one too? I don't know it works though. Hurdy gurdy Man,
(37:49):
hurdy gurdy man. Buzz aldren Astronaut rumored again just rumored
to have tweeted we were all in Dane. It is
evil itself, along with a picture of the alleged ice
pyramid Antarctic ice Perramid, and then he rapidly deleted it.
(38:10):
Let's let's take a note here, Buzz Aldrin is notorious
for his distaste for what he considers conspiracy theorists and
for his sense of humor. It's also not obvious why
somebody would fly buzz out to Antarctica to investigate a pyramid.
(38:30):
And one last thing here. According to Snopes, that website
that is loved and loathed by so many, it's it
says this is false. Yeah, so okay, that's not that's
just what it doesn't mean. It does. Well that that
just means if you believe Snopes, then it's scuttle. But
so apparently there are not astronauts trape scene about Antarctica,
(38:57):
although the US military did have some excursions there in
the World War two days. And if you are feeling
like a lovely trip down a rabbit hole, uh, go
ahead and hop on your preferred Internet search engine and
type in operation high Jump. Definitely, And just to stay
(39:19):
on Aldrin for a moment, do you guys remember when
he was on c SPAN and he had that little
he mentioned that aside about the monolith on one of
the moons of Jupiter. Do you guys remember this? He
actually says his statement, I don't have an exact quotes
in in front of you. But a statement is like
when people see that monolith monolith on one of the
(39:41):
moons of Jupiter, they're gonna say, where did that come from?
Who built that? And then he just goes on with
this conversation. It's pretty incredible and it's real, It's absolutely real.
And so there are other theories. I think we should
just jump to this theory. Some people. Okay, so we
(40:03):
can divide theories about pyramids into three rough buckets. There's
the bucket of how are they built? Right, and there's
the bucket of what were they for? And then there's
the other one, which is what do they do? Because
some people, you know, people who believe in uh sacred geometry,
(40:23):
for example, people there are people who believe that these
shapes or the placement of these structures has some sort
of significance in a in a larger sense, right, you
can find people who believe that the pyramids are built
along lay lines L. E. Y. Right, which is sort
of the belief in lay lines is the belief that
(40:48):
the planet has something like its own nervous system and
that these lines aggregate some sort of energy or power.
People who have tested this feel that that is not
scientifically valid. Right, they say, Okay, there's a secretion of energy,
(41:10):
or you stand in Stonehenge on the right time of
the lunar year or the solar year, and you you
feel like there's some great thing happening, but there's no
measurement of it. Right, there's no there's no heat differential all.
There's not massive geothermal vent or anything. We're definitely not
(41:30):
fully discounting that, but we are saying there is no
scientific evidence to prove its existence. So let's bounce around
these theories a little bit. No, I know you've been
dying to talk about this. Yeah, green, you know, where
where does green come into all this? That I mentioned
that a couple couple of times. I wasn't tried to poke, fine,
(41:53):
but just a friend of the show, Ben Carson, who
I believe currently serves as our secretary Um. He came
out during the campaign for president with an interesting theory
that that the Pyramids were created by Joseph Um and
his amazing technicolor dreamcoat to store grain. Yeah, there were granaries.
(42:18):
This in this belief surprised a lot of people when
when Ben Carson said this. When Secretary Carson said this,
because he uh, he was espousing a belief that a
lot of people had never heard before. It turns out
medieval Europeans believed the pyramids were these granaries that were
(42:39):
described in the Old Testament, and that's where the description
of the pyramids is Joseph's Granaries come from. It. It
goes back to like the sixth century. So he wasn't
just you know, off the dome making a guess um.
This uh. This was in a book called History of
the Franks by Gregory of Tours, and then it got
(43:00):
popularized by a book called the Book of John Mandeville.
