#448 - Lost 6,000 Year Old 'Pyramid City' Just Found in North America | Luke Reagan

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Luke “Caverns” Reagan is an explorer with a degree in Anthropology, & History Channel guest expert. Luke is dedicated to uncovering the lost worlds of North & South America: from ancient times, to the American frontier & period of exploration. SPONSORS https://kalshi.com/r/dannyjones - Download the Kalshi app and use code DANNYJONES to get $25 when you trade $25. Underdog: Download Underdog today & get in on the action. New users can score $50 in bonus entries when you play $10. https://quo.com/danny - Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months. https://stio.com/danny - Use this link for 20% off your order. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS @lukecaverns https://www.instagram.com/lukecaverns *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Jorge Alesanco, the man accepted by a pride of lions 11:27 - Sharks, the Nazca people & Lost Wilds of the American East 18:29 - Florida's history & jaguars, panthers and tigers 32:19 - Origin of panthers & encountering grizzly bears 37:57 - Gila Wilderness & cliff dwelling 45:39 - Risk of forest fires in the Gila Wilderness 52:54 - Flash floods & other natural disasters 58:21 - Why there are so many biblical flood stories 01:01:32 - The dark history of archaeology 01:11:17 - The rise of alternative archaeology 01:17:52 - Olmec's jade death masks 01:26:03 - Ancient stone softening 01:29:17 - Akrotiri, Greece & the story of Atlantis 01:38:48 - The problem with Plato 01:41:20 - How people in the future will piece together our past 01:46:35 - Ahnenerbe's hunt for ancient Aryan race & colonial archaeology 01:56:29 - What is still being hidden in Egypt 01:59:41 - The Carolina Bays 02:04:11 - How Luke discovered 80 unknown archaeological sites 02:07:44 - Archaeological site found on Epstein's ranch 02:13:32 - Corruption among the Epstein class 02:18:59 - Luke's lidar program & ancient Florida mound sites 02:26:10 - Huge ancient city discovered in Louisiana 02:39:47 - Why people aren't searching for new ancient sites anymore 02:43:05 - 6,000-year-old mummies found in Texas 02:49:51 - Evidence for jaguars in Missouri & "underwater panther" 02:55:40 - Ancient mound builder sites across America 02:59:40 - Serpentine intaglio never-before-discovered site 03:05:00 - Speculation of opening 'portals' in Moundville 03:13:52 - Luke's family name & American ancestry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  Luke Caverns, you're back, brother.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  What's up, man? How's it going?

• 1:10Danny Jones?

  Good to see you, dude.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  Good to be back, man. I was just telling you a minute ago, this is the first live podcast I ever did, over three years ago now.

• 1:16Danny Jones?

  And now you've been all over the world. You're doing all kinds of crazy expeditions, doing all kinds of big stuff. You've got your own YouTube channel. You're publishing all kinds of cool shit.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26Danny Jones?

  So what's the latest and greatest? Where you been? What you been looking into?

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Well, I just spent about 40 days in Africa. You know, we did a little archaeological tour around Egypt. And then before that, I was in Kenya. And I was spending some time, actually with a really cool character out there. I'm not sure that I can mention him by name. There's some weird stuff. But anyways, he is one of the first, well, actually, I think he's maybe the only person in human history that's ever been accepted into a wild pride of lions. And that was in Kenya. And so we got to-

• 2:06Danny Jones?

  Accepted into a wild-

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He is seen as, he is seen by the pride as a male lion. They accept him into the pride. I mean, it's, it was really fascinating, mind-blowing, actually. And-

• 2:24Danny Jones?

  That never ends well.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  You know-

• 2:26Danny Jones?

  We saw how it went for Grizzly Man.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  I was thinking that while we were there. I was watching him, and I think he knows that, too. His name's Jorge.

• 2:33Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  And I was thinking that while I was watching him interact with these lions. And it's really a profound thing, man. You know, he, it was mind-blowing listening to a guy who has spent the last, man, must be more than 20 years, living in the bush country, out in, outside of the Masai Mara Conservatory in western Kenya. He's living way out in the bush with his wife and only bushmen. I mean, he lives with the African Maasai bushmen every single day. And, you know, his whole life has been devoted to trying to understand the way of the African lion. And, man, it was fascinating talking to him. I mean, he repeated the way that the Maasai people talk about lions and that they call

• 3:19Speaker 03

  them people. And when you're out there in the bush, like, we visited a small village. And, you know, what I was doing was collecting lion attack, lion kill stories from people. I've been interested lately in accounts from the frontier, like, if it's the American frontier, African and Asian frontier. Like, the first time Europeans were pushing into these wild places that they hadn't explored before, and getting these first account stories, right? So I was kind of doing that a little bit with the locals in this village. And when you're out there, you really, it kind of levels your perspective of ancient people living out in Africa. Because that wildlife is just so different than anywhere else in the world.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Like, how many times on this podcast have you talked about the saber-toothed cats that used to be in North America? The, you know, the extinct bison, the mammoths?

• 4:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  I mean-

• 4:13Danny Jones?

  The giant sloths.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Giant ground sloths. I mean, there was so much. Ground sloths were all the way down in Florida, weren't they?

• 4:17Danny Jones?

  I have no idea.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  I think you had the giant jaguars in Florida, too. I mean, it just, you know, North America must have been a frightening place during the Ice Age.

• 4:24Danny Jones?

  All the big stuff, all the megafauna is gone.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  It's all gone. But in Africa, you think about it, and you, you know it when you haven't been there, but when you're really there, you understand it. Like, when you see a herd of 3,000 elephants go by, you're like, oh, I'm actually looking at the Ice Age right now in front of me. And so when you visit the bushmen, you were like, instantly standing in a place where people still live like they did in the Ice Age. I mean, they have, they have satellites and, or they have solar panels, and they've got phones that can connect to, what is it? Elon's-

• 5:01Danny Jones?

  Starlink.

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Starlink, yeah. And that's fascinating, but-

• 5:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they have porn now, don't they? Those tribes?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:09Danny Jones?

  I heard that's a big problem.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's funny. I heard that, too.

• 5:13Danny Jones?

  They have porn and sports betting.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:18Danny Jones?

  What's it called? What's the name of the sports betting website?

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Uh-

• 5:22Danny Jones?

  Draft, DraftKings?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Oh, DraftKings. Do they really use that out there?

• 5:26Danny Jones?

  Probably.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  You've heard about that? Yeah, yeah.

• 5:29Danny Jones?

  I mean, they're one of the same.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  But it's amazing that you end up realizing, like, this is why these big cats across the ancient world were so influential to these ancient cultures. And I mean, it even reflects back in ancient North American cultures and South American, the way that they would revere the jaguar or the cougar, the way that Africans revere the lion, or you go into India, all throughout Asia, it's the tiger. Because those big cats are like our primeval equal. And especially the lion. The lion, they have their own civilization, they have their own wars, they have, they have families that rule over territories, they have political assassinations, and-

• 6:08Danny Jones?

  What?

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And they hunt the same prey that you and I would be hunting if we're bushmen.

• 6:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  So in every conceivable sense, in the primal world, they're like people. They have their own civilizations. And everything in the bush reacts to the lion and knows, just instinctually, it's almost like telepathically, they know what's going on in the lion's domain. And so when the pride, when the prides are at war with each other, the whole bush will go quiet. Like, you won't see all of the herd animals, the prey animals, they'll be laying down in the grasslands, they don't want to be seen at night because the lions are out moving and they're at war. I mean, dude, even the bugs will go silent. It is spooky.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  And this is a guy who has been living, following this pride of lions northwest of the Masai Mara since the 90s. And he's watched this happen. He's watched the males, like, move in and out of this pride. He's known one of the females for like 15 years, and they have this close bond and relationship. I mean, it's really crazy stuff, man. I mean, really opened my eyes to the primal nature of the ancient world and what, like, prehistoric people experienced, you know? And then I found that really, really fascinating.

• 7:33Danny Jones?

  Does he actually live with them, or does he just go out there and, like, spend time with them? Does he have a normal life?

• 7:40Speaker 03

  You know what? I think we should look him up. Let's do it. Jorge Alissonco. I think I'm pronouncing his last name right. He's a Spaniard.

• 7:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, he's a Spaniard.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, and dude, he is, he's like a, he's almost like a conquistador, the way he, it's such a nice guy, beautiful, really kind-

• 7:57Danny Jones?

  Is he filming and documenting a lot of it?

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's got, he's got a documentary out.

• 8:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  I think it's like a four-part documentary. So that photo that you're seeing, I saw that on a regular basis while we were out there.

• 8:11Danny Jones?

  How far away were you from the lions?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  As far as this photo's being taken. Yeah. Yeah, I mean-

• 8:18Danny Jones?

  In like a-

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, in a Land Rover.

• 8:21Danny Jones?

  In a Land Rover.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So you don't, you don't get out. I mean, I would be seen like an antelope, you know, if I got out. I would probably instantly be killed. Just, probably just out of pure curiosity. But man, when he walks up to them, he talks to them in like that, you know, that classic Castilian, or Castilian conquistador, Spanish. And he basically, you know, he, he basically says that he builds them up, he encourages them, like, he speaks to them in Spanish, he tells them that he cares about them, and, you know, he just says whatever to them that he feels like they need to hear. And he's been around these lions for, since the 90s, and studying their way of life. And he's totally unique in that he is the only person in known history that has ever

• 9:07Speaker 03

  had a relationship with a truly wild. Not like, like in South Africa, you can go on a safari, but it's all fenced off. So the animals are not, they're wild animals, but they're in an enclosed space. And they're used to little tracks and roads going through their, you know, world. They've seen Land Rovers, you know? The lions in the Masai Mara-

• 9:27Danny Jones?

  They're used to people going up, taking photos.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. These lions literally live in the hills above the native Maasai villages. That's where, I mean, they're living in the wild. They're not confined. These are, this is as wild as an African lion can possibly be in the modern day. And, man, it really, really blew my mind. I mean, it just-

• 9:50Danny Jones?

  And he's been going out with the, he's been hanging out with these lions since the 90s?

• 9:54Speaker 03

  I think so. We should look that up. Maybe the 90s or the mid 2000s.

• 9:59Danny Jones?

  Has he ever had any close calls?

• 10:01Speaker 03

  No. No, he said, he said, he said he's never had a close call.

• 10:05Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 10:06Speaker 03

  No. And he said, he said, you know, once, once you're accepted into the pride of lions, provided that another male doesn't view you as competition, you know, you are accepted into the pride.

• 10:19Danny Jones?

  Steve, why don't you try your new AI? Your robo Steve. Have you been using that still?

• 10:24Speaker 03

  Well, I don't-

• 10:25Danny Jones?

  We got Steve a new robot, we got Steve a new toy, we got him an AI to search stuff, so it makes it quicker.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Spanish naturalist and ethnologist Jorge Alissonco has lived and worked among wild lions in the Masai Mara-

• 10:37Danny Jones?

  15 years.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  For more than 15 years and spent over 3,000 nights with them.

• 10:40Danny Jones?

  Jeez, bro.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:43Danny Jones?

  He started in December 2008.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so the mid 2000s, then. Yeah.

• 10:48Danny Jones?

  That's bonkers.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was mind blowing, man. I learned so much from that guy. Um, really expanded my, my way of thinking about the wild world, you know? I've spent years studying ancient cultures and only within the last year and a half, did that really expand into studying ancient cultures and their interactions with the wild world around them. And, and then gain an appreciation for just how much the wilds of the Americas or Africa or Asia impacted those cultures that were there. And like, the whole culture is shaped by their natural environment, right? I mean, it's like, it's, it's amazing. And for years, I just sort of overlooked

• 11:34Speaker 03

  nature, overlooked wildlife, you know, really just sunk into the ancient world. And, and now I'm at this point where I'm realizing, I'm realizing that those two things are inseparable. I mean, those ancient people all around the world were utterly and completely influenced by the wild world around them. And it basically shaped their culture, whether it's the Maya in, in Mexico and Central America. I mean, their principal figure is the jaguar at the center. Um, all throughout South America, it's the jaguar, you know?

• 12:08Danny Jones?

  It's always the most dangerous animal.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:10Danny Jones?

  Always the most deadly animal.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Well, and typically that ends up being a cat. And I think that it's because it's, I think that's because it's, it's like our equal in some way. We, we see ourselves in them. They are.

• 12:23Danny Jones?

  It's never a shark.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  It's never a shark, right? Yeah, yeah. Because golly, sharks terrify me, man. But yeah, it is like an alien. You know, sharks are crazy. I think about, um, so I was in Peru over the summer and I was looking at these, uh, ancient pots and they have all these wild depictions of, of, um, sea life on them from, uh, we talked about the Nazca once before, like the Nazca lines in Peru, the giant geometrical shapes in the, in the desert out there.

• 12:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  So those guys were doing much more than just making giant lines and stuff. And so they were also sailors and fishermen and they'd have these giant ships that they'd take out and into the, into the ocean. Of course, we don't know what they were doing out there. Probably at some point that led to contact between coastal Peru and Easter Island. You know what I mean? Like they're, they got, they clearly had massive boats in ancient times.

• 13:14Danny Jones?

  Isn't there evidence to show that Easter Island might've been like a chain all the way to Peru?

• 13:21Speaker 03

  It's a theory, but I, I don't know that there's evidence, but it looks like it.

• 13:24Danny Jones?

  Like you could island hop the whole way because of the way that the, the, the seafloor looks.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  It, it looks like it. If, if sea level, if, I don't know how much lower they'd have to be, but it looks like you could island hop, basically from. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it looks like you could have hot, uh, island hopped from like Taiwan, where they think the Polynesians came from, um, you know, all the way to South America. You could have hopped, skipped across the Pacific. I mean, you're going really long distances, but.

• 13:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  So the Nazca sailors are out there. I mean, they're, they're probably going on massive fishing expeditions. I mean, ancient people are so much more capable than we give them credit for. Um, but on all these pots, they have all these wild and kind of wacky depictions of, uh, sea life. And it's really interesting to look at it from that point of view because even till today, archaeologists and, and like archaeobiologists, um, they look at it and they're still trying to figure out what sea life they, uh, the Nazca were depicting because, you know, they only catch a glimpse of it, you know? If you see a whale, you see it for just a couple of seconds. If you see a shark, like I'm sure people got ate, eaten by sharks and, you know, back then.

• 14:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  But you only catch it for a second, right? So it's kind of, um, I've really been getting into this headspace lately of trying to understand ancient people and their interactions with the natural world around them. And in a lot of cases, that natural world just doesn't exist anymore. It's not like, I mean, the, the big thing that I, that I've been, um, into lately, now that I've moved to, uh, North Carolina, um, is, uh, I've been really interested in the, you know, the lost wilds of the American East. I mean, we think about the wildlife of North America. You're, you're out in the Rockies or even up in Alaska and there's elk and there's moose and there's cats and, and, you know,

• 15:15Speaker 03

  there's some wild bison, there's some wild horses, grizzly bears, you know, there's so much out there. But there was, it was probably more dense between Maine and Florida, just 300 years ago. You know, you had so many animals that don't exist. I mean, there's no wild elk in the east anymore. There's no wild cougars other than in Florida.

• 15:35Danny Jones?

  North Carolina, right?

• 15:36Speaker 03

  But they, they were, uh, yeah, just a couple of hours from where, from where I'm at, there's like one specific valley that you can go near, uh, it's in Cherokee, North Carolina, but they are western elk that were brought to North Carolina. I'm pretty, I'm pretty certain. Yeah. The last one.

• 15:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you can like walk right up to them.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  You can. Yeah, yeah. They're amazing, man. Hearing their like bugle, that call that they make is fascinating and, and kind of, you know, you just put yourself in, in, in the shoes of say an ancient Cherokee or, or, or an eastern Indian 300 to 11,000 years ago. And, and imagine what they would have seen right where we live, you know? Even here in Florida, dude, 300 years ago, Florida might be one of the single most like biodiverse places on the entire planet, probably there with the Amazon. You know, you know, Alabama has like a little delta that's like an Amazonian style, uh, like I think they call it the Amazon of North America.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, there's a stretch right there, um, that goes, I forget what, what river it is in Alabama. Um, but they, it's basically as biodiverse as the Amazon is. It's, it's very similar. It's the most biodiverse place in North America and that would have stretched all the way to Florida. I mean, if, if you and I were in Florida, let's say, you know, you and I've talked before about the Spaniards that were coming through Florida and exploring, exploring like Ponce de Le, Ponce de Leon, Ponfilo de Navarrez and Hernando just, uh, yeah, Hernando de Soto, he comes through. I mean, there's quite a few of these guys.

• 17:03Danny Jones?

  Like Ponce de Leon, um, there was another guy and then it was, then it was Hernando de Soto. And I think they all got their asses kicked.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:13Danny Jones?

  By the local Indians.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  And, um, you know, I think.

• 17:17Danny Jones?

  Especially Ponce, I mean, Ponce de Leon got shot with a poison arrow and died, like literally a couple of days after.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Hernando de Soto doesn't make it out of North America. Um, Ponfilo de, or Navarrez, he doesn't make it off the coast of Texas, you know? So North America would like swallow people up and spin them back out. Very dangerous place. You know, you definitely had jaguars out here, just.

• 17:40Danny Jones?

  The Kalisas, there was the Kalisas, then there was the Apaches, right? And they all came from like the Mississippi.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that during the contact period, it all gets, it all gets crazy because people, you know, tribes that are, that are typically like the Cherokee, you know, they're, they're living all the way up in North Carolina and Tennessee to north of that. And the Cherokee ultimately come from, you know, the Iroquois in area from New York. Then they moved to Appalachia and then they moved to like Texas and then they end up in Oklahoma. So they have to move around. So contact period gets really, really complicated, but.

• 18:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Man, yeah, it's just a, it's amazing.

• 18:17Danny Jones?

  We make predictions every single day about politics, pop culture, the biggest news headlines and even sports. Kalshi, America's number one predictions market platform, lets you trade on all these predictions on a live market. Here's one for the show. Who will be named in the next batch of Epstein files if they ever get released? Right now, Alec Baldwin is trading at 23% probability, meaning a $100 trade would pay out over 350 if they win. Or will Jensen Wong leave Nvidia as the CEO? If yes, before July next year, the current 30% probability means a $100 trade would pay out over $300. On Kalshi, you're trading against peers in a live market, meaning there's no house. And as the probability changes, you can buy in and out of your position.

• 19:00Danny Jones?

  Download the Kalshi app and use the code Danny Jones to get $25 when you trade $25. That's K A L S H I. Kalshi, trade on anything. 18 plus only. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Kalshi products are not available in all jurisdictions. Prices, values and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see kalshi.com/ regulatory. It's so weird that like they named La Florida, La Florida is off of a, based off flowers. They called it the land, Ponce de Leon said they, when they, or when, um, when I guess he first landed in Melbourne on the east coast, they saw a bunch of flowers.

• 19:43Danny Jones?

  They're gonna call this the land of flowers. And then they went all the way around. They came up into like southern Sarasota area and then got fucked up bad by the Calusa.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:55Danny Jones?

  And then, um, then they went back to Cuba, came back. That's when he got shot with a poison arrow and died. And then, um, yeah, like, you know, hearing all those stories about Hernando de Soto coming and then, you know, it came with like 600 people and a bunch of ships.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  You know what's crazy is, is he had been down in Peru. He'd seen the Inca realm and he brought like Inca textiles and artifacts with him and, and, uh, and, and like gold artifacts. And he brought those with him to Florida to show the natives, like what, what he was looking for, right? And so much of that stuff disintegrated or disappeared, um, when they would get attacked by natives. So like somewhere in the swamps of Florida, there are probably like small remains of, of Inca artifacts from Peru, just like buried out there from, from that expedition. And there's been, um, there's been golden artifacts that have been found, um, throughout Florida that look awfully similar to things that you would see in South America.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  There's one that's like a anthropo, anthropomorphic, uh, crocodile figure where it's like, you know, they melted down the gold and then they bend it. It's almost like they make it out of strings and like wire it all together, if that makes sense. And, you know, it doesn't look like anything. That you would commonly see among natives in Florida. So one way or another, there are things from South America, northernmost, at least in Colombia, that are making their way to Florida in ancient times.

• 21:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:24Danny Jones?

  Including lots of drugs now.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  For sure. Yeah, it's crazy.

• 21:27Danny Jones?

  This place is crazy. There's everything here. You have the, you have the swamps, the Everglades, you have, you know, both coasts, which have a very wide ranging diverse, diverse diversification of species and animals. And, you know, also the jaguar, we have the Florida, the Florida panther, rather, that's here. There's only a few of them left, but they're coming back. And, you know, there, there's been lots of people who've been trying to like, fight to keep them alive, because like, one of the main things in Florida, that's hindering the jaguar, or the jaguar, the Florida panther population, has been all the highways, intercoastal highways that go from, from, from here to the east coast. And like, literally, because we're such a narrow peninsula, those highways, those toll roads specifically, they

• 22:10Danny Jones?

  cut off the like migratory path for the Panthers, because they, they're the, I keep saying Panthers.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Well, they are.

• 22:17Danny Jones?

  They're Florida, they're kind of like, it's a Florida panther, but they, they are used to migrating from like, the southern tip of Florida, up into like, the northern area, for like mating and all that kind of stuff. And those toll roads have been cutting them off. So they like, Carlton Ward was showing us a bunch of these photos, how they're building, they're having, they're having to specifically build like, these giant bridges, so that these Panthers have their natural corridor, so they can get from north to south. And it's crazy. The photos that he takes are absolutely stunning.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. Panther is the right, is the right term. When the, when the first English explorers are coming through, they make a distinction. Like, there's a guy, there's a guy named John Lawson, who's, who explores South and then North Carolina, or what would become South and North Carolina. And at that time, it was called the Province of Carolina, and it was owned by England. And in the year 1701, he goes on an expedition from Charleston, and he follows these Indian guides all the way up to about where I live right now, the triad, like Winston-Salem area. It's called the, like, the Greater Piedmont. And he, he goes all the way up till there, and he documents all the wildlife that he sees. I mean, he's

• 23:34Speaker 03

  basically making a report for the King of England of what's in the land, like, what's in those wild, faraway places. And, and so, he makes a very clear distinction between a panther and a tiger. And what's really interesting is, when he talks about the tigers, man, I, I don't even know why this is disputed among wildlife biologists. Like, it should be basically printed in a textbook, that this is a fact. I mean, you read this guy's account, there's no other way around it. And he basically says that, he, he talks about, he talks about tigers at least three times, but he says something along the lines of like, when they were going along a path with their Indian guides, one day, at the end

• 24:16Speaker 03

  of the path, there was a tiger, which was a large, bold cat, that was more bold than a panther. And, and the dog, like, one of their dogs, like, ran up to it, and then the dog eventually gets scared, and like, tucks his tail between his legs, and then it comes back, and they shoot at the tiger, and it doesn't move. It just stays about right there. And then he says, he says that it's, he says it's a large, bold cat, that's, that's much larger, more bold than a panther, that differs from the tigers of Asia and Africa. And what he means is, the term tiger, is a hand down from the Spaniards, they would call it tigre. And all that meant, all it was, is just a slang term for a large spotted

• 25:00Speaker 03

  or striped cat, which meant leopard, or the Asian tiger, right? And so, they see a jaguar, and they're like, oh, well, that's a tiger. They've always known, that it just looks just like a, looks just like a leopard, and they call the-

• 25:13Danny Jones?

