#421 - "Hollywood BANNED!" - Uncensored History of Aztecs, Conquistadors & Cannibals | Will Brown

Summary

Julian Dorey Podcast #421 – "Hollywood BANNED!"

Uncensored History of Aztecs, Conquistadors & Cannibals | Will Brown
Date: May 13, 2026
Guest: Will Brown
Host: Julian Dorey
Episode Description: Wild stories from history and uncensored takes on the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, why Hollywood avoids this explosive subject, and what modern AI means for historical storytelling.

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the history of the Aztecs, the Spanish conquistadors, cannibalism in Mesoamerica, and why Hollywood shies away from dramatizing these violent, controversial stories. Will Brown—a historian, filmmaker, and YouTube creator—shares both historical details from primary sources and commentary on how AI is shaking up the way we revisit the past. The discussion candidly explores shifting historical perspectives, troubling aspects of conquest, the cycles of civilizations, and even veers into modern bioethics and simulation theory.

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Key Topics & Discussions

Will Brown’s Background & Use of AI for History ([00:13-06:55])

• Will Brown discusses living in Puerto Rico and his travel focus on South & Central American mysteries.
• Praised for his YouTube work using AI to recreate historical scenes (Aztecs, Conquistadors).
• AI allows “history teachers on a budget” to show what Hollywood would never touch:

  "There are things happening with AI that are going to allow people like me with a history teacher budget to do things that Hollywood would have… It would take $10 million to do." (Will, 05:00)

• The history of Spanish vs. Aztec contact is cited as one of the wildest, most underappreciated—and controversial—stories never made by Hollywood.

Why Hollywood Won’t Touch the Spanish-Aztec Story ([06:55-08:45])

• Hollywood avoids stories such as the Conquistadors and Aztec Empire due to controversy and political sensitivity:

  "I think it’s a topic that a lot of people don’t want to touch because it’s so… It’s the craziest story of all time." (Will, 08:46)

The Nature of Primary Sources & “History Written by the Victors” ([09:04-12:12])

• Will defends the use of Spanish sources, highlighting their dual fealty to both Catholicism and the Spanish Crown—making them incentivized to write accurate (if sometimes self-justifying) records.
• Addresses the issue of English translations sometimes painting the Spanish worse than they were.
• Valuable primary sources are available from Project Gutenberg, WikiSources, writings by Hernán Cortés and Bernal Díaz.

The Complexity of History & Zero-to-One Hundred Internet Culture ([15:26-16:43])

• Julian notes: “People either got to be 0 or 100 on something.” (15:26)
• Emphasis that historical figures were both impactful and deeply flawed.

Spanish Atrocities & Aztec Cannibalism ([16:43-18:45], [134:20-136:59])

• Spanish sources openly record their own “sins” and massacres, e.g., the Cholula Massacre (5,000–6,000 slaughtered)
• Aztec society described as conducting human sacrifice and cannibalism, not just as ritual but as a system of taxation and control:

  "You had children being fattened up in cages at some of the [Aztec] markets, like, to be sold... as a commodity, like a food, to be eaten." (Will, 134:03)

• Not all recountings are agreed upon by modern scholars or indigenous sources.

Crazy Conquistador Tales ([22:32-34:51])

• Adventurers like Lope de Aguirre: a “madman” who hunted a judge across South America for three years barefoot, mutinied, declared himself king, and died gruesomely.
• The Amazon exploration: Spanish chroniclers describe finding vast, organized civilizations, mounds, and “pens of river turtles” for food.

The Use and Limits of AI in Storytelling ([34:51-37:16])

• Will explains technical process: generate precise stills, then animate, rather than prompt a video outright for better accuracy.
• Julian laments: real Hollywood budgets now often go to replacing actors with AI rather than telling untold stories.

The De Soto Expedition & Realities of Conquistador Life ([38:48-41:21])

• Hernando de Soto’s wild, doomed trek through the Southeast US — a disaster with most participants dying, leaving maps and stories behind.
• Inspiration for “Pocahontas” narrative may have come from a Spanish castaway, Juan Ortiz.

The Impact of the Colombian Exchange ([43:12-46:44])

• Discussion on how ingredients like tomatoes and tobacco, “most used drug in the world,” originated in the Americas—transforming Old World cuisine and society.

  "The Italians didn’t have tomatoes before this... that's lasagna, that's pizza!" (Will, 44:05)

Numbers and Logistics of Conquest ([46:44-47:53])

• E.g., Columbus’s first voyage: approx. 86–90 men, three ships.
• Early confusion: Columbus thought Cuba was Japan.

War, Conquest & Atrocities: A Universal, Tragic Alliance ([50:23-54:47])

• Rape and enslavement were often “prizes of war” across history and cultures; the Spanish Conquest was particularly brutal.
• Notable Spanish figures often bragged about atrocities in private letters.
• Hollywood reluctance to depict this unflinchingly.

Alternate Histories & The Rise of Spain ([75:53-78:09])

• Spain’s “golden era” kickstarted by the Americas – fueling its power for 200 years.
• Speculation: What if Aztecs had 100–200 more years to rise before Spanish arrival?

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The Conquest of Mexico – The Story of Cortés ([120:10-149:48])

Origins & Approach

• Hernán Cortés: From ambitious young man to major landholder in Cuba.
• Maneuvers to lead expedition to Mexico, essentially pirating the permission of the governor.
• Initial contact with Maya and then with interior tribes through Tabasco and Veracruz.
• Acquires interpreters: Malinche (Nahuatl/Maya speaker) and Aguilar (Maya/Spanish speaker).

The Road to Tenochtitlan

• Strategic alliances: Tlaxcalans (100,000 warriors!) join Cortés, motivated by hatred for Aztec taxation and sacrifices.
• Massacre of Cholula as psychological and literal warfare.
• Montezuma, possibly influenced by prophecy, welcomes and is soon held captive by Cortés.

The Siege and Fall

• Spanish paranoia leads to a massacre during a festival at Tenochtitlan (with Cortés away fighting rival Spaniards).
• La Noche Triste ("sad night"): Spanish attempt to flee the city, half are killed or sacrificed.
• Final siege—Spanish regroup, blockade city, disease (smallpox) ravages the Aztecs.
• New emperor tortured (feet boiled in oil) for location of gold—much of Montezuma’s treasure lost in the lake.

Aftermath

• Cortés returns to Spain to defend his actions, eventually settles back in Mexico.
• La Malinche (his interpreter/concubine) and their child: among the first Mestizos.
• Massive death on both sides; Spanish New World empire takes shape.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “I’m not saying I’m getting everything right, but I don’t hide the fact that in these videos, these conquistador videos, my primary sources are the Spanish.” (Will, 09:04)
• On the complexity of history:
  “Love the Revolutionary War. Love the guys that did it. Incredible work. They were still imperfect men." (Julian, 16:10)
• “You can’t touch history if you can’t touch anything brutal.” (Will, 53:30)
• "As soon as you think you got your bearings, history just gets weirder." (Will, paraphrased various times)

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Aztecs, Astronomy & Civilizational Patterns ([80:14-100:59])

• Natives in the Americas possessed extensive astronomical knowledge—building temples and organizing society around cosmic cycles, e.g., the 18.6-year lunar standstill.
• Surprising links between economic cycles (Ray Dalio, WD Gann) and ancient astronomical cycles.

  "When you have these things happening... I think something's probably happening, right?" (Will, 99:37)

Simulation Theory & Free Will ([97:23-104:34])

• The conversation veers into philosophy: Is everything predetermined? Is consciousness separate from deterministic physics?
• "Simulation theory is just a 2026 definition of what's already been written in the Bible." (Will, 97:50)
• Will: Magic mushrooms, nephew’s healing, and humility lead back to belief in God—but with skepticism about certainty.

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Modern Bioethics, Eugenics & the Dangers of Scientific Progress ([109:16-119:59])

• The problem of designer babies, CRISPR, and what it means for society when only the wealthy have access to advanced genetics.
• “Even if it's illegal... that paints a dystopian world to me.” (Julian, 113:55)
• Stories of Chinese gene editing for HIV resistance—unexpected offshoots: Genius-level IQ in gene-edited twins.
• Cautions about breakaway civilizations and private bioengineering.

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Closing Segments

• Will describes his teaching background, favorite era is New Spain/conquest.
• Julian and Will agree: Hollywood and streaming platforms are missing a massive opportunity by not tackling this era with depth.
• Noted historian Kevin Seppell (Conquistador Voices)—recommended reading for honest, nuanced takes.

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Recommended Resources

• Primary Sources: Project Gutenberg, WikiSource (Cortés and Díaz’s writings)
• Book: "Conquistador Voices" by Kevin H. Seppell
• Will Brown’s YouTube Channel
• Further Research: Fourth Turning (Howe & Strauss), cycles in economics (W.D. Gann), Colossal Labs (bioethics discussion)

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Timestamps by Segment

• Puerto Rico & Will’s Background: 00:13–05:13
• AI & Storytelling: 05:13–06:55
• Why Hollywood Won’t Touch These Stories: 06:55–08:45
• On Primary Sources: 09:04–12:12
• Complexity of Historical Narrative: 15:26–16:43
• Spanish Atrocities & Aztec Cannibalism: 16:43–18:45, 134:20–136:59
• Conquistador Survival Stories: 22:32–34:51
• AI and Film Industry: 34:51–37:16
• De Soto & Early Southeast Explorations: 38:48–41:21
• Colombian Exchange/Global Impact: 43:12–46:44
• Conquest Logistics: 46:44–47:53
• War, Rape & Historical Atrocities: 50:23–54:47
• Rise of Spain & Alternative History: 75:53–78:09
• Aztec Origins & Cosmology: 76:21–80:14
• Cycles — Astronomy and Economics: 80:14–100:59
• Bioethics and CRISPR Debate: 109:16–119:59
• Full Story of Cortés and the Fall of Tenochtitlan: 120:10–149:48
• Teaching History — How Will Reaches Students: 158:17–160:00

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Final Notes

This episode is a masterclass in how wild, nuanced, and relevant the history of the Americas can be when stripped from the safety of textbook summaries. Will’s commitment to primary sources, his honest acknowledgment of moral ambiguity, and Julian’s probing questions create a fast-moving yet thoughtful exploration of why the Conquest—and history in general—remains contested territory.

If you want cinematic, gritty, uncensored stories from history—Hollywood isn’t giving you one. Listen to, and watch, creators like Will Brown make them instead.

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For more, subscribe to Will Brown’s YouTube and the Julian Dorey Podcast. Watch Will’s "Spanish vs. Aztec" episode for a visual companion to the stories above.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to New Jersey.

[A]

Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it. Big fan of the pod, of course.

[B]

Thank you. Thank you, brother. It's also like shocking you haven't done a million pods already. Your channel's great.

[A]

Thank you. Yeah, you know, I've kind of just been growing here and there, putting out some content lately. Lately I've been doing these AI videos, videos with the conquistadors, retelling the history of that first contact moment. But for the last few years, I've been chasing mysteries down in South America, North America.

[B]

Yeah. You've been on the ground, you were telling me.

[A]

Yep, on the ground. And kind of got a smorgasbord worth of stuff we can talk about today. So excited to be here.

[B]

Of course there's. There's a lot on the bone, for sure. But your whole. What was really cool is like, first of all, you're living down in Puerto Rico right now. How'd you end up down there? That's. I heard amazing things about it.

[A]

Grew up in Kansas, landlocked state and decided I needed to be near an ocean. I love Latin America. Got easy access to South America down there. And so I've been over there for going on like a year and a half now. So Puerto Rico's home now. I love it.

[B]

That's awesome. Where are you in Puerto Rico?

[A]

San Juan. San Juan.

[B]

So you were telling me though that the west coast of Puerto Rico is like a pretty. Pretty well kept secret.

[A]

Yeah. West coast. I don't know if it's too much secret. Like it's. Rincon is where a lot of the Puerto Ricans go and vacation. They call it Green Cone. There's a lot of gringos that live there, so. But that's the surf capital of the Caribbean. Big waves, like big swells out there on the north side of northwest side right there. It's kind of a cool area because you got. The northwest side is huge waves like pipeline level waves during certain seasons. And then you just go around the corner of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico's small island.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And those waves calm down. And so you got these, you know, flat, you know, water where you can see islands out there for miles. Yep.

[B]

That's beautiful. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.

[A]

I love Puerto Rico. Shout out to Puerto Rico and everybody there. My Spanish, it's getting a little better. It's a little rough.

[B]

Oh, you're still not Fluent in it.

[A]

Not. Not fluent.

[B]

But did you know any before you went down there?

[A]

Yeah, I've been traveling around Mexico and South America for four years. But food, food and like, drinks, no problem, man. Like, my, my, my, like, number one interaction in Spanish is always ordering in restaurants, so. But Puerto Rican Spanish is really fast.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so I have to ask them to slow down. But they also speak a little bit of Spanglish over there. Like, these are all American.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Right. So there's a little bit of, A little bit of a blend, but yeah, I love it down there.

[B]

That's our, that's our 51st state.

[A]

Hey, it's.

[B]

Everyone says Greenland, but, you know, I feel like Puerto Rico's got the inside track there now.

[A]

Well, you know, Puerto Ricans know they've been Americans, they've had American passports, they've served in the military for a long time now. So it's definitely its own vibe there separate from they're. I feel like Puerto Ricans first and foremost, like, where their pride is, you know, kind of like a Texan maybe, but, yeah, like Fourth of July, it was hopping. They were celebrating. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

American patriotism down there.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

It's a little warmer down there right now, too.

[A]

That's nice. That was quite the. The difference. When I landed here, I got this hoodie that's all I brought, and it was cold.

[B]

Man, I would have told you back at Jack it was cold. We just had like one of the more historically cold, like, week and a half we've had in a long time. I'd be walking in the gym in the morning and it would say, like, the temperature is 3 and with a wind chill of minus 13. I'm like, well, I guess I'm going to be awake when I get in there.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. You don't need to do the cold plunge after the sauna. You just walk outside.

[B]

We don't have to do it artificially.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

Got it in our bones. But like I was saying, you got a great channel. You were shouted out by Michael Button when he was in here. And you and I have a close mutual friend as well in Luke Caverns.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Who speaks really highly of your work, but you do a lot of different types of topics. And I, for one, you, you referenced that. I don't know if we were on camera yet when you did, but you referenced, you know, some of the AI storytelling as well. I, I really like how when you did, for example, the history of the Aztecs, which we'll talk about today, because you did an amazing job with that. But like you were using, creating like AI to create the scenes and everything. And like to me that's a good use of AI because we don't have like footage from you know, 1500 and like that. To be able to tell historically in a documentary format on YouTube, here's what's happening and to be able to kind of show people what that might look like. Really, really good stuff, man.

[A]

Appreciate that. So a lot of people, they're still, we're still getting used to this idea of using AI for whether it's B footage or just a full on documentary. And for me it wasn't even necessarily. I don't even call it a documentary. I kind of just call it a, like a Spanish versus Aztec video. There are, there are things happening with AI that are going to allow people like me with a history teacher budget to do things that Hollywood would have. It would take $10 million to do several years ago. I'm not saying we're there yet or that I'm there yet, but that's why I'm getting interested in it. A lot of people talk about AI slop and that's true. There is a lot of AI slob out there. I'm guilty of some AI slop. But my goal is to keep getting better at it because I prom. It's. It's rapidly developing and I think history is a really good way to use it. In particular because Hollywood doesn't ever do anything with the conquistadors. Yeah, it's a very tab. I don't want to say it's a taboo subject. It's a very sensitive subject and for me I'm ready to make it. I think the Spanish versus Aztec story is probably the most underrated story that Hollywood has never really touched before. Why? That moment of first contact where two worlds are colliding. We have documentation of it. The Spanish wrote a lot of things down and I got some words, I got some stuff to talk about with that too. Because a lot of people say they were lying and embellishing. I'm sure there's some of that. But I got some stuff to say about that later too. But they've never made a Hollywood movie about it.

[B]

Why? That's what I want to know. Why do you think it's so taboo for them to do that? And I say this as someone who, even though this isn't the exact topic, it was technically something fictionalized right before. I say this as someone who. One of my favorite movies ever is Apocalypto Yeah. Which is, like, cinematically beautiful and tells an amazing story. You know what I mean? And people, really, especially over time, people that has aged so well. So what? Why don't they go make something? Like, on that time period with the Aztecs?

[A]

It's. It's pretty fresh. And I think it's a little too soon, maybe, for a place that's too, like, kind of politically correct, like Hollywood and 500 years, you know, there's still a lot that is developed since. And. And I'm. I'm kind of joking when I say it's too soon. Like, it's been 500 years. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I think it's. I think it's a topic that a lot of people don't want to touch because it's so. One of the reasons it's done so well. My video on Facebook, it's gotten millions and millions of views. I got 17 million views on Facebook in December just from reposting clips of all this stuff.

[B]

You got to teach us. I don't. I'm not even on Facebook.

