#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America

Ed Barnhart is an archaeologist and explorer specializing in ancient civilizations of the Americas. He is the Director of the Maya Exploration Center, host of the ArchaeoEd Podcast, and lecturer on the ancient history of North, Central, and South America. Ed is in part known for his groundbreaking work on ancient astronomy, mathematics, and calendar systems. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep446-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/ed-barnhart-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Ed’s YouTube: https://youtube.com/@archaeoedpodcast Ed’s Website: https://archaeoed.com/ Maya Exploration Center: https://mayaexploration.org Ed’s Lectures on The Great Courses: https://thegreatcoursesplus.com/edwin-barnhart Ed’s Lectures on Audible: https://adbl.co/4dBavTZ 2025 Mayan Calendar: https://mayan-calendar.com/ SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: MasterClass: Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://masterclass.com/lexpod https://lexfridman.com/s/masterclass-ep446-sc Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep446-sc NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/netsuite-ep446-sc AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/ag1-ep446-sc Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/notion-ep446-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (08:59) – Lost civilizations (16:04) – Hunter-gatherers (19:36) – First humans in the Americas (29:28) – South America (34:57) – Pyramids (42:01) – Religion (55:05) – Shamanism (57:02) – Ayahuasca (1:03:15) – Lost City of Z (1:08:09) – Graham Hancock (1:15:11) – Uncontacted tribes (1:21:12) – Maya civilization (1:37:00) – Mayan calendar (1:52:17) – Flood myths (2:20:46) – Aztecs (2:38:12) – Inca Empire (2:56:13) – Early humans in North America (3:02:10) – Columbus (3:06:46) – Vikings (3:10:55) – Aliens (3:15:23) – Earth in 10,000 years (3:31:33) – Hope for the future PODCAST LINKS: – Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast – Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr – Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 – RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ – Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 – Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Ed Barnhart, an archaeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of South America, Mesoamerica, and North America.

• 0:12Lex Fridman?

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• 0:57Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by MasterClass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I return time and time again to Martin Scorsese, who has an excellent masterclass on filmmaking. I'm a huge fan of Scorsese, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly where his greatness is. I think in part, it's the storytelling. How do you tell a story in a way that pulls a person in in a very short amount of time, gives you a feeling of a peoples, of a time, of a culture, of the drama, of the tension, of the hopes, of the loves, of the betrayals?

• 1:40Lex Fridman?

  All of that pulls you in as quickly as possible and lets you intimately feel that.

• 1:47Lex Fridman?

  That, I think, at the foundation is about storytelling. Now, on top of that, there's the technical expertise of cinematography. Just a lot of beautiful, intense, fun shots that contribute to the story. Some of it is lighting, some of it is framing, some of it is the tracking shots. And of course, of course, some of it is the mastery in the editing room. Anyway, it's all those little details that, when put together, create some of the greatest films ever made. So you can check them out at MasterClass and get unlimited access to MasterClass

• 2:29Lex Fridman?

  and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod. And that's masterclass.com/lexpod. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store and also a company that is easily and commonly confused with Spotify, especially on X, when people celebrate the CEOs of both companies. CEO of Spotify being Daniel Ek and Toby, the CEO of Shopify. It's hilarious when both are celebrated correctly and incorrectly on social media.

• 3:12Lex Fridman?

  Love it. And Toby should be celebrated. Fascinating guy. Probably I'll talk to him on a podcast at some point. And not just fascinating because of Shopify and entrepreneurial journey of that from the beginning to, to creating the company as it is now, but also just philosophically. The guy is a powerhouse. How he sees the world, how he thinks about the world. He's just fun to brainstorm with. I got a chance to meet him and talk to him. Brilliant guy. And I'll probably talk to Daniel Ek at some point. I think we agreed to talk like a year ago. Travel situation, scheduling, all that kind of stuff got in the way. Both, I would say, are incredible companies.

• 3:57Lex Fridman?

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• 4:21Lex Fridman?

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• 5:06Lex Fridman?

  and sometimes war with each other, sometimes conflict with each other on the cultural, on the economic, on the war front. And so, breaking down the barrier of language can break down the barrier between peoples, and it can break down the barrier between the different departments within a company. That's what NetSuite helps you do. Over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I'm about to drink it in a few minutes. I'm feeling good about life.

• 5:50Lex Fridman?

  I'm feeling good about my health. I'm going to have to do a very long run today. I did a hard training session in jiu-jitsu yesterday, putting my body through a lot of physical and emotional and mental stress, but feeling good under the weight of the challenge. And for that, you have to make sure your nutrition is in a good place. I got a lot of vitamins. Basically, AG1 is a super awesome multivitamin, and that serves as a great foundation for all the fasting, all the carnivore, all the whatever diet things I do. It's cool to create a little habit in terms of food and nutrition, and count on that habit to be your grounding from which you can launch into

• 6:33Lex Fridman?

  the crazy adventures that life offers. Anyway, they'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. They've really, really been pushing the AI front of how to integrate AI into the workflow of teams, into the workflow of note-taking. It's been incredible.

• 6:59Lex Fridman?

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• 7:41Lex Fridman?

  And it's actually really good at just doing a TLDR that gives you a basic summary, not just across a single document, but across multiple documents, across multiple wikis, projects, all of it. So if there's a large team, you can ask, "What's been happening?", and you can get a good summary of that, and that's super, super powerful. And, you know, I have a conversation coming up with a cursor team that's a code editor, and they've been pushing the same kind of thing for the niche world of programming. And so, you know, when you have a great UX that integrates the human and AI together effectively, just the world of possibility opens up. I've been using Notion for just this and loving it.

• 8:24Lex Fridman?

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• 8:34Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ed Varanhart.

• 8:59Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there are lost civilizations in the history of humans on Earth, which we don't know anything about?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. And in fact, you know, we, we have found some civilizations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime. I mean, we've got Gobekli Tepe, and we've got the stuff that's going on in the Amazon. And there's some other less startling things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and give us whole new civilizations we had no idea about. So yeah, it's happened. And I think it'll happen again.

• 9:38Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's a lost civilization in the Amazon that the Amazon jungle has eaten up? Or is hiding the evidence of?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. And I, we're beginning to find it. There are these huge, what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like Rome. And I don't think we're ever going to find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon. I think a lot of things there, I mean, wherever you are on the planet, you use your natural resources. And in the Amazon, there's not a whole lot of stone. What stone is there is deep, deep, deep. So a lot of their things were built out of dirt and trees and feathers and textiles.

• 10:31Lex Fridman?

  But is it possible that all that land that's not covered by trees is actually hiding? Stone, for example, some architecture, some things that's just very difficult to find for archaeologists?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  I think at the base of the Andes, where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there's a lot of potential there because that's where the stone actually starts poking up. When you get down into the basin, stone is meters and meters under the ground, except for a stray cliff here and there where the river dug deep. And even then, only in the dry season because that river rises like over 100 feet every year.

• 11:12Lex Fridman?

  That's one of the things, having visited that area, just interacting with waterfalls and seeing the water. I was humbled by the power of water to shape landscapes and probably erase history in the context that we're talking about of civilizations. As water can just make everything disappear over a period of centuries and millennia. And so if there's something existed a very long time ago, thousands of years ago, it's very possible it was just eaten up by nature.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that's almost a certainty in a lot of places.

• 11:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  You know, the Grand Canyon was dug by water. There's this wimpy little river in it right now, and you can't possibly imagine that it dug that, but it did. The power of nature and geology is really kind of magical. And when it comes to ancient civilizations that could be from a long time ago, there's probably a lot that are just under the ocean and just the wave action have destroyed them and what they haven't destroyed buried deep.

• 12:18Lex Fridman?

  Under the ocean, so you think Atlantis ever existed?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  I don't think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato's many parables talking about, you know, putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school. If one did exist or a shadow of it, my money would be on Akrotiri. Akrotiri is what's left of a big city that was on the island of Santorini. And when their volcano blew up, it blew up most of the city and shot chunks of it so fast that 70 miles away in Crete, there are chunks of Santorini in their cliff. So it blasted what was ever there, but what's left on the side of the crater, Akrotiri,

• 13:09Speaker 01

  is strangely advanced for its age. And so if there's anything that's a model for Atlantis, as Plato explained it. It's Akrotiri.

• 13:21Lex Fridman?

  Akrotiri, the ancient Greek city. So it says the settlement was destroyed in the Thera eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the remains of the frescoes and many objects and artworks. So we don't know how advanced that civilization was.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  No, but we can walk around the ruins and see that it's got streets, it's got plumbing, it's got little sconces for, uh, for torches at night. It was a vibrant city with, uh, with a lot of, especially in terms of hydraulic engineering. It's, it's very advanced for being 3,500 years old.

• 14:03Lex Fridman?

  So if you check out, here's an image of the excavation. What a project.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  It's an amazing place and you can tell that it's just part of it because it, it's pretty close to where the crater begins. So the city itself was probably much larger.

• 14:19Lex Fridman?

  So in this case, there's a lot of evidence, but like we said, there could be, there could be civilizations that there is no, there's very little evidence of because of the natural environment that destroys all the evidence.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Right. And I think Akrotiri is actually a great example of that because here we have the side that did preserve that looks amazing, but we know there was more of the city that was completely obliterated. It was shot, chunks of that city are probably in the walls of Crete 70 miles away. And, uh, you know, Plato says that it, it sunk, it was on an island and it sunk. Well, that's exactly what happened to Akrotiri.

• 14:56Lex Fridman?

  I think this is what Plato was referring to.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  If it does exist, at least the model of it, I think this is probably what he was talking about.

• 15:04Lex Fridman?

  And there could be other civilizations of which Plato has never written. Right.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 15:09Lex Fridman?

  That we have no record of. And it's humbling to think that entire civilizations with all the dreams, the hope, the technological innovation, the wars, the conflicts, the political tensions, all of that, the social interactions, the hierarchies, all of that, the art can be just destroyed like that and forgotten completely, lost to ancient history.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  I reflect upon that often as an archaeologist. I think about this great country that I live in and love and all the things we've achieved. But, you know, we're a baby historically speaking. We've been around 200 years. Heck, a lot of the cities I study in Central and South America, they had a run of 800, 1,000 years, and now they're ruins. But we're barely getting started in terms of historical civilizations.

• 16:03Lex Fridman?

  So humans, Homo sapiens, evolved, but they didn't start civilizations right away. There's a long period of time when they did not form these complex societies. So how did we, let's say 300,000 years ago in Africa, actually go from there to creating civilizations?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  I think that a lot of human evolution had to do with the pressures that their environment put upon them. And a lot of things start changing right around 12,000 years ago. And that's when our last ice age really ended. I think there was a whole lot of things that just pressured them into especially finding new ways of subsistence. Here in the Americas, a huge thing that happened was all the megafauna went away. When the climate changed enough, the mammoths died out and the bison died out. And they had

• 17:08Speaker 01

  to come up with different ways of doing things. We were hunters and gatherers and we had things we got from hunting and we got things we got from gathering. And in the Americas, when the things that they were used to hunting went away and they had to make do with rabbits, they're, you know, the, the gathering started to be a much more important thing. And I think that led to figuring out, hey, we could actually grow certain things and gardens turned into crops, turned into intensive crops. And then people were allowed to gather in bigger groups and survive in a single area. They didn't have to roam around anymore. And that's where we get the first sedentary communities, which means they, they stayed

• 17:52Speaker 01

  in the same place all year long. For the vast majority of human existence, we've been nomadic and we've done these kind of wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region where they'd know, okay, you know, in the mountains, well, in the, we'll be in the summer in the mountains because there's berries and things. And then in the winter, we'll be down here and we'll hunt. But they'd move. So, once humans figured out how to stay in a place, I think there, that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization.

• 18:27Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is, uh, there's a lot of questions I want to ask here. What, what do you think is the motivation for societies? Is it the, the carrot or the stick? So you said like, is it, well, like when resources run out, when the old way of life is no longer feeding everybody, then you have to figure stuff out? Or is it more the carrot of like, there's always this kind of human spirit that wants to explore, that wants to, uh, maybe impress the rest of the village or something like this with, uh, the new discovery they made in venturing out and coming out with, with different ideas or technological innovation, let's call it?

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I, I have an explorer's heart, so I'm kind of, uh, you know, bi- I'm biased.

• 19:09Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  You know, I, I do think that, that we have an, an eight desire to see what's on the horizon.

• 19:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  And to impress other people with our achievements, things like that. Uh, we're, we're social beings. Um, that's, that, that's really the edge that humans have is our ability to work together. So I, I think that it's much more the carrot than the stick. When things get ugly, the stick comes out, but usually the carrot does the job.

• 19:36Lex Fridman?

  The really interesting story is how the first people came to the Americas. I mean, to me, that's pretty gangster to go from Asia all the way potentially during the Ice Age, or maybe at the end of the Ice Age, or during that whole period, not knowing what the world looks like, going into the unknown. Can you talk to that process? How did the first people come to the Americas?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Well, first off, I agree with you. That was pretty gangster. I mean, that's, that's, that's a hard place to live. I, I listened to some of your podcasts, that guy, uh, Jordan Jonas.

• 20:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Cut the mustard, but I, I wouldn't have made it crossing there.

• 20:14Lex Fridman?

  Well, there you go. Like the, the fact that those guys exist, that somebody like Jordan Jonas exists, people that, uh, survive and thrive in these harsh conditions, that, that, that's an indication that it's possible. But yeah, so when, when do you think and how did the first people come?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  The traditional theories are still somewhat valid, or at least, you know, on the table, that when that land bridge occurred, that nomadic hunters just followed the game like they always had. And the game went across there because there was no barrier and they followed them across. The thing that has changed is how early that happened. DNA has been a total game changer for archaeology. You know, we've, we get all these, uh, evolutionary tracks that we could never see before. When I was a young archaeologist, I had, I would have never dreamed we'd have the information we have now. And that information, a lot of it's coming out of Texas A and M.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  We see the traditional, like 12,500 years ago, that there was a migration. But now we're seeing one that's almost certainly happening closer to 30,000 years ago. And now the thing that seems like madness, but might be true, is that it could have been as early as 60. A lot of the DNA things are suggesting that the very first migration could have come across as early as 60. And when I was a younger archaeologist, it was heresy to go beyond this 12,500. You were a wacko if you said that. But now it's really very clear that they came over at least by 30,000. And the bridge opened and closed and opened and closed.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  That's during the Ice Age. Right.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I mean, that's crazy, right? That's, that is crazy. Yeah, I mean, you know, they didn't roll in and immediately make New York. But there were people and there were definitely not people here before that, which is fascinating. The, uh, the, when the, when the bridge closed, DNA mutated. And so we have specific kinds of haplogroups that are here in the Americas that don't exist otherwise. And that same haplogroup game has been showing us more and more that people came across Siberia. That it's not Africa, it's not Western Europe. Those are still, you know, they've become kind of fringe theories, but they're not totally eradicated. I have.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  DNA is a developing science as well, and I think we all need to keep that in mind. That it's not like they just cracked the code and now we know all the answers. And sometimes, like in any science, a breakthrough puts us two, two steps backwards, not forwards. So I think, you know, we don't need to have too much faith in the models that are now being created through DNA. But they are pointing in the direction of everybody came across from Siberia. That all Native American people are of Asiatic descent.

• 23:27Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it was a gradual process? If it's like thirty to sixty thousand years ago, was it just gradual movement of these nomadic tribes as they follow the animals? Or was it like one explorer that pushed the the tribe to just go? Go, go, go, and go across maybe across a hundred years, travel all the way

• 23:55Lex Fridman?

  across maybe into North America, into North, North America where Canada is now. And then sort of like big leaps in movement versus gradual movement.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  I think it was big leaps. And now this is just, you know, mostly guess, I'll, I'll admit. But I think that it much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change. And then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern. And then something big will happen again. I do think that the early people went as far as they could go. And there were certain colonies that just got isolated for thousands of years. One of the fascinating things that DNA is showing us, which actually blood types were showing us way before

• 24:47Speaker 01

  that, is that the oldest people in the Americas are in South America. The ones that are, that got separated early and didn't mix their DNA like the people in the Amazon. Most of those guys have O blood type and their haplo group D, which is the oldest one that entered the, the US. And what are they doing down there? If I do believe they came across the Bering Strait, I don't think it's very. We have no real evidence to say they, they came en masse across Oceania. So they made it probably by boat along the coast, all the way to South America.

• 25:31Lex Fridman?

  So there's some kind of cultural engine that drove them to explore. So if you had to bet all your money, it happened like. Tens of thousands of years ago, but at a very rapid pace. There's these explorers that went all the way to South America. And there established their kind of more stable existence. And from there, South America, Mesoamerica, North America was kind of gradually expanded into that area.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Like, the next waves came down and did North America and Central America. And the very first wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated.

• 26:11Lex Fridman?

  Isolated.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  And then mixed in with the next groups that came.

• 26:15Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Kind of like, there's an interesting correlate in Europe, where today, everybody feels like Celtic people are from Ireland. But actually, Celtic people started in Eastern Europe, and it was the entire area. And when Rome kind of swept everything, and Rome was now the ruler of the day, it was only that far edge of the Celtic world, Ireland, that they were like, ah, we're not going to mess with those guys on that island, we'll leave them be. So now, it looks like that's the heart of Celtic tradition, but actually, it's the fringe.

• 26:59Lex Fridman?

  So if it is 60,000 years ago, these are really early humans.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there were consistent things that have been coming out for decades about very old carbon 14 dates in the Amazon and in the Andes area that everybody just dismissed. It's no, you didn't get a date of 40,000 years. But I think we're going to come back around to start readdressing some of these based on new evidence at hand.

• 27:27Lex Fridman?

  And that's the interesting thing is, you know, the early humans spread throughout the world. And then, like you said, perhaps they've gotten isolated. And then civilizations sprung from there. And they all have similar elements, even though they were isolated. That's really interesting. That's really interesting, that there's multiple cradles of civilization, not just one, like, one good idea. Those ideas naturally come up. Those structures naturally come up.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And I, I wonder whether, you know, the similarities that all those cradles have, it could be, uh, you know, a shared, much deeper past that they all have. Or it could be a more kind of Star Trek thing where, uh, you know, Captain Kirk was always talking about the, uh, the theory of parallel human development, that humans across the universe go through certain stages of development and that that could be the answer to it.

• 28:29Lex Fridman?

  Which, which one do you lean on? Which, which one do you lean towards?

• 28:33Speaker 01

  I think it's a case by case thing. Well, I think if we look globally, I'd lean much more towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas and we have a shorter time period where, you know, the, the things that become major civilizations now, now I'll say, you know, up to 30,000 years ago, which is still a blip in the time of, of humans. Um, I think that there were shared things that those people came over with from Asia and that as they got separated, that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and, uh, cultural customs that we can see. I, I'm a big proponent

• 29:17Speaker 01

  that there are, uh, commonalities in all the cultures of the Americas that lead back to and point to a, a single distant origin.

