Julian Dorey Podcast - #284 - Scorsese Writer on DiCaprio & Most Dangerous Story NEVER Told | David Grann

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

SPONSOR: 1) Download DRAFTKINGS CASINO app & use code "JULIAN": https://shorturl.at/e8zhM (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY: INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey DAVID'S LINKS: BUY "THE WAGER": https://www.amazon.com/Wager-Tale-Shipwreck-Mutiny-Murder/dp/0385534264 BOOK/WEBSITE: https://www.davidgrann.com/books/ X: https://x.com/davidgrann ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Leonardo DiCaprio & Martin Scorsese Bought “Killers of the Flower Moon”, Story of Lord of the Flies Ship Desolation, How David Writes a Story 10:55 - David’s Obsession on Topics (Living Out Books), Expedition to Wager Island, Gulf of Pain 22:34 - Patagonia Region & Ship Falling Apart/Hypothermia Weather, Cannibalism of Dead Bodies 30:15 - Coming in Contact with Indigenous Patagonia Tribe (Live in Canoes Pretty Much), Using Bodies as Sails, War Over the Truth (2 Sides to Mutiny vs Stranded), Captain’s Log (People are People) 39:37 - Writing Story for 5 Years & Planning Wager Island 53:32 - Process of Writing, David’s Wife is his Reader, Linguistic Dive (Phrases) 01:06:25 - #1 Reason Good Writers vs Bad Writers 01:11:55 - Killers of the Flower Moon, Meeting Martin Scorsese & Film vs Book 01:30:41 - Filming in Oklahoma on Native American Reservation, Visiting Reservation Lands 1st Person (Seeing The Devil: Native American) 01:47:11 - Speaking to Descendants of Murders’ Families, Erasing History & Got Away With It 01:54:15 - What Happened to all the Money, Osage Nation Today, Any Regret from Taking Blood Money 02:05:11 - 1st Hand Witnesses & People Describing Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) 02:09:51 - Percy Fawcett & Lost City of Z 02:18:03 - Going to Southern Base of Amazon Jungle 02:23:29 - Percy Fawcett’s Obsession with Lost City of Z (El Dorado) Descriptions of Gold Layered Pyramids & Cities, Carrying Laptop in the Jungle 02:38:19 - Percy Fawcett Disappeared CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian D. Dorey - In-Studio Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@alessiallaman Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 284 - David Grann Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

about me what I write about I never know anything about what I write about before I do but how do you even go and do the research on getting down into the granular detail like that what's the story there you know I write all true stories and if I can't find the underlying materials I can't tell him why was Percy Fawcett so obsessed with the lost city is he and like what was the nature of him even finding out about it as he would do these expeditions he began to gather these clues like you know in the jungles of Bolivia and and he would see these earth maps. You know, they looked pyramidal, but they were made of earth. There's not a lot of stone in the Amazon. And then he would be going along and he would find pottery. And he started to think these are

remnants of these ancient civilizations. You would read some of these early Eldorado people who went into the jungle looking for gold and they would describe in these accounts these kind of fabulously described large populations towns bridges gold yeah all these things they would see and over time when other explorers would go into the amazon and not find anything and populations have dwindled to really you know tribal societies they concluded that these accounts were all myths and there's no doubt that some of that was true but people like Fossil would read these accounts and say no no I think this is evidence there were lots of people here and that these things really were here and that it could still be there you look like Larry David

a little bit by the way so I'm very proud of that and in fact I don't take that as an insult Larry David wasn't around when I wrote The Lost City of Z but if someone were to ask me now by the way. So I'm very proud of that. And in fact, I don't take that as an insult. It's not. Larry David wasn't around when I wrote The Lost City of Z, but if someone were to ask me now, what was your trip like in the jungle? I'd say, it's kinda like Larry David in the jungle. So I'm glad you asked me that. and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.

So you got another book option by Leo and Scorsese, huh? I do, which is great. That's gotta be exciting. You got literally two goats of the game who already took one of your books and made it and now they want to do another one i feel like if you write another one they're gonna want that too well i would feel pretty lucky about that but they did a remarkable job on the first one and so uh you know they did killers of the flower moon uh worked on that for a long time um were really committed to it committed in doing it the right way and so when

they expressed interest in the wager this kind of crazy story about a shipwreck on this desolate island that descends into this real life lord of the flies true story um you know it was a pretty easy decision on my part oh yeah now this is what in like the 18th century? 18th century. Yeah, yeah. It was a British ship that is part of a war effort. It's sent off to try to capture a Spanish galleon filled with so much treasure. The ship was known as the prize of all the oceans. And just even getting on the ship was nuts. You know, the thing about me, what I write about, I never know anything about what I write about before I do. Really?

I'm a complete generalist. So I knew nothing about maritime life in the 18th century, nothing what it would be like to be on one of these ships. You know, so everything kind of astonishes me. So, you know, I'm doing research. And I'm reading just even how they depart on the ship. They would be short of crews. You know what they would do?

No. They would go about. They would send out of crews. You know what they would do? No. They would go about, they would send out these press gangs and they would look for anybody who had any signs of being a mariner. So they would literally look at your fingernails and if you had any tar, which was used on a ship,

they'd say, oh, we got a mariner. And they would basically kidnap you and they would take you out on a ship. And it would be a three-year, you know, it was going to be a three-year voyage. And you might've just come back from a trip from two years from the Pacific. And suddenly you didn't get to see your girlfriend or your wife. And you're being hauled onto this ship.

And the other crazy thing, and your mouth always drops when you do the research on these things, is they were still short of seamen. So you know what they did for the wager? They went to a retirement home. They went to a pensioner home for soldiers. They had that back then? Yeah, they home. They went to a pensioner home for soldiers. They had that back then? Yeah, they did. They did. And they said, okay, we've got some 60-year-old,

70-year-old folks here, and we are going to take them and we're going to put them on the ship. And many of them were missing an assortment of limbs. One of them fled on one leg. Oh, my God. And they put them on the ship. And, you know, we could talk more about it. But the seeds of destruction were planted

at the very beginning and most of those people knew they were sailing to their death. And then everything you could imagine would go wrong even before they got to that island where all hell breaks loose. How do you even, you know, I had this guy Colin Woodard in here who was writing about a

similar area like the golden age of piracy. It's maybe like 100 years before. But how do you even go and do the research on getting down to the granular detail like that? Were there guys writing about this and we've been able to recover that? What's the story there? Yeah, it's a really good question because, you know, I write all true stories. And if I can't find the underlying materials, I can't tell them. You know, occasionally I'll come across a great story and I'll be like, yeah, that's classified. I'll never get the materials. I can't true stories. And if I can't find the underlying materials, I can't tell them. Occasionally, I'll come across a great story and I'll be like, yeah, that's classified.

I'll never get the materials. I can't write it. So what was interesting and kind of surprising to me was how many records existed. This was kind of the beginning of early cheaper printing. And on a ship, you were required to keep a logbook. But what happened on this voyage is they get shipwrecked on this desolate island. And then the survivors are eventually summoned back to England. And they're summoned to a court-martial for their alleged crime. So after everything they've been through, shipwreck, scurvy, cannibalism.

You go to court. Yeah, you're going to court. And if you don going to court. Yeah, you're going to court. And if you don't tell a convincing tale, you're going to get hanged. Could you imagine? Some of them have been gone for six years, six years of endurance and survival. And now everything is going to hinge on the story they tell. So what do they do? They all start to try to shape their tale. They write it. They give testimony. Some will publish it.

Wow. They create diaries. And what's amazing is you go to England. You ask them about the research. So you go to England, and you go to the British archives or the Greenwich Maritime Museum. You put in a request. Out will come one of these logbooks or these diaries in a box

from the 1700s. You take it out. You breathe in the dust. I mean, when I say dust, you literally breathe in it because the bindings have all been breaking apart. Do you have to use the tweezers to turn the pages? You put them on pillows. You've got to put them on pillows. The pages

are all kind of loose. They give you a little kind of... It's almost like... It looks like almost where you put them on pillows. You got to put them on pillows. The pages are all kind of loose. They give you a little kind of, it's almost like, it looks like almost where you put the kind of hold your place in a book, like a paper mark. And you use that to turn the pages. And, you know, you're reading these things. I will say this. When I first started this project, because, again, I didn't know anything about maritime history. I didn't know how to read this. It took me about a year just to become fluent in the lingo and the language of these ships and to be able to read these documents because they may use code. So, for example, one of the journals I pulled was the muster book. A muster book seems pretty – when I first looked at a muster book, I thought, well, this is pretty boring.

All it was was when you entered a ship, you would have your name listed, your rank, the time you arrived, and that was it. But there was always these little coded words next to your name. Sometimes there'd be a letter R. I said, what does R mean? I called one of my, these British historians who were really, you know, so patient with me and, you know, what does R mean in the muster book? Well, that means run, David. That means run. They deserted. They fled. So, okay. And then I noticed alongside so many of the names, I saw the word, the two symbols.

It would say DD, DD, DD, DD. And I was like, DD? What does DD mean? So, one of my British historian friends, I said, what does this DD mean? He said, well, David, that means discharged dead. I was going to say drunk driver. Yeah, drunk driver, yeah. And discharged dead. And so initially when I was looking at these muster books, I thought, what's this book really telling me? Then I realized, well,

this muster book is telling me something actually quite powerful. It's telling me the human toll that this expedition took. And so I actually calculated all the DDs. And out of 2,000, nearly 2,000 people went on this expedition, more than 1,400 of them had the words, had the symbol DD next to their name. Oh, wow. Yeah. And even for that timeframe, just a huge, huge cost to this. So that's more than, a lot more than the usual percentage. A lot more, yeah. They suffer one of the worst scurvy maritime outbreaks you could ever imagine.

And again, to me, that's kind of the richness of this kind of research. Because again, most people, at least I did, I don't know about you, did you have any idea of what scurvy is or any image of scurvy? Not really. I think Colin explained that when he was here. I've heard the term before, but you don't think about what it is. Yeah, you don't think about it. Of course, we don't have it now.

And my image of scurvy was like, okay, don't your teeth get a little loose and your gums turn kind of black? And that was kind of it. And so then I start reading about scurvy because before they even get to the island, suddenly they can't get out of their hammocks. And I read all this stuff about scurvy. And you realize your whole body starts to kind of come apart. First, your teeth fall out, your hair falls out. It would get into their brains, as one of them said, and we went raving mad. So you have these people kind of raving mad on the ship.

And then the craziest thing is, you know, even the tissue that kind of holds your bones together seems to be coming undone. And so there is a description in these logbooks, these journals that you can read. There was a soldier who had broken a limb. I think it was like four, I don't remember now, maybe 40 years earlier in a battle or 30 years earlier. Like 30 years earlier. Yeah, in a war because he was some seaman. He was an older seaman.

So it healed. Exactly. And guess what happens? He got scurvy and- And it just breaks in the very same place. The very same place. So you just, it's kind of coming on down. And then these bodies would be thrown overboard

into this, the graveyard of the sea. Oh my God. And the tragedy, the thing about scurvy, and you really appreciate it because I wrote a lot of this scurvy scene during COVID. Oh my God, that's not a good time. Not a good time. But I could have a lot, I actually had a lot lot of empathy I wrote it at the very beginning of COVID it was

that period of COVID when you were like um you know the package would come at the door and you would look at it can I grab the package or can I you know because you're from up here like where I'm from yeah it was bad yeah it was bad up here yeah and so you're like what are you doing those first day and so you know on the ship they're describing to figure out, they didn't understand even germs back then. And they did not understand the cause of scurvy. They're going, they're sniffing the air. They're like, is it on your breath? Is it in the air? They were taking vinegar on the wood, trying to get rid of it. And these guys wrote all this? Oh yeah. They're describing it. So you can reconstruct all of this. And, um, and of course all they needed was vitamin C. I mean, that is the cure for scurvy.

And- That's it? That is it. You just need vitamin C. You just need vitamin C. So make sure you have your orange juice. I take that every day. Yeah, have a lime. I mean, honestly, well, and it took still many more decades for the British Navy to realize that, oh, we just need vitamin C. And so British semen would later become known as limeys. And they were known as limeys because they were given limes on the ship to prevent scurvy. But scurvy back then used to kill more semen than anything else,

more than warfare, more than storms. It was scurvy. Yeah, it sounds like the worst way to go. A terrible way to go. Just attacking your friend. All you got to do is a little vitamin C. That's crazy. Yeah, and on the wager they actually stopped uh and you kind of you know it's funny when you have hindsight and you're reading these things because you know so i'm

reading one of these journals and they stop before they go around cape horn when they start to suffer from scurvy they describe stopping at this beautiful island off of the coast of brazil and um and they were describing all the fruits and the vegetables and how they just taken any of that with them. They would have been okay. But you know, in those, in those days, you didn't think about bringing that kind of thing because they were so perishable and you didn't have refrigerators. So it wasn't like something you would actually think so much about bringing. Right. The great rewards hunt is on. So join the adventure with DraftKings Casino. For fun seekers, follow the trail to huge jackpots, weekly bonuses, and exclusive games.

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Ends April 27th, 2025 at 1159 p.m. Eastern Time. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Now, you said you're coming into all this as a generalist. Oh, I don't know anything.

Yeah. What is it? So you just like to learn? You like to dig into stuff and, like, just learn everything about it and become an expert on your own? Exactly. You know, you, I just, I'm just like a perpetually curious person. And so you're reading or you hear something, you know, we might have a conversation, you know, and I come across something.

Sometimes it's a footnote in a book. It's just some random little thing and it just piques my interest. And, you know, before I know it, I'm in a rabbit hole. And, you know, in the case of The Wager, you know, I had discovered a manuscript from the 18th century. It was written by the midshipman on The Wager. How did you discover it? I was doing it. I thought, well, you know, I was looking for a new topic aftershipman on the wager. How did you discover it? I was doing it. I thought, well, you know, I was looking for a new topic after Killers of the Flower Moon.

And I was like, okay, what can I do? I said, well, I'm always interested in mutinies. So I just started reading about mutinies. And somehow I ended up, I was on the computer kind of doing searching and reading. And I ended up in a British archive. And they had a digital scan of this 18th century manuscript. It was written by John Byron. He was the 16-year-old midshipman on the wager.

When I first came upon it, it was written in this really archaic English. You know, it had the, back then the Fs were Ss and it's just kind of weird. I'm kind of, what is this kind of, you know, like I'm like, I don't know how to read this kind of thing. And I'm like, this is kind of boring. But then you're reading it and you suddenly see him describe, you know, the storm around Cape Horn.

And he says he described it as the perfect hurricane. And then he describes the scurvy. And then he describes the mayhem on the island where there's murder and abandonment and cannibalism, which he doesn't want to refer to as cannibalism. He just says, I think he called it that last extremity. So did you have to find out what that was, I assume? Oh, yes, yes. That's the first time you read it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yes.

You're like, oh, I wonder what that is. You kind of have to figure it out, although it's kind of obvious a little bit, you know, when you're reading the text or when they're, because, yeah, it's kind of obvious in the text. He just doesn't use the term, but someone's literally taking a, yeah. Oh, got it.

Yeah, taking out a piece of a body part, and you're like, yeah. So it's got to clear what they're thinking about then. And you're like, yeah. So it's got to clear what they're thinking about then. And I read that and I thought, this is kind of fascinating. And then before you know it, you go to archives. And then before I know it, my obsession, these things, it's been five years, more than five years researching and writing it. And at one point, I end up on a small little wood heated boat

off the coast of Patagonia. Okay, how does this happen? Because when I, by the way, we're going to come to Lost City of Z later. Like I was reading that, you're like trying to become a full-blown explorer yourself. Yeah, yeah. So you really do live it.

Yeah, I do live it. And anyone who could tell, just look at me. I'm not much of an explorer. But, you know you know it's funny i the way it happens is i don't think about it you know if i thought about these things i would never do them i end up doing things that i would never do in my ordinary life in the course of research i live the most boring you know order my chinese food get it to the house don't want to fucking camp don't you, you know, hate bugs. I mean,

I'm just, you know, I just give me a book. Let me sit by the fire. I mean, I'm, you know, that's my, that's my existence. And, you know, but I was doing the research. I did two years looking at these journals and logs and people, but you know, you're always wondering, you know, what more could I know? And you do feel this weird commitment to try to understand these people you are writing about. I don't want to sound high-flying, but you do feel like a moral responsibility. Like, if I'm going to render you on page and do both the good and the bad of the things you've done, I've got to understand everything I can possibly do that you went through. And so at a certain point,

I go to my lovely wife, who's the practical one in the family, the producer, and I say, I think I'm going to go to Wager Island. That's the island that it's now known as. Can we pull that up, Alessi, so people can see that on the map? Yeah. And of course, I should have known better at that point because Wager Island is situated in what is called a Gulf of the Penas, which is, I'm pronouncing that terribly, but it is known as the Gulf of Sorrows or, as some like to describe it, the Gulf of Pain. And I got, I contacted this Chilean captain and he sent me a picture of the boat. He said, you know, I can take you there. And he sent a picture of the boat. And in the picture, the boat looked pretty good.

I was like, oh. It always does. It always does, man. It looked really good. I've seen used cars that look great. Yeah, used cars looking good, man. It's looking really good. I'm like, okay, I got this.