That was back when there were way fewer books, so
you could just call the thing you wrote the book
the book by me. Yeah, what his His main argument
was that the pyramids were hermetically sealed um, and that
you wouldn't need to hermetically seal a crypt um, but
(43:23):
that would be something that would come in handy if
you were trying to preserve grain. I've got a quote
here from a BBC article from an egyptologist. Remember those
guys we talked about them, they exist, They're real. One
of them his name James Allen of Brown University, and
he says, quote, there's no way in the world. An
ounce of grain would be stored in a structure like that,
(43:45):
it would be totally impractical. It's like saying the Tower
of London was built as a granary store you could
put grain in it. I mean, so is it granary?
Just any structure that contains grain essentially, that's used specifically,
that's built for it. So we could fill this studio
with grain, and that way, it wouldn't make it a
(44:07):
granary because we didn't build it specifically for that purpose,
I guess. But you also have to think about how
does the grain get in, how do you get it out?
Does it make sense? That's true with the pyramid, it
just doesn't make any sense. And there's another there's another
idea here. In eighteen fifty nine, a British publisher named
(44:28):
John Taylor wrote a book called The Great Pyramid, Why
It Was Built and Who built it? Uh. He said
that Noah, not the Egyptians, the biblical Noah built the
pyramid because he built the arc and then he was
therefore the most competent to direct the building of the pyramid.
(44:49):
He also believes that the purpose of the pyramid, if
we're going to a different theory, is to be a
repository for the divine system of all mathematical truths. WHOA, right,
that's fun. What is that? Is that like a like
a like a real fancy slide rule or something. Yeah,
it's it's an enormous slide rule because they couldn't get
(45:10):
the moving parts for an abbocus. Got it, and we're
going to build a huge advocus. There are other people
who believe that the Great Pyramid is predictive. There's a
book called Our Inheritance of the Great Pyramid, also published
in the eighteen hundreds, revealed to use to use our
patented air quote revealed the date of the apocalypse. I
(45:37):
mean that's cool, is it? Yeah? I mean why not
if you could? You want to know, if you could
glean the date, then maybe you can prevent it. What
are you gonna do about it? Drink more water and
less soda? Where more sunscreen? So we can see that.
A lot of the more m out there theories about
(46:01):
pyramids come from the pyramid craze in the eighteen hundreds, right,
and a lot of them are religiously based. There. Of course,
people who will say that pyramids were built by some
diabolical force. Right, an ancient evil or a demon. Uh.
There is of course no proof of that. Back in
(46:25):
the time when a lot of these theories were propagated,
people were sort of feeling around in the dark. Um.
One of the interesting things probably interested a lot of
people here is that for a long time there was
a fairly popular conspiracy theory of sorts that, uh, you know,
(46:45):
a global civilization built all of these things, to to
with the Atlantis fabled lost civilization of Atlantis built the pyramids.
So let's look at the argument. To a fellow named
Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, how's that for a name that sounds great?
Congressman from Minnesota in the late eighteen hundreds, he argued
(47:10):
this very point, he said, and that there once existed
in the Atlantic Ocean opposite the mouth of the mediterrane
see a large island was a remnant of another Atlantic
continent known as Atlantis. Uh. He said that Plato's description,
which Soften taken to be a fable, was the straight poop,
(47:32):
that it was actual history, and that modern man first
rose from barbarism to civilization in Atlantis. And then he
said that the Atlanteans stablished colonies around the world. I
mean we've we've heard all of this, right, Uh, And
at this point we know that there have been ancient
low civilizations, but again there's never been one big you know,
(47:55):
like one people to rule them all found. You know,
still people love this theory. What do you guys think
about the cargo cult theory of pyramids? Oh, that's interesting.
