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

Summary

Camp Gagnon Podcast Summary
Episode Title: Lost Cities of Gold: What's REALLY Hidden in Mesoamerica | Luke Caverns
Host: Mark Gagnon
Guest: Luke Caverns (Anthropologist & Archaeologist)
Release Date: October 7, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this in-depth and fast-paced conversation, Mark Gagnon welcomes field anthropologist and archaeologist Luke Caverns to provide a sweeping history of Central and South America's ancient civilizations. The episode explores the origins, cultural intricacies, interconnections, and dramatic collapses of the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec worlds, as well as their relationship to the legendary Inca of South America. Both host and guest challenge commonly held western narratives, offering fresh perspectives on lost cities, priestly politics, myths of gold, and the enduring mysteries still hidden beneath the jungles and rivers of the Americas.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Deep Origins: Olmecs and the Birth of Mesoamerican Civilization

[02:08–10:05]

• Geographic Scope: Luke emphasizes his specialization is "below the Rio Grande," focusing on Mesoamerica, which extends as far north as northern Mexico and maybe into New Mexico/Arizona.
• Olmec Civilization (c. 1800–300 BCE):
  • The Olmecs, called the "rubber people" (from Nahuatl), are the earliest major civilization in Mesoamerica, thriving in the fertile Coatzacoalcos river valley of Veracruz.
  • Their wealth derived from exporting basalt, maize (corn), fish, and, crucially, rubber (the world's first rubber ball games originate here).
  • The iconic giant stone heads are exact portraiture of elites: kings, generals, gods—often merged in one person.
  • Memorable Moment: "The Olmecs are so old that I don’t even know if the Aztecs knew they ever existed." – Mark [05:54]
  • Olmec art includes not just stone heads, but abundant images of "were-jaguars”—half-human, half-jaguar, often representing a shamanic priestly caste, possibly originating from reverence for genetic deformities.

2. Deformity, Divinity, and the Priestly Class

[11:29–21:05]

• Reverence for Deformity:
  • Unlike Greeks (who discarded "imperfect" children), Olmecs and their successors revered those with visible deformities (e.g., cleft lips, Down syndrome), seeing them as divine or semi-divine.
  • Olmec statuary frequently depicts babies with features resembling real genetic disorders (ectodermal dysplasia with fangs and cleft lips), perhaps indicating a sacred shamanic lineage.
  • Quote: "Mesoamericans revered people with deformities and that it began with the Olmecs. It’s the opposite of the Greek view." – Mark [11:35]
  • The "were-jaguars" might reflect this, blending natural, supernatural, and social status.
• Priestly vs. Kingly Power:
  • The king is never depicted as a were-jaguar. Olmec monuments reveal a pattern: priestly monuments deface kingly heads, perhaps evidence of deep-rooted feuds (paralleling Egypt).

3. Cultural and Political Transitions: From Olmecs to Maya

[42:27–56:59]

• Maya Civilization’s Emergence:
  • Maya origins traced to the remote jungle city El Mirador (Guatemala), whose explosive growth was fueled by jade and serpentine quarries—themselves "discovered" through Olmec trade expeditions in search of precious resources.
  • Olmec wealth, not lineage, fertilized Maya civilization; culturally, the Maya are not Olmec heirs.
  • El Mirador's pyramids—the largest Maya ever built—sit on vast man-made platforms to lift them above the snake/flood/ant-ridden jungle floor.
  • Quote: “The Olmecs inseminated wealth inside the Maya world in the middle of the jungle.” – Luke [49:39]

4. Maya: From Priests to Kings to Collapse

[57:01–69:16]

• Priestly Astronomers to Dynastic Kings:
  • Early Maya civilization centered on sacred astronomers—hereditary priestly scholars considered semi-royal for their role in timing crops and interpreting the heavens.
  • Over centuries, power centralized into kingship, culminating in the Classic Period (c. 200–900 AD). Kings absorbed religious power, mirrored in their monumental art.
  • "Star Wars": Fierce dynastic warfare (named for their connection to celestial omens) impoverished and destabilized Maya society. The Star Wars in Star Wars (the movie) draw inspiration from Maya history (e.g., Yavin IV based on Tikal’s ruins) [01:08 & 62:10].
  • Environmental Collapse: Deforestation, overuse of stucco, and mercury poisoning led to catastrophic crop/freshwater failures (e.g., at Tikal, Copán).
  • Volcanic Disaster: The great volcano of c. 850 AD covered Palenque and other cities in ash, acting as an omen of collapse.
• Social Revolution:
  • At the period's end, art depicts rulers among commoners—possibly reflecting a push to abandon failed kingship in favor of older, priest-centered models.
  • Mass migration north to the Yucatan ensues, kings are "killed off," and the Postclassic Maya revert to God-centric rather than king-centric rule, just before Spanish arrival.

5. The Aztec Ascendancy: Mercenaries to Empire

[73:38–88:12]

• Origins:
  • The Aztecs were a nomadic, previously exiled group, possibly from the present-day U.S. Southwest, who were forced south and settled as marginalized mercenaries on a barren islet in Lake Texcoco (Tenochtitlan).
• The Founding Myth:
  • Their migration was guided by sacred visions: “You will know your land when you see an eagle grabbing a serpent.” This image endures as the Mexican national symbol.
  • Through political cunning and violence (including the infamous “flaying of the princess” ambush), they seized power over the valley and constructed a spectacular lake city.
  • Quote: “They put them in a castle in a moat... and the Aztecs took over everything.” – Mark [76:33]
• Society:
  • Despite their reputation for brutality (e.g., mass human sacrifices of war captives), the Aztecs maintained poetry gardens, zoos, hygiene, and even an archaeology museum.
  • Contrast: Maya mostly sacrificed their own, rarely, and with ceremonial care; Aztecs sacrificed outsiders en masse.
• Contact & Cataclysm:
  • The arrival of Cortés was initially met with fascination by Emperor Moctezuma. Despite one of history’s most improbable conquests, the Spanish victory ultimately turned on epidemics rather than sheer military might.

6. The Inca: Empire by Abundance and Diplomacy

[104:52–112:45]

• Incan Distinctiveness:
  • The Inca are characterized as notably peaceful and efficient, expanding by offering client kings food, protection, and privilege ("an offer you can't refuse"), rather than conquest.
  • Their true strength lay in the abundance produced by the Sacred Valley; violence was relatively rare and unnecessary.
  • Empathy as Administration: Soldiers could leave the front lines if family needed them for harvest.
• The Spanish Arrive:
  • Pathogen waves, not armies, devastated the empire ahead of the Spaniards. When Pizarro finally reached Cusco, the Inca emperor was dying of smallpox brought overland from the Caribbean.
  • Inca response was marked by fatalism and omens rather than resistance.

7. Lost Cities of Gold & The Legacy of Disease

[112:45–124:48]

• The True Fate of the "Lost Cities":
  • Early explorers (like Orellana) described vast cities, pyramids, and highways in the Amazon—accounts long dismissed as myth until lidar proved their existence in recent years.
  • Epidemics ravaged Amazonian civilizations prior to direct European contact. Jungle overgrowth swiftly erased cities from subsequent view.
  • Quote: "They estimate the population of the Amazon went from 20 million to zero over the course of a few decades." – Mark [115:24]
  • Legends like El Dorado were not fabrications; gold-laden mummies and artifacts now recovered from these "lost" centers confirm enormous wealth and trade linkages.
  • Tomb 7 at Monte Alban (Oaxaca), untouched and filled with South American gold, is evidence of an ancient interconnected trans-continental exchange.

8. The Future of Discovery and Historical Understanding

[128:38–138:35]

• Transformation of Knowledge:
  • New lidar technology is revolutionizing the search for hidden cities—soon, private individuals will be able to scan whole landscapes, likely exposing thousands of unknown ancient mounds and urban centers.
  • The scope of lost civilizations across both North and South America is profoundly underestimated.
  • Quote: "If we could pull back the canopy of the Amazon and see what's actually under there, it's the size of the United States, bro." – Mark [133:06]
• Personal Projects:
  • Luke shares stories of his own recent discoveries (including Florida mound cities possibly visited by Ponce de Leon) and hints at new expeditions with Mark.
• Philosophy of History:
  • The episode closes on a shared awe at how real, local history—much more recent and accessible than Atlantis-mania—offers tangible mysteries and treasures yet to be understood.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Olmec Heads:
  “The Olmecs are so old that I don’t even know if the Aztecs knew they ever existed. It’s fascinating.”
  – Mark Gagnon [05:54]

• On Cultural Difference:
  “Mesoamericans revered people with deformities and that it began with the Olmecs. It’s the opposite of the Greek view.”
  – Mark Gagnon [11:35]

• On the Maya:
  "The Olmecs inseminated wealth inside the Maya world in the middle of the jungle.”
  – Luke Caverns [49:39]

• On Star Wars & Maya Influence:
  “These wars are called the Star Wars. And this is where the name of Star Wars actually comes from.”
  – Mark Gagnon [01:08, 62:10]

• On Empires and Loss:
  "They estimate the population of the Amazon went from 20 million to zero over the course of a few decades."
  – Mark Gagnon [115:24]

• On Ancient Interconnectedness:
  "These weren't just isolated tribes... Whoa. This is all one vast interconnected world. These weren’t just isolated tribes."
  – Mark Gagnon [125:09]

• On the Future of Discovery:
  "If we could pull back the canopy of the Amazon and see what's actually under there, it's the size of the United States, bro."
  – Mark Gagnon [133:06]

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Timestamps: Important Segments

• [02:08] – Defining Mesoamerica, Olmec rise and fall
• [11:29] – Deformity, divinity, and beginnings of priestly power
• [26:00] – Priestly vs. kingly class; evidence from art and monuments
• [42:27] – Maya emergence, Olmec-Maya connections, El Mirador discussed
• [49:39] – Maya's economic foundation and city-building
• [57:01–62:55] – Maya's shift from priests to dynastic kings and "Star Wars"
• [69:16–70:22] – Collapse of the Classic Maya; migration and transition
• [73:38] – The origins and meteoric rise of the Aztec Empire
• [84:35] – Symbolism: Eagles, serpents, and Mexico’s flag
• [88:10–90:17] – Spanish conquest, Moctezuma, and the devastation of disease
• [104:52] – The Inca: empire by abundance, diplomacy, and fate
• [112:45] – Amazonian cities, lidar, and real lost civilizations
• [125:09] – Evidence of transcontinental trade and sacredness of gold
• [133:06] – The true scale of unknown sites and potential discoveries
• [137:56] – Luke’s Florida mound finds and upcoming expeditions

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a whirlwind tour through Mesoamerican and Andean history, uncovering how myth, violence, environment, and spirituality shaped these civilizations. Luke Caverns and Mark Gagnon dismantle the “lost city” clichés, revealing instead a tapestry of real, grounded mysteries—many of which will be solved not by fantasy, but by the relentless advance of field science and indigenous knowledge.

For anyone fascinated by ancient history, lost cities, or the hidden richness of the Americas, this episode is essential, thought-provoking listening.

Transcript

[Mark Gagnon]

High priest of the Aztecs goes and takes this deterra mushrooms and he gets this prophecy from the God to go offer the proposal of a dynastic marriage to the Cal princess. So they have this huge marriage ceremony thing and then the priest goes to back to the temple, takes the deter again and asks Cuitopoli, what's your next command? And he says, kill the princess and fillet her and have the prince put her skin on and be dancing in a parade when the Cat King arrives. The Cat King sees his daughter's skin being worn by the prince that he just married her to. And they raid the city of Cal and conquer it all at once.

[Luke Caverns]

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

[Mark Gagnon]

People don't realize this Star Wars, a lot of the premises of it are just based on Mesoamerica. Kings bring about a lot of war and because they're all astronomers, these wars are called the Star Wars.

[Luke Caverns]

In one episode, in just a few hours, Luke covers everything in brief and gives me an entire abridged history of the entire region. I mean, to be honest with you, it's one of my favorite episodes I've done lately. So please enjoy it as much as I had it. Without further ado, sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. If we're going to map a similar thing to I guess the Maya and the Aztecs, broadly speaking, is there a way to sort of understand that timeline and the history of how these different cultures sort of intersect and maybe even throwing the Inca in there? Because I think people like me, we kind of, in my mind I'm like, yeah, it's all sort of the same thing around the same time. Different people, different.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't be more wrong though.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I can imagine.

[Mark Gagnon]

So we should. Well, with, with my expertise, my expertise really comes in below the Rio Grande, so below Texas. I'm just now kind of, I would say North America like we were talking about before. And I said North America is just not talked about enough because it's, it's like a, it's like a fine Wine or a bitter coffee? Like a. Like. Think about like a bitter Mexican coffee. How long you got to drink coffee before you develop taste for that? It's. North America is very difficult to understand. It's an extremely complicated continent with so many civilizations that are constantly changing and at war with each other. I'm just now kind of developed the expertise to be able to dive into North America and understand it. So. So the history I'm going to give is going to be below the Rio Grande. We start with the Olmecs. They seem to appear sometime around 1800 B.C. now, we know. We know that pre Columbian cultures in Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica. Let's. Let's define that. Mesoamerica might extend all the way up to New Mexico. So that's north of the Rio Grande. But it's. I think the northernmost place is a place called Pakime, which is either Arizona or New Mexico. Could we look that up, Christos? Yeah. Where is you? May. May, look up. Where is Pime? You could just try to spell it. You probably figure it out.

[Luke Caverns]

He'll Google anything for you because he's so buttered up that you talk nicely about the Greeks. I'll be honest.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. Bakim, I don't know. Maybe you'll find it. Is it. Does it say it's in Mexico? It might actually be in Mexico. I think it's northernmost Mexico. I. For some reason, I was thinking it was New Mexico. Anyways, there's something very interesting there. We're like halfway through the city. On the northern part of the city, it's something that's iconically like Pueblo ancestry. And on the bottom half, there's a Mesoamerican ball court. And there's a river that runs through the middle of the city. And it's like it draws that river, like, draws the line between Mesoamerica and North America. It's very interesting. Wow. So Mesoamerica begins civilization itself. There were people there for like 20,000 years plus. But civilization itself seems to begin at place called San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan in Veracruz, Mexico. It's an Olmec city, and it's this plateau that sits up above this river around it. And there are these. There are these. It's like an oasis. I mean, I was there in December, and the group that I was with, we were looking down at the river and I was like, it just clicked. And I was. Because this is one of the fertile crescents of the world, that it's the most overlooked fertile crescent. And I'm Looking down at it and it's like these palm trees and it's all so green and lush. And I real. And I realized if you took a picture of this and showed it to me, I would think that it's Egypt. It's that similar. Is that similar? It's so similar. Then there's a lot of similarities between the Olmecs and the Egyptians. We don't have to get into that. But so the Olmecs essentially sprout along this huge river called the Coetzkaukos. Very fertile river. And they're. Some of their main exports are basalt and, and corn or maize. And they're also fishing a lot. So they're selling fish. They're just super rich. And they're, they're the first guys that kind of sprout out of Mesoamerica. They're. They're the guys that are making the huge heads, the giant Olmec heads. Some. There's a head that's so big you couldn't fit it in this tent. Actually, several of the heads. You couldn't fit it. Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

Let's get a, let's get a picture of these heads because they're fascinating looking and I think they're also very iconic in terms of how people sort of imagine like Mesoamerican art. But I didn't realize that these were so old.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. These, these sprout out at the very beginning. I'll tell you, man, the Olmecs are so old that I don't even know if the Aztecs knew that the Olmecs ever existed. It's fascinating. That's crazy, right?

