Tyler Engle

The conversation starts with the host praising Tyler Engle's Instagram, which he calls "a rabbit hole". He picks out Engle's latest post on Noah's Ark. He says he already knew about the scans of the site but had not known about its links to Sumerian texts, or that Noah appears on the Sumerian King List. He asks Jamie to play the clip so the account gets more attention, and says it is the kind of thing that makes doom-scrolling feel "justifiable".

Mount Ararat is almost 17,000 feet high, straddled by two of the saltiest lakes on earth and a dry one to the south.

The clip, from Engle's account baseforge, lays out a chain of claims. It says most people confuse the biblical flood with the Younger Dryas event, which the narration rejects because "That is way too far back in history." It says the nearby town of Shuruppak (transcribed as "Sharupak") was buried in 50 feet of mud, and that this mud was dated very close to the mud covering the structure on the mountain. It identifies Shuruppak as Noah's home town. It says the Sumerians called Noah Ziusudra, the last king on the Sumerian King List before the flood. The clip gives no specific dates or dating methods for either layer of mud.

The narration then calls the Sumerians a megalithic culture, which it defines as people able to work very large, very hard stone. As evidence it says their temples are so badly destroyed that 10-ton stones lie "in the middle of nowhere" after being "thrown off the top of a mountain." The clip cuts off mid-sentence ("these guys could") before it explains why this matters.

After the clip, the discussion asks why the site isn't simply dug up: "Just dig the thing out." The reply is that people are trying to excavate the area slowly to find out what it is. The host then pushes back on the literal story. Two of every animal on one boat followed by a repopulated Earth strikes him as "so preposterous". He reads it as "a ridiculous simplification of something that was. probably at least somewhat true."

I don't think that they had all the animals on the boat because that doesn't make any sense. There's not enough room. You know, animals eat other animals.

The two speakers frame it differently. One suggests there were probably several flood events across history. The other says the one in Turkey is well documented, and the exchange that follows briefly contradicts that ("It's not."). The distinction they settle on is that many cultures have similar flood stories, but "they probably weren't the same day." The events could have been sequential and hit different regions at different times.

The geography argument rests on the region being surrounded by mountains, with one range running from Iran to Greece. That raises the question of how it holds a saltwater lake. Lake Van is described as volcanic in origin, with a volcano underneath and mineral deposits, and as one of the saltiest lakes around. The speakers separate soda (carbonate) lakes like Van from pure salt lakes like the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea. Their claim that the Dead Sea is "really close" to Lake Van is stated without support. One speaker admits openly that this is "definitely more of a Randall area" than his own.

Their working conclusion, given with hedging ("most likely it was probably"), is a semi-local event confined to Turkey. The ancient writers would have recorded it as world-ending because their known world was all that was destroyed. They would have had no idea what was happening in China or the Philippines.

If everything you see around you is barren wasteland because you got tsunamis, like, the world's over. Right. And that's what you're going to put on the rock.

That reframing raises a harder question, which the speaker says is "where things get real weird." Even if the flood covered only the area of Turkey or the continent, how did one man know far enough ahead to spend years building what the speaker calls the biggest boat built up to that time? The tone is speculative and joking ("we're fucked in about three years. I gotta get to work"). No answer is offered.

Asked about a recent film, the speakers recall the Russell Crowe Noah movie. One recommends its intro for the backstory it builds from old lore, including the Nephilim. That leads to giants. The host says many things he "used to think were nonsense" now seem credible, and Engle says he is "almost all in on giants." The reasoning offered is cumulative rather than specific: "there's just too many stories. There's too many tales." The host also admits, "I don't know what it means."

To test what "giant" might mean, the host uses the strongman Brian Shaw, who he says was at the Mothership recently. He describes Shaw as 400 pounds and about seven feet tall, with unusually dense bones. The figures for how rare that density is shift as he talks, from "five or six people on earth" to "one out of five hundred 100 million people". He then describes it only as "some insane number," so the statistic is not reliable as stated. The point he draws is that extreme variation already exists today, with pygmy tribes on one end and the Maasai, described as seven-foot-tall people, on the other.

The segment also includes a sponsor read for Uber Eats, after which the talk returns to Brian Shaw: "He likes to be a giant."