• 29:27Lex Fridman?

  You've spoken about the lost cradle of civilization, South America. So, uh, South America is not often talked about as one of the cradles of civilization. So, South America, Mesopotamia, can you explain?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Well, we have very early stuff in South America. You're right. I mean, you know, especially as, uh, uh, as an American, our country's so big and, you know, the, we are so far removed from these places, we don't even think about it. But more and more, we're seeing things that, that predate the earliest stuff that we like to talk about, like Egypt and Mesopotamia.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  There are things, it's all on the Peruvian coast that we have these cradles of civilization. Someday, we might start talking about the Amazon more and more. But right now, what we've got are things that date back into the 3000s BCE along the coast of Peru. And there are big stone-built pyramids and temples. And they're amazingly isolated, even now that we've found them. Some of them, like Corral is one of the most famous ones, just north of Lima. We've known about it for a couple of decades now, how old it is. But every time I visit there, it's like I've visited the moon.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  There's absolutely nobody there, not for miles. It's amazing how such a discovery was made, and yet, still, nobody goes to see it. It's not easy to get to.

• 31:04Lex Fridman?

  So you think there's a bunch of locations like that? Some may not have been discovered in the Peru area?

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Oh, there are so many. Peru has tons. That desert gets really ugly quick, and it buries things completely. There are so many pyramids out there that are still completely untouched. You know, when people hear the name pyramids, they think of Egypt immediately. But Egypt has got about 140 pyramids, and we have pretty much found them all. Peru has thousands, thousands of pyramids. And now, they weren't built of a lot, not all of them were built of stone. Some of them were adobe bricks, which have weathered terribly. So now, they don't look, they're not exciting places to visit today. You know what's funny, too?

• 31:50Speaker 01

  You know, we started off talking about, you know, whether I think there's a lost civilization out there. There are definitely things that are... Still to be discovered, but there are some things that were discovered 100 years ago, and archaeologists, or back then they called themselves antiquarians, just kind of passed over. Corral was one of these sites because the coast of Peru has some of those pyramids that were made by the Moche are full of gold and beautiful ceramics and, you know, things that you can sell for big money. But Corral was found a long time ago, but the archaeologist was like, ah,

• 32:32Speaker 01

  no gold, no ceramics. Forget about it. This place is no good. We can't sell anything here. And then about the 1970s or 80s, somebody said, hey, no ceramics? Is that older than the invention of ceramics? Shit, we better go take another look at that place.

• 32:51Lex Fridman?

  So what's the dating on Corral?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Corral, I think, starts at about 3200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it until about 1800 BCE.

• 33:08Lex Fridman?

  So what's the story behind, like, looking at some of these images? What's the story about constructions like that? What was the idea?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  That thing, isn't that amazing?

• 33:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I know that, gosh, I mean, it should be some sort of, you know, I'll be a flaky archaeologist, like, you know, this is a, this is a place where rituals took place. That's so many things we say are so just painfully vague, and that's about, you know, what we got. And a place like this, I know the one we're looking at here, I've been here a couple of times, in the pyramid behind it, the rubble's built in a way where the building won't rock apart. This is a very earthquake-prone place, but the buildings haven't fallen because they make these net baskets of rocks inside that all kind of wiggle around and don't allow the building to fall down.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And inside these, we've also found a couple of things that were babies, that were human babies that were buried in there. And I don't think, there's a lot of people that see that and go, oh, look at that, they were sacrificing babies, these monsters. I think a lot of the things that are interpreted as baby sacrifices, carols, evidence being one of them. I think it's more about the tragic nature of infant mortality. In the past, it was a lot more common. There were cultures that didn't even really properly name their kid until they got to five because chances were they were going to die.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  And so I think a lot of these babies that we find in these ceremonial contexts that are interpreted as sacrifices. I think they're putting them in special places because they mourn the death of their kids. And it just happened a lot more frequently then.

• 34:57Lex Fridman?

  One of the things you said that really surprised me is that pyramids were built in Peru,

• 35:03Lex Fridman?

  possibly hundreds of years before they were built in Egypt. Is that true?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, there's

• 35:09Lex Fridman?

  That's crazy.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  There's one that's now pushing

• 35:14Speaker 01

  6,000 BCE. Like, that's thousands of years before the stuff in Egypt. And that one's called Wakaprieta. And it was not a, it was not an Egyptian pyramid. It was, but it was a pyramid and it was thousands of years before.

• 35:33Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the motivation to build a pyramid? The fact that it can withstand the elements? Structurally, that kind of thing? Is it, yeah, why do humans build pyramids? And why do they build it in all kinds of different locations in the world?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Well, you know, my, my rude answer is, is, is pretty boring, really.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  A lot of people ask me, why are there pyramids all over the planet? How is that, is that a coincidence? I mean, who? I think that

• 36:06Speaker 01

  when people wanted to build a big building. Without rebar or cement, you end up building something with a fat base that goes up to a skinny top and that turns into a pyramid. You know, any kid who's playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down. And if he wants one that's going to stay and be tall, he ends up making something with a fat base and a, and a tiny top. And I think that, uh, you know, building something big and tall together is one of those, those human things. Like we built that, that will be here after we're gone. People remember who we were. We are all, if there's any human commonality, it's, it's fear of our own deaths

• 36:50Speaker 01

  and that we were nothing and no one will ever remember us. I think that the first big monuments like that were probably a group of people saying, we're going to do something that people will remember forever. Now that being said, you remember, we were just talking about Waka Prieta and this one that's almost 6,000 B.C. now is the first one. That one's a funny case. We just talked about all these lofty goals, but actually I'm pretty sure that Waka Prieta's first pyramid was about capping a smelly pile of trash. I think everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town and it stunk. It's, it's on the coast. It stunk like fish. And somebody said,

• 37:35Speaker 01

  if we just bury this thing with dirt, it won't smell anymore. And then it was a big mound where people could get up and talk to everybody and then said, well, it's squishy. They, you know, if we, if we cap it with clay, then it will really not smell. I really think that the very first pyramids in Peru were about trash management. Talk about deflating, huh?

• 37:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but then they probably saw it and they were impressed and humbled by the, sort of the enormity of the construction. And then they're like, oh, we should, maybe the next guy thought, maybe we should keep building these kinds of things.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And not, not to jump ahead, but in North America, you know, where they also made pyramids, there's this interesting evolution where there were these piles of shells along rivers and along the coastlines. People ate a lot of shells. That was an easy thing to collect and eat. So these piles of shells would be near communities and they probably became landmarks, but eventually they started burying their dead inside those too. Probably again, you know, about stink and about, you know, well, we don't want the dogs to eat them. I maybe put them in the middle of the shell pile. But then that all of a sudden became this like, that's where my grandfather's body is.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  That's where great grandfather's body is. And all of a sudden people started being attached place, not just for the resources, but for the shared memories of their ancestors. So when the very first pyramid was built in Ohio area by the Adena people, it was built out of dirt, but it's full of bodies. And I think it's an echo of a old thing where they used to be putting bodies in shell mounds.

• 39:21Lex Fridman?

  So where and who were the first civilizations in South America, South America?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think we're still piecing that together. Coming back to the first things we talked about, I think we're still missing a lot of stuff, especially in South America. It just keeps getting older and older. Part of the reason it's hard to answer that question is, you know, at what point do we consider people a civilization or a culture? We have in the Americas, this long period of time that we call the, the, the paleo Indian time, where they were hunting megafauna. And then when those went away, we get into this even longer period of time called the archaic, where they're just hunters and gatherers. Sometimes somebody's coming up with a cool, different kind of arrowhead.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  They go back and forth with different hunting tools, but really nothing changes for thousands of years. And then finally, they start developing into these larger groups, which for the most part has to do with agriculture. It used to be archaeology. That was just the end all be all. Civilization starts with the invention of agriculture, and we can't have sedentary communities until people learn how to farm. But that's been discounted. Peru was a big part of that. That area of Corral, it's connected to another city on the coast called Aspro. And Aspro starts about the same time, but they're all about fishing. They have no farming.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And Corral, who's upriver from them, is farming. But funny enough, they're not really farming food. They're farming cotton, and they're making nets, and they're trading the nets with the people on the coast for the fish. So it's not as simple as it's just agriculture anymore. But it is, I think, still rooted in, how can we feed more people than just our family? How can we together create a food abundance so we're no longer scared about running out of food?

• 41:29Lex Fridman?

  So is it possible, which is something you've argued, that civilization started in the Amazon, in the jungle?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  I do think so. I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old. There's actually the earliest pottery in all of the Americas, of all these places that we have civilizations that grew up. You know where the oldest pottery is? The middle of the Amazon.

• 42:00Lex Fridman?

  So there's interesting cultures developing in the Amazon. So religion, you would say, preceded civilization?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  In South America, the Corral and Aspro that I was just talking about, it's weird what a dearth of art and any evidence of religion we have. We have those pyramids and things that we call temples, but we don't really know what went on in there. And there's no hints of religious iconography, ceremonies, nothing like that. The first stuff that we get is right when that culture ends, about 1800 BCE.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  This culture called Chavín starts up and they, their main temple is up in the Andes in this place of least, path of least resistance between the Amazon and the coast. It's about three days walk either way from this, this place where this temple is. That's where we start seeing the very first religious iconography and it's all over the temples. There are things that are definitely from the coast, but the iconography are all jaguars and snakes and crocodiles. And those don't come from the coast. All of those things are coming out of the Amazon.

• 43:19Lex Fridman?

  I mean, religion is a really powerful idea. Religions are one of the most powerful ideas. They're the strongest myths that tie people together. And to you, it's possible that this powerful idea in South America started in the Amazon.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  I do, I do think it did. And you're right, ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archaeology can't see them at all. We can see, sometimes we can see ideas manifesting in the things they, they create and lead to, but there's an interpretation problem. Are we right about what idea created this? That, those are things that archaeology just can't get at.

• 44:03Lex Fridman?

  That's one of the challenges of archaeology and looking into ancient histories. You're trying to not just understand what they were doing in terms of architecture, but understand what was going on inside their mind.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  That's really what, what I'm in it for, trying to understand these people and it's real detective work. And we know we're dealing with a totally flawed record. We only have what could preserve the test of time. You know, if we look around this room here, if, if 2,000 years of weathering happened in this room, what would be left? And what would we think happened here?

• 44:40Lex Fridman?

  Right, right, right. But there's, not in this room, but if you look at thousands of rooms like it, maybe you can start to piece things together about the different ideologies that ruled the world. The religion, the different ideas. Tell me about this fang deity. One of your more controversial ideas is that you believe that the religions, there's a thread that connects the different civilizations, the societies of the Andean region. And the religion that practiced is more monotheistic than is currently believed in the mainstream.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  That is exactly what I think. And I think it's all about this fang deity who somewhere thousands of years ago crawled his way out of the Amazon up into the Andes and a religion took hold. That could have been kind of a combination of ideas from the coast and the Amazon, but he is the one creator deity, in my opinion, through all of these cultures. And the people in the Amazon still talk about him there. His name is Vihomase in some groups, but they say that his emissaries on earth are the jaguars and that he is the creator deity.

• 46:01Lex Fridman?

  Why is the current mainstream belief is that a lot of the religions are not monotheistic?

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Well, there are bona fide pantheons. You know, Greece had one, Egypt had one, Mesopotamia had one. Lots of the early religions of the old world were pantheons. And I think that was part of the problem. The earliest archaeologists walked in there with a preconceived notion that ancient cultures have pantheons. And so they went to the art looking for them. And they came up with things like the shark god and the moon goddess and the sun god and all these things. But when I look at the art, and I was trained by a person right here in Austin, Texas as

• 46:46Speaker 01

  an art historian, you follow certain diagnostic traits through art to see the development over time. And when I look at it and use that methodology, there's a single face with goggle eyes and fangs and claws on his hands and feet and snakes coming off of his head and off of his belt. He's, he's got really identifiable traits. He also likes to sever people's heads off and carry them around. But he's the fanged deity and he's there. He shows up in Chavín de Huantar, the capital of that Chavín culture. And he keeps showing up through every culture, even thousands of miles away,

• 47:29Speaker 01

  throughout the next two millennium, right up to the Inca. The Inca have a creator deity, they call Viracocha. But Viracocha is the Fang deity.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  He is, when we do see him, by the time you get to Inca, they do this kind of like almost

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Islamic thing where they say you can't understand the face of Viracocha. So when they do put him in a cosmogram, they'll make him just a blob, like he's just unknowable, but he's at the very top. I think we're misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural beings. If we flip the mirror on Christianity and take a look at it, which of course Christianity is monotheistic, right? It would be heresy to say otherwise. But who are all these other characters? Who are all these angels and demons and, you know, Jesus Christ? And I mean, I don't even know who the Holy Spirit is, but he's some sort of supernatural

• 48:33Speaker 01

  being, but it's that monotheistic system has lots of things that have supernatural powers that are not God. That's where I think the crux of us misunderstanding ancient Andean art is.

• 48:49Lex Fridman?

  So what is the process of analyzing art through time to try to figure out what the important entities are for that culture? Do you just see what shows up over and over and over and over?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Well, certainly without the advent of writing,

• 49:08Speaker 01

  depictions in art have all sorts of meanings encoded in them. And there are certain, you know, what we call diagnostic elements. Like we can, we can pull apart the same sort of thing in like in the Greek pantheon, you know, you know, by their dress and what they're holding, what the different gods are. You can tell Hades from, from Zeus by the different things they're holding, you know, lightning bolts or tridents or whatever it is. So they all have these diagnostic elements to them. So that's how art history goes about analyzing art over time. Once, well, once we can put it in a chronological sequence, then we can say,

• 49:49Speaker 01

  okay, here's, here's a deity here in Chavín culture. Now we move forward 500 years. Now we're in Moche and Nazca culture. You know, who were, who, where are the deities here? And what I see is that same guy with not just one or two traits, but a whole package of them that shows up again and again and again for thousands of years in each one of these cultures. He's got circular eyes. He's got a fanged mouth. He's got claws on his hands and feet. He's a, he's a humanoid, but he also has snakes coming off of his head like hair and snakes coming off of his belt.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  And then not so much in Chavín, but as it goes forward, he starts carting around severed heads, human severed heads. So they're like in the old literature, the Moche will call him the decapitator deity. But then they have these other like, oh, here's the crab deity and here's the fox deity. But if you look at them, like the crab deity is just that guy's face coming off of a crab. And the fox deity is that guy's face coming off of a fox. So I think in, on that particular instance, I explain it similar to what Zeus did. You know how Zeus was able to like, you know, turn into whatever animal he wanted to get with the woman he wanted?

• 51:19Speaker 01

  And he showed up in all sorts of forms, but he was always Zeus. I think that the, the fang deity manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don't have anymore.

• 51:36Lex Fridman?

  And across hundreds of years, thousands of years, from Chavín to Moja to Inca, as you're saying.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Right. Wari has them too. Tiwanaku, that's that famous place, Pumapunku. He's all over there.

• 51:50Lex Fridman?

  I wonder how those ideas spread and morph of this Fang deity.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  I think people walked and proselytized and places like Chavín, there's a later one in Inca times called Pachacamac, that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if they're sick, but also just to pay homage to the powers that be. So Chavín was a place where people from the Amazon and people from the coast were all coming together. In fact, we saw it in the archaeology there. There's these interesting labyrinths under the pyramids with the Fang deity all over them that have like one labyrinth will have all pottery. The next labyrinth will have a bunch of animal bones. The next one will have a bunch of things made out of stone.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  So people are showing up and giving this tribute and they're learning and then they're going back to their communities. So I think it dispersed from certain pilgrimage spots and became, just like pilgrimage spots do, somebody goes back and they build a temple to the Fang deity.

• 52:57Lex Fridman?

  Do we know much about the relationship they had with the Fang deity and like their conception of the powers of the Fang deity? Is it, were they afraid of the Fang deities and all-knowing god? Is it something that brings joy and harvest or is it something that you're supposed to be afraid of? And sacrifice animals and humans to, to keep it, keep it bay?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  I think he had two sides of the coin, like a lot of the Hindu gods are, you know, one aspect is terrible, the other aspect is lovely. I think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior, taking people's heads off. And he is a jaguar, which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity. But then there are other funny things about him, like he is definitely involved in a lot of healing ceremonies and a lot of those healing ceremonies are involved with sex acts when it comes to the moche. There's this whole group of sexual pottery where priests are having sex with women or men. And some of them show their faces transforming into that

• 54:11Speaker 01

  fang deity, like he is acting through them. But the, the thing that most cracks me up that shows his softer side is the fang deity has a little puppy. He has a puppy that's like just dancing around his feet and like jumping up on him in various scenes. They see him again and again. Sometimes he's in these, these healing sex scenes. In fact, I tracked that puppy from other contexts to these sex scenes where the, where a priest was having sex with somebody in a house.

• 54:44Lex Fridman?

  And there's a puppy.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  And the fang deity. And there's a puppy just scratching at the door like, hey, you forgot me. And then finally, one day, I found one with the puppy having sex with the woman instead of the fang deity. I was like, no, he really is very involved in this. What is this weird puppy? So he's, yeah, he likes to take heads off, but he also has a puppy he adores.

• 55:05Lex Fridman?

  This actually, this is awesomely makes sense now because I, I saw the opening of a paper you wrote 30 years ago on shamanism and moche civilization. It reads, "The moche are the major focus of this paper. Sex, puppies, and headhunting will be shown to be related to ancient moche shamanism." So now I understand. I was like, well, the puppies.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Puppies, yeah.

• 55:28Lex Fridman?

  All right. And the headhunting, that's the decapitator.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And I've added rock and roll to that list since, actually.

• 55:35Lex Fridman?

  Which?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  It's rock and roll, or you know, music is also a big part of it. They, they.

• 55:39Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  They, they call spirits down. There's this whole spirit world. There's the ancestors and the, the people that drink San Pedro cactus juice, kind of, they don't talk about the fang deity anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back, you know, it was unpopular to have a pagan deity. So they don't talk about him much anymore, though he's still around. They're in like around Trujillo, they call him Iaipec.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  But music playing in the Amazon, they play flute, sometimes a chorus of women sing, and that's supposed to bring the spirits down into the ceremony. There's a spirit that's hurting the person that's sick. And then the priest, or the shaman, or the corandero, whatever you want to call him, has his own posse of spirits that are going to help him figure out what's going on. So when the music starts, that's bringing those spirits in. And people don't see them unless they've imbibed the San Pedro cactus juice, which is the hallucinogen, which is in the Amazon side, it was ayahuasca. On the coast, it

• 56:55Speaker 01

  was San Pedro cactus. But that's what allows you to actually see that other world.

• 57:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I went to the Amazon recently, did ayahuasca, a very high dose of it.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Bold move.

• 57:12Lex Fridman?

  When in Rome, how far back does that go?

