#335 Ed Barnhart - The Amazon Rainforest is Hiding a Lost Civilization?

The Shawn Ryan Show

Dr. Ed Barnhart, an archaeologist specializing in Mesoamerican and South American civilizations, discusses the Maya, Aztec, and Inca empires,

Key takeaways

• LiDAR technology has revealed previously unknown ancient cities hidden beneath dense jungle canopy.
• There is no archaeological evidence supporting alien contact with the Maya; technological advancements were gradual and human-driven.

Main topics

• Maya civilization and its archaeological discoveries
• Aztec and Inca empires

Notable quotes

"I see no archaeological evidence that they were influenced or in contact with aliens."

Conclusion

Dr. Ed Barnhart emphasizes that while ancient civilizations remain mysterious, their

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:04) Dr. Ed Barnhart, welcome to the show. It is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Pleasure to have you. But yeah, I think I ran across your YouTube channel a little while ago, and we've been kind of wanting to dive into some ancient civilization stuff and some historic type stuff. So we reached out, and here we are. So originally, I wanted to talk about kind of just the Mayans. and um do a whole episode on that but it looks like we got a lot more to cover so we'll see how it goes but i love this kind of stuff we've had a couple of um a couple of guys on we've had randall carlson on we've talked with graham hancock a couple of times but um have been able to work it out and um yeah we've had some guys on talking about ancient egypt and Tim Albarino has been on, so here Speaker 1 (1:03) you are. Well, I'm happy to be here, and thanks for highlighting the Americas. Most of the archaeology people knows about is somewhere outside of our hemisphere, and there's so much here. I'm thrilled to get a chance to talk about it. Perfect. Let me start you off with an introduction here. Speaker 2 (1:22) Dr. Ed Barnhart, you're an archaeologist and explorer best known for your work studying the ancient civilizations of the Americas. You discovered and mapped the Maya city of Mashnah in Belize and later led the Speaker 2 (1:41) Palenque. How am I saying this? Palenque. Palenque. Mapping project in Mexico. In 2003, you founded the Maya Exploration Center and have served as the director ever since. You also have a YouTube channel offering weekly deep dives into the ancient cultures of the Americas, in addition to being the host of the ArcheoEd Speaker 1 (2:02) podcast. Speaker 1 (2:04) Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Nice introduction. Thanks for that. So before we get started, everybody gets a gift. Speaker 2 (2:12) Those are Vigilance League gummy bears made here in the USA, actually up in Michigan. And it's just candy. Speaker 1 (2:20) Well, thank you. Yeah, well, I'm from Colorado. It might have had more in it, but I like candy just fine. Thank you very much, Sean. You're welcome. You're welcome. Speaker 2 (2:32) And then one other thing to knock out, I actually heard you have a Patreon account as well. Speaker 1 (2:37) I do. Can Speaker 2 (2:38) I walk into Speaker 1 (2:38) that conversation? I do have a Patreon account. It's a fraction of what yours is, but I think Patreon's great. I think that, you know, Google and all those other things, those algorithms are not really treating you and I well. I think Patreon's a great way for people that care about what we do to support us directly. Speaker 2 (2:59) Yeah. When I started out, I started this in my attic and, um... Speaker 2 (3:06) Was the year? It Speaker 1 (3:07) was 2019. When Speaker 2 (3:09) I started this? Yeah. Yeah, I started this in Christmas of 2019. I Speaker 1 (3:14) think we're very much the same. I started my podcast like right when COVID started and I was trapped at home and I could not travel and couldn't do anything. I just went nuts and went into my holiday closet and just started talking to a microphone. Right Speaker 2 (3:30) on. It worked out. So these guys have been with me since the beginning and they were the ones that really supported me and carried me through all the way to today. And so we've turned it into one hell of a community. And one of the things I do is they get the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. So this is from Mad Dog Crazy. Do you believe the Mayans interacted with aliens and to what degree? And how do you interpret the Mayan calendar or its supposed predictions when you compare them to what's happening in the world today? Let's leave out the Mayan calendar because I know we're going over that later. Speaker 1 (4:13) That's a long one. That's a long one. Speaker 2 (4:14) So do you believe the Mayans interacted with aliens and