[Luke Caverns]

And, and it's interesting. What, do we have an idea of what they look like based off these heads?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah. These are, these are exact portraits of these people, I would guess likely like.

[Luke Caverns]

High ranking kings, generals or gods or all the above.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right, There you go. There you go. You're thinking like a Mesoamerican.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

There's there in, in, in Mesoamerica all of our little categories that we love. Why do we like categories? Because the Greeks are all about figuring out the world, trying to put everything in its boxes. It's how we're, it's how we're wired. Right. These guys are not that way. It's all the same. So like a God is an important figure, is a. Or I'm sorry, a king is an important figure and is a God at the same time. There's also one added element. My thought. Oh, I should say one of the main Olmec exports is rubber, this land of the rubber trees. The word Olmec is a Nahuatl word. Nahuatl is the Aztec language. So 3,000 years after the Olmec exists, the Spanish chroniclers are asking information about Mexico and the name that they were told of the people that live in the land where the Olmec heads were found. In the 1860s, the Aztecs called those people Olmecs, but that doesn't mean that they were calling the ancient civilization of the Olmecs just the same people that lived in that area in 1520 that later, 300 years later when the Olmec head was found. Does that make sense? Yeah, of course. So, but the word Olmec means rubber people or people from the land of rubber. So it's where the Mesoamerican ball was created. It's where the, it's where the first Mesoamerican ball courts come from. So what we think is that the helmets that they're wearing is a ball game helmet. And so it's the king himself showing everyone that he is a great ball player and is also a God. It's all three of them all wrapped up together. So it's like, it's like, it's like the, the Roman emperor Commodus, what was the one thing that he did to show off to everybod fought in the coliseum? This is exactly the same thing. Wow. Yeah, that is fascinating. Yeah, it's super cool. So this is happening from 1800 B.C. all the way down to 300 B.C. is the rise and then the fall of the Olmecs.

[Luke Caverns]

That's a, that's a good run.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's a really good run. Now we don't really understand why the Olmecs fell, but they have three different capitals, they have a bunch of different cities, but there's three, like principal large hubs. San Lorenzo, Tenoche, Titlan, La Venta, and then Tres Zapotes. And I've been to all three really cool sites, amazing museums full of all kinds of statues that like, if I were to take you on an Olmec tour, by the end, believe it or not, by the end of that Olmec tour, you would no longer, when I was talking about the Olmecs, you would no longer think of the heads, you would think of all the other artifacts that you had seen. Because there's a different type of imagery in the Olmec world that's just as important to these heads. And it's, it's this were jaguar, this half human Jaguar, shaman being. It's everywhere. There's way more were jaguars than there are Olmec heads. Hundreds more. Thousands more. But it's just the heads are so iconic. So Olmec civilization rises and falls. Oh, do that fourth one. Oh, it looks like a Picasso. Dude, you got to get that for the tent.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, man, that would be perfect in here. I think I got one jaguar.

[Mark Gagnon]

Can you say that? I want to see if I can. I don't know if it's real, but I might. I might try to buy that or something.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's sick. I mean.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, I got. I think that's a jaguar behind you.

[Mark Gagnon]

I think maybe it might be. Or a wolf.

[Luke Caverns]

Who knows?

[Mark Gagnon]

Some kind of creature.

[Luke Caverns]

I got to get a blessed. That's all I know.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is cool.

[Luke Caverns]

Anyway, I don't want to distract. So these things are all over, and they're. They're found in the same place as the Olmec heads.

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, I don't know about this guy, but I just think it's cool. Okay, Christos, middle, middle row, all the way to the right. There we go. That's the iconic were jaguar. That's a person. Okay. He's got jaguar eyes, and he's got these downturned, snarling lips. And you can't see it here because it's so dark on the inside of his lips, there'd be two fangs sticking out. Sticking out. If probably. If you were to click, see more images and see stuff that's similar to this, we'd find one that has. That has fangs. Oh, yeah, yeah. The one straight below it. So that one or the next one or even the next one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. Yep. That one right there. There we go. That's a. Were jaguar. So that's a. So that's a person. He's got. He's got these furrowed jaguar brows. His eyes are now, like, rectangular, like cat eyes sort of. Or they're becoming sort of oval at cat eyes. And he's got these two fangs. Man, there's so much that we could go into with the. With the. Were jaguars. Like, this is. I don't know if I call it my area of expertise, because I don't know if there's so much out there that you can be an expert on this. It's just a huge mystery because this is really old. Really, really, really ancient. Yeah, yeah. Like. Like, again, I should say, I don't think that the Aztecs knew anything about this. That's how. That's how ancient it is. Maybe they did.

[Luke Caverns]

We know it's half human, half jaguar.

[Mark Gagnon]

Half human, half jaguar.

[Luke Caverns]

It's not fully a jaguar. You can see that there are human elements here.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so. Okay, so there's something really interesting here that's worth diving into. So I think that ancient Mesoamericans revered people and saw them as divine people who had deformities. There were things wrong with them. It's the exact opposite of the Greek view. Right. Like, if there's anything wrong with somebody.

[Luke Caverns]

Leave them on a hill somewhere.

[Mark Gagnon]

Leave them on a hill somewhere. I think that Mesoamericans revered people with deformities and that it began with the Olmecs. I should give the first account that we know of, of this happening is when the Spaniards show up at Moctezuma's temple in Tenochtitlan. The Aztec emperor that Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi is based on Moctezuma's temple. Because the Spaniards show up and there was all these weird creature looking people. Like they didn't even know if they were actually people. It's how deformed and odd these people were. But they were being taken care of and, like, looked after. So imagine maybe people with down syndrome, hunchbacks, all kinds of deformities, some type of enlarged skull. Yeah. Like, was the one like elephant.

[Luke Caverns]

Elephantitis.

[Mark Gagnon]

Elephantitis. Like all kinds of crazy stuff. They were being cared for. So we think of the Aztecs as super, super vicious. Sacrificing 80,000 people a day, ripping their skin off, putting their body inside the skin of their captives. Or, I'm sorry, putting. Yeah, yeah, like climbing into the skin of their captives and running around and parading and doing all, you know, this vicious stuff that terrified the Spaniards, all that was actually happening. But they were also taking care of people with special needs and revering them. Right. It's fascinating. They would also have people. They also had gardens with, like, all the most exotic flowers and birds and everything. And people would stand in the gardens and read poetry. There's a whole side to the Aztec world that gets overlooked that's like, full of beauty and wonder and, like, almost like it's Narnia, you know? So. So I think that this tradition of taking care of people with deformities began in the Olmec world and then ended in the Aztec world. Why do I think it began in the Olmec world? Because in the Olmec world. Christos, could we look up Olmec babies? They're weird babies, man. These are not just normal babies. I think that these are special needs babies with, like, down syndrome or something like that. You can click on. You can click on any of them, and you can look at them, and they'll have little cleft lips, and they kind of have. They have features where you can tell that I've seen thousands of them. And you. They have features where you can tell, oh, okay. I've kind of. I've seen what a Down syndrome or special needs baby looks like. This is what these are. And you never see images of fully grown people that look quite like this because we have other statues of fully grown that are either out of terracotta or sometimes these are like serpentine stones of fully grown people that look nothing like this. They don't share the same similarities. And so when I was there, when I was taking people on the. On the few Olmec expeditions I've done, and we've talked a lot about this, what I think that these babies are. I'm trying to think. There's so many examples here. I'm trying to think of, like, a way I can kind of put all this together like a painting. But. Oh, yeah. What I think it is is that these babies probably only lived for a short period of time. And that's why they have statues made after them, because it's like honoring this baby, this child that lived for a certain period of time. And so I think that they, you know, they give them some kind of. Almost like they're deifying them or immortalizing them. And then something else that happens is there are these little serpentine, sometimes redstone statues that are made from people with elongated skulls and that have these downturn, cleft like lips that'll have two fangs coming out. And when I found this, it was what made this click for these babies. What this is my wife being a dentist. This is ectodermal dysplasia. Cleft lips with two little fanged teeth that come down in the front is an actual deformity that some children are born with. And as of the 1970s, it just doesn't exist anymore. It was disproportionately common among native children in Veracruz all the way up to the 1970s. So in ancient times, there were children probably being born with cleft jaguar lips like we're seeing in these depictions, with two little fangs. And there's also no learning disability. They're completely cogent. Normal, Right? They're completely normal, but they have these two little things and a cleft lip. Could we look up ectodermal yeah, just only look up ectodermal dysplasia.

[Luke Caverns]

So this image here would be the kind of like the cleft lip maybe that you're talking about?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes. I don't. I honestly don't know if. If that's Olmec. Okay, so click on the first kid. So he. This isn't. This is probably an Indian kid, but he has no learning disability. He just has those two fangs. And so this is something, you know, deformity that people all around the world can be born with. But it's. But it's. It was disproportionate in Veracruz. Well, why was that? Was that. Was that. This is just my idea. Is that a genetic predisposition that they have or the Olmec engineering people to be born more and more like this? Because in the Olmec world. Okay, Christos, if we could. Thank you. If we could look up. If we could look up Olmec Alter 5. Perfect. Here we go. So this is a Were jaguar shaman man with an elongated skull coming out of a cave carrying a baby, who also has this Were jaguar cleft lip. So my guess is the Olmec heads, we never see duplicates of the Olmec heads. What I think there is. There's a king class and there's a priestly class. The king. There's only one guy. The king is never a Were jaguar. He's never, ever depicted as a Were jaguar. This whole shamanic class, there must have been at least dozens of these people alive all at once. And we. We see them sometimes as fully grown adults. You see how his mouth is kind of downturned. That the grown man is. And then the baby, you can sort of see it. But when you're there in person, it's much more clear. So he's emerging from a cave out in Guerrero, Mexico. There are these Olmec caves that we found that have these, like, cave art paintings in them. It's hard to go study it because it's a very. It's like the most dangerous part of Mexico. So I've never been there. But what my thought is is that these images here of these babies being brought out of these caves is. I think that either the babies were born in the caves and that this depiction of it in stone is like the immortalizing of this Were jaguar's like, call to his sacred, divine power. Right. Like man. There's so much here. Okay. Another thing I should highlight is that it's a very common phenomenon where indigenous people who take in. Who take Part in ayahuasca ceremonies or other. Like, you know, things like psilocybin, whatever, whatever. In the jungle, they will awake inside the eyes of a jaguar and they'll be in like, Paul, Rosalie's talked about this. I believe being inside a jaguar, that's a very common thing. And so my thought is this is a mixture of all these things. There's deformity of ectodermal dysplasia as well as this priest class who's able to embody the jaguar. And then when there are kids being born with this disease, they think that, oh, okay, this is like you're like a half jaguar. It's like this religion that's forming in primordial times and that rises up through Olmec civilization. Right now. I think I'm one of the only people in the world studying this right now. But I've been here so many times and seeing all the patterns I'm starting to see. Okay. And like my wife being a dentist, okay, I think that this is a deformity that people are noticing. And they're also trying to understand their ancient world. So they're realizing that this person with ectodermal dysplasia has these two fangs. What else has two fangs? The jaguar, which we revere and worship. And maybe we see it as some kind of God. Okay, well, clearly you have some kind of importance, yada, yada, yada. And somewhere in. In here you have these facets of religion and society that are being formed. And I'm just trying to follow the patterns and figure this out. And then you see these strange looking babies, but you never see adults. So it makes me think that these are deformed babies. Maybe they have down syndrome. Maybe there's something. There's something a normal about them. And maybe they don't survive. And so the Olmecs are like weeping for these babies. And so by making some kind of physical image of them, you immortalize them, preserve them or honor them, right? I'm not quite sure, but in the Olmec world, I think it's the start of the honoring of people with deformities. Because we see it in the Maya world as well. Like the Maya revered dwarves, like little people were very important to their society. And so that carries all the way to Moctezuma's temple.

[Luke Caverns]

This.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. It's crazy, right?

[Luke Caverns]

It is fascinating.

[Mark Gagnon]

Holy shit.

[Luke Caverns]

What's up, people? Let's take a break really quick because I want to talk to the fellas. Let me ask you something. Are you stuck? Do you feel like you're struggling with work or relationships or maybe your marriage or just feeling like you're not like the, the dude you want to be. You ever just, you know, thinking to yourself, like, man, I should be farther along Right now, I just get caught in these cycles where I just kind of lose self control. Well, here's the thing that nobody likes to admit. It is possible that porn might be part of the problem. Yes, I know I said the P word. Now look, I don't want to be overly moralistic here, okay? But if you're someone that struggles with pornography and you know, research has shown that regular porn users actually leaves men feeling more anxious and less connected and ironically, less satisfied. And then it creates a cycle that then you gotta be a little secretive about and you tell yourself like, I'll quit. And then you come back to the same cycle and now you're in a trap. Well, that's where Relay comes in. Relay is a therapist backed app with actual clinicians designed to help men quit pornography and actually feel better and get control of their lives. And the difference with Relay is that you're not doing it alone. With Relay, you basically join a small group of guys that are kind of on the same road. They're sharing accountability and encouragement and actual tools to help when triggers hit and you're feeling, you know, anxious or alone. Relay helps you feel a little more connected and you can stay totally anonymous. But for the first time, you're not going to be in this battle alone. I mean, think of it like a gym membership, but with your brain and for your habits and for the future of your relationship maybe.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right?

[Luke Caverns]

Thousands of men and their families are already seeing some change because the men in their lives are a little bit less stuck. So if you're feeling stuck, check out Relay. Don't wait another month to be the man that you want to be today. And you can break the cycle with Relay. So go ahead and use the code Gagnon gag no N for a seven day free trial. If you feel like this thing has just got a grip on you that you're not able to let go, that is, join Relay. J O I N Relay A R E L A Y app A P P camp and use the code Gagnon for a seven day free trial. Don't put it off. Be the man you're supposed to be today. Today. What's up guys? We're gonna take a break really quick cause I gotta tell you a story. Imagine you're sitting in your house, it's cold outside, it's it's a little snowy. And you're like, man, I just want a panini. So you go and you order it, you know, from a, from doordash or something like that. And it never gets to you. You're looking at the app, you're like, dude, it's been four hours. Where's my panini? You're calling? No one answers. Well, this is a true story that happened. There was a woman, a client that was working as a doordash driver, and she slipped and fell on an icy walkway outside of a Panera bread in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She breaks her elbow, which leads to surgery and hardware having to get inserted into her arm. She can't work. And originally, you know, she sues Panera. And Panera's like, okay, we'll give you like 125,000. But then the good people over at Morgan and Morgan fought for her and got her the million dollar verdict that she deserved. Yes. If you never heard of them, Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. Yes. And they are that way for a reason. They've been fighting for the people for over 35 years. Now, I'll be honest. If I ordered, you know, a panini and the woman gets paid a million bucks because she slipped, I mean, it's a tragic thing to happen, of course, but I deserve a little bit of that. I. I should get a cut at least, right? As I'm the one to order the panini. If I never ordered that panini, she never would have slipped, never got a million bucks, which obviously she deserved. You know what I mean? But maybe next time she gets a million and million point one, I can get a cool a hundred thousand out of that. Regardless. All I'm saying is if you're ever injured and you are looking to get the money that you deserved, the compensation that is entitled to you from your injuries, Morgan and Morgan could be the way to go. Hiring the wrong law firm can be disastrous. I mean, you can be locked up and litigate. It's a nightmare. But hiring the right law firm could substantially increase your settlement. And with Morgan and Morgan, it's easy to get started. Their fee is $0. Unless they win. That's right. Their fee is free. Unless they win your case, you don't pay zero. You pay zero cents. Unless they win your case, you can visit forthepeople.com gagnon g a g n o n that is f o r the people.com gagnon or dial pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. That's for the people.com gagnon or click the link in the description below. And thank you so much to the good folks over at Morgan and Morgan for sponsoring this program and making this show possible with this paid advertisement. Let's get back to the show. So if you have ectodermal dysplasia, you can live a normal lifespan. Like, it doesn't inhibit anything, I imagine, like food at a certain point or maybe like breastfeeding, I imagine would be like disrupted in some way. But you could have a generally normal life. Is your theory that they become priests or shamans?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes. Yeah, I think it's a bloodline.

