Julian Dorey Podcast - #341 - The BRUTAL Rise of Aztec Empire & Lost Ancient Civilizations of South America | Luke Caverns

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) GHOSTBED: Right now, as a Julian Dorey listener, you can get 25% off your order for a limited time. Just go to https://GhostBed.com/julian and use promo code JULIAN at checkout. WATCH PREVIOUS EPs w/ LUKE CAVERNS: EPISODE #272: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1y3J9LDyM8cYPj7a5ZqG7M?si=c4d36462976b48fb EPISODE #271: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2cFYnkOaUMCS3tJbp7oLjt?si=tjgrw-T_TX2Xp_JnexqXpg EPISODE #176: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tHWPYnu8MDfIn4O4jA4oo?si=69874d0df0c040a6 EPISODE # 175: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5wK2JCEiy7KZbkhKquh29n?si=87146b35294e4b4a PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Luke Caverns is an Ancient Civilizations Historian, Researcher, and Anthropologist. He specializes in the lost civilizations of Egypt, South America & the Amazon Jungle. FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey LUKE LINKS - YT: https://www.youtube.com/@lukecaverns - X: https://twitter.com/lukecaverns JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Intro 01:15 – Hotel Julian, Luke’s Books, Meso America, Cortez, Aztecs, Olmecs, Teotihuacán 12:15 – Mercenaries, Lake Texcoco, Betrayal, Aztec Empire, Military-State 24:25 – Two Phases, Talud Tablero, Blueprint, Loyalty, 1519 Peak, Rome, Bartering, Gold 34:39 – Polarizing, Spaniards vs Aztecs, Tenochtitlan, Maya, Montezuma, Warfare, D3aths 43:56 – Tenochtitlan, Cortés, Cabral, 1500–1700, Flower Moon, Summer Moon, Civilization 54:42 – Primordial America, Great Plains, Comanches, Expansion 1:02:05 – Cortés, Gods?, Disease, March to Tenochtitlan, 150 Men 1:07:25 – Conquering, Smallpox, Peru, Temples, Geoglyphs 1:18:01 – Amazon, Garden Theory, Clickbait, Preservation 1:26:12 – Conquest, Olmecs, Coatzacoalcos, Agriculture, 17 Heads, Transport, Engineering 1:34:34 – Aliens?, Gods, Psychedelics, Ego Death, Shamanism 1:49:02 – Middle Ground, Understudied, Progress, Family, Athens 1:57:46 – Troy, Greece vs Americas, History Beneath, Squanto 2:13:00 – Croatoans, Broken Spears, Colonial History, Fort San Juan, Bias 2:23:04 – Transatlantic Accent, Olmecs, Monument 19 2:33:06 – Olmecs vs Maya, Stone of Kings, Trade, La Danta, El Tigre, El Mirador, Macchu Picchu 2:47:51 – Ancient City Patterns, Fibonacci, Tuning In 3:01:48 – Luke's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 341 - Luke Caverns Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What a fascinating and overlooked part of history. I can tell you right now, nobody in Mesoamerica liked the Aztecs. The Spaniards were shocked at how barbaric. The Aztecs were essentially said that their civilization was absolutely demonic. So this is the blueprint for the Aztecs. You're crippling the guy that you're fighting, and then you're going to tie him up, pull him to the top of the pyramid, rip his heart out, and sacrifice him to the war god or the sun god or the rain god. But the Aztecs were also shocked that the Spaniards, their style of warfare was complete total war.

Just slaughtered people in the marketplace. This is like just the momentum of civilization moving forward. Exactly the same thing was happening in the Americas. You think of the Wild West, your only lot in life is like, I hear about this place over in California, there's lots of gold out there, having absolutely no idea that there are Comanches rolling around the planes that will scalp you and torture you death and burn you alive just 160 years ago. Think about that.

And what's really crazy is right at the beginning of their civilization, how did the Olmex transport these heads? aliens. I find myself studying ancient people and I see the bizarre things that they come up with and things that they believe and I actually have to agree with you. What is actually the answer to this? Hey guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. it's been great man yeah thank you so much got all your accommodations everything necessary i've got everything necessary i've got the nice massage chair i'm i'm i'm living large massage chair not illegal masseuse just want to be clear about that we're not you know no ditty around here no ditty

that's right so can you say that now or am i going to get sued for saying that he is a convicted felon all right so we're good saying no ditty yeah so yeah i've been enjoying it man then actually i'd see more of the city this time around it's gonna say you went exploring yesterday before talking with our buddy Marky gags. Yeah. Where'd you go? It's nowhere. I just wandered around 14th Street and checked out a couple stores and then rode the subway a couple places, checked out a park, checked out some church and then headed over to Queens.

Very on brand as an explorer. You treated New York City the same way as you treat Cambodia. I love that. Yep. That's excellent. Yeah, yeah. Had nowhere in particular I wanted to go. I didn't want to go do all the cheesy trademark stuff because I'm going to do that with my wife at some point. I'll do all the Empire State Building, the Met, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, I just kind of wandered around. You're writing a book now? I'm in the process of writing a couple books. There's one that's like the, my all-time book that I want to write. I can't share the idea of it publicly. But this other one I'm writing right now is on the Olmex. And I'm going to do like a, I don't know exactly what I'm going to call it yet. I was just going to make it the

Olmec Enigma or the something like colossal heads I'm not really sure but yeah I want to do a history of ancient Mesoamerica and I want to do a book just on the Olmex and because I feel like they deserve their own topic or their own book and then I want to do a book called lost cities of the snake god and that that basically goes from the Maya to the Aztecs and then I might do a third follow-up at some point like i think i'll do it three years back to back to back wait you're gonna call it lost cities of the what was it of the snake god yeah because you have the the the feathered serpent that's like uh one of the trademark gods of mesoamerica have you trademarked that yet no you got to do that that's hard as fuck someone's gonna steal that yeah yeah yeah i know well that's why i can't steal

or that's why i can't publicly say the book i want to write okay yeah the one i was telling you about a minute ago so the other one yeah with that i think that title's been taken though that's the thing. The one you told me outside? You think so? I mean, I know so. There's been feature films made called that. We can do better than that, too. That other one you have. Yeah, yeah. Lost City of the Snake God. Yeah. Yeah. I'm buying that. I don't even know what it's about. I'm buying it. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good.

So that's the third one, the untitled one? I haven't figured it out, but it's essentially going to be the, it's essentially going to be the conquest of Mexico. So it's going to, it's going to begin, so right at the end of Mesoero. American pre-Columbian history, the Aztecs are planning a final assault on the Maya world in the Yucatan. And the next day is when Cortez shows up. And basically, you know, it's like two unstoppable forces meeting each other, the Aztec Empire and the Conquistadors. And I want to write a book that starts there and goes for maybe like the next 150 years or so. So like a three-part history of ancient Mexico and Central America. Let's dig into that. What, what happened there?

Let's do a little preview of the book, if you will, here. So Cortez comes in, for people not familiar. You can explain exactly what the tete-a-tete with the Aztecs were there. But how many guys had he come in with? What was the disease that happened afterwards? And then how did civilization settle over the next basically six, seven generations? Yeah. So the only other thing I may do is I may just make it a two-parter where I start off with the Olmex.

Because the Olmex need their own book. There's no book out there that's just really. dedicated to the olmex that's accessible for just history fans yeah um and then i may follow that up with a single book which is lost cities of the snake god and that one maybe includes the fall of mexico in it like the second half of the book but um yeah so well should i start do you think i start with the olmex or you want me to say come back to the omex the aztecs i've been waiting to do that so let's do it yeah um where do you want to start with the aztecs like what do you well you know what actually a little exposition would be good so if we have like kind of chitlan and everything

before cortez gets there just what it was like where it was located to show people the scene and then we can get the cortez and you go wherever you want to go my friend so uh so to noche teelan um this is something that i think a lot of people don't realize is you know the aztecs are so synonymous with mexican history but the aztecs are and are not mexican at all um Nowadays, yeah, we just, they have been totally absorbed into the Mexican world, especially the modern Mexican world, but the Aztecs came from further north than the Mexican Valley, maybe not even Mexico at all, possibly north of the Rio Grande up into New Mexico, Nevada, maybe even Utah.

We don't exactly know where they came from, but they came down from far north, a place called Aztlan, and they say that they came from like these caves of Aztlan, and that's their homeland. And that's not just a legend. these codexes, which are these long pieces of paper. So a codex is essentially, it's analogous to papyrus. So you've seen a papyrus scroll. They roll it up. Well, the difference is in Mesoamerica, a codex is like, you ever had a, you ever had those sticky notes that are folded like accordions, you know, where they're connected on each opposite side? So that's a codex. That's what a

codex is. And so you would read it like this and then flip it over and read it the other way, like a book. So the Aztecs had these codices, and they essentially tell their origin story in it, that they came from this lost place called Azthlon. They were essentially kicked out of it. And we think that they were kicked out of it for the same reason that they were kind of getting kicked around the Valley of Mexico when they came down because they were such a violent, savage, barbaric, unamicable society that couldn't get along with anybody. And that's pretty much their history, is that they're, you know, living next to the Aztecs, like constantly brushing up against sandpaper like it's just it's impossible to live around these

people um and so we know that they when they migrate down from somewhere north of the rio grande they find the mexican valley and if what approximate year do you think they did that okay so this is this is probably sometime around 1,100 or 1,200 so 800 so 800 800 800 years ago they have a buttress of seven a two 300 years before cortez 400 years somewhere in that area so that's when they arrive in the mexican valley and um you know it's not hard to it's not hard to see why this is a place that they would have loved so they came from the american southwest which is just desert this is the land of the cliff dwellers and and uh you know very arid environments and as soon as you hit the valley of mexico well it's just a beautiful highland mountains cool

crisp air, fertile valleys. You can grow anything. There's, uh, you know, it's, uh, the valley of Mexico is where, uh, corn was first grown, like, like maize. Um, it's just an extremely fertile, extremely wealthy place. And, and was wealthy long before the Aztecs ever arrived. Like, have you ever heard of the, uh, you ever heard of Teotibokan, the pyramid of the sun, the moon? Yes. Temple of Ketal Coat. You talk to me about that the first time you were in here. Okay, was I? So it's 177. Or did I? Um, yeah. Um, yeah. So, so, that was a great empire that existed about a thousand years before the Aztecs ever arrived in the Valley of Mexico. So the Aztecs found that city Teotibokan and it had been abandoned

for a thousand years by the time the Aztecs showed up. And what was the surrounding geography like there? It's mountainous. It's like arid, it's like arid mountains, but yet the closer you get to the rivers, the more fertile. it is. So you have a lot of, there's a lot of agriculture there. It's a, yeah, it's got it. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's absolutely gorgeous. This photo is probably taken in the winter. So everything's a little bit more dead. Yeah, that step pyramid looks like the one in apocalyptic when they were throwing the bodies down it. Yep. Yeah. Um, so this was the, uh, this was the empire of teotibacan, which was, uh, a civilization that flourished in the area of, uh, north of modern day Mexico

city, about a thousand years before the Aztecs arrive. So when the Aztecs get there, they, you know, they see the wealth that's here. They see why people would want to live here. And then they want to live there as well. And so they're kind of orbiting around the valley of Mexico, where you have multiple different tribes and kingdoms who are already there that are now living in the shadows of, living in the shadow of the pyramids of Teotibokan. They know what happened in those imperial times a thousand years ago they know about all the war that happened between the valley of mexico and the maya and they're all getting along with each other relatively amicably and so the aztecs are a pretty savage and violent group of people and so they're constantly getting

brushed out by these other tribes that are already living in the valley of Mexico and they're just kicking them out kicking them out kicking them out and they probably orbit around this valley for several decades, maybe 50 years or so. I mean, from what we think. And eventually, they approached the city of Caliqan. And so the kingdom of Caliqan, they eventually, you know, the Aztecs tell them, you know, where are our people, at least we think, they make some kind of agreement, and probably what it is, is the Aztex are coming to them saying, listen, our people, our people are. Someone's not okay out there, but keep going. So the Aztecs come to them and say, listen, people are starving we don't have a place to settle down we have nothing you know we please let us let us

work for you let us do something for you we'll be mercenaries for you we'll be soldiers and warriors for you and so the calicoan you know royalty probably gets together and it's like well yeah these guys would probably make good warriors um okay what are we gonna what are we gonna do we should probably use these guys before someone else uses them against us so they're like they're like okay what can we do um well they're good warriors but they're pretty savage people uh they're not going to fit in with our society so let's let's hire them as mercenaries and we'll give them a little plot of land inside of our kingdom or inside of our territory that they can use you can fake a lot of things a headline an alibi even a good story but you know what you can't fake good sleep that's why ghostbed is here

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Most orders arrive in two to five days so you can be sleeping better by next week. Right now, as a Julian Dory listener, you're going to get 25% off your Ghostbed order for a limited time. Just go to ghostbed.com slash Julian, that link is in my description below, and use promo code Julian at checkout. Once again, that's ghostbed.com slash Julian, promo code Julian. Upgrade your sleep with Ghostbed, the makers of the coolest beds in the world. Some exclusions apply. Seaside for details. So what they do is they're like, okay, well, let's give them this crappy outcropping in the middle of the lake Teshkoko, where there's like, there's just, you can, the lake's real shallow, you can walk across some of the stones on it, and there's a rocky outcropping sitting in the middle of the lake. And it's like the worst real estate you can possibly imagine.

But the Aztec prophets and the chroniclers had been told by their god, Huitz de Potli. So, you know, their shaman's probably take psilocybin mushroom or deterra or something like that and go into this trans state and speak. Yeah. And so they probably speak to, they probably speak to Huitsipotli, their god. I think I met him when I did ayahuasca. You may have. I remember that guy. You may have.

Him and Ben Franklin together. Wild combo. So they're given the prophet or they're given the great vision of when you see the, you see the. the serpent and the talons of the eagle, that's where you'll know that you're, you're supposed to settle down. It's like our promised land, right? So that's the iconic eagle grabbing the serpent image that we see in Mexico today. So the Aztecs are like, okay, well, I guess we're going to go out to this little outcropping in the middle of this lake. So they go out there, sure enough, there's probably, there's some water snake on those rocks and an eagle comes down and swoops down and grabs it

and flies off and they're like, oh, well, this is where we're supposed to be on this little crappy, rocky outcropping. So they start building this little village there on top of the water and they're bringing more stones in and essentially building up the land and building these little huts on it. And, you know, it's like a, it's like a primitive Venice, right? It's just they're living on top of the water in little huts. And this goes on for 100 to 150 years. And the Aztecs act as Caliqan's mercenaries as their warriors, and they make Caliqan very rich, and they make themselves very rich in the process. And so the Aztec kingdom basically grows up inside the empire of Caliqan, or Caliqan is a neighboring kingdom that has dominion over them. And so the Aztecs are getting

more and more wealthy from these military expeditions and raids they're doing for Caliqan. And so after a half a century to a century, the shaman goes into this trans state and meets Huitz-Depotli, and Huitz-Dopoli tells him, okay, it's now time for our kingdom to be elevated. I want you to send a proposition to go tell the king, to send a proposition to the king of Cali-Con that we will send our Aztec prince to marry the Cali-Con princess and form a dynastic marriage and tell them that, you know, and probably we just assume that the incentive for Caliqan to do this was that the Aztecs were getting more power. powerful. They're obviously very skilled warriors. It's better that we have, that we now have a

dynastic marriage rather than just a contract. Right. Instead of, well, maybe we partner up with these guys now, you know? And so as the Aztecs get more powerful, Caliqon has this now incentive to be like, okay, this probably makes sense that we officially secure ourselves with a bloodline to the Aztecs and essentially become a fortified nation. And so Caliqon agrees. And they they send a princess over and they have a they have this wedding and they get married they build this palace for the or we assume that they would have had a palace for the aztec prince the princess comes to live into nochtitlan you know in the middle of this lake and the shaman goes back into the temple and goes under the deterra or psilocybin or peyote probably peyote and

goes into this trans state and huitsdipotli has another plan and says, I want you to invite the Caliqan king back into Tenochtitlan and we'll have a celebration. And they had something big planned. They wanted to elevate, you know, the Aztec world. This was their overall goal. So the Caliqan king shows up into Tenochtan. They open up the gates. The other, you know, the rest of the royal family is with him.

He's there to see his daughter. And rather than seeing his daughter, he sees the prince wearing her skin. and dancing around in the, you know, in the middle of the plaza performing next to her dead corpse. And they had filleted her and cut all of her skin off. And the Aztec prince had slipped inside of her skin and was dancing in it. And so... Drag queen filet. So you can imagine this scene.

