YouSaid · the spoken record

Ed Barnhart

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262

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2024-09-30

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2024-09-30

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1. “Americas, and we're going to make it part of the curriculum for every kid in the US to know the full history of this country.”

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “What I'm really trying to do with this too is specifically the Americas. I want to be part of the reawakening that there were these great civilizations here, especially North America. I think that we have a group amnesia that there was no great civilizations here before Europe showed up. That's simply not true. I think it should be part of our history books. In fact, I have a program called Before the Americas that would introduce as part of American history the part before European contact. And I think that kids in the K through twelve levels should grow up not being told this fallacy that no one was here before we showed up in fourteen ninety two. And one of these days I'm going to find a funder to help us put together before the American.”

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “It's great. I love that feeling. I'm an explorer at heart. So finding something like that, when I was 25 years old, I found a whole Maya city. I got to name it. Its name is Mashnah. It's off in the Belesian jungle. And that was just outrageous. I mean, it almost depressed me. My entire, like, I had this great life ambition that I would find a lost city. And then I did it at 25, and I was like, God, now what's Actually, I wrote a bunch of letters to NASA trying to get them to let me be the first archaeologist on Mars. I never got a single reply back, I'm sure I'm on NASA's list as some weirdo.”

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Right. And the deeper we got off the road, the deeper it was. Sometimes it would clear out, but certain places if it was low, it would be such thick vegetation and it would grow back so fast. Sometimes we would cut just tunnels through tall grass and we'd come back like five days later and they were gone. We couldn't even find where our trails were. It would grow back that fast.”