[Luke Caverns]

Like, I think you're born of the jaguar.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes.

[Luke Caverns]

And then you, like. I'm assuming this is hereditary so that if you have extradermal dysplasia, you're more likely to have children with it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes.

[Luke Caverns]

And then your children then are also of the priestly class.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes.

[Luke Caverns]

And some of your children might be born without it and they just will be regular citizens. But if you're born with it, congratulations, you are.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now it's your claim to you have a divine duty, divine power. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That is fascinating. But the kings are never. Here's another. Here's another interesting thing. The kings are never aware jaguar. So it's two different facets of society. And if you study ancient Egypt enough, you'll find that there's a lot of clashing between the pharaoh and the priests. A see, you know, a lot. So the exact same thing is happening in the Olmec realm. And I. I haven't seen. And maybe someone else has noticed this and I just haven't read it, but I think I might be one of the only people. Now, Dr. Barnhart, my mentor, just came out with an Olmec lecture series in the great courses and I haven't had a conversation at length him about it. So I need to go watch this. But I think that it's obvious there's a feud between the Olmec kings, the like the dynastic family and these shamans. Because you see renovations of monuments in the Olmec world. You can see where a head was turned into an altar. Like that altar that we saw that was to. That was to exalt a. I call them like, like were Jaguar shamans. That was to exalt a shaman. It was probably something the shaman might sit on top of because we have cave paintings of Olmec people sitting on top of altars. Like where they have one leg underneath them and one leg Hanging off, talking about something. But that wasn't necessarily a king. It was probably a shaman. So it's a. What I just showed you with the baby coming out, altar five. That's where I think a shaman would sit on top and speak to his. You know, speak to the other priests or speak to regular people of the civilization. I mean, we just don't know.

[Luke Caverns]

And the art is an indication of who I am.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, exactly.

[Luke Caverns]

It's clear to the people, like, hey, I'm speaking to you now as the shaman. Yeah, you can see my jaguar teeth and this image. Because many of the people I imagine, are not literate, perhaps, or maybe they are, but I imagine having art is going to be the fastest way to communicate an image and that they're able to see, like, oh, I'm being brought forth from this cave from a shaman before me, and this is my divine right.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's his claim to his. Yeah. Divine rights. Divine power to be in his position now. Whoa. We see altars that are made from Olmec heads, but we have never found a head that's made from an altar. So what I'm saying here is the only people I'm trying to think of. The way I can word this. When you go throughout the Olmec world, you will notice that there are no. Were jaguar monuments that were ever turned into an Olmec head. Only heads that were turned into were jaguar monuments. And almost on every single head, on the top of it, where the crest of the helmet was, which is usually the symbol of the king's name, you find these claw marks that are going into it. Okay, okay, okay. Christos, stay on this. Yeah. Click on the one you're looking at right now. And then can you zoom into the top of the head? It's going to be real. You may have to find a super high resolution. But the. The crest of his helmet says three a. How? You have these three claws that are coming down. So it's three. And the top symbol is a. How it means three king. At least that's what we think. Because that same symbol later on in the Maya world would mean three a house. So we think that it's probably the same. Not this guy. It's not every single time, but yeah, let's keep going through the heads and see if we can find. Yeah, so that's a we jaguar. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, so bottom left. So not that one. One to the right. And then zoom in at the. The resolution is not good enough. But if you zoom into the top of the head. You. Yeah, and it's got to be higher, but. Okay, so on the top of his head, there are these claw marks. They're deep cutting claw marks. Yeah, we're not gonna be able to see it. You can just barely see the claw marks. But, man, if I were to take you through the Olmec world, it's even higher than that. It's like, on the very top of his head. Yeah. So there are claw marks there that are probably like, a foot long, and it's these deep claw marks. And when you go and look at them, there are four or five of them, and you can put your hand inside of it. So it's like a clawed hand scratched through the Olmec monuments. And on the backsides of a lot of the heads, you'll see them just completely torn apart. And I've looked at this and looked at this and looked at this, and I realized that these claw marks never show up on the Were Jaguar monuments. They only show up on the heads. So it's like the Priestly class is more in control of Olmec civilization than the kings are, because the Priestly Were Jaguar class is going back and defacing the Olmec heads. The were Jaguar monuments are never, ever defaced. And there's one head. You'd never be able to find a photo of it on the Internet because so much of the Olmec world is just not thoroughly documented. But there isn't. There is one head. The entire face is clawed off. Like I'm talking about, the entire face is mangled. You can't even see the face anymore. Like, you can see the jaw and the cheekbones, but the entire face is mangled. And so I'm thinking that this is clear evidence to me that. That. That the King class and the Priestly class were at feud with each other, just like in ancient Egypt. Yeah, so. So the more you look at it, you get this big picture that. Okay, okay, so there's this. It's almost like a race of were Jaguar people that they're. They're not seeing this as deformity. This is because it has no mental, you know, effect. It's only a physical effect. That this is actually. This is actually a positive. ATT gives you this divine right to have this power. And so they're breeding them and breeding them, and they're purposely engineering more people to be bred like this. And probably eventually it outweighs the Dynastic family. Like, you know, the king and his family can only get so big when you have Multiple families of, were jaguars that are constantly breeding. And, and yeah, so I, I think that I'm, you know. Yeah, I think, I think that I'm on to like documenting something that hasn't really been like officially acknowledged that is fused the priest class and the Olmec kings.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, not to mention, I imagine that like with any type of like dynasty there's a secession problem that happens, right? Like there's a king that has only daughters or there's a king that you know, gets overthrown and then there's a new regime that comes in and they need some type of right to rule the people. And whereas the priestly class, because it has almost a divine lineage, it's. I don't know if it's as susceptible and you correct me if I'm wrong. Like with Egypt, for example, like with Agnaten, there was basically a regime change and he needed to hearken on the old gods to basically give him credibility. So he created like, he like moved the capital and he, I forget the exact. He liked, what was the, the God Aten. Aten. And he basically creates like a sun disc and like he's like, okay, I am.

[Mark Gagnon]

It had existed but it was not a, it was not a very popular God.

[Luke Caverns]

But he was like, I am of an Atnatn and like I am of the godly lineage. And so as he takes over and tries to ameliorate the secession problem, he hearkens back to the religious element to basically justify to his people, like, hey, I actually am the rightful ruler. Don't care about the regime, don't care about the coup, none of that. That I like, politics aside, I am of God and that's all that matters.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, well, you know, he was, you know, this is very interesting because I had a very negative view of Akhenaten for a long time because he's kind of ghastly looking. Like he's kind of. All of his monuments make him out to be very scary looking. And then the art of the Amarna period is very odd. Like he's just an unsettling figure to look at.

[Luke Caverns]

And his son is Tut, right?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. As far as, as far as we know, his son, his son actually is Tut, not like biologically actually is his son. I think as far as we know.

[Luke Caverns]

From like his second marriage. Because he's married to Nefertiti.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes, yes. And so I think that Tut is, we think that Tut is his son but not Nefertiti's son, right? Right, yeah. So anyways, so I had a, I had a pretty negative view of Akhenaten for a long time just because of the visuals. Like I just don't like the Amarna period art at all. I think that the, that the Old Kingdom art is much, is the best. And Middle Kingdom is really nice too. It's just elegant, just looks amazing. Now what I think was actually happening here is we see the feud beginning between the priestly class. I know we just jumped over to Egypt, but it's fascinating still.

[Luke Caverns]

I think it's a helpful parallel.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sure, sure. We see the feud really getting significant between the priestly class and Akhenaten's father Amenhotep iii. And I thought a lot about like the psychology of like where Akhenaten is coming from and why he took such drastic measures. And this is my guess, the ancient Egyptians were well aware of the periods before. Like, you know, there are these intermediate periods where we don't really have a great grasp of everything that was going on. Like where you have seventy kings and days, you know, just a lot was going on. But that doesn't mean that the Egyptians were ignorant of everything that had happened before. And they knew how the government used to be run once upon a time. Like there used to not be a high priestly class, let's say during the time of the reign of Ra. You know, you have, you have Khufu, Khafre Menkara. Menkara means in the essence of Ra. So this is actually very fascinating and I don't think it's a bad argument. The reason that the burial chambers of the great pyramids, an argument I've seen put out there, the reason that the burial chambers are above ground. It's like the only time in all of Egyptian history, if we're going to call these tombs, where the burial chamber is not going in either straight into the ground vertically or diagonally and it's going up is because the greatest kings of the like. So the Egyptians during the first intermediate period and in the second intermediate period they would have these phrases like, oh, I long for the golden age of Seneferu, which was the Khufu's father, who we call the first great pyramid Builder, they would say how they long for the days of Seneferu. So that lineage, Senferu, Khufu, Khafre Menkara, that was the kingdom of the sun God, these were all pharaohs of the God of the sun God Ra. Ra is also a disk, like a, like a sun disk that was always looked on as the greatest period of Egypt, leading up to the 18th Dynasty, of which Akhenaten is the second to last pharaoh of. I'm sorry, not second to last. There's a few after him, but he's like the last significant one. So just touching on the pyramids, and we'll go back to the priest thing, because those I've seen it argued that Akhenaten was hearkening back to the pharaohs of the sun God kingdom, which are those four pharaohs I was talking about earlier. And the reason that those burial chambers are not above ground, or not underground, but above ground is because they were. They were semi divine beings that were at the actual essence of the God itself. Those men were not intended to be buried below ground. They need to be buried above ground. And that's the only, like, four pharaohs that are buried above ground.

[Luke Caverns]

Even in death, they're above the penal.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes, yeah, exactly. It's an interesting argument, and I don't have anything to refute it, but it's fascinating. So Akhenaten, my guest, just. Let's just time travel back to. I don't know which. I think that. Well, he must have lived in Memphis with his dad. I'm guessing that Amenhotep lived in Memphis, but we could look. We could look this up. Maybe he lived in Luxor, but it's a late night in the pharaoh's palace. Amenhotep has been at odds with the priest class at Karnak temple down in Luxor his entire life, and he's absolutely fed up with it. And, you know, the unskilled, skippable cutscenes with your dad when you're growing up, where you got to hear your dad talking about how much he hates his job and, like, all the problems with it.

[Luke Caverns]

It's the same story again and again.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's the same thing. And how much do you think Amenhotep iv, who will later become Akhenaten, sits here and he's listens to this. He's like, yeah, I can't stand these guys. Like, when I get in, all the things that these priests did to my dad, I'm gonna. I'm gonna eliminate these people. I'm not gonna deal with this. I'm not gonna deal with the stuff that my dad's dealt with for forever. He hears this his whole freaking life until his father dies. And then Amenhotep, when he becomes king, he's like, f all of you, I'm completely shutting down the temple. Egypt needs to be run the way it was supposed to be run. And the way it was supposed to be run was all the powers of the priestly class came into one single being, the pharaoh himself. When the pharaoh was the king and the high priest simultaneously, that was true ancient Egypt. He was all. These priests were supposed to be vessels for the pharaoh himself, acting as arms of the. Of the pharaoh. But they became over time, like, okay, so. So I'm pharaoh in the early fourth dynasty of Egypt, when Pharaoh is as pharaoh as pharaohs are ever going to get. I'm first, and I'm first in charge. My siblings are all second in charge, and then my cousins are all third in charge. Right. Like, you have these ranks that go down. But my cousin died, and I don't have anybody to fill his place. Okay, well, I trust this guy well enough. You're going to fill his place. Oh, my other cousin died. Oh, this sickness comes in. Boom. Half of my family is eviscerated now. Half my government is filled up with people that don't have my blood. Another thing, another tragedy happens. Like, and you can just imagine that the pharaoh's family gets pieced away, and there's way more people he's not actually related to that have to become a part of the government. And they all become priests, because religion is intertwined with the government. And then they all become landowners and this, that, and the other. And then before long, the pharaoh and his family are vastly outnumbered by other powerful people. And the pharaoh is no longer the center of the religion and the government. He's the center of the government. But the other 50% of the entire civilization is being run by people that aren't even his bloodline. Right.

[Luke Caverns]

So they have direct connection to Ra also because they're the priestly class.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes.

[Luke Caverns]

And so now they can almost take a claim to the people and be like, are you going to listen to this guy that's the monarch, or are you going to listen to me who's connected to rock?

[Mark Gagnon]

Exactly. Exactly. And so Akhenaten had had enough of it, and he wanted to return Egypt back to this golden age where it was only the pharaoh that had complete control. But, you know, the Old Kingdom was a long time ago, and that was, you know, Akhenaten probably existed in 1450 BC and the pyramids had, at their youngest age, been built over a thousand years before that. You know, Old Kingdom was a long time ago. And two other new eras have already risen, or two eras have risen and fallen since then. You know, so the makeup of ancient Egypt just. It wouldn't have worked with the old ways, like you had to be. Things were much more complicated now. And Egypt was also way more populous and way more interconnected with the rest of the world. Like back during the time of the Old Kingdom, it was just Egypt and Egypt alone. They didn't really have to deal with people around the Mediterranean. But by the New Kingdom, they got.

[Luke Caverns]

Phoenicians coming in, you got men and Minoans and you got the Hittites. Like there's all these other people around that now you're trading with and fighting with.

[Mark Gagnon]

You ever done a deep dive on the Minoans?