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I think longer than anybody can remember. But I mean, it's a natural plant that's been there forever. I think that it's thousands and thousands of years. That's another thing, Chavín de Huantara was talking about, where I think the things came, the religion came from the Amazon. There's this wall on the backside that faces the Amazon side. So if you're entering the city from the Amazon path, you see this wall first. And it's a bunch of faces that some of them are human, some of them are total jaguar, and some of them are transforming in between. But there's a group of them that are midway through transformation, and they show their nostrils leaking out this snot that's coming

• 58:01Speaker 01

  like down their face. San Pedro doesn't do that to you, but ayahuasca does. Ayahuasca, traditionally, they'd take a blowgun and just shoot it up your nose, or up your ass. But it was a lot of times up your nose. And when it shoots up your nose, the first thing that happens is just this gush of snot comes out of you. And there are stone Depictions of people uncontrollably snotting on the backside of this temple from, you know, 3,000 years ago.

• 58:33Lex Fridman?

  So that you think could have been a big component of the development of religion and shamanism?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  I think that hallucinogens opened the mind then like they opened the mind now.

• 58:46Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that, you know, the stone ape theory, do you think that actually could have been an actual catalyst for the formation of civilization?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  In the Americas, yes, I do. Though, you know, hallucinogens are not part of every ancient tradition in the world. In fact, strangely, the majority of plants that are actually psychotropic, not just mood altering, are from here in the Americas. There are very few drugs that will make you hallucinate outside of the Americas. Of course, now they're global and, you know, they can be grown all over the place. But originally speaking, very, very few were outside of the Americas. So they were part of the experience here in a way that they just couldn't be in other places.

• 59:38Lex Fridman?

  I wonder to what degree they were just part of a ritual and the creative force behind sort of art versus like literally the method by which you come up with ideas that define a civilization. It's like the degree to which they had a role in the formation of civilizations. It's kind of fun to think about psychedelics being like a critical role in the formation of civilizations.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  I think in terms of South America, they probably really were. In North America, where we're in a more northern climate here and there are less of them, not so much, at least in terms of psychedelics, things like tobacco was always a big part of it. But a lot of the, you know, there's more than one way to meet, to reach a hallucinatory state. The hard way is starvation, sleep deprivation. And for the Maya, for example, would go sleep deprivation, starvation, and then they'd cut themselves very badly. And that loss of blood, we believe, triggered hallucinations and visions. Nothing to do with drugs.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  I much prefer the drugs route.

• 1:00:52Lex Fridman?

  It's the it's the result, not the the tools aren't the thing that creates insight. It's the the result.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  So that getting to, you know, it it's hallucinogens are poisoning us. They're killing us. That's, you know, it's a it's a near death state. And people of the Americas believed sleeping was entering that other world. Death, you entered this other world and that when you took this mighty dose of poison, it was helping you enter that other world for a period of time.

• 1:01:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, as Tom Wade said in that one song, I like my town with a little drop of poison. So maybe that poison is a good catalyst for invention. So who were the early first sort of mother cultures, mother civilizations in South America? And like, what is, if we look chronologically, is there a label we can put on the first peoples that emerged?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  That picture is evolving. I mean, forever, it was just the Shavane people that we've been talking about, the ones with all the first depictions of religious art were the mother culture. And they certainly did transmit a lot of stuff. But then, all of a sudden, we find Corral. The next one that we've barely even begun looking at, but it's probably older than Corral is Sachin culture. I was just poking around there last year and just just from the bus on the highway, I could see like, that's a pyramid out there. Well, there's another one. And I know how old the stuff we have studied there is. It's again, 3000 B.C. We're just barely beginning to understand them.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Corral frustrates me to no end, the lack of art there. That's, we've got, you know, stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on. And they didn't have the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret. So I don't know what those people believed.

• 1:02:55Lex Fridman?

  Right, so one of the ways to understand what people believe is looking at the art, the stories told through the art, and then hopefully deciphering if they were doing any kind of writing.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  That's our most fruitful place to try to get at this elusive ideas.

• 1:03:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And it sucks when they don't have art. If we just go back to the Amazon, you've mentioned that it's possible that there's a lost civilization that existed in the Amazon. So it's carried a lot of names, Lost City of Z or El Dorado. Do you think it's possible it existed?

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Well, City of Z and El Dorado are in pretty different places. El Dorado, the ideas of where it is kind of center around towards Colombia.

• 1:03:38Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  And City of Z is named after a region of Brazil called the Xingu. And so those are an America worth of distance apart. You know, the entire, people don't really think about it on the map, but the entire United States would fit inside the Amazon. That's how big that place is.

• 1:04:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  And these two are on either end, but both of them have evidence of civilizations, these big, you know, it's lowland and it floods all the time. So what they did is they'd make these big mounds and then they'd make huge causeways between mounds so they could walk through their cities while they were seasonally inundated. And a bunch of that stuff has been found in the Xingu area, like huge areas that would support tens of thousands of people. Again, you know, it's not stone-built and it's been under the forest forever, so it's very torn up, but it's there. Now, you know, Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now. And a thing that I think

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these, what we call like geometric earthworks. So there's more and more evidence of these civilizations. It's not a, it's not that it could be there. It's there for sure.

• 1:05:11Lex Fridman?

  By the way, the people who are trying to protect the rainforest really hate the highway. One of the things I learned is if you build a road, loggers will come.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:05:21Lex Fridman?

  And they will start cutting stuff down. Now, from an archaeology perspective, if you cut down trees, you get to discover things. But from a sort of protective, very precious rainforest perspective, it's obviously the opposite way.

• 1:05:37Lex Fridman?

  But it is interesting. I've seen where loggers cut through the forest and then they and when they leave, the forest heals itself very quickly.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  So quickly.

• 1:05:48Lex Fridman?

  And, you know, you just think that across decades, you expand that to centuries. And it's like, you could see how a civilization could be completely swallowed up by the rainforest.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  And it happened for sure in the Amazon.

• 1:06:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  You know, there, one of the ways that we're trying to push the frontier of where people were in the Amazon, because yes, the, the trees and just the biomass have eaten so much evidence, but they're finding more and more of these places that they call terra prata, which is black earth, and there are huge swaths of it. So I guess the anthropology term is anthropogenic landscapes. And what they're saying is that that really dark earth couldn't have just got that way through natural forest processes, that sometime in the distant past, that forest wasn't there and there was major farming and human activity to the

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  point where they totally turned the soil black and it's much more enriched. And when I, when I took a trip into the Amazon, I took, I went from Manaus up the river, the Black River, a couple of days and went and met some different communities. And I asked them about this black earth. And they were like, yeah, that's why we're here. Sometimes we move our village, but when we move, we look for the terra prata. And that's where we're going to put our village because that's a place that all of our gardens work. The other places, they don't.

• 1:07:25Lex Fridman?

  One of the things you talked about, literally just asked, you have to ask the right question. And the stories, all the, all the secrets are carried by the people and they will tell you.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so many of them. You know, the thing that excites the world about archaeology right now is Gobekli Tepe and this, you know, 10,000 now Karan Tepe is 11,000. The whole area is called the Tass Tepler. We only found it a couple of decades ago, but it was just, you know, archaeologists roaming through the area and ask a sheep herder, hey, you know, you guys know where anything ancient is? Oh, yeah. Let me, let me show you this. And then all of a sudden, we've got a lost civilization and the, and the shepherds always knew where it was, just nobody asked them.

• 1:08:09Lex Fridman?

  So, speaking of Gobekli Tepe, what do you think about the work of Graham Hancock, who also believes that there's a lost civilization in the Amazon?

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Well, I've met Graham and personally, I like him. He's a nice guy, got a nice sense of humor, and I think he's smart. And, and I also think he is a very good researcher. He and I are working on the same set of facts. The differences are interpretations. I do not believe Graham's idea that a single now lost ancient civilization seeded the rest of them. I just don't see that on a number of levels, artifact wise, technology wise, art historical analysis. So I think his research is great. I think that he's, he's very well read, in

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues. But his conclusions I disagree with. And he and I have talked about this and had a very civil and normal conversation about it and agreed to disagree without spitting any venom at any point in the conversation.

• 1:09:20Lex Fridman?

  That would be a fun argument to be a fly in the wall for. So he, he believes, he's proposed as possible that the Amazon jungle is sort of a manmade garden. So it was planted there by advanced ancient civilization. Is there any degree to which that could be

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Frankly, I agree with him. I mean, it's just like what I was just talking about that the it's the conclusion part that we differ from.

• 1:09:49Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  But the facts that he's basing that on are that terra prata are the huge geometric earthworks are the ever increasing evidence of them. They are now from, you know, the bottom of Bolivia to Guyana. They're everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle, we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilization that was there. How advanced they were is a question and also, you know, a perspective thing. Graham really focuses in on what we don't know and what could be.

• 1:10:29Lex Fridman?

  What's the, just to educate me, what's, what's the key idea that he's proposing that you disagree with? Is it, it was the level of advancement that the civilization was or how large and centralized it was?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  My main point of disagreement is that his, and his ideas evolve like everybody's, you know, it, no, no scientist or researcher in anything has an idea at the beginning of their career and holds it till the day they die. His ideas are evolving, but his ideas remain, a core of them are that there was a very advanced, single ancient civilization that was utterly destroyed by climactic conditions and the younger, drier, dryass hypothesis is part of that most recently. He used to not say that. Now he's into this meteor thing.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  But he believes that that civilization was destroyed, but that members of it escaped this cataclysm and then spread out all over the world to seed all of the world civilizations for the next revival. There's where I disagree with him. I think these were independent civilizations that grew up in their own ways, that they were not seeded by some more advanced civilization from the past and that they all hold. Things in common because they have this common ancestry of a, you know, in his early books, he suggested it's Atlantis.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  I don't think he suggests that anymore, but he still hangs on to the single advanced, now completely lost civilization. And, you know, archaeology is, we don't have, you know, we're, all of our ideas are theories, very few of them are facts. And we're not, you know, we could have the story wrong, but one thing we're real good at is finding stuff. I mean, we find fish scales. So I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can't even find a pot shard from.

• 1:12:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And of course, it is a compelling story that there's a single civilization from which all of this came from. Because the alternative is, you know, the idea that we came across the Bering Strait from Asia, went all the way down to South America and got isolated and created all these marvelous, sophisticated civilizations and ideas, including religious ideas that look similar to other, you know, everybody has a flood myth.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:19Lex Fridman?

  Right. So like, there's a lot of similarities. Everybody building pyramids.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Lex Fridman?

  But there could be a lot of other explanations. And for, even if it's a simple, compelling explanation, there has to be evidence for it, right? And what would that evidence look like?

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  That's the bottom line. I mean, everything's theories. And as responsible scientists, we're trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That's, that's one more foot out of the science box that archaeology often steps, where we're supposed to be disproving what we think is happening, not proving it.

• 1:13:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you don't want to lean into the mystery. Too much. I mean, most of it's such a weird discipline because you're operating in a it's like really in a dark room. You're feeling around a dark room. So it's mostly mystery. I would say a lot of sciences operate in a mostly well lit room. It's like a dark corner and you're kind of figuring out a way to light it. But in, yeah, in archaeology, it's most of it is a mystery, right?

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Yes, it's job security. I like that part. You know, but I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans has have ever had began as heresy and lunacy, you know? That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish. Because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift. And if we, you know, if we're busy burning books of ideas that we don't like, that's where we close our minds to the possibility of advancing things.

• 1:15:09Lex Fridman?

  I really love that. And I really appreciate that you're saying that. One of the fascinating things about just the Amazon to me is that there's still a large number of uncontacted tribes. And to rewind back into ancient history, you can imagine all of these tribes that existed in the Amazon that were isolated, very sort of distinct from each other. Can you speak to this, your understanding of these tribes and their history? They're still here today.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of them are these, you know, by uncontacted, we mean, we don't know anything about these guys. We know roughly where they are. But places like Ecuador have very responsible policies where no one's allowed to go contact them. So we have a dearth of information. If they walk out of the jungle and talk to us, that's one thing. But we don't go out in there looking for them. But they do seem frozen in time. And I don't think any of us have a good estimation of how long they've been like that. But, you know, we were saying earlier that, you know, humans change based on pressures of their environment. You know, it's a mother necessity is oftentimes how we invent things or why we change.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  It's pressure. And one thing the Amazon is, once you, you know, figure out how not to die in it, it's a paradise of food. Food's fallen from the sky all the time there. And if, once you learn to adapt to that environment, you've got very little need. There's no pressure to make anything else. Things are working.

• 1:16:48Lex Fridman?

  So for the modern humans that come across these uncontacted tribes, one of the things they document and notice is the propensity of these tribes for violence. So they get very aggressive in, in attacking whoever they come across.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  And not just foreigners, they attack each other. The Yanomamo are famous for just having never ending feuds with each other.

• 1:17:12Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the philosophy behind that?

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  I don't, you know, I'm a relatively peaceful person, but I've got, you know, I've got the monster in me like everybody does. And I, I think that these, you know, it's cultural norms that become institutionalized. For the Yanomamo, they really, part of the path, the rite of passage to be a man is to go kill or maim somebody from an outer village. And they go in there, they, they oftentimes, the, the way they don't let inbreeding set in and ruin everybody, not that they think of it scientifically, but they, they typically go and steal women from far off communities. And that starts a big fight.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  Another thing that starts fights that when nobody even fought is illness. Illness in the Amazon and all of the ancient Americas wasn't seen as a biological thing. It was a spiritual thing. So if somebody in your village gets sick, the question is asked, well, what spirit is menacing him? And who called it out on him? And then the rumor starts, well, I bet you it was Joe over there in that other community. Still pissed off for that time when we stole his daughter. And we ought to go over there and kill Joe. And then he'll get better. And so this, this, uh, this round of never ending violence, uh, like Hatfields and McCoys

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  had that thing and the, uh, the people of, uh, New Guinea also do that. So it's not, you know, there are certain areas, uh, mostly wooded areas, now that I think about it, where people just hide out and they attack each other as a cultural, uh, institution.

• 1:19:03Lex Fridman?

  It's such a tricky thing to do to study an uncontacted tribe without obviously contacting them, to figure out their language, their philosophy of mind, how they communicate, the hierarchy they operate under.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  And yeah, you know, there was a fascinating story in Peru. I guess it was probably like eight years ago or something, but there was a ranger from one of the biology stations who just in the by and by of, uh, protecting his area, met one of these uncontacted tribes and befriended someone, not the whole tribe, but he made some friends who would meet him in the woods, not in their community. And he started to learn their language over a couple of years. And so he was this kind of important guy who actually could be the first translator to talk to these people. And one day a couple of them just came out of the woods and just plugged him with arrows and just killed him. And then they went back in the woods. Like that's the one guy who understands what we're saying. We should

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  kill him and move our village.

• 1:20:02Lex Fridman?

  So those folks really lean into the, uh, as you said, the monster versus the, uh, the puppy.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  You know, everybody's got it. I, I think, I think, uh, you know, we, we need to listen to our better angels because if we don't, we, we, we as a human species can easily devolve into just using violence and against others to get what we want. We, it's a, it's a daily choice we make not to be savages.

• 1:20:32Lex Fridman?

  Which is a fascinating thing to remember. What kind of thing in civilized society, we've moved past all that, but it can, uh, it can be summoned. Like in, uh, uh, 1984, the two minutes of hate.

• 1:20:49Lex Fridman?

  With the right words, that primal thing can be summoned and directed and lead to a lot of destruction.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  And, you know, our, our sports are really based on taking those kinds of urges and channeling them positive where somebody's not dead at the end of it.

• 1:21:08Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:21:11Lex Fridman?

  So at which point did what we now call the Maya civilization arise?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a, that's another complicated one, another group living mostly in a jungle that we have barely begun to explore. You know, the truth is, a lot of the questions in the Amazon and, and what we're talking about now is the Patan and the mountains there. Those aren't places archaeologists want to live. They're horrible. I mean, I've been there. I don't want to live in a tent and eat rations. I want to live in a nice town. So a lot of the places where the answers are, we still really haven't gotten there because it takes a special person to be educated enough to know what they're looking at and tough enough to want to be there. I've done my tour of duty. I'm now in a nice little podcast studio.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  But seriously, the, the Maya, the first hint that we see people who are culturally Maya, very close to where the time period for that Chavín culture is about 1800 BCE. There's a culture that some call the Mocaia, not Maya. But they're on the Pacific coast where Guatemala and Mexico connect. It's called the Soconusco. And those are the first people that are really going to be culturally Maya. And they're interacting with the culture that has traditionally been seen as Mexico's mother culture, which is the Olmec. They're kind of the same thing as we were talking about in South America where the, the

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  Maya, the original Maya are not, there's not a whole lot to indicate that they have a religion.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  But the Olmec have this religion they develop and they start exporting it. And you see the Maya become more and more involved in, in the religion that's being created by the Olmec who are to the north of them in the swamps of what we call the Isthmus of Tahuantapac.

• 1:23:09Lex Fridman?

  I have a lot of questions to ask here, Bob, just a natural stupid confusion I have. So first,

• 1:23:17Lex Fridman?

  Did the Maya or the Olmec come first? And are they distinct groups? Like, how do you maintain a distinct civilization when you're so close together?

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  I just finished filming a whole thing on the Olmecs and their interaction with the Maya for The Great Courses. I'm thrilled for it to come out next spring. I think they co-evolved. Archaeology in this regard is the worst enemy of this. We put these names on cultures. We, we talk about how they evolved from one to another. We draw these lines where there aren't any. We make these time periods that a culture magically transforms into somebody with another name, where I'm pretty sure they didn't care about any of those names. But the, the Maya and the Olmec are two parts of a larger interaction sphere that's happening in Mesoamerica, a very dynamic time.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  The Olmec are really bringing the religion part. But the other areas are bringing technology, ceramic technology, making hematite mirrors, making tools out of obsidian and other, other stone types. So you've got the Olmec in the middle where, where Mexico gets skinny and it gets swampy down there. That's called the Isthmus of Tuantpec. That's where the Olmec are. Then you've got the Maya to the east of them. Then you have the Valley of Oaxaca, where the people called the Zapatecs, they're rising up. And then you have the Valley of Mexico, which will eventually become the Aztecs, but not for millennia.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  All those areas are interacting with each other.

• 1:25:01Lex Fridman?

  Can we just also draw some more lines?

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:25:06Lex Fridman?

  So what is Mesoamerica and what is South America? And what you just said to Olmecs and the Maya, like, can we just linger on the geography that we're talking about here in the, what is this, like 1,000 B.C.?

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, the time period we're talking about where the, the Olmec are there. 1,000 B.C. is a great midpoint of it. I'd say it starts about 1800 BCE and by 500 BCE, the Olmec are gone.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  And a whole new wave of civilization and population increase happen. In terms of Mesoamerica, looking at your map here, I'd say about halfway through the Chihuahua Desert up there in the top left, that's, that's about the boundary of Mesoamerica. There's this big desert where almost nobody lives. And once you get north enough, you get into the ancestral pueblo people of what's now America, the, the Four Corners area. They're not Mesoamerican. They have different lives.