   2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “There was a funny Maya ceramic that had the ceramics are neat because they don't, the monuments can be kind of broken records. I'm the king. I was born this time. I beat these people up. Married this woman, I died. But the ceramics will tell us things out of mythology stories. And there was this one with a rabbit looking at the merchant god. And nobody could translate the text. And finally, this Eastern European, actually a Ukrainian guy, translated it. And the rabbits saying to the merchant god Bend over and smell my ass. Like, oh man, we were expecting this wonderful piece of mythology, but no, it translates Bendover and smell my ass. That's great. That's human”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “That's a neat one, too. And that's so human. I'll tell you a little side story here that, uh... When I worked with the Maya people in Palenque, I spent three years making this map of the city and hiking through the jungle every day. And they would talk to each other in their own language. It was Celtal was the group I was working with. But I noticed after a while they were big jokers. They loved to make jokes. And they would laugh at jokes. But then they would also, one of them would say something, and the other ones would go hoo. And I eventually asked, you know, what is that? Why do you guys always make that hoo-hoo noise? And he said, that's because he made a really smart pun. It was like he said three different things at once. It was a turn of phrase that was smart. And they didn't make laughs at that. It was there. They had a noise for when somebody said something just super clever.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “All over pottery, he's everywhere. I got to write this book. This next year is the year I'm going to write my Fang deity book, and I will have a whole chapter dedicated. Thank you. The”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Pissing us off. I mean, they were like, you know, giving the best of them. It was a different mentality. This was not brutal. This was a bona fide sacrifice on their part, a loss”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I think it's our estimation of their motivations that were probably most wrong on. My teacher, Sheley, a long time ago, said, you know, I've come up with all sorts of theories. I was always thinking about stuff. And she looked at me and she said, if you don't stop thinking like a Western European and start trying to put yourself in the mindset of these people, you will never understand any of it, which I've always taken to heart. I mean, I really do when I approach these things, I try to step out of my cultural assumptions, try to think like they would think is the best I could. And it's very different. I mean, this whole, you know, the Maya are cyclical, the whole sacrifice we're so, you know, obsessed with that. But, you know, that was an austere actual sacrifice on their part. They weren't just, you know, hey, let's all get together and kill that guy that's...”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “That matter have me and my colleagues done that at all. I'm almost certain that the Maya would just gut laugh at what I think I know what they were.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “A talk in Sioux Falls. And I said, you know, I drove in here and there was a big obelisk in front of the town. And everywhere I go, I see the names Lewis and Clark. And a thousand years from now, if I was an archaeologist investigating this place, I would think that it was founded by the Egyptians and their kings were named Lewis and Clark. But the truth is you know, Lewis and Clark stayed one night here. But it's just a big deal, so I would be so wrong about what I thought about your town based on what preserved.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Well, you know, time moves on and things that are perishable perish. So, you know, you didn't put a time element in there, but I would say that, you know, everything that can perish will and whoever shows up here will be stuck with only the things that didn't perish. So we'll have, you know, buildings, plaques, but they won't have any books, they won't have any billboards. They'll have the incomplete record I have. I one time did a...”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we're going to survive this. Not that we're going to make it go away.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “I guess there's always that chance, but I am an optimist. I think you're an optimist too. I think exactly as you just said, I think that the greatest capacity of humans is our ability to innovate. And we are never more innovative than when we're under distress. I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about, you know, we didn't change the world when we were comfortable. It was when we were in crisis, mother necessity is the mother of invention. And I think we'll be all right. I think that this impending climate crisis is real and happening. I actually personally think that I'm going to answer a question that you didn't even ask me. I think we're wasting our time thinking that we can reverse this.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “You know, I heard somebody say, I forget who it was, but, you know, Systems of any kind, human systems, biological systems, can be put on a graph that's change over time. And any graph that the change is way faster than the time and the line starts going straight up, that is a system in crisis. In almost any biological system that has that fast change over that little of time, any other thing, you'd describe it as a crisis when you apply that chart to technologies change, it's a crisis.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “That's an interesting question I think it will be a lot more automated or it'll be a smoldering pile. I mean, there is a possibility we could end ourselves. There's always that possibility that we've really... opened pandorous box in some regards. I did listen to one of your podcast guests with the what would happen in the case of nuclear war. That was chilling. Her opinion was certainly we would burn everything to a crisp within minutes, apparently. So we have that capacity. That's scary. That's a possible future for us. But I'm an optimist. I'd like to think that guys like you are going to make friendly robots who make my job better.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Aliens visiting us. I don't know. It does smack of a kind of human hubris that we think we're important enough for some advanced species to give a shit about us. Statistically speaking, the universe is way too big. We can't be the only sentient beings. There's got to be somebody else out there. Whether they care about us, that's a question. I've been on ancient aliens a number of times. I show up and I'm an educator. I mean, refusing to be part of the conversation is an immediate fail in my book. But there was one time where they asked me at the end, you know, do you have anything else that you want to say? And I said, well, you know, y'all's premise is that aliens came down a long time ago and they gave humanity these wonderful gifts of science and medicine, engineering, all these things. Today, we also have Have a lot of”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Had me right until the ever visited thing. That one I'm not entirely sure about. I'm not sure whether we have any, we certainly have no archaeological proof that I would cite or contemplate as the evidence of such. You know, the guys that discovered DNA, Watson and Crick, Watson, who actually habitually used hallucinogens to invigorate his thinking, he said that he thought that DNA on this planet was way too complex to have developed over the time period that it had at its disposal and that his guess was that our DNA was somehow seeded from outside of our planet. You know, take that for what it is, but the guy who we respect on many other levels also said that. So that's interesting. But in terms of”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Story I read of a Spanish priest in the Amazon in the Brazilian northern part of the Amazon where he made this utopian community and he was bringing people in that were getting sick. And he wrote, you know, I'm baptizing everyone. You know, I baptized 10,000 people a day. And yet God's still killing them. Why is he doing this to them? They're doing everything that I ask them to do. They are submitting to the will of God. But this guy doesn't realize that the same bowl of holy water that he's baptizing them in. He's just wiping the disease on everybody's faces. He's accelerating it when he doesn't even realize he thinks he's saving them, but he's actually killing them. That's a tragedy. That's not just like. Spoils go to the victor stuff. That's just straight up tragedy.