The host of the excellent podcast Skeptiko, Alex Tsakiris, joins us for a wide-ranging conversation covering many topics from ancient aliens to the nature of consciousness to conspiracy to the question of evil. Alex has interviewed hundreds of researchers and scientists on his show in his quest to gain a better understanding about who we are and what we are "supposed" to be doing here in this existence, and his show has taken him on a path of "following the data" as much as possible to find answers to these questions, or at the very least, to find better questions to ask.

This is another special show with a guest who joins us in-studio. Bob Johnson is a geologist, now retired, who spent 35 years traveling extensively in North Africa and the Middle East. He has visited many of the ancient sites we have discussed on our show, and gives us his personal perspectives of the many places he has visited, including the Serapeum, the Giza Plateau, Ba'albek, Petra, Malta, and many more. We also discuss a very interesting case he worked on as a scientist and geologist, where mysterious, spontaneous fires were plaguing a small village, and the people living there were convinced the fires were being caused by the jinn. We also talk about the science of geology itself, about uniformity and catastrophism, climate change and ice ages, flood myths and other ancient stories that may be supported by geological data, and much more.

We are joined in-studio by David Getzin, a longtime friend of the show, many of you may remember us reading his emails about good pipe tobacco and constructing a Djed Drill. He was on a cross-country road trip and stopped by to visit us here on the plateau, and once we started talking about ancient mysteries and other similar snakebro topics, we realized, we had to record a podcast with him. So we all climbed into the tangent cube and, amidst copious clouds of fine tobacco smoke and a few glasses of wine, we recorded this episode. The discussion ranges across many topics, but the main idea David describes is something called the "Prime Symbol" in architectural expression of cultures and civilizations across the ages, how it changes, and what it means for us now in the modern age. We talk about the categorizations of Prime Symbol in past cultures and what they tell us about how those cultures viewed the world around them, and how that may help us understand how to better express a modern Prime Symbol in our own architecture. You can follow David and his work through his podcast, A History of Architecture, his YouTube channel Living Process, and his website, Living Process, LLC.

This episode is one of those rambling conversations that is difficult, in retrospect, to give a concise title. We do talk about entropy and the arrow of time, but we also discuss gravity and astrophysics, orbital mechanics, lagrange points and trojan points, geomagnetic anomalies and an "activated" asteroid in a Jovian orbit, the Dead Sea Scrolls and DNA testing, and the Rosetta Stone and a brief history of the attempts to translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. We also read a couple of really great emails, and open three 1up boxes, which takes a long time, and is part of why this show is longer than usual. We probably will have to restrict ourselves to one box per episode in the future.

This is the final part of our deep dive into William Bramley's The Gods of Eden. We pick up where we left off last week with the Count of St. Germain, and his strange ability to travel back and forth between warring aristocracy in Europe and England, the part he played in the coup of Catherine II over Peter III in Russia, and later, the implications that he may have staged his death and lived on, or even the possibility that he was, if not immortal, at least very long-lived. We also look at Joseph Smith and the formation of the Mormon church, and some of the information said to have been written on the "metal plates" that Joseph was supposedly told to recover from a hidden place, which detail terrible catastrophes that fell on a civilization now lost to history. Finally, we end with Bramley's message to anyone who wants to carry his research forward, and his outlining of several threads to pull on. We hope you all enjoyed this deep dive as much as we did!

We are back to our regularly scheduled program of our deep dive into William Bramley's The Gods of Eden after last week's break. This week we finish up with the sections on the Plagues and begin moving into more recent history, following the corrupted Brotherhood's machinations as they foment war and strife across Europe. We look at the Protestant rebellion, Calvinism, the Eighty Years War, the strange cult known as the "Friends of God", and Rosicrucianism. We end in the middle of the chapter on the Count of St. Germain, a very strange and mysterious figure from the 1700s.

Russ is sick this week(not with Covid19, don't worry), so we had to put the Gods of Eden book report on hold because Russ can't read when he's sick. (Well, really, it's just hard to talk so much with a sore throat). So instead we have Chris Cottrel from The Dabbler's Den on for a segment to talk to us about a new and fascinating idea that he and Antonio Zamora have been working on, related to the Carolina Bays,  called "Splash Chevrons". Chris shows us some of the LiDAR images he has been looking at that show these features(if you want to see the images, you can check our YouTube Channel for the video for this episode, as we did record video during the interview with Chris),  and we talk about what they might be. We also have on our good friend Brendan Lea, who some of you may know from recent emails to the show about "nothing". We talk with him about his work with world champion martial artist Peter Ralston, but we talk not about "fighting", really, but something much deeper about the nature of reality itself and what that means(or doesn't), because part of the training he has undergone with Peter is about having an "enlightenment" experience of something absolute, and that changed his life and his entire outlook on reality itself. We hope you enjoy this show, and the book report will resume next week!

We continue our reading of William Bramley's The Gods of Eden, following the corrupt Brotherhood and the Custodial machinations to the end of the Crusades. Bramley focuses briefly on the ancient Americas, talking about the Custodial influences there, with the same legends of "gods" from other worlds or the stars. We then go back across the Atlantic and begin looking at the Black Death and the plague years, and the strange sightings in the sky of lights and objects during this period,as well as the unknown cloaked figures reported in the outskirts of towns that later became the popularized image of "Death", holding a scythe.

We continue to follow Bramley's "Custodial" powers up through history as the Brotherhood continues to splinter and create warring factions across the globe, keeping humans splintered and scattered and fighting amongst each other while these ancient powers pull strings in the background. We look at the early formation of Christianity and how it changed when governmental powers moved in and absorbed it. We look at the beginnings of the Islamic faith, and the splintering and factioning that happened soon after. We look at the crusades, the Knights of St. John who became the Knights of Malta, and the Templars who became the Knights of Christ and later, the Freemasons. We look at the Assassins, and the powerful tool of the "lone assassin". We also read a lot of listener communications talking about the previous Gods of Eden episodes, read an article from the Cosmic Tusk about space bacteria, and Kyle reads another great article written by a skerptard on the life and ideas of Dr. Freeman Dyson, which spurs a short conversation on the concept of "macrostructures" like the Dyson Sphere.

We pick up where we left off last week with William Bramley's book, The Gods of Eden, following the "corrupted Brotherhood" through history as it spreads across the world, bringing conflict to mankind and obscuring true understanding.