And I said to my wife, like, look at this. No problem. I got this. And I said to my wife, like, look at this. No problem. I got this. So it takes me about three days. I take planes and then buses and a ferry. I finally get to this island called Chilauea Island, which is about 350 miles north off the Chilean coast of Patagonia, about 350 miles north of what is now known as Wager Island.

And I take one look at the boat, and I'm like, yeah, that's not Jacques Cousteau's vessel, is it? And then it was so rough and stormy that we couldn't leave the port. So one day goes... Looking at this map right there, like approximately where's the port? Okay. The southern side. So further down, you see that island? Yeah. No, I think you were in there. Wasn't that the... Is that... That's Wager right there. Yeah. Right there. Yep.

And then where's your port relative to that? It would be further north. Further north. About 350 miles north. So all the way up there. Yep. Another island. Yep. Oh, wow. Go further north. And north, about 350 miles north. So all the way up there. Yep, another island. Oh, wow. Yep, we'd go further north, and we were going to come down this coastline. Now, what was interesting is when we got to the island, I didn't know they did this. I mean, I guess they maybe did it.

But the coast guard, the Chilean coast guard, had closed the port. You were not allowed to leave because it was so stormy. And so one night passed another night. And then I started to wonder, you know, I did have a plane ride back. I was like, am I ever going to get off there? I also had the really dumb idea of I had to go during winter

because that was when they were... It's actually cold down there. You're far enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cold and it's windy. That was not smart. Yeah, but I wanted to understand what these poor people

had gone through. And so in any case so we finally get out. Now, looking at that map, the cool thing is I had never been to Patagonia before. And so when you're – a lot of the coast looks like if you took a plate and you just kind of shattered it. Yeah. And so – because there are all these little islands and channels. So if you kind of weave in the channels, you're sheltered from the Pacific. And so I was getting my confidence up. I was like, okay pretty good i got this i got this then after about five days the captain

came to me he said well now if we're gonna get to wade dryland the gulf of pain we got to go out into the ocean and that was when i got my first glimpse of these seas and uh how big is this boat by the way yeah i think you said that god I'm trying to remember how many feet it was. It was not very big. When I say it was wood-heated, it was heated by a wood stove. Oh. That's not what I was picturing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, no. It was heated by wood stove. And we would stop at the little islands, and the captain would get off, and they would chop down wood, and they would bring the wood onto the boat so that we could stay warm. It was about 30 degrees south. Was he putting you to work? He was very nice. He didn't put me to work.

I don't think he trusted me. I think he thought I would just mess up the whole damn operation. And then they would take a hose and they would run the hose up to the glacial streams and that's how we would get water for the vessel. So they would take these hoses on the island, and so it was the coldest water. You could take a shower. First of all, they gave me the nicest cabin,

which was just this tiny little, tiny little, I mean, when I say tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, no light, and you could take a little shower there with the hose. With the hose. Yeah, and it was like 20 seconds, and it was so cold. And it would wake you up. But I think I took – I stunk because I think I took one shower at a time. But in any case, so we head out into the ocean.

And I actually kind of grew up on the sea. I'm pretty used to the ocean, unlike the jungle when we talk about that. But I was kind of – Where did you grow up? I grew up connecticut so i i know you know long island sound but long island sound is not the open pacific no patagonia it's like not at all yeah no not at all and um and we get out there and it was like being in a ping pong ball you just had to sit on the deck if you in the inside if you stood you would be thrown and you'd break a limb so i just sat on the floor holding on things are flying past me the bilge is going i mean everything is fine

i just kept watching this jacket seesaw like this and like i'm feeling more and i was like an experiment i was like a lab test for every seasick medicine known to humankind oh i'll bet yeah yeah so i had the thing you you know, behind the ears. It's like I had some, you know, mystical thing around my wrist. And I, you know, again, I was pretty used to water. And then I took, I was just like, I just kept taking Dramamine. I just was, I was dosing myself on Dramamine, you know, to try not to throw up. If you keep doing that, though, don't you start getting like a little woozy?

Oh, yeah. Well, you're like a stupor. You're like a half-drunk stupor. Yeah, yeah. So I just kind of was sitting there like this. And then you had to spend about 12 hours a day before you would go into night into the port. And so you had to just sit like that. And I'm like, well, what am I going to do?

How am I going to – I got to distract myself. And so the only thing I could think of is why is it – well, I am I going to do? How am I going to – I've got to distract myself. And so the only thing I could think of is, well, I've got an audible book on my phone, and I had Moby Dick. Oh, that's not the one you want to read out there. Come on. I was not – so I put out Moby Dick, one of the great American works. That's great. Fantastic. The worst book to listen to in a storm being led by Ahab to destruction into the sea.

But my captain, thankfully thankfully was not ahab he was he was very skilled and sane and managed to lead us through the gulf of pain the interesting thing about the gulf of pain is we're looking at the chart and to me there's always what's interesting about history you know we all live in a world that has been shaped by the past but half the time we have no idea why or how, even the language we speak. A lot more than half the time. Yeah, where it came from. So we're looking at the map,

and there are these little islands we're going by, and he says, this is so-and-so island. I'm trying to remember what they were called now. Um, Waller. One was called Waller Island. And I was like, God, those names seem kind of familiar. And I had a copy of one of the journals, the wager journals, the seaman, and it turned out these were islands, these seamen, they were named after seamen. And these were castaways who had been banded on these islands because they could no longer fit in the

castaway boat and they had perished. And so this was their epitaph with the name, you know, Waller. And now the captain, he had no idea why he just you know, Waller Island. And now the captain, he had no idea why. He just says, it's Waller Island. And then we went by a cheap canal. And cheap is named after the captain of the wager. And now it's just there's a cheap canal as you go by it. There is a Byron Island named after the first manuscript I discovered, John Byron, the 16-year-old midshipman who would later become

the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. And eventually we do get to this island. And it really was important. This kind of research to tell these stories really is essential. Oh, yeah. You can feel it. You can feel it. You can feel it. And so, for example, and quite literally feel it. So, for example, I had the journals and they kept saying how cold they were.

And I looked it up. I said, okay, well, it's not Antarctic. It's about 32 degrees. And so, but when you get there, you realize how cold it is because it's a place of constant precipitation. So, it's always raining or sleeting. So they were always wet. The wind blows usually between 20 to 30 miles an hour off the sea every day. That's another minus 15.

Yeah, exactly. And it suddenly occurred to me for the first time, because I had like 18 layers on and a wool hat and all this stuff going on. And I was shaking. And I realized, oh, my God, they had hypothermia, a term they never would have used, which would have affected their decision making. So you make these kind of discoveries. What were they wearing?

Like what was the typical outfit they were wearing down there? Yeah. You know, they basically had to flee. Their ship began to break apart. Everything, the cabins caved in. And so they fled just basically what they were wearing. They would wear these kind of loose, kind of baggy clothes that were kind of down just past the knee.

They often would have checkered shirts. They would wear a hat. Usually they had a hat. And that was kind of it. Yeah, they're not bundled up at all. Oh, no. And their clothes are disintegrating on the island. I mean, by the end, some of them were basically, you know,

half naked, if not naked. I mean, they had virtually nothing to wear uh one of them yeah they just basically had nothing and um and and and you get to this island the other thing that was interesting they said well we can't we can't walk on the island they never explore it too much why can't you walk so i tried to walk on the island and you realize it's first of all it's mountainous there are these mountains that come down so and they come straight down to the water so you can't walk along the coastline because you'd have to go up a mountain the mountain it's literally straight straight straight down into the sea i've ever seen that yeah it comes straight down into the sea

and then in the middle of the island it's this dense wooded area your feet sag everything entangles your legs i walked you know maybe a football field and i was just exhausted and so you realize and the other thing is they couldn't find any food and sure enough you couldn't find any food there's no bed there's no animals they did find some celery and i actually tasted the celery and the celery did actually help with their scurvy although although they didn't know why. There's some vitamin C in celery. But there are no animals. There were some birds that flew about, but they tried to sometimes hunt them,

but they really couldn't. There was a few clans, but they exhausted them. And so they began to starve. But there was also people on the island because they ate them, like the cannibals. So how were they surviving? So there was nobody, no other people on the island because they ate them, like the cannibals. So how were they surviving? So there was nobody, no other humans on the island except for themselves. So the cannibalism was of their dead bodies.

No, when one of them would die, they began to eat. Oh, I missed that. Yeah, they would eat the flesh of their dead. Oh, it was them doing it. They would eat the flesh of their own. Oh, my God. Yeah, they would eat the flesh of oh it was them doing it they would they would eat the flesh oh my god yeah yeah they would eat the flesh of their own there was there was a movie i still haven't seen it but my buddy matt cox brought it up in a different context on on episode 96 with me one time but i think it was called alive oh yeah it's based on a true story you're familiar with this

100 yeah i read you know you do your research You read anything where cannibalism takes place. Yeah. Yeah. So I read that. So that wasn't that long ago either. No. That was like 40 years ago or something. Yeah.

Was it the soccer team? I'm trying to remember. I think it was – It was the Chilean soccer team or the Bolivian soccer team. In any case, yes. Yeah. It was some soccer team. Stuck in the Andes.

Yeah. I think it was a plane crash. It was a plane crash. It was a plane crash. Stuck in the Andes and they were very Catholic and – They ate the pilots. They ate the survived. They ate the survived. They ate the – They were dead Catholic and they ate the pilots. They ate to survive. They ate to survive.

They ate to some. And they were dead by the way. Yeah. They didn't kill them. They did not kill them. Right. Yes. And it's interesting in the journals,

they describe most things. They don't describe much that, you know, Byron talks a little bit about it. He talks about trying to stop someone from doing it um but there is they they don't really talk about but um one of the things that happened on the island is when i visited it then i want to talk about people just remind me that because interesting people do visit them from the area which is very interesting but but when i was on

the island you know looking around and i was like okay this place is completely barren i understood there was a british officer who described the island as a place where the soul of the man dies in him. I'm like, okay, my soul. That's a British line. Yeah, that's such a British line. It's like my soul would die. That's where the soul dies. Yes.

Yeah. And it would totally, my soul would croak there. But at one point, the captain said to me, over here, over here. And he pointed to a stream of water. And in the stream, I could see some timber, you know, kind of like this table. And they were about five to seven yards, these beams. They were held together not with nails, but they were held together with wooden pegs.

And they... No way. Yeah. They are remnants of His Majesty's ship, the Wager. And we knew what they were because a joint British-Chilean expedition had discovered them and tested them about a decade earlier. This is like 300 years later almost. Almost, yes. Yes.

And a wood peg. Yeah, the wood pegs are holding them together. And you could see them. Wow. their wood pegs are holding them together and and and you could see them and that was wow and that was really i mean there's this kind of ferocious human struggle that took place there and that was kind of all that remained and it was funny because i kept thinking you know i've been reading so much there was the war of words there was quite literally a literal war on that island and a philosophical battle between the captain the commanding officer and a philosophical battle between the captain, the commanding officer, and a growing insurrection about who has the right to lead,

where does leadership come from, are you a natural leader or are you appointed a leader, is it through the hierarchy, all these kind of philosophical debates. But in that moment when I'm looking at these timber, there are no sounds except for that kind of hush of the sea. And I was just so struck by it. I just stood there just kind of listening to the sea going. It was just kind of a remarkable moment. How many people were on the island with you? Just the captain or anyone else?

Just me, the captain, a translator who I brought with me, and two crew members. And how long did you spend on the island well the trip was about three weeks on the vessel and we were on the island we kind of went we explored it um got in a zodiac from the boat and then we went on it um and we kind of went all around and we spent a day kind of just exploring the island and then the next morning um i feel bad because i brought a peanut butter was it a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? I can't remember what kind of sandwich I brought. But I had a nice sandwich with me, too, which I felt really bad about.

Oh, because they didn't? No, they didn't. Well, no, my crew did. But I just kept thinking the people I was writing about didn't have anything. And I was like, hold that thought. We're having a little picnic on the island. You know, we're like, you know. But yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, sometimes when I go to, I love history. on the island you know we're like uh you know it's like but uh yeah yeah oh yeah i mean sometimes when i go to i'd love history so when i go to places especially like if i'm going alone to look or look around it might sound a little weird but it's almost like i'll stand there for a while and see if it talks to me a little bit yeah do you get did you get a lot of that there because you're you're even seeing some physical remnants of it. You 100%. I mean, so much of what you're trying to do... You know, the difference between history and fiction, you know, I know fiction writers, is... in those, you enter people's consciousness

and you imagine them. With history, you're always an external observer, even when you have their diary. But you're trying to get as close to external observer, even when you have their diary. But you're trying to get as close to the people as you can and to their consciousness. And so you have conversations with the people you write about. You try to stand in the places where they stood. You try to rest in the places. You taste the celery they ate. You are trying as best you can to understand and see the world through their eyes since you're going to be writing about them. That's so heavy. It's so cool that you did that too because this is such a, I mean, this is out there. It's not on my list of vacation spots.

Yeah, no, not, yeah, there's not much to see there. Now, I will just say, because again, you know, I don't know anything about these places I write about until I do. And so I kind of have the same, hopefully, the things I share with readers, that kind of surprise is really what I experience when I do the research. So, you know, when the castaways were on the island, suddenly, you know know they describe in their journals emerging on a couple canoes are indigenous patagonians oh yeah the people coming back yeah the carisquar and i obviously didn't know much about the carisquar before or anything about the carisquar and you read about them and they were these kind of remarkable people they they had um lived in the region their peoples for you know coming back more than a thousand years when you in the region, their peoples, for, you know, coming back more than a thousand years.

When you say the region, like that strip of land to the east of the island? Yes, to that strip of land, kind of, and both somewhat to the north and somewhat to the south along that coastline. But they were a people that lived almost entirely off the sea and at sea. It's a very difficult terrain to live on. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at Visa.ca slash fintech.

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So they were living, they basically, they spent more than half their time in canoes. And they were never, they would stay in a place just kind of for a day or so, but they were always kind of moving. And they lived almost exclusively off maritime resources. But they had learned how to adapt to this region. You know, there's always this thing, you know,

people, we underestimate cultural adaptation because, you know, often travel logs are described by the people, you know, if it's a Western or European going in and they describe it. And they're like, oh, I'm dying or this or that because they're not used to it. They don't know what to do. But people who've lived there for a long time, they've adapted.

And so they would always keep a fire going in their canoes so they knew how to stay warm. A fire in a canoe back then. Yeah, fire in their canoe. They always had a fire going. And when NASA was thinking about putting people into space, what did they do? They said, well, let's study the Karaskar

and how they adapt. No way. I swear to God. Yeah. How did they adapt to this extreme climate? And so one of the things they did was they looked at the Karaskar people. They were known as the nomads of the sea. So their canoes are made out of wood though, right?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So they're burning wood within the wood. Yep. They would put stones down along the base of them so that're burning wood within the wood yep they would put stones down along the along the base of them to so that it wouldn't burn the wood and they would keep the fire going all the time now are you reading some of these accounts through the eyes of the guys on the wager who are describing this some of the first descriptions that we have, because the Karaskar didn't write their accounts, they had oral traditions. God, I hate that.

The accounts, so the accounts we have, some of the most detailed accounts we have are filtered through their eyes, but are in these logbooks and journals. Okay. And do we know the size of their population, roughly? Like what it might have been at that time? I did at one time, and I no longer remember, but it was a few thousand. They were not a large,

and they traveled in familial groups. So they did not travel. They were nomadic. I mean, they moved along the sea and it was a place where resources were hard to find. So they knew not to exhaust the resources in a place so they could return to it. You know, the clams and the sea lions.

And then they would move on. And they were kind of always moving. And they would, you know, the groups that showed up, you know, maybe an extended family, two canoes, the grandparents, the kids, coming in. It's crazy the things that not that long ago, people in whatever part of the Earth, in this case, we're here in Chile looking at this,

what people had to consider just to survive the day and to think about how they were going to survive next year and now it's like a crisis if our electricity goes out oh yeah or something like that yeah no you you you know when i i will say anyone who reads the wager or at least the experience i felt researching the wager was um you know, no matter how bad things, I'm feeling better about my own life. Oh, yeah. I mean, what they went through.

I mean, just even, you know, even these 18th century seamen. I mean, what they went through on that ship and then on this island to survive. And the fact that any of them ever even make it back to England. Yeah. You know, it's just, you know, some of the, to get off the island, some of them end up, you know, only a few survive, you know,'s just you know some of the to get off the island some of them end up you know only a few survive you know a few dozen um but the you know they some of them build this you know a

little castaway vessel and they travel some three thousand miles three thousand they go through the straits of magellan i don't know if you want to show yeah let's pull that out straight some magenta they go through so they start here yeah. Yep. So there are two different... How big is a castaway ship? Oh, gosh. Well, they crammed onto this thing about 30 people, but they were so tight, they could barely move. So they had 30 people crammed onto this thing. It was probably about 16 feet or something, 20 feet. Okay. So they go through this? They go all the way south through these violent seas in this castle, and then they go through the Strait of Magellan. And the way they would navigate...

To get east. Yeah, because they don't want to land, because they're British and they're at war with Spain, they don't want to end up in any Spanish area because they know they'll be taken prisoner. So they want to try to get to Brazil, which is a Portuguese colony. Did they own the Falklands at the time? The Falkland Islands, the British? I'm just looking at the map because it would make sense. They stopped. That's a really good question. I don't know the answer. They probably...