to what degree? Speaker 1 (4:21) I see no archaeological evidence that they did. Every one of their technologies, we see them building from rudimentary things to more complex things in a very understandable human fashion. I'm happy for this question because I have appeared on ancient aliens like 25 times now, so people could get the impression that I'm pro-alien theory. At least when it comes to the Maya that I have studied for my whole life. I see no evidence that they were influenced or in contact with aliens. Do you believe in aliens? Do you think they're out there? I do. I think it's a statistical impossibility that we're the only people in the universe. And I'll also say that the modern Maya today, big fans of the aliens things. Every ruins I ever go to, I talk to the guards. I love to talk to the guards because they see everything. Speaker 1 (5:18) They're always telling me that aliens are floating over the sites at night. Okay. They say there's green and red lights. Some of them say they're like spirits, and some of them say they're aliens. But, you know, from hearsay, out of the mouths of the Maya, they're sure interested in their ruins today. That's what they say. So when you say Speaker 2 (5:39) there's no archaeological evidence that they were interacting with any aliens, what, I mean, what? What archaeological evidence would you be looking for? Speaker 1 (5:49) I mean, that's a good question. I mean, how do we look for an artifact that we have never seen? How do we, what would be the evidence? I would think that the evidence would be some kind of like startling technology leap. One day they're Stone Age, the next day they're building cars, that sort of thing. But the Maya were, you know, the Maya through their entire period never even got to metallurgy. So that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I would expect some sort of large leap in technology, in the kind of materials they're using, maybe in their medical sciences. But I don't see anything like that that would be, you know, unexplained other than contact. You know, we have lots of contact. lots of archaeological examples of one culture contacting another and that culture immediately picking up on new technologies and changing. Gotcha. That's the sort of thing. And on a, you know, on just a terrestrial scale, we see the evidence of that all the time. So if I was to look for something that could be alien contact, I would expect the same kind of radical technology adoption change. Nothing in Maya history gives me that. Okay. Speaker 1 (7:16) Sorry. No, I actually don't believe in aliens. Speaker 2 (7:20) Well, I mean, Speaker 1 (7:21) now the question of do I think aliens have been here, that one kind of smacks of human hubris, doesn't it? It's kind of like, why would we be so important that an advanced species would even come and look at us? That one's less statistically possible. But the universe is so vast. How would we be the only... sentient beings in it. I don't know. Maybe we're Speaker 2 (7:50) the only ones created. Speaker 1 (7:51) But how Speaker 2 (7:53) did, okay, so let's get into, I just, how did you get into this? How did you get, what sparked the fascination with the ancient civilizations and the Americas for you? Speaker 1 (8:05) Well, I think that I'm one of those lucky people who have always been who I've been, and I just had to figure out a way to channel it. I was always an explorer. Even as a little kid, my parents had to lock the front door because I would just open it and walk out and keep walking. I would just explore. I explored the woods behind my house. I explored down the street until I was tired. I could be miles away. And so... I mean, I was always just thrilled to go explore new things. And when I was 13 or 14, I went to the Dollar Theater in Irving, Texas, and I saw Indiana Jones. And I was like, that's what I want to do. That looks cool to me. Of course, I've never gotten to fight any Nazis or anything, but the archaeology part came true. But I was a very bad student. When the opening lines came up, it said like 1936 South America. Honestly, I was like, there's a South America? I just thought there was America. So I went and looked it up in the library, and then I became obsessed with the Inca. And through high school, I read all about the Inca. And at the time, they were talking about Machu Picchu being this one citadel up in the mountains, but I thought there must be many more of those if that's where they pray. So I told the high school counselor, I said, the job counselor, she said, what do you want to do? I said, well, I want to... find a lost city. She said, that is not a practical job, Ed. You should try to find an actual career. But, you know, I kept with it. I