[A]

Facebook is where. Facebook's where it's at. We can talk after this.

[B]

Yes, please.

[A]

The. The boomer. Shout out to the boomers. They will sit down and watch a video. And they're all on Facebook, so definitely get on there. And Facebook's monetized as well.

[B]

If you know how to do. I'm dead serious. If you, like, know how to do it and want to talk to me about that and want to just take a cut and do it.

[A]

I know. Hey, hey, I'll do it for free. I got Michael Button on it. He's. He's cooking on there now, too. But my point is, one of the reasons it gets so many views and so many people care about it is because, number one, it's a badass story. Like, it's the craziest story of all time. And we can talk about.

[B]

We're going to.

[A]

And then, number two, it's a very controversial story. You should see the comments of. In. In some of those Facebook posts, man. You got one side accusing me of being a Spanish, you know, apologist. You got another side accusing me of being an Aztec apologist.

[B]

That means you're doing a great job.

[A]

I appreciate that. I'm trying to. I'm not saying I'm getting everything right, but I don't hide the fact that in these videos, these conquistador videos, my primary sources are the Spanish. There are some pretty good sources for the other side of the story as well, like broken Arrows is a really good book that tells the Aztec side of the story. Broke.

[B]

Broken arrows.

[A]

Broken arrows.

[B]

Pull that up.

[A]

And. But one of my more controversial takes on this, and I'll get grilled for this, is anytime people talk about the Spanish and the Aztec, a lot of times even academics will preface it with, well, the Spanish, they were probably embellishing and they were probably lying about a lot of stuff. And, hey, the victors write the history books. Yes. I have never seen any evidence that shows that the Spanish were any different than the Romans or anyone else in history. That's one big conquest. Of course that's going to happen. But with the Spanish, what's interesting and one thing why I take a lot of what they say seriously, is there's three reasons here. They had their main religion. Their religion was Catholicism. Right. But they kind of had this secondary religion going on with the crown. So as much as they were, you know, devout Catholics, their other thing that they were very devout with was the authority of the crown. And anytime they're writing something in history, especially Hernan Cortez and some of these early conquistadors, that is an official letter to the crown. And the conquistadors, like anyone in human history, especially back then and well, now, too, they would be quick. I don't want to say backstab, but if. If somebody was sniffing out a lie, they're gonna. They're gonna rat on each other, I think. So. I'm not saying that they didn't embellish. I'm sure they did. But it's the best primary source we have for what happened then. And I decided to go read those primary sources and start making videos about them. So that's.

[B]

So you've read all this stuff?

[A]

Uh, a lot of it, yeah. So a really good website is Project Gutenberg.

[B]

Project Gutenberg.

[A]

Amazing. This site right here is. They're basically their goal. I think it's a. I don't think it's for profit. This site right here uploads all of. I don't know if this is it right here. I think that's probably it. Yeah. Yeah. So 75,000 free ebooks. All of these are prime. A lot of these are primary sources from the 1500s, 1600s. They're basically trying to scan as many sources as they can to put up on the Internet. Another one is wiki sources, where you just get the. Their words, how they were. Hernan Cortez's letter to the king, Bernal Diaz, who was one of the conquistadors that took Part of the Aztec and Spanish. They have all of his work that you can read for free, and all that's copyright free at this point. They've been dead for 500 years.

[B]

So do you ever have any. Run into any issues with interpretations of what they're saying? Because they spoke differently when they wrote.

[A]

And that's one thing to keep in mind. A lot of these people that translated these, and a lot there's. There's something called the Black legend, I think is what it's called. And so a lot of the translations were done by English Anglo scholars. And so a lot of these Spaniards that are historians have problems with some of their interpretations. They think it tries to make the conquistador sound a little worse than they were. But definitely a lot has changed linguistically since then, especially writing styles. And there's probably only a handful of people these days that could actually tell you exactly what they were writing. But for unfortunately, back in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, a lot of people were translating these writings into English.

[B]

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at $89.99 a month with our two year price guarantee. Call 888, add dish or visit dish.com today. So once again, it's kind of the best we got and that you can say the same thing for any period of history.

[B]

Absolutely. And you make a really good point about any empire or kingdom or insert term like that here. Throughout history. Yes, it's always written by the victors and in some cases it's really slanted the wrong way and in other cases it's not and it's up to interpretation. But like to me, one of the tragedies of the zero to a hundred Internet culture we live in is exactly what the title there is. People either got to be 0 or 100 on something. Meaning. I've used this example a lot. But like I studied the out of the Revolutionary War. Love the Revolutionary War. Love the guys that did it. Incredible work. They were still imperfect men. Right.

[A]

100%.

[B]

So you can find things sometimes, by the way, things that actually even are written in the history books that just don't get mentioned in the documentaries and the summaries and stuff where it's like, yeah, that was kind of fucked up. Like we did it, you know, not the British. Meaning you could find that 10, 15% that's like a little different than the story they're going to tell you at the U.S. constitution Center. Does that mean that you should Therefore turn that 10 to 15% into 100 and say, you know what, actually the revolutionaries were the bad guys. I wish the British won the war. No, you know, for sure.

[A]

And for me, I just want to tell the story.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So let's, let's give their story a ride here, basically. And on that note too, the Spanish in their writings didn't hide their sins. They describe their massacres. They describe a lot of the things that, you know, did not. Did not age well throughout history. Did they justify it? They would. They would try to justify it, but they would talk about like the Cholula massacre. Have you ever heard of the massacre at Cholula?

[B]

Actually, yes, but please explain this.

[A]

So as Hernan Cortez has already landed with his men, they are trying to get to the Aztec capital, right? So it looks like we maybe got it pulled up here. They eventually get to Cholula, which is in modern day Pueblo Mexico. I've been there three times now, by the way. It's. I think, correct me if I'm wrong on this, I'm pretty sure it's the largest pyramid by volume in the world.

[B]

I think Luke was talking about this. Yeah, Michael, one of them was talking about this. I think you're right.

[A]

And he had his class Callan allies. So that's the other part of this. He had his class Callan allies with them where arch. Okay, arch enemies of the Cholulans, who, by the way, the Cholulans are part of like the. The Aztec empire. And the Last Callans are ready to. They're ready to tee off. These guys are. Are not friendly with the Cholulans. And so basically, Hernan Cortez, or Bernal Diaz, I think in this case, writes about how Hernan Cortez brings all the priests and the Cholulin, you know, hier into this square, gives this speech about how they've all betrayed Montezuma the king, and now they all must die. And then income the Tlaxcalans. And it's just this massacre that happens. I think over 5, 000 people were probably killed all in one go.

[B]

They like sliced their heads off.

[A]

Just started at that point. Once the Tlaxcalans came in, there was, you know, not much the 500 Spaniards could do to. To stop what was going to happen next. I think women, children, you know, it was. It's. And they write about it. They write about it. And yeah.

[B]

The massacre of Cholula was an attack carried out by the military forces of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez on his way to the city of Mexico, Tenochtitlan in 1519. Francisco Lopez de Gomorra indicates that the massacre of Cholula began after Cortez captured and killed Chaluteca leaders, unleashing with this act the slaughter of 6,000 people in less than two hours. According to his letters of relationship, Cortez affirms that he made this decision as a prevent. Here you go. You just. You nailed it. As a preventative action before a possible ambush by 20,000 Mexican soldiers. However, the accounts collected by Bernardino de Sahugan contradict this version since it is narrated that only unarmed Charlie Tech civilians were killed.

[A]

Yeah, so there you go. And so he's definitely trying to justify it. Yeah, right. And you know, regardless, 6,000 people end up slaughtered. So it's. You know, and they. They had to admit that. That there wasn't any escaping, that he knew he had to get ahead of that. So he starts writing this letter to the king and. Yeah, not. And there's. There's so many more examples of that throughout history down in the. You know, at this place in Cajamarca, Peru, with the conquest of the Inca, Pizarro and Hernando de Soto were responsible for a massacre that killed about the same amount of people in Cajamarca.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Not one Spaniard died. They went and basically kidnapped. Yep. Here you go. Right here. That's a. That's a crazy painting right there.

[B]

I remember Luke talked about that in episode 175 back in the day.

[A]

That's the. That's the king Atahualpa. And they. They took. They took him prisoner. I believe it's estimated. You can see what they say. I think it's like 5,000 people possibly died, maybe more. Not one Spaniard died. And they caught them by surprise.

[B]

You know, we live in this era. Will of Starlink. And places that were previously totally remote and inaccessible technically are also, if given the right resources, accessible at the click of a button. And yet, when I was out in the middle of the Amazon visiting Paul Rosalie back in 2024, he's a cool guy.

[A]

I don't know him personally, but I love this. I love his stuff. Sorry to interrupt.

[B]

No, no, all good. But you know, I could not help but think we were 100 miles past, you know, the most localized version of law enforcement level in military or anything like that. And in this era at that time, 2024, if happened out there. Oh, yeah, no one knows. No one's going to find out or whatever. Now think about 500 years ago to where, you know, you had to send a carrier pigeon across on three different boats. Hopefully two of them actually make it with the message to get their months later and tell the government, like, what happened.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, you can say whatever you want to Say, and by the time they even find out about it, let alone make a decision.

[A]

Right.

[B]

You're already 600 miles east of there. Already done it three more times over.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Did Luke talk to you about the. The discovery of the Amazon? I put in quotations because this is the Francisco. Yeah, yeah. This is the discovery by the conquistadors. There was an entire civilization living there.

[B]

Yeah. Before we get to Cortez, can. Can you explain what you mean by the entire civilization living there, who obviously discovered it?

[A]

Yeah. So in Graham Hancock's really put a lot of this out there. And so, you know, I'm sorry, I don't know the archaeologist names that have been working with the LiDAR down there, but they're finding huge settlements along the Amazon River. But one of the Pizarro brothers decided to go look for cinnamon. You know, they were always looking for gold, but cinnamon and spices was, you know, the real cash crop out there. And there was this idea that the city of gold and cinnamon was going. They call it, you know, the place of La Canela was going to be found up northeast. So they start going on this expedition with a guy that you mentioned earlier, Oriana. And at some point, there's another, the friar with them named Gaspar de Carvajal.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Gaspard de Carvajal. And Oriana, their men volunteer. They start dying of hunger. They've ate their horses. All the pigs are gone. And so Pizarro stays behind. They volunteered to go down the river just to go look for food, and quickly found out they weren't turning back. There was going to be no turning back. And along the way, they document what they describe as, like, an organized civilization with these gigantic wooden pillars that are carved intricately. I believe they're. They're seeing mounds. You know, if you see, like, the mound builders out in the eastern part of the United States, I think a lot of the structures likely look like that, and we're seeing that today with the LiDAR imagery. But, yeah, there's some crazy stories from that. A lot of massacres, but they were finding. Basically the way they sustained themselves was they'd go raid these native villages for their turtles. These natives were, like. One of their main sources of protein was river turtles, like these gigantic Amazon river turtles. And when they'd go in there, they'd have, like. I guess you could call it domestic. I'm not saying they're domesticated turtles, but they'd have, like, these entire pins full of turtles that they would raid and some fish as well. So they had A whole system out there. And, you know, I think it's estimate. I don't know the exact number of people that were living in there. That's not like Luke could tell you a lot more about that. But that's one of my favorite stories, because these people, these conquistadors, basically have to build their boat several times, rebuild their boat several times. They have to, you know, get as much metals they possibly can and melt it down to create nails, and they end up sailing back to Spain with these boats. I think eventually they get to, like, the northern coast of Venezuela at some point. But it's a crazy survival story, and really only for a few. I think, like 90% of that expedition died. And then Orianna comes back, you know, which is just crazy to me. You survived once, he comes back, and then he dies of fever on the second round in the Amazon. So. Yeah, pretty rough.

[B]

Yeah. And it's like, it's so hard to even try to imagine what it's like to go to an entirely new world.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then chart down something as treacherous as the Amazon river across an entire continent.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And just everything around you could kill you.

[A]

Yeah. There's one crazy story from there. There was this conquistador, unnamed. They just talk about one of the soldiers. He aimed his crossbow at a bird. He was wanting to hunt a bird. And while he was about to shoot, the, like, nut of the crossbow falls off and goes into the water. And then an hour later, they catch a fish, a catfish. And supposedly the nut was in its stomach. And so they got the nut back. And all of a sudden, you know, I think they probably had just a handful of crossbows left. So they were all thinking it was a miracle from God that they were able to replace this bolt that the crossbow had lost. So that's a. That's one of my. That's one of my favorite stories from there.

[B]

What are the chin. What are the.

[A]

I know that.

[B]

That's crazy.

[A]

Wild. Yeah. So, yeah, conquistador stories. My next one, I'm going to go down and I'm still doing the research on this is going to be. Golly, what's his name? But Aguirre, if you look up a G U I R R E, I'm going to call this the craziest conquistador of all time.

[B]

What makes him so crazy?

[A]

The man was a. He was a madman. So he start. He comes to Peru, and a lot of these guys are criminals when they come in the first place. Like, it took not all of them, but like a Lot of them to get recru from Spain to even come to the New World, you know, they're looking for anything. Yeah. And Aguar, if I'm saying his name correctly there, AG. Oh, nice.

[B]

What is this? Thief? 1972 movie with Claus Kinsky is Wrath of Gods.

[A]

That's a sick title.

[B]

That's on. That's on.

[A]

Okay. For forgive my gringo accent.

[B]

That's so good.

[A]

And so he. He shows up in Peru.

[B]

That's why I said Puerto Rico guy.

[A]

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

[B]

Shout out to my Puerto Ricans.

[A]

It's a struggle, but he shows up in Peru, and the crown actually had laws against enslaving the natives. And they did. They did from, like, pretty early on. But enforcing those laws was obviously not going well. And Aguirre here, Lope de Aguirre, he gets caught basically manipulating and exploiting the natives. And so a judge sentences him to a flogging, basically public humiliation, where they all, you know, kind of beat on you for a little bit in front of the entire public. And the story is. And it might be on this Wikipedia page here, the story is that he never forgot that. And he followed that judge for three years across Peru, Ecuador, and just was trying to go find this guy so he could get his vengeance.

[B]

Finally, the judge was over there.

[A]

The judge was down. I believe it was down in, like, the Cusco region.

[B]

Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

[A]

And so he gets. He gets word that Aguirre is looking for him, and we're just marching across north, south of the Andes. Basically, his entire mission for three years is to find this judge, and he finally catches him and kills the guy. And just as, like, was about to hit the fan for Aguirre, and justice was about to come. They needed him and any man they could get to, like, suppress some rebellions that were happening. So they kind of forgave him real quick. And so quickly, all these conquistador men, they quickly realized, we need to get rid of these guys. We need to go make them useful somewhere else before they all start a rebellion. And they send them north once again to, like, the land of Cinnamon, La Canela, looking for the lost cities of gold, all these different legends of El Dorado, basically just to give them something to do. And I don't want to. Well, we'll. We'll talk about it. So basically, I didn't want to spoil it because I'm about to make a video on this, but whatever, let's do it. Let's give it to y'. All.

[B]

Everyone still go watch the video.

[A]

It's gonna be.

[B]

It's gonna be a banger.

[A]

Aguirre is just kind of a soldier. He doesn't really have any authority, but very quickly starts playing his cards to start a mutiny, to start a rebellion, and starts whispering, you know, complaints about the guy in charge. And pretty soon him and some guys get together and they kill the main captain. Do you know his name, by the chance? Joey. The actual guy they end up murdering.

[B]

So might be on his Wikipedia.

[A]

Aguirre takes over and they're starving. They're on the Amazon at this point.

[B]

Yeah, keep going.

[A]

And he, and he. And he basically makes it a rule that if anyone is unenthusiastic that day, they must be planning a rebellion. And so he just starts killing everyone left and right. People are paranoid. He writes a letter to the king declaring himself the new king of. Like, of, of. Eventually, when he gets up to Venezuela, that territory that he no longer serves the king, and the guy's just a total madman. Long story short, they make it to the island of Margarita, which is right off the coast of Venezuela. How they got from the Amazon to the island of Margarita, Just venturing up these different streams and channels and tributaries.

[B]

Can we.

[A]

On a boat? Yeah, it's. There is a map there. There's definitely a map up there.

[B]

And it's also by the defound it. So a year later, Aguirre participated the overthrown killing of Ursula and his successor, Fernando de Guzman.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Referring to. Yeah, let's see this map. That's even off the top of my head. Let's pull up South America.

[A]

If you put in. If you put in his name and then like, conquistador map. Okay, let's see here. There's got to be one. Yeah, this one might be.

[B]

We could almost follow it on Google Maps though, right?

[A]

You could.

[B]

Like, if we look, he goes up.

[A]

I know he for sure goes up the Rio Negro from the Amazon at some point. So if you can find that area, he's deep in the Amazon. But long story short, finally, after he writes this letter to the king, some of his men go, okay, well, we've had enough. We can't betray the king. And when he gets to the island of Margarita, a bunch of his men end up killing him and ripping him to shreds. They quarter him and. And the guy ends up dying a pretty miserable death.

