Camp Gagnon - Lost Cities of Gold: What's REALLY Hidden in Mesoamerica | Luke Caverns

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Luke Caverns joins us in the tent today to give a rapid-fire history of Central and South America, helping us understand some of life's unanswered questions. What are the origins of the Aztecs? Where did Mayan culture start? Who created the Olmec heads, and how were they able to make them? Luke helps us explore these and more fascinating topics... WELCOME to CAMP! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsor: Relay, BlueChew, and Morgan & MorganJoin the Relay App community HERE: http://www.joinrelay.app/camp 👕🧢 GET YOUR CAMP DRIP HERE: http://camp-rd.com🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History Here: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.comTimestamps:0:00 Origins of Aztec & Mayan Culture + Olmec Heads7:13 Werejaguars of Mesoamerica19:29 Olmec Kings Feuding Werejaguars26:38 How Akhenaten Changed Egypt36:43 The Rise of The Maya + Jade & Serpentine Quarry’s 50:19 Origins of Mayan Royalty54:50 Mayan Star Wars + Omen That Reset Civilization1:05:59 Origin of The Aztecs1:18:42 Aztec Sacrifices + Spanish Discovering Gold1:22:22 When Moctezuma Met Cortez1:29:24 The Spread of European Diseases1:38:41 The Friendliness of The Inca Empire145:13 The Final Expeditions to Map The Amazon1:50:00 Hidden Cities of Gold2:06:31 Mississippi Pyramids#history #mystery #pyramid

High priest of the Aztecs goes and takes this deterra mushrooms, and he gets this prophecy from the god to go offer the proposal of a dynastic marriage to the Calyuan princess. So they have this huge marriage ceremony thing, and then the priest goes to back to the temple, takes the deterra again and asks Kuwaitipoli, what's your next command? And he says, kill the princess and filet her and have the prince put her skin on and be dancing in a parade when the Calicon king arrives. Cali Khan can see his daughter's skin being worn by the prince that he just married her to,

and they raid the city of Cali Khan and conquer it all at once. This is Luke Caverns, an anthropologist and archaeologist who goes on site to uncover the truth about lost American civilizations. And today, he's giving a rapid fire history of Central and South America, from the giant Olmec heads and the people that carved them to the wealth of the Maya, the brutality of the Aztecs, and the brilliance of Incan politicians and engineers, and how one fateful event made it all come crashing down. This episode is absolutely amazing.

I knew so little about Central and South American ancient civilizations from the Aztecs of Maya. People don't realize this. Star Wars, a lot of the premises of it are just based on Mesoamerica. Kings bring about a lot of war. And because they're all astronomers, these wars are called the Star Wars. In one episode, in just a few hours, Luke covers everything in brief and gives me an entire abridged history of the entire region. I mean, to be honest with you, it's one of my favorite episodes I've done lately.

So please enjoy it as much as I had, having it. Without further ado, sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. If we're going to map a similar thing to, I guess, the Maya and the Aztecs, broadly speaking, is there a way to sort of understand that timeline and the history of how these different cultures sort of intersect? And maybe even throwing the Inka in there because I think people like me, in my mind, I'm like, yeah, it's all sort of the same thing around the same time, different people, different countries. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I couldn't be more wrong, though. Yeah, I can imagine.

So we should, well, with my expertise, my expertise really comes in below the Rio Grande. So below Texas. I'm just now kind of, I would say North America, like we were talking about before, and I said North America is just not talked about enough because it's like a fine wine or a bitter coffee. Like a thing about like a bitter Mexican coffee,

how long you got to drink coffee before you develop a taste for that. North America is very difficult to understand. It's an extremely complicated continent with so many civilizations that are constantly changing and at war with each other. I'm just now kind of developed expertise to be able to dive into North America and understand it. So the history I'm going to give is going to be below the Rio Grande. We start with the Olmex. They seem to appear sometime around 1800 BC.

Now, we know that pre-Columbian cultures in Mesoamerica, Mezzo America, let's define that. Mesoamerica might extend all the way up to New Mexico. So that's north of the Rio Grande. But it's, I think the northernmost place is a place called Pachime, which is either Arizona or New Mexico. Could we look that up, Chrysos? Yeah, where is?

You may look up where is Pekime. You could just try to spell it. You'd probably figure it out. He'll Google anything for you because he's so buttered up that you'd talk nicely about the Greeks. I'll be honest. Yeah, Pekime. I don't know. Maybe you'll find it.

Does it say it's in Mexico? It might actually be in Mexico. I think it's northern most in Mexico. For some reason, I was thinking it was New Mexico. Anyways, there's something very interesting there. We're like halfway through the city. On the northern part of the city, it's something that's iconically like Pueblo, ancestor and on the bottom half there's a meso-american ball court and there's a river that runs

through the middle of the city and it's like it draws that river like draws the line between mesoamerica and north america it's very interesting um so meso america begins civilization itself there were people there for like 20 000 years plus but civilization itself seems to begin at a place called san lorenzo to nochatelan in vera cruz mexico uh it's an olmec city and it's the oldmec city and it's this plateau that sits up above this river around it. And there are these, there are these, it's like an oasis. I mean, I was there in December and the group that I was with, we were looking down at the river, and I was like, it just clicked.

Because this is one of the fertile crescents of the world that it's the most overlooked fertile crescent. And I'm looking down at it and it's like these palm trees and it's all so green and lush. And I realized if you took a picture of this and showed it to me, I would think that it's, Egypt. It's that similar. It is that similar. It's so similar. And there's a lot of similarities between the Olmecs and the Egyptians. We don't have to get into that. So the Olmex essentially sprout along this huge river called the Coets Calcos, very fertile river. And some of their main exports are basalt and corn or maize. And they're also fishing a lot. So they're selling fish. They're just super rich.

And they're the first guys that kind of sprout out of Mesoamerica. They're the guys that are making the huge heads, the giant Olmec heads. There's a head that's so big you couldn't fit it in this tent. Actually, several of the heads you couldn't fit it. Yeah, let's get a picture of these heads because they're fascinating looking. And I think they're also very iconic in terms of how people sort of imagine like Mesoamerican art. But I didn't realize that these were so old. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

These sprout out at the very beginning. I'll tell you, man, the Olmex are so. old that I don't even know if the Aztecs knew that the Olmex ever existed. It's fascinating. That's crazy, right? And it's interesting. Do we have an idea of what they look like based off these heads? Yeah.

Yeah, these are exact portraits of these people, I would guess. Likely like high-ranking kings, generals, or gods or all the above. Right. There you go. Here you go. And you're thinking like a Mesoamerican. Exactly. So there's, there in, in Mesoamerica, all of our little categories that we love, why do we like

categories? Because the Greeks are all about figuring out the world, trying to put everything in its boxes. It's how we're, it's how we're wired, right? These guys are not that way. It's all the same. So like, a god is an important figure, is a, or I'm sorry, a king is an important figure and is a god at the same time. There's also one added element, my thought. Oh, I should say one of the main Olmec exports is rubber.

It's the land of the rubber trees. The word Olmec is a Nahuatl word. Nalwattle is the Aztec language. So 3,000 years after the Olmec exists, the Spanish chroniclers are asking information about Mexico and the name that they were told of the people that live in the land where the Olmec heads were found in the 1860s. The Aztecs called those people Olmecs.

But that doesn't mean that they were told them. calling the ancient civilization of the Olmecs just the same people that lived in that area in 1520 that later 300 years later when the Olmec head was found does that make sense yeah of course so but the word Olmec means rubber people or people from the land of rubber so it's where the mesoamerican ball was created it's where the it's where the first mesoamerican ball courts come from so what we think is that the helmets that they're wearing is a ball game helmet and so it's the king himself showing everyone that he is a great ball player and is also a god it's all three of them all wrapped up together so it's like uh it's like it's like the roman emperor commoditist what was the one thing that

he did to show off to everybody he fought in the coliseum this is exactly the same thing wow yeah that is fascinating yeah it's super cool so this is happening from 1800 bc all the way down to 300 bc is the rise and in the fall of the Olmex. That's a good run. Yeah, it's a really good run. Now, we don't really understand why the Olmex fell, but they have three different capitals. They have a bunch of

different cities, but there's three, like, principal, large hubs. San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan, Loventa, and then Trace Sopotes. And I've been to all three, really cool sites, amazing museums, full of all kinds of statues that, like,

if I were to take you on an Olmec tour, By the end, believe it or not, by the end of that Olmec tour, you would no longer, when I was talking about the Olmex, you would no longer think of the heads. You would think of all the other artifacts that you had seen because there's a different type of imagery in the Olmec world that's just as important of these heads. And it's this wear jaguar, this half human jaguar shaman being. It's everywhere. There's way more wear jaguars than there are Olmec heads. Hundreds more, thousands more. But it's just the heads are so iconic.

So Olmec civilization rises and falls Ooh, do that fourth one Oh, it looks like a Picasso Dude You gotta get that for the tent Oh man, that would be perfect in here I think I got one jaguar Pastos, can you say that?

I want to see if I can I don't know if it's real But I might try to buy that or something I mean, yeah, that's sick I mean yeah, I got I think that's a jaguar behind you, I think Maybe Or a wolf, who knows

Some kind of creature I gotta get a blessed That's all I know This is cool Anyway I don't want to distract These things are all over And they're found in the same place As the Olmec heads

Well I don't know about this guy But I just think it's cool Okay Christos Middle Middle Row all the way to the right There we go That's the iconic

Where Jaguar That's a person Okay He's got Jaguar eyes And he's got these downturned snarling lips

And you can't see it here because it's so dark. On the inside of his lips, there'd be two fangs sticking out, sticking out. Probably if you were to click see more images and see stuff that's similar to this, we'd find one that has fangs. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the one straight below it.

So that one or the next one, or even the next one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I'm sorry. Yep, that one right there. There we go. That's a wear jaguar. So that's a person. He's got these furrowed jaguar brows. His eyes are now like rectangular, like cat eyes, sort of.

Or they're becoming sort of oval like cat eyes. He's got these two fangs. Man, there's so much that we could go into with the wear jaguars. Like this is, I don't know if I call it my area of expertise because I don't know if there's so much out there that you can be an expert on this. It's just a huge mystery. Because this is really old. Really, really, really ancient.

Yeah, yeah. Like, again, I should say, I don't think that the Aztecs knew anything about this. That's how ancient it is. But we know it's half human, half jaguar. Half human, half jaguar. It's not fully a jaguar. You can see that there are human elements here. And so, okay, so there's something really interesting here that's worth diving into.

So I think that ancient Mesoamericans revered people and saw them as divine people who had deformities. There were things wrong with them. the exact opposite of the Greek view, right? Like if there's anything wrong with somebody. Leave them on a hill somewhere. Leave them on a hill somewhere. I think that Mesoamericans revered people with deformities and that it began with the Olmecs. I should give the first account that we know of this happening is when the Spaniards show up at

Magtizuma's temple in Tnoche, the Aztec emperor. That Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi is based on Magdazuma's temple because the Spaniards show up and there was all these weird creature-looking people like they didn't even know if they were actually people it's how deformed and odd these people were but they were being taken care of and looked after so we got to imagine maybe people with Down syndrome hunchbacks all kinds of deformities spina bifida syndrome large skull yeah yeah yeah like ell was it was the one like elephant elephant titus like all kinds of crazy stuff they were being cared for so we think of the as Aztex is super, super vicious, sacrificing 80,000 people a day, ripping their skin off, putting their

body inside the skin of their captives, or I'm sorry, putting, yeah, yeah, like climbing into the skin of their captives and running around and parading and doing all, you know, this vicious stuff that terrified the Spaniards. All that was actually happening, but they were also taking care of people with special needs and revering them, right? It's fascinating. They would also have people, they also had gardens with like all the most exotic flowers and birds and everything and people would stand in the gardens and read poetry. There's a whole side of the Aztec world that gets overlooked that's like full of beauty and wonder and like almost like it's Narnia, you know.

So I think that this tradition of taking care of people with deformities began in the Olmec world and then ended in the Aztec world. Why do I think it began in the Olmec world? because in the Olmec world, Christos, could we look up Olmec babies. They're weird babies, man. These are not just normal babies. I think that these are special needs babies with like Down syndrome or something like that.