And so they ambush the Calvacan king and the rest of the royal family and just eliminate CaliCon and invade the city and raid it. and then absorb Caliqon into the Aztec kingdom instead, except the Aztecs have complete control over Caliqan. And now the rest of these other neighboring kingdoms and tribes hear about this savage tribe that just a century ago wasn't even allowed to be a part of our civilization, and now they've conquered and completely betrayed the most powerful kingdom here. But I think the short-sightedness

that Caliqon had was rather than putting the Aztecs out on this crappy piece of real estate, what they actually did was give them a castle in the middle of the largest moat in the entire region with only one bridge going from the mainland into the city. So now they have an impenetrable city in the middle of the Lake Teshoko with all the power of the Mexican Valley. Do we have any idea how big their civilization is around this time, like ballpark? Um, you know, I don't know. I mean, I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess, I don't know about the Aztecs, but I know the Mexican Valley, maybe it's half a million people, ish. All right, so nothing, yeah, it's not, millions and millions. Yeah, yeah. But within 150 years, the Aztec Empire will be about, at least, I just read the conquest of Mexico, which was written in the 1850s, and, uh, and I think that the estimate was like 10 million. It'll grow to 10 million people. There were 10 million Aztecs?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, that's not necessarily Aztecs. It's people who are living inside the Roman Empire, right? So it's like saying there's, it's like saying there's 100 million Romans. Well, that includes Africans as well, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know the numbers of who are actually Aztec blood-wise. Right, so a couple things here. Let's start with this.

Obviously, we're now including people that they conquered who aren't part of the original Aztec tribe, if you will, but how big of a span, including where the conquered people lived, did the Aztecs have in the Mexican Valley? Was it 300 miles? Was it 500 miles? Well, it quickly went from just the Mexican Valley. So right around Lake Tashkoko, you know, you had these several different kingdoms that were around the lake and then they are in the center of it. Well, it quickly became all of the Mexican Valley and then within a hundred years it was

everything north of the valley of Mexico all the way up to the Chihuahuan Desert I think all the way to the west to the Pacific coast all the way down the Pacific coast into southern central Mexico

all the way over to Chiapas up to Veracruz yeah so it was it was the vast majority Dave saw on it. Look at that. So do you see on the right where it says Maya? Holy shit, Dave, the whole middle of the country.

Yeah, and the Aztec Empire was bigger than this. Do you see that, do you see that river that's just, that's just to the left of the Maya? So I think that's the Usama Sinta. The other one? So you go one more over, one more river to the west of that. That's about where the Aztec Empire ended. Somewhere in there. It's a blurry line because you still have Maya that are living there.

So I'm not going to even try to. eyeball square mileage here but if people are watching this and not listening you can see it's a large i mean the cartel would be very happy to have all that territory yeah yeah so that and and it was it was much larger than this too it also went further out to the west to those further uh coastlines so this is like the smallest version of the aztec empire map how did they like police this did they have like their own roman praetorian god something like what was the deal My guess, we have some data on this and I'm not yet an expert on the Aztecs. Like the way I grew up doing this for the last six, seven years is I started with the early Maya and I went back to the Olmex and then I went forward in time.

So now I'm becoming an expert more so in right before the colonial period and then the colonial periods. This is kind of what I'm studying right now. oh sorry but uh sorry would you ask me yeah i was asking you about how they how they policed

yeah yeah yeah this area like did they like did they have a military or okay oh yeah yeah imagine it probably sounded cooler than that like no well they they definitely had a military they had

um you know they they they did planned coordinated strikes and conquest and missions they had things drawn out and maps like it was full blown military warfare you know in the way that we would imagine it with the Romans and the Greeks fighting as strategically and methodically thought out as that was it's the same thing yeah right so you have people being sent to just making something up right now as an example you know they have a town somewhere in the west there that's a conquered part of the empire

then now is part of the Aztec empire maybe a thousand people live there yeah and they send three equivalents of what we might refer to today as a soldier to be there to kind of like look over stuff and people know don't fuck with that that's exactly right yeah yeah so we know from so you kind of have these two phases of empires that come from the mexican valley and the prototype for the aztec empire was teotibulcon that i was telling you about earlier that massive city that had been abandoned a thousand years before the the aztec empire rises uh so teotibulcon was also an empire a thousand years before, very similar in many ways to the Aztecs.

And when we go to the Maya world, we will find what we call Touloud-Toblero architecture. So Toulod-Tablero architecture is just the name of the architectural style. So you'll see an entire city with thousands of buildings that we know, you know, this is Paten architecture. This is, you know, Riobeck architecture,

X, Y, and Z, Pook architecture. So this is, this looks like this is Paten. This is probably... Deepa's up here? Yeah, this is probably Guatemala. So you would go through a city and you'd see a lot of architecture that's very, very similar to this. And then you'll

see one building that's in the style of Toulod Toblero. And it's very noticeable. Like the facades of the front of the building are just totally different style while yet still in the same genre. And so judging by the hieroglyphs and the images

and the gods that are depicted on these buildings, we know, that these buildings were built by Teotihuacanos that were living in the Maya world and these were basically ambassador buildings. So when Teotihuacan was taking over the Maya realm, it's not like they invaded a Maya city with a bunch of Teotihuacano people. They just probably killed all of their soldiers or killed most of them and then brought their own soldiers in and put them in. And then they had an administrative ambassador building where an important governmental person from Teotihuacan lived in this Maya city and basically made sure everything ran according to the plan of the Teotu-Wilano emperor.

That's what you got to do. You got to come in. You got to kill the existing soldiers. It's just an administrative hassle. And they would allow the they would allow most of the time the royal family to still exist, but they'd kill the king and replace the king with a with a Teot-Ti-Wilcano's son. How does that even work then? How does it still exist if you cut off the head of the snake?

There's no royal bloodline. Well, yeah, so it's kind of like, it's kind of like, okay, so there's a city called Copan. It's in Honduras. It's the farthest Maya city that you can get from the Mexican Valley, farthest major Maya city. And there's a stele there where we can see the lineages of the Maya kings. And then I forget the last king, but he ends. And the next king that shows up on a stele is a man that looks completely different than we've ever seen before. and his name glyph is a Teotihuacano name.

So he becomes the new king all of a sudden and he marries a Maya woman and they have this dynastic marriage that now can show it's like Teotihuacan took over Copan, killed the king and then had one of the daughters there marry his own son. So now his son is the king of Copan, right?

So it's subsidiary. Backdored it. Yeah, yeah. And I'm guessing, you know, it's undetectable but they probably just replaced all the soldiers with their own soldiers. And, you know, something, something like this. So this is the blueprint for the Aztecs.

The Aztecs just fit right into, they just do exactly the same thing. And then sweep across the Mesoamerican world. This is not, but that's what's crazy. They didn't even come, as you were pointing out, they didn't even come down to Mexico until 1,100, 1,150, 1,200. And they're able to build that large swath of land. Again, this isn't like in the modern day where things move faster because there's more means of technology and intercommunication all that they build that big of a

swath of an empire within basically like two or three hundred years yeah which I know that's a long time but again back then like lack of resources crazy they were able to do that in all different kinds of terrains there as well you got to think about fighting the geography oh it's great and yet they they turn into this 10 million strong empire basically over there by the time Cortez comes around now part of the problem is and I can ask this question about every empire that's ever existed that conquers people. So it's relevant to all them, but it's relevant here again.

How do you develop pure loyalty when you conquer all these people who technically are then pulled into your empire, but they're not a part of your culture by blood, such that when someone, I don't even know this is relevant to Cortez, but just bear with me here, someone like Cortez comes in, you know, a lot of those 10 million people, basically 9.5 million of them don't even want to. to fight for it because they're like whatever all right it's totally relevant right it's it's utterly completely relevant um yeah cortez arrives and the reason that the aztecs fell is because so many of the tribes turned against the aztecs in and helped cortez so cortez essentially divided and conquered mexico he got everyone to turn against the aztecs because the aztecs are are anything but Mesoamerican. I mean, we see them as synonymous with Mesoamerica. They're incredibly important

to Mesoamerican history as a whole. But I can tell you right now, nobody in Mesoamerica liked the Aztecs. They came from the north. They are invaders just like the Spanish were. They invaded ancient Mexico or ancient Mesoamerica and completely flipped it on its head. You know, their style of warfare, the brutality, the way that they conquered was inherently different than the way that things had been run in Mesoamerica previously. And it was just much more, it was just much more brutal and much more vicious. Warfare in Mesoamerica previously, for thousands of years previously, was vicious, but it wasn't necessarily imperial.

The only example of that is Teotibokan, and Teotibokan fell from inside itself and around the year 500 AD and never rose again. All of the other wars were not really imperial. the Maya were not imperial people the Zapotex were not Veracruz culture was not imperial they were very they just didn't view the world in that way

and so the Aztecs were very much alien to the Mesoamerican world and so when Cortez showed up yeah everybody else that was already native to Mexico instantly turned on the Aztecs and helped the conquistadors plot against them and fight against them now before we go to that whole

history and how that went down what at their peak which is essentially like right before cortez comes yeah it's yeah yeah their peak is 14 er is uh 15 19 okay yeah so at their peak what did their economy look like and what did their social class structure look like oh gosh i mean i mean i this is kind of beyond something that i can answer as far as the aztecs like if it were the maya i could answer this very that's why i like you luke you're willing to say i don't know instead of making shit up. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. I don't worry about it. Well, my guess would be, um, my guess would be, you know, they have an empire that runs out of Tenochtitlan and everything else in Mexico

was actually running just like normal. Um, you know, again, it's not like they replaced the city of Chulula, uh, which is just another site in, in the Mexican Valley. It's not like they replace the city of Chulula with all new Aztec people and totally change the fabric of society. Um, you know, you had your different levels. So you have, at least from what we can tell, right? Like, we don't have a document that tells us exactly how Mesoamerican society was run. The way that we know is,

so we were walking, you and I were walking down the street the other day, and I said, in ancient times, people would cover up the buildings with stucco. You remember that? Yeah, that was today. Because the brickwork was kind of ugly in the ancient world. So they would flatten it out with white stucco, and then they would paint on it.

And those paintings represented everyday life. So sometimes you get like a depiction of a market or you get a depiction of, or you get a depiction of a marketplace, dynastic people, a royal family, interacting with normal people. So judging by that artwork, we can infer a lot about their society. So what does Mesoamerican society look like? Kind of anywhere else in the ancient world, like probably very similar to Rome. I mean, you have people that are just at like subsistence level that are barely making it by.

there are however i should say money did not exist there's no there's no currency it's all trading like chickens and shit yeah it's just trade so like you know trade for trade my my material for your material there is no concept of money and what's funny is that as appalled as the spaniards were at many of the behaviors of the asex like the you know thousands of people that the asex were suffering in the way that they would torture people they the aztecs were just shocked at how barbaric and vicious it was. I'm sorry, the Spaniards were shocked at how barbaric the Aztecs were, but the Aztecs were shocked at they could not comprehend the Spanish lust for gold. It was just like a completely, utterly different society. They did not value gold

and material like this in a monetary way. They clearly knew that gold was important, but having gold didn't necessarily make you rich. The thing that made you, rich was your bloodline that's it that's the only way well if they don't have money and they're just trading is it essentially there's some people just dying out there's some shit going on i don't know if like those are like pro astech people that are upset what we're talking about but i swear to god the door's locked so i think we're good the aztecs are this is a uh this is a very i just ran with that this is a very controversial topic yeah yeah so i'm learning people are going to be people can be upset about the Aztex.

That's okay. That's what the comments section is there for. It's very close to heart and there's a lot of there's a lot of like Latino, Mexican people that have Aztec blood and a lot of people feel very strongly about the Aztecs and they're as polarizing today as they were then, right? Because you know, the Spaniards essentially said that their civilization was absolutely demonic. Like even the Daily Wire came out with a video where they're calling the Aztecs demonic. demonic yeah yeah so they're calling them demonic because of the people they were sacrificing but it's really a lack of that's rich from ben shapiro neither here nor there it's it's really it's really a lack of uh an in-depth understanding of the aztec world and the nuances of it yeah they were probably this is why i always think it's funny uh at the same time i i see this from both sides

you know there are people that go well you know the spaniards saying that the aztec were sacrificing 80,000 people a day and you know ripping their hearts out and throwing them off the top of the of the of the of the pyramids, you know, that has to be an exaggeration. I'm like, oh, do you, are they exaggerating by 80,000 people? Like, if they're exaggerating, how many was it? 40,000? Right. And so, it's like when people argue over like atrocities today, there were only 40,000, not 80. It's like, wait a minute. I'm pretty sure that's not good. So that's kind of the, that's kind of the Aztec world. But, you know, most people only know the Aztecs for their vicious savage side, of which they were. You know, they got everything that was coming to them. You know, the Spaniards

was like the universe's answer to the Aztecs, right? It just, they got what was coming to them. I can't, you know, I can't sugarcoat that anymore. But also, they had a lot of interesting parts of their society like the first spaniards to see tinochetlon in i think it was early 1520 they describe it as being the most impressive thing that they've ever seen that the city was absolutely mind-blowingly beautiful and perfect and pristine and clean what made it that way to do okay there's all there were all kinds of things about the city that you would never expect like when you think of an ancient Mesoamerican city, you imagine, look up a Tenochtitlan reconstruction, if you would. And there's a, there are modern day reconstructions of it that

really give you an idea how beautiful it was. Now, this is a Spanish, this is a Spanish recreation of the city. So you can see it's sitting in the middle of this lake. But wait until you see these new 3D reconstructions. It's sick, man. It's amazing that they were able to build something like that. I mean, again, you can say the same shit about like Venice too. Check that out. That people can even rebuild that. Is that, wait, that's a reconstruction right there? Yeah, yeah. So it's a digital reconstruction of what it would have looked like based on archaeological data. Yeah, it's beautiful, right? That looks like a beza in the middle of the fucking Colorado Rockies. Tell me that, tell me that that doesn't look amazing. So the Spaniards,

the Spaniards had never seen anything like this. They said that it was, they said it was more beautiful than any city that they'd seen in Spain. How do you even militarily conquer something like that. It's so, it's quite literally fortified. I'm just thinking in like older terms. Now there's technology. You know what's crazy is this is a, this is a great mystery about, uh, about the Aztecs, is that Moktizuma knew that the Spaniards were marching through Mexico trying to find him, trying to find him. Uh, because they, they had heard the name, the Spaniards had heard of Moktizuma. They'd heard of the Aztecs. They knew the city to Nostitlan. They were looking for it. And Moktizuma knew that Cortez was headed for him. And Ravid,

Rather than just meeting Cortez head on and going straight to war with him, Mactezuma invited Cortez into the palace and let all, I think, roughly, 150 Spaniards into the heart of Tenochtitlan, where they took Mactezuma captive in his own palace. And we don't exactly know how Mactezuma died in that palace, but it was like... Listen. It was like he just opened up the gates and let him in. Listen, it didn't work out how I was supposed to because something got fucked up, But Montezuma, and I know this, I have a really good source on this.

He was a huge fan of the godfather. And rule number one is keep your friends close, but your enemy's closer. He was just, you know, he was three D chess in them. He was trying to. And then he got a little four deed. And, you know. He did. He did. That's what happened.

And the Spaniards, man, this is that with the Aztec Empire and the Inca Empire, they just conquer it like immediately, like it was nothing. It is, it's one of the most bizarre things of Mesoamerica because a lot of people, again, this is kind of, I guess this has sort of become my purpose as to popularize pre-Columbian history and like help people understand more of the nuances because they look at the Native American world as like primitive and vastly inferior to the Europeans because of how easily Europeans seem to have conquered Mexico. That couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, when the Maya tried to go to war against the Spaniards, the Spaniards could not, could barely conquer the Maya. They just couldn't do it.

in the Aztecs were far superior warriors with much more numbers and were much more sophisticated at that same time or contemporaneously. And so anyways, yeah, the Cortez just essentially gets invited into the palace in Tenochtitlan, and they're sitting there in the middle of the city. They take, they take Moktizuma captive and essentially put the entire Aztec Empire on hold. And nobody knows exactly what happened to Mactezuma in that temple. There's a, I think there's three different theories as to what happened. One, he was strangled to death and he was killed or something and the Aztecs later found his body in the temple.

Two, he was strangled to death or killed in the Spaniards through his body over the side of the walls, like out into the street. Or three, they convinced Maktizuma to become a spokesperson for the Spaniards, right? To like, essentially he would be like a puppet emperor, right? on behalf of the Spaniards. And then the Aztecs were so pissed off that they stoned Maktizuma to death. Hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed,

please hit that subscribe button. It's a huge huge help. Thank you. In response. So those are the three stories that we get from the Spaniards. So obviously conflicting details. No one knows what happened.

Nobody knows exactly what happened to him. But long story short, the Spaniards are in the middle of Tenocht, in the palace in the giant plaza center that you see there, surrounded by millions of Aztecs and they've got themselves fortified inside the palace

of course the Spaniards are covered in armor they have swords you know swords are just it's a okay so a difference in warfare the Spaniards the Aztecs were also shocked that the Spaniards their style of warfare was complete total war it wasn't about like extrapolating it wasn't about subduing you and then taking your material

from you it was about eliminating your existence like you and i most the time when you get in this this is sort of mesoamerican warfare it's kind of like a street fight you're not intending to kill the other person you just want to subdue them and hurt them really badly and then get what you need out of the situation right that's what they would do that's mesoamerican war yeah yeah yeah that doesn't fly with europe it doesn't fly with europe yes exactly and so they were shocked that oh these swords that they have this is like this is killing people they don't they don't even exist anymore it was it was just shocking brutality even to the aztecs that the people throwing hearts off the exactly right it's crazy right yeah it doesn't make sense because it's a completely different it's a completely

alien world to us they even they even gave their enemy's death significance because so they would have something called the makawi which was a club that had razor sharp of obsidian edges on the and so they would also have like a wooden shield and so when they would run at each other in battle you would try to hit each other with this bat with these razor edges and you essentially wanted to cripple the guy and then tie him up that's what they would use

yeah yeah so it's better than a Louisville it's cool right and so you in those obsidian so there's nothing sharper than obsidian by the way yeah I was gonna say like but this takes like a little bit of the work out of it though too like one blow I mean you're crunching bones Whereas with a Louisville, it's more personal. You've got to take a couple hacks at it and feel the crack. Like inglorious bastards?