  Just with no stripes.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and they, they would call the African and Asian leopard a tiger as well. It was just a slang term for like, that kind of cat, right? And, because the lion is your iconic, plain, you know, tan, or orange cat, but then you've got these lesser spotted and striped cats over here, those are just tigers. So when they see a jaguar, they, it's just a tiger to them.

• 25:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Even though it's a little bit different, and it's bigger than the ones in Asia and Africa. And so, and then when he, he has this list, where he writes down the beasts of Carolina, and it goes down through him, and he's like, the wildcat, the bobcat, the catamount, which he's talking about like, a lynx and wild cats, and then he says panther, and it says tiger. And so, without a doubt, dude, jaguars were all the way up in North Carolina, all the way down in Florida, all the way over to probably where the Chihuahua Desert like, extends up into the American Southwest, and then down into Mexico and South America. And what's crazy is, I found that, I found that account, and then popularized

• 26:19Speaker 03

  it. I just put it in a video called, The Extinct Jaguars of Appalachia, and dude, exploded. Like, on YouTube-

• 26:26Danny Jones?

  How many, how many layers of separation are there between like, a traditional jaguar you think of in the Amazon, and a, and a Florida panther, I wonder?

• 26:34Speaker 03

  How many layers, what do you mean?

• 26:36Danny Jones?

  Like, how, how far-

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Evolutionary?

• 26:37Danny Jones?

  How evolutionary disconnected are they?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Not even related. Yeah, yeah. So, so-

• 26:42Danny Jones?

  Can you find the lineage of the Florida panther, Steve?

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, a, a cougar is more along the, the body type of a, of an African cheetah. They would, they come from like, the same ancestral cat, you know, millions of years ago. If you look at their bodies, and the way that a panther doesn't roar, it's got that, it's got that meow, you know, it's like-

• 27:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  You know? A cheetah does exactly the same thing. If you look at their bodies, my buddy Manu at, at Cool, he, he always says, like, if you were to dunk it in, in water, and look, you know, and you could see its actual form, it's the same as a cheetah. But a jaguar would be more closely related to like, a leopard. They both descend from the same ancestral, you know, ancient, super prehistoric cat. So they're, they're not even related, the jaguar and the, and the cougar. And what's, what's really crazy is that jaguars and cougars-

• 27:40Danny Jones?

  Jaguar and the Florida panther belong to two completely different taxonomic genera and evolutionary lineages within the cat family. Jaguars are felidae.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  And both felidae.

• 27:56Danny Jones?

  Panthera is the-

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. So felidae would be like a cat, but then, if you're, if you're a panthera, you're like a big cat, right? You have the ability, you have the ability to roar. There's several different-

• 28:09Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  You know, anatomical differences.

• 28:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, so the Florida panther comes from a puma? And a, or a mountain lion?

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 28:19Danny Jones?

  Okay. Pumas and mountain lions are related to the Florida panther. Got it.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so puma, mountain lion, panther-

• 28:27Danny Jones?

  Panthers are adapted, the Florida Panthers are different, because they're specifically adapted to the Everglades, and the sort of like, swamp lands.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they, they just have, they just have little, I don't even know if you would call them subspecies, they just have environmental differences. Like, okay, so, so your Florida panther, or a panther you might see in California, and a panther you would see in southern Chile, all the way to the bottom of South America. All exactly the same cat, just diff, just evolved slightly different for their environment, right? It's kind of like, well, it's like Native Americans, actually. I mean, if you, if you look at Inuit people, and you look at people from Peru, you can tell that they're all from the Americas, but they look a little different, right? But they're not different species, or different subspecies, right?

• 29:15Danny Jones?

  Look at an uncontacted tribe in Peru, and look at some people in like, Denmark.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, if, if you were to, you know, sometimes if you were to see a Florida panther, sometimes they have, they're kind of reddish, right? I've never seen one in person, but they kind of have this-

• 29:32Danny Jones?

  Pull up some of Carlton Ward's photographs of the Florida, the, the trail cam photos that he's got.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  I think that their coats are thinner, they're skinnier, they're more, they're more lanky. But if you were to look at a cat from Chile, they're big and bushy, and even their faces are a little bit different. I think that the Florida panther has a, they have like, a very, this very intense sort of stare. They're, they're really intense animals. But a, like a Peruvian or Chilean cougar, almost has a bit more of a cute face to it. It's weird how they, how the dip, the, you know, the environments of these animals change their characteristics a little bit.

• 30:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Click on his-

• 30:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've seen that photo. That's an amazing photo.

• 30:15Danny Jones?

  Path of the Panther.

• 30:17Danny Jones?

  So he sets up these camera traps, he calls them camera traps. He puts a camera in a housing, and there's like, a laser beam, or whatever, if the animal crosses the laser beam, it takes a photo. And look at this, like, this is just like, animals in the wild, no people around.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Man.

• 30:31Danny Jones?

  Like, that's, for me, like, that's really cool, because you're seeing what this animal's doing, what it's, what it looks like, when there's absolutely nothing around it.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  That, that is one of the most like, stunning cats in the whole world, man.

• 30:43Danny Jones?

  The coolest one is the photo of the one that's leaping, when Hurricane Irma came through, it's leaping over a log, in the pouring rain. It's the most incredible photograph I've ever seen of a panther.

• 30:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you're gonna have to search for it, Steve. You have to Google it. Just Google images.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  This is probably it.

• 31:02Danny Jones?

  There it is, right there. Dude, that photo is just unfucking believable. Leaping over that log in the pouring rain. This is what, this is, mind you, this is in the middle of a fucking hurricane smashing into Florida. This panther, this photo was taken.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 31:18Danny Jones?

  He had like two dozen camera traps that were out in the middle of the frickin' uh, swamp lands and, and um, the Everglades. And uh, I think only three or four of them survived the hurricane.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  But he got that.

• 31:31Danny Jones?

  And the one that survived had that fucking photo on there.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  Wow. Have you ever seen one?

• 31:36Danny Jones?

  Never in person. I've seen a dead one on the highway before.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Oh, really? There's only what, a hundred and fifty in Florida?

• 31:43Danny Jones?

  How many, how many, um,

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Wow, look at that guy.

• 31:46Danny Jones?

  How many Florida Panthers are estimated remaining?

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Thought there were two hundred.

• 31:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's definitely in the low hundreds.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  And you know, I'm, I may be wrong about this, but I, I'm pretty sure that there's a,

• 31:57Danny Jones?

  One twenty to two thirty.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Wow, isn't that wild how they don't exactly know?

• 32:01Danny Jones?

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• 32:44Danny Jones?

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• 33:20Speaker 03

  So, I'm, I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure there's a very dramatic story about uh, conservationists in Texas who captured

• 33:31Speaker 03

  the ancestors of these wild cougars, maybe like fifty or sixty years ago, and they brought them from Texas and planted them in Florida. So these are all western cougars. I'm, I'm almost certain of that.

• 33:41Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a very dramatic, dramatic story there, but you know, that's kind of the story of, of,

• 33:47Danny Jones?

  How did Florida Panthers arrive in Florida originally?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Oh, they migrated here. I mean, they're natural to,

• 33:52Danny Jones?

  Natural?

• 33:53Speaker 03

  All of the Americas. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that, that really is like the predominant species of all of the Americas. They're native everywhere. Um, I mean, they can go far, far north in Canada, very, very south in South America.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  I was listening to Meat Eater the other day, and I think he, I think he said that there was some spotting in Alaska, apparently.

• 34:14Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Uh, that might be BS, but yeah, apparently there's a spotting in, in Alaska. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's a,

• 34:21Danny Jones?

  Alaska's a, I don't, fuck dude.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Ever been?

• 34:23Danny Jones?

  Just the, no, I've never been, bro.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Would you go?

• 34:25Danny Jones?

  I'm so terrified of, of just big wildlife, like I'm so afraid of bears and wolves and fucking lions and shit, man.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  You know what's crazy is, is going to Africa cured my fear of grizzly bears.

• 34:38Danny Jones?

  Uh, really?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I was talking to Joe once. I was telling him, um, I was telling him I don't have any desire to go to Northwest, because grizzly bears just scare the shit out of me. Um, I, I went to Alaska, um, in two thousand and seven, and my dad like sadistically had us watch the movie The Edge with Alec Baldwin and,

• 35:01Danny Jones?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Was it Anthony Hopkins? And you know, it's basically, I think it's a helicopter tour that crashes and, and um, these men have to survive through the Alaskan wilderness with a grizzly bear chasing them down as winter is setting in. And that just like permanently scarred me for years, man. I, I would have dreams for, I mean legitimately, like a couple decades of, of uh, of grizzly bears chasing me through the forest, trying to kill me. I mean, just, it terrified me, man. And you, and you can't do anything to them, you know, you can't, um, I, I did, I did this uh, study on, on Lewis and Clark and, and their journey, solely from the point of view of focusing on the grizzly bear. You know what's crazy is when the settlers were in

• 35:47Speaker 03

  the eastern, um, when they're in the eastern part of, of North America, um, you know, they're coming into black bears, but black bears are very timid, they're small, you know, they're, they're basically just giant raccoons, and they'll run away from you. I mean, I, I have found myself, um, deep in the Nana Halo Rainforest in, in uh, in North Carolina, and found myself between a mother bear and her cub, and like directly between them. It could have a hundred percent been mauled to death. Had it been a grizzly, I would, I would have died six years ago. And um, man, that little cub just runs right around me, and the mother never even makes herself known. I just, I just eventually hear her like tumbling through the forest when the cub comes around.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  And um, and I just thought like, I mean, I had a, I had a, I think I had a nine millimeter, and I drew it, and I, I, I'm looking off to the left, and I, I hear like crashing through the leaves, and I look, and I'm like, I'm like, oh, it's a hog. Is that a monkey? Oh, it's a bear. And, and so immediately I saw this little bear, and I, I drew, I, I drew, and I turn around, I'm standing just like this, facing towards the woods, and I'm just looking, looking, looking, waiting for a mother to pop out. Nothing happens. Little bear comes, I'm not even looking at the cub anymore, but it goes by me, drops off into the woods, and then I hear like crashing through the woods to go be with the cub, and she was just right there in the bush next to me, but she was too timid to make herself known.

• 37:12Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  And I just thought, man, had that been a grizzly, I, I would have certainly be dead.

• 37:18Danny Jones?

  My buddy just got back from an elk hunting trip in Alaska, and uh, they get, basically they got dropped off for like for ten days in the middle of Alaska, in the middle of some, you know, remote area. And um, they got a couple elk, I think they got three elk. And you know, the way they do it is they like have to kill it, they have to like quarter it up, and they'll like slug it, slug it all the way back to where the plane lands to pick them up, and like tie it up into the top of a tree so bears don't get it, or whatever. And he was saying the last day, um, they were waiting for the plane to pick them up, and they saw three giant grizzly bears, like maybe two hundred yards away. And they saw one like stand up,

• 38:01Danny Jones?

  and it started like, they started, all three of them started making their way to them, like directly in their direction.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:07Danny Jones?

  And they were like freaking out because they only had two bullets left. Like they had, they had one rifle with two bullets, so they were like trying to figure out what they were gonna do, like, all right, one of us is gonna have to knife fight one of these bears. Like, we have two bullets and a big knife, someone's gonna have to knife fight one of these.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  Is it because they have to pack so light?

• 38:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know. Maybe, maybe. I'm not sure exactly the reason. They only had two bullets left. But um, luckily, there was like a carcass or something like a dead animal, like that was in between them and the bears, and they got distracted by that, and they started eating that, and they fucking didn't have to knife fight a bear. But like, those stories are what, I don't know if I'm like, I can handle being in the ocean with sharks all day long, but when it comes to being out in the middle of the woods with fucking grizzly bears,

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Florida, man.

• 38:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I, I, so uh, early this year, we did um, a little expedition to the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, if you've ever heard of that. And basically, it was, you know, it was almost like a practice, a trial run for, you know, what would an unsupported on foot expedition look like if I was somewhere else in the world? Um, or if I was in the Yukon or Alaska or something like that. And so the Gila Wilderness is um, you know, decent elevation, you're going from maybe four thousand to eight thousand and back down. Um, it's not too, too bad. And um, basically what we were doing was, there's, there's Gila Cliff dwellings. And you know, there's probably a thirty-five mile um, river that goes upstream.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  And so Gila Cliff dwellings is like the, the, you ever seen any cliff dwellings in, in the southwest? Have you ever visited them, like Mesa Verde?

• 39:47Danny Jones?

  Find some images.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Chaco Canyon. Yeah, you could look up uh, just Gila Wilderness um, uh, Cliff Dwelling Monument or something. It, it'll come up. Um, or, or any cliff dwellings in the southwest will be fun.

• 40:00Danny Jones?

  Those things, yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:03Danny Jones?

  Okay. That's a cliff dwelling?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  That is, yes. That is, yeah. There's that photo right there. Um, yeah, that's, that's Gila. Oh yeah, the one with the ladder is great. So that's, yeah, so that's a cliff dwelling. And so basically, they would modify these natural caverns in

• 40:20Danny Jones?

  And live in them.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then live in them. And, and man, they're, they're basically air conditioned and vented and everything. I mean, it's amazing. Like, the wind, the wind just sweeps through there. And, and basically, it's off the, it's in a, it's in a canyon slot on the side of the main Gila River. And so whenever the river would flood, it would never actually come all the way up to the cliff dwellings. Like, they're, they're far enough removed from the main water source. Yeah. And so, you know, this is the main cultural monument or, or cultural center of the area of Gila. And it was built by the people called the Mogollon people. And so they are contemporaneous with

• 41:02Speaker 03

  what's really interesting is, these guys may actually be the northern edge of Mesoamerica. So like, we talked about the Aztecs before.

• 41:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  There's evidence, how is it? I think evidence is the right word. It's not proof, but there's evidence that these guys knew the Aztecs. They have, they have cultural, there's like cultural iconography that's, that's, you can tell it's pretty inspired by Aztec iconography and the way that they, you know, would like ritually sacrifice and kill people and things like that. So anyways, the Gila Wilderness is actually the United States' very first designated wilderness area. And it's the place that my grandfather actually made his bones as an explorer. And on the, on the southernmost edge of the Gila Wilderness. And so there was a lot of things pulling me there. And

• 41:52Speaker 03

  so ultimately, I devised this, you know, little expedition to go up to, close to the headwaters of this river, which is about, maybe it's thirty or, about thirty miles upriver of this monument. And

• 42:08Danny Jones?

  Steve, can you find like a map of the area?

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of the things about, yes, this is pretty interesting. So, oh, man. All right. So you see Lake, you see Lake Roberts there?

• 42:18Danny Jones?

  So we're in New Mexico right now?

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Yes, sir. Yeah, yeah. All right. So just, just in the middle of that wilderness area, just, yeah, in the middle of that, just zoom in. Okay. Take your cursor and go a little bit to the left. Right there. So I explored that entire river bottom, the entire thing that you see.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  Me and my little team did. And man, I mean, you're talking about some

• 42:44Danny Jones?

  How long did that take?

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Um, so

• 42:47Danny Jones?

  You're out there for days?

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was eight, it was eight days, moving about

• 42:53Speaker 03

  eight to ten miles a day, on, on about a thousand calories a day. And

• 42:59Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  So, and so we, we had to enter this by coming up over the mountain that you see north of it, and also traversing the, the canyon that you see on the north side of that. Yeah, so that area there. We had to, we had to pass through there and then come over the top of the mountain and come back down. And so the elements, the elements of the expedition,

• 43:23Speaker 03

  you know, I did my best to predict them. And I did my best to predict how long it would take. And vastly overestimated how quickly we could move through the wilderness. We moved

• 43:33Danny Jones?

  That place is called Diablo Range. That's not comforting.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, that's, that's way, that's quite a bit farther south than where we went.

• 43:41Danny Jones?

  Why is it called Diablo Range?

• 43:44Speaker 03

  I don't know. There, there's all kinds of names for stuff out there. Yeah, Devil Range? That's interesting. HP. Huh. I don't know, no photos of it. But, you know, some of the, so we moved at about thirty percent the pace that I thought that we could move at. It was much, much slower than, than I thought. And the wildlife that we had to look out for, really, I, I was not afraid of us seeing a cat. Didn't even think we would see a cat. I was curious about, when you get in those close canyon slots and those valleys, coyotes, you know, wildlife only has really one way to move, and, and so do you, right?

• 44:27Speaker 03

  So when you're in these confined spaces, you like cross paths, like there's, there's traffic in that area. I was curious about, would coyotes be curious enough to come around us at night?

• 44:39Speaker 03

  And then, you know, the biggest thing was, was going up into a canyon slot. And so what I'm looking for is, so you see along that main river, there are these canyon slots that would come off to the north and south side. And so you're looking for a canyon slot that has southeast orientation. And so, you know, the, the natives are, they're all astronomers. They know how the sky works. They, they know how to calculate the sky. So they're looking for southeast facing orientation, so that in the winter, in the morning, they can catch the sunrise to heat up their homes. But in the summer, in the afternoon, the sun is, is on their backside. The sun's on the other side of the mountain. So that they're able to stay warm in the winter as much as possible, and they're able to stay cool in the summer as much as possible.

• 45:21Danny Jones?

  That makes sense.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  So you have context clues as to how to look for archaeological sites.

• 45:24Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  But, you know, landslides and floods and things like that, you know, can bury things permanently. And so we're going up and down this

• 45:33Danny Jones?

  So roughly, how wide is that little ravine that we're looking at?

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Uh, sometimes it would be as narrow as ten feet.

• 45:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, shit.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, as narrow as ten feet with, with like canyon walls that are thirty feet tall.

• 45:46Danny Jones?

  Look, you can see all like the switchbacks going around. If you really punch in, yeah, look at that.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was, it was unreal, man. It was, it was actually unreal.

• 45:56Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  You know what's crazy? I, I can show you a place where, where we actually explored. Could we go upriver a little bit?

• 46:04Danny Jones?

  People disappear there all the time.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  We've heard about stuff. Yeah, keep going upriver, the West Fork. It's gonna be here.

• 46:13Danny Jones?

  Hell's Hole.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Hell's Hole, yeah, that's one of them.

• 46:15Danny Jones?

  We got Hell's Hole and Diablo Canyon.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, Lily Canyon. Okay, okay. So, so you see where, so right where your cursor is, go a little bit to the left. And can you see where there was a ravine that kind of ran down the mountain on the north side? You can zoom out a little bit. You see the vegetation that's going up to the left at Lily Canyon? It's going up, it's going up northwest.

• 46:35Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Right. So we came down that into the West Fork Gila. We hadn't seen anybody in three days, and we're right there where your cursor is at. And, and all of a sudden, we, you know, there had been wildfires out here, because it's really dry.

• 46:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden, we start smelling smoke. And we're three days away from, from the vehicle. And we start smelling smoke, and there's smoke coming through the canyon, like, oh, my God. I, we're gonna, we're gonna have to drop everything and run three days worth of, of range to find a vehicle to get out of here, because it's a forest fire. So, so, yeah, it was, it was insane.

• 47:11Danny Jones?

  Did you have any connection, like via sat phones or anything?

• 47:13Speaker 03

  We did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, that's not gonna help us.

• 47:17Danny Jones?

  Was there, did your cell phone have signal?

• 47:19Speaker 03

  My phone did not. I turned off my phone for eight days.

• 47:21Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  But we had, we had a sat phone, and we had one guy with Starlink.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  And so, but you know, we checked the Starlink once a day or something. And so, and so I'm standing right there, and I tell the guy, like, I take off my bag and everything. And I tell the guys, like, all right, wait here, I'm gonna go up. So I walk up a little bit. Dude, there's an old man and his wife and like ten donkeys out there, and they're, they're having a fire and like cooking bacon. And, and so we walk up and we're like, hey, hey. They see us, and we're both surprised to see each other, basically in the middle of nowhere. Well, they, it took them twenty days to get out there where they were at. And they had the donkeys like carrying all the packs. So they're just walking totally free weight. And each of us have fifty or sixty pounds on our backs, you know?

• 48:09Danny Jones?

  You guys should have brought donkeys, man. Lesson learned.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Lesson learned, although, although, although at the time, it was an expense that I couldn't spare.

• 48:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? Are donkeys expensive?

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. I mean, unless you want to literally raise your own donkeys and bring them in.

• 48:26Danny Jones?

  Can you rent them?

• 48:27Speaker 03

  You can, but you have to bring the owner with you. You have to rent the owner, which is very expensive.

• 48:33Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  In the future, I would like to go on horseback. And I've had, since I put out the video from the expedition, I had some people reach out to me offering to, to lend me a horse and go with me, you know? So, gosh, that changes everything.

• 48:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, or, or you could ride on a mule, you know?

• 48:55Danny Jones?

  So what were those people doing out there? They were just

• 48:57Speaker 03

  They were just retired. They were just retired and, and had the time. They drove down from maybe Utah or Idaho or something, and those were their donkeys. And they had been packing it out there for almost a month.

• 49:08Danny Jones?

  How many donkeys would you say?

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Probably ten.

• 49:11Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe so, maybe. And, and, and all the donkeys are, are like he-hawing at us, you know? They, they're very protective, right? They're like dogs. They're looking out for stuff. They keep all the wildlife away. And so we sat and talked with them for a little bit, and then we went further down the river.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  And so, okay, so Steve, if you keep going east to the right, I'll show you. We can zoom in on a little canyon that, that we went in one of these days. So it's beyond Hell's Hole. If we just keep going.

• 49:40Danny Jones?

  What was at Hell's Hole?

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Okay, zoom in on Hell's Hole. I think Hell's Hole was like an interesting geological formation on the northern side of it. And so, so my worry here going through all of this is you have these very narrow slot canyons and you're at the only source of water in the entire area, right? So you're literally in town square in the wild world.

• 50:06Danny Jones?

  Drink that water?

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Oh, we, that's all we had to drink. That was it. So zoom way out really, really quick where you can see the top of the mountain to the north. So we had to cross that entire mountain like above this to get down in this valley and that was 10 miles of walking straight, straight over the mountain all the way down in a single day. So when, you know, we would fill up our water bottles and then I'd, I'd be like, all right, guys, are y'all ready? It's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be 10 miles before we have, before we have more water or we have access to more water. And so, you know, everybody did it. Actually.

• 50:41Danny Jones?

  I'm sure you had to time like when the sun would set, like make sure you're in a good spot before the sun goes down.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Because, because it would drop like 20 degrees in as soon as that sun wasn't on you anymore, it dropped 20 degrees like half of, you know, as the sun is going down. And think about it. So your, your days are much shorter when you're in these canyon slots because you're not walking around when there's not sun on you. It's freezing. We did this in February. There was only time that was balanced enough where it was cool enough during the day that you could cover a lot of ground, but it wasn't so hot during the day that it was destroying you, right? But at night it was freezing. It was so cold that if you got your socks wet by falling in the river or stepping too deep into the river.

• 51:23Danny Jones?

  You're fucked.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  You would never dry your socks out. And so all of our socks ended up being wet for the, for the whole week. And if you, if you started a fire, it was too cold outside to dry out your socks. There's just no way.

• 51:36Danny Jones?

  Would you let the fires go all night long?

• 51:39Speaker 03

  No, no, we, we put out the fires. I think that that would, I think that that maybe slightly pissed off my guys a little bit, but I was just so paranoid about, about a forest fire, like us being responsible for a fire. And, you know, we had permission to do it. Rangers knew that we were out there, but I just told the guys.

• 51:58Danny Jones?

  People would normally leave the fires burning all night, right?