• 1:26:11Lex Fridman?

  Where does modern Mexico end?

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Modern Mexico ends, right? You know, you see the name Maya there with the white line around it? That's Guatemala. So Guatemala cuts off most of Mexico from Central America.

• 1:26:23Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  But Mesoamerica only goes about halfway through Honduras. And then it's really kind of a no man's land.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, they really, they're neither. They're not Mesoamerica. They're not South America. They're more South America because they've got some gold there. But then basically you get on the other side of Panama and you're, you're fully in South America with two distinct groups too. You've got the guys that are on the Andes on the west coast, and then you have the Amazon.

• 1:26:59Lex Fridman?

  So the, the west, the Andes and the Amazon are very distinct. So when you say, when you refer to the Andean region, is that referring to the Andes and the Amazon or just the Andes?

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Just the Andes, the, the, and the, and the coast that to, to the Pacific there. That's, that's Andean civilization.

• 1:27:18Lex Fridman?

  So did Maya make it to the Andes, the Andean region?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Not that archaeology can prove, but it's almost certain that they interacted with each other. Number one, it's just, you know, it's biased to think that these people couldn't travel as widely as people on the other side of the planet did. But there's all sorts of hints, like that first ceramics I was talking about that the Maya made, they show up strangely sophisticated technologically already. And down in Ecuador, they had them for a thousand years before. So a lot of people, myself included, think that the idea of ceramics actually came from South America to the Maya.

• 1:28:03Lex Fridman?

  Did the Maya get seeded by the second wave across the Bering Strait? Or did that initial wave of people that came and populated South America? Were they the ancestors of the Maya? Like, how did the migration happen here? Do we understand?

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  We're still piecing it together. I don't think, you know, I'd be lying if I told you I had the answers. But we do have evidence of Maya stature people. They're a small people. Generally speaking, people that grow up in the forest are smaller and people that grow up in the open plains are taller, probably about, you know, just generations of people that hit their head on a branch or not.

• 1:28:47Lex Fridman?

  You're joking, but you know, there could be something to that.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  I think there's some truth to it. I mean, the pygmies are small and the people on the plains in Africa are big. The North American Indians are tall and the Maya are small. It's, there is, there's definitely a pattern of smaller people in the forests. But anyway, um, there's a cave in the Yucatan called Loltun Cave that has handprints in the cave. It's somebody who put their hand on the cave and spit charcoal around their hand like a negative print.

• 1:29:18Lex Fridman?

  Yep.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  We can date that charcoal and it comes from 10,000 years ago. And the hands are all small. It's, you know, typical old Mexico. I, I walked right up to these things and could put my hand, I didn't, you know, mess with them, but I put my hand next to these hands and they're all smaller than my, you know, Northern European hand. And so either it was a bunch of kids who were in this cave 10,000 years ago, or it was people of Maya stature who did it.

• 1:29:52Lex Fridman?

  It's so cool that you can date the charcoal and it's so cool that 10,000 years ago, there are people leaving.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  And, and actually we have, uh, one that's I think 2,000 years older now, just a couple of years ago, again in Yucatan in a cave, they found a woman they named Niaia now. And she's like 12,000 years old.

• 1:30:13Lex Fridman?

  So the best guess maybe that you have is it goes across the Bering Strait to South America, possibly the Amazon, develop a lot of cool ideas in the Amazon and start drifting back up into Mesoamerica.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Was kind of a co-evolution. The technology of ceramics, I think, got there through an interaction with.

• 1:30:35Lex Fridman?

  See, the interesting thing is that the Maya didn't really have religion, didn't have as a vibrant religious set of ideas, and they borrowed it from the Olmec.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  I've been doing a deep dive on this for this Olmec course that I just did, and it really does seem like these other cultures that have jade and hematite and obsidian, the Olmec had none of that stuff. They were living in a swamp and building things out of dirt, but they were importing those materials from those areas, carving them into all sorts of religious iconography, and then exporting them back to them.

• 1:31:16Lex Fridman?

  And still the Fang deity show up?

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  No, the Fang deity is nowhere in Central America, in Mesoamerica. That's why. There's Jaguars, there's Jaguar iconography, but it's not the same thing. This whole Jaguar Transformer deity does not exist there. They do have a pantheon.

• 1:31:36Lex Fridman?

  So the Maya, the Olmecs are the interesting peoples of the regions. What was their...I'd love to ask questions about who were they? So one question I'm curious about, what was their sense when they looked up at the stars? What was their conception of the cosmos?

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  That's a question I've spent my entire career trying to answer. I think that they saw it as proof of the cyclical nature of life.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  And certainly, they saw like every ancient group did like, are those the gods? Why are those things so far away? But I think that the Maya especially looked at it in a with a much more mathematical mind than most did. And so they watched these things move every night. And if you do that even today, you notice that all the stars move in tandem. They're just this blanket. They're like they're they're like this curtain behind me. They're the stage upon which some very important players are dancing. And that's the moon, the sun and the planets. There's five planets we can see visibly.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  So they started watching like, why are just those seven moving differently than the rest? And those are the things that they keyed on mathematically. The the sun, of course, was also involved in the agricultural cycle. So that was important in and of itself. But the the planets, we can see them coming up with ideas, definitely doing the math and seeing that there is a repeated cycle. And then coming up with mythology around them like Venus for them was associated with war. And they had very ritualized times to go to war that had something to do with Venus.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Sometimes in the classic period Maya, it was the first appearance of Venus as the morning star. That was a good time to go to to battle with your neighbors. And when it became the post classic with like Chichen Itza being the capital of the Yucatan, then it looks like if you watched Venus day after day, it goes slowly up every day. And then when it hits its highest point as morning star in the in the morning. It goes down to the earth like three times as fast. All of a sudden it it just shoots down and hits the earth. And so the the people of post classic Maya civilization saw that as

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  the gods shooting a spear into the earth. And that was a good time to attack your neighbors. That was like wartime, when the spear is going to hit the earth.

• 1:34:19Lex Fridman?

  All right, so this is fascinating. They just had at the foundation, a sense that life existence at the various time scales is cyclical.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Lex Fridman?

  That's that's a starting point. And then you just look out there. And if you're extremely precise, which is fascinating, how precise they were, you can just measure the the cycles.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they did it really well. Now, of course, they they are the only ones to develop a fully elaborated writing system in all of the Americas. The South America had the keepu, but it's so different than our writing. We're still trying to figure out what the heck it is. We know there's math there, too. But they had the ability to take a lifetime worth of measurements and hand it to the next generation, who would then do it more and do it more. That's how they figured out kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy. How good were they? Was whether they could see the procession of the equinoxes? The fact that we're just barely wobbling and there's a 26,000 year period where the

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  stars as that backdrop will spin all the way around and come back. It's 26,000 years. But the Maya were able to figure out, wait, it's moving one degree every 72 years and did a calculation based on on on where it should be in the ancient past. And they're using constellations. They're showing us they know by saying like.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  This planet's in this constellation right now, and 33,000 years ago, it would be in this constellation.

• 1:35:59Lex Fridman?

  It's just fascinating that they were able to figure this out. I would love to sort of understand the details of the scientific community, if you can call it that.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  I think we absolutely could. And that's actually one of the things that I'm, I'm hoping to move the needle on in my generation with my career is to give these cultures the, the respect they deserve as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect. There are things that should be called science that are not being called science at the moment. They're, you know, their math is incredible. Their, their hydraulic engineering is incredible. Their chemistry is incredible. And so I hope to talk about these things differently as a way to get people to recognize the achievements in a different way.

• 1:36:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean unquestionably incredible scientific work in the, in the astronomy sense, especially here. Can you speak to the, all the sophisticated aspects of the Mayan calendar that they've developed?

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. You got another five hours?

• 1:37:10Lex Fridman?

  Yes, go.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  No, I'm kidding.

• 1:37:12Lex Fridman?

  I should say that you also gave me

• 1:37:17Lex Fridman?

  the 2024 Mayan calendar.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do this just to, you know, show the world that that calendar system is evergreen. It can go into the future or the past for billions of years in the system they made, just like our system is.

• 1:37:32Lex Fridman?

  So can you speak to the three components here as I'm reading the Tzolkine, the Hobb and the Long Count? What are these fascinating components of the calendar?

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  It's, it's neat how obsessed they, they were really math nerds. They, it wasn't good enough for them to just make one cycle to describe time. They had all these cycles that, that interlocked into each other like, like cogs in a machine, though they never thought of it like that. But.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  The Solkeen's their oldest one and the one that still endures today. There are millions of Maya people that are living their lives based on a 260 day count. No weeks, no months. It's just 13 numbers combined with 20 day names for a total of 260 days. And then it goes again. Everybody in the Highlands knows what their birthday is in that calendar, knows what it means about their personality and the kind of jobs that they're supposed to do. Each one of those days has their own spirit and what's supposed to happen in those days. The Maya collectively call them the mom, the grandmother, grandfather spirits.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  And, and, and they talk to each one of those days and they pray to them. They have, there's now an association of some 8,000 people that are called Aki that are daykeepers who are keeping the days. And they're also like community psychologists almost. People come to them and say, you know, my life is mixed up. What's wrong here? Well, let's ask the mom like, okay, well, it looks like you're not doing this or that. Or you know what? You're an accountant. You're not supposed to be an accountant. You're supposed to be a, you know, a midwife. What are you doing? You're, you're living your life wrong. You're, you're, you're a Keeb. You need to start being a Keeb person.

• 1:39:22Lex Fridman?

  They take extremely seriously the day on which you're born, what that means, like the, the spirit that embodies that day.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Right. Like I'm, I'm Keeb, I'm 13 Keeb. And it says my, it's funny how accurate a lot of them are. Mine is basically is a, I'm a, I'm an irresponsible husband and parent, but people like me. So my family still prospers. Like, well, God, that's, that's horribly, that's horribly accurate.

• 1:39:50Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's, some of it is also the chicken or the egg. If you truly believe, so if you've structured society where this calendar is truly sacred, then it kind of like. You manifest a lot of the, the spirit does manifest itself in the life of the people that is born on that spirit's day.

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:40:09Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  And, and, and the Maya really feel this in this system. So that's the core system. This 260 day calendar was the very first calendar they made thousands of years ago, and it's the one that's most important today.

• 1:40:22Lex Fridman?

  Why 260 days, by the way? Is there a reasoning behind it?

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  From, most Maya agree with this today. And, you know, who knows what the original architects thousands of years ago were thinking, but it's nine months. It's the human gestation period. So if you, if you conceived on the day 13 monkey, chances are your kid's coming out on or near 13 monkey. And I think it's beautiful. I mean, if, if that's right, that means the Maya and the people of Mesoamerica will all share it together. When they thought about, we need, we need a count of time that's for us. They didn't look up into the heavens. They looked like into their bodies.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  What's the first cycle that we actually go through as humans? And they picked this nine month thing. It's, it really is our cycle. And no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar like that.

• 1:41:25Lex Fridman?

  So that's the oldest one and the sacred one that still carries through to today. What's the second one, the hob?

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  The hob is the solar calendar, the one that everybody on the planet eventually comes up with. We know it's second though, because when they start talking about it, they use all the symbols and the numbers from the 260 one. They say, well, we need a solar one too. Let's just keep counting this another 105 days and we'll get to 365.

• 1:41:53Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting. They kind of carry the same. Got it, got it, got it, got it. And that's useful because for all the sort of agricultural, all those kinds of reasons.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Right. Though interestingly, they never put a leap year in. The HAB is also called the vague year because it's just 365, which means every year they're off a quarter of a day. And eventually it starts really adding up.

• 1:42:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  In fact, it's even caused modern, modern problems. In this calendar here, I just do the straight math from a thousand years ago. And so I place the beginning of the solar year differently than some Maya groups do, especially the guys in the highlands of eastern Guatemala. They write me nasty emails saying, I don't know what time the year is. But their relatives changed it in the 1950s because their agricultural cycle was so far off. They moved it 60 days back to make it in the spring again. But it drifts, which is strange because it's not a very good thing for the,

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  the agricultural cycle. It's one of these mysteries we still don't have an explanation for.

• 1:43:06Lex Fridman?

  Uh, so that's the HAB. And then what's the long count?

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  The long counts, they're really mysterious, cool one because it's a linear count of days, which are not like them. It's, it's a bunch of cycles like ours. You know, our weeks are a cycle, our months are a cycle.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  But it's weird in that its estimation of the year in the, in the long count system is only 360 days. So it's miserably off a solar year. They count in base 20. So they count, like we count in 10s, we're decimal. They count in base 20, the decimal. And so it should be, you know, there's ones, there's 20s, there's 400s, there's 8000s, there's 160,000s. It's up, it goes just like our 10s, hundreds, thousands, 10,000s, but it's times 20.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  So that third, so they have days, months of 20 days, and then they have these years that are, should be by their math, 400, but it's only 360. And that throws the whole thing out of whack going further up. Then they have a 20-year period and a 400-year period, 400 years to their calendar, but it's only, by that time, it's only 396 years in our period, in our reckoning. So it's mysterious that it's, why did they tweak it at the year to be only 360 days? That's, that doesn't follow any astronomy, that doesn't, that's not the human cycle.

• 1:44:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but they're, I mean, it's interesting that they build up towards thinking about very long periods of time, like Bakhtuns is 144,000 days.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  Right. Or a Bakhtun is 400 of the long counts years. So it's kind of like our millennium. You know, we, we think it's a big deal when we hit a millennium or a, or a century. That's, they have a 20-year period that they do a lot of celebrations on called a Khattun, and then they have the 400 Bakhtun, which is the big one. That's like their millennium. And 13 of those Bakhtuns occurred in the creation before us. They also think that we're in, that the world has had multiple creations. They're not alone in that. There's lots of ancient civilizations who say that, but we're technically in the fourth creation.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  And there, they have a creation story called the Popol Vuh, and the Popol Vuh is clear as day that the third creation ends with the help of these heroes called the Hero Twins, and the fourth creation begins. And so on the Maya monuments, we see them doing the math through the long count, and we can calculate it back very exactly. It happened, the fourth creation started on August 11th, 3114 B.C. And it says, it doesn't say it's day one, it says it's the last day of the 13th Bakhtun of the third creation.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  Which leads us to believe that a creation is only 13 baktuns long.

• 1:46:28Lex Fridman?

  Right. So, and this would be the fourth creation to count.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  This is the fourth creation. But if you do the math going from 3,114 B.C. And count 13 baktuns forward, you get to 2012.

• 1:46:45Lex Fridman?

  And hence, the, uh, the very popular notion that 2012, whenever that was, December, something like that.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  December 21st, 2012.

• 1:46:54Lex Fridman?

  Will be the end of the world.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:57Lex Fridman?

  So can you explain this?

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  Those were very fruitful years for me. I had so many lectures around the country. That was, it's like, uh, like Garrett Morris in Saturday Night Live, the, the, the apocalypse was betty, betty good to me.

• 1:47:13Lex Fridman?

  Uh, I mean, but that, that is pretty interesting. So that's, that, that will be, so technically would be in what, in the fifth?

• 1:47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, technically we'd be in the fifth. Though my argument was that actually, if you look through all the corpus of Maya mathematics and calendars, they never say anything like that. In fact, there's a handful of dates that tell us, uh, that, that the fourth creation does continue farther on, that, that baktun place should have 20, 20 baktuns in it, like their counting system would dictate, not 13. And there's, there's a place in, uh, in Palenque, there's a place in the Dresden Codex,

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  and one other place I'm forgetting, that, uh, that all talk about time after 2012.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  So how does that happen? It's a conflict.

• 1:48:10Lex Fridman?

  Is there supposed to be an overlap of the, of the, of, uh, the 13? So it's like 13 is the core of it and it's 20 long?

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  They, they love the number 13. It's all over the place. It's a magic number to them. My explanation, which I admit is, is not very solid, but, uh, I think that.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  The magical deeds of the hero twins in their creation story at the end of the third,

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  the third creation, hit the magical reset button. And that it just restarted time right there because of their magic. But that was not to say that the natural Baktoon cycle should be 13. And there are certain texts that that go way forward in time or way backward in time. And whenever they want to do that, there are higher increments than just the Baktoon. Above that, there's the Piktoon, then there's the Kalabatoon, then there's Alawatoon. And it goes on and on. And these are like, you know, 160,000 years. Huge increments of time. Whenever they want to do that and they talk about a long period of time, they start putting 13s

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  in all of those increments, those higher increments. And I think what they're saying is they're making an esoteric statement about the never ending nature of time. That's, that's what I think they're, they're telling us in those texts, that time goes on forever magically.

• 1:49:44Lex Fridman?

  But they still had a conception that it didn't go on forever before. Right. That there was other civilizations that came before and they're, and this is the fourth creation.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  This is the fourth creation and the gods made everybody. The, the first ones were made of mud and they melted. The second ones were made of sticks, but they were jerks to the animals. The, the third ones were like us, but, uh, but flawed in some other way. And then we're finally made of, uh, of the blood of the gods and corn. We're made out of corn, so we're, we're perfect. And as the, as it explains to us, the, the Popol Vuh does, we got it right this time. There, there is, there, there's no reason to believe that this creation has a set duration.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Well, one of the weird things is that the Aztecs, who we talked to a lot at Contact, they also had the concept of multiple creations before us, but they were real clear to the Spanish that they weren't all the same time element. Some of them were in the 300s of years, some of them were in the 700s of years, but they were not the same time period. So, our, our mathematical logic that if the third creation was 13, this one must be third creation, is in, or also be 13, it's in direct opposition to what the Aztecs told us about the nature of creations. They're different time periods.

• 1:51:21Lex Fridman?

  Why do you think there was the myth of the previous creations? Did they have some kind of long, multi-generational memory of prior civilizations?

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  It may have had some echo in the, the flood myths.

• 1:51:38Lex Fridman?

  Right. So same, it's the same kind of major myths carried through long periods of time.

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  There's a lot of different opinions about it. And, you know, they're like, if they were all 13, if we have five creations, like the Aztec said, and they were all 13, they would come up to roughly 25,000 something years, which is very close to that processional cycle. So some people are like, they designed it all to be one completion of the procession of the equinoxes.

• 1:52:09Lex Fridman?

  And I mean, that, the...

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  That, I don't believe that one, but that one sure sounds good, doesn't it? That's, that's gonna get a lot of internet hits.

• 1:52:17Lex Fridman?

  And one of the things I do obviously wonder about is why the flood myth is part of like, most societies and most religions.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  I think that one's pretty easy. It's the end of the Ice Age, when the bathtub filled back up.

• 1:52:37Lex Fridman?

  Huh. So it's just the Ice Age?

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's seas filling back up.

• 1:52:44Lex Fridman?