Did the British own the Falklands? Yeah, later. We can Google that. Yeah, Google that for me. I should know that. No, that's all right. Yeah. You got a lot in that encyclopedia brain. Oh, yeah. Can, Google that for me. I should know that. No, that's all right. Yeah. You got a lot in that encyclopedia brain. Oh, yeah. Can't download all of it. Yeah, because I'm familiar with like the 1980 like Falkland. Right, the Falkland. But that's way after.

So when did British rule reasserted first settlement was 1764, so they didn't have it yet. Oh, you know what's so interesting? I think if I'm not mistaken, my memory, because I didn't write about this, but I think John Byron, that 16-year-old midshipman, if I'm not mistaken, then later does a voyage after he survives all this,

and he may have been the one who claimed the Falkland Islands. In Turisanta. Don't go to the bank on that. I could be wrong about that, but I have this memory that that was the case. But either way, they go through the Strait of Magellan to avoid Spain. They go through the Strait, which is – and the Strait of Magellan is – these are some of the roughest seas. I mean the Cape Horn where the wager originally goes across are the roughest seas in the world.

I mean – and you try to figure out why they're the roughest. You always ask – what I always like about the research is you're kind of like, okay, yeah, Cape Horn, bad seas. And then you're like, okay, well, you start doing research. You're like, well, why are they bad seas? Then you start to research. You're like, okay, this is the one place on the globe where the seas go around the whole earth completely uninterrupted. They don't get blocked by land. Yes.

So they're traveling. I don't know, whatever that is, 13,000 miles. I don't know what it is. They go around the whole globe. Then they get the water suddenly funneling between antarctica and the tip of south america so they're all this this sea with all this forces coming through the sea floor suddenly shallows and so you suddenly have this change of the sea so you suddenly have these cape horn rollers you could get a you get a you can get a 90 foot wave and a 60 foot wave

you could get a wave dwarfing a hundred foot you know a 90 foot mass on one of these ships you get winds that can reach up to you know you know 200 miles per hour 200 miles an hour yeah that's that's category five oh yeah no that's insane and um and it has the strongest currents strongest currents on earth i'll bet and you know when they were coming around Cape Horn, now this is not in the castaway vessel through the Shaman's Gem, but when they were coming through with the wager, they're in a storm and they couldn't fly their sails. Their sails are blown out.

And so one of the descriptions of one of the vessels, they describe that the captain couldn't steer the ship in the storm because he couldn't fly any sails. And so you know what he does? He says to the, what were known as the top men, they were essentially usually actually boys, they were like 16, 17 year old, to climb the mass, scurry up these hundred foot mass,

you know, climbing the ropes. In the wind and all that shit. In the wind, to know, climbing the ropes. In the wind and all that shit. In the wind. To then cling onto these ropes and to use their bodies as sails. And the ship was tilting about 45 degrees to one side, 45 degrees to the other, in a category five. Yeah. So if someone asked me that, I'd be like, thank you, Captain.

Yeah. I'm going to jump. Yeah. You would get the R in your muster book, run. Yeah. No, I'd be out. I'd be like, you know, let's just save the time. Let's just die.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. And the Shady Magellan, while not quite as bad as Cape Horn, are equally, they're known for these storms that just come up very quickly. And so they're navigating this ship. And he's navigating the ship. He had an account.

Because in back days, they don't have really good maps of the areas. These areas are because they're new to them. But there have been British seamen who have gone through the Strait of Magellan. And so he had the account written by him. So he's literally reading the logbook, the kind of things that I was looking at in England, looking at this logbook for the descriptions and then trying to eye the places on land,

saying, okay, this is where we are. This is where we need to go. Could you imagine? No. That's how they navigate. And they go about 3,000 miles. They get to they get to uh they get to brazil and there's you know there's about 30 of them survive they're so emaciated almost none of them

can stand right away um and one of them finally stands and announces that they are the survivors of his majesty ship the wager it's crazy and they're kind of seen as heroes and and and they're hailed for their courage and their ability to survival but then you know about three or four months later another little vessel washes ashore this one on chile island where i started my journey and this one is even smaller this one is just like a canoe. It's like a dugout. It's got a sail that's just blankets that are sewn together and torn. On board that ship are three people, including the captain of the wage.

He's so delirious, he can't even recollect his name. Oh, they were left behind? They were left behind. Whoa. And they begin to tell another story. What? What do you mean, another story? Those people went to Brazil. They say they weren't heroes. Those people were mutineers. to tell another story what what do you mean another story those people went to brazil they

say they weren't heroes those people were mutineers they abandoned us and so then they get back to england and they have this war of words oh my god and it's this crazy world reality tv in the 18th century yeah 18th and it's a crazy war of the truth and the thing that really kind of interested me was it was a war over the truth. And we are living through a time now where we have wars over the truth. Of course. And they even had – and one of the journals are like, oh, that's a fake journal. And then I was coming up.

Oh, like fake news. Yeah, like fake news. I'm not kidding. They used the term fake journal. So, you know, human nature doesn't change. No, it does not. The technology changes, dialogue changes, the clothes, the costumes we wear. But human nature. They're people.

People are people. I was going to ask you that earlier. Like when you're reading this, once you start to get the lingo down, once you get past, you know, paying attention to how different some of the writing is and the weird styles, and you actually start to see the substance of what they're saying, and you kind of get lost in it. So that now you're like, oh, I'm hooked. I'm in. Did it feel like – this might be a weird way to look at it, but did it feel like you were talking to a contemporary who's just living in a different world? In many ways, yes. And in the sense that I wrote the book

from three different perspectives. Since they're all having wars over the truth, I can't completely resolve exactly what happened. So I decided I'm gonna tell it from the three points of view and let the reader be the juror. Let them interpret. And I would be so immersed when I would write from one of their perspectives that I'd be like, oh, yeah, I understand exactly what this person did and why. And I would have done that. And then you

suddenly read the other perspective like, I can't believe that person did that. But I'll give you, but what was so interesting to me is that it gave me such insights into the way we kind of shape our stories because each of them would write their stories and they weren't liars they didn't lie in the sense that like i've written about liars people just like con artists and they're just lying about everything left and right and you don't even know like they write their birthday and then you check it and it's like yeah no you know and that wrong nationality and you shout out matt cox yeah and um and but in this case he didn't lie.

But what they would do is they would kind of omit certain things and then highlight certain things where they would look good. And I'll just give you a great example. One of them said, the captain actually, scribes in a report. He's writing, I was forced to proceed to extremities forced to proceed to extremities to extremities okay sounds like something like and then i would pick up john byron's account the 16 year old midshipman the very scene and his was writing it from the sales yeah yeah and his account he says uh

oh yeah he shot him right in the head and he bled out in my arms and and so you know and so you you you know he didn't lie he just said i was forced to proceed to extremities so you know he took him out back i'm not gonna get into it i was gonna leave that bit out so um but you you got that insight but i always said you know the thing that was so interesting to me was when I was writing about that on that island. Because, you know, they break into camps and they do good things, they do bad things. But I would always say, I was always wondering.

I was wondering myself, and I think the reader, no doubt, would wonder too, is like, you know, who would I have been on that island? Like, would I have been the captain? Would I have been the mutineer? Would I have been the captain? Would I have been the mutineer? Would I have been like Byron who was torn between them? And I always thought to myself, if you think you know the answer, you don't. And if you come to it too quickly, you're not asking yourself the hard question. I always try to think of the line this way.

When people say, if I were blank, then I would blank. I'm very careful with that because it gets dangerous. You don't know, especially with the higher the stakes, whatever it is. This is life and death, like old school scenario. You don't fucking know until you're in that situation. And you'd hope you're the right guy. But, you know, also the people that might have been the mutineers or however it played out, they probably thought they were the good guys. They did.

You know? And in fact, when you, and you could see their vantage point. They had some good reasons for mutinying. And you could, you know, it's a complicated situation. And the leader of the mutinies in many ways is this incredibly instinctive leader.

The captain is very rigid and he kind of thinks he should remain in command because he was the commander of the ship. He's very concerned about kind of sacrifice for the empire. And the mutineers are like,

yeah, we don't want to die anymore. We have nothing. You know, he's still trying to come up with plans to try to, you know, attack the Spanish. are like, yeah, we don't want to die anymore. We have nothing. He's still trying to come up with plans to try to attack the Spanish. And like, we're stranded on an island dying. Can we just get back to England? And so they have these kind of philosophical debates. And you see these words.

You know what the phrase the mutineers, the leader of the mutineers uses? He uses a phrase called, I think I have this right because it's been a while now, but I think he says the phrase to kind of rally the mutineers. I think he said liberty and happiness or life and liberty. And it's basically the same phrase you see in the Revolutionary War. So you could see this even playing out in these incredibly small ways. And as you say that construct of if, I always like to research and write about situations where there is a kind of confined space, whether on a ship or on an island, put people in an extreme, people, not put them,

they're in an extreme circumstances, and it ends up testing your character. Yes. And it's like a laboratory, because most of us in our daily life, you know, we don't always have to, you know, when I'm riding here to get to your show, we're not testing my character. You know, I get an Uber, it's pretty easy. You know, I got my coffee, everything's pretty smooth. But they're getting their character tested every minute and moment.

And so it inevitably ends up revealing who they are, both the good and the bad. There's something really powerful in that because, like you said, human nature doesn't change. So you can learn lessons from all this, relate it back to today. Sometimes, as you were pointing out, there's examples that literally look like things we see today. But I mean, this is a theme across the books that I know of that you've written. Like, these are the kinds of stories you do. They're very different. They're all unique. But whether it be Percy Fawcett in the middle of the Amazon, or writing about the Osage murders in 1920s in the middle of Oklahoma, you know, basically on a reservation, or writing about the wager on this fucking island down there where they're all going in 200 mile an hour.

I mean, it's suicide to a lot of us, but it's fascinating to see that there's people who would survive these things or could tell the tale and give us lessons that we still have today. Very cool. They do. And I always think if you pick the right story,

they're timeless. Yeah. They speak to you. You know, I think we tend to, and, you know, I started my career as a reporter. So I had this thing. Well, in Mexico. In Mexico?

Yeah, yeah, Mexico. I was doing some research down there. Hablas Espanol? Well, muy malo ahora. But back then I could speak. I'm embarrassed to speak now. I'm going to speak now I'm gonna use it but and um and so I got some my some of my first clips uh back then but there was a kind of a there's a kind of a

predilection or uh the the new it's got to be new it's the news it's it's it's happening right you got to break it you got to break what's happening. And then at a certain point, I became kind of unshackled from that. And I was like, just because it didn't happen yesterday, why isn't this story just as riveting or interesting? And maybe we can even see it more clearly now. We have all, you know, I find it very hard to see the present, you know, because things are happening. It's confused. It's hard to know all the information, to kind of decipher things. And so maybe one of these stories from the past can still speak to us. It's still timeless. And I do think, I mean, I do think that human nature is constant.

I mean, I do, you know, I think culture can change and affect the way humans behave. But what is inside us, whether you're reading antiquity or the Bible, or you're reading the, you know, the paper today. I mean, people are people. Yeah. I think the more you read and the older you get, the more you appreciate that too. You know, and I get to talk to a lot of cool people in here who are looking at a lot of things. It could be everything from ancient to the news today. And like you, you kind of make those patterns the same way you did over time. But you said you were writing this for five years, approximately?

Yeah, I always, about half a decade, probably a little more than half a decade researching and writing. So how far into the five years from, because I also love how you get the idea, you hear something, you're like, ooh, that sounds interesting. You go down the rabbit hole, you scratch your own itch, you kind of go after it. But how far into the five years did you do this trip uh probably about

uh let's see at least two two years okay yeah at least two years of archival research before i made that trip so you had been with it had you were doing all the research before then had you put pen to paper and started writing any of the chapters yet no i don't think it's that point no that's great i didn't feel like i had enough command yet of the material yet no i don't think it's that point no that's great i didn't feel like i had enough command yet of the material and sometimes and maybe if we talk about for example uh you know even like killers of the flower no we're gonna talk about that yeah you know you think you know a story and then what you think you're writing about and you've been working on for two years may the bottom may fall out and you may end up telling a different story about the same subject because you realize the facts are suddenly leading

you in a place you hadn't expected and so even the framework that you were working within can change and i will say with with the wager you know for those two years i never it hadn't i was never thinking i'm going to go to wager island i just oh you didn't you didn't have that idea at all no i i mean it just it seemed kind of just not a possibility i mean how would you your wife was saying don't go or no just because like you kind of look on it and you're like well i mean how would you even get there the mechanics of it all just seemed kind of beyond me it's not like you get a tour boat. It's like, I wouldn't even know how to do that. And then I found someone who could finally help me.

But at a certain point, you're kind of like, this is still a piece. I don't, this is a piece that's missing. This is a piece that's missing. It's gnawing at you. And so then you're just like, okay, well, I guess I'm gonna try to go to Wager Island. And then you went and you do really breathe it in.

It sounds like from everything you've said, it gave you like the whole perspective on it that you needed. You could describe the island. You could feel the wind and the accounts make sense. And you're kind of checking the accounts. You know, as a writer, you are always skeptical. You know, you have to maintain that skepticism. You have to interrogate.

And so you're confirming. I've written about con artists. So it's like people lie about their birthday. So when they're just, are they exaggerating? Often in travel accounts, they exaggerate a lot. Are they exaggerating about the lack of food? I was like, no, turns out there really is not food. Are they exaggerating about the cold?

No. And so those, can they not walk across that? Oh, yeah. That really, it's hard to walk. And so that kind of, you're looking for that kind of confirmation, but you're also looking for that connection, you know? And I think you asked me that earlier. And I think that, in a way, is partly as much as anything you're after.

And it's sometimes, it's not even going to go in the book. I don't even describe my journey in the book. I mean, unlike- Not at all. No, lots of you see I describe my journey in the book. I mean, unlike... Not at all. No, Lost City of Z, I describe my journey for various reasons. But for this one, I didn't. It just informed the narrative. That's really cool. Did you, when you finished the trip and got home, did you literally start writing right away?

I think it was shortly after that I did. I was like, okay, I feel like I'm ready. What's your process in doing it? Because, you know, with Lost City of Z, the way you wrote the book kind of, as you just said, like interspersing your own personal experience with the history, also with some of the modern history as well, like relating it all together is really seamless. But as someone who, like, I've been a writer in the past, I love that stuff, not on your level, but, you know, it's like,

you made it come together. So, how do you get there? Like, what's your process? Do you outline it all ahead of time? Crazy outlines. Crazy outlines. I could not write without an outline. And for a book, I think it would really be impossible. And like a book like The Lost City of Z, where, you know, I'm gonna be alternating each chapter pretty much between the past and the present, between Fawcett's journey into the Amazon and my own journey kind of following in his footsteps and his son. And for those who haven't read the book, it's about a British explorer disappeared in the 1920s looking for this ancient civilization, which he called the City of Z.

Which we know as El Dorado. A kind of popular culture. A kind of popular culture. Yeah. It's kind of a version of El Dorado. Of course, he would have called it the city of z which we know is el dorado yeah kind of popular culture kind of popular culture yeah it's kind of version of el dorado of course he would have called it the city of zed uh which is very funny which i i had not occurred to me i because just being a dumb gringo i just was like you know it's the city of z city z and then i remember when the book came out i was doing an interview in england about it and they're like oh the city of zed and i was like oh yeah i guess fett would have called it the Said. I felt really stupid about that. But, yeah, so outlines are really important.

And I do kind of two kinds of outlines, and this may get too much in the weeds. But I do a kind of a global outline because you're trying to figure out a book kind of where is it going to go. Like the 30,000-foot view. Yeah, like a book's going to have a narrative, right? It's going to be a journey. And where is it kind of flowing? Where is it kind of going? Where is it going to begin?

Where do you see some of the peaks and valleys of this story? Or more often than not, it's kind of the twists and turns of the story, I think is a better way to phrase it because stories have these unusual twists. And so you have that and you're thinking about that. You're kind of sketching that, always that out and fine-tuning it. And that gives you a sense of the kind of the structure, the general story. And then you have these kind of micro-outlines. And these micro-outlines are basically the chapters.

And you'll just put in all your information and break it down. And even a chapter will have its own twists and turns. Oh, of course. So each piece, you're kind of working. So you both have to have an intense micro. But you've read those accounts. And I do it in my own thing where you're so micro that you're like, this is so boring. Where am I? I'm like know i'll give you the the and i have a good reader and it's my wife my wife is my first reader best reader you can have right there best reader i can have and she's a journalist oh she is she is a journalist kira darton and

very cool yeah and she runs uh she does documentaries runs runs a place called retro port and they do these quick little tangent what was so what's she doing she's she well she does these documentaries. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but like what kinds of – let's give her a shout out. What kinds of things? Oh, she does – go to RetroReport.com. I think that's what it would be.

And they do amazing stuff. And they do docs. They take historical stories, usually kind of more recent than what I've done, and kind of look at where was the story misreported. They might update it. You know, They finish stories. It's also one of the great age machines ever because they will interview people for things that have happened in the 70s and 80s, and you see them as these young people when they're older. But they do remarkable stuff. I mean, they did, for example, the case of the hot coffee with McDonald's, something we all heard

about. And you think it's one thing, and then they reinvest it, and you're like, actually, no, the thing we know in myth is not quite accurate. I hate how that happens. They get to that. But she's my best reader. That's great. Yeah. And this is very embarrassing, but it's true.