• 52:02Speaker 03

  I think they normally would. I'm, I'm just hyper paranoid about, about things. Like I try to be really thorough about the dangers. I mean, that, that is my role as.

• 52:10Danny Jones?

  Luke Caverns burns down national park.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Oh my God. Oh yeah, that, well, that's kind of what I was thinking, right? Like, you know, when you publicly advertise that you're going on an expedition and then you do something stupid like, you know, so. So I just told the guys, I was like, I was like, listen, you know, all of your, you know, basically it, it's, it's the normal philosophy, like our success is all of our success. Any one of your failures is my failure.

• 52:35Danny Jones?

  Not like you're in the Amazon too. Everything's wet, you know, where you know, you can't like that stuff's not, that can't burn, right?

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Burn the whole fucking place down again, you know, it, so, so it had all, a forest fire had already taken so much of this out. I mean, the amount of destroyed, burned trees that we stepped over just going through that environment was absurd. It was actually to the point of being depressing. One of, one of my friends who I brought down from Newfoundland to go with us. He told me that, that like the biodiversity in Newfoundland just was, it wasn't even New Mexico wasn't even comparable to Newfoundland, at least where we were at because of the devastation of the forest. I mean, man, we saw literally no wildlife going, going through there because the, because the forest fire had destroyed

• 53:26Speaker 03

  all of it. And it, it was actually, it was just a, it was just basically a desert. And it was a relief to see a bird. That's how dead it all was out there.

• 53:39Danny Jones?

  What did you guys eat?

• 53:41Speaker 03

  So we packed in food like, you know, preserved, dried up.

• 53:45Danny Jones?

  Fish in those rivers?

• 53:46Speaker 03

  No, no, no. They're, they're, well, I mean, maybe the like little fish, but, but nothing that you're going to be able to get. I mean, they were basically just streams at this point of the year. And also one of the other risks that we ran was this is an early spring, right? So the snow melt, it will start coming in within a week after that. But if it happens to have, if there happens to be a really, really hot day, we could be camping by the river and the snow that melted up at the top comes in, in basically a tsunami and just like washes people away. I, I have friends die while I was in high school in Texas, camping on the side of the river and they got washed away. So like every day, every day we would just be out there and I would just have to find a place

• 54:28Speaker 03

  that was high enough to put the guys there where, where it was all safe, like really high up away from the water. And.

• 54:34Danny Jones?

  Saw a video on Instagram the other day of this giant like rock slide, I think in North, maybe in North Carolina. With this, these giant like 10 ton boulders are just screaming down the side of a mountain.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  Really?

• 54:46Danny Jones?

  And just like taking out trees, you know, if you're there, you're completely, you're not even.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Did you ever see the, uh, did you ever see the videos of the hurricane and, and, you know, in, in the mountains in western North Carolina? The hurricane from last year basically caused flash flooding up in the mountains in North Carolina. That's how bad it was. And, and so there would be these commercial, I saw a video that came from like a commercial cabin property where you've got all these cabins lined up and it's up on a mountainside. And this girl, she's filming and she's looking down at the other cabins and, and a tsunami comes up over the mountainside and sweeps through all the houses. And I mean, just like that, everything on the first level is completely underwater, like all the cars are now

• 55:34Speaker 03

  moving and tumbling down the, the mountain sides. And man, there were hundreds of people that went missing. They found dozens of bodies like lodged up in trees and stuff. I mean, natural disasters are insane. Insane. And the amount that happened in North America is, is crazy alone. You remember, um, what was it in Nepal? Did you see all those videos of the, of the flash floods in Nepal?

• 55:57Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah. I was confused because, I mean, there was a lot of videos, but I was wondering how many of, how many of those videos were AI and how many of them are real? Cause I saw a bunch of crazy ass videos.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  I don't know. There's one that looks like it comes from, I don't know, what is it? It's not, it could be a security camera, but it's almost.

• 56:12Danny Jones?

  Find some of those videos, Steve?

• 56:13Speaker 03

  From a mountaintop. Yeah. There's one that's from a mountaintop. And, uh, and it's looking down on this giant gateway. Yeah, this one's.

• 56:20Danny Jones?

  Is this real?

• 56:23Danny Jones?

  It's from France, uh, from striking images show new flash flood hitting central Nepal. This looks real.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Oh, the one that you can just barely see on the bottom right of the screen? Dude, you should watch that one. Yeah. It's a border crossing.

• 56:38Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, look at that, bro.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, imagine, man.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  So the reason that, that this is relevant to this whole heal expedition I've been talking to you about is these kind of natural events happened in the Gila wilderness throughout the ancient world and, and they would hide archaeological sites and cultural sites. So you'd be going through places. There was, there was one canyon slot that we came to that literally had the perfect geology. It was facing southeast from satellite imagery. It looked just like a cliff dwelling site. And we went in and, and it was obvious that, uh, that mudslides had come down from the top of the mountain and that the area had been flooded. And whatever was at eye level where there could have been an archaeological site was completely buried right in front of me. And so, I mean, I could have been standing

• 57:30Speaker 03

  five, 10 feet on top of like a truly unknown archaeological site, but you know, you just, there was, there was no way to know. I mean, we, we would need to spend two weeks surveying and, and, you know, digging through that area if we had the permission, which we never will get.

• 57:46Danny Jones?

  Was the reason for that Nepal? Do we know that the, the reason for that flood, the flash flood?

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Was it, uh, was it not that a reservoir, uh, at one of the top of the mountains melted? I think it may have been.

• 58:00Danny Jones?

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• 58:41Danny Jones?

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• 59:21Speaker 03

  I, I reposted that on X and I said, um, I said, this is why you have stories of, you know, biblical floods all around the ancient world. People don't forget that, right? I mean, okay, can we go back? There was one more video I want you to watch where you can just see the scale. It's at the bottom, right? It's that one you can see. Yeah, it's that one right there.

• 59:41Danny Jones?

  Okay. Is this one real? Oh, this is 15 million views?

• 59:44Speaker 03

  This is real. So, so look at the scale of this. So you see the people that are down there. Look at the scale of this.

• 59:51Danny Jones?

  These people are all toast.

• 59:54Danny Jones?

  I wish there was audio. I've seen this.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  This is insane, man.

• 1:00:03Danny Jones?

  So everyone is hauling ass. Some people are running into the building.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, what do you do?

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Bro.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 1:00:17Danny Jones?

  Everything is buried.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  Imagine that. And so imagine like.

• 1:00:23Danny Jones?

  Shows the moment, Jirong checkpoint, the main tourist crossing, oh.

• 1:00:30Danny Jones?

  The main tourist crossing point between Nepal and Tibet was destroyed at 11 AM local time. Keep going.

• 1:00:36Danny Jones?

  I can't believe the camera kept rolling.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy, right?

• 1:00:41Danny Jones?

  Four hundred foreign tourists have been reported missing.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Looked like it was more down, more than that.

• 1:00:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I mean, thousands of years ago.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Coming in, too.

• 1:00:53Danny Jones?

  Thousands of years ago, you know, you, if something like this happens, you think you pissed off the gods.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  For sure. Okay, so what you're, it, it, it looks like it splashes of, of water coming through there and, and of course, it is water that's melted water that's coming down. But basically, those kind of events are so powerful that they just turn land into liquid.

• 1:01:14Danny Jones?

  Right, because it doesn't look like water. It looks like just.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's debris.

• 1:01:19Danny Jones?

  It looks like mud.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's debris from the buildings and from rocks from, you know, there are boulders from the sides of the mountains coming through. It's everything.

• 1:01:26Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  It's crazy, man.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in ancient times, when somebody experiences something like that, they never forget it. And, you know, I, I, definitely at the end of the Ice Age, there is something that happens that is dramatic, that changes the world forever. I don't know what exactly that is, and it's amazing that we can like know so much about what destroyed the dinosaurs, but the, the end of the Ice Age is still such a mystery. It's odd.

• 1:01:57Danny Jones?

  Isn't that very odd?

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know the, I don't know why.

• 1:02:00Danny Jones?

  Archaeology is such a weird science.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Danny Jones?

  You know, it's one of the most like, one of the most divided.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Danny Jones?

  Areas of science there is where everyone likes to fight about the narrative. Everyone tries to, everyone is fighting to keep control of the narrative of archaeology. Not so much geology, maybe, but more so archaeology. And it's just because it's a soft science, you know, with nothing wrong with being a soft science, psychology is a soft science.

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  It's also an art, you know? So there's, there's a site called Chaveen de Wantar, way up in the mountains of Peru. And, um, we should look up the, the guy who first excavated it, his name to give him credit. This is back in the nineteen thirties. Span, no, he was a Peruvian guy. And, um, now, when he, it's either him or it was people before him that went in. It, it may have been him. He went in, and, and this is just something that happened in early days of archaeology, even at, um, even at the site of Mycenae, and it happened all the time, um, on Crete, among the, you know, the, the Minoan sites.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  But this site in Peru, basically, these first archaeologists would go in and they would just find all the cultural artifacts and they'd pull them all out of the building, set them all outside and organize them and start studying them. But what they didn't realize was that they were disturbing, uh, you know, it's not in situ anymore. You cannot record where it was at. And they didn't realize that there is importance as to the exact place that you found it. And right where it was found is sometimes more important than the object itself, because the object without context.

• 1:03:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  Of where it was sitting, you lose its importance, right? It's, it's gone. And so, science is oftentimes processes that can be replicated, right? You can go back through it, you can prove it. But archaeology is not fully that way. It's like an art as much, it's an art as much as it is a science, because.

• 1:04:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  The analysis, that first analysis can only be done once, right? So, and that's not discrediting archaeology, but, but it's different than most sciences.

• 1:04:16Danny Jones?

  Very different, yeah. Like, because it's, it's a soft science, right? I mean, you have things like LIDAR or whatever that are more of a hard science. But, you know, like, we, I had this woman on a couple of months ago, uh, who was doing, her name's Heather Lynn, she did a, she was studying in college in, to be an archaeologist, who was doing a, getting a degree in archaeology. And she was explaining how, you know, how some of the sort of like alternative history of archaeology got her interested and wanted, and helped her to make that decision to study that in college. And she was saying that one of the first things that they did in her lectures and in her classes as her introduction was they were showing them all the people to avoid,

• 1:05:01Danny Jones?

  like the Graham Hancock, the Michael Creemo type people, all these historical people who have come up with these other narratives, you know, some of the alternative stories of Atlantis, the like, you have to, they were saying like, we need to avoid the pitfalls and we have to make sure that we protect the establishment of, like, of archaeology. And then there was all of this money stuff and like this funding and these grants that they were chasing and trying to get. And it was more of like a, a preservation. The focus was more on like preserving the establishment of archaeology and like maintaining the, the current narrative and, and making sure everyone is aware of all the pitfalls that one can fall down. And we don't want anyone to go down the wrong path.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  She just graduated recently?

• 1:05:47Danny Jones?

  No, it was years and years ago, yeah. Wow. But yeah, that was, uh, that was a very interesting story. And, you know, she was also explaining how like, the origins of archaeology is very tied into spycraft.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, there's, there's, well, the origins of archaeology are weird all the way around. I mean, the origins of archaeology have ties to.

• 1:06:11Danny Jones?

  Rich people trying to make money and.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, like antiquarians, collectors, um, the Nazis. I mean, there's, there's, you know, so many people, so many affluent and influential, powerful people were interested in the ancient world and they all kind of, they all want to get into it for different reasons. And, and during that time period is the formation of the practice of archaeology itself.

• 1:06:32Danny Jones?

  And there's the whole Downton Abbey thing where he excavated King Tut's, King Tut's tomb, and they took it all out and he put it in like, you know, the basement of his mansion and then they invited everyone out to, you know, have drinks and look at the, all the things that he pulled out of King Tut's tomb when he did the excavation and like, that whole thing is, that whole history is insane.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very, um, I, I don't know.

• 1:06:57Danny Jones?

  What year did, can you find out what year Downton Abbey excavated King Tut's tomb?

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  Now, now, what is downtown Abbey? Cause it was Howard Carter that was the head of the archaeologist. But I'm not sure when you're saying downtown Abbey.

• 1:07:10Danny Jones?

  Downton Abbey?

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  Is there a reference to?

• 1:07:12Danny Jones?

  I thought he was the guy who funded.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  He may have been, he may, he may have been because Carter had a, uh, he had a funder that he had to constantly appeal to. Maybe that's who, maybe that's who that is.

• 1:07:22Danny Jones?

  Maybe, let's find out.

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Carter? This is what I got.

• 1:07:27Danny Jones?

  Uh, King, King Tut's tomb was actually excavated in nineteen twenty-two by archaeologist Howard Carter with the funding of Herbert Carter, um, and the owner of the Highclere Castle, um, the filming location of the television series Downton Abbey.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  Maybe downtown Abbey is like, is like a reference to sort of like a.

• 1:07:47Danny Jones?

  I thought, I heard that Downton Abbey was like the funding for this.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  I, I wonder if it's, if it's not maybe like a, some kind of cultural reference to that sort of era of like Victorian, it's like a Victorian society, you know, uppity funding, if that makes sense.

• 1:08:06Danny Jones?

  Did Abbey fund the excavation?

• 1:08:09Danny Jones?

  Uh, no, Abbey did not fund the excavation. The confusion comes entirely from the name of the television show. The excavation was funded individually by George Herbert the Fifth.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  I see.

• 1:08:19Danny Jones?

  Earl of Carnarvon, a wealthy British aristocrat. Okay, the Abbey connection is from the TV show. Interesting.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  Is downtown Abbey a person in the TV show?

• 1:08:31Danny Jones?

  I thought it was.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  No, that's the name of the place. It's like, like, it's like an estate. Okay, so it's like, it's like saying that, uh, it's like saying that you're funded by the White House.

• 1:08:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  Ah, I see, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:44Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  I see.

• 1:08:46Danny Jones?

  Or Ruth Eckard Hall, you know?

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  So in a sense, you're right.

• 1:08:49Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funded by that sort of Victorian kind of, uh.

• 1:08:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  You know, classical.

• 1:08:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Archaeologists, antiquarian people. Antiquarians were like well-to-do businessmen that were also interested in things of the ancient world, right? And so.

• 1:09:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  They're able to fund.

• 1:09:08Danny Jones?

  There's lots of those.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're able to fund expeditions to basically plunder a place. Although Carter, although Carter's not, you know, Carter's not the worst example of this. Oh, Sir Arthur Evans, um, absolutely destroyed, uh, the site called Knossos, which is the biggest palace, like ancient Minoan palace on, uh, the island of Crete, just literally just destroyed the whole thing and like rebuilt it based on vibes kind of. And so like.

• 1:09:40Danny Jones?

  That's a good way to do it.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's wild. But yeah, early archaeology is messy. Mid archaeologists, mid, like middle period archaeology is messy, it's still messy now. It's weird because it's, you know, it's funny, it's like so, it's so obviously messy because it's a human science based on humans, right? Like, the whole thing is run by humans, it's based on humans. It's, it's, it's inherently like morally antithetical, right? Like, the pharaohs definitely intended for their tombs to be honored and left alone, but yet, you know, we go in and we rob their tombs and, you know, we, we do it because we're fascinated by them and we honor them. But at the same time, they probably don't take it as being honored, you know what I mean?

• 1:10:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  It's probably not how they receive it. It's the same thing with the Native Americans, right? Like, I'm, I love Native Americans and I would love to, I would love to be given the permission to be a part of or fund or, or lead in, you know, an excavation at a mound site and like find a body in a grave and learn more about maybe the Hopewell or the Mississippian people or the woodland people or something. Because I'm trying to honor those people and, and teach the world about them. They would probably see it as me utterly desecrating something that they had worked their entire life to create, be entombed in and preserved for eternity, right?

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  So it's like an inherently sort of antithetical, um, you know, field that's, has this like moral dilemma. But ultimately, you know, it's, most of the, I think most people who get into it. They just love the ancient world and want to be, you know, want to be a part of it. I think that the people who get loud, that's where you start getting all of the, you know, the weird opinions and polarizations and things, you know, that obviously the people with polarizing opinions are going to be the loudest, whether they're academics or whether they're, I guess, more establishment, you know, I'm sorry, whether they're academics or they're a part of the establishment, whatever exactly that means, or whether they're in

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  the alternative independent space, you know, but then these things have like branched out so much now, you know, just in the, in the mid 2000s, you know, Graham Hancock had maybe been around for 10 years and there was just like a little league of people that were like him, you know, you had, you know, and I guess you had a range there, you had like Zacharias Sitchin and Graham Hancock that are on two different ends of the alternative spectrum, but then you sort of had the, you sort of have the regular archaeologists that are kind of all finally coalesced amongst each other, but now it's just exploded into like, you know, even the academics have this wide range of beliefs and approaches to communicating archaeology to regular people.

• 1:12:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah, what's the point if you can't communicate it?

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  Well, I do think that the explosion of the alternate space has basically put up a mirror to academics and been like, you guys really have to work on your delivery, like bringing archaeology. I mean, it is fascinating. It's intrinsically fascinating, but I think that it was, it was always in like BBC documentaries and magazines and stuff, and it wasn't sexy in the way that, you know, these alternate people come in who, they're almost like, they're almost like outlaws, you know what I mean? They come in and they have this fascination with it and they grab this massive chunk of people and like run away with them, you know, and so that pissed off so many archaeologists and.

• 1:13:17Danny Jones?

  Yes, I've been doing this for 25 years and no one's paid any attention to what I do and this guy comes out of nowhere with no credentials, writes a book and makes all this money and everyone loves him. Not fair.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and I think that that was the mentality for a long time. And now I think that there's a lot of archaeologists. I mean, I'm seeing it, maybe like every month there'll be some archaeologist who's been very vocal on X, that's always been like good-hearted and really trying to have a conversation and they'll go, okay, I'm starting my YouTube channel and their videos are popping off, you know.

• 1:13:52Danny Jones?

  Barnhart's videos, he's got all kinds of super popular videos on, you know, on Florida. I think his most, one of his most popular videos is on Florida mounds.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's amazing, you know, and people were, so one of the things that that was tough about the alternative space and I, I got, you know, kind of like the gravity pulled me into that space just from how doors opened up and opportunities that I had. And one of the reasons I not got out of it, but I kind of went off to my own island, you know, it's like me and Dr. Barnhart hanging out on our own island, like away from the whole, away from the battleground, you know?

• 1:14:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  And, and one of the things is that in the alternative space, people really want more. They just, you know, like, like your average guy who's working as a loan officer at some bank or something and he's thinking all day about like, man, I can't wait to get off to listen to this podcast about ancient civilizations, you know, whatever, whatever. They want more. They just want to sink their teeth into something and be whisked away into a new world, you know?

• 1:14:54Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  And so, some of the people in the alternative space, I think are very honest and genuine, and some of them see it as a great financial opportunity. And so, dude, they whisk these people away who are completely unsuspecting and take them on this massive journey through, through the ancient world, but it's all BS, you know, and, and I just saw like this massive chasm, you know, opening up and.

• 1:15:19Danny Jones?

  Well, you really notice it when evidence comes out that proves one thing wrong, or at least really tip, tilts the scales like the opposite way in which you, like say like one of these guys has made a bunch of documentaries, done a bunch of like trips and tours to strictly look at one mystery that they believe that they have an idea or a theory on, right? And then something comes out where someone does a study or a report on something that says, okay, look, you're probably wrong here. And then they start to, you know, that cognitive dissonance starts to kick in where they're like, oh no, then it becomes like a polarization,

• 1:16:01Danny Jones?

  like politics, where it's like, no, that person, that person's a, you know, a chaos agent trying to come in here and subvert what we're doing. We have to focus on the mission and it becomes like tribal. And like one of those big things that happened was the vases. There was this guy who, that came on the show and he was, he did a peer reviewed study on those vases and I was completely, I was completely under the belief, I believed wholly that those things were like a mystery and they must have been created with some magical ancient machine or something, because how else would they be so precise? You know, they measured them under those laser scanners. They were perfectly symmetrical within like the deviation

• 1:16:41Danny Jones?

  of like a, a micro millimeter, like less than the width of a human hair. And, you know, it boggled my mind how those things were made until this guy Max did this study, Max Sambalov is his name.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Did you have him on?

• 1:16:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah. He did this peer reviewed study where he looked at all of the vases and he found out that the most precise ones were all in private collections. And all of the most precise ones, all the most, like, like this one, this 3D model right here, this 3D print, which is like one of the most precise ancient Egyptian vases. Right? They're not aswan granite.

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  No way.

• 1:17:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah. All of the vases that are like crude and not perfect and look like they were handmade, they're aswan granite. All of the perfect ones are different types of granite, like rose granite or different, whatever.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  Maybe, and maybe they're not native to Egypt?

• 1:17:47Danny Jones?

  And he paid like 5,000 something dollars to a company in China to create a vase and they did it out of granite.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  No way.

• 1:17:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So like, I can't fucking, I can't talk about that the way I used to talk about it, right? Because that's, it's most likely that those are modern. Those precise vases are probably modern.

• 1:18:06Speaker 03

  Damn, that's crazy, man.

• 1:18:09Danny Jones?

  I know, it fucking took all the wind out of my sails, man.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Well, you know, okay, you know what's, you know what, man? I've changed my tune on a lot of stuff, like, was this a real one? This, this model?

• 1:18:20Danny Jones?

  It was a real granite vase. I don't know whether that thing was, was modern made or ancient.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Okay. If, one day you gotta go to Egypt.

• 1:18:32Danny Jones?

  I know, I do.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  You, you go to the old Cairo museum or you go to the Grand Egyptian Museum and you see the real ones that are there, man, to the eye, they literally look perfect. They're fucking amazing, you know, but it doesn't have to be made with some crazy ass technology. Okay, I had a geologist come with me to the Olmec realm where they make these jade, hey, we could, we gotta pull it up on my Instagram. You just gotta see this thing, man. They would make these jade like death masks and some of them out of serpentine. They would polish them to the point that they're like translucent, like the way you can get the, that crazy paint job on a car where if the, the sun shines on it, it changes color, you know what I'm

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  saying? Where it has like depth to it. You'll just have to scroll down somewhere, you'll see like a jade mask show up somewhere. You may have to go down a little further. I think I was there in January, so maybe a little further down. Let's see, a little bit further. You're almost there though. Yeah, there it is. That green mask right there. So that's, so that's jade. And man, it's polished. It's got like a mirror.

• 1:19:42Danny Jones?

  How hard is that stone?

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  Jade is not too hard, but it's delicate, right? And so I was with the head.

• 1:19:51Danny Jones?

  Steve, click the arrows to scroll through the pictures.

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  Jade is a, rates a six or a seven on the Mohs scale.

• 1:19:56Speaker 03

  Holy shit.

• 1:19:57Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's pretty hard.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, look at that, man.

• 1:20:01Danny Jones?

  Damn.

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Danny Jones?

  Look at the details of the lips and the teeth.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Oh, it's sick.

• 1:20:06Speaker 04

  It is nice and smooth. It's very, very, very smooth.

• 1:20:10Danny Jones?

  And this is verified how old? Like how old do they believe this is?

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  More than 3,000 years old.

• 1:20:15Danny Jones?

  More than 3,000 years old?