[Luke Caverns]

No, not particularly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Dude, that's cool. Civilization, that's topic for another time. But man, there's just so much, there's so much out there. But yeah, so you have, you have this war between the priests and, and the pharaohs and. Yeah, it's just like, it's like a, it's a, it's a tale as old as time, you know, literally. So anyways, that's the Olmec world now. The Olmecs are getting their jade and serpentine. This is actually really funny. For a long time it had been a mystery as to how Maya civilization sprouted, like how it began. Is a Maya civilization the direct heir of Olmec civilization or did it arise simultaneously? Is it like a sister civilization? We know know that the height of Olmec society was happened much earlier on than the height of, you know, okay, height of Olmec society around a thousand B.C. around 800 years after they really sprout into existence. Right. Or I should say after they appear in the archaeological record. But they probably existed for maybe a thousand years earlier. Right. So height of Olmec civilization about a thousand B.C. and then it kind of steadily falls off for 700 years and they kind of just, they kind of just disappear into the rest of Mesoamerica. Because by about 250 BC the rest of Mesoamerica is starting to rise around the Olmecs and starting to learn to be able to do what the Olmecs do, like fishing, like efficiently raising maize. They're also, they also have their own rubber farms now. So it kind of diminishes the power of Olmec society and they all kind of blend together. By about 250 BC everyone around the Olmecs have risen up and the Olmecs have fallen down. So everyone's like at the same level. Well, the Olmecs are going to fade into, to just fade into history. They're going to be Lost to time. And everyone's going to rise up around the Olmecs. The next ones are going to be the Maya. Now the reason that I do not think that the Maya are the direct descendants of the Olmecs is because they have no similarities to the Olmecs at all. But that doesn't mean that they weren't directly connected to them. And dude, the other day I, I have, I've got some buddies that like, travel with me down to Latin America and, and we'll hang out. And I was having some of them over to the new house and we were in the backyard just like smoking. And I love thinking about the ancient world because it just allows your brain to think about things in a different pattern. And I had this realization, and it doesn't sound especially profound now, but I had the realization that the mystery of why Maya civilization sprouts from the city called El Mirador, which is in the middle of the Guatemalan, the Patan jungle in the Guatemala Africa, out in the middle of nowhere. It's a massive city with the two largest pyramids that the Maya will ever make. Is from the Maya's oldest city. Well, there's Nok Bay and then there's, and there's El Mirador. The two pyramids are called Lanta and El Tigre. They face each other. And the bottom platform of these pyramids is the entire city. Like the entire city is raised up on a platform. I don't know how to explain it any other way. Like, imagine New York City sits on an artificial platform form. And so the two biggest pyramids they're ever going to make, they make it the beginning of, of their civilization. Let's. It goes all the way back to like 800 BC and reaches its height around 200 BC. So it reaches height right when the Olmec, like are at the are in their last days. And for a mystery, it had been a long time, or it had been for a long time, it had been a mystery. Well, why did Maya civilization start out here in the middle of nowhere in these lowland jungles? They don't have. They're not. This isn't even around a river. There's no river around them. They're as far from the coast as you can actually get. Like from the Atlantic or, you know, from the Caribbean coast and the Gulf Coast. It's as far from either one as you can get. And, and I just, this epiphany came to me and I, and I thought, okay, why would people ever go to the middle of the jungle? They Must be the original people must have moved out there, there thousands of years ago to escape all of the violence that definitely occurred on the coastline, because that's the prime real estate when thousands of years ago. You want to live on the coastline. You want to live right on the beach where you. This is pre agriculture, right? You want to live right on the beach where you can, where you can fish all the time. And it's just so easy to get sustenance, right? So you have like the weakest people, the most skittish, inept people that have to flee to the middle of the jungle, right? But far away, hundreds of miles away, the Olmec civilization is rising up. And they want luxury goods. They want basalt, they want shells, they want shark teeth, and they want jade and serpentine. So they send out these expeditions. This is just me reinventing history, thinking about what I know and trying to understand this. And I probably wouldn't have thought this way had I not been in a certain state of mind. And so they're sending out expeditions to find these resources, probably because these resources just happen to appear by chance. And they want to know exactly, like, what is this? Where did you get this green stone? I want more of this. This is beautiful. You know, so they send out expeditions. This is prehistory, you know, this, like, think about this far primordial time, they're sending out an expedition and they say, oh, you know, probably comes somewhere from the east. Okay, what's out there in the east? Well, that's the Maya land where these people that worship these gods live on these little rock mounds and, and, you know, worship the rain God and which is Chak, the Iran God. And Maya civilization at this point there, you know, let's call it 800 B.C. there were. So you've seen an Indian mound in North America about that size, made totally out of stone with a bunch of other wooden thatch homes built around it with huge farms. So it's early. It's not these huge impressive cities that it will become later on. And so the Olmecs probably send out resource expeditions into here, and then they find out in the middle of the jungle, they probably keep looking. Where do you find these stones? Asking them, oh, it comes from the east. Go to the east. It's going to be in the middle of nowhere, blah, blah, blah. In the middle of nowhere where these people who fled to the middle of the jungle to be safe from all the violence, you know, going on on the coastlines in the middle of that jungle is where those jade and serpentine quarries are. And so those people that in early prehistory fled the coastlines to the middle of the jungle to be safe had no idea that they were sitting on top of jade and serpentine quarries. And the Olmecs came looking for them. So what do those people do? This is how we can can have money. So they start coring everything up, and then they start trading this green stone to the Olmecs, who are filthy rich, the only filthy rich civilization in Mexico at the time, sending them resources back. Boom. A giant city in the middle of the jungle, in the most infertile place in all of the Maya world, with the two biggest pyramids the Maya ever going to make is sprouts based on Olmec money. Right. So it's like the Olmecs inseminated wealth inside the Maya world in the middle of the jungle. And that's why the height of Maya civilization begins in the middle of the jungle, because of the Olmecs searching for this green stone. Wow. Yeah. It's crazy, right? That is fascinating. Yeah, yeah. And then it just spreads out from there.

[Luke Caverns]

And so that is. That is the actual navel of Mayan civilization is right there.

[Mark Gagnon]

So. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you had Maya people already living everywhere. Everywhere. Like, all over the Yucatan Peninsula, down in Guatemala, like the area I said earlier. But yes, it kind of goes like this. So you have it here, and then it just from this one center area, this like. I don't even know how to explain it. It's like this. It's like a shooting star rises out and everything follows it. Right. You know what I'm saying? It's like the shooting star of culture and wealth. And then everyone emulates that. Right? But that shooting star of El Mirador, this deep, potent El Mirador and Knock Bay, that shooting star is its own unique identity with its own gods and its own way of life. That is nothing like the Olmecs. But it started because Olmec money was being poured into it to get all of the jade and serpentine out of that area.

[Luke Caverns]

So do they keep that city as a stronghold and they keep on, like, quarrying all that jade?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah. So El Mirador last. Now, I should say this pyramid you're seeing right here, it's impossible to know. Okay, do you see the other little bump in. Okay, to the left. So we go up a little bit where you can see a little bit more of the photo to, like, the left side of the photo? Yeah, yeah. You see that little hump off in the jungle to the left that's another pyramid. And there's another pyramid to the right and another one to the right. That one right there. So this is El Mirador and the other one is, or I'm sorry, this is Lanta. And the other one is El Tigre. Now these pyramids are so big that when I climbed up to the top of the one, we spent a little bit up there taking photos. You can, you know, you have to come in from a helicopter. It's like a two hour helicopter ride to see it. And you, you just, it's a flat jungle and it's just boom, this gigantic mountain that comes out of the jungle. But they, you know, they barely excavated any of it. That, that portion you see is like the top tenth of the pyramid. And so when you come down this pyramid, this, this is basically my, the way I experienced it, I walk down, down, down, down, down multiple levels of, to the bottom. I walked for five minutes. I'm like walking and talking with somebody, with somebody next to me. And then I came across a staircase and I realized I had been on the pyramid the whole time. And I was walking in a straight line on one level of the pyramid for five minutes before I started to descend down it for the last time. Wow. That's how big they are. And then what they didn't realize for a long time is when I came down that final staircase and then I was walking on flat ground. I still wasn't because you can walk from there there for a mile to El Tigre. And you're actually just on a pyramid platform. So the whole city sits on what is actually the lowest platform of this.

[Luke Caverns]

And it's not just a mountain with steps. It is a standalone structure.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes, because the paten is flat jungle. All of it is flat jungle. So they built up the entire thing, they built up all of it out of stone. So the whole city is built up above the ground? Well, I spent a lot of time in shitty areas in the jungle that get flooded. And there's all kinds of stuff on the ground. I mean like the, the ground is what you're looking at when you're walking through the jungle. There's snakes, there's spiders, it floods all the time. Oh my God. Like there will be ants moving across the forest that make the forest floor look like it's a liquid. Like there's so it just looks like it's a liquid running through the, the, the ground. And so you can, can. It's not hard to imagine why you'd want to build your city lifted up off of the ground. Right. Because ants aren't going to climb up through the foundation, and you can get away from snakes. You know what I mean? So you want to lift it up off the ground so you can't flood. You just prevent so many issues. And then you build your city on top of the platform and. But the platform is miles long and miles wide.

[Luke Caverns]

Do we know where the jade quarries are? Like, do.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes. I mean, I don't think it's something that you can Google. There was a. Well, I know you can Google it, but I don't. I. I don't think it's something that would, like, pop up on Google Earth. You. You wouldn't maybe get a GPS coordinate for it. Maybe.

[Luke Caverns]

But, like, we know where they are generally.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes. Like. Like. Like an expert. If I were to go to El Mirador and ask, do you know where the jade quarries are? Somebody could be like, oh, yeah, I can take you on a trail and show you it. But there's not gonna be anything out there. It's just gonna be a. Just gonna be like a crater in the ground that's filled in with vegetation. That's it.

[Luke Caverns]

Because they took everything out.

[Mark Gagnon]

Out of it. No, no, they're still. I mean, it's like an infinite deep hole of. Of jade and serpentine, and there's many, many, many of them out there. But, yeah, it's not like. It's not like they're tourist destinations. Like, nobody goes to the quarries today. I mean.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, I've never even heard of this monument, so I can imagine even fewer people are going to look for the thing that made them rich.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. So there was a book called Stone of Kings, and I think it wasn't even until the mid-1900s that the quarries were discovered, because somebody kind of like me was looking into this, and then eventually was like, wait, okay, so where is all the stone actually coming from? Like, all the fuel that made all these civilizations rich because they didn't have gold, so jade was the thing. And. And so they're like, okay, well, where is this all there is? Stone of Kings. And so in this book, they're tracking down the different quarries from where it all came from. And they found several of them, but most mo. Actually, I think all of them are in Guatemala, but they're in a couple different areas.

[Luke Caverns]

And the Olmecs had all sorts of different jade. Like.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes. And all of it came from the Maya realm. And so. So you can imagine they're fueling Maya civilization. And so when. As the. As Maya starts to rise up. Olmec starts to fall. And then so by the time the Olmecs disappeared, now the Maya are going. And so the height of El mirador is about 200 BC, which is, is in the same century that the Olmecs fell. And so Maya civilization just roars on. This is the pre Classic, the Pre Classic Maya civilization. It's very broad. It probably goes from 2000 BC to about 200 AD. So they were active for a long time. They had been around. But it wasn't until about 800 BC 500 BC that they started getting rich from trading with the Olmecs in the middle of the jungle. Now El Mirador continues on, but something happens in El Mirador or in, in these first pre Classic cities. But we can focus on El Mirador. There is no exaltation of any single person in the pre Classic Maya world. There are no kings. This is why they're, this is why they're starkly different than the Olmecs. They're not the descendants of the Olmecs. They don't inherit the Ol Olmec way of life.

[Luke Caverns]

No heads that we find. No giant sculptures.

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, later on there are Maya heads. It's like the Maya went and found Olmec heads.

[Luke Caverns]

Like, oh, these are sick.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah. And they try to make their own, but they're smaller and, and there's, they're smaller and much less significant. It just less significant in general. So what's really interesting is Maya civilization starts with pretty priests. Probably what they are, are sacred astronomers. And then like you have these people that are scholars, astronomers, slash priests, kind of all the same thing. They're trying to figure out the sacred elements of the world. Right. And they need to spend all their time doing this. So they're kind of like more important people. They probably eventually become more important people, let's say, I don't know, let's try to come up with how this could happen. Happen. You have a guy who figures out something. Let's say he's, let's say when he's 17, he's like a very curious guy. He's got 150 IQ. He's genius. You know, there were definitely people that had a much higher IQ in the Maya civilization than Einstein. Right? Like they're just like us. And let's say when he's 16 or 17 and he's just a savant, you know, and he says, he says, he says, watch on this day, such and such time. But really he's saying like next year, but we don't know exactly how they word that watch. That star is going to appear right over my house. And his friend's like, no way. No way. Or maybe he starts predicting things, right? And then all of a sudden, it's like magic. Like, how. How can this kid understand all this stuff? And he's like, oh, I've been watching. So he's onto this, like his whole life. He's obsessed with this, and he's starting to figure things out. And then eventually he realizes that it had. Then he starts to realize that it's locked with the seasons too. So he knows when you can start planting things. And he's doing this over and over and over again. And then when he gets older, older to keep doing this, and he's learned so much, he needs people to take care of him. Ooh. Royalty is now beginning. This is the origin of how people start being elevated above everyone else. And then as he has a son, he's taught his son everything. And then his son looks at the way his dad's now being treated and everything, he's going to step into his dad's shoes. Well, now his son's accustomed to being treated in a certain way. And he's also elevated above everyone else because he has the sacred knowledge. Knowledge. Well, fast forward 600 years. How much is that going to transform to just from the superhero, the sacred person in the civilization that had got the whole clock figured out. And he's like the magician to now he's an elevated royal person that's more important than everyone else. 600 years later. And then how long does it take before one of those priests realizes is I can learn everything that all these other guys know too. I don't, I don't need them, you know, and then, and then over time, all of the, the Maya priest, all of the power becomes culminated in one person. We don't know exactly how this happened, but it happened across the entire Maya world. They got rid of the. They got rid of not the priestly class because they were still subservient priests. But the priests were not, were not really acknowledged at all anymore. It was solely the king himself, the dynastic king, who became the physical embodiments of the gods themselves. And so by about 200 AD, boom. We have the dynastic period, which is, we call it the Classic period. So Something happens about 200 A.D. where every civilization just get kings instead. And that one king has all the priestly power essentially absorbed into him. This continues on for 700 years. Years. And then there's about 800-900-ad, which I was telling you was the fall of Yashilan, 600 years before Columbus shows up. This classic period of dynastic kings just collapses. We don't know why it collapses. Well, we, we kind of have several different ideas. So kings bring about a lot of war. Right. It's like a very egotistical civilization and war starts kicking off all over the place. In the MAYA World between 200, about 800 AD, everyone's at war. And because they're all astronomers, these wars are called the Star Wars. And this is where the name of Star wars actually comes from. Really? Yeah. Well, it's why Yavin 4, remember, that is the city of Tikal, the Maya city of Tikal in Guatemala. If you look it up, it's just filmed in the Maya city. People don't realize this Star Wars, a lot of the premises of it are just based on Mesoameric America. Yeah, it's crazy. So if you, if you look up. Yeah. So you should be able to go to images and it'll show Yavin 4. Yeah. So bottom right here. Yeah. The skyline. I'm sorry, one one up.

[Luke Caverns]

We lost it.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's somewhere on here, but okay. Yeah, yeah. So Mayan ruins, the Reddit link there in the middle to the right. Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

All the way to the right.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah. So that's the view. Remember, Remember when the, when the X wings fly up out to go to the Death Star? I think that's in Return of the Jedi. I forget, but yeah. So the city of tikal is yavin4 in even this link is today.