  And they, without really understanding what happened, they just carried that story.

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  Everybody knows that everybody's nice coastal village went underwater.

• 1:52:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  And they had to, they had to seek higher ground.

• 1:52:58Lex Fridman?

  And then, just like people like talking about the weather, everybody was talking about the weather for many generations as the sea level was going up. And then that, that myth carried.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Why do we live here, grandpa? Well, we used to live over there, but then the water came.

• 1:53:14Lex Fridman?

  And then many grandpas later is just kind of permeates every idea.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  It becomes mythology, but global mythology. So that one, you know, there's a lot of things I don't have a reasonable explanation for, but the, but the flood myth is almost certainly the, the rise in sea level.

• 1:53:33Lex Fridman?

  So the, this idea that every day represents, uh, that carries a spirit, uh, you know, there's modern day astrology. You know, most people kind of consider astrology, this, um, maybe a bit unscientific woo woo type of, um, uh, set of beliefs. But do you think there's some wisdom that astrology carries?

• 1:53:57Lex Fridman?

  From your scholarship of the Maya calendar, do you think if we carry that to the astrological perspective on the world, do you think there's some wisdom there?

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  I don't know. You know, that, I, I have a woo woo part of me. I, I would like to believe that stuff, but I don't think as a scientist, it makes, I cannot come up with a biological, scientific reason why that would be true. And, you know, when you look at it objectively, I mean,

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  really is everybody born with the sign Scorpio, a, a moody person? That's just, uh, that's just objectively not true. But it is funny how oftentimes these Maya horoscopes, for lack of a better word, do hit the mark. There was some student who surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked them about their Greek sign and their Maya sign. And his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better, which that's fascinating. At least that's fun. But no, I think I'm too much of a scientist to believe that I just don't

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  have a any foundation in science that would allow us to believe that the the month in which we were born in a cycle sets our personality and destiny.

• 1:55:29Lex Fridman?

  I agree. And yet there's so much mystery all around us that what I do like is the inbuilt humility to that worldview, that there's this whole, you can call it a spiritual world, but a world that we don't quite understand. And then you can wonder about what is the wisdom that that world carries. And then you construct all kinds of systems to try to interpret that. And then there is where the human hubris can come in and, you know, but it's good to be humbled by how little we know, I suppose.

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  I do love the mysteries of the world and I would love to find an ancient civilization, but I don't I don't want to solve the mysteries of the world. I think they're one of the things that make world life worth living.

• 1:56:20Lex Fridman?

  That's true. That's true. You mentioned the Maya writing system. What are some interesting aspects of their language that they've used and the written language that they used?

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  Well, you know, one of the things that confound me as a guy who's spent, you know, better portion of my life studying it, I had the honor of being the student of Linda Shealy, right here at the University of Texas at Austin. She got the group together who broke the Maya code of hieroglyphics in the 1970s. So I learned from the best and loved every minute of it. I miss Linda.

• 1:56:57Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to that code, actually, the hieroglyphic code and what it takes to break it?

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. I mean, what a what a thing. We had kind of a Rosetta Stone. We had a page out of Diego de Landa's book, a priest who was converting the Maya in Yucatan, asked his informants about their writing system and what every sound meant. And he was convinced they had an alphabet like we do. So he got this Maya guy, sat down in Spanish, and he said, "Okay, you're gonna write all the symbols right here in my book. Write, write an "ah" here, write a "be" here, write a "se" here." And that guy just wrote all of the sounds that

• 1:57:41Speaker 01

  the priest told him to write. They were actually syllables. They were vowel consonant combinations. They weren't an alphabet. But that turned into our Rosetta Stone of sorts. The big key is that the Maya still speak that same language. There are millions of Maya people who are speaking a version of Maya. Now, there's, there's where I get confused, that we've got a single writing system that is intelligible. We've broken the code, so we know that it's basically the same writing system from the top of the Yucatan into Guatemala and El Salvador.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  But we have 33 Maya languages today that are mutually unintelligible. And we, we backwards project the language of what they spoke back then that the glyphs are in to something called "chole-T," which is a combination of "short T" and "chole," two of those languages. But it doesn't work for me at all. How did, if there was one language, maybe two back then, how did it flower into 33 mutually unintelligible languages in just 500 years during acculturation and horrible infectious diseases that killed 90% of the population?

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  How did that happen? So we're missing something huge here. I think it's more like Chinese, where Chinese letters, writing can be read in multiple languages and still understood. I don't know exactly the mechanics of how that would happen, but it just seems impossible that there are more languages, not less languages, in the Maya area after the last 500 years that they've been through.

• 1:59:30Lex Fridman?

  So you think that there's some kind of process of either rapidly generating dialects, or there always has been these dialects, or I should say they're distinct languages, even though there's a common writing system?

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  There must have been a way that multiple languages understood the same writing system. Or maybe there was something like, like Latin. You know how there was a period in Europe where like, most people were illiterate? And there was this, this priesthood who all understood Latin and they wrote in Latin?

• 2:00:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  May, maybe the, the hieroglyphs represent a kind of Latin in the ancient Maya world.

• 2:00:12Lex Fridman?

  But we don't really know. And there's not clear evidence to fill in the gaps of how it's possible to have that.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  But we did realize it was actually a Russian scholar named Yuri Kornarozov, who broke the code. The Americans and the Europeans were absolutely sure that the language was, uh, that the written language was a dead language. But Yuri, not knowing any of that, not being filled with all of those thoughts from America and, and Europe, went about it in the way that he was taught, uh, in his, in his grad school in Moscow and just went to the dictionaries. And he looked at Yucatec language that they're speaking today. And he applied it to the symbol system. And he knew that there were certain sounds. He used Lambda's alphabet.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  And he found there was the, his two key examples were a, a picture of a dog with a symbol over it and a picture of a turkey with a symbol over it. And the dog, uh, a dog in Yucatec is su. So he saw two symbols and he said, this one's probably su and this one's ul. And then the, the turkey was kutz. So it would be ku ending in su. And he showed how, look, you know, this is suits, this is su. Those two things that, that should be su are the same symbol. And that began this process of unraveling the syllables that we're still working on today.

• 2:01:45Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating. Just that decoding process is fascinating. Like, how do you even figure that out? And there's probably still, is there still, are you aware of any, um? Written languages that haven't been decoded yet?

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's a number of them. There's a Easter Island script. I was just talking to, we've apparently made a few advances there now. It's called Rongo Rongo. And we only have about maybe 25 examples of texts. But we're beginning to break that. There's also the, the big one is Harappan. Harappan, for a long time, we used to say there were, there were five independent scripts on the planet. And those were Chinese Cuneiform, which is Mesopotamian, Egyptian Maya, and then Harappan, which is from northern India.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  That's the only one that we've never cracked. And now all the apigraphers, the people, that's the term for apigraphy is translating these languages. They're all ganging up on Harappan and want to kick it off the list because we can't break it. It had a, a big enough symbol set, but no one's been able to crack it. And now they're saying it's just an elaborate symbol set and doesn't reflect the, the spoken word.

• 2:03:06Lex Fridman?

  That's a, that's a, that's a hypothesis, but it's, which is what would explain why it's so difficult to break.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  But you know, we could just be faced with a quitter generation. Maybe somebody will pick up the baton next generation.

• 2:03:17Lex Fridman?

  Kids these days with their.

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  The other one that fascinates me is from the Americas. It's the keepu. The, the Inca had the keepu, this knotted string records, but it was definitely encoding more than just math. We know the math. I know lots. I can do the math keepus and figure out what they're totaling and things. Yeah, there's a keepu right there.

• 2:03:39Lex Fridman?

  Keepu are recording devices fashioned from strings historically used by a number of cultures in the region of Andean South America. A keepu usually consists of cotton or a couple of fiber strings. So there's a set of strings and they're supposed to what? To be saying something?

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  There, there's one long string that the little ones dangle off of, and each one of the, the dangling strings have sets of knots on them. And the knots, some of them are mathematical keepus and those, we can just do the math. We can prove that it's math. They also encoded language in there. They had entire libraries in Cusco where.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  Spanish conquistadors were brought through and the caretakers of the libraries would just they'd say, pull that one down, read that one to me. And he'd pull it out and just read a history of something that happened 200 years earlier. So it was definitely writing. But in the 1570s, one, uh, one head of the church there had all of the people that could read them called keepukamayaks gathered up, had them read all of their keepus and transcribed them into Spanish books. And then had the keepus burned and those people murdered.

• 2:04:53Lex Fridman?

  Well, there you go.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  And so we can't break the code still today, but we know it was absolutely a written language, though it wasn't written, it was weaved or knotted.

• 2:05:05Lex Fridman?

  And there's still some keepus available that could be.

• 2:05:08Speaker 01

  There's, I think now we've just crossed the 1,000 mark. So we have a thousand keepus, there's enough to break the code.

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  And I, and I think this generation might be the one that does it.

• 2:05:22Lex Fridman?

  It's sad that so few have survived.

• 2:05:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:26Lex Fridman?

  I mean, a thousand is good, but it's.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  But see, there's Peru has barely scratched the surface with archaeology. There's so much out there. There's, there was a priest I read about named Diego de Porres, who was one of the early people in Peru converting communities. And his chronicle is real clear that he wanted to teach this community of 3,000 people, all the Spanish prayers, the important ones for them to be converted into Christianity. And he had the, the communities keepukamayaks, not keepus for each person that told them that they could read them out and memorize the prayers. And if they were caught without their keepu in town, they were flogged.

• 2:06:12Speaker 01

  So he had 3,000 of the same keepu made and handed out to this community. If we find that community and find its cemetery. There is a Rosetta Stone.

• 2:06:24Lex Fridman?

  You know, it is probably the case, there is somebody in Peru and maybe a large community that knows this language that understands and like you just have to show up and ask them. And it's, it's like, they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, they.

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  There, there are some communities that are using them. There's a couple of them that we had high hopes for, and then it was apparent that they were just making shit up.

• 2:06:48Speaker 01

  They didn't actually know how to read it. They just knew it used to be read. So they like made a bunch of stuff about what it says and they bring it out and they act like they can read it. But then when you ask them the details, they don't know.

• 2:06:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  But then on a much simpler level, there's a llama herders who keep a string in their pocket and they've, they've got the knots equaling how many llamas they have. And then they have subcategories of information like this one's sick, we've lost these ones, this one's pregnant. So they have these more simple and more mathematical keepus, but they're using them to affect as a, as a record.

• 2:07:25Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible through archaeology to know what, you know, the social organization of the Maya was? Like what, uh, maybe if there was a hierarchy, maybe what the political structure was, if there was a leader, different roles, you know, priests or like who had the power, who was powerless, who had certain kinds of roles? Is it possible to know that?

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  Actually, because of hieroglyphs, yeah, we know a whole lot. There's, you know, basic things that archaeology, which is a very blunt tool can figure out, like this guy lives in a rich house, this guy lives in a poor house. But the hieroglyphs tell us specific stuff about who can rule, that it was hereditary, that, that hereditary rule was based on royal blood that could be burned and a connect to the ancestors that lived up in the sky versus the one that's lived in the underworld. It also told us things about hierarchy, like that there were councils of lords underneath the king,

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  who each represented clans who had their own neighborhoods and that there were revolving positions of authority. There was the, the site that I mapped for my dissertation and spent years in the jungle there, Palenque.

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  Had a lord's title named Firelord. That was one of the like generals of their army. And we could tell that position changed over time. So there was one guy named Chakzuts, who was the Firelord for the early part of a reign of a king called the Kalmonob. And then by the time he carves this other panel, there's another guy in the position of Kakh'ahal, which was the Firelord. And so he had

• 2:09:17Lex Fridman?

  Got promoted?

• 2:09:18Speaker 01

  It was, uh, well, he could have been killed. I mean, in the case of that. But then we have the interesting case of, uh, in the post classic, they shed the idea of kings. They don't like kings anymore. That's probably a big part of why the classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings. And so they turned into this more council system at Chichen Itza. But then when Chichen Itza falls, there's a new city that's, uh, that's, architecture looks a lot like Chichen Itza. It's called Maya Pan, but it has, uh, what is called the League of Maya Pan.

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  And it has a council of representatives from the communities from all around the Yucatan. And it is basically a democracy. It's, it is a Maya democracy that happens. The individuals from all around the Yucatan are there. They each, each family has their own council house at Maya Pan, though they live back at their place. It's kind of like a Maya Congress.

• 2:10:23Lex Fridman?

  Representative democracy.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  It, it really was. I mean, and this happens in, uh, I guess 1250 AD. That this, this Maya democracy happens and we know the names of them. We know the families. And of course they were humans. So eventually they screwed it all up. One family murdered another family and the whole, the whole city burned.

• 2:10:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And of course it's probably some fascinating corruption, which is hard to discover through.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  Uh, part of it was the Aztecs screwing things up. The Aztecs came down with all sorts of like, we'll buy everything you're making. And then eventually they were like, could we maybe buy some humans?

• 2:11:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  And then one family was like, no. And the other family was like, I don't know. They're making us a lot of money. So. Then, you know, they they murdered each other and the water supply got polluted and then the city burned.

• 2:11:15Lex Fridman?

  Seems like slavery, murder and disease is a large component of the story of humans. You mentioned different periods in the Maya, the classic, the post classic, the pre classic, the archaic. Can you just speak to that? So archaic is before there was really a civilization, those.

• 2:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, archaic is pretty much when everybody's hunter gatherers.

• 2:11:37Lex Fridman?

  So the classic period was the golden age and then the pre classic is the interesting time that we were talking about and the post classic is when the democracy came about.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  Well, midway through it.

• 2:11:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  Reverted back to council systems. The Maya loved to be part of councils. So, yeah, we have, pre classic is like the origins of civilization. They're starting to build cities, they're starting to create their calendar, they're starting to create these wonderful works of art. And the classic period, i- if you look at at 10 different textbooks for the Maya, you'll get 10 different dates that wiggle around in there. But basically, that's the that's the age of kings to me. That's when the cities decide that they're going to organize themselves around elite royal families that have this magical blood that can contact their ancestors that are directly in contact with the gods.

• 2:12:34Speaker 01

  The Maya never contact their gods directly. They contact their ancestors who are up there who act like liaisons to the gods. And so the Maya age of kings has these dynasties sprouting up where these people have, you know, basically snowed the rest of the people, that they've got a special quality of their blood and only their offspring can do the same trick and talk to the gods, where everybody, every Joe Maya can let their blood and burn it and contact their ancestor.

• 2:13:09Speaker 01

  But Joe Maya's dad is just a corn farmer who lives down below and he's got no influence over the gods. But the rulers, their, their spirits go down briefly, but then they go up into the heavens and reside where the gods are and can act as liaisons. So that's the validation for this kingship that happens for about 400 years. I know we, we say 250 to 900, which is kind of the, the encompassing edges of it. But it's interesting that it's actually specifically the ninth Baktun of their history. The ninth Baktun begins in

• 2:13:48Speaker 01

  like 426 and it ends in like 829. So it's a 400 year period of time. And before that, there were no kings. And after that, there really aren't kings. They're heads of councils. So it's, I, I call it the age of kings where everybody's following the directives of basically a despot. And for a while, that's great. I mean, cities build up, populations happening. Uh, that's it's, I, I see it as kind of a cult of personality moment too. Strong charismatic leaders inspire people to do great things together. But eventually like happens all

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  the time with power, too much power corrupts. All of a sudden, there's this unwieldy, huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else. And, uh, and they start saying, well, I think we should fight with those guys and you guys should go cut, take these things. And people eventually get sick of it and they walk away from these cities. And that's how we get the mysterious Maya collapse where all these cities are just gone.

• 2:14:56Lex Fridman?

  That's one of the great mysteries of, uh, the Maya civilization is that over a very short period of time, what, like a hundred years, it seems to have declined very rapidly. It collapsed. What do you think explains that? What happened?

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  I think it's a failing of archaeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities, populations moved.

• 2:15:22Speaker 01

  You know, no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm and they lived in perishable houses and all archaeology signature sees is that nobody lives in the city center anymore. We don't see a bunch of mass bodies. There was no, there's no evidence of people getting sick. There are certain cities that fought with each other at the end and we see that signature plain as day. We see, we know when a city was attacked and burned. Mostly that didn't happen. People moved and migrated. And it seems like right there around like between 800 and 900, a lot of the elites that were on top in the,

• 2:16:04Speaker 01

  most of it was in the rainforests of northern Guatemala. They move. They move in two directions. Some of them move into the highlands of Guatemala and some of them move up into the Yucatan. The city of Chichen Itza becomes the next big capital in Yucatan. But the word itza is actually a word describing the people who lived around Lake P10 Itza in northern Guatemala. And all of the Maya are super clear about that, that the itza came in as immigrants with these new ideas and created Chichen Itza. So that the elites who were no longer welcome

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  in their cities just moved and set up shop somewhere else.

• 2:16:51Lex Fridman?

  So why was there a decline? What was maybe the catalyst? Was there a specific kind of events that started this? Was this an idea that kind of transformed the society?

• 2:17:01Speaker 01

  We are still debating that. We, I don't think there is a single reason. I think humans are complicated. I think a lot of things led to this. One thing we can see archaeologically is that every one of the cities became overpopulated. They were too popular and we think that they pushed the limits of their capacity to feed and house people. We see it in lots of the cities at the end of the classic period that people are seasonally starving.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  I remember a really stark evidence in Copan, Honduras. Copan was this beautiful city, lineage of seventeen kings, but the last kings and the last elite burials that we dig from the city center, the teeth are the telling part. They get this thing when you're growing up and you're not getting enough food seasonally, it shows up in the enamel of your teeth. It's called dental hypoplasia. And if somebody's seasonally starving, it gets these lines in their teeth. And that last generation of Maya, before they left Copan, even the rich people

• 2:18:14Speaker 01

  are seasonally starving. So there's a problem there for sure. But I also think it's a weird thing. It was not an empire. It was a group of independent city-states like Greece. Some of them were allied, some of them were enemies. There was a huge civil war that settled out about the end of the Classic Period. So if it was Europe, you know, the victors would have taken over, the losers would have beat it and gone wherever they went. But when they abandoned these cities that were independent still, they all left, both the guys that won and the guys that lost the war. So it couldn't be just as simple as spoils go to the victor.

• 2:18:56Speaker 01

  It's such a wide area. Not everybody was starving like the people in the Copan Valley. So I personally think it was calendrically timed. It is interesting to note that that ninth period, that ninth 400-year period ends right then. And I think a lot of people, you know, I can't prove it archaeologically, but I think a lot of people said, we're coming to the end of a great cycle and we need to renew. We need to change what we're doing. When you talk to the Maya today, like at the end of this 2012 thing, if you actually talk to Maya, say, you know, what happens at the end of a big cycle here? They say,

• 2:19:36Speaker 01

  cycles are a time of renewal and transformation, that it is all of our obligation to change our lives at the end of cycles, that change is coming, we can either be part of it, or we can get steamrolled by it.