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. So these are, they call them ceremonial axe heads, but I mean, they don't really know. But there's thousands and thousands of these. All right. So the head archaeologist, really cool guy, the head archaeologist at the University of Puerto Rico was with us, I'm sorry, the head geologist there at the University of Puerto Rico was with us. He was the coolest resource the whole trip. I wouldn't, I was teaching him a lot, he was teaching me a lot. And I asked him, I said, he was blown away by, by these artifacts. And I said, how long does it take to make something like that? And he goes, he goes, thousands of hours. I'm like, I go, thousands of hours to polish something to that point by hand?

• 1:21:00Danny Jones?

  Today or back then?

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Back then, back then. But even today, if you were to do it by, if you were to do it by hand with, with primitive tools, like, I mean, you're talking about thousands of hours. And so he and I, we talked all week about why do ancient people try to make things so perfect, right? Like what, what causes an ancient person to make something that's like this out of granite? And they polish it to the point that it's like, you know, it just has, and granite is especially difficult to get it so polished and so smooth that it's almost like has this mirror like finish where sometimes they're translucent and, and you know, they do it with alabaster or whatever.

• 1:21:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  And I think one of the things that, that he said to me was like, it's almost as if you're creating something that's supernatural. Think about, okay, so I spent.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  You ever, you ever done like a backpacking trip like just, you know, where you're out in nature for maybe a week or something like camping or something?

• 1:21:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, in Georgia.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  And, okay, okay. So when you're out there, you notice within a couple of days, your mind starts changing. You start becoming more attuned to the things that are around you and you kind of get, you know, you start liking this, this way of living.

• 1:22:09Danny Jones?

  It's been so long, but yeah, no, and I've heard lots of stories too.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  And, and so imagine being in that your entire life. Okay. You're familiar with what jade is. Maybe you're a farmer in Egypt. Let's go back to Egypt. You're a farmer in Egypt and you know, you spend all your time living along the Nile. As an anthropologist is what I do, trying to get in these people's heads. So you're, you're a farmer, you're a wheat farmer that's living along the Nile. You see the pyramids across the river in front of you. You will probably never have the honor of being able to cross the river and see these magnificent spectacles that are like gleaming in the sunlight across the river from you. You know, nobody lives on the west side of the Nile. Normal people

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  don't. They live on the east side of the Nile. When you die, if you're high, if you're high caste enough, you get to, you can afford the luxury of having a tomb created for you on the west side.

• 1:23:05Danny Jones?

  Is that real?

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there were towns on the west side, but they're like really ancient, predynastic. I mean, when you, as, as Egypt goes on, things become more structured. And so there's some nuance there, but in a general sense, yeah, you live on the east side, you die on the, you die or you're buried on the west side. But you probably will never get to see these amazing spectacles across the river in front of you. Throughout your life, you might run around in the hills that are up behind like the Nile Delta and you'll, you would see stones. I mean, you would see buildings being made out, being made out of stone. You would know limestone, sandstone, tura limestone. You would know alabaster because maybe some like semi wealthy person might have something that's nice that's made out of alabaster. And you know that granite is like unusable. Like you just, nothing you

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  do with it. It's way too difficult. Okay. So then somebody can come and make something like this out of granite and they can polish it and make it so symmetrical that to the human eye, it doesn't matter if it's, you know, within the degree of one hair or five hairs. It's fucking perfect, right? Basically. And it, you're almost, you're like, it's, it's like a manifestation of humanity's ability to grab onto the natural world and make it do things that seem unnatural. It's almost supernatural. To give something, to give granite, which is rough and jagged and will scrape the shit out of you and pokes out of the side of mountains, to grasp onto it and to form it into something like this is reaching

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  into the supernatural realm and making something that's rough and jagged like granite as smooth as water, right? And reflective like water. It's just, it's, it's like, it's the same thing of why ancient people were so obsessed with sacred geometry. You're, you're, it's like a celebration of things that seem supernatural. It's like the language of the universe. And when you learn it, you can duplicate it and find it everywhere. And that's why you would see Native Americans creating this geometrical earthworks. It's, you might be able to see it in ancient Egypt, but even though it's still disputed, but you definitely see it in the Greek world. You see it in India, all throughout Southeast Asia, all up and

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  down the Americas. And you see these people figuring out the language of the universe and then celebrating it and extrapolating on it to the extent that we can't possibly fathom. But I, that's why I'm saying that is regardless of how they did this, it's amazing. They're making something that would seem utterly and completely supernatural to ancient people living in that time period. You would look at that and imagine when you look at it, how much it blows your mind today when you see it, even the real ones. You're like, how do you, how, okay, how do you actually get down and hollow these things out? As much as it blows your mind then, it's, it's completely insignificant to the impact that it would have on an ancient person, you know? And so that's what, that's why these things

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  are still so amazing.

• 1:26:04Danny Jones?

  It's always warm where I live. So any season outside of Florida is always cold to me. And whether it's a chilly day or I'm on a ski trip, the brand I always reach for is Stio. Stio is designed and tested in Jackson Hole by people who actually ski, bike, climb, and live in those winters every day. For everyday cold, their hometown down jacket uses 800 fill down, but it's designed to feel more like a favorite hoodie than some giant puffy jacket. And when you're actually on the mountain, their ski gear is built for the whole day, from groomed runs to side country and deep powder. For me, the keyline snap shirt is something I can wear all day around the resort because it's just ridiculously comfortable. And when it's snowboard time, the Stio double charge jacket and pants are my go-to. It's the stuff I trust when I'm actually out in the cold. The ski season's

• 1:26:48Danny Jones?

  almost here, so gear up now the way the locals do. Go to stio.com/danny for 20% off your order. That's S-T-I-O dot com slash Danny. Stio.com slash Danny for 20% off. Stio, designed and tested in Jackson Hole. And, you know, also like those scoop marks that are on those cerapium boxes, you know, some of those things are still like unexplainable. You know, you can't, you can't fake that. Like those boxes are in there and you see those scoop marks out of that and like some of the other stones. It's similar to, you know, what you and Dr. Barnhart were talking about last time you were here in the old studio where, you know, they were, I think, I think-

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  Which by the way, I like this studio much more. This one's really, this one's really cool. You encapsulated your vibe in a studio. I love it.

• 1:27:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's much better than the spaceship for sure, or the bookshelf. But like, the idea that they used acid is not crazy, I don't think. Or they use some, some sort of natural alchemy to soften the stones somehow.

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  Well, and it's all in the local lore. I mean, the, the people who live in the village outside of Tiwanaku in Bolivia, they will tell you that people used, people use bird spit to, you know, the acidic bird spit to be able to soften the stone. And, and Dr. Barnhart's, like when, when you go on the great courses or there are some other, you know, official pages where it lists him as an archaeologist and, you know, his little creed thing is, I'm going to butcher it, sorry. But it's something along the, along the lines of, of basically, once archaeologists and explorers stopped listening to their own gut and just listened to the words of the indigenous people, they would find the

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  thing that they were looking for, right? And so in the Native American world, it actually often tends to be that way. Is that, is that the Native Americans are just so prolifically good at keeping some kind of core element of their lore alive that often ends up being correct. I mean, you know, the Cherokee, man, they used to, the Cherokee would say that they came from the snowy mountains in the far north and from someplace far, far away. And so a lot of people used to think that that meant that, oh, they're talking about the, you know, the migration of the Ice Age, which maybe that's 11,000 years ago. But, but even more recently than that, and maybe that is what it is, but even more recently

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  than that, a thousand years before, they actually did come from northern New York up in the mountains and they migrated down into the Smoky Mountains, or they migrated down into, yeah, the Great Smoky Mountains of like Tennessee and North Carolina.

• 1:29:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  And so they, they can remember these things far, far back, which ancient people do all the time. And I, I think that, I think that people who study Native Americans don't feel this way, but I think that archaeologists who study cultures in other parts of the world do, that ancient people, ah, you know, I, I just think that they maybe think that they're a little more naive than, than they really were, you know, that, that ancient people, and they, they wouldn't say this and they don't actually actively feel this way. I think it's more of a subconscious thing, like the way that they're approaching their study. I think that sometimes people who study in the old world think that native people could not hold on to their ancestral memory as well as they really could. It's

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  the same thing as like, okay, a perfect example is, is I think it's, I think it's incredibly obvious that when the Greeks are later on talking about Atlantis, they're remembering the cataclysmic eruption of the island of Accretiri that happened 1100 years earlier. You know, it's a, so you know the island of Santorini? There was a, there was a, there was a city called Accretiri that lived on it. That city is the center of copper trade throughout the Greek world. And it's, it may have been the center of copper trade throughout the Mediterranean. It's filthy rich. Like it's a, it's, it was almost like, it was a capitalistic society. We don't know that it had kings or anything like that.

• 1:30:53Danny Jones?

  Someone was telling about, telling us about this island recently, saying that there's like a bunch of money launderers that live on that island now, like a bunch of like very wealthy cartel money launderers that live there because of the history of it. Like they're so obsessed. They're like these modern billionaires that are so obsessed with that ancient history of that island that they, they moved there and they have like, there's a, maybe a bank there or something. I don't know.

• 1:31:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, very well could be. So this is the city of Accretiri and people had been living here. It was a Minoan town. People had been living here for- Uh, maybe 2,000 years by, by this point, by 1600 B.C. And so in and around 1600 B.C., dude, the world's fourth largest volcanic eruption came out of this island. Okay, black in the skies over, over the, uh, over the Aegean Sea. Probably the, the pharaoh or whoever was pharaoh of, uh, of around that time.

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  I think it was late Middle Kingdom, recorded the skies being blackened all the way down in Egypt around the same time. It's disputed, obviously, but, um, you know, you can see a connection there. It basically cast a shadow over the entire island of Crete. And shortly after that, the whole island becomes like covered in a thin burn layer. So it's like, you know, the, the city, they're the basically it blackens the sky. There's no more sun. It's chaos. People are knocking over all the candles and torches around towns and they accidentally burned the whole island down. It's a catastrophic cataclysmic event that basically produced the end of the Minoan world because the Mycenaeans moved in and conquered Minoan Crete.

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  But the Minoans were the wealthiest, probably the greediest people in the ancient world because they did not have kings. It was businessmen, as far as we know, it was businessmen in the ancient world. Think about how profound concept that is in the ancient world. In the middle of the Bronze Age, when you have kingdoms, right? That are ruled by divine god kings, like you have, you know, the, you have the king, you have the kings in the Mesopotamian world. You have the king of, uh, of Egypt, which is the pharaoh. You have the king of Mycenae, which is like Agamemnon, you know, you've seen the movie Troy. So, but then you have the Minoan world right in the center of that. That's producing all this copper and, uh, it's trading so much throughout, uh, the Mediterranean. And then they're filthy rich and then they collapse.

• 1:33:19Speaker 03

  Well, and then, and then 1100 years later, you have the story that Atlantis was this greedy, filthy, or this, this, uh, this greedy, filthy, rich civilization that got too much on its high horse and this, that and the other. And they were so powerful and they were at war with Athens. Athens was a Mycenaean city at the time of the Bronze Age. Who, who their direct rival was the Minoans? Like the story is so obvious that Athens is a Mycenaean civilization at the time. It's not Athens in the way that Pericles and Socrates, you know, knew Athens or Plato knew Athens. It's, it's a, it's a Mycenaean Bronze Age city that's connected to Mycenae. And their direct rival is Minoan Crete.

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  And volcano erupts, destroys the entire economy of the Minoans. And then eventually the Mycenaeans, who are the Athenians, go in and conquer, uh, go in and conquer, conquer, um, the island of Crete. And then the very story of Athens is that, uh, you ever heard of, uh, Theseus in the, in the Minotaur? Um, if you've ever heard this legend, so Theseus is an Athenian. Um, he's a, he's a Mycenaean Athenian that goes and conquers the Minotaur. Well, the Minotaur is the cultural icon of the Minoan people. It's all, that's Atlantis, all in this, it's the collapse of, of the greatest, most powerful civilization in the middle Bronze Age. Or say like the height of the Bronze Age.

• 1:34:42Danny Jones?

  Steve, do you still have that chain of transmission? The Atlantis chain of transmission that we've pulled up here?

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  Now I say

• 1:34:49Danny Jones?

  Many times?

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  I say all that to say that Greek archaeologists don't think that that's the case. That, that Greeks living in, uh, Greeks living in classical Athens would not have remembered the fall of Accretory and, and, and that eruption that, you know, changed so much of the Aegean world.

• 1:35:11Danny Jones?

  Steve, go to the, go to the Flint Dibble podcast. He pulls it up in the beginning when we're talking about it. He pulls up a diagram or a list of basically the podcast that me and you did with Flint Dibble years ago. And if you, if you just don't have to do on, you don't have to, you know, show it to us, but you can go through it, scrub through it. You'll find that chain of transmission.

• 1:35:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:35:29Danny Jones?

  Under the Atlantis area. Yeah. And that's the

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  Now, are you talking about, you know, where the story basically comes from? And technically where Plato would have gotten it from?

• 1:35:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, like, like how the story actually came to be.

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  Well, cause where supposedly it comes from is Solon in the, in the, in the mid 600s, traveling to, uh, Egypt. And then they're supposed to be, yeah, there's supposed to be a chain of custody in classical Athens because Solon and Plato are vastly disconnected.

• 1:35:57Danny Jones?

  Here it is, chain transmission of the Atlantic story. Um, so destruction of Atlantis, 9,000 years before, oh, you just lost it. Thought I paused it. Uh, 9,000 years before Solon. Um, oral history for 1,000 years. Then it's finally written down by the Egyptians, 8,000 years before Solon. Uh, of course, and then it says there's no actual writing this early from Egypt. Um, priests read the records, years pass. He tells it by memory to Solon without consulting any written records. Solon tells his relative, uh, Dropades. Dropades tells it to his son, Critias the Elder.

• 1:36:40Danny Jones?

  And then at age 90, Critias the Elder tells it to his 10 year old grandson, Critias the Younger. Critias the Younger then tells it to Socrates. And 50 years later, later Plato writes down the story.

• 1:36:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think obviously he's saying this is tongue in cheek. This entire chain of transmission, yes, he's right. This is ridiculous.

• 1:37:01Danny Jones?

  Like a thousand years of oral history.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, Flint is completely right that this idea is ridiculous.

• 1:37:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Speaker 03

  You know, this idea that, that people would still know about it, or that somehow the Egyptians. It's fucking insane. Like it's not, there, there's no way that the details of this story can survive all that time. What I'm saying is, at least my thought is it maybe Solon heard something in Egypt. I, I don't actually know. I, I really don't know.

• 1:37:32Danny Jones?

  We really have no idea.

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  It could be that Plato made all that up. But what I'm saying is I think that there's probably some kind of cultural memory that's dancing in the background that's not visible or tangible in the Greek world. Like just 10 years before this is, uh, Plato writes this down. There's a city called, um, uh, in 373 B.C., there's a, there's a Greek city on, uh, on the Aegean coast that basically gets washed away just like Atlantis did. And, uh, and so I've always thought that that probably gets Plato thinking about probably this deep cultural memory of this great civilization that get washed away some, you know, it's almost, they almost become like children's stories, right?

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  And so what I'm saying is I think that the core, the kernel of that story of Atlantis is probably just like 1100 years earlier. I, I'm, yeah, I, I'm not saying that I think it comes from 9,000 B.C.

• 1:38:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  You know, so

• 1:38:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you're probably right about that.

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I mean, the idea, and man, I used to, I really used to, I really used to believe that. But as you, as you study the ancient world so much, you gain an appreciation for just how long a thousand years is. You know, Julian's got a great saying, um, that, uh, that, you know, when you study recent history, the history is so dense. But it like, you can easily become cavalier going back in time because all of a sudden you know, less and less about every century. And all of a sudden you're skipping thousands of years so quickly, you know? But history is so vast and dense, right? There is, I, I just don't think that there's any way that if, if Atlantis was destroyed in 9,000 B.C.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  That there's any way anybody would have preserved such a specific kind of story that the Egyptians somehow have in their, in that temple in Sais, you know? And, and, and the whole thing with like, how would the Egyptians even know what Athens is? Uh, it, the whole, yeah. Okay. So, so the, you, you and I agree, but the, the whole story, that story of Atlantis is not, um, when you gain a real appreciation for the ancient world, it just doesn't make sense, you know?

• 1:39:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And Plato was also a known liar, you know, a self admitted liar. I think Aristotle even was like complaining about how Plato was so full of shit. Um, and you know, that combined, you know, I think that's probably the reason Socrates never wrote shit down. Because, you know, he knew that writing was inherently deceptive. Imagine 2,000 years from now, someone goes back and reads some posts on the New York Times and be like, oh my God, look, this is what was happening.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:15Danny Jones?

  You know, and then you can go read something from fucking Huffington Post and it's like completely different. Or like something from written on the Fox website or whatever, you know what I mean? Depending on who wrote it, it's all opinion, some of its narrative, some of its deception, some of its propaganda.

• 1:40:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:29Danny Jones?

  You know, and how much of that was going on back then? And then combine that with the fact that none of these people that study the ancient texts ever talked to the fucking archaeologists or the geologists or the, uh, you know, the anthropologists or the people that study the actual like biological remains. Um, you know, it's just like, they're all in their own little bubbles. They don't, there's no interdisciplinary work being done, which is frustrating.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, yeah, that's a big thing. That's a big thing. Plato is, Plato is weird and complicated. Like if you ever really tried to read Plato, it's not easily comprehensible. Like it's, he's so, um, you know, he, I think he has this element in him where, you know, so Socrates was put to death for the corruption of the youth and, and the, um, you know, the indication that the gods of Athens might not be real, right? Which is kind of the corruption of the youth because he had all these young kids hanging around him. And, uh, and so, um, you know, Plato was one of those. And, and Plato kind of spends the rest of his life sort of, uh, rebuilding Socrates' reputation. Cause Socrates is like the centerpiece, you know?

• 1:41:38Speaker 03

  So his, so Plato's entire premise is based on almost like hypothetical conversations that aren't really that.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  Are basically never meant to be taken literally.

• 1:41:49Danny Jones?

  Thought experiments.

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Whereas Socrates, I'm sorry, Aristotle is so much better.

• 1:41:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  Oh, so much better. Aristotle talks right. Aristotle is talking to you in his writings. Yeah, golly, man. When you listen to.

• 1:42:04Danny Jones?

  Plato was a eugenicist, you know, he wanted.

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. He, he's got some weird stuff going on. Nothing against Plato, really. I just, I'm just not that big of a fan of his writing. I'm much prefer Aristotle. But, yeah, yeah, it's.

• 1:42:20Danny Jones?

  We have such a vague picture of what was really going on in the past, you know? And, you know, that's a good point, you know, compare the past and how we can freely, you know, be so liberal about how we talk about the past and compare it to like what's happening in the last week in the United States. You know, it's, it's completely, how much of that is going to get lost? And I also always think about like what I said earlier about how people 2,000 years from now are going to try to analyze what's happening right now in our lives, you know? Like, is someone gonna find the Lord of the Rings and be like, oh, my God, there was a man named Gandalf who lived in the center of the earth? Oh, yeah, what proof do you have? There's this trilogy called The Lord of the Rings. Look, it was written in 1997, you know?

• 1:43:05Speaker 03

  I was, I was just thinking about if you and I talked about this, on my, on my drive here, there's this big white cross like on the side of the road, like sticking up out of the trees. And I was looking at that, I was thinking, you know, if, if, if Iran getting nuked does spark World War III, if that really does happen and something crazy breaks out and, and, you know, if our civilization, you know, disappeared, if the modern world disappeared and in 1,500 years, the, you know, the institution of archaeology is rebuilt and they start digging down to the cultural layers of, you know, the, the early second millennium AD or something, or third millennium AD, you know?

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  You know, if they find that big white cross, if they, if I get buried in a coffin and I've got some stuff and my body is found and I've got some stuff in the coffin, like, what does that coffin say about? Or what is, what is, what does my coffin say about me? What are the things that are in my coffin say about me? And what kind of ridiculous conclusions? Like, okay, if you had to have some things put in your coffin, what would it be like? You know, my grandpa was buried with a Bible and I put a picture of, of, like, I put a family photo in the Bible and I put it like on his, you know, in his hands, in the casket. That's the only thing there. But some people get buried with photos and they get buried with little things that are special to them.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  You know, some people, like, if I had to be buried with, if I had to be buried with sentimental things that are explicitly important to me, what would that be? I don't really know. I mean, maybe some photos would be buried with me, like a photo of, of, you know, my wife and I's dog and, you know, whatever, photo of my wife.

• 1:44:47Danny Jones?

  Isn't that interesting that human beings think about that?

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:49Danny Jones?

  We care so much about how we're remembered.

• 1:44:50Speaker 03

  Maybe I'd be buried with a, a box of, of all the arrowheads and ancient stone tools and stuff that my grandpa found. Like, that's really personally important to me, but I don't put it on display. Maybe I'd put that in it. But then someone would find me and go, oh, my God, this guy, man, he was worshiping his dog and, you know, he was worshiping these ancient stone tools and, and, and, you know, they would have this whole idea about me that I spent my whole day worshiping my dog and worshiping these stone tools. Or that, or they would think that I was using the stone tools or something like that and I needed to be buried with them so I could use them in the next life or something. They would be totally wrong about who I am. Here's another example, is all this paper, man, this will all be gone. Everything, everything we had physically written down,

• 1:45:33Speaker 03

  our digital realm will not exist. It probably will not have been fully preserved.

• 1:45:39Speaker 03

  Maybe not preserved at all. And so, based on the physical evidence, look at our table. What, like, would this, would this, would this table even closely come to resemble the kind of conversations you've had in here? Like, what would they think of this room?

• 1:45:54Danny Jones?

  The only thing left would be these granite and limestone walls.

• 1:45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, how far, how, from what region of the world did you have all, all this stone imported?

• 1:46:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, these are from Giza.

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, these are from Giza. We got them out of the labyrinth.

• 1:46:10Speaker 03

  Your podcast must be doing very well, very well connected.

• 1:46:14Danny Jones?

  Peter Thiel gave me the money.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  Really, really?

• 1:46:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  And approved by Zahi?

• 1:46:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance gave me a secret. I tapped into their slush fund that was run by Kushner and they, they funded this beautiful cathedral we have in here, so.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  It is very nice. But, you know, the, people in the future will have such a utterly wrong idea about who we were. And this comes all back to this, why it's so crazy that we get so worked up about our interpretations of, of ancient people, you know? Good lord, dude, people hate each other over archaeology.

• 1:46:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  You know, and it's all just dead people and bones and stones and clay.

• 1:46:59Danny Jones?

  Like, like, it's just story that people care about. They want their version. It's like, at some level, it is like a religion, right? Like, you want your, archaeology is very ba, is, is heavily based on the story that is told through the archaeology.

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:17Danny Jones?

  You know, and everyone's got their own story, or every camp has their own version of that story that they want to be. And they go and look for the evidence to support what they believe.

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And, and those ideas are, are like very much shaped by the times. I mean, good, okay, the most, you know, most extreme example is the, the Anunnaki, the, the, the SS organization that's going around the ancient world looking for the origins of, of the great Aryan race. You know, they're trying to, they're trying, the Germans are trying to piece together this theory that basically, you know, they're trying to define their lineage as like the origins of ancient societies around the world and stuff. I mean, that's just, and so everything that they would collect was interpreted with that sort of bias in mind. And so, you know, not any archaeologists today that are doing that, but, you know, you, you inevitably

• 1:48:09Speaker 03

  have this background that you come into archaeology from and that obviously becomes like, it, it gets, it basically stains or inks everything that you do and you can't help it, you know?