The question becomes whether stories of giants could reflect a separate human species, since new ones keep being found. The speakers bring up recent research on the Denisovans (transcribed as "Dennis Sullivan's" and "Denisovins") and correct each other along the way. One says a complete skeleton was found. Another says it was only a more complete one than before. A third view is "I think they just have pieces" and "I don't think we have a full one yet." They agree the Denisovans were proportionally bigger than modern humans and that the skulls are "massive".

The figures read from the article on screen are average heights of about 168 centimeters for Neanderthal men and 190 centimeters for Denisovans. A phone converts 190 cm to 6.23 feet. One speaker's earlier guess had been "seven foot something, maybe." On dating, the article is paraphrased as putting most bones at about 160,000 years, while radiocarbon testing on the specimens in this study gave maybe 45,000 years. A speaker calls the gap "120,000 years of discrepancy". They also say modern humans "for sure" interacted with Denisovans, and that Denisovans were first found about 10 years ago "or less".

Nutrition is offered as the context for the height figures. The speakers say it was hard to get enough protein in the past. They give two examples: men during the Civil War were "like 130 pounds", and medieval people were much smaller, which they attribute to starvation. One speaker describes armor he saw in Italy, he thinks in a castle in Florence, as very narrow and fitting men of about five foot five. He adds that soldiers probably came from poor families without enough food to grow fully. The conclusion is that "it's basically a food thing," which makes a 190-centimeter Denisovan look even larger compared with people of its time.

The main methodological point is about sampling. The odds that anyone's bones are ever found are "so small." The speakers use dinosaurs as an example: animals that lived for hundreds of millions of years, of which they think perhaps a few hundred thousand have been found. They disagree mildly over whether any skeleton is 100 percent complete, saying there are "some really close T-Rex ones." Their argument is that because so few bones are found compared with how many animals died, the same gap could be hiding unusual human types. The analogy ends with a joke about dragons.

The dragon joke turns into an argument about legends in general. One speaker teases the other for believing in dragons and is told to "Do some research." The broader claim is a pattern: giants and Noah's Ark were treated as unreal, and now evidence is being claimed for both. The speakers do not separate confirmed findings from the claims they discussed earlier.

I think very few of those stories were fiction.

Two lines of support are offered. The first is Troy, which they say was long thought to be fiction until the city was found. The second is the practical cost of writing in antiquity. Books had to be written by hand, and few people could read or write. That leads them to ask who would be writing or reading fiction at all. They argue it was more likely that writing served to preserve accurate history, so that future generations "won't have to learn from scratch."

The same argument is applied to Egypt. One speaker says hieroglyphs "appear fully formed and sophisticated," with no visible evolution. He says they start in the Old Kingdom already "flawless," like an "engineering language," and asks where they came from. The host broadens the point: assuming we fully understand the past is "foolish" and should be the starting point for discussion. No specific evidence about early Egyptian writing is cited.

The host credits Engle's posts on temples carved straight into mountains, including the sound that resonates inside some of them. He says nobody knows how they were made, when, or with what equipment. They agree it was "not possible" to do it with other rocks. Engle's example is his recent video on the Kailasa temple in India, which he describes as carved out of volcanic rock that is "insanely hard." He says the video drew "so much blowback" from people arguing it was soapstone or some other softer stone.

His evidence is an experiment by the YouTube channel Proto Civilization. A man used a hardened steel pickaxe on rock behind Kailasa, not near the temple itself, and measured how much he removed. Engle says there are scans. As he describes it, four hours of work removed a patch about six inches across and about half an inch deep, leaving the large men doing it "gassed out." The channel's calculations, he says, showed that even a population working nonstop could not have carved the temple this way. Most of the numbers are gestured or approximate ("about this big, maybe that deep").

It was like 100 guys for like two years. And they barely scratched it.

The second piece of evidence is a historical attempt to destroy the temple, which Engle says the tools of the time could not do: about 100 men working for two years, "non-stop," with little effect. The host takes this as reason to stay open to an earlier civilization with a level of technology we don't understand. He limits the claim to what is unknown: "We don't know what the technology was. We don't know why they had it, what they did with it." He calls Kailasa one of the best pieces of evidence, a thing that makes you "go hmm" in the style of the Arsenio Hall Show. The segment then moves into a sponsor read for Ketone IQ about fasting and ketones, which is not part of the argument.