• 2:19:53Speaker 01

  The Aztecs did this neat thing called the new fire ceremony every 52 years, which was the biggest their calendar would go. They'd burn down perfectly good temples and they'd burn down their houses sometimes and they would just, everybody in, in society would perform this, what they called the new fire ceremony and they would renew the world. So I think my personal theory is that the Maya decided at the end of the ninth Baktun that it was time to renew the world.

• 2:20:26Lex Fridman?

  I think this theory makes sense because they really internalized the calendar. I mean, it was a really big part of their culture, the sense of the cyclical nature of civilization.

• 2:20:35Speaker 01

  That's what I think. I think that, uh, that they created that calendar to perceive the cycle and to harmonize with it.

• 2:20:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Uh, you mentioned Aztec, what was the origin of the Aztec? What did these, where did these people come from, what time and how?

• 2:20:57Speaker 01

  You know, almost every one of the cultures we're talking about now, we have two different versions of the answer to that question. We have the archaeology version and we have the Aztecs themselves. The Aztecs have this wonderful migration story where they say that they came from a place well to the north called Aslan and that they had this migration that went through kind of a hero's journey where they go to this snake mountain place and they encounter, uh, the birth of the war god that they'll worship after this and how they stepped into

• 2:21:35Speaker 01

  the Valley of Mexico as the last, the lost brothers of everyone in the Valley of Mexico. They said that they all came from the north near Aslan as a place, a cave with seven different passages called, uh, Chiqui Mostak and that all the people who spoke the language Nahwaddle came from the cave and most of them went early to the Valley of Mexico. And in the Aztecs, uh, story, they were just the lost tribe. They were the last brothers to come in. And but then they show up late game and they become mercenaries.

• 2:22:17Speaker 01

  They just start working for communities in the Valley of Mexico. And this takes place in the 1300s. So about 200 years before Cortez shows up, the Aztecs show up to the Valley of Mexico. And they make themselves this indispensable group of mercenaries. They do the dirty work. The all the, all the civilized communities around Lake Teshkoko, which is in the middle of the, which is now Mexico City. It's all dried up. But those guys were too civilized to fight with each other, but they could hire the Aztecs to do their dirty stuff.

• 2:22:57Speaker 01

  So the Aztecs did that and really changed the politics in the game of the Valley of Mexico.

• 2:23:04Lex Fridman?

  The dirty stuff, those are the muscle.

• 2:23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'd go in and, and they'd, they'd kill whoever you wanted killed and now you're the king of this area. So one of these kings that they were working for really liked them and decided, I'm going to make the Aztecs part of our ancestry. I'm going to give them my daughter to marry the head of the Aztecs. And the Aztecs sacrificed her. And that really pissed that guy off. So he took like his whole army and ran the Aztecs out for a while. They say they live in this horrible desert section, eating lizards. But then one of their priests say, we're going to walk around the lake.

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  And my visions say that where we see an eagle sitting on a cactus with a snake in its mouth is where we will build our capital. And they see that, but it's out on an island in the lake. And they he said, well, I don't know that's that's the place. So they build up an island, they go to that island and then they just start piling up lake mug until they make a whole city there in the middle of the island. They make or the lake, they make an island city. And all of this occurs in about 100 years. So they show up about 1300. The capital of Tenochtitlan, as they called it,

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  uh, is really established. And from there, they quickly take over the entire valley. They make, uh, what they call the triple alliance, which is the two other big communities of the lake are now their allies, but they're not really allies. The Aztecs were brutal. They were just, those guys agreed to shut up and let the Aztecs run the show. And then the Aztecs spread like a wildfire all the way down into the Maya area. Everywhere they go, they rename everybody's towns and make them pay tribute.

• 2:25:03Lex Fridman?

  Pretty short lasting civilization, uh, spread extremely quickly. Uh, famous, what, what, what are some defining qualities that explain that?

• 2:25:13Speaker 01

  I think they were very much like, they, they had an attitude like Attila the Hun. They just had no problem ripping your skin off. Everybody else had become too comfortable and too civilized. And the Aztecs were just mercenary. They told everybody, you know, we can either rip your heart out or you can work for us. And if you work for us, you'll be just fine. They'd go to every town they'd go to. The first thing they do is they'd show up with a bunch of, uh, merchants. There was a merchant class who were also military. They were really the, the, the people who assessed where they were going to attack next. They'd go in with a bunch of Aztec products and say, we'd like to trade with you.

• 2:25:58Speaker 01

  But all the time they were assessing their military prowess, what, uh, what products they had that they could take. And then soon after the pochteca were there would come the military with the reconnaissance.

• 2:26:12Lex Fridman?

  So the, they asked that kind of huge warrior class, as you're saying. So what was there just, can you? Winger on their whole relationship with war and violence.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  They they worshipped a war deity. Their main temple was the Templo Mayor. It had two temples up on top. One was Tlaloc, the rain god, who liked a lot of sacrifice himself. But then the other one was Huisele Poshli. He was, that translates the hummingbird on the left. But he's the war god. I love that he's a hummingbird. Maybe, you know, he's fast and he comes from the magical side or something. But then then right next to the temple on either side were the two temples of the warriors. One was the Eagle Warrior Clan. The other one was the Jaguar Warrior Clan.

• 2:27:04Speaker 01

  And they they were symbolically in competition with each other, though a unified force. I guess, you know, probably an analogy between like the Navy and the Air Force. You know, they had a good natured competition of who was better, but they were the same force. So those were their symbolic warriors, dressed up in all of their finery. And they would they they would come at people with these two forces. And it was very unlike anything that had happened before in Mesoamerica. Again, I think I could draw a parallel to what happened in Europe.

• 2:27:42Speaker 01

  You know, the famous Henry the Fifth moment in Agincourt where, you know, his kind of ragtag army wipes out half of France's aristocracy with the longbow. Like up until that moment, Europe had a very wars for the elite classes kind of attitude. And then after France lost half their aristocracy, then it was like, maybe we should be hiring from the villages. The same sort of thing happened with the Aztec that there was a.

• 2:28:16Speaker 01

  Mezzo-America really didn't have huge standing armies. But the Aztec put this army together and they intimidated people. They didn't actually have to use it a lot. It was very, it was used to great effect in the, in the Valley of Mexico. And for the rest of Mezzo-America, it was mostly the fear factor.

• 2:28:35Lex Fridman?

  But there also seemed to be, you know, a celebration of violence. I think you said that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec. Maybe like the Roman Empire, was it, they just had a, maybe a different relationship with what violence, where that stood in the purpose of life, purpose of existence? Is that fair to say?

• 2:29:02Speaker 01

  I would hypothesize so. I mean, you know, I think it's one of the wonderful things about studying these ancient cultures. You know, knowing what our human capacity is. And the Aztecs, when I, when I said that statement, I, what I, what I meant by that is they were absolutely comfortable with human sacrifice and ripping people's hearts out. This, they had this, this just, you know, grotesque, violent bent. But in the same way, they also absolutely loved flower gardens and poetry and music and dance. The same Aztec king who would order the hearts of a thousand people extracted

• 2:29:47Speaker 01

  also would stand up at dinner parties to recite his own poetry or the poetry of famous statesmen that had come before him. And they spent money on things like flower gardens. There, all of the causeways leading to the Aztec capital had beautiful flower gardens. And they had a museum and they had an aquarium and a zoo. And they had an opera and they had a ballet.

• 2:30:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:17Speaker 01

  And, and these things existed together. There was not, in the Aztec mind, Any conflict between witnessing someone's heart getting ripped out one moment in the evening, we'd go to the ballet.

• 2:30:33Lex Fridman?

  How does that contrast the relationship with war and violence with the with the other civilizations of Mesoamerica and South America, maybe the Maya? What was their relationship like with war?

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  The Maya were certainly influenced by the Aztec at the end. So we get a we get a skewed perspective from the contact period accounts because the Maya were much more violent and sacrifice oriented in their post classic rendition. But in the classic period, it was mostly the priests and the king who were doing the sacrificing of themselves. That we know that the Maya kings would cut their penises and then bleed that blood onto paper. And the paper would burn and become the smoke through which they they'd commune with their ancestors. But they'd actually tie

• 2:31:28Speaker 01

  this paper onto their penis, cut it, and then dance. So the blood splattered. But it was them cutting themselves. It was different than killing a bunch of other people for it. It was a auto sacrifice, we call it. Still very macabre, but very different than deciding a whole bunch of other people should die. It was a self sacrifice thing.

• 2:31:51Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to sacrifice a bit more? Animal sacrifice, human sacrifice? What role did that play in for the Maya, for the Aztec, for the different cultures here? Was that religious in nature?

• 2:32:03Speaker 01

  It was absolutely religious in nature. And the Aztecs were of the opinion that that the war god demanded people were captured and sacrificed. And it had to be valuable people. There was a lot of before they made that big standing army, they had just ritual battles that they would have and they'd take captives. In fact, all around Mesoamerica, they wanted captives so that they could bring them back and sacrifice them for the gods. And the Aztecs deciding to specifically follow the war god did this more than anybody. They did it so much and so successfully that they didn't have any enemies nearby.

• 2:32:47Speaker 01

  So they decided this one poor sucker group, uh, not that far away called the Tlax Collins, that they were never going to, uh, make peace with them. So that they could go close by every year and just have a little symbolic war with the Tlax Collins and haul them back for a sacrifice. Cortez met those guys and he was like, here are people who hate their guts. I'll just use these guys. So, you know, we say, oh, Cortez took over the Aztec world. It was, it was Cortez and 20,000 super pissed off Tlax Collins.

• 2:33:24Lex Fridman?

  And the actual sacrifice, what, so there would be kind of these ritual battles? Or is it chopping off people's heads and, uh, like, is there, is there some interesting rituals around the sacrifice?

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  It's mostly hard extraction, sometimes heads, but they bring them up on top of the temple. So everybody can see it and they had a, a specific stone where they would bend them over. So their rib cage would come out and they, they'd use, uh, like a thick obsidian knife. And they had a really just, uh, like tried and true way to do it. They'd stab it in, in a certain place, close, and then they'd push down on the sternum as they ripped up on the rib cage. And they just, so they just make a place where they could just rip it right out.

• 2:34:07Lex Fridman?

  With their hand.

• 2:34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, with their hand, but they were really just surgical about it. They'd use a thick obsidian knife where they could just break the ribs right along the sternum and then push the sternum down, pull up and just.

• 2:34:21Lex Fridman?

  While the person was alive?

• 2:34:22Speaker 01

  Yep. While the person was alive. And the Aztecs had this idea, like there was, there was a horrible drought that went on, that almost ruined the entire valley. And they came to this conclusion that it's because we haven't been killing enough people.

• 2:34:36Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:34:37Speaker 01

  We've got to bump this up. And then when they did, and they decided, uh, they, they really took it out on the Tlax Collins, it rained again. So it was proof positive that they should just keep doing that.

• 2:34:50Speaker 01

  And they ate people as well. They really did.

• 2:34:53Lex Fridman?

  As part of the sacrifice or is this?

• 2:34:55Speaker 01

  After the sacrifice, then they would eat them. And this was part of the drought and the famine thing that started, but then it was just kind of the thing to do. When, uh, when Cortez got there, they were still having certain special feasts that involved humans. And, and it really upset the Spanish that they would be like, uh, tricked into eating human like, hey, you liking dinner? That was a human.

• 2:35:20Lex Fridman?

  So the idea, was it actually, uh, having, having a taste for human flesh or is it just, you know, these kinds of ideas of like, if you eat a person's heart, that you can get their spirit and their strength and?

• 2:35:35Speaker 01

  In the case of the Aztecs, it seemed like they just liked it. This guy Sahagun, who was a very responsible, uh, chronicler that was pretty specific that like, uh, there was a distribution thing.

• 2:35:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  Like the, uh, the, the elites got butts. The butts were the best part. So the, the butt cheeks, those are the best parts to eat. And then like, it went down the chain until some people just got like fingers and toes.

• 2:36:01Lex Fridman?

  Literally bought taste for the Aztec.

• 2:36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:04Lex Fridman?

  Boy.

• 2:36:04Speaker 01

  All right. They really, they really did. They really did. In fact, that's what caused the, uh, have you heard of the Noche Triste? The sad night? The night that the Aztecs really go nuts on the Spanish and kick them out? It's all triggered by this, this one guy, um, Pedro de Alvarado, who's left in charge by Cortez. As Cortez goes to the coast and tries to, uh, talk to the new force, talk him into being for him, which he does. But Pedro Alvarado's left back in town in charge. And they're doing another one of these huge Aztec buffets and, uh, parties to honor them.

• 2:36:46Speaker 01

  And it happens, the guy says, you know, hey, do you like dinner? Like, oh yeah, it's a nice dinner. Well, it's humans. You're eating humans. See, I told you they were good. And Alvarado just freaks out and he has the, the guards close the doors and he murders everyone in the, in the party, women, children. Nobody has weapons. He just murders everyone. And that's what spazzes the, the Aztecs out to eventually murder Montezuma, who was their captive. And then try to murder all of them. And it was all, it was all Pedro Alvarado's fault for freaking out about eating humans.

• 2:37:25Lex Fridman?

  Just a little practical joke.

• 2:37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just, they thought it was funny. He did not.

• 2:37:30Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating. I didn't realize. So I kind of assumed that some level of cannibalism would have to do with, you know, eating the heart to, um, to gain the spirit of the person or something like this, but.

• 2:37:40Speaker 01

  In, in certain like a, you know, deer hunting rituals, things for sure. But the Aztecs, no, they just liked eating humans. It was part of the fear factor too. I mean, they could walk into a new town and be like, you guys could either send us, you know, a number of Quetzal feathers every month, or we could eat you.

• 2:37:56Lex Fridman?

  So that's psychological warfare and actual warfare. It worked and that's how they spread.

• 2:38:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And they were just about to take over the Maya when the Spanish came and messed everything up. They, they were, they had the Maya surrounded and they were about to take over the whole Yucatan.

• 2:38:13Lex Fridman?

  So you think without the Spanish, there would be this Aztec empire that would last for a very long time?

• 2:38:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think there would have been an Aztec empire. I think they would have finished dominating everybody, but they did it through hate. And everybody hated the Aztecs.

• 2:38:28Lex Fridman?

  They.

• 2:38:29Speaker 01

  Uh, they, so it wouldn't have lasted forever. They did not, they were not ruling justly. They were ruling by force and that, that can only go on so long before revolution happens. The Inca Empire, I think that would have gone on forever. Cause they were really community oriented. Once the Inca took over, like no one in the Inca Empire starved. They built architecture. Everyone was safe. There was, it was a society that could have lasted a long time.

• 2:38:57Lex Fridman?

  What was the origin of the Inca Empire?

• 2:39:01Speaker 01

  Well, it was bloody at first, like most of them are, but once uh once they started taking over, that what they did is they empire built they everybody else had just raided their neighbors to get the resources, but everybody they raided. They turned them into the Inca Empire and they created this incredible uh Mita system where you took turns working. And they created the road system so they could get groups of workers back and forth. So a town of, let's say, 5,000 people. Uh, the Inca would roll up with an army of a hundred, 200,000 people and say, you know, would you guys like to be part of the empire? Or would you like us to escort you to the edge of the empire?

• 2:39:46Speaker 01

  And if your mayor here agrees, then he can have a town, he can have a house in Cusco. But then the very next month, a big work crew would show up and they'd start building agricultural terraces and storage units. And every month with the agricultural uh excess, they would have big parties and everybody would eat. So people lived well in the Inca Empire. It was a rough beginning, but everybody who agreed to be part of it immediately had access to a whole bunch of resources and security they never had.

• 2:40:21Lex Fridman?

  So they started in South America and Peru and Cusco. Cusco was like the center of it.

• 2:40:27Speaker 01

  Cusco in their language, Quechua, it means navel or belly button. And it's up in the the mountains, but there's four quarters that they called their empire Tiwan Ting Suyu. The land of four quarters and the center of those four quarters was Cusco.

• 2:40:46Lex Fridman?

  It sprung to life, what in like 12, 1200 AD.

• 2:40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we we backwards project what it was, but it was probably.

• 2:40:57Speaker 01

  Mid 1200s, when the first Sapa Inca, the first ruler came in, but it was the, I guess the ninth one is Pachacute, who really started being an empire builder.

• 2:41:10Lex Fridman?

  And part of that, I mean, what really defined the empire, as you said, roads, they build a massive road network.

• 2:41:18Speaker 01

  Roads and in the same way that the Roman strategy of building roads and infrastructure, and then every place they took over, they'd create certain key pieces of Roman architecture that kind of made that city Roman and they'd rename it something.

• 2:41:38Speaker 01

  The Inca did the same thing. They had certain signature Inca architecture that they would build in as the administrative part. They'd send, they'd send the quipu quimayac, the, the, the guys who would weave the, or not the quipus as accountants and they would go through and say, what everybody did, okay, you know, you're a good farmer, you're going to farm. You are a good weaver, you're going to weave. All the men here are going to take a turn at being part of the army. And, and they, and they sent independent quipu quimayacs to that every community had like five or six that were not allowed to work with each other and they all had to independently send their quipus back to Cusco. And if there

• 2:42:22Speaker 01

  were accounting discrepancies, they were called to Cusco to figure out who was lying about what.

• 2:42:28Lex Fridman?

  So there's like a super sophisticated record keeping system.

• 2:42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was the quipu. And the Spanish recorded what they could and then burned them all.

• 2:42:37Lex Fridman?

  But that's an interesting development for, for an empire because that allows you to really expand and have some kind of management, some, some level of control.

• 2:42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they couldn't. At the end, they were at least 10 million people and there was just no way to do that without some sort of sophisticated record keeping system.

• 2:42:57Lex Fridman?

  If the Inca had to face Aztec, who wins?

• 2:43:00Speaker 01

  Inca.

• 2:43:01Lex Fridman?

  Inca.

• 2:43:02Speaker 01

  I mean, the Aztecs were psychotic, but the Inca had just reserves for miles.

• 2:43:07Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:43:07Speaker 01

  And they had that essential hearts and minds.

• 2:43:10Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:43:11Speaker 01

  There was only one thing that everybody got pissed off about when they joined the Inca Empire. For some reason, everything was owned communally, except the llamas. The llamas were the kings. And so that was one thing that like, some of them would stay in town just to be work llamas. But you know, you don't own your llama anymore. And, and people are really attached to their llamas to this day.

• 2:43:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:36Speaker 01

  They are like family members. So it'd be like, everybody walked in and said, everybody's family dog is now mine. It like really upset people on an emotional level.

• 2:43:45Lex Fridman?

  Well, the, I mean, so llamas are got domesticated at some point, probably early. I mean, what, I don't even know when, but early on.