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “I think that the epidemics, I consider it a tragedy. That did not have to happen. And that was not, you know, that was not a fair fight. Nobody knew what to do about it. That was just a tragic, perfect storm of events. I think that the Spanish and the Portuguese get unfairly maligned in what's been called the black legend that they just marched into America and murdered everyone. That's not the fact. It was the diseases that murdered everyone. In fact, there was a really poignant...”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Then we'll just loot all these Easter eggs, but the Native Americans in Canada were like not having it. They kicked their ass. In fact, Leif Erickson's brother, Thor, died there. The natives killed him. He was supposed to be in charge of expanding the settlement, but they just killed him.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “The truth It is absolutely true that the Vikings were here. There's a great site in Nova Scotia called Lanso Meadows, which definitely has what's left of a Viking colony. It was Lee Farick and his father Eric the Red, who they got kind of kicked out of Europe because they apparently couldn't stop murdering people. And so they went to Greenland and then kind of island hopped over to Canada. But I think the culture that was in that area was named the Dorset. But they would have nothing to do with the Vikings. They attacked the Viking settlement every day and did not give them an inch until they decided it was just worthless and they left it. The Vikings attacked Ireland and they just found a bunch of monasteries full of gold with a bunch of guys going, we're men of God, we don't fight. And the Vikings were like, this is great. That's great. This will be easy.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “In North America, there's a new term in the literature that I like. We call it the Mississippian Shatter Zone. Mississippian civilization was millions of people, but they got spread out all over the place over the next centuries. And now we have this shatter zone where we have ruins and the people that were actually from those ruins or somewhere else on a reservation far away. And I'm just about to talk to a Cherokee man who listened to some of the things I had to say and says, all those ho-chunk things you were saying from that ho-chunk culture, my grandparents talk about this sort of thing too. Can I talk to you by phone and tell you about these things? So we've got the shatters zone where, you know, we're going to try to put the puzzle back together, especially in terms of Mississippian religion. I really think we're making headway.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “90% of them died. And with them all their knowledge, just, I mean, imagine the moment where, you know, who dies when things get bad? It's the young and the old. So all the knowledge keepers die suddenly. The children die. This next generation that's half taught and now completely demoralized, thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only way out of it is to accept this new Christianity. But they don't have bring kids into this world where everybody's dying. And even if they do, they can't teach them what the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn't finish the transmission. So in a single terrible moment in human history, the generation loses all their knowledge. So a lot of the things that these people knew. New just blipped out.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “In the first 20, 30 years, there were people who had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them. But the numbers, you know, it's a shameful part of history. And it wasn't something that Europe perpetrated on them. Medical science at that time was still the four humors theory that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. And we did things like, well, you've got to bleed him. He'll feel better then. So we had no idea what an infectious disease was. But the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone and the numbers are now saying in the first fifty years that ninety percent of everybody was dead and that the number of people has increased as well as far as our estimates. We're thinking it's some Somewhere around one hundred fifty million people.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Well, you know, there's a great anthropological body of literature. It's called the Columbian Exchange based on Columbus, but it's, you know, all this trade back and forth between the New World and the Old World. And the Old World got just wonderful stuff. All of a sudden their diet didn't suck. All these vegetables came in. The New World got herd animals, it got pigs and cows and goats that it didn't have, but it also got 13 infectious diseases. Europe had had wave after wave and kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things, but it didn't actually go away. It just couldn't spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a sudden these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Fernando de Soto landed in Florida and went for three years from, he went up into the Carolinas and over down into Alabama and Louisiana, and he's the first one to see the Mississippi up there. But for three years he went through city after city after city. Unfortunately, decimating them, eating all their corn, giving them diseases. I mean, the documentation's clearly there. He met collectively millions of people in a very sophisticated and uniform civilization.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “And it was huge. It had a population of twenty thousand people and pyramids all over the place, a huge palisade wall around it. It was absolutely gigantic, a thriving metropolis and We in America have kind of a collective amnesia. We never hear about these massive civilizations. Cahokia was the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic. There were hundreds and hundreds of these big cities that had, you know, five to ten thousand people each.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “They evolved over thousands of years. We call them mound builders. This is something I object to. I think we should have a better, we do the last version of them we call the Mississippians now. But generally speaking, we call all these guys mound builders. But what they built were pyramids. They look like mounds now. And they didn't build them out of stone. That's kind of our just inherent Western bias, something that's built out of stone is sophisticated and something that's built out of dirt is rudimentary. But in their full living form, they did have cores of dirt, but then they also had kind of clay caps. So they had terraces, they had hole complexes of buildings up on top. There were kings that lived up there. The biggest of the Mississippian cities is called Cahokia. And it's right outside of St. Louis.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “We go through that Paleo-Indian and Archaic period for thousands of years as we started this conversation probably thirty thousand years is a conservative now humans first entered the Americas. But the first cultures we get here are mound builders around the Mississippi and to the east, and then also a totally separate group in what we call the American Southwest now, the four corners, who will develop into mostly the people we call the Pueblo people, who are still there today, like Zuni and Hopi people. So we've got these two clusters. The very first major community in North America is in the most unlikely place. It's in northern Louisiana. People think I'm crazy when I say this, but there is a pyramid in northern Louisiana, a big one at a site called Poverty Point that is three thousand five hundred years old, so it's the same age as the pyramids in Egypt. And it is a giant thing.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “You know, that large number of humans are motivated to work together by a small number of administrators who are dynamic and convincing in some way or another. Of my favorite quotes is, and I'm probably going to misquote it here, but I think it's Margaret Meade who said, never underestimate the power of small groups working together and the truth is that those are the only people that have ever changed the world, that small, dedicated groups of people are what changed the world. And they inspire big groups of people to embrace their vision. And we are way less capable than we used to be. I mean, the average human had all sorts of skills that, at least I personally do not. I'm wearing a shirt, but I can't make a shirt. That's for somebody else to do.”

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2024-09-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source