Right. I mean, I've never done this before. I've just, you know, I've heard it from a lot of people. Italian from Jersey, sure you haven't. Listen, I keep the bat in the car. I didn't say we use it. It's just there is a, you know, when you need a bat. So they go to war with these things.

They go to war with these things. They go to war with these things and you're essentially breaking each other's arms and legs. You're crippling the guy that you're fighting, and then you're going to tie him up, drag him back to the city center, pull him to the top of the pyramid, and then rip his heart out and sacrifice him to, you know, the war god or the sun god or the rain god. You know, but you even give your enemy's death a sense of significance, right? Like, every living thing has a sense of significance, even if they're your enemy, even to the Aztecs, right? Europe, like, dude, I don't care. Like, you know what I mean? Their whole, the Spaniard just slaughtered people in the marketplace.

Like, even in Tnoche-Lon, they slaughtered 3,000 men, women, and children with, you know, iron swords. And how did they... It's just a total war. It was shocking even to Mesoamericans. Can we back up for one second? Just to review the history, how did they even first find out about this? How did they end up on the western, I think they start on the Western Coast or Eastern Coast? Eastern coast. I'm sorry, yeah, Eastern Coast of Mexico and then, you know, get information that, like, Montezuma existed, Tena Cheat Line. Like you mentioned 1520, the first guy goes there. But like what, take me into that five, seven years leading up to that that gets culminates with Cortez going in there and we don't know what happened. Yeah, yeah. Montezuma dies.

So obviously 1492, Columbus thinks that he finds India or the Indies. But really he lands in the Bahamas. And there are four. expeditions in total, and they essentially inhabit a large part of the Caribbean, Hispaniola, you know, Jamaica, Cuba, et cetera, et cetera. So they largely inhabit these regions, and they're sending out other expeditions, kind of going around the coast of North America, poking around on Florida, trying to go around the coast of Texas, or sailing along, you know, the North America down the Mexican coast. They're even poking around to the Yucatan, down to Belize.

They're sailing around trying to just get a grasp without actually going on the land of what this landmass is in front of them. There's even a guy who gets lost to history, and man, I forgot his name, too. I wish I remembered it before. He really got lost. Yeah, he really got lost.

Dang, sorry. Like all the Anna Jones over here, couldn't find it. Yeah, yeah, sorry, dude. What years are we talking? Maybe we can Google and find out. The year 1500, he sailed all the way down to the coast of South America and found the mouth of the Amazon 40 years before Oriana did. I was going to say Oriana was the one that gets the credit for. No, no, this other dude did it.

Who found Amazon before Oriana? Pedro Alvarez, Cabral. Yep. Yeah, Cabral. There's a lot of syllables there. We've got to shorten that out. I'll just call him Pedro Alvarez. It sounds more romantic.

So, yeah, Pedro Alvarez. He found it in the year 1500, 40 years before we give Oriana. credit so i mean do you think about this this is this is i'm kind of like getting really into this period you know this early exploration period the europeans discovering america for themselves and trying to figure out because i mean think about this dude think about how much this interrupted human history oh yeah the the spaniards are sailing to try to find a different trade route to get to India just to be able to get the spices more affordably. And then they discover two continents. They discover the other side of the planet. That is, that is like finding an alien civilization.

Yes. In the middle of, you know, in the middle of the spice trade, it's like it just completely interrupted human history. You just, they just found another planet with a, with other people on it. And now everything changes, right? It's just, it's, it's, it's an immeasure of. inconceivably important era of history you and i were talking about this other day on our walk like between the year 1500 and 1700 is such an overlooked part of history yeah but even even right beyond i agree 100 but even like if you look more american-centric there sure sure which you are the stuff that you talk about by the way with south america just in general forget even 15 to 1700 it's so overlooked period all of it like the history down there's insane but now if you look at if you're looking

at the americas and you focus in on north america a little bit yeah 15 to 1700 at least though you know we get james town we get the pilgrims we get like a little bit of like things are being built i would say even beyond that when you get into like the years leading up to the french and indian war and then the french and indian war before the revolution that shit is insane and we live here and we don't even talk about it I don't know what they don't even make movies on it they barely make movies on the Revolutionary War that war was fucking nuts bro

there's a lot of movies in that war but like the French and Indian War I mean if you've seen the movie The Patriot where like you know Benjamin Martin Mel Gibson's always being said oh you're the guy from the swamp and he's like running away from it and his son finally asked him about it he's like we took our time we part from up

it was what was left of them we sent it back and eyes in the boxes hands and you know and you're like wait a second it's based that's not like a real event but that's based on the kind of shit that was happening crazy yeah i'm getting i'm getting dangerously close to diving into that post-colonial world because man i just there's so much history there that needs to be that needs to be talked about like uh and what really inspired me is what we were talking about a minute ago was uh killers of the flower moon i mean that that that's that's the very

end of the native american world man there's so many important stories dude during that time period so much man And that's one story of hundreds across the Americas. It's a fascinating period. We had David Grant who wrote the book that became the movie sitting right there. And obviously, for people aren't familiar, didn't see the Scorsese De Niro, DiCaprio film of it, or didn't read the book. You know, this has taken place in the earlier part of the 20th century. And like you said, back end of some of these stories. But, you know, he got emotional, David talking about it.

And these are people who died 100 years ago. Yeah. And it's just that heavy. Like, it's like this, sometimes I feel like we overuse this example. But you know how, like, when you were watching True Detective Season 1, the setting was really a main character along with McConaughey and Woody Harrelson? It's like you could feel the soul of that setting,

the dark underbelly that existed in this, in this, you know, swamp land. and there's a similar in the plainland type thing that still exists there and hangs over literally in the fact that there are people who are related to both sides of it. And that story, it's white settlers killing Native Americans. There's people whose bloodlines go back to both, which is just like...

Yeah, it's crazy. What I've been reading lately, we were talking about this, was halfway through Empire of the Summer Moon. and man i i'm just getting fascinated with this s gwen right yeah yeah with this with this american history of you know because people it gets so oversimplified you know we look at it as like oh this is this is these are colonial people that are evil and taking over the you know the americas and taking it away from the natives it's like you know what no this is actually the momentum of civilization

and nobody was going to stop it nobody the spaniards that came over and the conquistadors You know, people vilify the conquistadors, but these were actually poor, impoverished Spaniards, whose only lot in life was either to sit and rot away in the slums of Spain or jump on a ship and go participate in this conquest, of which they couldn't anticipate what would actually happen in the conquest or who they would meet or what they would take part in, and then all of a sudden you're there, you're fighting for your life. That's it. They exactly, exactly the same thing was happening in the Americas. Yeah, there are decision makers there are people involved in the government that were doing things that they knew

were atrocities but it's if you don't do it someone else will this is like just the momentum of the game of civilization moving forward and there's winners and losers and it just it always happens that way it was happening in the americas before the europeans ever even got here clearly as we were talking about with the aztecs and i'm just fascinated by this uh like what was the show american primeval you have this bundle words out of my mouth you have this bundle of people that are just just thrown into the Wild West. They were all born there. None of them were responsible for it. You have people who, I can get chills talking about it. You get people who, you know, are the son of a Comanche, who's the son of an outlaw, who's, you know, the daughter of a businessman in Baltimore. And then all of a sudden, you're all in the Wild West together, just trying to survive in one of the most violent places that's ever existed and places of complete uncertainty.

It's just a, man, what a fascinating and overlooked part of history. you know it's like dude i i knew nothing about the brigham young and Mormon settlement out there you know the one thing i can watch once in a while is like when there's a good limited series because i don't have time to watch it agreed yeah yeah yeah you know if i'm sick for a day i can actually get through that instead of like some fucking six-season tv show yeah yeah for sure but i was watching the first like 30 minutes of that i'm like all right i love some of the actors in it so i'm like All right, it's kind of slow. American Prime Evil.

Yeah, kind of slow. Like, come on, get me, get me. And then that first arrow hits in that scene. And you're like, ooh. Yeah, yeah. Woo! Yeah. And suddenly, like, you know, I'm pausing it every 10 minutes, like, going to Wikipedia.

Like, is this true? Holy shit, it's true. Yes, it is. You know? And it is nuts to me that that was only 160 years ago. And there's just this total much people go watch. I really wanted to get the creator, Mark Smith, in here. but he doesn't really do a podcast so he asked him and he didn't want to do it but mark would love to have you and he did an amazing job like the research they put into that to tell this story and show just how destitute just by the means of waking up every day people were just to try to find something how they had to stick with people to fight not just the terrain and the wild but the unknowns that they were going to encounter along the way that could even include like crazy french gypsies like you don't even know what you're getting out there.

Yeah. And they just did, they did such a beautiful job showing that in that show. It was very, like, I don't know, I haven't heard Taylor Sheridan comment on that show. Obviously, he didn't have to do with that one. But it felt very much like he would have been like, you did guys, nice job. Probably so. Yeah. Yeah, man. It's, I was so surprised to learn that, like, how you said, it's just 160 years ago. Man, that ancient primordial America, North America, still existed 160 years ago. They were, I wouldn't say that we can definitively say there were Native Americans living in North America that didn't know what a white man was, but they definitely were Native Americans living in North America who had never seen a white man 160 years ago. And something I think is so fascinating

when we talk about the dangers that people moving west towards California was, so you know the gold rush of the mid-18, quarter of the mid-1800s i never realized this one of the reasons you needed a wagon train wasn't just for convenience it was so that you could make it past the great plains because quite literally when you leave the woodlands and get into the great plains it is literally an ocean of grass it's just grass there's no trees there's no coverage there's no protection that's why they have the tent over the back of the wagon so you can have some protection they set

tents but you need that wagon train so everyone can stay together and stay along the same trajectory because there was no trails preserved in the great plains the it a wagon trail three days later like as the wheels are cutting through the grass would disappear because the ground was so soft and if it rained it's completely gone gone so people would emerge from this from this tree line into an ocean from horizon to horizon no trees at all and the only thing out there are roaming tribes of the great plains and so in in the great plains you have this lack of convenience um that that native americans had so think about this so in the woodlands uh which would be most of the east coast you had a lot of convenience you had a lot of rivers and you had a lot of wood to use

so you have you can have a much more sedentary lifestyle there's more luxury right so you have this is why we have all the mounds on the east coast and people were staying put in one place and when you're able to stay in one place you're able to farm corn and build up these big pyramids we call them mounds it's kind of it's a little bit like disrespectful or like downplaying the significance of it like these are full on pyramids if you saw them in ancient times you wouldn't even know it wasn't made out of stone like that's how monumental these things were um and so it was a much more luxurious sort of peaceful place uh less warfare less violent tribes but in the Great Plains, think about this, you have, the reason that a lot of those natives were pushed to the

Great Plains is because they weren't originally great warriors. Like the Comanches were just getting destroyed by everybody around them until one day they emerged as great warriors because they're pushed out into the Great Plains where it's the worst real estate. So what do they have to do to survive? They have to become the most violent people around. And so in the Great Plains, imagine how fierce the natives are that are able to survive in the Great Plains, right? So you have this added element that you can get lost in the plains trying to get to California. And then you also have the most savage Native American tribes roaming around the Great Plains. And this is the thing that I found so shocking is that the Great Plains Indians were such good navigators and had such a

perfect understanding of their geography, of their own territory that get this, if you were a large U.S. military convoy moving through Comanchee territory in the Great Plains, from Texas, you know, all the way up to Colorado, if you were within a 500-mile radius, you were in danger of being attacked by the Comanches. 500 miles. They could attack from 500 miles away overnight. Not, not overnight, but it was like, but it was like, uh, there's some fast fucking horses. Yeah, not, not overnight, but it was like, it was like immediate. Like, they could, they could do, uh, direct targeted attacks. They could smell you from 500 miles away.

Yes. Yeah. and it like literally like smell you no i don't know but but uh but yeah that's uh it's a it's a big part of a s g gwen's book is that is that they could they could plan strategic military attacks from 500 miles away and that's what made it so hard is because you didn't know how many camanshees there were or where they were at but they always knew where you were at and they would never stay in the same place twice like they would move from place to place following um following their herds of buffalo and they had herds of wild horses as well and yeah they could plan strategic

military attacks from 500 miles away and you would never anticipate them coming and as soon as they attacked they would disappear and so you could never get a sense of of where they were or where when they were coming or where they were coming from it's just a and that's why like you think of the wild west do think about that being born into that world and your only lot in life you have no money on the East Coast. Your only lot in life is like, okay, kids, I hear about this place over in California is what they call it. It's lots of gold out there. We're going to have to do that. Having absolutely no idea that there are Comanches rolling around the planes that will scalp you and torture you to death and burn you alive. You know, it's just like, it's just a completely

wild place just 160 years ago. It's just fascinating world, man. So this this post-colonial interaction between Native Americans and Europeans. I'm finding it infinitely fascinating because it is the furthest thing from black and white, which is the way people tend to treat it. But man, is it a complicated nuanced issue? Yeah, 1883 is another one that shows that. I haven't seen it yet. Pretty amazing. Yeah. Well, you should watch that because there's a lot that you're describing

and the fever dream in my head of picturing these things comes from a lot of the imagery that was filmed in that. I actually liked 1923 even better. I love that show, man. It was fucking awesome. 1883 was what we're talking about some of Taylor Sheridan's like pre-Yellow Stone limited series. 1883 was

pretty amazing and there's, I don't want to give plot points away to you if you haven't seen it, but you know, the same kind of idea. They're going down the Oregon Trail. I think that's what it was called. And you're fighting the terrain like you said, which

includes shit that we take for granted. Like oh we came to a little you know 25 meter wide river people are going to die when we cross this right all the way to some of the roaming tribes and yeah it get hunted that's it's it's it's crazy but we got on this tangent because we were talking about the years leading up to montezuma actually being killed and the spanish finding out about him and then working their way east to west inward land to get to Tenna Cheatlan and then eventually, you know, do the deed here. But so they, they land in the east. You were talking about how they went down.

First, they were finding the Bahamas. We got on the side track about the guy Alvarez, who found Brazil and all that before. Yeah. Shout out to Alvarez. Yeah, shout out Alvarez. Sounds like a third basement. But anyway, so, you know, he finds that. But now we're fast forwarding a little bit to the days of like when Cortez is coming.

So Cortez sends people ahead of him. I guess who go there first and how were they greeted? Like I remember there was something maybe I'm fucking this up and mixing this up with another one but there were people of the Aztecs who looked at the Spaniards

as gods. Sure, sure. Yeah, that's kind of something that is thrown out there. We really don't know the veracity of a statement like that. The Spaniards seem to say that a lot. Like about every,

encounter that, oh, they thought that we were gods. They thought we were gods. You know, there's a lot of, I would say, I would say it's right down the middle. It's 50-50 as to whether or not any of the Native Americans actually thought that they were gods. Now, I think where this comes from is that there was a prophecy that the great feathered serpent god Ketsokoat would return one day. And on the exact astronomical day, or at least that, I'm sorry, that year, which for the Gregorian calendar was 1519 to the Aztec calendar, it was exactly that year that Cortez arrived. It's just one of these great coincidences, or is it coincidence?

But this is where this idea comes from that all Europeans will say later on, they thought that we were gods. We really don't know. But it is possible that the Aztecs really did think that this was the return of Ketzal-Coat. But we just don't really know. And for how long did they think that? We don't really know. But there's like a five, six year period here before they do the deed where they or where it exists.

No, it's just like a year and a half. It's just, yeah, yeah. No, from awareness that it exists, not getting there, right? No, no, it's like seven months later. So how did they find out it existed? Did they like come upon and be like, what's that shining city on the house? So he lands. So Cortez wants to invade, if I'm getting my history right here,

Cortez wants to invade Mexico he wants to invade mainland Mexico but he was already kind of on a short leash with the Spanish crown and so he did he did not have permission to invade the mainland but he decided to do it anyways before he was essentially reprimanded and pulled back

and the position was given to a different conquistador right so he goes ahead and invades mainland Mexico Mexico anyways. So he lands on the coast of Veracruz, and the first people that he meets, as far as we know, are the Maya. And so he meets the Maya, and he says that these are like sickly, small, weak-looking people. Now, what he didn't realize is that these Maya already had European disease from the last 20 years of other Europeans poking around on the Yucatan and trading with them. These Europeans had been infecting the Maya. So the Maya were some of the, the first people in Mexico to get infected with this disease and it was spreading across and it had reached Veracruz by the time Cortez 20 years later came to Veracruz. He meets with the Maya and he essentially he sees some gold artifacts, he sees some riches and he asks them. He essentially says what all aliens say when he says, take me to your leader. So, you know, he hears of Tenochtitlan in 1519 when he first arrives in Veracruz, these Maya people are telling him about the city of Tenochtitlan and the

Emperor Makdizuma. So it's within seven to nine months later, he marches there with the 150 conquistadors and other like native guides, essentially, people he's paid off or maybe he's forced to them to guide him through and escort him through. So he's kind of got his, he's got his 150 men, and then he's got his, then he's got his local guides or slaves or soldiers, whatever it is. And they go on the seven-month expedition where they're on horseback and walking from the coast of Veracruz all the way to Tenochtitlan and and yeah it's it's it's seven or nine months later they're at the capital of Mexico and they I believe in that first meeting if I'm getting my history wrong and again everybody watching I'm I'm just now getting to

colonial history in my own studies but I believe it's in that first meeting that Magtizuma dies when the Spaniards first arrived and then the war continues for about another a year. The Aztecs essentially replaced Magdazuma with their own local leaders. Like another guy stepped up. So the Aztecs replacing. Yeah, yeah. So the Spaniards kill them. War breaks out and the Aztecs start fighting the Spaniards and they say we have a new leader now. Essentially, we think that they had already replaced Maktizuma before the Spaniards. So

I told you they were held up in that palace. Before, and I think they were held up in the palace for maybe around 100 days or so, if I'm getting my history right here. And so by the time the Spaniards flee that palace in the middle of the night, they flee in the middle of the storm. And they, like, cover the horses' hooves with these cloths so that on the cobblestones, it's not so loud. And, of course, they don't make it out undetected. While they're in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of the night, the flare and the horn goes up at the front of the bridge, and then it goes off at the back of the bridge. And, like, a million Aztecs storm these 150 conquistadors.