went to school in Colorado, mostly because I wanted to ski. And lo and behold, nobody knew anything about South America there, the Inca. There were no professors. But there was one for the Maya. And so I started studying the Maya. And in my, I guess, sophomore year, I signed up to do a field school in Honduras that was in a beautiful city called Copan. And I called my dad and said, hey, I made it in this field school. And he said, you're an idiot. You've never even been out of the country. You're going to go to Honduras? I was like, yeah, I am. That used Speaker 2 (10:31) to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world. San Pedro Sula. San Speaker 1 (10:35) Pedro Sula was number one for a long time, yeah. I was once walking around there and going between my hotel and the museum, and multiple people stopped me like, why are you on the street? You should get inside. Yeah, I've been there, too. Speaker 2 (10:50) It's an interesting place. Speaker 1 (10:51) It's getting better. It's no longer number one. I think it's like number eight or something. Really, they're on the rise. Right on. Right on. Anyway, I really fell in love with Copan, and that's where I met my mentor, Linda Shealy, who's the woman who broke the code of Maya hieroglyphics. And I followed her. to the University of Texas, and there I got into the archaeology side of it and signed up to do the deepest of the jungle surveys they allowed their students to do. And I found a city. You found a city in college? I did. And when I was 25, I found Mashnah. Everybody told me that was impossible, that all the cities had been found, that a student... leading students couldn't do such a thing, but I used these topography maps and I said, if I was a Maya in this huge area, where would I find it? Where would I put my city? And I knew they put their pyramids and triads and they symbolize the three hearthstones of civilization. I knew they're farmers. So I found this one spot and also their pyramids are called Tune Wheat Stone Mountains. So they revere the mountains. And I looked, and I looked for the tallest peak in the area, found it, and there were two little peaks right next to it with three rivers running through on the topography map in the 1990s. That was before our phones and everything. And I just, dumb luck, I guess, I said, if I was a Maya, that's where I'd go. And it took me two seasons to hike and cut out there with student groups, but it was there. How many students? Anywhere from four to eight. That's it? Yeah. And the other trick that I did is I bucked my professor's kind of demand that I just went in a straight western line through the hills, because up, down, up, down. Season one, I started finding these old overgrown logging roads that were from the British 100 years ago. And I was like, why am I doing this transect when these roads... Are the path of least resistance through these hills the same one that the Maya would have taken? I'm following these roads out there. So I liberated the roads as I went out there and ended up where I wanted to be. And there was the city actually on the first hill, not on the tallest hill. So Speaker 2 (13:18) hold on. Speaker 2 (13:20) So were you looking for anything in particular? I mean, you had mentioned that the professor, sorry, I forgot her name already. Oh, Linda Shealy. Speaker 1 (13:29) The Speaker 2 (13:29) Mayan hieroglyphics. Speaker 2 (13:33) Is there something that you guys translated that said there was like a lost city or something? Or were you just going, hey, there's probably cities out there that we haven't discovered yet. You're looking at topography going, where would Speaker 1 (13:45) I build a city? Sheely was in the art history department. My professor from the archaeology anthropology department was Fred Valdez. So they're two different professors. But it's just a well-known fact that there are... thousands of Maya communities out there, and we haven't found them all. We still have not found all the Maya cities at all. And so on my way to Mashnah finding it, I found five Maya villages, and we mapped those out. They'd have like 30, 40 buildings, nothing very big. And then finally, after going through, I thought I was just in another village, but then we ran into one that was like six meters tall. And square. And I thought, that's not a village building. And soon after that, we found one that was 18 meters tall and 100 meters across. And it was part of a big plaza where we found a ball court and a palace and fallen stela and a big reservoir eventually. What is a ball court? What's that? The Maya had a ball game. They had a ball game with a rubber ball, and the courts are very obvious. They have sloping walls and little stands above, and they have an open