[B]

But he was the first Nikki Santoro.

[A]

Yeah, right. So that video is going to be called the Craziest Conquistador of all time. The legend is, though, the legend is that when he was chasing that judge from Ecuador to Peru. The legend is he did that barefoot, that he didn't have shoes. Like, there's just. There's crazy lore with the conquistadors that keep coming up.

[B]

Pursued Esquival to Lima, Quito, and then to Cuzco, missing him in all three places. For three years, he trailed Escobal on foot and without shoes. That is dedication. His soldiers following this obstinate pursuit with interest, Aguirre found him in Cusco, taking a nap in the library of his house and wearing a coat of chain mail he had always worn for fear of Aguirre. Sleep with one eye open.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Gire crept up to the sleeping Escobar and stabbed him twice with a dagger. When the male stopped his blows to the former magistrate's body, he stabbed him in the right temple. That'll do it. And killed him. Protected by friends who had hidden him, Aguirre fled from Cuzco and took refuge with a relative in Humonga.

[A]

Yeah. And then he got away with it for a while. They let him go. They're like, okay, well, we do need you to, like, help us squash this next rebellion. If you could just not kill any more judges, that would be great.

[B]

There's someone I'm thinking of. I hate when this happens. I'm thinking of, like, some movie and some character, and I can see it, but I can't see the face and can't place it to where they're just like, well, it. I'm gonna go kill him.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And they just. They just, like, blood hunt him forever. And that's what I'm picturing.

[A]

Yeah. When I. When I. When I do some cooking with these AI visuals, I'm gonna make them look wild. Yeah, you're gonna see. You're gonna see it in his eyes. It's getting good. The AI visuals are getting better.

[B]

Getting better.

[A]

Nano banana, which is like what I use to Some of the secret sauce, a lot of people will go, and they'll just immediately generate a video right away with a prompt. That's not the way to do it. You want to generate the image first and get the image with nano banana, which is going to be a lot more accurate, a lot more consistent, a lot more character consistency. And then you. You want to use a detailed prompt to actually animate that.

[B]

So, you know, some of these documentaries like this, even before YouTube got huge in this stuff, but, like, think like the Men who Built America, if you ever saw that, where they use fucking F list actors to do very shitty scenes and whatever, right? That's the kind of stuff where like, AI will be better.

[A]

Yeah, B footage.

[B]

And for B footage, when you're putting out weekly content on YouTube and telling stories of things, especially in the ancient past, it'll be better. Where I run into a big problem with this is what we just saw a few weeks ago with where this could be headed and definitely were talking about this on our Patreon episode. We both feel this way. But you see what Darren Aronofsky is doing. No, I didn't keep pull this up thief on Twitter. So Darren Aronofsky is a very well known Hollywood director. I don't know if he's like, trying to be edgy or like ahead of the curve and experiment. I don't like faulting people for experimenting, but I do think there's like a line where there's a point in no return with some stuff. So Obviously it's the 250th anniversary of, you know, the Declaration of Independence coming up this summer. And so he has decided to do a series that he directed and set up that is exclusively AI created.

[A]

Dang. He beat me to it. I was trying to do.

[B]

That's what I'm saying, though. But this is real Hollywood, like, with real movie storytelling, like trying to replace actors. This is not B roll documentary footage.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And they're going to be a series of a bunch of. It sounds like 10 to 20 minute, you know, episodes of events in the Revolutionary War. And the saddest part about this to me is, you know, like, the Patriot is one of my favorite movies ever. The Revolutionary War is one of the most undercovered. We, like, we talked about the Conquistador period not getting covered. The Revolutionary War is one of the most undercovered, underdone things by Hollywood ever. And it's fucking. The history is insane. I know AMC did the show turn, which was solid, you know, about the Culper spy ring. But like, if they had really gotten a full budget, they could have done it way bigger than they did. And it's like, so now I've been begging for them to really make something good for a long time. And the actual artists, not like YouTube documentary type stuff, actual artists now want to replace humans to do it. This is where I draw the line.

[A]

And I go, right, for sure. Like they got the budget. Like, just make something sick.

[B]

Something sick.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So what I do is I add a lot of maps. I'll add historical photos as well. Historical. If I can get a historical video, I'll do it too. But as I'm actually narrating this story, it does help to have a visual.

[B]

Hell yeah.

[A]

Beat by beat by beat by Hell yeah. I've always wanted to do something cinematic, and this is like, kind of my opportunity to do it a little bit. My most recent One is the DeSoto expedition, so. Hernando de Soto. Yeah, pull that. Pull that one up. That one. I found a new generator and, like, they allowed me to. It didn't censor me as much. Like, there's one shot where I'd show some dude getting murked with an arrow in the back of his neck. No, it's three other. Those are the mummies. I got a little distracted for a while for my Conquistadors versus the Giant of Alabama. So Tuscaloosa was. That's the one you want supposed? Yeah. Tuscaloosa was supposedly seven feet tall here. And I got a lot of for this because they said an arrow can't penetrate steel. Well, the conquistador said that there could. This is the reason I did that was the conquistadors in their writing, said that these arrows that they were coming across with these native tribes in Florida were penetrating their steel. Oftentimes their actual male, which is probably a lot easier than like, that still played there. But yeah. So it's a crazy story. Quite a disaster of an expedition.

[B]

This was in Alabama.

[A]

Well, this was through Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas. Like, I mean, he just. They were going all over the place. And Hernando de Soto, have you ever heard of, like, the Icarus Deception? Like, if you fly too close to the sun.

[B]

Of course.

[A]

Hernando de Soto is like, the perfect example of this. Why this man was. Had wealth beyond measure with what he did down in Peru. I mean, he was like the number three guy in charge down in Peru. He had more wealth than you could imagine, even. And he probably. I don't know how much he made in Nicaragua, but he probably doubled it there. Goes back to Spain, is chilling, decides he wants to go back to the New World. He's going to become the governor of Cuba, and he's going to go conquer La Florida, which is this huge area of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and the man ends up dying of fever on the Mississippi River. I mean, it's like, you know, he had it all. He could have just sailed away and. And left it to somebody else. Instead, he died a miserable death on the Mississippi riverbanks. But this story right here is crazy. This guy's name is Juan Ortiz. This is actually. A lot of people think The. The story of Pocahontas and John Smith, like the love story is actually based off this Spaniard right here, Juan Ortiz. Yeah, he got. He was with the Grijal or the. Sorry, I'm losing the. There was an expedition that 12 years earlier had landed on Florida and was complete disaster. They had a lot of storms and basically the Narvaez expedition. Sorry, I was trying to think of it. And he was a castaway and got saved by these natives and was basically a slave for them for several years. And then the DeSoto expedition shows up 12 years later, and they see this guy that looks like a Spaniard, and he's looking at them, and all of a sudden it's like he'd forgotten how to speak Spanish. He starts speaking to them in Spanish and they go, that's a Spaniard with the natives. And so he was fluent in their language and was a, you know, really pivotal part of going through the American Southeast as the translator, basically. And spoiler alert, he dies, too, on the Mississippi River. Basically this entire expedition. I'm not like. I think it's like half ends up dying. I think over 300 people end up dying on this. So.

[B]

Yeah, that's the crazy part about these stories. They're so complex from. I don't know the term I'm looking for, but just bear with me here from like, a moral, ethical, historical standpoint, because it's like these guys for referring just at the con to the conquistadors for a second. They discovered lands that were unknown and set the pathway for what became Western civilization over here.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the missions that they went on were daring and crazy and brave and, you know, charted land, created maps that we were able to use to then, you know, build this whole thing. But there was also. These were also extremely imperfect men, as you've already pointed out many times today, that were not just flawed criminally in many cases, but also flawed egotistically and in what they wanted to discover. And they ended up meeting their own demise, as you're pointing out. And yet the things that they were able to accomplish in what were their tragic missions, for a whole host of reasons, were the baseline to what we have. It's very fascinating to think about.

[A]

Yeah. News. The right. The rise and fall of New Spain is. It's up there with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

[B]

I. I agree with you.

[A]

And once again, Hollywood, you know, it's time to. It's time to make some movies about it because it's. It is the most. The Spanish conquest of The New World, in my opinion, is the most impactful thing that's happened in history to date. This starts the.

[B]

In history.

[A]

In history. Look at the Colombian exchange. So as a result of this moment, you know, we think of Italians and, and lasagna and pizza, and it's all ingredients coming from the Americas. Tobacco helped.

[B]

Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. Back up. Hey, you're in New Jersey. Hey, you can't just say that.

[A]

I love last night. I ate some good pizza. I can't remember. It was a. It was airport pizza. Little Tony's. Little Tony's.

[B]

All right, all right. I almost want to.

[A]

Pretty good out.

[B]

Jesus Christ.

[A]

It was pretty good.

[B]

You're operating from behind, but keep going.

[A]

Tonight I've been told that I'm gonna go to North Hoboken. There's another pizza place. Dave Fortnite gave it like 8.9. Okay, I'm going there tonight.

[B]

That's better.

[A]

But my point I'm trying to make is the Italians didn't have tomatoes before this. That's, you know, Tell me, am I wrong?

[B]

That's just my knee jerk reaction. I'm calling.

[A]

It's true they didn't have tobacco, potatoes that. But potatoes, tobacco, all these things existed in the Americas and came over to the Old World as a result of this moment of contact between the Spanish and. And the natives.

[B]

So they didn't have tomatoes.

[A]

They didn't have tomatoes. No. Tomatoes come from the New World.

[B]

Get the out of here. Tomatoes were introduced to Italy from the Americas in the 16th century via the Colombian exchange. I feel like my whole life is a lie.

[A]

I'm telling you, this moment in history is. Is the most. One of the biggest moments. Maybe I went overboard saying it's the biggest, but it's got to be up there. This is when the New World meets the Old World, the Old World meets the New World. And this sinks entire exchange of spices, goods, and ways of life, you know, start blending together really quick. Really quick. I mean, within 50 years, there are really less than that. There are huge settlements in at least the Caribbean. And then also, you know, Mexico City starts to rise really fast after the conquest of Mexico. And this entire exchange starts happening. And, you know, not soon, not far after that. All that money and that gold that went to Europe, a lot of that ends up funding developments that happen with, like the Industrial Revolution.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So it's a huge part of history. And yeah, tomatoes, man, that's up.

[B]

Yeah, that's really up.

[A]

Tobaccos. Tobacco is the one for me. Like, I. I could See, tobacco.

[B]

That makes sense.

[A]

That one's probably the most used drug in the world. Right? Yeah. Maybe caffeine.

[B]

I was gonna say it's coffee and tobacco.

[A]

Yeah, right. Coffee.

[B]

Coffee. Nicotine, if you will.

[A]

But. Right.

[B]

No, it's not the right way to say it's coffee and tobacco. Sorry.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

But that's, you know, you think about how the timelines of what things would take back then. So maybe like as a baseline, just to give people a picture of this, when the conquistadors are sailing over to the Americas in the late 15th century and then 16th century especially, first of all, how many would they send at a time? How many boats would come over? How many men would be coming over? Like, I. I don't know if you want to use one specific conquistor as an example. Whatever's easiest for you. But, like, what kind of numbers are we looking at? And what kind of provisions were they bringing with them?

[A]

Like, the first one is like, the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria. So you got the three ships with. With Columbus.

[B]

Right. I've. I've seen Step Brothers.

[A]

How many. Right. It's a great movie. How many people were on that expedition, Joey. And what a lot of people don't. You know, Columbus is another one. I have a Columbus video. You know, people say. People like to say that Columbus didn't discover anything. That's not entirely true. Columbus had four voyages, so a lot of people think that he was just hanging out in the Caribbean. He had four voyages, and he actually did land in Nicaragua, which is technically North America. And he also was the first European to see the South American continent as well. He was right off the coast of Venezuela. He's kind of interesting. And sorry if I'm. I kind of forgot what your question

[B]

was, but we were talking about men with provisions. We'll just answer. Yeah, real fast. So people have it. So estimates say on the 1492 Exposition EX expedition that we always talk about, he had around 86 to 90 men.

[A]

Yeah. And. And so he.

[B]

He.

[A]

And people get mad when I say this, but you can read his journal. He. He thought he was. He thought the island of Cuba was Japan for a while. At one point, they brought these interpreters with them and they brought. They were going inland on the island of Japan just in case they were about to meet the Khan of China and they might be able to speak with him with these interpreters that they thought might be similar to the language. And it took them a while. In fact, it wasn't until Balboa, I think, in 1511 crossed the. Crossed over to PET from Panama to see the Pacific Ocean, that they got verification that, oh yeah, oh, yeah, this is a whole new world. This is not Asia. I'm sure. I'm sure most of them had figured it out by then. But that Balboa moment in 1511, so what is that? What's my math here? That's, you know, that's almost 18 years. Yeah, 18 years after. Or I guess, sorry, 19.

[B]

19 years after Columbus, 500 years ago, plus.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. And so. But yeah, Columbus's story, he's got some wild stories too.

[B]

He was also though, like, you know, you can say multiple things at the same time, discovered stuff, led missions here also really not great guy.

[A]

Yeah. Well, once again, a lot of these guys, A lot of these guys are especially Columbus's men were bragging about some of their atrocities they were committing.

[B]

Like what?

[A]

There's a guy named, I think his name was. He was an Italian, actually. Michelle De Sueno, if you want to look that A Michael De Sueno. C U E N O. But he brags about raping a woman in one of his letters. Fact check that name because that's a pretty big, you know, thing. But he talks about how he got. I put this in my documentary, but there's not my documentary, my video. And then, you know, they were. They said they didn't enslave the natives, that they would bring them back as representatives to the king and queen of Spain. But, you know, a lot of those people didn't even make it on the way back. And when they actually got there, you know, they were likely sold into. Into slavery.

[B]

So one of the darkest things about human nature that I would love to say is not still a thing, but it is around the world is the extremely unholy and sinister alliance of war, conquering and rape.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

You know, this. This still happens all over the world today. It's viewed as, you know, think about the semantics of it, which is like gross to say it that way, but like, you have militaries that are, you know, in most places around the world comprised of a bunch of dudes live together for months and years at a time, and they're testosterone up and they're told to go conquer this place because it's evil and their people have done evil things. That's how it's always sold. And then they go in there and as they're fruits of war, they get to do the worst thing you could ever do to innocent women. And it still happens today. But this was quite literally for thousands of years. Not only something that was allowed but was encouraged as a prize of war. You conquer, you get to go do that. And that is just something that will never fully process to me. Like what, like why how there's even a rush with that. I, I just don't, I don't understand it.

[A]

Yeah, it happened over and over again for sure. And you know, there's the, the Columbus with his four expeditions, really, you know, he gets the worst rap out of all the conquistadors because of, you know, he's the one that, he's the, I guess got the provenance. He's the one that first discovered the Americas for Spain. But when it comes to death tolls and when it comes to, you know, sheer numbers, there's a lot of other conquistadors that.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

That far out surpass Columbus.

[B]

Sure. That doesn't surprise me at all.

[A]

And so, you know, this is a complex of, we'll call it both a tragedy and a complex of a situation that happened 500 years ago where you had one group that had more better technology. Right. The masks and sales. That is a type of technology.

[B]

Oh sure, yeah.

[A]

Right. And a horse. That is a type of technology. Yep. Right. A cannon, gun, gunpowder. That's all technology. And so arriving and then basically having their way with the spoils. It's, it's a brutal history and it's one of the reasons probably Hollywood hasn't touched it. So.

[B]

But that's the other thing. It's like it's, you know, it's brutal. Of course, we just outline that quite literally. But you wouldn't touch any parts of history.

[A]

I know, exactly. So I'm just wondering how much time needs to like go by before we actually make the Spanish versus Aztec movie. Yeah, that I, I can confirm. Everyone wants to see it. It's my most. It's my most watched videos on fate. I had 17 million views on, on Facebook.

[B]

On Facebook without.

[A]

With a series where I basically clipped 31 minute episodes from my original Spanish versus Aztec video. It got like all of Those combined got 17 million views on Facebook. The one on YouTube, just the full one is about a million people want to watch.

[B]

I agree.

[A]

That movie.

[B]

We live in this era where everyone who has the strongest opinion is who gets attention online. So people get afraid of the people who are going to be like, you know, how can we talk about why are we glorifying all these whatever. It's not what it's about. It's about telling the story of how things happen and revealing what Human nature is. I don't see anyone complaining about Game of Thrones and how brilliantly, I might add, they showed the very dark side of human nature in addition to also good sides as well, but a lot of dark sides. It's fictional, but it's based on real world type stuff. Like this is what it is. History is very complex.

