Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Percy Fawcett: Real-Life Indiana Jones, or Deluded Psychic Racist?

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Robert concludes the tale of Percy Fawcett by discussing how he came to believe a hidden jungle portal would turn his son into a god (spoiler: they died horribly).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

World Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast for the very worst people in all of history, where I just thought I was about to sneeze, but I didn't. And so we're able to start now, as opposed to like three seconds later. Mazel Tov, Robert. Unless I sneeze in like a second. There's no way to know. There's no way to know.

It's really dusty out there right now, what with all the fire. Everything's on fire. Yeah. You know who's not on fire in like a bad way. But in a good way, they are. Being on fire can mean a confusingly wide variety of things. Hello, Miriam. How are you?

I'm doing good. I'm not on fire in any way that I'm aware of. Okay. Okay. Neither in a good nor a bad way. Yeah, I don't think so. Again, yeah, like you said, it can mean a lot of things, so, you know, I don't want to foreclose on every possibility. Yeah, that makes sense, you know?

So whether or not you're on fire, I hope you're ready to listen to the next part of our series. on the life of Percy Fawcett, the guy who was probably the most direct inspiration for Indiana Jones slash, just like the archetype of like the gentleman adventurer, you know, and who also, as we're about to discuss, is going to go increasingly crazy over the course of this episode. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all?

And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.orgia for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook.

Each week, we talk to some. in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle.

I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So when we left him off, he had first listened to his mom. and broken up with his fiance, and then years later, gotten back together with her.

He's converted to Buddhism. He's become a theosophist, and he's gotten really into the occult. And after being trained up as an adventurer and working briefly as a spy, he's finally wound up back in Ceylon in 1903, which he really likes, because it's this place.

It's filled with all these Buddhist temples. It's filled with what he sees as like these people who are seekers of the truth. There's a lot of not just, like, local Buddhists, but a lot of, like, white people who are really into the, occult are in Ceylon and moving, because it's really hip to travel to the east and to travel to

these parts of the world where there's people who are like Buddhists and Hindus, because a lot of these Victorian age and, like, slightly post-Victorian age, white people are really into, like, co-opting little bits of different Eastern religions and sort of, like, tacking them on to these pieces of, like, theosophy and other spiritualist, like, belief systems that are starting to be cobbled together as, like, a hobby. This is like a hobby for a lot of people, right? It stays fashionable for a while. It stays fashionable. And Percy's kind of using his military career as a way to also further his hobby in this way.

Like he's really happy to be stationed here with his wife. And Nina seems to be as well. She was born there. So many descriptions of Percy Fawcett's life depict the beginning of his career as a boundary surveyor as if it suddenly ignites a desire for exploration. In Grant's book, Chapter 8, Into the Amazon, goes straight from Percy returning to England in 1902. to him then being in Bolivia, like six or seven years later, which is like where the first adventure from the movie

The Lost City of Z starts too. And that leaves out years of his life where he was like getting increasingly into Buddhism and Theosophy in Ceylon. And it's kind of important because that sets the stage for what's going to happen next. So from what I can tell, despite Percy's aptitude for surveying, he doesn't seem to have been particularly drawn to it as a career at this point.

In 1903, his chief interest was a different sort of exploration, the search for lost treasures and esoteric truths via meditation and other forms of spiritual exercise. And because Percy's talking a lot about finding lost treasure, I think people draw this too much to like archaeology and think that he's often literally seeking like lost cities of gold. That's not the truth as much as he's speaking more metaphorically about these kind of spiritual treasures that he wants to uncover by finding places that are supposedly lost. So like the real treasure was in fact within you all the time? Yeah, but also the real treasure is going to make you and your son gods.

He's not selfless in where he thinks this is going to bring him. Right? It's still crazy, but it is different. Yeah. In the movie, Percy's depicted as an ambitious man weighed down by his father's reputation who's just like ready for any chance to become like a military hero. And the real faucet is exhausted by. military life of military life by 1903.

But he was so good at cricket. He's so good at cricket. But he's made a vow not to kill anybody and cricket's only good for killing. Right. Yeah. A.J. Lee, who read through Percy's many letters during this time, describes Fawcett is still captivated by Ceylon and his understanding of Buddhism. In fact, he may have returned there for what we would today call therapeutic purposes.

Lee describes him as, quote, being, captivated by the island's magic and mysticism, and with the help of Fakir's and Holy Men, he began to extricate himself from the manacles of his unhappy childhood. So in this account, too, it's not just that he wants to learn magic to become a powerful wizard, which is definitely part of it. But it's that he wants, he's working through some shit. And like these Buddhist holemen and these other sort of like mystics that are all kind of clustered in Ceylon are at least giving him an opportunity to like talk about his childhood. And that's not really a thing men of his stature get to do back England. Men will literally go across the world to hunt for gold before going to therapy and then

trick themselves into going to therapy. Into going to therapy because the real gold is within you all the time, right? That's sort of what Percy's doing. The real gold is figuring out that your mom was kind of the worst. Your mom was kind of the worst. Yeah. So Percy and Nina both grow obsessed with Eastern mysticism during this time. She's also really into this stuff. They're a legitimate good match. She gets pregnant in Ceylon, and Percy would later claim that before they announce to anybody that she's pregnant, quote, a deputation of soothsayers and Buddhists somehow found out, you're supposed to believe that they like, it was magic or something, that they found out that he was going, that his wife was going to have a baby. And they all show up to demand an audience with him because they've made predictions. There's a prophecy around this baby.

And I'm going to quote from. That didn't happen. That didn't happen. That didn't happen. After the usual, yeah, yeah, I don't believe this really happened either, but I'm going to read you what Percy says happened. After the usual formalities, I was informed I was about to become the father of a son whose appearance was minutely described. I suggested that it was obvious that something of this sort might reasonably be anticipated, but that a daughter would upset the prophecy. No, I was to have a son.

He was the reincarnation of a very advanced spirit, and my wife and I had been specially selected, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, that's Percy. right Cindy, et cetera, et cetera. Bro, married couple predicted to have child in early 1900. We're at what, 1903 at this point? Yeah, like you're really not, you're really not doing. They describe a mole that Jack has perfectly. So, Sophie, I'm sorry, but they describe the mole.

That means he's a reincarnation of a powerful spirit. Crazy thing that people have a mole. Wow. Yeah, it's super funny. Only baby with a mole, actually. Actually. Never happened before. Their first son, Jack, was born in 1903.

Tom Holland. Yeah, Tom Holland. And was probably named after Helena Blavatsky because Blavatsky's preferred nickname was also Jack, which is kind of why I think they named their son Jack. The Fossus make a big deal out of the fact that Jack is born on the anniversary of Buddha's birth. Although Percy then explorers that, like, well, Buddha's birth is like was over, there's a range of days that they all sell. because they don't know exactly what one it is. And he was born on the one that everyone says is the most likely of the days.

And I'm like, okay, okay. This very special baby was born on all those days. Yeah, he was born on every one of Buddha's birthdays. The mystical mole baby. However many he's got in Ceylon, I don't know. I don't believe this either. Percy would later write that until he went to school, he was intermittently clairvoyant, Jack, right? That, like, his son was clairvoyant as a child until the school beat it out of him, basically.

And he went on to add, and this is from a letter that Percy wrote to a magazine called Theosophist in 1913, both parents are psychic. He's like writing about his son. He's like, yeah, he was intermittently clairvoyant. By the way, both me and his mom are psychic. Like, that does not come up enough in the Percy Fawcett literature that he desperately believed he was psychic and wrote about it constantly. Yeah, no, that should have to, we should have to, like, that should be one of the first things you learn about a person, I think. People really should learn that. You should also have to read. the like three paragraphs or something of him explaining how because his son Jack was born in Asia he has slanted eyes. Oh no. That's Percy. That's Percy.

Look. Um, it's pretty rough. So from this point on, Nina and Percy would both refer to Jack as the special one. I'm sorry. I don't want to be distracted by this, um, that little racist,

um, let it out. Yeah. Did other people, I, sort of two questions here. Did other people also think that the son looked like he might have, for example, had one Asian parent? And are we sure that?