lane in the middle. And so they're easy to see, even ruined. The shape is very blatant that it was a ball court, and only big cities had ball courts in their plazas. Speaker 2 (15:16) I'm at the point where if a shirt fits weird or can't handle a real day, I'm not going to wear it. I want clothes that are easy. I put it on, it fits right, it moves with me, and I don't have to think about it again. That's why poncho outdoors has become one of the shirts I keep reaching for. My life is dynamic. One day I'm hosting the show, the next I'm traveling for interviews, walking into a business meeting, going to dinner, or taking the kids to something. I need shirts that can move through that kind of day without looking too technical. That's what Poncho does well. They make shirts with the function you want, but they still look clean enough to wear pretty much anywhere. Their denim shirt, the one that I'm wearing right now, has that broken-in feel right out of the box. It moves well, it holds up, and it has the practical details that I like. It's got hidden zipper pockets, a built-in lens cloth, and... Sunglasses holders. The fit is a big part of it too. They've got regular slim and tall options. So it's not one generic cut that either pulls under the arms or hangs like a trash bag. It actually fits right. And if the size is off, exchanges are easy with free returns. That's usually the test for me. If I wear something once and forget about it, it winds up in the back of the closet or the donation bin. If I keep grabbing it, That tells me everything I need to know. And poncho is one of those shirts that I just keep grabbing for. Go to ponchooutdoors.com slash seanryan. Enter your email and get $10 off and free shipping on your first order. Again, that's ponchooutdoors.com slash seanryan. Once you try one, you'll probably end up ordering a few more. That's what happened to me. Speaker 2 (17:12) Here's the pitch. It takes two minutes, and you'll never think about it again. Download it, hit one button, close the app. That's the entire job. No manual, no settings, no tech background. Nothing for you to get wrong. And then, it just runs. Blocking the trackers, the phishing sites, and the surveillance ads across every app on the device. All day, quietly. without anybody having to do anything. Its first week out, it hit number six on Apple's top downloaded productivity chart. Built by former US intelligence professionals. I'm a co-founder. Glacier, download it on the App Store. And remember, privacy isn't paranoia, it's protection. So what timeframe? Speaker 2 (18:12) Did the Mayans exist? Is it Maya or Mayans? That's a funny debate. And you Speaker 1 (18:17) know, one of the frustrating things about archaeology is there's no command structure. You know, in your world, you know, when the general says this is the way it is, that's it. Everybody does it. But in the Maya world, it's a competing thing. So some people, like linguists, want to say Mayan. But... Linda Shealy, who broke the code, always want to say Maya, except for Mayan languages and Mayan architecture, which is also random. I tend to say Maya just out of homage to my mentor. But it's a debate that nobody has the authority to finalize. So either one's right, really. So we'll just give it the potato-potato Speaker 2 (18:58) thing. How long ago did this civilization exist? Speaker 1 (19:02) Archaeology starts calling the people down there Maya, maybe 2000 BCE is the earliest that we really will say those people are Maya. 2000 BCE, so it was what? People down there, 10,000, 14,000. But archaeology does this thing where they have to behave a certain way before they're that cultural group. So they start behaving like Maya. somewhere around 4,000 years ago. And then they reach their peak. We have a pre-classic, a classic, and a post-classic Maya. The classic period where they made most of their pyramids and they really perfected their writing system and astronomy, that runs from about 250 AD to 800. And then there's this weird collapse, the famous, like, disappearance of the Maya. And really, they're just reforming themselves, and they emerge again in their, what we call their post-classic form, all the way up until the Spanish Contact. Okay. So the pre-classic is this long period from, you know, it ends at that, like, 250 AD, but it starts 2000, 1800. The cool thing about my archaeology is we're still figuring it out. I mean, as we sit here. somebody could be digging up the evidence that they were actually there for 500 years earlier than we thought. Speaker 2 (20:34) And how far did their... Speaker 2 (20:38) At the height, how big was the empire? Where did it stretch from and to? Speaker 1 (20:44) All of Guatemala, half of Honduras, into, in