[Luke Caverns]

I learned that the scene from episode four when the falcon first flies over the rebel base in Yavin, they are actually real places. It's the mines. Then it cuts off, probably says the.

[Mark Gagnon]

Maya city of Tial. So yeah, it's, it's really, really cool. So El Mirador is probably an hour and a half helicopter flight from here, further out into the jungle. Cuz you can drive here, you can't drive to El Mirador.

[Luke Caverns]

And they literally call it the Star War.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's, it was called the Star Wars. Yeah, yeah, it's just literally called Star Wars.

[Luke Caverns]

And the reason being is that they were sort of organizing these battles based off celestial alignments.

[Mark Gagnon]

Because all the kings get their divine power from the celestial alignments. Right. It's like the, the stars, it's the core aspect of the whole civilization.

[Luke Caverns]

Right. The reason we're here is because there was one philosopher king that understood how the world worked and he built our Whole civilization. And so we need to honor that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's. It's like an extension of that hundreds of years later. Right.

[Luke Caverns]

Science becomes religious religion.

[Mark Gagnon]

Exactly. And so these. So these Star wars go on for centuries and centuries and centuries, and they basically just impoverish the whole Maya world. They just ruin the Maya world. And during this time, they are very. Some of the main cities are really destroying their natural environments. Like the city of Tikal, they're painting so much, and there's so much mercury in the paint that they use that they accidentally poison their own water reservoirs. So they. So all the people get sick and they start dying and there's like this plague spreading through Tikal, which was the Tikal was like the major centerpiece of the Star Wars. I mean, it is the centerpiece of the Star Wars. I think you have the fire. It's. Was it the Fire King or It's like Jaguar Paw or, I don't know, Fire, Flaming Jaguar, Some major warrior king who just messed up everyone around him and his city starts falling apart. And then you have Copan and Honduran. They cut down so many trees to use for the stucco to, to decorate the sides of their temples. Think about this. Okay, so in a Maya city, there were no trees. They cut down all the trees. And then they would cut down more trees progressively to make farmland. And then they would cut down more trees for stucco. And stucco is like this layer of flat, like you make the wall perfectly white and flat to paint on. It's a perfect circle surface. From archaeological evidence, there was a period about 1200 years ago where from the city of Tikol all the way out past every angle on the horizon, there was no tree in the ground.

[Luke Caverns]

Wow.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. That's how much they cut the trees out. And they didn't realize that they would semi, permanently destroy the weather patterns. So it stopped for raining. And so they. And so all their maze crops went away and their farmlands became nothing. And we know this just from what we find on the ground. Like, we don't find as we don't find like the maze kernels everywhere that date back to this, these two certain centuries. So for like two centuries, it just didn't rain in Copan. And the civilization just. Or that city itself just like it. There's. There's no point in existing anymore because you're all going to die because it doesn't rain anymore and you don't to have food. So Copan, the most powerful city in the east, falls. Tikal Falls because they've destroyed Their environment. So you have the two like imagine if, imagine if New York City and LA just became deserted. What would that do to the rest of the country? Like you know it just how much it would affect the rest of the country. Death.

[Luke Caverns]

You have migration, I'm sure the people that remained left actually, actually I should.

[Mark Gagnon]

Say, I should say. Okay, so New York is a city in the east like Copan is a city in the east. Chicago is a city in the north like Tikal is a city in the north. And then Palenque, let's call that the city in the west just like Los Angeles. There's a giant volcano in the same century that erupts and it's one of the, it's the, it's the biggest recorded eruption that we have in ancient Mesoamerica about 850 A.D. it erupts and it blackens the sky sky from Chiapas, Mexico all the way over Guatemala all the way to Honduras and buries the city of Palenque in, in a like a several feet of ash Pompe, kind of like Pompeii. Well there's other cities around it that it actually did completely bury. So you have three of the major corners of Maya world that fall apart in the same century and then the, the entire sky is blackened and it's like this ohm in that the way civilization is going is not working right now. And it's in that same century everyone across the Maya world, the winners of the Star wars, the losers of the Star wars, the people on the peripheral that never participated in it, they all put everything down and migrated north to the Yucatan and started civilization again. And that's the post classic era from 900 AD to the arrival of Columbus. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. They just all agreed that civilization wasn't working and they tried again.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh I'm also, I'm sure it fucked up like the weather pattern too. You have this giant volcano, it's going to affect how things rain and the, you know, everything. And so even if like some people I'm sure are leaving for spiritual reasons and omen but they're also like yeah, we can't grow any crops because it doesn't rain anymore because we don't have El Nino or whatever.

[Mark Gagnon]

And there's, there's one altar that was found in a city. Maybe it's like Yasha, but it's a semi important city like, like let's say like a B tier city in Guatemala where it's an altar stone where it's the King sitting down in the market talking to normal people. Never was there anything like that ever shown before. If you go to like the 4002 AD Prime Classic period Maya, those kings are on the stele by themselves and the God is behind them. Maybe the God is behind them. It's all about the king. King. It's all about the king. For the king to be depicted on us on an altar surrounded by normal people in the middle of the market, what it tells me is that. And this is. Oh, and I should say there's a date on it. It's right at the end of the Classic period. What it tells me is that the exaltation of the king. Normal people are starting to realize that maybe we should go back to the old ways. Maybe the gods never wanted there to be kings. Maybe we should go back to the priest way because exalting the kings over the gods is clearly not working for, for. Why did the sky just turn black? You know what I'm saying? It's like this omen in front of the whole, over the top of the whole civilization that things have to restart.

[Luke Caverns]

So what does the king do?

[Mark Gagnon]

They killed. Well, they killed it. They got rid of all the kings. All of them. The entire Maya world got rid of the kings, they moved north and they started the pre Classic Maya civilization again with no kings, only gods. We never see the exaltation of a single person ever again. Until, you know, like all the way up to the arrival of Spaniards on the coast of the UK Yucatan. So they, so they go back to the, to the old ways and it seems to be kind of successful. But like right before the Spaniards arrived, the Aztecs just like swept through the Maya world and just were eviscerating everybody. And, and I'm pretty sure the night before Cortez arrives, we know from Aztec records that they were planning an assault on. I don't think it was Chichenita. I think it may have been Maya Paul Pond, or maybe it was Tulum. I forget. But the, the Aztecs were about to commence like a midnight raid the next day when the Spaniards showed up and they were going to wipe out Maya civilization for the last time. And then the Spaniard showed up the next day and stopped it. Yeah, it's crazy.

[Luke Caverns]

And so the Aztecs come out of that migration or like do they are.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. So, okay, so around 900, around 900 A.D. the Maya, they all move north. They abandon all the old cities. They're l. Living in that, that Yucatan Peninsula connecting The Gulf coast to, to the Caribbean. That's where they're all living in the north now. Sure, there were people who are much poorer that are now living in the ruins of the old cities. You know, that definitely happened. But for the most part, civilization is actually happening in the north now. What's happening in the rest of Mexico? I'm not too much of an expert, but civilization has moved on. But it's never as powerful and sophisticated as, as the, the, as the Maya. There's a whole period I skipped over here where there's the city of Teotihuacan, the three great pyramids in Mexico. That's an empire that arises from about 500 BC to 500 AD and they try to take over the Mayo world during that Classic period, during of the kings and, and half of the Maya world decides to join Teotihuacan. And the other half says, absolutely not. We're never doing that. And that's why the Maya started warring against each other. And so it was one Maya, one side of Maya civilization fighting for the empire of Teotihuacan. The other half trying to push Teotihuacan presence out. And the Maya ultimately won, pushed Teotihuacan all the way back to the Mexican Valley. And then sometime in this, in century or in, in the 500s, the Teotihuacan just burned to the ground from the inside and never rose again. And so it just, just like went to ruins. And then the Aztecs actually discovered it a thousand years later. So when the Aztecs discovered Teotihuacan, it had been abandoned for a thousand years.

[Luke Caverns]

What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because you need help pitching your tents.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes.

[Luke Caverns]

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[Mark Gagnon]

So where do the Aztecs come from? This is a crazy story. So the Aztecs arrive in Mexico around 1200 AD and we don't know exactly where they come from, but they say that they came from a place called Aztlan. Have you heard of this before? So we have no idea where Aslon was, but they come from, I think the seven caves of Astalon. Some might be seven, but they come from the, from the underworld of Aslan. And we don't know where that is, but we know it was far north of, of the Mexican valley. Probably it was from the United States. My guess is Nevada, Utah, maybe northern New Mexico, somewhere in that area. And they were like a sad, savage, merciless, mercenary tribe that were so brutal and warlike that everyone in the pueblo ancestry world, like the, the cliff dwellers of the American Southwest kicked them out. Go, go, go to the desert in the south. You don't belong here. So the Aztecs, you know, they, they get kicked out of, they get kicked out of the American Southwest into the Chihuahuan Desert desert south of the Rio Grande. They're wandering through the desert, they don't have anywhere to go. Pillaging tribes here, pillaging tribes there. And then they get further down south and they, and they find the Valley of Mexico, which is a beautiful place. It's one of the most beautiful places in North America. Man. It's like, it's really beautiful down there. Just so mountainous. And the Air is like crisp, especially kind of in the winter. Like the air is just crisp. It's beautiful. And they're like, oh, this place is pretty nice. And there's a lot of. There's a lot of pretty wealthy towns that are here. Let's try to, you know, assimilate. But they're so barbaric and nasty that all of the local kingdoms keep. All the local kingdoms are like, no, get out of here. Get out of the valley. Get out of the valley. And so they're, they basically circle like sharks. They're like circling around the valley looking for any way, for any way in. And eventually they approach the city of Kali and they approached Kawakan and they're like, listen, our people are starving. We're not going to be able to survive. We don't have anywhere to go. Like, help us out. What can we do for you? And Cal was a semi imperial kingdom that wanted to try to conquer the other. That thought, that thought about conquering the other kingdoms around the Mexican Valley. And I should say this is all right around Mexico City, modern day Mexico City. And so Cal, the kings get together. And we know all this from Aztec historians, people who knew the Aztec history that were Aztecs that told us the Spanish chroniclers in the 1500s. So they had, they knew their history, right.

[Luke Caverns]

It was relatively more recent than.

[Mark Gagnon]

And it just happened like this is. He's telling him things that happened like 200 years earlier, right. So this is fresh in their mind and their writing. So they, they, they even have the, the, the Aztecs had even written down in codices. It's in the Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology. They have a whole codex written down, down where you can see them. And they draw like comic books basically. And some of them even have, some of them even, even have like talking bubbles, like the way we do comic books today. Oh yeah, yeah. And it shows the Aztecs migrating from place to place until they get to the, to the Mexican Valley. So we know exactly what happened. This isn't just mythology. This really happened. So they go to Calon and they're like, come on, you got to help us. We got to like any, anything. Like our people are starving. We're not going to survive. And so the Cal, you know, king gets together with, with his people and they're like, well, what can we do? We got to do something with these guys. Are we going to kick them out again? Do we want to make enemies of them? What if, you know, they knew that the Aztecs were great warriors, but they were, like, savage and not really given a purpose, right? So kind of like wasted potential in a way. And they. And they were probably cautious of, like, well, what if someone else partners with these warrior. This roaming warrior tribe? Why don't we be the first ones to use them? So, like. Okay, okay, that's a good, good idea. All right, let's go give him this rocky outcropping in the middle of the lake, Teshcoco, which is like, it's a pile of rocks sitting up in the middle. Sitting up in the middle of the lake with no vegetation or anything. So they gave him, like, the crappiest real estate ever. So they say, okay, you guys go live out here at this site called Tenochtitlan or whatever. And it's just. It's in the middle of the lake. And what we're going to do for you is we're going to hire you guys out as mercenaries regularly to perform military operations for us. So this goes on for about two centuries and. Or maybe a century and a half, like 150 years or so. And during this time, the Aztecs are being compensated for their work, and they're being paid, and they're able to build houses and build roads and build streets, and they're kind of making this little island thing work. Like, they're bringing in stone and building up the island and then kind of lifting themselves up out of the water, right? They get more and more powerful until, I think, until, let's call it like 1350. Somewhere between 13. Yeah, probably about 1350. They've got a pretty sizable town now. Like, they've been doing this for maybe 100, 150 years or so. Pretty sizable town, growing pretty fast. And the high priest of the Aztecs goes and takes this, like, Detura mushroom rooms and glaze back, and he gets this prophecy from the God Huitz Dipotli to go offer the proposal of a dynastic marriage to the cawn princess to send. So he's a priest. He's gonna go tell the king to send the prince to go marry the cat princess. And so they follow the order of Huitzipotli. So they go the. The cat. The Aztec king goes to the Caukan king and say, look, we've had this alliance for 150 years now. We've had this alliance for 150 years now. There's other civilizations growing around the Mexican valley. You know, they may want to work with us someday. They may try to hire us or buy us out, but we don't want to have any problem with you. So let's have a dynastic marriage. I propose that my son marries your daughter and your daughter, we'll build a palace for your daughter and parts of your family to come live in Tenochtitlan. And now we can really make our city wealthy. And it'll be a part of the same kingdom. We'll be dynastically aligned. And so Kawakan, they think about it, and they come back and they're like, okay, it's time. Let's do this. So they have this huge marriage, this big marriage ceremony thing. They have this big marriage ceremony. And then the Caan princess comes back to live at Tenochtitlan. And then the priest goes to. Back to the temple, takes the detour again, and asks kuitipoli, what's your next command? And he says. He says, I want you to invite the Cain to finally come to Tenochtit titan for a ceremony. And I want you to kill the princess and fillet her and have the prince put her skin on and be dancing in a parade when the caon king arrives. And so he does that. The caon king arrives and he sees his daughter's skin being worn by the prince that. That he just married her to. And they bring, you know, at the same. It's like a. It's an ambush. They bring all the important people in, and they see him do that. They torture him to death. They sacrifice the king to Huitzipoli, and they raid the city of caon and conquer it all at once. So all of a sudden, the Aztecs control the. The Aztecs control everything. And that piece of crap property that the cause put them on, they put them in a castle, in a moat in the middle. What. That's effectively what they did, was put them in a castle, and they built the castle for the Aztecs over 150 year period, period, in the middle of a moat in an impenetrable fortress. And now the Aztecs control everything in the Mexican valley, just like that. And they're an unstoppable empire at this point that expands and absorbs everything else around them. And they did that for about 150 years. Just expanded and absorbed and just raided, pillaged, conquered, and built Mesoamerica's most impressive city ever. Like, the. The Spaniards who saw Calvican, the way that they describe it is, like, dreamlike. I mean, they had. And so we imagine the Aztecs being so savage, which they are, and they're so warlike. They're not. They're they're not very Mesoamerican at all. They're like their own thing. We think of them as Mexican, as Mesoamerican, but they're, they're. They're north of Mexico. North America is a very violent place. It breeds violent people. So it's, it's fascinating. Um, so. So anyways, we think of the Aztecs as being so savage and so warlike, but when you would go through ancient Tenochtitlan, it was like Venice, like a city sitting on top of water. Beautiful. It was so stunning that Cortez's men, when they left Tenochtitlan, and he's sitting up on his horse and his men are marching next to him, they look up at him. They're like, did we really see what we thought we saw? Is this all a dream? Like, what's the likely we're going to wake up and none of this is real? The way they described the city was that it was, like, serene and clean and, and just like perfect. The people had great hygiene. The cities were clean. The markets were full of thousands of people that had. That had, like, police and investigative forces to make sure there was no fraud, like fraudulent goods being sold in the market. 60,000 people would visit the markets in one day. They had zoos with wild animals, animals that contained the most exotic animals from all, from all around Mesoamerica. And they had. They had a zoo for birds as well. So the most exotic birds that they could find, like the quetzal bird and the condor, were being kept in these zoos. How they. I don't know if they were being kept inside nets, like open air nets, but the Spaniards described seeing these things. There was also an archaeology museum where the Aztecs had gone around Mexico. Mexico. And found ancient artifacts and drug them all the way back to Lake Tenoche or Lake Texcoco, across the bridge, like moats that led into the city and put them in museums and. And then there are these beautiful gardens with the most exotic plants and flowers from around Mexico. And there would be people standing in the gardens reading poetry and people sitting around listening. It was like a full on metropolitan area area. What.