I haven't heard that. It's not impossible. But I don't think that's the case. That would be very funny. I mean, I think it's probably just bad scientific racism. I've looked at pictures of Jack. I think this was him saying, as a baby, his eyes were slanted. So you could tell that he had the spirit of a great Tibetan mystic or whoever,

whatever kind of mystic. I don't know which country he thought the spirit came from. But I think it was the spirit of a great Eastern mystic. But Jack's white. That's also important that Jack is white. That you were aware Jack is white. I'm looking at this image that I've quickly Googled. No.

Percy's racial politics are fascinating. Yeah. We don't make them like this anymore. No. It would take a while to unpack all of the because he was born in Asia. Yeah, there's a lot going on here. He and Nina would both refer to their first son, Jack, as the special one or the great one. And, like, you get the feeling because his youngest son wrote about being kind of, like, Jack wasn't great.

Like, first off, let me just say, he was kind of a dick. He wasn't even as funny as people think. Like, his youngest brother seems to have been kind of pissed by this. Yeah, I mean, I can see how that would happen. Yeah. The special one and the, um, The special one. Yeah.

Look, we love all our children, but we only think one of you was the magical, reincarnated spirit of a wizard, you know, or a mystic or whatever. I love all my children equally, the special one and the other ones also. Percy is seeing, like, a Buddhist mystic is indistinguishable from Merlin. Like, let's be on. I'm not saying that's accurate to Buddhist mysticism, but that's what Percy thinks about these people. In 1906, Percy is called up for duty by the new president of, of the Royal Geographic Society,

a no-nonsense military man named Sir George Taubman Goldie. In the Lost City of Z, this is how Grand describes him. Famous for his keen intelligence and volatile temper, he had an almost single-handedly imposed the British Empire's control over Niger in the 1880s and 1890s. He had shocked Victorian society by running off to Paris with a governess and was an unrepentant atheist who championed Darwin's theory of evolution. Goldie is my favorite fact about this guy is he apparently always kept poison on his person so that he could kill himself if he were rendered handicapped immediately.

Like, that's the kind of dude that this man is. So just shockingly weird men, or the only people who reach high levels in the RGS. Like, all of the maps were made by crazy people. So not carrying poison because he was, like, behind enemy lines and, like, if he was caught and tortured. But just, like, if he fell down and broke his hip real bad. If I have to be in a wheelchair, I want to be out immediately. Okay, got to be on site for Goldie. He will not handle being taken care of.

No one is caring for Goldie. There was an episode of Star Trek the next generation where Worf tried to do this. He does have Worf's attitude. Yes, that's right. He tries to get his son to stab him to death when a box falls on him. If you want to imagine Sir George Talbman Goldie calling in Percy for this meeting as Michael Dorn, I won't stop you. And you won't be entirely wrong.

That's the direction I'm going with this. Yeah, yeah, all right. So Michael Dorn calls Percy in and asks if he's ever been to Bolivia. Goldie shows him a map and he says it's full of blank spaces and explains that Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru are all up in arms over the precise extent of their borders. Now, we just did episodes on the dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez and the War of the Triple Alliance that occurs not far from here. And it's a border dispute helps lead to it. In Grant's book, the Lost City of Z, Gran wrongly writes,

the boundary issues between Paraguay and its neighbors caused the war. That's not true. There were boundary issues that were inherent to conflicts between those countries previously, but the war was caused because Francisco Salano Lopez was a fucking maniac who wanted to get involved in Uruguay in politics, and then invaded Brazil, Argentina, and tried to invade Uruguay. It was not caused by a boundary dispute. Anyway, I just, I had to correct Grant on that as well.

A boundary dispute usually means more than like, oh, we thought the line was over here and you thought it was a half mile this way. Like, it's usually more like, we want more of your stuff. Yeah, we really want these mines is generally. And that's what's happening here, right? It's mines and rubber is generally what's at, like, the root of these. But also, when the boundaries were set up, people couldn't make good maps. Like, we didn't have the ability to really make high-quality maps. And so the boundaries were also not fixed.

Like it very much is a problem that was going to need to be solved. The first thing Percy does here is good. Like it was necessary for some motherfucker to get out and map some of these rivers. And when I say he was mapping them for the first time, the way that's depicted in the movie is he's going into a place like no one's ever been back from. That's nonsense. There were stations all up and down the river. People knew how to sail it. That doesn't mean there were maps of it, right?

Right. That you could, like, set boundary lines on. Those are two different kinds of things. It's very possible to live somewhere for hundreds and thousands of years and not know the coordinates of it. Right. Exactly. That's what needs to be done. As someone needs to go through and do that pain in the ass work and actually lay out where the boundaries are, right?

And so the British, part of the way the RGS is getting involved here, even though none of these are British territory, is that there's a lot of, like, money involved in particularly the rubber trade at this point. and the British are worried there's going to be a war over some of these boundary disputes, as there are periodically. And they're like, well, maybe if we can get this all mapped out, we can settle that ahead of time. And both countries are willing to have the British do it because they're seen as like a neutral party, right? So in Grant's book, he describes the area that Percy is going to map as several hundred miles of nearly impassable terrain. And he continues with language that is going to do that, like, this is very clearly written expecting there to be a movie made of your book The Lost City of Z. Quote, the expedition would take up to two years, and there was no guarantee that its members

would survive. Disease was rampant in the region, and the Indians who had been attacked mercilessly by rubber trappers, murdered interlopers. And this is how the movie depicts things, too, like as soon as Percy and his small team, including Robert Pattinson, set off on like this primitive rickety raft down the river, they're ambushed by Indians with bows. One man is wounded, and he falls into the water, and he gets tangled in a fishing net, and the piranha eat him alive.

Oh, shit. That's a fantasy. That's a complete fantasy. Both depictions of this voyage are complete fantasies. Both David Grant's depiction in his book and the depiction of the movie made off of his book. Now, some of that is because Percy Fawcett lied about his own adventures. He was a huge fan of adventure novels, and he couldn't resist making claims. Not in his actual, like, the paperwork he submitted to the RGS was always really good.

Most people seemed to agree. But he would give public speeches and he would, like, write articles where he would make lavish claims like that he had shot an attacking anaconda 49 feet long in the spine with his 44, 10 feet below its wicked head and killed it right before it could murder them all. And like, first off, it's, I mean, it's theoretically possible for an anaconda to get that big, but they haven't, like on record, been quite as big as the one he was claiming.

And also, they don't act that way. I found a critique of Fawcett by Hugh Thompson, another veteran. Thompson is like a real explorer, like today, who's led a, I think it's Peru where he's done a shitload of expeditions, but he's led a lot of expeditions into the jungle, and he writes, quote, those who've traveled on the Amazon know that it is in reality mundane, soapophoric and almost dreamlike.

Very little happens slowly. It is perfectly possible to travel for days without seeing any wildlife, let alone an anaconda, which would slither away at the sound of oncoming canoes. It's just a fantasy. Like, and there are crazy-ass animals in the Amazon, but you don't see them. because they don't want to be near you.

They're scared of people usually, right? You have to kind of go out of your way, and they're not generally going to attack you unless you're a huge fucking asshole. The thing that's going to kill you is the same thing that's going to kill you in most places of the world where people die from the environment.

It's little bugs that give you diseases. Yeah. Or like, you're not going to get murdered by an an an icon. You get a blister on your foot and die of gangrene. Right. And it gets infected because of the water and your foot rots off. Yeah.

One thing, every actual jungle explorer I have ever read from will point out is that if your narrative of an Amazon exploration has stories about being constantly attacked by deadly fauna, it's a lie because that doesn't really happen very often. Fawcett's first real life trip was mapping the Upper Heath River. The movie shows him mapping the Rio Verde first. He doesn't do that until years later. Here's how an actual world-renowned expert on the region, John Henning, described Fawcett's first trip mapping Heath. This survey was the best thing Fawcett did, but he described it as boring because the new frontier was all along rivers. This was the height of the great Amazon rubber boom, so he and his team cruised from one comfortable rubber barraket to the next, taking their regular measurements. Again, the movie shows them like fighting off death at every single turn, and the reality they're going down to different places that all have food and like a pretty comfortable raft. There's people all around. All they're doing is just some math, basically. Right?