Mexico, all the way up into the Yucatan, all of Belize, and about halfway through Chiapas, which is the Mexican state that's adjacent to Guatemala. Okay. There, the line phrase. And there's a couple of weird, not really Maya cities. And then we're into Zapotec and before them, Olmec territory. Okay. And on the other side, when you get into Honduras, there's a site called Los Naranjos on a lake, Lago Yehoah, that's half Maya and half the next culture over, the Lenka people. So we see the... the border of the Maya world blurring to the east and west, but to the north and south, it's from sea to sea. So a huge territory. And as a result, not all Maya are the same. The ones that grew up in the highlands with cold and snow behave differently than the ones that are down in the lowland jungles. Speaker 2 (21:51) Okay. What kind of... What were they documenting in hieroglyphics? What kind of things did you learn? Speaker 1 (21:58) Almost entirely, at least of the things that we have to read left, which are all on stone. They're really broken records, all about the kings. The king was born this day. He married this person. He fought these people. He was crowned this day. He died. Kind of frustrating because the stuff like... Speaker 2 (22:19) The biographies of one particular... Speaker 1 (22:21) Now... We get some texts out of ceramics. And ceramics are much, they'll tell different topics. Like sometimes those will give us little stories of mythology. There are some that say this is the king's cup. He drank chocolate out of it. And then we have four surviving books. And those are gold. Those talk about hunting rituals. They talk about astronomy. They talk about deep time. Deep time. What Speaker 2 (22:51) is that? Speaker 1 (22:53) Well, they go back like in the codices specifically, I think the farthest they go back is 33,000 years. But that's a ridiculously long period of time to be talking about. There's these sections called the Serpent Pages in the Dresden Codex. Speaker 1 (23:16) And they have this serpent body that winds down the page, and there are dates that go further and further back in time to 33,000 years ago. 33,000 years ago. And why did they go back that way for a long time? We don't know. The first guys that started really understanding that? Speaker 1 (23:41) J. Eric Thompson was the big man in like the 1930s. He called the Maya esoteric time worshippers because we had nailed the calendar stuff and we could read things like that. They're going back 33,000 years. There's a stela in Tikal that goes back 5 million years. Five million years. Five million years. At least when we do the math, which is right there, it goes back five million years. Thompson thought that was them saying that's the origin of the Earth or the universe. But he generally said they're esoteric time worshippers. He also said that these hieroglyphs mean nothing. They're just about their esoteric time worship. That's why they're going so far back in time. Now, recently, one of my friends and colleagues, Mike Grofe, has really, Michael Grofe, has really nailed an argument that they're going so far back in time to exhibit their understanding of the procession of the equinoxes, which is that tiny wobble that the stars do from our perspective. Every... 25,000, 26,000 years, the stars will completely reset. Every 72 years, they're moving one degree. That's something, that's kind of the holy grail of ancient astronomy. If a culture understood the procession of the equinoxes, that meant that they were really crack astronomers. The Greeks only figured Speaker 2 (25:11) it out. How would Speaker 1 (25:11) they figure that out? You know, you can do it. It just, one of the things that the Maya had that their surrounding groups did not is writing. So they could have a astronomer who would spend his entire lifetime recording the movements of the heavens hand that book to his apprentice who would continue it and continue it. You can do it. I mean, we could do it today with no tools if we had enough time. Every 72 years, the stars move one degree. So if you are pegged on a star that's going to rise on the horizon, At a certain time of year, 72 years later, it will rise one day later. And if you collect a couple of generations of information. You can see that and you can prove that. What would they Speaker 2 (26:00) use Speaker 1 (26:00) as a landmark? Speaker 2 (26:02) We have GPS and all this other shit today. How would they use? I mean, they can't use a tree, maybe a mountain peak. You could use a mountain peak. And what would they measure that in? You could also Speaker 1 (26:13) use a flat constructed space. A lot of the Maya astronomy we believe was done with one person in a stable viewer location with a stick. Another