And the conquistadors barely make it out. But they've, like, filled their armor with gold, you know, and everything in it. stolen. And so anyways, we think that during this period, the Aztecs had already replaced Mactezuma with somebody else, because you need an order. So probably, you know, the second or third guy becomes this new emperor. And so the war isn't over with the death of Mactezuma. The Spaniards flee. They barely make it out. Cortez barely makes it out alive. His horse gets killed. It falls over. He falls into the water. With all of his armor, he's going to sink to the bottom of the lake and drown. And a couple of his men reach in and grab him out while they're

being attacked. It's a crazy story. And just they barely make it out of Tenocht Tietan. Eventually the Aztecs kind of retreat after enough of them get sliced down and they barely survive. And then the war continues. They come back. They conquer Mexico City or they conquered Snosteatlan the next year and then just completely subdue all of Mexico. And they eventually, they essentially just turned Snosteatlan into Mexico City and then they launch their expedition down into Peru. How many people? How deep was the Spanish army? It was only 150 guys. I'm pretty sure it was only 150 guys. So it never got above that, though?

Oh, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that they came, I imagine that when they came back with the second expedition, it was many more soldiers, plus the help of other indigenous people that now saw that the Aztecs were weakened and wanted them dead too. So this second phase of the war is when we get this period of the Spanish priests giving the Aztec people the blankets that had smallpox in it. You've heard that you've heard of this, I'm sure. Tell that story for people. This is that, well, I don't know all the details of it. I just know that there were Spanish friars and priests who probably genuinely wanted the betterment. Like people think that we're talking about like biological warfare here. We want what's best for you.

take this small box it's it's hard to say man because the more i've studied it um you know back then they have uh what's the theory of like the the four fluids or whatever it was you is like blood saliva pee something else uh you know they they didn't really understand um they didn't really understand virology germ theory and so we think as as i've looked more into it i started off thinking that they knew that they were spreading disease, but I don't think that they did. I think that these priests genuinely cared about the souls of these people and wanted to protect them and comfort them because there were lots of Spaniards that weren't bad people. There are lots of Spaniards that genuinely cared about the Aztecs or the natives that they're interacting with

and wanted the best for them, but ultimately ended up hurting them even more. You sound like a Spanish apologist. Yeah, no, I'm just kidding. No, no, but that's probably really what was happening, is they really were giving the women and children these blankets to keep them, to keep them warm during the winter without realizing that they had brought these blankets from the Caribbean, surrounded by other, surrounded by other Europeans that were breathing all over them and putting all their diseases into these blankets. And then those blankets just decimate people in Mexico City, just bodies, thousands of bodies, piling up in the middle of the markets. It was like the Spaniards are walking through the markets and it's just piles of dead Aztecs everywhere. Now, another similar thing happens here is that there's a Spanish friar down in Peru a decade and a half later. And he's baptizing after Pizarro. Pizarro is a colleague of Cortez. I think he's a cousin or nephew of Cortez gets sent down on an expedition to conquer Peru. You and I talked about this on my first episode.

where Atawapa like spits on the Bible and throws it on the floor or throws it on the ground. Yeah, yeah. And so there was a Spanish friar there that was trying to baptize the Inca people. And so he had this bowl of holy water. And he had thousands of people putting their face in the bowl of holy water. Yeah, that's great. And all he was doing was giving each one of these people directly giving them the Spanish influenza's and smallpox. And so even though he was the guy trying to save their souls, he himself,

probably killed more people than any Spaniard ever did. I'm going to save your soul and send you to God. God damn. Yeah, man. What a savage, savage time on every front. Wild time, man. Wild time. You know, I even think about that from, I used to be, it's funny, like, my wife, she's cute.

I took her to Peru, and I'm talking to her about, we were going through Cusco, and I'm showing her all the Inca temples with these. you know, Spanish church is built over the top of them. And I'm explaining to her like the Spanish church essentially cuts off the power of the temple because the temples are astronomical observatories that are meant to connect to the sun and the night sky and the stars. And they, they act as like celestial astronomical clocks. They have a purpose. And by building this building on top of it, you cut off the Inca people from their spirituality, from their source, right? And I was going through all of it with her and by the end of the trip she's like i don't like the spanish you know she's she's like

she doesn't she doesn't like the spanish at all and uh you know the ink of people are just so nice but um you know it's funny but as a historian it all eats away at you and you end up realizing that like no no general group of people are ever as bad as they're portrayed to be there are individual people that are awful but the vast majority of people are just caught up in the tsunami of civilization right i wish we would take that lesson yeah today even people define different groups of people around the world and i mean you draw it along borders you draw along religions you draw it along races they'll use anecdotal things to define the whole and it's and it and it just repeats itself history repeats itself over and over again but

i never understand that you know there's there's cultures there's some ideas that are strongly infested in some cultures that you may be like I don't love that but judge people on people you know when we look at this history and that's important why you're given this context as well so that everyone listening understands similarly to today you know where we have men in suits going back rooms and shake hands and drop bombs you know maybe they didn't wear suits back then they didn't have fucking you know Hugo boss and all that but same idea just you know a few guys decide this is what it is and then suddenly you send the pawns out there as they would look at them which is unfair to describe them that way but that's how they looked at them to do dirty work and

you know you it could be everything from some savage conquering and war to what you're talking about with you know priests saying i'm going to save your soul and spread in massive disease that kills people it's brutal man yeah it is it is it's a it's a fascinating time man it's two different worlds disconnected by more than 10,000 years from each other, completely different worldviews in some ways similar. What do you mean in some ways similar? Just the humanity. You know, like, okay, so we study the ancient Amazonian people and judging, what's funny is judging by their archaeology, which thus far we haven't found a lot of the archaeology. We've only found smaller civilizations on the periphery of the Amazon. Like, you know,

probably the main hubbub of all these great lost cities in the Amazon we hear about were probably further into the center of the Amazon where Oriana is said to have seen them where you have like a where you actually have stone bedrock instead of clay and out in the west like where Paul is at um Paul Rosley yeah and but on the peripheral of the Amazon where it's much easier to access we found all kinds of civilizations out there and the archaeology that comes up is pretty interesting. The only thing that we find are, we find these raised platforms that essentially come up from these, from these canals. And so you have these, you have this farmland, you have these raised platforms, you have these dugout canals that go through the

ground. And so from what we think is that a lot of these Amazonians on the, on the periphery of the Amazon didn't necessarily walk from place to place all the time. They get in these little canals and little tiny boats and sail up and down from town to town. But all we find is the archaeological remnants of giant parties. Just, yeah, this is kind of similar. Deep on it. Yeah, this is pretty similar. This is a LiDAR map that's shown up. Now, this is a larger city that's closer into the interior of the Amazon. It sort of gives you an idea, but it isn't exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe you can look up like Amazonian geoglyphs, and you'll probably see a shot you'll probably see a drone shot from the sky and that'll that'll be a lot closer um this

this right here though this lidar scan this is like a major city there's there's a step pyramid there's a huge platform in the middle there's highways coming in smaller one over there on the far left that's green is that a mini step pyramid yeah probably a mini step pyramid so it's got that raised platform and then it's got a mound up on top of it so that raised platform you probably had some normal people setting up their huts and then those two mounds right next to it that probably royal people or much more wealthy, important people living up even more elevated. Okay.

Yeah. So, what are we got on this? Here we go. Perfect, dude. Yeah, yeah. So any of these. So, um... That looks like the movie shines.

It does, right? Yeah. Yeah, Dief was like on it. Yeah, so we don't... Come on, Mel, where are you? We don't understand why they make these geoglyphs and why they made these shapes, what the orientations are truly meant for.

They were talking. Talking aliens. Talking up there, baby. Could be. You ever seen the Nazca lines? The Nazca mummies? No, the lines in the ground. Aw, dude.

We're going to have to go down to Nasca. All right, finish this point. We're going down to Nasca. That's going in the title. NASCAR line aliens, boom. Everyone loves it. Let's do it. Cool.

So this is actually similar to the Nazca lines. It's giant geoglyphs that are made into the ground, but essentially people lived in these raised platforms similar to this. And you can see huge lines spanning off from here and there ditches in the ground that be filled with water and people would sail in little boats from one place to the other and essentially all that ancient amazonians did was farm and party and go to war and sleep with each other's wives that's basically it so listen you got to throw that in there yeah swinging so that's that that you know that's the in many many ways you look at

them and they're like okay you know they they like to have a good time they like to kill each other and They like to have sex. Good for them. Pretty similar to everyone else around the world. You take out the killing. We're good. Yeah. And so that's, you know, so much of the Mesoamerican world is so similar to other parts of the world.

And yet the way that those pieces interact with each other is just assorted completely differently, right? What was that one right there I was looking at? Is that a dude drawn into the, you see it in the second row, Dief? Yeah, yeah. That's altered, right? Yeah, I've never seen this one That looks like Bigfoot with a club Humans probably altered the Amazon

2,000 years ago Oh, no, Paul Rosalie's gonna have a heart attack Don't click that Yeah Yeah, well that's kind of an overblown thing Because people will go The Amazon's a man-made garden Cook Luke

No it isn't The Amazon's not a man-made garden What this is literally What will happen You'll be walking through the Amazon And all of the Amazon Has grown to every creature Every plant in the Amazon

in the Amazon has grown to defend itself from other things. So it's just a vicious cycle of death in the Amazon. Like a lot of the I'm making generalizations here, but a lot of the plants aren't edible. You've got these huge thorns

on these trees that are like, you know, thorns that are a foot, you know, a foot long and razor thin. You don't even see them until you've run into the tree. It's just the Amazon's an incredibly formidable place that seems like it wouldn't be possible to inhabit and at some point in that i mean probably 10 000 20 000 years ago

ancient amazonians in this primordial lost like mystic sea uh in the ancient world and this very blurry time invented a type of soil a black soil called terra prada and this soil could grow anything that they needed and so they they made patches of gardens in the amazon small little patches now We found a bunch of them, but it doesn't mean that the Amazon looked like the Great Plains, and then people planted the forest there. They just re-engineered the soil in certain parts to be able to grow the things that they needed to survive. And so you'll be walking through the Amazon, and then all of a sudden, Percy Fawcett did it, but he didn't know what Terra Prada was. He just found these gardens that were full of all the fruits and everything that he needed. Like, his guys would be starving, and they would come across a farm or something like that in the middle of the Amazon,

that he would say the entire all the vegetation is different with fruit that he'd never seen before but it looked delicious and it was edible and his men would gorge themselves on it and he would just find pockets of this well he was finding gardens he was finding Amazonian gardens and these are like I'm talking about tiny little

like all these little black spots on your table that's about how common they would be in the Amazon the vast majority of it is just natural wilderness that's been there since before the ice is. Yeah I think I think most people who say that i can't say all people i'm sure some people who run with that have indeed been there but most people who are saying that and seeing that have never been there and when you go there you will see you will realize especially when you go into the middle of the amazon like i was able

to do with paul you will realize what a spec you are and what a crowning achievement of mother nature that biosphere is i mean it's just like it almost doesn't make sense like And there were some times where I'd take in a moment and I'd be like, my God, the five-year-old me is just like jumping for joy right now. Like I'm floating in the water in the Amazon. Like this is the most special thing ever. But, you know, Paul might literally clip what you just said right there because if, and I understand this completely, it frustrates him so much when people say that because he's trying to save the Amazon.

And what happens is in fairness to some of the people who make comments along those lines, what they really say is that we have found some man-made things like a garden in the Amazon and then someone takes that quote and makes some article that they're going to sell ad space in but the article headline to get people to click needs to be Amazon man-made and most people read the headline they see the tweet about it and they're like oh shit it's man-made so suddenly now people get under the assumption therefore that well because it's man-made we've done it before I'm sure we can do it again we can rebuild it keep cutting the trees down and of course that makes absolutely no sense that's going to drive someone like paul nuts

and it should and so he wants to get out there to educate people to be like you you got to be real careful saying this because that's not what it is at all in fact and this is what he does come down here and see it i'll show you you'll realize within two seconds that ain't the case this stuff is older than seemingly the world itself not literally but you know what yeah yeah for sure it's like this has been around since fucking the dinosaurs we're around or whatever but you know it's it's really important i think that we talk about that stuff the right way because people don't see this in their backyard it's the amazon jungle it's way down there oh that's really cool i've read about in books i've seen a couple movies that's awesome

but it's you don't see it every day and so you don't have the appreciation that the amazon jungle which is i forget what percentage of the world's coverage it is but it's a way smaller percentage than this it represents 20% though of the world's global oxygen supply so when it gets to an exponential point of no return, hopefully it never gets there because we can save this thing. But if it gets past a certain point to where I'm making up numbers right now, but 43% of the Amazon were taken out, therefore it's going to go into extinction. It cannot be turned back around. We are going to face a world that's missing 20% of the oxygen moving forward and will totally fuck up the entire ecosystem that we enjoy, be it here in New Jersey or over in Spain or

China, wherever, like, you need something like that to exist. So I appreciate someone like you who studies ancient history and looks at the amazing things that human beings and ancient civilizations have been able to pull up. I appreciate the fact that you also understand the actual basis of what's there in the first place, which is the land and the ecosystem that existed long before the people were actually using it. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that that, well, one, I'm making two points. One, I think that clickbait titles have done such a disservice to like anything in the scientific world because it just, people just get these, you know, and freedom speech, you say whatever you want people is really people's responsibility to educate themselves, you know,

otherwise we just destroy ourselves. But, you know, the clickbait titles that nobody actually reads the article, or even worse, it's a clickbait title and then you have to pay to actually read the article, you know what I'm saying? So it's Amazon rainforest, man-made question mark, and you clicked on it and then you have to, and then it all gets blurred out and you can't read it and you're like, oh, I guess it just must be man-made. This is what everybody else is saying. That's what this is saying. Anyway, so clickbait titles from articles suck. Um, and people get so much wrong just because of stupid titles. And that's not just archaeology, but like, I think it especially creates like very inaccurate understandings of the ancient world, um, oversimplified understandings

of the ancient world for sure. And then the second thing is, um, You know, that idea, that idea, I mean, it allows people, when people believe that, they don't really care if China is logging up the entire Amazon. That's right. Or if they're planning on cutting highways straight through the Amazon. And America's buying it. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, it just allows people, especially with the Amazon in particular, but it just

allows people to just not really care about the natural world because, oh, it's just man-made, we could just do it again, you know? Maybe they think that. So that's right. And it's, you know, that's obviously it's, that's something that's personal on me at this point, not just because we've done content on it in here and had a guy like Paul in a bunch, but, you know, getting to see it and appreciate it. It's just, it's the coolest thing ever. And, you know, as I move along, that's something I want to do more of, go see some things up close. It's one thing to sit here in your comfy little studio and talk about it

like an armchair quarterback. But when you actually go see it for better or worse, depending on where you're going and what you're seeing, you know, you can speak to it more and you can you can understand it. And I just think, you know, there is some shit in this world that is magical and then there's some magical shit that human beings have been able to pull off to make it even more magical. And like it doesn't need to be one or the other. Yeah. With things, you can appreciate both. You can you can study the history and learn from it and you can also study the setting and environment and preserve it. You know, those two things should be hand in hand.

Yeah. Not even like the bloods and cripsmean either. Like, they should just be friends in general. Yeah, I totally agree with that. But the, so the Aztecs get taken out quickly, you know, by the Spanish and then disease spreads. And then, you know, the Spanish obviously pretty much colonized Mexico and you fast forward and you get to somewhere, somehow, how we got to today. But you had put a pin in the Mayans, but in particularly the Olmex and that whole history. I know that's something like one of the things I love by you is that you are constantly traveling to all these places to go see it for yourself.