And Percy's work here does make history, but in the rather pedestrian sense, of like, oh, well, we finally have a map for this area that we didn't have a map before, rather than like, oh, this bold adventure carved a path through the howling wilderness to make this great discovery. And in the movie, at the end of this first voyage, he finds a bunch of pottery shards and ruins in the jungle, which is what convinces him that there's this lost city in the Amazon. That's not what happens. In reality, Fawcett does, once he comes back to England, he gets famous for doing this,

because it was good work, and no one had before. And he was also good at like self-mythologizing, right? Once he gets back to England, he's not just telling people about the actual mapping he did. He's like, he's judging it up a little bit. He's making it a better story than it really was. Anacondas. Anacondas and shit. He gives at least one lecture prior to the outbreak of World War I in which he discusses seeing what might have been ancient ruins in the rainforest.

Now, we now know there are ruins in the area Fawcett said that there were ruins. But they're not stone ruins, which is what? but he always described and was looking for, they're like earthworks. And now that we have LiDAR, we can see where some of them would have been, right? So we do know that there was large-scale habitation in this part of the Amazon, previously the cut like European contact.

And that is kind of what Fawcett was saying. And he's so he's sort of right. But again, as I'm going to talk about, everything he believed about that habitation was wrong. Now, one thing the movie does get right is that once Percy gets a taste of the jungle, he starts going back, right?

He leaves his family for like a year or so to do, you know, this first mission. And he keeps going back and he just abandons them for years at a time to hang out in the jungle, mostly with a bunch of dying men. And that is accurate. That's what Percy does from like the next eight, most of the next eight years leading up to World War I is he just keeps heading back to the jungle to do different like surveying and explorational missions. Like he cannot abandon his family often enough or long enough for his taste.

Like there is no amount of being. with his family that he will not immediately get the fuck out of England to go back to the Amazon for you cannot make this man raise his kids he won't do it so he did learn something from his own father after all yeah he picked that up from his dear old dad incredible for his dad it was gambling and alcoholism and for Percy it's exploring the Amazon grand describes faucets next several years as exploring thousands of square miles of Amazon and helping to redraw the map of South America, painstakingly working his way inwards over years of voyages,

cataloging exotic species, until he had explored as much of the region as anyone. That's how Grand describes Percy, and it's nonsense. He is spending a lot of time in that part of the world, but Percy only surveyed about 300 kilometers of Bolivian rivers, and as

Henning writes, Fawcett's own writings reveal no special interest in flora or fauna, let alone his collecting or cataloging rare species. So he's just not doing a lot of the stuff, Grant, He's doing a pretty pedestrian job, or he's getting up to complete nonsense looking for ruins that absolutely aren't there, right? There's kind of two things that Percy is into. One of them is semi-useful, and one of them is getting everyone killed for no reason at all.

I don't know how he's failing to find these ruins when, as we know, he's a powerful psychic. That's right. His psychic powers have not let him keep just leading people in circles in the jungle until they die or starve. Crazy stuff. Man. Yeah. And one of the thing that's very silly about Grant's book is that he describes basically that, like, while Fawcett's continuing to try to get deeper and deeper into the jungle to explore more, he's opened up the jungle to other explorers. And so now he's got to compete with these, like, less skilled but better financed, amateurs.

You don't know the jungle like he does. And they're tramping around and ruining things, you know, at best, right? And this is, I want to read you one paragraph of Grant's book describing some of these other explorers. who are only able to get into the Amazon because Percy Fawcett opens it up. There was the Brazilian colonel and part Indian orphan, Candido Mariana de Silva Rondon,

who had helped lay telegraph lines across the jungle, lost a toe to piranhas, and started the Indian Protection Service. And again, he describes this as a guy who's able to, like, do all these good things because Percy helps to open up the Amazon. That's really fucked up because Rondon, like,

Candido Mariano de Silva Rondon is like almost in arguably the greatest explorer in Brazilian in history. By the time Fawcett got famous, Rondon had already spent 17 years straight exploring Southwest Brazil and, in fact, discovered so much of Southwest Brazil that the state of Rondonia is named after him. He said he lost a to piranha. Like, that's pretty legit. He actually got attacked by a piranha.

Like, not in the movie. Like, actually. Not in the movie. Like, for real Ziz. Henning describes Rondon's expeditions as having made Fossets look like a jaunt up the Thames. It's just some beautiful British shade right there. So at least Grand does correctly credit Rondon with founding the Indian Protection Service, whose noble motto was, die if you must, but never kill, right? That's the motto of the Indian Protection Service. The faucet of fiction would have agreed with this.

His belief in the city of Zee is depicted as being fueled by a belief that indigenous Amazonians were more intelligent and capable than white European gave them credit for being. And it is true that Percy was less racist against Indians than most British explorers of his station and era. That's probably fair. But Grant turns this into some

great history of like enlightened first contact and credits him with, quote, discovery of so many previously unknown Indians who taught him their languages, their herbal medicines, and their hunting methods. In reality, Fawcett never learned a single native tongue. He never wrote about learning native hunting

or farming methods. and he also murdered a native guy and covered it up. Here's Henning again. Quote, Fawcett's attitudes towards indigenous peoples were contradictory. He deplored the rubber men's cruelty to Indians, whom they pressed into forced labor. He admired the three tribes whose villages he entered. But he could also lapse into extreme racism, talking about dangerous, repulsive cannibals, degenerate indigenous or villainous savages, scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts,

whereas others were robust and fair people of civilized origin. David Grant is as perplexed as anyone by such contradictions. He feels that Fawcett was impressed by the eugenic movement of the early 20th century, but struggled to reconcile what he observed with everything he had been taught and could not rid himself of the pernicious disease of race. Grand does not quote the worst of Fawcett's racism. When he described Marioxi warriors as hairy men with sloping skulls and long arms of Neanderthals, unlike any indigenous people,

Fawcett allowed his team to fire into the air to frighten off these great ape-like brutes. But when Grand discovered the journal of Companion Hens, Henry Koston, this revealed that one shot had been aimed at a Marracoxy and hit him in the stomach. Fawcett, therefore, doctored his official report to the RGS and concealed the truth his entire life. Wow. Jesus.

That's real. So he sucks. So basically, Fawcett, first off, lied about this group, these group of Maricoxie warriors and described them as looking like ape men, basically, when, like, well, we just know that they aren't because those people exist. Yeah, they're just some people. They're just some people out in the jungle. And also, and Grand describes him as like shooting up into the air. Fawcett describes himself shooting up into the air.

But his companion, Henry Coston, played by Robert Pattinson, in the movie, is like, no, he fucking murdered a dude. He murdered a dude and he made us all lie about it. Yeah, he sucks. But we didn't want to say shit. Well, it seems like his, you know, this sort of combination of like, oh, there are these enlightened people in the jungle at some point in ancient times. And now there's just all of these people, I will say, racist things about. It does not feel unconnected to the spiritualism Blavatsky stuff where there's like... Super connected.

Where it's like where you can romanticize and idealize a completely fucking made up group that you might sort of have like a that might like be located somewhere in real geography and like link to real stuff but not actually like you're not allowing them to like self represent or or you're making them up entirely. And it doesn't actually lead to you treating well the people who are currently living there. Yeah, like the reality of Fawcett isn't that he was like had an enlightened view of what like ancient indigenous people were capable of. It's that, well, he believed that a certain number of them were basically descended from white people who had made a civilization here before that had collapsed for some reason or that they had ascended into some sort of spiritual realm because he thought there was a portal hidden in the jungle that he was looking for. This is what we're all building towards in the Percy Fawcett story. but it can sound on the surface when he's talking about the great achievements of these Indians

like he's actually like woke and he is for sure not he's just a lunatic guys I mean calling them apes and murdering them and covering it up is shot a man in the gut for nothing yeah and the thing where he claimed

to have learned stuff from indigenous people but never actually like bothered to study them in any meaningful way it's like he is somebody who thinks that the idea of being like taught secrets by indigenous people sounds very cool and he would like to be the kind of person who

people assume has been taught secrets by indigenous people. But like, he's not actually interested in what any indigenous person has to say. He's not going to talk to them. They have weird foreheads or something. What did he say slope? Like, you know, he doesn't like the shape of their skulls. Like, no. In reality, all of the ancient mysticism that he attributes to them came from like a Russian lady and his brother. Yes. He's like, yeah, it sure would be cool to talk to them. I bet they think all the same things as that Russian liar. But I'm not going to talk to them because again... Do not like the shape of their skulls.