person. with another stick tied to a rope. They pull it out so it's always the same distance and they mark. Okay, like if you're going to look at the simple one, the sun or the moon. Let's see where it rises. Today it's right here. Okay, tomorrow it's right there. Next day it's right there. Next day it's right there. Oh wait, look, it's hovering over here and it's coming back. And day after day, you'd mark it in an angular fashion and then you could orient a building to that. Same concept can be used for stars, but it just takes a lot longer to collect enough data to realize they too, that seemingly static backdrop that the moon and the sun go through, is actually moving itself. Interesting. And so that 33,000 years is talking about that the sun was in this constellation this year, and 33,000 years ago, it was also in that position on this date. Wow. It's the sidereal versus the synodic period of planets. Interesting. But they were great astronomers. We're jumping the gun here. We were actually talking about my beginnings, and now I've got you smack dab in the middle of the Maya. But that's okay, wherever the conversation flows. Speaker 2 (27:51) So let's go back to you. You're studying topography. I mean, talking about civilization, documenting time 5 million years ago, 33,000 years ago. Speaker 2 (28:07) Beginning of, seems like existence, I think it was 4,000 years ago. I mean, his topography, I mean, how much has topography changed in 4,000 years? How do you know what you're looking at was the same topography? 4,000, Speaker 1 (28:22) not much. 33,000, yeah, a lot. But I mean, the mechanisms, I think, are not... otherworldly. We are in such a world of technology, it feels like I don't know how the hell I ever survived without my cell phone, but I did. And so did my granddad. And there are, you know, in some ways, the less you have, the more ingenuitive you become. You probably understand that, being a guy that's been in the field with not everything you need. You know, I am totally convinced that the average ancient person was a hell of a lot more resourceful than I am. Speaker 2 (28:59) I don't Speaker 1 (29:00) disagree with Speaker 2 (29:00) that. Speaker 1 (29:00) And so the methods of astronomy could be as simple as, as you say, a hill from a certain position. I think we... Speaker 1 (29:12) under-credit farmers for a lot of their really smart stuff. The Maya were farmers, and I don't think... Sometimes there's a narrative that's painted that these... these Erudite Maya priests told an ignorant group of farmers when to plant and when to harvest based on the astronomical cycles, and I think it's exactly the opposite. I think every farmer knows some sort of trick like that. When the sun comes over that hill... It's about time to plant. When it rises in that little valley, it's time to harvest. I think that we have an opposite. I think that the Maya priests were actually honoring the knowledge that every Maya farmer knew and was so foundational to their survival as a society. Speaker 2 (30:02) But how do you know that it didn't change much? I mean, I used to live out in Speaker 1 (30:07) the Speaker 2 (30:07) woods, and I had a creek. And I spent a lot of time down there. And I could see, I've only been here for eight years, and the creek has changed drastically. I mean, to me, I mean, I'm down there every day, but it's Speaker 1 (30:22) changed quite a bit. That's a point well taken. Topography does change, especially the coastal areas can change radically. One hurricane can move the entire coastline. I think it began with things, you know, not as ephemeral as those. I think it's, you know, mountaintops. A lot of our earliest of the Maya cities that we recognize there's some astronomy in there. The astronomy has to do with those mountains. Oh, God. And it's from, you know, from this valley, the valley. The farther it is away, the more solid it is, too. If it's a pyramid 100 feet from you... You know, three people will see the right alignment. Everybody to the right and left sees off. But if it's a mountain 20 miles away, an entire group of people in a plaza would see the exact same alignment. So it began with, at least Maya astronomy began with things like that, that were alignments from a distance. I've wondered whether, you know, the Maya hieroglyphically say that their pyramids are called Tunhuit Stone Mountains. And I wonder whether the Maya origins in the highlands, when they went down into the lowland jungles with no mountains, I wonder whether they thought, well, crap, we can't do this without mountains. We should build some. Right. Speaker 2 (31:56) So how did you, I mean, on your excursion, I mean, they didn't, you didn't, I would have meant, I mean, now we see in