And it's like a quest too. Like you're always dressed apart too. I really appreciate that. But, you know, you've gone down and looked at a lot of the Olmec ruins and the places where they existed. And it, to me, the Olmex, we talked about it in episode 175. a little bit, but it's a very, among the ignored parts that we already highlighted, the fact that South America seems to be so ignored in a lot of these history discussions, ancient history discussions these days, the Olmex are passed over so much. So for people out there who really

have no idea what their origins were and who they were and what the civilization was like, can you just give the download on the Olmec people and their base history? Yeah, yeah. So the Olmex, man, incredibly ancient. It's, it's, it's, the origins of Mesoamerica. Now, the basics of Mesoamerica is basically everything below the Rio Grande. So below Texas is essentially the most northern edge of Mesoamerica. And it continues all the way through Mexico into Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and it kind of fades out as you get closer to Panama. That's essentially Mesoamerica. And this has been my central area of expertise for quite a long time now. It was what I studied in college and got

my anthropology degree in. And this was the world that opened up to me. I'm fascinated by it. And it's infinitely complex. But on the Veracruz coast, which is to the west of the Maya realm, to the east of where the Aztecs will later be, there is a river that connects to the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America, as some people call it now. It's called the Coets Calcos River. You know, I actually get, I actually get a lot of flack for that, because I make custom maps for my videos, and I still call it the Gulf of Mexico. And you get flack for that?

Yeah, yeah, people will be like, no, no, it's the Gulf of America. It's just the logistical nightmare. I'm like, I'm like, guys, you know what? I'm just going to stick with tradition here. It's been the Gulf of Mexico for like 500 years. It was fun to say. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm not switching up because one guy.

says so yeah i agree i agree that's right so um so anyways yeah so it's the uh the coetz calcos river connects to the gulf of mexico and um along this river it's essentially like think of think of the coets calcos river as the nile river that the egyptians you know the nile river gave the egyptians their civilization we did this whole rundown last time it it's it's it's It's not of the credit of the Egyptians, it's of the credit of the Nile. The Nile just gifted these riches to the Egyptians. So the Coetscalcos River just gifts all this fertile land to the Olmecs. And in fact, I brought a group of students with me in December, and we went to San Lorenzo

Tinochetlon, which is the first capital, really, the central metropolitan area of the Olmec world. And it's way up on top of this hill, and as you look down the hill towards the Coets Calco's River and these alluvial floodplains where all of their maize crops or their corn would grow. I took a photo of it, dude. If I were to show an Egyptian that photo, they would think that I took a photo of somewhere in Egypt. It's that similar. It's just, and I've been to other fertile crescents as well and looked at it. I'm like, oh, wow, these all have the same similarities. It's these low valleys where the river consistently floods and it has, you know, creates this alluvial fertile plane and this is how civilization begins it's just fascinating seeing that so um so

the omec world begins at san lorenzo tinoche teelan it's the it's the fertile crescent of mexico it's the most overlooked fertile crescent of the entire world i mean uh what you have seven fertile crescents Mexico is the most overlooked one it begins with san lorenzo snosh titlan 800 years ago. So 1,800 BC, I should say. And so the Olmex, essentially, they get their rise from, they have the, they have port cities as well that are actually on the goal from San Lorenzo is inland a little bit along the river. And so they're sailing out on the coast and they're fishing. They have, you know, all types of resources from, from their ability to catch fish, as well as raise corn. So they're just booming. They essentially rise before everybody else and they just

mastered agriculture before any of the other cultures in Mesoamerica even get started. And what's really crazy is it seems like right at the beginning of their civilization, they're able to quarry these 60-ton stones, these 60-ton solid basalt stones out of the Sierra de Latusula volcanic belt to their northeast and quarry them and transport them 90 miles away to this city and carve and erect these massive Olmec heads. And it's like they're doing this from the very beginning of their society. There is no, from what we can tell through the archaeology, there's no lead up to this. There's no developmental period before they're able to do this. They're just doing it from the very beginning.

So we could look up just, I don't know if you have my eyesight's not that great, but just Olmec heads or something. um yeah they're insane it's crazy how much did you say Wade so this is okay so this is a really this is a really cool mystery about the olmec heads um so looks like a pulling garden oh it's it's crazy yeah it's it's beautiful man and there's uh there's 17 known heads but there's actually three more heads that most people have never seen but they're made out of sandstone and they're not even human they're like uh wear jaguar half human half jaguar faces yeah we can we can get at the end of this is really really cool this is actually something that connects to south america and peru by the way okay um i think it has its origins in the amazon this is kind of my

other area that i'm looking into um so you asked about how much they weigh so get so get this so the maya exploration center uh of which i'm a member of this is run by my mentor dr ed barnhart on one of his olmec expeditions he had a nautical engineer that was traveling with him who was fascinated by this idea of how did the Olmecs transport these heads. So he created this algorithm that you could put in, I'm not exactly sure what it was, a software or a site or something, where you could input the theoretical weight of your Olmec head and the theoretical size of your balsa river raft. And he found that if you made the raft too big to go down the narrow stretches of the Coets Calcos River

and you put a five-ton head on that raft it would flip the raft and sink it okay so the engineering so going back over this if it's too long and too wide to go down the narrow stretches of the river to actually make it to

the city it's already too big to go down the river and you put a five-ton head on it it would sink the raft the smallest head is six tons and the largest head is 52 tons so nobody knows exactly how these things were transported

it's just all archaeologists have quietly known what's your idea aliens could be well UFO came down see that would be the easiest way to do this that's what I'm saying it makes the most sense

but see the problem with the alien thing is we have to figure out like you know the aliens come down and then Native Americans are like please we're starving our children are dying we need something like penicillin and they're like no no no no

you'll teach you all my kids you need these rocks right we'll lift the rocks for you because then they can pray to something yeah then they can pray to something and have their soul safe yeah yeah because the real life happens after that on earth could be see I already got all the holes filled in I know you're not going to plug these

I think you've been I think you've been plugging the aliens every episode not every episode a lot there's a lot of misinformation out there but when we look at when we look at the ancient world there's some stuff that I'm like come on you know you know you know what I actually I actually I actually have to agree with you um you know I kind of like when I think of like little green men and spaceships I kind of roll my eyes at that idea um but at the same time then I also find myself, like, as a, like a religious person, I find myself studying ancient people and I see the bizarre things that they come up with and the things that they believe and the things

that they, you know, have this conviction about. And, you know, there's entire eras. There's two entire eras of Maya civilization where they give no credit to any single person for anything, and they dedicate every temple to a God and never lift up one person. It's like they do it all for the gods. The Egyptians seem to do everything for the God. You know, there were Greeks who literally actually believe that the gods exist. Well, I mean, most Greeks did. It was only the philosophers that started kind of questioning whether or not the gods existed. But, you know, you see so many ancient cultures go so far out of their way for their gods.

It just makes me think, like, okay, what is actually the answer to this? Is it that people are just looking for something? like they're looking for an answer so they kind of just make something up do they make it all up to be able to control

the people beneath them or does it make more sense that these people were so convicted by their beliefs because what they were experiencing actually happened to them and it's like

what's the line between what's the line between an ancient person taking some kind of natural hallucinogen and interacting with a deity while he's in that that space right and in an alien what's what's what's the line that you draw there it gets weird man

and and like and like okay can you know i'm saying this is a very self-aware christian uh where does like christianity fit in this sure it's it's a fascinating thing and so i i agree with you i like i laugh about the alien stuff but then i also have to remind myself like well you know i my my hot my hot take about the ancient world is that i actually think it's more likely that it's not all made up yeah i mean i and i enjoy joking about it in all seriousness and i wonder what the hell's out there in this giant galaxy that we have no idea the ends of it and all that stuff but we live in this world especially when it comes to religion where people want to make things everything or nothing right religion is at the top of that sphere yeah it is and there's all these

different world religions and there's these different stories and different interpretations and different translations and different characters and different i could go on down the list right and to me it's like where are there themes it's like oh wait a minute and that lines up with that a little bit that lines up with that a little bit there maybe there's some sort of truth there even if it's a different experience and then you get to the way that conscious human beings have the ability to experience things I've talked to you about my friend ris vert so he was on episode 274 with me at the time of this recording we just recorded a new one i haven't put it out yet but it's definitely out now if you're watching this

podcast right now but you know he's an mit simulation theorist absolute genius great guy too and he's thinking about you know some of the most unanswerable questions there are which which have to do with with the mathematical probability and scientific evidence for the idea that things exist as zero and ones around us and we our consciousness just can't understand that and one of the things many things that he talks about is that when it comes to like UFO sightings or things that anything that has to do with an alien or something not of this earth that appears in written record or oral record throughout human history it's like it's possible and it's even been reported this way that there are people who can be standing next to each other in the same

place and only one person witnesses you know something supernatural going on the other person doesn't see it at all. So something in this person's consciousness is transcribed to just a little bit of a different frequency. That's not the word to use, but it's set to just a little bit of a different frequency than the other person that allows them to see this and experience this and then, you know, maybe get whatever information comes from that. So if you look at things like the pyramids that pop up in all these different places and civilizations that were stuck in different time periods basically over time. And when you look at,

some unexplainable stuff like the old mech heads and things like that where is there potentially some divine intervention we know there's a lot of world leaders that have liked to lie about oh i got talked to by the gods therefore you got to worship man they're full of shit but which ones weren't which ones actually did have some sort of profit you know seeing through to whatever the other side is i don't care what that is whether that's god whether it's simulation whether it's aliens whether it's future be i don't i don't know but you have to at least as crazy as it sounds and it sounds fucking insane to even say it out loud but you have to ask these questions when you're looking at some amazing innovations that ancient civilizations did where we have evidence that like they they didn't have iPhones you know they didn't have something that's totally different than iPhone but technologically equivalent to that yet they were able to pull something like this off there is something there man I totally agree with you I actually think um I I I I actually think I I I I really think that the answer to a lot of this is going to be found in, God, I don't even know what we would call it, like psychedelic archaeology. Psychedelic archaeology. I don't know. I just made that up. But, you know, I think that once this boomer generation of archaeologists moves on. Moves the, I love, that was a very nice, very nice Texas Christian boy way saying that.

Yeah. Now, I'm not going to discredit archaeologists. They all do, basically all of them do amazing work. There are people who make their public opinions known that are very bad public opinions, but fast majority of archaeologists work super hard jobs and achieve a lot for very little credit. However, it's impossible for our preconceived notions of our modern day reality to not bleed into our profession, right? So I can't tell you how many archaeologists I have spoken to and tried to talk to them about the psychedelics that the culture of which they are an expert in was partaking in. And, you know, I, uh, I met an archaeoastronomer, spent a week with him. And an archaeo astronomer. Yeah, archaeo astronomy. It's, it's kind of a new, uh, what a flex. It's a new frontier of archaeology. It's essentially the study of ancient cultures interaction with the night sky. So trying to study ancient astronomers and what they understood about the night sky and how that can further re-inform and change our perspective on the culture that we're studying or the ancient sites that we're looking at like you may not understand

why this building is not lined exactly to true north and why it's 15 degrees off and why is this building also 15 degrees off but yet the retaining wall is facing a different direction yada yada yada well if you were able to unlock the secrets of the city you would realize that each of the orientation of these buildings and walls had a purpose that was facing towards the night sky or the sun and that shadows and knives of light would like shine through the buildings and they're all astronomical solar clocks it's crazy stuff dude like it's it's really really in depth now i had this realization uh in like 20 21 uh i did uh i did some edibles with my buddy and we're laying down looking underneath the i hope you did mood i don't know they were

mood. They just said it for the camera. They were moved, right? They were mood. Thank you for our sponsorships. Deep and I enjoy. Anyway, please continue. So, I'm laying there looking at the night sky and, you know, I must have taken like 30 milligrams or something. And, you know, I'm blasting off, you know. And I'm laying there. And after a couple hours, like, I've lost my ego. I'm no longer me anymore. I'm just one with the night sky and with the universe and I'm like looking at a photo of myself and not even not even looking at it as though it's me I just can't even believe that that's my body that I

exist inside of and makes you have all these realizations about yourself and the things you need to fix about yourself it's very medicinal the whole experience is and I had this feeling um where I felt like whatever God is I understood him I couldn't put it into words but I could just feel it I could feel it deeply to my core And I could only feel it in that moment. Once I sobered it up, it kind of went away. I wasn't able to, like, access that. It just, it's like it frees you up.

It opens your mind up to some other. I mean, you probably maybe experienced something like this before. And, uh, yeah, just like that. Yeah. And so I'm, uh, so, you know, I'm having this experience. And then, and then it just opened up my eyes to like, oh, this is, you know, I can see how a culture doing this for, thousands of years and trying to figure out the secrets of their natural world how religion

can form and how people can learn so much about, you know, the introspective aspects of reality. And maybe this is where shamanism comes from and ancient priests. Like, it probably has something to do with this because I can only imagine if I were to do this for my entire lifetime, the things I would experience and the insights that I might have, right? And so anyways, I start talking to, I start, well, as time goes on, on, I experiment more and more, and I have different realizations about archaeology. Like, I'll be thinking about these ancient cultures that I'm obsessed with, and I will realize different aspects of their society that I'd never realized before. And it's like, things would

unlock, and I would get these new perspectives. And I found it, like, incredibly helpful. It's not like I do this a lot, but I've just found it incredibly helpful. And so I'm talking to this archaeoastronomer, and I'm like, okay, so you study the Pueblo Ancestrian people. And he's like, yeah and I'm like what kind of psychedelics do they do and so he lists them out to me and I'm like I'm like I'm like do you ever go out and stargaze at night at these you know at these sites that you study these cliff dwelling sites out in the desert he's like oh yeah all the time I'm like do you ever do the psychedelics that they did and then stargaze and he's like no no I would never do that and he had this knee-jerk reaction and it's just very it was the boomer and him bleeding through

into the archaeology right like because you have this preconceived notion of drugs you know drugs all drugs bad there's no there's no distinction between like crack cocaine and weed right well well let's let's talk to hunter biden who he's listen that was like listening to michael jordan breakdown basketball i mean i was that was incredible so hunter biden talking about crack oh i know yeah best thing best three minutes and 15 seconds in tv let's continue anyways yeah yeah so um yeah you know to so to a lot of boomers there's no distinction between natural plant medicine you know medicinal drugs things are mostly harmless non-addictive you know marijuana isn't changing the chemical makeup of your brain to force you to become addicted to it and it's also not poisoning your body right uh like alcohol

cigarettes other drugs do they just destroy your body um you know there's no distinction there And so he had this knee-jerk reaction where it was like beneath him to ever do something like that. And I talked to him that whole week and I was like, dude, I'm telling you, man, if you did, if you took these natural psychedelics and hallucinogens with everything you know about this culture, I promise you, the pathways your brain is going to go down, you're going to have epiphanies about a culture you've studied your entire life because you're going to view them from a perspective you've never, you've never experienced before. And you're going to be stepping into their shoes. And it was like, I wore him down by the end. I think he's done since then. Take this mushroom. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I forget, oh, well, we got off on this because I think that the origins of a lot of civilization is probably found in shamanism and psychedelics. And I think that that, I think that like this Renaissance archaeology, like independent archaeology is going to grow and grow and grow. There's already so many people who are researching things on their own and making discoveries on their own. I think maybe one of the best examples is the YouTube channel. history for granted. He's done so much research on the pyramids. Oh, I've seen that. Yeah, I've seen

that he's done so much research on the pyramids that Egyptologists have acknowledged his discoveries and his perspectives. And these things are going to end up in textbooks. Wow. Yeah, he's, he has been, he is like the first wedge. You know, there's been all these other people. He is the first wedge to go through. Now, that's cool. Yeah, that's good. You got to break through onto each other's sides a little bit. You know what I mean? We've got to find some common ground. for sure and I think you I've always cited you as an amazing example of that because you come from both worlds you come from understanding some of the alternative perspectives and being genuinely interested in it since you were a little kid but you are also academically trained under Ed Barnhart at college like this is this is what you're an expertise in from the from the academic side of it you know so you you understand the establishment and the anti-establishment and where both have a point on certain things and you've done a really good job to this point in your career of straddling that line and kind of being a peacemaker there and I hope you continue to do that because some of the fighting

especially you know behind keyboards on Twitter it's just like guys get the fuck stop this yeah you know get in a room and talk yeah it's a it's a tough place to be um it's a tough place to be I used to want to be involved more in the conversation like actively going out and being involved in the conversation I've realized the best thing I can do is is kind of just retreat back into my space, focus on my own work, and interact with people that want to interact with me, right? Because I'm really not accepted by the alternative side, although I'm cool with a lot of those people. We're all fine. But in the academics, I'm cool with most academics, but I'll never be accepted by them. You know, I'm never going to be part of

the club. And so I'm just kind of, you know, out here on my own island. I like that. Yeah, I'm just out here on my own island. I've got a few friends. Yeah. And so that's kind of I'm at. And I think that I think that the appetite for all the fighting is dying off. I think people are just kind of over it because it's not productive. I hope you're right about that, but I disagree. I think people

I think there's people that unfortunately live for it. You know? Yeah. Yeah. It's just how it is. And it's human nature. We just now have more accessibility than ever to be able to do it instantaneously all day every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true.

You've kind of evolved to that. Yeah. So, you know, You know, that's my role is I want to be one of these people in this kind of renaissance of archaeology, sort of doing it on my own. Now, that doesn't mean I have legal permits to go dig at places. But, man, there's been so many artifacts that have been excavated and so many narratives that have, in puzzles that haven't been pieced together yet from, you know, so many artifacts get excavated and then hand it over to a museum and never get looked at again.