[A]

Yep. So there's a author named Kevin Se that I'd like to shout out. He has a book series called Conquistador Voices. And I think Hollywood. Yeah, pull it up. I think Hollywood could use his approach to this. He basically, at the very beginning of the book with the introduction, prefaces, and says, I'm going to tell the conquistador side of the story because, well, that's our best primary sources of this and really only primary sources of this. And then he also adds the preface of, you know, there's probably embellishment here, like there is with any victor in history. However, I'm not going to constantly stop. He said, however, I'm not going to constantly interrupt myself to continue to remind you of that throughout this book. And we're just going to roll. We're gonna roll with what they say. And that's what he does in this book. So, yeah, his first volume is. It's. It's Columbus, Hernan Cortez, and then Pizarro down in Peru. And then his second volume has Desoto, a guy named Cabeza de Vaca, which is one of my favorite conquistador stories. He was actually a good man, in my opinion. He's a good man. Yeah, he was a good man. He was part of that Narvaez expedition earlier that I said had that Juan Ortiz stranded, you know, disaster of an expedition that ended up having Cabeza de Vaca, which means cow head in Spanish. But he ended up stranded on the shores of Galveston with like four other dudes in Texas. In Texas. Was naked, I mean, just had nothing to his name, was starving, had swallowed a lot of salt water and the native saved him. And but part of as a result back then being saved was, you're going to be our slave for a while. Like, you can't just live here for free. And so they save him and he becomes a bit of a wandering miracle healer.

[B]

A wandering miracle?

[A]

Yes. The natives were insisted that like his role was going to be he was going to go heal people. And so he would do the sign of the cross. He would do. I'm not Catholic, so I'm not sure the exact terminology here, but he would do these like Catholic prayers probably the rosary over these natives. And his story that he tells, along with some other conquistadors that survived, that corroborated this, was that it was working. These people that were on their deathbed, they would. They would basically do these prayers and the next day they'd be walking around. And so he develops a bit of a following. All of a sudden, he starts wandering from tribe to tribe. He kind of gains his freedom and word starts to spread. This guy will heal you. Like, he's. He's got powers. And so they do more prayers over these people, and he'd go to the next tribe and people would be following him along the way. He does this for eight years, I believe, before he finally. He wanders all through Texas, the Texas border, Galveston, down through North Mexico, finally winds up in modern day Sinala, like near Culiacan. And that's somewhere around there is where he runs into Spaniards for the first time. And unfortunately, he had this, you know, he had this huge group of natives that were following him almost like he was this holy man. And these Spaniards ended up being slavers. They were looking for natives to slave, enslave. And the story is that Cabeza de Ivaca did everything he could to try to stop them from enslaving these people who had saved his life. But, you know, good luck. Yeah, good luck. He ends up becoming a pretty high up official down in Paraguay, in South America. And in everything I've read about him, he always was a champion for native rights. I'm a big fan of Cabeza de Ibaca. He was a good man.

[B]

We got on this tangent, though. We were talking about that author, what was his name again, who said at the front, this is what it is. I'm not going to say this again. Let's tell the story. So he had multiple volumes and you said each one covered a different conquistador.

[A]

Yeah, he's got multiple volumes and it's great. I love it. The audiobook's really good.

[B]

Can we Google this guy as well? Dave, this is really fascinating to me. This is the kind of guy I'd love to get on the podcast.

[A]

Probably my favorite author from the conquistadors. And, you know, I got him cited through a lot of my conquistador books because a lot of his stories, the way he would tell them is what inspired me in the first place to even make the videos.

[B]

Yeah, he's got to wear that fedora in here. If we.

[A]

Yeah. Heck yeah.

[B]

Let's go.

[A]

Yeah, I'd like to meet him someday too. Kevin Sepel. If you're out there, you're awesome. Love your. Love your books. Cool.

[B]

Okay. I'm gonna have to check those out. So Davaka, kind of good guy. We had that.

[A]

I think so as well.

[B]

Do we still have that page up of the Vaka? So this is what you're talking about. Ambassador for Christ. From his own telling, one of Cabeza de Vaca's greatest accomplishments in his journey was bringing peace throughout the land. As the travelers passed from one indigenous group to the next, warring groups would immediately make peace and become friendly so that the natives could receive the party and give them gifts. Cabeza noted in his personal account of the journey that in this way, we left the whole country in peace. Cabeza de Vaca saw these events as part of his purpose in America, writing that he believed that God was guiding us to where we could serve him. According to de Vaca, his greatest challenge came when he attempted to bring peace between the conquering Spanish army and the natives. As you were saying. As Cabeza approached the area of Spanish settlement, he and his companions grieved to see the destruction of indigenous villages and their inhabitants. Enslavement. Cabeza claimed that out of fear of the Spanish army, many natives chose to hide in the forest and risk starvation, leaving fertile land uncultivated. And that's the thing. It's like, if we're gonna zoom out here.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Obviously it's brutal, and the things they did are morally wrong in every way. I don't want to be misheard here, but, like, you come to this new land that you thought was like Japan, you find out it's not, and it's actually like a new land. There's a bunch of people here who have an entirely different custom and culture, religion, everything, way of living, way of talking, etcetera, Less technology than you as well. And who also have the ability to kill in very biblical kind of ways.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, and so remove for a second what you've already, well, laid out about a lot of these conquistadors not being great guys. Let's even look at the guys who might have been. Okay, guys, There's a fear there.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Of what this could be. And the human nature element, unfortunately, becomes us or them, which then leads to the dignification, if you will, if that's the right word to even say there, but you know what I mean, of things that are totally undignified.

[A]

Right.

[B]

That you should never, like, enslave men killing people, let alone, you know, innocent women and children. Completely wrong.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But that fear can Lead you to do awful things.

[A]

Unfortunately, fear is like the driver of all offer awful things. Another cool story about Cabezi de Vaca. If it's all right, if we got time for him.

[B]

We got as much time as you want, bro.

[A]

He's. I love him. And they're all starting to pop up in my head again. So here, right, he gets stranded on the coast of Galveston and is taken in by very impoverished natives. These are not like this. The natives that are taking him in are also struggling, and they're giving him the last shirt off their back, so to say, right? There's not much out there. And so, you know, that's part of the reason why he, I think, had the sympathy that he did is he understood that now he does get enslaved momentarily because he has nothing. Eventually starts trading, like trinkets and stuff he would find on the coast. But he still kind of always had to go back. And every now and then, he would see one of the other conquistadors who was also enslaved by a separate group. And they'd come across each other and they'd say, what's up? For a little bit. And they talk before, like they had to go separate ways. Well, at some point, they decide they need to escape and go further inland and take their wandering miracle healers talents elsewhere, right? And he comes across them again, and the only way you know, they can't write to each other. So he says, hey, it's prickly pear season for like three or four months out of the years. Prickly pears are a fruit that grows on cacti cactus out there for. So for three or four months out of the year, that is all they ate. They ate nothing else. That's what they, like gorged on was the juices of this prickly pear. And he said to him, next full moon, meet me at the prickly pear fields, and we're getting out of here. And he waited for like three days around the time of the full moon. And him and his companions show up and they find each other and they get out of there. And it's just like, to me, that's, you know, thinking about, I. You know, I can text anybody at any time. I can send a message anytime. I can FaceTime my family whenever I want. And they had a plan ahead of time. Meet me at this spot at the full moon at the prickly pears during season. And I think it was months later, maybe the first full moon of prickly pear. I can't remember exactly when it. How he did it, but they Met up and they got out of there and then went on to the next place. And that's when they start to gather their following because they're doing one. They're doing healing work as they're going. So. And you know, this whole thing can get into like the, the placebo effect. And, you know, what was, was what was happening? Why were those people, why were those people healing? You know, and a lot of people say it's the placebo effect, but when you actually study what the placebo effect is, it's pretty incredible. I myself, I'm a believer. Like, I believe in God. And there's a book called you are the placebo. And basically when you. They have to do like triple blind studies, like, they don't even want the doctors to understand what it is they're doing because somehow it affects the results of the test, you know, and so if you give somebody hope, you know, that's a miracle.

[B]

You know, I do believe in that. Yeah, I do believe in that. There's one, one of my friends from when I was a kid that I grew up with. This kid, Nick Bod, is one of the most amazing stories I've ever seen. He was diagnosed, very, extremely healthy guy, college athlete. He was diagnosed with severe cancer back in. I mean, all cancer, severe, but like, it was, I believe it was like stage four cancer back in August 2020. And, you know, I found out about this maybe like a year later. And I keep in touch with him because he was just like the best guy ever. And he has got himself into remission. Wow. Six different times. Wow. Every time a bad update comes in after some sort of victory where it's like you're looking at it going, oh, yeah, I don't know. That one's gonna be tough to come back from. He does, right? And the unwavering self belief, and I'm sure he has his moments like any human being does, but the unwavering self belief, he has to battle this thing and continue living and winning against all odds over and over again. You cannot tell me that there is not something. I don't give a fuck what you call it, magical, spiritual, otherworldly, whatever it is. Placebo, Placebo within that, that is making that possible. And it's a beautiful thing, right?

[A]

That word placebo is often a word that is used to dismiss that stuff. But when you actually look at what the placebo is, I think it's a. That's a, that's proof in many ways. So, yeah, that's. It's a wild story. Man. And yeah, Cabeza de Ivaca. It's a. Interesting name. It means. Literally, it means cow head or head of the cow. And it's one of the best conquistador stories because you do have a sense that he has a pretty good moral compass, for sure.

[B]

That's cool. So there's a good guy.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, we like that.

[B]

We need that as well. You need to. You need to see that there were people at a good head on their shoulders. But, like, let's go back to the beginning of this whole thing because, like, let's look at Europe before they even go over there. Yeah. So the conquistadors, obviously were being sent by, you know, the royal family in Spain to go do their exploring. We know that at the time, you know, England had power over there, France had power over there. You had the fucking Vatican over there as well in Italy.

[A]

And the. The Moors, the. The. The Muslims were just getting expelled at that point from Spain. So this is all happening. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but.

[B]

No, no.

[A]

Group too.

[B]

Meaning that. Yeah, there's. There's a lot of different power structures there. What compelled Spain to kind of win this race at the beginning and, you know, be the people that were trying to land on the moon for that era, if you will.

[A]

Good question. So Columbus, first of all, the Crusades, you know, round two, I believe, had just happened, and they. Queen Isabella is, like, in the middle of expelling the last part of the Moors from, like, Granada. And so Spain, the way we think of it now and then even is actually relatively new. This new kingdom that is expelled, this. The. The Islam, basically from. From the area Columbus starts hearing. In Columbus and others, they supposedly start hearing rumors of strange objects that are drifting up on the shore and. And some of the islands out there that have carvings. There was even stories that bodies were drifting up on shores that look different than other bodies. I don't know how much I'd believe that you'd think that would decompose. But this is all what they're writing. And he goes to Portugal first. He actually went to Portugal first and told them, like, hey, I'm pretty sure that if we go west, we're going to find Asia. And so who's in charge in Portugal? I can't remember his name, but they decline it. But also at the same time. Oh, what's the guy's name? The guy that was.

[B]

This.

[A]

Portugal was more concerned about going around Africa. And at the time. Da Gama. Is that his name?

[B]

That sounds familiar.

[A]

Yeah. He is making A lot of progress going around Africa to get to the Spice Islands out near India. And so once he gets. Columbus gets denied by Portugal, he goes to the crown in Spain. And they're very interested because Portugal's already solidified their route. Yeah. Around Africa.

[B]

Vasco de Gama is who you.

[A]

Yeah, Vasco de Gama.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And so they've already. Portugal's already, you know, solidified that route. And so if Spain wants to compete, they gotta go do a little bit of a gamble west. Because Columbus is saying, if we go west, I'm pretty sure we're gonna find Asia and it'll be a direct route. We won't even have to go around Africa. A little did they know, though, that what they found ended up being an even bigger jackpot than the Spice Islands of Asia. And then this. This leads to the golden era of Spain. Spain was the most powerful country in Europe by far after this for at least 200 years, actually, really long into the. Well into the late 1700s, they start going to war with Britain. And I don't know a whole lot about that. That topic at the end there, that's something I want to dive into, is that golden era of Spain.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But wealth beyond measure. The crown gets their royal fifth with everything that these guys are taking.

[B]

And look at how many lands today in the Americas still speak Spanish, you know, despite everything that happened afterwards. Thief. Would you be able to pull up. I don't. This has got to exist. We're going to have something like this, but like a map. What the map of the world looked like to Spanish royal family in 1450.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You see what I'm saying? I want to know, like, what they thought it looked like.

[A]

So at the time, they're. They're even trying to fight for their own land because there's still. The Moors are still in there. It depends on what you. I guess you call the Spanish family. So. Whoa.

[B]

That's what they thought the map was.

[A]

Oh, of the world. I thought you meant of Spain.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, That's. That's what I'm saying is what am I looking at there? Deep. Is that the world?

[A]

What's the year?

[B]

On the Femoral map is a map of the world. Yep, you nailed it. Made around 1450 by the Italian cartographer Fra Morrow, which is considered the greatest memorial of medieval cartography. It is a circular planisphere drawn on parchment and set in a wooden frame that measures over 2 by 2 meters, including Asia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, Europe and the Atlantic. It is Orient. Is Orientated. With south at the top. The map is usually on display in Venice, Italy. Can we hit the picture of that? I want that map that looks like a bastardized version of like Westeros and Essos, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's so cool. So that's what they thought it looked like. Yeah. Look, there's Per, there's Steve just zoomed in Persia. Let's see some other places.

[A]

I love how they would label stuff on the maps back Asia.

[B]

So yeah, they were a little backwards on this. That's crazy. So think about, just from a technology perspective, think about how the literal shaping of the world.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Changed overnight when they found this stuff.

[A]

You know I just was thinking too. I just saw a map recently where it shows the lines where true north. There's only certain places in the, on the earth due to the. I don't understand this but due to the way the earth is shaped and the way that gravity works, there's only certain lines on earth where true north actually comes up on a compass. And they had to know all that when they were, when they were voyaging. You know, these guys were smart. Columbus at one point when he was I think northeast of Venezuela, wrote to the king and thought that he had was sailing on what he called a bulge in the ocean. Like imagine the ocean is flat and there's just this moment where the ocean on this, you know, turns into a bulge. He thought he found a gravitational anomaly and all this compasses multiple times throughout his trips. First voyage, second voyage and I think fourth voyage where his compass just starts going haywire for like several days and he doesn't really know how to explain it. And they were kind of sailing blind. So yeah, these guys were, these guys were smart. They had to use the stars. You know, they, they didn't have gps. They had their own internalized version of it.

[B]

But bro, when you like visit a city you haven't been to before.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And your service gets a little off and you're Google map is off by one street and your little like blue circles floating.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You get so pissed. Well if you're me, you get so pissed off and you're like, come on.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

These guys would have like all form of any type of old ass school.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, geographic data go wrong in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or an ocean, they maybe don't even know what it is. They'd be like, well we're gonna figure it out. Like the patience and I, I. That is the most amazing thing about history. The things these guys in life and death Situations.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Figured out over not like an instant, like, oh, my God, we gotta make a decision. But over months, they'd have to, like, make a decision and hope three months later it was gonna work out. And if it didn't, start the clock again, and maybe now it's six months.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

For them to fix it. It's insane.

[A]

These guys were bold. And a lot of people don't like when I say that. That they were brave or bold. But those words don't have to mean, you know, something virtuous necessarily.

[B]

They don't like when you state a fact.

[A]

It's. It's just absolutely true. There's no denying that these guys were extremely brave and bold. So, you know, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't be able to mustard up the courage, like, Aones to go and do that, you know?

[B]

But that's so interesting that, like, Spain was that much more powerful than other places for a while there, like during that golden era to where, you know, we just kind of, like, skip over that in our heads sometimes. Even though it's literally what created our civilization over here.

[A]

I do like thinking about alternative history. When I say alternative history, I don't mean. I don't mean like, different theories, but, like, what would have happened if this Spanish didn't arrive or if there was maybe even 100 or 200 years delay before that happened. Because the Aztec, they were cooking like they were. They were. They rose fast. You had Luke on here how quick their rise was from when they got down there, from wherever they migrated from, which is quite the mystery.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

People.

[B]

For people that didn't see episode 341 with Luke, which was the latest one where we discussed the Aztecs heavily. Would you mind go just given a brief history of where we think they derived from.

[A]

Yeah. So the Aztec supposedly came from Aztlan. I'm probably pronouncing that incorrectly from the north. And we don't know exactly where that's at. There's some people that speculate it's as far north as, like, Utah. That they were maybe, you know, people that came down from, like, the Ancestral Puebloan area. I don't believe that. I think that's. I don't think there's any evidence for that. And then other people just think it's somewhere in northern Mexico and they're, you know, that they were. They had this prophecy that they would arrive at a place and basically become the rulers. And they did. And it was out at Lake Texcoco, modern day Mexico City. And it happened quick that all of the. There's. I saw, there's. The other day I saw. I love Joe Rogan, but he got something wrong the other day. He did, he did. He's.