[Luke Caverns]

Can we get an image of that? Like, ancient Tenochtitlan.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, Tenochtitlon reconstruction or recreation? Yeah, there's some really, really good ones. And you'll get an idea of. Of what it looked like. So there's this whole other aspect to this savagery. Yes.

[Luke Caverns]

Remind me, how does this tie in with the imagery?

[Mark Gagnon]

The second one, I mean.

[Luke Caverns]

Wow.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

And how does it Tie in with the imagery of, like, the eagle and the snake.

[Mark Gagnon]

So the Aztecs, what H. Topot had told them was as they were searching for the promised land, they get kicked out of North America into the Chihuahuan Desert. When that priest goes under and takes the detura. The prophecy that he was told was, you'll know where our land is when you see the ser. When you see the serpent being clutched by the eagle. And so when the cow. When Cowan kicked them out to that little rocky outcropping, which is. Right. You see the center of the square right here, the rocky outcropping was originally there. And they expanded the whole city artificially. So this whole foundation is sitting on was built by hand. The entire city, including the ground it's sitting on, was built by hand and expanded out from this little rocky outcropping. And it was when they walked out to that little outcropping that there was a serpent out there, like a little water snake or something on the stone. And an eagle came down and grabbed it and flew off. And the Aztecs knew this is where we're going to live.

[Luke Caverns]

Wow. And that's still the imagery we see on the Mexican flag today.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yep.

[Luke Caverns]

And this is modern day Mexico City.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, God, no. This is. This is ancient Mexico.

[Luke Caverns]

Sorry, not modern day. But this is the same place where Mexico City is now.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So this. So this center, you see the main pyramid in the center, that right there was leveled and just. Just decimated. But the foundation it sits on is the plaza in the center of Mexico. Mexico City. Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

Can we pull up the plaza of Mexico City? And the Spaniards are the ones that decimated this whole.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

When they came in and conquered the Aztecs.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over the course of the next. Yeah. Two and 300 years, they just tore all of it down. Because, you know, they. The. The Aztecs didn't do themselves any favors by being especially ferocious. And so the. The Christians saw him as being, like, quite literally demonic. You know, the Aztecs, according to the records, were sacrificing 80,000 people a day. You know, and they would do it viciously. Like, they'd have an obsidian knife and they would just cut straight through your sternum and pull your sternum in half and reach in and grab your heart while it was still beating. And they would just do this to thousands of people a day, you know. Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

Babies and like, all kinds of stuff.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. And. And so the Spaniards see this and they're horrified by it, and they, you know, understandably think it's Absolutely demonic. And the Aztecs, I should say a differentiation between the Aztecs and the Maya. A major thing is that the Maya did perform human sacrifice, but they only performed human sacrifice on themselves. Only people from their own civilization might be one person a year or something like that. And it was, it was a, a semi royal child, usually maybe somewhere between the ages of like 15 to 18, maybe a beautiful girl or a very handsome young man. And for a year he would get to live in his own palace. Like they build their, they build him a palace for a year, he'd get to live there. He'd learn music, science, art, philosophy, painting, writing, and probably got whatever girl he wanted. If it's a guy, you know, had concubines, whatever, you know, ate all the food he want, which is probably like turkey and deer and fish. Anything he wanted would be given to him and at the end of that year he'd be sacrificed. So they were like fattening him up and they would sacrifice their best. But the Aztecs didn't sacrifice their own people at all. They, they sacrificed prisoners of war. And so, yeah, they were especially ferocious.

[Luke Caverns]

So when the Spaniards come across them, it's. Of all the people they could have come across, they were.

[Mark Gagnon]

Those are the worst ones they could. Yes, exactly. It was like. It's like what happened happens when, when two unstoppable forces meet, right?

[Luke Caverns]

Like, because the Spaniards were also ferocious but in a different way. They saw themselves as civilized and they had.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, fascinating. You know what else is crazy is that the, the Aztecs were appalled by the Spaniards. They, they're. So. There's a book, there's a great book called Broken Spears and it's, it's the history of the Aztecs discovering the Spanish. Right? So it's the inversion of this. And the Aztec, Aztecs write in their chronicles about how they were so surprised at the Spanish coveting gold. Like whenever they would say they would see. Whenever Spanish soldiers saw gold, their eyes would get really big and they would turn to ferocious animals that would kill for the gold. But the Aztecs didn't view they had gold. They used it as decorative. They were like elegant luxury items, but no actual monetary value. Value, because money wasn't a thing. It just like that whole concept didn't exist in Mesoamerica. It was all trading. And then you had, you know, you had special items like gold that probably had a sense of divinity that only certain people could have. But like a poor person in the Aztec world having gold doesn't make them Instantly rich. Because it's a religious artifact and they're not. It's a religious dynastic artifact and you're already not a high priest and you're not. Not a royal person. So what are you going to do with this? It has no value at all. So they were just astonished that this meant so much to the Spaniards. And. Yeah, so the Aztecs are. Are appalled at the Spaniards in return.

[Luke Caverns]

Especially those Spaniards whose whole purpose is to go there and, you know, get rich.

[Mark Gagnon]

His whole purpose there is to go there and get rich? Yeah, the. The entire purpose. Dude, you have got to read the book When Montezuma met Corn Cortez. It's crazy, dude. Like, the Spaniards, the way that they're able to conquer the pre Columbian world, like this is just wild.

[Luke Caverns]

Like Conquistador.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, Conquistadors. But is that.

[Luke Caverns]

What's the name of the book?

[Mark Gagnon]

This right here, When Montezuma met Cortez.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, it's literally called Oka.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

And again, so Montezuma is an Aztec king living in the Aztec emperor.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. And man, like Cortez, he just, he's a crazy guy that makes all the right moves. Like every crazy situation he's in, he does this wildly brave thing that saves all of his men. And you know, I'm really not an expert in like the conquest of Mexico. I'm much more an expert in like everything before, earlier pre Columbian things. But I'm getting more and more interested in the colonial period. But you know, I just recently read the Conquest of Mexico and man. Okay, so they. So the. What's crazy is as ferocious as the Aztecs were, Montezuma did not want war with the conquistadors. He was more interested in them than anything else. Like fascinated at these aliens that just arrived.

[Luke Caverns]

Did he see that they were outgunned early?

[Mark Gagnon]

We don't know. We don't know what. We don't know what his thought process was, but there's a lot of historical that wonder why he wasn't more aggressive with the Spanish early on, but he invited Cortez. It's. It's a, it's a crazy thing. So the Cortez is sweeping through Mexico, slaughtering some cities, being invited to others and passing through, conquering places, pillaging them for everything. Montezuma definitely knew that this was happening. And yet when Cortez finally arrives, within like seven months. Okay, yeah. Within seven months of him arriving in Veracruz, Mexico, he was at the capital of the Aztec Empire, being invited to stay in the. In Moctezuma's palace. He stays in Moctezuma's palace. This is a super summarized history. It's way more dense and nuanced than this. But one of the nights that he's there, his men just perform a surprise attack and they take Montezuma hostage in a room and conquer the Aztec empire. Just like that. Well, I see. Just say they basically have it by the balls and like it's the precarious situation where 150 Spaniards have fortified themselves in Moctezuma's palace and there's a million Aztecs outside waiting to kill them. And so I forget exactly what happens, but there's all kinds of crazy things that happened during this, during this period. And, and, and anyways, one night there's this vicious rainstorm. Moctezuma dies while he's being held captive. And we don't really know exactly what happens if, if they just left him in the room and then when the Spanish fled, the Aztecs later found him or if they killed Moctezuma and threw him over the side of the walls or if they had Moctezuma go out up to the top of his palace and talk to the Aztecs and tell them that, that and basically, you know, speak on behalf of the Spaniards. And the Aztecs were so pissed off at him that they stoned him and killed him. Anyways, we don't really know exactly what happened because there's so many conflicting stories and the Spaniards trying to spin it in a way that the crown doesn't get pissed off at them. You know, the Spaniards had a lot of reason to lie about things. And I should say they're not totally, completely bad people because most of those conquistadors were just impoverished Spanish Spaniards that their only opportunity to become wealthy was to go be a part of the conquest and get wealth while you were there and then come back to Spain. So that was their only lot in life. So it's just, you know, it's like, that's why I say the more I study history, the more I like, the less judgmental I become. Because like the Spaniards had no choice. Like, right, this is their lot in life. They're gonna do this or they're gonna be poor living in the gutter.

[Luke Caverns]

They're on a death mission basically. Yeah, you're gonna go there and maybe die or maybe get rich. Like you're rolling the dice.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, that's, that's your lim lot in life. And so these Spaniards are in this very precarious situation. I mean, think about this, dude. They're the only 150 Europeans in the Americas in the palace sitting. They have now taken over the palace and they're completely surrounded by millions of Aztecs in the middle of a continent that no other Europeans have ever been been to. And they're from Spain. They're just out there by themselves.

[Luke Caverns]

The most ferocious warriors maybe that have ever been seen.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's completely insane. Okay, so in the middle of the night, there's this huge rainstorm. Moctezuma has died. And they wrap these cloths around their feet to soften the sound of them scurrying across the stone. And 150 of these conquistadors, oh, and they wrap the claws around the hooves of the horses too, and they flee in the middle of this vicious storm in the middle of the night. But you have to cross this huge bridge on the moat to get, just to get to the mainland. And then to get to the mainland, what took them seven months to get here, like. And they're in the middle of the Aztec empire in the heart of it. And while they're in the middle of the bridge, the flare goes off at the front of the bridge and it goes off at the back of the bridge. And then the thing comes on and the Aztecs were waiting for them to try to flee. So the Aztec war warriors are, are chasing them down from both sides of the bridge. And 150 Spaniards fight against like thou. Just hordes of countless Aztecs. And Cortez, his, I think his horse gets killed. And so many of these Spaniards had loaded down their armor with like gold and expensive things to try to leave with and bring back to Spain. And, and so they would fall in the mud in the middle of the fight and they would drown to death inside the their armor. And, or you would fall off the bridge and sink to the bottom of the lake. And so Cortez, I think his horse gets killed and his horse falls over and he falls into the water and he's about to sink to the bottom of two of his men grab him in the middle of this fight. And I, I don't know the exact numbers, but only a handful of those Spaniards, only a handful of those Spaniards make it out of that fight. And eventually, you know, the Aztec warriors like retreat. Most of the Spaniards have died. And, and I think Cortez, yeah, I think he makes it out. I can't exactly remember, but anyways, I read up to that point when that battle ended, and I was like, oh, this is just crazy. But anyways, man, that's Basically the fall of Mesoamerica, then, like, that's from the Olmec to the Maya to the Aztecs. Holy shit. Yeah, there's lots of stuff in between there too, of course.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, this is an hour and a half summary of all them of Mesoamerican history. I'm sure there's some things that were skipped over. I'm curious how many of them were killed. Like, once Montezuma is gone, does disease take over and.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah, contagion. So. So the war really contends. It's not. The. The war really continues. It's not just over. When Cortez and his men get out, you know, more Spaniards come back. Yes. Yeah. Of course. Cortez survives because they send. They send off expeditions with Pizarro down to South America. America. So, yeah, the war continues and then the. Yeah, the viruses. So, you know, it wasn't. It wasn't conquistadors slicing down and cutting down Native Americans that killed off. That killed off the native world.

[Luke Caverns]

That certainly happened. But there's millions of.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it was waves of diseases. Right. And. And so those diseases would obviously target major hubs, you know, huge cities. And. And so, yeah, man, I think I've seen. What are people who study pathogens or whatever.

[Luke Caverns]

Epidemiologists.

[Mark Gagnon]

Epidemiologists talk about this, and they think that there were two dozen waves of diseases that basically killed off the Americas. It was actually moving so fast that. Okay, so Columbus arrives in the Bahamas in 1492. By the end of his fourth expedition, there are colonies all over the Caribbean at this point into the early 1500s. And funny enough, like Columbus, as great of a feat as he achieved, he died thinking that he had actually discovered the Indies. Crazy, crazy guy. So in the early 1500s, you have these brave but mostly unnamed European explorers that are just curious about the mainland because they're stuck on the Caribbean, right? And so they go on these little unauthorized voyages, you know, unsupervised voyages. If anything goes wrong, these guys are, you know, screwed. And so they go poking around on the coast of the Yucatan and meeting with the Maya people that are living there and trading with them. Probably taking some of the girls, you know, back to the Caribbean and messing around with them. And anyways, exposing those Maya people to disease. And so disease sweeps down the coast to. In the Gulf and also sweeps down the coast to Bolivia because more expeditions go down. And when Cortez arrives. So that's the year 1500, about early 1500s, you know, first decade. Cortez doesn't go into Veracruz until 1519. And when he does, he meets the Maya people, and he notes how they're small and sickly. Well, they're only sick because of those nameless, obscure expeditions that are only mentioned in early sources in, like, one sentence. Right. But it was those guys that exposed these Native Americans to these pathogens. So on the west side, it spreads into the Mayo world, across the Gulf coast, and then eventually over to Mexico City. And so the Aztecs get it, and then the rest of Mesoamerica gets it, but all the Spaniards have been, up to this point, they're just ignoring this Caribbean coast from. From, you know, the Yucatan peninsula down to Belize and Central America, down to South America. There's nobody poking around there yet. But civilization is still happening, and the diseases are moving, and it moves all the way down Central America, America, through Panama, eviscerates every single civilization, kills every single person in those civilizations. There are burials from this time period between in the early 1500s. There are burials of royal people completely covered in gold. And you carbon date their bones. And they died during the 1500s. And we don't even know the name of the civilization because they were completely wiped out during this whole period before the Spanish ever even knew it existed. Wow. And so it's coming down. It goes into Colombia, it goes into Ecuador, it goes down into Peru in the Inca empire. The Spaniards don't even know about the Inca empire until they start asking the Aztecs, where are you getting this gold from? Do you have gold mines? No, they don't really have gold mines. Well, where are you getting from? Oh, well, there. There are boats that arrive on the western shore. Take us to those boats. They go down to the western shore. This is. This is now 1521. The Spaniards have officially conquered Tenochtitlan, the Aztec empire. So now they're following the trade routes from where the gold is, because that's all they want. So they say, take us to the boats. They go to the western coast of Mexico, and then they say, where? And then more people come up from Peru, and then these are natives that look a little bit different. And then they're talking to the Aztecs to talk to the Peruvians, and they're saying, where are you getting this gold? Okay, take us. So they get in their ships and they're following the trading boats, and then they talk about how when they're going down the Pacific coast. No Spaniard has been to the Pacific, by the way. So they're dealing with waves and, you know, Pacific storms that they've never even seen before. The Pacific is vicious. And they talk about how the, the I can just imagine there are these crazy moments where they see these gigantic Peruvian trading barges that are passing them that are like as big, big as, as Spaniard ships. And then they say that they were capable of carrying like 60 tons of, of 60 tons of goods on the, on the barge itself. And I can just imagine this scene where they're like passing each other in the water and they're all staring at each other because no Spaniards they're ever seeing a ship that big and the natives don't even know what they're looking at and they're just passing each other in the coast. And so anyways, the Spaniards follow the gold all the way to the Inca empty empire and which leads them to Cusco. And when they get to Cusco, the elder emperor, the father of Atahualpa, his name's escaping me right now, but Atahualpa is going to become the most important Inca emperor. His father is dying of a mysterious disease. When the Spaniards arrived. So those first people in 1500 that infected the, the Caribbean coast all the way down Brazil, down through Central America, down through Panama, down through Colom Colombia, down through Ecuador into Peru, all the way up to Cusco. And the Inca emperor was dying of Spanish plague when the Spanish arrived. What? So it was, it was leaping ahead and. Oh yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. Juana Kapuk. So, so yeah, anyways, they conquer the Inca Empire. So through that, the geography, you can see that the Inca empire doesn't have a lot to do with the Aztecs and the Maya. All they're doing is trading gold to the Aztecs. And to be frank with you, I don't actually know what they were getting in return. It wouldn't be food. We should look this up. But yeah, but they had these massive boats, massive boats that were able to.