When I finish a chapter, I kind of tiptoe out very nervously. Here it is. You're pretty anxious when you you know you write something you know okay can you take a look at this and i kind of tipped away and i try to kind of peek i go around the corner and i kind of try to kind of watch her kind of reading out of the corner of my eye periodically you know where's that pen going and inevitably i always hear her kind of go, oh, God, no. Oh, God, no. That's not what you want to hear. Yeah.

And it's where I have written 20,000 words on how they built the wager ship. And I got a little micro. I went really in depth, you know, how they measure the wood. And, you know, she, you know know the reader is not gonna want 20 000 words and so i have to then take those 20 000 words distill them into the most compelling 500 or a thousand words so you will get the best facts 500 or a thousand yeah yeah down from 20 000. oh yeah yeah gravity is wit man yeah brevity's lit And I have what I call the God-Know file. The God-Know file is the cemetery of my micro-obsessions.

But... We need to publish those one day. I just want to write that down. And I used to get really upset. I'd be like, I wasted so much time. Why did I do this? And now I'm at the point, I was like, no, that's the process. Like, I couldn't write quickly, crisply,

and actually understand the mechanics of the ship unless I did all this research. 100%. And I did it. And so that's how I know it. And now I was like, okay, I don't need any of this anymore. I can show the reader, you know, and I could just take the fact, take like 4,000 trees to build one ship. Well, that's an incredible fact. You know, take the fact that

tells you the story, not the, don't bury it in a thousand facts, get the ones, you know? And so now I realize that's just the process and it's okay. It's okay. No, there's a couple of beautiful things there. Number one, you're getting all the information out so that you can pick the shiniest objects and actually make it into the... Take it from the symphony to the radio hit rock song, in a way. And I mean that in a positive way, in this respect. And then the other thing is, you ever seen the Ed Sheeran Fawcett theory? I don't know if he calls it a theory or whatever but

he he talks about obviously like he's an amazing songwriter and incredible artist but he has two pictures i love referring back to this of one is a sink with very dirty water coming out and the other is a sink with very beautiful clean water coming out and what he says is you can't get to the clean without turning it on and having this first and letting it work its way out of the pipes and it's a hundred percent true with exactly what you're describing you gotta get in the muck yeah you gotta get in the muck you gotta go in the rabbit holes you have to get lost and you have to figure things out and and and and it's funny it took me a long time to realize that that your is so perfect. But, you know, that metaphor. Ed's metaphor.

Ed's metaphor. Great metaphor. I'm going to steal it, use it. Ed, I'll credit you, of course. But, yeah, I mean, that is kind of, that is really true. And it's the journey to the page. And that is the process you kind of have to go through. You know, we talked about learning how to read those log books.

Well, I just kind of had to do that if I was going to. And I had to learn the language of a ship. You know, on a ship, everything had a different word. But we talked a little bit about how we stand on history and we don't even know it. And so when you're doing this research too, you kind of make these discoveries too about the world we stand on. And so I'm doing the research, for example, with the language the language i became very interested in language that was a lot of my micro research as well and i began to realize that like half the things we talk to each other about

are phrases that all came from the sea and that we don't even realize it so you know you know like a scuttlebutt a scuttlebutt was i've heard that before yeah so scuttlebutt was... I've heard that before. Yeah, so scuttlebutt's like gossip, right? You use gossip, right? So scuttlebutt was basically, it was a barrel, a kind of half barrel on a ship. They'd fill it with water, and the seamen would get their water rations. But what would they do? They would gossip, right? So then we have scuttlebutt.

Pipe down. Pipe down was the bosun's whistle to be quiet, either before battle or at night. And we use that all the time. Piping hot. Bosun's whistle for a hot meal. Everybody, the meal is ready. Come for the piping hot.

Oh, I love this one. Under the weather. That's from them too? Yeah. Under the weather. I always just like cool metaphor. It just kind of sounds right. Under the weather.

Under the weather. Feeling under the weather. Have a cold. Yeah. Completely literal. Completely literal. metaphor right it just kind of sounds right under the weather under the weather feeling under the weather cold yeah completely literal completely literal when you're on a ship and you were sick you no longer served on watch so you didn't serve on deck you were below and so you were quite literally under under the weather you were not exposed so that's what i gave it and then my favorite one which you know this one's a little bit later than The Wager, but it came later in the century, which was from Admiral Delson, to turn a blind eye.

That's from that too? Yeah. So to turn a blind eye. You know, this is a great one. So Nels – He didn't have an eye? Yeah. He didn't.

He was missing an eye. Damn it. But even better than that, he wanted to ignore his superior officer's signal. They would signal each other with flags back then. They didn't have walkie-talkies. They signaled with flags. To retreat. I gathered that.

He didn't want to retreat. So he took his telescope. He put it up to his blind eye so he wouldn't see it. So he turned a blind eye. That's what he said. But, right? But, I mean, that's, you know. But in any case.

I keep picturing, like, when you're describing the stuff, it just goes there. I'm like picturing Jack Sparrow in my head. I'm going to turn the blind eye. You know? But there's so much that comes from these things and we don't realize it. Exactly. That's why you're here. You got to tell us.

But how, you know, when you go and I love the writing process and the creative process. I love talking with people like geniuses like you about that, like how you get into it. Obviously to write so many books, like this isn't over the last 30 years either. You've written these over like the last 15, right? Something like that. So like you're a machine. I'm glad you called me that. I don't think anyone else would call me a machine, but I will take that to my grave. He was a machine though. You're definitely a machine. I'm slow, but I'm determined. Thank you, my friend. How do you, like, what's your process to get into writing? Like, I'm going to write today. Here's what I'm doing.

Here's how it's going to happen. Here's how I'm going to stay disciplined. It's a job. It really is. And, you know, I get up, drink my coffee, read the paper, and then go to work. And I have in my brain a kind of a general goal get up, drink my coffee, read the paper, and then go to work. And I have in my brain a kind of a general goal

when I'm writing, when I'm in the writing stage, I'm a slow writer. I wanna write 500 words a day. And sometimes that will take two hours and sometimes that will take 15 hours and I never know. And that's the hard thing about writing um you you could be completely professional about it in terms of i go to work i have a goal i'm gonna meet the goal but unlike you know when i take out the garbage in the morning that always

takes me the same amount of time yes input time output not always a correlation yes there's not a correlation and i've tried to understand it better because you kind of want to mimic that. Like, why is it writing? And you just can't. I mean, often it has to do, I think, with calmness for me. You know, if I'm anxious or too conscious. And there are kind of two parts of your brain in the creative process when you write,

and it's probably true of a lot of things. There is the... When you're writing, you want more of the unconscious brain. And then there is the editor's voice. And you want that editor's voice out of your head when you're writing. And the editor's voice is the one who's saying, oh, God, no, this sucks. Or, oh, you know, you know, oh, why am I doing this?

Or, oh, and you just keep... get hung up. Oh, this sentence doesn't work. Why am I writing this sentence? And so you want to separate those two brains from the rewrite process because that's your high consciousness. You're like, okay, let me look at the sentences. Does it work? Is the grammar right? Is this the right verb? When you're writing, you just kind of want to get on the page. But it's very hard to predict that. And so there's such an unpredictability to the process. Look at my lock screen.

Just make it exist first. Exactly. Just make it exist. You gotta get it out there. You gotta get the clay, and then you play with the clay. Yeah. That's what you're describing. Yeah. But, you know, I always say, you know, it's funny, because it's funny when you're a writer, you know, so you even have family members, they send you something, could you, you know, write something or help me with something?

And I'm like, oh, God, writing is work. And I always say the only difference between a writer and a non-writer is the writer is kind of willing just to sit there and sit there and sit there and just get it on the page. And then, because all writing is rewriting. Yes. All writing is rewriting. And. All writing is rewriting.

And so most people, they finish something like, ah, great. It's like, oh, I'm done. That's great. You got a kid and they show you something. Not with writing. Yeah, they show you something you wrote for school. I'm like, yeah, that's good, but that's your first draft. It's going to be about five more drafts

to get it to where you're... Yep. And a lot of people who are non-writers, they're just like, why would I ever do that? And I get that. But I really think that's the difference. You just sit. You stick to it.

You sit. You're determined. And you're consistent with it too. I have the same pattern every day. That's great. Every day. Because it keeps you in that habit and you're keeping the brain doing the same exact thing. Same exact thing.

You're very ritualistic about it. It's a job. And I have goals I have to meet. I have food I need to put on the table. I mean, having those incentives are not bad. Early in my career, I didn't make any money. I struggled. And I was always struggling to make a living. And so part of that, you never lose that in your mind that- That's good. You know, I got to make a living. I've got, I got to finish these books. I got to make a living. And that is, you know, you're conscious of that.

And especially when you spend, you know, many, many years, you know, my wife supported me for many years, you know, you really struggled. There are people who lose that though. There's a lot of people who lose that. There's an old line from, I just said this the other day, I forgot to look up which one which one said it but one of the boxers hearns or haggler one of them said it they said it's really hard to train seriously for a fight when you're sleeping in silk pajamas and you know when you've made it or gotten way bigger than it was when you were worrying about where the next meal was coming from people can change up but the great ones are the ones who whatever that ritual is however they

do it even if it's just like they go right at the same cafe that they used to write out when they were had nothing or whatever you know they keep something the same and it state that burn stays well i was really i mean we were talking a little bit off uh you know before we went on the air but i was really interested in your progression i mean how you went from you know working a little bedroom and now we're sitting here, and how you built this thing. I mean, determination, right? 100%. 100%. And it's also like you're...

I've been a writer in the past. With this job, there's a lot less writing. It's more like the way I made this thing go was the editing I would do, like making the clips and making them beautiful so that they would pop and everything, but the process is very similar to what you're talking about with writing. I mean, Alessio will remember it. I used to have.... But the process is very similar to what you're talking about with writing.

I mean, unless you'll remember it, I used to have, I have the file back there I could show you, but I would write down physically the layout of what a clip would be. And I'd spend 35 hours of work time on one like 33 second and 10 frame clip. And we'd have it laid out. It would start as, you know, six minutes of Andy Bustamante talking about nuclear war in Russia, and we'd get it down to slowly as I cut away the fat, we'd get it down to the 33 seconds without any breaths where it sounds continuous, where we're going to put music behind it, where he's able to perfectly describe the process of US nuclear protocol in here, and then Russian nuclear protocol and how the actual hitting the button is different. And like when you look at where that starts, you can get stressed because you're like, how the fuck are we going to get down to that? But if you just keep following the process, trim away, trim away, trim away, trim away, trim away, and then focus on making it beautiful. You have your outlines.

Yeah. I mean, you have your own kind of outlines. Exactly right. And you do that. And here's a great example. So for The Wager, because it was a long journey, I had a first sentence for a book, because you kind of think, okay, first sentence is important. And I never really kind of liked it. And it kept changing, changing over the years. And I didn't finally nail, at least I thought, nail the first sentence until

about five years that I had the sentence, that I finally felt it reflected what I was trying to say about the only, I can't remember the exact words now, but it's something to the fact that the only impartial witness was the son. And it got to this idea of everybody's partial. And it kind of spoke, told in that one line, but quite literally, because there's this castaway boat floating at sea, but there are no objective witnesses in this story. You set the whole theme. I got it right there.

And I kept, and then one day, and you're walking, and you're just, and it's that thing, you know, you're just thinking about your sentence. You're thinking about your sentence. You're thinking about your sentence. You try it out. Maybe you show it to someone. And then you find like – and then that's it.

And then when you get it, it's kind of like you do know it. You're like, oh, thank God. That's it. And also it's also great because you're like, thank God I never have to think about that again anymore. You never have a 10 out of 10 when you're like, oh, that's good. And there's like that little pause. You're like, it's really good. You have the 10 out of 10 when you're like, oh, fuck, yeah, that's it, baby.

You finally got it. But, you know, God, it was years. And sometimes it's even true with the title of a book. I mean, I remember with Killers of the Flower Moon. I mean, again, you're trying to come up with a title, right? You got that from a poet, right? Yeah, I was influenced by two writers, two Osage writers. One was John Joseph Matthews, who I was reading about.

So first of all, I had years... I did not have that title for years. Again, that was a book that took half a decade of research and writing. And I would write down, I had like a list. I had, you know, The Lost City of Zia, that was the one book I knew. Title, perfect. I knew that. That's the title.

Kills a Flower Moon, I was like, you know, I was like, what could be the title for this book? And I really didn't want something pulpy. You know, I didn't want something, you know, the obvious thing would be like, oh, you know, blood on the plains or something awful. And I was like, I wanted something to come out of the Osage tradition. It's an Osage story. The first perspective told in the book is from this woman, Molly Burkhart, she's Osage. And then I was reading this book by John Joseph Matthews, who is an Osage writer, no longer alive,

but he described how the Osage had a tradition where they would name each month, was named after a different moon. And in the month of May, they refer to the month of May as like the kind of little flower-killing moon because it was during that month when all these little flowers would spread over the prairie. You had these blue ants that looked like confetti.

And then these taller plants would come, and they would suck out all the water, and all the beautiful little flowers would die. And during the first death took place in May. So I say, okay, well, that couldn't quite come up with the phrase. He didn't have the killers of the flower moon. He had like little flower killing moon. It didn't quite work.

And then I read this beautiful poem by Elise Passion. It's actually a poem about Molly and one of the deaths in her family about her sister. And she had a variation of it. I can't remember the exact, but she had a little variation. And I was like, that's it. That's it you know you i was influenced but that took years and years and i i don't even remember the list but i had a list of like 50 titles and it was funny when i finished it it was a little bit polarizing because some people were like what the flower the killer what there's a lot of words and it was one where i was just like, no, that's it. I feel good about that. It sounds curt, but also like in a beautiful, like Native American prose.

And that's what it came out of. And I thought that was important. Yeah. Now, what is that phone call like? You know, you're sitting at home, suddenly you pick it up and it's, hi, David, maury scorsese i read your book i'd like to make a picture it's excellent how do we make this happen is that what it's like no actually i wish i wish it was i wish marty had called me and been like that if i would have fallen off my chair no you know it's kind of a it's kind of a funny strange process with these things where uh you

know you have your agent and they got to share the story and then someone gets picked up. And then you kind of start to hear rumors that somebody, oh, maybe so-and-so is interested or so-and-so is interested. And then eventually, it's usually your agent who actually tells you, like, yeah, I think Mr. Scorsese is. And, you know, I'm just, I'm basically like an archive rat. You know, I spend my time just, you know, whatever, just spending years on these stories. But I love film. I mean, I do.

I just, I love movies. I love Scorsese. You know, not with any expertise, like no expertise. Just the love of the game. Just the love of the game. Just, you know, let me just watch Taxi Driver. Let me watch The Departed. I mean, how many times have I seen these films?

You and I got a good list together, I'm sure. Yeah. And so you just kind of fall off your chair. And then eventually you do get to have that conversation with- Directly with him. Yeah. What was that like? conversation with, with directly with him. Yeah. And, uh,

what was that like? You know, it was really lovely. I mean, I will confess that it was kind of nervous. Um, um, cause I,

it's not my world and you know, you still have a little bit of that. Um, I don't know. There's something, I think if you're not in the movie business or maybe if you are, you know, there's a,

maybe it's also like, if like, like if LeBron James walked in this room, I would just just feel fucking nervous i don't know why i just would it's like that's lebron james like you know it's like there's michael jordan and so you know if the goat in their field just kind of walks in you're just kind of like that's the goat you know you had done a movie though you had done lost city is he done lost city z i've done child by fire i did old man and the Gun. And these were already done at this point.

These were done. Were they all out at this point? Yes, they were all out. Because it was Scorsese. You were just feeling the type of way. Yeah, although I usually would feel it even with some of the others. But Scorsese, you're certainly like, whoa. But I will just say, you know, it's a really lovely conversation.

He was really genial. And I didn't know what he would be like. And he was, you know, we talked about our families our families you know there's a lot of just kind of that I mean it was kind of which I kind of liked and did you do this in person with him eventually I would meet him in person that first time was a phone call okay yeah now what's the you know you're the author of the book yeah that gets adapted into a screenplay sometimes the authors are involved in that. Were you involved in any of them?

So, to a limited extent, in the sense that, like, I don't aspire to write screenplays. It's a different kind of writing. It's a different kind of writing. And I'm spending so much time, you know, how am I going to tell the wager if I'm trying to do something else? Right. I just not. It's like you have to make a choice. And also, I don't really feel like I know much about that. if I'm trying to do something else. Right. I just not. It's like you have to make a choice.

And also, I don't really feel like I know much about that. I still feel like I have so many mountains I'm still trying to climb in my own field. And the more I have watched the adaptation process, the more I realize they are actually very distinct mediums, the way you're telling a story. I mean, to begin with, I deal with two dimensions. You know, mine is, I'm dealing with documents. Oh, right.

And you create a film, like, I'm picturing the set in my mind, you know? They're reconstructing the town. And suddenly, you know, you have Lily Gladstone playing Molly Burkhardt, the sausage woman. You have Leonardo DiCaprio playing Ernest Burkhardt. And you see they are conveying information through expressions. They are animate souls.

Yes. They are inhabiting these people. You know, they don't even need to speak to say something. It's the look on their eyes. And, you know, that's not even need to speak to say something. It's the look on their eyes. And, you know, that's not the medium I'm working with. I'm working with words, the limited things that I can reconstruct based on those documents. There are places I'll never go in my books because my hands are completely tied based on the underlying material. You know, I'm not going to be writing about a lot.