[B]

Joe's never wrong.

[A]

I know. Well, Joe's. Joe's the man. But, but they were talking about how the Aztec basically inherited Tenochtitlan and all the temples there. That's not true. I think he was confusing Teotihuacan, which is the huge pyramids that you see near Mexico City. That's a different culture. Tenochtitlan, that was built by the Aztec very quickly, you know, the, the causeways in this basically island nation on Lake Texcoco. It happened very fast. And so I just want to know what the Aztec. What would have happened if they had 200 more years to continue cooking? Right? They were, they were on the up and up.

[B]

What, what made them so, like, what made them so advanced civilizationally to have that kind of power?

[A]

I believe so we were talking about technology and with the Spanish, I believe that the Aztec and the natives were. They had, what they had was. And I'm not an astrologist. I don't believe, like, that you should live your life based on astrology. I think that's like divination, right? But, yeah, like, that's like, you shouldn't, you shouldn't. And I have a point I'm going to make here. I know I'm rambling a little bit. I'm going to come back to why I'm doing this, but worry about it. But I don't think, like, if it's mercury retrograde or whatever, that doesn't mean, you know, you don't go on with your life. You know, if it's raining outside, you put a jacket on, you still go. And you just, you know, ignore a lot of that. That being said, though, they were very in tune with the cosmos and there's something to it, I think, you know, our bodies are made out of 76% water or whatever. We see what the moon does to the, to the tides. And the natives all across, both, both in North. North America, Mesoamerica, South America, they were all in tune with it. And so there's a place down in Chiapas, Guatemala, or sorry, Chiapas, on the Guatemala border, called Yakshalon, where my guide, when I was there, it had these, this temple had these holes. And I can send it to you later, Joey, so you can put it up there, these holes here. And he said that the wind would whistle through there and the shamans would Listen to the wind and compare that to where the stars were to determine on whether whether they should go to war or not. Joey, here's a trippy one. This isn't the Aztec, but if you go to my PDF and you go to the one that talks about Chimney Rock, Colorado, it's going to be a Google. Google Earth slide. Yeah, this is my favorite one. This is something. This is in my book. So I took that drone shot there. That's a shot I took.

[B]

That's you.

[A]

That's me. This, this.

[B]

Nice work.

[A]

I kind of went down a little rabbit hole here. And if you go to the one before that, I think I maybe even have a video. Wait, what is that?

[B]

Is that.

[A]

This is in Colorado, man. This is like the Machu Picchu of Colorado.

[B]

Oh, I thought for from far away that almost looked like a crop symbol, but it's. It's carved in.

[A]

Yeah. So this is. This is a Chacoan great house here. And this is just shows you how incredible the natives really were. And here near Pagosa Springs, Colorado, if you show the map here, I'll kind of orientate us. Yeah, we're right on the Colorado, New Mexico border near there in the San Juan Mountains. And during COVID I went up there and flew my drone around. If you go up again, I'll show you that shot. Right. Go to number 15. So right here, the reason this shot is this place is so cool, is every 18.6 years something happens called the lunar standstill. And this is. We're going to go down a little rabbit hole here, please. Okay. And there was a guy named Dr. J. Malville, I can't remember which university, but he was an archeologist. And when he was doing work up at this place called Chimney Rock, Colorado, he noticed that the tree rings, there was two building periods. And the tree rings showed that the building periods were 8, 8 were 18.6 years apart from each other. And he speculated that on the full moon in Sometime in the 90s, I can't remember when it would have been, but during the next lunar standstill, and I'll tell you what that is in a moment that a full moon would rise between the pillars at Chimney Rock, Colorado, and he was correct. So this one's from 2000 Pillars. Yes. And so the entire reason that they built this great house up in this area where there's no. There's not an immediate river nearby, it's the most one of the furthest eastern pueblos for the Chacoan culture, or they will call them the Ancestral Puebloan culture. The only reason that seems that they built this was to observe this phenomenon. And so here's where I'm gonna kind of blow you. Your mind a little bit or try to. I'm gonna attempt to blow me.

[B]

Pause.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No diddy. So. So we. So basically a lunar standstill is every 18.6 years. The. The way that the moon normally would, I guess rise and fall on the horizon changes a little bit. And they noticed this. And it happens for about three years. We're actually at the end part of the lunar standstill that started in 2023. Now 2026 is the last year that we're going to be in this latest lunar standstill. So you can actually see this phenomenon now. So if you go down a little bit, I thought this was interesting. Like, why are they observing this, this lunar standstill that happens every 18.6 years. And I've always been really into economics and cycles and cyclical theories like the fourth turning or even.

[B]

You're gonna fit in here nice.

[A]

Yeah. And even like Ray Dalio, his business cycle is like 18.6. It's like 18 years. His boom and bust, he calls it his boom and bust credit bust cycle or whatever.

[B]

Were you reading my text this morning?

[A]

No. I promise.

[B]

This is some weird shit.

[A]

This isn't my book. This isn't my book.

[B]

A bunch of people about this shit. Yeah.

[A]

And so I started going down the rabbit hole with a guy named W.D. gann. If you go down to the next slide, I'll show you WD Gann. This dude in the early 20s, he created a chart, what he calls his financial timetable. And if you extrapolate that out, basically he was creating these. This chart that predicted boom bust cycles every 18.6 years. Basically recession, clear the. Clear the leverage. And then a new cycle starts. It gets over leveraged again, and then it happens over and over again. And I think the natives were probably. I just think it's really interesting that the natives were following the same cycle. Maybe it was based off their boom and bust crop cycles, their famine, you know, maybe. Maybe it was their abundance and famine cycles. Like this thing keeps reoccurring over and over again. Well, he predicted the Great Depression. If you extrapolate his workout, he predicts the Asian financial crisis. Before that, he predicted the 70s inflation crisis. And then go back to that picture with the moon. What year Is this taken?

[B]

2007. Right? 2007 crisis goes full boom.

[A]

Exactly. And so, and so it's really interesting. And this is not financial Advice. Because the thing about these boom bust cycles is it can be a deflation or an inflationary thing. So good luck trying to figure out where to put your bets. But what happened in 2023? Right as I was writing my book about this and in fact I, right before I published, I wrote in the book, I changed the name of the chapter to the Moon and the Stars Control the Economy and the Silicon Valley bank collapse in 2020 three months after the lunar standstill starts is when the Silicon Valley bank collapsed and they had to inject a bunch of money. Several things else, several other things have happened since then. We got one more year of this lunar standstill cycle throughout 2026. And, you know, hopefully nothing bad happens. But, you know, W.D. gann predicted a lot of things and a lot of his work just so happened to coincide with the 18.6 year lunar standstill cycle. So a lot of WD Gann's basis for this is that. And I wonder if Ray Dalio's is as well. I don't think he's ever said that he calls it his credit bus cycle. But I wonder. I gotta think He's.

[B]

I'm trying to get Ray in here.

[A]

He's.

[B]

I'm trying to get Ray in here so I could ask him about.

[A]

He kind of tells it like he, like it is. I, I really appreciate. He was on Tucker Carlson and those are two dudes that maybe are different politically in, in many ways. And Ray Dalio and Tucker to his credit, just like, let him cook. He's like, tell us what's going on.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And Ray Dalio basically has a way of clearing signal or, sorry, clearing noise and just focusing on signal. And yeah, some of the stuff he says is kind of frightening about the, the dollar and all that, but that's a whole nother topic that I'm not, I'm not an expert on any of that. But I love this chapter in my book or really the videos I made on it. I think it got like a thousand views when I made it because, you know, it was so weird to me that those coincided this Native American 18.6 year lunar standstill cycle that they were observing. It was very important to them. And then here you have this guy, W.D. gann, making a timetable based off of it and it predicts all these things in a row. So crazy.

[B]

It is crazy. And I share your equally your fascination with things like the cycles. I love that you cited the fourth turning. People get pissed. I talk about that so much on this show. But when you look at the historical accuracy of that. Even just, just in America. I could go to other places, too, but dating back to the Revolutionary War, it is stunning. And it's a similar period. It's about a 21, 21 and a half year period for the different.

[A]

For the different generations. Yep. So that's what's kind of freaky about this one is you have the 18.6 year lunar standstill cycle coinciding with the unraveling or the. Right, the, the. The fourth turning, I guess.

[B]

You know, you talk about guys like Ray Dalio, though. When I would study, I worked on Wall street before I did this.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I was not a fit, but, you know, very interesting to see the guys who were most successful over the years there and what kind of tied them together. I always think about the story of Steve Cohen, who's, for my money, the best trader of all time on. On Wall Street. He just, you know, he's a controversial guy. He owns the Mets now, but, you know, people have thought he did insider trading and stuff in the past. It was the basis of the show. Billions, actually. Okay. But there's no doubt he was an unbelievable trader. And he would. He went to Pennsylvania in Philly and around the corner from where his campus was, you know, back in the early 80s, late 70s, whatever it was, you know, they had the live stock ticker.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The earliest electronical, like, you know, outside a bank or something.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And he would just go there and just, you know, almost like Alan in the hangover. Just watch the numbers.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Over and over again. And without thinking about what the symbol was or what industry they were in or whatever, he just had this ability to take all the noise and just reduce it down to like you're at the beach.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you ask yourself, are the waves coming in farther than they were.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Five minutes ago overall. Or are they coming in closer than they were five minutes ago? And the. To me, I say that because the guys like him, the guys like Ray Dalio, Raj Rajaratnam, you know, all these different dudes who were legendary traders and did it all in their own way. I think what ties them together is their ability not to spot 47,000 patterns.

[A]

No.

[B]

But to just kind of see one and bet on it.

[A]

Where can I zig while everyone else zags?

[B]

That's right.

[A]

That's. That's what it is. Like. Yeah. When things get top heavy, they do the opposite. Druckenmiller is another one. That's really good.

[B]

Yes. Yep.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And so this place, Chimney Rock, Colorado. They had smoke signals. Yeah, they had smoke signals that they found. Archaeologists have found on different mesas and hilltops that led all the way to Chaco Canyon, which is like the political and spiritual hub of the Anasa, or formerly known as Anasazi, but the Ancestral Puebloan world. Chaco Canyon is out in the middle of the desert and northwestern New Mexico. And basically, with these signals, I think that these smoke signals or these fire signals, they could relay messages to each other pretty quickly from one mesa to the other. That's if somebody had a dedicated job

[B]

to that slur of the ring.

[A]

Yeah, similar. And here we have this observation that you can still see today. I think the US Forest Service does occasional tours, so you can see this. I'm actually hoping that somebody gets some 4k footage of this, because this is the best photo we have now. And hopefully the US Forest Service is taking some good photos right now, because this is happening, I think, several times a month throughout the. Throughout the next year.

[B]

So what years again, did you say

[A]

they built that this happened. It would have happened in, like, the 1200. Probably. Actually, probably 1000. I have it on there on that slide. But 1000 A.D. probably somewhere between 1000 and 1200 A.D. i know.

[B]

That's what civilization.

[A]

Again, this was the ancestral. The Anasazi is what they used to be. That's apparently a politically incorrect term now. Oh, it is, yeah. But the Ancestral Puebloans. And then really this is a Chacoan great house, which is like the political dominant culture of the Ancestral Puebloans. And it's all the way out in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. And that might sound. Why that's interesting is it's. It's pretty far east compared to a lot of the. It's pretty far northeast compared to everything else in the Chacoan world. And they did it because somebody at some point goes, hey, the full moon rises between these pillars during that strange time where the moon is acting different on the horizon. Basically what we would call the lunar standstill. Yeah. And all of the native cultures, the Aztec, the Inca, the mound builder cultures, they all followed this 18.6 year cycle for sure.

[B]

When did you first look at this again?

[A]

And during COVID they were telling me I had to. I was on spring break. I was teaching out of Hawaii at the time, and I was on spring break living with my brother in Denver, when, like, all hit the fan with COVID And I remember I got my Trump Stimmy and I put half of it in bitcoin and bought a drone and, like, was Like, I'm gonna go start my YouTube channel. I'm gonna go do something. I don't want to be locked up. And so at the time, this place was closed, but it's US Forest Service land, so they couldn't stop me from going up there. And so instead of driving to the top like you normally would, I hiked like four miles to the top of this mountain and flew my drone out there, did the same. You know, went and saw all these sites out in the American Southwest. That's actually how I got started with making content.

[B]

That's cool.

[A]

My first video of all time is about the Ancestral Puebloans on my YouTube channel. So.

[B]

So did you. I'm just curious because it fascinates me that you're into some of the same patternistic things that I am. That's really cool. But did you get into things like the Fourth Turning and you know, cycle math and, and science or, or ideas, I should say like that because you looked at this or were you already very fascinated?

[A]

I was familiar with it. I used to be into the. Oh, I still am into it, but I used to really like, nerd out in the bitcoin community back in the day. And so back in the day, 2017. Okay, but, but, but there was. I can't remember his name. I want to give him a shout out. There was a good writer. There's people that are watching the podcast. If you're familiar with the bitcoin circles, you'll remember who he is. But he wrote a cool thing about the fourth Turning and how like all the stuff that's happening now, whether it's the invention of bitcoin or the, you know, the silic or the Wall street. Sorry, the. The subprime mortgage collapse in 2007. His name is Brandon. Brandon Kiddum. Yeah, I just remembered it all at the top of my head.

[B]

Got it right here.

[A]

And shout out to him. And it's a great article.

[B]

You want me to read the key aspects?

[A]

Do. Because it's been years.

[B]

All right. Because Deep south side right now. So key aspects of Bitcoin in the Fourth Turning, according to Brandon, I guess declining trust and institutional decay. The Fourth Turning describes a period of crisis where existing institutions fail, fostering need for alternatives like Bitcoin, which operates independently of government control. Crisis driven adaptation. As society faces increased geopolitical instability, debt and monetary crises, that is Iran and Venezuela, the demand for hard money increases. Trustless safe haven. Bitcoin serves as a neutral, decentralized and censorship resistant asset, making it a safe haven for wealth during periods of high inflation and societal instability, accelerating growth. Analysts suggest that Bitcoin will experience accelerated adoption and price growth during this era of transformation. So yeah, so the four turning suggests a shift from centralized top down structures to a decentralized future where Bitcoin serves as the foundation for a new monetary system.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Plugging in.

[A]

And so that was the first time I had heard about that. And then, so then I went and took a look at the generational theory.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is with was William Howe and his co author Strauss maybe. And you know, basically everyone's heard the saying, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard men makes strong, strong men. It's just like cycle. And so I then went down the WD Gan rabbit hole because there's. He has like a cult following to this day.

[B]

Wdgan.

[A]

Yeah. People trade based off of. People trade based off of his work still to this day. And once I read the literature on Chimney Rock, Colorado and they're talking about this 18.6 year lunar standstill cycle cycle, I realized that this was what WD Gann was talking about. And I just thought it was funny that they had the same interest back then as these guys that are playing the stock market do today for whatever reason. And so humans, you know, we're. I do think there's something about the cosmos that has us plugged in that is influencing us and that a lot of the, you know, people are always wondering if this news event right here is going to crash the stock market. I don't know what comes first. You know, I, I kind of wonder if some of that is destiny. These boom and bus cycles are already programmed in.

[B]

So Tom is a flat circle.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Great movie.

[B]

Do you ever think about when you see so many patterns like this that do line up. And I have another thought on this, but I want to stay with this point for a second. When you see so many patterns across history that happen to line up for different reasons that describe similar phenomena across the sociocultural things, economic things, historical things, whatever it may be. Do you ever wonder like if it's all a simulation?

[A]

Yeah, a little bit. I believe in God and I feel like simulation theory is just a 2020. I just feel like it's a 2026 definition of like what's already been written in the Bible and all that stuff. So I could see that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. We put fancy kind of secular language on stuff where it, you know, it's the new way of speaking which Is fine. We live in a more secular society right now than, than back then. And so we have to create new lingo for it. But simulation theory. Yeah, for sure. That being said, it just makes sense, right? Like we are little beings on this planet and gravity, gravity and gravitational pulls of other things around the cosmos got to be having some type of impact on us. You know, when you're. This is going to sound wild, but I'm from like a small cow town. And when you drive and you're going and you're watching all the cows out in the field, like the wind changes slightly and they all their heads all come up at the same time, you know, like something happens that makes them all react as if they're one. We're kind of doing the same thing. Like if you've ever been to a music festival and just watch the crowd, we all react on a massive level together. And so the same thing applies. Like the stock market's just a tool for betting on human behavior, like mass human behavior. And so when you have these things happening, lunar standstill, where I don't know how you can measure what's happening, but I think something's probably happening, right?

[B]

I think so.

[A]

You know, and that being said, you shouldn't, I don't think you should live your life based on it. You know, a lot of people say, oh, it's Mercury retrograde next week. It means I'm going to have a bad week. Well, now you're going to have a bad week because you just, you just have said that. So I don't really try to pay attention to it too much, but I knew enough about it to nerd out on that chapter.