This part of the episode opens with a paid advertisement, not interview material. The read promotes Ketone IQ as a way to get the focus and mental-clarity benefits it links to fasting ketones "without having to fast," and says the product is sold at CVS nationwide, with a free first shot and 30% off subscriptions at ketone.com/Rogan. These are the advertiser's claims. The conversation offers no evidence for them.

The interview picks up mid-argument about Kailasa, which the guest calls unique because it is "in the process of being finished." He says satellite temples are being worked "basically from the ground up," so visitors can see the stages of construction. The work is more detailed near the top, and scraping tool marks, "scrapes and scoops," survive at the bottom.

But the scrapes, the penetration depth of the scrape is greater than a jackhammer that we have.

He adds that a hydraulic jackhammer cutting into a rock wall "does not penetrate as deeply as the marks that are still in Kylosa." The marks continue into a narrow, unlit corridor that you have to pass through sideways. Asked whether it is narrower than a human body, he says it starts wide and narrows to a V, with tool marks "all the way through it." He agrees the builders probably started wide and cut inward. His guess is that they used "a mixture of what we do today" with some tool that made the work look like "no problem." He gives no measurements, sources or named tool for the depth comparison. It stays an observation-based claim.

From there the speakers move to their wider thesis: modern people assume too readily that theirs is the most advanced culture ever. The guest calls stonework "the best evidence" and says it is what drew him into the subject.

And we are just so egocentric in our position that we are the most sophisticated culture that's ever existed on Earth.

The guest's second example is the giant statue of Ramses relocated for the Grand Egyptian Museum. He says pictures don't do it justice: standing beside it, you barely come up to the shin, and he says he almost fell into the pool around it. He also says the statue's face is "a very generic face" that doesn't resemble Ramses's mummy. He notes that Ramses "put his cartouche on literally everything in Egypt." That remark implies, without stating it outright, that a cartouche alone may not show who made a monument.

The guest's first weight estimates were wrong. He guessed "in 200" and then 400 tons, and the producer reported that the statue is 83 tons. The guest accepted the figure and changed his argument. He now said the original block quarried for it must have weighed "at least 200" tons once the surrounding material is counted. That 200-ton figure is his assumption, not a measurement.

His main point is about logistics. Moving the statue today took "an enormous truck with huge steel beams," a special road and a special trailer. He contrasts that with the conventional account as he describes it: no roads, wet sand, and rolling on logs from Lebanon that he says are "really not that compressively strong." He cites his background: he studied this, did "a lot of these calculations," and worked in construction and building restoration. He notes that a boom lift can't use certain roads because it would cave them in, and that a boom lift weighs far less than the statue.

So all of it to my engineering brain was just absurd.

He adds a modern comparison: the LACMA stone, "the 300-ton boulder they put at the museum," and the effort it took to move on a perfectly flat route. He credits Jimmy Corsetti with raising that example. The comparison illustrates how much modern effort these moves require. It does not show what methods ancient builders did or did not have.

The speakers then go after conventional archaeologists, who they say dismiss ideas outside "this linear timeline theory." They summarize the mainstream explanation as copper tools and sand, and reject it: "None of it makes sense." They also see an inconsistency. Ancient people get credit for being very clever builders, but their own mythology and king lists are treated as fiction.

It's a simultaneous, oh, they were super smart, but this stuff was imaginary.

In this view, scholars reach a point where they "can't explain it away" and fall back on imagination when they could say "maybe we don't have a full picture of this." The speakers back this with an analogy about technology's limits. A Tesla that goes "zero to 60 in under two seconds" and drives itself home, and a pocket device for calling a friend in Connecticut and reaching "all the world's information," would look like magic to anyone living 200 years ago.

They push the analogy into a thought experiment. Imagine survivors 200 years after a nuclear war, living with sticks, stones and animal skins, who find a bunker of intact computers, phones and satellite dishes. They would call it magic, might worship it, and might spend hundreds of years trying to reverse-engineer it. An instruction manual wouldn't help if nobody could read English. A finder might not grasp the basic concepts at all: "What's a signal? It's in the air? Can you catch it with a net?"