• 1:48:23Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  And, and so, and so people will see how archaeology has changed. Like, we were talking about colonial archaeology. Dude, you know, I mean, in all practical sense, when they're finding an Egyptian burial, they're literally opening it up and they're, they're going, that's a leg bone.

• 1:48:42Speaker 03

  And they're getting the, you know, they're getting the gold out. That's his, that's his rib cage.

• 1:48:46Danny Jones?

  Didn't they used to eat the fucking mummies too?

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  Well, you know, that's an interesting thing. So that's called mummya in the French. Yeah, yeah. So they're a French, you know, it's just like the birth of Egyptology. And so the French, they're basically going through and plundering all these tombs and stuff. And so they start running out of like wealthy tombs, but they have this massive like pile of, of

• 1:49:07Speaker 03

  mummies that they don't have anything to do with. So they start, it's kind of like the diamond industry, right? Like, it's a, it's a, you know, diamonds are not valuable. It's, they're, they're not even special. They're not even rare, right? It's a, it's a false.

• 1:49:19Danny Jones?

  It's the story.

• 1:49:20Speaker 03

  Was it a false scarcity? It's a story that's created about them. And so, you know.

• 1:49:24Danny Jones?

  Manufactured scarcity.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, these are like blood mummies. And so, basically, they're selling back to the French, hey, you know, these mystical Egyptians, you know, everything was all about healing and, and all these people were healed when they died. And, and if you, and if you eat of the mummy and absorb its, you know, material essence, you will be, you know, you'll be cleansed of all of your ailments. And so, dude, they're just selling this shit back to wealthy French people and making shit tons of money, just like they were if they were selling gold and actually valuable artifacts. And they just figured out a way to sell people's dead bodies back to, you know, French aristocrats.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  And so they started eating them. Well, then, the, the, the, you know, clearly eating dead bodies can't be good for you. And so people started getting like cancer in, in, in France.

• 1:50:16Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  There are people who have like really done deep studies on this and I don't know too much about it. But, yeah, I mean, they, they have basically concluded based on the symptoms. And they were doing autopsies on people back then, that there were people who were developing tumors probably as a result of eating these mummies, you know, whatever it is, whatever happens from eating a dead body, 3,000 year old person. And, you know, there's also, they were also like consuming, they were also like consuming like ancient paint as well, like.

• 1:50:48Speaker 03

  Ah, yeah, it's something like that. And then sometimes they would grind the mummies down into, into a paste.

• 1:50:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then they would paint with that. That might be what I'm, what I'm trying to get. It's, it's an absurd, it's an absurd thing, but it's just a way to make money. You know, they, they had all this stuff and then they, they were running out of, of priceless artifacts to sell back to wealthy collectors. So they start selling the mummies back too, you know? So that is that period of, let me think, it's, so it starts in like 1798 or 1799. And I don't remember when, when the French lose Egypt, but, you know, that goes on during the early 1800s. And then mid 1800s has its own issues, late 1800s, even the early 1900s. I mean, things are very much. Um, extractionist, right? Like it's colonial, it's colonial archaeology. It is what it is.

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm not making a moral judgment on it, but you know, if you would have a bunch of Europeans and sometimes Americans who would show up and excavate something there and they found it by God, it's leaving the country and going back to the British Museum. And that's just how it was. And you know, and so that time period of archaeology will be marked by those things. And we look back at it and you know, I'm a very neutral historian. I don't look back and scoff and make moral judgments at much other than like the Holocaust, but um, but you know, I

• 1:52:09Danny Jones?

  That's where you draw the line.

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's like, you know, you look at World War I, you're like, who's the bad guy in World War I? It's so weird and complicated. In World War II, it's very obvious, right? And so, uh, you know, as a, as a historian and anthropologist that tries to understand people, you know, you, the moment you start making intrinsic moral judgments on the people that you're studying, like everything you're doing is now becoming clouded by your preconceived idea on what their experience must have been like. But you know, if you study Germany in 1920s and early 30s, leading up into World War II, you can, you can become very sympathetic to the German people. Um, cause it's a very sympathetic story, you know, and they were sold a pipe dream, you know,

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  about, about what Germany could be. And so, you know, you start acting like they're all evil, this, that and the other. I mean, you're, you're vastly oversimplifying real history. Um, and, uh, and diluting the significance of it. So the best thing you can do for the most part is remove your, try to remove your personal bias from what you're studying, right? But it's inevitable that you won't be able to completely successfully do that. But we can't see it. We're blind to it. So the future generations will look back at the early, you know, 2000s and be like, ah, those guys are such idiots studying archaeology, you know? Probably in a hundred years, you know, this, this is not satisfying to me,

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  but in a hundred years, they probably will not actually, uh, they, they may not actually excavate archaeological sites anymore. There may be some kind of like laser where you could just scan, like they'll scan, you know, a, a section of Goebekli Tepe and they'll be able to see every single monument that's under there. They'll be able to see every single artifact.

• 1:53:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, they already did it for the pyramids. They found those giant shafts, the spherical shafts.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  Well,

• 1:54:00Danny Jones?

  It's a power plant.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So.

• 1:54:02Danny Jones?

  Speaking to what you were saying though, about the mummies, uh, we had a French medical examiner on the podcast who was studying the chain of custody of one of the French kings. I think it was like Louis XIV's heart. It was sold and purchased multiple times. And he found a painting, like a suit, like an ancient painting. And he was examining the painting, testing it, and he found in the red pigment in this painting, he found the heart fibers of this French king.

• 1:54:30Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:54:31Danny Jones?

  Insane. And he found that, basically what he found was the guy who painted that painting was the one who purchased the heart of, I think it was like Louis, one of the, one of the French kings. And he was using that heart, grinding it up into a paint, into a pigment and a paint and painting it on this canvas. And it was wild, the fibers. He was able to find the fibers on the fricking canvas.

• 1:54:52Speaker 03

  What the hell?

• 1:54:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Do you remember what painting that was, Steve? Do you, can you find it?

• 1:54:56Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm looking. Now, why, why would the painter do that? Do you know?

• 1:54:59Danny Jones?

  I don't. I don't know. I don't know what the, I don't know even, I don't even know if that painting had anything to do with that king. I could understand like if he was doing maybe a painting about that king, using his own heart as like the red paint for the painting. But I'm not even sure if that painting had anything to do with that king at all. This might've been just like some sick fantasy.

• 1:55:23Speaker 03

  That is the craziest thing.

• 1:55:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:26Speaker 03

  Wow. Like no rhyme or reason known.

• 1:55:29Danny Jones?

  No, that's just one of the things this guy does. This guy's a medical examiner and he studies the ancient remains of some of these historical figures like Joan of Arc, Pablo Picasso, uh, Napoleon. He got some of Napoleon's remains and studied that. And like it, you know, it paints this picture about, you know, for him specifically, like what the health was of that person.

• 1:55:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:49Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 1:55:50Speaker 03

  Napoleon got stomach cancer, right?

• 1:55:52Danny Jones?

  Something like that.

• 1:55:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  Cause his father, his father had it too. And I think he, I think he, what they, they wanted to, he wanted them to perform an autopsy on him so they could.

• 1:56:01Danny Jones?

  Look, there it is. So it is, the painting is called the Vu de Cien, the view of Cien, C E A N by Alexander Pau de Saint Martin, used with the king's heart fibers. Um, the mummy brown is typically thought of as the brown pigment, the mummified human hearts, uh, processed with bitumen, created a very specific, unique glaze. Now, let's look at the, the photo. Look at that. And that, you can tell there's like that red pigment throughout the whole thing. But what is, is there any connection?

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  Why, why?

• 1:56:40Danny Jones?

  With what king? Like, why did he use the, the king's heart to paint this? Like, what was the reason?

• 1:56:46Speaker 03

  How did he get the king's heart?

• 1:56:48Danny Jones?

  I think he purchased it. He actually paid lots of money.

• 1:56:52Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:56:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It was being sold like on a black, on like a black market or something like that. From what this French medical examiner told us.

• 1:56:59Speaker 03

  You just ever feel like you were born in the wrong era?

• 1:57:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:02Speaker 03

  You just do wild shit back in the day, man.

• 1:57:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Very fucking wild shit. Well, let's take it a minute.

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

  I think about when I travel around the world and I, you know, you see how little, uh, how little guardrails there are for places, you know, and you can, you can do crazy stuff in, in Kenya. You can, you know, the Egyptians will, you know, there's, there's, this is kind of, you know, there, there's stuff that's being hidden in Egypt. It's probably all black market artifacts. You know, the people, you know, I, I ask all the time when I meet, uh, Egyptian archaeologists, like, I mean, are, is there anything that's actually hidden or is it, is it all, you know, can you, can you have access to everything if you have enough money? And they tell me, you know, the only thing that's, the only thing that's hidden are little royal,

• 1:57:53Speaker 03

  like noble tombs that they'll find that are untouched and they'll be doing excavation there. There'll be some things that go missing because they get sold on, on the black market and individual people are making a lot of money. There's a lot of hands that have to be greased in Egypt. Like, the amount of very minor corruption is crazy. It's very minor, but it's crazy, you know? So you can just imagine what really goes on behind closed doors. But, uh, you know, in Egypt, uh, I, I don't think there's anything that's sacred in Egypt. Like you could, if I had enough money, I could get access to whatever I wanted. Like name something, name anything that you can think of. If I had enough money and I knew the people, which you can find the people, it's not that crazy.

• 1:58:37Speaker 03

  You and I could do it. Um, dude, you want to shell out 10K? They'll take you into someplace that people haven't been to in 60 years. You know, if you want to shell out 50K, they'll take you into some place people haven't been to in a long time. But in the United States, man, if a place is, if a place is off limits, that is off limits. You know, you're not getting in there.

• 1:58:59Danny Jones?

  There's no, no politics in Greece.

• 1:59:01Speaker 03

  No, no. It's the same thing like, uh, in, in, in Mexico. Like Mexico is very serious about their archaeological sites. Uh, Bacall's tomb at the, I gave you that, the little pyramid I gave you three years ago. That's on the, so that pyramid right there, um, unless you literally have a personal relationship with some of the people who first studied and explored that pyramid, it doesn't matter how much money you have, you will not get in, get down into that tomb to see that burial chamber and the giant megalithic sarcophagus in there. Even the president of Mexico would really have to, uh, would really have to like push to be able to get down to that thing because it's so sacred. You know, it's just amazing

• 1:59:45Speaker 03

  like how in some parts of the world, it's still, if you have money and you're affluent, you can get, you can do what you want. And it's crazy, man.

• 1:59:52Danny Jones?

  Steve, do you have any luck with that or what?

• 1:59:53Speaker 04

  No, I lost internet connection.

• 1:59:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. That's not good. We lost, well, the cameras are still working.

• 1:59:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know what's going on.

• 2:00:00Speaker 03

  You know, coming from such a structured society, like it, it is bizarre traveling to places where it's not structured, you know? And, and you realize like, man, it's, these places are still operate like they did 200 years ago.

• 2:00:13Danny Jones?

  It's also so mind boggling that it seems all, the most interest in the ancient world is focused on Egypt and, you know, a little, a little bit lesser South America and Mexico. But like, no one ever talks about what was happening here and like some of the crazy ancient mountains that are here in Florida and even in Alabama and. You know, what was the thing that Hugh Newman was showing us? Was that Hugh Newman was showing us there's these big like depressions that are along the North American east coast?

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, um, they are called Carolina Bays.

• 2:00:57Danny Jones?

  The Carolina Bays, yeah, like some of that stuff is fascinating.

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, my buddy Chris Cottrell, he's, he studied.

• 2:01:03Danny Jones?

  Chris Cottrell, that was, that was Chris.

• 2:01:06Speaker 03

  He studied, he studied a lot of these and, and, and I, um, yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, they, they look like they're debris from impact sites, like something that hit the Great Lakes and it, the, the debris splashes across North America. I think you can find them all the way over in, in California, um, but they're really dense here on the east coast and in the Carolinas, obviously they're freaking everywhere.

• 2:01:27Danny Jones?

  What was that dude? So crazy how they're perfect, like you can look at them from the geological survey that they do and it's like, they're perfect spheres, like as if there was like some like debris blast that like ricocheted.

• 2:01:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're like, um, so some of them are very, they're, they're very spherical on one side, but they're almost like a teardrop.

• 2:01:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  And, and, and so what they do is they all point towards the Great Lakes. Uh, I mean, you can, you can just draw lines of them on, on LiDAR. And if you, if you basically, you know, if you take a, if you take one of these teardrop shapes and you draw a line from, you know, the center point of the, of the circular edge or the, let's say the southern edge and you, you draw it all the way down the middle of the teardrop, it'll just point right back to the Great Lakes. And so the idea is that maybe, you know, a lot of people have thought it's into the Ice Age. I think Chris thinks that it's like Jurassic period, something way, way, maybe even further than that.

• 2:02:21Danny Jones?

  Like a comet, like a giant comet, like a bunch of comets hit and like a bunch of debris came and like.

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it, so it hits, it hits the northern part of North America. Uh, it may even have something to do with Hudson Bay, like why Hudson Bay exists. Um, if you've ever really looked at Hudson Bay on Google Earth, dude, we have a sea. It's, it's, it's a bay, but it's basically like a sea just in the center of the northern part of North America. It's actually massive, like Henry Hudson thought that he was about to go into the Pacific Ocean from how big that, that bay is.

• 2:02:55Danny Jones?

  Really? Can you pull it up? Are you, did you have internet yet?

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  What? That's crazy.

• 2:03:00Danny Jones?

  You don't have internet on your computer?

• 2:03:01Speaker 03

  No, even, even when I switched to wifi, it's not working. It was all the jokes you made about Peter Thiel.

• 2:03:07Danny Jones?

  Is all of our shit working?

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, that's.

• 2:03:10Danny Jones?

  Is the camera switcher working? You need internet for the camera switcher, don't you?

• 2:03:13Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:03:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, I don't know what I'm talking about.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  Well, it was the jokes you made about Peter Thiel and JD Vance and.

• 2:03:19Danny Jones?

  Goddamn Palantir hacked us, shut Steve-O down. Um, what were you saying?

• 2:03:25Speaker 03

  Um.

• 2:03:26Danny Jones?

  Oh, we're talking about the, you were talking about the Carolina Bays and the Hudson, oh, the Hudson Bay, yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:29Speaker 03

  So the idea is, is that, is that debris from space hits, uh, hit the northern part of the continent and, and the debris basically splashes across the, you know, splashes southward. And you can see it like from Carolinas all the way to California and they're very faint and they're super rare out there, but they're still out there and they still point towards the Great Lakes.

• 2:03:52Danny Jones?

  And I think if I remember correctly, Chris was telling me that he's not sure, he doesn't, he doesn't necessarily think that the timing lines up with the Younger Dryas.

• 2:04:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what he thinks.

• 2:04:06Danny Jones?

  He, he doesn't think it lines up with that.

• 2:04:08Speaker 03

  No, no, yeah, he thinks it's like, I don't know, maybe a hundred million years ago or something. Maybe that's too far, but he thinks it's millions of years ago. And, uh, but God, it sure would be freaking cool if it did actually line up. Personally, I don't know, but, but the, but my connection with Chris was that he and I both spoke at a conference and we had become friends. And I always liked him because he's one of these guys that's in this alternative space, but he's very grounded, like he's one of these guys that will tell you the truth, you know, he's not trying to sell you, he's not trying to get you to subscribe to his YouTube channel or whatever. And he's just going to tell you the truth and he and I really related on that.

• 2:04:47Speaker 03

  And so as he was looking through the Carolina Bays, he started finding inverted depressions, which basically means like he's finding mounds. And so he starts looking, he's like, what are these little things that I'm seeing? And he goes on Google Street View and he ends up finding a known, like a labeled mound site. And he goes, oh, this is really cool. And so he got in touch with me and he was like, man, you know, I don't know anything about this, but I thought you'd find this interesting. So he gives me this like proprietary LiDAR data set that I had been using. Uh, I had been using it for maybe six months by the time I first came on your podcast. And I've spent the last three and a half years and I've, I've just, I have found

• 2:05:29Speaker 03

  um, about 80 sites that are not labeled, you know, they're not marked, they're not known in any, um, in any, uh, to any extent that I can find, you know, I've, there, there is a database out there, um, that, that only some archaeologists, like top level, you know, top guys have, uh, access to, and it's like, uh, GIS mapping, they're, they're survey maps of every single known cultural site in the state in which they operate in, right? So they have access to, for some people it's tens of thousands of archaeological sites. But this is a very, very tiny little group of people who have access to this information because if it got out, dude, you'd see shit disappear instantly, you know?

• 2:06:14Speaker 03

  It's amazing that it, oh dude, they would, people would show up with shovels and loot something like in the middle of the winter and a ranger would come find a giant hole in the ground and everything from that, from like a Clovis site or something would be gone, right? Cause you can sell Clovis points for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 2:06:31Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:06:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, if, if an archaeologist, you know, let's say, let's say in the 1900s, somebody finds a Clovis point, uh, on their ranch, they tell somebody about it, the location of that becomes known and archaeologist goes there and does a little survey, they find more Clovis points and they end up realizing, okay, this is a Clovis site on the Yadkin River, uh, that I just excavated for the last three days and I definitely found Clovis or, you know, whatever points, um, or the Dalton points, whatever. And, you know, these ancient Paleolithic site here, but they only have so many resources. So basically they, they take what they found, they cover it all back up and they, and they mark it secretly, right?

• 2:07:12Speaker 03

  Well, they've done this with hundreds of thousands of sites across the entire United States, you know, these archaeologists know where stuff is at. Um, and so I have reached out to archaeologists who have access to these databases to try to get confirmation, hey, do you know about this site? And, and, um, and, uh, you know, they'll either tell me, no, yeah, that's not actually a mound site, it's a civil war fort, which is crazy, that happened in Arkansas.

• 2:07:38Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 2:07:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I found it, I found a civil war fort that I bet you nobody's been to in over a hundred years, completely overgrown by the, by like the swampy, like wetlands, uh, next to the, uh, Wachita River. And, um, and I reached out to, uh, an archaeologist, the University of Arkansas, and I was like, hey, I found this on LiDAR. And then he basically sends me this long response and he's like, he's like, that's really cool that you found this, this is actually, uh, an old civil war fort that was built along, uh, that was built along the river. He's like, he's like, who knows the last time somebody's been out there, sent me a really cool reply and he was like, send me anything else you find. So I've sent him other mound sites and I think all the ones in Arkansas were known. But in Louisiana, I found a lot that were not known.

• 2:08:22Speaker 03

  One of them is fucking huge, man. It's like 970 yards long.

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  It's huge, probably nine.

• 2:08:30Danny Jones?

  What is it?

• 2:08:32Speaker 03

  It's an ancient city.

• 2:08:33Danny Jones?

  A city?

• 2:08:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have it on, if we can get.

• 2:08:36Danny Jones?

  Can you pull it up?

• 2:08:37Speaker 03

  It's in, it's in one of the, um.

• 2:08:39Danny Jones?

  All right, let's pause real quick, we're gonna fix, we're gonna fix Steve's internet and we're gonna pull this shit up. Where were we?

• 2:08:45Speaker 03

  Uh, we were at that big, uh, we're at that big, um, city that I found.

• 2:08:50Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:08:51Speaker 03

  It's, it's one of these photos.

• 2:08:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, you gotta find the photo.

• 2:08:54Speaker 03

  If you can, dude, I got, I got some cool shit in here. Those are some Amazonian cities I found. Bro, hey, go back to real fast? We gotta talk about this one at some point. I found a fucking ancient site on Epstein's ranch.

• 2:09:06Danny Jones?

  What?

• 2:09:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Are we going right now?

• 2:09:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we're rolling. Let's just go straight into this.

• 2:09:13Speaker 03

  All right. I mean, there's not too much to say about this, I just, people.

• 2:09:17Danny Jones?

  Well, this is the title of this podcast now, so you gotta talk about it for at least 10 minutes. I'm just kidding.

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  We attracted the totally wrong audience here.

• 2:09:28Speaker 03

  So, um.

• 2:09:32Danny Jones?

  Congratulations. You just came up with the title to our episode.

• 2:09:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, well, I saw, you know, I don't remember. This was sometime, I think this is in 2025. I found this. People were talking about how, well, when did he, when did he die?

• 2:09:49Danny Jones?

  Epstein?

• 2:09:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:50Danny Jones?

  2019.

• 2:09:51Speaker 03

  Oh, shit. Okay. Well, you know, something exploded, something popped off last year where people were talking about it again culturally. And, uh, and so, you know, I got this light.

• 2:09:59Danny Jones?

  This is his ranch in New Mexico?

• 2:10:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got this light art program and, and so, uh, people were, people were talking about, oh, man, you know, I bet there's like bodies buried and stuff out there. I bet he's got graves and stuff. And I was like, I was like, ah, if there's any noticeable depressions, I can find them.

• 2:10:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:15Speaker 03

  And, uh, I just, I literally, I think I did this while watching a football game. I wasn't really thinking.

• 2:10:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:21Speaker 03

  Much about it. And, uh, so anyways, I came across these, uh, southwestern, like ancestral pueblo and, uh, pit houses. I know that these are pit houses and I measured them.

• 2:10:30Danny Jones?

  What is a pit house?

• 2:10:31Speaker 03

  It's basically just, just ancient southwestern Native American, uh, homes, like made out of stone. They're, you know, they've got little pits and they've got walls. I found some of them, uh, in Hila, New Mexico. On our expedition earlier this year, I found a little pit house village. I mean, really, really exactly like this, this one. And so, yeah, I wonder if he.

• 2:10:53Danny Jones?

  This is underground, how far underground?

• 2:10:56Speaker 03

  It's probably not underground.

• 2:10:58Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could probably walk out there and anyone without a trained eye, uh, maybe would just walk right past it. Uh, but I mean, even if, if you had a little bit of an inkling that you should look for something that's manmade, you would notice this. Those, those little walls are probably, you know, from, from the desk here, I mean, they're, they might be this tall now. They used to be a little bit taller in ancient times. They'd put a little roof over it. And basically you would, you would climb in through the roof or maybe through a small little door and you go down a ladder. And you're basically like underground. So you could, so they could, uh, control the temperature of the, of where they lived, right?

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  But they were very shallow houses. So you probably had to crouch or lay down in them. Um, yeah. So he had a, he had an archaeological site on his ranch.

• 2:11:44Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 2:11:46Speaker 03

  Who knows if he knew about it or anything or ever.

• 2:11:48Danny Jones?

  You know, he was upset, him and Ghislaine Maxwell were obsessed with Atlantis.

• 2:11:52Speaker 03

  Really, really?

• 2:11:53Danny Jones?

  Particularly Ghislaine Maxwell was obsessed with finding Atlantis. She even had a submarine. She had a submarine, I think called the Atlantis. And, uh, she was.

• 2:12:02Speaker 03

  She had, she owned the submarine.

• 2:12:05Danny Jones?

  I believe so.

• 2:12:06Speaker 03

  Good lord, that's crazy.

• 2:12:07Danny Jones?

  You can't fact check me because we don't have internet right now, but that's, that's what I've heard from multiple experts on the topic, where she did have a submarine. I don't know if she owned it or Jeffrey Epstein owned it, but she did have a submarine called the Atlantis and she was very interested in, and she was like interviewing his journal or interviewing archaeologists,

• 2:12:31Danny Jones?

  um, specifically about Atlantis. And she was trying to get, she actually went to Cuba to get permission to go dive and study the sunken ruins off Cuba. I guess off Cuba, there's an underwater, some underwater ruins.