[B]

So yeah, your thoughts become your reality.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I don't, I'm not even trying to sound woo woo at all. Like I've really spent a lot the last year looking more closely at the science of that. Yeah, it's so true. People predict their own lives on the basis of what they feed their brain internally.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Every single day. And it's been proven. It's been proven in science. I talked about that science, that Japanese scientist Massaro, who studied how people spoke to themselves down to cellular level and the effect it had on their outcome. The negative speakers had a V outcome in the wrong direction compared to the positive speakers over time because he could observe literal physical cellular changes within the body strictly based on the impetus that was given in the words that were spoken to it. That is unreal.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. And then you can tie all that back into or talk about the Placebo effect and hope.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah, for sure.

[B]

Yep, for sure. I think that, you know, you talk about simulation theory being. I like how you said that the more secular term for things that maybe we could even read in ancient holy texts like the Bible. And I think you're onto something there, because my biggest problem. Well, to be clear, my biggest problem with people who speak so certainly about the afterlife is that the one thing that ties us all together is none of us. No. Yeah, that's number one.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

Number two, I guess, like, the second biggest issue is that I've always said I'm like, why can't these things coexist?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Why poss. As I'm saying, as a possibility. I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm saying as a possibility, it's like, is it not possible that some divine, incredible creator, which I too, agree, there is a God, something, had to create this, you know, created so many trillions, quadrillions, whatever numbers you could say of layers.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That. That he created some sort of. And I don't mean to oversimplify, but some sort of beautiful universal algorithm that allowed these things to operate on a simulated capacity that could still include, with the decision trees of a simulation scenario, the ability for people on this planet we call Earth to have free will and make their own decisions and create the simulation in whatever directions it can be potentially. Go.

[A]

Yeah. I was not expecting to talk about this on your podcast, but I do have something to say about this. So when I think about free will versus, like, determinism, I think it can be both. Like, we live in a determined universe and when it comes to, like, physical matter and the way it's moving, but conscious beings that have free will can operate inside of that. So I do believe in the Big Bang. I think the Big Bang is probably a reality or something like it, whatever you want to call it, this moment that basically determined, like, the trajectory of, like, all of this energy, which turned into mass, which turned into the Earth, which turned into sun, you know, and so a determinist would say, well, we're part of that. So that means that this conversation between you and me was inevitable because we're mass. We're masses that are part of that. But I actually think that conscious probably comes from consciousness. This is my, like, spiritual belief, I guess, call it my faith. Consciousness, I think, comes from outside of that, like, determinate, deterministic reality of this. Of physical things flying throughout the universe and that people can operate independently and with free will within it. So I think it can be both. And like, I think. I do think that we control our own destiny in many ways, but we also are susceptible to the deterministic realities of those cyclical cycles. For sure. How do we react to that? Like, yeah, Mercury retrograde is going to happen next week. I don't know when it's happening next, but, like, does that mean I'm gonna, you know, lay in bed for a week or am I gonna go to work and do my shit and maybe some weird stuff will happen, but, like, I'm just focused on, you know, whatever my goals are. So, yeah, it can be both. We can live in a deterministic world when it comes to. Or deterministic universe when it comes to matter and the cycles of the planet while still having free will, in my opinion. You know.

[B]

Beautifully said.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Did you grow up religious? You said you weren't Catholic, but.

[A]

Oh, first of all, let me just preface was like, I'm a sinner. I am not a saint. I don't even know if, like, I. I would. I'm not like a holy man, but New Jersey, Right, right, right. Yeah. I grew up like a Methodist, and at one point I was actually an atheist. I went through my college atheist phase.

[B]

What brought that on?

[A]

Oh, probably some. Probably some propaganda or something. No, no, I was watching Shout Out. Christopher Hitchens. I liked Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens. I. I used to watch a lot of Christopher Hitchens and some Charles or Richard Dawkins. You know, you go down those rabbit holes and then at some point. Yeah, I think I'd overdosed on some magic mushrooms at one point and was like, oh, I should go back to the drawing board because I'm pretty sure that was God or something. You know, something was going on there. That was when I was in my 20s. And then eventually, you know, I guess I've always. Even during my, like, couple years in College. I'm 36 now. This is a long time ago.

[B]

You're 36?

[A]

36 years old.

[B]

You're one of those guys that could be like 24 or 38 and you can't put your finger on it, but yeah. Damn. I would have guessed you were closer to the 24, to be honest. Not in brains, but.

[A]

Right. I appreciate that, but.

[B]

Must be that Puerto Rican son.

[A]

I'm trying to get it, man. I'm trying to get it. But even during that time, you. I would probably consider myself like a cultural Christian.

[B]

That's just what I grew up with, a cultural Christian.

[A]

Yeah. Now I. I believe. I believe I need to, like, Be a better person for sure. Like I'm human.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, I'm flesh.

[B]

But what was your belief moment?

[A]

My belief moment. So I told you about the magic mushroom experience. That like made me go, okay, well I, there's definitely like God. I think for sure I should probably stop telling people I don't believe in God because like that happened, you know, you take four grams of mushrooms or whatever it was, like it doesn't matter where you're doing it, like you're gonna go somewhere else. And I can't believe I'm talking about this. Hi mom, hi dad. But yeah, my nephew, when my nephew was born, he was born with a lot of problems. He had a, he had a, A, a birth injury. And I, I said my first prayer in a decade at that moment, just hoping that we were told he was going to be like a, a vegetable, you know, in like a vegetated state. And I just said if he could just be, you know, if his brain could just heal enough to be happy and smile and laugh, please, you know. And that happened. My nephew has had, he has his cerebral palsy and a couple other things now as a result of this birth injury. But all of those prayers were answered. And so, you know, whether it was by chance or not, I was like, whatever, like I'm gonna go down this route where I said, if you could just make that happen, like, I'll be a believer. And it happened. So he smiles now, he laughs, he enjoys jokes, you know, that you can make and if I make a goofy face, you know, he'll laugh. And, and so that's where I decided, well, I'm just gonna have faith. Also, Jesus is a pretty cool dude for sure. You know, forgiving your neighbor or forgiving your enemies and like wishing well upon them is like, definitely something I should work on more. Everybody should work on more. So. Yeah, but I'm not even trying to preach because like I'm, you know, I'm not a saint, I'm a sinner. But that's how I got into that for sure.

[B]

That's a cool story, man. Yeah, I think, you know, it's also like to see that your nephew was going to be totally non responsive, wouldn't be experiencing life. There's some people who would hear that though, and be like, well, he still has some awful limitations, but the, the possibility of at least being able to smile and see the beauty of the world compared to what it could have been.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, and you guys get to enjoy having that relationship as well, I think. About this a lot. This is a bit of a different topic, but I think a lot now about the technology we've developed and the ability to play God and the dangers with that and everything. And one of the things that gets really gross when you think about it and how it could be extrapolated is, you know, whether it's intentional or unintentional as well, you know, eugenics to where. Yes. We want to be able to.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Fix deformities and afflictions that happen within humanity. For sure. I'm on board with that. But we're now getting to this. Like, you know, build a baby.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

ERA to where there, you know, the, the evil where this could go to is that someone like your nephew will never get a chance to live at all.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

If. If the wrong. I'm a little. I'm being a little complex. I'm saying this, people. So my apologies. But like, if the wrong. I don't know, lack of guardrails, if you will.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Get put in. Do you ever think about that? Because, like, it's clear, like, you have a great relationship and he's grateful to be alive and you're grateful that he's alive. Well, it's not operating with. He's not operating with a full deck.

[A]

Yeah. His was a birth injury that happened was the main thing with him. But. Yes. Have you seen this thing with the. Oh, the CRISPR babies that they were trying out in China? They were trying to prevent. They were trying to basically make babies that would be immune to hiv. But like one of the side effects was they have way like higher than average IQs. Like, these are like little genius babies. Have you seen this? No. Yeah, I think Joe Rogan was talking about it a couple months ago.

[B]

CRISPR bombshell researcher claims to have created gene edited twins. Reports triggered shock reactions and call for regulation around the world. Okay, let me read this. Steve. Hong Kong, China, on the eve of an international summit here on genome editing, a Chinese researcher has shocked many by claiming to have altered the genomes of twin baby girls born this month in a way that will pass the modification on to future generations. The alteration is intended to make the children's cells resistant to infection by hiv, says the scientist. Hey, drank. We of the. Sorry, I'm not Chinese. People of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. The claim, yet to be reported in a scientific paper, initiated a firestorm of criticism today, with some scientists and bioethicists calling the work premature, ethically problematic, and even monstrous. The Chinese Society for Cell Biology issued a statement calling the research a serious violation of the Chinese government's laws and regulations. And the consensus of the Chinese scientific community. And Hayes University include issued a statement saying it has launched an investigation into the research which it says may seriously violate academic ethics and academic norm.

[A]

So like on your point earlier, you were talking about, you know, for some people, it might even some people with genetic abnormalities or let's say somebody with down syndrome, you know, it would take away that experience that we have with them. But beyond that, like at this level, just me, like I'm just a. I'm a midwit guy. Like I'm not, I'm not, I'm probably not like high iq, you know, and how am I going to compete, right, in that world if all of a sudden these CRISPR babies that they're, you know, that's right. Have. All have 170 IQ or something like that and everyone's. If everybody has options of that, everybody's going to want that to be their child. Like everybody wants their child to be smart. That's going to be wild.

[B]

And also who's going to get more access to it? Yeah, people of means.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Elites. Because it's going to be expensive.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And it's going to like we've seen that V structure of the middle class being basically legislated away in America since the early 1980s.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the wealth gap increasing so much now. You're going to embarrassment of riches.

[A]

Right?

[B]

The wealth gap because the wealthiest will get access. And unfortunately, even if it is illegal. Even if it is illegal. Yeah, unfortunately. Like if you need no further proof, go read Jeffrey Epstein's emails and the people he's talking with. The way these fucking people think is they are better, therefore they should be able to get things that other people don't. Including by the way, heinous, awful, disgusting things that no human being should ever have and should be fucking executed for even trying to attempt. That's goes without saying. But I'm talking some of the other stuff that's not illegal, the genetic stuff, right. And, and the way that they think about it, it. That paints a dystopian world to me and where it gets morally odd is like, you know, if you're an expectant parent and you were asked, would you like a fully healthy baby or would you like your baby to have down syndrome? Just objectively you're going to say, I'd like a fully healthy baby or even

[A]

like guaranteed fully healthy baby versus like right on the dice.

[B]

Right. There's nothing wrong with Saying you would rather have that. But, like, where does this get to an economic situation to where only those with the economics to be able to do that can say that? And where does this get to a moral implication? I. Are you familiar with the guys at Colossal Labs in Dallas?

[A]

Yeah, well, I. The only reason I'm familiar with them is because I heard that they were gonna maybe do some work on the NASCA mummies, but. Oh, yeah, they were gonna do. They did the direwolf thing, right?

[B]

Yes. Yeah, we're gonna talk about that. Because I think Ben, just, like, when that story was coming out, people were peppering him like crazy. And I don't think Ben was like. Like that familiar with. He's like, oh, I'll take a look at this.

[A]

I think. I think he should.

[B]

But I. I could. I could talk to him about that. Like, we did podcasts with them. We did number 297 with Ben and Matt James, who. Ben's the CEO. Matt James is the Chief Animal officer who spent his life working with animals, you know, and good guys. I get along with them really well. And some of the work they're doing is extremely cool. I'm fascinated by it. I'm gonna go visit. We're actually all gonna go see it in March and figure it out. But to their credit, they are very willing to answer the difficult questions to come up here, which is that there's a lot of ways this kind of thing could go wrong. You know, when they. The. One of the main conservation examples that they give that I'm on board with, like, I'm on board with things. Animal conservation is very important to me. I'm on board with things that can help save our greatest species around the world. I just want to make sure it does not get used for. For other things. And one of the examples that is tied to what you bring up here about this Chinese doctor, whatever he is, researcher who figured this thing out, that scopic problems is. Matt James was saying around roughly 20% of elephants die every year of something that is effectively called, like, elephant herpes. There's an official name for it. But he's like, it's the. It's something a lot of people, normal people who don't study the space don't know, but it's a huge problem.

[A]

It's like a virus, right?

[B]

And so, you know, Colossal's trying to do these exciting things, almost like Jurassic park type things. Some of the ideas. And one of those ideas is to recreate some semblance of a woolly mammoth. When they're doing that, it would be sick. But like, when they're first doing that, they're designing it using CRISPR and AI in basically a computer DNA simulation, meaning it is not alive when they're designing it. And it depends on how good a data they can get to actually be able to design that. Because obviously they've been extinct for so many years. But woolly mammoths are relatives of elephants.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So while they're designing a non living thing, meaning it's not alive yet. So the moral implications, as far as I know, aren't really there yet. But they could maybe come up with something in that genetic code that then they're like, oh, holy shit, there's a sequence that. I'm going to say this scientifically wrong, but let's just keep it simple for people out there that they could basically inject into elephants.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And stop that disease from spreading if that is what they do. And that's how they do it. And that's how it's used. That's awesome.

[A]

I think so too.

[B]

Right. But if they then use that to be like, oh, let's make, you know, Yao Ming. But he's Shaq like. All right, well, now we got a problem. Right now we got like, we're creating Terminator.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Out here. And it runs into a huge issue.

[A]

Yeah. Also he has a 205 IQ. He has a 45 inch vertical. It's like NBA 2K.

[B]

Yeah. It's not, you know, make a player. We got, it's. We're moving so fast with things. We got to be careful and we have to, we got to challenge those things. And, and I appreciate those guys being cool with that. And I told them I'm like, moving forward. I'm gonna have to challenge that on, on those, on, on those stances. Because, you know, if it's not in the public square that way you get like this, like what you just pointed

[A]

out, you know, it's like, I wonder how much, how much. You know, this is how a breakaway. Like everybody talks about breakaway civilizations. That's probably what's gonna. If you make that illegal, something is gonna happen in the background. And I wonder how much it needs to happen before those people end up finding each other, you know, these CRISPR babies, this new population of people. And all of a sudden, you know, they're working on stuff we're not even thinking of because they're all, you know, I don't know, it's just, it's gonna be a wild future because I don't Know, if making it illegal will stop

[B]

it, you know, making guns illegal don't stop criminals from getting guns.

[A]

Yep, exactly.

[B]

That's a good point. Yeah, it's, it's. I think about this one a lot.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, that's. I'm glad you pointed out this story from China. I wasn't familiar with that. I hadn't heard about that. But this is exactly what we're talking about. Like. Yeah, there's just some things that for all of our mega differences in the world, and boy, do our governments and peoples have some mega differences. There are some things that transcend even extreme politics or ideas or borders, I might add, things like that where just on a personal level, we should agree we've got to work together.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, if there were an alien invasion, I would like to think that, you know, Donald Trump, mbs, Xi Jinping, you know, the leader of Hamas, Netanyahu, Putin, the European leaders could all get in a room and be like, I know we, a lot of us don't like each other and want to kill each other, but like, yo, let's, let's work on this for a few minutes.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then we'll come back to.

[A]

For sure.

[B]

I would love to think that that would be able to happen, but I, I don't know for sure.

[A]

At the very least. Yeah. Some of this stuff, AI, Genetics, all that, like, maybe we can pump the brakes a little bit. Maybe a little scary.

[B]

Yeah, let's. Let's go back to the conquistador stuff. That was, that was a great tangent. I appreciate that.

[A]

Yeah. We can talk. Whatever. Nasca, mommies, Conquistadors, we're gonna get to nascar.

[B]

We might have to be doing two episodes. I can see this already happening because we're two hours in because there's. I, I really want to go through in depth and give it the justice it deserves. From your research, Cortez and.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which I definitely just said wrong. But Cortez is the one we've kind of been beating around the bush all day with with that full story. Again, your video on it, which. A couple things people. We won't even have to link that below. We're gonna, we're gonna co publish this with your channel. So everyone can go subscribe to Will right now literally by just looking at the title of the video. His channel's on there. And I believe it's your most popular video. It is, is the one on Cortez and the Aztecs. Highly recommend to check out, but. So let's just start at the Beginning. How did Cortez. I think you started to talk about this, but I just want to put it all together. How did Cortez become a conquistador? And what were his initial goals and how did he end up there?

[A]

So at a young age, Cortez is very interested in the Indies, is what they called, you know, Hispaniola, modern day Dominican Republic, Cuba. He'd heard tells of it. So he goes over there at a very early age and very quickly starts amassing wealth, property, natives that are servants, but really in the name of the Crown, that's what they're called, but you know, slaves.

[B]

Slaves.