They're not usually a lot of bedroom scenes in my books. They're not describing that. You know, they're not like we talked about. They got to work that in. They got to, but even like we talked about the cannibalism. Yeah. I described it in a limited fashion and I could kind of fold in information from how it was kind of done elsewhere,

but they were very hesitant on how they wanted to describe it. So'm not going to have a 20 page scene about that so it's just but the things they do i'm trying to picture like how you picture this in your head the things that they do describe like when you're reading one of the guys story where he's explaining we'll just stay with the wager right here where he's explaining how he saw this whole island thing going down you're getting to know the person well. And when you do that, at least if it were me, tell me if you think differently, like I'm picturing the person in my head. And when I'm doing that, I'm picturing their expression.

I'm picturing who they are. And then when you get to the movie, like that's where the greats like Leo are going to bring that to life. Yes. And I will say this. You are, how do I create, use words? My challenge is how do I take the underlying information and through words, through verbs and predicates and whatnot,

just the right word, convey an image, a mental image, rather than you actually see the image. It pops up internally into your head as opposed to your watching it. But I will say the people I have worked with are, I've been pretty blessed. It's like James Gray, another great New York director. I've worked with some, people are great. And they're all really dedicated to the craft. And so usually my role is, my attitude is usually like, I'm here if you need me.

And if you don't, that's okay too. And usually I'm there as kind of historical resource because they want to get things right. And so they're calling, they're asking, they're maybe calling up. And I'm usually just kind of constantly providing them information like Di dicaprio's playing uh ernest burkhart so in killers of the fire moon so you know did he walk with a limp um

do you have any images of him uh can you give me some court testimony and transcripts to hear how he talked was he literal was he not literate you know they're using but the text you have and then they want the primary materials to hopefully, if actors and directors of this caliber are of that kind of dedication, they're going under. They're going deep. And they did a lot of their own research. I mean, they were amazing.

So you're talking directly with the actors too? Sometimes. It's really up to them. And it's really up to them. I mean, like I said, I'm usually, I'm here if you need me. And some of them, you know, want that and, and reach out to you and, you know, asking you lots of questions. And,

and I, as a reporter, you know, it's a different world to me. I found it, I find it kind of fun. And, and it's good cause I'm not too into it, but you know, I'm not too involved. So I'm not, I don't feel, you know, it's more, I'm kind of curious. I'm just like, you know, it's like a little, you have these wonderful conversations with all these people and you're always interested. How's that art? Or you're a CIA officer. What do you do?

Like, you know, you're an author. And to me, that's a little bit like that. I'm a reporter and you're like, oh my God, how does an actor, I don't know anything about acting. How do you figure this out? How do you, what's your process? You just, and you get to, you know, you just get to kind of hold a little bit.

But I will say this about the two. The thing you want or the thing I want is I don't ever expect like, I know authors because, you know, they get very upset. You know, they're like, why'd they do this? They didn't do this. You're taking the question out of my mouth. Yeah, they get really upset. And I, look, I could in theory get upset if they, you know, if people did some really bad thing or if they were very offensive to those Asian Asians. But they were very dedicated and faithful to the main facts.

But the thing you want is it can't be the same thing. And so what you want it to be – The movie can't be the same as well. It can't be and it shouldn't be because it's a different medium to some degree. And so you want it to be faithful to the main facts and you want it to be. But ultimately, you basically want your mind is a printed historical medium. It's a book. It's a text.

I can also do things that they can't do just as they can do things that I can't do. I can, you know, go back into the 80s. I can do a whole backstory. You know, I can fold in the history of the Osage Nation in a very easy way. They're like, that's too many sets. We can't do that. Yeah. Yeah. And it just wouldn't make sense. You're not going to go back and tell a hundred years. I could go back, you know, I can suddenly discuss the Osage meeting with President Tom Jefferson at the White House in 1802. You couldn't... So I have places I can go. You know, they've got to stay in a kind of more linear narrative and focus.

And so I, you know, and there are places they go, I can't go. So the thing you want is you're both moving with a fierce commitment, because these are true stories. Yes. And they're important stories. You're kind of moving in your own way through your own forms to the similar truth. And if you do that, if they do that, I'm happy. I mean, that's kind of my view.

And every author's probably different. Well, I also like when you get to work with a legend like Martin Scorsese, he gets to do it how he wants to do it. Because people don't really tell him no. If he wants to make The Irishman 260 minutes, he's doing it. And with a story like Killers of the Flower Moon, that book I haven't read yet of yours, but I know the backstory. I was kicking myself.

I was telling you beforehand, I think off camera, but someone had brought up Killers of the Flower Moon like a week and a half ago. It might've been like Lou Ferrante. And in my head, I got it mixed up with S.C. Gwynn's book about the command channel. Great book. But I want to read your book about it because when this first got announced,

this was like before the, I remember this, before the pandemic, when Scorsese like got the rights to the book, I always like track what Marty's going to do next. So I went down the rabbit hole of this story and there are so many different layers to it. So if you're writing a book in your medium, you get to do it totally figuratively in the sense that it's my job as the reader to take the words you're writing and picture it all in my head. So like you said, you can jump around.

When you go to make a movie, it's now literal because you're putting it in front of them. But if you have 120 minutes to work with on a story like that, it gets really hard because even when you're doing the literal and cutting out, like trimming the fat, so to speak, like, you have to tell the story in such quick spurts. Whereas when you get, I think this one was probably like two and a half hours or something like that, or three and a half hours almost, with Killers of the Flower Moon, like, he gets to tell it, I would say, without reading it,

I'd love your thoughts on this, but I would imagine he gets to tell the story where it can fully breathe, like, to your expectations. Yes. And I will say, and the thing I really appreciated about Scorsese and DiCaprio and Gladstone and De Niro, and that whole production team, they leveraged their stardom, I think.

Again, this is just my interpretation. I'm just speaking from my own vantage point now. They leveraged their stardom to get that movie made. And to get it made in such a way where they work really closely with the Osage Nation. They leveraged their stardom to shoot on location in Oklahoma, which is something really important to the Osage Nation, they leveraged their stardom to shoot on location in Oklahoma, which is something really important to the Osage Nation, to the Osage Chief, Jeffrey Standing Bear. It's probably more expensive too, right?

Yeah, exactly. Like this day and age, you know, again, this is, I'm not an expert in this, but I gather this is just kind of not done anymore. You know, it's really done. They do it in Atlanta. Yeah, they'll just do it in a state. There's some tax break and they go and they're never shooting and where things are happening. And even for the Lost City of Z, I remember they were like, we'll shoot the England scenes in Ireland and we'll shoot the Amazonian scenes that were in the Brazilian jungle. We'll do them in the Colombian jungle because they're just picking based on affordability. But they did things like that. And that's where you could use your power in a

lot of different ways, but to see them use their power that way, I admired that. That's very cool. Yeah. A little side note on that, but I was telling you about Paul Rosalie and how he was the first guy, whoever mentioned you in the studio back in episode 124, we were talking about Lost City Aziz. Like, yeah, david graham wrote this great book and i read the book right after that and now here you are like two and a half years later but he when he was young because he's lived in the amazon for like 19 years he was about five years into being there or something like that and discovery channel comes to him and they're like you want to save the amazon he's like yes and they're like all right we're going to do a show with you and we'll come down and film with you and very quickly he realized like

some things they were like trying to kardashian it up and he would stop it from happening yeah and they would give in and it would mostly be fine and so he's like okay this is all right and then they call him up and they say because they were filming down in the amazon remember that they call him up and they say yeah so how badly do you want to save the amazon and he's like i mean that's why we're doing this and they're like okay well the way we're gonna sell this story is we need to now call it eaten alive and how do you feel about getting eaten by an anaconda on camera you'll be fully you'll be fully geared up it'll be fine he's like what i'm not doing that and they're like buddy you signed the contract you're doing that so he's thinking what the fuck are they gonna come down to the amazon like get

an anaconda like because he knows how all these animals work and stuff no they fly him up to tennessee to some guy named larry's house who has a pet anaconda who doesn't want to eat paul and they set him up with like this metal suit or whatever mic'd up with like team, like a go team outside to be able to jump in if they need to. And he had to spend off camera like three and a half hours trying to get the anaconda to eat him. And then when it went to eat him, it was crushing his collarbone. And so he's about to die. So he's like, fuck, I got to, as it's putting it into his mouth, he's like, I got to abort. And they came in and then he got all the shit because people were like,

it's called eating alive and he never got eaten. But this is how these, you know, that's Hollywood too. This is how it works sometimes. Well, you know, it is your worry, you know, because you don't control it. And when you, you have to, you don't have, you know, you are giving up control when you give, you know, when I'm in the book, when I'm working on my book, you know, I have an editor, I have a publisher, but like, I control every sentence. I control their fate. I control the photograph. I control, you know, I have a say in everything, you know, the cover.

Oh, that's a great cover the publisher made. But, you know, they're listening and you have, you it when you turn this over you don't and so the thing that is really important and is you got to get in to the hands of the people who do know what they're doing and aren't going to do that because the truth is they could i mean in theory you know you're you're you know my god you know they're going to eat your book alive i mean you know you're you're you know my god you know they're gonna eat your book alive i mean you know and so but the you know again when you for the most part i've been pretty fortunate and and and when you get someone like scorsese i mean you know and and the and what's great when you see something like that too and i saw the film too you know again you just kind of i was just kind of interested in the things they were doing and why. I mean, could you imagine me on the second, Mr. Scorsese?

I don't, I don't agree with that tracking shot. I, you know, I've always thought about tracking. Get him out. You know, you'd have to be, but you know, the same way I wouldn't want somebody coming in my room too and being like, you know, yeah, David't don't i don't fix that outline you know i was like this is the way i do it you know i've been doing this a long time i've worked my outlines like yeah read my imdb yeah you'll be all right but they you said

they were working really close with the osage nation themselves yeah and what did that look like that was really important to be honest that was because each story is different you know when they did old man and the gun which is great it was my first new yorker story it's a really fun film it's got robert redford and sissy spacek and it's just kind of a delight and uh but it was the first story i did it's about this bank robber who was robbing banks into his 70s he used to use a hearing aid as as a police scanner and um and then and then he was also a prison escape artist and he was probably probably the greatest i mean you know how do artist and he was probably the greatest. I mean, how do you measure

the greatest prison escape artist? Man of many talents. Yeah, but he broke out of San Quentin in a kayak and went to paint it on the side, rub-a-dub-dub. And it was funny, the reason I pitched that story to the New Yorkers, I was like, this is such a good, it was the first story I did for them.

I was like, I can't screw this one up. It's just the material. It's too good. It's too good. Like, just get out of the way. It'll be fine. But someone like that is a lot. And the director

was great. He had a... I think something that's like this story, like many, is almost true or something. And he just had fun with it. Killers of the Fire Moon, you're dealing with a racial injustice, one of the worst in American history,

dealing with a sinister criminal conspiracy. Would you mind just explaining the background for people who haven't read or seen the movie? Sure, of course. So it's about members of the Osage Nation who had become among the wealthiest people per capita in the world in the early 20th century because of oil deposits under their land. They found it. They found oil and they were receiving money for leases and royalties

what would be the equivalent today of there were about 2 000 or so on the tribal roll and they received in the year again my memory gets a little dodgy as i get older but something like what would be worth the equivalent today of about 400 million dollars in 1923 or 1924 and so they became extraordinary wealthy wealthy and then they began to die under mysterious circumstances. And, you know, the death toll just kept climbing. There were bombings and poisonings and shootings. Eventually it become one of the first major homicide cases of the FBI. Earliest days.

Yeah, in its earliest days. And so that's kind of the the the broad outlines of that story right so you I cut you off you were talking about the work that they were doing specifically like back work with the Osage nation yeah so you know early on the Osage chief Jeffrey Standing Bear he had appointed some I don't know what the term would be, almost like diplomats or whatnot, representatives, I guess, of the nation to build relationships with the production team. And I thought that was really important because when I worked on the book, I spent about more than half a decade. And you develop these relationships.

You develop trust with people and you get to know people. And to be honest, that's one of the best things about the whole process of these things. And it was really important that the film people do that. And it was really important to the Osage. And Scorsese, and to their credit, they were great. I mean, they started to form those relationships. And the Osage were deeply involved in the production of that film at every level, to the best of my understanding.

I mean, you know, whether it be building the sets, whether it be the costumes, whether it be Osage language consultants to make sure the Osage language was correctly used. They had consultants on the script. They had lots of Osage actors, many of whom had not been actors before in the film. And there's one really powerful scene. I got to witness it actually when I was there. Oh, on set? Yeah, on set.

And it's a scene of the tribal council meeting. And in that scene, the members of the tribal council are actually, they're Osage and they their descendants of people who had been murdered during this Osage reign of terror. And they are channeling much of what they felt and heard from their families. And at least I've been told, and I'm pretty sure this is correct. I've never asked Scorsese this, but I'm pretty sure this is correct because I've heard this from some of the sage who were in the scene. Um... all this knowledge and wisdom and history and oral history that he had heard from his relatives and ancestors over the years

and just, boom, let it out into the scene. And Scorsese, being the, you know, genius that he is, said, keep that. Let's use that. Let's use that. That's real. That's authentic. Let's get it in and that happens so much in these classic movies you hear these stories after where it's actually you know it's improv it was improvisational it was improv by somebody but somebody improv not like by just an actor who's kind of riffing improv based on somebody who had

real wisdom and knowledge. Generation trauma. And emotion and had the power. And so I hope for listeners, you know, go watch that scene now and it will have even extra layers of meaning and power. How did you first get hooked onto this one again? I can't remember if you told me that off camera or on. Yeah, so that one, an historian had mentioned the case to me, did not know much about it.

So I decided at that time, I was finished Lost City of Z, looking for a new project. At that point, I didn't think it could necessarily be a book. And I thought, well, but I could find really much written about it. So I said, well, on my own dime, I'm going to go fly out to Oklahoma. Never been to a prairie before. And so this is his thing. You look like you'd fit in. Yeah, exactly, right?

Little New Yorker. And half-blind New Yorker riding, not accustomed to the pickup truck. How often do you get you look like Larry David a little bit, by the way? I'm very proud of that. In fact, I don't take that as an insult. I do not take that as an insult since I love Larry David.

I do. And you know, Larry David wasn't around when I wrote the lost city of Z, but if someone were to ask me now, kind of what's like, what was your trip like in the jungle? I'd say it's kind of like Larry David in the jungle. So I'm glad you asked me that.

And, and, and, and my kids make fun of me because of my multiple larry david references and they never know if it's me or larry david there who's who's speaking at any at any one moment so like even when you laugh a little bit it's similar yeah yeah so yeah it is a huge compliment yeah i am yeah so i i take larry if you're out there i'm willing to be a double and whatever you will get them in get them in there but you larry david go out to oklahoma so i go out to oklahoma to your ancestral land it's a man so

i go and i visit the um you know you do that thing you do which is i went to the osage nation museum because i was like okay where am i going to learn anything and i went to the museum and there was a uh great photograph on the wall it was a panoramic photograph and i was looking at it was taken in 1924 i mean it went across a great photograph on the wall. It was a panoramic photograph. And I was looking at it. It was taken in 1924. I mean, it went across a vast wall of the museum. And my first thought looking at it was like, wow, I didn't even know you could take a panoramic photograph like that in 1924

because it was really cool and kind of its perspective. Just a very unusual perspective for an old photograph. And it looked pretty innocent. It was taken in 1924. You see members of the Osage Nation. They're standing along what looked like white settlers, white businessmen. But I'm looking at it. And off to the left, there's a portion of the photograph that seems to have been cut out or missing. So I asked the then museum director who I was meeting for the first time. Her name was

Catherine Redcorn. She's now a good friend of mine. But that was the first time I met her. And I said to her, what had happened to that that photograph and she said well you know it contained this figure so frightening we had you know we decided to remove it and then she pointed to the missing panel and she said the devil was standing right there and it's very rare for a book to have an origin story you know and that was i mean that just rattled inside me and she went down into the basement and she brought up an image of the missing panel. And it showed one of the killers of the, you know, during the Osage reign of terror, one of the most brutal of the killers.

And I just kept thinking, looking at that photograph, okay, Osage, you know, they had taken that photograph because not to forget what happened, but they, you know, nearly a century later, they can't forget what happened but they they you know nearly a century later they can't forget what had taken place you know these killings that had taken place and the robbery and the stealing and the graft and the murder and the bloodshed that is part of their um you know it still reverberates to this day. For sure. And yet, I'm standing there going, I don't know anything about this.

You know, someone mentioned to me, and I'm out here. I was in my books reading growing up. I never read about this. And so, I just thought, you know, if I can tell this story, if people are willing to open up to me and share with me the history, if I can find the records to do it, all right, let me try to do that.

Yeah, you're telling an oral history of something that's still relevant, as you pointed pointed out through the literal actors in the movie to people today because as i understand it if i remember correctly they caught some of the guys who did it but then there's like a lot of open cases to this day that they don't know how many of these people who obviously weren't in the hostage nation who were coming in and killing these people who obviously weren't in the Osage Nation, who were coming in and killing these people. By the way, another example, strictly out of greed. You talk about human beings' behavior and emotions doesn't change over time. That's a story as old as time.