You can click on any of them. And you can look at them and they'll have little cleft lips and they kind of have they have features where you can tell that, I've seen thousands of them. They have features where you can tell, okay, I've, kind of i've seen what a down syndrome or special needs baby looks like this is what these are and you never see images of fully grown people that look quite like this because we have other statues of fully grown um that are either out of terracotta or sometimes these are like serpentine stones of fully grown people that look nothing like this they don't share the same similarities um and so i when i was

there uh when i was taking people on the on the few omec expeditions i've done and we've talked a lot about this. What I think that these babies are, there's so many examples here, I'm trying to think like a way I can kind of put all this together, like a painting. But, oh yeah, what I think it is is that these babies probably only lived for a short period of time,

and that's why they have statues made after them because it's like honoring this baby, this child that only lived for a certain period of time. And so I think that they, you know, they give them some kind of they're deifying them or immortalizing them and then something else that happens

is there are these little serpentine sometimes red stone statues that are made from people with elongated skulls and that have these downturn cleft like lips that'll have two fangs coming out and when I found this it was what made this click

for these babies what this is, my wife being a dentist, this is ectodermal dysplasia. Cleft lips with two little fanged teeth that come down on the front is an actual deformity that some children are born with. And as of the 1970s, it just doesn't exist anymore, it was disproportionately common among native children in Veracruz all the way up to the 1970s. So in ancient times, there were children, Probably being born with cleft jaguar lips like we're seeing in these depictions with two little fangs.

And there's also no learning disability. They're completely... ...normal. Right. They're completely normal. But they have these two little fangs and a cleft lip. Could we look up ectodermal? Yeah, just only look up ectodermal dysplasia.

So this image here would be kind of like the cleft lip maybe that you're talking about? Yes, I don't, I honestly don't know if that's Holmec. Okay, so click on the first kid. So this isn't, this is probably an Indian kid, but he has no learning disability. He just has those two fanks. And so this is something, you know, deformity that people all around the world can be born with. But it's, but it's, it was disproportionate in Veracruz. Well, why was that?

Was that, was that, this is just my idea. Is that a genetic predisposition that they have or were the Olmec engineering people to be born more and more like this? because in the Olmec world Okay, Christos, if we could, thank you, if we could look up, if we could look up Olmec Alter 5? Perfect. Here we go.

So this is a wear jaguar, shaman man, with an elongated skull, coming out of a cave, carrying a baby who also has this wear jaguar cleft lip. So my guess is the Olmec heads, we never see duplicates of the Olmec heads. What I think there is is there's a king class and there's a priestly class. The king, there's only one guy. The king is never a wearer jaguar.

He's never ever depicted as aware of jaguar. This whole shamanic class, there must have been at least dozens of these people alive all at once. And we see them sometimes as fully grown adults. You see how his mouth is kind of downturned that the grown man is? And then the baby, you can sort of see it. But when you're there in person, it's much more clear. So he's emerging from a cave out in Guerrero, Mexico. There are these Olmec caves that we found that have these like cave art paintings in them.

It's hard to go study it because it's like the most dangerous part of Mexico. So I've never been there. But what my thought is, is that these images here of these babies being brought out of these caves is I think that either the babies were born in the caves and that this depiction of it in stone is like the immortalizing of this where Jaguars like call to his sacred divine power, right? Like, man, there's so much here.

Okay, another thing I should highlight is that it's a very common phenomenon where indigenous people who take part in ayahuasca ceremonies or other like, you know, things like psilocybin, whatever, whatever in the jungle, they will awake inside the eyes of a jaguar. And they'll be in, like Paul Rosalie's talked about this, I believe, being inside a jaguar. That's a very common thing. And so my thought is this is a mixture of all these things. There's deformity of ectodermal dysplasia as well as this priest class who's able to embody the jaguar. And then when there are kids being born with this disease, they think that, oh, okay, this is like you're like a half-jackuar.

It's like this religion that's forming in premortial times and that rises up through Olmec civilization, right? Now, I think I'm one of the only people in the world studying this right now. But I've been here so many times and seeing all the patterns. I'm starting to see, okay, and like my wife being a dentist, okay, I think that this is a deformity that people are noticing. and they're also trying to understand their ancient world. So they're realizing that this person with ectodermal dysplasia has the two fangs. What else is two fangs? The jaguar, which we revere and worship,

and maybe we see it as some kind of God. Okay, well, clearly you have some kind of importance, yada, yada, yada. And somewhere in here, you have these facets of religion and society that are being formed. And I'm just trying to follow the patterns and figure this out. And then you see these strange-looking babies, but you never see adults. So it makes me think that these are deformed babies. Maybe they have Down syndrome, maybe there's something, you know,

there's something ain't normal about them. And maybe they don't survive. And so the Olmecs are like weeping for these babies. And so by making some kind of physical image of them, you immortalize them and preserve them or honor them, right? Like I'm not quite sure. But in the Olmec world, I think it's the start of the honoring of people with deformities.

Because we see it in the Maya world as well. like the Maya revered dwarves, like little people, were very important to their society. And so that carries all the way to Maktazuma's temple. This is crazy, right? This is fascinating. Holy shit. What's up, people? Let's take a break really quick, because I'm going to talk to the fellas.

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But you could have a generally normal way. Is your theory that they become? priests or shamans? Yes. Yeah, I think it's a, I think it's a bloodline. Like, I think it's... You're born of the Jaguar. Yes.

And then you, like, I'm assuming this is hereditary, so that if you have extradermal dysplasia, you're more likely to have children with it. Yes. And then your children then are also of the priestly class. Yes. And some of your children might be born without it, and they just will be regular citizens. But if you're born with it, congratulations you are now. It's your claim to...

You have a divine duty. Divine power. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is fascinating. But the kings are never... Here's another, here's another interesting. thing. The kings are never aware a jaguar. So it's two different

facets of society. And if you study ancient Egypt enough, you'll find that there's a lot of clashing between the Pharaoh and the priests. Agnotton. Akhenaten. See, you know a lot. So,

the exact same thing is happening in the Olmec realm. And I haven't seen, and maybe someone else has noticed this, and I just haven't read it. But I think I might be one of the only people. Now, Dr. Barnhart, my mentor just came out with an Olmec lecture series in the great courses and I haven't had a conversation at length of him about it so I need to go watch this but I think that it's obvious there's a feud

between the Olmec kings the like the dynastic family and the shamans because you see renovations of monuments in the Olmec world you can see where a head was turned into an altar like that altar that we saw, that was to exalt a, I call them like, like wear Jaguar shamans. That was to exalt a shaman. It was probably something that the shaman might sit on top of because we have cave paintings of Olmec people sitting on top of altars, like where they have one leg underneath them and one leg hanging off talking about something. But not, that wasn't necessarily a king. It was probably a shaman. So it's a, what I just showed you with the baby coming out, altar five, That's where I think a shaman would sit on top and speak to his, you know, speak to the other priest or speak to regular people, the civilization.

I mean, we just don't know. And the art is an indication of who I am. It's clear to the people like, hey, I'm speaking to you now as the shaman. Yeah. You can see my jaguar teeth. And this image, because many of the people I imagine are not literate perhaps, or maybe they are. But I imagine having art is going to be the fastest way to communicate an image. And that they're able to see, like, oh, I'm being brought forth from this cave.

from a shaman before me and this is my divine right Yeah, it's his claim to his Yeah, divine right is divine power to be in his position Now, we see altars that are made

from Olmec heads but we have never found a head that's made from an altar So what I'm saying here is the only people I'm trying to go the way I can word this when you go throughout the Olmec world, you will notice that there are no wear jaguar monuments

that were ever turned into an Olmec head, only heads that were turned into wear Jaguar monuments. And almost on every single head, on the top of it, where the crest of the helmet was, which is usually the symbol of the king's name, you find these claw marks that are going into it. Okay, okay, okay. Christos, stay on this, yeah, click on the one you're looking at right now.

And then can you zoom into the top of the head? It's going to be real. You may have to find a super high resolution. But the crest of his helmet says three a how. You have these three claws that are coming down. So it's three. And the top symbol is a how. It means three king.

At least that's what we think because that same symbol later on in the Maya world would mean three a how. so we think that it's probably the same thing. Not this guy. It's not every single time, but yeah, let's keep going through the heads and see if we can find... Yeah, so that's a where- Jaguar. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

So bottom left. So not that one, one to the right. And then zoom in at the... The resolution's not good enough, but if you zoom into the top of the head, you... Yeah, and it's got to be higher. But, okay, so on the top of...

of his head, there are these claw marks. They're deep cutting claw marks. Yeah, we're not going to be able to see it. You can just barely see the claw marks. But man, if I were to take you through the Olmec world, it's even higher than that. It's like on the very top of his head. Yeah, so there are claw marks there that are probably like a foot long, and it's these deep claw marks. And when you go and look at them, there are four or five of them, and you can put your hand inside of it. So it's like a clawed hand scratched through the Olmec monuments. And on the back sides of a lot of the heads, you'll see them just completely torn apart. And I've looked at this and looked at this and looked at this.

And I realized that these claw marks never show up on the Ware Jaguar monuments. They only show up on the heads. So it's like the priestly class is more in control of Olmec civilization than the kings are because the priestly where Jaguar class is going back and defacing the Olmec heads. the where jaguar monuments are never ever defaced and there's one head you'd never be able to find a photo of it on the internet because so much of the omic world is just not not thoroughly documented but there is one head the entire face is clawed off like i'm talking about it's the entire face is mangled you can't even see the face anymore like you can see the jaw and the cheekbones

but the entire face is mangled and so i'm thinking that this is clear evidence to me that that uh that the king class and the priestly class were at feud with each other, just like in ancient Egypt. Wow. So the more you look at it, you get this big picture that, okay, okay, so there's this, it's almost like a race of where Jaguar people that they're not seeing this as deformity. This is because it has no mental, you know, effect. It's only a physical effect that this is actually a positive attribute that gives you this divine right to have this power. and so they're breeding them and breeding them and they're purposely engineering more people to be bred like this

and probably eventually outweighs the dynastic family. Like, you know, the king and his family can only get so big when you have multiple families of where jaguars that are constantly breeding. And yeah, so I think that I'm, you know, yeah, I think that I'm on to like documenting something that hasn't really been like officially acknowledged. That is a feud between, you know,

the priest class and the Olmec kings. I mean, not to mention, I imagine that, like, with any type of dynasty, there's a secession problem that happens, right? Like, there's a king that has only daughters, or there's a king that, you know, gets overthrown, and then there's a new regime that comes in, and they need some type of right to rule the people. And whereas the priestly class,

because it has almost a divine lineage, I don't know if it's as susceptible. And you correct me if I'm wrong, like with Egypt, for example, like with Agnottin, there was basically a regime change. And he needed to harken on the old gods to basically give him credibility. So he created, like, he like moved the capital. And he, I forget the exact, he like, what was the god? Atten. And he basically creates like a sun disk.

And like he's like, okay, I am. It had existed, but it was not. It was not a very popular God. But he was like, I am of an ad naun, and like, I am of the godly lineage. And so as he takes over and tries to ameliorate the secession problem, he harkens back to the religious element to basically justify to his people, like, hey, I actually am the rightful ruler. Don't care about the regime.

Don't care about the coup. None of that. Like, politics aside, I am of God. And that's all that matters. Yeah. Well, you know, he was, you know, this is very interesting because I, I don't know, I'm not I had a very negative view of Akhenaten for a long time because he's kind of ghastly looking.

Like all of his monuments make him out to be very scary looking. And then the art of the Amarna period is very odd. Like he's just an unsettling figure to look at. And his son is Tut, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, as far as we know, his son, his son actually is tut not like biologically actually is his son i think as far as we know

from like his second marriage because he's married to nefertiti yes yes and so i think that tut is we we think that tut is his son but not nefertiti's son right yeah um so uh anyways so i had a pretty negative view of akhenaten for a long time just because of the visuals like i just don't like the amarna period art at all uh i think that the that the old kingdom art is much is the best and middle kingdom is really nice too it's just elegant just looks amazing now what i think was actually happening here is we see the feud beginning between the priestly class and we just jumped over to egypt but it's fascinating still i think it's a helpful parallel sure sure we see the feud really getting significant between the priestly class and achanaten's father ammanhotep the third

and I thought a lot about like the psychology of like where Akhenaten is coming from and why he took such drastic measures and this is my guess. The ancient Egyptians were well aware of the periods before. Like, you know, there are these intermediate periods where we don't really have a great grasp of everything that was going on like where you have 70 kings and 70 days, you know, just a lot was going on. But it doesn't mean that the Egyptians were ignorant of everything that had happened before. and they knew how the government used to be run once upon a time.

Like there used to not be a high priestly class. Let's say during the time of the reign of Raw, then you know you have Kufu, Khafra, Menkara means in the essence of Raw. So this is actually very fascinating, and I don't think it's a bad argument. The reason that the burial chambers of the great pyramids an argument I've seen put out there, the reason that the burial chambers are above ground,

it's like the only time in all of Egyptian history, if we're going to call these tombs, where the burial chamber is not going either straight into the ground vertically or diagonally, and it's going up, is because the greatest kings of the, like, to the Egyptians during the first intermediate period and the second intermediate period,

they would have these phrases like, oh, I long for the golden age of Senephru, which was the Kufu's switzerland, who we call the first great pyramid builder. They would say how they long for the days of Senefru. So that lineage, Senefru, Kufu, Khaferam, and Kara, that was the kingdom of the sun god. These were all pharaohs of the god, of the sun god, Raw.