[Luke Caverns]

Traverse this, I imagine treacherous waters and that the fact that they were so big probably meant made them, you know, able to get through the water like that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

[Luke Caverns]

60 tons is crazy.

[Mark Gagnon]

They had nailed sailing like the Peruvians were sailing out to Easter island. Right? Yeah, yeah. And Easter island is so far off the coast that it's a five hour flight from Santiago, Chile to get to Easter Island.

[Luke Caverns]

Weeks to hit this tiny little.it's about.

[Mark Gagnon]

A, it's about 100 days I think of sailing for days. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, holy lee. I guess gold from.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. So. So what were the Inca getting in return for gold from the Aztecs? I, I don't know. It's a, it's a tough, It's a complicated thing. I'm. I'm sure.

[Luke Caverns]

Let's see if it, let's see if.

[Mark Gagnon]

We got anything from Aztecs. Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, there's a kora from four years ago. Let's see if that, that turns up anything they had.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay, so they worked copper, gold, bronze. Now I should say it's an oversimplification to say that the Inca were trading directly with the Aztecs, because right there says, it says there's no evidence. You had, I should clarify, you had northern Peruvian cultures like the Moche, but the Moche sometimes are subsidiary to the, to the Inca empire. So you have northern Peruvians that are trading with the Aztecs and the northern Peruvians are closely connected to the Inca. So it's kind of like I'm skipping over some details.

[Luke Caverns]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

But yeah, so maybe it was copper. That's what it was, what they were getting in return anyways. So the, the Spaniards do exactly the same thing to the Inca that they did to the Aztecs. They, they, they ambush Atalpa and his men in like one fail swoop. They basically got a knife to Atwalpa's neck. They kidnap him, they keep him in a palace. He sees a shooting star one night and he, and the shooting star is an omen that he's going to kill to die. He dies. And then the Inca just, the Inca just conquered. You know, the Inca were not as warlike as the Aztecs. They, they wanted peace. They're probably the nicest people of all the Native American. You know what? I, I think that that's probably very factual, that the Inca were probably the nicest, wholesome, most, most moral people. Major nation in the pre Columbian world. Even today. They're some of the nicest people. One of the things that I, that I had, I realized the last time I went to Peru was, you know, I travel all around the world and all around the Latin world, and there are places that you go where you can tell that the stray dogs and the stray dogs everywhere, but the dogs have never experienced love. Like he ever met a dog that's never been loved. And they don't even know what it's like to be pet.

[Luke Caverns]

I was in Honduras and I saw. I don't know if this will track with your experience, but there was like a little puppy that wandered into like this little plaza school thing that we were in. And it was like a little puppy and the dude that we were with that kind of runs, the town just walked up and punted the dog. Like he just like, yeah. And the dog was out.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's bizarre.

[Luke Caverns]

I don't think it's all Hondurans. It was maybe just this one guy in the town, but he just like kind of punted the dog. Like, yo, be gone.

[Mark Gagnon]

What I find is, it's. What I find is that's more modernity than it has anything to do with the ancient people. Because the ancient people loved dogs. Like Native Americans from Mexico all the way down to South America. Infinite iconography of dogs, infinite imagery of dogs. They loved dogs. I think not throw the Spanish under the bus. I think it's a Spanish influence, it's a European thing that, that happens in Latin America because Native Americans wouldn't have, they'd be disgusted by this. Right. And so the Inca, the Inca people who speak Quechua in Peru have really held on to this. And so what I was saying was, you know, I traveled a lot of places around the world especially, I'm sure you and Honduras, all the, her, all the Hondurans, they were probably really, really nice to you.

[Luke Caverns]

Okay, yeah, they were wonderful.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I'm not talking about them in particular. I haven't actually been to Honduras. But you know, I'll go to like Egypt, I'll go to some places in Mexico, go to some places in Guatemala, some other places in South America. And I see the way that they treat the dogs and I see that all the dogs are starving. I see that the cows are starving, I see that the horses are starving. The dogs don't know what it's like to be pet. They don't care that you're there. They've never been loved on. And then you can see the actual morality of the people that's there in that. Because in Peru, Peru, dude, there's not one horse, llama, goat, donkey, stray cat or stray dog that's starving and doesn't know what it's like to be loved on. Even the dogs on the street will walk up to you and lean their butt up against you and look up at you so that you'll pet them. There is not one skinny dog in Peru. They're all loved on. The Peruvian people are genuinely good hearted people that even take care of the stray animals. Animals. It's like that almost everywhere that I've been in Peru and I was talking to my wife and I had that realization just last month and I was like, yeah, people can hide it, but you can't hide that. The animals tell You. And that tracks with what we know about the Inca. The Inca were so adept at running such an efficient empire that the need for violence in the way that it existed in North America was not really necessarily necessary. Essentially what they would do is the way that they expanded their. Because it doesn't seem right for an empire. Right. Like you think every other empire, Aztec Empire, Roman Empire, extremely militarily adept. Right. That's not to say that the Inca didn't. Weren't great at combat. I'm sure that they had an outstanding army. We just don't have a lot of archaeological evidence for it. Because what would actually happen was they had this sacred valley that we talked about way at the beginning of the conversation that produced so much, much food, so much food, way more food than there were even Inca people. So what they would do is they go north to a land where they could use those resources. And they go, and they'd see the people there and be like, listen, your people are seasonally starving. You're not eating anything in the winter. You have no food in the winter. You don't know how to plant crops in the way that we do. We can supply you with all the food that you need for the winter. We can build terraces out here for you. And also, your people are too sick and they're dying off. And you don't have any defense against the Ecuadorians that are north of you. So I'm going to give you an option. I'm going to give you two options. I can show up tomorrow with 20,000 of my finest men and bring you more food than you've ever had before and supply you with everything that you're going to need for the winter. I'm going to replace all of your soldiers with my soldiers. I'm going to build you personally a palace in my city, which is the grandest city in South America. And I'm going to allow. Allow you to still be king over your people. And I'm going to make you more wealthy than you ever have been or ever dreamed of being. And you're going to pay me a small tax of all this, right? But he's now replaced his soldiers, right? So he, so he's established dominance, but he's going to allow him to become king. And he's saying you can do that. Or instead of bringing you all that tomorrow, I'm going to eviscerate your entire civilization and you won't exist anymore. And so they, and so they offer you can't refuse. So it's an offer you can't refuse. And as far as we know, I think the Inca never eviscerated anybody. And it's like looked at as one of the world's best run empires ever and like one of the happiest places to ever exist. They had so much abundance, so much abundance. And so what's crazy, another insight as to the Inca mindset was the soldiers, the young men that were fighting on the front lines against the Spanish, if their family needed them back home during the harvest, they could just leave the front line and go back home. Home and farm.

[Luke Caverns]

So it's like, because they knew their strength was ultimately in farming, it was in the abundance. Like with so much abundance, you have a ton of leverage.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. So. And it's also that kind of like empathy. Right. Like, okay, your family needs you. You're not available for the, you're not available for fighting. So you know, you got to go do what you got to do. It's, it's just a. Imagine telling, imagine any soldier telling their superior that in any other army throughout world history, they'd be like, of course.

[Luke Caverns]

Because all their power comes from their military.

[Mark Gagnon]

Exactly, right, exactly. And so, and so that's how the Inca empire grew. Now the place I should finish this is basically the last front now is the Amazon. They want to know, the Spaniards want to know where the Amazon river comes, leads off to and comes from. They want to map the Amazon. So you now have Cortez conquer the Aztecs, you have Pizarro, that's now conquered. The Incas, they kill Oto Tualpa, they establish a. We were talking about Manco Inca earlier who built the city of Vilcabamba. And this mass exodus, they essentially established him as a puppet emperor, a guy who can stand in place and be like, look, the Inca empire still exists. Like kinda, you know, and then so probably enough internal pressure, he actually turned into a full blown emperor against the Spanish, flees to Vilcabamba for 11 years or so and then eventually he gets killed. All the Inca people come back. Inca empire's done last frontier in a certain way. Now there's lots of other things, like there's Patagonia, there's still all of North America that's untouched. But the ne. I say just the next frontier was charting the Amazon River. So they send Orellana down, Orianna goes down and he ma, he, he notes like these 15 mile long cities with millions of people living in them, gigantic buildings with stone walls and like these women warriors that they'd never seen before. And they Called them the Amazons because it remind them of the mythical women war of ancient Greece. They see all this amazing stuff in the Amazon from 1541 or 1540 to 1544 or 1545. They do two different expeditions and on the second one Orellana dies at like 35 years old. But they map all this amazing stuff. But almost none of the Spaniards die. It's so dangerous. And it takes them, I think each expedition is like two years or almost two years. It's more, more than a year. And all of the Indians that they take with them basically die or disappear into the jungle. And then I think all but maybe 40 of the Spaniards die and then they get split up and they all crash land on the same island when they get out of the, on the Atlantic coast. And so it's this fascinating story, but they had told these stories of these great civilizations. So it sent, it's sends this surge to go find these lost cities of gold or whatever, but none of them are, are ever found. And then so this search for these, for this lost Amazonian gold, like cities like El Dorado, things like that goes on for so long and they don't find anything that by the late 1800s, early 1900s, all of these archaeologists out in, in, in England pretty much just assume that all the Spaniards were lying, lying about these grand civilizations, the Amazon, and that there was nothing like that out there and that the Amazon was too difficult to terrain to build these grand cities in. But we know today through Lidar, is that all these cities really did exist. There were, there were cities with huge step pyramids and mile, you know, like highways that are hundreds of miles of long cutting through the Amazon with huge raised plazas and market squares. And the reason that no one ever found them was because the disease had spread into the Amazon and the major hubs were just wiped out like that. So they estimate that the population of the Amazon went from like 20 million to zero over the course of a few decades. And, and all the major hubs were just eviscerated overnight essentially. And so those major civilizations that Orellana saw on the first expeditions didn't exist the second time around that Europeans came in. It was all abandoned by the, by the early seven, so that was 1540. And then by the early 1700s nobody saw these cities again. There were like no European. I think, I think it was the early 1700s that from then on no European ever saw any of these major cities again. All they would see is little villages along the river with like short, sickly.

[Luke Caverns]

People now a city of gold that was largely fabricated, or is it possible that they painted them with this stuff?

[Mark Gagnon]

I should address that. No, I'm pretty sure that, I'm pretty sure that they existed. None of these cities that have been lidar had ever actually been ground. Truth. They've never been excavated. We just know that they're there to this day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the only one is, is a site called Kiriguyu and there was already a town nearby it. They just didn't know that the city was there. But large parts of the city hasn't been excavated. But yeah, there, there are other Amazonian cities that have been found on lidar. But no ground expedition has ever actually gone there to excavate it at all because it's so expensive. It's like vastly more expensive than just running the lidar. Because you have to.

[Luke Caverns]

Like right now as we sit here, there's potentially a city of gold.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, I. Not just one. Yeah, probably. Probably dozens. Probably dozens. Probably dozens. I mean, yeah, I would say, I would say dozens. Like think about this, the Amazon. How many? Okay, you just guess how many. So we refer to. We know so little about the Amazon that we call them Amazon. Right. How many different civilizations of pre Columbian tribes, native tribes do you think existed, say in 1491, before Spaniards ever got here? How many tribes do you think existed just in North America within the borders of the US if you had to.

[Luke Caverns]

Put a number on it, within just the United States?

[Mark Gagnon]

How many would you guess?

[Luke Caverns]

You're, you're, you're tempting me to want to guess how high? I would guess probably like, I mean, let's say we got 50 states. Let's say you got like three. I would go high number like 200.

[Mark Gagnon]

200. Yeah, yeah. 200 is probably not a bad guess. I mean, yeah, I'd say 200 is not a bad guess. Maybe a little more than that. Maybe, maybe like twice as much. Possibly. Okay, the Amazon is the same size as the United States. So why would there just be one? Like there's going to be one in California and there's not going to be one anywhere else? No, man, there's dozens. And the reasons the Spanish could never find them is because they were, they were everywhere. But they had risen and fallen in ancient times. They just like Yashilan we were talking about, had fallen at 900 AD, 600 years before the Spaniards ever rose. The legends of these old, great, wonderful, super rich cities had existed long, long, long ago at various different points in time. And, and so these These villages that were around the Amazon knew the legends of these cities, and they were all they were. There were so many of them that whenever the Spanish would. Would. Whenever the Spanish would be asking about them, they'd say, yeah, I've heard of this. I think it's over down this way now. Modern academics look at it and say, well, it was the. It was the. The natives lying to the Spaniards so that the Spaniards would leave them alone and go look for this other place. I don't think that's the case, though. I. I think that a lot of what we see about Native Americans shows that they're pretty honest with the Spaniards. And I think that they knew the legend of these ancient cities and they pointed them to where the ancient city was. But I think they're so buried by the jungle that the Spaniards, hypothetically were walking through the jungle, went over a hill and kept walking and didn't realize they just walked over the city. They just walked right through it. That's how covered it up is, by the jungle.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah. And I guess I'm thinking like, okay, there's probably, when they look, land, 1492 in the Amazon, maybe there's, you know, 200, 300 different villages, tribes, whatever you want to call them, nations. But that's excluding the 2,000 years before that of cities that existed and rose and fell.