So cargo cults, which do exist. Cargo cults came from
(48:18):
Polynesian islands out in the Pacific Ocean, where in pretty
fairly isolated communities saw for the first time technology that
they had never seen before, radio towers, right, airplanes, weapons
of war, even clothing, even clothing of type yeah, that
(48:38):
they had never seen before. And so they also would
see these cargo drops which would contain food and clothing,
survival materials, stuff like that humanitarian aid for example. And
so these cargo cults began, uh instituting religious practices, spiritual
(49:00):
practices wherein they would build uh, radio towers or an airplane,
but it would be out of stuff available materials. Yeah,
it wouldn't be a flying it would be a symbolic
radio tower, symbolic airplane. And they would reproduce or enact
various ritualistic behaviors in hopes of uh in the hopes
(49:24):
of the cargo returning. One of these groups warshiped Prince
Philip as a god as it like, not as a
cool guy, not as just a regular dude as it
should bear. Have you seen as jawline? I mean you
can break stunning break walnuts and hearts on that jo line.
(49:45):
So the thing with this would be that the pyramids
sprung up throughout the world in all these different developing
civilizations because of some in the ancient alien theory. Some
either ship that resembled a pyramid and then they were
built like in Memoriam in a way or to try
and get them back down. You're doing a stargate thing here.
(50:07):
It's essentially little kind of like a star gate, but
just you know, a signal, a large enough signal that says, hey,
wherever you are up in the heavens, come visit again
or come back to us. It's fascinating. So then it
would be oh side note, the religious sect that we
mentioned is referred to as the Prince Philip Movement. They're
(50:30):
in an island in Vanuatu called Tana Nice. So if
you are searching spiritually for something and you think you
want to just try out a religion you have not
heard of, then go ahead and uh give the Prince
Philip movement ago and let us know how it works
out for you. So, ancient aliens, We've mentioned this on
(50:54):
the show before, and I feel like we'd be remiss
if we didn't explore this a little bit because this
ties in too one of the conspiracies, not a theory,
but one of the conspiracies that happened when Europeans began
exploring possibilities of the origin for pyramids. Right, So there
(51:17):
are a couple of things we should address here. First,
A lot of the ancient alien theory stuff that exists
now is descended from earlier, earlier, very racially based theories,
wherein uh, Europeans, maybe not the same guys who found
the Pointy Rock and Antarctica, but as someone who, for
(51:40):
the sake of argument, sounded very much like them, would
see a pyramid and say, you know, this is remarkable,
this is remarkable. Where where is the lost civilization of
clearly white people who built this? And so that just
the same way that um, a lot of my aren
urban legends descend from earlier what we would call fairy tales. Right, Um,
(52:07):
there's still that that folklore progression or storytelling progression, because history,
as we know, is just one long game of telephone,
and we have to we have to consider that because
the real, the real cover up, at least one provable
cover up, is that a lot of early explorers we're
(52:28):
searching for something that confirmed the belief they already had.
They had confirmation bias, because not only did they not
believe that native people could accomplish such tremendous works, but
they didn't want to believe that. And if they were
(52:49):
presented would proof, they probably would have just if we
know how confirmation bias works, they probably would have just
doubled down on their idea. Exactly. That's what I always
do that, No, I mean, really that is what we
do psychologically, unfortunately. I So these are these are some
of the ideas we do know that one provable cover
(53:12):
up was was either through negligence or malevolence. Where does
this all lead us? You know, we've learned that anything
can arguably be a granary if you fill it with grain. Um,
but that's kind of like saying that any any bag
(53:35):
you put a sandwich in automatically becomes a sandwich bag. Yeah,
you know. So we do know that there was one
provable cover up situation, and that occurred when earlier explorers
from different parts of the world said, clearly they didn't
(53:56):
build this their line, you see. And I know that
can be an ugly thing, but it happened. As for
the state of pyramids, now, the craziest thing to me
is we still don't know how many are out there.
We found the big ones, we found the big ones,
and well there are also pyramids that appear to be
(54:17):
in protected areas where perhaps an insular government doesn't want
any third party or NGO, you know, looking around to
find new ones that perhaps might be there or just
covered up in jungle that we can't see unless we
have highly sophisticated lighter just going through the jungle acre
(54:38):
by acre, which is a task that I wouldn't want
to do. Well. I guess that wraps up the topic.