Raw is also a disc, like a sun disk. That was always looked on as the greatest period of Egypt leading up to the 18th dynasty of which Akhenaten is the second to last pharaoh of. I'm sorry, not second to last. There's a few after him, but he's like the last significant one. So just touching on the pyramids, then we'll go back to the priest thing. Because those, I've seen it argued that Akanatenaten was hearkening back to the pharaohs of the sun god kingdom, which are those four pharaohs I was talking about earlier.

And the reason that those burial chambers are not above ground, or not underground, but above ground, is because they were semi-divine beings that were the actual essence of the god itself, those men were not intended to be buried below ground. They need to be buried above ground. And it's the only like four pharaohs that are buried above ground. Even in death, they're above the penal. Yes, yeah, exactly.

It's an interesting argument, and I don't have anything to refute it, but it's fascinating. So, Akanaten, my guess, let's just time travel back to, I don't know which I think that well he must have lived in Memphis with his dad I'm guessing that Amin Hotep lived in Memphis

but we could look this up maybe he lived in Luxor but it's a late night in the Pharaoh's palace Amin Hotep has been at odds with the priest class at Karnak Temple down in Luxor his entire life

and he's absolutely fed up with it and you know you know the unskippable cut scenes with your dad when you're growing up where you got to your dad talking about how much he hates his job and like all the problems with it it's the same story again it's the same thing and how much do you think aminhotep the fourth who will later become akhenaten sits here and he's listening to this he's like yeah i can't stand these guys like when i get in all the things that these priests did to my dad i'm gonna i'm gonna eliminate these people i'm not going to deal with this i'm not going to deal with the stuff that my dad's dealt with

for forever he hears this his whole freaking life until his father dies and then amin hote when he becomes king he's like eff all of you I'm completely shutting down the temple. Egypt needs to be run the way it was supposed to be run. And the way it was supposed to be run was all the powers of the priestly class came into one single being, the pharaoh himself. When the pharaoh was the king and the high priest simultaneously, that was true ancient Egypt.

All these priests were supposed to be vessels for the pharaoh himself, acting as arms of the pharaoh. but they became over time like okay so so i'm pharaoh in the early fourth dynasty of egypt when pharaoh is as pharaoh as pharaohs are ever going to get um i'm first in i'm first in charge my siblings are all second in charge and then my cousins are all third in charge right like you have these ranks that go down but my cousin died and i don't have anybody to fill his place okay well i trust this guy well enough you're going to fill his place oh my other cousin died Oh, this sickness comes in.

Boom, half of my family is eviscerated. Now half of my government is filled up with people that don't have my blood. Another thing, another tragedy happens. And you can just imagine that the Pharaoh's family gets pieced away, and there's way more people he's not actually related to that have to become a part of the government. And they all become priests because religion is intertwined with the government. And then they all become landowners and this, that, and the other.

And then before long, the Pharaoh and his family are vastly outnumbered by other powerful people. and the pharaoh is no longer the center of the religion and the government he's the center of the government but the other 50% of the entire civilization is being run by people that aren't even his bloodline right and they have a direct connection to raw also because they're the precy class yes and so now they can almost take a claim to the people and be like are you going to listen to this guy that's the monarch or are you going to listen to me who's connected to raw exactly exactly and so o'canotan had had enough of it and he wanted to return egypt back to this golden age where it was only the pharaoh that had complete control but uh you know uh the old kingdom was a long time ago and that was you know oakenotan probably existed in 1450 bc and the pyramids had

at their youngest age been built over a thousand years before that you know old kingdom was long time ago and two other new eras have already risen or two eras have risen in Holland since then. You know, so the makeup of ancient Egypt just, it wouldn't have worked with the old ways. Like, you had to be, things were much more complicated now. And Egypt was also way more populous and way more interconnected with the rest of the world. Like back during the time of the old kingdom, it was just Egypt and Egypt alone. They didn't really have to deal with people around the Mediterranean.

But by the new kingdom, they got Phoenicians coming in. You got Mennonites or Menoans and you got the Hittites. It's like there's all these other people around the night you're trading with and fighting with. You ever done a deep dive on the Minowans? No, not particularly. Ah, dude, that's a cool civilization. That's topic for another time, but man, there's just so much. There's just so much out there.

But yeah, so you have this war between the priests and the pharaohs. And yeah, it's just like it's a tale as old as time, you know, literally. So anyways, that's the Olmec world. Now, the Olmex are getting their jade and serpentine. This is actually really funny. For a long time, it had been a mystery as to how Maya civilization sprouted, like how it began. Is a Maya civilization the direct heir of Olmec civilization, or did it arise simultaneously? Is it like a sister civilization?

We know that the height of Olmec society happened much earlier on than the height of, you know, okay, height of Olmec society around 1,000 BC, around 800 years after they really sprout into existence, right? Or I should say after they appear in the archaeological record, but they had probably existed for maybe a thousand years earlier, right? So height of Olmec civilization about 1,000 BC. And then it kind of steadily falls off for 700 years,

and they kind of just disappear into the rest of Mesoamerica because by about 250 BC, the rest of Mesoamerica is starting to rise around the Olmex and starting to learn to be able to do what the Olmex do, like fishing, like efficiently raising maize. They also have their own rubber farms now. So it kind of diminishes the power of Olmex society and they all kind of blend together.

By about 250 BC, everyone around the Olmex have risen up and the Olex are falling down. So everyone's like at the same level. Well, the Olmex are going to fade into, just fade into history. They're going to be lost to time and everyone's going to rise up around the Olmex. The next ones are going to be the Maya.

Now, the reason that I do not think that the Maya are the direct descendants of the Olmex is because they have no similarities to the Olmex at all. But it doesn't mean that they weren't directly connected to them. And, dude, the other day, I have got some buzzer. that like travel with me down to Latin America and we'll hang out and and I was having something over to the to the new house and we were in the backyard just like smoking and I love like

thinking about the ancient world and and because just allows your brain to get to think about things like a different pattern and and I had this realization and it doesn't sound especially profound now but I had the realization that the mystery of why Maya civilization sprouts from the city called El Mirador, which is in the middle of the Guatemala and the Patan jungle in the Guatemala out in the middle of nowhere. It's a massive city with the two largest pyramids that the Maya will ever make is from the Maya's oldest city. Well, there's Nak Bay, and then there's El Mirador.

The two pyramids are called La Danta and El Tigray. They face each other. And the bottom platform of these pyramids is the entire city. Like the entire city is raised up on a platform. I don't know how to explain it any other way. Like imagine New York City sits on an artificial platform. And so the two biggest pyramids they're ever going to make, they make at the beginning of their civilization.

It goes all the way back to like 800 BC and reaches its height around 200 BC. So it reaches its height right when the Olmec are in their last days. And for a mystery, it had been a long time. For a long time, it had been a mystery. well why did Maya civilization start out here in the middle of nowhere in these lowland jungles they don't have they're not this isn't even around a river there's no river around them they're as far from the coast as you can actually get like from the atlantic or you know from the Caribbean

coast and the gulf coast it's as far from either one as you can get and uh and i just this epiphany came to me and i and i thought okay why would people ever go to the middle of the jungle They must be, the original people must have moved out there thousands of years ago to escape all of the violence that definitely occurred on the coastline. Because that's the prime real estate when thousands of years ago, you want to live on the coastline. You want to live right on the beach where you, this is pre-agriculture, right? You want to live right on the beach where you can fish all the time. And it's just so easy to get sustenance, right?

So you have like the weakest people, the most skittish, inept people that have to flee to the middle of the jungle. right but far away hundreds of miles away the olmec civilization is rising up and they want luxury goods they want basalt they want you know shells they want shark teeth and they want jade and serpentine so they send out these expeditions this this is just me reinventing history thinking about what I know and trying to understand this and and I probably wouldn't have thought this way and I've been in a certain state of mind. And so they're sending out expeditions to find these resources, probably because these resources just happen to appear by chance

and they want to know exactly, like, what is this? Where did you get this green stone? I want more of this. This is beautiful. You know, so they send out expeditions. This is prehistory, you know, this like, think about this far primordial time. They're sending out an expedition and they say,

oh, you know, probably comes somewhere from the east. Okay, what's out there in the east? Well, that's the Maya land where these people that worship these gods live on these little rock mounds and worship the rain god, which is Chok, the Maya rain god. And Maya civilization at this point, there, you know, let's call it 800 BC, there were, so you've seen an Indian mound in North America, about that size made totally out of stone, with a bunch of other wooden fatch homes built around it with huge farms. So it's early, it's not these huge impressive cities that it will become later on.

And so the Olmex probably send out resource expeditions in here And then they find out in the middle of the jungle They probably keep looking where do you find these stones Ask him oh it comes from the east go to the east It's going to be in the middle of nowhere blah blah blah In the middle of nowhere where these people who fled to the middle of the jungle To be safe from all the violence you know going on on the coastlines In the middle of that jungle is where those jade and serpentine quarries are

And so those people that in early prehistory fled the coastlines to the middle of the jungle to be safe, had no idea that they were sitting on top of jade and serpentine quarries, and the Olmex came looking for them. So what do those people do? This is how we can have money. So they start coring everything up, and then they start trading this green stone to the Olmex

who are filthy rich, the only filthy rich civilization in Mexico at the time, sending them resources back, boom, a giant city in the middle of the jungle in the most infertile place in all of the Maya world with the two biggest pyramids the Maya ever going to make is sprouts based on

Olmec money, right? So it's like the Olmex inseminated wealth inside the Maya world in the middle of the jungle. And that's why the height of Maya civilization begins in the middle of the jungle because of the Olmecs searching for this green stone.

Wow. Yeah, it's crazy, right? That is fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And then it just spreads out from there. And so that is the actual naval of Mayan civilization is right there. So yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, you had Maya people already living everywhere, like all over the Yucatan Peninsula down in Guatemala, like the area I said earlier. But yes, it kind of goes like this. So you have it here, and then it just from this one center area, this like, I don't even know how to explain it.

It's like this, it's like a shooting star rises out and everything follows it, right? You know what I'm saying? It's like the shooting star of culture and wealth, and then everyone emulates that, right? but that shooting star of El Mirador, this deep pretend El Mirador and Nakbei,

that shooting star is its own unique identity with its own gods and its own way of life that is nothing like the Olmecs. But it started because Olmec money was being poured into it to get all of the jade and serpentine out of that area. So do they keep that city as a stronghold and they keep on like quarrying all that jade?

Yeah, yeah. So El Murador last Now I should say this pyramid you're seeing right here It's impossible to know Okay do you see the other little bump In okay, to the left So we go up a little bit Where you can see a little bit more of the photo

To like the left side of the photo Yeah yeah you see that little hump Off in a jungle to the left That's another pyramid And there's another pyramid to the right And another one to the right That one right there So this is El Murador and the other one is

I'm sorry this is La Danta And the other one is El Tigray Now, these pyramids are so big that when I climbed up to the top of one, we spent a little bit up there taking photos, you can, you know, you have to come in from a helicopter. It's like a two-hour helicopter ride to see it. And you just, it's a flat jungle and it's just boom, this gigantic mountain that comes out of the jungle. But they, you know, they've barely excavated any of it. That portion you see is like the top tenth of the pyramid.

And so when you come down this pyramid, this is basically the way I experienced it. I walked down, down, down, down, multiple levels of the pyramid. I come to the bottom. I walked for five minutes. I'm like walking and talking with somebody next to me. And then I came across a staircase and I realized I had been on the pyramid the whole time. And I was walking in a straight line on one level of the pyramid for five minutes before I started to descend down it for the last time. Wow.

That's how big they are. And then what they didn't realize for a long time is when I came down that final staircase and then I was walking on flat ground, I still wasn't. Because you can walk from there for a mile to El Tigray and you're actually just on a pyramid platform. So the whole city sits on what is actually the lowest platform of the future. And it's not just a mountain of steps. It's its own standalone structure. Yes, because the Patin is flat jungle. All of it is flat jungle.

So they built up the entire thing. They built up all of it out of stone. So the whole city is built up above the ground. Well, I spent a lot of time in shitty areas in the jungle that get flooded and there's all kinds of stuff on the ground. I mean, like, the ground is what you're looking at when you're walking through the jungle. There's snakes, there's spiders. It floods all the time.