[A]

And pretty soon he becomes kind of a big wig out there in both Hispaniola and then eventually Cuba. He goes and helps with. With the. It wasn't much of a conquest, but with the conquest of Cuba. And so there's this funny story, he starts to climb the ranks quite a bit. And he's trying to. Everybody is really eager to go and explore. There's rumors of this land mass out west, AKA Mexico, Guatemala. Right. Some of these ships had gone by, but they didn't have. They needed permission from the Crown to go do any type of conquest you needed. At least if it wasn't from the crown, you needed it from the governor. So in this case, the governor of Cuba. And so the first expedition before Cortez was, I think his name was Grijalva, Juan de Grijalva. And they basically were given permission to go do a scouting mission that could possibly gather slaves. And during that time period, they go over to like the modern day Cozumel, which is an island off of Quintana Roo, Yucatan. And that's where they encounter the Maya. And they quickly realized these guys are pretty sophisticated. They have large temples, they have, you know, a clear society that's going on here. And keep in mind, this is not the height of the Maya. This is kind of the like what's left over after their fall. But it's still impressive to them compared to what they were used to in the islands, right? Which was, I guess you could call it more, you know, more primitive people compared to the Maya. Right. And so they sell all the way up the coast then to like modern day Tabasco, Veracruz. In fact, the river, the Grijalva river is a place that I've actually been to before. I had a sick drone shot that I put up there. And it's named after one day, Grijalva. And they once again are seeing big signs of like a civilization there. They even meet like diplomats on the Beach. And, you know, they didn't have any way to talk with them, but they could tell something was brewing in what's in modern day Mexico, that there's something big there. So they go back, everybody hears about this. Her non. Cortez, meanwhile, is, by the way, probably whether, you know, whether you want to call him a monster or not. He's. He was one of the smartest conquistadors by far. He was like. I don't know if he was a genius, but psychologically, the warfare that he will talk about here on some of these stories, you know, he was playing chess a lot of the time. So he's getting in good favor with the governor of Cuba, and he's trying to talk him into allowing him to be the next one to go on one of these scouting missions. And, you know, back then, you know, you had to put skin in the game, your own wealth to go get the supplies and the men and the boats and everything you needed. And then you could also get investors, which was often the governor himself. The governor was usually one of the richest dudes, so he might invest in this. And the story is that governor became pretty good friends with Cortez or liked him enough, and that they were walking to church together one time to Mass, and people who knew Cortez, that he was kind of a sly dog started mocking the governor, saying, you know, governor, you shouldn't trust Cortez. He's going to run off with your ships, and he'll never come back. And so right before the governor, the governor gives him permission to go on this scouting mission with like, 500 men and some horses. And Cortez is already thinking, nah, like, I'm going for everything. He knows at this point, there's something bigger over there in Mexico. And so he is quickly gathering men to get out of there as quickly as possible, because rumors are already starting to spread that these mocking these people, mocking the governor, saying he's getting played by Cortez, that it's starting to work, and that the governor at any moment could change his mind. And he does change his mind, and he actually sends men to arrest Cortez right before he leaves. Cortez and his men apprehend those men, recruit several of them to join their expedition, and they sell off into the, I guess the sunset. At that point, they're getting their own west. And so Cortez is now all in. He is now a fugitive of this governor of Cuba, and he's going to this foreign land where, you know, he's going to Try to conquer it. And so eventually they get to modern day Veracruz and Tabasco and that same beach, that Grijalva. The man I talked about before had met some diplomats. They have a battle with the natives right at the Grijalva River. I put a drone shot up. It's actually in my Spanish first Aztec video, if you. If you can find it. I don't know if I have it time stamped or not.

[B]

We also pull up a map, by the way, just so I can get my bearings here.

[A]

And so.

[B]

Go ahead.

[A]

Immediately, the cannons, the Arquebusiers, which is like a gun, The. The crossbows. Yeah, it's over by. Right over by Veracruz and Tabasco. It's technically in Tabasco.

[B]

Where am I looking?

[A]

Southern. You might want to pull up a state map would be of Mexico. Yeah. And so immediately they kill like 6, 000 natives on the beach or. Sorry, that's a different story. Like about a thousand natives on the beach. Just a complete massacre. And yeah, that purple one right there where Tabasco is, right on the border between Veracruz and Tabasco.

[B]

There. Right there. I gotcha.

[A]

And so during this time, one of the most significant things that happens is after the natives lose that first battle, some diplomats come from the local priests as well as some, like Aztec, I guess you could call them, diplomats kind of hanging out in the background, trying to gather information about what's happening there. And these. Hernan Cortez plays this psychological warfare on them where he convinces them, he does this good cop, bad cop thing. He convinces them that the horses and what he called the. I guess the cannons were these sentient beings and they were the ones that were in charge and that he would be in their favor and he would try to help make sure that the horses and the cannons wouldn't harm them anymore as long as they cooperated. This is where a lot of people think the Spanish were embellishing. But there's multiple accounts of this, this happening. And so the psychological warfare starts. And the. The big thing that happens here is they acquire. That's a terrible way to say it, but they acquire these new wives, these native wives. And one of them is La Malinche, which is on Nahuatl. Girl. So a girl, I guess, somebody that speaks Nahuatl, which is the Aztec language that had been traded, I guess, down there. I don't know if it was in slavery or whatever, but down in the Maya territory. So she spoke both Nahuatl and Maya. Now I gotta rewind just a little bit here. One of the things that happened was hernan Cortez and his men found these two Spaniards that had been cast away with the Maya for, like, almost a decade. And one of them, his last name was Aguilar, I believe. Geronimo de Aguilar. He decides to go with them. The. The other guy, I can't remember his name. He had already had a family with the Maya, and he. He stayed back. But Aguilar goes with them, and he speaks fluent Mayan and Spanish. So no. This llama Linche would translate Nahuatl, the Aztec language, to Mayan, and then he would translate it from Mayan to Spanish. And it kind of opened the world. They could now do diplomacy if they. If they had to. Right. They didn't always want to fight. There's only 500 of these Spanish conquistadors. And so they quickly decide that they are going to start marching inland, and they eventually get to Tlaxcala. I'm like, fast forwarding through several of this, but at one point, they experience salt deprivation or sodium deprivation.

[B]

How many men does he have at this point?

[A]

I think 500.

[B]

So he still has like 500?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Lost 100.

[A]

Did okay. Nope. And it gets pretty. They lose a lot of men once the actual battle starts happening in Tenochtit land. We'll get there. But they experience salt depletion quite a bit during all this. They're not getting a lot of sodium. And each time, there was several times that Cortez himself almost died of fever. He would get nourished back with. With just natives that are being nice. Out in the mountains of Puebla, there's actually a place called Zalta Pueblo that I went and traveled to. That was one of their stops along the way and one of the places that kind of helped them out. And eventually they get to Tlaxcala. And these Tlaxcalan people were not the Aztec. They were a completely separate nation of people.

[B]

How many? How big the nation?

[A]

The. The. The. The story is that the warriors that they had was hundreds of thousand. A hundred thousand Tlaxcalan warriors. Oh. Join the Spanish in their fight. Otherwise they would not have been able to do what they did.

[B]

A hundred. There was a civilization of a hundred thousand warriors right there. Not the Aztecs.

[A]

Right. And. And that might be discounted, but multiple people say a hundred thousand warriors helped the Spaniards with their march on to Nachti Line. And so they originally fought with the Flax Callins, originally had a battle with them. Quickly realized that these guys that had came from who knows where, the Tlax Collins did not know where these guys were coming from. Were really interested in Monuma, their enemy. And so the enemy of my enemy is. Is my friend. So they. They end up allying with them. And I told you about the massacre at Cholula. That was the next stop. They stop at Cholula, and that's where the big massacre happens then. And meanwhile, Cortez is sending letters, and not letters, but communications to Montezuma. They're actually speaking at this point between diplomats. And he's kind of playing this game where he's pretending like, oh, my lord Montezuma, we are on your side. We're here to tell you about our king and our God. But otherwise, you know, we're not here to disturb you. And Montezuma, the story, as the story goes with. With the Spanish, supposedly was really terrified about what was happening due to the prophecy that the Aztec believed in, which was the return of Quetzalcoatl. Now, this is where a lot of people say the Spanish were embellishing, but the story goes that the Aztec were expecting something to happen that year from 1519 through 1521, that Quetzalcoatl was going to return, and this was going to be the end of Montezuma's reign. And so a lot of people thought that Hernan Cortez, I guess Montezuma particularly supposedly thought that Hernan Cortez was Quetzalcoatl. And so if that is true, he basically believes that prophecy is taking place. And so, you know, do we attack them? Is this. Is this some. Is this. He didn't know what to do. Is. Is the story there? Eventually they get to Tenochtitlan and they stay. They're welcomed there. They stay there for quite a. Quite a while. And they're just amazed. Some of the quotes from, like, Bernal Diaz is that this is the most beautiful city we've ever seen in our lives. That they couldn't believe that the sights that they were seeing, the buildings, the architecture, the markets, they were very impressed with the markets.

[B]

What was so impressive about the market,

[A]

how organized everything was. And also, I think they were a little shock. It was shocked. It was. What was being sold at the markets? Like what? Like humans, you know, like humans. Humans, according to them, that these markets were being sold. They. At in Tallulah, they write about how there were children being fattened up in cages at some of the markets, like, to be sold. To be sold as in slavery, to be sold as a sacrifice, and then eventually as a commodity, like a food to be eaten.

[B]

And so wait, so you're saying the Aztecs were cannibals?

[A]

The conquistadors document cannibalism throughout even Tlaxcala and Cholula and the Aztec, extensively.

[B]

Can you take a sidebar on that?

[A]

Yeah, and there's. There's pretty good archaeological evidence just to support a lot of that.

[B]

So what were some of the. Besides the markets in Tenasheetland where they're fattening up children in cages to be sold as sacrifices or to be eaten, what other places were they seeing this as a. As a commonality? And were the. Was it a. Were they foreigners always meaning, like.

[A]

Yeah, I think so. I think a lot of these are captives. So, yeah, I do need to back up quite a bit. Kind of started. Just go. So if we go all the way back to before they even went to Cholula, they allied. Before they even allied with the Tlaxcalans, they allied with these people called the simple Wallens out on the Veracruz coast. And their main grievance was that these Aztecs were tax collectors, came and took some of their children and their. And their wives and their. And their kids as a. Basically attacks. And so that's. There's a reason why a lot of these people are allying with the. With the conquistadors. They are tired of this tax that they're paying, which is their human lives that are being sacrificed to their gods. And so that's kind of a little bit more context there. Now, those markets, they describe them as well organized. At one point, they realized that this was kind of interesting. They would sell these boatloads worth of human fecal matter, and they would use that. They would collect it. They had, like, all these different public restrooms that people would go do their business, and they would collect that, and they would extract salt from. That was the story. And once again, shout out to Kevin Sepel, his book Conquistador Voices.

[B]

Salt.

[A]

Yeah, salt. Because all that's coming out. And so apparently you can extract minerals, salt, all kinds of stuff if you get rid of, I don't know, the process they used for it. So that's in the. The video.

[B]

That's a South park episode.

[A]

Yeah, for sure. But eventually, they meet Montezuma. They tell him that, like, we're here to introduce you to our Lord. You. We are this. You know, we are the servants of King Charles as well as, you know, our Lord Jesus Christ. And they try to get him to stop these human sacrifices, and eventually they take him captive. And it's kind of quiet the way they take him captive. But meanwhile, Hernan Cortez kind of all over the place here. But this story is kind of all over the place. You keep in mind he's a wanted fugitive by the people back in Cuba, and a whole garrison arrives on the coast to arrest him. And this is right after he gets to Tenochtitlan, and they're in the actual city.

[B]

Which people in Cuba?

[A]

The Spaniards. Like the. The people that, you know. The governor at the. At one point, basically said, no, you can't go. And he took off with all of his ships and men, and now he's trying to conquer Mexico. And Cortez is writing to the king this entire time, trying to bypass this Cuban governor, knowing that he has to conquer Mexico at this point and make it in. In a way that would be favorable to the king. Right? Get that royal fifth. Let him know how big of a discovery this is, or they've found an entire civilization. And so Cortez gets word that this fleet has arrived to arrest him and even kill him, you know, basically, dead or alive. And so he has to go back to the coast and take care of this. And he does. He goes and he. They have a quick skirmish on the coast and basically tells these guys what he's discovered. And now he has reinforcements. He has a lot more people that.

[B]

Oh, they join him.

[A]

They join him because he's like. Guys like, you. First it was a skirmish. Like, he had a little bit of a battle. He attacked them kind of in a surprise. It was a surprise attack, but then let them know what they were dealing with here. You know, an entire civilization with lots of gold. These guys had gold lust.

[B]

How do we know it was a surprise attack?

[A]

Primary sources, Cortez and Bernal Diaz's letters.

[B]

So how did he do it?

[A]

I believe it was at night. I believe it was a night. And the commander. I know. I know that the. The guy that was in charge of trying to take Cortez into custody was, like, the last one to surrender, and he ended up losing his eye. I don't know if. But he lost an eye in the. In the battle. And so they go back to Tenochtitlan and find out that all hell is broken loose. The conquistadors that were there, that were left started to become really paranoid. Their welcome was no longer the. The welcome was worn thin, and at some point, there was a festival, and these conquistadors missed. They mistaked this festival for they thought that they were planning on. On massacring them. So the conquistadors did like a preemptive strike and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people in the middle of Tenochtitlan. And Cortez comes back to all of this and, you know, basically at this point, it's all out warfare. They somehow get into the middle of, you know, I guess with the. You got to keep in mind these guys have shields, these guys have, you know, advanced weapons. They get back into the center of Tenochtitlan. Cortez is furious that they allowed this to happen. Like, why did you guys attack them? They. We had this. We had to dip. We had monuma on our side. And now it appears, I think, that the kinky stores likely killed him. The story is that he was killed by his own people because the people were starting to rebel and that a rock was. He went out to, like, calm them down and a rock was thrown and it hit him in the head. But a lot of people think it was probably the conquistadors decided that he was no longer useful to them alive. And.

[B]

What a crazy story.

[A]

It's a crazy story. So they decide they need to make their escape. Meanwhile, during this entire time, the conquistadors had been building brigantines to try to. To try to sail on because they're. Remember Tenochtitlan. If you pull up a picture of this, it's in the middle of Lake Texcoco, and the only way in and out are these causeways. And the Aztec are the ones that control these causeways. And at some point they decide that they're going to escape. And this is the. This is like the part that's really crazy where half the conquistadors end up dying. They try to escape on these causeways. Yeah, here's some pictures.

[B]

The map of tennis sheet line always blows my mind.

[A]

I know, it's like, it's, you know,

[B]

it's a mini Atlantean looking thing, right? You know?

[A]

Yeah. It's insane. It's out in the middle of this lake and those causeways, you see those little yellow bridges there? They try to sneak across, but before they know it, everybody sees what's happening and basically a massacre happens. Half the conquistadors get caught by the. The Aztec and Hernan Cortez and several, you know, the rest get out of there. And the story is that they watched from a distance and heard from a distance their brothers in arms being sacrificed alive.

[B]

Sacrificed.

[A]

Sacrificed alive. That they're captured and. Yeah, what would they. Where.

[B]

Where are they sacrificing them?

[A]

Templo mayor in the center.

[B]

What is that? When they're sacrificing them alive. What does that consist of?

[A]

Oh, I. So, you know, this is probably Luke Cavern's territory. A little bit better, but an obsidian blade and probably some type of ritual, I don't know. But the story that's this is called La Noche Triste. If you pull up La Noche Triste, which is the sad night, read some of the details on this because it's a crazy story. You know, they think it could have been tens to hundreds of of them sacrificed that night and then many more killed.

[B]

So what a horrible way to go. All right, so the sad night, the night of sorrows, called victorious Night by some sectors in Mexico. It's the name of the defeat suffered by the Spanish troops of Hernan Cortez at the hands of the Mexica army on the night of June 30 or July 1, 1520, the last day of the month. I'm not even going to try to say that word. Technique, Something, something. On the outskirts of Tenochtitlan in Tacuba, under a leafy tree in what is now Mexico City, on November 8, 1519, Hernan Cortez and his army entered Mexico, 10 clock o', Shetland, the capital of the Aztec empire. Emperor Montezuma ii, surrounded by Aztec nobility awaited him. Cortez dismounted to embrace the Aztec ruler. But right Kaka Matsin, Lord of Texo Texcoco and Koala Hawk, Lord of Ita Palapa prevented him. As the Aztec sovereign was considered untouchable. Cortez removed a necklace of margaritas glass beads and placed it around mat.

[A]

So this is. Let's this if not to interrupt you, but this is kind of the beginning story.

[B]

That's a good point.

[A]

You go all the way down to

[B]

the massacre at Templo Mayor. Yeah, what you want Y so when Cortez had to had to leave to confront Pontillo de Narvaez expedition, he left. What was that again?

[A]

Yeah. So this is when he goes to basically take care of the Spaniards that are on the coast. Yeah. That are trying to get him and he. This massacre right here happens while he's away. All right, so if you scroll down a little bit more to actually La Noche Triste. Yeah, this is the one.