But should we do some some shouting outing cornering absolutely
Tally Hope shout at corners. Our first shoutout today comes
from Sean. Sean says, guys, I've loved this show up
(54:59):
to most recent episode. You're moving to Mars episode I
felt like it turned into a reading of get this
guy's the communist Manifesto. Listen, I get that political opinions
of people sink into their work, intentional or unintentional. You're
usually very good about presenting counter opinions, even if one
of you is just playing devil's advocate. It was pretty
(55:20):
sad to hear a conspiracy podcast advocating from more governments. Wow, well,
I I can see what Shaan is saying where there
were definitely definitely some ideas that could be considered communists,
and we pointed that out in the episode. There's definitely
a centralization of government, which is not necessarily communism. But
(55:44):
I don't think he's talking about just that because there
were other aspects there too. Yeah, spreading out everything where
everybody gets an equal share. Um, there's no real trading
of goods for profit in this way. They're just our
goods and you get them. You know, well, the whole
ide you have like some greater power authority assessing your
worth and giving you work assignment based on a series
(56:08):
of algorithms that I guess look through your past work
history and you know, kind of tell you what you
are and what you need to be doing. Yeah, but
we we we talked about this even before we did
the interview, and and maybe it didn't come across as
much as we would have liked, but these were things
that we discussed when kind of like preparing for this interview. Yeah.
I think one of the things is when we're hanging
(56:30):
out off air, we just for a peek behind the curtain.
These episodes don't usually end for us when the episode
ends on, you know, the the official episode stream that
you're hearing. Yeah, because we'll we'll sit, we'll sit somewhere,
we'll go somewhere after work, and we'll still be talking
about the thing. And one of one of the things
(56:53):
that we would say would be a difference between straight
up orthodox community and what was being advocated here is that, uh,
what Marshall Brain was advocating was that this would be
a technocracy. So instead of a Stalin or another strong
man at the top who was still human, Uh, there
(57:13):
would be an artificial intelligence, which is almost scarier to me.
It's definitely unknown. Well, it's like who programs the artificial intelligence,
you know, like where does that? It's like a chicken
or the egg kind of question. But we also should
point out that the Heat said from the start, this
whole thing was a thought experiment. It wasn't necessarily advocating
(57:33):
for any of this, because he totally was like, very
adamant about the fact that this is pretty much impossible.
Do you even get there to even have the environment
that would allow us to start such a society? And
that's why it was a lot of fun for us
to talk about, because that's kind of what we like
to do, is you know, get hypothetical with stuff and
sort of play devil's advocate for big questions and that
(57:54):
sort of this gave us that opportunity a big time
and I would say, um, Sean Marshall. At the end
of that episode, he gave his email address and he
asked for people to write to him to die so
if and actually I have forwarded him everything that's been
written to us, specifically to conspiracy and how stuff works,
(58:14):
because he wants feedback. He wants to know what people
think about some of this stuff. So sure, it's very
much work in progress, as he said, and I think
that's I'm glad you did that, Matt Well. One of
the things that I would like to explore in in
a future episode would be the actual technology nuts and bolts,
because we didn't really talk about that, right and we have, uh,
(58:39):
we have received a lot of great questions about this.
I'm laughing because one of them comes up in a
later episode and I don't want to spoil it for anybody.
But it was a great question and I'm still thinking
about it. So thank you, Sean everyone else who wrote
in regarding this topic. Marshall Brain is quite prolific, uh,
and he does read every email he receives, and as
(59:00):
he said, he sincerely welcomes feedback. Our next shout out
comes from Justin. Send us an email. Justin says, good morning.