100%. 100%. You know, greed and racism fueled together at that time period to lead to this systematic murder campaign. And very early when we were talking, I talked about how you have to be kind of open to your stories. Where is the truth? And I think even as human beings today, I mean, I'm always struggling with that. You read a tweet, is that true? What's the truth? Don't be too emotional. Let's get to the facts, say that to your kids and i had begun that story thinking of that singular evil

figure the so-called devil who had committed these crimes along with a few henchmen and that was the theory that the fbi had propounded and they had investigated and they were able to prosecute a couple of these criminals and i spent the first year and a half researching that book that was a story i was going to tell but the more time i would spend out in oklahoma i'd rent a little a room in a boarding house stay out there for you know uh one month and then many months later come back and do another month and i just kept doing that over the years like on a prairie kind of thing well this was right in pahuska which is a little town it's kind of the center of the reservation the prairie is not too far away and you drive you know 25 minutes you're out in the prairie um and um uh

you know doing this research and so like even catherine redcorno i met in that museum at one point i remember she said to me you know i have a relative who was killed, and that case was not investigated by the FBI. Whoa. Could you look into this? Could you see if you could find any information about it? She'd give me some records, some photographs. And then you go and you interview somebody else, another Osage elder, and this...

I remember this, Mary Jo Webb, she went into her closet. She had a box. She brings out the box. I said, what are those? She said, these are records I've gathered from trying to investigate the death of one of my relatives. It's never been investigated during this time period. Whoa. And the money that was stolen.

It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. Can you look into this? And you start to realize, okay, I think there are these murders,

other murders going on during this time period. And then I remember I went out to an archive in Fort Worth, Texas. It's this giant, it's a branch of the National Archives. And it's enormous. It's like, it looked like, you know, if you went out to Kennedy Airport and you had a hangar and you were put in the plane. Actually, the best image for it would be Raiders of the Lost Ark

where they stick the last covenant, you know. It's like that. And, you know, research has a serendipity to it. It has a complete unpredictability about it where you will find things you're not looking for. And I was looking for, at that point, a simple fact, which was the Osage had, it was a very racist system. They had guardians appointed,

white guardians to manage their fortunes in this time period. And they were appointed. They were appointed by the government. And they would also just steal and graft and steal money. And I was trying to confirm whether a certain Osage had had a certain guardian. So I was pulling these boxes. And in one of these boxes, I find a little booklet. It looked like something like In-N-In, you know, where you sign your name?

Yeah. And all it was was for a few years. And it was basically just the names of guardians and the Osages whose fortunes they had managed. The only other thing written in this booklet was next to a name of an Osage. If the Osage had died, some anonymous bureaucrat had written the word dead. That was it. So I look, I open it up, and I see a guardian, and they had about six Osages whose fortune they had managed over this period of time. And I noticed next to the first name, the bureaucrat had written the word dead. The next name, dead. The next name, dead. Dead, dead, dead. All six. All six. And I start,

that's really weird. And I start looking through this book and then I see another guardian had about a dozen Osages fortunes they had managed and had about a 50 mortality rate and on and on and one and no doubt some of these similar stories similar yeah no doubt some were of natural causes yeah um but it defied any natural death rate right osage had money they were extremely wealthy i had access to medicine they said it was like two thousand of of them? Yeah, 2,000 on the tribal roll. Yep. They were officially enrolled members of the tribe. So they all had access to this oil money? They all had access. They were all getting, they had what was called a head right, which was essentially a share in this mineral trust. And then when I looked into some of these cases, I could find evidence of somebody complaining

about a poisoning or the head right being stolen, the oil money being stolen. And I realized that this little booklet basically contained the hints of a systematic murder campaign. And so you had these interviews with these people, you start looking at these records, and suddenly the book that I thought I was writing completely collapsed in on itself. And I realized, okay, at first I was kind of bewildered. And then I realized, okay, this is not a book or a history or a story about who did it. It's really about who didn't do it. And it's really about this culture of killing. And it was about, and you could find evidence of morticians who were covering up bullet wounds, doctors who were administering poisons.

It's a full community conspiracy. It's a community conspiracy. And I spend most of my life disproving conspiracies because people are- They run with conspiracies on everything. Yeah. And there are people, I always say they're too incompetent to orchestrate. And this was a collective. And they had others who were complicit in their silence because they were all getting wealthy off what they referred to as the quote-unquote Indian business.

Oh, they referred to it? In the records, they referred to it as the quote-unquote Indian business. This business of like, how can we get money? You know, implication wasn't always killing, where they would say the killing, but just this oil money, the head rights, how are we going to get rich doing this off this money? Whoa. First of all, there's like a, there's another movie here that was missed out on,

which is, I, I, I'm thinking of some movies that I've seen before where it's someone way later going to an investigate something and re piece together what it is. But you were kind of living a movie here because you're digging up this old case and people are coming to you an author looking to write a book here and say wait there's a lot more since you're working on it take a look at this and i could like i can see you talk about the how we describe things in books but i can see the movie in my head of just like you looking through all the stuff and then telling the story of what you're seeing right there that could be really cool yeah Yeah, and it's kind of the clapping. And the third part of the book is that kind of collapsing

of the kind of narrative that was passed down and opening it up into this... far more disturbing reality. You know, Uncle Joe is, you know, participating in this stuff and stealing money. Did you talk to descendants of people who were on the other side of it? Yes.

Both murderers and descendants of both murderers and the victims. What was that like? Well, one of the things you have to understand, and it took me a while to kind of get my brain wrapped around this, is that these were inheritance schemes. And so to understand them, you had the share in a mineral trust. So those 2,000 or so in the tribal role were given what was called a head right. It was like a share.

And so whatever the collective wealth was brought in that year from royalties and leases, you got your share of those proceeds. A head right, because the Osages didn't want to be, have a head right stolen the way their land was, you know, so often land was stolen. So a head right could only be inherited. It couldn't be bought or sold. So there wasn't a way for you to come in and steal,

you know, through more conventional means and i would say he's just uh oil money so what they did is they began to marry into these families oh whoa and then they began to systematically plot to kill the person they had married and sometimes sometimes because children will get a head right too even the children you may have had with them yeah it's crazy it's it's you know it's it's kind of uh it is not it is it's sick it's in every way it's sick in every in every which way now you talk about having the idea at the beginning and you brought this up like an hour ago where you're saying you can have an idea what you have and you gotta let the facts guide you to wherever it's gonna land so in this case it lands on something that is actually i think far more

serious based on what you're describing way more serious but do you find it just as a side note real quick do you find it difficult sometimes as a storyteller which is what you're doing you're trying to take non-fiction things and tell the story what happened do you find it difficult sometimes when you may be really digging into a story maybe for the new yorker and you had an idea oh this is what happened this is what it is and then it turns out to kind of be i don't know if you want to call it like a dud but a lot less interesting than it was. Does that make, like, does that, does the cognitive bias make it difficult to get there? It's a great question. And you can become wedded, you can have tunnel vision, you know, it's,

you can have tunnel vision. You know, I write about people with tunnel vision, you know, investigations, whether they be scientific or criminal, where tunnel vision took over and the outcome became really disastrous. And so you're cognizant. We all have those biases. You know, you've been focusing on one thing. You think it's this thing. You've been working on this thing for so long.

You've been working it out in your brain. And then you're like, and it could take you a little while. Let's use Killers of the Flower Moon as an example though so um i remember when this started to settle i was kind of like it took me a while because you're trying to assess it and then you're also just like assessing it practically you're like okay i've spent all this time you know thinking this is it and this is and you're okay, I have to kind of rip this. Those outlines, they're getting all ripped up now, and this is a different story, and I've got to start to think about it in new ways.

But one of the things which I struggle with is there is a cognitive bias in knowing the answer, both as an investigator and I know for the reader. So I know the reader is going to want answers. And suddenly I was confronted with all these other murders. You know, I told you about Catherine. I told you about Mary Jo Webb. And I said, well, you know, can you look into these cases? And I would look into a lot of the cases. And sometimes I might find some evidence that might pinpoint a suspect, but often, often, you know, there were no proper investigation.

The witnesses are dead. The perpetrators are dead. Yep. And I don't know. And so for a long time, I was confronted with that. Like, okay, well, I don't know. And how do I convey that? And then there's a, I think, and if I were earlier in my career, there's a cognitive bias to seem smarter than you are as a writer or to seem like you've

got godlike omniscience. I know all the answers and you don't. And so I realized that this story is going to have this kind of gaping hole. And then the more I thought about it, that is part of the story. That is the horror that these people like Mary Jo Webb and Catherine Redhorn had lived with these unresolved crimes. And so it did take me a while to kind of recollect. And the truth is really powerful. It's just figuring out what it is and how to convey it.

But I ended up realizing that's the theme of the book. I mean, rather than just be like, oh, let's just kind of pretend like I know the answer. I'm not going to be able to know the answers. And there are going to be a lot of crimes as a reader. We're not going to know the full. And there are gonna be a lot of crimes as a reader. We're not gonna know the full tally. It's open-ended. But imagine these people who have lived with this. It's a little like someone missing in action.

You know, you can't in a war, you know, you don't get... You don't have closure. Yes. And to me, that was really one of the horrors, because the perpetrators had erased not only the victims' lives, but in many cases, their history. And to me me that was really one of the horrors because the perpetrators had erased not only the victims lives but in many cases their history and to me that was really and but it took me a while to realize okay that's what this what do you mean they erased their history i can't we don't know how they died we don't know who was the killer was it was it was it i meant something else no no no they erased their history because they covered up the crimes. They got the bodies buried without a proper investigation.

And they got away. I mean, they got away. They got away. They got away. With murder and money. Murder, money. And I can't, you know, I had always thought my job was, when you're doing a story about an injustice,

you think, okay, all right, whatever it may be. You're not fixing the injustice in the sense that it's already taken place. People have died or whatnot. But you can at least, in a case like this, identify the names of the perpetrators and make sure everybody knows who the victims were. And in this case, you could identify the victims, but you could not ensure that those perpetrators' names are known to us and can at least be condemned in history. And that's horrible. Yeah.

That's horrible. What became of the money? Like, were there... Obviously, they didn't kill every single Osage person, but Osage Nation member, but what does it look like today? Are a lot of the descendants of the killers living off the money that they were able to get through the head right? So, some still are getting blood money. I mean, there's not as much from a head right now, because it's the same amount of oil being extracted from the

land in that area anymore. But there are still descendants of murderers, descendants of guardians who are receiving blood money, which is an outrage. And there's never been a kind of a complete tally, but at least several sage and and the government eventually paid those sage about 300 million in kind of trust mismanagement which just had to do not even with the murders just had to do with general graft when was that when did they do that this was gosh it's in my book and i should remember this but it's more than a decade ago when that was resolved. So way later.

Yeah, way later. But this was just for general mismanagement of Osage resources. But hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen through graft from the Osage, which has never been returned. But I'm glad you asked me the question about what is Osage nation like today, because,

you know, when you write about history, you're writing about a particularly traumatic moment, but history doesn't stop. And we often think of history, whatever time period you're writing about, as kind of this frozen moment. And the Osage to this day, they're a really vibrant nation. They have, I think, more than 20,000 citizens in the Osage Nation, voting members. They have their own constitution. They have other sources of wealth. They still have some oil money. And as an Osage lawyer told me when I was visiting one time doing my reporting, she said, you know, we were victims of these crimes, but we don't live as victims. That's a great way to look at it. I mean, you know, it is many years later

and it's nice to see like the silver lining of them having a great community and all that because you can fall into that trap where it's like, oh, fuck, we lost all that horrible injustice that one time and it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you stay there. Yeah, and I think there is sometimes a tendency

with writers, especially outside these nations to kind of write about the traumas and see it as kind of a frozen in time. So I'm glad you asked that. I always think it's really important to emphasize that. in killing the Osage, did you have any difficult moments where you're like, you do understand you're being paid by blood money or something along those lines? Yeah. Um... Yeah. I mean, those were difficult conversations to have. And, um... You know, some of the descendants of the Guardians

were sometimes a little reluctant to talk or wouldn't, but some of the descendants of the killers did talk to me. Some of them expressed real remorse. Um, and said they are aware of what, um, their ancestors had done. Um, one of the things that I lost my track of thought, so, uh, when I was talking a little bit about these were inheritance schemes...

Mm-hmm. ...and the interviews, one of the things you have to realize is that the murderers and the interviews, one of the things you have to realize is that the murderers and the victims were often in the same household. So the descendants are often descendants. Both. Both. And I'll just give you one very powerful visual image of that. When I interviewed Marjorie Burkhardt, who's kind of the central figure in in my book and kind of the soul of the book and is also the central figure in the movie played by lily gladstone

and i interviewed her granddaughter her great not like her great granddaughter granddaughter and when you talk to a granddaughter you realize how this is still living history i she said to me at one point you know i didn't get to grow up with cousins and you're kind of thinking about that it's like yeah well because all of her aunts and great aunt they were all killed so they they she you know that's why she didn't have cousins but um she showed me a photograph and uh it was a photograph of a little boy and a little girl and the little boy was her father and at that time in the photograph he was just a little boy and he little girl. And the little boy was her father. And at that time, in the photograph, he was just a little boy. And he, I don't know how old he was, maybe he was six or

something. And the girl next to him is his sister. So it's Margie, who so the son of Margie and the daughter of Margie. And they are standing, each of them beside a figure. And you could tell it's a man. And you kind of, you look up this photograph, and you're going up the man, and you could see they're holding the hands of this man between them. And you go up, and then when you get to the top of the man, who's much taller than the two children, the top of the photograph is ripped off so the head of the person is missing in this photograph and i kind of knew i wasn't sure but i said who who was that she said well that

was molly's husband that was her uh grandfather who was a killer earnest that was earnest and so her and she said her father was just a boy in that photograph had ripped off the head of his father in the photograph and she used to refer to her father as dynamite he referred to his own father as dynamite because he was involved in blowing up a house that killed one of margie's sisters that's tragic uh molly sisters that's so tragic because he was also he was poisoning his wife yeah he was involved in poison right and she she almost died from that she almost died from that and she didn't know he was doing it she did not know she was doing that did you and, in reading the records, like once he was arrested,

because this is who Leonardo DiCaprio played in the film for everyone out there. But once he was arrested, and I guess she had to come to terms with that, that her own husband was trying to kill her. What, do we have any record of like, what her emotional state was with that? Yeah. I wish there was more.

Um, and that's where you go to your kind of, as a historian, you have limitations. Um, I couldn't find a written record of her describing it, but I did, um, get oral histories. Um, and... apparently, she would grow nauseous even at the mention of his name. And was obviously deeply haunted.

And I would ask, you know... It's a kind of betrayal that is a little... It's unfathomable. Yes. And I couldn't even after all those years ever fully understand what it must have been like for molly even interviewing uh her family members and her descendants to realize the person you thought you loved the person you married the person you thought loved you first you had children with,

is trying to kill you, has killed your mother, killed your sisters, your siblings. I mean, that's just, that's... These, because they were inheritance schemes, they involved a level of intimate betrayal. You say unfathomable. I think that's a perfect way to put it. I mean, it's just like you wonder if someone like that is truly just evil in their heart. I mean, there has to be.

There has to be a level of evil in there, first of all. just that or if there is also a complete genuine willful blindness to what they're doing because they're so focused on the bullshit which is oh let me get more money yeah i you know it's funny um when dicaprio was you know thinking about who to play in the in the film and he called me up at one point and said you know he's thinking about playing Ernest Burkhardt. Subtle flex right there. Subtle. And, uh, and, um... I thought that was the right person to play. Um, because when you read the records, there is enough evidence that there was genuine affection

between him and Molly. Mm. That there had been real emo... There was an emotional... He lived with someone, you marry them, that he had genuine affection for her and Molly had genuine affection for them. I found a letter from her to him,

which refers to him as my dear husband, and you could get some sense about that. And to me, understanding Ernest as many ways was more important than understanding the person who uh um de niro plays in the movie hail hail and hail is a central figure but hail in many ways is sociopathic i mean you read all the records i mean he is a sociopathic figure he didn't view them as human no he didn't feel it was human? No, he didn't view them as human. And he just, yeah. But someone like Ernest goes along. Yes.

And you got to honor, you know, when there are, when a society does something like this, whether you look at Germany, you know, whether you look at Nazis, you know, you didn't just have Goebbels and Hitler, you know. You actually had all these other people are going home to their families and tucking their kids in and then you know loading you onto the train to die at the camp and then coming home and so you got to try to understand

earnest and you got to understand how does somebody seemingly ordinary who does have a conscious you know he's not devoid he's like you could tell he's not he's not genetically devoid of seemingly ordinary, who does have a conscious. He's not devoid. You could tell he's not genetically devoid of a conscious. He's not a serial killer, that kind of way. He's manipulable. He's manipulable. He's greedy.

He's tempted. He has a mix of prejudice. All these things come together, and in the end, in the end, he goes along. Yes. He goes along to do these deeds. And that is a kind of, I think it's more important for us to reckon with people like that in some ways than with the kind of, you know, the just purely evil figure. Because in a way, you can almost separate that figure from the rest of us. Yes, that's not us.

Yeah, Ernest, there were lots of Ernests. There are lots of Ernests in this world. And so what is it about a figure like that? And, you know, partly you write these books to try to understand Ernest so that we don't become Ernests. Yes, and there will always be some person out there like a Hale who is a sociopath and is perfectly willing to use other people as a vessel and manipulate them, you know, like a mob boss. Yeah.