They just sit in a glass case and they sit there forever. Such a shame. And they never get studied. But as I've gone around the world and focused on certain cultures, I have noticed patterns between things where I will try to go research it and no other archaeologists has ever acknowledged certain things that I've noticed. And I've realized this particularly with the Americas and that the Americas are just very much understudied.

And this is kind of what you were talking about recently where I was thinking about going to school in Athens. and yeah i man i always loved the classical world i grew up loving it just like everybody else did my grandpa uh on his nightstand he had this book called western progress and it was essentially the origins of western society all the way up to like uh henry the fifth in england from the pharaohs through greece and egypt through medieval times all the way to king henry and i would look at that book and look at it and look at it and i poke through it and look at the pictures and read what i could much more dense reading that i would

was able to comprehend. But it was the classical world. It was Egypt, Greece, and Rome that first sparked my love for the ancient world. And it was weird as I was going down the path of committing to go to school for a year. It was going to be about 18 months in Athens at the University of Athens. I was committed. I was about to pay. And then it was like the day before I just had this huge wave of guilt come over me. And I felt like I was betraying a world that had given itself to me. You know, like studying the Americas was not something I ever anticipated that I would do. I always found it interesting, but I never anticipated that I would specialize and go all in on it.

But when I changed my major, you know, I was 20 years old. I was going to fail all my marketing classes. I was going to flunk out of college. I had to appeal to the dean to be able to switch to anthropology. They barely let me switch my major. I switched, and in Texas, they breed Mesoamerican archaeologists or Mexican archaeologists that specialize in ancient Mexico, what we've been talking about this whole time. And they just breed that.

There really wasn't much about Egypt. I took one part of a semester of a class on Egypt. And I just focused on the Americas. And that's how I met Dr. Ed Barnhart. And that's how I came to learn about, you know, this great archaeologist. Linda Shealy and it's how I came to learn about the Maya, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Zappotex, you know, and then later on the Inca. And it was like the Americas just opened itself up to me and like accepted me. And, um, you feel a spiritual kinship to it. Yeah, yeah, right? And, and also my

family, they were obsessed with the Spanish gold going back to the 1800s. I talked with Joe about this. I think we maybe even talked about this on my first episode with you and my first conversation like all the way back to the 1800s my family was chasing down Spanish gold and they were tracking down Spanish gold mines but they didn't realize that the Spanish gold mines were expanded indigenous minds and my grandpa had found all these Mogoyone which is just a New Mexican tribe all this pottery and artifacts and uh you know my family's just deeply involved with the Americas and in college the America the Americas opened itself up to me and I became sort of an expert in it in college and I just felt like even though I was wanting to return to what my childhood love was, it was the day before I was supposed to pay for my tuition. I had this nasty wave of guilt come over me, and I called Dr. Barnhart, and I told him, I don't think I can do it.

I don't think I can turn my back on the Americas. I think I meant to study it, but I had to come all the way to the point of almost no return to realize that's what I was supposed to do. How long would school in Athens have been? 18 months. I see what you're saying. And I understand.

You felt like it would have been like crossing over literally and figuratively. And now you're going to pour your heart and soul into that. And you're going to leave this behind. But, you know, I don't think you would have ever left that fully behind. And if this is part of the way the journey need to go for you, then that's great. Yeah. And I can feel how passionate you are about the Americas and about not wanting to leave that behind. But, you know, one of the things I like about you is you do study all of it.

Like you, I mean, we, the last time you were here in November, the episode didn't come out until end of January, beginning of February. But like, you know, we did six hours, two episodes of basically it was the 27,000 year history of Egypt. And it was spot the fuck on. I mean, it was amazing, amazing stuff. You were taking me through timelines, I didn't even know existed. And so for a guy who can go travel through the jungles of Guatemala and Mexico and break down everything that you've been studying your whole life and continue to. find new frontiers for that same guy to be able to take us over to Egypt where you've also been and spent time by the way and run us through a historical thread that goes beyond even our

comprehension of what human history is supposed to be I think that's an incredible incredible range to have and I always want to see you keep that range which means keeping all of it in the fold together so you felt like you were going to get too caught up in some of the more I don't know this isn't the term I'm looking for but mainstream ancient type stuff Whether that be ancient Greece or just ancient Rome and it's going to pull you away from these other overlooked areas, then great. I'm glad you passed that up. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think the thing was it was like, it was like, you know how sometimes, I forget what the word is, but sometimes you go looking for something and something else chooses you.

That's right. And it's like, it's like the universe opens up this door and this is the door you're meant to walk through. you don't feel it in that moment but you but that's the door that's meant for you you know yeah exactly and and i just i had to go down the ancient greece route i loved greece man like the very first thing that got me into ancient history was brad pitt uh you know i man i love that damn movie dude took brad pitt yeah it was yeah it was yeah it was back the history fuck the odyssey i needed bread yeah so it was it was a man i just i was obsessed with that movie in fact as a kid i memorized every single movement of the sword fights in that movie i could i could reenact yeah i've seen you and your

wife role play yeah yeah exactly yeah wearing all the yeah and uh don't post that on social no i won't i won't post it if you want to do an only fan is knocked yourself that's a good idea yeah i need to start looking luke caverns he's got a porn name over here already so i uh you know um it's with the curve i uh so i loved ancient greece and um but yeah it was just i needed to go that far to the day before i was supposed to pay the tuition to know okay hold on hold on if you're going to go here you're going to pour your heart and soul into this it's going to distract from all the america stuff you're doing how can you go back to that like you just need to i i had to basically return back to the feeling i had when i first started all this because

I'm very much the type of person. I'm very influenced by my academic background. And so much of that was like, you know, so many people in my ear, you really should get a higher degree. You really should get a PhD. You really should specialize. You really should become a particular expert in this one thing. And I was hearing that all the time. And it was the day before I was supposed to pay that I just knew, stop. Like, stop all of that. You've got to go back to the feeling that you had when you first started all this was that you wanted to be like a jack of all trades and study whatever you were interested in so you know whether that's you know i was in cambodia recently uh studying ancient cambodian world ancient egypt greece rome but you know the americas is

kind of like i guess it's like yeah it's like my journey you know what i mean like there's so much there that needs to be discovered and uncovered and spoken about and i think as time goes on And the last time I was in the fall when I was talking to Danny on his show, and I was talking about the, I was talking about the LiDAR maps that I have access to in North America that show all these mound sites in Florida and how I want to focus on North America. And then talking with you about the period just before the revolution and how much history there is with Native Americans, I'm seeing this world of Native American history that isn't dived into enough. and it's like this deep purpose that's there. Whereas with ancient Greece, it's all pretty much understood. You know, there's not a whole lot of mystery. Like there's the Ilusinian mysteries, there's a few things there.

But like the Native American world is completely shrouded in mystery. Yes. And it's just, it just like calls to me and opened itself up to me. Like I didn't ask for it. It just happened in my life by accident, you know. And it's like I was born to do it, you know. I think so. And I just realized that right at the last moment.

Anyways. No, it's beautiful. And I agree with you. I think, as you've described it in the past, in episode 175 towards the beginning of that, it's literally in your blood. You know, like you were just saying a few minutes ago, your family was looking for some of this stuff. You know, so it's a part of who you are. And I think there's something to that in how passions get passed down generationally, almost like DNA in a way. And that's, that's, that's there.

So, you know, here you are covering that, and you're going to keep doing that. And that's great, man. Follow your heart. I love it. That's why I want everyone to do. Yeah. You've got me particularly interested in this topic of, now I want to start diving into, yeah, like Native Americans leading up to the Revolutionary War. Just talking with you a little bit about it in the last couple of days has made me think, like, yeah, you know, I know a little bit about this, but it's such an interesting realm of history.

Even with, it's one of the great things I love talking about when people are in town and we're walking along the hudson there and looking at Manhattan, especially people who aren't from around here and they're kind of tinking it in and appreciating that. But like even at the Revolutionary War, like the average American even doesn't understand that New York City was the center of that war. It was the linchpin of that. It wasn't Newarktown, which ended up being where, you know, Cornwallis got surrounded. in in 81 by by the continental army and that effectively it didn't end the war but it effectively ended the war it wasn't you know some of the southern sites it wasn't philadelphia which was the capital and certainly a key place you had new york which you know sat on this island if we're looking at camera four right here you know you got two rivers parting fortification to the east that creates long island for

ships coming directly across from Europe, i.e. invaders. And then when you run up the Hudson, you go up there about an hour and you got the greatest turn and spot for a military fortress in the world, which became West Point, you know, at the time, because of its high ground and where it was located vis-a-vis the Hudson River. And it's like so much of what happened happened right here when this looked very, very different. And now you think about the years leading. up to that when there was an insane speed of colonial takeover between the British

and the French and then they end up fighting this war and caught in the middle of it or all these Native American tribes that existed in all these areas right here and it's not long ago this is less than 300 years ago we're going to do the 250th next year you know that's

it's a it's there is history below your feet everywhere it may not be like quite as noticeable combination of noticeable and far back is like when you're walking

through Rome yeah sure but there's a significant amount of like whoa right beneath your feet right here even it's an awesome

awesome thing to tell it's a yeah people vastly underestimate how complicated the pre-colonial world really was you know squanto

the i'm sure you know the story of squanto it that you know that's a fascinating it's just a it gives you a little window into how complicated this world was before the white man was ever even here you know squanto i think he's born he's born in the late 1500s because he's captured in like 1614 or something like that and um or maybe 1612 when he's you know just a just a teenager and he grew up in what is today yeah the late 1500s okay so um he grows up in what is today modern-day Massachusetts and he grows up within these three warring tribes that are there so it gives you this idea there's already complications here there's this history of these conflicting tribes just in the small area imagine what the entire United States looks like at this at this moment

he was the tannist dude in Massachusetts too probably I mean you know those irishmen ain't getting sun up there yeah he was doing okay and so and so you know when he's a i believe when he's a teenager or when he's maybe in his early 20s he gets captured by a trading expedition and he's brought back to england imagine that from his perspective you're being pulled to an alien realm that's vastly technologically superior to you like cobblestone streets with giant ships and what do they have black powder rifles by the early 1600s i mean they had obviously crossbows i don't know it's something rifles existed like maybe the little hand cannons existed uh obviously cannons exist i mean just like think about like the lot did the london bridge

still exist i don't know but i mean just there must have been mind blowing for him so he's he essentially works in uh london for 10 or i think it's london but he works in england for 10 years and then he he's finally freed and able to return back to the Americas. He joins a trading expedition, and they essentially just, they really do him dirty. They drop him off in Newfoundland. And they're like, this is the closest that we can get you. And he's like, he's like, oh, my God. So that dude solo hasn't been in the Americas for 10 years, builds a boat,

sails from Newfoundland to the mainland, and makes his way all the way back home to Massachusetts. That's insane. solos it as far as as i know when he gets to massachusetts he finds the three tribes are in complete disarray and they've been absolutely decimated by disease so this is around 1620 or so when the the first thanksgiving is 1621 right yeah he died in november 1622 so we're coming up on he died on the second thanksgiving by the way uh crazy um so he arrives a few years before the the the first Thanksgiving. And he finds that his homeland, his own people, his family, they've all died. All of us, most of his friends have died. And the warring tribes that they, that he grew up opposing

and hating, they were all decimated. And the land was in complete disarray. Well, what had happened? What have we, what have we been talking about? The Spaniards had invaded the Aztec realm. And now disease had spread from Mexico City all the way up the Americas and had from Florida as well and had moved towards that northern coast. And just now, a hundred years later, it was infecting people in Massachusetts and wiping them all out. And so Squanto returns to find his home like this. So he takes these three tribes and he turns them into the Wampanoag Confederation that he is now chief of because, I mean, obviously he's the most experienced man. He has so much knowledge of the world now. And he's obviously the most outstanding character in this new land.

And this is where I think, like, this story is just crazy. So one of his informants come to him, and they tell him, is it Jonestown, Jamestown? I think it's Jamestown. Jamestown? Yeah. Correct this in the comments. Yeah. I'm going to get torn up for that.

Like I said, my early colonial history, I'm just now getting into it. So, but they basically come and say, hey, you know, we know that you have a history with these white men. I think that some of these white men, the same people, are living out here on this town on the coastline and they're suffering. Half of them, more than half of them died last winter. They don't know how to work the land. You know, this is a completely different type of agriculture than they're used to. You know, they're not used to growing maize and potatoes.

And so they haven't figured out the land. And so imagine you're one of these colonists. You're living in this little town. you know there's Native Americans out there you haven't been attacked by them yet but you've grown up hearing stories of what they could do to people and so you're always kind of weary

of like what exists inside that tree line that we can't see who's watching us right and then all of a sudden this Native American man walks out of the jungle speaking perfect English and walks up to you isn't that so weird like you know mind blowing that must have been

for a guy to walk out and be like hello how are you speaking perfect English that they would understand it must have been just utterly jarring and and squanto he felt empathy for them you know he was the he was the only native there that we know of and clearly that saw their humanity and felt you know compelled to help them because they were suffering even though they were on their land and shouldn't be there and he probably knew very well from growing up in england what the english intentions were for this new land was to colonize it and spread out and yet he still helped them and so he teaches them

how to farm the land and everything saves that town and then the next year on christmas the spanish influenza the european influenza or i'm saying not the next year on thanksgiving squanto dies from that european disease on the second imagine that you make it through everything you find your way back home you're one of the most cultured men in the world because you've existed in across multiple civilizations effectively and then the flu gets you isn't that weird that that um highly important men you know that guy's up there and one of the most important people that's ever lived um you know i mean i don't know if you had to rank a top 10 000 human beings that's ever lived he's into the top 10 000 yeah and um and it's like isn't it weird it's like people

use up their importance quickly and then they die you know what i mean it's it's very it's it's very crazy like you look at all of the uh conquistadors they all die shortly after this great achievement that they've made you know oriana makes it down on the amazon survives it does it again dies at 35 it's a lot like a i guess it's like a wasp or something when they have not the people the actual insect when when they have that climactic moment in the heat of battle after this life of you know finding all these places to live and building things as a hive basically being warriors for the tribe of wasps and and bees and everything and and then they have to use their stinger yeah and it's this ultimate moment where it's like they're

crowning achievement and you know unless it's the dude moan his lawn that they just ruin his day if it's actually another type of species that's more on their level they kill this thing and it's like that moment in the movie and then when they do it they die yeah it's over yeah it's like they release it's like post not clarity but up you're dead yeah yeah like they release their potential and everything they have to be great it comes out and you die immediately and it's gone south bar how many people does that happen to it's a lot yeah it's a lot yeah you know or people have these uh people have these early premature very bizarre deaths like george washington's death you know what i mean he could live could live quite a bit longer and then he gets uh but it's pretty old was he like 65 i think okay

65 but yeah he could have lived longer or maybe he was maybe he was I think he was maybe like 67 or something but he gets he gets what doctors today think was bronchitis and then they perform all these crazy procedures on him yeah 67 they perform all these crazy procedures on him just try to save his life and then they just kill him and if they had just left him alone he might have survived bronchitis yeah that's a story of medicine yeah yeah no it definitely definitely to get it there yeah Maybe if Ben Franklin had come up with something, they would have jolted them to life. I know, man. Man, that's a rough world, dude.

Pre-I. I had this, this Guantos. It just reminds me this. I had this guy, Andy Powell in here for episode 202. I've heard that name. Okay. So this guy was so cool. He's from the UK, and he was the mayor of a town.

I forget the name of it on the west, southwest coast of the UK. And I can't remember, we recorded this January, 2024, and then I put out the episode, I held that one. I put that one out like end of April, 24, beginning of May. It was like right there. But he came across some sort of historical record where he realized that the lost colony of Roanoke was really the first colony in America before the ones that we know of. It was really founded in like 1587 and that the guys who founded it were from his town. And so it turned into this odyssey where he literally ended up moving to the United States where he still lives and sunk his life into this for the last over two decades,

covering the story and figuring out what happened because there's something strange where they came through, went back to Britain and then came back and the people they had left there were gone. and they found a sign from, I forget, the local tribe, what they were called. I think it starts with a C, but the local Indian tribe, where they wondered if they were like to Croatowans, that's right. And they found a sign that said like Croatoa. And they didn't know if it was like an SOS signal, like we've been kidnapped by them and maybe eaten or whatever the fuck could have happened, killed, maimed. Or if the people just join with the tribe and left forever.

And it's like forgotten to history. But he talks about the history of some of the Croatowans that when they met them coming here, they took them back to the UK and there's records of them being in the UK and like, I don't know, testifying to their experiences and taking in the culture. It's very similar to Squanto, but 100 years before him doing that over 100 years before him where, you know, there was this cross-pollination of culture at the highest first level. and you know these people got to experience something so outside of what their reality had been before you know these brits just washed up on shore it's a crazy crazy story it's so fascinating because you try to put yourself in the shoes of both parties and you know one's discovering like a land filled with people that have no relation to their culture and you know then the other is has the opportunity for some of their people to go back over to wear that

those people came from and see their culture and experience the same thing and you're just like, it's like a fucked up version of Spider-Man, but, you know, they're not both Spider-Man. Yeah, there's a,

there's a brilliant book. I think it's called Broken Spears, and it says, yeah, I think it's called Broken Spears and it says, it's, it's the Aztec discovery of the Spaniards, and it's written from the Aztec point of view

and how bizarre it must have been for Native Americans to see, you know, you never think about it from the Native American point of view, how strange that must have been. But yeah, man, okay, so in North America, people don't realize this,

and this is kind of what we were talking about, there's this underbelly of North American colonial history. I mean, when we think about the colonies, like the average person typically thinks of at the earliest, maybe the Boston Tea Party. You know what I mean?