• 2:43:55Speaker 01

  It's, uh, we, we have rock art that progresses to make it see like a progression from people depicted hunting them to people depicted standing next to pregnant ones.

• 2:44:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:08Speaker 01

  So it was still in that archaic period, at least that they became friends.

• 2:44:12Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, but if you roll in and you own them, that's a.

• 2:44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that pissed everybody off. The, for some reason, the Inca owned everybody's llama instantly. And he would take anything he wanted. A lot of them would just get carted away that day, just sent to Cusco. They'd also take their mummies. That was a weird thing. Everybody mourns their dead, but the Inca just like ceased to accept it. They would just, the mummies were still there. Okay, he's dead, but look, he's still got clothes. He's at the party. Let's put a beer in front of him. They just like, they just kept people as mummies. And so the ancestral mummies of every town, part of the being absorbed into the, the empire

• 2:44:55Speaker 01

  was, okay, your most important mummies are now going to have their own beautiful ta- house in Cusco. But they would physically bring those mummies to Cusco to make now Cusco the spiritual heart of their, their belief system.

• 2:45:12Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I can see how that would piss people off, but it's also a pretty powerful way to say like, the ancestors that you idolize, that you respect are now.

• 2:45:22Lex Fridman?

  In the capital.

• 2:45:24Speaker 01

  They've been elevated.

• 2:45:25Lex Fridman?

  They've been.

• 2:45:25Speaker 01

  We didn't steal them. We have given them a new place of honor. And you're welcome to come visit them all the time. And they did. They have these festivals where everyone from all corners of the Inca world would come to Cusco.

• 2:45:39Lex Fridman?

  And which of the civilizations mummified people? Is it?

• 2:45:43Speaker 01

  The Incas for sure mummified people and even did some of that kind of like Egyptian-esque taking out of organs and preparing the body. They put like straw inside the cavity and mummify them. But the Maya didn't do it at all. The Maya, in fact, on purpose would flood tombs with water so that the skin would float off the skeletons faster. And then they get back in there. It was jungly, so I think the bugs probably had part of it too. But then they would get back in there to get the bones. They'd open it back up and take the bones out and paint them with red cinnabar.

• 2:46:25Speaker 01

  The one that I was in in Copan, we had evidence that they had gone in there four different times. And the last couple of times, they only took the skull out and repainted it and then put it back in articulated in the on the skeleton. But they, they didn't mummify. They on purpose would like grossly float the bodies. So, so they could get the skin off faster and get to the bones.

• 2:46:50Lex Fridman?

  But would they keep the bones?

• 2:46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, they'd keep the bones and they'd pull the bones out occasionally and do rituals to them or commune with them and then put them back in.

• 2:47:00Lex Fridman?

  So there, there's a still a deep connection to the ancestors, to the physical manifestation of the ancestors then.

• 2:47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:06Lex Fridman?

  Whether mummified or bone.

• 2:47:08Speaker 01

  And, and to this day, like if, if you do an excavation here in the United States, Native American people don't like it. They don't like their graves, which is fine enough. I wouldn't want somebody digging up my grandma either. But the Maya, they love it.

• 2:47:22Lex Fridman?

  They love it.

• 2:47:23Speaker 01

  Every Maya person, if we find a grave, they're like, yeah, look at that bones. Cool. Can I touch?

• 2:47:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:30Speaker 01

  They, they, they're not spooked about it at all. They think it's exciting. I one time has helped out a, a physical anthropologist in town in, in Copan to get a osteology collection together of various animals. So if we got bones from a An excavation, we could see what kind of animal it was based on the collection.

• 2:47:54Speaker 01

  And this family said, uh, well, we, our family dog died last year and buried him in the backyard. You go dig him up. And so we were like, okay, yeah, I mean, we do need a dog. We'll go dig up your dog. And then they were like, but the kids really want to help you. So their kids came out and this was like their puppy and it died, you know, less than a year ago. When we got to it, they're like, the one of them just like grabbed up a bone and he was like, we see see details, like little bitty bones. Yeah. Like what a weird attitude. That's your dead dog there, but they just, they have a different relationship with the dead.

• 2:48:29Lex Fridman?

  It's some sense. That's a beautiful attitude, right?

• 2:48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:31Lex Fridman?

  Why, um, pretend like we're not mortal and there's not, this is just the process of it. And it's kind of, as you say it now, it kind of would be cool.

• 2:48:42Speaker 01

  That's what Day of the Dead is all about, and I love Day of the Dead. Uh, you know, Halloween's this creepy thing where they're all monsters. But Day of the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors. I convinced my kids after the movie Coco came out. Now we have an altar with all of our great grandparents on the altar. And we talk about who they were and how they lived. And we put things on the altar that mattered in their life and we remember them on that day. And it turned something that was a weird eat too much candy and wear a monster mask thing into something beautiful where we discuss where we came from.

• 2:49:18Lex Fridman?

  I have to ask about the giant stones that Inca has been able to somehow move and fit together perfectly. Do you understand, is it understood how they were able to do that so well?

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:49:38Speaker 01

  You know, the moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. You know, there, there are ways to pivot large weights. Uh, there's a, there's a great guy, uh, named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the U S who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota, single-handedly showing how you can move big stones. So I, you know, I think Wally's already figured out how to move them. It's the, it's the perfectly fit, so carefully fit together that you couldn't even put a dime in between the stones. That's the one that I think still has people baffled.

• 2:50:18Speaker 01

  The, the common archaeological wisdom that you'd find out of a textbook is that they just kept packing away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit. That is, there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody's got a hammer stone. I, I personally think it's acids. I think they melted them together. And there are weird places when you really look at closely to these stones, which I've done a number of times. I'm going back next month to Machu Picchu and especially Cusco. I walk around in the alleys where these 500,

• 2:51:02Speaker 01

  you know, to a thousand year old walls are still there. And you see, I see things like the, the crystals in the andesite are almost stitched together along the seams. Like there's the, the andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven't. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. Like it's just melted, like somebody like took a rag and wiped it while it was soft. Lots of talk about soft stones turning hard too. I, I haven't been able to prove it. This is one of these, you know, end of

• 2:51:43Speaker 01

  my archaeological career chapters. I'm either going to prove myself wrong or prove it. But I think they used acids. My dad's a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there's no way, there's no naturally occurring acids. But my current theory, actually I got the idea initially from the show Breaking Bad. I don't know if you ever saw that show. But there's a point in which they're trying to dissolve a body. Yeah. And they're using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrofluoric acid is so fascinating. It, you know, it, it won't go through plastic and you can also bring it in inert parts and then combine it. The, the Inca made

• 2:52:28Speaker 01

  tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the Andes. And they also mined a lot of things for gold and silver and the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid. You put sulfuric acid and fluoride together and it's hydrofluoric acid. And that will burn through andecite or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously, and you didn't care whether servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these together. And I think they're fused together. I asked the city of Cusco

• 2:53:09Speaker 01

  if I could take some core samples and they said, go away, gringo, don't touch our walls. So this actually, this next, this next time, I'm going to go try to talk to the more Ketchikan authorities in a place called Oleontitombo, and maybe I can convince them. But right now, they just think I'm a weird ass gringo who wants to put holes in their walls.

• 2:53:35Lex Fridman?

  That's a fascinating theory. And so the, how could you get to the bottom of that? So getting core samples to see if there's some kind of trace?

• 2:53:45Speaker 01

  Chemists I'm working with say that if there was hydrofluoric acid in between these, that a core sample right along a seam, they can separate out the elements in there and detect whether there was actually elements of hydrofluoric acid. I wanted to go straight to burning rocks, but they were like, no, I mean, we already know that's true. I mean, yeah, we can burn some rocks, but it would happen. And that's just chemistry. We gotta, we gotta prove that it would happen in the walls. So go get us samples. And that was before COVID and all sorts of, you know, you know how it is. You probably are the same guy where you've got a thousand ideas and, you know, the ones that are fruitful you run with and the other ones you'll get back to.

• 2:54:27Lex Fridman?

  That'd be fascinating if true. And I hope you do show that it's true or either one.

• 2:54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll try to disprove it.

• 2:54:34Lex Fridman?

  Disprove, yeah. I wonder if we discount how much amazing stuff a collection of humans can do. Because it just feels like if a large number of humans are eight are just working a little bit chipping away at stuff at scale, they can do miraculous things. So the question is, how can a large number of humans be motivated to do a thing? Because I just, when we think about like Stonehenge or some very challenging architectural construction, we don't think about a large number of humans working together.

• 2:55:13Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that large number of humans are motivated to work together by a small number of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another.

• 2:55:24Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:55:24Speaker 01

  One of my favorite quotes is, and I'm probably going to misquote it here, but I think it's Margaret Mead who said, never underestimate the power of small groups working together. And the truth is that those are the only people that have ever changed the world, that small dedicated groups of people are what changed the world.

• 2:55:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:46Speaker 01

  And they inspire big groups of people to embrace their vision.

• 2:55:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. I think we sometimes underestimate how much humans can do across time.

• 2:55:57Speaker 01

  And we are way less capable than we used to be. I mean, the average human had all sorts of skills that at least I personally do not. You know, I, I, I'm wearing a shirt, but I, I can't make a shirt. That's for somebody else to do.

• 2:56:13Lex Fridman?

  You've also lectured about, which I really enjoyed, about North America and also helped teach me that there is a lot more complex societies going on here for a long period of time. So maybe can we start at the beginning? Who were the early humans in North America?

• 2:56:35Speaker 01

  Well, we go through that paleo-Indian and archaic period for thousands of years. As we started this conversation, probably, you know, 30,000 years is a conservative now, humans first entered the Americas. But the first cultures we get here are mound builders around the Mississippi and to the east, and then also a totally separate group in the, what we call the American Southwest now, the four corners, who will develop into mostly the people we call the pueblo people, who are still there today, like Zuni and Hopi people. So we've got these two clusters.

• 2:57:17Speaker 01

  The very first major community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It's in northern Louisiana. People think I'm crazy when I say this, but there is a pyramid in northern Louisiana, a big one, at a site called Poverty Point, that is 3,500 years old, so it's the same age as the pyramids in Egypt. And it is a giant thing, just poking out of the bayous of Louisiana. And people don't believe me when I say it, but it's there.

• 2:57:55Lex Fridman?

  The mound builders, what was that society like in comparison to everything else we've been talking about in Mesoamerica?

• 2:58:01Speaker 01

  They evolved over thousands of years. We call them mound builders. This is something I, you know, object to. I think we should have a better, we do, the last version of them, we call them Mississippians now. But generally speaking, we call all these guys mound builders. But what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now. And they didn't build them out of stone. That's, you know, that's kind of our just inherent Western bias. Something that's built out of stone is sophisticated and something that's built out of dirt is rudimentary. But in their full living form, they did have cores of dirt, but then they also had kind

• 2:58:42Speaker 01

  of clay caps. So they had terraces, they had whole complexes of buildings up on top. There were kings that lived up there. There's, the biggest of the Mississippian cities is called Cahokia, and it's right outside of St. Louis.

• 2:59:00Speaker 01

  And it was huge. It had a population of 20,000 people and pyramids all over the place, a huge palisade wall around it. It was absolutely gigantic, a thriving metropolis. And we in America have kind of a collective amnesia, like we never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia was the, the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic. There were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had, you know, five to 10,000 people each. Were they their own thing, or is there some kind of thread connecting all of them?

• 2:59:44Speaker 01

  They had a unified religion and culture. They were, again, not an empire. So they were warring city-states. There were kind of territories that were owned by big kings and then the cities around them were kind of the subsidiary lords and kings. And then one, one kingdom could either ally with a neighbor or have a fight. So they were, they were kind of countries, I think for, yeah, we could safely say there were different countries within this patchwork that was Eastern United States. And, you know, it's so weird that we don't know this because it was clearly documented by the, by the

• 3:00:28Speaker 01

  Spanish. It's this, I'm not talking about just archaeology. We find them in archaeology now, but Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and went for three years from, he went up into the Carolinas and over down into Alabama and Louisiana. And he's the first one to see the Mississippi up there. But for three years, he went through city after city after city, unfortunately decimating them, eating all their corn, giving them diseases. But, I mean, the documentation's clearly there. He met collectively millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization. So it's disease?

• 3:01:14Lex Fridman?

  And stealing of resources, but was there like explicit murdering going on?

• 3:01:20Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, yeah, he was a murderer and a psycho and a liar. He, uh, he, he snowed them that he was some kind of deity, actually learned a trick from the Inca, who he, he was with Pizarro in his first run and got, went back to Spain, was rich, had a wife, a castle. Then he got bored and he decided to have a reign of terror on Northern America for three years. But he had people, uh, burned at the stake. He had his dogs rip them apart. He was very, very brutal. He, he ruled that area through fear and had absolutely no respect for anybody.

• 3:02:03Speaker 01

  He made promises and broke them all the time. He, he was really, he was a brutal man.

• 3:02:10Lex Fridman?

  So this whole period when Christopher Columbus came, how did that change everything?

• 3:02:18Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there's a, there's a great anthropological, uh, body of literature. It's, it's called the Colombian exchange based on Columbus, but it's, you know, all this trade back and forth between the new world and the old world. And the, the old world got just wonderful stuff. All of a sudden their diet didn't suck. All these vegetables came in. The, the new world got, uh, herd animals. It got pigs and cows and goats that it didn't have, but it also got 13 infectious diseases. Europe had had wave after wave and kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things, but it didn't actually go away.

• 3:03:02Speaker 01

  It just couldn't spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a sudden these just, a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first 20, 30 years, there were people who like had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them, but. The numbers, you know, it's, it's a, it's a shameful part of history and it wasn't something that Europe perpetrated on them. The, the medical science at that time was still the four humors theory, that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. And we did things like, well, you've got to bleed him, he'll feel better then. So we

• 3:03:45Speaker 01

  had no idea what an infectious disease was, but the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone and the numbers are now saying in the first 50 years that it, 90% of everybody was dead and that the, the number of people has increased as well, as far as the, our estimates. We're thinking it's somewhere around 150 million people and 90% of them died. And with them, all their knowledge, just, I mean, imagine the moment where, you know, who dies when things get bad? It's the young and the old. So all the knowledge keepers

• 3:04:26Speaker 01

  die suddenly. The children die. This next generation that's half taught and now completely demoralized, thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only way out of it is to, uh, to accept this new Christianity. But they, you know, they don't have, bring kids into this world where everybody's dying. And even if they do, they can't teach them what the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn't finish the transmission. So when a, in a single terrible moment in human history, you know, the generation loses all their knowledge. So a lot of the things that these people knew just blipped out.

• 3:05:11Lex Fridman?

  But with that also just the, the wisdom of.

• 3:05:16Lex Fridman?

  The entire civilizations.

• 3:05:19Speaker 01

  So much of what they knew was just lost at that moment. We have the Maya who had those hieroglyphs and that we've learned a lot from that.

• 3:05:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but not a significant integration of that wisdom into. So it wasn't, uh, when the Europeans came, it wasn't like the cultures were integrated. It was, um, a story of domination. Of a ratio.

• 3:05:42Speaker 01

  In the, in North America, there's a, a new term in the literature that I like. We call it the, uh, the Mississippian Shatter Zone. That Mississippian civilization was millions of people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries. And now we have this Shatter Zone where we have ruins and the people that were actually from those ruins are somewhere else on a reservation far away. And, you know, that I'm just about to talk to a Cherokee man who listened to some of the things I had to say and says, all those Ho-Chunk things you were saying from that Ho-Chunk culture, my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too. Can I, can I talk to you by phone and tell you about these things?

• 3:06:24Speaker 01

  So we, we've got this Shatter Zone where, you know, we're gonna try to put the piece, the puzzle back together, especially in terms of Mississippian religion. I really think we're making headway in this generation and it's exciting to be part of piecing this old religion and its mythology back together.

• 3:06:45Lex Fridman?

  Just as, uh, since a lot of people kind of refer to Christopher Columbus as the person who discovered America, um, I read that the Vikings reached North America much earlier in, um, 1000 CE. And, uh, why do you think they didn't expand and colonize?

• 3:07:04Speaker 01

  Cause they got their ass kicked.

• 3:07:08Speaker 01

  It's the truth.

• 3:07:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:09Speaker 01

  It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here. There's a, there's a great site in Nova Scotia called Lanzo Meadows, which definitely has what's left of a Viking colony. It was Leif Erik and his father, Eric the Red, who they got kind of kicked out of Europe because they apparently couldn't stop murdering people. And so they went to Greenland and then kind of island hopped over to Canada. But I think the culture that was in that area was named the Dorset. But they would have nothing to do with the Vikings. They, they attacked the Viking settlement every day and did not give them an inch until they decided it was just worthless and they left it.

• 3:07:51Speaker 01

  You know, the Vikings attacked Ireland and they just found a bunch of, you know, monasteries full of gold with a bunch of guys going, we're men of God. We don't fight. And the Vikings were like, this is great. That's great. This will be easy then. We'll just loot all these Easter eggs. But the Native Americans in Canada were like, not having it. They kicked their ass. In fact, Leif Erickson's brother Thor died there. The, the natives killed him. He was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement, but they, they just killed him.

• 3:08:24Lex Fridman?

  So a lot of the Native American cultures were also, I mean, they're sophisticated warring cultures also.

• 3:08:31Speaker 01

  Yes, they fought, especially the, the Mississippians. Boy, they were tough. And so were, you know, the, the Five Nations, the Mohawk, the Huron. Those, the ones that, that kicked the Vikings ass up there, they were probably Algonquin speakers. But they were connected like, you know, just above the, the Great Lakes. But they were all a very tough people.

• 3:08:56Lex Fridman?

  When you think about the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the over a hundred million people that were killed.

• 3:09:04Lex Fridman?

  Do you see that as a tragedy of history? Or is it just the way of history?

• 3:09:09Speaker 01

  I think that the epidemics, I consider it a tragedy. That did not have to happen. And that was not, you know, that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it. There was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. It was not, you know, they, I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what's been called the, the black legend, that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That's not the fact. That it was the diseases that murdered everyone. In fact, there was a, a really poignant, uh, story I read of a, a Spanish priest in the Amazon, in the, in the Brazilian northern part of the Amazon, where he made this utopian

• 3:09:54Speaker 01

  community. And he was bringing people in that were getting sick. And he, he wrote, you know, I'm baptizing everyone, you know, I baptized 10,000 people a day and yet God's still killing them. Why, why is he doing this to them? They're doing everything that I asked them to do. They are submitting to the will of God. But this guy doesn't realize that the same bowl of holy water that he's baptizing them in, he's just wiping the disease on everybody's faces. He's accelerating it when he doesn't even realize. He thinks he's saving them, but he's actually killing them.

• 3:10:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:32Speaker 01

  That's a tra, that's a tragedy, you know? That's not just like spoils go to the victor stuff. That's just straight up tragedy.