I recently started listening to stuff they don't want you
to know, and I'm enjoying it very much. Awesome, Justin,
thank you for listening and hanging out with us. I
think you guys should do a cast on cryptocurrency. You
could begin with discussions on bitcoin the leader, and then
(59:22):
move on to companies that use the blockchain to solve
problems in our everyday world. Take care of Justin. That's
a that's a great topic. There's a lot to discover
there on On my part, at least, I need to
do a lot of research just to really wrap my
head around how it all functions. I recently got a
coin base, which is like this app that allows you
(59:42):
to buy different cryptocurrencies. Um, the whole thing is fascinating
to me. And we have actually some colleagues at work
who bought into bitcoin back in the day where it
kind of boomed and actually I want name names, but
sold it before it boomed. Hard would have been a
minor millionaire he or she at the very least a
(01:00:04):
hundred thousand are the point being the history of cryptocurrency
and in itself is really cool, and the whole Mount
Cox thing and you know, all of that is its
own stuff, and then like how it's being used now
and the black market aspects of it and the deep Web.
Totally great episode, and some mysterious inventors stuff is in
there still in the future cash lest society that we're
running up on future I don't know. We're getting so
(01:00:27):
close and you'll just have to buy credits and have
them put on your wrist bands so that you can
scan them. Val they're gonna alter your d n A
so that every cell you every cell in your body
reflects how much worth you have that sounds like a
personal hell, like the world is just one big music festival. Yeah, yeah,
(01:00:48):
well if it was Bonnaroo, then for sure that is everywhere.
I mean, developing countries are increasingly cashless, and that our
previous episode on whether money is a religion I really
had us thinking about that too, like it's it doesn't.
It's not attached to a commodity directly now, so it's
(01:01:09):
an idea. It's out in the ether. It requires faith,
It requires a massive amount of faith. And we got
some cool emails about that one too. We should bring
up another time. Absolutely, you're so right. Just I just
want to say you're so right about the music festival
thing being a test run essentially of how it would
function when it's getting like a little village, like like
a society, you know, where we're all just living in
(01:01:31):
love and listening to string cheese incident and hemorrhaging money,
hemoraging money on fifteen red Bull and Vodkas. It doesn't
you know, it doesn't even have to have alcohol. It's
anything is at least ten dollars a hot dog, five
dollar waters plus four four dollars for bund service. That's
where they give you a hot dog bun charging for
(01:01:53):
the mud before you know it. Yeah, but but it
is true. It is a microcosm of society. So this fascinating.
All right, We got one last one from Anthony. Just
finished watching your latest video on Alisa Lamb's mysterious disappearance.
Staying on the topic of disappearances, have you guys looked
into the thousands of cases of National park disappearances? Say
(01:02:17):
that Anthony most notable David Pilots in his book series.
He also recently released a short documentary about it that
would make for an interesting topic to play. It's all,
this is a very prescient email, you guys got leave
it at that, but just yes and yes, and and
to quote our boss Jason Hope, stay tuned. And the
(01:02:38):
book series, the book series Anthony's referring to is missing
for one one as well as the documentary that is
now available. So yes, as as the colleague here said,
stay tuned. And that concludes our gosh but not our
(01:03:00):
or show. That is right, Matt Noel and I will
be returning next week with something probably completely different then pyramids. Yes,
ye okay, and we're gonna talk about a different shape. Yes, yep,
it's gonna be a trapezoid, perhaps decahedrons. What if there
(01:03:20):
are no angles? What if it's just a formless mass
of jelly? What if it's non euclidean alien love crafty
and geometry right, and just looking at it drives you bad?
Isn't that sort of what spawned you? I mean, you know,
I don't talk about my personal life the show. It
could be any number of things. It might even be
(01:03:42):
government continuity. Who knows, it may well be uh, but
either way, we hope that you do tune in, and
we hope that you find it interesting. In the meantime,
if you were like, this was not enough strange weird
stuff for this week? Where do I find more? Before
next Friday? We have just the place for you. If
you'd like to learn more about ancient technology, low civilizations,
(01:04:05):
mysterious structures, visit our website Stuff they Don't Want you
know dot Com, where you can find every audio podcast
we have ever done. And that's the end of this
classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about
this episode, you can get into contact with us in
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(01:04:27):
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