That's effectively what he did here, a mob boss of serial killing. But, you know, in your research of Ernest, because he – the interesting part about this story is also the time when it takes place. It's in that, you know, weird 20-year period, which is between World War I and World War II. And Ernest is a World War I vet who's coming home, looking for work, trying to get whatever. Were you able to find in your research, you know, what his experience in World War I was,

and if that affected him in some way? Not a ton. I got his military record. I knew he had served. I knew when he had served. I don't think he had seen that. It's been a while. I don't think he had seen a lot of combat. But I don't know. I knew, know that he, what you, what you get a sense of from the records and from interviews and from people. I interviewed one first general, someone who was alive, a child at the time, who was still alive, who was alive a child at the time who was still alive who was even at one of the funerals and helped me describe the funeral scene oh my god yeah when

when molly's sister anna dies i knew someone was at that funeral um as a little girl um but ernest was you know he he was um you know drawn to these boom towns, you know, to the oil wealth, to the kind of, you know, he liked to play poker. He liked to drink. Molly clearly detected some level of kind of sensitivity beneath that rough exterior. But he was kind of one of many, you know, who were kind of, you know, what would happen is oil would be struck in one of these towns. It's crazy to read because the oil would be struck, Like one of the largest deposits of oil would be suddenly struck. And literally within days, you'd have 10,000 people there. Like a gold rush.

Yeah, it was a gold rush. And these camps would suddenly go up and everybody was living. And these were boom towns. One of the names of these boom towns was called Whiz Bang because they whizzed all day and they banged all night. It's a whole rabbit hole to go into because, you know, we could have, once again, like your other stories, we could have situations like this happen today. The ones, I don't know, maybe saving grace that I take from something like this is though, there was a clear willful ignorance of the government and of, you know, the federal government and obviously the local government to even look into these cases or

whatever. And today I wonder if that would, with the internet age, I'm sure it's still possible, but if something like this could ever happen without really getting, it shouldn't take the pressure of the public, but without getting the attention of the public to pressure to say like, oh, we need to get to the bottom of this. Yeah. And you had widespread corruption back then. You had government officials who were complicit and you had people who, and you had lawmen who were complicit. Did you uncover evidence of that yourself? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You, you could find, I mean, there were, there were lawmen who were guardians and were getting rich off the system. You had private

detectives who were hired and they were just covering up evidence for people that, you know, they weren't exposing and they were just covering it up. They were completely crooked. So, you know, again, there was that level of complicity and level of prejudice fueled together at the time that... And, you know, one would hope. But I do think it's why we as human beings always need to check ourselves. And we always need to be vigilant. And we always need to examine our conscience.

And we always need to try to learn from the past. You know, I do think, you know, stories shape who we are and um and i think these kind of stories can you know hopefully you know kind of shape the kind of people you want to be you know who do we want to be you know who do we want to be as a people um so um but yes, you would certainly hope that, you know, that is always your hope. But there is a fragility to society and to institutions and to human nature. And the more I research, the more you become aware of that. And we should not, as people, take things for granted.

And we should cherish what is right and fix what is wrong 100 always trying to move the ball forward yeah well thanks for all the background on on that it's really cool that that also came to life through one of the goats as well so if people haven't seen the movie go check that out we'll have the links to the book down below and all the books but we had put a pin in percyawcett yeah and the lost city is a which is which is you know it's a tragic tale but it's Percy Fawcett's like this heroic figure he's this larger-than-life type guy this British industrious kind of dude but industrious not for business industrious to go into

the middle of jungle and find the secrets and he went down obviously somewhere in there. But, you know, I can't remember if this was off camera as well because we were talking before, but what was the first inkling and you wanted to look into his story? You never know where you're going to find a story. I don't think I told you this. I was reading, I did a story, I was doing a story

for the New Yorker magazine on the world's greatest Sherlock Holmes scholar who was found mysteriously garroted in his apartment. True story. And so I was reading everything about Conan Doyle who wrote the Sherlock Holmes books and I was reading a biography or some text. It was very boring. But there was a footnote that said

that Conan Doyle's novel, The Lost World, was partly inspired by this character, this real-life explorer named Percy Harrison Fawcett. I had never heard of the guy. And so I looked him up, and then up, you know, in these old newspaper archives, and up came these, like, banner headlines in the New York Times.

British explorer disappears into Amazon with his oldest son. British explorer not heard from for months. You know, wife of British explorer believes he's still alive. Movie star goes in search of missing explorer. Movie star disappears. And you're just like, this is the craziest story. And you're like, and it was kind of one of these sensations

in its day. I mean, it was everywhere. It would have been like, it was like the OJ story of its day. You just couldn't, you could have been, I mean, there were cartoons that influenced Tintin. I mean, there were, you could have been i mean there were cartoons that influenced tin tin i mean there were you know it was you could have been anywhere and like it was the best the best analogy would have been like saying at a certain point if you said like where where's jimmy hoffa buried yes people would say where's faucet like where where's faucet because he

vanished yeah yeah yeah yeah so that was its origin so it was a footnote it was literally a footnote in a boring book that's it that was it it a footnote. And then you just went down the rabbit hole? And then I went down the rabbit hole. Okay. And as you said, you're not an explorer by nature. Oh, come on. Now, take one look at me. I'm Larry David.

No, I, yes, I'm not an explorer. Now, I will say, you know. But you did it. You did it. I did it. And the funny thing is, you know, we talked about the wager. And, like, I love the sea. And I've actually, you know, I've done things at sea.

And so even though, like, I'm not used to those kind of seas, I'm not a jungle person. I hate to camp. I really do. I don't get the whole camping thing. I never have. What do you do? Are you just going to lay there in the woods?

I know. People are going to mock me. You're listening to something. I'm getting PTSD right now because I did it in the Amazon last May. Oh, you did? How was it? We're not going to talk about that. It was tough.

It's tough. Yeah, Paul Rosalie took me to an abandoned beach deep by the Brazilian border where the uncontacted tribes are. And there was an incident that night with some leafcutter ants. Oh, shit. I think I filled my camping tank for the rest of my life. Oh, yeah. And the whole time, David, when I was sitting in that tent in hell while we were about to get eaten, I was also thinking about the bug that bites you on the lip that you wrote about that then you think you're fine.

And 20 years later, you keel over dead. Oh, you just die. That was not a nice thought. That was not nice. Well, I'll tell you. So I always hire a fact checker to fact check my books. And it's a New Yorker fact checker. Use her or another fact checker.

And they go through it. And they just make sure I do my own check. And then I have someone else check it just to make sure I'm accurate. I don't want to have mistakes. And inevitably, you might have one. But you want to try to be as careful and as accurate as you can. I remember after my trip, there's a scene in the book. It's actually one of the craziest diaries I've ever read. There's a scene because Fawcett had done

several expeditions before he did his final expedition looking for this place he called Z where he disappeared with his older son and his older son's best friend. But he had kind of mapped a lot of the borders, a lot of the states ofivia and uh in the jungle and um he had at one point gone on an expedition with an explorer actually been with shackleton if i'm pretty sure he'd been with shackleton in antarctica yeah antarctica and he decided to team up with a murray was his name it's been a long time i haven't talked about z in a long time and he he teamed up with uh faucet and they both they're both, you know, they're both egomaniacs. You know, they're both, you know, who's the better explorer, you know, who's, you know,

and Murray's like the Antarctic's heart and Fawcett's like, you know, the jungle. But they are two completely different forms of exploration as I came to realize. One is about a complete deprivation. If you're in Antarctica, it's actually deprivation of all your senses, a lack of color, a lack of biodiversity. I mean, nothing's alive. And when you're in the jungle, it's the exact opposite. It's like an overwhelming stimuli of everything. Everything is alive. Everything around you, right? I mean, as you know., bugs, whatever, snakes are the things that got you. And so in any case, they go on this expedition. And Murray, it's the craziest diary I think I've ever read. It's like a black comedy when you write that part.

Oh, yeah. It's just crazy. And I don't even remember. They're like these bot things. I don't even remember. They drop something on you. It's been so long now. They drop something on you.

And then it's like a thing. And it burrows under your skin. And then this fly burrows under your skin. And it's a worm, basically. It's like a thing and it burrows under your skin. And then this fly burrows under your skin and it's a worm, basically. It's like a little – and it grows inside your body. It's growing and your head would sometimes pop out of your skin. And Murray is getting his whole body taken over by these things. And he's losing his mind, as you can imagine. And Fawcett, who was as tough as nails and also –

You're too slow. He is. Are you kidding me? Not only was he too slow, Fawcett was, I'm telling you, Fawcett was the last person you would ever want to be on an expedition with because Fawcett was just like, I'm getting to point Z, or I'm getting there, and you know what? And he would make them actually...

Anyone who joined an expedition had to agree that, yeah, if at a certain point you're dying, we're going to leave you because we can't carry you out. We're not going to survive. And so that's part of the deal. You have to basically join a contract. And so Murray, at a certain point, his body's getting taken over by these worms, and he's losing his mind because he's just so grossed out by these things. And Fawcett, at a certain point, he's like, yeah. Leave him. so grossed out by these things and foster at a certain point he's like yeah leave him leave him we'll get good and there's a horse you know go that way go go that way and hopefully you'll find it and there's by the way for people

out there there's no jungle trails oh yeah you're not you're not like sitting in the middle of a path waiting for no no this is brush everywhere you have to machete your way through it and every as you said everything grows on top of each other like every time paul goes out on the pathways that they've carved just their little areas near there he brings a machete and he would hand us machetes because they're constantly cutting down new brush that grew from like the fucking day before yeah crazy 100 it's like 100%. It's like a green out. I mean, you just, and there's a certain point

where you could just get completely, if you don't know where you're going, you will get completely turned around. So in any case, Murray ends up, he somehow manages to survive and then they have this horrible feud back in England

and it's kind of a scandal and they're trying to keep the scandal from reaching the press. But the reason I tell the story is my fact checker, back to my fact checker. It's a good tangent. So my fact checker is fact checking the worms and I've kind of described the length of them based on the diaries, how long they were and how long they grew. And she said, oh, David, I really want to

show you something. And she goes to the computer and there was like a YouTube video of one of these things and somebody is having it pulled out of his back. And I looked at that thing, and I said, first of all, I was so grossed out, but I said, thank God I saw that after the fact, because had I seen that before, I never would have gone. Yeah, there's people I know who will not go with Paul down there. I'm like, oh, it's great, You should go. He's got it under control.

But there is so much that can go wrong. Oh, yeah. And I don't like snakes. And yeah. But I mean, I will say it was a remarkable trip. But it did not make me love the jungle. I will say the- Where did you go, by the way?

I was in the Xingu, southern basin of the Amazon along the Xingu River. In Brazil. In Brazil, yeah. It's in the southern basin of the Amazon. And for me, because I'm not a jungle person, and the trip did not turn me into a jungle person. But, you know, I had these meetings with various indigenous communities along the way,

set up by a guide and, you know, met with the Kikuru and the Kalapala. And that was just... It's Truck Month at GMC tackle the open road with added confidence in a 2025 Sierra 1500 pro graphite at 0% financing for up to 72 months with an available 5.3 liter V8 engine, 20 inch high gloss, black painted, aluminum wheels off-road suspension with available two inch factory installed lift kit, plus a towing capacity of up to 13,200 pounds, you'll be ready for anything this truck month.

Truck month is on now. Ask your GMC dealer for details. That was just incredible experiences. I mean, just amazing. I mean, and hearing oral history. I mean, someone had oral histories about Fawcett. I mean, you know. Oh, what'd they say?

Oh, yeah, because Fawcett, for the Kalapalos, Fawcett was among the first white people they had ever seen. And they have, oh, man, they have an oral tradition. And an anthropologist had actually translated one of these oral histories about their encounter with Fawcett. Whoa. And it's like a, they're beautiful. I mean, they're kind of like an epic poem.

I mean, they're really these beautiful oral histories because she had translated them so beautifully. And, you know, it actually, first of all, we talked about skepticism. You know, it's like, okay, in oral history, is it accurate? Well, in the oral history, they describe Fawcett as playing a little musical instrument.

I knew that because I had in private letters from Fawcett to playing a little musical instrument. I knew that because I had in private letters from Fawcett to his wife that he brought a recorder with him. That was not ever in the press, never made public. You checked that? Oh, yeah, yeah. I'd never seen it. It was never mentioned. So I was like... That's good. They're good. They're on it.

This is good. The story. This is not BS. This is a real story. Go on. Yes, exactly. And then that story had real clues, because they described, they said they tried to discourage them from heading, was it east? I think it was east.

Like their ancestors had. Yeah, yeah, in this oral history. And they were repeating the oral history for me. Actually, one of the descendants was repeating the oral history to me. And they're trying to dissuade them from heading east toward what they referred to as the Fierce Indians, a group. And then they describe how they could see the fire

rising into the sky from their encampment for several days. And then the fire went out. And then they go and they inspect the area eventually. And there's no sign of them, but the implication is they've been killed. And it's probably the most likely explanation too because, first of all, Fawcett was such a survivor. The idea that all three of them would have died and communication would have ceased instantly

from all of them suggests they were killed abruptly. And also, and he just had powers of survival kind of living in the jungle. So I thought that oral history had real clues. Yeah. The level of the sinister nature of them dying, though, could be a range. It could be as sinister as an uncontacted tribe got a hold of him and, I don't know, ate him or something, whatever, something crazy like that. Or it could be a tree fell on him. Or a jaguar got to them.

Hunger. I mean, that's the thing you learn about the jungle too. Especially the Europeans would often starve because they weren't accustomed to finding food. It's really challenging, even in that very biodiverse area, to find food if you're not good at it. And it was probably why a lot of Europeans always thought, oh, the jungle is completely uninhabitable,

because they would get in there, they would get diseased, and they would die. And yet, indigenous communities, a little bit like the Karaskara we talked about, you know, they've been there for hundreds and hundreds of years, and they know how to live there, and they've adapted to the terrain. And terrain that seems so hostile to foreigners,

to them has, you know, they have plants that, you know, offer medicines. You know, in the groups where I was using, they would use this kind of – they would shoot these darts and have a kind of – I don't remember what the – it's like a poison, but it's not quite a poison. It doesn't kill you, but it would stun the fish. And then the fish would just get stunned. And float. And they would float.

And then they would just pick them up and they would still be alive. And then they would eat them. They wouldn't even have to fish them out. That's nuts. Yeah. Yeah, Paul has a quote. He said, there's a sap for that instead of there's an app for that. And he talks about how they use, like what they use in the jungle.

Because he lives with all of his friends and the people he works with there grew up in the jungle. They're all indigenous people from the jungle. They're brilliant these are these are people that can hear a bird from two miles away and know exactly what what it is and almost what it's saying too and he's always talking about like when he comes back to the western world you know two three months out of the year it's like all the problems we invent and then all the things we think we understand like medically even is like half of it's wrong because they can handle themselves out there and survive in horrible conditions sometimes and actually live longer yeah as well yeah i mean the use i mean the way their expertise in in the plants is just kind of remarkable yes and you know of course now you have so many scientists

who are going into the jungles to try to study these plants for modern medicines but um but you know even though i just gave that example of the thing with the fish but i mean it's kind of like incredible i mean these little kids go in there with a bow and arrow they shoot this thing into the water and suddenly up come all these piranha and they just eat the piranha that's it that's it now what why was percy faucet so obsessed with the lost city of z and like what was the nature of him even finding out about it? Yeah. So, you know, he grew up, you know, it's funny, you grow up at a certain age and, you know, whatever, we grew up with athletes or whatnot.

These people we read about are astronauts and these people that kind of fill our minds and our imaginations. And so when he was growing up as a child, it was kind of this era of Victorian exploration where these people would go out into the world. And their stories were huge. You know, they were read, you know, like the Bible. You know, everybody was reading them. And so, he was greatly influenced by these stories,

and they just kind of captured his imagination. He served in the military, and then he eventually... eventually he goes to the Royal Geographical Society, kind of goes to a little... Manuals, from a time point, are great historical resources. Manuals? Manuals. If you want to understand a time period, it's often don't read, like, the big history book.

Look at the manuals. So there were little manuals for these people who would go there, like, if you're going to be an explorer, what to do. Oh. And so these manuals, it's a little like, if you're trying to understand, like, look at the wedding pages in the New York Times. if you wanted to see how cultures changed over decades, just look at the wedding page. Like sometimes these weird things tell you stories you don't

expect, you know? And so, you know, you look at these manuals. So I went to the Royal Geographic and I'm looking at these manuals that he actually read and he carried with him. I knew he had them. I knew he read them. He carried them with him. You know, they're telling you how to survive. You know, if you get this, you know, cut off your arm, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, oh, I love this one. If you get wounded, you take gunpowder, you pack it into the wound and then you blow, you know, and light it up to like corduroys a wound, but you're kind of seeing how they would survive. But in any case, so he, he went there, he kind of trained and then he goes, he gets a job to kind of mapping and doing cartography in South America.

And he has these remarkable powers of endurance. And slowly on these expeditions, he's doing them over years. He would go for like two years at a time. You got to realize like, and there isn't you know no sat phone i mean you're gone i mean you're just gone it's literally crazy your wife and your children you're just gone i mean you and you i mean always the their story is hugely important too you know so what are they going through and um and as he would do these expeditions he began to gather these kind of first of all he's kind of obsessed with el dorado and these dreams and then but he would do these expeditions, he began to gather these kind of clues. First of all, he was kind of obsessed with El Dorado and these dreams.