• 2:12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, gosh, they've been talking about that for years. I don't know if it's legit or not. It's one of those like Bimini Road things.

• 2:12:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:12:54Speaker 03

  That's crazy, man.

• 2:12:55Danny Jones?

  And when she went on the, when she went on the land, when she went on the run, after Epstein died, she created her own, her pseudonym was Janet Atlantis.

• 2:13:06Speaker 03

  What does she use a pseudonym for?

• 2:13:09Danny Jones?

  She didn't want to get, she was, she was running from the feds.

• 2:13:12Speaker 03

  Wow. So dude, the, the, the level that like what, what ultra wealthy people are able to do is absurd. Like you can come up with a fake name and like avoid the US government.

• 2:13:23Danny Jones?

  And you know what else?

• 2:13:24Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 2:13:24Danny Jones?

  Jeffrey Epstein, he made people refer, he called himself the Magus.

• 2:13:32Speaker 03

  The what?

• 2:13:32Danny Jones?

  Magus.

• 2:13:34Speaker 03

  What does that mean?

• 2:13:35Danny Jones?

  Like magician.

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 2:13:38Danny Jones?

  Like ancient Greek, the ancient Greek term for like magic, like a magus or whatever. And he like, there's emails of girls emailing him referred, referring to him as Magus. So they were very into the ancient world. Oh, and there's a fucking movie called The Magus about a guy who lives on an island

• 2:13:57Danny Jones?

  who traffics people. And this is a picture of that guy's island. And it looks just like the little temple that Jeffrey Epstein has on his island.

• 2:14:05Speaker 03

  Man, isn't it crazy how those, those people, those people like, they, they would play in your face about things. Like if you read through the, um, you know, I, I really don't know that much about Epstein. I know that, uh, like when the files were released, I, I watched some of Julian's episodes going like, reading through the transcripts. And it's like crazy how, if you know the code of the language with which they're speaking to each other, it's absurd, the things that, that they indicate to each other and like how, how these powerful people can just get away with, you know, the, the worst things you can possibly imagine, you know, and get off on basically playing in your face about it.

• 2:14:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:43Speaker 03

  You know, it's crazy.

• 2:14:44Danny Jones?

  It's like Tim Dillon said in his recent episode, he's like, I'm pretty wealthy. He's like, I can get away with parking tickets. I can park anywhere I want. I'll just park there. If I got a $200 parking ticket, I'm above that. I'm going to pay the $200 parking ticket. I'm not worried about parking fines or whatever. These people on a whole nother level with the amounts of money that they have. Imagine, just use your imagination to think of the way that, you know, a millionaire thinks about parking tickets, how they think about other things that they can get away with and how they're above the law. Like if you're Elon Musk, what's your, what's your parking ticket if you're Elon Musk, you know? It's just crazy.

• 2:15:23Speaker 03

  Oh, man, it, it is wild. Um, one of the weird things I've thought about lately was, um, you know,

• 2:15:33Speaker 03

  when I, when I came on your podcast, um, my YouTube panel hadn't gone anywhere. And I was still working at SeaWorld in San Antonio. I was making nine, I was making no money on, on YouTube at the time. I was monetized, but I really wouldn't make anything. And, um, and I was making $950 a month at SeaWorld, but it cost me $300 a month just to drive there. I couldn't, I couldn't get a different job or anything. It was, it was really bad. And my, and my wife and I were surviving on her student loans. You know, she would get like a certain amount in every month and we'd basically survive off of that. And, um, so, uh,

• 2:16:14Speaker 03

  you know, now, three years later, like things are a lot better and I, you know, we have a house and we've got two cars and I don't have to think about, you know, if I want to have steak every night of the week, like it doesn't matter, but now like, you know, it, it feels like I'm, you know, that makes me feel so like, wow, like I, I got whatever I, I got it all now, you know? I'm not rich or anything, but like dude, when you're talking about people like that, they are so mentally and intrinsically disconnected from you or I or anybody watching this. They live in a completely different realm. They have everything in front of them. And I just, I think that it almost inevitably,

• 2:16:56Speaker 03

  unless you're like really grounded in some way, I think it just like, you're inevitably going to become so dark and twisted up, you know? I mean, read about any ancient king, like ancient royalty, it's so rare that you actually get a good person who becomes king. You know what I mean? It just like the power just twists people up inside and, and, and I think that, uh, oh, I mean, I mean, you know, the United States is, is seeing the symptom of this. We are so, even our, even our poor people are so wealthy, uh, compared to, you know, when I drive around Egypt, man, it's, it's devastating. Look at some of these people that, you know, that in, in some of these towns, they don't even have like a, an organization for picking up trash.

• 2:17:40Speaker 03

  Like there's nothing to do with your trash, other than just toss it in the, in the covert.

• 2:17:45Danny Jones?

  I heard it's very dirty.

• 2:17:47Speaker 03

  And it's not just Egypt. It's so many places, right? And there's not even an institution to come and pick up all your trash. And so these people just live in waste and they have probably no real opportunity. There's nothing on the horizon for, for, for, you know, uh, there's no future, you know? I mean, they may not agree with that, but like as compared to an American, I mean, good lord, man, you can be born and, you know, my dad was born in absolute, literal devastating poverty and got out of it and became successful. And, um, I mean, it's just, we have so many opportunities here, but all those opportunities, all that freedom, all that wealth,

• 2:18:27Speaker 03

  it, it corrupts us emotionally and mentally, you know? We have, we have so much time. We're, we're, we're so, our life is so cush that we kind of like become separated from, you know, the, the, the struggle of surviving that actually does make you happy. You know, you're supposed to work really hard throughout the day because the little leisure time that you have in the, in the evening becomes so much more intensely enjoyable. And that's why those people that live in slums in Egypt are happier and have less mental illness than people in the United States do. You know, we have more time to be with our mental and emotional issues. So.

• 2:19:02Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:19:03Speaker 03

  Anyway, so, you know, and then you end up like Epstein and you got bodies on your ranch and you own ancient ruins and submarines and trafficking people all around the world and, and then joking about it in your emails. Oh my God, that's crazy, man.

• 2:19:17Danny Jones?

  It is very interesting how these people with the, you know, disgusting amounts of wealth are so obsessed with ancient shit and the ancient world. And, you know, the weird mysteries of.

• 2:19:29Speaker 03

  What is?

• 2:19:29Danny Jones?

  Humanity.

• 2:19:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Maybe they're just interested in like the rest of us are, but it's like weird that, it's weird that they're almost all interested in it, you know?

• 2:19:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:40Danny Jones?

  And living forever. That's another thing they're very concerned about is living forever.

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:45Danny Jones?

  They're very afraid of death.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, even look at Disney. He, what, he's got, what, his head preserved or something? So that he hopes, so that he can be resurrected someday in the future?

• 2:19:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:55Speaker 03

  I wonder if that's going to work out for him.

• 2:19:57Danny Jones?

  No, it's not going to work out for him.

• 2:19:58Speaker 03

  You know, so anyways, yeah.

• 2:20:00Danny Jones?

  This is cool. So this is, um, this is a LIDAR?

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we've been talking this whole time. We were talking about it three years ago, this LIDAR program. This is what it looks like when I'm looking at it. I can see.

• 2:20:10Danny Jones?

  You know, Chris was showing us a LIDAR of Florida going back and he like did it like, it was like by decade and he went back really fucking far. And it like Florida's LIDAR, he was just showing us this county. And it was fascinating to see what it looked like, how there was like these cuts through the entire peninsula or whatever. And it's all been built over. You can't see any of it now.

• 2:20:30Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:20:31Danny Jones?

  The way it's changed, the way, the way that it's just changed in the last few hundred years is astonishing, man.

• 2:20:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a book, I, I read part of it. Uh, man, I can't remember what it's called, but it, but it, it was called, it was about the devastation of, of natural Florida, like how much Florida has been developed and how much like, you know, just massive parts have been completely erased, like, you know, but, um.

• 2:20:56Danny Jones?

  Especially South Florida. South Florida is like.

• 2:20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Danny Jones?

  A hellhole.

• 2:21:01Speaker 03

  You know, I couldn't get, um, if, if I can, if I can somehow fix whatever is going on with, uh, with the LiDAR program, for some reason it cuts off like, um, it cuts off the, the, the, the southern tail of Florida. There were some amazing mound sites that I found that I wanted to show you. Um, and I could not get the imagery to load. And man, I re-downloaded and re-downloaded the program so many times and like updated Google Earth Pro and I was trying to get it to work last night to give you these, um, images, but I couldn't get it to load. But man, there are some like really stunning. I mean, actually, actually the coolest visual mound sites I've ever seen are in Florida. I couldn't get them to load.

• 2:21:41Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:21:41Speaker 03

  And, but they're, they're right next to this road. And then, um, this, they're, they're massive. They're probably, you know, they're hundreds of yards long. And, um, there are these crazy, uh, they're like in the shape of a hand, but, but it's like geometrical shapes. One of them, uh, that's very similar is called Tony's Mound. I don't know if we can look stuff up. Um, but, uh,

• 2:22:01Danny Jones?

  Is there any back yet? Look for it.

• 2:22:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tony's Mound.

• 2:22:05Danny Jones?

  Um, I didn't know this until I watched Dr. Barnhart's video on Florida and St. Petersburg, which is just 15 minutes away from here, in the eighties, used to advertise itself as the city of mounds because there were so many ancient mounds in St. Pete.

• 2:22:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:24Danny Jones?

  But I guess they're like mostly shell.

• 2:22:26Speaker 03

  That's one of them. That's, that's one of them. And I've found, I've found many others like that. That's Tony's Mound.

• 2:22:32Danny Jones?

  Tony's Circle Mound. Whoa, it looks like some sort of alien thing.

• 2:22:35Speaker 03

  Yes, it, it really does. And, um, they're, they're all over Florida and I've found them just hidden underneath like the, basically, I mean,

• 2:22:44Danny Jones?

  Where is that now exactly?

• 2:22:46Speaker 03

  So that's in, um, southeastern Florida and it's, um,

• 2:22:49Danny Jones?

  That looks like the Nazca line, like some Nazca shit.

• 2:22:53Speaker 03

  It's crazy, huh? So, uh, it's in, it's in southeastern Florida and it's, it's basically it's this like pocket of, of preserved land. Um, that's, uh, it's owned, it's owned by one individual and there's a few other geoglyphs, uh, that are on them. So that's like a mound site, but it's also a geoglyph site where they're making ge- glyphs out of the ground, right? And so there's a, there's a massive highway that like cuts directly through where the ancient site used to be because the mounds run all the way up to the highway and they're cut off by the highway. On the other side of that is a man-made reservoir where they like, they lowered the ground level to create a reservoir that's vastly larger than just the little piece of the

• 2:23:35Speaker 03

  archaeological site that you can see. So you can see the other vast majority of what must have been an archaeological site was just literally scooped, scooped out and turned into a massive reservoir. And, uh, man, I've found, Florida was, was where I've, uh, I started on the, uh, the Apalachicola River in the Panhandle and, um, and, uh, I started finding a bunch of mound sites along, along that river. And I reached out to, this is when I knew I was really on to something. Um, I reached out to the head professor, uh, archaeological professor at, I think it's the University of Southern Florida, um, whatever school is the Bull.

• 2:24:15Danny Jones?

  USF, yeah.

• 2:24:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I reached out to who was the head archaeologist at the time, maybe they still are today, and asked them, and cause they had studied this area specifically. And I asked them if they knew about these sites. And I was, um, and I was talking to them about, and they had this like really jaded attitude. They were very rude. And, and I started, you know, I just thought that maybe they'd be flattered that someone was interested in their work.

• 2:24:41Danny Jones?

  Ask him about that one that you showed me.

• 2:24:43Speaker 03

  Not, not that one. It was, it was, uh, in western Florida.

• 2:24:48Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:24:49Speaker 03

  And, um, and they were very, very rude to me. And, and, uh, they didn't really perk up or be any semblance of polite until they realized that like I had access to LiDAR in this area that they had been studying and I was going to show them something. And then even then they were a little nicer about it. But I had asked them, I was like, I was like, have you ever run LiDAR out there? Are you aware of these mounds that are like right here? And I was giving them the GPS coordinates. I was like explaining where it was in proximity to mounds that they had studied. And then they got interested and they're like, no, no, no, I haven't, I, oh, okay. So how do you have this LiDAR? And then I realized this isn't even something that a university is using. Blew my freaking mind. And so I, I never emailed them back. I never re-got in contact

• 2:25:31Speaker 03

  with them. And I was like, okay, I need to spend some time teaching myself how to, how to, um, how to analyze, uh, LiDAR and really learn like what's dredging, what are mound sites? And so, you know, it's been three and a half years of really teaching myself how to do it. Now I've partnered with a company called BaseMap and we got, uh, we got this project that I'm headed out to in a couple of days to do, um, in Louisiana. But Florida, Florida is where, is where it all started. And I found tons of mound sites in Florida that were undocumented, but the most, the highest density that I found was in Louisiana. I found some in Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia, the Savannah River, um, uh, some in North Carolina, like one in my parents'

• 2:26:13Speaker 03

  hometown that was in the middle of a neighborhood. Crazy. Um, and, uh, so I found one in Louisiana that we are going to check out next week from a distance. We're gonna fly a drone over it. Um, I can't actually walk on it. I got the contact of the, uh, let's, let's go to the photo. So, um, it's worth going through these now. Um, it's one that says archaic, question mark?

• 2:26:40Speaker 03

  So this is a, this is like a, we used, um, an AI artist, like a professional AI artist. My friend Will, um, at Incredible History, he recreate, this is Poverty Point, he recreated this. This is just kind of an idea of how we're gonna try to visually recreate these ancient sites when now that we can make 3D models of them from the LiDAR remote.

• 2:26:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:26:58Speaker 03

  So, uh, it's, it's one of the ones that says LiDAR. Maybe it's LiDAR number two.

• 2:27:04Speaker 03

  So not that one. There we go. Yeah. So, uh, can we go full screen on it? So this one is in Louisiana. Um, I've got to be very discreet about the way I, I talk about these. I can't tell you the river or anything like that. You really have to be, um, discreet about these things.

• 2:27:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:27:22Speaker 03

  Um, but, so the long, like if you measure this long ways, like from the two distant, uh, points of the circled enclosure, this is 970 yards long.

• 2:27:34Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Almost four football fields long with massive, uh, pyramids. If I had, if I had the ruler up and I can measure the elevation.

• 2:27:42Danny Jones?

  970 yards?

• 2:27:43Speaker 03

  970 yards.

• 2:27:44Danny Jones?

  It's almost 10 football fields.

• 2:27:48Danny Jones?

  Football field is 100 yards, right?

• 2:27:49Speaker 03

  Four, yeah, yeah. Wow. That's that, yeah. I, I think earlier I said four football fields long. You're right. It's almost 10 football fields long. Holy shit. Yeah. So there is nothing. I reached out to, um, an archaeologist that has the GIS mapping survey of Louisiana. They were not aware of this. Ended up getting on the phone with them. They were so glad that, that somebody was, was using this. I, I, uh, I gave them, you know, the, uh, the LiDAR program and I'm working with them on, on, you know, finding more things. And so this is, this is basically a, um, a, a top-down, very low resolution, uh, LiDAR scan.

• 2:28:28Danny Jones?

  And on the left is what it looks like from a satellite?

• 2:28:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:28:31Danny Jones?

  Can you zoom out a little bit, Steve? Wow.

• 2:28:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um,

• 2:28:37Danny Jones?

  Where's that pointy part though? Like it looks like a, like a volcano or something coming out of it.

• 2:28:42Speaker 03

  Hey Steve, can we, uh, will you, we go back and forth through some of the other LiDAR scans?

• 2:28:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:28:49Speaker 04

  Oh, does it?

• 2:28:51Speaker 03

  Sorry. Um, okay. Yeah. Not that one. I'm sorry. It's this one right here. They're, they're very similar cause, cause this one is archaic as well. It's this one. Uh, cause one, for a second when we zoomed out and saw it from, from actual satellite imagery. So yeah, so it's farmland now. Um, and it's being, it's being used by a, uh, man, he's like some, you know, uh, I don't even know. What do you call people?

• 2:29:18Danny Jones?

  So what do you think this was?

• 2:29:20Speaker 03

  Oh, this is a city.

• 2:29:22Danny Jones?

  This was an ancient city.

• 2:29:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So this one right here is 970 yards long. Um, and it's, it's farmland. Um, I tracked down last night, I tracked down the phone number, paid a stupid amount of money to one of these websites to figure out the guy who, uh, owns this, tracked, got his, uh, phone number and his email address and, and I called him and I was like, uh, I said, I said, hey man, this is a weird question. I'm a, I'm an independent, uh, anthropologist from, uh, from North Carolina. I'm doing a mound scan. You know, we're creating 3D models of, of sites in, in Louisiana. Um, and I said, uh, I was like, I was like, I was just curious. I mean, you know, I mean, you know that

• 2:30:03Speaker 03

  you have mounds on your property, right? And he's like, yeah. And I said, I said, I said, uh, I was like, I was like, man, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm not with a government organization, not with the university. I'm literally independent. Like I'm just by myself. I'm just interested in the site cause it's massive.

• 2:30:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:19Speaker 03

  And I said, I said, have you ever had anybody come try to talk to you about this archaeological site?

• 2:30:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:27Speaker 03

  And he goes, I, I said, how long have you lived on the land? And he said that, he said that it's inherited, like it's been in his family. And I said, I said, has anyone ever tried to come talk to you, uh, any professional archaeologists try to come talk to you about it? And he goes, uh, no, no. And I went, uh, okay. All right, man. Well, um,

• 2:30:45Speaker 03

  You know, I'm gonna be in the area. I'm gonna be coming right by there uh next week. If you'd be willing to just walk me across the site, I'd love to just get a sense of how big it is in person and and you know, just hear your experience with it. And he goes, he goes, oh, you know, man, I know that those are back there. Uh, you know, I I know that they're out there, but uh it's best that we we ought not do that. And I was like, I was like, all right, man. Are you sure? I mean, I get your hesitation, but you know, I'm not gonna publish the the location or anything like that. I'm not gonna say where it's at. And I was like, I was like, I just really like to see it and just, you know, I could maybe, I could send you a a LiDAR scan of your of your property. I could,

• 2:31:27Speaker 03

  I could tell you an approximation of how old it is. It's probably an incredibly ancient.

• 2:31:32Danny Jones?

  Probably increase the value of your property, you know, if you were sold.

• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he goes, he goes, oh, well, I appreciate that, but it's uh it's probably best that we ought not do that.

• 2:31:41Danny Jones?

  You don't want nothing to do with it.

• 2:31:42Speaker 03

  And I was like, I was like, uh, I was like, I was like, well, you know, man, I mean, judging by, you know, the the layout of the site, it's probably an archaic period site. It might be the oldest major site in in the state of Louisiana. And he goes, oh, yeah, I know they've been back there for a lot of years.

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• 2:33:00Speaker 03

  Hmm. And I was like, all right, man. Well.

• 2:33:04Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:33:05Speaker 03

  And that's it. You know, so so I'll never be able to step foot on this property. Um, but judging by the uh the the layout of the city itself, um, you know, over time, the the, we can call them the Mississippians, but the mound builder people, uh, they built their mound cities in different forms. And as we go through some of these LiDAR scans, you can see the different styles.

• 2:33:27Danny Jones?

  So the blue is an elevated mound?

• 2:33:29Speaker 03

  Yes, sir. Yeah.

• 2:33:30Danny Jones?

  And how how high roughly do you think it is?

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  Oh, I have the, I have the measurement. I don't want to get it wrong. Um, but they get.

• 2:33:37Danny Jones?

  Like ballpark?

• 2:33:39Speaker 03

  Those might be uh 15 or 20 meters tall. I mean, how?

• 2:33:43Danny Jones?

  And those those peaks, what are those peaks?

• 2:33:45Speaker 03

  So those are, all right. So what so what you're seeing is, you're seeing an entire raised platform. So this is all swampland, right? And so what they do is they they bring packed earth in and they build the land up inside the swamp and they pack it out and make it really, really firm. So that's that oval shaped.

• 2:34:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:34:03Speaker 03

  That's the platform. And all the little raised mounds you see on it, well, there used to be a wall that would go all the way around on on many of these that would kind of encircle and encase the site. And you see on the right side, that's a, that was a ramped gateway that would come up in where hundreds of people could walk inside the city at once. Can you see that on the right side? It's like a little ramp. And you have two gates and there'd be a wall surrounding it. And each one of the um, the areas where you can tell that it's rising up, those are basically earth in, they're pyramidal mounds that are built on the perimeter of the walls. So it's like a, imagine a oval shaped city that's that's, you know, basically uh raised up out of the out of the swamp.

• 2:34:44Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:34:45Speaker 03

  Oval shaped, has this giant ramp that comes in. You got these two, you know, probably gateways. There's a wall that comes around it. And then on top of the wall, there are more mounds. And then, you know, maybe, maybe on, maybe on that top one or or uh on any one of the sides, you know, who knows?

• 2:35:00Danny Jones?

  God, I wish we could go figure out how old that was.

• 2:35:01Speaker 03

  A king lived there. Uh, my guess, if you if you zoom out, I think I have a approximate date on there. This just by the construction of similar places.

• 2:35:09Danny Jones?

  Four to 3,000 B.C.

• 2:35:10Speaker 03

  I'd say four to 3,000 B.C. Yeah, archaic period. This is before farming was known to have existed in North America. Farming maybe existed already in uh in in Mexico, but as far as in the mound builder realm, agriculture did not exist yet, as far as they know. Somehow, some way, you would think that agriculture would be first and then you would build cities. But that's not, that's not what the evidence actually shows is that is that people were living in massive cities even when they were just foraging and hunting. You know why? Because the fucking abundance of the wildlife that used to be

• 2:35:50Speaker 03

  here. You didn't need to, you didn't need to farm. There's so much wildlife, millions of deer. When my great, great, great grandfather, um, he was an explorer of Texas in in 1839. He was a scout during the Texas Cherokee War. Um, and then he rose to like be a, he rose to be like the treasurer of Texas and everything. Um, cool guy. Uh,

• 2:36:19Speaker 03

  he writes in his journals that when he first arrived in Texas, there was an endless amount of whitetail deer and buffalo and wolves and wild cats. Endless amount. And that turkey and that turkeys and deer and buffalo were always within eyesight, no matter where you were. That's how much wildlife.

• 2:36:41Danny Jones?

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  That's how much wildlife used to be in in eastern North America. And so um, and so that's probably, you know, I don't know what forced people to start building cities in eastern North America, but the abundance of wildlife was so much that nobody needed to farm. You would, you would just, you would live in a city and you'd have hunting expeditions. You know, you'd probably send men out with their bows or.

• 2:37:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:07Speaker 03

  Get this, man. They were so good at using atlatls and spears with hunting, going all the way back to the Clovis people who came in with their spears. And I don't know when the atlatls, uh, you know what atlatl is. It's like the little, it's got a little handle on it and it holds the spear right here and you, it's got leverage and and basically you can throw a spear much farther than you.

• 2:37:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:27Speaker 03

  And much, with much more power than you actually could. And so they're using those. They're not even using the bow. They don't even, they they they almost definitely know what a bow is, but they don't even use it. Maybe because of tradition, or maybe they're just so successful at hunting in the in the traditional way that had been around since the Ice Age, that they basically reject the use of the bow. The bow shows up in like South America and in Central America before it does. And um, they, these people only started using the bow like 700 years ago. Yeah. So so they're so successful at just hunting the wild game that uh, you know, they don't need to farm. They don't need to raise corn. It's.