[B]

So the fighting between the Mexican the Spanish had already lasted a week. The Spanish and their indigenous allies were besieged in and around the palace of Ax Cattle, almost without food. So they decided to flee. At midnight on June 30, 1520, Cortez gave the signal to leave and under orders of silence they marched stealthily across a bridge of canoes toward tlan, careful to avoid the winning of their horses. Upon imagine them just like it. Shut the up. All right. So, upon reaching the Toltech canal, an elderly Mexico woman who had come out to fetch water from a jug, noticed the Spanish escape and alerted the Aztec warriors. Soon the serpent skin drum from the temple temple began to sound. And the Spanish found themselves surrounded by thousands of enraged warriors. Within minutes, the lagoons surrounding Mexico Tenocheet line was teeming with canoes full of natives armed and spears and arrows. While the rooftops thousands of warriors attacked the rear guard. And other natives cut the bridges to the mainland, which was made of canoes tied together. It is said that the soldiers who chose to rid themselves of their jewels and gold survived, while many of those burdened by steel armor, gold bars and jewels died rich. But there is also an element of legend here. In a night battle on a narrow causeway built over water, attacked by thousands of enemies simultaneously from both flanks in the rear, salvation could only have come from courage or luck. Alvarado himself was saved by Martin de Gamboa, who lifted him onto the back of a horse and later declared that Alvarado wore only a cotton armor of Mexico design and his Toledo sword at his belt. Men and horses drown in the ditches and pools. Artillery was lost. Cortez's indigenous allies were massacred occurred. The term is accurate. Of more than a thousand tx on allies, barely 100 survived. And half of the Spanish troops were killed, with almost the rest wounded. So during the ceremonies for the ascension of the new emperor, captured Spaniards and tx gakkens were sacrificed. It was claimed that 90% of the loot from Montezuma's treasure was lost.

[A]

Yeah, at the bottom of Lake Texcoco. The idea that they they drowned because they didn't want to empty their pockets. You see that tree right there? The legend is that Hernan Cortez weeped at that tree as they listened to what happened to the people that were left behind. And that tree is still there.

[B]

And what did he do about it?

[A]

Well, so they then go back to Tlaxcala with what's left of their allies, and they regroup, they get a lot more warriors, and then more Spaniards come. And then they go back and do the final siege of Tenochtitlan, which is another battle that even more conquistadors dies. Hundreds of thousands of Aztec die. And from not only the war, but from disease. They cut off the causeway or the the waterway of Chapultepec, which was where all the fresh water came in from the city and basically starved them out. At this point, a huge wave, like right before a huge wave of smallpox comes in and just takes care of a lot of the dirty work for the conquistadors. And. Yeah, so at that point, there's huge bombardment of the city and what's left of the New. There's. There's. I can't remember his name, but there was a new king, an Aztec king that ended up being. Surrender. Ended up surrendering to Cortez when they caught him. And at first they spared him, but the. The story is that when they got frustrated because there was hardly any gold to be left to be found because a lot of this had went. They boiled his feet in oil, torturing him, trying to get out, you know, where's the gold? We know there's more gold, and they never got it.

[B]

Feeding oil.

[A]

Yep, that's the story. They boil his feet in oil. And so a lot of people were very frustrated with Hernan Cortez at this point. All these soldiers that had risked their lives, many of them wounded, many of them had their brothers and friends killed. There's not a lot of spoils to be divvied out among the men. A lot of people thought Hernan Cortez actually hid the gold, that he took some of the gold and put it elsewhere. And so it's a crazy story. And it's the first one I've did for a while. Sorry. It's the first conquistador video I did when I did this whole series. So it's been a while, but it's got to be. They got to make a movie.

[B]

They have to make a movie.

[A]

It's wild.

[B]

What became of Hernan Cortez after this.

[A]

So Hernan Cortez goes back to Spain to basically try to justify what he did. At this point. There's a Council of the Indies and

[B]

a Council of the.

[A]

Yeah, like. So the Council of the New World, I guess we'll call it at that point.

[B]

Who are based in the New World in Seville, Spain. Oh, so they're back home.

[A]

So he's going back to court and. And kind of explaining the massacre at Cholula. You know, a lot of the massacres that happened at Templo my. Or, you know, explaining himself for betraying the Cuban governor in the first place. Cortez was a bit of a pirate, like he was. He had to go clear his name, and he ends up having a child with Llama linche. The first one of the first Mestizo children in the New World. So Lama Linche was the interpreter that they had, you know, acquired, I guess, or got in Tabasco. And he settles down in Spain for a while. And I believe maybe look this up. Joy. I want to say he ends up being buried in Mexico, but maybe Mexico recently decided they didn't want his body in Mexico. I can't remember where his body lies today. Let's see here, sir. Non Cortez, Spanish conquista, or the Empire, is buried in Mexico City. So he's still in Mexico City. So his body's actually in Mexico City. Yeah, but, yeah, he has a. He has a child with La Malinche and dies a very rich man. He did one more expedition or several. He did several other things, but one more expedition out in Baja California at one point. Baja California, and that was just another frontier that hadn't been explored. He becomes California. He becomes pretty instrumental in the building and development of Mexico City after his name is cleared. So, you know, he kind of starts the new empire of New Spain in many ways.

[B]

Do we, can we trace his family tree back? Does he have living relatives?

[A]

I had a guy message me that said a lot of his relatives ended up being Tejanos in the, in Texas that a lot of Cortez's bloodline ended up near, like the Alam in San Antonio in southern Texas. So I'm sure, I'm sure there are people out there that, you know, have as know about that as. I'm sure that's something you could trace.

[B]

Yeah, that Cortez blood in them. Yeah, it's an insane. We got to get that author in here. I, I just, I, I love the, and I don't love all the outcomes, obviously, but like the, the history there and the story of that conquest and the ultimate, you know, political tete a tet that goes south and yeah, one side decides to massacre and then the other side says, all right, we'll raise you times 10 and also give you smallpox.

[A]

Yeah. And the fact that they didn't even know about each other until two years prior to the complete fall of this civilization. You know, usually two enemies know about each other for quite a bit of time before, you know, hits the fan. This was all just like a sudden Armageddon in many ways for the Aztec.

[B]

I would love you talk about a movie. I would love to see a narcos style show done where every season is. It is 10 episodes of a different Conquistador.

[A]

Yeah, that'd be sick.

[B]

And you give it its full ability to breathe and Some of them might need to be two, three seasons.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

If you're doing 20, 30 episodes to really tell the story where you stay as historically accurate as possible. And then, you know, you also work in some Hollywood stuff to make an entertaining.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, or get some plot points. But that would be so cool. And I think people. We've seen this, you know, looking at it historically, people have a real desire for that, whether you look at something fictionalized, like Game of Thrones and how popular that got from a medieval perspective, as far as, like, the type of setting. And then you look at something historical, like the crown and what an amazing show that was across different generations of, like, Queen Elizabeth's life. And people really, you know, mopped up the history there and. And like, that. I. I think there. There would be a huge, huge opportunity. I agree with you.

[A]

Yeah. And Hernan Cortez and his story would be like, in my opinion, the best episode.

[B]

Who plays her? Non Cortez.

[A]

Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. Well, it's got to be. Let's see, like, how old was he

[B]

when he met with Montezuma? Do we know?

[A]

In his 30s. I want to say mid-30s. Isn't that crazy? Like, I'm 36 now.

[B]

Can Jacob Elordi speak Spanish?

[A]

So he's born in 1485, in 1519 is when they first. First arrive. So what's the math on that? 34. When he first gets there, and then by the time he sacks to Nachitlan, he's 36.

[B]

Yeah. He's got a little bit of that, like, Al Pacino in. In the Merchant of Venice look to him, right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. He almost. He almost died, like, three times, in fact. I just really. I'm sorry, my brain was getting a little wild there. I needed some. I need some more of this caffeine. I skipped a whole part of it. There's a.

[B]

Let's go back. You have room to rewind.

[A]

There's a story of the first time they actually set or a Spaniard set eyes on Tenochtitlan was. There's this volcano. If you want to pull this up. It's called papo. If you pull up the volcano, Papo and Papo, P O. P O. And it's really a Nle word, but for sure is papo. It's this beautiful volcano in Puebla. And after they do the Cholula massacre, they need some more gunpowder. Right. And so you have all of. Basically everything you need in a volcano. They have the. Oh, what do you Call it the. Oh, smells like rotten eggs. The

[B]

phosphorus.

[A]

Some type of. Yeah, phosphorus or something like that. With the. With the volcano.

[B]

That's probably not right.

[A]

That's right. I don't think that is right out there. Sorry, sorry. I'm drawing a blank right now. But one of the ingredients for gunpowder for their in cannons was in that volcano. And so he sends some men up to go with their native guides to go climb this very active volcano that's still active today. And sulfide, Sulfur. I'm sorry, my brain. My brain was a little foggy, so. Sulfur. And they climbed this volcano to the very peak, which is just crazy. Like, this is a very active volcano even to this day. And that's when they see Tenochtitlan for the first time from the volcano. That's the story now, whether you could or not. Some people argue that you couldn't. And I get a lot of crap online because I say that this was Hernan Cortez's first time seeing the volcano and that he was just amazed by it. And a lot of people say, well, they have volcanoes in Italy. This couldn't have been his first time seeing a volcano. But Hernan Cortez went to the new world at a very early age. So for many of them, this was their first time as they were going by it, seeing an active volcano. Volcano. And they were pretty amazed by it. Yeah, absolutely. He didn't climb it. He sent some guys up there.

[B]

Of course he did.

[A]

Right? He's the boss.

[B]

He ain't taking that risk.

[A]

But they climbed this volcano supposedly to

[B]

go get some sulfur for their steep ass climb too.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Actually drove crazy looking. I drove up Cortez's pass. I did a road. I drove my car from Kansas to Oaxaca, and I stopped in Puebla and drove up Cortez's pass, up this. Near this volcano, and I got a pretty sick drone shot of it. I wish I would have brought it for you. But that pass is the pass that they use to get to Tenochtitlan. One of them. So. Yeah.

[B]

Now you. You went. You were telling me off camera, you went to college with a focus in history.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then you were a history teacher in high school, teaching pretty much everything.

[A]

Yeah, I went to college for teaching history, secondary education.

[B]

That's awesome.

[A]

I taught for eight years.

[B]

What. What eras did you teach to your students?

[A]

Everything. When you're teaching at small schools, you are the history department when you get hired. So I was teaching like 6th graders through like 12th grade AP American history. So I'd be Teaching middle school geography. And then next hour, I might be teaching AP American History or ap, you know, World History.

[B]

What is your favorite history of all to study by far era?

[A]

New Spain. Well, the. That first contact through the rise and fall in New Spain. That's my favorite one. Right.

[B]

Kids would be really interested in that, too.

[A]

I think so.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I think it's. As long as you don't censor yourself too much. Talk about the tragedy, talk about the. The gore, talk about the nastiness, you know, the. The wild. Both the good and the bad of history. You know, be real. Be as real as you can without being, you know, getting. You got to pick your battles. Parents get a little mad sometimes, but.

[B]

Did you run into that a lot?

[A]

Not necessarily.

[B]

School was pressuring you to not say things? No.

[A]

I'm from an area that has pretty thick skin, like things can fly where I'm from, so. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

[B]

That's one thing. I just kind of thinking about the eras of my life. I got really lucky because. Because I just missed that era of where they would have been. Like, we need to edit this and make it more digestible. Like, my history teachers throughout my life were awesome. They just taught it.

[A]

Yeah. You know, an era of history that I'm super interested in but don't know a lot about right now is the Crusades. I feel like I need to do a prequel to all this with the Crusades because it all ties into why people even went to the Americas in the first place. So that might be a project. Once I finish this Conquistador series, I got a couple more episodes with the Conquistadors that I want to do.

[B]

Crusades is nuts.

[A]

Crusades is wild.

[B]

You ever seen the director's extended cut of Kingdom of Heaven?

[A]

No, I haven't.

[B]

Yeah, so they made Ridley cut that movie down and it was poorly received because it, like, cut around. But he was. He. I think he released. We can check this deep. I think he released multiple director's cuts, and they each got longer. But the full director's cut is actually an amazing movie. But that whole. That's another one. It's almost like. And I was just talking with another guy I'm going to have on the podcast about this. It's almost like we get so fascinated with ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, which. Let's call that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Dwindle it down to a couple thousand years old world, ancient history. Right. And then once Rome falls for the first time. 476. There's like a. Of. Of just like this happened, then this happened, then this happened. And roughly that happened. Don't worry about that. Right there. And then we kind of get to, like, 1700 North America.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And Europe. You focus in on those two different, like, areas and what was happening in the world. And there is so much.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

In there that we ignore. And of course, lessons to be learned.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

From the different ruling classes of those times. Times.

[A]

Yeah. And it's. Well, you know, like the Roman empire. Egypt on YouTube is pretty well covered. And so I thought about doing some content on Egypt because I am interested in it. I made one video on Herodotus, which was the Greek traveler that went there and documented what he saw and what he learned. And I quickly realized, yeah, it was cool. But, like, I want to do the Americas. The Americas are so interesting because even before Columbus arrived. So interesting because it's one big mystery. We know quite a bit. We have really good archaeologists that have done a lot of great work on the Americas. And there's really good oral histories from the natives that are still here that have documented a lot of their customs. But there still is, like, there's. Beyond the Maya and the Aztec, when you go up to, like, North. North America, there's not any writing that we have to. To see. So a lot of it's coming from oral traditions, from the descendants that are still there. And so there's a lot of mythology, you know, there's a lot of lore in the Americas. It's still there. And a lot of mysteries, a lot of enigmas that are, like, still hard to explain with the Americas.

[B]

Ain't it crazy? We don't think about the feet below us right here on the ground.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Knowing what exactly live in this European history world, because that's who charted it. But what about all the. That didn't get charted before they found it.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Like Manhattan is. Was probably prime real estate to the natives.

[B]

Of course.

[A]

He's a great spot.

[B]

Incredible.

[A]

You know, me and Luke talk about that quite a bit. Luke Caverns. Like, anytime you're looking at a beautiful spot somewhere, you know, out in nature somewhere, or maybe a good spot on the river, there's a good chance that somebody else thought that that was a good spot too. You might find an arrowhead there. You might find something there, you know.

[B]

Yeah. Like even. But even, like more recent stuff that you should care about a lot. New York was a ground zero spot, no pun intended on that with the Revolutionary War.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And like, just. And I'm always thinking about that walking along the Hudson when I take my walk walks there and like. Oh my God, they went from there to there and right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Staten Island. Oh my God. That's where Washington escaped. And then he escaped up here. And by the way, West Point's an hour away.

[A]

It's like.

[B]

Yeah, man.

[A]

Yeah. It's crazy.

[B]

Amazing.

[A]

I grew up on the Arkansas river and you know, I think even further back, like 12,000 years when the hunter gatherers were just slaughtering big mega fauna out there, you know, they found so many. There's. There's so many mammoth tusks just out there in like western Kansas, eastern Colorado that, you know, you could uncover or probably were uncovered when agriculture came through. And you're just sitting out here driving on this Highway 50 on this road. It's pretty desolate. And you just think back like 200 years ago, the grizzly bear was out here. We don't have grizzly bears in Kansas anymore. Like, grizzly bears are pretty isolated. No, no. Grizzlies are not even Colorado supposedly anymore or New Mexico. The grizzlies used to be all upon the high plains.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And they're now up in Wyoming and Montana and Idaho and Washington, I guess. Brown bears, grizzlies. So I think about the different animals. I know that Luke. I hope I'm not spoiling this, Luke. Luke's really interested in how far the, the jaguar came into the Americas. And you know, there's a traditional territory map that he thinks maybe it should be a little bigger because of some of the artifacts that you find even out in like the mound builder cultures. I won't say anymore because I want Luke to cook on that, but Oldiana

[B]

Jones on it again.

[A]

You're gonna have to get him back on brother, because he's got a lot to say about the jaguar. Yeah. So I think about all that for sure. The Americas are still a big mystery. And they're going to be a mystery with respect to like archaeologists who have done amazing work and who have told us a lot. There's just a lot we don't know. Right. I know that's a cliche thing to say, but it's true.

[B]

Oh, it's, it's. Especially with North America.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Holy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And speaking of that, we gotta talk about that. So we're, we're gonna get there. And then you just did this whole investigation on the Nazca mummies and you were also interviewed by my buddy Jesse Michaels, who had done his own investigation on it to kind of give the counterpoint because you've gone and observed this stuff and uncovered a lot of problems with that story. And I can talk about some things I've seen behind the scenes that I have problems with on that. So I want to break all that down. We've got to talk about the Mayans as well. I gotta take a piss. We've been talking for like 2 hours, 45 minutes. So this is gonna be episode two. If you're not subscribed, please subscribe and subscribe to Will's page. It's amazing stuff. You will love it. I'll see you for the next episode. Peace. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you.

[A]

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