[Mark Gagnon]

Exactly right.

[Luke Caverns]

So now we're in, like, the thousands.

[Mark Gagnon]

So you have this current layer, and then you have the layer underneath that, and then the layer underneath that, and then underneath that. Holy. Yeah. Yeah. So when you're looking for these lost cities of gold, you can see that the gold is there in. I mean, I have. I have hundreds of photos in my phone of South American gold artifacts. Like, there were people who were wearing outfits made entirely of gold, just entire, like the headdress, the. The mask, the little nose piece, the mouthpiece, the. This upper collar with the necklaces that are made out of gold and waistbands that are made of gold and shoes that are made out of gold, and gloves with gauntlets that are made out of gold, like. And, yeah, it just. It was everywhere. It was all over the place. And in fact, I think that there's even a. There's even a city. It's a Moche city called. Dang. What's this thing called? Takume. You could look that up. T U C U M E. Yeah, Moche city. Takume. And. And so if you click on it, it looks like something that would be in ancient Egypt, but all the pyramids are basically. Basically like melted if you just pull up more photos of them, and from this city, you could even type gold at the end of the search, and you'll see that the Moche, they had so many gold artifacts. Like, this is another El Dorado right here. I. That's. That. That's the myth that I think about El Dorado is that people think it was one city. I think it was dozens of cities, just dozens of them. Now, is this. Does the city appear the way that it was shown a movie? Probably not. I mean, it probably looks like what we expect them as American city to look like. However, it's filthy rich in gold. Like, they just have tons of gold jewelry. Right. Because it's not like they. They're not. They don't have ingots of gold. They have little plated pieces of gold. It's like a plate that's this big, or it can be this big. And they're hammering it out and making little designs out of it and then wearing it and putting. Putting it on their body. And so it's. I don't think. Oh, yeah, yeah. If you go one to the right of the one you clicked on. Oh, that's like the Alps. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Down middle.

[Luke Caverns]

Right.

[Mark Gagnon]

Second photo.

[Luke Caverns]

Yeah, that one right there.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. So that's what the guys were wearing.

[Luke Caverns]

And so they see these guys, and they're like, yeah, they got a lot of gold.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

And then the disease precedes them.

[Mark Gagnon]

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

[Luke Caverns]

They're walking over an overgrown plaza.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

Potentially overgrown tombs full of gold underneath.

[Mark Gagnon]

Full of all the gold that they were looking for, because as they were dying off, they were being buried with it, because it's not monetary. It's religious. Right. So you wouldn't. Nobody would keep it for themselves. And also, Native Americans didn't view things like, oh, this is jade. This is serpentine. This is gold. I got to hoard this. This for myself. There's a tomb called Tomb 7 at Mont Alban in Oaxaca, Mexico, and it's the wealthiest tomb ever found in Mexico because so much of the Aztec world was looted, but this one wasn't looted. Yeah. So here's tomb. Here's tomb seven. So this is actually South American gold that's being brought up to Oaxaca. There's no, there's no gold like this at this time. So. So this is about 500. This is about 500 to 250 BC. So there's no gold in Mexico at this point. So this is gold that's being traded up from South America. Mesoamerican archaeologists don't want to acknowledge this because it's like, it opens up kind of dangerous territory for a South American archaeologist to now want claims to be able to study certain artifacts in Mexico, because this technically originates in South Africa, South America. Right. So Mexican archaeologists look at it, they're like, no, no, no. This is. This is definitely Mexican gold.

[Luke Caverns]

Where did it come from? Well, we just don't know yet.

[Mark Gagnon]

Exactly. It's. It's bs. It's clearly. It's clearly South American gold.

[Luke Caverns]

That also illustrates how sophisticated the trade lines are.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, dude, that. That's kind of like the. That's actually. That's kind of like a new. Okay, so everyone's obsessed with Atlantis, the interconnectedness of the Americas. For me and the people who watch my channel and some other people who do what I do, that's kind of like our Atlantis is like just how connected the Americas were. You can read through the lines and see it, and it's like, whoa. This is all one vast interconnected world. These weren't just isolated tribes.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, 500 BC, these guys are getting gold from two and a half, 2,500 miles away. Like.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, it's remarkable. Through dense jungle.

[Mark Gagnon]

Through dense jungle. Or across the ocean or a treacherous Pacific Ocean. Ocean, exactly, exactly. So. So all of this was being kept in something called Tomb 7. It's this. It's this stone tomb with these megalithic floor slabs, wall slabs, and then these lintels that cross over like this. I've been down inside Tomb 7, and. And it's actually, it's probably about. It's. It's actually the same size and the same shape as your tent right here. And so he was laid down in the center of it with this burial mask over. Over his. Over his skull and all these gold artifacts around him. And this next thing I'm going to tell you gives you an idea of the way Native Americans thought about riches. Okay. They clearly viewed them as ceremonial and sacred and something you would never even dream of. Like, okay, so Egyptians looted each other's tombs all the time. It wasn't just Modern European tomb robbers that broke into Egypt.

[Luke Caverns]

Middle kingdoms taken from old kingdoms.

[Mark Gagnon]

Exactly right.

[Luke Caverns]

New kingdoms taken from Middle kingdom.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sometimes the grave diggers themselves were the grave robbers the next day. Right.

[Luke Caverns]

They would lock up the front. They had a back entrance they knew about.

[Mark Gagnon]

Exactly, exactly. And Native Americans would never, ever, ever, ever think about doing this because this king or whoever it was was buried in Tomb 7. And 40 other people from a later civilization. So that's like. I could have some of my dates wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is 500 BC ish. It's definitely the beast BC period. Then the mishtechs around 900 AD 1400 years later, buried. 40 people were buried inside that tomb just on top of that guy. Never even disturbed all the grave goods that were in there. Didn't take anything out. They found the tomb. Yeah, yeah. Because it was like a. You could, you could like pull the slab off of the front grave. Like they, the. The city of Mont Alban probably, I mean, probably still existed. It was cleaned up, well kept landscaping, you know what I mean? They knew where the cemeteries of the city of Monte Alban were. It probably wasn't a secret. And so people wanted to be buried with this. Probably it was a historical figure that the Mixtecs knew who this guy was and knew that this grave was important. But we have no idea who the identity of this person today. But clearly they knew who this guy was. So I'm pretty sure 40 people chose to be buried in there with the. That guy who had been buried in there 1400 years earlier. And they did not disturb any of the grave goods. They just laid the body down inside the grave with him. And so it's like nowhere in, in the Native American world do we ever see any evidence of people of, of materialism. You know, they just, they understand that gold is valuable and important, but yet it's not something that you would ever steal from a tomb. So it doesn't have monetary. Like you can't just go to a market it and sell it.

[Luke Caverns]

Right. Also, if it's more ubiquitous than it is in other places on earth, then it's going to have less value or lesser value.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, my. What I think it is, is I think it's probably, I think it's probably a sacred material that they were able to identify that it doesn't erode. It can't, you know, you can't do anything to damage gold. It's eternal. It lasts forever. It can, it can go into many different shapes. You can melt it down and turn it into something else and melt it down again. You can leave it in water and pick it back up out of the water, and it's perfect. You know what I mean? I think that they. I think they saw that gold had a divine element to it, and that's why only important people could have it. I don't think that it's like, oh, gold is worth this many coffee beans, this much chocolate. Right? So. And that's why the Aztecs were, like, appalled that the Spanish wanted the gold so bad. Like, you're not. You don't even. You don't believe in our religion. Like, what do you want this for? They had no idea. They don't even understand what money was. Right. So it's just crazy. It was all. It was all bartering and trade.

[Luke Caverns]

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

[Mark Gagnon]

I think that that's kind of the. That's something I'm hoping to, as I go forward, like, making YouTube videos and stuff is I, you know, I. I study. Like, my wife has gotten an education on. On ancient history. I mean, man, you live and breathe this. I live and breathe. This is all I do. And. And what I feel talked about on my YouTube video, in my YouTube videos or my, you know, social media videos is just. It's like nothing compared to everything that I've studied. But I'm just. I'm trying to learn how to communicate these things effectively. And I think I'm finally kind of getting it, you know, so. Yeah. Yeah. I hope over time I'm able to cover all of this in a comprehensive, fun way for people to understand. Because I think that the thing is, is, like, history can sometimes be inaccessible because it's presented in such a boring way. Yeah. And I'm trying to convey, you know, without. You know, it's easy to ride the Atlantis wave. It's easy to only talk about Atlantis. But, man, there's so much more, you know, there's so much more than that. And I think that when people realize that there's some really amazing mysteries that can actually be solved, I And. And it's presented in a fun way. I think it opens up people to an entirely new world. And. And I think that the Americas are.

[Luke Caverns]

The key to that, especially when there's so much on the precipice. I mean, like, of course, the pyramids of Giz are fascinating to me. Like they are most people. But you're telling me there's potentially unknown cities, dozens of them. Not potentially, certainly unknown cities. Potentially unknown cities of gold.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. You know what?

[Luke Caverns]

Scattered through the Amazon. I mean, that gets me excited.

[Mark Gagnon]

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

[Luke Caverns]

And where is that. Where is that airing?

[Mark Gagnon]

It's right now on the History Channel. Yeah. Fuck, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I filmed this like a year ago. So it was History's Greatest Mysteries with Laurence Fishburne on the History Channel. So they. They. The CEO of History. I can finally talk about this. The CEO of the History Channel saw me on Julian's podcast in 2023 talking about Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z. So they called me in to do this episode with Laurence Fishburne. And I just realized, just saying that lost cities in the Amazon, it just reminded me that, yeah, it's probably happening. It's probably happening right now. It's probably wrapping up right now, or it's about to start. But yeah, man, there's not. Not potentially 100% is. You could just look up lidar maps of the Amazon and boom. Oh, dude. They just found. They found a City late 2023 or. Or early 2024 in the Ecuadorian Amazon with 2000 buildings in it. And I think they're just now excavating it and they've already started to find gold artifacts there. So. It's everywhere. It's everywhere, man. If it. When once independent lidar becomes a thing and it becomes so easy to do that you can get away with it. Right. Because it's illegal. Like, if I had a LIDAR drone and I tried to fly it in Ecuador or. Or Mexico or Colombia, the government's not.

[Luke Caverns]

Going to just let a drone fly around tracking their city or tracking their town.

[Mark Gagnon]

Absolutely not. No, no. I would get thrown under the jail. Yeah. But eventually it's going to become so easy to do it that that's going to happen no matter what. Right. And then some. Some. Some guy is going to invest 50 grand in a crazy LiDAR drone that can fly 20 miles away. You know, let's say like, let's say like 15 years from now, he's going to invest 50 grand in this crazy drone that's like the size of this room that you can put in the back of a truck. And he's going to sneak it down into Peru and he's going to fly it to this site that he found on this Google Earth on steroids, where you can see, you know, a pen on the ground or something, and he's going to find an ancient city, and then when he gets back to the US he's going to release it to the Internet and boom, it's going to be this. It's going to be a wild west. And like, everything's going to get mapped and, and I, you know, if we could, if we could pull back the canopy of the Amazon and see what's actually under there, it's the size of the United States, bro. There's. So if you look at a map from the early 1900s of the known mound sites in North America, from the Mississippi all the way up to the Great Lakes, it's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pyramids in North America. Like, we don't call them pyramids, but we should, because that's what they are. They're. They have the same significance as pyramids elsewhere. They're just made out of packed earth. But if you saw them in ancient times, you may not realize that they weren't made out of stone. That's how pristine they would have been. They weren't just grassy nulled hills like they are now. They were well defined and sometimes they had artwork on them or they, they could be painted on. So anyways, some, some of them were made out of stone, but, um, there were thousands of them, dude. And that's. And we're just now realizing how, how much this. I'm talking about one famous map. But we're just now starting to realize how underestimated that map was of the amount of mounds that there actually are. Because now there's a lot of people asking for the mound to be updated and because they know that once it gets updated, the whole country will be filled in with red dots. They're everywhere.

[Luke Caverns]

And that's just America.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, that's just the U.S. so, you know, the Amazon is probably more so.

[Luke Caverns]

Well, I'm excited for you to discover all of them.

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, I have, I have a. I have a. I've talked about this before. I have Access to a, A, a comet impact map of the US there's teams that study like, so they think that the, the, the Great Lakes are a comet impact site and that shrapnel shot all over the US and they're trying, they were trying to track the shrapnel of this, this comet. And in doing that, one of the guys, that, his name is Chris Cottrell. He and I are friends, and one of the guys was working for the team. He sent me that map because when he was looking at these little impact sites, he saw these little bumps under. On the lidar, and he realized that those are Indian mounts that were in the middle of the woods. And he was like, hey, here's this map. You might find some use with it. Come to find out. I, I start mapping things in like, Florida, you know, the south, the Southeast, finding all, all kinds of mound sites that hadn't been charted before. And I, I look at the, the Apalachicola river in, in western Florida, and I mapped like, probably like four cities in, along the river in the middle of this, like these swamps, like the jungles, you know, where you're miles and miles and miles away from the road. There's nothing nearby it. And I call the head professor of the University of Florida or senior South Florida. I don't. It's not the ones of the Seminoles. The other, the ones. The mascot is the bull.

[Luke Caverns]

Usf.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, usf. I called the head professor of the archaeological department, and she kind of gave me a bad attitude and she didn't want to talk to me. And so I start talking to her on the phone. I'm like, hey, you know, I got this access to this LIDAR map from this team that works with meteorites. I saw some stuff out in the Apalachicola River. I saw that you wrote a book about it. I was just curious if you've seen anything like this. She was like, okay, what do you mean? And so I sent her an email and she, her tone changed. She goes, where did you get this? I've never seen anything like this. And I went and I hung up the phone. And I've never, I've never shared this with anybody, I swear. I hung, I hung up the phone on her and, and I did not realize that even the universities in Florida didn't have access to something like this. So I've mapped a ton of sites in Florida. I have to share them with you, man. I, I'm talking about things will blow your mind. And the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon was taken to a city that was a mon. A mile in, and that was a mile off the coast of Florida, and no one's ever found this before, and I found something that fits that description, and Dr. Barnhart thinks so as well. So I'm gonna go down there later this year and find out. What the hell, dude?

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, this is so exciting.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Luke Caverns]

I mean, especially, like, someone like me from Florida. Like, I've read about Ponce de Leon my whole life.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

Like, he's, like, a part of, like, Floridian history and the fact that you're gonna go uncover.

[Mark Gagnon]

Maybe you should come with me. I'll see you there. I'm dead serious.

[Luke Caverns]

I would love this.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay. Yeah, let's do it. I think Danny wants to come too. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

He's in Tampa.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Luke Caverns]

Oh, my. Dude, legit. Sign me up. Okay. And this has been fascinating.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. Truly. This is everything I wanted it to be. This is. And I love your set.

[Luke Caverns]

Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. This is so fun. And I'm really excited for you to come back once you. Once you. Once you make some more discoveries.

[Mark Gagnon]

Thank you, sir. We'll do it. Thank you.