But he would gather these clues. Like he'd be in the jungles of Bolivia, and he would see these earth mounds. He'd be like, oh, these look like earth mounds. He would say, you know. Earth mounds. Yeah, these large, but they look man-made. They look man-made, these kind of earthworks. They look pyramidal, but they were made of earth.

There's not a lot of stone in the Amazon. No. And then he would be going along, and he would find pottery. They couldn't date it back then, but it just looked really old. So he started to gather kind of these clues, and he started to think, you know, I think there were these, these are remnants of these ancient civilizations and that there were people there. Now-

Had he read like Francisco de Oriana? Oh yeah, he read all that stuff. And you know, it's interesting, you know, people are trapped and you know, Fawcett is interesting. Fawcett had a lot of racism. And so on one level, he's very radical because he's kind of saying okay I think these indigenous people really capable and a lot of other people saying no no no they couldn't have they couldn't do these things because you know because of I mean Victorian and warning of

prejudice were no I would have never like that at all yeah they're like yeah there's no way these Amazonian people good but so he kind of he's kind of, there were these myths then about kind of like white Indians. And he kind of fell prey to this bullshit. And so that's kind of how he's trying to square the circle. He can never quite fully escape it. But he is finding these evidence of these ruins, and he begins to become convinced it is there. And what's interesting, you mentioned these Eldorado texts, which you would read. And these texts are really interesting.

Who wrote it again? It was like the priest or something? Oh, gosh, yes. It was the priest. You know, this is what happens. You write a new book, you forget the old book. But yes, do check us. But that's a crazy account if you read some of those. Yeah, the priest wrote that one. But you would read some of these early Eldorado people who went into the jungle looking for gold, as was the want of the conquistadors. And they would describe in these accounts, these kind of fabulously described large populations, towns, bridges.

Gold. Yeah, all these things they would see. populations, towns, bridges. Gold. Yeah. All these things they would see. And over time, when other explorers would go into the Amazon and not find anything, and populations had dwindled to really more tribal societies, they concluded that these accounts were all myths and that they had been written just to kind of impress the king, that their journeys have been disastrous, so let's write something to impress them and justify what we've done. And there's no doubt that some of that was true,

but people like Fawcett would read these accounts and say, no, no, I think this is evidence that there were lots of people here and that these things really were here. And that it could still be there. Yeah. What's so interesting about modern archaeology is they're now starting to find in those places where those conquistadors had gone, they're finding black earth. Black earth is kind of earth that has been enriched

from kind of human remains and waste. And what does that mean? It means lots of people once lived there. People were there. And so now scholars are going back on these texts and they're starting to look at them and starting to realize actually some of these do have actually evidence of larger populations.

And they start to find like even like where Fawcett had found these earth mounds, archaeologists have now studied those earth mounds and realized that these things are massive earthworks built by human beings in some ways as sophisticated as the pyramids. Now, they weren't done with stone because stone didn't exist, but they had elaborate irrigation systems and when you date a lot of these ruins and you start to date some of them and some of the sides some date quite far back but often they might date to around 1500 like in the area where fossil what happened then that was when oriana was going through down the amazon and what did they bring and what did they bring disease oh right yeah exposure the first exposure to disease was wiped out so many native americans yes so when then later explorers were kind of coming into this area and just seeing these kind of small

um you know hunter gathering groups that were kind of mobile they assumed that's the way the amazon had always been and more and more evidence is indicating no no no that's's the way the Amazon had always been. And more and more evidence is indicating, no, no, no, that's not the way the Amazon really was. There were these much larger populations who had much larger civilizations who had these earthworks. And in fact, in the area where Fawcett disappeared, when I was there on my trip and I was staying with the Kukurus who was an artist. Is that like Dead Horse Camp or something? Yeah, well, Dead Horse Camp was the last known sighting where they were seen from, and then they vanished. That's still in Brazil, though, right? That is still in Brazil in the Southern Basin.

And when I was visiting the Kikurus, there was an archaeologist living there, Michael Heckenberg, and he said to me, you know, I want to show you something. And he took me there with the Kikuru chief, and we went out, he got his machete. And he starts, you know, You got to sharpen that baby up.

Yeah, sharpen that baby up, go in there. And he starts showing me and there's this kind of area that it looks like, you know, it's kind of all dug out. It's kind of going around and it's kind of a large wedge of earth that's kind of going down. I said, what is that? He says, it's a moat. And then he starts showing me so there's what over here there were bridges and you know earth bridges and um and you know he had found evidence of all these um uh settlements dated to this same time period um and they had roads he had found evidence of roads that were built at these right angles you know these right yeah and and so and the crazy part is faucet probably walked right over them because you know the thing that the thing

that he he would have expected stone to some degree or gold or whatnot and some of his you know by the end his ideas are kind of a mix some of his, you know, by the end, his ideas are kind of a mix of myth and reality and also probably by the end, some madness. Yes. Especially after serving World War I. I mean, after World War I, he witnessed the complete collapse of Western civilization.

So his notion of Z began to change. It went from kind of a very practical, concrete thing into something kind of more dazzling. To aspire to? Yeah, to get to. Almost like a refuge. Almost like an Atlantic. Something that was more golden almost because he had witnessed.

He was at the Battle of the Somme. I mean, where people just, 10,000 people die in a day, climb out of the trench and die. He was there. Yeah, he's one of the most unique people. Yeah, gas. Yeah, just crazy. But in any case, a lot of these things are earthworks. So the jungle, you described it perfectly.

Your friend, within a day or two, the jungle's back. And so the jungle would kind of overgrow a lot of these earthworks. And so he'd probably walk right over some of his dream lands. I'm thinking about it like in where I was, where some of it's carved out. And the way you describe it of everything's alive and it's all just like in your face is perfect because if I were going back in there

like treasure hunt or something, I wouldn't even know where to look because you're watching, you're literally watching like where your next step is going to be. There's so much going on that, you know, a treasure hunt could be something as simple as like a root that you see. And then you got to go down and pull the root. And then after you pull the root, you pull the dirt. And then eventually you get a shimmer of gold.

And then you got to dig fucking 10 feet down. Maybe you get it. You know, how do you even do that in the middle of a vegetative jungle? It's crazy to me. There was a moment where I got separated from my guide. Oh, no. I see a Larry David episode already. It was so pathetic.

I'm so pathetic. But in any case, I'm just waiting and waiting for him to come back. And eventually, I'm like, it's starting to get dark. I better go. So I'm trying to find, so I head out. It was a very funny story, which I'm almost too embarrassed to tell. Oh, you're already too deep in. All right, so I'm the only idiot

who brings a laptop computer into the jungle. Oh, no. And let me tell you, this was like 2007, maybe. 2005, I think, when I made my trip trip a laptop computer in 2005 weighs about two tons i mean it was just as big it's a brick it's a brick i mean i still have it it's truly and i had you know i kind of i'd always brought a computer with me on my reporting trips because you're gonna type and stuff it's like who brings a laptop into the computer so i brought it to the jungle so i but i had been had it with me and i had been carrying it with me and transporting and so i have so i set off looking with this laptop computer that weighs you know a brick and um

i head into the jungle and just as you were saying at a certain point if certain point, if you're not familiar with the biodiversity, it kind of all looks the same. It's just a lot of greenery. And you're just like, wait, wait, did I just walk past that point? Am I walking in circles? And I thought I was going in a straight line. And then I realized, wait, I think I'm circled back. And then you start to panic. And so then you're just kind of walking. And then I'm in the water. And I'm water up to like my waist. And I have this laptop computer. And I'm like, but I'm like, at that point, I had this weird,

it was like this weird thing. I was like, but I can't let go of my laptop computer, which I can't even use in the jungle. So I'm carrying this damn thing on my head as I'm walking through the water. And I'll never forget, I suddenly, I hear this noise. And then I start to see things kind of flitting about. You're like, this is it. I'm like, yeah, this is the end.

There's the jaguar. And then I hear this kind of weird, it's kind of, it almost felt, I couldn't, it was a peculiar sound. It was kind of a flitting sound. It was like, I wish I could describe it. It was musical. But it sounded almost like laughter. And I'm like, what the hell is going on?

And then suddenly emerges from the jungle all these little kids. And they were all these quick crews who had been sent out to try to find me. Oh, my god. And they just saw this picture. They did not know who Larry David was. They thought I was the funniest damn thing they had ever ever seen and i mean they're probably sitting around now they're 30 years later going do you remember that idiot in the jungle and he was carrying a laptop computer and he didn't know which way was you know east north through oh my god yeah that's

a very new york story oh yeah it's classic new york does the jungle it was it was yeah it was that was classic yeah yeah i'm embarrassed so that's right oh wait can i just get the coda to the story so i managed to get that computer back home and it never worked again it was completely broken from the rain and the water it just never worked it just got it got beaten up who takes a computer it just didn't survive. And it was like, also, they were prehistoric, those computers back then. Did you get your files off it? Yeah, probably.

You know, I don't know if I actually ever did. No, I don't think it ever worked again. And I still have the damn thing. That might have some good shit on it. You can send that in. Okay. All right. Yeah, we should look for that.

Yeah, we should talk about that. All right. We get some links up there. Yeah, I just had John Kiriakou in here who gave us the subtle flex. He always does these subtle flexes off camera. He's like, yeah, I actually lost my hard drive. It got wiped last year. So I called up Edward Snowden.

Six hours later, we had it. I'm like, oh, you called up Edward Snowden. He's like, yeah, he's in Russia. I'm like, I know John. Like, he just, how'd you get it? He's like, oh, he did the whole code over the phone. So maybe we'll get you out of the zone. We'll see what happens but with percy faucet i love the image that you gave in the book where you

described this and you kind of said this a little bit ago where it's like these were the modern day heroes so when you describe him leaving new york he came over from britain to new york to like set sail and there's all these headlines like oh we're gonna wave off percy faucet he's gonna go find lost city of z and obviously he never came home now when did they lost contact with him because he would like have a messenger go back yeah at at some point and it would come back and forth that was a little confusing to me but at some point the messenger went and he wasn't there when did it become like a public story that it's like, -"Ooh, he's probably dead." -"Yeah, so...

It's crazy. So part of the... It was really one of the great media stories of his day. Partly he needed to try to fund his expedition. And so he contracted with a media group. And so he was writing dispatches along the way and these dispatches would get printed out and they would get you know on telegraphs and they would be sent around the world so you could be in africa and asia wherever you might be twitter before twitter before twitter you could get your tweet and um and then when he went into the jungle, for a long period, he continued to write these dispatches.

And he would encounter either someone who was part of his group. He would add the pieces of paper. And these people would then carry them out. And it might take them a month and a half to get back. And then it might take another month for them to be um typed up in a telegraph and broadcast so people were following the news in real time although it was probably about a two month lag time yeah which is crazy but people were holding their breath because they were able to read this and they were able to read his own accounts and in one of his last accounts he

says i may be out of contact for a while now we're now heading into the you know yeah exactly and that was kind of so you had his words and it was almost as if it like went off into an ellipse and you're just kind of waiting and waiting and waiting and soon as often happens with these things theories begin to emerge. Many people couldn't ever wrap their brain around the fact that he may have died, including his wife, who held on to the belief for decades later that her husband has to be alive somewhere in the jungle because he was indestructible. And others said, there's a Tintin, the strip, these novels, these stories, Tintin,

where it's like Fawcett is depicted as being too happy. He doesn't want to go back to the urban modern world that is emerging of cities and machineries. And then, of course, there were some who thought he was dead. Some thought he was being held. And then some people try to look were some who thought he was dead. Some thought he was being held. And so, and then some people tried to look for him and try to gather evidence. There's this movie star that goes and looks for him. There's a Swiss trapper who goes and looks for them,

and they're not heard from again. Swiss trapper? A Swiss trapper. Sorry, I didn't say that. He wasn't heard from again? I'm pretty sure, yeah, the Swiss trapper was not heard from again. And the movie star was not heard from again. He was kind of like a B-list movie star.

Yeah, B or C-list. C-list, yes, list yes exactly doesn't have a lot of memorials no no no yeah fuck that guy but he thought this could be my chance i mean he did think this is my chance to start him loved him and friends he wasn't good after that so they all go in looking for him that what's that over like a five yeah over five six seven year period yep yep, over a five, six, seven year period. Yep, yep. People are looking for him. And it just kind of then went into, then it kind of goes into conspiracy land. He's dead.

Yeah, is he dead? Is he alive? Is this, is he that? And everyone has a different theory. And then where's Hoffa Berry? Where's Fawcett Berry? What do you think happened? I think it's that oral history

that they decided to head further east into an area where, according to the Kalapalos, they referred to them as the fierce Indians. It was a more warring group. And you have to understand, too, that, and as your friend, I'm sure, would tell you, there's so much incursion onto indigenous lands from outsiders, from whether they had been rubber trappers or people trying to get loggers, that a lot of the indigenous groups, you know, they very fiercely defend their areas because they're constantly under threat. And so I think they went east and that the Kalapala saw their fire for several days and that they were killed shortly after. And the fire went out as, I think that's a great word in the oral history. I can remember what it was but um and that they were killed do you think it was the kind of thing

where they were just a threat and they were quickly killed or do you think it could have been more ritualistic or you know it's actually in the film they just they he depicts it james gray as more ritualistic um you know i don't know i don't know i i don't i don't again there's those elements of history where you can't go yeah now paul paul's what you would like him because he's one of these guys who's always like rolling his eyes at shit where people just run with it with a strand on stuff and there's a lot of things in the amazon that he pushes back on publicly because people are people will say things like the entire amazon's man-made or something now based on some of the man-made evidence.

And it's like that's not the proper way to put it. But one of the things that keeps him up at night that he's talked about before on here and I've talked with him off camera about it is he works with all these indigenous tribes. And they don't – obviously they don't contact the uncontacted tribes, but they know where they are and they kind of know who each other is. He's known guys who have been killed by them. We met one of his rangers who was literally shot with an arrow right here and had to swim underneath the Amazon like to safety from these guys. I mean it's a real thing. But he's like within the uncontacted tribes, deeper, far past them, there are even more uncontacted tribes. And there's people where it's not only that they're uncontacted, they've never been seen before. Because the Amazon to him is a lot, and I think

I agree with him, it's a lot like the ocean. There's a lot we haven't even seen of it. And there are some stories that bother him where it's like, according to some oral histories from some of these other tribes and stuff, kind of like what you were hearing there is allegedly some pyramids in the amazon and there are uncontacted tribes that protect them and i always wonder if like faucet said oh you know for example on one of those last telegraphs we're not going to be seen for a while whatever direction he did go if he went deep enough that like he actually got to one of those i wonder if like he actually saw something that, even if it's not El Dorado, it's like a remnant of it,

and then he died. That's certainly, you know, I mean, those were kind of the theories that emerged. Some people said, you know, believed he had found whatever this place he was, the Z. You know, it's interesting, and I'm always careful. I think there is a tendency where there are places that are remote. And remote enough that there are places that are less,

you know, we don't have, you know, you don't have everyone with their iPhone taking pictures like we do now. And I think through centuries, the Amazon became a place where people would project onto them what they wanted to see or what they needed or whatever their desires were. And over time, that might change. And I think you see that. I mean, the Amazon is a place of, I mean, you know, of mythology. Because usually what will often happen in areas that are less known, we tend to want to fill in the stories, right?

We want to fill in those blanks. You know, I'm always very skeptical in the sense of like as the historian, I just kind of am like, okay, I can't get there. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. That's a good way to be. And you know what?

The hardest thing is just to say, I don't know. I don't know. And so, you know, even with Fawcett, I tell you, what do I think happened? Okay. I think that's what's happened. I don't know. Just a guess. Yeah.

It's just a guess. It's an educated guess. It's probably a more informed guess based on the evidentiary trail and based on things you would, but at the end, it's still supposition. Yes. And I actually, it's funny, unless he'll recognize this, but I've complimented people in here before where I bring in an expert on something. And one of my favorite things about them will be that they are willing to say the words, I don't know, or I'm not sure, or that's not my area. Because we kind of live in this world where people are like, oh, you should be a personal Google on every single thing. And if you look into something, you should know everything. That's not how it is. These

things are very complicated. And where you can't find evidence on stuff, you shouldn't come out and say, based on the evidence, I can say that. No, you got to be able to say, look, we don't have enough information there. So I respect that a lot because obviously it's clear in your books. Like you dig as deep as you can. I go as far as I can go. I go as far. And I'm desperate to know. I mean, even though I say like, what is the impulse?

It is a desperate desire to close the gap. 100%. And that is what you're after. You're just trying to close the gap. 100%. And that is what you're after. You're just trying to close the gap. But you get to a point. I always reach a point. It's the hardest point where I have to say, I could keep going for another 30 years and I don't think I'm going to close that gap and I got to go sit down and write.

Seems like a good place to leave it right there. David, this has been awesome, man. Thank you, man. You're a great writer. I really love Lost City of Z. I'm looking forward to reading the other ones as well. Thank you. Appreciate it.

It's fun to do. Of course. Thank you so much for coming through to do this. It was my pleasure. And we'll have the links to The Wager, your latest one down below, as well as your other books. So just double check that when we put it out. You got it. We'll have everything in there for you.

But everyone go check them out. Guy's a great writer. And obviously, Marty Scorsese loves him. So good luck with the newest movie whenever that's going to get going. Thanks, man. All right. Thank you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.