Oh, man. Anyway, you know whose skulls I like? The skulls of these advertisers, bring them to me. Wait. Yeah, yeah. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite?

Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.za for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements.

We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the Big. is and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right?

How about we flip this script? What is the surprise woman who actually you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird? Adam Scott. This entire time. You've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect. I have.

I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, is that weed? Nope.

It's frustrating. gradual masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's the state. Everyone's so dumb. And fake.

Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle.

I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to be.

book your first trip. I hope you listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Munga shit together and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you, and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain, as opposed to his brain. Here's some hard truths. I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five-year acceleration.

And get myself into a world of trouble. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. To make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

Ah, so the reality of Fawcett's journeys and competence have been greatly exaggerated, not just by David Gran. I think this has established that, like, Gran left out a lot of important stuff and also just added a lot of stuff that Fawcett himself didn't even put in the narrative. for his part Fawcett bragged about his own toughness constantly, claiming to feel none the worst for wear after losing 53 pounds in a disastrous expedition and that's often like you'll see

that fact mentioned as like evidence of how hardcore this guy was like this was a real man he could really take punishment that's what it took to be a great explorer. No, it's not. He lost 53 pounds because he was a fucking idiot who got a bunch of people killed for no reason planning an expedition

really badly. And now we're going to talk about, so in the movie, it shows his first expedition as being, which was like his first actual expedition was up the Heath River. And as we've discussed, it was not at all that interesting or harrowing. The journey that most of that first journey in the movie is based on is a 1908 trip that's the only true expedition that Percy Fawcett ever planned. And it was a five-week trip to survey the river Verde for the state of Brazil. This is the only time that he actually planned an expedition into an area that had not been mapped or charted and tried to map or chart something. As Henning wrote in an article for Spectator, the preparations were appalling. Fawcett took minimal supplies since he was accustomed to being fed by rubber stations.

This was the end of the dry season with the river at its lowest, so they soon had to abandon their boat and continue on foot. After only a week, all food was exhausted and they were really starving. Fawcett casually remarked that five out of his six peons died from the effects. of this five-week disaster. This is the only expedition he led into unexplored territory. And in the movie, in like his second or third expedition, he goes back with this famous explorer that he actually did go on an exploration with this guy who had been an Arctic explorer, and they actually did have a big falling apart.

And the movie shows this guy is like destroying and wasting all of their rations. And I just love that in Fawcett's actual worst expedition, he just didn't think to bring them. You said he lost like 53 pounds or whatever. If you're losing 53 pounds on a five-week trip, you fucked that trip up. You're really bad at planning, man. Like, I'm not a great backpacker, but I think I do better than that. My God. And he's just, and like the people working for him who he like doesn't seem to be talking about a lot.

I'm sure carrying all his shit and maybe him sometimes are just dying and he's like, eh, what can you do? Just dropping like flies. What can you do? I didn't bring food. I thought there'd be people to hand me food. It just proves how hardcore I am that all of my people I'm responsible for are dying. It just shows how good at this I am, actually. So much of his reputation for toughness comes from the fact that he survived starving to death because he himself did not bring enough food repeatedly.

It's very funny. Fawcett kept going back to the Amazon, though. Even after this disastrous trip, he would not stop going and he would not stop writing breathless articles and giving speech. and giving speeches about his harrowing journeys with nightmare encounters of deadly insects and creatures and Indians that he'd survived. Hugh Thompson describes Fawcett's public image pre-war this way. Fawcett's self-mythologized, presenting jungle journeys as if they were Homeric Odyssey's. He was inspired in his descriptions by adventure novels such as Jules Verne's Lajaganda

and the works of H. Writer Haggard. All featured trusty companions, unreliable natives, and clues given by some ancient chronicle. The relationship between Edwardian writers and explorers was a symbiotea. one. In other words, Fawcett's framing of his own life and the things he's trying to do in the jungle are inspired by fiction. He's not a scientist most of the time, really ever past those first couple of journeys. He's a crank who thinks he's in a novel. He's kind of larping. He's he's larping, yeah. Paying people to like come along and pretend with him that they are, that they are doing an adventure, except those people are getting killed. He wants to be Alan Quartermaine.

Yeah, he keeps getting people killed to do it. Not a real man. Percy was in central Bolivia in September of 1914 when word came through that his old buddy, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand hadn't made it through his last trip. And there was going to be a World War I thing starting up soon. So he probably better get home. Yeah, yeah, everybody knows. Got to get home for World War I.

Don't want to miss that. Don't want to miss World War I. That would have been a good time to start. stay in the jungle, to be honest. That World War I thing. I'd have gone right back. I don't even care if there's food, better than the front. Oh, my goodness.

I would take starving in the jungle over the trenches. Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, easily. You can even lie about how hard it was. You can even lie about it later. In one of the few passages where he is far too kind to Fawcett, Henning writes this about Percy's time at war. He'd hurried home, and by January 1915,

was back in the artillery. In his late 40s, he was too old for frontline service, but he fought a good war, ending as a lieutenant colonel. This is Henning trying to be nice to Percy Fawcett, because actually Henning knows that this isn't true. I think he was just trying to be polite. Fought a good war is such a like... He did not.

He fought a... He did not. It sounds like, you know, when the kid, like, strikes out in a baseball game, and you're like, no, you did, you did good. Like, good try. Yeah, that's more accurate. Fought a good war is such a... Yeah, that's how, that's usually what people describe as like, well, he did his, he did fine, you know, in World War I.

The movie goes kind of crazy. It shows him leading a charge across no man's land during the Battle of the Somme. And again, he was an artillery man. He stayed behind the lines. He was not charging into the fucking no man's land. He wasn't running at German machine gun nests, guys. He actually shot a German anaconda. Yeah, he shot a German anaconda.

Yeah. As Hinnings stated, he stayed behind. lines, but he did not do what anyone would call fighting a good war. During research for the book, Brazil That Never Was, author A.J. Lees happened by chance on a copy of a book titled Tommy, the British soldier on the Western Front. And as he's just doing research on Fawcett, he's thumbing through this completely unrelated book, and he sees Fawcett's name listed in the index. And he's like, well, I should probably look into that, right? If I'm going to be writing a book about the guy. Here's a quote from his book. I leaped through to the relevant page,

dealing with the problems encountered by the British artillery and quelling the German heavy guns and red. Perhaps the most notorious problem came in Sixth Corps in late 1916 when the Amazon Explorer, Colonel Percy Fawcett, arrived to take up the new post of core counter-battery kernel. He immediately declared that he was not in the least bit interested in the innovative work being done on the detection of German guns by flash-spotting and sound-ranging. The only counter-battery shots, which he would allow, were those against targets clearly visible from British lines, or those he had personally detected on his Ouija board. Fuck.

Yes. Oh, my God. Love the Ouija board parts. These dipshits who serve under Percy Fosser like, oh, my God. We found that when the gun fires, if you count how much time happens between seeing the flash and hearing the explosion and then it landing, you can determine the distance and use that to directly determine the position of the German guns and thus shoot at them with our own guns and take them out. And Percy says, you're a fucking idiot. I've got a Ouija board.