Oh, my God. Like, there will be ants moving across the forest that make the forest floor look like it's a liquid. Like there's so, it just looks like it's a liquid running through the ground. And so you can, it's not hard to imagine why you'd want to build your city lifted up off of the ground, right? Because ants aren't going to climb up through the foundation. Right. And you can get away from snakes, you know what I mean?

So you want to lift it up off the ground so you can't flood. You just prevent so many issues. And then you build your city on top of the platform. And the, but the platform is miles long and miles wide. Do we know where the jade quarries are? like do it yes i mean i don't think it's something that you can google uh there was a um

well i know you can google it but uh i don't i don't think it's something that would like pop up on google or a few you wouldn't maybe get a GPS coordinate for it maybe um we know where they are generally yes like like an expert if i were to go to el murador and ask um do you know where the jade corries are somebody can be like oh yeah i can take you on a trail and show you it but there's not going to be anything out there. It's just going to be like a crater in the ground that's filled in with vegetation. That's it. Because they took everything out of it. No, no, there's still,

I mean, it's like an infinite deep hole of jade and serpentine. And there's many, many, many of them out there. But yeah, it's not like, it's not like their tourist destinations. Like nobody goes to the quarries today. I mean, I've never even heard of this monument. So I can imagine even fewer people are going to look for the thing that made them rich. Yeah. So there was a book called Stone of Kings, and I think it wasn't even until the mid-1900s that the quarries were discovered. Because somebody kind of like me was looking into this and then eventually was like, wait, okay, so where is all the stone actually coming from? Like all the fuel that made all these civilizations rich because they didn't have gold, so Jade was the thing. And so they're like, okay, well, where is this? There is, Stone of Kings.

So in this book, they're tracking down the different quarries from where it all came from. And they found several of them. But actually, I think all of them are in Guatemala. But they're in a couple different areas. And the Olmex had all sorts of different jade. Yes. And all of it came from the Maya realm. And so you can imagine they're fueling Maya civilization.

And so as Maya starts to rise up, Olmec starts to fall. And then so by the time the Olmex disappeared, now the Maya are going. And so the height of El Murador is about 200 BC, which is in the same century that the Olmex fell. And so Maya civilization just roars on. This is the pre-classic Maya civilization. It's very broad. It probably goes from 2000 BC to about 200 AD.

So they were active for a long time. They had been around. But it wasn't until about 800 BC, 500 BC, that they started getting rid. from trading with the Olmex in the middle of the jungle. Now, El Murador continues on, but something happens in El Mirador, or in these first pre-classic cities, but we could focus on El Murador.

There is no exaltation of any single person in the pre-classic Maya world. There are no kings. This is why they're starkly different than the Olmex. the descendants of the Olmecs. They don't inherit the Olmec way of life. No heads that we find, no giant sculptures. Well, later on there are Maya heads.

It's like the Maya went and found Olmec heads. They're like, oh, these are sick. Yeah, yeah, and they try to make their own, but they're smaller and much less significant. It's less significant in general. So what's really interesting is Maya civilization starts with priests. probably what they are are sacred astronomers and then like you have these people that are scholars astronomers slash priests it's kind of all the same thing they're trying to figure out the sacred

elements of the world right and they need to spend all their time doing this so they're kind of like more important people they probably eventually become more important people let's say i don't know let's try to come up with how this could happen you have a guy who figures out something. Let's say he's, let's say when he's 17, he's like a very curious guy. He's got 150 IQ. He's genius. You know, there were definitely people that had a much higher IQ in the Maya civilization than Einstein, right? Like, they're just like us. And let's say when he's 16 or 17, and he's just a savant, you know, and he says, he says, watch on this day, such and such time, but really he's saying like next year, but we don't know exactly how they word that. Watch, that star is going to appear right over

my house and his friend's like no way no way or or maybe he starts predicting things right and then all of a sudden it's like magic like how can this kid understand all this stuff and he's like oh i've been watching so he's on to this like his whole life he's obsessed with this and he's starting to figure things out and then eventually he realizes that it had then he starts to realize that it's locked with the seasons too so he knows when you can start planting things and he's going this over and over and over again and then when he gets older to keep doing this and he's learned so much he needs people to take care of him. Ooh, royalty is now beginning. This is the origin of how people start being elevated above everyone else. And then as he has a son, he's taught his son everything. And then his son

looks at the way his dad's now being treated and everything. He's going to step into his dad's shoes. Well, now his son's accustomed to being treated in a certain way. And he's also elevated above everyone else because he has this sacred knowledge. Well, fast forward 600 years. How much is that going to transform to just from the superhero, the sacred person in this civilization that got the whole clock figured out and he's like the magician to now he's an elevated royal person

that's more important than everyone else 600 years later. And then how long does it take before one of those priests realizes I can learn everything that all the other guys know too? I don't need them, you know? And then over time, all of the, the Maya priest, all of the power becomes culminated in one person. We don't know exactly how this happened, but it happened across the entire Maya world. They got rid of not the priestly class because they were still subservient priests,

but the priests were not really acknowledged at all anymore. It was solely the king himself, the dynastic king, who became the physical embodiments of the gods themselves. And so by about 200 AD, boom, we have the dynastic period, which is, we call it the classic period. So something happens about 200 AD where every civilization just get kings instead. And that one king has all the priestly power essentially absorbed into him. This continues on for 700 years. And then there's about 800, 900 AD, which I was telling you was the fall of Yashiland, 600 years before Columbus shows up. this classic period of dynastic kings just collapses we don't know why it collapses well

we we kind of have several different ideas so kings bring about a lot of war right it's like a very egotistical civilization and war starts kicking off all over the place in the Maya world between 200 and about 800 AD everyone's at war and because they're all astronomers these wars are called the Star Wars, and this is where the name of Star Wars actually comes from. Really? Yeah, well, it's why Yavin-4, you remember, that's, that is the city of Tikal, the Maya city of in Guatemala. If you look it up, it's just filmed in the Maya city.

Like, people don't realize this. Star Wars, a lot of the premises of it are just based on Mesoamerica. Yeah, it's crazy. So if you look up, yeah, so you should be able to go to images and it'll show Yavin-4. Yeah, so bottom right here. Yeah, the skyline. I'm sorry, one, one up. We lost it.

It's somewhere around here, but okay, yeah, yeah. So Mayan ruins the Reddit link there in the middle to the right. Yeah, all the way to the right, yeah. Yeah, so that's the view. Remember, remember when the X-Wings fly up out to go to the Death Star? I think that's in Return of the Jedi. I forget, but, so the city of Tikal is Yavin-4 in Star Wars. Even this link is, today I learned that the scene from episode four

when the falcon first flies over the rebel base in Yavin, they are actually the real places. It's the Mayan, it cuts off. Yeah, probably says the Maya city of Tikal. So, yeah, it's really, really cool. So El Mirador is probably an hour and a half helicopter flight from here further out into the jungle. Because you can drive here.

You can't drive to El Mirador. And they literally call it the Star War. Yeah, it was called the Star Wars. Yeah, yeah. It's just literally called Star Wars. And the reason being is that they were sort of organizing these battles based off celestial alignments. Yeah. Because all the kings get their divine power from the celestial alignments, right?

It's like the stars. It's the core aspect of the whole civilization. Right. The reason we're here is because there was one philosopher king that understood how the world worked. And he built our whole civilization. And so we need to honor that. Yeah. It's like an extension of that hundreds of years later, right?

Science becomes a religion. Exactly. And so these Star Wars go on for centuries and centuries and centuries. And they basically just impoverished the whole Maya world. They just ruin the Maya world. And during this time, they are very, some of the main cities are really destroying their natural environments. Like the city of T.Kal, they're painting so much and there's so much mercury in the paint that they use that they accidentally poison their own water reservoirs.

So all the people get sickly and they start dying and there's like this plague spreading through Tikal, which was the... Ticol was like the major centerpiece of the Star Wars. I mean, it is the centerpiece of the Star Wars. I think you have the fire... Was it the Fire King or... It's like Jaguar Paw or, I don't know,

fire flaming Jaguar. Some major warrior king who just... messed up everyone around him. And his city starts falling apart. And then you have Copan and Honduras. They cut down so many trees to use for the stucco to decorate the sides of their temples. Think about this. Okay.

So in Amaya city, there were no trees. They cut down all the trees. And then they would cut down more trees progressively to make farmland. And then they would cut down more trees for stucco. And stucco is like this layer of flat. It's like you can make the wall perfectly white and flat to paint on. It's a perfect surface. From archaeological evidence, there was a period about 1,200 years ago

where from the city of decal all the way out past every angle on the horizon, there was no tree in the ground. Wow. Yeah, that's how much they cut the trees out. And they didn't realize that they would semi-permanently destroy the weather patterns. So it stopped raining. And so they, and so all of their maize crops went away and their farmlands became nothing. And we know this just from what we find in the ground. Like we don't find as, we don't find like the maze kernels everywhere that date back to these two certain centuries. So for like

two centuries, it just didn't rain and cope on. And the civilization just, or that city itself just like it, there's no point in existing anymore because you're all going to die because it doesn't rain anymore and you don't have food. So Copon, the most powerful city in the east falls. Ticol falls because they've destroyed their environment. So you have the two, like imagine if, imagine if New York City and L.A. just became deserted. What would that do to the rest of the country? Like, you know, it just, how much it would affect the rest of the country? Right. Your death, you have migration. I'm sure the people that remained left. Actually, actually, I just, I should say, okay, so New York is a city in the east, like Copon is the city in the east.

Chicago is the city in the north, like Tikal is the city in the north. And then Palenke, let's call that the city in the west, just like Los Angeles. There's a giant volcano in the same century that erupts. And it's one of the, it's the biggest recorded eruption that we have in ancient Mesoamerica. About 8.50 AD, it erupts. And it blackens the sky from Chiapas, Mexico. all the way over Guatemala, all the way to Honduras, and buries the city of Palenca in like several feet of ash.

Pompeii. Kind of like Pompeii. Well, there's other cities around it that it actually did completely bury. So you have three of the major corners of Maya world that fall apart in the same century, and then the entire sky is blackened. And it's like this omen that the way civilization is going is not working right now. And it's in that same century.

everyone across the Maya world, the winners of the Star Wars, the losers of the Star Wars, the people on the peripheral that never participated in it, they all put everything down and migrated north to the Yucatan and started civilization again. And that's the post-classic era

from 900 AD to the arrival of Columbus. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. They just all agreed that civilization wasn't working and they tried again. And they... I'm also, I'm sure it fucked up like the weather pattern too. have this giant volcano, it's going to affect how things rain and the, you know, everything.

And so even if like some people, I'm sure, are leaving for spiritual reasons and omen, but they're also like, yeah, we can't grow any crops because it doesn't rain anymore because we don't have the El Nemia or whatever. Very true. And there's one altar that was found in a city, maybe it's like Yashah, but it's a semi-important city like, let's say like a B-tier city in Guatemala where it's an altar stone where it's the king sitting down in the market talking to normal people. Never was there anything like that ever shown before.

If you go to like the 400s AD prime classic period Maya, those kings are on the stele by themselves and the god is behind them. Maybe the god is behind them. It's all about the king. It's all about the king. For the king to be depicted on an altar surrounded by normal people in the middle of the market, what it tells me is that and this is oh and i should say there's a date on it it's right at the end of the classic period what it tells me is that the exaltation of the king normal people are starting

to realize that maybe we should go back to the old ways maybe the gods never wanted there to be kings maybe we should go back to the priest way because exalting the kings over the gods is clearly not working for why did the sky just turn black you know what i'm saying it's like this omen in front of the whole over the top of the whole civilization that things have to restart So what does the king do? They killed it

They got rid of all the kings All of them The entire Maya world got rid of the kings They moved north And they started the pre-classic Maya civilization again With no kings Only gods

We never see the exaltation Of a single person ever again Until you know Like all the way up to the arrival Of Spaniards On the coast of the Yucatan So they go back to the old ways. And it seems to be kind of successful, but like right before the Spaniards arrived,

the Aztecs just like swept through the Maya world and just were eviscerating everybody. And I'm pretty sure the night before Cortez arrives, we know from Aztec records that they were planning an assault on, I don't think it was Chichenita. I think it may have been Maya Pond. Or maybe it was Tulum. I forget. But the Aztecs were about to commence like a midnight raid the next day when the Spaniard showed up. And they were going to wipe out Maya civilization for the last time. And then the Spaniards showed up the next day and stopped it. Yeah, it's crazy.

And so the Aztecs come out of that migration? Or like, do they? No, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. So, okay. So around 900, around 900 AD, the Maya, they all move north. They abandon all the old cities. They're living in that, that Yucatan Peninsula, connecting the,

Gulf Coast to the Caribbean, that's where they're all living in the north. Now, sure, there were people who were much poorer that are now living in the ruins of the old cities. You know, that definitely happened. But for the most part, civilization is actually happening in the north. Now, what's happening in the rest of Mexico? I'm not too much of an expert, but civilization has moved on, but it's never as powerful and sophisticated as the Maya.