documentaries and everybody uses LIDAR and things like that. Did you have that back then? Nope, I did not. Speaker 1 (32:10) I ordered topography maps from Belize that took two months to get to my house in Texas. GPS was just starting, but it was crappy. It would not. see through the trees. So I had one, but I could only mark my position when there was a tree fall and I could stand in an open patch and go, aha, we got one. We got one point, guys. Now LiDAR will take, you know, millions a second. I'd be like, we have a point. But it actually also got me in a tough situation in Belize where... Speaker 1 (32:50) I let an assistant who was pretty new to the area, we had cut trails everywhere, but their trails were all over the place, so you could get lost. let him have the GPS to teach the students and they got six of them got left behind and and lost us and By the time we got to the site I counted everybody like oh crap We're missing six people and me and my other assistant chased them through the jungle the whole day and it was all about them Getting lost from us because they were trying to use the GPS It was much different back Speaker 1 (33:25) So, no, I had nothing but, you know, old school survey methods and thoughts. And I guess luck. I mean, I will give it that. It was not some brilliant Sherlock Holmes discovery of mine. I had some logical thinking and probably a lot of luck. Well, Speaker 2 (33:47) I mean, jungle down there is pretty thick. I mean, I've hung through... Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia. I was wondering if you've been in the jungle, too. I love hanging out in the jungle. I mean, it's dangerous. There's a lot of shit in there that will kill you. But it's beautiful, isn't it? It's amazing. And you can... survive off nothing. Yeah, there's a lot of resources in there. But, so, I mean, how would you... I mean, some of these things are so thick that, I mean, you'd be Speaker 1 (34:17) lucky to go a kilometer a day. There were times. There were some times, especially before I found the city, I was actually kind of the laughingstock of the camp, that my students would just come back full of nettles, and they'd be like, what'd you do today? Just uselessly hack the jungle and get... stung by it. Like, yeah, I did. There's this, uh, there's this vines that are called, uh, uh, by y'all that are like, uh, like a rubber band ball just glued together. And if you hack one part with the machete, the rest of it could come on wild unwound and just whack everybody in the whole group. with these tiny black needles that would dig... Black palm. ...like, so deep into your skin. And they're so thin, you'd try to pull it out and just snap. And then, okay, I guess that's got to fester for a couple of days before it comes out. We had a guy... You know, insects will lay their Speaker 2 (35:17) larvae in that. Yeah. And so we had a guy... Yeah. You're supposed to wear gloves when you're in there. We had a guy grab one. got infected. We were out there. We couldn't get back. You know, we were doing some sniper stuff or something, and he cut it open, and the larva started coming out of his hand. And we were like, oh, shit, this is nasty. Speaker 1 (35:40) There was a girl in our camp who got 16 bot flies in her scalp. And those things, they fester in there, and then they eventually fly out as flies, but they're worms with, like, a tail that latches into you, so you can't... Pull them out. Well, yeah, there's one that'll... Speaker 2 (35:57) You can't piss in the river down there because... Amazon. You Speaker 1 (36:02) got Speaker 2 (36:02) that thing that'll swim up your pee stream. And then these little... Yeah, these spikes come out of it. Oh, I've Speaker 1 (36:12) been in the Amazon. Yeah, you Speaker 2 (36:13) got Speaker 1 (36:13) real Speaker 2 (36:13) issues. Speaker 1 (36:14) More than once, somebody's come like, come swim in the Amazon with me. No hard pass. I'm staying on the boat. None of that stuff. Did you Speaker 2 (36:21) have any interesting encounters with wildlife or indigenous peoples down Speaker 1 (36:28) there? Oh, a number. A number of them. I have never seen a jaguar out there, but they've seen me. There was a time back there in Belize where there was a rainstorm, and then we came out the next day and followed our path up. Day before when it rained, our feet had gone deep in the mud, so we made deep footprints. Following those footprints back out, there were Jaguar prints in our footprints. And I was just like, oh, shit, how long did that go on? How close was it to us? Was it like right behind us and we didn't see it? Or did it just smell our trail later? So that was... That was a wake-up call, like, be careful. The same when we lost those students and