• 3:10:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah, but that one is even hard to know what to do with like black death. It's, I mean, infections, they don't operate on normal human terms, right? They just, they just go through entire populations. Back to wild ideas.

• 3:10:57Speaker 01

  All right. Just my style.

• 3:11:02Lex Fridman?

  I mean, we didn't really talk about how life originated on earth or how. How humans have evolved? And we did talk about that there could be just a lot of stuff in ancient history we haven't even uncovered yet. Do you think it's possible that other intelligent civilizations from outside of Earth, aliens, ever visited?

• 3:11:27Speaker 01

  You had me right into the ever visited thing. That one I'm not entirely sure about. I'm not sure whether we have any, we certainly have no archaeological proof that I would cite or contemplate as the evidence of such. But you know, the guys that discovered DNA, Watson and Crick, Watson, who actually habitually used hallucinogens to invigorate his thinking, he said that he thought that DNA on this planet was way too complex to have developed over the time period that it had at its disposal

• 3:12:08Speaker 01

  and that his guess was that our DNA was somehow seeded from outside of our planet. And you know, take that for what it is, but the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that. So that's interesting. But in terms of, you know, aliens visiting us, I don't know. It does smack of a kind of human hubris that we think were important enough for some advanced species to give a shit about us. Statistically speaking, the universe is way too big. We can't be the only sentient beings. There's gotta be somebody else out there. Whether they care about us, that's a question. I've been on Ancient Aliens a number of times.

• 3:12:53Speaker 01

  I show up and, you know, I'm an educator. I mean, refusing to be part of the conversation is an immediate fail in my book. But there was one time where they asked me at the end, you know, do you have anything else that you want to say? And I said, well, you know, y'all's premise is that aliens came down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of, you know, science and medicine, engineering, all these things. Today, we also have a lot of.

• 3:13:26Speaker 01

  Stories of the aliens coming down, but now all they're doing is mutilating cows and sodomizing rednecks. Like whatever we did, we were super pissed them off, apparently.

• 3:13:38Lex Fridman?

  The quality of the gifts has decreased rapidly.

• 3:13:43Lex Fridman?

  What it's an interesting thought you've mentioned. What archaeologically would you have to see to be like, this might be an alien?

• 3:13:53Speaker 01

  A technology that doesn't belong there first and foremost. I mean, you know, we got a it if we just run with the premise that somebody was capable of making a vehicle that could get them from somewhere far away to here. That was almost certainly mechanical. Now, I, you know, I love the aliens thing where, you know, biomechanical is something that that certainly could be. And that would, you know, that that would disintegrate. We wouldn't see that at all, but I would expect some kind of technology that that showed up out of the blue and changed things. That would be something. But but I would think, you know, mechanical or, you know, a substance that's not from here.

• 3:14:38Lex Fridman?

  But of course, we would only see the the results of that mechanical. You mean, like literally a mechanical thing?

• 3:14:44Speaker 01

  Right, some sort of thing like that.

• 3:14:49Speaker 01

  The typical thing people say is like, you know, how did they move these giant stones? Right? But, you know, just just look at that on the face for a second. Aliens come from across the universe to meet humans. And the thing they tell them is how to move rocks? Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, you know, like, give them, give them antibiotics or a combustion engine or something. You're gonna they should they came across the universe and they showed them how to move big rocks? I mean, that doesn't make any sense. That just doesn't make any sense.

• 3:15:23Lex Fridman?

  What do you think Earth will look like? 10,000 years from now?

• 3:15:29Speaker 01

  That's an interesting question.

• 3:15:33Speaker 01

  I think it will be a lot more automated or or it'll be a smoldering pile. I mean, there is a possibility we could end ourselves. There's always that possibility that we've really opened Pandora's box in some regards. I did listen to one of your podcast guests with the what would happen in the case of nuclear war.

• 3:15:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:55Speaker 01

  That was chilling. Her opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes, apparently. So we have that capacity. That's scary. That's a possible future for us. But I'm an optimist. I, you know, I'd like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make my job better.

• 3:16:15Lex Fridman?

  But a thousand, 10,000 years is a long time. And technology is improving and becoming more advanced rapidly. And the rate of that improvement is increasing ever more. So.

• 3:16:30Speaker 01

  That that's the part that frightens me, actually. I don't know. Does that frighten you?

• 3:16:34Lex Fridman?

  Yes, terrifying.

• 3:16:35Speaker 01

  You know, I, I, I heard somebody say, I forget who it was, but you know,

• 3:16:41Speaker 01

  systems of any kind, human systems, biological systems can be put on a graph. That's change over time. And any graph that the change is way faster than the time and the, and the, the line starts going straight up. That is a system in crisis. And almost any biological system that has that fast a change over that little a time, you would any, any other thing, you'd describe it as a crisis. When you apply that chart to technologies change, it's a crisis.

• 3:17:20Lex Fridman?

  From that perspective, absolutely. But I also have a faith in human ingenuity that we humans like to create. A really difficult situation and then come up with ways to get out of that difficult situation and in so doing innovate and create a lot of awesome stuff and sometimes cause a lot of suffering, but on the whole, on average, make a better world. But yeah, if it, you know, like with nuclear weapons, the bad stuff might actually lead to the death of everybody.

• 3:17:55Speaker 01

  I guess there's always that that chance, but I am an optimist. I, you know, I think you're an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said, I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate and we are never more innovative than when we're under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about, you know, we didn't, we didn't change the world when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis. Mother necessity is the mother of invention. And I think we'll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis

• 3:18:35Speaker 01

  is real and happening. I actually personally think that I'm gonna, I'm gonna answer a question that you didn't even ask me.

• 3:18:43Lex Fridman?

  Good.

• 3:18:46Speaker 01

  I think we're wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this. We're delusional. I'm all for electric cars and, you know, being good stewards of the environment, but we are wasting our time not technologically adapting to what's about to happen. We're spending too much time pretending, you know, the average American thinks if we all just drive electric cars, we'll be okay. That's bullshit. That's not going to happen. We need to start making technologies that desalinate water, that a host of things that, that we need to use our technological capacity to accept it and adapt instead of Pollyanna thinking we can make it go away.

• 3:19:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, kind of accept that the world will change and a lot of big problems will arise.

• 3:19:40Lex Fridman?

  And just develop technology that addresses them.

• 3:19:43Speaker 01

  I think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we're going to survive this, not that we're going to make it go away.

• 3:19:50Lex Fridman?

  And not just survive, thrive. Again, we're pretty innovative in that regard. But if some catastrophic thing happens, or we just leave this planet, what what do you think would be found by

• 3:20:07Lex Fridman?

  aforementioned alien civilizations when they visit the anthropologist, the grad student anthropologist that visit Earth and study, how much of what we now have and love and think of as human civilization will be lost, do you think?

• 3:20:22Speaker 01

  Well, you know, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So, you know, you didn't put a time element in there, but I would say that, you know, everything that can perish will, and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn't perish. So we'll have, you know, buildings, plaques, but they won't have any books, they won't have any, you know, billboards there. They'll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a, did a talk in Sioux Falls. And I said, you know, I drove in here and there was a big obelisk in front of the town.

• 3:21:06Speaker 01

  And everywhere I go, I see the names Lewis and Clark. And a thousand years from now, if I was an archaeologist investigating this place, I would think that it was founded by the Egyptians and their kings were named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is, you know, Lewis and Clark stayed one night here, but it's just a big deal. So I would be so wrong about what I thought about your town based on what preserved.

• 3:21:33Lex Fridman?

  This is so beautiful as a thought experiment. Like, what would archaeologists be really wrong about? And what would they could possibly be right about?

• 3:21:43Speaker 01

  Washington DC was clearly made by a combination of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans, because that's what all the architecture is.

• 3:21:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And would they be able to reconstruct the important empires, the, the, the powerful empires? And the, the warring empires?

• 3:22:02Speaker 01

  For that matter, have me and my colleagues done that at all? I, I'm almost certain that the Maya would just gut laugh at what I think I know what they were.

• 3:22:11Lex Fridman?

  I wonder, do you, you ever think about like what we just as a human civilization are wrong about the most, like mainstream archaeology?

• 3:22:20Lex Fridman?

  Just like a suspicion, what, what could we get completely wrong?

• 3:22:25Lex Fridman?

  Well, one way to get something wrong is totally like lost civilization, like an obviously gigantic civilization. That was there along with the Maya or something like this in the 10,000 years ago.

• 3:22:37Speaker 01

  There's certainly that. There could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things.

• 3:22:46Lex Fridman?

  And everybody knew they existed and everybody interacted with them. It was.

• 3:22:50Speaker 01

  I think, I think it's our estimation of their motivations that we're probably most wrong on. My, my teacher, Shealy, a long time ago said, you know, I, I've come up with all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about stuff and she looked at me and she said, if you don't stop thinking like a Western European and start trying to put yourself in the mindset of these people, you will never understand any of it, which I've always taken to heart. I mean, I really do. When I approach these things, I try to step out of my cultural assumptions, try to think like they would think is the best I could. And it's very different. I mean, this whole, you know, the Maya

• 3:23:31Speaker 01

  are cyclical, you know, this, the, the whole sacrifice, we're so, you know, obsessed with that. But, you know, that was an austere, actual sacrifice on their part. They weren't just, you know, hey, let's all get together and kill that guy that's pissing us off. I mean, they were like, you know, giving the best of them. It was, it was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a, you know, bona fide sacrifice on their part, a loss.

• 3:23:59Lex Fridman?

  Plus, the whole mystery of the puppy that eventually starts having sex with.

• 3:24:03Speaker 01

  I tell you, that one, I'm gonna unweave that one one of these days.

• 3:24:07Lex Fridman?

  One of these days. Now, that puppy appeared on Pottery.

• 3:24:11Speaker 01

  All over Pottery. He's everywhere. I gotta write this book. This next year is the year I'm gonna write my Fang Deity book, and I will have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy.

• 3:24:25Lex Fridman?

  The mystery solved. I mean, it could just be the birth of memes of humor. I don't know. I mean, again, humor, you don't know what the nature of their humor, of what their jokes are.

• 3:24:34Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a neat one, too. And that's so human. I'll tell you a little side story here that when I worked with the Maya people in Palenque, I spent three years making this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day. And they would talk to each other in their own language. It was Seltal was the group I was working with. But I noticed after a while, they were big jokers. They loved to make jokes, and they would laugh at jokes. But then they would also, one of them would say something, and the other ones would go, "Hoo hoo!" And I eventually asked, you know, "What is that? Why do you guys always make that hoo hoo noise?" And they said, "That's 'cause

• 3:25:14Speaker 01

  he made a really smart pun." It was like he said three different things at once. It was a turn of phrase that was smart. And they didn't make laughs at that. They had a noise for when somebody said something just super clever. So there's also that, like, you know, just clever turn of speech.

• 3:25:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, wit.

• 3:25:36Speaker 01

  And I think about that when I'm a hieroglyphic translator. Like, here's a beautiful thing that's gonna be like a poem or a political statement. And I'm just ploddingly looking in a dictionary of what that word means. There's probably double, triple entendres all through this text, and the real meaning is the subtext. And I'm, you know, I'm thinking they're talking about corn, and they're talking about the nature of life.

• 3:26:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it could be satire. It could be, you know, as it was in the Soviet Union, when there's a dictator, maybe there's an overpowering king, you're not allowed to actually speak. You have to hide the thing you're actually trying to say in the subtext. And all of that.

• 3:26:20Speaker 01

  There was a funny Maya ceramic that had... The ceramics are neat, because they don't...

• 3:26:28Speaker 01

  The monuments can be kind of broken records. I'm the king. I was born this time. I beat these people up. I married this woman. I died. But the ceramics will tell us like things out of mythology stories. And there was this one with a rabbit looking at the merchant god. And nobody could translate the text. And finally, this Eastern European, actually a Ukrainian guy, translated it. And the rabbit saying to, to the merchant god, bend over and smell my ass. It's like, oh, man, we were expecting this wonderful piece of mythology. But no, it translates bend over and smell my ass. That's great. That's human.

• 3:27:08Lex Fridman?

  As we mentioned previously, human nature does not change. You, you mentioned Palenka mapping it. It's just out of curiosity, what is that process like? It seems fascinating.

• 3:27:19Speaker 01

  Oh, it was, it was a great adventure. I loved it, but it was, it was difficult. I, I woke up every morning thinking I will be hurt today somehow. I don't know how. I don't know how badly, where on my body it will occur, but it's going to happen. Cause it was the jungle.

• 3:27:34Lex Fridman?

  So in the jungle, what's, what's the process like? What, what, what do you have to do to, to map it?

• 3:27:40Speaker 01

  Well, it was tricky too, because it was also a, a national forest. So the forestry department didn't want us to cut down anything more than we had to. So we basically just cut tunnels through the foliage and I would, uh, we'd map everything twice. The first thing we do is I'd go in, uh, find a building, draw it on a piece of graph paper. And I'd say like, you know, you guys go north, you guys go east, west, find other buildings. And when you find them, pace back to this one. And so I'd start making a map and I'd make the whole, uh, one piece of graph paper was enough to, then we'd bring the machine in. We'd bring the laser theodolite and get really accurate information. But on that piece of paper, I would write like,

• 3:28:24Speaker 01

  don't bring the machine this way. There's a tree fall or stand on top of this building and you'll see four different buildings at once from this one.

• 3:28:31Lex Fridman?

  Nice. And all of this is in dense jungle.

• 3:28:34Speaker 01

  Right. And the deeper we got off the road, the deeper it was. Sometimes it would clear out, but certain places, if it was low, it would be such thick vegetation. And it would grow back so fast. Sometimes. We would cut just tunnels through tall grass and we'd come back like five days later and they were gone.

• 3:28:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:59Speaker 01

  Like we couldn't even find where our trails were. They would grow back that fast.

• 3:29:03Lex Fridman?

  But you see the buildings, so you could see.

• 3:29:06Speaker 01

  Right, and that was the fun part. I mean, sometimes it would just be like a little neighborhood with little low buildings no bigger than this table, but sometimes, you know, just five more meters in and I'm standing under a pyramid that nobody had ever mapped. Like, wow, I've just found another one. And some days, you know, on good days, we'd find three pyramids. And I felt that's such a more exciting job than the typical excavation. So my buddies were all just, you know, in a hole for the whole week in the middle of the city and where I'm dancing around through the jungle, I could find, you know, 10 buildings today. I might find a pyramid today, who knows?

• 3:29:43Lex Fridman?

  What's that feel like to find like a pyramid or buildings that you're one of the only humans that are not from that civilization to ever see this thing? What's that feel like?

• 3:29:53Speaker 01

  It's great. I love that feeling. I am, you know, I'm an explorer at heart. So finding something like that, you know, when I was, when I was 25 years old, I found a whole Maya city. I got to name it. Its name is Machna. It's off in the Belizean jungle. And that was just outrageous. I mean, it almost, that one almost depressed me. I was, my entire, like, I had this great life ambition that I would find a lost city. And then I did it at 25 and I was like, God, now what do I do? I thought that was supposed to take me my whole life. I actually, I wrote a bunch of letters to NASA trying to get them to let me be the first

• 3:30:38Speaker 01

  archaeologist on Mars. I never got a single reply back. I'm sure I'm on NASA's list as some weirdo.

• 3:30:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, how'd you find a Mayan city?

• 3:30:49Speaker 01

  I, uh, I used a topography map of the area and I played the game, if I was a Maya, where would my favorite place to live in this big area be? I, I looked for the biggest mountain because they call all of their pyramids, tuna, wheat, stone mountains. I knew they loved mountains. And when I found that mountain, there were two others right next to it that made a triangle and they love those triads and there were rivers in between them. And I thought, that's it. That's where I would build the city. And I hiked out there over two seasons with students. The other grad students were like, he's just having his students just wander in the jungle all day. But I came back with the city.

• 3:31:32Lex Fridman?

  So, given that you've looked into the deep past of humanity, what gives you hope about our future? Maybe our deep future of this human civilization?

• 3:31:45Speaker 01

  That's a good one. And I do have hope. I do have hope. I, I believe in the spirit of humankind. I, I, as a person who have studied history, I kind of feel like history does kind of a sine wave. There's highs and there's lows, but no matter how low we go, we get up again and, and we climb. And I think that humanity will continue that. We will rise to the challenges. Now, some of the challenges may be created by ourselves as well, but we will adapt and overcome. That's, that's what we do.

• 3:32:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, humans find a way, right? That's, that's like, uh, that's the thing you see with, with history. You want the empires collapse. They, uh, the humans that come out of that, they pick themselves up and find another way. They build a new thing.

• 3:32:38Speaker 01

  And the people I study believe in the cyclical nature of life, that you really can't, life can't continue without death being part of the cycle. We get their lows, we get our highs, but the cycle continues forever.

• 3:32:51Lex Fridman?

  I should mention that you have a lot of great lectures on the great courses, but you have also an amazing podcast, Arquio Ed. If people want to listen to it, this is a tough question, but what would you recommend?

• 3:33:11Lex Fridman?

  What episodes should they listen to? What's the answer?

• 3:33:14Speaker 01

  Oh, that is a tough question.

• 3:33:16Lex Fridman?

  What is the, what is the sampling? You know, it's like asking a chef, like, what's the best stuff on the menu?

• 3:33:24Speaker 01

  Well, different strokes for different folks. You know, I do two different things on that podcast. Sometimes I just teach about cultures that you've never heard about. Or I, I love, I, I start off by saying it's my podcast and I'll talk about whatever the heck I want to talk about. Sometimes I talk about really, uh, specific things, like a tool type or an animal type. But my favorite ones have become when I just tell my stories of my adventures. I've got a lot of weird adventure stories and, uh, it's, it's been fun and they've been very well received. I've got, you know, I can put my humor in there and I can talk about, you know, the, the things that went right, the things that went wrong, the adventures that I had are all part of, part of this archaeoed thing. It's an archaeoed's kind of a double entendre.

• 3:34:09Speaker 01

  It's me, I'm just Ed, but it's also education. You know, what I'm really trying to do with this too, it's specifically the Americas. I want to be part of the reawakening that there were these great civilizations here, especially North America. I, I think that we have a group amnesia that there was no great civilizations here before Europe showed up. That's simply not true. I think it should be part of our history books. In fact, I have a, a program called Before the Americas that, uh, would introduce as part of American history, the part before European contact.

• 3:34:50Speaker 01

  And I think that kids in the K through 12 levels should grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in 1492. And one of these days I'm going to find a funder to help us put together Before the Americas. And we're going to make it part of the curriculum for every kid in the U.S. to know the full history of this country.

• 3:35:15Lex Fridman?

  That's a great project. Ed, thank you so much. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for all the fascinating ideas that you put out into the world. And, uh, I can't wait to hear your new course.

• 3:35:27Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Lex. It was a real pleasure.

• 3:35:31Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ed Barnhart. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Joseph Campbell. "Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? How many can say, asks the Aztec poet, that there is or is not a truth beyond?" Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.