There's a whole period I skipped over here where there's the city of Teot. Tiwakan, the three great pyramids in Mexico, that's an empire that arises from about 500 BC to 580 and they try to take over the Maya world during that classic period of the kings. And half of the Maya world decides to join Teotipakan and the other half says absolutely not, we're never doing that. And that's why the Maya started warring against each other. And so it was one Maya, one side of Maya civilization fighting for the empire. higher of Teotibokan, the other half trying to push Teotibokan presence out. And the Maya ultimately

won, pushed Teotibokan all the way back to the Mexican Valley. And then sometime in the century, or in the 500s, the Teotihuacan just burned to the ground from the inside and never rose again. And so it just like went to ruins. And then the Aztecs actually discovered it a thousand years later. So when the Aztecs discovered Teotibokan, it had been abandoned for a thousand years. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick, because you, You need help pitching your tents. Yes, and that's what we do over here at camp. Maybe you're in line waiting for a concert somewhere, and you just need something to lean on.

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What's up, guys? I'm on the road. I would love to see you guys there. Obviously, if you don't know, I'm a stand-up comedian, and stand-up comedy is my passion. It's the thing I love to do. And seeing you guys all come out to the shows

truly makes my life. I hang out after the show and say what's up to everybody. So if you want to come through, check out the show, say what's up to me. It would mean the world. You can see me at all these dates

and more on my website, mark agnonlive.com. And I'll see you guys on the road. So where do the Aztex come from? This is a crazy story. So the Aztecs arrive in Mexico around 1,200 AD. And we don't know exactly where they come from, but they say that they came from a place called Astlan.

Have you heard of this before? So we have no idea where Ashton was, but they come from, I think, the seven caves of Ashton. It might be seven, but they come from the underworld of Ashton. And we don't know where that is, but we know it was far north of the Mexican Valley. Probably it was from the United States. My guess is Nevada, Utah, maybe northern New Mexico,

somewhere in that area. And they were like a savage, merciless, mercenary tribe that were so brutal and warlike that everyone in the Pueblo ancestry and world, like the cliff dwellers of the American Southwest, kicked them out go go go go to the desert in the south you don't belong here so the aztecs you know they they get kicked out of the american southwest into the chihuahuan desert south of the rio grande they're wandering through the desert they don't have anywhere to go pillaging tribes here pillaging tribes

there and then they get further down south and they and they find the valley of uh mexico which is a beautiful place it's one of the most beautiful places in North America. Man, it's like, it's really beautiful down there. Just so mountainous and the air is like crisp, especially kind of in the winter. Like the air is just crisp. It's beautiful.

And they're like, oh, this place is pretty nice. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of pretty wealthy towns that are here. Let's try to, you know, assimilate. But they're so barbaric and nasty that all of the local kingdoms keep, all the local kingdoms are like, no, get out of here. Get out of the valley.

Get out of the valley. And so they're, they basically circle, like sharks they're like circling around the valley looking for any way for any way in and eventually they approach the city of calwa con and they approach cowacan and they're like listen our people are starving we're not going to be able to survive we don't have anywhere to go like help us out what can we do for you and cal wakan was a semi-imperial kingdom that wanted to try to conquer the other uh that thought that thought about conquering the other kingdoms around the mexican valley and i should say This is all right around Mexico City, modern-name Mexico City.

And so Cali-Con, the Kings, get together. And we know all this from Aztec historians, people who knew the Aztec history that were Aztecs, that told us the Spanish chroniclers in the 1500s. So they knew their history, right? It was relatively more recent than... And it just happened. Like, this is...

He's telling him things that happened like 200 years earlier, right? So this is fresh in their mind and their writing. So they even have the... The Aztecs had even written down in codices. It's in Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology. They have a whole codex written down where you can see them and they draw like comic books basically and some of them even have some of them even have even have like talking bubbles like the way we do comic books today. Oh yeah, yeah. And it shows the Aztecs migrating from place to place until they get to the

Mexican Valley. So we know exactly what happened. This isn't just mythology. This really happened. So they go to Calvocon and they're like, come on, you got to help us. We got to like anything. Like our people are starving. We're not going to survive. And so the Cowlcon, you know, king gets together with his people and they're like, well, what can we do? We got to do something with these guys. Are we going to kick them out again?

Do we want to make enemies of them? What if, you know, they knew that the Aztecs were great warriors, but they were like savage and not really given a purpose, right? So kind of like wasted potential in a way. And they were probably cautious of like, well, what if someone else partners with these warrior, this roaming warrior tribe? why don't we be the first ones to use them? So like, okay, okay, that's a good idea. All right, let's go give them this rocky outcropping in the middle of the lake Tesh Koko,

which is like it's a pile of rocks sitting up in the middle, sitting up in the middle of the lake with no vegetation or anything. So they gave them like the crappiest real estate ever. So they say, okay, you guys go live out here at this site called Tenochtitlan or whatever. It's in the middle of the lake. And what we're going to do for you is we're going to hire you guys out as mercenaries regularly to perform military operations for us. So this goes on for about two centuries. Or maybe a century and a half, like 150 years or so.

And during this time, the Aztecs are being compensated for their work and they're being paid and they're able to build houses and build roads and build streets. And they're kind of making this little island thing work. Like they're bringing in stone and building up the island and kind of lifting themselves up out of the water right they get more and more powerful until i think until let's call it like 1350 somewhere between 13 yeah probably about 1350 um they've got a pretty sizable town now like they've been doing this for maybe 100 150 years or so pretty sizable town growing pretty fast and the high priest of the Aztecs goes and takes this uh like deterra mushrooms and glays back and he gets this prophecy from the god huitz de potli to go offer the proposal of a dynastic marriage to the calyelcon

princess to send so he's a priest he's going to go tell the king to send the prince to go marry the cowlcon princess and so they follow the order of huits de potli so they go the the caliccon king or the aztec king goes to the cowwakan king and say look we've had this alliance for 150 years now we've had this alliance for 150 years now there's other civilizations growing around the Mexican Valley they may want to work with us someday they may try to hire us or buy us out

but we don't want to have any problem with you so let's have a dynastic marriage I propose that my son marries your daughter and your daughter will build a palace for your daughter and parts of your family to come live into Nostitlan and now we can really make our city wealthy and it'll be a part of the same kingdom

will be dynastically aligned. And so Cali Khan, they think about it, and they come back and they're like, okay, it's time. Let's do this. So they have this huge marriage, this big marriage ceremony thing. They have this big marriage ceremony. And then the Caliqon princess comes back to live at Snowsitlan.

And then the priest goes to back to the temple, takes the deter again and asks Kuwaitipoli, what's your next command? And he says, I want you to invite the kentai. Cali Khan King to finally come to Tenochtitlan for a ceremony. And I want you to kill

the princess and fillet her and have the prince put her skin on and be dancing in a parade when the Cowlokan King arrives. And so he does that. The Caliqon King arrives and he sees his daughter's skin being worn by

the prince that he just married her to and they bring, you know, at the same, it's like a it's an ambush they bring all the important people in and they see him do that they torture him to death they sacrifice the king to huitsipoli and they raid the city of caliccan and conquer it all at once so all of a sudden the aztecs control the the aztecs control everything and that piece of crap property that the cowicans put them on they put them in a castle in a moat in the middle what that's effectively what they did was put them in a castle and they built the castle for the aztecs over 150 year period in the middle

of a moat in an impenetrable fortress. And now the Aztecs control everything in the Mexican Valley, just like that. And they're an unstoppable empire at this point that expands and absorbs everything else around them. And they did that for about 150 years, just expanded and absorbed and just raided, pillaged, conquered, and built Mesoamerica's most impressive city ever. Like the Spaniards who saw Calvacan, the way that they describe it is like dreamlike. I mean, they had...

So we imagine the Aztecs of being so savage, which they are. And they're so warlike. They're not very Mesoamerican at all. They're like their own thing. We think of them as Mexican as Mesoamerican, but they're north of Mexico. North America is a very violent place. It breeds violent people. So it's fascinating.

So anyways, we think of the Aztecs as because, being so savage and so warlike. But when you would go through ancient Tenochtitlan, it was like Venice, like a city sitting on top of water, beautiful. It was so stunning that Cortez's men when they left Tenochtitlan, he's sitting up on his horse and his men are marching next to him and they look up out on it. And they're like, do we really see what we thought we saw? Is this all a dream? Like, what's the likely we're going to wake up and none of this is real? The way they described the city was that it was like serene and clean and just like perfect. The people had great hygiene. The cities were clean. The markets were full of thousands of people that had like police and

investigative forces to make sure there was no fraud like fraudulent goods being sold in the market. 60,000 people would visit the markets in one day. They had zoos with wild animals that contained the most exotic animals from all around Mesoamerica. And they had They had a zoo for birds as well. So the most exotic birds that they could find, like the Ketzel bird and the condor were being kept in these zoos. I don't know if they were being kept inside nets, like open-air nets, but the Spaniards described seeing these things.

There was also an archaeology museum where the Aztecs had gone around Mexico and found ancient artifacts and drug them all the way back to Lake Tashkoko across the bridge like moats that, led into the city and put them in museums. And then there are these beautiful gardens with the most exotic plants and flowers from around Mexico. And there would be people standing in the gardens reading poetry and people sitting around

listening. It was like a full-on metropolitan area. Can you get an image of that, like ancient Teno-T-Lan? Yeah, Tenocht-Lan reconstruction or re-nation. Yeah, there's some really, really good ones. You'll get an idea of what it looked like. So there's this whole other aspect to this savagery. Yeah, it's just fascinating.

Remind me, how does this tie in with the imagery? The second one. I mean, wow. Yeah. And how does it tie in with the imagery of like the eagle and the snake? So the Aztecs, what Huitzipoli had told them was as they were searching for the promised land, they get kicked out of North America into the Chihuahua desert when that priest goes under and takes the Dutura. The prophecy that he was told was, you'll know where our land. land is when you see

the serpent being clutched by the eagle. And so when the Cowlacon, when Cowlacon kicked them out to that little rocky outcropping, which is right, you see the center of the square right here? The rocky outcropping was originally there and they expanded the whole city artificially. So this whole foundation it's sitting on was built by hand. The entire city, including the ground it's sitting on, was built by hand and expanded out from this little rocky outcropping. And it was when they walked out to that little out.

outcropping that there was a serpent out there like a little water snake or something on the stone and an eagle came down and grabbed it and flew off and the Aztecs knew this is where we're going to live wow and that's still the imagery we see on the Mexican flag today yep and this is modern day Mexico City no god no this is this is ancient Mexico but sorry not modern day but this is the same place where Mexico City is now yes yeah yeah so this center you see the main pyramid in the center, that right there was leveled and just, just decimated. But the foundation it sits on is the plaza in the center of Mexico City. Yeah.

Can we pull up the plaza of Mexico City? And the Spaniards are the ones that decimated this whole when they came in and conquered the Aztecs. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, over the course of the next two and three hundred years, they just tore all of it down because, you know, they, the Aztecs didn't do themselves any favors. by being especially ferocious. And so the Christians saw them as being like quite literally demonic.

You know, the Aztecs, according to the records, we're sacrificing 80,000 people a day, you know, and they would do it viciously. Like, they'd have an obsidian knife, and they would just cut straight through your sternum and pull your sternum in half and reach in and grab your heart while it was still beating. And they would just do this to thousands of people a day, you know?

Yeah, babies and like... All kinds of stuff. Yeah. And so the Spaniard see this, and they're horrified. by it and they, you know, understandably think it's absolutely demonic. And the Aztecs, I should say a differentiation between the Aztecs and the Maya, a major thing, is that the Maya did perform human sacrifice, but they only performed human sacrifice

on themselves. Only people from their own civilization might be one person a year or something like that. And it was a semi-royal child, usually maybe somewhere between the ages of like 15, to 18. Maybe a beautiful girl or a very handsome young man. And for a year he would get to live in his own palace. Like they'd build him a palace. For a year he'd get to live there.

He'd learn music, science, art, philosophy, painting, writing, and probably got whatever girl he wanted, if it's a guy, you know, had concubines, whatever, you know, ate all the food he want, which is probably like turkey and deer and fish anything he wanted would be given to him. And at the end of that year, he'd be sacrificed. So they were, like, fattening him up, and they would sacrifice their best. But the Aztecs didn't sacrifice their own people at all.