Like typically, yeah, yeah. Like at the earliest, that's kind of where it begins. yeah dude there's 200 years of history beneath that 200 years of history beneath that 200 years before that there are already forts way out in north carolina near where i live winston salem i think it's called uh san juan fort and the spaniards put a fort all the way out there they were going to try to make a claim for all of the southeast united states this is crazy stuff dude so i think it's in the 1530s or maybe it's the 1560s they put a fort all the way out in North Carolina and kind of like the colony of Roanoke they

essentially say hey guys I don't know when we're gonna be back so you're just gonna have to survive and we're gonna go from the coastline and build inwards to try to get to this fort you know what I mean they're gonna try to cut off the this they're gonna try to cut off this northern edge and the southern edge and essentially corner off piece mail you know the right the the the southeast US and eventually connected to Texas but they had some problems with the Comanchees in Texas so they kind of abandoned that.

That happens a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this Fort San Juan, if they were able to connect these, to connect these trade routes from the Mississippi River to the North Carolina coasts like the Outer Banks and over, they would have

cornered off the entire Southeast United States. We'd all be speaking Spanish today. It would be completely different. But the Cherokee banded together and raided that fort in the middle of the night like one of the biggest invasions that we know of that's completely overlooked in american history and it was the cherokee that pushed the spaniards out of the southeast united states and destroyed that fort had that not ever happened shout out to the

charity shout out to the cherokee had that not ever happened history could look totally different right now and man there's all kinds of stories of this of of the 1500s europeans are out exploring North America and trying to conquer it. It's just, and all of these things had to happen exactly the way that they did for American history to turn out the way that it did. It's just, it's an incredible history, dude. I also talk about it all the time, the exponential bias with which we view history. And what I mean by that is when we look at what we might put, quote unquote, modern history and talk about like post-World War II, We have generations that are still alive.

So we look at like the people that were growing up in the 40s and 50s is they're the oldest people in our society. That was so long ago, right? But it's not that long ago. The farther back we go, though, we start to squeeze together time. Meaning by the time we get to thinking about the 1700s, someone who lived in 1725 seems almost the same as someone who lived in 1765. Whereas today, when we look at it, someone who lived in 1965 and someone who lived in 2005, too, very different people but then when you get all the way back to like zero year zero or 50 AD or 100 AD we talk about people that lived in 50 AD and 375 AD is like the same thing and they're

fucking 12 generations apart yeah yeah yeah you know what I mean the culture is so different so we look at time through this weird sphere based on our our current perspective of it and so we ignore as you said a lot of that like that's like almost 200 years of history basically before you even have a revolutionary war yeah that's almost the length of our current existence as a country yeah yeah yeah wild when it's it's it's it's it's like um yeah it's like uh the the recipe all of the ingredients are coming together for what the world society is going to become today and it gets looked over i remember um growing up you know you get the basic american history that's why i say most of the time we start colonial colonial history you open up you know american textbook in high school

and it starts with the Boston Tea Party. There's nothing before that, you know, not really. I mean, maybe there is something there. They put like the Stamp Act in there. Yeah, yeah. But that's kind of where it begins, you know, in those years leading up to the kicking off, you know, the Declaration of Independence.

And what's funny is you might get something about Columbus in there as well. And it's like, it's like, I don't know if most people, we all have Columbus in the back of our head, 1492 sails the ocean blue he discovered the he discovered the america's boom american revolution you know what i mean you almost like you almost like don't even perceive the fact that there's so many i mean it's almost 300 years of difference in in there and it's like we just skip directly over that i think it's so true i used that saying i was talking with mark yesterday about that i shouted you out i was like it was like julian he words it so well that further you go back in time

uh we start like compacting it together almost like almost like almost like we're minimizing the files and just in just clumping them all in because we we're just so far removed from it that we minimize the significance of those periods of time we can't have that appreciation of what that how different those things look like imagine plucking a person from year 100 and another person from year 200 they wouldn't even know how to have a conversation with each other yeah you know we just look at everything as like more as well it's just gotten faster with technology so it's slower back then yeah but people change think about think about this if you put if you put yourself in a room with another guy that's exactly your age

but in 1925 and you're both standing down the street in new york city you have nothing to relate to each other nothing in common at all your your perception of new york city every single facet of the entire city is utterly completely different right and it's like man you think about i guess I guess this kind of easily gets into like why sometimes I'm just perplexed at how how vindictive archaeologists and historians can be about their assertations about the ancient world because I'm like, dude, I don't even know if you could actually dive into and truly appreciate and understand the mindset of somebody who lived exactly where you do a hundred years ago. He can't.

Joe might be able to. He's been writing a play about it. That's now off Broadway on New York. shot out Sacco and Benzetti the famous case from 19 you know the late 1910s into 1920s yeah you'd be able to have a conversation

with someone back then yeah I think so I think I could I could match up with their transatlantic accent is that really a fake thing this transatlantic accent like was it something that was only put on from movies and radio

it was like something it was it was an accent that they tried to force right to sound aristocratic or sound smart you want to do it for people Joe you're coming in the morning and we're going to play and we're going to have a couple of cheeseburgers with some cigarettes on our cheeseburgers we're going to put cigarettes on everything because that's what we love here we love cigarettes that's awesome yeah he's like spot nice job dude you can do it no this love that this is like he's a stud okay so is that accent it was actually artificial though right yes americans tried to make it work but it didn't yeah and in for like you said it was to

it was supposed to give an air of uh aristocracy and you know just make you sound smarter and more sophisticated and especially for like showbiz there's a lot a lot of those guys sounded really stupid with their actually regular voices did they actually take it on though meaning like people put it on so much that they used it absolutely right yeah yeah like you look at if you look over in in england and high society there's the the the accent of the kings right they speak differently yeah yeah and they actually taught they actually talk like that because yeah they do it's worse it's the worst it's pretty gay but you know anyway we it's it's not it's not as gay as uh as the way that uh so like when you go around

when you go around the latin american world and you hear people speak spanish it sounds cool it's masculine it's romantic and you go to spain and they all speak with uh with the with the uh with the with the lift come what style do you know why this happened it was because one of the spanish kings had a had a lisp and he was very embarrassed by it and he made it trendy yeah yeah so it became a trend if you wanted to seem uppity in high society you would speak spanish with with a lisp and that's now why i think it's castilian spanish i think that's what it sounds right um yeah it sounds very gay yeah mexicans sound a lot better oh it's so much better it's like it's it's it's it's gangster it's romantic it's it can be masculine it can be very

feminine but like spain spanish is just like that king really did them all dirty you know bartholona yeah yeah that's what it is i didn't know that baby barthelona that's right yeah god damn it all those hapsburgs and breads fucking it up for everyone terrible terrible god bless america spain i guess but anyway so we we got on this tangent talking about the olmex though so let's let's wrap that up we went through the heads and how that can't even be moved, but what, what years again were they existing? So, so the Olmex, uh, the only, this is the craziest conversation you and I have ever had. No, it's great. Yeah, I'm, I'm loving it. Uh, so the, so the Omex, they appear in

the Coets, Calcos River of, uh, central Mexico, around the year 1800 BC. And they start with San Lorenzo, Tenoche, Teland. They're erecting these huge heads, like from the very beginning of time and there's no developmental period they just in the way that they in the way that people often say that the Egyptians are just building the pyramids at the beginning of time it's even more

so true with the Olmex with the pyramids there's a there's a short developmental period it just it's on like a ten time scale it goes goes shh like they very quickly go from building you know large temples and mastabotumes to boom

pyramids and but with the Olmex, it literally begins with these giant heads and these huge altars and these other large monuments. There's so many monuments there that I don't think most people have ever even seen or heard of before. So for an unknown reason, San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan collapses or becomes abandoned or the population gets smaller. It may actually be a result of, oh, what's it called?

Like when you're so successful that it hurts you. I forget what the phrase for that is, but that Olmex society is just, is just exploding, and they don't have enough land at San Lorenzo to No Steylon to sustain these people. So they leave and they, they, the hub of Olmex society essentially moves to this place called Leventa. Leventa is essentially just a duplicate of San Lorenzo. Now, what year are we in when they do that? Now we're at about, we're at about a thousand to five hundred. So, you know, I say a duplicate, obviously there must have been so many. any nuances and discrepancies between these eras. But now we're at Leventa. And we have more

heads, but we also have more unique and different monuments at Levinta. This is actually where we get the, it's actually where we get when I was talking to you about the Lost City of the snake god, that book I want to write. This is actually where the first depiction of the feathered serpent, Ketzelkoak, comes from the Olmec world, actually. Most people don't realize that. Yeah, but it's undoubtedly. And if you were to look this up, you could look up a monument, is it monument 19 or maybe it's monument 13? Yeah.

But, well, Monument 13 might be the traveler, but I think Monument 19 is the feathered serpent. So think about this. When I'm going to show you this, dude, this is the beginning of ancient Mexico. And they're able to carve artwork into, into, this basalt is as hard as, granite by the way okay there's no formative period that we have an archaeological record of that leads up

to this but they have this kind of aesthetic this art style carved into the hardest stone available in their natural environment a stone that can sometimes be as hard as granite and the artwork looks like this at the beginning of time at the beginning of time this is so ancient that when the Aztecs migrated down into Mexico and invaded Mexico 3,000 years later, they perhaps did not even know who the Olmex were or even knew that the Olmex ever existed at all. This is how ancient this is. This happened from the very, very beginning of time. So then you have Leventa and eventually Omex civilization begins slowly collapsing as it's kind of like Egypt. Egypt arises. They have this, it's like this first primordial sea of darkness like neolithic prehistoric people and then this

spark of consciousness right it's like that's that's egypt and the egypt rises up and as egypt rises it pulls everyone up else around them right like that that influence of civilization influences everyone else and everyone else rises and over the course of several thousand years these people become as powerful as egypt and egypt's level kind of in the hierarchy kind of kind of falls down The same thing happens with the Olmex. The Maya start rising alongside the Olmex. And the Maya are, or the Olmex are trading with the Maya back and forth. And so as everyone starts to rise around the Olmex, the Olmex essentially fall, collapse,

everything that made the Olmex unique, rich and successful, like their ability to fish and their ability to farm and sell maize crops, everyone else learned how to do this as well. And so their importance essentially, yeah, their importance diminishes. and then they just dissolve into the rest of the Mesoamerican world. And then you have the Maya rising, the Zapotex rising. Then you have Veracruz culture, which is the same bloodline as the Olmec people, but they're never as influential. And then over in the Mexican Valley, you have like the bubbling of Teotihuacan,

of what will eventually be this great empire that tries to influence the Maya world, and then the Olmex just disappear. And that's probably 500 to 200 BC, and we never see the Olmex again. Yeah. Whoa. Way back. Oh, way, way back. So how long total you think they existed? Earliest evidence is probably 2000 BC. Whoa. So this is a borderline 2,000-year-old civilization. And yet they had been gone for over 2,000 years. Yes, yeah, yeah. So they existed for about, I mean, well, they definitely exist long before we have an archaeological record of them, right? Like, that's kind of accepted everywhere that. every civilization that we know of probably existed long before we have a record of them right but at least by about 2000 2000 BC is a safe bet and then by 1800 BC they're really starting to get

going by 1500 BC full-blown civilization by a thousand even twice as big and then by 500 they're diminished and by zero they're gone they've just disappeared and and kind of been absorbed and dissolved into everything else around them and then as it's like as soon as they fall the maya rise and this is why a lot of people think the Maya are the direct descendants of the olmex but they're they're not and what's funny how do we know that we have DNA proof of that um no i don't i don't know if if DNA proof or not um but you you don't need DNA proof uh so what's funny is i was with a group of my buddies and we're in my backyard just sitting in the backyard having a good time smoking

a joint and talking about the Maya and the Olmex and caverns you look bad ass smoking a joint and yeah I just I love I never do it like for stupid fun I always do it and then sit down and talk about ancient history because I feel like I'm going to get something from it sure enough I had this realization why the old why the Maya and the Olmex are distinctly different from each other and why the Maya and why the you know the omics are often called the mother culture of ancient Mexico. In some ways, that's kind of true, but, but they often think that the Maya are the direct descendants, but, but they're not. They're, they're completely different, but the Maya were influenced and helped by the Olmex. So, people have often wondered why Maya civilization begins

in the middle of the Patent jungle in Guatemala. It's the most, like, it's the worst place that you could begin a civilization. It's kind of like, it's kind of like being in the middle of the Amazon, right? Except it's even worse in the middle of Guatemala because there's not a major river next to you. The only thing you have are freshwater reservoirs, like swamps that are infested by these huge crocodiles and everything. So I'm trying to think of like the psychology behind why do people live there in the first place. Okay, in early, early prehistoric times, let's go back like 5,000 BC. You already have people living in Mexico and what will become Mesoamerica, prehistoric Mesoamerica. And probably the prime real estate, if this is

pre-agriculture, pre-farming maize, probably the prime real estate is along the coastlines because you can sail out, you can go fishing, you can catch fish. I mean, that's just, that seems to be the obvious real estate. It also must be incredibly violent, right? And so just like the Comanches who get beat up in, you know, early pre-Columbian times and they get pushed into the Great Plains and a place with the worst real estate, probably there was a group of just Maya people who were very unequipped for warfare to be able to survive on the coastline. So they retreat into what is the worst real estate in all of Mesoamerica, which is in the center of the Patin jungle where you have no freshwater running rivers.

All you have is reservoirs and like the water table. So you dig this huge artificial lake and then the water seeps up out of the ground and that's your water, which wasn't really that healthy and it kind of causes problems, maybe a thousand years later or so no more maybe like two thousand years later but um for a long time was a mystery why did maya civilization start in the middle of the peten jungle in guatemala in the worst place there are so many other places it could have began and i just i realized it this this one night when we were talking about it the olmecs were so wealthy or let's let's go to about 1500 bcc the olmecs are so wealthy that they're commissioning basalt to be brought in from the sierra de la tutucia

mountains to their northwest but that wasn't olmec land necessarily there were there was a different culture that was living there and that was coring the stone and moving it for them okay they were also getting serpentine and jade serpentine and jade is not native to the olmec realm it comes from somewhere in the maya realm and so they were trading with the maya people to get this jade for a long time nobody ever knew where the jade and the serpentine was coming from because quarries are really hard to find especially in the jungle it's like this big crater in the ground but then over thousands of years it gets filled in with jungle and vegetation and then it just becomes this little looks like a hill right there looks like a it looks like two hills and that's it you can't even

perceive it anymore and so in the in the late 1900s there were these expeditions that went out and there There's a book written called Stone of Kings, and they went looking for the serpentine and jade quarries. And sure enough, they come from the center of the Patent jungle. That's where they were at. And I haven't seen many Maya archaeologists expand much more on this other than saying, hey, this is where the jade quarries were, that the Maya were getting their jade. But they've never connected it to the Olmex.

But I'm like, the jade and serpentine is coming from the center of the petend jude. jungle. This wasn't started because the Maya were mining it to give it to themselves. They started it probably because the Olmecs were looking for it, found, they liked these valuable green stones, and sought it out and sent expeditions into the Maya world, into the farthest deepest depths of the jungle where the poorest Maya people that were afraid of everyone else were living in the middle of the jungle and said, you guys have access to this, mine this for us and give it back. to us. And so from the center of the jungle, probably, you know, like just the bitches of the Maya world that got pushed away from the coastlines did not realize that they were sitting on top

of an on top of an endless quarry of valuable green stone that the Olmecs wanted. So probably the Olmecs are trading with these people. And just like Kawakon made the Aztecs filthy rich, the Olmex made the Maya in the center of the jungle filthy rich. So these people that were pushed away from the coastlines and forced to live in the center of the jungle, we're actually sitting on top of the jackpot and that's why the major origin the fertile crescent of the Maya world emerges from the center of the jungle in the least hospitable place that they could have possibly been living because and that's exactly why so it was the Olmex fueling the Maya and then the Maya emerge at a place called El Mirador in a two like evolution in a weird

fucked up way it's weird right yeah I've never seen the Maya archaeologists like acknowledge this or talk about this before um And what's crazy is this happens between 1,000 BC and 200 BC. And so the two pyramids at El Mirador are called Ladanta and El Tigray. And it's the two largest pyramids that the Maya will ever construct. They will never, ever build pyramids larger than the first two that they made. It'll never be... It's just like in Egypt.

The original pyramids are the biggest and baddest. It's the same thing in the Maya works. Because that's when the aliens were there. That's when the aliens were there. And so, yeah, it's fascinating, man. And the pyramid at El Mirador is so large to give you just an idea of... That one on the right side, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's large.