• 2:38:07Danny Jones?

  Crazy, dude.

• 2:38:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's wild. So so then they're building these massive cities. Um, and uh, and so what you're seeing right here is really just the cultural center. It's just the hub of what would have been an archaic city.

• 2:38:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Speaker 03

  But you would have had, you know, thousands of other people living right around in in the general proximity of of this area. It's crazy. You know, another thing that's really interesting about this is that in Louisiana and throughout all the mound builder world, the the range of um, so my friend, uh, Jeffrey Lewis, who's a archaeologist in Arkansas, he's um, kind of been an advisor for me on my, on this uh, LiDAR expedition, mound builder expedition that we're doing, or this mission that we're doing. It's gonna take years to do all this. Um, but he's been, he'd been my advisor about this. And uh, we spent a lot of time talking and he's enthusiastic about it because he's like, he's like, you

• 2:39:03Speaker 03

  know, just over the course of four days, as you're going and scanning these places, you're covering probably 6,000 plus years of history. Um, and what's weird is that, you know, the the natives are are all very traditional. Like in the Maya world, I mean, God, the the the importance of keeping up with tradition is crazy. Um, even so much to the point that when they were building stone pyramids, they would build the stone pyramid and craft it in such a way that it looked like a thatch hut. Like, that's how important it was with keeping up with the ancient, archaic, primordial times of these people. Even when they're not building things out of wooden thatch, they make it look like it was in stone. It's crazy. So um, these people would live along the same river for

• 2:39:46Speaker 03

  6,000 years, right? But different groups come in, different cultures and everything. But what's odd is that not all the time will a culture come in and find a giant abandoned city like this and then just inhabit it in the way that uh, you know, some some other cultures around the world would.

• 2:40:02Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:40:03Speaker 03

  What would happen is just like 10 miles away, they would just build a different city. And they would leave this one alone, almost like it was uh, you ever heard the story of of um, of when the first settlers were coming through the mound builder world? They would talk to the natives and be like, who built this massive earthwork? And then they would say, the gods did it. Um, you know, I think, I think Graham has used this in one of his books, you know, just alluding to the fact that, maybe he did it in that book he wrote about the Americas. But he uses it to allude to the idea that uh, um, the Americas are much older than people realize. Um, and so what will happen is, is this mound builder culture went on for so long. I mean, technically, it's older than the established date of the of the great pyramids by far, right?

• 2:40:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:40:47Speaker 03

  Um, it's one of the oldest things in all of the Americas. I mean, there's not really, um.

• 2:40:54Speaker 03

  There's one site that I can think of in South America that's as old as this. So like Louisiana.

• 2:40:58Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:40:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So like Louisiana could be the could be the Fertile Crescent of North America. Right? It could be where civilization was born. But it's not it's not currently what's thought right now. They think it's is the Olmecs is that that's the Fertile Crescent of North America, where that civilization was born. But, you know, it could be Louisiana.

• 2:41:17Danny Jones?

  But USF doesn't even have access to any of this LiDAR?

• 2:41:22Speaker 03

  Well, USF would do it in in in Western Florida.

• 2:41:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:41:28Speaker 03

  I reach out to a professor at Tulane, which is in New Orleans.

• 2:41:31Danny Jones?

  Did he have this stuff?

• 2:41:32Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. They they have done their own LiDAR scans, but it's like when they personally commissioned a LiDAR pilot 10 years ago when it had to be on a plane and not a drone. I think they've done some stuff with drone, like they they did Poverty Point. They're major cultural centers. But as far as exploration, looking for new sites, it doesn't really exist anymore. There's not, you know, nobody, nobody is, is, you know, I could.

• 2:42:00Danny Jones?

  Why is that? Not enough money?

• 2:42:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, the funding's drying up, especially I don't mean to get political at all. But like even, you know, especially during this administration, like like archaeology, like archaeology is not a top priority.

• 2:42:12Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:42:13Speaker 03

  So, and what I mean, what our wildlands are not a top priority.

• 2:42:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:42:18Speaker 03

  Either. So, you know, archaeology is kind of suffering right now. Maybe it'll be better, maybe it'll be better in the future, but, you know, but yeah, there's just really not enough funding. There's not even enough people. Get this. In that area, the Gila that I was in, a culture that is potentially the northern rim, although it's disputed, it's potentially the northern edge of Mesoamerica, a culture, the Mogollon, the people that I was investigating when we were in the Gila, are potentially culturally related and economically tied into the Aztecs, to the Maya, like that world of ancient Mexico and Central America may extend all the way up into New Mexico. All right, there are only three active archaeologists that study

• 2:43:03Speaker 03

  that cultural region, just three.

• 2:43:06Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 2:43:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:07Danny Jones?

  Well, that used to be Mexico proper, that area, right?

• 2:43:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, there's a, there's a place called,

• 2:43:16Speaker 03

  oh, what is it? There's a, there's a, there's a, there's a pueblo in site right in that area. I can't think of what it's called, but it's not that far from the actual Gila cliff dwelling monument. And and the modern day pueblo and people, they basically, you know, the native tribes in that area, they basically,

• 2:43:38Speaker 03

  I don't mean to use we use the word gatekeeper because that sounds harsh, more harsh than it is. But they basically have the on and off switch of what excavations happen. So, you know, me as a, let's just, you know, speak plainly as a white American archaeologist. If I was like, man, I really want to excavate this site because I really think it can, you know, open up our understanding of the northern edge of Mesoamerica. And who knows, maybe we can find more cultural artifacts here that show us that New Mexico should actually be included in the Mesoamerican, you know, sphere. Well, the local, the descendants of the Native Americans of that area, and in reality, it doesn't actually matter if they're the descendants of those people

• 2:44:21Speaker 03

  or if they come from like Apaches that came from a different area or whatever, you know. If as long as they're Native Americans, they basically have a say as to whether or not you can do that or not. And as of right now, like the switch turned off. There's there are not excavations happening. So all archaeologists are doing there is, like you were saying, conservation, like it's just all about conserving the sites, protecting the sites, and just keeping everything in order, right? There's nothing more happening.

• 2:44:49Danny Jones?

  Don't upset the apple cart.

• 2:44:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and that, maybe all that makes it sound more

• 2:44:58Speaker 03

  malicious or malignant than it really is, but like, that's just the fact of how of how it's happening out there.

• 2:45:03Danny Jones?

  It's just stagnant.

• 2:45:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, there's just not anything happening. You know, the other thing that's a that's a real tragedy too is there are amazing mummies that have been found in West Texas, 6,000 year old mummies like pharaohs that have been found in caves in West Texas of the these cultures that would mummify people and then bury them in the mountainsides. You literally cannot find a photo of that mummy. You as me as an individual, an independent anthropologist, I cannot study ancient mummification in West Texas because it is forbidden by the modern descendants of the natives of West Texas to be able to view the remains of a Native American, right?

• 2:45:43Danny Jones?

  When were those those mummies excavated?

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  In the 1900s, I am, I think that some of them may have been excavated in the 50s because they were on display in a in a hotel lobby for a long time.

• 2:45:54Danny Jones?

  And what is the reason they give why they won't let anyone study them? Or see them?

• 2:45:59Speaker 03

  Because it's disrespectful to the to the native people, you know, they, you know, that's, that's their reason. I

• 2:46:09Speaker 03

  I guess I get where they're coming from, but at the same time, like when the, when a person is thousands of years old,

• 2:46:18Speaker 03

  you know, the the modern day Native Americans that are living in that area probably cannot tie their tribal lineage to those people. You know what I'm saying? Like you're talking, we're talking about archaic Indians, like.

• 2:46:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:46:32Speaker 03

  These are, these are not even, we don't even know, we don't even have a perceivable idea of the name of these people. You know what I'm saying?

• 2:46:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's too long ago.

• 2:46:41Speaker 03

  They live back in like the basically the time of the dinosaurs, right? It's just so long ago that it's like totally obscure. And so, you know, the during, like we were talking about earlier during the colonial eras, the natives get pushed around. They get pushed all over the US like that, you know, the amount of natives that we dumped in Oklahoma are like, hey, make it work, you know? And, you know, it's crazy. And so,

• 2:47:07Speaker 03

  and so a lot of natives have been displaced. And so I, you know, I guess I, if you, if you were to study the entire history of colonial Native America from their perspective, you would be very sympathetic to the idea that, okay, maybe they they do have some say about how their, you know, other Native American tribes, ancient, you know, artifacts should be treated. But then at the same time, logically, it's like, well, you know, your people lived in Kentucky. This is in Texas. You know what I'm saying? So it's, it's, it's a, it's a double edged, very nuanced thing. But but it just sucks for people like me who, you know, I don't work for an institution. I'm not an employed anthropologist or anything like that. I just work for myself.

• 2:47:51Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm, I'm a part of the Maya Exploration Center with Dr. Barnhart. But that's, you know, that's still our own, like, independent organization. And so, you know, for me to make discoveries, for me to widen our understanding of the ancient world, you know, I I do not excavate sites. I, you know, as of right now, I that's, that's fine with me. I shouldn't be excavating sites. I wasn't trained that way. And so, but what I can do is I can have access to LiDAR like this. Because of my YouTube channel, I can fund little excursions to go and LiDAR scan these sites and and help make 3D models of them. I can partner with companies like BaseMap to do that.

• 2:48:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:48:34Speaker 03

  I can, I can study, I can spend so much of my time studying artifacts that have already been found and excavated, but today they're just sitting in little showrooms and nobody studies them. And I can come in with my own perspective where I say, okay, I'm going to go throughout the entire mound builder world and I'm going to look for anything that could possibly resemble the existence of jaguars here in ancient times. I've done this. I'm very interested in in the North American Jaguar. And I have found and pieced together little pieces of history from whether it's, you know, archival accounts of, you know, explorers, European explorers going through the Americas. Or I've been in a showroom of some dusty, small podunk town

• 2:49:19Speaker 03

  that's got some mound builder artifacts on display. And I'm like, that looks just like a cat and it's got spots on it, you know? And so I take a photo of that. I go and learn more about it. So I can connect these dots of things that have already been excavated and that are on display. But there's so much more that is not on display because the living tribes say, no. You know, this was found in a tomb. It can't be put on display. This is found in a burial site. It can't be put on display. This is a mummified body. It can't be put on display. There's just so much that you can, as a researcher, you cannot have access to. And in reality, I don't know where they sit. I don't know what kind of storage rooms.

• 2:49:57Danny Jones?

  I wonder if they've sold any of them.

• 2:50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have.

• 2:50:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure, you know, so there's, there's, you know, I'm, I'm, I live

• 2:50:10Speaker 03

  not far from Cherokee County, North Carolina. That's like one of the wealthiest places in the whole country. Those are some wealthy natives that live there. And and, you know, some of them are, some of them are very nice people. I love going there and hanging out there. I like talking to the natives and hearing their stories. A distant relative of mine, James Mooney, my mom's last name is, she's Hope Mooney. James Mooney is the most prolific explorer and scholar of the Cherokee world. Bar none, it's not even comparable. There isn't a second guy. And I love hearing the stories of those people, but

• 2:50:50Speaker 03

  you know, you also hear about the corruption that's there because of the massive casino that's there. And the town is super nice, right? So, you know, there, and you hear in so many reservations that the money doesn't go where it's supposed to, you know? So it's not like, it's not like these people are unique in their corruption. It's just all humans that are in positions of power and influence and leverage. They use it for their own benefit, right?

• 2:51:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:14Speaker 03

  Doing the same thing anybody else would do in that situation.

• 2:51:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:17Speaker 03

  So those are the obstacles that I have to deal with.

• 2:51:22Danny Jones?

  What other interesting places like this have you found in North America?

• 2:51:25Speaker 03

  Oh, man, I, let's, let's.

• 2:51:27Danny Jones?

  Are there any of them that you have called up the people who own the land and they have let you go and check it out?

• 2:51:36Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:51:36Danny Jones?

  No? Fuck.

• 2:51:38Speaker 03

  Not yet. Um, let's, let's go through these though, these, uh, these LIDAR.

• 2:51:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah, go through the LIDAR one, two and three, four.

• 2:51:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so there's Epstein.

• 2:51:46Danny Jones?

  That's Epstein's, we already looked at that one. Go down.

• 2:51:52Speaker 03

  Oh wait, well, those are actually, we can talk about these, these are these Jaguar Gorgets that were found, um, in Missouri from about 250 B.C. So these depict Jaguars.

• 2:52:00Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, look at that.

• 2:52:01Speaker 03

  Living all the way up in, all the way up in Missouri.

• 2:52:03Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 2:52:04Speaker 03

  Now, the traditional interpretation of this is that this probably was a guy who, um, you know, a wealthy person would have something like this made for them. So what an archaeologist would interpret this as is a wealthy guy who traveled down to Mesoamerica and maybe saw a Jaguar, heard about one, and he wanted this made for him, whatever, whatever. That's not what it was, bro. There were fucking Jaguars in Missouri, uh, in 250 B.C. Absolutely for sure. There's this myth, I won't derail on this because I want to get to the LIDAR stuff, but there's this myth of this thing called the underwater panther, uh, which is like a well-known, uh, aspect of, of the mound builder world. It's just one of their

• 2:52:44Speaker 03

  mythical creatures and it's, it's this panther that it exists in both worlds, it exists in the upper world and it can descend down into the water of the lower world and, you know, there, there's all different aspects of what the underwater panther is. And, but what people will say is, oh, that's a, that's a eastern cougar. That's, that's a eastern cougar.

• 2:53:02Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:53:03Speaker 03

  Dude, it's not the fucking eastern cougar. It is a Jaguar. Like a Jaguar, if you look at the, um, if you look at, at, at what the Maya believed about the Jaguar, is that it was the king of the upper world and it was the king of the lower world. Why is that? Because Jaguars hunt on land and they also hunt underwater. They can hold their breath for like five minutes while they swim and chase down a caiman. They can wrestle with a crocodile under the water for several minutes before they finally crush its skull and drag it up out. They, they are awake in the day and the night and their spots are black and yellow, right? So the, the daytime and the nighttime. And so all, all the aspects of the Jaguar is that it's the king of the day and night. It's the king of the upper world,

• 2:53:48Speaker 03

  which is land, the lower world, which is inside of the water. That's, that is ubiquitous from Mesoamerica down to South America. So when I'm in the mound builder world, mound builder world, and I hear about the underwater panther, which is this panther that would go and be under the water and it come up and be on the upper world, that's not a cougar. Cougars are not diving into the water. A Jaguar will go sit up in a tree and they've got like polarized lenses on their eyes and they can see everything, you know, under the water.

• 2:54:15Danny Jones?

  Under the water. No shit.

• 2:54:17Speaker 03

  They'll dive, oh yeah, we could pull up a video of this. They'll dive from like 20 feet down, straight down, and then they'll crash into the water and swim under the water with their eyes open and chase down a caiman and bite it and crush its head. They can do, they can be underwater for like three minutes. You would think surely that caiman just killed that Jaguar. Boom, it'll emerge out of the water with the Jaguar or with the caiman in its mouth. So it's, it's the king of the Americas.

• 2:54:42Danny Jones?

  That's crazy that it has polarized filters on its eyes so it can see through the water.

• 2:54:47Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:54:48Danny Jones?

  I did not know that.

• 2:54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you know what's crazy is, is it-

• 2:54:51Danny Jones?

  I wonder how many animals have that?

• 2:54:53Speaker 03

  I don't know, probably a lot. Um, and so it, it learned to do this. It was all forced to do this because the Jaguar was actually a small cat during the Ice Age. So think about, think about the saber tooth cats.

• 2:55:04Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:55:04Speaker 03

  Um, and then, uh, so saber tooth cats hunted, yeah, saber tooth cats hunted

• 2:55:13Speaker 03

  at night in the forests and the American lion hunted during the day on the plains. Okay. Um, so you have the smaller Jaguar that's alive at the same time. The Jaguar is not as big as the saber tooth or, or the American lion. So it has to learn how to adapt. So what it does is it would hunt on the plains at night when, when the American lion was asleep. So it's hunting on the, on, you know, in the open plains. It's avoiding the American lion. It doesn't want to compete with it. And then in the forest, it's hunting at night while the saber tooth cat is asleep. And so one of the ways it could learn to compete and survive was by getting, was by climbing up in the trees to avoid that cat,

• 2:55:56Speaker 03

  which could be its predator. Cause saber tooth cats, I, I think that they cannot climb up in trees, like they just judge by their anatomy that that's probably not something that they did. Maybe they're wrong, I don't know. But, um, but one of the ways that they survive was by hunting in water because the land game was so competitive. So they climb up in the trees and then they jump down in the water and they learn all these skills and they survive the Ice Age and become the predominant, uh, feline of all of the Americas. And what's interesting is that Jaguar is also the most American cat. Uh, as far as I know, it is actually the first cat that arrived in the Americas, like four million years ago or so. It wandered in from, from Asia when-

• 2:56:37Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:56:38Speaker 03

  When, uh, the Bering Strait was, or Beringia was, was a lot warmer. Um, I, I imagine it was still very cold, but like four million years ago it wandered in. So it's the first cat in the Americas. All the other cats come later. They push it to adapt to new skills to survive. All those cats die other than the cougar and then it's just the cougar and the Jaguar left. So the Jaguar survives and it's still, you know, so it's our most American animal. And one of my thoughts is like, you know, we have, in, in the United States, we have our iconic animals, right? We have a moose and a, we have a moose and a, in the bald eagle and-

• 2:57:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:57:16Speaker 03

  The grizzly bear and, you know, except the cougar and everything, but the Jaguar is one of those animals and it should be. It should be celebrated as one of our animals in the United States. There's a long history behind it.

• 2:57:27Danny Jones?

  Wow, dude.

• 2:57:28Speaker 03

  Anyways, yeah, it's really, really fascinating. I'm gonna write a book-

• 2:57:31Danny Jones?

  That is super fascinating.

• 2:57:31Speaker 03

  I'm gonna write a book someday called, uh, called American Tiger and it's gonna be about the, the history of the Jaguar in the U.S. Cause it's vast and very, very dense. And stretches back to these guys. So this right here is, um, this is actually a site in Arkansas. Um, this is actually a site in Arkansas. Now it's disputed. This may be a known site. Uh, can you see on the river on the, on the bottom right side where you can see a little blue that's been like cut off slightly? Uh, go, go up with the cursor. It, it's, it's there. Yeah.

• 2:58:05Danny Jones?

  On the edge, right there.

• 2:58:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, right there, right there. So there is an old photo taken in 1910 that might be of that mound that's cut in half, but there was never LIDAR and it was never, the site was never fully excavated or surveyed or mapped or anything. So this imagery of this site is completely brand new. When I came across this, well, this is, this is the only image of this site from bird's eye view that, that gives you an idea of the formation of it. Uh, it's owned by a timber logging company. Um, and I think they obviously know that there is something out there, but it's never been, um, it's never been explored. And my friend, uh, my friend Jeffrey, who's an archaeologist in Arkansas, uh, he, he and I were going through it and he was like, he's like, that, this might be this, this

• 2:58:50Speaker 03

  site that was only photographed once, like a hundred and 16 years ago, uh, on the side. And so he, he thinks that by the formation of it, that it's a Caddo site, which the Caddo are, um, you know, that hits close to home for me. I grew up in East Texas. So that's our, that's our local, you know, tribe. Um, so he assumes that by the, uh, by the formation of the mound site, just like the, the, the, the architecture there, that it's, um, I mean, the, I guess it's, I guess it would be late Mississippian or mid Mississippian, but even though the Caddo are like west of Mississippi, it's a whole different thing. But, um, yeah, so there's like a highway in the middle of it and there's a little, there's a little circular platform that would have been in the middle of town.

• 2:59:33Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, the cir- yeah, look at that circle.

• 2:59:35Speaker 03

  Now here's the thing about it though, is that what it looks like that little, that little depression highway, like you can tell that it leads to that, you can tell it leads to that important pyramid there. Now what's interesting is that, that river that cuts through there probably was not there-

• 2:59:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:59:52Speaker 03

  A thousand years ago.

• 2:59:53Danny Jones?

  Which is why that, that one mound is cut off, right?

• 2:59:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So we're probably missing some element of, of why that little road is there, um, and what else, what else was in this, uh, city. But yeah, man, I mean, this is a place that's never been excavated. I don't think it's been, you know, it hasn't been deeply researched because there, I don't think there is a survey of this site or a drawn map from, you know, 80 years ago or so, like there is with so many mound sites.

• 3:00:18Danny Jones?

  And the stories, like, like the, the rulers or the kings would live on top of those pyramids, those pyramid mounds?

• 3:00:23Speaker 03

  At many, at many places, yes. Um, you know, there, there are so many levels to the mound builder world. Like it begins with the, well, I was gonna say it begins with the Adena, but it, but it really doesn't. It begins, um, you know, the, okay, so the mound builder world is so much more dense and hard to comprehend than I think any region of the Americas because of how decimated it's been. Um, you know, it's, it's the most settled place in the Americas basically is the east coast of, of North America. So so much of it was just literally obliterated for farmland. Like in, um, in Illinois, dude, I've found thousands of mound sites that are just like farmed over, you know, farmland,

• 3:01:08Speaker 03

  you know, where it's just like the place was slowly eroded by tractors over the course of 300 years, you know, people plowing through it and everything. So, um, it's so difficult to understand, but the, the, the tradition of building mounds begins sometime in the, in what we call the archaic period, which is, you know, let's say 4,000 B.C. or so. It might even go back beyond that. Like, like at LSU, there's the disputed mounds that may be like 9,000 B.C. or 9,000 years old. It's crazy. Um, but, uh, so it begins, let's say safely, basically a hundred percent, 3,500 B.C. at a place called Watson Break, Louisiana. Um, I actually think that that was the, I actually think that that was the

• 3:01:51Speaker 03

  mound site that I, the very first one that we were looking at. That might be Watson Break. Uh, yeah. So it's this circular enclosure. This is, this is this archaic site. This is a famous place. Um, but this LIDAR does not exist anywhere else. This is my personal LIDAR of this site.

• 3:02:04Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 3:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you will not find-

• 3:02:07Danny Jones?

  What is that snake? Is that, is that a river? That purple snake thing?

• 3:02:10Speaker 03

  Ooh, dude. Okay, yes, it's a river. All right, let's go through, okay, you'll see, you'll see one that says serpent. Um, that's, that's in labeled. Um, so this is the very first time I'm talking about this.

• 3:02:24Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:02:24Speaker 03

  Um, there's, there has to be a lot that has to be done about this.

• 3:02:32Speaker 03

  But our LiDAR team, BaseMap, who have, they have scanned a lot of territory, you know, hundreds of square, thousands of square miles of territory across, you know, the, the, the western hemisphere. Um, I found this depression near Moundville, Alabama. Um, and it reminded me of something that's called an antiglio, which is a mound that is ma, that is like, um, or I'm sorry, it reminded me of, of a geoglyph, uh, like serpent mound in, in Ohio, right? But this is a depression. So what that would mean is that it's an antiglio, which is like a depressed, uh, a depressed geoglyph. So it's an image that's basically

• 3:03:17Speaker 03

  carved into the ground. Okay. There's no water in this. It's not actually connected to that river creek right there. And it's clearly in the shape of a serpent with like, with like its head spitting something out and a tail right there. And, um,

• 3:03:34Speaker 03

  eventually, when I get, uh, we met the landowners here, you know, I was wrong. I did not personally meet these guys, but BaseMap, um, uh, they went out there on my behalf and, and scanned this. And then I'm gonna go out there, uh, following this.