They sacrificed prisoners of war. And so, yeah, they were especially ferocious. So when the Spaniards come across them, it's of all the people they could have come across. They were... Those were the worst ones they could come across. Yes, exactly. It was like, it's like what happens when two unstoppable forces meet.

right like because the spaniards were also ferocious but in a different way they saw themselves as civilized and they yeah exactly exactly yeah fascinating you know what else was crazy is that the the aztecs were appalled by the spaniards they they there's a book there's a great book called broken spears and it's it's the history of the aztecs discovering the spanish right so it's the inversion of this and the aztecs write in their chronicles about how they were so surprised at the Spanish coveting gold. Like whenever, they would say, they would see whenever Spanish soldiers saw gold, their eyes would get really big and they would turn to ferocious animals that would kill for the gold.

But the Aztecs didn't view, they had gold. They used it as decorative. They were like elegant luxury items, but no actual monetary value because money wasn't the thing. It just, like, that whole concept didn't exist in Mesoamerica. It was all trading. And then you had, you know, you had special items like gold that probably had a sense of divinity that only certain people could have. But like a poor person in the Aztec world having gold doesn't make them instantly rich because it's a religious artifact and they're not,

it's a religious dynastic artifact and you're already not a high priest and you're not a royal person. So what are you going to do with this? It has no value at all. So they were just astonished that this meant so much to the Spaniards. And yeah, so the Aztecs are appalled at the Spaniards in return. Especially those Spaniards whose whole purpose is to go there and, you know, get rich. His whole purpose there is to go there and get rich. Yeah, the entire purpose. Dude, you have got to read the book when Montezuma met Cortez.

It's crazy, dude. Like the Spaniards, the way that they're able to conquer the pre-Columbian world like this is just wild. Is it conquistador? Yeah, conquistadors. But what's the name of the book? this right here when Montezuma met Cortez. Oh, it's literally called Oka. Yeah.

And again, so Montezuma is an Aztec king living in Tanishad line. Yeah, he's the Aztec emperor, yeah. And man, like Cortez, he just, he's a crazy guy that makes all the right moves. Like every crazy situation he's in, he does this wildly brave thing that saves all of his men. And, you know, I'm really not an expert in like the conquest of Mexico. I'm much more an expert in like earlier pre-Columbian things. But I'm getting more and more interested in the colonial period. But, you know, I just recently read the conquest of Mexico.

And man, okay, so what's crazy is, as ferocious as the Aztecs were, Montezuma did not want war with the conquistadors. He was more interested in them than anything else, like fascinated at these aliens that just arrived. Did he see that they were out? done early? We don't know. We don't know what his thought process was,

but there's a lot of historians that wonder why he wasn't more aggressive with the Spanish early on. But he invited Cortez. It's a crazy thing. So the Cortez is sweeping through Mexico, slaughtering some cities, being invited to others and passing through,

conquering places, pillaging them for everything. Montezuma definitely knew that this was happening. And yet when Cortez finally arrives within like seven months, okay, yeah, within seven months of him arriving in Veracruz, Mexico, he was at the capital of the Aztec Empire, being invited to stay in Magda Zuma's palace.

He stays in Magda Zuma's palace. This is a super summarized history. It's way more dense and nuanced on this. But one of the nights that he's there, his men just perform a surprise attack and they take Montezuma hostage in a room and conquer the Aztec Empire just like that. Well, I just say they basically have it by the balls.

And like it's the precarious situation where 150 Spaniards have fortified themselves in Magasuma's palace and there's a million Aztecs outside waiting to kill them. And so I forget exactly what happens but there's all kinds of crazy things that happened during this period

and anyways one night there's this vicious rainstorm Moktizuma dies while he's being held captive and we don't really know exactly what happens if they just left him in the room and then when the Spanish fled the Aztecs later found him or if they killed Maktizuma and threw him over the side of the walls or if they had Moktizuma go out up to the top of his palace and talk to the Aztecs and tell them that

and basically, you know, speak on behalf of the Spaniards, and the Aztecs were so pissed off at him that they stoned him and killed him. Anyways, we don't really know exactly what happened because there's so many conflicting stories in the Spaniards trying to spin it in a way that the crown doesn't get pissed off at them. You know, the Spaniards had a lot of reason to lie about things. And I should say, they're not totally completely bad people because most of those conquisadors were just impoverished Spaniards

that their only opportunity to become wealthy was to go. go pee a part of the conquest and get wealth while you were there and then come back to Spain. So that was their only lot in life. So it's just, you know, it's like, that's why I say the more I study history, the more I, like, the less judgmental I become because like the Spaniards had no choice. Like this is their lot in life. They're going to do this or they're going to be poor living in the gutter in Spain. They're on a death mission basically. Yeah, exactly.

You're going to go there and maybe die or maybe get rich. Like, you're all the dice. Yeah, that's your only lot in life. And so these Spaniards are in this very precarious situation. I mean, think about this, dude. They're the only 150 Europeans in the Americas in the palace sitting. They have now taken over the palace, and they're completely surrounded by millions of Aztecs in the middle of a continent

that no other Europeans have ever been to, and they're from Spain. They're just out there by themselves. The most ferocious warriors. Maybe that have ever been seen. It's completely insane. Okay. So in the middle of the night, there's this huge rainstorm. Magtizuma has died.

And they wrap these cloths around their feet to soften the sound of them scurrying across the stone. And 150 of these conquistadors. Oh, and they wrap the claws around the hoods of the horses, too. And they flee in the middle of this vicious storm in the middle of the night. But you have to cross this huge bridge on the most. to get just to get to the mainland and then to get to the mainland well it took them seven months to get here like and they're in the middle of the aztec empire in the heart of it um and while they're in the middle of the bridge the flare goes off at the front of the bridge and it goes off at the

back of the bridge and then the thing comes on and the aztecs were waiting for them to try to flee so the aztec warriors are are chasing them down from both sides of the bridge and uh 150 spaniards fight against like just hordes of countless Aztecs and Montereux Cortez his I think his horse gets killed and so many of these Spaniards

had loaded down their armor with like gold and expensive things to try to leave with and bring back to Spain and so they would fall in the mud in the middle of the fight and they would drown to death inside their armor or you would fall off the bridge and sink to the bottom of the lake

and so Cortez I think his horse gets killed and his horse falls over and he falls into the water and he's about to sink to the bottom of two of his men grab him in the middle of this fight and I don't know the exact numbers but only a handful of those Spaniards only a handful of those Spaniards make it out of that fight and eventually the Aztec Warriors like retreat

most of the Spaniards have died and I think Cortez yeah I think he makes it out I can't exactly remember but anyways I read up to that point when that battle ended and I was like, oh, this is just crazy. But anyways, man, that's basically the fall of Mesoamerica then.

Like, that's the, that's from the Olmec to the Maya to the Aztecs. Holy shit. There's a lot of stuff in between there, too. Yeah, of course. I mean, this is an hour and a half summary of all of Mesoamerican history. I'm sure there's some things that were skipped over. I'm curious, how many of them were killed, like, once Montezuma's gone, does disease take over and contagion?

So the war really contends. It's not the war really continues. It's not just over when Cortez and his men get out. You know, more Spaniards come back. Yes, yeah, of course Cortez survives because they send, they send off expeditions with Pizarro down to South America. So, yeah, the war continues and then the, yeah, the viruses. So, you know, it wasn't it wasn't conquisitors slicing down and cutting down Native

Americans that killed off the native world. That certainly happened, but there's millions of... Yeah, it was waves of diseases. Right. And so those diseases would obviously target major hubs, you know, huge cities. And so, yeah, man, I think I've seen... I've seen what are people who study pathogens or whatever? Epidemiologists?

Epidemiologists. Talk about this. And they think that there were two dozen. waves of diseases that that killed off that basically killed off the Americas. It was actually moving so fast that, okay, so Columbus arrives in the Bahamas in 1492. By the end of his fourth expedition, there are colonies all over the Caribbean at this point into the early 1500s. And funny enough, like Columbus, as great of a feat as he achieved, he died thinking that he had actually discovered the Indies, a crazy, crazy guy. So in the,

early 1500s you have these brave but mostly unnamed European explorers that are just curious about the mainland because they're stuck on the Caribbean, right? And so they go on these little unauthorized voyages, you know, unsupervised voyages. If anything goes wrong, these guys are, you know, screwed. And so they go poking around on the coast of the Yucatan and meeting with the Maya people that are living there and trading with them, probably taking some of the girls, you know, back to the Caribbean and messing around with them. And anyways, exposing those Maya people to disease. And so disease sweeps down the coast in the Gulf and also sweeps down the coast to Bolivia

because more expeditions go down. And when Cortez arrives, so that's the year of 1500 about early 1500s, you know, first decade. Cortez doesn't go into Veracruz until 1519. And when he does, he meets the Maya people and he notes how there are small and sickly. Well, they're only sick because of those nameless, obscure expeditions that are only mentioned in early sources in like one sentence, right? But it was those guys that exposed these Native Americans to these pathogens. So on the west side, it spreads into the Maya world

across the Gulf Coast and then eventually over to Mexico City. And so the Aztecs get it and then the rest of Mesoamerica gets it. But all the Spaniards are. have been up to this point, they're just ignoring this Caribbean coast from, from, you know, the Yucatan Peninsula down to Belize and Central America down to South America. There's nobody poking around there yet. But civilization is still happening and the diseases are moving. And it moves all the way down Central America through Panama, eviscerates every single civilization, kills every single person in those civilizations. There are burials from this time period between, um, In the early 1500s, there were burials of royal people completely covered in gold, and you carbonate their bones, and they died during the 1500s.

And we don't even know the name of the civilization because they were completely wiped out during this whole period. Before the Spanish ever even knew it existed. Wow. And so it's coming down. It goes into Colombia. It goes into Ecuador. It goes down into Peru in the Inca Empire. The Spaniards don't even know about the Inca Empire until they start asking the Aztecs, where are you getting this gold from?

Do you have gold mines? No, they don't really have gold mines. Where are you getting from? Oh, well, there are boats that arrive on the western shore. Take us to those boats. They go down to the western shore. This is now 1521. The Spaniards have officially conquered Tenochtitlan, the Aztec Empire.

So now they're following the trade routes from where the gold is, because that's all I want. So they say, take us to the boats. They go to the western coast of Mexico, and then they say, where are you and then more people come up from Peru and then these are natives that look a little bit different and then they're talking to the Aztecs to talk to the Peruvians and they're saying where are you getting this gold okay take us so they get in their ships and they're following the trading boats and then they talk about how when they're going down the Pacific coast no Spaniards has been to the Pacific by the way so they're dealing with waves and you know Pacific storms that they've

never even seen before the Pacific is vicious and they talk about how the the I can just imagine there are these crazy moments where they see these gigantic Peruvian trading barges that are passing them that are like as big as Spaniard ships. And they say that they were capable of carrying like 60 tons of goods on the barge itself. And I can just imagine this scene where they're like passing each other in the water and they're all staring at each other because no Spaniards have ever seen a ship that big. and the natives don't even know what they're looking at and they're just passing each other in the coast. And so anyways, the Spaniards follow the gold all the way to the Inca Empire,

which leads them to Kusco. And when they get to Kusko, the elder emperor, the father of Atta Hualpa, his name's escaping me right now, but Alta Hualpa is going to become the most important Inca emperor. His father is dying of a mysterious disease, when the Spaniards arrived.

So those first people in 1500 that infected the Caribbean coast all the way down, Brazil, down through Central America, down through Panama, down through Colombia, down through Ecuador, into Peru, all the way up to Kusko, and the Inca Emperor was dying of Spanish plague when the Spanish arrived.

What the floor? So it was leaping ahead. And, oh yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, Hawaiian Copac. So, yeah, anyways, they conquer the Inca Empire. So through that, the geography, you can see that the Inca Empire doesn't have a lot to do with the Aztecs and the Maya. All they're doing is trading gold to the Aztecs. And to be frank with you, I don't actually know what they were getting in return. It wouldn't be food.

We should look this up. But, yeah. But they had these massive boats. massive boats that were able to traverse this i imagine treacherous waters and that the fact that they were so big probably made them you know able to get through the water like that oh yeah yeah for sure 60 tons is crazy they had nailed sailing like the peruvians were sailing out to uh easter island right yeah yeah and easter island is so far off the coast that it's a five-hour flight from santiago chile to get to east island it's weeks to hit this tiny little dot it's it's about a it's about a hundred days

I think of sailing for days. Yeah, yeah. I mean, holy. I guess gold from... Yeah, yeah. So what were the Inca getting in return for gold from the Aztecs? I don't know.

It's a tough, it's a complicated thing, I'm sure. Let's see if we get anything. From Aztecs. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I mean, there's a Cora from four years ago. Let's see if that turns up anything.