Like, that's literally what he's doing. Percy's incredible. It's so fucking funny. Fuck your math. I've got a board game I can use to talk to ghosts. Trying to spot the German guns and count how far they are away. No, we'll talk to ghosts about it. They told me where a city in the jungle is. It's hard to hear the Ouija board sometimes over the sounds of all of the men I've led to death in the jungle. But I think he's saying there's a gun over there. Incredible. So I got to say, when I found, when I came across this fact, that's what made me decide

to do an episode on Percy Fawcett. The fact that he's there at the front in the fucking 1916 trying to spot German cannons with a Ouija board. Beautiful stuff. And that it's happening as an actual technique for this exists is amazing. And historians wrote about it. It's not like you're out at sea before they have radar and you're like trying to guess where other enemy ships are. It's like, no, no, we have a way to do this.

You're fucking around with a Ouija for. You can actually triangulate the distance of artillery in a number of ways. But okay, we're just doing nonsense. All right. And Lees, when he finds this fact in this book, he writes to John Henning. And Henning, who had written like, well, Percy fought a good war. And under this questioning, Henning kind of breaks down and admits, like, Like, so actually my dad served under Fawcett in World War I.

And maybe I have a couple of reasons to be annoyed by the guy other than Grand's book. And so Hinnings' father served under Fawcett with another officer named Bragg. And the two, quote, despaired when they learned that the mad psychic Fawcett had added non-existent German gun emplacements to their highly accurate positions. In other words, Hennings, dad, and this other guy were trying to use, like, math to find out where the German guns were. And Fawcett just kept sticking more pins in and being like, the ghosts. have revealed another gun emplacement to me. Such a cool guy.

How did this guy not get shot in the back by his own men? He really was like the prime target for getting shot in the back by his own men. No officer ever deserved to be fracked more by his own guys. Unbelievable. Like really amazing he made it out without that happening to him. It's astonishing. So after the war, Percy only grows more obsessed with his lost city. He'd given exactly one lecture to the RGS before the war in which he discussed the possibility of ancient ruins in the Amazon.

As Jason Colavito summarizes, Fawcett's public proclamations on the Lost City of Z were fairly sober. He spoke of the possibility of a monumental city akin to those of Mesoamerica or the Inca. And that might seem like kind of plausible because there are these big stone cities that are really fucking cool and crazy looking in other jungles, right? Why couldn't there be something like that in the Amazon? And so like that makes sense to people. And Percy has another piece of evidence that he's able to pull up. He's found by this point a report from 1753, published by a Portuguese explorer who had run into what he described as a city in the jungle, deep in the Amazon.

Percy had found this on like this document like in some like government files in Rio de Janeiro. And he brought it forward. And he would put this forward as like evidence that no, no, there are credible accounts from white explorers that they found. something in the jungle that resembles this city I've been talking about. And this account talks about this large, opulent city made out of stone. There's an entrance gate with these three huge arches, and it's all, it's covered in hieroglyphics of this indecipherable alphabet.

Nearly all of the Fawcett myth today centers on this 1753 report, which Fawcett learns about after the war. Now, this is a real report. It does exist. Other people have seen it. Like, it's been basically everyone who writes a book about him, like goes to the library where it's stored and looks at this fucking thing is if it's going to bring them more to tales.

And this is an account by a Portuguese fortune hunter who goes searching in the Brazilian jungle for rumored lost gold mines. The party allegedly spent like 10 years in the jungle and never found anything. And one might argue their reports of a fantastical lost city that they brought back no evidence of might just have been an attempt

to save face. Like, well, we all were starving in the jungle for fucking years. But yeah, there's some stone stuff there. Sure. Did he maybe write this while he was trying to secure funding for the next expedition? Yeah, maybe he wanted to get some money out of someone. Yeah.

Whatever the truth, the fantastic city described in this paper, is unlike anything Percy Fawcett or anyone else has ever uncovered in the Amazon. Jason Colavito, who wrote an article titled Percy Fawcett, victim of a theosophical obsession, provides a translation and a summary of the sights of this purported city. Quote, a blackstone column of extraordinary greatness and at the statue of an ordinary man with one hand on his left hip in the right arm extended.

pointed the index finger to the north pole. Another statue depicted a beardless youth crowned with laurel. A great temple was a work of such amazing artistry that the writer was left in awe. Beyond the city was a river leading to a field of great tombs, all covered in writing. Much later, Barry Fell would declare the writing based on hand-drawn copies in the manuscript, Potolamaic Egyptian, and the city therefore classical. Right? So that's this report of like this Egyptian almost-looking city with hieroglyphics that are clearly of Western origin, you know?

Yeah. A youth crowned with Lorraine. sounds a little... Yeah. Okay. Doesn't sound like anything in the Amazon, but sure.

As Hitting noted in two articles of his own, anyone with experience in the Amazon finding a city of this description there would be impossible. The first thing

that probably stands out to most of us is these claims of hieroglyphic writing. In his article, Jason Colavito, accuses Grant, of misleading his readers

in a description of the report. Quote, he edits the manuscript to remove all elements of the fantastic, listing only stone archways,

a statue, roads, and a temple, He makes the city seem plausible by removing the improbable. And in a separate critique for the Times' literary supplement, Henning accuses Grant of worse obfuscation than this. To bolster the notion that there might be a Lost Stone City in the Amazon forests, Grant quotes from one of My Books, a German-led expedition in the 16th century that saw a large town that contained golden objects.

What he does not make clear is that this was Philip von Hutton's expedition of 1543 in the northern Andes of Columbia, and that the town was of the usual thatch and the gold was Musica. When Grant himself visited the Upper Zingu River, he met the Amazon anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, who was excavating causeways and concentric ramparts around the current Kukiru village. Heckenberger explained to him why ruins of a stone city will never be found in lonely Amazonia. Stone is rare in a rainforest, whereas timber and thatcher super abundant, but are perishable to termites and to decay, right? Right. We know there were cities. Yeah.

That they did earthworks because that makes sense, whereas quarrying stone in the Amazon would be. It sucks. Pretty hard, I imagine. It's just not going to happen, really, and the extent you need for a massive stone city. And Gran leaves out a lot of details that would make this seem less plausible and make it clear that Fawcett isn't looking for a real place. He is looking for a fantasy, right? Now, Grant does ultimately conclude that Fawcett's vision of Z was heavily influenced by his spiritual beliefs and not reality. But the fact is that Fawcett's entire conception of this lost city and the people who made it was from the jump.

based on a theosophic fantasy. In other words, he believed there was a lost city in the Amazon because of the occult tradition he followed and because it talked of fallen cities and advanced elder races. He saw that 1753 report, not as confirmation of evidence he'd actually found in the jungle, but as confirmation of his religious beliefs that he took with him into the jungle. And, yeah, like, that's the core of kind of what's happening here. Yeah, so he's genuinely looking for these, like, um, Theosophical ideals that don't, that are not a real thing.

No. And he's, and he's sort of pinned it on this thing written by somebody who, whose motives we don't know in the 17th century. Right. Cool. Yeah. And that, and that grand is kind of taking this to make Fawcett look like more of a man searching for, more of a man outside of his time, you know, who believes in something

that was eventually proven true. Because we know there were some larger, you know, there were some much more habitation in the Amazon than like, certainly Europeans thought there was in that day. We do know that's true, but Fawcett's not thinking about that. Fawcett believes there's like a magical city of wizards that he can access through a portal. And like Fawcett believes in some lovecraft shit. That's what Percy Fossett's really looking for in the jungle. He thinks fucking Cthulhu's in there.

He thinks he's going to run into a temple to fucking Azath or something like that, right? Like he is not thinking, like this is all fucking novels and fantasy shit. Yeah, he's not a. a man out of time because sitting around and doing drugs had fully been invented by then. And like that's how you, like, both meditation and doing drugs. Yeah. Yeah. And to be fair, one thing Grant does point out is that Fawcett's Dreams of the City of Z had a lot in

common with fiction stories that writers like H. Rider Haggard, who were his friends wrote? Right. And that is a good point. But I don't think he carries it through to his conclusion, which is that like Percy just didn't know fantasy from reality. Like, I really do think that's what's going on here. Like, if you're sitting around writing books about this idea or, like, talking about how cool that would be, like, that's one thing. But you are, like, getting real actual people killed looking for this.