• 3:03:48Danny Jones?

  With a drone?

• 3:03:49Speaker 03

  Um, no, well, yes, they went out there and scanned it themselves with a drone. There's a 3D model of this that, that's being, uh, processed and created right now. Yeah. And, um, and so this guy is the only person that our team has met that was like, he was like, "Yeah, man, come on my property." Like, he wanted to see all of it.

• 3:04:05Danny Jones?

  What, what does he use the property for? Farming?

• 3:04:09Speaker 03

  I don't know. I think it's just like backwoods property. I don't think, I don't know that he does too much to it, but he was all in on it. And so they went and looked at it and, and my guys at BaseMap, they're like, "Yeah, man, that doesn't look like anything natural I've ever seen." And all these guys do is scan natural stuff. So I say all that to say, I say all that to say, eventually, when I get an archaeologist out there, when I get a geologist out there, uh, my hunch is that that is going to be an entirely new category of ancient sites that nobody else has ever identified before. It's not even a category that exists in the mound builder world. Is that these, so rather than like, you know, let's say, let's say serpent mound, you're building it up to make it look like a snake, you're now depressing it to accomplish the same thing.

• 3:04:51Speaker 03

  Does that mean it was filled up with water? Are you looking for the reflections? What are you trying to do? Obviously, we don't know. Um, but, but these antiglios, these depressed, uh, figures being carved into the ground in the eastern side of the US is not a known category of, of archaeological ancient sites. It's not, it's not a known category. They've never found one. They've never found one because they're underneath the trees. They're, you can't even identify them. Like, if you're walking around, you, there's literally no way you would perceive that it's there other than by LiDAR.

• 3:05:23Danny Jones?

  That's fucking crazy.

• 3:05:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so I, so I have been scouring the eastern part of the US, looking for more of these. And, uh, so far, this is the only one that I've found. And it's probably not a coincidence that it's at Moundville, which is...

• 3:05:38Danny Jones?

  So when you get there, what will you do physically?

• 3:05:41Speaker 03

  I physically will not do anything. I'll have, I'll have, uh, you know, an archaeologist come out and basically they will test the soil and see if that, if it was packed, you know, intentionally, you know, they, they have a whole processes that they can do to basically, like, they can be like, "Yep, people were here, um, and created this." And so you dig down, you look at this, you look at the, the layers of the dirt and, and any trained archaeologist, which I'm an anthropologist, I study how people live, right? Um, these guys study dirt and what's in the ground. They can tell like that, whether or not it's man-made or not.

• 3:06:15Danny Jones?

  Geez, that's so cool, dude.

• 3:06:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, so if that's done, dude, that'll be in like some kind of, I mean, not, I, I'm, I'm speaking metaphorically, but it would be in like some kind of...

• 3:06:24Danny Jones?

  Oh man, I can't wait to hear what happens. When are you, when, when are you going? Do you know when, roughly?

• 3:06:27Speaker 03

  Uh, Moundville is gonna be within the next six months. So the first, so the first, um, you know, it's really just a matter of me, of me getting all the people together and then, and then booking it. The hardest, the hardest, you know, basically what I do is wrangling people and getting people together and making it all work. Um, so the first part of our LiDAR mission of the mound builder world starts in two days in Louisiana. We start in New Orleans and we go up to Poverty Point and back, basically the state line of Arkansas and back down. Um, and then the next thing will be, uh, Moundville. Um, my friend, uh, my friend Jeffrey, he was talking to me about Moundville, and I don't mean to misquote him, but he said something that blew my mind. I've never like really thoroughly

• 3:07:11Speaker 03

  picked his brain about this, but he was telling me like, there's some dark shit going on at Moundville. Like, you know, these people were very, very sophisticated. Um, if, if we can, you could, they probably have LiDAR in Moundville and you can actually see the expanse of it. Um, I've got LiDAR of it too. I just...

• 3:07:27Danny Jones?

  What kind of dark shit does he think was going on there?

• 3:07:29Speaker 03

  Okay. I don't know exactly what he, what he meant by this. And I, and it, I don't know exactly what he meant by this, but he said, uh, he said, he said, "I think that they were trying to open up a portal." And I was like, I was like, "Wait, what?" And I was like, and, and we didn't harp on this because we had so many other things to talk about. I don't know exactly what he meant by that. I'm not saying he, the guy's not crazy. He's a fucking legit archaeologist. Um, and, uh, but he just said, he just said, "I think some dark shit was going on up there." Like, they were trying to open up a portal. And, uh, and he and I just agreed, we'd talk about that again in the future.

• 3:08:04Danny Jones?

  He didn't expand upon that at all?

• 3:08:06Speaker 03

  No, because we, we, I was, I was basically going through all of this with him and I wasn't actually talking about, our conversation was not about Moundville. It was about many other things. Moundville was just like a little side tangent and that seemed like opening up a giant can of worms. And we were already like two hours into a meeting and it was something that he and I'll pick up on. It, when, when I go have dinner with him in Arkansas, I'm gonna be like, "All right, tell me what you meant by open up a portal." Because I don't think he literally means, actually, I don't know what he, I don't know what he means, but, uh...

• 3:08:39Danny Jones?

  I need to know if they were opening portals in Alabama 6,000 years ago.

• 3:08:42Speaker 03

  Dude, you know, uh, he's one of these archaeologists that are like really open to, he's got some YouTube videos and stuff, like really good ones on Poverty Point. He'd be a cool, he and other guys like him would be like a cool guy to like sit down and just fucking, just pelt the guy with questions. You know what I mean? Especially about the mound builder world, man. Yeah, especially about the, uh, he would do it. He's, um, he's like 37, young guy, uh, very well spoken, like really, I mean, crazy, he's got a PhD.

• 3:09:10Danny Jones?

  This is fascinating, man. And I'm glad that, I'm glad that you guys are really doing, I'm really glad that you guys are doing this because no one else is focusing, at least that I'm aware of, on the Americas as much as you are, like with this LiDAR stuff. And like the, the academic mainstream archaeologists don't seem to be interested.

• 3:09:26Speaker 03

  Well, they are, but they, um, you know, a massive advantage that I have is funding. You know, I, my, my, my channel can...

• 3:09:36Danny Jones?

  You can self-fund, yeah. You can self-fund. You're not reliant on an institution.

• 3:09:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. I, I do not have to, um, you know, I do not have to appeal to anybody to do what I want to do. And, and the way that the laws are set up right now, um, you know, if I have a LiDAR drone and like, say you own a property and, and, uh, and it's got a mound site on it and you're like, "Fuck you. You cannot come to my site. You can't, you can't come to my archaeological site, you know. Uh, I'll never allow you on it." I can go, "All right, well, I'm still gonna LiDAR scan it." And that's fully legal.

• 3:10:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:10:11Speaker 03

  So I can...

• 3:10:11Danny Jones?

  You'd be like the guy in Giza who scanned the pyramid without their permission.

• 3:10:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:10:16Danny Jones?

  You don't own the skies, motherfucker.

• 3:10:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So, so you know, I, I get to be a little bit of a, I'm, I'm not an outlaw, but I'm like a, I'm like a cowboy archaeologist, explorer, anthropologist, right? I just like, I kind of just bootstrap it together and, and figure it out. And it's taken me years to figure out that, you know, the, you know, one of the things that I, that was really hard for me when I was talking about, you know, I was in the alternate space, whatever, you know, you're trying to find your voice, like, you know, who are you gonna be? What, what route are you gonna take? How are you gonna do something that actually means anything? Because, I mean, just being real, like, how many people are in that, are in that space that just, you know, just copy word for word what other people have said in their YouTube videos and just say it in a slightly different way? And, and

• 3:11:01Speaker 03

  they're not actually studying anything. They're not actually doing anything. They are using the ancient world to ingratiate themselves. You know, that happens a lot. People hijacking, you know, hustling ancient cultures and everything. And so I, for years, man, I was just trying to figure out like, you know, who am I, what am I gonna do? Um, and so for a little while, I was like, you know, obsessed with the Greeks and, and I was actually gonna, um, I got accepted into, uh, the American University of Athens and, uh, and I was going to, the day I was supposed to put in my tuition, I had this like overwhelming feeling. It's only happened to me, uh, two times in my life. The first time was when I, was when

• 3:11:41Speaker 03

  I needed to choose to, um, like fully commit my life to being with my wife. Um, and the second one was, uh, to not send the tuition into this school in Athens. And, and I just had this overwhelming feeling that was like, you're, you come from a lineage, uh, you, you, you, I mean, I was born into like a pioneer family of the United States. Um, you know, like my family settled the Smoky Mountains. They settled and, you know, my great, great, great grandfather built part of Texas. And, um,

• 3:12:18Speaker 03

  And so, you know, I just felt like I was turning away from like everything that was me, right? And when I was in college studying anthropology, like I was flunking out of school, I had like a 1.7 GPA. The dean of the anthropology department like begrudgingly let me in because he thought I wrote a good, you know, extracurricular essay about Amazonians and how they disappeared. And he saw I was actually passionate about this, so he let me in. And then, you know, after that, I made my relationship with Dr. Barnhart. It was like the Americas opened up to me, you know, and people wanted to hear me talk about the Americas. And I was like battling that. And I just fully committed to it after that. It was, it was clear as day.

• 3:12:59Speaker 03

  And, and I've just found like, you know, I've found like my purpose in really highlighting the world of the Americas. And that is my lane. And luckily enough, like I've removed myself from the fucking battlegrounds of, you know, social media, archaeology, and I'm just so, you know, me and Dr. Barnhart are out on our own island, like studying the Americas. And, and, you know, he studies early pre-Columbian stuff, like really ancient times. And I have really enjoyed also studying that, but also studying the contact period and studying the accounts of the first explorers that are pushing into the Americas and basically seeing a world that is about to vanish, right?

• 3:13:42Speaker 03

  Like they, that, that John Lawson coming in through the forests of North Carolina and he sees that, he sees Jaguars that are out there. The next explorers that will come in will not see the Jaguars because the, all the prey species, the bison, the elk, the deer.

• 3:13:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:13:57Speaker 03

  They're all being eviscerated by the fur, by the fur trappers and the long hunters. And so the Jaguars have no prey left. And so they just disappear from the area and they move down further south. And so by studying that, you know, nobody had gone through John Lawson's logs.

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• 3:14:59Speaker 03

  In the entire history that they've existed and really extrapolated just the parts where he talks about the Jaguars that are side notes and create a new narrative of that and then publish it to the wider world. Nowadays, if you go on Facebook and there's a video about Jaguars, all the comments will be, oh, they were also in Appalachia, they were also in the Smoky Mountains, this, that and the other. You'll see hundreds of comments. Those literally came from the videos I made about that. I know, because that didn't culturally exist before. It like shifted the way people talked about Jaguars. And, you know, there's just like little gifts that I've been given of just my interest and millions of people found it interesting. And, and I've like listened to that, you know?

• 3:15:40Speaker 03

  I see people also being interested in these things that I'm interested in and, and accepting that rather than trying to fight it and be like, you know, this is my, this is the world that opened up to me and the Americas, just like my family that's always, you know, been here. This is like my responsibility to take on and, and teach more people about it and get them interested in it, you know?

• 3:16:01Danny Jones?

  Well, you're doing a fucking killer job, dude. I mean, you're definitely standing out from the crowd and I think following your gut was the right choice there because you're doing fucking amazing work, man.

• 3:16:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:16:13Danny Jones?

  This shit's really cool. It's been really cool to see you evolve from the first time that I met you three years ago. Or two and a half years ago, however long it was.

• 3:16:19Speaker 03

  Last month, I guess it'll be over three years ago.

• 3:16:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man.

• 3:16:23Speaker 03

  That's crazy, isn't it?

• 3:16:24Danny Jones?

  It's fucking wild.

• 3:16:25Speaker 03

  That's wild, man. Really crazy.

• 3:16:28Danny Jones?

  Thanks again, bro.

• 3:16:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. I can't believe, can't believe we've already done.

• 3:16:31Danny Jones?

  This is the third one we've done? Is that right?

• 3:16:33Speaker 03

  This is the third one, yeah. So I'll have to do more.

• 3:16:35Danny Jones?

  Fucking cool. Tell everyone about your YouTube channel and all the other fun stuff.

• 3:16:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can find me at, my, my YouTube is a little weird. So, you know, I talk about my family history a lot. I'm kind of having a personal, like quarter life crisis about this because originally my YouTube channel was, the, the name of my channel was Luke Caverns. So people would find me because I thought that like Reagan, you wouldn't be able to find it. You know, that's my government last name is Reagan. And, and then I was also worried at the time that like if people knew my family history, you know, like, you know, what if there's people who hate Ronald Reagan and they don't...

• 3:17:09Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, Ronald Reagan's your like, what is he?

• 3:17:11Speaker 03

  He's a distant cousin. But, you know, on the opposite side of the spectrum, my great, great, great grandfather is John H. Reagan, who's one of the founding fathers of the Confederacy, right? He was, he was a close personal friend to like Jefferson Davis and helped instigate the Civil War. He like, he like built the Confederate post office. He's like the, he's known as like, there's, there's like four great Texans, which is, what is it? Hogs, Stephen F. Austin, Robert E. Lee, and John H. Reagan. And, but he was a big time Confederate. All indications are he was a slave owner and everything, you know, but he was an explorer and he comes from a pioneer family and, and in the Smoky Mountains.

• 3:17:53Speaker 03

  And one of the stories there is that a black cougar chased my great, great, great, great, great grandmother through the forest of the foothills of Appalachia and, which is probably a black, like melanated Jaguar in the early 1700s. It's the earliest story of my family. And this is when she was not a Reagan, she married a Reagan. Her, her last name was Four Acre because her family was so poor, they didn't have a last name. They owned four acres, so her last name's Four Acre. So when she was 12 years old, a black cat chased her through the forest and rather than freaking out, she jumped into a river and kept her eyes like above the water and she saw the black cat like walk by her.

• 3:18:37Speaker 03

  But had she been eaten that day, my family wouldn't exist.

• 3:18:39Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 3:18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So that story was handed down and then, you know, my great, great, great grandfather, John H. Reagan, his first job at 20 years old was he was an explorer of the Texas frontier. So he's the one that some people will pull on from historical records of that, that there were buffalo, like bison migrating through Texas and that there were wolves in Texas. And then, you know, then he becomes the postmaster general of the Civil War. During that time in Texas, there are Confederate lieutenants or officers that can be seen wearing Jaguar skin chaps of Jaguars that they shot from East Texas, right? So it's like, I was just, I just didn't, I was scared of the weight of my family history,

• 3:19:24Speaker 03

  like being used against me six years ago when I first started everything. And now...

• 3:19:29Danny Jones?

  Lean into that shit.

• 3:19:30Speaker 03

  Now I, now I, now I realize just how important it is. And over time I've like realized, you know, and then my grandfather becomes an explorer and everything. For everybody listening, my family lost everything. Like my dad was born in utter complete poverty. Like my family's history doesn't bankroll what I do. Like, you know, like I said, I was broke three years ago, so. But all of that was like so clearly in my blood and it's just, it's so important to who I am. And as I've gotten older, I've realized it. You always kind of knew it's there. And then as you become older, like you just start realizing even more and more like how much it's impacted you. And so, you know, probably, I'm not going to do it quickly. I'm not going to like rug pull myself, but, you know, or eventually I'll just probably

• 3:20:15Speaker 03

  be...

• 3:20:16Danny Jones?

  You're going to delete, you're going to slowly phase out Caverns.

• 3:20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll just be Luke Reagan, you know, because...

• 3:20:19Danny Jones?

  That's a good move.

• 3:20:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess it's kind of like you did that.

• 3:20:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got rid of concrete and just...

• 3:20:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it was just called concrete and everyone, I transitioned to the podcast, just made more sense to just make it my name.

• 3:20:29Speaker 03

  Did you get like friction at first?

• 3:20:31Danny Jones?

  Um, I don't think so. No.

• 3:20:34Speaker 04

  I don't even think people noticed.

• 3:20:36Danny Jones?

  No, most people never even noticed.

• 3:20:37Speaker 03

  Really?

• 3:20:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's kind of, you know, I'm, I'm not gonna, yeah, I'm not gonna like do it overnight, but I've been like, you know...

• 3:20:46Danny Jones?

  That's a good move.

• 3:20:47Speaker 03

  Phasing in my real name.

• 3:20:48Danny Jones?

  That's a good move. It's a fascinating story.

• 3:20:50Speaker 03

  And I just...

• 3:20:51Danny Jones?

  Fascinating history.

• 3:20:52Speaker 03

  I just applied to, I put in my massive application to the Explorers Club in New York City. It's basically our, the United States Royal Geographic Society, like literally all of the great American explorers were in that club.

• 3:21:04Danny Jones?

  Now we figure out how Luke becomes a Freemason and joins the Illuminati.

• 3:21:09Speaker 03

  So, but...

• 3:21:10Danny Jones?

  This is the trajectory, Luke. This is how it happens.

• 3:21:12Speaker 03

  But if, if I'm given the honor of acknowledged as an American explorer, it's not going to be Caverns, it'll be Reagan.

• 3:21:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:21:20Speaker 03

  So I...

• 3:21:21Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 3:21:22Speaker 03

  Makes sense that I just go with that.

• 3:21:23Danny Jones?

  That's a good move.

• 3:21:24Speaker 03

  You know?

• 3:21:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that, that history is fascinating.

• 3:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. At some, some point in the future, we should get into it because it's really cool. Like it's, you know, it's this pioneer, you know, it's like your archetypal explorer, surveyor, pioneer family that like, you know, my family settled Gatlinburg, Tennessee, if you've ever been there.

• 3:21:41Danny Jones?

  No, never been.

• 3:21:42Speaker 03

  It used to be known as Reagan Town. It was like colloquially called that because the Reagans, they settled that after the Revolutionary War and they built up that town and then they moved there and went to Palestine. And because John H. Reagan lived in Palestine, it was, that was about to be the capital of Texas. It wasn't going to be Austin at first. It was going to be my great, great, great grandfather's hometown. And then they lost this, the Civil War was lost and he was the only, here's what's crazy. I'll leave it on this last thing, but he was the only cabinet member of the Confederacy to vote against Robert E. Lee pushing into Gettysburg because he knew that was a terrible idea. Nobody else in the cabinet listened to him, thought he was an idiot. I don't think he and Robert E. Lee were very close.

• 3:22:26Speaker 03

  Jefferson Davis didn't listen to him. He thought that they should pull back and they should secure the Mississippi River because he fought in Texas, he knows how important controlling the Mississippi River was. Ultimately, nobody listened to him and the, the defeat at Gettysburg was like, that was the end of the Confederacy. You know, the war still had to go on, but had they listened to him, you know, it could have been possible that the South could have prevailed longer. And, and so they didn't listen to him. Ultimately, the war was lost and he became the only Confederate to actively...

• 3:23:00Speaker 03

  Brush off all the old beliefs that the Confederacy had. And he tried to tell everybody, you know, except that the institution of slavery, the uh, oh gosh, I'm trying to think, uh, antebellum way of life, you know, it's basically like imperial, like, like you're living off of the backs of enslaving people, right? It's like Roman shit.

• 3:23:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:23:19Speaker 03

  It was destined to all fail and fall apart. And the, and the, uh, the economy of the South was not very strong anyways. And so he saw the writing on the wall and he told everybody in the South, listen, guys, if you do not get it together and adapt to this new way of life and accept that the South is gone, then the Northerners are going to completely run our cities and everything. And he was hated for like 10 years. He was banished to farming, you know, plowing his own fields and everything for 10 years. And ultimately they needed him to come back into office. And he became the only prominent Confederate to then hold a seat in Congress in the United States government. Yeah.

• 3:23:56Danny Jones?

  That's crazy, dude.

• 3:23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. So he, so I was scared of that history for a long time. I was scared of it being like held over my head, like, oh, your great, great, great grandfather was an explorer, but he's also a slave owner and a, you know, had the Confederacy won, there'd be a list of the founding fathers and the last, the last one would be Johnny Tracy.

• 3:24:14Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, dude, that's pretty fucking nuts.

• 3:24:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 3:24:18Danny Jones?

  You have a really deep, interesting family history, man.

• 3:24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's heavy, you know what I mean?

• 3:24:23Danny Jones?

  Very heavy.

• 3:24:23Speaker 03

  And so, and so it, so it deeply influenced me and also scared me, you know, so.

• 3:24:28Danny Jones?

  Should scare you a little bit.

• 3:24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure, you know, like, I'm not, fuck, you know, he, he had, he has this major, uh, you know, if I were speaking to him today, I would be like, you know, you have this major flaw in your philosophy that you're like a down home Christian guy who believes in the Southern way of life, but you're literally enslaving people. You know, you fucking own these people. And, uh, you know, he's just got this major flaw, but he did lots of other cool things before he ever owned slaves, you know? He did lots of cool things while he owned slaves, big, big things, you know? He, what's crazy is a lot of historians think that he was the most influential Texan during the 1800s. It's freaking crazy. He like built the institution of how Texas works today during the 1800s. It's freaking wild.

• 3:25:10Danny Jones?

  What was his first name again?

• 3:25:12Speaker 03

  John, his name is John Henninger Reagan.

• 3:25:14Danny Jones?

  John Henninger Reagan?

• 3:25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:25:18Danny Jones?

  And he was your, how many?

• 3:25:20Speaker 03

  Great, great, great grandfather.

• 3:25:22Danny Jones?

  Great, great, great grandfather.

• 3:25:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25:24Danny Jones?

  Wow, man.

• 3:25:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, um, before him, there were some of his cousins, they were like cattle rustlers and, uh, um, cattle wranglers in Western Texas and they owned this land, um, called Reagan Canyon. And there's like one of the big like legends of, of, of Texas lost treasures and stuff is like this, uh, lost Spanish treasure that was found on their property and it becomes like one of these big odysseys of Texas history of like this treasure going from there to San Antonio and a bunch of people dying and like it's, it's a crazy history. So there's all these kind of little things that I grew up hearing about that like loomed over me my whole life. And it wasn't until I had no choice in, I was either going to flunk out of college

• 3:26:07Speaker 03

  or I was going to take anthropology, which is the only thing that was even tangentially close to history and everything that I was interested in, that I embraced it. And, um, and I was 20. So from 20 to 29, you know, I've just fully embraced like, it was like this inevitable thing that was in my blood and everything else I tried worked against me and I hated it, you know? And once I just embraced my, this thing that was in my blood, it just blossomed. It was like every door I wanted to open, open and everything I wanted to do has happened and.

• 3:26:38Danny Jones?

  That's really cool, dude.

• 3:26:39Speaker 03

  It's like, you know, once you, you know, as, as like new age people would say, like, once you align with the universe, all the doors open.

• 3:26:46Danny Jones?

  You're out of the closet now.

• 3:26:47Speaker 03

  You know?

• 3:26:48Danny Jones?

  It's amazing.

• 3:26:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:26:49Danny Jones?

  Cool dude, well, you have a fucking flight to catch.

• 3:26:51Speaker 03

  I know, I know.

• 3:26:51Danny Jones?

  We gotta get your ass to the airport. Thanks again, Luke. Uh, we'll link all your stuff below. Good night, folks.

• 3:26:56Speaker 07

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• 3:27:26Speaker 05

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