Okay, so they worked copper, gold, bronze. Now, I should say it's an oversimplification to say that the Inca were trading directly with the Aztecs. Because right there it says there's no evidence. You had, I should clarify, you had northern Peruvian cultures like the Moche. But the Mocha sometimes are subsidiary to the Inca Empire. So you have northern Peruvians that are trading with the Aztecs, and the northern Peruvians are closely connected to the Inca.

So it's kind of like, I'm skipping over some details. Exactly. But, yeah, so maybe it's copper. Yeah, that's what it was, what they were getting in return. Anyways, so the Spaniards do exactly the same thing to the Inca

that they did to the Aztecs. They ambush Attawapa and his men in like one fail swoop. They basically got a knife to Atalpa's neck. They kidnap him. They keep him in a palace. He sees a shooting star one knife. and the shooting star is an omen that he's going to die he dies uh and then the inca just and

the inca are just conquered and you know the inca were not as warlike as the asex they wanted peace they're probably the nicest people of all the native american uh you know what i i think that that's probably very factual that the inca were probably the nicest wholesome most moral people, major nation in the pre-Columbian world. Even today, they're some of the nicest people. One of the things that I realized the last time I went to Peru was, you know,

I travel all around the world and all around the Latin world, and there are places that you go where you can tell that the stray dogs and the stray dogs everywhere, but the dogs have never experienced love. Like, he ever met a dog that's never been loved? And they don't even know what it's like to be pet. I was in Honduras, and I saw, I don't know if this will track with your experience, but there was like a little puppy that wandered into like this little plaza school thing that we were in.

And it was like a little puppy. And the dude that we were with that kind of runs the town just walked up and punted the dog. Like he just like, whiz. Yeah, it's bizarre. And the dog was out. Yeah, it's bizarre. I don't think it's all Honduras. It was maybe just this one guy in the town.

But he just like kind of punted the dog like, yo, be gone. what i find is it's what i find is that's more modernity than it has anything to do with the ancient people because the ancient people loved dogs like native americans from mexico all the way down to south america infinite iconography of dogs infinite imagery of dogs they loved dogs i think not throw the spanish under the bus i think it's a spanish influence it's a european thing um that that happens in Latin America because Native Americans

wouldn't have, they'd be disgusted by this. Right. And so the Inca, the Inca, people who speak Quechua and Peru have really held on to this. And so what I was saying was, you know,

I traveled a lot of places around the world, and especially, I'm sure you and Honduras, all the Hondurans, they were probably really, really nice to you. Yeah, okay. Yeah, they were wonderful. And I'm not talking about them in particular.

I haven't actually been Honduras, but, you know, I'll go to, like, Egypt. I'll go to some places in Mexico, go to some places in Guatemala, some other places in South America. And I see the way that they treat the dogs. I see that all the dogs are starving. I see that the cows are starving. I see that the horses are starving.

The dogs don't know what it's like to be pet. They don't care that you're there. They've never been loved on. And then you can see the actual morality of the people that's there in that. Because in Peru, dude, there's not one horse, llama, goat, donkey, stray cat. or stray dog that's starving and doesn't know what it's like to be loved on. Even the dogs on the street will walk up to you and lean their butt up against you and look up at you so that you'll pet them. There is not one skinny dog in Peru.

They're all loved on. The Peruvian people are genuinely good-hearted people that even take care of the stray animals. It's like that almost everywhere that I've been in Peru. And I was talking to my wife and I had that realization just last month and I was like, yeah, people can hide it, but you can't hide that. animals tell you. And that tracks with what we know about the Inca. The Inca were so adept at running such an efficient empire that the need for violence in the way that it existed in North America was not really necessary. Essentially what they would do is the way that they expanded their, because it doesn't seem right for an empire, right? Like you'd think every other empire,

Aztec Empire, Roman Empire, extremely militarily adept, right? That's not to say that the Inca didn't, weren't great at combat. I'm sure that they had an outstanding army. We just don't have a lot of archaeological evidence for it. Because what would actually happen was they had this sacred valley that we talked about way at the beginning of the conversation that produced so much food, so much food, way more food than there were even Inca people. So what they would do is they go north to a land where they could use those resources

and they go and they'd see the people there and be like, Listen, your people are seasonally starving. You're not eating anything in, you know, the winter. You have no food in the winter. You don't know how to plant crops in the way that we do. We can supply you with all the food that you need for the winter. We can build terraces out here for you. And also your people are too sick and they're dying off.

And you don't have any defense against the Ecuadorians that are north of you. So I'm going to give you an option. I'm going to give you two options. I can show up tomorrow with 20,000 of my finest men and bring you more food than you've ever had before and supply you with everything that you're going to need for the winter. I'm going to replace all of your soldiers with my soldiers. I'm going to build you personally a palace in my city,

which is the grandest city in South America. And I'm going to allow you to still be king over your people and I'm going to make you more wealthy than you ever have been or ever dreamed of being. And you're going to pay me a small tax of all this, right? But he's now replaced his soldiers, right? So he's established dominance. But he's going to allow him to become king.

And he's saying, you can do that. Or instead of bringing you all that tomorrow, I'm going to eviscerate your entire civilization and you won't exist anymore. And so they... Offer you can't refuse. So it's an offer you can't refuse. And as far as we know, I think the Inca never eviscerated anybody. And it's looked at as one of the world's best run empires ever.

And like one of the happiest places to ever exist. And... There's so much abundance. So much abundance. And so what's crazy, another insight as to the Inca mindset was the soldiers, the young men that were fighting on the front lines against the Spanish. If their family needed them back home during the harvest, they could just leave the front line and go back home and farm. So it's like... Because they knew their strength was ultimately in farming.

It was in the abundance. With so much abundance, you have a ton of leverage. Yeah. So it's also that kind of like empathy, right? like okay your family needs you you're not available for the you're not available for fighting so you know you got to go do what you got to do it's it's just a imagine telling imagine any soldier telling their superior that in any other army throughout world history yeah of course because all their power comes from their military exactly right exactly and so and so that's how the inca empire grew

now the place i should finish this is um basically the last front now is the amazon They want to know, the Spaniards want to know where the Amazon River leads off to and comes from. They want to map the Amazon. So you now have Cortez, conquer the Aztecs. You have Pizarro that's now conquered the Incas. They kill Atalpa. They establish a, we were talking about Monko Inca earlier, who built the city of Vilcabamba and this mass exodus. They essentially establish him as a puppet emperor, a guy who can stand in place and be like, look, the Inca Empire still exists.

Like, kind of, you know. and so probably enough internal pressure he actually turned into a full-blown emperor against the Spanish flees to Vilcabamba for 11 years or so and then eventually he gets killed all the Inca people come back Inca empire's done

Last frontier in a certain way Now there's lots of other things Like there's Patagonia There's still all of North America That's untouched but the next I say just the next frontier was charting the Amazon River So they send Oriana down

Oriana goes down and he notes like these 15 mile long cities with millions of people living in them, gigantic buildings with stone walls and like these women warriors that they'd never see before and they called them the Amazons because it remind them of the mythical women warriors of ancient Greece. They see all this amazing stuff in the Amazon from 1541 or 1540 to 1544 or 1545. They do two different expeditions. And on the second one, Oriana dies at like 35 years old. But they map all this amazing stuff. But almost none of the Spaniards die.

It's so dangerous. And it takes them, I think each expedition is like two years or almost two years. It's more than a year. And, you know, all of the Indians that they take with them basically die or disappear into the jungle. And then I think all but maybe 40 of the Spaniards die. And then they get split up. and they all crash land on the same island when they get out of the

on the Atlantic coast. And so it's this fascinating story, but they had told these stories of these great civilizations. So it sends this surge to go find these lost cities of gold or whatever, but none of them are ever found. And then so this search for this

lost Amazonian gold, like cities like El Dorado, things like that, goes on for so long and they don't find anything, that by the late 1800s, early 1900s, all of these archaeologists out in England pretty much just assumed that all the Spaniards were lying about these grand civilizations at the Amazon and that there was nothing like that out there

and that the Amazon was too difficult to train to build these grand cities in. But what we know today through LIDAR is that all these cities really did exist. There were cities with huge step pyramids and might, you know, like highways that are hundreds of miles of long cutting through the Amazon with huge raised plazas and market squares. And the reason that no one ever found them was because the disease had spread into the Amazon and the major hubs were just wiped out like that. So they estimate that the population of the Amazon went from like 20 million to zero

over the course of a few decades. And all the major hubs were just eviscerated overnight essentially. And so those major civilizations that Oriana saw on the first expeditions didn't exist the second time around that Europeans came in. It was all abandoned. By the early, so that was 1540. And then by the early 1700s, nobody saw these cities again. They were like no European. I think it was the early 1700s that from then on no European ever saw any of these major cities again.

All they would see is little villages along the river with like short, sickly people. Now a city of gold, that was largely fabricated. Or is it possible that they painted them with this stuff that we talked about? Yeah, I should address that. No, I'm pretty sure that they existed. None of these cities that had been LIDAR had ever actually been ground truth. They'd never been excavated. We just know that they're there.

To this day? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only one is a site called Kiriguyu, and there was already a town nearby it. They just didn't know that the city was there. but large parts of the city hasn't been excavated. But yeah, there are other Amazonian cities that have been found on LIDAR, but no ground expedition has ever actually gone there to excavate it at all

because it's so expensive. It's like vastly more expensive than just running the LIDAR. Because you have to... Like right now, as we sit here, there's potentially a city of gold. Oh, not just one. Yeah, probably dozens. Probably dozens. Probably dozens.

I mean, yeah, I would say, I would say dozens. Think about this. The Amazon, how many, okay, you just guess how many, so we refer to, we know so little about the Amazon that we call them Amazonians, right? How many different civilizations of pre-Columbian tribes, native tribes, do you think existed, say in 1491, before Spaniards, or. ever got here. How many tribes do you think existed just in North America within the borders

of the U.S.? If you had to put a number on it? Within just the United States. How many would you guess? You're tempting me to want to guess high. I would guess probably like, I mean, let's say we've got 50 states. Let's say you got like three. I would go high number like 200.

200? Yeah, yeah. 200 is probably not a bad guess. I mean, yeah. I'd say 200 is not a bad guess. Maybe a little more than that. maybe like twice as much possibly okay the amazon is the same size as the united states so why would there just be one like there's going to be one in california and there's not going to be one anywhere else no man there's dozens and the reasons the spanish could never find them is because they were they were everywhere but they had risen and fallen in ancient times

they just like yashelon we were talking about had had fallen at 900 ad 600 years for the spaniers ever rose, the legends of these old, great, wonderful, super-rich cities had existed long, long, long ago at various different points in time. And so these villages that were around the Amazon knew the legends of these cities. And there were so many of them that whenever the Spanish would, whenever the Spanish would be asking about them, they say, yeah, I've heard of this. I think it's over down this way. Now, modern academics look at it and say, well, it was the, it was the natives line.

to the Spaniards so that the Spaniards would leave them alone and go look for this other place. I don't think that that's the case, though. I think that a lot of what we see about Native Americans shows that they're pretty honest with the Spaniards. And I think that they knew a legend of these ancient cities, and they pointed them to where the ancient city was. But I think they're so buried by the jungle that the Spaniards, hypothetically, were walking through the jungle, went over a hill and kept walking, and didn't realize they just walked over the city. They just walked right through it. That's how covered it up it is by the jungle. Yeah, and I guess I'm thinking like, okay,

there's probably when they land 1492 in the Amazon, maybe there's 200, 300 different villages, tribes, whatever you want to call them, nations. But that's excluding the 2,000 years before that of cities that existed and rose and fell. Exactly, right? So now we're in like the thousands. So you have this current layer,

and then you have the layer underneath that, and then a layer underneath that, And then underneath that. Holy shit. Yeah, yeah. So when you're looking for these lost cities of gold, you can see that the gold is there. I mean, I have hundreds of photos in my phone of South American gold artifacts. Like there were people who were wearing outfits made entirely of gold.

Just entire. Like the headdress, the mask, the little nose piece, the mouthpiece, this upper collar with the necklaces that are made out of gold and waistbands that are made of gold and shoes that are made of. of gold and gloves with gauntlets that are made out of gold like yeah it just it was everywhere it was all over the place and in fact I think that there's even a there's even a city

it's a mocha city uh called dang what's a city called um tcume you could look at a T-U-C-U-M-E yeah Moche city Tacume and um and so if you click on it

it looks like something that would be in ancient Egypt, but all the pyramids are basically like melted. You can just pull up more photos of them. And from this city, you could even type gold at the end of the search, and you'll see that the Moche, they had so many gold artifacts. Like, this is another El Dorado right here. That's the myth that I think about El Dorado is that people think it was one city. I think it was dozens of cities, just dozens of them.