So that's the pyramid of El Mirador superimposed on top of the city of Tikal. So the pyramid of El Mirador is the size of the city of Tikal. Look at the trees in comparison to that. Oh, it's insane. It's absolutely insane. Here's an idea of how big the pyramid at El Mirador is, La Danta. Indel Tigray. I walked all the way up the pyramid. It's a daunting walk. I'm completely exhausted. The Guatemalan jungle just zaps your strength. You know from the Amazon. Like you just sweat like

crazy. You can't drink enough water to stay hydrated. It's just, it's just insane, you know. So we spent some time up there taking some photos. We eat some lunch on top of the pyramid, take some photos of the jungle. It's super cool. Like it's the only place I've ever been where I look off to every single horizon and it's nothing but jungle. It's the only place I've ever been. been like this. You're just eating Taco Bell on top of this pyramid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I was eating an uncrustable, actually. Two uncrustables and some Oreos and a Fanta. You have to have Fanta in Latin America. Fucking Magdalas is like Brandon bitch. Yeah. And so we walk back down the pyramid. I'm having a conversation with some of the people that are with me. And, you know,

we walk steps. There are these, on some of them, there are wooden staircases that are built up to help, because they don't want you walking on the stone. And I mean, keep in mind, this is the middle of the jungle that they built these wooden staircases on the side. It's crazy. And so we walk down, down, down, down, down, down, down. One level, walk across down, down, down, down, down, down. Another level walk across down, down, down, down, down. We get to the bottom of the pyramid. I'm walking along this path for like five minutes or so and having a conversation about El Mirador and how far out here we are. It's just like, it's just unbelievable. We're here in the middle of that there's another step down. So I had been walking on the pyramid for five minutes after I thought I was at the

bottom, walking forward on the platform. You almost toppled over. And then I reached the next descent down to the bottom of the pyramid. It's absolutely massive. And what they didn't realize until just within the last few decades or so is that when you actually get down to the real bottom of the pyramid, you can walk then for another mile to get to the pyramid across the way and they directly face each other. But that path that you're walking on is actually a platform that's raised up off the ground

and the entire city, including both of the pyramids, sits on top of a man-made platform in the middle of the jungle. Oh, it's insane, dude. It's just... Actually, if you were ever to come to a place, to a cool place,

like, you should come to Guatemala and you and I should just fly in a helicopter to a mirror door. Like, it's something that's... I don't do helicopters, but I'll definitely go there. I'll show you a video or something. Maybe I'll send you the video.

You can put it in. Yeah, that looks sick. It's one of those things where you're out there. And you're kind of like you were saying that when you're in the Amazon, it is bigger than you can comprehend. It's like a, it's one of the wonders of the world, right? Like El Mirador, Morgan Freeman, when he went, he thought that El Mirador should be added to one of the wonders of the world. Because when you're there walking around, that's God saying. It's God saying.

yeah when you're there walking around it is truly mind-blowing like you're looking at the size of it and you walk down the bottom platform and you think about this entire city is artificial they're not they're not using the natural terrain because the jungle is flat everything there is raised up off of the ground it's mind-blowing dude and you think about okay these guys started doing this in the middle of the jungle around 800 bc it's inconceasing It's completely inconceivable. Yeah. It's crazy.

And like you said, when you go out to these places, obviously I haven't been to Guatemala. Yeah. But I've been in the middle of the Amazon struggle. It's different, but similar kind of vibe. You're a speck in the middle of this... You are, man. ...varaciously growing on top of itself ecosystem. You're just like, with everything we have...

With everything we have now, you can't even get cops out there. or the army out there there there's no laws imagine it back then yeah there's nothing i mean it's like and the other thing that the other thing that's crazy is um i realized the distance so being there it's one of the only times you get to see the ancient world mostly untouched like some of that city is excavated but there is no maybe there's one or two structures in that entire city that's completely excavated because there's a camp out there but you have to get there by helicopter so there's like maybe you have to take a helicopter or you walk for three days to get there yeah i'll do to walk for three days that's fun that's fun to do and during that three day walk when you camp you're stopping at

other cities that are in the jungle so there's campsites set up at just these cities cities full-on cities in the middle of jungle you've got to walk basically from one horizon to the next every day and uh what i've realized when i was out there was that you can actually kind of predict the proximity. Like if you're looking for a lost city, they're all within, or they're all within the horizons radius of each other. Like if you're in one city, you can see another city. If you're standing on top of the pyramid, just scan the horizon and you'll see it, boop. And you keep going around, you'll see another, boop. And they're all a horizons distance away from each other. Wow. That has to be strategic. It has to be like, so you can do smoke signals or you can do fires

military bases and you can you can you can yeah you can send signals to each other so it has to be this interconnected web of cities actually in the Inca world I was surprised to find when I was there last month it's exactly the same you can find this is so cool okay so Machu Picchu uh I mean you've seen Machu Picchu it's sitting up on top of this spine of this mountain side and flew over that yeah you what yeah I had to fly from when I felt was but when I was flying to see Paul inland I flew over

those mountains and everything so I've been there but yeah yeah yeah yeah seen it it's amazing dude it's just one of those places you got to go to and so I'm sitting there and I'm talking to this there's a young archaeologist who's maybe like my age

or so and I was asking him I was like I was like okay so on these other mountain sides that are nearest because you know it's this steep mountain and then the other mountains come up It's just like this out in the eddies. It's crazy with rivers running through it. And I say, okay, on this mountain next to us, is there anything over there?

Have they ever found any ruins over there? They're like, oh, yeah, yeah. There's some vestiges over there. And I was like, vestiges. What do you mean? And he was like, I don't know. They're like forts, like lookout points. And then I was like,

do you think that they were sending fire signals back and forth, like throughout the mountains? Like, do you think that they could bounce fire signals to try to get messages across? And the guy was like, the guy was like, well, I mean, they found single buildings on mountain sides before. And I was like, I was like, so theoretically, if you were to go looking through the jungles that's up on top of these mountains, which is like extremely treacherous, there's a 50% chance you would die trying to go do this. And I was like, I was like, but do you think that they had vestiges on the mountainsides where if something's happening at Machu Picchu and you needed Kusco to find out rather than having a sprinter or somebody, you know, walking us in a me. message could you just

like you could bounce a signal through through the mountains to get there and then the guy was like well maybe you could I started looking into it and this was something

that Hiram Bingham thought as well he was finding little things and so you're like having a doctor house moment over here where he like looks up like

I got it oh it's crazy and so I'm seeing a similarity here between the Inca sending fire signals and then they must always have things

within a certain proximity of each other to be able to communicate instantly. I mean, like, that's like communicating at lights. That's like communicating at cell phone speed compared to walking, you know, me sending a letter to you. And so, yeah, there's got to be different. When I was at El Mirador, that's where the idea happened,

that there must be a pattern of where the cities are built. And you could probably create a web and estimate the proximity. Like, wherever you're at, if you want to try to find a city, you could go on a map and draw out. the horizon from one single area and if you were going to go look for a city you go roughly to that horizon and follow in a circular path around you just orbit around one city and just keep following that horizon of your central city and you'll probably come across something that that would be that's insane i just spilled the sauce for people look at the lost cities but that's actually insane

yeah so they could come up with stuff like this wild man what you know i thought about that a lot like you know they're really into sacred geometry and they understand like uh gosh dang what's the ratio was it like uh uh yeah the fibinacci sequence and everything and the ratio like one point 1.018 or what something like that yes they the maya figured this out in their own unique way by before the vinci so this is the maya doing it yeah oh yeah yeah yeah there were lots of cultures that figure this out because this is this is the language that permeates reality like even if even if all of humanity died to, you know, the next, you know, COVID 3.0 or something, and there was just the Amazonians left, you know, the uncontacted tribes. Those, the descendants of those people

would eventually figure out the Fibonacci sequence. It's, it's just one of these things that permeates reality. Everyone can discover it if you poke at reality long, like if you stare into the abyss enough, it'll, you know, it'll, you'll figure out the code to the universe. So the Maya did it as well. And the thing I've thought about is, man, there must have been people who were just as intelligent, if not vastly more intelligent than Einstein himself. You know, in the ancient Maya realm who sit around and thought about their natural world on a level and a certain depth that just, I mean, okay, think about this. If your whole purpose was to sit out in a garden and think about the world around you. everyone else just took care of you. You'd come up with a lot of shit. You'd be, um, the insights you

would have would be totally insane. Like, uh, I heard somebody talk about this the other day. I think this is something that's kind of going viral and like self-help Instagram. And this guy was like, this guy was like, if you want any solution to your problem, you've probably seen this. He said, if you want any solution to your problem, the secret is to go sit in a room by yourself in peace and quiet and do nothing for 30 minutes. Also the hardest thing for a man to do. Exactly. He was like, He was like, he's like, just do that. Well, my mind, you know, being an ancient historian is I think ancient people were a lot more prone to that. Just thinking, you know.

Perfect example is, man, growing up in East Texas, dude, we had to rake leaves so much. Oh, I feel your pain there. Yes. I had to grow up doing that. Unbelievable, dude. Like, unbelievable. I was raking. And we had seven acres, man.

And my dad would just like, my dad would just, I would spend. I would spend like 24 hours or, you know, at least 10 hours a day on my Saturday and Sunday raking leaves. And I hated every second of it. And to help pass the time... Put on the tarp and take it back somewhere. Oh, it's horrible. And to pass the time, I would put my headphones in and like listen to music or, you know, listen to like YouTube videos on my phone or something. And that helped me pass the time.

Ancient people did not have that luxury. They're sitting there thinking. They're white knuckling it. and thinking. So think about how much more they just thought and existed in their world than we do. We kind of just ignore our world. There's something to be said for that, though, Luke. Yeah. We have all these distractions now in our world. Every little thing is one click away. We, you know, you talk to anyone. They're like, oh, I'm so busy. I say it. You say it, right? But a lot of the business, especially not to call out people who don't have their own business, but, you know, especially when you're

working for something else right that's not yours like a lot of it has to do with the distractions to get you away from the annoying toil sometimes of a job that you don't like if you have a job like that and then you have people like we have a lot of fans of the show who love their job and you know they're out they're out building things right like i have a lot of fans who are like carpenters and stuff like that and so you know they get lost and building something for 12 hours but at least they have a ride along right they have this show and some other shows to kind to entertain them along the way. But that in and of itself is at least curating content for you to think about. These people, none of that was even in their lexicon as an option. They didn't have

the temptation of saying, you know what, I think I'm just going to listen to music for 12 hours today. Or I think I'm just going to go enjoy this thing to kind of get that dopamine hit while I'm doing it. They had to create their dopamine hit to your point of like, all right, what is happening around me? Because by the way, I can't even forget Google. I can't even take out a textbook and figure this shit out. We haven't written any of this stuff down. I have to look at it and understand. And it reminds me of like Paul's team down in the Amazon, JJ and all those guys.

And obviously, they have tech. They're connected to the real world. But they grew up in the jungle. Those motherfuckers can hear a bird from three miles away and not only know what kind of bird it is and how high altitude it is at that time, they know what it's saying and they can talk back to it. I watched them do it. That sounds unbelievable. But like, I believe it.

Oh, it's incredible. And it's because they, like, that's, they lived in it. Yeah. They were among it. They, they weren't distracted by other things. Like, trying to explain to JJ, who's like a literal genius, who Elon Musk was,

it was fucking hilarious. It was absolutely hilarious because there's no concept of that. And it's like, he knows what Starlink is because he uses that. Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, he's like, wow, thanks Elon Musk, if that's who it was, who made it. like in his world it's just yeah yeah he's out there with nature and so connected and you feel like when you talk with him about any of this stuff you feel like you're talking to a sense say and you are yeah i mean he's so i'm talking about pole's guy jj who i mentioned but like you know j j j's the

co-founder of the whole organization down there with paul and is unbelievable but like he's on another level and and also not for nothing whatever that clarity is that he has that he's developed from his life of really being in touch with everything around him makes him exude a level of charisma that i have never been around natural quiet unassuming charisma that strikes your soul that's how i would describe it like he's next level it's a different kind of human you're interacting with yeah it's like a in a way you are a European meeting a Native American in a certain way I don't know is he is he a native guy I mean he must be yeah so so you're meeting you're having a similar experience right where they have these they have these admirable traits about them that

come about through a much more holistic lifestyle you know just utterly completely alternate to our reality. Have you ever noticed, this is something I think about a lot, is like, my wife and I will talk about how smart our dog is. Like, he just... What kind of dog you have? Texas Kerr, Blackmouth Kerr.

The same... So in the movie, Old Yeller, they don't actually use a blackmouth cur, but the actual book is written about the kind of dog that we have. It's like all-American, bred by Native Americans, pre-colonial dog.

really really smart dog and uh just yeah so um but we always talk about like how well he can read body language and he's aware of every little sound outside of our house he's aware of things that like i don't perceive you know what i mean and that's because he doesn't have a phone he doesn't watch tv he doesn't have anything distracting him he lives in his reality and he's just tuned into it and we're so desensitized and tuned out of our reality we would be just as aware if not if not 10 times more aware than than a dog might be you know we're just obviously vastly more intelligent but we're able to like turn off parts of our brains as well and and uh you can just imagine like uncontacted tribes to live in the amazon or you know like this guy you're talking about he's just perceptive of things

that that's correct none of us are perceptive of it i mean imagine how much of your brain power is taken up by thinking about the intricacies of like, you know, the YouTube world and this modern media, this modern media industry that we're kind of climbing our way up through and you have to be attuned to it and you have to kind of be aware of what's going on and knowing the things to say and the things you shouldn't say and the things you just stay away from. It's like, well, that's just akin to surviving in the Amazon, but our Amazon is this thing. That's right. But it's also kind of dystopian because this isn't what our biology was meant to be interacting with these fluorescent lights and yeah yeah it doesn't make any

sense but i see i see how easily your body would just just like it adapts to our modern day environment how it would adapt to that kind of environment being born in it like jj's been there his whole life he's 50 years old right i was there for the better part of two weeks and one of the things i did i never took my phone out this was may 2024 it was the first time and over four years of doing it at the time that I took any time off and I was like I'm doing this the right way there's no phone coming out I'm just going to live out there and it's a very microscopic example compared to a guy who lived 50 years out there obviously it's a blink of a moment in time but my sensory awareness by the end of that trip was turned up just a little bit you yeah not not not

you know it wasn't this like enlightening like unbelievable like oh my god I could feel everything or not like that but just a little bit where you're you've been removed for just a long enough time from real society that you get a little bit more in touch with just nature and mother nature herself and it was a it was a beautiful thing and that's why i don't care if it's the amazon or whatever there's there's some amazing places around this world obviously most of which i haven't been to but you know if you can get out and go off the grid a little bit for a couple weeks and do something like that, I can't recommend that enough. Because it's, especially in our click, click, click, click world, it's, it's very useful. Yeah. The other thing I

think is euphoric is, you know, so it's been, it's been over a year since I was in a situation similar to that where I'm really out there in the jungle. I mean, like, I've been out to Machu Picchu, well, I mean, I was at El Nirador, but I'm talking about for an extended period of time, days on end, you know. When I went out-outel Amirador, it was a full day, but I came back and I slept in a hotel that night. And because I study Mesoamerica, there's not a whole lot of reason. It's not like South America where you can, you need to be out in the jungle for multiple days at a time because it's so remote. In Mesoamerica, you can kind of dip your toe in and come right back out. There's really no reason to camp out in the wilderness, right? And so it's mostly

day excursions. But a little over a year ago, I did an expedition. and Campeche, and man, we were out for days. Campesche? Campeche, it's a state in Mexico. Okay. And we were out in the Campeche jungles, and we were sleeping in tents on this little Maya, this local Maya camp site.

And, man, I can't, I mean, I know you know. It is so euphoric. It's like a religious experience. And also, I think the added element of the danger of being out there is also especially euphoric. like you're almost, you're, it's like a trade-off. It's a thrill. Yeah, it's a thrill.

And it's a thrill and it's euphoric and it makes you feel very much alive in a way that you're not usually, I think it's like what video games try to emulate, you know? Video games try to simulate stakes and that's why people get addicted to it. And, you know, all it's doing is simulating a bunch of dudes getting together and going off in the jungle and hunting down an animal and killing it. And it's like, that's a dangerous thing to do. There's lots of elements, things that could kill you. But if you can achieve that, do it successfully with your buddies, it's completely euphoric. And it's like, dude, how unhealthy is it that we don't have that anymore?

Well, we're evolutionarily wired to be drawn to things like that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like you're on guard and you're also about that shit. You know what I mean? Not to overstate it and be like the dude that just wants to run you and be hard. i'm saying like it's a cool experience knowing yeah that there's the unknown little traps of nature out there that you know respectfully we ain't getting here in new york yeah yeah yeah it's really cool but yo man i got to get you to your flight and since it's gonna be popping out

here this is a pleasure doing this is pleasure doing it's always great we've done five of these we did 175 and 176 and i think we did 271 and 272 together but you know your your knowledge is is incredible It gets better every time. So I love doing these, and we will do it again soon, my man. Yes, sir, we will. Thank you. And we'll have your links down below to your YouTube. Everyone go check that out and subscribe.

Everyone go follow you on Instagram as well. We'll have that link. And, you know, you get daily content just like this. And you get weekly content on YouTube with full video breakdowns by the man in front of us. So enjoy everybody. Cool. All right, bro. 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.