Yeah, just like you probably got real people killed trying to hunt down German artillery with a Ouija board. Who knows who you shot? My God, man. There's no good way to die in World War I. But, like, dying because your commanding officer is using a Ouija board. It's like particularly bad. Conductive Barra counter battery fire, my God. So Fawcett spends his post-war years trying to hunt down this fanciful place.

In 1920, for some reason, he leads an expedition and he follows the route of a German anthropologist nowhere close to where he thought Z should have been. He was forced to abort the mission and try again in 1921, further down the Atlantic coast. He interviewed a bunch of local miners who knew nothing about a lost city. And this is kind of accidentally one of the funny things about the movie is that it'll show Percy periodically just stumbling up to some man in the jungle and being like, have you heard of a city? And they'll be like, yeah, I don't know, maybe, man. And then he'll just wander back into the jungle.

And I think that is kind of what he's doing for some portion of this. Wow. Is like, have you heard rumors of a city? Yeah, okay. And then off he goes back into the fucking jungle, right? Like, he's trying to, like, live out that scene in the book or the movie of an explorer where they, like, hear from some guy in some bar that, like, like, oh, the city's out.

Like, he's trying to make that scene happen for him in real life and is instead just like interrupting some dude doing like his, going about his day. Have you heard any weird stories? And he's like, I don't know, sure. Sure, man. Yeah. Over there. Why don't you go back into the jungle?

Yeah. All the stories I've heard are about how you should get away from me. You should be far away from my home. You look like you're riddled with disease, Percy. And he was. He often was. None of these voyages panned out. And Percy Fawcett ran out of money.

After going broke, again, he can't like give up this dream. So he embarks in a series of get rich quick schemes that all fail. In at least one instance, he seems to have at least both been conned and possibly robbed. He moves his family to California and they like lose everything. And I think like an oil scam. There's a break. Yeah. He deserved it, frankly.

He couldn't. He probably. He did have it coming a little bit. You know who else has it coming? The products and services. The sponsors of this show. Yeah. Yeah.

They have your money coming to them, I hope. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus. from $94 a month, price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit.

Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us.

Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head, right? How about we flip this script? What is the surprise woman? Actually, you think it's the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott.

This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to the, visit the show. I would never expect. I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept.

You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity. Exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, I was like, is that weed? Nope, it's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is.

You know what I mean? They're like, oh, what's a state? Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right. Fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us.

Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita. trading the pity for possibility.

Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran

or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Munga Shatigather, and I'm back with a new season of the podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about, and what it really means to live forever, for all of us. I learned about some rad science.

I can make a brain for you. And then we can test what draw is the best for your brain, as opposed to his brain. Here's some hard truths. I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five-year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. To make it look more defined.

They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, by this point, the early 20s, his son, Jack, is a young man. And both Nina and Percy, while Percy didn't really raise him, but Nina had raised him to believe that he was holy, a great spirit destined for some fine cosmic purpose. Jack tried to live up to this. He seems to have taken very seriously the fact that he was like the special golden boy.

So he's trained constantly as a young man and expectation of the fact that one day Dad's going to get enough money for the final big expedition that will take us to the lost city of Z. And I've got to go with him because my destiny's there. He and Mama have both told me my whole life my destiny's there. Oh, this kid's going to die in the jungle. This kid's so fucking doomed. Yeah, he's going to die in the jungle so bad. I mean, parental expectations are hard at the best of times.

But, like, I think what most people deal with is the, like, you know, your father and mother and I worked very hard to send you to school and you better become a doctor. And like that's rough. But like you are a higher spiritual being is, that's abuse. Your father has to find enough money to lead an expedition into the jungles that you can ascend through a portal. Wow. That's what they're teaching this boy. Tell me about this portal.

You've mentioned the portal a couple of times. I have. I have. So by this point, if Fawcett's view of Z had ever been a belief in. a real physical city that someone could do archaeology on, it had morphed into a theosophic belief, into a sort of portal that might lead you to a place, or at least like a place where the veil of reality is thinner, and one can commune with the secret masters of the world, right? That's what he's looking for.

Yeah, you got to get away from the thick veil we got over here. Right. You got to get to where the shimmer starts or whatever. Jack became a devoted spiritual practitioner. one friend described his slight aesthetic restraint as remnant of one of the knights of the grail. So he is like living like a monk almost in order to prepare himself for his great purpose. Now I've mentioned H. Ryder Haggard several times. He's a, he's, I mean, he's the creator of Alan Quatermain, right?

Who was played by Sean Connery and Sean Connery's last movie, which was not very good, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Not a good movie. A better graphic novel. Better graphic novel. Yeah, a pretty good graphic novel. He and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became close friends with Percy, not just because they loved stories of adventure,

but because they were all spiritualists who were into the same weird occult shit. Doyle based his novel The Lost World on some of Percy Fawcett's absolutely falsified accounts of his adventures. And that's why I say that you can kind of say Alan Grant is inspired by Percy, too, because The Lost World is one of the things that helped inspire Michael Crichton to write Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World. There's somewhat different, very different books in a lot of ways, obviously, but it's, you know, it's in this tradition. And Percy Fawcett is a part of this tradition. He helps inspire these. You can draw a line from him to Jurassic Park in some ways, as well as to Indiana Jones.

Which just means he could have, he could have stuck to writing novels. Like, we could have a whole series of trashy novels by this guy that people would probably be facing. Right. Yeah. They could have maybe fed his family. Yeah. Raised his kids. All kinds of stuff he could have done.

gotten, gotten fewer people killed. Yeah, certainly would have gotten fewer people killed. Now, for his part, Haggard helped set Fawcett's doom into motion by bringing Percy. One day, this novelist comes to his friend's house with a small stone idol that he received from a fan in Brazil who claimed Indian somewhere in the interior had made it. And we have an illustration of this idol that H. Rider Haggard has, gets given by this fan. So if you'll show it to you now, it looks like an Egyptian idol. It's like a statue of a guy, and he's holding like a tablet. with either hieroglyphics or cuneiforms, whatever, on it, right?

Yeah. It does look kind of very Egyptian. It certainly seems like something you'd see in an adventure movie or even like a lovecraft thing, right? If you make that face a little fissier, if that could work as like a lovecraft sort of idol, right? There's something like this at the start of the call, the short story of the Cthulhu. Yeah, it looks like a good MacGuffin. It looks like you start out a movie with somebody finding this.

Absolutely. You got a movie. Yeah, you got a movie. This is all you need to start your journey of exploration. And Nicholas Cage could vamp on this statue for 90 minutes at least. Well, he could do that with anything. Yeah. Fawcett became instantly convinced that this statuette came from one of the lost cities.

So now there's more than one that Percy's convinced up. Now, unfortunately for both. One of the lost cities. One of the lost cities. You've got to find at least one before you can start talking about there being more than one, I think. God. Men why? This is crazy.

Either of these guys. If you want to like see how much did these men really know about ancient artifacts? I found an article by the Archaeological Institute of America, which analyzed, you know, the illustration, at least we have of the statuette and noted, however and wherever Haggard got the thing, it's a fake. The figure's costume and writing are on par with something from the prop department of Hercules Conquers Atlantis and have no parallels in real artifacts. Fawcett took it to the British Museum where he. noted, experts were unable to tell me anything about the idol's origin. If not a fake, I was told, it's quite beyond our experience, which is a polite way of them to say to this respected explorer, this is clearly a fake. Yeah, yeah. That's the, I think that's the polite British version

of like, looks like bullshit to me. You're fucking idiot, dude. That's bullshit. That's nothing. I'm sorry, man. But Fawcett just listens to the It's Quite Beyond Our Experience part. Again, you can't be kind to these people. They're crazy. You have to be direct to them. Otherwise, they're going to take their son and his friend to die in the jungle. Now, on daunted, Fawcett sought to learn the secret of the stone image, that's what his words, by having a medium hold the figure in complete darkness and write down any impressions. The psychometrist saw a large continent between Africa and South America, long prior to the rise of Egypt. There are elaborate temples with beautifully carved columns and processions of what looked like priests, including a high priest or leader, wearing a breastplate

similar to the one in the figure. Then disaster struck, volcanoes and violent eruption, flaming lava, pouring down their sides. The whole island shakes with a mighty rumbling sound. The sea rises as if in a hurricane and a huge portion of land on both east and west sides disappears under the water. Is this Atlantis? It's an Atlantis myth. Yeah, he thinks he's going after Atlantis and it's in the Amazon.