Now, does a city appear the way that it was showing them? movie probably not i mean it probably looks like what we expect them as well american city to look like however it's filthy rich and gold like they just have tons of gold jewelry right because it's not like they're not they don't have ingots of gold they have little plated pieces of gold it's like a plate that's this big or it can be this big and they're hammering it out and making little uh designs out of it and then wearing it and putting it on their body and um so it's i don't think oh yeah yeah If you go one to the right of the one you clicked on. Oh, that's like the album.

I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Down middle row, second photo. Yeah, that one right there. Yeah. So that's what the guys were wearing. And so they see these guys and they're like, yeah, and they got a lot of gold. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then the disease precedes them. The disease precedes them and destroys these civilizations before they ever even get there. And a lot of the people are buried with the gold that they owned. Because in Panama, you had all of these graves that are found just like this guy, completely covered in gold. And so all the gold gets buried. So by the time the Spaniards are wandering through the area, it's just there's just nothing there.

They're walking over an overgrown plaza. Yeah, exactly. Overgrown tombs full of gold. Full of all the gold that they were looking for. Because as they were dying off, they were being buried with it. Because it's not monetary, it's religious, right? So nobody would keep it for themselves.

And also, Native Americans didn't view things like, oh this is jay this is serpentine this is gold i got to hoard this for myself there's a tomb called tomb seven at uh montaubon in wahaka mexico and it's the wealthiest tomb ever found in mexico because so much of the aztec world was looted um but this one wasn't looted yeah so here's tomb here's tomb seven um so this is actually south american gold that's being brought up to wahaka there's no there's no gold like this At this time, so this is about 500, this is about 500 to 250 BC. Wow. So there's no gold in Mexico at this point.

So this is gold that's being traded up from South America. And Mesoamerican archaeologists don't want to acknowledge this because it's like it opens up kind of dangerous territory for a South American archaeologist to now want claims to be able to study certain artifacts in Mexico because this technically originates in South America. So Mexican archaeologists look at it and they're like, no, no, no, this is definitely Mexican gold. Where did it come from? Well, we just don't know yet. Exactly. It's BS. It's clearly, it's clearly South American gold.

That also illustrates how sophisticated the trade lines are. Oh, dude. That's kind of like the, that's actually, that's kind of like a new. Okay, so everyone's obsessed with Atlantis. The interconnectedness of the Americas for me and the people who watch my channel, and some other people who do what I do. That's kind of like our Atlantis, is like just how connected the Americas were,

you can read through the lines and see it, and it's like, whoa, this is all one vast interconnected world. These weren't just isolated tribes. I mean, 500 BC, these guys are getting gold from 2,500 miles away. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's remarkable. Yeah, through dense jungle. Through a jungle or across the ocean.

Or a treacherous Pacific Ocean. Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So all of this was being catching something called Tomb 7. It's this stone tomb with these megalithic floor slabs, wall slabs, and then these lentils that cross over like this. I've been down inside Tomb 7. And it's actually the same size and the same shape as your tent right here. And so he was laid down in the center of it with this burial mask over his skull and all these gold artifacts around him. And this next thing I'm going to tell you It gives you an idea of the way Native Americans thought about riches Okay They clearly viewed them as

ceremonial and sacred And something you would never even dream of Like, okay, so Egyptians looted each other's tombs all the time It wasn't just modern European tomb robbers That broke into Egyptian tombs Taken from Old Kingdom Exactly right New Kingdom's taken from Middle Kingdom

Sometimes the grave diggers themselves Were the grave robbers the next day They would lock up the front, they had a back entrance they knew about that. Exactly, exactly. And Native Americans would never, ever, ever, ever think about doing this because this king or whoever it was was buried in Tomb 7 and 40 other people from a later civilization. So that's like, I could have some of my dates wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is 500 BC-ish. It's definitely the BC period.

Then the Misch text around 900 AD, 1,400 years later, 1,400 years later, later buried 40 people were buried inside that tomb just on top of that guy. Never even disturbed all the grave goods that were in there. Didn't take anything out? They found the tomb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was like a, you could, you could like pull the slab off of the front grave. Like they, the city of Montiel Bonn that probably still existed.

It was cleaned up, well kept, may, I should say, landscaping. You know what I mean? They knew where the cemeteries of the city of Montiol Bon were. It probably wasn't a secret. And so people wanted to be buried with this. Probably it was a historical figure that the Mischtex knew who this guy was and knew that this grave was important. But we have no idea the identity of this person today.

But clearly they knew who this guy was. So I'm pretty sure 40 people chose to be buried in there with that guy who had been buried in there 1400 years earlier and they did not disturb any of the grave goods. They just laid the body down inside the grave with him. And so it's like nowhere in the Native American world do we ever see any evidence of people of materialism.

You know, they just, they understand that gold is valuable and important but yet it's not something that you would ever steal from a tomb. So it doesn't have monetary. Like you can't just go to a market and sell it. Right. Also, if it's more ubiquitous than it is in other places on Earth,

then it's going to have less value or lesser value. Yeah, my, What I think it is is I think it's probably a sacred material that they were able to identify that it doesn't erode. It can't, you know, you can't do anything to damage gold. It's eternal. It lasts forever. It can go into many different shapes.

You can melt it down and turn it into something else and melt it down again. You can leave it in water and pick it back up out of the water and it's perfect. You know what I mean? I think that they saw that gold had a divine element to it. and that's why only important people could have it. I don't think that it's like, oh, gold is worth this many coffee beans, this much chocolate, right? So, and that's why the Aztecs were like appalled

that the Spanish wanted the gold so bad. Like, you're not, you don't even, you don't believe in our religion. Like, what do you want this for? They had no idea, they don't even understand what money was, right? So it's just crazy. It was all bartering in trade. I'm truly blown away by your recall

And you're I mean I understand this is your profession But even just like I mean you're like the same age as I am And the fact that you know just the depth of dates And tracking the timeline is like truly remarkable Like even just like following you on Instagram Like I knew that you knew stuff But I didn't realize off the cuff how versed you were And all of this I'm like just so blown away

I think that that's kind of the That's something that I'm hoping to as I go forward like making YouTube videos and stuff is that I you know I I study like my wife has gotten an education on on ancient history I mean man you live and breed this I live and breathe this is all I do and and what I've talked about on my YouTube videos or my you know social media videos is just it's like nothing compared to everything that I've studied but I'm just I'm trying to learn how to communicate these things effectively and I think I'm finally kind of getting it you know so yeah yeah I hope over time I'm able to cover all of this in a

comprehensive fun way for people to understand because I think that the thing is like history can sometimes be inaccessible because it's presented in such a boring way yeah and um and I'm trying to convey you know without um you know it's easy to ride the atlantis wave it's easy to only talk about atlantis but man there's so much more you know there's so much more you know there's so much more than that. And I think that when people realize that there's some really amazing mysteries that can actually be solved, and it's presented in a fun way, I think it opens up people to an entirely new world. And I think that the Americas are the key to that. Especially when there's so much on the precipice. I mean, of course, the Pyramids of Geese are fascinating to me,

like they are most people. But you're telling me there's potentially unknown cities, dozens of them. Not potentially. Certainly unknown cities, potentially unknown cities of gold. Yeah. You know what? Scattered through the Amazon. I mean, that gets me excited. Yeah, yeah.

You know what? Speaking of, I bet you, yeah, right now at this moment, Percy Fawcett and Lost City of Z is airing on the History Channel. And that's me talking about this exact topic. Yeah, that's just weird to me. And where is that airing? It's right now on the History Channel. Yeah.

Fuck yeah, yeah, yeah. So I filmed this like a year ago. So it was History's Greatest Mysteries with Lawrence Fishburn on the History Channel. So they, they, um, the CEO of history, I can finally talk about this. The CEO of the history channel saw me on Julian's podcast in 2023 talking about Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z. So they called me in to do this episode with Lawrence Fishburn. And I just realized, uh, just saying that lost cities in the Amazon, it just reminded me that's probably happening right now. It's probably wrapping up right now or it's about to start. Um, but yeah, man, there's not,

not potentially 100% is. You could just look up LIDAR MASSADR. of the Amazon and boom. Oh dude, they just found a city late 2023 or early 2024 in the Ecuadorian Amazon with 2,000 buildings in it. And I think they're just now excavating it and they've already started to find gold artifacts there. So it's everywhere. It's everywhere, man.

When once independent LIDAR becomes a thing and it becomes so easy to do that you can get away with it, right? Because it's illegal. Like if I had a Lidar drone and I try to fly it in Ecuador or Mexico or Colombia or Peru. The government's not going to just let a drone fly around tracking their city or tracking their town. Absolutely not. No, I would get thrown under the jail.

Yeah. But eventually it's going to become so easy to do it that it's going to happen no matter what, right? And then some guy is going to invest 50 grand in a crazy Lidar drone that can fly 20 miles away. You know, let's say like 15 years

from now. He's going to invest 50 grand in this crazy drone that's like the size of this room that you can put in the back of a truck. And he's going to sneak it down into Peru. And he's going to fly it to this site that he found on this Google Earth on steroids where you can see a, you know, a pen on the ground or something. And he's going to find an ancient city. And then when he gets back to the U.S., he's going to release it to the Internet. And boom, it's going to be this, it's going to be a wild west and like everything's going to get mapped. And, you know, if we could, if we could pull back the canopy of the Amazon and see what's actually under there, it's the size of the United States, bro.

There's so, if you look at a map from the early 1900s of the known mound sites in North America, from the Mississippi all the way up to the Great Lakes, it's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pyramids in North America. Like, we don't call them pyramids, but we should because that's what they are. They have the same significance as pyramids elsewhere. They're just made out of package. earth but if you saw them in ancient times you may not realize that they weren't made out of stone

that's how pristine they would have been they weren't just grassy nulled hills like they are now they were well defined and sometimes they had artwork on them or they could be painted on so anyways um some of them were made out of stone but um there were thousands of them dude and that's and we're just now realizing how uh how much this i'm talking about one famous map but we're just now starting to realize how underestimated that map was of the amount of mounds that there actually are.

Because now there's a lot of people asking for the mound to be updated and because they know that once it gets updated, the whole country will be filled in with red dots. They're everywhere. And that's just America. Yeah, that's just the U.S. So, you know, the Amazon is probably more or so.

Well, I'm excited for you to discover all of them. Well, I have a, I have a, I've talked about this before. I have access to a comet impact map of the U.S. There's teams that study, so they think that the Great Lakes are a comet impact site and that shrapnel shot all over the U.S. And they were trying to track the shrapnel of this comet. And in doing that, one of the guys that, his name's Chris Cottrell, he and I are friends, and one of the guys was working for the team, he sent me that map because when he was looking

at these little impact sites, he saw these little bumps. on the LIDAR, and he realized that those are Indian mounts that were in the middle of the woods, and he was like, hey, here's this map, you might find some use with it. Come to find out, I start mapping things in like Florida, you know, the southeast, finding all kinds of mound sites that hadn't been charted before. And I look at the Appalachicola River in western Florida, and I mapped like probably like four cities. in along the river in the middle of this like these swamps like the jungles you know you're miles and miles and miles away from the road there's nothing nearby it and i called the head professor of the university

of florida or south florida i don't it's not the ones of the seminoles the other the ones the the masquilat is the bull us f yes i called the head professor of the archaeological department and she kind of gave me a bad attitude and like she didn't want to talk to me and so i'd start talking to her on the phone I'm like, hey, you know, I got this access to this LIDAR map from this team that works with meteorites. I saw some stuff out in the Appalachia-Cola River. I saw that you wrote a book about it. I was just curious if you've seen anything like this.

She was like, okay, what do you mean? And so I sent her an email, and her tone changed. She goes, where did you get this? I've never seen anything like this. And I went, and I hung up the phone. And I've never shared this with anybody. I swear, I hung up the phone on her. And I did not realize that even the universities in Florida

didn't have access to something like this. So I've mapped a ton of sites in Florida. I have to share them with you, man. I'm talking about things will blow your mind. And the Spanish explorer, Ponce Dalyon, was taken to a city that was a mile in. And there was a mile off the coast of Florida. And no one's ever found this before.

And I found something that fits that description. And Dr. Barnhart thinks so as well. Somebody go down there later this year and find out. What the hell, dude? I mean, this is so exciting. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, especially like, something like me from Florida. Florida. Like, I've read about Ponce de Leon my whole life.

Yeah. Like, he's like a part of, like, Floridian history. And the fact that you're going to go uncover... Maybe you should come with me. I'll see you there. I'm being dead serious. I would love this. Okay. Yeah, let's do it. I think Danny wants to come to. Oh, fuck you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my... Dude, legit, sign me up.

Okay. And, uh, this has been fascinating. Yeah, truly. This is everything I wanted it to be. And I love your set. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. This is so fun, and I'm really excited for you to come back once you make some more discoveries. Thank you, sir. We'll do it. Thank you.