Awesome. Awesome. It's so cool. He's going to get his kid killed doing this. It's really funny, though. And again, he thinks it's from Atlantis because a psychic held it in the dark. Yeah. Well, he went, his first, he did try to get his first opinion from an actual, you know, reputable expert.

Sure. And when they didn't know anything, he went to a, yeah, he went to a psychic. And she said it was from Atlantis. Great. So Fawcett, who published a number of articles in the Occult Review magazine, believed in the existence of Atlantis and was convinced that he could find a remnant of its advanced population. After all, the psychometrist saw the high priest take the very idle Fawcett possessed and hand it to another priest with instructions to retain it carefully and in due course deliver it to an appointed one who in turn must pass it on at length until it comes into the possession of a reincarnation of the personage it portrays. Oh, no. and things will through its influence be elucidated.

In other words, this medium says like, oh, I'm seeing as the city falls, they're handing this idol off and say, pass it on until you find the man who can deliver it to the reincarnation of our great priest. And we've already set up that he thinks his son is a reincarnation.

He thinks it's his son? Yeah. Oh, no. So he thinks E. Trider Haggert has given him a little statue of his boy in the past. It's really funny. Well, this will end well. Yeah, this is going to end great.

In his own book, based on extensive letters between Nina and Percy discussing this, A.J. Lees has come to believe that Percy grew so obsessed with the Lost City of Z because it thought it would lead him to an underground Great White Lodge where he could execute what he and Nina had taken to calling the Great Scheme. And they capitalized each of the first letters in those words. I don't want any Great White Lodges executing any great schemes. Thank you. This is a great scheme. You're going to love this scheme. He would send word to Nina after finding it, the city, whereupon she, along with other sympathizers,

rejoined the three men and form a community on the Brazilian plateau, broadly modeled on the one Harold Large had created. Now, I got to stop you there. Harold Large was a wizard and a friend of the Fossets from New Zealand, and in 1907, Large had founded an experimental magical community named the Havelock Work in New Zealand. This was a free love and also art and like woo focused place where everyone could like fuck and make art and do sex magic. I think is the basic idea behind this commune? I mean, that honestly, that sounds fine if people want to do that. To do in New Zealand.

Like, not the middle of the Amazon with just you and your son and his friend. I mean, I would even venture to say maybe go back to England and do it there. Go back to England anywhere. But, yeah, I mean, you know, it's fine. People are going to be wizards. I don't know much about this free love wizard community. But I will say that his largest focus was that like the modern world is destroying us. It's this tyrannical place that is like destroying the human soul.

And so we have to create these communities so that like enlightened beings can gain the actual psychic power that they're supposed to have or something like that. I think is the basic idea behind the havelock work. And so the faucets are so inspired by what their friend large is doing that they kind of work this into their vision of what's going to happen when Percy finds this mystical city, right? that he'll sin for his wife and all of their friends, and they'll all move to this, like, place where the veil of reality is thin in the Amazon, and they'll live forever as, like, free love wizards, I guess. I think that's the basic idea.

And it's important that you note that Percy's bringing his son to this place, but the commune isn't going to have a place for Jack, which I guess is good, because that would be kind of weird because his parents are both going to be, I guess, fucking all their friends there. I'm going to continue from Lee's book. I wish there was a responsible, adult taking over for this kid, but I don't think they're going to find him in the wizard commune, frankly. No, they have not.

How old is the kid? He's like 19 or 20 or something right now. He's a young adult. No, no, no, he's got to be older than that. He's got to be in his early 20s because he was born in like 1903, right? Yeah, early 20s. So Lee's writes, Jack Fawcett would be handed over to the Earth Guardians and his physical body would be taken over by an ancient other. He would then depart Brazil and set up a new lodge near Trincomoli in Ceylon.

There, a new colony of evolved beings would rest control from national governments and become the masters of the universe, guiding the human race back to a new beginning. So that's the best explanation I've seen as what Percy thought he was really doing out in the fucking jungle. I've got to give my son up to these spirits so that he can take over governing Ceylon, and then me and my wife will get to fuck in the jungle with our friends forever. I think that's kind of the idea as far as I can tell. He's signing over his son's actual body to a spirit. To the earth guardians. Okay.

To the earth guardians. Yeah. Who are going to give his body to another. Don't know what happens to Jack's spirit. That's actually kind of unclear. Yeah. I hope it gets a break from all this. This kid never had a chance.

No. It's about to. So as evidence that the, yeah, Jack was fucked from the jump. As evidence that the Fossits really believe. this stuff. Lees includes in his book a letter that Jack wrote to Large, the guy with that commune in New Zealand in 1924, and this is Jack.

I begin to look upon Ceylon as my own private property now and feel quite annoyed to think there are thousands of strangers laying down the laws there. You seem to think we shall soon go and that always cheers us up. Where clairvoyance fail, we always say, well, H.L. did not say that or H.L. says we must go and he

knows. So this guy, Henry Large, definitely gets them killed too. Right? He's for sure part of it. He's hugely to blame. I begin to look on Ceylon as my private property. Look, how could this not go to your head? And you get a bit of that from his younger brother who writes the book, like who edits his dad's notes into the book Expedition Fawcett.

Because he's like, Jack wasn't a great spirit. He was kind of a dick sometimes. I think he probably was an asshole. I mean, again, this is a little bit too much cultic belief for like one child. Like, this kid is going to be messed up. I could both say he was probably pretty annoying to be around because he thought he was a god, but also that's he, what else could have happened here? Yeah. If he made it into his like mid to late 20s and got away from his parents, it would be, you know, his responsibility to figure things out and become a better person.

But I'm guessing he doesn't get that chance. He doesn't. And even then, like it's not just his parents. As that letter shows, guys like large who are like famous and like rich and very like. well regarded, keep coming up to him and saying, yep, you're definitely a great spirit in there. Yep, yep, you're going to become a god and rule over Ceylon one day, my boy. Like, it's not just his parents. Like, he's really getting this reinforced by a lot of adults who should know better.

Yeah. And who are, like, using him to play out, like, just their sort of spiritual fantasies, just, like, stuff they think would be cool. No, and they're pissed because World War I happened, and it kind of proved that, like, the world isn't just, like, getting better, even though you thought it was. like things are really bad actually and they're about to get worse. And all these people just want to like break away and go fuck somewhere pretty and do magic. You know, whom's among us? But you can do that without like sacrificing all of you. Like for example, you can just written some books, Percy and like bought a house, done that.

It's an option. That's a lovely option. Sounds great. I'm not doing an episode on H. Writer Haggard, you know. I mean, maybe I should actually. Because he enlarge are definitely two of the people besides Percy who are most to blame for what happened next. In 1925, broken aging, Fawcett put together one last Hail Mary of an expedition. It included Jack and his son Jack's best friend Raleigh Rimmel.

Before going, Percy visited a psychic named Helen Barry. She claimed to have been born into a mysterious mystical order dedicated to preparing human beings for important spiritual tasks. And she basically tells him, oh yes, this statue, Percy, is a statue of your, yourself as a priest in a past life, and you must take it into the jungle. Also, and this is something Lee's writes in his book, other mediums that Fawcett contacted around this time provided him with advice on the exact location of the South American Lodge and answered some of his other uncertainties, such as whether humans can have sexual relations with elementals.

I'm so glad he cleared that up. I love that. First off, that should tell you what Percy's really thinking about with this journey, is like the sex magic is a big part of this for him. I don't think that gets enough credit in any of the books about this. Which, again, it's so many people do sex magic without getting anyone killed. Exactly. Very rarely do they get people killed.

This is not anti-sex magic. This is an anti-whatever the hell Percy Fawcett's doing podcast. Whatever you're into, you know, but like, and it's amazing how many psychics he seems to find who tell him what he wants to hear. Weird how that works out. You'll note that that psychics tell him. telling him a little bit different thing from the last one, right? And he interprets them all a little differently. But it never, the fact that no one's ever saying exactly the same things never really dissuades Percy.

It makes, maybe these people are all just kind of making shit up separately, right? So as for why this 1925 expedition winds up being Percy's last. Here's John Henning again. The old surveyor, Percy, made two suicidal pronouncements. One was that the trio should travel light with nothing more than small packs. Everyone in Amazonia knew that you could not cut trails and keep your team fed with fewer than eight men. I can confirm this having done months of such cutting and carrying. But Fawcett sent their pack animals and porters back and continued with only his two novices.

His other dictum was that Indians would look after them. This was equally dangerous. The Zingu tribes pride themselves on generosity, but they expect visitors to reciprocate. All expeditions in the past four decades had brought plenty of presents, such as machetes, knives and beads, Fawcett had none. And this is a thing that when people have talked to the actual indigenous folks who were alive at the time, as a number of expeditions did, they'd all be like, well, he kept asking for food and he didn't, like, have anything.

Like, he wasn't doing the thing you're supposed to do, which is where you, like, give us a gift. And, like, sometimes they stole shit. Sometimes they were rude. You hear different stories. Some of them are true. Some of them probably aren't. But, like, the one thing that comes through is that they were seen as rude.

And they were seen as rude in part because they didn't bring anything with them. And it is, it's actually kind of rude to like stumble into a place you've never been and don't understand starving to death because you didn't bring enough shit. And they'd be like, hey guys, can I have your food? Can me and my butt? My kids have your food. Sorry, can we have like all of it? We are starving. And it's not like, it's kind of a dick move.

If that happens because like, wow, you know, something really bad happened to you, your boat wrecked. Like whatever. Of course we'll help you out. Man, shit happens. It's the jungle. Yeah. You on purpose didn't bring the stuff you had the resources to bring because you had this idea. based on your refusal to study and learn from the indigenous people.

You're a white man. We know the shit white people have access to. You should be bringing stuff with you, first off. We've seen others. And also, we know you Percy by this point. You kind of have a reputation for being a cheap skate, you know? But the psychics said he was entitled to it. That's right.

That's right. He had to take over Ceylon. You know what? It's nice that just once the white male entitlement will get this guy what he deserves. Yeah, he and his son and his son's buddy, who all die. I feel less good about that. They all die probably horrifically. These are probably not good deaths.

They are never heard from again. They send a couple of letters earlier in their expedition, and then they just disappear. And we have no idea what happened to them unless you take the highly credible accounts of local tribesmen who say they were murdered for being dicks or going. in a place they shouldn't have gone or a combination of the two, right? Now, there are some other plausible theories. Maybe they got lost and sick because they didn't bring enough stuff. Maybe there's even one account that they were mercy killed because some locals are like, oh, you guys are going to get yourselves murdered.

And we know the people you're going to get murdered by are really fucked up. So we're actually going to kill you now at a kindness because we can't stop you. You're clearly deranged, but we don't want you to suffer. That is one of the accounts. Damn. I mean, is it also possible that they found a portal that led them to Atlantis and their king's there now? Maybe they found a portal. Has anyone been to Sri Lanka ever?

I don't know. I've never heard of a person from Sri Lanka. It's possible. No way to know. Other than by briefly researching if there's things in, oh, yep. Yeah, yeah. Turns out a whole country. Is it governed by the ghost of a white boy?

Nope, nah, it's not. Okay. So not that then. So not that then. I'm sorry, guys. I did a little bit of research there. It turns out not. That was my bad.

That's weird. This Ouija board says they totally made it. Wow. Oh, okay. Well, two sources, different things, you know? That means it's in dispute if we're the New York Times. I'm not interested in litigating, like, what exactly happened to Fawcett and his kid and his kid's friend because it's not really a mystery. They did a stupid thing in a dangerous place and they died.

That's what happened to them. Large and Nina corresponded for years after Percy went missing. And there's some really upsetting passages in their letters in the book Brazil that never was, where Nina is clearly really worried about her son and her husband. And Large is like, don't worry. I know they're going to be fine. They're going to come out of the jungle. Percy will be out of the jungle any day now.

Don't you worry? And she really gets strung along for a while there. It's kind of a bummer. That's a bummer. Yeah. That sucks. Yeah. Modern historiography, his proven faucets,

theory about a lost city, sort of right, if you squint. We do know that the Amazon was much more densely-peopled, prival to the arrival of white people in disease. I think one of the, one of the, one theory is that during roughly the medieval period, what we'd call the medieval period, there would have been a population of between 1.5 and as much as like two to two and a half, maybe even three million people living in the Amazon, which is much more densely people than certainly the Europeans knew it to be after contact. And they did have, we have also found evidence using LiDAR scans of what very likely were semi-large urban communities around where Percy expected to find Z.

These were not Cyclopean stone cities or modern metropolises, but we're talking, you know, populations of in the thousands, you know, five or six thousand, not millions, right? These are not like vast, you know, things. But these were fairly advanced sites created by fairly advanced cultures. And one very, you know, prominent theory suggests that a lot of the Amazon was crafted intentionally over a long span of time is basically a giant living grocery. store, a food forest, right? And so we should look at the Amazon not as like this, this prime evil unspoiled wilderness that people never advanced in, but as a thing that people shaped and

changed and engineered to a significant extent in order to better suit their own needs and provide them with a more comfortable lifestyle. And then they all got sick and died. A lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them got sick and died. And so a lot of the larger communities that had existed were gone by the time Europeans were fucking around there. And they were just like, like it's complete wilderness, which is not really the case probably, right? We don't know for sure. These are theories, you know? And none of those people were ancient Greeks or ancient Egyptians. We know that. They definitely were ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Yeah, that's 100% confirmed. Yes. Wow. Yeah. I do want to quote once more from an article by Hugh Thompson, who's that,

is that Peruvian scientist and adventure who led numerous expeditions. And he wrote this a faucet for the Washington Post. As Grant acknowledges in his book, again, you will find nothing of it in the film. Fawcett was deeply conflicted about his suspicion that there might have been an earlier advanced civilization in the Amazon, a suspicion that, for all the wrong reasons, he was right about, although he himself never found anything to prove it. He could not reconcile this with his poor opinion of the Indian tribes, so he postulated the existence of white Indians who had somehow traveled across the Atlantic from Europe and brought civilization with them, right? And that's all you deserve to remember Percy Fawcett as. He was a crank who got his kid killed. And if he'd been less racist and paid attention to what people there said and how they lived, then he probably wouldn't have died.

So, like, congratulations, white man dies of racism. That's actually kind of cool. Yep. Too racist to live. Yep. Wow. Yep. Cool.

Well. Mm-hmm. Miriam, you got anything you want to plug? Yeah, there's this secret lost city in the jungle, actually. No. So I would like to plug my podcast, which I do with members of my anarchist publishing collective that I'm in, which is called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. Your friend Margaret Kiljoy is also in that collective. So she is also on the podcast a lot.

The podcast is Live Like the World is Dying. And it is a podcast for people who feel like shit's getting pretty fucked up. And we'd like to talk about what to do about it. And also we're not trying to hide in a bunker with beans, but build community and skills. And also beans are good, you know, but we're just. Beans are good. We're mostly anti-bunker, I would say. But yeah, we got stuff going on over there.

We're strangers in a tangled wilderness on some various social media platforms. And check us out. Sweet. Yeah, check it out. And check out the Amazon. You know what? I'm going to go on an expedition down there and find a commune or a place for a commune and then some ghosts. And I don't know.

I think one of us will wind up ruling an island in Southeast Asia. Pretty good chance. If you just go to the jungle, just buy a plane ticket to Brazil or anywhere with a jungle. Just fly there and start walking. Just walk. You'll find me. Oh, Robert. Hold on.

Bad news. My Ouija board just told me if you do that, you'll die. Well, I don't believe your Ouija board. It wasn't right about the artillery stuff. Good night, everybody. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bass. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook. Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stillard, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us.

Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle.

I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island to serve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture. with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.

Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen to pro society on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.